“Tried to run us off the road.”
“I’ll need to get a few things. Have a word with my parents,” Peter said.
Hollis and Lamb went with him. I waited, sitting on the wall. The birds were singing, but my spirits were at a low ebb. Peter would be safe. Peter would be gone.
When they came back, Patricia and the vicar were with them. The vicar had Patricia’s hand. She was in her dressing gown and her face was pink and swollen with tears.
Peter put his bag in the boot of a silver Audi and then came over to where I was sitting. “I’ll see you soon,” he said. “Don’t look like that.” He bent and pressed his lips against my cheek. “You should see Marcus, ask him … ask him about Mrs. Duncan.”
“Mrs. Duncan the dinner lady?”
“Mrs. Duncan the dinner lady who also worked in the charity shop.”
Then he went and got in the car with the men from MI5, and his parents and I watched as they drove Peter away.
CHAPTER 21
REVISITED
We grow up but the games go on. Work, relationships, belonging to a religion, being left or right, having a class or gender, or interests, a personality even, they all seemed like games begun long ago, far back among the mists of time, played ceaselessly, routinely, and with neither end nor prizes in sight. Each day, less convincing. In the days after Peter went away with the men from MI5, I could not have told you anything about myself and been certain it was true. I stayed at the vicarage; finally the spare bedroom with the daisy curtains and matching bedspread was mine.
“Do you like fish, dear?” But the question seemed too hard, so Patricia made me chicken, every night, for two weeks. After they went to bed, never later than ten p.m., I would sneak into Peter’s room and lie on the bed and take up something of his in my hands; a falling-apart paperback edition of Crime and Punishment; a scrapbook into which we had once stuck clippings from the local paper. One reported a missing donkey, rustled from its field. Another was a piece about a spate of car thefts, where the cars had been mysteriously returned, washed and waxed, the insides given the full valet treatment.
Each day I went out walking. The river was racing, the streams and ditches bright and overflowing with water. Then there were three warm days in a row, and as though responding to a blare of trumpets, spring broke like a wave surging up a beach, foaming into blossom and bud, rippling into green. I climbed up Liddington Hill and stared at it. A part of me that was not my mind cried Green! Green! and pressed to the front of my eyes. I watched the cows being let out to pasture after their long winter in the sheds, watched them run, udders flying, tails whisking, across the fields, and I understood. And part of me said, Go on, have a catatonic breakdown. You’ve earned one. But another part said, I want to feel.
Peter called one night, after dinner, and the three of us huddled around the phone taking it in turns to talk to him, although he would not say where he was or what he was doing, only that he was going to travel, to do something for them, as he put it, and then he would not be in touch for a month or two.
“Then we’ll do something together, Andy. A trip. We’ll go somewhere beautiful and fox-trot round a fountain.” But his tone was compensatory as it had been when we were younger and he’d had access to a treat—a visit to some puppies, an excursion to London to see a show—to which I wasn’t invited. I sensed he’d found a new game, one I wasn’t allowed to join in.
I did the washing up while Patricia hovered. Would I like a glass of sherry? The vicar wouldn’t, but she would have one if I had one. The questions trickled, and then poured. She was so hungry to know her son.
“We were surprised that he chose law in the end. Because,” she cast me a sidelong glance, “he was so artistic.”
She wanted to know about Peter’s special friends.
“Karsten?”
“Karsten von Kloss.”
“Von,” she mused. An evangelical light shone in her eyes. “You know, Andy, the Gospels say very little about, well … sex. Much, much more about money, about helping one’s neighbor, succoring the poor and weak.” And then, “Because the Bible was written by man, inspired by God but written by man, so it’s flawed.” Till it burst out of her, “Peter can love who he wants. No one is better than Peter, no one has the right to think they’re better than Peter!”
* * *
I went to church with them, taking Patricia’s arm as we navigated the cracking, uneven path. The congregation was small and elderly, the organist tone-deaf, the singing thin. Richard mounted the pulpit and read from the Gospel of Matthew about Jesus turning over the tables of the money changers in the temple. Later, he asked us to shake our neighbor’s hand. When it was over, I went and talked to Em and to my mother. Marcus didn’t call, and I gave up expecting him to, but in the town, I turned every corner with the thought that he’d be there.
I went to the house. The council had sold them off and the whole row had been done up; new windows and doors, an unblemished cream paint job from end to end. I lingered outside Mrs. East’s with my hands upon the wall and then walked down to where I had once lived with my mother, with Joe. A shiny bottle-green Mini was parked outside. Beside the front door were two sets of muddy wellies, one adult-sized and green, the other small and pink. The curtains were pulled back in the front room and I took a few steps forward to peer in. As I did so, the door opened and a woman came out, and then a little girl.
She was more or less my age, with shoulder-length brown hair and a jumper all the colors of the rainbow. The girl was about four. Upon seeing me, she took a step back behind her mother’s legs. I wavered.
“Can I help you?” The woman’s smile was friendly, open.
“It’s just … I used to live here.”
“Oh! Are you Mrs. Jevons? I don’t think we ever met, but the estate agent—”
“No, I left twenty years ago. I grew up here.” The door was still open and I could see the carpets had been taken up and the floorboards polished. A print of a Matisse hung at the end of the hall. Beneath it was a walnut chest of drawers with a turquoise ceramic pot on it. A pause. I tore my eyes away.
“Listen … Would you like to come in and have a quick look?”
I thanked her, but said I had to be on my way.
“We came down from London. Couldn’t get a studio there with what we had. We wanted Ella to have her own room. It’s been an adjustment, but we love it now. And the house, it’s a happy place. We’ve always felt, well, that people were happy here.”
Not trusting myself to speak, I nodded.
She unlocked the car and started getting the girl strapped into her booster seat. I waved goodbye to them both and went over to where the telephone box had once stood. It had been taken away, but the concrete plinth remained, weeds pushing their way up through the cracks. Where were the children now, the ones like I had been, now that the turquoise ceramic pot owners had moved in?
When they’d driven off, I went back, staring at the house like I could incinerate it, thinking what it must be like to have lived the kind of life that allowed you to invite strangers into your home, to believe the walls within which you lived radiated happiness.
* * *
The car slowed down up ahead and then reversed until it drew level with me. The passenger window slid down and I heard a voice say, “Is that you, Andy?”
It was Em’s mum. I leaned down to mumble hello.
“So it is you!” But then, seeing my eyes red from crying, she said, “What’s all this then? Oh Andy, come on, get in.”
I tumbled into the car. It was a moment of need, a moment where what I needed overrode my self-control. I fell across the passenger seat into her arms, pressing my face into her jacket. June did not push me away. She was not angry with me. Instead, she stroked my hair while I wept and shook.
“I’m all right. I’m all right.” I don’t know how many times I said it.
“You been up to your mum’s?”
“Yes.” I sat back, with my hands o
ver my face.
“Oh, Andy. Come on, love. Let’s go home.”
* * *
Not my home, of course, but Em’s. We sat in the kitchen, under the low beams. Out came the tea and cake. It was June who looked after Mum’s grave. She went up to see Em most weeks.
“Used to see your Marcus up there sometimes. I invited him back, but he never wanted to come. He’s done well with his uncle’s business.” She paused. “Got married a while back. His wife, Lisa, is friends with my Faye. Kids the same age. The boy’s a sweet little thing, but his girl is an unholy terror. Wild as the wind. Gorgeous, of course. Lisa says her dad worships her.”
We talked for a bit about her grandchildren. There were two, with a third on the way.
“I’m sorry I never came.”
“I thought you might visit. Even if it was just to see Peter’s mum and dad. Sometimes Mrs. White would pass on a bit of news if she’d spoken to him. Then I got to thinking what’s she got to come back for? There were times I’d have run off too if I could.
“Nothing ever makes up for it, Andy, for losing Em. Some days I’ll remember a falling-out we had, because she borrowed my best earrings without asking or locked herself in the bathroom for three hours so I’d had to pee in the garden. And I’d cut off all my limbs to have her back. But you make a place for it. That’s what I tell them—Jack, Faye, the rest of the family. Because I’d get angry sometimes, like they wanted to pretend she was off on holiday somewhere, or hadn’t existed. Oh, that made me hopping mad. People cope differently. I told them, you have to let me do it my way. Faye understands now. She had a miscarriage between her first and the second, and idiots kept saying things like ‘Well at least you’ve got your Shelley,’ or ‘You’ll have another one.’ Like you’re not allowed your grief.”
I swallowed hard. June cut me another slice of cake and slid it across. She asked me about London, about what had brought me back.
“That was Peter? Well, I never. I remember the two of you, right back to infant school. That was a love affair like no other! Em would be ‘Andy this,’ and ‘Andy that,’ and ‘Oh but Andy only likes Peter.’ She was so pleased when you finally became friends. Never shut up about you. Then you started coming round. Do you remember? And she’d whisk you off upstairs so she could have you to herself. It was like having a little wolf about the house. Then I started noticing, after you’d been, all the Tampax would be gone from the bathroom. And I wondered, ‘What’s going on that she’s got to help herself to Tampax?’ And I’d see your mother in town sometimes. I wanted to talk to her, but…” Her face darkened, “Unhappy woman. That’s what I used to think. That’s an unhappy woman.”
June was heading out to pick the littlest one up from playgroup.
“Do you want to see her room? You can let yourself out, or I can give you a lift, after we’re back from swimming. Some days I sit in it, but less now. The girls sleep in it when they stay over. I wasn’t sure about it. But it’s better. They love it. They call it Dead Aunty Em’s room. Horrible, but then kids are horrible, aren’t they?”
I followed her upstairs as if to my execution.
The sun was slanting in under the thatch through the latticed windows, strewing diamonds of light across the floor. The shoebox of My Little Ponies that Em’d kept hidden under her bed was out. Small jumps had been built out of twigs and the cardboard tubes from toilet rolls.
“Might see you in a bit then, Andy.”
Sitting on the bed, I listened to her footsteps descending the stairs. After a few minutes, the door clicked shut. All of Em’s things were there. The red teapot on the window ledge. A pencil tin with I MF still visible in Tipp-Ex on the lid. Martin Frost or … Marcus Fisher? I picked up her hairbrush for a bit and held it. On the dressing table was a black eyeliner. I got it going on the back of my hand and then, in the mirror, I did first one eye and then the other, aiming for flicks, but I’d never been able to get them right. I knocked over two of the ponies and knelt down to set them straight. With one hand, I took the one with the rainbow mane and tail over the jumps, then placed it back on the carpet, but so it was humping the pink one with hearts on its bum. In my head, I heard Em laugh.
The Christmas tapes were on the side by her CD-Double-Cassette player. There was one for each of us. I slipped mine into the machine and lay back on the bed with my head on Em’s pillow, reading through the track listings. Some of the songs she’d taped off the radio and there would be the last second of John Peel introducing them before the music started. She knew what I liked. Seattle sounds, girl punk bands, Leonard Cohen, Elvis Costello. When side one finished, I turned it over and this time I closed my eyes, and for a while I could feel myself held in Em’s mind, could feel her reaching out to me. Songs for Andy, the cassette said, and on the inlay card, she’d drawn a cartoon in pencil, the figure of a girl from behind, looking out into a landscape of Christmas trees and snow, a small moon, hanging like a lantern in a sky studded with stars.
* * *
When it came to an end, I took the tape out and put it back in the case and then into my pocket, along with the one for Peter. I looked around, ready to go. In the alcove by the wall was her art stuff, the plastic toolbox full of paints and brushes, sets of pastels and crumbling sticks of charcoal. On the shelf above, her sketchbooks were lined up. I pulled one down, recognizing the cover, and put Marcus’s tape into the player. He liked his music loud and shouty. Didn’t matter if it was rock or rap or rave, just so long as you could take a corner fast to it, shifting up and down the gears with the engine revving.
The sketchbook was the one she had started that summer at the manor. She always left the first few pages blank.
Too much pressure, and if I fuck up the first page, I won’t want to use it anymore.
You could tear it out.
Not possible Andy, not possible.
I remembered her saying that after she had drawn something, she never forgot it. She could close her eyes and see the thing exactly as it was, not the drawing she had made of it, but the thing itself.
There was one of the fountain, and another of the manor from the front, not quite right so she’d ruined it by drawing two smiling stick figures on the roof. A few of the sketches were from art class, a still life, a copy of a painting of a platter of fruit and what looked like a baboon, a miniature picture of the temple and the lake—and there were sketches of us. I knew she had done them, indeed I had seen them before. Peter wearing a daisy chain. Me. Marcus. Why are you doing this to me, Em? Me again, on the lawn looking away, the shoulder wrong but the eyes right. A half-finished portrait of David, all wrong; you could see why she had given up.
But there were others, others I hadn’t seen. A sketch of Marcus. And then another. And then a lot more. Different poses, quite a few portraits of his face. Proper finished pictures, time spent on them, time and love. I had the sketchbook on my lap. Lead had come off on my fingers and I wiped them absently on my trousers. Marcus sitting half in and half out of the shade with his eyes closed. Marcus lying in the grass.
I hadn’t really been listening to the tape, but the music swelled now to fill my ears, not shouty but soft, soft, full of longing. I picked up the case and looked at it, properly looked at it, reading the listings.
Love song, after love song, after love song.
CHAPTER 22
THE SECOND SET
I did not know what to do with the tape Em had made for Marcus. In the end I took it, and let myself out, and when the Whites had gone to bed, I listened to it, over and over on the stereo in Peter’s room, with the volume low in a way that I had not listened to music in years.
After much deliberation, I left it in Darren’s room, inside the visitor’s book, on a Friday evening, knowing Marcus came in on Saturday mornings.
On the walk back, Oliver called again. Sometimes he tried to woo me back. A couple of times he’d threatened me with violating the terms of my contract.
“What are you going to do? Volunteer in Liberia?
Build yurts in Mongolia? Start a cheese farm? A yoga camp? Are you going to train in the art of vaginal steaming? It’s all bullshit and you know it.”
I let him run. When he’d finished, I cleared my throat. “I don’t know, Oliver, really I don’t know. All those pictures you sent. Remember? I want to find the things behind them.”
“What things?”
“The things behind the pictures. I can’t see them because the pictures are in the way.”
“You’re not making any sense.” He sighed. “Listen, take a holiday if you have to. But you’ve worked so hard. Don’t throw it all away. We can talk about your hours. Money. Work-life balance or whatever. Are you listening, Andrea?”
“Yes.”
“Will you think about it?”
And I said I would. And I did, among other things.
David alive again in my head. Spectral company. Turning to gesture to the man selling coffee, legs stretched out from a red plastic stool. His face in shadow in the tiny Florentine chapel. David’s lips touching mine in a display bed in the empty IKEA.
I had always wanted magic from David, and he had supplied it, as best he could, with what he had. A part of me had reasoned that if there were people like Joe, blight men, wrecking balls, that there must exist the opposite. The ragged ancestors who raised the standing stones at Avebury and Stonehenge must have believed in magic, or why did they cart rocks weighing tens of tons from Wales to Wiltshire before the invention of the wheel? The early Christians shivered in their stone churches waiting for Viking marauders, believing in their God’s protection. I had needed magic too, but I had wanted David to perform a spell that only I was capable of. I didn’t want to make the same mistake again.
At night, I lay in bed in the vicarage spare room, fretting. I had the idea I might go south, to Cornwall, to the sea cliffs. I researched courses in climbing, battling the specter of Oliver laughing over my shoulder. I had a vision of myself, suspended on ropes over the foaming sea, stretching for a handhold somewhere high above. There, alone, I would find my nerve. I fed the image, and struggled to believe in it, held captive by the other images that came: of indifferent, much-younger climbers cold-shouldering me, of a sarcastic group leader, macho and posturing, an impatient man with an unkind laugh. Even when I imagined the ropes holding me, my thoughts turned to falling, to falling and not being caught.
Before the Ruins Page 25
