by Alan Clark
Inside the chamber, Vic had stuck a candle in a bottle. It flickered over the crusty face of Apollo on his plinth. Vic was standing beside the statue, his arm draped around its shoulders. He didn’t look at me or say anything. He just stood there, frozen. The tableau.
I suppose my mouth was hanging open, which made it easier for the projectile vomiting of the kettle chips onto the flotsam of soggy leaves and the atrophied corpses of long-dead toads. Vic reached an arm out towards me, but I backed away and sagged against the crumbling door frame. I had an overwhelming urge to run but my knees wouldn’t work. I wiped the foul dribbles off my chin with the back of my hand. My stomach muscles ached and my throat was stinging so much I’m not sure I could have spoken even if I’d known what to say.
‘Toots, I’m not a man who’s done anything very dreadful in his life, give or take the occasional lousy ‘B’ side,’ he said in a half-whisper, the words sneaking out between gulps of breath, ‘but I did a truly bad thing that night over thirty years ago on this very spot. Because of me you lost your home and the love that had been there for you. I wanted to try and give it back to you. That’s what it’s all been about, changing your grandmother’s will, restoring the house, everything. I did it all for you.’
Vic turned away so I couldn’t see his face. He brushed the dirt off a stone bench and slumped down, staring at the teeny skeletons on the floor.
‘My only excuse is that you dazzled me, blinded me to the wrong I was doing. Sorry, I know it’s all a bit Death In Venice though I’d never been into teenage boys in the slightest, I swear it. And anyway, you were nearly sixteen, you’d said. Almost a man. It was you who tempted me in here and I knew what you wanted. But I still never forgave myself.’
I’d gradually slid down the lintel and was sitting on the dirty floor. It was too late to save Hugo Boss; the brambles had done for him and now he had sick in his crotch. It seemed about a hundred years since I’d got up this morning and headed for Camden Town Hall. I must ring this date in next year’s diary and simply not get up.
‘A while later I heard from my buddy, your grandmother’s lawyer, that you seemed to have been more or less banished from Mount Royal, though he didn’t know why. But I did of course and I was devastated. Over the next few years, I asked him casually about you often, then he told me you’d disappeared abroad. For ages, I wondered how to put it right. Eventually I guess I tried to bury the whole thing in my memory and got on with turning myself into a national treasure. Then what do you know? By sheer chance, her Ladyship landed in my nursing home. She had the beginnings of Alzheimer’s by then and didn’t remember me at all. I should have hated her I suppose, but I couldn’t manage that. She was so pathetic and I’d done her such harm too you see. Anyway, by this time we were living in a Google world and I tracked you down. I woke from a snooze that day beside her bed and there you were. Wow. Middle-aged and a bit of a bruiser now, but I was dazzled once more. All the time we were cleaning up Sibyl’s poo, when we had coffee in the lounge, when you gave me that hug goodbye, I was watching for the recognition to dawn in your eyes but it never came. I loved you again from that day.’
I knew I should say something. I’d stopped shivering and was sweating now.
‘From then on, I craved your visits like a drug,’ said Vic. He was talking faster now, pumping out the sentences as if scared that I might try to stop him.
‘At first I told myself not to be a sad old asshole, that my feelings could never be returned. But I sensed an aimlessness in you, a lack of direction maybe. And I began to fantasize that I might be, I don’t know, some sort of safe harbour. Despite the age gap, despite the fact that when I bend over now there’s a partial eclipse of the sun. The day I moved into this house I was groggy with hope. Nasty shock when the dusky midget appeared but I told myself it was just sex and that he’d pass through your life like a gallstone. So you’ll understand why I had a bit of bother getting my Weetabix down this morning after you’d gone off to be hitched. And coming right on top of the tear-jerking discovery of the long-lost kid, well it’s all seemed a bit hopeless. I mean what the fuck would you need me for? I’d saved Mount Royal for you, this place where I’d dreamed that we might have been together and it had all been a total waste of time. I was just another one of Rory’s Boys. Silly old fool. The whisky’s been useful so far but I think I might need to track down some absinthe pretty soon.’
There was silence now inside the folly, broken only by the toads still partying in the pond outside. A breeze had got up and it whistled in through the open doorway, stirring up the fetid smells and the images of that other night. The long Givenchy sheath, muddied and torn. The Malacca cane that quivered then fell. The look in her eyes as she stared down at me.
‘So I’m the one you heard the trumpets for?’ I managed to ask, the puke still burning in my gullet.
‘And the walls came a-tumbling down.’
‘You’re telling me all this now Faisal’s gone, now there’s a vacancy?’
‘Possibly. I don’t know,’ said Vic. ‘I’ve never been sure whether I’d ever tell you about the past. I’ve always been careful to hide away photos of me when I was younger, old album sleeves, that sort of thing. I’d even hoped it might never be necessary to confess; that we’d draw closer anyway and everything would be fine. So maybe today’s just the catalyst. But I just couldn’t keep it inside me for even one more sleepless night, lying in my bed, getting smaller. Not one. And now que sera, sera.’
‘As your old pal Doris used to sing.’
‘Yep.’
I pulled myself to my feet and said I was returning to the house. He asked me to stay and talk but I turned and went out into the Wilderness. I heard him call my name, but I kept on going. When I reached the far end of the finger of water I glanced back towards the folly. It was almost invisible now in the gathering dusk. I wondered if he’d be all right. I could still just see the pinprick of candlelight, then it was suddenly snuffed out. Just as it had been all those years ago.
SEVENTEEN
Whatever the village might once have been, it had forgotten long ago. Perched on a bluff above a winding, unpretentious river, the Chilterns crumpled on the eastern horizon, it ought to have been appealing, the apple of an estate agent’s eye. There was a decent Norman church, a sprinkling of thatched cottages, even a Georgian manor house mentioned in Pevsner. But it was blighted by a thirties council estate, bus-shelters doused in graffiti and a playground with peeling swings, where hard-faced young mothers smoked their fags while their kids screamed expletives in competition with the birdsong.
The farm was on the outskirts, but with its back turned against the village, somehow not quite part of it. It looked run-down; shabby barns with corrugated iron roofs streaked with birdshit, the fossils of elderly tractors beached in the fields. The small farmhouse was pebble-dashed in grey; yellowing net curtains at every window to repel the curiosity of the passer-by; an ironic precaution since anyone would have quickened their step at the sight of it. Dolores’ vowels might have suggested some Laurie Lee idyll, but the reality of the place where she’d grown up had no such romance.
We sat in the Merc outside the farm gate. This was as far as we were going, she said. She’d no idea if Mr Potts were at home. There wasn’t going to be any meeting of her two Dads; she enjoyed a good soap-opera but flatly refused to appear in one. So we’d just driven round and about; I’d been shown her primary school, her secondary school, the local Asda where she’d worked in the holidays, the dog-eared antique shop where she’d lost her virginity to a middle-aged dealer she’d always assumed to be gay. She’d flaunted herself and got more than she’d bargained for; including a pregnancy swiftly followed by a termination. Her parents had known nothing. Her mother would have thrown herself under the combine harvester. Jesus, I’d been a grandfather for about five minutes and known nothing about it.
‘There were times I wished Mama had aborted me,’ said Dolores, peering at the farmhouse from behind a vast pair
of shades. ‘She wasn’t exactly a million laughs. That whole Catholic number, you know? No control over their own lives. Do what the old arsehole in Rome tells you to do. Fuck that.’
‘But surely it’s thanks to all that stuff that she didn’t abort you?’ I said it with a grin, to mask the horror that had coursed through me at the thought of it. ‘So three Hail Marys for the old arsehole. But I’m sorry you and your mother didn’t get along.’
‘Actually no, we were quite close in some ways but I was her shame too you see. Only Mr Potts ever knew in fact and she wasn’t much bothered about that. It was God knowing that really did her in. You want to go see her now?’
‘Sorry?’
‘She’s in the churchyard,’ said Dolores. ‘I thought you might like to renew your acquaintance. In fact, I insist that you do.’
I’d not reckoned on this; I’d just suggested a sentimental journey as a possible way of kick-starting the bonding process. She’d agreed but only under pressure. There was still that arm’s-length thing going on. I’d no clear idea how she felt towards me. On the night of the big disclosure, she’d said she’d just come to take a look at me. Was that it then? Was that all it would ever be? Maybe it was just her generation and its armour-plated obsession with its own agenda. She’d hardly even raised an eyebrow when she’d heard about the death of Caravaggio; just said ‘shit’ and begun talking about a copper beech that might need felling. I wondered how you got through to Dolores Potts.
I parked the Merc carelessly close to a gang of feral schoolgirls and followed Dolores through a lychgate and up a sloping path lined with graves. In front of us, the church tower leaned back against a mouse-grey sky. Dolores veered off among the tombstones. Her mother, garlanded with freshly-laid flowers, lay in the shelter of the perimeter wall. On the other side of it, somebody’s TV pumped out of an open window. Fern Britton was talking about cystitis.
Cristina Gomez Potts. 1963–2010.
I looked at the headstone and tried, yet again, to bring the face into focus. Dolores had shown me an old photograph but it hadn’t helped much. All I recalled were a couple of dates, me half-pissed, another naked body lying on a bed waiting for me to prove myself a proper man. I suppose I’d never been bothered about the faces. Just like I’d never registered Vic’s.
‘Isn’t this nice?’ said Dolores sitting on an adjacent tomb and lighting up. ‘The family together at last.’
She stared at her mother’s grave then back at me. Suddenly her expression changed from its usual disengaged serenity. She looked desperately uncomfortable.
‘This was a mistake,’ she announced, leaping up and grinding her fag beneath her red stiletto. ‘Come on, let’s go.’
Something made me grab her arm as she moved past me. Mascara was trickling down her cheek.
‘You fucked up her life,’ she shouted. ‘She only got forty-seven years of it and you fucked it up for her. She fell in love with you and let you screw her. The good Catholic girl. Didn’t you even notice she was a virgin? Then you just disappeared. On to the next one, yeah? But every day for the rest of her life Mama looked at me and saw you. That was why she loved me and why she was so hard on me too.’
‘I had no idea …’ I said. ‘If I’d known … I meant her no harm …’
‘People never do, do they?’
‘I was a bit screwed up, that’s all.’
‘And you still are, aren’t you? Twenty-six years later, you came on to me. Isn’t it time you accepted yourself? It’s unbelievable in this day and age, it really is. Anyway, you’re now one of the most famous shirtlifters in the country, so what’s the bloody point? Grow up Daddy before you grow old.’
Dolores turned away from me. She scraped a match across the scabby catafalque of some ancient nobleman and lit up again.
‘I just wanted the whole shebang,’ I said. ‘It’s what I’d been brought up to expect. To have anything I wanted; like kids for example. Instead, I lost everything.’
‘Oh it’s always about you, isn’t it?’ she snapped. ‘Rory Blaine, centre of the fucking universe. So your grandmother dumped you cos you were a poof. I wormed it out of Elspeth. Big deal. Cry me a river. Well you walked away from my mother. You’d been injured and then you caused injury because of it. Even if you didn’t mean it, the pain still happened. So you’re quits with life, aren’t you? Now butch up and get over it.’
Dolores walked back to the grave, knelt down and crossed herself.
‘I thought you didn’t subscribe to all that,’ I said.
‘I don’t, but she’d like to see me here doing it, so what the hell.’
I wondered if I should kneel down too but just stood there awkwardly. On the other side of the wall, Fern Britton had moved on to teenage truancy. A boy called Shane was explaining why school was a load of bollocks.
‘Your photograph’s in there among the bones,’ said Dolores, ‘along with her rosary and a fragment of stone from the cathedral in Sevilla. I put it there myself. Mr Potts doesn’t know.’
‘Jesus.’
‘I guess if Cupid’s arrow hits you hard, you’re fucked,’ she said. ‘I wonder what it’s like.’
‘I’m told you hear trumpets,’ I said.
A young curate, scarce out of short trousers but already balding, held open the lychgate to let us pass. He smiled in that automatic way and hoped we’d enjoyed our time with God today.
‘Well did you enjoy it?’ I asked Dolores as we reached the car. ‘Getting all that off your capacious chest?’
‘Not really.’
‘You don’t hate me then?’
‘Maybe, right after Mama died, but only for about five minutes. And when I came to Mount Royal I soon realized you were just a messed-up bloke like the rest of them. Then I discovered I kind of liked you too. But I wanted you to know about this, which is why I agreed to this little awayday. Anyway, whatever I’ve said, you’re still my Dad. Now let’s get the hell out of here before we bump into the other one.’
I glanced back across at the churchyard and in that moment Cristina Gomez’s face came to me at last. She’d tripped over a cable in the office and twisted her ankle. I’d scooped her up in my arms like Rhett Butler and carried her to the first aid room. She’d been wincing and laughing at the same time. She’d had a high tinkling laugh. I could see her big dark eyes, the ones she’d given to her daughter, and feel her breath on my cheek.
For a moment, I thought my new-found ability to blub, so far revealed only to Elspeth’s lap, was going to prove itself again. Instead I just stared back at the churchyard till Dolores came round and took me in her arms. This time there was no tension in her body as I held her.
‘Come on Daddy,’ she said, rubbing my back like she was burping a baby. ‘Time for drinkies.’
I’d booked lunch at a posh place nearby; a Tudor inn with bulging walls, guarded by regiments of box pyramids and glossy young men who valet-parked your car. Dolores was just as at home as she’d been in the Ritz. I wondered how the girl from the drab farmhouse had transformed herself into what she was now. How long it had taken. What the trigger had been. Or maybe I knew the answer to that last one now.
We needed to talk about trivialities. Vic was recording his duet with Elton soon. Did I think Vic would let her tag along? I said to ask him herself. I hadn’t spoken to Vic in the three days since our melodrama in the Wilderness. I had no idea where we went from here. I’d been finding reasons to escape from the house; yesterday I’d gate-crashed Curtis Powell’s group outing to the V&A, today I was here with Dolores. It couldn’t go on.
Over the pudding, she announced she was going away for a long weekend. An old client had a new estate above Monte Carlo. He wanted her advice and she’d always been interested in Mediterranean planting. More of a challenge than England’s rain-soaked earth, she said. Tougher odds. She liked that. She hoped I didn’t mind her doing the odd outside commission. I lied and said I didn’t.
She asked if I’d heard from Faisal and I told her I h
adn’t. She looked at me from beneath her long Spanish lashes and toyed with her sorbet.
‘Well,’ she sighed eventually, ‘I think you’ve had a lucky escape.’
‘So you said in your note,’ I replied, mildly irritated. ‘Maybe everyone has a view? What’s Bruce Willis’s opinion? Have the Chamber-Laddies taken a vote?’
‘He was a decent guy, but not exactly a comfortable presence, was he?’
‘Maybe not. But at least, he was a presence. I happened to need that. Or I thought I did.’
‘I think you still do,’ she said. ‘Just choose more carefully next time. You understand feng shui? The way things are positioned in relation to each other? It’s quite useful when you’re planning a garden. Well I reckon you can apply it to people too. We get too close to some, too distant from others or just see them from the wrong angle. And all the time we could create a much happier space for ourselves if we simply repositioned.’
‘Isn’t that a bit rich coming from someone whose default position in relation to others is horizontal?’
Dolores threw back her head and laughed louder than people were expected to when paying these prices.
‘Yeah but that’s the position I’ve chosen for myself, right now at least. I’ll change it when it suits me. Anyway, how dare you presume it’s horizontal?’
One of the glossy boys swept the Merc up to the entrance and handed Dolores inside. She asked if his mother knew he was out. He was smitten. We twisted back along the lanes that led to the motorway As I accelerated towards London, Dolores reclined her seat and dozed off.
I’d called Ms Prada’s office yesterday. She was no longer in Lanzarote but had extended her itinerary to take in Madeira. Useless. We were nearly at High Wycombe when I swung the car onto the hard shoulder and slammed to a halt. Dolores sat bolt upright and swore. I stared ahead out through the windscreen and told her everything that had happened in the Wilderness three nights and thirty years ago. I left nothing out. When I finished, I turned to look at her. She smiled back at me, shaking her spiky black head.
