by Rachel Joyce
‘Those clothes are out of date,’ said Beverley. ‘You should get something more fashionable.’
‘Between you and me,’ Byron wrote, ‘I believe she has stolen them. I also now believe she had the lighter in her handbag all along.’
The shopping trip was Beverley’s idea. Diana drove them into town and they parked near the department store. They tried on matching dresses while Jeanie swung between the rails and Lucy scowled. They stopped for more advocaat at the off-licence and a bottle of cherry cola for the children. When Lucy said they were not allowed sugary drinks, on account of their teeth, Beverley laughed heartily. ‘You lot need to live more,’ she said. The women paraded their new kaftan dresses on the terrace and it was like watching two contrasting halves of the same thing. Diana, blonde and slim and graceful; Beverley, black-haired and undernourished, and altogether more glued to the spot.
After lunch, Byron was bringing lemonade for his mother and Beverley when he interrupted a conversation. He could tell it was important because his mother and Beverley had their heads so close that Diana’s blonde hair appeared to grow out of Beverley’s black parting. Beverley was painting his mother’s nails. They didn’t even look up as he tiptoed across the carpet. Carefully he removed the glasses from the tray and set them on coasters. And that was when he heard his mother say, ‘Of course I wasn’t in love with him. I just thought I was.’
He edged from the room as quietly as he had entered. He couldn’t think what his mother was talking about. He was aware of not wanting to hear any more while also not being able to move away. Then Jeanie gave a wild laugh from the garden, and he hid on his knees, cramming himself against the hall side of the drawing-room door, because he didn’t want to play with Jeanie again. Now that her leg was healing, she seemed to like hiding in bushes and running out at him when he least expected her. It was dreadful. Crushing his eye to the crack between the door and its frame, he could see the two women as if caught in a shard of light. He reached for his notebook and even as he opened it, the binding creaked and his mother glanced up. ‘I heard something.’
It was nothing, said Beverley. She told Diana to go on. She placed her hand on Diana’s and he didn’t know why but the longer it stayed there the more he wished she would take it away. He wished it very much.
His mother began to speak. Her voice was soft and he caught only unconnected phrases, words that at first made no sense. He had to flatten his ear to the crack. She was saying, ‘… an old friend. We bumped into—I didn’t mean any harm. And one day—It all grew from there.’
Byron’s pencil stalled over the pages of his notebook. He didn’t know what he was writing. When he pressed his eye back to the splinter of light, his mother had sat back in her chair and was emptying her glass. ‘It’s a relief to say this,’ she murmured.
Beverley agreed that of course it was a relief. She asked for Diana’s other hand so that she could finish her nails. She talked about how lonely it must be at Cranham House and all the time his mother watched her hand in Beverley’s and agreed that yes, it was. So lonely sometimes she could hardly bear it. ‘But the person I’m thinking of, I met before we moved here. Just after Seymour and I were married in fact.’
Beverley’s eyebrows shot up and stayed there. She dipped her brush in the polish. Byron couldn’t say how but it felt as if she were somehow beckoning the words out of his mother’s mouth simply by saying nothing.
‘Seymour found out. He’s a clever man and he sees straight through me. If I try to lie because I want to buy a little gift, or something secret, he’s on to me like a hawk. Although at the time Ted didn’t feel like a lie.’
‘Ted?’
‘He just felt like a young friend.’
‘If Ted was only your young friend, I don’t see the problem.’
‘Hm,’ said Diana, suggesting that – despite Beverley’s inability to see the problem – there was one and it was of considerable size. ‘Seymour bought the house here after that. He said the country air would be good for me. I owe everything to him. You have to remember.’
Finishing Diana’s nails, Beverley passed her a cigarette and flicked at the retrieved lighter. She warned his mother to keep still or the colour would be ruined. Diana pulled long drags from the cigarette and blew the smoke above Beverley’s head, where it spread like opaque fingers and disappeared.
‘Seymour needs me, you see,’ she said quietly. ‘It’s frightening sometimes, how much he needs me.’
Byron could barely move. It had never occurred to him that his mother might have loved anyone other than his father, that there might once have been a young man called Ted. His head was hot and spinning; dashing all round the things he could remember, overturning them like stones and trying to make sense, trying to see the underside of them. He thought of the man she had once mentioned who liked champagne, and her unexplained visits to Digby Road. Was that what she meant? Then she continued speaking, and he had to clasp his damp hands in a ball in order to concentrate. ‘When I met Seymour I’d had enough. Enough of those men who love you and then disappear. The theatre was full of them. Or even the men who waited at the stage door and wrote letters and took us out for dinner. They all had wives. They all had families and they never—’ She left the sentence as if she was afraid of finishing it or wasn’t sure how to. ‘Seymour was persistent. He was traditional too. I liked that. He brought me roses. He took me to the cinema on my afternoons off. We were married within two months. It was a small wedding, but he didn’t want the fuss. And my friends were not the sort of people you’d invite. We didn’t want my past to come with me.’
Beverley gave a splutter as if she had just choked on something in her drink. ‘Hang on. What was your job exactly?’
But Diana said nothing. She rubbed out her cigarette and reached straight for another. She laughed but for once it was a hard sound as if she were looking at herself and not liking the person she saw. She pulled again on the cigarette and yawned out a wraith of her blue smoke. ‘Let’s just say, I took after my mother.’
For the first time, Byron could not write in the notebook. He could not telephone James. He did not want words. He wanted nothing to do with the meanings of things. He ran and ran across the lawn, trying to leave his thoughts behind, and when Jeanie laughed at him to wait he ran faster. His breath cut his throat and his legs felt boned but he kept going. He crawled under the fruit cages and the smell was so full, the raspberries so red, the prickles so sharp, he was dizzy. He sat there for a long time. Later he heard his mother call his name from the house but he still didn’t move. He didn’t want to know about Ted or his father or the job his mother couldn’t mention, and now that he did, he didn’t know how to stop knowing. If only James had not asked him to take notes. He stayed hidden until he glimpsed Beverley and Jeanie strolling down the drive, waving their goodbyes. They were not hand in hand; Beverley stalked ahead, beneath her purple hat, while Jeanie ran large circles round her. Once he saw Beverley stop and shout, though he couldn’t hear what she said. The house was a glaring white in the late-afternoon sun and behind it the sharp rim of the moor sliced into the sky.
James telephoned first thing the next morning. He was very excited about a new Operation Perfect folder he was making. He explained he had redrawn Byron’s map of Digby Road because the scale of it was not right, and all the time that he spoke Byron felt he was on the opposite side of a window, looking in at his friend and unable to be heard.
‘What happened yesterday?’ said James. ‘Did you write everything down?’
Byron said nothing had happened.
‘Do you have a cold or something?’ said James.
Byron blew his nose and replied he had a stinker.
At the weekend there was rain. It flattened the nicotiana, the delphiniums and stocks. His mother and father sat looking out of windows from different parts of the house. Sometimes they passed and one or other of them made a remark which the other appeared to only half hear. Then Seymour observed there was
an odd smell in the house, a sweet one. His mother claimed it must be her new perfume. Why was the smell in his study? he asked. Where was his paperweight? And while he was on the subject of missing items, why was there another blank stub in the chequebook?
Diana emptied her glass as if it were medicinal. She must have moved the paperweight when she was dusting. She would look for it later. She sat down to serve dinner. She looked exhausted.
‘What are you wearing?’ said his father.
‘This?’ Diana sounded surprised, as if moments before she had been wearing something entirely different, a cocktail dress, for instance, or a two-piece suit from Jaeger. ‘Oh. It’s a kaftan.’
‘It’s a hippy garment.’
‘It’s the fashion, darling.’
‘But you look like a hippy. You look like a feminist.’
‘More vegetables?’ She ladled each plate with three extra boiled carrots and a golden pool of butter. His father’s voice bulldozed the silence.
‘Take it off.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Go upstairs. Get rid of it.’
Byron stared at his plate. He wanted to be able to eat as if everything were normal, but his mother was making small swallowing noises and his father was breathing like a bear. It was hard to want your buttered carrots with all that going on.
‘Beverley has a kaftan too,’ said Lucy. ‘It is exac’ly the same.’
His father paled. The little boy rushed into his face again and he looked for a moment as if he had no idea what to do.
‘Beverley? Who is Beverley?’
‘Mummy’s friend,’ murmured Lucy.
‘A Winston House mother?’
‘Jeanie doesn’t go to Winston House. They live in Digby Road. She wants to go on my space hopper and I won’t let her because she is dangerous. She has black bits on her teeth, here and here and here.’ Lucy pointed at her open mouth. There was quite a lot of carrot in there so it was hard to tell where precisely she was pointing.
His father turned to Byron. Byron didn’t have to raise his eyes to know. ‘This woman comes to visit? Is that right? Does she bring anyone else?’ Byron’s head began to bang.
‘Leave them alone.’ Diana threw down her fork with a clatter and pushed her plate away. ‘For God’s sake, Seymour, I’m only wearing a bloody kaftan. I’ll change after dinner.’
She had never sworn like that before. His father stopped eating. He moved back his chair and stood. He walked to his mother and stopped so that he looked like a black pillar behind a little fountain of colour. Seymour’s fingers tightened around the rim of her chair. They were not on her skin, but all the same it was like watching him touch a part of her and it was hard to tell if he was tickling or hurting. The children did not move. He said quietly, ‘You will not wear that dress. You will not see that woman again.’ His father’s fingers kept squeezing her chair, while his mother’s made tiny noises against the tablecloth like a bird flapping its wings in a cage.
As suddenly as he had stood, Seymour left the room. His mother patted her neck with the backs of her hands, as if she were pressing everything back into place, the veins and the skin and the muscle. Byron wanted to say how much he liked her new dress but she told the children to run outside and play.
That night Byron tried to read his Look and Learn annuals. He couldn’t stop seeing his father with his fingers on his mother’s chair. So much had happened and for the first time he had no idea how to share any of it with James. At last he fell into a light dream about people with heads that were too big for their bodies and whose voices were low, but persistent, like cries without words.
Waking, he realized the voices belonged to his parents. As he crossed the landing, the sounds grew louder. He pushed the door open a crack and stood stock-still, not believing what he was seeing. He could make out his father’s torso, almost blue, and beneath him the profile of his mother. His father dug and dug at her body and her arm flailed at the pillow. Byron closed the door without clicking the handle.
He didn’t even know he was going outside until he was there. The moon was pale, the sky bruised. There seemed to be nothing between himself and the moor. The night stole all the detail of foreground and middle spaces. He moved through the garden and opened the picket gate into the meadow. He wanted to throw something, stones, and he did, he aimed them right at the moon, but they merely scattered round his feet. They didn’t even touch the dark. Of course James was right about the Apollo landings. How could a man get all the way up there? How could Byron have been so stupid as to believe in NASA and the photographs? He climbed over the fencing and made his way to the pond.
There he sat on a stone. The air was alive with tiny clickings and scrapings and patterings. He didn’t know what to think any more. He didn’t know if his mother was good or bad, if his father was good or bad. He didn’t know if Beverley was good or bad – if she had stolen the lighter, the paperweight, the clothes – or if there was another explanation. The night seemed to be so slow. He kept looking at the horizon, waiting for the crack of dawn light over the east and the first blaze of sun, but they didn’t come. The night just went on and on. Slowly Byron returned to the house.
He wondered if his mother would be waiting, if she would be worrying, but the only sound came from his father’s clocks, striking at the silence. Time was a different thing entirely inside his home, as if it were bigger than the silence, but it wasn’t really. It was all made up. He wrote a brief letter for James: ‘Jeanie’s leg now fully healed. Tout va bien. Yours sincerely, Byron Hemmings.’ That was the end of Operation Perfect, he thought. It was the end of many things.
Byron never saw the kaftan dress again. Maybe on Sunday night it found its way to the bonfire, like the mint-green dress and the matching cardigan and shoes; he did not ask. He put away his torch, his magnifying glass, his Brooke Bond tea cards, his annuals. They seemed to belong to someone else. And he was not the only one who appeared changed. After the weekend, his mother was more guarded too. She set up the plastic sun loungers on the terrace for Beverley but she smiled less and did not fetch the gramophone. She did not offer drinks.
‘You only need to say if I’m in the way,’ said Beverley.
‘Of course you’re not in the way.’
‘I know you have all those other mothers to see.’
‘I’m not seeing anyone.’
‘Or maybe you have other people your prefer to dance with?’
‘I don’t always feel like dancing,’ said Diana.
Here Beverley laughed and rolled her eyes, as if she had heard differently.
On 2 August it was Lucy’s sixth birthday. Byron was woken by his mother’s voice, and the flowery scent of her, tickling him out of sleep. She had an idea for a surprise, she whispered. It was going to be the happiest day. They must dress quickly. As they headed downstairs, she couldn’t stop laughing. She was wearing a red summer dress, the colour of a field poppy, and had already packed towels and a picnic.
The drive lasted several hours but his mother hummed nearly all the way. Looking at her from the back seat of the Jaguar, he admired the wave of her hair and the softness of her skin and the pearliness of her fingernails, placed exactly right on the steering wheel. It seemed the first time in many weeks that she had driven the car without looking frightened. When Lucy needed a lavatory they stopped at a small roadside café and she told them they could have ice cream. The vendor asked if they would like flakes or sauce and she said yes to both.
‘They look like good kids,’ he said. And she laughed and said yes, they were.
They sat to eat at a metal table in the sun because she didn’t want ice cream in the car and while they ate she closed her eyes, tilting her face to the warmth. When Lucy whispered she was asleep their mother opened one eye and laughed. ‘I can hear every word,’ she said. Already her forehead and shoulder blades were tinged pink with the heat and it was like little fingerprints all over her.
The sun was blazing by the time they a
rrived at the beach. Families had set up homes for themselves on the sand with windbreaks and deckchairs. The sea crinkled silver and he watched the sunlight, the way it landed on the moving waves like sparks. The children took off their sandals and the sand burnt beneath their toes. Diana showed them how to make castles and to bury their legs. There were still sugary smudges on their skin from the ice cream, and the sand glued to their knees and chafed when she rubbed it away. Afterwards they visited the pier and she showed them the penny slot machines, the candyfloss stalls, the dodgem cars. She bought them each a stick of rock.
In the House of Mirrors, their mother swept them from one glass to another. ‘Look at me!’ she kept laughing. Her happiness was like something in the air that day, something sweet they could taste on their tongues and swallow. Sidling close to her, Byron and Lucy held her hands and found shortened, fattened or elongated versions of themselves in the mirrors. The children were sticky and red from the heat, their clothes creased, their hair tousled. It was only their mother in the middle with her poppy-red dress, her puff of hair, who looked beautiful.
She sat them on a bench to eat their sandwiches. While they ate, she strayed to the edge of the pier, and looked over the sea. She held her hand over her eyes to block the sun. When a passing gentleman stopped to say hello, she laughed. ‘Be off with you. I’ve got children.’
Outside the theatre at the end of the pier there were notices: Stalls full, Gallery full. Their mother licked the tip of her handkerchief and wiped their faces clean, before pushing at the glass doors and leading the children inside. She held her finger to her mouth, urging them to be silent.
The foyer was empty but they could hear laughter and applause beyond the velvet curtain. She asked a uniformed woman at the ticket kiosk if there were any seats left and the lady said there was a box free, if that would suit them. While his mother counted the money from her purse, she told her it was years since she’d seen a show. She asked if the woman had heard of the White Supremo and Pamela the Lady with a Beard, as well as a dancing group called Sally’s Girls, but the ticket lady shook her head. ‘We get them all here,’ she said; and once again his mother laughed and took the children’s hands. A young man with a special hat and a torch led the way up the darkened stairs and along a corridor. His mother asked for two programmes and gave them to the children, one each.
