‘I’ve come to apologise,’ he said.
In the distance, she could hear sirens. Nothing was ever going to happen in the right sequence. He was supposed to be in the garden, waiting for them. And now he was here, smiling to the thump, thump, thump of the music downstairs, which would never protect her, from anything.
Christopher Goodwin knew his way from the railway station in Kay’s town, the way he told people he knew the inside of his own pocket, a comparison he repeated to himself now while knowing it was daft, because he was always so unsure of exactly what his pockets contained. Items collected in there with the ease of dust but greater bulk, such as biros and pieces of paper, receipts for purchases, an umbrella, the crumbled remnants of cigarettes, unanswered letters and a pair of useless nail scissors, which his fingers clutched in the search for cash. The pocket of a cassock and the capacious pockets of his anorak were probably the equivalent of a handbag for a woman and, getting out at the right station and setting off at a good speed, he had a vision of himself with one of those, instead of the routine, design accessory of an ugly old polythene bag.
He walked by the sea, which was nothing at first but a cold, dark backdrop, calling Kay McQuaid all the names under the moon. If she were not in her house, he would bomb the place, and the very thought of that made him pause with the thought of his own impotence. All right, he would pick up pebbles from the shore where Theodore Calvert had drowned and break all her windows. Oddly enough, the anger had been easy to sustain over an hour and a half’s journey in a cold train. All he had to do was to think of that poisonous document of a will and the sad draft that accompanied it, the posse of drunken youths at the far end of the carriage, Sister Barbara and that boy, Francis, to make him hyperventilate to screaming point, cross his arms over his chest and rock back and forth. Understandably, no one bothered him on the train and no one was going to bother him on this road by the sea, a kind of small esplanade where the street lights illuminated the wet concrete and the curl of the waves breaking into foam on the shingle below mocked him with their patient consistency. What’s it like to do the same thing every day? he asked the waves, pausing for a moment to watch a piece of flotsam move sluggishly on the current, floating inwards and sideways towards the foam, trying to guess how far it would travel before it hit the shore. In the brief time he watched, considering how his own St Christopher would have waded into the waves and rescued it, it moved far to the right, almost out of sight, edging closer and moving back in a coy dance. Even a broken crate could move with grace, fighting the strength of the current. He shuddered at the thought of Theo Calvert’s body, deposited here with far less care.The man Anna referred to as her giant of a father.
Kay McQuaid was not a person who went early to bed, or one to be alarmed in her somnolent, ultra-respectable road, to have someone knock at her door on the right side of midnight. He went to the back of the house, where light shone through the glazed kitchen door, and knocked thunderously. Timid knocking made people ever more nervous. There was a new lock, a big brute of a seven-lever Banham, of the kind favoured by his rich parishioners, although perversely, it was the poor who were burgled most. He could see a bright-coloured dressing gown hovering behind the door.
‘Open up!’ he roared. ‘For God’s sake, woman, it’s only the priest.’
She opened it slowly, to show a tired face, in which relief was notable for its presence and the lack of cosmetics for their absence. A different gown to any he had seen, with a stain down the front of its satin texture, and not a hint of surprise in her whole bearing, only a degree of resignation. Christopher Goodwin realised that his old friend Kay was moderately drunk. Good.
‘Hello, Kay. Surprise, surprise.’
‘Not really,’ she said dully, letting him past her with all the enthusiasm she may have offered someone who had come to read the gas meter, following him through the kitchen into the living room, still fashioned around the donkey cart of drinks and the Buddha squatting in the fireplace, looking ready to burp. He noticed how the doors to her garden were curtained, shutting it out, making an announcement that life had moved indoors and summer was now officially finished until next year. She always had been a bit of a control freak, trying to influence the weather and then shutting it out if she didn’t like it, changing her face to overcome her mood, changing her clothes, latterly, to control the time of day. She was a one, that Kay McQuaid, but even in the electric light, he could see that her eyes were pink, her eyebrows unattended, so that they looked fierce, and the room subtly disorganised. It was not the living room of someone at the end of their tether, but the room of someone who had not moved very much or very far for more than a day.
‘Help yourself,’ she said, sinking back into an armchair, which had obviously borne her weight for several hours without any of the obsessive plumping of cushions that was her custom. He went for the Jameson’s, relieved to find it pristine, fussing over it with umming and ahing, going out for a clean glass, to give her time to compose herself, hide the stain on the gown and whatever she needed. He found a piece of stale bread, sitting on a crumb-filled bread board, and ate it. Once settled in the opposite chair, with a glass in hand, he put the damp parcel of documents on to the smeared glass table between them both.
‘Don’t,’ she said. ‘I’ve never been much good with the written word.’
‘What a liar you are, Kay,’ he said, agreeably, easing himself down and wishing he was not so hungry, thinking he might go back into the kitchen to find that open packet of peanuts he had also seen, spilling on to the floor. ‘You were always good with a letter.You were granted a primary education, somewhere. Always wrote well. Good signatures.’
She grunted and smiled at him, vacantly, a fatuous smile spreading across her face, and then two parallel sets of tears coursed down her cheeks. Plump cheeks, like the rest of her, hidden bones in a pulpy face he had always found so vivid before. Beauty was ever in the eye of the beholder.
A scar, ticking away beneath the disorganised eyebrow, otherwise disguised.
‘I’ve something to tell you,’ he said. ‘Your boy Jack is working in the convent garden, the convent itself, more like, and had them all in various states of sublime adoration. Francis, he calls himself now. Blond and beautiful and poisonous. Have you any idea of what it is he might be trying to do?’
She shook her head and moaned.
‘Of course you do,’ he continued evenly, although it was an effort. ‘Theodore’s will says that it all goes to his daughters, provided they do not sin. Should they be seduced away from the paths of virtue he had come to loathe, he would rather leave his inheritance to the devil. Otherwise known as Jack McQuaid, bypassing the middleman, so to speak. Who the hell persuaded him to write such a thing, darling? You?’
She roused herself.
‘No.’
‘But you knew. You signed it.’ ‘I signed whatever Theo wanted me to sign.’ ‘Ah, yes. As one does. And you have a copy in the house?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you have the draft with the notes?’
‘No. I never had that.’
He waited. She pulled herself further up the chair and used her index finger to stroke her eyebrows straight. Alas, he thought, drunk, but no drunker. Pity. He preferred confessions from those of the slurred voice, Help me Father for I have sinned, with enough of the drug- or alcohol-induced inebriation aboard to tell some approximation of truth or at least as much as the confessional ever offered. He drummed his heels on the floor. The vibration seemed to echo in her chair. The closed-in room reminded him of the convent parlour and he was, to his own relief, as angry as ever.
‘Francis,’ she pronounced it with the emphatic care of someone unused to the syllables and adding a lisp on the S, ‘stayed here for three years. Theodore treated him as a son. But long before that, ever since he was ever so small, he was convinced he was Theo’s son. He started to believe it when I left you and went to work for the Calverts. Remains convinced.’
&
nbsp; ‘On what grounds, darling? Why the devil would he think that?’
She squirmed in the armchair, looked at her gin. Empty. He got up, swifter-footed than he would ever have thought, and poured, into a fresh glass. The one from which she drank had done service far too long and there was no shortage of glasses. She gulped at it. Christopher Goodwin felt slightly ashamed of himself.
‘I don’t know quite why. He’d always asked. I never said. Drove us both mad, those questions. I took him to meet the girls when I worked for the Calverts. They fascinated him, they were so pretty and so small. Petite,’ she snapped. ‘Tiny little overprivileged things, like dolls. With a mother who chucked him out, the bitch. Couldn’t stand a raw-blooded male, even one with a crucifix round his neck, even if he was only twelve at the time. Ha, ha, ha.’
‘A crucifix?’
‘I put one round his neck when he was small. To ward off the evil eye. He always liked it.’
She got up, steadily, and went to the bathroom. He heard her footsteps trailing away and, after an interval, coming back. Bathroom on every floor in this house, all luxurious, equipped with toothbrushes, soap, talcum powder, flowers, in case anyone should ever arrive, the points in the compass of this big house where she still did everything Theo had suggested. Christopher did not prompt her as she sat back in her armchair, where he had rearranged the cushions in her absence, for comfort. It made him feel ever so slightly offended that she did not notice. Women should appreciate such small attentions, even if the intention was subversive. Maybe he was just another unreconstructed male after all.
‘And?’
‘I suppose I let him think it.’
‘Think what?’
‘That Theodore was his long-lost father and the girls were his younger sisters. I let him think it by refusing to tell him who his father was. I had always refused to tell him that, always. He created the myth of Theo as his daddy out of his own mind. I don’t know when it took root. When I sneaked him into the Calverts’ house? Later, when I moved here, bringing him with me? It must have looked like Theo coming into his own as a parent at long last. Offering his boy a home and a start in life, to make up for what had gone before. And Theo had this huge, bitter gap in his life. He wanted a young thing to make a fuss of. A substitute daughter. He was very kind to Jack. Spoiled him. I never had, never could. It must have been like coming in from the cold.’
The whiskey was warm and acrid. Kay had washed her face in the bathroom, making it pink and herself more fluent. Christopher did not know if this was good or bad. The fluency was an effort. She lapsed into silence.
‘Surely you told him it was all nonsense? That he was just a lucky boy, to have found a place like this to live, someone who would take care of him . . .’
‘Jack, I mean Francis,’ she spat, ‘didn’t want luck.He wanted a birthright. He wanted the right to live in a big house with no worries. Always wanted to go to a posh school when he was a kid and be like the sort who came home in a uniform with a mobile phone in each pocket in case Daddy got worried. Francis wanted everything. I told him Theo was not his father. He wouldn’t have it. He hated me.’
‘But he left.You told me. Ditched the idea of college and went for a job in London. If he liked it so much, why did he go?’
She got up again, sloshed more gin into her glass, added tonic, spilling some. She produced her cigarettes from the pocket of the gown, lit one and threw the packet towards him. Old friendships die hard.
‘Whatever gave you the idea he simply went? Oh, I see, I did. Well, he was bound to be the one who bit the hand that fed him. Jack was corrupt from the moment he was born. By that time, I couldn’t have shifted him from the notion that Theodore was his father even if I’d tried, but Jack would always want an insurance policy. And he could see Theo going demented, trying to get his daughters away from their mother. Distancing himself from everything else . . . killing himself with love and anxiety, although, God help him, he never went for the drink again. Saving himself to be a father.’
‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, woman. Didn’t Francis ever demand proof that Theo was his father? Something simple? One of those DNA tests? People in the parish do it all the time. Or at least, I don’t know if they do it, but they ask me how it’s done.’
Kay gazed at him with disdain. He was being slow. ‘You don’t ask for proof if you have no doubt. Would you ask for proof of your own paternity?’
He thought of his mild father, and his quiet mother, who had always wanted more children and brought up their own with a rod of iron, their vocations all decided for them.
‘No, I wouldn’t have dreamed of it.’
‘No more did he. But in case his father should reject him first, he thought of another angle to keep him loyal. Sex. I told you he was corrupt. Lost his cherry to some old man when he was about ten, I think. He traded in sex before we left London. He could see poor Theo was starved of it, even at his age, so he tried to seduce him.’
The spiral of smoke from the cigarette in Christopher’s hand shook. He took a long drag on it, trying to suppress shock. Get a grip, man: you’ve heard worse, and she may be lying again, but he did not think she was.
‘It’s an odd thing to try with your daddy,’ he said, conversationally.
‘Not at all,’ she said in the same tone. ‘Daddies do it with babies all the time, so what’s the difference the other way round? So Theo’s unhappy and half asleep, Francis crawls in beside him and gets to work. Mistake. Didn’t get far. He was gone next day, with a bit of money, to be sure, but gone.’
Father Goodwin stubbed out the cigarette, somewhat at a loss for words. Then he sighed.
‘Well, at least the boy knows which sex he likes. He has an orientation—’
‘Oh, is that what you call it? Don’t kid yourself. Francis would have fucked his own mother if he thought it would help. Anything goes with Francis. Women, men, dogs for all I know.You must have known boys like that.’
He did, feral creatures, from an early parish somewhere else: orphan predators.
‘Would it not have helped if you had told him who his father was? Would it not have given him some pride?’
She laughed. Laughed until she choked and he moved to her side to pat her on the back. It did him good to slap her between the shoulder blades, belting out some of his own tension and bugger the bruises. Tears seeped down her face. He could see, with the ice chip in his soul, the wisdom of not wearing face powder to be streaked and ruined by such tears, tried not to let them distract him as he sat back in his own chair, away from her. They had some distance to go yet.
‘You don’t tell a child that he’s the product of a gang rape in an Irish garage shed. That you don’t know who his father is, except that he might come from a mixture of all the bad blood in a small place. That he would have been aborted if his mother’s parents hadn’t listened to the priest. He was born with me screaming hatred, Father. What else is there to tell? Do you wonder I never loved him?’
He was determined to avoid pity. There was no time for it. It was late, he had got her on the run and there was no telling what she would be like in the morning. Pity was for another time. A good priest, even an indifferent priest, learns to ration compassion. He made coffee in the kitchen, leaving her to stare blankly towards the pattern of the curtains, which shut out the night, brought it back, pulled his chair closer and spread a copy of the Calvert will on the table between them.
‘I take it you knew that Francis was working for the convent?’
‘I didn’t know, I promise you. But I do now.’
‘And he’s seen this will of Theodore’s?’
‘He could have done. I wrote to him after Theo . . . died. Told him to expect nothing. He wouldn’t have believed me.’
‘But he’s seen this.’ He stabbed his finger at the official-looking will, rather than the other document festooned with notes.
‘Yes. He’s probably been back here . . . many times.’ ‘Which means he has.’
He
took another of her cigarettes. Lit it on the third attempt with trembling fingers. She was shrinking back into her chair.
‘So he knows that if he manages to make Theo’s daughters stray from the path of virtue, if he makes them sin,in a very obvious way, he stands to inherit.’
‘Yes.’
‘What better sin could the boy imagine than, say, to make a girl commit incest? He believes these girls are his blood sisters. Surely it would be a sin to be seduced by a brother? To be tempted into wickedness by him? What worse sin could he imagine? Or does he imagine that he could drive them to sin another way? Drive them into some outer darkness, like his own?’
She shrank back further, muttering under her breath.
‘What?’
‘I said, Francis would do it just because he hated them. That would be reason enough. They had everything he thought should be his.’
Christopher Goodwin leaned forward, picked up the copy of the will and tore it in half. The sound of tearing paper seemed abnormally loud.
‘This thing is a piece of useless rubbish. It might be signed, but it’s only a draft. It’s no more valid than a piece of toilet paper. You can’t put conditions like this in a will. You signed it as a witness, too. A beneficiary can’t be a witness. The whole thing’s crap.’
‘And Jack’s belief that Theo was his father is also CRAP!’ she shouted. ‘But the point is, he believes.’
Christopher imagined someone looking at this will and finding its legal verbiage entirely convincing. The mention of trustees thereof and devising and bequeathing would lend credibility at first and even second sight. It would be easy to credit.
She let her cigarette fall and ground it into the carpet with a slippered foot.
‘So what’s so odd about him believing all that? For Chrissakes, Father, you should know all about that. You’re an expert in believing the unbelievable. The more incredible it is, the more you believe. The Resurrection? The Virgin Mary. Belief without doubt? Hope? It’s what you bastards call having FAITH. Francis has his own version.’
Seeking Sanctuary Page 22
