“Nothing, dad. Nobody did.”
“So what did he say?” When Toby retreated into a blank silence I said “I’m surprised he didn’t send something else to fetch them.”
“Dominic, that’s more than—”
“You hid them in your schoolbag, didn’t you.” This angered me as nothing else had. “It was the day you took it there,” I said, “when you told us you wanted to show Phoebe Sweet what you were reading,” and the phone rang at my back.
I twisted around in a rage and stalked across the room to seize the receiver, mostly to silence the bell. “Hello?” I demanded.
“Dom, it’s Bobby. Just to let you know Phoebe Sweet says they’ll be happy for me to spend time with them.”
“Then I’m afraid they’ll be taking care what they let you see. Can I call you tomorrow? I’m just in the middle of sorting something out. I don’t know if I’ll be able to send you what I said I would.”
She’d scarcely answered when I hung up and strode back to the window. The garden was deserted except for the ball, which loitered like a cartoonish moon on the grass, meeting my glare with its inane grin. I crossed the room just in time to find Lesley urging our son along the hall. “Toby,” she said, “you stay with me and draw until we have dinner.”
“Wait a moment, Toby.” I lurched out of the room and caught his hand, only to let go and recoil. He’d raised his eyes without altering his innocent expression, and as I looked into them I felt as if I were falling into a void—into the blackness his eyes appeared to contain, reaching immeasurably deep, “What has he done to you, for God’s sake?” I cried.
“Go where I told you, Toby.” As he made for the kitchen without looking back, Lesley turned on me. “I said what would happen if you carried on like this,” she told me almost too low to hear, “and now I’m afraid it will.”
16 - No Place Like Home
My father’s house smelled of memories, although none that I wanted to share—stale clothes, a gathering of damp, a trace of cigarette smoke, a crumpled greasy newspaper preserving some remains of fish and chips, which I found beside the chair that faced the television in the front room, along with the video recorder he’d never learned to program. The house felt like a shrine to the unfinished: an incomplete crossword weeks old on the dining-table, where a ballpoint with a gnawed plastic barrel bled blue ink into an empty square on the grid; half a dozen bathroom tiles propped against the wall next to the bath, under a bare patch of insecure plaster; a stepladder standing defiantly upright beneath a flex on which the lampshade had been dragged awry, nearly wrenching it free of the socket. As I cleared away fragments of the smashed bulb from the faded threadbare carpet I felt neglectful for having left the house in such a state after my father’s death, even though I’d had so much else on my mind. I binned the crossword and the remnants of my father’s solitary meal, and trudged upstairs with a sagging cardigan I found on the back of a kitchen chair to leave it on a hanger in his bedroom wardrobe. I was thrown by finding my old golliwog money box on the bedside table, and wondered if my father had kept it there as a reminder of my childhood or of some other aspect of the past he missed. I shook it, and it gave a hollow rattle before yielding up a tarnished penny, worthless now.
While that room had the largest bed, I wasn’t going to sleep where my parents had. I opened all the windows, enclosing the house in birdsong from the trees along the street and in the graveyard, and then I devoted the afternoon to clearing cobwebs from my old bedroom and wielding the vacuum cleaner. I lugged my suitcases of clothes upstairs, past the framed homilies crowned with dust, but left the cases on the landing once I’d transferred the contents of one into the chest of drawers and the equally creaky wardrobe, I felt like my father, though not in a positive sense, for fetching dinner from the Chinese takeaway near the old Norris house beyond the railway bridge and watching television while I ate. I was seeking distraction from my dull unhappy thoughts, but even though one channel was showing a Hitchcock film I couldn’t engage with it. The images seemed cut off from me, not only by the dust on the screen. When Henry Fonda uttered an inaudible prayer his face was transformed into an unfamiliar one. While I found the spectacle unwelcome, it occurred to me that I could have included the film in my course, since the wrong man was a Christ figure. The thought let me feel more rational, and I went up to bed.
I slept so little that I might as well have stayed awake. Apart from wondering how long it would take Bobby to expose Safe To Sleep, and forcing myself to wait until this made it plain to Lesley that our son was horribly at risk, I was acutely aware that the family grave was visible from my room. Eventually I went to the window, to see that the headstone was shifting. No, I realised once I’d fumbled the window open, some other stealthy activity was in progress. Small dark tattered shapes were swarming up the memorial as though hatching from the grave, and I found it hard to breathe until I grasped they were shadows of leaves on a tree near a street-lamp, though I couldn’t feel the breeze that made them restless. However mistaken I’d been, the sight convinced me that I ought to watch out for my father. I was afraid that now he was dead, Christian Noble might find a use for him.
I craned out of the window until I began to hear the thumping of percussion, the only audible element of music somebody was playing. It felt disrespectful when it could be heard all through the graveyard, not to mention inconsiderate towards the culprit’s neighbours so late at night. Or was it a record? When I strained my ears I still couldn’t hear even a hint of the music I’d thought was the source. Perhaps the insistent pounding was closer than I’d assumed, in which case it must be muffled. As I stared out at the Sheldrake grave I began to dread that I knew where the sound was coming from—the sound like fists thumping the underside of a lid. The idea sent me stumbling downstairs and into the back yard, where I pressed my ear against the fence alongside the cemetery. The thudding was louder, and I had a distinct sense that it involved a wooden surface. I was digging my nails into my palms when I managed to relax my fists, having realised at last that the noise was my own pulse, amplified by flattening my ear against the fence.
I still felt the need to be vigilant on my father’s behalf. Each night I had to make myself leave the window and try to replenish my sleep. Once I was in bed I generally managed to stay there until morning—at least, I did until the night I heard the voice in the graveyard. To begin with I wasn’t even sure it was one, that vague blurred moan that rose and fell as it seemed to endeavour to gain strength, but as it grew louder I couldn’t deny that it was struggling to form words. I staggered to the window and saw that the family grave had acquired a new shadow, a dark patch in front of the headstone. No, it wasn’t a shadow, because it was restless even though the tapestry of leafy silhouettes on the memorial was quite still. It was a hole, and it was gaping wider to emit more of a voice.
I had no idea which clothes I dragged on before dashing out to the graveyard. As I ran between dilapidated angels and inscriptions too dim to read I recognised the pleading voice. Misshapen and painfully strained though it was, it belonged to my father. “Don’t let him take me,” he was begging. I was nearly at the grave when I saw that the hole in the mound wasn’t just a hollow. It was a mouth, and I could see its tongue coated with earth. It might have been miming its efforts to speak, because as the thick lips widened in a grimace they crumbled, spilling some of the soil of which they were composed into the throat and stifling the feeble plea. By now I was striving quite as hard to find my own voice, and when at last I rediscovered how to produce it I let out a cry even weaker than the entreaties of the mouth that had grown as wide as the mound. The cry took far too long to surface, which made me feel like the tenant of the grave. When at last it succeeded in wakening me, I found myself in my old bed. I felt like a child again, but now there was nobody to comfort me, just the dark that had gathered in the empty house.
I didn’t sleep a great deal after that, but next day I managed to teach. It felt like a pretence, and my
life did now—a pretence that all was well or would be. So long as Toby ultimately would, that had to be enough. Meanwhile I was doing my best to construct a life for myself in the house to which I’d returned if not reverted. I’d unpacked my suitcases and borrowed hangers from my parents’ room to use in my wardrobe, and I’d succeeded in cleaning the kitchen sufficiently to feel comfortable about cooking meals there. I wondered how soon I might do that for Toby, but at present Lesley didn’t want me seeing him, and I’d managed not to insist for fear that we would both upset him.
While her department wasn’t far from mine, we seldom met by chance on the campus. I couldn’t judge whether she was avoiding me until I saw her near the university library, when she turned away as soon as she noticed me and walked away at a speed close to a barely restrained run. The sight made me feel emptied of all the memories we shared, and I headed in the opposite direction with no sense of where I was bound.
Of course the situation couldn’t stay so unresolved. I suppose I was hoping Lesley would relent, having decided Toby still needed a father. Next day he was at school, and as I drove to work I thought this might be a good time to approach his mother. By the time I reached Communication Studies I was planning to call her and suggest meeting for lunch. I thought she’d anticipated me when the solitary envelope in my pigeonhole proved to be addressed in her small neat handwriting. Dominic Sheldrake, it said.
The formality took me aback, but it was only a taste of the tone of her unsigned note. Kindly inform me how soon you will be available to meet my lawyer. I wanted to believe she had to write like this to control her emotions, but the impersonal remoteness almost made me crumple up the note. I had nearly half an hour to spare before I saw my students, and I made for the Department of English. As the building came in sight I saw her heading for it and realised I’d only just missed her delivering the note. “Lesley,” I called loud enough to make several students look.
She hesitated without turning and then took another step. I thought she meant to take refuge in her department, but she visibly straightened her back to wait until I moved in front of her. “What is it, Dominic?”
Her dark eyes were withholding the gleam I’d grown so used to, and the shape of her generous lips made them look burdened. “You wanted me to get in touch,” I said.
She might have been lowering her voice to set me an example. “You could have left me a message.”
“Why slow communication down like that? I’d rather we were face to face.”
“It isn’t just about what you want, Dominic. It has been too much of the time. I’m not supposed to be in contact with you any more than absolutely necessary.”
“Supposed by whom? By this lawyer you’ve hired?”
“That’s right, by somebody who knows what should be done. Somebody who can make sure it’s as civilised as possible.”
“Lesley, how on earth have we come to this?”
“If you don’t know, then that’s your answer.”
“I know we’re having problems, nobody knows that better than I do, but can’t we work them out between us?”
“What do you think I’ve been trying to do? But I can’t any more by myself.”
“You don’t need to. You’ve still got me.”
“You know perfectly well what I mean. Don’t try to play on my emotions, Dominic.” As my own came close to destroying my control she said “Colleen Johns warned me that might happen. That’s one reason she told me to keep it in writing.”
“She’s your lawyer, is she? May I ask how you chose her?”
“Judith recommended her. She handled Judith’s case.”
“Which is to say her divorce.” When Lesley’s lips hinted at a grimace that might have been reproachful or regretful, I said “Do you honestly think we need to go that far? Are you really proposing to split us up for good?”
“It isn’t just about us.” Remorse glimmered in her eyes and seemed about to moisten them, and then it vanished. “Not even mostly,” she said.
“I know that better than I think you realise. How is he?”
“My son is as calm as I expect a boy of his age can be under the circumstances. And I’m sorry if you’d rather not hear this, but I’m glad Phoebe Sweet is caring for him.”
My guts had stiffened at her first words, and now my mouth did. However my face looked, it made several passing students rather more than glance at me. “Let’s end this now,” Lesley said. “When are you free to meet Colleen?”
“Have you already forgotten my hours? My afternoon is clear tomorrow, just like yours.”
“I’ll have to check that it’s convenient for her. Judith can collect Toby from school.” With something like concern she added “You might want to find yourself a lawyer.”
“That’s one thing I won’t be doing. Yours can take all the responsibility for whatever we’re made to do.”
At once I wanted to qualify my outburst, but Lesley’s gaze had strayed beyond me, and she seemed not to know how to look. “Am I interrupting an interdepartmental conference?” the vice-chancellor said.
“No,” I turned to say, since Lesley left the answering to me, “a private one.”
“I feared as much.”
I couldn’t help demanding “Why do you say that?”
“It was apparent at some distance that your discussion was hardly professional.”
“I’m sorry,” I said but added “If we need to be.”
“I would simply counsel keeping it less public. It’s of paramount importance to present a united image to the students. I wonder if a private word or two in my office might be appropriate.”
“No need. We’re already meeting someone who’ll apparently be taking charge.”
“Please keep my offer in mind nonetheless,” the vice-chancellor said, at which point I grasped that he hadn’t meant it as an official warning. “May I assume the discussion is done?”
“I’ll leave you a message with the arrangements,” Lesley told me and made for her department at once.
I was about to head back to my own when the vice-chancellor murmured “Are we looking at a crisis of some ilk, Dominic?”
I saw it was pointless to say much, and that was how it felt to say anything at all. “We don’t agree over bringing our son up.”
“Have you reason to believe his mother is mistaken?”
“Any number of them.”
“Then if you set them out calmly and rationally I’m sure she will give them due consideration. I shouldn’t care to think that any member of the staff was less than reasonable.”
I wondered how thoroughly his last remark was aimed at me, since his interrogative gaze was. “I’ve given her every reason I can,” I said. “She’s not convinced.”
“Then perhaps you should consider shifting to her position.” When I didn’t risk a response he said “Or are both sides entrenched?”
“You can put it that way if you like.”
“I never like to hear of conflict on the campus. Are you able to acquaint me with the likely resolution?”
“Just now it looks as if we may be splitting up.”
“It distresses me to hear it. I very much trust it won’t lead to any further public confrontations.”
“We’ll try and keep our feelings out of sight. Now if you could excuse me, I’ve a class to teach.”
“You should have alerted me that you were late for it, Dominic.”
“I’m not yet,” I retorted and hurried to the auditorium, where some of my students proved to have watched the Hitchcock film on television. Usually I would have welcomed such a productive coincidence, but just then I could have felt the course I’d planned had been diverted, yet another of the frustrations that had invaded my life. An extended disagreement whether the wrong man’s prayer summoned the culprit to justice only reminded me of the dispute my marriage had become, and I couldn’t even decide which view to take, I offended more than one student by suggesting that it didn’t matter, and had to explain
at length that I meant ambiguity was fruitful, however much I yearned for certainty in my life.
When I returned to my desk I found Lesley had left me a voicemail, briskly confirming tomorrow afternoon’s appointment and providing the address. That night attempting to plan what to say kept me awake once I managed to finish my vigil at the bedroom window. After lunch, or rather the time I would have had it except for lacking any appetite, I reached the car park nearest our departments just as Lesley’s Victor left it for the road. My hand began to rise in an instinctive wave, and then the situation brought it down. She might have thought I was trying to hitch a ride, in which case I fancied she would have put on speed.
I drove downtown and parked in a multi-storey near the waterfront. Colleen Johns’ offices were uphill in the business district, on a Victorian alley off a main road. They overlooked a sex shop with a window painted the black of a gap between stars. As a pink-faced man stole out of the shop, clutching an emaciated brown-paper packet that no doubt hid a magazine if not a wad of photographs, he had to dodge a young woman who looked steeped in orange paint—an artificial tan. I watched him flee while she shoved the door inwards with the pizza cartons she was carrying, and then I turned to see a woman staring at me from an upper window. As she stepped back I thought she gave her head a terse shake.
The lawyer’s offices were on the first floor. Chipped stone stairs led around the iron cage of a vintage lift shaft to a mosaic landing, where a door named COLLEEN JOHNS AND PARTNER boasted a brass bellpush in a marble socket. Since the door wasn’t locked I strode in, to be met with a reproving frown from a lanky long-haired blonde packed behind a desk. “Mr Sheldrake,” she barely asked before announcing me through the switchboard. “You’re to go in,” she said, and surely not with concealed amusement “I think you’re late.”
Born To The Dark Page 18
