Rosalie did not share that sanguine view. She did not believe her son was satisfactory. She had not believed it for a long time, and was aware that the afternoon he had failed to return from school was a single bead in the chain of unease that was beginning to form. When he had been taken into the behavioural centre her hope was that he would remain there indefinitely. ‘Now, let’s try to discover why you wish that, Mrs Mannion, ’ one of the staff had pressed her, his manner loftily clinical. But when she said it was simply something she felt, she was brought up sharply. It was pointed out to her that the centre was for observation and study, and the accumulation of case histories: in that respect it was doing well by Gilbert, but it stood to reason he could not remain there. Her son was fortunate to have her, she was informed. She had a role, that same lofty manner insisted, without words. She was, after all, the mother.
On the evening of Tuesday, November 21st Gilbert helped with the washing-up as usual, and then said he intended to drive over to the Bull public house. He reminded his mother where it was, as he often did: at the corner of Upper Richmond Road and Sheen Lane.
‘I’ll not stay long,’ he said.
On the nine o’clock television News a picture was shown of the straggling cotoneaster and the dead leaves where Carol Dickson’s body had lain. Carol’s mother, appealing for witnesses to come forward, broke down in the middle of what she was saying; the camera lingered on her distress.
Rosalie turned the television off, not moving from where she sat, using the remote control. For the moment she couldn’t even remember if Gilbert had gone out last night, then she remembered that he had and had come back earlier than usual. It was always the News, on the radio or the television, that prompted her dread. When a fire was said to have been started deliberately, or a child enticed, or broken glass discovered in baby-food jars in a supermarket, the dread began at once – the hasty calculations, the relief if time and geography ruled out involvement. More than once, before she became used to it, she had gone to lie trembling on her bed, struggling to control the frenzy that threatened. The second time he sent his picture postcards, her mocking little screen had shown a burnt-out dance hall, fourteen fatalities obscured by blankets in a Brighton car park. There had been a fire – deliberately started also, so the News suspected - on a cross-channel ferry four days after Gilbert had announced, ‘I’ll just take the Skoda here and there.’ He had been away when a branch of the Halifax Building Society was held up by a gunman who left his weapon on the counter, a water-pistol as it was afterwards discovered. He had been away when an old woman was tied to a chair in her council flat and only an alarm clock stolen from her, which reminded Rosalie of the teaspoons and egg-cups and the potato-peeler. She was certain a kind of daring came into it, even if the chances he took were loaded in his favour: he did not place himself in danger, he had a right to survive his chosen acts of recklessness, he had a right to silence. He would not be caught.
Last night he had come back earlier than usual: again, unable to help herself, she established that. But the recollection hardly made a difference. As soon as she’d seen the place where the body had been and noted the tired bewilderment in the police inspector’s eyes, she knew there was a mystery; that weeks, or months, would pass without progress, that the chances were the crime would remain unsolved. She knew, as well, that if she went to Gilbert’s room she’d find not a single leaf of cotoneaster, no titbit taken from the girl’s clothing. There wouldn’t be a scratch anywhere on Gilbert, nor a tear in his clothes, nor a speck of blood in his Skoda.
It had never been said that Rosalie’s marriage failed because of Gilbert, but often during the sixteen years that had passed since the divorce she wondered if somehow this could be so. Had she, even then – when Gilbert was only nine – been half destroyed by the nagging of her fears, made unattractive, made limp, wrung out by an obsession that spread insidiously? None of that was said: the other woman was the reason and the cause. An irresistible love was what was spoken of.
Rosalie had often since considered that the irresistible love had picked up the fragments that were already there. Hidden at the time – like something beneath a familiar stone, something that had arrived without being noticed as a danger – was the reason and the cause. This view was strengthened by subsequent events. Since the divorce there had been kindness from men who liked her, theatre visits and tête-à-tête dinners, hints of romance. But there had always been a fizzling-out, caution creeping in. She tried on all such occasions not to talk about her son, but she knew that he was somehow there anyway, and dread is hard to hide. It intensified her solitude, spread nerviness and was exhausting. In the fabrics shop, when voices all around her were saying what a terrible thing, it wasn’t easy to keep her hands from shaking.
‘I’ve brought you back the Evening Standard,’ Gilbert said, smiling at her. It was a habit of his to pick up newspapers in public houses. He played a game sometimes, watching the people who were reading them, trying to guess which one would be left behind. He never bought a newspaper himself.
‘Thank you, dear,’ she said, returning his smile. I believe Gilbert has stolen a car, she had written to his father, who phoned as soon as he received the letter, listening without interrupting to everything she said. But he’d pointed out, quite gently, that she was merely guessing, that it was suspicion, nothing more.
‘Cake?’ Gilbert said. ‘A Mr Kipling’s, have we?’
She said there was a cake in the kitchen, in the Quality Street tin.
‘Tea?’ he offered.
She shook her head. ‘No, not tonight, dear.’
He didn’t leave the room, telling her instead about his visit to the public house. He had drunk half a pint of cider and watched the other drinkers. Two girls were crawling all over a man with a moustache, a man who was much older than they were. The girls were drunk, shrill when they laughed or spoke. The red, white-spotted skirt of one of them had ridden up so far that Gilbert could see her panties. Blue the panties were.
‘Funny, that,’ Gilbert said. ‘The way she didn’t mind.’
On the front of the Evening Standard she could see a half-page photograph of Carol Dickson, not a particularly pretty girl, her mouth clenched tight in a grin, bright blonde hair. She might have guessed he’d bring in the Evening Standard; she would have if she’d thought about it. ‘You’re an imaginative woman,’ one of the experts she’d pleaded with had stated, fingering papers on his desk. ‘Better, really, to be down to earth in a case like this.’
In the public house an old man had bothered him, he said. ‘Busy tonight,’ the old man had remarked.
Gilbert had agreed, moving slightly so that he could watch the girls, but the old man was still in his way.
‘Fag, dear?’ the old man offered, holding out a packet of Benson & Hedges.
She could always guess, Rosalie sometimes thought: what would happen next, how he wouldn’t refer to the girl on the front of the Evening Standard, how the panic would softly gather inside her and harden without warning into a knot, how the dryness in her mouth would make speech difficult.
‘Afterwards I flagged down a police car,’ Gilbert said. ‘“That old poufta’s out again tonight,” I told them. Well, I had to.’
He’d noticed the police car crawling along, he said, so he drew in in front of it and made a hand signal. ‘I told them he’d still be there if they went along immediately. They wrote down what he’d said to me, tone of voice and everything. When I put it to them they agreed an obscene way of talking is against the law. Quite nice they were. I thought I’d better report it, I explained to them, in case the next time it was some young boy. They said quite right. They’ll have him on their books now. Even if they decide not to take him in tonight they’ll have him on their books. They can give a man like that a warning or they can take him in if there are charges preferred. I’d always be ready to prefer charges because of the harm that could be done to an innocent boy. I said that. I said this was the eighth or ninth tim
e he’d addressed me in that tone of voice. They quite agreed that people should be allowed to have a drink in peace.’
‘You didn’t go out again last night, did you, dear?’
‘Last night? It was tonight the poufta -’
‘No, I meant last night. You were back quite early, weren’t you?’
Headachy for no particular reason, she’d gone to bed after supper. But she’d heard him coming in, no later than a quarter-past nine, certainly no later than half-past. She’d fallen asleep about ten; she thought she remembered the sound of the television just before she dropped off.
‘The Big Sleep last night,’ he said. ‘But you can’t re-set a thing like that in England. It doesn’t make sense. A girl in the Kall Kwik was saying it was great, but I said I thought it was pathetic. I said it didn’t make any sense, interfering with an original like that. Silly of them to go interfering, I said.’
‘Yes.’
‘West Indian the girl was.’
Rosalie smiled and nodded.
‘Funny, saying it was great. Funny kind of view.’
‘Perhaps she didn’t know there’d been an original.’
‘I said. I explained about it. But she just kept saying it was great. They’re like that, the West Indian girls.’
Sometimes, when he went on talking, she felt like the shadow of a person who was not there. Ordinary-sounding statements he made exhausted her. Was it a deliberate act, that tonight he’d had a conversation with the police? Was it all part of being daring, of challenging the world that would take his rights from him? Often it seemed to her that his purposeless life was full of purpose.
‘I’ll make us tea,’ he said. ‘Really cold it is tonight.’
‘Not tea for me, dear.’
‘Chap in the Kall Kwik was saying the anti-freeze on his wind-screen froze. If you can believe him, of course. Whopper Toms they call him. Says he likes the taste of paper. Eats paper bags, cardboard, anything like that. If you can believe him. Means no harm, though.’
‘No, I’m sure he doesn’t.’
‘Congenital. Pity, really. I mean, I’ve seen him chewing, always chewing he is. It’s just that it could be gum. Could be a toffee, come to that.’
Impassive she sat, staring at the grey empty screen of the television set when he went to make his tea. His father had found it impossible to love him, long before the marriage had collapsed. That had not been said either, but she knew it was true. For some reason he did not inspire love, even in a father. Yet it had broken her heart to say he should be retained in the centre where they’d studied him. It had broken her heart each time she’d begged that he should be put somewhere else, when they’d said the centre wasn’t suitable. Vigilance was his due, a vigilance she was herself unable, adequately, to supply. All she could do was listen to his rigmaroles, and care that he couldn’t bear wool next to his skin. The policemen he’d flagged down would have said he had a screw loose. In the Kall Kwik they would say the same.
‘You saw it to the end?’ she asked when he returned with a tray. ‘You saw that film to the end even though it was so silly?’
‘What film’s that?’
‘The Big Sleep.’
‘Really grotty it was.’
He turned the television on. Politicians discussed Romania. His features, coloured by the highlights from the screen, displayed no emotion, neither elation nor melancholy. He was meticulous about taking the drugs prescribed. ‘There is nothing to fear,’ she had been assured, ‘if the medication is taken. Nothing whatsoever.’
The time of the dance-hall fire she’d thought she’d never see him again. She’d thought he wouldn’t come back and that eventually there’d be questions, two and two put together. She had imagined waiting, and nothing happening, day after day; and then, in some unexpected place, his apprehension. Instead he returned.
‘Mr Kipling’s Fancies,’ he said, offering her the iced cakes, still in their cardboard carton. When she shook her head he poured his tea.
‘Bet you it’s gum he chews,’ he said. ‘Bet you.’
If he’d gone out again last night she’d have heard the car starting. The car would have woken her. She’d have sat up, worrying. She’d have turned her bedside light on and waited to hear the car returning. Even if he’d left the house again almost as soon as he’d entered it he would have to have driven very fast to reach that part of London by five to ten, which was the time they gave; five to ten at the latest, since the girl had said goodnight to her friend at nine-fifty and only had seven hundred yards to walk. There was nothing unusual about his bringing back the Evening Standard. He’d mentioned the old homosexual who bothered him before: it just happened that tonight there was a police car prowling.
‘This is lousy stuff,’ he said, and changed the television channel. His hands were thin – delicate hands, not much larger than her own. He was not given to violence. ‘No! No!’ he used to cry, still sometimes did, when she swatted a fly. In all his acts of bravado there had never been violence - when he refused to open his schoolbooks, when he spent a night in a basement, when he acquired a motor-car without money. No one would deny his cleverness, cunningly concealed beneath his tedious chatter. No one would deny being baffled by him, but there was never violence.
‘Hey, look at that,’ he suddenly exclaimed, drawing her attention to overweight people at a holiday camp for the obese. He laughed, and she remembered his infant’s face when first they showed it to her. People didn’t want him. His father and a whole army of medical people, the social worker, people he tried to make friends with: all of them deserted him too soon. He was on sufferance in the architect’s office; wherever he went he was on sufferance.
‘Awful,’ he said, ‘as fat as that.’
Then the News was on again, on Channel 3, and he sat silent – that awful silence that closed him down. On the screen the face of Carol Dickson was just as it was in the newspaper. Her mother broke down, the police inspector gave out his facts: all of it was repetition.
She watched him staring at the screen intently, as if mesmerized. He listened carefully. When the News was over he crossed the room and picked up the Evening Standard. He read it, his tea and cakes forgotten. She turned the television off.
‘Goodnight, Gilbert,’ she said when he rose to go to bed. He did not answer.
The newspaper was on the floor beside his chair, the face of Carol Dickson spread out for her, the right way up. She remembered how he’d stood when he’d come back after his first disappearance, how he leaned against the kitchen door-frame, following her with his eyes, silent. When he’d come back with the Skoda she’d thought of going to the police. She’d thought of trying to explain to some kindly older man in a uniform, asking for help. But of course she hadn’t.
She might dial 999 now. Or she might go tomorrow to a police station, apologizing even before she began, hoping for reassurance. But even as these thoughts occurred she knew they were pretence. Before his birth she had possessed him. She had felt the tug of his lips on her breasts, a helpless creature then, growing into the one who controlled her now, who made her isolation total. Her fear made him a person, enriching him with power. He had sensed it when he had first idly examined the palms of his hands, and felt her mother’s instinct disturbed. He had sensed it when he had hidden the kitchen objects where they could not be found, when he had not come back from school, when he had talked to the social worker about photocopying. He knew about the jaded thoughts recurring, the worry coursing round and round at its slow, familiar pace. The Skoda had been stolen; parked outside the house, it was always a reminder.
All night, she knew, she would sit there, the muzzy image of Carol Dickson where he had left it, a yard away. She did not want to sleep because sleeping meant waking up and there would be the moment when reality began to haunt again. Her role was only to accept: he had a screw loose, she had willed him to be born. No one would ever understand the mystery of his existence, or the unshed tears they shared.
&nbs
p; The Potato Dealer
Mulreavy would marry her if they paid him, Ellie’s uncle said: she couldn’t bring a fatherless child into the world. He didn’t care what was done nowadays; he didn’t care what the fashion was; he wouldn’t tolerate the talk there’d be. ‘Mulreavy,’ her uncle repeated. ‘D’you know who I mean by Mulreavy?’
She hardly did. An image came into her mind of a big face that had a squareness about it, and black hair, and a cigarette butt adhering to the lower lip while a slow voice agreed or disagreed, and eyes that were small, and sharp as splinters. Mulreavy was a potato dealer. Once a year he came to the farm, his old lorry rattling into the yard, then backed up to where the sacks stood ready for him. Sometimes he shook his head when he examined the potatoes, saying they were too small. He tried that on, Ellie’s uncle maintained. Cagey, her uncle said.
Selected Stories Page 13
