by Mark Lawson
But, re-reading the text a quarter of a century later, Ned saw that the dramatic balance was more complicated. Tomas can be regarded as an unpleasant zealot obsessed with personal as much as scientific progress: declaring that the baths are poisoned, he can’t resist adding that he has been proved right, having told the local politicians years before to put the health centre in a different place. And Ibsen, overlapping with Freud, suggests that Tomas and Peter are partly driven to disagree by sibling hostility; a dynamic familiar to Ned from his elder children.
His discovery about the water permits him to piss on his brother’s parade. Was it possible that there had been a less brutal solution than the total closure of the baths? (Ned made a mental note to Google the history of chlorine and filters.) Certainly, Dr Tomas Stockmann now seemed to Ned less unequivocally a victim than had been the case before.
Our Lady of Sorrows
There was still a supermarket opposite the war memorial, although the blue facade of the Mac Fisheries (a now vanished franchise) of his childhood had been replaced by the green, as familiar a colour in comfortable England as well-trimmed grass, of Waitrose.
He found a metered parking bay on the road that sloped down from the church. Despite the chilly breath of the BMW’s air-conditioning, he had been forced to blink and shake away sweat several times as the M25 – the slow lane, the only speed at which he now felt confident to drive – blurred before his eyes. And, since stopping, he had felt a thicker film of perspiration dampening his scalp. Even before his fall, Our Lady of Sorrows had always unnerved him. He officially linked this with memories of his father’s funeral, but suspected that guilt at his fugitive (he was not yet ready to say lost) faith was another trigger.
Visiting his mother at the time of the divorce, Ned had come to understand that anyone prone to depression at the evidence of passing time is best advised to avoid – along with squash courts, TV re-run channels and old photograph albums – the high street of their childhood town. Though belonging to a profession that chronicled epochal progress, Ned felt no less dismay than non-historians at contradictions to his memory of the place he knew best.
Some changes were merely name-deep – Abbey National translating into Santander, Kentucky Fried Chicken becoming KFC – but most sites had converted their purpose, and generally in one direction. Two shoe shops, Universal Toys, Best Records, the Cork and Bottle wine bar and Art and Craft Supplies were all now coffee franchises, as was Goodread Books, where his mother had taken him after Holy Thursday mass and told him that he could choose any two paperbacks he wanted; a reward, he later realized, for still coming to church with her at seventeen during the Easter holidays, when so many of her friends’ children had ‘lapsed’.
His first selection had been Geoffrey Elton’s England Under the Tudors, which, forty-three years later, was still on the shelves of his study, its margins bearing perky, Biro-ed notes about ‘ecclesiastical corruption!’ and ‘Katherine Catholic!’ He was about to re-read the second Christ-bribe, concertinaed from attention and spotted with holiday sun cream: Rattigan’s Plays 2, which he had picked in memory of his father and because one of the plots he knew best had appealed to his vivid teenage sense of being obscurely persecuted, although not as strongly as it spoke to him now.
Martyred with hay fever all his life, Ned had never had a feel for flowers, depending, when courting women, on Interflora to deliver bouquets which, more than once, he had removed from the bedroom while their recipient was in the bathroom, in order to prevent his climax consisting of unstoppable sneezing. But he knew, from emergency birthday presents for his mother, that Waitrose sold single orchids in a ceramic vase. This floral ostrich neck seemed to him a paltry gift but Emma had assured him that they were a prize for the horticulturally literate, and this had seemed to be true in the past.
He used self check-out to avoid the risk of being identified, or having an awkward conversation with a clerk who turned out to be the child of a schoolfriend. Walking back up the hill towards the car, he was averting his eyes from Our Lady of Sorrows on the opposite side when a woman’s voice, aged to a croaky alto but still mentally re-dressing him in shorts beneath a low desk, called: ‘Is that who I think it is lurking under that baseball cap?’
Mrs Ricks. Children have no sense of age but, as she had been a Mrs not a Miss at Saint Barnabus, she was probably in her thirties then, so eighties now. He had a clearer memory of her than of other teachers because, as a friend of his mother through church, she had been at Mum’s sixtieth, seventieth and eightieth, and his nephews’ First Communions and Confirmations.
She blinked at the flower he was holding. ‘Oh, Lord, have I missed your ma’s birthday?’
‘What? Oh, no. I try not to be one of those once-a-year sons. This is a non-particular visit.’
‘Bless!’
But when she read it in the papers, she would guess.
She nodded a crash helmet of grey perm towards the spire. ‘I’m lighting a candle for Desmond. It’s his anniversary. It has to be locked these days because of – well, vandals and, er, satanists, I suppose – but the cleaners and counters have keys.’
He felt a nostalgic pang for the comfortingly clubbish rituals of religion. ‘Yes. Mum said. I always wonder how many devil worshippers there actually are breaking into churches, especially in Kent.’
‘You may say that, Edmund. But Monsignor has stories that would make your eyes water.’ Her tightened mouth widened into a smile. ‘I was watching you the other night,’ she said, using the phrase common to stalkers, spies and TV viewers. Even now, when his deepest desire was to become invisible, there was egotistical pleasure in recognition.
‘What was it?’ his admirer asked herself. ‘A repeat, I think. Late. I couldn’t sleep. No. I can’t remember. Anyway, you were as good as ever.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Are you working on another “blockbuster”?’
‘We’re sort of between series at the moment.’
‘I still get a “kick” out of it when I tell people I taught you – sometimes they’re thrown at first because I’ll always call you “Edmund” – but then they say …’
Oh my God, not the rapist?
‘… that Ned Marriott,’ she concluded. Her face was instantaneously pained and he wondered if she somehow knew or suspected, but the grimace was explained by her saying: ‘Did your mother tell you about Patrick Rigby?’
Class 6, which was Year Whatever now. Ginger, freckled, once caused a storm by teaching ten-year-olds on the playground (including Ned) what turned out to be an IRA marching song.
‘I’m not sure.’
‘They buried him last month. Pancreatic cancer. Four children.’
He suddenly wanted – a general instinct intensified by their connection of half a century ago – to tell her what was happening and that she must not believe it.
Mrs Ricks was also remembering St Barnabus. ‘It’s the school’s seventy-fifth anniversary next year. I’m sure Monsignor will be in touch about asking you to do the honours.’
‘Is it? Wow. So it must have been the Silver Jubilee around the time when I was … I don’t remember any celebrations …’
‘Do you know, Edmund, I think you’re right … ?’
‘But I think people generally made less fuss about stuff then. Actually, you know, I think they might be better off with Father Tony.’
Anthony Glascock, presumably tormented by his cohort for his surname, now St Barney’s other publicly-known alumnus, as ‘Father Tony’ (shrewdly Christian name only), a Jesuit priest and regular contributor to Thought for the Day and Songs of Praise.
‘Ah,’ his old teacher said. ‘Of course, you’ll be very busy.’
Mrs Ricks’ eye-lids and lips pressed together in parallel, a never-forgotten expression that instinctively quickened Ned’s heart-rate and loosened his sphincters, which were already less reliable than when he had disappointed her as a child.
‘It’s just that I’ve got a book to
finish,’ he told her, then tried a joke: ‘You of all people wouldn’t want me being late with my homework.’
The affectionate metaphor either escaped her, or was ignored.
‘Well, it must be all go for someone like you,’ she sighed, at the very edge of courtesy.
He glanced pointedly at the orchid as if it were a watch. ‘Well, I don’t want my mother’s burnt beef on my conscience.’
‘No, of course. Tell her I’ll see her at counting.’ A roster of parishioners totted up the cash and ‘planned giving’ envelopes after mass. ‘Keep up the good work, Edmund.’
‘Thank you, Mrs Ricks.’
‘Oh, silly boy, I’ve told you: surely Harriet by now.’
But, after a career in education, she must know that calling former teachers by their first name remained forever an intimacy as forbidden as incest. Watching Mrs Ricks fumble-juggle with the keys at the side door of the church, he wondered if he should help her, but was distracted by a premonition of the humiliation to come.
Turning to look down the hill at the town, he thought: once they know, I will never be able to come back here. The Marriott Cup for Excellence in History would be discontinued from future St Barney’s prize-givings, like Savile’s messianic gravestone being levelled in Scarborough.
As he settled in the car, Ned felt the dampness of his clothes against the seat. He shakily located in his jacket pocket the wrap of Diazepam and swallowed another 5mg with a slug of his traffic-jam Evian, already tepid from the morning sun.
On the Common, a groundsman with a heavy roller was squeezing any remaining bounce from the batsman’s paradise of a pitch on which the teenage Ned had once scored an undefeated 130 for the village team. As he turned onto Westside Road, his pulse, despite the drugs, started thudding. Going home had felt as portentous as this only once before, when he came to tell his mother that he was leaving Jenny; but divorce was within the rehearsed fears of a mother, even a devoutly Catholic one, for her children.
Most writers of profiles of Ned Marriott mentioned the coincidence (which they called an ‘irony’) that a historian who had written about Henry VIII had grown up in a Tudor priory, although no one had noted the actual historical irony of Catholics living in a building once seized from their church.
Delaying his entry, using the excuse of allowing the sedative more time to take effect, Ned looked up at the three black-andwhite triangular eaves, which, in his childhood, he had imagined as the sharpened cowls of scowling nuns. Inside were the rooms he had mentally toured, on Tom’s advice, as a sleep aid.
Unless abused or embarrassed by their family, most people are soothed by the sight of the home they grew up in: the memory of certain summers, birthdays, Christmases, meals, sleeps. Ned floated for a moment in the warm calm waters of his past. Then he was hit by the rip tide of the circumstances of his return. He lifted the vase from the passenger seat, the crackle of the cellophane sounding like stamped gravel in the soundproofed cell of the vehicle.
His mother, having heard the engine, was already standing at the open door. He felt an ache at her smallness and frailty, deep into a parent’s final journey of becoming her children’s child. Ned stooped to kiss her cheek and then, taller than the sixteenth-century norm, ducked through into the hall.
‘Was the traffic bad?’ she asked, which he took as a rebuke for being later than he had said.
‘It’s never not now, is it? England is a building site. I got you this.’
He passed over his guilt gift.
‘Oh. You don’t have to, Jack, er, Ned.’
Though she had so far avoided diagnosable signs of dementia, his mother increasingly suffered from the geriatric tendency to alternate family names, calling her son after his stepfather or occasionally, more happily, his father (Val, short for Valentine, one of the two gentlemen of Verona). More and more, when she spoke, an unfound verb or noun was replaced with ‘thing’.
I am bringing you a flower and also shame that will long outlive it, boomed the newly melodramatic inner voice that medication could apparently do nothing to suppress.
Beef in its final stages of roasting – his desert island smell – infused the reception room. Ned’s stepfather was meticulously levelling out a glass of sherry that stood beside a generous whisky already poured.
‘Ah, Edmund,’ he said, without turning. ‘Welcome.’
Jack Starling used a towelling slop-rag to dry a hand that he then abruptly stuck out in front of him. The Marriott-Starlings would never become one of those blended families, seen in American movies, in which everyone hugs each other regardless of blood. Ned returned a stiff stranger’s handshake.
Like a game-show host with the last two prizes, Jack held up bottles of Diet Coke and elderflower cordial. ‘I’d offer you a proper drink but you’ll be driving.’
Ned pointed to the low-fat cola. He looked at the name on the side of the bottle and let out a sigh he had intended to be silent.
‘Nick was the closest we could get,’ the resident bartender explained. ‘Your mother hasn’t found a Daphne yet either. Of course, we Jacks are laughing. Damn pity I can’t stand the stuff!’
His mother and stepfather sat on the sofa, with a bodily closeness that always made Ned – choosing what had always (did Jack know this?) been Dad’s chair – feel like Hamlet.
They sipped or slugged, depending on beverage and temperament, their drinks.
‘You’re sure you don’t want a glass and ice for that, Edmund?’ Jack asked.
Ned raised the bottle to his mouth in reply, prompting Jack, in a rearguard action for social manners, to hand him a red linen napkin. When Ned had swallowed the acidic fizz, he said: ‘Oh, Mum, when I stopped in town, I met Mrs Ricks …’
‘Mrs … ? Oh, Harry.’
‘Harry? Mum, I haven’t got as far as Harriet yet, so that one’s abridged too far for me.’
‘What?’ She laughed, always his best audience. ‘Oh, very good. You should use that one.’
‘I have.’
Highly trained, as an insurance broker and obsessive golfer, in artificially sustaining conversation, Jack contributed: ‘One of my primary school teachers was named on the door as Miss U Pagett. All year, we scratched our little, nitty heads, wondering what on earth the initial could stand for, and eventually decided that it could only possibly be Umbrella! Of course, in retrospect, obviously Ursula.’
As his mother giggled, Ned busied himself with drinking. For a few minutes, their small-talk took its usual course, Jack arguing that Ed Miliband’s adenoidal voice and Communist father made him untenable as a potential prime minister, while Ned riposted that David Cameron’s Etonian tones and stockbroker daddy hadn’t prevented him from being an amateurish plodder in office. Both men then joined in incredulity at Ned’s mother’s continuing tolerance of Nick Clegg.
They discussed what they had recently seen on television. Mum said she had been enjoying the honourable thing – Honourable Woman, Ned corrected her – but Jack said that he had given up infuriated, not knowing what side he was supposed to be on, the Jews and the other lot being as bad as each other in his humble opinion.
More drinking in silence, which Ned broke with: ‘Er, Jack, if it’s okay with you, there’s something I really need to discuss with Mum alone? It’s a bit …’
Imperfectly disguised fury on Jack’s face, at being ordered out of his own living room; terror, not at all dissembled, in his mother’s features, as she computed what her son might be willing to tell only to her.
‘Darling?’ Jack asked his wife to adjudicate.
‘Oh, er.’ Familiar with being cast as conciliator in their ad hoc clan, she pleaded with her eyes for Ned to withdraw the dilemma.
‘I’m sure Mum wouldn’t mind if there was stuff your girls wanted to discuss with you,’ Ned said.
His mother redirected her optical semaphore towards Jack, who reluctantly stood up. ‘There’s an e-mail to the council about double-parking by the Common that I can be drafting. Grub up in
, what?, twenty minutes?’
‘Yes, love, I’ll call you.’
The hospital consultant turns over the cover on a folder of notes, the job interviewer peers at an applicant’s CV, the politician is asked on television a question that dare not be answered truthfully. Some pauses are as ominously loaded as storm-clouds.
‘So,’ his mother said. ‘You’ve got me worried now, of course.’
‘Mum. First of all, I’m really sorry to have landed you with this, and all I can say is I’m as shocked as you will be …’
‘Edmund, just tell me,’ she said, gently but tensely.
The pressure of wanting to impress and protect her was still too much and all he could say was: ‘Look, I’ve got a serious problem.’
‘Oh, dear,’ she said, never a swearer. ‘It’s not … not … everyone you hear about seems to have … cancer …’
The word was spoken as vehemently as an expletive. And her guess was good enough; it was a code people used: the doctors have found a problem.
‘No, not cancer,’ he said, wanting to add, ruling out the second greatest societal terror: and not paedophilia either.
‘But you don’t look well, Jack, er, Edmund. You work too hard for your age.’
‘Well, I am ill, sort of, but not … it’s the stress of …’
‘That’s what I’m telling you. They didn’t think about pressure then, but I’ve always been convinced it’s what killed your dad …’ A second possibility struck her. ‘If it’s you and Emma, I’d be sad, very sad for Toby, and you know my views, but you’d still be four short of Henry VIII …’
‘Mum, there’s no easy way of saying this: someone has made an accusation of … sexual assault …’
She gave a harsh rasping out-breath as if a bullet had just hit her lung. Her cheeks coloured as she sniffed and blinked. A memory flared of his mother turning away or leaving the room in the years after his father’s death. But she was looking straight at him, although foggily, as she said: ‘Someone where? At work? The university or the television?’
