As the Clock Struck Ten

by Gill Mather

  And in just two weeks they'd do it all again when he went to Northampton. His happy few weeks with Emma and living and painting in the summerhouse was over forever. But at least he was starting an exciting new life in Northampton, whereas his mum at her age was having to take the retrograde step of living in a small studio apartment. There was no way she would go back to his dad, though Greg in any event seemed to have a new girlfriend already. Luke had seen her when he’d gone over to get the rest of his stuff. An over-made-up mid-forties floozy. Alex seemed to be out of the picture.

  He was sorry about his mother’s circumstances and said so.

  "Don't worry too much Luke. I'm going to divorce your father. I'm sorry but I expect you see that it's inevitable." Luke nodded and sighed. "And when it's all settled, I'll be able to buy myself a little house. So it's not forever though of course I don’t expect it to be easy, battling it out with your father. Anyway, what about you and Emma?" said Grace. “Is it definitely over?"

  "Sadly yes, I think so. After what happened, all the fun went out of it. And she’s terribly upset about her father. Really worried. She doesn’t like my new accent much. But I'm off to uni. I can't pretend to be a yob forever. I expect we'll see each other when we both get to Northampton. Our paths are bound to cross though I'll probably get in touch with her anyway. She's making a complaint you know. I hope she gets somewhere with it. I dare say Don won't do anything himself.

  "Oh by the way, Emma was able to go back to work at the restaurant because Alex isn't there any more. Emma said no-one knows where she is and I wasn't damn well going to ask my father."

  "How was Don when you left?"

  "About the same," said Luke. "Emma’s really worried about him but he won't respond to her either and she hasn’t much choice but to leave for uni when I do. I'm really sorry mum. Though I think he may be working again. I saw the light on late in his study some nights. Oh and Ryan got that promotion so that’s good. I’ll try and go out one evening with him to celebrate."

  They stowed his things in a corner. He inflated his camping mattress and draped his sleeping bag on it. This was to be his billet for the next couple of weeks. He couldn't wait to get off to uni.

  LEFT TO HIMSELF after Emma left for university, Don fell into some sort of routine. It didn't include work or housework but every few days he drove himself to the nearest convenience store and got in some food, mainly ready meals. He couldn't face planning for more than a couple of days ahead. He slept in late in the mornings and as a result he didn't go to bed until the early hours. He had a bath every four or five days. He didn't change the bedclothes at all. He sat and watched daytime TV. If anyone came to the house, he didn't answer the door.

  Sometimes he went into his office and, ignoring all emails, he downloaded and read information about bizarre conspiracy theories which had somehow become a pet enthusiasm of sorts. Some of it was in fact quite believable. And they had rallies and events too, though mostly they seemed to be in the USA. What these things all had in common however was that they were fairly well removed from any semblance of real or normal life. The characters who espoused and propounded these theories were a little odd to downright nutcakes. Don sat and chuckled and made comments but he stopped that when he realised that he was doing so out loud as though there was someone else in the room with him.

  What brought him up sharp however was going to the convenience store one day in late September and finding that his debit card wouldn't work. So he pulled out his credit card instead and that wouldn't work either. He hunted about in his pocket but there was only a few pence in there including some euro cents he’d picked up from Emma’s room. Consequently he was unable to get anything to eat and shuffled out of the shop. If he presented a sad and lonely image, then he didn't notice or care. He had to survive on toast and jam that day and later he went online and checked his bank and credit card accounts. It took all the nervous energy he could muster to do so but he had to transfer money from a savings account into his current account and pay the outstanding balance on the credit card on which the small limit had been reached. He’d never bothered to ask for it to be increased.

  Having done so, he found he had the initiative to look at his emails and there were a vast number of them. Most of them he deleted. Those from clients and prospective clients he replied to with apologies saying that he had unavoidably been forced to suspend his business activities for a period and he posted the same message up on his website. There was an email from Martin gently reminding him that he hadn't paid Martin’s bill. He replied to the several emails from Emma saying he was OK. There was also one from Grace but he didn't open it. He put some credit on his mobile phone. Despite his job in the IT industry, he had resisted so-called smart phones or an iPhone and expensive contracts.

  Accomplishing these routine necessary tasks caused him to at last take a look at the house. It was a mess. And himself. He got undressed and opened the wardrobe door in his bedroom. He peered into the full length mirror on the inside at the grumpy paranoid old man in the room with him, the one who had said all those horrible things to Grace and distrusted even his own daughter. The man looked like a ghost, with pale skin, glaring anxious eyes with dark rings around them, a tatty crumb-laden beard and collar-length uncombed greasy hair, the grey appearing to have overrun the dark. The body of the man was droopy, skeletal and hunched. He couldn't bring himself to start work again nor contact Grace, but tomorrow he would make a start on sorting out the house and doing something about himself.

  "BLESS ME FATHER for I have sinned. It's been three years since my last confession."

  Haven't we all, thought Father Burk for the umpteenth time though his own sins tended to be of the purely imaginary variety and he had no truck with the proposition that the thought was as bad as the deed.

  He knew very well who the girl was. He recognised her voice and he'd seen her kneeling at a pew earlier. She'd been to the Catholic primary school and she'd been a regular at the church until….yes it must have been about three years ago. But she still came to church events with her parents and siblings, sometime bringing a boyfriend along as well. One hoped she would eventually want to come back and be more active.

  There was silence so he said: "Would you like to tell me what's troubling you?"

  The girl was crying. This wasn’t uncommon. These days fornication, contraception, infidelity, all these things weren't regarded as sins by the majority of people. The flesh was weak; Father Burk accepted that, regardless of the strict teachings of the church. There were however still things which people did regard as basically sinful, heinously so in fact, however prevalent they were in modern society. He had a good idea what it was that Connie wanted to get off her chest, therefore he said:

  "If it's something you've kept to yourself, you may find that it helps to unburden yourself."

  And so it all spilled out. The surprise at finding she was pregnant, how careful they'd been, the initial worry of the pregnancy, the impossibility of having a child in her circumstances, the termination, how vile it was, the strain of not telling anyone, even the father, in fact especially not the father, and worse the certain knowledge that she would now never forgive herself, that she had deprived her own child of life and committed it to an eternity in Limbo. Her own mother had become pregnant at a much younger age but had married her father and gone through with the pregnancy, had more children and the family were happy. She had been brave whereas Connie had opted for what had seemed to be the easiest remedy at the time but for her had turned out to be a nightmare.

  Father Burk wasn’t surprised. He heard similar confessions on a regular basis, and not only from girls; he heard them sometimes from the would-be fathers, young men who had wanted the abortions to take place but who afterwards were wracked with guilt and usually the relationships fell apart.

  When God had said to Adam and Eve "Be fruitfull, and multiply, and replenish the earth", he hadn't been kidding. Fertility was in many ways a curse, entirely indiscri
minate in its successes and failures. If online statistics were to be believed, world-wide four million terminations took place per annum; four million extra people every year who would have filled the planet and used up its dwindling resources. But Connie had stopped crying and was obviously waiting for him to say something.

  "God understands," Father Burk said. "He is well aware of human frailty. God loves you. You should do your best to forget what you've done and make the very best of your life to come. You'll have children in due course. I can guarantee that you'll be happy again." He deliberately didn’t say 'other children'. He prepared to wind up the session.

  "But that isn't all Father," Connie said. "I….a man threatened to tell my boyfriend and family what I'd done if I didn’t do something he asked me to do."

  Father Burk sat and listened with growing unease as Connie outlined what the man had blackmailed her into doing, a course which would ultimately have resulted in her perjuring herself in Court including taking the Lord's name in vain. There had been, Connie said, no Court proceedings so far but she understood that the man she had falsely accused had been arrested and questioned and her false allegation must have played a part in that. Whatever the effect had been on the man so accused, and it may have been considerable, she was partly responsible for that. She had, she said, sleepless nights over it and was tempted on many occasions to go and own up to the man what she'd done.

  Father Burk shook his head. One wrong so often led to another. When a crime was involved, it put him in a difficult position. His duty was of course clear. He would never disclose things said to him in the confessional but he might still be questioned about the matter if the police got their teeth into the case. Indeed if Connie went and told the man about her false accusation to the police and her confession to her priest, the man might then go to the police who may wish to interview him, Father Burk, to try to find out if it was true. This possibility led directly to a conflict of interest on his part. That is: what his guidance should be to this poor tortured girl seeking his advice and opinion.

  However he was only human too. He didn’t want a lot of trouble and he said again to Connie that her best course was to forget the whole thing and move on. Instead of doling out a number of Our Fathers and Hail Marys, he told her that a good and highly effective way to atone for her sins would be to give practical help to others. He was trying to set up a soup kitchen and drop-in centre in the town for the many homeless and poor people. Volunteers were urgently needed. She wasn’t the first confessor he had suggested this to. He pushed a makeshift leaflet under the dark carved wooden screen between them.

  Connie thanked him and left soon after.

  AFTER LUKE LEFT, Grace missed him more than she could say. All his stuff littering the floor, his artwork, his clutter of shaving gear, deodorant, shampoo etc in the shower-room, his dirty underwear and socks and T shirts waiting to be washed, his clean clothes in a heap on his mattress. She'd happily have it back to have him back too.

  She'd driven him and his things to Northampton the week before his new term began and seen him settled in his room and signed up for all the things he needed to get signed up for after which she'd returned the same evening to this room that now managed to look so empty, despite how small it was. She would have gladly put up with all the previous clutter just to not be on her own in this little room every night.

  She frequently recalled their last two weeks and their happy evening meals together with a glass of wine for her and a beer for him. He couldn't have been that happy himself having lost his girlfriend but he always managed to cheer her up. Just being with him was a huge pleasure to her and now that he wasn't there and she was all on her own, though she tried to resist it she was becoming depressed. Not clinically so, but extremely down-hearted. Hoping to open up a line of communication with Don, she emailed him to ask how he was but he didn't reply. She missed him desperately and regularly had to stop herself from driving over to Mayfield Cottages.

  She found it difficult to work up the enthusiasm to make a proper meal every evening and often got takeaways. Noticing her waistline expanding, she therefore sometimes ate nothing in the evening at all and just went straight to bed and watched the TV more or less as soon as she got home. Apathy started to set in and she felt powerless to resist. She got through her working day satisfactorily enough but she couldn't summon up any interest in anything else. Daily she hoped that Don might contact her but he never did.

  Grace had not said so to Luke, but part of the reason for choosing to take such cramped rented accommodation was because she'd had to provide him with the money to pay his deposit on his halls of residence and a fund to tide him over until his grant and loan came through. Paintings he’d managed to sell didn't add up to enough, especially as he had to buy new equipment and would have books etc to pay for.

  You had to wonder how people managed who had no indulgent parent able and willing to subsidise them at the beginning of a degree course. She had assured Luke that the money came from a fund she’d specifically set aside for when he went to university and that giving him the money had no bearing on her choice of accommodation and he seemed to accept this though quite honestly he’d had little choice. Having already submitted the financial application showing hers and Don's joint financial details, she had had to hurriedly submit revised details now that she was living on her own. She had filled in the form at work one lunchtime when there was no-one around to see the tears that such an exercise had produced.

  By mid-October she was so low that she called Luke and asked if he'd mind her visiting him in Northampton. She promised not to bother him much. She'd get a cheap hotel to stay in and perhaps they could meet for a meal at least but he insisted they met both the Saturday and Sunday and he'd spend the whole weekend showing her around.

  She found Northampton to be nicer than she'd expected. Luke took her to both campuses. He of course was studying in the Avenue Campus and he showed her the impressive main building, the Newton Building where he said Emma studied. He took her to his halls of residence and to his room. Incredibly, there was almost no clutter in the room (for heaven's sake don’t look under the bed, she was told), perhaps to allow for the vast canvas which took up most of the available space. She stepped around it.

  She looked with awe at the painting which faced the window and away from the door and depicted in fuzzy definition a man and a woman either side of a deep chasm. Like many of his paintings, the landscape was alien and bare, the sky in turmoil. More cracks were appearing in the ground as the man's arms stretched out towards the woman but the woman was apparently taking no notice and was moving away. Insofar as you could see the man's face, it was tortured and pleading and in the distance figures were approaching him bearing arms. The whole scene looked as though it was being viewed as a reflection in rippling water or through a film of heat haze or similar.

  "Wow," said Grace. "Er what are you going to call it?"

  "Well, actually, originally I thought, I hope you won't be upset, I'd call it 'The Parents', but then I thought it could be anyone so I'm just calling it 'The Couple'."

  "Oh," said Grace as there ran through her mind the various couples it might be. "Oh," was all she could say again.

  "I'm hoping it'll get shown at the next exhibition we have. It's not quite finished yet."

  "Wow," she said again.

  "Shall we go out then? You don’t mind do you? About the painting?"

  "No of course not. It's spectacular. And as you say, it could be anyone. Yes let's go." She hoped this work hadn't taken too much out of him emotionally but perhaps it was a healthy form of release for him, a way of expressing things he felt without having to put it into hard, bald words.

  They went to the cultural quarter together but towards the end of the Saturday afternoon, Grace said she'd treat them to a meal and they both decided they'd prefer Indian food. They walked along Bridge Street to the other end where the Royal Bengal was situated. Luke said he'd been there once and it was very
good.

  AS GRACE AND LUKE opened the door to go into the restaurant and enquire about a table, at the other end of Bridge Street, a tall older man rounded the corner on foot. He walked with a slight stoop of which he was conscious but it was getting better with practice. He was on his way back to an estate agent's shop he'd visited earlier during his visit to put in an offer for a property he'd been to see in the preceding few days; one of so many it made his head spin but he thought he'd made the right choice. He spent half an hour with the agents filling in forms and providing details including ability to pay and identification and he arranged to go and view the property again the following day with his daughter. He was told that it was likely the offer would be accepted.

  Satisfied with his efforts, he turned his attention to getting an evening meal somewhere. He'd noticed an Indian restaurant along the road and toyed with the idea of going to eat there but he was tired after walking around all day. His out of town budget hotel had its own a restaurant. The food was passable but the main thing was that he could have a beer with his meal and then go straight to his room, have a shower and go to bed and watch TV. He had no life partner to share these things with. He had messed up his last relationship. Or it had been messed up for him and he’d helped the process nicely along. Someone, he often thought these days, should run a lance through Greg Bennett. Greg, who wouldn’t have been out of place as a medieval baron constantly plotting and conniving someone’s ruin, their downfall to further bolster or secure his own position.