by Mark Morris
“Gerard.”
“Gerard—that’s right. They were big and blond-haired, and—”
“Jack, we’re here,” his aunt said softly.
He stamped on the brake as if an animal had run in front of the car. He was aware of his tires sliding a little on the bumpy road, a billow of dust that quickly dispersed, his aunt lurching forward, then snapping back as the seat belt locked. A tingle of reaction scuttered up his legs, up his back, across his shoulders and down his arms. It settled in the palms of his hands, itching as if his skin had gone from cold to hot too quickly. The pores in his body seemed to gape and ooze sweat. “Sorry about that. Are you all right?” he said.
His aunt was frowning in pain, her eyes half-closed, kneading her breastbone with the tips of her fingers. “Why did you do that?” she said, grumpily but weakly. “Whatever were you thinking of?”
“I’m sorry,” he said again. “I don’t know. I was daydreaming. . . . I’m sorry.”
“Were you trying to see me off as well?”
Jack knew she was joking, but bad-temperedly. “No,” he said, and added again, “I’m sorry.”
She glared at him a moment, then her expression softened. “Ah, well,” she said, “no real harm done.” She pointed over Jack’s right shoulder. “What do you reckon of the old place then?”
For a moment, he actually felt reluctant to turn round. He smiled at his aunt and said, “Give me a chance,” before swivelling slowly.
And there was the house. At first Jack thought it was stirring, its roof splitting into a pattern of interconnected spines that were waving like tendrils. Then the light shifted, perspective imposed itself, and he saw that the tendrils were simply the peaks of the tallest trees in the woods behind the house. The house itself was as he remembered it, louring and inhospitable. There was no colour about the place, no flowers in the garden, no brightly painted door. Even the curtains at the windows appeared grey, like thick swathes of dust or cobweb. By contrast, the sky seemed almost impossibly blue—the colour of the sea on a holiday brochure. There were some alterations to the place, though, since the last time he had been here: a new wrought-iron gate to replace the rickety wooden one, the front lawn mowed stubble-close, revealing the dull mounds of intermittent molehills.
“Welcome to your luxurious holiday home,” he murmured. “Guaranteed to make your stay a happy one.”
“I’ve cleaned and aired the place for you,” his aunt said. “Well, with some help from young Tracey, the landlord’s daughter from the Seven Stars. She was telling me she’d read all your books. I think you might have a fan there.”
Jack gave a vague smile.
“Shall we go inside?” said his aunt.
Jack took off his spectacles, slipped them into the inside pocket of his jacket, and got out of the car slowly. He turned to lever the front seat down and grab his suitcase from the back.
“Is there anything I can carry?” Georgina wanted to know, but Jack shook his head.
“No, there’s just my laptop in the boot, but that can wait until later.”
Despite the gate being new, it still creaked; true to form, Jack thought wryly. As though this walk up the path to the front door meant nothing to him, he asked his aunt, “Will it be okay to park my car on the verge over there?”
“Oh, yes, I should think so,” she said, and took a key-ring containing two keys from her pocket. It was the same heavy wooden door, but with an extra lock. Thinking of her arthritis, Jack put down his suitcase and said, “Here, let me,” but she had already pushed the door open.
The smell that enveloped them when they stepped into the gloomy hall took him by surprise. The odour of tobacco and alcohol and of something sour and organic, like rank sweat and rotting vegetables, had been eradicated by the chemical tang of furniture polish, disinfectant and lemon-scented air freshener. It was certainly a far preferable smell to the one Jack had expected, though it nevertheless made him uncomfortable, for it seemed to suggest it was covering up something bad. His “dark and quirky imagination,” as The Daily Mail had once put it, began to shift into overdrive. Had he been told everything about his father’s death or had his aunt left out a vital detail? Such as the fact that his father’s dead body had remained undiscovered for some considerable time?
As if guessing his thoughts, Georgina said, “It’s a bit stuffy, isn’t it? I’ll open a few windows.”
Jack smiled vaguely at her, put down his case and looked around. Being here made him feel very strange indeed. There was a weight in his stomach, as if his memories of childhood had congealed there.
The hall was exactly as he remembered it, so familiar that it could have been only a week or a month since he was last here; it seemed inconceivable that fifteen years had passed. The wide staircase was immediately in front of him, clinging to the right-hand wall; the corridor which slipped down the left side of it led to the vast kitchen and the dimly lit sitting room. At the bottom of the stairs was the wooden telephone table, scratched and battered. A red telephone—it looked like the exact same one that he’d used to call the ambulance for his father in 1989—sat atop a local telephone directory and Yellow Pages that seemed barely to have been touched. Curiously, Jack picked up the receiver and put it to his ear. He was oddly relieved to hear the familiar hum of the dial tone. The mouthpiece smelt of stale breath; his stomach turned slowly as he realised whose breath it must be. Behind the door were a row of coat hooks, none of which were presently occupied. There were four of them, ornate pieces of brass set on a wooden plate. Jack remembered his father always used to moan about having to traipse through to the kitchen every time he wanted his coat; eventually he’d remedied that by purchasing these hooks and putting them on the wall.
The wooden floor and stairs were uncarpeted, though Jack always recalled them being scuffed and muddied, not gleaming as they were now. Even without his spectacles he could see how the polish really brought out the deep red of the wood, the intricate whorls of the grain, the minute distortions in the floor’s surface. He reached out his hand and cupped it around the carved wooden acorn atop the post at the foot of the stairs. He would always reach out instinctively for this when he was about to ascend and would use it to swing himself onto the second or third step. The memory of this little thing, which he used to do a dozen times a day and not even think about, was so sharp he could almost taste it. He felt his heartbeat snagging his breath, making him pant slightly, because just for a moment the passage of the last fifteen years seemed so quick and ephemeral and insignificant that it frightened him.
The wallpaper was the same—white with a squiggly blue pattern endlessly repeated—though it was more faded than Jack remembered it. However, it was cleaner, too: perhaps Aunt Georgina and her helper, Tracey, had even gone so far as to swab down the walls. At the top of the stairs early afternoon light spilled in through a window, saffron at the edges, misty white in the centre. All at once Jack shuddered and looked away. The place gave him the creeps. As if some presence . . .
“Memories,” he said out loud to quash the thought. “Bad memories, that’s all.”
Georgina appeared at the end of the corridor and hobbled towards him. “That’s better,” she said. “Nothing like a bit of fresh air to blow the cobwebs away.” She stopped some yards away and regarded him quizzically. “What’s the matter, Jack? You look a little queer.”
Normally he would have found her choice of words amusing, but just now he didn’t feel like making anything of it. “It’s just this place,” he said. “Coming back . . . You know?”
She nodded, not unsympathetically. “It’s been a long time, hasn’t it?”
He nodded and smiled. He wanted to make some comment, to say something appropriate, but he couldn’t think of anything and the moment passed.
“I expect it’ll just take a bit of getting used to, that’s all,” she said. “How about a nice cup of tea to get you settled in?”
Jack shrugged. “Okay.”
“Lovely. I
’ll put the kettle on if you’ll make up a fire in the living room. It’s a bit chilly in there. It doesn’t get much light.”
She disappeared into the kitchen. Jack sighed and walked toward the sitting room. His recent dream came back to him, the house as some hostile, living entity, swallowing him whole, but he forced it to the back of his mind.
The sitting room was a little smaller than he remembered it, but apart from that it looked much the same. The carpet was brown—to absorb alcohol stains, thought Jack—and had obviously been recently cleaned. He couldn’t recall what the old three-piece suite had been like, so was unsure whether this was the same one. It certainly looked old enough to have been. The fabric was faded and a little threadbare, the cushions shapeless as boulders. The dining table and chairs were in the same place as he remembered them, with the sideboard flush against the wall behind them. Again his dream came back to him: his father as the ogre in his book, his mother in her white gown, rising into the air as she gave birth to some twisted, nightmarish thing.
He shivered a little, jiggling his shoulders as though shucking off the memory like a coating of snow. He looked around again, working out how to best impose his personality on the place. He was pleased to see his father had replaced the decrepit black-and-white TV with a colour one; pity there wasn’t a DVD player, too. He would set up his laptop on the dining table, together with his various other writing accoutrements, and would plug in his CD player to fill the place with music and noise.
He circled the settee, knelt in front of the soot-blackened grate and began to build a fire. He was surprised by how quickly he recollected the process; he hadn’t done this in fifteen years, yet his movements were swift and automatic. When his aunt entered with a tea tray he was carefully laying coal on top of his construction. He lit a match and touched it to the paper underneath. He felt absurdly proud when the fire quickly began to blaze.
“Soon be warm now,” Georgina said, pouring the tea. Jack sat beside her on the settee, facing the fire, and she handed him a cup. The china service looked delicate, a little cracked and stained, but despite its obvious age Jack didn’t recognise it. Probably packed away when his mother died, he thought, and felt a twinge of sadness. Just like his father’s love had been packed away and left to wither and turn bad.
The fire danced for him, flames weaving sinuously as though in a desperate attempt to sustain its meagre life. Occasionally it popped and crackled, black sparks fleeing up the chimney like inverted fireworks. Like the sea, Jack had always found fire awesome and beautiful. He still felt tense, but gradually the heat of the flames seeped into his skin, lapping at his muscles, relaxing his body. He was aware that at some stage he and his aunt would have to talk about his father. How about now? He shifted on the settee, turning to face her. “Aunt,” he said tentatively, “how was my father . . . I mean, how had he been since I . . . since I left?”
Georgina put down her cup, which rattled in its saucer, and leaned back with a sigh. She looked not at Jack but into the fire. Flames flickered in her eyes, making them oddly feral.
“How was he after you left?” she repeated, and pulled a face as if the question was too large for her to answer. She was silent a few moments longer, then said, “You never used to want me to talk about him when we spoke on the telephone.”
“I know, I know,” Jack said, feeling guilty in spite of himself. “But I do now. Now that he’s . . . no longer here, now that I’m back in Beckford. . . .” He scowled, confused. “I don’t know . . . I feel an urge, a need, to fill in the gaps.”
His aunt didn’t question this. Instead, after a slight pause, she said, “When he came out of the hospital after the two of you had had your fight, he wouldn’t speak to anyone. Even I couldn’t get through to him. He just stared into space and grunted when I tried to make conversation. Even when I became angry he failed to respond, and that frightened me because it seemed as if he didn’t care any more. He was very subdued, very listless. He sat around the house all day, which admittedly was nothing unusual, but he wasn’t even drinking or smoking very much; it was as if even that was too much of an effort. He . . . ,” she screwed up her face, searching for the right expression, “I don’t know. It seemed like all his spirit, bitter though it was, had gone right out of him.”
“There was no one left to hate any more,” said Jack.
She shook her head. “No, I don’t think that was it. I remember once, I came here unannounced to see how he was, and I found him crying. He tried to cover it up at first, said he had a cold, but I kept on at him, asking him what was the matter. I felt as though he desperately wanted someone to talk to, although he wouldn’t have admitted it. That was the closest your father ever came to pouring his heart out. He said to me, ‘I’ve messed it all up, Georgina, haven’t I?’ ‘Messed what up, Terry?’ I asked him. ‘Everything,’ he said. ‘My whole life. Everything I ever wanted has just gone down the drain and I’ve done nothing to stop it. I’ve lost everything in this world that I’ve ever loved and it serves me bloody well right.’ ‘Do you mean Jack?’ I asked him, but he wouldn’t say any more. He jumped up, suddenly angry, and said, ‘I don’t want to talk about it, I’m going out.’ I tried to stop him, but there wasn’t much I could do. I tried to get him to discuss it on a few occasions after that, but he just clammed up or got angry and stormed out. When he died he was a virtual recluse. He just used to sit around the house all day, brooding.”
She shook her head sadly; Jack heard the slight strain in her voice as she tried to contain her emotion. “Such a waste,” she said, “such a waste of a life. He wasn’t a bad man, Jack. I think he wanted to love you, but the poison just built up in him and he couldn’t ever get rid of it. When he died I felt almost relieved for him because I knew he was finally at peace. . . .” Her voice had become a whisper and now it tailed off completely. Jack had been staring into the fire, a lump in his throat, a knot in his belly. He looked at his aunt and saw she was wiping tears from her wrinkled face with a tissue. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Just ignore me. I’ll be all right in a minute.”
Jack didn’t know what to think. Despite the obvious tragedy of his father’s life he couldn’t reconcile the tortured, lovelorn image his aunt had portrayed with the drunken, vindictive slob he had known. He felt sympathy for his father’s circumstances but not for the man himself. He supposed, as usual, that his aunt was looking at the situation through rose-tinted spectacles; it was not that she didn’t recognise Terry Stone’s considerable faults, but simply that she had so badly wanted Jack and his father to be friends that she had something of a blind spot where Terry’s treatment of him was concerned. Oh, she had berated Terry about Jack’s cuts and bruises, but she had always allowed him to go back to his father, hadn’t she? Jack thought he had a right to hate her a little bit for that but he didn’t; he knew her intentions, though misguided, had been well-meaning.
“Look . . . don’t cry,” he said awkwardly. “You did all you could for him. Nobody could have done any more. He didn’t have to live like that, did he? He didn’t have to grieve and hate all his life.”
His aunt blew her nose. “I know,” she said, “but I don’t think he could help it. It just took him over. I don’t think there was anything he could do.”
Bollocks, Jack wanted to say, but didn’t. He wanted to point out to his aunt that plenty of other people get the same bum deal from life, but they don’t all crumble as his father did. And they certainly don’t take it out on their kids. Jack felt that if the same thing happened to him, he would give his child twice as much love, would work doubly hard to create a bond that would never be broken.
He voiced none of this. It felt too much like speaking ill of the dead. Instead he leaned forward and placed his hand on the pot to ensure it was still warm, then he poured his Aunt another cup of tea.
“Here,” he said, “drink this.” Georgina took the cup, sipped it once, then put it aside.
“He was very proud of you, you know,” she told Jac
k.
“Proud,” he repeated, unable to keep the scorn from his voice.
“He was proud of your success. It was the only time after you left that he showed any sort of enthusiasm. He used to tell people about his famous son.”
Jack snorted. The disclosure made him angry but he wasn’t sure why. Perhaps because of his father’s strange duality: he had hated Jack to his face, boasted about him behind his back.
Abruptly his aunt pushed herself up from the settee, tottering for a moment before stabilising. “Well, I’d better be off,” she said. “Leave you to get settled in.”
“You’re going already?” he said, surprised. The prospect of being left alone here was not appealing. He tried to make light of it. “Was it something I said?”
“No, of course not,” said Georgina, patting his arm. She looked momentarily uncomfortable, as if she wanted to tell him something but was not sure how to go about it. Eventually she said, “To be truthful, the house upsets me a little bit, seeing all his things and knowing he won’t ever be coming back. And seeing you again, it’s all been a bit too much for me. . . .” Her voice choked off and tears sparkled in her eyes once more. Embarrassed, she waved a hand. “I’ve told you before, just ignore me. I’m nothing but a silly old woman.”
Jack stood up, slipped his arm around her back and gave her a brief hug. “You’re not silly at all,” he said. “I think you’re brilliant. Come on, I’ll take you home.”
She insisted on walking, and although Jack thought at first she was either joking or simply being polite, she stuck to her guns until finally he had to concede.
“You may think I’m on my last legs, Jack,” she said defiantly, “but I’ve walked two miles a day ever since I can remember and I don’t intend to stop now. It’s what keeps me alive and breathing. It may take me a while to get from A to B but I always get there in the end. Besides, it’s too lovely a day to be stuck in a car. You’d be doing yourself a favour by getting some fresh air into your own lungs instead of all that London muck.” She struggled into her coat. “Now, the pantry’s well-stocked and you know where I am if you need anything. Perhaps if you’re not too busy tomorrow you can pop down for lunch.”
