The Good Father

by Marion Husband

  It had rained for three days. Alone in the cottage his father had rented for the month, Guy and Ava played the card games she had taught him and Ava talked about her childhood, halcyon pre-war days when the sun always shone, bleaching Hans’s hair still blonder and burnishing his skin to gold. Guy hadn’t wanted to think about Hans, not really. He was the enemy, after all, and not just an ordinary enemy, like the dull-witted German soldiers depicted as such buffoons in his comics, but an SS officer, one of those men who despised fair-play and decency and the proper rules of war. But the more Ava told him about her brother, the more human Hans became, no longer a cartoon version of evil, but someone he could empathise with when Ava told him of the arctic conditions he’d endured in Russia. He forgot for the moment that the Russians had been on their side.

  That rainy afternoon though, it seemed that Ava was determined not to be sad, allowing herself only that one sigh before turning to him, becoming bright and brisk as she said, ‘We’ll go for a walk. We shall put on our Wellington boots and take our umbrellas and the English rain shall not defeat us.’

  Perhaps the rain had loosened the stones.

  In the garden, Guy stopped his angry pacing and looked back at the house that had never truly been his home. His father had bought the place when he came home from Germany – a house to impress Ava, to make her love him; Guy had always suspected that his father believed Ava didn’t love him as much as he wanted her to. But the house was just a house to Ava and couldn’t replace all that she’d lost; not even he could do that. It was his role just to listen, to be the one to whom Ava could relate her tales of Hans and in telling those tales, make her brother live again.

  He saw his father at Ava’s bedroom window. Harry blamed him for the accident – of course he did – just as he blamed him for his mother’s death. If he hadn’t been born, his mother wouldn’t have become ill with post-natal depression; if he had been good like other children – not being constantly expelled – he would have been at school that June, and Ava wouldn’t have volunteered to take him away on holiday. His mother would still be alive; Ava would still be herself, if not for him.

  Looking up at the bedroom window, he held his father’s gaze. At last Harry drew the curtains without acknowledging that he’d seen him.

  Guy went on gazing at the window, rage building inside him. Suddenly, he turned and ran through the garden and out onto the quiet street.

  Chapter 26

  Guy wandered the streets, his rage gradually subsiding: he could never be angry for long, it seemed too much of a waste of energy to him. Still, he couldn’t bring himself to go home. Home was too full of Ava.

  He walked until the storm came, the thunder so loud, the lightning striking down so fiercely after the heat of the day, so close; he knew how dangerous it was. He was only a few yards from the house, the place that Hope had shown him, the place he had probably been heading for all along. The key was no longer in its hiding-place so Guy smashed a pane of glass in the door and released the catch from the inside. He went upstairs, the lightning violently, briefly, illuminating the dark passageway. This house was full of ghosts; he’d sensed them that afternoon as Hope led him from room to room. He had wanted to explore the house alone. Only then they had heard the voices outside, and the panic had begun.

  He went first into the room full of toys, where the picture of the prince hung above the fireplace. The picture had its own ghost, of course, its very own horror lurking to surprise the unwary. A warning, Peter Wright had called the goblin, at least according to Hope. A warning against sex with boys like him. He went to the picture and touched the goblin’s leering mouth. Hope thought Peter Wright was a pervert. She didn’t realise that most men were, beneath their earnestness or pompousness or stern aloofness or any of the other disguises used to make mothers and fathers believe their children were safe with them.

  He had been six when a master first fondled him. He had been eight when he was first buggered. Buggered! What a fat, horrible word that was, disgusting and preposterous at once. He knew that most boys made more of a fuss about it than he did – that they cried more, at least; he didn’t cry at all. He pretended to be someone else entirely when they touched him, not Guy Dunn at all but a boy called Dan who didn’t care for anyone or anything. And when it all got a bit too much even for Dan, he simply ran away. He knew he wasn’t like other boys, he had some crucial bit missing, some bit that was to do with pride and self-respect and taking yourself oh so bloody seriously. Most boys – most men – were stupid bastards, both the bullies and the weaklings. He had learned that from his first day at his first school. So far he hadn’t met anyone to change his mind.

  The prince in Wright’s drawing had a very beautiful face, like Wright himself. When he saw this picture, Guy had thought that Wright might be queer, a thought that had crossed his mind when he’d met him at Irene’s birthday party. He certainly didn’t look at Hope in the way Hope imagined he did. Innocent little Hope, she made him smile sometimes, she was so sheltered, and then she would shock him – even him – with the things she did. He hardly knew what to make of her, had to concede that he didn’t know that much about girls, given his upbringing. He did believe he loved her though. He believed it more each time he saw her, as she became more familiar to him.

  The lightning flashed again, making the prince’s face look suddenly animated, as though his horse had startled. Guy turned away, remembering that Hope really believed Wright wanted her – and it puzzled him that she could misread the signs so badly. It was obvious to him that Wright loved her as a father would. Guy frowned, thinking of the likeness between Hope and Peter Wright. Then: ‘Christ,’ he said aloud. Then, more softly, ‘ Christ.’ Of course – Wright was Hope’s father! Their alikeness spoke for itself. No wonder this house had felt so haunted to him; it was stuffed full of this great enormous secret.

  Guy opened the wardrobe, the drawers in the chest, searching for clues, wanting to find evidence to back up his new theory, realising that he wanted Wright to be Hope’s father rather than that idiot Jackson. He went downstairs, began on the desk in the sitting room, working his way steadily through the house. It seemed as though someone else had done this before him: most of the drawers and cupboards were empty. Finally, the rest of the house searched, he stood in the scullery at the top of the cellar steps, breathing in the smell of damp walls and coal dust.

  He felt along the wall, hoping to find a light switch just as there was on the cellar steps of the derelict house that had been his retreat from the world before he met Hope. Thinking of that house now and the hours he’d spent alone there, he began to feel the pressure of his own strangeness, a feeling he’d had less often since Hope but one that still had the power to unnerve him. Perhaps he would never be in step with the world, would always be an outsider looking in on other people’s lives, wondering at the insignificant things that seemed to matter so much to them. He made himself think about Hope, the kindred spirit he had found; they were outsiders together, especially if his hunch about her was true. His fingers found the switch and the steps were bathed in a dim yellow light.

  The cellar contained only gardening tools, neat and tidy where he had expected to find the usual accumulation of rubbish and spiders’ webs. Guy walked along the corridor that led from the main cellar to the outside steps. There were doors along its length. The third door hung open and Guy could see that in the space behind it, a paving-slab had been lifted and someone had been digging into the exposed dirt floor. Two small metal spades – the kind children used to dig sandcastles – lay beside the hole, and beside the spades was a pile of small bones.

  Guy squatted down to look more closely. He thought at first that they were animal bones – those of a rat, perhaps, or a small dog. He picked one up and examined it. After a moment he went to fetch the spade he’d seen hanging on the cellar wall.

  Harry lay beside Ava; she was sleeping, the doll Danny in her arms. Guy had given her the doll the first time he had visited her i
n hospital. His arm had still been in plaster, his face so pale still that Harry had believed he would never truly recover but would remain forever this wan, frightened little boy. He was eleven years old and had lost his odd, cocky confidence that had always made him seem so much older and so independent that Harry would feel totally superfluous to his son’s needs. This feeling had helped ease the guilt Harry had carried around with him since he left Guy at his first boarding school – even before that, if he was being honest with himself. He realised he couldn’t remember a time when he hadn’t felt guilty over his son.

  Harry had never asked how Guy had come by the dolls. He had had an idea – one that he was ashamed of – that his son had stolen them from the children’s ward where he’d stayed for a week after the accident. It was only recently that he had overheard Guy telling Esther that he had bought the dolls from the hospital’s little shop. Guy had laughed that easy, careless laugh of his. ‘They cost me all my pocket money – even then I didn’t have enough. The woman in the shop let me off. I think she felt sorry for me.’

  Harry had gone into the kitchen then, wanting to embrace his son, to beg his forgiveness for doubting him. Guy had glanced at him, smiled in that knowing, supercilious way he had that was such a barrier between them; it was as if Guy had known all about his suspicions – even as if he had made up the story about spending every penny he had on the dolls because he knew that his father was eavesdropping. Harry experienced the same irrational anger he often felt around his son; he returned to his belief that the dolls had been stolen. This belief fitted with everything he knew about Guy, all his bad behaviour that had Harry travelling up and down the country looking for schools that would take him on.

  Ava stirred in her sleep and Harry stroked her hair, murmuring to her that he was there, that everything was all right. Danny stared up at him with his big, smiley blue eyes – amazing how much expression could be stitched into cloth. He remembered how Guy had placed Danny and the other doll at the foot of Ava’s hospital bed and had stood silently beside him as Harry tried to explain that Ava might not recognise him any more. Guy had nodded. ‘That doesn’t matter. When she gets better we can explain who we are.’

  ‘We think this is the very best we can hope for, Mr Dunn,’ the consultant neurologist had said. The man had glanced at him, returned to the pages and pages of Ava’s medical notes. Harry waited, although he knew the consultant didn’t have anything else to say – really couldn’t be bothered any more now that there were no more operations to carry out, no more experiments he could try to shock his wife’s brain into behaving. At last the man looked up at him. ‘I’m sorry. Take your wife home, take care of her – there’s nothing more to be done.’

  And he had taken care of her – he had – to the very best of his ability, the very best way he knew how: he threw money at the problem. He had paid for the finest nursing home he could find. But Ava had deteriorated in the Home, despite its gardens and lawns and views of open countryside, despite its lovely public rooms that were full of the demented old. Whenever Guy was home he would insist on accompanying him on his weekly visits to the place, and on the way back his silence bore down on Harry like a Panzer division. He had wanted to ask Guy what he thought he should do, because didn’t he have to work every day to pay his school fees? He had to work, resolving other people’s problems with each other – how was he supposed to look after Ava? But Harry never said any of this, never tried to make excuses, only bore the terrible silence.

  Then one day the nursing home wrote to advise him that it was about to close; apparently there were more profitable uses for such a large amount of real estate. The closure had set him on the path that eventually led to Esther.

  Harry sighed. As he’d put Ava to bed he’d entertained the idea that he could possibly change Esther’s mind. But then he’d thought about how she’d told him she was too young for this job of caring so much and so relentlessly. The young needed to see progress and rewards; they needed something to aim for. And Harry had seen the way Esther looked at Guy, and soon Guy would be leaving and his unpredictable, rare visits home wouldn’t be enough to sustain the girl’s hopes.

  How easy it was to blame everything on Guy, Harry thought, and how perverse, when the boy was innocent of everything Harry wanted to find a scapegoat for.

  Getting up as quietly as he could, he laid the female rag doll down in his place and stood over Ava, ensuring that she slept on. He was tired; he thought that in the morning he would be able to think more clearly. For tonight he had no idea of what he would do or even how he would live, now that his life had hit the buffers with such dull predictability. Not that he had predicted any of it; he’d believed Esther would stay for ever, that Val would go on loving him so selflessly. Laughable, really, if he felt like laughing at all. He hadn’t realised he was capable of such self-deception. He had always thought rather better of himself.

  Leaning over his wife’s bed, he kissed her, catching the scent of the soap with which he’d washed her face. ‘I love you,’ he whispered, and it wasn’t a lie, not a true lie. He loved her in ways he couldn’t even explain to himself, ways that he was sure he could trace back to that rat-infested room in Berlin, when the memory of a beautiful, blond boy swinging on the end of the hangman’s rope was all too fresh in his mind.

  Chapter 27

  I shouldn’t have spoken to Val the way I did. Now she believes that I must hate Jack, for why else would I say the things I said? I have made a fool of myself; I suppose I feel the sting of this more than anything else.

  I couldn’t sleep and so went downstairs to work, although the same thoughts that kept me awake now kept me from concentrating on the job in hand. I thought of Val, of course, the look on her face after my outburst; I could see that she pitied me. And why shouldn’t she? After all, I seem to have so little; even my family must seem second-hand to her. And now she even knows how I spent my war. God alone knows what possessed me to tell her, except that sometimes I crave sympathy. Pathetic. In fact, I feel I am becoming more pathetic, the more time passes.

  Ironically, in the camps I was known as the one who always looked on the bright side; I geed everyone along. There I was with beriberi or dysentery or with ulcers on my legs the size of saucers, weak with exhaustion and hunger, encouraging the others! I suppose I felt I had so much to live for. Perhaps if I’d known about Carol and Jack, about Hope, things might have been different.

  Carol and Jack. I think their marriage was a happy one, as far as any outsider can tell. She bore her secret stoically until I came home and her desperation for another baby became too much. I remember they would touch a lot – yes, even in front of me – and they had pet names for each other. He called her Pudding because she became quite plump in the years before the twins were born.

  I remember how self-conscious she was about her body because it had changed so much from that of the young, virginal girl I’d known. She would undress in the dark, the not-quite dark because it was always afternoon and so a little sunlight sneaked through the gap in my bedroom curtains. I would still be able to see how pale her skin was, the blue-blood veins showing on her belly and thighs, see where her skin had stretched tight during her pregnancy only to shrink back, a little of its elasticity gone for ever, pock-marked as an orange. Her breasts were heavier and less dense, there was a softness to her so that when her body was released from the reinforced moulding and flattening of her matronly underwear, marks were left on her skin, red welts and indentations as though she had mortified her flesh. I think that, had I allowed it, she wouldn’t have undressed at all, only taken off her knickers and laid down, flat on her back, eyes closed tight as against some unpleasant gynaecological procedure.

  She guessed at the days when she would be most fertile and would tell me a few days in advance that I should expect her on that Tuesday or Friday or Wednesday afternoon; there was no way I could flatter myself that she desired me. She believed that I desired her though, that I was quite mad for that body
that Jack had pounded and pummelled night after night after night. She was right, but it wasn’t passion that fuelled my madness, only rage over what she had done to me – was doing to me. I fucked her and pretended I was making love because I could kiss her and suck at her and work my fingers and lips and tongue to make her come despite herself; I could feel her holding back, her dismayed shuddering before I tipped her over the edge moaning and yelping, a real adulteress at last. I would slip inside her so easily then; there was nothing to push against as there had been that first time. She was so slack, so wet; she would always have to wait far longer than she would have wished for my climax. Sometimes I just couldn’t reach those heights at all; my desire – my rage – would simply die, shrivelling me. I’m sure she thought I did this deliberately.

  When I was successful though, when my seed was safe inside her, she would lie on her back for a while, managing to imbue her stillness with such portentousness that once I asked her if she would like to raise her legs and hips, give the sperm a fighting chance against gravity. She made a face as though I had said something filthy, shifting even further away from me in case I should compound my vulgarity by brushing against her. She would lie still on her back and so would I, our nakedness exposed to the ceiling, my badly used cock flaccid and sticky against my thigh. I could smell the talcum powder she used to sanitise her genitals before she visited me, a sharp, flowery scent of Lily of the Valley mixed with my musky cum, so that the first thing I would do after she’d gone was open my bedroom window. I couldn’t wait for her to leave so that I might open my window and then go straight to the bathroom to bathe. But I would stay lying on my back on the bed until she got up because it seemed to me the most gentlemanly thing to do.