He didn’t eat much. Besides being wary of conjuring another belch, he felt though someone who knew more about him than he realized was observing him. When he took the last of his plates into the kitchen, Carol gave him a harassed disappointed blink. “Dinner was excellent,” he assured her, though it had been something of a repeat performance of last night’s, with cold beef understudying ham. “I’m just not very peckish. I expect I’m too excited at the prospect of a date with my favorite young lady.”
“Do you still want to go out with my uncle tonight?”
Helen had kept her back to his comment, but turned with a quick bright smile. “Yes please, Uncle Lionel.”
That was more like the girl he remembered. It lasted as far as the street, where he said “Shall we just go for an amble?”
“To the rides.”
“Best save those till I’ve been to the bank.”
“I’ve got some money. If we aren’t going to the rides I don’t want to go.”
He felt as if she knew he’d manufactured his excuse. “It’s your treat,” he said.
All the way along the promenade he had to remind himself that the screams from the tracks etched high on the glassy sunset expressed pleasure. The sight beyond the entrance to the amusement park of painted horses bobbing like flotsam on an ebb tide provided some relief. He halted by the old roundabout to regain his breath. “Shall we,” he said, and “go on here?”
Helen squashed her lower lip flat with its twin. “That’s for babies.”
He might have retorted that she hadn’t seemed to think so last year, but said “What shall it be, then?”
“The Cannonball.”
“I thought you didn’t care for roller coasters any more than I do.”
“That was when I was little. I like it now, and the Plunge of Peril, and Annihilation.”
“Will you be awfully offended if I watch?”
“No.” The starkness of the word appeared to rouse her pity for him, since she added “You can win me something, Uncle Lionel.”
He felt obliged to see her safely onto the roller coaster. Once she was installed in the middle carriage, next to a boy with an increasingly red face and the barest vestige of hair, Lionel headed for the sideshows. Too many of the prizes were composed of puffed-up rubber for his taste—he remembered a pink horse whose midriff had burst between his adolescent legs, dumping him in the sea—but they were out of reach of his skill. He had yet to ring a single bell or cast a quoit onto a hook when Helen indicated she was bound for the Plunge of Peril.
He was determined to win her a present. Eventually rolling several pounds’ worth of balls down a chute towards holes intermittently exposed by a perforated strip of wood gained him an owl of shaggy orange cloth. He would have felt more triumphant if he hadn’t realized he’d betrayed that he wouldn’t have needed to go to the bank. He was just in time to see Helen leave the Plunge of Peril
She glanced about but didn’t notice him behind a bunch of teddy bears pegged by their cauliflower ears. As he watched through the tangle of legs she shared a swift kiss with her companion, the red-faced boy crowned with grey skin, and tugged him in the direction of a virtually vertical roller coaster. Lionel didn’t intervene., not even when they staggered off the ride, though he was unsure whether he was being discreet or spying on them or at a loss how to approach them. He was pursuing them through the crowds when their way was blocked by two figures with the night gaping where their faces ought to be.
They were life-size cartoons of a man and a woman sufficiently ill-dressed to be homeless, painted on a flat with their faces cut out for the public to insert their own. Lionel saw Helen scamper to poke hers out above the woman’s body. Her grimace was meant to be funny—she was protruding at the boy the tongue she’d recently shared with him—but Lionel realized that too late to keep quiet. “Don’t,” he cried.
For a moment Helen’s face looked trapped by the oval. Perhaps her eyes were lolling leftward to send the boy that way, since that was the direction in which he absented himself. She emerged so innocently it angered Lionel. “I think it’s time we went back to your mother,” he said, and thrust the owl at Helen as she mooched after him. “This was for you.”
“Thanks.” On the promenade she lowered a mournful gaze to the dwarfish button-eyed rag-beaked soft-clawed orange lump, and then she risked saying, “Are you going to tell Mum?”
“Can you offer me any reason why I shouldn’t?”
“Because she’d never let me see Brandon again.”
“I thought that was already supposed to be the arrangement.”
“But I love him,” Helen protested, and began to weep.
“Good heavens now, no need for that. You can’t be in love at your age.” The trouble was that he had no idea when it was meant to start; it never had for him. “Do stop it, there’s a good girl,” he pleaded as couples bound for the amusement park began to frown more at him than Helen, and applied himself to taking some control. “I really don’t like being used when I haven’t even been consulted.”
“I won’t ever again, I promise.”
“I’ll hold you to it. Now can we make that the end of the tears? I shouldn’t think you’d like your mother wondering what the tragedy is.”
“I’ll stop if you promise not to tell.”
“We’ll see.”
He was ashamed to recognize that he might have undertaken more if she hadn’t dabbed her eyes dry with the owl, leaving a wet patch suggesting that the bird had disgraced itself; should Carol learn of Helen’s subterfuge she would also know he’d neglected to supervise her. Carol proved to be so intent on her business accounts that she simply transferred her glance of surprise from the clock to him. “I’ve a job for you as long as you’re here,” she told Helen, and Lionel took his sudden weariness to his room.
As he fumbled for the light switch he heard a scream. It sounded muffled., presumably by glass—by the window. He couldn’t tell whether it signified delight or dismay or a confusion of both, but he would have preferred not to be greeted by it. A memory was waiting to claim him once he huddled under the quilt in the dark.
Yet had he done anything so dreadful? Days after the incident at the Imperial, her mother had taken him and Dorothy to the amusement park. On the Ghost Train his cousin had sat as far from him as the bench would allow, though when the skull-faced car had blundered into the daylight they’d pretended to be chums for her mother’s camera. For her benefit they’d lent their faces to the painted couple, ancestors of the pair behind which Helen had posed. Lionel had been growing impatient with the pretense and with Dorothy’s covert hostility when he’d seen all six dwarfs, dapper in suits and disproportionately generous ties, strutting towards them.
He must have been too young to imagine how she might feel, otherwise he would surely have restrained himself. He’d grabbed her shoulders, wedging her head in the oval. “Look, Dorothy,” he’d whispered hotly in her ear, “they’re coming for you.” In what had seemed to him mere seconds he’d released her, though not before her struggles had caused her dress to ride up, exposing more of her thighs than he’d glimpsed in her room. As she’d dashed into the darkness behind the cartoon he’d heard her mother calling “Where’s Lionel? Where are you going, Dorothy? What’s up now?”
In time nothing much was, Lionel reassured himself: otherwise Dorothy wouldn’t have invited him to spend summers at the boarding-house after she’d inherited it. Or was it quite so straight-forward? He’d always thought that, having forgotten their contentious summer, she had both taken pity on his solitariness and looked to him for company once Carol had married and Dorothy’s husband had succumbed to an early heart attack, but now it occurred to him that she had kept him away from her daughter. He withdrew beneath the covers as if they could hide him from his undefined guilt, and eventually sleep joined him.
He thought walking by the sea might clear his head of whatever was troubling him. There was just one family on the beach. He assumed they were quite dista
nt until he noticed the parents were dwarfs and the children pocket versions of them. They must work in a circus, for all of their faces were painted with grins wider than their mouths, even the face of the baby that was knocking down sandcastles as it crawled about. Lionel had to toil closer., dragging his inflated toy, before he understood that the family was laughing at him. When he followed their gazes he found he was clutching by one breast the life-size naked rubber woman he’d brought to the beach.
He writhed himself awake, feeling that his mind had only started to reveal its depths. As he tried to rediscover sleep he heard a scratching at the window. It must be a bird, though it sounded like fingernails on glass, not even in that part of the room. When it wasn’t repeated he managed to find his way back to sleep.
He felt he hadn’t by breakfast time. Being glanced at by more people than bade him good morning left him with the impression that he looked guilty of his dream. There wasn’t much more of a welcome in the kitchen, where a disagreement had evidently occurred. When Carol met his eyes while Helen didn’t, he said “She’ll be all right for this evening, won’t she?”
“Quite a few things aren’t all right. I’m afraid. Torn serviettes, for a start, and tablecloths not clean that should be.” She was aiming her voice upwards as if to have it fall more heavily on Helen. “We’ve standards to keep up,” she said.
“I think they’re as high as your mother’s ever were, so don’t drive yourself so hard. You deserve a night or two off. Is the show at the Imperial your kind of diversion?”
“More like my idea of hell.”
“Then you won’t be jealous if I take Helen tonight? I’ve got tickets.”
“You might have said sooner.”
“You were busy.”
“Exactly.”
“I think you could both benefit from taking it easier. You and your mother managed., didn’t you?”
Carol unloaded a tray into the sink with a furious clatter and twisted to face him. “You’ve no idea what she was like when you weren’t here. Used me harder than this one ever is, and my dad as well, poor little man. No wonder he had a heart attack.”
Lionel had forgotten how diminutive Dorothy’s husband had been, and hadn’t time to brood about it now. “Let me hold the fort while you two have an evening out,” he said.
“Thanks for the offer, but this place is our responsibility. Make that mine.” Carol sighed at this or as a preamble to muttering “Take her as long as you’ve bought tickets. As you say, I’ll just have to manage.”
He thought it best to respond to that with no more than a sympathetic grimace and to keep clear of her and Helen for a while. He stayed in his room no longer than was necessary to determine he had nothing to wear that would establish a holiday mood. He bought a defiantly luxuriant shirt from a shop in a narrow back street to which the town seemed reluctant to own up, and wandered with the package to the park, where he found a bench well away from the bandstand in case any of the musicians identified him as yesterday’s eructating spectator. The eventual concert repeated its predecessor, which might have allowed him to catch up on his sleep if he hadn’t been nervous of dreaming—of learning what his mind required unconsciousness to acknowledge it contained.
It was close to dinnertime when he ventured back to his room. Rather than examine his appearance, he left the mirror with its back to him. His new shirt raised eyebrows and lowered voices in the dining room. At least Carol said “You’re looking bright.” which would have heartened him more if she hadn’t rebuked Helen: “I hope you’ll be dressing for the occasion as well.”
Perhaps Helen had changed her black T-shirt and denim overalls and chubby shoes when he found her waiting on the pavement outside; he couldn’t judge. He told her she looked a picture, and thought she was responding when she mumbled “Uncle Lionel?”
“At your service.”
She peered sideways at him. “Will you be sad if I don’t come with you?”
“I would indeed.”
“I told Brandon last night I’d meet him. I wouldn’t have if you’d said you’d got tickets.”
“But you’ve known all day.”
“I couldn’t call him. Mum might have heard.”
“You mustn’t expect me to keep covering up for you.” Lionel supposed he sounded unreasonable, having previously complained of not being let into the secret. “Very well, just this once,” he said to forestall the moisture that had gathered in her eyes. “You two go and I’ll meet you at the end of the performance.”
“No, you. You like it.”
It was clear she no longer did. “Where will you be?” he said, and immediately “Never mind. I don’t want to know. Just make certain you’re waiting at the end.”
“I will.”
She might have kissed him, but instead ran across the promenade to her boyfriend. Lionel watched them clasp hands and hurry down a ramp to the beach. He stayed on the far side of the road so as not to glimpse them as he made for the Imperial.
The stout girl in the booth seemed even more suspicious of his returning a ticket than she had been of the purchase. At last she allowed him to leave it in case it could be resold. In the auditorium he had to sidle past a family with three daughters, loud in inverse proportion to their size. He was flattening a hand beside his cheek to ward off some of the clamor of his neighbor, the youngest, when someone tapped him on the shoulder. Seated behind him were two of Carol’s guests: a woman with a small face drawn tight and pale by her sharp nose, her husband whose droopy empurpled features had yet more skin to spare underneath. “Will you be stopping this show too?” the woman said.
Could she have seen Dorothy chased by the dwarfs? “I don’t,” Lionel said warily, “ah…”
“We saw you at the concert yesterday.”
“Heard me. you mean.” When that fell short of earning him even a hint of a grin, Lionel said “I expect I’ll be able to contain myself.”
The man jabbed a stubby finger at the empty seat. “On your own?”
“Like yourselves.”
“Our granddaughter’s one of Miss Merritt’s Moppets.”
His tone was more accusing than Lionel cared to understand. “Good luck to her,” he said, indifferent to whether he sounded sarcastic., and turned his back.
As the curtains parted, the child beside him turned her volume up. He put the empty seat between them, only to hear the sharp-nosed woman cough with displeasure and change seats with her husband. Before long Lionel’s head began to ache with trying not to wonder how Helen and her boyfriend were behaving, and he couldn’t enjoy the show. He squirmed in his seat as the moppets in their white tutus pranced onstage. At least they weren’t dwarfs, he thought and squirmed again, growing red-faced as another cough was aimed at him.
He had no wish to face the couple at the end of the show. He remained seated until he realized they might see Helen outside and mention it to Carol. He struggled up the packed aisle and succeeded in leaving the theater before they did. Helen was waiting on the chipped marble steps. She half turned, and he saw she was in tears. “Oh dear,” he murmured, “what now?”
“We had a fight.”
“An argument, I trust you mean.” When she nodded or her head slumped, he said “I’m sure it’ll turn out to be just a hiccup.” She only turned away, leaving him to whisper “Shall we hurry home? We don’t want anybody knowing you were meant to be with me.”
They were opposite the ramp down which she’d vanished with her boyfriend when she began to sob. Lionel urged her over to the far corner of her street while Carol’s guests passed by. Once they’d had ample time to reach their room and Helen’s sobs had faltered into silence he said “Will you be up to going in now, do you think?”
“I’ll have to be, won’t I?”
Her maturity both impressed and disconcerted him. Each of them pulled out a key, and he would have made a joke of it if he’d been sure she would respond. He let her open the front door and followed her in, only to flinch from bumpi
ng into her. Carol and the couple from the theater were talking in the hall.
They fell silent and gazed at the newcomers. As Lionel struggled to decide whether he should hurry upstairs or think of a comment it would be crucial for him to make, the sharp-nosed woman said “I see you found yourself a young companion after all.”
Her husband cleared his throat. Presumably he thought it helpful to tell Carol “My wife means he was on his own at the show.”
Carol stared at Helen and then shifted her disapproval to Lionel. Her face grew blank before she told them “I think you should both go to bed. I’ll have plenty to say in the morning.”
“Mummy…”
“Don’t,” Carol said, even more harshly when Lionel tried to intervene.
“I think we’d better do as we’re told,” he advised Helen, and trudged upstairs ahead of her. Just now his room offered more asylum than anywhere else in the house., and he attempted to hide in his bed and the dark. His guilt was lying in wait for him—his realization that rather than make up for anything he might have done to Dorothy, he’d let down both Carol and Helen. He heard Helen shut her door with a dull suppressed thud and listened apprehensively for her mother’s footfall on the stairs. He’d heard nothing further when exhaustion allowed sleep to overtake him.
A muffled cry roused him. Heat and darkness made him feel afloat in a stagnant bath. As he strained his ears for a repetition of the cry he was afraid that it might have been Helen’s—that he’d caused her mother to mistreat her in some way he winced from imagining. When he heard another sound he had to raise his shaky head before he could identify it. Some object was bumping rhythmically against glass.
He kicked off the quilt and stumbled to drag the curtains apart. There was nothing at the window, nothing to be seen through it except guest-houses slumbering beyond a streetlamp. He hauled the sash all the way up and leaned across the sill, but the street was deserted. He was peering along it when the muffled thumping recommenced behind him.
As he stalked towards it he refused to believe where it was coming from. He took hold of the mirror by its bunch of wrists, which not only felt unhealthily warm but also seemed to be vibrating slightly in time with the sound. He gripped them with both hands and turned the glass towards him. It was full of Dorothy’s outraged face, glaring straight at him.
The Collected Short Fiction Page 139
