A Spell of Swallows

by Sarah Harrison

  I’m only cleaning the kit for something to do, whatever Jarvis says. The last thing I ever want to think about is where I lived as a kid—I couldn’t call it ‘home’, that woman my mother made sure it was never that. That said, I’ve got a lot to thank her for. She made me what I am today: devious, cunning, secretive. I get a lot of quiet pleasure from how much she’d hate my gratitude.

  People often say only children are spoiled. Well, I was an only child, and there are two meanings of the word ‘spoiled’: one of them is ‘overindulged’, and that’s not me, the other is ‘damaged’.

  I’m sure my parents only did it the once and that was enough for both of them. My father Gerald was nice but useless—it was my mother who ruled the roost. She was always a bully, cold and cruel. She had one of those sneering mouths, with lines that ran all the way from the corners of her nose down to her jaw like a wooden puppet. Her name was Audrey. Sounds like the creak of a prison door.

  She had never been a beauty, but in old photographs she looked thin and bright-eyed, and smart as paint. Even I remember she had a way with words, she used them like weapons, so perhaps she was an amusing, witty woman before she became bitter and disappointed, and that was what attracted my father.

  He wore a collar and tie to work but he was a dogsbody just the same, shat on by the bosses and despised by the workers, you could just tell. Before I started to despise him too, I felt sorry for him because he hadn’t always been a dull, weak-tea man. He could play the banjo, and sing, do a bit of soft-shoe. He was good-looking, with crinkly hair and dark eyes, but the day he married my mother her first job as a wife was to set about killing his spirit. I can just remember when there was a little bit of it left; days when he’d catch my eye and pull a face as much as to say ‘Hark at her!’ and for a moment we were two blokes together, under the thumb.

  But it wasn’t a joke, and he was dying right there in front of me. I used to wake in the night and hear them in their room—hear her, attacking him in a low, vicious whisper, hissing and spitting. Once or twice I heard him crying, and that was worse. That made me want to be sick. To hear my own father, a grown man, sobbing and choking and pleading. For what? For mercy? For sex, is what I think now. Why he didn’t walk out and get what he wanted somewhere else, I’ll never know, it’s easy enough. But the crying, on and on . . . That turned over my whole world, as well as my stomach.

  She won, of course. He seemed to shrink, and get paler. His crinkly hair got thin and his face sagged so that the bottom of his eyes showed a wet, red crescent. Even his lips and fingernails became bluish, like a corpse’s. He became of no consequence in the house, just going to work and coming back, a nothing, a ghost. I took my tone from my mother. What was I supposed to do, I was what, nine years old? At that age it’s like the Buddhoos, you’ll stick with whoever’s winning. For a while we held it there—him coming and going, us taking no notice, no respect and affection between any of us, but going through the motions. We were very respectable. I was doing well at school and she liked that. She used to taunt him with how different I was from him and little Judas that I was I let her do it, and never caught his eye any more.

  But she had to feed off something, and gradually, because there was nothing left of Gerald, she turned on me.

  ‘John,’ she said one day. ‘I want a word with you.’

  We were just finishing tea. Gerald was still eating his, but she got up.

  ‘Not here,’ she said.

  He was so defeated by then that he didn’t even look up from his plate as we left the room. Over the years I’ve kept that picture in my mind of him sitting there, gazing down at his lamb chop, chewing, swallowing, his Adam’s apple jerking, letting us go . . . I’ve kept it because it was the end of the beginning. From then on everything changed. He must have had some idea, but he was just a thing by then, or so I thought.

  What she hadn’t wanted from him, what she had spurned and spat at him for all those long, awful nights, she wanted from me. Or at least, she wanted to take it from me because I didn’t want to give it. Didn’t even know how. I hadn’t even had a wet dream yet, but she got hold of me and said it was time she taught me something. I was horrified. Shocked. To lose control like that is bad enough. But to be made to do it by her . . . I didn’t know where I was. No matter how horrible she was, or what she’d said or done to my father to make him blub like a child, she was my mother, the only one I had, and so I had to believe it was all right. Perhaps all mothers did it. It felt exciting but nasty at the same time, and she seemed to think so too—carried away, but immediately afterwards she’d be cold and cross and clean us both up roughly with a disgusted look on her face. But I couldn’t talk about it, so I had no way of knowing just how disgusting it was.

  The only certainty was that it was a secret. She told me there were some things it was wicked to tell other people, and this was one of them. That wasn’t a problem. As I say, who would I have told?

  It was always very quick, and very quiet. And always when my father was in the house, that must have been part of the thrill for her, knowing he was only a few feet away. Whether he had any idea, I don’t know. He’d got so uninterested, so detached from his surroundings, that he probably didn’t. Unless she told him—I wouldn’t have put it past her. The only time her mouth lost its sneer was when she was doing that to me. It got loose, so I could see her tongue and the spit on her teeth. Her cheekbones went pink.

  The minute I was respectable again she’d shoo me away. ‘Go on!’ she’d snap, sharp as a pair of scissors, her eyes all small and flinty, ‘Go on! Go and see what your father’s up to!’

  Till then I’d been doing all right at school, but my work soon went downhill. I’d never had a big gang of friends, but now I let go of the one or two I had. I felt tired, and guilty, and my body didn’t seem to belong to me, but became like something I dragged around and couldn’t escape from.

  With all this, you’d have thought I’d mature early, but I didn’t. Some instinct—fear probably—held me back. I was thirteen before I began to look at girls in a different way, and that was when I began to realise just how bad what I did with my mother was. What happened to me with her was what happened to me when I thought about girls. Only she was my mother. She was old (all of thirty-five), and rough and nasty. I was scared of her and disgusted with myself.

  One Sunday afternoon when I was fourteen, I was clearing away the dinner dishes with my father. My mother had left the room, but not asked me to go with her for once. My father and I didn’t talk much—not a lot of talking went on in our house in those days—except once, to pat me on the back and ask how I was getting on at school. I told him fine, which was a lie.

  ‘Got a girl?’

  I was appalled. I think I blushed; I didn’t want him thinking about these things. If he’d been wondering about that, then what else? I didn’t want to be in his head at all, ever.

  ‘No,’ I muttered, dead surly.

  ‘Never mind,’ he said. ‘Plenty of time for all that.’

  I didn’t answer, but he wouldn’t let it go. After years of silence he had what amounted to verbal diarrhoea.

  ‘If there’s anything you want to know, lad, you only have to ask.’

  A couple of years before it might have been possible. But now the idea was ghastly. It made my flesh creep.

  And then my mother called. ‘John! John—can you come up here a moment?’

  For once I didn’t mind. No price was too high to pay to get away from my father at that moment.

  But this time it was different. She was sitting on the edge of the bed, in her petticoat, and the covers were turned down.

  ‘Over here, John,’ she said. ‘Quickly now.’

  For another year, I did as I was told. I couldn’t look at a girl, and I truanted from school. I looked awful, I was beginning to look like my father: the walking dead. I was pale, I had spots, my hair was greasy and my eyes were fish-eyes, dull and flat. I had impetigo as well, the scurfy patches of peeli
ng skin painted with gentian violet to make them even more noticeable. I was a leper, a pariah—unclean, inside and out. God knows why my mother kept on with what she did. Perhaps the state of me gave her a perverse pleasure; after all, it was sort of punishment for being male.

  And then my father—I can’t say ‘dropped the bombshell’ because it was more like thistledown, or a little piece of paper that floated in through the window.

  I was walking back from school and to my horror he was standing on the corner of our road, waiting for me. I pretended I hadn’t seen him, but there was no escape. He raised his arm and crossed the road.

  ‘Hallo, son.’

  ‘What are you doing here?’ I said.

  ‘Came to meet you. There’s something I’ve been wanting to say and I thought, no time like the present.’

  I didn’t ask him what, I just kept walking. He was panting like an old dog trying to keep up.

  ‘Steady on, you’re too quick for me.’

  I stopped dead. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Come in the park, let’s sit down for a minute.’

  ‘The park’ as he called it was a gritty little garden with black iron railings and a cinder path. We went in and he sat down on a bench. He sat in the middle of it; I hovered, not wanting to be too close. I never wanted to be physically close to anyone, ever again.

  ‘Sit down, why don’t you,’ he said, patting the seat, and moving to one side a bit so there was more room.

  Gingerly, I sat down, pressed up against the arm at the opposite end.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he said, with a flash of his old, knowing spark, ‘this won’t take long.’

  ‘Go on then—what?’

  ‘But I want you to hear me out.’ When I didn’t reply he cocked his head to peer at me, ‘All right?’

  I shrugged.

  There was a grey squirrel scampering about on the balding patch of grass in front of us and he watched it as he spoke, following it closely with his eyes, as if what he had to say just had to be spat out and got over with, without too much fuss.

  ‘You don’t need to put up with anything you don’t like around the place. At home, I mean—you know that, don’t you, John?’ His use of my name, instead of the usual ‘son’ was a shock. It put the whole exchange on a different footing. I felt cold, and my stomach bubbled nervously.

  ‘Your mother,’ he went on. ‘It pains me to say it, but she’s not the woman I married. She’s changed, and not for the better. I’ve put up with a lot, over the years, as I’m sure you’re well aware. You’re a bright boy. The only reason I haven’t gone long ago is because of you. But you’re growing up, and I may not stay much longer.’ I wasn’t looking at him, but he must have known I’d be terrified, because I felt him glance my way. At least he had the sense—or the sensitivity—not to touch me.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he looked away again. ‘I won’t go till you do.’

  The squirrel darted up the wide trunk of a tree and stopped dead, spreadeagled, as if someone had pinned it there with an arrow. Stopped dead was how I felt.

  It wasn’t so much what he’d said, which wasn’t a lot after all, but what lay behind it. Was he really telling me that he’d known, all this time, what was going on? And more importantly that he knew it wasn’t something my mother and I got up to together, but that it was her fault? I’d always suspected that she might have told him, as part of the special torture she handed out to him, but she certainly wouldn’t have taken responsibility—it would have been me that was the dirty, unnatural little beast. But if he’d known that much, why hadn’t he stepped in, done something about it, behaved like the man of the house?

  ‘How did you know?’ I asked. I whispered it, and my head was turned away from him.

  ‘I know your mother.’

  That was all he said.

  I could have forgiven him, just, for being defeated and wretched, a nobody around the place. But for this—for knowing, all these years, and doing nothing—I knew I never could. My mother was wicked, sadistic; perhaps even a little mad. My father had no such excuse. He had decent instincts, was holding down a job, providing for us, paying the rent on the house where I was subjected to that, eating the food cooked by her hands, closing his mind and his conscience to my thousand private, sickening humiliations. Before today, I’d merely despised and discounted him as pathetic, a defeated man, but at least there was a part of me that identified with him; we had both suffered at her hands. Now, when he spoke to me so calmly of my not needing to ‘put up with anything’, of his leaving, but not until I did, I wanted to kill him! Not dispose of him cleanly but to tear at his flesh with my nails and teeth, to hear him scream! All those days when he had sat there at the dining table or in his chair in the front room, eating or reading, with meek, downcast eyes, and he had known. In my eyes at that moment he was as much her accomplice as if he’d been in the room with us.

  That was when I learned you couldn’t trust anyone. It’s lies, not love, that make the world go round, and you’re a lot safer acknowledging that and acting accordingly. No one says what they mean. And what they do isn’t what they think. No one’s feelings are clean, or straightforward. There are very few honestly good people, the ones who seem good are just better at concealment. Bigger liars, in other words.

  I got up and left my father in the park, and I never saw him again. I called his bluff; he was free to go then, but I don’t know if he did and I don’t care. I went straight home, and luckily my mother was out at the shops. I went to my room, put some things in a pillowcase and set off up the road, like Dick Whittington.

  I only slept rough for a week. Every day I went to the Gents in Holborn and washed and made myself respectable. Then I got a job as an office boy on a little newspaper in the East End, the Bethnal Green Bugle, and a room—cupboard, really—with the man in charge of the personal ads, Mr Hawkins. ‘Call me Philip’. He was bent as a butcher’s hook, but kind. Never took advantage, but liked to give the impression to his friends that we might be together, as you might say. Lies again. We understood each other.

  I was good at the job—I was even offered a promotion, thanks to Hawkins, as a clerk in the ads department. But I needed to move on. The moment I felt people were beginning to know me, I had this urge to get out. When Hawkins implied that maybe I should be a little bit grateful, I was gone.

  And that’s how it was with me, for years, till I went in the army. I never had any trouble finding work, I could always parlay my way into a job, and do it pretty well, too. Wherever I was, I kept my eyes wide open and my mouth shut, and didn’t mix. The first sign of someone getting chummy and you couldn’t see me for dust.

  I learned a lot, though, as you do if you’re not wasting energy on other people. In a restaurant, I picked up a few basic techniques. You don’t need to learn the recipe for lobster thermidor, you need to know how to make a sauce. I worked as a bootboy in a big house off Piccadilly and the chauffeur showed me how to drive (the first time I sat behind the wheel of a vehicle I’d never actually driven one of the things in my life, but I winged it). I watched the people I worked for, and saw how it was done. You don’t have to be quality to act it. That’s why I taught myself to speak properly.

  I joined the army at the start of the war, and it suited me down to the ground. A big institution’s a great place for a loner. When the show started I was in my element. All bets were off. The world had gone mad, and I was the only sane person in it.

  And now it’s the night before Ctesiphon. I’ve done Jarvis’s kit and I’m throwing dice for a chicken. I’m going to win.

  Half an hour later the scrawny bird’s skewered on a stick over a fire and I’m the bee’s knees.

  ‘Ashe,’ says Jarvis, ‘that smells ambrosian. You’ll make some woman a wonderful husband.’

  ‘Maybe sir,’ I say, ‘but I wouldn’t marry any woman who’d have me.’

  He roars. Probably thinks I can walk on water, but for now the chicken will do.

  Chapter Six<
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  Saxon, standing in the drawing room window at five to six, saw John Ashe walk up the drive and take up a position next to the car. He stood with his hands in his pockets, gazing back the way he’d come, presenting his damaged profile to Saxon, who frowned with distaste. Thankfully his wife, during the course of her lesson, would be in the driving seat, and therefore not exposed to the dreadful spectacle.

  He heard her quick footsteps in the hall, and a moment later she appeared in the drawing room doorway. She was respectably dressed, thank God, in a jacket and skirt, but had spoiled the effect somewhat by wearing what he thought of as her errand-boy cap, tied on with a scarf.

  ‘There you are,’ she said. ‘We’ll be off in a minute.’

  Saxon turned back to the window. ‘He’s out there now.’

  ‘Then I must dash!’

  ‘No need for that,’ said Saxon testily. ‘He’s only just arrived. Anyway, I shall come out with you and see you off.’

  ‘Thank you!’ Impulsively she flew to his side and kissed his check. He felt he had been thrown a sop.

  Outside, Saxon deliberately slowed his pace; it was a kind of experiment, to see whether Vivien would remain at his side, or be unable to prevent herself from rushing enthusiastically forward.

  To his great satisfaction, she stayed with him, even putting her hand in the crook of his arm, though he suspected the gesture might be in the nature of a self-imposed restraint. It would have been too much to expect her not to call out, and of course she did so.

  ‘Mr Ashe! Good evening!’

  He took his hands from his pockets. ‘Good evening, Mrs Mariner. Reverend.’

  ‘Good evening.’

  ‘I’m glad to have seen you, Mr Mariner. I was in two minds whether to knock on your door.’

  Saxon felt himself slightly on the back foot. From where he’d been standing two minutes ago, Ashe had certainly not looked like a man in two minds.