Wild Mountain Thyme

by Rosamunde Pilcher

4

  FRIDAY

  Oliver was on the sofa, holding the child standing up on his knees. As Victoria came up the stairs the first thing she saw was the back of Oliver’s head and the round, red, tear-drenched face of his son. He, surprised by her sudden appearance, stopped crying for an instant, and then, realizing that it was no person he knew, at once started up again.

  Oliver jigged him hopefully up and down, but it did no good. Victoria dropped her bag and came around to stand in front of them, unbuttoning her coat.

  “How long has he been awake?”

  “About ten minutes.” The child roared furiously, and Oliver had to raise his voice in order to make his voice heard.

  “What’s wrong with him?”

  “I imagine he’s hungry.” He got to his feet, heaving his burden with him. The little boy wore dungarees and a wrinkled white sweater. His hair was copper-gold, the curls at the nape of his neck tangled and damp. The only information Victoria had managed to elicit from Oliver before she had left for the Fairburns’ was that the child was his son, and with that she had had to be content. She had left them together, the baby sound asleep on the sofa and Oliver peacefully downing his whisky and water.

  But now … She gazed with sinking apprehension. She knew nothing about babies. She had scarcely held a baby in her life. What did they eat? What did they want when they wept so heartbreakingly?

  She said, “What’s he called?”

  “Tom.” Oliver jigged him again, tried to turn him around in his arms. “Hey, Tom. Say hello to Victoria.”

  Tom took another look at Victoria and then let them know, lustily, what he thought of her. She took off her coat and dropped it onto a chair. “How old is he?”

  “Two.”

  “If he’s hungry, we should give him something to eat.”

  “That makes sense.”

  He was being no use at all. Victoria left him and went into the kitchen to search for suitable food for a baby. She stared into the cupboard at racks of spices, Marmite, flour, mustard, lentils, stock cubes.

  What was he doing, back in her flat, back in her life, after three years of silence? What was he doing with the child? Where was its mother?

  Jam, sugar, porridge oats. A packet brought, the last time she had been in London, by Victoria’s mother, for the purpose of making some special sort of biscuit.

  “Will he eat porridge?” she called.

  Oliver did not reply, because over the yells of his son he did not hear the question; so Victoria went to the open door and repeated it.

  “Yes, I suppose so. I suppose he’ll eat anything, really.”

  Feeling near exasperation, she went back to the kitchen, put on a pan of water, poured in some oats, found a bowl, a spoon, a jug of milk. When it had started to cook, she turned down the heat and went back into the sitting room and saw that already it had been taken over by Oliver, it was no longer hers. It was filled with Oliver, with his possessions, his empty glass, his cigarette stubs, his child. The child’s coat lay on the floor, the sofa cushions were crushed and flattened, the air rang with the little boy’s misery and frustration.

  She could bear it no longer. “Here,” she said and took Thomas firmly in her arms. Tears poured down his cheeks. She said to Oliver, “You make sure the porridge doesn’t burn,” and she bore Tom into the bathroom and set him down on the floor.

  Steeling herself to cope with steaming nappies, she unbuttoned his dungarees and found that he wasn’t wearing nappies at all, and was, miraculously, dry. There was, obviously, no pot in this childless establishment, but with a certain amount of contriving she persuaded him to use the grown-up lavatory. For some reason this mild accomplishment stopped his tears. She said, “What a good boy,” and he looked up at her, still tear-drenched, and disarmed her with a sudden grin. Then he found her sponge and began to chew it, and she was so thankful that he had stopped crying that she let him. She buttoned up his clothes and washed his face and hands. Then she led him back into the kitchen.

  “He’s been to the loo,” she told Oliver.

  Oliver had poured himself another whisky, thus finishing Victoria’s bottle. He had his glass in one hand and a wooden spoon in the other, with which he stirred the porridge. He said, “I think this sort of looks ready.”

  It was. Victoria put some into a bowl, poured milk over it, sat at the kitchen table with Tom on her knee, and let him get on with it, which he did. After the first mouthful, she hastily reached for a tea towel and wrapped it around his neck. In a moment the bowl was empty and Thomas apparently ready for more.

  Oliver eased himself away from the cooker. “I’m going out for a moment.”

  Victoria was filled with alarm, and suspicions that if he went he would never come back and she would be left with the child. She said, “You can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “You can’t leave me alone with him. He doesn’t know who I am.”

  “He doesn’t know who I am either, but he seems quite happy. Eating himself to a standstill.” He laid the palms of his hands flat on the table and stooped to kiss her. It was three years since this had happened, but the aftereffects were alarmingly familiar. A melting sensation, a sudden sinking of the stomach. Sitting there with his child heavy on her knee, she thought, oh, no. “I shall be gone about five minutes. I want to buy cigarettes and a bottle of wine.”

  “You’ll come back?”

  “How suspicious you are. Yes, I’ll come back. You’re not going to get rid of me as easily as that.”

  He was, in fact, away for fifteen minutes. By the time he returned, the sitting room was once more neat, cushions plumped up, coats put away, the ashtrays emptied. He found Victoria at the kitchen sink, wearing an apron and washing a lettuce. “Where’s Thomas?”

  She did not turn around. “I put him into my bed. He isn’t crying. I think he’ll go to sleep again.”

  Oliver decided that the back of her head looked implacable. He put down the brown grocery bag containing the bottles and went to turn her to face him.

  “Are you angry?” he asked.

  “No. Just wary.”

  “I can explain.”

  “You’ll have to.” She turned back to the sink and the lettuce.

  He said, “I’m not explaining if you won’t listen properly. Leave that and come and sit down.”

  “I thought you wanted to eat. It’s getting terribly late.”

  “It doesn’t matter what time it is. We’ve all the time in the world. Come on. Come and sit down.”

  He had brought wine and another bottle of whisky. While Victoria untied her apron and hung it up, he found ice cubes and poured two drinks. She had gone back to the sitting room, and he joined her there and found her settled on a low stool with her back to the fire. She did not smile at him. He handed her the glass and raised his own.

  “Reunions?” he suggested as a toast.

  “All right.” Reunions sounded harmless enough. The glass was cold to her fingers. She took a mouthful and felt better. More able to deal with what he was about to tell her.

  Oliver sat on the edge of the sofa and faced her. There were artistic patches in the knees of his jeans, and his suede boots were worn and stained. Victoria found herself wondering on what he chose to spend the fruits of his considerable success. Whisky, perhaps. Or a house in a more salubrious part of London than the Fulham back street where he had lived before. She thought of the big Volvo parked in the Mews outside. She saw the gold watch on his long, narrow wrist.

  He said again, “We have to talk.”

  “You talk.”

  “I thought you’d be married.”

  “You said that before. When I opened the door.”

  “But you’re not.”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I never met anybody I wanted to marry. Or perhaps I never met anybody who wanted to marry me.”

  “Did you go on with your painting?”

  “No, I threw that up after a year. I
wasn’t good enough. I had a little talent, but not enough. There’s nothing more discouraging than having just a little talent.”

  “So what do you do now?”

  “I have a job. In a dress shop in Beauchamp Place.”

  “That doesn’t sound very demanding.”

  She shrugged. “It’s all right.” They were not meant to be talking about Victoria, they were meant to be talking about Oliver. “Oliver…”

  But he did not want her questions, perhaps because he had not yet made up his mind what the answers would be. He quickly interrupted her. “How was the party?”

  She knew that this was a red herring. She looked at him, and he met her gaze with watchful innocence. She thought, what does it matter? Like he says, we have all the time in the world. Sooner or later he’s going to have to tell me. She said, “The usual. Lots of people. Lots of drink. Everybody talking and nobody saying anything.”

  “Who brought you home?”

  She was surprised that he was sufficiently interested to want to know this, and then remembered that Oliver had always been interested in people, whether he knew them or not; whether he even liked them. He would sit in buses and listen to other people’s conversations. He would talk to strangers in bars, to waiters in restaurants. Everything that happened to him was filed away in the retentive storehouse of his memory, mulled over and digested, only to reappear at some later date in something he was writing, a scrap of dialogue or a situation.

  She said, “An American.”

  He was instantly intrigued. “What sort of an American?”

  “Just an American.”

  “I mean bald-headed, middle-aged, hung about with cameras? Earnest? Sincere? Come along now, you must have noticed.”

  Of course Victoria had noticed. He had been tall, not as tall as Oliver, but more heavily built, with wide shoulders and a flat stomach. He looked as though he played furious squash in his spare time, or jogged round the park in the early mornings, wearing sneakers and a track suit. She remembered dark eyes, and hair almost black. Crisp, wiry hair, the sort that has to be closely cut or it gets out of hand. His had been expertly barbered, probably by Mr. Trumper or one of the more exclusive London establishments, so that it lay on his well-shaped head like a smooth pelt.

  She remembered the strong features, the tan, and the marvelous white American teeth. Why did Americans all seem to have such beautiful teeth?

  She said, “No, he wasn’t any of those things.”

  “What was his name?”

  “John. John something. I don’t think Mrs. Fairburn’s very good at introductions.”

  “You mean he didn’t tell you himself? He can’t have been a true-blooded American. Americans always tell you who they are and what they do, before you’ve even decided whether you want to meet them or not. ‘Hi!’” He put on a perfect New York accent. “‘John Hackenbacker, Consolidated Aloominum. Glad to have you know me.’”

  Victoria found herself smiling, and this made her feel ashamed, as though she must stand up for the young man who had brought her home in his sleek Alfa-Romeo. “He wasn’t a bit like that. And he’s flying to Bahrain tomorrow,” she added as though this were a point in the American’s favor.

  “Ah! An oil man.”

  She was becoming tired of his teasing. “Oliver, I have no idea.”

  “You seem to have made remarkably little contact. What the hell did you talk about?” An idea occurred to him, and he grinned. “I know, you talked about me.”

  “I most certainly didn’t talk about you. But I think it’s about time you started talking about you. And about Thomas.”

  “What about Tom?”

  “Oh, Oliver, don’t fence.”

  He laughed at her exasperation. “I’m not being kind, am I? And you’re simply bursting to know. All right, here it is. I’ve stolen him.”

  It was so much worse than she had imagined that Victoria had to take a long, deep breath. When that was safely over, she was calm enough to ask, “Who did you steal him from?”

  “Mrs. Archer. Jeannette’s mother. My erstwhile mother-in-law. You probably didn’t know, but Jeannette was killed in an air crash in Yugoslavia, just a little while after Tom was born. Her parents have looked after him ever since.”

  “Did you go and see him?”

  “No. Never went near him. Never set eyes on him. Today was the first time I ever saw him.”

  “And what happened today?”

  He had finished his drink. He got up and went into the kitchen to pour himself another. She heard the clink of the bottle, the ice going into the glass, the tap being turned on and off. Then he returned and resumed his seat, leaning back on the deep cushions of the sofa, with his long legs stretched out in front of him.

  “I’ve been in Bristol all week. I’ve got a play coming off at the Fortune Theatre, it’s in rehearsal now, but I had to do some work with the producer, rewrite some of the third act. Driving back to London this morning, I was thinking about the play. I wasn’t really paying attention to the road, and suddenly I realized I was on the A.30, and there was a signpost to Woodbridge, and that’s where the Archers live. And I thought, why not? And I turned the car and went to call. As simple as that. A whim, you might way. The hand of fate stretching out its grubby paw.”

  “Did you see Mrs. Archer?”

  “No. Mrs. Archer was in London, buying sheets at Harrods or something. But there was a choice au pair girl called Helga who needed little encouragement to invite me in for lunch.”

  “Did she know you were Tom’s father?”

  “No.”

  “So what happened?”

  “She sat me down at the kitchen table and went upstairs to fetch Tom. And then we had lunch. Good healthy fare. Everything was good and healthy, and so clean it looked as though it had been through a sterilizer. The whole house is one enormous sterilizer. There isn’t a dog or a cat or a readable book in the place. The chairs look as though no one ever sat in them. The garden’s full of horrible flower beds, like a cemetery, and the paths look as if they’ve been drawn with a ruler. I’d forgotten its utter soullessness.”

  “But it’s Tom’s home.”

  “It stifled me. It’s going to stifle him. He had a picture book with his name written in the front. ‘Thomas Archer. From Granny.’ And somehow that finished me, because he’s not Thomas Archer, he’s Thomas Dodds. So then the girl went to get his beastly perambulator, to take him out for a walk, and I picked him up and carried him out of the house and put him in the car and drove him away.”

  “But didn’t Thomas mind?”

  “He didn’t seem to. Seemed quite pleased, in fact. We stopped off somewhere and spent the afternoon in a little park. He played on the swings and in the sandpit, and a dog came up and talked to him. And then it began to rain, so I bought him some biscuits and we got back into the car again and came back to London. I took him to my flat.”

  “I don’t know where your flat is.”

  “Still in Fulham. Same place. You’ve never been there I know, but you see, it isn’t really a living place, it’s a working place. It’s a basement and grotty as hell, and I have an arrangement with a large West Indian lady who lives on the first floor, and she’s meant to come and clean it up once a week, but it never seems to look any better. Anyway, I took Tom there, and he obligingly fell asleep on my bed, and then I rang the Archers.”

  He came out quite casually with this. Moral cowardice was something from which Oliver had never suffered, but Victoria felt quite weak at the thought.

  “Oh, Oliver.”

  “No reason why I shouldn’t. After all, he’s my child.”

  “But she must have been out of her mind with worry.”

  “I told the au pair girl my name. Mrs. Archer knew he was with me.”

  “But…”

  “You know something? You sound the way Jeannette’s mother sounded. As though I had nothing but evil intentions. As though I were going to harm the child, bash his brains out on a b
rick wall, or something.”

  “I don’t think that at all. It’s just that I can’t help but be sorry for her.”

  “Well don’t be.”

  “She’ll want him back.”

  “Yes, of course she wants him back, but I’ve told her that for the time being I’m keeping him myself.”

  “Can you do that? Legally, I mean? Won’t she get the police, or lawyers, or even high court judges?”

  “She’s threatened all those things. Litigation, ward of court, in the space of ten minutes she threw everything at my head. But you see, she can’t do anything. Nobody can do anything. He’s my child. I’m his father. I’m neither a criminal nor otherwise unfit to take care of him.”

  “But that’s just the point. You can’t take care of him.”

  “All that’s required of me is to provide a home for Tom with resources and facilities for taking care of him.”

  “In a basement in Fulham?”

  There was a long silence while Oliver, with slow deliberation, stubbed out his cigarette. “That,” he told her at last, “is why I am here.”

  So, it was out. The cards were on the table. This was why he had come to her.

  She said, “At least you’re being honest.”

  Oliver looked indignant. “I’m always honest.”

  “You want me to look after Tom?”

  “We can look after him together. You wouldn’t want me to take him back to that moldy flat, would you?”

  “I can’t look after him.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’m working. I have a job. There isn’t any room for a child here.”

  He said, in a false voice, “And what would the neighbors say?”

  “It’s nothing to do with the neighbors.”

  “You can tell them I’m your cousin from Australia. You can say that Tom is my aborigine offspring.”

  “Oh, Oliver, stop joking. This is nothing to joke about. You’ve stolen that child of yours. Why he isn’t howling his head off with misery and fright is beyond my comprehension. Mrs. Archer is obviously distraught, we’re going to have the police on the doorstep at any moment, and all you do is make what you think are funny remarks.”

  His face closed up. “If you feel like that about it, I’ll take the child and go.”