Fairness

by Ferdinand Mount

  ‘Oh yes.’ We came downstairs into the hall where a bulbous candelabrum of Murano glass gave a dim light.

  ‘You mind me asking, but have you got some kind of thing about dolls and stuff?’

  ‘What? Oh yes.’ The light shone upon the diver’s little imitationbrass helmet.

  ‘Because yesterday you had that goblin, and today –’

  ‘It’s Brainerd’s.’

  ‘Right. On second thoughts, you better get after Jane and have the coffee later.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’ll take care of that diver for you.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  Out on the beach, the mist was blowing aimlessly, thinner now, drawn out in grey snotty skeins. The sea beyond was darker, a dull gun-grey slopping half-heartedly against the shingle with a lazy slap. Not a human being, not a dog nor a seagull to be seen. I trudged for a few hundred yards towards Monsieur’s cage, then thought no, she would have gone in the other direction, towards the little port. But for all I knew she might have gone inland instead, up towards the hotel, even perhaps to find her husband who played bridge in the salon de thé on dull mornings when golf would be no fun. I walked on without much hope of finding her, nor indeed much hope of convincing her of my mistake. The embrace had been intense. In my agitation I even fancied that perhaps Tucker had begun to respond. She certainly seemed not to be at all resentful, if anything quite cheered. All the same, the darkness on the stairs might be a saving grace. Jane might not have seen all that much, might be prepared to accept that it was just a chance collision. No good saying I’d mistaken Tucker for her in the darkness, I knew that much. Nobody wanted to be mistaken for anyone else.

  I trudged on until I was nearly at the last breakwater before the beach expired on the low crumbly rocks. Here the mist was thicker, paler. I could hardly see the sea beyond, could hardly see anything, but then there was nothing much there, and only the cry of the gulls beyond the rocks picking over the garbage that came down from the harbour.

  My eyes were already tired from peering through the mist and so I did not see the figure coming across the rocks until she was ten yards away. She was soaked, hunched and shivering, and slipping and skidding upon the wet seaweed and the tideworn purple rocks. Her great flounce of copper hair had shrunk into lank and sodden hanks, making her face seem more white and bony still.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said. Her eyes were as red as a mongoose’s and her teeth chattering. ‘It was too cold.’

  I began to explain but she kept saying it was too cold. Then I tried to put my arms round her and her mood changed in an instant. She thrust me off with a flailing fist.

  ‘Go right away now. Go away. Go away.’

  ‘Yes all right but I must explain . . .’

  ‘Just go, fucking go now. Can’t you understand?’

  ‘But I don’t want you to think . . .’

  ‘Who gives a fuck what I think? You want that peabrained bitch, you have her. She’ll –’

  ‘I don’t want her, I don’t. It was a mistake, can’t you –’

  ‘It certainly was a mistake, a big mistake. Get out, get out now.’ She was sobbing so fiercely and shivering so much at the same time that it was hard to make out what she was saying. Then she went from anger to misery again, from rage against me to pathetic babbling apologies for how she always messed everything up, she couldn’t even drown herself properly and how she’d let everyone down, she’d chosen this part of the beach because she didn’t want the children to see her but she didn’t realise how shallow it was, she walked miles out and it was still no good and anyway how could she have thought of doing anything like that when she had Brainerd and Timmy even if she was no good to them or to anyone else.

  ‘Look,’ I said, ‘we just bumped into each other on the stairs. That’s all it was. I don’t even know her properly.’

  ‘You don’t know me either, do you, not properly? Don’t know and don’t much care either. Well, I don’t blame you.’

  ‘It was a mistake, a mistake.’

  ‘It was a crazy idea, the whole thing in the first place. I don’t know why you went along with it. You’re probably hard deep down, don’t give a damn about anything much. Poor Tucker, doesn’t know what she’s let herself in for.’

  ‘She hasn’t let herself in for anything, it was a mistake.’ My voice up to a shrill yelp now.

  ‘Never mess with the help, that’s what my mother used to say. She wasn’t right about much but she was right about that.’

  ‘Look, I’d better leave.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s right. Easy for you. Just walk away. Forget the whole thing. Oh yes I spent the summer in France, with some Americans, quite amusing really, the wife wasn’t bad.’

  ‘Please don’t, please.’

  She was quiet for a bit, and the only noise was the squelch of my shoes on the shingle and the sound of her sobbing. About a hundred yards from the house, we met Brainerd and Timmy slouching back from Monsieur.

  ‘Mom, you’re all wet. Why’re you wet?’

  ‘I fell in the water, honey, off the rocks.’

  ‘That was dumb.’

  ‘Yes, real dumb.’

  She clutched the boys to her, crouching down to their level. They wriggled away at the squelch of her wet shirt, but she held them tight and they moved along as a crablike threesome. The boys had come back early because Timmy had thrown up.

  The turret of the villa looked full of menace against the bruised sky with the foghorn still sounding out to sea. I wished I had never come and had instead spent the summer picking raspberries with some cousin who had a small fruit farm in Perthshire and needed help. Why had I come? It was only now that the end was so obviously in sight that I fully admitted to myself that what had decided me was the woman at the agency saying when I hesitated: ‘Oh but they’re so rich, you’ll have such a good time.’ There had seemed something entrancing in the prospect, a kind of freedom. Even if I had to work a little for the privilege, I would be in the company of people who didn’t have to, something of their carelessness might rub off on me.

  ‘You go play outside while I get some dry clothes on.’

  ‘But Mom, we’ve been outside the whole morning.’

  ‘You go play.’

  There was a figure seated at the end of the table in the sitting-room. Even in the dark, there was no mistake about this one. Mr Stilwell sat upright like no one else, spreading the impression that those around him were suffering from sloppy posture if not curvature of the spine. But for preference he sat alone, like now, and that is always how I think of him. He was wearing the blue blazer and the lilac Lacoste polo shirt, his usual costume for bridge.

  ‘Why honey, you’re wet,’ he said to Jane who was fleeing upstairs. She was at the turn in the stair before he had finished speaking, and invisible, half-audible, flung back a curt ‘Fell in’.

  ‘Fell in?’ he repeated as she disappeared from view. ‘In the sea?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘The rocks are very slippery.’

  ‘Never heard of anyone falling in the sea, not fully clothed. In a pool, yes, but not the sea.’

  ‘It was misty too.’

  ‘Right. She better have a hot bath, catch pneumonia else.’ He paused, as though pondering whether to pass on this advice directly, decided not to, then paused again before moving on to another topic, no doubt the topic he had been thinking of before she appeared.

  ‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘if you have a piece of real estate in England and you find oil underneath it, or coal, what’s the legal position?’

  ‘You mean, who does it belong to?’

  ‘Yup. Is it yours or Her Majesty’s?’

  ‘Well, I think it belongs to the Coal Board if it’s coal. Perhaps you get some kind of compensation.’

  ‘Is the Coal Board a separate legal entity from the Crown? Would the royalty be negotiable or on a fixed percentage?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Interesting,’ he said. ‘Dodo’s
going into Britain offshore, for oil, that is. The offshore coal’s just about played out. It’s gonna be huge, the North Sea, I understand, as big as Kuwait.’

  ‘Really, how amazing.’

  ‘You didn’t know that. Not many people do.’

  There was a pause lasting a decade or two.

  ‘How come Jane got so wet? If you slip on the rocks you might get your jeans wet, but she looks like she’s into total immersion, and she’s a good Episcopalian.’ There was something rather charming about his slow dry little smile, even if it came only in response to his own jokes.

  ‘They’re quite deep, those rock pools.’

  ‘Is that so?’

  ‘This may not be the best moment,’ I said, ‘but I’m afraid I’ve had some bad news from home. My father, he’s not well, nothing too awful, but I think I ought to . . .’

  ‘Go see him,’ he supplied after another year-long intermission. ‘How’d you hear?’ By now I had got the hang of him and knew that this was not a suspicious question but merely part of his craving for practical information.

  ‘There was a letter at the Post Office. I had my mail sent Poste Restante because I didn’t have the villa’s address.’

  ‘Probably get your mail quicker that way. Good idea.’

  ‘I could get a train tomorrow.’

  ‘How’ll you go? Change at Rouen and take the Havre boat? You may not believe this, but it could be quicker by Dieppe.’

  He didn’t say anything about how much they would all miss me. He was a truthful person.

  As I packed my bags, I looked out of the window through the hexagon of clear glass. It was low tide, the sand as pale as Helen’s skin, the sea an uninsistent lilac-grey, the sky motionless. The women in black were stumbling over the shingle talking to each other in hoarse voices. I could hear the clank of their buckets as they walked out over the huge wet sands.

  Minnow Island

  ‘YOU CAN’T GET across from that side. You have to go back to the station and walk over the bridge into Middlesex.’

  ‘Back to the station?’

  ‘Yes. You’re in darkest Surrey. We don’t speak to people over there.’

  She was quite close. The channel between us was narrow and the tide was right out, only a sluggish trickle in the stony river-bed, so I could see tyres and oil-drums and old boots though they were all covered with an evil brown sludge. The tall weeds guarding the island were coated in mud up to the high-water mark. The river seemed depleted, without hope of refreshment. Helen was looking down from a rickety wooden balcony on the bungalow roof. The bungalow was faced with clapboarding painted a brownish-black colour, much the same colour as the mud. The balcony had the look of a bridge on some decrepit little galleon that had only just managed to limp back into port.

  It was a warm day for September and quite a long way round. The first drops of sweat were gathering on my brow as I crossed over the railway bridge and heard the grimy green SR trains below charging up with that peculiar zinging chung as though impatient to infect the sleepy suburban platforms with their surplus energy. Beneath the great ironwork bridge the river was already busy with pleasure cruisers and young men rowing their girlfriends down to the pubs in Twickenham and Teddington. Another quarter of a mile up the towpath on the Middlesex side and there was a high skinny footbridge spanning the broader channel over to the island. She was waiting just the other side of the bridge, fair and tiny just as I remembered her.

  ‘What made you think you could get across from that side?’

  ‘The map makes it look as if you can walk straight over.’

  ‘Not unless you’re Jesus Christ you can’t.’

  The air was heavier on the island in among the willows sweeping the ground and the bosomy poplars whose leaves were shimmering and rustling though there was scarcely a breeze. There was no road on the island, only a winding footpath of crumbling tarmac between the bungalows, shacks and chalets scattered through the undergrowth at odd angles to one another, refusing to present a front even to the narrow path. Something secretive, yet also provisional, not so much that I felt there was a danger of eviction (though that might be a risk too), more that one morning the people living in these makeshift dwellings would suddenly declare they had had enough and move on. The more ramshackle places looked as if they could be taken apart and loaded up on a lorry to be reassembled somewhere else. The link fencing was heavy with bindweed and sticky sweetheart.

  Some of the little gardens had runner beans in full flower giving still more protection from the outside world. By the front doors of these hutches there were improvised devices, for bringing supplies over the footbridge she said: wire trolleys attached to bicycles, little detachable trailers knocked together out of wood and hardboard and painted green or pink with flowers, and a peculiar sort of hod with bars running round it and a harness, this last locked to the porch – the island was full of locks, heavy padlocks on the sheds, lighter Squires and Chubbs on the bikes, there was even a wheelbarrow locked to a rose-trellis. Was the isle a warren of footpads, the lack of motors and its tiny, primitive jungly atmosphere for some reason provoking thievery?

  ‘Oh yes, put something down in this place, turn round and it’s gone and they’re off the island in a flash.’

  Yet it also seemed like a place to squirrel things away in. Having to cross two bridges and go into a different county to get to it made me feel as if I had burrowed right to the core of things. But then again, this sense of impermanence, the restless, fidgety feel of the place, and the never-stopping rustle of the leaves.

  ‘Have you always lived here?’

  ‘Oh no.’ She thought the question extraordinary. ‘We never stay in the same place, not for more than a couple of years. Dad sort of exhausts a place.’

  He too was waiting, just by the front door of the little clapboard bungalow which on that side was painted a dirty royal-blue, the colour of an upturned boat. An intense slight upright man, very dark-faced, not at all like his daughter to look at except for the motionless upright way he held himself, like a chessman about to be moved. His face was fixed in a frown, not so much of irritation as puzzlement, as though he had just heard a strange noise which he couldn’t quite identify but which he knew needed attending to. His dark blinking eyes had the same intense uncertain look.

  ‘Ah there you are then.’ I expected him to start with a question and his quiet firm voice came as a surprise, a cool, rather pleasant sensation. ‘Martin Hardress,’ he said as an afterthought.

  ‘Sorry I’m late, went along the wrong side of the river.’

  ‘It’s like the Boat Race, you have to choose the Middlesex station. Come on in.’

  I could hear the north in his voice, but only just. In the north they would probably have thought he had put on a bit of a southern accent. Following him in, I noticed again how slight he was. The immaculate faded jeans seemed to be keeping themselves up.

  The door opened straight into a little study lined with bookshelves with no books in them. Instead, the shelves were filled with old telephones with boxes beside them, mostly tin and wood painted khaki, the brass bits beautifully polished.

  ‘Field telephones. That’s the oldest one there, Boer War issue. I’ve been collecting them for years. The Science Museum have offered me a fair sum, but I’m not biting, not just yet anyway.’

  Over the desk there were half a dozen framed certificates which I peered at: Twickenham Show Best Kept Pony – Helen Hardress (Bouncer); General Certificate of Education, Advanced Level, in the following subjects . . . On the side wall more certificates: Lower Thames Gymkhana, Showjumping Intermediate, First Prize; Eventing Junior Team, First Equal.

  ‘You told Wilmot you weren’t horsy.’

  ‘I just wanted to shut him up. Anyway it was years ago. One night I’m going to creep in and smash the lot. It’s so embarrassing.’

  ‘You’ll only set off the burglar alarm, Hel. I’ve just rewired it and connected it to the police station. You’ll be arrested
on suspicion of stealing your own certificates. You have a burglar alarm?’

  ‘No, afraid not,’ I said.

  ‘You’re quite right. Lot of trouble, especially if you connect up to the police. What do you think of the police these days?’

  It was impossible to tell what answer he expected or wanted, or even whether he would be interested in the answer. I said something about them being all right in the country, but a bit dodgy in London.

  ‘Quite right,’ but even when he said quite right it still wasn’t clear whether he really agreed. Not that he seemed the least bit insincere. It was more as though his brain had moved off in some other direction and he was having trouble in trying not to appear distracted. No doubt all sorts of people have that problem a good deal of the time, most conversations not being on the subject you would have chosen if you had a free hand in the matter, but his manner was so intense, that you couldn’t stop wondering what was going on in his head.

  ‘Ah here’s Helen’s mother.’ His voice suddenly lost all its flatness and almost throbbed with relief as if her presence had been secured with enormous difficulty, perhaps by means of a parachute-drop, although there had been a clatter of crockery from next-door ever since we had come into the study. She was tiny too. It would have seemed odd if she hadn’t been. I was already learning to live with my Gulliver-in-Lilliput role, trying not to bump into the field telephones or stoop too obviously (bending the knees a fraction helped more than you might expect).

  ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘coming all this way and getting lost at the end of it, I’m so sorry.’ She had a boat-shaped face, prettier than her daughter’s, but ruffled by anxiety to such an extent that it was hard to believe that my journey could possibly have provoked so much worry. But then she began to describe how she had overcooked the leeks and her face was overwhelmed by the same shattered look.

  ‘I’m sure they’ll be fine, Min,’ he said, but in his distracted way which wouldn’t have reassured anyone, let alone her.