Thomas and Mary

by Tim Parks

  ‘Hi, Tom!’ Mary appeared at the French window, beaming. She clapped her hands and shouted something. Perhaps it was Chinese. The kids sat up, the little boy comically perplexed, the girl smiling. ‘Lunch!’ Mary announced, over-articulating, as if teaching a language class. ‘Lunch,’ she repeated, smiling invitingly at the girl, whose jet black hair was tied in two rose ribbons. ‘Lanch,’ the girl repeated. The little boy was already dashing into the house. Ricky barked. Mary turned and went in, shepherding the children one under each arm. Thomas followed.

  ‘Can’t you tell the difference between Chinese and Korean!’ They were the children of Ji Won, Mary explained, who had looked after their own daughter in Seoul a couple of years before. She was on holiday with her husband and had parked them here for a while so that they would be free to visit museums and eat in nice places, all the things you can’t easily do with kids.

  ‘I couldn’t say no, after what she did for Sally.’

  Thomas watched his wife as she moved around the kitchen. She had rustled up spaghetti for the kids, salad for themselves. She was wearing loose jeans, an old blue T-shirt, no make-up, and seemed in excellent spirits as she sat down beside the little boy, taking his fork and showing him how to gather the spaghetti round its prongs. He was impatient, grinning and frowning, flailing his podgy arms and mucking up his mouth with spaghetti sauce. Mary laughed. Thomas didn’t remember her being so indulgent with their own children.

  He sat and helped himself to salad. When he smiled at the boy, who had kept his cap on, the kid pulled funny faces from under the visor. He had a fantastically round face, a gap in his front teeth, and a hilarious scowl.

  ‘Tell Tom your name,’ Mary said warmly. She repeated the phrase more slowly, pronouncing carefully.

  ‘Tell’ – she pointed at her mouth – ‘Tom’ – she pointed at Thomas – ‘your’ – she pointed at the boy – ‘name. Name.’

  The boy was perplexed, the spaghetti sliding off his fork.

  ‘Your name,’ Mary repeated. ‘My name is Mary. His name is Tom.’ Again, she pointed.

  Suddenly the girl chipped in, speaking rapidly in their language. The boy frowned gloomily. ‘Kwangjo,’ he said, looking down at his food. Losing patience he began to bang his fork on the spaghetti to cut it up. Drops of sauce flew into the air.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ Thomas said gently.

  ‘Kwangjo,’ the girl said.

  ‘KWANGJO!’ the boy yelled. He pulled his cap down hard on his forehead.

  Everybody laughed.

  ‘And you are?’ Mary invited the girl. She pointed and repeated to help the child understand, ‘His name is Kwangjo and your name is…?’

  ‘Yuri,’ she said obediently.

  ‘Very good! My name is Yuri.’

  ‘My name is Yuri,’ she repeated.

  ‘Hi Kwangjo, hi Yuri, I’m Tom,’ Thomas said. ‘Pleased to meet you both. You look a hell of a pair.’

  The children grinned.

  Thomas ate his salad. It was quite a mix of leaves and radishes and nuts and apples and rocket and feta cheese and fennel. Very tasty.

  ‘I’m glad you’re pleased, they really are fantastic,’ Mary enthused, as the children hoovered up their spaghetti. ‘Yuri is learning really fast.’

  The boy banged his fist on the table. Mary hurried to the pot to get him some more spaghetti. Throughout the lunch, she was mostly on her feet.

  Afterwards they went for one of their old walks in the hills. They drove up to the ruined mill and then climbed through the pine woods. Yuri held Mary’s hand. The little girl was in love with her new minder and eager to please, repeating all the words that Mary gave to the things around them. Tree. Stone. Fence. Path. Sunshine. Shade. Leaves. Kwangjo refused. His frowns and pouts were gloomily melodramatic. Perhaps he was missing his family, Thomas thought.

  Thomas picked up a pine cone and threw it at the boy. It caught him on the shoulder. The kid’s eyes opened wide. He hadn’t understood. Then he saw and yelled with delight, gathering the cones on the path to throw at Thomas. Thomas ran ahead, up the steep hill, occasionally turning and tossing a cone back at the little boy. Suddenly Yuri forgot her seriousness and dashed after them. Cones were raining back and forth, very few of them hitting anybody. Ricky came tearing out of the undergrowth and barked wildly. Mary followed, hands behind her back, smiling quietly.

  In an exchange of emails the previous week it had seemed easy for the couple to discuss their many problems, to talk about a new start and what it might mean. Some of the words going back and forth were hard and firm. Both agreed that big changes were in order. But now Thomas was here, there seemed no point in saying anything. All was as it had been. At the top of the hill they sat on the steps of the disused chapel while the children ran around among the rocks with the dog.

  ‘Don’t make him mad,’ Mary called. ‘There are limits to his patience.’

  ‘They won’t understand,’ Thomas observed.

  Kwangjo was throwing cones just over Ricky’s head. The dog was leaping to catch them. Giggling wildly, Yuri picked up armfuls of cones and flung them in the air any old how. Both children seemed seized by a frantic vitality.

  ‘Reminds me of Sally and Mark,’ Mary said.

  This had been in the air.

  ‘They loved throwing cones,’ she observed.

  ‘Funny,’ Thomas said, ‘but I can’t remember our ever parking them with anyone else while we took a break.’

  ‘Perhaps we should have.’

  Thomas didn’t reply. His wife would have been the last to agree to such an arrangement.

  ‘Soon there will be the grandchildren,’ she mused. ‘That will be fun.’

  He had picked up a twig and begun to split off the small shoots on each side. ‘Not for a while, I hope.’

  Sally had just married.

  ‘Why not? You should look forward to it.’

  Thomas reflected. ‘I’m happy for them to have children, of course. But why hurry it on?’

  ‘Tom!’ Mary exclaimed. ‘What’s come over you?’

  He frowned. ‘Nothing that I know of.’

  ‘You’re not afraid of being called grandfather, are you?’

  ‘Not at all. Just there are still a few other things to do in the meantime.’

  ‘Don’t be such an old sourpuss. You know you always love kids when it comes to it. You’re so good with them.’

  There was no point in pursuing this. Thomas watched the children. They were wrestling with the dog now, smothered in pine needles. Fortunately the animal was about as long-suffering as a dog can be. Then the boy began to shout something at his sister and she got to her feet and hurried towards them. She seemed at a loss, then came to whisper in Mary’s ear.

  ‘Kwangjo, toilet,’ Thomas heard.

  ‘Here we go!’

  In a second Mary had jumped to her feet and was pulling tissues from her handbag. She picked up the little boy under the armpits and hurried him off into the trees. He was kicking his legs. She was speaking to him very clearly. ‘Hold on, Kwangjo. We’ll just find a nice easy place out of sight. Hold on now.’

  Thomas stayed put. Smiling in a rather demure way, the girl sat beside him. Then Ricky sidled up to join them and lay at his feet. With Mary and Kwangjo away, the place seemed uncannily still. The pine needles soaked up any sound. The spring sun was pale in the clearing with the abandoned chapel. They had sat here a hundred times in the past. Often Thomas had brought the children on his own. There had been picnics, and once or twice a fire. Sometimes this place had been just the first goal in much longer rambles. Returning, the chapel was always the first sign that they were re-entering familiar territory. Nearly back. But those days were long gone, Thomas thought. It would be hard to say what was really left of them now. What is the past?

  Yuri bent down to stroke the dog. Thomas would have liked to ask the girl how long she and her brother were staying, but she wouldn’t have understood. The dog was lazily licking her hand now. Yuri put
her face against its fur. Thomas was fascinated by her foreign eyes and hair and smile. All children are foreigners, he thought then. They come from a different country and when they’ve grown up they head off to another country again, leaving you where you always were.

  A crashing of undergrowth announced Kwangjo’s return. He came rushing into the clearing, punching his fists in the air. Still running, he picked up a cone and hurled it at Thomas. ‘Let’s go for an ice-cream,’ Mary’s voice was singing behind him. ‘I bet you both understand the word, ice-cream.’

  In the evening they did a jigsaw puzzle. Or rather Mary pulled the thing out, cleared the big living-room table, helped get the pieces all face up, then went off to watch the news upstairs. The picture they were supposed to put together was Constable’s Hay Wain, a horse and cart crossing a muddy stream. It would have been hard, Thomas thought, to imagine anything less appropriate for two small Korean children than this very English, very adult landscape. They sorted out the border soon enough, but the sky pieces all looked the same, and the sky was vast. The vegetation was a finely nuanced grey-green, irritatingly flecked with white, from a sun that might have been anywhere. Kwangjo was quickly frustrated. Thomas found him the pieces for the dog in the foreground. Then for a wheel of a cart. The boy put them together with a little help, then was immediately frustrated again. Eventually he ran off to join Mary at the television, but then came running back because the programme didn’t interest him. He deliberately broke the border they’d made and tossed a few pieces of sky into the air. Yuri shouted at him. Thomas was relieved when the phone rang and it was Ji Won.

  Now the children bounced on the sofa, grabbing the phone from each other and chatting away in Korean. Mary came down to sit with them and say a few words to Ji Won. Afterwards, Kwangjo burst into tears. Mary tried to hug him, but the boy ran away and flung himself on the floor face down.

  ‘Put a cartoon on for him,’ Thomas said. ‘Didn’t Mark have some manga things?’ Their son was now away at college.

  ‘Manga is Japanese,’ Mary objected.

  ‘Might be in the zone, though, for kids.’

  ‘I was hoping they’d learn some English,’ Mary said. ‘What about Batman?’

  ‘Put the mangas on,’ Thomas said. ‘He isn’t going to be learning anything in the state he’s in.’

  The two went off and Yuri followed. Thomas sat with the jigsaw. It was strange, he thought, how Constable had fused beauty with leadenness, the dramatic movement of the sky with a gloomy stillness of the land. After a while he got up and went to the fridge. There were beers. Mary didn’t approve of her husband’s drinking every evening, but she had made sure there were some bottles in the fridge. At least that. For a moment, alone in the kitchen, Thomas couldn’t remember where they had kept the bottle opener. Or perhaps he did remember, but in his absence Mary had made changes. He could have gone upstairs and asked her, but he didn’t really want to. Opening drawers, he was struck by just how much stuff they had. Tea towels, tablecloths, napkins for ordinary meals and napkins for special meals, a brush for painting milk on pastry, moulds for making cupcakes, pie cutters and soup ladles, no end of pots and pans and plates and cutlery. The kitchen surfaces were generous and well kept, tasteful combinations of brushed steel and fine woods. It was a beautiful place to live in. But no bottle opener.

  Damn! Thomas tried with a knife, slipped and cut himself. Damn and damn and damn again. Now he had to go into the ground-floor bathroom and look in the cupboard where the medical stuff used to be. His thumb tip was streaming blood. Deodorants, soaps, toothpastes, lotions, no plasters. He held the wound under the tap, dried it with toilet paper, then wrapped it in more toilet paper. At once the blood came through brightly, actually far more brightly than anything in the Constable. For some reason the thought gave him a grim satisfaction. He took the paper off and repeated the operation. Again the blood came through. But the third time the toilet paper stayed eggshell blue. Thomas went back into the kitchen and tackled the bottle top with a fork. At last it spun off. The beer foamed and he took a long swig.

  Returning to the sitting room, he found Yuri bent over the puzzle. For a moment he watched her from the doorway. The child was intent, in a thoughtful, diligent way. There was something extremely attractive about her Koreanness, her Asianness, the pursed lips, furrowed forehead, sharp, narrow eyes. Beyond her, the French window was still open on the mild evening. It was too early in the season for flies and moths. From upstairs came the sound of cartoon music. Thomas went to his seat. ‘Let’s do the house,’ he said. He pointed at the masonry to the left of the photo on the box top; one wall was whitewashed, then there were orange bricks and darker roof tiles. ‘Let’s do that.’

  Yuri frowned, then nodded and began to look for the right colours. Her short fingers moved very fast, pulling out promising pieces and moving them round to put them on the table the right way up. Gradually they built the house outwards from the left edge of the frame. When they found a piece that fitted, she smiled and he said ‘Great, well done.’ ‘Great, well done,’ she repeated. He was rather enjoying himself, Thomas realised.

  Then Mary reappeared with Kwangjo. They could hear her talking to him as they came downstairs. Did he watch a lot of manga cartoons at home? Which mangas were his favourites? ‘This little boy has to go to bed,’ she laughed, coming into the room. ‘I just need to get him something to drink.’ Clearly the boy had other ideas. He broke away from Mary’s hand, ran to the table, climbed on a chair and started feverishly shifting pieces all over the puzzle, trying to force them into quite impossible homes. Yuri spoke sharply to him, grabbed the belt of his trousers. Mary came back from the kitchen bringing a small carton of fruit juice with a straw. Then she saw Thomas’s hand.

  ‘What on earth happened to you?’

  ‘I couldn’t find the bottle opener,’ he grinned. ‘Or the plasters.’

  ‘And you didn’t come to ask me where they were?’

  Thomas laughed, ‘Evidently not.’

  Mary’s expression, holding the boy’s fruit juice so he could suck through the straw, was somewhere been perplexed and knowing.

  ‘By the way,’ Thomas asked, feeling vaguely guilty, ‘how long are the kids staying?’

  Mary grimaced and shook her head as if to criticise this indiscretion.

  ‘I really don’t think their language skills are a hundred per cent yet,’ Thomas said evenly. ‘They’re not going to be upset if I ask how long they’re staying.’

  ‘Two weeks,’ she said.

  ‘Two weeks!’

  ‘Ji Won kept Sally for a month.’

  ‘Sally was a twenty-year-old paying for her room and board and attending college every day. Not an infant in need of constant attention. Never mind two infants.’

  Mary shook her head. ‘I’m trying to be generous, Thomas. Come on, little fellow,’ she said, turning to Kwangjo. ‘Chimdae lo idong!’

  Yuri turned with a satisfied look on her face. The boy resisted.

  ‘I’ll keep him company till he falls asleep,’ Mary said. ‘Come on, Ricky. Let’s go to bed with the doggie,’ she told the boy, ‘he’ll lick your hand.’

  Thomas and Yuri worked on. It was past eleven now. He fed her the pieces he found; she read them with her dark eyes and tried to fit them into likely places. ‘Great,’ Thomas smiled. ‘Great,’ she repeated, smiling and waggling her pigtails. ‘Fantastic,’ he said, when two little clusters connected. ‘Fantastic,’ she nodded. They had the house almost done now, and the tree growing out of its walls and the trunks of the two trees in the centre of the picture. The leaves would be more difficult. Not to mention the clouds. Yuri yawned. She covered her mouth with a wrist. Suddenly she was tired. ‘Tomorrow,’ Thomas said. He put his hands together and leaned his head on them. ‘Sleep now.’ The little girl bowed to him and climbed the stairs. She really was a charming companion.

  Alone, Thomas got his laptop from his bag and checked the day’s mail. He had heard Mary talking in a low voi
ce to Yuri as she got her to bed and had expected his wife would then come downstairs. There was a moment in particular when he thought he heard her on the landing; she must be choosing between coming down to him or going into their bedroom. Thomas wondered where he was going to sleep tonight. He wondered where he wanted to sleep.

  There was nothing interesting in the mail. Another message in an ongoing discussion with his brother about the difference between knowledge and information. Something from his sister about taxes on his mother’s house. An invitation to a friend’s fiftieth birthday party in Hull. He knew at once he would turn it down. At least some decisions are easy.

  Mary’s footsteps climbed up to the loft. The children were on the first floor, in between. Down in the sitting room Thomas sat with the unfinished puzzle. He looked up The Hay Wain on Wikipedia and found it was painted nearly two hundred years ago. It had recently been voted the second most popular painting in any British gallery. Why? Thomas clicked on the most popular painting. Turner’s Fighting Temeraire. He remembered it at once. An old warship being tugged to a breaker’s yard in a weird mix of sunset and moonlight. Both paintings were sad, freighted with sentiment, drenched in resignation. The whitish warship had a ghostly look. Why did people like that?

  Suddenly uneasy, Thomas got up and went through the French window into the garden. It was such a beautiful house. He had felt excited on the long drive home this morning. An affair that had been going on for some time was over. He thought how nice it would be to be back in these spacious rooms, to have the dewy garden outside, to be able to take his coffee and read his paper in the open air. He thought how fine it would be for the family to feel that he and Mary were together. The kids could stop worrying about them and get on with their own lives. Even Ricky had been a pleasant thought.