Pa was shaking his head. ‘She’s gone,’ he said.
Rosie said, ‘Pa, Pa,’ and she kissed his pale head as his violent, liquid inhalations reported through the room.
We stayed that way for minutes: my father in tears, my sister hugging him, Steve and I just standing there miserably in the awful company of grief.
Eventually, there was an exhausted quiet.
Rosie passed him her handkerchief. ‘Here, take this.’
He accepted it and covered his face with it, patches appearing on the cloth. ‘I’m sorry, kids,’ he said, wiping his eyes. ‘I’m just tired. I’ve really been through the wringer this week. I’m sorry.’ He blew his nose, then blew it again. He patted Trusty, who had finished eating. ‘Good girl,’ he said. ‘Good girl.’
‘I’ll run you a bath,’ Rosie said gently. ‘Don’t worry about breakfast, I’ll clear it all up.’
‘Thank you, my love,’ he said. He gulped up mucus. ‘I’m sorry for snapping at you like that. I don’t know what’s come over me.’ He shuffled his feet into his slippers and got up. ‘Thank you for mowing the lawn,’ he said to Steve. ‘You’ve done a great job.’
When he came down from his bath, shaven and dressed in his old track suit, he said, ‘I’m taking the dog for a walk on the beach.’ He picked up the leash and clipped it to the dog’s collar. ‘I’ll see you all later. Thanks for the breakfast.’
The front door made a slam.
Rosie said, ‘Poor Pa.’
I threw her a cigarette and lit one myself. We smoked together for a while without speaking. Then I came out with the news about Angela’s role in Pa’s sacking. I did not have the strength to withhold the information any longer.
She breathed in her cigarette in silence, regarding the elegant plumes of fumes that flowed from her mouth. Her short hair had been lightened by the sunshine of the last week. She said, ‘You didn’t know she was doing this? You really didn’t know?’
I shook my head.
Instead of flying into a rage, she looked at me with curiosity and said, ‘It’s over between the two of you, isn’t it?’
I shrugged weakly. ‘I don’t know. I don’t know what’s going to happen.’
‘Well, think about it. How is she going to be able to deal with us? I mean, what does she expect us to do? Carry on being nice to her as though nothing had happened?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. I looked down at my shoes. The soles were splitting away from the leather.
She said softly, ‘I can tell you one thing. I’m not speaking to that woman again.’
There was a thick gasp of blades snagging in grass: Steve had resumed his mowing.
Rosie stubbed out her cigarette. ‘Cheer up, John. The two of you weren’t going anywhere, anyway, if you want to know the truth. Water finds its own level.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘You’re a miserable overgrown teenager, she’s a successful businesswoman. That’s what that means.’ She began scraping the food left on the plates on to a serving dish.
I controlled my temper. ‘You and Steve are hardly the ideal couple either,’ I said.
She laughed and turned to look into the garden, where her boyfriend was disentangling grass from the machine. ‘Look at him, the poor darling. Look at that frown on his face. He’s not used to concentrating that hard.’
‘He’s a total idiot, that’s why,’ I said.
Rosie, who was holding a pile of plates, stiffened.
‘Look, I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘But if you’re going to start talking about my life like that, I can do the same about yours. Tit for tat, Rosie. I can’t see why you should be the only one to speak your mind. Besides, it’s the truth. It’s not my fault that Steve’s a waste of space.’
She turned to me with glistening red eyes, hugging the dishes to her chest, and said hoarsely, ‘You think I don’t know that? You think you need to remind me of that?’
I blushed. ‘I– ’
‘What do you think, that I wouldn’t get someone else if I could? That I’m turning down offers to stay with Steve? You think that I’m happy with the way things are?’
I kept blushing. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said.
She wiped her mouth with her sleeve and went into the kitchen before joining Steve in the garden. She held open a plastic bin-liner while he, wearing my father’s old gardening gloves, filled it with handfuls of grass. When the bag was filled they set about weeding together, pulling nettles and other long-rooted intruders from the soil of the flowerbeds, clearing the garden of all blemishes.
I left them to wait for my father. He would be on the beach now, throwing sticks into the grey surf for Trusty to chase, or examining the stranded blue gunk of the jellyfish, or stepping along the black-rocked breakwaters that ran out into the water flanked by red triangular signs warning swimmers of dangerous currents. He would reach the tip of the breakwater and count the ships queuing on the horizon for entry to the port, marvelling, as usual, at the relentless forces of international trade, the thousands of smooth-running charter parties that gave birth to this traffic jam on the sea, and then he would turn around and look at the beach, where ramshackle bars on short stilts had sprung up for the summer. He would tramp the long way home, a mile over the cardboard-coloured edge of the land, then back through the wooded dunes, keeping an eye out for wildlife behind the barbed-wire fences – pheasants, rabbits, magpies, foxes. The dunes. I used to dig huts and erect tree-houses in those hills with my friends, secret camouflaged retreats where we kept comics and soccer magazines and, in case of emergencies, flashlights and bars of chocolate. They were our hideaways: a cool bolt-hole scooped out in the sand, or a construction up on a bough twenty feet in the air where you would sit with a branch in each hand for balance. Below, the Bird’s District, with its neat red roofs and fat perfect trees, would be reduced to a toytown and Rockport itself to a tranquil gathering of towers and spires; above, as you lay horizontal and looked up, the blue, giddying sky. You’d feel like a stone at the bottom of the sea.
And here I am today, on this train now steadily hauling me, through flat, dark, green fields, to Angela.
When I think of her, I daren’t think.
It was the same when I arrived home from the brunch. I fell on my bed, thought about Angela and felt nothing but fear.
I fell asleep and awoke at six. I took a shower, shaved and went into town, to the Devonshire Gallery.
I found Simon Devonshire sitting at his desk, drinking from a bottle of red wine. Behind him, in the unlit rear of the gallery, were the scattered shapes of my chairs on the floor.
‘Well, well, well,’ Devonshire said slowly. ‘If it isn’t John Breeze himself. Come in and have a drink.’
I was too embarrassed to do anything but accept the glass of wine he held up. ‘I’m sorry I haven’t been able to get back to you earlier,’ I said.
He shrugged.
‘And I’m sorry about the chairs,’ I said.
‘Sorry? Why?’ He was examining his glass.
‘Well, because …'
‘Because what?’ He raised himself vigorously. ‘John, you have made a bold and pertinent statement with your chairs. You’ve broken new ground.’
‘But– ’
‘No buts, John.’ He touched a wall-switch, and the back of the gallery lit up like a stadium. ‘Come over here, take a look at what we’ve done.’
I followed him to where the stools, as though skittled by some passing missile, lay randomly on the ground. He motioned with his arm. ‘Here they are, my boy. The Fallen.’
I looked, even though there was nothing to see, nothing but objects that served no purpose other than to take up space. These were not even seats. These were useless, meaningless bits of matter.
‘It’s never going to work,’ I said. ‘You’ll never pull it off.’
Devonshire laughed. ‘Have faith, Johnny. If you tell people that these things are significant, bingo, they’ll believe it. It’s exactly wh
at they want to hear, it’s what they need to hear. Why else do you think they come?’ He laughed again. ‘No, they’ll buy this all right. They’ll be queuing up to buy these Breezes.’
I had not heard my pieces described in that way before – as Breezes.
Devonshire said, ‘I want your cooperation on this, Johnny. I want your full cooperation. Do you follow me?’
‘Yes, I do,’ I said. I had no option.
‘Excellent,’ Devonshire said. He put his arm around my shoulder as he showed me to the door. ‘You want to start believing in yourself,’ he said. ‘I promise you, these chairs of yours are wonderful. You’ve got talent, John, real talent.’
By the time I returned home it was evening, with red clouds scrawled to the west above the mountains.
Angela called at about nine o’clock. She knew that I knew.
‘I’m sorry, Johnny, I’m sorry,’ she said. She began to cry. ‘I feel so terrible, I can’t tell you how terrible I feel, Johnny.’
I could not say anything. My throat had dried up completely.
Angela sniffed. ‘Just a moment,’ she said, ‘I’m just going to close the door.’ She returned. ‘Johnny, are you still there? Say something. Johnny? My love?’
‘I’m here,’ I said.
‘Johnny, my love,’ Angela said. She sniffed again.
There was a silence.
Then I said, ‘Well, I don’t know, Angie, I just don’t know any more.’ My voice was low and very calm.
Angela said, frightened, ‘Johnny?’
Another silence.
Then she said, ‘Johnny, I have to see you. Why don’t you come here on Saturday? My parents are going to be away and we could go and stay at their place. It would just be the two of us.’
I said, ‘You want me to drive all the way to you? All the way out to Waterville?’
Angela said quickly, ‘No, I just, I just thought that …’ She stopped. ‘I’ll come,’ she said decisively. ‘I’ll get the train.’
‘No, wait,’ I said. I had to get out of the flat, out of Rockport. ‘I’ll come. I can’t say when yet. I’ll see you when I see you. At your parents’ house.’
‘Johnny?’ Angela said. ‘I’ll be waiting for you, my love.’
That’s right, I thought as I hung up, you bloody wait. You get a taste of what it’s like.
I slept badly that night. I was worried about everything. I was worried about Angela and I was worried about Pa and I was worried about what I was going to do with the rest of my days. I was so worried about my life that I wasn’t worried about dying.
19
The train is rumbling slowly forward. The lady is asleep, mouth open, nose upturned, lightly snoring. The man has cast aside his newspaper and is staring dispiritedly out of the window, his shoulder leaning against the side of the carriage. He has abandoned his coffee-stained letter of complaint, which lies crumpled on the floor, there being no litter bins.
‘I might enter this quiz,’ Steve said. This was yesterday, Friday, morning. Rosie had left for work and I was watching him watching TV while trying to cut his big toenail with a small pair of nail scissors. It was an unequal struggle, the blades flapping fruitlessly against the hard white outcrop. He was always grooming himself in public like this, filing his warts or picking his corns or pushing down his cuticles right in front of you. ‘Bakelite,’ he said to the television as he focused on his foot. ‘I could win this thing,’ he said. He put down the nail scissors and went to the kitchen to open the cutlery drawer. Returning with the large wine-coloured industrial scissors, he placed his foot on the edge of a chair and concentrated with a grimace. Crack: a solid fleck sprang across the room like a grasshopper. ‘Riyadh,’ Steve told the quizmaster.
The phone rang.
It was Pa. ‘Son, I wonder if you would come down to the tennis club with me this morning.’
‘Yes,’ I said, surprised, ‘of course.’
‘I’ll be round in twenty minutes,’ he said.
He hung up without further explanation, so I changed into tennis gear, white shirt and white shorts, and dug out an old wooden racquet with crooked cat-gut strings. Although tennis is not my game, I was happy enough to bat back a few balls to Pa. It was a positive sign of rehabilitation.
But when he arrived he was not in his sports gear; he was wearing his dark suit, a dark tie and clip-on shades over his glasses. ‘Johnny,’ he said falteringly, regarding me. ‘Never mind. It doesn’t matter. Don’t bother changing. Let’s get going, otherwise we’ll be late.’
Late for what? I thought, but he was not saying anything. He just chucked me the car keys and fell into the passenger seat.
The tennis club, dreamily secluded in urban woodland, was just ten minutes away. I reversed into a parking space and looked to Pa for an indication of what to do next. He had not spoken during the journey, and now he just wound down the window and rested his elbow on the ledge and looked out at the surrounding scene. Through the brilliant and shadowy foliage you could see the soft orange terrain of the clay courts and the pale movements of players. The pick-pock of tennis balls being struck drifted through the trees. Pa took off his glasses, rubbed his eyes, then opened them wide and blinked hard, as though sleep still glued the lids together. Then he laid his head against the headrest and closed his eyes. A neat split had appeared at the exact centre of his flaking bottom lip. Apart from yellow-grey, that red gash was the only colour on his face.
Pa moved his head. A brown saloon had turned into the car-park. He sighed. ‘Come on,’ he said.
We stepped out. To my dismay, the saloon yielded the two Rasmussens, mother and son. Pa and Mrs Rasmussen kissed, and then she presented him with an object. Pa accepted it with both hands. It was a pewter urn and he held it by his waist like a bashful cup-winner.
Billy and I shook hands after a moment of hesitation. He must have wondered why I, a complete stranger to him, kept showing up at these most private and solemn moments. He must also have wondered what I was doing all in white, dressed for a spot of tennis.
Pa gave Amy Rasmussen his arm and they began walking.
‘Merv was at his happiest here, when playing with your father,’ Mrs Rasmussen said to me as I accompanied them. ‘It was the highlight of his week.’
Pa led us through to the one unoccupied court. On each side, games were in progress. He looked at Mrs Rasmussen, who nodded. Then he looked at Billy, and I was prepared, after his jokiness in hospital, for an ill-judged one-liner. But Billy said nothing.
Pa removed the lid from the pot and said some words in a tired voice. ‘Merv,’ he said, ‘was a fine man. He was a fine husband to Amy and a fine father to Billy. He was a fine friend to me. Merv was a loved man,’ he said. He paused. The pause continued. ‘May God rest his soul,’ he blurted. In one decisive movement, he tilted the urn and spilled the ashes on to the back of the court, creating a small black and grey mound. Treading carefully, as though afraid to foot-fault, he scattered the rest of the ashes along the base line. Then he shook the pot into the air and the last particles of Merv came forth in a cloud and blew away in a drift of air. Out! shouted one of the players in the adjoining court. Pa crossed himself instinctively and we all remained where we were, contemplating the dust pile that the breeze was already dispersing.
A voice was raised in a shout. ‘Oi! You there!’ A man was approaching from the direction of the clubhouse. ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ he demanded loudly, so that by the time he reached us people were watching. I guessed, from the broom he was brandishing, that this was the groundsman. ‘You can’t just come here and dump this dirt all over my courts.’
Pa said weakly, ‘These ashes are Mervyn Rasmussen’s.’ He hesitated. ‘He’s a member here, like me. He came here a lot, you’d know him if you saw him.’ Pa clumsily hunched his back in an attempt to trigger a memory in the groundsman.
‘I don’t care who you are,’ the groundsman said, ‘and I don’t care who this rubbish is.’ He began sweeping up the ashes
towards the drainage ditch at the side of the court. ‘This is my court and you don’t put nothing on it, not without special permission’
Pa said, ‘Please, don’t, listen– ’
Billy Rasmussen moved forward and snatched the groundsman’s collar with his left hand and his wrist with the other hand, forcing him to drop the broom. ‘Billy!’ Mrs Rasmussen cried, ‘don’t!’ Billy lifted the groundsman’s small frame into the air, carried him forward and then threw him down hard beyond the doubles tramlines. Then he stepped towards the remains of his father and, knee-deep in a cloud of dirt, furiously kicked and stamped at the ash-heap until it had irrevocably scattered and petered out. ‘Are you happy now?’ Billy shouted at the groundsman. ‘Is this what you want?’
All that was left of his father was a thin dustiness in the air above the court and black dust-stains on his clothing that a single low-temperature wash would remove. Billy turned and ran away across the courts, elbows beating like flippers, his champion swimmer’s bulk ungainly in its movement over land.
My father escorted Mrs Rasmussen back to her car, and then he and I got into the Volvo. This time, he took the wheel.
After we had been on the road for a few minutes, I asked him whether I might have use of the car the next day.
‘What for?’ he asked.
It was a routine question, but I wished he hadn’t asked it. ‘I need to get to Waterville,’ I said. I hesitated. ‘To see Angela,’ I said.
He didn’t respond.
I felt I owed him an explanation. ‘I need to see her. We need to talk about– ’
‘Take the car,’ Pa said, cutting me short.
I said, ‘I– ’
‘Take the car,’ Pa said. ‘I don’t want to hear about it.’
We drove on. The day’s brightness had turned my father’s sunglasses almost black, obscuring his eyes. With his white shirt and dark tie, he almost resembled a secret serviceman.
We stopped at a traffic light and Pa reached up and opened the sunroof. He leaned back in his seat and tilted his head against the headrest, relaxing his neck muscles.
‘It’s green,’ I said. ‘It’s green, Pa,’ I said.
The Breezes Page 18
