Undercurrent

by Frances Fyfield

  She did not protest, spoke through chattering teeth and uncontrollable shivering.

  'It was a trick you learned as a child in order to scare your parents to death and make them take notice of you, if you had them. Let the current take you from one side to the other. I did it Christmas Day when I was twelve. Last chance.'

  'You bitch.#'

  'If only I was,' she said. 'Life would be so much easier.'

  There was this insane cheerful thought at the back of her mind which cleared it beautifully and made everything as bright as the sun. No way would Philip ever have attempted to get into the water and find her; he disliked getting wet. It was always the thought that counted.

  They sat in his room. She admired the tidiness of it, the carefully stacked papers, the book of poetry, the laptop, the room of the soon-to-be-off, journeying man. Henry preferred the penitent look of her, with the metallic curls scraped back; she was a certain kind of animal which looks better when sleek, wet and unadorned. Outside, a row of seagulls lined the edge of the waves, waiting for the revelations of the tide.

  'Look, I'm sincerely sorry about this. Henry. When I was asked to represent Francesca, and it was her choice, I certainly believed she was guilty. She made me believe it. Which might have been why she asked for me, because I always believed her, was always slightly in thrall to her superior wisdom, she was always more powerful than me. If she said a thing, it was the truth. Will of iron. She was so calm, it was repellent. And the calm could have meant she was resigned to the truth, no room for self-pity, any pity, or it could have meant a ridiculous level of self-control. Either was consistent with the way she was. We always talk about her in the past tense, as if she was dead, don't we? May as well be. She won't talk to me. I broke my promise.'

  'She wasn't in a position to exact promises. I never can understand how she manages to manipulate from afar.'

  'You give away your car, your video, your valuables, you can ask for things in return, can't you? On one level, anyway, although the promise she exacted from me had nothing to do with that. I promised on my solemn, ten-year oath - we exchanged blood, you know, down in the moat of the castle, and a little blood goes a long way - anyway I promised I'd never look into it. That I'd do her the honour of never questioning what she'd done. Accept it as all for the best, she said. If she ever heard that Edward or I were making further enquiries, and she would hear, somehow, then she'd sack us and make a statement saying we were deluded.

  She wanted her flat sold. and the money given to Angela, that was all. Otherwise, forget about it. I promised.'

  'And?'

  'I had to take it literally. Not difficult at first, otherwise distracted, you see, by the relative disappointments of my own life. Then it just creeps up, the nonsense of the promise as well as everything else.

  Some of the things you've thought of, some I have. But I couldn't open the can of worms, I promised I wouldn't. Somebody else had to do it. A stranger and a determined stranger at that.

  Some completely objective searcher after truth. Walking into Edward's office, you were manna from heaven. We just had to tease you along a bit.'

  'A sting,' Henry said.

  'You don't come with a bundle of preconceptions and you can look at the place with a cold eye. That's an advantage. You don't know the people involved.'

  'You lived here and you don't either.'

  She paused. 'True.'

  'Are we doing what she wants? That's the main thing.'

  'I've no idea. We could turn away. God knows, I've wanted to.'

  He stood by the window and watched the seagulls. They looked like sturdy, disinterested guardians of the shore, incapable of squabbling or even flying, waddling round, awaiting orders and he no longer felt the same.

  'I don't know if I'm trying to prove guilt or innocence,' Maggie said.

  'I want that boy's death to have a purpose,' Henry answered. 'I can't think of another way to justify it.'

  He looked with distaste at the jacket flung on the bed.

  'So I'm going on my fucking errand. With my fucking jacket.'

  'Where? Can I come, too?'

  'Nope. I'm going to see an Uncle Joe and I don't want you wrecking things, because . . .'

  'I'm not objective,' she finished, flatly. He grasped the arms of the chair in which she sat, leaned into it and kissed her lightly on the cheek. She flinched and then smiled sadly. "Course you aren't objective,' Henry said. 'You're a lawyer. And you might get cold.'

  It was a grey hinterland into which the taxi with creaking springs took him round the back of the town where big houses diminished into small and the grey fields began. Never too cold or too hot, Francesca had told him; she was wrong about the first and he had no means of testing the second. He did not think he would wait to see the spring or feel the legendary heat of a summer; he could not imagine a day when that cold ocean would welcome a swimmer without the water feeling like a grave.

  The flat land gave way to fields of undistinguished crops and three miles beyond the town, his taxi took him through the Fergusons plant. The sight of the factory shocked him; it was a reminder of another world. It rose out of the mist like a strange mirage, all chrome and steel, spreading out across the emptiness. The buildings shone with acres of glass buttressed by gleaming metal: the lights of a hundred offices and laboratories illuminated the gloom of the afternoon and the vast carpark housed hundreds of new cars. This was his own territory; this was where he would work, if he stayed, in a place constructed out of anything but brick.

  Henry asked the driver to slow down. They crawled, creaking, beneath the bridge which spanned the road in an arch of steel, connecting one wing of millennium industry with another, and through the glass of the walls Henry could see a rising escalator on one side, thronged with people.

  The edifice radiated cleanliness, efficiency, prosperity; the contrast between it and the town he had left behind was breathtaking. It looked like a spaceship recently landed on alien terrain and Henry reminded himself that this was where he rightly belonged: in buildings like this half of his adult life had been spent. Perfecting scientific processes to improve the lives of the twenty-first century. Pro-cesses, not prahcesses, he told himself, and you don't put flowers in a vaice, you put them in a vahz. Grasshopper mind. Henry, he told himself as they left Fergusons behind. And the natives imagined that all Fergusons did was make Viagra. The fucking English might as well be going round covered in fucking woad; they were blinkered and prejudiced; they did everything they could to keep themselves confined.

  It felt like a long time since ever he had ridden an escalator or even seen a building bigger than a castle. Or seen one committed to the future, and the sight of these made him grimace with homesickness. There would be no smoking and no dogs allowed inside Fergusons. Henry had a faint sense of panic at the thought of returning to normal life. It suddenly seemed impossible to imagine himself going back to a structured existence which had nothing to do with the past, or secrets, or idiotic promises made by himself or anyone else: he had a yearning for a world of bright, clinical lights, no shadows, no dark corners, no suspect motives, nothing but the driving imperative of work which had bored and dismayed him and now seemed infinitely attractive.

  Everything in that little town, so old, so pessimistic compared to this. People content to remain in a tiny world. They were not even interested in prosperity.

  Look at Maggie: bright enough for a brilliant career, content to junk it, Edward, an attorney who failed to make money; Francesca who let her own, unambitious life eat her alive because she could not or would not move . . . didn't she want to get on? They all avoided their duty to be happy.

  It was the sea that mesmerized them all into collective stupidity. Under floods that are deepest.

  Which Neptune obey. Over rocks that are steepest. Love will find out the way. Get out of here.

  The car crawled uphill, gears grinding on a steep gradient, and the ocean appeared below at a turn in the road. Henry saw the
jagged outline of a white chalk cliff meeting the shining water, found himself smiling. The guttural sound of his humming alarmed the driver, who shifted uncomfortably in his seat and revved the engine.

  Henry had been happy that his own father had never had to leave his own house in order to die. Died with a view of the walnut tree in his precious back yard, without any of the upheaval involved in a removal to a place like the one the taxi finally reached on the headland. Dad always did have a good sense of timing and he would have liked the view. The ideal place if you liked to watch from the windows either the storm clouds on the horizon or the golfers on the greens behind, but it seemed to Henry far too remote for its purpose of housing the old. It had an air of faintly distinguished decrepitude, like the occupants, but the isolation of it made him obscurely angry. Put the elderly on a headland, away from sight, as if they were lepers of a kind. The interior reassured him slightly. It was warm and green with plants, like a comfortable hotel. The woman in the office seemed kind.

  There must be some confusion, she said. No one had visited Joseph Chisholm in months. He lay sleeping in a pleasant room at the back, overlooking the golf course, waking to moments of increasingly rare animation when there was football on the television. Still able to goose the younger female staff occasionally but deteriorating like a piece of old stone. The man who received the Sunday visitor was that one, over there, the one with the white hair and ruddy skin, holding the newspaper. He had taken possession of Joseph's favourite place as soon as Joseph had taken to his bed. He loved company, that one. Sat and watched the comings and goings as if he was watching a play. Henry took the seat alongside. The old man had a smile of great sweetness. His speckled hands folded the newspaper with neat certainty and he looked at it, as if pleased with the achievement.

  'I think,' he said, 'that I only have a small part in this play. I knew you'd come. Or someone like you. She won't come any more, will she? She won't.'

  'I don't know who you mean.'

  'You liar, of course you do. My beautiful

  Angela .. . her beautiful daughter. Those two. You've stopped them.'

  Henry patted the mottled hand. It had the feel of warm, dry paper. He knew the feeling of it.

  'Tell me why,' he suggested. The old man sighed. 'Oh, it's obvious, isn't it? She might realize that my name is George, not Joe. She might realize that one old roan is distinguishable from another. But I couldn't resist, you see. In she came with that gorgeous child and said. Are you Uncle Joe, I've been sent to see you. Iknew she'd be wasted on miserable old Chisholm, so of course I said, yes, who else would I be? It doesn't matter who you are at my age.' He sighed and the smile twinkled back across a distinctive, ruddy face, with devastating effect.

  'I was once handsome, you know. Like all Chisholms are. I used to eavesdrop when the last one came: I'd look at the way he listened.

  They were good at that. Handsome or mad, usually both. And all I had to do after that was occupy the same seat and listen myself. Which has been a positive pleasure.'

  'Why shouldn't it continue? What made you think it would stop?'

  The face of the old man blurred into that of Henry's father, weather-beaten from fishing, and the greenery behind blurred into the yard. The walnut tree, the lines of the face becoming beautiful, and he was going to ask him about Francesca until he remembered that this man had never met Francesca and might know nothing.

  'I'll come and see you if she doesn't,' he said, rashly.

  'Shall you? How absolutely lovely.' He began to fold the newspaper, slowly, sadly. 'I'd prefer Angela, I must admit, and that talkative child. She talked and talked and then Angela didn't bring her back. They talked as much as one another actually.' He crossed his legs and his arms. 'She shouldn't have done it, you know, it was frightfully bad . . . that poor child ....'

  'Why do you think she won't come back?' Henry wanted to shout it.

  'Because she told me too much,' the old man said, simply. 'Far too much. I knew there would come a point when she would realize that.' He smiled again, blithely confident of Henry's understanding, then the smile faded into a frown. 'Oh dear, you young people are so slow.' He leaned forward. Henry could smell mint on his breath, admired the closeness of his shave and the careful combing of his hair. A man who had not lost an element of vanity and was always expecting a visitor. 'You see, I never really knew what she was describing, or any of the people she was talking about, so I just agreed with everything she said.

  Agreeing, placating, an echo, really. I didn't want to talk: I just wanted the joy of listening to her. And once it's obvious that you're spellbound by a person dying to talk and you really won't be able to repeat it because you're too old and dumb, well you're a whatsit, aren't you?'

  'A receptacle,' Henry said.

  'That's the word. Fancy a Yank knowing a word like that.

  She'll bring us some tea if you wave.'

  Henry had a yearning for a double espresso from Starbucks, the sort of coffee that made a man sweat.

  'And you can smoke out here,' the old man added.

  'That's why Chisholm sat here. Probably what's killing him now too.'

  'Well I guess a cigarette helps conversation,' Henry said, producing a packet in case this was a hint. The offering was looked upon with disapproval. Henry put it away. He had misunderstood.

  The only oil the conversation required was the weak tea which he loathed; he should have brought a gift. They looked downhill over a peerless view, enhanced by the glass of Fergusons laboratories, or ruined by it, depending on your point of view.

  'I'm eighty-seven, you know,' the old man said with a touch of defensive pride. 'Lost my wife to a Yank at the end of the war. You had the money, you see. Now what was I saying?' Henry cleared his throat in an attempt to modify his accent when next he spoke.

  'And I suppose you work at that place,' he gestured towards the barnacle on the view.

  'Where they make all them happy pills that can't keep me walking or daft old Chisholm alive.'

  'You were saying that you were a receptacle and Angela told you too much,' Henry whispered helpfully, speaking through pursed lips to make his voice sound rather more BBC.

  'Speak up, will you? Yes. Far too much, but it does make a change from someone sitting there and watching the clock, wishing they could go. A bit like you. Talk, talk, talk, about this and that, such a storyteller she should go on the wireless. Not much of it true, I shouldn't think. People like making up things to make their lives more interesting. Never enough drama in daily life, I found. You need a newspaper for that. That's where things happen. Not that I believe them entirely either. Mad axeman strikes again, that sort of thing. Not here he doesn't. It's more like frog remains on coastline for third day running.'

  Henry smiled. He was beginning to see how visiting this old man was less than a chore. He himself could feel an anxious enjoyment.

  'What kind of stories did she tell? Murder, rape and mayhem? Burglary, robbery? Happens in the best of places.'

  'Well, I wish it happened here. Not in Warbling it doesn't. Absolute nonsense. The way that girl of hers talked in the beginning, well, of course I didn't believe it. She learned how to fantasize from her mother, I suppose. Very entertaining. Matilda told such dreadful lies...'

  'It made one gasp and stretch one's eyes,' Henry murmured. '... about someone I was supposed to know pushing a child off the pier, as if anyone would. I just said, how dreadful and let her go on while her mother went to the lavatory. Then she had to go and sort out the car, water in the brakes or something on the way up this damn hill. And anyway, telling me all this and getting me to pull faces made poor Tanya upset. I managed to shush her before her mother got back, get her to talk about school. I didn't really approve, you know.'

  'Approve?'

  The old man lowered his voice and leaned forward.

  'She could describe it in such detail, you see.

  How the child was pushed by a dog on the pier. Her mother shouldn't have told her
such stories, even though she's an angry woman. Very. They need a dog. Mind, I wasn't going to say anything. None of my business and she might have stopped coming to see me. Angela's forgotten about it. Other worries.

  Now she's got a whatsit, you know, one of those buggers who goes after kids, a . . .'

  'Paedophile,' Henry supplied through gritted teeth.

  'One of them, running round the town. I ask you.

  I told her to get a dog!' He laughed uproariously at his own suggestion. The teacups rattled as he slapped the table. 'Bite his balls off. Lock him up!' Henry winced. Then the old man became sombre. 'I might have caused offence,' he said sadly. 'Is that why she won't come any more?'

  'No, I'm sure it isn't that. And I'm sure she'll come back. Why shouldn't she?' Henry rose from his armchair.

  He needed to think; the warmth was oppressive and the door was closed, he could feel the beginnings of the familiar agitation and he was ashamed of it.

  'And so shall I,' he added, wondering at the wisdom of what might be a lie. The old man grabbed at his sleeve, he shook his hand, feeling the surprising strength of the bones. His own hand seemed enormous by comparison.

  'Those things she told me . . . None of them were true, were they?'

  'No,' Henry said. 'Of course not. Remember Matilda? None of them.'

  The old man winked, a slow, deliberate wink.’ you haven't heard the half of it. So you'll have to come back, won't you? Bring some of that Viagra with You. We could do with it.'

  He stood on the headland and watched as the fog rolled in. Down below, before the mist covered it in blanket, the Fergusons buildings caught the light and then faded into an insignificant part of the white landscape. Without being able to see the details he could make out the shape and thought he knew where everything was. When the fog rolled back, a slightly different picture would emerge, but he would still know what was there. And he had been looking at all the wrong books.