Mrs Sarobi followed her into a low-ceilinged sitting room dominated by a large, old-fashioned fireplace and, next to it, almost on the same scale, a heavy black TV on a stand. The mantelpiece was crammed with pastel-coloured figurines, she noticed, as Mrs Ludgate tidied away some magazines and crumbs from a tired couch with a garish pattern. The two women sat down, awkwardly, at either end of the sofa, and Mrs Ludgate looked into the bag.
‘Blackcurrant jam,’ she observed.
‘Yes,’ Mrs Sarobi had to admit.
‘Ah, well,’ Mrs Ludgate sighed and they were both quiet for a moment.
Mrs Sarobi cleared her throat. ‘Perhaps this wasn’t such a good idea … I should leave,’ she said, uneasily, wondering if her voice, if her accent …
Mrs Ludgate looked up. ‘No,’ she said, abruptly. ‘No, why don’t you stay for a cup of tea?’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yeah, why shouldn’t I be? It’s the time for it.’
‘The time?’
‘For tea.’ And it was decided.
While Mrs Ludgate went to the kitchen to make the tea, Mrs Sarobi looked around the brown gloom of the sitting room. The furniture seemed to have been bought as a suite, some time in the seventies. The flowery pattern, in green and mauve, had been worn away into a greasy shine on the armrests of the couch and two matching armchairs. She placed her hands in her lap and sat delicately on the end of her seat. A low table of polished pine in front of the sofa was marked as if a dog had gnawed at it. An opened can of peaches stood on the table, the handle of a fork or a spoon sticking out of it. Syrup had trickled down the side of the can and hardened into a ridge of grime on the wooden surface. In the unlit fireplace, leaning against the iron grate, was a broken vodka bottle, shards still swimming in a pool of liquor. She wondered why she hadn’t smelt the alcohol on the air as she walked in. Just then, Mrs Ludgate returned with two tea mugs – one featuring an insane-looking purple cow and the other a bright yellow cat that looked as if it had been electrified.
‘Is Mr Ludgate not at home today?’ Mrs Sarobi asked, sipping her milky tea. It was as drab and tasteless as the passing of time in this house.
‘Nah, he’s not around just now,’ Mrs Ludgate replied vaguely and languidly but, somewhere in that casual voice, Mrs Sarobi detected a familiar note – a note from a long time ago, when violent men had ruled her own life.
They drank their tea in silence for a moment, staring ahead into the darkening room.
‘Shall I switch it on?’ Mrs Ludgate asked, hopefully, nodding towards the TV.
‘Oh, no; not for my sake, no,’ Mrs Sarobi answered in alarm and added, ‘Thank you.’
Mrs Ludgate sighed audibly.
Looking around in desperation, Mrs Sarobi’s eyes fell on a framed photograph of a child on the mantelpiece. It was partly hidden behind some plaster kittens, so that Mrs Sarobi had to stand up briefly to get a better view. The child was a little girl, she realised, and the Technicolor had started to bleed in the corners. The frame was made of seashells stuck together with glue, and it had a little plastic sign shaped as a scroll at the bottom saying Ilfracombe. ‘What a sweet little girl’ she said, rather unconvincingly, whilst peering into the tightly unsmiling face that seemed to have been pasted on to a stripy roll-neck jumper. ‘Who is she?’
‘It’s my daughter,’ Doris Ludgate answered. Her voice sounded tired.
‘I did not know you had a daughter.’
‘No reason why you should. She lives in Exeter.’
‘Does she visit often?’
‘Sometimes … but only when my husband is away. She sends me cards for my birthdays, though.’
‘Really? That’s nice.’
‘Yeah, every year. But she hasn’t been to visit for a while now. Not for a few years …’
‘Oh …’ Mrs Sarobi had to sit down. ‘Why?’ It was all she could muster.
‘Dunno. It’s just the way, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, I suppose …’ Mrs Sarobi had to agree.
‘She’s that busy.’
‘I see.’
‘A visit would be nice, though. Perhaps sometime soon, she will come …’
‘Yes, perhaps.’ Mrs Sarobi nodded, feeling helpless amongst such sadness.
Suddenly, Mrs Ludgate stood and walked across to the mantelpiece to rearrange some of the plaster animals around the photo frame. It was as if she had to put this gesture between herself and the child in the photograph. ‘Her name is Celestine,’ she said with a dry laugh. ‘I named her myself. Silly, really, giving a child a name like that. What was I thinking?’
She remained standing with her back to Mrs Sarobi, who tried to console: ‘It’s a pretty name.’
‘A bit too pretty for these parts, wouldn’t you say? Don’t know what came into my head. It was just one of those moments … She was sleeping in my arms and her face was so pretty and peaceful, I could hardly breathe. She was so beautiful, I wanted to cry – I could feel it like a pain in my heart, you see.’ She turned abruptly to face Mrs Sarobi on the couch. ‘She was my darling girl.’
Mrs Sarobi nodded again, knowing that her voice wouldn’t hold if she tried to speak.
‘Mr Ludgate hated the name, of course. He wanted to call her Jessica, so that’s what she was christened. But I still call her Celestine, in my head, like.’
Mrs Sarobi sat silently on the edge of the couch. She was aware, of course, that too many words had been spoken today and that, in amongst those words, too many secrets had somehow been revealed. She sighed and hung her head, sensing a swoop of grief going through the room.
But it was too late. Mrs Ludgate realised that she had been lured by a rare and unexpected kindness into letting her guard down. And now she had to protect herself from this compassion, this foreign goodness that threatened her battlements. Her guest was smiling a sad, still smile, as if she knew, as if from the very beginning she had known, so that Mrs Ludgate had no choice but to hate her too, like she hated that Professor Askew.
‘It’s a shame, isn’t it?’ she said with a sneer.
‘What is?’
‘That you didn’t meet that Mr Askew twenty years ago, so that you could have had a child of your own, rather than gawping at other people’s daughters.’
Mrs Sarobi only shook her head uncomprehendingly.
‘Barren women always do that – gawp at other people’s babies. Not saying you in particular, love – just barren women in general.’
‘I don’t … I mean … Why are you saying this?’ she answered, faintly, feeling exhausted and oddly fragile. She tried to remember the means that she herself had once used to defend herself against cruelty – and that sticky kindness, which threatened to expose the shame of it. But she could no longer remember the defence, only the hands that had held her down and pushed her face into a pillow.
‘So starved for love that they have to make fools of themselves in front of babies – or older men.’ Mrs Ludgate stumbled on with a strange fire in her eyes – panic mixed with Schadenfreude, perhaps.
And Mrs Sarobi, who had dried up all those years ago, was once again close to tears.
‘Ah, well, such a shame …’
But Mrs Sarobi was no longer listening. She had got up from the couch, her legs shaking a little. ‘I must go,’ she mumbled.
‘Really? Won’t you stay for another cuppa?’
‘No,’ she answered. ‘Thank you.’
‘Oh, well, I thought I should offer, seeing as you came all the way.’
But Mrs Sarobi was already making for the door.
Doris Ludgate was alone.
Hoping to escape the destruction she had caused, she went into the kitchen to feed the dog, which had been locked into the conservatory. He was a big brute who only listened to her husband. She scooped some dog food out of a tin into the bowl and hesitated before unlocking the door. The dog was growling at her through the glass panel. Quickly, she turned the key and pushed down the handle at the same time as she rushed out
of the kitchen, slamming the kitchen door behind her. She could hear the dog in there, devouring his food, his claws rasping against the linoleum.
If Mr Ludgate had ever laid hands on their daughter, if he had ever touched her, it was something Doris Ludgate had chosen to forget. The alternative was impossible. How would a mother be able to stand in front of such a thought and face it unflinchingly? It was more than she could endure. That’s how I lost her, she thought to herself now. She deserved that absence and those non-committal cards; they were not gifts of love or even duty, she realised, but constant reminders of how her daughter perceived her. Her own daughter. Sometimes, just after having woken up in the morning, before reality had arranged itself properly around her, she would try to think about how it had been, early on. She tried to remind herself of moments of awkward intimacy, of a small hand in hers or tiny socks hung up to dry on a line strung between the trees in the orchard, in pairs, like a string of DNA. The building blocks of a kind of life.
Evening had fallen outside and the sitting room was gloomy as she returned to the couch. Still she did not switch on the lights. She sat in darkness, waiting, listening for the sound of her husband’s engine on the drive. Once or twice, she flinched as she thought she heard his footsteps on the gravel outside, but it was only the mounting wind off the moor. He would not come. There was no need for fear. Her heart was racing; her hands were cold. I am pathetic, she thought to herself. I must not be afraid. I must not. No.
9
Uncle Gerry’s death was awfully plain. He just slipped away one day, sitting in his chair. A coward sneaking out of the back door without saying goodbye. It was an aneurysm, Dr Lennon confirmed, and, rather unimaginatively, blamed the bottle before adding that it might just as well have been the liver. ‘Quite rotten through,’ he said. ‘Must have been in excruciating pain.’
To Gabriel, the episode was disappointing. He had been cheated of what was supposed to have been the most devastating and significant moment of his life. It did not occur to him that the loss had already seeped into him and that he had lived with the anger, grief and absence for almost a year, ever since the episode in the pub on the moor. He had carried the unbearable for so long. The actual death – the stiffening corpse in the surviving armchair – was just something that had been left behind, a somewhat awkward legacy that one didn’t quite know how to deal with – like the cottage with the books and records and stuffed birds and the old tweed jacket, which Gabriel took to wearing. At the funeral, as he carried his wreath to the newly filled grave, Gabriel was struck by the futility of this conventional gesture; it did not seem to match the shadows in his own heart. The whole thing had been confusing – too confusing to know exactly what it signified.
*
The memory of Uncle Gerry still enraged Mr Askew. It had occupied his mind for days now. Why could those blasted memories not leave him alone? He stomped along Market Street with anger in his step. ‘What if I, too, had taken to the bottle, like the two of them? What then, eh? Eh?’ he muttered to himself, making a couple of schoolchildren step off their scooters to giggle and point. And then, halting at the street corner, he stood, shaking his head like an old horse, and said, ‘I suppose I am to blame. I should have done something. But no one told me what to do. No one ever told me anything.’ How easily we betray each other, he thought. And, most frequently, most devastatingly, we deceive those closest to us. Was there supposed to be some kind of awful symmetry to it? That kind of betrayal was like suppressing one’s own origins, like detaching our life from its force and context. That’s when we split in two, so that we can never be whole again. Never be one. ‘And yet,’ he muttered aloud, ‘we are told we must learn to forgive, to overcome, to bridge and create order out of chaos.’ When I try to imagine harmony, all I remember is a palm pressed into mine like a gift – or an offering: the unexpressed loyalties and tenderness of my childhood.
Suddenly appalled, he straightened himself up; in another minute he might have cried – there at the corner of Market Street and Gorse Lane. A grown man like himself. He looked around. The children had long lost interest in him and moved on, shooting on their scooters towards that Aladdin’s cave of Rowden’s. A dog ran past, sniffing the hedgerow at the other side of the street, and then, a moment later, its master appeared, dressed in loden fabric and plus fours for the moors. The man with the dog looked at Mr Askew a fraction too long but, deciding not to get involved, he nodded briefly at the rather elegantly dishevelled man, standing hapless and red-eyed inside his battered trench coat. Mr Askew sighed with relief and pulled at his collar. He did not like being addressed by strangers. Especially not the kind who dressed to kill. And those red socks. He had always been suspicious of red socks. They seemed to want to express individuality in a person without character. Not that he would know about these things, of course. Fashion had never been for him and, as he had never really fully known who he was, it would have been difficult to dress accordingly. He liked to think, however, that he had had some aesthetics. A saving grace. That was important, he realised, as was having taste. Taste was an indication of integrity, he reckoned. He might be judgemental, but only when it came to vulgarity. Take Mrs Ludgate, for example: was it not within his full right to loathe her? The thought of her made him shiver with discomfort. Or was it fear? There was a novel idea. Perhaps he was afraid of Mrs Ludgate. It wouldn’t surprise him. The truth was that she seemed to know too much. She was not at all the fool he had taken her for in the beginning. And somewhere inside that knowledge lived a kind of danger – the threat that he would have to face up to it all. He was a coward, after all. There, it was said. It made him feel better, relieved, to think that the blame – and the bitter shame of it – self-inflicted, perhaps, but still his burden – might be eased, lifted for a moment.
Fortified, he lumbered on along the lane towards the bridge.
A single sparrow chirped like a bad phone line in the hedge.
*
After Uncle Gerry’s funeral, leaving was easy. There was a time of waiting, of course – a few months of confusion and frustration, until school finally finished – but all those sliding moments just served to increase the separating distance. So that, in the end, it was easy to leave; the lifeline, such as it was, had already been cut. He knew he must go away, but he had no idea where to – nor what his going away might lead to. Mother talked about university, but he could not think what to study. He had sent off all the appropriate forms, but could not remember what subjects he had listed, or what institutions. The whole idea seemed so utterly alien to him, as he had never yet believed in himself enough to take anything seriously.
Deciding on going west, as far as the coast, was directed as much by a romantic idea of the sea as by the practicality of being able to afford the train fare there. And he relished the challenge of walking the distance back, camping along the way.
‘Now, listen to me …’ Mother would demand, and he would sigh and say nothing.
‘A young man like yourself needs to have a plan.’
‘Like me?’
‘All I’m saying is that you’re not the kind of person who can fall back on the goodwill of other people – or a large family. Not at this time, at any rate.’
‘Well, then.’
*
One summer evening, when he was still building up the courage to leave, he was sitting at the kitchen table, hunched over The Times. Idly flicking through the pages, he considered, for once, his mother. She was busying herself by the cooker; her back was slightly bent these days, her features somewhat blurred or distracted – the way features become when you stop looking at them. She was wearing what looked like a man’s cardigan over the plain navy blue dress she wore for work, and he noticed that she had been biting her nails. Whose cardigan could it be? He didn’t dislike her or resent her – on the contrary, they were vaguely friendly towards each other these days. It was just that he didn’t know her – he didn’t know who she was. How could he, when she had always k
ept things hidden from him? Over time, and through the loss they should have shared, the distance between them had become too vast, too arduous to cross. He realised that she was probably quite lonely. Just then, she looked up – not at him, exactly – and asked something or other, but vaguely.
‘Mm?’ He pretended to study the pages more intently, and that was when he saw the article. The title caught his eye first – The Last Freak Show in Europe – and then, below it, he saw the photograph, slightly blurred where the printer’s ink had smudged, of the smiling showman in a tall hat, standing in front of a circus tent, his arms extended, palms facing up. Gabriel recognised him straight away – he hadn’t changed much since Gabriel and Michael had visited Dr Buster’s Sideshow on that night before the incident at the Giant’s Table. He leant over the paper, oblivious, once again, of Mother, and looked closer at the photograph. There, at the back of the shot, barely visible, were those two golden girls – the Siamese twins that had fascinated him so all those years ago.
Gabriel began to read:
In many cultures today, a monstrous birth amongst humans is still blamed on the mother. In Europe, there used to be a common belief that a woman could imprint on her unborn child her own impure fantasies, so that the deformity of the child mirrored her wickedness. A source from seventeenth-century Germany tells of a woman who quarrelled with her neighbour, and butted her head against the other woman in fury – she subsequently bore a child with two heads. A loose woman may give birth to an hermaphrodite child who would be able to fornicate with both men and women. A woman who told lies and was never to be trusted might find herself mother to a two-faced Janus. It has been said that the mother of Joseph Merrick, the Elephant Man, was frightened by an elephant during pregnancy. Today, of course, we know that physical malformation is programmed in the genes long before birth, and the exhibition of so-called freaks has long been banned on humanitarian grounds. But Dr Buster’s Sideshow is still in business. The show last visited Britain ten years ago, but has since been confined to southern Europe, where laws are more relaxed.
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