by Janet Davey
‘An eye doctor?’
‘Shut up,’ Ross shouts as he rises from his chair.
‘Yes. Dr Fred Grabowski.’
‘I’m really sorry, Jude. It must be very upsetting for you,’ I say.
Ross gives an exasperated sigh and subsides. He puts a protective hand on Jude’s lower back.
‘Mum was wearing a summer smock thing and an old white trench coat. Not even leggings. She’ll be really cold. They both slammed the car doors and Pappa mashed the gears, driving off. He dropped me at the station. I was glad to get out of the car.’ Jude snuggles into Ross. ‘Do you want to finish my pudding?’
‘Thanks, babe.’ Ross holds her tight and begins to scoop up the mess on her plate.
‘It’ll work out, one way or another. They’re going for couples’ counselling,’ Jude says.
They leave. The creaks of the bed are background noise, like rain on the roof or cars passing in the street. It is intolerable to register every footstep overhead, every banged door, the ebb and flow of recorded sound from one room or another. I sense as much as hear and resort to putting on the radio and turning up the volume to a level that indicates I have become deaf. In fact, I remind myself of my father who leaves Radio 3 on for company. Anything involving trumpets, he turns up to full blast. A Bach Brandenburg Concerto, for instance. I answer a message from Richard. I never see him at the weekend. He seems very far away.
25
I FIND MY copy of Silas Marner in the bedroom cupboard, among belts and sunglasses that are no longer fashionable and letters from the days when people still wrote them. The book should have been returned to school and is still in the cellophane jacket that I covered it with in Upper Five, the corners stuck down on the inside with sticky tape that has become brittle and yellow. I remember the class listening in silence, stirring occasionally. Feet shuffled, a fingernail scraped on a desk, someone coughed; small elements of restlessness that, like the movement of a bird in a bush, have no power to disturb. As if willed by the group in front of her, our teacher, Miss Fletcher, rolled on, spellbound by the words and the good acoustic of a high-ceilinged classroom. ‘“She was perfectly quiet now, but not asleep – only soothed by sweet porridge and warmth into that wide-gazing calm which makes us older human beings, with our inward turmoil, feel a certain awe in the presence of a little child”’ – the part where Godfrey Cass, having seen the face of his dead disowned wife, looks at his daughter cradled on Silas’s lap, as he sits by the fire. The mystery of infancy and death persists through Silas and Godfrey’s low-pitched conversation and Godfrey’s return to the Red House. Even though the end-of-lesson hooter sounded, it persists. The peace of a baby radiates to fill a room, a whole house. Miss Fletcher carried on reading.
Outside it grows dark but nothing changes. At this time of year, the lights stay on all day. Ross and Jude sleep in. They do homework. They go for bike rides. Blandness, like a mild headache, takes hold, tinged with disappointment peculiar to Saturday afternoons in winter. I hope life in our house is not too dull for Jude.
I get out the Terry’s All Gold to show her. It is the 16oz box and contains family photographs, not the early snaps of me and Randal, but pictures of the boys.
‘You were really pretty, Lorna,’ she says, ‘and the little boys are so cute. You should put some of these out, make a collage or something.’
The television is on, though we are not paying it much attention.
‘You don’t have any photos on display, do you? Not even in your bedroom. Mum and Pappa have this long line along the radiator shelf.’ She stretches her arms out. ‘I like their graduation pictures, though they are silly. I’m looking forward to mine. The gown and the hat. It’s a shame Ewan never got that far.’
I stiffen but carry on shuffling through the box, passing her pictures I think she might like. She sits with one leg tucked under her, comfortable.
‘Oliver and Ewan were a bit alike, weren’t they?’ Jude holds up a holiday snap of the two boys. She turns it this way and that and gazes into it as though into a make-up mirror. Her lean face turns rapidly to profile. All nose when her hair hangs loose and all cheekbone when she pushes it back.
‘Those two are more Doig than Parry, though Oliver’s fair like me and Ewan is dark.’
She carries on examining the photos. ‘It’s weird the way you talk to Ewan.’
‘Weird in what way?’ I say quickly.
‘Sort of monotonous? As if you don’t expect a reply?’
I take a deep breath. ‘A soliloquy?’ I say. ‘I hadn’t thought of it in those terms but maybe you’re right. From Latin – solus, alone, and loqui, to speak.’
‘I didn’t know that. That’s cool.’
‘A series of reflections not meant to be overheard. The audience participates in the illusion.’
‘The first time I heard you, you said something about a sick cat.’
I glance at the television screen. Elderly people in wheelchairs are being entertained by a woman in Edwardian-style drag. I note the jauntily angled top hat and the striped waistcoat. Heads are thrown back in sleep or nodding on chests. One lady taps her fingers on the armrest in time to the music, though her eyes remain closed. I turn down the volume and we watch in silence for a few minutes. The camera focuses on another old veined hand as it wafts to and fro.
‘Poor old things,’ I say.
‘Actually, Lorna, I thought he might be dead.’
Jude’s phone beeps.
‘It’s Ross. He says to go back up. People do that, don’t they? They carry on talking to someone who’s died. And they keep the person’s room as a kind of shrine,’ she says.
‘Usually tidier than Ewan’s room. But that’s terrible. Terrible that the thought crossed your mind. God, I can’t believe it, Jude.’
‘He must be so bored.’ She seems lost in thought.
Upstairs, a door opens. ‘Jude?’ Ross calls out.
She deletes the message and pushes her phone towards me.
I peer at the screen. ‘A box? What am I looking at?’
‘It’s an old-style reel-to-reel tape recorder. It’s on the floor in that cupboard place I told you about. Remember, I said I’d find out what’s in there.’
‘They were built like tanks, those old recording machines. Impossible to lift. Everything that’s now lightweight used to be heavy,’ I say.
‘I’m really surprised they leave the cupboard unlocked. They lock all the other rooms. I’ve seen Mr Child go in there a few times now.’ Jude shows me close-up shots of a treasury tag and a black metal bulldog clip with its jaws clamped shut and the handles apart.
‘Artistic,’ I say. ‘You could have an exhibition. Still Lifes and an English Teacher. So it was a stationery cupboard. Like you, Mr Child is too young to remember the valid use for a treasury tag.’
I think of Jude following him along the school corridor. And of Jude entering the unoccupied house at the end of the lane. The sign to the riding school and the horses warm and breathing in the darkness of their stalls.
On the television, a nurse is wheeling the drugs trolley. She pauses by one of the old women and hands her a little canister of pills and a beaker of water. The camera lingers on the nurse’s watchful waiting. I imagine an agonised swallowing going on out of shot.
26
AS I WALK along Green Lanes, I glance down the Luptons’ road at the unbroken terraces of houses. There is no one about. Cars are parked bumper to bumper on either side but the pavements lack shoppers. I go past boarded-up premises. I have lived into the late capitalist period and this is what it looks like. Kebab shops, fried-chicken shops, betting shops, pawnbrokers. No Woolworths. If cattle emerged from the quiet lines of an English print and lugged their heavy bodies in the direction of the North Circular, they would not cause much of a stir. The traffic is slow moving, as usual.
We look forward to meeting you, Dirk said. I wasn’t keen to get involved but for Jude’s sake I agreed. He suggested Palmers Green as the venue,
though he and Frances do not know the area and I had to name the café. The choice was between the usual chains, one of the Greek Cypriot cake shops, or the bustling place with deliberately mismatching old china that is loved by young parents and crammed with buggies. I chose Costa’s, one of the Greek Cypriot cake shops, though now, recalling the air of melancholy that prevails and the elaborate wedding cakes in the window, I think I have made the wrong decision.
The glass-fronted counter at Costa’s displays cakes and pastries but they could be fake because there is no smell of baking. I remember this characteristic as soon as I walk through the door. Baking, I conclude, as I did on a previous visit, must happen off the premises.
I am the first to arrive at a few minutes before eleven and choose a table midway down the café in the centre row. The air is cold and I feel a draught around my ankles. I take off my coat and hang it over the back of the chair but keep my scarf on. The other tables, bolted down in neat ranks, one behind the other, are unoccupied. I take a book from my bag and begin to read without much attention, glancing up every now and then, though no one comes in or goes out.
At ten past, the door opens and two men walk in, the first in work dungarees and heavy boots. The second, older man comes straight towards me. He is tall, wide-shouldered and fails to smile – forgetful or unfriendly – I do not know which yet. He wears a dark padded jacket. His close-cropped hair is of an unvarying grey. I bob up. He shakes me by the hand, remaining severe.
‘Frances is riding. She says hello and is sorry not to see you. I think on this occasion she really is with the horses.’
He undoes the buttons of his coat and sits down opposite me. His face shows signs of fatigue but I can see Jude in him. The sturdy set of the head, the downward-sloping eyes. The woman in the white wraparound overall comes out from behind the counter. We order coffee and Dirk gets up to choose a cake. He rises quickly and, before moving away, adjusts the position of his chair so that it is once more squared up with the table. After examining what is on offer and asking the woman various cake-related questions, he makes a decision.
‘This is a good choice,’ he says, as he sits down again. ‘Quiet. A fragment of the past, like in a museum. When you said Costa’s I thought no because I prefer to avoid the chains but then you said cake and I knew we were in business.’ He puts his hands on the seat of the chair and repositions himself.
‘It’s rather cold in here. I’m sorry about that,’ I say.
‘Warmer than Manchester,’ he says. ‘The weekend there did not go well from my point of view. And Christmas was very difficult.’
‘Ah,’ I say, or perhaps it is some other indeterminate sound.
I tell him how much I like Jude. What a lovely girl she is. He clasps his hands together and bangs them against his lips. I ask him about his work. The conversation is hard going. I am aware of its construction – the my turn, your turn. The gaps are like amnesia, or blank pages caused by a print error. I tell him – in some desperation – that my mother underwent tests for glaucoma when her optician noted that the pressure in her eyes was raised. The hospital appointment – just a few weeks before she died – was at eight in the morning and she spent most of the day in the waiting room, first reading a book, then, once eye drops were administered, no longer able to read; after every intervention, back among the other patients in the rows of chairs, waiting for a doctor or a machine to become available. She returned home elated, not caring at all about the time spent, because she was given the all-clear and did not have a lifetime of eye medication ahead of her.
‘I see,’ Dirk says, though I can tell he has stopped listening and closed an invisible door. I observed a similar expression on Randal’s face when Jehovah’s Witnesses called round with The Watchtower and tried to interest him in Armageddon.
‘She always told a good story, putting on the voices and leaving out the tedious parts.’
‘Good.’ Dirk speaks curtly.
He fixes me with his gaze. There are fishtails at the corners of his eyes, where Jude’s skin is smooth.
‘I had thought we would reconnect in Manchester, or at least find some clarity. But there is no clarity. Yet. The weekend did not go well. Frances referred to many of my failings. Some general, some particular. The particular I didn’t always recognise.’ Dirk touches the little bowl of wrapped sugar with his fingertips and pushes it a few inches along the table as if making a chess move. ‘She remembered things I said, even whole events, which I have no recall of at all. She spoke of an occasion in a shop in Biarritz when she was trying on a pair of trousers. There was another when we were on board a Stena Line ferry from Harwich to the Hook. I believe her because why should she make it up? I am perplexed that I have forgotten so much. It is like the mise en abyme. I am searching the long corridors of mirrors, looking for something I recognise. I don’t even recall we went to Biarritz. The holiday in the Pays Basque, yes. Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port where we stayed, the houses dipped in the River Nive, the cobbled main street, the very nice auberge where we ate colombe. From Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port to Biarritz is many kilometres. Frances did not like to drive the big car on mountain roads and at that time I had a bad back. A sciatica for which I took painkiller. I had a seat wedge and an adjustable backrest made of basket. I would never have undertaken the journey.’
The woman comes out again from behind the counter. She brings two cups of coffee and a custard tart for Dirk on a thick white plate. I thank her. Dirk nods and bites into the puff pastry. He brushes the flakes from his lips.
‘If her recollections are correct – and I have no reason to disbelieve her – I am indeed a monster. Such a person would cause unhappiness and the unhappiness would lead inevitably to Dr Fred Grabowski, a young, excessively handsome doctor who specialises in lacrimal surgery. Handsome to the point of ugliness. Or some similar man. Dr Fred Grabowski happened to be there at the right moment. The wrong moment for me. Often, it is the male who strays. When it is the woman it is doubly difficult because of the surprise element. I believed implicitly that Frances was where she said she would be. Tuesday evening at her clinic, Saturday morning with the horses. Where are people when they are not with you? Where do they go? I find I am questioning the most basic notions. Where is Mr Doig, for instance? I hope for your sake he is where he says he is. Now Dr Fred Grabowski has emerged and Frances has promised to tell the truth, however unwelcome, I believe she is where she says she is. There would be no advantage to a second layer of dishonesty at this point.’
His assertion is a form of words or comforting logic that has no bearing on the situation. He and Frances are pressed too close to it. Emotions whir like rotor blades: metal and air, false and true, are indistinguishable. When the amount of lift produced by the speed exceeds the weight of the situation, they will grow lighter and slowly leave the ground. This may take months.
I hear the semi-jocular tone which at first I mistake for comedy but soon gather is a question of intonation and excellent but non-native English – this coupled with dejection. Dirk looks through rather than at me, seeing the scenes that overwhelm him, his mind mentally stretched almost beyond endurance to a point where he cannot control the flood of words, or the pace at which he delivers them. I continue to maintain eye contact – it is the least I can do – and take comfort from the solid items that edge my field of vision. The glass-fronted counter, the paper napkins in an aluminium container, the eclairs and meringues, the little pink-and-white pyramids that are tough on the teeth and in my childhood were called coconut kisses. I resign myself to the role of sap-head and follow pretty much until the point when Dirk says ‘Mr Doig’. Then the transmission that has been coming in smoothly jerks to an unscheduled stop. Dirk Neerhoff hopes for my sake that Randal is where he says he is. I understand that Ross might never speak of Charmian – a name I avoid myself – but the sadness of this near-stranger believing that Ross’s father still lives with us washes through me.
Dirk stirs his coffee, though he has not added sug
ar, and licks the spoon before repositioning it on the saucer.
He is staring at me, wanting, I can tell, more on his wife. Nothing about his daughter. Nothing about the teachers of Lloyd-Barron Academy. He hopes for an interim verdict.
I shift in my chair, aligning my spine with its back. ‘She’s still at home – Frances. She hasn’t left. That’s a good thing.’
‘In theory, yes, but we must untie the knot when we are the knot – that is not so easy.’
‘Isn’t that always the dilemma?’ I put as much brightness into my voice as I can manage. ‘It’s very hard for you. And very hard for Jude. How’s she coping?’
‘To be honest, she is vile. To both of us. And she cries. Have you heard her cry?’
‘No.’
‘Hmm. They are unstable in that age group. It is part of the territory.’ He gives himself a little shake. ‘Now we must speak of other things. I have talked only of myself and you will be thinking, Who is this selfish Dutchman? Maybe another cake would be nice.’
27
‘I SAW YOUR dad. It was nice to meet him.’
‘I knew Mum wouldn’t go.’
‘No?’
Jude is thinner. The marriage staggers on, it seems; efforts are made. She does not want to speak about the situation. I do not know if she can talk to Ross. They are still finding out about each other. Their chatting is sometimes easy, sometimes sticky as they enter a zone where one of them suddenly feels undefended. I notice moments – in-between moments when the music is off and she and Ross haven’t decided what to do next – when Jude looks lonely. She is whippy like a sapling but vulnerable. I worry for her.
The pattern of Jude’s visits becomes more erratic. Late arrivals on Friday. Early departures on Saturday. I do not know what’s going on. The old regime has changed and is not balanced by Ross taking himself off to Crews Hill. In February half-term week, Jude does not show up.
