Therapy in action, mustn’t fall down, must we, things to do, wise old bird. Giving me chubby Samantha as my companion, so adult, she, so forgiving. How absolutely perverse it was that I should be cleaning and dusting with the clumsiness of no real practice, Samantha equally inept, obeying instructions to be good and telling me jokes, both of us actually enjoying ourselves. It was bizarre to have such a completely happy couple of hours, anxious but completely absorbed.
‘Mummee . . . Here’s a good one . . . Why can’t you play cards in the jungle?’
‘Don’t know, darling. You tell me.’ I was packing surplus paper into a polythene sack.
‘Too many cheetahs!’ She rolled around on the floor, clutching her sides and laughing like a chimpanzee, though I’m quite sure she has no idea what a real cheater is. ‘Another?’ she said, gasping. ‘OK, go on, do.’
‘What’s a crocodile’s favourite game?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Go on, guess.’
‘I can’t, that’s far too hard for me.’
‘Snap!’ she would shout, jumping on the sofa and kicking her legs in the air, while I laughed too, both of us like that, we love jokes, only I never realized. ‘Come on,’ I said, ‘this is work. Carry this stuff downstairs.’ ‘Why, what is it?’ She peered inside a sack replete with bottles, old letters and dead flies, some of the bottles not quite empty. ‘Rubbish,’ I stated firmly. ‘I like rubbish,’ said my daughter.
Still bleak outside, you could forget it was summer, a preternaturally dark day, autumn striding rather than creeping into central London like a colossus and the trees shaking their heads in wild disapproval. Sammy and I crashing sacks down the steps to place by the railings the detritus of two rooms, Mark’s and mine, and Sammy insisting on adding hers, but abandoning all labour to run up the street on her stubby legs in order to examine the far more interesting rubbish of everyone else. Monday is rubbish day in this stretch of London, but like many a Monday, they had forgotten to collect. On this day in every seven, the street takes on a polythene life with sacks and bins and God knows what appearing from all over the place, oh what work you could do investigating the lives if you looked inside. Be you never so rich, you still have to take out your trash, only I had never done it before. I kept mine indoors, in my mind.
‘Look, look, look . . .’ Samantha was ten steps away up the pavement, examining a bag outside the Allendales’. ‘Mummy, look,’ a strangled stage whisper louder than a prompt.
‘Darling, you shouldn’t look at other people’s rubbish, not nice, come away.’
‘Look,’ she insisted, standing ground, she of the iron will and bossy tendencies so refined in her mama. So I ambled up with studied innocence in my walk, and looked: anything to continue this conspiracy with my suddenly gorgeous daughter. ‘Doggy must have bit the bag,’ she said importantly. How observant she is, picking the one bag with a large split.
And I could see why she was interested. No mouldy old foodstuffs here. A grey plastic sack (the Allendales would, wouldn’t they? – designer rubbish, not put inside ordinary black), split open down one side. Flanked by other grey bags, up-market rubbish, I bet, fish-bones and empty caviar jars, my own bitchy guess, but in the torn bag, colours dripping on the ground, nothing but clothes. My eye was caught and held like a bur on a yellow thing with pink spots, diminutive garment sandwiched in between other smaller garments and a pair of striped pyjamas. I should have stopped Sammy, but she pulled at the things, bringing more of them on to the pavement. ‘This is a nice one, Mummy; why is they throwing it away?’ Only the colours danced in her eyes, but I saw more. A swathe, there was, of Jeanetta’s clothing, little favourites I recognized out of the new clothes Katherine had bought for Jeanetta that one time weeks before, and stranger still, in the same heap, I thought I saw the dustier, more sophisticated pink of a summer suit I had seen that mother wear when we met not long ago. A new suit, I thought, as well as those striped pyjamas, either a replica of the same or a pair of Mark’s: I had never checked to see if they had all been returned. ‘Don’t,’ I repeated to Sammy, ‘Don’t. Put them all back, they’ll see us.’
‘Who will?’
‘They will.’
She was fascinated like a dog determined to pursue a smell, while I felt the strangest sensation in my bones, so strange, a paralysis worse even than that fear for Mark, a sweeping chill which rooted me to the spot, powerless to stop her while goose-pimples raised on the back of my neck and my mind struggled for thoughts. I was shaking with cold but my arms were rigid with shock: then the light went out: I heard the trees again, and Samantha, screaming in whoops of excitement, howling with joy. And slipping into the kerb with noiseless efficiency, Sebastian’s Mercedes with a small, white face peering out from the rear window. White and triumphant, trying to look solemn but really smiling like the hero coming home, my son, never more alive.
Sometimes since, I have wondered, without being at all wistful about it, what it is like to be a child. The son and heir was indeed injured: he had fifteen stitches in one calf and a broken ankle, must have hurt like hell, but all he could see by the time the stitches were inserted, was all the compensations which his little mind understood as bound to follow. Such as, ‘I won’t have to go back to school quite at the beginning of term, will I?’ or ‘Do you think people will want to sign this?’ pointing to the modest amount of plaster which decorated his skinny shank. That plaster, such pride: he produced it from the car like a film starlet might produce one high-heeled leg, slowly and with great aplomb, waiting for the whistles and the applause, even enjoying the fact that Samantha, initially so full of welcome and gabbled news, was rapidly filled with jealousy.
‘Mummy, will I be able to have some crutches?’ Sweet, dozy questions from Mark’s bed, where I simply sat and watched him.
‘Anything you want,’ I said. And I meant what I spoke. Anything he wanted, anything within my power either of them wanted. Watching him, without thinking too much, I knew I had hit the bottom only to rise a little. There was nothing more important, nothing to begin to put into the same scale, as this boy, this precious life. Oh, I did not weep: I was even bustling but I knew it well. I love my children. Oh Christ I love them all.
Equally well I knew how sensitive was my husband, delivering back the son and heir and letting me take over, even knowing how clumsy I was. Of course he could have bedded the child, washed him with greater efficiency and skill, done all those things better and quicker than I, but they stood back, the Harrisons and Sebastian. He soothed Sammy with attention, left me to direct the comfort of the patient, guided by his instructions. ‘No, Mummy, mustn’t get it wet, this plaster stuff. Can I have a biscuit? No, a chocolate biscuit, please. And some apple juice? Can I get Adam’ (a friend from school, another stranger to me) ‘to come round and see my leg tomorrow?’ Yes, yes, yes, until he was drowsy, some drug in him other than trauma making him slip away although he was fighting to stay awake, muttering as his eyes closed, desperate to inform and receive anything he might have missed in his small world, his questions following no sequence.
‘Did the beggar come back?’ he asked suddenly from the depths of the pillow.
‘Which beggar? A man in a book?’
‘You know, the dirty man who got in here and got upstairs when Harrison was watching the cricket. Sammy said he came back.’ Sammy and Mark had conversed in whispers through the door of the loo, before she was shooed away. ‘. . . And the police came, Sammy said. I think the beggar took Jeanetta, that’s what I think, and that’s what Sammy says. Is that why the police came? I missed it . . . ow, that hurts. Jeanetta could have come and seen my plaster . . .’
‘What man, darling?’
‘That one, you know, you must know. But I wasn’t supposed to tell you until Mrs Harry told you. Or they would take us away, other beggarmen, we’d be kidnapped, she said,’ he added with sleepy relish.
‘Of course you wouldn’t. You are a silly-billy.’
‘But
Sammy says they took Jeanetta. Jeanetta isn’t there any more. She was so thin, Mummy.’
‘Jeanetta’s coming back, darling. She’s only gone to stay with her granny. I expect she’ll be back very soon. She’ll be able to write on your plaster.’ Why the hell was he thinking such irrelevant things? Sickness makes for nonsense: I couldn’t remember him mentioning next door’s lot for weeks. But then, I had not been paying attention: for all I knew, they may have been discussed ad nauseam. Sitting there in the quiet comfort of his newly tidied room, I got back an almost imperceptible hint of that peculiar coldness I had felt in the street. Mark’s beautiful dark eyes were gradually closing and his face was rosily pink. The dog snored in the corner, another indulgence for the patient.
‘No, she won’t come back. Netta. Anyway, she won’t write on my plaster, ’cos she can’t write . . .’
‘Can’t write, night-night. Nice dreams.’
‘It was ever such a big spike, Mummy . . .’
On my soft way downstairs, treading quietly although there was no need, dizzy with relief and the mind still in overdrive, I wondered about this beggar, but there were too many other things of greater importance, just then. Besides, he was a secret, whoever he was, and in my new humility, I was prepared to let them have their secrets, as many as they liked, Mrs Harrison and all: I could not afford jealousy. The house was warm: the tranquillity too precious to disturb. Tomorrow would do. Tomorrow would do for everything except whatever was going to happen next.
The face my husband turned to me was lined with incredible weariness, and in it, I saw all the reflected features of our son. Sebastian had not sat in that chair for so long, the mere sight of him, slightly dishevelled, open-necked shirt, all of him creased from the head to the shoes, reminded me suddenly of the man on the park bench. Lonely. Like me, I suppose, making my first admission. I did not feel tension since there was no emotion left: I did not feel awkward because I was more grateful to see him there, and if there ever had been another woman for him to run to (which I knew very well there was not: he never tells lies), I had lost all power for indignation.
‘Would you like a drink?’ My request, noticing he had made no move to find his own.
‘Please.’ I disinterred the whisky, the hated whisky which I loathe, quite proud to present it still full. Then I poured a very small gin, put it ever so slightly beyond the reach of my own hand. That way, I would have to reach every time I wished to sip. I cannot reform all at once; I cannot pretend that I would, any more than I can pretend about anything. Dishonesty, like the jealousy, is not a commodity I could afford.
‘Are you going to work tomorrow?’ A casually loaded question from him.
‘No. I thought I’d take a few days off and amuse the boy. Are you?’
‘No.’
One sip of the gin, this part required some courage. He was opening his mouth to say something which I interrupted with my words first. I could not let him ask first.
‘Will you stay here then? Please.’
‘Yes.’
We did not touch. You do not rush across a room and embrace the spouse who has left you, even if you left him first, or you do not if you are me. I saw the father of my children, not a new-found lover with nothing at all to reconcile. But I touched his shoulder as I passed to the kitchen, briskly, a very passing gesture which he might have thought was a mistake if he had cared to notice, which I thought he might. It cost me, that little touching, but I did touch first. Then I made some supper for us both, like wives are supposed to do, once in a while. Mrs Harrison might be proud of me.
CHAPTER 20
‘Don’t snap at us, John. We’re all busy and you aren’t the only one with a head for God’s sake. You moody bastard,’ fondly said. ‘What’s the matter with you today? You drank too much, or something?’
‘Nope. I . . .’ Somehow he could never finish the sentences, tore his eyes from the blank sky of the windows and smiled. The lethargy was becoming overpowering. ‘. . . Only all . . . day, I haven’t been able to fathom this bloody message. Why didn’t she phone again?’
‘It’s that woman. A mogul. They don’t repeat themselves. But she is a relative and did say it was urgent. I didn’t ask why she couldn’t intervene, not wise to ask, you told me so. Accept what they say at face value and act on it, no other way; hope they’re wrong. You jus’ gotta go.’
He shuffled, awkward. ‘Not enough,’ he muttered, ‘not enough to justify . . .’ fumbled again, ‘. . . I mean, no screams, no yells, bruises. Simply innuendoes. Parents disbarring relatives from house, maybe all relatives a pain in the neck, often are. Mother neurotic, often is. Twentieth-century disease . . . enlarged groins, enlarged consciences . . . to say nothing of the expectations . . . what’s different?’
‘Nothing. As much as we usually get. Sort of message starts, nothing wrong and what there is I’m sure as hell not going to tell you. They’re all ambiguous, you know they are. Nobody says what they mean, quite; they put out signals, little screams for help, and that’s our strength, recognizing the code. What’s the matter? . . . Just because you didn’t get that bloody award. Well, we didn’t either. I thought you were bigger than that. OK. I’ll send someone else.’ John stirred, outraged.
‘Don’t be stupid. Of course I’ll go. Have you seen the address?’
‘What’s that got to do with it? I don’t suppose you could possibly give us some sort of report by tomorrow?’ she added, knowing she was pushing her luck. ‘That woman, you know. The complainant. Think of the funding.’
He wandered up the street, his favourite and yet most unfavourite street, later on the Monday evening. Or at least the hour felt late, technically well into daylight, but dark with the rainy cloud, full of threats; the sky was distended, releasing nothing, and the sun was dead. John felt little but a dull hatred pulsing against his temples as he plodded along one side of the perfectly maintained pavement, the sweeties in his pocket scratching against his thigh through the thin fabric of cotton, his right hand missing the usual plastic carrier of tins. Nothing in this street which was not subdued to man’s most prodigal taste: nothing strictly utilitarian at all. Proceeding in a westerly direction, looking left and right with his arms now linked behind his back like a policeman on patrol, he noted the cars. Mercedes, BMW, tiny new Renault, small enough for the wife’s runabout or a toy for the servant. Bastards. John knew this street so exactly from his daily passage, he was always surprised to notice more, disgusted himself by the ignorance which never read numbers and had never given him to understand that his destination was right next door to Mrs Harrison. He looked in the street for the familiar vagrant, saw no one guarding the cars, stopped short of the Harrison house. This was ridiculous, quite ridiculous.
All he could recall for the moment was that woman’s casual remarks about the affluence of them next door and the fat child of theirs he had once seen. Bitterness rose like bile, the heartburn of anger. Affluence, inexact anagram of flatulence, diminishes, ruins, desensitizes all those in possession, but above all else, protected them from evil, Amen. There could be nothing wrong with this house. He passed the Pearson Thorpes’ slowly. Lights in each window, no need to worry about the quarterly bills, not they, what with no one in sight but, sitting like a king, one grand and perfect Persian cat slightly above the level of his eye, fitting height for his majesty occupying the whole of a windowsill. The indifference of the cat basking in good fortune and obscene health stung John like a whip, bringing treacherous tears to his eyes while the animal neither blinked nor stirred under his scrutiny. A pedigree purring. John moved on.
The seven o’clock sky was even darker and those ominous trees flanking the large houses were respectfully still. Fifteen self-conscious steps (turning back only once to look at the cat), until he was level with another window affording a better view. Inside here, a glowing kitchen, the same place where he had once been surprised by a senior lady dressed in lace, sipping sherry while inviting him to bow to her regal wave. But currentl
y in her place, a small, bright, dark-haired boy with damson eyes, sitting in a high chair. Flowers on the table, big, fat, Michaelmas daisies. A man, so patently the father, cooked while the boy watched for the next meal, and a blonde woman was setting their places, her face turned half to the light and a frown of concentration marring the features. You get to look old by doing that, John heard his own jeering words: watch for the frown lines, lady. There was a door at the far end beyond, only partially in sight, and greenery visible through large French windows beside. The boy at the table swayed to the sound of some music, waving a spoon in time to an orchestra which John, mere onlooker, could not hear.
He could not see the colours or the elegance, only the distance between these and other lives. Sod them. Sod the informer as well as this mother and child waiting like baby birds with ever open mouths. Sod them all. Bastards. Filthy rich, plutocratic, patrician, sound-proofed against youth and age, bastards. Deliberately he leaned over the railings, not so much careless of being seen as indifferent to their indifference, spat into the well of the basement, twice. He could write the fucking report blindfold; could describe in words stinking with authenticity each detail of every magnificent floor of this house, borrowing details, dimly remembered but still exact, from Mrs Harrison’s accounts of the house next door. ‘All them stairs, Mr Mills,’ her words taking him from room to room. He looked back once more towards the cat, so sure of its own survival, imagined the blonde woman dressed in a fur coat. Threw the sweeties out of his pocket. Walked slowly and seething to an empty home.
The evening of the party posed all the normal problems. ‘What are you wearing?’ Monica was asking Jenny, suspiciously bright on the evening of Tuesday.
The Playroom Page 30
