by Daisy Waugh
‘Hmm,’ she says, ‘I’m not sure I like the sound of this…’
63
He has never, in sixty-three years of living in the village of Fiddleford, ventured to the other end of the Old Rectory’s drive. Today, clutching the little green jersey, muttering and coughing as he whirrs along the smooth, shiny-new tarmac, Russell Guppy does so for the first time. He hasn’t the slightest interest in what he might find down here, so long as there is a door. And a Mr and Mrs Adams on the other side of it.
Mrs Adams is still in the television room. She has read the first twenty pages of Scarlett and Kitty’s book and Oliver Adams has at last spotted some of the many insulting similarities between himself and the Adam Oliver in the story. He is puffed up with rage; Geraldine has called for Clive but had no response and they seriously need to bring him in on this. Action will have to be taken.
‘I’ve always hated Kitty Mozely,’ Ollie spits. ‘And I hate her spazzer-fatso-gay daughter.’
Geraldine is saved from reprimanding him for that by the sound of the doorbell. She leaps to her feet.
‘Oi! Mother,’ he shouts after her. ‘I’m still sitting here, you know. So it still counts. As long as I’m sitting here I’m still counting minutes. So you’d better cough up!’
She strides out through the hall, finger still marking page twenty-one in the book, legal mind churning. After all the help she’s given Kitty over the years, it seems incredible. It does. And they’ll sue, of course. They’ll sue her for every penny. They’ll ban publication. Nobody makes a public mockery of her baby boy. Nobody. She’ll make Kitty Mozely pay for this…
Geraldine peers through the frosted glass at the figure on the porch, glimpses Russell Guppy muttering and coughing, and feels sure she ought to recognise him. He looks familiar and yet not; she is distracted, of course, not just by her plans for Kitty, but by his enormous, state-of-the-art wheelchair.
‘Hello!’ she says, hysterically warm (because of the wheelchair). It’s actually a funny time for a wheelchair to call, it occurs to her. Past dusk on a weekday evening. Perhaps it – he – perhaps he saw Clive on the television. Perhaps he’s in urgent need of some Adams Family Practice legal advice. Geraldine is not, she reminds herself, one to make assumptions about disabled people. They aren’t necessarily all broke.
‘Well, come in! Come-in-come-in!’ she cries. ‘What can I do for you? Can I get you some…’ She stands back to allow him in. He looks grey…blue-grey…yellow-green-grey when the hall light falls on him fully. She’s never seen anyone so frail, so lacking in legs, so—‘Maybe some hot milk?’
‘Hot milk?’
‘Sorry. Medicine. Oh, fuck. Excuse my French. Medicine! What am I talking about?’ She laughs, casts around for help. Fails to find any. ‘A drink! Would you like a drink? I’m afraid Clive’s on the phone.’ She wrinkles her nose. ‘Bit of a busy time! Perhaps you saw him on the news this evening?’
‘That,’ says Russell Guppy, ‘is what I come to see you about.’
She smiles. She arches one of her fine eyebrows. ‘Oh, yes?’ she says. ‘Tell me more!’
‘My name,’ he pauses to cough, ‘is Russell Guppy.’
‘Russell Guppy! Well, of course it is! I know that! How lovely to meet you at last. I’ve heard so much about you.’ He’s eyeing her drily, apparently untroubled by the need to blink, and clearly unmoved by the warmth of her welcome. She finds it a little disconcerting. ‘Ollie, baby,’ she calls. ‘Ollie, dear? Come and say hello to this nice gentleman.’ But Ollie has already returned to his Nintendo. He ignores her – as she assumed he would. ‘Well, anyway. Come on in. We’ll go into the parlour, shall we? I’m sure Clive will join us in a minute…Can you manage?’
It’s not until they are both settled opposite one another, and Geraldine has adjusted the White House furniture to accommodate his wheelchair, and has handed him the requested tumbler of whisky and ice, that she notices the little green pullover on his lap, with the familiar-looking label peeping out at the neckline.
‘Oh!’ she says, staring at it. ‘Isn’t that—Good Lord!’
‘That’s what I come about, Geraldine. That and the telly.’
Geraldine? A bit fresh, she thinks. Nevertheless. Big smile. Moving on. ‘Russell – may I call you Russell?’
‘You may,’ he says solemnly, taking a gulp of whisky. Nothing like a free drink. Russell Guppy doesn’t get out more than once a year these days and just now, before the business begins, the parlour’s soft white light and the smell of flowers and the chinkety-clink of ice in the heavy crystal tumbler…Makes him wonder if he’s finally made it to heaven. He smiles, an unusually happy smile. But the smile makes him cough, which brings him quickly back down to earth. It is a few moments before he recovers.
Geraldine asks if she can get him water but doesn’t quite move to fetch it. She’s more intrigued by the question of the small green jersey (Brora, cashmere) and how it found its way on to Russell Guppy’s lap. She bought it for Ollie the last time she was in London, and at vast expense: Brora cashmere does not come cheap. Seeing it there, in its raggedy heap, she realises he hasn’t worn it for weeks. Not surprisingly perhaps, since it is midsummer. She’d forgotten all about it.
‘Do you mind my asking,’ she says, as soon as Russell Guppy has recovered, ‘only I think that little jersey belongs to my son. Could I—’
Uncle Russell hands it to her. It is damp and dirty, and as it passes between them they are both hit with the unmistakable stench of petrol.
‘Goodness!’ she says, delicately holding it out, taking care not to let it touch the sofa. ‘Well, it is Ollie’s. Certainly. We’ve been missing it…He’ll be delighted.’ She folds it neatly on to her lap, pats it, and beams at Russell Guppy. What a lonely man he must be, she thinks, to come all this way for the sake of a child’s dirty jersey. Just because he’s seen Clive on the telly. ‘Thank you. Really kind of you.’ She peers at him curiously, and for a moment her heart swells with honest pity. ‘Russell,’ she says warmly. ‘You’ve come all this way. Would you like to stay for supper?’
Just then they hear Clive striding across the hall towards them. ‘That was the rector, Geraldine,’ he’s saying. ‘Of course he’s mad keen to cool this thing down. He says the Diocesan Council are coming down on him and he wants to bring about some sort of concord sans resorting to the courts, hohum. Needless to say I told him—Oh.’ He stops. ‘Who are you?’
‘Clive, darling,’ she says, standing up like a nervous bird, stepping towards him. ‘I was calling you. Where’ve you been? We desperately need to talk.’ She leans across, murmurs into his ear. ‘Seriously. You’re not going to like it. Kitty’s gone too far this time.’
‘What’s that?’ Clive stares absently past his wife, directly at the wheelchair. At his leg stumps. ‘Sorry,’ he says to them. ‘Have we met?’
‘Oh! And this is Russell Guppy,’ says Geraldine, quickly remembering herself. ‘Sorry! Dane’s uncle. He’s terribly kind. He’s actually brought Ollie’s jumper back. The lovely green cashmere from Brora. Do you remember it?’
‘What?’
‘Well, anyway. You can’t imagine how grateful I am. I’ve, er, actually I’ve just asked him to supper.’ She sounds a little surprised by the fact.
‘Oh,’ Clive says, and immediately starts backing out of the room. ‘Well, I’ve got a hell of a lot of calls I need to make. Pleasure to meet you, Mr Guppy. Geraldine,’ he nods at her. ‘Catch you later.’
‘But wouldn’t you care to know, Mr Adams,’ demands Russell Guppy, eyeing his host, ‘exactly where I found it?’
‘Found what?’
‘The lovely green…cashmere from Bro…ra, Mr Adams.’
Clive pauses, shrugs, flashes one of his lawyerly smiles. ‘Well, certainly. If you would like to tell me, Mr Guppy. Of course.’
Russell Guppy leans forward in his enormous chair. There is an unmistakable gleam in his eye as he does so – and for the first time, the Adams Family Practice sen
ses danger. ‘I found it,’ he says, and begins to cough…
Clive and Geraldine flick a glance at one another. They wait.
He continues to cough. Pauses. Takes a slurp of whisky, looks for a moment as if he’s about to disintegrate into yet further paroxysms, but manages somehow to control himself. ‘I found it in my shed…’ He looks from one to the other, but neither reacts. ‘I found it,’ he says again, ‘in my garden shed…Right there where I keeps my petrol cans…’
‘Ahhh!’ says Geraldine. Her tinkly laugh sounds shrill. ‘Well, that explains the smell of petrol, then, doesn’t it? How curious!’
‘Not really,’ says Russell Guppy.
But Geraldine doesn’t seem to hear him. ‘Extraordinary! I wonder how it found its way there?’
Clive says nothing. He has his eyes fixed on Russell Guppy, and there is a small muscle pumping away at the emaciated jaw.
Russell Guppy watches them, back and forth, back and forth. Silence. Slowly he raises his hand. He points at Clive. ‘And you know when your lad put it there, don’t you?’
‘I think not,’ says Clive with a cool, cold smile. ‘Really, Mr Guppy. You’re talking Latvian, as far as I’m concerned. How could I possibly know?’
‘Because that’s about the time he came back here, isn’t it? All scruffy and no sweater, and all stinky with smoke and petrol. What did he do, I wonder…Run upstairs and…bathe ’imself?’ He smiles. ‘A strange thing…for a young lad to do. Wouldn’t…you say?’
‘Really, Russell.’ Geraldine laughs; the same neurotic tinkle, only shriller. ‘Really, Russell…Clive?’
He ignores her. ‘I’m not sure, Mr Guppy, that I understand what you’re getting at.’
‘’Cause I was watching the little bugger…Worse luck on you. Telly was broken.’
‘Was it? Well, now, that’s fascinating,’ Clive says rudely. ‘The telly was broken!’
But the sarcasm is lost on Russell Guppy. Or he doesn’t react to it. ‘That petrol can was too heavy for him. So he tipped half on ’em out in the ground in my shed…see? He leaves his sweater where he drops it…The way…lads will, eh, Geraldine?…And in all the…excitement…he forgot all about coming back for ’im after. But I didn’t.’ He laughs. The laugh becomes a choke. Clive and Geraldine watch him, the same wicked thought flitting through both their minds.
But he doesn’t choke to death right there in front of them. He straightens up and continues. He says, ‘I watched him…lugging the thing over the road, watched him pouring it this way and that and…this way and…that.’ Once again he leans forward in his chair. ‘Geraldine. Mr Adams. I watched your boy striking the match…And there ain’t no way round that fact. So you’d better get yourselves accustomised to it.’
‘Liar!’ It’s Geraldine, sprung forward. ‘How dare you come to my house in your fucking wheelchair, you – legless little shit—’
Clive steps across, taps her gently on the arm. ‘You’re being hysterical, Geraldine,’ he murmurs. Very cold. Very controlled.
‘But we all know—’ She laughs, wild laughter (no tension in it now). ‘Tell him, Clive. Everyone knows! Ollie has nothing to do with the fucking fire! It was Dane!’
‘Of course it was,’ Clive mutters soothingly, his thin hand gripping her arm. ‘Of course it was. Shhhh.’
‘Dane, was it?’ says Uncle Russell. ‘So why are you defending him?’ he asks. ‘If you’re so sure he done it? Which he didn’t, by the way, as I knows.’
‘We’re defending his right to an education.’
‘Except he’s getting one, isn’t he? The Flynn girl’s teaching him. She’s been having him round every evening.’
They didn’t know that. Aren’t pleased to hear it, either. ‘We’re defending his right to an education,’ amends Clive, ‘without enforced segregation or isolation from his peers. Guilty or not, Dane Guppy has a basic and inalienable human right to be taught alongside children of his own age. Not at some – idealistic young woman’s kitchen table, but in a classroom. At a school. And I intend to prove that. I intend to make history proving that.’
Uncle Russell chuckles. ‘Except he can’t go in a classroom, can ’e? ’Cause your son went an’ burnt it down.’
‘He did not!’ yells Geraldine. Clive tightens his grip on her arm and she winces distractedly, barely noticing it.
‘That sweater’s been in my shed ever since the morning of the fire. And frankly, Mr Adams, I wouldn’t have done nothing about it…It’s only when I see them…’ His face contorts so much it triggers another coughing fit. ‘It’s when I see them pricks being saintified on my television set – sitting on their sofa like they own the fucking world. That’s when I says to myself, That’s enough…Enough’s Enough! I’m not having no more of that!’
A silence falls. Clive and Geraldine are struggling. They can’t quite bring themselves to look at each other – because inside them both there have always been tiny, secret whispers of suspicion, unacknowledged, never mentioned, not to themselves – certainly not to one another. Ollie had emerged after the vicar’s drinks party that day, with a clean set of clothes and wet hair and no explanation as to where he’d been all morning. It was Ollie and his little pack of friends who, days later, had made the great discovery of the petrol can, half-buried under brambles in the neighbouring field. It had been Ollie who rolled the can triumphantly back into the playground.
Clive says, quietly, ‘Mr Guppy. What is it, exactly, that you want from us?’
‘I already told you what I want. I want them ugly pricks taken off my TV.’
Clive releases his wife. ‘I’m not certain I understand. You want—’ A gurgle of laughter escapes him. ‘Excuse me—’
‘I’m not being funny, Mr Adams.’
‘No, of course not. I’m just – I’m sorry, I’m just struggling to understand. You’ve come all this way not because your nephew Dane may have been the victim of some miscarriage of justice, but because you want—’
‘I want them ugly pricks off of my TV! And if I so much as peep ’em there,’ another bout of hacking, angry coughs, ‘I’m taking that sweater and I’m going to the police.’
64
Mr and Mrs Ian Guppy had gone next door to Ian’s brother’s place to watch themselves on the telly that night, so they could be certain to get it all on tape at home. With Dane gone, they weren’t sure how to watch something and video it at the same time, and they didn’t want to take any risks.
So they all squidged in together, cups of tea and ashtrays on the Mrs Guppys’ laps as per usual, and cans of cider for the men. At the end, after Mrs Guppy’s tearful bit, and the clever topping-and-tailing from Clive, there was a stunned, embarrassed silence. Nobody knew quite what to say. And so, to avoid having to say anything at all, the Guppy brother, who knew better how to work his video player, leant forward, rewound, and played the whole thing again.
They do this several times, maybe four or five, without anyone advancing any kind of comment. The brother is leaning forward to rewind yet again when his wife turns to Mrs Ian Guppy, wedged beside her on the leather sofa. She lays a hand on her thigh.
‘Marian!’ she says softly. ‘That were beautiful.’ Which three words are probably the most beautiful, gentle, honest words Marian Guppy has had addressed to her in her life.
Marian, startled, and – extraordinarily – on the brink of tears yet again, can feel a sweat of shame rising. She can feel it on her forehead, on her cheeks, on her tremendous thighs. She can feel it itching as it mingles with the talcum powder in her hair. ‘Well,’ she growls, with a whisper of a smile, and staring through burning eyes at her fat, fat hands, ‘we had to give them cameras somethin’ showy, didn’um?’
‘That’s right,’ says her husband with a shifty laugh. But he, too, is looking at his Marian a little differently. ‘Mum’s the werrd,’ he declares brightly. ‘Everyone needs a mum like Marian!’
‘Mum! Mum!…MOTHER! It’s…Tracey!’ Nobody moves. ‘Mother, please…I need you.
’ Nobody speaks. ‘I saw you talking…on the telly…’ They all hear her slumping on to her parents’ porch. And then nothing…A soft sound, animal-like, some cross between a sigh and a moan, something filled with despair.
Mrs Ian Guppy looks at none of them. She flushes with emotion: with anger, possibly, embarrassment, almost certainly, but most of all, with hope.
She hauls herself up from the sofa. ‘’Scuse me,’ she says.
The three Guppys left behind sit quite still, listening. They hear Mrs Ian Guppy thumping over the tarmac. They hear Tracey’s sudden silence and then nothing…Crying again – but it’s quieter, more subdued – and then voices, also subdued, and the opening and closing of the other front door. Ian Guppy tiptoes to the window. His wife has taken Tracey back into the house.
65
Macklan has searched the village for Tracey; he has searched everywhere he thinks she might feasibly be hiding. Tracey doesn’t drive, and the bus doesn’t come to Lamsbury after seven o’clock. Nobody’s seen her anywhere. He’s beginning to worry.
At ten o’clock he finds himself lingering at the bottom of the path leading to Russell Guppy’s bungalow, leaning against a tree and smoking a cigarette – hidden from view. He hears the whirring of the Guppy wheelchair and listens out for voices. But there are no voices. It’s only as the chair draws up in front of him that he notices the light-footed, tight-lipped Clive Adams walking alongside it.
‘Tracey’s not here yet, Mr Adams. So you better push me up the path yourself,’ Russell Guppy wheezes. ‘Chair can’t do it on ’is own.’
Mutely – oddly submissively, Macklan thinks – Clive Adams pulls his hands from his suit-trouser pockets and prepares to take hold of the wheelchair. Macklan flicks his cigarette to the ground and steps out towards them. His silhouette looms in the darkness – tall and powerful, just like his father. Clive screams.
‘Not to worry,’ Macklan says. ‘It’s all right, Clive. Only me.’
‘You!’ says Uncle Russell. ‘Where’s Tracey?’
