Once or twice the woman glanced over her shoulder to see that I was following her. I heard her saying indistinctly that she was glad I’d come, that she’d been worried I might not come, that I might have changed my mind about coming... I was going to say I’d never thought of not coming, that I had nowhere else to go in the whole of England, no friends or relatives and only the prospect of staying in a bed-and-breakfast in Grimsby or sleeping in the back of an old hearse... but I nodded back at her and, ducking through the low branches of ash and silver birch, followed her slim, quick figure through the glade.
She was thirty-something, five or eight years older than me: a pixie-woman who’d dropped out of a tall, dark tree, all scuffed and smudged by twigs and moss and lichen. When we broke out of the shade and into the light of a lawn, when she turned to me again and said, gesturing with a sweep of her arm, ‘Let’s go in and I’ll get us a drink...’ a flicker of cloud ran the length of the building in front of me, so that it seemed to shudder as the shadow passed over it. Chalke House: an old hunting-lodge, chalky white and gently rounded like a slab of boulder which had tumbled from the ridge of the wolds and come to rest in the deep, wooded valley. I had time, before we stepped from the lawn and through the wide-open French windows, to look up at the house and see its curiously angled roofs, an eccentric parapet and a kind of tower with crumbling battlements. The shadow of the cloud crawled up and up the tower like a live thing and moved higher and higher across the woodland behind the house. For a second, there was a movement in the window of the tower, the flash of a white face pressed to the glass... and then I was inside, blinded by the darkness of a big, dusty living-room.
The curtains were drawn. In the gloom, she was a fragile, fey figure. She had the advantage, as I dropped my bag and tried to make out the shape and dimensions of the space around me, to press an ice-cold glass into my hand and then sit me down on a soft shabby sofa. One taste of the drink – a gin and tonic – and she was perched so close to me that our knees were almost touching... and she was opening the envelope I’d handed her, my CV and a couple of references, murmuring, ‘Borneo? How extraordinary...’ and then she was reading aloud, line after line, glancing at me from time to time to see if the impressive, glowing words matched the reality of the person who’d just arrived at her house...
Christopher Beal, a twenty-eight-year-old English teacher, six years in a government secondary school in a logging-town called Marudi, on the Baram river, Sarawak. The reality was me, a tousled ex-pat, jetlagged and a bit hung-over, whose hands shook a little and rattled the ice in the gin and tonic.
She smiled, a sudden snarl of pointed little teeth. It was an odd response to what I’d just told her, that I’d flown home at short notice because my father had had a stroke and moved into a nursing-home. ‘He’s been a monumental mason all his life,’ I was saying, ‘carving the names on headstones, re-carving the names on war-graves. That’s his car, he converted it into a workshop and...’
But she didn’t seem to be listening to me, and I realised that the snarly smile was directed past my face and over my shoulder. I glanced around, thinking that someone had come into the room and was standing silently behind me. But there was no one.
Her eyes flickered beyond me. The smile quivered and vanished from her mouth. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said. ‘I thought I heard... I mean, I’m sorry to hear about your father.’
She was herself again. She’d been distracted, she’d been elsewhere, somewhere in a dim corner of the dark room. She folded my papers and slipped them back into their envelope. ‘So, your father... now that he’s settled reasonably comfortably, and you’ll be able to go and visit him as often as you like, you can stay here for the summer and be a friend for Lawrence.’
She pulled herself together. A cliché, but that was what she did, she seemed to tug at the outermost corners of her concentration and draw them tightly in, excluding, shutting out, blinkering out anything else which might distract her from the reason I was there.
‘That’s what Lawrence needs,’ she said, ‘not a counsellor or an analyst – he’s had so many of those that we’ve lost count and none of them’s been any good – and not really a tutor, although that’s what I put on the advertisement. He needs someone nice and kind and patient, to be his friend, a kind of brother...’
Her voice tailed away. She swigged from her glass and then swirled the ice cubes round and round at the bottom. We both stood up. She was a head shorter than me, so she tilted her smudged, anxious little face up towards me. She dipped a piece of tissue into the ice-water in her glass and dabbed deftly at the scratches on my forehead. I could smell the gin on her breath and the scent of soap from her skin, as she cleaned my negligible wound. And at the same time she was whispering, ‘I don’t know how much you’ve heard about Lawrence. I mean, do you get the news out there, the newspapers? In any case, whatever you’ve read, whatever you’ve heard, just be a friend for him. Please, that’s all I need, that’s all he needs.’
She took me upstairs to meet Lawrence Lundy.
Chapter Three
‘HE LIVES IN the tower,’ she said.
On the first floor landing of the house, she beckoned me to follow her and disappeared into a narrow spiral staircase. It was cool and dark in there, just wide enough for one person to be going up or down, and the white-washed walls had dropped a powder as fine as talcum on every step. Her little body swayed above me, up and up, and her footsteps were almost silent, just a slip and a slither of friction on the velvet dust. I put out a hand to steady myself against the wall of the staircase, as it wound and wound around me, and I felt the dry powder on my fingertips – indeed, when my arm brushed the wall, the whiteness glimmered on the material of my shirt. It grew darker as we climbed further away from the landing below us, but then, all of a sudden, the woman reached up, pushed open an arched wooden doorway and a pale wash of daylight, clouded with chalky dust, flooded the staircase.
‘Lawrence,’ she called out, and then drew me up and into a big, sun-filled room. ‘Are you there, Lawrence? He’s here, the gentleman’s arrived...’
The boy turned to face us. He’d been standing at a window with a pair of binoculars pressed to his eyes, but he lowered them on a strap round his neck and crossed the room towards me.
He was as unlike his mother as any son could possibly be. Almost as tall as me, Lawrence Lundy was a sinewy, lanky fifteen-year-old with purple-black, mole-dark hair. His face, unusually narrow and gaunt for a teenage boy, was downy; at least, the light from the window from which he’d been staring shone on the down as he angled his face one way and another. His Adam’s apple bobbed and bulged as he said, ‘Hello,’ in a manly voice, and his handshake was bony. Beside him, his mother looked even smaller than she had before, a pantomime elf clutching the hand of a pantomime ogre. He was dusky-dark, his hair like a pelt, the bristle of his eyebrows and the gleam of his incipient whiskers... while the sunlight caught her bright quick colours as she looked from her son to me with an imploring smile, with the unmistakable plea in her eyes that we should straightaway like each other...
The boy seemed less interested in me than in the smudges on his mother’s face. He loomed over her, and, although she tried to fend him off with exasperated swipes of her hands, he feinted at her cheeks and her forehead with his long white fingers. The tower-room was a grand airy space, with wide windows on all four sides, and the views of the woodland valley, right up to the distant ridge of the wolds and further to a hazy, blue horizon, gave the sensation of being in the eyrie of some huge bird of prey. The windows were open, and a breeze was moving and tinkling dozens or even scores of model aircraft which hung from the rafters of the high ceiling... a hundred planes of different shapes and sizes and colours, a myriad squadron which swerved and banked in such a chill wind that it might have come all the way from the faraway coast of the North Sea. A door opened directly onto the odd parapet I’d glimpsed from the lawn – and just then, before I could comment on the unusual, mar
vellous room and interrupt the woman and her son in their teasing play, there was a sudden commotion...
An orange cat sprang from the parapet and into the room, holding a pigeon in its jaws.
The bird, a wood-pigeon which seemed to be as big as the cat itself, was beating and thrashing with all its strength, and yet the cat tiptoed between the three of us as though we weren’t there, sprang effortlessly from the floor onto the boy’s unmade bed and pressed the struggling creature deep into the rumpled sheets. In the few seconds it took for any of us to react, the pigeon fought itself out of the jaws of the cat and sculled across the bed, was pounced on and recaptured, shaken violently and pinioned...
The boy, Lawrence, took two long strides to his bed. His mother gave a little squeak, with both her hands pressed to her mouth. He took the cat by the scruff, lifted it from its prey and dropped it unceremoniously onto the floor. Straightaway he had the exhausted pigeon in a close, firm grip. Unable to move, it hissed and panted and stared around the room with bulging, red eyes. In another moment the boy had crossed to the open door, and before his mother could say more than, ‘No, Lawrence... I don’t think it can...’ he’d tossed the bird off the parapet and into mid-air.
‘Lawrence, no... it can’t...’ his mother said again, but it was too late.
Whether the boy had meant to rescue the pigeon by enabling it to flutter into the nearest tree or had simply dumped it out of the tower, it made no difference. He leaned over the parapet and chuckled hoarsely, a dry rasping sound in the back of his throat, ‘Go on, fly... go on, fly!’ I followed the woman outside, in time to see the bird falling and falling, beating one of its wings pathetically in a futile attempt to remain airborne, wheeling and tumbling until it landed upside down in a nettle-bed and sank into the undergrowth.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a flash of brilliant orange... the cat shot out of the tower-room and down the spiral staircase. A moment later, as the boy and his mother and I craned over the parapet, we saw the cat reappear far below us. It sprang out of the house, through the open French windows. It paused on the lawn, long enough to sense and locate the flutter and flap of the broken bird... it must have sensed, in the way that perhaps only implacable killers can do, that the pigeon was fatally crippled... and it strolled nonchalantly across the grass, head down, swaying its hips like a lioness, and slunk at last into the nettle-bed from which the sound of the fluttering was coming.
I was watching the boy, whose friend I was going to be. Lawrence Lundy. The name still meant nothing to me, although I’d seen my father almost apoplectic in his efforts to tell me where he’d heard it or read it before. Quite oblivious of me – indeed, he’d spoken only one word to me and barely glanced in my direction for more than a second or two – the boy now lifted the binoculars to his face and pointed them down to the spot where the bird had crash-landed, where the cat had disappeared.
He was holding his breath. Then he licked his lips and swallowed, so that the bulge in his throat rose and fell and was still again. The smile on his mouth was like a scar. I saw a prickling of tears in his mother’s eyes.
Chapter Four
I’D SEEN THE advertisement pinned up in a newsagent’s stall on Lincoln station.
I’d got off the train there to make the connection to Grimsby. With a few minutes to spare, I’d bought a newspaper and a chocolate bar and scanned the notice-board for the possibility of renting a bed-sitting-room or a cottage or even a caravan to use as my base while I was settling my father into his home. There was a hand-written note on water-marked paper, large, cursive letters from the broad nib of a fountain-pen: ‘Home tutor needed for a teenage boy, to live as part of the family in a comfortable, quiet, country house. Chalke House, 0392 0897.’ Straightaway, on an impulse, I’d used the handful of change the newsagent had given me to make the call from the telephone kiosk on the platform.
The Grimsby train was pulling in. The station loudspeaker started blaring. The call-box swallowed coin after coin. I shouted my name and the purpose of my call into the receiver and could barely make out the breathless voice of a woman suggesting I visit as soon as I could make it, even tomorrow, Monday, and some directions for me to find the house... ‘Lawrence, my son’s name is Lawrence Lundy, he’s fifteen and...’ The voice was so faint I could hardly hear it. My coins ran out. The train was going to leave. No more than a minute since I’d first read the advertisement, I was scrambling onto the train for Grimsby, with the dim notion of a job and even a home for the coming summer months.
‘YOU WERE VERY brave to come at all,’ the woman was saying.
Juliet Lundy, the imp from the tree-tops, had bathed and changed into a loose cotton robe. I’d showered in my own bathroom, adjoining a spare bedroom which looked across the dark brown pond and into the woodland. A cool twilit evening... the French windows were still open, and she was nestling on the sofa with her feet tucked underneath her. It was a large, untidy, comfortably dusty lounge; the inside of the house was covered with a powdering of chalky dust which sighed and sifted with every breath and movement of the building’s inhabitants. After a sherry, we’d eaten lamb sandwiches, apparently the leftovers from the previous day’s Sunday lunch, but delicious with a minty salad and a bottle of red wine.
Dusk gathered around the house. The darkness crept out of the surrounding woodland, folded onto the tower, the battlements, the obliquely angled roofs of Chalke House and all its softly rounded corners. The room was pleasantly gloomy. The only light was a shaded lamp in the corner and a paraffin lamp just outside, where the boy was sitting and reading.
‘I meant it when I said I didn’t think you’d turn up,’ the woman went on. ‘Yesterday, on the phone, you could hardly hear a word I was saying, and you were shouting over that awful loudspeaker. When you didn’t try to call again, I thought you weren’t interested. But you came, so thank you for that.’ She made a vague gesture of toasting me with her wine glass. ‘If you want to stay for a few days or a week and see what we’re like, that’s all I can really expect.’
I frowned, about to demur, genuinely puzzled by her insistence that I’d performed some unexpected feat of bravery by turning up at her house. She glanced across the room and caught the eye of her son. Lawrence had been poring over an old aviation magazine, he hadn’t seemed to be listening at all. But all of a sudden he prickled himself upright in his chair and was staring hard at his mother... as if he was assessing the implications of everything she was saying and was ready to stop her if she said something wrong. So now she pulled a face at him, turned back to me and tried a joke. ‘I mean, you hadn’t even got out of your car and I’d thrown a hammer at you. Not very welcoming, but not entirely my fault. It isn’t every day a hearse comes rolling into the garden...’
The boy bent over his magazine again. Earlier, I’d had some success with him. Through mouthfuls of cold lamb and mint jelly, in answer to my gentle questioning and encouraged to answer by his mother, he’d told me he’d been at school in Alford, not so far away from Chalke House; he hadn’t liked the teachers or his fellow pupils, he’d asked and then persuaded his mother to take him out of school. ‘Just before last Christmas,’ he was mumbling, ‘I made a mess of my exams, I failed them all, and then there was a bit of trouble with some other boys and I...’
She’d stopped him in mid-sentence, with a gentle hand on his arm. ‘Don’t try to eat and talk at the same time, dear. There’ll be plenty of opportunity for Christopher to get to know you properly.’
It was a mutual, reciprocal thing. They watched each other and they listened, almost breathless with waiting, waiting for a slip-up or a giveaway. That was what it sounded like, on that long, slow, first evening at Chalke House with Juliet and Lawrence Lundy. Now, leaving the lamp burning outside, the boy came in. I talked about Borneo, the weeks and months of an ex-patriate teacher in a small town in Sarawak, the kind of boys and girls I was teaching, their hopes and expectations, their lifestyle, their lives... Another bottle of wine, the windows w
ide open on a cool, black night, the wind in the high trees and the bubbling call of a tawny owl... and as I talked a little more, the woman and her son sat side by side on their sofa and sank deeper into the soft, shabby cushions.
They wanted me to talk. And I started to understand why. Not because they were fascinated or even mildly intrigued by my descriptions of another world so many thousands of miles away, but because it saved them from talking. They could relax. They didn’t have to guard what each other was saying. Whatever secrets they were keeping from me – and I kept seeing, from time to time on the blank screen of my mind, an image of my father’s tormented face, the gleam of fear in his eyes as he scoured his memory for the meaning of the name I’d given him – while I was talking they were safe in their own silence.
I was suddenly very tired. A cockchafer whirred through the window and butted noisily against the lampshade in the corner of the room. For a moment, my mouth was ready to begin a sensational account of the bugs and beetles, snakes and crocodiles I’d encountered along the banks of the Baram river, but my head was too weary. The boy was watching the cockchafer, his mouth curiously agape. The lamplight accentuated the unusual swarthiness of his face. He looked somehow nocturnal. He was scenting the air, tasting it, as though the beetle had brought the spirit of the night into the house. Indeed, he opened his mouth and his tongue shone with saliva, as if he might snap at the insect and swallow it down. His eyes gleamed as he followed its erratic, bumbling flight, as it bashed and buzzed around the room and back to the inescapable lure of the lamp.
The Waking That Kills Page 2
