‘Sadly, we’re here for a funeral this time. On Saturday. My aunt’s. She moved to the Cape from England in her twenties.’
Mia waited for a standard response: ‘Well, we hope you enjoy your stay in spite of the sad circumstances,’ or even, that peculiarly American form of sympathy, ‘We’re sorry for your loss.’ But the owner simply closed the registration book, straightened the pen on the desk and switched off the lamp. He was like a man in a neck brace, minus the neck brace, and Mia felt a cold charge of resentment explode somewhere within her.
His wife forced another smile. Her teeth were yellowy, almost see-through, their enamel worn down. ‘A take-out breakfast is available in the reception annex from 8 till 11.’ Then she turned to polish a copper lantern.
Outside, Felix shook his arms and head, as if a current had passed through him. ‘Was that The Earl?’
She grinned, ruffling his hair. ‘You said it, bunny rabbit. That was The Earl.’
*
Dan was the first to find the words. ‘Well, well, well.’
She warned him with her eyes not to laugh.
They were standing in the middle of a room into which was crammed two large four-posters, a nightstand, a playpen, a primitive air conditioner, two red leatherette armchairs, a desk and chair, a bar fridge, a bulky TV and two luggage rests.
‘Spider-webs!’ announced Felix, pointing to the crocheted canopies above the beds. Dust traps, thought Mia. On the wall by the apparently leaded window, a framed poster from Shakespeare in Love was in need of straightening. The window itself was covered by heavy burgundy curtains that matched the bedspreads.
Felix wrinkled his nose. ‘It smells in here.’
Mia shifted Rosie to her other hip. ‘It’s just a little musty.’ She switched off the air-conditioner and cranked open the window. But the curtains were on rigid hooks that wouldn’t move more than a couple of inches along the rail. Dan dropped the two cases he was carrying. ‘Not on the floor,’ she said. ‘The luggage-rests.’ Bedbugs. She’d heard it was an excellent year for bedbugs.
Felix was unzipping his Thomas the Tank Engine suitcase and pulling out his trunks and towel. Dan bumped through the room with the last of the luggage. ‘Good idea, squire.’
Felix tipped his head from side to side, baring his baby teeth. ‘Perfect relaxation morning, noon or night. Perfect relaxation morning, noon or night. Perfect–’
‘Okay, Felix.’ Dan threw him his arm-bands. ‘Thanks. We got it the first time.’
‘Do me a favour?’ she murmured. ‘Pull the key out of his back,’ and Dan smiled, the strains of the day draining from his face. Then he reached for his towel and snapped it across her bum. ‘Last one in is a–’
‘DEAD MAN!’ roared Felix.
They looked at each other and rolled their eyes. Felix giggled.
*
He and Dan went on ahead with the sunscreen. Mia located Rosie’s swimming cozzie and sun-hat, changed Rosie, then herself, mislaid her sunglasses, found them, forgot the key, then slipped it into the pocket of her camp-skirt. They’d get their swim. Then – the SUV being in the state it was – they’d order a take-away for supper. Later, with any luck, she and Dan would sit out under the stars with the duty-free and two Dixie paper-cups from the bathroom dispenser.
As she locked the door behind her, the golden light of early evening, the lush green lawns and the gaudy cheer of the azaleas dispelled the gloom of the room. Rosie tugged at her hair, twisting it impishly in her fingers. ‘Hello, sweetness. Are we going for a swim? Yes, we are!’ and she bounced her in her arms.
An elderly couple, both in powder-blue shorts and white cotton T-shirts, smiled broadly as they passed in the car park. ‘Can you wave, Rosie? Wave…’ Mia held up her hand for her. ‘Bye-Bye.’
‘Bye-Bye!’ sang the pair, their dentures gleaming.
The owner was out walking too, still wearing his invisible neck brace. From a distance, she watched him approach, his stride measured as he surveyed his earldom. He was something, she thought. While he gave the impression of looking into the middle distance, he was in fact sneaking sidelong glances at the cars in his car park; at the doors that opened and closed; at the extended family group that laughed by the barbeque pit. He wore a tan-coloured polo shirt buttoned up to his neck; khaki-coloured shorts, belted and crisply pressed; and brown sandals. Beside him, a lean black Doberman trotted without a lead.
She hoisted Rosie higher, nodding hello as they passed. He blinked in reply.
*
She could hear Felix – ‘Watch me, Dad! Watch me!’ – long before she saw him. The pool was surrounded on three sides by high pickets; the other side was bordered by a chain-link fence. A scattering of pink, white and purple sweat peas climbed up its iron links. She pressed Rosie’s nose to a blossom while, on the other side, Felix surfaced in the shallow end, spluttering. ‘Mum! Mum, watch me jump again!’
But Dan surprised him from the rear, scooping him up in his arms and hurling him into the air. Her son was a flash of orange arm-bands before he tumbled into the depths and bobbed up, grinning fiercely.
A plastic sign was nailed to the door of the enclosure. ‘Open 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. No unaccompanied children below the age of 16.’ The latch was high up, level with her eyes. Child-proof.
Inside, Felix thumped across the sundeck, streaming with water. His cheeks glowed. ‘Mum, mum! I can hold my head under water for eighty-six seconds! I just counted!’
She loved the sight of his little breasts that shook as he ran. In another year or less, all his baby fat would be gone. ‘You star! I’m really proud of you.’
‘But I don’t want to wear my arm bands any more.’
She peered out from under the brim of her hat. ‘Too bad, so sad.’
‘Are you coming in now?’
‘In a minute.’
‘I want you to pull me like you’re my horse. Just you and me.’
‘But sweetheart, Rosie wants to come in too.’
‘Leave her on a chair.’
‘No, Felix. Rosie is allowed to have fun too.’
‘She can watch us threeeee,’ he sang. He held his palms out for effect, as if he’d offered the obvious solution.
‘Rosie and I will have a dip in the shallow end. Then Daddy will take Rosie, and I’ll be your horse.’ She was relieved they had the pool to themselves.
‘Come on, Felix,’ his father called. ‘Show me how you do the Dog.’
But his face was clouding over. He kicked a stray pebble into the pool. ‘Dad, pick up Mum. Pick up Mum and throw her in the water!’
*
She saw it right away. A white credit card slip on top of the desk.
‘He was in our room.’
Dan looked up from the bag of wet towels. ‘Who was?’
‘The bloke.’
‘The Earl?’ asked Felix, his eyes wide.
She looked at Dan and nodded, sucking in her upper lip.
‘Didn’t he say he’d bring it to the room?’
‘Yes, but I assumed he meant when we were in it. He knew we were at the pool. I passed him with Rosie on our way over.’
‘Does it matter?’
‘Yes. He has no right to walk into our room just because he has keys.’ She looked beneath a curtain. ‘He closed the window and turned on the air-conditioner again.’
‘And what an air conditioner it is. The air it throws out must be twenty years old.’
‘But Dan!’ Her head felt tight; her eyes heavy. Now that they were back indoors, her damp swimsuit was cold. ‘He can’t come into our room and close our window just because he thinks the air conditioning should be on. Who knows what else he feels free to investigate?’ She slumped on the bed. Felix stared at her over the Spiderman colouring book he’d pulled from his case.
‘I’ll have a word.’ Dan kissed the top of the bridge of her nose. ‘I’ll take our passports over now and I’ll have a word.’
*
The grass was cool between her toes.
The air was balmy. And in the room behind them, the children were sleeping at last. She ran a finger across Dan’s forearm, enjoying the solid construction of bone, muscle and tendon.
He slapped a mosquito on his ankle. ‘I told his wife. She said she would pass on the message.’
‘And you believed her?’ But the whiskey was loosening her thoughts. She wanted to forget The Earl and Mrs Earl.
Dan stretched out in the canvas beach-chair and looked up. Overhead, the stars teemed. ‘Do you know what the sky reminds me of tonight, out here?’
She tipped her head back, letting the whiskey burn her throat.
‘That night years ago when we slept on the dunes, at the end of the boardwalk on – what’s it called? – Town Neck Beach?’
She turned an ear to the open window behind them and listened for a whimper from Rosie, or a burst of sleep-talk from Felix. But all was quiet. ‘Aunt Patricia was telling me the dunes lose a few feet every year.’
‘That year, thanks in part to us.’
‘We didn’t know any better.’
‘The fence was a bit of a clue.’
Her voice dropped to a whisper. ‘I can’t believe she’s gone.’
Somewhere beyond the 6A, a train moaned in the night. She loved the trains in the States; the way they mouthed their loneliness to the land. But now, now the whistling cry seemed to cut through her head, through her chest, whittling her down.
He reached for her fingers. ‘Seventy-nine ain’t bad.’
‘She wasn’t ready. She might have been seventy-nine, but until three months ago, death seemed as impossible to her as it does to us right now.’
He nodded. ‘I know.’
‘I always assumed that, when a person lived their full span, death brought some kind of natural closure; that it was like… like a frame around a picture. You might not see it during the illness and through the chaos of hospitals and sickbeds, but I always thought the frame would be there, after.’
He squeezed her hand. ‘She did well. All those talents. Her photography and the garden and her writing. God help the first dead person who tries to sell her on the idea of eternal rest.’
She swirled the whiskey in her paper cup. ‘She was so down, at the end. When I phoned her each day at the hospice, she couldn’t get her son out of her head. She’d never spoken of him to me in all my thirty-eight years, and suddenly she was telling me his name – Christopher – and his birthday, August the 5th, and how she'd tried to find him last year but there'd been no paper trail to follow.'
‘I thought you said she’d had him adopted.’
‘She did, but she’s convinced the doctor who supervised the orphanage in Lexington simply took him on as his own son; that a doctor had that sort of authority in small towns in those days. He and his wife couldn’t have children, and they liked Aunt Patricia. They got on. She even wondered afterwards if they were vetting her.’
‘I suppose it’s possible.’
‘She told me she managed to track down the doctor’s contact details a year ago; that she got up the nerve, phoned his house on August 5th and spoke to a man, the doctor’s son apparently, who sounded as if he were in his mid-forties. The right age. She was sure she was talking to Christopher. Can you imagine what that must have been like? Talking to Felix on his birthday after a lifetime apart. But of course, what could she say?’ Mia felt her tears coming. ‘I mean, I know I panicked when I was pregnant with Felix – I know I was sick at the thought that I’d never sculpt properly again – and I know it took much longer for me to–’
‘Sssh, Mia. Don’t do this again.’
‘But now, I couldn’t imagine. Dan, I just couldn’t imagine what it would be like, having to give him up in hospital. And you know, at the time – I never actually said this to you before – I wanted to.’ She searched for the whites of his eyes in the darkness. ‘Or a part of me did. I wanted to turn time back. I didn’t want there to be a Felix. I actually felt dead when I looked at him the first time.’ She blinked back the tears. ‘I did, Dan. I swear I did.’
He drained his cup and stared into the night. ‘You were post-natal. You were in a bad way.’
‘If I’d been on my own, and if someone had assured me it really was all for the best, I would have been relieved in that first fortnight to give him away. But there’s Aunt Patricia, who had no one and no choice in the matter, and she’s still pining for her baby boy every morning when she wakes up, even forty-five years later.’
‘Look.’ He pointed skyward. A star streaked above the treeline, its tail a surge of radiance.
She stared at the point where it burned itself out. ‘And even though her talents could only ever be hobbies, and even though there wasn't a man who stayed, and even though she'd lost her son, she was still so… so…’
‘Alive.’
‘Yes.’ She curled her feet beneath her in the chair. ‘We’re lucky.’ She trembled and pulled her jacket over her knees. ‘I’m lucky.’
*
When she opened her eyes to the smothering night, her spine was rigid. Her pulse boomed between her ears. She was sticky with cold sweat. She tried to calm herself, to talk her heart off the ledge of panic.
The room was airless, that was all. Dan snored lightly beside her; Felix breathed, fast and shallow, in the next bed.
But her heart still thudded in her chest. A palpitation snaked in her leg. She’d never known a room so dark. No streetlight edged through the curtains. No haze of moonlight softened the darkness. It seemed palpable; a substance, not an absence, and slick as tar. Her chest, her lungs, were full of it.
She clambered to her feet and groped the distance to the playpen. Rosie lay half on her stomach, half propped up on her knees, her white nappied bottom a small, dear beacon in the darkness.
She crept to the door, eased it open, then pulled on the screen door, desperate for it not to creak, and slipped outside. In the car park, next to their broken-down car, she gulped the night air until her heart stopped banging.
The whiskey, she thought. It was only the whiskey.
*
They slept late. No morning light spilled into the room to wake them. Dan got the kids dressed and out. When she emerged at last in her kimono, they were seated at a picnic table on the front lawn feasting on yogurts, muffins and slices of bright watermelon.
Felix sat at the table, holding a wide arc of green rind to his mouth. ‘Look, Dad! I’m happy. See? I’m happy.’
Dan rubbed her thigh as she sat down beside him. ‘I phoned. The local garage is sending the break-down truck.’
She flashed him a covert smile and leaned toward his ear. ‘Thank fuck for that.’
‘Mum!’ piped up Felix. ‘I’m happy. See?’
‘I’m glad, sweetheart.’ She reached for a pulpy red slice, took Rosie from Dan’s lap and nuzzled her neck. ‘Did The Earl let you use the phone?’
‘Mrs Earl did.’
‘Ah.’ She didn’t know why she wanted to know. Then, ‘Come on,’ she said to Felix. ‘Let’s go feed those ducks while Dad waits for the man from the garage.’ She turned. The Earl and his dog were striding past, on patrol again. His eyes darted their way.
She got to her feet and suddenly noticed Felix, suspended in mid-motion: his eyes were trained on The Earl’s receding back; his mouth was a watermelon-frown. And as she wrapped two muffins in napkins, she took a small, ludicrous comfort in the knowledge that Felix hated The Earl too, for her.
*
At the far edge of the lawns, the pond glimmered. Three ducks floated among the bright green algae, as still as decoys. A family of fat-bottomed geese waddled by on the muddy bank.
‘They walk like Rosie in her nappy!’ Felix declared, pleased by his powers of observation.
She lowered Rosie to the ground. The fence was as tall as Felix, but there were gaps, covered in chicken wire, between the wooden posts, where children could see through. On the opposite bank a bird-house squatted, the size of a garden shed. A path of duckboards r
an from its door through the mud down to the water’s edge.
‘Here, Felix, throw them this bit of muffin. Throw it far.’
He drew his arm back and cast the cakey piece over the fence. It sailed high, then dropped down on the other side, only inches away. The geese padded over quickly, their orange beaks scissoring the air. Felix laughed, hugging his tummy. Rosie turned her face up and grinned, gap-toothed, at Mia.
‘Watch me, Mum!’ Felix flung the next piece into the middle of the gaggle. ‘Bull’s eye!’
The geese honked, and Mia turned at the rumbling of tires in the drive behind. The recovery-truck was pulling up behind their rental car. She lifted Rosie onto her shoulders and reached into her pocket for the other muffin. ‘Here, Felix. You can feed the geese this one. I have to get dressed now and help Dad with the car.’
He nodded without looking up. ‘Goosey goosey gander,’ he sang to the geese, ‘where do you wander?’
He hadn’t learned the rest, as she recalled. His interest had always stopped at the lady’s chamber.
*
The bloke from the garage was down on his hands and knees. ‘See that?’
Dan got down and peered beneath the car. ‘See what?’
‘No water on the ground. I just poured in half a gallon, but I’m not seeing so much as a slow leak from the rad.’
The dentured couple, now sporting matching yellow shorts, walked by and waved. Mia and Rosie waved back.
‘So there’s no quick-fix, I’m afraid.’ The garage man – Buck, according to his badge – wiped his hands on his overalls. ‘I’ll have to tow her to Friendly’s.’
‘The rental company will collect it. They’re delivering our replacement tomorrow. It just leaves us rather stranded today.’
The New Uncanny Page 15
