The One and Only

by Francis King

  When she returned – Tim was still sulky at having had to drive the hired car to the hospital – it was first to tell Bob and me that she had dropped ‘the poor little thing’ off at ‘that squalid little hovel of theirs by the abattoir’ and then to go into the kitchen to tell Maria to go home too. She would herself prepare the evening meal, she announced.

  This she did, in the highest of spirits, warbling ‘Funicolì, funicolà’ as she rushed about the task.

  ‘Though I say it myself, I really do think that I’m a better cook – or, at least, a more imaginative cook – than our dear old Maria,’ she boasted, with justifiable pride, when we had eventually sat down to the meal.

  ‘You’re a marvel,’ Tim said.

  And, for that day at least, it was true.

  There were other such ‘good’ days; or, if not good days, then good hours or even good moments. But even as I was thinking: Dear old Ma, or She’s not really all that bad, she would perform some action so stupid, so selfish or so cruel, that, in a fury, I would tell myself: We must do It, we must!’ Soon, soon, soon! Why the hell are we waiting?

  These abrupt shifts in her behaviour and in my attitude to her paralleled the no less abrupt shifts in the weather. From the terrace one would look down on the lake, serene beneath the bluest of skies. Then, in a few minutes, huge, leaden clouds would crowd up over the horizon, a vicious wind would claw at the surface of the water, and a storm would explode around us, in thunder and torrents of rain.

  Such a storm occurred on our last day in Bellagio. We had scarcely stepped off the vaporetto from Cadenabbia than we had to race for shelter under the awning of a hairdresser’s, which Ma had disdained ever to patronise, preferring to go to Como, or, on one occasion, to Milan. There were, as always, a number of small sailing boats, rowing boats and motor boats out on the lake. To our horror we all at once saw that one of the sailing boats, as though some invisible giant’s hand had plucked at it, had capsized. ‘Oh, my God!’ Ma screeched, putting her hands to her cheeks. Motor boats careered to the rescue. People rushed out from houses, shops and cafés and, unheeding of the deluge, lined the shore. Bob and I joined them, leaving Ma and Tim still beneath the awning. Soon both of us were soaked.

  When, later, we heard that two of the three people, all French teenagers, on the boat had been drowned, the first thought that came to me was: Why couldn’t the storm have happened yesterday afternoon? Tim had then persuaded Ma to go out in a sailing boat with him. Like Bob, Ma hated the water and could swim only with an effortful and clumsy breast-stroke.

  Suddenly, one last memory of those last days in Bellagio comes back to me.

  The night was extraordinarily humid and I had been lying awake, wishing for Bob beside me and wondering whether to venture into his room at so late an hour. The last time that I had taken the initiative in that way, he had been furious, first shouting: ‘No, no, no!’ and then, when I had edged nearer and nearer to his bed and had eventually put out a hand, yelling: ‘Oh, fuck off! Fuck – bloody – off!’

  Undecided, I clambered off my bed and crossed over to the open window. A mist was rising off the lake, so that I could see only the houses immediately beneath me, their outlines becoming increasingly nebulous and at last vanishing as they receded on either side of the hoop of the shore. Then, all at once, I realised that there was someone out there, seated on the low wall which separated the terrace from the garden failing away below it. I could see the glow of a cigarette, I could make out a humped shape.

  I peered, eyes screwed up.

  It was Ma! What on earth was she doing out in the garden so long after we had all gone to bed?

  On an impulse I pulled on my dressing-gown and, barefoot, tiptoed down the stairs, through the sitting-room, still reeking of stale cigarette smoke, and out on to the terrace.

  ‘Ma! What are you doing here?’

  She put a finger to her lips. ‘Sh!’ Then she plucked what was left of her cigarette out of its amber holder and flung it over the terrace into the garden below.

  ‘I couldn’t sleep either,’ I whispered, perching myself on the wall beside her.

  With amazement, I now noticed that her cheeks were glistening with tears.

  ‘What’s the matter? Has something upset you?’

  She only sighed, turning her head away from me.

  ‘Ma! What is it?’

  She bent over to scratch at a bare ankle. No doubt one of the mosquitoes which infested the garden at night had bitten her. Then, still bent over, she said: ‘Oh, I don’t know. It’s all so hopeless really. He says he loves me, he constantly says he loves me. But … but,’ she repeated. She gave a little laugh. ‘Why does there always have to be a but?’

  ‘Perhaps he’s not really right for you,’ I ventured.

  ‘Of course he isn’t right for me. But what am I to do, darling?’ She put a hand over mine. ‘You’re too young to understand an infatuation. That’s the problem, you see. Your poor old Ma is well and truly infatuated.’ Her hand now gripped mine. ‘There’s no way out. None that I can see. I’m just – just mad about him. The One and Only.’ At that she leapt to her feet. ‘Sorry, darling. I shouldn’t unload my troubles on to you. It’s just that for some reason I all at once began to feel blue. It’s no fun for a woman when she begins to get old.’

  ‘You’re not old, Ma.’

  ‘Oh, yes, I am! I am! To him I am. Ancient. As old as the hills.’

  At that, without another word, she slipped away from me, entered the drawing-room, vanished.

  I sat on, as the mist, clammy and smelling of decay, crept higher and higher. Suddenly I was pierced with a feeling of sorrow: for her, above all for her, but also for Dad, dead now, and yes, for myself, for myself too, although I could not think why.

  Chapter Thirty Five

  In the dining-car, Ma was suddenly taken ill. She had been talking vivaciously; then, all at once, she put a hand first to her chest and immediately afterwards to her mouth. She gulped, jumped up from the table and rushed out.

  Tim got reluctantly to his feet. ‘What’s the matter with her?’

  Bob went on carefully buttering a roll.

  I too now got up from my seat. ‘Perhaps I’d better go and see,’ I felt, at one and the same moment, a sickening terror and a wild joy. These emotions were accompanied by a strange visual hallucination. Everything on the table – the bottles of Orvieto and San Pellegrino, the glasses, the plates, the vase and the flowers in the vase – seemed to be pulsating, as I stared down at them, in time to the ever-increasing speed of my heartbeats. For a moment I thought that I was about to pass out.

  ‘No, no. I’ll go,’ Tim took a pace and then turned: ‘You might ask the waiter to keep my food hot.’ He always hated lukewarm food.

  I stared at Bob, willing him to acknowledge responsibility for what had taken place; but for a long time, staring out of the window at the darkening countryside, he would not meet my gaze. Then he turned: ‘Soon we’ll be going through the tunnel again. I found that tremendously exciting the last time. I think it was the most exciting thing of all on this holiday.’

  ‘I hope Ma’s all right,’ Once again I gazed intently at him and once again he did not return my gaze. I gave a nervous giggle. I put out a hand. I all but touched his, resting on the table between us.

  Still staring out of the window, he shrugged. ‘Something she’s eaten must have disagreed with her.’

  Ma later described that journey as ‘hell, sheer hell’. All that night, as we crossed Switzerland and then entered France, she was horribly ill. Still weighed down by dread and yet fizzing with excitement – how could two such contradictory emotions have existed side by side? – I repeatedly made the journey down the swaying train from the hard class to the first class, where she and Tim were once again sharing a sleeper. Somehow the guard had located a French doctor; but, sleepy and ill-tempered, he was of little use. Wrinkling his nose, no doubt in distaste at the nauseating stench of vomit in the little sleeping-car, he said: �
��Maybe she eats something not good. Soon she will be better. She must drink water, water, much water,’ Ought we to pay him? But he had gone before I could put the question to Tim, who brushed it aside – ‘No need to pay him for some perfectly useless advice.’

  Meanwhile, rigid in his seat, his head thrown back and his eyes shut, Bob slept through all my to-ings and fro-ings. By dawn Ma was at last better. Face pale, lipstick smudged and sweat beading her forehead, she lay out sleeping on the bunk. Her breathing was effortful.

  ‘She seems to be recovering,’ Tim said with a sigh. ‘At last. I’m utterly whacked!’

  Once again I plunged into an abyss of disappointment. ‘ What do you think upset her? We were all eating the same things.’ Nothing that I said must alert him to the possibility that Bob had been responsible.

  He shrugged. ‘Who can say? A fly settles on one piece of meat and not on another. That’s often how it happens.’

  When I returned to our carriage, feeling sweaty and disorientated and reeling with fatigue, Bob was awake. He smiled at me, rubbing the stubble on his chin; then he yawned. ‘So? How is she? Still alive?’

  ‘She seems to be better. But it was a really ghastly night.’ I shrugged, pulled a face, stared intently at him. He did not respond. For a while we sat silent, facing each other, with people still asleep on either side of us. Then I said: ‘Come out into the corridor for a moment.’

  ‘Why? What the hell?’

  ‘Come out.’ I felt my heartbeats fluttering in my fingertips.

  He followed me out of the carriage. Once again he yawned, not bothering to raise a hand to his mouth. He edged over to the window and squinted out at the landscape now beginning to define itself in the first opaque, grey light of dawn.

  ‘Bob, you must tell me. Did you have anything to do with Ma’s illness?’ Now my heartbeats were also hammering in my temples.

  ‘I? I? Did you?’

  ‘Tell me, Bob. If you did …’ I smiled at him in complicity and love. ‘Well, if you did …’

  He laughed, throwing back his head. Then he repeated what he had said to me on that previous occasion: ‘Thoughts have power. Dreams have power. Wishes have power.’

  With that he turned away from me and re-entered the carriage.

  Chapter Thirty Six

  There was still a week to go before our return to school. It seemed only reasonable and only kind that for that period we should ask Bob to stay with us in the Campden Hill Square house; but Ma would have none of it. ‘No, I’m sorry,’ she had said in Bellagio, when I had raised the subject with her. ‘I’ve had enough of him. He’s so grubby and so gauche. Terribly unappealing. If he were a little more sortable, I might feel differently.’

  ‘But, Ma, he’s got nowhere to go!’

  ‘What about that holiday home in Worthing or Hastings or wherever it is?’

  ‘He hates it there.’

  ‘Too bad. I can’t be blamed for that. It’s his parents’ responsibility, not mine.’ She stared into my face. ‘It’s no use scowling like that. You’ve no idea what he’s cost me. I really do think that those parents of his could have at least paid his fare. And the amount he ate! Even worse than you.’

  ‘Tim ate quite as much as we did.’

  Ma ignored that. ‘I’ll have to put through a long-distance call to those holiday-home people. Ask him if he has the number or at least an address. If they can’t take him, I’ll have to get on to the school. He’ll just have to arrive there a week early.’

  Now Bob and I were spending our last everting together. Ma had finally agreed that he could spend the night with us in Campden Hill Square before travelling on, by an early train, to Bexhill.

  We were alone, eating our supper in the kitchen. Ma and Tim had gone out to a party given by one of Tim’s actor friends and, due to a misunderstanding, none of the staff would be back until the morning.

  ‘I hate cold tongue.’

  ‘Well, have some cold ham then.’ I held out the plate. He sighed, taking it from me. ‘I suppose I must eat something. This is as putrid as supper at school. Surely he could have done us better.’ It was Tim who had gone out to a local delicatessen to buy us our food.

  ‘He certainly would have done if he’d been buying for himself.’

  ‘Smoked salmon,’ Bob said.

  ‘Caviare.’

  ‘Pâté de foie gras.’

  We both burst into laughter.

  For a moment I had forgotten the car crash and Ma’s illness on the train; or, if I had not forgotten them, I had pushed them out of my consciousness. I had also pushed out of my consciousness those increasingly frequent times when I had brooded on a world without Ma, either thinking: We could do It, we could do It!, or willing Bob to do It.

  ‘I’m sorry you can’t stay. I did try. But you know what Ma’s like. Terribly obstinate.’

  ‘Once a bitch, always a bitch. Well, it doesn’t really matter. At least I’ll see Jeanette.’ This was the eleven-year-old girl at the summer school. ‘Yes, I rather look forward to that.’ He mused, smiling to himself. Then he looked up: ‘But I’ll miss you. In your own way, you’re quite as good as Jeanette.’

  ‘Oh, shut up!’

  He laughed. ‘Why do you have to be so embarrassed and ashamed? You don’t think what we did was wrong, do you? Just a bit of fun. We’re not queer, for God’s sake. Variety is the spice of life – isn’t that what they say?’

  I munched on some ham. Then I leaned across the table to him. ‘We’ll still be friends at school, won’t we?’ I surprised myself with the question. Why shouldn’t we be? What did I fear?

  ‘I should think so. Why not? We’re totally unlike each other, in every possible way. But …’ He raised his shoulders. ‘ The attraction of opposites.’

  After dinner, we played jazz on the gramophone which had once belonged to Aunt Bertha. She had often played me Beethoven or Chopin or Schubert on it. I do not imagine that, while she was alive, a single jazz record had ever revolved on its turntable. The records which we were playing, of Joe Daniels and Harry Roy and Fred Elizalde, all belonged to Tim. Most of them Ma had given to him.

  Suddenly, in the middle of a record of Nat Gonella, Bob jumped up and pulled off the needle, so violently that its squealing passage must have left a scratch. ‘Oh, I can’t go on listening to this bilge!’ He threw himself back into the sofa. ‘ What are we going to do now? We could go out to a flick, I suppose. It’s not too late.’

  Suddenly, unbidden, an idea winged in to me. ‘We could go upstairs.’

  ‘Upstairs?’

  ‘To Ma’s room.’

  He stared at me. I might have said something totally crazy.

  ‘Or your room. Or my room.’

  Then he began to laugh. He laughed more and more loudly, throwing back his head. ‘ Oh, no, no, no!’

  ‘Why not? … Please. It’ll be the last time for, oh, ages. Please!’

  ‘Sorry. I’m just not in the mood.’

  ‘Oh, come on!’

  ‘Sorry. No can do.’ He jumped up off the sofa. ‘ Let’s go out to that flick.’

  Chapter Thirty Seven

  I awoke that morning, as I was so often to awake in the years ahead, with a feeling of terror. It was as though an invisible hand, almost throttling me, had shaken me out of sleep. Then I remembered: Bob would be leaving for Bexhill that morning. I put my head back on the pillow and stared at the opposite wall, criss-crossed with the first light through the thick lace curtains. I always drew back the brown velvet curtains before switching off the light and getting into bed. I loved to wake to the glimmer of dawn and then, snuggling down into the bedclothes, to slip back into unconsciousness once again.

  Bob would be leaving; and he did not have to leave. It was Ma who was depriving me of him, just as it was Ma who had deprived me of Dad, intermittently ever since I was born and now permanently through her selfishness and callousness. Delenda est. That was what Bob had said and I had known enough Latin to understand him. Between us, during
the week ahead, before we went back to school, we might have indeed been able to destroy her. Bob, so much more intelligent and resourceful and so much more cool-headed than I, would have thought of the perfect way. Then, once she had vanished, we would have had only each other and the money with which to do precisely what we wanted. Smoked salmon. Caviare. Pâté de foie gras. That litany of ours over supper the previous evening now came back to me. I could hear Bob laughing, as we intoned each delicacy.

  Looking back now, I can only marvel at the extraordinary rage of my love for him at that moment. I was never again to love any man in that fashion, let alone with that same feverish intensity. Nor have I brought that same feverish intensity to my love for Noreen. It was a kind of madness; and yet a madness in which I saw everything with total clarity and logic.

  Neither Ma nor Tim came down that early to breakfast. The previous night, on her way up to bed, Ma had said in an offhand way to Bob: ‘ Well, I’d better say goodbye now. I won’t be up in time to say goodbye tomorrow.’

  Bob had put out his hand, with its savagely bitten nails (at that time even the thought of their ugliness excited me) and reluctantly Ma had taken it. ‘Thank you so much, Mrs Frost. It was a really super time.’

  ‘Yes, it was super, wasn’t it?’ Once again, merely by repeating some word or phrase which Bob had said, Ma had been able to mock him.

  ‘Goodbye, Tim.’

  ‘Goodbye, old chap. Have a good journey.’

  Ma had put an arm round Tim’s waist, and together they had then begun to mount the wide staircase, without a backward look.

  Now Bob and I faced each other across the breakfast table. From the chafing-dish on the sideboard, he had helped himself liberally to sausage, bacon, grilled tomatoes, fried egg. I had taken merely a slice of toast.