All the Beauty of the Sun

by Marion Husband

  ‘Dad?’

  He looked up at him. Paul had always resembled his mother when he was a child. Even now, when he was so changed, her ghost was still there in his face, in his good eye. He wondered how he might have talked to Grace about Paul, because an explanation would have been necessary. He wondered how she might have reacted; he hadn’t known her long enough or well enough to guess.

  George unfolded the napkin and spread it over his knee. ‘Last night went well. You must be very pleased.’

  ‘I’m sorry I didn’t invite you. But I thought … Well, actually I thought no one would come. If it had been a wash-out–’

  Another waiter came and took their order. The wine waiter uncorked the wine at their table, pouring a small measure for Paul to taste. When this rigmarole was finished with and they were alone again, Paul said, ‘I’m very glad you’re here.’ He raised his glass. ‘It’s good to see you.’

  George raised his own glass. He sipped the wine and it was delicious, just as he expected their lunch to be delicious, just as there wasn’t a stain on the starched cloth or a smudge on the cutlery, just as the rain stopped and a sudden shaft of sunlight dazzled the silver cruet and made the white flowers in their tasteful arrangement appear cleaner and more beautiful. Paul had chosen well. As his son unfolded his own napkin, George noticed his manicured fingernails and his cuff-links that were milky green opals, lustrous, translucent against his immaculate cuffs. The fine tailoring of the dark suit he wore made him appear older, a little broader, a little less like the slight boy he had appeared to be last night. George wondered why he hadn’t worn this suit to the opening; perhaps he hadn’t wanted to stand out too much from a Bohemian crowd, perhaps he had wanted to pretend to be more like such men and women who didn’t care for appearances but only for their Art. Touched by this thought, George said, ‘You look very dashing.’

  ‘Do I?’ Paul smiled. ‘Dashing? It wasn’t the look I was aiming for.’

  ‘Which was?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. Seriousness, I think.’ He picked up his glass only to put it down again. ‘I suppose I wanted to look as though you don’t have to worry about me.’

  ‘I’m not worried. You look happy. Successful.’ He raised his glass again, smiling. ‘I’m very proud of you.’

  Their meal arrived, rare steak and sautéed potatoes and thin green beans, and they ate and talked about Thorp and George’s medical practice so that George realised that he had memorised an entertainment of anecdotes for Paul and that he must have been hoping that they would be as easy as this together, as easy as they had been before the war, in that too-brief period between Paul leaving boarding school and joining the army. There were times even during the war, on his rare leaves home from the front, when they were friends like this; he had always liked his son as much as he loved him, and at this moment he loved him terribly, a love that made him fear for his own life – what would he have left if Paul was gone?

  But Paul had gone of course; although not dead, but so far away, to a place he would never visit, could never visit. He thought of that man: Patrick, who had come to his home, stood in his kitchen, the great, intimidating height and breadth of him blocking out the light from the window as he said, ‘I’ll take care of him. I know how to protect him, keep him safe. I promise you, Dr Harris, on my life. I would rather die than see him hurt again.’

  Such histrionic words, but said with such calm and conviction – Patrick Morgan truly was a paradox of a man. What could he have done except agree that Paul would be safer in a country that wasn’t England? He could have said no, and this man, with his love for Paul like a carefully contained but agitating force inside him, would have done what he had to do anyway. George guessed that Morgan had come only out of a calculating courtesy, no doubt reasoning that it was best to have an ally who would help convince Paul that leaving everything he loved was for the best.

  The waiter cleared their plates. Paul lit a cigarette, having first asked him if he minded. He did, but he said nothing. Paul ordered coffee and pulled a face as he tasted it. ‘I’d forgotten how bad coffee is in England.’ For a moment, he seemed far away, preoccupied by a memory that George guessed must be pleasant from the look in his eye, a memory of Morgan, perhaps, and the foreign coffee they drank together in a house he imagined resembled the houses pictured in a child’s bible. ‘There is a courtyard with a fountain,’ Paul had written to him, shortly after he arrived in that alien country. ‘The sun bleaches everything clean. I am well.’ The letters they exchanged were stilted, at least in those early days of his exile. Paul never wrote of Morgan, of course, or only obliquely.

  Pushing away his coffee cup, Paul said, ‘What time’s your train?’

  ‘Half past three. Plenty of time.’ George acted on the urge, perhaps prompted by the wine, to reach across the table and cover Paul’s hand with his own. Paul smiled at him.

  ‘I’m all right, Dad. Honestly.’

  And perhaps it was the wine that caused him to say, ‘You could come home –’

  Paul withdrew his hand. ‘No.’

  ‘No? Why not? It’s all forgotten – that business. And now Margot is remarried, settled, she might be happy for you to see Bobby –’

  ‘No, Dad. Please. Let’s not spoil this afternoon.’

  But he couldn’t see the point in stopping, and besides, the words were coming too quickly, as though he had rehearsed them as he had rehearsed the amusing stories. ‘Margot is happy, I’m sure. And happiness helps people to forgive. You don’t have to live in Thorp, but close – at the seaside, perhaps, where we used to go when you were a child.’ He must have been drunker than he thought because he laughed with the excitement of such an idea. ‘You could paint the sea!’

  Paul was gazing at him, allowing him to babble on until George realised how still his son had become, as though he was keeping some fierce emotion in check. Dismayed, he trailed off. ‘I’m sorry. I don’t know what came over me.’

  ‘I understand that you had to ask. I would have, if I were you.’ Paul laughed slightly. ‘Paint the sea, eh? That cold, grey sea.’ Suddenly he said, ‘I dream of home – at night, I mean. You’re in this dream and Bobby is still a baby and Margot has given him to us for good, she doesn’t want him any more. And you’d think that this would be a marvellous dream, wouldn’t you? But I only want to run away and I wake up and all I feel is relief …’ He stubbed out his cigarette and looked up at him. ‘Patrick thinks I’ll stay in England now. He thinks I’m brave enough not to run away again.’

  ‘He’s right!’

  ‘No. Usually, almost always in fact, but not about this.’

  Paul summoned the waiter and asked for the bill. Turning to George, he said, ‘Let me get this – it will be the first time I’ve bought you a meal. It will make me feel like a grown-up.’ He smiled, handsome, ironic, more grown up than anyone ever deserved to be so that George felt soft with pity and love for him.

  ‘Paul, my home is always your home.’

  ‘Thank you. That means a lot to me.’ Glancing away towards the tall windows looking out over the sunny street, he said on a rush of breath, ‘It’s just that I couldn’t survive without Patrick.’

  George tried to keep the scorn out of his voice and failed. ‘Paul – of course you could –’

  It seemed that Paul forced himself to look at him. ‘I couldn’t. I know it must sound terribly melodramatic to you. Terribly wrong. But I don’t want you to have any hopes for me, Dad.’

  ‘You were married, Paul – and I know you were happy with Margot. You could be happy like that again –’

  ‘I shouldn’t have married her.’ He had never said this before, and it was as though he realised that there was too much truth in this statement, a truth that was too painful to be aired, too full of renunciation, because he stood up quickly. Too brightly he said, ‘I’ll walk with you to the station. It will make a change, me seeing you off on to a train.’

  On the train going home George thought about them st
anding on the platform at King’s Cross, with a few minutes to spare before his train arrived. The station was crowded, and full of all the smell and noise and grittiness that never failed to take him back to the war, when Paul would stand beside him in uniform, anxiously looking down the track as if only afraid of being late.

  As though Paul had been remembering the same scene, he had said, ‘I used to imagine I’d come back – if I came back – to girls with flowers, to brass bands and bunting … Can you imagine Thorp Station decked out like that?’

  George had laughed. ‘No.’

  ‘I’d imagine the station and the bunting, but I couldn’t imagine myself beyond that, at home, being me.’ He’d smiled at him. ‘I’ll write to you.’

  Those were always the last words they’d say to each other, even from the earliest days of Paul going off to boarding school, another uniform swamping him. George would let him go, standing on a platform until the train was out of sight, reluctant to go back to his empty house. Perhaps this is what he should have done differently: he should have kept him by his side, taught him at home, made him his own and no one else’s; and later he should have maimed him in some small way, just enough that the army wouldn’t want him.

  Resting his head back on the train seat’s antimacassar, George closed his eyes. The wine had gone to his head, thickening his brain; he hoped he would sleep away the long journey home, only to be woken by a kindly guard at Darlington. There, he would make his connection home to Thorp, a short fifteen minutes away, hardly time for him to pull himself together enough to be Dr George Harris, smart, straight-backed, dignified, and if not a pillar of the community, then respected by his remaining patients, despite his son’s disgrace.

  George opened his eyes. Disgrace was the word Paul had used; Paul had stood in his study, still white with the shock of spending a night in a police cell, and with odd, stilted formality had said, ‘I’m sorry to have brought this disgrace home. If you want me to leave –’

  George had only stared at him, slack-jawed with fear for his son, only managing to say, ‘Where on earth would you go? Leave where?’

  Paul had bowed his head, trembling; he had never seen anyone tremble so delicately, so thoroughly from his head to his feet, grasping the back of the chair he should have been sitting on, his knuckles white. George knew he should have gone to him, but at the time he felt he didn’t have the strength to stand up, and so the strength of the anger in his voice surprised him as he said, ‘You have a wife! A son! What were you thinking of?’

  Paul had only shaken his head.

  ‘Have you told Margot? My God, Paul – how can you tell that little girl something like this?’

  Little girl. On the train, George remembered how a spark of anger had shown in Paul’s face, so quick that he might have been mistaken, although he was sure he was not because Paul’s voice was hard as he said, ‘My wife isn’t a child.’

  But she was, George thought; Margot had never been more than an eighteen-year-old child to him, immature, too quick to worship Paul, seeing only the boy in uniform, the wounded young officer who was kind and attentive and took such great care of her and their baby. In every respect, he had been a good husband. Every respect but one.

  He sometimes wondered what Paul had told Margot that terrible morning, when, still wearing the clothes he had gone out in the previous night, still stinking of the police cell, he’d taken her upstairs to their bedroom and closed the door behind them. What did a man say to his young, young wife when he had been caught buggering a man in a public lavatory? That he would go to prison; that the details of the trial would be printed in the local newspaper and that her neighbours would from now on cross the road to avoid her and put excrement through her letterbox along with their hate-filled letters? From his study George had heard Margot cry out, a thud as though something had been dropped; he had been holding Bobby, who had looked up towards this noise, his face crumpling as his mother began to howl.

  His son had been disgraced, then, and sent to prison; his daughter-in-law and grandson moved to her parents’ house across the road from his; and his neighbours and many of his patients had shunned him, affecting his living. He smiled to himself bitterly; Paul had owed him lunch, especially such a lunch he could no longer afford for himself.

  He thought of his home, Parkwood, the ugly house full of unused, freezing rooms his father had designed and built as a very young man. In those days the Harris fortune was still intact under his grandfather’s good management. His grandfather and father had both been architects; his father could draw anything, swiftly, with an uncanny, joyful perception; as a child George had thought him a magician for the way he could create a running, jumping dog from just a few strokes of a pencil. His father had adored Paul; the two of them shared the same skills. Perhaps Paul’s artistry shouldn’t have surprised him quite so much.

  Parkwood was on the outskirts of town, close to the park and cemetery. From Thorp Station he would walk the mile or so home through the evening’s empty streets. He would unlock his door, turn on the hall light, place his case down and hang up his coat and hat. In the hallstand mirror, he would see that his face was smutty from the journey and he would go into the kitchen to boil enough water to wash. He would make tea and drink it black because there would be no milk. He would light a fire in his study, one he had laid before he left for London, all ready to put a match to. Empty for two days, Parkwood would seem sullen in its cold dampness, showing only how shabby it could be; but everything would be all right once the fire was burning, the tea brewed, some toast made; everything would be just as if he had never gone away.

  George stared out of the window as the train sped through the Essex countryside. He had told Iris that he would put a lamp in his study window when he arrived safely home, bright enough so that she could see it from her bedroom. Perhaps her husband Daniel would be out administering at a deathbed and she would be free to slip from the vicarage, across the graveyard and over the road to his house, escaping quick and quiet as a ghost from a tomb. And she would be a little breathless when he opened the back door, shivering in the sympathetic moonlight, smiling. ‘I’ve killed him,’ she’d say. ‘I stove in his head with an axe.’ It was something she sometimes said, her blackest joke. Standing aside he would hold the door wide open. ‘Come in. I’ll wash the blood from your hands.’

  She had said, ‘You won’t tell Paul, will you?’

  He had thought she knew him well enough not to ask such a question. Iris: Margot’s mother who knew all about Paul and the disgrace he’d brought home.

  George had wondered what she took him for if she thought he could tell Paul anything about his relationship with Paul’s ex-mother-in-law; besides, what was there to tell? That they held hands across his kitchen table; that once she had looked so unhappy he had stepped around the table to hold her in the way he would hold a distraught patient. She was another man’s wife, and he wasn’t absolutely sure she wanted him, although she seemed to. The only certainty was how much he wanted her.

  Perhaps he wouldn’t put the lamp in the window, and perhaps tomorrow he would go to her and explain that her neighbourly visits were more than his heart could take, but that he could be an adulterer, if she could – it was just that he couldn’t go on hiding his desire.

  The guard came and checked his ticket and told him that the buffet car was open, if he cared to go along. But the meal he had eaten with Paul lay heavily and he turned back to the window and the darkening fields; he would be home soon enough.

  Chapter Seven

  PAUL WALKED FROM KING’S Cross, through Holborn to St Paul’s Cathedral, where he had told Edmund he would meet him outside on the main steps.

  Edmund had grinned. ‘Are we to be tourists?’

  ‘I am a tourist.’

  It was true he didn’t know London very well: not nearly as well as his father, who had lived and worked here before he married. He thought about his father as he walked; his confession that he felt he hadn’t done
enough with his life had hurt him because it seemed he had wished away his marriage, his children: him. And now, unbearably, he could only think of his father as a disappointed man.

  He was early for his meeting with Edmund, had planned it so that he would be: he wanted to see the boy coming and to take pleasure in watching him; he wanted to attempt to read his expression, whether he appeared happy, anxious or only calmly indifferent. Not the last, he thought. ‘You will come, won’t you?’ Edmund had said. There had been a note of pleading in his voice, even though he was smiling, and his eyes had searched his face as though the boy suspected he was the kind of man who would make an arrangement only to renege on it. Paul had wanted only to reassure him at the time, when Edmund was still there in front of him looking at him with such intense, puzzling want. Now, on the steps of St Paul’s, he couldn’t help feeling that perhaps he should have told him that it would be best if they didn’t see each other again.

  Yet here he was, of course; he couldn’t help himself. Besides, he’d thought that he wouldn’t be able to be alone this afternoon, prey to an ambush of memories that last night he’d believed would be the only outcome of lunch with his father. As it was, the memories weren’t so difficult to cope with; he had the strength for the solitary pleasure of an art gallery and he could almost regret this afternoon’s complication, almost, if he wasn’t being truthful, if he really wanted to pretend to be the kind of man who would give up on the certainty of sex, no matter its complications.

  He paced, climbing a few steps only to walk down again. He looked out towards the statue of Queen Anne and the London traffic beyond, an empty open-topped tourist bus making its redundant journey on this changeable, umbrella day. He had bought his umbrella that morning – an oversight in the packing because Patrick had forgotten about rain, it seemed – and now he unfurled it as the rain began again. People dashed past him up the steps and into the cathedral, making his waiting more conspicuous. He looked at his watch: five more minutes, if the boy was on time. He felt sure that he would be.