‘You’re so still. What is it? Are you afraid to go and see?’ Andy’s arm was round me again. ‘I’ll come with you.’
‘No.’ I shook my head vehemently. ‘You back up and wait for me, and don’t let anybody else come. I want to go by myself.’
I got out of the car and walked across the pavement, through a gate left carelessly ajar, up a weed-sprouting path to the yellow front door. The chromium door-knob and letter-box were corroded, the knocker hanging off. I stood there. My hand wouldn’t move to knock at first, and I thought: this is like with Toby. He’s behind there somewhere, and he’s not expecting me, and he’s been so important in my life. With one small movement I can bring him face to face with me and then we must go forward, unravel it, force our way through our own and each other’s and our combined reactions in order somehow to make sense of our connection.
I knocked, and then felt weak and helpless and nearly turned and ran. But the longing I had to recover David kept me rooted, through the approaching footsteps and the click of the inner handle.
The door opened. A man stood there. It wasn’t Terry.
Christ, yes, it was.
But how changed! Height and the colour of a man’s eyes don’t change, but everything else can. His face, which had been greyhound-thin, had filled out puffily; his hair, which had been fair, was dyed dark brown and hung right down over his eyes, ears and collar. Instead of the rather sporty, ultra-English clothes he had once worn, he now wore a sort of mulberry-coloured shirt open at the neck, with an ornament in the opening, and grubby jeans; his teeth, which I saw at once because he drew his lips back over them in a grimace when he recognised me, were so smooth and white and perfect that they didn’t look like human teeth but like a miniature fence covered with high-gloss paint. And there was some other change, too, something which made his face almost a grotesque parody of itself, but somehow I was so shocked I couldn’t see what it was.
As soon as I saw him I knew at once that he hadn’t seen David. We stared at each other. All likeness to my meeting with Toby was gone, for this man was as much a stranger to me as any man could be. Yet he was David’s father. He had had me, and despised me for it, and David had come from that mismating. In some horrifying way, that relationship—the physical relationship between David and him—was more obvious than I would have thought possible before. The dark hair, the fatter cheeks, brought about a likeness I had thought didn’t exist, and this likeness revolted me further, for Terry now looked not merely rather weak, but almost effeminate—only men of unimpeachably rugged masculinity can get away with really long hair, as only pirates and gypsies can get away with earrings. The puzzling, the appalling question was how I had ever found anything solid enough about him to be attracted by, for no man who can alter his appearance, his whole outward personna, as much as this, can have any truly inviolable core.
I felt urgently that I must get it over quickly and be shot of him and of every offensive memory belonging to him. I felt deeply afraid of him and realised for the first time the madness of coming at all.
‘I’m sorry to come like this, but I must have a word with you.’
‘It can only be,’ he said, ‘about one thing. Come in.’
He was still staring at me with that rictus of amazement twisting his mouth, but now he gave a shiver, reached out, took my elbow in his thin hand, and pulled me through the door, closing it behind me.
He smelt stale.
We stood together in the dimness of a dusty hall. His tall, no longer perfectly lean body swayed forward a little, and for a moment I thought he might kiss me or do something unbearable, but instead he turned and led me into a pigsty of a living-room.
‘Excuse the mess,’ he said in a toneless voice.
We sat down facing each other.
‘You’ve hardly changed,’ he said in remote surprise.
‘You have.’
‘What do you mean? Oh, the hair. I had to dye it for a—a film I was doing.’
‘What film?’
His eyes wandered and he shrugged. ‘It was a telly commercial, actually. I’m doing quite a few now. Pays the gas bill. You’d be amazed at the big names who are doing them these days . . . I met Kenneth More on my last one . . . Why not? You can fit interviews and so on in quite easily, and it’s a sort of—shop window, in a way . . .’ His voice trailed into silence.
‘Terry—’
‘Jane.’ And now he smiled, and I saw that those awful teeth could be called an improvement, from a telly-commercial point of view; they made him handsome in a way, but I hated them. And what was that other, elusive, change? It disturbed me more than the teeth because I couldn’t think what it was. It put his whole face out of focus, destroyed the integrity of feature it had had once. More and more incredulously I kept asking myself, how could you have gone to bed with this—this strange man? But what did any of that nonsense matter when David was lost?
‘Listen. David’s lost.’
He leant back in his chair, with both arms limp and hanging, and looked at the ceiling. ‘Who is David?’ he asked whimsically.
‘Our—’
I stopped myself in horror before the single syllable was half-out. ‘What are you playing at?’ I asked instead, roughly.
‘Our son, were you about to say?’ He straightened his head and smiled again, narrowing his eyes. ‘Your son, you mean. How could he be mine? My seed, but not my son. You denied him to me. You kept him all for yourself.’ He put his head back and closed his eyes, his arms still spreadeagled across the arms of the chair in such a silly, affected way that I was suddenly furious. Of course I knew he was doing it on purpose to punish me, perhaps I even deserved it, but it was more than I could take just then.
I got up. ‘It’s quite obvious you haven’t seen him. How could he find you here?’ I started to leave, but he was up out of his chair and across the room in a moment, and holding my wrist so tightly that it hurt when I tried to jerk away.
‘Find me?’ he said in an explosive hiss. ‘What do you mean, find me? Is he looking for me?’
I wrenched my wrist away and stood rubbing it, all my pent-up feelings boiling up in anger, glaring at him with pure hatred.
His fair skin had gone a dark, ugly red, a blackish red, dangerously choleric. He’d always seemed to me a rather gentle, indeterminate person; it was a shock now to see him looking, not just angry, but as if he might translate his anger into some kind of physical action.
‘Listen to me,’ he said in a very low voice, ‘eight years ago you had a baby, and I came to the hospital and you let me see it, asleep in that white box-thing beside your bed. I looked at it and I thought “That’s mine”. And then you went away. I must have phoned your father fifty times, until in the end he stopped putting me off tactfully and roared at me over the phone, “She doesn’t want you! Isn’t that clear to you by now? She’s ordered me not to give you her address.” And that was it. I thought, well, if that’s the way she wants it. So I went back to my own life. I got involved with Grace, and she seemed like a nice girl at the time, so we got married, and I remember thinking: “Now I’ll have my own kids that nobody can say I’m not entitled to”. I kept planning what a first-rate father I was going to be, to prove it to myself, and to you if you ever turned up again, to make you bloody good and sorry you’d been so “who-needs-you?” to me and reduced my ego to a chewed-off stub. You know, I used to watch out for kids, or adults, who’d been brought up by their mothers. I thought, and still think, there’s something a bit off about every one of them. They’re all off-balance somehow, not quite complete. And I used to think, was I such a rotten sod she’d rather have nothing than me for the boy? Maybe it’s hard for you to realise what you did to me by refusing even to let me help you support him. You robbed me,’ he said, putting his face close to mine. ‘And you stole more than I realised for a long time, because for ages I kept hoping that Grace’d produce something. I got so desperate at one point I had her every night for a whole month, in case, twi
sted and arse-end-up psychologically as she was, she might be twisted physically as well and only able to conceive when you’d least expect it. When that didn’t work, she made me go through those fertility tests. Jesus Christ! Do you know what they do? It’s like submitting yourself to rape by some a-septic robot. I can still remember those spotless white screens and the lights glaring and the feeling of utter, complete and total humiliation . . . And all the time wanting to yell at them, I’m all right, I’ve proved it, it’s her that can’t . . . Grace dares to say I never did anything for her, even after the tests she accused me of being “one of those primitive Englishmen who always blame the woman”. We had the results of the tests in front of us, we knew it wasn’t me, but she still wouldn’t accept it. Of course she was already half-way round the bend . . .’
He suddenly drooped at the shoulders. His lank, wig-like hair fell forward like bead-curtains on either side of his face. He turned away from me and slumped into his chair again, bent over, his hands between his knees.
‘Trying to avoid self-pity and all that, but you can’t imagine what a bloody rotten time I’ve had since I last saw you,’ he muttered.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. It wasn’t really true, fundamentally. I pitied him, but in an appalled, repelled sort of way, the sort of pity that makes you cringe and want to escape.
He looked up at me again. His eyes were still narrow and full of accusation. ‘It could have been so different, if only you’d given me my rights,’ he said bitterly.
‘What rights, Terry?’
‘Has a father no rights? And don’t you dare say I forfeited them! I asked you to marry me. Now don’t deny that. I damn well did ask you! I remember it distinctly—’
‘Yes, you asked me, very formally, because you felt you ought to. I remember it distinctly too. I also remember distinctly the look of naked relief on your face when I said no.’
‘Well, what did you expect? I was very young, and I wasn’t in love with you.’
‘Nor I with you.’
‘All the more credit to me for asking you.’
‘We had no claim on each other. You weren’t all that young,’ I added as an afterthought. ‘You must have been twenty-nine.’
‘Very immature for my age,’ he said rather primly, so that I could almost have laughed.
‘Our ages are irrelevant anyway. I had David without your help or support, what right did you have to any share in him?’ The old, old arguments I’d used with myself at the time, coming out all pat and neat despite the fact that later events, radical changes in my point of view, had long since invalidated them. I forced myself to look at him again, really look at him. ‘Gone to seed’ was the phrase that came; but how, indeed, might he have looked, how might he have been, if I had acknowledged then what I was secretly obliged to acknowledge now—that he had rights, that even an unwilling offer to ‘do the decent thing’ gives a man a moral claim on his own son; that it was no fault of his that he had not sustained me through my pregnancy, or in fact married me at the beginning of it, for how could he have acted well when I didn’t give him the chance? I had never even told him, he had found out only by the merest accident.
And how would David have been now, if I had married Terry—not this horrific version of him with his awful hair and his puffy outlines but the mild, sweet, gentle, inoffensive young man he was then. Weak characters strengthen in the right atmosphere, from the right sort of challenges. We could have lived together and raised David together, the fatal palliatives he had grabbed at he would have been spared . . . No false smile, no telly commercials, no middle-aged-hippie look, which is more pathetic than anything else that can overtake a man . . . Had my pride, my possessiveness, my stiff-necked stubbornness and unwillingness to settle for second best translated Terry into this sad wreck? Had it translated David into a problem-child, a runaway?
I turned away, unable to face him, and myself in him.
‘I’m going,’ I said.
‘No you’re not, wait a minute!’ He was up and ready to grab me again, but I pulled my arm out of his reach. ‘You haven’t answered me yet. Is he—David—is he looking for me? Has he run away to look for me?’
We stared into each other’s eyes, perhaps the first clear, honest look we had ever exchanged.
‘He’s run away to look for a father. Not his, any. He has a dream of you. Even physically, it’s nothing like the reality.’
‘Do you mean the hair?’ he asked again.
Could he really be so unaware? ‘It’s not just the hair, Terry, you must know that.’
He turned away abruptly.
‘I’ve put on a bit of weight—so what?’
I said nothing. I’d seen that kind of puffy fat on a man’s face before—my father’s, to be exact, and I knew very well that it is not overeating that puts it there.
He seemed to guess my thoughts, and turned to me.
‘All right! It’s not against the law. Believe me, most men would have been on hard drugs by now after what I’ve been through. And living alone here, not working full-time, hasn’t helped. What do you expect?’ he shouted. ‘I’ve never known what you expect of me!’
‘The short answer to that is nothing.’
‘If you could see yourself. Standing there so calmly, looking so bloody wholesome and clean and above-the-scrum—’
‘Oh don’t talk such utter rubbish! I haven’t had such an easy time myself, you know.’
That stopped him for a moment. I glanced through the window. There were no cars outside; they must have parked down the road. For the first time I speculated on Andy’s state of mind, while I was in here talking to David’s father . . . I quailed from a sudden sharp pang of real shame and dismay at the realisation that I might have to introduce Terry to the others; the only worse horror I could imagine was having to introduce him, at any time now or in the future, to David . . .
I stared speechlessly at Terry, helplessly visualising the scene of such a meeting, and suddenly I saw what it was—the other alteration. It was his nose. His narrow face had always come to its rather low-key climax in an aquiline nose, which gave it some pretentions to character and distinctiveness; this had been changed, not radically, just the sharpness taken off its crest, so that it now limped down his face from his pale eyebrows in utter ordinariness, effectively removing the last vestige of strength from his features and somehow blurring them until you felt his face could be superimposed onto a million others and just disappear . . .
‘Oh my God, Terry,’ I said aghast. ‘You’ve had something done to your nose as well.’
‘Oh, that . . . I did that ages ago. I couldn’t stand that beak I had, it made me look like a bloody kike.’
Many, many times I had unwished my connection with this man. When I was actually in bed with him; the next morning; for weeks afterwards until I finally received his casual, dismissive note; practically the entire period of my pregnancy—and several times subsequently. But never more poignantly than now. My nausea was so sharp that I nearly lost control of myself completely and shouted at him, ‘You’re revolting! How dare you get like this! How can you be David’s father?’ But I didn’t, and I was glad I didn’t, because really he was too pitiable to attack.
Nevertheless, I knew suddenly that I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t show him to Jo, to Andy, I couldn’t even show him to W.P.C. whatever her name was. It seemed unavoidable, but I would find some way to avoid it. And without my even having to stop and plan, the right words emerged.
‘Look, Terry, I came up here by myself from the police-station and I must get back there and tell them you haven’t seen David. I want you to stay here just in case he comes—’
‘How could he?’ he broke in eagerly. ‘Do you think it’s possible he might just—arrive here?’
‘Well, I found you. Maybe if he gets help from some grownup, he might, too.’ I didn’t believe it for one moment, but he did, because he wanted to. Seeing his naked eagerness, I felt sorry for him again, but in the same d
isgusted way as before.
‘How did you find me? I’m not listed in the phone-book at this address.’
I told him how we’d traced him, and then said, ‘But you used to live here.’
‘How do you know that?’
I had to stop and think. How had I known where to come, that time? ‘You must have been listed in the phone-book at this address once, because I knew it.’
‘Yes, I was. Nine, ten years ago. I bought this place when I married the first time. Then I rented it when my first marriage broke up, but I never sold it, and when I left Grace I kicked out my tenants and came back here.’
‘Why did you tell her about—me, and David?’ I asked curiously.
‘Oh, Christ, how can you go on forever, sparing somebody? I kept quiet about it just so long as I thought our marriage stood a dog’s chance, but in the end her whining and complaints got me so livid I just spat it out at her one day to shut her up about not being able to give her a baby. I must have known it was the end; mentally I was quite prepared to clear out, even before she threw me out.’
‘But did you have to tell her you were coming to me?’
He fixed his blue eyes on me. ‘I see you’ve had a nice long friendly chat with her,’ he said.
‘That’s one way of putting it.’
‘Poor Grace. Being alone probably hasn’t helped her any more than it has me. I think she enjoyed our rows in a way. Some women need a good all-out screaming match every so often to keep the bogies away. She was always better after one. Quite sweet and tender for a while.’ He heaved what sounded to me like a faintly theatrical sigh. His whole manner about everything in his life—everything, that is, except David David—smacked of a sort of languid, world-weary je m’en foutisme. Only when David was in question did some clear, sharp, genuine feeling seem to come back into his blurred face and veiled expression. Was this another man who throve on fantasies rather than on realities? Yet David was real enough, and if Terry ever saw him, God knows he could be excused for grabbing him with both hands and holding him as a barrier between himself and total desolation, total disintegration of body and spirit. I couldn’t bear it. Even the faint, faint chance that David might find this place was too terrible to take. And yet what could I do to prevent it?
Two Is Lonely Page 27
