‘We’re looking for a child,’ said the policewoman.
The casual vibrations of the house seemed to catch like a held breath; through the vaulted darkness of the landing, other doors creaked open a crack, and the house seemed to listen.
The little woman, still taller than we were because of the stairs, glared down at us through fierce yellow eyes. My blood suddenly burned my veins in a flush of renewed panic and terror. In such a house, it couldn’t happen that a white child would appear (or disappear) without every inhabitant knowing of it. If this little wiry defender denied knowledge of him, we might go further, get a warrant, search the house from attic to cellar, but we would never find him because the community of the house would have reason to take care that we didn’t. What reason? Why was I afraid of them? Had John taught me nothing? But it was their antagonism that frightened me, I realised suddenly. They hated us, their children hated our children. ‘Whity, whity, lifted her nightie . . .’ A cold shiver passed over me, and I felt Amanda clutch my hand in a spasm of echoed disquiet.
‘You come for the little boy?’
I, who cannot faint, had to reach out for the greasy banister and hold onto it to steady myself.
‘He’s here then?’ I heard the policewoman say through a sound-fog that partly blocked my ears.
‘He’s with Mrs. Nelson. You wait there, I go and call her.’
She turned to go further up the stairs, but a voice from above called, ‘Okay then, Selma, I heard. I’m bringing him.’ And then, fainter: ‘David, looks as if your mama’s come for you.’
Later we sat in the room where David had spent twenty-four hours. It was at the top of the house, next to John’s room, and it belonged to Mrs. Nelson and her husband and their baby. The husband was at work, but Mrs. Nelson made us tea and gave Amanda a drink of orange. David had nothing. He had sat on my knee and cried until he could cry no more. After that he just sat, with his arms round my waist, and didn’t look at anyone or say anything.
I wished we were alone, but we were not, and I had to talk to this woman who had taken him in and been very kind to him but who had not had sense, or courage, or something, enough to get in touch with the police and save us all that misery and anxiety. The policewoman gave her a very restrained, but cutting, telling-off before going to find a telephone. She left me to drink the tea and look after the children until she came back.
Mrs. Nelson rocked her baby and smiled at me and said,
‘I heard him out on the landing last night, knocking and knocking at the door of John’s room. Well now, I knew John was not there, but how do I know where he went? Three days he not been back, anyone else in the house tell his neighbours before he goes off for more than a day, but not John—he’s very shut-in, you know, keeps himself to himself, doesn’t tell anyone his business. Which is all right, but sometime you need to know. So I didn’t know when he come back, I mean, it could be last night or this morning or anytime soon. Your little boy, he just told me David and no more, said he would wait for John, so what could I do?’ She shifted the baby’s weight and reached for a feeding bottle of orange-juice. ‘It’s all very well for her—’ she indicated the absent policewoman with her head—‘to tell me off for not ringing the police. I know my husband, he had enough of them, I didn’t even suggest it to him because I know what he’d say. John’s room is locked, I can’t get in to let him wait in there, and anyway he so little I can’t let him be on his own. I think to myself, by tomorrow, if John’s not back, I do something. This morning I begin to get a bit frightened, my husband getting angry, we can’t keep him here. Of course not, but what can we do? So I say, tonight if John doesn’t come, we ring someone. We won’t ring no-one, he says, I take him to the station and leave him outside. But then David says, I won’t go till I find my daddy.’ David’s arms jerked. His face burrowed closer to my damp shoulder. The woman was shaking her head. ‘I must admit I’m glad you got here,’ she said.
The policewoman came back without knocking. ‘All’s well that ends well,’ she said with a thin smile which did not seem to include Mrs. Nelson, who looked blankly in another direction. I stood up, setting David on his feet. He still clung to me so that I could hardly walk.
‘David, say goodbye and thank you to Mrs. Nelson.’
He didn’t move or speak.
‘Don’t worry the boy,’ said Mrs. Nelson comfortably. ‘It don’t matter.’
‘Well, I’m very grateful, anyway,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry for all your trouble.’ I hesitated. Should I offer her some money? I decided to, because obviously David would have eaten something and they were clearly hard up. I pulled out my wallet, but she immediately backed away, waving her light-palmed hands and shaking her head.
‘No, no,’ she said. ‘No, no, no.’
I put the wallet back, feeling ashamed. ‘I only thought, for his food—’
‘He didn’t eat nothing to speak of,’ she said.
‘Thank you, then.’
We shook hands and I touched the bright-eyed baby with one finger on his satiny black cheek and thought, I’ll send some lovely toy. ‘What’s his name?’ I asked.
‘Douglas.’
At the last moment, David recovered enough to wave goodbye to her. Then we walked down the stairs through an underwater silence speckled with anemone eyes, and went out to the car.
‘Your friends were at the station when I rang,’ said the policewoman. ‘They know he’s been found.’
I sat with David on one side and Amm on the other. They stared at each other like strangers across me. I put an arm around each, but Amanda disengaged herself quite politely, which freed another hand to hold David, plastered to my side and still faintly trembling.
At the police station we were met outside by Andy and Jo. Jo looked twenty years younger, radiant with relief. She embraced me and David together as we got out of the car.
‘Oh darling! I’m so glad, I’m so unspeakably glad! Now I can ask to be forgiven—’
Histrionics were unlike her, actressy as she often was in other ways. I brushed it off almost brusquely. ‘Oh, shush, don’t be absurd. It’s all over.’ I squeezed her arm and she briefly pressed her cheek against mine. Then she hugged David. ‘You little villain,’ she said. ‘What you put us through—’
‘Not just now,’ I said, and she stood up at once.
Andy was beside me. ‘Let’s separate up and get home now,’ he said.
‘Of course,’ said Jo. ‘Come on, Amanda.’
Her voice had taken on a tone I can only call menacing. Amm cast a speaking look of appeal at me.
‘I’m sorry, Auntie Jane,’ she said in an unwontedly tiny voice.
‘Jo,’ I said. ‘Please don’t lean too hard, until we’ve talked. She was on a fearful spot.’
‘She’s on another one now,’ was all Jo would say grimly.
Then David, Andy and I were driving home together.
At first we didn’t talk. Andy had to navigate the evening rush out of London. At every red light or other necessary halt, he would take his left hand off the wheel and take hold of mine. David sat on my knee and speedily lapsed into an exhausted sleep.
When we got out of London, we stopped, and laid him on the back seat under a rug. I stared at him in the twilight. I wanted to throw myself on top of him and kiss him until my lips were sore. Nothing else could assuage the feeling of love and gratitude and relief I was suffering from—suffering is not the wrong word, it was real pain. I drew a ragged breath which was almost a sob as I got backwards out of the car, and Andy put his arms round me.
‘Cry if you like,’ he said.
‘I’m all cried out.’
‘I think not.’
‘Well, not just now. Let’s go home.’
‘I love you.’
‘I love you.’
‘Are you sure?’ he asked.
‘As sure as I can be at this moment of loving anyone but David.’
He kissed me and we got back into the car.
&nb
sp; ‘Did you see Chris?’ he could, poor devil, no longer keep from asking.
‘Oh, God! I’m sorry. I haven’t even mentioned him. Yes, I saw him, and we’ll talk about him, but Andy, you’re quite wrong. I’m crazy about him.’
He looked absolutely aghast with disbelief.
‘You can only mean he’s got over it,’ he said.
‘I don’t mean that at all. I doubt if he’ll ever get over it, in that sense. He’s radically different from you and he always will be.’
‘But you liked him?’
‘He’s a darling, and sound as a nut. He’ll be all right, you’ll see.’
We drove on in silence through the dusk. I looked at Andy’s profile, and caught an expression of relief mixed with incredulity. Why is nature so unreasonable as to implant in us this conviction that our children will or should grow into facsimiles of ourselves? Yet when I glanced over my shoulder at my sleeping son, the runaway restored, I was struck afresh by the realisation that his defection had not merely shocked but staggered me—not by its wickedness at all but because I would never in a million years, at age eight or any other, have been capable of anything like it.
Needing to touch him, I half-turned in my front seat and laid my hand gently on him through the rug. Jo had called him, barely half-jokingly, a little villain, but I was having none of that. David was no villain. If there was a villain in the piece, it was me. I couldn’t blame him for trying to get a look at Terry, for trying to get his desperate filial hooks into him; in fact now I thought about it I was quite bemused with admiration for his courage in the doomed enterprise. For my timid, mummy-clinging little cry-baby, to plan and execute such an operation, even under Amanda’s Machiavellian inspiration, was a feat of daring so astonishing that I could only gape at it, and at him.
‘What about your other chap?’ Andy suddenly asked.
‘Over,’ I said.
‘Finally?’
‘Oh yes.’
He drew a deep, ragged breath.
‘Still,’ he said, ‘I’m glad he’s three thousand miles away.’
I tried to be utterly sure it didn’t make the slightest difference, but I couldn’t be, so I said nothing.
‘Was it the sort of affair you wish afterwards hadn’t happened?’
Not for the first time, the essence of Terry-and-me, and Toby-and-me, sprang up side by side, offering their wild contrast for instant comparison. The first had taken on new and sombre tones, with several added warps and twists, since what I profoundly hoped would be my final encounter with him that afternoon. What a man becomes is what he essentially was all the time, and to have loved, or even only lain with, a man like Terry, could only be regarded as a signal blot on any woman’s escutcheon. As for Toby, our combined love-image was also not undamaged, but it still stood tall beside the other, head and shoulders above every other relationship in my life so far. But there was room for a greater to follow, something to be built unashamedly out of need, David’s, Andy’s, and—at last I could look at it straight in the eye—my own. I seemed to see the three of us, drawing together as if a suture-thread around the open wound of loneliness were closing the natural gaps in a healing bond.
‘Well?’
‘Sorry, what did you say?’
‘I asked if you regretted your affair with him.’
‘No, I don’t.’
‘That’s good.’
The headlights fanned round the dark bends ahead.
‘Are we away then?—You and me?’
‘Yes.’
David stirred under my hand and I felt a light-wave of love and excitement strike through me as a spear strikes through a fish, impaling it. For a moment I gasped and writhed; even to be impaled by a happy fate makes you jerk against the knowledge of inevitability, of final commitment. But I wanted it really, as I had wanted the impalement of David, pinning me to life for ever. I put my free hand on Andy’s arm as the car swerved and began to bump over the first ruts on the lane leading home.
THE END
Postscript
EXCEPT that of course it wasn’t the end.
On arriving at the cottage that same night we found a cable from Toby, very terse, saying Rachel was being put on a plane which would be landing at London Airport in the early hours of the following morning. There are either no words, or at least two thousand, to describe the discussions of the night . . . I met the plane with a sense of numbed inevitability. She has been with us ever since.
Now it’s 1973. David is nearly fourteen. Rachel, my unadopted daughter, is thirteen. And my second son, Andy’s and mine, Guy, is five. We live in Andy’s house-in-the-field, enlarged now to hold our curiously-constituted family.
It would be pleasant to be able to say that Chris, on his return from his wanderings, settled down with us and married Georgie, but he didn’t. True, he lived with her for a bit, but then took off again, to the Far East this time, after a series of shattering rows with his father. The last we heard of him he was living with a stone-age tribe in Borneo. Andy still can’t speak of him calmly and I still love him. So, more oddly, does Georgie, who, with her three-year-old daughter, lives with us, though officially she’s supposed to be renting Andy’s cottage. For me it’s like watching history—my history—repeat itself. She also refused an abortion, and wouldn’t allow us to locate Chris and tell him . . . Well, but at least she had us. And one day Chris will turn up . . .
For the rest: Whistler has married again. I’ve met her several times. She’s very sweet, as John said, not a ha’porth of harm in her. But although basically antagonistic to me, she was, when it came to the crunch, glad enough to let me keep Rachel, though I’ve never been given any legal security. Impossible for me to understand . . . We could never be friends.
When I married I sold out my share of the shop to Jo, and she moved herself and it to London, leaving the original as a branch with Georgie nominally in charge. Amanda is at boarding school and we see her every holiday, except when they go off to glamorous foreign parts. She is highly sophisticated and David finds her far too much to handle. He may catch up later, but at the moment all his brotherly devotion is for Rachel. He is what Toby would call quite a little mensch these days—my queer-fears have long since melted away, thanks largely to Andy.
Andy remains to some extent a mystery to me. Perhaps that’s the secret of our success. Closed doors have opened one by one, but not all of them by any means, and those remaining closed continue to intrigue me. The open ones have revealed a man whom I was entirely right to entrust myself to.
Terry died. He actually did die . . . It was poor mad Grace who wrote to tell me, through the police . . . Her strange letter struck an astonishing note of grief, a grief she apparently expected me to share. But for my part, instinctive relief mingled thickly with guilt, for hadn’t I ill-wished him? Andy pooh-poohed my unease, but years later, when I told John, he said matter-of-factly: ‘Yes, you probably helped to kill him. Happens all the time. Can’t be helped. Anyway, everybody better off now, specially him.’
John has become a name to conjure with. He roamed about the world with his dwindling hippie band (he took over their leadership when Chris left) picking up folk-songs all over the place, and suddenly burst upon the pop world from San Francisco . . . I believe he even had his budding entourage of groupies before he firmly shook them off. Somehow he has managed to remain a loner, even in that claustrophobic world, and basically I found him unchanged. Of course the look of contempt he feared in David’s eyes has not appeared; rather there is a gleam of devoted admiration. David is only too delighted to brag at school that John is his friend.
David is normal, as normal as any fourteen-year-old can be in these peculiar times. Even Rachel’s ill-timed advent, and Guy’s a year later, didn’t unduly upset him—I think because he was too absorbed at the time in coming to terms with his adventure, which was traumatic for him and for us. It really is tempting to go on at length about the children, all so different and so exciting . . . Guy prom
ises to be the cleverest, Rachel is the strongest, the most beautiful and the most temperamental; but David and I went through most together and for me he will always be the one I am closest to.
And Toby? Toby is still in the kibbutz. He writes occasionally, I mean he writes to me, but of novels there has been only one in six years, a strange introverted book with a kibbutz setting which I think hardly anyone read except me. It was not very good; it was as if his mind had been on something else when he wrote it—irrigation, perhaps . . . That novel freed me as nothing had until then, and I can view his proposed visit next year to see his daughters (Rachel has been annually to see him) with reasonable equanimity, or at least, I could, were it not for the appalling fear that he will have grown up and want to take her from me . . .
But that’s another story.
THE HISTORY OF VINTAGE
The famous American publisher Alfred A. Knopf (1892–1984) founded Vintage Books in the United States in 1954 as a paperback home for the authors published by his company. Vintage was launched in the United Kingdom in 1990 and works independently from the American imprint although both are part of the international publishing group, Random House.
Vintage in the United Kingdom was initially created to publish paperback editions of books acquired by the prestigious hardback imprints in the Random House Group such as Jonathan Cape, Chatto & Windus, Hutchinson and later William Heinemann, Secker & Warburg and The Harvill Press. There are many Booker and Nobel Prize-winning authors on the Vintage list and the imprint publishes a huge variety of fiction and non-fiction. Over the years Vintage has expanded and the list now includes great authors of the past – who are published under the Vintage Classics imprint – as well as many of the most influential authors of the present.
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