Serenity House

by Christopher Hope

  And of course she promised she would. She slipped the map into her bag, didn’t she? But, better and better, Innocenta had had an idea. She did not know what Max would think of it. But he had said to get close to Jack – hadn’t he?

  After Max left Greyacres in such distressing circumstances his daughter Elizabeth had struggled to come to terms with herself. Her remorse had been huge. Then came the rage. Since Albert’s revelations about her father, she found herself increasingly wishing she might have acted on her impulse to push him under the water on those nights when he gave trouble on his bathability stool. No longer occasions for guilt, those bathroom memories now seemed more like lost opportunities. It would have been as natural as drowning a spider.

  She still gave rather good parties and worried aloud about seating plans. ‘The trouble’, she told another newspaper, ‘is when you find people deep in conversation before dinner and you know you’ve placed them at your table cheek by jowl.’ But her conversations showed signs of a new sharpness. She told Tony Hyslop, chair of the Commons Select Committee looking into the adoption of a common Euro-currency, that he had better bloody well watch the Germans. ‘Give them an inch and they’ll be everywhere,’ she said.

  She feared especially the knock upon the door that she knew must come. It might be that dreadful American boy who left the strange letter to Marta and whom she’d seen at Serenity House. It might be the police making enquiries about ‘your father’s entry into Britain after the war, and his movements prior to that’. It might, indeed, be her father. He said, when she visited him, that she had sent him away to the ‘camp’. He said there was no escape. He told her there were dogs. Electrified fences. She told him not to be silly. He could leave Serenity House any time he liked. But this was not something she liked to imagine.

  She had lasted nine months of the Grand Bargain with her father, until Max finally wore her down. Not that they wanted to send him away, but what was the alternative? And he seemed quite happy these days in Serenity House. Certainly there were times he demanded to come home, indeed there had been occasions when he did come home, unexpected and uninvited. Once she found him making himself tea in the kitchen. On another occasion she found him asleep in his bed wearing a bright red, conical, knitted cap. He always went back to Serenity House, but it was awful. He became quite rigid with resistance and she was reminded of how badly her cat Marmaduke had behaved whenever they went on holiday. At the sight of the cat basket prepared for the trip to the kennels he spat and scratched and howled, did Marmaduke. Max simply went very stiff, he turned into a kind of clothes horse and she’d have to propel him down the path towards the waiting car.

  Her whole life seemed to be measured in terms of ‘before’. Before they’d moved to the big house in Highgate, her husband Albert had seemed more solid somehow. Now he seemed increasingly, well, pneumatic was the only word she could think of. He wasn’t where he was. Slothful, sly but solid Albert, substantial, sweet if somewhat vague at home, serious in bed, when, beneath the ceiling covered with patterned wallpaper, gold fleur-de-lis on a navy ground (his choice) inset with a large oval mirror (her inspiration) they made slow, somewhat sweaty, but satisfactory love around once a week, usually on a Friday night, as if having completed his business in the House of Commons, Albert was free to turn his attentions elsewhere.

  Albert’s love-making, like Albert himself, was methodical and unstoppable. In the early days of their marriage, he had suffered from premature ejaculation. Seconds before his cock slid into her vagina, Albert would be convulsed by a violent orgasm.

  It had been three years from the beginning of their marriage before Lizzie had achieved her own climax. It came quite suddenly, one Friday night, after Albert had expired quietly on her breasts and lay there, a little perspiration dripping slowly from his eyebrows on to her neck. She moved. Just a little. And suddenly a deep and distant fluttering like the beginnings of a sneeze or a giggle began somewhere down there and grew, mushroomed hugely as if someone had turned up the volume, like a violent thunderstorm with stereo effects, so loud that, as she lay there, she had covered her ears and so did not hear Albert’s surprised and slightly aggrieved question: ‘What on earth’s happening, Lizzie?’ Oblivious, she did not hear him, nor did she hear her own shrill papery cry as the sound and the wetness overwhelmed her.

  Albert’s ejaculations grew less premature. She learned to take, steal, would be a better word, her pleasure from the straining, heaving bulk of her husband’s body. In his brief ascendancy, some years earlier, as a parliamentary private secretary to the Minister of the Environment, Albert had entered a new phase in his sexual relations. He took to asking Lizzie to straddle him and might lie that way motionless for up to ten minutes, and his climax was barely a ripple, as if his responsibilities were such that he could no longer spare the energy in bed. At the same time his demeanour suggested that, rather like taking a drive in a dull but dependable old jalopy, if she wished to take him for a spin now and then, he would not object, always providing she did not expect much by way of acceleration or excitement.

  After a time this ceased to worry Lizzie who became adept at taking her pleasure in semi-private, managing sometimes as many as three orgasms whilst straddling the white and pink bulk of her immobile husband. She did not care to work out how her husband could keep erect for so long his short but powerful penis, angry aubergine at the tip, thick and yellow where it arose from his pubic hairs like the stem or stalk of some slightly dubious forest mushroom. But what the hell! Riding the carousel or taking the inflatable were just some of the phrases that she used to herself when referring to this weekly exercise.

  Innocenta had been such a sweet baby, and had given no sign of her horrifying future. That had soon changed. Even as a child she had not been easy. Her early stories had been about Tibetan lamas with third eyes. When other children had been reading about rabbits, she frightened Lizzie with accounts of rebirthing techniques. Always a forthright girl, she thought nothing of demonstrating the correct foetal position by lying down in Selfridges. The neighbours would complain about her Primal Scream.

  Now, said Albert, she had become a religious zealot and was attending a church in a basement somewhere in Islington. Lizzie had asked him where precisely in Islington. Albert had become very exasperated and said he had no idea. He did not know Islington and was unlikely ever to do so.

  Albert’s temper grew worse. He visited Serenity House twice a week now, trying to get Max to tell him ‘the truth’. When Elizabeth said it would be better if her father were dead, Albert replied that, even dead, someone would have to get to the bottom of things.

  ‘Poor Lizzie,’ Albert gave his committee smile. ‘What would happen if the spider didn’t drown after all, and come back one morning? Back up the bloody plug hole? Spiders do that, you know.’

  When the knock on the door finally came Elizabeth ran into her bedroom and locked the door. She waited there for about five minutes, shaking and pulling the pillows over her head. Albert was at the House. She was quite alone. But the knocking did not stop and, in the end, she had to go and peer through the spyhole, shivering and pulling her pink cardigan around her throat. When she saw Innocenta, her relief was so great that her mood shifted from terror to delight.

  ‘Darling!’

  ‘Hello, Mummy.’ Innocenta carried a small wand about the thickness of a bicycle pump, a gift from a friend who’d belonged to a Wicca group, for she had the unmistakable feeling that she was going to need all the protection she could get. ‘I’m coming home.’

  ‘Are you, darling? How lovely.’

  Her mother was using what Innocenta thought of as her ‘we are now addressing the brain-damaged’ voice.

  ‘Have you become a witch, Innocenta?’ Lizzie wished Albert had been more specific about Innocenta’s new religion. She eyed the wand. ‘That must be very interesting.’

  ‘I’ve got my things in the car,’ said Innocenta.

  At that moment, thank heaven, Albert arrive
d, leaping from the silver Jag and shouting at the top of his voice: ‘For God’s sake, Lizzie, this is the last straw! Heard today that the police are promising to hit the ground running in the matter of you know who. And here am I, the befuddled foolish son-in-law. I’ll get the truth if I have to wring it out of him. Can you imagine what the papers would make of this?’

  He stopped short when he saw Innocenta. He rubbed his eyes. He said: ‘It’s the Queen of the Fairies. Except for the club she carries. Are you offering witchcraft or violence, Innocenta?’

  ‘She’s coming home, Albert,’ said Elizabeth. But Albert was looking at something else. There he was, walking up the garden path behind Innocenta.

  ‘Well, well,’ said Albert, ‘it’s the American boy.’

  ‘I told you I had my things in the car,’ said Innocenta. ‘Daddy and Mummy, this is Jack.’

  ‘How do you do,’ said Jack carefully. It had taken Innocenta ages to teach him. It must have been rather the way Professor Higgins felt when he trained Eliza Doolittle.

  ‘We’ve met,’ said Elizabeth. ‘We’ve still got your letter. What are we to do with it?’ Albert looked angrily at Jack.

  ‘Lots of time for that,’ Innocenta smiled, sweet and slow, ‘when we’re living here.’

  ‘Over my dead body,’ said her father.

  ‘That flat belongs to Grandpa, even if you drove him away.’ Innocenta pointed out. ‘We had a good talk. Now he wants me to have it.’

  ‘If Innocenta wants to come home, then that’s what she’ll do. With her new – friend.’ Elizabeth led the way indoors.

  Jack smiled to see the house looked as good as ever. In a picture over the fireplace a horse with skinny legs leapt over a hedge with its rider inches out of the saddle. Two blue porcelain cats sat on either side of the fire. Behind them spread upward, rich and red, in their leather covers, shelf upon shelf of books. An entire fucking wall of books!

  ‘Jack will take the spare room. I’ll have Grandpa’s. Don’t look so fierce, Daddy. You’ll hardly know we’re here. You’re as quiet as a mouse – aren’t you, Jack?’

  ‘What do you want?’ Albert put his hands on his hips and leaned over Jack. ‘With your letter and your threats? We have laws in England. I should warn you. My father-in-law is now a police matter.’

  ‘Old Max, he’s down the road in Serenity House.’ Jack smiled. ‘Ain’t saying nothing to nobody – yet. Old Max and me.’

  Albert said heavily, ‘All bloody roads seem to lead to Serenity House.’

  ‘That’s right, Daddy.’

  Jack thought the English were screwy. Everyone knew that all roads lead to the Magic Kingdom.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Albert Puts his Foot in It

  ‘Give us a shout if we need anything, Mr Montfalcon.’ Mr Fox leaned over Max and adjusted his blue Kumfee wheelchair cover with its extra warm Thermalux lining, before he slipped away to deal with Lady Divina, who was once again having trouble with her pill-hopper. Albert, making another of his increasingly angry visits, sat grimly, making a megaphone of his hands, pressing them to the old man’s ear: ‘We’re going to sort this out!’

  The thought that Innocenta and the American boy were living in his house added to Albert’s sense of helpless grievance. He shook Max roughly.

  Max opened his blue eyes and stared blankly. ‘Who are you?’

  To the problems facing him, that is to say the difficulties of memory and the question of number, Max Montfalcon brought a novel approach. To remember something, one needs, in a sense, an occasion for doing so, some sort of reason. Without some reason, recalling an event, or remembering anything at all, becomes, literally, pointless. One did not remember because one wished to be accurate – at least he did not – but precisely because one did not wish to forget. The buried reason for not wishing to forget, though it may be lovely, fraudulent, dishonest, heartfelt or false, is the place where the spring of memory resides. There is a kind of policy for allowing this fact rather than that to resurface. Just as there is a motive, whether you acknowledge it or not, for forbidding its resurrection. Memory, after all, was not history, but more of a system of values. Sometimes it was a form of rebirth. Often it was a matter of will, even of power. How else could you explain the anger of his son-in-law who for reasons Max did not understand now sat beside him, hands to his mouth, demanding in a monotonous voice, over and over again: ‘Tell me what you can remember.’

  ‘I began in Harwich.’

  ‘Harwich! Now, Max, you know as well as I do that that is not true.’

  ‘Harwich, gateway to the continent.’ Max was firm. He could see it all now. Dear old Harwich, a splendid town with a colourful history facing the estuaries of the rivers Stour and Orwell.

  Albert, it seemed, was not really interested in Harwich, although Max could have told him a good many fascinating things about his old home town. He could have spoken about the old Electric Palace, the very first cinema in Britain. In the light of Albert’s job, the news that Samuel Pepys had been MP for Harwich might have found an answering echo. But no, Albert just glared. And Albert, for his part, had a word of his own with which to challenge Harwich. And he bared his teeth when he said the second syllable, his lips peeling back: ‘Poland!’ said Albert Turberville. And after that he would ask, again: ‘How many?’

  Mr Fox danced lightly into the room carrying a copy of Homage opened at a painting by Winterhalter of Queen Victoria’s consort in a splendid crimson tunic and blue and gold sash. ‘Something rather troubling about the eyes, don’t you feel, Mr M?’

  Max studied the painting fiercely. ‘Look at him. Teutonic arrogance. Imagine what would have happened if Victoria had died and Albert lived!’

  ‘We’re having a private conversation,’ Albert growled.

  ‘Your father-in-law rang.’ Fox leaned forward and opened Max’s jacket to show the bleeper clipped to his trouser waist. ‘He’s wired up, is Mr Montfalcon. On account of the little walks he likes to take. So I wired him with the bleeper so he could call home if he was in trouble. He’s never used it, until today. I think he’s learning.’ He leaned over the old man. ‘I’m proud of you. Well done, Mr Montfalcon. Next time maybe you’ll use your bleeper when you go on one of your walks. Now I think we’re a bit fatigued, Mr Turberville.’

  ‘I haven’t finished.’

  ‘Look at him. You’ll get no more out of him.’

  The old man sat motionless in his chair, his tie up around his ear, until one of the carers bustled in and took him away. ‘Lord, oh, Lord, Mr Max. You look just like a schoolboy with your tie under your ear.’

  ‘What’s he keeping in that cupboard?’ Albert demanded.

  Mr Fox inclined his head. ‘Precious possessions. But none of my business.’ He explained with a solemnity which Albert found infuriating, that Serenity House encouraged guests to bring with them a few things they prized most dearly. Such mementoes sometimes helped to ease the pain of transplant. The pain of leaving a beloved house. Moving to a single bed after a lifetime of sharing a double bed with a partner. The loss and dispersal of books, pets, kettles, pictures – these things can be so strong that elders have been known to die from shock within weeks of moving into a refuge. Transplant failure.

  The next day Albert was back. Back with his question: ‘How many, Max?’ Back with his own answer to his question: ‘A lot!’ Regarding his son-in-law through half-closed eyes, Max decided he was the sort of man who never let one get a word in edgeways.

  Or was this noisy, shaggy intruder who interrogated Max perhaps a clone of his son-in-law? The identical blue suit, the same shoes, the elephant’s knee wrinkle to the trousers. ‘Clone’ was the new word. Back in the University in Cracow, in the old days, someone – had it been Hippius? – (Max really couldn’t remember) had called it ‘the human building material’. One cell, in theory, was enough, old Hippius had said, and you might one day re-create identical copies of the original. Imagine it, a Poland full of beautiful Germans, all with long heads.
Such ideas had been ahead of their time. They’d come to nothing, to ashes. Why was that? Max couldn’t remember exactly. ‘Ash on a young man’s sleeve.’ Wasn’t that T. S. Eliot’s line? Eliot, he felt, would have been a poet to understand something of the difficulties of those times. At any rate, now we had clones, we could work directly on the human building material. And so there rapidly approached the possibility of making unlimited copies of Albert Turberville MP who stood before his wheelchair shouting ‘How many did you murder?’ and then answered his own question by shouting, even louder, ‘A lot!’

  The vagueness of it irritated him. How many was ‘a lot’? It was so imprecise a manner of speaking. The English were sadly slipshod about questions of number. Did it mean ‘a few’? ‘a large amount’? or even ‘one or two’? Such phrases, as always in English, never meant exactly, or even inexactly, what they said.

  Albert groaned. His eyes were watering slightly and the mottled flush in his plump cheeks glowed and paled, seemed to be pulsing. A clock-face of flesh, and deep within it hid something coiled to strike. Max sat tall and upright in his wheelchair. Though he still liked to walk, particularly out of doors, he preferred to sit in the wheelchair in his room. Mr Fox had chosen for him the Gazelle. A cushion, deep and soft, a comfortable perch.

  As Max stared mistily at Albert’s pulsing face he began, in a delicate and vague way, to do his pelvic exercises, tightening the sphincter muscles, promising himself to keep it up, planning one day, he liked to tell himself, to build a pelvic floor like cast bloody iron! His incontinence, never more than partial, had definitely improved since he had started the exercises. He settled back, counting to four with each contraction, letting go slowly. Then he looked at Albert’s shoes, and had an idea.

  ‘On questions of number Fowler says that “a few, a great many and a good many, are idiomatic, but a good few is facetious or illiterate; a very few is permissible—”.’