‘And no one’s going to want to set foot in the shop, so the sooner we close it the better.’
‘Daddy wanted Jack to run the shop.’ I felt a shiver of shame as I began to put my thoughts into words, taking auntie Ada’s hand into mine as I spoke them. ‘Would you, auntie Ada? Would you really have gone to such lengths just to sabotage daddy’s last wish? Was that what you were doing when I saw you with the sergeant?’
‘Now listen to me, Jane...’
‘But why, why should I believe a word you say when already I know that you’re a liar?’
‘My secrets are my own,’ said auntie Ada possessively, her wet crooked fingers wriggling out of my grip one by one.
‘And my father’s secrets, whose were they?’
‘You really think those horrible things came from me?’
‘They can’t have come from Jack, and who else could they have come from if they didn’t come from you? Unless… Oh my God, auntie Ada. The Inspector, it must’ve been him. Don’t you see? He wasn’t trying to help us at all… It was all just an act, to make us trust him… And we fell for it, all of us. We told him everything he wanted to know. Then he twisted it and sold it to those horrible men.’
‘I don’t think so, dear. And really I think it’s time you spoke with Jack. If I were you I’d call him now. I’ll be upstairs in my room if you want me.’
‘Yes?’ A woman’s voice answered.
‘Hello, could I speak to Jack, please?’
‘Who is this?’
‘It’s Jane,’ I said.
‘Jane, thank God, I thought it might’ve been those people from the papers again. They’ve been ringing on and off all afternoon, honestly, Jane, I’ve lost count how many people I’ve told to fuck off. Of course by then it was already too late. I mean, how was I supposed to know that the first call was a trap? Jack says it wasn’t my fault, he never warned me what to say if someone rang and asked to speak to Mia-Mia, so when they did, like an idiot I gave Jack a shout and put him on, and half an hour later those creeps from the paper were here. Jack went outside to talk to them, I could see him arguing with them through the window, and then they took some pictures and they went. Oh, Jane, Jack said not to mention any of this if you rang, he didn’t want you worrying yourself, and I wouldn’t have, I’m not even sure what exactly this frightful palaver’s about, something personal, Jack said, and he doesn’t like to talk about personal things, but I gather the story’s got something to do with your dad, so it’s best if you’re prepared, don’t you think? I mean, it’s the ’60’s, for God’s sake, not the middle ages - if no one’s getting hurt, who cares what anyone gets up to in their bedroom? I’ll tell you who – all the hundreds of thousands who buy The Daily Fox for titillation. We’re a nation of hypocrites pretending to be prudes, that’s what we are.’
‘Am I speaking to Sharon?’ I finally managed to ask.
‘Listen to me prattling on, and I’ve not even remembered to introduce myself. Dear oh dear, Sharon, what’s the matter with you? The poor girl asked for Jack and got a ruddy diatribe instead… Jack’s popped out, love, he had some arrangements to make, but he’ll be back later on to pick up all his stuff, and if you called he said to let you know that he’ll phone you just as soon as he’s back. He shouldn’t be too long now, he’s already been gone quite a while…’
‘But why’s he picking up all his stuff, is he moving?’
‘Taking time off to try and think things through, I think that’s what he said, but Jack being Jack I wouldn’t have a clue what these things are that he needs to think through…’
‘Did he say if he was coming to the funeral tomorrow?’
‘The funeral tomorrow?’
‘My dad’s.’ My head was swimming, and the whispered words had sounded like an echo.
‘Your dad’s? You mean he’s dead?’
‘Please remember to ask Jack to phone me,’ I said. ‘And thank you.’
‘Yes, yes of course, just as soon as he comes back.’ Sharon sounded flustered, genuinely taken aback. ‘Jane, I’m so sorry about your dad, Jack never said. Obviously if I’d known…’
I tried not to draw any conclusions from my long, one-sided conversation with Sharon until after I had spoken with Karl. Auntie Ada had a point, I did have a duty to warn him that tomorrow would not be going ahead as planned, that the papers had got hold of a story about my father, and the journey to and from Hypnos Crematorium was likely to be fraught. Now more than ever I needed him to be there, but naturally I would offer him the choice to stay away, which of course he would turn down without a blink.
And he did, after listening in silence to my long preamble – about my father and my mother and about auntie Ada; about my father and Mia-Mia and Jack; about the notes and auntie Ada; about the Inspector and the sergeant and my run-in with the two men from The Daily Fox; about my conversation with Sharon; about Jack’s possible absence tomorrow.
‘You don’t have to come if you don’t want to.’
‘Of course I’m coming. I’ll be there before 11 like we said. And that’s the second time I should’ve walked you home and I didn’t.’
I had only told Karl the bare facts, careful to omit all the clues, or even any hint of my half-formed contradictory suspicions. I didn’t want Karl coming to a conclusion before I did.
If the story hadn’t come from the Inspector, then it might have come from Frank and Norma of Captain Cook’s Fish and Chips. They knew Mia-Mia, they knew she was Jack, and they had sent their regards to Mr George. The scoundrels from The Daily Fox might have squeezed the story out of them somehow, although how would they have known about Sharon? Well, quite possibly Mia-Mia had told them, her job as a hairdresser in Chelsea was hardly a secret.
‘Hello, Jack?’
Ten minutes after my long conversation with Karl, the telephone had barely started ringing when I picked it up with a start. I had moved the pouffe to the hallway and had sat on it cross-legged, so intensely waiting for Jack’s call that in my rush to answer I had yanked at the handset too hard, and the telephone had nearly tumbled to the floor. And now it was making crackling noises in my ear…
‘Hello, Jack, can you hear me?’
But no amount of crackling could have caused me to mistake the voice that answered for Jack’s.
‘It’s me,’ said Karl.
From his cheerless intonation I knew why he was calling. I listened to his muddled, convoluted explanation of why Mami had “forbidden” him to join me for the funeral tomorrow. His attendance could only do both of us harm, and for my sake as much as his own it was better if Karl kept his distance. What good would it do if we were both embroiled in scandal? As long as I had nothing more to do with the young man at its centre, who was obviously disturbed, the scandal would eventually die out. In just a couple of months, it would be like it had never happened, and “things” could then go back to normal.
‘Is that what you think, that I’m “embroiled in scandal”?’
Karl stayed silent.
‘And that Jack must be “disturbed”?’
‘I don’t know him.’
‘Neither does your mother. In fact I don’t think she even knows you. Certainly she doesn’t know me. But she thinks she knows what’s best for me.’
‘For both of us.’ His voice was of defeat and unconditional surrender.
‘You’ve used your mother’s words, don’t you have any of your own?’ I found myself struggling for feeling. ‘Does it mean anything to you that I needed you to be there? Oh, but Mami’s forbidden it, I’m sorry, I forgot. And you think that after this, “things” can just go back to normal? I mean, really?’
‘But isn’t this nothing, compared to…’
I hung up; I returned the handset to its cradle with as much emotion as I’d been able to draw out of Karl. How could he have dared to compare? It was the comparison that had caused my revulsion. How spineless was he, how beholden to “Mami”, that he could have allowed himself to be “forbidden”
after I’d forgiven him for that? And how hollow was his music after all… I felt deceived, but also relieved that this second betrayal – I had yet to decide who had been the perpetrator of the first - had freed me from an error of judgment that no doubt I would have paid a heavier price for later on.
“Mami” was a curse and she wasn’t going away. She would stifle Karl and stunt him as a man and a musician; he seemed to be completely under her sway. The hideous thought returned that in all likelihood it had been Mami who decided it was time for her son to have sex, and that perhaps he ought to have it with me. It would have never crossed her mind I might say no, and crushed by a refusal that Mami must have left him unprepared for, Karl had gone berserk. I didn’t doubt the honesty of his feelings, which Mami in all her wisdom had completely either missed or misread. And the saddest thing of all was that even after that, Karl had still not broken free. But I refused to feel sad; truly there were more deserving claims on my sadness.
I had sunk into the pouffe with my hands intertwined in my lap, staring at one thumb as it revolved around the other. Again I jumped when the telephone rang, but my movements now were slower. First I brought my feet together on the floor, then I dug into the pouffe with the palms of my hands and gave myself a gentle upwards thrust, just enough to lift me up onto my feet, and finally I picked up the receiver.
‘Hello?’
‘How are you?’ Jack’s voice trickled through the wires. ‘I suppose it would be too much to hope for that they wouldn’t have bothered a child.’
‘Too much, yes.’
‘The bastards promised, you know – I made them. But they were hardly men of honour, so I can’t honestly say I’m surprised.’
‘And you, what did you promise?’ I asked the question only as a matter of fairness. After accusing auntie Ada and doing away with Karl, I wanted to at least hold on to Jack, but not at the cost of more lies.
‘I sold out. I told them what they wanted to hear.’
In the short silence that followed, I was unable to interpret what Jack had just said. No, he was not being ironic, but perhaps he was not being altogether literal either.
‘You mean you told them the truth,’ I almost demanded.
‘Oh no, they weren’t interested in the truth, so I helped them make it up.’
‘You mean you went along with their story.’
‘They didn’t have a story until I sold them one.’ Jack was closing up every loophole, as though to stop me from inventing mitigation and excuses.
‘But Sharon said it was a trap, that they rang and asked for Mia-Mia, and she passed them on to you. I thought Inspector Cambridge, or maybe Norma and Frank…’
‘I know what Sharon said, I was there when you called.’
‘But why?’ I had asked a thousand different questions in one.
‘Money,’ said Jack. ‘Quite a lot of money, too.’
‘But why, I still don’t understand.’
‘Enough to get away and make a new start,’ Jack went on, as though blurting out the truth to a script. ‘So I thought, why be mean and pin the blame on poor Ada, it really wouldn’t have been fair. I can’t say I’m particularly fond of the woman, but she’s all you’ve got, and as I’m very fond of you, it would hardly be decent if I turned you against her.’
‘So you had Sharon lie, and then you changed your mind.’
‘That’s about the size of it, yes. At least now you can stop blaming Frank and Norma or the Inspector.’
But Frank and Norma and the Inspector had long since been dispensed with as excuses. ‘And it was you who told those men that my father preyed on vulnerable boys?’
‘Is that really what they’re saying? No, I never told them that.’
‘So you didn’t tell them lies.’
‘I almost told them Ada’s story, it was rather too delicious to resist, but I managed to restrain myself.’ Jack’s laughter was forced, and it fizzled out quickly. ‘I’ve been a disappointment, I know.’
‘But you didn’t tell them lies,’ I said again.
‘If I hadn’t told them anything, then there wouldn’t be a story and there wouldn’t be any lies.’
I steadied myself by leaning with one side of my body against the wall. ‘You’re being too cruel,’ I said.
‘Oh yes, didn’t you know? We queers are traitorous people. That’s why half of us are working for the Russians – half the clever ones at least.’
‘Stop it, please! You’re being deliberately horrible and mean, I don’t understand!’
‘It’s all for the best,’ Jack answered dully. ‘And you’re young, you’ll soon forget…’ As though he had thought better of what he had intended to say, he stopped. ‘You’ll soon forget,’ he said again, but more finally now.
‘You’re trying to make me hate you.’
‘And you must. I would rather you hated me today than tomorrow. Then tomorrow you can hate me just a little bit more.’
‘Are you really not coming?’
‘Don’t let them cut your father in half, or even pretend to. It really isn’t what George would’ve wanted.’
‘That’s all been cancelled,’ I said. ‘No one’s coming, not even Karl.’
‘Karl?’
‘He promised he’d come, but Mami won’t let him.’
‘You’ve seen him?’
‘And I wanted him to meet you, but now neither of you is coming.’
‘Why would you even want me to come?’
‘Because I don’t believe you, I don’t, I don’t! I don’t think Sharon was lying, I think you are. And if all you’ve told those men is the truth, then why should I have to hate you, I don’t want to. Please come tomorrow, I don’t want to be alone with auntie Ada!’ At my own mention of auntie Ada, I was struck by an unanswered question. ‘But how did auntie Ada know?’
‘Know what?’
‘She said you spoke but that you didn’t really talk.’
‘That’s right, we didn’t. I gave her this number and asked her to ask you to call me.’
‘So how did she know that if I talked to you you’d take all the blame?’
‘She can’t have known.’
‘But she did. “I don’t think so, dear,” she said, when I blamed the Inspector. And then she told me I should call you. So she did know, don’t say she didn’t.’
‘She can’t have,’ Jack insisted. ‘When I spoke with her I didn’t know myself.’ But after a pause he came up with a different explanation: ‘She must’ve guessed that I wouldn’t have wanted to harm you more than I already have. And that’s what I’d be doing if I told you more lies.’
‘Yesterday I saw her talking to the sergeant, and today I was chased by those men.’ I was flailing about, uncertain what exactly I was doing or why I was doing it. Perhaps Jack was telling the truth, and instead of trying to exonerate him I should offer to forgive him. I had forgiven Karl for more, and he hadn’t deserved it. I knew Jack well enough to know that he was not who he was trying to come across as, and even if he was telling the truth, when it came to it he had not wrongly accused auntie Ada. He, too, had every reason to be angry with my father – for the hell in Shepherd’s Bush, for not loving him enough to be able to live with the truth, but again most of all for being dead. I felt too bereft to let go. I had lost too many people already.
‘The sergeant?’ I heard Jack asking, perhaps for the second or third time.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said. ‘Can’t we just say that bad things have happened, but that we’re not going to let them make everything bad? I don’t want to lose you. I can’t. And I’m never going to hate you.’
‘Sweet Jane…’ Jack faltered, his voice at last surrendering its hardness, like a bug breaking out of its shell and revealing the softness within. I waited for more – a sign at least, something to hold onto. But I waited in vain.
‘You’re not changing your mind,’ I said.
‘Or my feelings,’ said Jack.
‘Then the distance between u
s will only be miles, and you’ll always be close to my heart.’
Jack’s laughter was tender. ‘If any grown-up had said that… but then grown-ups are jaded.’
‘At least they can decide things for themselves. I needed you and Karl both to be there tomorrow, but you and Mami have decided something else.’
‘And I think we’ve both done you a favour.’
‘Mami definitely has, but you definitely haven’t.’
‘Or maybe it’s the other way around. You’re too young to be sure about anything,’ said Jack.
The very next morning I had to decide if Jack had been right. If I changed my mind after thinking I had made it up definitively, perhaps it was because, like Jack had said, I was too young to be sure about anything, rather than because I was too weak. In the end I decided that I ought to do what felt right today, not what had seemed unshakeable yesterday. It was a matter of reflection but also of instinct, and surely it was as much a sign of maturity not to be stubborn as it was not to be rash.
Already last night, at the end of my long conversation with Jack, I had become unsure about everything else, while at the same time being certain seemed to matter much less. I had gone upstairs and knocked on auntie Ada’s door, and the little that was said while we pressed against each other had signified a mutual letting go of our claims and counter-claims on the truth.
And now, in the simple clothes I had decided to wear for the short ceremony by which we would be bidding my father a modest farewell, half an hour before the excessive limousine from Hypnos Crematorium was due I was holding the front door ajar while Karl, magnificently sombre in a black suit and tie, his hair cut short and neatly parted, was being photographed by one of the several men he would have had to walk past before knocking on the door, to ask me when I answered if perhaps I might be able to forgive him.
Should I hold it against him that, rather than being clouded by the well-deserved dread that the door might be shut in his face, his whole countenance glowed with that same familiar confidence that had once so endeared him to me? If I thought that it stemmed from the arrogance of taking me for granted, then I probably would. But that wasn’t what I thought. The impression he gave me was one of an immense relief that he had made the right decision, regardless of how I might react. And I reacted badly.
The Madness of Grief Page 20