by Rose Tremain
Her father’s house on the outskirts of its northern city had always seemed large to Nell. Too large. As though for every room there had to be an invisible occupant, a person whose space this rightfully was. As a child, she’d searched for these people – behind curtains or in old wardrobes – or thought she heard them (yearned to hear them) talking together on the landing. She had a name for them: the Clusters. She dreamed of them crowding in to her attic, dressed in white. They would tell her: ‘Here we are, dear. Don’t be scared. And look who’s with us: your mother! She’s woken up at last.’
Now, as Nell drove north, she decided she would refuse Laurel’s offer to stay overnight. What her attic room contained these days was Laurel’s exercise equipment: rowing machines, cycles and weights. It had become a kind of gym where middle-aged Laurel’s sinew and muscle were toned, to keep her young and fighting fit. So where, in the huge house, would she sleep anyway, if her attic was a fitness centre? Not in what her father called the Old Room, the bedroom he’d once shared with Nell’s mother. And all the Cluster rooms had functions now: computer room, games room, solarium. There would be no space for her in any of them. No bed.
And for years, anyway, the very idea of the house had been loathsome to her: its stale-fruit smell, its way of seeming dark. No, she’d find a cheap hotel nearby and perch there. A narrow bed, a TV within reach. Or perhaps she wouldn’t even stay the night, but turn straight round and drive back to London? All she needed to verify was the incontrovertible fact of her father’s death. She certainly didn’t want to lay flowers on the mound. She wasn’t going all this way to forgive him.
The house was full of people she’d never met: Laurel’s friends. They stood about in the kitchen, searched cupboards for teacups and sugar and packets of biscuits. When Laurel introduced her, they turned from whatever they were doing to look at her. ‘Did he have a daughter?’ said their stares. ‘How peculiar that we never knew.’
Nell took the cup of tea she was offered and, as though drawn by some remembered physical routine, began to make her way up the stairs towards her attic.
‘Nell,’ said Laurel’s voice behind her, ‘wait a moment. Don’t you want to talk?’
Nell didn’t pause, but went on up. ‘No,’ she said. ‘And I’m not staying. I only wanted to look at my room. Then I’m going to see him.’
‘Listen,’ said Laurel, ‘if you’re blaming me because he never got in touch . . .?’
‘I’m not blaming you,’ said Nell. ‘I didn’t want him to get in touch. I wanted to forget.’
‘You know he mellowed . . .’ began Laurel.
‘I don’t know anything,’ said Nell.
Laurel was standing on the half-landing (the very place where the gentle Clusters used to whisper), her tanned face looking lean, her white angora sweater crackling with the electricity of sudden shock. Nell turned her back and climbed the remaining stairs to the attic. In London, the day had been sunny, but here the sky was heavy and sudden squalls of rain blew in from the west.
There was still a bed in the attic room. Or, not a bed exactly, but a kind of couch covered with a towel where, Nell presumed, Laurel rested between sets of exercises.
Nell went to it and sat down and stared at all the body equipment. Then, suddenly tired after her drive, she put her cup of tea down on the floor, drew up her feet on to the couch and closed her eyes. The couch was where her own bed had been, under the window. Twenty-four years ago, she’d been lying right here on a spring night when her father’s sister, Aunt Iris, had come tiptoeing in and knelt down on the floor, with her arms resting on a chair. She had looked very pale. Nell had wondered if this aunt imagined the chair were a toilet bowl and that she was about to be sick into it. ‘Nell,’ said Aunt Iris, ‘something has happened to your mother. And I’m the one who has to tell you.’
Nell asked Iris if she was feeling sick, but she said no, not sick, pet, only sad. And then she explained that Nell’s mother had been hit by a car and, after this terrible hitting, she had fallen asleep. Fast asleep for ever. And she was never going to wake up.
Five-year-old Nell didn’t believe her aunt. In the early morning, she crept down to the Old Room, expecting to find her mother lying there beside her father, but there was no one in the room and after searching for her father, she discovered him snoring on the kitchen floor. She woke him and asked: ‘Is it true my mum’s gone to sleep?’
The father put his two fists in front of his eyes. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It’s true.’
‘Where?’ asked Nell.
But there had never been any answer to this – not one she could remember. So, just as she searched for the Clusters, Nell began to look for her mother in the kinds of places where people might decide to go to sleep. One of these places was a shop called the Reliant Bed Centre. She would tug her hand away from the aunt and go running in. ‘She’s not there, love,’ somebody would say. But one day, Nell saw her. She was lying on one side of a big Reliant Bed and next to her, on the other side of it, a man was lying, and Nell’s mother and this man were bouncing on this bed – not asleep at all – and laughing. But then, it wasn’t her; it was a stranger. ‘Come away, Nell,’ said Aunt Iris, ‘she’s not anywhere on this earth.’
Nell almost dozed, sensing the light at the window altering. She knew it was time to visit her father.
They asked if she was family. As she answered them, she choked on something – a microscopic living organism or a particle of dust from a hospital blanket – and they mistook this choke for anguish. They spoke to her kindly then and said that, when she’d been in to see him, there’d be a cup of tea waiting. This was all she’d had that day: white wine and tea.
‘What was the cause of death?’ Nell asked.
They didn’t have the answer in their minds or to hand. They had to go away and consult a chart. Then, looking at the chart and not at her, they explained the term myocardial infarction: a blocking of the major arterial vessels, these vessels becoming stuffed with a fatty substance, restricting blood movement and eventually causing the heart to stop.
‘Is it certain?’ she asked.
‘Is what certain?’
‘Death.’
‘Well, not invariably. Because there are warning signs and modes of surgical intervention that can prolong life, such as arterial bypass or . . .’
‘No,’ said Nell. ‘What I mean is, is my father really dead?’
They looked up sharply from their charts. As if she’d just announced the closure of the hospital. ‘Yes,’ they chorused. ‘Yes.’
Naturally, it was very cold where he lay. A white room. Two slabs, the other one vacant. Screens around him, moved aside to let her in. Cruel light falling on to his face, boring into it, giving a deep contour to wrinkles and blemishes. Nell didn’t touch him, couldn’t bear to reach out to him; only stared and stared, allowing herself to acknowledge the fact at last: this is no longer him, this is a corpse.
So sad, Nell had always thought them, the dead. Gone to nowhere, like her mother. Searched for and longed for and never found. But all Nell could feel for this dead body was shame, untempered by pity. The man had died of a petrified heart – his perfect end. Because it was his inadequate human heart that had sent his first wife out into a spring night, hit on the mouth, confused, weeping, wandering off the pavement and into the road when the car had come by. This same inadequate heart had taunted and bullied his only child across eighteen years of life, seeming to wish her dead each day, until the last of the last days, when she packed and left for London. And never came back. It had hardened her own heart, let her be stranded at thirty, high up in an airy empty flat with seldom the least shadow of any other arriving or departing: only the grey parrot, turning on its perch and trying to speak.
Nell lay in the narrow hotel bed. She longed for silence, but traffic on some sodium-lit throughway burdened this silence, as if it were endlessly attempting to reach her and endlessly prevented.
Would the small hours let it come? Nell doub
ted it. City traffic sighed and shuddered night and day, never dying down.
After two hours, Nell counted out three herbal sleeping tablets and swallowed them. She knew the sour taste they left in her mouth was from the Valerian they contained. Valeriana officinalis. The plant alchemised earth into bitterness and the bitterness ushered in oblivion.
And now, this oblivion was waiting near, almost ready to take her, and, as it did, Nell found herself once again in the shop where she used to search for her mother. She walked slowly up the carpeted pathway between the brand-new beds. And there she was at last, the parent who had loved her, curled up neat and comfortable on a Reliant Deluxe Pocketed Sprung Mattress. On the mother’s sleeping face was a smile and when Nell reached out to touch her, the hand she held was soft and warm.
The following day Nell drove back to London. She played loud music in the car. She felt light, reckless, full of hope, as though she might still have been a girl, with all her life to come.
Peerless
His parents had christened him Broderick, but for as long as he could remember, he’d always been known as ‘Badger’. He spent his life feeling that Badger was a fatuous name, but he couldn’t stand Broderick either. To him, the word ‘Broderick’ described a thing – possibly a gardening implement or a DIY tool – rather than a human being. Becoming an animal, he decided, was better than remaining a thing.
Now, because he was getting old, it worried Badger that the hours (which, by now, would have added up to years) he’d spent worrying about these two useless names of his could have been far better spent worrying about something else. The world was in a state. Everybody could see that. The north and south poles, always reliably blue in every atlas, now had flecks of yellow in them. He knew that these flecks were not printers’ errors. He often found himself wishing that he had lived in the time of Scott of the Antarctic, when ice was ice. The idea of everything getting hotter and dirtier made Badger Newbold feel faint.
Newbold. That was his other name. ‘Equally inappropriate,’ he’d joked to his future wife, Verity, as he and she had sat in the crimson darkness of the 400 Club, smoking du Maurier cigarettes. ‘Not bold. Missed the war. Spend my days going through ledgers and adding up columns. Can’t stand mess. Prefer everything to be tickety-boo.’
‘Badger,’ Verity had replied, with her dimpled smile, with her curvy lips, red as blood, ‘you seem bold to me. Nobody has dared to ask me to marry them before!’
She’d been so adorable then, her brown eyes so sparkly and teasing, her arms so enfolding and soft. Badger knew that he’d been lucky to get her. If that was the word? If you could ‘get’ another person and make them yours and cement up the leaks where love could escape. If you could do that, then Badger Newbold had been a fortunate man. All his friends had told him so. He was seventy now. Verity was sixty-nine. On the question of love, they were silent. Politeness had replaced love.
They lived in a lime-washed farmhouse in Suffolk on the pension Badger had saved, working as an accountant, for thirty-seven years. Their two children, Susan and Martin, had gone to live their lives in far-off places on the other side of the burning globe: Australia and California. Their mongrel dog, Savage, had recently died and been buried, along with all the other mongrel dogs they’d owned, under a forgiving chestnut tree in the garden. And, these days, Badger found himself very often alone.
He felt that he was waiting for something. Not just for death. In fact, he did nothing much except wait. Verity often asked him in the mornings: ‘What are you going to do today, Badger?’ and it was difficult to answer this. Badger would have liked to be able to reply that he was going to restore the polar ice cap to its former state of atlas blue, but, in truth, he knew perfectly well that his day was going to be empty of all endeavour. So he made things up. He told Verity he was designing a summer house, writing to the children, pruning the viburnum, overhauling the lawnmower or repairing the bird table.
She barely noticed what he did or didn’t do. She was seldom at home. She was tearing about the place, busy beyond all reason, trying to put things to rights. She was a volunteer carer at the local Shelter for Battered Wives. She was a Samaritan. Her car was covered with ‘Boycott Burma’ stickers. Her ‘Stop the War in Iraq’ banner – which she had held aloft in London for nine hours – was taped to the wall above her desk. She sent half her state pension to Romanian Orphanages, Cancer Research, Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, Amnesty International, Victims of Torture and the Sudan Famine Fund. She was never still, always trembling with outrage, yet ready with kindness. Her thick grey hair looked perpetually wild, as though desperate hands had tugged it, in this direction and that. Her shoes were scuffed and worn.
Badger was proud of her. He saw how apathetic English people had become, slumped on their ugly, squashy furniture. Verity was resisting apathy. ‘Make every day count’ was her new motto. She was getting old, but her heart was like a piston, powering her on. When a new road threatened the quiet of the village, it was Verity who had led the residents into battle against the council – and won. She was becoming a local heroine, stunningly shabby. She gave away her green Barbour jacket and replaced it with an old black duffel coat, bought from the Oxfam shop. In this, with her unkempt hair, she looked like a vagrant, and it was difficult for Badger to become reconciled to this. He felt that her altered appearance made him seem stingy.
The other thing which upset Badger about the new Verity was that she’d gone off cooking. She said she couldn’t stand to make a fuss about food when a quarter of the world was living on tree bark. So meals, in the Newbold household, now resembled post-war confections: ham and salad, shop-bought cake, rice pudding, jacket potatoes with margarine. Badger felt that it was unfair to ask him to live on these unappetising things. He was getting constipated. He had dreams about Béarnaise sauce. Sometimes, guiltily, he took himself to the Plough at lunchtime and ordered steak pie and Guinness and rhubarb crumble. Then he would go home and fall asleep. And in the terror of a twilight awakening, Badger would berate himself for being exactly the kind of person Verity despised: apathetic, self-indulgent and weak. At such times, he began to believe it was high time he went to see his Maker. When he thought about heaven, it resembled the old 400 Club, with shaded pink lights and waiters with white bow ties and music, sad and sweet.
One spring morning, alarmingly warm, after Verity had driven off somewhere in her battered burgundy Nissan, Badger opened a brown envelope addressed to him – not to Verity – from a place called the Oaktree Wildlife Sanctuary. It was a home for animals that had been rescued from cruelty or annihilation. Photographs of peacefully grazing donkeys, cows, sheep, geese, chickens and deer fell out from a plastic brochure. Badger picked these up and looked at them. With his dogs, the last Savage included, Badger had felt that he had always been able to tell when the animals were happy. Their brains might be tiny, but they could register delight. Savage had had a kind of grin, seldom seen, but suddenly there in the wake of a long walk, or lying on the hearthrug in the evenings, when the ability to work the CD player suddenly returned to Verity and she would put on a little Mozart. And, looking at these pictures, Badger felt that these animals (and even the birds) were in a state of contentment. Their field looked spacious and green. In the background were sturdy shelters, made of wood.
Inside the brochure was a letter in round writing, which began:
Dear Mr Newbold,
I am a penguin and my name is Peerless.
At this point, Badger reached for his reading glasses, so that he could see the words properly. Had he read the word ‘Peerless’ correctly? Yes, he had. He went on reading:
. . . I was going to be killed, along with my mates, Peter, Pavlov, Palmer and Pooter, when our zoo was closed down by the Council. Luckily for me, the Oaktree Wildlife Sanctuary stepped in and saved us. They’ve dug a pond and installed a plastic slide for us. We have great fun there, walking up the slide and slipping down again. We have a good diet of fish. We are very lucky penguin
s.
However, we do eat quite a lot and sometimes we have to be examined by the vet. All of this costs the Sanctuary a lot of money. So we’re looking for Benefactors. For just £25 a year you could become my Benefactor. Take a look at my picture. I’m quite smart, aren’t I? I take trouble with my personal grooming. I wasn’t named ‘Peerless’ for nothing. Please say that you will become my Benefactor. Then, you will be able to come and visit me any time you like. Bring your family.
With best wishes from Peerless the Penguin.
Badger unclipped the photograph attached to the letter and looked at Peerless. His bill was yellow, his coat not particularly sleek. He was standing in mud at the edge of the pond. He looked as though he had been stationary in that one place for a long time.
Peerless.
Now, Badger laid all the Sanctuary correspondence aside and leaned back in his armchair. He closed his eyes. His hands covered his face.
Peerless had been the name of his friend at boarding school. His only real friend.
Anthony Peerless. A boy of startling beauty, with a dark brow and a dimpled smile and colour always high, under the soft skin of his face.
He’d been clever and dreamy, useless at cricket, unbearably homesick for his mother. He’d spent his first year fending off the sixth-formers, who passed his photograph around until it was chewed and faded. Then, Badger had arrived and become his friend. And the two had clung together, Newbold and Peerless, Badger and Anthony, in that pitiless kraal of a school. Peerless the dreamer, Badger the mathematical whiz. An unlikely pair.