Kansas in August

by Patrick Gale

  ‘Lady Macbeth is a wicked lady and this is why she has to go mad. She can’t cope with the problums of trying to be Queen of Glasgow, and a good wife and not let anyone know what she feels like.’

  ‘Too simple by half,’ Hilary began to scribble in the margin of the child’s exercise book. ‘Why is she wicked? You rush on too fast; her wickedness needs at least a paragraph to itself. The same goes for her “wifely” qualities (was she a mother? etc.) Beware of writing can’t, don’t, shan’t etc. as these are both inelegant to read and unlikely to be accepted by the examiners. You cannot always write in the way that you speak. There is no “u” in problems.’

  He read on, inflicting red ink lacerations with barely a frown. This was the twenty-fifth version of What are the reasons, if any, for Lady Macbeth’s insanity? which he had read that day. 15B were short on originality, even when it came to making mistakes.

  The gas-fire was hissing softly and the windows were cloudy with an evening’s condensation. Above the fireplace there hung a large, framed photograph of Mary Martin dancing in an oversized sailor suit. This was mirrored by a long, narrow photograph of the finale ensemble from A Chorus Line. A handful of small parcels lay in a bed of unopened envelopes beside the telephone. A half-eaten Chinese takeaway for two lay beside the desk. Rufus was four hours late and Hilary had been drinking conscientiously for three of them.

  The telephone rang. He glanced at his watch and saw that it had just gone midnight. Dad and Marie-Claude calling from Paris. He downed the last half-inch of whisky and turned up the volume of There is Nothing Like a Dame before lifting the receiver.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘’Appy birsday to you! ’Appy birsday to you! ’Appy birs …’

  ‘Hang on, Marie-Claude. There are a lot of people. I’ll just …’ He turned down the volume and returned to the receiver. ‘Hi.’

  ‘’Appy birsday, darling. Quarter of a century; what a big boy!’

  ‘Yes. Thank you. Sweet.’

  ‘I ’and you to your father.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘Au ’voir.’

  ‘’Bye.’

  ‘Happy birthday, Hil.’

  ‘Thanks, Dad.’

  ‘Did you get our parcel?’

  ‘Yes. It’s right here. I’ll open it in a sec.’

  ‘Good. Got a lot of people there?’

  ‘Quite a lot, yes.’

  ‘Henry?’

  ‘No. I expect I’ll hear from her tomorrow.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘How’s everything with you?’

  ‘Marvellous. Great. How about you? How’s school?’

  ‘OK. Bearing up. Looks as though I might be kept on for another year.’

  ‘Oh, that’s good. No more singing and dancing, then?’

  ‘Well, no. It doesn’t seem so. Not for the moment. Dad, you must go. This’ll be costing …’

  ‘Rubbish. It’s good to talk to you. Marie-Claude says, when are you coming to stay again?’

  ‘Soon. I promise. Maybe Easter.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘I said, maybe Easter.’

  ‘Great. You do that.’

  ‘Well look, thanks for ringing, Dad.’

  ‘Not at all. Happy birthday. Here’s M – C again.’

  ‘Marie-Claude?’

  ‘’Appy birsday to Hil,’ she sang once more and laughed.

  ‘Thanks a lot, Marie-Claude. Sweet of you to ring. ‘Bye.’

  ‘Au ’voir, chéri. If the present’s no good, they’ll change it at ‘Arrods.’

  ‘Fine. ‘Bye.’

  Hilary replaced the receiver. He fiddled with the dial for a few seconds then, failing to tuck the receiver under his chin, dialled a London number. It rang nearly twenty times before a woman’s voice answered, faintly. He started apologetically.

  ‘Hello? … Oh, look, I’m terribly sorry to wake you … I didn’t? Oh good … Yes, I wonder, is Rufus Barbour there, please? … Thanks.’ He waited while she went to look. Muted, Mary Martin was washing her man right out of her hair and sending him on his way. ‘Hello? … Thanks a lot anyway … No, no message. Thanks. ‘Bye.’

  Hilary raised himself back onto his feet and sauntered back to the desk. Leaning over the chair, he took up the red biro once more and scribbled at the foot of the last essay.

  ‘23/50. Only fair. You have clearly read the play and grasped the gist of the story, but your essay lacks all argumentative thread. See me.’ He flipped the exercise book shut and tossed it on top of the others in his briefcase. Then, turning the music up once more, he sat down to celebrate his quarter century.

  He opened the cards first. Three of them turned out to be gift tokens from clinging aunts. There were several to ‘Mr Metcalfe’, bought by parents and grudgingly signed by pupils. There was one of Marlene Dietrich ‘with loads of affec. and admiration from Brij xxx’ and one of Vivien Leigh as Scarlett O’Hara from Richard, with a joke about ‘never ever have a birthday again’. The last was from his sister, Henry – a funny card which he had seen before, with a ‘P.S. Prezzy following soon’. Pat Casals, a fellow teacher, had bought him a nasty tie. Marie-Claude also had sent him a nasty tie, presumably bought after careful browsing in the last ‘Arrods sale. His father had given him a Rolex watch. This was generous; it was a beautiful one, remarkably similar to the beautiful Rolex watch he had sent the year before last. Rufus had sent nothing.

  Rufus Barbour, twenty-seven, undiscovered concert pianist never in at midnight. He taught the piano at Hilary’s school one day a week. A year and a half of undying love and half-hearted hunting for two-bedroom flats. Alternatively, eighteen months of climactic rows and botched reconciliations, or nearly two years of misplaced gratitude and sweet insecurity. Hilary sat staring at the gas-fire, feeling his jersey overheat and twisting the nasty ties around the Rolex box. Suddenly he fairly jumped to his feet. Lights, music and fire were extinguished in seconds and soon he was scarved and coated and out on the street. If Rufus had sent nothing, and wasn’t in his flat, then naturally he was on his way to deliver his present in person. Despising himself for being so mistrustful, Hilary pulled the door shut.

  He lived in a cramped flat over the Shiva Late-Nite Deli on North Pole Road. The school where he taught and Wormwood Scrubbs prison were within four minutes’ bicycle ride. The street was aptly named, for the area had a feeling of extremity about it; the combined effects of lying beyond the Westway, being dissected by heavy twenty-four-hour traffic that was always hurrying somewhere else, and being surrounded by wide open but peculiarly lifeless spaces like the greater and lesser Scrubbs and the Latimer School playing fields. Directed simply to ‘the North Pole’, most taxi drivers knew exactly where to go. Just as Hilary had taken on a temporary teaching post while masterminding his career as the new Fred Astaire and had stayed three years, so had taken emergency lodgings over the Sharmas’ shop and had proceeded to put down roots there.

  He walked along the treeless reaches of Wood Lane. The wind was so cold that it burned his lips and it was beginning to snow. He waited in the shadow of the Westway for the lights to change. The flow of cars off the flyover was steady. There was a subway, but he never used it for fear of being mugged. He crossed the road and walked on towards White City station. Passing the subway entrance he fancied he heard a high-pitched wailing, like a baby’s cry, coming from the dank tiled passage. He paused. The lights had changed, however, and the renewed roar of traffic deafened him. A snatch of car radio, perhaps.

  On the wasteland to his left, where gypsies camped in summer, stood the Unigate Dairies building, a lone white citadel executed in a shade of Los Angeles cream. By the jaundiced glare of the street-lamps he could make out the fading Pepsi cans and dolls’ arms which the wind had rolled through the sickly grass to come to rest against the chicken-wire barricade. To his right, the stadium was half demolished. Workmen had begun work last week, flattening the place with iron balls and bulldozers. One of the children had marched proudly into class b
earing a yellow plastic ‘W’ which she had poached from the site on the previous night. Some of the old women in the post office had heard a rumour that a smart shopping precinct was to take its place, but most seemed less optimistic. Another patch of soulless nowhere; somewhere for people to throw broken radios. And dolls’ limbs.

  ‘When’s the last West-bound train due in, please?’

  ‘It says on the notice over there.’

  ‘You don’t know, off-hand?’

  ‘We’re not allowed to give out that brand of information in case we get it wrong. It says over there.’ Impassive, the black woman waved a slow hand towards the entrance.

  ‘Thanks,’ said Hilary and went to look. The train was due in in five minutes. He walked about in the entrance, blowing on his hands. It was snowing in earnest now: large flakes flying, almost horizontal, on the wind. He read the posters, paced a bit more, saw a plaque he had never seen before which proclaimed the station a Festival of Britain prizewinner, and stopped to blow again on his chilled fingers.

  There was a distant clatter and the train came in. As he heard the first footsteps on the stairs, Hilary prepared his face and wondered what to say. Were Rufus clutching a parcel or even an envelope and looking suitably crestfallen, he would be all smiles and would say something about having had a mound of marking to do in any case. As the meagre crowd filed through the barrier, he stood well back. Rufus loathed public display.

  Hilary tried to still his excitement. He thought back to Tuesday night. It would be like that again. Rufus would be drunk and sarcastic; having disgorged a cruelly inflated argument against their continued intimacy, he would vomit in the kitchen sink and fall sound asleep without brushing his teeth. There would certainly be no present. Oh no. No such token of even a passing affection.

  There was no Rufus. An old man with a stick emerged from the stairwell and hobbled past the ticket collector, fingering his travel permit. Hilary stood a little longer, to watch the light go out in the ticket office and the ticket collector lock up her draughty booth, then turned out into the snow. As he overtook the old man and traced the chicken-wire back towards the flyover, he rehearsed the commonplace of his complaint.

  Here walked he, good-looking – well, not bad – twenty-five – which isn’t so very old, and certainly younger than some people – with a job that was only slightly soul-destroying and not unreasonably paid. Here walked he, who could do tap, soft-shoe, jazz, ballet (when he could fit in the classes) and sing like a … well, sing. Here he was, letting some failure of a pianist, who could only find a job teaching elementary classics one day a week, walk over his promising life. Rufus Barbour was a fully-qualified shit. Not only was he selfish and pig-headed, he was greedy, obstinate, morose, anti-social, parasitic and promiscuous. He delighted, as much as well-meaning friends, in dropping veiled references to his impulsive one-night-stands. What kind of mind is it that can’t cope with steady affection, love indeed, but has to glean thrills from a succession of puny conquests? He was probably riddled with disease. Frankly, who wants to share their lover with half the trash and social misfits of Charing Cross?

  Frankly, thought Hilary, as he kicked an adventurous doll’s arm into the path of an oncoming lorry, I wouldn’t half mind.

  Chapter four

  Henry came out from behind her desk to welcome Mrs Lewin.

  ‘Mrs Lewin, what a surprise! Just when we thought you were doing so well.’ She nodded to the porter. ‘Thanks, Joe.’ Joe left and Henry showed Mrs Lewin to the sofa. The corpulent visitor arranged herself on its edge and her nightdress over her knees. Henry sat in an upright chair beside her. She gave a wry smile. ‘We found you a flat and a perfectly good job weeks ago – what went wrong?’

  Her deskside manner was understanding without undue sympathy. She would nod slowly as she listened to an explanation. Her voice was gentle, low in pitch and only the faintest irony pulled at the edges of her smile. Her cheeks were high and smooth, but her forehead was heavily scarred through an habitual raising of the eyebrows.

  Mrs Lewin had relaxed in Joe’s absence and was now leaning a thick forearm on one knee so as to bring her nose closer to Dr Metcalfe’s.

  ‘Well, I suppose it was all OK; nice flat and that. Don’t think I wasn’t grateful. The work wasn’t bad, it was just the people. They didn’t …’ She broke off, wheezing, to cough heavily and swallow what she produced. ‘Pardon. No, the people there didn’t understand, you see.’

  ‘What didn’t they understand?’

  ‘The kids. They came back you see, like I said they would.’

  ‘Were you still taking the medicine?’

  ‘Well …’

  ‘Now be honest. It’s important.’

  ‘Well, no. It wasn’t doing any good.’

  ‘How can you tell if you weren’t taking it?’

  ‘The kids came back, didn’t they?’

  ‘But was that before or after you stopped taking the pills?’

  ‘Before. No after. No, it must’ve been before, because it was them as told me to stop taking the medication.’

  There was a pause as Henry looked briefly at her hands, then she raised her gaze full on to Mrs Lewin’s uncertain face. Very slightly she smiled.

  ‘Are you sure?’ Mrs Lewin looked away and twisted a piece of nightdress in her great, liver-spotted hands. ‘Because I can never be quite sure if you’re telling the truth.’

  ‘It’s not me, it’s the kids as don’t tell the truth.’

  ‘Then why did you listen to them when they told you to stop taking the pills?’

  ‘Well, you’ve got to listen to your kids, haven’t you?’

  ‘I couldn’t say. How many came back?’

  ‘Five.’

  ‘Five? You’re sure of that?’

  ‘Yeah. Five,’ answered Mrs Lewin, gleaning assurance from repetition. ‘I counted them; Mandy, Louie, Della, Pete and Joey.’

  ‘Joey? He’s new.’

  ‘Yeah, well Della died, didn’t she?’

  ‘But you just said that Della was one of the five.’

  ‘I didn’t mean Della, I meant Sam.’

  ‘Before you left us last time, there were only four, and Della was never one of them.’

  ‘Yeah, well she came and went pretty fast.’

  ‘So it would appear.’ Henry waited to see if there was any answer to that, but apparently there was none. ‘What went wrong at work, then? You say the other people didn’t understand?’

  ‘That’s right. I told them about the kids and they thought I was weird.’

  ‘I thought we had come to an agreement on that. I’ve told you repeatedly that however real they seem to you, you can’t expect other people to be interested.’

  ‘You’re interested.’

  ‘That’s my job. But they’re not my children – they’re yours and they’re totally your responsibility. You know they only come when you stop taking the pills, and you know that if you let them come and you start talking about them, people are going to think you’re funny.’

  ‘They said I was loony.’

  ‘That’s what people out there call people in here. You know that. It’s not rude really; it’s simply a way of saying, “We don’t understand you because you’re different.”’

  ‘Well, I think they’re different.’

  ‘Of course you do, and they are, but unfortunately there are more of them than you. You’re the only woman I know with five children called Mandy, Louie, Della, Pete and Joey who live inside your tummy and come and go as they please.’

  ‘Sam. Della’s copped it.’

  ‘Sorry, Sam. Is he there now?’

  ‘Yeah. ‘Course.’

  ‘What is he doing?’

  ‘I’ll ask him.’ Mrs Lewin cocked her head on one side so that a strand of lank, black hair fell over her eyes. She stared at the window. ‘Sam?’ she called. ‘Sam? What are you doing now?’ She waited and mouthed counting one to five before she answered, triumphantly, ‘He says he’s looking
for meat and he can’t find any.’

  ‘Is that your way of saying you want your supper?’

  ‘No. I’m not hungry, but Sam is, and Della.’

  ‘I thought Della was …’

  ‘I mean Louie,’ Mrs Lewin corrected herself hastily. ‘Louie’s hungry too; they’re all bleeding ravenous. Filthy lunch today. They didn’t like that suet much.’

  ‘Mrs Lewin?’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Do you like it here?’

  Mrs Lewin slipped her great hands coyly under her thighs like a seven-year-old faced with a cameraman and gave a girlish wiggle.

  “Course I do,’ she said. ‘It’s where my friends are.’

  ‘Well, you’re not going to be here for long. You’re not what anyone could call “ill” any more. We’ll just keep you here for a couple of weeks to get you back on your pills and while we find you another job and then the holiday’s over. Is that clear?’

  ‘Yes, doctor. Thanks ever so.’

  Henry stood and held out a hand to help her out of the sofa.

  ‘Come along then. Let’s find you your supper. Just wait a second while I collect my things.’

  Mrs Lewin stood buttonning up her dressing-gown while Henry pulled on an overcoat, threw a few papers and yesterday’s shirt into her briefcase and switched off the desk-lamp. Then she guided her patient back to her ward in search of supper for the kids.

  Dr Henrietta Metcalfe suffered from truncated youth. Born in Kuala Lumpur, where her father had held a post in an oil company, she was an only child for the first ten years of her life. Her mother then died from various complications on presenting her with a little brother by bungled Caesarian section. Henrietta was promptly despatched to a suitably protective English boarding school – the Saint Catherine’s, Selmbury, where she met Candy – while the family amah cared for baby boy and grieving father. The oil company paid her air fares, so she came home for every holiday and donned her mother’s apron. Through her teens she helped her father at dinner parties and taught her brother to swim, sew and make pastry. While her neighbours were playing badminton in the joyless heat she would sit on the verandah to supervise Hilary’s reading of Winnie the Pooh and later, to instruct him in the uses of his chemistry set. It was only in her twenties, when it was too late not to forgive him, that she came to think of him as a matricide.