They all noticed that she looked tired and none of them could think what to say to stop her continuing up the stairs. When they heard her door close, and a lock being turned, Fred remembered the people in the kitchen.
‘Christ,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘What now?’ The gaggle in the hall looked back at him, politely expectant, and he realised that Caroline was here, in his house, and that he was in charge. ‘Into the kitchen with everyone else,’ he said. ‘I’ll get her down. She’ll be delighted.’
By the time Fred had persuaded Juliet to come downstairs, she was irritated and the guests were bored. He made her go in first and she kicked open the door, turned on the light and stared at her siblings and friends, who, convinced that the time would never come, stared back. Fred was determined on his moment and so raised his arms like the conductor of a recalcitrant school choir, but then lost his nerve: ‘SUR-prise?’ The guests, too, were caught out. ‘Surprise!’ someone barked, ‘Surprise!’ another grumbled, then a yelp, a hoot, a whisper: ‘Surprise!’ ‘Surprise!’ ‘Surprise!’
Clara refused to look at her watch. She was enjoying this too much: being in town without children, not lugging a portfolio around and not leaking breast milk, but drinking gin and tonic in a backstreet pub near Clapham Junction with a man who was evidently pleased to have bumped into her and who seemed to be in no hurry either. She studied him as he waited at the bar, not leaning forward, not raising a note or waving a hand, just standing two or three people back, smiling perseveringly at a pretty young woman who, once she saw him, served him right away. The woman’s face had lit up at the sight of this charming man; he would, Clara knew, have held her gaze for a little too long.
‘That man,’ Fred had observed, ‘is quiet in a loud way.’
As Jacob paid, he dipped his head and looked up humbly, so grateful that the woman would take his money, so astonished to be given change. As she put the drinks down on the counter, one slopped and spilled and he rifled urgently through his pockets and brought out a handkerchief, his hands flapping as he insisted on mopping it up himself, unaware that the woman had found a cloth and would far rather have done it herself. That was her job. Couldn’t he see that he was being embarrassing?
There it was, the flaw in Jacob, the thing that made his charm real and his artifice redeemable. He was not, after all, in control. The woman, for a moment so animated and alert, had withdrawn her interest as his attention lost shape; just like that – too much. Confused, disdainful, she dropped the cloth on the bar and turned her back. Clara noticed that Jacob left his handkerchief beside it.
Graham was leaning against the mantelpiece, just as he had the last time he visited Khyber Road, only now it was because otherwise he would not be able to stand up. There had been the champagne and some surprisingly good wine, and a lot of grass which he had smoked in order to encourage Caroline, who said that she had heard it was an aphrodisiac. She was sitting next to the other brother, the fat one, whose arm rested along the sofa behind her back and who was pretending not to look at her breasts under her slippery shirt. The fat brother was waving his other hairy hand in the air and whatever he was saying was making her laugh.
‘How’s the wife?’ It was Fred.
‘The what?’
‘Jane – your wife?’ Fred persisted, standing annoyingly in front of Caroline.
Graham’s mind swerved around an awkward thought.
At that moment, Caroline rose up behind Fred and asked where the bathroom was. He took her arm and led her upstairs.
Graham slumped beside Carlo on the sofa. ‘She’s asleep,’ he said. ‘Upped her dose since she got the boot at work.’ His eyes thudded shut and his head jolted onto Carlo’s shoulder.
Tania gave up trying to get upstairs to say goodbye to Juliet. It would have been awkward anyway as Fred was sitting on the stairs with that big girl more or less on his knee. They didn’t appear to be kissing. His eyes were closed and her face was buried in his neck. There was a wet patch on her nasty short skirt. Were they, despite the loud music, asleep? Tania went back to the doorway and smiled efficiently round the room before leaving.
On the doorstep, she met Clara and Jacob. They were flushed, as if about to melt into the mucky sunset behind them.
‘Bad idea!’ Tania laughed and they looked caught out. What was that grass, some kind of truth drug? ‘I mean the party. Juliet went straight back up to her room and hasn’t been down since. Still, now you’re here, Jacob …’ She stopped as if struck by something terrible, opened her mouth and shut it again, pushed past them, turned the corner and vomited into her handbag.
Jacob and Clara stood in the hallway. Eventually, Clara gestured towards the stairs in a manner she knew would annoy him: ‘Off you trot.’
He put his hand on the small of her back. ‘I don’t think so.’
Graham came to and climbed back up the mantelpiece. He was clutching at it and trying to pass off his swaying as dancing. If only he could get his body to move backwards and forwards, because that seemed to be the way people danced these days, or at least these people. They had their arms up in the air and were doing twiddly things with their fingers. The fat brother was touching the ceiling and those three lovely women had formed a ring and were stroking him. Graham looked down at the pale girl who had been crouched over the stereo all evening. She kept searching through boxes of records and tapes, pulling something out, putting it back. It was only music, for god’s sake, and not very good music at that. It kept getting stuck, repeating itself, all stop and start. She did look dull.
Someone shouted ‘Go on!’ and the tall black woman, the really beautiful one, wrapped an arm round Graham and pulled him towards the ring. ‘Someone wants to dance with you,’ she said and tugged him forward. His feet wouldn’t adjust and tripped over themselves so that he staggered towards the Japanese woman with the shaved head (or was she Chinese or Taiwanese? Some sort of – nese), who stepped aside and then he was falling, falling down the body of the one with the long blonde hair, past her long golden neck, bouncing off her powerful shoulder, catching briefly on the point of her breast and then sliding all the way down the taut line of her black dress, on past a mile of fuzzy brown leg, on and on to the surprising length of her shoe.
Mary looked round for a different tape, something that would calm everyone down while Carlo and Clara helped the idiot in the tight ironed jeans onto the sofa. They propped him up and Clara undid a couple of the buttons on his pink shirt because its high collar was pinching his spotty throat.
Graham did not dare open his eyes. Was one of those goddesses actually undressing him? The smell of her skin was unexpected – tobacco and gin, and then milk, sweat and the tang of something deeper. ‘Try to breathe,’ she said and her voice was not charmingly accented as he had imagined, but tough and dry. He opened his eyes and it was not a goddess at all but the older sister, whose breasts he had tried not to stare at. Her face had seemed striking in a handsome way, what with all that hair but up close, shaded and enlarged, it became that of a ‘Witch’. Had he really said it? ‘Take your hands off me, you fucking witch,’ all the time with a smile on his face because he was drunk and stoned and melted on the outside while in his heart, he felt one clear thing: how much he hated women like this.
‘Witch!’ He said it again and couldn’t stop laughing even though people were pulling at him and he was out on the street where the pavement ought to have been only there wasn’t one, not even a kerb, and he sat down anyway, or fell because where were his bones and god did it smell bad, worse than her, the witch, the bitch, but he didn’t get up until someone threw a bucket of water over him, after which he remembered a bit more and wondered what he was doing in this slum and made his way home, for once not getting lost in the half-made streets of the estate and for once not on the lookout for black men with knives and for once looking so shabby and relaxed that those who passed him, carrying knives or not, smiled and some even said goodnight.
Graham tottered under the railwa
y bridge, stopping to greet a tramp he passed every day and never usually spoke to: ‘Weren’t we at school together?’ to which the man replied, ‘Actually, yes. I was a friend of your brother Simon’s.’ He continued across the main road, waving cheerily after the car that nearly knocked him down, ‘Do I know you?’ and off behind the burger bars and charity shops into the solid streets of mansion blocks. No dog shit here; just signs telling people to clear it up. Graham concentrated on getting from one lamp post to the next and read each sign he came to: Neighbourhood Watch, a lost cat called Timon, a choral society, plans for a conversion, a petition for CCTV, a petition against CCTV, a holistic gardener, a local celebrity giving a poetry reading (his own poems) in a library, an advert for a private security firm.
On the fourth floor, behind deep walls and double-glazed windows, Jane sat among cushions and waited. She did not sleep as much as they thought. Graham had insisted on going along to protect Caroline from desperate little Fred Clough. Why had Caroline wanted to go in the first place? Jane hadn’t.
She was pleased that Graham came home alone. He reeked of dogshit and vomit and curry, perhaps the goat curry they sold in that tiny shop by the station, where he called the owner by his first name but got it wrong. Graham liked to take his friends there after a night in the pub, daring them to eat goat and insisting that they would not be able to take the heat. He would eat leftover spicy orange patties for breakfast and then fart all day in front of the television.
Graham slid down the wall, looked up at his wife and asked her if he had a brother called Simon. For once, Jane thought of the right thing to do at the right moment. She guided Graham into Caroline’s room and put him to bed.
Barbara Dart returned to Jacob’s room. She hadn’t seen him for over a week and he hadn’t answered his telephone, which she knew did not necessarily mean that he was not there. Sometimes Jacob chose not to answer the telephone for days. Still, she was unnerved, more so when she found the room empty and more or less unlocked again. Where was Jacob? With the girl, perhaps, which did not matter because she knew from Tania that the girl was going to America. Poor Jacob, the girl had been going away all along; she had never meant it. Barbara scanned the room and saw that the things she had gone through last time were still strewn about. Then she noticed something stuck on the wall, no, in the wall – a rolled up note. She read it and took it.
Fred had woken long before Caroline but had stayed put, mostly because he had lost all feeling in his right leg, the one she had been sitting on. He didn’t care if he never felt anything again. All he had to do was move his head slightly and his lips could touch her cheek. He could smell and taste her. Fred knew that most people would not find Caroline beautiful. Her forehead gave way too steeply to a chin already cushioned by a creamy fold. Her teeth had the quelled look that English teeth take on once they have been vigorously straightened, as if her smile had retreated. Her eyebrows were excitingly heavy but her eyes were pale. He could never decide on their exact colour. Her hair also eluded colour. It had been strained into shape and had now flopped.
What really excited Fred, what really moved him, was Caroline’s skin. It was so lively. One winter morning she had arrived at work and he had thought her face looked remarkably liquid and clarified, magnified, as if behind glass, so that when she asked him why he was staring at her, he said ‘You look like a frozen pond’, which was exactly right but all wrong because everyone laughed.
When Caroline stirred, he raised her to her feet and limped stiffly along to his room, forgetting that Bella was in his bed. He scooped the snoring child up with one arm while letting Caroline gently down with the other. Then he settled Bella in a heap of clothes and left them both to rest.
The goddesses were squeezed together on the sofa, eyes shut. No one could keep still on that thing usually, let alone go to sleep. Fred lay down at their feet.
Up in the attic, Allie, who smoked the stuff all day and still didn’t sleep, was sharing a joint with Mary. She would have liked to have danced with Carlo but Juliet’s friends were so scary that she chose instead to climb the ladder and finding Allie there, asked if she could sit for a while and get some air. It was dark, like the club, and she couldn’t see anyone, not even Allie who had crouched in a corner as he always did because ‘they’ were out there watching and would be coming to get him. Mary sang:
… dawn’s early …
haunting me …
where will you be …
cold …
The door to Juliet’s room opened and Carlo came out onto the landing, where he stopped to listen. He stopped again in the hallway because he could see that in the kitchen Jacob was making coffee in a pot on the stove, and Clara sat at the table slicing ham and cheese. They were silent, apart and turned away from one another, but something was clear. If they had felt the need to make conversation, Carlo would not have worried.
‘What’re you doing?’ Fred bumped up against him, rubbing his eyes.
‘Observing,’ replied Carlo.
‘What?’
‘The Dart. I mean, who wears black these days? Especially all black …’
‘Undertakers. Referees. Shadows.’
‘Didn’t you enter a fancy-dress competition once as a shadow?’
‘No.’
‘I’m sure you did. That first summer we were in Allnorthover, when Ma bribed us to go along to their fête. My god it was medieval – some modern version of the ducking stool …’
‘That was Julie Lacey in a polka-dot bikini. Boys were paying to knock her off a ledge and into a pool.’
‘How would you remember? You were only eight.’
‘Come on, it was Julie Lacey in a polka-dot bikini. It was talked about for years.’
‘That and Tom the Drowner.’
‘Was that the same year? Christ.’
They both looked up towards the attic where Mary had stopped singing.
‘And it wasn’t a shadow,’ said Fred. ‘It was a puddle. Nobody bloody well got it, but it was brilliant. A puddle.’
Everyone woke up at the same moment and was hungry, even Bella, whom Caroline brought down and held on her knee and fed. When Bella punched Caroline on the arm and Mary jumped to apologise, Caroline smiled and punched Bella back.
They heard Juliet go into the bathroom.
‘We need to check the time of her flight,’ said Carlo.
‘Whose flight?’ asked Caroline.
‘Jacob, don’t you think it might be a good idea if –’ Carlo faltered.
Jacob was leaning against the open back door. ‘I will wait for her,’ he said.
‘Wait for her to come downstairs or wait for her to come back from America?’ Fred could not stop himself.
‘Yes.’
‘Which?’ He always managed to do it, the bastard, somehow he always got right under Fred’s skin. ‘Down or back?’
Jacob shrugged and Fred would have hit him if Caroline had not interrupted: ‘Oh! I thought you were her husband!’
For once, Jacob looked surprised. ‘I’m sorry?’
Caroline gestured towards Clara: ‘Her husband.’
‘No,’ he said eventually.
‘Oh,’ said Caroline. ‘Sorry, um, whatever your name is.’
‘Clara, my name is Clara.’
‘But you do have a wife, don’t you?’ Later, Fred would blame it on Allie’s grass. ‘Although funnily enough, she’s not either of my sisters, is she?’
‘Yes.’
‘No she isn’t!’
‘No.’
‘Don’t play your games! Even when Tobias was killed, you were playing your fucking games. You think you’re so exempt!’
Two or three people in the room had grasped what had been said and waited for Jacob to explain. In the end, it was Sara who spoke and her tone was that of a goddess leaning over the earth to disentangle a couple of fishermen’s nets. ‘Yes, he has a wife. No, it is not either sister.’
‘So who is your wife then?’ Caroline demanded.
Jacob said nothing. Hannelore, Ritsu and Sara passed food and poured coffee. Juliet had not discussed Jacob with them, so they assumed that he could not be that important. They carried on pouring and passing as Jacob, without a hint of capitulation, went upstairs.
Clara stood up and yawned. ‘Only Juliet would contrive a situation as drearily complicated as this. Carlo, can I go back to your place to get some sleep? It must be getting on for six o’clock and I’ve got a meeting with someone about a commission.’
Caroline looked up. ‘A commission? How fantastic!’
Clara ignored her. ‘Keys, Carlo? I’ll call a cab. Anyone else going east?’
Mary took Bella back to bed, Clara gave up trying to explain to the taxi firm how to find Khyber Road, and set off with Hannelore, Ritsu and Sara to meet the cab. Carlo went into the living room, shut the door, picked up the phone, dialled Jonathan Mehta’s number and put it down again. This left Fred and Caroline alone.
When were they ever alone? There was usually someone else there – Graham, say, or someone to deal with, like Jacob. Terrified, Fred bolted for the back door and taking a deep breath, suggested that Caroline might like to get some fresh air ‘while it lasts’, and she came to stand beside him and looked up with him beyond the concrete yard, past the dilapidated roofs, above the high windows of the fenced-off primary school and the higher windows of the tower blocks. Up there, jet trails persisted, solidly white, as if it really did take a considerable effort to move through the air and a long time for the sky to recover.
TEN
Juliet continued to pack and unpack until she had worked up the courage to ask a direct question: ‘Should I be leaving you?’
Jacob could tell what this was costing her, but his fear had its own momentum. He tried. He opened his arms and drew her to him and she tried to believe that this was answer enough. And even though for Jacob the feeling of falling away from her slowed and he felt that after all things might be alright, he could not stand to bring his dream of their romance and its unspokenness down to the level of her question.
An Irresponsible Age Page 10