by Pat Barker
‘And then your grandfather died.’
‘Yeah, babbling on about rabbits, poor old sod. Gran went back home. She couldn’t do anything — she was ill herself. I think — I’m not sure — I think there was a bit of a breach. I think she blamed my mother for Granddad dying like that. He was doing too much, trying to help, and he couldn’t, his heart was too bad.’
‘It sounds as if there was a lot of blaming going on.’
‘Oh, a tremendous amount.’
‘How did you react to all this?’
‘Went off the rails. Let me see, what was I doing? Starting fires. Once in my bedroom, I think that was the worst time.’
‘How did it feel?’
‘Marvellous. Fantastic. My mother said when she came into the room I was staring at the fire, not doing anything, not trying to put it out. And that was awful for her, because then she felt she couldn’t leave me, and she had to leave me. She’d got a job cleaning, by this time. The farm was up for sale, but it wasn’t selling. She sold all the stock and lived on social security, Dad never sent a penny. And she got this little job, cash in hand, and she used to run all the way there and all the way back, and every time she turned the corner she fully expected to see the place on fire. Then I burnt the barn down. And there was one other little fire in the shed. The rest of it was all outside. But that was with other kids. We lit a fire once that took four fire engines hours to put out.’
‘Did you watch?’
‘Yes.’
‘How did you feel?’
‘Powerful’
‘The opposite of being hung up on a peg.’
A sour smile. ‘Yeah.’
‘And what did you do the rest of the time?’
‘Moped about. Nicked off school. Stole.’
‘On your own?’
‘No, there was a gang of us. Except I think… I don’t know.’
‘No, go on.’
‘I think they were more normal than me. I mean, we used to play at being the S AS behind enemy lines, and we’d be completely lost in it, the way kids are, but then the game would stop for them, and they’d go and do something else. I was inside the game all the time. And then I’d go to call for somebody and he’d come to the door, and say, “I can’t play out today. Me nanna’s coming to tea.” And I’m like, What does he mean his nanna’s coming to tea? We’re the fucking SAS. I was inside the game all the time. I’d be lying in bed at night listening to Mum and Gran downstairs and they were enemy civilians.’
‘And the fire-setting and the stealing?’
‘Part of the game. Setting fire to enemy buildings. Living off the land.’
Any moment now he was going to claim that Lizzie’s death was collateral damage. ‘Who did you steal from?’
‘My mother. Shops. Eventually houses.’
‘With the gang?’
‘Sometimes. Everybody nicked sweets from shops.’
‘And stealing from houses?’
He hesitated. ‘No, that was just me. It wasn’t about money, though I did need it. I don’t know… I liked being in the houses. Being there, breathing the air, leaving all these invisible traces all over the carpet. I liked the idea that when they came back they wouldn’t know.’ He shrugged. ‘It’s hard to explain. Nothing in the house could do anything.’
‘The house was helpless?’
‘Yeah – something like that.’
‘Did your mother know?’
‘She knew about the shops, because I got caught. The newsagent caught me. She had to go to the police station. And then the headmistress wanted to see her, I was playing truant, and then social services got involved. And that was worse than the police. She wasn’t used to anything like that. And she did what somebody like her would do. She talked to the vicar, and he got me into the church choir. Oh yes,’ he added, noticing Tom’s expression. ‘In the middle of all this, I became a choir boy. Only I stole from the boys in the choir, and the vicar came to the house, and said he couldn’t have me in the choir any more. Not fair to the other boys. And that was it, she cracked.’ He was stubbing a cigarette out as he spoke, grinding it flat. ‘After the vicar had gone,’ he said, at last, deliberately, crumbling fibres of tobacco between his fingers, ‘she took the belt to me. The other thing he left behind. I thought, You can’t do this. She lashed out, shouting, screaming, she looked so ugly, and I suddenly thought, No. And I caught the end of the belt, and wrapped it round my wrist. And then again. I swung her round and round, and then I let go and she crashed into the wall and slid down it. Her wig was all lopsided. She looked at me and I looked at her, and…’ A deep breath. ‘I ran out of the house. I didn’t go back till nearly midnight.’
‘What were you feeling?’
‘Exhilarated.’
‘Where did you go?’
‘Nowhere. Just walked.’
He sat looking down at his hands, unwilling or unable to say more.
Tom broke the silence. ‘How long before Lizzie’s death was this?’
Danny looked up with an expression of mild surprise. ‘Do you know I never realized? It was the day before.’
FIFTEEN
Lauren rang to ask when it would be convenient for her to come and collect her pictures and some pieces of furniture. ‘Never,’ he wanted to say, but stopped himself in time.
‘Which pieces?’ he asked, grudging and suspicious. He didn’t want or mean to sound like that, but the idea of a van drawing up outside and men carrying away part of his home was unpleasant, to say the least. And, when he first heard her voice, there’d been a second of hope. He’d thought she just might say, ‘Look, let’s not do anything in a hurry. Let’s give it a few more months.’ Instead, there was this crisp, cool, businesslike request for a date and time.
‘The hall table. The sofas in the living room, the balloon-backed chair, the chest of drawers in the bedroom.’
All hers. All entirely reasonable.
When he remained silent, she said, ‘The hall table was a present from my father. I hadn’t even met you.’
‘No, no, of course it’s yours. And the rest.’ Take the lot, he wanted to add, take everything. At the same time he had an uncomfortably clear picture of himself grappling with the removal men on the steps. He’d lived with those things for years. They were part of him.
‘So when would it be convenient?’
Never. ‘Thursday.’ And that word: ‘convenient’, he thought. He hated it. It was a non-word. Like going on talking about ‘discomfort’ when the patient’s screaming with pain. ‘About ten o’clock? Or is that too early?’
‘More like one o’clock. I’m driving up.’
That raised the prospect of food. Drink. He didn’t know whether she wanted that or not. Well, he could offer. She could say no. He didn’t want to give her the opportunity of saying no. ‘All right.’
He wanted to say something else, but then he heard a man’s voice in the background, and her voice answering, muffled, because she’d put her hand over the receiver. ‘Look, I’ve got to go,’ she said, in a breathless rush. ‘One o’clock, Thursday. Okay?’
No. ‘Yes, all right. See you then.’
After she rang off he spent some time trying to convince himself that the voice’ in the background had belonged to his father-in-law, then wandered round the house, dreading the coming invasion. He looked at her paintings. Three of them in the living room, all attempts to capture that peculiar quality of the light on the river in early morning and evening, especially when the tide was out. The most successful was almost abstract: a blend of brown and silver-grey, with the ribs of the submerged boat showing above the water as the tide turned.
His favourite among these paintings was the sunset scene, for no better reason than that he’d been there when she painted it. Late one afternoon they’d taken a picnic and gone out to the estuary, and as the sun sank she set up her easel and started work.
Black bars of cloud across the horizon, but the water was calm, luminous, reflecting the last l
ight of the sky. He settled down with a book, ostensibly reading, but in fact watching Lauren. She became a different person when she painted, opening a can of beer, laughing when the foam squirted into her face, barefoot, an old pair of his jeans tightly belted round her waist. Lauren was beautiful, and elegant, but she was not, except when painting, graceful. She was too self-conscious; none of her movements was exactly the right movement. Except at times like this, stepping back from the canvas, moving forward, dabbing, stepping back, dabbing again… Speeded up, she’d have looked like a hummingbird. It needs something in the foreground,’ she said. ‘You’ll do.’ So, carrying the book, he went and stood where she indicated. ‘Put the book down, for God’s sake. You look like Wordsworth.’ She held his shoulders, manipulating him into the right position. He smelt Chanel 19, which he didn’t find sexy, and turpentine, which he did — very. ‘There.’ A satisfied nod, and she went back to the easel. Looking out of the corner of his eye, he could just see her eyes above the canvas, contemplating him as a problem in light and shade, and beneath it, her bare feet doing their never-ending dance in the dirt.
Almost the worst thing about the last week had been the way in which the snag in his present life ran back into the past and unravelled it. Because they were splitting up, it was easy to believe they’d never really been happy. When he tried to visualize Lauren painting the estuary, the image was changed by the fact that she had left him. The slim figure in the baggy jeans became doubly insubstantial, as if her recording of that sunset over the river had been no more than the first stage of her saying goodbye. Holiday snaps: the need to record a place that you already know will live on only in your memory. In his memory she shifted from one foot to another, raised a can of beer to her lips, streaked paint through her hair, smelt of turps, but she was already dwindling. What this painting gave him, when he looked at it again, was reassurance. She’d painted the river because she loved it, and, grasping the reality of that love, not vaguely, not as a general proposition, but precisely, in the particular strokes of her brush, he was able to go on believing that she had also, once, loved him.
It helped, it soothed him, but on Thursday the paintings would go.
SIXTEEN
Four days after that conversation with Lauren, Tom found himself standing in a small railway station on the edge of the Yorkshire moors, watching his departing train dwindle to a doubtful wink of light in the far distance. After it had gone there was silence, except for the click of the railway lines contracting after the day’s hot sun, and somewhere, in the far distance, a peewit crying.
On the phone, Angus had sounded brisk and efficient, his Scottish accent less pronounced than Danny’s mimicry had led Tom to expect. No point driving, he said. The Scarsdale Writers’ Centre was at the end of a mile-long track so potholed that only a Land Rover could manage it. And anyway it would be no trouble to meet him at the station.
Trouble or not, there was nobody here. Tom put his overnight bag down, arid sat on a bench beneath a poster advertising the delights of Whitby, and another proclaiming the 24-hour availability of the Samaritans.He was beginning to wonder how he should set about calling a taxi when he heard the click of high heels, and looked up to see a woman with long orange hair, trailing clouds of diaphanous fabric behind her.
‘Are you Tom Seymour?’
He admitted that he was.
‘Rowena Moody.’ She announced her name as people do who expect it to be known, though it meant nothing to him. T-m one of the tutors on this week’s course,’ she added, the drawl of dissolute grandeur drying to a schoolmistressy snap, as she realized the ‘Oh’ of recognition would not be forthcoming. ‘There’s a bit of a flap on at the moment. This is the night we have an outside reader, and Angus was hoping to have…’ Her voice sank reverentially over a name that even Tom, who read no literary fiction, knew to be famous. ‘I told him it wouldn’t happen. He’s not going to trail up here. As far as he’s concerned, there’s only a hole in the ground between London and Edinburgh.’
They were walking briskly towards the Land Rover. Ail those flying draperies were making Tom think of Isadora Duncan, but Rowena got herself safely behind the wheel and tucked the yards of silk chiffon around her.
They lurched forward across the car park and out of the station yard. It rapidly became clear that Rowena had no business behind the wheel of a Land Rover or any other vehicle. She was lethal. ‘Oops,’she said at one point, jamming on the brakes and placing her left hand in Tom’s groin to reinforce the operation of his seat belt. ‘I didn’t see him at all, did you?’
It was a relief to be out on the moors, where there were comparatively few cars, and the sheep saw her coming, and fled.
‘So how do you know Angus?’ she asked, in what passed for a quiet moment.
‘I don’t really. It’s a sort of a friend-of-a-friend thing.’ He should have come with a story prepared, since there could be no question of mentioning Danny.
‘So you’re not an aspiring writer?’
‘No, I’m a psychologist. I do write, but nothing creative.’ The sooner they got off this line of questioning the better. ‘Do you often tutor for this course?’
It was her third time. She was happy to chat about the arrangement: fifteen aspiring writers cooped up for a week with two professional writers: an apprenticeship system.
‘It becomes quite an emotional pressure-cooker – you’d be surprised. Some groups more than others, of course.’
‘How’s this one?’
‘We haven’t found the weirdo yet.’
‘Does there have to be one?’
‘If you’re lucky. Two or three, if you’re not.’
Perhaps Angus liked intense, enclosed communities. At any rate he seemed to have found himself another one, or a succession of them. ‘Does Angus teach?’
‘He’s teaching on this one, but no, not usually. He and Jeremy run the place. Jeremy’s his partner.’
There was a questioning note to her voice. He had an uncomfortable feeling that his sexual availability was being explored. ‘I haven’t met Jeremy either.’
‘No, well, he’s not here this week. I’m afraid it’s a case of when the cat’s away…’ She wrinkled her nose with fastidious malice. 1 wouldn’t care to claim the path to the tutors’ cottage has remained entirely untrodden.’
Without signalling or slowing down, she turned left on to a potholed lane bordered on either side by drystone walls. A steep descent, taken at speed, brought them to a low farmhouse that seemed to have burrowed into the side of the hill to escape the winds that had deformed every tree. Even now, on a peaceful autumn evening, a gust snatched at him as he got out of the Land Rover. On a stormy night you must feel you were out at sea.
Rowena led him into the house. Red-tiled floors, a huge vase of hemlock casting shadows across a whitewashed wall, a bowl of pebbles on a wooden chest. She swept into the kitchen and he followed. A tall, fair-haired young man was standing at one of the work surfaces, squeezing meat out of sausage skins into a bowl.
He looked up and raised his eyebrows. ‘Couldn’t get sausage meat, would you believe?’
‘Don’t let Angus see you,’ Rowena murmured. ‘I don’t think I could cope with a cardiac arrest. Where is he, by the way?’
‘In the office. Trying to find a replacement.’
‘Oh, not still.’
Angus was on the phone. He raised his thumb in the air when he heard Rowena’s voice, saying into the phone, ‘No, absolutely not. Of course I’ll come and get you, and you’ll stay over, won’t you? There’s no point going back tonight.’ He listened, said: ‘Forty minutes? All right, then,’ put the phone down, and punched the air with his clenched fist.
‘Success?’ Rowena asked.
‘Lucy says she’ll do it.’
‘Oh, thank God. Perks things up a bit, you know, midweek,’ she said, turning to Tom. ‘Getting somebody else in. They’re sick of us by then. Though I must say I think they’ll find poor Lucy something of an a
nti-climax.’
‘Well, sod their luck,’ Angus said, sibilant, but stagily so. ‘And you must be Tom.’ A warm, dry, firm handclasp, and a hard stare. ‘I’m afraid I’ve got to dash off, but we’ll see each other later. As I expect you’ve gathered, it’s been quite a day.’ He was taking the Land Rover keys from Rowena as he spoke. ‘Could you be a darling and tell them in the kitchen she’s a vegetarian? Tell them not to make a fuss – just make sure there’s plenty of salad.’
After he’d gone, Rowena pulled a face. ‘It’s always like this. He sweet-talks people into making the commitment, but then they don’t bloody well show up.’
The dining room had blackened beams, white walls and an ancient fireplace. Three tall windows overlooked the valley, which was now brimming with blue light, though the sun still shone on the distant hills. Tom sat next to Rowena. Angus and Lucy, a small, brown woman with a shy and sour expression, arrived late and sat opposite. The food was good and washed down with large quantities of wine.
‘There’s a kitty,’ Rowena explained, ‘but some of us bring our own as well.’
She spent the meal pointing out the course participants to him. There were two elderly ladies, sisters apparently, both widowed – one of them, after her husband’s death, had moved three hundred miles to be closer to the other – and until this week they’d been inseparable. Now they sat at opposite ends of the table, each looking, since there was a striking resemblance between them, like the other’s mirror image. Neither of them spoke to the people on either side.
‘That’s Angus, for you,’ Rowena said. ‘He always sees them individually, and he pokes and probes away till he finds out what makes them angry. Calls it the grit in the oyster. You find the anger, you find the voice. Well, what makes Nancy angry is that her father used to get pissed and beat her mother up, and her mother was an absolute saint who brought eight kids up on next to nothing. And what makes Poppy angry is anybody saying anything against her father, who was a marvellous man, never once the worse for drink in his entire life, despite being driven up the wall by a nagging wife. There’s only two years between them – and they seem to have grown up on different planets. Angus persuaded Nancy to write about the father’s drinking, and she read it aloud to the group. And Poppy got up and walked out. And they haven’t spoken since.’