A Stone's Throw

by Fiona Shaw

  ‘Hey, mate.’

  There was a hand on his shoulder, and he started.

  ‘You all right?’

  He was confused. His head felt blood-rushed and his fingers were fizzy and numb. He nodded, or he thought he did, and made to stand upright.

  ‘I’ll give you a hand,’ the voice said. ‘You look a bit ropey.’

  He sounded young and male, and rough with something. Will felt his elbows grasped, then he was half-pulled, half-lifted away from the edge, and a hand steadied him on his feet.

  ‘There,’ the voice said.

  Will turned. He was very young, more boy than man, and dressed in dirty jeans and an old anorak. He wore a battered rucksack with a bedroll slung below.

  ‘Thanks,’ Will said. ‘Got out of breath, dizzy.’

  ‘It’s fine,’ the boy said. ‘Sure.’

  ‘Could do with a cup of tea,’ Will said. He was cold, still shaky. He needed to sit down. ‘Anywhere round here you know of?’ because it was still very early, too early for most places.

  ‘There’s a place off The Cut’ll be open by now,’ the boy said.

  He bought the boy a cup of tea and a full English, and watched him eat it in double quick time, eyes glancing up with every mouthful as if someone might take it off him. They didn’t talk. The boy was sleeping rough, but he had an appetite and Will thought that must be a good thing. Afterwards, as if they had discussed it, as if it were already understood, the boy took Will to a quiet alley, and Will fucked him.

  He never told Barbara. Of course he didn’t, and anyway, he’d sworn it wouldn’t happen again. He had stood beside the hospital bed and looked down at his wife still sleeping, at his daughter, and sworn it. It was just because of the day it was, he told himself. His mind, his emotions out of kilter.

  But he was wrong about that.

  In that first year of Cassie’s life he marvelled at her single-mindedness, her sheer tenacity as she learned to crawl, and stand, and walk, and say ‘Dada’ and then ‘Mama’, and hold tiny things in her fingers. He marvelled at all the hard work there was in being a baby, and he clapped and cheered her, his gorgeous, round-faced diva daughter. But while Cassie thrived, his marriage died. The boy on the bridge had unlocked something in him, and soon he was living a second life that had its geography mapped out in secret places and borrowed times. Lunch hours, after work, sometimes even late at night he cruised. The sex was like a drug, each fix assuaging something for a time until the hunger came again. He told himself it did no damage. That the cruising was in one place, and his family in another. He told himself he loved his wife more fiercely for it. He told himself he could stop at any point. And he didn’t think about Benjamin; wouldn’t let himself. But when Barbara found him out and said to him: ‘Don’t lie to me,’ he wept, because it was the end between them.

  Eventually he built a safe life for himself; an ordered, functioning life. He lived alone, he did his job, he had his friends, he saw his daughter and sometimes he cruised for sex. But each within its bounds. He was careful and he didn’t let things overlap. As the years built and Barbara remarried, Meg would ask him sometimes if there was anyone else in the picture, a woman perhaps. And sometimes he would make somebody up, a Catherine or an Alison, and take them on imaginary dates; but mostly he would say that Cassie was the only girl for him.

  Gradually Will’s head steadied. He knew what to do when things fell away; how to sit up slowly and make himself breathe, deep breaths in, and slow out, and haul himself back from the edge. Then stand, though his legs were like lead, and find the solid land. He had learned how to go out of the room and shut the door behind him again, and he did that now. But he still wondered where his father was. The father he would bury tomorrow. Because in all Will’s tumbling thoughts, he had been nowhere.

  The day had gone to dark while he lay remembering. He stared at the windows in the flat. Outside it rained but he saw nothing but himself reflected back. His father was a man who believed that things were as they seemed. That clocks told the passage of time, and that clothes told the man. When Ben died, his father had sold the land he died on and the boat he died carrying, as if it were those things that had failed him, and not Will, and not Ben’s own bolt-struck heart.

  Will went into the kitchen and cut the electricity to the green digits of the oven clock, then took out the batteries from the clock beside the bed. In the bathroom he turned the metal key against the grain, felt the cogs protest. He pulled out the winder on his watch so the hands were held just there. And last of all, he went into the sitting room.

  He loved this room, its different geometries, its different objects: the long, angular sofas, the zig-zag pattern on the grey rug runner, the tall, white blinds in the tall windows. In place of the hearth there was the stainless steel cylinder of a Pither stove, and on the walls he had mounted a series of African masks, their features flattened and elongated. Only one thing in here seemed anomalous. It was an eighteenth-century bracket clock that stood on four carved feet in a mahogany casing on the side table, and it had been a gift from his parents on his twenty-first birthday. Every seventh day Will wound it and in two minutes it would strike out the hour. But now he opened the case and stilled the pendulum with a soft hand.

  ‘No more time, Father,’ he said.

  Then he got newspaper, tugging it urgently from the pile, and grabbed a whisky tumbler and the new bottle of Johnnie Walker, took them into the sitting room. He spread the newspaper over the floor, and fetched his shoes, half a dozen pairs, and the shoe-cleaning box from the bedroom. They were hand-stitched brogues and Oxfords; shoes his father approved of. Opening the bottle, he poured himself a glass and drank it straight down. He didn’t like whisky very much, but tonight it was what he needed and he poured a second.

  George had given him this box years ago when Will got his first proper job. It was polished with brass hinges and a brass plate engraved with his name: William Garrowby. Inside were brushes, a shoehorn, soft cloths and tins of polish – tan, black, brown – each in its apportioned place.

  ‘Always look at a man’s shoes if you want to know what you’re dealing with,’ George had said. ‘It’s a good rule of thumb. And when you’re cleaning, watch out for the seams and the crevices; that’s where the dirt gets in.’

  Then George had poured them each a Johnnie Walker and lifted his glass to Will’s success.

  Time and shiny shoes: his father’s bequest. Will ran his finger over his name and picked up the first shoe. Remembering calmed him and with his father’s voice in his mind, he cleaned as George had taught him, brushing in the polish, taking care with the eyeholes, and using a soft cloth to buff a deeper colour into the heel and the toe. Sometimes his tears dropped on to the leather uppers and he rubbed them in too. He cleaned and buffed till every shoe shone, and till he had drunk four fingers of the whisky. Then he put the shoes away and stood up. He was stiff from kneeling for so long and he felt heavy with sadness, or anger, or loneliness, he didn’t know which.

  ‘Clean shoes, Father,’ he said, and he laughed. ‘Fuck it. I never got it right.’

  The funeral director gave each of them black gloves to wear. Pallbearers’ gloves.

  ‘They’re one-size,’ he said, which was for Emma who was the only woman. They were flimsy, cotton things and Will didn’t think they’d be proof against anything much. The funeral director told them to double-tie their shoelaces and to be careful where they put their feet because the aisle was uneven. They were to set the coffin down on the trolley at the front, then take their seats until the very end, when they would carry the coffin out again. Emma had the middle position on the left, behind him, and Henry was on the right. As they lifted the coffin to their shoulders, he heard Emma gasp; just a small sound, maybe no more than an intake of breath as she shouldered her father. Slowly, carefully, they walked into the church. It was full and as he walked down the aisle, he felt the movement, like a soft wave, as people turned to watch. Head against the coffin he pictured his
father, lying just the other side of the varnished wood, his brow close to Will’s, resting on its quilted pillow. Nearly close enough to kiss.

  He thought: You didn’t know very much about me, and now you’ve died, so that’s that.

  For the rest of the service Will stood outside of things, as if he’d drifted some way off. He rose and sat at the correct times, and sang the hymns: ‘Fight the good fight’, he sang, and ‘Rock of ages, cleft for me’. He marked the course of the vicar’s voice, rising and falling. He looked round at his mother, who was dressed in her own kind of serenity and who struck him as looking stoical and beautiful. There was Henry, and Barbara, and there was Emma. Emma held her pallbearers’ gloves in one hand, her finger stroking and stroking the cheap black cotton. And beside him sat Cassie. She looked older than her twelve years, with her hair up and her sober dress. When he sat down, she took his hand.

  ‘You all right?’ he said.

  ‘I can’t believe he’s in there, It’s too weird.’ She didn’t cry, only kept tight hold.

  When it was time for the eulogy, he took out his script, walked to the front, and spoke in a clear, steady voice. He captured George’s strengths and his passions, and was affectionate about his oddities. He conjured up a man who had risen out of poverty to forge a life of prosperity and security; a man his wife, children, and friends, would all remember as enthusiastic, energetic, often exacting, and passionately fair. A man who kept his word, and kept the time (there was a kind laugh at that); who was a loving husband and father and a devoted friend.

  He looked down at the front pew. Barbara was nodding and Henry was smiling as he spoke. His mother stared straight back at him, her chin lifted, her expression … he didn’t know what her expression was. Proud, perhaps; or defiant. Emma had her arm around Cassie’s shoulder and each of them was crying. He thought: at last I’ve got it right. First time ever. Bang on, and he’s not bloody here to see it. And he thought that if it were him in that long box, being cried for, then nobody would get it right.

  Things were nearly over when Meg put her hand on his arm. People had eaten and drunk, and talked his father deep into the ground and most of them had left now. Barbara had gone to see her parents in the village. In the sitting room Cassie played Monopoly with Emma and Henry. Will went to find her, breathe her in as he used to when she was a baby. She had found from somewhere his old sailing cap, and when he kissed the top of her head, he could still smell the sea in it. He watched them for a minute, till he felt his mother’s hand.

  ‘Will,’ she said, nothing more, but he heard the appeal in her voice so he turned and followed her out.

  They sat on the old bench in the garden, out of sight of the house. She looked very pale, and he wondered if perhaps she was falling ill.

  ‘I have to tell you something. Now George has died,’ she said.

  She paused and he saw how her hands clutched and unclutched.

  ‘Is everything all right?’ he said. ‘I mean beyond …’ and he made a gesture that took in their funeral clothes, the death between them.

  She didn’t reply immediately. Her hands were fists on her lap, and when she did speak, she looked ahead of her, to the drop in the sky where the sea began.

  ‘This is very hard,’ she said, her voice so quiet, it was as though she were speaking to someone else.

  ‘Mother?’ he said, because her breath was coming quickly now and she was biting her lip and still staring ahead, and he worried that she was ill; or that her mind had become overstrained in these last weeks.

  ‘Perhaps you could leave it till later,’ he said. ‘Till tomorrow. I’ll be here tomorrow. Or we could talk next time …’

  ‘No!’ She said it so fiercely, then more quietly: ‘No, now. You spoke about him well in the church. He would have been proud. And he was a good man.’

  ‘Yes,’ Will said.

  ‘We had a long marriage, and he was a good man …’ she said again, as though she needed to impress this upon herself.

  Will rubbed at his face. He felt bleary, as if he’d just woken. Questions blundered through his head: Had his father done something wrong? Was it the will? Or debts? Did he have a mistress?

  ‘And you have to speak to me first?’ he said, looking round at her. ‘Before Henry or Emma?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She had always told her children to look at the person they were speaking to, and she always did so herself. But she didn’t – wouldn’t – meet Will’s eye now. Finally she continued.

  ‘You remember the story I used to tell about how I went to Africa in the war, to marry your father.’ It wasn’t a question, and Will waited. ‘I used to tell you about the ship, and how it was torpedoed, and the lifeboat, and George waiting for me. And how we got married immediately.’

  ‘Of course I do,’ Will said.

  It was one of his earliest memories: sitting at the big, shiny table, listening. He saw himself, elbows planted high, and the light coming in through the windows, and the pale blue plate in front of him. His mother still had some of that china.

  ‘Everything I told you was true,’ Meg said. But she shut her eyes a moment and shook her head.

  ‘Mother?’ he said.

  ‘I can’t do this,’ she said. ‘I don’t know how to do this.’

  Far off, near the house, there was the noise of a car on gravel, then voices, fading quickly.

  ‘It’s fine. I understand.’ He was coming out with platitudes because he didn’t know what else to say, but he couldn’t bear seeing his mother like this. ‘Leave it for now.’

  She pushed his hand away.

  ‘No. It has to be today,’ and like someone jumping into icy water, she took a deep breath, shut her eyes, and went on.

  ‘I did something. Only once. It just happened the once, but …’

  Will waited, shifting on the bench, which was narrow, and too low for him to be comfortable.

  ‘I was very young, travelling on that ship, and very lost. I can see that now.’

  She spoke in quick, short bursts, as if the words were gathered under pressure.

  ‘I knew I’d lost my brother, of course – though I’d never stopped searching. But I didn’t know I’d lost myself too.’

  Will had never heard his mother talk like this. Never. Not about anything, and he wanted her to stop, and he wanted her to carry on.

  She caught her breath and then, abruptly, spoke in a rush as if to get it out quickly, before anything happened, before she couldn’t bear to.

  ‘I’m not trying to excuse myself. Because of you, I’ve never regretted what happened, not for a second. And I’ve never told anyone before. Not a single person.’

  ‘Because of me?’ Will said.

  ‘I met a soldier. I was lost in the ship; very lost, and he rescued me.’

  ‘A soldier?’

  He’d have been in terrible trouble if he’d been caught … but he took me back to my cabin.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘He’s your father, Will.’

  Nothing happened. Nothing moved, or exploded, or dropped to the earth. Will stood up and walked off a little way. He wanted to laugh. That was his first feeling. That it was so funny. Far out, over where the sea was, the sky was black with a storm that might never arrive. But it had coloured up the late afternoon sun, and all the trees were blocked in, each in a different light, as if each stood in its own kingdom. He looked at his mother. Her face was like a mask, all emotion hidden behind.

  ‘Is there any doubt?’ he said.

  She shook her head.

  ‘And Father?’

  ‘He never knew.’

  He looked down at his shiny shoes.

  ‘Are you sure of that?’ he said.

  Everything was quiet. The birds had gone silent, and the air was still, windless.

  Then: ‘You could have told me before the funeral. I feel like a fool. I stood up in the church today behind that shiny eagle as George Garrowby’s eldest son, and I did it very well. I know I did; I co
uld tell when I looked at everyone sitting there.’

  The brewing storm had moved further off now, over the sea, and the sky had cleared to the palest blue.

  ‘What was his name?’ he said.

  ‘Jim,’ she said. ‘Jim Cooper.’

  Then she said: ‘I’m sorry.’

  Anger flashed through him, electric, convulsive.

  ‘So you had your soldier on the ship, and then Father a few weeks later.’

  He might as well have hit her; he saw her start, then square herself as if to acknowledge the blow.

  ‘It wasn’t like that,’ she said, but he didn’t want to know.

  ‘Ring on your finger, done and dusted. So easy,’ he said, and his words were stones, pelted one after the other. ‘Why did you have to tell me?’

  He twisted away and put his hands to his head, as if he could shake her out. His ears were buzzing and he felt the headrush of vertigo.

  ‘He always loved Henry more than me. Right from the start, even in Africa. But it’s no wonder, is it?’

  ‘He loved you, Will. He was proud of you.’

  ‘And he couldn’t have borne it, could he? Knowing, I mean. His bastard son. He had to have everything respectable. In its proper bloody place …’

  ‘Stop it,’ she said.

  ‘… shined up nicely. Because that’s what he cared most about.’

  ‘Stop it, Will.’

  Her voice was cold and when he turned, her fists were raised, as if she might hit him; as if she might rain down blows with her fists in a pantomime rage. But slowly she lowered them.

  ‘How dare you? We buried him today.’

  And he watched her walk back up the garden and out of sight.

  Maybe it was a long time, or maybe it wasn’t very long that he sat there for, he didn’t know. But it was long enough for the sun to drop below the tree line and for his mind to settle. He was still angry – how could he not be? – but now mixed in with his anger was something else, something more difficult to name.