Mark got up and turned the television off. He finished his drink and went into the kitchen to place the glass in the dishwasher. He would wake to a tidy home, everything in its place. His flat was beautiful – everyone said so. He was told he had exquisite taste. His guests admired the oil paintings of seascapes on his pale walls, his elegant, antique furniture, the way his few rooms seemed so full of light, of a kind of grace, Tony had once said, and had looked at him curiously as though he couldn’t quite accept that they weren’t lovers.
Mark undressed for bed. He brushed his teeth and avoided his eyes in the bathroom mirror. He hated the sight of himself, more so since Ben had told him he was set on finding their natural father, Danny. Since then his face was even more a reminder of trouble. He looked so starkly like Danny, so unlike the blond, blue-eyed Simon that it was obvious that he was only an adopted son. Ben could pass for Simon’s blood but not him. He was Danny’s, through and through. And yet it was Ben who wanted to find Danny, Ben who wanted to reach back as though their blood held some knowledge he couldn’t get along without.
Mark gripped the edge of the sink, sickened again by the idea of Ben excavating their shared past. For the first time it occurred to him that his brother might have dug up more than he’d admitted to, and he pictured Ben meeting him outside Simon’s house tomorrow with Danny at his side. He wondered if he would faint with fear or run like a madman. He forced himself to look at his reflection full on. Danny gazed back at him. He turned away quickly and went to bed.
Chapter 2
April 1968
Annette Carter watched as the man who had insisted on being addressed as Simon poured her a sherry from a sticky-looking bottle. He was tall, about six foot two, his shoulders were broad, his waist slim and his hair was thick and blond, often falling over his eyes so that he pushed it back impatiently. He wore a tweed suit with flecks of green in its weave, a suit that may have been expensive once but looked old-fashioned now. His dark blue tie was stained and his shoes needed polishing. He smiled often. Earlier he’d told her that he was a surgeon. She’d noticed his hands then, and thought how strong and capable they looked.
If she’d had to guess she would have said Doctor Simon Walker was only thirty or so. He was forty-five – she’d calculated his age quite early in her interview as he explained why he limped. Aged twenty-one he had lost a leg during the liberation of France in 1944. Smiling he’d said, ‘It didn’t used to slow me down quite as much as it does nowadays.’ His smile was lovely; it had made her feel shy and she’d looked down at her hands clasped in her lap. Nervous from the start, his gentle manners and good looks made her feel anxious. Danny would hate this man.
Doctor Simon Walker handed her a schooner of sherry and sat down in the armchair opposite her. He said, ‘Annette – may I call you Annette? Annette, as I said, my wife is in hospital and will be for the next couple of weeks. I would like this house to be spic and span for her return – comfortable, welcoming…’ He glanced around the large, untidy room. There was a stain on the brown wallpaper above the mantelpiece, the same paper curling away from the corners of the room. Cobwebs collected dust around the light fitting, a single, unshaded bulb that dangled from the chipped ceiling rose. The doctor’s furniture was as old and grand as the stuff she dusted in the homes of the solicitor and bank manager she cleaned for, but neglected, its fineness almost obscured by accumulated junk.
Doctor Walker frowned. As though he was seeing his home for the first time, he said thoughtfully, ‘It’s not a very homely house, is it? I’d forgotten how cold and damp it is. But I would like my wife – Joy – not to be too dismayed when she finally gets to see it.’
‘I’ll do my best, sir.’
‘Simon.’ He smiled. ‘Sir makes me feel terribly old.’
‘Sorry.’ To avoid his gaze she glanced away towards the damp patch above the French doors. The doors led out to the garden, a huge lawn enclosed by a high wall. Daffodils bloomed beneath a row of trees, the branches shading the veranda of a summerhouse. The summerhouse had a hole in its tarred roof; its door hung open on its hinges. Small birds flew in and out of the snow-white blossom of a hawthorn hedge. She had never seen such a beautiful garden; she would like to lie down on the grass and soak up its peacefulness, to drift into sleep knowing she would be safe. She thought of Sleeping Beauty’s garden, its wildness shielding her from the outside world until the Prince hacked his way through.
She realised the doctor was speaking. Startled, she looked at him as he said, ‘I’m afraid the place has gone to rack and ruin since my mother’s illness. I hope you don’t feel too put off by its shabbiness. Look – why don’t I show you around? You can decide for yourself whether it’s something you would want to take on or not.’
* * *
Annette had seen the postcard advertising for a cleaner in Brown’s window. She had been on her way home from taking Mark and Ben to school and straight away she had gone to the telephone box at the end of her street and dialled the number on the card. She hadn’t given herself time to think about it. When Doctor Walker answered on the fifth ring he had asked if she could be interviewed immediately. Standing in the smelly phone box she had looked down at herself. She was wearing her tartan miniskirt and a skinny-rib jumper, American Tan tights and the black coat Danny had rescued from a bin on the posh end of his round. She had brushed the coat down and sewn on new brass buttons and it looked all right if she didn’t show its torn lining. As Doctor Walker gave her directions to his house she decided that she was presentable enough to be offered a cleaning job. She had told him she would be there in half an hour.
The doctor led her through the house, from the sitting room and dining room that looked out over the garden, through the hallway and upstairs to the grand bedrooms with their thick, faded curtains and Persian rugs and views of the graveyard across the road. There were graves as far as the eye could see. Her own parents were buried there, their grave unmarked in a shady spot way beyond the obelisks and urns and weeping angels that marked the resting places of the prosperous. For a moment she and the doctor stood side by side looking out at the sobering view. Then, wordlessly, he turned away and led her up more stairs to the attics, full of suitcases and tea chests, then down again to the kitchen and scullery.
It seemed that the kitchen hadn’t been touched since Victorian times. There was still a black-leaded range and a stone sink with a single tap, and a Welsh dresser loaded with china cups and plates and servers and soup tureens – the kind of delicate stuff no one used any more. The Spode and the Wedgwood gathered dust that dulled the pretty patterns of Chinese bridges and willow trees, roses and windmills. It would take a day just to strip the dresser to its bare shelves and wash each piece in soapy water.
In the pantry she noticed a mousetrap and guessed that the house would be over-run with mice and cockroaches, silverfish and moths, all the little creatures that had such noses for the dirt and grime old women left in their wake. Simon Walker had told her that his mother had lived to a grand old age in this house and would not be moved from it until the very last. Annette imagined her living solely in this kitchen, close to the heat from the range, surviving on bread and milk and sweet tea, just as her own grandmother had – a squalid, deranged existence.
Standing in the middle of the kitchen Doctor Walker said, ‘You’re very quiet, Annette. I’m afraid you’re going to run away in horror.’
‘No – really, I’m not afraid of hard work.’
‘Do you think you might be able to start straight away? Tomorrow, say?’
‘I’ve got the job?’
‘Of course – why not?’
‘I could come in the morning, about half past nine?’
‘Half past nine it is.’ He smiled. ‘Now, may I give you a lift home?’
She thought of Danny and the interrogation he would subject her to if he saw her getting out of a stranger’s car. She had an idea that she could keep this job a secret, the money she would make would be hers alon
e, hers and Mark’s and Ben’s. Thinking of her boys, she said, ‘I don’t need a lift, thank you. I only live a short walk away.’
He showed her to the door. On the black and white tiled path that led to the gate he held out his hand. ‘Goodbye, Annette. I’ll see you in the morning.’
His hand was warm and dry in hers. As she walked away she felt his eyes on her and looked back. It must have been her imagination because already the door was closed and the house looked as empty and undisturbed as it had when she first arrived.
Simon finished the last of the sherry and went outside to throw the bottle in the bin. He walked along the side of the house and into the garden and thought about picking some of the daffodils to take to Joy in hospital. Joy loved flowers, the wilder the better. Not for her the roses and lilies and chrysanthemums his mother had preferred. His mother had dismissed as vulgar the fat headed daffodils that grew like weeds in this garden. Joy, no doubt, would think them pretty. He sighed, profoundly miserable.
He walked across the lawn to the summerhouse and sat on its steps. Four months ago, newly married to Joy, he had given up cigarettes on her insistence but now he longed for a smoke. He had smelt tobacco on that girl’s clothes and had almost asked her for a cigarette. Perhaps he should have, it might have helped her to relax a little. He frowned, remembering how tense she was, jumpy as a feral cat. He remembered how she couldn’t bring herself to meet his eye and how she had blushed when he’d explained his bloody leg. Perhaps he’d said too much, he often did when he thought it might put others at ease. Gushing, his mother had called it. Well, his gushing had backfired with this girl. She must have thought him a fool, an old soldier for the love of God.
As well as cigarettes, the girl had smelt of Lily of the Valley perfume, a sweet-sharp, oddly old-fashioned scent for such a young woman. And she was young, only about twenty-two or three. He’d expected someone older, a matron in a flower-sprigged overall, pink spiky curlers showing beneath a dull headscarf. When he’d opened the door to Annette Carter he’d thought that she was a gypsy like those that occasionally called at his London home selling white heather or offering to read his palm. Annette had the same dark looks, the same wary suspicion in her eyes. Such arresting eyes she had, a curious, lovely green. He’d noticed how full her breasts were beneath that tight, cheap sweater. He had watched her as she walked ahead of him up the stairs to the bedrooms, her skirt skimming her mid-thighs and showing off her shapely legs and swaying hips. She was one of the sexiest women he had seen for years, since the war, probably, when all girls seemed to be as gorgeous as Annette Carter. He thought of Joy lying in her hospital bed, pale and plain and spinsterish as the day he met her, and felt ashamed of himself.
His mother had called him a fool and asked him why he had wanted to marry such an old maid as Joy Featherstone. ‘You could have any woman you liked – any! If only your father was alive to talk some sense into you!’
‘Dad would have liked Joy.’
‘He loved Grace.’
‘Grace is dead, Mum. Please, let’s not talk about Grace.’
Grace, his first wife, had been killed during one of the last air raids on London. They had been married for two years. In his memory she had become incandescently lovely and for more than twenty years he’d believed no woman could replace her as his wife. He had taken lovers instead, discreetly, one after the other; these women were other men’s wives mainly – women he imagined would be less trouble to him. Then he met Joy, who wasn’t married, who he suspected had barely been kissed, and had been so horribly easy to seduce, so grateful to him for being kind and gentle as he took her virginity. So kind and gentle he had forgotten his usual precautions and a few weeks later Joy told him she was pregnant.
From the summerhouse steps he gazed unseeing at his new home. It was Joy’s pregnancy that had brought him here, that and his mother’s sudden death, a beginning and an ending conspiring to wreck his comfortable, careless life. When Joy had told him she was expecting his child he’d felt as though he’d been punched in the head. In the photographs of their wedding he looked dazed. He looked old, too. After so many years of thinking of himself as young he saw the wedding pictures and felt a kind of dismayed embarrassment, realising that if he hadn’t made Joy pregnant he would have blithely gone on with his old life. In no time at all he would have become a laughing-stock, a middle-aged Lothario.
He got up from the steps and walked restlessly around the garden. His parents had bought this house a year after the war, his father pleased with the idea that another doctor had lived here, a man who had run his practice from its large, stately rooms, just as he was about to do. His father believed that he would join him, becoming one of the new National Health Service GPs like him, but he had wanted to stay in London where he had trained. Londoners seemed to need doctors more than the people of Thorp, a town that had come through the war relatively unscathed. Besides, he had no connection to Thorp; he imagined he would despise its small town narrow-mindedness. He’d been a soldier. He’d seen and done and wanted to do more. His father, a veteran of the first war, had told him he understood. His mother raged. Remembering her impotent fury, Simon smiled despite himself. She seemed to have been angry all his life. Even when her stroke silenced her, her eyes blazed.
From the kitchen garden Simon looked back at the house. It was certainly big – five bedrooms, three attics, three receptions rooms, one of which had been used as his father’s surgery. He remembered the first time he had visited his parents here, how his father’s patients waited on chairs lining either side of the wide hallway: men who had worked too hard for too long and too little and were prematurely old; young, skinny women with too many children. Many of the women were pregnant; their pregnancies had struck him quite forcefully. Inevitably he had thought of Grace, who had wanted children, who hadn’t thought that his new disability would make a jot of difference to his capabilities as a father. In 1945 in his father’s surgery, as the poor and desperate and ill coughed outside the door, he had wept for this lovely, dead wife as his father waited patiently for him to collect himself.
Joy too had thought he would make a good father, even after he had suggested that she have an abortion. They had sat in her flat, a tray of tea on the table between them, and he had been surprised at the way she squared up to him. He remembered how she sat on the edge of her horsehair couch, her back sergeant-major straight and her knees tight together below the hem of her thick woollen skirt. Her eyes were defiant – he remembered being in awe of her as she said, ‘I want this child. Our child. I’m prepared to bring him or her up alone. I won’t be made to feel ashamed and I won’t have a termination as you call it – a horrible word for a horrible act. I don’t want anything from you. I just thought you should know.’
She’d smoothed her skirt over her still-flat belly, looking up to catch him staring at her. There must have been some scepticism in his expression because she said, ‘I am pregnant, Simon. I’ve had the tests. July – I’ve been given the date of 10th July.’
In the garden Simon stooped to pick a daffodil. He picked another and then another until he had an armful, some barely out of bud, others in full bloom and almost ragged. He thought of a nurse placing them in an ugly, hospital vase beside his wife’s bed. Joy was in a side room off the maternity ward, within earshot of mewling newborn babies. It seemed a particularly cruel place for her to be. But that’s what his profession often was, cruel and thoughtless and dismissive of feelings.
Joy had begun to lose the baby on the train from Kings Cross to Darlington. Sitting beside him in the packed carriage she had suddenly let out a surprised yelp, like a puppy whose tail had been stood on. She had grasped his hand tightly, turning to him with such a look of horror he had realised at once what was wrong. The train sped on between stations so that they lost their child in a kind of nowhere land where he could do nothing except hold her and make his feeble reassurances that the blood soaking into the train seat didn’t necessarily mean she was miscar
rying. At the next station the other passengers helped him support his wife from the train, others passing out their luggage. He wondered if they could smell the blood, or whether its warm iron, ironically fecund, smell was just in his imagination. The blood was a large, dark patch on the seat; he remembered wondering if British Rail would send him a bill for cleaning it up. This was shock he realised now, shock and horror and grief – all emotions that since the war he had tried to protect himself from experiencing again.
He walked back inside the house and stood the flowers in the sink. A bumblebee crawled from one of the yellow trumpets and bumped against the window. He let it out, watching as it flew low over the grass. He noticed how quiet his new home and garden were. The air was sweet with the smell of his neighbours’ gardens, gardens which ran down to ThorpPark with its swings and slides and flowerbeds full of Corporation daffodils. This would have been a safe place for a child to grow up, a far cry from the busy, polluted streets surrounding his flat in Hampstead. Joy had been pleased to come here, pleased, too, that he was willing to change his life so drastically.
He had taken a new job as chief of general surgery at Thorp hospital, he was to start in a week’s time, a breathing space intended to allow him to show his wife around Thorp and settle them both into their new home. As it was, Joy had never even seen this house. Last night, when he’d visited her in her cell-like room she had turned her face away from him. When he tried to comfort her with a plan for their new future together she had refused to speak. She was right to ignore him because it wasn’t much of a plan, only that she could choose new paint and wallpaper and furniture for the house and plants for the garden. Joy had green fingers; she could also sew and knew how to decorate a room so that it looked homely and welcoming. But she wasn’t interested in such things any more. All she wanted was her child growing inside her again.
Say You Love Me Page 2