In a Good Light

by Clare Chambers

  This time it was Dad who opened the door, while I hovered behind. We had been washing up and he was still wearing a Liberty print apron with a ruffled hem, over the top of his clerical garb. Mum was in the loft checking for squirrel damage; Grandpa was watching TV; Christian was working in his room.

  The caller was a short, pigeon-chested man of about Dad’s age. His fiery red arms and neck, revealed by a tight white T-shirt, implied a summer spent out of doors. He was shifting from foot to foot in an agitated manner, and seemed slightly thrown by the sight of Dad’s dog-collar and floral pinny.

  ‘You Mr Fairchild?’ he demanded.

  ‘I am,’ said Dad politely, peeling off his rubber gloves with a snap and passing them back to me.

  ‘Your kid thumped my kid in the mouth.’ The man was still bobbing from side to side, as though preparing to throw, or possibly dodge, a punch himself.

  Dad frowned. ‘Goodness. I’d better see what he’s got to say about it.’ He moved to the foot of the stairs and called, ‘Christian! Can you come here, please?’

  A moment later Christian loped down, looking perplexed.

  ‘Not him,’ said the man, who had now caught sight of me lurking in the background. ‘Her!’

  The three of them stared at me incredulously. The anonymity of the headmaster’s study would have been a treat in comparison.

  ‘Is this true?’ Dad asked, in a voice that seemed to plead for a denial.

  ‘Well yes, but only after she nicked my lunch,’ I replied. I was about to launch into a full account of my (relative) innocence, when I was saved by the complainant himself.

  ‘Blimey, she’s not very big,’ he said, looking me over. I suppose the eyepatch might have contributed to an appearance of vulnerability. ‘Oy, Dawn,’ he summoned the victim, who had been standing out of sight behind the bramble hedge. ‘Is this the girl you mean?’

  Dawn emerged reluctantly from her hiding place. One side of her bottom lip still bulged, which made her look gormless as well as asymmetrical. I could see she wasn’t nearly so hard now she was on our turf. She seemed to have lost all stomach for the confrontation, which had obviously been his idea, not hers. When she saw Christian, handsome in his Turton’s uniform, with shirt collar unbuttoned and tie at half-mast, she even blushed. ‘Yeah, it is, but . . .’

  ‘I thought it was one of the bigger girls who’d been picking on you,’ said her father, looking thoroughly ill at ease now. ‘You made out it was.’

  ‘No I never,’ Dawn muttered.

  ‘But, I’m not being funny, you’d make two of her.’

  I noticed that Dad and Christian had gradually moved closer to me, one on each side, and I was touched by this protective gesture.

  ‘Nevertheless, Esther, I think an apology is in order,’ Dad said, in his best ‘severe’ voice.

  ‘I did apologise at the time,’ I said. ‘But I’ll do it again if you insist. Sorry I hit you, Dawn.’

  ‘Say you’re sorry you nicked her lunch, or whatever,’ said the man, nudging Dawn.

  ‘Sorry I nicked your lunch,’ she intoned listlessly. She was desperate to get away.

  ‘That’s it.’ He nodded his approval. ‘Kiss and make up.’ He took a large, grey handkerchief from his jeans pocket and used it to wipe his neck.

  ‘Would you like to come in and have a drink? We don’t have to stand here discussing this on the doorstep,’ said Dad politely, as if they were just a couple of regular parishioners wanting spiritual advice. It wouldn’t have crossed his mind that the man had come here for a punch-up.

  ‘No, no,’ said Dawn’s father hastily. ‘We don’t want to keep you. Just thought it was best to get this straightened out.’

  ‘Absolutely.’ Dad nodded emphatically. ‘Very glad you did.’ He thrust out his hand, which was still dusted with primrose lint from the inside of the rubber glove. Dawn’s father automatically wiped his own palm on the side of his jeans before shaking.

  ‘Girls, eh?’ he said, with an exaggerated shake of the head.

  ‘Yes, indeed,’ said Dad, seeing the pair off with a cordial wave. Sometimes his manners made you want to cry.

  As we resumed the washing up Dad remarked in his dry way that he hoped my thirst for violence had been fully slaked by the incident, and he needn’t expect to find any more enraged fathers on the doorstep in future. I assured him it had, and the subject was never raised again.

  18

  IT WAS NOT long after this that Christian went away for a week on an Outdoor Pursuits trip with the school. I know it must have been some time that term, because I was still wearing my eyepatch. I remember how it made a little reservoir for my tears. I never quite understood it, but the trip had something to do with the Duke of Edinburgh. After a year or so of performing good works and feats of skill and endurance, half a dozen boys and a teacher from Turton’s were to go climbing in Snowdonia in the harshest possible conditions with the minimum of equipment. The survivors would get a medal at Buckingham Palace. Something like that.

  Christian took Grandpa Percy’s rucksack, which looked like a relic from the First World War. It was made of tubular steel and leather and thick green canvas, and was formidably heavy even when empty. Once it was stuffed with Christian’s share of the camping equipment – tent pegs, mallet, groundsheet, sleeping bag, dried food, gas canister, maps, torch, billy-cans – it would have felled a donkey.

  ‘Goodness,’ Mum said, watching Christian’s bent-backed progress around the garden. ‘Do you seriously think you’ll get to the top of Snowdon with that thing?’

  ‘I’ll be lucky to get to Paddington,’ Christian gasped, legs buckling.

  ‘It always was a blighter to carry,’ Grandpa Percy conceded. I couldn’t help feeling that this was a serious shortcoming for a piece of luggage.

  ‘Is there nothing you can jettison?’ Mum pleaded. She was starting to suffer from twingey cartilages herself, and was alert to the fragility of knee joints.

  ‘We’ll have a weigh-in at the station and even out the loads,’ Christian reassured her. His fellow travellers – all Turton’s fee-payers – would be roughing it with the very latest in outdoor survival gear and aluminium-framed nylon backpacks so lightweight that only the waist strap stopped them floating away.

  He couldn’t be persuaded to have a lift to the station, wanting to do the whole journey, door-to-tentflap, under his own steam.

  ‘Will you send me a postcard?’ I asked. It was the first time he’d been away for such a long stretch, and my anxiety at the prospect of a lonely week was only intensified by his eagerness to be gone: the yearning ran only one way.

  ‘Yes, of course,’ Christian replied. ‘There’s a pillar box on the summit of Snowdon. It’s emptied twice a day.’

  I pulled a face and he just laughed, maddeningly.

  ‘Here’s a pound for emergencies,’ said Mum, taking the last note from her purse. ‘I’d like it back if possible.’ It occurred to me to wonder what species of mountain-top emergency could possibly be solved by a pound note, but Christian looked suitably grateful as he put it away. Mum didn’t often wave money in his direction.

  I handed over my own offering: a four-ounce bar of plain chocolate. It was something people in stories always seemed to have about their person, untouched, ready to produce in moments of extremity. This always struck me as unconvincing, but it gave me pleasure to imagine Christian awaiting rescue on some bleak crag, sustained only by dark chocolate and the memory of sisterly love. The gift was not made without sacrifice: it had cost me a sizeable part of my fortune, which consisted of the loose change culled from down the sides of our baggy armchairs. This was a useful, though unpredictable source of income. Experience had taught me that the collision between unwary male visitors with pockets full of coins and our slack and springless furniture produced the highest yields, and it was in this way that I had scraped together my modest fund.

  ‘Thanks, Pest,’ Christian said. He put the chocolate in the pocket of his parka, and gave me a k
iss on the cheek – a pleasing variant of his usual embrace, which was to crush my head under his armpit.

  Mum, who had been ransacking the broom cupboard, reappeared holding a scuffed shopping bag on wheels. ‘If we get rid of the bag,’ she said, starting to wrench the tartan vinyl, ‘you can strap your rucksack onto the frame and wheel it along.’

  Christian rolled his eyes. ‘This is a wilderness trip, not the Women’s Institute,’ he said.

  Mum had the decency to laugh at herself, and slung the half-demolished trolley back in the cupboard.

  ‘Go on, then, Mr Wilderness,’ she said. ‘Enjoy your blisters.’

  He shouldered his pack, and set off, whistling ostentatiously. I ran up to the attic to watch his progress along the lane. Before he had even reached the corner he had taken out my bar of emergency chocolate and disposed of it in three big bites.

  The week passed miserably without him. the house seemed too large, too quiet and too empty. I missed the sound of his homecoming each day, the clatter of his bike on the gravel, the slam of the door and the crash of his schoolbag on the hall floor. Watching TV wasn’t nearly so much fun without him sprawled on a cushion in the middle of the carpet, laughing like a witch. Although he hadn’t had so much time lately for pontoon and chess, with the rugby and the jogging, and the homework, it was his big, comforting presence that I was used to, and my own company was a poor substitute.

  Grandpa Percy tried to fill the void by teaching me every two-handed card game in the canon, and Mum and Dad showered me with extra attention and kindness, but they, too, were finding Christian’s absence strange. The weather had turned suddenly wet and cold, and we listened anxiously to the forecast for North Wales every evening.

  One afternoon Dad went up into one of the lofts and came down with a wooden box containing some crumpled tubes of oil paint and balding brushes. Some of the colours were fossilised beyond redemption, but we managed to squeeze out a few threads of chrome yellow, white, ochre and ultramarine, and I produced what I considered a very passable still life, entitled Milk Jug, Egg and Banana.

  I took it into school to show my art teacher, Mr Hatch, and he was very complimentary, and even gave me some hints on composition, suggesting, for example, that next time I didn’t need to arrange the objects in a straight line, and could possibly put them on something, rather than have them floating in space.

  Dad wanted to frame it, but once Mr Hatch had hinted at its flaws, I didn’t feel it deserved to be displayed. I kept it anyway, as it represented a milestone: the beginning of a stormy relationship with oils.

  On the day marked out for Christian’s return, I decided to go and meet him at the station. It was a fair ride away, and I wasn’t sure quite when in the afternoon to expect him, but I had nothing else to do, so I set off after lunch, taking a small sketch pad and pencil to help while away the time. My art teacher, in addition to his other advice, had recommended I carry these with me when I was out and about, and get into the habit of ‘Sketching from Life’.

  I chained my bike to the railings in the car park, found myself a seat at the end of the platform which commanded a view of trains arriving from London, opened my sketch pad, and began, rather self-consciously, to draw. My eyepatch seemed to be something of an asset in this endeavour, removing the troubling three-dimensional element from the matter of composition. Viewed through one eye the world already looked as flat as a picture. However, I was unprepared for the annoying reluctance of Life to keep still while I was drawing it, and several of my sketches had to be abandoned incomplete as the subjects wandered off to catch a train. After a while I began to appreciate the importance of speed in capturing the unposed human form, and to hanker for the relative compliance of my milk jug, egg and banana.

  I eventually settled on a teenage girl who was sitting nice and still on a bench further down the platform. She was at too great a distance to suspect me of watching her, and was in any case engrossed in a book, which gave me hope that she might not be intending to move for a while. Her blonde hair hung forward over her face, which saved me the bother of tackling her profile. I had more or less caught her outline, and was about to put in some light and shade, when she stood up to examine the timetable board. A moment later she sat back down in a fresh position, angled away from me, at which point I gave up.

  Half an hour passed. My pencil was blunt, my bottom numb, and I had produced a dozen unfinished scribbles of my surroundings, and one detailed drawing of my own foot, clad in semi-perished plimsoll. I was growing tired of shielding my work from the stares of nosey parkers so I went in search of a bin to deposit some pencil shavings, and immediately lost my seat. I don’t know whether it was the cold wind, or my great industry, but I suddenly had a fierce craving for sugar and spent some time debating whether to go to the kiosk or risk my money in the machine on the platform, for the additional gambler’s buzz, and the pleasure of pressing buttons. The gamble won of course. I could almost feel the hot breath of parental disapproval on the back of my neck as I posted the coins in the slot. Mum had always held vending machines to be instruments of Satan, and would sooner starve than use one, with the result that they now held a strange and terrible fascination for me. My feeling of guilt turned to dismay and rage as the dispensing drawer refused to yield to gentle and then urgent tugs. I could see my bar of Whole Nut, the nearside half-inch of it at least, trapped in the bottom of the tray.

  I was so engrossed in this futile struggle with the machine that I wasn’t even aware of the arrival of a London train until the sound of slamming doors brought me to my senses. Beyond the other twenty or so passengers who had alighted, I caught sight of Christian at the far end of the platform, straining to lash himself back under his rucksack. I put my hand up in greeting and he gave a great, wild grin and waved back, but there was something not quite right about it. As I approached I realised what it was: the wave and the smile were not for me, but for someone ahead of me, to my right.

  When comprehension finally comes to the chronically deluded it lands like a sledgehammer, and for a moment or two I stood reeling, as the blonde girl, whose likeness I had been attempting to capture with my pencil only minutes before, walked up to Christian and put her arms round his neck. I saw him stoop to kiss her, and then I shrank back behind the pillar where I had just been tussling with the chocolate machine, so that they wouldn’t see me as they passed, hand in hand. I needn’t have bothered, as they were entirely preoccupied with each other, but the desire to hide was instinctive.

  I suppose it was disappointment at finding myself superfluous that caused a few tears to pool up behind my eyepatch, but it was a feeling more like grief that curdled in my blood as I watched them turn into the booking hall and vanish from sight. I aimed a final punch at the tin belly of the chocolate machine, and then trudged back to retrieve my bike for the long ride home, with the defeated attitude of someone twice robbed.

  19

  ‘CHRISTIAN’S GOT A girlfriend,’ I announced over dinner a few days later. I hadn’t intended to say anything about it, but in spite of my broad hints in private, Christian had shown no signs of wanting to confide. There was nothing for it but to force his hand.

  ‘Have you, Christian?’ Mum enquired serenely. ‘Is she nice?’

  Christian shot me a look of pure hatred before saying, ‘Yes’, in a clipped tone that suggested further questions would not be welcome.

  ‘Well, that’s nice,’ said Mum, fishing for seconds in the casserole.

  ‘There was one of those urban foxes in the garden again today,’ said Grandpa Percy, whose contributions to conversation tended not to relate to the prevailing topic. ‘Skinny, emancipated creature,’ he added with disgust.

  ‘Are we allowed to know her name?’ Mum asked, dredging a ladleful of chicken bones from the pot and depositing them on Dad’s plate with a clatter.

  ‘Penny,’ said Christian.

  ‘He pretends to go jogging, but he’s actually meeting her,’ I explained. I’d burnt my boa
ts as far as popularity went, so I thought I may as well make what I could of my hard-won knowledge. ‘She’s got blonde hair.’

  ‘How do you know so much?’ Christian demanded. ‘Have you been following me?’

  ‘No,’ I replied, truthfully.

  ‘I could probably have got a shot at him if I had an airgun,’ said Grandpa Percy.

  ‘I’m sure Christian would have told us about her if he’d wanted us to know,’ Dad said to me with a frown, and it was so unlike him to offer me even the mildest rebuke that I felt myself shrivel.

  Far from bringing Christian to order, my declaration had the opposite effect: legitimising his many absences from home. Instead of resorting to his former subterfuge and disguise to engineer his meetings, he now abandoned all pretence of jogging and sauntered out of the house each evening, smartly dressed, in a miasma of acrid antiperspirant. Penny lived in one of the houses at the very furthest extent of his paper round. They had met months ago in the driveway during a territorial dispute between Christian and her dachshund. This much information I had managed to wring from him.

  ‘He’s never here,’ I complained to Mum. ‘Doesn’t he like us any more?’

  Mum smiled indulgently. ‘Of course he does.’ The fact that nobody but me seemed to mind was just another provocation. ‘You’ll be exactly the same when you’re sixteen.’

  Yes, but what am I supposed to do with myself till then? I wanted to shout. It was so miserable being the younger of two: always the disciple, the bumbling apprentice, perpetually outstripped and outperformed.

  Even when Christian was at home he was good for nothing. He was either busy with schoolwork, or lying in a daze on his bed, staring at the ceiling. Occasionally I would hear the thud of darts hitting their target, but by the time I’d made it up the stairs to challenge him to a game he’d have grown bored and fallen to mooching again. He had recently acquired a guitar on loan from Turton’s music cupboard, and was trying to teach himself to play from a book. A Tune a Day, it was called, with fabulous optimism. Christian had been practising for many days and produced nothing more than a horrible discordant thrumming. No sooner did he reach a standard sufficient to pick out a recognisable tune – Blackbird, say, or The House of the Rising Sun – he would spoil it all by trying to sing along. Such was his distraction during this period that I managed to pull off my first and only victory at chess. He hadn’t wanted to play, but I had nagged and nagged, and he put in at best only fifty per cent concentration, but still, it proved how deep the sickness had gone. He caught on to what I was doing just too late to rally. Before I could even say the words Check Mate, he had dragged one of the couch cushions down on top of me and sat on my head. I felt happier than I’d done for ages.