‘Please God,’ she prayed. ‘Let her be safe.’ The retreatants were right. There had to be a God so you could pray to Him when the one thing you valued in your life was threatened. Plain, moody Chris was her life—her flesh, future, heritage.
When the doorbell rang, she flung herself towards it, almost wept that it was David standing there and not her daughter. He was rambling on about some hold-up on the train and how he hadn’t been able to phone because they were stuck between Vauxhall and Clapham Junction.
‘Come in,’ she said. He was wearing a white shirt with a dark blue jacket, looked smart and yet uneasy as if he had put on clothes which belonged to someone else, was clutching a small brown paper bag. All the pleasure she should have felt on seeing him seemed now to have seeped away. She led him down the hall. It seemed suddenly too full of things—antique settle, inlaid table, framed prints set one above the other.
‘I’m afraid my daughter isn’t back yet. Shall we have a drink?’ Her hands were shaking on the bottle. She fetched her own glass, sat down opposite. Stupid to panic. David had materialised with a perfectly routine reason for his delay—and Chris would do the same, in just a moment. She sipped her sherry, sat back in her chair. Everything was normal now, two people sipping amontillado, waiting for their younger guests.
‘I’m sorry about your train,’ she said. ‘They can be awful.’
‘I’m sorry to be late.’ David was pulling at a button on his jacket. ‘How about your daughter? Is she coming by train as well?’
‘No, motorbike from London, and coach before that.’ Cheaper and more dangerous. ‘It takes twenty-seven hours in all, with various stops and so on.’
‘She’ll be pretty tired, then.’
‘Mm.’
She could see him glancing round the room. It suddenly looked vulgar, like the bedroom—an uneasy mix of her and Neil. Bea had bequeathed them some of her choicest pieces—the Queen Anne sideboard, the mahogany sewing table. Neil had chosen the rest—insisted on the sort of expensive modern masculine furniture he had in his own advertising agency: leather chairs, chrome and glass coffee table, hessian on the walls, prints chosen more to tone than for any artistic merit. Antiques aged gracefully. Time had done nothing to Bea’s furniture except improve its patina; had been more unkind to Neil’s things. The long-pile oatmeal carpet was losing its plush like Bear, there were scratches on the glass, the leather chairs were sagging. She wondered what would happen when they got older still. Throwing them out would be like destroying Neil. She couldn’t live there for ever, though, custodian of Neil’s monument—especially after Chris had left. Even with the two of them, it was extravagant, unjustified. Was David judging her? One of the retreat talks had been on poverty—six or seven kids squabbling in a flyblown room, eight million Indians crammed into Calcutta, while Mrs Neil Gordon spread herself through nine House & Garden rooms and half an acre of velvet lawn and apple trees.
If there had been an accident, she would be left alone in what the estate agents described as a family home. Chris filled half the house now and even Martin had begun to take it over, left his stuff around. Without them, she would shrink to nothing. Really nothing. She glanced across at David, long legs stretched out straight in front of him, trousers slightly short. She should be entertaining him, not indulging in self-pity. She had forgotten how tall he was, forgotten the lurch of excitement and nervousness he had produced in her before, and which was returning even now, beneath the worry over Chris.
‘Have another drink,’ she urged.
‘I’ve hardly started this one.’
‘Fasting again?’
He forced a smile. ‘No.’
‘Good. I’ve got a lot of food out there and no one to eat it. I mean, we can’t really start without them. Or do you think we should?’
‘Oh, no.’
He seemed so sure, she let herself relax a little. No policeman had rung, no hospital or doctor. No news is good news, people always said. Except people said a lot of things which turned out false—‘Every cloud has a silver lining’, ‘Enough is as good as a feast’, ‘God is love’.
‘Do you believe in God?’ she asked suddenly, cursing herself for being so direct. She had planned to orchestrate the evening, lead only gradually and slyly to the crucial questions, maybe use her daughter as a sort of catalyst. It was a stupid question, anyway. Of course he believed in God. Hilden Cross would hardly invite a speaker who was an out-and-out atheist. And yet through the whole of his lecture on the miraculous, he had never mentioned God as such, seemed always to slip between or beyond conventional definitions.
David took a cautious sip of his sherry. ‘My God, yes.’
‘What about St Abban’s?’
‘They’re not that different.’
‘Really? A hair-shirt God, then, gobbling up your penances?’
‘Oh no, a young God. Abban’s God was thirteen hundred years less old and tired than ours. He still danced and sang.’
‘That sounds rather pagan.’
‘Maybe. Remember how close the pagans were. And St Abban was a Celt as well as a Christian, knew the old traditions.’
‘Yet he seems to emphasise denial all the time.’ Morna recalled the French professor’s words—penitence, mortification corporelle.
‘Yes, but don’t you find he does it with a … sort of joy? It’s not a spoilsport sourboots attitude, like some of the later ascetics. I know our society shies away from any type of self-denial, regards it as neurotic or obsessional, but I disagree with that. Anything worth having is worth suffering for, and Abban’s so … so eager to suffer anything. He almost burns with it, like a bridegroom going through the fire for his Beloved.’
Morna stared at him. Half a glass of sherry had loosened his tongue already. He was sounding poetic, romantic even. She tried to refill his glass, but he covered it with his hand.
‘Go on, just a small one. Let’s be pagan.’
David laughed, drained his glass, held it out to her. ‘There you are.’
She filled it, lingered by his chair—couldn’t see the clock from there, only hear it ticking through the silence. It seemed impossible to concentrate on intellectual matters or make routine conversation while Chris was still delayed.
David uncrossed his legs, cleared his throat. ‘You’re … er … worried, aren’t you, Morna—about your daughter?’
She nodded.
‘You’ve phoned the boat and train, I take it?’
‘Mm.’
‘And no one’s rung you?’
‘No.’
‘Shall we pray for her?’
Morna turned on her heel, strode back to the chair. If he were going to behave like Father Clarke, imagining God had time to spot-check all the mortuaries or work her own personal miracle as soon as they joined their hands, then …
‘Don’t over-react. I don’t mean to a God—mine or yours or anyone else’s. Just hold her in our own thoughts, concentrate all our energy on her safety. It’s a question of trust. We’ve got to trust she’s safe, refuse to doubt it.’
‘That’s … praying?’
‘Isn’t it? The power of the mind’s enormous—the power of faith. Just shut your eyes and concentrate a moment.’
It sounded bogus, but she shut them all the same—saw Chris at eight months trying to sit up—fierce determined expression on her face, tenacious arms. The child had mastered it, then gone on to walk, talk, add up. Amazing skills. She had trusted then. It had never entered her head that Chris might turn out lame, dumb, dyslexic, even dull. She hadn’t. Was that the result of trusting, or just good luck?
She opened her eyes a crack to check on David. His were still closed, his whole face creased in concentration. It touched her suddenly that he should lavish such concern and fervour on someone he had never met. He had been delayed himself, must be tired, hungry—had expected dinner, not a worry-hour. Several minutes passed. She could almost feel the power and intensity of his faith, tangible and vibrant in the air; the r
oom charged with it, alive with it. It was like a spell thawing her own worry. Her daughter would be safe—she knew it now.
‘Listen,’ she said, when he had opened his eyes at last. ‘Why don’t we go over my translation until Chris and Martin turn up, and have dinner after that—unless you’re starving?’
‘No, that’s fine.’
‘Right, bring your glass to the study and I’ll show you what I’ve done since …’
Neil had called it study, kept his tycoon toys there. There was still a modern sculpture on the desk, a fancy chrome-framed calendar five years out of date. Before Neil had left, she had done her own work in the kitchen, first pushing back the toaster and the coffee pot, clearing crumbs and dirty cups. Neil didn’t want a working wife. She felt less guilty playing with words at the kitchen table, like a child. ‘Just keeping up my languages,’ she told people.
She pulled up a second chair for David, wished the room wasn’t quite so grand. You could sleep seven homeless children there, cram in twenty-seven of Calcutta’s starving. Even the desk was big enough for four. She edged a little nearer David so he could see the manuscript.
‘The main problem was the shorthand,’ she told him. ‘I don’t think you realised, but Le Goff changed it halfway through. At first he was using his own brand of sort of speedwriting, leaving off the second halves of words, putting initials instead of spelling whole words out, but then it changes. He seems to have picked up shorthand proper. Fortunately my shorthand’s still quite good, so I could follow most of it, but then he starts combining the two, adding hieroglyphs of his own and that’s where I’m slowed down.’
David had taken off his jacket, was flicking through the pages. ‘I’m sorry, I’d no idea what … You’ve done a hell of a lot, though. I just don’t know how you managed it in the time. I can’t tell you what a help it is. I’m absolutely delighted.’
Morna turned to the originals, checked through them for examples of the shorthand. The work had certainly been demanding. She had had to give up reading, walks, even cut her sleep down, in order to complete so much. David was right about joy in self-denial. There had been joy in it—not only in her achievement, but in his obvious satisfaction.
‘After chapter ten, it gets much easier. In fact, what I’ve done is …’ She broke off, kicked her chair back, darted down the hall, calling out apologies to David as she flung open the front door.
‘Chris!’
‘Mummy!’
No Mum, no Martin, not even any luggage. They were hugging—a pre-teens hug, fierce and unselfconscious. Morna could feel her daughter’s tears hot against her neck.
‘What’s wrong, darling? What happened?’
‘N … Nothing.’
Chris was thinner even than when she left, ribs hard against her own flesh. ‘Where’s Martin? Didn’t he come and meet you? Why didn’t you phone? I’d have come myself and …’
‘He d … did come, he did—in fact all the way to Dover. He was w … waiting for me on the quay.’
‘Why are you so late, then?’
‘We … er … didn’t start immediately, and then we … stopped for a bit and …’ Chris suddenly pulled away, rocketed upstairs.
Morna swung round. David was standing tall and awkward in the kitchen doorway. She was torn between the two of them, running halfway up the stairs, then stopping, turning back. ‘I’m sorry,’ she called down. ‘Have another drink, David. Read my work. I must just see what …’
‘Of course.’ David was putting on his jacket, making for the door. ‘Look, I’d better go now. I … I’ll phone you in the morning.’
‘No, please. Please stay.’ She was pleading with him, voice rising, felt ridiculous relief when he trailed back to the study, closed the door.
She dashed on up to Chris who was standing by the window, staring out. Morna cursed herself for the apples and the flowers, the vulgar comic card. If Martin were lying paralysed in hospital, such things were crassly inappropriate.
‘Martin’s not … hurt, is he?’
Chris shook her head. She had removed her jacket but still had a blue silk scarf swathed around her neck, almost like a bandage. Chris never wore scarves—nor gloves and hats, despite the number Bea had given her.
‘What is it, then?’
‘Oh—nothing …’ Chris still kept her back turned, shutting her mother off.
Morna felt excluded, useless, walked slowly to the door.
‘We had an argument, okay?’ Chris swung round, started pacing up and down. ‘Two arguments, in fact.’
‘Wh … What about?’
‘Oh, everything. Him and me. The future. You see …’ She paused, chewed her lip. ‘Bunny wrote to me in France.’
‘Bunny?’ Morna gripped the doorframe. That was the new wife’s name.
‘Yeah. She can’t spell and she uses ghastly pink paper which smells of roses. She wanted us to visit them.’
‘Us? What, you and Martin?’
‘No, you and me.’
‘Me?’
‘Yup. She’s suggesting we go out there for Christmas.’
‘You mean California?’
‘Mm. Martin’s furious. He says I’ve been away two months as it is, and we’ve been arguing over Christmas anyway, almost since the last one. He wants me to spend it at his place. I told him about Grandma and how she’d hate it if we broke the tradition and her being on her own and everything. So we’d agreed Christmas Day as usual there, and Boxing Day with him. But now …’
‘But you’re not going, are you? Not to Bunny’s?’ Morna was still incredulous. One of the advantages of Bunny was that she wasn’t real. The name was so absurd to start with, you couldn’t take it seriously. She was just a harmless pet, something Neil kept in a cage, would tire of when he grew up. But if Chris were to meet her, stay in her house, get to know her son, exchange letters on her pink scented paper, then …
‘Look, Mum, I haven’t seen my father for five whole years. If I wait for him to come back here, I’ll be dead and buried.’
‘B … But we can’t afford it. The fares are …’
‘He’s paying everything. It’s my Christmas present and birthday present combined. He wrote to me as well—not on pink, but a sort of grey glossy art paper with the name of his firm on top—huge. He said as soon as we let him know, he’d book the tickets.’
Morna still gagged on the ‘we’. ‘But why me, for heaven’s sake?’
‘That’s Bunny, I suppose. She’s got this thing about loving her enemy.’
‘And I’m the enemy?’ Morna tried to make her voice sound neutral. ‘I should have thought it was the other way round.’
‘Well, she wants you to love her, then.’ Chris wiped her eyes with her sleeve. ‘I wish you would, Mum. Try, at least. I hate you hating her.’
‘I … don’t.’ Morna had tried for five damned years to say nothing, stay always bloody neutral, keep her racking disapproval locked up in her mind. And Chris, her shrewd and honest daughter, had seen through her all the time.
‘I won’t go if you don’t.’ Chris sagged down on the bed.
‘Why not? That’s ridiculous.’ Unfair. A sort of blackmail. Morna resented Chris as well now. Christmas was sacrosanct. Bea in dove-grey cashmere and real pearl earrings, and Joy with a red bow on her fringe; Chris out of jeans as a concession to her Grandma, she in Chris’s blusher and mascara. Four females proving that they didn’t need their men. Frost on the windows, glowing fires inside.
The glow paled into the California sun—golden beaches, golden curls on Bunny’s four-year-old, proving something different—that she and Neil had … had … Mustn’t think about it. How could she not, when her safe and tidy calendar was disrupted? Waking on Christmas morning in an enemy house. Rose-scented Bunny gift-wrapping bitterness and resentment. Planes, packing, falseness, fear, fear.
‘You don’t understand, Mum.’ Chris sounded close to tears again. ‘I’m … scared of Daddy. Well, not scared exactly, but … I don’t feel easy
with him. I mean, I won’t do in the States.’
‘Why go at all, then?’
‘Look, just because you’re divorced, it doesn’t mean I have to be as well. I want a father. He left when I was twelve—dying to be netball captain and doing my first-aid badge at Girl Guides. That’s not me any more.’
‘And supposing he’s changed just as much?’
‘He will have. That’s the point. I’m remembering him all wrong—sometimes not remembering him at all. Do you realise, Mum, just before I went to France, Martin asked me what colour my father’s eyes were. I said ‘grey’, of course, like mine, and tried to picture them, like in—you know, a sort of passport-photo machine flashing little pictures into your mind when you put your 50p in. But the machine had broken down. The photos were all blank.’
‘But …’ Morna stared around the room. Neil smiling, wheedling, bare-torsoed in his swiming-trunks. ‘He’s here. You see him every day.’
‘I don’t. I hate those photographs. They’re all sham.’
‘So why keep them, darling? I’m not too keen on them myself.’
‘I’ve got to keep them. I’ve nothing else. Oh, his presents, yes, but they’re his taste, not mine—or maybe even Bunny’s—and I bet he gets his secretary to send them. He’d never have the time to hunt around for brown paper and Sellotape and stuff. They’re probably just a guilt thing, anyway, to make up for the fact he hardly ever writes. Even when I do get a letter, like the one in France, it’s all sort of stiff and false. He’s no idea what to say. I mean, he asks me things like how am I enjoying netball, when I gave it up three years ago.’
‘So why don’t you tell him in your letters?’
‘I do.’
There was silence for a moment.
‘I don’t think he even reads them—not properly—just the beginning and the end. Like he used to do with books—you know, so he can say he’s read them and feel okay about it.’ Chris was tugging off her boots. ‘By the way, who’s that guy downstairs?’
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