It was early evening and dark by the time I had finished, and I had to do the puttying by candlelight. Before I left I stuck a note to the kitchen table which just said: Gerald, where are you? I’m worried. Call me. Chris but I didn’t really believe he intended to return. The fridge, dark and silent without its power source, had been cleared out, apart from an ancient grapefruit which imploded when I picked it up, releasing a puff of blue powder. On my way out I took the liberty of removing a new front door key from the little row of wooden pegs in the hall and gave it to Avril. She took my number and promised to call if there were any further domestic crises, and to tell Gerald that I had been looking for him, in the event that he put in an appearance. There was something conspiratorial about her eagerness to be involved, which hinted at long-term loneliness. Still, I was glad to have an ally on the ground.
Although I hadn’t set off that morning with anything like enthusiasm, I left the house with a considerably heavier heart. I had not only failed to locate Gerald, but I was now saddled with a plumbing emergency, to remedy at a distance of two hundred and fifty miles. The condition of the place at least explained Gerald’s absence and possibly his silence. If, as I suspected, the pipes had frozen and burst because the power had been cut off thanks to his refusal or inability to pay the bill, he wouldn’t necessarily have been in a hurry to call me and confess.
I wondered which of his erstwhile ‘landladies’ – girlfriend wasn’t quite the word for the succession of older women with whom Gerald had lodged over the years – was putting him up. Or whether, in fact, he was dossing at a hostel for down-and-outs, as he had been known to do in those interludes when the host/parasite relationship had temporarily broken down.
The other reason for my uneasy spirits concerned the discovery, on the bedside table of the room Gerald had been occupying, of a family photo taken on the pier at Cromer in 1976 when I was fifteen. It was the last time all four of us went on holiday together: the following year Gerald and I rebelled and stayed at home, and Mum and Dad took their revenge by going somewhere interesting – Salzburg, I think. I remembered the occasion of the photograph – or at least my outfit – perfectly well. Paisley shirt, hipsters, heeled boots – these last regarded by Dad as an abomination, strictly for ‘nancy boys’. It was one of those typical holiday snaps taken by an obliging stranger: posed, but not composed, exactly fifty per cent sky, with a tilted horizon. Gerald was glaring, Mum and Dad were smiling regally, determined to go on record as enjoying themselves. It was impossible to tell what my mood might have been because someone – Gerald evidently – had excised my face from the picture. At first I thought the hole was a cigarette burn, but on closer inspection I could see the blunt, snipped edge, and I was immediately put in mind of more than one ropey crime novel I’d read, where the killer obligingly signposts his intentions by defacing old college photos of future victims.
Although I didn’t suspect Gerald of plotting murder, I couldn’t help finding it disturbing and I wondered what had prompted this outburst of vandalism, and how long ago it had taken place. Perhaps the picture had reminded him of some incident on that holiday when I had been especially obnoxious. This wasn’t impossible, but coming on top of the business with the changed lock it didn’t reassure me greatly. It seemed that the game of sibling rivalry, in which I’d always been a reluctant player, was destined to go on and on, without a goal or a winner and, since the death of our parents, without either audience or referee.
It was after midnight when I reached Hartslip, and I was freezing cold and exhausted. I’d missed my connection at York, or rather the railway timetablers had carefully arranged it that way, and when the train to Malton finally did turn up the heating was on the blink. I’d laid a fire in the grate at home before I left, ready for the following morning, but I lit it now, and sat in front of it with a big pot of coffee, thawing out. All the way home I’d been chewing over the problem of the flood and wondering if I could organise the necessary repairs without going back to London, and how much the damage would have wiped off the value of the property. It was only now, as I hunted in my pocket for the insurance details, that I came across the letter addressed to me that I had salvaged from the hallway. I opened it with a slight sense of foreboding. It was written on headed notepaper from the University of York and was dated three weeks earlier.
Dear Mr Flinders
I am researching the life of the editor Owen Goddard and I have in my possession a letter from you dated October 1984 in which you thank him for a gift of money. I wonder if you remember the background to that incident, or if by chance you have kept any other correspondence from Owen Goddard, or have any recollections which might shed light on that period of his life. I work at the university as a lecturer in the English Department, but am currently in London doing some research. If you have any material that might be of interest I would be delighted to meet – at your convenience.
Yours sincerely
Alex Canning PhD
I sat for a long time looking at the page until I wasn’t focusing any more, and the black handwriting swam against the white. Owen Goddard: the name had once been holy to me, and now someone was writing his biography and wanted me to be a footnote. But parts of his story were my story too, mine to conceal if I chose. I was under no obligation to this Alex Canning PhD. I could be like Gerald: strategically unobtainable.
I would reply, though. The Goddard name was a lure I couldn’t resist. It was as if I’d known all along that sooner or later someone would cast a line down the years and reel me in.
7
‘THE UNTHINKABLE HAS happened!’ I wrote in my diary for 1st May 1975. ‘Gerald has got a girlfriend.’ At fourteen I wasn’t a conscientious diarist: the rest of the year was blank.
He had met a girl at Bible reading, of course, and somehow or other a bike ride followed by tea at our place had been arranged. I would have loved to witness these negotiations. I couldn’t believe the initiative had come from Gerald, even though the choice of activities seemed to bear his hallmark, and yet why would she have chosen him?
The appointed day was sunny, which was a blessing, since the wet-weather alternative had been a trip to the Horniman Museum (Mum’s idea). I watched Gerald set off on his bicycle, his hair wet-combed and parted, trousers sensibly tucked into his socks, conveying as always that air of being twenty years older, and wondered what this girl could be like that he had so improbably ensnared.
I was out in the back garden hitting a tennis ball against the coal bunker, aiming just above a line chalked at net height, when the back gate clanged. The cyclists had returned, not riding but wheeling. The outing had not been a success. They had got as far as Crystal Palace Park when Gerald had ridden over a piece of broken bottle and punctured his front tyre. He had been forced to walk all the way back, pushing the bike, while his companion rode slowly alongside. He kept berating himself for not foreseeing this eventuality and taking the puncture-repair kit along, and I had the feeling, from the girl’s expression, that this had probably been the main theme of his conversation on the journey home.
We stood, awkwardly, unintroduced, until at last I said, ‘Hello, I’m Christopher,’ keeping hold of the tennis racket to avoid bungling a handshake.
‘I’m Katharine,’ said the girl, smiling for the first time, to show slightly crowded teeth. She was much more presentable than I’d dared to expect, though not what you’d call pretty. I took in shoulder-length brown hair, held back off her face in a gold clip, a squarish jaw, freckles, no make-up, but a proper in-and-out woman’s figure, not entirely disguised by a matronly pinafore dress.
Mum and Dad had tactfully gone out, leaving tea on the kitchen table. Ham sandwiches, fruit cake and chocolate mallows – Gerald’s favourite since early infancy. I only hoped he didn’t reprise his old habit of smacking them against his forehead and peeling the cracked chocolate off the marshmallow, piece by piece. But thoughts of tea, and indeed Katharine, had been displaced by the more urgent matter of tha
t puncture, and while we were saying our hellos, Gerald upended the bike and began stripping off the damaged tyre. That was the thing with Gerald: he’d get fixated on a project and have to complete it there and then, and nothing would deflect him.
‘You can watch how I do this if you like,’ he said to Katharine, as a few spots of rain hit the concrete. She glanced skyward, shrugged and sat down on the back doorstep, hugging her knees. I left them to it and went indoors to catch the football results.
Ten minutes later, I noticed that the rain was coming down harder. He’s surely not going to make her sit out there in the wet all afternoon, I thought, wishing Mum and Dad were around to intervene. I wandered out into the kitchen to put the kettle on and found Katharine sitting at the table, gazing blankly ahead, a picture of neglect. Through the window I could see Gerald still wrestling with the tyre, periodically stopping to mop his glasses.
‘Are you all right?’ I said, embarrassed on his behalf. ‘Once he gets going on something . . .’
‘Oh, that’s OK.’ She looked grateful to have been disturbed.
Now what was I going to do with her? ‘Do you want to watch TV?’ I asked.
She shook her head. ‘I don’t watch television.’ Now that I came to think of it, neither did Gerald since he’d joined Vivian’s church.
‘What do you do instead, then?’ I asked. ‘In the evenings, I mean.’
‘Well, homework. I’ve got exams this summer. And I’m teaching myself the guitar.’ She blushed slightly. ‘And sometimes I do a bit of my rug. I’m making a rag rug. It’s really good fun.’
I nodded, smiling encouragement.
‘Why don’t you come along to one of the PUSH meetings with Gerald?’
‘Push?’
‘Pray Until Something Happens. Group prayer is really powerful. It cured Vivian’s mum’s arthritis.’
‘I haven’t got arthritis,’ I said.
She laughed. ‘You don’t have to have something wrong with you. You could just come anyway.’
‘I don’t think so.’ I went to put the kettle on, hoping its whistle would bring Gerald in from the garden. On the tea tray, beside a china bowl of lump sugar was a pack of cards, probably left over from one of Mum’s bridge afternoons. It was a nice new deck, sharp-edged and slippery. ‘Do you want a game of rummy or something?’ I asked, forgetting that cards, like TV, might be regarded as ungodly, but she nodded, so it was obviously OK.
She didn’t seem to have heard of any of the games I suggested, and couldn’t remember the rules of the one game she knew but hadn’t played for years: donkey. I gave the deck a last shuffle and put it back on the tray.
‘I can play chess,’ she said at last, in a tone which implied she already knew I played.
We had just set up the board between the fruit cake and the chocolate mallows when Gerald came in, drenched, but glowing with the satisfaction of a job well done. He dried his hair on the roller towel on the back door and raked it flat with his fingers before sitting down to tea. I was about to make my getaway when Katharine pushed her king’s pawn forward and said, ‘Your move,’ so I felt obliged to continue, while Gerald sat watching, absent-mindedly eating his way through the plate of sandwiches.
She wasn’t a bad player, which was a pity, because I wanted the game to be over as quickly as possible (on my terms of course), and the only way to guarantee that was to play like a moron. Although I was keen to escape I had too much pride to allow myself to be beaten by a girl, particularly a Christian, rug-making friend of Gerald. She, in any case, was in no hurry, taking her time over every move, and so the game proceeded its laborious way towards stalemate, while Gerald made the tea and looked on with no great enthusiasm.
By the time it was over the sandwiches and cake had been disposed of, so I stood up and made some excuse about having to finish my homework, at which point Katharine looked at her watch and said, ‘I ought to be getting home. I haven’t got lights on my bike.’
Gerald gave me a baleful look, before leaning down to tuck his trousers back into his socks.
There were no more weekend bicycle trips to Crystal Palace, and for a while no mention of Katharine, from which I deduced that one experience of Gerald on his home territory had been enough for her.
‘What happened to that girl from the church?’ Mum ventured to ask him one day, when he was mooching about the kitchen, getting in her way.
‘I don’t know.’ He shrugged. ‘I haven’t decided.’
‘Did the bike ride not work out?’ A thought struck her. ‘The tea was all right, wasn’t it?’ She was making scones for her bridge ladies, and there was flour on her glasses and in her hair.
‘Yes. There was nothing wrong with the tea. It went fine apart from Christopher interfering.’
‘You didn’t!’ Mum turned on me, wagging the rolling pin, which shed flakes of raw scone mix on the lino. ‘I told you to keep out of the way.’
‘They played chess for practically the whole afternoon,’ said Gerald bitterly.
‘Only because you were totally ignoring her,’ I protested. ‘I was just being polite. I don’t even like her!’
‘I was teaching her how to mend a puncture.’
‘Chess and bicycle maintenance,’ said Mum, rolling her eyes. ‘I’m amazed she’s not been back!’
‘She seemed quite happy to learn,’ said Gerald stiffly.
‘In the rain,’ I added.
Mum ground the pastry cutter into the dough until it screeched against the kitchen table. ‘If you’d only had a sister, you wouldn’t be so clueless,’ she sighed. It was the first time it had ever occurred to me that Mum might harbour private disappointments, or indeed thoughts of any kind.
A month or so after the infamous first date I was upstairs in my bedroom trying to smoke a cigar. My best friend David Creerson had swiped a bunch of them from his dad’s humidor and dished them out at school, and I had been saving mine for a quiet moment. It gave off a fusty smell of old men’s clothes, which intensified almost unbearably when I finally got it to light, and I was puffing queasily out of the open window when I saw Katharine wheeling along the path on her bike. She was riding it like a scooter, standing up, both feet on the same pedal, as though to distance herself from the illegal activity of cycling on the pavement. She was wearing an embroidered blouse, a gingham headscarf and blue cotton trousers that were not quite denim. Jeans for people who aren’t allowed to wear jeans.
Gerald was out at his new Saturday job in Sainsbury’s at Stockwell. He was in charge of broken eggs, checking all the boxes for cracked shells and breaking the rejects into waxed cartons to be sold by the scoop. At the end of the day any unsold slop was his to keep. It was always omelette in our house on Saturday night.
I withdrew slightly, so Katharine wouldn’t see me, keeping the snout of the cigar just poking over the window ledge. From behind the curtain I watched her chain her bicycle to the lamp post and a moment later heard a rap on the letter box and the sound of voices.
‘Hello, I’m Katharine Clement from the Faithful Few. I came to tea a few weeks ago.’
‘Hello dear.’ This was Mum. ‘I’m afraid Gerald’s not here at the moment. He’s working up at the new supermarket. He won’t be back till six. He’ll be sorry to have missed you.’
Then the words which made me fumble my cigar so that it went spinning into the front garden, where it embedded itself in the privet hedge and continued to smoulder.
‘It isn’t Gerald I’ve come to see, it’s Christopher.’
We walked along the east side of the common, Katharine pushing her bike between us. My one thought was to get her away from the house before Gerald came back. I had given Mum a beseeching look as I came down the stairs in answer to her summons. Get me out of this it plainly said, but she had replied with the bland smile of one determined not to get involved.
I let Katharine do most of the talking: I had nothing to say, and in any case needed my concentration to scan the horizon for anyone I knew. If Cree
rson, or anyone else from school, saw me with a girl in a headscarf I was finished. Her exams had started, work on the rag rug was progressing well, she had played a guitar solo in church, and won a fiver in a chess tournament. I trudged beside her, murmuring politely at these feats, and wondering how soon I could feasibly get away.
‘Shall we go to the café?’ she suggested. ‘We could sit down and have a cup of tea?’
I shook my head. I hadn’t thought to bring any money, and besides the café was always crowded – I was sure to be seen. We ambled on until Katharine spotted a bench and decided to sit down, propping her bicycle on its stand and padlocking it, though we were sitting only feet away.
‘You smell all smoky,’ she said. ‘Have you been smoking cigarettes?’
‘No,’ I replied, truthfully.
‘You can put your arm round me if you want. I don’t mind,’ she said.
Obediently I manoeuvred my arm into position. It lay, stiff as a plank, along the back of the bench, my hand a lifeless slab of flesh cupping the air six inches above her shoulder. She prattled on about school, and the antics of the fifth-year leavers on their last day. Someone had started a fire in a locker and the whole place had had to be evacuated. There had been flour fights on the bus. We agreed that this was silly and childish.
I glanced at my watch. Nearly six – time to go.
‘I’ve got to go back for tea now,’ I said. As I went to disengage my arm, I saw the distinctive figure of Gerald toiling up the hill towards Gleneldon Road, a carton of broken eggs in each hand. Something unnatural in my frozen posture must have caught his attention, because he looked up and saw us. For a second it seemed as if he was going to wave or call out, but then he didn’t, and instead walked on slightly faster, with his head down.
Gerald didn’come down to tea that night, and when Mum sent me up to investigate I found him lying on his bed, holding his stomach, a nauseous expression on his face.
The Editor's Wife Page 5