by F. G. Cottam
Elizabeth stood with a backwards shriek of chair legs on waxed parquet. She ran more than walked towards the door to the vestibule. ‘I need some air,’ she said into her own wake.
‘You’ve just described an eight-year-old girl wearing the uniform of St Anselm’s Primary School,’ Richard said, sipping coffee.
‘Well,’ James said, ‘there you go.’
Richard looked at him coolly over the rim of his cup. ‘St Anselm’s closed its doors for the last time in 1961,’ he said.
Olivia Greer could hear Jack crying in his bedroom through the wall that divided it from hers. Her bedside clock told her that it was shortly after ten. That was very late, to her, with the next day a school day. She was supposed to be asleep by eight thirty except on Friday and Saturday nights when she went to bed at nine and on holiday when sometimes she stayed up outrageously late. That was her mum’s description. ‘You shouldn’t be up, Livs,’ her mum would say, looking at her watch in a foreign restaurant or on a foreign street. ‘It’s outrageously late.’
She would have liked to go and comfort Jack in the way that he always comforted her when she fell over and grazed a knee or banged her elbow or, most recently, when she had been upset by a bad dream. She loved her brother and the sound of his sobs was itself upsetting. It was shocking, too. Jack was brave and did not often cry. She could not remember the last time she had heard him do so. She wanted very much to go and climb into his bed and cuddle him and say the kind things that would make him feel better. But she did not dare.
She did not dare move or even properly open her eyes. Her eyes were not open. Neither, though, were they quite shut. They were open only to the sly point she opened them to when she cheated at hide and seek and secretly watched the person trying to find a hiding place through blurry lashes.
She was secretly watching now. She was secretly watching the girl standing in shadow to the left of her bedroom door, watching her. The girl was very still and pale and dressed in a school uniform from a school Olivia did not think was local to where she lived. She recognised all of those, knew by sight their colours and crests. This girl’s uniform was not one of them. In the murk of her room, through the curtain of her lashes, she was pretty sure of that.
Olivia was not exactly frightened. The girl by the door did not look fierce or unfriendly. She did not look at all like someone intent on harming her. There was the question, though, of who she was. There was the question too of how she had got there.
Olivia had heard of having imaginary friends. She had never had an imaginary friend of her own. Perhaps that was what the girl watching her from beside the door was. But she thought it best to be cautious and pretend to be asleep. She did not really see how a friend could be termed imaginary if you could see them well enough to describe them. It kind of did away with the need for an imagination.
Had she imagined a friend, she thought she would have imagined someone really exotic and strange. She would have dreamed up a friend who dressed like Pocahontas or wore a suit of armour or had wings like an angel. At the very least, she would have Rapunzel-length hair. This girl just had a straw hat with a purple band. The only unusual thing about her was that her feet, in their leather shoes, did not seem quite to rest on the floor.
She thought that maybe she was just dreaming the girl. It was best to think that, quite comforting, really. The problem with it was Jack’s sobs coming through the wall. Olivia sometimes had quite convincing dreams and the bad dreams were the most convincing of all. But the sobbing from Jack’s room was a detail she could neither ignore nor consign to a dream. It was a detail too far. She knew in her heavy heart that her brother’s sorrow was real.
Eventually, her eyes really did close. The tiny muscles around them grew tired from squinting and she relaxed them and the rest of her relaxed too and she fell asleep. When something woke her, something that felt vaguely like a breath of breeze, the figure by the door had gone and she was alone in the room. She was glad. She felt relieved. And she was glad that the sorrowful noise from her brother’s room had stopped and the house was silent. She thought that it must by then be what grown-ups called the small hours. The world seemed very still. She descended into peaceful slumber for the remainder of the night.
Chapter Five
Jack did not feel like making his usual home alone joke the morning after calling his dad in Cornwall. He was tired, for one thing, and too irritable as a consequence to want to joke around. Plus the joke had been going on for a year, ever since his parents had first started to trust him in the house on his own for short periods. It was getting stale. There was the fact that his mum was only going to be the fifteen or twenty minutes it took to ferry Olivia to school. It was not a period of absence worth remarking on, was it? And finally there was the feeling that joking around with his mum was not something he really had the heart for. He was far too angry with her to bother.
She paused at the kitchen door with Olivia, waiting for him to say it as he stirred his cornflakes and milk into mush. But he did not say it. Instead he looked at his mum trying to see her not as his mum but as Robert O’Brien might. She was dressed in jeans and a white shirt and a short black jacket made of thin leather that was very soft to the touch. She was slim, quite tall and smelled of Jo Malone perfume. She had lovely hair and sparkling eyes and a very nice smile if she was pleased with you.
She jangled her car keys, impatient for the joke that would not come. Jack thought that his mum was glamorous. That was the word. She was pretty, but there was more to her than prettiness. She had this confident, successful thing going on and she was stylish too. She was glamorous, his mum, there was no doubt about it. And he was disgusted with her.
Actually, what he felt was worse than disgust. The word to describe what he felt was one he understood the meaning of but had never had a context for in his own life, not even when that gang had beaten and robbed him on that bus; not even when he had seen his own face in the mirror for the first time after the damage the tyre iron had done to it. What Jack felt, stirring the breakfast mush in his bowl, was the feeling of dismay.
‘Do yourself a favour,’ his mum said, ‘say goodbye to Mr Grumpy.’ He did not respond. She reached for an apricot from the fruit bowl on the surface next to her and made as though to throw it at him. He did not react. He was not willing to be playful. ‘Suit yourself,’ she said. She dropped the apricot back into the bowl and turned with Olivia and left.
After she had gone he went to his room and switched on his computer and googled Robert O’Brien. He was a pretty famous guy. He was pictured quite a lot astride the motorcycle he had parked outside their house the previous day. It seemed to be sort of his trademark. There were some pictures of him windsurfing with sunglasses on and his long hair gathered in a ponytail. He was in good shape, athletically built. He looked very fit and also very vain.
He did not much look like a writer. But then what did writers look like? They did not look much like William Shakespeare or Charles Dickens any more. Robert O’Brien wrote mostly children’s stories. Chris Ryan wrote stories for kids; Jack had read a couple of them, and he didn’t look like a writer at all. He looked like a Special Forces soldier who had killed people, which is what he was and exactly what he had done.
Appearances were deceptive. Jack’s friends described his dad as a computer geek. On paper that was what he was, too. He was a software designer. But Jack could not imagine anyone less geeky than his dad. His dad was a brilliant driver. He could fix anything from a car engine to a hi-fi amplifier. He could swim two lengths of an Olympic pool holding his breath underwater. After a row with the builders, he had fitted their kitchen himself, cutting and smoothing and polishing the granite with power tools he’d got from a hire shop. He had no interest at all in sport. But that did not make his dad a geek.
Jack groaned and switched off his computer. He heard the front door open and then close behind his returning mum. What was she playing at, going to bed with a tosser with a ponytail? On paper,
Robert O’Brien was an impressive sort of bloke. He was good-looking and successful. But he had sounded like a creep, wheedling yesterday at the door. And his mum was married and was deceiving his dad and acting like her own children didn’t matter to her. They were supposed to be going off to enjoy a new life together but they weren’t even really together as a family, were they? Was O’Brien going to tag along? Would he turf up on his Harley in his sunglasses and his ponytail? They were going to live at the seaside. He’d enjoy the windsurfing, wouldn’t he?
Jack descended the stairs, thumping down them on feet as heavy as his heart. He wandered aimlessly into the kitchen. His mum was there, thumbing someone a text on her crackberry. She did that thing with her head, the gesture familiar throughout his whole life to her son, that shook the hair away from her face and out of her eyes. For the first time in his life, he wished that he did not love her so much.
‘What do you fancy doing today?’
‘Don’t know. Don’t care.’
‘Livs is going to a friend’s for tea. That gives us until early evening. I think we should take the train to Kingston and then catch a boat to Hampton Court. It’s a lovely day. We can have a picnic on the river and you will get plenty of fresh air to help mend that bruised brain of yours.’
‘My brain isn’t bruised. And I don’t feel like going out.’ His mum had grown up in Kingston. His dad sometimes made jokes about her being a posh Surrey girl. His dad was from a place called Moss Side in Manchester that apparently was the opposite of posh. Jack had been to Hampton Court before, but he had been about five and could not remember anything about it. Part of it was supposed to be haunted, but he could not remember by whose ghost. Probably there was more than one ghost, like at Hogwarts.
‘We’ll have a lovely time,’ his mum said brightly.
Jack looked from her to the fruit in the bowl, the substance of her earlier, playful threat. He saw that most of the pieces were bruising slightly, neglected without his dad here to help eat them.
‘What’s wrong with you?’
‘Nothing is wrong with me.’
They walked to the London Bridge underground entrance on Borough High Street and took a Jubilee Line train to Waterloo. They caught a fast train to Surbiton and walked along the Mall and Portsmouth Road to the top of Queen’s Promenade and their first view of the river, the ancient island of Raven’s Ait right in front of them and then to their left as they ambled along the sweep of the promenade to the Riverside Café. Parr’s boats ran to Hampton Court Bridge from a landing stage more or less outside the café. Lillian Greer ordered a cappuccino for herself and a Pepsi for Jack and they sat on brightly painted metal chairs at a round metal table in the sunshine next to the water.
There were geese and ducks and swans swimming on the placid river and the odd cruiser or narrow boat chugged picturesquely by. The narrow boats had lots of decorative paintwork and polished brass fittings that gleamed. Some had plants flowering in lines of pots along the tops of their cabins. One was black with coach paint and gold, scrolled embellishments.
‘Pimp my barge,’ Jack said.
‘Would you like something to eat? Maybe a tuna melt?’
‘I’m not hungry.’
It had been obvious to Jack from the moment they got off the train at Surbiton Station that this was all very familiar territory to his mum. It was all a part of her early life, the part she had lived before he was born, when she was a child and then a young girl before going to college in London and meeting his dad. It was a mystery to him, this part of her life. But that was okay. It was a mystery she was perfectly entitled to.
They were both silent for a while. The café proprietor bustled around, greeting regular customers and whistling. He was really good at whistling, the way window cleaners and greengrocers were in old films on the telly, Jack thought.
Eventually his mum said, ‘How much did you hear?’
‘All of it.’
‘I see.’
‘I don’t, Mum. I don’t see at all. I thought we were a family. I thought we were locked on.’ His eyes filled with tears and his voice was choked off by a rising sob. Locked on: it was one of his phrases. He knew what it meant. He knew that his mum did too.
‘If you listened to everything, you know that I have ended it.’
‘You should never have begun it.’
She did not reply to that immediately. She sipped coffee and then looked across the river to the far bank. There was a towpath there of orange clay, visible between still trees in full leaf. Even through the blur of tears, it was a very pretty view. His mum had a little moustache of milk foam on her top lip from sipping her coffee. It was completely unlike her to be careless of such things. She became aware of it and wiped it off quickly with the back of her hand. She said, ‘Nobody is perfect, Jack. Neither your father nor I would ever claim to be that. People make mistakes. Both your parents have made plenty of mistakes. It’s part of being human.’
‘I googled him when you were dropping Livs to school. He’s a complete twat.’
‘I have made a mistake. It was a bad mistake I regret very deeply. I wish I had not made it but I did. I would ask you to think very carefully about how you use the knowledge you have gained about the mistake I made. And I would prefer it if you did not use that sort of language.’
‘He is, though. He’s a total twat.’
‘Yes,’ his mum said, smiling a smile complicated because there was no pleasure at all in it. ‘I rather suspect he is. But that does not excuse the use of bad language from a thirteen-year-old for whom I am responsible.’
The house on Topper’s Reach was a short climb through the village from the Leeward Arms. Richard Penmarrick turned up just as he had said he would at eight o’clock and breakfasted at the pub with James. They ate smoked mackerel fillets served on freshly baked bread and washed down their food with Charlie Abraham’s excellent and invigorating coffee.
The previous evening had ended at about midnight, fairly soberly. He had not driven to the Penmarrick house for dinner and he had not driven back. He had actually thought about walking back through the summer darkness but his host had insisted that this was not a good idea. He had not been specific as to why. Instead, James had been diverted into a relaxed conversation about Lillian’s art by Elizabeth Penmarrick and then Charlie Abraham had arrived at the wheel of an old Land-Rover and ferried him back to the pub and his room.
On the stroll to the Reach, Richard asked James about his liking for folk music. He seemed genuinely interested that a man who designed computer software for a living could have fallen for a genre so rustic and arcane.
James had never really analysed the reason for his partiality to the music he liked. He pondered on it for a moment. Then he said, ‘When you listen to Kate Rusby sing ‘The Recruited Collier’, you are transported instantly to the distant, pastoral England of the war against Bonaparte. The same is true of listening to Sandy Denny singing ‘On the Banks of the Nile’. She takes you back and you feel the grief and loss and hear the clamour of battle. This music makes a visceral connection with me. I think it does so actually on a genetic level. It feels familiar and intimate and right. It stirs my emotions. If you are English, this is our soul music.’
Richard had stopped walking to hear this. He began again. He said, ‘What does Lillian think of it?’
‘She thinks I’m melancholy by nature. She thinks I listen to the music that enables me to wallow easiest in the sadness with which I’m most comfortable.’
Richard laughed. ‘I’m with her,’ he said. ‘I like soul music, James. But my idea of soul is Marvin Gaye and the Isley Brothers.’
‘You’ll get on all right with my wife, then. She likes Curtis Mayfield and Sly and the Family Stone.’
‘Elizabeth sings.’
‘Really?’
‘If you are lucky, you might hear her sing tonight at the Leeward. There’s a bit of a do on at the pub. My wife is shy by nature, timid concerning public performance but if s
he can be persuaded, you are in for a treat. She has a truly lovely voice. Either way, there will be acoustic music, a bit of dancing and an opportunity to see some of the more colourful local characters hereabouts.’
‘Morris men?’
‘Inevitably.’
‘You’re kidding me.’
‘Why would I kid you? You’re not in Bermondsey now, my friend. And we’re here.’
James looked up. He was obliged to. The house on Topper’s Reach was tall. It was also physically isolated, occupying a walled plot approached by a narrow lane that divided into two even narrower lanes that flanked either side of the property.
The house itself looked more Tuscan than indigenous. It was three storeys high, constructed from a reddish stone and roofed in yellow tiles. It looked a little austere in the shade of the sun above the hills ascending behind it. It faced west and in the afternoon, James realised, would be bathed in light. The windows wore closed wooden shutters. They were painted green and had weathered to a matt paleness in the sunshine and the salt air. The wall around the property was about six feet high and right before where they stood was a high ornamental metal gate secured by a padlocked chain. James thought it all very handsome.
‘It might be a bit grand for us,’ he said.
‘And it might not,’ Richard said. ‘It might actually be a steal. Obviously it’s beyond the means and probably, if we’re honest, also the needs of the average Brodmaw native. And Brodmaw is beyond the reach of affluent weekenders from London. In the language of property dealing, this house is a bit of a difficult sell. That said, if you commit to living here, it might be exactly what you require.’ He took a substantial key from his pocket. ‘Let’s go in.’
The house inside was large and airy and bright and very empty. The rooms were generously proportioned and the fittings and fixtures modern but tactfully chosen, not a vulgar contrast with the fabric or character of the building. The specification was discreet but high. Both of the bathrooms were tiled in a dark green marble and in the kitchen a newly fitted Aga gleamed. James ran a knuckle along one smooth wall and it came away white with plaster dust.