by Patrick Gale
‘Andrea! Hey!’ She looked round. Brevity was yapping recognition. There was no one in the playground but two little girls confiding at one end of the slide and an adult pair canoodling on the roundabout. ‘Over here!’ She turned and saw Faber racing towards her on his tandem and Brevity in hot pursuit. Andrea watched him swing a leg over, so that he slowed up standing on one pedal. She envied his grace. She smiled as he said, ‘Hi,’ and envied afresh his perfect dark brown skin. He made her feel pale and mottled.
‘Where’s Iras?’ she asked.
‘Home,’ he said, ‘Glued to that wretched computer. Mmm. Kiss you.’ He kissed her cheek, she, the air.
‘Is she still rewriting Genesis?’
‘Oh no.’ He laughed, wheeling his bike beside her as they walked. ‘Much worse. I took Dot Halliwell on one side when I picked Iras up from her classes the other afternoon and said that she had got it into her head to rewrite the first books of the Bible from a woman’s point of view and that I was concerned that this might be taking her away from her proper work.’
‘What did Dot say?’ Dot was Iras’s tutor at the school for special children.
‘Well she said that Iras was bang up to date with her maths exercises and so on – if anything, ahead of where she should be, as usual – but that she’d have a word with her about it.’
‘And?’
‘And the next thing I find is that Iras has been encouraged to “write something of her own”.’
‘Nothing wrong with that. Creative writing’s standard syllabus for any child.’
‘Honey, Iras Washington isn’t just any child. I mean, a sweet little story about a day at the zoo, or a poem or two, or My Worst Dream or something like that would be fine but my little girl’s almost finished her first novel.’
‘No! But that’s wonderful. Isn’t it?’
‘Well of course it’s wonderful. Iras W. is the wonder of Clapham Common South Side. But it’s not normal. She’s only twelve, for pity’s sake. She should be out playing and instead she’s shut away tapping at that machine hour upon hour. She’s working harder than I am. She skipped school today to write.’
‘They don’t play at twelve, they sit together in corners and giggle about boys.’
‘Well, even that would be fine, but she’s way past boys. You know I can’t work that computer much, and even if I could, you can bet she’d have put codes everywhere so that I couldn’t snoop, but yesterday I had a good read over her shoulder when I went in to make her come and eat some lunch.’ He stopped and turned to her. ‘Andrea, my little girl has progressed into alien sex.’
‘What?’ she laughed. ‘Little green men?’
‘Precisely. Little green men. Together. Well, to be honest, she did start to explain that her little green men are actually hermaphrodite. She’s got it all from some book on snails and earthworms so it’s all slime and interchangeable slithering parts.’
‘Sexy.’
‘Oh, shut your mouth and give me some bread.’
‘Here.’
They stood throwing bread pellets at the pondwater and were soon standing in a seething crowd of wing and darting beak. Andrea concentrated as usual on ignoring the queue-jumpers and throwing her bread to the less pushy birds, floating modestly in the background.
‘Well?’ Faber asked her.
‘Well what?’
‘When’s he coming home?’
‘Oh God. I’d forgotten. That’s why we’re meeting isn’t it? Well all he said was soon, so I expect he’ll turn up over the weekend.’
‘You must be overjoyed.’ He read her expression then added, ‘N’est-ce pas?’
‘I’m frightened, Faber. He hasn’t been home for eight years. People change in that amount of time. Last time he was here was his twenty-first. We offered to clear out of the house for the weekend to let him throw a party for all his friends but he insisted we stay and give a small dinner party, instead; just we three, my mother, Candida, of course, and Jake. It was all rather solemn and grown-up, with champagne, all the silver and I’d spent hours actually making puff pastry for a vast salmon en croûte. That was the May of their last summer term. Jake drove Candida and Robin back the next morning and four weeks later I had Candida in tears on the phone. But I’ve told you all this.’
‘Yes. Well, not really. Only bits. Come back for coffee.’
‘I mustn’t. You’re working.’
‘I’m not. I’m talking to you. Coffee?’
‘Yes, please.’ They set out over the grass towards Faber’s studio.
‘Were there any signs then? Of Candida’s interest in Jake?’
‘Oh yes. Robin didn’t see, of course, and neither did Peter. I did. I suppose I should have said something. Robin would only have been cross with me. He was always being cross with me; it’s one of the things I’ve missed.’
‘Did he love her very much?’
‘Oh, it wasn’t Candida he loved.’
‘No? But I thought she was his childhood friend and so on.’
‘She was. But it was Jake that he loved. Poor Robin.’ They were nearing the roadside. Andrea stooped to fasten Brevity back on her lead and felt tears well, stinging, in her eyes. Faber let his tandem drop on the turf and took her in his arms. She hugged him back, staring across his shoulder to incurious traffic churning by. ‘I’ve been so strong. I’ve tried so hard,’ she whimpered then realised the spectacle they were presenting. ‘Come on,’ she said, pushing him gently away. ‘They must take us for a middle-aged woman parting tearfully from her young black stud; hardly flattering for either of us.’ He laughed as she trumpeted into her handkerchief then stuffed it back up her sleeve. ‘If only I were Irish. They love it when their sons turn into monks.’
‘Only with them it’s usually less of a surprise.’
‘And as if Robin coming home in a habit and cowl weren’t enough, I think Peter may have found a girlfriend somewhere.’
‘What in God’s name gives you that idea?’
‘Well, I don’t really. But he’s become terribly vain – obsessed with his age, spending hours in the gym keeping fit, that sort of thing – and he’s suddenly trying awfully hard to make a show of interest in me by helping me buy new knickers and things, which my mother always said was deeply suspicious.’
‘We won’t talk about this until I get you home, Missy and give you a jug of coffee.’
‘Strong and black?’ She laughed, waiting for the familiar response.
‘Like yo’ man, honey chile, like yo’ sweet hunk of man.’
Seven
Faber slung Andrea’s mug into the dishwater and ate the one gingernut she had left in the packet. A slow thumping sound overhead reminded him of Iras’s presence and that it was time to make something for her lunch. When she was concentrating hard, or happy – the two being commonly simultaneous – she swung her feet hard against the sides of her desk. He walked out through the studio and up the stairs.
‘Iras?’
‘Yes?’
‘Can I come in?’
‘Yes.’
He pushed open the door to her room. It was only a baby’s room, really. He had often asked her if she would like them to move to somewhere larger, or at least if she would let him buy her a sofa for her friends to sit on. This would have made it a kind of sitting-room for her, but she had always declined. He asked once if the smallness of the room made her feel safe. She had rubbed her wrists and given him one of her equivocal ‘well’s which they both understood should be taken as yeses. He stood in the doorway and watched her tapping at her word processor keyboard. In the old days, before the advent of this domineering machine, she would always raise a hand in the air, her left hand, stopping whatever she was doing until he had taken it in his and kissed its sticky palm. Now that his entrances were all but ignored, he contented himself with the occasional obstinate kiss on the crown of her head, where the mouse hair swirled in a perfect whorl. He kissed her there now.
‘Has she gone?’ she asked.
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‘The child speaks! I was beginning to forget.’
‘Well?’
‘She’s gone. She sends her best wishes; she didn’t like to disturb the young authoress.’
‘She did well.’
‘How’s it coming?’
‘Mmh.’
‘Translation?’ he asked, rubbing her narrow shoulders with two fingers of each hand.
‘I mean just-so.’
‘You’re tense. Your shoulders feel like iron. Have you got a headache?’
‘No.’
She was lying.
‘Well, even if you haven’t, it’s time for a little parental control.’
‘Oh, Faber!’ she whined, ‘I’m working.’
‘You were working. Now it’s time for a little exercise.’
‘But …’
‘Exercise. On the bike. Now.’
‘Can’t I do it after lunch?’
‘Who said anything about lunch?’
‘Isn’t that why you came up?’
‘Well, as a matter of fact it was. How do scrambled eggs sound?’
‘They sound like what we had yesterday.’
‘But I cook them so well. Now, come on. You can ride for ten minutes while I make lunch and then you can go back to your work this afternoon.’
‘Oh, all right. But only if you put a record on for me. It makes it less boring.’ She followed him out onto the landing where the exercise cycle stood. ‘Put on that Nina record.’
‘My Baby Just Cares for Me?’
‘Yes but put on the album, not that short one.’
‘OK.’
She clambered astride the machine.
‘How far have I ridden this year?’ she asked.
‘Not far enough. We don’t want you getting pasty and fat.’
‘It wouldn’t matter,’ she claimed, starting slowly to pedal, ‘I wouldn’t have to see myself in the mirror.’
‘True, but you’d feel yourself wobbling when you sat down and getting all hot and sweaty as you squeezed into clothes that didn’t fit you anymore.’
‘Eeurgh!’
‘Quite. Now ride.’
‘Put the record on.’
‘Put the record on, please?’
‘Put the record on, please.’
The needle was almost as old as the record player and the record was dusty and scratched from over-use. Nina Simone had to sing through an electric haze and compete with the oily hiss of the cogs on the exercise bike and the clunk of its constantly shifting handlebars. As Faber walked back through the studio to the kitchen and began to slice bread and crack eggs, he heard her groaning, ‘My Baby Just Cares For Me’.
Iras’s room was the only unillustrated part of the building. She quite understandably had no time for pictures, but hung her walls with last year’s experiments in ‘braille painting’. She occasionally spent her pocket money in a florist’s on the Common. She chose on a basis of what smelled or merely felt good so would frequently return with an armful of plain foliage, ripped from someone’s shrubbery as often as honestly bought.
The studio walls were crowded with Faber’s huge, gaunt canvases; the unsold, piercing first drafts of portraits of generous friends, rich acquaintance, or interesting strangers. Most recently he had invited in a trio of female drunks. He had passed them every day for months where they sat by the Temperance drinking fountain, and without fail they hailed him,
‘Wotcha blacky!’
‘Is it true – you know – what they say about black guys’ winkles?’
‘Ere!’ Ain’tcha got lovely skin, then?’
‘Ooh! Can I touch too?’
He would smile widely and there usually followed a brief exchange about the weather, the litter in the park or the fact that the Temperance fountain had dried up. One morning a few weeks ago they had complained in unison about the unbearable heat and he had asked them if, in return for a cold beer, a fiver each and a few hours in a big cool room, they would let him immortalise them in paint. He had quite forgotten inviting Andrea for lunch, so she was astonished to arrive, flowers in hand, to find him sketching and photographing the garrulous, unwashed threesome who were arranged on the dining-table. Mercifully it was not to be a nude study, not wholly. The sketches and photographs were now pinned at random on a broad piece of pinboard in a corner. The first three paintings taken from them hung on ropes from the central beams. The fourth, had not progressed beyond the head and shoulders of the central figure; a lean, tallow-skinned woman called Winnie. She was throwing back her head to laugh, revealing her chicken neck and gold tooth.
The main wall, its base littered with a jumble of leaning canvases and empty frames, was ruled by Faber’s favourite work to date: a huge charcoal drawing he had made for a portrait of the breakfast broadcaster Candida Thackeray with her baby son. He had known her sister-in-law at art college and this generous commission had come a few months after Candida’s buying one of his sketches at the graduate show there. It was a marked contrast to her sharp, public image and caught a momentary expression almost of pain as she stared down at the baby in her grasp. Even had Andrea not told him first, he gathered from the newspapers that Ms Thackeray (alias Browne) had just been delivered of a bouncing baby girl. The hopes he entertained of a repeat commission were only faint; the Brownes were notoriously fashion-conscious and unlikely to repeat themselves.
Elsewhere there was not a vertical surface unillustrated. The walls of the kitchen cupboards, where some fathers might have stuck their daughter’s adventures in poster paint or potato printing, were papered with newspaper cuttings interspersed with carefully selected postcards of morning-after gratitude or kitsch ones of holiday smugness. The bathroom walls were hung with a variety of mirrors and among the often unframed landscapes and still lifes on the galleried landing were plaster casts of Iras’s left hand and left foot, made on her every birthday since her arrival and placed on a shelf within her grasp. Faber’s bedroom was devoted to sleep and death. Mainly sleep. There was a painting he had made of Iras asleep on the grass with a book and a cushion. He had a collection of prints and paintings of sleeping figures (and occasionally dead ones) hung there, and a skull on his bedside table which served as a bookend. The latter had come away from its skeletal body when Iras had been allowed one cherry brandy two many last Christmas and tried her hand at a danse macabre. The headless remainder was now elegantly draped in black watered silk and arranged in a broken corner of the studio.
Iras suffered all this visual prejudice in good part, regarding it as a weakness of Faber’s to be humoured and foreborne. Challenged, she made a brave show of being interested in the pictures for their smell (mirrors smelled different from windows, she said, and paintings from either), their feel, or the difference they made to each room’s accoustic, but he could tell that she was only being kind.
Nina Simone sang ‘Don’t Smoke in Bed’ and followed up with her peculiarly stately version of ‘He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands’. The scrambled eggs were ready too soon. Faber switched off the gas then buttered toast for Iras and spread margarine on Ryvita for himself.
‘Iras!’ he yelled at the ceiling. ‘Lunch!’ Then he reached for the telephone and dialled. ‘Yes,’ he said, when someone answered, ‘I’d like Briar Ward please.’
‘Putting you through,’ said the receptionist.
‘Hello, Briar Ward,’ said a nurse.
‘Hello. I’m ringing to ask after a friend there. Marcus Carling.’
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘It’s you.’
‘Yes.’
‘You really ought to come in, you know, if you’re a friend of his.’
‘How is he?’
‘Worse. Much worse. Visiting hours are nine to twelve-thirty then two-thirty until eight. Who shall I say called?’
Iras was coming downstairs, singing. Faber hung up and busied himself spooning the now rather flaky scrambled eggs onto two plates.
‘Ride far?’ he asked, setting the plate before her.
‘Itsy-bitsy.’
‘What?’
‘It’s “itsy-bitsy baby,”’ he pointed out, sitting beside her and breaking his Ryvita. ‘Not little bits of baby.’
‘You’re wrong,’ she said, shaking her head and reaching for where the salt always was. ‘Maybe in your version it’s itsy-bitsy but the way Nina sings it, it comes out as “little bits”. I prefer it that way anyway.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘Well,’ she set down her knife and fork and put her head on one side the way she always did when she explained a rudimentary truth to an idiotic world. ‘If you listen carefully instead of singing along, you’ll hear that she never says who “he” is.’
‘Well, everyone knows it’s about God.’
‘I don’t,’ she said. ‘I think it’s about Death. It makes much more sense that way. Serene but menacing. And “little bits of baby” sounds harder and more frail. Itsy-bitsy’s too cute.’