by Patrick Gale
Faber told her to eat her scrambled egg before it got cold and they ate on in silence.
Eight
Robin had told her he would come home soon but he doubted that she expected him back this quickly. When he finished talking to her on the Abbot’s ancient telephone, he had imagined he would need a few days to grow accustomed to the idea of leaving. Two or three.
It needn’t be for long, he told himself, I can come straight back if I’m not ready.
He told the Abbot, who went on to say the same things.
‘You needn’t feel you have to stay away,’ he said. ‘You have nothing to prove by suffering. If you don’t feel you can cope, if you’re not ready for it, come straight back. Never mind the christening. I’m sure your friends would understand.’
But then the Abbot went straight into organising a farewell supper for him, with a mead allowance and a honey-crusted ham and Robin saw that there was no need to hang around. He was ready. He would go tomorrow. He went back to the orchard to tell Luke and finish picking apples. After the first few questions, the news made Luke broody and they worked in silence. Robin knew he was there from sickness, not piety, but Luke’s reaction and then the slightly hectic jollity of the farewell supper made it seem as though he had failed somewhere and they were kindly covering his failure with a show of celebration. He hated their mead and as always it made him long for sleep but he forced himself to stay awake for compline.
He had never been in all those years. He used to lie awake and hear the singing from his room but no one had ever told him to come and he had never felt interested enough to suggest it. But the end-of-term spirit had taken him, so he went. They were pleased and handed him a book with words in it.
It was a short, lyrical service; a sort of late-night spiritual insurance, full of lines about protecting us from the devil who prowls like a lion, or something. When they had to sing,
‘Keep me as the apple of thine eye,’ Robin glanced over at Luke, who was watching him carefully as ever, and he smiled. This was mean, he knew.
He said his goodbyes all round before going to bed then got up early and unseen to hitch a lift ashore with a fisherman. There was a red flag the monks hoisted by the cottage on the beach if they wanted someone to take them across, not unlike those orange signs that light up and say TAXI at night outside old mansion blocks. As luck would have it, Robin caught the post boat after about four minutes’ wait. As it chugged him back to the mainland he leaned against some greasy fish crates and watched Whelm dwindle. The rule was that, before boarding a boat, one had to lower the red flag again and the fisherman had duly done this after dumping the post in the cottage for collection. As Robin watched, someone ran down to shore and hoisted it again.
‘Someone being sent out to drag you back, I reckon,’ his water-cabbie shouted from the wheelhouse. ‘You done something you shouldn’t? Eh?’
‘No,’ Robin told him.
‘Not said your prayers, maybe.’ He chuckled and crossed himself. It was hard to tell if he did this in mockery or superstition. ‘Don’t worry,’ he went on. ‘I’m not turning back this far out. He can just wait his turn.’
When he came to climb on the train to London, Robin scanned the thin crowd boarding with him but saw no familiar face.
He had almost no luggage – just the few things he had first brought with him and a beeswax candle made by the sisters of Corry which the Abbot asked him to pass on to his mother. He had also handed over the small brown envelope in which he had sealed Robin’s fistful of cash on his arrival. Eight years had dwindled its already paltry value, but Robin still had his cheque-book, his wallet and his fountain pen, all three unused since his arrival. His mother had posted him four new cheque-cards in the course of his stay, which the Abbot had kindly intercepted and kept safe. The ticket clerk eyed Robin suspiciously as he now produced all four, gleaming new and still unsigned. Robin’s signature had changed, with neglect, into a pale reflection of its former, italicised self but, with some effort, he managed to sign both card and cheque in roughly similar styles. He caught the clerk’s stare and laughed in explanation.
‘I’ve been away,’ he said. ‘Haven’t needed any of them.’ The sum demanded of him seemed vast but a tutting queue had formed and, in the wake of the display of cards, he thought it better not to query it. Parting with seemingly large sums for very little made him feel pleasantly like a tourist, giddy at the unreality of inflated foreign currency.
As he found a seat on the train he followed some long-hidden prompting and busied himself destroying the out-of-date cheque-cards. The difficulty of twisting the plastic to breaking point sent the recollection spilling into his mind of a bank account spectacularly overdrawn in student bravado. He realised that all this time his mother and father would have been fending off querulous demands from banks, bookshops, the college bursar and various ignorant acquaintance. They would have been cancelling subscriptions for him. They would have paid off his outstanding rent and had his things sent home (being, of course, too upset to drive over and pack them up for themselves, his absence being, as Luke put it, ‘a kind of death’). For eight years they would have been maintaining the reduced, temporarily redundant mechanism of his now not so young existence and the thought of this saddened him. Robin’s vacancy had been marked with a dry memorial; a mounting rustle of almost blank, unchanging bank statements, old boy magazines and invitations refused by proxy in his mother’s disarmingly rounded hand.
As the train slid with unsettling speed away from the sea that had been, if not a home, then a refuge, he did his best to keep thoughts of his destination tamped down. Clinging from old superstition to his little cash, he had bought no newspaper, so he had to make do with reading the Bible. He had been in no state, on his arrival at Whelm, to dip into even the most featherweight fiction, but Luke claimed that he had read aloud to still him in his wilder moments. Once Robin was well enough to read again for himself, Luke had made the rather charming gesture of giving him the Bible that had been his principal sedative. It was a plain, elegant edition (Robin has it somewhere, still) and Luke had pressed various Whelm flowers between its pages for use as bookmarks (a typically nelly gesture, Robin thought, but sensitive nonetheless). For all the iniquities it had excused, the Bible was a surprisingly good read, a better companion in prison than Das Kapital, say, or what indigestible little he had ever managed of Proust or Mein Kampf.
‘If only so much mystic crap had not accrued to it,’ he had once told Luke, ‘We might appreciate it for what it is; a cultural scrapbook, an anthology unsurpassed by anything the Greeks or Anglo-Saxons left us. Any novel maddens when picked up in the wrong mood, but there is something in the Bible for every shift of temper; history, ripping yarns, cool philosophising, sex in plenty, love poetry, war poetry, even drug-influenced well-nigh psychedelic poetry.’
‘And evidence of God’s love,’ Luke interrupted. He liked to chip in like that, Robin thought, spoiling things with his insidious sentiment.
This morning Robin read the Epistles. Most Bible-dabblers shied away from Saint Paul. They disliked his hectoring, housekeeperly tone and skipped on to the grander obscurities of Revelations. They missed a treat. Those endless strictures, homilies and transparent attempts at solicitude delivered by an insecure misogynist and bigot who believed himself to be part of God’s senior management, were instructive in a way the author never intended and profoundly amusing.
At least, Robin tried to read but he was distracted time and again by the insistent presence of his fellow travellers. He gathered from the conversations around him that several end-of-season sales were to begin that morning and that this was the chief reason for most of them rising so early. There was a disturbing formality about their appearance that could not be explained as a mere display of provincial insecurity or by the need for early morning imbecility to be buttoned and pressed into sleepy decorum. For all the curiously open gabble of money and shop geography, the sharply dressed women and their few male com
panions might have been weekday commuters. While the women were no more than aggressively smart, most of the men in sight and those who boarded at later stations seemed to be cultivating an appearance older than their faces. A case in point was Robin’s immediate neighbour who could not have left his twenties yet wore clothes and a manner more suited to a fifty-year-old. He had mimicked the old-young husbands of Fifties advertising with pompous shoes, sober tie, signet ring, brilliantine to make his short hair seem shorter and even a studiedly middle-aged frown which he wore to smack the crumples from his old man’s newspaper or stride to the corridor to light his pipe.
Perhaps Robin had examined them all too blatantly for he soon felt their eyes on him. He tried again to hide in the Epistles but found that even new, unscrutinised arrivals glanced his way. Then he followed their sharp, incredulous glances and saw that the clothes he had come to consider a second skin were suddenly out of date; the cut of his trousers, his shirt collar, doubtless the handkerchief around his throat, suddenly belonged to an era. He shifted in his seat and shut his Bible too loudly, sending a pressed violet to the floor, where he let it lie.
He had left in a time of New Romance and come back to one of hard lines, shoulder pads and grey discretion. He tried sitting with his face to the glass but already they had left real countryside behind. Graceful valleys were punctuated by supermarkets built to look like giant red barns. Plains bisected by motorways on which all the cars travelled in the same direction as the train, offered up Toytown housing developments, blank car parks and grey, reflective cubes. The train paused long enough at a platform for Robin to see a poster where a man in evening dress offered a half-naked blonde a solid gold apple. She was smiling at the camera, having a diamond-studded silver banana behind her back. Floating in the dark, doubtless expensively scented air above their heads, calm white lettering announced the arrival of a magazine called Capital.
Robin left his carriage, to the evident delight of the old-young pipe smoker, and passed the rest of the trip to Clapham Junction amid rolling beer cans and paper cups on the floor of the guard’s van. He had a caged peacock for company and a large crate marked ‘Hazardous Chemicals’. There was a trampled copy of yesterday’s Guardian in one corner. He clawed it out of the dust and read about his new world.
Clapham, at least, had barely changed. Lavender Hill was still bright and smelly with traffic going nowhere loudly. The same tired grocer’s and sticky-carpeted pubs remained. Now however there were wine bars and bistros every hundred yards. He counted twenty different estate agents between the junction and his home street. He stopped in a new boutique he judged to be suitably hard-faced, to write another outrageous cheque, this time for two bagfuls of black clothing. He changed inside a coin-operated public lavatory that filled its air with squirts of song and hostile perfume and promised to brush and flush its every surface on his departure, then gave his old things to a grey-skinned woman who appeared to live in a shopping trolley. She had the good grace to accept these colourful relics with an understanding smile. Robin smiled back, happy to find he was not the only one.
The Chase, scene of Robin’s childhood, had always considered itself an oasis, a cut above its neighbours. It was twice as wide as any street in the district and few of its large houses had been split into flats. Long-established trees kept the rest of Clapham out of sight and long gardens ensured that, with the exception of Guy Fawkes night, residents sniffed only their own cooking and heard no one else’s laughter. The common and the road to the Continent were within easy reach and a zealous residents’ association with contacts on the council, held all plans for new building or for the reopening of an old meat pie factory permanently in the pending tray. The Chase swept up from the shabby anonymity of Wandsworth Road towards the oldest part of Clapham and the common. House prices and social pretentions climbed as the road did. Robin’s family lived about three quarters of the way up.
At the last it was as if nothing had changed. There were the same battered estate cars, so practical for doing the school run, the same sleek cats, the same old roses, the same glimpses of overdecorated interiors; the same air of team effort. And the spare key to the back door was hidden behind the same loose brick in the garden wall.
Nine
Saturday being a holiday, Peter had been doing chores. He had been to ‘Paw Relations (Canine Health and Beauty)’ to pay the latest bill run up by Brevity, spent an hour trailing round a new jumbo supermarket tracking down the week’s supplies in a space like a bank holiday airport and he had queued at the library to pay the fines on two lost books that had resurfaced yesterday under a sofa. Andrea was still out visiting her black friend, Faber when Peter lurched in, laden, at the side door. She had taken Brevity with her – her chore for the day – but she had left a note.
‘Darling,’ it read, ‘have walked over to Faber’s for coff. Soup and bread and cheese for lunch, I thought, so no need to do anything. Sudden panic: there’s no bedside light in Robin’s room anymore because the one on your side of the bed bust the year before last when someone caught their ankle in the flex at our party, do you remember, and I replaced it with Robin’s. Could you be sweet and brave and have a look in the loft for me? I know there are several up there somewhere that probably just need new plugs. Back by one-ish. A. xxx.’
Curiously, in a woman who read novels whose covers alone left him unsettled, who sat through the grisliest horror films and documentaries with a surgeon’s composure, Andrea was afraid of the dark. By a quirk which they had never got around to altering, the roofspace had to be climbed into and half-crossed before one could switch on a light. Andrea had tried this a few times, when they had first moved in, but claimed that she became so disorientated in her fear, that there was a danger of her straying off the boarded area and tumbling through a ceiling. Ever an adept at conjuring up nightmare scenes, she would never argue a point of view when she could scare him into agreement. It was always he who ventured into the attic, to spare himself the image of her lying broken across a blood-spattered dressing-table in a cloud of plaster dust. She had controlled their son’s upbringing with similar subtlety, painting visions of Robin and his first two-wheeler tossed aside by a speeding lorry, of Robin wracked by dreams after watching television past eight o’clock, of Robin turned into a “gun-junkie” by a syllabus with compulsory military training, of Robin trapped at the bottom of a slowly closing ice fissure on a school mountaineering trip. It wasn’t that Peter had no imagination of his own, but it needed strong stimulation.
He stacked away the shopping and made his way upstairs. The other reason why Andrea preferred not to enter the loft was its lack of stairs. There was a hatch, its hinged lid darkly patterned with fingerprints, that could barely be reached from the top of a stepladder. There was a moment that Peter too found awful, as one hoisted oneself through the black hole above, when the ladder could easily be kicked aside leaving one stranded.
A hot noon sun had begun to heat the still, stale air up there. A pigeon was cooing on the other side of the tiles, dragging its wing feathers to attract attention and there was a splashing from the water tank. Keeping the hatch’s square of light behind him he felt his way across to the light-switch that dangled free on its wire. With visits to the place so infrequent, it was wonderfully tidy and he was able to find four bedside lights in no time. Two were gutted of wire and one was a first generation Anglepoise, crippled by inexplicable loss of springs. The fourth was a Chianti bottle he remembered proudly converting at some date too distant to bear precise calculation, when they still drove to Europe without making any reservations and when Andrea was wearing things called, if memory served him right, Bolero slacks. He had even gone to the great trouble of drilling a hole through the bottle’s bottom so as to give the flex a tidier exit. Peter blew some of the dust off the thing and went, sneezing, back to pull the lampshade off the least battered of the other lights.
Then he heard someone moving around downstairs. He glanced at his watch. It was too early
for Andrea to be home. Besides, her passages through the house were virtually soundless. He set down the bottle-lamp and walked softly back to the hatch to listen. Someone was walking up the stairs from the hall. Peter heard the floor creak where it always did, outside the bathroom. Whoever it was went into the bathroom. Peter heard the rubberised clunk of the lavatory seat and was about to call out a greeting to his wife when he heard the sound of someone peeing. Even in their first outbreak of love, Andrea had never presumed so far as to leave the door open and even had she done so she would, to the best of his knowledge, have been incapable of aiming so directly into the water. Peter dithered on the brink of the hatch, torn between charging downstairs in a challenging fashion or pulling the ladder into the loft and quietly shutting the flap. But then he heard the intruder shut the bathroom door and start up the attic staircase at a trot, so he pulled his legs back – there was no time for the ladder – closed the flap and scurried for the light switch. Even if they took away the ladder, even if they locked him in, he didn’t care.
He turned out the light and instinctively crouched. A dark, muffled voice said something. There was a pause then he heard footsteps on the ladder. The hatch-flap flew back with a bang, two hands grasped the rim and a strange bearded face came into view and said,
‘Dad?’
Peter stared hard then stood to turn the light back on.
‘Robin?’ he asked. Then they both laughed and Robin climbed on up.
‘Your’s hair gone white,’ Robin explained.
‘You’ve grown a beard,’ Peter told him. Robin came forward and they shook hands vigorously to hide their surprise. Peter held wide his arm to hug this son-turned-man but, more shy than moved, turned the gesture into a sweeping one to indicate the loft. ‘I was up here to find a light for your room. My one got broken at a party – that was a year ago now – and your mother moved your one into our room. She said I should dig one out for you but I suppose, by rights, you should have your old one back. Oh look. Ha ha! Here’s that terrible old one I made out of a Chianti bottle! I could use that one.’ Robin was not listening. Peter babbled on. ‘Actually, we weren’t expecting you back quite so soon. I’d have come to pick you up in the car if I’d known. Get out at the junction, did you?’