by Patrick Gale
She had moved back home to Mum and Dad’s place in Tower Hamlets until she’d earned enough for a mortgage on a house. Material possessions had figured pretty small with her and Mag – nothing much to show for three years’ marital bliss. Mo’d been glad of this as it helped her make a clean start. All she had (the flat had been furnished) was the book, and the photo that stood at her bedside – Maggie on Brighton beach, sunburnt, and smiling with a slight wince because the sun was in her eyes. There had been a lot of clothes that she’d had to sell to pay for Mag’s backpayments on the rent.
She had to identify the body as the police couldn’t find any next of kin immediately. The shock of seeing her laid out in the hospital chapel had been intense, but oddly soothing. Accidental death was so unreasonable that her brain demanded solid evidence that her lover was not going to appear again the next night with a slight bruise on her temple and a wicked story about the nurses on casualty duty.
The secrecy had been the worst part. No other women friends. They’d lived on their own little island of joy. None of Maggie’s family had suspected that they were anything other than best mates. The funeral had been torture because she’d had to sit back and let the family – who’d taken no interest in the girl for three years – monopolize her.
Since Mag there’d been no-one. Mo had joined the Force, worked hard and played little. She’d lusted, but lust was just lust – an indulgence, like the occasional ciggie or a glass of port. Maggie had loved her and that was enough. When she was blue there was always Andy to hug – he was a big cat and could take a good deal of squeezing before he complained. She was lucky to have had love at all. From what she could gather from the women at work and their tales of woe, she had tasted an uncommon passion.
‘Hello, you filthy animal. Come here!’ Mo slung the unprotesting Andy on to her shoulder and unlocked the front door. He rubbed her neck with his head and purred in her ear, making no attempt to jump down when they were inside. Mo talked to him as she hung up her helmet, kicked off her boots, and walked into the kitchen to make them some tea.
‘What’ve you been up to today, then, And? Out with the girls, eh? Off with those girls? You filthy bastard! Look what you’re getting for dinner then.’ She scraped the contents of a small plastic pot into his bowl. ‘Sausages, beans and a nice bit of kipper. Cor!’
Stirred at last, Andy landed heavily on the lino and set on his food, his tail sinking slowly – a happiness meter. Mo filled the kettle, slung a couple of bags in the pot, and laid out some kippers under the grill. She sat with a yawn on a chair, scratching her scalp that itched from the heat, and flicked on the radio. A cheery London station with lots of adverts and equally inane jingles.
‘And we finish our six o’clock reports with the story of a man who has written a novel more disposable than most. Damien Bell has just published a book where each chapter has an alternative after it. You can read the happy version on pink paper or the sad one on blue. Mr Bell’s publishers say that he had asked them to print the whole thing on perforated paper so that the unwanted chapters could be torn out where required
‘Bloody stupid,’ muttered Mo as she turned the kippers.
The telephone rang. She swore and switched off the grill. The kettle had come to the boil so she filled the pot before walking out to the hall.
‘Hello …? Oh, hello, er, sorry, I’m not that good at … oh, May. Hi, May. How are you? … Good … Tonight? Well … OK. What sort of time? … Right. And you’ll drop in here on your way, will you? … Can you remember the address? … Right, May. See you in about an hour. Thanks for ringing. See you.’
Mo walked back to the kitchen and re-lit the grill. She poured herself a cup of strong, black tea and squirted some pre-packaged lemon juice into the mug. Andy had finished his tea and rubbed himself against her ankles as she sat down once more. She thought of the phone call.
‘Ruddy Nora!’
FRIDAY five
On the way, Evelyn stopped at the petrol station to fill the tank for the next day’s journey and found that wallet, cheque book and some scent had vanished. Familiar with the Peakes and their crises, the little man said they could pay another day. She checked back at Moshinski’s but the waitress only stared at Seth again and said no she hadn’t seen them, Madam. They drove home.
‘Thank God the cheque card was old and the book almost empty. I’ve got a new card and there’s a new book in an envelope on the hall table. I’ll cancel the credit cards by phone. The scent was my best. I suppose I have to make a statement. Oh, blast and damn! I’ll drop you off to do your packing.’
The fridge had not yet been cleared. The contents would be eaten for supper. Seth stole a pork pie and felt at once the satisfaction of a thorough homecoming. Then, cat at his heels, he ran upstairs ripping off his tie and unbuttoning his shirt as he went. The hateful uniform was hurled into a corner of his unnaturally tidy room and some faded jeans and a shapeless cotton jersey were donned in its place. Then, luxuriating in the sensation of walking on a carpet, and without stout, black shoes, he toured the house.
He and Venetia had been allowed to redecorate their own rooms recently, with a certain amount of supervision. Evelyn was a great believer in self-expression. Elsewhere she had expressed herself at length. There were paintings and drawings everywhere, bu she had an italianate distaste for clutter that was at odds with the irrepressible late Victorian spirit of the place. The modern classicism of her colours and furnishings was here gently subverted by a chaplet of plaster marijuana leaves, and there by a piece of florid stained glass. Seth left Father’s study until last. Half-mocking, half with serious intent, Huw Peake had said that he thought it unfair that he should be denied self-expression simply because he was held to be colour-blind. Half-laughing, half-piqued, Evelyn had granted his boon, although she was meeting the decoration bill.
The walls were white, the windows hung with Venetian blinds. There was a desk with a telephone, lamp and typewriter, regimented bookcases, a waste-paper basket and two hard-backed chairs. There were no pictures and no carpet save a small rug under the desk. The only quirky touch in the spartan ensemble was a hamster cage gathering dust on the highest shelf. Placed there originally when the beast died seven or eight years ago and the children were still in shock, and left there for want of a suitably rational explanation to Doctor Peake as to why one was bothering to move it.
Seth remembered the death of Fifi (christened Fiordiligi) all too well. An aggressive hamster at the best of times, who delighted in hanging by her teeth from the youthful hand that dared to feed her, she had developed a tumour of the brain.
He slid the case on to the typewriter and heaved the whole to the floor. Then he opened the top drawer of the desk. The photographs. He set them out. Mother on one side, Father on the other and he and Netia in the middle: the nuclear family. He picked up his picture and his father’s again and sought similarities. Father was good-looking in a wasted sort of way. He had the devastated glamour of the occasional tramp. At about thirteen years, Seth had resented the man intensely, but only insofar as he felt that this was expected behaviour. They had never quarrelled. Now he would just have him dead. Always so cold, so unremittingly rational, never treating children as children. He laughed at, not with. There was something immasculine about him. He had a ‘masculine’ intellect, to be sure, but there was a timidity, too, that shocked his son.
Recently they had been visiting some friends in Fulham and were driving home when they found themselves in a traffic jam, caused by the crowds leaving a football match. In the distance they could make out a sea of blue and white surging out of the gates and surrounding the cars up ahead. Then, as they drew nearer, breaking glass could be heard above the shouting. It transpired later that a match had been lost by the home team. Mother, sitting in the front passenger seat had turned to Father, crying, ‘For God’s sake, Huw! Don’t just watch them – turn round!’ But for a moment he had remained frozen at the wheel. Seth had stared at the beads of sweat ri
sing and trickling down his temples. Then Netia had lost her nerve and screamed, jolting the man into action. On the way home, no-one had mentioned his behaviour. Conversation had kept to the horror of the mob, the lack of policing and so forth, but later that evening, Seth had commented on it to his mother. She had become suddenly grave.
‘Sometimes, darling, your father suffers from agoraphobia. You know what that is? It’s because of the war, you see. He had some terrible experiences.’
Whenever this tender tone came into her voice when she spoke of Father, it puzzled him. He had sought to understand their relationship, but could form only a piecemeal, over-deductive analysis. She had felt guilty for wanting to leave Grandpa and Granny to pursue the interests of a career, and felt that forming a family of her own would do something to redeem herself in the accusing eye of her God. Marriage being a sacrament. Father got on with his theological history, she with her teaching and goodness; a horrible coupling beneath the civilized restraint of its dress. Taking for granted that she loved him because she was his wife, he showed no affection, only an acceptance of custom. His philosophy denied her religion, his misanthropy mocked her public spirit. She was too grateful to him for having been in the right place at the right time ever to admit to herself that she did not love him. She respected his work and she could quite understand their ideological differences.
‘No-one,’ she would say, ‘could have encountered the Nazis and not been scarred to their very soul.’ She liked to suggest that he had suffered an appalling experience in some infernal theatre of war and been left with an unshakeable misanthropy, but Seth recognized this as the glamorizing of a shocked imagination.
Huw Peake’s interest in theology was a wholly destructive one, concerned less with the exploration of belief than with the puncturing of the bubble mystery. He had none of Mother’s rapture. With neither love nor worship, he had only scorn and terror. A man with no faith in his neighbour’s innate goodness needs must suspect the stability of the public. A man whose life is dedicated to the establishment of hard realities needs must quail at the prospect of their destruction.
Seth, confirmed a year ago today, opened the drawer and returned the photograph of his father together with those of mother and son. Then his eye caught Venetia’s and slid from it to Mrs Peake’s, now uplifted in the dimness of the desk. He smiled at the tricks they had played on themselves. Venetia, Mother and Granny were strikingly alike, and yet Mother had grown up plain by being forever told how pretty her mother was, and had reversed the process on Netia by drumming it into her identical head that she took after Granny, who was once so lovely. None of the three was especially beautiful, but the fluctuation of self-esteem over the last two generations had wrought a startling effect. Mother stared at the top of the picture frame, fine but distant, as if to say, ‘So? I’m not Vivien Leigh, but just feel the strength of character!’ By contrast, Venetia had been taught to use her face to win. Though merely a younger version of her mother’s, its eyes sparkled, its lips pouted slightly. He had once watched her sitting in a corner with a mirror, learning how to flare her nostrils. They were confidently flared in the photograph.
Venetia would be home soon. She had not missed Trenellion once since their childhood, had even been driven there peppered with the remains of a severe bout of chicken pox. Though she knew she would argue with Mother on the way, and often be beside herself with boredom, she had twice turned down offers of glamorous trips abroad just to sit in a Volvo and be driven for hours to a place she always swore she was seeing for the last time.
Delighted at the arrival of a live dolly in the household, nearly sixteen years ago, she had adopted Seth at once. Surrounded by the chattels of her miniature domesticity, she would chide him for failing to understand the invisible tea she fed him, and then press him to her hard little chest to quiet his bewildered tears. As she had grown older and found silence, he too had learnt the arts of peace and would sit quietly while she pored over a school book, drawing a picture or reading, in mime at least, a book of his own. His time was shared almost exactly between mother and sister and he never sensed any jealousy in the air until, around his seventh birthday, Netia suddenly regressed from her calm affection to infantile hugging and cooing. He was frightened by the violence of this new display, then disgusted when he saw that it only occurred when Mother was present. He sensed the aggression involved and recoiled from it, spending more and more time at his solitary music-making.
Seth placed his sister on top of his mother. From the drawer her smile was almost saucy. He was jealous to a degree of her poise. She never blushed, never sweated, never dropped anything and, if she had, one could be sure that it wouldn’t break. Venetia had no accidents. Her life contained no spots or fillings, no crumples or rips. Since nothing ever seemed to go wrong, he often wondered whether she had enough experience to appreciate the extent of her good fortune. But how long did luck last? Her horoscope sign was Virgo; dreadful in old age, that at least was some consolation, but he wished that something could go wrong now. He wished with all his heart. Just a little something – a token gesture to curb her hubris for her own sweet sake.
He heard tyres and slammed the drawer shut. There was a strangled scream from a claxon. He pulled on the shoes he had brought down with him, ran across the hall and opened the front door. Netia with the friend from Cambridge.
‘Seth darling!’ She laughed. ‘What have they done to my poor baby’s hair?’
Venetia acted a lot. She was rather good. Seth remembered her companion of the moment as her most recent co-star. A well-dressed snake. Netia leapt out over a door of his vintage car and ran to hug her brother. Her chest was not much softer than it had ever been. Then she laughed some more and kissed him on both cheeks so that she left lipstick marks. She smelt divine. Stepping back she looked him up and down appreciatively.
‘Yes. He’s grown some more.’ She rubbed a hand on the shaved back of his head. ‘Ooh, it feels so sexy!’ she growled.
The companion of the moment stepped up behind her with her suitcases, the leather of his soles ground, satisfied, on the gravel. She spun round and laughed again. Venetia laughed a lot when she hadn’t seen one for a few months.
‘Benji, may I present Seth Peake, heir to the family name, protector of its honour and the only bro they’ve ever let me have? Seth, this is Benji Buckhurst.’ She put on a childish lisp. ‘My bethtetht fwend.’
Blushing like a shaved mule, Seth held out his hand which Benji’s cool white one grasped and wrung. Netia sprang up the stairs with a cry and a mew to pounce on a cat who was wreathing a welcome in the porch.
‘Delighted to meet you at last, Seth,’ said Benjamin. His eyes opened very wide on the ‘delighted’ and he squeezed Seth’s hand a little too long. Feeling another, deeper, blush coming on, Seth turned to walk up the steps, tripped and just caught his balance on the railings. Netia hooted.
‘Legs too big for you now, are they? What size are your feet?’
Seth reached her side.
‘Nine,’ he lied.
‘Oh poor thing! Benji’s are only eights.’ Hating Benji, Seth walked past her towards the kitchen. At times like this one had to hide as much of one’s lower body as possible under a large pine table.
‘Where’s Mummy?’ Netia asked as they sat down. Benji remained standing to scrutinize the spines of the cookery books.
‘Oh. She’s at the police station. Someone nicked her purse, her cheque book and a bottle of scent when she was out this afternoon.’
Netia’s almond eyes rolled inexpressively.
‘No!’ she laughed. ‘How awful! Did she lose very much?’
‘Thank God, no. And the card was old and the cheque book nearly finished. She should be back any minute. She’s been making her statement for hours. God knows why, because she can’t have much of a statement to make. I’m meant to be doing my packing.’
‘Oh rubbish. You’ve got to talk to us. So all she knows is that they’ve gone?’
‘Gawn but not forgotten,’ Benji intoned in a lugubrious voice. He and Netia collapsed in fits of laughter. Seth got up and made for the boiling kettle. As its whistle subsided, he heard that they still hadn’t quite recovered. He turned and managed a half-smile as he asked, ‘What …?’
Netia pulled her face together.
‘Oh. It’s a line from this term’s revue, Sizewell Revisited. It was terribly funny. You know Bella? Oh you know. Bella Macpherson. She did this brilliant bit about Brideshead meets the Nuclear Holocaust dressed as Charles Ryder in drag, and it ended with her saying, “Gawn but not forgotten”.’ She laughed again but soon gave up. ‘It’s months since I’ve seen you, darling,’ she said, as Seth put the teapot on the table. He opened the fridge and took out a milk bottle.
‘Jug,’ she said flatly. He poured out a jugful and replaced the bottle.
‘We were burgled only two weeks ago,’ offered Benji.
‘Oh dear,’ said Seth, ‘was an awful lot taken?’
‘Yes. I should say. But Perkins caught them.’
‘Is Perkins a detective?’
‘No, the gamekeeper, actually.’
They watched as Venetia, faultlessly, poured the tea.
‘Benji lives in a real live castle, darling.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes,’ Benji affirmed.
‘Whereabouts?’
‘Near Buckhurst.’
‘Does it have a haunting and glamorous name?’
‘Just Castle Buckhurst,’ said the heir.
‘Oh, of course. Silly me.’ Seth blushed so his sister made it worse for him.