And then there was the rose bush. How could she have believed there was anything intrinsically harmful about this trespasser after the rose bush? Two days after an earlier summer storm, when the largest bush, almost a tree of brambly roses, shaggy from too little pruning, certainly none by the present owner, suffered from having its overlong branches all splayed, some broken by the force of wind and driving rain, the roses themselves blown into a heap of pock-marked petals in a sad trailing petticoat around the roots and across the grass. On inspection of the damage three days after, Helen had found the petals in heaps, tidily gathered as if to preserve them, and three of the broken branches bound at the fractured point with Elasto-plast. The hardy bush had reflourished the way things did in this garden, and she had hoped he had noticed its reponse to his futile but loving care. Since then, she had never minded his intrusion. He who would give first aid to a rose bush would not wound its owner.
Although she was well aware that of all eccentric introductions to the many facets of her life, Bailey accompanying her to the wedding of a former husband was odder and more personal than most, a gesture of peculiar trust and confidence on both parts which had been amply justified, she was not prepared to explain to him either the history of her intruder, or her reaction to it, suspecting he would prefer the explanations and precautions of a policeman, rose-surgery regardless. At the end of a long and successful day, there were other and safer topics. In the moment when the football boots caught her eye, Geoffrey and she were midway through post-mortems of wedding and Antique Fair, with the spoils of the last at their feet – one clock, not working, Helen’s purchase, to be his repair, both shaded from the last of a sticky, hot sun, both decently half-way out of all the impediments of formal clothes. He was reduced to open-necked shirt, trousers, no shoes, she to the rolled sleeves and crumpled skirt of the suit which had been the wrong choice after all. The wine was not cool enough; there was nothing cooler, and it did not matter. Nothing mattered. Helen felt she looked a mess, had laughed too much to care. He thought she had never looked prettier, had surmised the husband was no great loss, even accepting that he was in no position to judge, nor wished to do so. He wished he had cauterised his own past far sooner, and reviewed it all in a garden like this.
‘You were right about the mother-in-law.’
‘But I didn’t tell you anything about her. Gave you licence to behave as badly as you liked, told you she had eyes like lasers, the biggest snob unhung. What did she say? She cornered you for all of ten minutes.’
‘I enjoyed the ten minutes.’
‘You what? How could you?’
‘After I’d told her I ran guns for a living …’
‘Geoffrey! You didn’t!’
‘… and told her, no, we didn’t have any plans to get married; you didn’t believe in any of that any more, but we might reconsider after the baby.’
‘You told her that?’
‘Why not? She deserved it.’
‘Couldn’t have done better if I’d turned up naked. You’re the best alibi I could have had: my name’ll be mud. What more could I want?’
He had been pleased with his own invention, relieved by the fluency, pleased to make her laugh. A relaxed silence, sip of warm wine, a celebration of not being an in-law, or the victim of one.
‘I wonder what a gunrunner does?’ was Helen’s only lazy enquiry, her eyes caught again by the boots on the bush, wondering why they were the only thing after this day which she would hesitate to explain to this man.
‘Why are there football boots in that bush?’ was his only hand-pointing question, a mind-reading exercise in the same silence.
‘Oh, next-door’s boy … he comes in sometimes.’
It might have been true if she had known of the existence of any next-door boy: Helen and Peter shared the same embarrassment with lies and Geoffrey was better able than Edward to detect them. And to know, at this particular moment, when to let them go.
‘Food?’
‘There’s an idea: long time since canapés.’
Bright things on toast, glazed to an unappetising sheen like half the guests, he had thought, and she had laughingly agreed. The sandwich later had been preferable however curled, and even that had passed beyond memory as dusk began to fall. Lazy debate on food, culminating in the indecision of salad things, a kind of picnic, eaten in the still warm out of doors, colder wine, talking with the softness dictated by light on summer darkness. Talking of the cameos of the Auction Fair, the ferret-like dealers with all their subdued rivalries, beautiful, wonderful, enviable, ugly things for sale, the way liking for one of them prevailed over all caution, and how it was that an old prize, paid for in the same money as the dull necessities felt more like a gift snatched from fate. Late talk, better, slower, until ending became inevitable, sultry warmth gave way to less continental chill: they shivered, lingered to talk of summer places, moved indoors with plates and dishes, he in search of jacket and the duty of parting. Again. Friend and friend first, still lawyer and policeman in that other life, dictating a whole plethora of inhibitions, buried deeper than bones, accepted for more years than the weeks of their acquaintance.
But he kissed her. He altered it all; he could not help it, no more could she, nor the manner of it, out of doors again, by his car, somehow safer, and just before it was too late to kiss at all, unbearable to leave without some signal of mutual trust, or fail to place some floating mark on the undercurrent. Her fault; it was she who had touched his shoulder, brushed his cheek with her own, saying thank you without moving away, so that she was still close enough for him to pull her closer, hold her face in both his hands and kiss her longer, not on the cheek, but on the soft and willing mouth, feeling her arms circling his neck, slightly uncertain, not much, with her tasting of coffee and wine and everything he could ever remember wanting, a lengthy kiss, like a slow electric shock.
Driving home like a boy racer, forty-six-year-old child, nothing new under the moon, happy as Larry, knowing none of this would be pursued. She would retreat, and so would he, for now; all wrong, and all so right, whilst she was indoors furiously happy and embarrassed, wondering if the blush was permanent, and how she would never let this happen again even while her face was blazing young in the usually cruel bathroom light.
Only in the morning was she relieved that no one, in Geoffrey’s presence, had arrived to collect his boots. And with all the mutual liking, knew she was right; he would not have accepted with her equanimity the visitor to her garden.
If little Peter was hurt beyond redemption, frightened by now into almost total silence by Ed’s defection to the ranks of traitors, then so was Edward worried by what he had done, defensively concerned by the completeness of his brother’s new reserve, a refinement of the old to the extent that they did not have their impatient exchanges in the middle of the night, nor any of the normal few words in the morning. He missed it. For days afterwards, there was suddenly no pleading from Peter, no ‘When shall I see you … can I come and find you after school? Please, Ed, let me …,’ pleading which Ed regarded as whining, but led in the event of a Yes, to occasions which Ed suddenly realised he actually enjoyed. Perhaps once a week Peter would be allowed to meet with his hero brother in a café: they would mooch around shops, nose to windows in Holloway Road or Chapel Market, Ed conducting a slow monologue, making Peter listen to music in HMV or comment on whatever Ed wanted to buy. Uninterested in either music or clothes, Pete tried anything for the sake of the company, hearing new tapes with every sign of pleasure, shaking his head as Ed appeared from a changing-room in too tight trousers which he knew Ed would not buy. Edward liked expensive gear: but it would be a giveaway. The pretend evening job might have provided some excuse, but even with that he could not wear suits worth a hundred pounds without a more legitimate source of funds although he looked at them all the time. Peter glanced sideways round the shops, trying to avoid eyes, grinning foolishly, not quite pretending he was alone, but almost; still proud of Ed and
wanting to be there rather than elsewhere, wishing the pleasure was less pain as Ed proved too big for slender modern clothes, his father’s son in that respect, solid-thighed, broad-shouldered and chested, a challenge to the fitted shirt, a joke in a double-breasted jacket. In the end he concentrated on the purchase of things which did not reveal their own value, good shoes, belts for his wide waist, jeans which actually fitted.
‘What do you reckon, Pete?’ turning in front of a mirror, while Peter, relieved at the imminence of a real purchase, always agreed, delighting in Ed’s more carefully controlled pleasure, nodding vigorously.
Buying was invariably followed by treats, usually food, with Peter relieved to break the monotony of Aunt Mary’s provisions, and able to eat everything on offer in whatever enormous quantity provided.
‘You’ve got a worm, Pete, you really have,’ Ed would say, watching the slender wrists at work transferring egg and chips, ice-cream, buns, toast, sweets, into the gaunt little face, and this was as far as he would ever get in words of admiration for the boy. No one would have diagnosed their brotherhood on first sight; Peter so small and tinny ribbed with legs like sticks, sharp shoulder blades, wispy hair, wide, permanently creased forehead and huge-eyed gaze, next to stocky Ed, low-browed, thick thatch, small, puffy eyes. But in overhearing the sparse conversation, you would have known they were brothers. Mere friends could not have tolerated all those silences.
Now there was nothing, not even the familiar, taciturn ease, and it was Ed who missed it most. Through all his cool plotting, exerting authority over gangs challenging his one-man band, with all the envy and hatred he excited, Ed was by force of circumstances completely alone apart from Peter, and, like Peter, immune from every human contact. The fact that he had chosen it, with the isolation descending on him bit by bit, month by month, did not make it any the more palatable, since even Edward needed some voice to blend with his own, some corner where he could touch shoulders without threat in the intimacy. The room which Ed could have left so easily had been kept for the unconscious purpose of listening to another’s breathing, and even though he regarded Peter’s adoration as a chore and his company deficient, he had not known, still did not know, how important it had been.
The state of frustration remained unanalysed.
‘Look, I’m sorry,’ Ed had shouted on the second day of silence, ‘You should have said where you’d been …’
It was a churlish apology which rebounded on itself. Peter’s silence, even his nervous half smile and his it-doesn’t-matter-forget-it gesture, so infuriated Ed he almost hit him again, and both of them had recognised that violent temptation hanging in the air like a nuclear cloud. However much Peter struggled and mumbled, ‘S’all right’, managing it once or twice, it was the most he could do before speechlessness descended again, and Ed’s rage dragged him out of the room or numbed him into sleep. Perversely, he came home more often, drawn by the nameless need, both of them turning in their own grooves with the air electric around them. The only thing which Ed understood absolutely was that Peter would need from him something far more precious than gestures or gifts before he would ever again nag for company, trust him, plead for his time, instead of bolting away like a rabbit from a fox. Ed had nothing of the kind to give, nothing sufficiently precious except his own secrets, and finally, after two weeks of screaming frustration, surrendered these, crashing through every rule in his own book in sheer desperation. If Peter’s intention had been to practise blackmail through silence, he could not have been more effective, although nothing had been further from his injured mind than the baring of Ed’s soul. Peter’s wishes were never fulfilled. He always got the opposite. This time it was alien, self-indulgent words, designed to restore comfort, but destined to terrify.
Late at night in the dark room, Pete’s silence pushed Ed to an orgy of words.
‘I’ll be able to look after you one day, Pete, I really will …’ In the telling which followed, Ed could not resist the boasting. ‘One day, I’ll be rich, Pete. You know how Dad came to get into prison, Pete? Well I do. He got frightened, and he got caught; he didn’t have the bottle, couldn’t have learned, he weren’t clever, not like me. You know that Mrs Cartwright, the one who got him to do in that stupid woman for her?’
Peter did, but scarcely. The details of his father’s disgrace were hazy since no one had ever explained it all; everything he knew was eavesdroppings.
‘Dad thought she got his name from the book, but she didn’t. No one knows, but I knew her first, see? I got in her house, two years ago, and she caught me, see? Didn’t call the police, nothing like that, just sat down, talked to me, told me I’d got no choice but talking back. I thought she was mad, but she isn’t, she’s clever. She let me go, but she made me turn out my pockets, tell her where I lived. I can’t tell you what she’s like, but she got me so frightened. I hated her at first, but then I didn’t, I got to like her, and after the first time she made me go back, I didn’t mind going. She got me to say what I did, all the thieving I done, and she clucked her tongue, I thought she’d say she’d shop me, but she didn’t do that. She just said, “Well, boy, it’s as good a career as any, no one owes anyone anything these days, but you’re wasting your time. What are you, fifteen? And you haven’t even started learning anything yet. If you’re going to be a criminal, be a good one, and learn to do it proper.” She said she wished she’d done that, instead of spending her life trying to be good. She said, “Let’s talk about this.” I said, “What?” and she said, “About being a proper crook, that’s what, and not being afraid of anything, being ready to do anything. You can’t be a successful villain if you’ve any respect for the rules, you could have a team in the end to do it for you, but you must have done it all yourself first.” Then I pinched some stuff for her, good stuff; she flogged it and paid me fair. “This is the kind of stuff you need,” she said, “not all that old rubbish, tellies and all that stuff,” and she told me where else to go with it, names, people who had it in their houses, stupid rich gits, we used to laugh about them, we really did.’
Ed was enjoying himself. He was not deterred by Peter’s silence, knew he had his attention.
‘About every fortnight I’d go there. Make yourself at home, Edward, she’d say; always Edward, formal, but I didn’t mind that. She was the only one who listened to anything I said, she made everyone else look like idiots. Sit down, she’d say, and tell me what you’ve done. Everything. What’s the point going to school, she’d say. Look at me, it got me nowhere. You can always come here, or to the shop if you want to learn something, get to know a good thing from a bad thing. Only deal in quality, nothing else is worth the risk, she told me. She’s right, you know; she’s always right.
‘But she wasn’t so clever about Dad, was she? “Now,” she said to me one day, “now for something entirely different. You know how I told you you had to learn to do everything, not stop at anything? Well, I’m wanting to practise what I preach. I want somebody knocked off, not by you, don’t worry.” She must have seen my face …, “but what about your dad? He’s a private detective; don’t private detectives do that sort of stuff sometimes, or know who does it?” I’d told her about Dad, all about him, how he wasn’t really good at anything, what he tried to do, about me going with him sometimes, watching people. She’d said, there was no money in that: I told you she was always right. You want to be a detective, she’d said, only to find who needs robbing, that’s all. Anyway, about Dad, she said to me, would he do it? I couldn’t let her know how I thought about it, shit scared I was, and I said no, straight off, no. But there he was, bellyaching on about being so big, and all the time being so poor, and I thought again, and then I told her, he might, he just might, you never know. “So,” she said, “I think he might if you push him a bit; I’ll ask him, but not yet. He can do some work for me first. She didn’t need to tell me not to tell him I knew her, and she didn’t say anything more about it for a bit, and I didn’t ask, but I knew she’d got him when he st
arted going round all worried and mysterious. Then the gormless idiot took me with him to see her. I just sat there, kept quiet as if I didn’t know; then I had to listen to him all the way home, and every night afterwards and I thought she’s right again, it isn’t such a big deal to knock off some silly woman. Shall I, shan’t I, he went on and on, even after he’d been watching the woman for all that time. He made me sick. Remember the time I had that black eye? Well, I lost my temper, and he lost his, and then I really got to him, got his goat. “What are you Dad?” I said, “what the fuck are you? Go on, hit kids … hit me again, hit other boys … I’ll line them up for you. S’pose you can make money hitting kids, when you haven’t got the bottle to go near some silly rich cow who could buy and sell you with her money … Go on, you pansy … Go on!” In the end, he did it.’
The silence no longer mattered, and the response was less important than the talking even into a vacuum. Ed had despised his father’s confessing, but there he was, isolated with the audience of one horrified child, victim to the same desire as Dad to have a witness for his tale whatever the consequences.
‘She knew, you know, I’m sure she always knew, that she wouldn’t get away with it, but she didn’t seem to mind, as long as it was done. Not at the last anyway. She said, “You never know your luck, but I know mine, and your dad’s, not so good, either of us. I hope you don’t mind.” “No,” I said, “I don’t mind, but what do you mean?” “He’ll blow it,” she said. “He’ll blow it sky high, and I’ll come down in pieces unless I’m very lucky and I’m never that lucky, even though I never stop fighting until it’s all finished.” “No,” I told her, “you won’t get caught.” “Just watch,” she told me, and I did, watched what happened, and I hated Dad for being such a cretin. What could they have done if he had kept his big trap shut? Nothing is what, sweet nothing.
A Question of Guilt Page 16