The Misremembered Man

by Christina McKenna

  “And that husband of hers is an idiot. Look at him!” Johnny Craddock had just heaved into view, with a cake tin in one hand and a wooden spoon in the other.

  “What way is that to dress when you’re baking—a blazer and cravat? You’d think he was at the races. What happened to aprons, I wonder.”

  Lydia saw Johnny’s blazer and cravat as an augury of imminent significance. She remembered Frank Xavier McPrunty’s description of the attire he’d be wearing: “navy blazer, gray slacks, a white shirt and red cravat.” As she looked at Johnny Craddock’s bald head and bemonocled eye, a feeling of dread overtook her. Better to discover the truth as soon as possible, she thought.

  “Mother—”

  “Yes, I know: the books. I’m not finished with the Cookson, but you can take back that other piece of filth.” She pointed at a book on the windowsill. “I’m not allowing Jean Plaidy back into this house. She had a woman taking her top off in front of a man. I’d never read such smut. You tell that friend of yours to put her under the counter, or better still in the dustbin, where she belongs.”

  Lydia picked up the item of “pornography,” bent and kissed her mother goodbye as the credits for Fanny Craddock rolled.

  “Why are you wearing so much scent?” Mrs. Devine demanded. She looked Lydia up and down. “And those are your Sunday shoes.”

  “Look, Mother, I’m going out.” She saw her mother’s eyes take on that all-too-familiar glint of suspicion. “To the library.”

  “You’re up to something. Why are you wearing all that scent if you’re just going to see that friend of yours?” Elizabeth touched her daughter’s cheek. “And you’ve too much powder on your face. Yes, there’s a man somewhere. I can almost smell him.”

  “Mother,” Lydia began, her voice edged with impatience, “I’m wearing all this scent for myself, d’you hear? And the face powder, shoes, and dress—all for me.” She splayed a hand on her chest and beat it several times to drive home the point. “For me, me, me! Not Daphne, not for any man or any woman for that matter. Just me, d’you hear?”

  There was a silence. Elizabeth Devine was prepared to concede that she’d been well and truly rebuked, but still felt it necessary to throw another little poisoned dart as Lydia turned to go.

  “Doesn’t matter what you say. You still look like a strumpet and if your father were here he wouldn’t let you out looking like that.”

  “See you in a couple of hours. I’m getting my hair done as well.”

  Lydia shouted all this over her shoulder as she made a beeline down the hallway. She had invented the hair appointment, knowing that her mother would strongly object to not having been informed earlier of something so important. Hair appointments were Elizabeth’s territory.

  And sure enough, as Lydia pulled the door shut, she caught the first part of her mother’s objection.

  “You never said anything about a—”

  But Lydia was gone, and freedom beckoned.

  The parking lot at the Chestnut Inn Hotel was reassuringly vacant when Lydia and Daphne pulled in. They counted only five cars.

  “No wedding to contend with, it seems,” Lydia said, cutting the engine and looking in the rearview mirror. “Thank heavens for that. I couldn’t stand it if there were gaggles of people roaming round.”

  “What a lovely place,” Daphne said, looking up at the white Georgian façade. “Have you been here before? God, it looks terribly posh. This Frank person has expensive tastes, I’ll give him that.”

  But Lydia was barely listening. As her eyes swept over the clipped lawns and hedges, she was contemplating the nature of what she was about to do. This act was a defining one.

  “What?” she asked absentmindedly. Daphne was still giving forth. “Oh yes, it is rather grand, isn’t it?”

  “Are you nervous?” Daphne gave her friend’s arm a gentle squeeze. “What a silly question. Of course you’re nervous. I’d be too.”

  “Oh, I’m okay, but…” She hesitated. “What if he turns out to be an absolute ogre, Daphne?”

  “Of course he won’t! Here, let me see his letter again.”

  Lydia passed it over without a word. Her attention was elsewhere. She was staring ahead of her, at the heavy cedar doors with their inlaid glass panels, trying to focus on what she was about to do. Was she insane?

  She had never done anything rash in her life. From an early age her father had instilled in her a sense of duty and responsibility. Any venture must be mulled over and planned, viewed from all angles and weighed with the utmost consideration; that way, the outcome one expected was all but guaranteed. That way, life held no unpleasant surprises. Disappointment lay in careless thinking and an incautious attitude. And happiness? There was no such state, in her father’s estimation. The trials of life must be borne with a stout faith and fortitude. The reward was the happiness of eternal life in the heavenly realms.

  Lydia steeled herself against the thought of the Reverend Perseus Cuthbert gazing down on her now—as he surely must be—from those same heavenly realms. If he were alive, he would most certainly be lecturing her on the weakness of the flesh and the dangers of rash adventuring. But he wasn’t alive, she reminded herself. He was dead and she was free.

  “He doesn’t seem like an ogre to me,” said Daphne, interrupting her reverie. She folded the letter. “In fact he seems like a very nice gentleman.”

  “What?” she almost shouted, believing for a confused moment that Daphne was referring to her father. Daphne looked at her strangely. “Oh, Frank. Yes, of course. Good. Shall we go in then?”

  “We should. The longer we sit here, the longer you’ll worry, and that’s not good.”

  “Do I look all right?” Lydia snapped open her Max Factor compact and checked herself.

  “You look lovely,” Daphne lied. She could see that her friend had applied too much powder to her nose. It looked as though it had been dipped in a bag of Early Riser flour. “And the pink really suits your coloring.”

  Lydia stowed the compact and shut the purse. “Thank you, Daphne. What would I do without you, dear?”

  Daphne set her face in a determined smile. They left the car and strode purposefully toward the hotel entrance.

  A brass arrow and carpeted steps beyond the lobby guided them down to the place of rendezvous. They descended and found themselves facing the lounge doors. Lydia grabbed Daphne’s arm.

  “Wait,” she whispered. “Let’s see if I can pick him out from here.”

  She opened the stained-glass doors a crack and peeked in, unobtrusively scanning the lounge interior for man-with-camera.

  There was a couple at one table having a drink: a woman with a beehive hairdo and a man who looked half her age; at another table a young family was having a late lunch. A youth seated at the bar was staring fixedly up at a football game being shown on a suspended television set.

  Where was he? Perhaps he hadn’t arrived yet. She was about to venture in when her eye fell on a solitary figure seated by the window, looking out in what seemed like expectation.

  Her heart sank.

  The camera and glass of Fanta soda before him confirmed her worst fears. He was small and totally bald, with a turtle-like neck rising out of an extravagant, mulberry-red cravat. If she still had doubts, then his navy blazer with outsize shoulder pads, buttoned brassily over his front, and his gray slacks, so accurately described in the letter, verified his identity. Mr. McPrunty had come to life painfully before her eyes.

  Sixty-one? He looked closer to eighty-one. She absorbed the scene in a few heart-stopping moments. She wanted to flee.

  Daphne, sensing her disappointment, caught her arm.

  “What is it, Lydia? Have you seen him?”

  Lydia could not speak and simply pointed.

  “Is that him?” Daphne asked. “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, I’m sure,” Lydia said in a desperate whisper. “Of course I’m sure. There’s the camera he spoke about, and he’s wearing exactly what he described i
n the letter.” She put her hand over her mouth. “Oh my God, I can’t meet him, Daphne! I just can’t. He’s an old-age pensioner. He could be my grandfather.”

  “Now, Lydia, come into the ladies and we’ll discuss this. You just can’t leave him there like that. It wouldn’t be right.”

  She yanked Lydia back out through the door, and found the bathroom a little way to the right of the lounge entrance. She nudged the door shut.

  “Now look, you must go and meet him. It’s only proper. It would be very rude to let him down after all this.”

  They stood in the faux-marble enclosure under the thrum of a strip light. Lydia looked undecided. Then she went to the mirror, held her face in her hands and peered into the smoked glass.

  “Yes, and I suppose it’s not very rude of him to lie to me that he’s sixty-one when he looks like Methuselah? Oh my God,” she asked the mirror, “how did I get here?”

  Daphne tried to console. “Look Lydia, it’s only a meeting. And he can’t be that bad.” She addressed her friend’s reflection. “Looks,” she said, “aren’t everything, you know.” Lydia glared and Daphne realized her error.

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Daphne! Would you be seen with him?” She turned from the mirror. “Now be honest.”

  “Well…”

  “Come on—be honest.”

  “Well, I’d give him a chance by talking to him….”

  “But would you take him along to Heather’s wedding? Remember, that’s the object of this exercise.”

  “Well, to be honest…” She hesitated, mobilizing her thoughts. “You want the truth, do you?”

  “Yes, the God’s-honest truth.”

  “I wouldn’t be caught dead with him.”

  They howled with laughter. When they’d recovered themselves, Daphne made a suggestion.

  “Let’s get out of here,” she said. “We’ll have tea at the Copper Kettle.”

  “Splendid idea.”

  They wiped away their tears of mirth and adjusted themselves in the mirror. Presently Daphne held open the inner door.

  “After you, my dear.”

  “Thank you, my liege.”

  Lydia flung back the outer door—and halted with a gasp. There, on the checkered Axminster, stood a balding little man with a mighty camera pointing accusingly at her from his double-breasted front. Frank Xavier McPrunty.

  Lydia gave a small cry. Daphne collided with her back, nearly propelling her into him.

  He raised a knotty forefinger.

  “You wouldn’t be—?”

  “Good heavens, no!” Lydia blurted out, and she reversed into the restroom, pulling Daphne with her. The door shut automatically. They threw themselves against the row of washbasins, Daphne in fits of laughter, Lydia in shock.

  “Shush…”

  She shook Daphne’s shoulder. They heard the outer door of the powder room opening.

  “Oh my God, he’s coming in. Quick!”

  And they both dashed for the stalls. But it was the woman with the beehive hairdo—one half of the drinking couple she’d spotted earlier—now with a glazed-over, unsteady look about her and Lydia noticed that part of the beehive had come unstuck. She eyed the two ladies suspiciously.

  “Is one a yous a Lid-something Day-vine, are yous?” she said.

  Lydia stared at her. “Why, who wants to know?”

  “There’s a wee man out there astin’ after ye. Sez he’s a Savior Mick-Brontee.” She jerked her thumb in the direction of the lobby and staggered—like a newborn calf—on into the stall, grasping the door frame for support.

  Lydia opened her mouth to speak, but Daphne put a warning finger to her lips and rolled her eyes at the stall.

  “Wait,” she mouthed, and busied herself washing her hands. Her friend followed suit and waited for the woman to finish and leave.

  By and by they heard a heavy sigh followed by a noisy flushing sound, and out came Miss Beehive. She wobbled to the door, seemingly unaware that she was not alone.

  “God, did you see that? She didn’t wash her hands.”

  “Look, Lydia, there’s only one way out of this.” Daphne went to the sash window and began heaving it up.

  “What, are you crazy? We can’t do that.”

  “Well, it’s either this, option one, or stand about here for another hour hoping he’ll go away. That’s option two.” Lydia opened her mouth to protest again but Daphne ignored her. “Or, the third option.” Her voice strained under the weight of the resisting window, but within moments she’d managed it. She turned proudly. “Good, there we are.”

  “And the third option?” Lydia asked expectantly.

  “Yes, the third option is for you to go out there now, introduce yourself to Mr. McPrunty, and have him explain the inner workings of his life and his mighty camera.” She gave her friend a challenging look.

  Lydia dashed to the window and, with as much of her dignity as she could retain in the circumstances, started climbing out.

  Chapter sixteen

  The autumn months of every year were particularly cruel for the little inmates of the orphanage. Every morning at eight a bus clattered into the yard, and the boys would line up and climb aboard. They took their places on bare iron seats, their pale, sad faces lost beneath outsized caps, their frail bodies in ragged, grubby, hand-me-downs.

  They swayed and collided and wordlessly righted themselves as the bus drove across the city’s suburbs, bumping and bouncing over the cobblestones, dodging the steaming horses and the chattering traps they pulled. They passed shawled women and weary workmen; rising heavenward, the smoking factory chimneys mapped the sky in monstrous yellow blots.

  No one wanted to go to the fields. No one wanted to wrest the muddy potatoes from their muddy pits and load them into the baskets. No one wanted to suffer the ache in his back or the wounding splinters in his frail little hands. They prayed that it would not rain and that they would not provoke the farmer to anger.

  The bus driver, Bartley, was a hard man with a pitiless face and hands made for destruction and murder. A raw man, born of pain and violence and raised on both. He despised the children he shuttled to and fro, his vehicle clanking its way through the grimy streets, as the louring sky moved above him and a sludge of fearsome thoughts foamed in his head.

  He talked to himself, directing a rapid, broken discourse at the windshield, bending over the big wheel to round a corner at speed, laughing loudly when, in the mirror, he saw his charges fall out of their seats and stumble to retrieve their caps. He roared and shouted in his strange language; he made misery for others, and in so doing, warped the peace that could never be his own.

  Before long, the city had fallen behind them: a gray tattered veil in the cracked rear window of the bus. Grassy swards opened up on either side of them, and a weak sun stroked the fields and raised their spirits. Mountains lay in the distance, soft and still, like sleek, sleeping deer.

  Each boy observed and sought solace in this beauty, escaping for a while the graceless, lumpen nature of the life he led. Happiness for the time being was that peaceful place, always moving out of reach through the grimy glass of the window, something beyond the implacable band of nuns and men who peopled the present and the future. Each knew there was something more, when released like this on the rattling bus, with the insane driver; released from the harsh, unstable world of the orphanage with its draughty rooms and flailing voices, into this gentler world. There was peace in the unpopulated countryside under the bird-blown skies.

  Eighty-Six sat with his forehead pressed against the glass, his fingers gripping the rubber ledge of the window frame. He felt every hump and hollow of the road in his throbbing brow and trembling hands. He wanted the tender violence of the journey to last. His small body thrown this way and that, whilst he dreamed his little dreams.

  Sometimes he glimpsed white-and-brown cattle in a field, heard the bleat of sheep as they rushed toward the barbed wire fence at the sound of the rackety vehicle. He dreamed one day of
befriending such animals, thought they would understand him as no human could. He imagined stroking their rough coats and speaking to them in their own language—their stuttering baa’s and moo’s. His little heart beat faster when he thought of this; it quelled his fear and put it to rest, replaced it with an emotion he did not recognize yet as passion. Later in life he would never be able to recapture—or describe—what he felt in those moments.

  They all leaned instinctively to the left as the bus approached the final bend. Each boy grasped the horizontal bar of the seat in front, bracing himself in readiness for the sudden, jolting violence of Bartley’s stop. As they stumbled out, he raved and spat and cuffed any boy who dared to look his way. It was said that Bartley had been an inmate of the orphanage, too. He was a sorry reminder of what they could become, the essential nature of him stripped away so that only a few raw wires and a high-pitched madness remained.

  A sharp, dry wind was cutting across the landscape and driving down the open field as they braved the early morning chill. They shivered in their thin clothes, their bare knees revealed like birch saplings where their pants ended and their Wellington boots began.

  The field was a vast, ribbed expanse of flowering potato heads. By nightfall a quarter of it would be turned over, the orphans having scrabbled deep and rooted out the sustenance that would keep the bellies of the Doyle family filled for a year. Farmer Doyle drove his tractor up and down the drills, spraying out potatoes from under the spinning disks of the digger. A cloud of hungry gulls flapped in his wake, swooping and diving on the exposed earth.

  The boys broke into pairs as Bartley threw out the baskets. Eighty-Six and Eighty-Four stuck together. They did not speak to one another but bent immediately to the task. The reward, five hours later, would be a mug of tea and a hunk of bread.

  If it were judged that anyone had been slack or if they’d talked on the job, the food was withheld and the culprit went hungry.

  Soon all twenty were immersed in the torturous rhythm of bending and harvesting, their bodies a frieze of hooped shapes inching up the field. Bartley walked behind them, kicking at the ground, attentive for missed potatoes, feeling the necessity to lash out or drive his boot into a backside if he felt so inclined.