He glanced round the room, looking to see where Grace was sitting. He worked to his own private rota: every visit he started with a different old lady but it was strictly fair so that everyone had equal attention over a three-month cycle. And nobody ever questioned or complained, perhaps because they sensed in him a natural authority, though never had he displayed this, not with them. Arthur’s great power was his ability to make other people feel special, more than they were. He appeared to give one hundred per cent of himself but was also capable of taking in equal measure.
With the old ladies it was as easy as pie. The initial barrier wasn’t there, the barrier he had to overcome elsewhere, that of his appearance. They were all as ugly as he and their lifetime of experience had enabled them to judge more by what they heard than what they saw. Besides, he had their gratitude, just for being there, before he even started working on them. He really enjoyed these visits, perhaps even more than they did. He despised every one of them and found it the most satisfying sensation imaginable that none of them knew, especially the matron, who had been more of a challenge and therefore the greater prize.
Of course, he hadn’t expected it to be easy with her: after all, she knew what the others didn’t. Mumsie knew why he’d started his visits. She had to know and at first she’d viewed him with arch suspicion, even contempt; she’d looked down upon him as if he were little better than a worm that had unwisely emerged from the mud and she was debating whether to ignore it or squash it. But all that had changed. He’d won her over and with remarkably little effort. He talked to her about his mother and how very much he missed her. He’d told the story of loss so well that those steely eyes of hers had become watery, and when he started calling her ‘Mumsie’ she’d capitulated without reserve, she felt so sorry for him.
Pity then power, that was Arthur’s way of going about things and he’d learnt it from an expert, the mother who he would never have dared call ‘Mumsie’.
Grace was sitting by the plant trough.
‘I’ve saved this for you,’ she said, coyly, raising a trembling hand from the side of her chair. Her fingers were clasped round something hidden in her palm which she now pressed into Arthur’s. It was a boiled sweet in a clear wrapper.
‘It’s a red one,’ she added, waiting to see his pleasure.
Arthur put it in his pocket.
‘I’ll save it for later,’ he said. ‘It’ll be a treat to look forward to.’
Grace smiled, satisfied. That was all he needed to say to her. Any attempt at conversation would frighten her witless.
He moved to her neighbour, Hilda, the only danger area. She was the oldest resident, nearly ninety-nine. She appeared impossibly feeble – death there but constipated. She had been his greatest fan at the beginning and Matron had told him she believed it was only his visits that kept her hanging on. But Hilda’s eyes had changed over the past few weeks. It seemed to Arthur that maybe they saw more than they should, that they looked deeper than before. Hilda found it tiring to speak but she liked to listen and was the only one who perhaps saw the possibility of there being another, quite different Arthur, who was not kind and gentle, caring and unselfish. Nearly forty years earlier she’d retired from the public school where she’d been headmistress, but maybe the memories were clearer now than during the previous three decades, memories of girls who charmed and never got into trouble, those who were charismatic among their classmates; those girls whom she’d never trusted. Arthur talked to her for ten minutes (a little more than her share and therefore an imprudence). He talked to her about the new Education Bill about which he had read at length in The Times, then he moved on to an amusing piece written by Bernard Levin. He made no pretence about having gleaned his knowledge from other people’s opinions, he was careful about making that clear. He talked on, mindful that frail Hilda was only senile in outward appearance. He felt he had done well but he hoped Hilda’s chair might be vacant the next time he called. He considered this an honest thought and was pleased with himself that he could accept it as such, without guilt. It was an intellectual achievement, this banishment of guilt – a useless feeling which only ever diminished human potential. His day was made when Hilda, at the last moment, patted his hand. He should have known. He need not have had any doubts.
He moved on to Jane and Florrie, Gladys and Jessie. With each he was able to ask about grandchildren and great-grandchildren, having memorized the names. Their parents he found it more difficult to enquire after: people who abandoned their mothers were, to Arthur, unspeakable ingrates. He was then able to tell Marie the horse that would win the Derby, and he’d brought May the copy of Country Life in which an article by her nephew appeared.
They waved fluttering fingers as he went back into the main part of the house to find Matron and the cup of tea.
‘All done?’ she enquired brightly as he entered her office.
Arthur smiled.
‘Sit down and I’ll pour the tea,’ she said.
‘Let me,’ Arthur said. ‘You do too much.’
The matron sighed and subsided in her chair, watching Arthur with affection as he sorted out the stacked cups and saucers.
‘What sort of a weekend did you have?’ she asked him conversationally.
‘Not that special,’ he said. ‘I got involved in a cricket match.’
‘I didn’t know that you played?’ she said.
‘Why do you sound so surprised?’ he rounded on her, sharply.
Matron’s expression altered swiftly to a look of discomfort and anxiety. She shifted in her chair.
‘I didn’t mean to suggest –’ she began.
‘You didn’t mean to suggest what?’ Arthur said, coldly.
She let out a strange, uncomfortable little laugh: ‘That you . . .’ Her expression changed again. She was pleading with him.
He gazed at her steadily for a few moments then laughed himself.
‘Poor Mumsie,’ he said, handing her the tea. ‘Just a little joke. Of course I don’t play cricket – my eyesight’s too poor.’
She looked relieved, and pathetically grateful.
‘What did you mean, then?’ she asked, tentatively, not wanting to provoke any further ‘jokes’.
‘Oh, just a little encounter I had at the weekend. It’s really not worth discussing.’
‘I’m sure you’d be very good at cricket if you chose to be,’ she continued, wishing she could see his eyes more clearly.
Arthur didn’t respond but waited for her to go on with this placatory nonsense, knowing she still wasn’t quite sure he’d intended any humour. He greatly enjoyed her like this, the big, bosomy bully, uncertain of her ground, anxious to please, frightened of what he might say next. People like her were so easy to manipulate – they couldn’t cope with uncertainty.
‘I should imagine you’re very good at a lot of things but you’re not going to get me flattering you too much!’ she said, recovering herself a little.
‘That’s right, leave me to be the flatterer,’ he said, allowing her to gain this small leeway. ‘Besides, there are so many nice things to say about you and very few about me.’ He said this last bit in such a way that it held both truth and cynicism and a small seasoning of sorrow.
‘Dear Arthur,’ Matron said, reassured she had not trespassed too irrevocably on his sensibilities, ‘what would we all do without you to brighten our lives.’
At half-past four the taxi returned and by five-to-five Arthur was back at the shop. Mondays he closed all day: nobody bought antiques on a Monday. He unlocked the front door and went in to the darkened shop, carefully locking the door behind him as if to make too much noise might disturb someone within. He edged his way past the tables and chairs and cabinets arranged for viewing, and past the glass dome wherein the owl stared out at him, her eyes bright and penetrating, unchanged in nearly thirty years. He was pleased to get her back, although his pleasure was equivocal as for a major part of his life Mona Lisa had represented terror and pain.
> *
‘Stupid boy! Stupid boy! Dirty, stupid. What are you?’
‘Dirty. Stupid.’
‘Louder!’
‘Dirty, Stupid!’
‘Oh don’t cry, don’t cry! Why do you cry darling, darling. Come to mother. Come to your mummy.’
‘B-but d-i-r-t-y.’
‘Stop it! Don’t stammer. Don’t! Don’t, don’t, don’t! Say it. Come on, say it little boy.’
‘D-d-d.’
Little Arthur’s neck went rigid as his mother grabbed his collar at the back and propelled him from the drawing room and up two flights of stairs, the big wide one with the slippery steps his feet hardly touched, then the steep narrow one up to the top of the house and the low-ceilinged room that smelt of dust and decay. A shaft of sunlight from the window in the roof held captive a million struggling particles of dust as the door was flung open.
‘In you go!’
The grip on the collar was released and with it the coughing and wheezing that brought a moment’s remorse: ‘Darling boy, this hurts me more than it does you. Stop it now, stop making that silly noise. You know what must be done and no cheating, after all, you’re being watched.’
A kiss then. A delicate brushing of moist lips across the cheek.
‘It will all be worth it,’ and the door closed, the key turned with a sharp click and the receding footsteps fell away beneath him.
The dust went on dancing, a frenetic upward spiral that seemed to pass straight through the glass, silently, endlessly. But that was cheating, to watch that cast of millions. The owl was at the other end of the long low room and she was watching him, waiting for his attention.
‘Think wise thoughts, Arthur. It’s the only way to learn, the only way to be a better boy. One day you’ll thank me and mean it.’
The backs of his legs ached so and his eyes hurt too as the daylight went and he peered through the dimness.
‘Stand up straight and still and concentrate. Keep your eyes on wisdom. It’s the most precious gift to be had in this world. Look away for a moment and you might lose it and then where would you be? Shut up in a room like this forever.’
‘Say, “thank you”, Arthur. Say it!’
‘Thank you, Mother.’
*
Arthur was hopeful that Mickey would come and see him but wise enough to realize she might not. She had told him a great deal about herself, unburdening unhappiness and disappointment in the way he had said those in despair sometimes will to a stranger more than a friend. He had perceived her wariness of him when he offered her tea and showed her his room. He had noted it and calculated what had to be done to dispel it. He played each move to put her at ease with him, but most important, he had shown that he wanted to listen to her and perhaps that alone would bring her back.
He had found her attractive the first time she came into the shop, searching so particularly but not knowing what it was she wanted. This sort of customer could be exasperating but Michaela Evans he had wanted to help because the search was earnest, she was earnest. She wanted to please someone, perhaps placate, and he understood that very well.
*
Arthur’s mother had wanted the best for him. He’d known it from an early age – she’d told him often enough. She’d wanted a son who was big and strong and clever and successful and although he hadn’t been able to fulfil the first two, he’d done his best to make up for this shortfall by working hard at school. Arthur enjoyed school, particularly after he was thirteen and went to board at a minor public school. It was a reactionary establishment but the rigours of daily life – cold showers, fagging in the first year for the mildly brutal regime of boys in the ‘sixth’ – were easy for him to cope with after the training he’d had at home; and besides, there was always comfort in discomfort shared.
The other boys soon accepted that he was small for his age and could do nothing about it, and they did so because Arthur was clever enough to hide the fact that he was sensitive about his size. Boys only taunted those from whom they would get a reaction.
Thus he was found ‘niches’ wherein his smallness was an advantage. The school was near a large river and rowing was a major activity. Arthur became cox for the school’s racing eight.
But it was all too brief, the spell away from home and mother. She went into ‘a decline’ in the summer holiday when Arthur was sixteen and as there was no one else to look after her Arthur had to leave school two years earlier than he’d anticipated. He hadn’t thought he resented this, after all he’d been at school to please his mother so her needing him at home achieved the same result.
Arthur’s father was a mystery. Only once had he asked his mother. She’d wept and accused him of being ungrateful. ‘Am I not enough for you? Don’t I do everything for you? Ungrateful, inquisitive boy. Inquisitive boys fall down dark holes and break their necks.’ Arthur recoiled.
His mother’s decline was malignant but she was old (in her forties when Arthur was born) and the growth inside and wasting outside took a much slower course than it would in a younger person. They lived, friendless, in an isolated house left to Arthur’s mother by a distant relative. Arthur had acquaintances, people in the village he spoke to when he did the shopping, but otherwise it was not worth the aggravation to cultivate friendships; his mother demanded constant attendance and was rapacious for her son’s devotion.
‘Oh, you don’t love me and why should you, darling boy. I’m just a horrid old nuisance.’ And she would not be placated until he knelt beside the bed and made tears spring from his eyes and wept into her lap. Weeping and wailing were all that made her happy. Her bedroom was a quagmire of contrived emotion and in time the invisible divide between truth and imagination gave way to a pretence that became their only reality.
For a time Arthur looked forward to her death. He planned his freedom, the time when he could start to live again. He thought he might go abroad, see a bit of the world, but when the time came he was quite overcome by an intensity of grief he could not have imagined. It was a grief accentuated by guilt and accompanied by a sudden sense of loneliness he had not expected.
He wasn’t quite himself for a while. Strange things happened both in his imagination and in reality and he had difficulty distinguishing between the two. He didn’t go abroad but he did go away for a spell. The house was shut up for a long time and when he returned he no longer wanted to live there. It was then that he conceived the idea of going into antiques. The house, his mother’s house, was full of them. He sold up and moved, with his initial stock, to another part of the country, to the shop he’d now had for nearly a year.
Arthur liked the place he’d found. The people in the village were friendly and although he never allowed himself to appear anything other than unassuming they seemed to think he might have something to offer and it was even suggested he should stand for the parish council. With the vicar and the postmistress, he was one of the few people to live and work in the village. But Arthur declined this involvement, feeling the need to keep his distance, not to become too integrated. ‘Never give too much of yourself,’ his mother had instructed him, paradoxically, ‘familiarity does breed contempt.’ These dictums were delivered in a self-pitying yet autocratic manner Arthur found impossible to challenge. At the time he thought his ‘Yes Mother’ was no more than lip service but the attitudes were transferred just as if blood still flowed between them.
And Arthur was lonely, just as lonely as his mother had been, and equally capable of ensnaring his own victim.
Chapter Seven
Mickey was amazed at how the time had gone while she’d sat on Arthur’s chaise longue; perhaps it was the Mozart that had kept her there. David wasn’t interested in music and she never thought to listen by herself: music was for sharing, the television for being alone.
The following week it was Sibelius, the one after that Elgar.
‘I must give you your money back,’ Arthur told her.
‘That seems unfair. You’ve been so pa
tient and helpful. It’s my fault not being able to make a decision. The trouble is I did like the owl and still do.’ This was the fourth Saturday although this time Mickey was there in the early evening and they drank sherry instead of tea.
On the previous two Saturdays she had gone back to the shop reluctantly but urged on by Arthur with his promises of new stock coming in. He seemed so anxious she should find the right thing but there was nothing David would like.
‘You know I really don’t have much idea what he does like,’ she confessed on the fourth visit, ‘but I can’t keep coming back, taking up your time like this.’
Arthur smiled but said nothing. Mickey had realized that he was lonely, sensed that he enjoyed her being there. She felt a bit like someone visiting a relative in hospital, sacrificing her time but staying longer than planned because the visit turned out to be less of a chore than anticipated.
She didn’t consciously view the time she spent with Arthur in this way. The sensation of bestowing a favour was there but not properly identified. She felt sorry for him but she didn’t explore why. It was just that he was not ‘one of her kind’ and if she went on seeing him (which she did not envisage) and became his friend, the relationship would be quite separate from the rest of her life. Subconsciously she was guilty of dismissing him as someone who did not count, an underdog, but Mickey being Mickey, this was the most potent thing in his favour.
Another week went by, another visit, but this time when she apologized for taking so much of his time, he looked at her steadily and said, ‘You don’t have to say that.’
‘No,’ she concurred, making up her mind that this really would be the last visit. But that afternoon she talked about herself more than she ever had, largely, she thought because Arthur wanted to know, and as she wasn’t going to see him again it didn’t seem to matter.
She told him about Molly and the Walrus, Laura and her baby, her brother Gordon and the long-standing feud between him and their father. And Arthur saw that she had never been the centre of attention, and intelligent and self-effacing as she was this had been a deprivation. And then she’d married and the full weight of her expectations had been placed upon her husband who, from what she had said, was too accustomed to playing centre stage himself to move over a little for her.
Not Playing the Game Page 8