She watched as he threw himself back into the chair and kicked one leg over the other in what she guessed he probably thought was a study of calm repose. She looked closely at him and wanted to giggle, but she knew this would be mean. After all, she didn’t dislike him; she just felt sorry for him. Seriously, did he think she was barmy enough to pack up her life and her two kiddies and follow him halfway across the world? Julius, Julius, Julius, I’ve already taken charge of the situation and made my own plans.
“Let me ask you, Monica, do you know what love is? You have made a commitment.”
“You need somebody else, Julius.” She wanted to add: perhaps you should buy a dog.
He sprang to his full, lanky height so that he now hovered over her. She could see that he wanted to shout, but as she stared up into his knotted face, a slow ripening into resignation began to smooth out his features.
“For Christ’s sake, Monica. Really, where the hell do you think you’re going? What on earth is the matter with you?”
What’s the matter with me? Nothing, Julius, except I’m tired, poor, and worried that because I don’t know how to be myself, I don’t know how to be a mother to these two boys, who deserve a damn sight more than we’ve been able to give them. I’ve lost myself, you buffoon, which is pathetic, given how much effort I put into looking out for myself before I met you. You didn’t come banging and knocking and demanding; it was me, I came to you, and I now reckon that I shouldn’t have: that’s what’s the matter with me, Julius.
He moved across the room to the settee and sat down heavily.
“So, we’ve come to this. You’ve got nothing to say? No discussion, no nothing, and you’ve made up your mind, and tomorrow morning everybody will know that we’re a failure, is that what you want?”
“I made a mistake, Julius.” She paused. “Sometimes it occurs to me that maybe I’m not worth loving. I know I’ve not got the looks, and I’m hardly the outgoing, vivacious type.” Again she paused. “Anyhow, I’ve got to try and do what’s right for these children.”
“But I love you, Monica. Don’t you remember?”
Monica began to smile. “I’m sorry, Julius, but you never really loved me.”
“And you think running away with the children is going to help you? You know you’ve already run away once. You think you’re strong enough to do it again, this time with two children?”
* * *
The success of being promoted to deputy headmaster had encouraged Ronald Johnson to buy a brand-new semidetached home on an estate on the northernmost extremity of the town, out past the dejected jumble of half-empty warehouses and run-down factories. Once you’d gone through the last roundabout, and just before the start of the Outwood Road, you made a sharp left into a country lane that quickly opened up and revealed a maze of modern houses. They all were laid out like a child’s model playground, with neatly trimmed lawns and freshly planted trees that still needed to be supported by upright sticks and bits of tented string. Ronald Johnson’s house was situated at the end of the first cul-de-sac, and through the window he could see an ever-changing cast of birds flitting about the wooden feeder that he had struggled to assemble one Sunday morning. Spread out before him on the desk in the corner of his bedroom were various pieces of paper whose contents he was trying to collate and then précis into a short, but comprehensive, report of the school’s achievements, both educational and sporting, during the past academic year. Part of his increased responsibilities included making a short annual presentation to the board of governors and then passing around a copy of his report to each person present.
His wife knocked and opened the door at the same time, a habit that irritated him no end as the abrupt rudeness of the second gesture rendered the first pointless.
“I’m sorry to bother you, but I expect we ought to be making our way to the station.”
Ronald Johnson slowly replaced the cap on his fountain pen and carefully laid it down on top of the foolscap notepad.
He stood before the bathroom mirror and meticulously dusted the dandruff from the lapels of his jacket. He didn’t feel as though he had aged, but when she looked into his face, what would she see? A greying man who was still moving upwards in his chosen career, and with whom she would now agree that discipline and effort are the twin paths to success. Or would she see a stubborn man, with a solemn expression, who continued to refuse to accommodate her waywardness?
That afternoon, when he arrived home from school, he was surprised to see his wife sitting at the dining table with a letter open and visible next to a carefully slitted envelope. She looked up, as though in possession of news that might disturb him.
“Monica’s got a job in Leeds, and she’s coming back.”
He sat down and picked up the letter and briskly read it through for any references to him, but there were none. He had assumed that his wife and daughter maintained some pattern of contact, and while he didn’t necessarily approve, it at least afforded him the opportunity to conjecture that they both still enjoyed a relationship of sorts with their only child. But out of the blue, in his hands, there was the possibility of a potential reconciliation, and he immediately convinced himself that he ought to make an effort for the sake of his wife. But Monica’s timing was awful, for the governors’ report would be his first real test, and now his wife was rushing him before the pair of them had even had the opportunity to discuss the dilemma of where to put the two boys. He turned away from the bathroom mirror and decided that at some point on the drive to the city centre he would raise the problem, although he took it somewhat for granted that Ruth would have already anticipated the quandary and prepared the back bedroom to accommodate all three of them.
He saw them huddled together on the platform like evacuees, and all that was missing were their name tags. Monica looked like a big sister who had been placed in charge of a large suitcase and her two little brothers, but as he and his wife walked towards them, he could see the exhaustion on his daughter’s harried face. Ruth stood to one side while he quickly kissed Monica’s bloodless cheek and then attempted to muss the hair of the older child, before self-consciously touching the nose of the younger one with his forefinger in the manner of a drill sergeant inspecting for dust. His daughter looked tense, as though she had arrived for a prearranged Christmas holiday already burdened with a resigned sense of obligation. He could see that his wife was holding back the tears, and he prayed that she’d continue to do so; the last thing they needed was waterworks.
He sat alone in the bedroom hunched over his desk and continued to work on his governors’ report while giving mother and daughter time to reacquaint themselves. The drive home was stressful, and if it hadn’t been for his own valiant efforts to make small talk and try to fill in some of the events of the past six years, Monica, it seemed, would have been happy to pass the time in silence. Clearly she wasn’t ready to take any responsibility for her reckless choices, and her chippy behaviour implied that she still believed that there were no consequences for the decisions you made in your life. Why did the girl always seem so intent on making him feel uneasy by steadfastly refusing to share any thoughts? He put his pen to one side and remembered that it was only after his wife had assured him that she had spoken with Monica about the birds and the bees, and that he would therefore face no ticklish questions on this front, that he tried in earnest to engage with his daughter on a wide range of subjects, including music, but she was impossible to reach. And then, sometime after her sixteenth birthday, it became apparent to him that beneath her fierce intelligence and studious determination Monica possessed a wayward, slightly ethereal streak, and he started to fear for his child and wondered if he should put her down for counselling.
As they started for home, he began to steal furtive glances at her in the rearview mirror, and he wondered if he was being hasty. Perhaps her recent experiences had finally chastened her into a new appreciation of his way of thinking, and the evidence of the transformation would become tang
ible only after she had recovered from the journey. However, every time he glanced up Monica was staring moodily out of the window, seemingly lost in her own dreamworld and giving away nothing. As for the two children, he had difficulty seeing who would be kind to them now that their father had completely failed to value his daughter’s affections and disowned them all and run off back to wherever it was he came from. He felt sure that at some point somebody would have to plead with his obstinate daughter to accept the introduction of the word “adoption” into her vocabulary.
Monica returned from the bathroom and took up her seat at the dining table, and he could tell she had washed her face. It even looked as though she had applied a bit of makeup, but he couldn’t be sure about this, for his wife had never stooped to cosmetics, and tarting oneself up was not sanctioned for the female teaching staff. But, painted or not, a little blush had certainly returned to his daughter’s cheeks.
“I suppose it will be different for you living back up here after all that time in the south. It might take a bit of getting used to.”
“I don’t see why. I’m from here.”
“No, well, you’re right there,” he said, eager to agree with her and avoid any guise of confrontation, although he wanted to remind Monica that it didn’t cost anything to be affable. Her letter to her mother had explained that having been successful in her application for a job as a junior librarian in a small branch library in Leeds, she had made the decision to break off with London and leave her so-called husband.
“But you’ve never worked in a library, have you?”
He saw what he assessed to be a frown starting to crease his daughter’s face, but as it grew, it revealed itself to be a look of bewilderment.
“You mean for money?”
“Well, yes.”
“No, I haven’t.” She paused. “Have you?”
“Well, not as such.”
He would have liked to have offered to help financially, but he already knew what her response would be. He also wanted to ask about this man Wilson and ascertain if he’d made any provision to send her some kind of an allowance, and suggest that if it would help her in any way, then he would happily set his solicitor on the bugger, but he elected not to trespass. Having had some smattering of conversation with her and successfully avoided the use of the phrase “begin again”—as in “so you’ll be beginning again”—he knew that he shouldn’t push his luck.
Ruth backed her way through the door with a tray laden with crockery, a teapot snug in a colourful cosy, and two packets of ginger biscuits. Monica stood up to help, and he wondered whether he ought to offer to wake up the two children, or if this was something that his daughter, or his wife, would prefer to do, so he erred on the side of caution and said nothing. As Ruth poured, he tried to determine what he would have made of this Julius Wilson now that he felt free to think about him in the past tense. But the man had never made any attempt to write and advocate for a meeting at which he might explain himself to his senior, perhaps fearing that having already walked out on one marriage, he might well find it testing to justify why he considered himself a fit and proper person to start another. And now look what the fool had gone and done: he’d abandoned his only child with this permanent stain on her reputation.
His wife began to admit how much she missed the old terraced house and her few friends, while careful to point out all the modern conveniences of the new semi and stress the fact that there were plans afoot for a whole row of shops to be built on an undeveloped parcel of land to the back of them.
“Eventually the number twenty-four and twenty-six routes will be extended so that we’re the terminus, but they’ve not said when.”
She could feel her husband closely scrutinizing her, and she began to feel oafish in herself. However, Ruth knew that there was still plenty of time before she would be collecting her pension, although she had to admit that she sometimes looked, and even acted, like a lady whose Tuesday mornings were spent lining up at the post office to get her book stamped. Her hair had turned prematurely grey a decade ago, but rather than colour it, or at the very least have it cut into a borrowed style that might change the shape of her face, she had begun instead to bunch it on top of her head and hold the hysterical tangle in place with an assemblage of carefully placed hairpins. She imagined it was her ever-ripening plumpness that was causing both a little arthritic slowness and shooting pains in her feet and ankles, so much so that these days she wore only carpet slippers, and had even bought a pair for outdoor use, but her husband had drawn the line at this vulgarity. She didn’t argue, but that was pretty much how she had managed to maintain what she assumed was a tolerable marriage, by not arguing and locking away all her talk inside of herself.
Thirty years ago Miss Patterson had been a vivacious, buxom young shopgirl who, from the time she left school at fourteen, had taken the eyes of the local lads, all of whom fell over themselves trying to get her to agree to go out with them. He’d known that if he was going to stand a chance, he’d have to somehow conquer his ineptitude and give over yanking at doors marked PUSH, or forgetting which pocket he’d put his bus ticket in when the inspector got on. Once he had acquired enough discipline to stop betraying himself, he started to woo her, and as he hoped might be the case, it was she who began to ask questions of him when he stopped in for his Yorkshire Post and ten Woodbines on his way to his very first teaching job. He imagined that the briefcase and suit helped rouse her curiosity, plus the fact that he eschewed a cap and chose to go about bareheaded, but whatever it was, it was soon obvious that the curvaceous Patterson girl in the shop was going to be his bride even though people, including his own parents, might well be surprised to see him stooping down to the bottom drawer and marrying a girl without his advantages.
She peeled off her apron and carefully draped it over the back of a chair as she spoke. “When I was younger, I’d have killed for the kind of kitchen facilities you lot have at your fingertips. I mean, you don’t know you’re born really, do you?” It was with some surprise, and alarm, that she found herself jabbering away to her daughter, for whom she had once happily baked and even encouraged to lick the cake mix from the bowl. However, one day teenage Monica suddenly turned her nose up in the air at such foolishness, and she did so with a flash of meanness that convulsed their relationship into a premature formality that made her mother want to weep for her loss. And now, she wondered, what does our Monica see beyond a pudgy woman whose poor neck is little more than a wide set of stairs descending from her ears down to her shoulders, and whose bust contains the secret of a growth that her doctor claims is “well under control”? “But remember,” insisted Dr. Owen, “it’s only a fool, Ruth, who tries to push open the door to the future.” She looked closely at Monica, and wanted to clutch her daughter to her bosom and confess to her the source of her fretting, but she was shaken out of her abstraction by a sudden storm of footsteps up above, which could mean only one thing.
“I’m sorry, love, but I should have said. You will be stopping here tonight, won’t you?”
“I can’t. I’ve made arrangements for lodgings.” Her mother looked dumbfounded, so Monica continued. “We can stay for another hour.”
“But surely you don’t have to go up to Leeds today? It’s Saturday. And the kiddies should nap some more. They need their rest.”
Ronald Johnson sat upstairs in the bedroom at his desk, but he was finding it impossible to concentrate, for he could hear the pair of them in the kitchen. He threw down his fountain pen with more force than he had intended and watched as the gushing ink described a near-perfect semicircle, which began boldly at one end and tapered to a thin italic whisper at the other. He made a gavel of his hand and noiselessly pounded the desktop and demanded silence, for he needed to concentrate. For Christ’s sake, what’s with all this ruddy carrying on? He didn’t like to consider it too deeply, but in nearly thirty years of marriage his wife had completely failed to introduce a single topic into their table talk that
had either surprised or even interested him. Was that too much to ask for, a question that he might research, or an issue that it was possible for them to exchange ideas about? And now what was she trying to do to their daughter, whose education should have placed her beyond Ruth’s influence? Was this to be his legacy, two gossiping women and two misfit children? He stared at the defaced fair copy of his report and silently shook his head. It troubled him to admit that at some point he had made a decision to marry a shopgirl who wouldn’t even be able to take charge should an emergency be forced upon them. As he opened the desk drawer to search for some blotting paper, the unfairness of the situation continued to darken his humour.
At just before seven, he dropped Monica and her two children at the train station. He removed her hefty suitcase from the boot of the car, and then he and his wife followed their daughter, whose boys clung to her, one to each hand, down the full length of the platform. Monica was hurrying, like somebody who’d heard the five o’clock whistle, and he could see that her slip was showing, but he knew that it wouldn’t do to say anything. For a moment it crossed his mind that perhaps there was some mystery man with whom she would be rendezvousing when she stepped down from the train in thirty-two minutes’ time? Or maybe she really did have an unnamed coworker who had agreed to meet her and the children and take them to their new flat. Monica temporarily released the two boys, and she gave her father an unenthusiastic hug, which made him feel foolish. She then kissed her silent mother on the cheek and moved away before her mother could grab her arm.
“Take care,” he said as he hoisted the suitcase up and onto the train after her and the children. She looked down at him with a puzzled expression. “Of yourself, I mean.”
“And you take care too,” she said. “Of yourself.”
III
GOING OUT
She wiped Tommy’s mouth with her hand and then shoved the remains of the food into a bag that she slung up onto her shoulder. She had saved a salad cream sandwich in case her older boy was hungry, but when she looked around, she still couldn’t see him. The sun had gone behind a cloud, and it looked like it might rain, so she knew that it was time to leave this sorry excuse for a park that was littered with dog mess and empty beer cans and pop bottles. Having straightened Tommy’s shirt, she looked again and spotted Ben playing on the swings with a group of Pakistani children, but when she called to him, he ignored her and kicked his feet up in an attempt to climb even higher. “Don’t you make me have to come and fetch you.” She could feel the intrusive stares from the foreign men and women, who sat on the grass in a circular group around a seemingly endless supply of food that the wives had no doubt slaved over. They behaved like it was their park, which in a way it was now.
The Lost Child Page 6