Christina left her mother and walked right to him. ‘Granny P bought me new shoes,’ she said. ‘Can we go fetch them, please?’
‘I have no interest whatever in your shoes,’ Joe said, rather surprisingly, she thought, ‘nor in your socks either. Am I to understand, Christina, that you left this house entirely on your own, without telling your mother or your grandmother?’
‘Joe,’ Alice said quickly. ‘Please, love, she’s terribly tired.’
He ignored her. ‘Am I to understand,’ he said, with rising menace in his voice, ‘that you walked all on your own into town this afternoon, after which you took food from a stranger?’
It began to dawn on Christina that she had done something that her father did not like.
‘But I crossed at the crossing,’ she said.
Joe whacked her sharply across the back of her legs, which jolted tears to her eyes.
‘Joe,’ Alice said, ‘she’s exhausted.’ But it only made him more angry. He was holding on to Christina by the wrist.
‘Alice,’ he said. ‘You would be well advised not to provoke me. Thanks to your vigilance – and to that of your dear mother – I find that my daughter has been at liberty to wander unshod and unsupervised through the hazards of the town centre in the company of a crazed itinerant.’
‘Oh come on,’ Alice said, wishing to lower the temperature. ‘She’s shared a bun with dafty. He’s as harmless as the day, that man. She’s come back. She’s safe and sound and she’s exhausted. I’d really like to give her a bath.’
‘Not so fast,’ Joe said. ‘It may be a paediatrician should take a look at her.’
Alice’s mouth dropped open with disgust and disbelief. ‘You have the foulest mind sometimes,’ she said. ‘Really. I dread to think what goes on inside your head.’
Christina could feel the tension rising, along with the pressure on her wrist.
‘Chrissie,’ her father said urgently. ‘I have to know this, sweetheart. You have to tell me, okay? Did the man touch you at all?’
Christina began to cry. Her father was being so hateful, she thought, and everything had suddenly gone wrong. It was true that the juggler had touched her, since he had held on to her hands to help make the balls go round, but that had been a perfectly nice thing and nothing at all to get angry about.
‘Chrissie,’ Joe said. ‘I’m waiting.’
She felt trapped and humiliated. She wiped snot from her dripline with the back of her free hand and hiccupped a staccato reply, feeling a precious instinct for defiance under scrutiny.
‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘he was nice to me. And anyway . . . he showed me with his hands. And anyway . . . he said I could have just as much sugar as I liked. And anyway . . . he’s got lots and lots of money. And anyway . . . I said that he could be my Nearly Father.’
Her utterance was followed by a painful breathing silence which Joe was the first to break.
‘Say that again,’ he said, but in a wholly different voice; a voice now devoid of anger but somehow pregnant with dread.
‘I said that he could be my Nearly Father,’ Christina said, sensing the need to capitulate. ‘I only said my Nearly Father.’
‘Chrissie,’ Joe said, ‘what is all this? The juggler said that he wanted to be your father?’
Christina felt the need of a little solidarity and she knew that the juggler wouldn’t mind. She nodded her head, affirmative.
She heard her grandmother draw in breath. Then her father released her wrist. He used his hand to wipe over his face. Then he let out a sigh like a whistle.
‘Jesus Christ,’ he said. ‘Alice, I hope that you’re satisfied.’
For a moment Christina thought her mother the only one of the three who was not behaving strangely.
‘Honi soit qui mal y pense,’ Alice said, sounding more than a little sarcastic, but that didn’t make much sense either.
‘Come on, my sweetie,’ Alice said, and she got up and led her daughter towards the stairs. ‘Let’s get you into your bed,’ she said. ‘Pam’s been waiting for you.’
‘Valerie,’ Christina heard her father say, as she got to the bend in the stairs. ‘Valerie, I will need a detailed description of this man.’
‘Oh, that’s all right,’ Granny P answered. ‘The police all know him already. Just tell them it’s that loony by the war memorial.’
It was something like the beginning of the end of childhood.
Jago, Peter and the Dog Star.
The Lost Boys
Peter had not always been Peter. Until the day that his mother had met the English schoolmaster on the beach in Lyme Regis, he had known himself to be Pietro, though his grandmother had always called him Pierre.
Until he was five, he had lived alone with his mother at the top of a tall grey apartment house in Paris, five minutes from the Luxembourg Gardens. When the change came, he had at first tried hard not to remember it, not because he had disliked his time there, but because it was necessary for him to strive assiduously to be English. In the language class at school, he spoke French competently but not so well that his peers would revert to calling him ‘Grenouille’, or ‘Mon-sewer Jérémie Pêche-à-ligne’.
He remembered that he had slept in a sort of walk-in cupboard off his mother’s attic bedroom – a triangular prism like a Toblerone box, so small that his mattress had covered all the floor space. At the weekends he had spread his toys over the floor of his mother’s bedroom on a carpet that was pale grey. He remembered that his five cloth animals had lived on the sill of his mother’s bedroom window, beyond which was a maze of grey slate roofs with leaded seams. Pigeons had strutted over the roof ridges and sometimes he had seen them stalked by a sure-footed, piebald cat.
He knew that his father, who was dead, had been a racing driver, but – as a person who related more to the sky than the ground – it had been a small step for his imagination to reconstruct the man as a pilot who would one night fly over the rooftops in a bi-plane and perch, like the pigeons, on one of the roof ridges. Peter trembled to think of his father proceeding inexorably towards the window in his great goggles and climbing in like Peter Pan.
He was afraid of Peter Pan. He was afraid that his father would come back. He was afraid that le père Noël would come down the chimney. He was afraid of almost everything except his own loneliness. He considered that the stars made satisfactory friends. Being an only child, an indoor child, a rooftop child, he interacted well with the stars. He knew that the nearest galaxy to our own was 1,600,000 light years away and that this could be written as 16 × 105. He knew that the Arabs had invented the astrolabe. He knew that the stars were great luminous balls of gases and that young stars evolved, over millions of years, into Red Giants and White Dwarfs. He knew the Twins and the Ram and the Great Bear and the Little Bear. He knew the story of Ariadne’s Crown. He knew that Venus was the Morning and the Evening Star. He knew Syrius the Dog Star. He knew that their distances from each other were so great that these could be measured only in unimaginable waves of movement. He knew that isolation was benign.
On the April day that changed everything, Peter was on the beach in Lyme Regis, playing tennis with his mother. He had accompanied her there on a photographic assignment because his grandmother could not have him. She had recently acquired a hip replacement and was only two weeks out of hospital. They had travelled from Paris in an aeroplane reassuringly unlike the one that his father would land on the rooftops and had stayed in a hotel near the sea. Peter could remember how he had seen the plastic tennis set in a newsagent’s window and had whined for it. Two yellow racquets and four cheap yellow balls made of sponge foam.
He was not an athletic child, but he had seen Bjorn Borg on his grandmother’s television set and the bright yellow colour of the racquets and the balls had attracted him.
He could remember his disappointment and frustration at finding out how difficult the game was. When Maman served, the rubbishy, fake balls always blew on the wind and landed wide, which m
eant that he consumed his time in retrieving them. It was unpleasant to walk on the beach. It was like walking in lead boots and, whenever he himself tried to serve, the balls, after twirling in the air over his head, would evade the inept swipe of his racquet and fall immediately behind him.
As the hour got closer to lunch, Peter became intransigent and irritable. He whined that it was all not fair and that it was all Maman’s fault. And Maman was wearing that familiar, half-concentrating look which meant that, while her body was with him, her mind was far away. Neither she nor his grandmother had ever been any good at playing.
Peter threw the ball up harder than ever and – having swiped the air once more, this time with angry vigour – he flung the racquet after it. It flew in an anti-clockwise arc and landed somewhere behind him.
‘Pietro!’ Maman said, and then she said, ‘Oh, excuse me, sir,’ and she sounded rather embarrassed. ‘Pietro,’ she said. ‘Va chercher la raquette et demande pardon au monsieur.’
Peter turned to see that some distance behind him and seated on a deck-chair was an elderly man dressed in the collar of a curé and wearing an old straw hat. He was sitting alongside a younger man who had looked up from reading a newspaper. He saw that the old man had the plastic racquet in his hand.
‘Non!’ Peter said, his shyness sounding like bad manners. ‘Non!’ But, to his horror, the old man then rose from his chair and walked purposefully towards him. Peter froze to the spot. It took him some moments to realize that the assailed person was advancing in a spirit of cordiality.
‘My word, young man,’ the old man said. ‘This is really no way to play tennis.’
Gentille had been both charmed and diverted by the old man. So few people in this life conformed to type, she reflected, and here was a small, absurd slice of storybook England; an old cleric in a straw hat and rolled trousers who came forward on a beach to work at a small child’s serve. To watch him with her son caused her a small glow of pleasure which enlivened her pale, impassive face. There was a quietness about Gentille, a complete absence of fuss and flap, that men often found appealing. Because of it they mistakenly assumed her to be vulnerable, but Gentille was completely sure of herself.
Meanwhile the old man had positioned the racquet in Peter’s hand and, having gestured to indicate an invisible tennis net, had taken hold of the boy’s right arm and shoulder. Gentille knew that Peter understood not a word of what the old man said, but he was responding readily to the spirit of the instruction.
‘Now, then,’ the old man was saying, ‘right shoulder away from the net. That’s the ticket! That is quite definitely one hundred per cent better!’
Gentille had not only taken to the old man. She had arrived with a predisposition towards certain things English. This was her way of being just slightly anti-French. While she seemed to people in England the very epitome of all things French, Gentille was an outsider by history and inclination. She came from a family of outsiders.
Her maternal grandmother had been a fair-skinned, blue-eyed Polish Jew who, being in the final stages of labour when the Gestapo had raided the hospital, had miraculously survived the fatal evacuation by crawling, mid-spasm, into a dark recess for fear of being trampled underfoot. An hour later she had given birth, all alone, in an unlit linen store, had wrapped her daughter in a towel and had licked the mucus from the baby’s eyes. She knew that everything about her former life was over. Young, recently married and very much in love, she knew that she no longer had a home or a family and that she would never again see her husband. Over the next few years, in a macabre and protracted odyssey to which she had never properly given voice, she had effectively walked to France. There she was taken in by an ailing, middle-aged storekeeper and put to work in the shop.
At some time thereafter she married the storekeeper. The arrangement was convenient to both. She was young and strong and the storekeeper needed her labour. He was possessed of an income and an identity which she and her small daughter lacked.
The daughter was Peter’s grandmother. By the time she was eight years old, the storekeeper was a bed-ridden old man with ravaged lungs and rheumy eyes, a skeletal figure in an upstairs room. Then he was dead. She had nothing belonging to her real father; no photograph, no watch, no small book of verse awarded in school for good attendance, and her mother – who had learnt the wisdom of speaking as little as possible – had never been expansive in bequeathing to her the past. What she did bequeath was that quietude and muted emotional response which had been born out of her own ruptured life experience, and Peter’s grandmother had bequeathed it, in turn, to Gentille – who bequeathed it to Peter.
Since Gentille’s own father, aged twenty-six, had died within two hours in a freak attack of undiagnosed viral pneumonia, she too had come to maturity in the absence of a male parent. It seemed the natural state of things. She had grown up a bright, poised and diligent girl with a quiet, private manner and a fine, pale face. Having done very well at school, she had gone, young, to university in Paris, from which she had taken a step sideways into photo-journalism.
Soon afterwards, while on an assignment in Turin, she had attracted the eye of one Aldo Rusconi, a racing driver. The marriage had been hasty, unsuitable and brief. Gentille’s austerity had been ill-matched with her husband’s dare-devil hedonism, and she had taken a prompt, uncompromising stand against his on-going sexual promiscuity. Within fourteen months she had returned to Paris with a very young baby and had taken a job, first in the picture department of a newspaper and then on a magazine. At the same time she had persuaded her mother to take an apartment nearby and to assume the day-care of the child.
By the time Peter was four years old, his mother was twenty-seven and his father, like all the fathers in his family, was dead. Gentille’s first awareness of her estranged husband’s death came when she saw the pictures of his burning vehicle in the offices of her workplace. She had subsequently inherited some money and, having no need of it herself, she had put it aside for Peter. She was a competent, hard-working professional woman and she earned a decent salary. Aldo’s death in itself had had almost no effect on her. She already knew that nothing in this life was permanent; that change came, for good or ill, and that, when it came, one moved on. Aldo belonged to the past, and the past, by its very nature, was not there.
Now it was midday and she wanted to get on. ‘You are very kind, sir,’ she said, ‘but Pietro keeps you from your lunch.’
The old man, preoccupied, merely gestured vaguely towards the deck-chairs. ‘Take a seat, dear lady,’ he said. ‘My son will take care of you, I’m sure.’
Gentille was not accustomed to being patronized with male courtesies and was about to stand her ground when her eyes met those of the younger man. She saw that these were dark brown and sparkling and that they spoke ironic amusement at the old man’s put-down. Her facial expression responded to this in kind. The young man removed his newspaper from the vacant chair beside him and rose politely as she approached.
‘You mustn’t let my father bully you,’ he said. He was unaware that Gentille let nobody bully her.
‘Your father is very kind,’ she said.
‘Yes,’ said the younger man. ‘Yes, he is.’
She offered him her hand. ‘I am Gentille Rusconi,’ she said.
‘I’m Roland Dent,’ he said.
It was clear from the vantage-point of the deck-chairs that Peter was having the time of his life. So was his companion. The old man had been feeling the lack of grandchildren. One of his daughters, who was in broadcasting, lived, childlessly, with a businessman in Dulwich, while the other, who was married with two small daughters, lived somewhat inaccessibly in Vancouver. As for dear Roland, he was thirty-one and unattached. Puzzling, that, the old man thought. His son was a thoroughly decent young man, capable, considerate and easy on the eye. Yet he had had – after a series of trifling youthful alliances – only one serious passion, some five years earlier, for a shy young student at Oxford called Alice. Th
e affair had ended badly and the poor boy had been most terribly cut up. Still, five years was five years, after all, and the boy was distinctly eligible.
In the minutes that followed, Roland learnt that Gentille was a photo-journalist on a French magazine, and Gentille learnt that Roland was a schoolmaster who taught mathematics in a boys’ boarding school in Worcestershire. She learnt that he was spending some days with his parents who had recently retired to a woodland cottage in the Dorset countryside some two miles from the sea and that the old man was a retired army chaplain who occasionally stood in for local clergymen when they were ill or taking a holiday.
Peter learnt that the old man’s name was also Peter.
‘So you’re Pietro, eh?’ the old man said. ‘That’s Peter. Like me. I’m Peter too. Peter Dent.’ And they shook hands solemnly. ‘Ever set a rabbit trap, old man?’
Peter went to tea at the cottage next day. He went with his mother. Roland drove out to fetch them from the hotel. The cottage was not visible until one came upon it because it lay in densely wooded terrain, down a winding half-mile lane and over a small bridge that forded a stream. The stream formed the boundary of the garden at the front and behind was a ring of old oak trees. Beyond these, and rising steeply, lay acres of mixed woodland. The old man, when he came out to greet them, had a jaunty little dog at his heels with a pirate-patch over one eye who wagged his tail and wiggled his back ecstatically.
‘Hello, there,’ said the old man. ‘Syrius, meet Pietro.’ Peter was already crouching to receive the canine kisses.
‘Alors, comme l’étoile?’ he said excitedly.
‘Good man,’ the old man said. ‘Well done, Peter! Yes indeed. Étoile, just so. You have made the acquaintance of Syrius the Dog Star. The Star Dog, as he prefers to think of himself. I’m afraid that most people mistakenly believe his name to be “Serious”. He’s had to put up with the indignity.’
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