‘But the sign’s come on,’ Pam was saying. ‘One of us ought to go get Papa.’
Christina wished that her sister would not behave quite so much like little Beth March where their father was concerned. She had more than once reminded Pam of that sacrificial creature’s remarkably swift dispatch.
‘Don’t worry, Pam,’ their mother said. ‘He’ll come. The steward will make him.’
‘But he’s smoking,’ Pam said anxiously.
Alice sighed. ‘Don’t worry, Pam,’ she said again. ‘He’s over twenty-one. He’ll stop. The steward will make him.’
When Christina glanced down towards the end of the aisle, she saw that, sure enough, her father and some newly acquired companion, were drawing on the weed. They were also evidently sharing a joke. There was something irritatingly school-boyish, she considered, about two grown men snatching a hurried smoke alongside the airplane toilets. But then, her father, having opted as usual for the non-smoking section of the aircraft – ‘for the girls’ health’, as he put it so piously – had been up and down like a yo-yo during the flight to indulge his nicotine habit.
All the same, there was something in the gracefulness of the smokers’ gestures – the cupped palms around the flame, the languid positioning of the hands, the forms that it gave to the mouth – that Christina always found unsettling, even as it irritated the hell out of her. And to be sure, right then, it irritated her still further that her father, as the world would persist in judging these matters, was inclined to look imposing.
He was not only possessed of a tall, powerful body which, thanks to his repellent ego-mania, he had kept impeccably in shape, but he had always had that happy knack with his clothes. Right then he wore a loose, petrol-green, chenille sweater pulled over his shirtless brown torso and his pale cotton bags hung elegantly loose around his hips and thighs.
And – given that the man was almost completely bald – he had had the good fortune to have been endowed with a shapely, bump-free cranium, the skin on which tanned evenly. He had also always had the sense to keep such hair as he had clipped short. Preening as he was, Christina had grudgingly to admit, he was not the man to delude himself with a few glued strands across his pate. He had never been a member of the Brotherhood of Silly Hair.
These things could not have been said about his smoking partner, whose outward appearance, in most respects, was something reminiscent of Mrs Alfieri’s fat-bellied Mr Five. He was overweight, flight-rumpled and sweaty-looking. His coal-black hair, ineptly layered and straggling limply downwards on to his collar, had managed to recede in a manner unconducive to personal dignity. It had accomplished its retreat to the apex of the crown, while leaving a small, tufted island on the brow as witness to the site of the original hairline. Christina could only glimpse, partially, the upper half of his person, but he wore what appeared to be a tent-like black shirt over an immoderate spread of chest and belly, and his black-framed, bottle-glass spectacles, bound at the hinge with electrician’s tape, were far too small for his face. They had that look of a wedding ring, adopted in youth, on a bloated, middle-aged finger.
‘I’ll go,’ Pam said, and she moved to undo her seat-belt, but just then, as if telepathically impelled to it by the quality of her concern, the men broke up and stubbed out their cigarettes, and gestured hurried partings before returning to their seats.
Her father fastened his seat-belt with a brisk click. Then he smiled at his wife and his daughters.
‘Looks like nice weather down there,’ he said. ‘You’ll have a good time, I think.’
‘But I wish you could stay with us for more of it,’ Pam said. ‘I really wish you didn’t always have to work so hard.’
Their father beamed his pleasure upon her. ‘Adorable girl,’ he said.
He is always happy, Christina reflected, to accept homage for the value of his presence.
‘So who is your fat friend?’ she said, wishing to erase the smile. ‘Does he have a glandular disorder, or does he snack too much?’
‘He’s Father Zachary Levine,’ her father said.
‘Who?’ she said.
‘Father Zachary Levine,’ he said. ‘He’s a Jesuit who works with cut-throats in the ghettos of Jamaica. He’s visiting with his parents who keep a delicatessen in Finsbury Park.’
‘Oh yeah,’ Christina said, wishing she hadn’t asked. And wouldn’t he be, she thought. Wouldn’t the bloated creature just have to be Father Levity Whatsit SJ? And wouldn’t her father just have to be in possession of some morally rank-pulling little scenario like that? Some hyper little slice of somebody else’s biography to offer in return for an honest put-down? He was like a jack-in-the-box, her father. Squash him and he would leap up shouting, ‘Look at me. I’m jumping.’ Furthermore, he was like a witch-detector who could sniff out wacky types.
Christina began at once to choreograph in her mind the fat Jesuit’s context. The aged parents, she decided, would be small and frail as birds. They would be worn with toil, like two little hedge sparrows who have expended their resources on a cuckoo. She envisaged them pausing to dab at rheumy eyes as they bottled sour dill pickles and sliced up kosher pastrami. All the while they would be grieving for the defection of their boy; their clever only son, who had always brought home such golden reports from grade school.
Before long, she had thoroughly satisfied herself with the intensity of her loathing for the fat Jesuit. She despised him. And she despised her father too, for that easy, promiscuous way in which he struck up friendships with strangers. With people like Father Thingummy Whatsit with his outsize shirt and his silly hair and his bag of one-upmanship with regard to his doings in ‘the ghettos of Jamaica’. How come he was a Jesuit, anyway? Had he come to the Spiritual Exercises via the rabbinical school?
Her father would be glad about this, Christina reflected. That’s why he had sounded so jaunty in reply to her. He would be rejoicing in the man’s defection. If you were a serious Catholic, then that was what you were supposed to be glad about. If people forsook their fathers and mothers and defected to the Cross, then you were supposed to consider this a sign of special grace, when really it was just a piece of ordinary treachery. Like in The Merchant of Venice when Shylock’s daughter defected to the courtly dandy and gave her dead mother’s beautiful ring to a monkey.
Christina began, in her imagination, to accuse the fat Jesuit of stealing his mother’s jewellery and flogging it in order to swell the coffers of the Priests’ Training Fund. Or maybe merely in order to acquire for himself one hundred sacks of bagels?
By the time she was disposed to respond to her father, her voice was carefully loaded with disdain.
‘I read about this army officer in a magazine,’ she said. ‘He joined the Jesuits for the discipline. But then he left because all they do these days is watch TV.’
Her father laughed. As he did so, he placed a hand lightly on her upper arm. It produced a sensation which Christina imagined to be something like lockjaw in the ball joint of her shoulder.
‘You have an edge, Chrissie,’ he said. ‘You have your knives out. I guess we are getting closer to your grandmother.’
‘As a matter of fact,’ said her mother’s old friend, as they sat in the Renovated Railway Tea-room, ‘I too am waiting for somebody. I am waiting for Tilly.’
‘Tilly?’ said Alice.
‘My wife,’ he said. ‘She’s shopping for ballet shoes with the girls. We have two little daughters aged seven and six.’ He smiled at Pam and Christina as they sipped at their ginger beer and then again at their mother. ‘But you will know all about little girls and their shoes,’ he said. ‘And the time it can take. Dear me.’
And then the train roared in and got between the tea-room and the sunlight and it screeched and stopped. And Christina saw her father leap nimbly on to the platform, with his leather valise over his shoulder. He was wearing shades, but, even so, she observed, just before he composed his features to engage with the company, a glance so sharp, so inten
se, it was like the quick unsheathing of knives.
‘Joe!’ Alice said, sounding surprised, because the time had passed so quickly and there he was standing behind her. She offered him her cheek as she spoke, but he pointedly tipped her head back and kissed her on the mouth. Christina was all too painfully conscious, through the duration of the kiss, that the beautiful dark boy was watching intently, while the small blond boy kept his eyes to the floor.
‘I see that you are enjoying yourself, Alice,’ her father said at last. ‘Just as I predicted that you would.’
‘Joe,’ her mother said, ‘yes, but Joe. So exciting! Such a thing! You will remember Roland? Dear Roland. My teacher friend from Oxford? Well. Here he is!’
The two men promptly shook hands and said that they remembered each other, from a brief meeting, just once, in Oxford, when Pam was a brand-new baby. A baby whose birth had caused her parents so precipitously to fall in love and forsake all other, greatly to the detriment of the Nice Young Man of whom everyone had been so fond.
‘He’s a headmaster,’ Alice said. She was evidently entertained by the idea. ‘And his school is terrifically okay,’ she said. ‘Absolutely crème de la crème. And it’s round the corner. Eight miles as the crow flies.’
Roland smiled. ‘I’d call it fifteen, Alice,’ he said.
‘Congratulations, Roland,’ the girls’ father said, finding it a little difficult to enter into his wife’s rush of girlish enthusiasm.
‘But the most important thing,’ Alice said, ‘the best bit is that we are all going to see it! All of us. Roland has asked us all to tea. Don’t look at your watch like that, Joe. So kill-joy. He doesn’t mean today. He means tomorrow. Today we are having tea in this idiotic little station caff. Hey, but this was a good idea, Joe. So clever of you to have thought to bring us here.’
‘Now, please,’ Roland said, attempting a little diplomacy. ‘About tomorrow. Absolutely only if it suits. You may well find that you’ve plenty to do.’
‘But of course we’re coming!’ Alice said. ‘Aren’t we, Joe? Of course we’re coming! We wouldn’t miss it for the world.’
‘Alice,’ Roland said, and he couldn’t help laughing, ‘if you will excuse me for just a moment, your husband needs a drink.’ He turned to Joe. ‘What can I get you?’ he said.
‘Absolutely not,’ Joe said, and he made a move from the table towards the counter. ‘I’ll get it myself. Please sit down.’
Christina watched, enjoying the edge of tension. She understood that, in refusing Mr Dent the right to give, her father was passing a message. And the message was not quite friendly. For what can be less friendly than one person’s refusal to place himself in the debt of another?
* * *
And then came Tilly, accompanied. She was slim, pale, translucent and gliding, whereas the two little girls were stocky, robust, corporeal and chattering. They had ruddy cheeks and dark brown eyes and chunky little brown legs. Tilly wore a narrow, grey linen skirt with a long slit up the back. She wore a plaited leather belt and similarly narrow, grey leather shoes with peep-toes and sling-backs. She carried the little girls’ cardigans over her arm, while the girls were busy pulling from carrier-bags pastel-pink knit cross-over tops and pairs of pale pink ballet slippers bound with elastic bands.
‘My dear,’ Roland said, and he rose politely, as did all the males among the party. Joe, who had just returned from the bar, regarded the newcomer with interest.
‘I ran into some friends,’ Roland said. ‘You’ll have heard me mention Alice?’
‘Ah,’ Tilly said, with the slightest hint of meaning. ‘Ah, yes. And I am Gentille.’ She spoke a beautifully modulated English, her voice soft and low.
For Alice, the meeting was evidently pure pleasure. It delighted and entertained her that Roland, who was as English as the West Somerset Steam Railway, should somehow have acquired for himself a French wife whose elegance and hauteur he probably did not notice and whose name he had so absurdly and conveniently anglicized. It also allowed her to exorcize guilt, since, of the two young men who had presented themselves to her before Joe’s coming, Roland had been distinctly the more worthy and the one whom she had the more dramatically short-changed.
Gentille, meanwhile, unlike Alice, was sparing in her smiles. She had heavy-lidded, somewhat Garbo-esque eyes, and a manner sufficiently muted and aloof for Christina to decide that she was cold. She is cold-blooded, like a mermaid doing time on earth, Christina thought. And she has her nice, solid, earthling husband and her two solid little earthling daughters.
But then she has that other child from before; that weird, transparent boy from another element who seems, if anything, more air than water. And he is best friends with exquisite James whom I will love until I die. And her eyes crept again to that object of her desire, the beautiful dark boy, who was so close that it was scarcely to be borne.
Roland’s two little girls, meanwhile, excited by the unexpected company and sensing Joe’s strong predilection for young children, attached themselves to him at once, like two steel pins to a magnet. They put on their ballet shoes for him and chattered excitedly in unison. They turned pirouettes for him on the platform, while he admired them and egged them on. It gave Alice time to observe the little girls and, having done so, she turned to address Roland.
‘Looking at your daughters,’ she said, ‘it’s clear that you have quite absurdly dominant genes.’
She could not help laughing at the ebullient little girls, who were dancing about her husband, colliding merrily, like heated molecules in a pot.
‘See how my skirt goes twirly when I turn round,’ Ellen said.
‘Mine too. Look at me,’ Lydia said.
‘This is called arabesque.’
‘This is called fifth position.’
‘Oh, my,’ Joe said. ‘What exquisite ballerinas.’
Christina noticed that Roland was not a man for feminine display.
‘Ellen. Lydia,’ he said abruptly. ‘Sit down and be quiet. That is quite enough for the time being. Thank you.’
The ballerinas stopped. They wriggled undaunted on to their chairs and contented themselves, instead, with crazy eye-rolling to prompt little bursts of half-smothered giggles.
Next day, Roland came for them at three. He collected them from the old coaching inn where, on the previous evening, Christina had been sufficiently mellowed by love to have succumbed at dinner to a platter of skate in black butter and a measure of puréed parsnip.
The following morning, however, she had refused enticements to participate in family walks and had consumed the time in her bedroom reading back numbers of The Field. In between, she had counted the hours until three. Her anxiety hovered around the question of Jago Rutherford’s whereabouts. Would he or would he not be at Peter’s house that afternoon? The school year, she knew, was over. She had heard the boys say as much. So might he not have packed for home and left?
Roland, regrettably, came alone, so this did not help to enlighten her. She had noticed his arrival at once, because her window overlooked the car park and she leaned out of the window to watch him crunch over the gravel towards the hotel reception. He was wearing the exact same clothes as he had worn the previous day – the identical flecked jumper and faded old beige cords. It gave her pleasure to contemplate the comfortable nature of Roland’s clothing along with the comfortable doggie-largeness of his hands and feet. She liked him for being so comfortable with himself. She knew that, unlike her father, he would never show off; never preen. He would have no need for those things. She thought how fortunate were Peter and those funny, bouncy little girls, to have a person so straight, so unaffected for their male parent.
Christina, at thirteen, had long ago relinquished any serious fantasy that she, like Pam, had been born in enviable and mysterious circumstances – an orfana; a foundling; a changeling; a melodious inmate of the Ospedale della Pietà; a Parisienne protégée of the kindly Miss Clavel. She knew now, beyond all doubting, that she was her mot
her’s daughter and her father’s also. She therefore did not seriously consider the possibility that the man crunching the gravel underfoot as he passed beneath her window could have been her natural father. It was simply as a sort of tribute; as a parody of her own infant self; a mere involuntary throw-back, that she found herself murmuring to the top of Roland’s head:
‘You can be my Nearly Father if you like.’
The Stolen Boy and the Idea of the Objective Correlative
Tea was a disappointment, though its preamble was definitely seductive and its corollary dramatic. The party, coming upon the school by road, wound through dense, light-stippled woods until the foliage gave way to parkland and the great brick structure appeared, clear on a low hillside, its charming conical turrets and tall chimneys throwing a pattern on to the sky.
The main building dated from the first decade of the nineteenth century and had been erected to replace a smaller, Elizabethan structure which, before being gutted by fire, had nestled at the foot of the hill.
Roland and Gentille occupied stately quarters to the right of the house, where their two ground-floor living-rooms, each with wide, low bays, gave on to a formal garden cut into symmetrical quarters by paths. Beyond this were views over parkland, farm and woods. At the back, to Christina’s delight, a pergola ran from the kitchen door to the apple orchard, making a canopy of vine leaves from which hung bunches of tiny, unripe grapes.
‘Tea,’ Roland said hospitably. ‘Come along in.’
For Alice, disappointment lay in the increasing realization that she could not warm to Roland’s wife. She wanted so much to rejoice in her dear friend’s marital circumstances, but Gentille was by nature distancing and seemed to grow more so with the passing of the afternoon.
Juggling Page 10