by Unknown
‘She says she was attacked by cows.’ Adrian listened carefully to Bea, then added, ‘Well, not attacked exactly. Menaced.’
‘Menaced?’ Frank stood up painfully. ‘Give me the phone, please.’ Adrian slipped easily out of reach so that Frank had to follow him round the room with his hand out like a child trying to get his toy back. ‘Stop messing about.’
‘A whole herd?’ said Adrian. ‘They can be quite dangerous if they have calves with them. Did they have calves with them, Bea?’
Frank cornered him by the coffee table but Adrian jumped over it, then trampled along the duvet on the couch. At the bookcase in the alcove Frank nearly had him but Adrian put his hand up to warn him to stop. This was no time for silly games.
‘Bullocks,’ said Adrian. ‘Bullocks and cows maybe. They turned nasty so she had to escape into the river. Which is where she is now. They won’t let her get out.’
‘And what does she want me to do about it?’
‘Frank says, “And what do you want me to do about it?”’ Adrian listened some more and said nothing.
‘Well?’ said Frank.
Adrian walked calmly to Frank’s desk and sat down. He set himself off on slow revolutions on Frank’s chair, using the table leg to maintain momentum.
Frank saw that he had the phone in his lap. ‘Adrian, what in God’s name is going on?’
Adrian stuck his foot out and brought his orbits to an end. ‘I’m just waiting for her to reach the shallow bit.’
Frank closed his eyes and tried to gather his thoughts. Something he didn’t understand was happening to his wife.
Faintly, Bea’s voice called Adrian’s name.
Frank shook his head, put his fingertips into his trouser pockets and adopted what he assumed was an expression of piercing insight but which reminded Adrian of the bewildered and worn-out old bull in a toreo he’d once seen on the television in Spain.
‘Bea, Frank wants to know what on earth you’re doing all the way over in Grantchester and also, what’s for supper?’
His eyes roved the room as he followed the originality of her logic. He relayed the information back to Frank. ‘It was beautiful . . . it was warm . . . soon summer will be gone . . . spaghetti.’
‘And kindly ask whether I am to bring you, your sister and her friends to Grantchester too,’ said Frank, hands on hips, vexation, indignation, consternation and many other kinds of ‘ation’ making him feel suddenly alive and upright for the first time that day.
‘We’re all coming to get you,’ Adrian told Bea. ‘Oh, and Bea?’ he added. ‘Would you rather be stupider than you look, or look stupider than you are?’
Adrian listened, then handed Frank the phone. He headed for the door.
‘Bea would rather look stupider than she is,’ he said. ‘And her battery’s going.’
Cow
WAIST-DEEP IN river water and fully clothed, Bea held her phone clear with one hand and clutched at reeds with the other. Her left foot succumbed further to the river bed’s muddy embrace while the current coiled around her other leg like rope. She lurched towards a thicker clump of bulrushes near the bank and felt her long skirt float out behind her. She thought she could hear a weir somewhere, roaring out of sight, round the bend.
All at once the situation seemed serious and sad, as if she were hearing the story from someone else: Woman Found in River. Things could change and slip out of control so fast. She shouldn’t have sounded calm and cheery on the phone to Adrian. ‘You’re so calm,’ people always said to her. But she didn’t feel calm very much of the time. A bit stunned perhaps, but not calm. She managed to take another step forward and the river’s drag on her legs lessened.
Those bastard cows were still looking at her. A gang of five or six crowded at the bank by the wooden footbridge, their heavy-skulled heads blowing and puffing. One or two had got as far as placing hooves into the steep, broken sides of the water’s edge. Cows Drown Woman. What bovine slight or trespass could she possibly be guilty of? She looked at the swirling brown eddies of water and realised she might have to swim upstream in order to get out. Perhaps if she headed for the middle, the current would be weaker. She had seen people swimming here, she was sure of it. To her right, a mass of bright reeds flowed past like green snakes.
‘Are you all right?’
On the bank behind the press of cows, a young woman ran slowly on the spot. Tiny black pumas leapt up the tongues of her shoes.
‘I’m fine,’ said Bea with her hapless, sexy smile. She was thinking she needed a new word. ‘Fine’ didn’t quite do it these days.
The woman on the bank had the artless, honest face of the very physically fit. Nike was emblazoned on her chest. Her body seemed impatient to get on with the running but her head remained turned towards the odd sight of this handsome blonde woman, fully clothed and up to her breasts in the river. ‘You sure?’
No. She wasn’t quite herself; had the sense that she had become tiny and remote, vanishing down the wrong end of a telescope, and that the last few years had been a long dry spell, a lonely crawl through desert and scrub, and that she was tired and desperately thirsty and in truth she did not know how she had ended up in the river except that she felt something bad was about to happen and tried to create her own ending rather than have one happen to her. A new and powerful current tugged at her lower legs. She hoped Nike saw the scene for what it was: a woman getting out of her depth.
‘I’m afraid of the cows.’
‘They won’t hurt you. They’re just curious.’
‘Well actually,’ Bea pushed the mobile phone down into her cleavage and braced herself against the current, ‘actually they kill five people a year. Women mainly. Women walking dogs.’ Sludge oozed up between her toes and something nibbled her knee. The main cow chewed at her insolently. This cow was definitely giving her evils, as Laura would say. A long tongue, like a tentacle, swiped drool from its aqueous nose. Nike flapped her arms at them.
‘Shoo!’ she shouted, then delivered a volley of curses.
‘Watch out for that big buttery-looking one,’ warned Bea. ‘It encouraged the others.’
‘Get out of it!’
The cows looked sheepish. They blew down their noses and shuffled off, bumping their bony angles and heavy sides against each other, cleft hooves trip-trapping across the bridge. They fell into single file and ambled along the path that led towards the far meadow.
Bea pushed forward towards the bank, where the water was warm, and here, at the shallow margins, the sludge between her toes was rather pleasant in a forbidden, ‘Don’t do that, Bea, it’s not nice’ kind of a way. She beamed up at Nike, who offered her hand and helped her up through the hoof-pocked mud. Tussocky grass spiked at her ankles and feet.
‘Wave your arms around and swear your head off. My dad told me that.’
Bea glanced down at the swags and pleats of her mud-slicked skirt. She looked odd, she knew, alien and primordial. Then the fish clambered out of the swamps and the world was changed for ever. Her father’s voice, as they searched for fossils among the rocks and chalk of Hastings beach, her hand in his. She flicked a creature off her calf, remembered Patrick’s hot, angry grip on her wrist on this very bank two months ago, his voice clear in her ear: I’ve never forgotten you and I never will.
‘I’ll walk back with you if you like,’ offered Nike, beginning to jog on the spot again. ‘Which way are you going?’
‘Really, I’m fine. Thank you for your help.’
Bea wished her gone now, unsure how to handle the kindness. She looked towards the line of willows at the turn of the river. The cows grazed peacefully. Seed heads and butterflies spun and danced in the soft light.
‘Sure?’
‘Yes, honestly,’ she said, thinking how rare it was to have an adult to help. She had Wanda of course, although she couldn’t really afford her and didn’t truly need her, the house was so small. But without Wanda, cheerful curator of objects and clutter, converter of creases to
flawless expanse, she sometimes thought it would be hard to come home after work. Wanda was all Flash and muscle, she was Pledge and sparkle, and if it weren’t for Wanda, Bea suspected that the jumble and chaos of life in Oyster Row would rise up and close over her head. Her phone fell from her cleavage as she wiped at the mud on her shins. ‘I phoned my husband just before you came.’
Nike nodded. She looked up the path and shook her arms and wrists.
Yes, thought Bea, as she flicked away some dark, wriggling things that were inching across her chest. Husband. Oh, yes. She tried the word on for size. Hus-band. For better, for worse. My husband. ‘My husband is on his way.’ She froofed her curls into shape and thought of the other husband, the one that wasn’t hers but someone else’s, the one she had given the best ten years of her life to, the husband called Patrick not Frank. They’d said goodbye, goodbye again, finally, one last time, two months ago in buttercups and clover, not far from this very spot.
‘Well, that’s all right then.’ Nike was waving goodbye and moving down the path at a slow jog.
‘Yes, goodbye!’ called Bea, waving. ‘And thank you for . . .’
But she was gone, head bobbing, narrow, upright body swaying into the light, covering the length of a child with each easy stride, putting distance between herself and the middle-aged river woman who had climbed out of the water and on to the bank.
Fetch
FRANK MARCHED into the kitchen and put the phone on its charger. Coffee spluttered on the stove and the boiler whumped into life. A blast had killed sixty-four in Baghdad and Frank despaired at Bea’s flagrant waste where the hot-water timer was concerned. It was half past five. Who was going to be having a bath at this hour? The fighting in Afghanistan is extraordinarily intense. The battles are close and personal and hand-to-hand. Unless more troops— Frank said, ‘Bloody hell,’ and silenced the radio with a stab of his finger. Close and personal. He knew what that meant. That meant bayonets. What in God’s name were they doing bayoneting the enemy in the desert in the twenty-first century?
He went to the foot of the stairs and shouted up at Laura and her friends. He knew they were in because he could hear the thudding of their moronic music through the ceiling. Earlier he had heard their shrieks and thumps.
Here he was, he thought, staring up at the landing, herding teenagers at the age of fifty, and not a play or a script sold in five long years. The stairs did their mean and narrow rodent yawn back down at him, silent witness to the night before. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. It was supposed to be a wide and sweeping staircase in marble and mahogany. It was supposed to be a glorious gleaming glide from one pinnacle of literary achievement to the next.
‘Laura, I’m going to fetch your aunt!’ he bellowed, climbing halfway up, where he was startled to find his niece’s head hanging upside down in the gloom over the landing banister. Her hair dangled, and her mouth split into a lunatic grin. Her tongue, bright purple from some toxic confection she had been drinking, protruded from between stained and haphazard teeth.
‘Cool.’
Frank sighed. ‘Laura, you should probably come with me.’ He hesitated, and saw the others lurking and listening. ‘Don’t your friends have to go home now?’
‘Huh?’ Laura braced herself on the bottom of the banisters and raised her lower body up in the air until she was perpendicular. Her yellow top fell over her head. Her hair fanned. Frank looked away.
‘Laura, get down. You’ll have an accident like your aunt.’
‘Can my friends come, Frank? Please? They’re allowed.’
Laura’s friends called, ‘Hello, Noddy!’ and collapsed on to the carpet in hysterics. Laura rolled on top of Rachel and Chanel thumped Rachel’s backside hard with a cushion. Laura said, ‘We’re doing homework.’
‘Come on, Bea’s stuck in the river.’ Frank turned resolutely around and went downstairs shouting for Adrian and thinking it was absolutely preposterous that he should be left in charge of all these damned children. Here he was, trying to do the hardest thing, to write, to create a work of genius, and yet more often than not he spent half his day hanging about looking after other people’s offspring. Frank took in a deep breath of righteous indignation. Adrian and Laura weren’t even his flesh and blood, they belonged to Bea’s sister, Katharine. The others upstairs, whatever their names were, well heaven knows who they belonged to. Frank let out a heartfelt sigh. Where the hell were the mothers, for God’s sake?
‘Wait for us!’ called Laura.
The girls came downstairs in every possible way but normally. He wondered whether their school, Colgate Community College, might ever consider it sensible to teach them some Trollope or Rachmaninov every once in a while, something they didn’t know about, instead of all this Media Studies and Sex and Relationships nonsense. Probably not. Education was rendering the younger generation quite incapable of serious thought. Of course, if grammar schools existed such as the one that rescued him from a lower-middle-class background of cultural and intellectual poverty, things might be different. He despaired sometimes, he really did.
Adrian nudged him and said, ‘Er,’ looking pointedly at Frank’s head.
‘Yes, Adrian? Any chance of some language, child? You know, words, a phrase? Push the boat out perhaps and try a whole sentence? Hmm?’
‘The nodding,’ murmured Adrian. ‘You’re doing it again.’
The girls pushed each other into the coat pegs and ran back upstairs to the bathroom. Then there were several minutes of footwear confusion, followed by a tedious conversation in which Frank said, ‘You’re not going out like that, are you?’ and they said, ‘Like what?’ before they finally all spilled out into the front garden.
A hooded boy appeared from nowhere on a bicycle and accompanied them down the street, keeping his front wheel rampant the whole way and hawking up phlegm whenever the conversation, such as it was, dried up. Rachel and Chanel swooped and swerved round him while Laura trotted on the pavement saying, ‘Oh shame, man’ and ‘Oh my days, I, like, don’t believe it.’
Adrian said to Frank, ‘Do you like my sweatshirt?’ for the tenth time.
It took a while to find Bea’s car, which was parked round the corner near the flyover. By the time Frank had bundled the teenagers into it, negotiated his way through the Cambridge rush hour and endured their bawdy clamour, he was very nearly beside himself with fury. Here was another day frittered away and precious little achieved.
When they reached Grantchester Meadows, the children ran from the car before he had time to ease himself from the driving seat. He shouted after them to wait and was about to bellow dire warnings of what would follow if they didn’t do as he said, but instead he rested for a moment against the warm bonnet of the car. The sun was gentle on his face, the scent of apples and beer filled the air and from the garden of the pub came the buzz of early-evening drinkers. He had forgotten. He should get out more. How pleasant to be in the Meadows on a late-September afternoon. As he began to walk, he felt the weight on his shoulders lift, the pain in his back ease a little. The trouble was, since his last birthday, a leaden dread had settled inside him. It made him snap at the children and droop at the shoulders when he walked. The dread weighed heavier each time he read the words ‘bright young talent’, ‘extraordinary promise’ or ‘playwright of the year’. It kept his eyes to the ground when he walked, like now, and it beat out a refrain to the rhythm of his feet on the path. ‘Your best is past. There’s no more to come . . .’ Enter Wanda.
Frank paused and looked about him. No sign of the children or of Bea. How typical of them all to disappear. He turned and began walking back to the car. He would call Bea’s phone from the pub and wait for them all there, and anyway, he really could murder a drink. Now Wanda was a woman who could hold her drink. Bea used to be able to hold her drink, but all of a sudden, quite recently, she couldn’t. Wanda, though, my God, she could knock back the vodka like it was water. And Wanda was very calming where the writing was concerned. She to
ld him that her father was still writing when he died at the age of eighty-three (which, as Bea pointed out, meant that Wanda’s father was in his sixties when Wanda was born). Frank flicked away that thought with a shake of his head. What about a screenplay set in communist Poland? A woman in the secret police falls in love with a much older dissident writer. Frank quickened his step and tugged at his cuffs. Close and Personal, he could call it. Thank God for Wanda. The ideas were coming thick and fast now. He should walk more often. He would phone his agent tomorrow and tell him all about it. He felt suddenly better. Last night had been a wake-up call, a kind of ghastly sleepwalk or waking dream. It was a warning not to neglect his creative impulse, a sign that he must take his work more seriously. This nonsense of Bea’s and the children’s had to stop. He would make himself unavailable for as long as it took to complete the script.
He heard shouting and looked back. The girls sprang through the grass like puppies, shedding shoes as they went. Adrian ran large circles round them, chasing first one and then another. The willows and chestnuts burned gold and red and the sun was low. Overhead, the sky stretched away, a rippled sea of pink and blue. His throat ached and the view blurred. He would have loved a son.
Adrian swerved inches from him, panting and bounding over waist-high grass.
‘Stop larking about,’ snapped Frank. ‘And just remember that we’re looking for your aunt.’
Love
FRANK DIDN’T have to walk very far before he heard the children calling and laughing and he saw Bea walking slowly towards him. Back-lit by the sun, the shape of her skull was silhouetted so precisely in its halo of hair that he could feel the shape of it in the palm of his hand.
‘I’m a bit wet,’ she said when they reached each other.
He looked at the space around her.
‘Where are the cows?’ he asked. ‘The stampede?’