The Lover

by Amanda Brookfield

  ‘I know you mean to be kind,’ she began slowly, ‘but I would hate to feel…’

  ‘I don’t want anything from you,’ he interrupted, ‘not even friendship, if you’re not prepared to give it. That must be a gift too, or it is nothing.’ He looked quickly away, squinting at the reflection of the sun on the water behind. ‘You haven’t seen my mother have you?’

  ‘Your mother? No, I…’

  ‘She must have wandered off last night or early this morning. I usually hear her, but I’d been drinking.’ He smiled ruefully, causing Frances to feel a sudden leap of pity at the thought of the grim realities of Christmas Day for such an isolated, eccentric pair.

  ‘Would you like me to help look?’ Ashamed now of her outburst, she was eager to make amends. ‘Heavens, but it was freezing last night—’

  ‘Don’t worry. I’m heading home now anyway. I expect she’s there. She usually gets herself back in the end – habit or instinct or something. Doesn’t seem to feel the cold either. As reluctant to wear a coat as a child.’ He stepped past her onto the footbridge.

  ‘Joseph – look, I’m sorry,’ she called. ‘About the garden and so on, I feel such a fool.’

  ‘No need. If you want anything done you have only to ask. I never had much time for your husband, to be honest, but he had an eye for beauty that’s for sure, of the ordered kind, that is.’ He touched the peak of his cap and stepped past her to the bridge, moving briskly, not bothering to steady himself on the side rail.

  Back home Frances found Felix slumped in front of the television eating from a large bag of tortilla chips.

  ‘I was going to cook some lunch.’

  ‘Don’t bother, I’m not hungry.’

  ‘I’m not surprised.’ Frances made a teasing lunge for the bag, but he jerked it out of reach with a grunt of irritation. ‘I’ll make a macaroni cheese – it won’t take long—’

  ‘Don’t bother. I said I’m not hungry. I’m not a kid any more. I’ll eat when I need to.’ He flicked the television off and stamped upstairs to his bedroom, taking his snack with him. He knew he had hurt her, but didn’t care. She barely seemed to notice him these days. It was like she had left the planet. He threw the remainder of the bag of chips into the bin and opened one of the text books he had been assigned to read in the holidays. Too preoccupied to concentrate, his eyes skimmed the words. Not missing his father did not prevent a baffling anger at the fact that he was no longer around. And even the Sally business, once so simple, had grown complicated. The day before, lying on the mattress in the attic after making love, she had wheedled so hard for reassurance, that he felt bullied. Feeling the same silent pressure behind her gaze over the mayhem of breakfast that morning he had deliberately ignored it, wolfing his cereal and saying a hearty farewell to the whole room. Yet looking back on the scene, remembering Sally’s taut, sad face, he felt mean and regretful. Felix dropped his head onto his open book and closed his eyes, wistful suddenly for all the early tremulous uncertainty, when he had had to chisel away at Sally’s fractious outer shell for signs of the softness inside.

  Downstairs Frances set about making macaroni cheese, telling herself it would do for supper. Furious though she was at Felix’s rudeness, she was determined not to make a big issue of it. It was a hard time for both of them, she reasoned, some conflicts were inevitable. Though tempted to bring up the subject of Paul on many occasions, she had mostly resisted, waiting for prompts from Felix himself. Knowing the delicate idiosyncrasies of her own grief, she felt she had little right to probe her son’s. He would open up in time, she told herself, grating cheese so vigorously that yellow crumbs bounced off the plate. Maybe even over a nice meal that night. Feeling an old maternal stab of satisfaction at the sight of the heaped casserole dish, she carefully wrapped the remaining stump of cheddar in Cellophane and stowed it in the fridge.

  But when Felix emerged from his room it was to tell her that he was catching the bus into Hexford to meet up with old schoolfriends. Dismayed, but not wanting to appear nagging, Frances waved him off with a show of nonchalance. She picked at the macaroni cheese alone, watching Harrison Ford seduce a girl young enough to be his granddaughter and wondering when, if ever, the pulse of normality might return to everyday life.

  Chapter Fourteen

  It was Sally who found Mrs Brackman. Or rather Sheba, rootling along the bank in the semi-darkness of late afternoon. She was floating face down, her straggly grey hair matted round the back of her neck, her white nightdress ballooning round her thin, veiny thighs. Sally recognised her at once, because of the hair and white nightie, and the purple roots of blood in the lower calves. Tugging at Sheba’s lead, repulsed at the animal’s eager curiosity, she allowed herself only one glance at the corpse before backing away. She moved slowly, taking big steps, her heels slipping in the soft mud.

  Although the Brackmans’ cottage was probably closer, Sally’s instincts directed her back up to the road home. Darkness was falling fast and all was silent apart from the gentle scraping of Sheba’s claws on the road. She walked as quickly as she could¸ soundless on her rubber soles, aware that in spite of her thin jacket and the increasing cold she was sweating. The gruesome image of her discovery floated alongside, adding such urgency to her stride that when she got to the phone box at the fork in the lane she almost passed it without stopping. Fingers trembling, she dialled not 999 but 192, in order to get the Brackman phone number. She dropped her ten-pence piece twice before managing to steer it into the slot. ‘Mr Brackman, it’s Sally…your mother is…I’m sorry, but I’ve just seen her…in the river,’ she stammered, when Joseph answered the phone.

  ‘Under the old stone bridge next to Leybourne Lane. I’m so sorry.’ Unable to manage any more she dropped the receiver and set off at a run for home.

  At the sight of her family, ranged cosily round a three-dimensional counter game that somebody had given somebody the day before, Sally burst out crying and couldn’t stop. It was several minutes before the cause of her hysteria was understood. There followed a flurry of telephone calls and soothing attentions. She was given a half inch of brandy and tucked up on the sofa like an invalid. When the sobs kept on coming, as irrepressible and persistent as hiccoughs, they explained it was shock and would ease with time. But Sally, shaking and shivering till her whole body ached, knew that it was more and worse; that finding Mrs Brackman’s corpse in such a place at such a time had violated more than her peace of mind. The affair with Felix was over. Their coupling in the attic had sorted nothing. At breakfast he had looked not only sheepish, but ashamed. A little repulsed, even. She had gone to the bridge for comfort. Stumbling on old Mrs Brackman merely confirmed that there was none to be had, ever again about anything.

  After an hour or so, Libby pressed her palm along her daughter’s forehead and pronounced her ill. So ill that Dr Leigham was summoned from a family game of charades to administer reassurance and antibiotics. Sally, who knew that she was indeed sick, but on the inside where no medicines could reach her, submitted to each new development with a meekness that made her parents afraid. Deep inside some part of her relished being consigned to the role of patient, for the excuse it gave for withdrawal and passivity, for the way it allowed her father to bundle her in his arms and gently carry her to bed. ‘Can’t have you ill, little one, can we?’ he murmured, nuzzling her hair with his nose, staggering a little under her weight at the turn in the stairs.

  *

  The old adage that other people’s woes offered the best distraction from one’s own was certainly proven in Frances’s case during the course of the next few days. Sally ran such a high temperature that Libby refused to leave her side. No one was allowed to visit, not even Felix, who kindly offered to drop round with some CDs and a few music magazines. Instead of the promised gentle introduction to the challenging complexities of retailing, Frances ended up manning Libby’s shop almost entirely on her own, with a telephone as the only lifeline for crises over Switch cards, the eccentricities of t
he till and guessing prices for the innumerable objects that had no tag.

  Addressing the problem of helping Joseph Brackman, as Frances felt duty bound to do, was equally taxing. Having been at pains to keep him at arm’s length, she was only too aware of the irony of finding herself on the doorstep of his cottage, thermos of soup and box of chocolates in hand, playing a role she had herself so recently despised. That it was the right course of action to take, however, she had little doubt. Not just because of the rules of common decency, but also because, with hindsight, she recognised the integral role played by the outside world in jolting her out of the black self-indulgence of her own unhappiness.

  It took several knocks to summon Joseph to the door. He looked dazed with shock, chalky-faced, the scar a purple worm.

  ‘I should have found her,’ he murmured, over and over again, while Frances made tea and unscrewed the lid of the half bottle of brandy in her coat pocket.

  ‘It wasn’t your fault.’

  ‘Hardly an Ophelia, but beautiful in her way, with the darkness and the silver moon. Hardly an Ophelia, but beautiful,’ he repeated to himself, as if rehearsing refrains for the written page.

  ‘It wasn’t your fault,’ Frances said again, handing him a drink and being vividly transported back to the early days of her own grief, when no consolations had any effect, and how she had needed to hear them all the same. Seeing the rawness of his emotions, the way he clumsily gulped the drink, she experienced a small stab of relief at how far she had moved on.

  While less charitable members of the community murmured that Joseph Brackman’s loss constituted perhaps the least harrowing of options from the spectrum of possibilities for human bereavement, Frances, after a couple of visits to the cottage, began to see that there was nothing easy about it at all. Not just because of the macabre circumstances of the old lady’s death and Joseph’s sense of guilt, but because of suddenly finding himself relieved of a role to which he had grown deeply accustomed. The millstone of a dependent mother had had its advantages, she realised, for the structure it imposed on his existence, for the pretext it gave for social isolation. While never openly addressing such issues himself, Joseph began to reveal an almost paranoic fear of being forced to exchange the cottage for one of the shoe-box flats on the new Leybourne estate. Frances reassured him on the matter as best she could, explaining that bureaucracies could take years to come up with such initiatives and that there were a hundred ways to resist them when they did.

  In the midst of these dramas, Felix announced his intention to return early for the spring term. Ever since Christmas Day he had been so moody and irritable, so impervious to every effort at communication, that Frances was almost relieved to see him go. ‘I don’t know if he’s missing his father or suffering under an avalanche of hormones,’ she told Joseph, when she visited the cottage a couple of days after Mrs Brackman’s funeral, resorting to the subject in a somewhat desperate bid to engage his interest. Recently he had seemed calmer, but in a tight, deeply controlled manner that lacked conviction. ‘It has crossed my mind that my son’s real reason for returning to Sussex so early could be a fermenting student love affair – mothers are always the last to know these things.’

  Joseph, sitting nursing a mug of tea at his kitchen table, let out a dry laugh. ‘The young Taverner girl won’t like it if he is. The pair of them have been carrying on for months in nooks and crannies along the river.’

  Astonished both at the lucidity and content of this response, Frances turned slowly from the sink where she had been working through a stack of dirty dishes. ‘And which young Taverner girl would that be, Joseph?’

  ‘The one that found Mother, poor creature…is she still running a fever?’

  ‘She’s much better, I believe,’ Frances replied, shaking her head in wonder at having stumbled upon the cause of Felix’s moodiness and debating what if anything to do about it. She returned her hands to the soapy water, pressing them palms down on the bottom of the old porcelain bowl, noting the thousands of hairline cracks crisscrossing its edges. While aware that she ought to disapprove, she felt instead a well of tenderness. She had met her own first serious boyfriend at fifteen. And Sally could do worse than Felix, who underneath his moods, was sensible and kind.

  When she got back home, she reached for the phone with the intention of telling Libby, but changed her mind. Although Sally was well enough to cope with the now intermittent start to the school term and her own hours in the shop had been cut to a more reasonable three-day week, Libby was still fairly fraught. It would be unkind to burden her with further worries, Frances told herself, especially if the romance turned out to be over and done with, or merely the imaginings of a disturbed mind.

  Still musing upon the possibilities, she wandered up to Paul’s study with the intention of having a final, thorough look for the missing share certificate. Hugo Gerard had mentioned it again in a recent communication about dividends, his own tidy mind clearly still irritated by its disappearance. Kneeling down to pull open the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet, her eye was caught by several inches of paper hanging out of the back of the fax machine.

  Dear Friend December 29

  Thank you for your reply. I would so like to meet you. It will be an ordeal I know, if you feel half the timidity I do. But some sixth sense tells me our apprehensions will slip away fast. And if they don’t, no harm will have been done. Please call me to arrange a time. Since we have not exchanged photos, red roses in our lapels will have to do. My telephone number is: 01483 6539921. Call soon.

  Yours hopefully,

  James Harcourt

  Frances gently tore the piece of paper from the machine and read it again, several times, her heart thumping inside her rib cage. After nervously checking for faxes in the days immediately after Felix’s alarming good turn on Boxing Day morning and finding nothing, she had stopped bothering. With so much going on in the meantime it had taken little effort to put the matter to the back of her mind.

  The fax had been sitting unattended for over a week, Frances realised now, glancing in horror at the date and then promptly telling herself that this was a sign that the whole enterprise was never meant to be, that James Harcourt would have long since followed up on other infinitely more promising replies. She screwed the paper into a ball with the intention of dropping it into the bin, only to find when she got back downstairs that it was still clasped in the palm of her hand.

  Chapter Fifteen

  At the sight of Felix’s mother, half-way up a stepladder seeing to a display on a top shelf, Sally was tempted to turn and run out of the shop. But the little bell above the door had already announced her presence and Frances was smiling hello and asking how she was. Sally responded as politely as she could, observing in spite of her own preoccupations, that Mrs Copeland was looking better than she had ever seen her before. Stunning in fact. Her hair was pinned to the back of her head in a loose, sweeping bun, showing off delicate silver earrings and the fine strong line of her jaw. She was wearing make-up too, not much, but enough to enhance the hazel-brown of her eyes and the generous outline of her lips. ‘You look nice,’ she remarked shyly.

  ‘Thank you Sally and so do you,’ replied Frances a little briskly, stepping off the ladder and wiping a stray wisp of hair from her forehead with the back of her hand. Having endured quite a grilling from Libby, she was in no mood to confess her imminent blind date with James Harcourt to her daughter as well. ‘You had everybody rather worried. It’s lovely to see you looking so well again.’ She beamed, feeling a stab of fondness for Felix and wishing she could come right out and ask the girl whether Joseph’s claims about the pair of them were true.

  Sally blushed, scowling at the compliment. She had been enduring similar remarks from teachers all day at school. That she looked healthier seemed to her to be a fact of the cruellest irony and one that arose from a new and frenzied appetite for food, confectionery in particular. Eating lifted her spirits, providing the only flimsy respite sh
e had yet discovered for the misery still bubbling inside. While not officially splitting, she had barely glimpsed Felix before he scuttled back to university. It was the worst of all worlds, nothing resolved, but not much room for hope either. To make matters worse, her old skinny self was disappearing, drowning in a new, robustly fleshed profile that she barely recognised. Her once flat breasts were beginning to push into the creases of her bra, while her school skirt was so tight she had left the top button undone, hiding it under the hem of her jumper. Even her feet had grown. In fact the only reason she was in the shop was because of a promised expedition with her mother to go in search of new shoes.

  Struck suddenly by how alike Felix and his mother were, Sally’s blush deepened. They even had the same quizzical look in their eyebrows, like they were eager for a reason to smile. It was a relief to see her own mother emerging from the store room, winding a scarf round her neck and pulling on gloves.

  ‘There you are.’ Libby kissed Sally fondly on the forehead. ‘Shall we go darling? Don’t worry Frances, I’ll be back to do the daily tally and lock up. Couldn’t have you being late tonight, could we?’ She grinned conspiratorially, making her new employee wish, for by no means the first time, that she had kept her date with James Harcourt to herself. Though Frances knew Libby meant well, there was something a little too eager about her attitude, as if she found the whole scenario entertaining. But she had been immensely supportive too, she reminded herself, remembering Libby’s thoughtful eagerness to dispel any fears about such a bold move being in any way premature or disloyal.

  By the time Libby returned to relieve her of her duties, Frances’s apprehension about the approaching evening had turned to sheer terror. It was insanity. Unnecessary torture. Far better to return to the empty but familiar surroundings of her home, to kick off her shoes and drift through another evening alone. Lonely and dishevelled maybe, but in the bliss of undemanding privacy. Attempting to re-do her lipstick in the rear-view mirror of the car, her hand trembled so much she had to give up, smoothing the colour out with the tip of her index finger instead. Putting on the inside light, she scrutinised the map for perhaps the tenth time, tracing the route down yellow and red lines to the small dark circle representing the town in which they had agreed to meet. Half-way between his home and hers, neutral territory, joked James Harcourt, his voice sounding – so she had thought at the time and reminded herself on many occasions since – pleasingly warm and rich. In the glove compartment of the car, its stem carefully wrapped in silver foil, sat a single red rose. She had bought it from the florists the day before, intending just to buy the one flower, but ending up shelling out almost ten pounds for a bunch of six instead. Not because she had wanted a vaseful for the hall table, but out of a momentary panic at the sheer ostentatiousness of buying only one, dreading the look of enquiry it might prompt from the salesgirl.