‘I might,’ she said. ‘You never know.’
‘And what about work, have the offers been flooding in after your triumph?’
‘It’s good, I can be as busy as I want to be.’ She thought she had better proffer some unsolicited information to keep interrogation, so to speak, at bay. ‘We’ve been invited to do a short season at the Parade on the Park, and if that’s not smart I don’t know what is.’
‘What fun!’
Andrew, who had been gazing at his daughter throughout this conversation, leaned forward.
‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘where are you these days?’
Stella’s heart lurched. In that question she heard his uncertainty, his instinctive, fumbling feeling of the way, like the hands of a blind person on her face. He knew something, but could no longer recognise what it was.
Mary topped up the coffee, eyes lowered, not intervening.
‘Well,’ said Stella, ‘I’m still living in London. Though I must say after seeing George’s new place I’m tempted for the first time by the idea of moving out. We’ve finished the West End run, so I’m taking stock.’
‘We’re going to Shanghai,’ said Andrew. ‘I’m taking some of the boys.’
‘Are you?’ Stella kept her eyes on his face. ‘When will you go?’
‘At the end of term.’
‘It’s something we’ve always wanted to do,’ said Mary carefully. ‘But whether it will come off or not is anybody’s guess.’
Stella was caught in the cobweb of their gentle conspiracy. ‘It sounds like the trip of a lifetime. Can I come?’
‘No children allowed,’ said Andrew. ‘Positively no children. Grown-ups only, I’m afraid.’
Even if she’d been tempted to take issue with this contradiction, her mouth was stopped by her mother’s first direct, warning look.
‘Dad, you’re preaching to the converted,’ she said, and left it at that.
‘How do you find the brood over at Bells?’ asked Mary.
‘I’ve only seen Zoe so far. She’s seems great, but what do I know? Brian’s gone to spring the others from jankers for the day.’
‘That reminds me, I’ve got some things for them to take back. I’d go and get them right now while I think of it.’
As she left the room, Andrew smiled at Stella. ‘Are we having boys for lunch, then?’
It was an old joke, and her father in turn sounded so much like his old self that for a split second she was disorientated. But with her laugh, his smile faded, and he leaned forward once more with a frown.
‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘where exactly are you these days?’
Driving back to Bells she thought that this was worse than a bereavement. Worse because her father was still alive but lost to them. Not gone, as the pious hoped, to a better place, but trapped in one that was just out of reach. The fact that his old self was still not quite obliterated, that from time to time it showed itself and pressed its hands, like a mime artist, to the invisible barrier, made it still harder to bear.
She thought: I am about to bring a child into the world who will know its grandfather as a mad old man. But children accepted such things, didn’t they? And new life was hopeful, a stake in the future. It would make Mary happy.
Everything depended on everything else.
They spent a nice day. A day in which Stella strove, for once, to be passive and allow herself to be carried along, to achieve a sense of where she stood in this pattern of family life. She was glad, now, that she had said nothing to George the day before. She wasn’t yet ready, nor fully at ease with her decision. There were other and more important considerations than telling her sister. She had first to talk to herself.
The roast pork and apple sauce, the fresh raspberry trifle and ice cream, and the wonderfully crusty Cheddar cheese, were consumed, washed down by two bottles of Brian’s special-offer New World Shiraz. The two older children were at first hyper and loquacious, showing off for Stella’s benefit and drinking (though not finishing) French lager straight from the stubby. Under the influence of good food and grown-up conversation they reverted to type and retreated, when coffee appeared, to sprawl on the sofa and watch Beauty and the Beast with Zoe.
Brian had a glass of port on the strength of not having to make the return trip at six o’clock.
‘The other side’s turn,’ he explained. ‘I’ve done my bit.’
It was half-past three when they left the table and Brian declared that they should all stir their stumps and take the kite out on to the hill. George said it was only him who wanted to fly the kite, Zoe was too young for it and Kirsty and Mark too old: Brian replied that okay, he would fly it and the rest of them could watch. Normally Stella would have resisted these overbearing tactics and persuaded George to stay in, with loose talk, more wine, the Sunday supplements and an old musical. Today she acquiesced, with the result that the others were less mutinous than they might otherwise have been.
They went out of Bells Yard in the opposite direction from the one she and George had taken the previous day, up a Tiggywinkle thread of footpath that wound diagonally across the hill overlooking the village, with Brian piggy-backing Zoe in the lead, she accompanying George who carried the seagull-kite, and Kirsty and Mark bringing up the rear.
Brian called a halt at a point where the hill shelved and the path levelled out for a few hundred yards with a broad shoulder of grass on either side. On the crest above them stood a small mined building, like a tor.
Brian got the kite into the air and they took turns at flying it, feeling the thrilling tug of the wind, making the seagull climb, turn and swoop. Each of them felt they were doing it for someone else, making a present of their skill. Watching the kite bound them together, they ceased to be a slightly fractious and unwilling post-prandial rabble and became a group, a team, all eyes fixed on the sky.
Remember this, she thought.
Everything depends on everything else.
It was at about eight o’clock when she was only halfway home that Stella began to feel tired. Not pleasantly sleepy, but as though her blood had turned to lead. She pulled into a garage and bought a bar of chocolate which she ate there and then, and almost immediately afterwards fell asleep. When she woke she was startled by her surroundings – the lights, the other cars, a man in a leather jacket peering at her from beside the pumps – and also by the length of time she had slept: it felt like hours and had been only fifteen minutes.
The nap stopped her eyelids drooping but the aching exhaustion remained. Crawling into London in the slow stream of Sunday night red tail-lights she had to exert tremendous concentration to keep going, to co-ordinate the usually unconscious small motions of driving, to read signs and judge distances. When she finally reached the sanctuary of her flat she was trembling with fatigue and went to lie on the bed, with her coat still on. Being there in her own surroundings, safe at last, she reminded herself that she was, after all, pregnant, and that perhaps this was to be expected.
When she woke, it was to a dull pain in her lower stomach and back, which instinctively drove her to the lavatory. By now she was shivering convulsively, her teeth were chattering and her hands, clutching her coat round her as she sat there, were blue and white.
The baby, what there was of it, fell out of her with terrifying ease, like so much waste material voided. As it poured from her one pain ended and another began. She sat hunched with her fingers pressed to her eyes, waiting for it to be over, praying for it to end: the sound and the sensation of loss . . . of losing it.
It didn’t take long, a couple of minutes. She rose slowly, with one hand braced on the wall, and wiped herself. She yearned for a bath but retained some long-ago warning about hot water, that she might faint, or haemorrhage. She tried not to look down as she lowered the lavatory lid, but could not avoid a glimpse of the dark matter, part liquid, part solid, that had only hours earlier been new life, the focus of so much. Fiercely, she pulled the plug and listened to it swirl and suck away. Swe
ating and freezing she sat on the floor for a couple of minutes until the cistern filled, and then flushed again.
She couldn’t bear to check a second time. She had to do something normal. Unsteadily she walked into the living room, pressed ‘Play’ on the answering machine and lay down stiffly on the chaise longue, her eyes closed.
‘Stella, it’s me, Robert. Please let me see you. Please let’s talk. Everything’s changed. We may not have the right stuff for a sensible partnership, but I believe we could have love, and that’s all you need, some say. Please listen to this. I love you. Don’t ring me at home, I’ll call again. ’Bye. Goodbye? Au revoir.’
Don’t ring me at home. So not quite everything had changed, then. Not for him.
Everything depended on everything else.
No right stuff. No love. No baby. She’d lost it.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
‘. . . rights inherent and inalienable,
among which are the preservation of life, and liberty,
and the pursuit of happiness’
—President Thomas Jefferson, Declaration of Independence
Spencer 1946
Afterwards, when people said ‘during the war’ Spencer got two images in his head, and they weren’t exactly of combat but of two enclosed spaces. The narrow, pulsating metal cylinder of the P–51, in which his body fizzed with adrenalin and his mind was diamond-bright and clear; and the tranquil domestic interior of the Ransoms’ cottage where every response was muffled by secrecy and even sensation itself was ambivalent. In the first he looked down on a physical world made simple by speed and distance. The stillness of the second had afforded an altogether different view – the dim, uncharted landscape of the mind.
When the war ended, the impression he retained of that time and those places was like the memory of a dream, imperfectly understood but bleeding its colours into the rest of his life. The people he recalled in a series of vivid mental snapshots, frozen in their particular time and setting: Frank on his bunk, his nose in a book, Ajax curled in the crook of his arm . . . Si winding up to pitch, his eyes wicked with intent . . . Mo beaded with sweat in his Santa Claus suit . . . Davey hanging round the sentry box with his hands in his pockets, pretending not to give a damn. And then there was Janet, that first evening, holding his hand over her heart. ‘Please . . . Please . . .’
And Rosemary – well, she was more than a snapshot. She lived in his head, flickered like a small pale flame that wouldn’t go away. He knew now what people meant when they talked about carrying a torch. She’d seemed secretive, and yet she was in herself a secret. It was strange to realise that he knew something about her that she did not know herself. A hostage, perhaps, to fate.
In Moose Draw, things were pretty much the same; and those that weren’t seemed changed only because he was. His mother looked a little older, but he saw in her face that he himself had altered profoundly. On his first night at home he caught her watching him with a kind of wary respect. That made him sad. They could none of them turn the clock back; he wanted to bring her with him, not to leave her behind. The proud and generous composure which she had displayed on his departure had temporarily deserted her. Then, she had maintained that composure to make him feel like a man. Now that he was one, he sensed she was thrown off balance.
It was slightly different with Mack, who perhaps felt that becoming a fully paid-up member of the great club of manhood was something they now had in common. Spencer was glad of this, but didn’t want his mother, his old ally and confidante, the person for whom the water was wide, to be excluded by it.
To this end he saved telling her about his journey into the past until the next day when Mack had made an early start to go work on a pick-up at one of the hunting lodges, and the store wasn’t yet open – Caroline said it was quiet these days, and anyway they had a young fellow who came in and helped.
It was like old times, with him sitting at the kitchen table with his mother, except that she didn’t bustle as she used to do; she was quite happy to sit there and drink him in along with her second cup of coffee.
He said: ‘There’s something I haven’t told you about.’
‘You haven’t told me anything – not really.’ She smiled, to show that it was not a criticism, but a pleasure yet to come.
‘I found the house.’
‘Oh! Did you—?’ He could see in her eyes, along with delight, the anxiety that he himself might have been disappointed. ‘It’s just a very ordinary house.’
‘Not really. The couple who live there run it as a rooming house now.’
‘I can’t imagine that.’
‘They let three rooms on the first floor. They had a vacancy when I was there, so I stayed the night in one of them.’ ‘You didn’t! You actually slept in the house?’ He nodded. ‘Like a baby. The landlady was a good sort. When she found out why I was there she didn’t even charge me.’
‘Was it – oh, what am I saying?’ She shook her head at her own foolishness. ‘I was going to say, was it changed? But how would you know?’
‘You forget, I feel I know it. I had it up here.’ He tapped his head. ‘And to begin with I couldn’t make it out, I couldn’t see what you’d told me about, because the neighbourhood’s so different.’
‘Tell me.’
‘It’s all built up these days – there are factories in back of your road, but there’s a sports field in between them and the houses. And where you described the wood . . .’
‘It wasn’t much of a wood,’ she put in apologetically. ‘A sort of little island that had got forgotten. It seemed special to me because I was only little myself but maybe I made too much of it.’
‘No, I don’t think so . . . But it isn’t there now. They’ve made a park. I walked round it. As a matter of fact I was told to keep off the grass.’
‘That’s awful.’
‘Grass is pretty much at a premium round there, they have to take care of it.’ He smiled, jerked a thumb at the window. ‘The opposite to here.’
She laughed. ‘That’s true. So – go on.’
‘One thing, they had a whale’s jawbone over one of the paths. You ever hear of that?’
‘No!’
‘Some old guy who lived nearby donated it to the park.’
‘What about the pond?’
‘There was a pond. Kind of formal, with fish in it. But the landlady remembered the one you talked about, she called it a dewpond.’
‘That’s right . . .’
‘And there were one or two old trees that they’d kept from the original wood.’
‘It was so pretty.’ She was there now, in her mind’s eye.
‘I can imagine. She took me up to the top floor of the house, it’s where she and her husband have their room now, because of the guests—’
‘Cissy’s room!’
‘—and when you look out of the side window you can see the tops of the old trees, and not the rest of the park. So it was like when you were a kid. I could imagine being you looking out of the window.’
‘We used to kneel up there for hours . . . Cissy used to tell me stories. I can remember always being happy up there.’
There were tears in her eyes. She started to say something, perhaps to thank him, and to stop her he held out his hand and she hesitated for a fraction of a second before placing hers in it. That was the difference, of course. Once, she had held out her hand, open-palmed to receive and enfold his smaller one. Now, it was the other way about. But they had always understood each other.
After the brief celebration of homecoming, the being hailed as a local hero with his picture on the front of the Monitor, the being described as a ‘veteran’ along with the other young men who’d come back, the rest of Spencer’s life yawned before him. He’d forgotten, until now, just how slow was the pace of life in Moose Draw. The dream was over – he’d lived it, and come back safe, a new life had to be set in train.
Spencer discovered a new and healthy regard for the sloggers-on, the pe
ople who without fuss lived peacefully in small places and stuck faithfully to small tasks, and raised kids, and looked out for their folks. It took a certain kind of courage to do that, a grace and humility which he wasn’t sure he possessed. As a boy, he had always somehow assumed that his mother would not end her days in Moose Draw, but be taken up, as in books, by some itinerant English aristocrat and carried away from an uncomplaining Mack to live out her days as the chatelaine of a big house. But though as he grew up he knew that no such thing would happen, he was still shocked to realise that Caroline really was going to see out her allotted span as wife of a small-town storekeeper and local jobbing mechanic.
Needing something to do in the short term, he went back to helping Mack, and soon discovered that business was down to a mere trickle, and a slow one at that.
‘It’s only outa kindness they ask me now,’ Mack told him as they stripped down Judd Ellison’s motorbike in the side lot one warm afternoon. It was companionable work – the warm, oily smell of the machinery, the feel of the metal parts, each distinct, some sleek, some grooved and knubbly, their two pairs of blackened hands reviving old habits of co-operation.
‘And because you do a good job.’
Mack pulled his mouth down. ‘Pretty good, I’d say. Thorough – But slow. There’s a big new filling station and works on the other side of town, they got three men working there, they can turn any job round in half the time I can.’
‘The personal touch,’ suggested Spencer. ‘People know you, they trust you – and you charge a fair price.’
‘A damn-fool price.’
‘Then hike ’em up.’
Mack shook his head. ‘I’d be pricing myself out of work. Same with the store. There’s a self-service place in town now, right bang in the middle, and a five and dime . . . we can’t compete.’
‘Sure you can.’ Spencer, unconvinced, described a banner in the air with his hand: ‘McColl’s Convenience Store – Personal Service With a Smile.’
Mack, resolutely unsmiling, peered closely at the carburettor. ‘Your mother and I are too old to start all that sort of thing.’ He might have been referring to some bizarre perversion.
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