by David Rees
“I thought the typewriter was going a bit quicker than usual. What’s it about?”
“A teenage boy from a one-parent family goes to stay with his father. He hasn’t seen Dad for years, and he discovers that Dad is homosexual.”
“Oh. Does it take place in Bournemouth?”
“Some of it will, I guess.”
I frowned. I didn’t like this at all, though Dad had probably thought I would be flattered. “I wouldn’t want anyone at school to read it,” I said.
He looked hurt; it was obviously not the reaction he was expecting, nor had the idea occurred to him that I might be bothered if other kids knew the truth. But, as usual, he didn’t take long to invent a plausible answer. “By the time it’s written,” he said, “if it ever gets written and published, and bought by your school library, and that’s assuming the librarian would want to buy it and the publisher would want to publish it—we’ll both be two years older. At least. You’ll be eighteen and just starting, I hope, at a university. You’ll have these problems in a different perspective, and you may not care tuppence about what your friends read.” I shrugged my shoulders. “What was the other thing you wanted to tell me?” I asked.
“Oh. Yes.” His face brightened. “I’ll drive you up to Alresford on Friday.”
We set off in his ageing Toyota, the back seat and the boot laden with cardboard boxes full of plants and gardening tools—trowel, fork, shears, secateurs—that he had lent or given to me. This last week had been as good as the rest of this strange holiday—tennis, chess, swimming, and talking about life. We went to Poole, where we explored the harbour and the shops in Old Town; and on another occasion we drove through the New Forest to Lymington for a picnic lunch by the sea. Across the Solent was the Isle of Wight, very different from how it looked at Bournemouth. “I’d like to go there one day,” I said.
“I’ve never been,” Dad answered.
“Never? And you live so near!”
“You shouldn’t go to some places; you may be disappointed. I think the Isle of Wight has a great deal of mystery. Romance, even. I love staring out of my window at the Needles and the lighthouse, particularly in rough weather. If I go there that could be spoiled. I’m afraid it will be just like anywhere else.”
I shook my head. “I don’t understand that at all!”
“Who was it said it’s better to travel hopefully than to arrive? T.S. Eliot? I can’t remember. Have you read Virginia Woolfs To The Lighthouse?”
“No.”
“James Ramsay, aged six, wants to visit the lighthouse, and is very annoyed because his father won’t let him. But he does go eventually, ten years later, and he finds it’s just a squat, ugly, functional building covered in bird droppings.”
“And the moral is . . . ?”
“Hope deferred maketh the heart sick, I guess.”
“I’m Sagittarius. The wanderer.”
“Well . . . all I can say is . . . may your lighthouses be beautiful and kindly.”
He had travelled, and found Adrian—who was like James Ramsay’s lighthouse, perhaps. I had travelled too, and found my father. On the whole, beautiful and kindly: there was, I admit, a certain quantity of bird droppings.
I was thinking of this conversation on the journey to Alresford, and wondering what he would discover when he saw his wife. What /would discover: Mum was correct in suggesting I might not be the same person who had left on the train three weeks ago. And what would she make of it all? That similar thoughts were in his mind, I deduced from the words he sang as we sped along the Ringwood by-pass and climbed up to the wild, open heath of the New Forest—
Lay that pistol down, ma,
Lay that pistol down;
Pistol-packing momma,
Lay that pistol down!
As we got nearer to Alresford, passed the signposts to Ovington, then Tichborne, went under the railway bridge and turned into Grange Road, I was surprised to see the accustomed props of my life exactly as I had imagined them. I had shed a skin since I’d been away. I would have to put it back on, or Mum would really be alarmed.
“I think we should go via the station,” I said. “They expect me to arrive on the train, and though Mum and Aunt Bridie probably won’t come down to meet it, Nic will be there.”
He was. And amazed to see me get out of a car, accompanied by a strange man. “This is your Uncle Peter,” I said. Nic’s expression was absolutely blank.
“My father,” I added.
“Oh!” For a brief moment he looked as if he’d met a dangerous alien from outer space, then he said politely “How do you do?”
“I last saw you when you were one month old,” Dad said; the three of us giggled with embarrassment, and lapsed into silence.
“We’re going up to the house,” I said to Nic. “Do you want to come with us?”
“Mmmm . . . thanks . . . but I’m waiting for the three twenty. I might go to Alton in the cab, if Mr Bowles doesn’t mind.”
“Are Mum and Aunt Bridie at home?”
“They went for a walk by the river, but they shouldn’t be long.”
Tralee was empty, so I let myself in. “Don’t stand on the doorstep,” I said to Dad. “Come inside.”
“I wonder if I should.”
“I’m inviting you.”
“Well, in that case . . I showed him round, and he told me—I knew it anyway—which were the pieces of furniture he and Mum had owned when they were married, then said Bridie’s house hadn’t altered a great deal over the years. But what had they done, he asked, with the sideboard, the blue Wilton carpet, the grey sofa, the small wardrobe?
“Mum sold them when we moved in. We didn’t need them.”
In my bedroom he sat in the peacock chair. “It’s ages since I’ve put my bottom on this,” he said. “Nora’s re-covered the cushion, I see.” He patted the arms, as if he was delighted to say hullo to an old friend. The key turned in the lock downstairs, and I heard Aunt Bridie’s voice in the middle of some long story, then Mum say “Yes . . . is that true? . . .I’d never have thought it!” Dad shifted uneasily. “I think I’ll stay here for the moment,” he said. “You go down and warn them. I don’t want Nora to have a heart attack.” I protested, but he waved me away; “Get on with it!” he ordered.
It was not the most joyful of family reunions. Aunt Bridie’s mouth fell open when I conveyed the news, and she rushed out of the house, probably to inform Mrs Eggins or Mrs Blenkinsop that her ne’er-do-well brother-in-law had breezed in like a bad odour. Mum turned pale, and immediately went upstairs. I followed: I didn’t want to miss out on this. Dad was smiling and calm—or at least giving a good imitation of being relaxed; Mum was tense. I had not seen them together for thirteen years! I would have liked to pretend to myself that it was the beginning of a time when he would see a lot more of her, or that he had never been away, was at this moment just dropping in from an office where he worked to say he’d be home early for dinner. But that would have been daft. Childish.
Dad explained about the plants and how I couldn’t have carried them all on the train, and said that he did not intend to stop long, but it would have been rude just to leave without a word. Mum said she was surprised to hear I was interested in gardening, but, well, a splash of colour outside wouldn’t do anyone any harm. It was a stiff, polite conversation at first—the sort two acquaintances have while waiting for a bus that is overdue, neither of them really interested in what is being said, as their minds are more concerned with what will happen when they arrive late for their appointments. Mum asked a few questions about Amsterdam, and whether Dad was writing anything at the moment, and she hoped I hadn’t been a nuisance; he asked how Aunt Bridie was, talked about the weather, and said that the tourist season in Bournemouth was much the same as usual.
Then, as if he considered these topics a waste of time, Dad said “We should see each other more often. There’s no good reason why not.”
“Well. . .yes. . .” Mum answered, and nervously crac
ked the joints of her fingers.
“We should have been able to stay friends. Many people do.”
“Peter . . . Michael’s here.”
“He doesn’t need protection. He’s not a child any longer.”
Mum’s face hardened. “That’s for me to judge,” she snapped.
“You ought to come down to Bournemouth and stay for a day or two.”
“I . . .I don’t quite know what I’d find there.”
Dad was obviously angered by this remark, but he continued to talk in the same soft, reasonable tone of voice. “Nothing that would offend your maiden aunt,” he said.
Mum stared down at her lap, and brushed away some invisible specks of dirt. “That part of my life is finished. I don’t want to dig up painful memories . . . open old wounds. Every link is broken, and it’s just as well they are.”
“Not true,” Dad said. “There’s Mike.”
“What about him?”
“Links.”
“For years he’s not even troubled his head with thoughts of his father. It was as if you didn’t exist. And he was perfectly happy. Then you had to ring up that night and change it all!” She sounded very resentful.
“Why did you let him come?”
“Yes,” I said, butting into the conversation. “Why did you let me?”
My mother turned to me. “You’ve probably discovered this past three weeks how very nice and convincing and persuasive your father can be. He has a reply to everything, and in any argument or discussion he leaves you without a leg to stand on. Yes, even on the telephone! You end up driven into silence, or else forced to agree with him. You agree, for the sake of a quiet life. I’d been on the Guinness, and—”
“Doing the Lambeth Walk,” I said.
“—and my powers of reasoning weren’t up to their usual standard. Not that they match his when they are!” She moved to the door. “Would you like a drink, Peter, before you go?”
“Ah . . . hmmm . . . yes, please,” Dad said.
We went downstairs and drank some dry sherry. Aunt Bridie was still out. “Why can’t you be friends?” I asked. “Why go on having a grudge all these years?” The sherry, I guess, was loosening my tongue.
They both looked embarrassed. “In my book,” Mum said, “a promise is a promise, particularly those you make in the marriage vows. To have and to hold . . . for better for worse . . . till death do us part. They’re not like paper chains, broken three days after Christmas.”
“But you forced him to leave!”
“Oh, he told you that, did he?”
“Mike,” Dad said sternly, “drop the subject!”
“I’ve decided something,” I said. “And it’s very important. During the school holidays, from now on, I’m going to live in Bournemouth.”
Mum put her glass down on the table with such a sweeping gesture its stem broke. She walked out of the room, then out of the house.
“If you’ll have me,” I said to Dad.
“Je-sus.” He took a deep breath. “You certainly know the mechanics of how to create a grand scene! Of course you can come to Bournemouth, whenever you wish. Though . . . I don’t think for one moment that Nora will let you.” But he looked hugely pleased, like a kid who’d just discovered an unopened birthday present that had been forgotten.
If I really want to,” I said, “I don’t see that she can stop me.”
“Yes . . . well . . . you’ll have to work on that. Now . . . I think I’d better be going.”
A few minutes later the red Toyota was disappearing into the distance.
7. Embracing the world
Shunting practice. The trucks were clonk-clonk-clonk-clonking into each other, and the ancient, arthritic engine was wheezing and whiffling, on the whole sounding as if it were pleased with its performance. Roma Termini and Conseil Supérieur de Chemins de Fer were gliding to a gentle halt on track number two. Beyond the railway embankment the river wound as lazily as always between the flat water meadows, its willows weeping and its weeds awash in the current. Pillars of gnats danced. A kingfisher flashed. Nothing had changed, and everything had changed.
But I tried to show for Nic’s benefit that it hadn’t. I squatted beside him on the embankment, our faces inches from the engine’s great iron wheels, and I thought how boring it all was compared with flying in aeroplanes, eating in Indonesian restaurants, and talking adult-to-adult. “Did that boy ever show up again?” I asked.
“What boy?”
“Sid something-or-other.”
“I found out he lives in Bishop’s Sutton.”
“He hasn’t bothered you when you’ve been camping at the fulling mill?”
“Haven’t seen him at all,” Nic said, swishing at a fly that was trying for the third time to settle on his nose. “How did you work that? Sleeping at the mill?”
“I waited till they were on the Guinness. Mum got stung by a bee that afternoon and needed a little drop, she said, to take her mind off the pain. Aunt Nora had to dance the Lambeth Walk by herself.”
“What else is new, while I’ve been away?”
“Nothing.” Shunting had evidently finished; Mr Bowles, holding an oil can, climbed down from the engine and trudged along the track to the station. We stood up, and ran down the embankment to the path by the river. “Someone’s buried a dead dog,” Nic said. “Just beyond the fulling mill. There’s a little wooden cross on the grave, with ‘Fido ever faithful’ carved on it, and the dates. Why should anyone want to do that?”
“No idea.”
“Would you like to see it?”
“Not particularly.”
The path took us over a bridge where a gurgling exuberant rivulet joined the main stream. Nic kneeled, as he often did here, and trailed his arms in the water. Wild cress grew on the stream’s bed, and he pulled some of it up. “Ever tried this stuff?” he asked.
“No.”
“It tastes revolting.” He ate it. “Like iron. Like chewing an engine wheel.” He spat it out. “Must have been nice, staying with your dad. You know, when I do things I’m pleased about, like finding an easier way than you did of climbing into the fulling mill, I think, oh, I must tell Dad when he gets home, and then I know I can’t because he’s dead. It isn’t. . . fair, somehow.” “I read in some book that fairness is a word invented by adults to keep children quiet.” He had seen himself and me, despite the difference in our ages, as having a kind of equality being without fathers; now that had been taken from him. “Next time I go there,” I said, “perhaps you can come with me. He is your uncle.”
“Could I?” His eyes lit up. “I think I might enjoy that. Is there a station?”
“Yes. But it’s an ordinary sort of station, not a bit like Alresford. It’s called Pokesdown.”
“Pokesdown!” He laughed. “What else is there? What’s in the house?”
“A harp. I want to learn how to play it.”
“Does it belong to the man from the Wessex Philharmonic Symphony?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t suppose Mum would let me go,” he said, rather wistfully. “She doesn’t approve of Uncle Peter. Is he . . . bad, or something?”
“No. He’s not bad. Not bad at all.”
“I like the garden you’ve made.”
I had already spent several back-breaking hours pulling up weeds, preparing the soil, digging the plants in and watering them: two bits of the wilderness, on each side of the house, now looked quite respectable. One I christened the summer gardens, as I had given the phlox, montbretia, rudbeckia, heleniums and so on their homes there; the other one was the winter gardens—for chrysanthemums, yellow jasmine, kaffir lilies and snowdrop bulbs. Aunt Bridie asked why I didn’t mix the two together so we could have something in bloom in the same flower-bed the whole year round. I told her I liked the idea of keeping them separate, and she said she supposed it wasn’t her affair; I could do as I wished as I was putting in all the hard work.
We had reached the fulling mill, and I w
as intrigued to know how Nic had discovered an easier way of getting in than I had done. He took me to an outhouse, a sort of shed attached to the side of the mill, opened the door and dragged out an old, worm-eaten step-ladder, no bigger than himself but obviously ideal for climbing from the top of the water-butt to the chimney.
“I never thought of looking in there!” I said, admiringly.
“You have to have brains,” Nic answered. “The only trouble is, when I’ve got to the chimney, I like to pull the ladder up after me in case anyone sees it and tries to get in. Rather an effort, heaving it up on to the roof.” Between us, it was no effort at all and in next to no time we were down the chimney and inside the mill.
He had turned it into a second home. His sleeping-bag was there—on an air-bed—and cushions, books, crockery, cutlery, a primus stove, a kettle, tea, milk, sugar, a tin full of cakes, a flashlight and a bucket. “Where did all this stuff come from?” I asked.
“Tralee,” he said. “They don’t seem to have missed any of it. Yet.”
“What do you do if it rains?”
“It hasn’t so far. But it could be a problem, as the chimney’s open to the sky. Will you sleep here tonight? I’ve been really looking forward to you coming home so we can both camp out in this place! I was extremely disappointed when you rang up and said you were staying another week.”
“O.K.” It was the last thing I wanted to do, sleeping in a damp, sooty, ruined mill. But I didn’t want to hurt Nic. Even a partial wriggling back into the uncomfortably tight old skin of childhood was not easy.
“What I don’t understand,” I said, “is why you thought it necessary to protect me so much. I’ve been starved of information all these years! I didn’t know what the answers were, because I . . . I didn’t know the questions!”