by David Rees
“I was afraid he would take you away from me. He seems to have been successful.” Mum looked very small and bleak. Aunt Bridie was in the kitchen, noisily washing up. Nic was at the fulling mill.
This deflated my anger: it was the truth. The honest truth; I felt that instinctively. She didn’t mean take me away by force, the kind of drama you sometimes read about in the newspapers—Man Kidnaps Son—but ‘take’ in a more subtle sense of the word. She meant his disarming, attractive personality, his. . .his charisma would seduce me into feeling life with him was a lot more exciting than the dullness of Tralee. Or that he would give a tremendous display of that side of his character while I was in Bournemouth so I would be impressed. But I hadn’t been deceived by someone putting on an act; everything about him was genuine. I think.
“I’m here,” I said. “And I . . . I shan’t go to Bournemouth till . . . I don’t know . . . Christmas perhaps. If he invites me.”
“Christmas!” She looked alarmed and hurt at the idea of her only son not being with her at Christmas.
“Well . . . maybe not Christmas itself. New Year. As for living with him permanently, I don’t want to. And I don’t suppose he’d like it, either. He probably would think that was rather a nuisance.”
“As always,” Mum said bitterly, “he pursues his pleasures and evades his responsibilities.”
“He sends us money every month.”
“He has to. By order of the Divorce Court.”
“O.K. . . .” I was exasperated; conversations like this went along parallel lines that never met. Mum was the most rigid parallel line I knew of. “What do you feel he should do?”
She didn’t answer that, but said after a moment’s pause “Was there anybody else in the house, living there?”
“A friend of his. Adrian.”
“Friend?”
“Lover.” The word made her wince, as if she had been stung. “He left. For good.”
“The Wessex harpist, I presume.”
She sounded as if she’d like to hear the details, but I didn’t particularly want to launch into an analysis of that furore; to do so would be a kind of betrayal. It wasn’t my business, and it certainly wasn’t hers. I was not going to act as a spy on my parents’ lives, regaling each of them with bits of gossip about the other. But I did say “He’s now the harpist of the Mersey Philharmonie.”
“Oh. How did Peter react to that?”
“He’s all right.”
She guessed that I would not say any more, I think, for she stood up as if to signal that our chat was over; but I was on the point of leaving the room when she said “I hope you aren’t in any way . . . like he is.”
This was the first time my mother had ever made any reference, oblique or otherwise, to the fact that she was aware of me as a sexual being. “It isn’t hereditary,” I said.
“Probably not,” she agreed. “But people can be . . . dangerous influences.”
“I like girls,” I said, looking at her straight in the eye. I wasn’t tempted to do so, but it did occur to me that if I told her what had happened in Amsterdam she would be reassured on that point. Shocked, upset, maybe outraged . . . but reassured.
“Do you have a girlfriend?” she asked.
“No.”
“Then how can you be certain?”
I laughed. “I’m certain!”
“Well. . .” She sighed. “Maybe there’s nothing to worry about. But I wish people like your father could decide who they are and what they are before they begin ruining other people’s existences.”
“I guess he wishes the same thing. Wishes those like himself could be allowed to make their minds up sooner than he was able to.”
“Most of them do nowadays. And nobody’s prohibiting the others.”
“Aren’t they? You wouldn’t be thrilled if I was gay— you implied that just now. You couldn’t stop me, in a literal sense . . . but wouldn’t you, and the rest of the world, make me feel guilty—or dirty, or evil? So that I’d try not to be gay, as I imagine Dad felt he was forced to do.”
“You know too much for your own good, in my opinion,” Mum said. “Too clever by half. You have the same ability as your father has to make black sound like white. To mess about with words so nobody else can argue. It isn’t that marvellous a gift—you can end up smug and conceited.”
“Or a writer. That would be . . . oh, great!”
“Get out of here and let me do the cleaning! I want to dust this room and hoover the carpet.”
Aunt Bridie came in, so absolutely on cue, it seemed, that I wondered if she had been listening at the keyhole—I hadn’t heard the sounds of crockery being washed for the last five minutes. She looked at my mother, as if she expected her to say something, but Mum was busy feather-dusting the lampshades. “Everything all right in here?” she asked.
“What do you imagine is wrong?” I answered. “Wrong?” Aunt Bridie echoed. “There’s a great deal wrong with the world, Michael. You don’t need me to tell you that. Nuclear weapons and greedy unions, Russians and the price of everything these days, and good men dying before they should and bad men running away from their responsibilities, and children not showing any gratitude to mothers who’ve brought them up single-handed.”
“You’re bitter, frustrated, and sex-starved!” I shouted, then ran out of the room, slamming the door. Why did I say that, I asked myself, true though it was. It would mean trouble. A lot of trouble. But as I left the house, I heard, to my surprise, Mum not expressing sympathy for her sister, but demanding angrily why Bridie always had to put her foot in it, particularly when it was something really delicate to do with me.
I walked down the road, under the railway bridge, up Station Approach and past the church. The church was old—bits of it Saxon — but it wasn’t all that interesting, nor was the green around it, which was excessively tidy, the tombstones removed from their original places and set along the walls in order to make life easier for the man who mowed the grass. It wasn’t somewhere you could experience the kind of feelings you normally did in graveyards—profound, or melancholy, or poetic—just a short cut through to the busy High Street. Here, despite the traffic—it was the A31, the main road from Alton to Winchester—was a better sense of the past than by the church. The Swan Hotel and the Bell Hotel stood on opposite sides of the street, coaching inns that had changed very little in their appearance since the eighteenth century. I knew the names of all the Alresford pubs, though I had never been in one. I could see, from where I was standing, the Running Horses up the other side of the big dip where the A31 zoomed down to the Cheriton cross-roads; best beer in Alresford, my uncle had often said. Out of sight were the Peaceful Home, the Globe, the Horse and Groom and the Cricketers’ Arms. (The latter, about a mile out of town by the golf course, was where my uncle drank many a week-end lunch.) There used to be the Sun, the Volunteer’s Arms and the Dean Arms, but these establishments, ages ago, had been sold off and turned into private houses. Every building in this street was old, and you could see where Alresford finished, abruptly, as if there was an agreed point where the countryside should start. There was no twentieth century glass and concrete at either end of the town, no gradual thinning out of houses, or that dreary mixture you see so often of petrol stations, car dumps, and derelict fields. It was as if for generations people here had said the countryside was not to be raped.
Yes, there were changes, like the Sun and the Volunteer’s Arms no longer being pubs. The china shop where Aunt Bridie had once bought a bowl was now a café. The coffee shop Mum would often take me to when I was little now sold clothes, and its owner, peg-leg Lilian, with her Hampshire burr so pronounced you could hardly understand what she was talking about, was dead and under the churchyard grass. The two-roomed infants’ school I went to when I was five was now a store-place for a builder’s merchant. But these alterations did not affect the face of the town: nothing here seemed to be different. Welches’ fish shop was exactly as it had always been. When I was
seven or eight, Marigold Welch was my girlfriend. There was a disused chicken-house at the bottom of her garden, but no chickens, which had long since been eaten for Sunday dinners. Marigold and I often sat in it and kissed. On more than one occasion we undressed each other completely. Her mother caught us once, and said she would tell my mother. I waited in fear and trembling, but nothing happened. Mrs Welch, presumably, considered it was not so awful a deed as Mum would have thought, and decided not to bother with traipsing up to Tralee to tell her story. I wondered if Marigold might be as interested in what my body was like now as I would be in hers, and I peered through the fish shop window. But she wasn’t there.
I walked along Broad Street, and took the path by the watercress beds to the fulling mill. I shouted for Nic, but there was no answer; so I clambered on to the roof and yelled “Nic!” down the chimney. Silence. If I followed the river I would find myself back by the railway station and home: I didn’t want to return. Instead, I struck out across the fields, uphill, away from the placid willows and poplars, the huddling town, and on to the chalk hills with their wide, sweeping views, lolloping hares and larks singing like dribbling taps. Up here you feel free. The white, dusty path led to Abbotstone, a village—a hamlet, no more than a collection of farms—I’d never been to before.
I should never have shouted at my aunt. It was awful! I would apologise, whether Mum insisted or not. But my coments were right, I was certain, and they applied with equal truth to Mum herself. The two sisters, because something dreadful had happened to them both, had in a sense stopped living; they’d shrivelled. Withered. Even if they had their moments of fun, and continued to care about their children, they had lost . . . what was it? Tolerance. The ability to leap into new situations. A love of life. Dad hadn’t. Nothing would make him stop living, not Adrian’s departure, a succession of books that didn’t sell, or the fear of loneliness. His battle, I guess, was long ago, the one in which he finally accepted himself for what he was; a battle he had won, and no problem that occurred subsequently had forced him to bow his head and surrender.
I would be like him, not like Mum. I want to go on struggling against whatever it may be that could threaten my whole existence, and when I’m carried out in my coffin at the age of ninety-two I’ll still be screaming.
I want to travel the whole wide world, and write lots of books. Meet scores of women. Get married one day, and have children I’ll attempt to understand and talk to. Leave Alresford as soon as I’m grown up. See Dad, often. More immediately, I want to improve my tennis, find myself a girlfriend, and learn how to play that harp.
These lofty thoughts and resolutions flew out of my head when I rounded a corner of the hills and saw Abbotstone. So that’s what it’s like, I said to myself. Nothing special. A few old cottages buried in fields. The only humans there, as far as I could tell, were two ancient farm labourers who stopped chatting as I passed in order to stare at me very suspiciously. Several dogs barked as I walked on, but that was all. Soon I was up the other side of the hill, over the top, and Abbotstone was out of sight. Like the mad boy, it seemed to be a piece of another life, a figment of a dream.
I went as far as Itchen Abbas, and came home on the three twenty train—in the cab with Mr Bowles. “Long time since you’ve done this!’’ he shouted over the roar of the engine, and I nodded.
Chuffa-chuffa, chuffa-chuffa, chuffa-chuffa. Cows swishing their tails in damp meadows on either side of the railway, the river here flat and sluggish, now there purposeful and swift; dark patches on its surface indicating luxuriant growth of weed or reed underneath; dazzling patches glittering in the sun like light on pewter. The best place, over there, in April for kingcups. Jamjars and tiddlers: once I’d got saturated and plastered with mud, and was given the inevitable lecture when I returned to Tralee. The engine’s smoke, fleecy white clouds evaporating above the fields. Now the bridge over the A31 and the water research station where my uncle used to be boss; the land rising sharply so that we were now in the cutting. Smoke everywhere, and it wasn’t possible to see much, only a sprawl of stinging nettles and rosebay willow herb, a shed, a woman at the end of her garden grabbing sooty washing from a line; then out into the sun and Mrs Tope’s trees which would soon have their red September crop of plastic balls, the sidings, the trucks, Roma Termini: Alresford Station. The creaks and groans as the sinews of the old train braced themselves to stop. Goodbye and thanks to Mr Bowles for the trip. Nic on the platform, grinning, pleased and surprised to see me. The slamming of doors; Colonel Ramsbottom home from work. Home is the sailor, home from sea.
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
That was all a long time ago, five years; I’m twenty-one now and I graduated this summer from the University of Cambridge with a first-class honours degree in English. I’m living in North London—I’ve been here four months—in a house with my girlfriend and a dozen other young people, though at week-ends the influx of visitors makes it seem like two dozen young people. Some of us work; some of us are unemployed. I’m one of the lucky ones—I’ve recently started at the foot of the ladder in a publishing consortium. It won’t make me rich very quickly, but it’s what I decided, some while ago, I wanted to do to earn my living, for, if I just sat in my room and wrote books, I would starve to death. I like the job. And I’m writing. I began to write in my first term at Cambridge—short stories and poems, a few of which appeared in student magazines. Now this. . . this novel, or autobiographical fragment, is almost finished. Whether anyone will care to publish it, let alone read it, is totally beyond prediction. But I shall send it off and wait for the rejection slips, or for what would be the happiest day of my life—a letter in the mail which says, yes, we’ll take it.
Only Dad has seen the manuscript—no-one else, not even my beautiful, attractive, lovable girlfriend. Dad said the “I” of the book was undoubtedly an accurate self-portrait—arrogant, over-confident and sex-crazy; but he was very non-committal about my chances of seeing the thing in print. (Though he obviously enjoyed it. He would, wouldn’t he? He comes out of it rather well.) “Who’s it for?” he asked.
“For? Anyone who wants to read it, as you once said yourself about your own books.”
“But you must have some sort of market in mind,” he said, impatiently. “Is it a novel for young adults?”
“I don’t know. Yes. I suppose so.”
“In that case, you’ll have to cut out the swearing. And the sex. Also, I don’t think people will believe a sixteen-year-old from a sleepy country town, however bright and intelligent, thinks and feels as maturely as your narrator.”
I capitulated on the first two points, though a great many adolescents know about four-letter words and use them as often as their parents do. I argued that there was almost no sex, and it would be dishonest in a book with a boy of that age telling the story to leave it out altogether. True, Dad replied, but try saying that to the Moral Majority. The last point I defended passionately—I was recording exactly what I thought and felt and how I spoke at that time, and if it was more mature than the behaviour of an average kid I couldn’t help that. Adults, I said, never realize where teenagers have arrived; they invariably imagine kids will be younger than they actually are, as if they didn’t somehow want their children to grow up, or were frightened of them doing so. Dad agreed, but suggested I was nevertheless bringing later experience to bear on my sixteen-year-old life; memory distorts, he said: it selects. One always rewrites history. No, no, no! I cried. That summer was recorded in my head in detail as vivid as you’d see in a photograph.
He still lives in the Bournemouth house, alone. He has had a few relationships since Adrian left, but nothing serious. He doesn’t want anything serious, no binding promises, till-death-do-us-part stuff. It would interfere with his work, he says, and he seems to be in quite a productive phase, two novels a year, though he never got round to doing the book about the three weeks in which he re-discovered his son—which is why I’ve done it for him. He may be
alone, but he isn’t lonely. There is usually someone somewhere. He’s fifty, but I guess he’s still an attractive man because he has energy. Energy is eternal delight, William Blake said.
I, too, at this stage of my life, don’t want a relationship with binding promises, though Dad says that’s because I’m an archetypal male chauvinst pig. I say I’m too young to be married—there is so much to do, to experience first. Kids who are hitched at twenty and think they’re settling down to a life just like their parents’, with washing-machines and mortgages and nappies, are out of their tiny minds. They usually end up in the divorce courts when they’re twenty-five. I do, however, hope I’ll get married and have children—a long time off in the distant future. In my thirties. I want to be sure that it will work, for one thing I’m determined on is not to end up in the divorce courts. I know from my own childhood and teenage years how dreadful that can be.
I did go to Bournemouth for much of my holiday time when I was seventeen and eighteen, and one summer Nic went with me. I think Mum and Aunt Bridie gradually—if grudgingly—admitted to themselves that being with my father didn’t corrupt me, and that it was therefore all right for Nic. He enjoyed himself very much, I seem to remember. He’s seventeen now, and madly in love with Marigold Welch’s sister, Morelia.
Aunt Bridie still lives at windy Tralee, and I don’t think anything that happens in the future will change that, or her. But you never know: the big astonishment of the past five years is that Mum was introduced to a man, married him, and moved out to live in Basingstoke. I don’t see her as often as I see Dad, though I occasionally go down to their bungalow for a weekend, which, I have to confess, I find pretty tedious. I just don’t have a lot to say to Mum or to Kevin. Nor they to me, and I suspect Mum doesn’t really care for anything I do, my values, my way of life. With one very obvious difference, I’m too much like my father. But she’s happy, which pleases and re-assures me, a lot happier than during all those years she lived with her sister. She taught Kevin how to do the Lambeth Walk, and once a week they go to some club, do old-time dancing and drink Guinness.