Undercurrent

by Frances Fyfield

  He looked at the bookshelves, found a few novels, a shelf full of nursery rhyme books, nothing more to indicate who had lived here, except the marks and the scuffs and the tracks made by feet. Where were the volumes of verse he had expected? Where were the poets? Henry sat in the chair and looked at the grey sky. The splendour of the sea was invisible; the level of the window was all wrong, set too high from the floor for anyone seated in a chair to get the best view.

  The sound of the television continued, an irritating buzz, like a fly in the room. To be deprived of a view of the sea seemed to be the ultimate insult for anyone who deliberately lived on the edge of it, a feature which would drive him mad.

  He stood, therefore, and paced. A sizeable kitchen with table for eating, efficiently equipped by transatlantic standards with cooking and chilling facilities all of which looked beaten if not into submission at least into over-familiarity. A bathroom which was simply rudimentary, and Henry was beginning to learn that the Brits did not seem to set much store on power showers and such.

  There were no ornaments anywhere. Useful objects - TV, phones, microwaves had been removed, leaving signs of their presence such as a mark on the wall, an empty stand and small table with directories beneath. The apartment had been subject to controlled and authorized scavenging.

  Think, Henry. Just damn well THINK. His father's voice, the reminder of intellectual rigour, resisted.

  Hey Dad, I'm thinking I don't like her much. The woman I knew would never have lived in a place like this. If she lived in it, you'd know she'd been there and there's not a single sign; I think I'll go now. It's all too ORDINARY. No, you damn well don't. THINK. Measure it out; do not do anything by halves. Look at the shelves. Yeah, and a letter will fall out of a book. Happens all the time.

  THINK. The shawl was the only personal object left and he wondered why. It looked deliberately placed; at odds with the lack of personality.

  Henry had moved house more often than he could count, always looking for the one with a greater sense of space. He had seen rooms left equipped with enough furnishings to make them appear habitable and give them some sense of scale, but never one so completely neutralized. Only an owner could take everything away; no one else could be as ruthless.

  He sat in the window chair, but the line of the sill across his eyes and the view of nothing but ominous clouds irritated him, so he stood up, hands on hips, prowling like a prospective tenant.

  Maggie said Francesca had done it in the intervening days between Harry's death and her own arrest; her apartment had reached this state by the time she was taken in the third time for questioning. She had not expected to come back. The car and the etceteras went later, on her instructions, to specific destinations, but the correspondence, the mementoes, the family snaps, the Christmas cards, even the birth certificates and household bills were long gone, as well as most of her clothes and all of Harry's.

  Not the systematic actions commonly associated with someone rendered unsystematic by guilt... or grief. Henry could feel dislike of her creeping all over his skin like a mild sweat.

  Maggie said all she wanted in prison were books and reams of paper. Perhaps that's what she did in there: rewrote her own life. If you had felt the arms of a child wrapped round your neck in hopeless trust, how could you harm it? He did not know; he simply did not know. He felt unqualified to know: it was not a desperation or a temptation he wished to share.

  The sound of the television had ceased, leaving a vacuum of silence. Outside sounds were muffled by the double-glazed windows. In the House of Enchantment, there were none of these; Henry had come to enjoy the intrusion of sound. He looked down from the living room window, preferring his own view. Second floor, less than ideal for a child; stairs to traverse on the way out.

  He could see the castle squatting to the left and the dark sea ahead of him.

  Remembered his laptop. The scruffy library with internet access. Cerebral palsy .. . no typical profile for a child of five... depends upon severity ... epileptic fits?

  He could see a child crawling across the floor, with one arm tucked beneath, hauling himself along with the other. He had retreated to the front door with his back to it, feeling in his pocket for the key, his shoulder touching the painted wood. The timid knock on the other side seemed to touch his spine. Henry stood upright, shook himself. He had every right to be here.

  He was a prospective tenant. Must have been a dozen or three over the year. One of them left a cigarette end in the trash can; he'd seen it.

  Francesca had smoked. Mild Indian cigarettes which were a password to conversation. That had been her smell. Henry opened the door.

  'Oh. You.'

  Standing on the threshold was the granny from the High Street who picked him out of the gutter and told him she lived round the corner from the house.

  Three-quarters of a mile from here, level walking, but still a distance. She had a lit cigarette she hid behind her back.

  'Thought it might be you,' she said, matter of factly. She walked straight through to the kitchen and stubbed out her cigarette in the sink. 'I live downstairs,' she said, as if that explained everything.

  'Heard you. You've never been falling over again, have you?'

  'No. It isn't a habit.'

  'One of these days, maybe. Lovely flats, these. Do you want to buy it?'

  'No.'

  She moved to the window and tapped the sill. The clouds outside and the fading light seemed to meet with her approval. 'It wasn't like this, you know. You can't keep a place nice with a kid in it and she knew not to try. But she had a ladder with cushions on it by this window. That's where she'd sit. Reading, when she got the chance.'

  'What did she read?'

  'Books, of course. She gave most of them to me.

  She was forever giving things away.'

  He felt a faint fluttering of the heart.

  'She said they'd look nice in my living room and she was right about that. I never thought she wouldn't come back. Nor him, neither, poor little chap. Not that I've got much use for books. My eyes are bad now.' She stared at him and looked away. 'I got the books and the poofs got the video. I could have done with the video. I could have done without those two kids over my head, yelling fit to bust, and all I get's a few useless books. I miss her to death. She did everything the wrong way round and she was smashing.

  Do you want these books, or not, since you're a friend of hers?'

  He was nonplussed and nodding. She was on her feet, leading him out, telling him to lock up.

  She was a single-handed explanation of why the place could not be sold. He followed her downstairs.

  'She should have let me look after him instead of them poofters,' she said over her shoulder.

  'But I didn't really have the strength. I can't manage that dog, either. It keeps getting out. Harry was strong, you see, and wilful. But I tell you one thing. He wouldn't have gone all the way downstairs and out on the pier by himself on a morning like that. If there was anything Harry hated, he hated the cold. Are you going to come in?'

  An hour later, walking home with the sea on his right, Henry swung his arms and let his fingers grow nicely numb with the cold. The chill was almost pleasant; Granny’s double-glazed flat was hotter than Florida, with a breathless, hermetically sealed, humid heat.

  She was mortally afraid of the cold. The jungle temperature of her premises made him relish it now. Her phrase echoed, He hated the cold, that boy. Henry knew why Harry hated the cold.

  Henry was walking home with the lining of his good jacket still torn, but his shoes clean.

  Thinking of facts and why a person would abandon their books. Thinking of all the thumbnail sketches Maggie had given him and what little he had learned.

  There it was again, that damn black dog, coming out of a turning, wagging a tail at him and running off. It fitted his mood, as elusive as fact.

  Saw the chaplain today. Distracted me from the facts I was on the brink of writing.

&nbs
p; I always had a belief that Creation could not be random and merely the forces of nature, although if you looked long enough at the sea, you would doubt there was a human logic to it. The sea might feed us, but is alien, because its primary purpose is to feed itself and all the creatures who live in it. A brutal regime is imposed from time to time; there are mandatory culls of the predators and passengers. Man is endured, allowed to harvest as well as to cross, but if it all gets too much, the ocean shrugs him off and eats him. As dictated by a committee of Neptune’s.

  I tend to believe there are several gods; it is quite impossible to believe in one. There's a sort of parliament of Gods with ministries, definitely not democratically elected and all undermining one another. There's too much for one God to do; he had to delegate after the first failures, break the whole thing down into dukedoms and fiefdoms and they all formed rivalries. I can see it. Somebody shouts I WANT TO BE MINISTER FOR THE SEA, but he can't. His job this session is to be Minister for Weather.

  The thunder God went for a ride (I told the chaplain),

  Upon his favourite filly,

  I'm THOR! he cried.

  The horse replied,

  You forgot your thaddle, thilly.

  That was one of Maggie's. Yes, a cabinet ministry of gooses and their delegates with thor thaddles.

  I digress. I MUST digress.

  I had to say that the door was open and he took himself off. It was what I said first and I had to stick with it No one else in the world knew the extent of his condition as well as I did, or his temperament. They might have done if they had read all the books and the papers I read searching for a prognosis. That was why I got rid of the books. I told them I went to find him, already cross with him, and when I saw him, naughty as ever, I decided, enough was enough. I told them I had thought of it often. When I saw his limbs swell, when I read what he might become and knew he was not one of the mild cases. When I saw that even at his most engaging, he was friendless.

  But he did have friends, they said, and so did you. Ah yes, but not the ones I needed and he craved. He adored Uncle Joe, who were at best indifferent. He adored Uncle Joe, who, harmless as he was by then, only had eyes for little girls. So much for family. So much for knowing anyone. It takes such a long time and the choice is such a gamble. I befriended Uncle Joe when he was old because it seemed to me that to be isolated from your tribe, and in particular from children, is a fate worse than any death.

  To be old, without visitors; to have lost your reputation, what kind of suffering is that? How prophetic. I wanted him to avoid the fate I have made myself.

  The chaplain finds me frivolous. He says I must face facts.

  FMC.

  CHAPTER EIGHT.

  Crunch, crunch, crunch. Their footsteps along the gravel of the beach echoed loud enough to waken the dead. She seemed sure-footed; he slithered and she took his arm.

  'Steps up that way. Henry.'

  'Thank you.'

  Maggie liked the way he consented to be led. No macho nonsense. The sea was unnaturally calm and kind, kissing the stones like a flirt at a party, he said.

  It was a strange description for him to use.

  'This won't be haute cuisine,' she warned.

  'I'm into depravity. Carbohydrates and cigarettes are fine.'

  Seven in the evening, blacker than a road. He did not care what he ate. They stumbled up steps from the darkness of the beach in a state of merciful quiet, walked down an alley he had never noticed, round several corners he had never noticed either and into the bowels of a building. He was not in an observant state this evening, and she was duly grateful. She could criticize Warbling's restaurant fare because she lived here; if he did it, she would be defensive.

  'All there was, was medical books,' he said flatly as they sat. 'And the old lady confuses books with magazines, same thing to her. Books on paediatric illness, psychology, abuse, and two dozen pamphlets on cerebral palsy. No poetry. No letters. What happened to her soul?'

  House wine arrived on a checked cloth. He raised his glass to her. She waited for him to wince at the taste, but he was entirely indifferent to the quality and she sighed with relief, annoyed at the same time that she should actually mind if he liked it or not.

  'Children were her job. Henry, as well as her passion.

  There's nothing odd about a collection of books like that, even without Harry. She was thorough. She would have known more about Harry's hemiplegia than anyone else.'

  'More than the prosecutor. And the so-called defensse, it seems,' he said quietly.

  'We spell it with a "c". Henry. As in fence. And an English lawyer. Henry, is not a writer of fiction. We do not create a defensse, any more than we can write a story. If we have a client who is responsible, intelligent and articulate, and that's a big if, our humble role is only that of translator.'

  She rearranged her knife and fork, aligning them with the edge of the table. 'The point of the role is to clarify the facts and the mitigating circumstances, make all of them understandable and sympathetic to the most unresponsive of tribunals.

  There is only one sentence for premeditated murder, Henry. Life imprisonment. As a translator of facts, one does not have a great deal of scope to influence the outcome. Especially with a client as stubborn as that. Someone who had decided that the sentence was necessary for her own redemption. The choice here, by the way, is pizza or pizza.'

  'A truly universal dish.' His face creased with a smile and seen like that, it was an extremely pleasant face, made memorable by dimples and almost mischievous.

  In repose, the same face was perfectly inscrutable. One did not know, Timothy had observed to her, whether it was content, curious, angry or on the verge of tears. One simply hoped for the best. The smile was infectious and she smiled back. For people who had spent hours in conversation, the formality of dinner alone at his suggestion was making them oddly stilted with one another.

  'What's so funny. Henry?'

  'You,' he said. 'You get so didactic. You give me lectures. I can see you laying down the law.

  Only it doesn't go with anything else.'

  'Such as?'

  'The dress. The hair. The eyes.'

  She crossed her eyes and pulled a face.

  'You can leave the eyes out of it. They're simply genetic inheritance. The hair is tinted every six weeks. And colourful clothes are allowed, even for part-time lawyers. It's a nice red, isn't it? Like old bricks. I call this ensemble my battered English rose look.'

  He eyed the dress. Modestly scooped neck, simple knitted thing with long sleeves. A row of pearls at the neck, cheeks pink from the walk and hair blown wilder. He looked beyond her to the door, always checking the exit, especially in basements, like a spy, and after that he felt relaxed, even though the day had been depressing. There was always tomorrow and he could not remember when he had last sat opposite a woman as oddly glamorous as this and it was fun, even if his attitude towards her was tempered with profound suspicion.

  He really should know her better, well enough to tease her at any rate.

  'Listen, Maggie. If we'd met through, oh, say a dating agency or a mutual friend . . .'

  'We did.'

  'Just say we were having our first evening alone ...'

  'We are.'

  'You just aren't cooperating, Maggie. I'm asking you to use your imagination. If we were on a prearranged, let's-get-to-know-each-other date, without the agenda we already have and all the encrypted information you dole out, what would you want me to know about you? I mean, what would you be telling me?'

  'OK, I'll play if you'll play.'

  He nodded. 'You go first.'

  She clasped her hands beneath her chin, hiding long fingers, fluttered her eyelashes theatrically.

  'I'd give you a slightly self deprecating account of my life to date, the description carefully tailored to suit the occasion and leaving out the worst bits. I'd probably omit the childhood, because you wouldn't want to know.

  I'd tell you I
left the small town for the sake of a career, but I probably wouldn't tell you that I went to find a better class of husband, who abandoned me for a ... no.' She paused. 'No, I wouldn't say that. I'd say I was amicably divorced, in case you should think I was a contentious bitch who liked fighting. I'd mention somewhere along the line that I used to like designing rooms and cooking. Emphasis on home comforts. By the end of my little recitation you'd know that I was brave, modest, capable, bittersweet and available. Definitely available. I'd stress that as much as cooking.

  And I wouldn't be wearing this dress.'

  He was laughing. She teased her hair with her fingers and looked at him soulfully, fluttering her eyelashes again in a parody of shy hesitation.

  'I wouldn't, on considering, tell you that on my second date with my husband, I tried to impress him with steak for dinner in my weeny garden flat, only the dog got it and was trying to bury it in a flowerbed.

  I rescued it, quietly, dusted it down and served it up.

  He ate it like a lamb and persuaded me to give away the dog. That should have told me everything I needed to know.'

  The order for food was written down laboriously.

  Henry had an idea it might take some time to arrive.

  Three other diners between himself and the exit had the look of starved resignation. Maggie nibbled a breadstick.

  'I'd lie quite a lot. Henry. The quotient of lies to truth would depend on how much I liked you. Your turn.' Her face had reverted to normal: that of an intelligent listener without an ounce of the coquette.

  'Well. . .' He coughed and cleared his throat.

  'No hesitations.'

  'I guess I'd start with my full name and qualifications.

  Tell you my status. Let you know I earned money, had no debts, travelled a lot. Was smart.

  Didn't go round with my flies undone. No sexual problems, but not a womanizer, like them too much. Failed relationships not the result of infidelity or malice. And it would all be true. In a way.'

  He played with the paper napkin, forming it deftly into the shape of a hat while she watched intently. 'I'd say I wasn't so good at talking about myself and I was kind of shy on account of always opening my mouth to say the wrong thing. Also true. I don't like to lie. Low on social skills. But I guess I might leave out the stuff about being afraid of the dark, scared to death of being locked in, running away from confrontations and commitments so fast I'm out of sight.