Undercurrent

by Frances Fyfield

  I'd probably pretend that I wasn't quite available, some little piece of unfinished business somewhere.

  I'd confess to being complex.'

  'And are you?'

  'Nope. Not as far as I know. I'm just a fully paid up coward.'

  There was an uncomplicated silence, punctuated by the sound of her teeth with the breadstick and the murmur of conversation from behind.

  'I wonder if we'd want to see one another again.'

  Henry shrugged and grinned as the pizza arrived, thumped on the table in a loud challenge to digestion.

  'Probably not. Such a paragon of a woman would destroy my confidence. If she said she liked gardening, it might be a different matter.'

  'And I,' she said, 'would be worried by your haircut and all that bloody mystique.'

  They began to eat, slowly. Henry struggled with a blunt knife, looked at the problem logically and opted to cut the pizza into four slices, which was easier decided than done. A portion of Neapolitan cheese'n'.tomato scooted from his plate across the narrow table and on to her lap. She flicked it to the floor, delicately.

  'Shit, I'm so sorry. Didn't I mention the clumsiness?'

  'If this was a date. Henry, you'd have blown it.'

  He struggled silently; elbows flexed, then picked up a slice and chewed it carefully. It was only another pizza, which would go on and on being a pizza, the way they did. He was deciding that if he was ever going to have any preference for food, it was going to be for a lot of different little things on a big plate, eaten to the tune of impersonal conversation.

  'I think Francesca gave away her medical books for a reason,' he said. 'Such as not wanting anyone to know how bad Harry was. Or how relevant his condition was to the manner of his death.'

  'There's a medical report on the file. Henry,' she said patiently, resigned to his resumption of the topic.

  'There was nothing to hide. The prognosis wasn't good. She was desperate for him to be able to go to a normal school and it didn't look as if he could.'

  'There's nothing there about the daily details.

  Exactly what he could and couldn't do. What he would, or wouldn't do. Didn't you know?'

  She shook her head again. The hair danced. 'I came back about a month before it happened, got a job with Edward. Saw them a couple of times, but I was so full of self-pity I didn't notice anything much.

  Except how cold it was. I was waiting for spring.'

  'Did you love her?' he asked, hesitantly, then waited for her to finish a mouthful. The blunt knives did not seem to affect her efficient dissection of the food; there must be a knack to it. The silence went on for so long, he was afraid he had been impertinent, or worse, sentimental, but it was only her manners and the length of time she needed to demolish a mouthful.

  'Oh yes. Better than anyone alive. But I was jealous of her, too.'

  'Why?'

  'Because she seemed to have an unerring sense of right and wrong. Because she was loyal and good and because everyone loved her.'

  When he looked down, his own plate was bare, hers half empty. It was another thing he noticed about the Brits, that they ate so slowly and everything took so long. As well as what they said not making sense.

  In the House of Enchantment, the boys had left the door on the latch, expecting a late arriving guest. A figure crept up the stairs. The dining room and the hall reverberated with Timothy's furious playing of the piano and Peter's voice, rising in wavering unison.

  Say, gentle ladies, if love you know.

  Is love this fever troubling me so?

  Ees love this fe-evah troubling me so?

  The figure paused on the landing, pushed open doors, softly, a single, swift look inside enough to establish the negative. The room on the second floor was too feminine, the rooms below so obviously the domain of the resident. Another flight, panting as he reached the top. Hardly any need for a light, with the sky outside and the moon and the fire. The floorboards creaked; he tiptoed. Checked the clothes neatly hung in the wardrobe above an empty suitcase, looked around for inspiration, tiptoed back to the case by the desk.

  Emptied the contents on the bed, switched on the light and hurriedly rifled through them.

  Ginseng; acidopholus, milk, thistle, vitamin E, iron supplement. . . Dun-coloured wrappings and jars for worthy, indescribable goods. No familiar blue Viagra colour; nothing to cause a flutter of excitement. There was a rattle as everything was scooped back and the case dumped where it was found with a mutter of frustration.

  The figure prowled round the room, looked beneath the pillow, swearing, felt beneath the blankets for some hiding place. His fingers encountered warm fur, withdrew quickly, stifling a scream. Stepped away, breathing hard, fingers in mouth. Nothing.

  Then he noticed the shawl draped over the bottom of the bed, stroked it with the other hand, thought it felt pretty. He snatched it and went down the stairs slowly, stuffing it inside his jacket, froze on the first landing as the dining room door opened to a gaggle of greetings. Then it closed again and the music resumed.

  Cold first attacks me. .. Then ardour burns. : Then in a trice, my misery returns.

  As he ran for the door, the dog inside the dining room began to bark; the barking turned into a wail of protest as the singing grew louder and turned into laughter. He was through the door and out in the cold, sweat cooling on his face, relief making him giddy. The last bit was the worst. He might have been forced to kick the dog. Instead, such was his fury as he walked away, Neil Hulme kicked his own pet, then went back to the beach to kick the shingle. He still had enough for the week, but enough was never enough.

  They walked back along the shore avoiding the shingle. The quiet was impressive and the sky was vast with stars. Henry did not know whether he wanted to peer into windows or watch the steady calm movement of the sea and she decided for him. Inside one small house, dwarfed by a grander neighbour, a woman sat wearing a hat and painting at an easel with the television creating a bluish light in the opposite corner . In another room, only slightly obscured by net curtains, a man was sewing and talking, in a third, the final stages of a crowded supper were being served.

  By common accord, with arms linked, Maggie and Henry crossed the road to the seaward side. He craved an invitation into those rooms, to sit and belong without being asked to do anything.

  She noticed the details.

  'They've changed the curtains,' she said. 'And they've got a new chair . . .'

  On the seaward side he could see the glow of three small pools of firelight, punctuating the slope of the beach.

  'What's that?'

  'Night fishing.'

  'They must be crazy.'

  'Why? It isn't so cold.'

  Mild, even. She was right: the temperature had changed again into a comfortable cold. They crossed back. From outside the front door of the House of Enchantment, they could hear the sound of the piano and a ragged chorus of voices, to the additional accompaniment of Senta's barking.

  Where they had linked arms, he was not sure, only aware now, as she shed her coat in the hallway, that there was a prominent greasy mark at the thigh level of her dress.

  Inside the hall the musical row was louder, voices in competition with instrument. He shied from it, but Maggie was already humming.

  'G'night, Henry. Unless you want to sing?' she asked, but it was not an invitation, more of a dismissal, as if she had had enough of him.

  'G'night.'

  He tramped up the stairs into his room where the fire was lit, and he wondered again at their endless solicitude. The perfect room for a man of his disposition; a controllable space which seemed to be built out of the sky. All it required was a cocktail cabinet; he would buy sherry. From the window he looked for the small, firefly glowings he had seen on the beach.

  They were more romantic from here in the safety of his own warmth. Dad would have been out with them, rain or shine.

  A sole man sat on the shingle with a lamp and a campfire directly opposit
e the house. As Henry watched, he stood and cast a luminescent line into the water, the thread of it extending against the fire and moonlight, entering the water beyond the gentle waves. Henry was sleepy, but he still felt a curious desire to go back out, hunker down by the fisherman and ask him how he did it, and why, keep him company through the small hours.

  But the man was totally absorbed: he would resent a stranger. Perhaps I'll learn to fish.

  Henry thought. The perfect activity for an introverted man, and on the cusp of that, another thought. The boy didn't like to go out in the cold. Granny said. Could not grasp with the right hand, but he was desperate to learn to fish. He was suddenly so shaken with pity, he could not move.

  The answers lay in the facts. Henry turned on the laptop and looked at the notes he had made before dinner. The hemiplegic limbs are commonly smaller than the normal ones, the dwarfing more marked in the hand.

  Vasomotor changes are also common in the affected limbs, which are colder than normal. . The motor disability of the hand in some patients may be much increased in cold weather . . . Cold weather, then, was not good for learning to fish. Poor little boy. Henry's concentration was gone. The answers probably lay on the internet.

  Yawning, sad, not wanting any emotional reflection to intrude upon his chronic desire for sleep, looking for the damned sweatshirt he wore at night. Henry noticed that the shawl was missing from the end of the bed. Noticed without resentment or any particular curiosity. It was missing, that was all, and he was more concerned with the question of his own reluctance to go back outside, speak to one of the fishermen and ask what it took to learn to fish.

  They would know about tides, things he could never discover otherwise, and here he was, afraid of rejection and the sound of his own feet on the shingle. Perhaps Maggie had borrowed the shawl and he needed to tell her she was welcome.

  He moved down a landing. Silence in this impervious house. One more floor down to the door of her room, identified, never explored, although she had become a familiar presence in his. A messy room, a third the size of his own, strewn with clothes and shoes and a dying plant. Papers and magazines and realtors' sheets in shabby heaps; a small bookshelf with a bunch of dying snowdrops in a vase and a score of slim volumes of verse. A shawl, not his own, over a bedside chair.

  He drew the door closed behind him. Looked down the stairwell for the sight of her. The sound of the piano pulsed from the ground floor; he could hear her singing. Such a woman, determined not to feel. Decidedly frivolous.

  In the morning, Edward Burns gazed at the fish on the office wall and waited impatiently for Maggie. The daily correspondence for the practice, remarkably thin at this time of year, lay on his desk and he had begun opening it as best he could while still wearing gloves and waiting for the electric fire to bring some warmth into the room. He opened the post at random, whether addressed to himself, his self-effaced, nondescript partner on the top floor, or his part-time assistant, Maggie.

  Edward took this to be a supervisory duty as well as an aide-memoire, because if he did not read the correspondence, he would never remember what was going on. Once read, it was placed in neat heaps for personal delivery to the relevant quarters, apart from letters of complaint about delay, which he kept back for discussion. Delay was the commonest complaint, treated with courtesy and ultimately, complete indifference. Things took time and for those who complained, longer.

  Edward had perfected the art of handling a cigarette between gloved fingers, but considered it did nothing for the flavour. There were two letters which gave him cause, if not for alarm, a sensation he discouraged, then at least consternation. Alarm was something he saved for his son's school reports. One letter was for Maggie, marked private and confidential, an instruction he invariably ignored.

  It was a letter from her husband, stating in abject terms that although they were now divorced, he found himself deeply unhappy and it occurred to him that he might have made a terrible mistake. He did not like the musical tastes and sartorial habits of his youthful partner. She made a noise; she was insatiable, she jeered at the onset of his baldness, probably. Edward read most of this between the lines since the ex-husband was a great deal more circumspect and articulate than that, but Edward had seen the aftermath of many a separation and felt he could decode the specifics of the regret, however subtly it was phrased.

  What he could not do was predict Maggie's response; he hoped it would be fury, but he was unsure enough to feel a huge reluctance to pass on the missive at all. Maggie might deem herself irresponsible, was a lousy timekeeper, had none of the gravitas of dedication, but if left to her own devices, she was undeniably efficient, and he liked her. A lot.

  And besides, there was this unfinished business with Francesca Chisholm, which disturbed him and for which the American was paying at a modest, but useful, rate. Which led him on to the second letter.

  Under the watchful, single eye of the fish Edward read it again, this time without gloves. A letter from that senior persons' residential home on the cliffs at Ramsgate, stating that Joseph Chisholm's condition had deteriorated to such an extent that his removal from there to a nursing home was imminent. The Director of the home wrote a neat letter entirely without recrimination.

  Uncle Joe was one of several in her establishment whose only link with the outside world was via a solicitor, to whom application was made for extra expenses not covered by his pension.

  He was effectively her responsibility; there was no one else to make the decision, so he would be moved to a sister home in the same group where nursing care was available, twenty-four hours. 'After several months of almost speechless incapacity improvement is not expected and distress, we hope, unlikely'

  Edward Burns acted as trustee to several old buffers- without relatives, or relatives so distant and geographically removed they were meaningless. He was as sceptical about the loyalties of blood as he was about those of marriage and did not see why, for instance, Maggie should pay any attention to an uncle she had been preserved from in childhood and never saw since.

  Blood was not thicker than water; you either liked your relatives or you bloody well didn't and it was only affection which created a bond, after all. And there was the other fact that Angela Hulme was deputed to visit dear old Uncle Joe, just as Francesca had done.

  What the hell did she say to a bedridden old man?

  He left the Director's letter prominently displayed on the front of the strewn desk, and put the letter from Maggie's ex in his pocket. They were not lucky with husbands, these Chisholms.

  Edward himself valued and adored his own placid wife, who kept his house as tidy as his office was not, and never bothered about odd socks.

  The downstairs door crashed and the building shook. Maggie came up the stairs, singing, horribly ebullient early in the morning. Just as she slammed into his office with two cups of coffee, he made the resolution that he would give her the letter in his pocket at the end of the day, after she had done some work, not before.

  There were two new clients for her to see in the course of the morning: petty criminals with drink problems, requiring to rehearse their mitigation for the Dover magistrates next week.

  Edward regarded the poverty of his office surroundings and his practice in general, wondered if he should have been a bank robber instead, but there was a slight problem with temperament. He found the pursuit of riches perfectly pointless. Catching a real fish on the end of a line was far more of a priority and he resented the fact that it was such a good morning for fishing with a lousy forecast for the weekend.

  'Lovely day,' she said, making it worse. He pointed to the Uncle Joe letter. She read it swiftly.

  'Did Angela mention to you that he was bedridden?'

  'No. She said he ate a lot of biscuits, read the newspapers and was rather jolly.'

  'I wonder,' Edward said, with the other letter burning a hole in his jacket, 'who the hell it is she's been going to see?'

  'I don't know. Does it matte
r?'

  'It might.'

  'C'mon, Tanya. C'mon. Isn't it nice you aren't going to school today? C'mon. Eat up.'

  Getting her to eat what she didn't want to eat, every mother's problem. Angela shared it with the married mums and the ones who never had to go to parenting sessions to prove they were fit for it. Do not use bribery or blackmail. Crap. A long walk on the beach this milder morning, Tanya chatting to the fishing people and then gauging the distance between the break" waters to run out and back, again and again. They never went on the pier any more. Tan preferred the challenge of the steep slope of the beach. Pink skinned, she allowed her hair to be forced into plaits. Wisps of stiff hair curled from the braid. She would never have smooth hair, but it would always be magnificent.

  'Finish the porridge. Then you can have chocolate later. If you're good.'

  'Any kind?' The spoon was poised.

  'Any kind.' Angela sighed and patted her head

  The eating resumed and the braiding was complete

  So peaceful like this.

  'But I like going to school. Mum. I like it. Why can't I go today?'

  'Do you, darling? Since when, eh?' The child's remark delighted her and the reaction was controlled. She had noticed the difference, of course, but it was not quite the same as hearing her beloved daughter admitting to a change of heart which coincided with the end of almost daily tantrums and a skull-rending clash of wills right up to the school gates.

  'I still get into trouble, but there's loads of girls much worser than me.'

  'Bet there are. Got your coat and your books and stuff? Time to do drawing today. Shouldn't be busy.'

  'We could stay at home for that.'

  'No, darling, we can't.'

  Angela did not say, we need the money. We need the money from my little jobs and Neil's little handouts, even if we've got Francesca's car and other things she left.