Undercurrent

by Frances Fyfield

  'Mummy, when's Francesca coming back?'

  The heart stopped for the second time. Whoever said that having kids shortened your bloody life? The question hadn't been asked for three whole months and it dropped like a stone.

  Something must have reminded her: an overheard phone conversation, perhaps, when she was on the blower to bloody Maggie, losing her temper and raising her voice. The bloody American, why the hell should she talk to him?

  Angela remembered to keep calm.

  'Don't know, darling. Perhaps in the summer.'

  It was difficult to envisage the summer as they walked over the bridge to the castle entrance, Tanya trailing, more or less pleased with the plaits and keeping hold of one of them with her spare hand. The other held her satchel, a labelled thing for street cred, envied by her peers and guarded like gold. The castle was a favourite place. In the normal course of events she reacted to the sheer sombreness of it, and inside the warm and cosy ambience of the shop, became a docile creature. It was Francesca who had taught her to climb but that, too, was in the summer. Damn you Francesca.

  In the kitchen of the House of Enchantment, Henry watched the video, with a different attitude now that he knew more. The boy on the screen ran with his elbow flexed, his right hand turned in towards his body and his right shoulder held higher than his left. He had scabby knees; the right foot tapped at the ground as if afraid of the contact; it made Henry think of the lopsided gait of a three-legged dog although he did not approve of himself for making the comparison. As the boy drew nearer the camera, Henry could see that his face was not as ugly as he had assumed on his first sight of it, but merely contorted into a ferocious frown of effort. When he came to a halt in close-up, a slender arm reached across his face and wiped the mucus from under his nose with a handkerchief.

  'There were certain things he could not do,’ Timothy was explaining. 'Things nobody can do if their right hand refuses to work. Such as blow one's nose and brush one's teeth. Or make the best of falling over. He was always a grubby little boy.'

  'And he wanted to learn to fish.'

  'Would have done, too. We'd have taught him, though it might have taken a long time. We were working on the creation of a new kind of rod. You see,' Timothy stated, pouring more coffee,

  'he wanted something he could do by himself, although Fran always wanted him to be with other children.

  Pushed him to be with other children, so they could bring him on. But he was frustrating for other children. He wanted them, he adored them, but he knew they got a bit fed up with him.'

  'Which is natural,' Peter said. 'Children are cruel.'

  'They're rehearsing to be adults,' Timothy said sarcastically.

  'How could it be otherwise?'

  'Have either of you seen a shawl I left lying around in my room?' Henry asked inconsequentially.

  'On the end of your bed, isn't it?' Tim said.

  'Unless, of course, Harry's been in and borrowed it.

  He's awfully fond of a nice Indian shawl.'

  Henry could see the damn thing now, tricking out that damned Wendy house.

  Ghosts, bah, humbug. Rubbish. FACTS. He detested whimsy, and sat in the library to read facts about castles until the afternoon was advanced and there was less chance of visitors. This particular castle, he decided on the basis of his new-found knowledge and his own estimation of the place, was simply a miniature model for a king to play with, pretty in this light.

  Inside the main entrance, framed on a wall, was the text of a letter, dated 1842.

  To the Queen's most excellent Majesty . . . Most gracious Sovereign, we, your Majesty's dutiful and loyal subjects, the Mayor, Authorities and other inhabitants, beg leave to approach your Majesty with feelings of the most devoted loyalty and affectionate attachment.

  We hail your Majesty's arrival and fervently hope that your Majesty will experience every degree of satisfaction and pleasure and will graciously condescend to bear your Majesty's sojourn here in kind remembrance.

  Distinguished as this vicinity has been from the earliest ages by the visits of eminent personages, never did it attain to honour equal to the present. . . That the Supreme Being may, in His infinite goodness, continue to shower on your Majesty his choicest blessings is our sincere and earnest prayer...

  Oh my, oh my, did they take their monarch seriously Surely someone wrote that stuff tongue in cheek? Or did they have the committee round the table in an orgy of sycophancy? Then Henry thought of a citizen addressing a Senator in his own democracy, and the sedulousness of the letter was less surprising. Hell, he had watched people kiss the feet of the head of the Corporation.

  He went into the shop.

  'Excuse me, do you have a copy of that letter? Oh, hello - Mrs Hulme, isn't it?' ?

  She was seated behind the counter as he had seen her before, neat and hard as plastic with a look of fatigue round her eyes. The beautiful child sat next to her, using the counter top to construct a cardboard model of the building, sold in boxed form, price £5, and looking complicated. Tanya gazed at him and smiled her heart-stopping smile, then turned her gaze towards three teenagers who selected postcards and murmured over the choice. They were dressed almost identically in state of the art trainers, with unnecessary sunglasses pushed into their tawny hair; she waslost in admiration of their clothes. Angela Hulme took their money and they moved through the entrance to the keep, adjusting headphones.

  'Entrance is £4.50,' she said. 'You got in free last time. And you didn't pay for the chocolate.'

  'I'm really sorry,' Henry murmured, taken aback by the steely aggression in her voice. He found it difficult to understand. Maggie said she was a tricky lady, but then she had been unwittingly involved in a tragedy, brought up a child alone, and trickiness was surely her right; still, he did not think he had done anything to offend. Yet.

  'Great place,' he said unconvincingly, placing money on the counter. Pound coins reminded him of a certain kind of gold-wrapped candy he had eaten as a child. He hesitated. Small talk was not going to work. 'I need to talk to you, Mrs Hulme, if that's possible.'

  'No. What about?'

  As if taking a cue, Tanya slipped the moorings of the counter and followed the teenagers.

  Angela did not stop her. There was a stool on the customer side of the counter and Henry occupied it.

  'I need to know about Francesca, Mrs Hulme. I was a friend, oh, a long time ago, and I came here to find her and talk about old times. Wish I'd come sooner. I might have helped. Not that I'm much of a help-'

  'There's nothing to tell,' she interrupted. 'Why don't you mind your own business? Going round, asking questions, stirring things up. You bastard. If any of this gets back to my daughter, I'll kill you. Bet you don't think of her, Mr bloody scientist snooper.

  What about her if she hears people talking about poor little Harry, her best friend, just when they've finally stopped talking about him? They played together all the time . . . she looked after him

  . . . what do you think it was like for her when he died? Kids shouldn't have to put up with that kind of thing, especially not a kid like her. She was just turning a corner.' Her voice was rising. Henry spread his hands, helplessly.

  'Please, please, leave us alone.' There were tears in her eyes.

  'OK, OK, I'm sorry. Don't tell me about him, tell me about her. You were friends for a long time, Iknow. Great friends.'

  'Why the hell should that matter to you? What right have you got to ask?'

  'No rights, Mrs Hulme. None whatsoever.'

  She seemed to calm down, a false calm, he guessed and just as likely the prelude to a storm.

  The tears were rubbed out of her eyes with the red knuckle of her right hand. She had no time for tears. 'Yes, we were. Like sisters. I helped at her school.' She laughed, bitterly. 'Couldn't stay away from kids, me. Just liked to be close. I was trying to give up the idea of one of my own: couldn't. She steered me - us through the adoption stuff. It's easier if you'll take a child rather
than a baby. I suppose one of the reasons we were accepted was because they knew she'd give support. And she did. And then she had him. And then her bloke buggered off. Yeah, we had a lot in common and Tanya loved the baby. Now piss off.'

  'Please ... I can't do that, not yet. You see . ..'

  'You don't even know what you want to know, do you? You don't even know what you want to find out.

  You don't care who you might hurt. Even her. You're just like one of those seagulls, picking at carrion and shitting all over. Here's your ticket, and if you see my daughter on the way round, don't you dare say a word except to tell her to come back here. We close soon.'

  It was the please which unhinged him, and the tears. She was right about one thing. Henry thought uncomfortably as he followed the tourist path into the courtyard. He did not know what it was he wanted to know and her scornful observation troubled him as he skirted the wall. OK, Henry, take the tour; accept the reprimand; you have no right to make anyone unhappy. Not unless you have a worthwhile, morally viable objective in mind, such as healing the sick, bringing the dead back to life, alleviating suffering, feeding the hungry, consoling the wounded, and none of these ambitions, dear to his heart in the idealistic days of trailing round India, applied to his current enterprise. What did he want to know? The satisfaction of a personal curiosity seemed a puerile excuse for causing outrage and yet he felt he already knew more than anyone else.

  India: the jewel in Queen Victoria's crown; no wonder the Mayor and the town councillors wrote her letters like that.

  He could hear voices from the cannons and walked in the other direction round the walls.

  He turned on the audiotape and turned it off again, leaned, and watched the pennant fly. Then he followed the direction sign into the fat body of the castle itself. Please she had said. Leave us alone.

  The central area he entered seemed to be a series of huge, cave-like rooms with domed ceilings, dry, floodlit, dusty and surprisingly warm. He stood in awe in front of a huge fireplace of mellow pink brick, the brick beautifully designed into an arch supporting a lintel of wood so old and pale it looked ready to crumble at the touch. He touched: it felt as solid as iron. He tried to imagine the dimensions of the fire which required so massive a hearth and wondered how anyone would get close.

  Where did they sit the Queen? He wandered up a flight of steps and found a panelled room with portraits and framed photographs, the only furniture of any kind in the whole place, dawdled for while, wondering why none of these men wore eyeglasses at their age and wondering where it was in this crazy edifice that the Chisholm family had kept their quarters. The atmosphere slowed him down; the quiet made him careful and he made himself cough for the sake of sound. It was a very peaceful place of war.

  Back in the kitchen area, he consulted the map which came with his ticket and realized it was getting dark. He had not encountered the others except for the sound of their voices in the distance. Not such a miniature castle after all; it had space without grace. He must repeat such a neat phrase to Maggie who thought he was so dull, and quite apart from any other consideration, the tour was incomplete. Without the aid of the audiotape, recited by a man whose cut glass accent reminded him of nothing more than a peerless Hollywood villain. Henry steeled himself for a swift sprint round the lower floors: where they had planned to fire muskets on the enemy from all those lime holes in the walls he could see from the outside at the bottom of what he thought should have been a moat.

  It would be darker down there. There was floodlight in these cavernous rooms, sconces on walls creating a warm glow on stone which varied in colour from ochre to grey granite. For a full, poignant, hesitant minute, Henry wished his father was here, raising his eyeglasses from his hooked nose and saying. Will you look at that, son, they dug up every damn quarry they could find to make this mongrel. Even with that, Henry knew he did not want to go down. He would read the guidebook and pretend he had. He knew his limitations.

  He turned from the larger room, marked at one angle with yet another sign WAY OUT, a description which was, for an American of his generation, deeply deceptive for an exit sign, looking more like a sixties description of approval: way out, man. At the top of the slope, and the place was fuller of slopes than stairs, as if stairs were scarcely invented, he had noticed a great brute of a big black door. Toiling towards it, he could see a welcome patch of puffy, grey sky and a light outside.

  One of those security lights which reacted to the onset of darkness by becoming at first luminous and then timidly brighter as evening encroached, the kind of device his father would have examined, too. Such a cute thing, he might have said, stroking it, always amazed at how the simplest of things worked. Halfway up the slope, the door closed. Then the spotlights went out.

  He stumbled uphill to the door and thumped on it, not alarmed, simply annoyed in the same way he always was by the inefficiency of others. He thumped again, creating a small, ineffectual sound against the wood and hurting the heel of his hand on a metal stud. Henry did not shout; it was not something he did in response to simple mistakes; anger was something he controlled. He just wanted out. The solidityof the door muffled noise, but he could hear scrabbling on the other side.

  He knocked again, yelling this time EXCUSE ME! EXCUSE ME! His voice came back inside his ears, sounding foreign and false. Once he stopped, he could detect an increase in the scuffling beyond, then the child screaming, half hysterical: 'Nooo, Mummy, no. He's in there. If he stays in there, he'll get so cold. You mustn't lock it. Henry hates the cold. NO. No, no no, stoppit, stoppit, stoppit. LET HIM OUT.' And after that, with his head pressed against the wood, Henry heard murmurs of brisk consolation: 'Aren't you a little silly one, aren't you just? It isn't a person, silly.

  That nice man went home.

  I told him please go. He's deaf. That thing in there is only one of Neil's silly ghosts.'

  There was a further protest, Angela's voice shriller.

  'What do you want, silly? Do you want me to be sent away too? Is that what you want? Come on, darling. Time for tea.'

  I don't really understand the purpose of imprisonment (except as a form of revenge) and I don't really think I ever did. It alters nothing. A sentence like mine is only a warning, not an education.

  I am not imprisoned because I would otherwise take to the streets, killing children at random. No one suggests that my criminality is bound to become a habit. The only child who was ever vulnerable to me was my own son. No one is in danger from me, except me. Or from my friend in the kitchen. She killed her husband and she makes everyone think that's what I did, too.

  I think I imagined, in a daft kind of way, that having sentenced me and sent out all the necessary messages about justice and condemnation, someone might say. What really is the point of keeping a useful woman locked away, doing nothing? They would think, what a waste of money and quietly let me out the back way. Maggie says that's basically what they will do, although not for fifteen years. It is the years that weigh on me, not the present. The only way to deal with incarceration is to take it one day at a time. Not a whole day, even: an hour, a minute. And the only way I can accept it is to remind myself constantly that it does have a purpose even if it isn't obvious to anyone but me.

  Without that, I'm sure I should go mad. ' .

  Not everything I've ever done has had a purpose.

  One's aimless so much of the time, which is just as well because it's when I've been my most determined that I've been my most mistaken. Poor Harry. You deserved better.

  I asked for more of the pills. Otherwise I shall scream and cry.

  Forget my stiff upper lip.

  FMC.

  CHAPTER NINE.

  Uncle Joe, Tom Cobbley and all could wait. 'Life without you is not the same . . .' Maggie read in the letter. She put it down on the threadbare carpet of the office and stamped on the envelope, as a substitute for the immediate desire to tear it up. It was an odd aspect of legal training which made it impossible for her to de
stroy a letter because of its evidential value, but she could abuse it. The paper was creased from a working day's contact with Edward's pocket, improving the fulsome prose. 'I do not know what madness possessed me,' he wrote, 'to imagine I could have a better existence with someone who is so much your inferior in every way . . .'

  'Life without you is not the same,' she mimicked to Edward, flourishing the letter at him.

  'What did he bloody well expect? He didn't want it to be the same.

  And what possessed him was perfectly obvious. A bitch with big boobs, sixteen years younger than me. He's a cliché. A ten-foot transvestite, at least I'd have a topic for conversation.'

  'What do you think of its style?' Edward murmured.

  'He hasn't got any style'.' she yelled.

  'I meant the letter.'

  She looked at the sentences, perfectly punctuated and nicely turned. He had taken his time to construct his thoughts and give his plea for a meeting the right degree of pathos and dignity. 'I can't get you out of my mind and I'm full of sorrow . . .'

  'Rather contrived, I thought,' Edward said. 'You shouldn't have married another lawyer.

  We're all pompous farts. What are you going to do?'

  She looked at him and the fish behind the desk, all hazed in cigarette smoke.

  'Drink,' she said.

  Henry focused on the words. Time for tea. Quaint. He was trembling with fury and willing it to cease as his eyes adjusted to the gloom. A couple of dim security lights high on the walls blinked into life within minutes and for these he was profoundly grateful. He had space to move; there was a mean ration of light, sufficient for reading the large print of the direction signs, he was not cold, and in a minute she would come back and open the damn door. He felt in his trouser pocket for his packet of cigarettes, lit one and began to pace the floor, counting his steps, one, two, three. He shrugged inside the warmth of his leather jacket and soft sweater. He would circumnavigate the central keep, beginning here, fifteen times, and by the time that was done she would have come back. Or someone would come back; there would be a night watchman; someone.