So he wandered manfully up and down, down and up in ever decreasing circles, pausing against parked cars, bored, frightened and wakeful after a long sleep, but still craving the oblivion of more. More than sleep, he needed a place of safety, even one of the hostels if he knew the nearest. About midnight, a police car caught him mid-roadway: the driver slowed the vehicle and looked at him closely. He stuck his nose in the air and began to walk with exaggerated purpose, half stepping, half running, a comic movement down an alley at the end of a road, as if he knew where he was going. Once out of sight he scaled a wall far higher than the scope of his normal efforts, found himself in a small garden, unkempt and empty, so empty he felt the opposite of safe, so climbed another high wall on the opposite side. Reckless by now, he simply wanted a place to rest where he could see lights and know there was someone there, even though he planned to have moved long before they saw him. He wanted to look at lit windows to relieve his own isolation whatever the risk: the sight of people was better than empty sky, kept at bay the threatening ghost was better than empty sky, kept at bay the threatening ghost which had begun to torture his dreams. By the time he reached the third garden, he had no choice but staying put since the energy which had driven him so far so fast died in his skinny chest to the tune of loud panting and a pain over his heart. In any event, this garden was nicest on account of lights burning safely in far upstairs windows of the house to which it belonged. He had settled into a hidden area beneath elegant steps which he only admired for the shelter they offered. Put the red cloak round himself and slept without caring when the rain began to fall.
Sleep proved treacherous for the second time, carrying his oblivion well over dawn and into the hours when life was busy around him. Cars in the street beyond, a drain gurgling close to his ear, flies buzzing and the whole world wide awake, tickling his grubby skin with a very slight awareness of danger. Despite all that, he still could not find a sense of urgency. Everything about him was blunt and his feet were wet, nor could he remember the route he had taken to get where he was. After standing and shaking himself, he climbed beyond the steps up into the garden, noticing the blank French windows and on one side a projecting wall with a narrow window at his own head height. Something drew him to the cosy little window, jammed open for a crack at the top, familiar temptation of a man who was not really a thief, but still an opportunist, reassured by the silence of the building despite all the noises right and left. He crept close, raised his head slowly until his eyes were level with the pane and his nose was pressed to the glass. Then he clutched his own throat to stifle his own scream, his heart hurting his chest in one giant convulsion. Immediately opposite his own eyes, separated only by the thickness of a centimetre, was another face also pressed against the glass. A wild, miniature face, distorted by the contact, grubby with tears, hollow-cheeked and luminous pale. The flattened orb was surrounded by a tangled halo of gold, the eyes china blue, the pink mouth opening and closing like a fish, mouthing words. Slightly above the ledge of the window, higher than the head, there were small hands each side of the staring eyes, clawing at the window with bitten nails. The face began to disappear as if drawing back, breath left on the window from the mouthing of words. ‘Mine,’ the soundless voice appeared to be saying, ‘Mine, Mine, Mine,’ while the fingers clawed and pointed. His jaw hung slack for a minute: he noticed the nails, chewed to the quick like his own, as his eyes remained locked, fixed on the other hands, smearing the pane, helpless. Transfixed only for the moment, the terror then reached his feet: he staggered, stumbled wildly to the extreme end of the garden, not the way he had come in, but crashing over a medium wall and a flimsy trellis on the other side, stumbling forward to another building, down some steps to collide with a basement door, knocking at it and gibbering like an animal while he hit at the window in the top, all caution lost in an agony of terror. The vagrant needed humankind: if they put one arm up his back or stabbed at him or beat him, he still needed them more: could not control his tongue or his own brown and bitten fingers which rapped for attention. He gibbered in his baby language, gibbered more like the child, wanting nothing else than they should let him in.
After the police had come and gone with more indifference than efficiency, carrying away with them this small, filthy adult suffering from dementia, Mrs Harrison made a cup of tea. Thick and strong with plenty of sugar the way they liked, even more sugar than usual because it was good for shock. Samantha’s yelling had added to the distraction and speed of the officers and for this service she was being rewarded with chocolate biscuits. On account of the row, the officials had required minimal information, nor had any of them waited for tea, such a disappointment to one and all in finding nothing more than yet another vagrant in a neighbourhood populated with such. ‘Talks a lot, didn’t he?’ said Harrison, feeling braver and far more confident in the aftermath. Mrs Harrison was simply relieved for the continued absence of the mistress. That old lie about the necklace lay heavy, although what with Mrs P caring nothing for anything, might not have mattered any longer, but then again, could have been trouble: you never could tell; and besides, second nature dictated she lied at least a little of the time. Keep them in the dark about everything except your own perfections, a habit maintained over years of service for which she never considered herself properly rewarded. Too late to confess now, although, thinking as she did so frequently of Jeanetta, she bitterly regretted the dishonesty imposed on Katherine Allendale, felt profound unease.
‘He was just jibbering,’ she said slowly, ‘that beggar, talking like a monkey. Must have been frightened by something, I don’t know. Kept trying to pull the blighters into the garden, but there wasn’t anything there. All that fiddling, pointing with his fingers and waving his hands round his head. Bit touched, poor devil. But he must have seen something, or why knock?’
‘He must have wanted catching. Comfortable inside, isn’t it? Better than being out in the rain. Must have been the rain that did it. He was talking foreign, I thought, in bits.’
‘How would you know?’ she jeered at him.
‘I don’t know, but I couldn’t make it out, so it can’t have been English, can it?’
‘Probably saying thank you to you for letting him in. Like you did last time. Here, open the windows, it stinks in here.’
Harrison ignored the jibe and sank into the chair which was the oldest, aged entirely by his own behind, took a sip from the tea mug, shuffling. ‘What’s this, then?’ His behind was disturbed by an extra crease, uncomfortable, since he was familiar with every nuance of his favourite chair. ‘Here, look,’ he said, retrieving the red shawl from under his behind; ‘he’s gone and left this.’ The red cloak emerged, filthy and crumpled. ‘What’s he think he is?’ Harrison chuckled. ‘Batman?’ Mrs Harrison grabbed the garment.
‘Put it down, you daft man sitting on it, you don’t know where it’s been.’ She held the cloak aloft with suspicion, tempered with puzzlement and a frisson of familiarity. ‘Might have been a nice thing once,’ she remarked, moving towards the fire with the thing held between two fingers. Then she appeared to think again and shoved it in the bin which contained the rubbish. A number of stranded memories were struggling for connection: she began to take the cloak out of the bin again when the upstairs door banged so loudly the house shook.
‘It’s Her,’ said Harrison, ‘back from the shops. Got herself the usual supplies, by the sounds of it.’ There was a thump of shopping hitting floor. ‘Did you have another go at her, after I did, about next door? You said you would?’ He knew she had from the way the face clouded. ‘Shut up,’ said Mrs Harrison, ‘just shut up a minute. Let me think.’
The day was so fresh after rain, and her mind so clear she did not want to think. Katherine had slept a sleep which was free of all dreams and even the alarms which followed waking were not disturbing. Such as finding the clothes in her wardrobe had been pruned of almost everything she had acquired without David’s guidance, including the suit she had exchang
ed in the boutique he most frequently preferred. All that remained in the scaled-down collection were clothes which reflected his preferences, severely classical or tarty. Since he had slept late, hugged her without any demands before rising to see amiable Jeremy, putting her first, she was more than disposed to forgive, did not really consider there was anything to forgive although she vaguely regretted the hiding of a pair of jeans. There was nothing nicer in the whole wide world than knowing that she did not have to get up, could stay, if she wished, in the cocoon of that bed, safe.
Tranquillity bloomed through the house with Jeanetta absent from it: Katherine set her mind away from anything which could possibly disturb that precious status quo, let herself be fussed over, an exquisite pleasure. Going down to the kitchen, dressed in a neat skirt and favourite cashmere, she found the tidy crumbs which signified their breakfast, wondered where the men had gone, feeling absurdly cosseted and happy. The basement, perhaps: Jeremy adored the workshop below stairs. Katherine looked inside the fridge, found sliced cold beef, and suppressing the hurt which arrived with the knowledge of how well he had looked after himself the day before, took two slices. She could have her own way today; anything she wanted was hers. Eleven o’clock: a sandwich as good as anything, and she began, with gaiety, to construct one. Oh what to do with the day, nothing for preference: exhaustion was still lurking despite the refreshment of such a calm and blissful morning. From the garden end of the kitchen, the radio was playing softly. Surprising for such a self-sufficient man to need so much music, but he said the sound soothed the boy. Her handbag was still on the kitchen floor, nasty little memory of some time ago, the sight occasioning a guilty memory, only subdued by her recovering from inside the apples she had placed there, washing them and returning them to the fruit bowl. So tired still, so very tired. She walked to a mirror on the wall by the windows to the garden, examined her hair: what a mess, a frightful bush full of wisps and sticking-up tufts, must remember never to sleep with damp hair. He would never make her cut it now. Using both hands, she pulled back the mane, looking round for something to tie it, sighing. It was only then, close to the playroom door, she could hear an echoing sigh, absorbed in a sound which seemed to come from a great distance, a kind of singing.
‘Rainy, rainy rattlestones. Go away . . . and break his bones . . .’ A pause for breath in the tuneless droning, immediately resumed. ‘Pussy-cat, pussy-cat . . . Where you been? He’s been up to London to . . . something the Queen. Miaow . . .’ the line and the subdued voice trailing away into a cough. The cough was politely subdued, as if not part of the repertoire.
Katherine moved like a marionette, legs refusing to bend. She jerked back to the table where her beef sandwich sat on a plate. Jeanetta with Sophie, gone to stay with silly Granny, oh good, he had said, he wouldn’t lie, would have left the door to the playroom locked whatever, he always did, all the doors. This was imagination, rain playing tricks, spoiling everything and spoiling her turn to be spoiled. She looked at the sandwich, granary bread, beef and a little mustard to spice the taste in her mouth. Reached in an unlocked drawer for a piece of polythene, wrapped her breakfast and put it in the handbag. Rose from this stooping to the floor and jerked back across the room, not looking at the playroom door, and turned up the volume of the radio.
CHAPTER 18
Sophie had found the cat on Sunday morning. Marshalling her energies, although these seemed to lack direction whatever she did, she had travelled on the threatening tube line and alighted at the wrong stop for the house of her son. Knowledge of the losses in her burglary made her abstemious enough for public transport: otherwise she could not tolerate less than a taxi or walking, which was her preference provided she need go no more than half a mile without a little rest. In the whole of her dependent life, she had never arrived on the doorstep of her son unannounced: the sheer temerity of her expedition made her nervous. Then the lack of consideration showed by a train driver in depositing her so deliberately at the wrong stop, especially after she had waited in surroundings of sublime ugliness for the thing to arrive, angered her to the extent she walked away from the wrong station muttering something along the lines of how she would never darken their doors again. Only two stops wrong, so small a space on that map on the wall of the tunnel. Looked as if you only walked in a straight line, no distance at all. But she came out of the station and lost her bearings, encountered a main road leading to another road twice as busy. Looking for a quieter street, she fell into a small Sunday market where music played from stalls and clothes of all colours were for sale. This was the cause of half an hour’s distraction and a total expenditure of three pounds sterling. Parting with the money in those small, bright coins which always reminded her of chocolate currency consumed at Christmas, she refused to think of how closely the sum approximated to a taxi fare between her own violated house and that of her grandchildren.
Such a notion could hardly count when she had just purchased for them both a pair of luminous socks, also a pair for David. He would scoff, of course: but it would show she had remembered his birthday. The only hope was that the mellowness of that occasion would have leaked into this weekend before the event, enough to make her welcome although she was breaking all the rules. Enough to allow him to admit her unannounced, or make him explain why her last cry for help, in the middle of the night for heaven’s sake, had met with so little response. Well, no response. Which would be the problem to face if only she could begin to discover exactly where she was. At the moment she saw the cat, she wanted to sit down and howl; repeating howlings of all their names in order to bring them to her side and scold them for putting her old body to such trouble, and also because she was lost.
She had set out so bravely, muttering all the evening before, ‘Now listen here, David: what d’you think you’re up to, old tricks again, mmm? I’m your mother, just you listen to me . . .’ All of this bravado might have faded on his doorstep, but she could not find his doorstep. Somewhere in a mass of flyovers, underpasses, a pedestrian in a jungle of cars, the courage faded sooner. She was sat by the side of the road, counting her money and weeping, and the cat came and rubbed against her legs, keening in tune with her own, quiet moaning.
Since the burglary, she had been brave and organized, but occasionally found all her senses slipping, everything changing as she watched some of her instincts undergo a kind of metamorphosis. The nondescript animal at her feet was nothing she would ever have adopted normally. Far too dirty, scarred by a fight, limping, with matted ears and one malfunctioning eye, ugly as sin even taking misadventure into account. Sophie looked at it, remembered she was alive, and who she was. ‘Go away,’ she said, ‘get off, you dreadful thing. Ugh.’ The ringing tones of her carrying voice would have graced a military parade ground, but there was no one to appreciate the evidence of command. ‘Go A-way,’ she repeated, then looking down at the matted ear, speaking in an even greater confusion of memory, added, ‘Please, oh do get off, please.’ The cat arched round her ankles as a lorry thundered by. ‘You shouldn’t be here, really you shouldn’t,’ Sophie went on, rubbing her shins, quite liking the sensation. Then the thing began to move towards the road and she noticed how small it was. Not a cat proper, a kitten, mangled by fortune and even more bereft of street wisdom than herself, scuttling towards the traffic. Perhaps it had thought she was going to kick it, oh my dear, what a thought, as if she would. ‘Stop,’ she commanded, ‘stop at once.’ The small rump wobbled in response to a draught raised by a passing car. Sophie leapt forward, dropping the socks and her handbag, scuttled back to the safety of the wall with one bundle of fur. She stuffed it in the front of her best jacket and picked up her bag, noticing the dirt on her hands and the lace of her cuffs. She felt the bizarre elevation of having stolen something, and somehow, what with that and the filth, it was not quite possible to carry on to David’s house.
‘An absolute dice with death, my dear. Really, I didn’t know I had it in me. Practically under the wheels of a juggernaut.
Isn’t that right, pussy? Nice taxi-man brought us home.’
‘For nothing?’ Mary asked caustically, doubting with her usual consistency any act which even smelled of philanthropy. So far the saga of all these events had taken longer than planned. She had only intended a passing visit, an interlude in the desert of Sunday afternoon, which was even worse than Saturday. If there had been a point to this story, other than one disgusting animal lying on a hearthrug, she had begun to forget, as the teller intended.
‘We paid the man, of course.’ Sophie was not about to repeat the episode of offering him the luminous socks in lieu. ‘Anyway, that’s why I never got to David’s.’
‘Why were you going?’ Mary asked. ‘Did they ask you? Shouldn’t you phone and explain why you never got there? It’s three o’clock. You know how they are about Sunday lunch. Or any lunch.’
‘They didn’t ask me, as it happens,’ Sophie stated after some hesitation. ‘I was just going to go. Time that boy was sorted out. Really. Never coming to see me after I was burgled, appalling behaviour. Not Katherine either.’
‘Oh, Sophie, sweetheart, I am sorry. And about your burglary. How absolutely awful. You should have phoned me.’
‘I didn’t want you,’ said Sophie with devastating dignity. ‘I wanted Katherine.’
Mary was shocked into silence, standing to one side of Sophie’s chair with her fists clenched. ‘Not at first,’ Sophie continued artlessly, ‘I wanted David, of course. And the children, more than anything. Something to hug.’ Her brow wrinkled in the effort of concentration. ‘I haven’t seen my own grandchildren for weeks. But then I wanted Katherine, nice, sweet Katherine. She’s always been nice to me. She understands me, you see.’
The Playroom Page 27