Facing the Tank

by Patrick Gale

  He shut the book without reading the entry, pulling a large rubber band around it. Then he kicked off his shoes and switched off the light. Lying on his bed in the darkness he heard bells.

  16

  She had taken Clive’s hand and, rather than shake it, only held it in hers and gave it a cool squeeze. Her eyes were almond-shaped. Her nose was long, fine, smooth as wax. Pearl drops kissed the generous lobe of each curiously long ear. She turned smiling to Tobit. Her long hair had been pulled hard away from her face into something midway between a cascade and a bush. She was slightly taller than her fiancé. She was dressed in some kind of delicate, clinging suede whose fawn set off to perfection the richness of her skin. She smelled of vanilla. She was glorious.

  ‘You must be Glorie,’ Clive said. ‘Welcome to Barrowcester.’

  ‘It’s cute,’ she replied. ‘Really. We had a lovely walk around by the Cathedral and then along the ramparts over the river.’

  He gestured for her to come in and she slid past him so closely that her hair brushed his hand and her scent wafted into his face.

  ‘Hi.’

  Tobit was grinning on the steps, car keys in hand. He looked like a poster for driving lessons.

  ‘Tobit. Hello, old man. Congratulations.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  Clive’s voice always came out wrong when he spoke to his son. Whereas he sounded like a fairly intelligent schoolmaster when talking to anyone else, he had only to open his mouth to Tobit to sound like a father in a television family; the sort of man who goes jogging with a golden retriever, plays with a train set and spends all weekend in a white tracksuit. A dad rather than a father.

  ‘Come on in,’ he said.

  ‘Thanks,’ said Tobit, ‘Dad.’

  As his son passed him, letting slip a waft of what was doubtless some overpriced Italian cologne, Clive found himself patting the boy’s back and was disgusted at the image they must be conveying.

  ‘Lovely house,’ said Gloire, emerging from the sitting room and peering up the stairs. ‘Is it Victorian?’

  ‘A little earlier. You must get Lydia to show you round when she comes down,’ said Clive. ‘It’s more her baby than mine.’

  He poured them all champagne which he brought from the kitchen on a tray. As he crossed the hall to the sitting room, Gloire and Tobit started apart from a clinch and giggled. Lydia arrived, adding a third scent to the cocktail that was already thickening the air, and greeted Tobit and Gloire anew. Once she and her future daughter-in-law had stroked, cooing, the tissue of each other’s clothes, Gloire asked to be shown around.

  ‘I’m incurably inquisitive, I’m afraid,’ she admitted in her faintly American accent and laughed with a cunning approximation of shyness.

  ‘So it’s true,’ thought Clive. ‘They do blush.’

  Equally appalled at the prospect of being left alone together to make polite conversation, the men of the family followed their women on the tour of the Hart domain, which started in the garden as always.

  There had been a time when Clive had worried about his relationship or rather lack of one to his son. If enjoyment of another’s company and acceptance of their confidences were the measures of a close relationship, he was closer to most of his male pupils than he was to Tobit. This had not always been the case. When their baby had first arrived, Lydia had suffered an alarming depression and had moaned at the very sight of her creature, which meant that Clive had been thrown into fatherly love at the deep end. He would sit at his typewriter with the cot at his side; the experience was novel and he had enjoyed it. Pre-conversational infants are little more than helpless animals and as such Tobit had appealed to Clive’s charitable impulse. Since his young wife was keen to finish her cookery course, young Clive had delighted in being seen to push a pram around Pimlico. Later he had carried Tobit in an Indian papoose to rehearsals of his ill-fated third play and, on the steps of the Royal Court, had even been interviewed by Woman’s Hour on the growing importance of paternal involvement. Then, around the time when their fortunes had see-sawed and Lydia had swung into the limelight, she had taken Tobit off Clive’s capable hands. She had poached him. Overnight.

  ‘My son is just as important to me as my career,’ seemed to be daily on her lips. ‘Clive has been a wonderful help and now it’s my turn to let him concentrate on his work. Share and share alike is the key to our marriage.’

  She had poached Tobit and turned him into a pretty, prattling fashion accessory who played sweetly in the background of her Guardian column, sat on her lap in her early publicity photograph and who never had anything to say to his father.

  Tobit had not been bright but he was clever with a pencil and paintbrush and generally good with his hands, so they had sent him to a new co-educational boarding school in the heart of Devon where design, fine arts and gardening were featured as high on the curriculum as maths or English. Lydia had disliked sending him away to board but felt that he needed to make some friends of his own age – a commodity in which geriatric Barrowcester was sorely lacking. By this time Clive was finding Tobit’s combination of feyness and wanton ignorance a depressing contrast to the precocity of the boys and girls in his classes at Tatham’s and was secretly glad to have him out of the house. Tobit’s bookless approach to the arts was but one of many links slyly forged between him and his mother; Clive had felt himself become jealous of their cherished similarities. The immaculately illustrated, semi-grammatical letters home were addressed firmly to Lydia, although they were meticulous in including ‘love’ to her husband.

  As the boy grew through his teens there was a resounding lack of the adolescent traumas that Clive had been expecting and which might have served to bring them closer together, if only in argument. Too well-behaved by half, the youth left his school, spent two months working behind the counter in Hart’s and consorting in a suspiciously matey way with the girls there, then moved to a bedsit in London. He had won a place at St Martin’s School of Art to study fashion. He had soon moved into a flat with a fellow student and it had been no surprise to Clive when they had visited him there with flat-warming presents and found that there was only one bed.

  Lydia had been as forthright in her ‘positive attitude’ towards this discovery as she had been earlier this evening on the subject of black flancées. She had made jokes about how nice it would be to be spared grandparenthood and had been as maternally supportive as ever. Lydia being Lydia this meant a generous allowance. After hearing at first hand how impressed his teachers were with his entries for the finals fashion show, she had set Tobit up with a little business in Marylebone High Street where he ran off extremely popular and staggeringly priced ball gowns and cocktail dresses. What had been jealousy on Clive’s part had recently curdled into bored dismissal. Although it was unfashionable to speak of blame in these matters, blame implying that something was wrong, the fault was entirely Lydia’s. She played Frankenstein to Tobit’s monster, and Clive could not but admire the pluck with which she had thrown herself into the role. Today’s sudden metamorphosis of monster into conventional handsome prince, however, was going to change matters somewhat.

  ‘So tell me,’ asked Lydia, after they had sat down, flushed with champagne, to lasagna and Riecine. ‘Have you decided on a date?’

  ‘We thought this Saturday,’ said Tobit, who was pouring out wine on his father’s behalf.

  ‘Good God!’ exclaimed Lydia then softened her tone. ‘Darling, isn’t that a bit soon?’

  ‘Don’t worry, Mrs Hart. He hasn’t got me into trouble.’

  ‘Not yet,’ said Tobit and the two of them chuckled.

  ‘I didn’t mean that,’ Lydia hurried on. ‘Of course I didn’t mean that. But, well, guests and things …’

  ‘Oh, Ma. Please no,’ pleaded Tobit.

  ‘We thought just a quiet family wedding,’ added Gloire. ‘We’re all four of us busy, and weddings on a big scale take so long to fix up.’

  ‘Just we four,’ suggested Tobit, ‘and Gloi
re’s parents.’

  ‘That’s why we want it on Saturday, you see,’ said Gloire. ‘They’ll be in Europe briefly and I know they’d like to be here.’

  ‘Oh but of course they would,’ Lydia prattled, artlessly she hoped. ‘How lovely. We can have a splendid lunch and lots of flowers and Clive, darling, do you think we could use the Tatham’s chantry as you’re on the staff?’

  Clive had been silent all this time because he was being molested. The moment he had sat down beside her at the table, Gloire had slipped a hand on to his left knee and had begun mercilessly to caress his leg. He was so shocked that he had not yet taken the initiative of moving his leg away. The sensation was also so pleasurable as to have lulled him into silent inactivity. He tried to move his leg now, but her well-honed nails dug into the fabric of his trousers and pulled it back.

  ‘Don’t see why not,’ he croaked and took a gulp of wine.

  ‘You do want a church service, don’t you?’ Lydia checked.

  ‘Certainly,’ said Tobit. ‘Gloire’s mother is very devout.’

  ‘Oh,’ murmured Lydia.

  ‘Oh, good,’ said Clive, uncertainly.

  ‘And where do your family come from?’ Lydia pursued.

  ‘Cheltenham,’ said Clive.

  ‘My father’s Jamaican,’ said Glorie, ‘and my mother’s from Martinique.’

  ‘Which makes her a Catholic,’ added Tobit.

  ‘Oh,’ said Clive, relinquishing the struggle and falling silent.

  ‘More lasagna, Gloire?’

  ‘No thanks. I have to watch my figure. Tobit’s made me a very clingy dress.’

  ‘Lucky you,’ said Lydia, pouring herself more wine then remembering to pour some out for her guests. ‘All he ever made me was a nightie.’

  ‘My stuff’s too sexy for you, Ma. You know that.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  Gloire leaped in.

  ‘I’m sure Lydia – I may call you that, mayn’t I?’

  ‘But of course.’

  ‘I’m sure Lydia would look lovely in that black one you’ve just finished,’ she told her fiancé.

  ‘No. I think Tobe’s right,’ said Lydia, pushing the lasagna tin towards Clive, partly to make him empty it, partly to rouse him from what looked like near-slumber. ‘They aren’t terribly – I mean they’re lovely – but they aren’t terribly me.’

  Clive tried once more to pull away his leg. Gloire tugged it back and gave it a savage pinch.

  ‘So tell me about your work, Gloire,’ he said, rallying, to his wife’s relief. ‘How much longer before you’re set loose on unsuspecting patients?’

  ‘I’ve been on the wards for nearly two years now,’ she said.

  ‘Oh. Forgive me.’

  ‘That’s all right,’ she said and pinched him again.

  The situation was becoming impossible. He waited until she was raising her glass to her full pink lips then stood up sharply. The movement tugged her forward, causing her to drop the glass.

  ‘Oh I’m so sorry,’ she exclaimed.

  ‘Clive, you idiot! You startled her.’

  ‘No I didn’t.’

  ‘I’m not some half-wit antelope,’ muttered Gloire.

  ‘Quick. Stand up or it’ll go on your dress,’ shouted Tobit and he, Lydia and Gloire jumped to their feet as three trickles of wine slid out across the table top from the shattered glass. After a second of staring drunkenly with the rest, Lydia darted into action with a wet cloth.

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Gloire. ‘No, my dress is fine, Lydia. Honestly. Actually I think a dry cloth might be … Oh thanks, Tobit. But your glass, Lydia. Are they special ones?’

  ‘No. Not at all. Clive, I don’t see what’s so amusing.’

  ‘Nothing,’ said Clive. ‘Honestly.’

  17

  Far too full of his landlady’s coffee and thoughts of her daughter to think of sleeping yet, Evan took the spare latch key Mrs Merluza had insisted he borrow, and set out for a moonlit walk. He had hoped to see the outside of the Cathedral under floodlights but had forgotten that the Close was locked at ten-thirty. Instead he sought to get as near as he could by turning left out of the front door then swinging right towards the Cathedral along Dimity Street. He was catching his first glimpses of the west end when he was distracted first by voices and then by a sighting of what had to be Barrowcester’s token black. After the racial assortment of Notting Hill and, to a more specialized extent, the British Library, he had been disappointed and faintly disturbed by Barrowcester’s marked lack of anyone who was not Anglo-Saxon, let alone Third World. There were tourists, of course, but foreign residents seemed to be limited to the families who ran the city’s Italian, Chinese and Indian restaurants. Even Le Tarte Tartin was owned, according to his food guide, by one Priscilla Fox and while pretty, its waitresses were far from French.

  Light was pouring through an open front door. Someone was evidently leaving a dinner party. A couple emerged on to the doorstep. Evan could not see the faces but from their voices they were roughly his age. The woman hugged a willowy young man, whose face caught the light, while her partner patted him on the back. The youth then clambered into an open-topped car and called out,

  ‘Gloire?’

  in the loudest voice Evan had heard since his arrival. While the woman was giggling and telling the youth that he’d wake the neighbours, Evan lingered in the shadows to see who this Gloire was.

  ‘Coming,’ called a bright American voice, and he thought he had the answer.

  ‘She’s re-doing her hair,’ said the man.

  ‘Oh darling, she’s so nice!’ enthused the woman to the youth.

  The nubile, unexpectedly black subject of this muttered praise then sailed from the house, swooped with a low murmur on the woman, lingeringly hugged the man, then climbed over the door on the passenger side of the car. There was a roar of high-performance engine, a shout of

  ‘See you Saturday!’

  and a waving departure. The couple seemed to sag when left alone. As they returned inside. Evan hurried forward. Their house was extremely large – nearly thrice the width of Chez Merluza – and what little he could make out seemed to be Queen Anne. The front door had a prosperous look to it. Standing still to admire the fanlight, he distinctly heard the woman say,

  ‘I can’t bear it. I just cannot bear it.’

  Intrigued by these bare bones of crisis, he lingered to admire the view of the floodlit Cathedral. Then headed back the way he had come, past the top of Tracer Lane, then down Scholar Street to examine Tatham’s by moonlight. He had heard about the school from his agent Jeremy over black buttered skate at Manzi’s. It had turned out that Jeremy went there and not to Eton as so many people supposed.

  ‘It should have been abolished long ago,’ he declared, trying the Pouilly Fuissé and accepting it after a moue of discerning resignation. ‘It’s only survived by taking in a bunch of embryo bluestockings and a few thick little rich girls and by letting TV crews inside. The academic record is high but so’s the nervous breakdown rate. It used … Oh. Thanks.’ He paused while their fish arrived. ‘It used to be a suspiciously wealthy convent before the Great Divorcer kicked out the sisters and gave it, library, buildings, lock, stock and mead barrel to an upstart pet cleric of his called Tatham. The idea was to churn out a regular supply of Protestant, king-adoring bishops-to-be. Good-looking turbot. How’s your skate?’

  Madeleine who, Evan gathered, had been Tatham’s first female scholar, had told him that the main gates to the old part of the school stayed unlocked until midnight so as to let supervising gods out to their families. She said that the place was run like a dictatorial university; with strict regulations but an unusual degree of self-rule and solitary study periods for the pupils. The archway where Evan now arrived would not have looked out of place in Oxford or Cambridge. The porter’s lodge was lit but showed no other signs of life, so Evan slipped through the shadows into the chapel quadrangle.

  There was a huge moon, now obscure
d by the gate tower, and the sky was riddled with stars, which made a crenellated silhouette of the four sides. A few windows were still lit, including those to one end of the chapel where someone was quietly practising the organ. There was the occasional shout or rush of stout shoes on old floorboard, but he saw no one. He knew that if he walked along the chapel wall he would find a way through to the cloisters spoken of by Petra Dixon that morning. He walked gingerly across the cobbles and, as his eyes became accustomed to the gloom, saw a black, arch-shaped hole. This led to a passage which duly spilled into a quadrangular colonnade surrounding a tiny chantry. Never frightened by the dark so long as he was alone in it, he began to wander round, piecing out his impression of damp, intricate stonework with remembered photographs and engravings.

  Then he got a Bad Feeling. Evan’s Washington Aunt Ciboulette used to get Bad Feelings. She said she would walk into a stranger’s house sometimes and suddenly feel as if a live catfish had been slipped down the back of her dress.

  ‘And I’d get my Bad Feeling,’ she’d say, ‘And I’d just know!’

  Ciboulette had never said what she knew exactly, but his mother had later explained that it must have been something unfitted to tender ears, involving bigamy, lovers in too much riding gear or hatchets buried in the chicken run. Unlike his aunt, Evan hadn’t got religion, but he was sensitive to religious atmospheres and suddenly the cloisters did not feel altogether Christian. Besides, it would soon be midnight and he had no wish to spend his night locked in with a crowd of egg-head children when he could be getting his beauty sleep for breakfast with Madeleine.

  He was starting rather more quickly out of the cloisters than he had wandered in, therefore, when he saw something move. Because of the obtuse angle of the moon and the few lights from quadrangle buildings, his side of the cloisters was in total darkness. As he turned, something had jumped from within an arch on to the ground about six feet away. He just saw whatever it was slide out of silhouette and he could hear shallow breathing. He had felt countless cigarette butts underfoot so, his shock past, he guessed that this was some boy out for a quick Winston before bedtime.