The Insect Farm

by Stuart Prebble

  “Jonathan.”

  “Yes.”

  “About this weekend…”

  That was all she needed to say, and I could feel my stomach tightening. And the worst of it was that, while I would know that she was every bit as unhappy about it as I was, and that she would have been dreading raising the subject, still – and this says something unattractive about the human condition – still, I could not stop myself from being grumpy about it.

  “What about this weekend?” As if I didn’t know.

  “We’ve been asked to play a gig at short notice for the VC’s conference, and the others can make it…”

  “Yes. But obviously you can’t make it, because we have a long-standing plan for you to come here this weekend. I’ve made arrangements. I’ve bought extra food. We are expecting you.”

  A pause.

  “Don’t worry. I’ll tell them that I can’t do it.” Another pause. “Jonathan?”

  “What?”

  “I said I’ll tell them I can’t do it.”

  My indignation was a pendulum in full swing, accelerating downwards and then meeting the resistant gravity of the guilt I instantly felt about having given her a hard time. This would send the thing with equal and opposing velocity in the other direction, propelled on the wave of shame and regret that I had been less understanding and supportive than I should have been. At about the midway point on my journey back to reason I would begin to reverse.

  “Obviously I am not saying that.”

  “What are you saying then?”

  “I’m saying that of course you have to accept. You’d be letting the others down.”

  “And so you are implying that I would rather let you down than to let Brendan and the others down?” Harriet’s response was as quick as a flash. “You know that’s not what it’s about. It’s about the money. If we start to turn down gigs like this, they’ll find someone else to play, and then we might not get the chances in the future.”

  “I hadn’t mentioned Brendan. And why is it more about letting him down than it is about letting down Martin and Jed?”

  “Only because he was the one who got us this particular gig. It’s not about Brendan more than it’s about anyone else. You know that. Don’t be stupid.”

  I did know that in my head, and that I was indeed being stupid, but somehow I had never got around to knowing it in my stomach. So every mention of Brendan carried with it a nasty little twinge of pain in my guts, like a corkscrew being inserted and then twisted in my flesh.

  “OK, OK, uncle,” I said. At last the swingometer had reached its final extreme. I was conquered. “It’ll just mean a few extra helpings of pepperoni pizza for Roger and me, and while you are slaving over a hot flute on Saturday, Roger will be enjoying a very nice bottle of cola, and I will be enjoying a very nice bottle of claret.”

  “My loss then,” she said, and we were friends again.

  On average I reckon that Harriet and I saw each other one weekend a month during term time, and then obviously we were together all during the end-of-term vacations. The quartet did one or two London-based performances during holidays, and at Easter Brendan arranged for them to play in the market at Covent Garden. The four of them set up their music stands in one of the lower tiers of shops, where the sound they made could bounce off sharp corners and around the colonnades, echoing in and out of doorways and walkways and market stalls and café furniture. The effect was wonderful, and Roger and I went along to ambush the foreign tourists who may have thought they were getting a free concert, but who looked appropriately embarrassed when asked for a contribution. It was a great success – so much so that we ended up staying far longer than we had originally intended.

  “I’ll get some coffee,” I said, and Roger came with me as I headed off towards the greasy spoon inside the covered market which still catered for the traders. On the way there I counted the money and reckoned that we had earned enough to justify a small celebration. “Go back and ask them if they want anything to eat,” I told Roger. He did, but I think he must have got lost on the way, because it took him all of ten minutes to return. When he finally turned up he seemed a bit confused and disorientated, and all he could tell me was that everyone seemed to have everything they needed.

  Having Roger collecting money on such occasions was a gas – basically because very few of the people he tapped up for a donation could work out whether he was acting or was not quite all there. We raised £28 that day – minus £4 between us for coffee and doughnuts – split four ways, this was a very good take for the times.

  Weekends with Harriet were usually wonderful, and were marred only by the fact that we always knew that our time together was limited and therefore we needed it to be perfect. We didn’t have enough of it to do a lot of the routine stuff that is as much a part of a decent marriage as the highlights. The grocery shopping, the going to the launderette, the hanging out. Because our hours together were so limited, we seemed to feel that we had to pack them with pleasurable things, and that would sometimes cause a strain.

  One thing we never disagreed about was having Roger around. He used to go to the day centre on Saturday mornings until noon, which meant that Harriet and I could have some time to ourselves. I would walk with him down to the bus, and then come back to the flat with only the now constant presence of Olly the Siamese cat competing for attention. I’d make tea and bring it to bed, and then Harriet and I would spend a couple of hours making love and catching up with each other’s lives.

  Those times were among the most wonderful I have ever known in my life. In some ways I knew her so well, and yet in others she was a stranger to me. We had the comfort of familiarity, but also the joy of rediscovery. So much was happening to her – she was learning so much, experiencing new stuff, but little of it was very relevant to me. She was growing in her own world. The result was that in small ways she was a slightly different person every time I met her. She had learnt more, discovered more, while my routine was more or less static. Yet when we made love there was none of the hesitation or trepidation which goes with a new romance. We were instantly utterly at home, with no inhibitions, no holding back. I felt like a man crawling through the desert towards an oasis, but when I got there, the oasis was not a mirage, but a wonderful, absorbing, revitalizing, regenerative immersion.

  After kissing and drinking tea and lovemaking and more tea and then some more lovemaking, it would be lunchtime and one or other of us would take the short walk to meet the bus which dropped Roger off. He would always be delighted to see Harriet, they would kiss and embrace, and then we would all have some food together, and as quickly as possible he would want to head off down to the allotments to check up on the insect farm. Either Harriet or I would usually walk down there with him; we knew that he was safe and absorbed when he was there, and so it gave us the chance to do as much of the ordinary stuff as we could do in the time. Harriet would bring me up to date with her news, which inevitably would centre around the stresses and pressures of studying.

  “They expect us to do three essays a week,” she said, “and then one of us has to read out their work in the seminar and all the others pick it to pieces right there in front of you.”

  I would be treated to a blow-by-blow account of the projects she was being set, the essays she had to write, the seminars she had to lead, the assessments she had to endure and the exams she had to prepare for. To listen to Harriet, you would easily gain the impression that every waking hour was spent with her books and with music practice. However, I knew enough from my own experience in Newcastle that, even for the most conscientious of students, it really wasn’t possible to work the whole time, and there was plenty of it left over for socializing. At those times my mind would inevitably go back to those few weeks of our first term when both of us were students, and the stings of pain I would experience when I used to see Harriet surrounded by admirers. I remembered once again thinking that she seemed to have few if any female friends, and that she was just o
ne of those women who enjoyed the company of men so much more. No sooner would such thoughts come into my mind than I had to shoo them out, for fear that they would sting me all over again, and I knew myself well enough to know that that way lay madness.

  I guessed that Harriet was choosing not to talk about how she spent her free time, in order to avoid giving me any reason to become concerned. My idiotic expressions of jealousy over the years had left her in no doubt that I was capable of being totally unreasonable. Hardly surprising, then, that she would exercise the discretion of brevity or omission rather than take a risk that I would start up again.

  By and large I had managed to control, if not totally to conquer the most negative of those feelings. There can be no doubt that in those days I was drinking far too much, and when I did so on my own, I had a tendency to become depressed. However it never got out of control, and I was always aware of the need to stay the right side of a line. I worked out that, as our choices had made it inevitable that we were going to be apart for so much time, if I wanted to stand any chance at all of retaining my sanity, I would simply have to find a way to deal with it.

  I had made my choices, and by and large I was content with them. Roger was my priority and no one needed to remind me of that. Nonetheless, knowing what your responsibilities are and being happy to live up to them is not the same as being blind to what might have been. I think I would have been less than human if, on hearing Harriet’s tales of university life, I had not experienced the occasional pang. Of course I did, but I became very good at keeping it all bottled up, because Harriet never seemed to notice. When she had finished her breathless account I would bring her up to date with mine, all of which was inevitably less interesting.

  “We set up the mobile library on one of the dodgy estates up in Deptford on Wednesday,” I told her. “Then they left me on my own all afternoon. It was like the siege of the bloody Alamo. Dozens of kids throwing handfuls of gravel at the caravan, so that at one time it sounded like it was raining hailstones. I thought I’d have to call the police when one kid tried to release the handbrake.”

  I’d tell her how Paddy the delivery driver had been told off by the branch librarian Mr Waddington, and how the Irishman had told the boss to go and fuck himself. Mr Waddington had been to see the town clerk to try to get Paddy fired, but the unions were so strong that no one could be dismissed for something as trivial as insubordination.

  “And how about Roger?” she would ask. “How’s he getting on, do you think? Is he happy?”

  That would be my cue to run though some of the funny things that had happened to us, usually involving the reaction of some unsuspecting bystander to the realization that Roger was not all he seemed.

  On one visit, not long after the Easter concert, I told Harriet about my conversation with Roger on the subject of the insect farm. About how I had asked him whether our dad had ever suggested that he would have to get rid of it, and how he had reacted with alarm but had given no indication that the incident had ever happened. Harriet hadn’t remembered, or maybe I hadn’t told her, that the police had raised the question when they were investigating the cause of the fire.

  “You don’t think it’s possible, do you?”

  “What, that Roger started the fire that killed our parents?”

  I had said it. The thought that had remained unexpressed to anyone; suddenly it was out there as an idea, floating around in the airwaves.

  “Yes,” said Harriet, “I suppose that’s exactly what I’m asking.”

  My instinct was to answer unequivocally, but the directness of the question caused me to crystallize the niggling thoughts which must have been stored away in the corners of my mind. Suddenly I had an image of Roger crouching in the darkness of the insect farm, while the orange glow of flames cast flickering light against the window panes. I saw again the lonely figure sitting in the side ward of the hospital and playing with the stethoscope while our parents lay dead just a short distance away. And then, just as quickly, I remembered that this was Roger, and nothing that Roger did could be judged by the standards of normal behaviour. My moment of doubt had gone as quickly as it had arrived.

  “No, I don’t. You know what he was like on that morning after the fire, waiting for me in the hospital casualty department. He was sitting there in a world all of his own, completely oblivious to anything that had happened in the previous few hours. No doubt Roger is capable of some weird stuff, but never anything as weird as that.”

  I saw Harriet looking beyond me, focusing on the middle distance, and after a moment I saw that she was gently nodding her head in agreement.

  “Yes,” she said, “I see that. Obviously I don’t know him anything like the way that you know him, but I would swear on a stack of Bibles that he wouldn’t be capable of doing something like that. He is just so innocent; I don’t think he has the kind of mind it would take to carry it off.”

  We sipped our tea and paddled around in our own thoughts, occasionally murmuring our continuing assent.

  “Mind you,” I said, “if Roger was ever going to do anything drastic, it would be that bloody insect farm which would cause it. He’s obsessed by it, which is great for me because it gives him something absorbing to do where I know he is completely content. Whether it’s good for him or not, I don’t know.”

  “It must be good for him,” said Harriet, “sorting it all out and having to organize it to make sure all his tiny creatures are fed and looked after has been incredibly stretching for him.” She seemed to think for a moment or two. “But you are wrong about one thing.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “If Roger was ever going to do something drastic to protect something he treasured, it would be to protect the thing he cares about more than anything else.” I looked at Harriet, wondering what she was going to say, my eyebrows raising the question. “That’s you,” she said. “And, by the way” – she leant towards me and took my hand in hers – “the same goes for me too.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  It was in the summer holidays before Harriet’s final year in Newcastle. I had taken off my whole holiday allocation from the job at the library to spend as much time as possible with her. Harriet would need to do quite a lot of studying, but one way or another we would have a fair amount of spare time to hang out and do the things that normal people do. To be like a married couple.

  The quartet had been booked to play at one or two summer parties, and one I remember in particular was to be held in an enclosed garden in a square in a very smart area of Chelsea. The booking had come through an agency, and at first there was some secrecy about the identity of the host. Then one day Harriet took a phone call from Brendan, who told her that the event was the annual party of the TV presenter David Frost.

  I was no more interested then than I am now in the world of celebrities, but even for casual observers such as myself, David Frost’s annual garden party was a well-known part of the social calendar. His was a very unusual world which took in politicians, statesmen, musicians, actors and comedians, and so a party that brought them all together was bound to be an experience.

  When Harriet and I went to have a look at the venue a few days in advance, the organizers were busy erecting a marquee in case of rain. The garden was surrounded on three sides by large fine houses of red brick. Access was through a locked gate, and the whole area was bordered by shrubbery and then railings which came up to shoulder height. In the course of chatting to the caterers, I got myself hired as a waiter for the evening.

  Occasions like this left us in a slight dilemma about what to do with Roger. Not that there was any problem in leaving him on his own. Roger’s disability did not make him a danger to himself or to others, and he was usually perfectly content to be left for hours at a time at the insect farm, and was happy to walk the couple of hundred yards back to the flat when he was ready. It was no real problem to leave him in the flat either, though I was never certain how he spent his time when we were away. I kno
w that he used to sit and watch the same programmes over and over again on children’s television; sometimes when he would be viewing in the other room I could hear him laughing and speaking back to the TV presenter. I’d go in and find him sitting on the sofa, stroking Olly the cat, and watching something I knew he had seen many times before.

  On the occasion I’m thinking about now, however, Roger was a bit fractious. It worried me, partly because it was a rare thing. He didn’t actually complain, but seemed more disappointed than usual when I said that Harriet and I would both be going out for the evening.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Harriet and the quartet have a booking in Chelsea and I’m serving drinks. It’s an open-air thing in a square. Lots of posh people. Maybe even some celebrities.” Roger shrugged his shoulders. He was one of the few people who were even less likely to be impressed by the idea of celebrities than I was. “Maybe there will be some TV producers there and they’ll want to put Harriet on the telly.” I don’t know why I said it, but I thought the idea would amuse Roger. It did.

  “Yes, let’s get Harriet on the telly. She’d be wonderful.” His lighter moment was short-lived and quickly Roger’s smile faded from his face.

  “What’s the matter, Roger? Won’t you want to spend the time down at the insect farm?”

  Roger shrugged his shoulders. Suddenly he seemed like the eight-year-old boy that he was in his head, just fed up without any obvious reason.

  “Maybe he could come with us?” It was Harriet. She had overheard our conversation. At first I didn’t quite understand what she was talking about.