Father of the Man

by Stephen Benatar

  Well, anyhow.

  The reservoir—the Arboretum—cemetery. This was the route that Jean generally followed to reach Canning Circus and the small antique shop where she worked.

  It was possible, the police said later, that the man had been lying in wait for her.

  It happened shortly after she entered the Arboretum. A hundred yards inside the park the path ran under a tunnel. She’d never liked this tunnel. It was only short and wasn’t particularly dark; it provided support for the road above and a frame for the vista which lay ahead. And yet it possessed an aura that made her quicken her step and hold on more tightly to the wicker shopping bag which contained her reading matter for the day, writing materials (ha!), bread and fruit for lunch, her purse and cosmetics and keys and all the usual paraphernalia. Especially did her grip tighten when—as today—there was nobody in sight: no gardeners, no dog-walkers, no students on their way to college. She was seldom unaware of this tautening of her fingers, however automatic. Once, in the Nouvelles Galeries in Bordeaux, at the checkout from the food department, she had discovered that her wallet, with more than five hundred francs in it, had been snitched from her shoulder bag. At first she just couldn’t absorb the truth of it, even though she should have been alerted, had of course been alerted, by the opened zipper, the obtruding hankie. But when the truth could no longer be evaded she had started to shake—and couldn’t stop shaking. The strength of this reaction was perplexing. Admittedly the loss had been of a fairly large sum—she had just come from the bank—yet could that really justify a state of shock? The thought of some thief’s fingers touching her belongings, or the sight of the week’s provisions jostling one another on the belt, in supermarket limbo, naturally hadn’t assisted, but nevertheless it was all so…all so…

  Feeble.

  Everyone was very kind. Along with the money, she had lost her French and must have seemed half-witted but the woman next in line put a weathered arm about her, and those trying to press forward behind this bulky black-garbed barrier condoled vociferously with Jean and vilified all pickpockets. The cashier left her seat and began packing the groceries into carrier bags—including, with understanding shrugs, the items Jean had already stowed at the bottom of her shopping trolley—so that there’d be no need for her to search them out again; and the manager of the department, summoned by his staff, finally took a gratefully smiling but still visibly trembling Jean into his office for a small cup of black coffee, slightly sweetened, into which a generous dollop of brandy had been poured. This helped considerably; and leaving her shopping trolley in his office she’d turned in the opposite direction to home and weaving dexterously among the crowds half-run along the rest of the rue St Catherine (she’d still been in her thirties then; it was only a kilometre from the store to the Place de la Victoire; and the threat of an asthma attack at the checkout had been averted, thank God, by her Ventoline inhaler—contaminated or not). When she’d got to the Faculty of Medicine, in which the English Department was housed, she’d obtained easy access to Ephraim, in private, and had blurted out the whole occurrence whilst sobbing in his arms. After that there was a full recovery: she’d apologized repeatedly, and even laughingly, for making such an idiot of herself—“I don’t see that you did,” said Ephraim, “but in any case why do you think you would need to apologize?”—had washed her face, told him he was very sweet (“I can’t believe you realize just how good you are! Please promise you’ll never stop loving me, no matter how silly I become!” “Okay,” he’d answered, “if you promise you’ll never stop loving me!”), had returned to the bank, where luckily, although they weren’t exactly flush, Ephraim’s salary for last term had recently been paid in, then gone back to the Nouvelles Galeries and expressed her appreciation in gratifyingly coherent French, with a lot of sincerity and some not very good jokes which had all been warmly responded to. So in the end it had been an episode to regard as something by no means entirely bad; even as one she might almost have been sorry to pass up.

  But it had formed her only known close contact with a criminal; and even then she hadn’t seen him.

  Now—in the Arboretum—again she neither heard nor saw. Her mind had been full of her recent conversation with Oscar; unusually she hadn’t even realized she had reached the tunnel.

  At the last moment, however, she must have caught some warning sound or movement because she whirled round and encountered this…this thing…practically beside her; and its hands were coming not for any bag but straight towards her throat. It seemed less like a man than like some half-human monster from a horror film; its teeth were bared and as their eyes met it even started snarling.

  But she acted from instinct. She brought her basket up—swung it with all her strength—full into the creature’s groin.

  The impact not simply stopped him but sent him reeling back, still grimacing but in a different way, no longer snarling but gasping, whimpering, hands covering his crotch.

  He was bent double now but she felt no compunction for the pain she had inflicted. She moved towards him and possibly planned on inflicting more. Certainly she brandished her basket. Certainly her words reverberated—like bullets—off the brickwork. “Bastard! Pig! Wimp! Shit! Pathetic, inadequate, undersized prick!” The belligerence unleashed was greater than any aggression she had ever shown, except perhaps once, when during the worst of her rows with her violent, jealous, radical boyfriend, she had gone for him with a carving knife—thank heaven he had turned in time! Now, not only did she advance on her would-be assailant—who far from looking like a monster was in fact merely insignificant, not a lot taller than she was, a little man, twenty, twenty-five, sallow, pockmarked, mangy. She lunged for his dirty parka when he began to run away.

  She was going to chase after him, too; she was still so enraged she might well have caught him—his run was little better than a fast hobble—but what prevented her, bathetically, was the thought of being so late in opening up the shop (Oscar had already lost her fifteen minutes); so she stood and watched him get away and pursued him purely with her taunts…where are those snarls, you snivelling wimp, why don’t you show me your teeth again?…although when, at the top of the low embankment by the road, he turned to look back she shook her fist at him contemptuously.

  And she wasn’t shaking; she wasn’t shaking in the least. Her asthma wasn’t bothering her. She felt almost jubilant as she proceeded on her way—still furious, yes, but raised up by her fury, proud, vengeful. Now that that piece of scum had disappeared there was again nobody in sight; possibly, from start to finish, the whole thing had taken no more than three minutes: the fullest three minutes she had ever known? But she strode out confidently, swinging her basket, glad of the thick biography of Lord Byron that Ephraim had recently surprised her with (for no good reason, he had said, other than that he loved her, had been overcome by one of his wild fits of extravagance, and knew how much she wanted the book—blast, though, why had she needed to remember that?). She didn’t see anyone, although she kept looking behind her, until she was nearly as far as the bandstand—and then the old gentleman with a carnation in his buttonhole, whom she quite often met, lifted his hat with a flourish and wished her his customary robust good morning; and a little further on, admiring the rockery, the poor old fellow in his cloth cap and woollen scarf—yet why ‘poor’? he always seemed content—waved his walking stick at her and called over to ask where her cocker spaniel named Polly was.

  “At home, I’m afraid. She has to spend today cooped up at home. I don’t think that she’ll like it very much!”

  He nodded, smiled at her happily. “Where’s your cocker spaniel named Polly, then?”

  She didn’t abate her walking pace and with a farewell lift of her hand was quickly out of earshot. Both she and Ephraim were getting to understand his speech much better these days; sometimes they saw him here, sometimes near the path leading down from the reservoir, thoughtfully inspecting a tuft of grass with the tip of his walking stick or peering over a
fence at the blossoms on an elderberry; and at first he had caused them perplexity, especially when remarking without preamble on the sharpness of the creases in his new trousers or the fact that his dad had used to collect matchboxes or that his mum knew a girl who made marrow jam. To begin with Ephraim had been the more skilled interpreter but nowadays the old man chiefly inquired into the whereabouts of their cocker spaniel named Polly or—depending on the circumstances—might say, “That’s your cocker spaniel named Polly!”, and was clearly much pleased that he could so easily recall both her breed and her name.

  At the pond—miniature lake?—and by the bird cages (a plaque in one of these commemorated ‘Cocky, sulphur-crested cockatoo, died 1968, aged 114’) there was a father showing his little boy the nearly luminous green plumage around the head and breast of one of the ducks. There were also a couple of gardeners leaning on their forks and smilingly listening to the driver of a lorry who sat above them in his cab. Everything as normal. But what was even more reassuring: she saw, on the other side of the water, a young man in communion with a goose…putting his arm about its neck—laying his cheek on top of its head—just chatting to it, dreamily. He was frequently there, this man; she had never spoken to him but self-evidently he was nice: thirtyish, not at all odd-looking, well-built, rather handsome; apparently always recognized at once by his friend the goose. Sometimes Jean quite wished somebody would chat to her like that. It reminded her of Brindley and made her want to cry.

  It wasn’t until she reached the shop—striding out through the cemetery as she had stridden through the Arboretum, not because of lateness but because of unaccustomed energy—that she began to have a reaction that was altogether different. This time she didn’t shake precisely but several violent shivers racked her within half a dozen minutes. She saw his hands zero in towards her throat and for the first time she thought: what if I hadn’t had my basket, or that heavy book inside it, or the time or the space in which to swing it, or the instinct which had made me do it? Supposing I hadn’t turned would he have encircled my neck and throat from behind? And once his hands had found their target would she have had the strength to dislodge them? She imagined herself gasping for air—unable to breathe, worse than the worst kind of asthma attack, as bad as her nightmare vision of the potholer with shoulders wedged between the rocks—and saw her hands flailing against him with decreasing power; lived through the agony of straining to gulp for oxygen now being denied.

  It was then that she needed her inhaler—Ventide these days, not Ventoline—and to grasp at the edges of her desk while telling herself not to panic, to take slow steady breaths, it’s going to be all right. Gradually she was able to look about her at the cluttered interior of the shop and think about a man maybe pouring out his innermost emotions to a goose but it was only as she did so that she realized there were tears running down her cheeks and dripping onto the stockbook. She blew her nose and she telephoned the police. As she gave them her account it sounded practically unreal—melodramatic—a hysteric overreaction to a student prank. When they told her there’d be somebody round immediately she wanted to say no, no, please don’t bother, I’m sure it isn’t worth it.

  Before they arrived, or before any potential customer should come in—quite often, however, she might see nobody until lunchtime—she splashed cold water on her eyes; reapplied her makeup. She felt better for this and could even smile, tentatively, at her reflection in the cracked glass. She knew she’d had to report the incident. Later in the week, they’d said, perhaps this evening, she’d have to go across to the station and look through some photographs; which was a nuisance. She also knew she would never again, or at any rate not for a long time, be able to walk through the Arboretum, or the cemetery, on her own—one of the few remaining pleasures in her life and he had spoilt it. (No, it wouldn’t be a nuisance: nail the bastard.) And he wasn’t the only one she was angry with. She was also angry at Ephraim. She felt she didn’t know him any longer; recently they hadn’t seemed to talk. (Perhaps they never had—perhaps it was only their shared interest in the children which had given the illusion that they used to speak about more than just the things you could discuss with strangers at a party.) So there operated a kind of force field which made it impossible for her to reach out now and dial his number: Help—please come to me—this is an emergency.

  I need you.

  13

  “Do men have to pee right in the centre of the bowl?”

  Joan had continued to pop in often after the breakup of her marriage to Neville and it was when she was living with her new husband in a luxury block in Weymouth Street, literally round the corner, that one evening she had put this question to Ephraim, apropos of being awoken every night by the man upstairs emptying his bladder. “Imagine! Of all the things in this world, I’m slowly being driven mad by a three o’clock piddle!” Ephraim sometimes thought of it these days when he himself was urinating and stirring up a froth. (Another thing he sometimes thought of was the way he’d used to create pictures in the water: cloud formations, animals, trees, the design of the newspaper advertisements for The Wicked Lady where half the advert had been shaded, presumably to indicate duality.) “Does it make a man feel more…more masculine or something?” They’d all laughed about it, the three of them, drinking tea in the lounge, with the great brown wireless on a nest of tables in the corner, and the elegant escritoire in the bay window, and the still life of dusky, bloom-laden fruit on the wall above the imitation-coal electric fire. His mother had suggested that Joan should knock on her bedroom ceiling with a broom handle. “That might encourage him to do it more discreetly! Or write him a letter; you could make it anonymous.” They’d had a lot of fun deciding how to word it. Ephraim had said, “Why not send Emil up to speak to him, or go yourself and speak to his wife?”, and still today he considered he’d got it right, but their laughter had grown quite manic while they rehearsed the variety of conversations it would be possible to have with one or the other of them…Ephraim thought of it on Wednesday morning, in the john at work, and was still half-smiling as he shook his penis, put it back inside his trousers, pulled the zip.

  His first distinct memory of Joan had, paradoxically, nothing in it of Joan. It was of an incident that had happened on the staircase in the days when the High Street had still had something of a village character (the small open greengrocer’s, with the shutter rolled down at night, where Mrs Brown saved him and his mum his first-ever bananas—slightly disappointing after all he’d been led to expect of them; the Ridgeway, occupying a large site on the corner of Devonshire Street, where waitresses like the ones you got in cinema restaurants brought you toasted teacakes or salads or, once eggs were available again, poached eggs on toast; Gaylor & Pope’s, the haberdashery store that had those overhead tracks along which ran brown balls containing your change, after the assistant had dispatched your money, rocket-like, up a hissing chute)…still something of a village character, despite the side-street slums and also the bombsites, covered in rosebay willowherb, to front and rear of the flats.

  The staircase was of bare stone, light grey, the colour of cement. Dingy. Its walls were just as bare; the white distemper flaking, grimy. There were four flats in the building, one on each floor, except at ground level, where there was only access to the basement and the dustbin area and space to keep his brother’s bike—which later had been passed on to him—solid, black, and rusty. On every half-landing was a grimy sash window that looked out on the backs of other tenements; and on every full landing was a green front door—and a push button encased in brown Bakelite to operate the lights. The lights lasted solely for a minute and went out with a loud click. Of course, during the day you never needed them, unless the sky was exceptionally overcast. In the daytime it naturally grew lighter between the third floor and the fourth. It also grew more cluttered: an upturned trunk and empty suitcases in the corner opposite their own front door (the third), tea-chests and cartons covered by a large blue-gingham cloth—or sometimes
green-gingham—outside Neville and Joan’s, overhead.

  Joan was the one person who lent an air of luxury to the staircase; and that, not because of her draped gingham but because of her perfume. Ephraim couldn’t think how she had managed it. You always knew when she had recently come in or gone out…even in 1945 or ’6. And he was sure it wasn’t cheap or sickly; that wouldn’t have been at all in character. She was at that time the most glamorous woman he had ever encountered. (Still rated amongst them.) Red fingernails weren’t, he supposed, unknown to him; but blue-or green-shadowed eyelids were.

  One afternoon he met her on the staircase—or so he thought. It was that twilight time of day when the place was at its gloomiest and yet for some reason (she had a shopping bag in each hand) they’d neither of them bothered with the lights. He was no more than eight-and-a-half but ghosts had never been a thing to worry him. At that point Joan and Neville had only just moved in, and, despite Neville’s being Ephraim’s first cousin once removed, they were still comparative strangers to him. Ephraim had seen Joan perhaps two or three times previously—that’s what his mother said—but his recollection of their meetings remained hazy.