Marghanita was Effie’s daughter – that was her flabbergasting news. Flabbergasting, but then again not. Of course Marghanita was Effie’s daughter! How could she not have been? And when had Henry really thought otherwise?
As a general fact of life, Henry had heard the story a hundred times; he just hadn’t heard it told about his own family. From what had passed the lips of Henry’s school friends and from gossip overheard in his own kitchen, he’d deduced that there were illegitimate daughters of Marghanita’s age all over Manchester, secreted in broom cupboards, handed on to the safekeeping of institutions, bartered, bandied, passed off as the offspring of their grandmothers, become their mothers’ sisters. Victims of the great provincial shame. Partly it relieved Henry, after all this time, to discover he had secrets in common with the rest of humanity; though it perplexed him, too, that the Stern Girls, with all their apparent aristocratic insouciance, turned out to be as conventional as everybody else.
But that was sex for you. Sex ironed out everything.
Henry tried a joke. ‘Was that why you all moved to North Manchester?’
But in sex there are no jokes. Not when it’s family sex. ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘There was never any question of staying in the south with Effie’s belly getting visibly bigger with me, and the man unacceptable.’
‘On religious grounds, I take it.’
‘Hardly religion. Tribal is more like.’
‘Shame, I’d fancied our family was free of that.’
‘Ha!’ Marghanita said. Not a laugh, an expostulation. ‘But in fairness he was also married to someone else at the time. And three times Effie’s age.’
‘So the tribalism was the least of everybody’s worries.’
‘Never the least, Henry. But it’s sweet of you to try to think the best of us.’
‘It’s a way of trying to think the best of myself.’
‘Well, I can’t say I don’t understand that.’
A pause between them, the present too feeble to keep pace with the past. Henry felt he could hear one of them trickling away into the other, but he wasn’t sure which was trickling into which. ‘So you were born on this side?’ he finally said.
‘While no one was looking, yes.’
He leaned over to stroke her forehead. Unbidden, the recollection of stroking her breasts, that foolish and exquisite evening when he held her shoes. ‘How disappointing,’ he said. ‘I have always thought of you as a Wilmslow girl.’
‘Well, I am. I was conceived there.’
‘Ah, but I thought of you as a Wilmslow girl who had been conceived in St Petersburg.’
She smiled at him – lovely still, her smile, sadder than summer
– leaning into the pressure of his soothing hand. ‘That’s you all over,’ she said. ‘Forever wanting more than you can have. I suppose you’d like my unmentionable father to have been the tsar.’
‘He wasn’t?’
‘He was a teacher.’
‘Languages?’
‘How did you know?’
‘A guess. Effie’s language teacher, presumably?’
‘Of course. We always revered learning in our family.’
Another passage of silence between them. Learning – tick, tock. Henry the professor. The silence long enough for Marghanita to make it known to him, because she remembered how papery his skin was, that he hadn’t let them down. The sight of her expending the little energy she had on his wounded self-esteem wounded Henry still more. Did she know, then, did they all know, the bad opinion of himself he entertained? How terrible to think he’d been imagining he was sparing them when all along they’d been sparing him.
Why, had he known that he might have left the Pennines and sought fulfilment as a bookie’s runner or a shoeshine boy. He had only become a teacher in the first place to please them.
‘Yes, it’s our weakness,’ he said.
‘No,’ she said, shaking her head at him, ‘it’s our strength.’
‘So did you ever meet him?’
‘My father? No. Your great-grandmother forbade it. And Effie never wanted me to either. We wiped it out as though it had never happened. We moved here where nobody knew us, I grew up as Effie’s sister, and in the end we believed our own lies.’
‘Eminently sensible.’
‘Yes and no. Maybe if we hadn’t kept everything secret I would have understood it all better. Maybe become a wild girl, who knows, or a nun.’
‘We don’t do nuns, Marghanita.’
‘No. We don’t do wild girls, either. We just do wronged women. And as the daughter of one, I stepped into the role myself as neatly as if I’d been measured for it.’
‘Like my mother.’
She looked at him. And Henry remembers that she didn’t agree or disagree, just kept on looking and then closed her eyes.
When she opened them again it was to correct any impression she may have given that she was sorry for herself. ‘It hasn’t been a ruined life, Henry, I’m not saying that. In many ways I’ve been more privileged than most. But I think what happened knocked the stuffing out of us. It’s possible these secrets gnaw away at your insides, I don’t know. Certainly the more conscious you are of having to conceal a shaming secret, the more front you have to put on.’
‘I loved your front. I loved the sight of you marching out to right some wrong.’
‘Usually yours, Henry.’
‘Exactly. Usually mine. You were my champions.’
‘Like so many Don Quixotes.’
‘Hardly. You were always better shod than him.’
‘But every bit as mournful of countenance.’
She thought about that image, smiling to herself. Then, following an inner logic of her own, she said, ‘The situation was sadder than it needed to be, that’s what I’m saying – for all of us.’
Henry didn’t want to hear it. Not sad. Please don’t say sad.
‘Well, you were all my example, anyway,’ he said.
‘Exactly,’ she told him. ‘And look how sad you are.’
So she knew.
She was Henry’s first corpse. The one he’d been saving up.
At her request he stayed with her throughout the night, kept awake for most of it by the morphined demons that swarmed around her. In the early morning she woke suddenly, sat up in bed, the pale light bleeding her hair of all lustre, her eyes ground hollow as though by the knuckles of someone’s fist. ‘The poor child!’ she cried.
Henry went cold. ‘Hush,’ he said.
She was frantic, looking about her, the tears pouring down her cheek. ‘The poor child!’
‘Hush,’ he said, taking both her hands.
But she wouldn’t let him have them. She needed her hands to make space in front of herself, a swimming action, taking her away, or a gesture of rage, hitting out at whoever was hindering her.
Then she looked deep into Henry’s eyes. ‘That poor child!’ she cried. ‘That poor, poor child!’
He didn’t ask her who she meant. Couldn’t bear to hear the answer, supposing she had an answer in her. Wanted it to be no one, no one she knew, no one he knew, no one at all.
She fell back on her pillow and began to snore deeply. Tired out, Henry dropped into sleep himself. When he awoke, an hour later, he realised she was silent. He could feel the cold around him.
He wanted to do something for her, smooth her hair back, kiss her lips, shut her eyes the way they did in books and films. But he wasn’t able to look, afraid of seeing an expression on her face which would break his heart, dreading the texture of her skin, dreading discovering that she had begun to crumble like old stone, or become as papery as parchment, already. Above all he was terrified that his father had been right all along to keep this from him, because his father knew him, and knew he wasn’t up to it.
I was, Henry. I was always right about you. A father knows.
So he stole out of the room – understanding that if he failed to hold himself together he would come apart for ever – and
rang the doctor.
The disgrace of it.
And never saw her face again.
THIRTEEN
He doesn’t want to go home yet. He would like another day.
‘Not if you’re going to be morbid,’ she tells him. ‘Not if you’re going to go on about benches.’
He promises her he isn’t. He just wants to be with her, beside the seaside.
‘I’ll have to ring Aultbach, he’s expecting me in the shop tomorrow.’
‘Ring him.’
‘And we are supposed to be going out with Lachlan tomorrow night.’
Such a wild life they lead.
‘Then ring him as well.’
He doesn’t mind. He has always liked the woman he is with, on borrowed time, to be busy with other men. It releases him a little of the burden. Means he won’t be their only mourner. Means his won’t be the only tears. And, yes, makes him a little jealous.
Not that he is in need of the stimulus of sexual rivalry in Moira’s case. On his own account he can’t have too much of her. He has reached that stage in a love affair, what some would call its climacteric, when everything about the woman fascinates you, when any angle you see her from enhances her beauty, when you attend so closely to the way she makes herself up and dresses that it is as though you are on the other side of her – not just under her clothes but under her skin, become as subtly conjunct to the movement of her body as cartilage – and when you cannot imagine how existence was ever possible any other way. The seaside is partly, though not entirely, responsible for this. Henry has always been more in love by the seaside than anywhere else. It could be the air, or the sensation of being driven to the brink – the seaside being as far, topographically, and therefore erotically, as you can go. Or it could be associational – Henry remembering how much he missed not having a little girlfriend in the days when his parents took him to Southport and Morecambe and New Brighton. What age was he then? Five, six? It starts early, started early in Henry’s case, anyway. He was a worry to Ekaterina and Izzi, he remembers, so downcast did he become the minute they took him away. ‘We could have left you behind, Henry, would that have suited you more?’ – his father speaking. ‘Come on, darling, brighten up, we’re only here for a few days more!’ – his mother. But he could hardly have told them, could he, that there was nothing the matter with him that a fuck wouldn’t have put right. Did he mean a fuck? He couldn’t have. He was years from knowing what a fuck was. But there is a premonition of sexual intercourse from which you can suffer when you’re five or six. You know you want the warm proximity of a girl. You know you want to exchange the liquids which swim about in her eyes with the liquids which swim about in yours. You know you want to vanish into her and suffer obliteration – even though you don’t necessarily know the word for it – at her hands. And you anticipate the pain you will feel when the heart she gave to you she gives now to another. Put it this way: limited as was little Henry’s knowledge of romance at that age, everything he wanted then, together with everything he feared, did indeed come to pass more or less as he’d anticpated it would.
Now, as he moves in on his second childhood, his idea of sex is returning to that earlier, more primitive form. Talk, holding hands, companionability, the condition of being chums, before or after or even in the absence of coition.
Ask Henry to enumerate his reasons for loving Moira and it will be a long time before he gets on to bed or bodies considered carnally. He loves holding hands with her. Lacing fingers, crooking thumbs, swinging as they walk. Hence the particular advantage of the seaside. You can stroll with your hands laced and swinging for miles, whether on the beach, or along the promenade, or up and down the pier. As a child he knew with certainty that that was what beaches and promenades were for. Hence the cruelty of his single state, aged five.
He loves putting his arm around her shoulder. Perhaps stroking her custard hair, perhaps not. Just leaving it on the clavicle can be enough.
He loves feeling her neck. The tracery of veins and whatever else. He doesn’t know what’s in there. The body, as a machine, isn’t his subject. But he loves feeling life being pumped through, the messages to and from the brain trembling his fingertips. Her neck being long and slender, the skin very fine, Henry is just about able to decipher with his touch what the messages are saying.
He loves nuzzling her. Stopping mid-walk and burying his face in her shoulder, blotting out the light, blind to anything but her smell, or blowing in her ear, which she starts from, laughing, skittish, ticklish. Make a person laugh and you part them from themselves. Henry loves doing that to Moira – uncoupling her.
And she uncouples wonderfully, like a starburst. All the air around her, peopled by her.
He loves sliding his arm around her waist, encircling it, possessing her slenderness, having her, almost as though he’s wrestling her, which of course he isn’t, on his hip.
He loves walking so close to her that he can feel the warmth of her thigh against his. She is cooler at every point than he is, so limb on limb he ought not to be able to feel her heat, but he can.
He loves coming up behind her, if they’ve been parted infinitesimally, and putting his hands on her hips, or, moving further in on her, placing the flats of his palms on her belly, feeling the declivity either side – the ilium, is it? Ilium with its topless towers – the wad of flesh on the bone which is shaped like an ear, and which he reckons, if he blew into it, would also make her laugh.
He loves buying her an ice cream and unwrapping it for her – his boyish gift, all his pocket money gone. Or he loves it when she says no to ice cream but darts at him suddenly, like a predatory bird, to steal a lick of his, looking up at him from under his chin, the scene of the theft, her eyes smiling, her lips wet and cold, enjoying the unaccustomed angle.
He loves that – looking down at her. And also looking up at her. Though that’s moving closer to the carnal than he is willing to do in this enumeration of what he loves.
He loves slipping his hand inside the back of her cardigan, or a little way down the waistband of her skirt, or into the cuffs of her shirt if she’s wearing a shirt, or under the narrow straps of her summery top, or into the sleeves of her jacket. If she’s lying across him, with her feet up, he loves feeling about in her shoes, and if her feet are bare, loves making forays between her toes.
He can’t stop playing with her. This is how he would have been at five or six had the right girl only given him the chance, but since then he’s enjoyed the company of many women close up, and worked with countless numbers more, few of whom he hit it off with, it’s true, but still, they were women – so why, suddenly, is this woman such a novelty to him?
He loves fiddling with her rings when she’s sitting idly, staring at seagulls, with her hand in his. He loves unfastening her watch strap and then fastening it again. He loves taking off her earrings and absent-mindedly feeling their weight, then clipping them back on – assuming he hasn’t broken them by then. He can’t keep his hands off her or her things. At any moment he expects her to turn on him and tell him to leave her alone, to keep his filthy interfering mitts off her and her jewellery, to give her a moment’s peace; indeed it sometimes occurs to him to wonder whether he isn’t doing everything in his power, perversely, to provoke such a rebuff; but it never comes. She doesn’t shock him by opening her mouth or showing him rude parts of her body as much as she used to – they know each other a little too well now for that – but every so often she does revert to her old tactics, as when today, in broad daylight, posing for his camera at the end of the pier, she whips her top up a fraction of a fraction of a second before he clicks. And she wouldn’t be doing that – would she? – if she wanted him to leave her alone.
As for his even possessing such a thing as a camera, who can explain that? Henry hasn’t owned a camera since his parents, thinking to cheer him up and make him interested in things outside his head, bought him a Brownie 127 and binoculars in matching leatherette cases for his sixth b
irthday. In the intervening years Henry has had no need for any sort of recording device. No camera, no tape recorder, no Walkman, no video, no DVD, no nothing. ‘What is it I’d want to preserve?’ he would have answered anybody surprised by this asceticism. The prig he was. But now Henry is preserving like a mad thing, snapping Moira at every possible opportunity, hoping to record her every mood and movement, even asking passing Japanese if they’d be good enough to snap the pair of them together – Henry who has always been too embarrassed to ask anyone for anything, fearing the sting of refusal.
He is even the owner of a photograph album, the first of his adult life, into which he affixes her, remembering to write the name, the place, the date, on the back of every photograph. Not beautifully like his mother. Henry is not in possession of the idle calm of copperplate. Spider-scrawl, befitting the spider he has been – that’s Henry’s hand. Words written to make words indecipherable. Explain that. Has anyone investigated the psychology of a bad hand? The hurry of it. A man of words who cannot get the words out of his fingers soon enough. Even Henry’s signature is stillborn. Explain that.
But if it’s an instinct for death, he’s fighting it. An album after all, however you deface it, is a vote for sempiternity. And he is trying to slow his hand down, releasing the pressure on the pen, clasping the other hand about his writing wrist, hunching his back, biting his lip, forming each letter like a little drawing in itself, the way he was taught to do at primary school.
He is a boy again. She has done this for him. She has given him back the verve he never had.
‘Life,’ he exclaims, ascending or descending stairs with her, enjoying escalators where he can stand behind or in front of her, feeling their bodies exchange stature as they go up and down, now him higher, now her. ‘Protean life, everything in flux, nothing ever the same.’
‘Jesus, Henry,’ she says, ‘can’t we ride an escalator without you becoming a philosopher.’
‘Just be pleased,’ he tells her from the lower step, whispering into her neck before it rises from him, eluding his breath, the small of her back now level with his lips, and even that escaping him, vertebra by vertebra, ‘just be pleased you make an old man happy.’
The Making of Henry Page 28