My Policeman

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My Policeman Page 19

by Bethan Roberts


  In the kitchen, I unloaded the boxes of supplies you’d brought – olive oil, bottles of red wine, a bunch of fresh asparagus, purchased, you said, from a charming roadside stall en route.

  ‘I’m so sorry about that bed,’ you announced, when we’d all had a cup of tea. ‘It’s an awful old thing, isn’t it? Like trying to sleep in a shifting sandpit.’

  I reached for Tom’s hand. ‘We don’t mind at all,’ I said.

  You stroked your moustache and glanced down at the table before announcing that you’d like to stretch your legs with a walk to the sea. Tom jumped up, saying he’d join you. The two of you, he informed me, would be back in time for lunch.

  You must have seen my startled face, because you put a hand on Tom’s shoulder and said, looking at me, ‘In actual fact, I’ve brought a picnic with me. Let’s all go down and spend the day, shall we? Shame to waste this glorious weather, don’t you think, Marion?’

  I was grateful to you for your graciousness.

  Over the next few days, you showed us the coastal paths along the south of the island. As we walked, you made sure I was positioned between the two of you wherever the path allowed, guiding me to your side with a firm hand, never allowing me to lag behind. You seemed a bit obsessed with the stone that made up the landscape, telling us how each different type of rock, pebble and grain of sand was formed, pointing out the different sizes, shapes, colours. You referred to the landscape as sculptural, and talked of nature’s palette and the texture of her materials.

  During one particularly long walk, when my shoes had started to pinch, I commented: ‘It’s all an artwork to you, isn’t it?’

  You stopped and looked at me, your face serious. ‘Of course. It’s the great artwork. The one we’re all trying to imitate.’

  Tom looked very impressed with this answer, and to my annoyance, I could think of absolutely no reply.

  Every night you cooked dinner for us, spending hours in the kitchen preparing your dishes. I still remember what we had: beef bourguignon one night, chicken chasseur the next, and on the last night, salmon in a hollandaise sauce. The idea that you could successfully prepare and eat such sauces at home, rather than in some fancy restaurant, was novel to me. Tom would sit at the kitchen table and talk to you whilst you cooked, but I generally kept out of the way, taking the opportunity to disappear with a novel. I’ve always found too much socialising very tiring, and although I was still at a stage where I quite enjoyed your company, I needed to escape now and then.

  After we’d finished our meals, which were always delicious, we’d sit and drink wine by candlelight. Even Tom acquired a taste for your reds. You’d talk about art and literature, of course, which Tom and I both lapped up, but you also encouraged me to talk about teaching, about my family, and about my views on ‘the position of women in society’, as you put it. On the second evening, after the chicken chasseur and too many glasses of Beaujolais, you asked me for an opinion on working mothers. What effect did I think they had on family life? Was adolescent delinquency the fault of the working mother? I knew there’d been a big debate about this in the papers recently. One woman – a schoolteacher in fact – had been blamed for her son’s death from pneumonia. It was said that if she’d been at home more she would have spotted the seriousness of the boy’s illness much earlier, and his life would have been spared.

  Although I’d read about the case with some interest – mainly because it involved a schoolteacher – I didn’t feel quite ready to voice an opinion on the matter. All I had to go on, at the time, were my feelings. I didn’t seem to have the words, back then, to talk about such things. Even so, encouraged by the wine and your intent, interested face, I admitted that I wouldn’t want to give up work, even if I had children.

  I saw a little smile form beneath your moustache.

  Tom, who’d been busy playing with a puddle of candle wax during this conversation, looked up. ‘What was that?’

  ‘Marion was just saying she’d like to continue to work after you have children,’ you informed him, watching my face as you spoke.

  Tom said nothing for a moment.

  ‘I haven’t made any real decisions,’ I said. ‘We’d have to talk about it.’

  ‘Why would you want to carry on working?’ asked Tom, with that deliberate mildness to his voice that I would later recognise as rather dangerous. At the time, though, I did not understand this warning.

  ‘I think Marion’s quite right.’ You filled Tom’s wine glass to the brim. ‘Why shouldn’t mothers go out to work? Especially if their children are in school. It would have done my own mother the power of good to have some profession, some purpose.’

  ‘But you had a nanny, didn’t you? And you were away at boarding school most of the time.’ Tom pushed his glass away. ‘It was completely different for you.’

  ‘Unfortunately, yes.’ You grinned at me.

  ‘No child of mine …’ Tom began, then trailed off. ‘Children need their mothers,’ he began again. ‘There’d be no need for you to go to work, Marion. I could provide for a family. That’s the father’s job.’

  Back then, I was surprised by the strength of Tom’s feelings on the matter. Now, looking back, I can understand them more. Tom was always close to his own mother. When she died, over ten years ago now, he took to his bed for a fortnight. Until then, he’d seen her every week without fail, usually alone. During the early days of our marriage, if I entered my mother-in-law’s house I would remain largely silent, whilst Tom filled her in on his latest triumphs on the force. Sometimes, I knew, they were fabricated, but I never tackled him about it. She was immensely proud of him; the place was decorated with photographs of her son in uniform, and he returned the compliment by taking round catalogues of outsized clothes and suggesting which ones might suit her. Towards the end, he even chose and ordered the clothes for her.

  ‘No one’s debating your fitness to be a father, Tom,’ you said, your voice soft and consoling. ‘But what about what Marion wants?’

  ‘Isn’t all this a bit theoretical?’ I asked, trying to giggle. ‘We may not even be lucky enough to have children—’

  ‘Of course we will,’ Tom stated, reaching over and placing a warm hand on mine.

  ‘That’s not what we’re discussing,’ you said, quickly. ‘We’re discussing whether mothers should go out to work—’

  ‘Which they shouldn’t,’ said Tom.

  You laughed. ‘You’re very categorical about that, Tom. I didn’t have you down as being so – well, suburban about it.’

  Again you laughed, but Tom did not. ‘What do you know about it?’ he demanded, his voice low.

  ‘We’re just debating the issue, aren’t we? Chewing the proverbial fat.’

  ‘You don’t know anything about it, though, do you?’

  I stood and began to clear the plates, sensing a growing tension that I didn’t quite understand. But Tom continued, his voice rising, ‘You know nothing about children, or about being a parent. And you know nothing about being married.’

  Even though you managed to keep smiling, a shadow passed across your face as you muttered, ‘And long may that remain the case.’

  I set about bringing through dessert, talking all the time about what a wonderful apple and rhubarb tart you’d made (your pastry was always better than mine – it melted on the tongue), giving the two of you time to gather yourselves. I knew Tom’s moods blew over fairly quickly, and if I could just keep twittering on about custard and spoons and fruit fillings, everything would be all right.

  You may have wondered, even at the time, why I did this. Why didn’t I let the row build to a climax, and have us pack up and leave? Why did I sit on the fence, unable either to defend my husband or to push him to denounce you? Although I hadn’t yet admitted the truth about you and Tom to myself, I still couldn’t bear to see how easily you provoked his passion, how obviously he cared about what you thought of him. I didn’t want to think about what that might mean.

  But it w
as also that I agreed with what you said. I thought women who went to work could also be good mothers. I knew you were right and Tom was wrong. And this wasn’t the last time I would feel this, although each time it happened, I continued to deny it.

  On our last day on the island, I got my own way about a trip to Osborne House. I’ve never been that interested in royalty, but I’ve always enjoyed snooping around stately homes, and it seemed to me that a visit to the Isle of Wight wasn’t complete without taking a look at Queen Victoria’s holiday home. Back then, the place was open only on certain afternoons and many of the rooms were out of bounds to visitors. There was certainly no gift shop, tearoom, or even much information; the whole thing had a rather musty, forbidden flavour. It was as though you were prying on a private world, albeit one that had come to an end many years ago, and that was exactly what I liked about it.

  You objected, mildly, to the idea, but after the previous night’s discussion, Tom was on my side, and we ignored your smiling protestations about the terrible taste of the royals and their second-rate furnishings, and being herded around with a load of tourists (what made us so different from them, I didn’t ask). Eventually you relented and drove us there.

  No one’s making you come, I thought. Tom and I could go alone. But you joined us in the queue for tickets and even managed, towards the end of the tour, to stop rolling your eyes at everything the guide told us.

  The most striking part of the house was the Durbar Room, which seemed to have been fashioned completely from ivory and was almost blinding in its whiteness. Every surface was embellished: the ceiling deeply coffered, the walls sporting intricate ivory carvings. Even you stopped talking as we entered. The long windows looked out on a shining Solent, but inside it was pure Anglo-India. The guide told us about the Agra carpet, the chimneypiece and overmantel, shaped like a peacock, and, most wonderful of all, the miniature maharajah’s palace, carved from bone. When I peered inside, I could see the maharajahs themselves, their tiny glittering shoes turned up at the ends. The guide said the room was the Queen’s attempt to create a corner of India on the Isle of Wight. Although she’d never been there herself, she was entranced by Prince Albert’s tales of his travels on the subcontinent, and she even employed a particular Indian boy, to whom she became very close, as a personal secretary, although he, like all servants, was instructed to look away when he spoke to his sovereign. There was a photograph of this boy in the room, wearing the turban that the Queen had apparently insisted he thread with gold, although it wasn’t his custom. His eyes were large and serious-looking; his skin gleamed. I imagined him unlooping the turban to reveal the black snake of his hair, and Victoria – fifty-something, trussed up in corsets, her own hair tied so tightly it must have made her eyes ache – watching, and longing to touch it. He looked like a beautiful girl, that boy. No wonder they went in for beards and swords, I thought.

  Although the room struck me as incredibly frivolous and even verging on the immoral – all those elephant tusks, just for the amusement of a queen with a liking for the exotic – I knew what you meant when you praised its audacity, its fabulously pointless beauty, as you put it. In fact, I was so engrossed in the place that I didn’t notice you and Tom slip out of the room. When I looked up from studying yet another embroidery fashioned from a million gold threads, the two of you were nowhere to be seen.

  Then I caught a flash of your red cravat, out amongst the topiary. Our guide had begun preparing the group to leave, but I hung back, close to the window. Tom, I now saw, was standing, hands in pockets, half hidden by a tall shrub. You were facing him. Neither of you were smiling, or saying a word; you were just looking, as intensely as I’d looked at the photograph of the Indian boy. Your bodies were close, your eyes locked, and as your hand fell on Tom’s upper arm, I was sure I saw my husband’s eyes close and his mouth fall open, just for a moment.

  LAST NIGHT, WHILE you were sleeping, I stayed awake in the hope of being able to talk to Tom. This involved a disruption to our usual routine, which has been in place now ever since we both retired, and goes as follows. Every evening I prepare a rather lacklustre meal, nothing like the feasts you used to offer us: oven-ready lasagne, a chicken pie or a few sausages from the butcher in Peacehaven, who somehow manages to be both surly and obsequious. We eat at the kitchen table, perhaps engage in a little conversation about the dog or the news, after which I wash up whilst Tom takes Walter for his final walk around the block. We then watch television for an hour or so. Tom buys the Radio Times every week and high-lights the programmes he doesn’t want to miss using a yellow marker pen. We have a satellite dish, and so he has access to the History Channel and National Geographic.

  While Tom watches another documentary about polar bears, how Caesar built his empire, or Al Capone, I tend to read the newspaper or complete the crossword, and it’s no later than ten o’clock when I turn in, leaving him to at least another two hours’ viewing.

  As you’ll have gathered, there is something about this routine that inhibits real conversation or deviation of any kind. There is also, I think, something about it that both Tom and I find reassuring.

  Since you’ve been with us, I make sure you have your meal, which I feed you from a spoon to avoid upsets, before Tom and I sit down to ours. And even though you are in your bed in the room down the hall, we do not speak of your presence.

  Lately, though, I’ve got into the habit of sitting with you whilst my husband watches television. Tom has said nothing about it, but rather than joining him in the living room, I sit at your bedside and read aloud. We are currently enjoying Anna Karenina. Although you still cannot speak yourself, I know you understand every word I read, Patrick, and not just because you are doubtless very familiar with the novel. I see you close your eyes and enjoy the rhythm of the sentences. Your face becomes still, your shoulders relax, and the only sound apart from my voice is the television’s regular hum coming from the living room. Tolstoy’s grip on the female mind is, I’ve always thought, remarkable. Last night I read one of my favourite sections: Dolly’s reflections on the sufferings of pregnancy and childbirth, and tears came to my eyes because so often, over the years, I’ve longed for those sufferings, imagining that a child could have brought Tom and me closer together – despite everything, I’m convinced he wanted children; and even when I knew this could never happen, I imagined a child might bring me closer to myself.

  Whilst I cried, you looked at me. Your eyes, which have a pickled look about them these days, were soft. I chose to interpret this as a look of sympathy. ‘Sorry,’ I said, and you made a slight movement with your head – hardly a nod, but close enough, perhaps.

  When I left your room I felt curiously elated, and perhaps it was this that made me sit, fully clothed, on the edge of my bed until past one o’clock in the morning, waiting for Tom to retire.

  Eventually I heard his light tread on the hallway runner, his loud yawn.

  ‘You’re late turning in.’ I stood in my doorway and kept my voice low. He looked startled for a moment, then his face crumpled back into tiredness.

  ‘Can I have a word?’ I held my door open by way of invitation, feeling again like the deputy head during my last days at St Luke’s, when I often had to have a ‘little chat’ with a new teacher about taking the responsibilities of playground duty seriously, or the dangers of becoming too close to the more needy children.

  He looked at his watch. I held the door open a little wider. ‘Please,’ I added.

  My husband didn’t sit in my bedroom. Instead, he paced around as if the place were deeply unfamiliar to him (which I suppose, in some ways, it is). It reminded me of our first night together at the Ship. My bedroom is very different to that room, though: instead of curtains, I have a practical wooden-slat blind; instead of an embroidered eiderdown, I have a duvet cover that needs no ironing. These items I purchased, along with the bedroom furniture, from IKEA when we moved in. I gave the whole exercise very little thought, and IKEA helped me, as they said
, to ‘chuck out the chintz’. And so out went all the bits and pieces I’d inherited from Mum and Dad – not that there was much: a fringed standard lamp, a wall mirror with ornamental shelves, a scratched oak table – and in came the IKEA look. I wanted blankness, I suppose. Not so much an attempt at a new start as a refusal to engage with the process. Perhaps a longing to negate myself from the location altogether. To this end, the walls are painted a biscuity shade, and all the furniture is made of artificial wood in a colour they call ‘blonde’. That word makes me smile – such an odd word to apply to a wardrobe. Blonde. It’s so glamorous, so voluptuous. Bombshells are blonde. And sirens. And Tom, of course, although now his hair is grey; still thick, but without the shine of youth.

  My one extravagance in the room is the floor-to-ceiling bookcase that I had built along one wall. I’d always admired your bookshelves at Chichester Terrace. Of course, mine are nowhere near as impressive as yours, which were fashioned from mahogany and were filled with leather-bound hardbacks and outsized art monographs. I wonder what happened to all those books. There was no sign of them in your Surrey house, where I went a month or so ago, first in a bid to find you before I knew you were in the hospital, and then to pick up some things for you to bring here. That house was a very different place to Chichester Terrace. How long must you have lived alone there, after your mother died? Over thirty years. What you did during that period I have no idea. The neighbour who told me about your stroke said you’d kept yourself to yourself but you’d always said hello and asked very attentively after his health in the street, which made me smile. That was when I knew I’d definitely found the right Patrick Hazlewood.

 

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