Martin stood back to reveal a small skiff, a knocked-about blue with two benches inside and a rill of dirty water slopping about in the bottom. It would have been big enough for three if it weren’t for a small wire cage jammed in the bow. Inside, a cockerel jerked its head, staring at them with one beady eye and then the other, its wattle swaying.
“Daddy,” Flora said, “what is this? I thought we were bringing you to look at the sea.”
“I’m going out on the water,” Gil said. “I’m not sure Martin’s up for the rowing, so it’ll have to be one of you two.”
“But the chicken?” Richard said.
“Cockerel,” Martin said.
“It’s a little trick Flora’s mother told me about,” Gil said. “A long time ago . . . well, not so long ago.” He stepped forwards into the water beside the boat, his trouser bottoms turning a darker grey. “Hold it steady, Martin.” Gil lifted one shaky leg and the cockerel croaked in the back of its throat.
“Wait, Daddy, wait,” Flora said. She dropped the folding chair, flung the blanket and cushion into the skiff, and moved to her father. “Richard,” she said, “come and help.”
“I don’t think this is a good idea,” he said, but he stood beside the old man, put an arm around his chest, and lowered a shoulder for Gil to lean on. Flora and Richard manoeuvred his limbs like those of a stiff-jointed doll until they got him sitting on the bench in the stern, opposite the cockerel. Gil clung on to the side with his good arm and caught his breath, his sun hat knocked off and hanging down his back. The others stood on the beach, undecided, while the bird watched.
“What is going on, Martin?” Flora said in a low voice.
“Don’t ask me. You know what Gil’s like. He wanted me to meet him here this afternoon with a boat and a cockerel. It took some getting, I can tell you. I had to pay twenty pounds just to borrow the bird for the afternoon from a farmer over near Sydenham. He’d better not come home with a single feather ruffled or I’ll be done for.”
“So one of us has to row him? But where to?” Flora looked at the sea. A couple of yachts were moored far out, and the silhouette of a container ship sat low and motionless on the horizon.
“He always liked a bit of an adventure,” Martin said. “God, we used to get up to some stuff around the village, you wouldn’t believe.” He seemed about to go on to give an example and then changed his mind. “Look, the man is dying.” His voice was quiet, and the three of them glanced at Gil, who sat with his head pushed forwards on his scrawny neck, staring at the cockerel, which was eyeing him back. “Take him out on a little row around the bay and home again. That’s all he wants. So what if he’s taking a cockerel with him. People have asked for stranger things.” He didn’t give an example of these, either.
“You go,” Richard said to Flora. “It would be good for you to spend some more time alone with him.”
“There’s enough room for us both.” Although she wasn’t sure there was, with the cockerel’s cage.
“I’ll wait with Martin.”
They turned the boat and pushed it out, and when it began to float, Flora jumped in, settling in the middle and holding the oars. She rowed with her back to the cockerel, facing her father. Flora liked the action of rowing: there was something satisfying about pressing her feet against the sides of the boat and feeling her shoulder muscles work—the closest she could come to swimming without being in the water. The skiff gave a blip as it rose and dipped in the swell; Gil took off his sunglasses and closed his eyes, wedging himself into the corner formed by the stern and one side. His arm was stretched out and his hand gripped the side of the boat.
When they were about a hundred metres out, Flora turned the skiff and rowed hard against the current, which flowed towards Old Smoker. She got into a rhythm, pulling the oars through the water, lifting and rotating the blades. Behind her, the cockerel’s croak had changed to a puk, puk, puk.
“I read about this trick that you can do with cockerels,” Gil said, opening his eyes.
“I thought you said Mum told you,” Flora said, when the blades were out of the water.
“Well, yes. Whichever,” Gil said. “They have a sort of sixth sense.”
“I have to rest for a bit.” Flora pulled in the oars and bent over, panting. They had gone past Dead End Point and were opposite the beach huts, where a few owners sat out on wooden decks. Without the forwards motion the boat wallowed in the waves, which were bigger now they were out from the lee of the cliff, and Flora felt the wind chilling the sweat that had formed down her back. “Are you cold, Daddy?” Gil was hunched, his free hand tucked between his legs. Flora picked up the cushion and the blanket from the bottom of the boat, but they were both sodden and she dropped them back. A bigger wave caught them broadside and spat at all three of them. The cockerel’s noise changed to an open-beaked bray, starting high and plummeting to a throaty cough. It wasn’t a crow but a sound more melancholic, a lament. As soon as it finished, the bird began the sound again. Flora twisted around to look behind her and the boat rocked. “I think it’s seasick,” she said.
“If you row over the spot where a person drowned, the cock will crow,” Gil said.
“What?” Flora turned back to him.
“Or maybe it’s where their body is, under the water. I’ve forgotten exactly.” Gil’s eyes were closed as if he was concentrating, and his hand again gripped the side of the skiff, his knuckles white.
“Is that what this is all about? You think Mum drowned? But you saw her in Hadleigh.”
“I saw something. Who knows what it was. Something my imagination served up for me.”
The cockerel was louder now, and Flora saw people on the beach stop to stare out at them.
“Do you think it’s all right?” Gil craned his neck to look around her. “Maybe it’s seasick.”
Flora rolled her eyes. “Your imagination?” she asked.
Gil ignored her. “Perhaps we should let it out, and then it might crow.” The cockerel’s noise was hideous, and it tried to flap its wings but the cage was too small.
“I can’t row all over this patch of sea,” Flora said, picking up the oars. “We’re not even up as far as the nudist beach. I think we should go.” When she looked at the land, they were drifting back the way they had come, around Dead End Point.
“Open the cage just for a moment,” Gil said. “Then at least it might be less distressed.”
Flora shifted to manoeuvre her legs over her seat. The boat listed and cold seawater slopped over the edge. The bird’s cage tilted and the terrified creature grew even louder. Contorting her body, Flora reached to unhook the catch. The bird jumped, battering itself against the top.
“Careful,” Gil said.
“I am being careful!” Flora shouted over her shoulder, but he didn’t mean the cockerel. When she turned with the wailing, flapping bird in her hands, one of the oars was overboard and bobbing beside the boat.
“I can get it,” Gil said, leaning awkwardly.
“No, Daddy!” Flora shouted above the cockerel’s shrieks. It jabbed with its head, aiming for her face, and she let it go. The bird perched on the side of the boat and glared at them and the strange wet land they had brought it to.
“There,” Gil said, pointing at the oar, which Flora could plainly see. “Get it.”
Using the remaining oar as a paddle, she tried to move the skiff forwards as the floating oar travelled ahead of them in the current. The boat jerked and bumped, and there was a scraping as they hit the underwater rocks at the Point.
“Push us off! Push us off!” Gil said, and Flora jabbed at the rocks with the oar so that the skiff bumped again and Gil held on tighter. With each bump the bird bounced and then resettled on the edge, until Flora pushed with all her strength and with an ungainly flapping flight the bird took off, landing a couple of metres away on a seaweedy rock which poked up out of the waves. And then they were clear of Dead End Point and being returned to the beach, with Flora paddling to keep them
angled towards the sand, the waves washing them back in.
Richard and Martin were waiting, and beside them was a furious-looking Nan. Flora twisted to get a glimpse of the cockerel, and Gil watched it too as it puffed out its chest, tipped up its head, and crowed. Gil wheezed out a laugh, and Flora began to laugh, too. Richard waded out a little way and took the rope tied to the bow to pull them in.
“Bloody hell, Gil,” Martin said. “How am I going to catch that effing bird now?”
Nan’s face was white with anger.
They made a bedraggled procession as they walked up the chine, Richard carrying a wet Gil in his arms.
“He could have drowned,” Nan hissed at Flora. And Flora wondered, for a moment, if that was what he had wanted after all.
Chapter 38
THE SWIMMING PAVILION, 28TH JUNE 1992, 4:45 AM
Gil,
Yesterday the three of us caught the bus into Hadleigh. I thought it’d be fun—we would have fish and chips on the beach and I’d buy us some clothes, even though you’re late again with the money. We went to the shop that calls itself a department store because it sells everything in one room, and Nan and I combed through the racks of clothes. Flora sulked. She didn’t want to be there, wasn’t going to wear anything from that “shitty place,” she was going to catch a “bloody bus to London or anywhere else but here.” I cajoled and reasoned, ignored and bribed, but after five minutes Flora walked out and Nan and I ran after her, just in time to see her turning the corner onto the promenade and disappearing into the amusement arcade. We gave her ten minutes and then I sent Nan in after her.
“She won’t come,” Nan said when she returned.
I went into that jangling, eye-jarring place, which was murky with smoke. Tiny aluminium ashtrays overloaded with cigarette butts shuddered on top of every machine.
I found her at the back of the room. “Flora, we need to go now.”
“Five more minutes,” she said.
“Now.” She walked off, scanning the bottom trays for stray coins. I followed her. “Nan’s waiting. We need to go now.”
“I’m not ready,” she said.
“We’re going, whether you like it or not.”
“OK.” She moved to another machine.
“And you have to come too.”
“Why?” Flora didn’t look at me.
“Because I say so.” My voice was raised.
Our youngest daughter bumped her hip against the glass of Rio Carnival, girls with coconut-shell bras cavorting alongside the sliding plates of two-pence pieces. A cascade of coins dropped into the crevice at the side and disappeared.
“Bugger,” Flora said.
I could see the woman behind the change counter watching us, eyes squinting. “Now, Flora.”
“What if I don’t want to?”
“I don’t care what you want. We’re going.”
Then Nan was there. “Mum,” she complained. “I’m hungry.”
“OK, Nan,” I said, surprising myself at the volume, and she backed away from me.
I grabbed Flora’s wrist and yanked her. She became limp and silent under my hand, and I dragged her along, negotiating the blaring machines.
“Mum! Let her go.” Nan was crying, tugging on my arm. The lonely men with their plastic pots of 50p’s and the women with their blonde hair and cigarettes stared. Bad mother, they were thinking. Bad mother. Nan, pleading with me to let her sister go, was thinking, Bad mother.
When we got outside, Flora ran to the steps down to the beach and huddled against the promenade wall as if I’d beaten her. It took Nan half an hour to talk her round so we could catch the bus home, without doing any more shopping or having fish and chips. The girls sat together and I sat alone near the front. And it was while I pressed my forehead up against the bus window, and with the warm smell of dusty upholstery in my nose, that I wondered if my children might be better off without me.
In September 1990 you delivered A Man of Pleasure to your editor and the advance was larger than we could ever have imagined. Previously he’d taken a month to return your phone calls, but now you were in demand for London lunches, deals, and meetings. You phoned to speak to the girls every night you were gone, but I was left explaining to Flora why her father wasn’t here to put her to bed, and to Nan why she no longer had to worry about switching off the lights so I wouldn’t cry when the electricity bill arrived. It took me weeks to get used to the idea that I didn’t need to tally the prices in my head as I walked around the supermarket and that I could take a taxi home from Hadleigh rather than the bus.
You gave me the manuscript of A Man of Pleasure only after I’d repeatedly asked for it. You handed it over in a brown envelope and warned me to read it when the children were in bed and to hide it afterwards. And when your novel was printed, you wouldn’t allow a copy of the book in the house. I wasn’t shocked or disgusted at the story; I knew it already from when I’d whispered the whole book to you in bed at night. But the final draft you gave me to read that autumn was missing one crucial element, wasn’t it, Gil? The one line that was more terrible than all the lurid scenes of debauchery I’d invented and you’d copied down in such arousing detail.
The book was as controversial as your publisher and agent had hoped, and the reviewers who looked beyond the subject matter said your third novel was “lean and understated,” “measured and poetic,” “from a writer at the top of his form.” Jonathan didn’t see it like that, of course, especially since you hadn’t even bothered to change his name. I agreed with all the things he shouted when he came that final time, and I’d have liked to tell him the truth of who the real author was but I was too afraid of what he’d think of me, too afraid I’d never see him again. Neither of us ever told anyone whose head the real story of A Man of Pleasure had come from.
You were keen to point out to interviewers that it was your fourth book, and I’ve always thought how I’d like to have been that brave. What did I reply when a hairdresser or a new neighbour asked how many children I had? I curled my fingers into fists, pushed my nails into the palm of my hands, and answered, “Two.” I always answered “Two,” and hated myself for it.
You were delighted with the book’s success, and the money rolled in. You gave interviews on radio and television where you were jokingly coy about your private life. You were handsome and charming. Isn’t it ironic that the publicity focused so much on the book’s author? No one, not even you, was interested in its readers.
I was usually too busy with the girls to go with you to many of your literary events. “You won’t like them,” you told me. “They’re full of boring, bookish people standing around talking about themselves for too long.” But I went up for one of your television appearances: ten minutes in an armchair on an arts chat show with a tumbler of whiskey in front of you.
In the television studio I stood in the margins, amongst the cables and the cameras, to watch you in the spotlight. You mesmerised us—studio crew, audience, interviewer (and me); we were alternately laughing and hushed, listening to everything you had to say. I was so proud. They loved you, your book, your stories, and your looks. I loved you, too.
I loved you and nodded when the production assistant, standing beside me, whispered, “Isn’t he great?” And I smiled when she said, “He’s a bit of a rogue, though.” I still loved you when she continued, “Apparently he’s got a wife and children in the country. Keeps them there out of harm’s way, I suppose.” I said nothing. “He took my friend out for drinks a few weeks ago,” the girl whispered. “And then he asked her to stay the night in his hotel room. ‘Aren’t you married?’ she said to him, and he said, ‘What the eye doesn’t see and the mind doesn’t know doesn’t exist.’”
I didn’t look at the girl as she spoke. I watched you on your black swivel chair, legs crossed in the grey slacks I’d ironed, wearing the socks I’d washed and hung as a pair on the line outside the kitchen. Even the interviewer was laughing, unable to get his questions out coherently. I r
emembered our first summer, lying in the long grass outside the Swimming Pavilion, your head on my lap as I read to you, holding the book high to block out the glare of the sun.
“Did she take him up on his offer?” I said. “Your friend?”
“I can’t blame her,” the production assistant said. “He’s pretty old, but God, I would. Wouldn’t you?”
I waited until we’d driven off the ferry, paid the toll, and were on the dark straight road heading home.
“I met a girl tonight,” I said, “who told me you’d fucked her friend.” I said “friend” in the way that people write to agony aunts about their friends who have slept with their boyfriend’s brother and want some advice.
“What?” You gave a short laugh, like a yap.
“So you didn’t?”
“What?” you said again.
“Fuck her?”
“Fuck a friend of a friend of a friend?” You said it like it was a joke.
I didn’t answer, and when the silence became uncomfortable, you said, “Come on, Ingrid. It’s a silly girl gossiping. She probably knew who you were and was hoping for a reaction.”
“So you’re denying that you fucked her?” I said.
“I thought it was her friend I was supposed to have fucked,” you said. “And when exactly was this meant to have happened? I have been very busy, you might have noticed, earning us money.”
“Pull over.”
“We’re nearly home. Let’s talk about this later.”
“Pull over,” I repeated sharply.
You drew up on the sandy edge of the road. A couple of cars passed us, their headlights moving over our bodies like lighthouse beams sliding across rocks. “I’m not going to do this all again,” I said.
“Do what?” You took your hands from the steering wheel and clasped them together in your lap.
“Be made a fool of!” I shouted. “Be the last to know!”
“You’re no fool, Ingrid.” You wouldn’t look at me.
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