by Ray Connolly
I took the baby for a walk the next afternoon, to the big park that my father had taken me to when he bought me the yacht. I hadn’t been there for years, but nothing had changed. I took the path alongside the pond and as I walked a little motor boat came racing through the ripples and crashed into the bank near my feet. I bent down to turn it round and send it back, and as I did I caught the glance of a father and son at the far side of the little stretch of water, watching me. It was strange, but it made me remember my father. He’d never liked the shop either, and he hadn’t been able to settle down. I wondered where he was and what had happened to him. My mother had never said. Why was it, I thought, that some people found it so difficult to lead normal and contented lives? I looked at the baby. He was contented. But so had I been at his age.
Jeannette caught me packing. I hadn’t wanted her to see me leave, but she’d come back from her mother’s early, and hearing me upstairs must have come looking for me. The open suitcase on the bed, nearly filled with my belongings, should have told her all she needed to know, but she didn’t seem to fully comprehend. She was holding the baby.
‘What’re you doing?’
‘I’m off.’
She looked more quizzical than shocked.
‘Where to?’
She had to understand: ‘I’m leaving, you know. Leaving.’
She knew then. Her face crumpled, her hands went up to her head, and she rushed forward to grab hold of me: ‘You can’t. What about us?’
I found myself echoing my father: ‘You don’t need me. You’ve got my mum, and the baby, and the shop.’
My case was packed, and I pushed past her and ran down the stairs. Behind me I heard her burst into tears. The sound brought my mother running through from the living-room.
‘He’s leaving us,’ Jeannette, still holding the baby, was sobbing on the landing.
I reached the bottom of the stairs just in time to face my mother. Her glance was all I needed to know that this time there would be no welcome back. This was the end.
I hurried through the shop, and opened the door. It would have been nice to have had one quick look back at my family, but I couldn’t. Behind me my mother was trying to comfort Jeannette who was verging on hysteria.
‘I’ll take the baby, dear,’ I heard her say with a voice that sounded strangely triumphant. And then I was out and running up the road, away from all of them. Like father, like son, they’d say, and they’d be right. And I wondered about baby James, and what he’d do when his time came.
Again I hadn’t made any plans about where I was going. I’d acted impulsively. But this time it was going to be different.
By the bus station in town there was a music shop. I knew exactly what I must have.
‘Sure you’ll be able to handle it all right?’ the assistant asked superciliously as he handed me a secondhand guitar and took my £9–10.
I didn’t have any doubts: ‘I’ll be all right now,’ I said.
And I just knew I would be.
This electronic edition published in 2011 by Bloomsbury Reader
Bloomsbury Reader is a division of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 50 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3DP
Copyright © Ray Connolly 1973
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ISBN: 9781448205981
eISBN: 9781448205677
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