The One and Only

by Francis King

  ‘We’ve got each other,’ she goes on. But the consolatory cliche has no power to console me. I doubt if it even consoles her.

  I kiss her goodbye, first on the cheek, then on the forehead and then on the mouth. I have never kissed her three times over like that before. It is almost as though I were saying goodbye to her for ever. ‘Now take care of yourself. Don’t overdo things.’

  She gazes up at me, holding my hand in her own twisted, knobbly one. ‘Good luck,’ she says. Appalled, profoundly moved, I see that there are tears in her eyes.

  As, brief-case weighed down with Bob’s manuscript in one hand, I emerge into the street, I spot Ivor outside the greengrocer’s opposite. He is in conversation with an elderly couple whom I often see but whom I do not know. Pray God I can get into the car unnoticed! But, abruptly excusing himself, he is racing across the road, in the path of an oncoming lorry. I can see the face of the lorry-driver contorted in rage; he hoots and hoots again.

  ‘Maurice! Maurice!’

  I have to halt before our garage, which is next door to the house.

  ‘You’ve heard the news, haven’t you?’

  ‘What news?’

  ‘They’ve gone! Done a bunk! Can you believe it? Up sticks and gone!’

  For a moment I have no idea of whom he is talking. Then I realise that it must be of Jack and Iris.

  ‘What a scandal! Everyone in the village is talking of nothing else this morning. I’m amazed you haven’t heard already.’

  He goes on like this for a while. Then I say: ‘I’m terribly sorry, Ivor. I must get going. An appointment.’

  ‘Yes, of course, of course, old boy. But what a scandal, what a scandal! In all the years I’ve lived here, we’ve never had such a scandal.’

  Chapter Forty One

  Ma stood in the doorway as the taxi moved off down the hill. One hand was raised in a last, forlorn farewell, but Tim did not look back. When the taxi had swivelled into Holland Park Avenue and vanished from sight, she turned away, hand to forehead, and then let out an inarticulate wail. This was followed by an ‘Oh, God! God, God, God!’ Without even glancing at me, her face contorted, she raced into the drawing-room, threw herself on to a sofa, and began to sob, so violently that it sounded as though she were retching against the cushion pressed to her cheek.

  The room, shadowy and smelling of cigarette smoke and booze, was in the condition in which she and Tim had left it in the early hours. No doubt soon Isabel would come in, to jerk back the curtains, to take away the brimming ashtrays, the dirty glasses and the empty bottles, and to straighten and pat the cushions. As I walked across the carpet, rage made me feel so giddy that I staggered as though on a high sea.

  I stood over her. ‘ Why did you do that?’

  Continuing to sob, she made no answer. She might never have heard me.

  ‘Why did you do that? Why did you give him Dad’s signet ring? It has the crest of the family on it. That should have been mine.’

  Now she twisted her face, red and tear-stained, up and round in order to stare at me. She looked astonished. ‘What are you talking about?’ she asked me. ‘ What are you talking about?’

  ‘Dad’s ring. Dad’s signet ring.’ Still she did not answer. ‘Can’t you hear what I’m saying?’ I leaned over and grabbed-her arm. I jerked her up into a sitting position.

  ‘Ouch! You’re hurting me. Don’t do that!’ Then she said: ‘I gave it to him because I wanted to give it to him. I was your father’s only legatee. Everything that belonged to him came to me. You know that perfectly well.’ Then she was crying again. ‘Why, why, why do you have to start all this now? Can’t you see how upset I am? Oh, do leave me alone!’

  ‘I’m also upset,’ I said.

  ‘You! You’re too cold a fish to be upset, really upset about anything at all. There’s not a hope in hell of making you understand what Tim’s going like this means to me. Not a hope! Once he’s over there – out of my sight – anything, anything at all could happen. I may never see him again! I just can’t live without him. He’s The One and Only. I know there’ve been others but he’s …’

  ‘Oh, stop using that silly One and Only! Stop it! You’re only interested in him because he fucks you. That’s all. He’s a good fuck, the best you’ve ever had. That’s it, isn’t it? Isn’t it?’ Once again I grabbed her arm. I began to shake it.

  ‘Stop that! Stop!’ Suddenly she looked terrified.

  ‘Why did you give him Dad’s signet ring?’ I repeated.

  ‘Because I wanted him to have something to remember me by.’

  ‘But you’ve given him so much else. Much more valuable things. The cigarette lighter. That Fabergé cigarette case. The watch. All those clothes. The car. That ring was mine! It belonged in the family.’

  ‘Tim is family. He’s one of us now. Anyway I can always have another, similar ring engraved for you. We can to go Mappin & Webb today. Any day. Whenever you like. But schoolboys don’t wear rings.’

  ‘It was mine, you bitch! It was mine because it was Dad’s.’

  By now I had released her. Rubbing her bruised arm, she put her head on one side, tongue between lips, and then burst into laughter. ‘All this Dad, Dad, Dad! You don’t know – nobody knows – if he was really your Dad.’ She hesitated for a moment. Then she said: ‘My guess is, he wasn’t.’

  ‘What the hell are you talking about?’ Once again, as on the train, I was experiencing that weird hallucination. Everything at which I looked – the soiled glasses, the overflowing ashtrays, the cushions on the sofa, Ma’s blotched, derisive face – seemed to be pulsating in and out, in and out, in time to the ever more insistent thudding of my heart.

  ‘Unlike Tim, he was never any good at it. And at the time … well, there were …’

  Beside the sofa, on the low table, there were two empty cocktail glasses and the chrome-plated cocktail shaker, a plate with a partially shaved lemon on it, and the knife, small but sharp, which Tim always used to do the shaving. I grabbed the knife, and almost at the same moment she screamed and then, even more piercing, screamed a second time. In a frenzy (that was how it was repeatedly described in court), I stabbed her over and over again. Forty-seven times was the count. Curiously the only thing that I could later remember of the stabbing was blood of hers splashing up on to my lips and of my tasting it, metallic and bitter.

  Isabel heard the screams. She appeared for an instant in the doorway of the drawing-room (of course I did not notice her) and then, yelping in terror, she rushed out of the house. In the distance she saw the horse-drawn cart of the milkman, so soon to be killed at Dunkirk. The milkman rang the bell of the Braceys’ house and hammered on the door.

  When the police arrived, I was sitting on a straight-backed chair by the window.

  They tried to question me but I said nothing. I continued to say nothing until, three years later, Noreen made me say that first Yes and so, eventually, retrieved me from the Black Box.

  Chapter Forty Two

  It is now not so much a village as a suburb of Canterbury. I enter an area of what seems to be waste land, dotted with an occasional tree, and then pass through a housing estate, high, symmetrical blocks of flats ranged in rectangles around concrete areas which are littered, even at this hour of the morning, with surprisingly expensive-looking cars. Beyond the housing estate rises a small wooded hill, towards which, having yet again consulted the map, I begin to make my way. I pass one drive, leading up to an invisible house, and then another drive, this one leading up to a squat bungalow set back from a scrupulously kept garden, with a red setter asleep on the lawn.

  Then I see the gate, with ‘Meadowlands’ inscribed on it. Where are the meadowlands? Presumably once, before the high-rise blocks were erected, there were green fields around the hill, and cows and horses browsed there.

  The house is a large red-brick Victorian one, with two high, narrow gables and a porch from which the olive-green paint is flaking. At some recent date an ugly concrete garage was attached t
o one side. Its doors open, it is empty. Can this mean that Bob is away or out? Noreen repeatedly urged me to telephone him first. That I did not do so was because I feared that he might then refuse to see me.

  The kidney-shaped patch of lawn needs cutting, the laurels around the house need pruning, and clumps of weeds are obdurately thrusting up through the gravel of the drive. A child’s gym shoe lies discarded in a flower-bed full of straggling roses, and a plastic bag dangles from a high branch of the chestnut tree which soars up over the garage.

  Slowly, fearfully I get out of the car and shut the door. Then I remember the brief-case with the typescript in it, and I open the door again. After that, I ring at the bell, wait, ring again. My heart has set up an uncomfortable drumming within me, which seems also to administer jolt after jolt to my brain.

  ‘Yes?’ The door has opened; the voice is irritable.

  ‘Bob.’

  He peers up at me, clearly not recognising me. I might not have recognised him, but for that head which, above a sadly shrunken, stooped body, now seems even more disproportionate than before. Then a vague suspicion nickers in his eyes. ‘You’re … Good God! It’s Mervyn!’

  I smile. ‘Not Mervyn now. Not even Otto Cramp. Maurice. Remember?’

  ‘Maurice! Yes, of course, of course! Come in, dear chap, come in! Forgive the mess – all this mess.’ He gestures around him, having backed into the hall. Two children’s bicycles are propped against a wall. A child’s T-shirt lies on the floor, beside a gym shoe which presumably makes up a pair with the one in the flower-bed. The Times and the Guardian are still on the doormat.

  ‘Laura is away with the kids in our cottage in Wales. I thought it a good opportunity to put the finishing touches to the book.’

  ‘You mean the autobiography?’

  He nods; then extends a hand. The nails, I notice, are still savagely bitten to the quick. ‘ Let me take that from you.’ Reluctantly I hand over the brief-case and he then places it on the hall table. He grins at me. ‘Well, what a surprise! I hardly recognised you after all these years.’

  ‘I hardly recognised you.’ His eyes look huge behind his thick, horn-rimmed glasses; his forehead is corrugated, and there is a network of red and purple veins over his cheeks and nose. I realise that he has not shaved this morning.

  ‘Time isn’t kind. Is it?’

  He leads me into a long, high-ceilinged sitting-room, as untidy as the hall. There are a few good pieces of furniture in it and, surprisingly, some even better pictures – I at once recognise a Burra and a Piper and guess that the one beyond them must be a Bomberg. As I cross over to examine the possible Bomberg – yes, I was right, there in a corner is the signature – Bob says: ‘It’s a shame Laura’s missed you. She shares your interests. As you know, I never had any visual sense at all. Just as you never had any scientific sense.’

  I know from the autobiography that Laura is his second wife and that he has two young children, a girl and a boy, by her, in addition to the two grown-up daughters by his previous, French wife, now dead.

  ‘I feel that I now know far more about you than you know about me,’ I say. Puzzled, his now shaggy white eyebrows almost joined, he stares at me. ‘I mean – after reading your book,’ I explain.

  He laughs. ‘ Yes, it is rather a give-away!’ He removes some knitting from an armchair and points at it. ‘Sit down! Sit down!’

  I sit. The seat, springs broken, subsides uncomfortably under my weight. He perches on the arm of the chair opposite to me, head cocked to one side and those hands, with their stubby fingers and cruelly bitten nails, interlocked. He smiles. ‘You were passing, I suppose?’

  ‘No. I came because I had to come.’

  ‘Oh!’ He grins. ‘You mean you made a special journey? That sounds terribly serious.’

  ‘It is serious. For me.’

  Now he slides sideways into the chair, on the arm of which he has so far been perching. He raises his left hand to his mouth and begins to gnaw at the nail of the little finger. I want to say: ‘Oh, do stop doing that!’, as I used to do at Gladbury. The habit always nauseated me.

  ‘Tell me,’ he says.

  I sigh. ‘Why did you send me that typescript?’ I get up, go out to the hall, and fetch my brief-case. I open it. ‘This.’ I pull out the typescript and hold it out to him. He takes it from me, looks at one page and then another, as though it were something that he has never seen before, and then places it on his lap.

  ‘I thought it would interest you. Since there’s so much about you in it.’ He leans forward. ‘Didn’t it interest you? I’m rather pleased with it. I – I think it could have a modest success. Laura thinks so too, and she was in publishing before we met.’

  ‘Anyone – any journalist – who reads that book will know exactly how to find me. Why on earth do you have to be so specific?’

  He jumps up from the chair. ‘Let’s go and have some grub. I was just about to get my lunch. Cold, I’m afraid. I never could cook. Laura’s terrific. Like you – if I remember correctly.’

  ‘I don’t feel at all hungry.’

  ‘Oh, come on. L’appétit vient en mangeant. You know that.’

  Angry at the interruption, I follow him down the hall to the large kitchen at the end. Its window overlooks a shabby back garden, with two corrugated iron sheds at the bottom of it. Used crockery and glasses are piled everywhere. He pushes some plates to one side on the kitchen table and then, having tugged out its warped drawer, removes some bone-handled knives and forks. ‘Let’s see what we have.’ He opens the refrigerator and stoops to peer into it. ‘There’s some cold ham here and some coleslaw. Oh, and I think there are some tomatoes. How does that strike you?’

  ‘I don’t feel at all hungry,’ I repeat. ‘Anything will do.’

  Now from a rack by the old-fashioned sink he is getting down some plates. They are Belleek, I realise at once from their mother-of-pearl lustre; but one of them is cracked and the other, with a dark, diagonal fissure across it, must have been clumsily repaired. As he continues with the preparations, I stand leaning against the sink. I am in a fury of impatience.

  ‘Yes, yes, this is a surprise. But a most welcome one. Most welcome. When did we last see each other? It must be years and years ago. Of course we wrote for a while. That’s how I knew that you had set yourself up – or, rather, Noreen had set you up – in that little shop of yours. Once Laura and I were driving past it and we all but called in. But we were already late for lunch with some friends in Brighton …’

  I hardly hear him as he goes on and on.

  Now at last we are facing each other across the table. ‘I hope this ham is okay. It’s almost a week old. But it’s been in the fridge all the time. What do you think?’

  ‘I’m sure it’s all right.’ I spear a single piece with my fork from the pile on the grease-proof paper which he is holding out to me.

  ‘Is that sufficient for you?’

  Suddenly it comes back to me – God knows why – that Ma often used to tell me that it was ‘vulgar’ or ‘common’ to say ‘sufficient’ instead of ‘ enough’.

  ‘Yes. Fine. Thank you.’

  He picks up the old-fashioned knife, blotched with rust, and holds it over a loaf of granary bread. ‘A slice of bread?’

  I shake my head.

  Then I lean forward: ‘There’s another thing – if you had to be so specific about everything else, why did I have to become Otto Cramp?’

  He throws himself back in his chair, with such violence that it is amazing that it does not tip over. He laughs uproariously. ‘Otto Cramp! I rather liked that name. It seemed – somehow – to express all the essential things that you are.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, something Germanic. That’s the Otto part. And then … there’s always been something clenched about you. Something tightly closed, something under – under enormous tension. No?’ He pops some ham into his mouth. ‘Hence the Cramp. Tension creates cramp. As in a fist which one keeps ti
ghtly closed for far too long.’ He chews. ‘I’m sorry you don’t like it.’

  ‘What I’m trying to get at is … It’s so inconsistent to change our names and yet not to change the name of the village and – and all the other details about us …’

  He shrugs. ‘Would you like me to give your real names?’

  ‘No. Of course not. No!’

  ‘An autobiography has to be specific. It’s not a novel. You can’t tamper with the facts – any more than you can tamper with the facts if you’re a scientist. I had to put down the facts.’

  ‘Why did you have to write of – of all that?’ By ‘all that’ I mean, of course, It and the Black Box.

  ‘Well …’ He leans back in his chair, thinking for a moment. ‘It was an important part of my life. Wasn’t it? You and your mother and Tim and Como were all an important part of my life. Sometimes – sometimes I think – the most important part. You can’t write an account of your life and then leave out the most important part. Can you? Anyway, your story was also a part of my thesis – the whole thesis of my book.’

  I shake my head. ‘I don’t understand.’

  He laughs. ‘I suspect that you’ve read only what I’ve written about you.’

  ‘No. I’ve read the whole book.’

  ‘Well, then … As you know, I call it Blue Genes. Laura thinks that a thoroughly silly title and I have a feeling she is right. No doubt I’ll think of something better. But the point is that the one thread ranning through the book is my life’s work – my life’s obsession if you prefer it. Genetics. Ordinary people are frightened of genetics. And geneticists are frightened that ordinary people are frightened. Because the fear of ordinary people can so easily turn into loathing.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘That doesn’t surprise me. You were always dim about anything scientific. Why are ordinary people frightened of people like me? Because we geneticists tell them that their genes – and not their upbringing or their environment – have made them what they are. Because we geneticists deny them the comforting belief that all men are created equal. Intelligence, like almost everything else about us, is hereditable. One day someone – not perhaps in our lifetimes – will be able to take a single embryo cell and predict the exact degree of intelligence of the child eventually born from it.’ He stuffs some more ham into his mouth. ‘Have you got me so far?’