She went home distracted by food for a family. Little Isabel, Serena had mocked, busy as a bee. Solid food, homemade pork pie, a joint of ham, a dish of potatoes sliced and baked with onions and cheese. Isabel trying to show her contemptuous brother how well she could do when she did not take her mother shopping and encouraged her to sleep in the afternoon. It was all laid out in the larder, more in the fridge, except the trifle and the cream, which were in the cellar for lack of other cool space.
Alone, Serena gazed at the display. She had locked the cat into the cellar to serve it right for being so frightened and so plaintive about going outdoors. She broke off pieces of the pork pie and enjoyed the sticky sensation of pastry crumbling between her fingers; saw the gelatine uncovered and went ‘Ughh!’ There was a dim memory of eating the best food in the world and never liking wholesome fare like this: she was doing someone a favour by trying it first and finding it lacking. She hacked at the glazed joint of ham with the new breadknife Isabel had bought to replace those that went missing in the weeding expeditions Serena made in the garden. She tasted a clove and removed it carefully from her tongue, dug it into the surface of the spuds. She knew they were spuds: spuds had a lovely sound.
The larder was so spick and span, unrecognizably clean and reorganized, that Serena could not imagine what it had been, only that it was logical to suppose that anything edible in here was for herself, since Isabel was always telling her to eat. Eat, eat, nag, nag. Isabel did not make food, she made mountains: she would make some poor man a good wife. There were lights from the car. Serena opened the cellar door, scooped the fleeing cat into her arms and scuttled down the corridor into the living room. She had a vague sense of being righteous, but also of being naughty. The cat curled on the sofa and began to wash, assiduously. Serena resumed the writing of letters, equally concentrated.
Food. It was the first time George could bring himself to admit even the most grudging respect for Isabel Burley. If anyone had asked, which no one would, he would have said in his abrupt fashion that they did not get on, although he minded his manners and did not think she noticed the way he winked at Serena and she winked back at him to signal their conspiracy against this silly little girl who kept on changing round things that were perfectly all right as they were. But when it came to cooking, there she was, all afternoon, creating the same sort of things as his own dead mother, making his mouth water. He was fascinated by the sight of another person cooking. He sneaked a look at cooking programmes on the telly: he liked to see food taking shape from lumps into edible things. Oh, she was extravagant: she bought apples, for God Almighty’s sake, when there were apples for the picking, though admittedly past their best. She had to look at a book to do half of what she did, but she was doing fine. Then he remembered he could not afford to like Isabel or court any improvement in the atmosphere.
George had been able to manage Janice, who kept her hours and went home without ever entering into Serena’s affections, but Isabel was different. There was less loud music, fewer furious questions, and the end of that closeness he shared with Mrs Burley and no one else knew about. Such as sitting on her bed in the morning, telling her what to wear today, coming back in the evening sometimes, after Janice had gone, sitting by the fire so that he could postpone going home. Since the advent of Isabel, he had pottered in the kitchen and garden, taken Petal for longer and longer walks, kept his distance. Isabel had poured him coffee when he came back today to witness the cooking. Different coffee, he noticed, disliking the bitter taste of it.
‘I think she’s so much better, don’t you? I hope my brother thinks she’s better.’
‘Your mother? Oh, yes.’ He had thought for a moment Isabel was talking about the dog. He did not think Serena was better. She was having a quiet spell, that was all. There was nothing wrong with her in the first place: she was fine as she was.
‘George, you’ve done so much for her, I don’t know what we’d do without you. She says you won’t take any money for all the time you spend here. Can’t we put it on an hourly rate? It wouldn’t be much. Cash, though.’
George thought of the things Serena had pressed upon him. The vase, the teapot, the ornaments, all sold under Derek’s direction. No great profit; enough for the purpose he had in mind, which was a good purpose, but not good enough to stop him half knowing it was, in some way, corrupt: the extra money was not for himself.
‘I never did want paying,’ he said, hideously embarrassed. ‘I’ve got a place to live, unemployment. If I get any money, that’ll stop and I’ll be worse off.’
He could not have begun to explain to her why he did not want the money. He had no real use for the stuff: money got him into trouble, had him hanging round women, made him feel he could drink. He felt safe when he was here: he had enough to keep the old car going and that was all he needed. Besides, payment for his presence would inexorably alter the whole status of it, and he supposed that was what Isabel wanted. Serena always made him feel a dear and exclusive friend who could arrive when he wanted and stay as long as he wanted. Money would change him into the hired help.
‘Something towards the running of the car?’ she suggested tactfully. He was tempted, but he shook his head.
‘Well, think about it. Perhaps we could settle on what time you get here and what time you leave?’
Bile rose in his throat. He had made his own routine: now she wanted him tied down to hours. She’d soon have him clocking on and off, like in a factory.
‘Can’t do that,’ he said. ‘I’ve got other commitments, see?’
Like now, hiding. Shivering with remembered guilt.
Derek had come into his room about eight o’clock. Flourished those letters about which he had almost forgotten, a shade pissed, the way Derek usually was when someone, somewhere, had given him cash and he wanted company. He sat on the bed and looked at George owlishly.
‘Hallo, gorgeous. Why aren’t you talking to me these past weeks? I’ve got something of yours. Picked ‘em up by mistake. Sorry about that. Are you coming for a drink?’
‘Not tonight, Derek, I’m tired. Another time.’
‘Another time? You’re always saying that.’ He sighed like a beauty queen deprived of the prize. ‘Come out for a drink, George. Meet people, have fun. I want to talk to you.’
‘What about?’
An evil grin appeared on Derek’s dark features. He looked like a wizened jockey, magnificent eyelashes flattering the lined face of a man much older than his thirty years. Something ate Derek from within. George did not think it was disease, merely a hungry tapeworm thrashing around in constant discontent. In the days when George had given half his food to Derek, the lad could have eaten a horse.
‘I want to talk about the place you go every day, where you won’t take me. It’s not fair, George. You told me about a beautiful woman, a princess, you said, and you never let me see her.’
‘You’ve not got a lot of use for women, Derek. Never did have.’
‘Not like you, George. Six years for rape. You must have liked it once. I don’t know what makes you so fussy now. You’re over fifty.’
Age was everything. It was supposed to bring a scintilla of wisdom. Why had he departed from the habits of half a lifetime and opened his mouth to this boy? George smiled, one man to another, waiting for worse.
Derek waved the crumpled letters. They were all disorganized: they could not have told anyone a story. Especially Serena’s, which consisted of lists of words, like a child’s vocabulary book. Hope flared and then died in George’s slow imagination.
‘I’m telling you, George, there’s one here with a lot of really hot stuff. I bet it’s your princess, writing to a bloke. She’s telling him she loves him and she’s sorry she bit! That’s what they do, women. Bite people. You’re better off without them. But it turned me on, it did.’
George lunged for the letters. Derek was only on the cusp of drunkenness and drew back in time, playfully. The letters disappeared into the top pocket of
his bomber jacket. He smiled coyly, fluttering the magnificent lashes.
‘Naughty,’ he admonished. ‘Very naughty. Come out for a drink, George. I got money. I miss you.’
George had gone for the drink he did not want, in the hope of getting back his letters. Two halves of bitter to Derek’s three Carlsberg Specials made his head spin and left his senses raw, sending up thanks for the food he had eaten and Derek had not. He tried to be polite to Derek’s other friends, Bob and Dick, but he did not like them either and it showed. Big, silent men who kept themselves apart. Dick smelled of sweat and his eyes moved incessantly, his gaze lingering on the women at the bar. Thus much George had understood by the time he took the letters from Derek’s jacket pocket when the others went to the lavatory. Derek had made the connection between his own daily destination and the address on the letter which begged for a reply: the one about biting someone and being sorry about it. George cursed Isabel, not for whatever she had done, or the contents of the letter which clearly gave Derek such unholy glee, but for the clarity of her writing when she wrote her home address. Where is it, George? Where is it, this big house full of old things and the princess you told me about? Where is it? Derek now knew where it was. He would not need the letters to refresh his memory.
George bought the fourth round, resenting the money. There was a disturbance by the door. Bob, touching up a woman who screamed abuse at him; the beginnings of a fight. Under cover of the noise, Derek leant forward and kissed him. George could feel blood ready to explode from the pores of his forehead. He wanted to hit the man, the way he had once wanted to hit a woman. If he could have borne the proximity, he would have undone Derek’s dirty, tight jeans, seized his prick, twisted it, torn it off and thrown it away. That was what queers made him feel like. Even if he had once been convicted of rape, they were worse, coming on strong like this. Derek went back to the bar, the kiss unreciprocated, the thirst unslaked and the cash still sufficient. George fled.
Nowhere to go and no way to cope. He could not go back to his room with the useless warden off-duty and Derek knowing exactly where he was. Nor could he get in his car at a time of night when the police were busy enough to notice the rust on the side and the smell on his breath. Wait in the dark, until sleep overtook them all? He opted for that.
End of October: mist beginning to settle on the so-called old end of town. One mile walk from the suburban end, where the hostel nestled in anonymous ugliness among the rest, next to the brand new Methodist church. Now he was crouched against the wall of the alleyway between a row of shops and the old chapel furniture exchange where he had sold Serena’s things. His feet had crunched on rubbish and there was no light. Wariness of Derek and his friends had grown into a terror of revulsion. They wanted something and Derek wanted most.
The alleys of the old town stretched either side. George was shivering cold, dressed in clothes that were fit only for the warm room he had left. The warmest things about him were the letters scrunched up to his heart beneath his sweatshirt and the desire to dance in the dark with Serena Burley, whom he knew he had already betrayed. Someone else now knew where she was, in possession of all those old, damaged things which someone would want. It was not the immediate prospect that troubled him now, but living long enough to cope with it, what with the voice of Derek in the near distance, wandering the streets in the fog, shouting. He could not face Derek: he would strike him.
‘Come out, George. I know where you are: I’ll find you, promise.’
George closed his mouth, willed his shivering limbs to stay still. He crossed his arms over his chest and squeezed his eyes closed, bracing himself against the wall.
‘Come out, George. I loves ya, George.’
He stuck his thumbs inside his ears; he placed his little fingers into his eyes and, ignoring the dirt where he crouched, he rolled himself into a ball with his back facing the glow of the street lamp.
‘I loves ya, George. Where are you?’
The voice began to falter; then it faded. ‘I loves ya, George’ died away into the night. The effort needed to take his hands out of his ears was enormous: the energy required to move his limbs from curled to straight seemed greater. He writhed in an agony of cramp, of unsound mind unhinged by confrontation. He would stay there for ever to avoid a fight.
He thought of December, when he might freeze as he lay, parcelled up for the dramatic discovery of rubbish men in January. Serena would miss him. She needed him. At two in the morning he unscrewed his arms and walked back to a silent dwelling.
Robert Burley was teased about his name because it matched his physique. Big, tending to fat because of a liking for solid food – cake, real ale and potatoes. He was the kind of solicitor who studiously avoided making real money on account of his principles: knowledge should be placed at the disposal of the community. Conspicuous wealth brought out the Trotsky in him. All property was theft, unless it had a huge mortgage on it, like his terraced house in Manchester. His moral crusades, which were born out of an inability to compete, were never quite as sincerely felt as he imagined. He simply wanted to be worthy. The end result was a wretched practice and a life of endless complication. Envy ate at him like a worm, without making him thin. Only in his own house was he a king.
‘Joan! You ready yet, woman?’
‘Nope. Take the baby. Look, Robbie, are you sure we have to stay the night? So much easier if we just go there and back.’
‘I’ve said we’d stay, so we’re staying. C’mon, love, give me that girl.’
A soft, enormously fat fifteen-month-old lump of baby, made in his own image and liking. He could not have ordered up anything better: his daughter, his one and only. The four-year-old son, a thin child of quietly precocious habits, was beaten into second place by his sister and did not seem to mind. He had the undiluted love of his mother: he preferred women.
‘Don’t hold her so tight, Robbie. She’ll suffocate.’
‘No, she won’t. She’s all right, aren’t you, Cathie?’ The child grinned and squirmed. Robert put his finger in her mouth and let her suck. Joan accused him of spoiling her. He strapped the baby in the front seat beside him, even though it was supposed to be safer in the back, a fact he ignored because he wanted to go on sneaking glances at her and because he believed implicitly that his own superior skill as a driver was all it took to avoid accidents.
‘My God, this car’s like a travelling circus,’ Joan complained. ‘Why do we have to take so much?’
‘Because we aren’t going to a place equipped for kids, as you well know.’
Joan sighed. ‘I wish we didn’t have to go at all.’
Joan was a placid wife, but a shrewd one. They made a duty visit to his mother every few weeks, purely to satisfy conscience. This time they were going because Robert had received a valuation on his mother’s goods and he also wanted to make sure Isabel was not colluding with the help. He wasn’t worried about the house. There were only a few years left on the lease, which made it worth little to any inheritor. The only hope of getting anything out of Mother was keeping the contents intact and keeping her in it. So much for principles. The prospect of a third child was eroding them fast.
Oh, be fair to him Joan told herself, handing the boy a carton of orange juice with instructions not to spill it. He does care for his mother: he cares for everyone. He’s beaten himself to death caring.
‘Is she asleep?’
‘Not yet.’
You could not spoil a child by adoration alone, he told himself. Surely not. It took love of a particular kind to do that. Like the love his father had had for Isabel, who could do no wrong, Father’s little piece of perfection. He could remember rushing towards his father on Father’s return from a foreign trip and being literally pushed to one side, to stand with his arms outstretched and nothing to hold, because Isabel had been behind him. He might as well have been invisible: so might his mother. It made him burn with humiliation, even now. It was one thing to prefer one child to another, he re
flected with the wisdom of parenthood, but you had to pretend to be even-handed. Father had not dissembled. And it was not just Father who preferred Isabel so outrageously: there was also Aunt Mab, who signalled it by leaving her everything. One way and another, Robert Burley felt his sister owed him a lot. He owed her nothing.
The afternoon was pleasant, the drive in the past-its-sell-by-date Ford Sierra uneventful. The boy in the back expressed no curiosity whatever about their destination. When they arrived he got out carefully and ran indoors.
They went to the back door, as family should. The front door was for the parties Robert remembered before his father died. Gross over-consumption, where Dad danced with his daughter and Mother flirted with the men. Men who were mostly dead now, he supposed. Perhaps Serena’s sexy partiality for men might explain the dearth of women friends now. Widows have long memories. Robert doubted if Isabel had thought of that. He contemplated his own life with satisfaction. A serious man was better off with a plain wife.
‘Hallo, Isabel. You look terrific.’
His voice boomed over the garden. Out of the corner of his eye he saw that odd little man, George, sidling away in the direction of the fields. If Robert was startled, not to say faintly satisfied by the change in the sister he had last seen three months before, he did not show it. The slenderness of her was even more extreme: it was pinched. She was breathless and anxious to please. Serena was magnificent. In his bitterness, Robert always chose to forget whose favourite he had been.
‘Darlings, wonderful!’
A flurry of warm, scented kisses, smothering him, arms round him like steel, face nuzzling his hair, her mouth finding his ears and his nose, like a puppy. She would never have shoved him aside.
Sun streamed through the dining-room windows reflecting in the table, which Robert was relieved to see had not been chopped up for firewood. More than a thousand pounds, the valuer had said. They went straight in to eat, Joan telling Isabel she should not have bothered: they could have gone out and, anyway, they’d bought sandwiches. It was a strange meal: cooked ham in a kind of casserole that tasted of tinned soup, a bit gluey, baked potatoes. Serena fed hers to the dog. The boy, Jack, attached himself to Isabel like a limpet, refusing to eat anything unless she gave her approval to each mouthful. It was almost normal.
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