Dangerous Pleasures

by Patrick Gale

  The possibility that she had misjudged or underestimated her mother’s character did not occur to her. Instead she felt wounded to the quick that her mother had felt the need to mute her natural exuberance when Matilda was around. Matilda was not partial to excessive display of any kind, even as a child, but she appreciated vivacity in its place. The thought that her mother had suppressed such a side to herself, had been on dully good behaviour in her daughter’s presence, awakened at once a sensation of profound regret at losing a companion whose company she might, after all, have enjoyed and of shock at the bitter possibility that here was an older woman who had not liked her.

  ‘Don’t be silly’, she was fond of telling her more yielding friends when family matters were discussed. ‘Like or not like doesn’t come into it. They’re your family. They’re what you’re born to. They’re the only people in your life you don’t get to choose.’

  But she had always spoken, however bracingly, from the secure belief that her mother had loved her with unquestioning loyalty, however vague or erratic its expression. Admittedly her feelings towards her mother had long since cooled to the merely dutiful, but she allowed herself the odd crisis of sentimental warmth at birthdays and Christmas, and soothed any pangs of conscience with the thought that the love of the young for the old was, by its very nature, a less vigorous growth than the helpless bond between mother and child.

  At last she could bear it no longer. The matron was tearfully recounting the happy evenings she and Matilda’s mother — ‘more like a pal than a resident really’ — had spent at the cinema on the sea front and how very up-to-date her mother’s taste in films had become, when Matilda felt a great surge of childish envy pass over her, a wave of bilious heat. How dared this woman, any of these people, lay such tender claim to her mother? Hers!

  Leaning against the hostess trolley in which the matron had seen fit, in view of the hour and the lingering guests, to warm up some individual meat pies, she cried tears of outrage, hot on cheeks tired from smiling. The matron was kindness itself, quite prepared to break up the little party but Matilda, who hated scenes, seized the opportunity of escape and, with a quick moan about the sudden need for solitude and fresh air, hurried out through the gathering crowd to the front door. Her first thought was only of peace, which was swiftly found in such a quiet neighbourhood, but a natural momentum seemed to drive her down the garden path, out of the gate and along the road towards the sea.

  The house was on the genteel side of town, in a district of large, outmoded Victorian mansions on streets named after long forgotten Bavarian resorts. The sea was clearly visible at intervals between cedars or over shrubberies, and the air was bracing, but the houses nestled a safe distance from the palmy turmoil of the esplanade. Golf links lay close to hand (inexplicably her mother had refused to take up the sport despite the benefit the exercise would have done her figure) and helped preserve the area’s tranquillity. Rosenheim Avenue ended abruptly with the golf course club house beside which lay the beginning of a cliff top footpath.

  The grass was mown, there was a sign enforcing a pooper-scoop bylaw and, here and there, wooden benches had been constructed a little higher than usual to make them easier for less flexible citizens to vacate. Thus tempted, Matilda walked on for some ten minutes, recovering her composure and admiring the first hints of a sunset. A few last golfers were striding about the links in pastels but apart from a young man with an old dog she met no one on the path. Relishing the sense of being quite alone again, she sat on a bench with a fine view out to sea and back towards the esplanade. Seagulls wheeled and dropped, cackling, into their colonies on the cliff face below her. Occasionally she heard a shout or a burst of laughter from the beach. As a girl she had loved heights. She used to stand right on the edge, whooping into the wind, until her mother called her back. At some stage, puberty probably, she acquired a fear of them, however. She grew taller and wiser and learned geological dread and social embarrassment as if by the same hormonal process. Her husband could not understand this. He made her ride lifts to the top of towers to teeter out on pigeon-haunted platforms. He convinced her that if she lay on her belly to peer over a cliff edge it was less dizzying but she found it all the more so, like some film effect where an actor was meant to be hanging from a window ledge and one knew they were lying on their belly in front of a back projection. Once she was doing this, at his insistence, when he lifted her feet off the ground for a joke. It was the cause of their first major argument and caused her to fall out of love with him.

  Matilda closed her eyes and basked. There was still some heat in the sun. This was where her mother had walked. This, or somewhere near it, was where she had brought her watercolours and talked with the young Asian couple. This was where she had jumped.

  She opened her eyes again abruptly. Had her mother walked calmly to the edge or made her way gingerly? Had she perhaps sat on the precipice first then bounced off as one might from a low wall? Had she made herself drunk beforehand? That would, at least, explain her reported laughter. The bench was some forty feet from where the grass began its gentle slope down to the void but Matilda shuddered and glanced instinctively over her shoulder and grasped tight on the bench wood as though some malevolent stranger were about to give her a murderous shove from behind. There was no one there of course. The sunset was beginning in earnest, dyeing some clouds an unpleasant shade of salmon pink not unlike the curtains in her late mother’s room.

  ‘I should be getting back,’ she said aloud, surprising herself with the sound of her own voice. Mutely she wondered if a single plastic cup of wine could have been enough to inebriate her.

  In the distance she made out a small boy running along the path towards her. He could not have been more than eight, although, childless, she considered herself a poor judge of age in the young. He was solidly built, his little legs pounding like pistons. His head was down, his small arms pumping. She sat back to watch him, remembering the childish pleasure of following a narrow path with the blind obedience of a train. If anyone were to meet him walking in the other direction, she had no doubt that they would have to stand aside to let him pass. As he drew closer, she saw that he was in school uniform: grey shorts, a short-sleeved grey shirt and a purple tie. At least, she assumed they must be uniform. No modern mother would dress her child so formally. One saw so few children in uniform now. It was something she missed. Children now seemed barely to touch upon a childish phase before they were hanging around on buses and street corners like so many vengeful unemployed. Children had become insolent, even intimidating. She was glad she had not become a teacher. Her youthful ambition had been based on recent memories of a school where girls wore elegant brown gymslips over cream blouses and where teachers called Miss This or Mrs That were regarded with a respect approaching adoration.

  She rose to go but as she returned to the path she glanced back along it. The boy’s face was red with the effort of running and as he drew closer she saw that he was crying. She avoided addressing children as a rule but something in his uniform and pitiful state inspired confidence. She stood until he approached her, his run slowing to a panting walk. He was rather chubby. There was a deep cut on his knee which needed a mother’s attention; a dab of iodine and perhaps a bandage to make him feel a hero. She mustered her kindest smile.

  ‘Hello? Is something the matter?’

  He glanced around him, at the sea, at the grass, bashful in his tears.

  ‘I…I’ve lost my mother.’

  So few children called their mother’s that anymore. He was nicely spoken too. Like a child from an old film.

  ‘Oh. Oh dear. Where did you see her last?’

  ‘I…I’m not sure. Here somewhere. I’ve been looking for simply ages.’ As a slightly cross note entered his voice, he looked at her, his small, black eyes searching her face as if only just noticing her.

  ‘Well why don’t you blow your nose, first, then you can tell me all about it and I’ll see what I can do. Have you got a
handkerchief?’

  He searched his pockets, producing string, some shells and a quantity of what looked like seaweed.

  ‘Lost it,’ he said and seemed about to cry again.

  ‘Here,’ she told him and passed him hers. ‘It’s quite clean.’

  ‘Thank you,’ he said. He gave his nose and eyes a perfunctory wipe before handing it back to her. He looked calmer now, almost distinguished. She thought back to her girlhood, to the panic of losing her mother while shopping, to the constant, trustless fear of being wilfully left behind at the swings and slides, in a hospital, on a beach…Mothers nowadays were so slatternly.

  ‘Where do you live?’ she asked.

  ‘I…I can’t remember.’

  ‘Oh. Well. What’s your name?’

  ‘Tom.’

  ‘I’m Matilda.’

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘Well it’s going to get dark in about an hour so I suggest I take you to a telephone and we call a nice policeman to help us out.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  Entirely trusting, he put his hand in hers. Despite the run he had just taken, it felt cool. She wondered if he was in shock. She glanced at his knee. Blood was trickling down to the rim of his sock and soaking in. Perhaps there had been an accident. Perhaps the poor thing’s mother had slipped and fallen and he was too traumatized to recall anything. Welcoming the diversion from her own, sad affairs as she did any opportunity to take responsible charge of a situation, she began to lead him back towards the town. There was nobody else in sight. The club house was further than she remembered.

  ‘Are you on holiday?’ she asked.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Are you?’

  ‘No I was…visiting a friend.’

  As she said this the weight of her mother’s death and that afternoon’s grim rituals seemed to slip away from her and she received a fleeting intuition that her mother was a good age and had spared herself the indignity of senility. She had also, in a curious way, set Matilda free from an implicit burden of guilt and frustrated duty. Matilda had no ties. No husband. No mother. She was free as air. She could emigrate. She could dye her hair. She could run a little wild. She had been at liberty to do all these things for some time, of course, ever since her widowing, but the knowledge that she still had a mother, albeit a fiercely independent one, had placed a check on her.

  They were reaching an upward slope in the path. Strangely elated, almost gay, she squeezed the boy’s hand and began to sing to cheer him up.

  ‘The grand old Duke of York,

  He had ten thousand men…’

  She stamped in time to the tune.

  ‘He marched them up to the top of the hill…Do you know this?’ she asked him, breaking off.

  By way of answer the boy swung her hand in his and sang back,

  ‘And he marched them down again.

  The grand old Duke of…’

  Together they marched and sang to the top of the gentle incline. The club house seemed so far away still she could almost believe they had been walking in circles, or on the spot, were that not patently absurd. She sighed to herself, foreseeing a visit to a police station, time-consuming giving of statements, a reunion with some unsuitable, probably unmarried mother and a delayed journey home to her London friends, perhaps even an enforced night in some bleak hotel full of pensioners and friendless sales reps.

  ‘Can you skip?’ the boy asked cheerfully.

  ‘Of course,’ she said.

  He began to skip, tugging her along so that she was obliged to skip too to keep in step.

  ‘He marched them up to the top of the hill

  And he marched them down…’

  What did it matter? What did anything matter? There was no one to see her behaving so inanely and what if there were? She had no plans to return. She had forgotten what fun skipping was; the lilting step, its surprising, elegant swiftness. And the view was delighful from this point. Small boats on the water, a row of palms on the promenade, a grand hotel, creamy pink in the setting sun. She laughed as she sang, growing quite breathless, and glanced down at the boy, happy that she should have raised his spirits so effortlessly and her own in the process. He glanced back at her, black eyes shining like a small bird’s, sharp little teeth clenched in a grin.

  Quite suddenly they swerved off the path and were skipping across the grass towards the dangerous slope. Taking this for youthful high spirits, she tried to tug him back towards safety, but he yanked her along with him.

  ‘Stop,’ she cried, imperious now. ‘Tom, stop it. This is silly. Tom!’

  He ignored her. His fingers had imperceptibly changed their position so that instead of enlacing with hers they were now grasping her by the wrist. His grasp, like the force in his fat little arm, seemed steely as a grown man’s.

  ‘Stop it! You’ll make me fall. Stop!’

  She swung her hand out at a last passing bench but missed her grip on it, succeeding only in grazing her wrist painfully as she flew by.

  He had stopped the ridiculous song and stopped skipping. Now he was running, with that same pistoning movement she had seen him use in the distance, pulling her with him towards the brink. As he ran he let out a piercing, incongruous whoop of delight, as though he were merely about to jump a ha-ha or vault a fallen tree. One of her shoes came off and, hobbling, she cried out as she stamped on a thistle mat. Then her stockinged foot slipped into a rabbit hole bringing her flat on her face mere inches from the cliff. To her horror, the dreadful, crazed child seemed to fly onwards, still whooping. His hand wrenched from her, sending a spasm of agony through her wrist. Perhaps it was the Chardonnay taking effect on her imagination but she fancied his triumphant cry was tinged with fury in the seconds before it stopped.

  For a full minute she lay face downwards, winded, snatching pained breaths, assuring herself that she was still safe and that her ankle and wrist were unbroken, then she clumsily hauled herself to her knees and lurched abruptly backwards, sickened at the dazzling void before her. Impelled, dreading what she was about to see, she inched forward on her hands and knees to the very edge. Perhaps there was a grassy ledge only feet below. Perhaps the little wretch knew about it and played this trick regularly by way of tasteless sport. She steeled herself for his hideous ‘boo’ of surprise.

  There was no ledge. She saw, quite clearly, that there was no trace of him. The seagulls were crowding over a dawdling beach refuse cart, not the freshly pulped corpse of a stout little boy. He must have tricked her, jumped sideways and sprinted back across the grass as she fell. Doubtless he was watching her indignity and fear from behind a bush and giggling.

  To her horror a middle-aged couple out walking had spotted her and hurried with their dog across the grass.

  ‘Are you all right?’ the man asked.

  ‘The grass gets so slippery. You should be careful,’ his wife added accusingly.

  ‘I’m fine, thank you,’ Matilda told them gruffly as they helped her up. ‘I wanted to look over the edge, at the nesting birds, and my foot went in a rabbit hole.’

  ‘Your other shoe.’ The man returned it with a ridiculous, caring expression on his insipid face.

  ‘Thanks,’ she told him. ‘I’ll be fine. Honestly. Thank you.’

  She dismissed them. They were treating her like some old thing escaped from a residential hotel.

  As they continued their walk, talking, she slipped her shoe back on and made her own way back to the path, shaking the grass and mud from her clothes as best she could and determined to appear as untroubled as possible. She glowered at the nearest clumps of gorse and thornbush. She would not give the little bastard the satisfaction of seeing her upset.

  Pausing to blow her nose and make a few repairs to her appearance on the corner before the rest home, she reached into her pocket for her handkerchief and was revolted to find it quite wet. She drew it from her pocket. He had scarcely dabbed his eyes and nose with it yet it was soaked, almost dripping. With a spasm of revulsion, she thrust it into
a neatly clipped hedge and walked on. Dabbing at her nose with the back of her hand, she frowned to discover that even a brief contact with the wet linen had left her fingers as pungently briny as a fishmonger’s.

  OLD BOYS

  for Susanna Martelli

  THE LAST VERSE of the school hymn was stirring stuff about strapping on breastplates, guarding imperilled shores and standing shoulder to shoulder against some unidentified foe. Foreigners presumably, or Sin. Boys in the gallery, spared the embarrassment of sitting with family, bellowed the familiar words with the clannish fervour of a rugby crowd. Below them, the fourteen diminutive choristers piped a descant, barely audible above the efforts of the heartier element. Wives, fragrant and carefully dressed for a long, summer day, faces raised over hymnals, delighted in the relative fragility of their own voices.

  ‘But of course it’s sexy. It’s desperately sexy,’ Elsa had insisted as they were dressing that morning. ‘You can’t imagine. Standing there surrounded by all that young masculinity. The odour of testosterone is quite overpowering. I’d love to be a headmaster’s wife. I’d be a tremendous tease, wearing lots of scent and rustly silk things.’

  The chaplain commanded them to prayer and the chapel filled briefly with the sounds of thumping knees, dropped hymn books and skittering leather cushions. Colin glanced across at Elsa, her lovely face partly shaded by a hat brim, subtly painted lips barely parted, eyes obediently closed. He could imagine her here, as a master’s wife, jet black hair shaken out over a tumbled silk headscarf, hugging herself against the cold on a playing field touchline, calling out, ‘Come on House!’ with a fine show of loyalty then catching the eye of a nearby prefect and making him blush. She would be bewitching and shameless and boys would jostle to sit by her at lunch so as to admire her cleavage. On the whole, he decided, she was safer cloistered in her cubby hole at the World Service; left too long in an environment like this one, she would become more than ever like the young Elizabeth Taylor and prove the catalyst for some drama of horrific erotic violence.