Half Broken Things

by Morag Joss

  I do not think we were ever afraid that it might not last, but perhaps we were half-expecting that somebody would come and try to spoil it. I do know that we acted extremely quickly to stop Shelley.

  The weather grew warmer. One morning Sally told Steph, unnecessarily, to be sure to put on Charlie’s sunblock, which Steph took as approval in principle that she might take Charlie out and about in the pushchair. That evening Steph told Sally that she had taken Charlie up to the manor to ‘meet my aunt’, omitting to mention that Charlie had, in fact, spent every single day there so far. The following day, Steph made a point of saying that she had taken Charlie there again and that he had enjoyed the walk up the drive, and she brought back a lemon cake for Sally ‘with best wishes from my aunt. She’s great at cakes’. After that Steph filled a vase with buttercups that, she explained, Charlie had been charmed to see growing in one of the manor paddocks. The next day she reported how ‘my aunt’ had been reading his baby books with him. Then Steph had a brainwave.

  The following day, instead of taking Charlie up to the manor, she got Michael to come down to the house after Sally had left. Together they blitzed the place, resisting the temptation to throw most of Sally’s junk away, instead cleaning round it and tidying it into more rational arrangements. That evening Sally arrived home not just to the silent, smiling Steph and a bathed, fed and sweet-tempered Charlie, but also to a pine-scented and gleaming house. It was still cluttered, but there were at least enough clean surfaces to allow her to walk in and put her things down without having to move other things first, and then find places (by shifting other things) for those things she had picked up in order to make room for the things she had come home with. She seemed slightly confused by the tidiness, but grateful. She even offered Steph a glass of wine but Steph, anxious to get home and feeling fairly sure that she was unlikely to enjoy the Cфtes du Rhфne that Sally was uncorking, declined, and slipped off.

  ‘Sally,’ Steph said the next morning, ‘you don’t mind me taking Charlie up to the manor, do you? I thought it’d be nice to have him up there and save messing up the house. Now it’s all nice, shame to get it all, you know.’

  ‘No, I don’t mind, you take him, it’s fine,’ Sally said, slightly absently, looking round the kitchen. The wine bottle she had emptied the night before stood on the draining board. ‘But he does live here. I mean I’m really grateful, but we don’t want things so perfect we can’t touch them, do we? I’m not bringing him up in a bloody sterile environment, after all. Am I?’ She began picking through a basket of onions to find her car keys. ‘Maybe I should pop up there one day, you know, just to see he’s settled. I’d like to meet your aunt, anyway.’

  Steph had been expecting this. I’m going to check up on where he is all day and who he’s with is what you really mean, she thought. Jean had suggested that any half-normal mother would want to do that.

  ‘Oh, yeah, right,’ she said. ‘My aunt was saying she’d like to meet you, meet Charlie’s mum. She said suppose you take us up there in the car one morning and drop us off, on your way to work?’

  ‘Well, we could do. It’s in the other direction. We’d have to be out of here half an hour earlier,’ Sally said, her interest waning.

  ‘OK. I’ll tell her you’ll be up tomorrow then, OK?’

  ‘What? Oh fine, yes, tell her that’s fine.’

  ‘Glad you like the spring-clean, anyway. Nice to have it a bit clearer, isn’t it?’

  ‘Oh yes, but I mean in a way, now it is a bit better, it seems a shame not to be here a bit more.’

  ‘Oh no, of course, I didn’t mean-’ Was it all going to backfire? Steph thought fast, and delivered her masterstroke. ‘It’s just- well, I think Charlie likes to see new faces. You know. He likes my auntie. He gets tons of attention up there, you see.’

  ‘Oh, yes, yes. Oh, where are my keys? Steph, have you seen my fucking keys?’

  ‘Here they are. Anyway, I think the stimulation’s really good for him. You know, especially when he doesn’t see very much of you. You know, when he doesn’t see you all day. And with him being an only.’

  The next day Sally drove them up to the manor, cursing at the early start. Jean came out to meet them in the drive, shook hands with Sally and invited her in. Sally refused coffee, spent all of five minutes in the kitchen where one end had already been transformed into Charlie’s play area, smiled and said she must be off. Jean saw her back to her car, chatting amiably. When she returned, she and Steph exchanged a look. Jean put plates to warm and made a pot of coffee while Steph, with Charlie on her hip, laid the table. After another minute or two, just to be cautious in case Sally came roaring back up the drive for any reason, they called to Michael, who had been waiting upstairs, and then they sat down to the breakfast that Jean had ready in the oven. That was all it took.

  ***

  I’ve gone woefully off the point, because looking back a few pages I see I didn’t get to the end of the Mr Hapgood story. He took Father’s clock away and stored it at the back of the shop. He reported that he had found out that it was a Vulliamy clock of 1788. Unfortunately, however, it had only a number (169) rather than the maker’s signature, indicating that it wasn’t among his best work. He showed me all this, how the number 169 wasn’t engraved on the backplate along with a signature like the finest examples, but punch struck on the reverse of the brass bob at the base of the pendulum, somewhere inconspicuous. It would have been signed if it had been a superior clock, he said, but it was still an attractive piece and could be worth as much as Ј150. It seemed an awful lot for a clock, I said. But inside I was thinking it didn’t sound like enough to go to university for three years. I hoped I was wrong. I hadn’t looked into it. Although Mother had rallied, a little- she had been up and about quite a bit in fact, supervising the people putting in her downstairs bathroom- it still hadn’t seemed the right time to raise it with her, the question of me leaving home. Did I say, it was always difficult to talk in that house? It was no easier with Father gone. With him gone there were no more kind little blinks or never-mind looks between us when Mother’s back was turned. So I didn’t broach the subject.

  Mr Hapgood went on to say that it was very important to find the right buyer. Why didn’t I ask what he meant? I don’t know why, except that he made it sound as if I should already know, or as if there were a sort of buyer who was ‘right’ in some way over and above wanting the clock and having the money for it. He said that even though he himself wasn’t in the ‘mainstream antiques business’ I had done the right thing in coming to him, because he would see me right. For a start I wouldn’t be having to pay an ‘extortionate dealer’s premium’. I didn’t ask what that meant, either. But it might take a little while to find ‘the right buyer’, however, and he suggested that I pop in once or twice a week to see if there was any progress to report.

  So I did. I must have been living in some fug that stopped me barely noticing, let alone minding, that there at the back of the shop, in the drowsy oil-stove heat, he always had more tea for me than progress to report, and soon a lot more cuddles than tea, and before long he said we were very good at comforting each other and cheering each other up, and could get even better. Soon enough his hands had been everywhere and I was confused by the way he seemed both a little impatient if I showed any reluctance, but at the same time pleased with me. He was gradual, and clever with his hands. So by the time he took my hand and put it down his trousers and made me keep it there, I was at the very least curious. And on the day he unbuttoned himself and showed me everything, I was almost as ready as he was to go (as he said, brandishing it) the whole hog. The whole hog did not take long, and was carried out in silence except for the creaking of the rickety old sofa. I remember thinking it was the sofa that was taking the brunt, because I felt in a curious way rather out of it and at a distance. Then Mr Hapgood was saying I should be on my way and I remember the slipperiness and the smell like raw potato that I thought was me, so that I was embarrassed and only too
ready to go.

  These days it would be called abuse, of course. But it was what he did later that still seems to me infinitely worse.

  In the third week of May Michael unlocked the door at the back of the low stone pavilion by the pool. Old, trapped summer air poured out, peppery and slightly damp. White cotton curtains had been drawn against the French windows on the far side, so he crossed the room through the milky light and pulled them apart, finding the material just slightly tacky under his fingers. A few dead flies stuck in old webs in the curtain folds spun with the sudden movement; one or two fell and clicked faintly on the floor. He opened the French windows, strolled out onto the stone terrace, from which shallow blue steps led down into the water, and made his way to the end of the pool. Slowly he turned the handle at one end of the horizontal spindle that stretched the width of the poolside, and wound in the winter cover. After its last edge had been pulled free and was hanging dripping from the spindle, Michael crouched down and dipped his hand in the water. It was extremely cold, and the level of the water was lower than he expected, but he was surprised at how clean it looked.

  Turning back on his bare feet, he could feel as soon as he reentered the pavilion that the sun was already striking the terracotta tiles of the floor and stirring up the faint reek of warming earth. Michael’s body tingled as he breathed it in. He liked the way the smell seemed to come to him almost through the soles of his feet. It was both fresh and fertile, so new, and made him think of earthy things that were workaday and practical, the slap of water over clay, human sweat, and the later, sweet baking of the sun on bricks and tiles. Yet the smell carried in it also a dank note, a threat from the sour underground it came from. Heavily and inexpressibly ancient, it was also lifeless, and although dead, it was at the same time so darkly erotic that Michael felt simultaneously animated and destabilised. It was not an unpleasant feeling. He smiled, thinking of Steph, picturing her unpeeled from her solid nursing bra and engrossed in the steady nursing of Charlie. She had become capable and authoritative on every practical detail of childcare and breastfeeding but if, when Charlie was nuzzled up and sucking from her, her attention would wander, a look of such distant, private sensuality would come over her face that Michael would find himself staring like a voyeur. Watching her made him feel quite helplessly joyful, as well as aroused. She did not seem to mind.

  But the matter in hand was to get the pool working, and first he had to locate the machinery. He was hopeful that there would be some sort of instruction book that would tell him what to do, but if there wasn’t he had another idea. It would be well within his capabilities to ring up a pool maintenance outfit, posing as Oliver Standish-Cave of course, and get somebody round to do it for him. The idea rather appealed to him, in fact he had already rehearsed the mock-exasperation he would express at being ‘just hopeless I’m afraid’ at this kind of thing himself, and ‘a bit too snowed under to see to it personally’. But both Jean and Steph had looked worried when he had suggested it, and it would be, he had to admit, intensely satisfying to manage such an unfamiliar job by himself. He could see the admiration in their eyes already. He had discovered since coming here not just that he had a definite practical streak but that there was pleasure in having something to accomplish; he liked having a few projects on the go. So although his mind was quite ready to take him off further into his reverie, perhaps to the mental picture of Steph and Charlie naked in the water together, he turned his attention back to the place where he was standing.

  Most of the room had been made into a space for lounging around in and was furnished in a kind of green and faded English garden style that he imagined Jean would like. Steph would like it less; perhaps once she had finished the nursery mural (she had said this morning that it would be ready by the end of the day, and was up there now painting, while Jean looked after Charlie) she might fancy doing something here. Something to do with water would be better than these white walls with prints of ferns, he thought, looking round at the bamboo sofas with their white and green cushions.

  Against one wall, set into a long, white-painted kitchen unit, stood a sink with worktops on each side. A row of glass-fronted cupboards, containing nothing but ice buckets and tumblers, was fixed along the wall above. On either side of the cupboards were two identical doors. Through one he found a large, neglected bathroom with corroded taps and chilly white tiles covering the floor and walls. The other door led into a bare, stone room like a scullery where the pool machinery was installed. Here, on a shelf next to several tubs and bags of chemical-looking cleaners, Michael found what he was looking for: a damp notebook with the words Pool Maintenance Checklist on it, and a colour brochure entitled Enjoy Your Pool. He picked them up, returned to the green and white room, stretched himself out along one of the sofas and began to read.

  It turned out to be quite complicated, but with the book in his hand Michael eventually identified the pump, filters, motors and heater. He cleared out the valves and pump head, charged the filters with water, primed the filter pump and checked for leaks. Back outside he re-installed the water surface skimmer baskets and, following the measurements prescribed, gave the water a dose of chlorine. Then he tested and adjusted the alkalinity and calcium levels. He felt like Einstein.

  It was while he was hosing down the paving round the pool that he heard a shout from Jean. Looking up, he saw that she was approaching across the grass, moving as fast as she could, and if she had not been holding Charlie she would have been waving her arms. Her hair had shaken free of its clasp and the few clumps of it that Charlie had not managed to grasp in his fists flew out behind her. Her usual serenity had vanished, not a vestige of poise remained; she was jabbering and distraught- only a few jerking steps away, it seemed to Michael, from complete breakdown. Just then Charlie, jiggled almost insensible by the dash across from the house, got enough breath back to start up with a high-pitched, bewildered bleating. Michael dropped the hose, turned off the tap on the wall and strode towards them across the grass. He took Charlie from her a little roughly, which upset him even more. He pulled round from Michael’s arms and stretched back to Jean, wailing louder. His confused eyes scanned the space around and behind, looking for Steph, and then he arched his back and screamed. His brown arms pumped up and down in rage. Jean was shouting incoherently above him, but Michael was too busy struggling to get a better hold of the writhing Charlie and keep his face clear of his waving fists to hear what she was saying.

  But how, he was managing to wonder, how had this happened? Two minutes ago he had been calmly working on the pool. He had left Jean a little over two hours ago, baking bread in the kitchen while Charlie gurgled and watched her from his reclining seat, happily flinging his rabbit to the floor from time to time. Steph had been painting upstairs and presumably still was; she would be up a ladder, humming to herself and too far away to hear that once again their peace had been obliterated. How? What had gone wrong this time? Why could they not be left alone?

  ‘Come on, sit down. Sit here on the grass and tell me what’s the matter,’ he said, in his most coping voice, pulling her down. He set Charlie gently on the grass and Charlie, perhaps bamboozled by being plonked in yet another unexpected location, stopped crying and stared up at the sky instead.

  ‘What’s up, then?’ Michael was managing to sound calm, but oddly, he realised that he was not just putting on the right voice, it actually was his voice, and he really did feel the way he sounded. Jean needed him to be this way. Whatever the matter was, he would put it right for her.

  Jean was rocking to and fro on the grass. ‘I’ve just had a call. From Town and Country, the agency, the house sitting people.’ She raised frantic eyes to Michael. ‘I don’t know what to do! Shelley’s coming. Shelley, she runs the agency, she says she’s on her way. Here! I couldn’t stop her!’ She buried her face in her hands and moaned. Charlie, kicking on the grass, gurgled and gave a short wail.

  ‘Oh, Christ. Christ, when?’

  ‘Now! In about a
n hour. She phoned from the car- she said she wrote and gave me the date and to tell her if there was any problem with it. She said, “Well, Jean, since you didn’t object I assumed it was fine, and now I’ve scheduled it in”!’

  ‘But did she? Write and give you the date?’

  Jean burst into loud sobs. ‘I don’t know! You know what we’re like! We don’t bother with the post anymore, it’s never for us. I ignore it, I just shove it in the library desk, I hardly look at it!’

  ‘Oh Christ.’ Michael got to his feet and stood looking round wildly.

  ‘Michael, I tried to stop her, I really did. I said I’d be out, but she just said that’s why she was ringing, to make sure I’d be here. Oh, Michael!’

  ‘But why? Did you ask her why she’s coming?’

  ‘I couldn’t! She’s so definite and so, I don’t know, so official. I couldn’t exactly demand to know. I did say, oh you’ve never done that before, visited when I’m doing an assignment, and she said it was a new company policy, it was all in the letter. Oh Michael, I don’t believe her! She knows! She knows, and she’s coming to spoil everything! She’ll ruin everything!’

  ‘Oh no, she won’t,’ Michael said quietly. He took a few steps away, leaving Jean sitting on the grass. He had to think. Crying softly, Jean collected her hair and twisted it anxiously into a tight bundle at the back of her head. Then she picked Charlie up from the grass and rocked him gently as his little voice creaked in unconvincing half-complaint.

  Michael turned away, trying to think, but found himself considering the house, wondering for one wild second if it might be looking back at him. It never changed in itself, but he liked the way it wore the changing colours of the light so transparently, remaining always the same behind them however varying the cloaks of certain times of the day or year. Though the hours and seasons changed, the light this summer must be the same as in summers past, and come the next one after this, it would be no different. In the early afternoon in summertime, the same warming light would glow on these walls, always like this.