Deep Water

by Tim Jeal

  When she had become resigned to her son’s continuing concentration on his book, Leo unexpectedly fixed her with steely attention.

  ‘Did he blub at the station?’

  ‘Justin or dad?’ she asked, smiling.

  ‘Dad doesn’t cry.’

  ‘Justin was upset. You know it, Leo.’

  ‘Do you like him because his dad died and his mum’s a tart?’

  ‘Because I’m sorry for him? Maybe a little.’

  ‘But mainly because he’s such a perfect little sweetie. I know what you really mean, mum.’

  To stop him goading her, Andrea stood up to go and said lightly, ‘Shout if you want to eat something. Some crackers, maybe?’

  Downstairs again, she let her breath out in a long sigh. Was Leo’s anger due to jealousy of Justin, or because he believed the boy’s revelation about her? Maybe he didn’t know what to think. For a moment Andrea wanted to run upstairs to reassure him. But how could she, while still meaning to spend the night with Mike? She would hurt him badly if she cancelled. But what if Leo saw her leave the house in the night? He might tell his father he didn’t want to go on living with her. Keep calm, Andrea. Until Mike takes Leo sailing, the balancing act must go on.

  ‘I could use a highball,’ she thought. Holding up the whisky bottle it seemed lighter. The level of the sherry was definitely lower. But if Rose had been drinking at her expense, Andrea didn’t care. Highball in hand, she called Mike and told him she had to meet him right away.

  CHAPTER 16

  Looking at the boy as he gazed angelically at the bellying mainsail, Mike was disconcerted to feel such dislike. Yesterday, because the little sod had apparently treated his mother even more churlishly than at the tennis, Andrea had rung up to say she couldn’t spend the whole night at the school after all. Mike was also upset with her for assuming that Leo must have believed Justin’s vindictive tittle-tattle, especially since, according to her own account, Justin had thought Leo hadn’t been convinced. During a snatched half-hour together, Andrea had wept before telling Mike that she hated herself for breaking her promise. Then she had begged him to be understanding. He had certainly tried to be, though his concern for what was going on under Leo’s reddish thatch was limited to the effect it was likely to have on his chances for seeing Andrea. Yet this one consideration did make Leo’s thoughts very important to him.

  ‘When he’s out on the river for his lesson with you,’ Andrea had told Mike, ‘he’ll be sure to spill the whole thing. He won’t be able to hold back. I know it. And then we’ll know what to do.’

  Yet here was Leo, out on the river, and, for the past hour, far from spilling anything, he’d hardly said a word.

  Even as Mike was explaining, in a relaxed and friendly way, why it was sensible for the helmsman and his crew to move their weight aft when running, he felt twinges of resentment towards his pupil. Mike was sure that Leo had provoked Justin to make his disastrous disclosure.

  If Andrea was right, and Leo openly accused him while they were sailing, Mike meant to protest his innocence. He didn’t want to lie to the boy but felt he had no choice. Andrea would definitely desert him if she ever thought Leo knew enough to persuade Peter to leave her and take him too.

  Leo looked so young and inexperienced holding the tiller, that, even now, Mike found it hard to credit that this twelve-year-old boy might have the power to stop him being close to Andrea ever again. But by convincing her that he believed what Justin had told him, Leo could quite easily achieve this. It was strange he hadn’t told her already, but presumably he had his reasons. Boys sent away to school at an early age were often capable of forming elaborate secret plans.

  A gull swooped down, briefly regarding Mike with its round, expressionless eye, before soaring away across the dinghy’s lace-like wake. On this overcast day, he and Leo were sailing past a beach which curved, like a white apple paring, under the shadow of a granite cliff. Framing this cove were twin reefs which jutted seawards, tilted into layered ridges at some remote period during the earth’s cooling.

  ‘Like to go ashore?’ Mike pointed.

  ‘I thought I was having a sailing lesson.’

  Mike nodded cheerful assent. ‘That’s why I want you to practise getting the main down fast, and landing under jib alone.’

  After they had beached the dinghy, Leo flipped stones into the sea while Mike pulled the boat up on his own. Leo waited for Mike to sit down first, and then sat several yards away from him on the sand.

  ‘When did I catch the plague?’ Mike asked affably.

  ‘I think you know that.’

  Mike made a show of thinking deeply. ‘Was it when you realised I liked your friend?’

  Leo jumped up angrily. ‘Just leave my family alone.’

  Mike gazed up at him quizzically. ‘Justin’s not family, is he?’

  Leo’s eyes narrowed. ‘My mother bloody well is.’

  ‘I can’t believe you’re saying this, Leo. What reason have you got?’

  ‘Justin saw you and her.’

  ‘Saw what, precisely?’ Mike managed to make his voice quietly menacing.

  Leo hesitated for a moment, blushing fiercely. ‘He saw you stick your tongue in her mouth.’

  Mike could not help laughing. Nervous astonishment mainly; but the effect of his amusement was splendidly insouciant. ‘You really believe that?’ he chuckled.

  Enraged at being patronised, Leo hissed, ‘For your information, Justin followed her on my bike when she took his.’

  Though shaken, Mike said calmly, ‘When did he tell you this?’

  ‘What does it jolly well matter?’

  ‘If he told you after you’d refused to invite him for the summer, it matters a lot.’ Mike stood up so he would be the one looking down. ‘Justin wanted to punish you, so he lied. His own mother walked out on him, so he knows the kind of fib that really hurts.’

  Leo cried out, ‘He wouldn’t have lied about mum putting the saddle lower.’

  ‘When did he say he first noticed that?’

  ‘I don’t know and I don’t care,’ replied the boy, enunciating very clearly.

  ‘That’s silly of you, Leo. If it was supposed to be several days ago, it’s very curious he didn’t tell you then. Don’t you find it odd he only “remembered” when he was angry with you?’

  ‘He wouldn’t make up that stuff about the saddle.’

  ‘You think he couldn’t invent a clever thing like that? I thought we all knew how clever Justin is.’

  Several sleek round waves had swished onto the sand before Leo turned and fixed Mike with his blue-grey eyes. ‘Do you swear on your honour that Justin was lying.’

  ‘Of course he was.’

  ‘But do you swear?’

  ‘If it makes you any happier, sure I do.’

  At the end of the longer of the two reefs, a cormorant was twisting his neck to preen his tail-feathers. Mike was about to draw Leo’s attention to the bird when he heard a scraping sound behind him. The boy was already pushing the dinghy into the water.

  ‘Home, James,’ murmured Mike, as he gave the boat a powerful shove. There was something magnificently dismissive about Leo’s haste to be gone. Is it because he knows I lied? Mike dismissed the idea. Leo would never have asked him to swear to anything if he’d been sure of his facts.

  Sorry to have lied ‘on his honour’, it occurred to Mike that ‘honour’ was probably a concept which Leo’s father would dismiss as quaint pre-Freudian self-deception. Perhaps there was something to be said for a coldly scientific view of human pretentions. Indeed, for most people, morality was what circumstances made it – only a handful were naturally virtuous. And I, it seems, am not among them, since I would lie repeatedly to keep Andrea’s love.

  ‘Yes,’ Mike would say to her, ‘Leo did mention Justin’s story, though he didn’t seem impressed by it. And, frankly, he was even less impressed after our chat.’ So unless Leo himself contradicted this anodyne version of events – which didn’t s
eem likely, given his earlier reticence – Andrea would surely feel relaxed enough about her son to risk spending part of the next two nights away from home.

  The line to take with Leo now would be to treat him as if nothing untoward had been said. So, seeing salt stains on Leo’s shorts, Mike told him that in Brittany any man caught by the Germans with similar marks on his clothes would be interrogated and shot, unless able to explain himself.

  *

  On Leo’s return from his sailing lesson, his mother asked him whether he had ‘gotten the impression he was improving’.

  ‘Improving? The commander? No, he’s still a smooth clever-clogs,’ he replied, noting the disapproving compression of his mother’s lips.

  ‘Did you talk sailing all the time?’

  ‘Sometimes he boasted about his work.’

  ‘Oh, Leo! He never did when he was visiting here.’

  ‘He knew dad wouldn’t have swallowed it.’

  Andrea held up her hands. ‘Stop joshing me, Leo.’

  She was laughing, falsely he thought, as she went out to talk to Rose. Later, she told Leo she was going to practise the piano for an hour or two at the school.

  Since Rose was busy doing the washing, Leo felt safe to look for Mike Harrington’s love letters. All lovers wrote them, and ladies never threw them away, he had read in a women’s magazine. Since he would never hide anything secret of his own in his bedroom, Leo decided his mother’s bedroom could wait. Instead, he started searching in the dining room, looking under the box containing place mats and the wooden cutlery tray in the top right-hand drawer of the sideboard, before removing the napkins and napkin rings, and grovelling under the table to see if a letter had been pinned there.

  He himself would probably tape something of the sort behind a picture, so he tilted all of them away from the wall, peering behind without dislodging the cords from the hooks. Nothing. In the drawing room it was the same story behind the pictures, so he lifted cushions and rugs, and then looked into vases, and inside the drinks cabinet. But again, failure. The kitchen and the scullery were out, since his mother would have known Rose would find anything hidden there.

  In the bedroom, Leo felt embarrassed to be looking through his mother’s things, especially her underwear, but what else could he do? There was an all-in-one garment not unlike the Berlei ‘controlette’ recently advertised in the Daily Mail with the heading ‘Figure Precautions’ instead of ‘Air Raid Precautions’, and a picture of two girls, one a search-light girl in a bulky coat, the other beside her wearing nothing but the undergarment. Though he didn’t seek them out, sometimes, when looking at such ads, they gave Leo a warm feeling in his penis that made him want to rub it.

  Most of his mother’s stuff was lighter and made of pink or black silk. He held up petticoats, step-ins and camiknickers for brief inspection, fascinated by the feel of them and by their unfamiliarity. Girdles and garter-belts left him briefly forgetful of the task in hand. But soon he was searching again, under sweaters and carefully folded blouses, beneath silk stockings and coarser oatmeal-coloured ones, and even among her shoes at the bottom of the wardrobe.

  He found her jewel case on top of the wardrobe but neither inside it nor anywhere else could he lay his hand on a letter. He looked blankly at her silver-backed brushes and the mess of spilled powder on the dressing table, but no new hiding places occurred to him. Nothing was pinned behind the mirror. Nothing was in the pocket of her bathrobe, as she insisted on calling her dressing gown. He slipped a hand under the mattress as far as he could push it. Then at last, under the bed, Leo found something: a small square cardboard box, which he feared might be nothing important. There was a picture on the lid of an odd, dome-shaped thing, not unlike a sliced section of an inflated fooball bladder.

  ‘Lambert’s “Wife’s Friend” Dutch Pessary’ was printed under the picture, and below that a manufacturer’s address, 60, Queen’s Road, London, E.8.. A dictionary would tell him what a pessary was, but he feared there wasn’t one in the house. He lifted the lid and was disappointed to find the box empty, except for some tissue paper smelling of talcum powder. Inside the lid, there was a printed drawing of a woman in an odd hunched-up posture, and under her were several paragraphs of print.

  ‘In order to place the Dutch pessary in position, squat on your heels with your knees bent and feet apart. Holding the pessary in the palm of your left hand in such a way that the dome is pointing upwards, pinch the rim – now lying in contact with your palm – between the thumb and forefinger of the right hand, and introduce the pessary into your vagina.’

  Leo had sensed that this pessary thing was a very private item, more than likely to do with a woman’s health. The instructions seemed to confirm this. He knew from dirty jokes, and from the big dictionary at home, that a woman’s vagina was her hole where men pushed in their cocks and where babies came out, but that didn’t tell him why the dome thing should be put up there too. Since it wasn’t in its box, his mother might have to wear it inside herself all day. Perhaps, like false teeth, it was only taken out at night. Leo put the box back under the bed and wondered why she had concealed it there. Perhaps to stop him seeing the picture of the squatting lady, though it was really only a diagram, and didn’t show anything interesting because the woman’s hand was in the way. But if he had to push something into his bottom every day, he knew he would definitely keep its box in a secret place. On leaving the bedroom, he began to fear that his mother might be seriously ill. His anxiety was bad enough to persuade him to ask Rose.

  She was not in the kitchen, but he saw her as soon as he went outside, over by the apple trees, hanging wet sheets on the line. After helping with the pegs, he delivered a line he had rehearsed in his head while crossing the grass.

  ‘Please don’t think I’m being rude to ask, but do ladies wear Dutch pessaries when there’s something wrong with their stomachs?’

  Rose burst out laughing. ‘It’s to stop somethin’ bein’ wrong with their stomachs.’

  Leo knew he was blushing again. For a moment he was close to tears. But then he rallied. ‘What’s so funny about stopping being ill?’

  ‘Pessaries don’ stop illness, my dearie. They stop babies. Don’ ’ee worry. I didn’ know nothin’ ’bout it neether, till doctor told my sister when she married, and she told me.’

  He swallowed hard. ‘Women only wear them before …?’

  ‘Before they go with a man. And they gotta keep it in for a fair while after.’

  ‘How long?’ Leo managed to gasp.

  ‘I don’ know reely. A few hours maybe. Long ’nuff for his seeds to die.’

  Wanting to be alone again, Leo mumbled, ‘You won’t tell mother I asked?’

  She grinned appealingly. ‘Not if ’ee tell Rose why ’ee wants to know.’

  ‘I can’t,’ he muttered. ‘I’m really grateful you talked to me. But please don’t tell.’

  She caught him by the sleeve of his jersey and whispered, ‘Are you a bad boy, Master Leo? Drinkin’ and buy in’ Dutch caps for your girl!’ She laughed shrilly.

  ‘I haven’t got a girl,’ he screeched, trying to pull away from her, but feeling her lips planted playfully on his neck before he could.

  ‘I could ask ’ee to do anything, couldn’ I?’

  Her cheeks were flushed with the effort of hanging onto him, and Leo’s heart was hammering. ‘Stop fooling,’ he shouted, before darting away towards the house with her laughter in his ears.

  Before his mother came home from her ‘practising’, which had started to sound horribly bogus, Leo had an idea which made him cheer out loud. The box could have been under the bed for months, and might have nothing at all to do with his mother. The house had been rented out for ages. What a fool not to think of this. So the fact that the dome thing hadn’t been in the box probably wasn’t important after all. Really, there was no reason to be suspicious. Unless, of course, he looked inside the box tomorrow and found the pessary had returned. But at present Leo was so relie
ved he couldn’t believe such a thing possible.

  Downstairs again, he thought of all the rude things he’d said to the commander, and felt dreadfully embarrassed. Mike would be sure to tell Andrea, who would be furious. Leo knew he’d offended her enough already over Justin, and was depressed to reflect that he’d given her a whole new reason to be angry. In most ways though, Leo was glad that Mike’s arguments had made him doubt Justin’s story – just as his own failure to find love letters made him do. But Leo still detested Mike’s confident manner and dreaded having to apologise to him, as he supposed he would have to.

  Just as Leo was allowing himself to become miserable over the prospect of grovelling to Mike, he suddenly realised what a prize fathead he was. The one thing he wanted, above all others, was for his mother not to be involved with Mike, and for her to love his father again. And dad’s prospects looked a lot brighter than a few hours ago.

  *

  Andrea was running her fingers through the hairs on her lover’s chest and thinking how amazing it was that they had made love only minutes after meeting, when there had been so much she had wanted to ask him. But that must be what happens, she thought, when two people have spent days imagining their bodies entwined and have then been obliged to wait at the last moment. It was two in the morning and she and Mike were lying together on the cushions in the schoolroom. His eyes were closed and there was a smile on his lips.

  ‘I can’t imagine what you said to Leo,’ she murmured, ‘but he was really friendly this evening for the first time in a whole week.’

  ‘I gave him a new perspective on things.’