by Glen Duncan
‘Yes, sir.’
‘I don’t want you to be frightened. I want you just to be sure you’re telling the truth. Are you?’
‘Yes sir.’ A heavy smell of mown grass came in through the office’s long upper window. Scarlet had said: They won’t believe us, anyway.
‘All right, you can go. Send Scarlet Reynolds in, please.’
I closed the door behind me to get a moment. She was leaning against the wall opposite with her hands in her skirt pockets and her chin down on her chest. She looked up at me, brought herself back from wherever she’d been.
‘Did you tell him? Like we said?’
I nodded. ‘He wants you to go in.’
She pressed her face against mine, nose to nose, as if to evoke Gary and Wally’s version of the gesture from the week before. I got the hairwashed smell of her, and when she pulled away saw the faint freckles sprinkled under her eyes.
All the way to Miss Livsey’s I kept thinking of how Scarlet had said: They won’t believe us anyway. They won’t believe us, she’d meant. Herod and the lousy innkeeper’s wife. Chicken curry and rice on Sundays.
Two weeks later, Dinah, with a silent, damp-looking cold-eyed man I’d never seen before, came and took Scarlet away.
There’s a Post-it I’d forgotten about stuck at the bottom of this page. It says: Parallels: Kate orphan loses everything creates family. Scarlet orphan loses everything rejects family.
I sit back in Maude’s armchair and pick up the TV remote. Great Fights of the ’70s finished a while back. Since then, in and out of reading, I’ve been flicking (still with no volume) between Iraq coverage on BBC News 24 and Supergirl on Channel Five. The actress playing Supergirl (yes, as in the girl version of Superman) is so Americanly blonde and youthful and healthy and pretty and angelic it’s been hurting my heart to watch her. It’s a sweet pain to me, the supernatural freshness of young American actresses. I can forgive America anything for these girls it produces.
Deciding enough’s enough I hit the Off button and the picture disappears with a thump-tick-crackle.
‘You’re still awake?’
Pasha’s voice startles me. I hadn’t heard him come down. He’s groggy and pinch-eyed, but sees me jump and quietly laughs. He stands in the doorway in his ivory cotton pyjamas (the man from Del Monte pyjamas, my mum calls them) and bedsocks, hair sticking up, one hand gently rubbing his belly. He’ll have got up for a pee and seen the line of light from the lounge door. ‘What’re you doing?’
‘Just going through some stuff.’
‘It’s nearly four o’clock.’
‘I know.’
He rubs his hand over his face, half waking it. He’s not a night prowler but he’s seen the files there on the floor. ‘I’m going to have an Eno’s,’ he says. ‘You want one?’
‘No, I’m all right, Dad.’
‘Bleddy stomach’s griping.’
He turns and goes to the kitchen. Eno’s anti-acid powder is the panacea. Heartburn, indigestion, constipation, pimples on the tongue, trapped wind. As a child the ritual fascinated me, the soft white powder, the panicky effervescence, Pasha hurrying the glass to his lips before the whole lot frothed over the brim. He used to save me a mouthful. It tastes like fizzy salt, Dad. Don’t give him that rubbish, my mum would say. The great magic was its conferral on me of the ability to produce burps of adult magnitude, which in spite of herself made my mum laugh.
When he’s had his drink (he burps, baaaarouwp, as if in solemn praise of a primitive god) he comes back to the lounge doorway. There are these moments when he looks not his age, but shockingly older than my mental image of him. The belly remains redoubtable, the dark hands elegant and cunning, but the skeleton in places–knees, clavicles, elbows–is beginning to assert itself, to speak of essential structure.
‘You’re not going to bed or what?’ he asks.
Outside it’s still dark, but there’s been in the last minutes a perceptible weakening of the night’s concentration, as if it’s raised its head from hours of study. ‘I will,’ I say. ‘I got sidetracked with all this.’
He comes in, burps again, goes to the bay window, lifts the curtain and looks out. It’s still surprising to him and my mother that the kids have houses like this, big rooms, gardens. Melissa and Ted have a swimming pool. Mater and Pater have swum in it, but still more or less refuse to believe in its existence.
‘I wanted to ask you something,’ I say.
‘She’s forgotten the bleddy crook lock again.’
‘Dad?’
‘Eh?’
‘How come in India you weren’t really aware of what was going on?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean politically. You must have known things were going to get lousy for the Anglos once the British left.’
He yawns, gigantically. ‘Yeah, we knew, but what were we going to do? Handful of people in millions. The ones who could get out got out, that’s all.’
‘Didn’t you feel there was anything you could do? Get involved, I mean. Organize?’
He shakes his head. ‘It didn’t occur to us. Well it didn’t occur to me. Hector got obsessed with politics for a while after ’47, but I could never be bothered.’
‘But I mean the whole shape of the world was changing. Didn’t you…?’
‘We didn’t think about it, much. Don’t forget I was boxing. That was always going to get us out.’
Which draws down silence.
‘What you’ve got to understand, my son, is that I wanted to be in the ring. It always felt to me like…’ He purses his lips and shakes his head. ‘All the bleddy this and that, politics, news, work, money, the British, the Indians…In the ring all that meant nothing. It was like a kind of purity. There’s the man and you’ve got to knock the bugger out, you see?’
‘Nothing else mattered,’ I say.
‘Nothing else mattered. You haven’t been in the ring, so you don’t know. Everything else…There’s nothing comes close to it for the purity of the thing. I haven’t got the words.’
Like sex, I want to say, thinking of Scarlet. I’ve been in that ring, Dad. ‘Like being in love,’ I opt for.
He’s not stupid, he knows what I mean. He laughs, makes a slight dismissive gesture that somehow leads both of us to look at the contents of the files scattered on Maude’s taupe carpet.
‘How’s it going?’ he says.
‘Slow. A lot of other stuff keeps creeping in.’
He doesn’t mean the Book, The Cheechee Papers. He means Skinner. The Gas Board bugger didn’t remember him, I’d lied. It’s another dead end. All day I’ve been rehearsing the words: Dad. Listen. I’ve got something to tell you. I’ve found him. I’m waiting for the daughter to call.
But something gives me pause. The briefest loosening of his face. He’s not thinking about Skinner. He’s suddenly arrested by the oddness and the hour, standing in his pyjamas not even in his own flat. He’s an old man and he doesn’t like his routines disturbed. There is the perennial swarm of worries–about money, about Maude’s crook lock, about getting mugged, about how Carl’s running three cars and putting two kids through college, about me and my neither here nor there wifeless life, about what’ll happen to Mum if he dies first, about what’ll happen to him if she dies first, about the pensions crisis, about Elspeth’s moving in with her boyfriend, about the NHS waiting lists, about terrorists, about his prostate, his kidneys, his bowels, his feet and his teeth–there’s this swarm of worries and ever-increasing feeling of his diminished say in the world, his grip in subtle increments loosening. Sometimes his face, as now, relaxes for a second and I know he’s seeing it clearly, that the bulk of his strength has gone. Unopenable pickle jars are passed to me, these days. The first time it was thrilling; since then a negligible acute sadness. When I see him seeing it like this, a feeling of febrile insubstantiality takes me, a manageable panic.
‘Is that Scarlet’s picture there?’ he says.
‘Yeah.’
&nb
sp; ‘Show, let’s have a look.’
He studies the Elvisish headshot. ‘I don’t remember her having her hair short like that.’
‘It was at the end. Just before we broke up.’
‘You never hear from her?’
‘No. I think she went to America.’
‘Acha?’
‘Well, it’s just a feeling. I don’t know. She could be anywhere.’
I know he knows the score; my mum will have enlightened him: Scarlet Broke Owen’s Heart.
‘We all thought you two were meant for each other,’ he says, dropping (carefully; he’s not insensitive to these things) the photograph back on to the papers on the floor. ‘I mean, when you met her at university after all those years.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Destined to be together, I told your mother.’
‘There’s no such thing as destiny, Dad.’
‘Well,’ he says. Pauses. Belches softly, bouwp. ‘There used to be.’
Familial ESP is keeping him hanging around. He doesn’t know what’s in the air but something is. He goes to the doorway, hovers. I could tell him, now. The cat-flap goes again and Fergus appears, slinks with abstracted sensuality between the old man’s ankles. Pasha’s fond of this cat, to his own surprise, is quietly flattered when Fergus appears to recognize him or chooses his lap to curl up in. Old age is sparing with its gifts but this is one of them: there’s room and time to take in the personalities of little creatures, find these late, small, uncomplicated relationships.
I know what’s holding me back. I imagine discussing it as if it’s a novel with my Friday three o’clockers. Daniel’s weary analytical acumen, half of them not paying attention, heads full of mobile phone numbers and contraception, hip-hop lyrics, diets, the gaggle of celebrities having a permanent soiree in their brains. Not to belabour the point, Daniel would say, not to state the obvious, but the reason he holds back from telling his old man is because maybe, just maybe, this lifelong quest for Skinner is what’s keeping the old boy, you know, engaged. Actually find the fucker, deliver him, you know, then what’s his dad got to—
Well I think live for is a bit strong, Daniel, but yes, that’s more or less it.
‘I’m going to clear all this up and go to bed,’ I say.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The Tryst with Destiny
(The Cheechee Papers: Bhusawal and Bombay 1946–52)
That first Inter-Railways season, March to September 1946, introduced Ross to the absurdly privileged life of the sports star. For their six-month sojourn in Bombay the teams were housed in stationary first-class carriages in the Victoria Terminus sidings, commodiousness and luxury Ross had never known. Plush berths, tin baths, self-contained toilet and shower closets, cooks, bearers. ‘I told you,’ Eugene said, laughing, uncorking a bottle of Three Barrels rum. ‘This is the bleddy life, men, what?’ The bleddy life was, on the whole, getting paid for lounging around drinking and smoking (plus in Eugene’s case womanizing) and being waited on, with the odd bout and game of football thrown in as if to remind them apologetically what they were there for. Many of the Anglo-Indian fighters and players brought their wives, families and servants with them. Not Eugene. He’d been married to Mitzi for six months, long enough for the novelty of fidelity to be wearing thin. She’d disappointed him between the sheets. Years of knocking-shop gymnastics–and more recently the affair with Cynthia Merritt–had left Eugene with a broad sexual palette. Mitzi was not only not interested, she was morally stung. ‘You’re hopeless,’ Ross told him. ‘I don’t know why you bothered getting married in the first place.’ Marriage was much on his mind.
Kate had said nothing of dreams and weights lifting off her head and machetes and God. She did say, after their first dance a week following Kalia’s death, when Ross put his arm round her on the walk home under a dust of stars: ‘I’ll tell you this once. Once must be enough. I know what the talk is. I know they say I’m his mistress. I’m not and never have been, nor ever will be as long as I live. If that’s enough for you, we never have to speak of it again.’ She hadn’t rehearsed it that way but when she opened her mouth found that was all there was. Six sentences like a line of stones. He’d said (after a pause in which she was thinking how strange it was to have someone’s arm around your waist, how all her life since the death of her parents there had been nowhere for physical affection to go, how if the door into love and family opened the terrible force of her affection would come rushing out, that she knew now she would love her children with ferocity, beyond any kind of control): ‘It’s enough for me.’ And she’d said: ‘Good. I’m glad.’
‘So that’s you, is it?’ Cyril said to her one night a month later, when Ross had walked her all the way to the gate. Since the stabbing her uncle had barely spoken to her. Death had come close, shown him what he would have to take with him. It had left him shrivelled round his core of tawdry rottenness. He never said, You put him up to it, planned it. That would be to admit the magnitude of her hatred, which threw him back on the question of his hatefulness. No. Intolerable. Instead his face had taken on a new look, curl-lipped and wet-eyed, between disgust and imprecation, as if in this courtship with another man she was betraying him. Sometimes just the sight of the back of his head made her feel physically sick. Contempt kept her from vomiting. If he had touched her then, she would have killed him out of sheer disgusted reflex. But he didn’t touch her. Instead started these small-mouthed non-questions. ‘So that’s you, is it?’ She ignored him.
In February her grandfather had another stroke. He survived, wheelchair-bound, with further diminished powers of speech. Kate, still the unpaid labour force at Sellie’s, had her hands full. At Sellie’s the talk was of leaving for England. ‘This place is going to go to shit,’ Will said quietly, on the veranda, holding his evening wet up to the sun as if proposing a toast to the idea. ‘Only one place for us now and that’s home. This time next year we’ll be gone, Kitty.’ This was the current that wrecked her nerves. Cyril was afraid of emigrating to England (where he’d be no one), and carped endlessly about Sellie’s selfishness in leaving him with the burden of the old man.
Ross, meanwhile, had to wait for victories in the ring and on the pitch, the leverage they’d provide. He knew he wanted to marry her (she had it, the instinct for fierce allegiance, the hunger for making a knot of shared life against the gale; there was a bottlenecked power in the girl which he in his moments of naked intuition was afraid of, and on top of all that the great Godswirl of destiny [the stars that first walk home had seemed to allude to] that had connected them) but not on a fireman’s wages. Look, just be patient, for Christ’s sake, Eugene had told him. Win the boxing in April. Win the football with us in September. Get up to goods guard at least. She’s not going to want to marry a bleddy pauper, is she?
And so the courtship crept on through 1946, both of them waiting, her for him to ask, him for a life worth asking her to share. He dropped what hints he could, back in Bhusawal between bouts or matches. ‘Listen,’ he told her, during a slow dance at the end of an evening at the Institute (she was exhausted from the day with Sellie’s kids and her grandfather), ‘when the season’s over I’m going up to the training school at Bina for two months. If I pass the exam I’ll get on as a guard. I’ll be getting better money.’ ‘Is that a plan?’ she’d asked him, sleepily. ‘Yes,’ he’d said, ‘that’s the plan.’ (He said nothing of the rest of the plan–or was it a different plan?–the trials, the Olympics in London, the promoter, the pro-boxing, all the sweet pussy…He didn’t think about it. His instinct was to make her his. Everything else would have to fit round that. When it’s her, Hector had confided to him, disgusted, when it’s her, brother, you’ll know, believe me. And you’d better pray to Christ in Heaven she’s not already taken by some bleddy English hotel manager bastard…)
The plan held while Kate waited. Ross came home at the end of September with the Inter-Railways Bantamweight Title (he’d had to go to Calcutta for the finals, where he�
��d beaten the BB&CIR’s southpaw Lester Parnell with a knockout; a close fight he came near to losing when Lester’s renowned left uppercut caught him at the very end of the first round–white sizzle, cymbal smash, faltering waltz with gravity–but he survived, kept his wits and dropped his man with a right cross a minute into the third), and his centre half’s share in the football team’s glory; at the Cooperage ground the GIPR’s first eleven had beaten the NWR by three goals to one to lift the cup for only the second time in the company’s history. He spent Christmas and New Year in Bhusawal before going north in January 1947 to the training school at Bina. According to the plan: three months, sit the exam, pass, come back to start life as a goods guard, on which wages, sooner or later, they could marry.
Then, at the end of February, the day before Ross was due to return, Kate’s grandfather died. She found him as she had found her father ten years before, at dawn, with the life gone. Not peacefully, either, the rictus grimace said.
She was past being surprised by her feelings–in this case not the loss of him, personally, but a disorientating shift in the invisible machine weights of her world, as if the old man had been wittingly or otherwise holding some swing or motion in check.
Before Cyril spoke, later that afternoon while Dr Bannergee was writing the death certificate, she knew what he was going to say. ‘Well, that settles it. We’ll go to England with Sellie and Will.’
We. She was to be included. The Lomaxes were leaving that summer. Tens of thousands of Anglos had already gone. The names of distant countries had become common currency: Australia. Canada. England. People kept talking about Motherlands and Fatherlands. It sounded babyish to her, as if they were talking about fairies and monsters. It first surprised and then irritated her that people attached so much weight to the idea of a country as some living thing to which you were related. She never thought in that way. India was the name of the country she lived in but home was herself, under her own skin. God and men went about their brash business any-and everywhere, like the weather. There was no home. Or every place was home whether you liked it or not. She knew these feelings were peculiar. She knew she was peculiar. But she knew, too, that Ross Monroe wanted her, that she was almost sure she wanted him. That, in the first instance, would have to be enough.