All the Beauty of the Sun (19 page)

‘He has drawings on his arms.'

Paul smiled at him, and then glanced towards Bright, who was smearing tables with a grubby cloth. ‘Those drawings are called tattoos.'

Bobby looked at his empty ice cream sundae glass, its long spoon resting on the glacé cherry at the bottom. ‘What will he have in it?' Bright had asked. ‘Everything,' Paul had answered. And now he worried that it had been too much. He reached out but stopped himself from stroking his son's hair. ‘Are you all right, Bob?'

He didn't look up, only touched the spoon, making it clink against the white, pink and chocolate brown smeared glass. ‘Thank you for my ice cream.'

‘My pleasure.'

He wanted to hold him, to sit him on his knee and hold him very close and breathe in the smell of his hair and skin; kiss him over and over and say I love you, I'm sorry. Instead, he was sitting beside him in Bright's Café where there could be no such carrying on. He could only look at him and stop himself from stroking his hair because Bobby didn't like him to, he flinched away a little, but such a little. It seemed as though Bobby felt that he had to endure whatever grown-ups did and to duck away from them was impolite.

‘He's very shy,' his father had said to him in the hotel room. Shy because he held on to Iris's hand and didn't seem to want to let go. But Iris had fetched his coat and buttoned Bobby up in it, saying, ‘This is Francis, Bobby. He knew your Daddy very well and he would like to take you out.' And then she had looked at him pointedly, as if he might challenge this explanation, and asked if he would take good care of him. He had pretended hardly to hear her, only said
of course
and only because he was so desperate to take Bobby away and not show how much he hated her, in case she stopped him.

Bright began to wipe their table. ‘How was that, Sunny Jim? Want another? Go on – ask your dad if you can have another.'

Bobby stared down at the table and Bright laughed and ruffled his hair roughly. ‘Maybe Dad would like a cup of tea?'

‘No, thank you.' Paul stood up and held out his hand to Bobby. Turning to Bright he asked, ‘Is there a park around here, somewhere he'd enjoy?'

‘Enjoy?' Bright laughed. ‘He's getting spoilt, is he?'

‘Yes.'

He continued to wipe the table. ‘There's nothing round here for kids. You'd best get on a bus, see where the fancy takes you.'

On the street outside the café, Paul crouched in front of Bobby. ‘I'm a bit lost, Bob. I don't live here, you see...' He gazed at him, searching his face. He looked exhausted; he wanted to take him back to his room, tuck him up in bed, lie beside him and read the stories George had read to him. He would watch over him as he slept and when he woke up … When he woke up, then what? He would take him away, home.

Paul touched Bobby's cheek, imagining this; they would be together and Bobby wouldn't have to wear the stiff wool coat and schoolboy flannel shorts they'd dressed him in even though he was just a little boy. He wouldn't have to wear those shoes like a grown man's shoes in miniature, those thick, itchy-looking socks showing off his white knees. In Tangiers Bobby could run around barefoot and his skin would become brown, his hair becoming as blond as it had been when he was born. They would be together and he would take care of him … He would cry for his mother, he would miss her, but he'd get over that – he'd never had a mother himself after all, just a father, just George. He hadn't needed a mother. He and Patrick would look after him; Patrick wouldn't mind, he never minded anything he did. He imagined opening the door to their house, calling Pat's name as he held Bobby's hand, and Pat would appear. He tried to imagine the expression on his face. Impossible.

He searched Bobby's face, as though this child might all at once tell him what to do. But he only hung his head, a confused little boy.

‘You're tired, aren't you? Do you want to go back to Granddad?'

He nodded.

‘All right.' He straightened up from his crouch. ‘It's not far, is it? We'll be back in no time.'

No time. He held Bobby's hand, small and soft and ice-cream sticky and thought of things he might say to him. He should say something, make the most of this time; he wanted Bobby to remember him, didn't he? But he couldn't think of a single thing, the street was too grey, too bleak, there was nothing to point at, to remark on, there was just the two of them and no fat men or ice cream in funny glasses with awkward spoons and wasted cherries. He wouldn't have eaten that cherry, either; he'd always hated glacé fruit. Eventually he asked, ‘What do you like to eat best in the whole world, Bob?'

‘Ice cream.'

‘Ah. I suppose that was a silly question?' He smiled at him. ‘Is ice cream better than cake?'

Bobby shrugged. At last he said, ‘I like chocolate.'

‘Me too. When I was your age, Granddad –' he hesitated and corrected himself, ‘my daddy used to keep chocolate and sweeties in a tin on a very high shelf and one day my brother Rob …' Again he hesitated, wondering how he hadn't realised how difficult this would be, or how Rob's name would make his voice catch. Bobby glanced up at him. Quickly he went on, ‘My brother and I would take a chair and piles of books and use them to climb up … And Rob could just about,
just about
reach, if he stretched really hard … I'd worry he would fall …' He smiled at him again, remembering Rob and his horrifying bravery. ‘I'd be scared he'd fall but I never tried to stop him from trying to get those sweets.'

‘Were you naughty?'

‘Oh very.' He squeezed his hand lightly. ‘I bet you're not naughty?'

He shook his head.

‘Do you play in Granddad's garden?'

Again he shook his head.

‘Oh you should! It's a lovely garden.' He forgot himself, saying, ‘I built a tree house – right at the end behind the vegetable patch, in a sycamore tree – the tree with the seeds that float down like little propellers? I wouldn't let Rob up – no room for the both of us, anyway. I had candles up there, and this and that I took from the house.' He laughed. ‘Robbie must have helped me, now I come to think. I think Rob probably helped quite a lot …'

He smiled at Bobby, bringing himself back from the garden, from Robbie climbing on the rope lassoed around a thick branch of the sycamore. He could see Robbie in Bobby's rare smile, in his shy seriousness.

‘
I want to call him Robert
,' Margot had said, and he had wanted to say, no, no, he's mine and I'd like to call him Guy. But he hadn't had the nerve or the strength, and Margot looked so hopeful, wanting this one thing. He had glanced at her, hardly able to take his eyes from his baby son, but he had, at last, and saw how exhausted she was, pale and sweaty from her labour, that thick, fecund smell coming off her, blood and something else, milk leaking from her breasts perhaps, a fundamental female scent. Holding their baby, he had lain down beside her and stroked back her damp hair. ‘Yes,' he'd said, ‘we'll call him Robert, of course. I love you, anything you want. I love you so.'

He brought himself into the present again; these memories were relentless, taking him back and back as if he couldn't concentrate on the here and now, on his son's hand in his. He made himself smile again, to say, ‘Ask Granddad if you can play in his garden. Perhaps he's not so busy nowadays that he won't help you build another tree house. It is a lovely, garden, Bob … I'm sure you can go and play there.'

‘Daddy says I can't.'

A feeling that someone had collided violently into him, sending him spinning, made him stop, and this was ridiculous and melodramatic' stopping so suddenly like this as if he had forgotten something and was about to run back for it. Bobby was looking up at him, small, impassive, tired; he shouldn't have to bother with this strange man who didn't talk and then talked too much and asked him silly questions and stopped dead as though someone had brained him. Paul was still holding Bobby's hand. He looked down at him. He wouldn't have recognised him; he had always imagined a one-year-old baby, as he was on the evening he walked out … He walked out … On the evening he walked out to Thorp Park … to Thorp Park where there was a place …

‘Paul!'

He spun round, automatically lifting Bobby into his arms. He was no weight, slight and small just as he himself had been as a child. He held him tightly.

‘Paul?' Edmund frowned at him. ‘What's going on?'

‘This is not right! None of this is right –'

Edmund said, ‘No, I know, I understand, I understand, Paul …'

As Paul paced his hotel room, Edmund watched helplessly from the door he had closed behind him; he'd taken no more than a step inside; he still held the door's handle, as though this might reassure Paul that he would leave at any moment if he wanted him to. Paul stopped and turned to face him; he looked as if he was about to spring on him and tear him to pieces.

‘He's my son! Mine! And I'm to pretend, pretend –' He looked up to the ceiling. A few minutes earlier Paul had taken the child up to the next floor where Paul's father waited for him. Paul had told Edmund to stay there, outside his room, his voice like that of an extremely angry teacher who was just about controlling his temper. And he had stayed there, like a schoolboy, with the same sick fear he used to have waiting outside the headmaster's study for the cane.

In Paul's room, Edmund dared to step a little closer to where Paul stood staring at the ceiling. ‘Paul … Go up to him now. I'll leave – or I'll stay if you want me to, whatever you want.'

‘I pretended to be someone else! A stranger – I am a stranger, a stranger keeping a secret, hardly able to speak for giving it away. He must think I'm wrong in the head –'

‘He's just a little boy, Paul, he doesn't think anything.'

He looked at him. Quietly, as if afraid to be overheard, he said, ‘They told him I was dead. I am dead.
I'm dead.
What can I say to him? What? What do dead men say?'

Paul sat down on the bed. Sullenly he said, ‘Do you have any cigarettes?'

‘No, I'm sorry –'

He sprang up again. ‘Christ Almighty! Why don't you smoke properly – messing about, taking or leaving it! Why smoke at all? Useless –' He pushed past him, out of the room and down the stairs.

Edmund followed, catching up with him on the street outside. ‘Paul,' he caught his arm. ‘Wait, you'll need this.' He handed him his wallet.

Paul took it, shoving it in his pocket without looking at him. ‘Did you bring my key as well?'

‘No, sorry.'

‘Then I'm locked out.'

‘They'll let you back in.'

‘Will they? Sure about that?' He met his gaze. ‘I need cigarettes. Where's closest?'

‘I'll take you.'

There had been a shop close by; Paul thought how he could have walked there alone, without a guide, and he would have tried to buy cigarettes, searching his pockets for his wallet, having to go back to the hotel, back through the lobby with the receptionist watching him avidly, back up the stairs, afraid of bumping into his father, or her, his ex-mother-in-law, a woman who looked at him as if he was something not right. But Edmund had saved him from all that, bringing his wallet, even though he had shouted at him as though he was some bloody snivelling kid of a second lieutenant, fresh off the boat. Edmund had saved him and in the tobacconist's shop Edmund had even asked the man for the right brand, even asked for matches because he couldn't speak for himself he was so angry and Edmund seemed to understand this, and on the street he opened the pack and took one out and lit it and handed it to him. ‘There,' he said.
There.

‘I can't go back to the hotel.'

Edmund had nodded, ‘All right. Come back with me.'

Paul lay on Edmund's bed, fully clothed apart from his jacket and shoes. Edmund sat on the chair, talking about a cricket match he had once played at school, quite a grand school where he was a better bowler than a batsman, and anyway, he had bowled five of them out … And this story went on, and he found it easy to drop in and out of it, listening to the musical sound of Edmund's voice, light and easy and confident. He had a sister, Caroline; another sister, Diana; a brother Rupert – in the Household Guards, who thought he was the bee's knees in his uniform, apparently. Edmund talked about how Rupert was the eldest and he only the baby of the family … The baby, the youngest, he might have guessed.

He listened to him and smoked and smoked and Edmund got up and opened the window and he could hear the traffic on the street outside, feel the breeze that smelt of exhaust, of people going about their lives, and the breeze made his cigarette taste different, worse. Upstairs a baby cried; a woman called out; a door slammed. Edmund talked on; he made school sound as though it was only last week, that cricket-match tea with its egg-and-cress sandwiches and sultana cake, all its who said what to whom, that sunny cloudless day only last week so that he knew how young Edmund was, the youngest, the baby, whose father was a doctor, like his, but so much more grand, Harley Street, treating dukes but still as useless as any doctor, although he didn't tell Edmund what he thought of bloody doctors. He only smoked, and Edmund seemed so proud of his family, and of his father; he loved them as he should.

He thought Edmund wouldn't run out of words: he was so confident, light and breezy, he would go on and on, but he trailed off, stopped. Paul noticed that the plate-cum-ashtray beside him was full, the pack of cigarettes Edmund had bought half empty. He noticed that Edmund was gazing at him, that look he had. It was a look he must surely only use on him because it was so strange, no one else would be able to bear it; they would think Edmund was mad and no one seemed to think this, not his family who loved him, or the boys at his school, in his cricket team. It seemed everyone adored him and always had.