Dying Flames (7 page)

“What has he to be aggressive about?”

“He resents losing his father. He thinks Mum chucked him out—which she did. They only get to see each other three or four times a year, which isn't enough for Adam. He wants a regular dad who comes to watch him every Saturday scoring goals for the underfifteens.”

“And Adam was livid about Terry's visit, was he? Why?”

“Well, you can see his point. Suddenly he's got a new big brother—out of the blue, with no smoothing of the way. Why was he never told he existed? Why is Mum so delighted he's turned up again, when she's never been bothered about him before?”

“And why do
you
think that is?”

“I don't know, but I think Adam came close to the mark. When I told him I'd come home and found a young man here, he exploded: he thought it was another of Mum's fancy men. ‘I knew it would come to this,' he said. ‘She lives in a fantasy world. She'll soon be bringing back
boys
—younger than me.' He gets these ideas about Mother from me, but he does understand them, and he's often right. Anyway, I explained about Terry being her son and our brother.”

“How did he take that?”

“I think
gobsmacked
is the word. He practically choked at the thought. It's the fact that we hadn't been told anything about it. Being told lies is one thing, being told nothing hurts. Somehow Mother is used to having us around, but doesn't care for us, or care about us. It's like we're totally unimportant. It's sort of odd, and rather unpleasant.”

“I can imagine.”

“Anyway, eventually Adam said, ‘I expect she's all over him because he's a new actor in the play called
Peggy.
Someone who'll provide her with all the admiration and adoration we've stopped giving her.'”

“Adam sounds like a sharp young man.”

This pulled her up. Then she put aside her reluctance to admit it.

“I suppose he is. Anyway, eventually he calmed down, and finally he said, ‘She's probably loving all the attention and admiration. It won't last.' And that about sums up Peggy's retreats into a fantasy world: they only last for a short time.”

“How do these retreats end?”

“Sometimes in an explosion. More often they get bored, the men hanging around her. Sometimes she gets bored and goes on to something, or someone, else. Mother to a long-lost son is a new and quite a good part, but she hasn't thought twice about him for the first twenty-five years of his life, so I can't see it lasting long.”

“That will be hurtful to her son.”

“I suppose so. Unless he's playing a part just as much as she is and moves on quite happily. I'd be more worried about Adam than about Terry.”

“About Adam? Why?”

“He's all over the place—emotionally and every other way. He's never really got over the divorce. Sometimes he acts as if he hates Peggy. He'd have gone to live with his father long ago, if his father had been willing to have him. Harry is a traditional soul. He believes children should be looked after by their mothers.”

“It must have seemed like rejection.”

“Adam tried to tough it out, but I'm sure it did. I heard him crying at night. Harry told him there wasn't room, because he has two young children by his new wife. That didn't make it any better.”

They stopped talking as the waiter came along, removed empty dishes, and stocked the table with more. Christa's face lit up with anticipation.

“Can you believe that people used to eat teas like this every day? They must have been enormous! But just for once, it's fantastic!”

She tucked in. Graham was glad she had the elasticity of youth and could slough off melancholy with the arrival of cream sponge and fruitcake. He was glad too that so little eating would be required from himself.

Whenever the phone rang, he hoped it was Christa. He had to restrain himself from running to pick it up. Graham had a keen sense of the ridiculous, particularly where he himself was concerned. Even when he was alone, he liked to maintain his dignity.

“Hello?”

“Graham?”

“Yes. Hello, Peggy.”

He found the voice, now stripped of the distraction of the body, to be like Christa's, but measurably older. Both had an element of flirtation apparently built into them. But Peggy's flirtatiousness reminded him of the past, the briefness of their affair. Christa's seemed like a promise for the future.

“Graham, I want you to do something for me.”

“How did you find out my number?” asked Graham, playing for time.

“I looked in Christabel's address book. I knew she had been ringing you.”

“Of course. How simple.”

The irony and the criticism were quite lost on her.

“Now, Graham, don't say no at once,” Peggy resumed, the voice becoming almost schoolmistressy. “I'm having a little family reunion—a dinner at Luigi's, my favorite restaurant around here. They worship me there, and they'll do anything for me. It's…it's my birthday, or near enough to it. It's a time for get-togethers and buryings of the hatchet, don't you think? My father and I have had a bit of a difference these last few years—it's really pained me, and he's promised to come. And Christa and Adam, of course—you'll like Adam. And—well, one or two others. Not actors—they're so competitive, aren't they? But a few relatives and friends—people really close to me. I count you as one of the closest and dearest to me. Will you come, for my sake, and for old times' sake as well?”

Graham's novelist's ear wondered how many times
I, me,
and
my
had figured in the conversation so far. He also noticed the blithe insouciance with which she had changed the story about her parents' deaths.

“I don't know. You haven't given me a date.”

“October the first. It was the only date my dad could manage. You remember how close we were in the old days.”

Graham heard the boast, dancing round in the back of his head, of the young Peggy: “I can twist my dad round my little finger.” He refrained from comment on Ted's resurrection from the dead and gazed down at the empty space under October the first in his desk diary.

“I don't know if I can. There's quite an important engagement that evening. It won't be easy to change it.”

“Oh, Graham,
please
! For me? Pretty please!”

Graham grimaced into the phone. The awfulness of the appeal made him unwilling to give way at once.

“I'll see what I can do.”

“Please.
Of course you can do it. You're famous.”

“I'll give you a ring.”

“Oh, you meanie! Do you have my number?”

“Yes. I found it in the telephone directory.”

He put down the telephone and thought, going through the conversation step-by-step. The egotism he could take in his stride. It was not so different from Christa's natural adolescent self-absorption. The thing that surprised him most was the mention of actors. Presumably Peggy still did stage work now and then. Amateur, in all probability. For some reason the fact of her still acting was something he had never till then considered, or asked Christa about. But it was consistent, it made sense: limelight is attractive, even dim, provincial limelight.

The mention of her father he took with a pinch of salt, and he did not believe the dinner was to celebrate a reconciliation with him, or the date fixed with him in mind: elderly widowers were not so busy in the evenings that they only have single, isolated free ones. Ted Somers was being hauled in as a makeweight, one of Peggy's few links with the past she shared with Graham.

He had no doubt that the evening was really organized to act out a little drama in which he would play a leading part: his introduction to his son. She was staging a recognition scene straight out of Greek drama or
The Winter's Tale.
He felt he was going to spoil it for her by feeling very little indeed. The truth was, now he had got his thoughts in order, he didn't care whether he met Terry Telford or not. And what did the young man himself feel? He had been keen to meet his mother, that was certain. And that was a feeling many adopted children had. But his father? He didn't seem to have figured very high on Terry's agenda.

He suddenly remembered Peggy mentioning Adam. A reunion between him and Terry could be painful to a boy whose emotional equilibrium had been shattered by the virtual disappearance of his father from his life. He could be shattered by this new encounter. He could turn nasty. Then he wondered whether “family” could include Adam's father, Peggy's ex. The man who had adopted Christa and then found himself paying maintenance for her. Somehow he didn't see him agreeing to come, or, if he did, fitting in happily or easily with Peggy's plans. He asked Christa about him next time she rang.

“Invited but not coming,” she said. “Mum never learns. She thinks everybody loves her and will do whatever she wants. And she had to mention inviting him in front of Adam, with the inevitable disappointment and stormy moods. He was never going to come anyway.”

“Why not?”

Christa sighed. “Mum took him to the cleaners for everything she could get to support us. Or supposedly to support us. Mum enjoys living the high life when she gets the chance, so most of it went on her. My support finished when I was eighteen, but Harry is still stumping up for Adam.”

“So he should.”

“Agreed. But you can see him being a bit annoyed about me. First she gets him to adopt me, then she throws him out, then she bleeds him dry supposedly to support me.”

“I wouldn't be too happy, I admit.”

“Are you coming then?”

“I'm tempted,” said Graham, reluctance palpable from his voice. “I know perfectly well why the party's being given. I can see that I'm vital to the whole performance.”

“Absolutely vital. Are you getting paternal feelings yet?”

“I've just been thinking about that. The answer is a loud no.”

“Looks as if the whole thing's going to be a damp squib, then.”

“Looks like it. But it's possible Peggy has something unexpected up her sleeve. A coup de théâtre. By the way, I didn't realize that she still acted.”

“Oh, yes! Didn't I tell you? She does one big part a year, though she sometimes does a cameo role as well. The last big one was
Mrs. Warren's Profession.
”

“Shaw still.”

“Prefers Ibsen, struggles with Shakespeare, can't cope with American English, so Tennessee Williams gets mangled.”

“Quite a nice little career, though.”

“In amateur drama,” said Christa, in that voice children throughout the world use about their parents' ambitions. “She still dreams of the head of the National Theatre dropping in on the off-chance to one of her great performances and casting her as Hedda Gabler.”

“We all have our dotty dreams,” said Graham, whose own was getting an international best seller. “Well, next time I see you will be at the feast. I suspect I shall feel like Banquo's ghost.”

“Oh,
Macbeth
!” said Christa. “We read a bit of that at school.”

“Reading a bit of
Macbeth
is a gratuitous piece of literary cannibalism.”

“I love it when you use words I don't really understand.”

“I don't even think whether you understand them or not.”

“That's even better.”

He rang Peggy later that day to tell her he would be at the party.

“Oh, you are a dear. Who would have thought all those years ago—”

“I'll be at Luigi's. Seven thirty all right?”

“Oh, but couldn't you come…Yes. Seven thirty will be fine.”

She had been going to ask him whether he could come to Milton Terrace first, but the thought had struck her that this could have compromised her firm intention to stage a wonderful scene in a public place. Graham told himself that he understood her, knew her through and through. The world revolved around her, and that almighty carousel could be twitched and manipulated to minister to her monstrous sense of self. What didn't happen to her, didn't happen at all
for
her.

He remembered a moment during that meeting at Upper Melrose, the first real meeting they ever had, and the beginning of that very brief affair. He—eighteen, just left school, earnest, convinced they should be talking in depth and with mature seriousness about the play they both had just been in and which had run to great applause—mentioned something in the scene between the Earl of Warwick and Cauchon. “Oh, I wasn't in that bit,” Peggy had said. She wasn't in it, so that great scene didn't exist.

He found Luigi's in the yellow pages for Romford at the Ipswich Library. He got an odd pleasure from doing such things for himself, without help or advice from his editor or agent or from one of the occasional researchers he had used in the past. Doing it
secretly
was part of the appeal, he admitted to himself. He wanted the relationship with Peggy, her family, and friends to be known only to himself. He drove to London against the early evening rush-hour traffic and at twenty past seven was seated at a large table in Luigi's.

“You friend of Mrs. Peggy's?” the waiter had said. “Is big celebration. Vonderful lady, Mrs. Webster. A real star around 'ere. She love us, an' ve love 'er.”

So that was all hunky-dory, thought Graham, studying the menu with half an eye, and the occupied tables with the other half. Mostly Romford, he guessed—couples, or parents with children—with an Italian family by the window (favored over the loved Mrs. Webster, apparently), and a tourist couple, camera on the floor and maps being scanned, at a table over by the wall. Graham was just plumping in his mind for the sea trout (almost certainly farmed in Scotland at some piscine Dotheboys Hall) when an elderly man came into the restaurant. Tired, wary eyes, noted Graham, shoulders bowed, making him look care-worn. A strong man in the past, but now past his best, and without relish for the festivities ahead. When Graham saw the waiter directing the newcomer to his table, he got up.

“I'm Graham Broadbent,” he said, holding out his hand.

“I'm Ted Somers,” said the man, then frowned. “Graham Broadbent? Then you're—” He stopped, his face now more alive. “Oh, dear. Has Peggy got something up her sleeve?”

“Four aces and several jokers I should think.”

But they were interrupted. The restaurant's doors to the street burst open and Peggy sailed in, followed by her party—Christa, a teenage boy, the couple from the greengrocer's, and a plump young man, all talking (except the teenage boy) at the tops of their voices. Peggy said, “Graham! Dad!” in that order and rushed over, all billowing voile and matte makeup, embracing Graham as if he'd been her dearest love all her life, instead of for ten days in 1979, then taking her father's hands and giving him a peck on the cheek.

“I know you don't like a fuss, Dad. ‘All that actressy stuff,' you used to call it. But I
am
an actress, in my little way.”

She looked round to try to gather in the plump young man and seat him next to Graham. She mistimed it, however, and Christa, who had followed her mother over, sank into the seat by Graham, who now found himself between her and her grandfather.

“Have you met Grandad?” Christa asked. “Oh, you have. And this is Adam. We've got to pretend he's drinking lemonade tonight. The Halliburtons you've met, haven't you—Michael and Vesta. They're both very active with the Romford Players. And this is Terry Telford—you've heard me mention him.”

The plump young man nodded, with no particular interest or engagement, and Peggy took charge of him and sat him in the seat nearly opposite Graham, with the Halliburtons beside him. Adam took the lower end of the table, Peggy herself the seat of honor, sitting down grandly as if it were the nearest thing to a throne currently available.

“Well, isn't this nice?” she said, beaming round.

“What are we celebrating?” asked her father.

“Well, my birthday's not far away”—her father frowned, but Peggy studiously refused to notice him—“and I've had a wonderful surprise that I want to share with everyone. Now the first lovely part of any meal: the menu. Don't miss the specials on the board. Luigi's specials are always
very
special! And so are his prosciutto and melons—how he commandeers
all
the just-ripe melons in the country I don't know! No offense, Michael!” The smiles of the pair from the greengrocer's were a little unripe too. “Now this is Giovanni”—patting a tanned hand to her right, attached to a slim young man with a notebook and a standard waiter's smile—“and he'll take your orders for starters and main course, and then we'll take the sweets as they come.”