Gentleman's Relish (15 page)

The child's cry cut through the Schumann quintet Desmond was playing as he enjoyed a whisky after supper. He tried ignoring it at first and turned back to the article his brother had just published in a journal.
The Global Village,
he read,
Towards a Dialectic
. But the cry came again, more urgently, jangling his nerves and sending his glance skittering across the text. He swore under his breath, knowing he was being quite unreasonable, set down his book and glass and climbed the stairs.

‘Coming,' he called out as cheerfully as he could.

The boy, Hamish, cried, ‘Quickly! Please!'

‘I'm here,' Desmond said, turning on the landing light and letting himself into the smaller spare room, his boyhood room, where he had thought to make the child at home among books and kites and
ancient toy bears. ‘Whatever is it? I thought to find you murdered after such a row.'

Hamish was sitting stiffly upright against the headboard, his eyes wet in the moonlight. ‘It was the Moth Lady,' he said softly.

Desmond sighed, ‘Her again,' and turned on the boy's bedside light, thinking it would comfort him.

‘No!' Hamish cried out. ‘No light! It makes her worse. It's the light that brings her.'

Desmond duly flicked off the light again, startled by the glimpse it had afforded of the boy's drawn, tear-stained face. ‘Okay,' he said and sat on the edge of the bed. ‘Hamish, I thought we'd discussed this. There's no Moth Lady.'

‘But there
is
!'

‘Well. There is in your dreams but in real life you're quite safe from her. There are moths because it's a warm summer night and they follow the lights and come in at the open windows. But there are none in here. They're all downstairs with me and my reading light.'

This rash stab at levity brought on another whimper.

‘Look,' he said. ‘I'll close your window. How's that? You'll still get fresh air from the open door. Better?'

There was a sniff and he could tell the child was nodding.

‘Good boy. No more dreams now. Sleep tight.'

He returned, via a much needed top-up, to his
brother's supremely tedious article. His brother worked for a charity and was forever implying that this was a nobler pursuit than Desmond's picture restoration, although he earned three times as much. His salary had done little to leaven his prose style.

Desmond disliked children as a rule, his brother's in particular. He found them tedious and unrestrained. He associated them with noise, mess and primary-coloured plastic and regarded any friend embarked on parenthood as lost to a hostile power until further notice.

Hamish was an exception. Wary, thoughtful, bookish and apparently without friends, he reminded Desmond of himself in boyhood and it was a happy accident that he had acquired him, and not one of the more typical specimens, as a godson.

Hamish's unmarried mother, a curator and old friend, had often brought him to stay – cautiously at first, then with more confidence once she saw how he and Desmond warmed to one another, but this was his first visit on his own. She was away at a conference for two nights in the nearest university town and had dropped Hamish off en route.

‘I shan't ring,' she said. ‘It would only get him all churned up. But of course you can call me if there are any problems. There shouldn't be, though.'

For a seven-year-old he was, indeed, a remarkably easy guest. While Desmond worked in his shed, he spent contented hours either curled in the shade
reading a book or wandering the paths around the marshes and reed beds that surrounded the cottage, armed with a little magnifying jar and a pocket guide to insects. He had no allergies or irritating dietary fads but politely ate whatever food Desmond set before him.

An unobtrusive boy, he repeatedly put Desmond in mind of a characteristically mordant phrase of his mother's:
too good to live
. Desmond would miss him when he was gone and wondered if it would be thought sinister if he invited him back at the tired end of the summer holidays. Unmarried men had to be so careful around children these days and the precautions had a way of arousing, unbidden, thoughts of the very deeds they were designed to prevent. Hamish's mother could always be invited too, of course, but, being an adult, she required active hospitality whereas the boy required as little attention as a demurely self-contained whippet. Until now, that was.

The music had come to an end and there was no sound but the usual soughing of the night breeze in the reed beds and the persistent tapping of insects against the windowpane nearest to his lamp. Hamish's slightly hoarse, unbroken voice was so unexpected in the studious gloom that Desmond sloshed his drink on the upholstery in surprise.

‘She's back,' Hamish told him. ‘She wants to take me with her.'

‘Jesus!' Desmond shouted. The child's mother had not breathed a word of this neurotic fear of his. Perhaps it was put on? A piece of manipulation born of resentment at her self-absorbed absence?

Hamish lingered on the edge of the pool of light and Desmond remembered his fear of the bedside light upstairs. Curious child! The boy's plump lower lip was trembling and he shivered. He had come down without his dressing gown and slippers and even in July the house was prone to draughts.

‘Come on,' Desmond told him. ‘Come and sit on the sofa and tell me all about the bloody woman.'

Hamish climbed obediently onto the chaise-longue, tucking his legs up beside him as though afraid of what might lurk underneath.

Feeling a great upswell of emotion, an unfamiliar mix of ordinary compassion and intense, heartwarming awareness of himself as a fatherly protector, Desmond unfurled an antique patchwork quilt he kept on one of the sofa arms for the bitterest nights and tucked it around him. ‘There!' he said. ‘That's better.'

The boy nodded, still wretchedly wan.

‘Cup of cocoa? I can make some for us both.'

‘No!' Hamish almost shouted, adding softly with tragic politeness, ‘Please don't leave me, Desmond.'

‘I won't. Good Lord! We didn't eat
so
much cheese with supper, did we?' Desmond sat back in his
armchair, abandoning
The Global Village
for the time being. Perhaps the child felt the lack of a father. ‘Tell me about it,' he said. ‘Sometimes you have to talk about bad dreams to make them stay away.'

‘She's not a dream.'

‘But…Very well. If you say so. Who is she?'

‘I
told
you. The Moth Lady. She's very thin and sort of…
whispery
. She's naked and she has compound eyes and antennae like brown feathers. She doesn't speak but she just uncoils her proboscis and touches me and I sort of
feel
her words. She wants to take me and I don't want to go.'

‘Well you won't. You'll stay right here with me.'

‘Please don't laugh at me.'

‘Sorry. I wouldn't dream of it. Why does she want you?'

‘I can't tell. But she wants to wrap me in a leathery cocoon so I can't move.'

‘So you'll become a moth too?'

‘No. For…I think it's for food.'

Desmond sighed. The boy had obviously spent far too long hunting dragonfly in the glare of noon. Perhaps he even had a touch of sunstroke. Desmond put a hand to Hamish's forehead but it was cool and slightly clammy. ‘No one is taking you for food or for anything else,' he assured him. ‘You curl up there and go to sleep. You're quite safe. If the Moth Lady or anyone else comes for you, I'll spray them with poison and stick them with a pin for you to
admire in the morning. There there. Only joking. Don't take on. You're sure no cocoa?'

‘No, thank you. Desmond I…I think I'll be safe here. Won't I?'

‘Absolutely.'

‘Are all the windows closed?'

They weren't, of course, because it was July and the house would have swiftly become stuffy. His practice was to leave the dining room's window open and its door closed so that cooler air could be drawn in but no insects could see his reading light to be drawn in too.

‘You know,' Desmond began, making one last appeal to reason. ‘Moths do no harm to anything. It's only their caterpillars that eat wool or plants. I've given up planting verbascums because of the verbascum moth caterpillars and I never waste money on cashmere in case a clothes moth lays eggs on it, but I couldn't say I'd ever been
hurt
by one. Wasps and hornets, now, they're another matter. And there's a spider you find on compost heaps – the woodlouse spider – that can give you a painful nip…'

‘I didn't say she was a moth. She's just
like
one.'

‘Ah.'

Hamish was unconvinced but he was also exhausted, worn out by fear, and he yawned heavily as he spoke and pulled the quilt more snugly about him.

Relieved, imagining he would carry him back to bed when he himself retired, Desmond took a sip of what remained unspilled of his whisky and picked up the journal again. He found his brother's article once more.
The Global Village
, he read,
Towards a Dialectic
, but his concentration strayed within seconds and he soon realized he had read the same dull sentence several times over without even grasping the sense within its woolly construction.

He glanced up. The Schumann had ended and Hamish was sound asleep. Desmond discarded the journal again and reached instead for the little insect book that had inspired the boy's imagination so drastically.
232 Species in Colour
, it promised. He flicked past pages of beetles and flies of improbable size and came to a halt at a page devoted to the Goat Moth. Its body was elegantly striped in shades of grey and cream, it had, indeed, a certain dustily feminine elegance, but it was scarcely threatening even when reproduced to seem the size of his thumb.
Evil-looking caterpillar
, he read.
Has a pungent odour. Not easy to find as they feed on dead willow trees but a large tree will sometimes have hundreds of larvae boring in it.'

There were several dead or dying willows across the way on the marsh's edge. He had a clear image of them as he too fell asleep; he pictured the unnerving way they had of seeming to rot and die, only to
spring up again from where a broken limb had rooted in the mud.

He woke at the sound of his whisky glass smashing on the floor. He opened his eyes. There was a filthy smell coming from nearby, far more pungent than the smell of whisky. He traced it in seconds to the lamp where he saw, to his disgust, that some kind of fly or moth was cremating itself against the bulb. He turned the lamp off instinctively then cried out as broken glass pierced his sock. He limped across to the hall in the moonlight and turned on the light out there.

Hamish had taken himself off to bed. The quilt was discarded on the floor, with uncharacteristic carelessness.

Desmond tutted, folded it back onto the sofa arm, then swept the broken glass into a dustpan. He opened the back door to tip the shards directly into the rubbish bin and was briefly transfixed by the beauty of the night and took a few steps away from the door in his socks.

The breeze that had been stirring the reeds earlier was now quite gone so the air was full of suggestive scents – river mud, grass mowings, lavender from the bushes that defined the path to the garden gate and something else, something sweet. The full moon was still up, reflected in the water and silvering the reeds and willows.

Then he saw the moths. He saw only a few at
first, which were apparently crossing the garden from the marsh, but, tracing their flight, he saw that there were scores of them, maybe more than a hundred, dancing in the moonlight and seeming to gather about Hamish's unlit, reopened window.

He ran back through the house, ignoring the pain in his cut foot, shouting the boy's name.

The bed was empty, the sheets quite cold. An old, long-forgotten fear told him, as he ran from room to empty room, that his search would be fruitless.

He had waded, gasping, around the marsh's fringes for half an hour, muddying his boots and trousers, before he thought to ring the police and the boy's mother.

He knew what people would say. He knew how it would look.

Lorna's formidable sister-in-law went caravanning every summer and was a keen member of the Caravan Club and observer of its clannish codes. She and her husband always stayed in well-populated camp-sites, usually by prior arrangement with fellow members. They would arrange their caravans in a tight formation – pioneer style – to keep the rougher, tented element at bay, and would recreate a suburb on wheels, visiting one another's caravans for drinks and bridge and ingenious one-pot suppers.

If Lorna had not sensed this was not for her, the sister-in-law confirmed it by never once urging her and her family to follow suit and join in the fun. She handed round photographs of the holidays and explained the features of each restlessly upgraded
caravan with the patronizing air of a displaced urbanite explaining running water and regular bath-times to a barefoot family in a mud hut: expecting wide-eyed admiration, not company amidst the bubbles.

Lorna and her husband preferred to rent remote cottages for their holidays. These were invariably more basically equipped than the sister-in-law's latest caravan and were found in the trustworthy back pages of
The Lady
. Holidays were exhausting for Lorna because she had to pack most of her kitchen equipment and larder as well as pillows and bedding, cats and dogs, maps and library books, but it was precisely because each holiday was a bit like moving house that it was so stimulating. Lumpy beds, idiosyncratic plumbing and other people's taste were half the adventure. Adapting to new surroundings stirred one up and refreshed one's appreciation of home. Then there was the matter of space. The sister-in-law had just two very good if unenquiring children who were easily pleased whereas it was a point of reassurance for Lorna that her three boys and a baby were restless and inquisitive and not easily to be contained in a mobile home, however well equipped.

But that morning she was detained at the village garage while Mr Boorman topped up the oil and water for her and, idly inspecting the huddle of second-hand cars on his little forecourt, she came
across the caravan. It was eight years old, so must have been made in nineteen fifty-something and was called The Sprite, which charmed her. It was powder-blue and cream on the outside and seemed to have more character than the new, white things the sister-in-law favoured. She opened the narrow door and stepped up inside.

It was tiny but ingenious. There were two beds, both doubling as seats, a little Formica-topped table, a cold-box, a sink and a two-ring gas cooker. There were curtains whose gay fabric reminded her of a favourite skirt she had worn out before her marriage and the cushions were covered with a sensible sort of orangey bouclé. She sat at the table, gazing around her and out of the little windows, and was won over.

One could be sure Mr Boorman had maintained it well – he was quite misty-eyed about selling it – and the price he was asking was not much more than two months' rent on their usual sort of cottage. She impulsively wrote a cheque for a deposit then set about persuading her husband over Irish stew that evening.

He was unsettled at first and seemed doubtful of the taste of her suggestion – he had never approved of his brother's marriage or his subsequent caravanning – but she won him over by appealing to his frugality. This would be like a cottage where two months' rent lasted for years! They could travel
far further than usual, she suggested, by being able to spend a night here and a night there. They could journey the length of the country. They could show the children castles and cathedrals and Hadrian's Wall. They didn't even have to stay in horrid camp-sites every night if they didn't mind washing with a flannel or making do with the sea. They could buy a tent as an overflow dorm for the older boys. It would be fun. It would be an adventure.

And since he had always trusted her to arrange everything and was too busy to be bothered with it himself, he agreed.

What she didn't realize and certainly didn't admit to herself until years later, was that what had charmed her about The Sprite was its suggestion of precious freedom. It had reminded her, she saw too late, of Wendy Houses where she had made pretend tea and raised pretend families as a girl. The escape she had pictured in it, beside a dreamy loch or overlooking a romantic ruin, was made on her own.

Her husband was a clumsily erratic driver – he had learnt on a tank during the war – and had no more training than she did in how to reverse a trailer still less a view-obscuring caravan. Following religiously a circular itinerary supplied by the AA, they journeyed all the way to Northumberland and back but it was a white-knuckle ride. He kept forgetting the caravan was there, so it was forever mounting pavements and scattering pedestrians. They were
twice cautioned by ashen-faced policemen and had a very nasty row with a woman who claimed they had scraped the paintwork on her roadside bungalow. It was a miracle nobody was killed.

The children loved the caravan at first but never mastered their disappointment at not being allowed to ride in it. They saw castles and abbeys galore and completed well-stuffed holiday diaries but the weather was filthy, the boys never got the hang of putting up their tent unassisted, the baby cried for England, they all caught nastily productive colds and the one night they stayed in a camp-site smart enough to have passed muster with the sister-in-law, the Jack Russell disgraced them all by proudly rounding up a flock of sheep and driving it among the furious campers. Lorna was a cook who needed space, she discovered, and cooking family-sized meals on a doll-sized stove proved such a strain they repeatedly dined on fish and chips or even pork pies.

The only one who really enjoyed the experience was her husband, who was a natural Spartan and never happier than when doing without or making do. When Lorna's camera film was posted back from the developer's in its distinctive yellow envelope, she found that he was smiling in every photograph, pipe clenched in chattering teeth.

A few weeks after their return, with the excuse that it took up too much room in their drive, Lorna
hitched up The Sprite one more time and drove it to her parents' house on the Isle of Wight.

‘Easy enough to collect when we need it again,' she said but somehow the occasion never arose.

Shown the holiday photographs, in particular one with the baby parked morosely on its potty and Lorna furiously frying sausages beneath a line of flapping nappies, the sister-in-law pronounced them the sort of people who gave caravanning a bad name.

They had a field beyond the garden wall, Lily's field, bought with Lily's money to stop anyone building on it and where she kept a pair of retired donkeys to hold the thistles in check. What with the cost of maintaining fences and paying vet's bills – donkeys not being as hardy as they looked – the field had become her folly. So there was a certain irony in parking the daughter's folly within the mother's.

Lily cursed the caravan at first, thinking it a senseless, common creation, unable to imagine why Lorna had bought the thing or why, having seen sense, she kept it. Then weeds grew about its wheels and she began to overlook it.

Influenced by advertising, she had always looked forward to her husband's retirement, picturing it as one long summer weekend. She should have realized that weekends were only a pleasure because
they were short and exceptional. There was a limit to how often he could clip the hedges or mow the lawn. His hobby had always been bonsai and that was scarcely time-consuming. Now that he was home all the time, he was bored, and now he was no longer earning, he was niggardly.

She loved him dearly, of course, but theirs had always been a combative love founded, she now saw, on her clawing back in the course of the working week the territory she conceded at weekends. Now that he no longer had work, he began to take an invasive interest in hers, finding ways of cooking and cleaning that were somehow superior. Their garden was large but the house wasn't and with him home all the time she found his temper and restless energy left less and less space for her.

One autumn afternoon, when he elected to make large quantities of admirably cheap jam from the bullaces that thrived along a nearby bridleway, she realized she was on the verge of losing her temper and saying something she might regret. So she stalked out to commune with the donkeys in the drizzle. Their stoicism, and the meaty sensation of their ears beneath her hands, were usually calming but that day they were being wilfully unsociable. Then the drizzle turned without warning to a downpour so she claimed the nearest available shelter.

It was musty but it was dry, and she perceived as she sat on one of the squashy little banquettes,
miraculously peaceful compared to the house. The drizzle turned to full throttle rain and Lily was startled by the noise it made on the skylight. Stranded but curious, she investigated further. Lorna was a reliably bad housekeeper and, sure enough, had not thought to empty the cupboards entirely. Lily found a packet of gypsy creams, Lapsang tea and a bag of sultanas. She experimented with the little stove and found there was still gas in the canister and water in the whistling kettle. Hunting for matches, she found some overdue library books, including a smutty American crime novel. She set the kettle to boil, discovered that a tug of a leather strap turned the larger banquette into a fairly comfortable double bed with a charming view of her donkeys sheltered under distant trees and settled down with a lapful of sultanas and the biscuit packet tucked in the crook of her arm and began to read.

This might have remained an isolated incident had bullace pickle not become the next day's project and the stench of spice and vinegar not driven her outside again.

She finished the crime novel and started another. She brought out fresh water and better biscuits, secretly purchased. By stealthy degrees the caravan became hers. She bought second-hand paperbacks for its bookshelf, a little radio, a cheery pelargonium, a doormat. Claiming her GP had told her to exercise more, she took to embarking on daily walks which
led circuitously to its door and an hour or two of cherished, feminine peace. She didn't care that it was a little shabby and dated: the Doris Day décor was a reminder of happier, earlier years in her marriage. She didn't care that her husband took advantage of her absences to drink. When they met up again at teatime, each was as sweet as pie.

Leo inherited the field from his mother who in turn had inherited it from hers. It was months before he visited in person, then he drove over with a bossy boyfriend who was determined they should build eco-friendly holiday chalets on it. No one had mentioned the caravan, which had been broken into and vandalized as much by time and weather as by disaffected local youth. While the bossy boyfriend measured and photographed the site and took notes, Leo let himself in and sat, astonished, on the only surviving cushion.

He had no memories of his holiday in it as a baby but had spent days and nights in there as a child because his grandfather couldn't bear small boys in the house and banished Leo and his brothers to the field on visits. His grandparents' marriage was not happy – his grandfather drank and his grandmother probably did too in order to cope with his temper. Looking back, he suspected she used to
hide in the caravan when they weren't visiting. Quite possibly she resented their visits for depriving her of a bolt-hole, but perhaps she sheltered behind the business of entertaining guests as effectively as she could in a field at the bottom of a long garden.

Being noisily insecure, Leo's brothers had forever found excuses to cross the field and garden to visit the adults at nights but Leo had loved the caravan, loved the sensation it offered of playing house and the feral, male air it acquired after a few days of their presence in it.

The same fifties curtains swung in the breeze now, sun-bleached but intact. The bumpy fabric his fingers remembered still covered the cushion and on the shelf, dog-eared and buckled by alternating damp and heat, he found the collection of unsuitable novels he had learned to decipher and relish over a succession of half-terms.

He took up
Death Becomes Her
, flicked the mouse droppings off it, opened it at random then thrust his nose between the pages and took a luxurious sniff from its spine. The strangely mixed bouquet was unchanged and unmistakable: glue, camping gas, sunshine. Freedom.

He looked up to find the boyfriend staring from the doorway.

‘You wouldn't understand,' he told him. ‘It's a caravan thing.'