Going Loco (11 page)

He looked wounded. ‘Oh, come on, Maggie. I said I was sorry.’ He crossed his enormous legs and hugged his arms across his enormous chest. Was he wearing padding?

‘Hey, I can’t have been that bad.’

‘I mean you,’ she said firmly.

‘What?’

‘Just go,’ she said. Her histrionic gesture towards the door was somewhat undermined by the big red fluffy racing car she clutched to her chest, but she still meant it. ‘I’m flattered you should go to all this bother. But honestly, just go.’

He gathered his things sullenly, hunching his shoulders protectively, like a bear who’d been smacked on the nose. He had to stay true to character, she supposed. She felt quite sorry for him.

‘Look, I’m off for a month of stuff,’ he said, as he gathered his things. ‘Boxing in Las Vegas, tennis in Germany, basketball in Sweden. Can I call you sometime? Or when I’m back? I’d really like to.’

‘I can’t stop you,’ said Maggie. Noel was a very cruel person, she was realizing. When you know how needy for affection a person is, you shouldn’t tease them this way.

‘Look, I really like you,’ he blurted. ‘I think I love you.’ He touched her arm.

‘Don’t.’

He cupped his hand and moved it to her shoulder. Then he stroked her face. ‘You’re lovely,’ he said. ‘I never met anyone like you.’

‘Don’t,’ she whimpered.

‘Why?’

‘Because you don’t mean it.’

‘You’re very hard, Maggie. Come to Malmö in March.’

‘Oh please, stop it. How can they play basketball in Malmö in March? They’d slip over on the ice.’

‘Basketball is indoors, Maggie.’

‘Is it?’

‘Yes.’

He left at last, and she watched him hail a taxi. ‘Wandsworth, the Arndale Centre,’ he told the driver, even though she knew Noel and Julia lived in the opposite direction, in Kennington. She admired his thoroughness, but was so pleased to see the back of him that when she returned indoors she fell straight asleep.

‘You’re putting on weight,’ observed Mother, that Sunday afternoon. ‘That’s no way to keep a husband, if you don’t mind me saying so. Don’t you want to watch
The Clothes Show
with us?’

‘No thanks,’ said Belinda. She’d been lying on her new couch reading a biography of Hans Christian Andersen and eating a Mars bar. A bag of mini Twixes was at her side. From outside, she could feel the reassuring tremble of the commuter trains as they thundered through the cutting at the end of the road. Her blanket was warm, and she was horizontal in the middle of the afternoon. She had never been happier in her life.

‘Doesn’t Linda do a lovely shark with peppercorns?’ Mother asked. She looked mildly alarmed at the memory of it, but then she always did.

‘Mm.’

‘What was it you cooked for me the last time I was here? Baked beans on something?’

‘Baked beans on cream crackers. You know very well.’

‘That’s right. You’d run out of bread!’

Belinda tried to keep reading, but Mother hadn’t finished with her yet. ‘Linda’s cleaned the bathroom floor. Did you know it was green under all that?’

‘No. Look, is there something in particular?’

‘No, no. Just to say brill with kumquats tomorrow.’

‘Great.’

‘Brill,’ Mother repeated. ‘Whoever would have thought it in your house?’

She went away, and Belinda rearranged herself under the blanket. Hans Christian Andersen’s story ‘The Shadow’ had been the original inspiration for her book – a story so troubling that she had never been able to forget it. It concerned a scholar from a grey north European country who took a holiday in Italy and discovered for the first time that his shadow had a personality. At midday it crouched near his feet; in the evening it stretched and lengthened and enjoyed itself. Then, one night, the scholar stood on his balcony and saw the shadow projected against the shutters of the house opposite. What if my shadow could go inside? he thought. Go on, shadow!

Of course, the shadow detaches itself, and the scholar goes home without it. But years later the shadow returns – now accomplished and worldly, standing upright, with its own clothes and jewellery, but unable to put on much weight. The scholar is helpless as the shadow takes over his life, forcibly swaps identities with him, and finally orders his execution. Belinda’s theory was that the story fell into a parental pattern – it was about the essential shock of parenthood. You give children your blessing to go off and leave you, to learn more than you ever did, and the next thing you know, they’re telling you what to do. Power abruptly transfers to the child. Or doesn’t, of course, if you’ve got a mother like Virginia, who remembers an innocent baked-bean supper catastrophe for the rest of her natural life.

Linda brought her a sticky toffee pudding, and some homemade biscuits for later. She also topped up Belinda’s coffee machine.

‘Thank you, Linda,’ she said, without moving. ‘You’re a marvel. Mother says the bathroom floor is green. They should give you an archaeology award. You should also get a medal for being the first person of my acquaintance that my mother approves of.’

Linda smiled weakly, but merely gathered some crockery and turned to go. At which point, with a shock like a punch to the stomach, Belinda noticed there were tears in her eyes again.

‘Oh no,’ she said. ‘What’s happened?’ She could scarcely breathe. The effect of these tiny drops of moisture was devastating. ‘Is there something wrong, Linda?’

‘I’m afraid I’ve discovered something so upsetting about you that I’ll have to leave.’

‘No,’ Belinda gasped. ‘About me?’

All the guilty secrets she’d ever had whirled into her mind. The sin of stopping an ice-cream van once in childhood, when not wanting an ice-cream, had given her sleepless nights until she was thirty years old, but she’d always known that, crime-wise, this incident was rather small potatoes to anybody with an ounce of mature perspective.

‘When I think of all the things I was preparing to do for you,’ Linda said, ‘it makes me feel like a fool. Did you know I’d agreed to do the
Late Review
for you on Thursday? No, I thought not. I’ve been reading an Updike novel and I’ve seen a play with lots of swearing in it at the Royal Court, and – and – and now this.’

‘Now what?’

Linda’s chin was wobbling again.

Belinda put an arm around her shoulder. ‘Please, tell me. What have I done?’

‘Mr Johansson just told me—’ She sniffed. ‘He told me—’

‘What?’

‘That you don’t like fish.’

Belinda yelped with laughter.

‘It’s not funny,’ Linda snapped.

‘Yes it is. Oh Linda—’ She reached to touch her, but Linda stiffened. Her jaw jutted out. ‘The point is, you lied to me, Belinda. I’ve given you lots of fish because it’s good for the brain, and you didn’t tell me that you didn’t like it, and you swore you’d tell me if I did anything you didn’t like. You
swore.
But now I find this out, and I know you must have been laughing at me, and now you’re laughing at me again. I’m just so disappointed in you, I feel as if you’ve stuck a dagger in a baby’s heart.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Well, so am I.’

‘Don’t go.’

‘How can I trust you now? You might say you’re pleased I’ve set up a deal with a toy company, but really you disapprove. I couldn’t bear that.’

‘Have you set up a deal with a toy company?’

‘Not yet. I’ve got a meeting on Wednesday. But what’s the use in me carrying on if you can let us both down like this?’

Belinda made a decision. Being browbeaten by your cleaning lady on such a trivial matter was ridiculous. ‘Listen,’ she said, ‘I do like fish.’

‘What?’

‘Stefan was mistaken. I told him about a nightmare I had once, which did put me off for a while because I was wading through a pond with fish nibbling my legs. But in fact I adore fish and could eat it every day.’

Linda melted. Such a simple lie, but completely effective. ‘You’re not just saying that?’

‘As if.’

‘I couldn’t bear it if you were just saying it to appease me.’

‘No, no. Brill and kumquats, yum-yum. That’s what I say.’

‘Do you swear that you like fish? There must be something you don’t like? You can tell me.’

Belinda knew this was her last chance to mention shellfish, the mere sight of which set her stomach in a spasm, but she didn’t believe Linda’s assurances any more. She could not tell Linda that she abhorred langoustine, or that crab claws made her vomit. The woman might threaten to walk out again, calling her a Judas. ‘No, I love it all,’ she pronounced.

‘Octopus?’

‘Yep.’

‘Eels?’

‘Fab.’

Linda visibly relaxed. She had forced Belinda to lie extravagantly about a love of seafood. And, for some reason that Belinda could not fathom, this evidently counted as a triumph.

Fifteen minutes after Noel left Maggie’s, the doorbell rang.

‘Oh God, he’s come back,’ said Maggie, as she went to answer it.

‘It’s me again, Leon,’ said the man outside, holding a very small bunch of daffodils. ‘I wondered if you’d like to come out for a drink.’

‘Oh my God,’ she said. It was indeed Leon again. But the trouble was, it wasn’t the Leon who had called earlier. He was smaller and brainy-looking.

‘Where did you get that dreadful phallus?’ he asked her.

Looking down, she realized she’d been absently hugging the Oshbosh car. ‘Didn’t you just give it to me?’ she queried.

But she knew he hadn’t. This was quite obviously Noel, and his impersonation was terrible.

‘What on earth are you talking about?’ he said. ‘Really, Margaret, if you don’t go along with this, how’s it ever going to work?’

Stefan Johansson was not a clone, but he had a secret. And his secret was considerably larger than the petty ice-cream-van offence that had, on and off since childhood, murdered the sleep of his innocent wife. The truth was, he wasn’t Swedish. Nor was he a geneticist. He was in fact an apple-farmer from Kent. And his real first name was George.

Linda had guessed something of this right away, even before she found albums of photographs showing his family on long-ago outings to Canterbury and Rye. She thought it suspicious that you could never help him out with a word. Normally, with any foreigner, you can supply ‘wasp’ or ‘jamboree’, and feel incredibly clever. But with Stefan you couldn’t. And now, to confirm her misgivings, here was little Stefan in a big sun-hat, dappled at a typically English model village, and little Stefan on a donkey on the beach at Camber Sands, with Union Jacks fluttering in the background. Lots of childish wasps, probably. And a sense of childish jamboree. Both these pictures, moreover, were clearly marked. ‘Me, George,’ said one. ‘George – Me,’ said the other.

To give Linda her due, once she had the evidence she produced it. One stormy evening, after a splendid supper of halibut steamed in seaweed with lugworm hollandaise, she
placed the albums gently on the table, then sat down beside Stefan on the sofa in front of the fire. Belinda was working; Mother had gone to bed; Stefan was thinking likewise of climbing up the wooden hill to Bedfordshire. When he saw the albums, however, he stiffened. Then he smiled at Linda a little uncertainly.

‘They were under the bathroom floor,’ said Linda, simply. ‘I can imagine why you thought they were safe.’

‘Oh my God,’ said Stefan.

‘I won’t tell anybody.’

‘You won’t?’

‘No.’

‘My real name is George, you see.’

‘Yes.’

‘I’m not Swedish.’

‘No.’

Stefan went to the kitchen to recover himself. He came back with a bottle of red wine and two glasses. He poured it unsteadily and took a long drink.

‘It all began in Malmö,’ he said.

‘Yes?’

‘I went to Sweden for a holiday in 1971, and I found myself there.’

‘Is it a particularly lovely place, this Malmö?’

‘Lovely?’ he repeated, surprised. ‘No. Although it was quite prosperous, in those days, with the shipyard.’

He went to the door and shut it, poured some more wine, and sat down beside Linda again. And then, as the fire burned brightly in the grate and the wind blew interestingly outside in the naked branches, he told the story of what happened to him in Malmö.

‘It was the early seventies, as I think I said,’ he began. ‘I was young, I had just left agricultural college. I was good-looking, I had a bit of money, and Sweden being well known
for its permissiveness at that time, I was optimistic of having a very happy summer of love. Knowing nobody didn’t matter. There was to be a folk festival in the Slottsparken, featuring the radical Hoola Bandoola Band – a group sinfully overlooked by the other countries of Europe, in my opinion, but that’s another story.

‘Malmö is just a short ferry-ride from Copenhagen, you know. For centuries the whole of the south of Sweden was Danish, and a certain identity crisis persists in the region to this day. Anyway, the ferry from Copenhagen dropped me on the dock on a pretty pink summer evening, and I followed the little crowd towards the lights at the station, where I bought my first drink at the Bar Central. I felt gloriously free. People looked at me, wondering if I was Terence Stamp – a lot of people thought that in those days. The sabre-flashing scene from
Far from the Madding Crowd
was one I was often called upon to reproduce. I have to admit it was a peerless seduction technique. Although, for reasons that will become apparent, the idea of all but slicing bits off your girlfriend has rather lost its appeal to me, as the years have gone by.

‘Anyway, Swedish pop music was playing in the Bar Central, and it was heady and foreign, backward and progressive, all at the same time. I was dizzy from the drink and the sun, and the promise of all life held ahead of me.

‘I don’t remember how I got involved in the game of blackjack, or how I managed to win fifty kronor. I knew the game only as “pontoon”, which I’d played for pennies at my prep school in Tenterden. But I seemed to be good at it. Stakes were low, but it was fun. Someone bought me a drink, and then another. I played some more, and won even more money, which was a surprise. I noticed one man, about my own age, who couldn’t take his eyes off me. And when the time came to leave, I staggered outside into the strange summer dusk, and came face to face with Stefan Johansson.’