Homework (24 page)

Read Homework Online

Authors: Margot Livesey

BOOK: Homework
2.64Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
“For suggesting we go out together.” He smiled. He was still wearing his teaching clothes, but he had undone the top button of his shirt and loosened the knot of his thin red tie. “We had this terrible scandal at school today. Someone wrote ‘Fuck you' on the door of the headmaster's office. He was furious. He lectured the whole school about it for ten minutes during assembly. I didn't dare to look at Deirdre.”
He leaned forward, describing the headmaster's circumlocutions. A juke box, or radio, was playing quietly in the background. I felt my sense of purpose wavering; one part of me wanted to relax into Stephen's good mood. But as he continued to put forth various theories as to who might be the culprit, I had a sudden vision of the tiny, shrivelled corpse nestling among my clothes. I raised my glass and drank to steady my purpose. When he paused I said, “I wanted to talk about Jenny.”
“Oh,” said Stephen. He sat back, crossing his legs and clasping his hands as if to ensure that no involuntary gestures would escape him.
As calmly as possible I described what had happened with the money. I mentioned the other accidents that had occurred since Jenny moved in, and then concluded by telling him what she had told me about Selina. Stephen listened with a frown;
several times he seemed on the point of interrupting but refrained. When I finished, he leaned over and took my hand. “Celia, I wish you'd talked to me sooner. About the
Bunty
annual, there's nothing mysterious. I gave Jenny the money. I mean it was her money, but I was keeping it for her.”
He smiled, waiting for me to respond, but I could not utter a word. I was in the grip of furious embarrassment such as I had not suffered since childhood. Not only had I made a mistake but I had made a profoundly foolish mistake. I had accused his daughter of being a thief because she had purchased a new book; that was what it amounted to. If only I had kept silent, or could board a boat to China and never return.
“As for the hole in your pullover,” he continued. “I've no idea how that happened, but I'm sure that Jenny had nothing to do with it. Of course accidents happen, but she would never do anything like that deliberately.” He was similarly sensible about the mouse.
I was so mortified that I could not attend to the details of his conversation, but I grasped the general drift. He was saying how glad he was to have the matter about Selina sorted out; how he had worried about Jenny treating Selina badly. I looked over his shoulder out of the window; the sky was already dark. When we were waiting to hear if our offer on the house had been accepted, I had remarked how different Stephen and I were: I was on tenterhooks, while he seemed entirely sanguine. I had said then that I imagined his brain like a very orderly city, all the streets signposted and running at right angles, every intersection with a traffic light. Whereas my brain was like a maze. Or like a city during the war, when all the street signs had been taken down to confuse the enemy; cars were constantly running into each other, turning into cul-de-sacs, going the wrong way down one-way streets. “So we complement each other perfectly,” Stephen had said, and kissed me.
Now he was watching me. Although the expression on his face was calm, he was fidgeting nervously with his tie. “There's nothing for you to worry about,” he concluded.
“I'm sorry,” I said. “I don't know what came over me. It's a difficult adjustment to make, living with a ten year old.” Suzie's reasons seemed the only excuse I could offer for my absurd accusation.
“It is difficult,” said Stephen, a little too quickly. “Even though Jenny is my daughter, there are some days when there's nothing I want more than for her to be magically transported to Paris. But overall I feel fortunate. I'm getting a second chance at being a father, and after this year, I think, whatever happens, Jenny and I will be friends.”
I thought then of my father and how hard I had wished that I might matter in his life. I reached for Stephen's hand, curling my fingers tight around his.
On Friday night it rained heavily, and in the morning when Stephen and I walked to the corner shop the privet hedges were still beaded with water and the street gleamed. Mr. Murgatee was behind the counter. “Good morning,” he said. “It's a grand day.” I had never heard him speak ill of the weather. Without being asked, he passed us our bag of rolls. We had got into the habit of buying half a dozen of the soft, white Edinburgh baps for breakfast on Saturdays. They were still warm, and I held them close as we walked back towards the house. In this direction, we could see clear across the Forth and into Fife.
“You know what we should do this afternoon?” Stephen said. “We should go to the camera obscura.”
“I didn't know there was one in Edinburgh.”
“It's at the top of the Royal Mile. You get an amazing view of the city. We'd be able to see all this.” He waved his arm to embrace our house, the street, the line of hills shining on the far side of the water.
“I'd love to go,” I said. “My father told me how they work, but I've never been to one.”
We had paused beside the garden gate, and Stephen was still staring off into the distance. “If I ever get rich,” he said, “I'd like to build my own camera obscura. Maybe when you edit a best-seller.”
“That'll be the day. Come on.” I opened the gate. Jenny was looking out of her bedroom window. I smiled, and she waved.
 
 
We set out for the camera obscura after an early lunch. As we were leaving, Stephen suggested that we take the bus into the centre of town. “You know what it's like trying to park on a Saturday afternoon,” he said.
“What if we want to go somewhere else?” Jenny asked. The car was parked immediately in front of the gate, and she stationed herself beside it.
“Like where?” asked Stephen.
“Like Arthur's Seat. Or suppose you and Celia see something you want to buy.”
“Yes,” I said. “Suppose we want to go to Holyroodhouse.”
“You two are worse than my third form.” Stephen held up his hands in a gesture of surrender. “All right, I give in.”
While Stephen drove, we played I spy. “I spy with my little eye something beginning with
B
,” said Jenny.
“Bus,” I said.
“No.”
“Butcher,” said Stephen, pointing to a shop on the left.
“No.”
“Boy,” I suggested.
After about twenty guesses, Jenny revealed the answer: a bulldog that had been waiting to cross the road with its owner when she first spoke.
“That's too difficult,” said Stephen. “You have to choose something that we can see for a while.”
“Okay,” she said. “It's your turn.”
Stephen spied something beginning with C and after half a dozen attempts Jenny solved it: Calton Hill. Then it was my turn. “I spy with my little eye something beginning with F.”
“Flags,” said Jenny immediately, pointing to the several fluttering above Princes Street.
“That's right,” I said.
“Well done,” said Stephen. “I'd never have guessed that.”
We reached the Grassmarket and joined the queue of cars
driving slowly round and round in search of a parking space. Just as Stephen was saying for the second time that he knew we should have taken the bus, a Range Rover pulled out. “There,” said Jenny. “What did we tell you?” Stephen handed her three ten pence pieces, and she slid them into the meter with obvious pleasure. Then she led the way towards the stairs up to the Royal Mile. Like me, Jenny had never been to the camera obscura, but she knew where it was because when her class made a map of the city, Miss Nisbet had marked it in.
The steps brought us out a little below the Castle, and we crossed the street against a coach party of tourists. “There it is,” Stephen said. A small sign advertising the camera obscura hung from one corner of the white house, but otherwise the building looked identical to the other tall stone houses lining the cobbled street. I understood how in my explorations of the city I had failed to notice it. We went inside. A woman, seated at a table, took our money and told us that a showing would begin shortly. Stephen led the way up a narrow spiral stair which wound unevenly past a number of small rooms. Quite suddenly we were on the top floor. On one side of the landing was the camera obscura, the doors still closed, and on the other a terrace overlooking the city. We stepped outside to wait. We were facing towards Princes Street, and from this distance the ceaseless flow of pedestrians and traffic looked almost motionless.
“Isn't that the church where you and Mummy got married?' said Jenny, pointing.
I had always assumed that Stephen and Helen had gone to a registry office. Now I suffered a sharp, double-edged pang. He had already done everything with her, I thought, and whatever he did with me could only be a feeble repetition. At the same time I was reminded of how much I did not know about Stephen; getting married in a church was a major fact, and yet he had not bothered to mention it. While he and
Jenny tried to distinguish the spire, I moved across to the far side of the terrace. The Castle rock was only a few hundred yards away. Stephen had told me that almost every year someone fell trying to climb up to the Castle, and seeing the rock from this angle, I could easily imagine the hordes of enemies who had faltered and perished on those flinty heights.
The doors of the camera opened, and half a dozen people emerged, blinking in the light. A young man summoned us inside. Stephen, Jenny, myself, and a middle-aged couple filed into the small room and stood in a circle around a convex disc, not unlike a round table. The young man closed the doors, leaving the room in darkness save for the light of a dim red bulb. The image of the city on the disc grew sharp.
He began to describe how the camera obscura worked. In the ceiling above us was a periscope, with a lens that reflected the image onto the disc below. The original camera had been built in the 1850s by an optician named Maria Theresa Short and then restored more recently. He angled the periscope in such a way as to show the area immediately surrounding the Castle. The enormous black facade of the Tolbooth Kirk loomed beneath us. The flags flapping on the Castle battlements were flapping in the room. A bird flew behind Saint Giles. The young man handed Jenny a piece of paper folded into a V and told her to hold it in the path of a bus. She did so, and the bus appeared to go up and over the paper. “Oh,” she exclaimed.
“One time when I was doing this,” the young man said, “a boy spotted his family's car parked on Johnston Terrace, and as we were watching, a man got into the car and drove away. Of course there was nothing they could do, except run to the phone.”
“Hear that, Jim,” said the woman standing beside me. “I told you we should have parked in a car park.”
In the darkened room the streets and houses upon which
we had gazed a few minutes before lay seemingly within our grasp, the same in every detail but quite different. Looking at the image on the disc was not like looking through a window or a camera lens, although it did have something in common with each of these. What we were seeing was simultaneously a created image and the real world. As I watched the constantly shifting picture, I began to understand the vast popularity of camera obscuras; prior to the invention of film, this was the only kind of moving picture.
The guide tilted the lens again, and suddenly, as Stephen had predicted, we could see the water of the Forth, blue in the sunlight, and on the far side the soft outline of the hills of Fife.
Stephen and I made pizza for supper. During the meal, Jenny entertained us with descriptions of her science teacher's attempts to do experiments. She knelt on her chair and, using the wine bottle and her glass, imitated Mr. Laing's attempts to dilute a solution. “Well, girls,” she kept saying in a deep voice, then collapsing in giggles. Afterwards the three of us played Monopoly. Jenny and I joined forces to drive Stephen out of business.
 
In the morning I lay in bed dozing, while Stephen rose and dressed. We had no plans and I felt the pleasure of having an entire day at my disposal. Perhaps we could do something decadent, like go to a matinee. Eventually the smell of coffee lured me out of bed. As I went to the bathroom, I could hear Stephen and Jenny talking in the dining room: first his muffled tones, then Jenny, higher pitched and more audible, exclaimed, “Daddy, you always say that.” I washed my face and hands, and opened my contact lens case. Gently I picked up the right lens with the tip of my finger and reached for the cleaning solution. I always performed these actions in exactly the same order. Suddenly I noticed a familiar smell. I sniffed once, twice to be sure, then I laid the lens carefully on the shelf
above the basin and picked up the storage case; instead of the clear, odourless soaking solution, the case was full of a slightly pinkish liquid. It was malt vinegar.
I put my head round the dining room door. “Stephen, could you come here?” I said.
Jenny looked at me, and even though without my lenses I could not see her clearly, I knew, without doubt, that she knew. Stephen, however, was cheerfully oblivious. “What is it?” he asked, as he came out into the hall.
“I want to show you something.” I was about to usher him into the bathroom, when Jenny opened the dining room door, her eyes bright with curiosity. For a moment I thought of confronting her, demanding an explanation then and there, but I was not so far gone in anger as to abandon all caution. “I want to speak to Stephen alone,” I said.
Her eyes widened. She stepped back, closing the door very quietly.
I led Stephen into the bathroom and locked the door behind us. “Go and look at my lens case,” I said.
He stared at me and then stepped over to the basin and picked it up. “Vinegar,” he exclaimed. “How on earth did this get in here?”
I looked at him, waiting for him to answer his own question.
There was a pause. He sniffed the liquid again, then dipped his finger in it and raised it to his lips to make sure. “Celia, was there some sort of mix-up? Did you use it by mistake?”
“I filled the case last thing at night with soaking solution, just as I always do. Did you touch it during the night?”
“No, of course not.” He stared at me, taken aback by my accusation. Then his eyebrows rose, and his eyes widened still further. “You think Jenny did this?” he asked.
“Who else? Imagine if I hadn't noticed. It would have been excruciating.” I waited for an explosion of rage, but he was not angry. He was frowning slightly with what I judged to be mild anxiety and bewilderment.
“It's ridiculous,” he said. “Of course she wouldn't do a thing like that.”
“So you think it's more likely that either of us did it than that she did. Whenever something goes wrong you take her side.” I launched into a vehement speech, enumerating his betrayals. At the height of my tirade—I was talking about the island—there was a knock at the door. Jenny called plaintively, “I need to use the bathroom.”
“In a minute,” Stephen said. Then he turned to me. “Celia, I cannot believe Jenny would try to hurt you, even if she did dislike you, and in fact all the evidence is that she enjoys your company. Maybe there have been some accidents, but children …” He stopped, seeing the expression on my face, and said, “Look, we'll ask her.”
He opened the bathroom door. We came out into the hall, and Jenny hurried in. Stephen went to make coffee. I sat waiting at the dining-room table. Without my lenses everything was vague; I stared through the window at the indistinct landscape. At last I had caught Jenny out. Now Stephen would understand what had been going on, and I felt almost sorry for her; I knew how dearly she valued his good opinion. She seemed to take an inordinate length of time, but presently she returned and sat down at her place. Stephen came in with two cups of coffee. He passed one to me and sat down. “Jenny,” he said, “did you by any chance touch Celia's contact lens case?”
She hung her head, and behind the wings of hair, the colour came into her face. “How did you know?” she mumbled.
“This morning it was full of vinegar. If Celia hadn't noticed, it would have been terribly painful.”
“I'm sorry. I was playing hospitals yesterday. I meant to empty it, but I forgot.”
“How could it have been when you were playing yesterday?” I demanded. “I only put the lenses away when I went
to bed. You must have got up in the middle of the night and put vinegar in.”
“No,” said Jenny. “It was while you and Dad were cooking.”
“You shouldn't play with Celia's things,” Stephen said gently. “Her contact lenses aren't a toy; they're something medical.”
“I'm sorry, Celia,” she said. “I won't do it again. I promise.”
I pulled my chair closer so that there could be no mistaking Jenny's expression. “I filled the case with fresh soaking solution last night long after you were in bed. Whatever you did, you did while Stephen and I were asleep. It wasn't a game.”

Other books

It Gets Better by Dan Savage
Thunder and Roses by Mary Jo Putney
Raised by Wolves by Jennifer Lynn Barnes
The Mighty Quinns: Ryan by Kate Hoffmann
The Undead in My Bed by Katie MacAlister;Molly Harper;Jessica Sims
Drip Dead by Evans, Christy
The Journey's End by Kelly Lucille