In The Presence Of The Enemy (20 page)

“Shit,” he whispered. He leaned into the sink, his hands on the draining boards on either side of it. Perhaps, like his wife, he should have gone to work today. At least there were motions to be gone through at work.

Here there was nothing except his thoughts.

And they were maddening.

He had to get out. He had to do something.

He poured another mug of coffee and drank it down. He found that his head had stopped pounding and the nausea was beginning to fade. He became aware of the monastic chanting that he’d heard upon waking, and he moved towards its location, which seemed to be the sitting room.

Mrs. Maguire was on her plump knees in front of the coffee table, where she’d set up a cross and some statues and candles. Her eyes were closed. Her lips moved silently. Every ten seconds precisely, she slid another bead of her rosary through her fingers, and as she did so, tears leaked from beneath her sooty lashes.

They dripped off her round cheeks and onto her pullover, where two splodges of damp on her ample breasts told him how long she had been weeping.

The chanting came from a tape recorder, from which solemn male voices were intoning the words
miserere nobis
again and again. Alex knew no Latin, so he couldn’t translate. But the words sounded appropriate. They brought him back to himself.

He couldn’t do nothing. He could act and he would. This wasn’t about Eve. This wasn’t about Luxford. This wasn’t about what had happened between them or why. This was about Charlie, who couldn’t hope to understand the battle going on between her parents.

And Charlie was someone he could do something about.

Dennis Luxford waited for a moment before honking the horn when Leo came out of the dentist’s surgery. His son stood in a blaze of late morning sunlight, his white-blond hair ruff ling in the breeze. He looked left and right, perplexity creasing his forehead. He expected to see Fiona’s Mercedes, parked three buildings down from Mr. Wilcot’s surgery where she had dropped him an hour earlier. What he did not expect was to fi nd that his father had decided upon a man-to-man lunch before returning Leo to his Highgate school.

“I’ll fetch him,” Luxford had told Fiona when she was about to leave the house to pick up their son and ferry him back to school. And when she’d looked doubtful, he’d gone on with, “You said he wanted to talk to me, darling. About Baverstock. Remember?”

“That was yesterday morning,” she replied.

There was no reproach in her words. She wasn’t angry that he’d failed to rise in time to have that breakfast conversation with their son. Nor was she angry that he hadn’t returned till long past midnight last night. She had no idea he’d waited fruitlessly until after eleven for a message from Eve Bowen telling him to run the truth about Charlotte on the front page of the paper. As far as she was concerned, last night was all about his job’s making another necessary intrusion into their lives. She knew the odd hours his career frequently demanded of him, and she was merely offering him the facts, as she always did: Leo had spoken about talking to his father two days ago; he’d planned the conversation for yesterday morning; she couldn’t be certain that he still wanted to talk to his father today. She had good reason for this line of thought. Leo was as changeable as the English weather.

Luxford honked the horn. Leo spun in his direction. His hair swept outward—sun lighting its ends like a halo—and his face brightened with a smile. It was an enchanting smile, very like his mother’s, and whenever he saw it Luxford’s heart tightened at the exact same moment that his mind enjoined Leo to toughen up, smarten up, walk with his fi sts cocked, and think like a yob. Naturally, Luxford didn’t want his son actually to be a yob, but if he could just get him to think like one—even like one-tenth of one—his general manner of confronting life wouldn’t be so troubling.

Leo waved. He swung his rucksack up to his shoulder, gave a little skip, and headed happily in his father’s direction. His white shirt, Luxford noticed, was hanging outside his trousers and below his navy uniform pullover on one side. Luxford liked the look of this dishevelment. Lack of interest in neatness was completely out of character in Leo but defi -

nitely in character for the average boy.

Leo climbed into the Porsche. He said,

“Daddy!” and quickly corrected himself to,

“Dad. ’Lo. I was looking for Mummy. She said she’d be at the bakery. Over there.” He crooked a finger in that direction.

Luxford took the opportunity to sneak a look at Leo’s hands. They were perfectly clean, their nails clipped, no dirt beneath them. Luxford catalogued this information along with everything else that concerned him about his son. He felt impatient with it.

Where was the dirt? the scabs? Where were the hangnails? the plasters? Damn it all, these were Fiona’s hands he was looking at, with long, tapering fingers and oval nails with perfect half moons at the cuticles. Had any of his own genetic material gone into the making of his son? Luxford wondered. Why should similarity of appearance translate to similarity of everything else as well? Leo was even going to inherit Fiona’s willowy height, not Luxford’s own more compact frame, and Luxford had spent many thoughtful hours considering what use Leo might make of his body. He wanted to think of his son as a distance runner, a hurdler, a high jumper, a long jumper, a pole vaulter. He did not want to think of his son as Leo thought of himself: a dancer.

“Tommy Tune is quite tall,” Fiona had pointed out when Luxford said no, no, defi -

nitely not to a pair of tap shoes Leo had wanted for his birthday. “And Fred Astaire. Wasn’t he tall as well, darling?”

“That’s hardly the point,” Luxford had replied from behind clenched teeth. “For God’s sake, Leo isn’t going to be a dancer, and he’s not getting any tap shoes.”

So Leo had taken matters into his own hands. He superglued pennies to the toes and the heels of his best pair of shoes and tapped energetically on the tiles in the kitchen. Fiona had labelled this behaviour inventive. Luxford called it destructive and disobedient, and he gated Leo for two weeks as punishment. Not that being gated mattered to Leo. He sat contentedly in his room, reading his art books, caring for his finches, and rearranging his photographs of the dancers he admired.

“At least it’s modern dance,” Fiona pointed out. “It’s not as if he wants to study ballet.”

“Out of the question, and that’s my fi nal word on it,” Luxford said, and he made certain that Baverstock School for Boys hadn’t added dancing—tap or otherwise—to its cur-riculum since he had been a pupil.

“We were going to have toasted teacakes,”

Leo was saying. “Mummy and I. After the dentist. My mouth’s all numb, though, so I don’t expect I would have much enjoyed eating them. Does it look peculiar, Dad? My mouth? It feels quite odd.”

“It looks fine,” Luxford said. “I thought we’d have lunch. If you can miss another hour of school and if your mouth isn’t bothered.”

Leo grinned. “Wicked!” He squirmed round in his seat and reached for his seat belt.

He said, “Mr. Potter wants me to sing a solo on Parents’ Day. He told me yesterday. Did Mummy tell you? It’s to be an alleluia.” He squirmed back into position. “It’s not an actual solo, I suppose, since the rest of the choir will sing as well, but there’s a part where I get to sing all alone for something like a whole minute. That counts as a solo, I expect.

Doesn’t it?”

Luxford wanted to ask if there wasn’t something else his son could do for Parents’ Day, like build a science project or give a speech exhorting his fellow pupils into a political uprising. But he bit off the words and started the car, guiding it into the late morning traffic. He said, “I’ll look forward to hearing you,”

and added mendaciously, “I always wanted to be in the choir at Baverstock. They have a fi ne one, but I couldn’t carry a tune. Whatever I sang always sounded like stones clattering round in a bucket.”

“Did you really?” Leo homed in on the lie with a disconcerting perspicacity also inherited from his mother. “That’s funny. I wouldn’t ever expect you to want to be in a choir, Dad.”

“Why not?” Luxford glanced at his son.

Leo was delicately pressing his fi ngertips into his upper lip, curiously testing his mouth for its degree of numbness.

“I expect you could get your lip mashed up after the dentist and you wouldn’t even know it,” the boy said thoughtfully. “I expect you could chew it off and not know it either. Brilliant, that, isn’t it?” And then, again like his mother, that unexpected shifting of conversational gears so as to take the listener by surprise. “I expect you’d think it was rather sissy, being in a choir. Wouldn’t you, Dad?”

Luxford wasn’t to be sidetracked off the topic of his choice. He also wasn’t going to allow his son to turn the conversation into an analysis of the father. Fiona did enough of that. “Have I mentioned that Baverstock has a school canoe club? That’s something new since I was a pupil. They practise on the swimming pool—these are one-man canoes, by the way—and they make a yearly expedition to the Loire.” Was that a flicker of interest on Leo’s face? Luxford decided it was and went on. “It’s part of the C.C.F., the canoeing.

They make their own canoes. And during the Easter holiday they have a week’s camp for adventure training. Climbing, parascending, shooting, camping, first aid. You know the sort of thing.”

Leo’s head lowered. His pullover had got rucked up by the seat belt. The buckle of his trouser belt was exposed, and he fingered this.

“You’re going to like it even more than you expect,” Luxford said, aiming for a tone that indicated his blithe assumption of Leo’s complete cooperation. He made the turn up Highgate Hill, heading for the high street. “Where shall we have lunch?”

Leo shrugged. Luxford could see his teeth chewing at his lip. He said, “Don’t do that, Leo. Not while it’s numb,” and Leo seemed to sink farther into his seat.

Since no suggestion was forthcoming from his son, Luxford chose randomly, sliding the Porsche into an available parking space near a trendy-looking cafe in Pond Square. He ushered Leo inside, ignoring the fact that his son’s usually light-hearted gait had altered to a heavy-hearted trudge. He squired him to a table, handed him a laminated ivory menu, and read the illuminated chalkboard aloud for the daily specials.

He said, “What’ll it be?”

Leo shrugged again. He set down the menu, rested his cheek in his palm, and kicked the heel of his shoe against the iron chair leg. He sighed and with his other hand he rotated the vase at the table’s centre and repositioned the sprig of white flowers and their accompanying greenery so that they could be viewed from every angle.

He did this with apparent unconsciousness, a second-nature activity that raised his father’s hackles and destroyed his patience.

“Leo!” Luxford’s voice had completely lost its air of paternal bonhomie.

Leo hastily withdrew his fi ngers from the vase. He picked up the menu and made a show of studying it. “I was just wondering,” he said in a low voice, his chin drawn in to illustrate the fact that his wondering was a wondering wondered to himself.

“What?” Luxford demanded.

“Nothing.” The foot kicked at the chair leg again.

“I’m interested. What?”

Leo lifted his nose towards the f lowers.

“Why Mummy’s lunaria has smaller fl owers than those.”

Luxford set his own menu down with painstaking diligence. He looked from the fl owers—whose name he could not have uttered even under threat of death—to his maddening son. Baverstock School for Boys was called for, all right. And the sooner the better. Without it, in another year Leo’s eccentricities would be beyond remedy. How did he
know
the damn things he knew anyway? Fiona talked about them, true, but Luxford knew his wife didn’t sit Leo down and lecture to him on the marvels of botany any more than she encouraged him to devour art books or admire Fred Astaire. “Dennis, he’s beyond me,” she said more than once late at night long after Leo had gone to bed. “He’s his own person, and it’s a lovely person, so why are you trying to make him you?”

But Luxford wasn’t trying to make Leo into a miniature version of himself. He was just trying to make Leo into a miniature version of Leo the future adult. He didn’t want to think that this current Leo was a larval form of the Leo to come. The boy merely needed guidance, a firm hand, and a few years away at school.

When the waitress came for their order, Luxford chose the veal special. Leo gave a shudder, said, “That’s a baby cow, Dad,” and selected a cottage cheese and pineapple sandwich. “With chips,” he added, and told his father in a typical display of honesty, “They’re extra.”

“Fine,” Luxford said. They both ordered their drinks and when the waitress left them, they both stared at the lunaria that Leo had rearranged.

It was early for lunch, just before noon, so they had most of the restaurant to themselves.

There were only two other occupied tables, and these were at the far end of the restaurant and sheltered by potted trees, so they had no means of true distraction. Which was just as well, Luxford decided, because they needed to have their talk.

He made the first foray. “Leo, I know you aren’t particularly happy about going to Baverstock. Your mother’s told me. But you must know I wouldn’t make a decision like this if I didn’t think it was for the best. It’s my own school. You know that. And it did wonders for me. It shaped me, gave me backbone, made me feel confident. It’ll do the same for you.”

Leo went the direction Fiona had predicted.

His foot kicked rhythmically at the chair leg as he spoke. “Granddad didn’t go there. Uncle Jack didn’t go there.”

“Right. Quite. But I want more for you than either of them has.”

“What’s wrong with the shop? What’s wrong with the airport?”

It was an innocent enquiry made in a calm and innocent voice. But Luxford wasn’t about to engage in a discussion of his father’s appli-ance shop or his brother’s position in security at Heathrow. Leo would have liked that, since it would have directed the spotlight onto someone else and possibly caused a complete shift in the conversation if he played his cards right. But Leo wasn’t in charge at the moment.