Inch Levels (21 page)

‘Might as well.’ Margaret flashed an anxious glance: and Robert shrugged. But he knew the brother’s game. As long as he didn’t begin to recite some damned poem outside the house.

And now here they stood. No, no recitation. But if anything, the brother looked far from crestfallen. He looked – pleased.

‘Not up to much, this place,’ Robert said, ‘is it?’

Margaret looked at him again. Pleading, a little.

But now the brother spoke. ‘I suppose it depends on your perspective.’

Oh,
perspective
.

‘Let’s walk on, will we?’ Margaret said – and they walked on, labouring now up the High Street. It should be fresher up here, there should be a breeze – Robert looked back into darkness, a tunnel of limp-leaved plane trees on the slopes below; there should be a breeze – but no: the air stifled. And he was too warmly dressed, besides: a leather jacket he could not now take off for fear of showing the circles of sweat leaking from his underarms and onto his blue denim shirt. The wrong fabric, the wrong shade. They trudged up the ever-steepening High Street – and turned at Flask Walk and now he was aware with relief that the ground was beginning to fall away again, and that in the distance, ahead of them now, the trees on the Heath were swaying in something like a breeze. A pair of teenage girls clicked down a flight of stone steps from some other street, some other lane: they cut in front of them and walked ahead, talking busily, and he took in their tight jeans, packed arses, bare arms.

Surely, he thought, Margaret will focus on him soon. Surely she will gather her attention together and take him in soon. The brother is – nothing, he is nothing, there is nothing much there. But – and Robert saw the way the brother had of carrying himself, a way that set Robert’s teeth on edge. An upward rush of temper. Young, yes – but there was more to him than that.

The girls walked ahead along Flask Walk, they extended their lead. Robert quickened his pace now, forcing the others to do likewise: his footsteps clattered on the Hampstead cobbles, echoing a little in the narrow lane. The echoes ran up and ran down, they bounced on the dark brick houses to either side. The girls disappeared into the shade of an avenue of lime trees. He’d catch himself, he’d get himself together once they were on the Heath.

*

This was a mistake.

Too soon for him to meet any member of her family: too soon in particular to meet Patrick, to take on the freight of this relationship.

It entered Margaret’s mind, as a sort of pale consolation, that at least Robert wasn’t meeting her mother: that at least she wasn’t about to set off across the Heath with Robert on one side of her and her mother on the other: arm in arm, stride matching stride, like a troupe of chorus girls. She almost laughed, before the reality grabbed her, roughly, that this present situation was bad enough. That these two did not, could not possibly get along. That Robert’s best side was not being brought out: that it took an almost magical combination of forces to bring out this side, and that this combination was not at this moment present.

That this manifestly was no laughing matter.

That her brother was discomfited by this stranger with his rough Belfast accent – and that as a response he was at his worst, his most superior, his most acid.

That she was hot and tired, and grimy and sweaty, after her day in the West End, and exhausted by this unwise climb through Hampstead. Keats and his house had not been worth it. Patrick should not have insisted on it. They should just have gone straight to the Heath and stayed there.

That she could do better than Robert. That she shouldn’t be with a man like this, a man nobody else would take.

She caught her breath, pushed this thought away.

At least Robert hadn’t swung for Patrick.

A pair of young girls appeared ahead of them: fourteen, fifteen, they talked confidently, they laughed. They certainly hadn’t been trailing around central London all day long. The world was their oyster. She eyed them as they clipped ahead, laughing: she felt old, just looking at them, like someone’s aunt. But the Walk was opening up a little now, Flask Walk turning into Well Walk and she took her eye off the girls: she looked to her left, at rampant, flower-laden gardens sloping in front of marching Georgian houses, and to her right, where the houses were narrower, and set directly onto the street. Margaret caught glimpses into these worlds as they passed: in the depths of one house, a woman setting flowers on a table in front of a window, through which a view of London opened up magically; in the depths of another, a family at a table before the same view. English families, in this English city – and now she thought of the big, rambling bungalow at home, of their table set beneath the skylight. She thought painfully of her mother. She peered, looked away, walked on.

The girls vanished into the shade of the lime trees that lined Well Walk. Patrick was pointing out this feature and that feature; another Keats reference, the eponymous well, the health-giving qualities of Hampstead well water, dark with iron. He was talking away, lecturing away: she murmured a question or two and then tried to fade him out – but this was impossible, so aware was she of Robert’s nerves being screwed up and up, a spring ready to explode outwards, releasing who knew how much energy. And now the dark, brick-built eighteenth-century houses gave way to bigger houses, showier and more exuberant Victorian mansion houses in red brick, and now at last they reached the end of Well Walk and crossed the road and passed through the narrow gate and entered the Heath, where the trees were immediately dense, cooling, shadowing. And she felt an immediate relief: at least, she thought, I can keep my face a little hidden now.

How could this have ever been a good idea? Margaret had had an ideal of tranquillity, and had imagined that it might be found up here on the Heath, on the windy summit of Parliament Hill, amid the kite flyers and dog walkers, with London indistinct and silent below. She had imagined tranquillity – not that this was a quality familiar in her life. And now she was here, under the shadows of the trees on the Heath, with twilight not far off. Tranquillity though: this remained unattainable. It would always be unattainable. She felt caught, suddenly, in a web of relationships: these two men who flanked her; her mother and father, in distant Ireland. She would be better off on her own – but no: her soul flinched at the idea.

Never alone.

She cleared her throat. ‘Will we make for Parliament Hill?’

*

‘
High thinking, plain living and small economies.
So they said.’

Margaret murmured, ‘Who said?’

‘Some commentator. About Hampstead at the turn of the century. Gas lamps and poets and intellectuals. The Hampstead women bought their necklaces one bead at a time, from a bead shop on the High Street. Not much money, you see, but they needed to keep up appearances.’

Patrick was filled with malice. A spirit of wickedness, his mother would have said: ready to sweep away any happiness, any smoothness or comfort or tranquillity. He pointed to the old well still in place there on Well Walk.

‘Dark as sherry, they said, with the iron content. You could draw the water right here. Set you up for the day.’ He thought of cholera, himself, and typhoid: these were his associations with London pumps and wells – but iron and in particular sherry served his purposes better at this moment than typhoid and cholera.

Robert might be at his ease around typhoid and cholera. Sherry, though – never.

Not much going on with Robert at the moment. Patrick watched him lope along in his heavy jacket, silent. He seems to have run out of juice, he thought, our simian friend. And she was silent too.

Never mind, thought Patrick. There was a whole lot left to say. He moved on to Well Walk itself.

‘And Keats again: he lived at Number Forty-Six, and DH Lawrence in Number Thirty-Two,’ he rattled on, winding up the tension, ‘and Constable lived – somewhere too. Somewhere along here. Maybe it’s been demolished.’

Nobody said anything. A hot, dirty breeze rattled the dry, heat-struck leaves of the lime trees: and it occurred to Patrick that in fact, he was not, now, enjoying this very much. He had checked his references, he knew all these irritating facts in advance, Margaret had filled him in on Robert’s background with quite enough detail for him to set about pressing all the correct buttons. And he had been pressing them and watching the result.

And yet now the results were in, and there wasn’t much satisfaction to be had.

They left Well Walk behind and entered the Heath: the heat at first seeming greater under the splay-leaved chestnuts and sycamores; but as they walked further, first downhill under the trees and through clearings where great logs lay along the edges of the bare clays, and then uphill through beeches, through brighter and greener light, so the oppressiveness of the evening seemed a little less and the breeze a little more evident. And now they broke through the trees entirely and walked through the upland and there was the summit of Parliament Hill itself: there were the dog walkers and the kite flyers, yes, they were all there; and the Post Office Tower and the dome of St Paul’s, and the thin, indistinct line of the southern hills running on the hazy, pollution-clouded skyline.

They sat.

They sat, the three of them in a row, on one of the benches scattered along the crest of the hill; and Patrick felt – like a fool, like a knave. He felt – vicious. No: there was no
feels
about it: he had been vicious with Margaret, for no other reason than spiteful jealousy. Robert was – not up to much, that was a certainty – but Robert was hardly his priority here.

*

A year or so later, Margaret made the move back to Derry. London was now out of her system, after eighteen months or so. She retrained as a teacher – nobody could say that they were alive and fizzing with imagination, the Jackson kids, in their choice of careers – and that seemed to be that. Everyone would live happily after all.

Everyone including – Robert. Yes, Robert came too. They married: a very traditional wedding, big and splashy and the reception in a hotel in Donegal. There was no convenient brother to act as best man, and Patrick found himself wondering if he would be asked: of course he would have declined, but instead Robert sidestepped the question and dredged up some old North Belfast school pal (as unprepossessing as Robert himself) instead. And that was that. Yes: everyone would live happily.

Patrick had spent the previous months praying to a – he now assumed – non-existent God for this awful man to fade away out of his sister’s life. To be knifed one day by a prisoner escaped from Pentonville, to fall under a train or be run over by a London bus or have his throat cut by someone, anyone. Then, when they returned to Ireland, to fall under a local bus. Or simply to walk away from Margaret and go and live a life of his own – though this would be less lurid a fate and certainly less satisfying.

Of course, Patrick thought, of course we sometimes read history backwards. Inevitably we do: I do it myself all the time, he thought – and this in spite of the fact that I am a history teacher and so have even fewer excuses than most. I spice my memories of the next few years with little bits and grains of knowledge that in fact came later: later, when it was evident to all of us what sort of man he was. We all understood how unsavoury he was: that he liked, from time to time, to have other women; that he barely made the effort to hide these inclinations. That he had a temper and that Margaret was, from time to time, made into his punching bag. We came to realise this – though we never dreamed what this temper would eventually bring, what he was ultimately capable of doing to other people.

At the beginning, however, Patrick was aware only of a fixed dislike that had its roots in pure prejudice. He disliked Robert: his coarseness, his accent, his – yes, his class, his origins. He didn’t want to like Robert – he would have disliked Robert had he been a hero, a Titan, the toast of the town – so the situation was all very straightforward.

And of course he wasn’t a hero, a Titan or the toast of the town. He was the opposite of each of these, which made the situation more straightforward still.

What the rest of the family thought: of course little was said aloud, but it was easy enough to read the smoke signals, to listen to the tom-toms beating quietly in the hills.

*

‘The breed and the seed of him,’ said Sarah. It was the taint of him; she caught the smoke and the reek and the shattered glass of Bombay Street; she caught the people who lived there. She wanted nothing to do with it. Martin stirred in his seat. ‘Sarah, not that kind of language.’ She kept her language to herself, after that.

*

The door to the sitting room was open: as Robert hesitated, on the threshold of entering, Sarah spoke. ‘The breed and the seed of him,’ she said. Her voice carried: could it be heard? – she didn’t care; she hoped so; that much was clear. She was sitting in upholstered, centrally-heated comfort; outside, the grass had been cut in neat, geometric lines; the pampas grass tossed in the wind. He heard Martin move uncomfortably; the leather creaked and squeaked. ‘Sarah, not that kind of language,’ and then the soft tap of rubber on wood, as he and his cane made their way across the floor. Robert slipped back into the kitchen.
The breed and the seed of him
: he’d heard enough. A flame of anger rose and was choked down.

*

‘Have you seen my cane, son?’

Patrick shook his head. ‘Which one?’ His father had over the years amassed a small collection of canes: solid, heavy oak; an elegant blackthorn switch; even one in glossy, fine-grained hornbeam, imported from England.

His father rubbed a jaw. ‘Well, at this point, any of them. How can a man lose, what, three, four canes?’ A pause. ‘What do you think of the handiwork, son?’

At Robert’s handiwork – and they stood, the two of them, and looked up at the new wooden shelves: rubbed with fragrant linseed oil, smoothly finished and handsome.

‘Impressive, it really is. And there’s us,’ said his father, ‘not knowing one end of a screwdriver from the other.’