Inner Circle (4 page)

‘Who washed your hair?’

‘Dolly-mum. Yesterday.’

‘How is old Dolly these days! Must give her a tinkle tonight. Now let’s go to the pub. I’ll have a quick bite and you sit outside drinking bitter lemon.’

‘May I have tomato juice, father?’

‘And who on earth taught you this bad habit! Anyway you’ll have your juice and potato crisps to drown the taste with.’

He laughed ho-ho-ho, tried the outside atmosphere with his toes, then pushed the blanket off with the other leg, and as briskly as ever dressed himself and gave Patrick a grin from the mirror when he started to shave. Dad’s night whiskers hadn’t grown much, Patrick thought; the electric razor buzzed around his pink face for a minute, and all was done, or almost. Ah, the hat! With the hat on, his father retired to the lavatory, and while he was lingering there, Patrick wondered what it would be like to have his two mothers and his father as well, in this very room, with him, Patrick, fetching heavy telephone books, drawing curtains, watching them all dress, and sleeping, of course, somewhere in the midst of them, under those flowers on the headboard. They would be a busy family, bumping into one another most of the time, which he wouldn’t mind, and they would also laugh at their Patrick, to Patrick’s unending delight.

The bite in the pub lasted long, until closing time in fact, at three o’clock, but Patrick didn’t mind waiting outside in the doorway. The only thing that bothered him was a puddle of vomit at his feet which a funny man with a beard had left in a great hurry. A cat approached the puddle, thinking no doubt it looked like milk from a tin mixed up with butter but he jumped aside in disgust, and that was that. Soon after, Patrick heard ‘time gentlemen please, time,’ and his father emerged, noticed the puddle, and jumped over it very much as the cat would have done, if he had been inside the pub for a bite.

‘Why are you standing near this filth, Patrick?’

‘Because you told me to wait and not go too far from the door.’

‘Patrick, you’re quite a character, ho-ho-ho!’ The hand patting his chin wasn’t allowed to withdraw; he pressed it to his lips until the ho-ho noise subsided. This was how love sounded, and Patrick could listen to it every time he made his father laugh at him.

‘What were the potato crisps like? Stale?’

‘Yes, daddy, stale.’

‘Sorry, son. The pub is damp. Too near the river. Let’s have a change of air.

We’re going to Bayswater.’

Patrick’s father had one of his houses there, but didn’t live in it, of course. He simply wouldn’t be able to sleep in any of his flatlets because of the thin partitions.

They went down into the South Kensington Tube station and looked at the lighted names on the indicator. Patrick recognized the letter ‘W’ and kept quiet about it.

‘Never comes when you want it, the Inner Circle train. You’d better pop into the loo like a good girl. Heaps of time. It’s upstairs.’

Patrick shook his head twice, once for being called a good girl and the second time because he didn’t want to pee at South Kensington. It would be more fun at the other end, in Bayswater. He hoped his father wouldn’t insist, like Dolly-mum. She had a thing about Patrick popping into every public convenience they passed on their walks in the park; just in case, she would say. No, his father didn’t insist; he decided to go up himself, but returned soon, just as the train was pulling up.

‘It’s Inner Circle,’ Patrick shouted, and they both jumped in smartly. Patrick touched a hard lump on his father’s pocket, then a bottle showed its neck as they were about to choose seats.

‘How did you know it was the right train? You can’t read.’

‘Because I thought you knew, father.’

‘That was clever of us.’ He glanced round, ‘We have a carriage to ourselves, Patrick. But isn’t it stuffy here?’ He took a gulp from the bottle, grimaced at the label on it, drank a little more and flopped into a seat under the drawing of a bottle-neck with tiny people inside it. The next time Patrick looked at the picture his father was snoring.

The train went on, the doors opened and shut, letters jostled on blue strips, then stood still for a moment and retreated together with a station. Patrick meant to count the stations from the first after South Kensington, but the snoring and that bottleneck filled with men confused him. Real people were now entering and leaving the carriage, some stared at Patrick’s father and smiled, and since he couldn’t smile back because he was asleep, Patrick did it for him, which made a good impression all round. Then a blonde lady stepped in with a red umbrella and two parcels. She put them on the seat which so far nobody had occupied out of courtesy to Patrick’s father. The lady heard the snoring, was about to smile when his elbow slipped and tore the paper on one of her parcels.

Patrick didn’t catch what she muttered, but his father woke up with a start, tried to turn round, made another hole in the wrapping, and finally addressed the blonde lady:

‘Where are we, my dear?’

‘Look what you’ve done to my parcel.’

‘I’m terribly sorry. Please forgive me. Had an exhausting day at my chambers, then some idiot drove straight into my car. The poor child is still suffering from the shock. But there you are. . . . Where are we, my dear?’

‘South Kensington is next.’

‘Impossible.’

‘Are you all right?’ The blonde lady had a deep voice, and soon said what her name was, and Patrick’s father said his.

‘Augustus, and I use every letter in it. Unabridged, unshrinkable, that’s me, ho-ho-ho!’

Patrick didn’t want to listen. Women seemed angry with his father at first, then he talked and talked, then the women laughed, nudged him, powdered their noses outside a pub, asked how late it was, pushed the door, and in the end Patrick heard the ho-ho, nothing else.

Now he heard his own name mentioned to the blonde lady. She said something in a whisper, and his father replied just as the doors were breathing out.

‘He’s a bit backward, you see, on account of his mother being Bulgarian.’

‘Oh dear, it’s me. Gloucester Road.’

Patrick wanted the train to stay underground for a very long time and make bigger and bigger circles. His first mother had once been on a tour and he still remembered some of those towns: Oxford, Liverpool, Birmingham, York, Glasgow, Durham. And Leeds, too. Yes, he liked places to sound like that. Now he was travelling between York and Glasgow, all the way under the surface. The woman had just got off, his father helping her with the parcels to the door. ‘Preferably after ten.’ Her deep voice was no more, swallowed and closed up by the breathing doors.

‘Hurry—’ Patrick felt his father’s hand and jumped to his feet. ‘We’ve nearly missed this damned Bayswater again. Going round in circles.’

Patrick was standing on the platform, his head suddenly empty of all names. He tried to remember one at least so that he could tell it to his father.

‘Daddy, it’s Leeds.’

‘What? What did you say?’

‘Oh, nothing, father.’

‘I thought you said Leeds.’ Then he paused and laughed. ‘Ho-ho-ho, I’ll probably get there by mistake, if I have my next snooze at King’s Cross Station.’

2

‘Never had breakfast in my life.’

Augustus repeated his standard explanation to all his lady-friends, current, recent, past and antique. They suffered from seasonal fits of sentimentality over Patrick. Such a sweet, charming and affectionate boy, and you didn’t even allow him to stay the night in your place, because he might have disturbed your beauty sleep and asked for breakfast.

Augustus hated women when they started being dotty about the whims of the otherwise perfectly reasonable child who happened to be his and not theirs.

With his very own hands Augustus had dismantled the grimy gas-ring in his bedsitter to avoid the temptation of brewing tea for himself in the event of a morning hangover. His first meal was always lunch, preferably in a pub, and he never felt ill for fear of being hooked once more by some fuss-pot of a female. That was how the Bulgarian Vera had taken unfair advantage of his debilitated wits eleven years ago, when she had first seduced him after a bottle of vodka, then presented him with her Asiatic flu, and for a dismal week, day and night, nursed him straight into marriage. The singing bitch, she married him so much that after two years he found himself asserting his rights against the name of Boris. With his paternal claws he fought for the Irish and St. Patrick, though in fact he didn’t care about either.

And now the hens were cackling and cackling over his poor head. What has he ever done for that sweet, affectionate child of his!

‘I took him for a ride on the Inner Circle,’ he said proudly to Dolly on the telephone. ‘Yes, the Circle Line, under the ground, you know. We went round twice, and the boy loved every minute of it.’ Out of habit, Augustus tried a crack on Dolly the naive.

‘He arrived safely at Leeds. Father and son are doing well.’

‘Augustus, you’re drunk.’

‘I am never drunk, Dolly, you know that. I only get tipsy whenever I sip little kisses between your shoulder-blades. You have the most beautiful back in Kensington and Chelsea combined. Yes, you have, my lolly-Dolly.’

‘Oh, you’re the same wicked old billy-goat, Augustus.’

She sounded pleased, then became reminiscent, and Patrick sank into the depth of her maternal instincts, which in a bachelor girl of forty-nine were predictably safe below the surface.

On his next visit, however, Patrick found his father full of concern, which frightened him a little. He preferred being laughed at, hearing a yawn or two, and getting those casual single pats when he didn’t expect any.

‘Patrick, you’re going to live with your Dolly-mum.’ This both delighted and puzzled him.

‘Staying the night? He thought of the house next door. Would the dog sleep or bark? He had never seen a sleeping poodle, and was curious.

‘Yes, sleeping and eating, Patrick, it will be the same as at your aunt. . . .’

Augustus forgot which aunt Patrick had been staying with until now. The boy certainly had too many of them. Some were real, others he called aunt by analogy. Whoever put him to bed and got him out of it for breakfast performed an aunt’s functions. His two mothers were far too important to look after him in an ordinary way. Dolly-mum made sense with her blue teapot or on a bench in Kensington Gardens. The first mummy was even more special: she never poured tea, sat in a bus or trotted in the park; she had a warm voice, and floated on it somewhere in the world from Durham to Liverpool and round the circle. Perhaps Leeds was in Australia because the other day they told him about her tour in Australia.

Patrick couldn’t really grasp the new arrangement with Dolly-mum. He would never call her auntie. His thoughts were chasing picture after picture. The poodle would be barking its fuzzy head off when he saw him in the window at breakfast.

Then his father told him about the school. It was called St. Patrick. The word

‘Saint’ didn’t sound like anything he knew, but he approved of the idea that a boy could go to a school bearing his own name.

There must be as many schools as names, he thought, many more than those letters in the alphabet.

St. Patrick’s School put Patrick through the alphabet again. On good days he could read newspaper headlines in a loud voice behind people’s backs, on others, he whined and stammered over a nursery rhyme, or the Lord’s Prayer, until he was asked to leave the letters in peace. All his teachers walked about in white robes which amused him for a time, but he couldn’t get used to calling them all father without any discrimination about their age and height. He believed in only one father, he said, and they praised him for his piety. Finally, he found a way out: whenever he spoke to anyone of them he called him either yes-father or no-father, and this seemed to work well. They were now telling him that besides being pious he was also a polite boy. If Patrick had any sins left over from the interminable alphabet of the other school, the yes-and-no-fathers saw to it that he received a general cleansing. It came about like this: Patrick mentioned his two mothers, a small, kind laughter followed; Patrick went on about his first mother being a Bulgarian on tour, and one of the older yes-fathers suddenly became very itchy. He scratched the bald circle on his head, summoned a couple of no-fathers with whom he talked and nodded, walking up and down the quad; then all three returned and surrounded Patrick with probabilities.

‘We think there’s a probability you weren’t baptized at all. On the other hand, you may be a Greek-Orthodox, that’s quite possible, too. But your aunt was rather vague about your baptism.’ They meant Dolly-mum, but Patrick let them get away with this slip. He didn’t like being Greek and that other thing as well, whatever it was. The old yes-father said he would ring up Patrick’s only father to clarify the matter, as he put it.

This worried Patrick for hours: daddy could be so rude on the telephone when he was woken up at noon.

Days passed, and on the third of April the principal yes-father kissed Patrick on the head, gave him his own hand to be kissed in exchange, and then announced that the christening would take place in the school chapel next Sunday afternoon. ‘In private, of course,’ he said. ‘Unfortunately, your father, Patrick, may not be able to attend, he’s developing a bad cold. It sounded like influenza on the telephone.’

Patrick was later told a few things, and asked how many gods there were in hell, and finally, to appease the most anxious no-father of them all, said:

‘Has the Orthodox god a longer beard?’

‘Judging by the icons, my child-yes, he has.’ The no-father smiled and Patrick saw love opening in that smile.

‘I prefer the one with the Catholic beard,’ he spoke with great conviction.

And they baptized Patrick just in case; and he became so pious that he could see words through the letters in some books and could guess numbers, too. He taught himself to spell Vera in three different ways, and wrote it down twenty-seven times in three rows.

Dolly-mum now gave him three rolls for breakfast which somehow made sense, and he chewed them carefully like a secret, straining his ears to hear the poodle. But the fuzzy mop never barked before nine o’clock. Out of piety, or happiness maybe, Patrick became as plump as a puppy.