Junction X (6 page)

I looked at Alex properly for the first time and found he was blushing, his ears and cheeks flaming, his mouth in a straight line. All he said was “Mum…” in a warning voice. His mother took no notice and continued to talk about him. With a shrug, he returned to staring at the garden and the busy bird table.

Valerie, who had been floating in and out whilst we were talking, stuck her head through the door and said, “Do come through to the dining room.”

“Take your drinks through,” I said. “I’ll get some wine.” I didn’t even watch Alex pass by. I don’t think I ever told him that, and I wish I had. When I look back to that first night, I find it hard to believe that I was more interested in finding a mediocre Beaujolais than I was in learning more about him. But then—we were both different people. We were all of us different people.

Chapter 4

“You won’t have heard of me,” my wife said. “Of course, I wasn’t Valerie Johnson back then; I was Valerie Sutton.”

“Oh but we have! Fancy! Valerie Sutton!” Sheila exclaimed, tackling the stroganoff with something that looked like trepidation. “We follow the tennis, have done for years. We’ve never liked football much.”

“Not football, no,” added Alfred. “I don’t mind cricket. But always been very fond of tennis. Been up to Wimbledon once or twice, when Alec was younger.”

“You were very good.”

“No, not really,” Valerie said.

“Good enough to get on the circuit, and there’s not many young ladies who can do that,” Alfred said. “Mind you, it’s all Russians and Bulgarians now.”

Valerie turned to Alex while I opened another bottle. “And do you play tennis, Alec?”

He shook his head, and Alfred continued. “He’s not a great one for games, I’m afraid. Your wife tells me that you play golf?”

“When I can,” I said. “Sheila, may I top you up?”

“When he can,” echoed Valerie. “What he means by that,” she gave me a sweet smile, which I returned, “is that he plays every chance he can. Why is it, Sheila, that women are capable of appreciating many things, and yet men get obsessed with one?”

Sheila let me refill her glass and smiled. “I do know what you mean. Luckily, Alfred is not like that, but Alec…”

“Mum…” he said quietly.

“With him, it’s all trains.”

I looked up, interested. “Really?”

“Oh yes, ever since he was small, nothing interested him but trains. His dad had a pre-war Hornby that we set up for him, and since then it’s grown and grown so much it was taking over the house. Apart from the benefit of being near St. Peter’s, the nice thing about the new house is the big room at the top. He can play up there to his heart’s content.”

I glanced at him with more interest and saw that his fringe had fallen over his eyes. He couldn’t have got his head any further down without actually sticking it into the stroganoff. I felt sorry for him. I estimated he was seventeen, perhaps eighteen, and no one that age likes to be accused of playing.

“It’s that big, then?” I asked. “The layout?”

Alfred nodded, swallowing. “It’ll take more than a day or so for us to set it all up, but when we have, I hope you’ll come over and see it. It’s something to see, isn’t it, son?” Alex nodded but didn’t speak again that night.

My talented wife gently steered the dinner conversation away from the masculinity of model trains. The remainder of the evening, however, has been blurred in time. We spent a lot of evenings with Alex’s parents and this one doesn’t stand out in my mind, unlike some of the others. After we shut the door after them, Valerie surprised me by turning to me and drifting into my arms.

“They are nice,” she said. “I liked them.” She tipped her face up to be kissed and I did so, chastely, on her forehead.

“The boy’s a bit old to get on with the twins, though,” I said, switching off the porch light.

“Mmm,” she said, and I remembered too late the tiger trap I’d just stepped into—the reason I’d spent the night in the spare room the night before. Valerie wanted another child, and I was running out of excuses. But she didn’t bite, to my enormous relief. She kissed me on the cheek and disappeared to clear up.

In the sitting room, I debated between Ella Fitzgerald and
Rachmaninov
. The classical music won and I threw myself onto the settee and stretched out, remembering guiltily and a little too late, to toe off my shoes. Phil weighed heavy on my mind. For ten minutes or so, all I did was lie there and think of him. I tried to put him into two boxes, the way he did. Phil the mate, whom I missed. Missed playing golf with, missed down the pub and missed laughing with. I hadn’t realised that his move would affect us so much and that he would find new friends, but then, him being Phil, I should have realised he would. Then there was the other Phil. The one with the dark and wicked voice, the one with the teasing fingers.

It was easy enough to separate them out like that. All I needed to decide was did I want Phil One or Phil Two? Or did I want them both? Though they seemed to be separate entities, I had come to realise that I couldn’t have one of them without taking the other, and that I was going to have to deal with that.

I smoked two cigarettes on the trot, while the music poured over me. Then, when the first movement ended, I strode into the hall and dialled Phil’s number.

“Hello?”

“Oh. Phil? It’s Ed.”

“Eddie!” His voice was the same, hail-fellow-well-met. “You do realise this is the first time you’ve rung me?” I smarted that he could put me on the back foot so easily. He was right, of course—I hadn’t. “What’s up?”

I took a deep breath. “I want you to get me into The Sands.”

He exhaled, and I could hear the smile in his voice. “Nothing would give me greater pleasure, old boy. This is sudden, isn’t it? What’s up? Tired of slumming it? Or just missing me?”

I remembered the way he reacted whenever I tried to be affectionate and realised he was teasing me because he could, because it was dangerous and because he knew me too well. “I’d like to see more of you,” I said carefully, but I wasn’t careful enough, for he leapt on the double entendre with schoolboy glee.

“I
bet
you would.”

“Phil.”

“Oh, don’t be so stuffy, Eddie, you know I’m only joking. Why don’t you come over here on Saturday? I’ll take you over there and we can fill in some forms and schmooze another member into speaking for you. It’s pricey, Eddie, you know that.”

“You let me worry about that.”

“Will do. Your funeral expenses. See you, then—about eleven?” There was a silence. “Eddie? You’re all right?”

“Yes,” I said, taking a small victory that I’d made him mildly concerned. “I’m fine. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Bring your cheque-book.”

“I will.” I put the phone down, feeling reckless and happy.

I poured a brandy for myself and a Cointreau for Valerie, putting it next to her chair for when she came in, and I justified my decision by putting it down as a business decision—something that would benefit my career. In that way it was a viable expense. What I
didn’t
listen to was the little voice telling me that I should have discussed it with my wife first.

“Who was that?” Valerie asked as she sank gracefully into her chair and curled her legs up under her.

“Phil.”

“Oh, how lovely. It’s about time you two patched it up.”

I frowned at her. “What do you mean? We hadn’t fallen out.”

“Darling,” she said, “you’ve been like a bear with a sore head since he moved and didn’t contact you. You could have rung him anytime, but you’re stubborn and had to wait until he rang you. You’re like a schoolboy sometimes, I swear.”

“You never said anything.”

“It was between you and him,” she said. “I knew you were pining over him. I wondered why you didn’t take the earlier train, if you wanted to keep in touch.”

“I’m not pining!” I said, stung and mildly guilty. I changed the subject a little. “Don’t you miss Claire?”

“Not so much,” she said. “I had an established circle before Claire came along. And, unlike you, I am capable of picking the phone up from time to time.”

I grinned, then. My mood had lightened, helped, no doubt, by the brandy. I thought about inviting her over onto the settee, but I wasn’t quite ready for that yet. Besides, she might have started talking about children again. We sat in companionable silence for a while, and I didn’t even complain when she changed the music for the television. Patrick Moore regaled us with something about radiation belts around the earth and, after the news, we went to bed.

That night Valerie was affectionate and, to complete the perfect husband behaviour set throughout the evening, I made love to her, but, despite a valiant attempt and pounding until we were both sore, nothing happened. I wanted to ask her to suck me, or at least to bring me off in her hands, but I couldn’t ask it of her. She’d question it, I knew, wonder where I had learned of such things, and probably would jump to the wrong conclusion. So, as so many other times in our married life, I pulled the unfilled rubber from my cock and disposed of it. Valerie hugged me and said it didn’t matter, but I wasn’t fooled by her kittenish compliance; I was being treated to a temporary cease-fire. I had no doubt that the battle would continue on another front, another time.

I know that it is pointless to write this now. If I’d told Alex everything, would he have been revolted? Perhaps I should have spoken about her in more detail, made him understand a little more about our lives. How could a married man explain to a teenager? Would it have mattered if I’d done so?

+ + +

Saturday was cloudy but warm, and Valerie had planned a day in London for her and the twins. The zoo, then shopping for new blazers and shoes. The time between waking and setting off was filled with headache-inducing chaos and excitement. It seemed the whole household was in the bedroom and I had about twenty children, at least.

“Mother!” John yelled, as he thundered downstairs for the sixteenth time, “Do you think we’ll have time to see it all?”

“I doubt we’ll see it all, dear,” Valerie called, brushing Mary’s hair before plaiting it.

“He just wants to see the chimps,” Mary said, “so he’ll know how to behave when we get to Harrods.”

“That’s not nice,” Valerie said, moving across to kiss me. “If he behaves like a chimp, we’ll leave him in the pet department.”

 
I was battling with the laces of my golfing shoes, which were knotted solid. She took the shoes from me and, even with the length of her nails, she conquered the laces in three deft movements.

“Thanks,” I said, gratefully, “What would I do without you?” Which made her smile, even if it was only a pale ghost of one. I wanted to take her by the hand and say sorry, but I don’t think either of us would have understood why I’d said that.

“I can’t imagine,” she said almost dryly. “I’ll see you this evening.”

“I’ll probably be eating out, so don’t expect me.”

“Of course.”

Mary at least remembered she had a father and kissed me messily before running after her mother. For a while, it sounded as if the hordes of Genghis Khan were rampaging downstairs until the front door slammed and silence reigned at last.

I pondered between Val’s Wolseley and the Bentley and decided on the latter. Best to make an impression. Besides, my clubs were already in the boot from the weekend before.

I drove under the bridge and towards the seafront. It was another hot day, and the road was busier than usual with people going to the beach; the car was stuffy and over-warm, and not for the first time I considered splashing out on a convertible. On English days like this, it seemed the thing to do.

Phil’s house, when I eventually found it after weaving around and past the new estate at the far end of the seafront, surprised me. He had always said that he loved the individuality of his house in The Avenue, and yet he had moved into a detached white 1930s monolith that was exactly the same shape and size as its neighbours. The drive was wide and swept around a cubist fountain at the front. With the sun shining off the gleaming house, I was glad I’d worn sunglasses. Smiling, his teeth as white as the house, Phil burst from the front door like a mad dog.

“About time, too.” He flung an arm around my shoulders and led me into the house, bellowing for Claire. In spite of my dislike of art deco, I had to say that the house was impressive, with light wooden floors, a white wrought iron staircase, all the rooms bright, almost dazzling. A very different atmosphere from the dark mock Tudor of The Avenue. He led me into a sunny room with wide rounded French windows where Claire sat, all neat tweed and shining black hair. With a smile, she rose from a wickerwork chair to kiss me.