King of the World (6 page)

Mervyn turned back to his work with an air of
overwhelming
relief, and the uneasy exchange was over. The problem of prime numbers – whatever it might consist of
– was serving as a comfortable substitute preoccupation for the problem of Christopher’s mental state.

And thus it remained for the following weeks, during which Norah’s anxieties slowly and steadily deepened.

By the time Norah had finished her phone call, relieved rather than dismayed by what she had heard –
centipedes
which tapped out Morse signals with their hundred legs were a soft option compared with the thing she had feared – it was quite dark. She drew the heavy, floor-length curtains against the misty darkness outside, and then sat for a while, considering her next move. They didn’t seem to be thinking of throwing her out – not just yet, anyway; though it was awkward that they weren’t letting her pay any rent. It made things embarrassing which would otherwise have been easy and straight-forward. For instance, right now she was wondering if she was entitled to switch on the imitation coal fire in this apparently communal living-room. Must have a talk with Diana when she comes in, she mused; and even as the thought passed through her mind, it was borne in upon her that Diana was already in, was, at this very moment, coming into the room.

But how strangely she was behaving! Pushing the door a little way open, and peering cautiously round it, as if fearing that something might be about to leap out on her.

“Hullo!” Norah said in what she felt to be a perfectly normal voice, and was about to continue with some sort
of apology for having used the phone, and a promise to pay for the call, when Diana silently withdrew her head and retreated without a word, closing the door softly behind her.

It was a couple of uneasy hours later when the two met up in the kitchen, brewing respectively a mug of coffee and a half-pint packet of instant soup. With the to-ing and fro-ing in the restricted space around the cooker, unbroken silence was impossible to maintain; especially for Diana, whose curiosity had by now
overcome
her initial panic at finding herself locked up (well, sort of) with a raving lunatic, and who longed to hear more about the centipedes. Insane or not, it had to be a good story, and Diana was partial to good stories, both professionally and in her ordinary social life.

And so it came about that, within a very few minutes, the two of them were cosily seated one on each side of the imitation coal fire, sipping their hot drinks and embarking on that sort of late-night conversation which is bound to end in an exchange of life-stories.

Well, why not? Norah had realised, by now, that she was a very poor liar. Already she had forgotten exactly what she’d told her friends on that first evening. It certainly hadn’t been a success; she’d already put her foot in it about that imaginary Women’s Refuge – Diana had caught her out almost at once in some sort of factual slip. Even less did she remember what she’d told Alistair during that unexpected meal that she’d rather disconcertingly shared with him. They had had a pizza, and he’d ordered a bottle of red wine to go with it, it had been so long since she’d enjoyed the sort of social life that involved sharing bottles of red wine, that her two – or was it three? – glasses had gone straight
to her head, and her answers to his increasingly tactless questions had probably been wildly incoherent. Oh, she’d lied about herself all right, of that she felt sure: but even lies can be discreet or indiscreet. And anyway, he hadn’t believed her, you could see he hadn’t. He’d been amused, though, and she’d been hazily flattered to feel that she was still capable of amusing a new man, even after all these black years.

“I told you a lie!” she blurted out now, in response to Diana’s cautious feelers. “I told you I hadn’t got any children, but I have. I have a son. I didn’t want to tell you about him, but I think I must. He’s eighteen and he’s a schizophrenic. I can’t bear it any more and so I’ve run away, which was an awful thing to do. There, now you know. I’m bad news. Throw me out if you like, I wouldn’t blame you.”

She wouldn’t, of course, be thrown out: no way. All unwittingly, she was employing the time-honoured Scheherazade technique: dangle a fascinating unfinished tale in front of someone, and rather than miss the dénouement they will refrain from murder, let alone from evicting you from their flat.

“It all began five years ago”, she told Diana. “It was one evening early in April. He was thirteen at the time …”

But
was
that when it began? Hadn’t there been earlier occasions – much, much earlier, when it could be seen, with hindsight, that something was wrong? Norah recalled her small son’s perennial reluctance to spend time with children of his own age. It had been a nuisance, she remembered thinking, because it meant she couldn’t join easily in the casual
child-swapping
arrangements by which the young mothers
of the neighbourhood secured stretches of child-free leisure for themselves, turn and turn about; but it hadn’t occurred to her, at the time, to worry about it. Nor did she rate as anything more than an inconvenience Christopher’s tiresome tendency to ignore any child who had been invited in to play with him. After a few minutes of eyeing the newcomer in sullen silence, he would turn away and get on with his own solitary amusements, while his mother was landed with the task of entertaining the small visitor. Again, a nuisance, but not, so far as she could remember, a cause for worry. And, of course, with Mervyn assuring her that it was all because their child was so brilliant, and Louise next door assuring her that kids were all a pain in the neck one way or another (if it wasn’t that, it would be something else) well, between the two of them, they quashed any qualms she might have had almost before they were born. And, on top of all this, Christopher was a very easy child in all sorts of ways; quiet, reasonable and well-behaved. She was lucky, really.

Or thought she was.

In the process of talking to Diana, it was all coming back to her with painful vividness; all the more painful because the events were now seen in the lurid light of hindsight; of knowing how it would all end.

“How awful for you,” Diana was saying. “And so what happened after that?”

After the episode of the seventeen-times tables, she meant; and Norah tried to think. What exactly
had
happened next?”

Certainly, during the following summer, Christopher had become increasingly silent and moody – but wasn’t that typical of adolescents everywhere? But there had
been frightening episodes now and then. Norah recalled one that had happened in the summer holidays that year – August it must have been, late August. Christopher had spent the whole morning and afternoon buried in his studies; and Norah, having tried in vain to get him at least to bring his books out into the garden and get some fresh air, had finally given up and settled herself in a garden chair on the patio, from where she could see the late-blooming roses and hear the bees humming in and out of the michaelmas daisies. She was reading, deeply immersed in her book, and so wasn’t sure quite when it was when the sound of hammering began, nor how soon it was when she began to realise that it wasn’t one of the neighbours engaged on some piece of “Do-it-yourself,” or “Do-it-your-selfishness,” as Louise used to call it when it was her husband strewing sawdust all over the carpet. No, it wasn’t a neighbour this time; the noise was coming from
her
house. Norah was at once pricked with unease, though she couldn’t quite have said why. Surely it would be a
good
thing, not a sinister one, if for once Christopher had abandoned his books in favour of something practical?

She hurried indoors.

At first, she couldn’t quite make out what he
was
doing. With hammer and nails he seemed to be fixing a huge wooden board, about two feet wide and five feet high, to his bedroom wall, while all around lay scattered chunks of plaster.

“
Chris
top
her
!” she cried from the doorway “What are you
doing
?
Where did you get that great piece of …”

And then she realised where he had got it. It was simply the reverse side of the full-length mirror which
had been a fixture on his bedroom wall ever since they’d moved here. With chisel and claw-hammer, he had wrenched it from its moorings, regardless of the damage to the wall, and was now savagely nailing it up again, with the glass facing inwards, against the wall.

“
Christopher
!” she shrieked, forgetting that she was a psychiatrist’s wife, and giving way to blind fury, “How dare you! Just look what you’ve done!” – gesturing at the mess of scattered plaser.

And when he said nothing, paid no attention to her whatever, but just went on hammering, Norah plunged across the room, snatched the hammer from his hand, and demanded an explanation.

All this was entirely the wrong thing to do, as Mervyn was to point out in no uncertain terms when he arrived home that evening; but at the time it had seemed to be what anyone would have done.

And indeed, more or less, it had worked. It at least got the boy talking, giving a careful and considered explanation that, unless you had been listening closely, might have made his bizarre action seem almost sane.

“I don’t like that mirror,” he said, eyes narrowed. “I’ve never liked it. I don’t like that boy who lives in it. I don’t like the way he looks at me, sometimes he seems quite mad. He has mad eyes. He’s always there, getting in the way, when I want to look at myself, and so I’ve decided to give him a lesson. He’ll just be looking out at a blank wall now. That’ll teach him!”

Diana was listening, rapt and spellbound, as indeed anyone might be.

“Whatever happened then?” she asked. “I mean, when your husband came home? Surely he realised then that the boy was mentally ill?”

“But he didn’t, Diana. You won’t believe it, but he still didn’t. When he saw what had happened, the mess of plaster and everything, he was furious, of course, as anyone would be. But not with Christopher. No, with
me
! “Look what you’ve driven him to!” he said later that evening. “It’s this crazy possessiveness of yours! I knew, I knew things were coming to a crisis! He’s at this vulnerable age when he needs above all a supportive and understanding background – and what happens? You, his mother, have mishandled the situation so grossly as to exacerbate his normal adolescent identity problems to a point where some violent resolution is his only option. In order to save himself he has to destroy himself symbolically; destroy, that is, his mirror image. And I’m afraid, Norah, that you bear a lot of the responsibility.”

“And then he listed all the awful things I’d done to him, ever since he was a baby. How I used to hold him up in front of the mirror when he was only a few months old, so that he could play a game of smiling, laughing, waving his arms about and watching the baby in the mirror doing the same. All right, it was a game; all right, the baby appeared to enjoy it; but did I not realise how dangerous a game it was? Deliberately inculcating the illusion of being two individuals, not one? What sort of a mother is it, he asked me, who goes out of her way to force a split personality on her child when he is barely a year old?”

“But how unfair!” Diana expostulated. “I’m sure all mothers and babies play this game with mirrors at one time or another, and the babies love it. Why should Christopher be the only one who …”

“Yes, well, that’s what I said, more or less, but of
course Mervyn wouldn’t listen. And he accused me of damaging the child by reading him
Alice through the Looking Glass
as a bedtime story. Didn’t I realise that it isn’t a children’s story at all, but a farrago of obscene symbolism aimed at perverted adults? By reading him such a book, I’d been building into his psyche a deeply-entrenched phobia about mirrors, which was now distorting what would otherwise have been the normal identity-crisis of early adolescence.

“He ended up kind of forgiving me, and giving me instructions for my future behaviour: ‘The important thing now, Norah, is that you
leave
him
alone
. Stop fussing. He is working out his own problems in his own way. Just get off his back, and he’ll be fine.’”

Was it altogether wise, Norah was beginning to wonder, to be confiding all this in her companion? She didn’t really know Diana all that well, and what she did know – namely, that Diana had some sort of a job in television – was not entirely reassuring. Might she not, even at this moment, be planning how to use these admittedly colourful confidences for some future programme? Could she do this without the permission, or even the awareness, of Norah herself? Having no knowledge whatsoever of how programmes were put together, and having herself watched many a
documentary
in which personal problems of such hair-raising intimacy were aired that it was hard to believe that the subject had given valid consent – in view of all this, she found her hands actually trembling as she helped herself to more coffee. She envisaged the possibility that Mervyn might by chance switch on the set one day, and be confronted by the terrible and long-kept family secret being beamed out to an audience of millions. In
a single moment his painfully-preserved illusion about his son’s normality would be held up to the mockery of the world.

Norah could understand his attitude well enough – though understanding, as so often happens, was of no particular help. She understood that so much of his own ego had been invested in this super-brilliant child of his, that to discover the worm at the heart of all this brilliance would be an ego-shattering
experience
so fearful that he just wouldn’t be able to take it.

And it would all be Norah’s fault, that was for sure. The disasters brought about by Christopher’s illness always had to be her fault. Because if they weren’t
her
fault, then there
must
be something the matter with Christopher, and this was unthinkable in Mervyn’s universe.

Like the day of the dinner-party – the last
dinner-party
she had ever dared to give, incidentally, thus laying herself open to her husband’s reiterated
accusations
of being obsessionally inhospitable, never inviting people to their home “like other wives”.

For some moments she wondered whether to tell Diana even about this. It had been so humiliating that she had never told anybody, not even Louise next door. But might it not, after all this time, be some sort of relief to share the memory with someone? Someone right outside her own neighbourhood, and yet interested, as Diana clearly was. She was leaning forward, eyes alight, all agog to hear more.