Meeting the English (17 page)

‘How long were you a teacher anyway?' she said quickly, to Ron.

‘A year or so,' said Ron, starting back along the path. He had a short person's walk: nose up, quiff a-quiver. ‘What strikes me,' he said, ‘just, as it were, wandering into this situation, as an outside observer so to speak, is that probably all this is about your dad. Struan, in the house, is in your brother's place, as it were…'

‘Well, that's hardly fair,' said Juliet, ‘Jake refused point blank to come home before Mummy ever hired Struan. He doesn't even visit, you know? Doesn't even come round and put the racing on the telly for Dad. Though mind you I was bit scared of doing all that, at first, if it hadn't been for Struan I might not even have managed it. My relationship with my dad is not so good, you know, he got divorced when I was eleven, I was never the favourite. Struan is a really great guy, you know, he is really kind. I think we've lost him. Do you know where the pond is from here?'

‘Don't you?' said Ron, absently. ‘In fact, in another way, I think you could say of Jake's action, his resentment of Struan, I think you could even say it was an anxiety of authorship.'

Juliet wished she could sit down. Her legs ached the way they always did, four hours after the pills. Maybe it was because her thighs were remaking themselves as Jane Fonda's, or Celia's. Another feature of the pills was that little sections of time went entirely missing, as if they'd been scissored out. Ron had his hands in his pockets now. His feet turned out. On he walked, hippity hop.

‘Jake,' Ron was saying, ‘is clearly mostly concerned about his artistic identity, about writing himself, as it were, into the world. And that leads inevitably into an anxiety around the father, or father figure, and the twin impulses to love and to destroy.'

Juliet thought she was really fed up of talking about Jake. Then she thought she had no idea where she was. Then a bench, a comfy wood one with a plaque, appeared just ahead and she sat gratefully on it and peered until the Heath clarified before her, blue and hairy in the starlight; an unearthly sheepskin rug.

Somewhere in the blue, Ron was pacing about. She wondered if he was going to kiss her. He was quite a good height for her. If someone saw them, kissing, they would think they looked all right. You wouldn't realize they were both short until you got up really close. Ron wasn't getting on with it, though. He was still talking about how young men create themselves.

‘What about young women,' said Juliet. ‘What about me? Don't I have an anxiety about creating myself?'

Ron sat down beside her, and grinned. A cloud moved in front of the moon, his teeth gleaming in the moonlight. ‘Tell me,' he said, ‘do you?' Then he put his heavy damp arm on the top of the bench, sort of on Juliet's shoulders.

Juliet realized she had no idea. She realized that she spent so long thinking about what people thought of her that she had no idea what she thought of them. She didn't know if she fancied Ron Fox, for example. Suddenly, she worried about how old he was, and what level of sex he might expect.

‘Honestly,' said Juliet, ‘I mostly worry about if I look fat.'

‘You've got nothing to worry about, Phillip Prys' daughter,' said Mr Fox, and then he kissed her, gummily, and their teeth clashed with a distinct little click.

16

In the study, Phillip's eyes open suddenly as blinds. It has happened again. He is helpless and prostrate and Myfanwy has come for him. He does not know if this a dream, or a memory, the afternoon or the night: all he knows is that the figure he has just in his sightline, the small, gesturing silhouette holding something glittering in its hand, is her agent.

Of course. Myfanwy, if she wished, could speak to him through the waves and streams, never mind a shadow on the other side of the study window. Myfanwy has many powers. He's explained as much to Shirin. To all the girls in fact. There isn't any point, see, in trying to get rid of her; how many times has he said that? The most you can do is draw a line in the sand, and she'll walk round it, isn't it?

The shape gestures in semaphore, but, because he'd married her, it is easy for Phillip's brain to turn the signs into speech, into Myfanwy's alto voice which only for him leaves its modulated stage-school tones, only for him goes back to its Swansea roots.

‘I'm here every day,' says the shadow, vigorously waving the instrument, ‘even if you don't see me. And you'll be dead soon, and then I will be here every day and everyone will see me. Then I will have this room made into the kitchen, I shall have the shelves chopped into bread boards and sell the books for pulp and when it is all done and shining, I shall sit at the table and cut myself cake, Phillip Prys, and remember every time you humiliated me, Phillip Prys, every girl you ever screwed on that desk of yours, and I shall munch up my cake and swallow it.'

Phillip's hands take hold of his wrists. His throat takes charge of his voice. His whole body is a dragnet hooked and roped to his mind. Sweat runs down the length of his spine, and he knows there will be no way ever to wipe it dry. And the shape in the window leans forward and blows out another gust of words.

‘And it had better be sooner rather than later, Phillip Prys, that you push off. Each hour you live in this house is a hundred off the value. You're shitting money out your flaccid arse. I'm warning you, now, don't live too long, or I'll be back with the pillow.'

And the shadow blows again on the window and starts to shrink away, its head halving, then quartering, then disappearing entirely with a crash like a door shutting. Phillip screams then, but the noise stays stuck in his head, an awful effect, like putting a phone in a pan. He has done that more than once, we should say, to Myfanwy, to girls who kept ringing. He has often put the lid on and left them to themselves.

*   *   *

In the Finchley Road, Myfanwy wakes in the middle of the hot night with a burning fanny and a strong memory of having actually murdered Tommy Jenkins, who has grown to six foot tall and squalled as he went down in a Scottish accent. It takes a long drink and a lot of stroking and anti-fungal to calm herself back down. After all, in reality, she has done nothing to feel bad about.

Phillip Prys has threatened his wife with a hundred specific deaths. He has thrown his mother-in-law out of his house daubed in caustic lime. He has locked his baby daughter in the kitchen, bawling in wet pants, and gone out. He has taken his son to Brighton, gone on a binge, and left the child Jake in a hotel room for sixteen hours, to live on tea biscuits and reform his id. Also, he has shagged every mouldy slag in London. So if, that afternoon, Myfanwy allowed a few words of frustration to escape her in Phillip's study, if she directed a few colourful phrases at her former husband, then these were but Bohemian efflorescence, part of the language of their long life together. And even if they weren't, she was still allowed.

And anyway, Phillip couldn't hear. And as for Struan, she had no reason to doubt Mr Riley's word. And Tommy Jenkins had lived.

*   *   *

Because of the Pimm's, and its strangely galvanizing and yet paralysing effects, Struan can never afterwards remember the sequence of events that evening. Three episodes are clear in his mind, three silent films, monochrome and jerky in the moonlight:

1: He is running along a path on the Heath. He is barefoot, and his flip-flops are in his hand. He's been running some time, and his trousers are damp, but whether with sweat or pond water he can't tell.

2: He is swimming across the black pond, his best crawl. The pond has grown a skin in the moonlight: it slides from his arms like scarves of silk: Shirin's.

3: From behind a tree, a man appears, and bends over like he is picking something up. He isn't wearing any trousers. Struan says, ‘Och, I'm just here for a swim,' and the man disappears as if Struan had dreamt him.

Then Struan gets back to Yewtree Row. This memory is also silent, but this time it is in colour, and forensically clear: clear as the electric light switched on. It appears in his mind as a statement made to Police.

First off, from the street, he spotted that Mrs Prys' (Shirin's) light was on in her room. Accordingly, he walked in carefully, and up the stairs to the landing. He intended to speak to Mrs Prys (Shirin) about her husband's health. He thought about knocking on her door. He considered that it was probably late at night. He considered that he couldn't hear her in there and she was probably asleep. But the light was on. He concluded he should wait till the next day. He considered: he couldn't bear to. He thought he would just go downstairs and get a snack and that would make up his mind. He remembered a particular piece of omelette, chilled in the fridge.

So down the stairs went Struan on his great silent bare feet. Down past the framed poster of the
Pit and Its Men
revival from 1969, and the still of the set of the film. Down past the closed doors of the study and the front room, down the twisting back stair to the kitchen. But the kitchen was lit up, and Struan paused, poised on the turn, where he couldn't be seen, in case there was an intruder in the kitchen, sir, there had been before.

There he recognized Mrs Prys. It was Shirin. Shirin's blue-black hair falling down the back of her silk dressing gown, Shirin's tiny round bum and feet in ballet shoes. Yes, he was certain he recognized her, Sir, he knew her well. And he recognized him, too. The man. Yes. Grasping her by the waist, his quiff brushed back like golden feathers on a dark wing: Jake Prys.

Then Struan moved backwards up the stairs, and at the top turned and crept silently all the way up to his attic bedroom. His misery was a great bag of water which he was holding in both arms against his chest. He had to get it upstairs before it burst. But the attic landing was shaking, and there was a light under Juliet's door, and her voice said suddenly, intimately: ‘Ron,' and Struan remembered that that was Mr Fox's other name, and he crept down the stairs again.

On Shirin's landing, Struan paused, looking at her closed door. He wanted to go into her studio and get out his painting, the one with the eagles. He could save that and smash the rest. Then he heard the front door click from below, and someone go out, and he backed into the sitting room, which was just behind him. No one ever sat in the sitting room, even though it had a bay window over the garden: it was because there was no telly, only books and bits of china. The heavy curtains were drawn, and Struan stepped behind one. After a long while, he heard steps on the stairs, and Shirin's door open and close. In the street a car drove off. He thought she was alone, Shirin. He thought she was slipping into her room and getting into the double bed alone.

Then Struan thought he could sleep in the sitting room. He lay down on the rug, with a hard little cushion under his head, but that was no good. His head slipped off the cushion, and the rug was too thin: you could feel the boards. He tried lying on the sofa, with the rug over him, but the pile gave up dust and the sofa was too short: his legs came off the end. So after a while he crept down through the dark house to the study, and gathered up Phillip's rugs and wrappings, enough for a sort of nest, and laid them out parallel with Phillip's bed on the floor.

The room was already blue with dawn, and filled with Phillip's wheezing breathing. Phillip's hands were abandoned at his sides, and Struan pulled one out and held the stuffed cold glove to his damp face, rubbed his eyes on the leathery knuckles. Phillip's eyes opened, and then closed.

Struan lay down flat and decided not think about any of it, and cried for nothing, therefore, for most of an hour, and then dozed till he heard the nurse at the front door.

17

Here was another rum thing about those pills: peculiar dreams. Bounce, bounce over the blue hairy Heath went dream Juliet on her rubber-heeled legs and splosh into the pond where a gigantic stone Struan sat on an island, his head in his hands like Father Time. It was essential for Juliet to tell Struan that this pond was the Ladies' one, lest Struan be embarrassed, so in jumped Juliet to tell him, but the pond was dry, a damp sheet, and all the bits of Juliet felt odd, handled and sucked. Juliet's eyes popped open, and she scanned the attic ceiling, wondering what was true.

Ron. That had happened. Heath. Struan in a huff, and lost. Had Jake hit Struan? Really? How theatrical! Ron Fox. Celia and Jake. Probably. Definitely. Maybe not.

Ron Fox. Just to review that. Juliet had definitely snogged a man called Ron who used to be Struan's English teacher, but they hadn't gone all the way. Juliet and Ron. When they'd got to the bit when he was sticking his hand into her knickers, and saying I do believe in safe sex, Juliet had suddenly said, I'm not old enough, I'm not sixteen, and Ron had stopped and said she was a little elf and walked her home, still talking bollocks about the creative mind, and then she'd said, I am sixteen really, but I'm just not up to it, and he'd been nice. He'd said OK.

Juliet closed her eyes again. There was the Heath, there was the pond, and she was just going to swim across the pond to tell the stone Struan that it was just a bit of snogging she'd been doing, and what business was it of his anyway, did he think he was the po-lis, when she heard a snore, and bing! She was awake, and there, stretched on the floor beside her, uncompromisingly short in his little jeans, was actually Ron Fox.

Golly. Juliet would have to tell Celia. Celia wouldn't believe her. No wonder. The story was very unlikely. Struan would definitely not believe her. No one, not the stone Struan and certainly not her mother, would believe Juliet about the snogging. The only way out was for no one to know. Juliet needed to get Ron unnoticed out the house. This could be complicated because Ron seemed way too interested in the house. He kept going on about her dad. And Jake, for Christ's sake. And he hadn't even met Shirin yet. He really must not, if it could in any way be prevented, meet Shirin. Juliet lay very still, and tried to interpret the noises of the house beneath her. She slid a hand under her pillow, and popped out a couple of pills, then lay still and waited for the amphetamines, and a plan, to surge through her.