Authors: Bethan Roberts
My Policeman
About the Book
From the moment Marion first lays eyes on Tom – her best friend’s big brother, broad, blond, blue-eyed – she is smitten. And when he comes home from National Service to be a policeman, Marion, a newly qualified teacher, is determined to win him. Unable to acknowledge the signs that something is amiss, she plunges into marriage, sure that her love is enough for both of them...
But Tom has another life, another equally overpowering claim on his affections. Patrick, a curator at the Brighton Museum, is also besotted with his policeman, and opens Tom’s eyes to a world previously unknown to him. But in an age when those of ‘minority status’ were condemned by society and the law, it is safer for this policeman to marry his teacher. The two lovers must share him, until one of them breaks and three lives are destroyed.
Unfolding through the dual narratives of Marion and Patrick, both writing about the man at the centre of their lives, this beautifully-told, painful, tragic story is revealed. It is a tale of wasted years, misguided love and thwarted hope, of how at a time when the country was on the verge of change so much was still impossible. Bethan Roberts has produced an intense and exquisitely raw yet tender novel, which proves her to be one of our most exciting young writers.
Bethan Roberts was born in Oxford and grew up in nearby Abingdon. Her first novel
The Pools
was published in 2007 and won a Jerwood/Arvon Young Writers’ Award. Her second novel
The Good Plain Cook
, published in 2008, was serialized on BBC Radio 4’s Book at Bedtime and was chosen as one of
Time Out
’s books of the year. She also writes short stories (in 2006 she was awarded the Olive Cook short story prize by the Society of Authors) and has had a play broadcast on BBC Radio 4. Bethan has worked as a television documentary researcher, writer and assistant producer, and has taught Creative Writing at Chichester University and Goldsmiths College, London. She lives in Brighton with her family.
ALSO BY BETHAN ROBERTS
The Pools
The Good Plain Cook
For all my Brighton friends, but most especially for Stuart
POLICEMAN
Bethan Roberts
Peacehaven
, October 1999
I CONSIDERED STARTING
with these words:
I no longer want to kill you
– because I really don’t – but then decided you would think this far too melodramatic. You’ve always hated melodrama, and I don’t want to upset you now, not in the state you’re in, not at what may be the end of your life.
What I mean to do is this: write it all down, so I can get it right. This is a confession of sorts, and it’s worth getting the details correct. When I am finished, I plan to read this account to you, Patrick, because you can’t answer back any more. And I have been instructed to keep talking to you. Talking, the doctors say, is vital if you are to recover.
Your speech is almost destroyed, and even though you are here in my house, we communicate on paper. When I say on paper, I mean pointing at flashcards. You can’t articulate the words but you can gesture towards your desires:
drink, lavatory, sandwich
. I know you want these things before your finger reaches the picture, but I let you point anyway, because it is better for you to be independent.
It’s odd, isn’t it, that I’m the one with pen and paper now, writing this – what shall we call it? It’s hardly a journal, not of the type you once kept. Whatever it is, I’m the one writing, while you lie in your bed, watching my every move.
*
You’ve never liked this stretch of coast, calling it suburbia-on-sea, the place the old go to gaze at sunsets and wait for death. Wasn’t this area – exposed, lonely, windswept, like all the best British seaside settlements – known as Siberia in that terrible winter of ’63? It’s not quite that bleak here now, although it’s still as uniform; there’s even some comfort, I find, in its predictability. Here in Peacehaven, the streets are the same, over and over: modest bungalow, functional garden, oblique sea view.
I was very resistant to Tom’s plans to move here. Why would I, a lifelong Brighton resident, want to live on one floor, even if our bungalow was called a Swiss chalet by the estate agent? Why would I settle for the narrow aisles of the local Co-op, the old-fat stench of Joe’s Pizza and Kebab House, the four funeral parlours, a pet shop called Animal Magic and a dry-cleaner’s where the staff are, apparently, ‘London trained’? Why would I settle for such things after Brighton, where the cafés are always full, the shops sell more than you could possibly imagine, let alone need, and the pier is always bright, always open and often slightly menacing?
No. I thought it an awful idea, just as you would have done. But Tom was determined to retire to a quieter, smaller, supposedly safer place. I think, in part, he’d had more than enough of being reminded of his old beats, his old busyness. One thing a bungalow in Peacehaven does not do is remind you of the world’s busyness. So here we are, where no one is out on the street before nine thirty in the morning or after nine thirty at night, save a handful of teenagers who smoke outside the pizza place. Here we are in a two-bedroom bungalow (it is not a Swiss chalet, it is
not
), within easy reach of the bus stop and the Co-op, with a long lawn to look out on and a whirligig washing line and three outdoor buildings
(shed
, garage, greenhouse). The saving grace is the sea view, which is indeed oblique – it’s visible from the side bedroom window. I’ve given this bedroom to you, and have arranged your bed so you may see the glimpse of the sea as much as you like. I’ve given all this to you, Patrick, despite the fact that Tom and I never before had our own view. From your Chichester Terrace flat, complete with Regency finishings, you enjoyed the sea every day. I remember the view from your flat very well, even though I rarely visited you: the Volk’s railway, the Duke’s Mound gardens, the breakwater with its crest of white on windy days, and of course the sea, always different, always the same. Up in our terraced house on Islingword Street, all Tom and I saw were our own reflections in the neighbours’ windows. But still. I wasn’t keen to leave that place.
So I suspect that when you arrived here from the hospital a week ago, when Tom lifted you from the car and into your chair, you saw exactly what I did: the brown regularity of the pebble-dash, the impossibly smooth plastic of the double-glazed door, the neat conifer hedge around the place, and all of it would have struck terror into your heart, just as it had in mine. And the name of the place:
The Pines
. So inappropriate, so unimaginative. A cool sweat probably oozed from your neck and your shirt suddenly felt uncomfortable. Tom wheeled you along the front path. You would have noticed that each slab was a perfectly even piece of pinkish-grey concrete. As I put the key in the lock and said, ‘Welcome,’ you wrung your wilted hands together and pulled your face into something like a smile.
Entering the beige-papered hallway, you would have smelled the bleach I’d used in preparation for your stay with us, and registered the scent of Walter, our collie-cross, lurking beneath
it
. You nodded slightly at the framed photograph of our wedding, Tom in that wonderful suit from Cobley’s – paid for by you – and me in that stiff veil. We sat in the living room, Tom and I on the new brown velvet suite, bought with money from Tom’s retirement package, and listened to the ticking music of the central heating. Walter panted at Tom’s feet. Then Tom said, ‘Marion will see you settled.’ And I noticed the wince you gave at Tom’s determination to leave, the way you continued to stare at the net curtains as he strode towards the door saying, ‘Something I’ve got to see to.’
The dog followed him. You and I sat listening to Tom’s footsteps along the hallway, the rustle as he reached for his coat from the peg, the jangle as he checked in his pocket for his keys; we heard him gently command Walter to wait, and then there was only the sound of the suction of air as he pulled the double-glazed front door open and left the bungalow. When I finally looked at you, your hands, limp on your bony knees, were shaking. Did you think, then, that being in Tom’s home at last might not be all you’d hoped?
FORTY-EIGHT YEARS. THAT’S
how far I have to go back, to when I first met Tom. And even that may not be far enough.
He was so contained back then.
Tom
. Even the name is solid, unpretentious, but not without the possibility of sensitivity. He wasn’t a Bill, a Reg, a Les or a Tony. Did you ever call him Thomas? I know I wanted to. Sometimes there were moments when I wanted to rename him.
Tommy
. Perhaps that’s what you called him, the beautiful young man with the big arms and the dark blond curls.
I knew his sister from grammar school. During our second year there, she approached me in the corridor and said, ‘I was thinking – you look all right – will you be my friend?’ Up until that point, we’d each spent our time alone, baffled by the strange rituals of the school, the echoing spaces of the classrooms and the clipped voices of the other girls. I let Sylvie copy my homework, and she played me her records: Nat King Cole, Patti Page, Perry Como. Together, under our breath, we sang
Some enchanted evening, you may see a stranger
as we stood at the back of the queue for the vaulting horse, letting all the other girls go before us. Neither of us liked games. I enjoyed going to Sylvie’s because Sylvie had
things
, and her mother let her wear her brittle blonde hair in a style too old for her years; I think she even helped her set the fringe in a kiss-curl. At the time, my hair, which was as red as it ever was, still
hung
in a thick plait down my back. If I lost my temper at home – I remember once shutting my brother Fred’s head in the door with some force – my father would look at my mother and say, ‘It’s the red in her,’ because the ginger strain was on my mother’s side. I think you once called me
the Red Peril
, didn’t you, Patrick? By that time, I’d come to like the colour, but I always felt it was a self-fulfilling prophecy, having red hair: people expected me to have a temper, and so, if I felt anger flaring up, I let it go. Not often, of course. But occasionally I slammed doors, threw crockery. Once I rammed the Hoover so hard into the skirting board that it cracked.
