New World in the Morning (6 page)

Soon, of course, he'd start to take more interest in girls. And vice versa—obviously. Already I could see he was becoming quite a hunk.

“Young Matthias,” I said. “I reckon you need building up.”

He, as well, had occasionally had breakfast seen to by myself—cereal, toast, a bar of chocolate—but even so… “Gosh! Eggs? Mushrooms? Did
you
cook them?”

“Who else?”

“Not bad. Not bad at all. Where's the fried bread?”

“Sorry. Must've forgotten.”

“And the sausages?”

“Sorry.”

“But thanks, Pop, this is cool. You're a good bloke. Ta.”

“No crossed fingers?”

“No crossed fingers. But next time…”

“What?”

“Don't forget the fried bread.”

Standing in the doorway I lifted two fingers at him; and they weren't crossed, either. He giggled. “I'll tell Mum…”

I made the toast and coffee—real coffee. I discovered a jar of honey in the larder; I knew Matt preferred honey to jam or marmalade. Honey on butter! (
Anything
on butter was the kind of extravagance I had generally frowned on; but not this morning. Nor, indeed, ever again.) I even prepared Susie a piece of buttered toast with honey, which I put on the grass near the back door. She guarded it between her front paws and looked at me askance, as though she supposed I might be passing through some form of crisis.

“Have
you
eaten anything yet?” asked Junie.

“No, but it's ready and waiting.”

“Well, go and have it, please. Your eggs and bacon will be cold. Mine were delicious. It was all delicious—every mouthful.”

I didn't mention that I wouldn't be eating eggs and bacon. Despite my decision of the previous night I'd now resolved to shed those extra pounds. Not wholly for the sake of appearance: asceticism got catered for as well: less self-indulgence in the future, a bit more restraint, a promise of my having reacquired control. (Surely I had once been in control?) Over appetites—digestive juices—destiny.

Therefore I drank only orange juice, no coffee; spread only honey on my crispbread—no butter. Went to collect the trays. But not even Matt took me up on my offer of more toast. And Junie scolded. “You'll wear your legs out running up and down those stairs! You can't guess how grateful I am, though. But your own breakfast wasn't spoilt, was it?”

“Not a bit.”

“And did you enjoy it as much as me?”

“No, I enjoyed you more.”

“Did you get as much enjoyment out of your breakfast as I did?”

“Yes thank you. I got at least as much enjoyment out of my breakfast as you did.”

“No, I'm sorry, I don't believe you.” She took my hand. “It's sad. You've stopped being trustworthy. Besides being an idiot.”

“I'm glad. Yes, how sharp of you to notice! I have stopped being an idiot, haven't I?”

Answered by nothing but a gently smiling forbearance, I told her she was unique; that most people would have found me quite insufferable.

I stacked the crockery and cutlery and looked out at the garden as the water ran. All that blossom. It was perfect. For a minute I propped myself there, my hands resting on the edge of the sink, and gazed out longingly, trying to take in every detail, imprint it clearly for all time, down to the robin on the branch of one of the cherry trees, the celandines and daisies beneath it, the Solomon's seal with its clusters of white flowers, the neighbours' black cat already basking on our brick wall. Seeing it on a postcard, or on the lid of a chocolate box, you might wonder if it hadn't been retouched.

Then I began the washing up. Even apart from the view, I enjoyed the sensual warmth of the sudsy water—as well as, before long, the recollection, which I often had at times like this (well, chiefly in the bath), of sailing my yacht across a pond in the park, on holiday with my parents in Torquay. Sometimes as I grew older I seemed to miss my mother more—I mean, more at thirty-six than at thirty. But this didn't seriously induce a feeling of melancholy, I simply wished I had more photographs and that I still possessed that little yacht, which, oddly, I could never remember having sailed on any pond in Deal.

My eyes misted, however—which struck me as perverse. Why on earth this morning, why today of all possible days? But after a moment it made me smile.

Sorry, Dad. I haven't forgotten. Big boys don't cry.

When I'd cleared up I shaved and dressed: a short-sleeved shirt today, first of the year. I recalled how yesterday, seeing that woman in her summer frock, I'd considered short sleeves premature. Now I apologized to that woman in her summer frock. Caution was for the timid, the untrusting. Caution wasn't for the treasure seekers.

Then I performed my regular Sunday chore: took a shovel round the garden, a shovel and a stick, collecting Susie's poos. Normally, during those five or ten minutes, my expression might have been one of mild distaste—particularly if the poor thing had been suffering from diarrhoea—even if such distaste was greatly leavened by self-protective humour. This morning I actually sang. Actually executed several dance steps, fairly lively ones, though not, I hasten to add, after the shovel had become well-filled.

Matt was in the garden, feeding the fish, putting out more nuts for the squirrels, replenishing the bird food; fortunately the neighbours' cat was elderly and somnolent.

My son looked at me in some wonder, shook his head and tapped his temple. I would have sung whether he'd been there or not, have gone in for all those silly, clownish antics. But it was good to have an audience.

8

We left the house at half-past-eleven; for some reason later than usual; on Sundays we almost invariably went to Jalna. (Jalna was the only place I knew which had a double-barrelled name: Jalna—the Dovecote: always scrupulously observed on envelopes by close friends and members of the family. Most members of the family.) Sometimes I would moan like hell about having to go. Sunday is my one day off, I would say—or, rather, shout—to Junie and the children; why can't I have the freedom to enjoy it? This is worse than going to church, I'd shout. This is worse than going to prison. (This is exactly the same as going to prison!) I'll join a potholers' association! Ramblers' club! Witches' coven! Anything…so long as its meetings unfailingly fall on a Sunday! Exclamation marks appeared to fly thicker than arrows over Agincourt; or over one of Junie's uncorrected letters.

Usually, the kids would either giggle or do their best to suppress their giggles; depending less on me than on their mother. Junie could be bent to my will in nearly anything that hadn't to do with her family but now she'd assume an indulgent smile which was infuriating (relegating me to position of third child, whom she must patiently seek to propitiate) yet which could generally coax me back towards a sheepishly grinning—if residually grumbling—form of acceptance. Until the next time.

Yet occasionally I'd take a real stand: sweep the children off to ride on a steam railway or see some distant castle or visit the Tower of London. To a degree, Junie could sympathize, but would mostly decline to accompany us; and her sympathy was intellectual, not of the heart. Occasionally too (for this was happening over
many
years) I'd insist I needed to get on with the decorating or needed to go to clear the contents of some house. Once, when I was feeling outstandingly bolshie, I'd declared I should like simply to spend the day in bed and take a little holiday, inaugurate a Samuel Groves Day, to be celebrated at least biannually, with fireworks and bacchanalia and a service of thanksgiving. I don't know—being much too grand even to inquire—in what form the message finally got through, but I remember they sent me back a cakebox filled with iced fancies and cheese straws and sausage rolls. (However, I refused to be touched…let alone humbled. I gave them to the children.) I thought how marvellous it would be just to pass the day like any normal family, reading the paper, popping out to the pub, watching TV, dispatching the children to Crusaders and spending the afternoon in bed.

Not that you couldn't do all those things at Jalna (the Dovecote) save perhaps the last. And not that I didn't generally have a pretty good time there—a better one than I might well have had at home. It was just its inexorability which I complained of. Its claustrophobia.

Its in-breeding.

And yet, before Junie and I had got engaged, it was precisely this close-knit quality which had most appealed to me; one of the factors, even, which may have influenced my hesitant proposal. I'd no longer had a family of my own, except for my grandmother, and had always longed for a sibling—ideally, for several. Junie was the youngest of five sisters; and the others, despite being married, still lived in the locality. I suddenly found myself drawn into a mainly young, charming, good-looking group whose members were full of fun, mutually devoted, and around whom existed an aura of almost storybook enchantment, of
Bright Day
exclusiveness. I had of course met Junie's parents on countless occasions—and all of their daughters and their daughters' husbands at least once—but although Mr and Mrs Fletcher were ostensibly the most hospitable couple I had ever known, and were obviously fond of me, even hopeful of me, their hospitality didn't truly extend beyond their own children and their own children's families; for whom Sundays were kept sacrosanct and unadulterated. Only following my engagement to Junie did the sabbath walls of Jalna finally fall before me. The outsider put away his trumpet and belonged.

But after a few years, when most of the initial glamour had worn off, though not without leaving a pool of variable affection, I'd once asked Junie if there weren't some unpublished list (or maybe even published—why not?) outlining the requisites for the perfect Fletcher son-in-law: a willingness, say, to remain forever within easy reach of Deal; to subscribe seventy-five percent of his Sundays, Christmases and other bank holidays (subject, of course, to rotas: only one family missing at a time) along with an equal percentage of his annual vacation…naturally to be subsumed into the Fletcher summer booking on the Continent? I'd acknowledged that Saturdays, at present, might be optional, but had ventured that all birthdays and wedding anniversaries were inalienably the property of Jalna. Junie had laughed and admitted, in a tone of faintly clannish pride, that I maybe hadn't got it all that wrong. I'd suggested with a degree of self-congratulation and mordant black humour that the son-in-law who really wished to make it big should have disposed of both his parents.

But today I neither moaned nor meant to wax satirical. Instead, as we drove towards Jalna, I thought about the diary I was going to keep. I must have been to Junie's childhood home nearly a thousand times but I decided I would try to look upon this as my very first visit—or else, on the theory that you should live each day as though you would be dead tomorrow, as my very last—and attempt to catch it through the viewfinder of my opening entry. “What's the date?” I asked.

Junie wasn't sure; and Matt said nothing.

“April the twenty-seventh…or possibly the twenty-eighth,” I repeated slowly, taking my hand off the steering wheel and laying it briefly on my wife's. “Nineteen hundred and ninety-seven or ninety-eight or thereabouts?”

“You didn't know it, either. There's really no call to mock.”

“In any case, a day to conjure with. Momentous. Uniquely historic.”

“Why?”

“Simply because it is.”

“Oh, Mum,” cautioned Matt, wearily, from the back seat. “He's going to say that this particular day will never come again—not ever—ever. That's why we've got to savour it. He's going to inform us that history is being made today…just like on any other day which we can read about with bated breath. Dad's in one of his
improving
moods. Can't you tell? Don't you know your husband yet?”

“Ah… Does anyone ever know anyone?” I inquired—improvingly.

But that was purely to point up a general truth. I certainly knew his mother. I knew his mother probably as well as I knew myself.

“He'll now go on to mention that today marks the very beginning of the rest of our lives,” said Matt, in the same tone of quietly tolerant resignation.

“Newborn like the spring,” I added.

“Newborn like the spring,” he explained.

“Well, I can't help it. You blasé wretch. I
feel
newborn.”

“Yeah. May you lead a long and happy life.”

“Thank you, Matthias—my precious sweet love. I really do intend to.”

“I give you till about lunchtime.”

“As long as that?”

“Going on past experience.”

“Ah, but today's different,” I assured him.

“Yeah, yeah.”

“
Today
is different,
I
am different.”

“How different?”

“As different as possibly can be. You'll find out.”

“All right, then. Let's put it to the test. Please, Dad, will you make me a present of five pounds?”

I chuckled…and pulled the car over. “What are you doing?” Junie asked.

“Looking to see how much money I've brought.” In fact I knew perfectly well. I'd again left my wallet in the bedroom but had neatly folded a couple of notes and placed them in a pocket of my jeans. Now I fished one out. “Yes, you're in luck,” I said. “Except we'll have to make it ten.”

“Darling, you're crazy!” And although Junie was smiling she honestly did sound a bit appalled. “I think you may have gone out of your little mind.”

“Well,
I
think I may have just come into it.” I started up the car.

“Come on, Dad. You'd better take it back.” Matt prodded me on the shoulder. The folded note was in his hand.

“No, Mattie, it's yours.”

“D'you mean that?”