Perfect (22 page)

‘It’s so nice of you to invite us’ was the first thing she said. ‘We’ve been excited all day. We’ve talked about nothing else.’ She apologized for the state of her pantyhose. They were slashed with ladders and stuck all over with tiny burrs. It was so nice of Diana to spare her precious time, she said again. She promised they wouldn’t stay long. She looked as nervous as his mother.

At Beverley’s side hung a child, smaller than Lucy, in a gingham school dress, with thin black hair that hung towards her waist. She wore a large fabric plaster on her right knee to protect the two stitches. It was ten centimetres in diameter. Catching sight of the injury, Diana gave a start.

‘You must be Jeanie,’ she said, bending to greet her. ‘I’m afraid my daughter is out today.’

Jeanie slotted behind her mother. She looked a slithery child. ‘Don’t worry about your knee,’ said Beverley. She used a loud, jolly voice as if people were watching from right across the moor and she needed them to hear. ‘You won’t hurt it again. You’re perfectly safe.’

Diana twisted her hands so hard she looked in danger of turning them inside out. ‘Has she walked far? Does she need another dressing?’

Beverley assured her the dressing was clean. In the last few days you could barely notice Jeanie’s limp, she said. ‘You’re much better, aren’t you?’

In agreement, Jeanie wriggled her mouth as if she was eating a large toffee and it had got stuck.

Diana suggested they should sit outside on the new sun loungers while she fetched drinks. After that she would show them the garden. But Beverley asked if they could possibly come inside. The sun gave her daughter a headache, she said. She couldn’t seem to keep her eyes still. They flew over Diana’s shoulder and scurried up and down the hallway, taking in the polished woodwork, the vases of flowers, the Georgian-style
wallpaper, the curtains in their theatrical swirls. ‘Nice house.’ She said it in the way Lucy said, ‘Nice custard. Nice biscuits.’

‘Come in, come in,’ said his mother. ‘We’ll have tea in the drawing room.’

‘Nice,’ said Beverley again, stepping inside. ‘Come along, Jeanie.’

‘I say drawing room but it’s not half as grand as it sounds.’ Diana led the way along the hallway, her slim heels going clip, clip, while Beverley’s sandals followed with a slap, slap. ‘The only person who calls it a drawing room is my husband and of course he doesn’t live here. Or rather, he does, but only at weekends. He works for a bank in the City. So I don’t know why I call it a drawing room. My mother would have called it the best room but Seymour never liked her.’ She was talking far too much and her sentences didn’t seem to join up. ‘I’m a bit of a misfit really.’

Beverley said nothing. She merely followed, peering to the left and right. Diana offered a choice of tea or coffee or something stronger and Beverley insisted she would have whatever Diana was having.

‘But you’re my guest.’

Beverley shrugged. She admitted she wouldn’t say no to a snowball or something fizzy like cherry cola.

‘A snowball?’ His mother looked perplexed. ‘I’m afraid we don’t have those. We don’t have fizzy drinks either. My husband enjoys a gin and tonic at the weekend. I always keep Gordon’s and Schweppes in the house. Or there’s whisky in his study. You could have that.’ She also offered Beverley a pair of her tights to replace her laddered ones. ‘Do you mind Pretty Polly?’

Beverley said Pretty Polly would do very nicely and so would a glass of squash.

‘Please put down your notebook, Byron, and take care of Beverley’s hat.’

Diana pushed open the drawing-room door tentatively as if half expecting something to jump out at her. ‘Oh, but where’s your daughter?’

She was right. In the short distance from the hallway to the drawing room, they had already lost her.

Beverley rushed back to the front door, shouting her daughter’s name at the stairs and wood-panelled walls, at the glass telephone table and Seymour’s ship paintings, as if Jeanie had made herself part of the fabric of the house and should materialize out of thin air. She looked mortified.

The search began gently. His mother called out for Jeanie, and so did Beverley, although it was only Diana who rushed purposefully from room to room. Then suddenly she began to worry. She ran out to the garden and called there too. When there was no reply, she asked Byron to fetch towels. She would go down to the pond. Beverley kept saying she was sorry. So sorry for the inconvenience. That child would be the death of her, she said.

Diana had already thrown off her shoes and was tearing down the lawn. ‘But how could she have got over the fence?’ Byron called, running after her. ‘She has her bad knee, remember?’ His mother’s hair flew out like gold streamers. Clearly there was no sign of Jeanie down there. ‘She must be somewhere in the house,’ said Diana, returning through the garden.

Byron passed Beverley in the hall, studying the label on his mother’s coat.

‘Jaeger,’ she murmured. ‘Nice.’

He must have frightened her because she darted him a nail of a look that softened afterwards into a smile.

The search continued downstairs. Beverley opened every room and cast her eyes inside. It was only when Byron checked upstairs a second time that he noticed Lucy’s door ajar, and stopped. He found Jeanie curled like a rag doll inside the bed and in the half-hour in which they had searched for her, calling her name in the garden, the meadow and down by the pond, she had evidently fallen asleep. Her arms were thrown across
the pillow revealing two thick scabs like flattened cherries at her elbows. She was right under the top sheet.

‘It’s all right!’ he called to the women. ‘You can relax now. I’ve found her.’

With shaking fingers, Byron dialled James’s telephone number from his mother’s glass table. He had to whisper because he had not asked permission. ‘Who is speaking, please?’ said Andrea. It took three goes to make her understand and then he had to wait a further two minutes for her to fetch James. When Byron explained about the search for Jeanie and finding her asleep, James said, ‘Is she still in the bed?’

‘Affirmative. Yes.’

‘You have to go back upstairs. You have to examine the injury while she is asleep. Bonne chance, Byron. You are doing very good work. Be sure you make a diagram.’

Byron re-entered the room on tiptoes. Very gently, he lifted the corner of the sheet. Jeanie breathed thickly through her nose as if she had a cold. His heart was beating so hard he had to keep gulping in case it woke her. The plaster looked stuck hard. Her legs were slim and dirty from the walk. He held his fingertip right over the thin point of her knee. There was no blood on the plaster. It looked new.

He was just slipping his nail under the corner when Jeanie woke with a start. She stared at him with dark, wide eyes. The shock sent him lurching backwards into Lucy’s doll’s house and Jeanie found this so funny she gave herself a round of hiccups. They popped right through her. Some of her teeth were like cracked brown beads. ‘Do you want me to carry you?’ he said. She nodded and threw out her arms but still she didn’t speak. Lifting her up, he was shocked by the lightness of her. She was barely there. Her shoulder blades and ribs stuck out in points beneath her cotton school dress. He took care not to touch her injured knee and as she clung to him she thrust her leg carefully forward to protect the plaster.

Downstairs Beverley’s anxiety seemed to have manifested itself in hunger. She sat in the drawing room helping herself to cucumber sandwiches and chattering freely. When Byron appeared with Jeanie, she nodded impatiently and went on. She asked Diana where she got her furnishings, did she prefer china plates or plastic, who was her hairdresser. She asked the make of her gramophone. Was Diana pleased with the quality? Did she know not all electrical goods were manufactured in England? His mother smiled politely and said she didn’t know that, no. The future was in imports, said Beverley, now that the economy was such a mess.

She commented on the quality of Diana’s curtains. Her carpets. The electric fireplace. ‘It’s a lovely house you’ve got,’ she said, indicating the new glass lamps with her sandwich. ‘But I couldn’t live here. I’d be scared of people breaking in. You have such nice things. I’m a townie myself.’

His mother smiled. She was a town girl too, she said. ‘But my husband likes country air. And anyway,’ she reached for her glass and shook the ice cubes, ‘he has a shotgun. In case of emergencies. He keeps it under the bed.’

Beverley looked alarmed. ‘Does he shoot things?’

‘No. He just holds it really. He has a special tweed jacket as well as a deerstalker hat. He goes shooting in Scotland every August with his work colleagues and he completely hates it. He gets bitten by midges. They seem to love him.’

For a moment neither woman spoke. Beverley skinned the crust from another sandwich and Diana studied her glass.

‘He sounds like a right banana,’ said Beverley.

An unexpected laugh seemed to shoot from his mother. Glancing at Byron, she had to hide her face.

‘I shouldn’t laugh, I shouldn’t laugh,’ she kept laughing.

‘You have to laugh. Anyway I think I’d rather beat a burglar over the head. With a mallet or something.’

‘Oh, that’s so funny,’ said Diana, wiping her eyes.

Byron reached for his notebook. He reported that his father had a shotgun and that Beverley possibly had a mallet. He would have liked one of the tiny sandwiches; they were carved into triangles no bigger than his thumb, but Beverley seemed to think they were all for her. She had the plate on her lap now and she nibbled at one half of each sandwich, before discarding it and starting on another. Even when Jeanie tugged at her arm and asked to go home, she kept eating. He drew a diagram for James showing the little girl’s leg and the location of the plaster. He made exact references to the time but he couldn’t help feeling disappointed when he began to record the conversation. For a new friendship, it seemed to err on the morbid side, although he had to admit he had never seen his mother laugh the way she did when Beverley called Seymour a banana. He did not write that part down.

He put: ‘
Beverley said three times that DH is lucky. At 5.15 pm she said, “I wish I had done something with my life, like you
.” ’

Beverley also told Diana that in the future you would have to think big if you wanted to get on, but his hand was getting tired so he drew a plan of the room instead.

Meanwhile Beverley asked for an ashtray and plucked a packet of cigarettes from her pocket. When Diana placed a small, varnished clay pot at Beverley’s side, she overturned it. ‘Looks foreign,’ she said, examining the rough underside. ‘Interesting.’

Diana explained it had belonged to her husband’s family. He was brought up in Burma, she said, before things went wrong. Beverley said something between her teeth about the old days of the Empire but his mother failed to hear because she was fetching a slim gold-plated lighter. While she held it out, flicking at the flint, Beverley tugged on her filter tip and said with a smile, ‘You’ll never guess what my dad was?’

Before Diana could answer, she shot out a coil of smoke and laughed.
‘A vicar. I’m a vicar’s daughter and look what happened. Up the duff at twenty-three. Council house and not even a wedding.’

At the end of the afternoon, Diana offered them a lift to town but Beverley declined. As they walked to the door, Beverley thanked his mother profusely for the drinks and the sandwiches. It was only when Diana said, ‘But what about her leg?’ that Jeanie faltered and began to swing it like a wooden one.

Fiddling with her hat, Beverley insisted they would take the bus. Diana had already done more than enough; she wouldn’t take up any more of her precious time. And when Diana said her time was not precious – now they had the holidays she had no idea what she would do with herself – Beverley gave a laugh that was like one of his father’s, as if she were trying to quell it but couldn’t. Well how about next week? she said. She thanked Diana again for the tea and the Pretty Polly tights. She would wash and return them on Monday.

‘Goodbye, goodbye!’ called Diana, waving from the front step and turning inside.

He couldn’t be sure but he thought he saw Beverley pause as she passed the Jaguar. She seemed to scan the bonnet, the doors, the wheels, as if she had seen something of interest and was committing it to memory.

After the visit Diana was in a light mood. Byron helped her to wash the plates and glasses and she told him how much she’d enjoyed the afternoon. More than expected, she said.

‘I knew a woman once who could dance the flamenco. She had the dress and everything. You should have seen her. She would put up her hands like this and bang her feet and it was the most beautiful thing.’ His mother held her hands in an arch over her head. She stamped several times and her heels rang out. He had never seen her dance like that.

‘How did you know that woman?’

‘Oh,’ she said, dropping her arms and taking up the tea towel. ‘That was in the past. I don’t know why she came into my head.’

She stowed the dried plates in the dresser and closed the door with a click and it was as though the dancing version of his mother had been shut in the cupboard too. Maybe her new happiness was something to do with Beverley’s visit. Now that James was involved, everything had taken a turn for the better. His mother went to fetch newspaper for a bonfire.

‘You haven’t seen my lighter, have you?’ she said. ‘I can’t think where I left it.’