Perfect (32 page)

And when Byron said, as he sometimes did, ‘Are you sure this is a good idea?’ or if he said, ‘My mother is sometimes sad,’ or even if he said, ‘But suppose Beverley tells everyone what my mother did?’ James simply talked over him. The most important thing, he said, was that he got to see the evidence.

J
IM AND
E
ILEEN
meet every evening. He folds up his Father Christmas suit and replaces it in its plastic wrapper and leaves via the staff stairs to meet her in the car park. She drives them into town and they do the things that everyone does, the everyday things. They go to the cinema, they meet for a drink, and if the sky is clear, they head for a brief stroll on the moor. One evening they visit the small Italian restaurant for a bowl of pasta. She asks about his day and he tells her Mr Meade has offered Darren a job. He tells her about a child who gave him his Christmas list, and meanwhile Eileen laughs and sighs, as if these things are interesting. In turn he asks about her day, her flat, her search for a new job. He is always home by nine.

When she drops him off at the end of the cul-de-sac she says, ‘I’d have a tea, if you’re offering,’ but he doesn’t know why she would say that since he isn’t. ‘See ya!’ waves Eileen, as he shuts her passenger door.

‘You be careful,’ he tells her. She laughs and promises she will.

And even though, after these meetings, he is not like everyone else – he
steps in and out, hello Small Cactus Plant, he binds the doors and windows with duct tape – he is not troubled by the rituals. They are a thing he does before he gets on with a different thing, which is thinking about Eileen. His heart jumps as he pictures her. He laughs at her jokes, when the evening is long since over. He can smell her. He can hear her. He feels bigger than the rituals; they are just a part of him, like his leg is a part of him, but not the whole person. Maybe one day he will even stop.

Paula corners him one afternoon on his way to the urinals. She asks how things are and he can’t look her in the eye but he assures her they are good. She says he seems well. She likes the way he’s done his hair and he says oh, that, because actually all he has done is comb it over his skull, more from left to right. He has seen Darren doing it this way. Maybe that is why Paula likes it.

‘I’ve got this idea,’ she says. She tells Jim she is an instinct person. She is not erudite. Actually what she says is that she is not Araldite, but he gets her drift. ‘Darren has this aunt. She’s nice. You’d like her. She lives on her own. We were thinking you should go for a drink.’

‘With your aunt?’

‘Me and Darren would come too.’

Jim twists his hands. He tries to explain he would love to go for a drink with Paula and Darren but he already has a date. She makes a squashed face that suggests she is impressed. He says in a rush that his date is Eileen, because he can’t help it, he is longing to tell someone, only now she looks struck.

‘Eileen? The woman who ran you over?’

‘It was an accident.’

He laughs but Paula doesn’t. She shrugs and begins to move away. She stoops to pick up a tin can someone has dropped and says as she aims it for the bin. ‘I hope you know what you’re doing.’

I
T WAS A
beautiful day for a concert. Rain had been forecast the previous night but there was not a sign of it when Byron woke at dawn. There was blue sky and a soft rose-coloured light over the moor. The meadow was already thick with clashing pockets of flowers. There were purple thistles, pink and white clover, orange trefoil, and yellow bundles of lady’s bedstraw. Unfortunately the upper lawn was also deep in grass and spotted with daisies. The roses sprawled every which way over the pagoda and swung thorny branches across the path.

Byron reassured himself that James was right, that the concert was a good idea. His mother was still sleeping. It seemed wise to leave her like that as long as possible.

He wasn’t sure how to go about cleaning a house but now that he looked, he saw something needed to be done before the guests arrived. Not knowing where to put dirty linen and dishes, he decided to stow them in the kitchen drawers where no one would notice. He retrieved the mop
and a bucket and had a go at the kitchen floor. He didn’t know why there was so much water. He tried to remember how his mother did it and all he could picture was the day of the accident when she had rushed to clear the spilt milk and broken jug, and cut her hand. Diana had been right. It seemed a very long time since that morning in early June when everything began.

There was considerable difficulty with the delivery of Beverley’s organ. The van got stuck in one of the narrow steep lanes leading up to the house, and the driver had to go back to town and ring from a telephone box to ask for help.

‘I want to speak to your mother,’ he said.

Byron said she was currently inconvenienced.

‘I’m bloody inconvenienced as well,’ said the driver.

Four men carried it round to the back of the house so that they could heave it through the French windows. Their faces were red and shiny with effort. Byron didn’t know whether he was supposed to give them anything and all he could think of was fruit. They asked if he knew his alphabet and he said he did but when they asked what came after ‘s’ he got confused and said ‘r’. He noticed the way the men looked round the kitchen, and he didn’t know if it was because it looked right or because it looked wrong.

‘Does the kitchen look like a kitchen?’ he asked Lucy as he found and washed her Peter Rabbit bowl.

There was no time for her reply because he had just noticed the state of her. Her hair was tangled, her socks didn’t even match, and her dress had a big tear all the way from the pocket.

‘Lucy, when did you last have a bath?’

‘I don’t know, Byron. Nobody has run me one.’

There seemed to be so much to organize. There were no cereals in any of the boxes and so he made Lucy a sugar sandwich. Afterwards he pinned open the French windows and carried the dining-room chairs as well as the
kitchen stools to the terrace to form a half-circle facing the house. The organ sat in an arc of sunlight, just inside the French windows. Lucy slipped from the breakfast bar and poised her fingers over the glossed wood lid.

‘I would like to play the organ,’ she murmured.

Byron scooped her in his arms and carried her upstairs. And while he washed her hair with Pears soap he asked if she had any idea about sewing because he didn’t seem to have enough buttons on his shirt.

When Andrea finally arrived with a tall young man in a suit, he thought for a moment that everything had gone wrong, that she had left James behind.

‘Hello, there,’ called a squeaky voice.

Byron was shocked. It was only six weeks since the end of term but James had become a different person. He was taller. His soft gold hair was completely gone. Where he had once had a flopping fringe, there was only a short crop of mouse-brown hair and below it a pale stretch of forehead bursting with pimples. On his upper lip there were tiny brushstrokes of a moustache. They shook hands and then Byron withdrew a few paces because it was like meeting someone he did not know.

‘Everything set?’ said James. He kept going to swipe his fringe and finding he hadn’t got one and rubbing his forehead instead.

‘All set,’ said Byron.

‘But where is your mother?’ said Andrea. She cast her eyes over the house as if every time she looked it turned into a different shape.

Byron said she was fetching the performer and her daughter. He omitted to mention that, due to the lack of a wristwatch, she was late.

‘Such a tragedy about her child,’ murmured Andrea. ‘James told me the whole story.’

To his surprise, all the invited guests arrived. Not only that, they had clearly dressed for the occasion. The new mother had blow-dried her hair into flicks; Deirdre Watkins had gone so far as to have a perm. She kept
touching the tight curls as if they might fall out and crimping them up with her fingers.

‘Well of course it’s a look that worked for Charles the First,’ said Andrea.

There was a pause where no one knew what to say. Andrea gripped Deirdre’s arm to show she meant no harm, she was only joking. The women laughed heartily. ‘You mustn’t mind me,’ said Andrea.

They had come bearing gifts of Tupperware boxes of salad and cakes. There was coleslaw, Russian salad, devilled kidneys, cheese straws, stuffed grapes, olives, mushrooms and prunes. They produced flasks from their handbags which they poured into glasses and passed round. As the women unpacked the food on the garden table there was a high buzz of excitement. It was such a good idea to meet again, they agreed; so generous of Diana to suggest the concert. They talked as if they had been kept away from each other for years. They spoke of the summer holidays, the children, the lack of routine. They asked one another what they had heard about Jeanie’s appalling injury, as they snapped off plastic lids and set out paper plates. They asked what Byron knew about the poor little girl with the caliper. It was terrifying, they agreed, that something like that could happen to a child, simply because of a small accident. No one seemed to know about Diana’s involvement in her injury. No one mentioned Digby Road, but it would only be a matter of time before they found out, he was sure of it. He could barely move for worry.

When his mother drew up in the drive with the performer and Jeanie, Byron led a small round of applause because he wasn’t sure what else to do. Beverley and her daughter both sat in the back of the car in sunglasses. Beverley wore a new black maxi dress with a spangled motif of a rabbit that jumped slightly around her breasts. ‘I am so nervous,’ she kept saying. She lifted Jeanie out of the car and into her pushchair and the women parted as she made her way to the house. Byron asked how her leg was and Jeanie nodded to show it was still the same.

‘She may never walk again,’ said Beverley. Several of the mothers murmured their sympathy and offered their help with moving her pushchair inside the house.

‘It’s my hands,’ said Beverley. ‘I get terrible pains in my hands. Though my pain is nothing compared to hers. It’s her future that bothers me. When I think of what that poor child is going to need.’

Byron had expected Beverley to be nervous, to be sheepish with the women, especially after the coffee morning where they had talked right over her and laughed, but she was the opposite. She was in her element. She shook each of them by the hand and said how lovely it was to meet them. She took care to memorize everyone’s name, repeating it as soon as they told her.

‘Andrea, how nice. Deirdre, how nice. Sorry,’ she said to the new mother, ‘I didn’t catch your name.’

It was Diana who looked out of place. Now that he saw her in the context of the other Winston House women, he realized how far from them she had strayed. Her blue cotton dress hung from her shoulders like someone else’s and her hair was so limp round her face it looked empty of colour. She couldn’t even seem to remember what to say. One of the mothers mentioned the Olympics, and another said Olga Korbut was a darling, but his mother merely bit her lip. Then James announced, as a sort of prompt, that he had prepared a few words by way of introduction, but Beverley insisted it was Diana’s place to speak.

‘Oh no, please,’ murmured Diana. ‘I couldn’t.’

She tried to take a seat in the audience but the mothers insisted too. Just a few words, sang out Andrea. James ran to offer Diana his prepared speech.

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Goodness.’

She took her place on the terrace. She stared down at the words. The piece of paper jigged in her hands.

‘Friends, mothers, children. Good afternoon.’

There were allusions to charity, music, and something else about the future. Whatever it was she was saying, she could barely be heard. She had to keep stopping sentences and starting them afresh. She plucked at the skin of her wrist and then twisted her fingers through her hair. It was as if she couldn’t even read. Unable to bear any more, Byron led another round of applause. Fortunately Lucy, who was busy scowling from her dining-room chair at Jeanie, clearly thought the concert was over and shot to her feet shouting, ‘Hurrah! Hurrah! Now can we have tea?’ It was humiliating for Lucy, not least because something funny had happened with her hair since he washed it and it looked like flat ribbons, but at least her response broke the ice and everyone stopped staring at Diana.