Remedy is None (12 page)

Charlie looked at her bitterly, his eyes opaque with anger.

‘If you want tae follow in the footsteps of your dear mother,
ye can do it some place else. Ye’ll no’ be doin’ it here.’

It was an insult administered with brutal precision, the more painful because only those closest to her would have known where to hit. The desertion of their mother had scarred them all, but in Elizabeth the wound had gained extra depth because of implications of heredity that could not apply to her brothers. For her it had seemed that the natural sexual instincts that she felt might possibly be the first stirrings of her mother’s shame manifesting itself in her. It had haunted her for a time. She had found it necessary to overcome them, to prove to herself that what she was experiencing was not her mother’s guilt in embryo. It had been a bewildering and lonely time. The terrifying mystery of puberty had entered her body accompanied by her private multitude of vague, half-formed, whispering fears. The only person who could properly have helped her to understand the fearful quickening in her blood was present only as a sinister shadow, a prophetic whisper that had to be disproved. Alone Elizabeth had to try to find her way through a holocaust of conflicting feelings towards the simple state of being ‘good’, that rickety fire-escape down which people evade the complexity of moral problems. By consultation with other girls, by comparison and analysis, she had painstakingly evolved her sexual code, allowing nothing to anyone until she had done so, holding herself in careful isolation until she was ready to come down from her own minute Mount Sinai. The result was a naive formula rigidly adhered to: only with the one she felt she wanted to marry would there be more than kissing, and with him there wouldn’t be much more. The simple North of her home-made compass was virginity until marriage. Perhaps the caution with which she carved each hand-hold into the future was exaggerated, but then she dreaded falling into the past that had claimed her mother. If she let go, she did not know how far there was to fall, and she couldn’t afford to find out. She had merely kept to her simple formula. And it had worked. Harry had fitted into it and with him she had unlearned her suspicions. Gradually she had ceased to associate
sex with guilt, enjoyed the limited expression of her feelings, and looked forward to their ultimate fulfilment. Now Charlie deliberately burst the closing tissues of time and reopened the wound. And the fact that his statement was utterly unfair only added salt to her suffering. Injustice only whets insult to a keener edge.

The noise of their two voices subsided into the single sound of Elizabeth crying. She was islanded in her misery, sitting with her hands covering her eyes as if Charlie wasn’t there. Every so often she invoked her father helplessly. The scene, taking place in the same room, reminded Charlie of the funeral. It was as if one of the mourners had forgotten to go home, did not know that it was over. But he was the one who did not know, refused to accept that it was over. He was the one who wanted more. And was this what he wanted? A girl sobbing in a darkening room by a dying fire. Was this how to see justice done? By taking advantage of his sister’s grief? What nobility of purpose! Charlie felt ashamed of himself. He had seen Elizabeth gradually coming to terms with the loss of her father and he had callously re-activated her grief. What was he trying to do? Her father had died of cancer and her mother of her own indifference, and he couldn’t let her be happy for a little while with her boy friend. His own brutality sickened him. The fear he had felt on that waste lot after Mick had gone assailed him again. Why was he trying to make the victims of what had been happening endure the guilt of it? Why did he find it necessary to distribute the pain of it among other people? Did he want to see the suffering of his father acknowledged in other people, re-enacted in their own suffering? But why in people like Mick and Elizabeth? Because they were available and he could impose himself on them? That was only adding to the injustice. They were innocent bystanders. Then who was not? Who was guilty? Who was he looking for? He felt suddenly very frightened, frightened of himself, of what he might do. He realized how dangerous he was, to himself and to everyone else. He felt growing in himself an uncontrollable and indiscriminate
anger that could strike blindly, at any time and in any direction. Elizabeth was right. He was in some sense ill.

Was it just because his own small certainties were extinguished? The thought of it made him feel unbearably lonely. He
was
ill, he felt, and bore about him the smell of death, carrying it into their tidy lives. The terror of what might be ehead of him made him long for the small assurances he had lost himself, the security, the certainty of ordinary things. He felt a terrible need for help, for protection from himself in the company of others.

He crossed to Elizabeth and put his arm round her shoulders.

‘Ah’m sorry, Elizabeth,’ he said. ‘Please forgive me.
Ah’m
sorry.’

She was hurt beyond the point of recrimination and was grateful even for the sympathy of her assailant. Her head sank against his chest, and in holding her he was not only giving but also taking comfort. It was the solace of mutual sadness, like the courage two children might gain from knowing that each other is afraid. They sat leaning protectively against each other, as pathetic as any babes in the wood, and more pathetic in that their proximity was illusory and each was lost in a private wood. For Elizabeth it was simply the confusion that Charlie had re-created in her world, the fears and doubts that overgrew the simplicity of things, shutting out understanding. Being not of her own invention, it was both as frightening and as easily escaped from as any wood in a fairytale. All it needed was the right reaction from Charlie, the magical resumption of his old identity, and everything would be all right again. If he would only revert to the person he had been before their father’s death, her life could resume its old routes, laid by habit and surfaced with certainty. For Charlie the entanglement was greater, the shadows deeper, and escape seemed much more difficult. The thing that pursued him and from which he had to escape, was himself, and haunted him like his own shadow. He dreaded being trapped by his own anger round every corner.

They were content just to be still for the moment, damming sadness with their silence. But the ticking of the clock trickled insistently around them, breaching the feeling of security that immobility gave them. A coal, patiently hollowed out by flame, collapsed suddenly in the grate. The noise snapped Elizabeth out of her trance like the fingers of a hypnotist.

‘Charlie,’ she said. ‘Charlie. What is it that’s makin’ you like this?’

The gentleness of Elizabeth’s voice was soothing. The darkness deepening in the room made it as intimate as a confessional and Charlie felt anonymous enough to talk objectively.

‘Ah don’t know, Elizabeth,’ he said. ‘It’s something Ah don’t even understand maself. But Ah didn’t mean what Ah said. Honest. Ah’m sorry.’

She sat away from him and rubbed at the tear-tracks round her eyes.

‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘That’s not what Ah meant. It’s no’ just that. It’s everything. Why are ye no’ going back up to the university?’

‘Ah don’t know. There just doesny seem to be any point to it any more. There’s just no reason for goin’ back.’

‘Don’t say that, Charlie. Don’t say that. Of course there is. There’s lots of reasons.’

It was a simple statement of faith, and one that she could not on the spot justify rationally. But she knew who could.

‘Charlie. John wants to see you. He wants to have a talk with you.’

Her words sank into the silence of the room, across the surface of which the clock still fluttered its fly-wings of sound.

‘Charlie. Will ye do it? Will ye go up an’ see John? He wants to talk things over with you.’

Well, it was what he had wanted. The company of others. So here it was – a cordial invitation. Why not? He had learned already that what troubled him was not something it was easy to talk about, but perhaps talking with John would help him to see things more clearly. Perhaps this moment of
accidental objectivity that he had found with Elizabeth could be repeated with John.

‘All right, Elizabeth,’ he said. Something prompted him to commit himself more definitely while he was still in the mood. ‘Ah’ll go up the night. Right after ma tea.’

‘Oh, good, Charlie. Thanks.’ Elizabeth felt as if she had been granted a real favour, and the concession created an appetite for more. ‘There’s just wan other thing, Charlie. Mary was up the night.’

The statement masked a question. But Charlie’s stillness in the dark suggested no answer.

‘She was nearly greetin’, Charlie. She wanted tae see ye.’

Somebody simulated maniacal laughter outside in the street and it was followed by a clatter of running feet and the whoops of mock pursuit.

‘Ah had to do something, Charlie.’

Elizabeth was edging towards the point where she would have to just close her eyes and jump.

‘Ah said ye would see her on Friday night. Seven o’clock. Outside McPartlin’s.’

She had done it. She waited for the jar of landing. But still nothing happened. Charlie’s first instinct was to refuse, but he paused. He remembered burning the letter and the finality he had meant that action to have. Yet it seemed to him now somehow a pathetic gesture, like sticking pins in a clay doll. Mary was present in his life. He couldn’t efface her by destroying her verbal image. Anyway, the physical pleasure he couldn’t help anticipating at the thought of being with her made him wonder if his anger at Elizabeth and Harry wasn’t alloyed with jealousy. It would please Elizabeth if he accepted. He owed her some gesture of apology.

‘Friday,’ he said. ‘Ah’ll see her then.’

‘That’s great, Charlie.’

Elizabeth involuntarily touched his cheek and retracted her hand at once, joy in cryptogram. Intuitively, she kept her pleasure to herself, as if to reveal its location externally might make it possible for it to be taken from her.

She rose and switched on the light. The room, like everything else, was practical again. It was no longer ominous with shadows, but bright with mundanity – a fire whose embers were growing a fur of ash, a window that called for the decency of drawn curtains. She crossed and closed the curtains.

‘What’s happened to yer face, Charlie?’ she asked, noticing the bruise for the first time.

Charlie fingered it self-consciously.

‘Nothing,’ he said.

‘What is it? Were ye in a fight?’

‘It’s nothing, Ah said.’

She didn’t want to disturb their new-found equilibrium with too many questions.

‘Ah’d better mend the fire,’ she said, lifting the pail. ‘It’s like Christmas day in the workhouse.’

‘Ah’ll get it,’ Charlie said.

He took the pail from her and went out to the coal house, foraging in the dark for nuggets to get the fire going again. By the time he had finished and was washing his hands, Elizabeth had made fresh tea and his meal was on the table, with apologies for
hors d’oeuvres.

‘Ah’m sorry, Charlie. But it’s a bit dry by now. It’s been heatin’ for that long.’

‘That’s all right,’ he said. ‘Ah like things done to a turn. Even if it’s an ill yin.’

As he ate, Charlie enjoyed a sense of respite. The immediate future was at least filled in two places, like the spaces in a diary. Something was being done and that salved his conscience for the moment.

Through in the living-room, Elizabeth took pleasure in the small sounds that came from the kitchen. The house was being used as a house should be. Everything seemed normal again. She felt a temendous conviction that the worst of it was over. The rest would be a steady return to the old order of things. Charlie’s anger had had the effect of bridging the separation that had been growing between them. Optimism enclosed her thoughts like a halo.

Suddenly she had an inspiration. Something that would make certainty even surer, turn the key another time on her happiness. She would have to hurry, before Charlie came back through. She went to the bookcase and took out writing-paper and envelopes. A search through the miscellany in the drawer revealed a biro. She felt almost mischievous, as if she were preparing a surprise birthday present for Charlie. After a brief consultation with what she remembered of form, she had her address in the right place. She wondered for a second about
their
address. But that was all right. It was the same as Charlie’s had been, c/o Mrs Wright. ‘Dear Andy and Jim,’ she wrote. It seemed strange, writing two names like that, as if they were a comedy team, like Laurel and Hardy. But Charlie had always seemed to refer to them in that way, as if they weren’t so much two people as one split personality. She would have to be careful what she wrote. She wouldn’t say too much. Just hint at Charlie’s moodiness and suggest that they might come down and see him. She felt quite daring, as if she was taking command of the whole situation.

She wondered how she should address it. Messrs. Layburn and Ellis? That sounded as if they were in business together. A. Layburn and J. Ellis. That would do.

She reinforced the comma after Jim’s name and thought again of how easy it had been to get Charlie to see John and Mary. That was the most hopeful thing of all. His own willingness. The way he had grasped at the opportunity for the meetings endorsed the importance of them.

She did not realize that straws may look like logs to a man who is drowning.

Chapter 10

CHARLIE PRESSED THE BELL AND WAITED ON THE DOOR
-step, as diffident as a collector for charity. He felt a little awkward about arriving at the door like this for a hand-out of elder wisdom.

A brief shower had fallen as he was coming up, and the street steamed slightly under the lamps. They weren’t in any hurry to answer the door. He listened for a moment, but he could only hear vague indecipherable sounds drowned in a burst of gun fire from the television. He waited till the smoke cleared and rang again. This time a voice shouted something, incomprehensible as a newsvendor’s cry, and a sudden thunder of hooves meant that the living-room door had been opened. The hooves reached crescendo as the outside door opened and John peered round it, holding himself in miniature under his arm.