Repeat It Today With Tears (21 page)

‘Did you ever ask him outright?’

‘No, I never did. I thought about it sometimes, especially when he behaved very badly and let people down because he was so obsessed. Do you know, one Sunday we had gone out to a special lunch with some very dear old friends, it was their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. We’d only just started and suddenly he jumped up, like a man possessed, and said he had to go; no apology, no explanation, he jolly nearly ran out of the restaurant…’

So, my father’s wife describes events earlier in that day; the other occasion on which I saw him weep. This was by far the worse; you may know that sobs issuing forth from a grown man sound quite dreadful. I, all unaware and humming a song from Ali’s radio, had climbed the stairs at Oakley Street in a haze of Diorrissimo and anticipation, the tips coins weighing down my
pockets. Jack had given me a key and I did not expect him to be back but he was waiting in the doorway of the room and he snatched me as if from danger at a cliff or platform edge. Then I realised that he was sobbing and he told me that he had thought that I was never coming; he said, ‘Oh, Susie, thank God,’ and he tilted my face as though he expected to see some sign or device of bad tidings inscribed there in magic writing and then again he hugged me to his chest and was sobbing the more so. I felt that I was ill equipped to deal with this adult grief. Lacking any appropriate stock of conversational phrases I did the only thing I could think of which might give him comfort, I began to undress. Expiating his sobbing and his sorrow he pushed me very hard that afternoon, bruising me quite markedly, there on the teatime bed. I accommodated and indeed encouraged his brutishness because I felt that it must be reassuring for him to do it that way. As he finished he might have been turning himself inside out. Afterwards he apologised; not for his ferocity, but for his earlier comportment, so really he was saying sorry not to me, but to Olive and to the old and dear anniversary couple friends.

‘God, what a stupid cuss I am. There I was with half a bloody avocado in front of me like a bar of soap and this blind panic seized me… I had this awful presentiment, I just had to get back to London to see… ’

‘What did you think had happened?’

‘I thought… er… I thought… I got this idea into my head that you had decided to call it a day… that you wouldn’t be here anymore… ’

‘But I promised you.’

‘People break promises, Susie. Christ, I should know that better than anyone… ’

‘I don’t,’ I said and then the kiss that I gave him was almost vicious.

‘I don’t.’

‘It’s all right,’ says Bonnie Jean, ‘she’s dreaming, that’s all.’

‘The funny thing was, apart from the times when he let people down because of it, I wasn’t angry at all. Well, I was a bit, with myself, for not knowing sooner, but I wasn’t angry with him, I couldn’t be, you see, because he was so absurdly, ridiculously happy. I couldn’t find it in me to begrudge him, I did care for him, after all and he was, I don’t know… transformed by this affair.’

In the Chelsea Potter, when Barry French was describing some supreme moment of pleasure, he talked of being translated. Bonnie Jean must have brought them biscuits to share from the big red Family Assortment tin; for a while I listened to crunching.

‘And did you know her, this woman?’ Some determination transmitted itself from my brain through my central nervous system and my hand twitched. Bonnie Jean leant across and patted it.

‘No, I’m still not sure, who she was… ’ Her voice trailed into a dreaminess, ‘But, my God, he must have loved her… ’

For a few seconds I sensed Olive regarding my marked face and my bits of ruined hair and her gaze was making them precious again. Fleetingly, during those few seconds, I believed that she knew and was recognising me for what I was to my father and as she held out her arms to me I gave myself up and both of us were glad for knowing.

‘And do you think that there was some connection here?’

‘How do you mean?’ Olive’s tone snaps back sharply from its dreamy state.

‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to pry.’ Bonnie Jean begins to stack up their cups and saucers.

‘No, no, I know that you didn’t, and it is a question I have asked myself, that and other things, I just don’t know. I did try to
find answers. As soon as I felt able to face it I went to the house where he lived during the week, I thought that the people that knew him there might be able to cast some light… ’

As surely as if I were able to open my eyes and look I know that outside the window the sky and the line of treetops have lurched sickeningly and wildly as when the liquid in a snow storm globe is tipped. It is vital that I muffle what she is saying. I do it with the song, which somewhere Jack is singing; he is humming, not in tune, over some task. Shoes. He is polishing the old brown shoes with the brush and the Cherry Blossom Shoe-shine from under the sink, kept beside the medicinal Spanish brandy…
‘They can’t take that away from me… oh no they can’t take that away from me…’
He sings louder over the rhythm of the vigorous brushing but I can hear chair legs scrape upon the linoleum as Bonnie Jean pushes it back against the wall. I want him to sing louder still so as to block out the light that Olive has seen cast. But I am safe after all.

‘But there was no one… there had only been two of them left in the house, old time tenants with controlled rents, once Jack was gone, the landlord was quick to persuade the last one out and sell, it was such a valuable property, you see… so there was no one I could ask, no one who would have remembered him. He lived a very solitary life in London.’

‘A bit like a monk’s cell,’ says Jack as he opens the door that first night before he falls headlong into my eyes.

‘Maybe it is just as well not to know,’ says Bonnie Jean and Olive says that maybe it is and as she departs she pauses to pat the cover of my bed with its smooth white icing sheet.

P

eriodically Trevor tries a new tack, especially when I have had darker days. Herne never does, he just worries at old ground mercilessly; probably he even bores himself. But Trevor, dedicated and optimistic, feels it incumbent upon himself to ponder new strategies and potential for us inmates. He might have been a curate in a deprived parish, wearing a chunky wooden cross and running a youth club.

‘How do you envisage your life after you leave here, Susie? What would you like the future to be?’

‘Don’t know.’

‘Come on, Susie, what do you want?’

What I want, Trevor, is to let my head sink, with a sigh, upon my father’s chest so that at last I can safely go to sleep again.

When I lay me down to sleep

Fourteen angels watch to keep…

I can listen for the rise and fall of his breathing and be lulled and comforted by the little bits of sweetheart words he murmurs to me, scraps of coloured ribbons, as we drift towards our rest.

Someone to watch over me…

‘Will you have ambitions for yourself, do you think? Are there things you hope to do? You could have gone far at school, we know that.’

‘What do you most want in all the world, Susie?’ Side by side
in the bed in the room in Oakley Street we lay, Jack and I.

‘You,’ I said.

‘You’re very sweet.’

His arms and my arms were straight down at our sides. I was holding his long hand and I closed on it very tightly, pressing hard on the bones.

‘I mean it, Jack,’ I said.

He turned on the pillow to look at me. It was only the third time that I had been to bed with him. As he comprehended the strength of my conviction his eyes were for a moment troubled and he frowned a little but I stared him out until he softly spoke my name and drew me into his arms again.

I wondered whether I could make something up for Trevor so that he felt his questions were worthwhile but I was too tired.

‘Nothing,’ I said, ‘nothing at all. Can I go back to bed, please?’

Whereas clogged hair Derrick asks interminably, ‘How long are you going to keep this up?’

‘Until the end.’

‘What do you mean by that?’

What do you think I mean, stupid. Don’t you know that passion always ends in death?

‘It’s like talking to a religious fanatic sometimes, talking to you, Susanna.’

I treat him to an adolescent look of scornful exasperation; an expression which my sister Lin used to dispense to great effect. Privately, however, I conceded that he had made a cogent observation. Probably it is the closest anyone has ever come to understanding. It was the first and only time that I felt respect for Derrick Hearn.

* * * * *

In another year it is September again. Olive arrives with the holdall and because it is full of things and I sense she is keen to make gifts of its contents to me I suspect that she will not be coming any more.

Lying on top is a bunch of dahlias, the spiky sort and the ones with petals resembling the paper Christmas decorations which can be concertina’d out; bells, often. ‘From the garden,’ she says, ‘picked this morning.’

When you picked them, could you see the fine raked tilth of the asparagus bed that Jack once worked on, weekend after weekend, so that the skin of his cheeks and the back of his neck were tanned by the sun and the wind. Or is that all long overgrown?

The Pre-Raphaelites are first out of the bag, followed by a sheaf of exhibition catalogues. Then there is a hand-thrown mug with a Tudor rose design worked up in the clay which a potter friend has made. The same friend will provide the wares for the gallery café, apparently. Olive seems fulsomely happy, she radiates warmth like a kitchen range.

Next there is a cake, wrapped in a napkin of some folkweave cloth. She has never said whether the friend with whom she is embarking upon the gallery venture is male or female. Perhaps if it is a male she feels she must observe some nicety towards my father, God help her. Bonnie Jean, asked if she might possibly be able to find a vase for the flowers, returns to praise the baked aroma and is told that it is apple and sultana cake.

A long time afterwards I might be able to acknowledge the irony of the next part of the September afternoon. You see, when my father’s wife first walked into this room I, unable to escape, was filled with fear. I cowered inside my head as I anticipated what she would say and do. Shout, accuse, perhaps strike physical blows, a slap to my deviant, once-painted harlot’s cheeks.
Perhaps pelt me with my old clothes, all patterned with that repeat motif of passion spent, and now rags merely. ‘Rag and bone’ the old man with the horse and cart used to cry through the South London mornings. ‘Rag and bone’.

I came to wish that she had done all or any of these things, nothing there to fear. But Olive did none of them; there in the golden perfidious kindness of the September sunshine, what she did do was infinitely worse. My penance was to prove far more subtle.

‘There are some old apple trees in the garden,’ Tisiphone explains to Bonnie Jean, who will doubtless miss their little chats.

‘Marvellous croppers and we always had so many windfalls… so I got into the habit of putting them into a cake, it was my husband’s favourite… ’

No, it wasn’t, you kindly stupid stupidly kind bovine woman who never had children so managed broken adults instead. And even if it was his favourite that was only because he had not yet visited the baker’s on the corner of Bywater Street and shared the sweet sandy curranty Nelson cakes with his sweet-mouthed sticky love in the early morning sheets of faraway mist-shrouded Chelsea.

She has cut me a slice but my hand is dead on the cover and so she offers some to Bonnie Jean. All the auxiliaries love to eat whenever they can, always pleased to share in the chocolate box or the toffee tin or whatever is brought in. I think it is the crushing nature of their work and the tedium of it; after all, even madness is boring if you have to see it day in, day out.

And then from the holdall a lumpy carrier bag is taken.

‘I’m warning you,’ my mother used to say, once, twice or three times before delivering some retributive blow.

‘I’ll put these in the bowl for you, Susie… they ripen up very
well… I’m not sure what the variety is, your father did find out, once upon a time, but I forget… ’

Lord Lambourne. And the sun through the glass will ripen them up says Jack while he tries to persuade me that I should leave him and I imagine how it would feel if I did and there is a hole right through the centre of my chest as though someone sculpted my form and cast me in cold bronze for the Chiltern winds to pass through the place where my heart should be.

‘Anyway, as it will be the last year I thought I ought to make the most of the old trees. I really think it’s the best season we’ve had… Do try it, Susie… ’

Bonnie Jean has declared the cake scrumptious and Olive is telling her that she thinks muscovado rather than caster is the key.

And ‘Aren’t you going to eat yours?’ they ask me. ‘Go on, give it a try… ’

‘I’m warning you,’ my mother said before she laid about her.

And it seems that there is no end to the bounteous harvest from Olive’s holdall for she has bobbed down to it yet again.

‘Oh, and Susie,’ she says, ‘I don’t suppose you ever remember seeing your father at all and so I thought… ’ and pauses breathless, ‘… this I think is my favourite one of him… ’

I shut my eyes just in time. If they want to make me look they will have to gouge them open.

‘Well, I’ll just leave it on the side here then… ’

‘Take it back. Get it gone. I don’t want to see.’

They cluck and whisper at the edge of the room beyond the cinnamon incense of the broken cake. Confetti was little bits of cake thrown by the Romans for nuptial celebrations. I hear a small bump as a stray apple drops from the bowl, one of them replaces it.

‘Susie, I can see that you’re tired and I have to go soon anyway, but there is one other thing I need to tell you. I’ve written down the details of the grave, in case you should ever want to go and see… It’s in the town where he was born, in Wales.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. He’s not dead. I don’t know anyone that’s dead.’