Running to Paradise (27 page)

At
the end of the meal, as Andrew was paying the bill, a pained expression on his face, Sophia looked across the table at me, her eyes challenging. ‘Guy, you see more of Mum than any of us, what do you really think?’ They all looked at me then: I felt naked, helpless, at bay, my mind a seething blank.

Suddenly,
Beth, her face white as paper, beads of sweat on her forehead: ‘I’m awfully sorry, but if we don’t get out of here fast, I think I’m going to faint.’

‘
Oh, Lord,’ Sophia again. ‘Quick, she must have air. Take her out, Guy, Andrew and I’ll follow in a moment...’

Saved
by my wife! Had it been deliberate? I’ll never know; suffice to say I shall always be grateful to her.

When
I arrived at Maple that night it was raining and the back door was locked. The back doorbell had been broken years ago, and I remember hammering angrily on the glass panels with my bare knuckles. Then George’s face, grey with worry, unshaven. ‘Sorry, Guy, I had to lock it, or she might have got out, you see. I can’t make her go to bed, she says she wants to go to a nightclub.’

I
followed him down the dark passage that always smelled of dog and wet mackintoshes. At the end, the kitchen blazed with light. The dogs ran forward barking. Char was sitting on the edge of the big, scrubbed table, her legs dangling, a glass in her hand. She had put a red, plastic rose in her hair and her eyes, as they focused on me, held no hint of recognition. But she smiled her special smile and held out her arms.

‘
Hullo,’ she said, ‘have you come to take me to see the soldiers? We’d better hurry, or they’ll all be dead.’

And
I just stood there, holding on tightly to her hands. OK, OK, I admitted defeat: they’d been right and I’d been wrong. Char had, for the time being anyway, left us. Why she had I simply did not pretend to know. Her children hinted the seeds of madness had always been there; perhaps they were right. Somehow, it didn’t matter whether they were or not. What did matter, and I remember feeling almost guilty at the wave of relief rolling over me, was that she had not betrayed me, at least not consciously, and with that to hang on to, I could cope with anything.

Gently
I lifted her down from the table. ‘It’s a bit late to see the soldiers tonight, darling,’ I said. ‘Never mind, I’ll take you in the morning...’

Char
and I never made love again — physical love — after that. It wasn’t that I didn’t still love her, God knows I did, but in those weeks since I had seen her last, those weeks in which the illness that, unbeknown to me, had hovered over her for so long, finally won its battle against her, my role somehow became switched. I became, once more, Guy, the prop and mainstay, father, mother, brother, friend, but no longer Guy the lover. Like George, I was simply there, and always would be. Incidentally, I don’t think Char ever completely accepted George’s defection to Bronwen Mallory; for her such a thing was beyond the bounds of credibility. Until, that is, just before she died, and then I have a feeling she did. For my part, I was quite willing to accept my role. I don’t think I would have wished it any other way. After all, I told myself, we’d loved one another, Char and I, long before we became lovers, and would do so long after we ceased to be. Besides, like a cat that bounds in each morning with the milk, wide-eyed and enigmatic, after a night spent on the tiles, who knew where she had been when the mood was on her? I, for one, didn’t want to know.

The
noise of my footsteps on the bare boards of the staircase sounded unnaturally loud. I crossed the hall and opened the front door; it had started to rain. I shut the door behind me and a sudden gust of wind blew a swirl of raindrops in my eyes.

16

They’d turned the old cartshed at the Ashley Arms into a restaurant: red plush seats, Victorian prints and tiny tables hopefully laid for a three-course meal. The place was empty and rather dark. A smartly dressed lady hovered in the passage that used to lead to the Gents.

‘
Can I eat in the bar?’ I asked. ‘I only want a sandwich.’

‘
Of course you can, my love,’ she said. ‘I’ll find you a menu.’ I wondered what had happened to old Sid Bean. The bar was not unpleasant; much larger than I remembered and much brighter. The rather inadequate Valor oil radiator had been replaced by a comforting woodburning stove, and instead of the brown and orange wallpaper, the walls were painted cream.

‘
What happened to Mr Bean?’ I asked. ‘I used to come here in the seventies. He was the landlord then.’

‘
Sid Bean? He died a while back now. Lived round here, did you?’ The lady wore pink, plastic earrings and her brilliant, blonde hair had been newly lacquered. She removed an imaginary speck of dirt from the sleeve of her spotless, pink blouse.

I
was the only customer. It must, I thought, be rather boring for her. ‘I used to stay at the Court, my wife’s parents — the Seymours?’

‘Ah
...’ I tried to interpret the sound; was it nostalgia or disapproval? ‘My husband sees the Major in Trowbridge sometimes. Getting on now, he must be.’

‘
Yes,’ I said.

‘
He married that Mrs Mallory, then, after—?’

‘
Yes,’ I said. ‘He married again after my mother-in-law died.’ I bit into a ham sandwich; the bread was good, but the ham was damp and tasteless.

‘
My Dad used to say the Court brought bad luck. He said there was a curse.’

‘
Really?’ This was a new slant, or at least one I’d never heard before. ‘No one ever stays long there, never have, not since old Lady Ashley died years and years ago: three owners it’s had since the Major sold it, and all of them have had bad luck.’ We were silent for a moment, thinking. ‘I hope I don’t speak out of turn, but the Major and Mrs Seymour had a few ups and downs — that poor boy of theirs — so young.’ I nodded, my mouth full of sandwich. I couldn’t think of anything to say anyway.

At
that moment, however, the door of the bar obligingly opened to admit a large man wearing a donkey jacket, his hair plastered down by rain. ‘Morning Vera, my love. Got any of that pie you had last time I came? And I’ll have a pint of Best while I’m waiting.’ In the ensuing bustle, I took my drink and the plate of sandwiches to a seat by the window. I was glad it was raining, it seemed fitting somehow.

I
sipped my beer and listened to the rain drumming on the roof of Sid Bean’s old greenhouse, and tried to will myself back to those years of the seventies; those years in which so much went wrong I’d wondered whether, for me, they would ever go right again; those years that I’d tried to forget.

Perversely,
now I wanted to remember, only fragments remained, vivid fragments, but nonetheless hard to place in the chronology of that time.

*

‘We’ve got to get her into one of those places, Guy. I don’t care what Dr Weil says, drugs just aren’t enough. I know she can fool people that she’s perfectly normal, but, by God, you should see her sometimes, and I can’t take any more; sooner or later she’s going to do me or herself an injury.’ George’s voice; desperate, drink-slurred. We had been sitting where I sat now, having one of our interminable discussions on Char’s future. I remember the taste of the beer; warm and not very nice, and the sound of rock music. In those days a juke box stood in the corner of the bar, under the clock, next to the cigarette machine that seemed always out of cigarettes.

The
phone ringing by my bed in the house in Fulham at three a.m. on a date I shall never forget — the 8th July. ‘Guy? It’s George. The police have just rung. They say Perry’s dead. Fell into a swimming pool, or something, at some party; too drunk to swim, they all were. Can you go round? I’ve got the address, it’s somewhere in Esher...’

‘
Char?’

‘
Dr Weil’s coming in the morning; he’ll have to cope, I can’t...’ I remember thinking should I wake Beth, then deciding I’d write a note. Earlier that evening she’d told me she was leaving me. We’d talked and talked, getting nowhere, then around midnight she’d taken a sleeping pill and gone to bed.

I
remembered too, driving round Esher in the small hours, trying to find the house where the wretched party had taken place; the house, it seemed, though this was still impossible to believe, where Perry had died. Finding it at last, when I’d almost given up hope — mock Tudor, affluent, pretentious — ringing the bell at the front door, one of those fancy, chiming affairs and no one answering for what seemed hours.

‘
The police have removed the body to the mortuary, I’m afraid. They couldn’t wait, they said.’ The party host at last; distraught, slightly dishevelled, wanting to appear in control of the situation, but manifestly not. My feelings of annoyance at a wasted journey; so typical of George to send me on a wildgoose chase.

‘
Have a chicken vol au vent, Mr Horton. I’ve just re-heated them.’ The host’s wife: she’d changed from party gear into business-like jeans and a shirt; she looked ghastly.

‘
No, thanks, I’d better go. Perry’s mother, you see, she hasn’t been told; I have to—’

‘
Such a tragedy,’ the host’s wife said. ‘We can’t take it in yet. Perry was such a splendid person.’

‘
I’ll ring the police,’ I said, ‘in the morning. Goodbye.’ The lights were still on as I drove past the pool; debris from the party lay scattered on the grass and a couple of empty bottles floated gently on the bright, blue water.

*

‘You can’t stop me seeing my son’s body.’

The
three of us, George, Dr Weil and myself, sitting round Char’s bed at Maple. ‘It would upset you too much, Mrs Seymour, believe me. Better, much better, to think of him as he was.’

Char
looks at Dr Weil, her eyes glittering, desperate, savage with pain. ‘I want to see my son’s body.’

‘
Well, you can’t.’ George shouts. He always shouts at her now. ‘You’ll only make a scene, you know you will, and I simply won’t take any more, I...’

Dr
Weil allows his face briefly to register exasperation, and gently lays a warning hand on George’s knee. ‘I’m sure you would not make a scene, Mrs Seymour, you are much too brave for that, but all the same, it’s better not; I do assure you, it’s better not.’ With a sudden, quick movement, Char leans forward and George, yelping with pain, snatches his hand from where it rested on the side of the bed, blood oozing from the bite marks on his thumb. He backs away.

‘
You’re not safe, you bitch, they’re going to lock you up at last. It’s your fault Perry’s dead, he never had a chance, not with your rotten family’s blood in his veins, he hadn’t.’

I
’m shorter and lighter than George, but he is older and out of condition. I stand up and clumsily lunging across Char’s bed, I manage to hit him quite hard in the face. Taken off balance, he falls heavily against the dressing table, then slowly slumps to the floor, bringing with him a cascade of lipsticks, jars of cosmetics and a vase of dead flowers.

‘
It’s about time you made yourself useful.’ For the first time Char looks at me. ‘What a shame the vase is broken.’

‘
You rotten little Judas,’ Char shouts at me just before they slam the door of the ambulance on her. But that came after: after, in strict adherence to the letter of the law, two doctors and a social worker had put their signature to a paper declaring Char Seymour to be a possible danger to herself or others, and no longer responsible for her actions.

An
ambulance had driven her away that first time. They’d cornered her at last in her bedroom, where she crouched at bay between the brass bed and the wardrobe.

‘
Come on, Mrs Seymour, give me your arm, there’s a good girl.’ Dr Weil, coaxing, hypodermic at the ready, sweating slightly.

‘
Leave me alone, you bloody moron. I’m going to my son’s funeral and you can’t stop me...’

In
the end it was one of the ambulance men who did the trick. He noticed Char had a First World War Royal Artillery badge pinned upside down on the cardigan she was wearing.

‘
Look now, Ma’am, you’ve got your badge the wrong way up,’ he said. ‘We can’t have that, can we? I was a gunner in the last lot.’

Char
had briefly, miraculously, returned from whatever hell she’d been inhabiting and smiled up at him. ‘Goodness, how stupid. Can you do it for me? My fingers don’t seem to be working properly.’

Gently
the ambulance man unpinned the brooch. ‘I was in the Eighth Army myself,’ he said. ‘That was a caper and a half...’ With ease, born of long practice, Dr Weil plunged the needle into Char’s arm; then a quick dab with a piece of cotton wool and it was over. They’d got her. I remember feeling violently sick and overcome with relief at the same time.

I
suppose Perry’s funeral was the last time Beth and I appeared together in public as a couple. He was cremated: this against Char’s express wish, but by then she had been officially designated a nonperson and her wishes had no bearing on the matter. The decision of how to dispose of their son’s body was left to George.

So
there we all sat — not Char, of course. She was safely put away by now — in a West London crematorium, glumly watching the bright, new coffin slide slowly forward towards the waiting flames beyond the screen.

‘
No point in moving the body down to Bath if it’s going to be burned,’ George had said with unanswerable logic. Did we have a ‘bun fight’ afterwards? I can’t remember, but I do remember quite clearly the tears trickling down Sophia’s face as she emerged from the crematorium chapel into the sunlight outside.

A
week or so later Beth moved out. It was, as I may have mentioned, a civilised parting. We were very business-like about everything. All passion, indeed, spent.

‘
You’re welcome to most of the stuff,’ Beth said. ‘Ronald’s got so much already, there won’t be room anyway.’ Ronald was the television producer she was moving in with and is now married to. They’re very happy, and have a son, born just before Beth’s fortieth birthday.

After
Beth had gone, we sold the house in Fulham, dividing the proceeds, and I bought my present flat in Battersea. The block was brand new then: an affluent, middle-class ghetto, set in the midst of an area of tower blocks already in decline, boarded up warehouses and empty, terrace houses clinging precariously to small, mean streets that no longer led anywhere. I remember my first night in the place. I went out and got drunk in the pub — since demolished — next door. The Sailor’s Haven was an extraordinary affair. A relic from the Festival of Britain, it appeared to be constructed entirely of weather boarding, and was designed to look like a ship, with portholes instead of windows and a gangplank in place of stairs. I don’t think I ever went again, but somehow at the time its insane decor seemed eminently suited to the nightmare I seemed to be living through.

‘
Penny for them.’ I jumped. The lady in the pink blouse stood beside me, keys in hand, smiling brightly. ‘It’s gone two o’clock, sir. I don’t want to hurry you—’

‘
I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I was miles away.’

‘
Thinking about old times?’

‘
You could say that.’

‘
Come again,’ she said, ‘next time you’re passing.’ I nodded, smiling, too. But I wouldn’t be passing, though, would I, not again.