Semi-Detached (21 page)

I
dreaded the mornings, especially if the mum insisted on making breakfast. ‘Here,
bacon, eggs, black pudding.’

‘Thanks,
Mrs Macey.’ A long silence followed, while Macey and I stared at the greasy
plates through throbbing eyeballs and pounding heads, fighting back nausea.

‘Your
father thinks someone was in our bed. What sort of people did you have here?’

‘They
were just normal people, weren’t they, Rhys?’

‘Yes.’
Can I push this stuff around the plate without actually throwing up?

‘But I
don’t understand. Would your mother allow this sort of thing to go on, Rhys?’

‘Mmm…’

Well,
of course she wouldn’t. She would have to be got out of the way too. Because in
the end, it wasn’t the damage, or the recriminations, or the period of grace
that would allow a modicum of tidying up, it was the loss of face that was at
stake.

I have
done it myself now, sat
,
like Virginia McKenna locked in the gun room,
while a group of savages on day release from inner London day schools laid
waste the governor’s palace. It’s a
phase. Of course, we didn’t believe
it was a
phase. We thought we had invented the genre.

Somewhere
in the middle of this I had met Jane, who was a
very naughty girl, and I
had fallen deeply in love with her.

I
picked her up at a party. Or she picked me up. Yes, she picked me up. This was a
rare event and what made her rather exciting. I should have known she was
only dallying with me.

She was
short and blonde and had been going out with someone who had just left the
upper sixth. She talked to me to annoy him, but she was very direct, and I was
seduced by her worldliness. The little girls — the fifteen-year-olds we were
expected to focus on — were like us, tentative, but Jane snogged furiously and
groped extremely efficiently. When I went to her house she introduced me to her
startled mother and led me straight up to her bedroom for a
bit of
torrid fumbling. There wasn’t any actual sex. None of us seemed to get sex,
however much we boasted, though we discussed the possibility endlessly. The
girls were generally far too canny. But we could rub and pant and get sticky,
and Jane seemed to want to do that as soon as we met.

Jane
was a wild child. I certainly wasn’t. I sat and had tea in the kitchen
afterwards, all flushed and wobbly, while Jane pointedly ignored her poor
mother. I remember the journey home, sitting on the front seat on a completely
deserted upper deck of the later bus, away from the usual rush-hour crowd,
exulting in the agony of adolescent passion. This was it. I was completely and
utterly consumed by the aptness of Jane, her blonde, slightly dirty hair, her
nylon school shirt, her willingness, her secret personality, her femininity
and understanding of my needs. We had groped in her room! With her mother
downstairs.

A few
minutes later, as I lurched through the night, I discovered that I couldn’t
remember what she looked like. I sat in a panic. But I was in love with her! I
just couldn’t quite recall her face. But the way she hitched her high-school
dark-blue skirt around her waist. And the way a
few tendrils of hair
hung upwards on her cheek from an earlier cut that was growing out … and the
way she talked to me about … what? We usually glued our faces to each other
pretty quickly. Ah yes. I remembered her face. Yes, that’s who I was in love
with. Phew.

So, if
I really, really loved Jane, because she was older than me and more knowing and
experienced, why on earth did I
tell
Gotley about her at all? Why did I
tell him that I met her in the woods at lunchtimes and near as dammit fucked.
Not really fucked, but got pretty close.

Because
the following lunchtime, when I met her in the woods again, we turned a
corner
heading for the bracken and there they all were, at least a
dozen of
them, sniggering and grinning. ‘Fancy seeing you here, Stubs.’

‘Yeah. Yeah.’

‘Aren’t
you going to introduce us to your friend?’

‘Bugger
off!’

She
didn’t say anything. But she could see I was really just a kid. Come next
Saturday and the next party, when I arrived longing for her, I discovered she
had already gone off with someone else.

One of
the girls from the joint historical society tried to comfort me. ‘Forget her.
She was just anybody’s.’ That was the point. She was as dirty-minded and
sex-obsessed as a
bloke. But she wasn’t mine any more. But by the end of
the evening I was back with my mates, getting drunk.

9. Mersea

‘Is that the Peldon Rose?’
my mother asked.

‘Yes.’

The
darkened pub flashed by. As children we liked it when we stopped for supper on
light evenings on the way back from the boat. It was the first place on the
mainland. We ate
on furniture made of grey logs, unsawn, like branches
from trees, and, since they looked so improvised, surprisingly heavy to lug
about — pork pie, Scotch eggs, rubber sausages. My father liked hot mustard,
and just the traces from his knife where he cut ours in half had seemed an
impossibly adult taste.

The
other way beyond the pub, the road dips, the screens of Essex blackthorn lift
and white fence markers appear. In the daylight, an expanse of salting
stretches off to the west to Tollesbury. At night the blank coastal strip
simmers under a
Lucozade dawn. Sometimes at high tide the road is
covered completely. The creeks on either side are shallow and clogged with mud.
It felt American. So did the whole island. All the English virtues of civic
dignity and properly organized pavements seemed slow to catch on. Is it still
like that I wonder? It was too dark to see. It used to be characterized by
private lanes with improvised road surfaces and half-developed plots. The
people of West Mersea seemed in denial, or perhaps their council was. They
refused for years to behave outwardly like a modern, settled 1970s community.

I
turned off into Firs Road.

‘Oh,
you know the way,’ my mother said and surprised me.

‘Yes.’
I knew the back route, even though I had never driven here as a teenager. I had
never driven at all as a
teenager. There was no chance of having a car,
and my father wasn’t going to lend us his, so there wasn’t much point in
learning. Perhaps we always took the main road through the ancient little
village, another American place of clapboard houses. The boat was usually
parked in a car park in front of the Victory pub. My mother wouldn’t have been a
regular at
the Club. My father wouldn’t have let her.

I was
speaking at the West Mersea Yacht Club as a guest of the Royal Naval Sailing
Association, East Coast Branch, and as we parked and as I helped my mother out
of the car, I wished I wasn’t. It wasn’t a
particularly focused wish,
just the usual ‘What the hell am I doing here?’ gloom that
accompanies
every after-dinner speech and makes me curt and unsociable when I arrive. I
would have to meet and talk with elderly strangers. (There were dozens in the
bar.) I would have to eat an indifferent meal. (It was fair but hardly
celebrant.) I would be sat
next to the chairman, and we would run out of
things to say to each other by the end of the hors-d’oeuvres. (He was a
nice
man with a
boat he kept in Bradwell, right on the other side of the
Blackwater. We persevered until half-way through the main course.)

As we
stood in the bar (the sort of place where you have to tiptoe carefully around
the subject of why you don’t drink) all I really wanted to do was look at the
black and white photographs of sleek fifties racing yachts owned by brigadiers.
These were the yachts we used to pass on the way out of the creek on a
Saturday
morning. The Kim Holman and the Robert Clarke designs that had glistened in the
Essex sun and seemed so elegant, fit and organized compared with our ersatz boating
experience.

I was
glad my mother had been able to come. She had been diagnosed with breast cancer
two months before. This was a cruel eighty-first birthday present.

‘They
keep telling me it’s
only younger women. They even stop testing you
after a
certain age.

They
also told her not to worry. ‘Something else will probably carry you off before
this cancer does.’ But that was what they had told my father at
the age
of seventy. It was the cancer that had quickly carried him off.

My
mother was being defiantly selfless about it — talking in surprised tones about
how she seemed to think about it all the time, as if this was the last thing
she had expected. She had finished treatment the week before. It had tired her,
but she wanted to come. ‘I’m sore,’ she told me, and I pulled a
sympathetic
face. In some polished gentlemanly society, sons can talk about the bruised and
aching breast of their elderly mothers. As for me, I grunted and commiserated
and tried to change the subject. She had a
large and dutiful ‘bosom’, as
she called it. This was the bosom I had rested my head on. This was my mummy’s
bosom. Now she was too sore to even hug.

She was
a victim of too many assaults of old age: mugged by legs, attacked by
arthritis, happy-slapped by a painful replacement knee, and now this. She
talked about my father. The round of life brought everything up in turn. (‘He
would have liked this.’ ‘Oh, that was so like your father.’) She told me that
she wanted him here now, when she was frightened, more than any other time.

It
seemed, despite all this, that she never faded. She just went on, my mother.
This was me, in denial of the facts. There were still lunches and meetings and
people calling. I accepted all the doctors told me, about how this thing would
settle and how it was less virulent, because it was convenient to do so. I
spent time persuading her that they were hopeful, but I knew that after all
the mechanical failures this seemed like something irreparable. I was reminded
of my father. (‘I had to tell a
woman that her husband would not survive
an illness. He was eighty-seven. Do you know what she said? “Why him, doctor,
why him?”‘)

I was
speaking at
the club because Derek had asked me to. Derek had retired
from the Navy as a
chief petty officer and joined the police. When he
sailed with my father he was a
detective chief inspector, the most
clubbable, social, entertaining policeman you could hope to be arrested by. How
on earth he hooked up with my dad I have no idea. We often sailed in a little
flotilla round the east coast, bumping into Derek and his family, doing things
together.

You
make assumptions about your parents’ friendships as a
child. Or rather
you don’t. You simply accept these adults and you ask no questions. Why these
two different men should have spent any time together only seems curious now.

To us
kids Derek was the best. He told incredible long-winded and carefully performed
jokes. He was easy-going in any society, confident, ready to laugh off
accidents. I used to wonder, though, what he would have been like as a policeman.
There were always, behind the huge smile and easy laughter and the brilliant
stories, these sharp detective eyes, alert to other human beings; unlike my
father.

It was a
good laugh for the audience at the club that night. ‘I go back a long way
with Derek. He banged me up for three years.

‘No, we
never came in here very much,’ my mother explained in the bar beforehand. ‘Your
father used to say it was the most expensive 100 he ever joined.’

I told
them that in the speech too. In fact I got provided with half the funny stories
for the beginning of my ‘talk’ simply by prodding memories, as we stood
surrounded by all these men in blazers with their little floating garden sheds.

‘Your
dad,’ Derek told me ‘was immensely proud of
Windsong.
And one day we
were in here … it might have been …’ He looked around. (It probably wasn’t.
It was probably in the Victory. He would have gone there for his lunch because
it was close to where the boat was kept in the winter.) ‘And anyway, I spot Maurice
Griffiths on the other side of the bar, and I was amazed that your dad had
never met him, and he revered those boats.’

I wasn’t
amazed. My father would never have freely introduced himself to anybody.

‘So I
introduced him. And Elwyn went up to Maurice and said, “I’m so pleased to meet
you because I am so proud of the boat I own that
you designed.” “Which
boat is that?” asked Griffiths.
“Windsong,”
says your father. “Oh, that
old hulk. That was the worst boat I ever built.” And your father was so crestfallen.’
Derek laughed.

Is that
what they thought, then, what all sons suspect about their father, that the
rest of the world is laughing at
them? But he
would
have been
crestfallen. It wasn’t my father’s way to be party to the broad stroke of
humour. He found social demands perplexing. If he was doing something else, he
couldn’t cope with them at all
.
I have that
trait too. I had
arrived at the club trying to work out where I would be talking from, fiddling
with the computer that
I’d brought but which wouldn’t show my
photographs through their screen projector, utterly preoccupied with what I had
to say and unable to let that ride and concentrate on chat, small talk and the
basic demands of humanity. God damn it. Yes. This is exactly how he would have
behaved. I am behaving exactly like my father!