Smut: Stories (14 page)

‘And all this advice is free?’ said Mrs Forbes.

‘Absolutely, because from the police point of view, it pays for itself. The more secure the premises the fewer the break-ins.

‘Mrs Forbes,’ said the policeman.

‘Please,’ said Mrs Forbes, ‘call me Muriel…’ And she put her hand on his knee.

When an hour or so later Mr Forbes let himself in it was to find the householder and the Crime Prevention Officer both on the sofa where she was showing him the photograph albums with pictures of Graham as a boy.

‘That’s Toby,’ she said pointing to a scruffy Scotty cradled in the boy’s arms. ‘Dreadful dog. Always rolling in things.’

‘DOES HE KNOW GRAHAM?’ said Mr Forbes after the policeman had gone.

‘Know him?’ said Mrs Forbes. ‘Why should he? He’s a policeman.’

HAVING HAD A GOOD look round a different car park, this one multi-storey, Kevin kept it under surveillance for at least an hour before suddenly slipping into the passenger seat beside Betty.

‘How can I help you?’

‘I’m Graham’s wife.’

‘Is that why you’re crying? Though I have to say I don’t know any Grahams. Do you mean Toby?’

‘Possibly.’ Betty blew her nose.

‘If his name is Graham why does he call himself Toby?’

‘How much do you want?’ said Betty. ‘I mean, to call it a day?’

Ten minutes later their talk satisfactorily concluded Kevin got out of the car.

On the other side of the car park Mr Forbes took an other photograph and switched off his recording machine.

‘Nice doing business with you,’ said Kevin. Which is not what he said when a copy of the CD came through the letter box next morning.

‘We do lead an exciting life,’ said Mr Forbes as they drove home. ‘It never used to be like this.’ So now the phone calls abruptly and inexplicably ceased and with no word from his sometime tormentor Graham’s marital vigour reasserted itself and, his fingernails once more immaculate, life returned to its old ways. It puzzled Graham that there was no comeback at the bank and when he eventually came to look into it he could find no trace in the accounts that anything had ever been wrong. When something bothered him at work he would normally talk it over with Betty, which in this case he couldn’t do so for a while he remained uneasy, eventually deciding that Kevin being a policeman this had led him…or the force possibly…to make the necessary reimbursement just for safety’s sake.

MRS FORBES, the unwitting beneficiary of the thwarted blackmail, remains unwitting, ignorant both of the peculations of her son and the ingenuity of her daughter-in-law who, along with her husband, were concerned only to safeguard her innocence.

Such concern might be thought of as wholly admirable except that self-servingness comes into it, too, and a distaste for disturbance and the attachment of all these parties to a landscape that is familiar and which the convulsive revelation of her son’s sexuality would certainly reshape.

There was, too…and this may be harder to understand…there was affection. Monstrous as she was, a tyrant and a snob, Graham’s mother was an ogre of such long-standing that her feelings (though they could often only be guessed at) nevertheless merited respect. Not yet an ancient monument she was a survival and on that score alone her outlook and her armour-plated ignorance merited preservation.

None of this would have found much sympathy with the lady in question, the object of these elaborate precautions almost certainly viewing such consideration as neither necessary nor appropriate. Graham’s mother did not need shielding from the knowledge that her beloved son was homosexual: she had known it all along. It was an opinion she had never bothered to share with her husband but before Betty had come into their lives she had always thought Graham ‘not the marrying sort’ and it was one of her (unspoken) grievances against Betty that the marriage had made it necessary for her to revise that opinion.

So when Kevin, in a last shot of his bolt (and more out of pique than self-interest), came round one afternoon and spilled the (long-postponed) beans Mrs Forbes was relieved rather than surprised: it was a return to the natural order of things. She had been right all along. True she put on a good amateur performance of what she imagined a devastated mother’s reaction might be, staring hard and grim-jawed out of the window as she contemplated the wreck of all her hopes, a performance so convincing it impelled Kevin to lay a consoling hand on her shoulder.

This was a mistake.

She poured them both a sherry. Looking at this delightful young man she could hardly blame her son who had, after all, impeccable taste. Marriage to someone as unprepossessing as Betty had been a lapse, which, thankfully, had only been temporary, the implication being that what a man needed in a woman (and which Mrs Forbes saw herself as providing) was perfection: given anything less a chap such as Graham was not to be blamed if he washed his hands of the whole gender and shopped elsewhere.

‘Can you blame him?’ she said to the captive Kevin. ‘It takes a woman to understand.’

Carried to its logical conclusion, of course, this free-market theory of sexual preference is hardly tenable as it would see the ranks of deviance swollen by droves of disappointed normality. Not that Mrs Forbes cares about that, her thoughts for the moment busy with a more immediate breach of suburban rectitude.

In conclusion, how much better…how much
healthier
…had all these persons, these family members, been more candid with one another right from the start.

As it is there’s every chance Betty will grow bored with Graham, with divorce the obvious solution. Except that they now have twins, whom they both adore, and besides divorce might mean that some awkward truths would have to be told and neither of them wants that.

That Mr Forbes still from time to time sleeps with his daughter-in-law and leads a vigorous fantasy life on the internet besides would shame both his wife and his son did it ever come to light; but why should it, the only clue to their clandestine relationship Betty’s disproportionate grief on Mr Forbes’s death from a heart attack a few years later? The death of her husband while at last giving Mrs Forbes occasion to play for real her often-rehearsed scene of sudden bereavement also draws Graham and his mother closer together, much as they had been before his marriage. Then, having had one sherry too many and thinking the better to bond with her boy and to show him she’s still in the game, Mrs Forbes comes clean on her escapade with Kevin. It had been more short-lived than she let on, their brief relationship curtailed when, a few months later, Kevin perished in a high-speed motorway car chase, a death that might seem to have more to do with narrative tidiness than any driving without due care and attention. Far from drawing him closer to his mother the revelation of this liaison, however perfunctory, shocks and embarrasses Graham, who feels that his mother might have had the consideration to keep this distasteful news to herself. It also abuts far too closely on his own sexual preferences, still, he fondly imagines, a secret known only to himself.

Graham goes home and tells Betty about Mrs Forbes and her fling with Kevin, ‘this gay policeman’ as Graham describes him. Betty, who, unsurprisingly, is unsurprised, promises never to tell a soul, the souls she particularly must not tell the twins. She also mustn’t tell them what Graham still hasn’t told her, namely that their father is not as other men are and likely to go on being so. Though if he’d told her that in the first place he would never have married her and there would be no story.

But the most secret secret of all which Betty alone knows is that the father of the twins is probably their grandfather.

So the secrets abound, with Betty more richly endowed with them as she is with everything else. Still, for all that everybody, while not happy, is not unhappy about it. And so they go on.