Somewhere Beyond Reproach (6 page)

‘Did it puzzle you that I was such a short time at the hospital?’

‘I didn’t think about it.’

‘You followed me this morning.’ This was a statement, not a question.

‘I did.’ I felt slightly sick. ‘Did you have to tell me that you knew?’ I said sharply.

‘Yes. I wanted to know why.’ The flat way he said this shocked me; the way he went on stripping fish from the bone. He wanted to know why. Why. I screamed the word in my head.

‘Because you married Dinah.’ I watched him carefully. He did not seem in any way put out.

‘I don’t suppose I could have expected you to find my life interesting for its own sake.’ He smiled. The placing of this joke decided me. If he knew what those words meant to me. He said:

‘You still think about her.’

‘Following you wasn’t very stimulating. I don’t like walking in this weather.’

‘I’m afraid I’m a bit too slow to get anybody’s circulation going.’ His humorously self-deprecating tone maddened me. All this had gone when he said.

‘Isn’t it better to forget?’ Definitely a question. I fought my anger. He was looking straight at me: brown,
sympathetic
eyes. As he leant towards me he knocked his stick on the floor. I bent down and handed it back.

‘You wouldn’t easily forget
that
,’ I said as he took it.

‘I shouldn’t have said what I did. I’m sorry.’

I said nothing. It wasn’t all right. Why should I say so?

He waited for me to acknowledge his apology. When he realised I was not going to he said:

‘So you see what sort of a man Dinah lives with.’

‘Aren’t you being rather unfair to yourself? I would have thought you were worth more than a few stilted words in a cheap restaurant.’

‘I don’t expect you think so,’ he said, making as if to get up.

‘So I’m meant to be thinking: poor Dinah married to a bloody-minded cripple or something like that?’

‘We seem to have gone off the rails somewhere.’ His voice trembled, but with the effort of getting up. I watched him brace one arm on the edge of the table, the other on the back of his chair.

Just before he turned to go he said:

‘I enjoyed the fish anyway.’ His smile was one of
wistfully
good-natured regret about the way everything else had gone. I could have said: ‘Good for you.’ In fact I didn’t say anything.

I watched him painfully thread his way past the tables between us and the door. Two people pulled their chairs in as he limped by. They were trying to shorten the distance he had to walk I supposed. He moved more painfully than I had yet seen him move. Then I saw why. He had left his stick behind. I picked it up and ran out after him. He was leaning against a wall further up the street. I could see the rapidity of his breathing as each breath became vapour in the cold raw air.

‘Wasn’t that rather a futile gesture?’ I asked.

I thought of his question again: ‘Isn’t it better to forget?’ I also remembered the callousness of my reply.

Simpson said:

‘I thought it might make a point.’

I walked away in the opposite direction. I doubted whether Simpson would relay this meeting to Dinah. I rearranged my silk scarf and reflected that I had learned more in one day than I could reasonably have hoped.

Just before two o’clock that Saturday I was standing outside Mrs Lisle’s varnished door.

‘You’re early. I suppose you thought I might take him out myself if he arrived before you.’

She led me into the sitting room. We both sat down. In the daylight I saw the room better. The photograph of Dinah was still there. The furniture was functional rather than beautiful. I also remembered the nineteenth-century
landscapes
. They would be fashionable now.

‘What would you have done if I’d asked Mark or Dinah to bring him?’

‘That wouldn’t have been very wise. They might have asked why you’ve agreed to let me take him out.’

‘I could have pointed out that you forced me by talking about the past in front of Andrew.’

‘Not altogether convincing.’

‘Have you any idea why I did say yes?’

‘Because you were curious to know what I was up to.’

She looked at me with interest. Behind her glasses her eyes fixed mine. When she spoke it was with slight unease, as though she was hiding something from me — something I ought to know.

‘Why are you trying to find out after all those years?’

‘Don’t you mean what am I trying to find out?’

‘Both. And you won’t answer. I don’t see why you should. Nevertheless I know perfectly well that you’re not just magnanimously showing that you forgive us for what
happened
.’ She clapped her hands together and leant forward
smiling: ‘Well, that’s enough of that. You must tell me about yourself. What are you doing these days?’

I began to wonder whether I had in fact forced her to let me take the child out. No, she had chosen to let me. I ought to be asking
her
questions. What could she think about Simpson?

‘Unashamedly pursuing the delights of mammon,’ I replied to her last question; then added: ‘Unlike your son-
in-law
.’

I saw her purse her lips with irritation. What had her financial ambitions for Dinah been? She decided to ignore my last words.

‘I gather from what you said to Andrew that you’re in the transport business.’

‘Not solely.’

‘Let me guess what else.’ She must have known how false this playfulness sounded. Anyway she seemed to know the answer. ‘Property,’ she announced with hopeful certainty.

‘I let out a number of premises for shops.’

‘While maintaining an interest in the shops, I trust.’ She gave me a look intended to make us brother and sister in the corrupt business of money-making.

‘Naturally,’ I replied flatly.

‘It must be awfully hard to know what to do with so much money.’

How many times have the poor said this to the rich and generally been wrong. I wish Mrs Lisle had been then.

‘It demands imagination,’ I said, assuming her playfulness of tone.

‘A quality which so few businessmen seem to have.’ She laughed at so sad a paradox.

‘What a wretched lot we are. With every penny I earn I’m heaping up fodder for a damned afterlife. “It is easier for a camel to pass through …” and all that.’ I smiled disarmingly at her. Again the pursed lips. I wonder what her emotions had been when she gazed at Simpson’s window. The thought made me feel quite friendly towards her.

‘Well I ought to slip through nice and easily,’ she managed
to say, while maintaining the appearance of her former mood.

I could have said that there were other qualifications besides poverty. In spite of my dislike I realised that the odious woman would be a useful ally.

At that moment the bell rang. Mrs Lisle got up to let Andrew in.

*

Andrew leant forward from the deep front passenger seat of the Mercedes. I looked at his face with satisfaction. He was impressed. If he knew how little the thing meant to me. News of my new opulence might well find its way back to Dinah.

‘My father’s sold his car,’ Andrew said with undisguised regret.

Just when he needed it most. Quite a man for gestures. Dinah couldn’t have liked that. If the news of my wealth did get to Dinah I should have to try and see it was properly presented.

‘You won’t tell your mother I took you out, will you?’

‘Why not?’ he asked slyly.

‘Because I’d rather you didn’t.’

Andrew accepted this adult evasion.

‘You mustn’t tell her about this car either.’

He didn’t bother to ask why. I looked at him carefully. I felt fairly confident that both these requests would be repeated more or less accurately.

As I let out the clutch and swung the car out smoothly into the road, Andrew asked:

‘How fast does it go?’

‘Fast enough.’

‘Over a hundred?’

‘Yes.’

‘Can we go over a hundred today?’

‘Not in London.’

I could keep a run on the motorway as a card in reserve.

‘Do you often go to the cinema?’ I asked.

‘Sometimes with Mummy.’

‘Daddy?’

‘Nope.’ He looked out of the window as though resenting these intrusions into an evidently deprived childhood. He turned to me and said with unexpected vehemence:

‘My father can’t take me to the cinema. He would if he could.’

I wondered if this was a loyal defence of his father or a chance to self-dramatise. I waited for him to tell me about his father’s awful disability. My admiration for the child was considerable. He didn’t say another word about it. Perhaps though with a child’s longing for ‘normal’ parents, he was ashamed. I didn’t think so though.

‘What are we going to see?’ he asked, trying not to sound too excited at the prospect of an afternoon in the flickering darkness of a West End cinema.

‘A western.’

‘You’ll enjoy it too?’ he asked me seriously.

‘I’m far too selfish to take you to something I’d hate.’

The child settled back satisfied. His earnestness appealed to me.

*

Andrew declined an ice-cream. I didn’t try to press him. He seemed happy to sit back doing nothing, waiting till the curtain rose.

The theme music swelled to a crescendo as the lights went down. The curtain rose mechanically gathering up each silken pleat. An endless corn prairie was revealed. We zoomed in on the ears of corn gently swaying in the hot breeze. Then a farm house and a stream. A completely tranquil scene. Suddenly screams, the dust thrown up by the hooves of Indian horses. The corn was in flames, the timbered roof of the farm crackled merrily as the inhabitants saw their blood drain into the placid waters of their once idyllic stream. I looked at Andrew’s face in silhouette, as he craned forward to get a better view. I saw the look of complete absorption that I must once have worn in similar
circumstances
. I thought back. I had always favoured soldiers to cowboys and Indians; since my childhood was during the
war I generally got what I wanted. Contests between ‘our fighting boys’ and the Hun; children’s cut-price Saturday shows. Then home again to knock down toy soldiers with matchsticks fired from unreliable cannons. There had been slaughters as splendid as Bunker Hill, only in my battles the victims rarely had red coats; only a few for realism.

Two American Army soldiers were being chased along a gorge by a band of Indians. The soldiers were carrying news of the farm massacre. Soon both the blue-coated riders’ horses had been hit. With their backs to a rock they fought on gamely. The Indians fell like ninepins but in the end the superior numbers told. The last soldier fought on for several minutes before heroism received the inevitable reward of a hero’s death.

I looked sideways at Andrew again. I saw that he was clutching the arms of his chair. I should like to have taken his hand. I thought of the love that Dinah must feel for him. For several minutes the child became much more than a device for gaining my ends. He was wearing shorts. Shorts in December. I looked at his bare and hairless knees with sympathy. I reached out a hand and squeezed his right leg.

‘Are you enjoying it?’ I whispered.

‘Shush!’

The scene switched to an American Army camp complete with watch tower and wooden palisading. Two officers were talking heatedly. One, who appeared to be the commanding officer, said:

‘To hell with the promised supplies. I’m going to finish Running Bull once and for all.’

The other officer stepped forward till he was almost treading on his superior’s toes:

‘But those Indians are starving. There’s been no rain for seven months. If you were starving would you just sit on your arse in a reserve and wait till you dropped dead?’

‘Supplies were promised only on condition that they stopped in their reservation.’

‘Those supplies should have been sent months ago.’

‘Do you know what they did to two of our scouts?’ The
speaker paused. We were given a close up of his bloodshot eyes. ‘I’ll tell you …’ Another pause, then he whispered with almost sadistic satisfaction: ‘They mutilated them. They’re nothing but savages.’

‘They’re dying of starvation.’

‘Lieutenant, just get out there and give the orders for an advance.’ He turned away and then spat out of the corner of a sneering mouth: ‘Unless you want to
see
what they did to those men.’

A close-up of the military man tortured by his scruples. Then a quick salute.

The scene ended with a long blue column of riders
thundering
out of the camp gates. The flag fluttered proudly at their head. A trail of dust clouds stretched out behind.

‘Who do you think is going to win?’ I whispered.

‘The army of course,’ he replied without a moment’s
hesitation
.

‘Doesn’t it spoil it if you know who’s going to win?’

‘No,’ he said abruptly and raised a hand to keep me quiet.

The army did win. The battle was long and hard. The Indian force died three times over; unless those already shot had been pretending. A cunning Indian who had shammed dead was about to cut down the commanding officer. I saw Andrew’s mouth open as if to warn him. The film makers however had decided that such an inhuman monster must surely die. The lieutenant risked his own life as he bent over him and unfastened his tunic. The bloodshot eyes closed for the last time. In the end only Running Bull and a handful of braves survived to be led back to their reserves. The Lieutenant signed a paper giving the necessary supplies to the Indians, neither would the vultures go hungry.

When we got out it was almost dark. I decided we might risk looking at the Christmas decorations in Regent Street before returning to Wimbledon. The rush-hour crowd milled on the pavements looking in at the well-lit windows. Both Andrew and I agreed that the decorations were beautiful. Less than a week to Christmas. The nylon shimmering trees, the paper Santa Clauses, the tinsel, all made me feel lonely.
My mother was the only person I felt able to give a present to. Andrew’s face was pressed against the window of a jewellers. I would give him a present.

‘I’m going to give you something for Christmas,’ I said suddenly. He looked at me with a bewildered expression.

‘Would Granny let you?’ he asked doubtfully.

‘You don’t have to tell her. I could buy it tomorrow and send it to your home.’

‘It won’t arrive in time with the post delay. Mummy posted something last week and it still hasn’t got to the person.’ Andrew looked at me downcast.

‘I could bring it round.’

‘My mother mightn’t let me keep it.’

I felt slightly discouraged by all these objections.
Nevertheless
I felt he might be right. Handsome presents from people hardly known are always treated with suspicion and as a rule rightly. I thought quickly.

‘If I bring it round when your mother’s out, you could unwrap it before she comes back, so then nobody would be able to return it.’

He thought for a moment before agreeing. He thought that she would be out during the afternoon the following day. I could ring up and check so there was no danger of running into her by mistake. I told him he could say who had given it. There was certain to be some kind of response. My standing with the child was already good.

The time had come for my being able to make this very indirect approach. By that time I should have seen the inside of the flat. I had already learned something about Simpson. Dinah’s response to what was going to be a very handsome present to her son, was going to tell me something about her. When we met the meeting would have a context. We would have a base to work from. My approach would not be the fumbling effort of a hopeless lover returning too late out of the blue and begging to be taken back. I should be the old friend who had forgotten all resentment, who had genuinely liked her, in a relationship that could exist without sex. That would be to start with. She would confide in me,
cry on my shoulder and finally realise that she depended on me too much to live without me. My optimism knew no bounds as I drove Andrew back to Wimbledon that evening. On delivering him I was quite spontaneously pleasant to Mrs Lisle. She looked surprised. Andrew looked happy. He winked at me as I left: an acknowledgement of our conspiracy.