The Good Father (14 page)

Chapter 14

When I told Jack that my father had left him the house and all his money, he just stared at me. His mouth opened only to close on whatever it was he was about to say. He shook his head. At last, almost angrily, he said, ‘That's mad. I can't believe he'd do such a thing. He's left me
everything
?'

I nodded.

‘But what about you?'

‘What about me?' I smiled, quite enjoying his reaction. I had his full, astonished attention, after all. ‘I'll be all right.'

‘How? How will you be all right?' Again he shook his head. Then: ‘No, this is nonsense. I'm not going to take your house – your home, your money. I couldn't be your friend and do such a thing!'

‘I want you to have it.'

‘No.'

I laughed out loud. ‘What do you mean,
no
?'

‘I mean I refuse to take it. Listen, forget all about it.'

‘The house is yours, Jack. I've already found somewhere else to live.'

He sat down, indicating that I should sit down too. We were in the front room of his house, a house he believed Carol had never thought good enough for her; it was too small, the rooms too poky, the patch of garden too over-looked by all the other, identical houses crowded round it. I sat on the sofa he and Carol had bought together, part of a suite that, like everything in this house since her death, had become shabby. I noticed how worn the carpet was – the boys took their toll on everything and Jack had long ago given up trying to keep the house up to the standards Carol had maintained. The dust was thick on the sideboard where Carol smiled from her wedding photograph, her arm linked through Jack's. I looked at it, and for a moment imagined that I had been there that day because the photo was so familiar.

Jack said, ‘Why did he leave me everything?'

I said simply, ‘I don't know.'

‘Did you know he was going to?'

‘I knew he wasn't going to leave me anything. He told me often enough.'

‘Christ.' Jack stared into space. Softly he repeated, ‘
Christ
.'

‘Jack, I'm not unhappy about this,' I reassured him.

He laughed that dismissive laugh of his. Looking at me, he said, ‘
I'm
unhappy, Peter. Actually, I find it disturbing. I don't want anything to do with it.'

The boys ran in from the garden, excited when they saw me, demanding that I play with them. I would have been happy to do so, but Jack told them to leave us alone, his voice becoming angry when they didn't do as they were told at once. When they'd gone, I said, ‘Think of the space the boys would have, Jack. They could have a bedroom each, and Hope wouldn't have to sleep in the box room.'

He looked at me sharply. ‘It's not a
box room
. And the boys don't need a room each. Look, Peter, it's out of the question.'

‘Why?'

‘Why? Because it's
yours
! Listen, we both know why he did this, and I don't want any part of it.'

‘Why did he do it?'

Fumbling in his pocket for his cigarettes, Jack lit one. At last he said, ‘Because he was a spiteful old bastard. Jesus, he even found a way to get at you from beyond the grave.'

‘I don't want the house, Jack.'

‘No?' He shook his head. ‘Nor do I.'

‘Then give it to the children. Sell it; keep the money in a trust for them.'

I could see him struggling with this idea and gave him time to think about it. From the photograph on the sideboard, Carol smiled at me. I gazed back at her, noticing as I always noticed the way she held her bridal bouquet in front of her, shielding the small bump that was Hope. I looked away, no longer caring what Jack did; I was going to leave that house whether he wanted it or not, and it would be like being relieved of a heavy burden.

I went into town when I left Jack, did my shopping, and called in to see Harry Dunn, who looked at me just as Jack had – as though I was too unworldly to be out on my own.

Carol used to interpret this unworldliness as kindness; she would say that I was the kindest man she'd ever known. Whenever I looked after her children, whenever I invited all of them to Sunday tea or bought the children presents, she would tell me how kind I was, as though my kindness dismayed her. Part of me relished her mild dismay and the momentary twinges of guilt that showed on her face. I liked to hear her protestations of
you really shouldn't have
when I gave Hope some small gift. There was always something in her eyes at those moments that told me she hadn't forgotten how badly she had let me down.

There was a time, soon after my return, when I had expected an apology, a tender moment alone during which she would say how sorry she was. I imagined her weeping; I imagined being cruel to her in some smart, cutting way. But of course that moment never came. I went on pretending to be kind, mercifully as it turned out; my regrets are hard enough without the burden of knowing I could be so pointlessly vindictive.

After that Japanese officer had broken my ribs, we were marched off through the jungle. A Sergeant supported me, a man named Arthur Graham. The pain in my chest grew worse with each step I took, and although Arthur encouraged me with kind words I felt that it would be best for everyone if I lay down and died. Some men did just that. We walked for days, and sometimes villagers would try to help us, sometimes succeeding in giving us a little rice. I remember how beautiful their tiny children were, their eyes big with wonder, as afraid of us as they would be of ghosts.

We walked until we came to a railway line and were put into cattle trucks. I lay down on the truck's wooden planks, curled small because there was so little space, watching the ground flash beneath us through the gaps, concentrating on this, wanting to be mesmerised, but drifting in and out of restless, dream-filled sleep. I dreamed of Carol standing on a railway station platform, and she called to me and called to me but I couldn't hear what she was saying. I called back to her that I loved her and woke, startled, distraught because the train had left her behind. Then I realised where I was, my cheek resting against splintered wood, the hot stench of so many sick, unwashed men all around me and the pain concentrated around my heart. I watched the ground speeding away only inches from my face and it was as though my strength was being poured through the boards' cracks like sand; soon there would be nothing left of me. I closed my eyes. So this was dying, then – this slow emptying of self. I would not accept it. I forced myself to sit up. Carol had been left behind but it didn't mean that I wouldn't see her again. I told myself I would go home and she would be my wife. I made a promise that I wouldn't die because I was precious to her and that she would be waiting.

The day before I left her we had walked in the park where we first met and she was quiet, so quiet for such a long time that I was afraid – but then she told me that her parents had gone away and we could go back to her house and there would be no one there. We went in through the back door, afraid of being seen, being heard, although we didn't speak. Nervousness stopped my voice, just as I believe it stopped hers. She led me upstairs, to her room at the back of the house, a room full of her childhood: a dolls' house, a rocking horse, stuffed creatures that stared out at me from the window seat. Because her bed was narrow as a child's, she spread an eiderdown on the floor, a soft square of pale pink that smelled of her. She smelled of roses, such a faint, elusive scent; I pressed my face against her neck and inhaled deeply, feeling her fingers curl into my hair.

We didn't undress, I wish more than anything that we had undressed and I had felt her skin against mine, seen her breasts, her thighs, her cunt. I only moved my hand beneath her skirt, her knickers, felt her tenseness, her dryness so that I wet my fingers in my mouth and pushed them breathlessly inside her. I felt sure she could hear my heart beating: my desperation seemed loud to me, a vibrating pulse that filled the whole room with noise. I couldn't wait, couldn't take my time caressing her and kissing her, reassuring her. The noise drove me on, deafening, isolating so that I might just as well have been alone, her body only a maddening object to be broken into before I could find release. She cried out when I entered her; I know I caused her pain. She turned her face away from me afterwards and her skin was white, her lips quite bloodless. I thanked her and smoothed down her skirt. After a little while I helped her to her feet and saw that we had left a stain on the pink eiderdown, a dark patch of blood and semen.

Mostly though, I didn't think of this in the camps. In the camps at night I made love to her so gently, so carefully, undressing her so that only a little of her was exposed at a time so that finally she felt easy in her nakedness.

Mostly though I didn't have the strength even for imagining this slowness; malaria would too often have me in its clutches, hunger always cramping my guts which constantly leaked diarrhoea until I thought I would shit my life away. Why not die like that, after all, when so many others had died such disgusting, demeaning deaths? But somehow my heart kept up, dogged and unfailing whilst the rest of me rotted and stank and became grotesque. My ribs showed through my stretched-tight skin and could be counted at a glance; I could feel the places where the breaks had mended, imagined that others could see my heart, my one unbeaten organ, pumping away behind its flimsy cage.

If I said that thoughts of Carol kept me alive, then I think I would be lying. On that train, at the beginning of my journey, she did save me. Later, I think it was only some trick of my heart, a strength it has that no one – least of all me – could have suspected. And there were days when I forgot her, and days when I would have exchanged my life for hers because I was so desperately afraid of dying.

But I didn't die. Despite sometimes believing that fear alone would kill me, I came home. I came home and saw Carol by chance as she walked along the street. And I've already written that she looked so shocked to see me, so surprised that I wasn't killed by the Japanese, although they'd done their very best to grant her wish. Because of course she wished that I'd died, just as I wished she'd never existed. My death would have saved her so much awkwardness.

When I left Jack today I had the feeling that our friendship – which has lately seemed so frail – will not survive my father's legacy. I would not mind so much if it wasn't for the twins and Hope. Especially Hope. I try to imagine ways of keeping her close to me, and perhaps if she was still a child it would be easy. But she is neither child nor adult; she can't love me as she once did, nor can she bring herself to be polite. We have been too intimate and she is too young for such chilly self-control. So, I am rather at a loss. I remember the fairy stories I used to tell her, in which impossible tasks were set and only sorcery and magic gained the hero the princess's love. I would not need magic, only the right words, said carefully, and a mirror, I think, one large enough for us both to stand side by side, facing our reflections, the truth staring her in the face.

I packed a small suitcase of clothes to take to the house on Inkerman Terrace, and another case containing my materials. My new home is furnished sparsely with plain, utility pieces that are as solid as they are dull, although there is a large, iron bedstead that is terribly ornate and takes up much of the space in the bedroom. I have never slept in such a bed before, the kind of bed in which babies are conceived, in which those babies are born and the old die. When I saw the bed it occurred to me that when my new neighbours discover I'm not married, they might believe I'm odd, even – whisper it –
homosexual
. After all, I make my living as an artist and so the evidence mounts, although queer men have never mistaken me as one of their own. I am much too charmlessly gauche and inept.

I decided that I'll go back later to collect my few remaining possessions I've left in the house. But I can't stay there another night. I must be free of the place now – I've delayed too long. Besides, leaving the house is the best way of convincing Jack that I am happy for him to take it. And if he decides not to move in, then at least I have escaped from the place and its memories.

Chapter 15

‘We've got a new neighbour,' Matthew said. He was peeling potatoes at the sink and he glanced over his shoulder at her. ‘Proper gent, he is. Real la-di-da.'

Val looked up from flicking through the evening paper. ‘Oh? What's he doing living round here, then?'

‘There's nowt wrong with living here.' Plopping a potato into a pan he added, ‘But aye – I think he must be down on his luck. He has a car, though. You'd have seen it parked up outside, did you?'

She had, and had thought that the doctor was visiting next door but one, where a young woman was expecting her first baby. No one on Inkerman Terrace owned a car. Curious now, she said, ‘What's he like?'

‘I've just told you!' Another potato went into the pan and Matt began to peel one more, frowning as though deep in thought. At last he said, ‘Your mam would have said that he had an old soul.'

Val remembered how her mother used to talk about some people as having been
here before
; these people were always slightly eccentric, and as a child she had been a little afraid of those her mother gave such a label to. Val glanced towards the wall dividing their house from their new neighbour's. She hoped he wasn't too strange, too creepy, as were most of the few single men who had at one time or another lived in the Terrace. When she was a child, some of these men would take too much interest in her and her friends, watching them play in the street, offering them sweets, inviting them into their untidy, smelly houses. She and her friends would laugh at these men, knowing exactly what they were after, but if she ever found herself alone with one of them she was afraid. It didn't help that sometimes her father thought they were harmless; sometimes even good men couldn't see who the rapists were amongst them. This new neighbour could easily have taken her father in.

She folded the newspaper and tossed it down. ‘I'm going out with Jack tonight.'

‘Aye?' He glanced at her. ‘Second time in a week, eh?'

‘So?'

He shrugged. Putting the potatoes on to boil he said, ‘Well, if you want any tea it'll be ready in half an hour. You've time to go next door and introduce yourself.'

‘Why would I want to do that?'

Matt smiled, a rare, teasing smile. ‘He's a nice lad. Wouldn't do you any harm to keep one like that in reserve. Go on.' He opened the oven and took out a small meat pie. ‘I made this for him. You take it round there – it'll be a neighbourly gesture.'

She hesitated, for a moment becoming that little girl again who was scared of strangers. But then her curiosity got the better of her. ‘All right,' she grinned. ‘At least I can judge for myself whether he's a
nice lad
or not.'

‘My dad made it,' Val explained. ‘It's a pie, probably corned beef and potato.'

The man who had answered her knock on the door smiled down at the tea-towel-wrapped pie in her hands, then he smiled at her – and she felt her insides contract. He was extraordinary, tall and very slim, his cheekbones sharply defined, his nose straight above a soft, full mouth. His eyes were the bluest she had ever seen, his pale blond hair pushed back from his forehead; there was the faintest shadow of a beard. He was like the Jesus in the pictures that had hung on the walls of her childhood Sunday school. She found herself staring at him stupidly, wondering if she had ever seen anyone more angelically beautiful.

He said, ‘Won't you come in?' He held the door open. ‘Come through into the kitchen.'

Leading her along the passageway, he turned to her. ‘This is very kind of him. Awfully kind. I was just about to go out and find a fish and chip shop, and now I won't have to.' In the kitchen he placed the pie down on the table and held out his hand. ‘I haven't introduced myself – Peter Wright.'

‘Val Campbell.'

As she shook his hand he said, ‘Would you like a cup of tea, Miss Campbell?'

‘No, thank you – really. I should go.' She glanced towards the door, suddenly shy of this man as she might be of a priest. There was a calmness about him, a gentleness that made her feel that he could see through to her soul. She imagined making her confession to him, that she had been an adulterer – was still, in her heart, an adulterer. She imagined him listening behind the confessional's screen, his head bowed, intent on her words. It would be best that she couldn't see him, only his shadowy outline in the darkness; he would be too distracting – she would think how grubby everything was, compared to such a man.

She made herself meet his gaze, wanting to see that he was ordinary, really, but he smiled, disarming her, so that she found herself asking, ‘What made you come to live here?'

He laughed, surprised. ‘It happened to be immediately available.'

‘Do you come from Thorp?'

‘Yes.' After a moment he added, ‘From Oxhill, near the park.'

‘It's really nice there.'

‘Yes, it is.'

She wanted to ask him why he had left, but instead blurted out, ‘We used to go and play in the park when we were kids. There was this big house on the corner, opposite the cemetery. I was scared to walk past it because it looked like something out of a ghost story.'

‘That's Doctor Walker's house,' he told her, ‘And yes, it's quite a horror, isn't it? I lived a few doors away, nowhere near as grand.'

She glanced around the bare little kitchen he had yet to make any mark on. This had been Mrs Granger's house and she had lived here for as long as Val could remember, a quiet old lady who went to church twice every Sunday and had died peacefully in her bed. Matthew, checking on her as he did every day, had found her. ‘I hope to God I go like that,' he'd told Val that evening. ‘God keep me from hospitals – I've had enough of them.'

Mrs Granger had kept the kitchen table in the centre of the floor, but he had moved it so that it stood beneath the window. Beside the meat pie, she noticed a sketch-pad open on a drawing of a sparrow. She stepped towards it, to look more closely. The drawing was life-sized, the little bird's head cocked, its eye bright, so exquisitely detailed it looked as if it might fly off the page. She turned to him.

‘It's lovely.'

‘Thank you.'

She looked down at the drawing again, compelled to reach out and touch the bird's wing. ‘You haven't finished it.'

‘No.' He came to stand beside her. ‘I was idling really; he flew down onto the windowsill.'

‘
Idling
?' Astonished, she said, ‘I wish I could
idle
like that.' Turning to him, she said, ‘I would love to be able to draw.'

‘I give lessons,' he smiled. ‘Special rates for neighbours.'

‘Really?'

He grinned and confided. ‘I used to teach, but found I wasn't very good at it. But here,' he tore the drawing of the sparrow from the pad. ‘Have this, if you like it. A thank-you for the pie.'

‘Are you sure?'

‘Of course.'

She smiled shyly at him. ‘Sign it.'

He laughed but did as she asked. As he handed it to her he said, ‘There, a genuine Peter Wright. Worth exactly as much as the paper it's drawn on.'

She looked down at the picture, saw that his signature was a tiny, indecipherable scrawl, the date in slightly larger letters below it, and she thought how modest he was, how unlike anyone she had ever met before. She had an urge to say something that would make a connection with this astonishing man, but could think of nothing except, ‘Thank you.'

Reluctantly she added, ‘I should go, Dad will wonder where I've got to.'

As he showed her out, Peter said, ‘Perhaps you and your father would care to have supper with me one evening?'

Stepping on to the street, she was about to make an excuse because she knew her father would think it daft to go and eat in a neighbour's house – especially a neighbour he barely knew. Even the word
supper
set him apart from them. They had
tea
at six o'clock; she imagined what Matthew would say to
supper
. All the same, she said, ‘That would be lovely, thank you.'

He glanced past her to the girls playing a skipping game in the street, his eyes lingering on a girl of about twelve who ran into the turning rope, her blonde ponytail catching the evening sunlight, her buds of breasts bobbing unrestrained as she began to skip. For a moment Val watched him watching this girl, saw how suddenly distant he looked, as though some terrible sadness preoccupied him. But there was also longing in his eyes and she felt cold suddenly; perhaps she had been taken in, perhaps he was like those other odd bachelors after all, one of her childhood bogeymen.

Quickly she said, ‘Goodbye, Mr Wright.'

He seemed to come to his senses then, turning that beautiful smile on her so that she wondered how she could have had such disgusting thoughts about him. ‘Peter,' he said. ‘Please call me Peter.'

As she reached her own front door she looked back to see if he was still watching the girls. To her relief he had gone inside.

She thought about Peter Wright that night as she lay sleepless in bed, wondering what it would be like to have him as a friend. She imagined going to him, sitting at his kitchen table and saying, ‘Jack proposed to me this evening. He wants me to marry him and be a mother to his children, he wants me to give up work, to stay at home and cook and clean and shop for him. He wants regular sex again, the ordinary sex married couples have. This is what drives him most. He wants to have sex with me and not feel ashamed or guilty afterwards, even if this means giving up excitement. He's decided, reluctantly I think, that regularity outweighs illicit thrills. His proposal comes down to this: he would like me as a mistress but can't find a wife.'

And perhaps Peter Wright, who looked like Christ about to give His list of those most blessed, would ask, ‘Do you love him?'

Val rolled on to her side and her single bed creaked and rocked a little because its metal joints were loosening. She had slept in this bed all her life and had spent only a few nights away from it – short holidays with her parents before the war, weekends with Harry in the hotel by the sea. Those weekends when it seemed that they would hardly leave their big bed except once to walk on the sands, make-believing a future – castaways imagining the luxuries that would be theirs once rescued. Harry had stopped to skim a stone across the still water. They had been silent for a while, the kind of pensive silence that follows wishing games, when suddenly he'd said, ‘I should never have asked you to dance.' He turned to her. ‘I should have kept my vow.'

He meant the vow of chastity he had made to himself, that challenge he had set to prove he was strong enough to do anything, even subjugate his own true self. Because Harry loved sex like he loved food and drink – he was a greedy connoisseur and there had been lots of women before his marriage, before his vow. On the beach that day, alone with her, he had said, ‘I wish things were different,' such a vague wish, unlike the wishes that had gone before it. He should have wished only that he wasn't married, but he couldn't bring himself to, couldn't disown his marriage despite the pain it caused him.

He spoke of his wife once, relating her story as though it was a fairytale, full of wickedness and misfortune, of impossible tasks and challenges. ‘There's no happy ending,' he'd said, ‘except that she is safe. It's a kind of safety, I suppose, even if she is frightened all the time.'

Once, late in their relationship, too late for his answer to make any difference, she had asked him, ‘Do you love her?'

‘I love
you
,' he said, and he'd covered his face with his hands as though appalled with himself.

Her bed protested as she turned on to her back. She wondered if her new next-door neighbour could hear her restlessness through the thin wall. Of course, she couldn't talk to Peter Wright as a friend – men and women were never friends. She couldn't confide in him, she couldn't confide in anyone. Somehow she had managed to become friendless – the fate of a single woman of a certain age unable to find another unmarried woman to share her scorn at the rest of the world.

They had been sitting in his front room, the children – even Hope – sent to their grandmother's house for the night, and Jack had taken her hand, kissed it and said, ‘Val, I think you're wonderful. I can't tell you how much my life has changed since you and I . . . Well, since you and I began to be serious about each other.'

He was too fastidious to mention the word sex, to say that he couldn't bear to give up fucking her now that he'd got a taste for her body. When they were still exchanging mildly flirtatious remarks in the works canteen, she had believed that Jack Jackson was the kind of man who would want a neat, slim woman in his bed, a woman who didn't ever initiate sex but would oblige decorously whenever he guided her hand towards his erection. She'd guessed that his wife had been the kind of woman who would lie still and quiet beneath him, neither expecting nor receiving very much except the sly satisfaction of witnessing his brief abandonment of his stern self-control.

She thought now that she had been a bitch to think of his wife like this, especially when in her heart she didn't really believe such women existed. But she had been jealous of married women, and to take the sting from her jealousy she had mocked them. Yet she had still believed that Jack wouldn't fancy her: she wasn't slim and she dressed too fashionably, too smartly to be considered anything as lame as neat. In truth, she had thought that she was too sexy for him; that he would want more tender meat. She supposed that had been just inverted naivety. He wanted her as much as any man she had ever been with – more, perhaps. She excited him; he made her feel powerful.

She had told Jack that she would think about marrying him.

She thought about life in his house, with his children, and pictured herself with a child of her own. This was the thought she held close. Like a gold coin found on a crowded street, she was full of the furtive, thrilling pleasure it gave her. Jack, she suspected, didn't want any more children, but accidents happened. He wasn't the kind of man who was as careful as Harry had been.