The Outcast (12 page)

Kit looked at Lewis and tried to remember what he had been like when he wasn’t like this.

‘We could walk into Turville,’ said Ed. ‘Too far,’ said Fred.

‘Too hot,’ said Robert.

‘Be rather nice to swim,’ said Ed, smiling at Tamsin.

‘I don’t have a bathing suit. None of us do,’ said Tamsin, knowing Ed was wondering what she’d look like with and without one, and smiling back at him.

‘Let’s go back and get our things and swim,’ said Ed. Tamsin looked over at Lewis, who hadn’t spoken for ages.

He was still looking down and he looked as he always did, closed and not really there. She decided she felt awfully sorry for him. He obviously didn’t want to go to the river and it was tactless of Ed to keep going on about it; after all, it must be in all their minds what had happened to his mother. The last time she’d seen him (and she supposed anyone had seen him) was at Easter when it had been very warm and Ed had his birthday outside. He’d invited Lewis because it seemed rude not to and everyone had such a jolly time, except that Lewis hadn’t spoken. He hadn’t spoken at all.There had been no reason for it. It wasn’t surprising he didn’t get on with people; often she thought he didn’t try. She wondered what he was like at Harrow; the boys she knew there were in higher years. He felt her watching him and looked over – and she felt it, the look – and she looked away. She thought, gosh, he’s only fourteen, I must pull myself together, it’s not as if

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he’s anyone one would consider, and he’s a baby! Ed was saying something about swimming, why did he keep going on about it?

‘I don’t want to swim,’ said Tamsin. ‘Lewis, you don’t want to, do you?’

‘No, I don’t want to.’

‘Well, Lewis wouldn’t,’ said Ed.

‘And nor would I,’ saidTamsin quickly,‘and if we must go to the river, I’d rather go to it in Woldham where we can have tea or ices.’

It took a moment for them to realise that Lewis had stopped walking and they only realised because Kit said, ‘What?’

They all stopped and looked back. Lewis was standing and looking at Ed.

Kit had been watching all of them. She was to one side and looking at him. He hadn’t spoken much, but he’d seemed all right so far.They were all still now, and Lewis carried on staring at Ed, who finally got fed up with it.

‘What?’

‘Why wouldn’t I?’ ‘What do you mean?’

‘Why wouldn’t I want to go to the river?’

There was silence. Nobody said anything. Lewis had a look about him that was immediately dangerous, not just the promise of danger, but danger right there, and Kit felt frightened, but Ed seemed oblivious to it and enjoying the confrontation.

‘Why wouldn’t I want to go to the river?’ ‘Come on, Lewis, everybody knows why.’ ‘Say it.’

Tamsin touched Ed’s arm,‘Ed—’

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‘Because of your mother,’ he said it mockingly, sing-song, ‘Because of your mother dying there.’

Then Lewis started towards Ed, he walked up to him quite fast and Tamsin backed off quickly and Ed stood his ground, but didn’t step towards him. They all stared, they were all waiting.

‘So what? So what about it?’

‘Nothing about it.You’re being ridiculous.’ ‘Don’t laugh.’

‘I’m not laughing,’ said Ed, laughing,‘I’m just saying you’re being ridiculous.’

‘Take that look off your face.’

‘What look?’ Ed laughed again and looked around at every- body.‘I must say you’re behaving in an extraordinary way.’

‘Take that fucking look off your face.’

Kit had never heard anyone of their age say that word before. She’d heard her father use it, in another room, and she’d heard it in the street, but this was different.

‘How dare you speak that way in front of the girls,’ said Ed and it would have been funny, but somehow wasn’t, and Kit thought how awful he was and that she’d never liked him.

Lewis went towards Ed again. Ed managed to move away and make it look as if he was taking up the pose of the philosopher, the commentator, but he was ready and his face looked very sharp.

‘It seems to me you’re being rather over-sensitive. If you will come walking in woods with rivers in them, on hot days, you can’t be entirely surprised if the subject of swimming comes up.We’re all very sorry your poor drunken mama had the—’

He didn’t finish his sentence because Lewis punched him

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in the face. Ed had known Lewis would hit him and he’d thought he’d be ready for it – he was looking forward to hitting him back and beating him – but he hadn’t expected Lewis’s punch to be so hard or so fast and he went down. His nose was broken and the pain was terrible and he didn’t get up, but lay there shouting, with blood pouring through his fingers. At school it was never like this; in a fight you never went for a chap’s face and even if you were really angry, it was more show than actual damage, with a lot of clothes-grabbing and wrestling.

Ed was lying there bleeding and Tamsin turned on Lewis, who looked as if he might kick him or get down to hit him again.

‘Oh my God! Oh my God!’

Annie burst into tears and the twins looked thrilled and amazed and got closer to Ed and further from Lewis. This wasn’t what normally happened, this wasn’t the way things were; it had a surreal quality, all the rules had gone, and Kit suddenly wondered if that might be normal for Lewis, not having anything to go by. She knew the feeling. Her father hitting her mother had always given her that vertiginous feeling of there being no rules.

Ed wasn’t getting up and Lewis turned and walked away, not on the path, but through the trees. Kit watched him go and envied him his violence, and pitied him for it. She wanted to go after him, but only watched him and then turned back to the clearing where Tamsin was having a lovely time helping Ed walk, and the others were following in a group like medieval villagers, scandalised.

‘Appalling, just appalling,’Tamsin was saying. ‘– deserves whatever he gets!’ said Robert

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They had all seemed to turn into their parents, Kit thought, and hated them.

They went back to the road and trooped towards the village. Ed’s nose bled for ages, but eventually stopped. He kept his hand up to it. Tamsin and Kit’s house was nearest, after the Aldridge house, and Tamsin said Ed should come to them. She sent little Annie home with the twins.

Tamsin took Ed into the kitchen where he washed his face – this was drama enough, as Tamsin hadn’t been in the kitchen for about two years.

‘I’m going to call Dr Straechen.’

Ed uncovered his face,‘Does it look bad?’

‘Awful. Wait here, I’ll phone. If it’s broken he can set it for you. Can you set noses?’

She went off through the baize door and Ed waited at the table. Kit sat opposite with her feet up on her chair. She had a scab on her knee. She wondered if she’d ever grow out of scabs on her knee; her mother seemed to think it was her defining feature.

‘You were horrible to Lewis,’ she said.

Ed couldn’t speak very well for the blood sitting between his nose and mouth and the swelling, but he managed outrage.

‘He hit me!’

‘You asked for it.You know you did.’

‘He wanted a fight,’ he said, thickly,‘you saw him, I couldn’t back down!’

She couldn’t go on sitting there with him. She got up and went into the hall. Dicky was standing by Tamsin who’d just come off the telephone.

‘Is it broken?’

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‘I don’t know, Daddy. It looks it. It’s gone awfully big.’ ‘Where is he?’

‘In the kitchen. I didn’t want him to bleed on things.’ ‘What about Lewis? Where did he go?’

‘He ran off into the woods.’

‘No, he didn’t,’ said Kit,‘he walked.’ ‘Shut up, Kit,’ said Tamsin.

‘What was he thinking, doing a thing like that?’ said Dicky, and Kit remembered the time he’d broken her mother’s arm against the fireplace in the drawing room and she’d had to tell everyone she’d fallen off a ladder picking apples, which was absurd in the first place as she’d never been up a ladder in her life and almost didn’t know where the orchard was.

Kit thought of Ed’s voice in the woods,‘your poor drunken mama . . .’

‘Daddy,’ she said, ‘Lewis hit Ed because Ed said something about his mother.’

Neither Tamsin nor Dicky seemed to have heard.

‘Ring Harry Rawlins,Tamsin.Where’s Claire? He should have some ice put on it.’

Kit saw it wasn’t going to go well for Lewis.

Dicky went off to look for Claire, andTamsin started through the telephone book on the table.

‘Tamsin! Ed was awful. He said a really awful thing.’

‘R . . . R. Rawlins . . . I know, Kit, but it’s no excuse.You saw the way he was, how he looked. He was horrid.You just don’t do things like that.’

‘Well, I’d have hit him if—’

‘Sh! Go away.’ She picked up the telephone.‘Guildford 131

please.’

* * *

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Lewis had just wanted to get out of the woods. If he hadn’t wanted to look at Tamsin, he wouldn’t have been there in the first place. His hand hurt from hitting Ed, and the feeling of Ed’s head going back and the contact of skin and the bone beneath it had stayed in his hand.The day was hotter than it had been and ahead he could see unbroken sunshine and a field. He went for the edge of the wood and soon came out of it.

He wasn’t sure exactly where he was, somewhere on Pitt’s property probably; there was a barn in the distance and the field was bright with stubble. He stopped. The landscape was wide and still and he felt uncomfortable in it. He didn’t want to panic, but he could feel it starting. If he’d had someone there to talk to he could break the silent feeling, but he couldn’t think of anybody.

He started to walk around the field with the vague idea of making a big circle home. He guessed he should apologise to Ed, but the thought of his face and what he’d said made him feel sick and he wanted to go and find him and make sure he had broken his nose and then break his legs for him, too. He let his mind play pictures of violence; it was better than feeling sick and the weakness and panic at any rate.

He had ended up walking all the way around the wood so as not to go back into it and that took ages. He hid himself and didn’t go into the house until after supper.

He’d thought when he got home he could explain to his father about what Ed had said – anyone would see how bad it had been – but when he got there he couldn’t make himself think of it, let alone use it to get himself out of trouble. He and his father sat opposite one another by the fire and Alice sat at the card table by the window with a drink and watched them. Lewis wished she’d go and find something else to do.

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‘Why would you do a thing like that?’ ‘I don’t know.’

‘You seem pleased to have done it.’ ‘No, sir.’

‘Well, tell me then! I’d like to know what possessed you—’ ‘Nothing, sir.’

‘Nothing? You broke a boy’s nose – you hit the son of good friends for no reason?You punched him in the face—’

‘I had a reason.’

‘What was your reason?’

‘He – It was – I was trying to stop him.’

‘Trying to stop him what?’ Silence. ‘Stop him what, Lewis?

You were trying to stop him? What was he doing?’ ‘. . . Nothing.’

‘Lewis! This is absurd – you have done a violent, horrible thing and you have taken pleasure in it. And you have no explanation? What’s wrong with you?’

There was always that, the thing that was wrong with him; he didn’t know what it was, either, but he knew there was some- thing.

‘Why can’t you get on with people? Do you see how hard it is to look after you?’

Lewis kept quiet and his quietness made his father worse, he seemed determined to break him in some way, but Lewis didn’t know what he wanted from him. He sat and listened and couldn’t think clearly enough to find a way to please him.

When he was finally sent upstairs he hadn’t been able to stop walking up and down the room. He couldn’t remember what had happened, or why he’d done what he’d done, only that his father hated him and he thought he was right to.

He kept walking back and forth in his room, from door to

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window, and he couldn’t stop; the door came towards him, then the window and then the door, and he kept walking the little distance again and again.

He heard his father and Alice come upstairs and go to their room and the house was quiet, except for his head. He stopped, listening. He was numb. He thought if he could feel something it would be better. He had been scraping his nails up and down his forearm trying to feel pain – sometimes that worked if he did it hard enough – but the scratching wasn’t doing anything, even though his arm was raw. Then he remembered what Ed had said about his mother. It wouldn’t leave his head. He couldn’t breathe. He left his room and went downstairs, thinking he might get out of the house.

The stairs were dark and it felt strange being out of his room when Gilbert and Alice were asleep. He saw the drawing room door open and the drinks table. He went in and shut the door, so that if they came to the top of the stairs they wouldn’t see him, and looked at the bottles and wondered what could be in them all. He couldn’t remember ever tasting alcohol before, sips of grown-ups’ drinks maybe, at parties as a child.

The whisky looked dark and he’d never liked the smell of it on his father. He chose the gin, and when he drank it – from the bottle – it nearly took the back of his throat off, but the taste of it, bitter and sugary, was familiar; it was like a taste he’d always known and it was very normal to him. He drank some more and looked at the wall in front of him and waited for something to happen.

The drink felt hot in his empty stomach. He felt his throat burning drily and the strength of the gin in his mouth, and after a few moments the hit of it in his blood and his heart felt it too. The hit went through him and it was dangerous and comforting.

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And then it slowed his head down. His thoughts were slowed down, and the repetitive, loathing rush of them eased.

He lifted the bottle and drank some more, and even smiled. He knew he’d found something then. He knew he’d found something that worked.

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