The People on Privilege Hill (11 page)

L
ester came wandering along the towpath in the moonlight feeling drunk, free and yet not altogether happy. It was late. He'd been playing music down the Painted Sailor on the quay. Tomorrow he was off to college.

At his back-garden door in the high wall he couldn't find his keys. Then he thought, It'll be open. They wouldn't have locked it.

The door was locked. Glancing up to consider whether to try to climb over the wall, he found himself looking into the eyes of a severe and magnificent mallard drake standing in the ivy.

“Hi,” said Lester. “They've locked me out. ‘Behold, I stand at the door and knock.' But they've locked me out. And I'm leaving tomorrow.”

He found his keys, dropped them on the gravel, fumbled about for them. “You'd have thought,” he said to the drake, “that they might have wanted me to stay home the night before I left. Eh? Not a word. They might have stood me a meal. Most parents do. But no. Mallard, THEY DO NOT COMMUNICATE.”

He picked up the keys and found that the door in the garden wall had been open all the time.

The house was in total darkness.

“You would have thought,” he said—though the mallard had disappeared—“that they might have waited up. Well, I know it's not forever and I'm not going far; but look, I've lived with them eighteen years. They'd have had a
lodger
in for a drink the night before he left, after eighteen years.”

The back door was also unlocked and he went into the house and at once fell over a huge quantity of luggage piled up inside. What they doing with my stuff? This is my private property. Two suitcases! She must have been ironing shirts all day and she knows I don't wear shirts.

You can't talk to her. She was ... my mother was ... she was great once. Beautiful. And she thought I was wonderful. And my father was someone. He doesn't say a bloody word now. You'd think he was afraid of me.

“They're taking me, though,” he said. “As if it was a boarding school. I've got mates there already and it's not fifty miles off, and I'm coming back often enough, but they're taking me. And he'll wear a suit. I know he'll be in a suit.”

On the landing he fell over a double bass.

“Am I taking that? Apparently not. They've left it up here. Oh God! Going to bed. Crash.”

Under the covers of the bed he had slept in since he was five years old, he wondered what bed he'd be in tomorrow night.

 

Some six hours later his mother, Stella, was woken by a tremendous pandemonium in the garden. Squawking. Crashing. The breaking of branches. A cacophony of ducks. “It's ducks fighting,” she said and was at the bedroom window.

“Ducks aren't great fighters.” Her husband was lying straight in their bed, nose to the ceiling. “They're sober birds.” He had been awake for some time.

“Well, there's something horrible going on,” she said. “Oh God! I hope it's not that cat. Or the fox.”

“Why ducks?” said he.

“Well, for God's sake, Alec, they're quacking.”

“It is six in the morning,” said Alec. “You are hanging out of the bedroom window in the dawn. Ducks are quacking. What do you expect ducks to do?”

“But we're—. We thought they'd never come back. Ducks used to come here. The same ducks, year after year. They told us so when we bought it.”

“I never believed all that stuff,” he said. “It was estate agent's blurb. Ducks don't lay where there's no water to launch the ducklings. And this is October. No duck would be nesting in October.”

“Well, they're here,” said Stella, bringing her head in from outside the window. “Maybe the climate's changed. Maybe they think it's still summer. Or they may just be late parents, like we were. Maybe they'll only produce one. Like us.”

“God help them,” said Alec, “if they produce more.”

Stella climbed back into bed, pressed up against him, considered; and got out again. She ran down to the garden on bare feet and walked on the grass in the autumn dew. A mallard drake with smart military chevrons of a beautiful dark blue was standing on the lawn regarding her.

“Hello,” she said.

The drake moved impatiently from one dark webbed foot to another, and turned his head about. He had a proprietorial look. At this time in the morning the garden was his. He quacked.

Up on the wall top behind Stella, the stone wall was caked with old ivy. From inside it the kerfuffle began again, and two points of angry light shone out: the eyes of another duck. This duck and the drake glared at Stella, pinpointing her between them, like searchlights.

The wild rebellion within the ivy ceased. The drake flew away and Stella went back to the house.

 

“Alec! There are ducklings,” she said. “I heard them. I knew it! She's trying to throw them out of the nest down behind the greenhouse and they're complaining.”

Over a silent breakfast she said, “You know, I thought Lester might have stayed in with us. His last day. I suppose he did come in last night?”

At once, without a word, Alec left the table and went upstairs.

He came down again carrying the double bass. “He's there,” he said, “or anyway there's a hump in the bed. This'll have to go in, I suppose. Do you know if he's taking his bike?”

“Ask him.”

“He's dead to the world.”

“If he is taking the bike, he'll have to help you get it up on the car rack,” she said. “With your back. What about the double bass?”

“Your guess is, as they say, as good as mine. I'll leave it around.”

 

Stella finished packing Lester's suitcases and Alec carried them to the car. After lunch—Lester had just come down and was drinking Coke at the kitchen table—Stella went to the garage carrying Lester's heavy video recorder and computer and boxes of loose tapes. This took three journeys and on the third one, a mother duck marched confidently out from behind the greenhouse, followed by twelve thistledown balls on legs. They rippled behind her in a wavering string.

She hissed at Stella, and her babies squeaked and cheeped like schoolchildren on a nature walk.

Stella lowered the computer to the ground.

 

Alec's voice shouted from the garage, “I've got the bike on top, but we'll never get the ruddy double bass in. Where is the damned boy? What's he doing?”

Stella stretched her hand towards the immaculate ducklings who at once rushed to their mother and clustered round her feet like a pulsating soft cushion, and Stella saw that the mother duck was not in fact confident at all. It was bravado. This was her most desperate moment. “Open the door,” said the duck's black, manic eye. “The door into the lane.”

She seemed to know where it was and set off towards it.

Stella followed and opened the door. With a serenade of quacking and squeaking the mother duck passed through followed by the long string of her perfect children. In a minute the whole parade had vanished into the greenery along the bank of the stream. A minute more, and there was a gentle splash followed by smaller splashes, as light as raindrops.

Stella noticed the drake then, standing some way along the towpath watching. Then he, too, vanished into the reeds. There was a sense of completion.

 

“Alec!” She ran to the garage. “Alec—did you hear them? I saw them! There were twelve. They've all swum off down the stream. The drake watched.”

“You weren't dreaming, I suppose?”

“I don't dream about ducklings. Or about anything now.”

He struggled with the double bass, but it resisted a back seat in the car. He swore. Lester was somehow present, looking on and eating a pie.

Alec quite suddenly gave up. “If you're taking the double bass,” he said, “there won't be room for all of us.”

“O.K.,” said Lester.

“So I shall stay at home. Right?”

“Oh, O.K. Right,” said Lester. “Thanks, Dad. Bye, Dad,” and he crawled into the back of the small car. He was a huge young man.

“Oh, Lester.” Stella saw that Alec's hands were shaking. Alec was wearing what he wore only for weddings: a suit and tie. She had put on a dress and jacket. Neither knew much about colleges and they had not been sure whether they would be introduced to the principal. “Oh, Lester.” In the wing mirror, Stella saw Lester's face looking relieved that his father was not coming.

“If I'd had a few driving lessons,” her son said, “I needn't have bothered you.”

“Thank you! But we need the car ourselves. Your father has fastened the bike on top,” she said. “All alone,” she added.

Alec lifted the double bass into the front seat and Stella clipped herself in behind the wheel.

“Thanks, Dad. See you later, Dad,” said Lester.

“Good luck then,” said Alec at the very last moment, just as the car turned into the lane, and Stella saw him come out after them and stand in the middle of the lane and wave to them; and she thought how thin Alec looked, his wrists skinny inside his suit. He was calling something after them, but they couldn't hear him.

We were old to have a child, she thought.

And she hated Lester. This Lester. She longed for the Lester who used to come in cheerful from school shouting, “Mum? I'm home, Mum. Can I go out now?” Or, “You in, Mum? I'm top again.” Or, “Mum, where's Dad? Is he going fishing?” Or, “I bought this for you, Mum.”

She longed for the earlier Lester who liked her to read to him in bed. “Go on, Mum. Don't stop now. Go on!” Or the earlier-still Lester, heavy and warm and teething; on her shoulder as she patted his back. Or the newborn Lester who had lain in his pram, gazing in wonder. Wonder at everything. At his own wrists. At leaves across the window, at the eyes of the cat, at the flames in the fire. The Lester who had stroked her face as he fed from her breast.

 

They had reached the campus of the raw, new university. It was scarcely an hour from home but Stella had never been inside its wrought-iron gates, which were about the only things that appeared to be finished. Lester had been there only once, last year for the interview. She drove cautiously through a treeless desolation of pink tarmac, tentatively round weedy roundabouts. Mud and workmen's tools were everywhere. Cement kerbstones held back rubble and were ticketed with signs and arrows for the future. In the distance there seemed to be a complex of drab prefabricated single-storey buildings. This was the wider world that Stella had been so proud that Lester was clever enough to inhabit.

 

In the back, Lester thought, Oh, Christ, it's dire. Media Studies. I'm doing Media Studies. I don't have a clue about Media Studies. I ought to be doing Music. In a proper place. Why didn't they suggest Music? They never suggest anything, my parents. They are uninterested. They turned sort of humble after I got all those A levels. They just do things for me, they never think of me. They are not interested in Lester, only in what Lester is like. When I was young they cared about my happiness. Now it's all ironing shirts. And I'll bet they'll go out for dinner tonight when they've got rid of me. Well, I'm not staying here, in this place, right? It's hell.

“Where do you think we go?” she asked him.

He didn't know.

 

As he sat silent in the back, she again examined her son in the driving mirror. The shaven head. The nose ring.

He is a huge soft fledgling, she thought. Some sort of doleful young owl. And he's fat.

And utterly conventional, she thought. Totally self-absorbed. He has no feelings. You can't get near him!

Some students in black tracksuits came running by, their faces screwed up against the fine rain that had started to fall. One of them turned back.

“Oh,” she called, “could you tell us where to go? I'm bringing my son. It's his first term. Could you tell us where we have to—report?”

“Sure,” said the wet runner and then, “Oh, hi, Les.”

“Hi,” said Lester and broke from the shell of the car in one grateful spring. He walked round to the front and lifted out the double bass. “Bye, then, Ma. Thanks for the lift. See you.”

“What
?
” she called after him. “What
?
Lester! Am I not even going to see your room?”

“'Bye, Ma,” and he loped after his friend.

“What about the bike?” she shouted. “All the luggage? The computers? Do I take it all home again?”

She started the car, roared after him, catching him and his mate up outside the prefabs. “Lester! I will not be treated like this. Take your stuff out of my car and get the bike down. At once.”

“O.K., Ma. Keep your hair on.”

The two boys piled Lester's possessions inside the tatty building. They seemed a little subdued and she sat on, not moving from her seat in the car.

“Right,” she said, switching on the engine. “You can just get on with it, Lester. I've done my bit and so has your father,” and she drove off.

 

Then, some way down the pitiless asphalt in the gathering dark, she stopped the car again and rested her head against the steering wheel. A huge tract of her life passed sadly by.

 

Feet came padding.

“Ma! Hey, Ma? What's the matter? Don't cry. Ma—? Love you, Ma.”

“I'm delighted to hear it,” she wept.

“Ma, I'll be coming home at the weekend you know.”

“What?” (Oh, how her heart leapt!) “Will you? You didn't tell us.”

“Of course I am. I'm coming home every weekend for the next three years. Didn't I say?”

And he saw her heart sink now. Like a stone.

 

A
t three o'clock in the morning over a hundred miles from home in a hotel I'd never heard of before that weekend, I broke my ankle in the bathroom of the en-suite bedroom where I was spending the night with my lover.

He was my first lover. For thirty years I have been married to my husband, Ambrose, who was not my lover before marriage. We were both virgins. I had never been unfaithful to him before that night.

My husband is a highly respected philatelist, often at foreign auctions and stamp collectors' conferences. He is also what is called a music buff and goes to the opera all over Europe. I am not interested in stamps and like to listen to music alone, even though it was at a concert that we met.

He was sitting in front of me and my friend Lizzie Fisher and I thought, What an enormous head! It's like Beethoven's.

It turned out that Lizzie Fisher knew him—she'd had a spell being interested in stamps—and she introduced us and I thought, What an exalted face. He looks like a saint.

Over the long years of our marriage he has been away from me a great deal.

And he was to be away the night of my infidelity, which was my birthday and which he had forgotten. I could see that he was rather troubled about forgetting my birthday and he said he would buy tickets for us to go to Glyndebourne some time to make up for it. He can always get tickets. He still went away.

 

For the past year or so I have allowed myself to take a tangential view of music and since my friend Lizzie Fisher had started to go to evening classes at the local school of art, and since I'd always secretly believed that I'd be rather good at sculpture, we both enrolled in the modelling class, where it turned out that I was hopeless and Lizzie—as usual—rather good. However, the teacher was kind to me. Often he came up and pushed me aside from what I was trying to do and with one flick of the knife he would turn it into something presentable. Even nice. I would gasp and he would look sideways at me and smile. He spent time with me and the others began to notice. The model in particular noticed. She was a beautiful Croatian girl, brown, hard, flat, silent and twenty. I heard soon that he'd been “seeing her” for over a year and she was wild for him. I could feel her big fierce eyes on me. But Geoffrey—the teacher—paid no attention and looked at me if anything with more affection.

At the break in each class we'd all go to the canteen where Lizzie Fisher and I would always sit apart from the others, being older than them. After the first term Lizzie Fisher gave up because she was bored. She'd found she was good at modelling the human figure and so began to look for something else. She'd been like this ever since we'd met at college long ago.

But I kept on going and I took my coffee break by myself. The day I discovered that Ambrose had forgotten my birthday and was off to Bayreuth I sat as far away from the others as possible and stirred my coffee and thought that it was years—years and years—since Ambrose had even touched me, let alone looked at my body, or made love to me. He had never been very keen on it, even at the beginning. He got through it as fast as he could, but in an abstracted way as if he was listening for distant music and could only spare a very short time.

Geoffrey came over to my table that evening and sat with me, and I looked up and saw the model drinking her mug of coffee in her silk kimono and bare feet, standing with the students all around her, all of them aware that she was naked under the kimono. Geoffrey sat with his back to them all and looked only at me. And she knew it.

And knew it when he put his long fingers over mine.

 

Towards the end of the term, just before my birthday, he put his hand over mine again and said, “Sleep with me.”

 

“There's a hotel in the Lake District,” he said.

“The Lake District? But it's nearly Scotland!”

“I have to go to Edinburgh. I can drive back through the Lake District. You can drive north from here. For the Friday night. The next morning I'm flying from Manchester to the Paris Exhibition.”

“Of course I can't—”

“Then what chance is there for us?” he said. “Ever. ... This is a God-sent chance.”

I didn't think that a hundred-mile journey to the Lake District to an unknown hotel was a God-sent chance. What if he didn't turn up? I'd have to ask Lizzie Fisher what to do.

But then I thought that this was my own life. It was time I stopped depending on Lizzie Fisher. This was new. It was newer and truer than my marriage thirty years ago, the predictable marriage of such a nice girl to such a kind and distinguished man. “Brilliant! Quite brilliant! And so well off. So respected in the Sacred Music world, and in Stamps. She's very lucky.”

 

I felt odd when Ambrose left for Bayreuth on the Friday morning. He would be away for a week. He was silent and seemed a little dazed. He gave me a peck and patted the dog's head, but he didn't ask what I was doing over my birthday. I suppose he thought I'd go out with Lizzie Fisher. She's the nearest I've got to family. The previous evening I had packed for him while he was in the garden. He meditates every evening for a quarter of an hour, the dog pacing behind him. I watched them coming slowly, slowly up the steps through the water gardens, Ambrose's head bowed, and I thought, He's getting old. How can I?

But I did. As soon as the taxi had driven off I was upstairs and putting things into a suitcase for myself. My car was full of petrol. I turned off the hot water and left lights arranged to come on when it got dark. I checked all the window catches and pressed the answerphone button on the telephone. Only one night.

Then I thought, But suppose he decides to surprise me? To come back? Or have flowers delivered for my birthday tomorrow?

So I wrote a note, just in case, and propped it on the hall table. Gone away with Lizzie Fisher.

I thought of telling Lizzie Fisher everything, but I couldn't. I tried to leave a message on her answerphone but it wasn't switched on so I wrote another, very unnoticeable, note and left it on the front doorstep with a pebble on it, saying, Please leave any parcels in the greenhouse.

Then I suddenly saw the dog, lying at the foot of the stairs.

It is unbelievable that I had forgotten the dog, but it is true. He is Ambrose's dog and called Ludwig, and looks ridiculously like Ambrose. I feed, walk, brush and deflea Ludwig, but he loves only Ambrose. He was watching me intently, a huge-headed shining black labrador, now of a certain age.

I'd have to take him with me. Hatred at my heart, I shoved him into the car.

And drove off.

It was the unbearable M6, all round Birmingham. There is an effective route that cuts out Birmingham on the way to the Lake District. I am not sure of it, but I did my best, the lorries bearing down on me like leviathans seeking whom they might devour. I did not care, though Ludwig seemed restless. It was Friday afternoon and the weekend world was racing towards its breakneck break.

I reached the Lake District safely and drove between the purple mountains and the crowds taking photographs beside the silver waters. The hotel stood on its own upon a green hillside. What was I doing? The dog lay asleep in the back with its four black legs in the air.

And of course Geoffrey wasn't there.

 

I waited a while, in the car park. Then I fed Ludwig off a tin plate I'd brought with a tin of Chum, and took him for a walk up behind the hotel and gazed down at the ridiculously beautiful backdrop of Causey Pike. What could I do tomorrow to fill the time? There was the Wordsworth Museum at Grasmere. Or Beatrix Potter.

The evening grew cold and grey, and the lake waters slapped bad-temperedly about, so I heaved myself up—my bones are no longer the bones of a girl—and back in the car park Ludwig growled and his hair rose behind the ears and I saw a small, furtive-looking man in awful cheap clothes scurrying about near the entrance.

So I went round the side of the hotel, shutting Ludwig in the car. I went in and sat in the lounge and read a newspaper.

People were all around, happily chattering. There was a group of two amiable families, noisy and pleased with each other, discussing old times over tea and cakes. After a while in came the unrecognisable Geoffrey and for a second he seemed uncertain. He too looked surprised as I lowered the newspaper. “Oh! Hi!” he said. I hadn't realised he was so short. And so common.

But the dinner was good, and the wine, and he lost his abstracted expression and in the lounge drinking brandies—the two families now decidedly rowdy and all still knocking back the tea—he put his hand over mine once more and said, “Shall we go up?”

I said, “I must see to the dog.”

He said, “The dog?”

“Must take him for his walk around.”

“Dog
?
”

“Yes. He's in the car. Ludwig.”

“Oh. I see.”

“I'll not take long,” and I ran to the car and let Ludwig sniff around and patted him, but when I tried to put him back he began to howl and he wouldn't stop. He leapt about the car over the seats howling for Ambrose like some singer at Bayreuth. I had to take him into the hotel and he dominated the entrance hall.

“He won't settle in the car.”

“Well, they won't let him in the bedrooms,” said Geoffrey.

“Oh, of course we will,” said the concierge. “Would he like a blanket?”

“He usually sleeps on a bit of blanket,” I said. “At home.”

Geoffrey was examining the watercolours on the walls.

“Well, we do have a bit of blanket,” said the concierge and we trooped up to bed.

Ludwig took a long time settling his blanket to his satisfaction. Then he scuffled about and snorted and farted and yawned. Finally he slept or seemed to sleep, but he whimpered in his dreams.

At last he was quiet, and Geoffrey got down to what we had come for and I thought, Oh yes! Yes! I remember! Oh, I love this! Oh Geoffrey! and Geoffrey made similar loud observations, and Ludwig awoke in consternation and leapt on the bed. He is a large and heavy dog, and Geoffrey I'd not realised is very slight. There was a tussle.

“Put the bloody thing in the bathroom,” said Geoffrey and I did, turning off the bathroom light and saying soothing things to Ludwig. I didn't feel anything against him. I almost felt love. I hadn't considered he might ever feel protective towards me.

Geoffrey fell asleep at once and, much later, I fell asleep too and then of course I woke. I am no longer twenty years old and I do sometimes have to get up in the night. I crept out of bed, opened the bathroom door, felt for the string to turn the light on, fell over the dog, and my feet flew from under me and one of them hit the further wall, only inches away, wham!

I heard the snap. My foot was gone. It hung down like a leaf. Ludwig, his protective instincts exhausted, padded from the bathroom and back to his blanket.

 

I knew it was broken.

At first I felt no pain at all but when I leaned forward to touch it there were vibrations everywhere like silent aeolian strings. They trembled up and down, back and front, over the toes, up each side of the leg and up the back of the shin. It wasn't a “twisted ankle.” It wasn't what in the Girl Guides we had called a “sprain” and had learned to treat. This ankle was broken. Smash, snap!

 

I crawled into the bedroom and heaved myself on to the bed, and Geoffrey lay there deeply sleeping. But something woke him and he turned his head and opened his eyes and he looked at me, mystified. He'd had a lot of wine.

I said, “Geoffrey. I think I've broken my ankle,” and he said “Oh, no!” and sank to sleep again.

Beside the bedside telephone there was a number to ring the front desk; but nobody answered. I tried again and got a metallic voice telling me that there was nobody there until 6:30 a.m. but in an emergency to ring ... And he babbled out a number so fast that I couldn't hear it though I tried three times. I think then that I passed out.

 

I woke to Geoffrey's packing (Ludwig was deep asleep) and it was seven o'clock and he was off to Manchester airport. He kissed my cheek. I said, “So sorry, Geoffrey. I'm afraid I broke my ankle,” and he said, “Oh, no!”

I said, “Don't go to Paris.”

He said, “Paris? I'm not going to Paris. I'm going to Zagreb.”

 

“You're so beautiful,” he said, “and so innocent. I'll tell them at the desk,” and he was gone.

 

In time I got help. They were excellent and so apologetic about the emergency number.

They were sending for an ambulance and I would be well looked after. The Lake District was the perfect place to break an ankle. The mountain rescue were on twenty-four-hour call. The nearest hospital was thirty-five miles away at Carlisle, but it was first class. They would telephone anyone I wanted. Had I children?

No, I had no children. And there was the dog.

“Ah—the dog.”

“Your—partner—settled the bill last night. He thought this morning that you might have a friend—?”

I knew that I did not want Lizzie Fisher to know. And what purpose to ring Ambrose in Bayreuth? I took a deep breath and said, “D'you know, my car's an automatic. This is my left foot. I believe I can drive myself home.”

“It is out of the question,” they said, but I saw what a relief it would be for them if I simply disappeared.

“Could you get me a wheelchair to the car and someone to help me wash and dress—and put the dog in?”

“We could, but we'd be most—”

“Oh, please.”

 

Someone came and helped me into the bathroom, where I closed my eyes.

And they lifted me into the car, put Ludwig in behind me, where he rested his smelly black jaw on my shoulder. They brought me a thermos of coffee. From the pretty Swiss gables of the hotel faces peered, the two indefatigable families venturing a distant interest. The mountains brooded on.