The Song House (29 page)

They didn’t go to the park and she didn’t see him off at the
airport, because it was so far and the trip was a bit of a drag
in the heat and she was meeting someone at World’s End and
really had to shift. It was a blessing really; he remembers feeling
as if he were duty-bound to make the suggestion, but the
thought of the two of them at the airport together brought
home the reality of the idea: he didn’t want her in Bahrain at
all. She promised him she’d think about it; said it over her
shoulder, walking casually away from him, the tanned outline
of her body clearly visible through the thin cheesecloth of her
dress. She turned back once, and seeing him standing there
in his suit with his case at his feet – watching her go – she
put her hand up and smiled, and so he knew that was the end,
of course. What would she have seen? A married man in an
unfashionable suit; an older man, seventeen years older. Old
enough, just about, to be her father.

He was paged in departures. The public address announced
an urgent message for Mr Kenneth Earl, and although he heard
it, once standing in the toilet cubicle, and once again while he
was washing his hands in the basin, he didn’t connect the name
with himself. And the third time: he was looking for a novel
to take him through the flight, hearing the creaking carousel
of books, and, above it, the exact same message delivered in
the same staticky monotone.

He would like to remember what he’d said to William. He
has to put himself back in the hole.

Kenneth sat on the edge of the bed, laid his hand on his
son’s bare feet and said,

Will, I take it there’s been some adventure. You’re quite the
hero, so Sharon says. What happened, son?

But the boy wouldn’t talk.

In another cell of his memory, the cell where such moments
are hidden from the light, Kenneth sees himself and his son
in the room, and the preferred, imagined memory evaporates
like dew. He sees again the dirty bare soles of William’s feet –
how it makes him rage to come back to that – and he’s towering
over the boy, his hands curled into fists; he’s towering and
shouting.

Stand up, boy! Have you forgotten your manners?

And William slides off the edge of the bed and gets to his
feet.

Kenneth lets out a small, baffled cry: now, he wants to hear
his son. Didn’t want to then. He thinks of his own father,
who held to the dictum that children should be seen and not
heard, and marvels at how, like some process of genetic osmosis,
he had absorbed the rule. But his father had never hit him;
can’t blame that on heredity. Rusty was quite different with
the boy. They were always – Kenneth strains the word out –
canoodling, him and her. Her little man. Wanted to take him
places with them; the opera, the theatre. Why didn’t he want
that too? He was only ever home for the holidays as it was.
Why did he want the boy to have his own sitting room, for
Christ’s sake? So that William could leave them in peace. To
do what? He can’t remember because he doesn’t know. What
was
wrong
with him? He gets up slowly, stiff and chilled from
sitting so still for so long. He has an urge to light the fire,
remembering at the last second, a lit match between his fingers,
that William had stuffed the chimney with bin bags last
winter to stop the heat escaping. Who’d light a fire in July,
anyway? But everything’s so damp. He wants to light a fire and
he can’t fathom why. Immobility, he says, taking himself off to
the kitchen and refilling his glass. Immolation. He can’t sit on
the terrace for the stink. What is it with this weather, that it
smells so bad?

Sam Moore pushes his crook further into the swirling mass.
Behind him, Aaron is breathing heavily from the run down the
hill. He tries to keep the torch steady so the light won’t bounce
around, but even so, only the surface is lit, broken like glass
into hundreds of tiny shards.

See him?

Sam doesn’t reply. He wades further into the wash, feeling
about in the cold and dark. He lifts a dripping holdall from
the middle of a nest of twigs and tosses it onto the bank, flinging
up beside it a bent bicycle wheel, a length of plumbing hose,
a single wellington boot. When he reaches the other side he
puts his hands on his knees and bends double, scanning the
ford for any sign of life.

Not a hope, he says, We can go to the centre, ask if anyone’s
missing.

And then to the pub, just to make sure?

Too right. Even if it’s only bottled. I’m gagging.

Aaron turns away and immediately back again, grabs the boot
and shines his torch over it.

Hang on a minute, he says, We need to look further downstream.

William drives like his father: fast, confident, music too loud
in the cabin. Nat had made him a compilation CD and he
plays it now, feeling the rush of adrenalin he always gets when
he thinks of her. A CD is a step forward; it means she cares
enough about him to share her tastes. She has thought through
the music carefully. He recognizes a Seth Lakeman song, and
Coldplay, but doesn’t know the next three bands and has to
keep glancing at the track listing after that. He stops paying
attention midway through; the CD case, nestled with his
mobile phone on the passenger seat, is hard to read in the dark.
And anyway, he’s never been one for that kind of obsession.
Perhaps when all this business with his father is over, when
he’s cured or better or something less histrionic, he’ll bring her
down to Berkshire.

Meet the family, he says out loud, grinning, Mad and very,
very bad.

It’s not often the roads are so empty, and he tries to enjoy the
feeling of space it gives him, like being in a car advertisement,
almost. Except his car isn’t shinily manoeuvring along a
winding road to the sea. His car is covered in grime and muck
from the lanes, negotiating the blocked-off and sealed-off and
impassable byroads that will, he hopes, eventually lead him to
Boxford. He’s going to visit Thomas, renew their acquaintance.
Put an end to the mischief.

Kenneth knows now that his mind is not the dodgems or the
ghost train; certainly no fun house. It is the hall of mirrors.
There is before and after, and squeezed in between them is the
actual moment itself, distorted by time, by what he knows now,
what he didn’t know then. And what he chose to ignore. Rusty
was pregnant. He couldn’t prove it wasn’t his, of course, because
she was clever. So, here’s the next reflection: how did he know
it wasn’t his?

She’d called him up to the nursery to deliver her news,
opening the door and smiling at him in an odd, peculiar way,
like a child trying to please. She said something about the room
coming into its own again, but he wasn’t really paying attention
because they’d been here before; once, twice, and she had
been so bitterly disappointed. And for a while after each failure
she’d go quiet, and he’d think she was happy, or at least coming
to terms with it, and then she’d begin again, the same arguments,
the same fanatical cast in her eyes. One child would
never be enough for her. She simply longed for a baby. And
William needed a playmate, someone to draw him out. She
never asked Kenneth what
he
might need. Then she’d had a
stillbirth, and they both agreed there would be no more
attempts.

Had they both agreed? He holds up another memory for
scrutiny, squirming at the deformed shape of it: he had said,
There’ll be no more; it’s ruining your health. That’s my final
word.

Afterwards, he’d taken every precaution – or thought he had
– so the news was a shock. That was how he knew it wasn’t
his, then? The idiocy, the stupidity of him. And of course, the
baby wasn’t to be. Third recollection: Rusty in the middle of
the bed, pillows stacked high around her, and the sheet pulled
up to her chin. Like a disembodied head, floating in an Arctic
sea. She had a look on her face, and once Kenneth had seen
it the first time, he would never fail to notice it again: a kind
of smirking contempt. He was trying to apologize, to share her
sorrow, even though he didn’t quite feel it in the same way.

Come on, Kenneth, he says to himself, What was it you really
felt?

And Keith Jarrett plays out a rhythm of not-quite-repetition,
and the answer comes in the spaces between the sounds: relief.
Huge, sparkling relief. He’d already made plans for his love
affair with Grace.

Grace. He’d kept it secret for a good six months: four of
planning, when only he knew what he was about to do; two
of snaring, although he preferred, in those cunning, deceitful
days, to think of it as romancing. Now he knows the name of
it, and is full of shame. Grace wasn’t one of the more beautiful
ones. But she was happy and free, and freedom is a kind of
beauty in itself. When he’d had enough of a particular dalliance
– when it became a problem – he’d enlist Rusty, confess all
(not quite all) and she would deal with it. If the girl worked
for the estate, she’d be promoted. If she was a friend of a friend,
she’d be welcomed by Rusty with a full and overpowering
benevolence. Rusty was so clever.

Kenneth wanders into the hall and opens the front door.
His leg is aching from the big toe to the calf. The sole of his
foot is throbbing. He continues out towards the rhododendrons,
the bushes fused into a block of saturated shadow, and
stares at them. The earth underfoot yields to his weight; his
feet sink into the cold and wet. It feels good. There’s a noise
in the distance, some sort of siren, like atonal singing. A million
years ago, it seems, a woman sang to him.

The journey from Boxford to Earl House is hazardous, and
William has to take it more carefully. The motorway has been
closed off, with diversion signs taking him in the wrong direction.
He feels, although he can’t know, not in this glossy
darkness, as if he’s circling the estate without getting any closer;
as though he’s stuck on an unending loop. Twice he’s had to
take a detour, found a river where a road should be, has had
to double back on himself, and the scenery looks exactly the
same; closed-in hedges and the tarmac like Vaseline; no houses
lit, no people, nothing. At Westbrooke he climbs the hill, and
as he rounds the bend, sees an unearthly sight; a caravan of
horses crossing the horizon. One follows behind the other,
nose to tail in a line, like a paper cut-out. Then no one and
nothing again for another mile or two, except the sodden trees,
and the road ahead, empty and straight. The CD has played
through and returns to the start, the frenzied violin on the
opening track making him press his foot harder on the accelerator.
Really, he wants to rip up the tarmac, soar through
space: he wants to fly, like the car in
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
.
Like the ones in
Blade Runner
. At this rate, it’ll take ages to
get to his father’s house. That meddling old bugger, with his
interfering ways. He thinks again about Thomas’s watery
eye through the crack in the door. Yes, someone had called. Someone
was asking, is what he’d said, but Thomas swore he’d said
nothing. Really, he’d said nothing. Swore it on his dog’s life.
And then – extraordinary – that pitiful cry. I’m an old man. As
if age ever made a difference. William licks his lips, tasting
salt and iron; the flavour, faintly shocking, of his own blood.