The Steep Approach to Garbadale (13 page)

The dream was interrupted when the door of his bedroom opened, light spilled in briefly and somebody stepped into the room, closing the door.

‘Alban?’ a voice said in the darkness. At first, he wasn’t sure whether he was really awake or not, and just for an instant he thought it might be his mother, finally replying. He struggled to wake up properly. It didn’t feel like he’d been asleep long. ‘Beryl?’ he said.

‘Put the light on,’ Great-Aunt Beryl told him. ‘Don’t want to bark a shin. One takes for ever to heal at this age.’

He felt for the bedside lamp, found it and switched it on. Great-Aunt Beryl was dressed in a long white nightgown and a warm-looking tartan dressing gown. Her hair - her real hair - was very white and wispy and sparse.

‘Is there something wrong?’ he asked.

‘No,’ she said. ‘Well, yes, but there’s no emergency.’

‘Boris still in his tank?’

‘As far as I know.’ She walked up to his bed and started unmaking the corner of the bed at its foot. ‘Shift over, nephew, and pass me a pillow.’ Beryl got the sheets at the bottom of the bed undone, accepted the passed pillow and climbed in, putting the pillow behind her so that she could sit up facing him. She fixed him with a disarmingly bright gaze. He pulled the sheets up a little to cover his nipples, bemused at himself for feeling so self-conscious. His great-aunt took a deep breath. ‘Now, Alban.’

‘Yes, Beryl.’

‘Did you get my letter?’

‘Yes, I did. Though only today. Fielding brought it from Wales.’

‘And you’ve read it.’

‘Yes.’ He reached for his water glass. ‘Would you like some water?’

‘Yes, please. Thank you.’

‘You’re welcome.’

‘So,’ she said, clasping her hands. ‘Unfortunately, since I wrote that letter, matters have rather come to a head, medically.’

‘Oh, Beryl, I’m so sorry,’ he said. The letter had just said that she was unwell and undergoing tests. As he’d never known Beryl complain about - or even mention anything regarding - her health, he’d guessed this was something out of the ordinary, something she considered important.

‘Oh, I’m ninety - a good innings and blah blah.’ Beryl waved away any sympathy. ‘However, it would seem that I am highly likely to die within the next year or so. Ha! As though, at this age, that was ever other than true. Annoyingly, though, they have found one of those unpleasant things that end in -oma inside me and apparently that makes the outcome pretty much inevitable, rather than giving one a sporting chance. I ought to have six months though, and possibly a year. The only good thing about getting cancer at this age is it spreads very slowly; the cancer cells are as decrepit and sluggish as every other part of one’s body, and take their time multiplying. ’

‘Oh, Beryl—’

‘Do stop it, please,’ she said, blinking furiously. ‘I take some comfort in people’s sympathy, but only so much. We all have to go; in a way I’m lucky to have the notice.’

‘If there’s anything I can do—?’ he began.

‘There is,’ she said brightly.

‘What?’

‘Be quiet and listen.’

‘Okay.’

‘Now, I may, in due course, as my illness progresses and my condition deteriorates, have to take matters into my own hands, because I have no intention of dying in any great pain, if there is no hope of recovery. That is something I feel I have to tell you, Alban, you understand, but you must be assured it is simply a practical means of escaping an unpleasant experience, that is all. Normally, obviously, one doesn’t really approve of that sort of thing - bit of an easy way out, always best to just soldier on, you never know what might be around the next corner, that sort of thing - however it is something that has to be faced, and I particularly want you to be prepared. It has also struck me that for some people, the unpleasant experience they are trying to escape through suicide is the rest of their lives. If they see that life as being filled with nothing but emotional pain until they die of old age, well, one can understand that would in itself be unbearable, and the younger you are, the worse. That’s the kind of thing one thinks about when one finds oneself in this sort of pickle. So, for what it might be worth, I pass that on.’ She paused. ‘Yes?’ She could see he wanted to say something.

He drew in a breath but eventually just nodded and said, ‘Okay. Thank you.’

‘Now, the other matter I alluded to in my letter. Which we spoke about once, some years ago.’

There was a pause, then Alban said, ‘Ah ha,’ for want of anything better.

‘I don’t know how much you know about the circumstances surrounding your birth.’

Alban looked away, seeming to search the dark corners of the room, lost in the shade.

He shrugged. ‘I was born in Garbadale House on September the third, nineteen-sixty-nine. My parents had been married two days earlier, also at the house. They’d been living in London before that. They were students at the LSE; that’s where they met. They stayed on at Garbadale and Dad became, well, it was never a formal post, but sort of trainee estate manager. Think that’s where he started painting. Winifred and Bert were there, too, most of the time. Mum - Irene - looked after me, though apparently she wasn’t very well herself. Some of it might have been postnatal depression. We stayed at Garbadale until . . . Until I was two. Until Irene died.’ He shrugged again.

Beryl looked thoughtful, her already small eyes reduced to puckered slits. ‘Hmm. I see. All well and good. What I wanted to tell you was from just before you were born, from the end of August that year.’

He nodded, folded his arms high over his chest.

‘Did you know your mother had been knocked down in the street, by a bus, in London, a couple of weeks before you were born?’

‘Yes, I did. That was one reason for her to go to Garbadale, for them both to go; she was recuperating.’

‘Hmm. Though undertaking a five-hundred-mile journey, even on the sleeper train and in a big comfy car, does seem a little strange when one’s been that knocked about. She had a lot of bruising, and head injuries.’

‘So I heard.’

‘If it had been a car that knocked her down,’ Beryl said, ‘she’d probably have had two broken legs.’

‘If you say so,’ he said. ‘But she can’t have been that badly injured; they let her out a day or two later.’

‘Yes,’ Beryl said, sounding thoughtful.

The truth was he didn’t like talking about any of this. He didn’t like to think about any of this. For most of his life he’d avoided going back to the great gloomy house and the damp, dark garden with the huge, desolate estate of rain-slicked rock and gale-hammered heather surrounding it. There had been those few long weekend visits to Garbadale House in his childhood to see Grandma Winifred and Grandad Bert, and once - shortly after his sister Cory had been born - they had stayed for a week, but he hadn’t liked the place and, looking back, was pretty sure his dad had hated it, too. You could hardly blame him. The first time Alban had chosen to go back of his own volition had been to dispose of something that had profoundly needed disposing of. Since then he’d been back a few times, determined not to let the place and the legacy it held intimidate him, but it was always, in effect, with gritted teeth.

‘You see, the thing is,’ Great-Aunt Beryl said, ‘I was in London when your mother had her accident.’

‘Oh,’ Alban said. Beryl had been a nurse, first in the Wrens, then in the NHS, in Manchester, then in Saudi and Dubai, then - for the last few years before her retirement - in Glasgow.

‘She was knocked down in Loake Street, close to a clinic,’ Beryl said. ‘Private place; surgical. What they’d call elective surgery nowadays. It was one of their doctors who was first on the scene. I visited her in Bart’s, the day after the accident. She was quite heavily sedated; couldn’t get much sense out of her. Tried talking to her for a bit, but then I was sent packing. Very furious Sister. Explained I was a relative and a senior nurse but she wasn’t having any of it. Rather bad form, I remember thinking at the time.’ Beryl frowned, as though this thirty-five-year-old incident still annoyed her. ‘Thing is, I was only down in the big smoke to visit an old girlfriend from the war. Pure chance I happened to be round for tea with Win and Bert in their flat in South Ken when the rozzers came to say Irene had been knocked down. I’d only just arrived, in fact; barely had time to dunk a biscuit before the door went. It was Win and Bert who dashed off as soon as they heard and left me to man the fort and stand by the telephone and so on. They didn’t get back till very late that night and then said Irene was unconscious and not allowed any visitors, though, as I say, I went next day anyway, just to make sure they were looking after her properly. Had to head off for the Gulf the following day, so it was my last chance, really.’ She went silent for a bit. ‘Never did see her again.’

‘Well, you went to see her; that was good of you.’

‘Something she said,’ Beryl said suddenly. ‘While she was lying there. I mean to say, she was semi-lucid at best, poor girl, but she sounded coherent when she said it.’

‘What?’

‘That he hadn’t wanted her to have it, and that was why.’

Alban thought about this for a moment. ‘Ah, I’m sorry?’

Beryl said, very clearly: ‘He hadn’t wanted her to have it, and that was why.’

‘Oh, Christ,’ he said, eyes widening, ‘the “it” here is me, isn’t it?’

‘Typical man,’ Beryl sighed. ‘Yes, obviously, the “it” was you. The point is, though, who was this “he”? And did this mean she’d walked out in front of that bus on purpose?’

‘Fu—’ Alban began. ‘Jeez, Beryl,’ he breathed.

‘Before I left for points east I found your father and talked to him.’ She paused. ‘Alban, has your father ever shown any aptitude for acting, or any sign of being especially good at lying?’

Alban was already shaking his head. Andy was a down-the-line kind of guy. Fairly quiet, arguably a bit boring; just a self-contained, buttoned-up kind of man. He’d been a good, caring father, and - as far as Alban knew - had never told a lie in his life. Jeez, he’d casually told Alban Father Christmas wasn’t real the first time he’d been asked directly. Even now, Alban could remember feeling horrified, and wishing his dad could have gone along with the story like everybody else’s.

‘Acting? Lying? No,’ he told her.

‘Hmm. Didn’t think so. I thought at the time that either your father had missed his vocation as an actor or he was telling the truth. Don’t think Andrew was the “he” she was talking about.’

‘She was only semiconscious, Beryl, maybe it was . . .’

‘Maybe it was all nonsense,’ Beryl stated.

‘Well, yes.’

‘Perhaps,’ Beryl said.

They were silent for a moment, then he said, ‘Who else could it have been? This “he”. Grandad?’

‘Or one of your uncles? Blake, James, Kennard, Graeme? I had no idea, frankly. I’m sorry to say I still don’t. Thing is, they all doted on you after you were born; Bert especially. If any of them didn’t want her to have it, they certainly changed their tune once you were on the scene.’

‘Anyway. This was nineteen-sixty-nine, not nineteen-forty-nine,’ Alban said. ‘It wasn’t
that
big a deal, being single and pregnant. Was it?’

‘The stigma was much reduced from my day,’ Beryl said. Something in her voice made Alban look at her closely. ‘Oh,’ she waved a hand. ‘Not me, but a couple of friends.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Not as sorry as they were.’

‘Did you mention this to anyone?’ Alban asked her.

Beryl frowned again. ‘Only to Winifred. I don’t know if she told anybody else.’

‘She never told me.’

‘No,’ Beryl said. She twisted some bedclothes into a knot in front of her. Then she allowed the sheets to unknot, and her hands to fall apart. ‘Perhaps I’m just a silly old woman, Alban. It was a long time ago and . . .’ She looked down, and Alban thought how suddenly infinitely frail and vulnerable she looked. Her voice died away.

Then she pulled herself up, cleared her throat and said, ‘Perhaps you ought to ignore me. Perhaps I shouldn’t have said anything.’ She smiled; a thin, wavering smile beneath rheumy eyes and a thin, skull-betraying face, yellow with age and marked by prominent blue veins. ‘Too late now, of course. Oh well. Put it down to this deck-clearing instinct, eh? One becomes frailer as one ages, in all sorts of ways. The burden of memories and . . . and secrets, suspicions . . . They all start to seem heavier.’ She fixed him with a very specific look and said, ‘They all start to tell, after a while.’

Then she yawned widely, putting one thin hand up to her narrow mouth. ‘I’d best get back to my own bed. Sorry to have disturbed you.’

‘That’s all right,’ he said. He watched her push back the bedclothes. ‘Beryl?’

‘Yes, dear?’

‘Are you telling anybody else about your health problems?’

‘Strictly need-to-know basis, dear. Tell people if you feel you have to, otherwise -’ she double-tapped the side of her nose ‘- shtum.’