The White Family (3 page)

He scratched his head. Was he growing more stupid? Less modern, perhaps? Less post-postmodern? Thomas’s mind began to drift.

Sex snapped on to it, like a magnet.

Could he hear Melissa above his head? Four o’clock. She would still be in school. Mornings and evenings were the hopeful times when he might hear her sweet feet padding on his ceiling.

Melissa. The first Melissa I’ve known. The name is cat-like and swift, like her. Honey-tongued, delicate, purring, golden …

Very groomed, was Melissa, in the early mornings, when he chanced to meet her on the stairs. Stumbling back upwards with his milk and his
Guardian
and his pyjamas under his clothes, he sometimes heard her come tip-tipping downwards in her brisk black booties with their sexy eyelets –

Six slick eyelets, slim pale ankles. She smelled of cinnamon, apples, musk, and soap and cornflakes and cleanliness. He probably smelled of old beer and bad breath but she still favoured him with her celestial smile, always slightly surprised, as if she thought she was on the moon and had just discovered that someone else lives there. ‘Oh, hello. You’re up early.’ As if she wasn’t always up early. Her job was so hard he shuddered to think of it, teaching hordes of savage young children. How could they ever appreciate her?

I could protect her. I could look after her …

Actually of course he had little to offer. A bad track record with relationships, a three-bed flat in a seedy part of London, a day job as senior librarian, one novel, written eight years ago (influenced by Proust and Woolf and relativity theory, though no one noticed –
The Wave, the Bridge and the Garden
, a title he now agreed was too long), a middling income he overspent, a guilty slither of credit cards, a second-hand car, a gift with words, his amazing penis, currently unused, needing tenderness, loving, licking …

Melissa does like me
. It isn’t an illusion.

But her eyes were bright, unkindly young, seeming to pierce beneath his skin.

Am I any good? Is there any point to me? What shall I leave behind on this planet?

Books. Words. The English language. I try to serve it. (And other languages. We have to now. Three-hundred-odd languages are spoken in London, and people expect us to have books in all of them. Which is fair enough … Or maybe too fair. Sometimes I feel it’s all gone too far. But I’m not allowed to think things like that. Librarians are servants of the people.)

He was writing his second book, very slowly. He’d been writing it for five years, to be honest.
Postmodernism and the Death of Meaning
. Perhaps non-fiction was harder than fiction. He hadn’t exactly got a publisher, though he’d sent a synopsis out to nine or ten editors, and one of them responded very encouragingly, wishing him the best of luck with finishing it, but begging him not to send the manuscript in case it should get lost in the post. Thomas still blushed with indignant shame, remembering what his ex-wife had said: ‘It’s twaddle, isn’t it, you great lummox. Is this all you learned at university?’ (Could she be right? Was he wasting his time?)

It was Thursday, the library’s half-closing day, the day when his book should be sprinting along. Pull yourself together, he told himself. Forget about the book and set off for the hospital. See how Alfred’s getting on.

It didn’t seem believable that he was in hospital. Alfred who was never ill … A man of iron, Darren’s Dad. They’d kept him in for a week already.

Thomas had decided to go and visit now, at once, in case Alfred died. Not that he often went round to the house (every few years? twice a decade?) – but he liked to know Alfred was
there
. Somewhere. The family he had always known. Safer than his. More stable than his parents, who had broken up, hopelessly, three years before they died, in different hospitals, still rowing by proxy. May wasn’t a good cook, but she’d always made him welcome.

Darren must be forty, if I am. Darren White the Golden Boy. He’s a journalist. Doing very nicely. The twenty-first century belongs to them, the e-mail he-men, the four-a.m.-faxers. Darren’s just married for the third time. Must have found someone younger, glossier.

Will he come back, now his father’s ill?

He always treated his family like dirt. Even his mum, who was nice to all of us hungry boys, piling in for tea after a football match. Alfred could be a bit sharp at times, but May was a darling, with her slow sweet smile and her dry sense of humour and passion for reading. I thought May did Darren’s English homework, but I was probably wrong. He had a knack with words. We both loved writing, in our different ways …

Melissa knows about Egyptian writing. She’s teaching her kids to write hieroglyphics, though quite a few of them still can’t write English. But Egypt’s on the National Curriculum. (She had blue-green eyes, like Egyptian stones. Goldy brown hair, and small golden freckles …)

He told himself to forget about her. He had things to do, he had grown-up worries.

Thomas shaved too fast, cutting himself. He’d given up his beard twelve months ago. Melissa said it made him look younger. Yet he felt quite old as he emerged, blinking, into the thin late sun of wintry London.

As he walked, his thoughts returned to the library. Something faintly disturbing had happened that morning. A young black man had approached the Inquiry Desk. ‘W King’, he had written his name. It was a face Thomas had seen before, he knew, though there were so many black students in the library. He sometimes thought the readers were mostly black, until he made himself count, one day. Funny how your mind played tricks on you. He guessed at the Christian name: Wesley? Wayne?

The young man’s face was memorable, high-cheek-boned, fine-featured. His eyes were peculiarly intimate, golden-brown with a steady gaze. Often Thomas didn’t meet people’s eyes – it got very tiring, dealing with the public – but this young man demanded to be looked at. ‘I left my name. I forgot some stuff. The man on the desk said he wasn’t a librarian.’ The punters always got puzzled by this, when the staff doing obviously librarian-like things, putting books on shelves, sitting at the Inquiry Desk, denied they were librarians – but it was the truth; most of them weren’t, because it cost more to have qualified staff.

As the young man gazed into his eyes, Thomas remembered why his name was familiar. It was written on those fanatical notes Suneeta had found the day before. ‘For the past four hundred years, the white man has been pumping his blood and genes into the blacks, has been diluting the blood and genes of the blacks … Many black homosexuals acquiesce in this racial death-wish.’ Obsessionally neat italic writing. And then he began to feel vaguely threatened, for W King, having reclaimed his notes, proceeded to eyeball Thomas closely as he read him a wish-list of titles, including two books by Eldridge Cleaver, and
One Hundred Years of Lynchings
. As the boy pronounced the titles, he had given a curious half-smile, half-laugh, at Thomas, and Thomas was aware of the boy’s height, and youth, and his long strong fingers, playing with a pen.

Frowning, he walked on into the cold, taking the road that passed the Park.

W King. He must live round here. He found himself peering at passing black youths with more than usual attention, then told himself to forget all about it. Libraries were always full of nutters. Parks, libraries … where else could they go?

It was hard to imagine the Park without Alfred. He was always in there, keeping an eye, guarding the flowers, bullying the kids when they tried to chase balls over the newly-bedded primulas, shouting at dogs, unblocking the drinking-fountain, forming little friendships with menopausal ladies, touching his cap to older ones, looking out for vandals in the toilets …

I don’t want anything to happen to Alfred.

Instead of going straight to the hospital, Thomas turned in through the gates of the Park, magnificent tottering fairy-tale things, Victorian curlicues of iron-work.

Inside, the council asserted itself with a new municipal notice-board. No Littering, No Soiling, No Golfing: No Motorcycles, No Camping, No Caravans. Were they afraid of Hell’s Angels and gypsies?

This was England. If in doubt, keep them out.

You weren’t allowed to sit on the bed.

It was the only regulation she knew, from long ago when she gave birth to Dirk. May didn’t like to break the rules, but the armchair was stuck right up by the bedhead where Alfred would get a crick in his neck from talking. She sank down on his bed with a sigh of content.

Rules and regulations. There were always rules. Their life at home was a mosaic of rules, mostly made by Alfred, but at least she knew them … Now they were on unfamiliar ground.

His body slipped very slightly askew as her weight changed the camber of the bed. He looked frail enough for a movement of the bedclothes to snuff him out, but she knew he was not. His bony strength would endure forever. Come rain, come shine he had gone to the Park and done his day’s work. Dawn till dusk. Summer and winter. Uncomplaining.

And many’s the time he should have complained, for they let him down often enough. But we didn’t complain. Not our generation.

Now Darren railed and complained for a living, writing pieces for the papers about ‘injustice’ and ‘corruption’. The real world seemed to astonish her son, which May could never understand. Of course life was unjust. Of course people were corrupt. She had known that ever since she was six and her teacher made a pet of a school governor’s daughter, although poor Elspeth was sour and plain. Of course the poor suffered and the rich flourished.

In any case, Darren was rich himself … but perhaps he wasn’t really indignant; perhaps he pretended, to make his articles more exciting. In which case it hadn’t worked, for her, for she no longer bothered to read the cuttings which arrived in bundles from all over the world. Alfred did, though. He read them, faithfully, and told Darren so in the curly-scrolled postscripts he added to her letters. His pride in their elder son was almost painful.

She gazed at his cheeks, which had sunken in as his jaw dropped with sleep, or was he getting thinner, was it happening already, the thing she dreaded? His beloved, angular, big-bridged nose on which he had perched his gold-rimmed glasses. Gently and fondly, she slipped them off, as she did at home when he dozed off in his chair. He couldn’t have meant to fall asleep, it must have sneaked up on him unawares …

All of it catches us unawares. What if he never wrote letters again, sitting in his waistcoat underneath the bright light in the living-room after tea and his nap, reading aloud the few short phrases he had written and asking her anxiously ‘Is that all right, May? Will it do?’ ‘Of course it’s all right. Put what you want to.’ Why did he need her reassurance so much? Men pretended to be strong, but really they were babies.

‘Mrs Um …’

‘Sorry?’

The nurse was freckled, pink, red-haired. ‘You might be more comfortable in this chair.’

‘I shouldn’t be sitting on the bed.’ May was mortified; told off by a teenager.

‘Oh no, it doesn’t matter, but the chairs are meant for visitors.’ The girl dragged the great heavy thing across, with a long squeal of chair-legs on polished lino.

‘Thank you.’ May felt her deep, hot blush, but the nurse skipped away with the sweetest of smiles.

How did they keep it up, with all these to look after? How did they manage to be so kind?

The armchair was a disaster, though. Its brown plastic seat didn’t yield at all, and its back was completely straight, tipping her chin forward, straining her neck. The unpadded wood hurt her elbows and wrists.

She felt a wave of longing for her normal comforts. Buttering the bread with the radio on, getting the tea-things out of the cupboard … But home wasn’t home with just her and Dirk. The boy hadn’t really talked to her for years.

All the same, she knew her youngest cared. He’d noticed last night that she wasn’t eating. ‘Mum. You haven’t touched your food.’

‘No … I suppose I’m not hungry.’

‘I’m not surprised. This tuna is disgusting. I never liked tuna. Cat food, isn’t it?’

May had been touched. He was a good boy. Alfred had always been hard on Dirk, but she saw his good side. She was his mother. Mothers were naturally soft on sons.

Whereas fathers weren’t always easy on daughters. Of course Alfred had doted on Shirley as a baby. And she was a darling, sweet-natured and biddable, with yellow curls and a smiling mouth; people always smiled back at her in the street, and then approvingly up at May, as if she’d done well, to produce such a paragon. Shirley, in her way, was a good girl still, a girl in her thirties now, of course, a thing that May could scarcely believe.

But Alfred had had no time for his daughter ever since she’d taken up with Kojo.

‘My own daughter. Taking up with a black man.’

‘She’s still your daughter,’ May had said, after Shirley for the first time brought Kojo to visit and Alfred had sat at the head of the table ignoring them, mouth compressed. He had avoided shaking Kojo’s hand, when they left, and shouted at their backs as they went down the passageway ‘You watch out for yourself, Shirley. You be careful.’ And Kojo had turned round with that gleaming smile and said, ‘It’s all right, Mr White, I’ll take care of her,’ and Alfred had been gobsmacked, speechless. Then when he got inside, ‘Cheeky black bastard! I know what he’s after. Why can’t she find herself a normal fellow?’ May was a bit upset herself, but Kojo had such lovely manners. ‘Well you can’t really say he’s not normal, can you?’ she tried, but tentatively, not wanting to annoy. ‘You bloody women,’ he’d raged at her, Alfred who hardly ever swore. ‘First performing monkey turns up in a suit, you’re practically begging him to take our daughter –’ ‘No,’ she had said. ‘But I liked his suit. I always did like men in suits.’ ‘I’ve never been good enough for you, have I …?’

He went to their wedding because May said she would never forgive him if he didn’t, and sat in a corner, he and Dirk, only talking to each other, morosely drunk. He never visited when Kojo got ill; she went alone even when Kojo was dying. Alfred only cheered up when he found out about the will, and she’d thought that then he would acknowledge at last that Kojo was responsible, a good provider, but he just said, ‘Well that explains it, doesn’t it. That’s why Shirley married him.’ And he’d softened to his daughter, briefly. And then she had taken up with Elroy, and May knew Shirley would never be forgiven.