Thicker Than Soup (25 page)

*

As he left, he glanced round the flat. He'd bring flowers back, lilies probably. He'd changed the sheets and put fresh towels in the bathroom. A new chapter was beginning.

Winding the car window down he let air blow its freshness into the car to dispel the trace of the White Linen perfume he'd bought Lisa the previous Christmas. Along the verges dandelions and daisies smiled their good morning and from the speakers of his car, Katrina and the Waves sang;
I'm walking on sunshine…

*

It might have been his new found freedom, or the aftermath of Sandy's company, but when he woke to a work-free Monday-morning-sun rising in a cloudless sky, he had a crazy idea. The day ahead of him was as free as he chose to make it, and he wanted to drive to Cambridgeshire to see what kind of a place he'd been born in. Before sense challenged, he gathered jacket, wallet, keys, and sunglasses, and let the front door clunk decisively behind him. It would be a day out. He wasn't knocking on any doors. It was just a day out, in the sunshine, in his nice new car.

He'd been driving for more than four hours when he saw a Little Chef. A road sign had told him he was somewhere called Guyhirn, which he assumed to be a village though with little more than an indeterminately long road dotted with indifferent industrial buildings, squat dwellings and cultivated fields, he couldn't be sure. Somerset villages had churches, cottages and meandering lanes. Even main road villages had some charm. This one, though, did have a Little Chef! He ordered bacon and beans from a big bellied man who gave him directions to Leverington in an accent that, with its ‘err's and ‘oi's, sounded oddly like home.

A few trees and buildings interrupted the flat, black, freshly tilled fields that stretched to the horizon. Even the sky was endless. Poplar trees and distant church spires seemed to spike the heavens and he wondered if it was the vast prostration of the Fens that produced such clarity of distance. Driving slowly down the middle of the narrow road he avoided the fractured edges and pot holes and passed symmetrical redbrick semis squatting in symmetrical plots. In the village, newer houses, bungalows mostly, and more of the cube-like semis squatted together. This was Leverington. Place of his birth. He saw he was already on Church Road and slowed, looking at house numbers. Thirty-two, thirty. He stopped. Twenty-eight. The house sat sideways to the road so that a pebble dashed façade with plastic framed windows offered a blank face to the road. He pulled forwards a few more yards and saw the front of the house. A UPVC door was half obscured by a re-sprayed Ford Cortina. Behind the car, an open, wooden garage, more a large shed, sheltered planks of wood and a residue of building materials. John wondered if the rusty swing in the garden had ever been his, or if his birth father had ever put a police car in that very garage. He opened his car window, lit a cigarette and mused. This was where he'd lived for his first year and some of his second, and its proximity confirmed that, for most of his life, he'd been lying to himself. It did matter. Blood was thicker than water. And history was repeating itself; Sammy was growing up without his real father too.

He finished his cigarette and threw the butt to the ground. He'd seen the house, and that was enough. He wasn't ready for whatever might be behind the door. He started the engine just as a tall stocky man of about his own age stepped from the front door and looked at him suspiciously.

“You looking for something?”

“No. No, not really thanks.” John hurried to reassure him. “I used to live here. A long time ago. I was in the neighbourhood and thought I'd take a look. For old time's sake.”

“Yeah? When was that?”

“Oh, long time ago. I was a baby. Your place now?”

“Yeah mate. Been here six years. Been doing it up.”

“Looks good.” In the circumstances, the lie was acceptable. “You local?” The man nodded. “Don't suppose you ever heard of a Jack Crowson? He used to live here.” The words had formed and sounded without thought, and with a bolt of fear it occurred to him that this man might be his brother.

“Crowson? No, mate. Hang on though, my Dad's inside. Knows everyone, he does.” John did a quick calculation; the father would be around the same age as Jack Crowson. In this community it was feasible they would know each other. He wasn't ready to face a father. Not yet. He needed time to think, to prepare. He considered driving away, there and then, but the Seagrams logo on the side of his car was as good as a calling card.

The man reappeared. “Dad says he knew a policeman once, called Jack Crowson, but he's been dead more than twenty years. Cancer, he thinks. His wife's living in Wisbech, with the son. They've got the greengrocer's on the High Street.” The man was pleased with himself. “They relatives of yours?”

Never for one moment had John thought that his father might not be alive. He'd been something of an apparition, but he'd always been alive. His legs weakened. A dead father. A living mother. And a brother. He was stunned.

“You all right mate?”

“Yes. I'm fine. Sorry – Jack was – a good friend of my father's. Thanks though. It's good to know his wife is still alive though. I might look her up. Thanks.” The man was inviting John into his home for a ‘cuppa'' but he wanted to go. “Thanks, but I've a long way to go, and I was just passing. Thanks for the information though. It's good to know….”

*

It was almost dark when he arrived home. The engine had drummed ‘Jack Crowson is dead, Jack Crowson is dead' and he was pleased to shut it off. There was no grief. Just frustration and futile anger. From within a cocoon of indifference he'd never questioned his father's mortality. Now he felt cheated, let down. Again, Jack Crowson hadn't been there for him. He vowed to find a way to make sure that history didn't continue to repeat itself; somehow he'd find a way to communicate with Sammy. And he'd quit smoking.

That evening, for the first time since moving into his new flat, he was lonely. Even his thoughts seemed to echo. He put the kettle on, then switched it off and reached for the whisky. The familiarity of whisky called for a cigarette but he refused himself the pleasure and thought instead, about Leverington.

He hadn't much liked the Fens; though finding the house of his birth had been gratifying. Jack Crowson – he couldn't think of him in any other terms – had taken his secrets to the grave, but the woman he'd despised since childhood was still alive. Jack and Gill. He sniggered. They were certainly over the hill! One dead and the other… Gillian Crowson had no right to the honour of ‘mother'. She'd rejected him, tossed him away. Frances had been all a mother should be, and more, at times, than he'd deserved. He recalled when at fourteen, she'd found him smoking in the garden and in the ensuing row he'd chosen words to wound. “You're not my mother,” he'd shouted, “You've no right to tell me what to do.” Michael had told him he was lucky to have her for a mother and he'd been right. But it hadn't stopped him hurling the same hurtful accusations again. Later, in therapy, the psychiatrist had plucked all sorts of truths from him, like the year he'd refused to give her a Mother's Day card and had told her why. He cringed now, at the cruelty. The psychiatrist had said that all children got angry and rejected their parents sometimes, but he'd known, with such accusations based on truth, that he'd hurt deliberately. The child in him could be excused childish behaviour but the man wondered if it wasn't too late to say he was sorry.

He wanted another whisky but the bottle was in the kitchen. Closing his eyes, he found Sammy, bright and without him in Sally's family photograph. There'd been a painting in which Branwell Bronte, unhappy with his own image in the family group, had tried to paint himself out. But the ghostly image remained. In the family picture behind his eyes, it was he, John, who was a ghost.

He turned on the TV just as a Government health warning advert he'd seen before started; it was compulsive viewing. Volcanic rocks crashed and demonic bells tolled as an ominous looking shadow chiselled the word AIDS into a tombstone. John Hurt's sinister voiceover warned of the deadly disease that had no cure. It was grim stuff, but quickly forgotten as he returned to Wendy Craig's TV family complaining as she dished up something inedible in ‘Butterflies' on BBC 2.

*

In the days that followed, thoughts of Sammy increasingly wormed their way into work activities. In quieter moments he wrote imaginary passages that might form a diary, a sort of episodic letter he might give Sammy one day, and in pre-dawn half-light he visualised meetings where he and Sammy would fill in the gaps of their lives and the bond between father and son would be strong. He wondered if Sammy had any artistic talent and imagined him finding fame that had eluded his father. In imaginary letters to Sally, he sometimes asked to be acknowledged, in others, demanded a meeting with his son. But as days followed nights, John faced reality. Sammy lived with his Pakistani family, too far away for a relationship, and too complicated for the boy to understand. John wasn't a part of that family. All he could hope for was that Sally would, one day, tell Sammy about him, and that he would want to find his father too.

*

Frances pushed the ledgers towards him. “Well, that's that all present and correct. All's going well.” She handed over her pen.

“Thanks Mum.” He signed the sheets. “I'm seeing Alain on Monday, he'll be happy with this.” He dropped the pen into his shirt pocket where it nudged the photographs of Sammy and the print of himself. “Dad playing golf?”

“He is. He'll be back around teatime.” Frances held out her hand for the pen and receiving it, added her signature to John's, then turned the page and began to head up new columns. “Did you want him?”

“No, no, it's ok. I just wondered.” He could feel the photographs against his chest. “Mum. Can I ask you something?”

She didn't need a crystal ball to know a significant question. “Go ahead.”

“I, I well. Er…” It was ridiculous; he felt like a small boy. “I don't quite know what to do.” He told himself to get on with it. “You see, I've been thinking. About Sammy.” He could see cautious expectation on his mother's face. “And … about his father.” It wasn't easy; he didn't want to hurt her, but this was important to him. “And that he might think about his real father. One day. You know; he'll want to know. I expect.” His mother's eyes seemed to bore into him.

“You want to know about your birth parents.”

It was disconcerting how she managed to get into his thoughts. He saw her chew the inside of her bottom lip; a habit that always manifested itself when she was upset or worried. He swallowed. He couldn't tell her about Leverington. And he didn't want to talk to her about the woman who'd abandoned him at the most innocent and vulnerable time of his life. He just wanted to talk to her about Sammy. “No. Well, not directly. I sometimes wonder about them; of course I do. It makes me realise that Sammy will wonder. About his father. One day.”

Frances continued as if John had agreed. “We expected you to want to know years ago, but you always said you didn't want to know. The truth is, John, we don't know much. We gave you what we had, your birth certificate and the adoption certificate a long time ago.” She chewed her bottom lip again. “We have some papers but I'd rather talk about this when your father's here.”

“Mum, it doesn't matter.” He didn't need the papers. He already knew more than papers would tell him. “It really doesn't matter.” He pulled the two photos from his pocket. “Look. Look at Sammy and look at me.”

To his surprise, she hardly glanced at the pictures. “I know, John. We saw a picture that Diane had, a few years ago, when Sally married her Pakistani man. We knew then. But after what had happened, and after Janine and Amanda, well…. we didn't think you wanted to know.”

Amanda? Janine? He looked at his mother in surprise. “What's Amanda got to do with it?”

“Well, she's your child too.”

He'd never seen Amanda, and the end of maintenance payments a few years earlier had, he felt, closed the link. Amanda had been Janine's child. The idea that she might one day contact him came as a surprise. She was as unreal as Sammy was real.

“No she…, well she's Janine's. Always has been. It's not like Sammy.”

“Well, what next? Do you think that Sally will tell Sammy about you?”

Again Frances read his thoughts as if he'd spelled them out to her. Picking up a biscuit he studied it. “No. I'm not sure,” he admitted, “though I hope she does.” It was enough truth. The biscuit disappeared into his mouth and he kept Leverington to himself.

*

Conversion of the Cider Barn ran over by two weeks – due mostly to an underground river that flooded the newly excavated cellar. But now drained and dried and with the river re-routed, Julia's English wines sat alongside more traditional French and New World wines, and above it, at floor level, a state of the art bar was ready to be stocked. Artwork had transformed the white, barren walls and embraced the previously vacuous space. The architect had been right to intensify the space with white and light, though before the pictures were in place John feared it had been overdone. With the art in place, the room had style. Seagrams style. The newly arrived Rothkoesque commission was waiting to be hung where, separated from the gallery by structural oak supports, it would be solitary but dominant.

Alain didn't understand art. He'd suggested that John could save the money by painting a panel himself, and the memory brought forth a hollow laugh. He wished he had the talent to express emotions in the way that Rothko had or Roly could. The portraits he sketched were good; they could be read, but abstracts were different. And Rothko's murals, a singular, interdependent work, repelled, whilst Roly's panels, individual and self determining, buzzed with energy. They had expression. He, John, couldn't do what they'd done.