War Damage (11 page)

‘Roisin?'

That voice! She gripped the handset. ‘Who is this?'

‘It's been a long time …' He paused, tantalising. But she knew; she knew – of course she knew.

She leant against the wall with her eyes shut. Cato whined.

‘Aren't you going to say hello?' Oh, the soft, familiar voice with a laugh in it. She felt as if she'd been punched in the stomach; winded. ‘A bit of a shock, I suppose, sweetheart. I hope you're not thinking – I hope you don't mind, only I had to look you up, only for old times' sake, you understand. You're living up by Hampstead Heath these days, I believe. We could go for a walk. Could you manage tomorrow? How about meeting up there – by that old house that's all shut up now. Three o'clock? I'll be waiting for you.'

nine

A
S CHARLES TURNED INTO
Regent's Park Road he saw the bulky black figure ahead of him. The skewed walk, the hat, the sense of a man determined, yet somehow adrift, pushing himself along as if against a stiff wind, although the late afternoon was calm. Arthur Carnforth. Charles stopped dead, then dawdled along very slowly, desperate not to catch up with him. But what was the use? They were both going to end up at home. There was no avoiding him. So he walked fast until he caught up with the art teacher.

‘Mr Carnforth! Sir!'

‘Hallam. I'm so pleased to see you. I'm on my way to see your mother, as you've probably surmised.'

What normal human being would use the word ‘surmise'? And why – why was Carnforth hovering round his mother all the time?

‘Your mother is very keen for you to be confirmed, you know, Hallam – or Charles, if I may.'

Charles was tempted to retort ‘I'm an atheist', but thought it wiser not to get into an argument. Refuse to engage.

‘The spiritual life is so important, don't you think?'

Charles tried to think of a witty answer, but he was too angry, too appalled. Worried too; school and home were two separate spheres, to be kept apart at all costs.

‘Charles?'

‘Yes sir, absolutely.' Charles infused as much insolence into his voice as he could manage, but Carnforth seemed not to notice.

‘I do hope we can discuss this, you know. Between pals.'

Pals
! But thank God, they'd reached the house.

Every day Vivienne waited for him to come home, every day, curled up on the sofa in the dust-sheeted room, with the Home Service droning in the background. There was usually a tea tray on the floor.

The difference today was the intrusion of Carnforth's great, black bulk. He seated himself in the chair by the window.

But perhaps she'd been waiting for Carnforth too? For with a sickening qualm Charles saw that the art master, despite his ungainliness, was actually quite good-looking. Surely, though, it couldn't possibly be that she … he couldn't even think about it.

‘You look tired, darling. Sit down and have a cup of tea. Madge made a special cake for you. She's so good at that eggless sponge.'

‘I must have a wash.'

The builders had obviously gone home for the day. Charles passed through the dusty hall, picking his way between the joists where the floorboards had been taken up to get at the dry rot, ran down to the basement and washed at the kitchen sink. He wanted to get away, upstairs to his room, to not think about Carnforth, to not be in the same room as him. But to get up there, you had to climb the ladder where the whole staircase had come down.

There was no looking glass in the kitchen. He ran his hand through his hair. He'd have to go back to the drawing room for a minute, but he wasn't going to stay.

They looked at him. Vivienne wore that tragic face he hated. Even in the few minutes he'd been away, they'd been talking about him, he knew it. Even about him and Freddie, he thought with a shudder. Like ghouls or vampires. Carnforth was a vampire, and he brought the earthy smell of damp plaster and dust from some graveyard. Charles liked the thought of Carnforth hanging about under the yew trees. But how dared he be here, smiling so unctuously and making himself at home. Carnforth as vampire would have amused Freddie. He'd have given that great, filthy laugh of his.

Charles leaned against the door frame in his favourite position. A faint smile twisted his lips at the irony of it – the only person with whom he could possibly have laughed away the menace of Carnforth, talked about the murder, the funeral –
everything
– was Freddie himself. But Freddie had gone. There was only a gaping void beneath the trees, between the gravestones …

There was always Freddie's red-haired friend, Regine. He could talk to her, perhaps, she'd understand … she'd invited him round, he'd call on her next week …

‘Do sit down, darling.'

He sat beside his mother on the shrouded sofa and stared at her photograph on the chimney piece. ‘Did Freddie take that?'

‘Oh
no
, that's by Lenare. That was the year … you know what I really like about that photograph?
You're
there too. I was already expecting you, although I still wasn't quite sure.'

Charles almost choked on his tea at the curdling embarrassment. ‘I should go up and make a start on my prep. I've got loads to do.'

‘Oh, darling – you haven't drunk your tea.'

‘Honestly, Mama –' He didn't know what to call her these days – in fact ever since he'd come back from America: Mummy, Ma, Mother, Mum,
Mom,
they were all childish, and Mama was wrong too, it sounded so affected. He'd have liked to call her Vivienne, but he knew his father wouldn't have that. ‘I've so much prep. I've got Greek, Latin, Maths – everything.'

‘I'm glad to see you're taking your work so seriously,' said Carnforth. Ugh – that slimy voice of a defrocked clergyman.

‘Oh darling, do stay …'

‘No, honestly …' He escaped and was in the dusty hall again. You could see the laths where the plaster had come off the walls. The whole staircase had been rotten. The workmen's ladder wobbled as he climbed. In his room two flights up, he stared out of the window at the trees. He opened his maths prep, but he wasn't working. His mother thought she knew everything about him: ‘We're so close, aren't we', and he remembered when, much younger, he'd sat on her knee and she'd murmured, ‘I love you best in the whole wide world.' That was before they'd sent him to America – before the war itself. He'd been too young, then, to ask – even to think – better than Daddy? But he knew the answer to that question now without ever in the end having had to ask it.

Close! He had a horror of her finding out about his other life, his secret world. Every day for weeks he'd sat here and dreamed about Trevelyan, but now it was as if the boy had never existed. He could think only about Freddie and that first time and then there'd been the man in Regent's Park, it had all happened so quickly in the dusk, behind some bushes. It had felt dirty and dangerous. The stranger had sunk to his knees and at the memory of the frightening, frantic haste of his actions, Charles closed his eyes at the throbbing in his groin. But it subsided and there was just the thought of death and Freddie.

It wasn't like being sad or upset. It wasn't like Granny dying, which had been awful mostly because his mother had cried so much – Granny was seventy, after all, and he'd hardly known her. It wasn't like when Goering the cat had died. Freddie's murder was more like when
Goering
had died, and gave him the same feeling as the concentration camps: all of it, hangings, cyanide pills, Goering's broad lips, his fleshy face and … he even looked slightly like Freddie … and the heaps of broken bodies piled in heaps like firewood, you couldn't let yourself imagine things like that, you must look away, pretend you hadn't seen, blank out the gas chambers, the walking skeletons and worst of all the obscene, unspeakable tortures. But averting your face was no good. You still saw it all out of the corners of your eyes and felt as if your entrails were being gouged out. And Goering's bland, blind smile.

That Thursday before Freddie died: they'd walked along the road together … the last time he'd talked to Freddie – the Sunday at Mrs Milner's didn't count with all those other people there. Why don't you walk up the road with me, dear boy?

Freddie had marched along at a terrific pace; looked sideways at him and lightly touched his arm for a moment. ‘How's life?'

‘The work's all much harder this year.'

‘No time for any fun, eh.' Freddie had grinned in a way that had thrilled and repelled. ‘It's an open invitation. I'll take you down the East End, meet the sailors. You'd like that, wouldn't you.'

Excitement had clogged Charles's throat. ‘You're always trying to lead me astray, Freddie.'

‘Well, someone has to do it. Your father isn't going to oblige.'

‘It's not his fault.' Obscene of Freddie to join his father and that other utterly secret part of his life all in the same sentence.

‘Well – fathers used to take their sons to brothels … on the continent anyway.'

No going down the East End now. Freddie had had the key to so many worlds Charles was desperate to know about and now Freddie was dead Charles was terrified he'd never find that key.

‘You're such a man of the world,' Charles had mocked, but he'd also believed it.

‘Don't mock, dear boy. You know you need me.' Freddie had looked around as they turned the corner towards Parkway. ‘Maybe your mother was right to install you in this part of the world – all these tumbledown mansions turned into rooming houses stuffed with Irish navvies. Oh – it gives me a frisson just to think of it.' A bellow of laughter.

Then, as they'd walked on towards the tube station: ‘You know, you should look in on Regine. A Sunday tea party's boring for someone your age, but if you're serious about being a writer – you might meet one or two people who could help you later on, if you play your cards right. Regine's little salon isn't completely devoid of talent. And Regine herself has knocked about a bit. She was in Shanghai before the war, had a bit of a reputation. That's where I met her.' Freddie had stopped to light a cigarette. ‘Want one?' Charles took it and Freddie bent towards him to light it, touching the boy's hand. ‘You know – it took more than one man to change my name to Shanghai Lily.' He'd roared with laughter. ‘Marlene Dietrich in
Shanghai Express
. They don't make films like that any more. Mind you, Regine's not
quite
in the Dietrich league, but she's very good-hearted.' They'd reached the knot of streets by the station. ‘And now – I must love you and leave you, my dear. But I'll see you on Sunday.
Promise
you'll come.'

Charles had no idea how long it was before his mother called him down for dinner. They were eating in the kitchen at the moment, the only room with a floor. Furniture from other rooms had been relocated, so that you could hardly move without knocking into cupboards, stumbling against chairs, dislodging books, saucepans, toothpaste.

Charles couldn't bear the claustrophobia of their evening meals. Had it always been like this? Surely when he first got back from New York it hadn't been that bad?

‘How are things at the hospital, dear?'

‘Exactly what one would expect.' John Hallam examined the forkful of shepherd's pie he had scooped up. ‘This tastes odd, Vivienne.'

‘Madge added lentils to bulk it up a bit. You said pulses were good for us.'

Her husband masticated. His thin, bony face, always gloomy, seemed to lengthen further as he endured the food his wife had provided.

‘Mr Tolliday said the health reforms are the most important for a hundred years.' Charles sort of knew this would annoy his father, but his form master's remark had genuinely surprised him. At home, few good words were spoken about the revolutionary new National Health Service.

‘Did he! He, of course, doesn't have to work within the system. He's not been badgered and bullied by a foul-mouthed Welshman.'

‘Mr Tolliday said Aneurin Bevan is the ablest man in the government.'

Vivienne caught her son's eye and her expression, half smile, half frown, was a plea not to provoke her husband and at the same time was meant to show she was really on Charles's side. ‘It's bound to be difficult, darling, to begin with, and with so many shortages. But surely things will get better soon – I mean things are improving in any case.'

‘You think so.'

Charles stood up to clear the table. ‘Darling, I'll do that,' cried his mother, as if appalled at the thought of a man undertaking domestic work of any kind. But Charles gathered up the dirty plates and placed them in the sink. ‘Don't leave them in the sink, darling.'

‘There's no room anywhere else.'

‘How long is this going to go on?' John Hallam spoke as if it were all Vivienne's fault. ‘I really am going to have to speak to Lugg. The workmen seem to come and go as they please.' Lugg was the building contractor. ‘Can't you be firmer with him?'

‘I do try, but he always says there are shortages.'

‘For God's sake! He's just off on another job.'

‘So many government regulations. The pudding's in the fridge, Charles. Would you get it, now you're up, please?'

The fridge was old and huge with a wooden door. He took out the chocolate blancmange and found the right bowls. It was Madge's evening off. Charles liked Madge. She was only two or three years older than he was, and had taught him how to make Welsh rarebit and the right way to cook sausages. She'd have taught him other things as well, but his indifference to women blinded him to her melting glances and flirty smiles. Fortunately for Madge, Vivienne hadn't noticed either.