You Don't Have to be Good (2 page)

‘Would you rather be—’

‘Yes, yes, I heard what you said.’

Adrian rubbed his bottom this way and that across the ribs of the radiator in a way that Frank found faintly offensive. The boy didn’t swear, had a brain the size of a planet and liked girls. He was an anomaly, and exceedingly irritating. He was at an age when the unconscious child in him had yet to be put to death by the scimitar of sex and surliness. That wasn’t a bad phrase. He ought to write it down, but Adrian was still sweeping up and down the radiator and was now doing a boggle-eyed, slow, head-rolling-back-on-his neck movement that suggested he was entering the nethermost reaches of boredom.

Frank tried to apply himself to the question. As it happened, he felt far from brilliant and looked appalling. Perhaps it was the strangeness of the night before. Now he came to think about it, he felt shredded and unaccountably close to tears.

He raised himself from the chair, paused until his lower back spasm eased, and made his way carefully to the fireplace, managing to become more or less upright by the time he got there. A bust of Chekhov frowned back at him from the mantelpiece. A string of red beads dangled from its neck. Wanda’s no doubt. She was pushing it, leaving things like that around the place. He sighed, lifted them off and dropped them in the waste-paper bin.
Wanda.
Even the thought of her failed him these days. There had been a time in the last year when the knowledge of what he had with Wanda made all the difference, when just the image of her name in his head, the feel of her name in his mouth,
Van-da
, would be enough to set his blood racing. But lately, the ‘what’ had been bothering him. What was it that they had exactly? The answer, knocking quietly and persistently at a small door down some long corridor in his mind, was becoming difficult to ignore.

Adrian started up an urgent fingernail tapping on the radiator. ‘Fra-a-nk.’

‘I’m thinking!’ Frank said.

A gold bullet of lipstick and a tube of mascara lay in the ashtray beside Chekhov. He really must speak to her about her encroachments. He had, after all, made it completely clear that the relationship could never edge towards the domestic, although as Wanda was in fact their cleaner, boundaries were possibly not as clear as they should be.

Adrian came and hovered alongside him, opened the lipstick and sniffed it, then repeated the question in a loud whisper. ‘It’s not a riddle,’ he added and began rocking from one leg to the other, knocking Frank’s arm in an arrhythmic beat. He drew a crimson smear across his lower lip and pouted at his uncle.

‘For God’s sake, Adrian.’ Frank gave the boy a shove so that the lipstick dropped from his fingers and fell to the floor.

Frank leaned forward to study himself in the mirror. There was something tired and diminished about him today, he thought as he scanned his face, taking care not to look himself in the eye. He turned his head a little and examined his profile. His nose was good, sculpted and rather fine, and he had what some had called a sensual mouth. Wanda told him that the crest of greying copper curls above his ears made him look distinguished as long as she kept it trimmed and neat. He leaned closer to the mirror. His eyebrows could do with a trim, and the tops of his ears too. It was strange what was happening to his hair. Having retreated from his head, it seemed to sprout and flourish in places it had never done before. Thank God for Wanda’s nail scissors and tweezers.

Adrian was back by his side and making kissing noises in the mirror.

‘You see, if you look stupider than you are—’

Frank held out a finger to shush the boy. He needed to collect his wits for this one. He laid his hand on Chekhov’s head and thought about it. Chekhov had an impressive mane of hair and a sublime, extraordinary face. No doubt about it, Chekhov looked like a genius, and when last winter Frank had studied the late manuscripts, seen the beauty and the power scratched on the page, seen with his own eyes the man’s conflict about which direction the piece should take, he had felt he was in the presence of divinity. He ran his thumb across Chekhov’s lips. The fact was that Chekhov’s face, though magnificently clever-looking, probably appeared stupider than he was. He nodded and turned round.

‘I would rather be stupider than I look.’

In the pause that followed, Frank had the sense that he had fallen short of the mark and was a disappointment. Adrian wandered over to the window and drew a face in the dirt. When the phone rang, they both leapt for the table but Adrian reached it first. Frank glared at him.

‘Bea!’ said Adrian, hugging the handset to his ear. He placed one hand over the mouthpiece and said, ‘It’s your wife.’

Frank snapped his fingers for the phone but Adrian flapped him away. He listened carefully to his aunt and said, ‘Oh,’ ‘Er,’ and ‘What?’

‘What does she want, Adrian?’ said Frank, getting slowly down on his hands and knees and looking under the couch for Wanda’s lipstick.

Adrian said, ‘She’s in the river at Grantchester and can’t get out.’

A vision from the night before surfaced in Frank’s mind. He sat back on his heels and sneezed. ‘Grantchester? What on earth is she doing all the way down there?’ There was plenty of river at the bottom of their road. Grantchester was two miles away.

‘She says she was attacked by cows.’ Adrian listened carefully to Bea, then added, ‘Well, not attacked exactly. Menaced.’

‘Menaced?’ Frank stood up painfully. ‘Give me the phone, please.’ Adrian slipped easily out of reach so that Frank had to follow him round the room with his hand out like a child trying to get his toy back. ‘Stop messing about.’

‘A whole herd?’ said Adrian. ‘They can be quite dangerous if they have calves with them. Did they have calves with them, Bea?’

Frank cornered him by the coffee table but Adrian jumped over it, then trampled along the duvet on the couch. At the bookcase in the alcove Frank nearly had him but Adrian put his hand up to warn him to stop. This was no time for silly games.

‘Bullocks,’ said Adrian. ‘Bullocks
and
cows maybe. They turned nasty so she had to escape into the river. Which is where she is now. They won’t let her get out.’

‘And what does she want me to do about it?’

‘Frank says, “And what do you want me to do about it?”’ Adrian listened some more and said nothing.

‘Well?’ said Frank.

Adrian walked calmly to Frank’s desk and sat down. He set himself off on slow revolutions on Frank’s chair, using the table leg to maintain momentum.

Frank saw that he had the phone in his lap. ‘Adrian, what in God’s name is going on?’

Adrian stuck his foot out and brought his orbits to an end. ‘I’m just waiting for her to reach the shallow bit.’

Frank closed his eyes and tried to gather his thoughts. Something he didn’t understand was happening to his wife.

Faintly, Bea’s voice called Adrian’s name.

Frank shook his head, put his fingertips into his trouser pockets and adopted what he assumed was an expression of piercing insight but which reminded Adrian of the bewildered and worn-out old bull in a
toreo
he’d once seen on the television in Spain.

‘Bea, Frank wants to know what on earth you’re doing all the way over in Grantchester and also, what’s for supper?’

His eyes roved the room as he followed the originality of her logic. He relayed the information back to Frank. ‘It was beautiful . . . it was warm . . . soon summer will be gone . . . spaghetti.’

‘And kindly ask whether I am to bring you, your sister and her friends to Grantchester too,’ said Frank, hands on hips, vexation, indignation, consternation and many other kinds of ‘ation’ making him feel suddenly alive and upright for the first time that day.

‘We’re all coming to get you,’ Adrian told Bea. ‘Oh, and Bea?’ he added. ‘Would you rather be stupider than you look, or look stupider than you are?’

Adrian listened, then handed Frank the phone. He headed for the door.

‘Bea would rather look stupider than she is,’ he said. ‘And her battery’s going.’

W
AIST-DEEP IN
river water and fully clothed, Bea held her phone clear with one hand and clutched at reeds with the other. Her left foot succumbed further to the river bed’s muddy embrace while the current coiled around her other leg like rope. She lurched towards a thicker clump of bulrushes near the bank and felt her long skirt float out behind her. She thought she could hear a weir somewhere, roaring out of sight, round the bend.

All at once the situation seemed serious and sad, as if she were hearing the story from someone else: Woman Found in River. Things could change and slip out of control so fast. She shouldn’t have sounded calm and cheery on the phone to Adrian. ‘You’re so calm,’ people always said to her. But she didn’t feel calm very much of the time. A bit stunned perhaps, but not calm. She managed to take another step forward and the river’s drag on her legs lessened.

Those bastard cows were still looking at her. A gang of five or six crowded at the bank by the wooden footbridge, their heavy-skulled heads blowing and puffing. One or two had got as far as placing hooves into the steep, broken sides of the water’s edge. Cows Drown Woman. What bovine slight or trespass could she possibly be guilty of? She looked at the swirling brown eddies of water and realised she might have to swim upstream in order to get out. Perhaps if she headed for the middle, the current would be weaker. She had seen people swimming here, she was sure of it. To her right, a mass of bright reeds flowed past like green snakes.

‘Are you all right?’

On the bank behind the press of cows, a young woman ran slowly on the spot. Tiny black pumas leapt up the tongues of her shoes.

‘I’m fine,’ said Bea with her hapless, sexy smile. She was thinking she needed a new word. ‘Fine’ didn’t quite do it these days.

The woman on the bank had the artless, honest face of the very physically fit.
Nike
was emblazoned on her chest. Her body seemed impatient to get on with the running but her head remained turned towards the odd sight of this handsome blonde woman, fully clothed and up to her breasts in the river. ‘You sure?’

No. She wasn’t quite herself; had the sense that she had become tiny and remote, vanishing down the wrong end of a telescope, and that the last few years had been a long dry spell, a lonely crawl through desert and scrub, and that she was tired and desperately thirsty and in truth she did not know how she had ended up in the river except that she felt something bad was about to happen and tried to create her own ending rather than have one happen to her. A new and powerful current tugged at her lower legs. She hoped Nike saw the scene for what it was: a woman getting out of her depth.

‘I’m afraid of the cows.’

‘They won’t hurt you. They’re just curious.’

‘Well actually,’ Bea pushed the mobile phone down into her cleavage and braced herself against the current, ‘actually they kill five people a year. Women mainly. Women walking dogs.’ Sludge oozed up between her toes and something nibbled her knee. The main cow chewed at her insolently. This cow was definitely giving her evils, as Laura would say. A long tongue, like a tentacle, swiped drool from its aqueous nose. Nike flapped her arms at them.

‘Shoo!’ she shouted, then delivered a volley of curses.

‘Watch out for that big buttery-looking one,’ warned Bea. ‘It encouraged the others.’

‘Get out of it!’

The cows looked sheepish. They blew down their noses and shuffled off, bumping their bony angles and heavy sides against each other, cleft hooves trip-trapping across the bridge. They fell into single file and ambled along the path that led towards the far meadow.

Bea pushed forward towards the bank, where the water was warm, and here, at the shallow margins, the sludge between her toes was rather pleasant in a forbidden, ‘Don’t do that, Bea, it’s not nice’ kind of a way. She beamed up at Nike, who offered her hand and helped her up through the hoof-pocked mud. Tussocky grass spiked at her ankles and feet.

‘Wave your arms around and swear your head off. My dad told me that.’

Bea glanced down at the swags and pleats of her mud-slicked skirt. She looked odd, she knew, alien and primordial.
Then the fish clambered out of the swamps and the world was changed for ever
. Her father’s voice, as they searched for fossils among the rocks and chalk of Hastings beach, her hand in his. She flicked a creature off her calf, remembered Patrick’s hot, angry grip on her wrist on this very bank two months ago, his voice clear in her ear:
I’ve never forgotten you and I never will.

‘I’ll walk back with you if you like,’ offered Nike, beginning to jog on the spot again. ‘Which way are you going?’

‘Really, I’m fine. Thank you for your help.’

Bea wished her gone now, unsure how to handle the kindness. She looked towards the line of willows at the turn of the river. The cows grazed peacefully. Seed heads and butterflies spun and danced in the soft light.

‘Sure?’

‘Yes, honestly,’ she said, thinking how rare it was to have an adult to help. She had Wanda of course, although she couldn’t really afford her and didn’t truly need her, the house was so small. But without Wanda, cheerful curator of objects and clutter, converter of creases to flawless expanse, she sometimes thought it would be hard to come home after work. Wanda was all Flash and muscle, she was Pledge and sparkle, and if it weren’t for Wanda, Bea suspected that the jumble and chaos of life in Oyster Row would rise up and close over her head. Her phone fell from her cleavage as she wiped at the mud on her shins. ‘I phoned my husband just before you came.’

Nike nodded. She looked up the path and shook her arms and wrists.

Yes, thought Bea, as she flicked away some dark, wriggling things that were inching across her chest. Husband. Oh, yes. She tried the word on for size. Hus-band. For better, for worse. My husband. ‘My husband is on his way.’ She froofed her curls into shape and thought of the other husband, the one that wasn’t hers but someone else’s, the one she had given the best ten years of her life to, the husband called Patrick not Frank. They’d said goodbye, goodbye again, finally, one last time, two months ago in buttercups and clover, not far from this very spot.