Aphrodite's Hat (2 page)

‘And how old are you?'

‘Twenty-six,' said Clare. ‘What is this? A Spanish Inquisition?'

‘Will you marry me?' Clive asked. ‘I'm twenty-nine tomorrow, by the way.'

Clare said she thought she might but she had better sit down first.

Later, in bed, he said, ‘You know, the Hampshires' flat is right next to Mrs Radinsky's in the next block?'

‘So?'

‘So I'm a surveyor, or will be. Old Hampshire's been sucking up to me since the meeting. Tried to find out what would be involved in extending their flat laterally.'

‘Ah.'

‘I think she's pretty safe, though. Rita.'

‘Rita now, is it? I'll have to watch her, given what we are so reliably told about her!'

Clive patted Clare's bottom appreciatively. ‘She'll like you. She saw you.'

‘Saw me?'

But he had heard something. ‘Hang on. There's a hell of a noise outside.'

They got up and, together relishing their nakedness in the December cold, stared out into the wintry darkness. A figure over by the bins straightened up and looked furtively about. Clive opened the window.

‘Oh, Mrs Hampshire,' he shouted down. ‘What a lovely party. We did enjoy ourselves. But we should have helped with all those bottles, instead of leaving them to you.'

Emily had met Lionel after many years managing on her own. For those who are not temperamentally suited to solitude, living alone feels not so much a trial as a waste. Emily's first husband, a physicist, had gone to America to deliver a lecture and had never returned. Emily was a little put out when, at a later date, she met the cause of his decampment. ‘Dumpy, with red-veined cheeks', was how she described the new wife to her friend Deb. Emily herself was slight and on the whole did not forget her makeup. ‘Perhaps he likes them with a bit more flesh,' Deb had, not too tactfully, replied.

While the children were small, Emily had coped with the life of a single parent, sometimes with a touch of despair, sometimes almost breezily. But when her younger daughter, Kate, left to study drama at Bristol University, Emily found herself crying into a brushed cotton nightdress – the one with koala bears on it which Kate had rejected as unsuitable for college wear. Emily knew from this that change was called for. ‘This won't do,' she said sternly to herself and arranged with Deb to attend evening classes.

Lionel was at the class on Greek civilisation which had led, in time, to a study tour of the ancient sites of the Peloponnese. Emily had left her handbag in a restaurant, and Lionel had been gallant in retrieving it. After that, they had become a couple, of a kind. At weekends, Lionel visited Emily because her house was larger than his bachelor apartment. They walked, her arm in his, through the park and discussed Greek and other civilisations; and it was pleasant to have a body beside hers in bed at night, and a face to chat and read the papers with in the morning.

Lionel's introduction to Emily's children went better than she'd expected. ‘He's nice, Mum,' Beth had said after a dinner where Emily had burned the leg of lamb in her anxiety over her daughters' pending judgement. ‘You could do worse,' was Kate's more laconic view. The girls were glad their mother had someone to spend time with so that they needn't worry about her. So when Lionel asked Emily to marry him it seemed not a bad plan.

‘Well, if you're sure,' Emily said. She didn't want another disappointment, not at her time of life.

‘I wouldn't ask if I wasn't,' Lionel had said.

Perhaps there is some concealed trap-door which the vow to love and cherish unlatches but once they had signed their names in the local registry office, which was the last port of dreariness, the sense of companionship which had attracted Emily to Lionel began to slip away. Few people attended the ceremony – just the girls and Deb on Emily's side – Lionel had not asked anyone on his, which Emily vaguely noticed but at the time didn't trouble to ponder.

The honeymoon in Ravenna, where they admired the famous Byzantine mosaics, was only moderately passionate – but sensible people know not to expect too much of such occasions. Emily had learned her lesson with Mark. She kept her own counsel when Lionel complained about slow service in the laid-back local taverna and became irate over the matter of the lazy water pressure in their bathroom. And she did not take issue when he objected to the weather – unfortunately unseasonably inclement – though it was far from clear to her to whom his objections could usefully be addressed. But then, she thought, it is not every day, thank goodness, that one gets married and maybe it was his way of letting off steam.

It was Deb who said, ‘Where have you gone? You know, I hardly see you these days.'

‘I'm where I always was,' Emily retorted, sensing reproach. But was she? Deb's affection carried the pedigree of a tried-and-tested friendship and there was a hint of hurt in her tone which made Emily reflect. It was a long time since she and Deb had been out together. In the past, they had eaten regularly at each other's houses – or been to the pictures, or the theatre, or even taken odd weekends away. Now any meeting with Deb was mostly on the phone.

‘I'm seeing Deb on Thursday.' As she spoke she experienced an emotion too fleeting to pin down but it was relief she felt when Lionel merely said, ‘You've not seen her for a while, have you?' Deb had suggested they meet for a film but after it was over Emily hurried home and did not take up Deb's invitation to go back to hers for a drink.

That Christmas Kate said, ‘Mum, why are you wearing that old apron? You always used to dress up for Christmas dinner.'

The Christmas was not proceeding well. Kate had invited a boyfriend, Robert, from Bristol. He smoked joints in the spare bedroom and, partly to steer the smoking outdoors, Emily offered the couple the loan of her car.

‘It's my car,' Emily said protestingly when Lionel suggested that a boyfriend on drugs was ‘too irresponsible' to be trusted. ‘Anyway, cannabis is practically legal these days and it's no worse than you drinking gin and tonic.' She didn't add – too many gin and tonics! Perhaps it was politeness which made her refrain; or perhaps it was some other emotion. But whatever in the world was there to be afraid of? Lionel was ‘nice' – hadn't Beth said so?

‘Mum,' Beth said, washing up in the kitchen when Kate and Robert had gone for a spin in Emily's car. ‘You've gone all quiet. What's happened? Cat got your tongue?'

Emily said she was feeling a bit whacked.

‘You look it,' Beth said. ‘Is everything OK? You're not ill, are you?'

Emily said she wasn't; but she found herself almost looking forward to her daughters' departure. It would be welcome to have the fine veil of anxiety, which seemed to have settled on her since their arrival, lifted. After Beth and Kate, and Robert, had been driven to the station Lionel said, ‘I think we might go somewhere next year – get away from Christmas.'

‘Oh why?' she blurted, at once regretting it.

‘I hate Christmas,' Lionel said. ‘All that fuss.'

Emily felt an upsurge of alarm. She had recognised there had been nothing even faintly seasonal about his attitude to the recent festivities, but the vehemence with which he was voicing dissatisfaction was disturbing.

‘Oh, but I don't mind …'

‘But I do. You might think of someone other than yourself for a change.'

Slicing onions at the time, she nearly sliced off the top of her thumb. At least the blood – crimson, like the brilliant berries on the holly branches which Kate had brought back from their drive in the country – was a distraction. Late that afternoon, Emily made a bonfire of all the Christmas paper debris and stood by the flames as the sky turned from pale to dark pewter and stray cawing birds came home to roost for the night.

The following year Kate rang and said, ‘I hope you don't mind, Mum, but we won't be joining you for Christmas. Robert's mum has asked us …'

Emily said she didn't ‘mind'. What else could she say? ‘What about Beth?'

‘Oh, Bethie's joining us too. It'll give you and Lionel a chance to be together without us getting in the way.'

‘But, darling, you're
not
, you've never either of you been “in the way” …' Emily's heart, bunched hard, was hurting under her ribs.

‘Yes, but Lionel … you know, Mum. It's better, really …'

‘It looks as if it'll be just the two of us for Christmas. What would you like to do?' she said that evening.

‘Nothing. Christmas is best avoided.' He didn't even call it ‘humbug', a word which at least has a touch of life to it.

‘We could always go to church.'

‘Over my dead body!'

‘You don't want me to make any preparations?'

‘You please yourself. You always do.'

How has this happened? she asked herself, putting on her old coat to creep out to the park. It was as if she had been in an accident so serious she had not even noticed she was damaged until she tried to walk. Something drastic seemed to have occurred in the region of her spine. Returning home she rang Deb, but a message announced she would be away till the New Year. Once she and Deb had not gone out for an evening without informing each other of their respective movements.

I am alone, Emily said to herself, kneeling by the phone still in her coat. And I have done this to myself. The admission of responsibility made nothing better.

On Christmas morning, Emily woke before Lionel, whose body lay in the bed, well away from hers, his mouth a little open and a slight dribble of spittle visible on his chin. In the past, she might have felt tender at so naked a show of vulnerability. Now she didn't even feel disgust. Anxious not to wake him, she slid out of bed and went downstairs to the kitchen to make herself tea. Outside there was a thick rime on the lawn and she watched a coal tit peck ferociously at the bacon rind she had hung for the birds on the lilac tree. A white lilac, which she had bought when she and Lionel married. It had never bloomed.

A card – one of the few they had received that year – from Beth and Kate, of the magi, on camels, following the star, was propped on the table. I'll go to church, she thought. That at least will be some kind of celebration.

Having nothing better to do, Emily washed the kitchen floor before putting on boots and gloves for the walk to church. She thought of popping back upstairs to say where she was off to. Maybe better to leave a note which he could ignore if he chose. On the back of the envelope from Beth and Kate's card, she wrote, ‘Gone to church'. Then, after a moment's reflection, she added, ‘Join me, if you like'.

As is so often the case when one has all the time in the world, by the time Emily set out for the service she was pressed and had to hurry. The pews were already packed when she arrived. She squeezed her way past a row of unyielding knees to a seat near the back of the church and knelt and made a silent prayer: Please, let it come right in the end.

She was singing ‘O Come All You Faithful' when she saw Lionel. He had obviously arrived after her and was standing unobtrusively in one of the side aisles. Well, what a nice surprise – so prayers were sometimes answered. He had repented and come after her. They could walk home together, arm in arm, maybe through the park, and have a companionable Christmas after all.

After the service, Emily looked about for her husband but he must have slipped away. Maybe he hadn't wanted her to know he was in church. But at least he had joined her, which was a start.

Emily's heart was uncommonly buoyant as she walked back beneath the bright December sky. Never say die, she said to herself. Back home, she lit the oven for the farm chicken she had bought just in case. Looking out of the window, she saw that the tits had finished off the bacon rind and the lilac had blossomed, a delicate white, the colour of the frost. But that was strange. And when she went upstairs in search of Lionel, she found him where she had left him in bed that morning – stone cold, with the spittle on his chin quite dry.

The maroon-and-cream country bus, the only one that ran that day on account of it being the holiday season, was late and it was already dark when the young man reached the crossroads at the top of the hill. Before him, the lights of the town cascaded into the creased steel of the water below. Way out, at the farthest reach of his vision, a fishing boat was trawling the horizon, carrying with it a frail cargo of two beads of greenish light.

It was colder than he had bargained for and he missed a scarf as he walked downhill towards the sea. The road was as familiar to his feet as to his mind. Maybe more so; the body has its own memory.

He had walked there so often as a child, envisaging the world he was going to escape to, a world wide with promise, a match for his elastic imagination. ‘Charlie,' his gran used to say, ‘is made for better things than here.'

A cat slithered past his legs, a strip of skinny orange fur, and he wondered what ‘better' meant to his gran. Fast cars and manicured blondes well turned out, in nightclubs, probably. Long ago, his gran had been a dancer herself, and in marrying a fisherman had come down in the world, in her own eyes.

He had been brought up, mostly, by his gran as he didn't have a father to speak of. And his mother had had to work. Then a time came, he couldn't be quite sure when, when Ivor, a furniture remover who drove a van, appeared on the scene. He came round for Sunday lunch, which they never usually had, and his mother had smacked his leg because he had revealed it was the first time he had eaten pork roast. She married Ivor in the end and he gave his stepson his name, McGowan, and a measure of grudging security. But Charlie always knew that his real father would have been different.

At the bottom of the hill, he turned right along the promenade, which ran alongside the unmindful water. Wrought-iron lampposts shed a lofty and undiscriminating light on a man peeing. The man shuffled round, setting his back towards Charlie, making a token gesture towards an embarrassment which neither of them felt.

Charlie continued along the promenade until it began to veer back towards the town and then ducked under the railings, and waded through inhospitable pebbles towards a hut, where, in the summer, ice cream and confectionery and hot dogs were sold. He leaned his back against the shuttered little structure and lit a cigarette, waiting.

He had smoked two cigarettes and was lighting a third before a car came to a stop in the road beside the hut. The car door banged to and then the heavy crunching tread of a dark shape of a man came towards him.

For a moment, Charlie thought the man was aiming a gun at him, then he realised it was a hand. He took the hand warily and shook it.

‘Charles?'

‘Charlie. Charles if you like.'

‘Charlie then. I found you.'

‘Yes.'

‘Shall we walk, Charlie?'

They walked along the pebbled shore while the waves made audible little flirtatious sallies and withdrawals at their feet.

‘You like the sea?' The voice was deep but awkwardness made it rise unnaturally.

‘It's OK. You get tired of it, growing up beside it.'

‘I never did.' There was a tint of reproach in the voice now.

‘You live beside the sea, then?'

‘I live by it. Your mum not tell you I was a fisherman?'

‘She never told me anything about you.'

‘Can't say I blame her. She was all right, your mum. A firebrand.' It wasn't easy, Charlie thought, talking to a man you'd never met whose face you couldn't even see. ‘How did you find me then, if your mum told you nothing?'

‘My gran kept an address.'

‘Ah, she liked me, your gran. I sent you presents, birthday and Christmas.'

‘When's my birthday, then?' Charlie said, hoping to catch him out.

‘May twelfth, five fifteen in the morning, just in time to meet the morning catch.'

‘I never got any presents.'

‘I did wonder.'

Behind them, along the promenade, a car hooted and the harsh voices of some youths rang out, ‘Fuck you!' ‘Fuckin' madman! Fuck it!' ‘Fuck off!'

‘Language,' said the man walking beside Charlie. It was hard to tell whether the comment was a reproof or merely an observation.

‘Mum never let me swear.'

It wasn't true. But he felt a weird obligation to assert a spurious vigilance on his mother's part, to distance her from this discovered act of treachery. For more years than he could bear to calculate, he had longed for some token from his father. The news that this had been denied him, deliberately withheld, prompted a general defensiveness.

‘She was all right, your mum.'

Charlie detected that this was the man's mantra against some cause for bitterness and tact made him draw back for a moment before lobbing the question: ‘Why'd you leave her then?'

‘That what she told you?'

In a moment of unspoken agreement, they had stopped and were looking out over the sea. The slate surface shimmered provocatively under the beam of the lamps on the long posts and the diffused lights of the windows of the bungalows, way up on Fulborough Heights.

‘She say I left her, then?' the man asked again. There was an undertow of something in his voice Charlie recognised.

‘Didn't you?' Any notion that there could be doubt over this was fantastic. He had been raised in the sure and certain knowledge that he had an absconding father. And yet there was that pleading animal tone.

‘She chucked me out.'

‘What for?' Relief that there might be another explanation for his father's dereliction struggled with the stronger fear that he was going to be asked to accommodate worse news.

‘Didn't rate me, I guess.'

They had reached the farthest point of the beach's curve and, with the same accord with which they had stood surveying the dappled waves, the two men turned to walk back the way they had come. Charlie dug his hands in his pockets against the wind, conscious as he did so that he was adopting a pose he had absorbed from films. The gesture was a feeble understudy for the words needed to voice what he was feeling.

‘Your dad was a right bastard,' he had heard his mother declare time and again. ‘Walked out and left me with a bawling kid to cope with. Mind you,' she had added, when the black mood was on her, ‘the way you go on, you'd have driven him out even if he hadn't gone before.'

‘Your mum's mum, your gran, wanted me to stay,' the man who was his father resumed. ‘Maybe I should've. I've often wondered what was right.'

‘Yes,' Charlie said. ‘Maybe you should.' As he said it he was aware of a dreadful gratitude emanating from the presence beside him. It seemed bizarre to make someone glad to learn that they had not done what you ardently wished they had done.

‘You missed me, then?' The voice was now unquestionably wistful.

‘Yeah, I missed you,' Charlie consented. He felt sick at his own words.

‘Missed' wasn't the size of it. He had mourned his absent father, fiercely, inconsolably, endlessly, desperately. Since he could remember thinking his own thoughts, missing his father had taken the lion's share of his inner life. It was, he suddenly recognised, to seek his father that he had made his way to London, for the only way to bear the loss had been to conjure that impossibly glamorous figure, whose flight it was possible to condone on grounds of innate superiority. He could never have envisaged this hesitant man with the unsettling squeak and tremor in his voice. Sharply, fervently, he wished this newly recovered parent to the bottom of the sea.

‘And you are a fisherman?' he said aloud in response to a solicitude he had come, over the years, to resent but had never had the heart to forswear.

‘Was is the operative word. I don't do anything now. No work for us fisher folk these days, what with the EEC.'

The note of whimsy was terrible. An unemployed, down-at-heel, shabby fisherman was no substitute for an insouciant profligate high-hearted deserter. Charlie, acute to personal danger, braced himself for further unwanted revelation.

‘I live with a decent woman. Pat. She sees me right. Works up at the local pub and helps out with the B and B there. I do odd jobs for them too. We get by. What do you do?'

‘I'm an actor.' Pause. ‘Well, trying to be. But …'

‘It's hard, I know. You've got the voice.'

‘Have I?' Charlie felt a shot of excitement at this unexpected encouragement.

‘A good voice, you've got. I heard it straight away. I had a voice once. Someone put me in a film. Said I was a natural. Offered to take me to Hollywood.'

‘Really?' Suspicion of this hint of redeeming enterprise in his lost parent hovered over relief.

‘I'm not a liar,' Charlie's father said placidly. They had reached the beach hut again and he stopped and took out a packet of cigarettes. ‘Untipped, they are. Got the habit on the boats.'

‘Hard to get, aren't they now?'

‘I'm not a liar,' his father repeated, cradling the match with which he lit Charlie's cigarette with a big hand. Red lobster hands. ‘I didn't leave your mum. She didn't want me. Don't blame her. But I shouldn't have left you.'

Charlie stood, looking out at the glimmer of the receding tide, pulling on his father's cigarette. A strand of tobacco had stuck to his lip. The words he had longed to hear, had rehearsed to himself so often, in bed at night, crying himself to sleep after his mother had been having a go, ‘I shouldn't have left you', bounced away into the unpitying darkness. He felt nothing. Not even contempt. It was a poor sort of an offering from a prodigal father.

‘I'm glad you've come to see her, anyway,' he said at last.

‘I'd've come sooner if you'd asked.'

‘Yes,' Charlie said. ‘I know. I should have asked you before.' It was a kind of acknowledgement between the two of them.

‘Better late than never,' said his father. Through the darkness Charlie could just make out that he was grinning. ‘Shall we go in my car?'

‘I don't have one. I came by bus.'

Walking through the hospital corridors, which smelled of nothing normal, Charlie looked at his father for the first time. Broad shoulders, middle height, hair once dark, now mostly grey, a face which might have been handsome once but had settled into hangdog, jeans, donkey jacket, with a sprinkling of dandruff about the shoulders, visible white vest, plaid wool shirt, brown suede shoes, wrong shade for the rest of what he was wearing. A model of unexceptional ordinariness. Except that he was the father he had never had – and at the same time he was not. He was quite another father. A stranger.

‘I bought her a present,' Charlie's new father said, producing a box from his pocket. ‘Roses chocolates. Too late for Christmas, but she used to like Roses. Mind you, she liked hard centres best, Jen, but I thought in the circumstances soft centres might go down better.'

Charlie did not say that his mother was past eating anything, even soft centres. Nor did he consciously form the thought, but in the region of his mind, which as yet had formed no words, he became aware that he was in charge of these two beings, his parents. An access of violent tenderness waylaid him and he touched his father's arm. ‘She'll be glad you remembered.'

‘Think so?' The blue eyes were horribly beseeching. A hurt child's eyes. ‘Bit late for Christmas but …'

‘I'm sure so,' Charlie said, untruthfully. He was not at all sure how his mother would take this. It had been an impulse to follow up the address he had found in his gran's oak bureau when he cleared it after she died. It was written on a corner of torn-off card, which, from the faint trace of glitter, and the suggestion of a robin's breast, looked as if it had been sent one Christmas. He had guessed at once whom the card had come from.

They were approaching his mother's ward, which, in deference to her condition, was shared by only two other patients. ‘Both on their way out' as his stepfather had observed. Ivor, Charlie guessed, was counting his wife's definitely numbered days to the time he could settle down to widowerhood and a story of suffering nobly borne.

Charlie's mother's was the first bed in the ward and, as was customary now, she was behind drawn curtains, as if she was rehearsing what it would be like to have the curtains drawn for good.

‘Mum?'

‘What? Oh, it's you. You're back, then.'

‘Mum, I've brought a visitor.'

Across the face, once pretty, now bleached by years of discontent and disappointment, and further diminished by drugs and pain, flashed a sudden enlivening angry interest. ‘Who is it?'

Charlie's father stepped forward, jolting the bedside cupboard so that the jug of water on it rocked perilously. ‘It's me, Jen.'

‘Mind that jug. Who's “me”, when you're at home?'

But she knew. And Charlie knew that she knew. And in that instant he knew that he had done something remarkable. Unquestionably, unmistakably, his mother was pleased. Relief rushed in on him, warming him like a double Scotch on an empty stomach.

‘It's Jeff, Jen.'

‘My God!'

‘No, your Jeff!' For a moment, there was something that Charlie saw in his father's face. Charm.

‘I don't believe it!'

‘All right if I sit down, Jen?'

‘Sit here.' Charlie's father sat on the bed where she had gestured and Charlie saw that his mother's face had grown not pale but pink. ‘I don't believe it,' she said again. ‘How did you get here?'

‘Him.' Charlie's father nodded towards their son. ‘He found me. Wrote to me. Said you were ill and …'

‘I'm dying, you know that, don't you?'

Charlie, who had had strict instructions from his stepfather to keep this news from his mother, felt a further rush of absolving relief.

‘It's why I came, Jen.'