Exposure (30 page)

Alistair suspected he ought to have a nervous breakdown, that, morally speaking, it was the only adequate reaction. But in his heart, he knew he was perfectly sane. Helplessly, he grinned at the perfect blue sky and said, 'What a beautiful day.'

Luke squinted through the windscreen. 'Mmm. Might turn viciously hot, though.'

They drove the rest of the way listening to the radio. There was Chopin playing and Alistair found it restful to be driven by his son and to stare out of the window like a dreamy child. In this way he ate and drank, too —accepting his lunch from Rosalind with boyish gratitude and a little smile that also communicated his emotional negligence, his inability to confront what he had done to their adult relationship.

As Luke and Alistair got near to Dover they found themselves driving behind foreign number-plates and left-hand-drive cars. Billboards advertised McDonald's hamburgers and milkshakes in French and English. Bottles of Lisco lemon-and-lime crush could be purchased for just € 1 or 75p a litre. Because it was August, plenty of holidaymakers were heading off in their cars for the ferry terminal; many contained a whole family and a great crush of suitcases and sunhats and beach-balls. There were bored children asleep in the back with vast bags of crisps in their arms, and story-tapes in fatuous adult voices—a universal sing-song—could be heard playing through the open windows as the cars slowed for the roundabout. All around were the signs not only of travel but also of import and export. There were lorries behind and in front of them, with exuberant slogans in Dutch and French and Spanish across their vast tarpaulins.

The sea and the cliffs came into focus as they reached the roundabout, and beyond the sunny haze, somewhere on the horizon, was Europe.

'You forget you're on a litde island, don't you?' Luke said. 'You really feel it here, though. This is like the edge of England. The last outpost.'

'Yes, I know what you mean. Yes,' Alistair said—always surprised if his son made an observation of any subtlety.

Luke noticed that some kind of demonstration was going on near the ferry terminal. It was just possible to make out a crowd and several placards. The two vast lorries ahead roared off towards the docks and Luke turned the car in the direction of the town centre.

They drove up York Street, towards the town hall. In spite of the threatening start, it had become a pleasantly warm afternoon. The scene in the town centre looked sunny and ordinary: young mothers pushed prams; adolescent boys walked around in scowling gangs; two old ladies clutched each other's arms at the zebra crossing; an enormous man in a vest put his hand up and simulated a jog across the road in front of their car, his belly jerking over his belt.

It struck both of them that people were noticeably fatter here, more garishly coloured than they were in London. Neon orange, lime green, scalding pink T-shirts strained across vast bra-less breasts and rolls of flab. Alistair watched female hands covered with cheap rings, male hands covered with tattoos, flash in the side window as the car moved along the road. They held beer cans and choc ices and cigarettes. Every face appeared to be chewing or swallowing something contained in bright packaging.

Cheap food depressed Alistair. He stared out at what struck him as conspicuous poverty. This sugary, colourful plenitude actually signified deprivation—of the capacity to discern what was good or bad for the body in the strobe flash of media images. Wealth, on the other hand, would always be a seamless absence, an opting-out of the mass market: pure as mineral water, discreet as a navy blue cashmere coat.

Thirty years ago, the crowd's noise and colour had come from pub sing-alongs and 'New! Luxury!' goods aspirations, but time and TV had effected this gaudy change. His head shook slightly as he remembered the spiritual awe with which his mother had longed for an American ice-box. Back then, it had all made him so angry and desperate. He had felt stifled by the material limits of their desires.

But they looked so joyous—and they always had. Dover had always contained this abundant human energy. How much happier these fat young mothers looked than the starved joggers in Holland Park. They were smiling and laughing in the busy street just as they had smiled and laughed when he was last here. He saw how patronizing he was being, but his relationship with the place he grew up in had always contained this uncomfortable quality. How could it not when he had been condemned to estrangement by his unexpected brain?

Had he been handed to the wrong mother? He remembered the elaborate fantasies he had constructed along these lines: the wealthy professor who came to the door, arms outstretched, calling him 'son'.

But his mother had been his mother, all right—he had her nose and her hands and her feet. These were not to be argued with.

Eventually he had come both to love and hate being the superior outsider. It had been lonely having only his ambitions for company, never being able to share enthusiasm for a book—except with one or two teachers at school, which always exposed him to bullying. And as he got older his awkwardness increased. It became harder and harder to join in with his old friends, with his mother and Geoff and Ivy drinking shandy in the garden. Without understanding why, the lonelier he felt, the more he had made terrible scenes about needing to study without interruption. He had slammed his books on the table and said no one understood how hard it was to win a scholarship to Oxford—but he was bloody well going to, though. His mother told him not to use that foul language in this house—and he shouted and stormed at her about how little she understood or cared about his brilliance, his plans.

At last everyone took him at his word and tiptoed past his door in silence. He nearly died of peace.

Alistair shook his head and smiled. What a lot of his life had passed sitting alone at a desk, listening to distant sounds of celebration!

He looked out at the sunlit pavement, at the shopping-bags and hairdos and thought: Perhaps it matters very little what your aspirations are so long as they are occasionally fulfilled. An American ice-box, the latest pair of trainers, a five-bedroom house in Holland Park. Perhaps there was only the most arbitrary of differences. Perhaps success was all a question of accrued sensation rather than meaning, after all.

If this was true, then what a very long way he had come to realize it. Or what a short way, he thought, as they turned on to Maison Dieu Road.

'Well, here we are, Dad,' Luke said.

'Goodness, yes. You got us here quickly. The surveyor isn't coming until a quarter to two. Shall we get some lunch first?'

'Fine by me. Where should we go? You're the expert.'

'Yes, I suppose so—although my information may be a little out of date. We could go to the White Horse—just up here and on the left. There's a little car park, I think. There used to be a little car park, anyway.'

They pulled up outside the pub, which was by a ruined church, on the corner of three roads. One led up to the castle and the cliffs; another stretched down to the sea and the third towards the town centre. Alistair sighed. 'My God, I haven't been here for ...' but he tightened his lips rather than supplying a number, which would have been meaningless to his son anyway. It would have been meaningless to
him,
really. He levered his bad leg out of the car and stared along the road, his head still shaking gently.

Luke had begun to observe that his father would be an old man one day. He had never seen Alistair injured before and the limp and the walking-stick were like a foretaste of old age. It was frightening and oddly exciting at once to contemplate this.

'So, do you remember it all, Dad?' he said, genuinely curious. 'After all these years?'

His father had a distant smile on his face. 'Oh, perfectly.' Alistair took his walking-stick out of the car and shut the door. 'Come on, they used to do good grub in here.'

The White Horse had been bought in the late nineties by a childless Australian couple who had needed a pet project. The husband worked behind the bar with his wife. They were tanned and muscular, at odds with their pink-and-white English clientele. The husband pointed out of the window at the pub garden. 'Have you guys come for lunch? We're doing a barbecue out there if you're into shrimps or steak or chicken.'

This was plainly not the White Horse Alistair remembered. Luke noticed his father's shock and couldn't help adding to it mischievously. He said, 'It says on your board you do kangaroo steak.'

The wife came over to the bar, 'Ah, yes, normally we do, but we just had a party of eight and they ate the lot. Big, greedy boys!'

'Kangaroo steak?' Alistair said.

'Yes, it's a little like pork.' The wife beamed healthily and handed him a menu. 'But we're all out, love,' she added gently. 'There's the barbecue—or we have great sandwiches, if you prefer.'

'Well, I know what I'm having. I'll have the grilled chicken panino with pesto, please,' Luke said.

'Yes. And I'll have ... I'll have the egg and cress—er—
bloomer.
What exactly is a bloomer? Type of bread, is it?'

'A bloomer? That's a typical English roll. Soft—delicious,' she said. 'You'll love it. You're all right with a bloomer.'

He remembered Karen asking him what a quesadilla was. Why would he be 'all right' with a bloomer? The barmaid plainly saw him as old and decrepit, and seemed to think she was indulging him with her patronizing manner.

'A roll. Right. I'll have one of those, please—just with simple egg and cress. And a pint of Old Simpson. You do have that, do you?'

'Yes, we do. That's a good, traditional English cider.'

'Make it two,' Luke said.

The woman smiled, first at Luke and then at Alistair, as she pulled the pints. 'Are you two father and son?'

'Yes,' Alistair told her warily.

'You don't mind me saying—but what a strong resemblance. Not just face shape and noses and whatnot. Just look at that body language!' She laughed.

Luke and Alistair checked themselves and then each other and found they were standing in an identical pose, Luke leaning on a bar stool, Alistair on his stick, each with one arm folded high across the chest and the hand tucked under the armpit, the head bowed. Both found a reason to move.

'Aaah,' she went on. 'Dad and son out for a nice pub lunch together, hey?' She put the second frothing pint down on the counter. 'Here you go, fellas.' Her hand shot out neatly for the money.

They carried the drinks over to a table in a cool, dark corner.

'Kangaroo steak,' Alistair said. They laughed and Luke lit a cigarette.

'Changed a bit, then, Dad?'

'Yes. But no more than I have, I suppose.' He sighed.

In forty years Dover was very different. And yet, like the photograph of his white-haired mother, it was still undoubtedly the same. The town centre and the bleached seafront hotels and the cliffs and the grey Channel itself were the essential bone structure.

What about the people, though? He wondered what Ivy Gilbert would look like now. He had not spoken to her since she had telephoned and told Rosalind about his mother's death. He had taken the coward's way out and written instead of calling her back and hearing a ghost's voice. But of course he must see her at some point—and if too much time had passed for him to see her out of affection then he must see her out of simple courtesy.

Ivy would be a very old woman now. His heart moved as he thought this and he knew that, really, the affection had remained unchanged through all the years. He had carried it around and it had survived miraculously, like a dog-eared love-note in a soldier's pocket. Would dear old Geoff still be alive? he wondered. He did not like to think of Ivy alone. Not all alone—as his mother had been.

'I wonder what that demonstration was about,' Luke said, 'by the seafront.'

'Demonstration? I didn't notice.'

'Yes. There were about thirty people holding these signs up just by the ferry terminal. You couldn't see what they said, though.'

'There are often things bubbling up there. Animal rights a lot, I think. Protest about live export.'

'I might go and see while you talk to the surveyor. Would that be OK? I'd like a walk.'

'Yes, of course. This is all so boring for you,' Alistair said. He felt embarrassed, unexpectedly beholden to his son. He watched Luke drinking his cider, his eyes focused on nothing in particular. It was not to be envied, really, that lost look of youth. 'Luke, thank you for driving me today,' he said. 'It's a shame we didn't get much done last time. I think I was just a bit—well, thrown, really. I'm sorry you've had to drive all this way a second time.'

It was such an odd reversal of roles but, again, this was not an unpleasant sensation to Luke. He felt mature and highly reasonable as he said, 'That's OK, Dad. It's not as if you never drove me anywhere I needed to go. Think of all those rugby matches.'

'Yes,' Alistair said, but he was guiltily certain it had almost always been Rosalind who had done that. He had found the thinly veiled competitiveness of the other parents intolerably petty and depressing. And sport was meaningless to him because it was not academic achievement: it got you nowhere, taught you nothing. You just went up and down a field. Claiming work pressure, he had avoided almost all the back-of-car picnics, Rosalind's sausage rolls and Scotch eggs, and the cheering in the rain. Consequently he had missed almost all Luke's sporting victories, too. Instead, he heard them lovingly misreported by Rosalind over family suppers. Luke would blush and correct her: 'It really wasn't the only try, Mum. Stephen Falconer got two.'

'Well, Mr Sanderson said
you
saved the game, darling. He
did,
Luke.'

Alistair watched his son now, stubbing out his cigarette, and thought he basically didn't know him at all. Could this extraordinary display of grief, the weight loss, the sobbing in his room at night, really be over a girl? 'Rugby or no rugby, I'm grateful, Luke,' he said, knowing this was not at all what he meant. Then he caught sight of their food coming over and was glad to put an end to this unfamiliar type of conversation.