Facing the Tank (11 page)

Madeleine was an ‘academic in the arts’ and underpaid; thus far Mercy could comprehend. The details of her daughter’s curious employment bored, when they did not escape her. Madeleine shared a sour-smelling flat in Earls Court with an African dispatch-rider called Georgene. Mercy went to stay the night there when she visited London for the January sales. Madeleine came home for a fortnight over her birthday in July and for a week at Christmas. She rang once every ten or eleven days to say hello. A spontaneous visit however, like the impending one, was unheard of and alarming. As she made up her daughter’s bed, Mercy sorted out the possible explanations. Pregnancy was hardly likely and, if that were the case, London was surely a safer spot to deal with such things than the watchful confines of Barrowcester. Affection, then? Mercy rejected this as being out of character and more frightening than pregnancy. By the time that the bed was made, clean towels hung out and she was on her way to cut some flowers for her daughter’s dressing table, the reluctant mother had settled for nervous breakdown. Madeleine had gone into a neurotic decline, as was the wont of plain intellectuals, and had come home to collapse; she was in a crisis and needed her mother.

Trying not to peer too obviously into the granny flat bedroom as she pulled a little strip of variegated ivy off the wall to trail from one side of the vase, Mercy felt a slight ache in her ample bosom. The sensation was unfamiliar but even a vague acquaintance, such as that know-it-all Lydia Hart, could have diagnosed an onset of motherly love.

In the kitchen that sprawled through the lower half of the extension designed for her by Fergus Gibson, Lydia Hart was busy chopping onions. Clive was arranging some flowers for the table. They were to eat in the kitchen as this was to be a family occasion. Lydia sniffed loudly.

‘Well for pity’s sake,’ Clive muttered, ‘there’s no need to cry about it.’

‘I’m not. It’s the onions,’ she snapped, tipping the chopped onions into a heavy sauté pan which she rattled with feeling over a flame.

Hot olive oil spat through the silence. Clive centred the flowers to his satisfaction, swept a heap of discarded leaves on to his hand and into the bin, then pulled open the cutlery drawer and began to count out four of everything. There was an awkward moment as they met, she on her way to the fridge to find mince, he on his way to the table to lay it. He gestured nervously to let her pass. He set out the cutlery as she crushed a pound of mince into the frying onion to brown it.

‘It’s only that I’m all overexcited and sort of
moved
,’ she said. ‘This doesn’t happen to us every week. I’m just very happy, really,’ she continued bitterly as she poured boiling water over a bowl of tomatoes.

‘That makes two of us,’ he lied, feeling nothing, as he kissed her cheek, but relief at an opening for such an overture. He held an arm across her shoulders – which always cut her pleasantly down to size – and watched with her as the skin began to break in the heat and slide off the tomatoes.

‘Why do you always make lasagna when he comes home?’ he asked her.

‘Why? Don’t you like it?’

‘No, I like it a lot. It’s just that we never have it when he’s not here.’

‘Tobit’s favourite,’ she said with a sniff.

So it wasn’t the onions.

‘Oh,’ said Clive, and leaving her side he took four place mats from another drawer and laid them on the table. ‘I mean to say, the way you were going on before you told me, I thought she was in a wheelchair or blind or something.’

‘Hateful comparisons.’

‘I’m not comparing. I’m just illustrating the effects of your overreaction on my imagination. Of course her being what she is isn’t a disability. It used to be
treated
as one but now it’s, well, if anything it can be an advantage. Positive discrimination and all that.’ He opened two bottles of the Riecine they had brought back with them from Saiole last autumn. Tobit gulped wine as if it were air and Clive suspected that, even after champagne, they’d all need a little extra tonight. There was an ominous silence coming from Lydia’s back. ‘Tell me about her,’ he said.

‘There’s not much to tell,’ said Lydia, turning, ‘as I saw her so briefly. She’s incredibly attractive. You’ll fancy the skin-tight pants off her.’

‘Hardly likely.’

‘Just try not to show it, that’s all I ask.’

‘For Christ’s sake, I don’t go for her type. Never have.’

Lydia raised her eyebrows and turned back with a sigh to her cookery.

‘It’s such a pity that …’

‘What?’

Sometimes she detested Clive’s habit of chipping in with a ‘What?’ whenever she was simply reaching for a word or pausing for effect. She detested it this evening. She wished he would leave her to brood. She wanted him to go upstairs and finish in the bathroom so that they wouldn’t both have to use it in a rush.

‘Him being the way he was though,’ she started afresh, pointedly, ‘I suppose if he was going to surprise us all by getting married it would
have
to be someone different.’

‘Do you think she knows about him?’

‘That he’s – that he used to be gay?’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘Oh, bound to have done. A lot of girls like the challenge. He makes a point of telling people. Well, he did. Don’t you remember, he told Emma Dyce-Hamilton once? God only knows why because he’s far too young to have been her type and poor Emma’s scarcely the sort of girl who needs fending off.’ Lydia snorted then turned her amusement into a sigh. ‘Oh Clive, it’s going to be so odd having to reshuffle the way we think of him. I mean, we won’t have to make little explanations and excuses any more.’

‘Oh I don’t know about that,’ said her husband. ‘Barrowcester isn’t exactly Brixton. I’ll go and finish in the bathroom.’ He walked slowly upstairs, leaving her to make a béchamel sauce and to grate Parmesan.

The bombshell had been dropped this afternoon. At her feet. She had arrived to find Hart’s, her delicatessen, in chaos. Beth, her manageress, had had to go home with flu and three pretty but motiveless assistants had been trying to do the Monday stock-take and serve customers at the same time. At around three, by which hour Lydia had calmed everyone down, tidied up Beth’s slatternly office and finished the stock-taking herself, her son Tobit had drifted in from the spring sunshine, dapper in crumpled linen.

‘Tobit! What a lovely surprise,’ she called out, startled.

‘Bigger surprise than you think, Ma,’ he said, with the sheepish grin he had inherited from Clive and which went so well with his lively green eyes, which were hers.

Sensing danger, Lydia had tried to gesture him into Beth’s office for tea. He had stayed put however, under the decorative gaze of the shop girls. When he had said,

‘I’ve got engaged,’ she had therefore been forced to react as a mother should; no glimmer of doubt in her radiant smile.

‘Oh Tobit, how perfectly
lovely!
Gilly, this is a celebration. Put up the closed sign and get a bottle of Dom Perignon from Truskers. Half-holiday!’ In the instant bustle of girls lowering blinds and draping cheeses, she snatched a few seconds’ privacy. ‘Tobe darling’, she said and hugged him properly. ‘Who is it? I had no idea that …’

‘Sorry. It’s a bit mean to spring it on you like this.’ He caught her eye and they both giggled. At least he had giggled and she had sort of gasped. ‘It rather took me by surprise too,’ he added and glanced over his shoulder at the door.

‘Is she up here with you?’

‘Yes. It’s her day off so I shut up shop and we both escaped. She’d never seen the place before and I thought, as it was such a lovely day …’

‘Can you both come to supper?’

‘I was hoping you’d ask that. Yes please. Ah, there she is.’ He darted out of the door and brought his fiancée across into his mother’s shop.

‘Ma, this is Gloire. Gloire, meet my ma.’

Smiling harder than ever as her girls seemed to freeze around her, Lydia held out a hand. The immediate impression of her prospective daughter-in-law was one of height, restrained glamour, poise and intelligence. Gloire was perfection as only Tobit could have found for himself. Gloire was also black as the. Well. Very
very
black.

They had drunk Dom Perignon and the girls had made suitably congratulatory noises and gone on irritatingly about how the bubbles were going up their several noses. Lydia had done her best to charm. Gloire had smiled rather too candidly. Lydia had hugged Tobit again. Tobit had laughed at her. Finally, unable to bear any more, she had kissed Gloire on the cheek and banished them to go sightseeing until sevenish.

Clive and she had spent the last hour simpering liberal platitudes across the kitchen at each other, but she disapproved and knew that he did too, in his way. It upset her that in such a crisis they had been unable to be truthful with each other. She assumed that mixed marriages were common enough in Tobit’s trend-setting circles. It would be harder to carry the alliance off in Barrowcester, but that was her problem, not her son’s. Lydia’s main worry was children. One read of half-caste children having crises through belonging neither to one race nor another. While there was no doubt that any grandchildren produced by Tobit and Gloire would be attractive, intelligent and so forth, she should hate them to be treated as fashion accessories; walking exempla of designer-tag liberalism.

If she was hard on herself, Lydia also dared admit that with him the way he had been, only death could have deprived her of her son. With none of the usual early warnings indulged in by the burgeoning hetero male, he was knocking down the snug exclusivity of their former relationship like so many nursery bricks.

Lydia assembled a faultless dish of lasagna and set it to bake. It was always so much better when cooked in advance and then heated through again. She tidied utensils away into the dishwasher and returned milk to the fridge and Parmesan to the cheese box, cutting off a finger of the cheese to nibble. Clive’s bathwater gurgled in the pipe outside the kitchen door. Lydia glanced at her watch and saw that there was not time for her to bathe.

‘Bugger the Pope,’ she swore and hurried upstairs to give her hair a good brush and to change into something befitting a celebration.

When Tobit sounded the doorbell in ten minutes, she sent Clive down to let him and Gloire in. She flung up her bedroom window, hugging a dressing gown about herself.

‘Welcome!’ she called down. It is hard to talk loudly when one’s head is thrown back, so they did no more than grin shyly up at her. ‘Your father’s on his way down,’ Lydia shouted and realized that she was saying that to both of them. ‘Love that dress, Gloire,’ she added, recognizing one of Tobit’s creations and already beginning to veer out of control. She pictured the girl laughing as she changed in the scant shelter of Tobit’s sports car.

Madeleine Merluza held her ticket up for inspection then lit her last cigarette. When she realized that she did not want it, she stubbed it out on the sole of her shoe and returned the thing to its packet for later use.

‘The demon weed, eh?’ piped up the young, ginger-haired commuter on the opposite seat. ‘Gets you in the end, you know. You heard of Buerger’s Disease?’

‘Bugger off,’ said Madeleine.

‘No offence, I’m sure.’

He returned to the perusal of his evening paper and she to that of her novel.

She had been pretending to read ever since they left King’s Cross. Acutely aware, of a sudden, that he had been watching her, she turned several pages with inauthentic rapidity and adjusted the scarlet fabric of her dress over her knees. She then caught sight of her reflection in the window, glared and wondered, as she had done several grim times a day since her spectacularly hormonal thirteenth birthday, why she bothered. She let her mud-brown eyes drift back to staring at the ‘scalpel-sharp exposé of soured marriage’ in her lap and thought again about flinging wide the door and launching her waistless form off the Barrowcester viaduct when the time came to cross it.

Her fear of annihilation was only marginally greater than her dread of public exposure. Her mother had once forced her into a leotard and dumped her, shivering and fat, in a ballet class. Six inches taller than the nymphs around her, she had also been the only one with braces top and bottom and pigeon toes verging on the deformed. Having heard how her daughter had been shunned at her London school for her warts, Mrs Merluza had not thought to have the growths cut out until the last day of the summer holidays. Madeleine arrived for her first day at Tatham’s bandaged like a junior leper. After both these and other, similar occasions she had paced feverishly from river to oven door to bathroom cabinet, only to baulk at the thought of the combined spiritual question mark and physical indignity that would follow hard on the heels of her doing anything ‘silly’. No. Shame was deadly, but death was worse. Marginally.

The news would break out tomorrow, which was why she was fleeing to Barrowcester tonight. Even as she and the gingery commuter were borne north-west through cattle-laden fields and minor dormitory towns, computer-assisted typesetters were laying out her doom. The train clattered over some points, past some children waving from the bottom of a lurid cottage garden, and Madeleine pictured the headlines that her travelling companion might be reading this time tomorrow in a recollective flush. CARDINAL IN PREGNANCY SHOCK! ROMAN SCANDALS! MARRY OR BURN? HIGH CHURCH DISGRACE! A red and blue waiter came by and she spurned his teetotal advances.

The clinic had telephoned with her test results during her mid-morning Mars bar and she had telephoned Edmund. He had said,

‘Oh God,’

a lot which, given his elevated status in the Roman ecclesiastical hierarchy, took remarkably little effect. He had also sounded a mite disappointed that she was still undecided about whether to go through with the pregnancy, which was unorthodox if human. Evidently his bitch of a bog-Irish housekeeper had been listening in and had bought herself return trips to both Lourdes and Connemara on the proceeds, for Madeleine had returned to find her Earls Court flat besieged by reporters. As she climbed out of her Mini a total stranger came up and said,

‘Congratulations, Miss Merluza. What does Cardinal Kilpatrick think of the good news?’

‘It’s Dr Merluza, actually,’ she said, ‘and I think you’ve got the wrong address.’

Another stranger took several photographs of unwed mother-to-be saying bugger off bastard hack as she dug in her briefcase for keys.

Hiding amidst the commuters at the bar, Madeleine bit savagely on a pork pie and took a swig from her can of Newcastle Brown. What had possessed her to catch a train home? Even now she could hear her mother’s neighbours – one hesitated to call them friends:

‘And she was always such a
quiet
girl.’

They were right. She had always been quiet. Ugly and quiet. Some of course would now nod sagely and call it furtive.

After ballet and warts had bitten the dust, her mother had left her beautifully alone. Well, alone. Studious, in her angry fashion, Madeleine had wound her furtive way through Tatham’s, via a degree in Fine Arts and Italian at Bristol, to the Warburg Institute on whose margins for the past six years she had pursued a devotion to the minute dissection of this thing called beauty. Her doctoral thesis, written with the collaboration of a geneticist friend called Madge and published to discreet notices last year, had provided biological and historical evidence that an obsessive appetite for aesthetic pleasure was a genetic trait and invariably accompanied reduced sexual security.

Madeleine’s flatmate, Georgene, had cleverly smuggled her out of the flat through the basement and a back entrance. Georgene’s nimble handling of her Harley-Davidson in rush-hour traffic would have shaken off any intrepid reporters who had tried to follow in taxis. Georgene worked as a dispatch rider and was out all day and some nights. She had been left with strict instructions that if anyone, including Edmund, bothered her for Madeleine’s whereabouts, she was to say she had left to do some research in Freyburg.

Madeleine finished her beer, crushed the can, gaining less satisfaction from this than usual, then returned to her seat with another pork pie and a reserve packet of cigarettes. The gingery commuter was leaving as she sat down.

‘Only forty-five per cent pork in those things, you know,’ he chirruped.

She leered back with her mouth full. He had abandoned his newspaper. She snatched it, burrowed in her bag for a pen and set about finishing his crossword. He had only filled in two answers. She replaced his ‘paternitty’ with ‘fatherhood’.

‘Hi, Mum. I’ve met this man …’

‘How’d you like to be a glamorous granny, Mum?’

‘How many Barrowers read
The Sun
, Mum?’

‘Hi, Mum. Long time no see. I’ve just got myself knocked up by a Cardinal.’

To mull over various ways of breaking the news had almost become a game. She was not absolutely certain that she wanted to have the baby. In fact, she was fairly certain that she did not. It would be kinder to Mum, therefore, to keep quiet about the pregnancy and see just how big a splash the papers made of it tomorrow. The ‘Mother, he done me wrong’ sketch, though corny, was fairly plausible. In terms of gritty experience, Madeleine had embarked on what Georgene called her Beretta Caper as a novice; untried and mildly curious. Sadly she had also been the kind of virgin whose erudition annulled the purity generally accorded those of untouched state.

It was all Madge’s fault. Madge managed to lead a double life as a full-time geneticist and a part-time good Catholic girl. The part-time role was mainly for her mother’s benefit and involved a quantity of good Catholic socializing. The latter brought her up against the personal secretary to a prominent Cardinal. Even the geneticist side of Madge had fancied this man, one Thurston. She had therefore seen rather more of him than was permitted under good Catholic auspices. His ‘boss’, it transpired, had recently been left a large library of eighteenth-century erotic prints by his father, a good Catholic blessed, plainly, with a wicked sense of humour. The Cardinal was a broad-minded man, as Cardinals go, and understanding that the collection was unique and unpublished, was seeking a good Catholic art historian for professional advice. Never one to leave a friend’s talents to languish under a bushel, Madge had passed Dr Merluza’s credentials and telephone number on to Thurston who, grateful, passed it on to the Cardinal who, delighted, rang Madeleine up and invited her to a good Catholic tea.

Madeleine had never looked at erotica over tea with a cardinal before. It might have proved the substance of a very witty article for a feminist review, only Edmund Kilpatrick had been more handsome and less typically ecclesiastical than she had pictured him as being.

‘I never wear my soutane for tea,’ he assured her.

In the course of two centuries the Cardinal’s late father’s collection of erotica had lost none of its powers to excite. Add to these factors the deadly hour of the encounter and one could see the conclusion as thoroughly foregone.

As Madge had often warned her, teatime in England was
the
great erotic hour. This was a fact foolishly ignored by many and exploited by only a churlish few. According to Madge’s theory, five to four found the intellect in the twenty-four-hourly doldrums when it could only be raised by a cupful of tannin followed two hours later by a shot of something stronger. The bodily resources were also low. One’s blood sugar level had sunk and the working beast had to muster all her remaining strength to stagger on until five-thirty. Five to four was the time of day when, if one stopped for a foolish second to analyze the lie of one’s thoughts, there could be nothing dearer to the human frame than to curl up somewhere warm, preferably not alone. When the French began to mock our habit of
le five o’clock
they little appreciated that the institution of teatime from the nursery onwards was a national fortification against lust. Sharp, overbrewed tea brought one back to one’s senses. Weaker mortals, more prone to the satyr’s influence, backed up the tannic defence with biscuits and cake. Cake, in anything but ungenerous proportions, was death to lust. A swiftly eaten slab of teashop gâteau was guaranteed to floor the most predatory bacchante.

Surrounded, in the Cardinal’s well-appointed sitting room, by inviting cushions and rugs, as well as his stimulating inheritance, Madeleine and Edmund foolishly left their macaroons untouched until it was all too late. Then a fanciful illustration to Boccaccio inspired them to put the cakes to a less fattening, rather ticklish use. And it was only four thirty-five.

At around six-thirty she was having great fun discovering the sluice system in his antiquated bathroom and Edmund, dressed again, was sitting on the stairs outside with a whisky beside him. His head in his hands, he was getting ready to admit that this must never happen again. Four days later he was in the same pose, in another part of the house, the same thoughts churning in his mind. And three days after that and two days after that. Edmund was a clever man but a weak one and Madeleine, while both clever and no doubt capable of immense feats of will, was having far too good a time preparing his erotica for publication – not in his name, of course – to think of anything but how to be a Scarlet Woman.

‘You’re savage,’ he told her, taking a mouthful of her hair and pulling.

‘Ouch!’ She laughed, and moved her face back towards his own. He murmured something and hid his face in her breasts.

‘What was that?’ she asked, leaning away slightly. ‘I hate it when I can’t hear what you’re saying.’

‘I said I can hardly bear it.’

‘Bear what?’

‘You. Your beauty.’

‘Oh come on. You’ll have to try harder than than. Go on. Convince me.’

‘Your eyes,’ he said, deadly serious. ‘And your strong round arms and …’

‘Yes?’

‘You have quite extraordinary teeth.’

Exchanges like this were frequent. Their frequency weakened her cynical barricades and afforded Madeleine a glimpse of herself as something other than a waistless lump. Fleeing now to Barrowcester, she was unsure whether this should earn Edmund her graditude or deathless malediction.

Georgene steered her in the direction of a family planning clinic to get her fixed up, unbeknownst to Edmund, with the Pill. Madeleine thought this was great fun too, and immensely clever, but soon became bored and forgetful of her daily dose. Recently she had forgotten to take it for three days and a week before that, she had accidentally knocked the foil packet down the back of a chest of drawers and got bored of trying to tease it out with a coathanger. On both occasions she had, in all innocence, tried to make up for her lapse by wolfing three or four pills at once. The consequence would not be visible for months, but it had made its presence felt. She had alerted Edmund and it seemed unlikely that they would ever meet again. It was only in their final interview, over the telephone, when she laughed at his explanation of the rhythm method, that he had realized that Madge had passed her off as a good Catholic under false pretences. Conducted entirely in his flat during daylight hours, their affair had been archly indulgent on her part, archly tortured on his, and wholly lacking in any emotional engagement from either party. Confronting the rude come uppance of this hasty liaison of loin and cerebellum, it had not crossed her mind to be hurt that he had not mentioned marriage, even to explain its impossibility.

They were hurtling over the viaduct. She had left it too late to hurl herself to an easy death. She pulled her case down from the rack, finished her second can of beer and relit a protective cigarette. If things were really bad she could always come down here on foot to put an end to it all. This being Barrowcester, someone would be certain to waylay her however, trying to dissuade her with arguments of eternal love, temporal duty, or at least an invitation to sherry. Madeleine hated Barrowcester. The emotion smote her in the spleen as they pulled into the station and a porter opened her door for her with a smile. She loathed the place. Why was she here? It was too pretty and the people were unnaturally caring and nice and it was all too damned un-her. She handed in her ticket and dawdled out on to Station Approach to begin the long climb up the High Street, along Tower Place, past Boniface Crafts and through the Close to Tracer Lane and home. Home, whose vowel moaned with animal discontent. She kept her head down, ignoring the blandishments of window boxes and kind, open faces. She was not ready to meet anyone and tomorrow, after reading their cleaning ladies’ papers, they would be all too ready to avoid her. Oh
why
had she come and why oh why was she in a red dress?