Facing the Tank (12 page)

Red in Barrowcester adorned only post boxes, telephone kiosks and the fire engine. The Barrowcester female wore calm browns and greens, tasteful blues and various exclusive shades of cobweb or limestone. Summer brought a brief crisis of pastels and florals but they were few who made brief erroneous ventures into geranium or tiger lily; it was all forget-me-not and jasmine with the occasional blown rose – always prickly old-fashioned, never some easy-care hybrid tea. Within two months of their arrival here from her childhood in florid Bayswater, Madeleine had seen her mother licked into semi-respectable shape. The old glamorous clothes with their poison greens and blood reds had been passed on to that Hades of fashion, the Tatham theatre wardrobe, and been replaced twin-set by twin-set with a uniform that sat awkwardly on a woman with a bosom and a past. Even her mother’s past had evaporated. She had never been exactly open about it with her daughter, but now, from what she could glean from conversations on her rare trips home, Madeleine found that most Barrowers had pieced out the outlines of some outrage involving a vast house on the outskirts of Barcelona and a terrorist bomb. She chose not to interfere; Mum had her reasons, not the least of which was that she had to live here.

When the impulse to run home had first entered her mind as she watched a poster curl in the kettle steam and heard Georgene’s whooping reports of the swelling crowd of journalists below their windows, Madeleine had pursued a fantasy of being the whore returned from Babylon, striding the cobbled streets, behind her a trail of corrupted youth and lingering pagan odour, before her a confusion of children snatched into safety and door bolts drawn in haste. The reality was a sad affair. As she slid cowering over the junction of the High Street and Tower Place, past her mother’s shop and one of the city’s few pubs, she sensed that the Barrowers held and would retain the upper hand. She had done the running. They would receive her, smug on their sheltered hill, and get on very nicely thank you without her when she ran away again, as she undoubtedly would in a few days. Earthly Paradise was strictly for pure and undemanding hearts. Madeleine invariably reached breaking point and fled with an inward scream in less than a week. She lit a last cigarette tucking the empty packet into a passing window box, and wondered whether the crisis baying at her heels might keep her there longer than usual.

She passed under an arch into the Close. The Cathedral’s twin towers glowed in the last of the evening sun. Before her and slightly to the right she could just make out the spikey roof of the chapel quadrangle at Tatham’s. Her pock-marked teens reached out at her from each lengthening shadow and she felt every lumpen pound the returning prodigal. Dining with swine had been a rare treat while it lasted.

As he soaked in the shoe box of a bathroom with four crackers spread with peanut butter and sliced banana lined up on the soap rack before him, Evan studied his distant toes and wondered about Mrs Merluza’s daughter. Placing the mother’s age at fiftyish and assuming her, from her glamour to be the kind of woman who has her babies early and by mistake, if at all, he would gauge her daughter to be around thirty. Evan munched a cracker, brushing the crumbs off his chest. Since the bomb tragedy that deprived her of her father had occurred in the girl’s infancy, she would have been reared wholly under the mother’s influence and was probably a creature of no ambition and affected dress, the lamb within turning to premature mutton.

When, spruce a couple of hours later, he climbed the stairs, following voices to the sitting room, he found that he was gravely mistaken. As he knocked at the door a woman’s voice, deeper than Mrs Merluza’s, muttered something angry in Spanish (possibly Catalan, as he didn’t catch it) and he entered. The air was heavy with stifled scene. His landlady was cowering in an armchair and a waistless woman in a red dress was staring away from him into the night beyond.

‘Ah, Professor,’ chimed up Mrs Merluza, able to rise now that she was not alone, ‘this is my dear daughter, Madeleine.’

The woman turned.

‘Hello,’ she said, not offering to shake hands. ‘You’ll make a change from all those creepy organists. Mum never invites them to supper.’

‘I’m honoured,’ Evan muttered.

‘Indeed you are. Sit down. What would you like to drink?’

‘Scotch?’

‘I’ll get it,’ said Mrs Merluza and fairly ran to rattle ice cubes at a table behind where he was sitting. Madeleine drew the curtains and flopped into an armchair. She was twenty-six or seven. Not conventionally pretty, but then, Evan reflected, neither was he. A big girl, she should not by rights have been wearing scarlet. Were one to drape her statuesqueness in black instead, or darkest purple, she would make an electric Norma or Ariadne. The red, however, showed spirit, as did she in the course of the evening. Her conversation was keen, not to say erudite – he discovered that she specialized in the history of erotica and concepts of visual sensuality – but Evan gained the impression that she was performing. He might have been her supervisor or an attentive brick wall. What fascinated him as they drank together then went down to eat was that she exerted some hold over her parent. It was as if she had a secret that her mother was terrified she might blurt out and her every utterance was followed by appeasement on the older woman’s part.

‘Delicious, Mrs Merluza. Really delicious,’ he said.

‘Thank you.’

‘Yes, Mum. It’s great.’

‘Why thank you, darling. Thank you. It’s only veal and a little …’

‘But Evan,’ Madeleine interrupted. ‘I can call you that, can’t I? Good – Evan, don’t you find his style apallingly dated? Honours aside, he writes like Castaneda, or even Dylan if you put on the right voice.’

Her English was effortless, even slapdash, compared to her mother’s. The only trace of Spanish was a marked softening of her Ss on the rare occasions when she spoke fast. She managed to combine the stolid, contained simmering of an Electra with a corrosive vein of Wickedest Girl in Class. Her hair. Evan wanted to reach out and rub its coarse thickness on his cheek. A luxuriant, coffin-dark mass, it matched her bovine eyes and made her mother’s black look navy blue. She had the heavy eyebrows and bangle-jangling, furred forearms of a Costa Brava waitress and the sharpness of Dorothy Parker with a stubbed toe.

‘Can I offer you a brandy, Professor?’

‘No thanks, Mrs M. I must stay up and work.’

‘More coffee then?’ Madeleine suggested.

‘Please.’

Mrs Merluza made to move but her daughter rose and waved her back.

‘Stay put,’ she told her. ‘I’ll get it.’

Evan watched her mother play with a cheese rind.

‘They grow up so fast,’ she simpered with a sigh and he smiled back to help her relax.

It could not be easy having such a daughter turn up to frighten one. Madeleine was the kind of girl medieval parents would have handed over to the strong arm of the church at the first decent opportunity. It was only when he felt a tumultuous relief on tearing himself away on the pretext of ‘important reading’ that he realized that even his customary state of amiable self-possession had been upset. He was in awe of someone.

He made another attempt at reading Sukie Lark Rosen’s
New Mythology
– an attempt so feeble, even he was not fooled – then sat at the table in his bedroom and took out his diary. He had never kept a daily journal, as he suspected these soon became a litany of self-accusation, drab encounter and supper menu. Instead he kept a book for the recording of states, crises and anecdotes. Its chief purpose was as a safety valve to lower the frequency of shamefully revelatory letters to friends of questionable fidelity.

‘Madeleine Merluza is fat and late twenties and I am thin and middle forties,’ he wrote. ‘I don’t like big girls. I have never liked big girls. I was wild about Miriam when first I met her and she was queen of the titless rakes. Maybe that was what was wrong with our marriage, and not babies or Thomas Aquinas? Can one go for forty years of one’s life under the misapprehension that one likes titless rakes before making the discovery that their polar opposite is one’s true lodestone? Come to think of it, Ma says that Huby Stokes, who Miriam is dating, is built like a lorry driver.’

He shut the book without reading the entry, pulling a large rubber band around it. Then he kicked off his shoes and switched off the light. Lying on his bed in the darkness he heard bells.

She had taken Clive’s hand and, rather than shake it, only held it in hers and gave it a cool squeeze. Her eyes were almond-shaped. Her nose was long, fine, smooth as wax. Pearl drops kissed the generous lobe of each curiously long ear. She turned smiling to Tobit. Her long hair had been pulled hard away from her face into something midway between a cascade and a bush. She was slightly taller than her fiancé. She was dressed in some kind of delicate, clinging suede whose fawn set off to perfection the richness of her skin. She smelled of vanilla. She was glorious.

‘You must be Glorie,’ Clive said. ‘Welcome to Barrowcester.’

‘It’s cute,’ she replied. ‘Really. We had a lovely walk around by the Cathedral and then along the ramparts over the river.’

He gestured for her to come in and she slid past him so closely that her hair brushed his hand and her scent wafted into his face.

‘Hi.’

Tobit was grinning on the steps, car keys in hand. He looked like a poster for driving lessons.

‘Tobit. Hello, old man. Congratulations.’

‘Thanks.’

Clive’s voice always came out wrong when he spoke to his son. Whereas he sounded like a fairly intelligent schoolmaster when talking to anyone else, he had only to open his mouth to Tobit to sound like a father in a television family; the sort of man who goes jogging with a golden retriever, plays with a train set and spends all weekend in a white tracksuit. A dad rather than a father.

‘Come on in,’ he said.

‘Thanks,’ said Tobit, ‘Dad.’

As his son passed him, letting slip a waft of what was doubtless some overpriced Italian cologne, Clive found himself patting the boy’s back and was disgusted at the image they must be conveying.

‘Lovely house,’ said Gloire, emerging from the sitting room and peering up the stairs. ‘Is it Victorian?’

‘A little earlier. You must get Lydia to show you round when she comes down,’ said Clive. ‘It’s more her baby than mine.’

He poured them all champagne which he brought from the kitchen on a tray. As he crossed the hall to the sitting room, Gloire and Tobit started apart from a clinch and giggled. Lydia arrived, adding a third scent to the cocktail that was already thickening the air, and greeted Tobit and Gloire anew. Once she and her future daughter-in-law had stroked, cooing, the tissue of each other’s clothes, Gloire asked to be shown around.

‘I’m incurably inquisitive, I’m afraid,’ she admitted in her faintly American accent and laughed with a cunning approximation of shyness.

‘So it’s true,’ thought Clive. ‘They
do
blush.’

Equally appalled at the prospect of being left alone together to make polite conversation, the men of the family followed their women on the tour of the Hart domain, which started in the garden as always.

There had been a time when Clive had worried about his relationship or rather lack of one to his son. If enjoyment of another’s company and acceptance of their confidences were the measures of a close relationship, he was closer to most of his male pupils than he was to Tobit. This had not always been the case. When their baby had first arrived, Lydia had suffered an alarming depression and had moaned at the very sight of her creature, which meant that Clive had been thrown into fatherly love at the deep end. He would sit at his typewriter with the cot at his side; the experience was novel and he had enjoyed it. Pre-conversational infants are little more than helpless animals and as such Tobit had appealed to Clive’s charitable impulse. Since his young wife was keen to finish her cookery course, young Clive had delighted in being seen to push a pram around Pimlico. Later he had carried Tobit in an Indian papoose to rehearsals of his ill-fated third play and, on the steps of the Royal Court, had even been interviewed by
Woman’s Hour
on the growing importance of paternal involvement. Then, around the time when their fortunes had see-sawed and Lydia had swung into the limelight, she had taken Tobit off Clive’s capable hands. She had poached him. Overnight.

‘My son is just as important to me as my career,’ seemed to be daily on her lips. ‘Clive has been a wonderful help and now it’s my turn to let him concentrate on
his
work. Share and share alike is the key to our marriage.’

She had poached Tobit and turned him into a pretty, prattling fashion accessory who played sweetly in the background of her
Guardian
column, sat on her lap in her early publicity photograph and who never had anything to say to his father.

Tobit had not been bright but he was clever with a pencil and paintbrush and generally good with his hands, so they had sent him to a new co-educational boarding school in the heart of Devon where design, fine arts and gardening were featured as high on the curriculum as maths or English. Lydia had disliked sending him away to board but felt that he needed to make some friends of his own age – a commodity in which geriatric Barrowcester was sorely lacking. By this time Clive was finding Tobit’s combination of feyness and wanton ignorance a depressing contrast to the precocity of the boys and girls in his classes at Tatham’s and was secretly glad to have him out of the house. Tobit’s bookless approach to the arts was but one of many links slyly forged between him and his mother; Clive had felt himself become jealous of their cherished similarities. The immaculately illustrated, semi-grammatical letters home were addressed firmly to Lydia, although they were meticulous in including ‘love’ to her husband.

As the boy grew through his teens there was a resounding lack of the adolescent traumas that Clive had been expecting and which might have served to bring them closer together, if only in argument. Too well-behaved by half, the youth left his school, spent two months working behind the counter in Hart’s and consorting in a suspiciously matey way with the girls there, then moved to a bedsit in London. He had won a place at St Martin’s School of Art to study fashion. He had soon moved into a flat with a fellow student and it had been no surprise to Clive when they had visited him there with flat-warming presents and found that there was only one bed.

Lydia had been as forthright in her ‘positive attitude’ towards this discovery as she had been earlier this evening on the subject of black flancées. She had made jokes about how nice it would be to be spared grandparenthood and had been as maternally supportive as ever. Lydia being Lydia this meant a generous allowance. After hearing at first hand how impressed his teachers were with his entries for the finals fashion show, she had set Tobit up with a little business in Marylebone High Street where he ran off extremely popular and staggeringly priced ball gowns and cocktail dresses. What had been jealousy on Clive’s part had recently curdled into bored dismissal. Although it was unfashionable to speak of blame in these matters, blame implying that something was
wrong
, the fault was entirely Lydia’s. She played Frankenstein to Tobit’s monster, and Clive could not but admire the pluck with which she had thrown herself into the role. Today’s sudden metamorphosis of monster into conventional handsome prince, however, was going to change matters somewhat.

‘So tell me,’ asked Lydia, after they had sat down, flushed with champagne, to lasagna and Riecine. ‘Have you decided on a date?’

‘We thought this Saturday,’ said Tobit, who was pouring out wine on his father’s behalf.

‘Good God!’ exclaimed Lydia then softened her tone. ‘Darling, isn’t that a bit soon?’

‘Don’t worry, Mrs Hart. He hasn’t got me into trouble.’

‘Not yet,’ said Tobit and the two of them chuckled.

‘I didn’t mean that,’ Lydia hurried on. ‘Of course I didn’t mean
that
. But, well, guests and things …’

‘Oh, Ma. Please no,’ pleaded Tobit.

‘We thought just a quiet family wedding,’ added Gloire. ‘We’re all four of us busy, and weddings on a big scale take so long to fix up.’

‘Just we four,’ suggested Tobit, ‘and Gloire’s parents.’

‘That’s why we want it on Saturday, you see,’ said Gloire. ‘They’ll be in Europe briefly and I know they’d like to be here.’

‘Oh but of course they would,’ Lydia prattled, artlessly she hoped. ‘How lovely. We can have a splendid lunch and lots of flowers and Clive, darling, do you think we could use the Tatham’s chantry as you’re on the staff?’

Clive had been silent all this time because he was being molested. The moment he had sat down beside her at the table, Gloire had slipped a hand on to his left knee and had begun mercilessly to caress his leg. He was so shocked that he had not yet taken the initiative of moving his leg away. The sensation was also so pleasurable as to have lulled him into silent inactivity. He tried to move his leg now, but her well-honed nails dug into the fabric of his trousers and pulled it back.

‘Don’t see why not,’ he croaked and took a gulp of wine.

‘You do want a church service, don’t you?’ Lydia checked.

‘Certainly,’ said Tobit. ‘Gloire’s mother is very devout.’

‘Oh,’ murmured Lydia.

‘Oh, good,’ said Clive, uncertainly.

‘And where do your family come from?’ Lydia pursued.

‘Cheltenham,’ said Clive.

‘My father’s Jamaican,’ said Glorie, ‘and my mother’s from Martinique.’

‘Which makes her a Catholic,’ added Tobit.

‘Oh,’ said Clive, relinquishing the struggle and falling silent.

‘More lasagna, Gloire?’

‘No thanks. I have to watch my figure. Tobit’s made me a very clingy dress.’

‘Lucky you,’ said Lydia, pouring herself more wine then remembering to pour some out for her guests. ‘All he ever made me was a nightie.’

‘My stuff’s too sexy for you, Ma. You know that.’

‘Thanks.’

Gloire leaped in.

‘I’m sure Lydia – I may call you that, mayn’t I?’

‘But of course.’

‘I’m sure Lydia would look lovely in that black one you’ve just finished,’ she told her fiancé.

‘No. I think Tobe’s right,’ said Lydia, pushing the lasagna tin towards Clive, partly to make him empty it, partly to rouse him from what looked like near-slumber. ‘They aren’t terribly – I mean they’re
lovely
– but they aren’t terribly me.’

Clive tried once more to pull away his leg. Gloire tugged it back and gave it a savage pinch.

‘So tell me about your work, Gloire,’ he said, rallying, to his wife’s relief. ‘How much longer before you’re set loose on unsuspecting patients?’

‘I’ve been on the wards for nearly two years now,’ she said.

‘Oh. Forgive me.’

‘That’s all right,’ she said and pinched him again.

The situation was becoming impossible. He waited until she was raising her glass to her full pink lips then stood up sharply. The movement tugged her forward, causing her to drop the glass.

‘Oh I’m so sorry,’ she exclaimed.

‘Clive, you
idiot
! You startled her.’

‘No I didn’t.’

‘I’m not some half-wit antelope,’ muttered Gloire.

‘Quick. Stand up or it’ll go on your dress,’ shouted Tobit and he, Lydia and Gloire jumped to their feet as three trickles of wine slid out across the table top from the shattered glass. After a second of staring drunkenly with the rest, Lydia darted into action with a wet cloth.

‘Oh dear,’ said Gloire. ‘No, my dress is fine, Lydia. Honestly. Actually I think a dry cloth might be … Oh thanks, Tobit. But your glass, Lydia. Are they special ones?’

‘No. Not at all. Clive, I don’t see what’s so amusing.’

‘Nothing,’ said Clive. ‘Honestly.’