Kehua! (9 page)

‘I think you’ve got Louis all wrong,’ says Scarlet.

‘No one ever knows what a man is really like,’ says Beverley. ‘Did
Kitchie know what my father was like? I’d say probably not. All that red, sticky stuff when she annoyed him, tried to leave
him. I wish I could remember the colour of my shoes, but I daresay I’ve blanked out the memory, and left only my knees going
one-two, one-two, all the way to Rita. The blood probably didn’t get up more than an inch or so: it depends what sort of thrashing
around my poor mother did. I remember the blue and white checks of my dress, and the red streaks turning black as I ran. I’ve
never been able to wear check gingham since. Odd.’

‘You should get over that if you can,’ says Scarlet, fighting back, cool as can be. ‘Check gingham suits any age. It’s lovely
stuff. There was quite a fashion for it in the thirties, when most children’s clothes were made at home. I wrote a piece about
it once. I daresay Kitchie ran the dress up for you.’

‘I daresay she did,’ says Beverley. ‘But one way and another it ended up quite spoiled. And do make sure Lola isn’t there
when Louis gets home. She’s quite capable of saying one thing and doing another. She lives in so relative a universe she lacks
even the concept of lie.’

‘Gran,’ says Scarlet. ‘To Lola, Louis is Methuselah. To Louis, Lola is a cultureless baby. Let’s stop fighting. If that story
is true and not just you trying to frighten me into staying home, then it’s terrible and I’m really sorry.’

‘It is true,’ says Beverley.

‘And not just you wanting me to start having babies and add to the number of your descendants?’

‘The way things are going,’ says Beverley, dismally, ‘certainly not. Better the line dies out.’

‘I have no intention of breeding. There is more to life than passing it on.’

‘You could have fooled me,’ says her grandmother, so sadly Scarlet relents and says, ‘Tell you what, I have some shampoo in
my bag. I’ll stay and do your hair if you like.’

‘I thought you were meant to be running to your lover.’

‘I’ve already texted him to say I’ll be late,’ says Scarlet.

Beverley’s golden age, when you come to think of it, is probably as much now as it ever has been, enjoying the peace and tran
quillity of Robinsdale, her family helping her out, elderly suitors thinking of visiting, private health insurance and behind
her a life if not well spent, certainly lived to the full. The only thing Beverley lacks is youth, though some may see that
as overwhelmingly important. We should not grudge her good fortune; she has had a hard time getting here. Three husbands down
and possibly still one to go.

It’s cosy down here. Supper upstairs is over – a rerun of yesterday’s, when we had people round. Couscous, minced beef and
vegetables stirred together and reheated in the wok, and the remains of the fruit salad, by now slightly fermented and the
better for it. Often I give up writing for the day at suppertime – but it’s nine now and I’m still in writing mode so I thought
I’d spend another couple of hours at the computer checking over that last conversation between Beverley and Scarlet and the
description of Nopasaran. Years ago I stayed in a Wells Coates house in Yeoman’s Row in Kensington and I’ve never forgotten
it. Wells himself even once called by. Architects tend to live anywhere but in houses they have themselves designed. He was
a very good-looking man. The house was so chic and so uncomfortable, and its inhabitants so truly good to me when I ran away
from my own home that I still remember them with gratitude. I got a dreadful cold in the nose: ‘Weeping with the nose, not
with the eyes’, a psychoanalyst later said, in the days when analysis was all the fashion. ‘Not surprising. Always the shift
downwards.’

I may have Nopasaran inhabited now by entirely fictional folk, but someone obsessive like Louis was bound to end up buying
it, someone smart like Scarlet bound to share it with him. The flapping kehua are worldwide; the inheritance of trauma past,
English version, follows me from generations back. The central heating
is purring away. The boiler switches itself on and off. Too good to last.

There is a slight rustling noise from inside the storage cupboards that have been fitted sometime in the last fifty years,
where once a kitchen grate used to be. A mouse? I open the cupboard. No movement. Just shelves and spare china and glasses
put there for safety, but no apparent origin for the rustling, and now the sound of metal on metal, which might be there and
might not. It’s easy to imagine things. I shut the door again, quietly. I know what it is. It’s the kitchen maid again. It’s
Mavis. She’s clearing the grate of ashes and laying the fire – scraps of paper from Mrs Bennett’s waste-paper basket upstairs,
kindling chopped by Teaser the outside boy, and small coal. The chimney will still be warm, the kindling and coal will have
dried out nicely, and the house is on a hill so this fire always draws nicely. She’ll have no trouble lighting it.

I hear Mavis sigh: she must be tired but she likes to do things properly, even this late. The Bible tells her to be diligent.
She is. I can’t see her today, but I’m in her mind. She will be up at five to put a match to the fire, and lay for the staff
breakfast at six. Cook will be down at five-thirty. Mr Bennett will breakfast at eight, before going off in the gig down the
steep hill to Loddenham Station to catch the train to Salisbury, where he practises law. Cristobel Bennett likes her breakfast
in bed. The three little boys, Ernest, William and Thomas, and their nanny, will have trays brought up to the nursery. Thomas
is the one who survived the war to inherit the house. I don’t know what Nanny’s name is, for some reason. Perhaps she’s never
been granted one? Just generic ‘Nanny’.

Silence now from the cupboard. Light, young footsteps across the floor in front of me, a puff of air as the lamp is extinguished
and a slight smell of acrid oil smoke and its gone. All so quickly it might
not have happened at all. I’m not frightened. Not a haunting, just a timeslip.

The Bennetts imposed their stamp upon Yatt House and it has not yet got out of the habit of following the routine it kept
for so many years. We of the future are the ghosts, the shadowy people who will follow on. All the same I think I’ll go upstairs
now.

Another day, another chapter. Some novels, as I say, charge along like a river in flood; others spread sideways and lie calmly
over neighbouring fields. This is one of the latter. I’ll get Scarlet to Jackson eventually, but not yet.

Louis is very good-looking, in a peaceful, etiolated, fold-your-clothes-before-bed kind of way. He is lean and aesthetic-looking
and a great relief to Scarlet after roaring, fleshy, ranting Eddie. Louis went to public school, feels at home in those clubs
where the Princes go, has friends amongst the titled and can take you anywhere. Scarlet rather likes that.

Louis had worked with Scarlet as a colleague for a time, while she was doing PR for MetaFashion. Louis admired her for her
energy, her determination, her general good cheer, her competence, her ability to make light of difficulties and later, her
ability to make him feel good while making love. It came automatically to her and if she was usually thinking about something
else he had no idea of it.

Louis’ mother is called Annabel: she is a lone parent with genteel aspirations and family money. See him as the child an Anita
Brookner heroine might have had, supposing an acceptable suitor had turned up to woo her and then she’d turned him away, although
pregnant, on moral grounds. Perhaps he was already married and she didn’t wish to upset his wife. However it happened, Annabel,
being not short of family means, was able to send Louis to a good public school where he was only moderately unhappy. He was
too arty and unfunny for general acceptance, but he was respected for putting on house plays. His nickname was ‘Poofter’,
a soubriquet spoken matter-of-factly, without any particular animosity. He had a gift for piano playing, for maths, and theatrical
skills. It was generally assumed that one day he would be an old boy of whom the school would be proud.

The male art teacher seduced him early, but by sixteen he had developed a crush on the Matron’s daughter, fifteen-year-old
Samantha, which was reciprocated, and they were caught by Matron
in flagrante
in the laundry room. His nickname changed overnight to ‘Sexbomb’, which Louis saw as progress, but too late to make him any
happier; especially since, though not expelled, he was asked to leave at the end of term.

His mother was horrified. What would she tell her friends? Samantha was sent to a boarding school elsewhere. Stuart the art
teacher, feeling betrayed by Louis, committed suicide, hanging himself from a pulley hook in the Art Block. Louis found him.
Louis did not seek Samantha out after the fuss had died down.

Louis still occasionally has dreams so bad he wakes up making that choking sound people make when they are trying to scream
but are asleep. And Scarlet will wake up too and try to comfort him.

‘You have post-traumatic stress disorder,’ says Scarlet. ‘From that dreadful time at your toff school.’

‘That’s absurd,’ he says. ‘It’s indigestion. You gave me mozzarella cheese for dinner.’ He wants to be unmoved by emotion
but is greatly prey to it. It affects him physically and his digestion is delicate. Her digestion is tough as old boots.

Louis wishes he had never told Scarlet about the art teacher, let
alone about Samantha. He feels the shared knowledge gives her mastery over him. It’s dangerous: sometimes he even fantasises
she’s a witch who steals fingernail clippings and uses them to cast a spell against their owner. However, the confidence was
freely given, in the heat of his first love for Scarlet.

Scarlet helps her grandmother to the bathroom. Beverley’s hair has thinned against the scalp, rather horribly. But it will
be the easier to wash and will dry quickly. Scarlet thinks of Jackson’s fingers through her own luxuriant hair, and rejoices.
He will grab it with a strong hand and force her mouth down on his cock and keep it there until she has to gasp for breath.
She likes that. It is not how Louis behaves at all. Just the thought of it makes her falter and catch her breath.

‘Are you not feeling well?’ asks Beverley.

Beverley realises she won’t be able to bend her head down into the basin. The blood rushes to her head these days and she
gets a touch of visual migraine, lightning zigzags round the edges of the cornea. Scarlet, who is also sometimes affected,
as is Cynara, but not Alice, swears aspirin cures it, but aspirin thins the blood, which means if you have a stroke you can
get excessive bleeding in the brain, which can kill you even if the aneurysm doesn’t, so thank you very much, Scarlet, but
no thank-you.

So leaning over the basin is out, and letting the back of your head rest on the edge of the basin when sitting backwards can
also cause a stroke, so she will just have to undress and stand in the bath while Scarlet uses the shower head. Beverley hates
the feeling of her hair when it’s greasy, when what’s left of it lies flat and thinly against her head. When it’s freshly
washed it can fluff up and the thinness
is not so apparent. She hates being old. You can tell yourself as much as you like that everyone takes shifts at being young,
and the thought that all will come to it in the end – if they’re lucky – is some consolation but not enough.

‘I just felt a bit dizzy,’ says Scarlet. ‘But I’m okay.’

‘Perhaps you’re pregnant?’

‘In your dreams,’ says Scarlet. ‘No, I expect I’m adjusting to having a murder in the family.’

‘Don’t worry about it,’ says Beverley. ‘It was a long time ago and you young people have so much to think about. Leaving home.
Running away. Breaking up. Global warming. Credit Crunch. All these terms you throw around to make light work of complicated
things. You all talk and think so fast, trying to pigeon-hole everything and get back to the next e-mail and make sure the
bed of your choice is waiting.’

Scarlet helps Beverley take her clothes off. Beverley still has limited movement in the knee, and complains it is aching.
There is the ongoing fear that she has contracted MRSA. But she hurts in her mind more than in her body. Once she had a body
to be proud of. Now it takes an act of will not to mind being seen naked.

Scarlet feels an unaccustomed tenderness at the sight of her grandmother’s body; it is so frail and yet so tough. The skin
that wraps it is a couple of sizes too large, yet has to somehow fit, so it solves the problem by wrinkling. Yet the body
still works well enough just to move the brain about from place to place, which is its only real purpose once the possibility
of procreation is gone. Scarlet finds there are tears in her eyes. One day, she thinks, she will make her peace with her mother
too, but not just yet.

‘Bless you, Gran,’ she says, without quite knowing why and Beverley looks surprised and touched. Sprays of water from the
shower head bounce off her body; water streams down from her now wet head of hair and the sun breaks through a cloud and a
shaft of sunlight illuminates Beverley in a golden cloak, which lasts a moment and then is gone again. And Scarlet thinks
of the sequence in the old film
She
, when She Who Must Be Obeyed stands once too often in the path of the rolling, rumbling wheel of immortal flame, and withers
into dust. If in the wavery translucence a minor kehua slips from Beverley to cling to Scarlet’s T-shirt it would hardly be
surprising; these creatures get about.

Beverley feels solid enough when Scarlet dabs her dry.

‘Thank you for staying to do that,’ she says when it is done and she is dried and dusted again. She feels unburdened and almost
young again, as if with dirt and grease removed, her body and mind can get going again.

While Beverley is having her hair washed Louis is wondering whether he should call Scarlet and apologise. He said things the
night before that he now regrets. He cannot remember the detail of what was said – which Scarlet can – but he remembers it
as unpleasant and uncivilised. He had to take a knife from her, though she let it go easily enough.