Last Guests of the Season (15 page)

Tom whipped out his hand and went scarlet. ‘I wasn't.'

‘Yes you were, I saw you.'

The canopy … The gap. Jack could see through the end, through the treacherous gap. Tom swung his legs round, and sat up; he put his hands on either side of him.

‘Okay, Jack, that's enough.'

From beside Jack came Robert's voice, steady and kind. He was leaning on the parapet, calling down. ‘All right, Tom? Had a good rest?'

He felt himself go redder still, mumbling a reply. And then footsteps came up from the garden, and Oliver appeared, followed by Jessica.

‘Hello, Tom. What've you been up to?'

‘He's been playing with himself.' Jack's clear voice came floating down through the warm still air.

‘Jack …' said Robert, but it was too late. Jessica burst into giggles, and Oliver, who he thought was going to get angry, seemed to think it was funny too, and then they were all laughing, as if they couldn't help it, as if he was on television or something. He sprang up, and tears of rage and humiliation spurted from him as he made for the other flight of steps.

‘Tom …' Oliver was reaching out for him, trying to take his arm: he snatched it away and began to run, stumbling across the orange tiles of the terrace, down the stone steps and round through the scrubby garden, up the next steps to the water tank. The water running into the tank sounded wonderful: he wanted to plunge into it, or race along the path into the pool, but he could hear Oliver calling him: ‘Tom, Tom!' and he ran up to the iron gate, panting, yanking at it, bursting out on to the road.

‘Tom!'

He stood undecided, breathing hard: should he go down, to the village? No, more people would see him – anyway, he'd be going past the garden again. He'd go up, away from everyone, away from them all. He swung round and went pounding up, panting even harder, terribly hot, the road beneath him swimming through the hateful blur of tears. How could he have done that, how
could
he? All out of doors, where anyone could see him, he must have been mad.

Someone was coming down the road towards him: he looked up, heaving. And there was Frances! He flung himself upon her.

‘Oh, Tom,' she said wearily, holding his hot, sweating body away from her.
‘Now
what's the matter?'

Night, the house in darkness. The shutters, opened in the late afternoon and evening, were closed again now, against air which began, as the sun sank behind the mountains, to grow chilly, and then, as the evening wore on, to grow cold. Jessica, the last of the children to come in from the terrace after supper, complained it was still too early; nonetheless she seemed glad to be in bed, suddenly tired, asking for another blanket. Claire found one in the cupboard, and tucked her in. ‘You really have caught the sun today.' She kissed her, and Jessica turned away, yawning.

Now, the whole house was asleep: Jessica, in her room by herself downstairs, her door open on to the sitting-room, where the moon shone through the pane of clear glass above the terrace doors; everyone else upstairs, soundless. The church clock struck three, but it could have been two o'clock, or four; after a while, a door on the corridor opened, quietly, and was closed again. Slow footsteps moved along the rag runner, hands felt along walls.

Tom, deeply asleep, was making for the stairs.

He came down them carefully, holding the banister, stopping at the turn; his lips moved and his eyelids flickered; he came on down, moving steadily, carefully, reaching the bottom, feeling for a step that wasn't there, standing very still, waiting. Then he moved again, along the wooden passage into the sitting-room, feeling the panelling, stopping when it stopped, feeling the air. He turned, and made for the doors to the terrace, across the moonlit expanse of floorboards, with nothing to stop him, everything airy and open and free.

But Jessica, dreaming uneasily, turned over and cried out something, and he came to a halt, and waited. Silence.

He moved on, reaching out again. His hands met something enormous and hairy, which rocked: his eyes flew open. The room was bright with the moon, but the figure towering above him was huge and dark, headless, with a hat. It swayed towards him, and he pushed at it, shouting. It fell with a dreadful crash, like thunder; somebody screamed. He felt hot pee pour everywhere.

Lights on, doors opening, Jessica's scream. A horrible fizzing sound, which grew louder. Bare feet raced down the stairs, voices were calling.

Someone was holding him close.

Jessica, shivering and tearful, was taken upstairs and tucked into her parents'bed: Robert, turning off lights to quieten the fuse-box, dispensing brandy to shaken grown-ups, said he would sleep down in her room. Jack, undisturbed by any of the uproar, slept on, breathing steadily, as Frances, by the light from the landing, helped Tom in to clean dry pyjamas.

‘There,' she said, buttoning him up, guiding him towards his bed, smoothing the pillows. ‘In you get.'

He was ashen, clammy, his hair sticking up in thick dark tufts. He clambered heavily on to the mattress and sank down.

‘Stay with me.' His eyes were blank.

‘Of course I'll stay.' She sat on the edge of the bed, holding his hand.

‘What happened?' he asked her. ‘What did I do?'

‘You –' she hesitated. Were you supposed to tell children they walked in their sleep? She knew you were never supposed to wake them: they never had woken him. Tonight – what should she say?

‘You went downstairs to the loo,' she said slowly. ‘You must have been half asleep and gone the wrong way, I suppose. So you banged into – that thing.' Well – it might have been the truth. ‘Poor Tom. Never mind, it's all right now.'

‘Mmm.' His breathing slowed. She realised suddenly, as he began to relax, that she had been dreaming of Dora when the crash came from downstairs, but that since then had not thought of her once. Let it go, then, she said to herself, summoning sense and reason, and an ordered future swam up before her, in which Dora had disappeared and Frances and Oliver were reunited, their child between them. Let it go, let it go.

Tom yawned, falling asleep with his hand in hers. Frances knew that Dora, who loved her children dearly, and was always talking about them, would have been the first to fly downstairs at the sound of that terrible crash and the scream; that it would have been she, no one else, not a woman he barely knew, who would have cradled her son in her arms, rocking, reassuring, holding him.
Dora
, she wrote, looking into the darkness, loving her more than ever with this vision,
I was dreaming of you tonight when Tom went sleepwalking
… What was the dream? She closed her eyes, feeling sleep heavy upon her, trying to recapture it.
Let me sink into sleep again, let me find you
…

The floorboards on the landing creaked.

‘Frances?' Claire whispered.

Frances opened her eyes to see her standing in the doorway in her nightdress, holding two cups of hot milk on a tray.

‘How is he?' Claire indicated the cups. ‘Would he like some?'

‘He's almost asleep – look.'

Claire looked. ‘You're not taking him in with you?'

‘Oh, no, we never do that. He's much better off in his own bed.'

‘But if he does it again –'

‘He won't, he never does. Usually we just take him back to bed still asleep, and he doesn't know anything about it.' She yawned, carefully releasing her hand from his. ‘Where's Oliver?'

‘Down in the sitting-room with Robert. They're finishing off the brandy.'

‘Oh. Right.' Frances yawned again, ‘Claire? Thank you – I'm sorry about all this …' She smiled wanly. ‘You must be wishing you'd never asked us.'

‘Nonsense. We'll talk in the morning. Goodnight.'

‘Goodnight.' Frances turned away, smoothing the bedclothes over Tom, looking down into his pale, heavy face.

Claire crossed the landing, and pushed open the door. There was a light on the chest of drawers, a bulb stuck into a wine bottle, with a shade made of raffia: the room looked comforting and warm. Jessica, propped up on the pillows, looked crumpled and tear-stained, not much more than six.

‘Here we are.' Claire sat down beside her, passing her milk. ‘You'll feel better when you've had this.'

Jessica took it mutely, cupping it between her hands. ‘It's got skin on it,' she said after a while.

‘Because you're not drinking it.' Claire reached out and lifted the skin with her finger, draping it over the side of the mug. ‘Remember Dr Dolittle? Gub-Gub the pig had a clothes-line for the skin on hot chocolate.'

‘Dr Dolittle's racist,' said Jessica. ‘They said so at school.'

‘Are you sure?'

‘Yes. The parrot wants to change the black prince to white in one of the books. She keeps on about it.'

Claire shook her head. ‘I don't remember. Anyway, drink it.'

They sipped in silence. Across the landing she could hear Frances, coming out of the boys'room, going quietly along the landing to her own. She had looked like a nurse, sitting there beside Tom, as if she were taking his pulse. No, she thought, reflecting, actually she looked like a patient: frail, in crumpled white pyjamas, dark beneath the eyes, sitting in silence.

‘Mum?'

‘Yes?'

‘Is it normal to sleepwalk?'

‘It's unusual.'

‘Did Jack and me ever do it?'

‘No, never.'

‘So why –'

‘I don't know why,' said Claire. ‘These things happen, children grow out of them. I'm sorry you had such a fright. Are you feeling better now?'

Jess put the cup on the floor and lay down, yawning. ‘A bit. Where's Dad?'

‘Having a drink with Oliver. I expect they'll go to bed in a minute.' Claire finished the milk, tepid now, and went to switch off the light.

‘Leave it,' said Jess from the pillows. ‘Please.'

‘Okay.' She came back to bed, and pulled down the duvet, climbing in beside her. ‘Isn't this nice?' She put out an arm and stroked Jess's thick heavy hair. ‘We haven't slept together for a long time.'

‘Don't start getting soppy.'

Claire smiled. ‘You are feeling better.'

Jess yawned again. ‘Goodnight. Thanks for the milk.'

‘Goodnight, sleep tight. No rush in the morning.' Claire lay in the warm, contented light of the lamp across the room, hearing, from downstairs, Robert and Oliver's low voices and then, from somewhere far away in the mountains, a dog, yowling. Then everything was quiet again, and she closed her eyes, uncertain in those last, drifting moments before sleep whether it were Jess or Jack or Tom who lay so close beside her.

‘I'm sorry about all this,' Oliver was saying.

Robert shook his head. ‘Please don't be. We're just glad he's not hurt.'

‘Yes.' Oliver looked into his brandy, thoughtful.

‘It's happened before?'

‘From time to time. Perhaps every three months or so. Occasionally there's a run of it, two or three nights together, but that's rare. I shouldn't think, after tonight, he'll do it again while we're here.'

‘And he doesn't wake up? This is the first time?'

‘Yes. Unfamiliar house, I suppose. Normally he finds his way around, quite often we've heard him and found him making his own way back to bed. It's more of a problem for us than for him – he's quite all right the next morning. Straight off to school.'

Robert was moved to ask, he didn't quite know why, about the holidays. In the holidays, said Oliver, Tom went to his child-minder. This was the first time, it seemed, that they'd spent more than a day or two all together since – well, it was probably Easter.

He shrugged. ‘I expect we're all still needing to settle down a bit, that might have something to do with it. But we've discussed it with our GP – she says he'll grow out of it. All the literature confirms that view.'

The literature, thought Robert. It was a word that sat ill with a child, somehow.

They were in the far corner of the sitting-room, Robert low in an unsprung armchair, Oliver opposite on the worn sofa, brandy on the coffee table between them. Placed thus for direct conversation, they did not meet each other's eyes, looking down into their glasses, or round the room. A single low-watt lamp stood on the desk in the other corner, which was lined with bookshelves, the foot of the L in what Claire and Robert always spoke of as a lovely room, broad and spacious, beautifully proportioned. Now, shadowy beyond that dim pool of light, Robert felt it threatening and unfamiliar. Jessica's screaming rang in his ears; across by the dining-room door the dark shape of the shepherd's straw cloak was back on its stand, where it always stood: righted again, waiting to topple again.

Oliver was silent, drinking. He wore a long, deep blue Paisley dressing-gown, a good one, which looked as though it might have been inherited from a father who had bought things to last. Robert didn't know anything about Oliver's father, or, indeed, anything about Oliver, and sitting there waiting for him to continue, distant and unemotional, he felt that he did not very much want to know. However, he did want to learn more about Tom, and he said now, keeping it light, ‘Children …', as if in the kind of complicity he imagined Claire shared with her women friends, other mothers: coping, raising their eyes to the heavens.

Oliver did not answer. Moths bumped against the parchment shade of the lamp; Robert cleared his throat in the silence. Oliver said suddenly: ‘We never wanted children, they never came into it.' He drained his glass, made a gesture of resignation. ‘But these things happen.'

Robert reached for the brandy bottle. Refilling their glasses he thought: yes, but I don't want to know how they happen – not in this case, not now. Long used to confidences from women friends at work, long used to an easy, unquestioning intimacy with his wife, he surprised himself by thinking; this is women's talk, it's private. It was the kind of information he expected to be fed to him by Claire – perhaps this was what Frances had disclosed to her the other evening, up by the pool, although he couldn't imagine why Claire should have seemed so thrown by it. But it was, surely, a conversation much more appropriate to them: he didn't want to be the recipient of Oliver's slow and heavy unburdening, even though, concerned for his child, he had invited it. Indeed, when he tried to think of one man with whom he had ever had, or wished to have, such a conversation, he found he couldn't. Not one. Nor had he ever missed it. Still –