My Life as a Man (22 page)

‘Has there been an accident?’ Beate asked.

Ignoring them, Norman pushed past us to the table.

‘The case isn’t in the car,’ he wheezed down at Eileen.

‘What case?’ she said. Without giving him time to answer, she asked Bernard, ‘A case?’ She made it sound like a bag of dogshit. ‘Is that why you’re
here?’

The two brothers spoke at the same time. Bernard’s monosyllable was lost in Norman’s outburst of anger. ‘Are you telling me you don’t know where it is?’

‘Who
are
these people?’ Beate asked.

Oddly enough, her question was directed at August. Perhaps she was in the habit of expecting him to know everything. He shrugged and stared down at the table, seeming to try to distance himself
from all of us.

‘I’m the husband,’ Bernard said. ‘I’ve come to take my wife home.’

Then an extraordinary thing happened. Eileen looked at me and then at him, and she shook her head. I couldn’t know that the moment had changed my life, but something beyond the mind
understood for my heart moved in me.

She had made a choice between us. He, too, saw that and understood what it meant. For that moment, it was as if the three of us were alone.

‘Mr Gas?’ he wondered. The words were dry with contempt, like a stick that was ready to break, but there was no disbelief in them. ‘A boy who ran away because he was
frightened.’

‘But he came back.’ She spoke quietly, but with an extraordinary soft vehemence.

Was that enough to make her love me? It was a choice I had hardly considered, and now it had been made for me.

Norman, however, was not to be turned from his own concern. ‘Where’s it gone?’

‘She doesn’t know,’ I said.

He overshadowed her with his bulk. ‘Either you know or he does. Which is it? Is it the boy? Is he the liar?’ He turned on me. ‘Are you the liar?’

‘And if he is,’ Beate cried, ‘hasn’t a son the right to protect his mother?’

At that, I heard a peculiar click in Bernard’s throat as if the dry stick were being snapped in two.

‘A son.’ He hitched himself with one haunch on the table, looking down on Eileen. ‘Well, we always wanted one of those.’

He looked from her to me, and the heaves of his laughter broke like a tidal wave. It promised us a lifetime of scorn, of hurtful misunderstandings, side-glances, sneers, jokes and asides, all
the pain of the mismatched, unmatchable years. We stood under it and weren’t parted. And when it ended, we had survived it and he saw that we had survived it.

The room put together the broken pieces of its silence. I became conscious of Beate frowning and smiling strangely in her confusion; and that August, even if he didn’t understand
everything, had caught the central fact of the relation between Eileen and me.

Only Norman was unaffected. He had waited the laughter out, let it flow round him, and now went straight on.

‘That case belongs to me – to us, my brother and me. We want it back.’

‘I don’t know where it is,’ I said.

As I spoke, my eyes turned to August. As soon as I’d done it, I knew that it must seem like an accusation. Certainly, I didn’t do it deliberately. If there had been a moment of
thought, I wouldn’t have risked it. In anticipation perhaps, he had raised his head and met my look blankly, almost vacantly.

‘If you think I’ll leave without that case, you’ll make me do damage,’ Norman said. ‘I’ll not be cheated.’

August sighed. It was a quiet sound after so much noise, but it made its mark.

‘I meant no harm,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t understand why it was left locked up out there. Why wasn’t it brought into the house? So I took it out and found a hiding
place for it. I’ve never done anything like that in my life before. But that’s all I did. I didn’t even look inside it.’ His voice was dull, like that of a man full of guilt
and self-blame. When he went on, it was almost in a whine. ‘There’s no living to be made in a place like this.’ He put his head in his hands and began to weep.

I looked at him with something like horror.

‘Let’s go get it,’ Norman said. To Bernard, he said, ‘You stay here and sort out this pair.’

‘Not on your own,’ Bernard said. ‘The two of us’ll go.’

‘You not trust me?’

‘What are you talking about?’ Bernard sounded bewildered.

Norman stared at him, eyes blinking constantly. He must have understood that the idea of being deserted for the money had never entered his brother’s head.

‘All I meant was I can do it myself. You know I can. See what I brought?’ With a struggle – maybe it was held by the fat of his belly – he pulled a gun from under his
jacket. Waving it at us, he said, ‘Don’t worry about it working. I got it from a friend of ours.’ He giggled. ‘He doesn’t need it any more.’

At sight of the gun, August put his forehead down on the table and covered his head with his arms. It was ignominious.

Norman waddled behind him and poked him in the neck with the gun.

‘Monkeys do that,’ he said, grinning at his brother over the crouching man. ‘It means: my arse is yours.’ He poked again, the gun gouging into flesh. ‘Stand
up!’

August lurched to his feet, but bowed forward, leaning on the table as if his legs could hardly support him.

‘Where is it?’ the fat man shouted, his voice breaking with excitement. His eyes went round the room. ‘Where have you hidden it?’

‘Outside,’ August mumbled.

‘What? What?’

‘I dug a hole under a rock.’

‘Show me, you bastard!’

August began to move towards the door. Panting for breath, Norman crowded after him. The gun jabbed and jabbed. August showed no sign of feeling it.

‘Don’t think I wouldn’t kill you,’ Norman said. There was a euphoria about him that reminded me of my friend Tony the morning after he claimed to have lost his
virginity.

Bernard said suddenly, ‘Something’s wrong.’

He moved in front of them, blocking August. Till that moment his features had been blurred, now they were sharp, wary and suspicious. It was as if he had come awake.

Catching August by the chin, forcing his head up, he asked, ‘Why hide it outside?’

But it was Norman who answered. Voice shrill and breaking, he cried, ‘Because he was frightened.’

‘Tell us again,’ Bernard insisted. ‘Where’s the money?’

‘Under a rock by a pool,’ August said.

Bernard slapped him in the face. The act was horrifying but the reaction was worse, for August whimpered.

‘Tell us where! We’ll find it ourselves.’

‘And leave him here?’ Norman sneered. ‘Where’s the sense in that?’ It seemed his brother becoming active was an unwelcome development.

Bernard ignored him. ‘We could shoot you in the legs,’ he told August. ‘That would keep you here till we came back.’

‘Please,’ August begged. ‘You wouldn’t find it in the dark.’

‘We’ve got all night.’

Norman lost patience at this. He shoved August so that he staggered forward, causing Bernard instinctively to step aside. As he did, August moved out into the hall and opened the outside door.
Next moment, as if he had tugged the brothers in his wake, all three were gone.

A figure coming to my side startled me. The height, almost the same as mine, told me it was Beate.

‘They’ve taken their car,’ I said. The low note of the engine grumbled along, not fading at all. ‘Why would they take a car?’

‘The fat one was in a hurry. He had no time to waste.’

Though she stood close enough to make me uncomfortable, she kept her face turned from me as she spoke.

‘August said he’d hidden the case under a rock near a pool.’ She didn’t answer. ‘There’s just the one pool near here, isn’t there?’

I could hear the sigh of her breath, feel its warmth on my cheek. She was so close I caught her smell, not very clean, but mixed with a salty, heavy warmth.

‘Why didn’t August take them by the path?’ I persisted.

‘Maybe he tried,’ she said softly, ‘and they were frightened.’

Not Norman, I thought. Not the fat man, transformed and self-intoxicated. But Bernard might have been. Not frightened – that wasn’t his style – but cautious.

A different question occurred to me. ‘Can you get to the pool from the road?’ The day I walked up to the croft on the hill I hadn’t seen a track off to the left, but there was
no reason why I should have noticed one.

Without answering, she stepped away to fade back in the darkness.

When I went inside, Eileen was in the same place, hands clasped in front of her on the table. I sat down beside her and, after a moment, put my hand on hers. It was the first time I had touched
her in a way that made a claim upon her. She didn’t move her hands from under mine.

‘Are you sorry?’ she asked.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. I thought she meant for going off and leaving her behind.

‘For running away with me?’

‘I never meant to get you into so much trouble,’ I said.

‘I’m not sorry I met you. I’m selfish enough not to be sorry for that.’

‘I wouldn’t change anything.’ The clumsy words were all I could find.

‘My life had stopped,’ she said, ‘and now it’s begun again. Whatever happens.’

We sat for a long time. We didn’t talk again. We were shy with one another. The light from the lamp on the table grew dim; perhaps the wick needed to be trimmed or the oil was low. The
plates and glasses sat in pools of shadow. Once I heard her sigh and I tightened my hand on hers. I’d rowed at the seaside, but I’d never experienced what I’d seen once in a film:
a man and woman carried in a boat on a calm river, his oars hardly feathering the water. Among the shadows, we were drifting and I had no thoughts I could put into words. At last, something,
perhaps a night bird crying or the easing of peats in the grate, brought me back to my senses. I thought of Bernard and wondered if the two of us should simply set out across the fields before he
came back, run off into the darkness and hope it would hide us. At that moment I heard the murmur of voices outside.

I had the momentary impulse to take my hand from Eileen’s, even to retreat to the other side of the table. When she made no movement, I found the courage to sit still.

It was Beate, however, who appeared in the doorway. She stood looking at us for a moment in silence, then she turned away and we heard her feet on the bare treads as she went upstairs.

‘I thought she’d gone to bed,’ Eileen said softly.

I shook my head, not wanting to speak in case my voice trembled.

‘How much longer?’ she asked.

Like me, she was thinking of Bernard, his malice and what it might make him do.

The agony was prolonged. It was August who finally arrived. Like his sister, he stood watching us from the doorway.

‘You waited up,’ he said. ‘That was thoughtful of you.’

When I heard the note of mockery in his voice, I knew that something had happened.

‘Is my husband with you?’ Eileen asked.

He shook his head. ‘I walked back,’ he said. I realised there had been no sound of a car. ‘That’s what took the time.’

‘Back from the pond?’ I asked.

He ignored me. His eyes never left Eileen; I might not have spoken.

‘They put the case in the car and off they went,’ he told her.

No sound of a car. Could I have missed it going past on the road outside?

‘All the way back, I thought they’d be here before me. But it looks,’ he said to her, ‘as if your husband got what he came for and left.’

‘Yes,’ she said. Her voice wasn’t much more than a whisper. Next day, I would try to understand how much damage these last years must have done to her self-esteem. At that
moment, though, I waited in panic for her to protest that she didn’t believe him. Instead she looked at me and half whispered in the same gentle, withdrawn voice, ‘I think I’ll go
to bed now, if you don’t mind.’

He hardly stood aside for her, so that she had to push past him.

When she had gone, he said, ‘Why don’t you go upstairs and join her?’

His words startled me like a threat. He smiled as if I amused him. ‘Why shouldn’t you sleep with her?’ he asked. ‘She isn’t your mother.’

The brutality of it stunned me. If he didn’t respect Eileen, what chance did we have?

Alone, I listened for a third time to steps mounting the bare stairway and the gentle percussion of a closing door.

After a time, I was surprised to feel a hand on my shoulder.

When I sat up, she was holding out a bowl of porridge with the spoon sitting in it.

‘No.’ She pressed me back when I went to get up. ‘Sup it where you are. And the tea’s made, and there’s an egg, if you want one.’

I muttered some sort of thanks. To add to my discomfort she sat at the end of the couch and there was nothing for it but to stir the spoon in the bowl and begin.

‘I took a tray up to Eileen,’ she said.

‘I’ll finish this and get up.’

‘When I was a child, I loved my breakfast in bed.’

I couldn’t think of anything to say to that.

‘What about you?’ she asked.

I was ashamed to tell her I couldn’t remember ever being given breakfast in bed.

‘Maybe you were never ill,’ she said, as if she had read my thoughts. ‘I got it in my bed when I had a cold. A bit ill, but not too much, was best.’

She was using again that oddly colourless accent both of them had used in the beginning – so that it had been possible to believe they were from South Africa, since their voices carried no
claim to belonging anywhere.

‘I sometimes thought it would be nice to get it for no reason – I mean, not have to be ill at all. But even if such a thought had occurred to my mother, my father would never have
allowed it. Would your father?’