The Colonel's Daughter (2 page)

‘He says he loves me, Franklin.'

‘And you believe the asshole?'

‘You don't need to call him that.'

‘Yes, I
need.
For me! Have you forgotten about
me?
You're screwing my life up – and yours – for an asshole!'

‘I told you, I didn't want this to happen . . .'

‘Why don't you go, Margaret?'

‘What?'

‘Now. Just go now.'

Margaret is silent, frightened. She's used to Franklin Doyle, his flat, his fruit press, his lumpy dressing gown, his electric typewriter.

‘Why now?'

Doyle puts his hands round his head and scrapes his scalp. ‘For my sake.'

Margaret feels homeless, adrift, afraid of night-time and cold weather and dreams.

‘Can't I go tomorrow, Franklin, when I've had time to fix something up and pack . . . ?'

‘I'll pack for you,' says Doyle, throwing his body up and out of the heavy designer-designed chair, hurtling it breathlessly towards his bedroom where his clothes and Margaret's, thrown together, softly litter it. He picks up at random a brown bra, a pair of high-heeled sandals, a pink sweater, a copy of
Ten Days that Shook the World
(a gift from him, unread), a jewellery box and a white nightdress and throws them into a pile on the double bed. He drags a suitcase from the top of a louvered wardrobe and begins tossing things in, scrunching and crumpling them, magazines, boots, tights, shirts, scarves, Tampax, leotards, dresses . . .

Margaret, relieved of her confession, alive to the sudden consequence of that confession, starts to sob for what she has destroyed, starts to weep and weep as her possessions go tumbling in. She feels vandalised, spoiled.

‘I've nowhere to go!' she says. Doyle stops snatching her belongings, slams the suitcase lid on the stuff he has collected, zips it up and hurls it at her. ‘Go to the creep! Go and bawl in his lap!'

So Margaret gathers up the case, remembering item by item all the things she is leaving behind, takes her pale jacket from a peg in the hall, turns, stares at Doyle, at his clenched hands, at his mouth, opens the door of the flat, turns again, sees Doyle through her shimmer of tears, goes out onto the landing lit by a brass chandelier and closes the door behind her. Slowly, and with sorrow she never expected, she walks down the stairs.

Doyle is at the sitting-room window. He pushes back the net curtains which smell mustily of dust and city rain, waits for the sound of the front door and the white figure of Margaret creeping out with her suitcase into the London night. He feels the failure and rage of forty-seven years lift his arm and bring it crashing down onto the window. Margaret slips from view. A cascade of glass fragments hurtles two storeys onto the pavement, startling a middle-aged Bavarian sculptress walking her dachshund on a tartan lead. ‘
Mein Gott
!' she exclaims and gazes up. She sees the light at Doyle's window. Nothing else. She walks on.

*

Near dawn, which comes early on their side of the mountain, Colonel Browne half wakes and mumbles across the space between him and his wife in her twin bed: ‘Funny old Admiral didn't get his share of the meat.'

Lady Amelia sits up and stares at her husband's arm which is dangling onto the carpet. ‘Duffy?' she says, ‘What's this about meat?'

Colonel Browne opens a yellowed eye, notices his trailing arm and withdraws it into the safety of the Swiss-laundered duvet.

‘Alright Amelia?' he asks.

She has put on her bedjacket.

‘I was perfectly alright until you woke me up with some nonsense about Admiral and meat.'

‘Meat?' The Colonel strokes a few strands of hair into place across his head. ‘Got that damned pins and needles in my hand again. Must be the birds.'

‘
Birds?
'

‘Vultures or something. Dream, I suppose. Must've been. You put a carcass out on the lawn and all these birds came . . .'

‘This is a holiday, Duffy dear,' says Amelia gently but firmly, ‘No nightmares on holiday.'

*

Yet at dawn, in his Camden basement, Jim Reese is dreaming his habitual nightmare which no holiday has ever obliterated since he was a Brighton schoolboy and his mother's house stank of lodgers' tobacco and frying eggs. He dreams and redreams the day his room is given away to Mr John Ripley, a North Lancashire toys and novelties rep making a summer killing on the south coast, and his boy's bed is squashed into a suffocating space no bigger nor better than a cupboard, and all his
Eagle
cutouts are torn down and his drawer of fag cards emptied for Mr Ripley to lay his handkerchiefs and his metal hip flask in.

Jim Reese wakes and stares out at pale light on the area steps. He is sweaty, uncomfortable, suffocated by the dream. All his life, since the Brighton days, he has moved on – place to place, woman to woman – and yet he has always felt contained, fenced up. John Ripley's ghost and the ghost of his mother frying eggs have gawped at his efforts to understand himself. Now he feels emptied of understanding. Emptied of the will to understand. He has a set of drums. Playing these, he feels intelligent. He soars. He knows life is for living, learning, creating. He wanted to form a band or group. He knew a singer, Keith, getting small-fry gigs but confident, with a cracked black-sounding voice like the voice of Joe Cocker. Keith was interested in the group idea for a while, till he got a US recording contract and pissed off into the big time. Now Keith sings in Vegas and Jim Reese is where he is, looking out at the area wall. The drums are silent most days. Sometimes he polishes the chrome and wood, because if things get tougher than they are, he might be forced, just to hold himself together, to sell them. Two weaknesses have blighted his life and he knows them: he cannot sell himself and he cannot get angry. It isn't that he doesn't
feel
rage. He feels it alright, souring his blood, a poison. Yet he can't express it, just as he can't express himself (only through his hands on the drums). Like his person and his will, his anger is contained, walled up, silent.

Jim Reese gets up, lights a cigarette, looks at his watch. He can hear a blackbird in the cherry trees above his window. He begins listening for a car. He returns to the bed and sits on it, still smoking, still listening. High summer, yet his body is pale – kept underneath the road where soon trucks will thunder, kept uselessly out of sight. He is thirty-seven. Far too old, says his mother's fat-spattered ghost, to be a pop star. You should have put all that out of your mind.

Time passes. He makes tea, sits and waits. Sun glints on the rail of the rusty area steps. Saturday traffic starts to rumble. He feels knotted, anxious. Charlotte. He says her name, listens to the minute echo of her name that hangs for a second in the drab room. When she is with him, he feels breathless, hot. Her intelligence suffocates him. Now, without her, he feels the same breathlessness in his fear that she's deserted him, as he's sometimes wondered if, even hoped that, she would. Yet the flat is hers and everything in it except him and his drums. In place on the desk is her typewriter and in place beside it, half finished, is her latest article,
Eve and the Weapons of Eden
. She worked on the paper all the previous day, he remembers, until seven-thirty when she came and found him sitting by the drums with a tin of chrome-cleaner and a T-shirt rag, crouched on the floor beside him and told him: ‘I'll be out most of the night. I'm driving to Buckinghamshire, to collect some things. I can't say what they are. I'll show you when I get back – probably very late, towards morning.' He took up the chrome-cleaner and the rag blotchy with stain and didn't look at her as she went out, carrying a suitcase. I don't own you, he said to her when she could no longer hear him, don't imagine it.

The tea is cold. The traffic is loud. The traffic reveals to him, day after day, his own stasis. His air is blasted with the lead fumes of other people's purpose; they fart their travelling ambitions into his face. He thinks of moving, as he has always moved, on. Somewhere quieter. Wales, even. Go to a mountain and hear the silly bla of sheep. Why not? Quit the notion that you can ever make anything of the city, or the city of you. Yet it is Charlotte who holds him, balanced on the edge of being there and not being there. She stands between him and his own disappearance. She feeds him tiny grains of her own purpose in the meals she makes and a little of herself creeps inside him.

Jim Reese will wait for another twenty-seven minutes before the green Citroen is parked near the gate to the basement and he sees Charlotte come slowly down the iron steps. In these twenty-seven minutes, a brilliant yellow sun rises on Wengen, flooding the balcony of Colonel and Lady Amelia Browne's room in the Hotel Alpenrose. Lady Amelia, wearing a blue robe de chambre, slips out onto the balcony without waking the Colonel, who has returned to his muddled dreaming, and begins her breathing exercises, gasping in the champagne air, dizzying herself with the cutting breath of the mountain. Into her mind, as her thin chest rises and falls, comes a delicious flowering of appreciation for the well-ordered world spread out like a gracefully laid table before her. Even, she notices, the arrangement of geraniums on the balcony itself is scrupulously wise, colours tossed into each other, growing, spreading, hanging, each bloom excellently placed. For Amelia Browne, order in all things has been an absolutely satisfying principle of sixty-eight years. In her valuable Victorian dolls' house, given to her when she was four, the little pipe-cleaner men and women she moved from room to room never – as occurred in the dolls' houses of her friends – stood on the beds nor lay down on the kitchen floor.

Charlotte is lying on the basement bed. The traffic is roaring now. Jim Reese finds her beautiful in the early morning light, with her tired eyes. He touches her with a tenderness he often feels yet can seldom express.

‘Jim,' she says, pushing away his hand, ‘this is the most important day of my life.'

Jim leaves her body, snatches up the cigarette packet. He stares at the crammed suitcase she has planted in the middle of the room. The explanation, he thinks suddenly, will be worse than what she has done. Because she is grave with achievement. She sits up, pushes wisps of hair out of her eyes.

‘Open the suitcase,' she says.

Jim feels cross, weary. Revelations have always disturbed and irritated him. But Charlotte's eyes are pools of red. It's as if she's tracked for days and nights across some desert, living only on her will. Her hand shakes as she fingers her hair.

‘Go on . . .'

Bored, resigned, he goes to the suitcase and opens it. As the lid springs back and the case falls with a thud onto his bare feet, bruising them with its extraordinary weight, Jim curses, tips the case, extracts his feet, kneels and rubs them.

Now he looks into the case for the first time and is motionless. Charlotte's red eyes stare at his crouching back and over his shoulder.

‘Jesus Christ!'

‘It's for you. Some of it for my work. But most of it for you. There are other things in the car – pictures and a clock . . .'

So he begins to scoop it all out now and pile it round himself: loops of pearls, diamonds stiffly jointed into necklaces and bracelets and inset with emeralds, gold chokers and chains and pendants, a moonstone tiara, rings, earrings, jewelled paperweights and boxes, boxes of amber and onyx and lapis lasuli, an ivory fan, silver knives, forks, spoons, silver tea spoons and napkin rings and salt cellars, silver table birds, bronze statuettes of deer and dogs and naked women with fishes, gold snuff boxes and cigarette boxes, tortoiseshell card cases and combs and brushes . . .

So he is trapped, between this weight of devastating objects at his feet and Charlotte's burning at his back.

‘We'll put you on the road now. Pay agents. Find someone to replace Keith . . .'

He looks dumbly down, stirs the treasures and they clink and clack. Minute lasers of light glance off the diamonds. ‘Shit,' he says.

Charlotte stands up, crosses to him, crouches down.

‘Jim, it's a simple conversion.'

Conversion? When he couldn't understand her, he hated her.

‘It's so obvious, so right. We convert all this artifice into life.'

‘Shit,' he says again.

‘It's the most perfect thing I've done.'

But Jim stands up, kicks a pearl necklace away from him like a snake and it scudders under a chest of drawers. He can't look at Charlotte with her eyes like coal, so he turns away and leans his head against the wall. I want to break her, he thinks now. I want to break her for imagining this. For her vanity. She relegates me, miniaturises me: ‘his life is so pitifully small, it can be transformed, reshaped by the selling of pearls and little boxes and ornaments.' But yes, for once in my life, I want to break someone. I can feel it start. Anger. Starts in my temple, but pushes out across my shoulders and down all the length of my arms and into my hands.

‘I could kill you!'

His voice is a sob, weak, vanquished. But when he senses her moving to him, he is round like a whip and facing her. She reaches out to him, but he binds her arms to her side and shakes her, shakes her till she screams and pulls away, stumbles over the suitcase and almost falls. But no, he grabs her again and his hands cut deep into her arms, so hard does he grip, because he can feel her strength, equal to his and he must keep hold, keep hold and let it mount in him, the new anger so long buried in bone marrow and trapped, but now flooding muscle and sinew, pushing and bursting till it hurtles from him and he sees it arc and fall in Charlotte's body hurtling over into the air, then falling, falling as slowly as his long cry, her head crunching the grey metal of the typewriter and all her papers crushed and scattered as the body dives to the floor and is still.