The Crow Trap (20 page)

“Yeah, look, I’m really sorry. Things haven’t been easy lately. I expect she … ” he nodded towards the open door,”… explained. I needed time to sort myself out.”

She heard the self-pity in his voice and for a moment she was cross.

What about me? she wanted to shout. Didn’t you think of me? Then she realized it was no good. If she wanted to keep in touch with her father she wouldn’t be able to make demands on him. Edmund Fulwell would need looking after.

Chapter Twenty-Four.

For nearly four years Grace took responsibility for her father, though this went largely unrecognized. It was an unprecedented period of stability for them both.

One day, soon after Edmund arrived back on the scene her Biology teacher called her back after class. “Have you ever thought of joining the Wildlife Trust? There’s a junior section. I think you’d enjoy it.”

The junior section consisted of Grace and two spotty adolescent lads who refused to speak to her, but she was taken under the wing of three elderly spinster sisters. The Halifax sisters lived in a house which had remained largely unchanged since their parents’ day. It was a suburb of the town which had once been very grand, housing ship owners and traders, though many of the houses had now been converted into flats. It had a library, filled with natural history books field guides, sets of encyclopaedias and monographs.

She spent hours in the library. Although Grace had never complained of the noise in Laurel Close, very soon after meeting her the sisters invited her to use the room for homework. They said it was good for them to have someone young in the house again. Later Grace suspected this had been suggested by her Biology teacher; at the time it seemed miraculous.

When she was working the sisters left her to her own devices, except the youngest, Cynthia, who had per med hair and large squelchy bosoms.

She interrupted occasionally to bring Grace cups of tea and home-baked ginger biscuits.

During the summer the Wildlife Trust organized field trips. A coach took them up the coast to look at sea birds or inland to walk in the hills. Then, for the first time, Grace plodded along pebbly river banks looking for otter spraints. Later in the season they saw bats flying into the stone barn to roost.

It was the badger watch which made the biggest impression. She sat with the Halifax sisters in a wood at dusk and waited for the badgers to emerge from a sett, their noses snuffling the air. Leading the trip was a postgraduate student who talked about her research. She knew each individual badger, how the group was organized.

When I grow up, Grace thought, that’s what I’m going to do.

Occasionally she invited her father to accompany her on the Wildlife Trust excursions but he always refused.

“Na!” he said. “I’ve never been much into wildlife. Except for eating it.”

Grace was already a vegetarian but she didn’t rise to the bait. She suspected that food was more important to his life than she was. At least it provided him with an income. He’d started work in the little restaurant where he took her on their first meeting. He’d been at school with Rod, the owner. He was an inspirational and meticulous cook and the restaurant appeared in good food guides. Because of this Rod put up with his occasional bouts of drinking, his truculence. He also allowed Edmund to live in squalor in the flat above.

Grace continued living with Maureen and Frank in Laurel Close but she spent little time there. Before school every day she took Charlie for a walk in the park. She could already identify all the common birds there. When school was over she walked to the sisters’ house, stopping on the way to have coffee with her dad if he was there. Sometimes he was out with a woman, though seldom, she thought, with the same one more than once. In the summer she walked to the town centre from the sisters’ house and caught the bus home. In the winter, when it was dark, Cynthia gave her a lift home in the sisters’ ancient Rover, or Frank would pick her up. Maureen and Frank didn’t seem to resent the time she spent away from home. Her Biology teacher told them that she was Oxbridge material and they said they wanted to help. Grace never seemed to have friends of her own age, but she didn’t really want them.

Suddenly, in the summer before her fifth form, she noticed a change in her father. She had listened to him talking about his women before, given sympathy when it was needed but in those cases it was a matter of hurt pride, not unrequited love. This time, it seemed, it was serious.

He gave up drinking. Completely. He cleaned the flat, got his hair cut. Grace asked if she could meet the woman.

“Not yet.”

“She’s not married?” She didn’t want him to get hurt.

“No, it’s not that. She won’t go out with me. Not yet. But she will, I can tell she’s weakening.”

And eventually she must have weakened because when Grace called into the restaurant again he couldn’t stop grinning and he couldn’t sit still for a second.

“Has he been drinking?” she asked Rod. She liked Rod, who was Welsh and calm. She never found out how he ended up running this unlikely restaurant.

“No. He’s been like this all day. High as a kite.”

The woman was called Sue. She ran an office supplies business from a shop on the High Street. She was much younger than him. He saw her first when he walked past the shop and he went in on impulse and bought some typing paper and a bottle of Tippex.

“Best fiver I ever spent,” he said.

Grace looked at him anxiously, like a mother watching her child embark on a first romance. She hoped it would work out for him. She’d like to pass some of the responsibility for looking after him on to Sue.

Sue was small with sleek blond hair. She wore the sort of make-up which gave her skin the shine of porcelain. She was very lively, never still, always talking and smiling and waving her hands. She and Edmund talked about things in which Grace had little interest cinema, music, theatre. Grace wasn’t jealous it was quite a relief to spend more time in the Halifax library. She didn’t find the syllabus hard but she wanted to do well in the exams. When she did see her father he was excitable, happy, full of plans.

It was at this time that his mother died.

“So,” he said to Grace on one of her occasional visits to the restaurant, ‘ old bat’s finally gone.”

“Can I come with you to the funeral?”

He looked at her sharply. “I’m not going,” he said. And that was it.

He wouldn’t discuss it any more.

Grace was a bit disappointed. She still dreamed of meeting the family in the big house. Then she thought they must have offended her father very badly if he wouldn’t attend his mother’s funeral.

One Sunday in November, the day before the start of her mock exams, she received a phone call from her father. She had spent all day in the sisters’ library and Maureen and Frank were making a fuss of her. They said she’d been working too hard and she needed to relax. They were sitting in front of the television drinking tea. The bad boys were out.

Frank took the call. When he came back he was frowning.

“It’s your father,” he said. “Do you want to take it?”

“Of course, why not?”

“I’m sorry, pet. I think he’s been drinking.”

This was an understatement. Her father was raging drunk, just coherent enough for her to work out that Sue had dumped him. She wanted to rush round to the flat to see him but for once Frank put his foot down.

“Come on!” he said. “He’ll not even know you’re there, the state he’s in.”

“But he might be sick. Choke. People can die.” “I’ll go,” Frank said.

She realized for the first time what an unusually good man Frank was.

The night before he’d been up until midnight sitting in the police station with one of the boys who’d been caught brawling in the youth club. All day he’d been ferrying them around football training for one, the Halifax sisters for her. He always cooked lunch on Sundays to give Maureen a break. He looked exhausted but he was prepared to go out again. She went up to the chair where he was slumped, his feet in his slippers she gave him two Christmases ago, his sweatshirt splattered with cooking stains. She sat on the arm of the chair, put her arm round his shoulders and hugged him. It was the first intimate physical contact she’d had with another human being since she was five and trying to impress the foster parents that couldn’t love her. Frank knew this was an important moment but he didn’t say anything. He took her thin hand in his and squeezed it, then he got up to put on his shoes and find his car keys.

When he got back Maureen was in bed because she had to be up for the early shift the next day. Grace was waiting for him.

“How is he?”

“Well, he’s had a skinful, that’s for sure.” Frank was born in Liverpool and when he was tired he talked like a Scouser.

“But he is all right?”

“Oh aye, he’ll be fine. Right as rain in the morning. And yes, he has been sick down the toilet. I got him to bed and he’s fast asleep.”

“Frank?”

“Yes.”

“Thanks.” This time she just reached out and touched his arm. He understood, and smiled.

“Getaway,” he said. “Now off to bed. It’s an important day tomorrow.

Mo and me have never had a kid go away to college before.”

At first she thought this would be a drinking bout like many others her dad had been through. For a few days he’d be dead to the world then he’d emerge, sheepish and bedraggled, to apologize. She concentrated on her exams.

Three days later she called into the restaurant to find Rod doing the cooking.

“It’s Ed’s day off; he said. “He’s gone out.” She thought that was a good sign. At least her father wasn’t upstairs in the flat drinking whisky straight from the bottle. He’d never been a social drinker.

“Does that mean he’s back with Sue?”

Rod shrugged. She took that, optimistically, to mean that things were pretty much back to normal.

Then she saw him in the town. It was the last day of the exams and the Halifax sisters had invited her to a special tea to celebrate. She was walking down the High Street with a gang of girls. She’d tagged along because there was a question in the Chemistry paper she wanted to discuss, but they weren’t very interested. They were talking about a party one of the sixth formers was giving, to which most of them had been invited.

The High Street had been pedestrianized and paved with ornamental brick. Wrought iron seats had been placed, back to back, in the middle of the streets and there were tubs of plants and shrubs, long since dead and waiting to be cleared out for the winter. Her father was sitting alone on one of the benches. He was dirty, unshaven and he was crying. An empty bottle lay on its side under the bench and rolled occasionally when there was a strong gust of wind. At least the other girls, still talking about the party and which of them definitely looked old enough to get into the off-licence, didn’t notice him. And Edmund was too absorbed in his own grief to see her.

She walked straight past him and on to the street where the Halifax sisters lived. Before knocking on the door she composed herself.

Cynthia had prepared a magnificent tea with smoked salmon sandwiches, meringues and gingerbread. Grace exclaimed over it and ate everything they pressed on to her.

She didn’t visit her father for two days. How dare he ruin a day when she was supposed to be celebrating? Then she cracked, and went to see him after school. The town had been decorated for Christmas in a mean-spirited way, with a tall thin spruce lit by ugly white bulbs. On the door of the restaurant there was a wreath of real holly.

The restaurant was empty but Rod was behind the bar. He’d poured himself a brandy in a large round glass and seemed surprised, rather embarrassed to see her.

“Didn’t that social worker tell you?”

“What?”

“Edmund’s not here.”

“Where is he?”

“Look, I’m really sorry. I phoned her first thing yesterday.” There was a pause. “He’s in hospital.”

“What happened? An accident?”

“Nothing like that. Not that sort of accident.”

“What do you mean?”

“He’s in St. Nick’s.”

St. Nicholas’ was the big loony-bin on the outskirts of the town.

Victorian gothic surrounded by 1930s villas. Everyone had heard of it.

In primary school it was the standard term of abuse. “You should be in St. Nick’s, you should.”

She didn’t know what to say. He came out from behind the bar.

“I’m really sorry,” he said again. “It wasn’t only the drink, you know. He was getting depressed and it wasn’t only Sue. His mother’s death hit him harder than he let on. I was afraid he’d do something daft. He needs time to sort himself out. I couldn’t cope. He needs professional help. Something more than I could give him anyway. More than you could too.”

Chapter Twenty-Five.

Miss. Thorne took Grace to visit her father in hospital. Grace was reminded for a while of the times they used to visit Nan. Antonia Thorne turned up at Laurel Close in her car. Grace climbed in beside her and they drove off without a word. Even the stilted conversation which did eventually occur was much the same.

“How are things going at school?”