The Haunt (13 page)

She hurried down the green flank of Castle Hill. She would say, ‘It’s to make amend for my clumsiness, a paperweight to ensure that your work will not be disturbed again.’ Three pounds fifty was not too much to pay for the thought: to let him know that she had had the thought.

*

‘I have been so remorseful about the interruption to your work.’

Struck by an implied longevity of her regret, Piper said dryly, ‘I trust it hasn’t spoiled your holiday.’

‘Oh no, indeed not. It was such a trifle – not the interruption, I mean; that must have been extremely aggravating. I keep remembering.’

‘There is no need.’ When she gazed at him in silence the likeness to an earless rabbit was quite pronounced. ‘I have forgotten the incident.’

‘I have not. Your papers all disarranged, displaced by the wind – because of me. Inexcusable.’

‘Don’t give it another thought.’

‘Will you accept this small atonement?’ She proffered a package wrapped in tissue-paper.

‘I assure you it isn’t necessary.’

‘Please take it.’

He did so, reluctantly, unwrapped the package and held
on the palm of his hand a brass fly with wings outstretched. ‘Why are you giving me this?’

‘It’s a paperweight, to prevent your work being disrupted in the same way again.’

‘How very kind.’

‘It has happened before: on that occasion it was a message from my father.’

‘Indeed?’ Piper turned the thing over in his hand, disliking it on sight.

‘He was communicating his feelings from the grave.’

It was not unreasonable for Piper to experience a downrush of tedium. He was so often called on to counsel the bereaved that the sense of loss, he had concluded, be it of fame, fortune, or loved one, was a paramount human emotion. It was certainly the most frequent. He prepared to hear yet another tale of dispossession. ‘You had a cherished relationship with your father?’

‘I had no relationship with him. He had no time for me. He wanted a son.’

‘Fathers and daughters are privileged. They see their children grow into womanhood with delicacy, compassion and tenderness – the qualities of the gentler sex.’

‘If only that were true!’

‘You don’t believe women have those qualities?’

‘My father did not see them in me.’ She spoke with harboured bitterness. Piper thought that to be born a daughter to a man desirous of a son was unfortunate, and doubly so for one lacking feminine charm. ‘He was a professional soldier. After my mother died he lived in barracks and sent me to
lodge with a Mr and Mrs Boddington and their family of three boys. I hardly ever saw him.’

‘As an army man his free time would be limited.’

‘He used to play football and cricket with the Boddington boys. I could never think of anything to say to interest him. I was still a child: I did the only thing I could think of – I tried to be a tomboy.’

Piper said, ‘Do you want to tell me about it?’ and suppressed a sigh.

She turned away to hide some too potent memory. ‘I wasn’t cut out for it, I’d always liked being clean and tidy. Trying to keep up with the Boddington boys was a failure.’

And shaming, the start of a long lease of shame. She could never forget how she had run about when there was nowhere to run to; how, when she banged doors as the boys did, Mrs Boddington, a caring woman, asked had something upset her; when she got her shoes muddy the mud disgusted her; when she shouted they all stared; when she climbed a tree she came over giddy.

Piper was listening – the Listening Ear – and surely he was seeing it too, her utter humiliation when she had tried to join her father and the boys at football. Because she had no proper clothes, she had put on her wellies and tucked her hair under a beret and run on to the field. Her father stood stock-still when he saw her, his jaw dropping. The boys, who were kind, shouted to her to go into goal. They sent a slow ball. She threw herself on it as she had seen them do, and fell flat on her face. The ball trickled past the goal-posts, the boys cheered. She scrambled up, bleeding
from her nose. Her father walked off the field. The memory still sickened her.

‘I didn’t see my father at all between the ages of ten and twenty. He was posted abroad. Once he sent a picture postcard of camels kneeling. On the back he had written “Funny beggars”’. No signature.

‘I left school and went to secretarial college. He paid for everything, there was never trouble about money. I got a job, moved into a room of my own. He sent a small regular allowance.’

‘You wrote to him?’

‘He didn’t answer my letters. Once he rang up, said we’d better meet for lunch, as if it was something we often did. I hadn’t even known he was in the country. “We’re off to North Africa,” he said, “there’s a little account to settle.”

‘I worried about what to wear for our meeting. He hadn’t seen me for ten years. I decided on a tailored suit and blouse with a bow tie. I cut my hair short: no make-up, I went with a shiny face.’

Ten years had brought him to early middle age, some fierce white flecks in his hair and a thickening of his neck. The rest of him was still hard and wiry. A seam of something, tension or vigilance, had opened between his eyes. She wanted to touch it, felt she could have eased it out.

‘He looked at me, I thought he’s really looking, for the first time. He said didn’t I have anything nice to wear. “A dress. Your mother wore a dress and she always looked nice.”’

‘It was an indication of his concern for your future.’ Piper
introduced a kindly twinkle into his eyes. ‘No man is entirely indifferent to true femininity.’

‘The next time I saw him he was in a military hospital with a tent of blankets over his body. I was upset, I cried, “What is it? What’s happened to you?” He said, “The fortunes of war.” I said, “There is no war.” “There’s always a war,” he said.

‘He didn’t die of wounds: he contracted an obscure Eastern disease which dried him up, a sort of drought of the body fluids. At the funeral his comrades came to me and said he had been a good friend and a fine soldier. All he left was his medals. I don’t even know if he meant me to have them.’

‘Have you never thought perhaps they were all he had to leave? Courage is manifest in its immediate context, in the eye of the beholder; those medal discs are his only evidence to you and the rest of the world of the sacrifices he made and the dangers and hardships he endured. They constituted his life’s savings.’

‘I wanted something personal to remember him by!’

Piper adjusted his tone to one of gentle rebuke. ‘The strong man is silent; when he can’t express his deepest emotions he takes refuge in his masculinity.’

‘I never asked him for anything.’

‘He could not give, you could not ask. There were constraints on both sides. Do you condemn him because for all his bravery he feared to speak three small words: “I love you”?’

Face to face with Mildred Gascoigne and accustomed as he was to conducting his sessions on a paper-to-paper basis:
‘Write to The Listening Ear, enclosing an s.a.e….’ – he wondered if he had gone too far.

Her eyes filled, she sniffed – or was it a sob? The telephone rang.

‘Excuse me.’ He turned to it thankfully.

Sam said, ‘When are you coming back?’

‘Soon.’

‘I never knew why you went to that place.’

‘I can’t talk now.’

‘Someone with you? Is it that girl who was asking about you?’

‘There’s nobody here.’

Piper hung up. He looked round.

Mildred Gascoigne had gone. He sat for a long while idly turning the brass fly in his fingers, disliking it still. Now that he came to think, wasn’t his situation the same as hers? Neither of them had been capable of inspiring love where love was due. They had both made fools of themselves in the attempt. An act of charity would have saved her, but where had he, the counsellor of love, gone wrong? Discovering that he had not yet put away childish things was to have been the bond between himself and James. But it had become a barrier, with James – and Angela – on the other side.

*

On the day of the boat trip a fingering wind blew offshore. The creek built up into a series of travelling ribs and travelled out to sea: there was a business air, yet nothing doing.

‘Choppy,’ said Charlie.

Clapham, stepping out of his boat, wiped his boots with
handfuls of grass. ‘This here’s bilge, collected while she’s been beached. I’ll have to pump her out.’

Charlie assumed that scales of lichen and green veining on the hull were evidence of different waters and conditions. He was impressed when Clapham boasted that he had converted the engine from a Ford car.

‘What did you do about the gearbox?’

‘Put a reversing propeller in its place.’

Charlie said thoughtfully, ‘Is there a market for car engines?’

‘Depends what you call a market. I got mine from a breaker.’

‘You had to pay?’

‘Fifty nicker. Why?’

‘Just curious to know what mine would fetch.’

‘Are you talking about the vehicle that’s been in Penweathers’ yard all week?’

‘Battery failure. That engine would drive the Queen Mary.’

‘I don’t advise you to try flogging it. There are plenty of good motors going for a song in the holiday season. Short of the ready, are you?’

Clapham sounded sympathetic but Charlie was taking no chances. ‘Idle curiosity. Like I might ask why you call your boat
The
Maid
of
Orleans.
’

‘The previous owner’s choice.’ Clapham polished a brass rail on his sleeve. ‘I’ve a fair bit to do to her. Don’t want the ladies getting their frocks dirty, do we?’

In the event, it was Antony Wellington who got dirty. There was trouble between him and Pam. She pleaded with
him not to go on the tour of the creeks, but suddenly he was determined that they both should go. They argued about it through every mealtime, even breakfast. At breakfast Pam took to whimpering and weeping; Antony was alternately red-necked and white-jawed. They did not exhaust the subject; it seemed that nothing else could engage their attention and when they were silent the air between them raged.

Soulsby said to Felicia, ‘It’s a boat-ride they’re debating, not the National Debt.’

They went down to the jetty hand in hand, lover-like. Mildred, watching from her window, was glad they had resolved their difference. But when the time came for Antony to help Pam into the boat it was obvious that his hold was a grip of iron, not love. He pulled her across the jetty crying, ‘Come and look, sweetheart!’ He leaned into the boat and turned, holding up a sheet of plastic. ‘See this, folks? Under water it looks like a big tadpole, no legs, no arms, no face, like an embryo before it’s legal. Isn’t that right, Pam?’

‘Leave it be!’ roared Clapham. ‘It’s to keep the ladies’ shoes clean.’

Cuddling the plastic, Antony stepped over the side, slipped and slid feet first into the bottom of the boat. Clapham, who was urging Pam on board, effed into her ear; Charlie went to Antony’s assistance; Senga and the Soulsbys watched from the jetty.

Flat on his back, Antony groaned. ‘What did I tread on?’

‘Guano,’ said Soulsby.

Clapham fumed. ‘I spent all morning scrubbing off the
muck and those bloody skuas did a slash-round as soon as my back was turned.’

Senga said, ‘They eat other birds.’

Pam approached, looked into the boat and shuddered.

Charlie held out a helping hand to Antony. ‘Oops-a-daisy.’

‘I can’t – I can’t move!’

Pam got into the boat beside him and tried to lift his head.

‘Leave me alone!’

‘Let him find his feet, he’ll get himself up,’ said Soulsby.

‘I can’t! I’ve broken my back!’

‘Oh God!’ Pam covered her face.

‘I’ll take your shoulders,’ said Clapham.

‘I tell you I can’t move!’ His voice rose to a scream. ‘I’m paralysed!’

Clapham shifted a coil of rope. ‘You sat down arsy-versy. No bones broken. The deck’s clear.’

Antony closed his eyes, murmured ‘Paralysed’, lingering on each syllable.

‘He can’t be – can he?’ moaned Pam, still hiding her face.

‘Tickle the soles of his feet,’ suggested Senga, ‘and you’ll find out.’

‘Try sitting up,’ said Charlie.

Antony whimpered. Felicia Soulsby said to her husband, ‘See if you can help.’

‘Me?’

‘It’s the least you can do!’

‘If he’s caused real damage it’s best not to move him.’

‘You know what I mean.’

‘I don’t like it.’

‘Maybe I should start the engine,’ said Clapham. ‘To encourage him.’

Antony screamed, ‘For God’s sake – you want to kill me?’

Pam burst into tears. Mrs Soulsby poked her husband between his shoulder-blades. ‘George!’

Soulsby stepped into the boat. His manner was that of a man reminded of a scruple he would prefer to forget. Antony opened his eyes: Soulsby stooped and looked into them. He seemed uncertain what to do next, or whether he should do anything at all.

Charlie said, ‘We should call an ambulance,’ and Pam moaned.

Antony cried, ‘Don’t touch me!’

Soulsby unfastened the collar of Antony’s shirt. Antony stopped turning his head from side to side and lay still.

‘George!’

Soulsby slipped a hand under Antony’s neck. Everyone waited. A bird with a malevolent eye flew down and perched on the gunwale. When Clapham lunged at it, it flew away, throwing them a honk of derision. Antony reached for Soulsby’s hand and pulled himself to his feet. He stood looking round in a baffled sort of way. ‘Lot of fuss about nothing.’

Pam cried, ‘You scared us to death!’

‘I pull a muscle and she talks about death!’

Senga said, ‘Can’t we up anchor or cast off or something?’

Mrs Soulsby demanded of her husband,
‘Now
do you believe me?’

‘No.’

‘When proof has been vouchsafed? What more do you want?’

‘I don’t want.’

‘That makes it right? How utterly selfish! You spare no thought to suffering humanity – you could give life—’

‘How often have we been through this? Do I have to tell you again, it’s a fluke. Fluky!’