The Kindness (9 page)

‘Married. Julian, what the . . .?’

His mother’s disapproval was etched on her face and he had the sudden urge to giggle inanely. ‘She was leaving him, he was leaving her, it’d been going on for ever.’ He held out the innocent palms of his hands, but she tutted at him and looked away to the kitchen clock. ‘Anyway, it’s done now,’ he said. ‘After twelve miserable years, she’s left him.’

She turned to him sharply then. ‘How old did you say she was?’

‘I didn’t.’

She waited, her eyes still upon him.

‘She got married at eighteen. Yes, she’s older than me, a few years. Does it matter?’ he said as she openly did the calculation on her fingers.

‘So, that makes her what? Thirty?’ she said and a silence fell between them.

‘It’s getting awfully late,’ Jenna broke it, extending her arms, fingers linked, above her head. ‘And there’s something I really do have to tell you.’ She stretched her neck until it clicked.

‘But first,’ he was straining for gaiety, ‘you
must
open your present.’

They both turned to the parcel leaning drunkenly against the wall beneath a hectically Blu-tacked retrospective of Julian’s artistic endeavours. On the shelves of the dresser clay animals roamed two by two in various states of expertise. He and Jenna made them every year, though he always felt discouraged when he saw his lined up beside hers. His earliest effort, age four or five, was barely more than a blob of clay with a trunk and a tail, but last year’s leopard was almost lovely. A pair of new creatures brought into being every Christmas, he and Jenna sitting together with the put-put of the portable gas heaters in the granary and frost patterning the windows, the excitement and chemical stink when she uncovered the kiln, telling him to keep his fingers crossed . . .

There was a lump in his throat as he slid the present towards her. ‘Come on, Mum, open it.’

A terrier whined, stretched, and jumped into one of the stuffed chairs beside the Rayburn. He imagined Julia sitting there, her legs dangling over its arm.

‘I’ll open it in a minute, but first you must finish what you’re saying and then I do need to tell you something before I go to bed,’ Jenna said. He replaced the package and started to pace. It was hard to find the words for what had happened: Julia coming to him in the early hours, her shirt hanging from her in ribbons, that bastard’s finger marks on her neck.

‘He had her by the hair and there’s a bald patch where he ripped it out. I couldn’t leave her and come here.’ He looked imploringly into his mother’s face. ‘You do understand, don’t you?’

‘Julian, stop pacing!’ She ordered him into his chair, grabbed his hand and squeezed it hard across the table. Even simple eye contact was now a self-conscious act.

‘We hardly slept that night and I was supposed to get the train . . .’ he was starting to falter. ‘I’m so sorry I wasn’t here.’

‘Julian! Will you stop apologising! I had a lovely day,’ but still she looked downcast. He noticed the tendons of her long skinny neck, was surprised by tears which she wiped impatiently with her wrist as she blurted: ‘On my birthday Michael asked me to marry him and I said that if he swam the river with me I would.’

He felt something twist. ‘Michael?’ Fat little Michael with his corduroy jeans and hairy hands? ‘Did he? Did you?’

She nodded and smiled. ‘Yes, and after the wedding I’ll be living with him in Barnes, where you’ll always have a room.’

Julian was almost winded at the thought of Michael’s house with its polished staircase and fussy, valuable furniture – of his mother waking each morning to embarrassing oriental erotic art and Michael’s extensive collection of netsuke that were not to be touched (but towards which, as a boy, Julian had been irresistibly drawn, resulting in the shameful theft of an ivory monkey).

‘You’re moving there?’ Julian sloshed more gin into his own glass.

‘Darling, Michael wouldn’t be able to commute to his office from here.’

‘Why now?’ He took a swallow of gin. ‘What about all this . . .’ He gestured around the kitchen with his glass, a sliver of ice sliding down his throat. He was choking and she leant across to bash him on the back.

‘It’s been a worry.’ She kept getting to her feet and sitting down again, doing that straining thing with her neck. He was frightened by her tears now and concentrated instead on the sleeping dogs curled Yin and Yang into the cushions of the chair.

‘What will happen to Firdaws if you’re not here?’

She struck the table with her palms, making him jump. ‘The Vales have made me give up the lease.’ It came out as a wail. She hit the table again and the cat leapt to the floor. ‘I never thought the greedy buggers would go through with it but . . .’ Julian was suddenly faint. ‘If your uncle was still alive they wouldn’t dare,’ she said. ‘But it was only ever in trust to me until you
came of age
and now you have. You’re twenty-one years old. A man.’

Firdaws was lost.

Eight

Julian stays drinking beer in the window seat long after the clouds and rain have rolled away. Swallows and house martins tick across the sky, the grass steams after so sudden a soaking, leaves drip. He opens the door to the porch to let the refreshed air in, gets himself another bottle, a packet of crisps and a lump of Cheddar. He eats the cheese, biting chunks straight from the packet, gulping them down with beer, and watches a blackbird tug a stretchy pink worm from the grass.

The dog crawls out from its hiding place, foolishly shellshocked. It is panting and trembling, slightly tragic in its cowardice but not averse to cheese. Patting the cushion, he invites it – him – to sit. Here was always his favourite place to read as a boy, dogs curled around. The window-seat cushions now are much larger and more splendid than the bobbly ones that went before. Papal velvet: Julia’s choice.

The small carved-ivory monkey calls to him from its place on the bookcase. Julian picks it up. Quite a thing, this netsuke creature, with its polished jet eyes and lewdly curling tail.

Michael never once remarked upon its theft, did not even acknowledge the letter of apology that Jenna had made Julian write as soon as she discovered it hidden beneath his pillow. Over the years, Michael’s silence had only enhanced Julian’s shame and he made excuses to stay behind at Firdaws whenever his mother went to Barnes.

The netsuke monkey’s eyes sparkle with malice. Your poor mother, it says. It’s no wonder they waited until you were gone to get married. ‘Fat hairy Michael’. That wasn’t very nice, was it? Look at everything he’s done for you. Picked you up from places, dropped you off. Crammed you for your exams. And all those tricks, poor man. What sort of person squashes real flies into someone’s Garibaldi biscuit? All those phone messages you never passed on, the time you wiped your arse with his . . .’ Julian closes his fist around the netsuke. ‘He’s been better than a father to you,’ says the voice within. ‘Where do you think you’d be without him?’

Michael’s good deeds run unbidden: arriving at Mrs Briggs’s in a Rentavan with the promise of a job for him at Abraham and Leitch, stopping at Geldings Antiques for Julia to drop off her keys and buying the wind-up gramophone for Jenna because she needed something to cheer her up. Without Michael there would be no books and no film deals, no lucrative screenplays to write. No Firdaws regained.

Julian drifts back to the first time he swam the river – he’d have been twelve or thirteen – and a salty feeling rises from his throat. Something his mother told him that day had made him want to cry. He sees her kneeling on the plaid blanket among the rubble of their picnic, her arms outstretched. And him: ‘Stop it,’ shunning her attempt to console him. Over what? He can’t remember. Standing up, quite suddenly, and without another word, she took two scissoring paces and dived in.

Pinkish clouds lent the surface a pearly sheen and in she went, a long, perfect arc in her black swimsuit straight to the heart of the river, the deepest part, with no thought for those she left behind. Vernon, their Battersea Dogs Home Alsatian, yelped and leapt down the bank to save her.

‘Oh my God! He’s like a big bear.’ Jenna swam in a circle laughing at the dog gulping his way through the lily pads. ‘Call him back!’ she shouted. ‘He can’t make it all the way down to where he can get out.’ Michael slipped but, disappointingly, did not fall as he hauled Vernon up the bank by his neck, waterlogged and snapping, his need to rescue his damsel entirely undiminished.

While Michael wrestled with the dog, Julian stood at the edge of the riverbank, its fringing of purple flowers at his feet. Way down, in the darkest water, his mother held her arms out to him and this time, without really thinking, he jumped and half fell towards her.

‘Are you sure you’ll make it all the way?’ she asked as he gasped at the cold. ‘There’s no way out and nowhere to put your feet down until Swan Bank.’

He was treading water, unsure, but she had already set off, carving long strokes through the water. Michael was shouting to him from the bank: ‘Here, let me pull you out. You’ll freeze your bollocks off!’

She was a powerful swimmer, parting the river before him. He was spooked when it became so narrow and eerily silent. They swam through a tunnel of choking blackthorns and weeds with long tendrils and he started to panic, coughing and swallowing water. She told him to imagine the fingers winding around his scrawny arms and legs as ‘a lovely massage’, reassuring him that soon they would be clear of their slippery caresses and in another wide pool where he would be able to float on his back and rest.

It grew deeper as they set off again and he asked her to slow down so they could swim side by side as the weeds slithered beneath them.

‘We’re clear of them now,’ she said, urging him on. ‘You know, the weeds are nothing to get in such a flap about. It’s the snake that worries me more.’

‘Didn’t I tell you?’ she continued, glancing back at him over the wing of her shoulder, timing her words to the rhythm of her stroke. ‘A couple of weeks ago I took Vernon for a walk to Swan Bank. I sat with him there for a while to watch the damselflies dance. Oh look, darling – like those two over there,’ she gestured across the reeds but Julian was blind to their disco dazzle, could look nowhere but at the water, only darkness visible.

‘Vernon was drinking at the edge when this enormous snake swam by. It was as thick as my arm and so long it made three loops.’ She demonstrated by undulating her arm, fingers pressed together giving shape to its head through the water. Julian cried out and was rewarded with another mouthful of river. ‘It gets worse,’ she said as he kicked his legs, splashing too much to get anywhere fast. ‘I was still staring at it when it doubled back and as it reached Vernon it rose from the water and hissed straight in his face.’ She said something about fangs. ‘Must’ve had young nearby, I suppose,’ she added as she swept on ahead.

He was panting when they reached the bank, couldn’t haul himself up its muddy sides quick enough. They lay on the grass catching their breath. He’d scraped himself getting out and there was a little pink blood puddled along his shin.

‘Why did you tell me that about the snake?’ he asked her. She sat up and touched his forehead with her palm, looking concerned, as though he might have a temperature. ‘I don’t know, I suppose I was frightened,’ she said, and she pulled him to his feet so they could walk back to the fire she felt certain Michael would’ve lit on the riverbank to keep them warm.

It was Michael who first mooted that the Vales might not have been entirely within their rights to retain all the money when they sold Firdaws out from under them. He took Jenna’s documents to his brother, a QC who liked nothing better than a wrangle over an inheritance.

It was Christmas Day, in Barnes, three years after Firdaws was lost that Jenna handed him the cheque: ‘We won.’

Michael was looking on, with a smile that tried not to take too much credit. ‘It’s your share of Firdaws.’ Both he and Julia stared in disbelief at the sum that was written there.

It was enough for a hefty deposit on Cromwell Gardens. White walls, fancy cornicing, glorious windows, a garden at the back. When Mr Pym, the flat’s owner, showed them through the kitchen: ‘I’m a conservatory designer by trade, hence . . .’ and threw open the kitchen door, instead of the garden they were expecting they were greeted by a greenhouse so large and ornate it would not have looked out of place at Kew. There had been no reference to a greenhouse in the estate agent’s particulars. ‘My orangery’ was what the sleekly satisfied Mr Pym called it while they haggled and Julian wished that Julia’s desire for it was not so plain. She was rooted to the spot, practically suffering an attack of Stendhal syndrome. Double doors folded back the entire width at the front of the greenhouse and the white-painted ironwork was scrolled and crested at the apex with unfurling ferns. Pym showed them the clever steam watering system and the opening windows that were controlled by a thermostat. Inside he had a bamboo cocktail cabinet, suites of wicker furniture and several formal rows of lemon trees in green ceramic planters lined up like bearskin guards.

‘Almost time for my gin and tonic,’ he said, touching a finger to his gold watch. ‘I’ve got the perfect space for it where I’m going. It’s not included.’

Julia’s eyes were bright with unshed tears and she was mouthing at him: ‘This was meant to be.’

‘Anyway, the agent thought most people would prefer to use the space to have a proper-sized garden, flower beds and a swing for the kiddy if you have one.’ Mr Pym glanced nervously from Julia to Julian. He had no way of guessing the true reason for her ardour.