The Kiss (15 page)

He asks his question as if he is not at all bothered about what Sophie is up to but, of course, he knows and she knows, that he is.

‘Nothing much,’ she says, cradling her cup between her hands, which look rather grubby. Her long hair falls like a curtain on either side of her face so that he cannot
see her expression. She is wearing a bulky greenish-khaki garment which could be either clean or dirty. His nose twitches. She has that mouldy smell again.

‘Where do you go? Discos?’ Surely not, looking like that! But how would he know?

‘I wish you wouldn’t cross-question me all the time.’

‘I don’t, not all the time. I restrain myself often, believe me! But I have a right to ask where you go until this time in the morning. You’re underage and in my care and I do care what happens to you. I don’t expect you to tell me
all
the details but I’d like to feel you could talk to me, like a pal of sorts, tell me what’s going on in your head. Your life!’ he ends, mock-dramatically, so that she won’t think he’s being too heavy. He often knows that he shouldn’t press on when he does. He is sure Rachel is much more subtle when she pumps the children for information, and more successful.

‘You don’t tell me what’s going on in your life,’ says Sophie. ‘You didn’t tell me about Clarinda.’

She has got the knife in between his ribs now. He wants to fold over, and nurse his wounds. When they told her about his suspension from school and the charge being made against him they had gone into few details and she had asked few questions. And as far as Cormac knows, they managed to keep it from Davy. But kids have a
way of finding out things and understanding more than you give them credit for.

‘You don’t know Clarinda, do you?’ he asks, appalled that she might.

‘No, but my friend Tilda does. She says Clarinda was madly in love with you.’

‘But I am, Cormac,’ said Clarinda. ‘I can’t help it. Why don’t you believe me?’

‘Of course you can help it.’ He spoke gently to her. ‘You talked yourself into it in the first place. It’s just a notion you’ve got.’

‘That’s not true!’ She started to cry, which gave him no option but to put his arms round her and comfort her. She was small and soft against him and her hair smelt of fresh rain. He felt her lips against his neck and a shiver ran up his spine making his shoulders twitch. For a moment he was tempted to bury his face in her hair and forget the world, Alec McCaffy, and all the rest of them. Instead he eased her firmly away from him again and held her at arm’s length.

‘Now listen to me, Clarinda. It’ll pass, believe me it will. After you’ve been home for a week you’ll laugh about all this.’

‘You can’t stop me loving you.’

‘You’re not Gwen John,’ he told her. ‘And I’m not Rodin.’

‘He was often horrible to her but that didn’t stop her loving him. And it didn’t stop him making love to her.’

‘We must go.’ His chest felt tight. ‘Come on!’

She wouldn’t move.

‘All right, suit yourself, stay there,’ he said, using the tone of voice he might to his daughter when his patience was running out.

He turned away from her but after the first dozen or so steps he was forced to look round. She was leaning against the wall again looking like a floppy doll. A man had stopped on the pavement and was looking at her.

Cormac walked back.

‘Clarinda, now you are behaving like a three-year-old!’

‘I want you to make love to me.’

‘Clarinda talked a lot of nonsense,’ he says to his daughter. ‘Her mother filled her head with romantic tosh. She was in love with Burns! Her mother, that is.’

‘What’s wrong with Burns?’

‘Nothing. Not his poetry, anyway. But Mrs Bain was in love with the man, or her idea of the man. Clarinda told me she kept a picture of him on her bedside table
as well as on the piano.’ He had seen the one on the piano, on the only occasion that he visited the Bains’ flat.

‘You had a mega-sized blown-up photo of Rodin on the wall of your studio. You said it inspired you. You said you felt he was watching over you and telling you to hang in there. What’s the difference? Maybe the picture of Burns was inspiring her to write poetry.’

‘But I wasn’t in love with Rodin. Mrs Bain recites a Burns poem before she goes to sleep at night. Instead of a prayer, I suppose.
My love is like a red, red rose
. Trouble is, roses have thorns.’ He speaks jocularly in an effort to lighten the topic but his daughter is in a dogged mood, determined not to let him off the hook.

‘So it was all her mother’s fault? Because she had a picture of Burns on her bedside table?’

‘I didn’t say that. I’m just saying that Tilda should not believe everything that Clarinda tells her. But we’ve wandered rather far away from you. Are you in love with anyone? Or wouldn’t you tell me if you were?’ He tries to smile.

Sophie shrugs and tilts her mug to drain the last drops of her chocolate drink. She runs the tip of her tongue round her lips.

‘So which is it?’ He keeps the teasing voice. ‘You won’t tell me?’

‘You wouldn’t approve of him,’ she says and goes into the kitchen to rinse her mug under the tap.

Eventually he managed to prise Clarinda away from the wall and coax her to come with him. She dragged her feet every step of the way. She was back to being a child again. A petulant, spoilt, sulking child, who could not get her way. His patience was spent and with it had gone his desire for her. He was wet, exhausted, and irritable. He remembered suddenly that he had a fifty franc note in his trouser pocket which he had put there earlier as an emergency back-up. He’d been determined not to be caught out as he had been coming back from the flea market.

‘I’m going to try and get a taxi,’ he said, bringing Clarinda to a halt on the edge of the kerb.

‘I want to walk. And I don’t want to go back to the hotel.’

A taxi was approaching. He stepped out into the road raising his hand. The car pulled up with a squeal of tyres.

Clarinda had retreated into a doorway.

‘
Un moment, s’il vous plaît,
’ said Cormac through the taxi window.

‘
Jeune, eh?
’ said the driver, looking past him at Clarinda.

Cormac felt like a dirty old man. He went over to Clarinda and pleaded with her in a low voice. He felt like threatening to abandon her altogether, except that that would offer further opportunities for drama. Was it what she wanted, to be the centre of a drama? It was not the time to try and fathom Clarinda’s motives.

‘If you carry on like this any more you’ll make me hate you, Clarinda!’

‘Don’t be so angry with me!’ She was going to cry again.

‘Then, come!’

She let him lead her to the cab and bundle her into the back seat. She leant against him as they swung hectically through the quiet streets. Cormac was aware of the driver watching them in his mirror, the thin line of his moustache curled into a little smile of amusement.

As they reached their destination the door of the hotel swung open and out stepped Alec McCaffy in his red and white striped pyjamas and blue paisley-patterned dressing gown. He waited on the pavement while Cormac paid off the driver and handed Clarinda out of the back of the cab.

‘
Bonne nuit,
’ said the driver in a voice that made Cormac want to push in his
louche
face.

Alec held the hotel door open for Clarinda. ‘I suggest you go straight to bed, Clarinda.’ He let the door swing shut and then he turned to face Cormac. ‘What has been going on, Aherne?’

‘Nothing, Mr McCaffy. Nothing of the sort that you are imagining. Clarinda became hysterical and ran off so I had no option but to go out and bring her back. You would have had to do the same had you been here. But you can take my word for it that I have neither raped nor seduced Clarinda Bain.’

They went into the hotel, said good night to the porter, and got into the lift. They stood side by side. Cormac reached out and pressed the button for the fourth floor. They began to rise.

‘So you’re trying to tell me that nothing at all happened?’ Alec had exchanged his headmasterly tone for a sly, suggestive one. He pulled the belt of his dressing gown in tight. ‘That seems difficult to believe, Cormac. The girl’s gone on you.’

The lift lurched to a stop and after giving a bit of a judder the door slid back to reveal the corridor plunged in darkness. Cormac groped for the wall switch and a weak light came on.

‘Sorry to disappoint you, Alec,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid you’ll have to find your own kicks.’

Now on that last night in Paris, Mr Aherne, we
believe that you were absent from the hotel for over an hour, with the girl in question. Would you like to tell us how you spent that hour?

Cormac goes into the kitchen to rinse his own mug.

‘Why wouldn’t I approve?’ he asks his daughter. ‘Try me. What do you think I’d have against your boyfriend?’

‘Everything.’

‘Come now, I’m not that narrow-minded!’

Is she sleeping with him, whoever he is, this pimpled youth, or man of forty? The thought of the latter makes him gulp, but if this lover of hers were simply a boy from school she wouldn’t be so desperate to conceal his identity, would she? He does too much talking to himself in his head.

If she is sleeping with him, whoever he might be, is she protecting herself? Alarm strikes at his heart. If anything bad should befall this beautiful daughter whom he loved from the moment he set eyes on her! He has a vision of her contracting some deadly disease, wasting away. His problem is that he has too much imagination, so the aunts used to say, all but Sal, who had been accused of the same crime herself when she was a child. The trouble is that his imagination is tending to become morbid now that he doesn’t have anything but the making of sandwiches to occupy his
mind. Obsessional thoughts about Sophie’s boyfriend and Rachel’s lover have occupied the empty space that used to be filled by his sculpture.

‘You know not to take risks, don’t you, Sophie?’

‘I’m not stupid.’

‘Are you—?’ He breaks off. He cannot decide if he is justified in pressing her like this. But she is underage and he is her guardian, ill-equipped as he feels to guard her against anything. He presumes she must be sleeping with the boyfriend since she has not denied it.

‘I’m almost sixteen,’ she says. ‘I could get married in Gretna Green soon. Or Edinburgh.’ She smiles. ‘I could leave school.’

He bites his tongue to stop himself delivering a lecture on the drawbacks of leaving school without qualifications, and how one would inevitably come to regret it in the future.

Clarinda’s sixteenth birthday fell the week after their return from Paris.

She was waiting for him a few blocks from school, in the doorway of an empty shop. He was on foot. She knew his route home and he had not thought to vary it. As soon as he saw her he realised that he should have done. He should have anticipated this. Since coming back to school he had made sure that he was not alone with her and in class tried to treat her like any other pupil. He was aware, however, of the other pupils’ raised interest when he addressed her, which he continued to do, since not to have done so would have also had been noted.

The first class after their return had been especially
difficult, for the pupils had understandably wanted to talk about Paris. When it was Clarinda’s turn and she spoke of Gwen John there was some sniggering. Cormac quickly moved the conversation onto more general grounds, asking the pupils if they thought it brought extra insight into an artist’s work to know something about their lives and see the environments they had lived and worked in? Did they, for example, think that their visit to Monet’s garden had added something to their viewing of the water lilies? Clarinda was silent but he already knew what she thought; the rest seemed to think that the visit to Giverny had enhanced their appreciation of the paintings though they were all agreed that that was a bonus and not essential.

‘I felt I was standing inside his picture,’ said Cathy, surprising him. ‘That one of the pond and the little green wooden bridge over it. It added something to it, at least that’s what I thought,’ she added diffidently.

One of the boys said he could understand that but he couldn’t see what standing in front of 87 rue du Cherche-Midi gazing up at the facade of the fourth floor would do for anyone, especially when you didn’t even know for sure which window it was! His remark was followed by some hilarity and the pink in Clarinda’s cheeks darkened.

Listening to their summing up Cormac, as their teacher, had felt pleased with his students. Their interest and enthusiasm had increased as the week in Paris had advanced. In spite of everything – in spite of the bit of bother with Clarinda, which was how he was choosing to regard it – the trip had been worthwhile and he would be able to say so in all truth when he came to write his report. Some members of staff had been giving him odd looks – Alec McCaffy’s tongue had doubtless been busy – but he felt hopeful that by the following week it would have become old news and something else would have happened to provide fodder for playground and staff room gossip.

Appearing from the shop doorway, Clarinda fell into step beside him. ‘It’s my birthday,’ she said.

‘
Clarinda
!’

‘You could wish me many happy returns.’

‘Happy birthday to you. Now, listen—’

‘I’m sixteen, Cormac. I’ve come of age.’

‘I’m pleased for you.’

‘Don’t be sarcastic. I don’t like it when you are.’ He lengthened his stride and she broke into a trot to keep up with him.

‘I need to talk to you, Cormac,
please
! I’m so unhappy I don’t know what to do with myself.’

He did not feel particularly happy himself now and wished he could take a sabbatical, go to the other end of the earth, to Australia, or Bora Bora, and return after a year to find Clarinda laughing about her crush on him.

‘I want to talk to you, Cormac.’ She was becoming tearful. How could they proceed along the road like this with the chance of being seen by dozens of pupils, as well as teachers? ‘If you don’t let me talk to you I’ll do something awful.’ She gulped. ‘I’ll throw myself off the Dean Bridge!’

He slowed his step. ‘Now that’s blackmail, Clarinda, and you know it. You have no intention of throwing yourself off anywhere.’ She wouldn’t, would she? You could never be sure with young girls. It reminded him of Sophie threatening to leave home. All right, they’d told her, go and pack your bag, and she hadn’t of course, and they had known she wouldn’t. But could he know for certain that Clarinda would not throw herself off the Dean Bridge in a moment of derangement? He remembered her going on about Gwen John tempting providence by sitting on rocks close to the sea and being swept off by a huge wave and referring to the sensation afterwards as ‘delicious danger’. Clarinda had said she understood that. But
surely danger was only delicious if you had at least a chance of survival? Throwing oneself off the Dean Bridge would not come into that category. He was not totally reassured, however.

Her bottom lip was quivering. ‘You don’t know how miserable I am.’

‘What else can I say? I can only go on repeating myself, saying I’m sorry, and try to persuade you to put all this behind you.’

‘I just want to be with you.’ Her voice was dwindling to a peep. Suddenly she burst into a torrent of weeping.

‘OK,’ he said, ‘let’s go and have a cup of coffee and talk.’

She sniffled her tears away and dried her eyes on a tissue. He took her to a different café from the one they had gone to before.

So, even after your return from Paris, Mr Aherne, you went to a café with her in Edinburgh? Was that not an odd thing to do considering the complications of the situation? Was it wise? You said you wished to discourage her.

He ordered coffee for them both and a
pain au
chocolat
for Clarinda, at her request. She was starving, she hadn’t eaten all day. And no doubt
pain au chocolat
reminded her of Paris, not that she needed any reminding.

‘I wish we could have stayed there. Why don’t we just go back? We could! Why not?’

‘Now don’t talk daft!’

He noticed that she had blue marks underneath her eyes and wondered if her mother would have noticed them too.

‘I was happy there. You said you were always happy when you returned to Paris. You said it made you feel fully alive and that is how I felt. You said it made the creative juices flow.’

‘I’ve said a lot of things,’ he said. ‘Some of them dubious.’

‘Nothing you said about Paris was dubious.’ She gazed limply at him. ‘Cormac, don’t be angry with me just because I fell in love with you.’

Cormac is watching his daughter fill a hot water bottle. She fills it carefully with water from the steaming kettle, then she holds it against her chest to squeeze out the air, and finally she screws in the top, getting the threads to match, taking her time, showing no sign of the impatience that she sometimes does. She takes a towel and dries the top. He is watching every movement, as if he might learn something about her. He has been so close to her all these years, yet now he feels he has to learn her
anew, to try to understand the changes that she is going through.

‘Night, Dad.’ She kisses his cheek.

‘Night, love.’ He wants to hold her tight, to lock her away, so that she cannot come to any harm, but that is not an option.

‘Clarinda—’ He paused and took a deep breath. ‘This cannot go on. You’ll have to talk yourself out of it just as you talked yourself in. I can’t take any more of it. I’m coming to the end of my tether.’

‘But that
kiss
!’

‘Was a mistake. It should not have happened!’ It had been reprehensible of him to succumb, even for those few seconds. Repent! he could hear the aunts crying in his head.

‘You’re being unkind.’ Clarinda’s voice was on the waver again. ‘And I told my mother that you were the nicest man I have ever met.’

‘You will just have to tell her you were mistaken. Right now I feel I could become downright nasty. And I don’t want to hear about Rodin being nasty to Gwen John, I’ve heard enough of it.’

‘But, Cormac, don’t you see … it didn’t
stop
her loving him. And he wasn’t nasty to her all the time. Even though he had that other woman, that awful
American duchess, he still came to visit her and make love to her. She said that if she had to go through a whole week without him making love to her she froze up like a stream in winter. I understand how that feels, I do. You shouldn’t undervalue my love for you.’

He had his first premonition that she had talked to her mother.

‘And don’t please tell me how much older than me you are. Age has nothing to do with love.’

‘It can often have quite a lot to do with it. You’ve lacked a father figure in your life. Don’t you think you’ve seen me as some kind of substitute?’

‘I don’t feel like a daughter to you. I want to go to bed with you.’

He felt the heat gathering in his face. He glanced sideways at the people at the next table; they seemed very quiet, and not to be talking, which made him wonder if they were listening. Was the whole world listening? He felt there were eyes everywhere.

‘It’s true, Cormac. I do want to.’

He got up abruptly and went to the counter and asked for the bill. The reckoning. Even then he did not think it would turn out to be so high. When he turned round he saw that Clarinda was crying into a paper tissue and the people at the next table were giving him
dirty looks. If they had not overheard the conversation they might, with a bit of luck, think he was her father giving her a telling-off for coming home late.

He made for the door and she jumped up and ran after him. Out in the street he said, ‘I’m saying it for the last time, Clarinda. I’m sorry about everything. But now we must draw a line under it. I think you’re a lovely girl but I look on you as a daughter more than anything else.’ She was continuing to cry but he did not even feel sorry for her any longer. He felt washed out. Arid. Incapable of feeling anything. His heart sat like a stone in his chest.

Later that evening, up in his studio, he paused from his work to go to the window and look down on the street and saw the silhouette of a girl standing under a tree opposite. He swore softly, over and over again. He did not know what else to do. It was dark and light rain was visible falling under the arc of a street light. She was looking up at his window. She had seen him. He pulled the blind down sharply, catching his finger, drawing blood. He sucked his finger and swore again.

He couldn’t work now. He covered the piece he was working on, the figure of a young boy kneeling, his son kneeling, and went downstairs to pour himself a dram.

‘What’s up?’ asked Rachel. ‘Your hand’s shaking. And have you cut your finger?’

‘It’s nothing. Only a scratch.’ He remembered the angry marks left on Clarinda’s bare arms outside the Métro at Clignancourt.

‘You’re shivering,’ insisted Rachel.

He shook his head. That would have been the moment to tell her, but he didn’t. It will all die down, he told himself; Clarinda will become bored and go away and forget about me and Paris and Gwen John and Rodin and return to her own life, to real life. Did he accept that what she said she felt was real? He did not know. He was too confused to judge the dividing line between fantasy and reality. He didn’t want to think any more. He tossed back the whisky, pleasured by the sting in his throat, and poured himself another now that Rachel had gone upstairs to have a shower.

He went into the hall, quietly opened the front door and peered out into the damp night. His left-hand neighbour opened his door at the same time and called over the hedge, ‘Is that you, Cormac? There’s a girl been standing under that tree across the road all evening. I don’t know what she thinks she’s up to. I was thinking of calling the police. You can never tell with all these burglaries around.’

‘Don’t do that,’ said Cormac hastily. ‘I was just going out to have a word with her. She’s a pupil at my school. She’s a bit, well, disturbed.’

‘Drugs?’

‘Not sure.’

‘Half the teenagers seem to be off the wall these days, one way or another. I don’t envy you your job.’

The neighbour waited on his step while Cormac went down the path, unlatched the dripping gate with fumbling fingers, and crossed the road.

‘I knew you’d come out to me,’ said Clarinda, her cold blue face cracking into a smile. ‘I knew you wouldn’t leave me here.’

‘You have to go home, Clarinda.’ He kept his voice down, conscious of his neighbour’s straining ears. ‘You can’t stay out here and you can’t come into my house.’

‘I suppose your wife is there.’

‘Yes, my wife is there.’

‘We could go somewhere else.’

‘We are going nowhere else.’

‘I’m
sixteen
now.’

‘I know. You’ve already told me.’

‘But don’t you see, I’m of
age
?’

‘Need a hand, Cormac?’ called the neighbour, coming down his garden path to the gate.

‘No, no, it’s fine, thanks, John. I’m just going to see her home. Right now, Clarinda,’ he said firmly when John had retreated, ‘we are going!’

He took hold of her arm and pulled her away from the tree. After the first few reluctant steps she allowed him to lead her down the street.

‘We could go up Calton Hill.’

‘I am taking you home. Where do you live? And don’t bother to give me the wrong address and lead me another merry dance for I’m not standing for it!’

‘You’re very angry.’

‘Yes. Very.’

He walked with head down into the wind. Soon the rain came on. Drops of water clogged his eyelashes, blurring the night. The traffic lights wavered and their reflections ran like spilt red, amber and green paint on the road. He could not go through another night like this; something had to be done to jolt her out of her madness. Next time she might bring a sleeping bag and camp out in his garden. He wondered if she had a cat. Mrs Bain looked the type of woman to have half a dozen.

It took twenty minutes hard walking to reach the street of the Bains. They lived in a typical, grey stone tenement block. Clarinda said they were hoping to move sometime – her mother would love a garden –
but they would have to wait until they could afford something better.

‘The neighbours think we’re kind of eccentric. Just because we’re different.’ She was in a chatty mood now and appeared to be enjoying this late-night walk.

‘Which number?’ he asked.

‘Are you coming to the door with me?’

‘I’m going to wait till I see you go inside.’