The Undertow (31 page)

It is Ruby who finds Amelia there, lying half on the hall carpet, half on the bottom two steps, her nightdress trailing round her calves, her mouth open. In that instant Ruby realises that she has been dreading this for months—this very moment, this very image. Amelia hurt. She might have been lying there all night, caught a chill. Ruby stumbles down to her, clutching the handrail, her own nightie and dressing gown bundled up in one hand to stop herself from tripping. She should have had Billy fit a gate across the stairs. They knew she was wandering: that’s why they moved her back in with them, to the room vacated by Will’s departure. They should have thought it through.

“Amelia?”

Ruby’s first concern is to get her up, get her into the sitting room, get
the gas on and get her warmed up, get a hot cup of tea into her, call the doctor. But Amelia doesn’t stir.

Ruby crouches down beside her. “Mum?”

The woman’s mouth is open and dry and pale. Her eyes are open too. Ruby reaches out a hand and takes her wrist, and the skin is cold, and feels already different; the skin hardening, the flesh underneath gone somehow spongy.

It feels strange, but Ruby doesn’t let go. She takes Amelia’s hand between hers, and chafes it. The bulging knots of her fingers. The worn-in strip of gold. Like where a tree has grown around the wire of a fence, coming to some kind of accommodation with it, an acceptance.

Janet will sleep for another hour or so. Billy will sleep until Ruby wakes him. She leans down over the body and flicks the skirts of the nightgown straight. She holds the hand, rubs at it again. She should wake Billy, even though it is an hour and a half or so before his usual time. He should be told. But she doesn’t know what will happen then. His mother is dead. What is he going to be like, once he knows?

She lays the cold hand down on the thin fabric of the nightgown. She turns and climbs back up the stairs.

At first he seems to be handling it well. Between them they move the body up the stairs and back into Amelia’s bed. Then he calls the surgery and Dr. Bennett comes round even though it’s still so early. It is evident that this was not unexpected, at least as far as Dr. Bennett is concerned.

“She had a fall,” Ruby says, hushedly, standing over the narrow bed. Amelia lies there, pale and solid and waxy. Billy flashes Ruby a glare, like she’s mentioned something shameful. “We found her at the foot of the stairs. We didn’t like to leave her there.”

Dr. Bennett tilts his head. “I don’t think that was it. Any headaches, strange behaviour in recent weeks?”

Billy stands silent, dwarfed by the tall professionalism of Dr. Bennett.

“I don’t know. Maybe,” Ruby says. “Yes. I mean, she’d started to wander a bit.”

Billy turns stiffly away.

“Maybe we’re looking at a stroke,” the doctor continues. “She might have had them before, little ones. I’ll ring the coroner. We’ll have to be certain.”

“What for?” Billy asks.

“For the certificate. There’ll have to be an autopsy.”

“Oh.” Billy doesn’t look at his mother.

“Is that really necessary?” Ruby asks. “She was an old lady.”

The doctor nods sympathetically. “I do understand, believe me. I’m very sorry for your loss.”

Billy goes out of the room. He leaves the door open behind him. She watches him cross the landing and go into Janet’s room. There’s a moment’s quiet, and then a sleepy mumbling from the girl, and then Billy’s lower voice, and then the girl’s exclamation,
Oh Daddy
, and the rustling of bedding as the girl reaches up to hug him. It doesn’t seem fair, that—to go and tell her, insist that she wakes and knows. To claim her like that; to claim her sympathies.

Billy pushes his wide-headed broom around the gymnasium, collecting clots of shed hair and the fibres from coconut matting and the stuffing of vaulting horses and medicine balls and the threads that fall from the climbing ropes. He moves through the white grids of light from the high windows, scattering dust motes. He can hear one of the classes down the corridor—the massed voices chanting out their seven times tables. He knows his times tables better now than he ever did as a boy.

She has money saved with the Co-op for a funeral, he knows that. He’s known for years.

At lunchtime the children queue at the hatch and take their plates with slopped-on mince and mash and swede, and he could get his too, if he wanted to, but he doesn’t. Instead, he goes out into the October sunshine and crosses the grey, gritty cement and goes out the school gates and keeps on going until he’s standing at the corner of Denham Crescent even though he hadn’t meant to go home at all.

Ruby is at work. Janet is at school. Will is away at college. His mother is in the hospital mortuary. The house looks down at him with its blank glass. It is a good house. A clean and comfortable house. It’s his; he pays for it. That’s something. He kept her comfortable in her last years. That’s something too.

He goes down to the end of the street, and back up the lane behind the houses. He goes into the garage. For a moment he just looks up at his old track bike, its hanging wheels, its dust-filmed frame. If he had been stronger, fitter, faster, better—but he can’t even imagine it, because then the world would have to be such a different place, and he a different man entirely.

He lifts the bike down. He wipes the frame and forks with a clean
rag. He drips oil onto another cloth and rubs at the joints. He lifts the back wheel, pulls the pedal round with a hand. It ticks round perfectly, the greased links of the chain meeting the gear teeth with easy precision. He’d forgotten this, the clarity of it, the perfection.

When he first gets on and tries to pedal, the bike doesn’t shift; the gearing is too high, and he’s too unfit, too old to make it move. It’s a track bike; it’s meant for athletes.

He needs Rudd—the shove from behind sending him flying out into the drum of the racetrack. But there is no Rudd. Rudd is thirty years ago, a world away. Billy stands on the pedals, one hand on the back fence, in his duster coat and cap, and uses his whole weight on one pedal, pushing down, and the wheels begin to inch forward, and he lets go of the fence, and begins to roll, and heaves down on the other pedal, and he’s moving, reaching the end of the back lane and out onto the street, and for a moment the struggle to get moving is like the first morning at Cheeseman’s, the bulk of that Alldays & Onions, the way he’d had to drag it into motion, and then the discovery of speed.

He turns into Bramcote Avenue, and then Cranmer Road by the cricket green, and then joins the traffic on the London Road.

He just rides. He slips through traffic and out of the press of buildings and alongside ribbon strips of semis, then villas. He’s in as perfect synchrony with the bike as its gears are with the chain. He’d forgotten this, the feeling of the body fitting itself into the mechanism, the way space concertinas, the way time folds in upon itself. The way you disappear.

Soon the road opens out straight and long, letting him pick up speed. He cuts through plain countryside—past wide, dull fields, hedges, through woods and villages; fewer and fewer cars. He stops in a market town and, still astride the bike, dips his head to drink from a municipal drinking fountain. He doesn’t feel tired, or hungry, or the burn of muscle use. He doesn’t even feel sad, not while the road is empty and open in front of him, and he can just ride.

But as darkness falls he finds himself approaching a fork in the road, in exposed, open countryside. To his left, an expanse of muddy, ploughed field; to his right, a field of broken stubble and a copse. No signposts. He slows off, comes to a halt. Tilts the bike, one foot to the rough gravel.

He wipes his face. Checks his watch. It’s getting on for six. Ruby will have expected him home hours ago. He thinks of that wintry street when he was little, standing at his mother’s side, the protecting squeeze
of her arm. He was right, Billy was, to get rid of Sully. Whatever her regrets might have been, they’d have hurt her less than that poison. True or not true, it doesn’t matter now. Her peace of mind, at least, was left untainted. His father died a hero. Everyone knows that.

Her lumpen knuckles, wrapped round with knitting wool. Her loneliness.

But the children. She’d had that. The children were an uncomplicated blessing; she could take them for who they were and not wish them different. When the boy was first in callipers, three years old, clanking around like a wind-up toy, she’d lift him up onto her hip, carry him out to the garden, show him the berries swelling on the fruit canes, or the birds’ nest in the hedge.

The fields stretch out and away and a faint rain begins to fall. The world is empty. Nothing stands between him and eternity.

He has to try harder with Will, before it’s too late. If he could just explain. About that day in Normandy; the price he paid for this.

Because already the boy is pulling further and further away; first A-levels and now off to college; he’s almost out of earshot. He’s doing well. He’s got pluck; he’s not daunted by anything. Soon as he was out of that calliper he was kicking a ball around all day long. From cripple to captain of the football team in three years. Making Billy feel, though he’d never say it in case it just made matters worse, that if the boy had only had two decent legs, they could have made a genuine athlete of him. He’s had choices though, the boy has. He’s had his books. His college grant.

I must try, Billy thinks. Next time I see him, I will really try.

Billy walks the bike round where he stands, and slips back onto the saddle, and wobbles off, slowly, back the way he’d come.

When he gets home, it is three in the morning or thereabouts. His legs are uncertain and his backside sore. Ruby is dozing in the chair. He sits down in the other seat. He doesn’t want to wake her, but doesn’t want to leave her either. Her face is soft in sleep. There is loose skin under her jaw. She’s beautiful. After a while, she blinks, and stirs, and looks at him.

“Billy,” she says.

“Sorry.”

“Oh God, love, Billy.”

Ruby pushes her way out of the chair. A rug falls off her knees and she steps over it. She wraps her arms round him.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m sorry.”

FROST STILL LINGERS
in the corners of the quad. Will makes his way down the path, past Grammar Hall, heading for Fellows’ Garden. He can feel the capital letters. Everything seems to be worth a capital here, and not to need an article. Not the grammar hall, but Grammar Hall. Not the fellows’ garden, but Fellows’ Garden. As if everything were the original, the only, the ur-thing.

The air is still as a pond. It brushes his skin, teases up the hairs on his legs, makes his breath puff.

He glances down at his leather football boots. They’re pretty good. Heavy, but that doesn’t bother him. Cost a week’s wages. His bad leg is lean still; it doesn’t match the good one in terms of bulk, but it’s muscular. He’s worked hard to make it so. He needs to keep it that way. And even then he still has to be careful; it doesn’t do to twist or tear anything.

They have gathered in a loose huddle, puffing, jumping, keeping warm. A miscellany of football shirts. A big bloke with dark hair carries a net of balls, like onions in a bag; another has a cluster of sashes in his hand, hanging like a bunch of limp flowers. Will skips into a run to join them.

Bare trees stand against the pale sky, and birds rise like flakes of burnt paper. He can feel the openness of this place, as if the cold emptiness of the countryside was slipping into the centre of the city.

It’s only when he gets close to the crowd that it becomes obvious. These young men are built on a different scale from him. He slows to a jog, joins the edge of the group, and he feels like he has come up on the edge of a wood. They’re oblivious to him, talk in familiar loud tones, like they all know each other already. Will stands on his right leg, drops his hip and hooks his booted left toe back into the earth, tries to keep
the wasted limb out of sight. He’s finding it hard to make out what’s being said. Even just on the basic level of the words: vowels seem somehow high up in the mouth.
Eh dint neh
, someone says, and that’s
I don’t know
, he thinks, but it’s a strange and ugly way of talking, and everyone seems to do it. He thought the students would have come from all over, but they sound like they’ve all come from the same place.

“When are we starting?” Will asks the guy next to him, and the guy glances down at him.

“When are we starting, Michael?” the guy asks.

Michael is the big dark bloke with the bag of footballs. “We ready then? Everyone here?”

There is a chorus of cheerful assent. Michael opens the bag and lets the footballs spill and bounce and scatter. Will scoops for a passing ball, but it’s gone, caught up by someone else’s booted foot. The boot is beautiful, lightly crafted, clean, barely worn. He catches the back view of a sandy-haired giant who thunders off down the pitch dribbling the football as if he owns it.

They divide into teams. Will is handed a red sash. Michael tells him he’s playing fullback. Will hates defence; it does him no favours at all. But he takes his place, marks his man, because this is just try-outs, and he’ll get a chance to show off what he can do later, and show off his goodwill and sportsmanship now.

He bounces on the spot to keep warm, watching the action down the far end of the pitch, bloody miles away, and the tall spreading fat trees at the end of it, and beyond that the river, and a pair of scholars walking along the riverbank, gowns flapping. The rooks settle in the high branches.

He glances across to the other defender. Indian lad. Smaller than many of them, about his height. Skinny legs coffee brown against his white shorts. Must be feeling out of place.

“Bloody cold, isn’t it?” Will grins.

The Indian lad glances at him with his big clear eyes, then looks back to the action. “It is October.”

The way he speaks is butter smooth. It makes Will see his own words, as if they’re buzzing around him like bluebottles; he says
cowld
not
cold
, he realises, and here that’s wrong. He jogs carefully on the spot again, looking back towards the game.