Undercurrent (10 page)

'New York's safer than London,' Peter volunteered helpfully, covering Henry's silence. Henry was looking peculiar, stretching his face into a reciprocal smile, unable to speak. His throat was suddenly swollen; he was about to choke. He nodded, speechlessly.

'How can that possibly be, with all those guns?' the widow demanded belligerently.

Henry was feeling cold and slightly less welcome than he had been half an hour earlier, discussing seventeenth-century verse and castles with the vicar. The room was warmed by a roaring fire; his face was flushed and his feet were chilled. The bruise on his forehead throbbed.

'What difference do weapons make?' the young man asked, suddenly communicative, as if he had been unable up until now to eat and talk at the same time. 'It's the attitude to life which counts. I mean, if you want to kill someone, you'll do it, won't you? All Francesca Chisholm had to do was throw her baby off the pier-'

'It wasn't a baby,' Peter interrupted. His face had a purple tinge and he was angry. 'It was a five-year-old, much-loved child.'

This time the silence stretched for longer. 'Sorry,' the young man mumbled. 'Sorry, I forgot.

You used to babysit, didn't you?'

'Yes.' Tim, this time, sounding terse.

'Well, a prayer for the dear deceased, I think,' the vicar intoned diplomatically, crossing himself and bowing his head. 'And talk of happier things.'

'Such as pudding,' Tim said brightly. 'Will you all hand your plates this way, please?'

There was a clatter of compliance, murmurs of delicious, a piling of forks and knives, all travelling from hand to hand towards Tim's end of the table. Senta the dog, banished to the hall, yapped from beyond the door in anticipation of scraps, and in the activity and resumption of chatter, Henry leaned forward to the young man, swallowed rapidly and spoke in a whisper.

'This. . . Francesca . . . Was this a long time ago? Where does she live now?'

'Oh not very far away.' He plucked a grape from the fruitbowl centrepiece. 'Cookham prison since last year, actually. Good Lord, almost a year to the day. She'll be there for life, I expect. Where else could she be except in prison?'

'And she really killed her child? Not an accident or anything?' The young man picked another grape, chewed carefully, obviously approving the taste.

'Oh no. It was all quite deliberate. She stuffed him through a broken floorboard of the fishing platform on the pier. Have you seen our pier yet? You must, you know. It is quite bizarrely 1950ish.

And it's sinking.'

Henry felt sick. He waited for the pudding to arrive, and then excused himself politely.

The wine did it. Bad breakfast food, rich supper food, fucking foreigners. French wine, purchased on the other side of the Channel, bargain prices, better value. They had all talked about bargains; everyone, everywhere talked about bargains. But not in the same breath as talking about Francesca.

Not his Francesca. Of course it was wine. His chronic weak stomach should never be treated with wine, although it did make him sleepy.

His stomach liked bourbon and vitamins, precious little else. He might have told her that, given the chance. Hey, Frannie, remember how I always got sick in India and you found the Ayurvedic doctor who fixed me up? You sure were good at fixing things. . . you used all your money to pay for those kids to go, too. That was when I got you the shawl, because you'd given yours away. Ideal for a backpack, a ring shawl, because it folds away to nothing. See? You can drag all two metres of it though a wedding ring; it floats softer than silk, but it keeps you warmer than. . . toast, you said. And it's far too expensive, you said. Especially since I bought two for you, one to use and one to keep for best.

Henry lurched towards the tiny toilet which served the remoteness of the top two floors, inconveniently situated between the two on a half-landing, just so everybody had to travel up or down a flight.
Travel broadens the mind. Fuck travel
. And you know what, Francesca, you know what I did when my father died? I went out and bought another shawl, not for me, just a kind of talisman to remind me I'd once been generous. Bought it here to give you, and yes you are right about the expense. In Boston, they cost a small fortune.

He retched and delivered the roast lamb of a dinner almost whole and entire into the bowl of the toilet.
Lav, lavatory, ladies, gents, netty, the heads, the loo, the bog, but
NEVER
the rest room
. W
hy do
you call it that?
Ancient questions on an Indian patio.
We call it the rest room because you can take a
rest in it. What? In a loo? Nobody rests in a loo.

Henry rested. Flushed the bowl, wrapped his gown around him and let his head rest against the ice-cold wall of the narrow room. This was wine and travelling and getting bummed out everywhere and it had nothing whatever to do with grief. He wasn't having anything to do with grief.
Grief as in mourning? Grief
. He had a poor stomach, was all, and yet he was here, sobbing like a crazy boy coming down from drugs, sobbing maybe because he needed more, sobbing for his father and the words of a poem she had sung him on an evening full of fireflies.
When there is no place, For
the glow worm to hide, Where there is no space for receipt of a fly; Where the midge dare not enter,
Lest herself fast she lay, If Love come he will enter, And soon find out his way.

Sentiment, bloody sentiment. He knew the sobbing was loud and uncontrolled; he would have fled upstairs if there had been any prospect of an embarrassed eavesdropper, even the damn dog.

Henry had manners, even in extremis, which was more than he felt he had witnessed in the English he had admired from afar for so long. Finally he moved, stiff with cold, made sure the place was left clean in his wake, another automatic response, and clambered into his high bed.

The fire they had lit in his room had died, leaving a faint, residual warmth. The fur hot water bottle comforted his feet. He had a dim memory of looking down that stairwell and seeing the same shawl draped over the bottom post. He took the shawl he had bought out of his bag and draped it over the covers. It seemed pale and insignificant beside the silk.

It was the wine did it. Just that one glass too many. Enough to wake her, make her restless, prowling round her rented room, dreaming without regret of the house she had once had and then looking at her handwriting, looped sloppily over the page, filling it with self-pitying rubbish and a memory of poetry learned in school and related to cousin Francesca in the holidays. Always seeking approval; anything to please. Always listening to Francesca, the fountain of wisdom, even when Francesca said, stay with your husband, Maggie; he'll get over his infatuation and men need forgiveness.

They may need it, she remembered shouting, but they don't necessarily deserve it, do they?

Yours left, didn't he? He left because he couldn't stand the image of himself in his horribly flawed child, so what qualifies you to give advice?

Maggie did not want to think about Francesca. She did not want to think of Francesca's crossing the road to punch the boy who had thrown a firework at her, or Francesca lending the right clothes for the occasion and saying she looked marvellous even when she didn't. Or Francesca encouraging her to take the exams, or Francesca leading out the kids from the primary school where she taught.

Nor could she bear to think of Francesca's devotion to neurotic Angela Hulme and her adopted daughter, or of all the mess and the shame and the obligations Francesca had left behind. Maggie wanted to dwell on her own fractured life and reach a point where she could start to mend it, without creating a whole new set of complications as she was doing now. She also needed to sleep a whole night from start to finish and not wake up in the middle with a raging thirst and an unaccountable desire for a bath.

Or to find she could not get into the loo because the man was locked inside it sobbing. Maggie listened for a long time, troubled and disturbed by his misery, wanting to knock on the door, but waiting until the sound became controlled before she returned quietly to her own room, draped the shawl over her nightdress, grabbed a towel and went the long flights downstairs.

Timothy was sitting at the kitchen table, smoking a cigarette, staring into space. Clean plates were marshalled next to him. Maggie had watched the laborious, washing by hand process; she had even helped, and she marvelled at the industry this impoverished pair put into the creation of an elegant and eccentric lifestyle. It was comfortable to live here but humbling to contemplate the effort it took, she thought a trifly sourly, surprised to see him there at all, especially with a cigarette.

Tim didn't usually allow himself such luxuries: all luxuries were saved for others or the dog.

'Any hot water?'

'A bit, maybe. I used most of it for the dishes.'

'Damn.'

He waved the cigarette. 'Vicar left them.' She sat down. 'Good party?'

'Oh yes. Until someone started talking about Francesca.

Seemed to upset the paying guest. And Peter and me, too.'

'Damn. Ah well. He had to know. Jumping the gun a bit, but at least the discovery looks accidental.

Is it very wrong to use him like this?'

'No. Yes. No. I don't know what you have in mind, you haven't said, so I doubt if you know.'

DAMN
Francesca
. If only people would stop talking about her. Francesca and Harry, her boy, the ghosts at every feast. She made unwilling conspirators of them all.

'It's like cookery,' Tim said. 'All experiments are fine. As long as they work. But you shouldn't use people for ingredients.'

'No,' she said, slowly. 'Not unless they volunteer.'

The light woke him. A unique kind of light he had never seen before, but had somehow imagined as peculiar to the sea and part of the reason why he had craved to live close to the ocean. It made nothing of the fear of being enclosed. A lake was not the same. He could always see to the other side and that limited it in his imagination. Lakes and rivers were for respectable traffic from bank to bank, not for the risk of being lost without bearings, without sight of land, drifting with the current.

It was only the sea which was suitable for high endeavour and escape.

The sky which glowed outside was luminously white. It pressed against the windows and the glass seemed to bulge inwards in meek resistance. It forced his eyes open; it was like white smoke, thick, dense, unyielding, almost brighter than sunlight. For the second morning in succession, Henry got out of bed and went to look.

Nothing. A vast expanse of nothing, the intensity of the light hurting his eyes. He looked at his watch: 0700 hours. Not early by the standards of a hard-working commuter, but all life, all movement, was dead. Until he heard the rumble of the sea and the more specific sound of an engine.

Discernible in the mist, a rubbish cart was at work in the road below, thump, crump, the engine revving, ready to move, a clang of metal. Henry could make out the squat machine and take a guess at the colour. Some kind of municipal green. It moved on, stopping a few doors down.

Henry looked ahead and then right, turning his head deliberately to make sure there was nothing he missed. There was nothing to see. A dense fog of sky, descending all the way to earth, no contours, no landmarks, no visible life, no nothing. He squinted and peered to see if the pier would appear out of the heavenly white murk, but there was no sign of it. The scene invited him to walk into a pleasant and mysterious oblivion. There was a little excitement as he put on his clothes and searched for the hat before he remembered it was lost and he had not replaced it. Forgot to take the daily dose of vitamins and minerals, or think how he might get back in if no one else was awake, tiptoed downstairs and out the front door before the dog could bark, determined to know what it was like to be out in this, with no one else alive.

The air filtered into his throat like a prickly thistle, so raw and sharp it made him gasp. From upstairs, the white mist looked warm. The cold was intense until he started to walk, and then it was damp rather than freezing. He knew exactly where he was going, but he was not sure why, which seemed the way it was in this town. This was a different world, everything about it surreal.

He walked briskly. Gradually, the outlines of the seafront houses became less obscure; he could recognize the occasional front door and dripping leaves in windowboxes muted into pale shades by the mist. He crossed the road without looking left or right. No need; no sound, but he could see the beginnings of the pier. Even the noise of the wallowing sea was muted by the weight of the mist.

Henry liked that. He loved to be without barriers or walls; no sense of distances, nothing to close him in. The monument of the fisherman, melded gloriously with his fish and his boat, looked like a guardian of the gate.

Henry walked on. It was suitable weather to be on an edifice like the deck of a ship. Eyes adjusted to anything, to extremes of light as well as dark, and the more he looked and the less the damp air raked his throat, the more he could see. Sinister things, like the signs attached to the stubby little lampposts, black with white lettering.
RISK OF DEATH. NO JUMPING. NO DIVING
. There were less prominent signs on the bins attached below. Litter, please place here. Before you jump. A green umbrella and a picnic box lay abandoned on one of the benches.

He needed to see those fishing platforms which flanked the caff at the end. Needed to, needed to, needed. . . He remembered them from yesterday, thinking how much Dad would have liked all that, how he would have chatted to those ageless anglers who grinned and got out of the way, careful to look before they cast. He needed to see what it was really like. See if the mist made soft.