Undercurrent (26 page)

It's so irritating to forget.'

"But if she whom love doth honour
‘Maggie recited tonelessly,
'be concealed from the day
. . .'

'Set a thousand guards upon her. Love will find out the way
,' Henry finished, beaming with satisfaction like a child triumphing in getting the right answer.

'What the hell are you doing here?' Her temper was ready to explode and her right hand itching to slap his face if only it were not so filthy.

'Oh, this and that. I'm a very conscientious tourist, I have to see everything.'

'Well, I think it's closed. Henry, and we'll go home now. Where'd you put your shoes and that jacket?'

'In the Runs, ha ha . .. down there, somewhere ' vaguely pointing.

'Would you like to go and fetch them?' The voice was now sweet and persuasive.

'Nope.' He was shaking his head apologetically.

'Nope. Can't do that. Absolutely not.'

'There aren't any ghosts,' she said. He seemed vaguely surprised at the suggestion.

'Of course not. But I'm not going.'

She clattered away out of sight, footsteps receding angrily in the downhill direction of the Runs and Henry listened, rather than watched, feeling only slightly guilty. What did he need a jacket and shoes for? He was doing OK as he was. A minute passed; then the half of another, and the cold crept back beneath his skin. One more verse and then he would have to go and look for her in case she was lost, like the starling.

'Some think to lose him by having him confined, and some do suppose him, (poor thing!) to be
blind. But if ne'er so close you wall him. Do the best that you may; Blind Love, (if you so call him,) Will
find out his way
.' Seventeenth century, he seemed to remember. Footsteps coming back, slower than they went, and there was Maggie with his jacket in one hand and his shoes in the other, holding them both away from her soft, camel coat as if they were contaminated while he still hummed the song. He could just about squeeze his feet into his shoes with a degree of pain and without any possibility of tying the laces, and he found it surprisingly difficult to get his arms into the sleeves of the jacket.

'I've been thinking .. .' he said as he hobbled after her up the slope and out of the open door, waiting for her to fiddle with keys while he breathed in the fresher, colder air and felt the rain on his face.

'Don't think. Henry, don't. You aren't good at it.' Maggie was conscious of an appalling headache forming like a storm cloud behind her eyes and she was unwilling to open her mouth, least of all for discussion. She pushed Henry into her car, drove by Neil's, posted the key through the letterbox, ground the gears twice in the short distance back to the seafront. Henry was still humming, not exactly at his best.

'What do you do for an overdose of Viagra?' she asked, to concentrate his mind and deal with another, residual worry as she watched the shiny surface of the road in the dipped headlights of her very old car.

'You wait for it to pass, I suppose. Was it raining on the day Harry got pushed into the sea?'

'Oh for God's sake. Henry, I don't know.'

The House of Enchantment was lit like a Christmas tree. It made Henry expect to see seasonal decorations in the hallway and he was slightly disappointed to find there were none. The sea on the far side of the road made soothing sounds and the rain fell. Peter and Timothy hugged him in turn and he hugged them back with enthusiastic affection, calmly grateful to be delivered back like a parcel into the domain of men and a bath full to overflowing. Soon it would be dawn.

Henry lay in his own, high bed, his feet and hands stinging and throbbing, and he thought of the starling. The words of the song would not go away and what was the difference between a song and a poem? Before sleep intervened, he found himself entertaining the thought that Maggie had engineered the whole episode; or Angela and her, between them.

A woman thing; teach the silly beggar to mind his own business; show him not to interfere.

The thought drifted away. She would not have done that; they were poles apart, those women, and it isn't all about facts Henry, it's as much about instincts. Trust them, he admonished himself.

Instincts. And there was a last irrelevancy . . . would he have spent so long on the trapped bird if it had been a fat, ugly seagull instead of a starling? Yes, of course, but it might have been harder. And sacking would have been better to contain a seagull beak, whereas the starling required the softness of a shawl.

Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you . .. You look like an elephant. Go back to the zoo.

Maggie woke to the sound of continued rain and saw through one eye the patch of grey sky which signalled another winter day. She closed the eye and tried to calculate the time. Raising her head to look at the bedside clock was effortful; about eight-thirty, at a guess. She could sleep again, if she wanted, but the headache clawed at her skull and the longer she lay, listening to the rain, the worse were the reflections which hurt more than the aftermath of the wine and the dull sense of shame attendant on it.

She groaned. The suit of clothes she had worn in the early hours of the morning hung neatly on the wardrobe as if already inhabited and ready to march, a last act of discipline before she had got back into bed. She put on her thick dressing gown, a hairy thing in tartan, chosen for warmth rather than elegance, shoved her feet into slippers looked out of the window down at the Wendy house in the garden, groaned again and aimed herself towards the kitchen.

Happy birthday to you
... a humming again. The kitchen of a house had always been her favourite place, along with back bedrooms and small gardens. Francesca had referred her to the House of Enchantment and she had never left. The choice had plenty to do with preoccupation and lethargy and nothing to do with the fact that she might have been able to see her second cousin in the garden, cavorting with Peter and Timothy on the three afternoons a week when they minded him.

She had had the opportunity, she supposed, to know Harry better during the brief interval between her return and his demise, but she had not taken it, a fact which rankled now. There had been in her mind the certain thought that if she had insisted on a child, her husband would not have left her and she did not want to pay attention to other people's children. Nor had she wanted to cry on the shoulder offered by Francesca, because she had resorted to it once too often and slightly resented the fact it was being offered again. How sad it is, she thought, that we recoil from the people who have helped us.

They know too much. Each heavy step down to the ground floor brought a fresh onslaught of misery,
I should have, I should have, I should have done this, that, the other . . . I should have noticed
.

I should have been conciliatory to my husband instead of forcing him away; I should have been nicer to little Harry, and now to grown-up Henry, and I do not know what the fuck to do next, what the hell it is I've started or even why.

'You should have some breakfast,' Timothy said.

'Bacon?'

'Ugh.'

'Toast, then. Tea.'

'Stop being nice, for God's sake or I might cry.

You're so bloody kind, you're a lousy example to a woman with a conscience. Toast, please.'

Toast and marmalade marked a point when life was tenable.

Not necessarily pleasant, but at least ongoing.

'Henry told us he stayed after closing time in the castle and got locked in. It might have been a mistake, he said,' Peter stated.

'How very diplomatic of him. No one has ever been incarcerated in there by mistake. And there's something else I'll have to tell him, too. Bloody Neil got in here the other night, I don't know when, and went through Henry's room. Took the shawl on the bed. It's in his house. What nice friends I've got. They're all duplicitous.'

'What about us? We're merely simple . . . what on earth did he want?'

'Little blue Viagra pills, I think. He may have been convinced that Henry had a supply and that's probably my fault, too.' Timothy giggled. Senta came and laid her muzzle on Maggie's lap, a kind, sensitive animal, born to give unconditional affection wherever it was required, or maybe wanting some of the toast. Cupboard love, any kind of love, would do.

'If Angela Hulme locked him in, what was she trying to say?' Peter asked, remarkably chipper for a few hours' sleep.

'Get away from me and my child. Go home. Yank Something subtle like that,' Timothy ventured with a wise expression. 'And, by the way, our little Harry has no opinions whatever, at the moment. It was far to cold for him last night. He may drift in for tea.' She was silent.

A competing kitchen smell began to overpower the toast and Tim bolted towards the oven.

There were times, especially now, when his frenetic movements made her dizzy and wrecked the languor of the kitchen. The results of his culinary anxiety were delicious but the price was the hypermanic way he went at the preparations, swinging from sink to cooker to table, unable to go slower and gibbering en route,
oh dear, oh dear, oh dear
, as if each manoeuvre might result in starvation and disgrace. Face flushed and spectacles misted, he produced from the oven two perfect, golden sponge cakes which he upended on to a cloth and reversed on to a rack to cool, where they looked to Maggie like a pair of yellow hillocks, stolen from another landscape. The air was fragrant with sweetness; she swallowed the last mouthful of toast.

'What do you think? Strawberry jam, or blackberry filling? White icing, he loathes pink.

Candles, of course.'

'Candles?'

'Harry's birthday,' Peter said, patiently. 'He adores a nice Victoria sponge. Will you be back for tea?'

'Oh, bollocks,' Maggie said.

The smell of cake seemed to permeate the whole ground floor by the time she had fled to her room and back downstairs again, pausing only to dress, wondering for an irrelevant second quite how many hours of her life she had spent choosing what to wear. Philip would hate the dressing gown. Philip would be waiting for an instant response to his letter: let him wait.

Should she wear the suit which announced her as someone who had come to cut off the gas/electric/blood supply, or should she look benign? A pale face in her mirror told her that all clothes were ineffectual disguises of mood.

The rain had stopped and all such mercies seemed small. She walked to clear her head. Her car, parked against the sea, looked lonely and salty; the pier looked like something erected without planning permission for no particular purpose and even from the depths of self-recriminatory depression, she was suddenly smitten with affection for it. Story of your life she told herself; you love useless things: high heals, husbands, redundant castles, inconvenient cousins imprisoned for life, silly little dogs and verse. She stopped to look at the sea, staring out to where a ferry smoothed its way across from left to right, going away from home or towards. The sky was breaking up into clouds and she wanted to be on that boat.

Was it raining on the day Harry died? What did it matter? Maggie sat on a bench, the better to postpone the day, rose again swiftly when she felt the damp, moved on slowly. From the entrance to the pier, she would be able to see the castle and the window of her cousin's flat and that would be the place for pausing.

Angela was likely to be at home. The seafront deserted. The right approach was to get Angela out of doors and into a quiet caff where she might be inhibited about raising her voice and, in the eyes of a few unconcerned but gossipy members of the public, pretend she had nothing to hide.

The new sculpture which stood on the pavement at the entrance of the pier was only called new on account of not having reached a certain majority. It was, by all agreed standards, modern; therefore tolerated after the original and inevitable protest died down and the shiny metal of its construction (designed to dazzle the eye in the sun) had dulled down with verdigris and the salt that stained it. The first protest had been forced into submission by the surprising fact that children loved it and concluded that the base of the thing, composed of metallic waves and fishes, was ideal for running round in circles, hitting the edge of the small boat in which the solid fisherman sat with his overlarge head, clutching his giant, fat fish and gazing at it with huge, sad eyes, locked in a tussle of love.

The whole of it was too rounded for climbing, but little hands somehow desired to strike and stroke. It made a satisfying sound and was warm to the touch when the sun shone. Small children hid behind it, playing tag in defiance of the no running, no jumping restrictions which applied on the pier.

As Maggie approached the statue, admiring it for its durable surface and squat power, a head with recognizable hair poked out from behind and ducked away again. Aha. This was irritatingly unexpected and more than a little shocking. She stopped and walked forward casually, circling the statue's base until she found Tanya, leaning into the curved spine of a fish as if trying to rub her own back against it.

There was a deliberate nonchalance in her pose as if, dressed in pristine clothes suitable for school and clearly during school hours, she was simply a detached part of an outdoor study group instead of a truant concealing herself. There was a dearth of ten-year-olds out on streets at this hour of a term time morning. To Maggie's eyes, Tanya was trying to make her presence appear official, which meant having the wit not to run away; she was anxious rather than defiant, which in Maggie's slight but regular acquaintance with her, was rare. Neither knew quite what to say until Maggie thought of something suitably innocuous.

'You waiting for a bus, Tanya?'

'Sort of. Only I'm early.' A swift, relieved response. '

I'll wait with you.' The child shrugged, not a confident, fuck-you, shrug, more one of resignation from a small person who was privately close to tears. They leaned in uncomfortable silence, Maggie reaching into her bag to retrieve Philip's letter, not because she seriously intended to re-read it, but simply to look as if she was attending to something else. There was nothing else to read apart from a list. The world blurred slightly, filled her with momentary fury, we all make awful mistakes, me more than most . . . such pathetic, self-serving ruefulness; so bloody coy. She glanced forward and back over the edge of the crumpled sheets towards the gravel of the beach for a full minute, then stuffed the letter back in the bag.