Undercurrent (33 page)

Such a view, the sea and nothing else. The gates to the pier were locked and that took her by surprise: she had forgotten they were ever locked. It made her want to rattle the bars and demand entry. She stared through the iron gates at the empty concrete road and decided no one had the right to close the pier, not even to stop people coming out of the pubs and jumping off the end.

Neil: the rages of impotence, why not? Neil could have killed Harry in mistake for a ghost.

Frustrations of love and lust turning into violence: maybe he had cause to fear his ghosts. The thought chilled her. He had a tendency to theft which she had never suspected either, and he was there, wasn't he, round the corner when someone pushed Harry into the sea . ...

That's what he was, that child, an object of love and an object of hate. I wonder if he knew.

And then there was Angela, exerting the divine right of motherhood. which allowed everything and made her perfectly capable of killing the opposition. And then there was Francesca, the homicidal parent about to be abandoned by her closest allies and all her ambitions for a family unit destroyed.

The obvious culprit, underlined. I should never have started this.

There was a fisherman on the beach with a fire. He turned to retrieve something from a satchel. She looked at him twice, hesitated, moved on hurriedly.

There was a light from the top floor of the House of Enchantment. The attic in occupation could never be anonymous; the light shone out like a beacon at the highest point in the row. Henry's room had once been given to her until she rejected it in favour of her own, nicely enclosed little room with a limited view on the world. It gave a lift to her spirits to know that Henry sat up there with his quiet patience and his laptop and his tidy, innocent mind.

She was always diminishing Henry when she described him, she realized. Nice, harmless, tidy. She was making him out to be smaller than she knew he was, as if she was trying to contain him and make him safe. As she went upstairs, Maggie was trying to work out what it was about Henry which made him both appealing and abrasive to others. She was perfectly aware of what made him appealing to her, but that was nobody's business. Perhaps it was his consistency, his clear set of moral values which stood out like the light from the window; perhaps it was his normality.

Being normal was something she had always found desirable; it would be a barrier, a bedrock; it would mean being a person who went on obeying the Ten Commandments as if they made perfect sense.

Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's wife, thou shall not steal, thou shall not kill, thou shalt
not neglect to wash the car and thou shalt not pity thyself.

He was so free of that.

There was nothing she had found out this evening which she had not, strictly speaking, known before, nothing which was not included in the statements she knew by heart, and therefore little enough, apart from Neil, to report to nice, normal Henry. Music played softly from inside his room; he had a tiny CD player she envied. The door was open a crack. She knocked and pushed it wider.

Henry had his back to her, facing the silent TV screen. He sat cross-legged on the floor in front of it, clutching the control monitor, staring fixedly at the images which moved in front of his eyes. A homemade video, jerky camera, an amateur record of a family outing. She stepped into the room, stood unnoticed behind him and joined in the watching.

There was a bright summer scene, blue skies and green grass with a red ball by a deckchair.

From the right of the scene, a little girl moved into focus to climb into the deckchair with a doll. She stared at the camera, challenging it, swimsuit slipping from her shoulder, legs splayed, all of her sprawled aggressively, eyes squinting. The camera moved closer, catching the texture of her pale skin and stick thin arms: the child smiled, a sudden vision of laughter and welcome, but there was something about the scrutiny she did not like.

As the camera came closer to her face, her expression contorted with startling ferocity.

Then she spat; it looked as if a gob of phlegm hit the lens. The child covered her eyes. The camera moved away abruptly, abandoned on the ground hurriedly. The film went on for a few seconds, showing grass and sky and a pair of bare feet.

Then it stopped and resumed, showing the child as she slept in the same deckchair, curled into it with her little buttocks exposed in the too big swimsuit and the small hand of the doll stuck into her mouth like a dummy. Her hair was covered by a white sunhat. The rest of the doll was strewn in pieces round the chair. The camera lingered lovingly on her limbs. There were the marks of faint scars on her thighs.

Henry sent the film fast forward. There was the same, unmistakable girl child, equally half naked, balancing on the shingle at the edge of the sea, those thin arms extended and one foot exploring the feel of the water. Frightened, stepping back from the sensation, unable to move without trying again, hesitant, anxious, then kicking at the water to punish it. The camera turned away from her before she turned towards it, panned to a view of the pier reflected in a sea as calm as a quiet pond.

That seemed to capture Henry's interest for a second; then he went back to the swimsuit girl and her skinny thighs in the deckchair and froze the frame. Maggie for the first time recognized an infant Tanya, smaller and more ferocious, ready to spit. She drew closer to Henry's back, fascinated and repelled.

Pervert. Sitting alone in an empty room, studying images of a half-clad infant, lingering on her skin. She watched as he flicked forward through the frames, featuring others, unknown grown-ups, scenery, a birthday party, until he found Tanya again. She was the star player, usually captured from behind with her vivid hair identifying her. He went back to the scene by the sea.

Angela must be right, then, Maggie thought in a rush. Normal Henry Evans was abnormally interested in images of little girls, yeuggh. She was close enough to touch his shoulder and did not want to touch. He had crossed his arms across his chest and rocked back and forth. She felt she might as well have discovered him masturbating, took a step back.

'Oh dear,' he sighed. 'Oh dear, oh dear, oh shit'

The voice brought her back into the room. She watched him scratch his head, turn his face away and then rub at the tears in his eyes with his fist. He was suddenly childish and entirely normal, someone locked into the wrong TV channel and wanting the programme to end.

'What the fuck are you up to. Henry?' Her voice was loud but did not seem to disturb him any more than her presence, as if he had known she was there all along. He straightened his legs, leaned back on his arms and stretched his toes. There was a draught from the window. His left cheek was pink from facing the fire and his hair was tousled. His trousers were crumpled and she noticed his socks were different colours.

'Would you like a drink?' he asked, nodding in the direction of a bottle of sherry and two glasses on the bedside table. 'It's not bad stuff for a cold night. Better than beer, but then anything's better than beer. And I was supposed to keep you off the hooch, but I didn't feel like setting an example.'

There was not a trace of guilt on his face, nothing of the shifty expression of a man caught in the midst of private sexual fantasies. Maggie tried to retrieve her suspicion, her righteous revulsion and the fleeting belief that he was here with some other, appalling agenda he could not confess; that he had come to find a child like Tanya . . . but he was simply the Henry she admired with the American twang and the traces of tears beneath his eyes, getting to his feet awkwardly, stiff from sitting too long. Maggie took his place on the floor while he poured sherry. Sherry reminded her of vicars and the way her own parents had entertained, cocktails, lunchtime and evening drinks, old-fashioned even then, before the universal devotion to wine. She had forgotten the soothing texture of sherry, a drink to calm and comfort rather than inebriate.

'A nice little tipple,' she said.

'A what?'

'Nothing. Never mind.' She wanted to soothe him.

He looked fevered; his face puckered and he sneezed, then blew into a handkerchief with an unselfconscious trumpeting sound. All these actions restored him. He put another log on the fire and came and sat beside her with his back resting against the bed.

'Are these all Francesca's tapes?' Maggie waved her hand in the direction of the spilled pile surrounding the TV.

'I suppose so. She never appears on any of them so I presume it was her with the camera. Or someone with a camera who never included her on the tapes because they knew she hated that.

Someone who wanted to capture the kids in all their moods, make a record of progress, something she could look at when they were grown and flown, remember what they were like.' She proffered the cigarettes. 'That child, Tanya, she was scarred, you know. Someone hurt her very badly.'

'I told you that.'

'Yes but I didn't quite believe it until I saw it.

Cigarette burns, I think, it puts me off smoking. And I don't think I know much about love. I don't think anyone who hasn't had kids knows about that kind of love. You know fuck all. You know about the breakable kind you can put down and pick up, make a little sacrifice for, but not that much. Turn it in for another model.'

She realized he was really rather drunk. Or ill.

Controlled drunk and flicking through the videos, looking for a glimpse of Francesca who was not there.

Still with a rough command of words, wavering rather than drowning. She felt entirely excluded, watched as his eyes began to close and then snapped open.

'I don't suppose Tanya's her daughter, is she?'

No. Definitely not. A daughter of a kind, but a real daughter, no.'

'Ah, shame. That might have explained it. I don't understand love like that,' Henry repeated.

'I really don't. It makes all other kinds seem . . . incomplete, corrupt.'

'I beg your pardon?' she said crossly. 'What about liking?'

'For if the darkness and corruption leave, A vestige of the thoughts that once I had..
' Henry intoned, dreamily.

'C'mon, what's the next line?'

'How the hell should I know?'

'How the hell?
Better by far you should forget and smile. Than that you should remember and
be sad
. Just as well she doesn't remember. Poor thing.'

'Who's a poor thing. Henry?' He waved, expansively, his back sliding down slowly towards the floor.

'All of us. All of us poor things. So stupid not to have worked it out. It's perfectly obvious.

Dunno what I do know, though- Why do you pretend you don't know the last line?'

She watched silently as he hauled himself to his feet and then, uncertain of the next task, sat down abruptly on the bed. Got up again and walked towards the fire, leaned against the mantelpiece in a parody of nonchalance. She could see him as an archaic academic in a study, holding forth over the port on the finer points of Chaucer. He was not made for the real world. Then he squatted by the fire and warmed his hands against the flickering blaze.

'I saw Angela,' she said, briefly. 'She puts Neil in the arena too. He hit Harry, didn't like him.

It was all about a dog. He hit him.'

She watched, tense with caution. There was a strange temptation in fire; like water, it lulled one to destruction and promised no harm. His hands went closer to the flames and he stretched his long fingers like a pianist preparing to play, then dipped two fingers into the half-full glass of pale sherry and flicked drops of it into the fire. The flames sputtered in response. His hands went back to clutch the glass at a crazy angle. 'Don't put your hands in the fire,' Henry said. 'My dad told me that, but I did it anyway.

A dog, huh? They couldn't have kept a dog.' His eyes glittered: she wanted to mollify him, prepare him for the headache he would have in the morning, clouded with poisonous sherry and thick with snivelling cold, and yet at the same time she suspected it was all a bit of an act.

'Did I tell you about Neil? He broke in here, looking for Viagra. It was him took your shawl, I got it back ... I put it on the bed. Neil could have been on the pier, fishing on the morning Harry went down, you know . . .'

'He's not a fucking ship!' Henry roared. 'He wasn't launched off the jetty with a bottle of fucking champagne, he was pushed under. And I read that statement, I can read. Could your fucking Neil have done that, do you think? And why should he think I keep Viagra?' He scratched his nose.

Anything rather than him putting those long fingers towards the fire.

She shifted, guiltily. She wanted him to stop everything, even reciting poetry like a maudlin bore, the way she herself did sometimes, although her tastes seemed to have become cruder lately, her memory for verse selective.
Oh love, will you not linger, like a sticky little finger. With your digit
on the fidgit, are you true
? she recalled to herself.

'I haven't the faintest idea,' she answered crisply. 'You can ask him if you like.'
If you stir
your cock in custard. It will never cut the mustard. Oh my darling is this person really you
? Now where had that one come from? Out of an empty wine bottle, like a genie, something she had composed for Philip.

'Ask Neil?' he repeated stupidly his eyes suddenly sober and full of hope. 'Neil? That fella?

If only. Where is he? Gotta talk to him. If only it was him.'

'He's outside on the beach. Fishing. Got his dog with him. The black one.'

'Oh shit. If only.'

His eyes closed and he put down the glass carefully, got up again and walked towards the bed where he lay down on the silk covers staring at the ceiling with his hand supporting his head.

He was not a healthy colour.

'Yes, I need to talk to him. But not now, obviously. Might ruin my reputation.' He laughed.

'Sorry about this. Upset. Dunno what to do. Need to think again.

Poor things. Talk in the morning.'

She stacked the video tapes, saw the description of contents noted on the outside in Francesca's neat hand, picked up the glasses and the bottle, turned out the central light, moved the fireguard and went to close the window. Henry spoke out of the corner of his mouth.