Undercurrent (8 page)

The sidestreet had been virtually empty, he seemed to recall, but now there was a crowd.

'Eh! That was a tumble! What's your hurry? Are you all right?'

'Oh, you've given yourself a knock. Up you come. Steady does it . . . There we are!'

It seemed as if a dozen hands were hauling him to his feet. His face was level with the wrinkled, weather-worn face of a grandmother and her arm steadied him protectively. He smiled, automatically. 'I'm sorry. . .' he began.

She grinned back. 'I should take more water with it, son, if 1 were you,' she said, and the other three people laughed, too, in relief. Henry felt ashamed, as if he had been drunk, falling down in the street like a bum, to be rescued by a woman a good thirty years his senior and, at the moment, twice his strength.

Perhaps if he had stunk of booze, she would have dropped him back.

'I should get home and bathe that scratch if I were you,' she was saying authoritatively. 'Where do you live?'

'Down the shore. The rooming house with the towers. That way.' He jabbed a finger.

'I'll walk with you.' Not an invitation, a command.

And that was how Henry Evans came to be walking home, to a place he had never meant to stay, not in the company of a woman who had haunted his dreams, but with an old lady who might have been his mother.

He found himself burbling to her about Francesca Chisholm. Probably concussed; ridiculously loquacious; something to be ashamed of later. Maybe that was why he had come away, to burble to strangers in a way he could not to friends. What friends? Which of them had ever understood his overwhelming grief at losing his equally shy father? Take a week off, Henry, it'll pass. It did not pass; it was a subdued madness of grief. Go to a counsellor, Henry. No. No. No. If I have to pay somebody to listen and straighten me out, I'd rather die crooked; I don't want to be straightened out. I want to talk to her.
Because hers died too
. And I didn't know what it could be like.

'Why's that?' Granny was holding on to his arm. He forgot what it was he was saying. They were walking on the inside pavement, with the sea, choppy but docile, safely on the other side of the road, a presence rather than a threat. If only he could concentrate on where he was. He could see the turrets of the House of Enchantment coming into focus in the distance. The Holy Grail.

'Because she'd know what I was talking about. You know what you talk about when you're twenty-two, twenty-three? Your damned parents. I criticized mine, but she was proud of hers.

Loved him like mad. He wouldn't have been so different from the age I am now, I guess, Francesca's father.'

'So?' They were walking steadily but slowly. Her grip on his arm had become his grip upon hers, so he slowed even further because he did not want to stop talking. It felt like a turned-on faucet, no, he was steeped enough in English literature to know he meant a tap.

'She could make me talk. And I only know now how much I let her down. Because she knew me and loved me and then when she got the news that her father had died, I really didn't know exactly what to do. Like she was leaving me, you know? And I had a plan, so I just went ahead with it. Left her to go home alone. No idea what she felt. No idea what she was losing, where she was at. Now I do. I guess I just wanted to apologize. Tell her I tried to turn round.'

'Of course you do.' Granny stopped for breath. He looked at her for the second time. It was a fine old face, he noticed, encouraging him by attentive silence.

'She'll have kids by now. Grown-up kids, even. She had a way with them, you know?'

They had reached the door. For the last few steps he had been dragging her along and in the course of his last recitation, she had been actively trying to detach herself gently, turning away with the cautious consideration of a person about to sneeze.

'Are you all right?' he asked.

'Me? Oh yes, of course. You're home now. The boys will look after you.' She took a handkerchief out of her pocket and blew her nose. It had been quite a distance they had walked; Henry wanted to ask her in, offer tea and a ride home. But it was not his house and he did not have a car. She might live miles away. His manners were all adrift; he had talked nineteen to the dozen; he did not know if there was something he ought to do, like offer money or something; he could not even tell if he were dealing with rich, poor or middling. Confused, he was failing to notice the hardening of her tone. She was standing with her hands thrust firmly into her pockets, with something to say.

'Francesca Chisholm let that son of hers be looked after by
poofters.
Poor little sod. What are men like that doing looking after a child?' The last word was almost spat. Then Granny controlled herself. She patted his arm and attempted a smile.

'Eh, don't listen to me. You seem a nice enough man. You take care, now. No more falling over, eh? Not unless you're really pissed. No need otherwise, is there?'

'You've been very helpful. . .'

She pulled on the doorbell and hurried out of sight before it was answered. He watched her go.

The hallway was richly warm and colourful as he stepped inside; the brindled dog yapped a welcome and sniffed at his trouser leg. Tim was dressed in the voluminous jellaba, this time held at the waist by a bulky sash of green silk. There were spectacles pushed back into his hair and he was waving a ladle.

'Oh Senta, do stop. He knows you're pleased to see him. Aren't we all? Come in, Henry, come in.

We were worried about you; thought you'd got lost. No sightings of you for hours. Did you enjoy the bacon and eggs? Oh dear, what have you done?'

Henry was a medium-sized man (Henry Evans, Mr Normal, he had once heard himself described) while Tim was tall, staring down at the lump on his forehead with great concern. 'Not fighting, I hope?' Tim questioned. 'Not so soon? Peter!' he yelled in a voice surprisingly deep and loud. 'Come and take over!'

The pair of them stood and surveyed him in the gaslight of the hall. Dirt on his trousers, lump on head, slight grazes on hands. They seemed to come to an unspoken conclusion, sealed by simultaneous nodding. 'Hot bath, don't you think, Tim, while you get on with supper and I deal with his clothes?' Another nod. Henry was frog-marched down the corridor, through the kitchen, into the bathroom he had loathed this morning, but which was now comfortingly warm. Tim turned on taps with a greater skill than Henry had managed when he'd secured this morning's trickle. Water gushed into the bath with the force and noise of an angry fountain; steam rose.

'Put your jacket and keks outside the door when you're ready,' Peter said. 'I'll press them. And when you're lying in the bath, try and keep this pressed against that swelling. It'll bring it down.' He handed Henry a wad of damp white muslin, smelling sweetly of lavender.

Henry did as he was told. This had become more than habitual. Handed clothes through a chink in the door, somewhat shyly, felt them plucked from his grasp and the door closed. Sank into a deep bath and held the muslin wad to his forehead. The room was clouded with steam; it was like bathing in a mist, floating free into profound warmth. From the kitchen, he could hear the radio sounding the hour. . . b
eep, beep, beep.
. . followed by the echo of big Ben:
This is Radio Four news
, overlaid with conversation.

It occurred to him that he had never in his life been administered to by men, with the exception of his father when he had been a very small child, before they both grew into their gruffer courtesies, and that this sensation of being looked after, fussed over in a fashion bearing on the intimate should make him feel uncomfortable, and for a moment it did. The door opened a crack; he saw the steam rush towards it, watched as his trousers and jacket, neatly assembled on a hanger, were left on the knob and the door shut again. He told himself he should be deeply suspicious; men were not kind to men, especially strangers. It was odd, possibly sinister, but in the end, he could not be bothered to think about it.

There was too much else. Such as why - when his falling in the street, just when he was so close, had made enough noise to attract those passers-by - why had she, whoever she was, failed to stop?

Francesca would have stopped. Even if she had thought she was being chased by an enemy, she would have stopped out of sheer curiosity.

The radio news droned on, made more important by the perfect English voice reciting it. That must have been where she learned to speak. From a glance at the back window as he rose in the steam and dried himself on a thick, rough towel, Henry could see that it was already dark. He was beginning to like this house. It had a pervasive influence of calm. It was free from all the claustrophobia he feared in strange places.

I suppose we are profoundly influenced by the surroundings in which we have lived. I
sometimes think that buildings are a bigger influence on life than anything else, including people. Not
that anyone here could exist without being completely indifferent to the surroundings. There are no
views; only faces.

I must not think of the sea and yet, I do . . . miss it most of all. Even the sea smothered in weather
with nothing but the sound of it.

I am learning new skills. It's called occupational therapy. There is even a choice, so I've opted for the
entirely non-intellectual as opposed to the library, which was far too obvious. I spend my days in the
kitchen where the company is not curious and there is plenty of noise to block out the sea which I
cannot hear and I have worked out who to avoid. I have a friend in the kitchen; I like the smells.

Oh what drivel I write. Is this the best I can do? No, but I'm afraid to do better, I must simply do
more. Steel myself for the anniversary of the day I arrived (anonymously, thank God) at this grand
hotel, and all the goodbyes I shall have to say again.

Better to write about nothing much. Think of the castle and the town, but not about who lived there.

Including me.

FMC

'IT'S very good of you to help, Maggie,' Neil said, as he always said.

'Not at all. A pleasure.'

'I counted them in and counted them out,' he went on. 'Just like the vicar in church. Do you know, he keeps a running tally of his congregation, written down in a notebook, so that he can work out "seasonal differences"? Odd man. I would have thought it was perfectly obvious, like it is here.

The colder it is, the fewer go out of doors. Doesn't matter whether they want culture, history or religious solace. Or even an excuse to wear a hat. Here we go.'

They walked through the entrance which led from the castle's shop out on to the yard beyond, the metal of his steel-capped shoes ringing on the stones. They climbed the steps to the first battlement, following the route of the tourists, past the cannons, then down the steps and round the circular wall of the inner keep. Neil picked up a couple of sweet wrappers which lay on the ground, grumbling as he did so. 'When I think of what people put in their pockets,' he muttered, 'I'm amazed they should think that a bit more litter would make any difference. Why not take it home with you?

Who do they think cleans it?'

The complaining was a standard accompaniment to the last trek round the castle before Neil closed the doors for the night. Not the whole castle; that would take half a day; simply the visitors'

castle, a fraction of the whole and floodlit after darkness as they entered the gloom of the third bastion, past the display and down the long tunnel to the kitchen. There were deep, black bread ovens set in a wall, a vast fireplace for open roasting in an otherwise unfurnished chamber the size of a small church, surrounded by smaller rooms with apertures in the walls for cannons and holes in the ceiling for the escape of fumes.

Then down the stairs to the lower level. They were in one segment of the castle's flowered shape, five semicircular outer bastions looking out on to an empty moat, five inner for the guarding of the central keep. King Henry's fear of French invasion had persuaded him to build an impregnable fortress of cunning design. From above, it looked like an open rose built in stone, while below, any soldier who got beyond the outer walls had to face the next and then the next, and no invader had ever made it. No foreigner had ever breached the safety of the central keep, although now they came in gentle hordes to pay their money and look.

For Maggie, there was something indescribably touching about being inside a place which had once housed an aggressive village of hungry fighting men and now housed nothing other than a few of their souvenirs. It was as if the walls could only live and breathe with the help of occupants to warm it, and at night closed itself down in an enormous sulk. She knew why Neil appreciated company on the last round of the evening whenever he could get it, especially when they descended into the base of the third bastion.

He might detest the tourists and love the place by day, but after dark he was afraid. Neil knew there were ghosts waiting for those prepared to recognize them, and he saw himself as cursed with that propensity. He saw ghosts everywhere; it made him an excellent storyteller, prone to wonderful embellishments for tourists, but each time he told stories about ghosts, he invented another and as soon as the creature was created in his mind, it remained in real existence. By now the place was teeming with them, especially in the runs.

The 'runs' were the corridors at the very bottom of the bastions, below sea level, leading from the centre in a curve round the base of the structure to rejoin it at the other end. Y
ou will pass fifty-three
small windows before you reach the next tunnel
. . .
count as you go
. Maggie could hear the words of the tourist audiotape, imagine shuffling footsteps. The lights illuminated white damp on the walls, a lump of something vaguely fungoid she would not have wanted to touch. He warned her to sidestep a puddle of water as she followed him round the narrow passage. He walked ahead, confidently, with deliberately noisy footsteps, shoulders braced, and she knew if he had been alone he would be whistling as loud as he could to warm
them,
whoever they were, to get out of the way.