Equivocator Page 5

  As he was dragged into the car, Justin dropped his golden handbag in the gutter.

  *

  I wondered if I’d ever sleep again. My mind was all over the place. I’d done a lot of crying in the night and my puffy eyes were half closed. Traffic let loose by the lights at the junction of Platt Lane with Rusholme bellowed past as I made for the infirmary.

  The ward sister refused to say how Justin was progressing, since I ‘and the literally dozens of friends who keep phoning’ were not family. Yes, we might visit, but not in a gang.

  I’d never before witnessed the obscenity of violence. Shrinking back, a perfect coward, I’d let the thugs batter my friend senseless. I would always do that, I thought, as I bought anemones at the infirmary kiosk.

  Justin had known what was coming, the second the pincer movement closed around him. He’d been manhandled into the car and groped and insulted. He’d been driven to a car park in Droylesden, taken into the bushes, beaten up, stripped and – after Christ knows what other abominations – left for dead.

  Justin drifted in and out of sleep. When his parents arrived, we were shooed away and lingered at the ward entrance. His dad, a builder – huge man, as dark as his son was fair – was a complete surprise. Not least perhaps to Justin, who’d complained that his father neither understood nor approved of him.

  Well, Mr Knight understood him now. He sat cradling his son’s head: ‘There’s a good lad. Be all right now, angel, you’ll see.’

  After his discharge, we helped cart Justin’s belongings between the Tower and Mr Knight’s van. The Infirmary had saved his eyesight; the ruined face was healing. Only after years of plastic surgery would Justin dare show himself again. Even when Harley Street restored his violated face, he was never as he had been. The yobs had trashed some loveliness that was vulnerably innocent. Justin was, he wrote, a self-impersonator.

  As I have been. From that day onwards.

  *

  ‘You don’t mind if I nod off a little, my sweetheart, do you?’ my mother asks.

  Elise, you called me sweetheart. That is enough. Why should I disturb you by dredging up questions you’ve had reason to place out of our reach? I watch over my mother, extended on the bed, a luminous silver-grey figure, well-dressed as always, in her immaculate silk blouse, a cameo at the neck.

  I close the sliding door between bedroom and sitting room. She’ll be asleep for an hour perhaps. Time to conduct my researches.

  As a kid I truffled around in Elise’s bedside cabinet on evenings when I could rely upon her absence. She was always in demand at functions – a dinner at this consulate or that. My foraging never unearthed much of interest, or at least nothing I could easily interpret – bar the packet of johnnies that scalded my fingers. I dropped it with a yelp, slammed the drawer shut and scarpered.

  Now, while my mother sleeps, her hair silvering the pillow, the pearl buttons on her grey cardigan luminous as the eyes of nocturnal animals, I am in two minds. Sweetheart, she said, sweetheart. A woman to whom endearments had never come easily. For they might prove costly. The territory of the maternal heart is to Elise (I’ve always thought) terra incognita. That doesn’t mean that she hasn’t cared. Unbending as she is, lacking in comfy qualities, Elise has still been my all in all. Am I prepared to gatecrash the integrity of her secret world now that she can less readily defend its frontiers?

  Apparently I am. I open her laptop. Guess the password. I’m in. And rifling through the documents she’s been scanning and the start she’s made on her autobiography. It’s the business of five minutes to copy the files to my memory stick: here’s a find dislodged from a deep stratum, holding traces of cryptic living tissue. Doubtless this will prove a rather dark form of enlightenment and a grubby form of knowledge. My partner’s anguished words come flocking back: ‘I’ve always been second-best – you keep me in the dark – you disrespect me – am I not enough? – why can’t you just be straight with me? Even to yourself you are not straight. You range about like a thief in the night.’

  *

  What is it about Jack? my mother’s diary asks in 1979. Light and flighty, wings on his heels, mercurial, he has something coiled within him that is life itself, life, she can’t think of any other word. Erotic charm is part of it: wherever Jack goes people fall for him, men, women, dogs, cats. It’s ridiculous. And exhausting.

  When Elise and I arrive home that summer from the Gower cottage, Jack’s not in and doesn’t appear that night: she thinks nothing of it. Sometimes he’ll phone and say, Surprise! I’m in Barbados – or Kenya – or America. That’s fine: suits both of them. Elise scans round for a note but there’s none. Again, she’s unfazed. Eventually she gets round to ringing Jack’s friends. No one has seen him.

  Odd that he’s left the shed door on the latch, swinging open. Elise never goes in there. It’s Jack’s writing space, just a box but furnished like a tatty palace – wall hangings red and green, with a Persian rug. Two glass tea cups are on the carpet, beside the floor cushions. She sniffs at one – cardamon and rose water. There are sugar cubes on a saucer. So who was with you, Jack? Who didn’t finish the bitter chai you brew? Perhaps, Elise thinks, the visitor was uncomfortable with the Persian way Jack affected, with the sugar cube between his teeth, sucking the tea through it. Terrible for his teeth. And Jack’s vain of his looks and scared of the dentist, so he ought to mind. But that’s up to him.

  The desk is clear of papers – which is unusual. Jack, forever in mid-scribble, generates litter wherever he works.

  When she reports her husband missing, police officers have a poke round the shed. Why has she taken so long to report her husband’s absence?

  Oh, he’s often away, she explains, he has his work, he’s a travel writer.

  So – is he a secretive man, would you say? the officer wonders.

  Only in the way writers are. A lot goes on under the surface.

  So you don’t think he tells you everything?

  Nobody tells anyone everything.

  The shed is ransacked, the carpet rolled up and removed. Colonies of woodlice scatter. Crates of books vanish.

  Jack will surface, Elise reassures herself and me. Always has, always will. She rings Rhys and leaves messages. He doesn’t get back; is believed to be in Alexandria.

  Elise hears me sobbing into my pillow. She doesn’t go in to me. She senses the void beneath our feet. Everything rings hollow.

  Things move on to another level. The Security Services arrive: public schoolboys with low side partings and pinstripes. – What personal interest does your husband have in the Middle East? What drew him there?

  Elise and I are relocated. She remains insanely composed, even when we’re told that the floorboards of our house are being raised, the shed disassembled, the garden dug up.

  It all comes flooding back as I read the diary fragments and put the bits together. I’d make detours from school on the way to our hotel, passing and repassing our home. I saw masked men in white. A bulldozer. A gazebo, beneath which a body was unearthed. It was that of a boy. I call him a boy because the forensic medics thought him not fully grown, or not quite. He might have been sixteen or seventeen. And he’d been lying there asleep beneath the floor where my father worked, and before the shed was built beneath the turf where I’d done handstands, run in and out of the water sprinkler in summer, thrown snowballs in winter. He’d been there when the garden was a field. He predated the Romans. A root of the beech I climbed had skewered the boy’s ribcage and levered him apart. The buried, cloven adolescent had been my constant unseen companion. Once upon a time he had suffered violent trauma to the head.

  Nothing to do with us. Obviously. How could he have been?

  My mother was questioned about my father. Again and again. I remember moving back into the house and looking out of the window. The devastation wrought by the digger in the back garden began to settle: once the earth had been raked flat, grasses and dandelions rapidly seeded themselves. The garden still looked rumple
d as if it had suffered a bad dream.

  Together we skinned over the wound we’d been dealt. New tissue formed a film over the festering damage. Elise and I spoke little, each secretive in our own way. Daily I opened the curtains and scouted for Dad, and then just opened the curtains without expectation. After seven years Jack would be declared dead in absentia.

  For a while, lovers came and went. I’d thunder up and down the stairs in my boots, to advertise my bolshy presence to whichever stranger had gained access to my home and mother. A parade of academics, diplomats, journalists. Through Elise’s half open bedroom door, I’d glimpse her, dressed in too little, bright hair over her shoulders. There’d be glasses of red wine on the bedside table and I might overhear the disputatious voice of an invisible stranger. And the talk that came from her bedroom. Words, words, words. Mandarin talk, lofty and abstruse, sprees of erudition. As if the sex were only foreplay or pretext for this carnival of polemic my mother craved. How ashamed I was of her. What other teenager was disgraced by a mother like mine? If Dad came home, how would he feel to find his bed usurped? I wondered if he’d see what, with dismay, I intuited: that she was more herself for being without him.

  In my memory Elise is sitting up with her knees bent, holding her insteps in both hands, rocking slightly, and her bedroom is a debating chamber, a nest of dissent and oratory. She looks young and kindled and intensely vulnerable.

  *

  When she wakes, Elise says she’ll freshen up with a shower. I hear the patter of water and a murmur of, improbably, hymn-singing. She is requesting, or rather requiring, the Great Redeemer to guide her through this barren land. Then she surveys the wondrous Cross. Finally, as the shower is turned off, her variable soprano loudly counsels her soul to be still: words by Katharina von Schlegel to the music of Jan Sibelius.

  Silence after these rollicking pieties.

  Out Elise pads in dressing gown and slippers, pink and softened-looking like a baby from the bath.

  ‘What I would like you to do,’ she tells me, accepting camomile tea, ‘is to bring your partner to see me, would you, dear. And you remember that I am composing my autobiography?’

  My face burns.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘You look remarkably shifty. For goodness sake, let’s behave like adults. I will enlighten you under various headings. But be careful what you ask for.’

  ‘Yes, I will bring Jesse. Yes. Thank you.’ I half-choke on the words. ‘If he’ll come. Because we’re going through a bad patch. I hope it’s only a patch. It’s certainly bad. All my fault. Jesse is such a lovely man, Elise, I know you’ll take to him.’

  ‘Do you remember,’ she asks, ‘when you were in the school play, at Radshead? You were, if memory serves, a member of the Chorus of Virgins in Elektra. Now, which was it, Aeschylus or Sophocles? There are two plays of that name. Whichever it was, the adolescent lad they cast as Elektra did a lot of caterwauling. You’ve heard of howler monkeys? His was a very screeching performance.’

  ‘Sophocles, I think,’ I said, my heart sinking. We are off on a tour of the Ancient Greeks: I’ll be powerless to arrest or divert the flow.

  ‘Of course,’ Elise adds, rearranging the cushions behind her back on the couch, and giving the impression of settling in for a nice long literary chat, ‘Euripides parodied Aeschylus’s Elektra, didn’t he? Something to do with a fawn. But actually I think this must have been Sophocles after all.’

  Go with it, I tell myself, gritting my teeth. In this way we might eventually drift back on to the true path. Or not.

  ‘So anyway,’ Elise goes on. ‘I’d driven like a demon and been flagged down by the police somewhere in Kent. Now where was it? Broadstairs? I made it just in time to see you in your nice little skirt sashay on to the stage with the other virgins to advise Elektra not to waste her life in mourning. Would it bring her father back? No. And did Elektra take the slightest notice? Of course not. We don’t, do we?’

  ‘No, Elise, mostly we don’t.’

  ‘We’re always walking forward looking backwards, aren’t we, Seb? But what I was going to say was: there seemed to be a bunch of mad boys in charge of the lighting. Things would get so dark that you could hardly make out which actor was doing what. And then these delirious light-boys would shoot the dimmers up. The audience was in stitches. It was the most hilarious tragedy I’ve ever attended. I expect you wonder where all this is going, don’t you?’ she asks with a look of amusement. ‘Well, when I was going through my papers, the mad boys threw up the dimmers.’

  ‘They did?’

  ‘Yes. In my memory. Keep up now, Sebastian.’

  ‘Right. Sorry.’

  ‘ Jack’s old chum. You were asking about him.’

  ‘But not if it upsets you to talk about it, Elise. Really.’

  ‘No – can’t say it upsets me. A long, long time ago. Poor chap, such an empty vessel. Isn’t it funny the way these schoolboys don’t grow up? They just couldn’t let go of each other. Oh, they tried – but when one ran away, the other was haring off after him. Talk about there being three of us in that marriage. And then again they were often at each other’s throats. Quite literally.’

  ‘But – Elise – how painful for you.’

  ‘I minded, Sebastian. And I didn’t. I had my freedom and space. I’ve always been self-sufficient – as you know – to your cost, doubtless.’ And it’s her turn to look shifty and pleading.

  ‘No, Elise. No. You’ve been –‘. I bite my tongue to stop myself trotting out the cliché about good mothers. You couldn’t be called a good mother, or even a good enough mother, I think. But you were mine, Elise; and you were there. And you are still here, still mine. And I wonder if she feels the forgiveness flowing in waves from me to her, and the gratitude. I’ve never called her Mum, let alone Mummy. She has always been her indivisible self. And somehow there are irrational tears in my eyes and I don’t know what to do with the arms that long to cwtch her.

  ‘Anyway. Thing is, these two poor little chaps, each the runt of its respective litter, were seven or eight years old, when they were packed off to prep school, to be bullied and abused in the name of civilised British values. Together they located this bolthole. They’d reminisce over it in the most rhapsodic terms. Know what it was? A broom cupboard! A place to escape. Oh the scent of mansion polish and chamois leather! Do you remember when we …? Etcetera. After that, there was public school and Cambridge – but they never found anything to match whatever it was they’d found in their secret world. So there you are.’

  Yes, I see. I think I do. They were far from home. All their lives. Even with me and Elise, Jack was a homeless person. She says nothing about Rhys’s proposal of marriage. Perhaps she’s forgotten it, if it ever happened.

  ‘So – anyway – about the lights. Rhys was always there in our house, morning, noon and night. Or about to be there. Or being referred to. Oh Rhys this, Rhys that. Jack and he were infatuated with one another but they were also jealous – or envious – rivals. What one had, the other coveted. Once I said to Rhys as we were chopping vegetables in the kitchen (for he was always wanting to enter into household activities), “You can take over from me and be Jack’s wife if you fancy it, Rhys, do please feel free – it’s quite a demanding job though, I have to warn you.” He grinned and said he might pass on that. Said he had something to Jack’s purpose nothing. Shakespeare’s Sonnets – look it up, Sebastian. But surely you remember Rhys from those days?’

  I shake my head.

  ‘He was practically a fixture. He’d take you for walks to the park and the zoo.’

  ‘No,’ I object, quite sharply. ‘I remember Dad taking me to the park. Pushing me on the swing, that kind of thing.’

  All Elise replies is, ‘Right?’ As if to say, Believe that and you’ll believe anything.

  ‘He did, Elise. I remember clearly. He did all sorts of things with me. We went fishing. He took me on a steam train.’

 
; ‘Well, anyway. Don’t distress yourself.’

  I’m not going to insist or ask further. My mother’s raised eyebrows are telling me I’ve confabulated. Memory has changed the mask on the face of the man who accompanied me on those outings. It’s easily done. Apparently.

  Rhys at that time was a handsome, quietly charismatic fellow, Elise continues – magnificent head of hair, which he still in the 1970s wore in the hippie-style, eyes pale, with long lashes. Jack had brought back from Thailand for each of them a pa kao mah, a sarong, which they liked to lounge around in. Elise was always in jeans and they all liked the feeling of release from constraints of gender. The electricity used to fail: it was rationed, in the time of the strikes and fuel shortages – and, sod’s law, usually at dinner time. They’d cook on calor gas and eat by candle light. Those meals would go on for hours. The talk of gods. Except when it was more like the braying of asses. My mother kept a diary, by candle-light.

  One evening Jack and Rhys were spaced out, they were dreamy and happy and sloshed. They smoked roll-ups and relived their lives backwards. Finally they arrived at their childhood refuge – in the boarding school cupboard with the mops and the smuggled torch, the place where they imagined themselves heroes and supermen and ate their Homeric feasts of tuck sent by Rhys’s mam and thick wedges of bread and jam smuggled from the tea-time meal served before prep and dinner.

  The hash was probably helping their mood, and the brandy. The room was brimming with hilarity and that sort of mellow, melting tenderness they felt for each other – and which flowed to include Elise. Perhaps it overflowed too far.

  They were discussing courtly love; it was a thing of Rhys’s. He was into King Arthur and Guinevere and bold Sir Lancelot, particularly the latter. Marriage is no deterrent to love; jealousy is essential to love; two men may love one woman – that kind of thing. One minute they were in a good place, the next at one another’s throats. A candle went flying. It left a scorch mark up the wallpaper, nearly to the ceiling.