Читать книгу The Moor is Dark Beneath the Moon - David Watmough - Страница 8

Alyson wasn’t there when Davey arrived that afternoon at his cousin’s house in Ladbroke Grove, but her two teenage children were only too much in evidence. He was disposed to ascribe his antipathy toward them to recent jet lag, but the truth was he had never cared much for either the few times he’d encountered them in the past. The conversation with them that now ensued while he impatiently awaited the return of their mother from shopping in the Portobello Road did nothing to increase his affection. To the contrary…

“It’s Uncle Davey!” Hester said, her voice seeming flat with disappointment as she shouted the news back down the dark hallway to where her brother, Quentin, presumably lurked.

Davey managed a smile. “You can forget the uncle bit—like I said last time. Apart from it being inaccurate, you’re both far too grown up now.”

“I don’t want to forget,” she replied with a stubborn tilt of her witch’s chin. “Where’s Uncle Ken. Didn’t he come, too?”

Once more Davey was relieved he’d rejected Alyson’s invitation to stay with them and had booked into the Gresham as usual.

“Ken is busy. Besides, your Great-Aunt Hannah was often rather mean to him whenever she visited us. He hardly owes her! You’re more family, come to that, but I gather from your mother that none of you intend to come down to Tintagel for the funeral.” He sighed. “By the way, can I come in?”

Hester had the grace to nod, and he found himself following her clean-curved, fifteen-year-old ass in its too-tight, faded jeans as she squeezed more successfully than he past the two bicycles stacked against the walls. The mildly unpleasant smell was of fish.

“Quent is in the breakfast room where he’s grooming his shitty dog. Mum said to make tea if you got here first, so we’ll join him there.”

“Neither of you at school then?” Davey asked, still addressing her posterior as he followed her to the deeper recesses of the gloomy house. “Taking time off for me? Should I be flattered?”

“It’s a holiday, idiot! You forgotten all about English holidays out there?”

He strove for flippancy to match hers. “What’s the point of trying to remember what you people seem to change every year? I thought these days you just went in for long weekends and, in any case, were always copying the Americans.” Then quickly, in the hope it was before she could get her nasty little teeth into that, he followed up with: “So what are we celebrating? Martin Luther King Day?”

“Funeee! As a matter of fact, it’s Michaelmas Day. Now that means it’s the twenty-ninth of September, and I have a hunch, dear Uncle Davey, that you must think it’s January ’cause, if I’m not mistaken, your murdered black leader is celebrated during that month.”

He resisted the temptation to point out she was referring to the United States and not Canada. But he was also having difficulty in accepting the fact that he’d been completely unaware of what month it was, let alone the day. His immediate inclination was to dismiss the precision of dates as something his Ken always took care of. But the presence of this bumptious teenager and her seventeen-year-old brother whom he was about to confront made him uncomfortably conscious he was nearly fifty years their senior. Davey reflected dourly that only the old can be four months out in their diurnal reckoning. He grimaced to himself as he decided it would be prudent to let the matter of dates drop. So he said nothing as they entered the room where Quentin, stripped to the waist, was on his knees, carefully combing and occasionally trimming the ears of a handsome clumber spaniel. The boy didn’t stop what he was doing but addressed the newcomer over his shoulder.

“Hello, Uncle Davey. Welcome to Ladbroke Grove. I’m sorry you caught me on Nigel’s bath day, but I had booked today knowing I’d be home from school. Besides, Mumsie has been nagging about dog hair on her bloody furniture ever since last summer. Where’s Ken? Shopping while you deal with the boring relatives?”

During their past two visits, both transatlantic visitors had nursed growing suspicions as to whether young Quentin would turn out gay or not. From vague remarks his mother had dropped, from the evidence of their own eyes and ears at some of his more outrageous comments, plus the occasional flip of a hip or limpness of wrist, there was gathering evidence to lead to the conclusion that either he was on the highway to queendom or that he must have prissy little fag friends at school or elsewhere whom he was seeking to emulate for some reason or other.

But for decades Ken and Davey had nursed a house rule between them: never suggest or even imply a homosexual likelihood about a member of each other’s family or the sons of their friends to a third party. That is, unless their suspect freely provided such information about himself. But that had never happened.

Quentin, as Davey’s youngest male second cousin, was the last in line to qualify as “family” who just might prove to be gay. But much as the two men covertly commented on his unkempt beauty, they would be the last to hint he might be more like themselves than the rest of his family. Accordingly, and perhaps with unwitting cruelty, they’d also be the last to proffer him any kind of germane advice.

In any case, Davey wasn’t about to change tactics at this juncture as the boy sprawled lissome legs before him and shook those handsome curls away from the soft features of his still-puppyish face.

“Don’t you think Nigel looks darling? All the bitches in the square think he’s a doll, and so do some of the boys.”

“I’ll put the kettle on while you try to shock Uncle Davey,” Hester told her brother. “You might also explain to him what the ridiculous Feast of St. Michael and All the Angels means and why it gives him the privilege of seeing his darling second cousins and not just their flustered mother.”

In the event Quentin did no such thing. He did say it was a holiday at both St Hilda’s School for Girls and his own Blesford Ride School, but for the most part he spoke of his adored spaniel, Nigel, and then of his plans to accompany three school pals the following summer to the south of France.

“Do you ever go to Cornwall these days?” Davey asked him when the kid had exhausted the lengthy description of his holiday plans.

“No. Why should I?”

Davey was taken aback. This kind of frankness wasn’t the version he and Ken entertained. “Well, your mother…” he murmured. “I thought she was always going back to Falmouth.”

“Only when her horrible parents were alive and blackmailed her. As soon as the Gramps were dead, she was finally free of all that Cornish balls—not to mention their revolting Methodism.”

“So she sent us to posh schools—call that an improvement!” Hester was back with us, a tray of cups and saucers in her hand. “Personally, when I’m through at St. Hilda’s, I shall be looking for a college—and a country, come to that—where God is seen as a piece of shit and religion generally as something that should’ve gone out with gaslight and horse-drawn buses.”

“Hester’s such a romantic,” her brother commented from the floor. “At least my school doesn’t flog God. We’re more into dog than God at Blesford, aren’t we, Nigel?”

“Milk and sugar—or are you gone all American?” Hester asked.

By now Davey was counting the seconds to his cousin’s return from wherever the hell she’d gone. But he was still determined to remain temperate with these snotty “Brit-pricks,” as he sometimes referred to them when discussing them with his partner.

“I’m surprised you should bother to ask yet again,” he said. “For one thing you know I’m a Canadian and did not become a Yank. Your other mistake is more expected, as I get the impression you both have decided to stamp out any knowledge of your Cornish heritage. Such as never taking sugar in any beverage. Then isn’t your generation desperately trying to be rootless, classless, and against national history so as to end up dutiful little Europeans? That would certainly account for the wholesale ignorance in your family’s personal background.”

“Oh, my God!” Quentin shrieked, abandoning his combing and rolling over a couple of times on the carpet. “We’ve got an Enoch Powell with us.” He smirked. “An Enoch not a eunuch, that is.”

Davey recalled the racist MP who had been a onetime British cabinet minister until fired for his attitude toward nonwhite immigrants. He wasn’t flattered by the comparison. “At the right time and in the right place,” he snarled, “I’ll give you my liberal views on the brotherhood of man.”

“On the sisterhood, too, I hope,” Hester added pertly.

“And on the idiocies of linguistic feminism,” he snapped in her direction. “In the meantime let’s stick to the implications of the fact-starved view of history you both seem to exemplify. It is, of course, an early indication of the decline of civilization.”

Sometimes Davey didn’t like himself, particularly. This was one of them. Then he also resented the power of these youthful two to evoke the worst in him.

“Oh, come and sit down here, Hester, and listen to a lecture by our relation,” Quentin invited. “Funny, though, I thought it was Uncle Ken, the avenging attorney—” he gave the title a broad American accent “—who might be more interested in that kind of thing while Uncle Davey just stuck to the daily dole of events from his newspaper.”

“Let me pour his sugarless tea first,” the girl suggested.

Before Davey could prepare himself for a further salvo a new voice entered what by now could reasonably be termed “the fray.” It was Davey’s plump and bustling Cousin Alyson who swayed in his direction, scattering multiple packages onto sofa and chairs while allowing a goodly portion of her wares to drop to the carpet.

“Now, Davey, dear,” she chided, “I hope you haven’t been quarrelling with the children. They were so looking forward to your arrival. Quentin was determined that Nigel look his most beautiful and Hester baked her biscuits—what do you call them, cookies, isn’t it?— as she knows how much you love ginger, just as your mother did.”

“How odd,” he commented, “considering they were both quite ignorant of the fact I never take sugar in my tea.”

“Uncle Davey says it’s part of the ancient Cornish religion to hate sugar in tea,” the pipsqueak sprawled on the carpet contributed. “He also says—”

“Uncle Davey can speak for himself, Quentin. Besides, I don’t want a recap of anyone’s conversation. I heard enough coming in. Davey, did you have a good flight?”

Davey sighed with the effort of reply. He was invariably depressed by his cousin’s refusal, perhaps inability, to come to grips with anything. On the other hand, he reflected quickly, he could readily sympathize if she was merely striving to put distance between her and her mewling pups and their idiot blather.

“The flight was as unpleasant as I’d expected. No surprises. As long as the airlines remain determined to disturb sleep with their gross interruptions, long nocturnal flights will never be comfortable.” He slumped back, satisfied that the observation, even if pompous, put space between himself and her offspring. However, he was forgetting their tenacity, not to say their impertinence!

“One mustn’t forget, Mumsie, that Uncle Davey first went to America by sailing ship,” Hester said. “It’s hard to adjust when you get older. At least that’s what Grandma was always saying when she moved in with us and started her nonstop complaining.” She started to circulate both cups of poured tea and plates of gingersnaps as if she were presiding at some sedate garden party. She served Davey first.

He felt too fatigued—probably a further wave of jet lag added to his irritation—to deal with Hester’s juvenile barbs. In fact, the self-image that clumped through his weary mind was one of those bulls of Pamplona—only one that was too long in the tooth to effectively vent its spleen against its puerile persecutors. In any case, Cousin Alyson, in her pacifically determined way, wasn’t about to encourage feuding in her presence, although Davey thought she was motivated by a pathetic hunger to preserve family unity rather than defend her cousin from these vengeful little ageists.

So abandoning antagonisms, Davey let Alyson’s words ooze over him, rather like the sun-warmed fringe of surf back home would sometimes trickle through his toes. Her kids, irritated, he suspected, by her gentle forbearance with the likes of her gay relative, began to disperse. First Quentin gathered up his canine toiletries and, with placid Nigel obediently at his heels, left for his “study” at the top of the house. Then Hester announced she wanted to see her favourite TV program, which was a series, she duly informed her second cousin, called Tragedies of the Century from theTitanic to theHindenburg, and followed in her brother’s wake.

A few seconds of silence ensued as Alyson moved to the chair her daughter had vacated and then initiated a discussion on their late Aunt Hannah, although that was only after a mild preliminary sparring over something Davey knew from long experience she’d bring up, even while praying she wouldn’t.

“You’ll stay with us, of course? The children have your room all prepared.”

“Alyson, I didn’t even know they’d be home. In any case, I booked in at the Gresham as usual. But I already told you that over the phone. Ken and I like the independence. We stayed there even when my parents were alive. It has nothing to do with affection or anything like that.”

“I just thought…what with the funeral and our being her only living relatives.” She sniffed, and for one awful moment he thought she was going to cry.

“You know very well, my dear, that if she hadn’t been spending the summers with us in recent years I’d hardly be here myself. After all, she was only our aunt by marriage. By the way, I quite understand your not coming down there with me. It would be sheer sentimentality. And as far as those kids are concerned, rank hypocrisy!”

At least that got her off the staying-under-her-roof business, he exalted. Then, with a fresh burst of reproach emphasizing the worry lines of her face, she sought to excuse her absence from the funeral. “I would’ve gone, if you’d insisted, Davey Whatever you say, my dear, she was still our Aunt Hannah. It’s just that tomorrow happens to be my busiest. I could even have juggled my shut-ins with Mrs. Armstrong and taken hers next week. But tomorrow is Allen’s birthday, and they phoned from St. Bride’s to say he was having one of his better spells and might even recognize me if I were to bring him presents from his brother and sister and bake him a birthday cake.” She paused. “He…he didn’t last year.” Then, as if to cheer them both up, she added, “At any rate, he isn’t being violent this time.”

As she talked about her schizophrenic son, Davey sat mute. He withheld eye contact, too. Allen was rarely mentioned. That was the final tragedy in an excessively scarred life that had included an early and abrupt single parenthood from her husband’s bloody expiry in an auto accident in Normandy, and the subsequent presence of her mother who had easily earned the title of monster during those intolerable years the lady had stayed with Alyson and the three young children in NOtting Hill, after quitting Falmouth on the wings of widowhood from a henpecked husband.

All of that was now stale if still depressing knowledge for Davey. Sometimes he thought it should have linked them more firmly, especially in a family where bonds were so close to being manacles. But although Alyson was only ten years his junior—she’d married late—her woes seemed to have forever placed her out front in the family quest for inimitable martyr in the race for who bore the heaviest crown. Indeed, by comparison, he knew they weren’t only leagues apart in that particular competition—his own life with Ken appearing idyllic in comparison—but in so many other ways it seemed they had inhabited differing worlds since adulthood separated them. And he knew that meant far more than geography.

His own degree of weaning from Cornwall had begun forty years earlier and had surely been invigorated by a near-lifetime on another continent that might as well have been another planet—and with a mate whose roots were as firmly planted in California as his own were in Cornwall. Yet, deep down, he was sorely aware he was still bedevilled by his place of birth, a place she had managed to so facilely shed for the lure of London and what he secretly called her acquired English values. He was always aware that she persisted in referring to the county of Cornwall, a wholly accurate designation, while he clung to the misleading, because less specific, duchy of Cornwall for its romantic Royalist and literary allusions.

He clenched hands until he felt nails digging into palms. Surely, he told himself, it was significant that he alone was going to bury Aunt Hannah on the morrow. Alyson and her offspring—whatever the excuses—were not.That was all the accuracy of place he felt he needed. He’d be there; they wouldn’t.

But all that said, his irritation with her kids also notwithstanding, they still shared something he believed neither did with anyone else. It was an elusive thing, hard to name, hard to characterize. In Cornwall they would have been content to ascribe their bond to common bloodlines, but that was too facile for Davey. The son of the gene-conscious age, he was no longer satisfied with totem words for either the menace and tyranny or the shared joys and insights from their inherited genetic bank.

They shared a volatile sense of childhood, liking the same relatives and equally scorning others. Another thing he relished was their ability to trust each other to a profound degree.

He knew a peace in her company that wasn’t only at violent odds with the feelings her children set up in him, but which he knew she reciprocated. If only she didn’t sometimes bore him… But where was perfection? he ruefully asked himself, concluding his little meditation.

In spite of poor Alyson’s endless attempts to calm the choppy waters that Quentin and Hester perversely animated, Davey believed she identified basically with him, her only cousin, and that this went beyond the claims and instincts of her own offspring. The frequent signs that the ever-potential rift between her children and himself was painfully troubling to her he took as evidence of what they shared from their own childhood past. Put simply, he silently argued, Alyson and he loved each other in a very Cornish family manner. And like all true human riches, such love was effortless— unimpeded by all the separations and vastly different attitudes to overcoming the hurdles and ambushes of the days.

Why, then, all this being true, he asked himself, did they fret and peeve as they sat there that late-September afternoon, discussing Aunt Hannah and what had set her apart from the Bryant clan?

If it wasn’t her children, then surely it was what they stood for: that ineluctable Englishness they had absorbed and what, in a narrower sense, they had inherited as teenage Londoners in today’s world. Some historical umbilical cord had been severed and their mother was powerless to mend it. The fluke of gayness, the chance of geography, had removed him, only to confirm him, paradoxically, in that Cornish ancestry they had repudiated and duly lost.

Life, the aggressive present, had also persuaded Alyson that her Celtic past was moribund and that survival for her from the wounds that littered and weighted her past meant a total grasping of the world she now inhabited and caring not one whit for the one she had left: that snug, crescent of a harbour and scattering of alien palms along the Falmouth front that stretched beyond the bay and lipped the English Channel’s mouth.

“You say you don’t want to reconsider staying here with us? That would give you and me, Davey, one of the few times we ever get to talk anymore. Surely we owe that to each other, now that no one else is left.”

“Alyson, we are talking now.”

“You do understand about Allen, dear? Why his improved condition makes it impossible for me to accompany you?”

“Of course I do! Quentin and Hester are something else, though. Not that for one moment I need them as companions.”

She shrugged plump and rounded shoulders. “They are free agents, aren’t they? I can’t force them. They expressed no interest— any more she in them. Then they hardly knew her, did they? Oh, dear! Why does everything end up in questions?”

“The simple truth of the matter, Alyson, is the fact she was the end of something. And that something is all tied up with just you and me. We’re the end of the Bryant line. We’re looking at the bare bones, the carcass of what we so long took for granted as the family.”

“You did maybe as a single man. But not my children, not their generation. They’ve been reared so differently. Their values… Well, Davey, surely the whole world has changed.”

“We will still never understand those changes unless and until we’ve all said our goodbyes to what precipitated them. Even your kids came out of something, not just a London limbo.” He could see by the obstinacy giving faint contour to her fleshy features that she was unconvinced. “Anyway, let’s drop it. I’d rather stick with what we have in common than waste time on what pushes us apart. Alyson and Davey…all that’s left.”

She wiggled her ample bottom uncomfortably in the armchair as always, resisting bleakness, fighting harsher realities, realizing if she had capitulated to that in the past it would have broken her. “I suppose in the end, Davey, I’m just a silly old mother. That’s what everything comes back to in the end. I can’t help it. Someone has to think of the shopping.”

He stared at her. How he wanted to admire her, knowing her virtues, her powers of self-sacrifice that he believed far beyond him. But he couldn’t help an irritation welling over her exaggerated mother bit, of her wasting her substance over two kids who already inhabited another universe from the one she understood. Teenagers who were already set to go their own way, leaving her by the way-side. He conceded then and there that he was probably jealous of them. In any event, he knew he had no right to upset her by scoffing at her maternity, however simplistic it sounded. If he even hinted at all that, he knew she would only end up rounding on him as a childless bachelor without either the instincts or experience to understand.

“Here’s to motherhood, old girl,” he said instead, holding up an imaginary glass in toast to her.

“Here’s to us both, Davey,” she responded similarly.

As shortly after that as he could, again carefully avoiding hurting her feelings, he guiltily made his departure, promising her with excessive emphasis that he would call her from their shared birthplace.

On the train the next morning, circuitously heading to Tintagel via Okehampton, it occurred to him that this was the second voyage since leaving home that he was encompassed with a sense of guilt that wouldn’t go away: first, after leaving Ken under less than warm circumstances, and now because of Alyson whom he’d somehow failed to comfort. He emerged from his compartment on the last train leg of the journey in a black depression as he sought to hire a car for the final part of the exhausting trip.