Читать книгу Significant Things - Helen McLean - Страница 11

When he first walked through the massive iron-studded front door of Harvey Rak’s house in Richmond, Edward couldn’t believe this was really a place where people lived and ate their meals and went to bed. It was immense and dark, crammed full of heavy furniture and strange terrifying objects. In the gloom of the front hall there was a huge vase covered in a design of purple flowers, a jar so big it could have held a dwarf, or a genie. Next to it was a big black dragon whose scaled back rose in writhing coils to support a brass tray, and on the tray a vase of dusty-looking peacock feathers arranged like a bouquet of flowers. He caught a glimpse through a partly open door to the right of a ferocious grinning figure, carved from some kind of green stone, sitting cross-legged on a pedestal — an ogre, maybe. The staircase facing him was as wide as a room, with blackish carved wooden newel posts and a runner of purple carpet going up the middle of the steps. The walls and ceiling of the hallway were made of rough-looking yellowish plaster, like the inside of a cave. Were they really going to live here? The place was horrible, ugly, frightening, not a beautiful house at all, but some sort of dungeon. Edward was exhausted from the ocean voyage and the long train ride to Richmond. The thought that he and his mother were going to have to stay in this house was too much for him. He collapsed on the slippery oak parquet at his mother’s feet and howled in despair.

“Tell the child to stand up!” Rak barked as Dolly bent over her son patting and cajoling. “He’ll learn to behave if he’s going to live in this house!”

That night Dolly pleaded with her new husband, and Edward was allowed to sleep, as a purely temporary arrangement, it was understood, in the bedroom next to the one they occupied rather than in the nursery on the floor above.

“Just until he gets used to being in a room by himself, Harvey,” Dolly begged. “He’s never been alone at night before.”

“Thoroughly spoiled, I’m afraid. You should have been stricter with him, my dear.”

“I’m sure I never meant to spoil him, Harvey. I was doing the best I could.”

“Well he’ll stay down here only until I find a woman to look after him. After that it’s up to the nursery with him.”

“I’m sure that will be fine with Edward — won’t it, darling, when your new daddy finds a lovely nanny to look after you?”

Edward wanted none of it, not a lovely nanny, not a bedroom of his own, not this horrible house, and not, not, not this new daddy. He hated Mr. Rak. It was clear to him that his mother was afraid of the man, that they were both his prisoners, and so he was afraid too. The so-called nursery was a large room with sloping eaves up in the attic, along the hall from the tiny bedrooms where the servants slept. When he and his mother had explored the house together she’d told Edward it was a playroom for rainy days, but it seemed Mr. Rak expected him to live up there and hardly see his mother at all. Anyway, after what happened that first night, even the dreadfulness of sleeping so far away from her almost seemed better than being down there where Rak was.

Some noise wakened him during the night. He was frightened at finding himself alone in a strange room, so he slipped out of bed and crossed the floor, padded along the hall to his mother’s room where a strip of light shone under the door. He heard a coughing noise, turned the knob very quietly, and peeked in. His mother was sitting on the low bench of the dressing table with her pink nightgown pushed down off her shoulders so it was around her middle, leaving her top all bare. Mr. Rak was standing in front of her, naked, blotchy, hairy, horrible, clutching her head with both hands, bending back her neck with his fists full of her blond hair, pushing his stomach against her face again and again while she scrabbled at him helplessly with her hands. Edward screamed and ran back to his bed and hid under the blankets, terrified. He knew Rak would be coming after him next, as soon as he’d finished killing his mother.

A few minutes later Dolly came into his room. “Edward, it’s all right, darling,” she said, crying a bit. “That was just something grown-up people do sometimes. It means they love each other, that’s all. Mr. Rak wouldn’t do anything to hurt Mummie.”

Edward knew she was lying. He turned over in the bed and hid his face so he wouldn’t have to look at her.

The very next day Nanny appeared, a sour-faced old woman dressed all in grey, with a veil over her head like those nuns back in Toronto, the ones his mother had always given wide berth to when she met them coming and going on Brunswick Avenue. This person now became Edward’s constant companion. She was way past retirement age, his mother said, which was why she was available on such short notice. Harvey Rak informed the woman in Edward’s hearing that her charge was to be kept in firm check, she wouldn’t be expected to go running after him from morning to night. When he came home from school in the afternoons she took him for slow, slow walks by the river, clutching his hand firmly in her own to keep him from tumbling mindlessly into the Thames, or so she said, more probably just to check his speed to match her own varicosed and bunioned pace. As soon as she was installed in the house he was banned forthwith from eating at the table with Mr. Rak and his mother, excepting on Sundays when Nanny had the day off. The rest of the time she trudged up the two long flights carrying Edward’s meals on trays and sat beside him while he ate under the glare of her beady eyes, listening to her hectoring nasal voice.

“Hold your fork properly, the way Nanny taught you. Don’t drink your milk with your meat. Chew that bite thoroughly before you swallow it. Eat those sprouts, I didn’t give you too many. No! There won’t be any pudding until those creamed onions are all eaten. I don’t care whether you want your pudding or not, those onions will be on your plate at breakfast if they’re not finished now.”

Edward learned before long how to bring on a fit of gagging merely by thinking about such disgusting things as creamed onions for breakfast, and when his retching reached the point of threatening to return the whole meal Nanny relented, no doubt to save herself trouble, and slapped down the dish of cooked apple drenched in unappetizing yellow Bird’s custard.

“You’re a wretched picky boy. Poor people in the London docks would think those onions were a feast!”

He had been enrolled in a preparatory day school in Richmond soon after Nanny arrived, and his loneliness at being separated from his mother all night and most of the day became a chronic ache, a pain he couldn’t get used to. He felt weak and hollow inside as if something had been torn right out of his body. He cried off and on during the nights, and spent his days waiting for the little time he and his mother now spent together. He knew she must be missing him just as much as he missed her, but sometimes she seemed not even to notice how sad and desperate he was.

Mr. Rak announced one day that he was going to take Dolly up to London to shop for new clothes — “a wardrobe properly suited to my lovely wife’s station in life” — and afterward they would have dinner at the Savoy Hotel “to celebrate.” Dolly kissed her son goodbye while Nanny was getting him ready for school and left in the car with Harvey Rak. By teatime that afternoon Edward was frantic with worry. Sleeping so far from his mother was one thing, but having her absolutely gone from the house was another, and it was terrible. He had no idea where Mr. Rak had taken her or whether she was even safe. That man might be planning to hurt her again. Maybe he was going to kill her and never bring her back, or he might leave her in some dark place where Edward would never find her. He lay awake in an agony of worry until at last, when it was nearly midnight, he heard the car roll up on the gravel drive in front of the house. He slid out of bed and hurried to the top of the stairs. Through the railings he watched his mother and Mr. Rak ascending from the ground floor, his mother carrying a large box before her in her two hands. Rak carried two more parcels in one arm while his other hand seemed to be holding onto his mother’s bottom. While he watched the slow procession up the stairs, Mr. Rak moved his hand in some way he couldn’t see, and his mother squealed and jumped a little, but when she turned her head back toward Mr. Rak, Edward saw that she wasn’t really upset or hurt: she was laughing. Until they disappeared into their room he stayed hunched there, motionless, gripping the spindles of the stair rail so tightly the palms of his hands still had red marks on them the next day.

During the next few weeks, after Nanny had begun to snore in her room adjacent to his, Edward would creep as far down the stairs as he dared to watch what was going on below. There were often guests to dinner, big men in black suits and their pale grey-haired wives wearing floaty dresses, none of the women as young and pretty as his mother. After those long, late dinners, when the chokey smell of cigars came wafting up the staircase, he watched while everyone crossed the hall into the drawing room where his mother always finished the evening by playing the piano for the guests. The sound of her playing overwhelmed the boy with grief and longing for those days when his mother had played in Eaton’s College Street store and they’d been so happy together. These days Dolly had so many things to do that she and Edward hardly even saw each other at teatime as they had during their early days at Riverview. Now other ladies invited her out to tea practically every day, or she was at the shops, or getting her hair done, or having fittings on new dresses and coats. She seemed not even to notice how unhappy he was, how he yearned for things to be the way they’d been before they met Mr. Rak, how much he missed her. It was almost as though she didn’t want to understand how he felt, because she hardly seemed to listen when he tried to tell her.

As months passed Edward began to notice something else about his mother: her figure was becoming stouter and wider. On Sundays, the only day he was allowed to eat dinner downstairs, he watched her as she waded into helping after helping of the heavy food that was served at that table — the thick brown soup, the slabs of beef or roast pork, potatoes drowned in gravy, blistered wedges of yellow Yorkshire pudding running with fat. By the end of the first year his mother’s fine-boned face had filled out until it was all cheeky roundness, and her slender body was well on the way to becoming a shapeless bolster. Even Rak had begun to chide her.

“I don’t think it would be good for you to have another eclair, my darling,” he said one evening, raising a hand to dismiss the maid hovering beside Mummie’s chair with the tray of pastries. “I’ve heard eating too many sweets can lead to sugar diabetes.”

“Oh Harvey, just one more.” She reached up to stop the maid from taking away the tray, gripping its edge with one hand while she helped herself with the other. “I do love them so.” She swiftly took not one but two eclairs, and began shoving great forkfuls of the creamy pastry into her mouth as though she were starving.

Of course there was no question of Edward’s having eclairs. Even on those evenings when he was allowed to eat with them at that long table, under two massive crystal chandeliers that he decided in later years must have come from the lobby of some bankrupt hotel, his plain nursery food somehow followed his trail through the house and turned up triumphantly before him in the dining room. He was forbidden gravy, Yorkshire pudding, all dishes baked with cheese, fried foods, butter, cream, sausage, smoked bacon or ham, pastry, trifles, chocolate, tarts, flans, gateaux, and sweets of all kinds. While Mummie bloated herself with whipped cream, Edward ate blancmange with stewed blackberries and munched on detested arrowroot biscuits or cardboardy Social Teas.

When he turned seven Rak dismissed Nanny and arranged for Edward to attend a boarding school near Cheam. The thought of actually living entirely away from his mother seemed to him so absolutely unbearable he could hardly believe it was really going to happen. The worst of it was that Dolly didn’t even seem to be putting up a fight to keep him at home.

“It was the lesser of two evils, darling,” she explained. “Cheam’s quite close by, don’t you see? At first he was talking about a school in Scotland, hundreds of miles away. If you go to this school at Cheam I’m sure I’ll be able to visit during term sometimes, and if I can’t, why at least you’ll be home for holidays. Oh darling, it’s a little hard at first, but you’ll really love it, I know.”

In reply he threw himself across her lap, wailing.

“Edward dear,” she murmured, putting her arms around him and patting his head, “it’ll be all right. You’ll see. You’ll have lots of lovely new friends at school, and think of all the wonderful games you’ll be able to play.”

Why had she said that? She knew he hated games, kicking footballs and running races, all of it. Unless they absolutely made him do it he never joined in at school. He clung to his mother, inhaling the perfume she’d just dabbed on her wrists and throat from a small glass bottle. He couldn’t imagine how he was going to be able to live without her.

When the day came that he was to leave for Cheam, Edward went to his mother’s room while she was downstairs and took that tiny scent bottle from her dressing table. Even if it upset her when she couldn’t find it, he had to have it. There was hardly anything left in it, only a drop or two, and she’d have to buy a new bottle soon anyway, so it didn’t really feel like stealing. He pushed the glass stopper into the tiny neck as tightly as he could, wrapped the bottle in a handkerchief, and put it in the sponge bag he was taking with him to school.

The dormitories at the school were damp and frigid, and the blankets so thin his legs ached all night. Often he couldn’t sleep for the cold and the dreadful loneliness that all seemed to pile up in him after the lights went out. When the other boys had settled down he would open his sponge bag and take out the little handkerchief-wrapped bundle with the perfume bottle in it, press it to his cheek and inhale its delicate scent, and after a while he’d begin to feel a little better and be able to sleep.

The boys were obliged to run about the playground wearing short pants and thin shoes however cold and damp the weather; in those days painfully chilblained fingers and toes were dismissed as the price children paid for a healthy outdoor life. The food was so similar to what Nanny had always fed Edward that he took no notice of it at all, although the other boys never stopped complaining about it. Most of the masters were somber grey-haired men, strict, but never so grim as Rak. Sometimes the blond-haired housemother reminded him a little of Dolly. He neither hated that school nor enjoyed anything about it. It was a colourless, shapeless time for him, a sort of limbo, and later, when he looked back on it, he found he could remember almost nothing about it, could hardly distinguish any one of the five years he spent there from another.

During summer holidays in Richmond, Edward idled away the rainy days alone up in the nursery, reading or drawing or working at some puzzle. He could fill in hours just leaning on the windowsill, looking down at the comings and goings on the tow path and the river. His mother didn’t seem interested in taking walks or playing games with him anymore, and often stayed in her room all day, only getting dressed in time to come down to eat dinner with Harvey when he came home from the piano factory. If Edward asked her what was wrong, why she stayed in her room so much, she’d tell him she thought she must be a little bilious, and maybe he should just run along and play now because she needed to rest. If his stepfather noticed him at all it was to drive him out of doors “to get the stink blown off,” as he charmingly put it. Bleak unrelenting loneliness, no less painful because it was chronic, was Edward’s constant condition.

He took to walking around Richmond by himself, making his way up to the green where he’d sit on a bench reading or drawing, or he’d go drifting through the quiet residential streets to the centre of town where he’d visit the public library or browse around in the shops. Nobody seemed to pay any attention to him. He often threaded his way through the Richmond Lanes, in and out of the tiny antique shops that lined those narrow walkways. The things they sold were interesting to him, and the proprietors must have got used to seeing him wander about, because they didn’t seem to mind when he’d spend fifteen minutes or so peering into their display cases full of antique watches and rings, try out one of the silver-headed Victorian canes, run his fingers over an ivory letter opener or a massive silver-topped cut-glass inkwell.

One day his attention was drawn to a tiny silver pocket knife that lay beside others under a glass-topped counter. When he leaned over to look at it more closely he couldn’t believe his eyes. The knife had his initials on it, E.C., plain as day, engraved on an oval medallion on the side. A thrill went through him. That knife belonged to him, he knew it did. It had been there waiting for him. He absolutely had to possess it. He was jumping up and down as he pointed it out to the shopkeeper.

“That silver penknife there, the little one — no, the other — yes, that one — look at it, sir, it has my initials on it!” The man smiled and drew it out from under the glass display counter and held it in the palm of his hand.

“What’s your name, laddie?”

“Edward Cooper, sir.”

He peered at it. “Then you’re quite right, Edward. Fancy that. Maybe it belonged to some relative of yours. Here, want to have a closer look?”

Edward held the little knife in his palm and gazed at it. Sunlight from the window flashed on the silver, and the metal felt almost hot against his skin. It was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen in his life. He opened its single blade very carefully and closed it again, almost breathless when he spoke.

“How much is it, sir?”

“Not too much. A pound, I guess, son.”

Edward’s face must have fallen. He didn’t have a whole pound at the moment.

“But I could do, oh, let’s say ten shillings, since it has your initials on it already.”

He had seven shillings at home saved out of the pocket money his mother gave him. Even Rak tossed him a few sixpences or a shilling now and then, as one might pitch coins to an urchin on the street.

“If I went home and got seven shillings now would you save it for me until I can bring the rest?” He knew he had only to ask his mother out of Rak’s earshot, and she would give him enough to make up the difference.

“Of course I will, young fellow. Bring in your seven now, and when you’ve got three more it’ll be yours. How’s that?”

Edward ran all the way home, pelted up the stairs to his bedroom, emptied his treasure box, and ran as fast as he could back to the shop.

“Here’s the seven shillings,” he said, gasping for breath as he proffered the fistful of coins. “I’ll bring the other three shillings tomorrow morning. But sir ...”

“Yes?”

“You won’t sell it to anyone else before I come back tomorrow, will you?”

The man laughed. “As far as I’m concerned, sonny, it’s as good as sold. I won’t even put it back in the showcase.”

Edward hardly slept that night for thinking about the penknife, woke up the next morning beside himself with impatience to hold it in his hand again, to feel its warmth in his palm. His need for it was stronger than any pang of hunger he’d ever felt, almost as strong as the love he felt for his mother. His yearning for it made him forget everything else. He knew, somehow, that when he had that knife in his possession he would be happy again, at last. As soon as Rak left for work he rushed to his mother’s room and asked her for three shillings, and with the money clutched in his hand he hurried back to the Lanes to claim his knife.

Owning that little silver knife thrilled him so much that for the next few weeks all he had to do was hold it in his hand and look at it to forget how much he hated Harvey Rak and his house, how unhappy it made him that his mother was lying upstairs half-asleep in bed day after day, even how bored and lonely he felt so much of the time. He could take that knife out of his pocket and press it to his cheek, or to his lips, take it to a window to let the sun shine on the beautiful silver, run his fingertip over the initials incised in its side, and feel the same burst of joy he felt the first time he set eyes on it.