Читать книгу Aphrodite’s Hat - Salley Vickers - Страница 7

The maroon-and-cream country bus, the only one that ran that day on account of it being the holiday season, was late and it was already dark when the young man reached the crossroads at the top of the hill. Before him, the lights of the town cascaded into the creased steel of the water below. Way out, at the farthest reach of his vision, a fishing boat was trawling the horizon, carrying with it a frail cargo of two beads of greenish light.

It was colder than he had bargained for and he missed a scarf as he walked downhill towards the sea. The road was as familiar to his feet as to his mind. Maybe more so; the body has its own memory.

He had walked there so often as a child, envisaging the world he was going to escape to, a world wide with promise, a match for his elastic imagination. ‘Charlie,’ his gran used to say, ‘is made for better things than here.’

A cat slithered past his legs, a strip of skinny orange fur, and he wondered what ‘better’ meant to his gran. Fast cars and manicured blondes well turned out, in nightclubs, probably. Long ago, his gran had been a dancer herself, and in marrying a fisherman had come down in the world, in her own eyes.

He had been brought up, mostly, by his gran as he didn’t have a father to speak of. And his mother had had to work. Then a time came, he couldn’t be quite sure when, when Ivor, a furniture remover who drove a van, appeared on the scene. He came round for Sunday lunch, which they never usually had, and his mother had smacked his leg because he had revealed it was the first time he had eaten pork roast. She married Ivor in the end and he gave his stepson his name, McGowan, and a measure of grudging security. But Charlie always knew that his real father would have been different.

At the bottom of the hill, he turned right along the promenade, which ran alongside the unmindful water. Wrought-iron lampposts shed a lofty and undiscriminating light on a man peeing. The man shuffled round, setting his back towards Charlie, making a token gesture towards an embarrassment which neither of them felt.

Charlie continued along the promenade until it began to veer back towards the town and then ducked under the railings, and waded through inhospitable pebbles towards a hut, where, in the summer, ice cream and confectionery and hot dogs were sold. He leaned his back against the shuttered little structure and lit a cigarette, waiting.

He had smoked two cigarettes and was lighting a third before a car came to a stop in the road beside the hut. The car door banged to and then the heavy crunching tread of a dark shape of a man came towards him.

For a moment, Charlie thought the man was aiming a gun at him, then he realised it was a hand. He took the hand warily and shook it.

‘Charles?’

‘Charlie. Charles if you like.’

‘Charlie then. I found you.’

‘Yes.’

‘Shall we walk, Charlie?’

They walked along the pebbled shore while the waves made audible little flirtatious sallies and withdrawals at their feet.

‘You like the sea?’ The voice was deep but awkwardness made it rise unnaturally.

‘It’s OK. You get tired of it, growing up beside it.’

‘I never did.’ There was a tint of reproach in the voice now.

‘You live beside the sea, then?’

‘I live by it. Your mum not tell you I was a fisherman?’

‘She never told me anything about you.’

‘Can’t say I blame her. She was all right, your mum. A firebrand.’ It wasn’t easy, Charlie thought, talking to a man you’d never met whose face you couldn’t even see. ‘How did you find me then, if your mum told you nothing?’

‘My gran kept an address.’

‘Ah, she liked me, your gran. I sent you presents, birthday and Christmas.’

‘When’s my birthday, then?’ Charlie said, hoping to catch him out.

‘May twelfth, five fifteen in the morning, just in time to meet the morning catch.’

‘I never got any presents.’

‘I did wonder.’

Behind them, along the promenade, a car hooted and the harsh voices of some youths rang out, ‘Fuck you!’ ‘Fuckin’ madman! Fuck it!’ ‘Fuck off!’

‘Language,’ said the man walking beside Charlie. It was hard to tell whether the comment was a reproof or merely an observation.

‘Mum never let me swear.’

It wasn’t true. But he felt a weird obligation to assert a spurious vigilance on his mother’s part, to distance her from this discovered act of treachery. For more years than he could bear to calculate, he had longed for some token from his father. The news that this had been denied him, deliberately withheld, prompted a general defensiveness.

‘She was all right, your mum.’

Charlie detected that this was the man’s mantra against some cause for bitterness and tact made him draw back for a moment before lobbing the question: ‘Why’d you leave her then?’

‘That what she told you?’

In a moment of unspoken agreement, they had stopped and were looking out over the sea. The slate surface shimmered provocatively under the beam of the lamps on the long posts and the diffused lights of the windows of the bungalows, way up on Fulborough Heights.

‘She say I left her, then?’ the man asked again. There was an undertow of something in his voice Charlie recognised.

‘Didn’t you?’ Any notion that there could be doubt over this was fantastic. He had been raised in the sure and certain knowledge that he had an absconding father. And yet there was that pleading animal tone.

‘She chucked me out.’

‘What for?’ Relief that there might be another explanation for his father’s dereliction struggled with the stronger fear that he was going to be asked to accommodate worse news.

‘Didn’t rate me, I guess.’

They had reached the farthest point of the beach’s curve and, with the same accord with which they had stood surveying the dappled waves, the two men turned to walk back the way they had come. Charlie dug his hands in his pockets against the wind, conscious as he did so that he was adopting a pose he had absorbed from films. The gesture was a feeble understudy for the words needed to voice what he was feeling.

‘Your dad was a right bastard,’ he had heard his mother declare time and again. ‘Walked out and left me with a bawling kid to cope with. Mind you,’ she had added, when the black mood was on her, ‘the way you go on, you’d have driven him out even if he hadn’t gone before.’

‘Your mum’s mum, your gran, wanted me to stay,’ the man who was his father resumed. ‘Maybe I should’ve. I’ve often wondered what was right.’

‘Yes,’ Charlie said. ‘Maybe you should.’ As he said it he was aware of a dreadful gratitude emanating from the presence beside him. It seemed bizarre to make someone glad to learn that they had not done what you ardently wished they had done.

‘You missed me, then?’ The voice was now unquestionably wistful.

‘Yeah, I missed you,’ Charlie consented. He felt sick at his own words.

‘Missed’ wasn’t the size of it. He had mourned his absent father, fiercely, inconsolably, endlessly, desperately. Since he could remember thinking his own thoughts, missing his father had taken the lion’s share of his inner life. It was, he suddenly recognised, to seek his father that he had made his way to London, for the only way to bear the loss had been to conjure that impossibly glamorous figure, whose flight it was possible to condone on grounds of innate superiority. He could never have envisaged this hesitant man with the unsettling squeak and tremor in his voice. Sharply, fervently, he wished this newly recovered parent to the bottom of the sea.

‘And you are a fisherman?’ he said aloud in response to a solicitude he had come, over the years, to resent but had never had the heart to forswear.

‘Was is the operative word. I don’t do anything now. No work for us fisher folk these days, what with the EEC.’

The note of whimsy was terrible. An unemployed, down-at-heel, shabby fisherman was no substitute for an insouciant profligate high-hearted deserter. Charlie, acute to personal danger, braced himself for further unwanted revelation.

‘I live with a decent woman. Pat. She sees me right. Works up at the local pub and helps out with the B and B there. I do odd jobs for them too. We get by. What do you do?’

‘I’m an actor.’ Pause. ‘Well, trying to be. But …’

‘It’s hard, I know. You’ve got the voice.’

‘Have I?’ Charlie felt a shot of excitement at this unexpected encouragement.

‘A good voice, you’ve got. I heard it straight away. I had a voice once. Someone put me in a film. Said I was a natural. Offered to take me to Hollywood.’

‘Really?’ Suspicion of this hint of redeeming enterprise in his lost parent hovered over relief.

‘I’m not a liar,’ Charlie’s father said placidly. They had reached the beach hut again and he stopped and took out a packet of cigarettes. ‘Untipped, they are. Got the habit on the boats.’

‘Hard to get, aren’t they now?’

‘I’m not a liar,’ his father repeated, cradling the match with which he lit Charlie’s cigarette with a big hand. Red lobster hands. ‘I didn’t leave your mum. She didn’t want me. Don’t blame her. But I shouldn’t have left you.’

Charlie stood, looking out at the glimmer of the receding tide, pulling on his father’s cigarette. A strand of tobacco had stuck to his lip. The words he had longed to hear, had rehearsed to himself so often, in bed at night, crying himself to sleep after his mother had been having a go, ‘I shouldn’t have left you’, bounced away into the unpitying darkness. He felt nothing. Not even contempt. It was a poor sort of an offering from a prodigal father.

‘I’m glad you’ve come to see her, anyway,’ he said at last.

‘I’d’ve come sooner if you’d asked.’

‘Yes,’ Charlie said. ‘I know. I should have asked you before.’ It was a kind of acknowledgement between the two of them.

‘Better late than never,’ said his father. Through the darkness Charlie could just make out that he was grinning. ‘Shall we go in my car?’

‘I don’t have one. I came by bus.’

Walking through the hospital corridors, which smelled of nothing normal, Charlie looked at his father for the first time. Broad shoulders, middle height, hair once dark, now mostly grey, a face which might have been handsome once but had settled into hangdog, jeans, donkey jacket, with a sprinkling of dandruff about the shoulders, visible white vest, plaid wool shirt, brown suede shoes, wrong shade for the rest of what he was wearing. A model of unexceptional ordinariness. Except that he was the father he had never had – and at the same time he was not. He was quite another father. A stranger.

‘I bought her a present,’ Charlie’s new father said, producing a box from his pocket. ‘Roses chocolates. Too late for Christmas, but she used to like Roses. Mind you, she liked hard centres best, Jen, but I thought in the circumstances soft centres might go down better.’

Charlie did not say that his mother was past eating anything, even soft centres. Nor did he consciously form the thought, but in the region of his mind, which as yet had formed no words, he became aware that he was in charge of these two beings, his parents. An access of violent tenderness waylaid him and he touched his father’s arm. ‘She’ll be glad you remembered.’

‘Think so?’ The blue eyes were horribly beseeching. A hurt child’s eyes. ‘Bit late for Christmas but …’

‘I’m sure so,’ Charlie said, untruthfully. He was not at all sure how his mother would take this. It had been an impulse to follow up the address he had found in his gran’s oak bureau when he cleared it after she died. It was written on a corner of torn-off card, which, from the faint trace of glitter, and the suggestion of a robin’s breast, looked as if it had been sent one Christmas. He had guessed at once whom the card had come from.

They were approaching his mother’s ward, which, in deference to her condition, was shared by only two other patients. ‘Both on their way out’ as his stepfather had observed. Ivor, Charlie guessed, was counting his wife’s definitely numbered days to the time he could settle down to widowerhood and a story of suffering nobly borne.

Charlie’s mother’s was the first bed in the ward and, as was customary now, she was behind drawn curtains, as if she was rehearsing what it would be like to have the curtains drawn for good.

‘Mum?’

‘What? Oh, it’s you. You’re back, then.’

‘Mum, I’ve brought a visitor.’

Across the face, once pretty, now bleached by years of discontent and disappointment, and further diminished by drugs and pain, flashed a sudden enlivening angry interest. ‘Who is it?’

Charlie’s father stepped forward, jolting the bedside cupboard so that the jug of water on it rocked perilously. ‘It’s me, Jen.’

‘Mind that jug. Who’s “me”, when you’re at home?’

But she knew. And Charlie knew that she knew. And in that instant he knew that he had done something remarkable. Unquestionably, unmistakably, his mother was pleased. Relief rushed in on him, warming him like a double Scotch on an empty stomach.

‘It’s Jeff, Jen.’

‘My God!’

‘No, your Jeff!’ For a moment, there was something that Charlie saw in his father’s face. Charm.

‘I don’t believe it!’

‘All right if I sit down, Jen?’

‘Sit here.’ Charlie’s father sat on the bed where she had gestured and Charlie saw that his mother’s face had grown not pale but pink. ‘I don’t believe it,’ she said again. ‘How did you get here?’

‘Him.’ Charlie’s father nodded towards their son. ‘He found me. Wrote to me. Said you were ill and …’

‘I’m dying, you know that, don’t you?’

Charlie, who had had strict instructions from his stepfather to keep this news from his mother, felt a further rush of absolving relief.

‘It’s why I came, Jen.’

‘He tell you that?’ Charlie’s mother gestured towards him.

‘No. I guessed. You don’t mind me coming?’

‘’Course I don’t, you daft ‘appeth.’

Charlie said, ‘I’m going for a smoke and a wander. I’ll be back in a bit.’

He walked down the corridor, where he met the duty sister. ‘Mum’s got another visitor,’ he explained. He didn’t want anyone spoiling anything by blundering in with a change of her bag, or whatever.

‘That’s nice. Who is it?’

‘A relative. They’ve not seen each other in a while.’

‘Ah, nice,’ the sister said, vaguely benign. ‘It’s one of the good things about the Christmas season. People get together again who mightn’t otherwise.’

She had a point, Charlie granted, staring at the hospital Christmas tree. It was still decked, though it was twelfth night, still bearing brightly wrapped faux presents. His gran would have said it was the Devil’s luck not to have that all down by now. Or was it the last day they could safely be up before the bad fairies dropped out of the greenery to work their harm? What was it happened today? He’d forgotten. His gran would surely have told him.

He went outside for a smoke and looked at the saucepan in the night sky. We Three Kings of Orientar, he remembered suddenly. On their camels following the star. Bringing gifts, gold, frankincense and … he couldn’t remember the last one.

When he returned to the ward, his father was still sitting on the bed holding his sleeping mother’s hand. She looked peaceful. Myrrh, he suddenly remembered. That was the other one. Myrrh. They put it on dead bodies, his teacher had told them at school. Death had its good side. Because his mother was dying, he’d found his father. But when she was dead and gone he would have to live with the find. Be careful what you look for, you might find it, his gran had sometimes said.

The box of Roses chocolates, like a small wayside altar, stood unopened beside the jug of water on the bedside cupboard.

Noting Charlie’s glance, his father said, ‘She says she’ll have one later.’

‘D’you want to go?’

‘Better had. Pat’ll be … But I’ll come again, if …?’

‘Yeah, sure.’

‘I’ll bring Pat. That’s if …’

‘Yeah, sure.’

‘Perhaps I won’t. She didn’t mind, did she, Jen, that I came?’

A lifetime of minding. Minding for her as well as for himself. Minding her taunts, her viciousness. Minding her accusations. Minding her furious campaigns against his life, and, almost worse – for there was no way he could help or stop her – her own. Excusing her fits of temper, her cruelty, her unpredictable hysteria because she had suffered this shocking injustice. Was it simply that she’d made a mistake? Sent away a man who loved her and then regretted it? Could she so not acknowledge the enormity of what she had done that she had hidden behind this bogus story, this piece of twisted, pointless, self-justifying confabulation? Or was she just an out and out liar? How could he tell now? He’d had to make a life without his father, and soon he would be making it without his mother. And who were they anyway, his father and his mother? How would he ever know now?

‘She was pleased with the chocolates, wasn’t she?’ his father said. ‘She loved chocolates, Jen did. I used to buy them for her: Roses, Quality Street. It wasn’t true, you know, about them asking me to Hollywood. I wanted them to. I’d have gone. But I reckon the film wasn’t any great shakes after all. And they didn’t ask.’

‘Yes,’ Charlie said. He looked at his father’s red lobster hands, clenching and unclenching. ‘I expect she was pleased about the chocolates.’

‘Yes,’ said his father. ‘She did seem pleased, didn’t she?’