A Perfectly Good Man (26 page)
The eyelids fluttered open. ‘Where is she?’
‘Gone home for a bit. Not for long, though.’
‘Not
her
!’
Stupid boy
was implied in the withering tone. ‘Always literal and a bit slow.’
‘You mean …’
‘Alice!’
‘Alice died, Dad. You remember.’
‘Of course I do but where is she? I don’t mean ashes. They were put in the garden. Under a fucking car park now, of course. Where … Where’s the essence?’
‘Her soul, you mean?’
There was a pause and his father pulled a slow-motion face, as though sucking on the forbidden word and finding it inexpressibly unpalatable. ‘Do you still believe?’
‘Yes. I wasn’t sure for a while after Alice. But it sort of grew back and wouldn’t be ignored.’
‘Know the feeling.’ His father tried to laugh at his own gallows humour but moaned instead and squeezed again for more morphine, or whatever they had him on. The moan became a sigh and he slipped off into something resembling sleep.
Barnaby watched him closely, picturing the two of them in their tiny room in the midst of a huge hospital as two people on a dimly lit sort of platform high in a great, black, concrete forest. He tried to work out what he felt for the man under the sheet before him then backed off from the attempt, fearful it was nothing loving, just an odd mix of heartless impatience and shameful fear. When his father spoke again it surprised him so that he jolted in his plastic seat.
‘Do you believe in hell, then? Buy into the whole system?’
‘I believe we make hell for ourselves, right here.’
‘Marlowe.’
‘Sorry, Dad? What was that?’
‘Hell is empty.’ His father fought to enunciate through the slurring of the drug. ‘And all the devils are here.’
‘That’s from
The Tempest
.’
‘Same difference.’
‘You’re quite safe here, Dad.’
‘I don’t want to die. Thought I did but …’
‘You won’t. Once they’ve stabilized you they’re going to run some—’ His puny attempt at comfort was cut short by his father crying out and scrabbling in the air as if for a handle or safety rail. ‘I’m here, Dad. Hold on.’ Barnaby had barely touched his fingers when his father seized his hands in his and squeezed furiously, continuing to cry out.
A nurse hurried in, swore and hurried out. There was noise, more footsteps. The nurse returned with another.
‘Professor Johnson?’ she called over his father’s wailing. ‘Professor Johnson!’
Both nurses seemed crazily young and bewildered, barely capable.
‘Where the hell is he?’ one of them muttered, glaring over her shoulder. ‘You might not like to watch this,’ she told Barnaby but he couldn’t leave, even had his father let go. The old man gripped so hard and painfully it felt as though Barnaby had all his body weight hanging from his hands, as though he were the only thing holding him back from a chasm.
‘It’s OK, Dad,’ he called, ignoring the nurses. ‘I’m still here. I’m with you,’ and a great surge of love came up within him out of nowhere, love such as he had never felt, it seemed, and he kissed both his hands on their grotesquely clenching knuckles. And then there was blood everywhere, stinking black blood, like blood mixed with coffee grounds and vomit and finally the doctor came and there was shouting and instructions and exclamations but he stayed put through it all, holding his father’s hands because there was nothing else he could do.
The doctor had gone. The first nurse was gently prising his hands clear of his father’s and kindly wiping them clean with a delicious wet flannel. The other was opening the window.
‘Is she coming back, do you know? Your mother?’
‘Yes,’ he said, not bothering to correct her.
‘If you wait outside, we’ll get your dad all nice and presentable for her. Do you want a cup of tea, love?’
‘Yes.’
‘Fetch him a tea,’ she told her colleague. ‘I can cope here.’
The second nurse, who looked younger than he was, about eighteen, sat him back in the corridor and brought him a mug of sweet tea and a KitKat. The chocolate was the best thing he had ever tasted and he ate it slowly, relishing the satisfying way it broke into neat fingers under its foil and crumbled on his grateful tongue. ‘Are you going to be all right?’ the young nurse asked gently, sitting beside him for a moment.
‘I’ll be fine,’ he told her. ‘Thank you. That was very kind of you.’
By the time Marcia appeared, some twenty minutes later, he found he was not only all right but entirely composed, so that he was able to be strong for her when she collapsed into his arms when he told her she had missed the end. She cried wordlessly for a minute or two and he could feel little spasms shake her warm, soft frame. Then she blew her nose, composed herself and stood aside a little, tidying her clothes.
‘Would you …?’ she began to ask. ‘Would you come in to see him with me?’
‘Of course,’ he said.
The nurse had washed him, replaced his soiled pyjamas and unfolded a spotless sheet up to his chest. He didn’t look comfortable or peaceful but he was still and looked clean. The room smelled of disinfectant rather than death.
He lied to her. ‘It was very peaceful,’ he said. ‘He asked for you but he was quite calm. He said he loved you.’
‘Did he?’ She seemed startled.
‘Yes,’ he lied again. ‘He held my hands and said, “I love her”.’
But she seemed not to be listening. She touched a plump hand to the handle of the open window. ‘Funny how they still always do that,’ she said and closed it.
She had come into some money soon after retirement and used it to convert his boyhood home from a large family house into four flats, selling off the basement and upper ones and living on with his father on the ground floor. The garden had indeed been largely tarmacked to provide parking for all the residents, although the larger trees and a fringe of gloomy laurel remained. He had felt no affection for the place before and was surprised rather than shocked at the brutal transformation. If anything it was a relief not to be sleeping in his old bedroom with whatever memories of Alice might have haunted it, but in an entirely new room, clumsily carved from one corner of their old dining room, so that it retained just two strips of original cornice and a fireplace now quite out of proportion and in quite the wrong place.
When they arrived there from the hospital Marcia fetched a bottle of red wine, cheese and crackers and they became rapidly, pleasantly drunk together. Even had she not still been without make-up she would have seemed an entirely different woman from the one he remembered. She was relaxed and frank with him in a way the Buttercluck could never have been. She told him they hadn’t married until after Alice’s death because Prof had wanted to spare Alice’s feelings, since Alice remembered her mother.
‘He adored her, you know.’
‘Our mother?’
‘No! Alice. He hardly ever spoke of your mother. I used to think he was unfair with you.’
‘How so?’
‘Well he wasn’t exactly even-handed. Alice could do no wrong but you could do no right and then when she was killed, well, she became a sort of saint.’
‘I was so upset because he didn’t have a funeral for her.’
‘It was selfishness,’ she said.
‘How do you mean?’
‘He didn’t want to share her, or his grief. He’d pretty much shut me out from then on.’
‘But he married you.’
‘Oh yes,’ she conceded. ‘He was decent and practical that way. Thanks for fibbing back there. You meant well.’
‘It … It wasn’t a peaceful death. Not at all.’
‘Good. Shall I open another bottle of this? It’s rather good, isn’t it? He must have been saving it.’
‘Why not?’
They drank on, he drinking less than she did because he knew he had a light head, and she let a great flood of reminiscence come out about how she had met his father, how she had stood by while he had affairs, how he controlled who she saw, who she befriended. How he belittled her and how much, despite it all, she continued to love him. She had a little cry then, but cheered up when he made them buttered toast because they had run out of crackers. It was dawn. The familiar thunder of traffic was starting up again. One of the new neighbours drove a little sports car into her parking space and let herself into the basement flat.
‘Prostitute,’ Marcia said. ‘Officially she works as a croupier in some club but she gets her money from sex.’
‘Really?’
‘She paid her down payment in cash. Unbelievable. Nice girl, though. Very clean. It’s spotless down there.’
‘Marcia, will you be OK?’
‘Listen to you. All of twenty-one in your Oxfam clothes.’
‘But will you?’
‘I’ll be fine,’ she said. ‘I’ll be dandy. Don’t worry about me. I’ll sell up here after the funeral and find somewhere near Weston. One of my sisters is there. The will’s very straightforward. We drew them up together after the wedding. Everything comes to me. But don’t worry. I’ll be changing mine now so that you get your share when my turn comes.’
He had been thinking about emotions not money when he asked her if she’d be all right but now that she had talked about it, he was shocked to find he resented his father’s having effectively disinherited him. He was as poor as any student. Uncle James had paid for fees and travel, nothing more, but throughout his schooling Barnaby had become used to being markedly poorer than his friends and grown adept and bold at ferretting out obscure travel awards and scholarship funds he could apply for. He took a certain satisfaction in living off baked potatoes.
He rang his tutors to explain and was given compassionate leave to remain away from his studies. It wasn’t an exam term. He stayed on with Marcia, as he found he now thought of her, until after the funeral. For a little over a week.
He had never been aware of her having much of a family beyond a sister in Bridlington, perhaps because of his father’s strict control of their social life, but it transpired she had a huge one. As well as the sister in Weston-Super-Mare, there were three other siblings and Marcia was the only one of them not to have produced several children. For a week various configurations of Clutterbucks overran the little flat, all of them cheerful and bossily helpful. Clothes were cleared out, books boxed up, files of animal research papers and correspondence burnt in an old dustbin behind the laurels, sending acrid smoke into the November fog that had conveniently descended. Alternately overlooked or patronized, Barnaby felt uncomfortably redundant and in the way.
After her night of drunken honesty, Marcia swiftly rebuilt her old self, hair, nails and all and distanced herself at once from him and from anything else she might rashly have told him. Yet he had promised to stay until the funeral so believed he must. He also felt peculiarly his father’s representative as the lone surviving Johnson-by-birth. He discovered that his student library ticket was accepted at Bristol University’s library, so spent several mornings hidden away in the history section, taking notes. None of Marcia’s nephews and nieces was a student. The entire family seemed to be in business or banking and it came as a shock to realize that they regarded her, whose conventionality had cast a pall over such a swathe of his childhood, as the family Bohemian and rebel, merely for having lived
in sin
with a scientist who didn’t play golf.
An even greater shock was her arranging for his father to have a church funeral. His own preference was for this but he wouldn’t have dared suggest it to his father and assumed Marcia’s anticlerical stance had not changed.
‘Wouldn’t he have hated that? He thought it was all mumbo jumbo.’
‘Well it is,’ she said. ‘But it’s nicer somehow than just cremating him and walking away. Anyway, funerals are for the living, not the dead.’
He didn’t feel he could argue but, come the day, for which one of the more reliable housemates sent down his suit and black shoes in a bag left at one end of a pre-agreed Bristol train carriage for him, he felt profoundly uncomfortable with being associated with such a flagrant hypocrisy. He was relieved when she insisted he go in and take a seat in the front pew so that she alone should walk up the aisle behind his father’s coffin.
The priest did his best, given that he had no prior knowledge of Prof’s personality. Barnaby read one of the lessons, the account of Simeon’s preparation for death. When he came to the words,
For mine eyes hath seen thy salvation
, he found he was wringing every ounce of meaning out of them to compensate for an occasion he felt was using the church as a wedding party might some themed hotel dining suite. The other lesson, the inevitable gobbet of 1 Corinthians 13, worn by familiarity to bland meaninglessness, was read by one of what Marcia called
the kittenmincers
, who had offered himself for the task.
When, in his hopelessly safe address, the priest said, ‘I know Mark wasn’t one of nature’s churchgoers,’ somebody further back laughed out loud and Marcia joined in.
Whatever common humanity she had recently revealed was forgotten as all Barnaby’s old, reassuring dislike of her came bubbling back. It completely distorted the rest of the service for him. Where he wanted to be thinking of, even praying for, his father, he found he was thinking only of her and, with an inappropriate elation, of how, far from binding his stepmother to him, this occasion liberated him from her forever and forestalled any influence she might otherwise have acquired over him. He was free.
Lenny liked to think his life was simple, his needs few. He thought in pictures, in things, not words, and the things that summed up all that mattered to him were simple and primary-coloured. Grass first, clean, green grass, not the muddy turf of a pitch by mid-March but the well-mown, unscarred promise of a season’s start. But grass didn’t just stand for rugby but for the land above Redworks Cottage and the hours he had spent walking the carns and moorland since early boyhood. Then blue sea, naturally, the picture postcard blue you got in a sandy bay with bright sun and a clear sky overhead. Then his mum. But his feelings about her were harder to give a colour to, especially recently, when he only had to enter the same room for her to start arguing with him and finding fault.