East of Innocence (28 page)

‘I am sorry, Daniel. She gave me this.’

‘Who did?’

‘Xynthia. When I came down to find you.’

‘You came?’

My mother looks at me curiously. ‘But of course I came. I am your mother.’

‘When?’

‘As soon as I could. I saved some money, I ran from that Irish man, I came back to get you.’ She laughs in quiet consternation. ‘You think I would leave you for ever?’

I open the newspaper cutting and read it. It is the story of a child who was drowned in a paddling pool at his home. The child is not named; a toddler from my neighbourhood.

‘She told you this was me?’

‘And then I gave up, of course. I went back to the Irish man. Where else could I go? It was what I deserved.’

‘No.’

‘A mother who lets her son die, like that? Oh yes, Daniel, I do think so.’

‘But back there? To all that?’

‘It wasn’t so bad. Really.’

My mother lies back on her pillow and I look at myself in the dark window, which now reflects the entire room; my head and shoulders appear over my mother’s bed, which is closer to the glass. I cannot see past it and perhaps it is right that it is hidden from me, that I cannot peer into the darkness and see and understand the full horror of what lies there. I have spared my mother the truth of my childhood; now she is returning the favour. But perhaps nothing matters beyond the window; perhaps all that is important is in this room. Why look further? I reach over to my mother and brush her hair away from her face, her skin dry and cold as if she has just come in from outside. She smiles and reaches up a hand, holds my wrist lightly. I think I can stay
like this for ever, even though at the same time I know that it cannot last.

I am in the kitchen of the Latimers’ house and Mr Latimer is making me coffee; he is inept but I understand that he is going out of his way, showing me that he, a stranger, cares for me in some measure. He realises that I am meeting my dying mother and that it can be no easy experience, and that it is one I am facing alone. With some difficulty he presses the plunger of the cafetière down; I could help him but sense that he would be mortified. He is wearing a fluffy dark-blue dressing gown and leather slippers and the light is pouring in through the kitchen’s leaded windows and on to his white hair, giving him a halo. I stayed most of the night by my mother’s side and, though she drifted in and out of consciousness and we did not speak much, I know that I was a comfort to her; she slept with a smile on her face. I caught a couple of hours’ sleep in the prim single bed of the room the Latimers have left at my disposal.

‘Get much sleep?’

‘Some. Not much.’

‘How was her night?’ Mr Latimer sits down next to me at the table and I can see the sadness in his eyes, too. It occurs to me that perhaps he will grieve for my mother just as much as, if not more than, I will; I realise that I have been remarkably selfish and that not only do I pose a threat to my mother’s health and wellbeing, but also that I have stolen some of my mother away from him, after all that he has done for her.

‘She seemed well. At peace, maybe.’

Mr Latimer nods at his hands clasped on his lap. He clears his throat and begins, ‘Mr Connell, I am sorry if I seemed overly zealous, regarding your mother’s wellbeing…’

I stop him. ‘Mr Latimer, given the situation, I believe you have behaved entirely correctly. Please, this is easy for nobody. You and your wife are being more than welcoming. I doubt I would be as gracious, in your situation.’

‘Yes, well.’ He gets up and pours coffee into two cups. The silence is awkward but there is nothing more to be said. He turns to me.

‘Sugar?’

The Latimers’ garden is enormous and takes hours to mow, but my mother is having dialysis, her blood being cleaned by a machine that Mr Latimer bought himself at a cost I imagine must have been enormous and I would rather be somewhere else, occupied. There seems something brutal and desperate in the idea of her blood being taken away, rudimentarily filtered and then pumped back into her by a humming piece of equipment. Apparently you cannot hire them and he refused to consider a machine that had already been used. With each passing hour, the devotion and love he has for my mother becomes clearer. Perhaps, after the horrors of her youth, my mother found her guardian angel.

I am trying to lay stripes in the lawn, passing first one way and then another, keeping the gaps even, the lines straight. I can look up and see the window of my mother’s room but nothing further, but I know that, if she is awake,
she will be watching me. It is hot and I am wearing only a T-shirt and shorts; the day is stilled by the heat so that, when I stop the mower, the silence is almost total. I feel marooned in a place with no time, where the outside world has ceased to matter. I wonder how long it can last.

My mother’s nurse is a tight-bodied Pole who refuses to smile at me and I am not even sure whether she understands who I am and why I am here. She is checking my mother’s drip when I enter the room and she darts a hostile look at me from dark eyes made more alarming by her tightly pulled-back black hair; I am tempted to stick my tongue out at her. Mrs Latimer has given me flowers, fuchsias from her garden, and I walk past the nurse and put the vase on top of one of the machines. The nurse tuts and takes it off, puts it on the bedside cabinet. She bustles about and walks out and I say to my mother, ‘Was it something I said?’

‘Agata does not like the routine disturbed,’ my mother says. She is looking well, better since her dialysis and her face has almost a glow to it. ‘She is a good girl, but I think she would also have made a fine Nazi.’

I lean over and kiss her. ‘How are you feeling?’

‘Feeling? Daniel, I feel like I could dance. Do you dance?’

‘Not really.’

‘Not really?’

‘At all. Imagine if I step on somebody’s toe.’

My mother laughs, looks me up and down. ‘So big.’

‘And ugly.’

‘Oh no. Oh, Daniel, you must never think that.’

I flick the flowers with the end of my hand, do not reply.

‘I used to dance. In Romania. Of course it was peasant dances, we were not allowed any decadent influence. But here, I went to dance classes. I learned the quickstep.’

‘I play tennis.’

‘Tennis?’ My mother looks at me and laughs softly, runs out of breath and has to take some moments to recover. ‘I am sorry, Daniel. You do not look the kind of person who plays tennis.’ She stops as if worried that she will cause me offence, but the idea of my playing tennis clearly tickles her and she laughs again. ‘In the little white shorts? Oh my God.’

I smile. ‘I was pretty good. Still am.’

‘I would have gone to see every game,’ she says. ‘I would have argued with the other mothers. “My Daniel is best. Hush your mouths.” Like that, every game.’

‘I’m sure.’ We are both smiling but of course it does not last, because rushing in behind the words comes the usual tidal wave of lost years and regret. Yet we continue to look at each other frankly; there is no hiding our pain. It is allowed, in the open, acknowledged. This is something we share, our pragmatism.

‘You never went back. To Romania.’

‘Why? Imagine the shame, Daniel. Leaving my parents for a better life, coming home a whore.’

‘No.’

My mother laughs. She laughs easily, though over her lifetime she should have laughed more. ‘Oh please, Daniel. It is in the past. And anyway –’ and here I see something in my mother which I have not seen before, a mischief which
is entirely without inhibition ‘– I was no good. At being a whore. I was better at the quickstep.’ She pauses, shakes her head in private amusement. ‘And I was terrible at the quickstep, also.’

‘I would have danced the quickstep with you,’ I say, but even as I say it I realise how mawkish it sounds.

‘No thank you, Daniel,’ she says. ‘I care too greatly for my toes.’

I stay at my mother’s side for three days, and during that time I believe that she shows signs of improvement. Mr and Mrs Latimer are kind to me and I feel welcome, even though their daughter doesn’t come to visit. My mother and I talk, and I watch her sleep, and she gazes at me whenever she is awake as if I am a temporary, miraculous visitation that could disappear back into the ether at any moment. And in some ways she is right; though I am happier here in the safety and security of the Latimers’ home, at some point I have to leave, to go back and face my demons in Essex. Rosie O’Shaughnessy has parents who have as little idea of what ultimately happened to her as my mother did about me; I cannot leave them to suffer in ignorance any longer. And Baldwin will not keep any longer.

My mother smiles when I tell her that I have to go but her smile is belied by the tears that fall down the sides of her thin head as she looks up at me from her bed. But she regains control and nods quickly and as I bend down she puts an arm behind my head and with more force than I believed she had she pulls me closer, covering my face with
quick kisses. I stand up and smile and walk away and there is nothing in the world I would rather do less than close that door behind me.

29

I HAD PHONED
ahead and when Xynthia Halliday opens her door she is dressed in a satin shift with a headband to which feathers are attached; she looks as if she is about to go on stage in a play set between the wars. She smiles when she sees me and before I have the chance to say anything she says, ‘So? How was she?’ I do not answer and after a couple of seconds her face loses its light and she suddenly looks nervous, though she tries to hide it.

‘What am I thinking? Come in, come in. We’ll sit down and talk. Come in.’

She makes way and I walk past her into her living room, the ranks of photographs still silently charting the success and wonder of her early, pre-Halliday years in theatre. I stand in the middle of the floor and she smiles, though without the brightness of before; she knows that something is up.

‘Cup of tea?’

‘No thanks.’

‘Okay.’ She fidgets with her neckline, running a finger inside it. ‘Well. You found her.’

‘She thought I was dead.’

‘Oh?’

‘Principally because you told her I was.’

Xynthia doesn’t say anything, sits down. She looks at the wall opposite as if it is showing her past. She sighs sadly.

‘She came back for you,’ she says. ‘She wouldn’t see sense.’

‘It wasn’t sense, her wanting to find her son?’

‘No.’ A flash of anger. ‘No, Daniel, it wasn’t. What would Vincent’ve done to her, if he’d found out?’

‘Why would he care? Wasn’t his son.’

‘It wasn’t about you. He… So she had a son. Do you think Vincent would have cared about that? She was back, after he’d sent her away.’

‘He sold her.’

‘And why? Because the alternative was to get rid of her another way. Listen.’ She smoothes her shift over her knees. ‘As far as Vincent was concerned, she’d made him look stupid. Carrying on with your father, getting knocked up, when she was
his
property. Now she’s back, rubbing salt in. You can’t see the danger she was in?’

‘So you lied to her.’

I see the anger in her eyes again. ‘You were a fucking baby, Daniel. You had your life in front of you. Marcela, she was in danger. Right then and there. She wouldn’t listen to reason, so I had to make her give up another way. Yeah, I lied. Best thing I could’ve done for her. I still believe that, even now.’

‘You sentenced me to a life without a mother. What gave you the right?’

‘Oh please.’ She waves a hand. ‘Stop being so fucking selfish. At least she’s still alive. Look on the bright side.’

I came to Xynthia’s door brimming with righteous anger but I can feel it evaporating, leaving only a hollow feeling where it had been. I look at Xynthia’s defiant face and I know that, at the very least, she felt like she had done the right thing. She called me selfish and perhaps there is some truth in that; I resent her for consigning me to the uncaring hands of my father, robbing me of the chance of happiness. But perhaps it had been the right thing to do. Certainly, she felt it had been, and I know Xynthia Halliday. She is not a bad person. I sit down opposite her, elbows on my knees, look down at her worn carpet.

‘I’m so sorry, Daniel,’ she says softly. ‘I used to watch you, you know. At school. You looked so sad, so lost. It would break my heart.’

I look up at her. ‘She was happy to see me,’ I say. But she doesn’t hear me, lost in the regrets of her past.

‘Poor, poor boy.’

As I drove back to Essex, I had watched lightning stabbing down on to the flat country as a cold front swept in to do battle with the occupying heat that had been sitting sullen and heavy over the land for a month or more. Thunder-heads miles high, their edges backlit by the red dying sun, loomed over me as I drove through fat raindrops falling slowly and ominously on to my windscreen. From time to time I would lift my little finger and regard the stump, which my mother’s nurse had taken the stitches from; it was shiny and traced with red lines but already it was less
angry than it had been. But my anger, my feeling of having been violated by a man as close to evil as I had ever experienced, was as strong as ever. As I thought about Baldwin, my hands gripped the wheel with such force that my shoulders ached, lost in visions of vengeance, which, if I was to be honest, I wasn’t sure I had the strength to carry out.