Gold Digger (23 page)

I wish you could tell me what to do. You said I’d know, but I’m not sure I do.

D
i and Patrick sat at Thomas’s desk in the long gallery. The storm was long subsided and the day was clear and cold. Rain had washed the windows clean of salt, and the distant retreating sea was murmuring, no harm done. They were looking at Patrick’s sketchbook, Di alongside, entirely absorbed while Patrick sat in Thomas’s chair, as if he belonged.

‘How many of these books do you have?’

‘Dozens.’

‘Well, just you make sure you don’t throw any of them away,’ Di said. ‘People will want to see them, one day. Anyway, you have to keep them to show yourself how you change and get even better. Do you still keep the diary?’

He nodded. ‘Yes, but not much.’ He pushed his spectacles back up his nose. They were loose. Di took them off him, bent the frame in the centre and put them back. They fitted better and he didn’t notice she had done it.

‘The drawing’s like a kind of diary, I s’pose, but I do what Grandpa said.’

‘“Write something every day, draw something every day. Collect something beautiful whenever you can.”’

They chorused the lines, laughing in unison.

‘What a bully he was,’ Di said. ‘He once told me that the Latin word for education was the same word as torture,’ she laughed. ‘He would never quite stop being the teacher, you see. That’s what he should have been, what he was, until he invented things instead. There were weeks when I never moved from this room. Here, I like this one, best.’ She pointed to a sketch in the middle of Patrick’s book. ‘Who looks at these? Your parents?’

She could not bring herself to refer to them as mum and dad. She was too angry with them for that.

‘Not any more,’ he said. ‘Not unless I show them.’

Patrick had such a talent for caricature that she could understand that they might not like what they saw. He drew shapes with ridiculous ease. The shapes became figures, the figures became cartoons, or not. Sometimes the shapes gambolled across the page; other pages were devoted to earnest, detailed drawings of objects, while the back of pages and the corners of pages were devoted to hands. He often began with hands and got no further, while on other sheets he simply drew noses. The one she was pointing out was a full face, with a big nose and thick neck descending into collar and tie. Her smile grew.

‘I know him, don’t I?’ Di said. ‘He’s a ticket collector from the train.’

Patrick smiled too, pleased with the recognition of it.

‘I didn’t like him,’ he said. ‘Bossy boots. Sometimes it’s easier when I don’t like them and I do it quickest. Besides, he had a funny face. Not like the other man at the station. The one who stared at me when I was sitting down, looking at the map, so I could remember the way. Big chin and a cap pulled down. Not a funny face.’

That was the drawing that made her blood run cold. They had passed over that one, quickly.
That man
, she had asked him,
what was he doing at the station? Was he on the train?

Don’t think so, he was just waiting in the waiting room. I stopped there, and drew him pretending to read his book. Then another train came and he got on the train going the other way.

Are you sure?

Yes. He went the other way.

Di went back to the ticket collector. Patrick had drawn a sketch of her father. Her father,
going away.
She wanted to believe it; made herself believe it. Quig would not like to be photographed, or drawn.

‘I’ve got other books where I just do
things,
you know tables and chairs, because I like the shapes,’ Patrick went on. ‘Anything I can see when I’m sitting on the floor. Stuff I do when people want to look, and I need to have something harmless to show them. That ticket collector? You know what? He doesn’t like his job.’

‘A lot of people don’t like their jobs,’ Di said, ‘Any more than you like going to school.’

‘School’s OK. I cracked it,’ he said. ‘I do drawings of people and they like them, so they leave me alone.’

‘Do you know what you are, Patrick? You’re a fucking star. A right clever bugger.’

‘I still don’t want to go home,’ he said. ‘This is home. This is where everything happens. I like it here.’

‘No one wants you to go home,’ Di said. ‘Not me, not Peg, not anyone. I’d do anything to keep you. But you do understand, don’t you? It’s the only way you get to come back.’

He pushed the glasses back up his nose again, vaguely surprised to find there was no need. She knew better than to
point out that she had adjusted them because it did not do to offend an old man or a young one. He calmed down and she found herself resenting the fact that he was so used to obedience.

‘’S’ok. Yes. I always knew it would be like that. I knew you’d have to phone them, get someone to phone them, whatever. I understand a lot of stuff. People say things around me thinking I don’t understand, but I do.’

‘And they do love you, your mum and dad.’

Don’t mouth clichés to a child too wise
, she told herself.
Don’t give him divided loyalties
. Her heart ached for him. A boy his size was the size of a man: a boy aged eight was fully formed, Thomas said.

‘S’pose they do, in their way,’ he said sounding old. ‘But Mum just wants me in manacles, away from harm, and Dad wants me to have growth treatment therapy. They’d like me better if I was different. I’m not what they wanted. He calls me a pansy, Dad does.’

The spectre of her own father rose before Di’s eyes and she banished it. Gone.
He had gone the other way.
She was like Patrick towards his father, perhaps less afraid than ashamed, and perhaps they were both wrong.

‘Beautiful flowers, pansies,’ she said. ‘Grow well in winter when nothing else does.’

‘I never draw flowers.’

‘Well,’ Di said. ‘Good taste doesn’t seem to be your father’s strong point. Everyone else thinks you’re damn fine as you are. Doesn’t matter if you never grow an inch, but you will, I promise.’

He smiled at her with Thomas’s soft blue eyes and they shook hands, formally, making a pact. Then his eyes strayed to the paintings on the walls, resting upon Madame de
Belleroche, who gazed down on them imperiously whilst eyeing up her courtier on the other side of the room.

‘She’s just like you,’ Patrick said.

She bowed towards him.

‘Why, thank you, kind sir. I wouldn’t mind looking like that, although maybe not for a few years yet. And he hasn’t quite got the hands right, has he? What do you think?’

‘Not really. There’s always a bit the artist doesn’t get quite right. Something he’s not so good at.’

Everyone else was still asleep. They had both been up early. By the time Di and Saul had got home, Patrick was petted out of existence and fed to bursting point. Such high excitement: such fitful sleep, so many arrangements. Ray -mond Forrest instructed, parents informed, all that. Di had found Patrick wandering in the morning, exploring the whole terrain, touching, admiring, looking in and looking out. To everyone else he was a child, but here, he was artist and critic, waiting to speak his mind.

‘I had to come,’ Patrick said. ‘I hated what they said. And I wanted to prove that they couldn’t just drag me around. They’ll have to listen to me now. I know I have to go back, but I still don’t want to. I did think I might be allowed to stay a couple of days, though.’

He looked at her, hoping again she would change the plan, let him stay longer. She shook her head. He was quickly resigned, deciding to make the most of time.

‘There’s plenty of time yet,’ he said. ‘Walk to the pier, the way I did with Grandpa?’

She wanted to say no, but she couldn’t. She wanted to walk with him, prove there was nothing to be afraid of, so they did. It was an easy transition from there to here, walking along, side by side, not linking arms, not close enough for
that, but close enough for it to be possible to do so. Cold and bright, today in this waiting period, post all the hysteria, post the making of arrangements. It was early yet. Raymond Forrest was not expected to collect the wayward child before noon. There had been no flooding, only a false alarm. The sea was flat and exhausted, robbed of triumph.

‘Will you look at that? You didn’t get your way, did you?’ Patrick yelled at it, waving at it as if acknowledging a friend who had failed to score a goal. ‘Never mind. Next time, my turn soon.’

The sea responded with a growl. Patrick grasped Di’s hand briefly and let it go, a gesture to say she was forgiven for making the adult decisions while not treating him as a child. They might hug, before parting, but not in public.

‘Grandad loved the sea, didn’t he? He said so.’ Grandad, Grandpa, he used both. Thomas would have answered to either. ‘And he liked me, didn’t he? He
really
liked me.’

‘Liked you?’ Di said, hearing an echo. ‘He loved you to bits. Far more than he loved the sea and believe me, he loved the sea a lot. He admired you, too. He loved talking to you. He said you see things.’

‘Like you see me. Do you see me?’

‘Yes, I do. Like a true colour. Like the sky.’

‘I know you do. Like Grandad did. At home, I’m no colour at all. They don’t have colour at home.’

They detoured off the concrete path and walked on the shingle; hard going and noisy, so they turned back after stooping and collecting a stone or two, repeating the challenge to find the one with the hole all the way through and they kept on, detouring on and off the shingle, hunting, until the pier stood before them, sticking out of the low tide water, looking like a giant grasshopper with many legs, showing
more knees than an old girl should. Di felt self-indulgent: it was delirious, even in these circumstances, to be talking about Thomas to someone who loved him. There were things that puzzled her, things she needed to know in order to evaluate her enemies, but she would not press. She kept looking behind as well as forward, walking backwards, looking; he copied her.

‘So what all went wrong, do you think?’ she asked as the pier came closer. ‘There you were, only a few years ago, you and the cousins being sent to visit sometimes, all right you were under escort but you were left alone with Grandad. Your mum and dad thought that was OK, and suddenly it wasn’t.’

‘I found one with the hole all the way through,’ Patrick said, holding a stone aloft. He perched it on the top of his little finger and transferred it to his pocket. An achievement. Another collector.

‘I think we were brought here first to “keep Grandad sweet”,’ he said, mimicking an adult voice. ‘Granny told them to take us, go and wave babies at him, rattle his conscience, he can’t resist kids and he won’t be dangerous now. I heard them say that later. I was very little then, but I remember those times though I don’t remember Granny except that she shouted and cried and I hated her. We didn’t come after she drowned, much, and I only remember coming in the summer when you were here. That party. You were the cook and you made games, too. And I was his favourite, like I was when I was a baby.’

‘Was that a problem?’

‘Well, I
was
the favourite,’ Patrick said, with a swagger. ‘’Cos my cousins are sooo stupid. Never noticed the paintings, never noticed anything much. Just sulked. Never noticed anything. Grandad walked with me, we did this … ’

He raced down to the sea shore, picked up a stone and flicked it over the calm water, watched it skitter, twice, before disappearing under the grey water: she followed suit, better at this than he, but letting him win. She could feel the mounting of his distress, the crowding in of what he had to tell, grabbed him before the force of his repeated throwing overbalanced and took him right into the water.

They staggered back up the bank.

‘It was that party,’ Patrick said. ‘You know, that party you had? With the King Frog and the witch, and us all getting dressed up? I tried to draw it all afterwards, that’s when I started, I wanted to remember it and drawing was the best way to remember, and Grandpa made us draw stuff. Cousin Ed teased me about being the favourite. He was magicked too, but he had to pretend he wasn’t. Not cool.’

She only remembered that they all seemed equally entranced. The cousins, Monica’s young nieces, the other local kids, all treated to fantasy tea and stories, because Thomas wanted his protected grandchildren to mix with ordinary children and all of them to enter another world for an afternoon.

‘Beatrice came to collect you,’ Di said. ‘She took one look at little girls dressed up in floating costumes, like something out of a harem, and she didn’t like it. She couldn’t take you away fast enough.’

Patrick nodded.

‘All the way home, she kept egging us on to say something. She kept saying, just to me, now you can tell me, you must tell me, what did he do to you, what did he do? Why did they make you change your clothes? Did you take them all off? I said he didn’t do anything and none of the girls took any clothes off. But cousin Edmund said they were running around with nothing on, and then he said you don’t have to
worry about what he does with little girls, mummy. They’re quite safe. It’s what he does to little boys. Edmund said that Grandpa Thomas got his thingy up when Ed was sitting on his knee. Said he bounced him up and down and felt for his willie and touched his bum. But he
didn’t,
Di. No one sat on his knee. He wouldn’t let it. We had tea in that tent. It was Edmund said he was touched. Then Alan joined in. But Edmund, he liked everything really. He just doesn’t like sharing. He likes getting attention.’

Di flung another stone, and thought,
darling Thomas, you were as naïve as I was, wanting to bring sheer fantasy into life
. Remembered her instructions before that glorious party.
Dress in many clothes, guide children, never touch them, never push or shove. Welcome them in; bring them to another world of colour, and stories. Give them magic. If you touch, touch lightly.

‘And Aunty Beatrice told Mummy and Mummy went quiet. That’s when they said we would never come back. That Grandad was a pervert, like he always was. Like Granny said he was, until she said he was too old and they’d better be nice to him anyway.’