The Good Father (18 page)

For some time he gazed at her, intending at first to discomfort this composed and dignified woman. But then he found himself only wanting to look at her for her own sake; she was the most exquisite woman he had ever seen. Even in this cell-like room with its harsh, unforgiving light, she was radiant. Then, remembering who and where and what he was, he cleared his throat. ‘Is there anything you could tell me that might help your brother?'

‘No.'

‘You know that he will hang?'

‘Yes. He isn't afraid.'

‘How do you know?'

‘I know him.'

Harry sighed. He thought how little he cared that he couldn't help Hans escape the gallows; he richly deserved such an end, after all. But still his curiosity nagged – and there was one simple trick he could play. Leaning towards her, he said, ‘Your brother told me what your neighbour did to you.'

Her hand went to her throat and he saw that her eyes were full of tears. He felt like a bastard. It hardly seemed to matter that he had been vindicated, that what he had suspected all along was right: that Hans had been defending his sister's honour.

At last Ava looked up. Her voice hard, her eyes glittering with hatred, she said, ‘I should never have told him. It was nothing to me, nothing that hadn't happened before when the Russians came. Just men, being dirty men – no better than children, I think. Wicked, nasty children!'

Later, Hans had said, ‘You should apologise to her.'

Later still, the day before his execution, Hans had begged to be allowed to speak to him.

Standing in the doorway of his cell, it seemed to Harry that the boy had aged a hundred years since he last saw him a few days earlier. Hans had stood to attention but rather than meet his eyes as he always had, instead he lowered his gaze, his voice quiet as he said, ‘Would you please give this to Ava?' He held out an envelope. ‘Please take it to her yourself – I cannot trust anyone else.' He had smiled then, an odd, wry grimace that gave a glimpse of the man this boy might have been if not for the times he'd lived through.

As Harry made to take the envelope from him, Hans drew it back a little. ‘You will take care of her, won't you? Now that she has no one?'

Sitting in his study, Harry heard Esther take his wife upstairs. He thought of Ava on their wedding day, in that terrible dress, those men's shoes. He remembered how he had found it so hard to believe that she was marrying him, that his life could suddenly be so altered. All the same he had felt joyful. She was beautiful, he loved her; he had repeated these statements like a mantra to ward off his disbelief in the wild turn his life had taken.

Harry stood up from his desk and went out into the hall. Calling up the stairs to Esther that he was going out for a while, he left the house and began to walk towards Inkerman Terrace.

Chapter 21

Hope listened, ears straining for every sound, as Peter put the boys to bed. She heard his voice, a low murmur as he read to them; once she heard him laugh. Lying on her side on her bed, she listened and felt sad and nostalgic and had to fight the urge to go into her brothers' bedroom, demanding that they make room for her to snuggle in beside Peter, too. She remembered that he always smelled of soap – never of cigarettes as her father did, but clean, like fresh laundry, and also of something more subtle – a warm, elusive scent that would have her pressing her face against him, making him chuckle and push her away. ‘Little puppy,' he would say. ‘Little sniffle pup!' He would tweak her nose, and his eyes would have that look in them, sad and happy all at once.

At those times she believed that she would marry him.

That afternoon, she had led Guy from the room full of toys along the hall to the other bedrooms. She had never been allowed in these rooms; there had been an unspoken rule that these were private places, and while the children might run around the rest of the house, Peter's bedroom and that of his father were out of bounds. She had never wanted to go into his father's bedroom. The old man disgusted her with his smells and his grunts, his fleshy, dribbling lips and vast red, pock-marked nose. He scared her, too; although he was very ancient and slow, she had a feeling, that when no one was looking, he would be fast and powerful, pouncing and swiping like a bear. Once she had peeped around his door and saw that his room was chaotic, his bedside table littered with medicine bottles and tumblers, the floor heaped with clothes. This was before he became bedridden, when the room became neat and clean under Peter's control.

A few weeks before his death, the old man had asked to see her.

Peter had said, ‘Would you mind very much, Hope? He wants to say goodbye. I'll go up there with you, if you would feel more comfortable.'

But she had decided to see him alone; it would be a good test of the feeling that she had about herself – that she was an adult now. So she had left Peter in the kitchen and climbed the dark staircase, with each step becoming more anxious, more ready to turn around. The man was dying and she had never seen anyone so ill before; she wondered what she would say to him, even if she might cry with the scariness of it all. At his bedroom door she had hesitated; she could hear Peter's wireless, tinny voices and laughter. Drawing breath, she knocked timidly only to think the old man might not have heard, so she knocked again more loudly and he called out that she should come in.

The room was dark, the curtains drawn against the late-winter sunshine, a lamp struggling to cast much light through its dark red shade. There was a smell of sleep-fugged, unchanged air, thick and stifling. As she stepped closer to the bed where Peter's father was attempting to sit up, she caught a sweeter scent, like gas at the dentist's. She held her breath, wanting to put her hand over her mouth and nose.

The old man gazed at her, his eyes narrowed and watery. After a moment he said, ‘You're very like your mother. I suppose he tells you that – my son; he tells you you're like her, I imagine?'

She felt wrong-footed; she had expected feebleness and self-pity, but his tone was strong, even mocking. He went on gazing at her. ‘Doesn't he say,
Oh
,
you're so like Carol when she was your age!
?' He laughed, and this noise was feeble, quickly becoming a cough that went on and on. At last, slumping back against his pillows, he said, ‘I'll be dead soon and he'll rejoice. You watch. See he doesn't have a sneaky little dance on my grave.' There was a handkerchief clutched in his fist and he wiped his mouth. Closing his eyes, he breathed out as though he'd been storing breath he found he had no need of any more.

‘Keep away from him.' He opened his eyes and his gaze was cold, powerful; she thought of the bear she had imagined him to be, chained to a post but still able to kill. ‘Keep away from my son,' he repeated. ‘Unless you want his fingers inside your knickers, unless you
want
him to fuck that pretty little cunt of yours.'

For a moment it was as though she couldn't make sense of what he'd said, unable to believe that he could use such words. She felt her insides soften, that familiar loosening that came with humiliation but was so close to the pleasurable sensations she could arouse in herself. The old man went on gazing at her; she felt unable to move, to do or say anything, so thoroughly had he degraded her. Eventually he waved his hand weakly, dismissing her as though she was nothing and the vile things he had said were no more than a comment on the weather.

She had left the room, walking normally she supposed, although her legs were shaking. She had even closed the door softly because he was old and very ill, still a part of her thinking that perhaps she had misheard him. She remembered that she felt numb; later, when she was alone in her bedroom, she felt as if he had stripped her naked and put his hands all over her body, prodding and poking, invading her, except it was Peter's hands she imagined, Peter pushing himself inside her.

Listening to Peter reading to her brothers in the next room, Hope remembered how she had run out of that house, brushing past Peter who had come out of the kitchen, unable to look at him. His father had changed everything between them with only a few utterly shaming words. Whenever she saw Peter she thought about his father and that f-word, that c-word, and she thought how stupid and blind she must have been not to have seen what was so obvious – obvious in the way Peter looked at her, the way that he could hardly take his eyes off her, such soft, smiling,
wanting
looks. He made her feel exposed and defiled; she believed that when he looked at her, he was seeing nothing but the
c
place between her legs.

Walking into the old man's bedroom with Guy, she had experienced again that degrading humiliation, even though the room was quite different, stripped of all his possessions, the sun streaming though the window. The bed was stripped too, down to its striped, stained mattress, its metal frame stark against the faded, flowered wallpaper. She had felt for Guy's hand, needing his support. He had turned to her, smiling, unknowing.

‘Well, well – a double bed.'

‘It's filthy.'

‘Maybe there's some bedding.' He glanced around and stepped towards a chest of drawers. ‘Just a sheet or a blanket is all we need.'

‘No, Guy. Let's go downstairs.'

He spun round, laughing in disbelief. ‘It's a
bed
, Hope – you said yourself, a great big bed.'

‘Not this bed. He died in this bed.'

‘Who?'

‘Peter's father.'

Guy laughed again. ‘Really? Christ. Maybe he's still here – a ghost, hanging around, wanting to watch . . . '

‘Don't! Don't be so disgusting. We shouldn't be here anyway.'

‘No. But who cares?' He stroked her face. ‘Are you going all prudish on me now? Has seeing all those toys again turned you into Irene or one of her friends? Goody-two-shoes virgins.' He grinned. ‘I thought you were like them – until you stuck your tongue down my throat at that party.'

‘I did not stick my tongue down your throat!'

He sighed. ‘Come on, Hope, don't be like this – it's boring. And it's a waste of time. Peter will expect you back at your house when he takes the twins home.'

‘I don't care what he expects. I hate him!'

‘Yeah, well – I think we've established that. Christ knows why, though. I think he's pretty decent.'

‘Yeah, well – I think we've established that, too. You've no idea, have you?'

‘Of what?'

She hesitated then said quickly, ‘He wants to have sex with me.'

Guy laughed shortly. ‘So what if he does? Hope, most men want to
have sex
with young girls. Can't we just forget about him for once?' Gesturing at the bed, he said, ‘You're right about the mattress, and if someone died on it . . . Do you want to go home?'

She hadn't wanted to go home. She had wanted him to say again that he loved her, that he didn't think she was odd – the kind of sex-crazed girl he imagined her to be. She wanted Guy to hate Peter as much as she did and stop pretending he understood everything about her. But ever since the moment the old man had unleashed those filthy words on her, she had barely understood herself, only that she somehow wanted to make herself strong, to make her body hers again and take away some of the disgust she felt about herself. Sex with Guy made her feel as though she was a proper, grown-up woman and that she could refuse to look at Peter if she chose to.

They would have stayed; she would have led Guy into another bedroom and they would have made love because when all was said and done she adored him, his body, the way she felt when he came inside her, when he groaned and cried out her name and was annihilated by her. But at that moment they heard Martin and Stephen shouting out to each other in the garden below the window, heard Peter and another man talking. She had turned to Guy in horror, so afraid of being found – just like a child caught out in a naughty game.

Guy had pressed his fingers to her lips and the two of them had stood very still, hardly daring to breathe until finally they made a dash downstairs to the front door. Half-way down the street, Guy stopped running, catching her hand so that she stopped too. Breathlessly he said, ‘Shall we just keep going – run way from all of them for good?'

‘Yes!'

He laughed, gazing at her. ‘If only.'

‘Why not?'

‘Because I think that would make me a deserter or something.'

She had forgotten that he was leaving. They walked back to her house in silence and she could feel him withdrawing from her, thinking about going away. She knew such thoughts didn't hurt him as much as they hurt her.

Later, Peter and the boys had come home, and she had hidden away in her room, and now she listened as Peter said good night to her brothers, as he closed their bedroom door quietly behind him. Once again Hope found herself holding her breath as Peter walked along the passage and knocked on her door.

I took the boys home to Jack's house. I fed them – fish-paste sandwiches, a shop-bought cake – and then read them a story, one they insisted on because I had illustrated it. They were quiet, sleepy, and I hugged them to me, one little boy under each arm, feeling their heads heavy against my chest, breathing in the familiar scent of their hair. There are times that I am so overwhelmed with love for them that I hug them too hard and they squirm away from me, sensing my distress, and I tell them I love them, but smiling, making light of my passion. Soon, because they are growing up, they will stop answering that they love me too, just as Hope has stopped. Thinking of Hope, as I'd thought of her all evening, I felt my anger tighten my chest. The moment I'd brought her brothers home she had retreated to her room and kept her door firmly closed. The house was charged with her defiance.

I closed the storybook. Briskly I said, ‘Sleep time.'

‘We want to wait for Daddy.'

‘No, he'll be cross if he finds that you're still awake past your bedtime.'

‘No, he won't!'

I couldn't argue, knowing that they were right. Jack was bad at routines and bedtime was only a vague idea in this house. Jack is at turns too stern and too lax, shouting at the boys only to ignore them if they are quiet, forgetting about them if they are out of sight or earshot. As for Hope, almost from the time Carol was killed he has treated her more or less as his equal, and as a surrogate mother for the twins. He made her grow up too quickly so that now she believes she may do exactly what she wants. I should have stepped in sooner, and much of my anger stems from the fact that I did not. I always thought it best not to interfere with Jack's parenting. Best! I suppose I mean easier. But I was always so afraid of losing contact with them that I couldn't risk giving Jack an excuse to end our friendship.

When I'd read the boys one more story and they could barely keep their eyes open a moment longer, I went along the passage and tapped on Hope's door. I heard her bedsprings creak and after a moment's hesitation, I knocked again, saying, ‘Hope, may I come in?'

At once she opened the door, holding it in such a way that I was barred entry. Sullenly, she said, ‘I'm tired, I was about to go to sleep.'

‘It's only eight o'clock.'

‘So? I'm tired.'

‘Have you had any supper?'

‘I'm not hungry.' She couldn't meet my eye, her guilt so palpable that I found myself touched by her childish inability to hide it. She tried to shut the door in my face as she said, ‘You can go home now.'

‘I'm not going anywhere.' I caught hold of the door. ‘We need to talk about what happened at my father's house this afternoon.'

‘I don't know what you mean.'

‘I know you were there.' I sighed. ‘Hope, I heard you.'

She turned abruptly and walked into her room, to the window, the furthest point from the door, from me. She was wearing a dressing-gown, buttoned and tightly belted with a cord, her feet were bare and her hair was down around her shoulders. I couldn't help but think of all the times I had put her to bed, the tenderness there had always been between us until so recently. Unsure what to say, I faltered, ‘You must promise me you won't go there with him again.'

Without any note of contrition she said, ‘I promise.' Quickly she asked, ‘Are you going to tell my father?'

‘I don't know.'

‘Don't. Please don't tell him.' Hesitantly she took a step towards me. ‘Please, Peter.'

She had never called me Peter before, only Uncle Peter. Lately she hasn't called me anything at all, has avoided addressing me altogether. But the way she said my name now, with such pleading, such adult, knowing inflection, made my heart contract. She stepped closer.