Tree of Hands (11 page)

‘What a silly noise,' she said to the boy. She got up and turned the television on again, altering the channel, Benet noticed, before she did so. A picture came, a pair of shire horses pulling a plough across a meadow.

The boy struggled to get down. He went up to the set and did a curious thing. He put his fingers on the screen and then round the rim of the screen as if he were trying to open it, to get inside or find something that was inside. That was what it looked like to Bent. He gave up the attempt after a moment or two and his oddly mature face,
his little man's face, looked sad, resigned. He sat down again, not on the settee beside Mopsa but on the floor quite near to the television and he leaned forward, watching it intently.

Benet took the newspaper downstairs. There was a lot in it about Leonid Brezhnev. She was more interested in reading the home news but she couldn't find much of that and presently she saw why not. Pages three and four were missing. Someone – Mopsa – had cut them out.

If Benet were to ask her why, she would only deny it. And although she knew Mopsa must have done it, she could not absolutely prove it. It might have happened in the newsagent's – there was the remote possibility of that. The phone began to ring. She thought she had better answer it, though it was nearly two weeks since she had answered the phone. She had to start answering the phone again sometime. She had to start doing the explaining that Mopsa had failed to do, been afraid to do.

The voice was her father's. How was she? Was she recovered from the flu? How was Mopsa?

‘She's fine,' Benet said and she added with a vindictiveness she almost at once regretted, ‘She'll be home very soon.'

He hadn't asked about James. What would she have said if he had? She had felt antagonistic towards him because he hadn't asked about James, though James was dead, though she could not have answered if he had asked. He should have asked, it was cruel of him not to, crueller than he knew. She went up to fetch Mopsa. The boy was still sitting on the floor, still staring at the screen, though the horses were long gone and replaced by a man in sequins tango-ing with a microphone.

Benet heard her mother talking on the phone like a young girl in a bygone time, the Twenties perhaps, who had been rung up by some undergraduate or subaltern she had met at a tennis party. She sounded coy, petulant, flirtatious. With this man she had been married to for thirty years, she was coquettish, provocative. She giggled and
gave a little scream of delight. Benet put on her coat and tied a scarf round her head and went out. She walked up the hill and down Heath Street and looked at a display of
The Marriage Knot
in paperback in the window of the High Hill Bookshop. There was a photograph of herself set in the midst of the arrangement. It had been taken when she was pregnant, though there was no sign of this through the folds of the dark loose dress she wore.

Go back two and a half years, she told herself, go back to the time before he was conceived. Go back to that. He was never conceived, it never happened. You didn't say to Edward, I'm going to have a baby but that makes no difference, it still won't work, it doesn't change things. You said a straight goodbye: Edward, it's over, we've come to the end. There was no baby, there never was. Hadn't Edward himself said there couldn't be?

‘I don't believe you, Benet. You're lying. You wouldn't do that, even you wouldn't do that . . .'

She bought herself a cup of coffee and a sandwich and sat alone in a corner watching the people who were all in couples or in groups. It was strange, she thought, that you couldn't see she was pregnant in that photograph. James had been born three months later but you couldn't see she was pregnant. It was almost an omen.

They were both in bed asleep when she got back. She looked for the missing pages from the
Sunday Times
but she couldn't find it. Probably it also was in Mopsa's room, under the mattress perhaps.

Mopsa had two more visits to pay to the Royal Eastern, one on Monday morning and one on Friday. She left the boy with Benet and went off at nine-thirty. Benet sat him on the floor in the basement with some sheets of paper in front of him and three felt-tipped pens in different colours. He was wearing the brown velour pants and a yellow jersey and his bright pale yellow hair, newly washed, stood out like a sunburst. After a while he asked for a drink, calling himself Jay, or something that sounded more like Jye.
What words he did speak were uttered in unmistakable cockney. Barbara Lloyd herself probably talked cockney, she had left school at sixteen, Benet thought unfairly. Who knew what sort of background this husband of hers came from? Benet knew she was being mean-spirited and snobbish. She couldn't help it. Despair and desperation had returned to her in the night and clung to her like heavy wet clothes.

When the phone rang, she considered letting it ring. It wouldn't be her father this time. It would be Antonia or Chloe or Mary or Amyas Ireland or someone she would have to tell the truth to.

The boy looked round and said, ‘Phone ring.'

‘I know. I can hear it.'

‘Ring ring,' said the boy and he made
brrr–brrr
sounds like a telephone bell.

Benet picked up the receiver, steeling herself.

‘Is that you, Benet? This is Constance Fenton. Is your mother all right?'

‘Yes. Yes, I think so. Quite all right. She's out at the moment.'

‘Only she did make a half-promise to come over yesterday, and when she didn't come and didn't phone, we rather wondered. There's usually someone here to answer the phone. I'm out at work, of course, but Barbara's been here with Christopher . . .'

Benet interrupted her. Her throat had dried and her voice sounded thin. ‘I thought your grandson was called James.'

‘No, dear. Christopher. Christopher John after his father.'

‘My mother hasn't been over at all then?'

‘We talked on the phone, that's all. But we should so like to see her so if you could ask her just to give us a ring when she has a moment . . .'

Benet murmured the necessary things. She felt curiously weak and enfeebled. She could see the boy busily drawing away in red felt-tip. Even from this distance you could
recognize a woman, a dog, a tree. She said goodbye to Mrs Fenton, put the receiver down, sat there with closed eyes, pushing her fingers through her hair.

Presently she got up and went upstairs and searched Mopsa's room. The missing newspaper pages were probably with her in her handbag. Benet found the boy's red coat in his bedroom. Mopsa had evidently washed it. When she was halfway downstairs a curious idea came to her, not at all a rational idea, that he shouldn't wear it, that it marked him out, that it made him immediately recognizable. Whoever he was. She went all the way up to the top again and made herself open the cupboard door in James's room where all his clothes were. She had bought him a duffle coat in thick brown tweed for the winter but he had never worn it. It had been on the large side to allow for growth. She made herself not think, merely do. She took the coat off its hanger and carried it downstairs and dressed the boy in it. They were going out to buy a paper. She didn't know how it would be, walking out with a child in a pushchair, a boy the same age as James. It wouldn't kill her though, that was for sure, it wouldn't kill her and she had to know.

They came home simultaneously, she and the boy and Mopsa. Walking up the hill, she had already read the few paragraphs on an inside page of the newspaper. It wouldn't have been a few paragraphs last Thursday, she thought, it would have been the front-page lead.

Mopsa saw the paper under Benet's arm. She came warily up the path and the steps, picking her way, almost wincing, as if it were hot sand she walked on instead of cold concrete. Benet held the door open for her, closed it quickly. She hadn't yet tried calling the boy by his real name.

‘Jason,' she said, ‘let me take your coat off, Jason.'

Mopsa made a little sharp sound and covered her mouth. The boy gave Benet a radiant smile. He was Jason, the smile seemed to say, at last they had cottoned on, at last they knew.

Benet took him into the living room. She knew Mopsa would follow her. She opened the paper and read aloud,

‘Six days after the disappearance of Jason Stratford, aged one year and eleven months, from a street in Tottenham, north London, a police spokesman said today that hopes of his being found alive are weakening. Jason was last seen in a street of houses scheduled for demolition near the North-eastern Canal at Winterside Down where he lived with his mother, Mrs Carol Stratford, 28, and Barry Mahon, 20, a carpenter.

Mrs Stratford made an appeal for Jason's return after the evening news on BBCI yesterday. “Jason would never have gone willingly with anyone,” she said. “He wasn't used to strangers.”

‘The street was Rudyard Gardens,' Benet said to Mopsa. It struck her sickeningly that it was she who had shown Mopsa the place. ‘When you came back from the hospital last Wednesday I suppose you took my route. Where did you find him? In a garden? Outside a shop?'

‘He was sitting on a wall,' said Mopsa. She made her voice throb with pathos. She thrust her face close to Benet's, the lips quivering. ‘All by himself. Left on a wall. No one wanted him. Then a dog came along, one of those big black Dobermanns, and it sniffed him and he was frightened. He was so frightened, he fell off the wall and I picked him up. No one was looking, no one saw me.'

‘Evidently not.'

Mopsa put her hands on Benet. She laid trembling hands on her arms.

‘I did it for you, Brigitte. I said I'd do anything in the world for you. You lost your boy so I got you another one. I got you another boy to make up for losing James.'

JASON HAD BEEN
gone for twenty-four hours, more than that, before they knew he was missing. That was almost the worst thing about it for Barry, that he could have been lost like that because one set of people thought he was with another set and the other set thought he was home with Carol. It was the hardest thing to explain to the police. Barry had just explained it for the umpteenth time. He sat in a room in the police station watching Detective Superintendent Treddick and Detective Inspector Leatham gather up their papers and get up from the table and leave him alone for yet another half-hour ‘to think things over, to think if there's anything you want to add to what you've said'.

There were things he wanted to add but he knew better than that. He knew what sort of construction they would put on it.

‘Get on all right with the boy, do you?' they had asked him in an artless way, almost a light and casual way, only nothing they said was casual.

‘Of course I do. Fine,' he had said.

And that was true. But it was also true that he had wanted to be rid of him. Not for ever, not in
that
way, but just so that he could be alone with Carol. He recalled now what a relief it had been when Iris said to leave Jason with her overnight and how he had welcomed Beatie Isadoro's laconic acceptance of another child in the house, provided the money was there. To have Carol to himself with no one shouting out or crying in the next room, that had made him go along with Carol in all her complex baby-minding arrangements. Sometimes his conscience had given him a
twinge, though not enough of one to make him do anything about it. That day, for instance, when Karen Isadoro or her mother or Iris or whoever it had been lost Jason, his conscience had been awake and active then, telling him to do something. He had bludgeoned it asleep. Did that mean it was really he who was responsible for Jason's disappearance? He hoped not, he didn't want to think like that. He remembered the day very clearly. Last Wednesday.

Ken Thompson and he were putting fitted furniture into the bedroom of a flat near Page Green. Considering the neighbourhood and the dilapidated state of the house, it didn't seem worthwhile, but who were they to question it? The money was good. These days, jobs like that were getting fewer and farther between. Too many do-it-yourself shops flourished and there were too many do-it-yourself magazines about. Soon after one o'clock, they were finished but for the mirror which was still in the shop at Crouch End being cut to this fancy shape. Ken said they might as well knock off and he'd come back himself and do the mirror around four.

Foreseeing they had no more than a morning's work there, Barry had made up his mind, while doing a final bit of glasspapering, that he would take Jason out somewhere for the afternoon. He got on to the Isadoros from a phone box. It was Dylan, the second or third boy, who answered. Jason was just going out with Mum and Karen in the pushchair. Barry said OK, thanks, they'd pick him up around six. He had that familiar feeling, a mixture of guilt and relief, we all experience when prevented from doing a tedious duty. Of course he could have insised, he could have said he was coming straightaway to take Jason to the park or to the swings or whatever, but he didn't say that. He told himself Jason was better off playing with kids than trailing about in the cold with him. It
was
cold. It was a gloomy grey November day with leaves blowing about everywhere and wet leaves underfoot.

Barry's free afternoon stretched before him. Carol didn't
go to the wine bar on Wednesdays. She worked all day for Mrs Fylemon and knocked off at five. He decided he would go and pick her up, not exactly call at the house but wait for her at the top of Fitzroy Park. That was more than three hours off. He crossed Green Lanes into Delphi Road and made his way to Lordship Avenue by way of the passage between Rudyard Gardens and Zimber Road, coming out at the big junction where the ABC Cinema was. The ABC were showing
The Dark Crystal
and the first programme was about to start. Barry liked films that frightened him, horror films that made the audience gasp and jump. He considered for a moment, then went in, buying himself twenty Marlboro on the way and being shown to the smokers' side of the auditorium.