Undercurrent (19 page)

Maggie waded across the snow in her direction, soaking the cuffs of her trousers.

'What's up, Tanya?' Maggie remembered not to use any diminutive of her name. If you did not know about children, you did not know what they liked, except their own dignity, perhaps.

Tanya kicked the snow until she found the grass beneath, went on kicking.

The laces of her trainers were undone. 'Someone else found the carrot,' she whispered, pointing. 'And I wish it was me. I tried to get it off her, so they told me to sod off.'

'Hmm, I see black stones, perfect for eyes,' Maggie said, stooping to the pathway. 'And then we can have leaves for ears, plenty of leaves. You can have my hat for his head.'

'Why?' There were furious tears in her eyes.

'Because when you give him a face, he'll smile at you.'

The child stared suspiciously, grabbed the stones, backed off, guarding them, turned swiftly and ran into the crowd, offering eyes for the face. Then shewas back alongside, like a puppy. What about them fucking ears? Laurel bushes framed the pathway:

Maggie shook them free of snow and plucked leaves which frayed at the tip, brown at the ends, curling inwards. They looked earlike; Tanya grabbed them as if they were salvation and ran towards her tribe. The ears appeared on the head. She cantered back to Maggie, still full of urgency.

'Your hat! I need-your hat. Pleeeeease.' Maggie bent her head.

'Tan, stoppit,'

Tanya paused for a second to look at Neil who had slouched to a halt beside them;, sprang away with the hat in her hand, screaming back to the group, waving it. The hat next appeared on the lopsided head of the snowman and there was the sound of ragged applause.

'Sorry about that,' Neil said. 'I'll get it back for you in a minute.'

'Doesn't matter,' Maggie said. 'I don't like hats.

Shawls are better.'

They watched the children. By common decision, the class had decided that the clumsy creation of their hands was now a suitable target for destruction. They were forming snow into solid lumps and flinging them. Maggie's hat was the target and Tanya was the only one to hit it. The hat was replaced at a rakish angle and the onslaught recommenced to the high, shrill sound of shrieking.

'It helps to be mad,' Neil said.

'I don't think I regret not having children,' Maggie said.

'The American you phoned about,' Neil said diffidently.

'Going to work for Fergusons. If I talk to him, do you think he'd get me some Viagra?'

'It works then, does it?'

'And how.'

'Be careful, won't you, Neil? You've got to be careful with any drug.'

'Oh, God, you sound just like Francesca, endlessly caring. But could he ...?'

She flushed pink with sheer annoyance. 'Oh, I'm sure he could. He's got a suitcase full of pills in his room. Guards it carefully.'

'Probably peddling them to poofters. In his room?

Like that, is it, Maggie? In his room often, are you?'

'No, Neil, it isn't like that. And I don't know how

Henry Evans might help. Tell you how to get it, perhaps.

All you've got to do is talk to him.'

'Me? I haven't got anything to say. I didn't know what was going on, did I? I was always excluded. Oh, not by Francesca; she did try and get us back together, but by Angela. She didn't want a man near that child.' His feet scuffed the grass where Tanya's had cleared the snow. 'I'd no idea about Fran's life.

Only knew that Angela resented her a bit. Harry took up time she'd given to Tan, not that she always liked that either. Difficult to please, Ange.'

'Well, let our Henry buy you a drink. Persuade Angela to have a chat with him.'

'You must be bloody joking. Tell you what, schools closed tomorrow and she's doing my duty at the castle with Tan. Send him there, I would.' Neil closed his eyes and thought of the plans made for his day off.

A trip to France, a meal to be cooked in the evening and ... He waved towards Tanya. 'She gets better all the time, though. She makes me laugh.'

The children were losing momentum; slower shots, chapped hands beginning to bite, mothers on the sidelines beginning to fuss until the girl alone went on with unabated enthusiasm.

The snowman withstood the onslaught with shapeless stoicism. Maggie's hat had disappeared.

'I have to admit that little Harry fair gave me the creeps,' Neil went on, frankly. 'He was like this sponge, absorbing energy without giving very much back, as far as I could see. But then, I wasn't his dad so I'm not qualified. Never could understand how he got to the end of the pier on his own, though.'

Tanya was tiring, stopping to blow on her fingers and warm them. Neil turned to Maggie.

'Whatever Francesca did for us, she took it all back. She cancelled it all out. She made herself indispensable and then, boom . . . and then she has the nerve . . .oh look, she's finished ... Better get her home. I want to go fishing.'

Tanya raced towards them, waving Maggie's hat and to her pleasant embarrassment, she curtsied and presented it. Then she hugged her. Maggie was taken by surprise. 'Swing me,' she demanded of Neil. She was just the right size and weight to swing in a circle, legs flailing, screaming as if she was tickled. He put her down, breathlessly. 'Again, again!' she shouted.

'Enough,' he said, and she moved ahead, obediently.

'She wouldn't have done that a year ago,' Neil muttered.

'What? Hug someone?'

'No, bring back the hat.'

She left them, then, unable to bear it. She could see it all, now. Neil, careful and responsible with a child he could never have fathered. And herself, going between them all, occasionally witnessed, like a ghost. Francesca's engineer, the bit part player who never engaged, the sort of understudy who learned the lines someone else would always say and stayed around at the end to pick up the pieces. Helping Henry rake over ashes, looking for some unidentifiable bone and knowing she had no choice.

They needed him. They needed a stranger.

Number 40 in the block, where Francesca had lived, was reached by anonymous stairs.'

Took lease here after husband left. Friend and daughter live other side of same building
.' A prudent and convenient arrangement to live close to friend, etc., but no one wanted to live in it now. Can't flog it, rent it or any damn thing, Edward Burns said. Desirable residence, ha, ha, ha. Bloody white elephant, even with sea views.

The lock was awkward; there was the noise of a television, muffled by walls as Henry fiddled with the key and felt like a burglar. The interior was an enormous disappointment, but then the House of Enchantment had spoiled him. Warm in temperature, anonymous in style; a big, sea-facing living room with the remnants of indifferent, fitted furniture of the kind she might have bought from the previous occupant, nothing new or distinctive and all of it worn. Shelves full of books, cupboards beneath with chipped doors and a carpet which looked as if it had been used as a playing field with the central area stained and worn to the thread.

A swivel chair by the window with a coffee table alongside and a shawl folded over the arm.

Henry picked up the shawl and held it to his face.

Inferior quality, faintly musty, and he tried to remember if Francesca had ever had a scent peculiar to herself. Perhaps, but he had not known it; he had no olfactory memories. She had a style, though; a definite style; a knack even with travelling clothes and a way of pinning her hair in a dozen different ways.

He looked at the bookshelves, found a few novels, a shelf full of nursery rhyme books, nothing more to indicate who had lived here, except the marks and the scuffs and the tracks made by feet. Where were the volumes of verse he had expected? Where were the poets? Henry sat in the chair and looked at the grey sky. The splendour of the sea was invisible; the level of the window was all wrong, set too high from the floor for anyone seated in a chair to get the best view.

The sound of the television continued, an irritating buzz, like a fly in the room. To be deprived of a view of the sea seemed to be the ultimate insult for anyone who deliberately lived on the edge of it, a feature which would drive him mad.

He stood, therefore, and paced. A sizeable kitchen with table for eating, efficiently equipped by transatlantic standards with cooking and chilling facilities all of which looked beaten if not into submission at least into over-familiarity. A bathroom which was simply rudimentary, and Henry was beginning to learn that the Brits did not seem to set much store on power showers and such.

There were no ornaments anywhere. Useful objects - TV, phones, microwaves had been removed, leaving signs of their presence such as a mark on the wall, an empty stand and small table with directories beneath. The apartment had been subject to controlled and authorized scavenging.

Think, Henry. Just damn well THINK. His father's voice, the reminder of intellectual rigour, resisted.

Hey Dad, I'm thinking I don't like her much. The woman I knew would never have lived in a place like this. If she lived in it, you'd know she'd been there and there's not a single sign; I think I'll go now. It's all too ORDINARY. No, you damn well don't. THINK. Measure it out; do not do anything by halves. Look at the shelves. Yeah, and a letter will fall out of a book. Happens all the time.

THINK. The shawl was the only personal object left and he wondered why. It looked deliberately placed; at odds with the lack of personality.

Henry had moved house more often than he could count, always looking for the one with a greater sense of space. He had seen rooms left equipped with enough furnishings to make them appear habitable and give them some sense of scale, but never one so completely neutralized. Only an owner could take everything away; no one else could be as ruthless.

He sat in the window chair, but the line of the sill across his eyes and the view of nothing but ominous clouds irritated him, so he stood up, hands on hips, prowling like a prospective tenant.

Maggie said Francesca had done it in the intervening days between Harry's death and her own arrest; her apartment had reached this state by the time she was taken in the third time for questioning. She had not expected to come back. The car and the etceteras went later, on her instructions, to specific destinations, but the correspondence, the mementoes, the family snaps, the Christmas cards, even the birth certificates and household bills were long gone, as well as most of her clothes and all of Harry's.

Not the systematic actions commonly associated with someone rendered unsystematic by guilt... or grief. Henry could feel dislike of her creeping all over his skin like a mild sweat.

Maggie said all she wanted in prison were books and reams of paper. Perhaps that's what she did in there: rewrote her own life. If you had felt the arms of a child wrapped round your neck in hopeless trust, how could you harm it? He did not know; he simply did not know. He felt unqualified to know: it was not a desperation or a temptation he wished to share.

The sound of the television had ceased, leaving a vacuum of silence. Outside sounds were muffled by the double-glazed windows. In the House of Enchantment, there were none of these; Henry had come to enjoy the intrusion of sound. He looked down from the living room window, preferring his own view. Second floor, less than ideal for a child; stairs to traverse on the way out.

He could see the castle squatting to the left and the dark sea ahead of him.

Remembered his laptop. The scruffy library with internet access. Cerebral palsy .. . no typical profile for a child of five... depends upon severity ... epileptic fits?

He could see a child crawling across the floor, with one arm tucked beneath, hauling himself along with the other. He had retreated to the front door with his back to it, feeling in his pocket for the key, his shoulder touching the painted wood. The timid knock on the other side seemed to touch his spine. Henry stood upright, shook himself. He had every right to be here.

He was a prospective tenant. Must have been a dozen or three over the year. One of them left a cigarette end in the trash can; he'd seen it.

Francesca had smoked. Mild Indian cigarettes which were a password to conversation. That had been her smell. Henry opened the door.

'Oh. You.'

Standing on the threshold was the granny from the High Street who picked him out of the gutter and told him she lived round the corner from the house.

Three-quarters of a mile from here, level walking, but still a distance. She had a lit cigarette she hid behind her back.

'Thought it might be you,' she said, matter of factly. She walked straight through to the kitchen and stubbed out her cigarette in the sink. 'I live downstairs,' she said, as if that explained everything.

'Heard you. You've never been falling over again, have you?'

'No. It isn't a habit.'

'One of these days, maybe. Lovely flats, these. Do you want to buy it?'

'No.'

She moved to the window and tapped the sill. The clouds outside and the fading light seemed to meet with her approval. 'It wasn't like this, you know. You can't keep a place nice with a kid in it and she knew not to try. But she had a ladder with cushions on it by this window. That's where she'd sit. Reading, when she got the chance.'

'What did she read?'

'Books, of course. She gave most of them to me.

She was forever giving things away.'

He felt a faint fluttering of the heart.

'She said they'd look nice in my living room and she was right about that. I never thought she wouldn't come back. Nor him, neither, poor little chap. Not that I've got much use for books. My eyes are bad now.' She stared at him and looked away. 'I got the books and the poofs got the video. I could have done with the video. I could have done without those two kids over my head, yelling fit to bust, and all I get's a few useless books. I miss her to death. She did everything the wrong way round and she was smashing.

Do you want these books, or not, since you're a friend of hers?'

He was nonplussed and nodding. She was on her feet, leading him out, telling him to lock up.