Undercurrent (32 page)

'Do you know, I was never quite sure why she did.

It simply arrived with all her tapes. She must have known we'd never use it much, apart from looking at the one with darling Harry, 'cos we didn't even have a telly before. We've no time for it, it's so unstimulating. I can't see the point in sitting down gawping at a film unless there's someone in it you know'

The flames lit the logs. Peter looked on with satisfaction, as if the fire was his own invention and his mastery of it a triumph.

'There are other tapes?'

'Yes, of course. Cartoons, Walt Disney. Home videos and kids' stuff. I must admit, I love The Jungle Book..:

'Can I see them?'

'Of course, you only have to ask. I'll bring it up here, shall I? Do us a favour, though. Keep Maggie off the booze tonight. Otherwise she'll get depressed and think about going back to her husband.'

'I didn't know she still had one.' Henry adjusted the log with the toe of his shoe and watched sparks fly.

'She doesn't. But she may be able to get one returned from the cleaners if she wants.'

Henry was furious with all these ambiguities. The log crackled, as if laughing. He wondered how much extra money he should leave them when he left, only he didn't want to go. He wondered about the etiquette of relative poverty, remembered the same puzzle from other travelling days. He was feeling lightheaded.

'Do you know where she is?'

Peter looked at his watch. 'The pubs are open. She could be there.'

'Well I doubt I'll keep her off the hooch; Henry said. 'It's my turn for that.'

He would go back to the old man on the headland with a bottle of whisky. Just like they did in the old and new films, where all you had to do was pour alcohol down the throats of reluctant spies and out came
vino veritas
. Fat chance. It would not work with Maggie either, any more than it would with the damn dog. But he was still a tourist, obliged to experiment, and perversely, he needed a noisier place than this for analysing his thoughts.

Henry had never been much of a drinker. He could hear his father say, what a pity, it did a man's career as much good as harm and loosened up the soul, while Henry himself thought it merely depressed it.

Freedom from addictions up until now had not managed to save him from embarrassments, nor from the contemptuous eyes of contemporaries when he fell over his own feet. There were times, he thought to himself, when he may as well have been drunk on all the occasions when he was tongue-tied and sober.

You prudish guy, he reflected as he donned the ghastly jacket and hit the road; prudish about drugs, trying the stuff once or twice and hating the way it made the company talk in monosyllables. He hated loss of control, but the hell with it; if control was going to be lost it may as well taste nice. He would do the famous English pub crawl, go native.

The first beer in the first pub made him shudder.

He sipped at the foamy scum of a clear, warm soup and wanted to gag. The pub was called the Smugglers but showed no sign of serving the fine wines available on the other side of the Channel, smuggled or not. They liked slop. They actually preferred this and did not seem to give a shit what they ate or drank away from home: just look at the menu on that blackboard. liver and onions, Irish stew. When he went home, he would take that notice as an abiding memory and laugh about it, but then a native from here would find hash browns equally unappealing. The greatest cultural divide known to Western man was not one of nationality, he decided; it was simply the food and drink and the difference between those who lived in cities and those who lived away from them.

He sipped his half-pint to aid his own reflections, wondering if Uncle Joe ever got to a pub and whether it was wimpish to order a half-measure when the other men had pints. Forgetting his specs made him slightly myopic and dizzy, but no one else was looking at anything much, except at him. They were staring at him. Not consistently, he had to admit and not many of them either, because at this early point in the evening there were not so many to meet his gaze and let their own slip away into the surface of their pints or to the far point on the opposite wall.

They were the sort of glances exchanged with a dead haddock in the fishmonger's.

Conversation was lacking. A man came in and said 'Lo and then took his pint glass and went off to sit nursing it in a corner. There was an interval Henry marked before the customer moved or spoke and only then to present the same glass on the counter with another 'Lo, answered with a nod and a refill.

There was the small clink of money. Isn't this fun. Henry thought. Are they always like this or is it me? The mist outside seemed comparatively attractive. He left his drink on the table and departed, pretending he was suddenly in a hurry.

Which he was, but not out of need. He did not like the idea of going into one pub after another simply looking for Maggie: it made him feel like a father trying to round up a wayward child or, even worse, some jealous boyfriend. He had to admit the thought of a returning husband piqued him for some indefinable reason, probably because it was one more thing she hadn't explained to him and it irked him. All these subtexts.

Henry considered his own life an open book from which anyone could read and he found it difficult to see why everyone else kept their pages stuck together. In the second pub, this time sipping wine and taking refuge behind a news paper, he came to the conclusion that the monosyllabic conversation between patrons was simply their natural, limited discourse; they just didn't go in for back-slapping and big greetings. In the third pub, he changed his mind. There was a woman behind the bar who responded to his polite request for a drink with a stony stare and then told him to fuck off in a quiet, but definite command which made him think better of asking why. He went. So much for an evening of riotous inebriation.

Outside, he found himself looking for the dog. Henry could feel the dirty mark of disgrace on his forehead and remember the shrill accusations in the street. The fish and chips he ate sitting on a bench facing the statue at the entrance of the pier were solidly delicious, the more so for being served with spontaneous friendliness. There were only a dozen more pubs to go, increasingly crowded as the evening drew into night, and the prospect was distinctly unpalatable. Henry put the greasy paper into a garbage can like a good citizen and went back to the place he called home.

He was becoming separated from anything he could think of as home. His empty house in the environs of Boston seemed utterly remote and the splendid modernism of the Fergusons plant where he might resume his career was equally alien. In the house, there was a bridge game in the room Peter called the parlour and up on his own floor Henry found the TV, video and a stack of tapes.

'Two can play,' Maggie said evenly. 'You can fling mud in the street against a nice and harmless man, how dare you? I can take a stand on the same corner and say how I found your daughter playing truant from school, sadly neglected by her mother.'

'You bitch.'

'Now there's another accusation I keep denying without it making much difference, I wonder why?' Maggie said airily. 'And after I've bought you a nice bottle of wine, too. Oh come off it and stop playing hard to get. I'm not a nasty witch any more than you are. Otherwise Francesca wouldn't have loved us. She wasn't exactly discriminating about the people she loved - look at her bloody husband - but she did have some judgement. Just drink it.'

Angela's hand strayed towards the glass Maggie had poured and set down on her kitchen table. She looked at it longingly and knew the drinking of it compromised her. She had tried to shut the door in Maggie's face, but Maggie was stronger. The child was asleep and a shouting match would wake her.

Trapped. She wrapped her fingers around the bowl of the glass to warm the red wine within and stop Maggie noticing that her hand was unsteady.

'Just tell me why you locked Henry Evans in the castle overnight and disturbed my sleep, will you?

That'll do for starters,'

'Neil should have ... It was a mistake.'

'No, it wasn't. Tanya knows it wasn't. Don't give me that crap. What was it you didn't want him to know? What's wrong with answering his nosy questions? What harm can it do?' Angela took hold of the glass and swallowed half the contents. Good: drink the rest, will you, Maggie urged silently. It makes fools of us all. '

'He brings back the guilt, that's what he does,'

Angela said, in a rush. 'He's made Tanya remember what she ought to forget. It's not bloody fair.' 'Why should you feel guilty?'

'Are you mad or just stupid?' Angela yelled and then remembered, stopped, went at the wine again and took one of Maggie's cigarettes. She examined it between work-worn fingers and then put it back in the packet. 'Of course I feel guilty. I never liked Harry . . . there was something about him I couldn't like and I thought I was someone who loved all kids.

Well, I'm not. I love my own, that's all. I didn't want to share her. I didn't want her held back by a kid like Harry. He was so ugly. He needed such a lot. I'm sorry, I detested him, which is enough to make anyone feel guilty, isn't it?'

Maggie resisted the cigarette. The atmosphere inside here was conspicuously smoke free, a good example to children. She wanted to rush around and open windows, let in a bit of healthy mist to neutralize all the cleanliness.

'I don't think you can do much about native dislike, can you? You either like someone or not, children included,' Maggie said. 'What you feel doesn't matter nearly as much as how you behave.

You weren't mean to him, were you? Didn't hit him or anything?'

There was a palpable hesitation. 'No ... I... No, of course not.'

'Did anyone? Was there anyone he was afraid of?'

'NO! He wasn't afraid of anyone. No one gave him any reason to be, everyone treated him with kid gloves, even when he screamed. He was only afraid of dogs. That was the one time when Neil hit him.'

Neil?' The glass was empty. Maggie refilled it quickly, spilling some down the side.

'Neil has rages. You don't think I'd have chucked him out just because of the sex, do you, with Tanya to consider? I couldn't have him throwing things around. And he always wanted to come back... well, he did then. He tried to be more of a father then, keep in my good books, win us round. He bought us this dog, see. Typical, silly Neil, but he knew I'd been thinking about it. Only when he brought it round, this puppy, Harry was here. He was often here, just as often as Tanya was round at Francesca's.' Maggie dabbed at the spilt wine on the table with a tissue and watched the tissue turn pink.

Harry was always knocking things over, Peter said, a habit not confined to children, but Harry was always afraid of losing his balance.

'...Such a sweet puppy, but Harry took one look at it and screamed and screamed. He backed into a corner and wouldn't come out. I told him not to be so silly, but nothing worked. I dunno why,'

she mused, 'but I reckon Neil sort of thought that the puppy was his last chance, thought we'd be thrilled, but I told him we couldn't have it, not with Harry reacting like that and Harry being a bit of a fixture. I told him he'd have to take it away, whatever he'd spent on it.

That's when he picked up Harry, shook him a bit and gave him a clout. I think he hated Harry for being in the way, nothing personal, that was all and that was the only time.'

'The dog it was that died,' Maggie murmured.

'Whatever happened to it?'

'Neil sort of shares it with Granny round the corner , she feeds it. It keeps on getting out. He never could keep anything, Neil.' She was calmer now. And is that all you wanted to hide? Maggie wondered.

'Anyway, that was when I told Francesca we shouldn't be so dependent on one another.

Separate out a bit. Better for the kids. Why shouldn't Tanya have a dog? But I don't suppose it helped, me saying that. She might have thought I was telling her we didn't want her at all, which wasn't true. Might have pushed her further over the edge, so of course I feel bloody guilty. She wasn't useless, she was bloody brilliant and I don't know what we'd have done without her.'

Maggie wished she had something to chew. She shredded the tissue and knew the action was irritating.

'I'm surprised you let Neil look after Tanya if he has these rages.'

'I haven't a choice, have I? I've got to organize our lives, work where I can. And he's never been a danger to Tanya, never. He loves her. Everyone does.' The voice rose in defensive pride

'Of course they do. What happened that morning?'

Maggie asked gently. Angela shrugged.

'Nothing happened. Like I said, Francesca said she'd take Tanya to school for me while I waited in for the electric. I told her not to bother, I'd get Neil to do it. But then he was late and Tanya had a temperature so neither of us went anywhere. Then she came, looking for Harry. She was out of her mind. I don't think she could take in what she'd done.'

Maggie could not pinpoint why this had the sound of a rehearsed speech and she struggled to remember where she had heard it before. Mrs Hulme's statement, made to the police, word for word, no deviations, no hesitations.

'So perhaps,' Angela said with cold confidence and some of her aggression returning, 'you can tell all that to your stupid American and stop him bothering me. Why should I answer a pervert's questions?'

They stood at the door, Maggie uncomfortable, wrong footed, wary, and it seemed trite to say good bye when so little had been achieved. Somewhere in there, there had been a momentary spark of mutual tolerance, sympathy even, understanding of how Francesca had admired her, all fading into Angela's fixed, farewell smile. Angela, anxious but triumphant, the key to the mystery, telling her there was no mystery at all.

What should she do now? Go home and report faithfully to Henry? Listen to whatever he had to say about Uncle Joe, but only with the same lack of curiosity she had always had about that missing relative she had never been invited to know.

The lightship was out to sea, winking at her blearily through the mist and the seafront looked as if it was beginning on a series of slow preparations for sleep. She was weary; she could feel the itchy nose and blocked throat which heralded a cold; what a fool to jump into the water like that, serve her right. She lit a cigarette. She should have written to Philip, and how pleasant it would be to be able to put her thoughts in a logical order of priority, stop them bumping into one another like a crowd at a football match scrabbling for a view.