Undercurrent (6 page)

Those were the days when people were expendable. One always assumed there would be
someone else of equal calibre. Wrong. Would you shoot tigers with him? My father would have asked.

Yes, but I went on to prefer the deliberately extrovert and sociable type of male. Then there are the
people I adopted because it was so unfair that no one else would. I cannot bear to see loneliness when I
can do something about it, but empathy with people who need you is not quite the same thing as
liking. I think that LIKING is a cousin to respect, but respect is more important. Angela was often
difficult to like, but she deserved enormous respect. I like Maggie she does not know how generous she
is and I must not take advantage of her. I have a phonecard. I could speak to her but I don't, it isn't fair.

I shall dribble on to paper instead, avoiding facts and dates.

Father once took us to the house of a military friend of his, very old school. He had stuffed
animal heads on the walls. Maggie and I must have been about two feet each, gazing at them in
horror. It was Maggie who said that the rest of the tiger was behind the wall, ready to come crashing
through as soon as we left.

And I believed her.

FMC

HENRY walked down the length of the High Street, took the next left and made for the sea. A stiff breeze raised the hair on his head and made him vow to buy a new hat on the way back. He had noticed a shop that seemed to specialize in what other men seemed to wear, a strange species of cap which did not seem to protect the ears, but he also noticed that the men who wore hats seemed to spend most of their time bareheaded. Into a shop they would go, and off came the hat; if they met a woman, off came the hat, a constant doffing of the thing, as if it was an embarrassment.

There was something else he noticed too, in the bustle of the narrow pavements, and that was the way that whenever they bumped into each other, both parties said 'sorry', regardless of fault. The word was a kind of password, a prefix to whatever came next, 'Sorry, could you hold the door for me . . . Sorry, I haven't got change today. . . Sorry you bumped into me.' It seemed mandatory to apologize for taking up space.

All in all, his encounter with the lawyer was one Henry decided he had found oddly exhilarating, despite the accompanying humiliation, and he was trying to work out why as he walked up towards the sea through a series of narrow streets, remembering to say 'sorry' to whoever crossed his path.

He felt he had got something off his chest by at least admitting to someone, even someone as alien as Edward Burns, that what he really wanted to do, above all else, was find Francesca Chisholm.

And he had done it; he had actually made the admission to a complete stranger; he had taken a spontaneous risk and he had not felt quite such a fool as he'd thought he might feel. That was number one reflection. The next was a sense of release that the lawyer had not said Francesca who?

Or murmured, my dear man, of course Francesca Chisholm is alive and well, but how on earth could you imagine she would want to renew an acquaintance with a lousy little bore like you? And thirdly, a sense of mild triumph which was the most difficult to explain.

Francesca Chisholm was patently alive and not in the graveyard, as a few of his contemporaries already were as the result of rash experiments with drugs, ambition and fast cars. He could not see Francesca as self-destructive, but he could see her crashing a car with the greatest of ease. She would be impulsive with her enthusiasms; she would never be scientific enough to know how an engine worked. She would press the pedals and tell it to go.

How do you know that? he asked himself. You don't know anything. You didn't really know her; it was she who seemed to know you. What pleased him most about the lawyer with the dead fish in his office was what he had revealed about Francesca, rather than what he had withheld. The woman was not only alive, but she had made the news, done something that made her attorney bridle so defensively. She might be a notoriety of some kind, raising Cain, running protest movements, leading a wild life, behaving scandalously, or at least oddly, shocking the natives one way or another, and he was distinctly proud of her for that.

The sense of vicarious achievement grew with each step. You are known, Francesca; people know who you are; they talk about you. You're a
somebody
; you didn't become a nonentity with a dry career like me; you stayed that bright light you were. So bright, she could shine in the darkness, it had seemed to him, twenty years ago. Had her beauty been so spectacular, or was it another kind of singularity which made her so haunting, even against the dramatic scenery of the Indian subcontinent?

Brilliant blue skies, the almost surreal colours of vegetation and the peacock shades of clothing against the dull browns of dried palm fronds which cooled the village houses. . . the vivid cerise of split watermelon; the yellow of the daily pineapple. . . He could struggle to remember the debilitating intoxication of the constant, visual feast it had been, and yet remember her, dressed in dull khaki trousers and her long hair in a twist. He could recall, with difficulty, the impact of the Indian women, the poor in the country, the rich in the hotels, universally exquisite but achingly untouchable.

They were removed by their eyes, dress, language, decorum and, surely, indifference to a large, hulking young man who went pink in the sun and could not digest their food. The one who watched them covertly, aware of his clumsiness and their fragility. He should have remembered them; he should have remembered the magnificence of the scenery, captured painstakingly on his camera, but all he remembered was her, the one he was never allowed to photograph.

Henry walked slowly through the streets, seeing nothing. He had been fragile when they had met, his stomach recovered to the extent that he could eat selectively and drink litres of bottled water a day. The water supplies weighed down his rucksack more than anything else and he was-too weak to sling it over his shoulder. And he was starved for conversation, too, after the deliberate isolation of his travels.

He had been determined to avoid the wandering tribes of travellers with their incessant boasts of cheaper accommodation, cheaper dope, better bargains. He had wanted to climb hills and see unknown views, and had almost done it; he was sick of it, and sicker of his own indolence.

Wherever he went, everyone else was working. They worked with incessant, labour-intensive industry while all he had done for three months was to follow an elaborate, carefully prepared itinerary and watch them about the business of their sweated labour.

He was humbled by generosity, infuriated by incurable poverty; he was lonely and nervous and sick of responding to Hallo, how are you? with the single response possible, I'm good, thank you, in the hourly recitation of a daily lie. Coming into the sanctuary of a shaded guest house to find her sitting on the veranda, telling stories to children, her instant appeal to him was not unique, but simply inevitable.

Perhaps because she liked poetry and thought it entirely natural to carry around a volume of verse when a packet of nuts would have been more useful. It was a cool evening; she wore a cheap shawl to cover her thin shoulders. He had thought, from behind, that she was an elderly woman.

Henry had reached the view of the pier without noticing any building he had passed, lost in memory of another time and place, and he swore under his breath. This was the most regular habit of his lifetime, making journeys to foreign destinations, covering every inch on foot and then somehow not seeing a thing, walking around with his eyes on the ground, privately occupying another space. That was why, years since, thinking of Francesca even then, he had stopped carrying a camera, because when he looked at the pictures when he got home he recognized nothing, as if he had turned a blind eye to the lens, like Nelson to his telescope. He did not feel he had ever been there, and here he was now, just the same.

You don't really look, Henry, do you? You take an inventory and pass it on.

Francesca had not been critical when she said that. She had simply been curious, as she was about everything. It was an essential part of her charm.

He had seen the pier from the window of the House of Enchantment that morning, made himself notice what a strange and ugly structure it was, made of colourless concrete with stiff, spindly, jointless legs which seemed to bow as they met the water.
The pier's legs have no ankles and
no knees
, the words of her description coming back to haunt, as if they had been as important at the time as the quality of laughter in her voice.

There were four shelters on the pier, built into the concrete for the benefit of fishermen, and a series of utilitarian street lamps leading towards the low-slung building at the end, which housed a caff and lavatories, flanked by semicircular platforms at a lower level nearer the sea. The caff looked like some miniature manufacturing plant, squatting on its own industry, while the whole of the pier looked like a benign mistake, simply a road which was intended to go further across the sea, ending where it did, the half-hearted beginning to a pedestrian bridge, because someone, somewhere, has simply decided to stop. Henry walked towards it, determined to keep his eyes off the ground and not to think about the cold around his ears.

There was no need to seek information: it was all there, written on two blackboards carefully placed to waylay the unwary at the porticoed entrance. Selective information_ Henry guessed, since the blackboards allowed the pier's caretaker to deliver different facts every day, changing them with a swipe of cloth and new, laborious lettering, according to whim.
This pier is exactly 882 feet,
nine inches, long and was opened in 1957. It replaces another pier which got hit by a ship in World
war Two. Entrance is free, unless you wish to fish, in which case, 20p. The wind force today is 1-2 and
the sea temperature is nil centigrade.

Low. Henry huddled into his jacket, reminded himself of the errand to buy a hat, and then reminded himself not to keep on thinking of what he was going to do next, but think of what he was doing now. Walking the concrete deck of a crazy structure unadorned with anything except the black umbrellas of fishermen, wooden benches fixed to the side walls, other walkers. It was relatively quiet; no loud music, no obvious sounds of fun, but the sound of human chatter against the sea.

He loved the openness of it and he was hungry; memories of India made him so; memories of never being ravenous, but never feeling fed, causing his stomach to growl ferociously. He blamed the sea air. From a ventilation shaft next to the door of the structure at the end, there wafted the forbidden, mouthwatering smell of frying bacon.

Henry forgot the view. The warmth inside was fuggy and humid and he found himself passing a hand over his stomach beneath his jacket, comforting it with a circular stroke, then measuring the extra flesh. He had been very fat, he had been gross for five years, and in those seven years since, he had craved the unnatural thinness which had been his in the rucksack-carrying year.

Without that weight, he might have tried to find her sooner. He had carried his luggage of vitamins, minerals, trace elements, supplements over several continents, leaving this until last. They weighed more than his baggage of water, twenty years ago. He scanned the menu for the vegetarian meal.

There had been a sign affixed to the entry door, announcing opening and closing times.
Sometimes
early and sometimes late
, it said.

'Can I have the vegetarian option?'

'No call for it, squire, not really.'

There was no contempt, only patience. The tea was the colour of rust. Henry closed his eyes, drank it with sugar and went back to the counter and asked for more. Then he ate bacon and egg with soft, white toast, agonizing over each mouthful His father would have liked this. There was never a day when he did not think about his father.

Henry watched the calm skyline and thought about his father. Dead these last three months and, along with Francesca Chisholm, occupying at least one half of his waking thoughts as well as many of his dreams. It was only when he thought of his father, and what he might have inherited by way of personal worth, that Henry Evans allowed himself to think he might be a decent enough man himself. He looked down at the fishing platform and noticed missing planks, the water churning beneath. The sense of fatigue came back.

The child looked angelic in sleep. Looking at her in this state made Angela wince with sheer pleasure, amazed that she should be such a graceful and placid sleeper, no tossing and turning, no signs of distress in her unconsciousness. She lay flat on her stomach, her perfect hands pressed into the pillow above her head, face on one side, displaying on the white of the linen the dark, rich curls of her hair. A proper auburn, Angela admired; the colour of horse chestnuts startlingly combined not with the pale skin and blue eyes of the traditional redhead, but a sallower complexion which always looked kissed by the sun.

And remarkable brown eyes, above a delicate nose which was sweeter than ever in profile like this, breathing in and out with the minimal sound of a contented baby animal. The lips were slightly parted; the fingertips were lightly curled; there were no nightmares and she was a piece of perfection who deserved to be the centre of the universe; she deserved any sacrifice which could be made and she would sleep for hours. Angela turned from her, feeling satisfied.