Anticipation (13 page)

‘No, ma’am,’ he says very seriously. ‘I want to save the Heathens.’

‘You want to be a missionary?’

‘He’ll do God proud,’ the nurse says, proprietary hands on my cousin’s bony shoulders. ‘Run along now, Edgar, there’s a good boy. Let the lady meet some other children.’ (Suspicious, like me, of my great-aunt’s interest, she gives Babs a hard stare.)

‘Is he really destined for the church?’

‘I couldn’t say, madam. It won’t be decided for many a year.’ The nurse smiles. ‘But I do know he sings like a little angel.’

‘I wonder,’ says Babs. ‘I have a friend. A scientist. Perhaps he might offer a little advice on the children’s vocations.’

Babs doesn’t go every month. Sometimes she has other
engagements
. There are lectures and concerts and dinners and, since Joshua’s death, battles with George over money and Fournier Street. Edgar can’t command all of her time.

But as Mr Jones, she returns at least once a year, notebook and craniometer in hand, to chart his bones. The carapace of young Edgar’s thought, joints straining, finding its final shape under her hands. The curves of ossis occipitale and ossis frontalis. The delicate wings of the sphenoid bone. Love or research, who’s to say? Again, the two need not be mutually exclusive.

As the years pass, Babs can no longer mistake the skull she sees emerging. The year Edgar turns fourteen, Anthony Boucher’s eyes stare out at her from her own head.

And it’s on her advice — or rather, Jones’ — that the hospital decides to apprentice Edgar to a printer. An honourable trade, to be sure. One that offers a young man any number of opportunities. Heresy, sedition, pornography and pound notes.

Babs watches and waits. For five years, Edgar sets the
King James
Bible,
letter by letter, verse by verse. By the time he’s old enough to apply for missionary school, he knows the text in its entirety, from
Leaving aside his unholy eyes, the Missionary Society can’t help but be impressed.

His strange benefactor is at the East India Docks to see him off. Watching her great experiment set sail for Malacca, my
great-aunt
can’t help but feel a little cheated. But it’s nothing to her disappointment two years later, when news of Edgar reaches home at last.

Babs’ interest in Edgar’s cranial bones, it turns out, is not unique. The day comes — soft-footed — a steaming, red-earthed jungle day, far over sleepy yellow seas, when a stranger, too, sees much in my cousin’s skull that surprises and delights him. Between the base of Edgar’s ossis occipitale and the top of his sweaty
dog-collar
, the stranger reads a bridge to the departed; notes, as poor lost Edgar turns, the dead man’s eyes. And with one practised blow, he takes all Babs’ work for himself. Removes it at the shoulders. Carrying away with him every promise and threat contained in Edgar’s curious head.

Is this what pushes my great-aunt over the edge of the Regent’s Canal? The souveniring of twenty years’ work? Her unspeakable grief?

Or is it something else? The shaking she can’t control. The painful tic in her eye. The dragging of her feet.

Who does she hear, there on the towpath? That voice, now, inside her skull, bouncing around the caverns left by her shrinking cerebellum — is it reason? Conscience? Dr Gall? Or just the maddening chatter of Marguerite’s blood?

The only thing I can say for certain is that it’s Edgar who pulls Babs down.

When she pops up again — as corpses do — the bronze cast of
my fifth cousin’s childhood skull is found tied to her wrist, and the authorities are quick to make up their minds. What else could she be but mad, this woman inside a man’s suit of clothes, bound to the model head of a child with what looks suspiciously like a rope of her own hair? Suicide by reason of insanity, so the court says. Which is surely reason enough, when everything else has been washed away.

It’s a verdict important to my great-great-great-grandfather, George, since it means he inherits Fournier Street, along with everything in it. Its silver and marble and brass and Spode, its cushions and dolls and mahogany table. Everything except a white china phrenology bust, which Babs gave to her nephew, the surgeon, Harry, along with her notebooks, that night she called upon him in his rooms. The night before she died. A life’s work in twenty-five volumes, one for each year, bound in red half calf, which sweet Harry will keep until the end of his days, on the bookshelf right next to his own in the study at Montpelier Row.

Of course, I can’t say if he read them all. Or if he did, what he made of the five-digit number written so neatly on the endpaper of
1833
— a man of such narrow experience could hardly have guessed at its meaning. But a century later, Miss Bickley’s trained eye will see it for what it is, and she’ll know how to follow where it goes — down the years to a baby, soon to be baptised Edgar, in the Foundling Hospital’s nursery. A lock of hair — dark, not red like Babs’ — pinned to his little gown, so that he can be told apart from his peers, just in case. If his mother should have a change of heart. If she should come to claim him.

George, meanwhile, sells the house as soon as he can. Number 30 Fournier Street is no place, these days, for a family of good name.

‘I thought I might come over this afternoon,’ Jake says on Sunday morning. ‘Get a bit done while the weather holds. The forecast’s pretty rough for next week.’

Phone in hand, I look out at the cloud boiling up to the west, behind the ranges.

‘Unless you’re busy,’ he adds.

I can’t say that I am. ‘Okay.’

It’s funny how some noises become part of silence, a day without them empty rather than quiet. Surf and hammering, wind and gulls. The slap of the swell on a tin dinghy. Bees in the lavender hedge, making the most of these last days of autumn.

I like the way Jake never comes up to the house unless he’s been invited. The way he waves without looking, and gets on. I put another bottle of wine in the fridge and wonder if he has plans for the evening. Someone waiting for him somewhere. Worryingly, I find I prefer to think not. Though of course I can’t have — and surely don’t want — any reason to do so.

Ella, returning from her joyful sprint to the jetty, scratches to be let in, then settles back down into her basket.

At some point, April’s sales figures must put me to sleep, because the rain wakes us both, a surprise barrage hitting the roof with the force of artillery fire. Ella, confused, gives a half-hearted bark. I struggle out from under my laptop and run upstairs to shut the windows.

From the turret, I can see Jake sheltering as best he can under the roof of the new boatshed. Behind him, brown waves smash over the jetty. He looks up at the house, and I wave at him to come inside.

‘Thanks,’ he says, as I hand him a towel.

I switch the lights on and look at my watch. Four o’clock. ‘Well.’ I take the wine glasses out. ‘I guess there’s nothing for it.’

He hesitates, looking out at the furious sea. ‘I’d probably better get back, eh. While it’s light.’

‘You don’t want to go across in this.’ Sarah Biggs-like, I open the bottle and pour. ‘Haven’t you ever seen
Coastwatch
?’

Jake looks from the wine to me in a hopeful sort of way, like the dog when she wants a thing she’s not sure I’m going to give her. I slide the glass across the bench to him. ‘There are plenty of spare beds here.’

(It’s true. I went out and bought three — a queen and two singles — after Steve and Anna got stuck here for two days with their kids, and I had to give up my bed. I’m quite pleased at the prospect of one of them finally being used. Since that weekend, I’ve been more careful about the weather, and Steve and Anna haven’t come back.)

‘You sure?’

‘Positive.’ I raise my glass to him. ‘I’ll never get another builder over here if you drown.’

‘I’ve been out in worse than this. I could make it back no worries.’ A pohutukawa branch tumbles across the lawn, and the beat of the rain on the roof shifts into double time. Jake swirls his chardonnay and smiles. ‘Probably get a bit wet, though.’

I can’t help noticing that he doesn’t call anyone. Nobody waiting, then. No plans. What’s that to me? Nothing. Nothing at all.

Jake shivers. I should probably give him dry clothes, but I can’t think of anything that would fit him.

‘Throw your T-shirt in the dryer if you want,’ I offer, rather ungenerously.

‘Yeah, okay,’ he says, and before I have time to look away, whips it off as if it’s the most natural thing in the world to do in the middle of my kitchen. Which it is, probably. It’s not like I haven’t seen him take his shirt off before. Just not this close up. Close enough to touch. And I know that if I look down, follow the line of his abs, I’ll see his jeans are soaking too.

‘I’ll light the fire in a second,’ I say, taking the wet shirt from his hand and heading for the laundry. When I get back, he’s wrapped himself up in the towel, nice and safe, and taken his usual Friday night spot at the end of the table.

We’ve sat here, a bottle between us, more often than I can count now. But it feels different this time, and not just because of Jake’s lack of shirt. Maybe it’s the darkness outside. Maybe it’s the staying. I’ve never let a man stay on the island before — a single, fuckable man, I mean. I don’t do that here.

‘Shall I open a bottle of red?’ I suggest briskly.

Jake finishes his glass. ‘Sounds good.’

‘Ella’s looking well,’ he offers, when I come back from the pantry. ‘She’s put on a bit of weight.’

Lack of exercise, no doubt.

He rubs her belly with his toe. ‘This is a great place for a dog.’

‘I’m not sure I’m feeding her right.’

‘What’s she getting?’

‘Chicken, mainly.’ I hold up my finger as he starts to laugh. ‘It’s your fault — you dropped her off here without any food, so I had to use what I had in the freezer.’

‘Sorry.’

‘Now she won’t eat biscuits.’

‘She probably would if she was hungry enough.’

‘Yes, well,’ I say in mock reprimand, ‘so would you, but it wouldn’t mean you enjoyed them.’

‘I don’t know, I’ve never been fussy.’

I refill our glasses. ‘Just as well. You haven’t seen what I’m making for dinner yet.’

God, what
am
I going to make? I can’t remember the last time I cooked dinner for two. But there’s only enough chicken for Ella and me in the fridge, so it’ll have to be something that defrosts fast. I rummage through the freezer while Jake tells a tall tale about eating poisonous toads in East Timor.

The dryer beeps. I wonder, as I retrieve Jake’s shirt, if he shot anyone over there. How it felt, watching them dying. If killing’s in his blood too. And what if it is? Would it make a difference?

It’s not until it’s time to make up the bed that I remember all the guest linen I bought is still in plastic packets. The only clean sheets I can find are ancient pink and white flannelette, relics of childhood souvenired from Maggie’s hot-water cupboard. They smell of Bradbury Street. Candlewick and hot-water bottles. Pledge and woodsmoke and frost.

‘Let me help you,’ says Jake.

The sheets barely fit the new single bed. Together, Jake and I smooth out the tidy lines of my dead mother’s ironing. He’s better at it than I am, his big hands sweeping neatly over the rosebuds, tattoos flashing blue as he makes a perfect hospital corner.

‘I had sheets like this when I was kid.’

‘Sorry.’

‘Don’t be. Mine were blue.’

Later, in my own five-hundred-thread-count linen, I remember the feel of flannelette, my old spring-base bed with the mattress curving up around me like a hammock. The touch of a winter morning on my skin. Hugging it to me, that shiver of knowledge that I was warm when all the world was frozen. While across the landing, Jake, presumably fully naked now, lies wrapped in the dubious comfort of my past.

It wouldn’t take much. It’s only a few metres. It’s not too late to remember something he needs — towels perhaps. Something I forgot to mention. I could go in there, lean over, run my fingers down that long-muscled arm, whisper,
Are you awake
? We all know what would happen next.