Cushing's Crusade (12 page)

Gilbert sipped his drink delicately. ‘I came up with an excellent man in my compartment,’ he said. ‘Good in every sense of the word. Runs boys’ clubs in the East End, that sort of thing, builds adventure playgrounds with his own hands.’ He shook his head and compressed his lips. ‘He was vile. Rude, short-tempered, and bitter. Poor chap had an in-growing toenail. All those years of goodness up the spout because of that. Incredible.’

‘He probably hadn’t cut it right,’ said Giles, ‘toenails should be cut straight and not shaped like fingernails.’

Gilbert made a fine show of perturbation and slapped his leg energetically.

‘Damn it. I didn’t tell him that. There he’ll be limping about in Penzance not knowing how to cut his nails.’

‘He’ll probably have to have the nail off in any case. That’s what happened to a friend of mine when his toe went septic,’ replied an unsmiling Giles.

Hadn’t he normally realized when his grandfather was joking? Derek said, ‘He was being funny, Giles.’

‘Lattimer didn’t laugh when they took his nail off.’

Angela was trying to stop herself laughing when she caught Gilbert’s eye and burst out afresh. Giles was looking at her with a mixture of incomprehension and hostility. Because she’d laughed at him or because … Impossible, Derek reassured himself as he took a gulp of beer. He thought of Giles spending hours at home learning jokes to amuse his friends. The memory made him suddenly feel close to tears. Was it his fault for being too serious? Had he killed the boy’s sense of humour? Or had Diana done it by laughing at his stones and fossils? He imagined his son as the geologist on an earnest mining engineering project, on some uninhabited Pacific island, telling the drilling consultant the one about the old lady’s embarrassing moment with the plumber. Angela was saying, ‘Three generations of Cushings and it’s hard to tell which is the funnier.’

Derek winced. An interesting competition to be sure. Should the winner be the elderly obsessive with false teeth and two dead wives, or his son, a middle-aged cuckold with piles and an identity crisis? Or should neither of them win the comic accolade?
There was a third competitor: the intense and insecure adolescent with adulterous parents and no sense of humour. A real fun family.

‘Laughter’s usually at somebody’s expense,’ Gilbert said, ‘but I don’t really care if it’s at mine.’

‘How uncommonly wise and mature,’ muttered Derek. But if I poured my beer over your head or pulled the chair from under you, would you still be so detached? At ten years old he had locked his father out of his flat in his pyjamas on a January morning. Gilbert had gone out for the milk and Derek had slammed the door on him. He had been angry enough to wrench off the knocker and seriously bruise his shoulder in an attempt to break down the door.

When they had finished their drinks Derek raised the matter of where his father should stay. After some persuasion, which Angela supported enthusiastically, he agreed to come and stay with the rest of them at Charles’s house. Having squared things with the publican, they left. Outside Derek suggested that Giles should put his bicycle on the roof-rack and come with them.

‘I’d rather ride back.’

‘Wouldn’t it be easier if you came with us?’

Giles didn’t answer but swung his leg over the crossbar and started to pedal away. In spite of the beer Derek’s mouth felt dry. He turned to his father: ‘Was he upset when he arrived?’

Gilbert thought a moment and shrugged his shoulders. ‘He’s not very communicative; not with me at any rate. They caught some fish he said, but not much else.’

‘Had he expected a whale?’ asked Angela as they got into the car. She gave Derek a conspiratorial smile as she flopped down into the back seat. No worries for her. She’d got rid of her irritation, recovered her detachment and ironic sense of humour, and was ready to enjoy anything that Cushing and son had to say. Derek could see her face in the mirror as he drove off. She was blowing him an insolent kiss and half-closing her eyes in a fine imitation of passion. Such fun, such naughtiness when at any moment the one-time Protector of Chinese, Straits Settlement, might turn round and see. Perhaps she would undo her shirt
again. Derek narrowly avoided driving into the ditch. Ahead of him Giles was careering downhill, his hair streaming and his shirt flapping. Derek tooted as he passed but the boy ignored him. Derek felt alarmed again. True, Giles had been calm enough, but hadn’t he been almost too calm? He’d been very silent in the pub and unusually humourless even for him. Then that emphatic refusal to come in the car and not even a nod or a wave as they passed. Derek changed down too fast as they approached a corner and grated the gears badly.

‘The only thing that bothers me,’ Gilbert was saying, ‘is that Diana may not be too pleased to see me.’

There had been a clock over the bar. It had showed six or a few minutes after when they’d arrived at the pub. Derek remembered noting this when his father had accused him of not meeting the train. Mounting panic was stopping him thinking clearly.

‘Well?’ said his father.

‘I’m sorry,’ muttered Derek.

‘I said Diana wouldn’t be too pleased.’

‘She’ll be delighted.’

So if it had been six then, how long before had Giles set out? St Mabyn was roughly five miles from Tregeare. Half-an-hour on a bike? About that; it was quite hilly. Giles had arrived just before them. So? He was breathing faster.

‘I don’t think that’s very likely,’ Gilbert murmured. He turned to Angela. ‘There are some people, and I’m afraid my daughter-in-law is one of them, who find the elderly slightly repellent because they’re old. I have false teeth; I don’t know whether you noticed, but I have. I’m not ashamed to admit that I make a noise while eating. Diana doesn’t like this noise; in fact it irritates her a great deal.’

Derek longed to shout at him to shut up. He felt so confused that he couldn’t work out whether precise times mattered. And such a beautiful evening. The golden warmth of the evening sun on trees and fields; the bright red-and-purple splashes of fuchsias in the hedgerows; insects floating in the air, small specks of gold caught by the sun.

They were passing through Tregeare when Derek realized
without a shadow of doubt that the precise time Giles had left was irrelevant. He had arrived a few minutes before them and the field had only been a couple of miles out of St Mabyn. He had to have passed the car, absolutely had to have done. For a moment Derek thought that he was going to be sick but the spasm passed and was succeeded by a feeling of complete helplessness. And now? he asked himself. And now?

*

Derek could not remember any occasion during the past ten years when he had deliberately set about making himself drunk; but the moment he got back to the house he poured himself half a tumblerful of whisky. By the time Charles offered everybody drinks, Derek had already tipped back the best part of a quarter of a bottle; and, although he was still aware of his problems, they seemed rather less pressing. As dinner progressed and brandy followed wine he attained what he had sought: an irresponsible sense of detachment. There was no doubt at all that Diana was responding unfavourably to her father-in-law but there was equally no doubt that Derek didn’t care—didn’t even mind too much when Giles went to his room immediately after dinner was over. The others were discussing aesthetic taste. Gilbert and Diana were as usual at odds. Charles was in his element at last.

‘Of course,’ he was saying, ‘because art reflects social conflict and dissonance these have become fairly central elements in our aesthetic experience. Art isn’t escapism, and modern realities have led to a rejection of precious tonal harmonies and delicate enamel surfaces.’

‘Art’s just a social and economic reflex?’ asked Gilbert with pretended horror.

‘Far from it,’ returned Charles with a chuckle. ‘The
quality
of art’s not something to be confused with the means of expression. On a different tack one could say that because many of the great Renaissance artists worked to commission they were just social tools. Utter rubbish. Or is Mozart’s music negligible because it was for a confined society?’

A short silence. ‘Sod quality and taste,’ Derek announced. ‘If somebody gets pleasure from what the cognoscenti call ugly,
what use taste? In the eye of the beholder, as the expression goes. How can you say I don’t feel the same emotion looking at a pavement artist’s work that you feel peering at a masterpiece?’

‘You’d have to be rather more precise,’ replied Charles.

‘Precision’s grossly overrated,’ cut in Gilbert, who had also drunk a fair amount.

‘To people who make generalizations like that, perhaps,’ said Diana.

Gilbert smiled affably.

‘Take my suit,’ he said.

‘Not on your life,’ chipped in Diana.

Derek clapped appreciatively. Gilbert shrugged his shoulders.

‘My suit,’ he went on, ‘would be essentially the same suit if it was ironed, pressed, altered here and there. You get me? Still inherently the same suit. Detail can become a fetish. Diana may be distressed by a hem a quarter of an inch too high or too low, she may be offended by wallpaper that doesn’t quite match or a slight crease below the collar of a coat; but does it matter? Who can say whether a suit should be cut in a certain way when fashions change as they do? My suit looks like a shower curtain, a relic of less scrawny days, but it may be very fashionable in a year or two.’ He smiled complacently at Diana.

Derek couldn’t help noticing the way his father’s adam’s apple bobbed up and down when he talked. He wondered whether Diana had seen. He felt inclined to point it out to her but didn’t because she was talking again.

‘I don’t mind people who are casually unkempt, but the borderline between that and looking down-at-heel and seedy is a narrow one.’

‘And the borderline between blatant rudeness and friendly argument?’ asked Gilbert. Derek stopped listening to them; instead he found himself scrutinizing Angela. She was sitting lengthwise on the sofa with her feet up. Sometimes she smiled and little brackets formed at the corners of her mouth, but throughout the evening she had taken care not to get involved in any acrimony. Derek realized that he was smiling at her. He looked away at once. The way she was sitting stretched her
trousers tightly over her thighs. With sudden pleasure Derek recalled the precise sensation of her stomach against his, recalled how he had been convinced for a moment that they were breathing together, that while they held each other’s gaze neither could look away. In retrospect, even in his drunkenness he was almost as surprised as he had been when it had all happened.

After the unpleasantness between Gilbert and Diana, the evening broke up quickly. When everybody went up to bed Derek remained in the empty room. He poured himself a final brandy and walked uncertainly back to his chair. The irony of it, the ludicrous irony. He took a sip of brandy and rolled it round his mouth, enjoying the warm sensation in his throat after he had swallowed. To think that for thirteen years he had lived virtuously, drearily, mechanically; had pursued his studies conscientiously, been a dutiful father if not a good one; had, it was true, hankered from time to time but had never attempted to convert his wishes into reality. Then, one summer afternoon because of a few drops of salt water in a watch, he had arrived late at a railway station and because of that he had fornicated in a field and because his father had not been met at the station, Giles had cycled to the pub and because of that …? Derek shook his head and made a plopping noise with his tongue. There had been thousands, no hundreds of thousands of hours of decent clean living and only twenty minutes of indiscretion but it would have to be those twenty minutes that proved significant. Significant! A smashing fuck. Derek managed a wry smile; his head had started to throb unpleasantly but he felt no less detached. The nagging ache behind his eyes grew slightly worse. He started to feel indignant. Why me? Why should fate have singled me out? If Giles had caught Charles and Diana that would have been justice of a sort.

Derek shut his eyes and tried to visualize the sex talks Giles had attended at school. What had that gruesome school doctor told them? The usual stuff designed to keep them off it: the meaning of sex and love, the spiritual and the physical both playing their parts in equal doses. Lust never brings any kind of satisfaction, desire without love brutalises rather than transfigures.
Sex was degraded without mutual respect. Derek thought of Angela and sighed. The merging of sex and love? Nothing like that, but at the time better. Unexpected, unpremeditated and even now almost unbelievable. A fantasy fuck made real. A miracle of a sort, pagan perhaps but still miraculous. Was that something to be ashamed of? Should he feel obliged to beg Giles to forgive him? Your mother’s flagrant carryings on gave me no right to pursue lecherous liasons on my own account; far from it; two wrongs never made a right. Forgive me for I knew not what I did and wish I hadn’t; I have erred and strayed and am no more worthy to be called your father. Why bloody well should I?

Would any self-respecting teenager think twice about the rights and wrongs of a casual lay if it had been fun at the time? Like hell he would, and quite right and proper. With people maiming, killing and exploiting each other all over the world what harm was a bit of fornication? If my only contribution to
universal
sin is a bit on the side with Angela, I ought to get a first-class ticket to paradise. It’d be worse to drive a car with faulty brakes or to refuse help when it was asked, or to say things intended to wound, than to join genitals with a willing accomplice.

When the missionaries first went to Africa to tell the natives about monogamy they thought it was the best joke they’d ever heard. To be horrified by adultery’s about as logical as an African tribesman’s fear of bumping into a menstruating woman. Derek gulped down the last mouthful of brandy and rose with dignity. Although they build a fire for me, I shall not recant, I shall not. He stared defiance at the empty chairs as though facing a hostile mob and then turned disdainfully towards the door. He managed to climb the stairs without falling.