Cushing's Crusade (17 page)

‘You can’t want me to stay,’ she replied quietly. ‘If you did, you wouldn’t have made all that fuss about being misrepresented. You’d have told me you loved me, been tender to me, said you needed me.’

Her tears were completely gone, and now she was looking at him with serene composure. Derek felt a spasm of anger and then a sharp stab of panic, but he was determined not to give in to it. She’d made up her mind to leave him and nothing that he could have said would have altered that. So much he was certain of. He’d happened to make it easier for her by being angry as opposed to pathetic.

‘I do care,’ he said defiantly, ‘enough not to make one last conciliatory gesture only to have it thrown back in my face.’

Dignity restored, the wronged man turns proudly on his heel and leaves without a backward glance. His horse is waiting and he leaps up into the saddle and rides away. The slate wiped clean, he starts life again with renewed optimism and courage. A battle lost, but not the war. Life goes on and the strong man goes out to meet it undismayed. His horse does not shy at the first hedge and toss him into the ditch; no shared possessions, children,
mortgages
, insurance policies or faint forebodings cause him a moment’s unease. He was always a loner, a man with sharp
piercing
eyes made to scan far horizons and strange new shores, a man never to be caged or tamed.

‘Have you told Giles what you’re going to do?’ Derek asked.

‘Yes.’

‘What did he think?’ Derek was unable to disguise his fear.

A slight pause as she ran a hand through her hair.

‘You’d better ask him in case I misrepresent what he said.’

‘Tell me,’ he shouted.

For the first time she looked guilty and embarrassed.

‘Well?’ he cut in desperately.

She avoided his gaze and said uneasily, ‘I’m sorry. I don’t pretend to understand his reasons, but he wants to stay with me.’ Derek’s legs buckled and unless he had been standing close to the wall, he might have fallen. His face had become ashen. She came towards him but he turned his face to the wall. ‘I put no pressure on him,’ she said hastily.

Except you cried when he told you about Angela, except you took my part and told him not to be too hard, except you were generous and forgiving in the face of treachery, blinked back your tears and comforted him after the trauma of the departing police car and the emotional impact of reunion; and all the time no faithless father to be seen. Nothing more to say.

A sudden wave of nausea broke in Derek’s stomach. He rushed to the bathroom and vomited painfully. Hardly anything came up; he had not eaten since the night before. With his forehead resting against the cold rim of the lavatory bowl, he started to weep. A little later he lay down exhausted on the bathmat and went to sleep.

Derek sank down onto the lawn and ran a hand across his
forehead
. He was sweating freely and felt alarmingly weak in spite of several hours’ sleep. He had spent the best part of the remainder of the morning searching for Giles, but although he had looked all over the house and the garden and had even gone down to the beach, he had been unsuccessful. Giles’s bicycle was leaning against the garage door, so Derek was relatively certain that he had not gone far. That being the case, it seemed likely that the boy was hiding. Can’t face me, thought Derek. Because he feels guilty? Or because the thought of seeing me revolts him? Through the trembling heat-haze he saw Charles coming towards him, looking long-faced and sympathetic. Wanting at all costs to avoid a serious conversation, Derek waved cheerily and said, ‘I think I shall buy a hat. Next summer I shall buy a nice straw hat to protect my bald patch from the sun. I shall look rather elegant.’

Charles left a discreet pause and then said in a quietly diffident voice, ‘Diana tells me she’s leaving you.’ He gave Derek a
surprised
questioning look, as though inviting him to deny such improbable news.

‘Perhaps she’ll buy radio and television time to tell the world,’ Derek replied briskly. ‘To do her justice she did tell me too, after she’d told Giles, but I was informed.’

Charles was studying the grass uneasily. He coughed.

‘She asked me if I’d help her find a flat.’ He hesitated. ‘
Something
temporary to tide her over till she gets something permanent.’

‘Go ahead,’ said Derek.

‘You’re not going to try to dissuade her?’ asked Charles with
pained amazement. Derek shook his head emphatically. ‘But this is absurd,’ Charles exclaimed with a forced laugh. ‘She’s told me you’ve accepted that you were mistaken about me and her. Well you have, haven’t you?’

Derek lay back on the grass and watched dark clouds
beginning
to build up above the horizon. The good weather seemed at last to be coming to an end.

‘When one’s lost all sense of cause and effect, it doesn’t much matter what one accepts,’ he said reflectively.

‘For God’s sake, Derek. She’s going to leave you. You’re going to have to pull yourself together.’

Derek started to laugh.

‘I might as well pull myself to pieces for all the difference it would make.’ He could see how puzzled and offended Charles looked. ‘Really, I mean it,’ he went on. ‘When anybody starts misinterpreting people as regularly as I’ve done, he might as well drop the idea that other people’s behaviour is governed by
ascertainable
motives. When that assumption goes, normal life’s a thing of the past.’

Charles was looking at him strangely as though he had learned more from Derek’s words than their sense. A brief silence before he said with sudden nostalgia, ‘Funny, but that’s how I
remember
you talking to me at Oxford. The same sort of ironic hopelessness. You impressed me a lot.’

‘Mercifully I can’t remember what we used to say. In love with paradox and aphorisms. The easier and more superficial they were, the more we liked them.’

‘It never struck me like that,’ replied Charles in a wounded voice. ‘But then I wasn’t as quick as you.’

Derek watched a bee moving from flower to flower. ‘How doth the little busy bee improve each shining hour, and gather honey all the day from every opening flower.’

Charles smiled at him affectionately. Derek felt suddenly ashamed. Perhaps he really did like him.

‘We had some good times,’ conceded Derek. ‘Your sports car and your bank balance and your booze. No wonder I sounded amusing. You had a lot to offer.’

‘A rich father?’

‘No, more than that. A reckless eagerness to enjoy yourself and the cash to make it possible.’

Charles frowned and gave Derek a reproachful look.

‘You never cared about my money. If anything you despised it.’

‘But I drank your wine and let you pay my bills.’

‘Precisely,’ cried Charles. ‘If you’d cared you wouldn’t have let me.’ He paused and smiled. ‘You threw up that lecturing
fellowship
as though it were nothing. Started work on your book with a nominal salary. Ten, twenty years but you wouldn’t sell out. You came here as a bloody favour because you never gave a damn and still don’t about who people are or what they’re worth. No book, no reputation, but you don’t care.’

‘You always overestimated me.’ Derek was uncomfortable. He wanted to deny what Charles had said but knew that he couldn’t face doing so. Instead he said quietly, ‘I’m sorry about
everything
.’

Charles lifted a hand to his chin and smiled.

‘One of those things …’ A moment later he said awkwardly, ‘Diana asked if she could stay on a few days. I said she could.’

‘I was going to go today anyway,’ said Derek, getting up.

The sun had gone in behind a heavy mass of unbroken cloud.

*

Diana was lifting her cases down from the roof-rack, while Derek watched.

‘I thought you’d better keep the car,’ she said.

‘I don’t want it.’

‘You can’t want to take the cat back in the train.’

Derek kicked one of the car tyres. ‘As if that trivial
inconvenience
would bother me after what’s happened.’

Diana sat down sideways on the passenger seat with her feet resting on the gravel of the drive.

‘Your new flat,’ enquired Derek in a dull voice, ‘how do you intend paying for it?’

‘By working.’

‘Isn’t freelance journalism a litle unreliable; unreliable, I mean, for somebody who hasn’t worked regularly for three or four years?’

‘If I have to, I’ll write copy for the trade papers and publicity stuff.’

‘You’ll like that?’ he asked viciously.

‘Perhaps you’ll send me something for Giles every now and then,’ she said, scuffing the gravel with her sandals.

‘A birthday cake? A pocket battleship with automatic guns and radio-controlled steering?’

‘I meant money, Derek.’

‘How stupid of me.’ Suddenly he was laughing. The money. His father’s gift, as yet unspecified, but possibly considerable and certainly in the order of thousands rather than hundreds. In the normal course of events he would have told her at once, but the past twenty-four hours had been anything but normal. She was looking at him with real bewilderment. Broken men do not laugh.

‘Tell you what,’ he said breezily, ‘I’ll set up a trust for him.’

Diana got up and slammed the car door.

‘We’d better discuss it when you can manage to be serious.’ She turned on her heel and started to walk towards the house. Derek shouted after her:

‘Margaret left my father all her money.’

Diana wheeled round and stared at him threateningly.

‘So?’

‘He’s making most of it over to me. Death duty and all that. God’s truth, I can assure you.’

‘You’re lying,’ she said in a trembling voice. ‘You’d have told me before.’

‘I only knew yesterday.’

‘Rather a coincidence, wouldn’t you say?’

‘Not really. Her affairs were complicated. Lawyers always take their time. He told me just before he left. Probably didn’t want to say anything earlier because he knew what I thought of Margaret.’

‘You rotten sod,’ she said in a limp expressionless voice.

‘It’s hardly my fault,’ he returned primly.

For several seconds it seemed that she was on the verge of tears. He took her by the arm and said firmly, ‘Stay with me.’

She shook her head violently.

‘How the hell can I?’

‘Pride isn’t so important. It won’t buy food or heat a room. Ask a starving man what it’s worth.’ He slipped an arm round her waist and went on gently, ‘Don’t go and live in some pokey flat. We’ll buy a house. To hell with Abercorn Mansions.’

She seemed to consider for a moment before saying bitterly, ‘It’s too late. Money can’t wipe out what’s happened.’

‘It might help distance things a bit.’ Her expression was
unchanged
. With a final effort, he went on eagerly, ‘Let’s call it chance. Chance brought her back, not money. Chance had been about to take her away. Chance brought her back. For once
coincidence
redressed the balance and went in my favour.’

She looked down at her feet and spoke with quiet emphasis. ‘When I wanted money, you didn’t have it; and now it doesn’t matter to me any more.’ She shrugged her shoulders and looked at him sadly. ‘As simple as that. You had your books and your ideas. I had the tawdriness of the flat. Perhaps you taught me to enjoy renouncing pleasure.’

She blinked away the tears that had started to brim.

‘Why are you lying?’ he asked tenderly.

‘Why do you bloody well think?’ she screamed as she ran into the house.

Derek stared at the ground for a time and then picked up her cases and replaced them in the car. Having done so, he took out his own case and Kalulu’s basket. A few large but isolated drops of rain had started to fall. He took his case into the porch but didn’t go into the house. In spite of the rain he walked out into the garden again. As the falling drops intensified he heard the rumble of distant thunder. He made for a large beech tree near the old tennis court.

He had been sitting on a root for some minutes, watching the falling rain, when he saw a movement in the summer house on the far side of the court.

Only one side of the roof kept out the rain and most of the
floorboards were rotten. Giles was sitting in a splintering cane chair; on the back of the chair, above his head, crouched Kalulu. Derek watched his son hacking at the end of a bamboo cane with his penknife.

‘What are you making?’ he asked.

‘A harpoon,’ Giles replied, without looking up from his work.

Kalulu jumped down from the chair and rubbed his sides against Derek’s leg. The rain was splashing down noisily from the eaves of the summer house. Giles was biting his lip, whether with embarrassment or concentration on the bamboo, Derek could not make out.

‘Why did you go off like that?’

The boy looked up and put down his knife on the side of the chair. ‘To be alone.’

‘But why?’

‘To think.’

Silence, except for the noise of the rain.

‘What do you think about Mummy leaving?’ Derek asked, doing his best to stop his voice shaking.

‘You haven’t got on for years.’ Giles picked up his knife again and started scraping at the bamboo. As he moved the stick, Kalulu dabbed at the end of it playfully with his paws. ‘Mum hasn’t been happy for ages.’ He caught Derek’s eye and asked insistently, ‘Have
you
?’

Derek sighed and looked away.

‘Only children and very silly people are happy most of the time. Happiness is just the absence of unhappiness as often as not.’ Giles snapped his knife shut and shook his head. ‘You don’t think so?’ asked his father.

‘You might be happier with somebody else,’ whispered Giles; almost a question. Derek stared at him open-mouthed. His heart was racing. He wanted to shout but knew that if he did, the boy would tell him nothing else. With difficulty Derek contrived to sound casual as he asked, ‘Why did you tell Mummy?’

Giles was looking at him warily.

‘You aren’t cross?’ he asked anxiously.

‘No.’

Giles shook some bamboo shavings off his knees and looked down at the floor.

‘You couldn’t have been happy to have done what you did.’ He looked at his father as if for some confirmation of this statement. Then he went on nervously, ‘You might be better off apart.’

Derek covered his face with his hands. Far from having betrayed him, Derek was now certain that Giles’s principal motive for telling Diana had been a simple desire to help his father end a dead marriage and begin again with Angela or another woman. Derek murmured weakly, ‘You did it for me.’

Giles said nothing but went on stroking Kalulu, who had just jumped up onto his lap. Derek felt suddenly exasperated by his silence.

‘Your feeble father would never have had the guts to leave his wife, so you thought you’d give him a helping hand.’ Derek had said this more harshly than he had intended. Still no answer from Giles. ‘I’m right, aren’t I?’ shouted his father.

Giles had gone very red and seemed close to tears. Derek was taken aback when the boy pushed the cat off his knee and jumped up angrily.

‘I did it for me,’ he blurted out defiantly. ‘Not for you or for her, but for me, because
I
wanted to.’

Derek was too stunned to be angry. The idea that Giles should have acted for personal reasons of his own had never even occurred to him. He heard Giles going on vehemently, ‘How could I have come home and seen you both lying to each other? Day after day you saying, “Yes dear, no dear”, and all the time her not knowing what I’d seen, and me having to kid you that I didn’t care; and you wondering if I’d tell her; and me not
knowing
if you wanted to go or stay.’ He paused and took several deep breaths before shouting, ‘That’s why I told her.’

Derek found himself staring at his son with stupefaction.
Vulnerable
he might look with the soft down on his upper lip and the harsh line of his glasses breaking the curve of his cheek;
touchingly
awkward too—the way he bit his lips when embarrassed and couldn’t keep still when talking. But there he was, not just a boy with an erudite hobby, skinny white arms and a freckled face,
but Giles, who considered things strictly from his own point of view and made his own plans and decisions. Giles, who thought for himself, and then acted upon his thoughts. His trousers were too short and the top button of his aertex shirt was missing. Derek wanted to embrace him but was afraid to do so in case he was rebuffed. He could feel his eyes filling as he said, ‘Are you really going to go with Mummy?’

Derek had expected the question to embarrass the boy, but it didn’t. Giles looked at him seriously and replied, ‘It wouldn’t be fair if I didn’t.’

‘Because of Angela?’ asked Derek bitterly.

Giles seemed surprised by the question. ‘Nothing to do with that.’ He picked up his harpoon and stabbed at a rotten
floorboard
, breaking off bits of worm-eaten wood. Water had started to seep through the roof in more places.