A Period of Adjustment (8 page)

‘Better?'

‘No. You promised. You
promised
me.'

‘What? What did I promise?'

‘The first time. First time you ever took me to Arthur and Dottie. That time. When you left, I asked you if you would come back …'

‘And?'

‘You said, “Always.” You said that. You said that. “Always.”'

‘So?' I took a handkerchief from my pocket and started to wipe his face.

‘Now you're going to leave me.'

‘I'm not. Hold still. You're covered in nose-snot. Open your eyes. Come on.'

‘I won't go with Mum. I want to stay with you. You promised me.'

‘Look, Giles. This is something your mother and I have to talk about together for your good, and for Annie's.'

‘You said all that. If you go, if I have to live with Mum and … him, Eric, I won't. And you'll be sorry.' He eased himself up to a sitting position, pushed his fingers through his hair. ‘I'll just kill myself.'

‘Don't be so silly.' I stuffed the soiled handkerchief into a pocket.

‘I will. I know how to. With a belt.'

For a moment we sat in silence. So still I could hear birdsong somewhere.

‘Look. I've got to see this business through. Today, I mean. With Mum. We'll have to talk about everything. I'll tell her what you've told me. I'll tell her why.'

He suddenly looked at me with hopeless, bleary, eyes. ‘About the bathroom?'

‘No.
Not
about that. Yet. I won't say anything about that. I'll just say that you want to stay with me when we do separate and that you want me to look after you. Right?'

‘Right. I do. But, I mean …' He started to pleat a fold on the knee of his jeans very slowly, sniffing from time to time, but otherwise apparently calm again.

‘What were you going to say, Giles? “
I mean”
what?'

‘If you're fed up with me? About the no soap when there was some, and all my shirts dirty, and Arthur and my French. If you are

‘I'm not. Not in the least. You are going to make a hell of a change to my life and I may not altogether manage to come to terms with things, but I will have a shot at it. Somehow we'll make things work out, and I am not in the least fed up with you. You're just a bloody nuisance but I do love you. Okay?'

He allowed himself an exceedingly watery smile. ‘Okay. But I won't have to go to live with them?'

‘No. Not if I can help it.'

He looked up in startled pain. ‘But you
can
! You can help it!'

‘Yes. Yes, I can. Of course I can. I will. Now that really
is
a promise. Will that do?'

He nodded his head slowly and I started the car.

‘Do you think you are ready? Dottie and Arthur? We'll have to get back to normal now. If we are going to work this out together, one of us has to be boss, stands to reason. And as I'm the oldest it's better that it's me. Agree? So let's get on with it all. We have a hell of a lot of problems to face. Together. So no more whining about dying and belts. Right? Clear?'

He wiped a hand across his face, rubbed his nose vigorously, shook his head and then nodded tiredly. I eased the car into the lane and we continued slowly on our way to the Theobalds'.

‘That was bloody blackmail. You realize that? Crafty little bugger, you are.'

‘It is quite easy, killing yourself,' he said calmly and with a half-smile suggesting that it was nothing now to be considered. ‘Jones G.C. did it. At school. In the fourth year. There was a big fuss. But that's what he did. In the gym.'

‘Does anyone know why, exactly, such a young boy should do that? At fourteen?'

‘No. I don't know why. But it didn't really matter. No one liked him much.'

We drove on into the sunlight, spiralling dust behind us into the morning.

Dottie Theobald was planting a rosemary hedge. I was looking at my watch.

‘He looks a bit weepy. You give him a whacking?'

She pushed a small spiky plant into a prepared hole. A long row of them going up the hill.

‘No. Nothing as simple as that. I'm meeting his mother today in Nice to discuss a divorce and what we do with the house in London and all that stuff.'

She pushed her straw hat to the back of her head, asked me to hand her another plant, tapped the trowel on the edge of a bucket briskly.

‘Always a bit of a problem, that. Fortunately I have never had to deal with it personally, but God knows I've gone through it with a mass of bewildered kids the parents have dumped on us at prep school. Whose parents are coming to the Sports Day? Whose father will run in the egg and spoon? And worse, of course, Mummy has a new “friend”. Brought down for inspection. Usually a bit richer than Daddy. We were near Bourne End on the Thames, so it meant picnic hampers on glossy motor launches or shandy and smoked salmon at some smart-arsed riverside pub. You know?'

We sat down together. She had found a half-filled sack of tourbe, and made a sign that I should squat on it. She perched, not altogether securely, on the rim of the galvanized bucket and I told her exactly what had happened twenty minutes before in the car. She listened quietly, now and again pursing her lips with distress, smoothing the blade of the trowel, nodding in agreement.

‘I don't know if I did it the right way. Or if I did
anything
the right way. I just did what I felt I had to do. Paternal stuff. Is that how it's done?'

She readjusted her hat, squinted into the sun. ‘I don't know, yet, if it was the “paternal stuff”. I do know that it was right to do as you did. He's too bright by far to try and hood-wink. I knew something had happened, so did Arthur. That's why he carted him off to what we both call the “school-room”. Up there. With the round window. Keep him out of the way. They're doing
Contes et légendes
this morning. Very advanced. I am sorry for you, but we guessed that there had been a problem. You were late, and he had been crying. I thought perhaps it was something to do with your brother. But I think you managed to spare him much of that? And now his mama. Oh Lord! If she fights to keep him? What then? Clearly he wants to stay with you, but can you cope with a boy of ten that you hardly know? You write. You need a certain amount of peace and quiet, don't you? You can't be expected to suddenly go fishing, or wash his socks and neck. Or cook his breakfast. You know?'

She made it sound so idiotic that I laughed.

‘No. I can't wash his socks. I'm not terribly good at washing my own come to that.'

She got up and picked another rosemary plant from an old Tide carton lying on the path, dug a small hole in the sandy soil, scattered a handful or two of tourbe in, stuck the root-ball carefully in place.

I got up and lifted the watering-can, carried it to her. She poured carefully.

‘Water here is like platinum. We had a terrible drought for two years. I'm so late getting these in. You'll live here, I suppose? As you have told me. At Jericho.'

‘Yes. I suppose that I have
done
the right thing altogether. For him and indeed for myself.'

‘There was little alternative, was there? I am afraid, Will, that it is simply a question of responsibility. That's all.'

She handed me the watering-can, took up another plant, wandered to the next pre-dug hole.

‘How long, Dottie, does it go on for?'

She looked up swiftly, her kind pale eyes glinting with wry amusement. ‘How long does
what
go on? Being “Daddy”? Being responsible? Looking after them?' She did her little act with the tourbe, the hole, then beckoned for the can, which I handed her, and she stuck in the rosemary plant. ‘That what you are asking?'

‘Yes. That's it. How long does it go on?'

She raked the soil round the plant, patted the moist little hump, and looking at me over her shoulder she said, ‘For the rest of your life, Will. Unless he does a runner or goes to Australia or the Antarctic, marries a Hottentot or something. Even then, you are never entirely free of them. Never.'

I sat back on the edge of the tourbe sack.

‘Even when they get married to the most wonderful girl in the world and litter the place with their young they'll still hang around. You'll see. Bad luck!'

We laughed together. I suppose I looked rueful because she said, ‘And you can't retract now. Not after this morning. You'll just have to see things through.'

‘I will. Somehow. It's this bloody lunch I have to face today in a couple of hours. That's what I fear most.'

She threw the trowel into the bucket, it clanged. ‘Some coffee?' I looked at my watch. ‘You have time?'

We walked together up to the house.

‘My first battle on his behalf. Today. Probably a fight.'

She pushed the bead and bamboo curtains apart into the kitchen. ‘I hope you
won't
have to fight. You said it was an amicable arrangement? Very civilized? I feel certain that your wife will be flexible. Don't you? She obviously cares
rather more for your daughter, which is unusual I'll agree. Mothers are desperately fond of their sons, sometimes dangerously so. But, of course, Giles was not first-born. That makes a subtle difference.' She turned on a tap and filled the kettle, went over to the arched doorway and called up into the shadow above, ‘Arthur? Giles? I'm making coffee.' She came back and set out cups and saucers. ‘I do so loathe mugs, don't you? Casual and careless, I think that they “taste” the coffee, tea … whatever it is. But this is only instant.'

She removed her straw hat, stuck it on the nail in the wall by the scissors. ‘Ah! Now that your wife has telephoned you, I suppose you can go over to Jericho?' She put out a sugar bowl, spoons, fiddled with the plait on her head, stuck in a slipping hairpin. ‘Get you both out of that Pavilion place. It sounds awful. Not a terrific help to a new father-and-son relationship. Altogether too intimate.'

The kettle boiled, coffee was spooned, and the sound of Arthur's boots clattering on the stone stairs came down to us. He was smiling, in a faded denim shirt, the baggy shorts, the laceless boots. Giles was behind him. Unsmiling. His eyes a little red, his face slightly puffy, he was quite steady. Hidden anxiety lurking. I was sitting in a rush-bottomed chair at the end of the table. I raised a hand towards him and he came, almost cautiously, towards me and took up a position of guard by my chair. He didn't take my offered hand, but leant with his full weight against my thigh.

Arthur said, ‘How's the rosemary hedge?' He was filling a silence with pleasantry. I said it was starting to look like a hedge already, almost half planted. ‘Eighteen inches apart? I've said to Dottie it's too wide, but she insists that's what the
Readers' Digest
gardening book suggests. A maximum five foot spread? Sounds right, I suppose?'

Giles put his hand on my shoulder. The slight movement
did not escape Dottie. She flicked a sharp look up, and away.

‘I've got to scatter bonemeal about,' she said. ‘I should have done it before, in the holes. Never mind. Coffee? Giles? Or a Coke?'

He shook his head, said nothing. Arthur dropped a sugar cube into his cup.

‘I suppose you'll be off to Jericho now, eh? I mean, your wife has contacted you. So you can nip off? I know I would. But I wouldn't count on the engineer from Sainte-Brigitte arriving with the Instrument, as they call it, for a while. Tardy fellows. All telephone engineers are.'

Giles kicked the heel of his trainer with one foot, a slight movement which did not prevent him from sliding his hand on my shoulder into a more possessive position, round the back of my neck.

‘I'll be out of that Pavilion', I said, ‘as soon as I can get out. The sooner the better, telephone or no telephone. We'll just hunker down, as they say. And wait.'

Giles said very quietly, ‘
Who
says “hunker down”?'

‘I don't honestly know. I've heard it. Do you know, Arthur?'

He was stirring his cup. ‘Cowboys, I'd imagine? Don't they hunker down round the camp fires or something? Chewing buffalo steaks? Or is it beans?'

‘Probably. Cowboys. All I mean is that we'll be patient, and just wait.'

A slightly strained little meeting. One could have considered it useless, but in fact it had been carefully engineered by Dottie. It had brought Giles and me together, allowing a moment of bonding between us, and it had given him extra time to allow the grief which had ravaged him seep away. He stood attached to me, literally, and possessively.

The conversation turned easily to Florence. And had I been able to tell her about the disposal of James's ashes? I
said that it had been agreed that she be left quietly on her own for a while, until everything had been tidied away and that I'd left a note to ask her to meet. Now that things were all clear, that the winds and sea had carried the last human vestiges of James away into space, we could all restart our lives. It had been, as Arthur said ruefully, a ‘quite astonishing few weeks'.

I had parked the Simca in the shade of a stand of carefully pruned bay trees, tall walking-sticks with feather-duster tops. Giles came with me to the car, wandering, as if there was no hidden urgency, or anxiety. His hands thrust deep into the pockets of his jeans, he leant against a lichened stone figure of a goddess, prodding the gravel at his feet with the toe of a trainer carefully, not looking at me. I got into the car, started up, sat there with the engine quietly running.

‘I'll get you some toothpaste, all right? And a couple of extra shirts, and tomorrow we pack up. Move over to Jericho.' I opened the glove-pocket before me. Under a pile of maps and an opened packet of fruit-gums lay, concealed, the ancient key to the house: the same key which had thumped on to the doormat, many weeks ago, in Parsons Green.

Now it carried no label, no sign of what it might be used for, or what it might open and reveal. No one would be tempted to steal it: it was old and long and too heavy to carry around in a pocket, not heavy enough to cosh anyone. I held it up, wagging it between forefinger and thumb.