Apple of My Eye (21 page)

The motherly-looking waitress beamed at Ronnie. ‘And what can I get for you?’

‘Nothing.’

‘You must have something. A growing boy like you. The chocolate gateau is very good. How about …’

‘I said I didn’t want anything. Are you deaf?’

The waitress flushed. Anna felt embarrassed. ‘Ronnie, apologize at once.’

‘Sorry,’ he said sulkily.

‘So am I,’ added Anna, more graciously.

The waitress wheeled the trolley away. Ronnie lounged back in his chair, staring at the pepper pot at the centre of the table. ‘What’s got into you?’ Anna demanded.

‘Isn’t there something you want to tell me?’

‘What?’

‘That you’re going to marry him. You are, aren’t you?’

‘Yes.’

He picked up a napkin ring, rolling it back and forth on the tablecloth.

‘How does that make you feel?’ she asked.

‘Proud. You make such an attractive pair.’

‘Ronnie!’

‘So what happens to me now?’

‘You finish your school year here in Hepton. Then you come to live with us in Kendleton.’ She smiled encouragingly. ‘You’ll like it there, Ronnie. It’s a beautiful place. The house is beautiful too. Right by the river with a garden so big that it really does take a man a whole day to cut the grass. It’s just like the one I promised you when you were little.’

‘But you didn’t promise we’d have to share it.’

‘It’ll be our home.’

‘And his.’

Silence. At a nearby table a man laughed loudly at his own joke.

‘Do you …’ he began.

‘No,’ she said quickly. ‘I don’t love him. But he’s a good man, Ronnie. He’s been a true friend to me, just
as he will be to you. Perhaps I will grow to love him. But one thing you must believe is that I will never love him as much as I love you.’

He looked up. ‘Do you promise?’

‘Do you need to ask?’

‘I don’t know.’

She covered his hand with her own.

‘When I was thirteen God played a terrible trick on me. He took everything that gave my life meaning and destroyed it utterly. For three years I wished that he’d destroyed me too. I used to lie awake every night in the back bedroom in Baxter Road and wish that I was dead so that I could be with my family again.’

He swallowed. His hand continued to move the ring.

‘And then I had you. My son. My Ronnie Sunshine who took all the pain away. From the moment I first held you in my arms I knew that I would willingly go through that pain a million times over provided you were waiting for me at the end of it. You are the most wonderful, the most glorious thing that has ever happened to me, and even if I were to love Charles more than any woman ever loved her husband it still wouldn’t be the smallest fraction of the love I feel for you. Sometimes I look at you and feel as if my heart will burst with pride. My brilliant, beautiful, perfect son.’

His hand stopped moving. He began to cry. The sight caused her physical pain. ‘Oh, Ronnie, darling …’

‘But I’m not perfect. I want to be but I’m not. And if you knew … if you knew …’

‘Knew what?’

He shook his head. She moved her chair closer, pulling him towards her, crooning over him as if he were a baby while his tears soaked through her blouse and on to her skin. The people at the next table, clearly embarrassed, kept glancing over. She ignored them. They didn’t matter. The only person who mattered was Ronnie.

‘Knew what, my darling? You can tell me. There’s nothing you could do that would change how I feel about you. You know that, don’t you?’

He wiped his eyes.

‘Don’t you?’

‘Yes.’

She stroked his hair. ‘Tell me, then.’

He looked up. Managed a smile. A faint Ronnie Sunshine smile.

‘I was jealous of Charles. I was sitting here wishing he’d been killed in the war, not just injured, because then he couldn’t marry you and take you away from me.’

‘He’s not taking me away from you. I’ll always be yours, Ronnie. No one else’s.’

‘I love you, Mum. I want you to be happy. If Charles makes you happy, I’m happy too.’

‘You make me happy. No one will ever make me as happy as you.’

She stroked his cheek. He kissed her hand. The people at the next table were still staring. One man muttered about people making exhibitions of themselves.
Impulsively she blew a raspberry at him. Startled, the whole group looked away.

Ronnie began to laugh. She did the same. They hugged each other, neither caring what anyone else thought.

Charles stood in the doorway of the restaurant, watching Anna with Ronnie.

Her arms were wrapped around him. His head rested on her breast. The two of them locked together as completely as two pieces in a jigsaw puzzle.

People talked about the bond between fathers and daughters but to him it could not compare to that between mothers and sons. A mother nurtured her son in her womb and fed him from her body. Surrendered herself to him in a way that she would never do to any other man, not even her husband. And the son, on reaching manhood, would discover that no woman, not even his wife, would ever give herself to him as completely as his mother had done. It was a bond made up of contradictions. Pure yet sexual. Nurturing yet crippling. Creating a love so powerful that no one, not even God, could ever completely tear it asunder.

And if there were no other family members to dilute that love …

The boy will always come first. However much she might love you she will always love him more.

A woman near by was staring at his destroyed right profile. When he turned towards her she looked
embarrassed. He wanted to tell her that it didn’t matter. That he understood.

Even though it still hurt.

He walked through the restaurant towards the woman he loved above all others and the boy with the secret eyes who would always eclipse him in her heart. ‘Is everything all right?’ he asked hesitantly.

‘It’s fine,’ Anna told him.

Ronnie raised his wineglass. ‘A toast to the future.’

Charles did likewise. ‘To our happiness.’

‘To my mother’s happiness.’

They clinked glasses. Anna smiled at him. Ronnie did too, with eyes that gave nothing away. Charles smiled back, telling himself that the future would be happy for all of them.

July 1961.

‘
Yet again Ronnie is a more than deserving winner of the year prize. Even by his own high standards, his performance in the exams was outstanding.

I am, however, still concerned by reports of restlessness in class which have grown ever more frequent in recent months. This may be due partly to excitement at his impending move but must now be brought into check as he enters the final years of his school career.

Ronnie’s teachers join me in wishing him all possible success in the future …’

The morning of Ronnie’s departure, and Vera was not herself. A strange madness had come over her
which manifested itself in an obsession with four words: Oxford, professor, author and rich. She couldn’t stop using them. Every sentence she uttered contained at least one. ‘I keep asking myself,’ she told the Browns, ‘whether it’s as prestigious to be a professor at an Ivy League university as it is to be a professor at Oxford. What do you think?’ Mr Brown said that he didn’t know. Mrs Brown said nothing, just looked sick.

The house was full that day. Vera and Stan. The Browns. Thomas and Sandra. Peter, Jane and their baby son. Mabel and Bill Cooper from the corner shop. Even Archie Clark. All there to say goodbye to Ronnie as he left Hepton for ever.

He sat on the sofa while Vera fussed over him. She had done a great deal of that since the wedding. ‘Are you sure you’ve had enough to eat?’ she enquired anxiously.

‘Yes, thank you, Auntie Vera.’

‘It’s no trouble to make you something else.’

‘I’ll have something,’ said Peter. He looked exhausted, as did Jane. The two of them shared the front bedroom that Peter had once shared with Ronnie. The baby shared it too, crying all night while his newly married parents shouted at each other, hinting at the long years of misery that lay ahead.

Stan was talking to Thomas and Bill Cooper about football. ‘Talk about cricket,’ Vera told him. ‘Rich people like cricket.’ She turned to the Browns. ‘Did I tell you that Charles is related to an earl?’ Mr Brown
nodded while Mrs Brown puffed furiously on her cigarette.

‘Actually he’s not, Auntie Vera. His stepmother was.’

‘Well, it’s the same thing.’ Vera sighed with pleasure. ‘Who would have thought it? A cousin of mine marrying into the aristocracy.’ Ronnie’s mother, for years a despised relative of Stan’s, had suddenly been elevated to the dearest of all Vera’s kin.

A Bentley pulled up outside the house. His mother and stepfather had arrived. Vera led them into the living room, fawning over Charles as if he were royalty. His mother was wearing a new suit. Chic and expensive. Different from her usual clothes. It made her look older. Harder. For a moment she didn’t look like his mother at all.

Then she saw him. Her face lit up like a child on Christmas morning and everything was all right again. She was still his mother. She was still his.

‘Hello, Ronnie.’

‘Hello, Mum.’

They sat together on the sofa, drinking tea while Vera forced expensive biscuits and cakes upon them. None of the cheap stuff the local shops sold. She had made a special trip to Harrods. Charles listened to Vera’s gushing with good grace while Mr Brown asked about the drive from Kendleton and poor, henpecked Stan talked about cricket as if his life depended on it. In the corner of the room, Peter and Jane stared at Charles’s damaged face. Jane whispered something and
Peter began to snigger. He caught Ronnie’s eye and gave him the usual sneer. Once it would have been accompanied by the mouthing of the word ‘bastard’, but not now.

His mother said that it was time to leave. Everyone crowded round to wish him well. Even Peter, after much prodding from his mother, offered his hand.

As did Mr Brown. ‘So goodbye then, young Ronnie, and take my advice. If you can’t be good then be careful.’ His wife and the newly refined Vera cringed but Mr Brown just laughed. His hand was fat and clammy. The hand that had once dared to fondle Ronnie’s mother. Ronnie laughed too, thinking of the letter that Archie would be posting in a week’s time. An anonymous letter, addressed to Mrs Brown, giving a full account of her husband’s philandering. Hopefully, after reading it, Mrs Brown would cut off her husband’s hand along with something altogether more vital.

Vera suggested that he take some biscuits for the journey. ‘I’ll go and wrap them for you, dear.’ She beamed at Charles. ‘He loves his biscuits, does our Ronnie.’

‘I’ll come and help you, Auntie Vera.’

They stood together in the kitchen beside the table where he had had to sit in silence through countless meals while his mother’s name was dragged through the mud. Vera smiled nervously. ‘This is it, then, Ronnie.’

‘I suppose so.’ He smiled too, thinking of the fifteen
long years they had spent together. They had had their ups and downs, that was for sure. But now it was over.

‘How about a hug, then?’

He did as she asked. She smelt of cheap perfume, talcum powder and beer. He hated the way she smelt. He hated everything about her.

Pressing his mouth close to her ear, he began to whisper.

‘You think the Browns are your friends but they’re not. They despise you. Everyone in the street despises you. They used to come into the shop and laugh at you the way you used to laugh at my mother. You think you’re better than her but she’s worth a million of you. She always has been and she always will be. So goodbye, Auntie Vera, and don’t ever expect to see or hear from me again unless you’re dying in agony, because believe me I would walk through the fires of hell itself to see that.’

He kissed her cheek, his hand stroking her scarred arm. Then, still smiling, he walked back into the living room.

One hour later he sat in the car as it drove towards Oxfordshire.

They had left London and the countryside was opening up around them. It was a beautiful day and the windows were open. His mother sat in front, describing everything they passed, radiating happiness while the wind blasted her hair and Charles smiled indulgently at her.

‘Am I talking too much?’ she asked him.

‘Absolutely not. Until today I had no idea what a cow looked like but now I do and my world will never be the same again.’

She began to laugh. A full, hearty sound. Ronnie had never heard her laugh like that before.

Except with him.

He laughed too, as loudly as her, masking the jealousy that churned inside him like a bag of snakes as the car sped on, carrying him away from his old life and on towards the new.

A hot day in June. Mae Moss was cleaning for Mr and Mrs Bishop.

She enjoyed cleaning for them. Unlike their neighbours the Hastings, whose home always looked as if it had just been burgled, the Bishops were a tidy family. ‘A place for everything and everything in its place,’ was Mr Bishop’s motto, and one of which Mae thoroughly approved.

She was working in the living room. Just a quick dusting of surfaces. Nothing else was needed. It was beautifully laid out; antique furniture, oil paintings and no television. ‘My husband says it kills the art of conversation,’ said Mrs Bishop. ‘Young people spend their lives watching it and we don’t want that for Susan.’ Mae enjoyed television and never missed an episode of
Emergency Ward Ten
, but when she thought of the ghastly
Juke Box Jury
that her grandchildren adored she was forced to admit that Mr Bishop had a point.

After finishing the ground floor she moved upstairs. Mr Bishop’s bedroom first, then his wife’s. They were the only couple Mae cleaned for who slept apart. Her
friend Dora Cox, who knew everyone’s business, thought this was down to Mrs Bishop. ‘She had a breakdown, poor love, and that’s usually due to problems in the bedroom department.’ Mae, whose husband snored loud enough to wake the dead, envied Mrs Bishop so understanding a spouse.

Finally she cleaned the top floor. Mr Bishop’s study was full of files and papers, all meticulously arranged. He was a successful lawyer who acted for many of the wealthy families in The Avenue, including old Mrs Pembroke, who owned beautiful Riverdale and was reputedly as rich as Croesus. Mae was always telling her grandchildren to work hard so they too could become successful lawyers and live in Queen Anne Square, and they would roll their eyes and continue arguing over whether Cliff Richard was as good as Elvis Presley.