Close Relations (25 page)

‘I'm sure he's feeling terrible,' said Stephen.

‘You're so nice,' said Dorothy. ‘You needn't defend him.' She sipped her coffee.

Prudence lifted her cup. Some of her coffee had spilled into the saucer. She watched Stephen's foot; it was stirring the fringe of the hearthrug.

‘He's a foolish man,' said Dorothy. ‘Innocent, really. He's brought up three daughters and he still doesn't know anything about women. First girl who sets her sights on him – God knows why, maybe she
is
after his money, I don't know.
Maybe she wants a father figure. She makes a play for him, he's putty in her hands. She's not even that attractive, compared to some of them.'

‘I'm sure it won't last,' said Stephen.

‘How do you know?' Prudence asked sharply.

‘I don't know,' said Stephen. ‘I'm just guessing. Maybe it's some sort of mid-life crisis.'

Dorothy nodded. ‘He probably thinks – oh, everyone's doing it nowadays, why not him?'

‘He'll come home with his tail between his legs,' said Stephen.

‘You sure?' asked Prudence.

There was a thump in the bedroom.

‘What's that?' asked Dorothy.

Prudence drained her cup. ‘I'm taking you out,' she said to her mother. ‘We'll go into town, we'll have lunch at Fortnum's and go to a matinée, that Gershwin thing.' She got to her feet. ‘And we'll go to Selfridges and squirt ourselves with perfume. We'll forget about everything and just have fun.'

‘Sure you've got the time?' asked her mother.

Prudence nodded. ‘I've got all day.'

Gordon was cut adrift. It was true, what he had told April. His old life had receded, its shoreline barely recognisable. He was helpless – he, Gordon, who had once fancied himself in control, who had spent his life telling other people what to do. Once it had been simple: you laid the foundations, you placed one brick upon another. Who would have guessed how flimsy the structure was, once you shook it, how easily it crumbled?

He had caused terrible pain and was continuing to cause it. His wife had crumpled onto April's floor as if she had been shot. During those winter days even Gordon, not the most reflective of men, tried to find a reason for what had happened. He told himself that his marriage, though
companionable, had quietly died. It had succumbed to decades of familiarity. He and Dorothy had little in common, they had just been cemented by child-rearing and the comforting, blinding routine of daily life. He told April this, trying to make sense of it. But hindsight simplifies the past; in the effort to justify what has happened, one coarsens the preceding events. No marriage can be reduced to clichés but clichés were what he needed to simplify the chaos.

The truth was: he had fallen in love. He had embarked on a great adventure, probably the last great adventure of his life. He and April were lost to the world, but who needed the world when they had each other? Since moving in, just before Christmas, he had met few of her friends. He himself had little contact with anyone for he was an outcast now. He sporadically went to work, driving to his various sites just to reassure his men that he existed. He was impervious to their innuendoes or their disapproval; he blanked himself off to anything but the tasks that demanded his attention. It all seemed irrelevant – had seemed so, in fact, since that day in October when he had had his heart attack.

He knew he had to sort out his life, for everybody's sake, but he felt paralysed. His brain was locked, for if he dared to think it was insupportable. Dorothy had gone home on Saturday; he should have been there to heat up the house and look after her, as she had looked after him. Instead, his daughters were doing his job and he was walking down Prowse Street, Walthamstow, showing April the place where he had grown up.

‘The coalman lived there.' He pointed. ‘He had one eye, scared the living daylights out of me.'

‘Where did Kenny live?'

He pointed to a house. ‘That's his bedroom window, where he used to dangle the messages.' The houses looked smaller than he remembered – shabbier too, most of the plasterwork was in a terrible state. ‘They had the first TV.' He linked his arm with April's. ‘It's another world, sweetheart, even to me. God knows what, to you.' He pointed to a used-car dealer's
on the corner. ‘That's where the air raid shelter was. I sat in there, counting my shrapnel collection. My mum thought we were going to die, but I didn't.'

‘Why not?'

‘Kids think they're the centre of the world, it's just there for them.'

‘Egocentric little buggers, weren't we,' she said.

He nodded. ‘I thought I'd live for ever, and here I am, with you at the end of it.' He squeezed her arm. ‘So I was proved right, wasn't I?'

‘Did you bring your daughters here?'

He nodded. ‘Had to drag them. I was just boring old Dad, droning on about the war. When you're a dad, everything you do is boring.'

‘Even this? What you've been doing with me?'

He didn't reply. He stopped and pointed. ‘That's my house. Forty-six.'

She closed her eyes. ‘I'm going to imagine you coming out.'

She opened her eyes. The front door of number forty-six opened. A family came out – mother, father, two little girls. They were black. April burst out laughing.

Gordon was a Londoner. He had loved his city for sixty-five years; he felt a Cockney's proprietorial pride in it. He had delved into its buildings. His work had made him intimate with its past – the craftsmanship of joiners and brickies long since dead. Like most men of his age he felt a nostalgia for what can never be recaptured. April led him into new places which until now he had only heard as a distant throb. Maybe his daughters were right, he had been prejudiced. He preferred not to think about that; he blocked it off, he was good at that. Willingly he was led by April into her world, just as he had led her into his. That afternoon they were shopping in Electric Avenue as if he had been doing it all his life. They walked through the covered market. She waved at her friend Carole who had a hair salon in Second Avenue, next to a spice
shop. Dazzling fabrics hung from stalls. Music blared from a shoe shop where an Indian boy kicked a football to and fro, rocking the shoe boxes. Two huge women passed, dressed in tribal robes of some sort, maybe from Nigeria, who knew? He knew little about the place where Maddy had lived. He knew nothing about anything.

‘Don't get me wrong,' he said. ‘I love them dearly. But they make me feel stupid. Stupid old Dad.'

April nodded. ‘They are pretty intimidating.'

‘Even when I've done nothing wrong. I've given them this education, see. Private schools, the works. I wanted them to do well for themselves, I worked hard for that. And now we've got bugger-all to say to each other.'

‘You haven't lost them. Not for ever.'

They stopped at a vegetable stall. It was heaped with strangely shaped objects; they shone in the electric light. ‘Go on, educate me.' He pointed. ‘What're those?'

‘They're yams. And they're plantains.'

‘How do you cook them?' he asked.

She laughed. ‘Search me. Fancy a McDonald's?'

They walked out into the street. ‘Teenagers didn't exist, see,' he said. ‘We were little old men wearing little old men's clothes.'

‘Most of the blokes I know have never grown up.'

‘Can I join them for a bit?'

She nodded, and rubbed her shoulder against him as they walked.

The house had been put on the market. Dorothy and Gordon stood in the lounge. There was a chill, uninhabited air about the place; they both wore their overcoats.

‘You never did finish those shelves,' said Dorothy.

‘Dorothy –'

She gestured around the room. ‘Frankly, I'll be glad to get shot of it. It's far too big, been far too big for years. All that bloody cleaning. And the new people next door making a
fuss about the yard.'

‘Aren't you being hasty?'

‘Me? Hasty?' She looked at him. She wore the fawn coat he hadn't seen for years. Why was she wearing it now? He had no idea. Her face looked tighter somehow, there was a hardness about her that he hadn't known before. Already, she had changed. ‘You can do what you like with the business, I don't give a damn.'

‘But Dot –'

‘You haven't even been in this week. It's finished, Gordon, the sooner we get shot of it the better. I'll do another month and that's it.' Her face softened. ‘No more getting up at six in the morning,' she said dreamily. ‘No more queuing in the bank, no more blasted VAT. Think I enjoyed all that? I did it for you, Gordon. For us. I've been fed up with it for years, not that you'd noticed. I've worn myself out and now I've had enough.'

‘But what're you going to do?'

‘It's none of your business.'

‘But I'm worried about you,' he said.

‘Oh yes?' She laughed mirthlessly. ‘I'm going to buy a flat, just big enough for me. Half this house, I'll get somewhere really nice, with something over. You don't have to worry about me, I'll be fine.'

He pointed at the furniture. He couldn't think what else to do. ‘But what about –'

‘All this? Oh, we'll sort it out later. I only want that –' She pointed to the brass lamp ‘– and that, and the desk. You can have the rest for your love nest –'

‘I don't mean that – I don't want –'

‘Give it to Oxfam,' she said. ‘Give it to the girls. I don't care. But I'm having the photo albums.' She looked at her watch. He had given it to her on her sixtieth birthday; it seemed the only familiar thing about her. ‘Got to get back,' she said. ‘I'm cooking Pru and Stephen dinner.'

It was Monday morning. Stephen was travelling to a roofing job somewhere in south-east London. He sat in the front of the van with Frank and a roofer called Phil – another mere boy who made Stephen feel inept. Kendal Contractors seemed to have an inexhaustible supply of these young men. Bounding over scaffolding like mountain goats, they shouted out orders to Stephen in their incomprehensible brogues – Geordie, Irish – and cracked jokes whose punchlines floated away in the wind. The stamina of them! The expertise! After three weeks Stephen had got the hang of the simpler tasks, he had done some of them at home, but the effort of learning new ones, and pretending he knew how to do them when he had been told several times, left him with the sort of headache he had had during Latin lessons at school. At the end of the day he fell into bed like a sack of cement, incapable of any movement, let alone making love to Prudence.

As they drove through the streets he counted backwards. Five consecutive nights, in fact. This was all right for an established couple – even the sexually voracious Kaatya had let him off the hook, sometimes for a week at a time, during the course of their marriage – but when a chap had broken up his home to live with his mistress he was duty-bound to perform frequently. Wasn't that the point?

Apart from sheer exhaustion, the other impediment was Dorothy. She had been staying with them for a week now; Prudence couldn't bear to let her go home to the empty house. In some respects Dorothy was a model guest. She shopped and cooked while they were at work, and frequently disappeared to Purley to look after the office. But her presence was a daily rebuke to him. Her pale, unhappy face was his own conscience. She was an abandoned wife, an older version of his own, left helpless to fend for herself.

Besides, with her there he couldn't tell Prudence about problems at work – after all, she was his employer. Muttered conversations took place in the bedroom, where he also phoned his sons – Dorothy's presence was inhibiting in this respect, too. And Prudence herself changed when her mother
was around. She became desexed; she reverted to being a dutiful daughter. All in all the place was too small for the three of them. No wonder he couldn't get it up any more.

Stephen, preoccupied, failed to notice where they were going. Looking out of the window, he recognised the houses. They were driving through Dulwich.

‘I'll drop you off there and get the bitumen,' said Frank.

‘The boss going to show up today?' asked Phil.

‘None of your business, young Phillip,' replied Frank. ‘You're getting paid, aren't you?'

‘Lucky for some, eh?' muttered Phil.

Frank passed Stephen the
A–Z
. ‘You're the intellectual. Find Agincourt Road.'

Stephen paused. ‘It's third on the left.'

‘Know this area, do you?' Frank hooted and overtook a learner driver.

Stephen nodded.

He sat, rigid, as the van drove along Abbey Way. He watched the familiar houses slide past. Then the shops – the off-licence, the delicatessen. The pet shop had a
TO LET
sign above it; Chattles had a
CLOSING DOWN
sale. Already things were changing; where was Dirk going to buy his gerbil food now?

Frank turned left and drove down Agincourt Road. He slowed down. ‘Number thirty-six,' he said. ‘Keep your eyes peeled.'

The van stopped outside Stephen's house.

‘Keys under a plant pot, apparently,' said Frank.

Phil got out of the van. ‘Bit foolish, isn't it? Anyone could get in.'

Stephen remained, frozen to his seat. Phil unloaded the gear from the back of the van and came round to the passenger side. ‘Hoi, mate. You coming?'

Stephen climbed down. Frank drove off. It was nine-thirty; the boys must have left for school. The drive was empty; Kaatya's battered 2CV had gone.

Nothing had changed. The house gave no sign of the
traumas that had taken place within it. Kaatya's plants still pressed against the downstairs windows, seeking the sun – everybody in Amsterdam seemed to cram their windows with plants, it was one of the more charming Dutch habits. A games sock lay in the porch, and a Sainsbury bag of what looked like empty wine bottles lay slumped against the boot-scraper. With whom had Kaatya been drinking wine? Somebody he didn't know?