Comeback (6 page)

“Yes, dear,” Vicky said, accepting it meekly.

“Three weeks tomorrow,” Belinda told her. “And now, Mother, I really have to run.”

I abruptly recalled a conversation I’d had long ago in Madrid, with my father.

“A child who calls its mother ‘Mother,’ wants to dominate her,” he said. “You will never call your mother ‘Mother.’ ”

“No, Dad.”

“You can call her Mum, Darling, Mater, Popsie or even silly old cow, as I heard you saying under your breath last week, but never Mother. Understood?”

“Yes, Dad.”

“And why did you call her a silly old cow?”

Lying to him was fairly impossible: he always saw through it. Swallowing, I told him the truth. “She wouldn’t let me go to Pamplona to run with the bulls because I’m only fifteen.”

“Quite right. Your mother’s always right. She’s made a good job of you and one day you’ll thank her. And never call her Mother.”

“No, Dad.”

“Mother,” Belinda said, “Ken says we’ll have dinner together soon. He meant it to be tonight, but with all this worry . . . I’ll phone you later.”

She gave a brief wave, turned and departed as speedily as she’d come.

After a short silence Vicky said valiantly, “She was a really sweet baby, very cuddly and loving. But girls grow up so independent. . . .” She paused and sighed. “We get on quite well really, as long as we don’t see each other too much.”

Greg gave me a sideways look and made no comment, though I saw that he felt much as I did about the offhand welcome. Belinda, I thought, was as self-centered as they come.

“Right,” I said cheerfully, “we may as well get your cases in, and if you like I’ll go to the shops.”

A certain amount of bustle at least partially filled the emotional vacuum, and after a while Vicky felt recovered just enough to investigate upstairs. The large bed in what was clearly the Sandersons’ own domain at least looked ready for occupation, though their clothes still filled the closets. Vicky said apathetically that she would unpack later the cases I’d carried up for her but meanwhile she was going to sleep at once, in her clothes, on the bed.

I left Greg fussing over her and went downstairs, and presently he followed, agitated and displeased.

“Belinda’s a pain in the ass,” he said. “Vicky’s crying. She doesn’t like being in someone else’s house. And I feel so helpless.”

“Sit down by the fire,” I said. “I’ll go foraging.”

When I came to think of it, I hadn’t been shopping regularly for food in England since I’d been at Oxford, and not much then. I was more accustomed to eating what I was given: the sort of life I led was rarely domestic.

I drove back to the straggly suburb and bought all the essentials I could think of, and felt like a stranger in my own country. The inside layouts of shops were subtly different from my last brief visit four years earlier. The goods available were differently packaged. Colors were all brighter. Even the coins had changed shape.

I found I’d lost, if I’d ever really known, any clear idea of what things in England should cost. Everything seemed expensive, even by Tokyo standards. My ignorance puzzled the shop assistants as I was obviously English, and it was altogether an unexpectedly disorienting experience. What on earth would it be like, I wondered, for someone to return after half a century, return to the world of my parents’ childhood, a time that millions still clearly remembered?

Every child had chilblains in the winter back then, my mother said; but I hadn’t known what a chilblain was.

I collected some scotch for Greg and a newspaper and other comforts and headed back to Thetford Cottage, finding things there as I’d left them.

Greg, dozing, woke up when I went in and came shivering out into the hall. The whisky brightened his eye considerably and he followed me into the kitchen to watch me stow the provisions.

“You should be all right now,” I said, closing the fridge.

He was alarmed. “But surely you’re staying?”

“Well . . . no.”

“Oh, but . . .” His voice deepened with distress. “I know you’ve done a lot for us, but please ... just one more night?”

“Greg . . .”

“Please. For Vicky’s sake.
Please
.”

For his sake too, I saw. I sighed internally. I liked them well enough and I supposed I could stay one night there and start my rediscovery of Gloucestershire in the morning, so again, against my gut reaction, I said yes.

 

 

VICKY WOKE AT six-thirty in the evening and came tottering down the stairs complaining of their slipperiness.

Greg and I had by that time lowered the scotch level, read the newspapers from cover to cover and found out how the television worked. We’d listened to the news, which was all of death, as usual. Amazing how many ways there were of dying.

Belinda had not telephoned.

At seven, however, a car arrived outside and the daughter herself came in as before, managerial rather than loving. This time, however, she had brought her affianced.

“Mother, you met Ken two or three years ago, you remember.”

“Yes, dear,” Vicky said kindly, though she’d told me she couldn’t bring him to mind. She offered him her cheek for a kiss, and after the fleetest of pauses received one.

“And this is Greg,” Belinda said. “I suppose he’s my stepfather.” She laughed briefly. “Odd having a stepfather after all these years.”

“How do you do?” Ken said politely, shaking Greg’s hand. “Glad to meet you, sir.”

Greg gave him an American smile that was all front with reservations hidden, and said he was sure pleased to be in England for the happy occasion.

Ken, at the moment, looked a long way from happy. Anxiety vibrated in his every gesture, not a simple nervousness at meeting his future in-laws but a much deeper, overriding bunch of worries, too intense to be covered.

He was tall, thin, sandy and wiry-looking, like a long-distance runner. A touch of Norwegian, perhaps, about the shape of the head and the light blue of his eyes. Fair hair on the point of thinning. I guessed his age at nearing forty and his dedication to his job as absolute.

“Sorry,” Belinda said to me, not sounding contrite. “Can’t remember your name.”

“Peter Darwin.”

“Oh yes.” She glanced towards Ken. “Mother’s helper.”

“How do you do?” He shook my hand perfunctorily. “Ken McClure,” he said.

It sounded very familiar. “Kenny?” I said doubtfully.

“No. Ken. Kenny was my father.”

“Oh.”

None of them paid any attention but I felt as if I’d been kicked in the subconscious by sleeping memory. Kenny McClure. I knew about Kenny McClure—but what did I know?—from a long time ago.

He’d killed himself.

The knowledge came back abruptly, accompanied by the curiosity I’d felt about it as a child, never having known before that people could kill themselves, and wondering how he had done it and what it felt like.

Kenny McClure had acted as veterinary surgeon at Cheltenham races. I knew I’d driven round the track with him in his Land Rover a few times, but I couldn’t now recall what he’d looked like.

Ken had made an attempt at dressing for the occasion in a suit, shirt and tie but with one black shoe and one brown. Belinda had come in a calf-length blue woolen dress under the padded olive jacket and, having made the effort herself, was critical of Vicky, who hadn’t.

“Mother, honestly, you look as if you’d slept in those clothes.”

“Yes, dear, I did.”

Belinda impatiently swept her upstairs to find something less crumpled and Greg offered Ken some scotch.

Ken eyed the bottle with regret. “Better not,” he said. “Driving, and all that.”

A short silence. Between the two of them there was no instant rapport. Eye contact, minimal.

“Belinda told us,” Greg said, finally, “that you’ve had some trouble with a horse today.”

“It died.” Ken had clamped a lid tight over his seething troubles and the strain came out in staccato speech. “Couldn’t save it.”

“I’m real sorry.”

Ken nodded. His pale eyes turned my way. “Not at my best this evening. Forgotten your name.”

“Peter Darwin.”

“Oh yes. Any relation to Charles?”

“No.”

He considered me. “I suppose you’ve been asked before.”

“Once or twice.”

He lost interest, but I thought that in other circumstances he and I might have done better together than he with Greg.

Ken tried, all the same. “Belinda says you were both mugged, sir, you and . . . er ... Mother.”

Greg made a face at the memory and gave him a brief account. Ken raised a show of indignation. “Rotten for you,” he said.

He spoke with a Gloucestershire accent, not strong, but recognizable. If I tried I’d still be able to speak that way easily myself, though I’d lost it to my new father’s Eton English soon after I had met him. He’d told me at once that I had a good ear for languages, and he’d made me learn French, Spanish and Russian intensively all through my teens. “You’ll never learn a language as naturally as now,” he said. “I’ll send you to school in England for two final years to do the university entrance, but to be truly multilingual you must learn languages where they’re spoken.”

I’d consequently breathed French in Cairo, Russian in Moscow, Spanish in Madrid. He hadn’t envisaged Japanese. That had been a quirk of Foreign Office posting.

Vicky and Belinda having reappeared, Vicky in red this time, Ken led the way in his car to a small country inn with a restaurant attached. He took Belinda with him and I again drove the rental car with Vicky and Greg sitting together in the back, an arrangement that led Belinda to conclude that “helper” meant chauffeur. She gave me sharply disapproving looks when I followed the group into the bar and accepted Ken’s offer of a drink before dinner.

We sat round a small dark table in a corner of a room heavily raftered and furnished in oak. The level of light from the red-shaded wall lamps was scarcely bright enough for reading the menus and there was an overall warmth of atmosphere that one met nowhere else on earth but in a British pub.

Belinda stared at me from over her glass. “Mother says you’re a secretary. I can’t understand why she needs one.”

“No, dear,” Vicky began, but Belinda made a shushing movement with her hand.

“Secretary, chauffeur, general helper, what does it matter?” she said. “Now that you’re here, Mother, I can look after you perfectly well myself. I’m sorry to be frank, but I don’t see how you justify the expense of someone else.”

Greg and Vicky’s mouths dropped open and both of them looked deeply embarrassed.

“Peter . . .” Vicky’s words failed her.

“It’s OK,” I reassured her, and to Belinda I said peacefully, “I’m a civil servant. A private secretary in the Foreign Office. Your mother isn’t paying me. I’m literally here just to help them over the few sticky days since they were attacked. I was coming to England in any case, so we traveled together. Perhaps I should have explained sooner. I’m so sorry.”

An apology where there was no fault usually defused things, I’d found. The Japanese did it all the time. Belinda gave a shrug and twisted her mouth. “Sorry, then,” she said in my general direction but not actually looking at me. “But how was I to know?”

“I did tell you ...” Vicky began.

“Never mind,” I said. “What’s good on this menu?”

Belinda knew the answer to that and began to instruct her mother and Greg. Ken’s thoughts had been on a distant travel throughout, but he made a visible effort then to retrieve the evening from gloom, and to some extent succeeded.

“What wine do you like with dinner ... um ... Mother?” he asked.

“Don’t call me Mother—call me Vicky.”

He called her Vicky easily, without the “um.” She said she preferred red wine. Any. He could choose.

Vicky and Ken were going to be all right, I thought, and was glad for Vicky’s sake. Belinda softened enough over dinner to put a glow on the thin beauty that had to be attracting Ken, and Greg offered a toast to their marriage.

“Are you married?” Ken asked me, clinking glasses with Vicky.

“Not yet.”

“Contemplating it?”

“In general.”

He nodded, and I thought of the young Englishwoman I’d left behind in Japan who had settled for a bigger fish in the diplomatic pond. The English girls on the staff of the embassies abroad were often the high-grade products of fashionable boarding schools, intelligent and good-looking as a general rule. Liaisons between them and the unmarried diplomats made life interesting all round but often ended discreetly, without tears. I’d said fond farewells in three different countries, and not regretted it.

By the time coffee arrived, the relationships among Greg, Vicky, Belinda and Ken had taken the shape they were likely to retain. Vicky, like a rose given water, had revived to the point of flirting very mildly with Ken. Ken and Greg remained outwardly cordial but inwardly stiff. Belinda bossed her mother, was reserved with Greg and took Ken for granted. A pretty normal setup, all in all.

Ken still retreated every five minutes or so for brief seconds into his consuming troubles but made no attempt to share them. He talked instead about a horse he’d bought two years earlier for peanuts to save it from being put down.

“Nice horse,” he said. “It cracked a cannon bone. The owner wanted it put down. I told him I could save the horse if he’d pay for the operation but he didn’t want the expense. Then, of course, the horse would have to rest a year before racing. All too much, the owner said. Put it down. So I offered him a bit more than he would have got from the dog-food people and he took it. I did the operation and rested the horse and put it in training and it won a nice race the other day, and now Ronnie Upjohn, that’s the owner, won’t speak to me except to say he’ll sue me.”