Exposure (59 page)

So, in that case, what was wrong with him and Sophie? It was as if there was a ghost in the house, stealing joy. Why had Sophie starved herself rather than eat her mother's meals and laugh and be happy? Why, after Sunday lunches, had he always sentenced himself to feminine exile in the garden with Rosalind while Alistair and Sophie debated at the table, like father and son?

It was mysterious. Family life was intricate. And he was tired of it now.

Rosalind had always been a passionate, all-weather gardener and Luke had stood out there with her in all kinds of conditions. He had consumed mugs of tea while the cool spring breeze rustled the forsythia; he had clinked ice in a glass of Pimm's while the sun beat on a honeysuckle vibrating with bees. But, just then, it was a memory of standing in the snow with her, tying clematis to sticks before a storm that strangely intermingled with the cold feel of the gun against his temple.

Of course, he had never had any interest in gardening, but he hoped his mother imagined he had. Then he gritted his teeth against the blow.

 

It is beautiful and terrifying at once to acknowledge that the circumstances that alter our lives are often dependent on the slightest chance. A tiny flashing light and a single high-pitched, electronic beep saved Luke's life. Had he put his phone on silent, he would have died. Rosalind would have rushed into the room to find her son's blood, bone and brain dispersed over the wallpaper.

Slowly, Luke's eyes found the mobile phone, which continued to flash on the desk where it had been sitting for days on its charger. His finger moved off the trigger. It was not that he was interested in who was calling, but he wondered why the phone was going flash-flash - almost as if he had never seen this phenomenon before. The curiosity he felt was bodily, basic as the sense of smell. He picked it up and read the words 'Dad mob' on the screen.

At that moment Luke could not have evaluated the oddness of this. It was three in the morning, but the middle of the night might as well have been the middle of the black ocean for all the sense he had left of civilization. And now here came a little bottle bobbing towards him from nowhere. He touched it curiously, expecting nothing and yet feeling instinctive dread. His was the motiveless enquiry of a sniffing animal.

'Luke?' the voice said. 'Luke? Can you hear me? Luke?'

'Yes?' It was a curious, hollow sound.

'Oh, you are there. Luke, it's me. It's Dad. I - look, it's the
middle of the night
,' Alistair said firmly, as if it was Luke who had called him, 'but I just ... look, you'll think I'm crazy, but I couldn't sleep and even though it's an
entirely inappropriate
time, I thought—perhaps wrongly - I thought that, well, you're so often up, and I thought that I might not disturb you if I called. I didn't wake you, did I, Luke? I
do
hope not. Did I?'

'No,' Luke said.

'Oh, good. Oh, I
am
glad. I would
hate
to have woken you. You sleep so badly, don't you? I'd never have forgiven myself if I'd woken you ...' Alistair let his voice trail off and Luke heard his own breathing echo in the phone. 'I suppose you thought I hadn't noticed you aren't sleeping,' Alistair said, 'didn't you?'

There was a silence.

'Did
you think that, Luke? God, we haven't exactly talked things over. So I suppose you thought I just hadn't
noticed
what's been happening, how unhappy you are. Did you think that?'

Luke knew he must answer or the questioning would continue. 'Yes,' he said.

'Well, you were wrong.'

Yes, wrong. Of course he was wrong. He was wrong about everything. Luke wanted to put the phone down and thought how nice it would be to quieten the voice and then, with one loud bang, to quieten the whole world. The party at Lapis-Lazuli would go silent after all.

He longed for the quiet he had been exposed to in the seconds after the car crash with Arianne and Ludo and Jessica, before they had all remembered themselves, when his mind had been quiet as snow falling in the night.

The voice went on in his ear—irritatingly, persistently: 'Look, of course I know this is highly eccentric but, God knows, I've had a pretty unusual day and I thought—well, I might as well carry on in the same vein. The truth is, Luke, there are rather a lot of things I want to say to you. They're things I strongly believe you deserve to hear.'

Luke felt his chin jerk back in surprise. It was an emotionless surprise—that of a scientist handed anomalous data. He said nothing, but continued to listen to the voice, to the breath, to this other person whom he had grown used to calling his father but who went to hotel rooms with unknown girls and was really just another load of chaos, like everyone else.

A week ago, when the party invitation arrived, he had stared at the envelope for a while. It said,'Luke Langford'. He had appreciated the fact that this was a person's name. And yet how could anyone ever hope to know who that person was, if even the man who tore open the envelope could not predict what 'Luke Langford' might do or feel?

But a belief that it was at least possible to know and understand was essential. Why would anyone bother to speak, or to act, for that matter, if other lives - if even your own life—amounted only to a sort of puzzling display? Surely he must have been understood by someone,
known
by someone? At a simpler stage of life, perhaps. Was it just possible his mother had known all there was to know about him when he had still worn nappies?

But even then he had acted without her knowledge; he had loved and detested for secret reasons.

He remembered on one occasion dragging a purple crayon across each of the walls of the newly decorated guest bedroom. It had been wonderful to see the wicked dark line growing over those civilized beige walls. When Rosalind found him, she clapped her hand over her mouth in an extremely satisfying expression of amazement. She still mentioned this incident as the exception that proved her son's sweet nature.

But it was no exception. There had been plenty of incidents she had simply not discovered—the day he had torn the head off the largest rose in the garden, for example, just to see if she would cry.

Stranger still were the dim recollections he had of acting in spite of his mother for reasons he had not even understood himself. His earliest memory was of slamming his fist down in his high chair and refusing to eat his mashed potato. He had been starving hungry—he could actually remember the hunger in his little bare stomach. Why had he refused to eat the mashed potato when he was
hungry?

He had reached the conclusion that nobody had known him then and nobody would ever know him. The only thing that could have disproved this theory would have been Arianne coming back to him. This would have amounted to benediction, to the fulfilment of promises the world had seemed to make him when he was a child—or during the first week of love.

There was rustling on the line and Luke listened for a bit. Alistair had no idea that his son had gone this far out, almost too far out for human contact to be possible, into the realm where the desire for death overwhelms both the vast horizon and the heartbreaking, heart-broadening desire to be understood.

But, of course, it was only
almost
too far—Luke's wrist had been caught just in time. Gradually he realized that the rustling on the line was the sound of human breath. His father was crying into the phone.

'Luke, I owe you an apology,' Alistair said. 'I'm calling to say I'm sorry.'

As surely as if it had been administered by a paramedic, this 50,000-volt dose, aimed right at the cardiac muscle, resuscitated him. Luke's consciousness came spluttering and choking into life and his first feeling was anger - rage that he had been returned to prison.

'Why?' he demanded, with enormous resentment that his father had, yet again, stolen peace from him. 'Why are you
sorry?'

There was a long pause, and then Alistair said, 'For never coming to your rugby matches.'

What kind of a joke was that? Luke said nothing. He asked himself what on earth his father meant, what new trick to demonstrate his inferior intellect was contained in this riddle. Sophie would understand it, no doubt. But even as these thoughts flashed through his mind he knew there was no deception here. He knew, as we all know it when it so rarely confronts us, that he was in the presence of humility. It was impossible to ignore.

He felt his body growing calm and pliant again, as if it was recuperating in a gentle climate. He glanced down and the gun had become an object in his grasp now, rather than a part of his hand, which he had merely to point towards a kind of freedom. He put it on the table.

'You are there, aren't you, Luke?
Luke?'
Alistair was saying.

'Yes, I'm here,' he said.

Alistair spoke urgently, almost breathlessly, repeating his son's name as if he was chasing after him down a corridor: 'Luke, I've been a bad father to you. I got it all wrong. I can see that now, I really can. I had no instinct for how to be a father.'

And, as if his father had caught up and thrown his arms around him from behind, stopping him, Luke felt his whole body jerk with emotion. Like Rosalind, he was essentially a kind person and his jovial smile concealed greater depths of compassion and mercy than there are in most people.

Alistair repeated, 'I've been going through it all. I did every single thing wrong.'

And Luke said, 'No, Dad. That's not true.'

'It is, Luke. Not school fees and so on, not clothes and doctors, but ... the things that matter internally to a child. All wrong. Not even
wrong
in your case - just not done at all.'

'No. No, I can think of things. You used to read to us,' Luke said. 'You remember? You used to tell us all the Greek myths and stuff.'

'But they were to go with Sophie's Greek classes, weren't they? Bless you, Luke. Thank you. There was never anything just for you, was there? I know that. Why?'

Luke said, 'I don't know.' He really didn't know. He had puzzled it out in The Cave a lot, over the years, when Alistair forgot to say well done for being the youngest boy ever to win the Stanton swimming medal, or even when Luke had worked like a maniac, enduring endless teasing from classmates, not to mention Sophie's impatience as a tutor, to get a 'B++' in Latin translation. Hiding in the hall outside the kitchen he had heard Rosalind say, 'Alistair, darling, do make a fuss of Luke about his Latin exam, won't you? He was longing to tell you and you didn't really seem to care.'

'What? I ... Oh, Rosalind, I've got a big case on and you're telling me about prep-school tests.'

Sophie padded across the kitchen in her socks, carrying the place mats. 'Anyway, they're easy-peasy, Luke's exams - "
amo, amas, amat
" stuff'

'I'm bound to say I agree with you, Soph,' Alistair said. 'It's a bloody expensive school for the amount of education they give, Rosalind. I know you think the world of it, but it's just sport, really. Brainless stuff at great expense.'

Luke ran away to cry hot tears in The Cave, until he was called for supper.

Now Alistair cleared his throat and spoke clearly into the phone, 'You never once complained, did you? Why?'

'I don't know,' Luke said.

'And you wrote me all those letters from school. All those letters with descriptions of tennis matches and swimming and so on, didn't you?'

'Yes.'

'And it was always Mummy who wrote back. God, I just ... I just
signed my name!

Luke could not have answered this because he was unable to speak.

Alistair went on, 'I want to apologize. I want you to know that I'm more sorry than I can really say, because I'm suddenly finding my vocabulary very limited. The best I can manage is to tell you I had no idea what I was doing—it
amazes
me how little idea I had of what I was doing—and to say I'm very sorry.' It occurred then to Alistair that he had spent his whole life longing to know who his father was, but all that had mattered in the end was that he should be a good father himself. He said, 'Do you think ... do you think you can forgive me for what I've done - for all the things I've done and all the things I haven't done? 'Then he laughed sadly. 'It's absurd to ask! Why on earth would you? How can we ask things like this of one another? But we have to. Oh, think about it, perhaps. Mull it over for a while. Let it sink in.'

'No, I don't need to,' Luke said. 'I already know I can forgive you. I already have.'

But it was not in Alistair's nature to accept love as the arbitrary miracle it is. He had always treated it as a philosophical proposition, subject to the laws of logic and therefore intelligible to the human mind. And in this way he corrupted all blessings. 'Why?' he said, still helplessly at the mercy of this trait.

Luke answered him simply, 'Because you're my father.'

Alistair glanced around at the newly whitewashed walls of his mother's bedroom. Then he put his head into his hands and acknowledged the full force of this reply. He saw that the love one has for one's parents is, essentially, the one love affair we never give up on. It is a pathological love but it is love none the less, regardless of whether it even appears to the rest of the world to be hatred.

Luke heard his own certainty too. In a silent drift, the horrifying discoveries of the last few hours fell away. His eye rested on the gun and he started with fright. What had he been about to do? His mind forgot. His thoughts hurried away from the unmentionable now and the gun was as grotesque to the touch as a human bone. He gave a deep sigh and accepted his life.

He said, 'Dad, are you coming back home?'

Alistair sighed and pressed the bridge of his nose. 'Yes.'

'Then why don't you bring some of her things with you?'

Alistair saw and was touched by the sentiment behind this, but this quickly gave way to shame, which lay beneath all his emotions. He said desperately, 'But
china dogs,
Luke? Such tasteless things, really. Where on earth would Mummy
put
them?'