Meeting the English (7 page)

‘An offer?' asks Myfanwy, still seeing Phillip's hard hairy bum out beneath his shirt, pumping away at silly Linda's palazzo pants, both of them squeezed into the narrow space between the tins – ‘For
The Pit?
'

‘No,' says Giles, ‘for Yewtree. For the house.' And Myfanwy stares.

‘He heard,' says Giles, ‘that Phillip was, you know, and I explained he wasn't, you know, but he asked me to put it to you anyway. In case Phil was, you know, in the future. Soon.'

‘Dead,' says Myfanwy, flushing. ‘How much?'

And Giles names the sum.

‘Oh,' says Myfanwy, and Giles nods. O. Such a lot of Os.

Then Myfanwy gazes for some time out of the window with her strange round marbly-blue eyes that were once so famous. That were once thickly fringed, snapping, full of fun, in the days when Myfanwy offered tea and rounds of toast among the bare boards and threadbare armchairs of Yewtree Row. Giles remembers that Myfanwy, lush on a dirty hearthrug: he blames Phil for her slow demise, to be quite honest.

‘I hadn't thought of it,' says Myfanwy, at last. ‘I'd thought of selling Finchley Road. If, you know. Renting Yewtree, at most.'

‘It's a lot of money,' says Giles, ‘enough to take care of Phil properly. If Shirin agrees. I haven't spoken to her yet. She's busy with this show.'

‘Could she block it?' says Myfanwy.

‘Yes. Her settlement entitles her to live in Yewtree till Phil dies,' says Giles. ‘All found, effectively.'

‘Well then,' says Myfanwy, ‘she'll have to have something as good. I'll put it to her, Giles, leave it to me.'

*   *   *

It is starting to rain, hot drops falling on Phillip's linen shirt. Struan turns the chair and starts to walk home, chin down, silently.

‘Just the weather,' says Juliet, hopefully, ‘for taking off all our clothes and rolling round the garden.'

‘You're joking,' says Struan, pushing faster. Briefly, he wonders if there is something wrong with him, if he ought to want to join Juliet, nude in the mud. Because Struan hardly ever thinks about stuff like that, somehow. Fancying, all that. Mud.

Probably, there is. The years most boys spent, according to
Portnoy's Complaint
and the rest of Mr Fox's dirty books, in a sweaty masturbatory frenzy, Struan spent tending his father's withering body, and after he died, other withered bodies in the old folks' home. Struan has learned to pour himself into this work with perfect concentration, exactly as he poured himself into Mr Fox's English essays, or into a Maths problem or the Periodic Table. If you looked at anything fully, he had found out early in his father's illness, if you gave yourself over to thinking about it, then all of you went outside yourself and nothing stayed inside your head to mourn or rage. Now, nothing disgusts Struan: not his father's shit-covered arse, not his English teacher's bristly mouth into which he poured his own breath, not Phillip's slack mouth nor the bubbles coming from it. But in order for nothing to disgust him, he has had to turn something else off, the bit that might have appraised Juliet, and her swelling little body, outlined in her damp dress, stumping crossly ahead in the hot, thickening rain.

*   *   *

In the tea room, in the sudden dark of the storm, Giles says: ‘About Phil. You are sure there's no chance of recovery, aren't you? Certain?'

Giles has lived with Phillip's rage for thirty years, a rage the size of an ocean liner: he can't quite believe it has gone, lost for ever in a slumped old man in a wheelchair. ‘Because,' he adds, ‘he'd be hopping if he, you know, woke up.'

Myfanwy remembers the blink. That was four days ago, though, and there has been no repetition. She thinks, with sudden dislike, of the Scottish boy, and his ostentatious way with Phillip, moving him out of the sun. She hopes there will be no trouble from that quarter.

‘He's never going to hop, Giles,' says Myfanwy. ‘You can be sure of that.'

And they sit on, in the cosiness of rain, watching the street decompose on the window.

Myfanwy says: ‘I don't want to lose it, though, if I'm honest. Yewtree. I love that house.'

Her eyes are sort of balding, now, thinks Giles, that's the problem. Maybe Myfanwy overdid the false eyelashes, back in the Elizabeth Taylor days, and pulled out the real ones. Or maybe it's her jowls, dragging the bottom lid too far down. Whichever, what with that, and the bosom, and the purple drapes, and the tummy, and the arms residual at the sides, one can't help thinking – O, bad, bad Giles – of Humpty-Dumpty. And with that pen-and-ink, Victorian thought comes a vision of the soul of Phillip Prys, small as a figure from a playing card, brown as a walnut, armed with a spoon, demanding why Giles had sold his beloved Yewtree to an over-rated drunk American with no feel for the plight of the working man. Giles shudders in his gilt chair, just perceptibly. He says:

‘No need to go out, not just yet.'

7

But there was no sign of improvement in Phillip. None. The blink had been a week ago, and he hadn't done it again, had he? No. Not exactly. Not, as Myfanwy pointed out to Juliet with an ostentatious flourish of her dishcloth (she was clearing the kitchen in Yewtree Row: no one had asked her) at all.

‘Struan,' said Juliet, ‘says that people don't recover from strokes in a straight line. He says it's one step forward, two steps back, quite often. He says Daddy's eyes follow him sometimes, and that's a good sign. He says he's quite hopeful.'

‘Struan,' said Myfanwy, ‘is an unqualified seventeen-year-old.'

‘No,' said Juliet, ‘he's eighteen in October, and he got all As in his Standard Grades already. That's like O-Levels. GCSEs, I mean. And he worked two years in an old people's home. A lot of the old folks had strokes, Struan says.'

‘Marvellous,' said Myfanwy.

‘I'm going to take Daddy for a walk,' said Juliet and even her voice had gone odd. Sweeter. ‘Struan says it's a good idea. He's going to push, and I'll show him the way. We went out the other day but it rained. Why are you here, anyway, Mum?'

‘I've come to see Shirin,' said Myfanwy.

‘Well, you'll have to wait,' said Juliet, ‘she's gone into town. Her paintings are a really big success, didn't you know? They're in the
Standard.
She's done a whole load of them, they're called
stroke/revolution,
with a sequence called
Father/Khomeini,
it's a meditation on grief and political change, it says in the catalogue and she's having an opening of them, it's tonight, it's Cork Street, that's good isn't it, Cork Street, and I shouldn't think she'll even be back, I wouldn't be.'

‘She will be back,' said Myfanwy, coldly, ‘at half-past five, for a quick meeting. I made an appointment.'

‘It's only five o'clock,' said Juliet. ‘Why are you always noseying around here? It's really weird of you, you're divorced, it's not your house.' And off she went, in a white dress with tie-strings at the back. She'd clipped up her hair in combs on either side, noticed Myfanwy, and crimped her fringe into a floaty pouffe.
Angel of the House,
decided her mother,
A Nun's Story.
Juliet was too stout and pop-eyed for either role.

*   *   *

Getting the chair out of Yewtree Row was a ticklish business at best. First, you had to tug the improvised plywood ramp from the basement area and lay it over the five steep irregular steps. Then someone, preferably Shirin, but today, Juliet, who had just disappeared yet again to do her hair, had to stand at the head end of Phillip and gently tip him back, while Struan straddled the pavement, leant forward to grasp Phillip's armrests, and used all his strength to brake the wheels' downward hurtle. A lot depended on the speed at which the brake was released, but even if it was Shirin at the controls, each impact hurt his back round the tops of his kidneys, let off another thin pinched signal of pain, adding to a chorus from his body which Struan was finding harder and harder to ignore.

He was hungry, for a start. He'd been hungry since he'd finished his egg roll at Victoria coach station, a week ago, since Myfanwy had given him coffee and no sandwich at twelve o'clock in the day, Gran would have died rather than do such a thing. There were no meals in Yewtree Row. One Mrs Prys puréed food for Mr Prys and stored tiny pots full of unknown, terrifying green and brown substances in the fridge, the other Mrs Prys told him there was plenty of stuff for him and Juliet in the larder, Pot Noodles and beans, and he knew there had been on Tuesday, he'd seen the box, but there wasn't just now, there really was not and he didn't know what to say about it because he didn't really believe Juliet could have eaten the lot, it didn't seem possible, even though she was on the round side, and odd about her food.

It was too hot, though, that was the big thing. Each day in Yewtree Row the heat had reached further and further into his resistance. It was hard to sleep in the tiny attic, under the broiling slates. His deodorant can was nearly empty. His trainers were untenable. As soon as he got his money, his £20, which he hoped would be tonight, because he'd been here a week now, he was going to get some sandals, even just flip-flops. Everyone he passed had sandals, and he envied every naked toe. And shorts, he needed shorts.

There was a pair of shorts hanging in the tiny attic wardrobe. Denim cut-offs. Jake's shorts. Photos of Jake adorned all corners of Yewtree Row, many of them in silver frames, and though in all of them he was smiling, there was something about the smile Struan wasn't happy about, something that stopped him borrowing the shorts, even though they did fit, he'd tried.

So Struan stood at the bottom of the steps in his hot trousers and let drops of sweat accumulate on his inner thigh and snake to his trainers, and the shorts hung in his mind in the cool of their cupboard, and taunted him.

‘Ready then, Struan?' said Juliet, reappearing behind her father's slumped head, her fringe freshly puffed and a flower behind one ear.

‘I've been ready a while,' said Struan, ‘are you ready with the brake?' Juliet smiled dimly.

‘What?' she said.

Struan wiped his brow with the back of his hand. Juliet was so defiant and bouncy with her mother, but when anything practical was required, like picking up her wee pots and damp towels from the bathroom floor, like tipping a wheelchair, she'd go boneless, she'd slump like a glove puppet with no hand.

‘There's no point getting cross with me for being crap, Struan,' said Juliet, ‘I'm even more hopeless if you shout.'

‘OK,' said Struan, carefully. ‘Like last time? Brake, align, release, take the weight? Ready?' and Juliet smiled, and released the brake, and sent the whole weight of her bald slumped father, the whole future of English literature as was in 1959, hurtling down a ramp toward Struan Robertson of Cuik, who took this blow, as so many others, full in the guts without flinching.

‘Oops,' said Juliet, ‘sorry.'

Off they trundled.

‘All right there, Mr Prys?' said Struan. ‘We're just going to the Heath. Off for a bit of air.'

Air. Struan had never appreciated the stuff when it came whistling past him in Cuik, but here, in London, he was desperate for it. It was clear to him that the sheer number of folk who lived hereabouts depleted the oxygen, so that what you breathed in was mostly waste product. All the staying in with the wheelchair didn't help. He felt so confined, he had even taken to long dashes round and round the block in the dark after ten o'clock at night wearing only his swimming trunks and trainers, like one of those American jogger types. He had instituted these walks to the Heath because Myfanwy said it was like the country and so airy, but the wheelchair was heavy, and somehow, Struan hadn't found the country bit yet.

*   *   *

In the kitchen, Myfanwy heard the crunch and thump of the exiting wheelchair. Immediately, she checked the larder. Either Struan or Juliet, she thought, and probably both, ate too much. Myfanwy had supervised the shopping last week and laid in plenty of Pot Noodles and beans, and here was most of it gone. Myfanwy didn't see why she should pay for Phillip's nurse from her own purse. The sensible thing to do – she'd mentioned it to Giles, he'd nodded – would be to make Juliet's educational trust into a more general House Account – especially when Juliet was actually living here.

Struan had drunk all the orange juice too – and eaten the strawberry yoghurts. Probably, he ate too much because he was too tall. That grated on her too, actually: the way he silently appeared, stooping in doorways; or suddenly unfolded himself from corners of the room, pale and birdlike and flapping.
Sad body shapes,
as dear Zbigniew would have said: drooping neck and sagging arms.

Myfanwy filled a glass with ice. The angostura bitters, at least, were untouched in their sticky bottle at the back of the larder, and there was enough gin left for a moderately stiff one. But there wasn't so much as a Twiglet left in the biscuit tin. Well, she wasn't going to rush to replace them. Shirin's job: and anyway, Myfanwy was truly pressed for cash. The agents had rung this morning: a young couple had been round the Cricklewood cottages that morning and been put off by signs of squatters. Squatters! The agent had called the police.

*   *   *

Struan was thinking: if he didn't get his money today, maybe he could get some cash out the bank tomorrow and then go down the High Street and buy some food and keep it under his bed in his sandwich box. He was thinking: maybe the Royal Bank of Scotland on Hampstead High Street would be air-conditioned, and no one would mind if he went in there and lay on the floor. He worried that he hadn't seen any ordinary shops on the High Street yet, anywhere you could get a loaf of bread or a malt loaf. A tin of pilchards maybe. He liked mashed pilchards and tomatoes, on a piece of hot toast. There was a van parked on the verge by Jack Straw's Castle. But the chips cost £1, twice what they would at home, and he didn't have enough money to treat Juliet, and last night, she'd eaten more than half of his. Struan had £60 in his bank account, but that was his emergency money and if he spent it on chips every night, he'd save nothing at all.