Mr Toppit (14 page)

It took me a moment, and then I smiled in recognition. “What?” she said. “What?”

I pointed at the book in her hand. “It’s from the books,” I said. “He’s in the book.”

“Who?”

“It’s really hard to explain.”

“Luke,
tell
me.” It was the first time she had used my name.

“There’s this guy in the books, this man, who’s called Mr. Toppit. He’s like an unseen presence. It’s only right at the end, in the last book, you see him, but everyone talks about him all the way through. He’s like a kind of
deus ex machina.”
I wasn’t absolutely sure what the phrase meant, but a review had used it.

Her eyes were small and intent. She was concentrating, taking it in. “Okay,” she said. “Okay.”

“He’s always getting Luke to do strange tasks, but Luke never gets it quite right, so Mr. Toppit’s always displeased.”

“Luke?”

“Luke Hayseed. He’s the main character.”

“Hayseed?”

“That’s why they’re called
The Hayseed Chronicles.”

She was flicking through the pages now. “These are pictures of you!” she said, with a broad beam. “I get it. Luke Hayman, Luke Hayseed.”

“Well …”

“This is amazing. You’re actually in the book!”

“Laurie, they’re not real, they’re novels. There’s magic and stuff in them.”

She was shaking her head in wonderment. “Did he do the pictures?”

“Lila did them. She’s a friend. She’s German.”

“Oh.” She wasn’t interested in pursuing that. “The other books, what are they called?”

I ignored this. “So, apart from talking about Mr. Toppit, what else did he say?”

“This is tough for you, Luke. I lost my dad when I was small. He went when I was really young.”

I wasn’t too interested in her father. “What else?”

“The books must have been really important to him if he was talking about them … you know,
then.”

Suddenly Martha shouted from the sitting room: “Luke! Baby! Can you come?”

“In a sec,” I yelled back. “What else?” I said to Laurie. “What else?”

Then she said something quite unexpected: “He talked about you living abroad.”

“What?”

“A couple of years back we were going to take a vacation there.”

“Where?”

“The Middle East.”

“Luke!”
Martha shouted.

“Coming!”

“Marge, this friend of mine, wanted to go to Petra—you know, ‘pink city twice as old as time,’ or whatever. I saw the pictures.”

“What do you mean, Laurie?”

“
Luke!
” I heard the impatient scrape of Martha’s chair as she got up in the other room.

“Jordan,” Laurie said. “Something about living in Jordan.”

I stood up, but my stomach stayed sitting down. I could hear Martha coming. “Laurie, don’t say anything. Please.”

Now she was clearly confused, but Martha was coming down the hall. “Just don’t say anything to Martha about what he said, okay? Please?”

Then Martha was in the doorway. She seemed surprised to see Laurie. “Good morning,” she said, then to me, “Get Rachel and Claude up. They can’t just sleep all morning. This funeral isn’t going to happen by itself. Has Luke been looking after you?”

“He’s been very kind, made me coffee,” Laurie said. She smiled at Martha. “Said he was going to find me some copies of your husband’s books, the
Hayseed
ones. He said I should read them.” She looked at me. “Didn’t you?”

“Well, why don’t you get them, baby?”

“Oh, I’d love it, I really would,” Laurie said. “You let me know if there’s something I can do for you, Luke.” Her eyes were holding mine.

“Okay,” I said at last.

There’s a lot of stuff that needs to be done when someone dies, much more than you’d imagine, but it’s all quite dull. Martha stayed on the phone most of the day. There were people to be notified, people to be summoned. She was talking to the local paper about the obituary, then to various people in London about who might do the address at the funeral and to the undertakers about the arrangements. She had positioned herself at the desk under the window in the sitting room, cigarettes, lighter, and ashtray beside her, alongside a tray with a Thermos of coffee. She was always good in a crisis.

Martha called a lot of people that day, and they had obviously told other people, so by the next day the phone was ringing constantly. Arthur’s death had made it into some of the national papers—“Children’s Author In Freak Road Accident”—and there were a couple of short obituaries, too, which would have alerted the people Martha hadn’t phoned. She was in a bad mood. She didn’t like the way one of the obituaries had ended. “How can they say, ’He is
survived
by his wife and two children’? Everyone will think we were all run over by that bloody truck, but he was the only one who
got killed.” Then she was upset that his career as a children’s novelist was given more prominence than his film career—it had always been a bone of contention between them that he had turned his back on films—and was incensed that in the other obituary his name was linked, not favorably, with that of Wally Carter: “His career as a screenwriter and director was eclipsed by that of his friend and contemporary, the Oscar-winning director Wally Carter, but in later life he secured a niche as the well-loved author of the series of children’s books known as …”

She threw the paper onto the floor. “Wally Carter—that puffball. I don’t suppose we’ll be hearing from
him
,” she said sourly. “I don’t know how Graham’s turned out as well as he has, not that he’s much of a husband, I hear. Wally was always so coarse, never had any intellectual rigor. What a childhood Graham had! Wally’s women! The drinking! Not a loyal bone in his body—Wally didn’t even recognize his old friend Arthur Hayman when he invited us to the premiere of that ridiculous film about the ship.” The story of that premiere had been told before, but in previous tellings Martha’s inflection was different. The fault then had been Arthur’s: he had become such a shadow of what he had been that even his old friend Wally Carter had failed to recognize him.

When, later that day, a telegram arrived from California—
REMEMBERING THE GOOD TIMES ALWAYS MARTHA DEAR STOP AFFECTIONATELY WALLY
—Martha read it several times before crumpling it into a ball and throwing it into the bin. Then she went up to her room, shut the door and didn’t appear again until after dinner.

It wasn’t until the second day at Linton that Lila was mentioned. The weather was still hot, and after lunch Rachel,
Claude, and I were lying on the lawn in the sun with the remains of the wine. Laurie was having a nap.

“Are you going to sit out there all day?” Martha shouted from inside. Then her head appeared at the window. “Has anyone rung Lila?”

We looked at each other. As Martha had either been on the phone calling people or sitting by it waiting for it to ring since we had got home, we presumed it was a rhetorical question. “Well, have you?” she said. “I can’t do it all by myself.”

“She’ll be offended if someone else rings her. She’ll want to speak to you,” Rachel said.

“Will you call her, baby?”

“Why can’t Rachel?” There was no answer to that because we knew why. The two or three times Rachel had called anybody about Arthur, she had hardly started talking when her face had crumpled and she had let out a series of inarticulate wails. Someone had had to take the receiver from her to complete the conversation.

“I expect she’ll turn up soon enough,” Rachel said. “Or you could ask
Laurie
to phone her.”

“Stop that right now, Rachel,” Martha said, and slammed the window.

The night before, Martha and Rachel had had a row about Laurie. Laurie had come down in the dressing gown Martha had lent her to say she was trying to have a bath but the water didn’t seem very hot: was she doing something wrong? Rachel had put down her wine glass with a loud bang and said, “I think you’ll find, Laurie, that our water is different from yours. It tends naturally towards the cold. That’s how we like it over here.”

Laurie’s face had gone pink and for a moment it looked like she might burst into tears. Martha glared at Rachel. “Why don’t
you use the children’s bathroom on the other side, Laurie?” she said. “The tank’s bigger.”

Laurie nodded. When Claude said he would show her the way, Rachel stuck out her tongue at him and slammed the door on their backs as they were leaving the room.

“Why is she everyone’s friend but mine?” she hissed at Martha. “She just sucks up to you all.”

“Grow up,” Martha said dismissively, and then they began shouting at each other.

An hour later Laurie hadn’t reappeared and I was dispatched to find her. She was in her room, sitting up in bed under the covers. She looked quite different. Her hair, which I had got used to in the most puddingy of pudding-basin cuts, was slicked away from her forehead and combed carefully back. Her skin was tighter over her face. She looked as if she might have lost some weight.

“Do you want some dinner?”

Laurie shook her head. I sat on the side of the bed. “Don’t worry about Rachel,” I said. “She’s just upset. She didn’t mean it.”

“You’ve all been so great to me,” she said. “You’ve all been so kind.” Then she gave me a little smile and put her hand under the cover and pulled out one of the
Hayseed
books I had given her earlier. She put it into my hand. I wasn’t sure what I was meant to do with it. Without taking her eyes off me, she produced the other four books one by one, as if she was a magician doing a card trick. Then she gave me a hug. “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you for the books.”

I had almost got out of the door when she laughed. “Luke?” she said. “You know, I just thought of something. When that june bug was in the bathroom, you could have picked it up by the wings and taken it into the garden, like you did with the bees.”

“Laurie, it’s not me in the books,” I said patiently. “Anyway, it might have bitten me.” She thought that was hilarious. As I left the room and came downstairs I could hear her laugh tinkling behind me. While that sound receded, another was growing.

In the sitting room, Rachel was shouting, “How could they? How
could
they?” Martha and Claude were sitting on either side of her on the sofa, trying to calm her.

“It’s just a mistake, that’s all,” Martha said.

“At least they didn’t lose anything. That would have been much worse,” Claude said.

Rachel’s chin jutted up at me accusingly. “Look what they’ve done, the hospital.” Her finger jabbed at the table in front of the sofa. “Look!
Look!”

The little box that the hospital had given us containing Arthur’s effects was open. I could see his scuffed black wallet, his glasses case, some loose change, his wedding and signet rings, a tube ticket, a notebook, and a couple of pens. “What is it?”

She prodded the box, which moved to reveal something glinting behind it.

“It’s a lighter,” I said.

“They’ve mixed his stuff up with someone else’s,” she wailed. “How
can
they be so sloppy?” Claude was patting her back as if she had choked on something.

I picked up the lighter, one of those chunky silver Zippo ones, but old and battered. It was surprisingly light. I flicked up the top. There was nothing inside. The lighter mechanism had been removed so that it was hollow.

“He didn’t even
smoke,”
she said. “We should make a formal complaint. It’s so unbelievably insensitive.”

I turned the lighter over in my hand. On the back, there was a set of initials “RLC” and underneath “Los Alamos 1945.”

“Where are you going?” Rachel said.

“Nowhere.” But when I was in the hall, I shouted back, “I’m going to put it in an envelope and send it back to the hospital.”

“Wait!”
Rachel wailed, but I was already halfway up the stairs. This time I didn’t knock, but went straight into Laurie’s room. She still had the books laid out in front of her.

“Your father’s middle name was Laurence, you said.”

“Yes.”

“What was his first name?”

“Rudolph—well, Rudy. That’s what people called him. Why do you ask?”

I was furious. I threw the lighter onto the bed. It landed with a plop. She picked it up. “It was my daddy’s,” she said, in a little voice. Her eyes were clear and bright. She was running her fingers over the engraved lettering. “He worked in Los Alamos during the war. That’s where we lived. He helped make the atom bombs we dropped on Japan.”

I wasn’t interested in all that. “Why is it with Arthur’s stuff?”

“My dad gave it to me when I was a little girl. He took out the lighter inside so I couldn’t get harmed. It’s the only thing of his that I’ve got. My good-luck charm.”

I said again, “Why is it with Arthur’s stuff?”

“Just before they put him into the ambulance I slipped it into his vest pocket. I wanted him to have something of mine. I thought it might bring him luck.”

“It didn’t do him much good, did it, Laurie? He died anyway.”

“Don’t say that, honey.” She stretched a hand towards me,
but I just stared at her. She was beginning to cry. I wasn’t going to comfort her. I didn’t see why I should.

Claude was looking more and more forlorn. He had made a new friend in Laurie and Rachel was jealous. After dinner, even though Claude had politely asked Martha if he could use the phone to call Damian, Rachel said coldly, “Please don’t be too long. There’ll be people trying to get through to talk about Daddy. Anyway, if you’re going to spend the entire time on the phone there’s not much point in your being here, is there?” Two little blobs of red appeared on Claude’s cheeks as he shuffled out to the phone in the hall.

When, after three days of Laurie wearing the same black outfit all the time, Martha suggested to Rachel that it might be a good idea for her and Claude to drive Laurie into town to get some other clothes. She refused. “What’s the point?” she said. “He’ll only ignore me. Anyway, there isn’t an outsize shop.” Martha slammed down her coffee cup and marched out of the room. “Claude!” she shouted, from the hall. “Where’s Laurie?” Footsteps came down the stairs, orders were given, and Martha led Claude and Laurie outside. Rachel watched them balefully through the window as they got into Claude’s car to go shopping.