My Life as a Man (7 page)

‘So that my brother won’t charge you with theft. He might not – not if you’ve brought it back.’ It hadn’t even occurred to me that I could be charged with
some crime. I hadn’t stolen anything. ‘You’d have nothing to worry about if you’ve brought it back.’

‘It’s at the house.’ Little bookkeeper! Fuck the car, I thought. ‘Your brother won’t be worrying about the car,’ I told him.

He shook his head at me and gave a little sigh.

Reverend Peters didn’t swear. On the other hand, he never did get back to me on how to find someone in a big city. After a few months I stopped going to church. And if some day my father
got round to sending another card, I wouldn’t ever know, not now I’d left home.

Norman took us into Bernard’s drive so fast I thought he might carry one of the stone gateposts along for company. Then I remembered Mrs Morton saying this house had belonged to
Bernard’s father. If it was the family home, Norman had been brought up here, too, and might have missed that gatepost by an inch a thousand times before.

He tried to open the garage, but it was locked. ‘If she’s come back, where’s the car?’ He peered in between the doors. ‘Can’t see a thing.’

‘Why don’t you just go and ring the bell?’

He spat on one of the glass panes and got up on tiptoe to rub it with the edge of his hand. ‘See if it’s there!’ he ordered and, when I hesitated, gestured at me to do as I was
told.

I wondered if he was trying to delay going to the door. It was an unpleasant idea. If the fat man was afraid of his brother, how afraid should I be?

Maybe he was afraid of what we might find when we went inside. An even more unpleasant idea.

‘What are you waiting for?’ Norman squeaked.

Because I was taller, it was easier for me to look inside. I tried each pane in turn. It made no difference. There was paint or something on the inside of the glass.

I shook my head at him and without waiting for his reaction went over to the front door. I pressed the button and the bell shrilled inside. The bow windows were shrouded in net curtains. It
wasn’t a house that gave anything away.

‘Maybe she’s sleeping,’ Norman said.

He reached round as if he was scratching his rump, and after a bit of effort produced a flat brown wallet. When he opened it, there were keys of different lengths hung from a bar. I recognised
it. His car keys were there, and the wallet had dangled from the ignition as he drove.

‘You’ve got a key for the house?’ I’m not saying it was a brilliant deduction.

‘Why not?’ He put it into the lock. ‘Bernard has a key for my flat.’

I wondered how Mrs Morton felt about him having a key to her house. I wished I knew where she was. I was worried about her.

The hall was dark, the way it had been the first time. All the doors off it were closed. Norman leaned on the banister and stared down into the blackness at the foot of the spiral stair. When he
went down, I went after him. He turned and looked at me but didn’t say anything. There was a little passage that led to a big room with ovens and sinks and work surfaces and cupboards and a
long wooden table with chairs round it. You could see trees and flowerbeds outside. It wasn’t gloomy the way I’d imagined.

He told me to stay where I was and went back upstairs, moving surprisingly lightly, the way some fat men do. It was his brother’s house. And I was nobody. Walking round his factory, he
wouldn’t see me, I wouldn’t register, a kid pushing a dump cart. He’d every right to tell me to stay put. And I resented it like hell.

I tried to picture the outside of the house. The ground floor was above me, but was there one floor above that or two? If I heard her voice, I’d go up. What else could I do, even if she
didn’t want me to? I stood at the foot of the stairs, straining to listen. Silence, I couldn’t hear a thing, but it was a big house. Anything could be happening. And then I got it into
my head Bernard might have come home and she might be lying up there unconscious. I knew that was being stupid. A house like this, people wouldn’t behave like that, I told myself. All the
same, I could see fat Norman peering in through the door of a bedroom where he’d found her lying on the floor. At once, I imagined him coming down with some excuse to get rid of me. Once I
was gone, he’d climb back upstairs and crouch, panting, like he’d done in front of the filing cabinet in the office, his fat belly hanging over her.

With my head full of what I’d imagined, I climbed the spiral stair, went along the hall and started up one slow step at a time towards the first floor until I was halfway and could see a
table with a blue vase and a strip above it of a picture. A painting, I mean, like the ones in the galleries at Kelvingrove, where Tony and I sometimes went on a Saturday to look at the marine
engines and the stuffed animals and room after room of paintings.

Apart from the ticking of a clock, there wasn’t a sound, no cries for help, nothing like that. I didn’t have the nerve to go up even as far as where the painting was.

Retreating to the dark hall, I remembered how only a couple of hours ago I’d stood here waiting for Mrs Morton to find some money to give me.

I opened the door I’d opened then, knowing I’d see a view of the front room and a balcony looking on to trees in the garden and an arched entry through to where the books were. And
just as I turned the handle and walked in, it came to me Bernard was going to be there.

It was just as I remembered: partitions folded back; front room lit by the sun as if it was set up on a stage; the long table with a magazine laid open as if it had been put down a moment ago.
I’d got it all right, except that it wasn’t Bernard at the desk inside the arch. It was Mrs Morton.

Elbows either side of the phone, she was leaning forward resting her chin and mouth against folded hands. The position might have made it seem she was staring into the garden, but she was so
intent I doubted if she was aware of anything but her own thoughts. Could she have been phoning? Was there anyone she could turn to for help?

At Norman’s voice sounding through the hall, she turned her head and saw me.

Before she could say anything, Norman called behind me, ‘Get out of there. Have you touched anything?’

As I turned, he saw her and lost interest in me. ‘I’ve been all over the house looking for you,’ he cried.

‘I was here.’

‘If you heard me, you should have called, let me know where you were hiding. What the hell do you think you’re playing at?’

I didn’t like the way he spoke to her, without any respect at all.

‘Bernard isn’t here, Norman,’ she said. Not ‘My husband isn’t here, so what are you doing walking into my house, you fat bastard?’

He gaped at her. ‘Of course he isn’t.’ He looked at me. ‘This is private. Wait through there. Out in the hall.’

When I hesitated, he reached for my arm.

‘Don’t fucking touch me,’ I said. And then, like a fool, I said to her, ‘Why do you let him talk to you like that?’ As if it was any of my business.

She rubbed her forehead in a gesture between distress and trying to think. ‘You shouldn’t have come back. I want you to go.’

‘Not till I’m sure you’re all right.’

‘I will be. Please.’ She gestured as if pushing me away. ‘I don’t know why you’re here.’

‘I’ve been to the factory. I wanted to tell your husband you weren’t to blame. But he wasn’t there.’

She stared at me in fright. ‘Why would you do that?’

At the question, spoken with a kind of bewilderment, Norman lost patience. ‘Oh, Christ!’ he exclaimed.

As he blundered towards the desk, I shouted, ‘Don’t touch her!’

The noise of it swung him round. ‘What? Don’t what? Me?’

‘Just don’t touch her!’

‘Oh, God!’ he said. Unbelievable, he meant, and just as quickly as that he was in control of himself again. To me he said, ‘I don’t know what kind of tinker camp you came
out of, but this is a civilised house with civilised people in it.’ To her, with a big gusty sigh, he complained softly and reasonably, ‘How could he get such nonsense into his
head?’ And when she didn’t answer at once, ‘What on earth have you been saying to him?’

She was looking down at a bowl with flowers to the side of the desk, and didn’t raise her head. The flowers were bent over with brown petals. ‘Poor things,’ she said.
‘They’ve been neglected.’

‘Flowers?’ And with the word he looked at me – Jesus, man to man – in astonishment at her stupidity. ‘Never mind bloody flowers. Where’s the key of the
garage?’

‘She didn’t have to say anything to me,’ I told him. ‘Don’t you think everybody in the factory knows? He makes her sit outside all day. What kind of bastard would
do that?’

What upset me was that he didn’t show any anger now, just bit his lip and shook his head as it might be pityingly. ‘Oh, Eileen,’ he said, ‘Eileen. Let’s get rid of
this boy. Start by telling him no one’s ever – my brother would never – lay a finger on you. Isn’t that true?’

‘If she said that, I wouldn’t believe her.’ Pushing in before she could say a word, not letting her speak for herself. Taking my cue from him, you could say; and so no better
than he was.

‘You know nothing about her,’ he said. ‘You don’t know about Alice.’

‘He’s talking about my dead baby,’ Mrs Morton said.

He looked surprised, perhaps because she’d spoken quietly, without any show of emotion. Without having it explained to me, I understood it hadn’t been like that with her before.
Perhaps, altogether apart from her tone, he had never heard her simply say what had happened until that moment, acknowledge her child’s death in that way, as a fact like every other.

She swept up the dry leaves round the bowl and poured them out of her hand on to the dusty earth.

‘When she died I was ill,’ she said quietly, ‘and after that things were different.’

‘What are you explaining to him for?’ he asked, although he had started it. ‘Family business,’ he told me. ‘You shouldn’t even be here.’

It was hard to find an argument against that. While I was trying to think of one, Mrs Morton said, ‘The car isn’t in the garage.’

‘Eh?’

‘You asked for the key of the garage. I thought you wanted the car for some reason.’

‘If it’s not in the garage—’

‘It broke down.’ She glanced at me. ‘I took it to the shops. I had to get a taxi home.’

‘Broke down where? My God, you left it in the street?’

‘No. It’s in Howie’s. I phoned them when I got home and they sent a tow truck to fetch it. They’ll check it over and let Bernard know what’s wrong.’

‘Howie’s? The one in Morris Street?’

‘That’s right.’

And at once he wanted to leave. He wasn’t in such a hurry, though, that he didn’t want me out of there first. It was a shock to him when Mrs Morton said no, she would phone for a
taxi to take me home. Later on it would occur to me that was a brave thing for her to do. I mean that I thought in the way her life had shaped itself in that house, there must have been a mass of
things she wasn’t allowed to do, which was a disgusting thought and one I’d rather not have had. There are thoughts like that; they come from nowhere and breed in your head like maggots
in the dark if you let them. He dithered and blustered, but she phoned anyway.

‘Ten minutes,’ she said putting the phone down.

I thought he’d wait, but he was off almost at once.

She went through to the front room and watched at the window. As I followed her, I heard his car start up. After a moment, she turned and said, ‘We’d better get out of here before he
gets back.’

‘Back from where?’

‘Howie’s. Didn’t you have the impression that’s where he was going?’

‘What makes you think he’ll come back?’

‘Because the car isn’t in Howie’s,’ she said. ‘I parked it in the lane at the back of the house.’

‘I can find the scheme,’ she said, ‘but once we’re there you’ll have to guide me to the house.’

She was taking me home, that’s what she called it, meaning the house Alec Turner lived in with his new girlfriend. Before I could ask why, she told me about the phone call she’d
taken just before Norman and I arrived at the house. ‘Whoever it was didn’t know your name,’ she said, and broke off.

‘Harry Glass,’ I said.

If she’d given her name in return, I could have said, ‘Pleased to meet you’; except that I already knew her name and hadn’t anything to be pleased about.

‘Or where you lived,’ she said. ‘That’s what he was phoning to find out.’

The man had called just after I left, wanting to speak to Bernard. As soon, however, as he’d realised who she was, he started asking what had happened to her and where had she been.

‘It must be somebody from the factory,’ I said. ‘The whole place seems to know about yesterday.’

She frowned doubtfully. ‘Anyone from the factory would have asked for Bernard differently. There wasn’t any respect. And, apart from that, I’ve never heard a voice like that
before, such a strange voice.’

‘Strange?’

She hesitated. ‘A . . . A kind of rough whisper.’

‘Maybe he had a cold.’

She gave me a look and, no, I didn’t think so, either. Something about that voice had frightened her, so much so that she’d hidden the car in the lane at the back of the house
because she’d told him I’d driven off in it after taking her home.