Perfect (8 page)

There were no photographs of Diana. She never spoke of her childhood. It was impossible to imagine her being anything except a mother.

In his bedroom, Byron re-examined his secret map of Digby Road. He wished Diana had not commented on Seymour’s habit of referring to the car as female. He wished he had not laughed. Of all the times to disagree with his father, this was surely the worst. It gave Byron a low, loose feeling in the stomach that reminded him of the way he felt about the cocktail party his parents had given for the Winston House parents the previous Christmas. Downstairs he could hear voices from the kitchen. He tried not to listen because his father had raised his voice but Byron found that even when he hummed he was still hearing. The lines on his map began to swim and the trees beyond his window were a scribble of green against the blue. Then suddenly the house fell so silent it was as if everyone had melted into dust. He tiptoed to the hall. He couldn’t even hear Lucy.

When he discovered his mother alone in the kitchen, Byron had to pretend he had run a long way, he was so frightened. ‘Where’s Father?’

‘He went back to London. He had work to do.’

‘He didn’t examine the Jaguar?’

She made a face as if she didn’t understand. ‘Why would he do that? He took a taxi to the station.’

‘Why didn’t you drive him?’

‘I don’t know. There wasn’t time. You’re asking a lot of questions, sweetheart.’

She fell silent and he was afraid she was upset until she turned to sprinkle the air with a flutter of soap bubbles. Laughing, Byron caught them in his fingers and she slipped another, like a white button, on the end of his nose. Without his father, the house felt soft again.

The Christmas party had been Seymour’s idea. It came several months after the incident with the pond. It was time to show those school parents a thing or two, he said. There were special invitations on white card. Diana had bought a tree so tall it touched the plaster ceiling of the hallway. She strung up paper chains, polished the wood panelling, piped fillings into vol-au-vent cases, and skewered maraschino cherries with cocktail sticks. Everyone had come, even Andrea Lowe and her QC husband.

He was a taciturn man in a velvet jacket and a dicky bow who trailed his wife with her glass and her canapé in a paper napkin.

Diana had handed out glasses from her hostess trolley and all the guests admired the new under-floor heating, the kitchen units, the avocado bathroom suites, the fitted bedroom cupboards, the electric fireplaces and the double-glazed windows. It had been Byron’s job to take coats.

‘New money,’ he heard a mother say. And Byron supposed that was a good thing now there was decimal coinage. His father was passing as the woman made her remark and Byron wondered if he would be happy too, only he seemed to discover something unpleasant in his mushroom vol au vent. Seymour’s face collapsed; but he had never liked vegetables without meat.

Later in the evening, Deirdre Watkins had suggested a party game; Byron remembered this too, although his witnessing of the event was now
restricted to a vantage point at the top of the stairs. ‘Oh yes, a party game,’ his mother had laughed. She was kind like that. And despite the fact that Byron’s father was not a gamey sort of person, not unless you counted solitaire or a very difficult crossword, the guests had agreed a party game would be tremendous fun and he had been forced to concur. He was the host after all.

His father had blindfolded Diana a little roughly, Byron felt, but she didn’t complain. The game was, his father said, that she should find him. ‘My wife likes games. Don’t you, Diana?’ Sometimes Byron felt his father overshot being a jolly person. You had a better sense of him if he were giving his views about the Common Market or the Channel Tunnel. (He was against both.) But by now the drawing room was heaving with grownups, all laughing and drinking and calling to his mother as she groped and flapped and tripped her way after them.

‘Seymour?’ she kept calling. ‘Where are you?’

She touched the cheeks and hair and shoulders of men who were not her husband. ‘Oh no,’ she’d say. ‘Goodness, you’re not Seymour.’ And the crowd would laugh. Even Andrea Lowe managed a smile.

Shaking his head as if tired, or hurt, or maybe even bored, it was hard to tell which, his father had left. No one saw, only Byron. But still Diana kept searching, sometimes crushed against the crowd, sometimes passed from one to another by it, like a ball, or a doll, everyone laughing and jeering, almost knocking her into the Christmas tree once, while she kept looking for Byron’s father with her fluttering, outstretched hands.

It was the last party his parents had held. His father said if there was ever another, it would be over his dead body. This did not seem to Byron an altogether inviting place to hold a party. But remembering it, and the feeling of sickness, of confusion, that had swamped him as he watched his mother carried like driftwood, he wished again she had kept quiet about the new Jaguar.

On Sunday night, Byron moved his sheet and quilt on to the floor. He set his torch and magnifying glass at his side, in case of emergencies. He saw there was hardship ahead, and even though it would not involve death or starvation, it was important to know that he could endure and make the best of things. At first the quilt seemed surprisingly thick and soft; he was delighted that enduring was so easy. It just didn’t seem very easy to sleep at the same time.

The heat didn’t help. Byron lay on top of the covers and unbuttoned his pyjama top. He was beginning to doze when the bells struck ten across Cranham Moor and he was awake again. He heard his mother switch off her music in the living room and her slight footsteps on the stairs, the click of her bedroom door, and then the stillness that followed. No matter which way he turned, or plumped up his covers, his soft flesh found the hard surfaces. The silence was so loud, he couldn’t think how people slept. He heard the foxes on the moor. He heard the owl, the crickets, and sometimes the house gave a creak, or even a thump. Byron fumbled for his torch and snapped it on and off, on and off, casting its light up and down the walls and curtains, in case there were burglars outside. The familiar shapes of his bedroom leapt in and out of the dark. No matter how hard he tried to close his eyes, all he could think about was danger. He would be bruised all over in the morning.

It was then that Byron understood. In order to save his mother, it wasn’t enough to keep quiet about the Jaguar. It wasn’t enough to endure. He must think what James would do. He must be logical. What he needed was a plan.

B
EYOND THE SUPERMARKET
window, the snow cloud looks so heavy it’s a wonder it’s still up in the sky. Jim imagines it collapsing to the moor with a thud. He pictures it punctured open, spilling white over the hills, and he smiles. And then almost as soon as he has that thought, another follows, and he doesn’t know why but this second one is like a jab in the solar plexus. He can hardly breathe.

Despite the years he has lost, sometimes a memory flies back. It can be very small, the detail that sparks a piece of his past. Glancing at it, another person might not look twice. And yet an insignificant detail can zoom out of its ordinary setting and induce such sorrow he feels twisted inside.

It was a winter afternoon like this, long ago, when they discharged him from Besley Hill the first time. He was nineteen. There was a powdery capping of snow on the moor. He stood watching it from the window while the duty nurse fetched his suitcase and then his blue gaberdine coat. He had to wrestle to fit the coat round his shoulders. When he tried to find
the sleeves, it caught his arms behind his back like a strap and bit into his armpits.

‘It looks as if you’re going to need a bigger size,’ said the nurse, looking up at him. And that was when it occurred to him how long he had been there. She told him to go to the waiting room. He sat alone with the coat on his lap. He folded it into the shape of a small pet and stroked the soft lining. He hadn’t been in the waiting room since they carried him through on the day he arrived and it confused him because he didn’t know any more what he was. He wasn’t a patient; he was better. But he didn’t know yet what that meant exactly. When the nurse reappeared, she looked surprised. ‘How come you’re still here?’ she said.

‘I’m waiting for someone to fetch me.’

She said she was sure his parents would be here soon. She offered Jim a cup of tea.

He was thirsty and he would have liked tea, but he was thinking about his parents and he couldn’t speak. He could hear the nurse singing from the kitchen while she boiled the kettle for herself. It was an easy sound as if everything in her life was all right. He could even hear the little clink of a teaspoon in her mug. He tried to practise things he might talk about with other people. Fishing, for instance. He had overheard the doctors talk about that, just as he had overheard the nurses talk about going to a dance or dating a new boyfriend. He wished he knew about those things. But he could learn. Now that he was better, he could do those things. Fishing and dating and going to a dance. It was not too late. He was starting again.

At the window the light had begun to fade. The thin showing of snow on the moor glowed a fragile pewter. When the nurse reappeared, she almost jumped. ‘Are you still here?’ she said. ‘I thought you’d gone ages ago.’ She asked if he was cold and he was, the room was ice, but he reassured her he was comfortable. ‘Let me at least make you that cup of tea,’ she said. ‘I’m sure they’ll be here for you any minute.’

While she sang in the kitchen, the truth dawned on him. No one was coming. Of course they weren’t. No one was going to teach him about fishing or inviting a girl to a dance. He didn’t know if it was the room that made him tremble or the new knowledge in his head. He got up and slipped out of the front door. He didn’t want to insult the nurse with his sudden disappearance so he left the coat, neatly folded, in the chair, to show the cup of tea was not for nothing. He kept expecting someone to run out, to take his arm and steer him back inside, but no one did. He walked the length of the drive and since the gates were locked and he didn’t want to trouble the nurse again, he found his way over the wall. After that he walked towards the moor because he had no idea where else to go. He spent days up there, and he didn’t know what he felt, only that he was wrong, a misfit, he was not cured, he was full of blame, he was not like everyone else, until the police found him in his underpants and drove him straight back to Besley Hill.

‘You like those hills,’ says his right ear.

Turning swiftly, Jim finds Eileen behind him. He jumps as if she is contagious. Her orange hat is perched at such a precarious angle to her head it looks on the verge of flying off. She holds a ham sandwich on a plate.

Eileen gives a big frank smile that lifts her whole face. ‘I didn’t mean to shock you,’ she says. ‘It’s an effect I have. Even when I think I’m being not shocking, I still shock people.’ She laughs.

After his previous experience with the smiling, Jim would like to try something different. Maybe he should laugh although he doesn’t want to suggest he’s mocking Eileen or that he agrees she’s shocking. He wants to laugh in the way that she does: a throaty, generous roar. He makes a smile shape and then does a noise.

‘Do you need a glass of water?’ she says.

He tries a bigger laugh. It actually twists his tonsils. This one sounds even worse. He stops laughing and looks at his feet.

‘The girls tell me you’re a gardener,’ she says.

A gardener. No one has ever called him that before. They have called him other things. Frog mouth, loony, weirdo, spaz; but never this. He feels a rush of pleasure but it might be a mistake to do the laugh again so he attempts instead to appear casual. He tries digging his hands in his trouser pockets in an easy-going sort of manner only his apron is in the way and his hands get stuck.

She says, ‘Someone gave me a bonsai tree once. Biggest mistake of my life, accepting that gift. And the thing is, I really wanted to look after it. I read the leaflet. I put it in the right spot by the window. I watered it with this thimble. I even bought a pair of mini clippers. And then, guess what? The fucker withered up and died on me. I came down one morning and it had dropped its piddly leaves all over the floor. It was actually hanging sideways.’ She gives an impression of a tiny dead tree. He wants to laugh.

‘Maybe you watered it too much?’

‘I cared for it too much. That was the problem.’

Jim is not quite sure what to do with her story about the bonsai tree. He nods, as if he is caught up with thinking about something else. He yanks his hands free of his pockets.

‘You have nice fingers,’ says Eileen. ‘Artist’s fingers. I guess that’s why you’re good at gardening.’ She glances back at the café, and he realizes she must be looking for an excuse to get away.

He would like to say something else. He would like to stay a little while longer with this woman who stands with her feet wide, whose hair is the colour of flame. But he has no idea how you do small talk. It’s easy, a nurse at Besley Hill told him once. You just say what’s on your mind. A compliment is always nice, she told him.