Precious Time (6 page)

‘It’s only those who can’t get a proper job who teach,’ his father had said, when Jonah had graduated from university and announced that he was applying for a year’s teacher training course.

He didn’t discuss it further with Gabriel, and certainly he didn’t look to him for financial support. He paid his own way through college by working shifts in a meat-processing factory and as a consequence hadn’t been able to look a meat and potato pie in the eye since.

That had been thirteen years ago, and still Gabriel hadn’t forgiven Jonah for settling for such a ‘second-rate’ career.

Jonah always felt a chill run through him when he came home to Mermaid House. A knot of anxiety formed in the pit of his stomach, with the desire to make his visit as short as possible. He tried to kid himself that it was the bleakness of the house and its remote situation that made him feel like this, but he knew it wasn’t. It was the memories.

Mermaid House was of an unusual, almost whimsical design, with a tower, four wings and a central cobbled courtyard. It was built of locally quarried stone that had turned depressingly dark and dreary with the passing of time. Now, as Jonah drove through the wide stone archway, the rumble of his car engine was amplified: it bounced off the walls and came back at him louder than it normally did. It confirmed what he had suspected earlier that morning when he had driven to work, that his exhaust was blowing.

He parked next to his father’s mud-splattered Land Rover in front of what had always been known, rather ostentatiously, as the banqueting hall: it boasted original timbers, trusses and a massive fireplace.

Getting out of his car, he noticed that the tax disc on the Land Rover had expired and that the tread on one of the tyres looked borderline legal.

He crossed the courtyard and found the back door unlocked. He knocked cursorily, let himself in and nearly took a flyer over a pair of old boots lying on the floor. He pushed them to one side, called to his father, and walked through to the rest of the house. He passed the laundry room, noting the piles of unwashed clothes, bedding and towels in front of the washing-machine, and kept going, past the gun room, until he came to the kitchen.

These days, the mess seldom shocked him; it shocked him more that he had grown used to the conditions in which Gabriel was prepared to live. There was the unappetising smell of gone-off fish and he located the source of this as an empty tin of pilchards in tomato source on the draining-board. He went to throw it in the swing-bin but found that it was full to the brim. It was indicative of the scale of the problems at Mermaid House. No job was ever in isolation. There was always a knock-on effect. To change a light bulb, you had to find the stepladder, and to find the stepladder you had to find the key to the cellar, and the key was anywhere but where it should be on the row of hooks in the kitchen.

It hadn’t always been like this. When Val had been in her prime she had run the house with military precision, determined, against the odds, to instil in the three children a sense of shared duty. ‘It’s a large house, so I would be grateful if you could all pull your weight,’

she had told them. On the first day of their holidays, when they were home from school, she would line them up and go through the running order. ‘Damson, I’d like you to do the dusting and polishing in the dining room and, Caspar, you can clear out the ashes from the grate in the drawing room and bring in some fresh kindling. Jonah, I’ve put the silver on the kitchen table for you to clean.’

‘Why does he always get the easy jobs?’ Damson had pouted

mutinously.

‘Because he’s the youngest. He’s not as big and strong as the pair of you.’

Just as rebellious as his sister, Caspar would argue frequently that their father was rich enough to have a host of servants to do the work. But Val would have none of it. ‘We no longer live in an age of servants, young man. We have Mrs Harper to help us, but she is not a servant.’

Ignoring whatever scornful comment Caspar would make, she

would clap her hands and send them on their way. And always there would be the same music played at full volume while they did their chores. Even now, Jonah could never hear a piece of Gilbert and Sullivan without wanting to reach for the silver polish.

The meticulous order that Val so prized was lost when she suffered the first of a series of minor heart-attacks. As she slowly slipped away from them, she took with her the smooth running of the household.

Mrs Harper, who was well past retirement age, handed in her notice and a succession of local cleaners proved unsatisfactory: the sheer size of Mermaid House overwhelmed them: ten bedrooms and three bathrooms was more than they wanted to take on.

It was more than any sane person would want to take on, thought Jonah, as he stood in the middle of the chaos. Suddenly he had the urge to hire the largest skip he could get hold of and throw everything into it. How tempting it was to clear the decks and start again. He would give his stubborn, sore-headed father the clean slate he needed. But he knew that that would never happen. Only a nuclear bomb would clear these particular decks.

But it was a bomb of sorts that he had come here to drop.

He called to Gabriel again, and helped himself to an apple from the bowl of fruit he bought religiously every week for his father, and which Gabriel rarely touched, then wandered out of the hall. He checked the drawing room, the dining room, and finally the library, where the curtains were drawn to protect the shelves of books from being damaged by sunlight. But there was no sign of his father. He stood at the bottom of the stairs and shouted, his voice echoing in the musty emptiness of the high-ceilinged house. There was no answer.

The irony was not lost on Jonah. Every week he did his father’s shopping for him, and tried to time his appearance at Mermaid House for when he knew his father would be in Deaconsbridge so that he could avoid speaking to him. Now he wanted to talk to him and he couldn’t.

Where was he?

Perhaps he had gone for a walk. Well, if he had, there was no point in looking for him. Jonah didn’t have time to mount a search party. He would have to come back another day.

To his shame, he felt relieved as he retraced his steps the length of the house, knowing that, for now, he wouldn’t have to go through with what Caspar had asked him to do.

He was about to use his own key to lock the back door - Gabriel really shouldn’t leave the house unlocked - when he thought better of it. His father might have forgotten to take a key with him.

Outside in the pleasantly warm sun and taking another bite of the apple, Jonah looked at his watch and decided he had time to see to the balding tyre on the Land Rover. But when he checked the spare, he found that it was in an even worse condition.

Sometimes there was just no helping Gabriel Liberty.

It was four days since Stella had left him, and while Archie wasn’t entirely surprised by her departure, he had been taken aback by the way she had gone about it. It was the coward’s way out and he had never thought of Stella in that light.

The note had been blunt and to the point. It seemed that the affair he had thought was over had picked up again and Stella had decided, at last, where her future lay. And it was not with Archie, the man to whom she had been married for twenty-six years and who had failed to give her the children she had always wanted.

Indicating right, he pulled off the main road and turned sharply into the hospital car park. He felt angry. It was always Stella who was supposed to feel the loss of not having children. What about him? Why hadn’t his feelings been taken into account? After all, it was he who had to live with the knowledge that he wasn’t man enough to become a father, he who had taken the jibes when Stella’s disappointment turned to bitterness. He had wanted children, too, but no one had thought he was bothered by his and Stella’s incompleteness as a couple and no one had thought to ask.

Next to him, now that they were parked, his mother was

struggling with her seat-belt. ‘Here, love,’ he said. ‘Let me.’ He pressed the red button and released the strap.

She straightened her hat and smiled at him. ‘Ready now,’ she said.

‘Ready.’ He smiled back.

She had dressed specially for the occasion - a trip to the speech therapist was a big day out for her. Archie had been roped in as chief style guru. ‘Pink or glue?’ she had asked, holding out two dresses as he sat on the edge of her bed eating his cornflakes.

‘Definitely the pink,’ he had said, trying to sound decisive. A hint of dithering on his part and they’d never get out of the house this side of sunset.

It seemed to work, and she held the dress against her in front of the long mirror. Then, lowering it, she said, ‘Or maybe the … the…

the …’ She squeezed her eyes shut, pursed her lips, and at the back of her mind, where some prankster was rewriting the English language for her, she located the word. She snapped her eyes open and said, proudly, ‘Or the cheese?’

He proceeded carefully. If he gave the wrong answer, the limited supply of good words available to her this morning would shrivel to nothing. He gave the matter serious consideration before he tapped the air with his spoon. ‘No, I still think the pink would be best. Very Liz Taylor, when she was at her best. Shall I help you?’

He helped her now to take her seat in the hospital waiting room, and could feel the heavy tiredness in her body: the short walk from the car park had sapped most of her strength. But it did nothing to dampen her desire to enjoy her big day out. She smiled at the woman opposite, who also looked as if she was dressed in her best party frock - she had overdone the makeup, though, and the red lipstick clashed with the frilly purple neckline. The man sitting next to her, presumably her husband, looked dog-tired, and Archie wondered what unearthly time the pair of them had got up to get ready for their appointment.

But the woman didn’t respond to the warmth of his mother’s smile. Disappointed, Bessie turned to Archie and, in a voice that should have been a whisper but missed the mark by several decibels, she said, ‘Cobbly cow.’

He tried not to laugh, and was still trying to contain himself when it was Bessie’s turn to see the young girl who was patiently teaching her to speak again. Though with a phrase as beautiful as ‘cobbly cow’ - so much better than ‘snobby cow’ - he wondered whether it wouldn’t be more fun to teach the rest of the world to speak as Bessie did now. He left them to their phonetics and flashcards and went in search of a polystyrene-flavoured cup of tea that would scald the top layer of skin clean off his tongue.

The vending-machine was situated in a bright, airy space where pieces of artwork from the local comprehensive were displayed on the stark white walls. There was an atrium-style roof to this modern extension - opened by a local soap star last year - and it felt more akin to a fancy hotel than a hospital. Not that Archie had had any first-hand experience of fancy hotels: the nearest he had got to one was when he and Stella were celebrating their twenty-fourth wedding anniversary. He had planned it as a surprise. He let her think he had forgotten about it, then on the day, while she was getting ready for work, he had presented her with tickets for the train to London and a show.

But it hadn’t turned out the way he had hoped it would. She was moody and distant with him, and found fault with almost everything: the train took too long, the hotel was too small, the food too expensive and the show too loud. During the journey home he had wondered if everything would have been to her liking had she been with someone else. He kept the thought to himself, but he soon knew the answer. He found letters and a couple of photographs. He hadn’t gone snooping, they had been left casually in a drawer, not even covered up; it was as if she had wanted him to find out. If she had been hoping for a confrontation, he must have disappointed her: he simply carried on as though everything was normal, convincing himself that if he ignored it she would get it out of her system and things would soon be okay again. Plenty of marriages had glitches; it was all about riding the storm. After a while he thought he had done the right thing. She stopped inventing reasons to be out of an evening, there were no sudden trips to see her sister, and the phone no longer rang with no one on the other end when he answered it.

But she wasn’t happy. If anything, she was worse - tearful, or irrationally angry. He almost felt sorry for her, imagining that her lover had decided to call a halt to the affair. Perhaps he, too, was married and hadn’t wanted to jeopardise what he already had.

Stupidly, Archie spent more time than was healthy putting

together a background for this unknown man. Was he younger than Archie? Better-looking? Funnier? More intelligent? Rich?

With the benefit of hindsight, he had been nothing but a coward.

Instead of wasting time dwelling on her lover, he should have been talking to Stella, making an effort to understand where he had gone wrong.

But he had left it too late. All the talking in the world wouldn’t make things right now. She was gone, no doubt to this perfect man who understood her. Who didn’t … who didn’t have an ageing mother to care for.

He swallowed the last of his tea and suddenly felt weary.

How would he manage Second Best and look after Bessie on his own? She wasn’t so bad at the moment, but he could see that in the future she would need a constant eye on her. He crumpled the empty cup, dropped it into the nearest bin, and cursed himself for having taken advantage of Stella in the way that he had. In relying on her to be at home during the afternoons - she only worked mornings - he had felt that he was doing the right thing by his mother. It served him right that Stella had left him. He had given her a gold-plated final straw.

With ten more minutes before Bessie would be finished, he went for a stroll. He was just passing a couple of pretty nurses who were chatting about a hen party they’d been to last night when he caught sight of a face he recognised. It was that nice Indian doctor from the surgery in town, the one who was always so good with his mother.