Running to Paradise (24 page)

Suddenly
I knew she was laughing at me, and at the same time became aware that somewhere, far down in me something was stirring and responding to her laughter. I stood quite still, Char’s eyes upon me, my knife still in my hand, staring down at the chopping board. And it seemed to me that somehow my laughter met and united with hers and for one, brief, moment, in some magical way, she and I were joined together and had become one person.

We
neither of us spoke for a moment, then: ‘Mrs Seymour,’ I asked, my voice neutral, my eyes on the rather hideous silver epergne (George’s) that stood in the middle of the mahogany dining table, ‘why was I put in the railway room, and why did you have me moved?’

‘
Damn! Now look what you’ve made me do.’ Char held out her finger accusingly. A minute bead of blood trembled on its tip. ‘Suck it,’ I said boldly, ‘it’s only a scratch. And you haven’t answered my question.’ Obediently she stuck the offending finger in her mouth, then scrutinised it carefully. ‘Because of the noise of the damned trains, of course,’ she said, ‘why else?’

I
don’t remember anything of the ensuing party; it’s somehow merged into all the other cocktail parties I attended at Maple in those early years. They were surprisingly decorous affairs: the guests predominantly retired service people, with a dash of the Church thrown in for good measure. It was only later, when a grown-up Perry would appear at the last minute with a horde of ‘undesirables’ when Char herself, having started on her journey into the shadows, could no longer be relied upon not to shout ‘Balls!’ at some elderly bore who’d buttonholed her to rail against the iniquities of Harold Wilson and the Labour Party, or even on one horrendous occasion, kick the secretary of the local Women’s Institute on the shins, that Maple parties turned into the cliff-hanging nightmares they eventually became.

I
do remember, however, that after it was over I borrowed George’s Cortina and took Beth and Sophia into Bath on a pub crawl — no breathalyser in those days — and wondered why on earth Beth always became so het up about her mother. To me Char seemed an enchanting creature, only too anxious to accommodate her children’s friends and not in the least possessive. And in the ensuing weeks, with the arrogance of youth, I chose to ignore the odd fact that while trying to explain the intricacies of the Reform Bill to thirty bored and lethargic fourteen-year-olds, or seated on top of a bus caught in the rush hour on Vauxhall Bridge, or even during Beth’s and my somewhat tepid lovemaking — the latter not helped by the frequent complaints of the woman next door — Char, disturbing, secret and infinitely exciting, would without warning, suddenly come into my mind. People, I told myself, did not fall for their girlfriend’s mother; at any rate intelligent grammar-school boys brought up in the healthy confines of number three Walnut Avenue, Epping, didn’t, and that was that.

After
that first weekend Beth and I would often visit Maple, driving down in the Morris Minor I had bought with the proceeds of a small but miraculous win on the football pools. I came to love the house and the garden with its tumbling, grey stone walls and rampant herbaceous borders. Through long, autumn afternoons Char and I would work together in the latter, vainly trying to create some kind of order. We wouldn’t talk much during these sessions; except in the early days when Char would instruct me in the intricacies of dividing the tangled clumps of phlox and Michaelmas daisies, layering carnations, or taking cuttings.

‘
I see a mass of purple here,’ she’d say grandly, a small figure in muddy corduroys and sensible boots, her hair blowing in the wind, ‘backed, perhaps, by a clump or two of those big, yellow daisies.’ I’d nod doubtfully, and get to work. Alas, most of our grand designs came to nothing, but we enjoyed executing them all the same, and because of, or in spite of, our efforts the garden at Maple, for me at any rate, would always remain an enchanted place. Beth, no gardener, would spend the time watching sport on television or doing our combined week’s washing in the washing machine in the old scullery.

‘
Well, at least now Mum doesn’t take to her bed as soon as I appear,’ Beth said, as we drove back to London one Sunday evening. ‘Last time Sophie was down she spent the whole weekend upstairs, and even hinted she hadn’t long to live.’ I shrugged: Sophia seemed to take a rather acid view of most things and was bossy to boot.

‘
D’you like my clever Sophie?’ Char had asked. ‘You know she got a first at Oxford? She’s the one you should be after, not Beth.’ I knew Sophia had got a first at Oxford; I only managed a second at Reading, and was painfully aware of this fact whenever we met.

Perry
was just thirteen when I first encountered him. He was about to spend a year at a crammer’s, as there were doubts as to whether without extra tuition, he would be able to pass the Common Entrance examination to Marlborough. George’s parents, I understood, were paying for this.

‘
So nice,’ Char said. ‘Next time you come you’ll be able to coach Perry in his cricket.’ I tried, unsuccessfully, to look enthusiastic.

‘
You know damn well Perry hates cricket,’ George said. ‘I don’t know why you will pretend he doesn’t.’

But
Char smiled and tapped her forehead with her finger. ‘He’s bonkers, you know,’ she said. ‘Don’t listen to him.’

Gradually
my role in the Maple hierarchy began to change from ‘Beth’s young man’ to that of surrogate son. Even George started to communicate a little. ‘Guy and I’ll do that next time he’s down,’ he’d say, and took to inviting me to accompany him to the local pub for a ‘quick pint before dinner’.

‘
Dear Guy, what should we do without you?’ Char would smile her secret smile and rub her face against my shoulder. Perry tolerated me, I suppose, but would brook no interference.

‘
It’s none of your bloody business,’ he shouted one Sunday afternoon, when I unwisely remonstrated with him for riding his bicycle over the herbaceous border. ‘You’re not our family.’

It
was the summer of my twenty-sixth birthday that I took the decision to give up teaching and go into insurance. I was no use at teaching and knew it; somehow or other my heart wasn’t in it and the sooner I embarked on another career the better. My present company, much smaller in those days, was advertising for young graduates to train for managerial positions. I applied, was accepted and have been there ever since. With a new job and better prospects I decided to move out of bed-sitter land and find myself a flat. Luckily for me my father approved of the scheme, and was prepared to loan me the down payment on a thirty-year lease of a maisonette on the South side of Clapham Common.

For
Beth and myself my move to Clapham meant the end of an era, and we both knew that some decision would have to be made over our relationship; Beth wanted marriage, I knew, but did I? I tried pleading financial insecurity.

‘
Don’t give me that,’ Beth said. ‘We’re not living in the nineteenth century, and I earn nearly fourteen pounds a week.’ In the end she issued an ultimatum: either we got married or stopped seeing one another altogether. The latter course made that much easier now we no longer lived next door to each other. I had a week to consider my options and at the end of it came down on the side of marriage. I was, I told myself, too fond of Beth and too used to having her around to let her go now. Beides, one should marry, it was good for one, and by this time most of my friends had already taken the plunge.

But
now, as I sat in my car nearly a quarter of a century later, I knew my reasons for marrying had been quite different to the ones I gave myself at the time: it was not Beth I was afraid of losing but her mother. Even then life without Char was something I simply could not bear to contemplate.

George
opened a bottle of champagne the day Beth and I announced our engagement. Was it then I saw for the first time that expression in Char’s eyes, to become so familiar in later years? Hard to explain, but a kind of desperate brightness: as though she were willing you to see in her the image of a woman who has had everything life can offer, but underneath is crying out in bitterness and anguish that she has had nothing.

Beth
’s and my wedding the following summer was a pucka affair: a marquee on the lawn at Maple, morning suits and all that sort of thing. I rather enjoyed it actually and so, I think, did Char, who behaved with magnificent decorum: the bride’s mother personified, except, unlike my mother, she flatly refused to wear purple. I have a picture of it all somewhere. I look insufferably smug, Beth very pretty and virginal, but rather sad, and Char in a toque with a feather in it, which didn’t suit her, making her ‘photograph’ face.

Beth
and I got drunk on our wedding night. We spent it in my flat; we were catching an early plane to Corfu the following morning, where we were to spend our honeymoon.

‘
You fancy my Mum, don’t you?’ I remember Beth saying at one point during the evening.

‘
She’s still a very attractive woman,’ I said warily, scenting even then a danger I didn’t quite understand.

‘
I suppose she is, really,’ Beth said. ‘I’ve never seen it myself, but people seem to think she is, so I suppose she must be.’ She took another gulp of champagne; we’d brought a couple of bottles back with us in the hope of prolonging the spirit of excited optimism that had prevailed at the wedding reception, but it had somehow evaporated on the journey up to London and the idea, although a good one, hadn’t worked. ‘But you have to admit,’ Beth went on, ‘Mum didn’t look her best in that ghastly hat.’

I
smiled, remembering how Char had stuck out her tongue at me, when earlier that day I had vouchsafed a slight criticism of the hat myself. ‘No,’ I said, delighted to be able to agree with my new wife about something, ‘she didn’t.’ Then, idiotically, I had to add: ‘I expect she wanted it to be your day—’

‘
Balls!’ Suddenly Beth looked so like her mother I almost choked on my champagne. ‘She couldn’t care less about it being “my day”. She probably bought that hat to bugger up the wedding photos.’

‘
Now you really are being stupid,’ I said, wondering guiltily whether she was right, and that indeed was the reason. Then I discarded the thought: it was much more likely Char had just bought the hat without thinking, in a hurry to get the boring business over with. She was never very interested in clothes. In her rich years, Algy had insisted she patronised such fashionable couturiers of the period as Molyneux and Digby Moreton, but her succeeding husbands seem to have accepted her very much as she was: in any case, I doubt whether either of them would ever have dared to criticise her taste in dress.

Beth
was staring at the floor, her mouth pursed in a certain way that in later years I was to become all too familiar with as marking the onset of a scene. Suddenly she looked up. ‘She always hated me,’ she said accusingly. ‘You do know that, don’t you? I’ve never been able to understand why. Sophie says it’s because my father let her down by getting himself killed by that bomb—’

‘
If Sophia says that, she needs her head examined. How irresponsible can you get, she—’

‘
You don’t deny it, then?’

‘
Of course I deny it, it’s absolute rubbish.’

‘
Sophie’s very bright, you know, and she understands Mum better than anyone. I know they have the most frightful rows — you’ve never been around to see them, but they do. Then, just as you think they’re going to kill each other, you find them sitting happily discussing the Labour Party Conference, or something equally idiotic.’

‘
That’s as may be,’ I said, out of my depth: fatigue and too much champagne were making me feel muzzy. ‘Sophie may have got a first, but from what I’ve seen, she’s never been that hot on human relationships, and aren’t we straying from the point? Of course your mother loves you. Look how pleased she was when we got engaged, and the trouble she’s gone to to make the wedding a success.’

For
a moment it seemed I’d convinced her, then she shook her head angrily, causing a few, stray pieces of confetti that had somehow lodged in her elaborate wedding hair-do, to fall on the carpet. ‘That wasn’t for me,’ she said almost inaudibly, ‘you know it wasn’t.’

I
looked at her helplessly: what on earth was I supposed to do? You couldn’t spend your wedding night arguing about whether your wife’s mother loved her or not. In the end I did the only possible thing: I took her in my arms and told her I loved her and that was all that mattered anyway, wasn’t it?

But
later, when she was asleep, her fair hair straggled on the pillow, her thumb endearingly in her mouth, I rang Char just for a quick word; just to see how she was...

‘
I’m alright, you fool,’ she said. ‘Haven’t you got something better to do?’

And
after that? Those early years are somehow kaleidoscoped together; hard to recall now which event belongs to which year. I remember the shock of Evie’s death in far-away Australia. Char had only seen her daughter once since Evie’s marriage: Australia was a long way and, although she had often talked of visiting her in Melbourne, somehow she never had, and now it was too late. There was a memorial service in the village church at Maple to which old Mrs Osborn came — a mummified figure draped in shawls — probably her last public appearance. The church, I remember, was bright with summer flowers arranged by Char (with me a willing, but somewhat clumsy assistant) and a surprising number of people turned up. I remember too, Char’s hand gripping mine so tightly as we went into the final hymn that afterwards my fingers were quite numb. Of course there was always the continuing saga of Perry.