Running to Paradise (25 page)

Perry
had somehow managed to scrape together several O-levels at Marlborough. ‘I always knew he was clever,’ Char said. ‘He only needed the right school.’ However, after this scholastic triumph, he flatly refused to stay on at school to do A-levels, and after a series of scenes, in the course of which he was alleged to have thrown a glass of wine at his father and knocked his mother down — I was not a witness — he was sent to France for six months to learn French. Peace reigned, but not for long, and only too soon he was back. He’d adored France, he said, but the language was quite incomprehensible. Briefly and disastrously, he lodged with us in Fulham. Some old flame of Char’s, one Gilbert Parsloe, managed to get him a job in the City.

‘
Mum says I never think of anyone but myself, and if I had children of my own I’d understand,’ Beth reported furiously, ‘and if we don’t have the little beast to live with us, she’ll only sulk. Anyway, he’ll soon get fed up.’ He did. He drank like a fish from morning until night, had his driving licence taken away for driving the wrong way up a one-way street at forty m.p.h. at three in the morning, and was found by Beth making love to some girl in our bed one Saturday afternoon, when she’d brought my mother back for tea after a shopping expedition in Oxford Street. Then he got the sack. ‘I simply cannot understand Gilbert,’ Char said. ‘Of course, I shall never speak to him again.’

We
prospered, Beth and I, in those years, and moved from Clapham to a small house in Fulham, just then becoming fashionable. We went abroad for holidays, entertained our friends to dinner; I took up squash and Beth became personal assistant to the managing director of her advertising agency. There were no children. After three years of trying, Beth was told it was unlikely she would ever conceive.

‘
I’m barren, Guy,’ she said after we’d had the specialist’s report. ‘I just bloody would be, wouldn’t I?’ and burst into tears.

‘
Don’t be silly. It’s not impossible, just unlikely,’ I said, ‘and even if there isn’t a baby, we still have each other.’

‘
That’s what I’m afraid of,’ she said and turned her face to the wall.

It
was cold now in the car and I shivered as I switched on the engine. I would drive up and have a look at the house, then perhaps go on to the Ashley Arms and get a bite to eat. I reached the top of the hill in third gear; in the old days there had always been a point where one was forced to change down. Cars, like so much else, had altered a great deal since the last time I had driven up the hill to Maple.

The
old white gate had gone, replaced by wrought iron. Instead of overgrown laurels, pinkish gravel and a scattering of those horrid little conifers so much beloved of garden centres. But the house looked much the same. I got out of the car and stood by the gate looking up at it, remembering.

Two
cars were parked in the drive, and after a moment the front door opened and some people came out: a middle-aged couple and a young man. They stood talking and then the couple got into their car and drove away; the young man, seeing me standing by the gate, came over.

‘
Are you here to see the house?’ Taken by surprise, I looked at him blankly. ‘I’ve got to get back, but if you want to have a look round, by all means do; if you don’t mind returning the key to our office in Bath.’

‘
Thanks very much,’ I said. ‘I didn’t have time to make an appointment and just came on spec.’

‘
That’s alright,’ he said. ‘Here’s a copy of the particulars, in case you haven’t got them. We close at one p.m. today, but you can always pop the key through the letter box and get in touch on Monday, if you’re interested.’ I thanked him again and he drove off at high speed in the direction of Bath, waving cheerily as he turned the car into the lane. Silence once more; only the sound of a branch rubbing against the gatepost and the distant hum of a tractor.

‘
Fine seventeenth-century farmhouse,’ I read. ‘Built by the Ashley family in the reign of Charles II. Spacious accommodation, gardens, garaging, etc.’

Stuffing
the estate agent’s particulars into my pocket, I wandered round the end of the house to the south side, the side that faced on to the lawn, the side dominated by the cedar tree. The lawn stretched smooth, bland, well cared-for to the ha-ha and the encircling fields beyond, but the cedar tree had gone, vanished utterly, not even its stump remained. I felt shocked, bereft, as though suddenly learning of an old friend’s death long afterwards.

I
turned and looked up at the house. Char’s three bedroom windows gazed blindly down at me; my sense of desolation was complete. Slowly, I wandered back to the front door. Inside, the house smelt musty, unlived in; I wondered how long it had been up for sale.

There
’d been a row at lunch that Saturday, I remember. The summer of 1968 was a rotten one, but there was one weekend in May when the temperature rocketed into the eighties. Beth and I were down for the local point-to-point. Or rather, Beth was down for it; I’ve always been bored stiff by such affairs. Perry and a horsy girlfriend, Petronella something-or-other, were also there, the former going through his brief legal phase; articled, I seem to remember, to a firm of solicitors in Bristol.

Char
looked tired and strung-up. Old Mrs Osborn had died, aged ninety, in February of that same year, and despite frequent protestations to the effect she was delighted to have Ma off her back at last, and the fact Mrs Osborn had been intermittently senile for some years, the removal of so powerful and influential a figure from Char’s life did appear to have taken its toll. Incidentally, in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, Char never appeared to accept the fact of her mother’s senility. I well remember the outrage in her voice when on her return from an audience with Ma — now devotedly cared for by a pair of long-suffering Pratt cousins — she told us: ‘I absolutely refuse to visit her ever again. I picked those flowers
especially
and all she could say was, were they made of plastic! Of course, she knew perfectly well they weren’t, she was just being foul.’ And no amount of ribald comments from George, or soothing noises from me, could convince her that old Mrs Osborn had not been wilfully trying to upset her.

Be
that as it may, whether or not it was reaction to her mother’s death, I don’t know, but certainly Char was drinking more than she should — to be fair, not as much as George, but still too much — and was more than usually aggressive with everyone, including me. She and Perry never stopping sniping at one another, and it was blatantly obvious that she had taken a strong dislike to Petronella. I couldn’t help sneakingly agreeing with her over this, albeit, no doubt, for different reasons. By this time I was well aware that Char, no matter how hard she tried — and she did try, despite what people said, I know she did — could never bring herself to more than tolerate any of Perry’s girlfriends.

Anyway,
lunch that day was a grim affair. George, Perry and Petronella were late back from the pub. ‘Lunch early,’ Char had ordered before they left, ‘if you all want to go to this bloody point-to-point.’ And as a result of their lateness, the sausages were burned and one of the dogs stole the ham. Perry slammed out of the kitchen, having informed his mother she was a jealous, cantankerous bitch, dragging a subdued Petronella in his wake. Beth burst into tears and said she wished she’d never come, and why did everyone always have to behave like lunatics; George helped himself liberally to another whisky and gave his burned sausage to the dogs, and Char, her eyes meeting mine across the table, announced they could all go to hell. She intended, she said, to spend the afternoon resting in the garden, and if anyone thought that she was ever going to sweat her guts out preparing another meal for them again, they were grossly mistaken.

In
the end, Beth drove George to the point-to-point in our car, Perry and Petronella having left in a cloud of smoke and a roar of exhaust sometime earlier. I pleaded a headache which, incidentally, was true — and retired upstairs for a kip, and Char settled down on a rug laid out under the cedar tree, an old straw hat tipped over her face, the dogs stretched out on the grass around her.

When
I awoke a couple of hours later, the shadows had lengthened across the lawn and the dogs had disappeared, but Char was still lying there under the cedar tree, a splash of colour in the wide expanse of grass. The cuckoo was calling through the open bathroom window as I splashed my face with cold water, the first I’d heard that summer; somewhere up the lane a lawnmower hummed. I wandered downstairs and out into the stifling garden.

As
I approached her Char didn’t move. At first, I thought she was asleep. Then I realised that her eyes were open; they were staring up into the dark recesses of the cedar tree with such an expression of naked sadness in them, for a moment I was paralysed with shock. Then, as the shock waves receded, I became aware of such an overwhelming desire to remove that look on her face and take whatever burden she carried on myself, I almost cried out in echo of her pain.

I
knelt down beside her: ‘Char, darling, what is it, what on earth’s the matter?’

She
didn’t answer, but slowly turned her head and looked at me, in her eyes a question. Then suddenly I was kissing her, the magic running through me. She spoke then: ‘Fuck me, Guy, fuck me, please,’ and, God help me, I did.

Afterwards,
cedar needles in my hair, the sweetness of her still in my mouth, Char sat up and grinned at me, squinting a little at the sunlight glinting through the branches above us. ‘What a waste,’ she said, ‘not to have done it before. So many years...and now...’

‘
And now?’ I asked.

‘
And now,’ she said briskly, combing her hair with a minute comb she’d extracted from the handbag she carried with her everywhere, ‘I’ll have to think what to give the bloody children for supper.’

*

A pair of blackbirds were hooking worms out of the lawn in the spot where the cedar tree had stood. The sun, for a moment, came out from behind the clouds and shone quite fiercely through the hall window: I blinked at the brightness. I’d go upstairs and have a quick look round, then drive to the pub for lunch; it was nearly one o’clock.

Char
’s white bedroom floor was covered now by an orange fitted carpet, the white walls by a matching wallpaper, tastefully patterned; there were net curtains at the windows. Had we really made love in this room, she and I, thirty years between us and whole worlds apart?

‘
Let’s fight first,’ she said. ‘It’s always better when you fight,’ and mostly it was. Just sometimes in those first few months — later I learned to accept that it was too late to change her now — I longed for a more peaceful lovemaking. Then I would try to tell her how I felt; how I loved her so, that if it were possible I’d give my soul to somehow turn the clock back.

But
she would get angry and tell me I was a romantic idiot, and she wasn’t that old anyway, was she? I made her sound like the female equivalent of the Wandering Jew, or someone equally boring. Then we would fall about with childish laughter, and I’d forget my agony for a while. They had been agony, though, those first months of our affair, despite that, at the time, I idiotically refused to admit the fact. Were they for Char? Sometimes I thought they were. I would catch her looking at me across the room, her green eyes those of a wistful child. But then, becoming aware of my glance, she’d smile her secret smile and turn away to bury her face in one of the animals, or perhaps, if Perry were there, suddenly put her arms round his waist and tell him how perfect he was and wonder how George could ever have produced such a paragon.

And
what did George think about it all? I never really knew, and I don’t know now. Certainly after Char and I became lovers, his attitude to me remained exactly as it had always been. Perhaps he tended to shout a bit more, and when carrying on a conversation with him, his eyes appeared always to be looking at a spot somewhere over my left shoulder, but that was all. He came back once I remember, when Char and I were making love in her bedroom. We heard his footsteps on the stairs, but he never came in. Char said: ‘Don’t mind him, he doesn’t care anyway’: all the same I hid under the bed and Char, damn her, laughed until she cried.

It
was not long after Char and I first made love that Beth started on about us buying a weekend cottage. All our friends were doing it, she said; now was the time to buy. I must know that as well as she did. And anyway it would do us good to get away from polluted old London — pollution was just coming in then — and unwind a bit.

‘
But what about Maple?’ I asked, panic stricken, knowing she was right.

‘
What about Maple?’ she said, crashing a pile of plates into the washing-up machine; we happened, at the time, to be clearing up after a dinner party. I carefully placed a tray of dirty glasses on the draining board. ‘Well, the air’s not polluted for a start, and we can always go there; not like some people—’

‘
You can bloody well say that again; we damned well aren’t like other people!’ Beth had drunk a bit more than usual that evening and it showed. ‘How many other couples, after six years of marriage, spend every fucking weekend with their in-laws, may I ask?’