The Facts of Life (28 page)

‘Teddy! Good to hear your voice!’

Edward hesitated a moment. Fat, rich, cigar-thickened, the sound conjured up in an instant an environment he had fled and barely contemplated since. He pictured Jerry at his sham-Louis Quinze desk in his sham-Rococo office, where the latest from his stable of starlets was languidly checking her seams in a mirror. Jerry’s voice cut in on his imaginings.

‘So the Oscar-winner’s back in the land of the living.’

‘Er, yes. I think so.’

‘You
think
so? Same wicked sense of humour.’ Jerry chuckled richly. ‘We’ve missed you, you know. Listen, Teds, are you ready to work? I’ll tell you why. I’ve got a project. Something new. Very daring. Very … modern. But the music’s going to be an integral part. You heard of Schnitzler?’

‘I’ve heard of Schnitzler.’

‘Well that’s one better than me. Anyway, it’s an adaptation from Schnitzler, but modern dress. Very sexy. And like I say, the music is going to be very up front. We’re even calling it
Theme and Variations
.’

‘Hmm.’

‘Nice, isn’t it?
Classy
. But we need the kind of score people talk about afterwards, something they can play on the radio, and only you will do. What do you say? We miss you, Teds. Don’t disappoint us.’

So Edward found himself working again. But this time Sally intervened and insisted he work from home until it was absolutely necessary to visit the studio.

‘And even then,’ she told Jerry, ‘if he’s not up to it, he’s coming straight home.’

They celebrated with the bottle of champagne Thomas had sent in honour of the Oscar. This led to them making love again for the first time since Miriam’s birth. And since Edward’s encounter with Myra … He was so nervous he came almost immediately.

‘Honestly,’ she assured him. ‘It doesn’t matter. Really.’

But he could sense her frustration and when they woke the next morning to find that, by some miracle, Miriam was content to gurgle to herself in her cot, he managed to hold back for a little longer.

‘It’s like learning all over again,’ he explained, frantic now at the thought of what he had imperilled and so nearly lost. ‘I love you so much. You know that, don’t you?’

‘I know that.’

‘Hold me.’

‘Ssh. I’m here.’

The renewed lovemaking, faintly alarming at first for one whose life had been temporarily rearranged so as to be as unexciting as possible, began to irradiate Edward’s uneventful days with a kind of glow. His experiences with Myra, buried behind the wall of his breakdown and its treatments, now seemed aberrations, almost a part of his illness. He looked at Sally, at The Roundel, at music with a new fascination. The lovemaking altered entirely his reaction to his child, too. Watchful respect tinged with fear lest he do something wrong was swept away by little surges of physical delight in her presence. Emboldened by Sally, he carried her around with him until impatience made her fractious. He showed her how to bang the piano keys, and sat by her high chair encouraging her – to Sally’s irritation – to clink her spoon against her bowl or clap her little food-smeared hands together in wild, spontaneous rhythms. He made Sally show him how to wash her and change her nappies, astonished at the huge turds such a tiny animal could produce. He even tried to annotate musically the noises she made, weaving them into his score for
Theme and Variations
as a personal memento. Whenever Sally had to go out, even briefly, she still took Miriam with her rather than leave her alone with him. This was never discussed. He remembered enough to understand her motives perfectly, however, and connived in the pretence that it was because he needed peace and quiet to work.

Sally moved back into his bed permanently, establishing Miriam’s nursery in the room next door. He woke from a nightmare one night to find her arms about him.

‘You were screaming,’ she said. ‘I was frightened.’

‘There’s something I should tell you,’ he heard himself begin. ‘Something I’ve done.’

‘Yes?’

Her kind, expectant face in the lamplight was so utterly reassuring that he only just pulled back in time from a spontaneous confession. He could not tell her about Myra. It meant nothing and would only hurt her needlessly. He had to tell her something, though. She was waiting. He wanted instead to explain about his sister but, just as he had found himself explaining away a nightmare as being about ‘trains’, so he now found himself owning up instead to a long forgotten crime he had committed at school. There had been a boy, a third son, Wykeham Minimus, a weakling whom everybody teased as a matter of course, a matter of honour even. As a fellow victim, Edward had won a small measure of valuable esteem in his oppressors’ eyes by a piece of inspired cruelty.

‘It was quite straightforward really,’ he told Sally, turning his face from the lamp’s accusatory glare as he lay in her arms. ‘He was known to be homesick and I had noticed that his voice was peculiarly bovine, especially when he was upset. So, one night when he was up late on bog duty –’

‘
Bog
duty!?’

‘Er. Yes. It was his night to clean all the lavatories. All the junior boys were meant to do it. There was a roster. But some were forced to do it more than others.’

Sally snorted with disgust. Edward went on.

‘Anyway, while he was up late cleaning the lavatories, I took the photograph of his mother from the little frame beside his bed, tore it up and replaced it with a big picture of a cow from a condensed milk label. When he came to bed I made a mooing noise until he noticed the photograph frame. After that everyone did it to him all the time. Whenever he spoke, even in classes, they mooed.’

‘How horrible.’

‘Yes. He became extremely withdrawn. There were worse things. Done to other boys by other people. Arms were broken. Once someone was even killed, with a rifle – which was passed off as an accident, of course. But this was my thing. I don’t know why I should suddenly have remembered it.’

‘Do you want me to absolve you?’

Edward examined his conscience for a moment, thinking about Wykeham Minimus, then about his sister, puffed up, senseless. Then he thought of Myra, reapplying her lipstick by the light of a burning match.

‘No,’ he said. ‘I was only young after all. I just wanted you to know.’

‘Little boys are horrible.’

‘Yes. Usually.’

He had finally managed to tell her about his sister that morning, before she left to meet Miss Bannerjee, forcing her to sit down and listen when she was hurrying about getting Miriam ready to go to her parents. He sat her on the sofa beside him and held her hands. He told her about the hospital, about how fat and simple-minded Miriam had become. He told her about her tattoo, the scar on her skull and what it signified. Tears sprang into her eyes and she held him to her, gently rocking him as she did their baby.

‘I killed her,’ he said.

‘It was a heart attack,’ she insisted. ‘The doctor said so.’

‘No. No,’ he said, shaking his head but she silenced him, staring urgently, closely, into his face as if reassuring an irrationally frightened child.

‘Edward you mustn’t blame yourself. You
mustn’t
! You’re just feeling guilty because it was her and not you.’

‘No. You don’t –’

‘Edward listen to me: it was beyond your control. You were not to blame. They sent you to safety, you didn’t choose to go. You were only a boy, for Christ’s sake. Just be glad she was set free. She must have suffered so dreadfully. Think what memories she must have been carrying inside her! The dreams! No-one should be kept alive in such a state. It was inhuman.’

‘But I
killed
her!’ he insisted.

‘No, Edward. No.’ She refused to believe him with such calmness that he was almost persuaded. ‘But if you had, it would have been an act of kindness.’

‘So,’ he asked, thinking now of how Myra had led him so firmly into the dark by the hand. ‘Do you absolve me?’

‘Ssh. Don’t be silly.’ She held him again, avoiding his staring eyes and softly chuckling at her response to his previous confession. ‘You didn’t
do
anything. It was a heart attack. You might have wanted to put her out of her misery but, effectively, she killed herself.’ She pulled back, looked at him and kissed him softly on the lips. ‘I really must go,’ she said gently. ‘I’ve got to get there before Miss Bannerjee has to catch her train back to Dorset. I won’t be too long. You’re sure you’ll be all right?’

‘Sure.’ He gave her a wry smile. ‘I’ll be fine.’

He was straining his eyes to read what he was writing in the gloom. He reached up to turn on the standard lamp. Nothing happened. He checked it was plugged in. It was. Irritated at the interruption, he tried the overhead light with no more success. He turned towards the kitchen stairs to check the fusebox but froze at the top of them, gasping. In the hours he had spent at the piano, listening to the heavy rain on the windows, the basement had filled with water. The murky brown tide reached almost to the kitchen ceiling. A bizarre assortment of displaced articles floated around the third step down and was mounting to the second even as he watched; corks, a cabbage leaf, the bread board. Amazed that he had heard nothing, Edward dashed across the hall and tugged open the front door, letting in a gust of rain and wind that almost blasted the door from his grasp.

The front steps, like the basement ones, were almost all submerged. The shrubberies on either side of the drive were nowhere to be seen. An already sparse landscape had vanished beneath the brown flood waters and their swirling cargo. In a dusk advanced by storm clouds, he could make out the barn roof and treetops and thought he could see people moving against the lowering sky on the tower of St Oswald’s. A barge lit with hurricane lamps moved slowly across what had yesterday been a ploughed field.

‘Hi!’ he called out, waving his arms, ‘Over here. Help!’ But the wind snatched the words from his lips and he realised he was probably invisible in the gathering darkness. He watched in terrified fascination as a small wave unfurled from the skin of the flood and rushed towards the house, gaining bulk as it came. Edward cried out as it broke over the steps around him. He lost his balance, falling heavily backwards onto the drenched floor. Another wave was gathering as he scrambled back to his feet and ran to slam and bolt the door.

Spurred into sudden action, he raced around, seizing objects and furniture at random and carrying them up to the landing and bedrooms. Music, books, pictures, candlesticks, a mirror, an armchair, the standard lamp; the little they had amassed. Water began to lap over the top of the kitchen steps and under the front door, sending weird ripples through the rugs before he snatched them, dripping, out of harm’s way. Gasping with the effort, he propped the piano up on books already ruined by water, one leg, and one book at a time, until it was nearly a foot clear of the great puddle that now covered the floor. Then, sweating from his labours despite the bitter cold and his soaked shoes, he retreated upstairs.

Huddled by a bedroom window, he found himself retracing the route between The Roundel and his parents-in-law, anxious for some memory of a gradient that would lift their house and his child clear of the flood. Wenborough was close to a canal. They would surely have taken early refuge on a passing boat. They would be fine. And Sally? Aware that he was beginning to whimper, he checked himself, roughly clearing his throat.

Sally had stopped twice more to try telephoning but now the line to The Roundel was also down. She had no option but to keep driving. For all she knew, the road behind was blocked by now and more policemen in waders would have been posted. It was getting dark and even with the headlamps on full she had to screw up her eyes and peer over the steering wheel like an old woman to see where she was going.

A part of her was excited by what was happening. As a local schoolgirl, she had been told time and again how the countryside of her birth had been won from the sea. Like many children before and since, she had marvelled at the thought of fish and whales swimming where she climbed trees, of seaweed uncoiling where wheat now waved. She had walked on the top of Sedwich Dyke with friends, peering down into the eerie depth of water it held back and tossing in stones to hear the hungry plopping sound as they were swallowed up in peaty blackness. She had imagined the excitement of climbing onto roofs to escape flood water, the fun of rowing past secretive neighbours’ bedroom windows and peering in. And as an adult there were many times when she had scared herself witless on the way home from the chest hospital by imagining a great wall of water in inexorable pursuit of her motorbike.

At first it did not seem to be a real flood. She imagined Sedwich Dyke had burst and covered a road, but that the water had swiftly dispersed into the surrounding fields and waterways with no harm done. Then she twice drove the car through puddles which turned out to be deep as fords, and offered prayers as she felt the engine splutter. When she saw a terrified horse frantically pounding its bloodied way through a fence to vault out of a flooded field where ducks now swam, when she saw a family bicycling in the opposite direction, backs laden, faces white, a chill of comprehension made her shudder so badly it caused the car to swerve.

Many of the fenland roads were built from filled-in, redundant canals and so ran along high banks, along unnaturally straight routes. This was one such. When it joined another to make a T-junction, she had to scrabble for her torch and consult the map, briefly disoriented. She faced a decision. One fork led back to her parents’ village and Miriam, the other, on to Edward and The Roundel. She flicked off the torch, tossed it aside and began to drive towards Wenborough then bumped to a halt, flung the car into noisy reverse and backed swiftly to the junction so as to turn and drive on to Edward. It was simply and unsentimentally decided. Miriam was with her parents. Edward was alone.