The Good Father (13 page)

She was gazing around her and her eyes came to rest on the candle flames flickering in the draught from the chimney. He watched her, pleased that she didn't chatter as he suspected most girls would. Most girls would want to hide their embarrassment behind a stream of silly talk. Hope just sat quite still and he was content to look at her and say nothing, but it seemed that she sensed him watching.

‘Why do you come here?' she asked.

Surprised at her bluntness, he shrugged. ‘Because I can.'

‘What do you do here?'

Obviously, she thought he was odd. At last he said, ‘I don't do anything. It's just a place to be on my own.'

They sat at either end of the rug, a brightly coloured raft on a sea of paint-stained, splintered floorboards. The rug was Persian, expensive, its pile deep and soft. His father hadn't missed it – at least, he had never questioned its absence. The smell of this empty house clung to it; Guy wanted to lie down, hold out his arms to her, but thought she wouldn't want to lie on a carpet that smelled so musty. Perhaps she would think he was more than odd – weird, in fact, to bring her here. He took his cigarettes from his pocket and offered her one just for something to do.

Shyly she said, ‘I don't smoke.'

Lighting a cigarette, he handed it to her. ‘Try it.'

‘Really, I'd rather not.'

‘Go on.'

As if she didn't want to offend him, she took the cigarette and drew on it inexpertly. She coughed and handed it back. ‘I don't think I'll ever smoke. It's horrible.'

‘I thought so too, at first. But I
persevered.
' He grinned at her. ‘You didn't like Irene's champagne either, did you?'

She looked down at her hands. After a while she said, ‘You think I'm too young.'

He laughed. ‘Too young for what?'

‘I don't know.' She seemed to force herself to meet his gaze. ‘You like making fun of me, though.'

‘I don't.' He moved closer to her. ‘At that party I only wanted you to notice me. I'm sorry if I behaved like an idiot.' Edging closer still, he said, ‘It was nice, wasn't it, being alone in the garden?'

She nodded, eyes cast down. Placing a finger under her chin, he tilted her head back a little. ‘Have you thought about me much, since then?'

‘Yes.'

He kissed her mouth lightly. Drawing back he said, ‘I think about you all the time.'

‘Really?'

She looked surprised and hopeful at the same time.

Kissing her again, he whispered, ‘Really, truly.'

She placed a hand on his chest. ‘We shouldn't be here.'

‘Why not?'

Shuffling back from him she said, ‘You know why not.'

Tossing his cigarette into the hearth he sat back on his heels. ‘What should we do, then?'

‘I don't know.'

‘What would you
like
to do?'

She avoided his gaze, her silence going on and on until at last he said, ‘Hope?'

‘I suppose I just want to stay here with you for a while. But I don't want you to have the wrong impression.'

‘Would you like me to sit on the other end of the carpet again?'

She giggled, despite herself. ‘We could just talk, I suppose.' Brightly, she asked, ‘Where did you go to school? It wasn't Thorp Grammar, was it?'

‘No. I went to a boarding school near London. Before that, I went to one in Durham. Before that, one in Essex. Before that . . . ' He frowned. ‘Oh, yes. Before that it was somewhere in Yorkshire. I wasn't there long. During the war I was evacuated to a school in Kent. It was OK there. I could have stayed there.'

She looked horrified. ‘But you would have only been a baby . . . '

‘Yes – it was a nursery school. I was sent there when I was four.'

‘On your own?'

‘Dad took me.' He remembered the train journey, Harry in his Army uniform so that he felt proud of this great big man holding his hand. The train had seemed full of soldiers, but none as smart as his father; he'd thought that Harry was a General, a General whose pockets were full of toffees.

Hope said, ‘Did your mother go with you?'

For a moment he considered lying, but she was looking at him with such concern that he realised he wanted only to be honest with her, not to wreck this relationship as he wrecked everything else. He said, ‘My mother died when I was a baby.'

‘Oh. I'm sorry.'

‘I didn't know her.' Suddenly, because it felt as though the truth should be hurried out, he said, ‘Actually, she killed herself. After I was born she went a bit mad, apparently. I read up about it. It's not that uncommon for women to be suicidal after having a kid.'

‘That's terrible,' Hope gasped.

He had a strong urge to kiss her, take advantage of her sympathy, but that seemed a dishonest thing to do and he wanted to behave properly with her. ‘You go to Irene's school, don't you?' he asked in turn. ‘Do you like it?'

‘No.' She blushed. ‘I'm a bit of a dunce, really.'

He grinned at her. ‘Oh, me too!'

‘Did you like your school?'

‘
Schools.
' He laughed shortly. ‘No. I kept getting myself expelled.'

‘Really?'

Unable to resist, he reached out and hooked a strand of her hair behind her ear. ‘Hope, could we lie down, do you think? I'd only hold you – I promise I won't do anything you don't want me to do.'

‘I don't think we should.' Quickly she said, ‘Did you really get expelled?'

He lit another cigarette. Exhaling, he said, ‘Didn't Irene tell you how bad I am?'

‘No – you know she didn't.'

A cushion lay at his side and he reached for it, putting it under his head as he lay down. He'd been thinking about her naked and his erection ached. Trying not to think of her hands around it, he said, ‘I never saw the point of school. Once I could read and write . . . well, I suppose I thought I could find out what was worth knowing for myself.'

She seemed shocked; he liked the way her eyebrows went up, the way her lips parted a little as though she was about to say something but was too surprised to find the right words. She looked so sweetly innocent, so easily outraged. He wondered how she would react if he asked her to take her clothes off, amused at the idea of her reaction, even as his cock became even harder and he knew he could do nothing to relieve himself.

To his surprise, Hope lay down beside him, a hand's breadth away. To the ceiling she said, ‘I've never been in trouble. I've always been good.'

Cautiously he said, ‘You sound as though you regret that?'

‘No.' After a moment she said, ‘Maybe. Sometimes.' Turning her head to look at him, she went on, ‘Everyone thinks I'm terribly sensible.'

He wanted to trace the outline of her mouth that was set in a straight, serious line. ‘Do you know I think you're the most beautiful girl I've ever seen?'

She turned away from him to gaze at the ceiling again. ‘What's that got to do with anything? Besides, you're only saying it. It's only
talk,
something to say to get what you want.'

‘What do I want?'

She kept silence, closing her eyes, and Guy turned on his side, propping himself up on his elbow to look down into her face. Her skin was flawless, her eyes, her nose, her mouth all in perfect proportion, perfectly conforming to accepted ideas of what was beautiful. He couldn't help comparing her to Esther, who was not perfect, whose puzzling oddness was so compelling. He could gaze at Esther for hours and still not understand why he was attracted to her. He looked at Hope and knew at once.

He kissed her, his lips barely brushing hers. He placed his hand on her waist, and she kept still, like a child pretending to be asleep so that she seemed even more alert, more aware of every move he made. He felt his heart quicken, his need for her become more urgent so that he could barely trust himself to speak. He trembled and she opened her eyes to look at him.

For some moments she held his gaze. At last she said, ‘Would you be careful?'

He made to speak but his voice broke. He cleared his throat. ‘Careful?'

‘I don't want a baby.'

‘Hope . . . ' He made to kiss her but she placed a hand on his chest, holding him back.

‘I like you,' she said, ‘more than like. I saw you and I knew you would be the one who . . . I've been thinking about it a lot. You don't have to say you love me or anything – no lies like that.' She closed her eyes again and he could sense her frustration. Quickly she went on, ‘I just don't want to be
me
any more – good, sensible me.'

And then she opened her eyes and it was as though she wanted him even more than he wanted her, so that he drew back, astonished by her, intimidated, suddenly unsure of his ability to be who she thought he was. All the same, he ached for her; all the same, he felt unable to move, afraid of his own inexperience. He would be clumsy, he would make a fool of himself. If he began he would have no way of stopping, but he had no idea of how to begin. He groaned, stubbing out his cigarette too vigorously.

‘Hope . . . '

Her hand brushed against his erection, lightly as though she had dared herself. He caught her wrist and held it. ‘Hope.' He laughed painfully. ‘Should we get undressed?'

She nodded. Sitting up, she pulled her sweater off. Static electricity caused her hair to fan around her head and he knelt in front of her and smoothed it down with both hands. Holding her head, he kissed her, drawing back to sit on his heels, watching as she began to unbutton her blouse. Her bra was white, with a pink rosebud sewn between her breasts; she put her hands behind her back and unhooked it. He saw how hard her nipples were.

‘Lie down,' he said, and she did as she was told obediently, gasping with pleasure as his mouth closed around her breast. 

Chapter 13

Harry dreamed. He was walking through the rubble of bombed buildings – stumbling, slipping and sliding on loose stones, holding out his arms to steady himself like a fat clown on a highwire. Behind him, Hans laughed. He shouted, ‘You're walking on their graves, Major! Be careful now.'

Harry turned, saw the small figure of a boy who walked towards him and then became a grown-up Hans, his SS uniform immaculate, the death's head on his cap catching the sunlight. ‘Help her,' Hans said. ‘Please.' And they were back in the interrogation cell, and Hans's nose was dripping blood, his eyes swollen closed. Ava sat beside him, gazing down at the ragged doll on her lap. Hans took the doll and thrust it into his arms. ‘There, Harry. Your child.'

Harry woke suddenly, thinking he was still in the office and that he had fallen asleep at his desk. Sitting up, the slow realisation came that he was in his own bed, that last night, despairing of everything in his life, he had drunk too much and had fallen asleep only half-undressed, unwashed. His mouth tasted foul.

Staring at his bedroom ceiling, he heard Esther and Ava in the bathroom. Esther would be washing his wife's face and hands then coaxing her to brush her teeth. He listened to Esther's sing-song voice encourage Ava and thought how he must get up, that he couldn't go on lying in bed when there was so much to do, so much relying on him. Except he didn't have the energy; his limbs felt weighted to the bed. Perhaps if he were to lie still for a while, perhaps if he only closed his eyes for a few minutes he would feel strong enough to face the day. But if he closed his eyes he might sleep again; the nightmares might come again. He truly didn't want to see Hans again or hear his voice so distinctly. There was no sense in remembering him, even in dreams.

On the landing outside his room, he heard Guy say good morning to Esther with his usual exaggerated, cheerful good manners. Harry thought of his meeting with his son's Headmaster just before he drove Guy home, how the man had seemed so sadly resigned to Guy's rebelliousness, his total lack of respect for anyone supposedly in authority over him. The Headmaster had even seemed rather admiring of the boy; that was the point when he'd told him how brilliant Guy was, that if he could only knuckle down . . . The man had sighed, becoming resigned again. He knew as well as Harry did that Guy would never
knuckle down
. The idea of Guy becoming a soldier was preposterous: his son couldn't possibly be serious.

Harry heard Esther explain to Ava that they were to go downstairs now and have breakfast, and that later, if the weather kept fine, they could go for a walk in the park and wouldn't that be nice? There was a desperate edge to her voice. He'd heard this edge more often lately, but in his present, useless state her desperation seemed worse, as though he had become as hyper-sensitive to the feelings of others as he was to his own.

This had been especially true yesterday, when his string of troubled clients had culminated with that woman whose husband wanted to divorce her, whose misery had felt suffocating. And then, when she had gone, and Peter Wright sat in his office, so pathetically brave and optimistic, after Wright had innocently conjured Val so that it seemed she was standing beside him, he had turned to the window and saw the scavenging tramp, a man who had suddenly become every human being he had ever seen suffer. How sentimental that feeling seemed now, and shamingly self-indulgent; he closed his eyes, despairing of himself, and heard Hans laugh.

He had known Hans for only a few weeks in Berlin during the spring of 1946. The morning they met he had noticed the thickening buds of a lilac tree growing in the garden of a bombed house and had been surprised that the season had changed. Berlin still felt in the grip of an icy winter, a dark, petrified city he couldn't wait to leave. All around him the ruins were a reminder that everything was futile, ending only in the grave. He could do no good, could change nothing; he could translate this prisoner's words, that Nazi document, and feel only corrupted, that by understanding their language he was somehow complicit. How weary he had been that spring, so sick to death. The ruins stank of coal fires extinguished by rain, of damp and musty, rat-infested cellars. And the dead were buried beneath it all, and the living made burrows from which starving children scrambled, filthy, stinking.

He had thought of the victims and felt himself grow even wearier. It wasn't even pity he felt, not even outrage or a righteous, burning desire for justice. He wanted to go home, to his own bed. He thought abstractly of the son he barely knew, safe in his boarding school in England, and daydreamed of being a proper father, making up for his absence during the last six years of war. Sometimes he could barely remember his son's face – and this only added to his sense of total exhaustion. He couldn't be a father; after this, he felt he couldn't be anyone much at all.

He passed the lilac tree growing in the rubble and turned the corner to the place where he worked. He was a Major in the British Army; he had important tasks to perform. There were prisoners to interrogate, reports to write, questions to find the answer to. Even though they were the victors, the questions seemed plaintive to him: he heard the voice in his head whining,
But why?
Pathetic, really, when the answer was so mundane.

In his office, he took off his Army greatcoat and cap and hung them from the hook on the door. He smoothed back his hair and sat down at his desk and wondered if this would be the day that they told him he could go home, duty done. Looking up from the piles of documents on his desk, he saw Sergeant Roberts standing in the doorway. The Sergeant smiled, used to his misery, indulgent of it. He said, ‘Everything all right, sir?'

‘Unless you're going to tell me otherwise, Sergeant.'

The man sighed. ‘They've brought someone in they want you to interrogate. They want you now, sir. Downstairs. They said as soon as you came in . . . '

Harry wondered at the urgency, it stirred some spark of curiosity in him. He got up from his desk and Sergeant Roberts held the door open for him. ‘Shall I fetch you a cup of coffee, sir?'

Downstairs was where the interrogation rooms were, where he had heard such stories, such excuses. The rooms were small and windowless, the stone walls painted two dull shades of green so that the air seemed colder, danker. He was directed into the first room, where a single bulb caged in a metal shade hung from the low ceiling and cast a brutish, ineffectual light; there was a wooden table, two chairs, a guard standing in the corner, and there was Hans. Hans sat at the table, he was handcuffed. He sat very straight, very still, and his expression didn't alter when Harry walked in but remained blank, as though he was looking at a dull picture in a doctor's waiting room. Prisoners weren't usually handcuffed, but this boy, or so Harry had been told, was a nasty piece of work, dangerous. He had killed his neighbour. ‘Stuck a knife in his guts,' Lieutenant Brown had told him, and had laughed incredulously. ‘You'd have thought they would have had enough of killing each other, wouldn't you, sir? Bloody barbarians.'

Hans's papers were forged.

Harry believed that killing his neighbour was Hans's way of giving himself up. This idea had made him despair, so that he found himself surprised at his ability to feel anything at all.

Much later, Hans told him that he had been tired of hiding, pretending to be a no one. ‘Such cowardly, skulking behaviour! I am disgusted with myself. But at the time . . . well, sometimes one only wants to live. I am human, after all.' And he'd smiled, as though he believed Harry thought otherwise, his vanity as monstrous as his contempt.

Lying in his bed, Harry suddenly tossed the covers aside and got up: he had to get out of bed quickly or he'd stay there all day. He went to his bedroom window and lifted the curtains aside. Below him in the garden was Ava and he watched her walk back and forth across the lawn, seemingly without aim. She looked even more like her brother nowadays, like Hans when he retreated into himself, when it seemed he couldn't even be bothered with his own posturing any more. He would seem very young then, even younger than his years. Once, Hans had looked up from one of these reveries, frowning at Harry as if he didn't recognise him. ‘My father was a good man,' he had said. ‘There. I want you to know that.' This was the closest Hans ever came to admitting his own badness, and at once he'd returned to his silence, his face become blandly youthful again, just as Ava's was now, both closing themselves off from their bleak futures.

Harry went downstairs and into the kitchen where Guy sat at the table with Esther. At once, Esther stood up as though she believed it was wrong to be sitting down with his son, even sitting down at all. She said quickly, ‘I'd better go and see what Mrs Dunn is doing.'

When she'd gone into the garden, Guy said, ‘You know we talked about me joining the Army? Well, like it or not…' He picked up an envelope and held it out to him. ‘Unless I fail the medical, which I won't.'

Harry took the envelope and, not needing to read its contents, placed it on the table.

Guy said insolently. ‘Aren't you even going to say that at least it will make a man of me?'

‘Why should I say such an absurd thing?' Harry sat down opposite him. ‘Is it still what you want?'

The boy didn't answer, only took out his call-up papers from their envelope and gazed down at them, turning a page over as if he thought he might have missed some vital piece of information. At last, looking up at him, he said, quietly, ‘Yes, it's what I want.'

‘Then good.' Harry stood up, began to make tea and toast. He felt relieved that this one thing was settled; unless there was a war he could go back to worrying about Guy in the abstract and not have the real, living, breathing Guy hanging around being
Guy
, scornful, facetious, unknowable.
Unless there was a war
. He was struck by the terrifying idea of having to worry about his son in such an all-consuming way; he was sure he wouldn't be able to cope with such an enormity of worry. He wondered if this proved that he loved him. He hated how much he needed proof, even the kind of proof that would put his child in mortal danger.

Harry turned to Guy. Gently he said, ‘Is there anything you'd like to ask me?'

‘Such as?'

‘Well – anything. I was in the Army for six years.'

‘
War years
.'

‘Still the Army.'

‘It's all right, Dad,' Guy said airily. ‘But if a question occurs to me, I'll be sure to ask.'

Harry gazed at him, wanting to remember a time when this handsome, intelligent boy had ever shown any sign of needing him. When he was a baby, perhaps, when he'd found him curled beside his mother's dead body. Guy had cried himself to sleep but had woken as soon as he lifted him from Julia's arms, his eyes startled, terrified so that he had started to cry again, a terrible, distressed crying unlike anything Harry had ever heard before. He'd had to put him down, desperate to see to his wife, unable to believe that she was dead, although it was obvious. Guy had cried and cried and reached up his arms to him; Harry remembered that he had ignored his cries, told himself it was because he was panicked, unable to think of anything but reviving Julia, his beautiful, wonderful girl. He remembered that Guy hauled himself up, holding on to the side of the bed, only just able to balance on his two feet, a few days away from his first steps. He cried for his mother and Harry had hushed him, not looking at him, just telling him to be quiet, to be good, a good quiet boy. Guy's nappy was soaked and soiled, weighting down his pyjama bottoms. He had been lying beside his mother all morning; Julia had carried him into bed with her after she had taken the pills. If Harry had not come home that lunchtime, he would have lain there all day. Later, thinking about this, Harry had clutched Guy to him and wept, saying how sorry he was, over and over again. Guy had struggled against this overwhelming embrace. He wanted his mother – only Julia could comfort him. Harry was no use to him at all.

Sitting down at the kitchen table again, Harry began, ‘Guy . . . ' But he was unable to think of anything to say to him; often it felt like they were strangers, now more than ever. Suddenly desperate not to feel so alienated from his son, he blurted out, ‘I love you.'

Guy laughed, surprised.

‘Why is that funny?'

‘I don't know – it isn't. Sorry.' Guy looked away, such a closed expression on his face that he looked almost pained. Eventually he repeated, ‘Sorry.' Then he stood up, saying awkwardly, ‘I need a shave.'

‘Have you any plans for today?'

‘Why?'

‘I was only wondering. I suppose you should make the most of your time before you leave.'

‘Yes.' Guy turned to him from the kitchen door. ‘That's exactly what I intend to do.'

Harry ate his breakfast. Esther and Ava came in from the garden, went out again, came in again; Esther smiled at him despairingly. She sat his wife at the other end of the table from where he was and spilled the jar full of shells out on a tray. ‘There,' she said, ‘Find the prettiest for Mr Dunn.'

Ava began raking her hands through the shells, turning them over, peering at one before placing it down and searching out another. She seemed absorbed in this task, happy even. Even so, Harry found he couldn't bear to watch her. He got up, grateful that he had his work to go to.