The Light of Day: A Novel (9 page)

20

How does it happen? How do we choose? Someone enters our life, and we can’t live without them. But we lived without them before . . .

The Empress Eugénie. Fifty years to go.

As if we were only half ourselves and never knew it. And maybe it’s best not to know. Maybe that’s what Rachel thought, standing in the kitchen doorway, in the exit from my life. That I was only half the man she’d thought I was.

I was half myself again. Or less.

But how does it happen? “Meant for each other,” “made for each other,” we say. And my granny Nora used to say when I was small, before we moved to Chislehurst, that “there’s a girl for every boy.” Maybe it’s what grannies have to say. But didn’t her own boy—my dad—prove it? Not just in marrying my mum, but in what he did for a living. His bread and butter: wedding photos.

My grandpa Ted was long dead. I never knew him. My granny Nora’s other half. Nora and Ted. And my granny Nora never lived long enough to know what I knew about her boy, my dad.

Matrimonial work. I see it from the wrong end, the bad end.

I used to go with him to the golf course, Sunday mornings. It lasted maybe three months, my golfing phase. I wasn’t so keen but I learnt the basics. I was only thirteen. But mostly I used just to caddy for him and his golfing mates. “Caddy”: a word that till then had meant a thing for holding tea. And mostly I went to please him. Because it was his high point, his triumph, becoming a member. I knew it even then. His golf was pretty shaky—he’d learnt as a visitor, as a guest of other members—but now he’d truly arrived, the Club had let him in. And he wanted me to slap him on the back.

Now that I look back, I can see that I wasn’t a rebel, like other kids, even at thirteen, can be. Rachel, for example, in her way. Helen, of course. I wasn’t gunning for my dad.

A rebel at school, maybe. Maybe not even there. A shirker—a shirker on principle. I just hated teachers, schoolwork, homework, deskwork. A man of action, me. It was Mum who tried to keep my nose to the grindstone: “Brains, Georgie, you’ve got brains.” But my dad, I knew, was a self-made man, he’d worked up from nothing. What had school ever done for him? And my mum had fallen for him, hadn’t she? She hadn’t turned him down.

Golf—it’s not exactly action, but it isn’t sitting on your arse. And I was pleased for him, really, I was on his side.

A high-street photographer. Chislehurst High Street. Frank Webb. As much a pillar of the community by then, in his small way, as any solicitor or bank manager. And now they’d let him join the golf club.

But once, I knew, he’d been a beach photographer, before I was born. Broadstairs, 1946, after he came out the army. Living all summer in a cheap back room with an old laundry-cupboard attached which he turned into a darkroom. Working the beach by day, the cupboard by night. Round-the-clock work, but that was how he learnt his trade. How to snap and make them smile. A camera and a bit of army know-how. And that was how he met my mum.

I used to think it was how he’d deliberately gone about it. That he’d gone down to Broadstairs just for that. She was the one he’d carefully selected. But first he’d built up his catalogue: beach girls, hundreds of snaps. They were all there with him, in the dark, in that laundry cupboard. It was how he chose.

My mum never said it was otherwise. It was her glory, after all. “I was the one,” she’d say. There were all those others, in their summer frocks and swimsuits, the first real summer after the war, but he’d picked her.

Now and then they’d both mention, with a certain look in their eye, “Mrs. Barrett’s place”—“Mrs. Barrett’s place in Broadstairs,” as if Mrs. Barrett was some guard-dog they’d more than once tiptoed by.

“I was the one,” she’d say.

They got married late in 1946. I came along the next year. So my dad began his steady progress, with my mum beside him, from beach photographer to high-street photographer, and so we moved, in ’52, from Lewisham to Chislehurst. A notch or two up and a better class of customer. Once again—like Broadstairs—he picked his patch well.

A pillar of the community. More than that: its record keeper, its curator. Weddings, christenings, sports teams, annual dinners, whole schools stacked up three-deep. Not to mention the countless studio portraits, commissioned for countless proud and loving reasons. “We’ll get Webb’s to do it.”

But more than that. There was that other thing he could bring about—even when the mood might be dead against it, even when the kid had been dragged in screaming, or the couple who’d made the appointment had had a bust-up that very day. Different ways of doing it, but in the end it was something in him, in his face, his eye, as if he only had to say the word and the result would follow. As if he was still standing there on a holiday beach where everyone knew how to do it anyhow.

“Smile!”

Each photo with his name on it—stamped on the back or embossed on fine-grade card, depending on the presentation required. “Webb’s, Chislehurst.” His name on all those memory lanes.

Strange, how those photos would find their way into other places. In the Force, when you needed a photo—“Is there a photo?”—what you’d often get would be the studio portrait, high on quality if not exactly up-to-date, handed over with a little proud echo of its former purpose: “It’s a good photo, isn’t it?”

(I’d look on the back. If it was one of my dad’s I never said.)

Missing persons . . . Copies would go out—the person would be missing but the photo would multiply. And whatever the result—a body, an arrest, a blank—the photo would still be smiling and unharmed.

Or the local papers. Reporters must do the same: Is there a photo? The same odd pride. The child killed in the accident: posed in a new school uniform with an angel’s smile (though in fact, on the day, there’d been a hell of a tantrum). The rapist who’d once gone to college . . .

Bob’s photo, next to the headline.

It’s still the same now—in my high-street trade. Is there a photo . . . ?

Sometimes there seems to be only the one. The one that shows the two of them together, beaming and never to be parted.

We’d load the clubs into the car. Sunday mornings in Chislehurst. I knew what it meant to him: the Golf Club. I didn’t want to mock and sneer. I even thought, in a small way, he was Mr. Magic, coming from nowhere with a camera instead of a wand. Finding my mum.

Caddying, dogging him from hole to hole. There were his chums, of course, his golfing pals. And I’d listen to their chit-chat. Ears pricked, even then. There was a bench about half way round, by a clump of pines, a place to pause, the brown needles at your feet peppered with cigarette ends like cartridges round a gun post.

I can’t remember his name—Donald someone maybe— though I can still see him, crinkly-haired and confidentlooking. Someone else who was someone in the High Street, or who ran some business, maybe, out on the factory estate by the Sidcup bypass.

I can’t remember his name, but I remember the name he spoke—Carol Freeman—and I knew it could only be one Carol Freeman.

I’d been at school with Pauline Freeman. If the truth be known, I’d fancied her—an eleven-year-old’s fancying: this was still primary school—and I’d thought it was mutual, just for a bit, but she’d gone off me all of a sudden. Girls for you. (Though maybe now I knew why.) And it had been long enough while it lasted for me to know that her mum’s name was Carol and her dad’s name was Roy. I’d even seen Pauline’s mum outside the school gates. She’d looked like a woman—a mum but a woman. She’d given me a smile, a wave. I even knew where Pauline lived: Gifford Road.

I think they thought I was out of earshot. A breeze stirring the pines. I was looking for a ball this Donald Someone had whacked into the rough.

He said, “Are you still seeing Carol Freeman? Are you still taking her pic?” I know that Dad looked up to see if I’d heard—he shouldn’t have done that—and I know that I made a good pretence of carrying on what I was doing, combing the long grass. I know that he changed the subject pretty fast. And then everything was as it was, but not. A bright blue day in May, when golfers need to shield their eyes. But now there was a cloud.

And up to then I’d thought he had it all made, he knew how it was done. There was Mum and him and me—and only me because that had been enough. A perfect happy triangle.

Caddying. And being taught a little. Golfing lessons. Now I knew—I carried on scouring the grass—I’d have to go on pretending.

Golfing lessons. Eye on the ball, swing from the hips. But on the very first visit, weeks before, there’d been a little history lesson and even a French lesson as well. The plaque on the club-house wall. It was written in French. So Dad could pretend he was translating. A hidden talent. “Napoleon III, Emperor of the French, died here.”

Napoleon?
Hadn’t he died on some island in the middle of the ocean?

“Not
that
Napoleon, George.” (So there was more than one?)

It all came back to me, in a rush, in Gladstone’s.

Not just any old golf course, not just any old step up in the world. I could almost see it running crazily through his mind: now
that
would have been a photo! If only he’d been around then—to have had such clients.

A photo—and a hell of a challenge, a hell of a test. The Emperor and the Empress exiled in Chislehurst. Him with his empire gone and soon to die, her (though she didn’t know it) with fifty years still to come.

“Ready. Look at the camera. Smile!”

How do we choose? Napoleon and Eugénie. She was a frisky Spanish beauty—Sarah’s told me—and he could be a bit of a glum old stick.

Nora and Ted.

And Mum used to say, even after he was dead, “Never mind all of
them,
never mind all those pictures he took—he knew how to make
me
smile. My God, he could make me smile.”

21

The leaves on the trees lining the cemetery paths are yellow as lemon peel. They don’t move, as if they cling by a miracle. The next breeze, the next shift in the air will free them all.

I don’t know what will free me here. I stand, I look. My feet are cold. How long do you give it? A minute? Five? I said to myself: Just do it, lay the flowers—go. But it’s not that simple. How long is right, how long is fair, when you only come once a year?

Put down the flowers. Now beat it before the hate, or anything else, rises up. The seethe in your throat. But it’s not up to me anyway. I’m here for her, for her sake. Her agent. How long would she give it, if she were here? For ever? Before she turned her back, closed her eyes, walked away. Suppose they let her out, just for this purpose, just for this one day. The taste of freedom. Lemon light. Cold air in the mouth. The freedom of a graveyard, where they never let you out at all.

But I have to do it for her, taste it for her. This life we cling to. As if she might be right here beside me, clutching my arm. Both of us looking down. The gall, the nerve of it.

I have to be here for her. To receive any messages. And that might need waiting—that might take ages—coming from the cold hard ground.

No word. Not today.

It’s not up to me. And now that I’m standing here, not knowing how, when to go, I have the same feeling I had last time. It’s up to
him.
He’s got me now, in his grip. It’s his one chance, I’ve walked into his trap.

You’re glad, aren’t you? Glad to be alive. He’s smiling at me coldly down there. Nice flowers. Beautiful day.

He’s not going to let me go in a hurry, not going to make it easy for me: this stranger he never knew, who turns up now like some phoney friend, some fake well-wisher. This stranger who followed him, shadowed him, though he never knew, when he was alive. Spied on him—in his pain, in his misery. And now comes to spy on him even in death.

22

Rachel chose me, that’s what I think now. Chose me—and unchose me. Though I thought I was doing all the choosing, making the move, sizing up the situation and stepping in, just like the well-trained cop I was.

Though I was something more than that by then: CID, if only just. A detective constable. Plain clothes. So she didn’t know, the disguise must have worked. And it was the first and the best time I’d ever used it like that, to my own advantage, like some magic mask, like some suit of invisible armour.

I said, “What’s the trouble here . . . ?”

Police training. A little bit of presence and authority. You can break up fights (book them if they hit you back), you can stop traffic, you can act like a little god—if you’re in uniform.

But she didn’t guess, she thought it was just me.

It’s how I met your mum, Helen, long ago. I was Detective Constable Webb. But I was Saint bloody George riding to the rescue.

I said, “This lady would like a cup of coffee.” (“This lady”!) And I sat right down at her table. The nerve.

It was called Marco’s. It was new and it was just a little way from the County Courts. I might have gone to the caff in New Street where all the cops on court duty hung out. I might have gone to a pub. But I mooched about and ducked into Marco’s just as a shower was starting.

Eleven-thirty on a Friday morning and my weekend off was coming up, and the judge had called a sudden adjournment. My lucky day. And the sergeant said, when I called in, “I’d hop it if I were you. See you Monday.”

Sometimes fate is on your side.

You can sniff an atmosphere straight away, you know when something funny’s going on. Off duty? Maybe, maybe not. I sat at a table by the window. The shower had turned into a downpour. A waitress with a strange, hounded look seemed only too pleased to serve me. Three tables along, a big man (Marco?—I’ll never know) was standing, towering over a girl who was sitting facing me but not looking at me, looking hard at her hands, one of which held a just-lit cigarette. The big man was speaking—under his breath but as if he might suddenly bellow—and she was ignoring what he was saying. He jabbed a finger towards the door. She wore a raincoat— unbuttoned, dry—but looked like she didn’t mean to budge. He wore a grubby T-shirt, a tea towel tucked into his belt.

She took a drag on her cigarette, blew the smoke quickly and straight up, tilting up her chin.

And I got it all straight away. Ten out of ten for detection (and for that other thing that goes with it, sometimes: intuition). A waitress too. But she’d just been given her marching orders. For something she’d done, in the kitchen perhaps, just moments before—or hadn’t done. Something
he’d
done (the details would get filled in later), and she hadn’t complied. You have to put yourself in the scene.

There was a waitress’s apron hanging untidily from one of the hooks by the entrance to the kitchen, as if it had been flung there in a hurry. So: she’d been all ready to storm out. Stuff your job. But then the rain had started outside and she’d had a better, angrier, braver idea. She’d sat down at the table.

If she didn’t work here any more, she could be a customer, couldn’t she? She could order a coffee, couldn’t she? And he could damn well bring it.

Brave, angry girl. She looked straight ahead without even seeing me. Brave, angry, blonde girl.

He leant over her, his voice rising. His hands gripped the edge of the table as if he might tip it up. I don’t remember
my
decision, I don’t remember getting up, but one moment I was sitting at my table, the next I was standing by hers, saying, “What’s the trouble here?” And the next moment I was sitting down opposite her, but looking at him, and saying, “I think this lady would like a coffee . . .”

The nerve. But who knows what I’d have done without my fall-back, my invisible shield? The ID in my breast pocket and the word waiting ready, which, as it happens, I didn’t have to use: Police.

“. . . and I’d like to buy it for her.”

She looked at me. I could almost hear her think: Now what? What now? Who was this bloke from nowhere?

He glared. A moment’s stand-off. Then he turned (I’d done it!), whipping the tea towel from his belt, back to the kitchen. More words under his breath.

A sudden certainty inside me.

She looked at me. Studied me like something that had dropped from the sky. Outside the rain was pelting. April— Easter coming up. My move, but it was my audition too. A drag on her cigarette, the smoke straight up.

I said, “The thing to do, when he brings it, is not to drink it. Not to drink it and walk out.”

She said, “I was planning on that.”

He brought the coffee, but he wasn’t going to be nice about it. Half of it was in the saucer already, more after he’d plonked it down.

We got up together, scraping our chairs. “A shilling,” he said, folding his arms. She stubbed out her cigarette. I took a shilling from my pocket, slapped it down. A cheap round, a bargain. We edged past him while he stood like some tree. Then we were out of the door—and the rain was suddenly stopping, switching itself off like a tap. A gleam in the sky. As if that might have been part of a plan too.

I remember everything—everything, Helen. The way she grabbed my arm, straight away. The shine of the wet road. The films of oil, little coiling rainbows, in the gutter. The puddles she stepped round, the flecks on the backs of her ankles.

You don’t see things, Dad.

Later, I’d say, “Only women smoke like that—blowing the smoke straight up—women who are angry. Like a kettle on the boil.”

She looked at me. “You notice things.”

“It’s my job,” I said. It had to come out some time. “I’m a cop,” I said.

But she didn’t go off me, didn’t change her mind.

And she was a trainee teacher (and I hated teachers) though I didn’t know she was a trainee teacher yet.

“Plain clothes,” I said.

“Or no clothes at all,” she said.

Rain outside again. Its hiss. A kettle on the boil. I notice things.

In her room, on the first floor, stuck to the wardrobe door, was a poster, a photograph: a man in a singlet, a cigarette dangling from his wide mouth, a pistol in his hand, held up near his cheek. A bad guy, a good-looking bad guy. Every night she let him watch her undress.

I said, “Who’s he?”

She said, “That’s Jean-Paul Belmondo.”

I said, “Who’s he?”

I stayed all that weekend. Before I left she took the poster down.

It’s how I met your mum, Helen. What do you think of my chocolate
roulade
? There was this other man in the room, a French geezer with a gun.

A trainee teacher. I wouldn’t have guessed. Nakedness: it’s a good disguise. Her last year of training—working in her Easter break as a waitress. Though not any more. One day she’d be a headmistress, a whole school under her thumb. Now she was holding my balls in her hand, cupping them like a pair of eggs.

I’d never have guessed. But nor could I have detected in her the girl of just three years before, who’d walked out on her parents (that’s what she did, Helen), and been disowned by them.

It was months before she told me, the whole story. Perhaps she thought it would put
me
off. The thing is they’d been religious, the whole family—one of those strict peculiar lots. In her bedroom, in those days, there’d been a picture of Jesus.

But she’d rebelled (your mum, a rebel too). One day when she was seventeen she’d told them. She didn’t believe in it any more.

The nerve, the bravery. Even now I try to picture it, years after she walked out on me. Brave, tough-minded bitch. I still see her when she was seventeen and I never even knew her, taking that first brave step. As if she’s up on some high wire, about to put her foot forward. And God’s up there, even higher, glaring down.

A great walker-out.

But didn’t I know it—hadn’t I seen it, in Marco’s, that afternoon? She’d walked out on God. She was on the rebound, a long slow rebound, via Jean-Paul Belmondo, to me.

How do we choose? I should have been in court. If the judge, and the sergeant, hadn’t let me go free . . .

And in those early days I even liked court duty. Strange, when words weren’t my thing. Action, me. Having to get up there and be made to look dumb. Having your evidence pulled apart. Seeing them get off. But I used to think it was a kind of reinforcement nonetheless. It was what we were for. Those things that might be just words were part of the fabric round you there: justice, law.

1968. We got married early in ’69. I was up for detective-sergeant by then, she was a qualified teacher. Model citizens. But her parents didn’t show up (I think I was glad). My parents were there, of course.

Georgie, marrying a teacher! And he’d always hated school!

They stood side by side, arm in arm, remembering their own wedding, I suppose.

A registry office. A civil ceremony—it had to be. But there was confetti and flowers. And photos, of course. And who else could have taken them?

He had to step out of the picture for a while.

“Smile.”

How do we choose? My dad had gone about things thoroughly—so the story went. As thoroughly as a policeman, combing the beach with his camera.

But up in that first-floor bed-sit that wet afternoon it came back to me, that passing, nudging phrase: “Mrs. Barrett’s place. Mrs. Barrett’s place in Broadstairs.”

Rain fell outside, all weekend it seemed. April showers, April rain. The swish of traffic sloshing through it. Buses passed, their top decks level with the window. Once—was it Saturday or Sunday morning?—she got up, quite naked, to peer through the crack in the curtains. A bus was coming and, just for the hell of it, she gave them a flash, whipping back the curtains, whipping them shut again. Her front view for them, her back view for me.

It’s how I met her, Helen. More
roulade
?

And now I think about it, I think Rachel never really gave up her god. Or, she gave him up but something that went with him, or her family’s version of him, stuck. I think the word is “righteousness.” That’s the right word. A sense of what’s right and what’s wrong. A cop. She’d never have guessed, never have imagined either. A cop. A knight to the rescue who turned out to be just a cop, but that was okay, that was all right.

She chose me, and I was always in court.

I should have seen it even there in Marco’s. The sticking to her ground, the coolness. Not just a girl with balls who’d told some bloke to take his grubby mitts off. So when she walked out on me twenty years later I shouldn’t have been surprised.
My
mitts were grubby now, so to speak. She was unchoosing me. Slipping her arm out of mine like a ship unties from its moorings. Sailing on.

Right and wrong. And I’d done wrong.

Never mind what Dyson did.