The Lost Child (7 page)

“After Notting Hill,” said Julius, “it’s just one problem after another.”

“And the police?”

“The police and the teddy boys are as bad as each other.”

Her husband was chased once, but he would never speak with her about what had happened. It exasperated her now that she could hear him talking about the incident to this man. She had held his head over the sink and dabbed at the cut on his cheek and stopped the blood, but he wouldn’t even make eye contact with her. That night a morose and wounded Julius had had the same abject look on his face as the poor man who had spent the greater part of the afternoon sitting alone in the café with only the shopping bag for company.

She turns, having decided that she should once again go and check on the children. As she steps towards the bedroom, she sees that their guest has begun now to use his hands as he speaks, but he has modified his voice, which suggests that they have moved on to some new issue that makes them both feel a little more at ease. However, this new sense of comfort with each other will be only temporary, for Julius has told her that this evening he will ask for more money to help with the children. He will tell Dr. Samuels that it is no longer possible for him to manage in the absence of a proper wage and without guarantees of some sort. She closes in the door to the bedroom behind her and can see that her two children are still sleeping peacefully. Then she turns off the lights and goes and stands by the bedroom window and looks down at the now shuttered facade of the café and waits for the snow to stop falling.

*   *   *

Shortly after the talks between the British government and the delegation from his country collapsed, Julius applied for a job as a lecturer at the institution that had awarded him his bachelor’s degree. There was no need for him to inform Dr. Lloyd Samuels, for relations between the two of them had finally broken down one wet Monday night in the lounge bar of London’s Grosvenor Hotel. That night, despite his obvious distress at Samuels’s duplicity, Julius remained in the hotel bar long after his former friend had cleared off and downed one drink after the other. He knew there was no way he could share the news of their falling-out with his wife and give her the satisfaction of being proved right. If it had just been he and Monica alone, he felt sure that they would have put an end to their misery a long time ago, but the presence of the sullen-looking boys seemed to elicit some unspoken guilt in them both, so they had lingered on across months and years in their cramped flat with little money, and without any coherent idea of where life was taking them. But that night, alone in the bar of the Grosvenor Hotel, Julius looked around, and it finally dawned on him that he had no real interest in giving anything to this country that had now been his home for over a dozen years. After all, what had he received in return from these people? A late-night beating from some hooligans, and the problem of an increasingly sloppy wife who insisted that the children call her Mam as opposed to Mommy, or even Mama, and who long ago seemed to have relinquished any appetite for improvement or accomplishment.

To begin with, Monica
had
given him security and purpose as he struggled to finish his dissertation, but she had never really shown full appreciation for his reciprocal gift of marriage. For some reason, she seemed to have grown to resent him, and over the years she had made no effort to claim a role and had simply deposited herself as a burden at the centre of his life. Whenever he tried to talk to her about what she might do, she stared abstractedly at a point somewhere over his head. Of course, what really infuriated him of late was her new habit of using the children as a shield behind which she hid from any real discussion with him. “Please, Julius, keep it down. You’ll wake the children.” The one time he proposed that she seek help, and even consider some kind of a reconciliation with her parents, Monica snapped at him that he didn’t know what he was talking about—which was true, but at least he was trying. As he paid for his drinks at the hotel bar and reached for his coat, he knew full well that things between them could no longer go on in this fashion. If she and her boys wanted to begin a new adventure with him, then he was willing to continue to make an effort, but only if she assured him she would start to pull herself together.

*   *   *

Julius had received a short, enthusiastic telegram in response to his application for the lecturer’s job, and he now held in his hand the official letter confirming his appointment. It was an early spring day, and he and Monica were sitting together at the living room table. The opportunity to go home and make a contribution, and perhaps try again to revise his dissertation and turn it into a book—this, he told her, was his true future.

“You still have faith in the book, don’t you?” He moistened his dry lips with a quick circle of his tongue.

“Julius, it’s some time since I read the manuscript.”

“Well, what are you saying? Do you feel I should write a new book?”

“Who knows what you should do?” Monica began to laugh and ran both hands back through her stringy hair. “In fact, who knows what you
will
do from one moment to the next.”

He watched her closely as she poured some milk from the bottle into a teacup and then lifted the chipped vessel to her lips. Having drained the cup, she fumbled at her blouse and undid the top button, for the weather was unseasonably warm. Monica had started to buy presliced white bread, and so she thought about toast, but almost at once the idea seemed too complicated. She put her feet up onto a chair and proudly exhibited her unpolished toenails. Julius seemed confused.

“Can I have some milk?”

Monica poured some milk into the same teacup and passed it to him.

“Back home we drink Carnation milk, but I know you’ll soon get used to it.”

“No, we won’t.” Again Monica laughed, and she began to push up her sleeves, first one arm and then the other. “You’ll be going by yourself, Julius. I’m moving back north.”

“To do what?”

“Is that all you have to say?”

Monica stared at this sad dreamer of a man she had married, and shook her head. Did he truly imagine she was going to just sit around for the rest of her life waiting for him to make all the decisions? Really, just who did he think he was? After the break with his friend, he started to have a go at England, which she knew was just another way of getting at her, but that was it. She knew that she had to take the boys away and make a fresh start. Wake up, you spaz, I’m not going to follow you around. We don’t have much money, only what I’ve been able to save up from the housekeeping, but I’ve got myself a job, and we’re off, okay? I came to you, Julius, because I thought you might be a better kind of man than my father, but you were never really interested, were you? I’ve made a bit of a twat of myself, haven’t I?

“Listen, Julius, tomorrow morning I’ll be taking the boys and leaving, okay?”

“No, it’s not okay. Leaving to go where?” He looked angrily into her face. “Why are you doing this to me? To us?”

She pointed to the open window. “Please keep your voice down.”

“For crying out loud, you cannot tell me what to do.”

She watched as he threw himself back into the chair and kicked one leg over the other in what she guessed he probably thought was a study of calm repose. She looked closely at him and wanted to giggle, but she knew this would be mean. After all, she didn’t dislike him; she just felt sorry for him. Seriously, did he think she was barmy enough to pack up her life and her two kiddies and follow him halfway across the world? Julius, Julius, Julius, I’ve already taken charge of the situation and made my own plans.

“Let me ask you, Monica, do you know what love is? You have made a commitment.”

“You need somebody else, Julius.” She wanted to add: perhaps you should buy a dog.

He sprang to his full, lanky height so that he now hovered over her. She could see that he wanted to shout, but as she stared up into his knotted face, a slow ripening into resignation began to smooth out his features.

“For Christ’s sake, Monica. Really, where the hell do you think you’re going? What on earth is the matter with you?”

What’s the matter with me? Nothing, Julius, except I’m tired, poor, and worried that because I don’t know how to be myself, I don’t know how to be a mother to these two boys, who deserve a damn sight more than we’ve been able to give them. I’ve lost myself, you buffoon, which is pathetic, given how much effort I put into looking out for myself before I met you. You didn’t come banging and knocking and demanding; it was me, I came to you, and I now reckon that I shouldn’t have: that’s what’s the matter with me, Julius.

He moved across the room to the settee and sat down heavily.

“So, we’ve come to this. You’ve got nothing to say? No discussion, no nothing, and you’ve made up your mind, and tomorrow morning everybody will know that we’re a failure, is that what you want?”

“I made a mistake, Julius.” She paused. “Sometimes it occurs to me that maybe I’m not worth loving. I know I’ve not got the looks, and I’m hardly the outgoing, vivacious type.” Again she paused. “Anyhow, I’ve got to try and do what’s right for these children.”

“But I love you, Monica. Don’t you remember?”

Monica began to smile. “I’m sorry, Julius, but you never really loved me.”

“And you think running away with the children is going to help you? You know you’ve already run away once. You think you’re strong enough to do it again, this time with two children?”

*   *   *

The success of being promoted to deputy headmaster had encouraged Ronald Johnson to buy a brand-new semidetached home on an estate on the northernmost extremity of the town, out past the dejected jumble of half-empty warehouses and run-down factories. Once you’d gone through the last roundabout, and just before the start of the Outwood Road, you made a sharp left into a country lane that quickly opened up and revealed a maze of modern houses. They all were laid out like a child’s model playground, with neatly trimmed lawns and freshly planted trees that still needed to be supported by upright sticks and bits of tented string. Ronald Johnson’s house was situated at the end of the first cul-de-sac, and through the window he could see an ever-changing cast of birds flitting about the wooden feeder that he had struggled to assemble one Sunday morning. Spread out before him on the desk in the corner of his bedroom were various pieces of paper whose contents he was trying to collate and then précis into a short, but comprehensive, report of the school’s achievements, both educational and sporting, during the past academic year. Part of his increased responsibilities included making a short annual presentation to the board of governors and then passing around a copy of his report to each person present.

His wife knocked and opened the door at the same time, a habit that irritated him no end as the abrupt rudeness of the second gesture rendered the first pointless.

“I’m sorry to bother you, but I expect we ought to be making our way to the station.”

Ronald Johnson slowly replaced the cap on his fountain pen and carefully laid it down on top of the foolscap notepad.

He stood before the bathroom mirror and meticulously dusted the dandruff from the lapels of his jacket. He didn’t feel as though he had aged, but when she looked into his face, what would she see? A greying man who was still moving upwards in his chosen career, and with whom she would now agree that discipline and effort are the twin paths to success. Or would she see a stubborn man, with a solemn expression, who continued to refuse to accommodate her waywardness?

That afternoon, when he arrived home from school, he was surprised to see his wife sitting at the dining table with a letter open and visible next to a carefully slitted envelope. She looked up, as though in possession of news that might disturb him.

“Monica’s got a job in Leeds, and she’s coming back.”

He sat down and picked up the letter and briskly read it through for any references to him, but there were none. He had assumed that his wife and daughter maintained some pattern of contact, and while he didn’t necessarily approve, it at least afforded him the opportunity to conjecture that they both still enjoyed a relationship of sorts with their only child. But out of the blue, in his hands, there was the possibility of a potential reconciliation, and he immediately convinced himself that he ought to make an effort for the sake of his wife. But Monica’s timing was awful, for the governors’ report would be his first real test, and now his wife was rushing him before the pair of them had even had the opportunity to discuss the dilemma of where to put the two boys. He turned away from the bathroom mirror and decided that at some point on the drive to the city centre he would raise the problem, although he took it somewhat for granted that Ruth would have already anticipated the quandary and prepared the back bedroom to accommodate all three of them.

He saw them huddled together on the platform like evacuees, and all that was missing were their name tags. Monica looked like a big sister who had been placed in charge of a large suitcase and her two little brothers, but as he and his wife walked towards them, he could see the exhaustion on his daughter’s harried face. Ruth stood to one side while he quickly kissed Monica’s bloodless cheek and then attempted to muss the hair of the older child, before self-consciously touching the nose of the younger one with his forefinger in the manner of a drill sergeant inspecting for dust. His daughter looked tense, as though she had arrived for a prearranged Christmas holiday already burdened with a resigned sense of obligation. He could see that his wife was holding back the tears, and he prayed that she’d continue to do so; the last thing they needed was waterworks.

He sat alone in the bedroom hunched over his desk and continued to work on his governors’ report while giving mother and daughter time to reacquaint themselves. The drive home was stressful, and if it hadn’t been for his own valiant efforts to make small talk and try to fill in some of the events of the past six years, Monica, it seemed, would have been happy to pass the time in silence. Clearly she wasn’t ready to take any responsibility for her reckless choices, and her chippy behaviour implied that she still believed that there were no consequences for the decisions you made in your life. Why did the girl always seem so intent on making him feel uneasy by steadfastly refusing to share any thoughts? He put his pen to one side and remembered that it was only after his wife had assured him that she had spoken with Monica about the birds and the bees, and that he would therefore face no ticklish questions on this front, that he tried in earnest to engage with his daughter on a wide range of subjects, including music, but she was impossible to reach. And then, sometime after her sixteenth birthday, it became apparent to him that beneath her fierce intelligence and studious determination Monica possessed a wayward, slightly ethereal streak, and he started to fear for his child and wondered if he should put her down for counselling.