The Stranger's Child (31 page)

The room was unexpectedly dark, the heavy curtains almost closed, and he moved forward not really listening to the clock but with a sense that the spaces between its deep ticks were stretching, as if it was thinking of stopping. The stripe of light across the red carpet made the shadow even deeper, for the first few seconds. Wilfrid knew his father had headaches in the morning, and avoided the light, and this sent another wave of despairing apology over him. At the same time the one line of light showed up ridges and knots in the carpet, which itself had the half-strangeness of something in a dream – in a house where he knew all the carpets as territories, castles, jumping squares, there was this other room with a carpet he had never jumped on. For a long time they seemed not to see him, and as he stepped forward it was as if he still had a chance to step back – the first they would know of his presence would be the click of the door behind him. Nanny was turned away from him, lying with her legs up on the settee, and watching his father, on the other side of the band of light, by the fireplace. His father was still in his dressing-gown, and with his sword in his hand looked like a knight. The fender here was a castle, with brass battlements, and on the black hearthstone beyond it there was a wild heap of smashed plates – other curved splinters of china were scattered across the carpet too. Again Wilfrid took in the pattern, they were the thick French plates with a cockerel on them, the wedding present they all said was hideous and ghastly. Nanny heard him, and glanced round, she half sat up and hugged a cushion to her. ‘Captain,’ she said.

‘What is it?’ said his father, turning to look at him, frowning, not angrily, exactly, but as if trying to make something out. He laid the sword down on the mantelpiece.

And Wilfrid knew he couldn’t say. He stepped further into the light. He hoped his own blotchy cheeks and sniffy nose were proof that something serious had happened, but there was no question of saying what. He said, ‘Oh, Daddy, I’ve just seen . . . Mrs Cow.’

‘Oh, yes,’ said his father, at once visibly disappointed.

‘I think she’s fallen over.’

His father tutted and went to stand beside his desk, switched on the lamp, peered at some papers as if already getting on with something important. His hair, normally black and shiny, stood up at one side like a wing. Nanny seemed entirely uninterested; she had stood up, straightened her skirt, shifted the cushions on the settee to find her handbag. Without looking at him, Dudley said, ‘And have you told her to get up?’

‘No, Daddy,’ said Wilfrid, feeling another wail rising in his chest at his father’s perversity. He said, ‘She can’t get up, you see, as a matter of fact.’

‘Broken both her legs, has she?’

Wilfrid shook his head, but couldn’t say more, for fear of crying, which his father couldn’t stand.

‘I wonder if I should look, Sir Dudley?’ said Nanny, with odd reluctance, patting her hair. It was her day off, anyway: she probably didn’t want to be involved. Slowly, with the playful menace he brought to telling a story, Dudley turned his head, and stared at Wilfrid.

‘I wonder if what you’re trying to tell me, Wilfrid,’ he said, ‘is that Frau Kalbeck is dead?’

‘Yes, Daddy, she is!’ said Wilfrid, and in the relief of it he was very nearly grinning at just the same moment the saved-up tears poured out of him again.

‘Of course she should never have come here,’ said his father, still maddeningly unexcited, but no longer blaming Wilfrid himself, it seemed. He looked sharply at Nanny. ‘Upsetting my son like this.’ And then he gave a surprising laugh. ‘Well, it’s taught her a lesson, what? She won’t be coming here again.’

Nanny stood behind Wilfrid, and laid her hands hesitantly on his shoulders. ‘Now, don’t cry, there’s a good boy,’ she said. He struggled to obey her, as he wanted to, for a moment, but when he thought of the dead woman’s face again, and her hand moving by itself, it was all beyond him and over him like a wave.

‘Run along to Wilkes’s room and telephone Dr Wyatt, would you, Nanny?’ said his father.

‘At once, Sir Dudley,’ said Nanny. Wilfrid of course would go with her, but she turned uncertainly at the door, and his father nodded and said,

‘You stay here, old boy.’

So Wilfrid went to his father, and was pulled experimentally for a second or two against the heavy strange-scented skirts of the brocade dressing-gown. It was the touch of privilege, a feel of the luxurious concessions allowed when something awful had happened, and in the interesting surprise of it he at once stopped crying. Then they went together, snapping odd sharp fragments of china underfoot, to the window, and each drew back a curtain. Nothing was said about the dinner service; and his father already had the mischievous preoccupied look that sometimes announced a treat, an idea that had just surprised him and demanded to be shared. It was like the mad glint, but usually nicer. Staring into the garden, fixing his eye so hard on something that Wilfrid thought for a moment it must be the source of his amusement, he started to talk, too quietly and rapidly at first for him to follow – ‘The body was found – it lay on the ground – without a sound’ –

‘Oh, Skeleton, Daddy,’ he said and his father grinned tolerantly.

‘ – old fat Mrs Cow – with her face like a sow – you won’t hear from her now’ – he turned and walked excitedly round the room, Wilfrid had a distracted sense of how he really never noticed his father’s limp – ‘with her Wagner and Liszt – and her hair in a twist – and always pissed – like a terrible Hun – with a twelve-bore gun – what? – ’

‘Yes, Daddy . . .’

‘ – smelly old Valkyrie – rosewater talc-ery – came down to Corley – and said she was poorly – took it quite sorely . . .’ A little flick of spit from his father’s mouth danced in the light as he turned. Wilfrid couldn’t follow or understand a lot of the words themselves, but the joy of improvisation caught at him as well as the sense of horror that his father’s poems always challenged you not to feel. He had got to the door and flung it open – ‘And that, young man,’ he said, ‘is more than I’ve written of my book for the past six months.’

‘Really, Daddy?’ said Wilfrid, unable to decide from his father’s tone if this was a cause for celebration or despair.

THREE

At five o’clock, when they were all getting their things, Miss Cobb, the Manager’s secretary, made a rare appearance in the staff-room. ‘Oh, Mr Bryant,’ she said, ‘with Miss Carter away, I wonder if you would walk with Mr Keeping.’

‘Oh,’ said Paul, glancing round at the others, ‘I don’t know . . .’ In his mind he was already halfway home, in the high summer evening.

‘I’ll do it,’ said Heather Jones.

‘Mr Keeping did ask for Mr Bryant,’ said Miss Cobb. ‘He likes to get to know the new staff.’

‘Well, of course I will, in that case,’ said Paul, blushing, with no idea, really, what he was being asked.

‘I’ll tell Mr Keeping. In five minutes, in the Public Space? Thank you so much . . .’ – and Miss Cobb withdrew, with her sad flinch of a smile.

In a week he had got to know all their names, which were still coloured and almost physical for him, made distinct by their newness and the need to tell them apart. Heather Jones and Hannah Gearing; Jack Reeves, the chief cashier; Geoff Viner, the second cashier, a bit of a looker; Susie Carter, a good-natured chatterbox, who was off today, attending a funeral in Newbury. Her empty chair and shrouded typewriter had quietened the office behind him. He slid his thermos into his briefcase and said quietly to Heather, ‘What does Susie do with Mr Keeping exactly?’

Heather seemed to think for a moment. ‘Oh she just walks home with him.’

Hannah, with her more maternal note, said, ‘Mr Keeping likes someone to keep him company. Normally Susie goes because she lives up past the church. It’s a nice little walk, really – it’ll only take you five minutes.’

‘Just don’t say, “How are you, Keeping?” ’ said June Underwood.

‘I won’t,’ said Paul, to whom the whole business sounded odd and euphemistic. From what he had seen of him, Mr Keeping was a cool and formal sort of man, with a sarcastic streak, but he’d noticed the staff took a strangely protective attitude to him. If they’d ever thought it odd for a middle-aged man to need walking home, they treated it now as the normal thing. He said, ‘Isn’t the Manager meant to live over the bank?’ He’d seen upstairs, where the sitting-room of the bank house was lined with filing-cabinets and the bedrooms were stacked with old desks and junk.

‘Well, this one doesn’t,’ said Jack Reeves, who’d just got his pipe going, the coarse dry smoke like a sign of his authority.

Geoff Viner, taming his hair with a comb and the flat of his hand, said, ‘I assume you don’t know Mrs Keeping.’

‘Oh, you know her, Geoffrey, do you!’ said June, and a bit of a laugh went round the room.

Jack Reeves said, ‘I assure you Mrs Keeping has no intention of living over the shop.’

‘I’d hardly call the Midland Bank a shop,’ said Heather.

‘Her words, not mine,’ said Jack.

‘Well, she’s got the boys to think of too,’ said Hannah. ‘They need a proper garden to run around in.’

‘What children have they got?’ said Paul.

‘Well, I say boys . . . John’s at college, isn’t he.’

‘John, the elder boy, is at Durham University’ – Jack Reeves frowned over his pipe, out of his greater intimacy with the Manager. ‘Julian is in the Sixth Form at Oundle School, and doing very well, I believe.’ He sucked and nodded and gazed over their heads. ‘They talk of Oxford’ – and he went out, leaving them half a roomful of smoke.

In the Gents Paul washed the money smell, copper and nickel and grubby paper, from his hands. The geyser rumbled. Grey-black suds speckled the basin. He was bothered about the imminent walk, but it was an opportunity, as his mother would say, and it looked a little easier if the Keepings had sons, one of them about Paul’s own age. John and Julian: he saw them, seductive images spun from nothing; already they were showing him around their large garden. He smiled narrowly at himself in the mirror, turning a little to left and right: he had a long nose, the ‘Bryant nose’, his mother said, disclaiming it; his hair was cut horribly short for the new job, and the strip light, which spared nothing, brought out its odd coppery sheen and the stipple of spots across his forehead. Then he started grinning, to see what that looked like, but immediately Geoff came in behind him and went to the urinal; it was a double one, on a raised step, and Paul looked furtively at Geoff’s back in the mirror.

‘No, the thing about the boss, young Paul,’ Geoff said, with a quick glance over his shoulder, ‘is he had a very bad war.’

‘Oh, did he, right . . .’ said Paul, busying himself with the taps and then with the damp curtain of roller towel.

‘Prisoner of war,’ said Geoff. ‘He never talks about it, so for god’s sake don’t mention it.’

‘Well, I wouldn’t, would I,’ said Paul, ‘obviously.’

Geoff finished, jiggled, zipped up his wonderfully tight fly, and came over to the basins, where he looked at himself in the mirror with no sign of the dissatisfaction Paul had felt. He jutted his jaw, and turned his head both ways with a stroking hand. His roundish, full-lipped face was sharpened up by a pair of handsome sideburns, shaved forward at the bottom into dark points. ‘Sorry to say,’ he said, ‘he’s a bit of a nervous wreck. Pathetic, really. He ought to have a much bigger branch than this. Brilliant brain, they say, but can’t take the strain. Feels he can’t go anywhere alone. There’s a word for it . . .’

‘Yes. Agoraphobia?’

‘That’s it. Hence the girls walking him home.’ He ran the hot tap and the geyser flared up again. ‘At least he says that’s the reason . . .’ Paul found he was looking at him in the mirror, one eyebrow raised, and he sniggered and coloured and looked down. He wasn’t nearly ready to joke about the other staff. He knew he had picked up on certain atmospheres between them, thought he glimpsed little histories; but any sort of sexual joke seemed to threaten him with exposure too. He knew he couldn’t bring them off. Geoff came up close to him to use the towel; he had a sharp five o’clock smell, smoke, bri-nylon and faded aftershave. ‘Well, mustn’t keep My Fair Lady waiting,’ he said. He was walking out with a girl from the National Provincial, the rival bank across the square, a fact which the girls at the Midland seemed to think a bit off.

When Paul got back into the Public Space Mr Keeping was just coming out of the Manager’s office. He held a light raincoat folded over his arm, and carried a dark brown trilby. Paul scanned him nervously for signs of his weakness, his wartime trauma. The dominant impression, of course, was his baldness, the great square blank of brow the home and symbol of that brilliant brain. Below it his features seemed rather small and provisional. He had dry, oddly rimless lips, and his smiles drew the corners of his mouth down with a confusing suggestion of distaste. When they were outside he stayed on the step to hear the successive muffled shocks of the door being locked and bolted from within. Then he settled his hat, with a forward tilt, low on his brows. At once he had a charming and even mischievous look. His guarded grey eyes, in the shadow of the brim, now seemed almost playful. And with a little bow, a little questioning hesitation – it was almost as though he expected Paul to take his arm – they set off up the broad slope of the marketplace, Paul instead earnestly gripping his briefcase, while Mr Keeping, with his raincoat over his arm, had the air of a mildly curious visitor to the town.