You Don't Have to be Good (20 page)

‘Pardon?’ His father looked at him, glass half raised to his mouth.

‘Do you want another drink?’ said Frank, pushing away his half-finished food.

Lance wiped his mouth and shook his head. ‘I wouldn’t mind some of those chips, though.’ He pulled Frank’s plate towards him. ‘Whatever you’ve done, son, go and make it up with her. A man’s no good on his own. A man needs a woman around the place. Do you know, not a day goes by when I don’t miss your mother.’ Lance was getting teary. Frank glared at the barman. ‘A man’s no good on his own and that’s a fact. I always thought I would find someone else because I know that’s what your mother would have wanted, but when it came down to it I just didn’t have the heart . . .’

Frank closed his eyes and stopped listening. A wave of nausea crept over him, which could have been the eggs and could have been the thought of Bea with her old flame, Patrick. Patrick the Prick, as Frank liked to call him. He had never been entirely sure that it was over between them; after all, they worked in the same building. He had met Patrick once at one of Bea’s work do’s. It was the first and the last such event that he attended. She had introduced them. Patrick was tall and gangly, with an effeminate taste in shirts. He had stooped elaborately to shake Frank’s hand, pumped his arm up and down and asked how the writing was going. Needless to say, by the time Frank composed a reply to this, someone else had swooped over to request the Chief Executive’s attention.

‘What’s the betting she’ll turn up at the weekend, Frank, cheerful as you like, telling you she’s been to see a friend down Hastings way or some such?’

Frank remembered Katharine had told him she was going to look in Hastings. Katharine had taken over, of course. Barging in as soon as she got the phone call. He was surprised she’d found the time, and she didn’t have the kids with her, which was a rarity in itself. Got on the phone to Bea’s mother. Got the poor woman all worked up and then told her not to worry. Typical. That’s a bedside manner for you. Must be scary coming round from an operation and finding Katharine by your bed with a clipboard, equine face all angles and bone, blood counts and bleeds and secondary spreads, no nonsense, telling you like it is through twisted teeth . . .

Lance rose, getting unsteadily to his feet. He needed the toilet. Frank got up and helped to shuffle him in. Then he waited and shuffled him out again.

Lance said, ‘Shall we take a wander then? See whether they’re done yet?’

‘I’ll go, Dad. You stay here.’

But Lance would not sit down. He gripped Frank’s arm. ‘What do I want sitting in here all on me tod?’

There was no way they could walk back. Frank looked over to the barman.

‘Can you call us a cab? It’s my dad. He’s not been himself lately.’

F
RANK FELT
it before he saw it. The front door had a melancholy look and the hairs rose on the back of his neck. Inside, the hallway smelt of polythene and dust. Lance hovered on the doormat saying, ‘Have they gone, then?’ while Frank looked tentatively in at the downstairs rooms. Every object, all Bea’s plates and jugs and bowls and figurines, had been taken from its place and put back awry; shelves gaped empty or half stacked with their contents the wrong way round; cupboard doors hung open and the computer was gone. CD cases were open and strewn across the floor; furniture was moved from the walls; rugs and carpets had been dragged askew and the floorboards bore the marks of a crowbar and hammer.

Feeling old and ashamed, Frank climbed the stairs. In the bedroom, in the children’s room, even in the bathroom, the same wreckage. He sank on to their double bed and tried to draw breath. Something in here was odd though, surely. He looked about him, at the carelessly repacked plastic bags, the disturbed drawers and wardrobe, at the dust balls exposed where the bed was dragged away from the wall. Then he saw them. Her egg cups lined up, precisely spaced as always, apparently untouched and watching him in silent reproach. He heard Lance calling from the kitchen.

Outside, they stood in the sand and cement where the patio had been and stared at the ruin of her garden. The lawn looked like a vandalised graveyard with its split turf, dug pits and dislodged paving stones. Clumps of ivy had been ripped up and piled up. A thrush hopped in the fresh soil, stabbing at grubs and worms. Someone had tried to replant her magnolia sapling but it leaned half in and half out of the soil, delicate twigs already drooping. Her shrubs were uprooted and the border plants, which she had begun to carefully prune and mulch to protect them from frost, lay with their roots and tubers exposed. Tender? Was that what she called them, the ones that needed covering for the winter? Those dark red ones with tips like asparagus that she wrapped in black plastic and bound with twine? He heard Lance say he needed a sit-down, he saw the drenched corpse of the squirrel still in its cage and he wondered what Adrian had been told. Abruptly he turned and marched into the kitchen.

Lance sat at the kitchen table, hands spread out before him.

‘Come on, Dad,’ Frank said, voice gruff as he slopped water over a tea bag in a mug. ‘Don’t start. It’s routine police semi-boiled procedural stuff.’

‘I don’t know about that, son.’

‘Here, drink this.’

Lance looked dubiously at the cup filled to the brim with grey liquid. He shook his head.

‘I think I need a lie-down, Frank. It’s the beer.’

‘Come on, Dad.’ Frank took the old man’s arm in a clumsy gesture of tenderness. ‘You can kip on the couch downstairs.’

W
HEN
FRANK
woke up a few hours later, he went down to the kitchen to find Wanda snapping on a pair of yellow rubber gloves. She turned on the tap so that water gushed at full force, spraying the tiles and plate rack. She squeezed washing-up liquid into the bowl, spun the tap to off and said, ‘We’ll soon have this place back the way it was. Then when Bea gets back, it will look lovely.’

Frank wondered whether she had misunderstood. ‘Bea has disappeared, Wanda.’

She tossed a laugh up at the ceiling and he wanted to hit her. ‘She will be back. It’s Saturday afternoon. Next Wednesday is her mother’s birthday. She wouldn’t miss that.’

‘How the hell do you know that?’ The woman had no boundaries whatsoever.

‘She’s having a break. And I don’t blame her. At least now I will get a chance to clean that front room of yours!’

He watched her hoist the vacuum cleaner out of the broom cupboard and lift a bucket of sprays and dusters with her other hand. She looked at the mess they had made of Bea’s ceramics and tutted to herself. Piles of painted china littered the floor and kitchen table. Under the rocking chair lay the family of Portuguese donkeys in white clay. One had lost its head, others their legs.

‘They are bastards to do this,’ announced Wanda quietly.

‘You’d better go,’ he told her gruffly, hoping that she wouldn’t leave without clearing up. There was something improper in her being here, even he could see that. He didn’t want her here if the police came sniffing round again. Did the police interview cleaners in such cases? he wondered. Somehow it seemed unlikely.

‘Don’t be ridiculous!’ Wanda strode out into the hall, banging the bucket as she did so. ‘What if she comes back and it’s like this? She’ll run away again.’

With Lance in the front room and Wanda roaming the house, Frank wanted very much to be alone; or rather he wanted to be here without Wanda so as to be able to think clearly about being here without Bea.

‘Oh my G-o-d,’ sang Wanda. ‘What have they done to her garden?’

Frank ignored her and went into the front room, where he sat on the edge of the couch next to Lance’s motionless form. He winced at the sight of Chekhov with a pair of Wanda’s tights tied like a bandanna round his head. Some joker from CID, no doubt. He noticed his camera on the coffee table, the memory card removed. Well, it wasn’t illegal to take photographs of naked women if you were a photographer, was it? He got up and peered at the bookcase, where a stack of records still lay on the shelf. Perhaps the search had been a rushed job, a careless job, designed to intimidate more than anything else. He looked inside the sleeve of
Tubular Bells
. The photos of Wanda were still there. It wouldn’t do for the police to find these. That would make everything so much more complicated.

He lifted out the photographs, a cool handful of slippery gloss. There was Wanda face down across the couch, Wanda astride the chair, Wanda bent backwards over the coffee table. One by one he held them over the metal waste-paper bin and snapped a lighter at their corner. He watched the jaundiced flame climb up each print, watched it darken, flare and curl before dropping it, a stinking, sooty mass, into the bin.

‘Whatever are you doing, Frank?’ asked a voice from the duvet.

‘I am disabling one of Adrian’s pyrotechnic devices,’ said Frank, impressed, as always at his ability to dissemble.

‘Adrian?’ Lance poked his face out above the duvet. ‘Is he here?’

Frank picked up the chess box and began laying out the pieces.

‘I’ll give you a game,’ said Lance.

Frank nodded and wondered whether he would see Adrian again.

‘Okay, Dad, yes. That’d be nice.’

W
HEN
A
DRIAN
opened his bedroom door late that Saturday night, he found Laura sitting on the top step, knees drawn up to her chin, head cocked in the direction of the kitchen door. She slid him a look as he sat silently on the step below her and pressed his forehead against the banisters. The voices of their parents drifted up towards them, rising and falling as they moved about the kitchen. Laura sniffed the air. Cigarette smoke lingered high up near the ceiling. Smoking was taboo in their house, but on rare occasions, in that extraordinary way that only parents are allowed, Katharine broke her own law. Distress signals was how Adrian thought of his mother’s smoking transgressions. The sour, hopeless scent of burnt tobacco in the house meant that things were slipping beyond the manageable.

Adrian felt Laura’s eyes on the side of his head and he looked up at her. She had the schoolgirl’s demonic ability to stare unblinking at a foe until they withered or turned to stone. He opened his mouth to speak, to say that it didn’t look like they were going to new schools on Monday after all, but she intensified her stare and his words died on his tongue. Katharine’s voice, jangled with wine and worry, reached them clearly.

‘I’m not sure I want the children alone with that man right now, Richard.’

The chair creaked and they heard the cat meow once.

‘Well that seems rather harsh in the circumstances, darling. He could have them tomorrow while we go to Hastings.’

‘No, I’ll go on Monday while they’re at school. We do not need to bring Frank into this.’

They heard a cigarette packet flipped open, then the flare of a match. A chair was pushed back suddenly as she got to her feet. Both children prepared themselves for flight, but the doorway remained empty except for the cat, which came and sat and looked up at them.

‘But the man must be in torment.’ Their father’s voice again.

‘Would you
please
stop being so damned reasonable!’ Something clattered on the table. ‘Every time I ring Frank they’ve dug up his garden or they’ve searched his house again. What do you think they’re looking for? Buried treasure?’

‘But they’ve also searched the river and the common. They’re just doing their job.’

They heard the clink of a bottle and the slide of a glass across the table. Laura put her lips to her knees and licked. Her mother would smell rank and stale in the morning and she would have a mood to match. Their father’s voice burred indistinctly. They heard ‘police procedure’ and ‘leave no stone unturned’, which prompted a ‘Christ, Richard!’

The cat meowed up at them.

‘If they thought he was a suspect they would arrest him, Katharine.
Do
be reasonable.’

Adrian winced and looked down at his toes. They waited for the explosion.

‘For
fuck’s
sake!’ Katharine’s voice was shredded with alcohol and fear. The cat scuttled down the hall and into the front room. Something between a grimace and a smile visited Laura’s face and she clasped her hands at her chin, curling in on herself. There were no more words, but they heard their father get to his feet. He would be holding her now, pressing her head to his chest.

His voice was gentle. ‘We have to keep things in perspective. For all his faults, Frank really does not have it in him to . . .’

Katharine was crying now and her words were gulped and swallowed like a child’s. Laura started to stand. She punched Adrian hard between the shoulder blades with her fist. He didn’t respond.

‘I mean, think about it, darling, the man’s lost his wife . . .’

The chair scraped again and fell with a clatter to the floor.

‘Well he should have taken more care of her!’

‘Katharine!’

But she was already below them in the hall, bumping against the wall, footsteps heavy and uneven.

Both children scrambled up and out of sight before she reached the bottom of the stairs, but not before Richard came to the doorway, looked up and spotted their feet darting like startled fish round the turn on the landing. He sighed and looked back at the debris on the kitchen table.
In pectore robur
. He collected up their wine glasses, the ashtray, Katharine’s cigarette packet and matches. He wiped down the tabletop and rinsed the glasses out in the sink. He heard Katharine blundering into furniture and doors above his head. He hesitated by the dining-room window and heard, but could not see, the branches of the trees tossing in the strong October winds. One of these days a tree was going to come crashing down. He looked up at the sky for a moon, but there was no trace of one tonight.