You Don't Have to be Good (21 page)

Sometimes he wondered what it would have been like to stay a while longer in the pale sheath of grief that Katharine lifted him from sixteen years ago. Sometimes, with difficulty, he remembered the tenderness of Sophie, her head on his chest or her fingers at his mouth. Sometimes he wondered about another life, Hong Kong, Singapore, New York, and the wife and the children he might have had there. But mostly – he persuaded the cat out of the cat flap with his foot and switched off the kitchen light – mostly he performed the tasks expected of him; and he gave the rear end of the cat, for it had hesitated halfway through the cat flap, a firm shove with the toe of his shoe.

F
RANK OPENED
the front door on Sunday morning to find Adrian standing there, just dangling there in that way that he did, his face white against the flames of his hair. He could have kissed him.

Adrian did kiss him. A cheese-and-onion-flavoured peck on the cheek. He said, ‘Hello, Frank. I think we know each other well enough now to do that.’

Frank stepped out into the front garden. He didn’t want Adrian seeing the house right now. It was in a state. He’d had a bit of a night.

‘What are you doing here?’

‘Mum and Dad have gone to the Salvation Army – they find missing people as well as playing carols at Christmas – and Laura’s making a YouTube Missing video.’ He squinted up at the sky, a gentle pearly grey with occasional flickers of sunlight.

Frank looked up the road. ‘I’m not sure that your parents want you here.’

‘Yes, but that’s not fair.’

Adrian was jumping, both feet together for maximum effort, up on to and down off the step. Ah yes, fairness, thought Frank. That rare and quaint concept beloved by children and eroded by adults and experience. Adrian told Frank, panting, and in rhythm to the jumps, that the move to London was postponed, that they weren’t leaving school after all, and that he thought Frank should come for a walk with him because he shouldn’t neglect his health given his age and circumstances.

‘Did anyone find Bea’s passport?’ panted Adrian.

Frank shook his head and confessed he had no idea where she kept things like that.

‘That’s good then. It means she’s gone away somewhere.’ Adrian stopped jumping and nudged Frank down the path and out of the gate. ‘Come on.’

‘Where to?’

‘A step to Stir-Bitch Fair?’

‘I beg your pardon?’

He followed Adrian down the street to the common and the river. A few feet before the cattle grid where the common began, Adrian took a sudden run at it and leapt across, mooing loudly. He waited for Frank on the other side and pointed to a National Waterways sign that said ‘Stourbridge Common’.

‘Stir-Bitch. It’s what Stourbridge used to be called. Site of the largest fair in Europe once upon a time. Isaac Newton came here. Everyone did.’ Adrian patted his man-bag, something that Frank was quite certain he would never wear himself, and added, ‘
The Pilgrim’s Progress
. It’s all in there.’

Stir-Bitch, thought Frank as he fell into step beside Adrian. Stir-Bitch indeed: Katharine, Wanda, Precious, Richard too probably. Even Bea, damn her, creating all this upheaval. And very little progress, when all was said and done.

‘They used to sell everything here,’ said Adrian casting an expansive arm around the grass and hedgerows. He flicked through the pages of the book he pulled from his bag until he found a place he had marked. ‘. . . titles, kingdoms, lusts, pleasures . . .’

Frank let the boy drone on. He felt a good deal stupider than he suspected he looked today and found the dank river smell that pervaded everything faintly nauseous. It was no doubt a fitting flavouring to the unfolding nightmare of his days.

‘. . . whores, bawds, blood, bodies, souls, silver, precious stones . . .’ continued Adrian, reading from the book.

The last time he had slept, proper easeful sleep, it seemed to him, was in the moments before the phone call from Precious five days ago. Other than the bloody police, only Lance had been near him these last few days.

‘Also, if you wanted juggling, cheats, fools, apes, knaves and rogues . . . then this was the place to come.’

Frank felt a momentary breathlessness looking at the path ahead and the sense of the past and the present and Adrian walking into the future without him and how Bea had loved this walk and all the times he had let her do it alone. He quickened his pace, afraid that Adrian would stop his recital and look at him. The boy was already taller than him, not so much a growth spurt as a fountain or geyser. It showed no signs of stopping, just as there seemed no limit to the space inside his head from where information and words and ideas seemed to gush. Physics, chemistry, history, the stars – everything, even literature now, for heaven’s sake, Adrian was overtaking him, while Frank felt he himself wasn’t learning anything new. Frank rubbed his head and nodded. He straightened his spine and tried to breathe. It was a daily struggle to hang on to what he had in there already.

‘And not forgetting thefts, murders, adulteries, false-swearers . . . Are you all right, Frank?’

They were opposite the mustard-coloured Penny Ferry pub, which stood across the river. Ahead of them were ditches and patches of brambles and hawthorn. Scruffy piebald ponies dotted distant fields.

‘We should go back.’ Frank was abrupt. He suddenly felt uneasy being out here with Katharine’s son. ‘Where do your parents think you are?’

‘Oh, I’ve gone to buy trainers. These ones hurt my feet.’

A train flew along the track that bordered the far meadow, clanging across the old ironwork bridge up ahead. A chill breeze cut through his jumper and the sky had a bruised and purplish look. Frank pulled at the thin beige machine knit. Today’s jumpers were no good for keeping out the wind. What he needed was a home-knitted one. Bea had laughed with him at the Fair Isle tank-top Margaret knitted him that first Christmas. Both were reminded of the jumpers of childhood, the fierceness of knitted care in cable and moss stitch, the way they twisted and rucked at throats and underarms, the purl and the plain, the drop one and knit one. God knows where that tank-top was now. It had vanished somewhere down the years. He remembered it had beautiful colours and shivered. It was nearly November and he ought to have worn his coat. Bea hated the winter. He was fairly sure that what Bea liked best was the light and the sun. He stopped and looked at Adrian, who wore no coat and no jacket, just a T-shirt.

‘Bunyan,’ said Adrian, tapping his book.

Frank doubted the boy had a bunion, at his age, but who knew what went on inside the footwear of the youth of today?

‘John Bunyan. He wrote
A Step to Stir-Bitch Fair
.’

Adrian passed Frank the book and stared hard at a cyclist approaching from the far side of the common. He thought of the hundreds of fairs this common had seen, held his breath and looked hard to eliminate the cyclist, the newly planted trees, the women with buggies and dogs. He tried to conjure the noise and the smell and the crush of people in 1665, tried to pick out the curling grey hair and long nose of Isaac Newton, and wondered whether if he could just find the spot, the very exact spot, where Newton bought the prism he used to show that light is made up of many colours, then—

‘Perhaps we should go back,’ said Frank. He didn’t like it here, the interminable, flat horizon. It felt hopeless.

They were at a small footbridge that crossed the ditch into Ditton Meadows. The ditch was choked with brambles where shrivelled blackberries still clung to some of the stems. Something scuttled in the dense, dying undergrowth. Adrian hopped across the bridge.

‘Let’s go on to Fleam Dyke. Bea liked it there,’ he called back across his shoulder. ‘And then we have to buy my trainers.’

K
ATHARINE HURRIED
through the underground car park, unlocked her car from twenty paces, threw in her briefcase, coat and handbag, slammed the door and started the engine, reversing at speed into the path of an oncoming Mercedes, which braked hard, tyres squealing and horn blaring. Seatbelt warning light bonging, Katharine threw the car into drive and went forward into the parking space again. Cursing, she checked the rearview mirror, saw the coast was clear and put her foot on the accelerator. The car leapt and surged forward, hitting the car parked ahead of it with a sickening force and the crash and splinter of breaking glass. Stunned by the violence, for a moment Katharine did nothing. Then she got out and looked about her. No one was around. She went to the front of the car and was surprised to find not a scratch on her machine; the cow bars had absorbed the impact. Glass crunched underfoot and her eyes skimmed the damage to the Daimler in front of her. The headlight had gone for sure; perhaps there was damage to the bonnet too, it was hard to tell in the gloom. She wavered for a moment, wondering whether she should leave a note on the windscreen with her number, but a Daimler, for God’s sake: the cost was likely to be wildly out of proportion to the damage. By the time she had told herself it was akin to leaving a blank cheque on the windscreen of a total stranger, she was back in the car and in search of the exit.

She drove in circles, up and down the narrow, low-ceilinged concrete vault, eventually coming to a ramp that pitched down sharply at a T-junction. EXIT LEFT. Terror reared up in her and she braked violently. A few feet in front of her the concrete floor vanished in an abruptly sheer drop into darkness, like the surface of an underground lake. She gripped the steering wheel and leaned forward, heart hammering at her ribcage. What she was looking at was the glassy surface of water that had flooded and filled the dip between two ramps. She glanced up. The shallow water was reflecting the angles of the concrete roof and had given the illusion of a drop. Reluctantly, she inched the car forwards, sitting high up in the seat, half expecting the lurch and fall into darkness.

Shaken, Katharine drove nervously, the world suddenly a fearful and unfamiliar place where disaster waited to ambush her at every turn. And now, in addition to the Bea-shaped void that obscured her vision, she was aware of a lumpen figure in yellow, herself in pigtails aged eleven, first in the queue to go out to play, turning her back on Bea sitting alone in the dinner hall, hands on her head before an uneaten plate of fish and beetroot. She checked the mirror and accelerated, an ugly sense of her own badness lurking at the back of her head. She pressed the central locking, checked her speed and relaxed into the leather embrace of the driving seat. Career, Children, House, John Lewis, Missing Sister, Mother, Hastings. She could handle this.

It was Monday morning. She had got up early, long before the children or Richard, and had driven to London to get things in order at the hospital before dashing into John Lewis for curtains, carpets, sofas, wardrobes for their new house. Now she was en route to Hastings, where she would find Bea before returning to Cambridge late that night. The drive to Hastings could be done in just over two hours if she pushed it and was lucky with the traffic. At least it could last time she went, which was a few years ago, because, really, all four of them traipsing down to Hastings for the day was rather impractical when it came down to it. It worked much better when her mother came up and stayed with them. And anyway, Bea visited once a month because Bea had the time.

Katharine found herself a few feet from the bumper of a Renault that didn’t understand that the middle lane was not for cruising at sixty-five; it was for overtaking. She flashed her lights and pulled out, glaring at the driver dithering at the wheel of the other car. The Salvation Army woman was full of statistics. She said that the average age of persons sought was forty-eight years; that the department’s success rate was eighty-five per cent, which was about ten reunions a day; and that a record reunion took place in 1999 between sisters who had not seen each other for eighty-three years. Katharine jiggled her shoulders and tried to relax her jaw. How people could be as careless as that was beyond her, frankly, but still, these numbers reassured her. It was going to be all right. The Salvation Army were on the case and prayers were being said for Bea. Yes, prayers! Bea would probably laugh at that and it had made Katharine feel a bit odd, but Richard was all for it. It always amused her to be reminded of Richard’s faith. She thought of it in the same way as his school motto that he was so fond of quoting. Arcane and completely irrelevant. Still, they had quite liked Major Whatever-her-name-was. At least she had until they got up to leave, when the question of a fee for the Family Tracing Service was mentioned and then the suggestion about donations. It was absurd in her opinion, although of course Richard went overboard and wrote out a cheque, then a monthly tax-free pledge for God knows how much. And she hadn’t liked the last thing the Major had said to her as they left. ‘Please remember,’ she said, ‘that although we have an eighty-five per cent success rate, it’s not always a happy ending.’ Patronising, thought Katharine. That was the trouble with religion.

And Missing People, the other organisation devoted to the thousands of the lost, were on the case too. From what she could tell from their website and from Hazel, the woman she had spoken to on the phone, they seemed to have all kinds of contacts and means of obtaining information that even the police didn’t have. The police, it turned out, could not even get information from a GP if the GP chose not to give it. But Hazel was very warm and reassuring. In all likelihood Bea had simply done a runner, would at some point pitch up in Hastings, and after a chat and a cup of tea and a bit of chivvying along would come back to Cambridge and they could all get on with their lives happily as before.

Katharine imagined a sisterly reunion as she drove. The door would be opened by her mother, a look of mild surprise on her face. In the kitchen, she would see the expanse of sea through the window, moiled and grey, the photos on the windowledge: her parents’ wedding, her own wedding to Richard, and a faded photo of the two of them with their father on the cliffs at Fairlight, the wind snatching at their hair and skirts. And round the corner, sitting at the scratched Formica table, would be Bea, her hand in her hair, that rueful look on her face. The kitchen would smell of pie and tea and she would go over and hug her and say, ‘Oh, Bea.’ No need for questions or explanations.