You Don't Have to be Good (3 page)

‘Well, that’s all right then.’ Nike was waving goodbye and moving down the path at a slow jog.

‘Yes, goodbye!’ called Bea, waving. ‘And thank you for . . .’

But she was gone, head bobbing, narrow, upright body swaying into the light, covering the length of a child with each easy stride, putting distance between herself and the middle-aged river woman who had climbed out of the water and on to the bank.

F
RANK MARCHED
into the kitchen and put the phone on its charger. Coffee spluttered on the stove and the boiler whumped into life. A blast had killed sixty-four in Baghdad and Frank despaired at Bea’s flagrant waste where the hot-water timer was concerned. It was half past five. Who was going to be having a bath at this hour?
The fighting in Afghanistan is extraordinarily intense. The battles are close and personal and hand-to-hand. Unless more troops—
Frank said, ‘Bloody hell,’ and silenced the radio with a stab of his finger. Close and personal. He knew what that meant. That meant bayonets. What in God’s name were they doing bayoneting the enemy in the desert in the twenty-first century?

He went to the foot of the stairs and shouted up at Laura and her friends. He knew they were in because he could hear the thudding of their moronic music through the ceiling. Earlier he had heard their shrieks and thumps.

Here he was, he thought, staring up at the landing, herding teenagers at the age of fifty, and not a play or a script sold in five long years. The stairs did their mean and narrow rodent yawn back down at him, silent witness to the night before. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. It was supposed to be a wide and sweeping staircase in marble and mahogany. It was supposed to be a glorious gleaming glide from one pinnacle of literary achievement to the next.

‘Laura, I’m going to fetch your aunt!’ he bellowed, climbing halfway up, where he was startled to find his niece’s head hanging upside down in the gloom over the landing banister. Her hair dangled, and her mouth split into a lunatic grin. Her tongue, bright purple from some toxic confection she had been drinking, protruded from between stained and haphazard teeth.

‘Cool.’

Frank sighed. ‘Laura, you should probably come with me.’ He hesitated, and saw the others lurking and listening. ‘Don’t your friends have to go home now?’

‘Huh?’ Laura braced herself on the bottom of the banisters and raised her lower body up in the air until she was perpendicular. Her yellow top fell over her head. Her hair fanned. Frank looked away.

‘Laura, get down. You’ll have an accident like your aunt.’

‘Can my friends come, Frank? Please? They’re allowed.’

Laura’s friends called, ‘Hello, Noddy!’ and collapsed on to the carpet in hysterics. Laura rolled on top of Rachel and Chanel thumped Rachel’s backside hard with a cushion. Laura said, ‘We’re doing homework.’

‘Come on, Bea’s stuck in the river.’ Frank turned resolutely around and went downstairs shouting for Adrian and thinking it was absolutely preposterous that he should be left in charge of all these damned children. Here he was, trying to do the hardest thing, to write, to create a work of genius, and yet more often than not he spent half his day hanging about looking after other people’s offspring. Frank took in a deep breath of righteous indignation. Adrian and Laura weren’t even his flesh and blood, they belonged to Bea’s sister, Katharine. The others upstairs, whatever their names were, well heaven knows who they belonged to. Frank let out a heartfelt sigh. Where the hell were the mothers, for God’s sake?

‘Wait for us!’ called Laura.

The girls came downstairs in every possible way but normally. He wondered whether their school, Colgate Community College, might ever consider it sensible to teach them some Trollope or Rachmaninov every once in a while, something they
didn’t
know about, instead of all this Media Studies and Sex and Relationships nonsense. Probably not. Education was rendering the younger generation quite incapable of serious thought. Of course, if grammar schools existed such as the one that rescued him from a lower-middle-class background of cultural and intellectual poverty, things might be different. He despaired sometimes, he really did.

Adrian nudged him and said, ‘Er,’ looking pointedly at Frank’s head.

‘Yes, Adrian? Any chance of some language, child? You know,
words
, a phrase? Push the boat out perhaps and try a whole sentence? Hmm?’

‘The nodding,’ murmured Adrian. ‘You’re doing it again.’

The girls pushed each other into the coat pegs and ran back upstairs to the bathroom. Then there were several minutes of footwear confusion, followed by a tedious conversation in which Frank said, ‘You’re not going out like that, are you?’ and they said, ‘Like what?’ before they finally all spilled out into the front garden.

A hooded boy appeared from nowhere on a bicycle and accompanied them down the street, keeping his front wheel rampant the whole way and hawking up phlegm whenever the conversation, such as it was, dried up. Rachel and Chanel swooped and swerved round him while Laura trotted on the pavement saying, ‘Oh shame, man’ and ‘Oh my days, I, like, don’t believe it.’

Adrian said to Frank, ‘Do you like my sweatshirt?’ for the tenth time.

It took a while to find Bea’s car, which was parked round the corner near the flyover. By the time Frank had bundled the teenagers into it, negotiated his way through the Cambridge rush hour and endured their bawdy clamour, he was very nearly beside himself with fury. Here was another day frittered away and precious little achieved.

When they reached Grantchester Meadows, the children ran from the car before he had time to ease himself from the driving seat. He shouted after them to wait and was about to bellow dire warnings of what would follow if they didn’t do as he said, but instead he rested for a moment against the warm bonnet of the car. The sun was gentle on his face, the scent of apples and beer filled the air and from the garden of the pub came the buzz of early-evening drinkers. He had forgotten. He should get out more. How pleasant to be in the Meadows on a late-September afternoon. As he began to walk, he felt the weight on his shoulders lift, the pain in his back ease a little. The trouble was, since his last birthday, a leaden dread had settled inside him. It made him snap at the children and droop at the shoulders when he walked. The dread weighed heavier each time he read the words ‘bright young talent’, ‘extraordinary promise’ or ‘playwright of the year’. It kept his eyes to the ground when he walked, like now, and it beat out a refrain to the rhythm of his feet on the path. ‘Your best is past. There’s no more to come . . .’ Enter Wanda.

Frank paused and looked about him. No sign of the children or of Bea. How typical of them all to disappear. He turned and began walking back to the car. He would call Bea’s phone from the pub and wait for them all there, and anyway, he really could murder a drink. Now Wanda was a woman who could hold her drink. Bea used to be able to hold her drink, but all of a sudden, quite recently, she couldn’t. Wanda, though, my God, she could knock back the vodka like it was water. And Wanda was very calming where the writing was concerned. She told him that her father was still writing when he died at the age of eighty-three (which, as Bea pointed out, meant that Wanda’s father was in his sixties when Wanda was born). Frank flicked away that thought with a shake of his head. What about a screenplay set in communist Poland? A woman in the secret police falls in love with a much older dissident writer. Frank quickened his step and tugged at his cuffs.
Close and Personal
, he could call it. Thank God for Wanda. The ideas were coming thick and fast now. He should walk more often. He would phone his agent tomorrow and tell him all about it. He felt suddenly better. Last night had been a wake-up call, a kind of ghastly sleepwalk or waking dream. It was a warning not to neglect his creative impulse, a sign that he must take his work more seriously. This nonsense of Bea’s and the children’s had to stop. He would make himself unavailable for as long as it took to complete the script.

He heard shouting and looked back. The girls sprang through the grass like puppies, shedding shoes as they went. Adrian ran large circles round them, chasing first one and then another. The willows and chestnuts burned gold and red and the sun was low. Overhead, the sky stretched away, a rippled sea of pink and blue. His throat ached and the view blurred. He would have loved a son.

Adrian swerved inches from him, panting and bounding over waist-high grass.

‘Stop larking about,’ snapped Frank. ‘And just remember that we’re looking for your aunt.’

F
RANK DIDN’T
have to walk very far before he heard the children calling and laughing and he saw Bea walking slowly towards him. Back-lit by the sun, the shape of her skull was silhouetted so precisely in its halo of hair that he could feel the shape of it in the palm of his hand.

‘I’m a bit wet,’ she said when they reached each other.

He looked at the space around her.

‘Where are the cows?’ he asked. ‘The stampede?’

‘Oh, I was rescued.’

He smelt of stale whisky and he had his shirt tucked in. What an unspeakable disaster, she thought, waving the children over. I married completely the wrong man.

Rescued? He looked at her then, at the broad swell of her belly, at the place on her breasts where the wet fabric clung. Of course. He nodded. Always this. Always the knight in shining armour standing in the wings. Who had she been here with? Bloody Patrick Cumberbatch? Surely he wasn’t still sniffing about the place, was he? No, Mr Cumberbatch had been booted out of Shire Hall (ha!). He had been told to take his bonhomie, his management skills and his skinny-arsed wife and take a running jump to Corfu or Costa Early Retirement or wherever.

‘Frank? Is your back bad?’

He wanted to crush her with a cold comment but her nipples had an insolent, brazen look to them. His eyes travelled up her throat as she swallowed, up to her neck where the skin was creased and crêpey. He looked at her uncertain mouth and offered a pained smile in the direction of the river.

‘Where are your shoes?’ She smelt weedy. It was important with Bea not to make too much of anything. Keep things on an even keel. She longed for melodrama and, like all women – not Wanda perhaps, but most women – she seemed to need a crisis once in a while.

Screams and shouts curtailed by a series of splashes informed them that the children had managed to fall in. Adrian ran towards them, arms flailing, legs leaping, laughing and shouting that all three girls were in the water, that Rachel’s phone had sunk, Chanel couldn’t swim and Laura’s foot was stuck. Frank tore towards the river in his lopsided run. Bea gathered up her skirt and followed him, heavy-thighed and slow. She watched him sprint ahead of her, arms pumping, zigzagging round the tussocks, racing with surprising speed towards the emergency, and she remembered vaguely what it was like to love him.

When she reached the bank, she found the dripping forms of the girls draped like leopards along a low willow branch. They were panting and smiling and swinging their hands and feet in the shallow water. Frank was supporting himself with one arm up against the trunk, catching his breath and trying to speak. Laura waved over at Bea and called, ‘We fell in too! Brutal!’ Adrian whacked the tree with a stick and said, ‘Are you all right, Frank?’ Laura pulled off her shorts and said, ‘I’m only going to have to walk back in me keks!’ Rachel said, ‘Minging,’ and Chanel said, ‘This branch is doing me an injury, innit though?’ Frank said, ‘Right, that’s it,’ and strode away towards the car park. They watched him go, stretching his arms down and splaying out his fingers, a gesture that had become a habit since Bea once commented that all his shirtsleeves were a little on the long side. He stopped and called back furiously to them.

‘Come on! I have a deadline to meet.’ Yes, he nodded to himself. There’s
Lupa
, there’s
Close and Personal
 . . . The others stared at him like cattle. ‘And I do not want my evening to seep into your evening of non-sequiturs, pantomime hysteria, pizza crusts and . . .’ He took a few steps towards them and the girls scuttled, giggling, behind Bea. He pointed at them. Bea took a long, slow final breath in. Was he really pointing at them? Yes, I’m pointing, thought Frank, because things are about to change around here. Then he shook his finger at them and Adrian looked up at the sky. ‘I don’t suppose your mother has deigned to inform us of her expected time of arrival, but if you don’t mind, I would like to get back before it gets dark!’ Then he turned on his heel and set off for the car park.

Halfway to the end of the path, he wondered if they were following and hoped that Adrian and Laura understood that it wasn’t that he didn’t love them. Of course he did. Well, he loved Adrian. Perhaps not Laura. Fond, yes. Love, no. There was something hard about her, and all that
blingish
she talked. What was that all about? An affectation. He was fairly sure that Laura wouldn’t know a US gang member if one came and bit her on the backside. The girl had too much of her mother in her. Katharine Kemp was a fierce, cold woman – ruthless, calculating, clever – the complete opposite of Bea. How Katharine and Bea had emerged from the same parents was a mystery. How Adrian had emerged from Katharine was a bloody miracle.

At the end of the meadow was the kissing gate, where Frank had to stop while a young couple went through. The girl and then the boy became trapped and then were freed with a kiss. Frank waited and coughed, aware of the ache in his lower back beginning to climb. He could smell charcoaled meat from the beer garden, and laughter rose up from the hum of voices. He looked back the way he had come, saw the swallows dive and swoop in the evening air but saw no sign of the others. When the gate was free, he let himself through, going through the paces of the silly foxtrot of love on his own, went to the car and got in. He waited, eyes closed, door open, listening to Bob Dylan on Radio 2. Funny, he thought, how they had reached the stage in life where they listened to Radio 2. They would have laughed at that ten years ago when they first met.