Perfect

  Diana stooped to pick a stem of oat grass, running her nail along the tip and scattering a feathery trail of seedheads, but she said no more about friends. He felt he had never seen her look so alone. He pointed out a pyramidal orchid and also a red admiral butterfly but she didn’t reply. She didn’t even glance up.

  It was then he realized how unhappy she was. It was not simply because of the accident in Digby Road and Jeanie’s two stitches. There was another, deeper unhappiness that was to do with something else. He knew that grown-ups were sometimes unhappy with cause; when it came to certain things, there was no option. Death, for instance. There was no avoiding the pain of grief. His mother had not attended her mother’s funeral but she had cried when the news came. She had stood with her head inside her hands and shaken. And when his father had said, ‘That is enough now, Diana,’ she had dropped her hands and given him a look of such undiluted pain, her eyes all red and rimmed, her nose all slippery, that it was uncomfortable. It was like seeing her without clothes.

  So this was how it felt to lose a parent. It was natural to be unhappy like that. But to discover his mother was also unhappy in a way that he sometimes was, because something to which he couldn’t even give a name was not right – that had not occurred to him before. There was a clear way to remedy the situation.

  In the privacy of his bedroom, Byron took out James’s duplicate list of Diana’s attributes. Copying the handwriting, because it was somewhat neater than his own or indeed his mother’s, and flourishing the tails of the y’s and g’s with James-like loops, he began to write. He explained that he was Diana Hemmings, the kind lady who had been the driver of the Jaguar on that unfortunate morning in Digby Road. He hoped he was not inconveniencing dear Beverley, he wrote, but he wondered if she would be so good as to accept an invitation for tea at Cranham House? He enclosed the telephone number, address and also a new decimal two-pence piece from his moneybox to cover her bus fare. He hoped it would be enough, he added, deleting the childish word ‘enough’ to replace it with the more professional-sounding ‘sufficient’. He signed the letter in his mother’s name. As a postscript he added an observation about the clemency of the weather. It was this sort of clever attention to detail, he felt, that marked him apart as a letter writer. In a further postscript he also asked her to destroy the message on reading. ‘This is a private matter,’ he wrote, ‘between ourselves.’

  He knew the address, of course. There was no forgetting. Telling his mother it was his Blue Peter design, Byron asked for a stamp and posted the envelope that same afternoon.

  The letter was a lie and Byron knew it, but as lies went, this was a kind one and could bring no harm. Besides, his experience of the truth had been stretched since Digby Road. It was difficult to discern the point where things strayed from one version of themselves into another. For the rest of the day he couldn’t sit still. Would Beverley receive the letter? Would she telephone? Several times he asked his mother how long the post took and the exact hour of the first and second delivery. That night he barely slept. He watched the school clock all day, waiting for the hands to move. He was too nervous to confide in James. The telephone rang the following afternoon.

  ‘Cranham 0612,’ said his mother from her glass table.

  He couldn’t hear the whole conversation; his mother sounded cautious to begin with. ‘I’m sorry?’ she said. ‘Who are you?’ But after a while he heard her exclaim, ‘Yes, of course. That would be lovely.’ There was even a little polite laughter. Afterwards she put down the receiver and stood a few moments in the hall, deep in thought.

  ‘Anyone interesting?’ he said, sauntering casually down the stairs and following her to the kitchen.

  ‘Beverley’s coming tomorrow. She’s coming for tea.’

  He didn’t know what to say and he wanted to laugh, only that would betray his secret so he had to do something else that was more of a cough. He couldn’t wait to tell James.

  She said, ‘Did you write a letter, Byron?’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Only Beverley mentioned an invitation.’

  The heat flew to his face. ‘Maybe she was thinking of when we took her the presents. Maybe she got muddled because you gave her our telephone number. You told her to ring any time, remember?’

  She seemed satisfied. Ducking her head inside the loops of her apron, she began pulling flour, eggs and sugar out of the cupboard. ‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘I’m being silly. It can’t do any harm inviting her for tea.’

  James was less sure. This bewildered Byron. While James admitted that he had acted shrewdly in writing to Beverley, and that he was glad there would be another meeting, he wished Byron had suggested a neutral setting. ‘If you were meeting her in town, for instance, I could arrive as if by coincidence. I could wander in as if I was not expecting to find you and say, Oh hello there, and join in.’

  ‘But you could come for tea tomorrow at my house.’

  ‘Due to circumstances beyond my control, that is not possible sadly.’

  Instead James issued Byron with a full set of instructions. He must take careful notes. Did he have a spare notebook? When Byron admitted he didn’t, James slipped a lined exercise book from his satchel. He unscrewed the lid from his fountain pen and wrote ‘Operation Perfect’ on the paper cover. Notes should include observations about the conversation, most importantly references to Jeanie’s injury, although the smallest and seemingly most insignificant details should also be recorded. Byron must be as neat as possible and give references to dates and the time. ‘Also, do you have invisible ink at home? This must be confidential.’

  Byron said he didn’t. He was saving Bazooka bubblegum wrappers for the X-ray ring but you needed a lot, he said. ‘And I am not allowed bubblegum.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ said James. ‘Over the holidays I will send you a code.’ He added again that Jeanie’s stitches were a matter of concern; it was important to find out as much as possible about them. But he didn’t sound anxious about the prospect. If anything, he looked excited. He wrote his telephone number out carefully at the back of the exercise book and told Byron to ring as soon as there were developments. They must keep in regular contact over the summer, he said.

  Byron noticed his mother appeared nervous when she came to collect him. The boys in the years above were singing and throwing their caps into the air, the mothers were taking photographs, and some had set up trestle tables for a leavers’ picnic, but Diana was in a hurry to get back to the car. At home she flew around the house, fetching clean napkins and making rounds of sandwiches that she wrapped tight in PVC film. She mentioned she would give the Jaguar one quick wash before she parked it in the garage, but then she grew so busy straightening chairs and checking her reflection that the car slipped her mind and remained parked in the drive.

  Their guests were half an hour late. It transpired that Beverley had got off the bus too soon and had to walk the rest of the way through the lower fields. She stood at the front door, her hair stiff as a wedge (she had possibly used too much hairspray), in a short, brightly coloured dress that was patterned with large tropical flowers. She had painted her eyelids with turquoise, only the effect was of two thick rings above her eyes. Poking out from beneath the rim of her purple hat, her face looked top heavy.

  ‘It’s so nice of you to invite us’ was the first thing she said. ‘We’ve been excited all day. We’ve talked about nothing else.’ She apologized for the state of her pantyhose. They were slashed with ladders and stuck all over with tiny burrs. It was so nice of Diana to spare her precious time, she said again. She promised they wouldn’t stay long. She looked as nervous as his mother.

  At Beverley’s side hung a child, smaller than Lucy, in a gingham school dress, with thin black hair that hung towards her waist. She wore a large fabric plaster on her right knee to protect the two stitches. It was ten centimetres in diameter. Catching sight of the injury, Diana gave a start.

  ‘You must be Jeanie,’ she said, bending
to greet her. ‘I’m afraid my daughter is out today.’

  Jeanie slotted behind her mother. She looked a slithery child. ‘Don’t worry about your knee,’ said Beverley. She used a loud, jolly voice as if people were watching from right across the moor and she needed them to hear. ‘You won’t hurt it again. You’re perfectly safe.’

  Diana twisted her hands so hard she looked in danger of turning them inside out. ‘Has she walked far? Does she need another dressing?’

  Beverley assured her the dressing was clean. In the last few days you could barely notice Jeanie’s limp, she said. ‘You’re much better, aren’t you?’

  In agreement, Jeanie wriggled her mouth as if she was eating a large toffee and it had got stuck.

  Diana suggested they should sit outside on the new sun loungers while she fetched drinks. After that she would show them the garden. But Beverley asked if they could possibly come inside. The sun gave her daughter a headache, she said. She couldn’t seem to keep her eyes still. They flew over Diana’s shoulder and scurried up and down the hallway, taking in the polished woodwork, the vases of flowers, the Georgian-style wallpaper, the curtains in their theatrical swirls. ‘Nice house.’ She said it in the way Lucy said, ‘Nice custard. Nice biscuits.’

  ‘Come in, come in,’ said his mother. ‘We’ll have tea in the drawing room.’

  ‘Nice,’ said Beverley again, stepping inside. ‘Come along, Jeanie.’

  ‘I say drawing room but it’s not half as grand as it sounds.’ Diana led the way along the hallway, her slim heels going clip, clip, while Beverley’s sandals followed with a slap, slap. ‘The only person who calls it a drawing room is my husband and of course he doesn’t live here. Or rather, he does, but only at weekends. He works for a bank in the City. So I don’t know why I call it a drawing room. My mother would have called it the best room but Seymour never liked her.’ She was talking far too much and her sentences didn’t seem to join up. ‘I’m a bit of a misfit really.’

  Beverley said nothing. She merely followed, peering to the left and right. Diana offered a choice of tea or coffee or something stronger and Beverley insisted she would have whatever Diana was having.

  ‘But you’re my guest.’

  Beverley shrugged. She admitted she wouldn’t say no to a snowball or something fizzy like cherry cola.

  ‘A snowball?’ His mother looked perplexed. ‘I’m afraid we don’t have those. We don’t have fizzy drinks either. My husband enjoys a gin and tonic at the weekend. I always keep Gordon’s and Schweppes in the house. Or there’s whisky in his study. You could have that.’ She also offered Beverley a pair of her tights to replace her laddered ones. ‘Do you mind Pretty Polly?’

  Beverley said Pretty Polly would do very nicely and so would a glass of squash.

  ‘Please put down your notebook, Byron, and take care of Beverley’s hat.’

  Diana pushed open the drawing-room door tentatively as if half expecting something to jump out at her. ‘Oh, but where’s your daughter?’

  She was right. In the short distance from the hallway to the drawing room, they had already lost her.

  Beverley rushed back to the front door, shouting her daughter’s name at the stairs and wood-panelled walls, at the glass telephone table and Seymour’s ship paintings, as if Jeanie had made herself part of the fabric of the house and should materialize out of thin air. She looked mortified.

  The search began gently. His mother called out for Jeanie, and so did Beverley, although it was only Diana who rushed purposefully from room to room. Then suddenly she began to worry. She ran out to the garden and called there too. When there was no reply, she asked Byron to fetch towels. She would go down to the pond. Beverley kept saying she was sorry. So sorry for the inconvenience. That child would be the death of her, she said.

  Diana had already thrown off her shoes and was tearing down the lawn. ‘But how could she have got over the fence?’ Byron called, running after her. ‘She has her bad knee, remember?’ His mother’s hair flew out like gold streamers. Clearly there was no sign of Jeanie down there. ‘She must be somewhere in the house,’ said Diana, returning through the garden.

  Byron passed Beverley in the hall, studying the label on his mother’s coat.

  ‘Jaeger,’ she murmured. ‘Nice.’

  He must have frightened her because she darted him a nail of a look that softened afterwards into a smile.

  The search continued downstairs. Beverley opened every room and cast her eyes inside. It was only when Byron checked upstairs a second time that he noticed Lucy’s door ajar, and stopped. He found Jeanie curled like a rag doll inside the bed and in the half-hour in which they had searched for her, calling her name in the garden, the meadow and down by the pond, she had evidently fallen asleep. Her arms were thrown across the pillow revealing two thick scabs like flattened cherries at her elbows. She was right under the top sheet.

  ‘It’s all right!’ he called to the women. ‘You can relax now. I’ve found her.’

  With shaking fingers, Byron dialled James’s telephone number from his mother’s glass table. He had to whisper because he had not asked permission. ‘Who is speaking, please?’ said Andrea. It took three goes to make her understand and then he had to wait a further two minutes for her to fetch James. When Byron explained about the search for Jeanie and finding her asleep, James said, ‘Is she still in the bed?’

  ‘Affirmative. Yes.’

  ‘You have to go back upstairs. You have to examine the injury while she is asleep. Bonne chance, Byron. You are doing very good work. Be sure you make a diagram.’

  Byron re-entered the room on tiptoes. Very gently, he lifted the corner of the sheet. Jeanie breathed thickly through her nose as if she had a cold. His heart was beating so hard he had to keep gulping in case it woke her. The plaster looked stuck hard. Her legs were slim and dirty from the walk. He held his fingertip right over the thin point of her knee. There was no blood on the plaster. It looked new.

  He was just slipping his nail under the corner when Jeanie woke with a start. She stared at him with dark, wide eyes. The shock sent him lurching backwards into Lucy’s doll’s house and Jeanie found this so funny she gave herself a round of hiccups. They popped right through her. Some of her teeth were like cracked brown beads. ‘Do you want me to carry you?’ he said. She nodded and threw out her arms but still she didn’t speak. Lifting her up, he was shocked by the lightness of her. She was barely there. Her shoulder blades and ribs stuck out in points beneath her cotton school dress. He took care not to touch her injured knee and as she clung to him she thrust her leg carefully forward to protect the plaster.

  Downstairs Beverley’s anxiety seemed to have manifested itself in hunger. She sat in the drawing room helping herself to cucumber sandwiches and chattering freely. When Byron appeared with Jeanie, she nodded impatiently and went on. She asked Diana where she got her furnishings, did she prefer china plates or plastic, who was her hairdresser. She asked the make of her gramophone. Was Diana pleased with the quality? Did she know not all electrical goods were manufactured in England? His mother smiled politely and said she didn’t know that, no. The future was in imports, said Beverley, now that the economy was such a mess.

  She commented on the quality of Diana’s curtains. Her carpets. The electric fireplace. ‘It’s a lovely house you’ve got,’ she said, indicating the new glass lamps with her sandwich. ‘But I couldn’t live here. I’d be scared of people breaking in. You have such nice things. I’m a townie myself.’

  His mother smiled. She was a town girl too, she said. ‘But my husband likes country air. And anyway,’ she reached for her glass and shook the ice cubes, ‘he has a shotgun. In case of emergencies. He keeps it under the bed.’

  Beverley looked alarmed. ‘Does he shoot things?’

  ‘No. He just holds it really. He has a special tweed jacket as well as a deerstalker hat. He goes shooting in Scotland every August with his work colleagues and he completely hates it. He gets bitten by midges.
They seem to love him.’

  For a moment neither woman spoke. Beverley skinned the crust from another sandwich and Diana studied her glass.

  ‘He sounds like a right banana,’ said Beverley.

  An unexpected laugh seemed to shoot from his mother. Glancing at Byron, she had to hide her face.

  ‘I shouldn’t laugh, I shouldn’t laugh,’ she kept laughing.

  ‘You have to laugh. Anyway I think I’d rather beat a burglar over the head. With a mallet or something.’

  ‘Oh, that’s so funny,’ said Diana, wiping her eyes.

  Byron reached for his notebook. He reported that his father had a shotgun and that Beverley possibly had a mallet. He would have liked one of the tiny sandwiches; they were carved into triangles no bigger than his thumb, but Beverley seemed to think they were all for her. She had the plate on her lap now and she nibbled at one half of each sandwich, before discarding it and starting on another. Even when Jeanie tugged at her arm and asked to go home, she kept eating. He drew a diagram for James showing the little girl’s leg and the location of the plaster. He made exact references to the time but he couldn’t help feeling disappointed when he began to record the conversation. For a new friendship, it seemed to err on the morbid side, although he had to admit he had never seen his mother laugh the way she did when Beverley called Seymour a banana. He did not write that part down.

  He put: ‘Beverley said three times that DH is lucky. At 5.15 pm she said, “I wish I had done something with my life, like you.” ’

  Beverley also told Diana that in the future you would have to think big if you wanted to get on, but his hand was getting tired so he drew a plan of the room instead.

  Meanwhile Beverley asked for an ashtray and plucked a packet of cigarettes from her pocket. When Diana placed a small, varnished clay pot at Beverley’s side, she overturned it. ‘Looks foreign,’ she said, examining the rough underside. ‘Interesting.’

  Diana explained it had belonged to her husband’s family. He was brought up in Burma, she said, before things went wrong. Beverley said something between her teeth about the old days of the Empire but his mother failed to hear because she was fetching a slim gold-plated lighter. While she held it out, flicking at the flint, Beverley tugged on her filter tip and said with a smile, ‘You’ll never guess what my dad was?’