‘I tried on this scent in a shop. I was early. I had nothing else to do. On the bottle it said it was called Scent of the Hills. I thought you would like that. So I gave it a go. I sprayed my wrists and my neck, the whole ruddy lot. And now I smell like a fucking toilet cleaner.’ She lifts the bag. ‘But thank you for the chocolates. Unless you want them back? For someone else?’
Jim shakes his head to show he doesn’t. ‘You smell nice,’ he manages to say at last, although now that he is actually beside her, he can barely breathe. He doesn’t know if it is his deodorant or her scent, or whether the two smells have already got together to produce something even more toxic, but either way the result is devastating. His eyes begin to water.
‘So do you still want a beer?’ she asks awkwardly and he replies equally awkwardly that yes, he does.
They walk to the pub, Jim and Eileen, followed by two smells, perfume and deodorant, that are so noxious it is like spending Christmas with an unpleasant set of relatives.
Apart from the fact that he has none, of course.
They talk about many things. His gardening, the news at the supermarket café. When he describes the huddle she laughs out loud and hearing her laugh he sees it too, the funny side, and he is no longer afraid. It occurs to him how much he would like to have that in his life, her laughter, her other way of seeing things, and he wonders if that is what people look for in a partner or a friend: the part of themselves that is missing. They talk about Eileen’s life; how she’s looking for another job, how she works part-time in the charity shop on the High Street. She asks again about Besley Hill, but sensing he cannot answer, her questions stop. He has a list of interesting things to talk about if conversation dries up but it is difficult, he realizes, to refer to such a list when the person you would like to interest is sitting right opposite. He wishes he had thought of that before. He wonders if this is a date or just something friendly.
‘So,’ says Eileen. She drums her fingers on the table.
Jim says in a rush, ‘Please will you describe your house?’ He says, ‘Do you have a dog?’ He says, ‘What is your favourite food?’ He says, ‘What do you wish you could be?’
It is as if his mouth is charging on despite the rest of him, determined to get the business of talking over and done with.
After their meeting, which may be a date but which may also just be something friendly, he opens the door to the van and it occurs to him they have lost an evening talking about the smallest things. She has told him she likes frost, not snow. The frost, according to Eileen, picks out each thing and marks it apart. ‘Whereas snow just dumps all over everything. And they don’t lay off the buses when there’s a frost.’
From now on, he will always like frost.
It is indeed a small thing, that Eileen prefers frost to snow, but it is these, he realizes, these smallnesses which make up the big ones. Besides, the big things in life do not present themselves as such. They come in the quiet, ordinary moments – a phone call, a letter – they come when we are not looking, without clues, without warning, and that is why they floor us. And it can take a lifetime, a life of many years, to accept the incongruity of things; that a small moment can sit side by side with a big one, and become part of the same.
It is several hours after the meeting, when he is binding the van door with duct tape, that another picture of Eileen fills his mind. They were sitting in her car and he was about to get out when she said, ‘You asked me some stuff earlier. About who I am. And I didn’t answer. So – if you still want to know, here goes.’ She told him about her flat on the edge of town. She told him she had no dog, though she would like one. She talked a little about her parents; her father was an army man in the seventies, her mother a society girl. They split when she was thirteen. She has travelled a lot in the last few years, not always to nice locations. She has found it hard to stay in one place. Then she smiled at him from her driving seat, and he had no idea why but it looked as if her eyes were filmed with tears. ‘I’ve done loads of things in my life. You have no idea how much I’ve fucked up. But if I could be anything – I’d ask to be a decent person. That’s all that counts.’
Jim stretches a strip of duct tape over the top of the door to the van. He cuts it with scissors to make an exact fit. Then he unpeels two more lengths and presses them down the sides. The rituals are performed swiftly, efficiently, and by the time the town clock rings eleven Jim is already in his fold-up bed.
13
The Catching of a Goose Egg and the Losing of Time
JAMES WAS RIGHT about the concert. When Byron suggested the idea, Beverley’s eyes widened. ‘What? Just me?’ she sang. ‘And in front of all the mothers?’
‘I don’t understand what you mean. What sort of concert?’ said Diana warily.
Byron repeated James word for word. He explained about inviting the mothers to Cranham House; there would be tickets and programmes to raise funds for Jeanie as well as a finger buffet. He showed how the boys would pin back the French windows and arrange dining-room chairs for the audience in a semicircle on the terrace, and all the time he spoke Beverley watched him hard, nodding her head, and murmuring, ‘Hm hm,’ as if she were snatching up the ends of his sentences. His mother listened in silence. It was only once he had finished that she shook her head but Beverley leapt in and gasped, ‘Oh I couldn’t – could I? Do you think I could, Di?’
There was no choice for his mother but to insist that of course she could.
‘I will need a costume and some more sheet music, but I think he’s right. It will be good for Jeanie.’
‘How will this help her leg?’ murmured his mother. ‘I don’t understand.’ But Beverley was already fetching her handbag along with Jeanie’s pushchair and blanket from the hallway. She had to get home and start practising, she said.
Seymour’s visit did not happen at the weekend. He had work to finish before his shooting trip to Scotland. Diana told him on the telephone that she was missing him. She promised to wash his country clothes but she drifted in and out of the words as if she was thinking about something else.
Waking early on Sunday morning, Byron went to his mother’s bedroom and discovered it was empty. He checked the kitchen, the bathroom, Lucy’s room and the drawing room but there was no sign of her. He knew where to look.
She was crouched low in the grasses by the pond with her glass between her hands. The water was dark and still, hung with soft green rags of duckweed. Despite the mid-August heat, the hedges still foamed with white blossom and dog roses, their petals like pink hearts. He trod carefully, not wanting to frighten his mother. He hunkered at her side.
She didn’t look up but she seemed to know he was there. ‘I’m waiting for the goose to lay her egg,’ she said. ‘The trick is to be patient.’
Above the moor the clouds were beginning to collect like granite peaks. There might well be rain. ‘Don’t you think we should go in for breakfast?’ he said. ‘Beverley might be here soon.’
His mother stared at the pond, as if Byron had not spoken. At last she said, ‘She’ll be practising. I doubt she’ll come today. Anyway the goose won’t take much longer. She’s been on her nest since dawn. And if I don’t get her egg, the crows will.’
She gestured with her glass towards the fencing. She was right. They were lined up all round them, smooth and velvet-black against the moor behind. ‘They look like executioners. Waiting for the end.’ She laughed.
‘I don’t think so,’ he said.
The goose ruffled her downy white feathers. She sat very still in her bed of nettles with her neck slightly erect and her blue eyes, rimmed with the same orange as her beak, blinking only now and then. From the ash trees at the meadow’s edge came the hollow rattle of a cry and the flapping of leaves; the crows were everywhere, waiting for that egg. He could understand why his mother wanted to save it. The gander pecked at the water’s edge.
Diana took another swig of her drink. ‘Do you think Jeanie will walk again?’ she s
aid suddenly.
‘Of course I do. Don’t you?’
‘I can’t see where this is going to end. You know it’s more than ten weeks since it all began? It feels like years. Beverley is happy, though. That concert was a very good idea of yours.’ She returned to staring at the pond.
It occurred to Byron that over the summer holidays Diana had become someone else. She was not like a mother any more. At least not one who told you to clean your teeth and wash behind your ears. She had become someone who was maybe more like a friend of your mother’s or her sister; if only she’d had either of those. She had strayed into being someone who understood that it was not always pleasant or interesting to keep cleaning your teeth and washing behind your ears, and turned a blind eye when you chose not to do them. It was a gift to have a mother like this. He was lucky. But it was also unsettling. It left him feeling slightly out in the wind, as if a wall had fallen down that was something to do with why things kept going. It meant he wanted to ask sometimes if she had remembered to clean her own teeth or wash behind her ears.
A slight wind took up. The lower feathers of the gander blew out around his haunches like soft white frills. Byron felt the first spots of rain.
‘I’ve been thinking.’ Here his mother fell silent again, as if she had run out of energy.
‘Oh yes?’ he said. ‘What have you been thinking?’
‘About what you said once. About time.’
‘I think it’s going to pour in a minute.’
‘You said we shouldn’t play with time. It isn’t up to us, you said. You were right. It’s playing with fire when we tamper with the gods.’
‘I don’t remember mentioning the gods,’ he said, but she seemed to be thinking something all of her own.
‘Who’s to say time is real just because we have clocks for measuring it? Who knows if everything is going forward at the same rate? Maybe everything is going backwards or sideways. You said something about that too once.’
‘Oh dear,’ he said. ‘Did I?’ The raindrops dimpled the water of the pond. It was surprisingly soft and warm and smelt of grass.
‘Or we could take matters into our own hands. We could move the clocks. We could make them what we want.’
Byron let slip a guffaw that reminded him uncomfortably of his father. ‘I don’t think so.’
‘My point is, why are we slaves to something that is just a set of rules? Yes, we get up at six thirty. We get to school for nine. We eat lunch at one. But why?’
‘Because if we didn’t there would be chaos. There would be people going to work and people eating lunch and people going to bed. Nobody would have a clue what was right and what was not.’
Diana sucked the left corner of her lip, considering this. She said, ‘I’m beginning to think chaos is underrated.’
Unclipping her watch, she slipped it over her wrist and into the ball of her palm. Before he could stop her she had lifted her hand and opened it. The watch twisted silver in the air and then cut through the dark skin of the water with a plop, sending a basket of ripples towards the bank. The gander looked up but the goose didn’t move. ‘There.’ Diana laughed. ‘Goodbye, time.’
‘I hope Father doesn’t find out,’ he said. ‘He gave you that watch. It was probably expensive.’
‘Well it’s done now,’ she said quietly into her glass, as if the person she was talking to lay somewhere at the bottom.
They were interrupted when the goose raised her lower haunches, tipping her neck forward. Her wings lifted and fell, lifted and fell, in the way that Byron might tense his shoulders and fingers. Then, where there had been no more than white feathers, there emerged a soft pink mouth of muscle, contracting and flexing. It peeped at them, like a wink, and then it was gone.
His mother sat up straight. ‘It’s coming.’ She took a deep breath.
The crows knew it was coming too. They were dropping from the ash trees and then steering overhead on slanted wings like gloves.
Here it was, the goose egg: a tiny white eye blinking at the centre of the goose’s pink muscle. It disappeared and suddenly there it was again, only now the size and luminosity of a new ping-pong ball. They watched in silence as the goose lifted her tail feathers high, pushing and quivering, until the egg shot from her and lay on the bed of nettles. It was perfect. His mother stood slowly and took up a stick, poking at the bird until she lifted to her feet. The goose opened her beak and gave a hiss but trundled away. She seemed too exhausted to put up a fight.
‘Quick!’ he shouted because, hearing her, the gander was crossing the water towards them and the crows were hopping closer. His mother bent to scoop up the egg and passed it to Byron. It was so warm and heavy it was like holding a living thing. He needed two hands. The goose waded away from them down the bank, still hissing. Her under-feathers were streaked with mud from where she had pushed herself into the ground to force the passage of the egg.
‘I feel awful now,’ said Diana. ‘She wants it back. She’s grieving.’
‘If you hadn’t taken it, the crows would. And that’s a lovely goose egg you got. You were right to make us wait for it.’ Rain filled the air and hung like tiny beads in her hair. The leaves and grasses creaked under the soft weight of it. He said, ‘We should go inside now.’
As she walked back to the house she stumbled once and he had to reach out a hand to straighten her. She bore the goose egg like a gift, staring at it as she went. She faltered again at the edge of the garden. He held her empty glass and the egg while she opened the picket gate.
From the trees beyond, the crows gave a rattling cry that hacked through the wet morning air. He wished she had not described them as executioners. He wished she had not talked about them waiting for the end.
‘Don’t drop them,’ she said.
He promised to take care.
In the end, the goose egg was never used. His mother stowed it in a dish on the windowsill. He saw the crows outside, flapping their wings for balance on branches that appeared too fragile. He clapped his hands to scare them and ran outside to chase them off. ‘Shoo, shoo,’ he shouted. But as soon as he turned his back they floated down and perched in treetops, waiting.
It was the same with time, he thought, and also sorrow. They were both waiting to catch you. And no matter how much you shook your arms at them and hollered, they knew they were bigger. They knew they would get you in the end.
When Seymour came to fetch his country clothes and his shotgun, the visit lasted a matter of hours. He said little. (‘It’s because he’s nervous,’ said Diana.) He checked in various rooms. He flicked through the pages of Diana’s calendar. When he asked why the lawn was so overgrown she said there had been difficulties with the mower and this was possibly true; it was growing harder to tell what was real and what was imagined. His father said it was wrong not to keep up appearances, and she apologized and promised to have everything ready for his return.
‘Have a wonderful holiday,’ she said. ‘Telephone us when you can.’ He asked for his sun cream and midge deterrent and she clasped her head in her hands. She had clean forgotten, she said. When she kissed him, she touched the air.
Afterwards the plans for Beverley’s concert became more concrete. She was practising every day; she now had ten pieces. James told Byron eagerly that he had enlisted Andrea’s help. Apparently she rang round the mothers, encouraging them to attend and provide a plateful each of refreshments. James said he had made tickets to sell on the door and programmes. He had designed a seating plan and was rewriting his speech for Diana. He telephoned every evening.
And when Byron said, as he sometimes did, ‘Are you sure this is a good idea?’ or if he said, ‘My mother is sometimes sad,’ or even if he said, ‘But suppose Beverley tells everyone what my mother did?’ James simply talked over him. The most important thing, he said, was that he got to see the evidence.
14
Going Out
JIM AND EILEEN meet every evening. He folds up his Father Christmas su
it and replaces it in its plastic wrapper and leaves via the staff stairs to meet her in the car park. She drives them into town and they do the things that everyone does, the everyday things. They go to the cinema, they meet for a drink, and if the sky is clear, they head for a brief stroll on the moor. One evening they visit the small Italian restaurant for a bowl of pasta. She asks about his day and he tells her Mr Meade has offered Darren a job. He tells her about a child who gave him his Christmas list, and meanwhile Eileen laughs and sighs, as if these things are interesting. In turn he asks about her day, her flat, her search for a new job. He is always home by nine.
When she drops him off at the end of the cul-de-sac she says, ‘I’d have a tea, if you’re offering,’ but he doesn’t know why she would say that since he isn’t. ‘See ya!’ waves Eileen, as he shuts her passenger door.
‘You be careful,’ he tells her. She laughs and promises she will.
And even though, after these meetings, he is not like everyone else – he steps in and out, hello Small Cactus Plant, he binds the doors and windows with duct tape – he is not troubled by the rituals. They are a thing he does before he gets on with a different thing, which is thinking about Eileen. His heart jumps as he pictures her. He laughs at her jokes, when the evening is long since over. He can smell her. He can hear her. He feels bigger than the rituals; they are just a part of him, like his leg is a part of him, but not the whole person. Maybe one day he will even stop.
Paula corners him one afternoon on his way to the urinals. She asks how things are and he can’t look her in the eye but he assures her they are good. She says he seems well. She likes the way he’s done his hair and he says oh, that, because actually all he has done is comb it over his skull, more from left to right. He has seen Darren doing it this way. Maybe that is why Paula likes it.
‘I’ve got this idea,’ she says. She tells Jim she is an instinct person. She is not erudite. Actually what she says is that she is not Araldite, but he gets her drift. ‘Darren has this aunt. She’s nice. You’d like her. She lives on her own. We were thinking you should go for a drink.’