It was another fitful night for Byron. He put Lucy to bed and locked the doors. There were so many things to hide: the hubcap, the payment for Beverley’s organ, Jeanie’s injury, and now the party at Cranham House. He couldn’t see how everything could keep going forward.
That night the telephone began to ring at nine o’clock but his mother failed to waken. It rang again first thing the following morning. Byron answered, expecting his father.
‘It’s me,’ said James. He sounded as if he had run a long way.
Byron said hello and asked him how he was, but James answered none of these questions. ‘Go and find the notebook,’ he said.
‘Why? What is it?’
‘This is an emergency.’
Byron’s hands began to shake as he flicked through the pages. There was something in James’s voice that already frightened him. Several times his fingers slipped and he had to go back to the beginning. ‘Hurry, hurry,’ said James.
‘I don’t understand. What am I looking for?’
‘The diagram. The one you drew of Jeanie with her plaster. Have you got it?’
‘Nearly.’ He opened the page.
‘Describe it.’
‘It isn’t very good—’
‘Just describe what you see.’
Byron spoke slowly. He described her blue summer dress with short sleeves. Her sloppy socks because she had no elastic garters. Her hair in two black plaits. ‘Though they’re not very good in the drawing. They look more like squiggles—’
James interrupted sharply. ‘Get to the plaster.’
‘It’s on her right knee. It’s a big square. I drew it carefully.’ There was a silence as if the air had swallowed James. Byron felt his skin creep with cold and panic. ‘What is it, James? What’s happened?’
‘That’s not her damaged leg, Byron. Her caliper is on the left.’
16
Words as Dogs
‘PLEASE LIFT YOUR foot,’ says the nurse. She reassures Jim none of this will hurt. Eileen stands beside him. The nurse uses scissors to cut the plaster cast open. Inside, his foot looks surprisingly neat and soft. Above his ankle the skin has turned dry and pale; the toes are shadowed with moss-green bruising. The nails have slightly lost their pink.
A doctor examines his foot carefully. There is no damage to the ligaments. Eileen asks the doctor practical questions about whether or not Jim will need painkillers, and exercises he should do to help his recovery. It is so new to him, that someone should be concerned like this, that he has to keep looking at her. Then she makes a joke about her own state of health and everyone laughs, including the doctor. It has never occurred to Jim that doctors like jokes. Her blue eyes sparkle, her teeth shine, even her hair seems to bounce. He realizes he might be falling in love and it is so happy, this feeling, that Jim laughs too. He doesn’t even have to think about it.
Afterwards the nurse replaces Jim’s plaster cast with bandage and a soft plastic boot to protect it. Good as new, she says.
Jim takes Eileen to the pub to celebrate. Without the plaster cast his foot feels made of nothing. He has to keep stopping to check it is still there. When he is paying for the drinks, he realizes he would like to tell the barman that he is here with Eileen, that she has agreed to come with him for a beer, that she does so every evening. He wants to ask the barman if he has a wife and what it is like to fall in love. A man at the bar is feeding his dog crisps. The dog sits on a stool next to the man and wears a spotted scarf round its neck. He wonders if the man is in love with his dog. There are many ways of loving, he sees.
Jim passes Eileen her drink. ‘Would you like crisps?’ he says.
‘Thank you.’
The room spins. He remembers something like a dog, only as soon as he has the picture that precedes the formation of a word, it changes form to become another shape. He is light-headed with confusion. He doesn’t know suddenly what words mean. He can’t see the sense in them; they seem to slice things in half even as he thinks of them. Is he, when he says, ‘More crisps?’ actually saying something else, something like ‘I love you, Eileen’? And is she, when she says, ‘Thank you,’ saying something else, something like ‘Yes, Jim. I love you too’?
The carpet at his feet swoops sideways. Nothing is what it seems. A person can offer crisps and mean I love you, just as a person can say I love you, and presumably only mean they want the crisps.
His mouth clams up as if it is stuffed with wool.
‘Do you want a glass of water?’ says Eileen. ‘You look funny.’
‘I’m all right.’
‘A bit green. Maybe we should go?’
‘Do you want to?’
‘Well I’m thinking of you. I’m easy.’
‘I’m easy too,’ he says.
They finish their drinks in silence. He doesn’t know how they have got to this place. A moment ago they were possibly saying they loved each other and now they seem to be claiming they would rather be alone. It strikes him how careful you have to be with words.
He says in a rush, ‘You said something once. About losing things.’
‘Oh,’ she says. And then a little while later, ‘Yes.’
‘Will you tell me what you have lost?’
‘Well,’ she says. ‘Where do I start? Husbands.’
At least they are back exchanging words again although he has no idea what she is talking about. She folds her arms.
‘Two of them,’ she says. ‘The first was a telesales man. We were together thirteen years. Then one day he rang someone, got into a chat about this and that, sold her a time-share apartment and that was it. They ran off to the Costa del Sol. I was on my own for a long time after that. I didn’t want to get hurt again. Then I gave in a few years ago. Got married. He was gone within six months. Apparently I am impossible to live with. I grind my teeth at night. I snore. He moved into the spare room but I sleepwalk as well.’
‘That’s a shame.’
‘That I sleepwalk?’
‘That he left you.’
‘C’est la vie. My daughter.’
Eileen’s face compresses as if someone has placed a weight on her head and ordered her not to move. When he says nothing, she fixes his eyes. She asks if he heard what she just said. And when he says yes, he puts his hand next to hers on the table, just as the social worker did with him when she explained about being ordinary. About making friends.
She says, ‘Rea left the house one day. She was just seventeen. I’d bought her this bracelet for her birthday – it was one of those silver ones, you know, with charms. She said she was going to the corner shop. We’d had a row but it was a silly one. About washing up. She didn’t come back.’ Eileen reaches for her beer and she drinks and then she wipes her mouth slowly.
Jim doesn’t understand. He doesn’t see how these pictures in his head of Eileen’s daughter and a corner shop and a bracelet fit with the other detail about her never coming back. Eileen takes her beer mat and she places it on an exact line with the table edge, and all the time she shifts it and realigns it, she talks. She tells Jim how she has not seen her daughter since that day. She has looked for her and never found her. Sometimes she gets a hunch, it can be in the middle of the night, that she knows where Rea is and she gets in the car, she drives there, but she is wrong. She never finds her. Eileen takes up the beer mat, which she has made so straight against the table, and she rips it into tiny pieces.
‘All I want is to know that she’s safe and I can’t have that, Jim.’
Eileen grips the table. She apologizes but she is going to cry. He asks if he can fetch her something, a glass of water or something stronger, but she says no to both. She just wants him to sit with her.
At first he can’t bear to look. He hears the sharp intakes of breath that precede sorrow and he wants to jump up. He saw people crying at Besley Hill. Sometimes they simply lay on the floor like children and you had to walk round them. But it is different witnessing the onslaught of Eileen’s pain. He twists on his st
ool, trying to search for the barman and the man with his dog but both have disappeared. He wishes he had something to give her but he has nothing, not even a clean paper tissue. He can only sit. She keeps a wide grip on the table, she spreads her feet wide, as if bracing herself for the worst. Tears overflow from her eyes and wash down her cheeks and she does not try to stop them, she simply sits, bearing her sadness, and waiting for it to pass. Watching her, he feels his eyes prickle though it is many years since he has cried.
When it is over, she wipes her face. She smiles. ‘Can I show you her picture?’
Eileen becomes very busy with the contents of her drawstring handbag. She plonks on the table a leather purse, her car keys, house keys, a hairbrush. ‘Here.’ Her fingers are trembling as she opens a torn blue-plastic wallet with a bus pass behind the transparent window. The pass is years out of date but the fading image shows a pinched white face, doe eyes, a mane of thick red hair. She is unmistakably a part of Eileen; only she is a fragile, youthful part. The part he has guessed at sometimes and never seen. ‘You see. We all fuck up,’ she says.
Eileen reaches for his fingers but he can’t do it. He can’t take hers. She puts her hand back where it was. ‘So what happened to your friend? The one you told me about? What did you do, Jim, that was so terrible?’
He opens his mouth but he cannot voice it.
‘I’ve got all the time you need,’ says Eileen. ‘I’ll keep waiting.’
17
The Outsider
NOW THAT JAMES’S suspicions had been confirmed about Jeanie’s leg, he wouldn’t let go. He asked when Byron was going to confront Beverley. He even wrote the scenario. Why didn’t Byron at least unbuckle the caliper while Jeanie was asleep? Did he not want to save his mother? James kept telephoning.
But Diana was in a new space now. In the last few days of the summer holiday, after she had thrown away her watch, and after James’s disastrous concert, there came a final abandonment of time. She seemed to grow less substantial. She spent long periods doing nothing. Byron tried to tell her about the caliper, about Jeanie’s original injury being on a different leg, but she gazed back at him as if he were heartless. ‘She still can’t walk,’ she said.
It was like being in a little boat that had slipped away from its moorings without anyone quite noticing. Throughout Cranham House, clocks had either fallen into silence or were keeping their own versions of the hour. Byron could walk into the kitchen where it might be ten to eight, only to enter the drawing room and discover it was half past eleven. They went to bed when the sky drew dark and ate when his mother remembered. The notion too of a certain order of meals – breakfast, lunch, tea – seemed to escape her, or at least strike her as no longer relevant. Every morning there were silver snail trails criss-crossing the hall. There were cobwebs like soft clouds and pepperings of mould at the windowsills. The moor was coming inside.
‘It was always going to happen,’ she said. ‘This is my destiny.’
‘What is your destiny?’
She merely shrugged as if she knew a secret he was too young to understand. ‘The accident was just waiting for me.’
‘But it was an accident,’ he reminded her. ‘It was a mistake.’
She gave a laugh that was more of a huff of air. ‘This is where I was heading right from the start. All those years of trying to get it right – they meant nothing. You can run and run but in the end you won’t get away from the gods.’
The gods, he wanted to say; who exactly are they? She had never to his knowledge been a religious woman. He had never seen her enter a church; he had never even seen her pray. And yet she referred to them increasingly. She lit small candles in the windows at night. After swearing sometimes, she looked at the air above her head and asked its forgiveness.
‘In a strange way, it’s a relief,’ she said. This time they were eating burgers in the new Wimpy Bar in town because they were hungry. Lucy was drawing pictures of mummies in pink dresses and removing her gherkins into an ashtray. Thankfully the conversation between Diana and Byron seemed to fly right over her head.
‘What’s a relief?’ he said.
‘The accident. Everything falling apart. I have been afraid of it for years. At least there isn’t that any more.’
‘I don’t think you should talk as if everything is over.’
She pursed her lips around her straw and when she had finished her water she said, ‘We don’t know what to do with sadness. That’s the problem. We want to put it out of the way and we can’t.’
The effort of being the woman she had tried so long to be was finally too much for Diana. It took everything she had to talk to Seymour and Beverley. Without them, she seemed to become diaphanous. It was like blowing the seeds from a dandelion and watching them drift. She started to become the naked thing she really was.
Directly after the conversation in the Wimpy Bar, she carried her mother’s furniture out of the garage. He watched her crossing the lawn with it towards the meadow, and assumed it would be burnt, just as she had done with her clothes. But to his surprise he found her a few hours later down by the pond, sitting on her mother’s chair, with the small wooden hostess table at her feet and several magazines. She had even set up the standard lamp with its fringed shade, although it wasn’t plugged in. It was like a living room with flowers for a carpet, with the belt of ash trees for faraway walls, and the flickering leaves and new elderberries for wallpaper. The cloudless sky was her ceiling.
Spotting Byron she waved. ‘Over here!’ She had set out coloured glasses and a jug of something that looked like lemonade. She had even brought tiny paper umbrellas on sticks and a round of cucumber sandwiches. It was like the old days – except for the meadow part.
‘Would you like to join me?’ She pointed to a low upholstered pouffe. He hunkered down and it gave a squelch.
‘Is Beverley not coming today?’ he said. ‘With Jeanie?’
His mother scanned the trees. ‘Maybe they won’t today.’ She sat back in the chair, nestling into the headrest and spreading out her fingertips, as if the nails were wet and required drying. ‘My mother used to sit in this chair. It was her favourite place. Sometimes she sang. She was a beautiful singer.’
Byron swallowed hard. He had never heard her speak of her mother before. He spoke gently, hoping that a question would not tip his mother back into silence. He very much wanted to know about her past.
‘Did your mother sit outside?’
Diana laughed. ‘No. She sat inside. For years and years she sat inside. She never went anywhere.’
‘Was she all right?’ Byron wasn’t quite sure what he meant by the question but felt compelled to ask it.
‘She was unhappy. If that’s what you mean. But that’s the price you pay.’
‘The price you pay for what?’
She looked at him briefly and then glanced back to the trees. A small wind passed through them so that the leaves lifted and rustled like water. The sky was such a deep shade of blue it looked freshly minted. ‘It’s the price you pay for a mistake,’ she said. ‘An eye for an eye. A tooth for a tooth. What goes around comes around.’
‘I don’t understand. Why was it an eye for an eye? What was her mistake?’
She closed her eyes, as if she were drifting into sleep. ‘Me,’ she said quietly. And then she kept so still he had to prod her briefly to check she hadn’t died or anything.
He wanted to ask more. He wanted to know why his mother’s mother spent her life inside, and what Diana meant when she described herself as a mistake, but she had begun to hum, very quietly, as if to herself and no one else, and she looked so at peace with that, he didn’t have it in him to interrupt. He helped himself to several of her miniature sandwiches and poured himself a little of her lemonade. It was so sweet he felt his teeth zing.
Clusters of red poppies were still out in the lower fields of the moor, as if the earth were bleeding. He didn’t want to think of the poppies like that, but he had now, and there was no
seeing them otherwise.
‘I could sleep out here.’ His mother’s voice surprised him.
‘I think you just were.’
‘No, I could bring a bed and a cover. I could sleep under the stars.’
‘You wouldn’t be safe,’ he said. ‘The foxes might get you. Or snakes.’
She laughed. ‘Oh, I don’t think they’d want me.’ She picked up one of her sandwiches and unpeeled the crust between her pinched thumb and forefinger. ‘The truth is, I don’t think I am a very housey sort of person. Maybe I belong outside. Maybe that’s my whole problem.’
Byron surveyed the field of moving grass, threaded with pink campion, vetch, spears of lady’s bedstraw, scabious and the deeply cut purple petals of meadow cranesbill. Beneath the blue of the sky, the pond was a deep green and thick with velvety strings of duckweed. A small pink petal was tucked in his mother’s hair and a picture came to his mind of her covered in meadow flowers. It wasn’t frightening. It was beautiful. ‘All the same,’ he said, ‘I don’t think you should tell Father when he telephones that you want to sleep outside.’
‘You’re probably right.’ She nodded and then, much to his surprise, she winked – as if they had shared a joke or a secret except that they hadn’t because he had no idea what it was.
‘When I was young I asked my mother,’ she sang, ‘What should I be? Will I be famous? Will I be rich?’
He quietly rose from the upholstered pouffe and made his way back to the house. With every step, he seemed to send grasshoppers springing out of the grass. They burst up like firecrackers. When he stopped to look back he could still see his mother down at the pond. A cloud of summer flies billowed round her head.
In the kitchen, Byron poured milk into glasses and offered Lucy what was left of the biscuits. He thought of his mother sitting outside, maybe sleeping or singing or maybe a little of both, and he felt like crying, although he didn’t know why. She had not seemed unhappy. He wondered if she would really sleep all night out there. Maybe he should take her blankets? A pillow?