‘He’s eaten something.’ Phil reached into the pocket of his jacket; Helen recognised pill-bottles from the pile she had dumped on the table outside the bathroom. ‘We got to make him sick.’
They hauled Edward to his feet again and got him across the hall and into the cloakroom. ‘You got to put your fingers down his throat,’ said Phil in anguish. ‘I dunno how. You do it.’
They propped Edward over the basin. She reached into his mouth. ‘I’m sorry,’ she told him. ‘I’ve got to do this.’
He retched. A trickle of vomit appeared. She reached again.
Edward heaved and was copiously sick. ‘That’s better,’ said Phil.
He kept patting Edward’s shoulders. ‘Poor ol’ Edward.’
She went on, brutally. He kept slipping from their grasp, so that they had to prop him up again. At last she said, ‘I think that’s all.’ They dragged him back into the sitting room and lowered him into a chair again. He seemed dopey to the point of oblivion. Phil straightened and looked at her. He said, ‘Edward’s tried to kill himself, hasn’ he?’
‘Yes, I suppose so. I think he’ll be all right, though. In a minute I’m going to ring the doctor and find out what we should do next.’ She felt dizzy. She sat down.
‘Thank goodness I went to look for him then.’
‘Yes, thank goodness.’
Edward groaned. Helen went out into the hall and dialled the
number of the surgery. Phil followed her. She talked to the doctor, put the receiver down. ‘An ambulance will come. He’ll have to go into hospital overnight. Where are those bottles?
They’ll need to see them.’ She put the pill-bottles in her bag. ‘I’ll go with him … No, I’ll follow in the car so I can get back. You stay here, Phil.’
‘But what’s the matter with him?’ he said. His eyes were enormous, horror-struck. He was almost as white as Edward. ‘I mean, it’s awful when someone’s so miserable they want to kill themselves. I didn’ know. Did you know, Helen?’
She gathered herself. ‘Yes. That is — I knew he was unhappy.
I didn’t think he was going to do this.’
‘But what’s wrong with him?’
She took a breath. ‘Edward is homosexual. He — made advances to Gary Paget. Gary’s father came round here yesterday.
He is probably going to the police.’ She started back to the sitting room.
‘But that’s awful!’ cried Phil. He trotted behind her. ‘I mean, Edward can’t help it if. .
‘I know. Let’s not talk about it now. The doctor says Edward must be made to walk up and down. He mustn’t go to sleep.’
Phil nodded. They got Edward up again and slung him between them. They trundled him up and down. Look, Helen said to her mother: your son, your grandson. Now what have you got to say? But Dorothy was nowhere, today; nowhere at all.
When, two hours later, she let herself into the house again Phil was waiting in the hall. ‘How’s Edward?’
‘He’s all right. They pumped his stomach out, to be on the safe side. He can come home tomorrow.’ Tam was greeting her with exaggerated enthusiasm, drowning what she said in a volley of barks. ‘Shut up, Tam.’ She had to repeat herself before Phil could hear. ‘I must have some tea.’ She headed for the kitchen.
Phil stumbled behind. ‘D’you know what that dog was doing, when I found Edward in the wood? It was just sat there chewing something it had dug up. An’ Edward might of been dying.’
‘Well, he isn’t, thank heaven.’ She felt drained, wrung out.
She didn’t want to revisit the previous hours, not yet. She wanted tea; rest. She put the kettle on.
‘I mean, what I can’t understand is why he’s so pissed off about being gay. I been thinking. I mean, so what? S’matter of fact if you ask me as many people’s gay today as aren’t. Actually when I was younger I thought I was probably gay. In the end it’s turned out I’m not, but there you are. You see what I mean?
It’s no big deal, being gay.’
‘Edward didn’t try to commit suicide because he’s gay. He did it because he’s unhappy.’
‘But he’s unhappy because he’s gay,’ said Phil sagely. ‘Right?’
‘Up to a point,’ said Helen, after a moment. ‘It’s also because he’s the sort of person he is. And you have to remember that Edward grew up at a time when … when homosexuality was illegal. Quite apart from being socially unacceptable — at least in the circles we moved in.’
‘That’s ridiculous. You can’t help it if you’re gay.’
‘Reasonable people have always thought that.’
‘Exactly. Poor ol’ Edward. S’a shame. An’ Gary’s a right berk.
Why didn’ he jus’ tell Edward to sod off? He didn’ have to go running to his dad. He should’ve jus’ told him to push off, he wasn’ interested. I mean, that sort of thing happens all the time, doesn’ it? It isn’ anything to get in a sweat about.’
The kettle was boiling. Helen got up and made the tea while Phil babbled on about the prevailing sexual climate. This isn’t happening, she thought; surely I’ll wake up soon. It’s some nightmare. Soon I’ll come to and I’ll be upstairs in bed, not down here in the kitchen, and none of it will have happened. Edward will be out in the Britches, attacking nettles or whatever it is he does there. Phil will be at home in North London, doing whatever it is he does.
‘You feeling all right, Helen?’
She opened her eyes. ‘Yes. I’m a bit exhausted, that’s all.
Perhaps you could give us both some tea.’
‘Sure. Will do.’
‘You’ve been a great help, Phil. Thank you.’
He presented her with a cup of tea, most of which was slopped
into the saucer. He was beaming graciously. ‘No sweat, Helen.’
He sat down. ‘You know what? Edward ought to go to a therapist. You got therapists down here?’
Helen took a long drink of tea. ‘What would a therapist do?’
she enquired. ‘Show him how to be happy?’
‘What a therapist does,’ explained Phil, is help you come to terms with yourself, see.’
‘Ah,’ said Helen. They sat in silence. Tam pushed his food bowl around the floor, ostentatiously demonstrating its emptiness.
Phil shoved him with a booted foot. Tam withdrew to the door and sat there with his ears back, twitching. Helen thought of Edward, ten miles away: doing what? Feeling how?
Sunlight flowed through the slats of a blind and made a rectangular golden stain on the wall beside his bed. The rim of this stain dissolved into a blur of rainbow colour. He tried to remember the principle of the refraction of light, failed, and saw that some small winged insect was making its way slowly across the rainbow. It turned from red to blue and yellow as it moved; he could see lacy wings and the quivering of antennae. Then it arrived on the unlit part of the wall and became an undefined grey blob.
There was a curtain round the bed. He could hear the clack of shoes on linoleum floors, voices, the rumble of a trolley. The sounds were loud and individual; they rang in his head. In the same way light was very bright, shape and texture were distinct and interesting; he stared at the shadow cast by a fold of the sheet, at the glinting silver surface of a tray on the bedside table.
There was a glass of water. The water itself contained light — circles and streaks of light — and the enlarged distorted brilliantly blue image of a pen lying beside the glass.
It had been like that all along: the exaggerated, insistent sense of the physical world. And he had known, also, that he was clinging to it, clutching with his finger tips: that he had been wrong, wrong. He heard a blackbird, and the clapping of pigeon wings, and then Helen’s voice, and Phil’s. He felt himself moving, being moved. He felt himself vomit. He tried to say
something, and could not. He wanted to sleep, and fought to continue hearing and feeling. He saw light and movement.
He had begun to slide into that fog so quickly. He had crammed the pills
into his mouth — two of the bottles were almost empty so he had shaken everything out, frantically, chewing and swallowing as fast as he could. And then he had sat there, watching Tam digging under a bush. And the fog had closed in.
But through it had come the blackbird, that pigeon.
The curtain parted. A nurse stood there. She smiled. She spoke. Edward turned his head. He said, at last, ‘What time is it?’
‘I could come now,’ cried Louise. ‘I want to come. I can get in the car and be there by midnight. I want to talk. How can this have happened …? Edward … And I’m going to strangle that man Paget. I’m going round there to strangle him with my bare hands. You what? Going to bed… I don’t know how you can go to bed, frankly. I doubt if I shall. I mean, how can none of us have realised that he might …? How can we have been so bloody ignorant? Yes, of course one always had the odd twinge … the way he would shut himself up inside himself, you know what I mean? You couldn’t ever talk to him about it. And after the debacle with that school one realised how vulnerable he was.
But this I never imagined. You know what I want? I want to get him up here to see a marvellous man I know about who does a new sort of… Well, there’s no need to be quite so dismissive.
You always condemn things you don’t know anything about.
Oh, I’m sorry. God, what’s the matter with me? It shows what a state I’m in. Can’t I come now? All right, then — tomorrow. And go to bed and sleep, you need it.’
Edward is coming home today, she thought. Who might not have been. I might be waking into an entirely different day. It is not a good day, it is dangerous and difficult but it might have been something quite other. It feels in some curious way like a beginning, not an end. All is not right with the world, not by
any means, but nevertheless I have this interesting sense of a future. A sense that things can be done: by me, by Edward.
And her mother, she noted, remained absent. Dorothy had nothing to say about all this; she was elsewhere, on another plane of time and experience, going about her business. With a jolt, Helen realised that she could not conjure up her face. She could no longer see her, or hear her.
He sat beside her. She found herself driving with exaggerated care. She said, ‘Louise is coming this afternoon.’
‘Why?’
‘Oh, Edward… Why do you think?’
‘I’d rather there wasn’t any fuss,’ he said after a minute.
‘There isn’t. There won’t be. She wants to see you, that’s all.
See us.’
He made no further comment. She saw him looking intently out of the window, as though they were passing through new and intriguing landscapes. And Edward, for his part, saw not the familiar reaches of the road from Spaxton to their home but strange and arresting conjunctions of tree and skyline, of field and hedge. He saw the pale rim of the horizon, grey clouds tipped with lilac, the golden flare of stubble, rich brown plough sweeping up to the dark cushion of a wood. He feasted. His mind was blank; he seemed to be the passive vehicle for a pair of devouring eyes.
The phone was ringing as they came into the house. She saw the look in Edward’s eyes. ‘I’ll answer it. If it’s anyone for you they can leave a message.’ Edward went into the sitting room.
She picked up the receiver. ‘Hello?’
‘Helen?’ said Giles Carnaby. There was a pause; I knew this, she thought, I knew it before I answered.
‘You sound a little … distracted. I hope I haven’t picked a bad moment.’
‘No,’ she said. No more than any other.
‘Ah. Then I’ll be brave and plunge. I wondered if we could
meet. I ask with great diffidence. But it would make me very happy if you’d say yes.’
Helen noted the pattern of light on the hall floor: shifting spheres and bars — like fish, like golden fish in a pond. ‘I’d rather not,’ she heard herself say.
‘Oh.’ There was a silence; the fish rippled and flickered. ‘I was afraid you would say that. It wasn’t, of course, a business meeting I had in mind. Things progress, on that side. We’ll be in touch, in due course. What I had in mind was entirely selfish.
That last occasion was … well, not very satisfactory, was it? I was hoping you might have had a change of heart.’
I see, she thought: I am intransigent, insensitive. ‘I don’t think it would be a good idea.’
He sighed. A delicate, regretful sound; quite natural, to the untutored ear. She would hear it, she accepted, for quite a while.
‘Then I’ll say goodbye, Helen.’
‘Goodbye.’ She put down the receiver.
Edward appeared, and at the same moment Phil came clumping down the stairs. Edward said, ‘Tam doesn’t seem to be anywhere about.’
Helen looked at Phil. ‘Have you seen Tam?’
He shook his head. ‘I think it went in the garden. You all right now, Edward?’
Edward blinked. He looked away. ‘Yes thanks. I suppose so.’
‘That’s good,’ said Phil. ‘Oh — I forgot. Mum rang — they’re all coming, Dad and Suzanne too. S’a bit much, innit? They’ll be here for lunch, she said.’
The fridge was all but empty. There seemed to be nothing in the larder but decaying potatoes. Helen went to the shop, bought cold meats and the wherewithal for a salad; Louise, on this occasion, would be uncritical. She set off home, rounded the bend in the road, and there twenty yards from the Greystones gate was Ron Paget. Waiting, it would seem. She walked towards him, resolute.
‘I gather you’ve had a bit of an upset. Your brother better now, Miss Glover?’
She eyed him. Who? The doctor? Impossible. Phil? Equally so. One would never know. Villages have eyes and ears. They have their own methods.
‘He’s all right.’
‘I been talking things over with Pauline. We’ve decided we’ll not take this business to the police. It’s not going to do our boy any good, and that’s the main thing. So I thought I’d let you know.’
‘You must do what you want,’ she said.
‘So the best we can do is put it behind us. You and us both.
We’re neighbours and have been for a long time and I’m not a man that likes trouble. So that’s the way it is.’
‘It’s entirely up to you. We are not making any sort of bargain.’
He looked pained. ‘Miss Glover, who’s talking about bargains?
I told you, we don’t want to see our boy put through any more.’
‘Very well,’ said Helen. ‘And now I must go. I’m expecting my sister.’
‘There’s something else I’ve got to tell you. I’m afraid there’s been a tragedy with that little dog of yours. One of my men found him just now, outside the yard. Dead. They reckon he’d eaten something. Likely someone’s been putting rat poison down.
Shame … Never rains but it pours, does it? Would you want the men to bring him over or shall I ask them to deal with it quietly, not to worry your brother?’ His expression was inscrutable.
No, not inscrutable; there was a tremor of concern.
Carefully calculated concern.
She took a deep breath. ‘I’d appreciate it if the men could see to it.’
He nodded. ‘No problem. Right, then. Let bygones be bygones, right? And so far as your bit of land goes — well, you know how things stand where I’m concerned.’
She stared at him, incredulous, and then walked past him to her own gate. She let herself into the house, put the shopping basket down on the kitchen table and went upstairs. The door of Edward’s room was closed. She knocked. ‘Edward? I have to talk to you.’
They had come, and they had gone: Louise, Tim, Suzanne. And with them went Phil. He had appeared in the kitchen as Helen was clearing the table; the others had gone into the sitting room.
‘I thought I’d get a lift to London with Mum and Dad. There’s some things I got to see to.’
‘Oh, I see. Right you are, then, Phil.’
‘S’a pity about Tam. I
mean, he was an awful dog but Edward liked him, so it’s a pity.’
‘Yes. We could have done without that just now.’
‘Anyway, thanks for having me. And take care. .
She had been reminded, wryly, of the hours after the funeral.
There they all were, gathered together again in an atmosphere of ritual ceremony in which were combined elements of unspoken relief and of mourning. Nobody referred to what had happened.
Louise flung her arms around Edward on arrival; Edward stoically endured this without overt signs of rejection. Tim shook him by the hand. Suzanne gleamed at him from behind a newly reconstructed coiffure which almost obliterated her face. Phil was startlingly genial; he welcomed his parents with the air of some benign Edwardian uncle receiving poor relations. He pressed refreshments upon them and suggested a tour of the garden. Louise, cornering Helen in the kitchen, hissed: ‘He claims he cut the grass. Is that true? I don’t believe it. What the hell have you done to him? And he says he’s coming home.’
They had sat around in the sitting room, that least inhabited of the Greystones rooms, always tinged with damp, always chill.
They had talked with animation of anything except that of which all were thinking. Edward, from time to time, had joined in. It had been agreed that Helen and Edward should come up to London for Christmas. Helen had heard herself saying that she planned to get a new washing machine and see about some electric storage heaters for the winter. Periodically someone would refer to Dorothy, but her presence now was dimmer, she was no longer the insistent unavoidable black hole that she had been on the earlier occasion. And then eventually there had been shiftings and glances at watches.
And so they were alone. Conspicuously alone — it was Tam who was now a hole, a silence, a small absence. His food bowl, standing by the sink, was a mute reproach. Helen, putting it into the scullery, met Edward; they exchanged looks that were filled with some odd kind of guilt. Edward said, ‘Do you think Ron Paget poisoned him?’
‘We’ll never know, will we? I suppose he may have done.’
Edward sat down at the kitchen table. He was still pale, and had the translucent look of someone emerging from illness, but there was also an alertness about him; he had lost the frozen passivity of recent weeks. He kept staring out of the window.