She slipped back into bed and he felt the hard goose-bumps on her flesh as they worked their arms around each other and kissed and held each other close, lying on their sides, their faces up close, resting on the same pillow. Her breath was minty, she must have just brushed her teeth, he thought, hoping his own mouth didn’t taste too bad. He loved the feel of her nakedness in his arms, pressed against his own body.
‘You’re still worried about that car?’ he asked.
‘It’s OK. I – I just wanted to make sure that it . . .’
‘Wasn’t your ex?’
‘I couldn’t see clearly but I didn’t think it looked like Brian. I wouldn’t put it past him to have me followed though.’
‘I have some binoculars. If the car does come back we can take a closer look.’
She raised her eyebrows with a grin. ‘Are you the neighbourhood Peeping Tom? Is that what you have binoculars for?’
‘Horses, actually.’
‘Horses? You like racing? Flat or jumps?’
‘The jumps. Katy liked –’ He stopped abruptly, not wanting to get drawn, and instantly regretted mentioning her.
There was a brief, uneasy silence, and sensing it, Amanda gently pushed some hairs back off his forehead, then changed the subject. ‘Tell me more about yourself. Do you have any brothers or sisters?’
‘I have a brother, three years older than me.’
‘What does he do?’
‘He’s a metallurgist. Works for Boeing in Seattle.’
‘Are you close?’ she asked.
‘No, not really. We get on when we meet up, but we don’t know each other that well – three years is a big age gap when you’re a kid.’
She kissed each of his eyes gently. He tightened his hold on her, and she moved closer still against his body as if silently comforting him, slipped one hand down his stomach, let her fingers drift through his groin and then began, with incredible tenderness, to stroke him. ‘Are your parents alive?’
‘Yes.’ He breathed in sharply from pleasure.
‘What do they do?’
This woman is incredible, Michael thought. Their love-making had been beyond anything he had ever experienced. And now he felt an extraordinary sense of ease and peace with her. He realised he had never, ever felt so comfortable with any other human being. Nor so horny.
I could fall in love with you, Amanda Capstick. I could fall seriously, utterly and hopelessly in love with you.
‘My father’s retired – he was a doctor – a GP in Lymington – down on the edge of the New Forest. My mother was his secretary.’ He was growing further in her hand, and she continued the light, tantalising strokes.
‘Beautiful part of the world. Is that where you grew up?’
Clenched teeth. ‘Yes.’
‘Does he still practice?’
An even sharper intake of air. You are driving me crazy! ‘No, he’s eighty-four. He married quite late. Just potters around with his little boat. My mother gardens, plays bridge and worries about me.’
‘My mother worries about me, too’ she said. ‘We always remain little children to our parents.’
‘Yup. That only changes at the very end when they turn into the helpless children we once were.’ He caressed her hair. ‘Tell me about your parents?’
‘My father was an artist – a painter. He left my mother when I was seven because he wanted to go and sit on a mountain in India in search of enlightenment. He was in a motorcycle accident out there and died of septicaemia in a hospital in Delhi.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘I barely knew him, he was hardly ever around when they were together. And my mother – she’s nuts.’ Amanda smiled, her face all blurry. ‘Nicely nuts, she’s lovely, but she’s always been eccentric – rather bohemian. She lives in Brighton and she’s fifty-four and she still hasn’t decided what she wants to do in life.’
‘Did she remarry?’
‘No, she’s had a succession of lovers, mostly unsuccessful artists, or actors or writers. She was a graphic artist by training, but has always dabbled in other things. She’s into Feng Shui at the moment. Large companies pay her a fortune to rearrange the furniture in their offices.’
‘Is there good Feng Shui here?’
‘I think she’d approve of your living spaces.’
‘That’s a relief.’
‘You’d like her. Everyone does.’ She paused, then added. ‘I think she’d really like you.’
There was another silence, but now it was an easy, secure space they had made for each other. Michael lay still, scarcely able to believe this was real, that Amanda Capstick was here, naked in his arms, pressed up against his erection, her warm, minty breath on his face.
‘Are you worried about Brian?’ he asked. ‘Is he violent?’ As he spoke, he ran his hand lightly over the flat of her stomach, then with his fingers began to tease her pubes.
‘He has a vile temper. But I don’t think he’s going to be turning up here at three in the morning with a pickaxe – that wouldn’t be his style.’
‘I’m OK with axes,’ Michael said. ‘I got attacked by a mental patient with one.’
‘Why? What happened?’
He wanted to make love to her again. ‘Later.’
‘Tell me now!’ She squeezed him hard and he exhaled a blast of air, laughing, then kissed her forehead.
‘OK! I was an expert witness in a child-custody case. I told the court the mother wasn’t fit to look after her children. A year later, she was waiting for me in the hospital car park with a logging axe.’
‘Did she hit you?’
‘She tried to hack my leg off, but luckily she hit my briefcase. Then I managed to disarm her.’
‘I didn’t realise psychiatry was a contact sport.’ she said.
Michael grinned. ‘I hadn’t either, when I went into it.’
She was quiet for a moment and then she said, ‘Why did you become a psychiatrist? Did you always want to be one?’
It was a question he was asked often.
‘I was always interested in biological things as a kid – I suppose partly from my father being a doctor. I did a degree in psychology, then realised that psychiatry is much more biological. I’ve always been interested in people, in what makes us tick. Psychiatry is the natural combination of the two. I just wish the public image of psychiatry was better.’ He gave her a quizzical look.
‘I think the public image is good,’ she said. ‘In fact I’m getting more impressed with psychiatrists every moment.’
‘Actually, we’re pretty much at the bottom of the food chain in medicine. We’re the last resort for GPs, when all else fails. We’re just one rung above snake-oil salesmen.’
‘Are you angry with me, for what I told you I was doing with my documentary?’
‘Did you ever hear the saying that, when you have their balls in your hands, their hearts and minds will follow?’ he murmured.
Their eyes met again, explored each other and, as if in reply, she slid her head beneath the sheets, took his balls in her mouth and closed her lips around them.
Then she began to hum.
Chapter Thirty-six
‘Open your present!’
She couldn’t sit still either! Spangles of April sunlight darted like fish in the deeps of her emerald eyes. ‘Go on, yes, open it, Tom-Tom, open it now! Happy birthday!’
She was even more excited than he was!
The folds of her silk dressing gown rustled as she sat, a Peter Stuyvesant cigarette burning in the ashtray, her blonde tresses shimmying; she was leaning across the table towards him.
The present was for him, but he knew how much it meant to her that he liked it. She was imploring him to like it! And he knew how angry she would be if he did not.
Thomas always wore his best suit on his birthday, with a tie, a plain shirt and black shoes. He was sitting in these clothes now at the large table in the breakfast room, which overlooked the garden, secluded from neighbours by tall tree
s and dense, immaculately tended bushes and shrubs.
He liked to go out there, but it was only rarely that his mother gave him permission. She had explained many times the dangers. Bad people could be hiding in the shrubbery waiting to snatch him and take him away for ever. Sunlight corroded human skin. London air was unhealthy to breathe. There were insects that could bite or sting, animal faeces that could make him blind. Horrendous stuff came out of aeroplanes when they flushed their lavatories and just hung in the air, slowly dropping down on people.
There was a gym and a sauna downstairs in the basement where the two of them worked out every day. There was no need to go outside except for specific visits, like today, when they were going to the Science Museum. Only the underprivileged and people who were doing bad things went outside when they didn’t need to. And only children who did bad things, or whose mummy and daddy didn’t love them, were sent to school, where they had to learn in classrooms with lots of other kids, instead of having their own private teacher, like Mr Goodwin, come to their house every day.
Under his mother’s guidance, Thomas prayed every night to God, to thank him for making him normal, and for giving him a mother who loved him. And he prayed for God to help him find new things to love about his mother each day.
There were three cards on the breakfast table. One was from Grandma Lamark and showed an elephant holding a balloon in its trunk; a ten-pound banknote was clipped to the inside. The second was from his Aunt Stella, who had sent him a five-pound book token. On the front of her card was the number ‘6’ in large letters and the word ‘TODAY!’ beneath it.
He didn’t know that some children got toys on their birthdays. No one had ever told him that, and he had no way of finding out; the kind of books to which he was given access were not the kind that mentioned toys on birthdays.
He didn’t know either that the staff employed by his mother – the cook (Mrs Janner), housemaid (Elvira), personal maid (Irma), butler (Dunning), secretary (Enid Deterding), chauffeur (Lennie), gardener (Lambourne), and his tutor, Mr Goodwin, were expressly forbidden to give him cards and gifts. The same rule applied at Christmas.
There was a click of the door and Thomas turned round. Dunning, an elderly, courtly man in tails, with hair as smooth as sealskin, stood attentively. At a signal, he addressed Thomas.
‘Good morning, Master Thomas. Happy birthday to you.’
‘Thank you, Dunning,’ he replied.
Then the butler turned back to his mother. ‘When you are ready, Madam?’
‘Your special birthday breakfast, Tom-Tom, are you excited?’ his mother asked.
He nodded. He was! Porridge, bacon, egg, tomato, sausage, baked beans, fried bread, toast, marmalade! The treat breakfast he got when he had been especially good and didn’t have to eat the boring muesli that came in a box from Switzerland and had a picture of an elderly man in spectacles on the front.
‘Are you more excited about your present or your breakfast?’
Thomas hesitated. If he gave the wrong answer, there was the danger of losing both. ‘My present.’ His voice travelled in hope.
Such joy in her face! He beamed. This was going to be a good day today!
‘Can you guess? Can you, Tom-Tom? Can you guess what it is?’
It was about two feet square, little more than two inches thick and wrapped in cream paper with a blue ribbon. Heavy. He turned it around in his hands. Hard and heavy.
No, he couldn’t guess. Really he couldn’t!
His brain was searching for possibilities. He wondered what could be in a flat box. For Christmas she had given him a Meccano set which had come in a flat box and weighed a lot. In the booklet that had come with the set were instructions on how to make a swing bridge. He’d built a cage with it. He captured spiders and put them in the cage to see how long they could live without food or water. Sometimes they lived a long time.
Maybe it was more Meccano.
Eagerly hoping so, he untied the ribbon and let it fall free.
‘Don’t tear the paper, Tom-Tom, we don’t want to waste it.’
‘No, Mummy.’ He worked loose the wrapping paper, being careful not even to add further creases, then finally he pushed it open to reveal the gift.
It was a photograph in a silver frame. His mother, in a long dress and black gloves, was talking to another woman, who was also wearing a long dress and gloves.
‘That’s Princess Margaret! Isn’t that a wonderful present, Tom-Tom?’
He said nothing.
‘I thought it could go on the wall in front of your bed so you can see it when you wake up. Would you like it there best?’
Thomas looked down at the table, not wanting to let her see his disappointment.
‘That’s the film première I told you about, the one before you were born we did to raise money for Oxfam, to help children less fortunate than you. Princess Margaret told me she adored my films! Would you like to meet a princess?’
Thomas wasn’t sure what a princess was. ‘Yes.’
‘You’ll have to be good for a long time. Princesses don’t visit anyone who is bad. You’re not looking at your picture. Are you sure you like it?’
Thomas looked at it and nodded.
‘The princess was upset with me when I gave up my career to have you, Tom-Tom, because it meant she wasn’t going to see me in any more films. She asked me if you appreciated the sacrifice I had made, and I told her you were a wonderful son and you did appreciate it. I was right to tell her that, Tom-Tom, wasn’t I?’
He nodded.
‘You do appreciate that, don’t you, Tom-Tom?’
Barely a whisper. ‘Yes’.
His mother took the photograph, turned it round and peered closely at it. ‘This was seven years ago. Am I still as beautiful now?’ Her voice sounded forlorn.
The sight of her looking sad made him forget his own disappointment. He couldn’t bear it when his mother was sad. ‘You look even more beautiful now,’ he said.
She reached out a hand that smelt of pine soap. He took it in his own tiny hand and kissed it.
‘I’m glad you like your present,’ she said. Then she smiled.
He smiled back and squeezed her hand. Happy now.
Chapter Thirty-seven
Much calmer now. Dust on the photograph. Thomas wiped it with a cloth, then stood back. His mother talking to Princess Margaret. An old photograph. One of the dozens of photographs of his mother in his den. He hadn’t looked at this one in a long while.
How long?
Where was it taken? What was the occasion?
His memory was letting him down again, as if someone was following him around, tearing pages out of his brain at random. Useless junk never got torn out: he could remember with photographic clarity the circuit boards of every computer he had ever owned, every chip, switch, wire, nut, bolt, solder. Completely fucking useless. Yet stuff that did matter just went. Stuff like the reporter, Justin Flowering, who was his house guest, who needed his hospitality, his care, his attention: he’d forgotten all about him yesterday, hadn’t taken him any water, any nourishment.
One wall of his den was lined floor to ceiling with bookshelves containing science, medical and technological books, the other walls were filled with photographs of his mother.
There was a powerful microscope on his desk and a stack of glass slides containing preserved animal and human cells. He liked to study the intricacies of life; one day maybe he would take up biological research. He wasn’t happy with Darwin. He preferred his namesake, Karl Lamarck. One day he would get around to it. He liked the methodology of research. The hours, days, months, years of observation, experiments, patience.
Order.
Downstairs in the kitchen the microwave pinged.
He prowled over to the window, tall and proud, the master of this house now, and peered out through the curtains that he kept permanently closed to stop the molecules of shit and urine that came out of aeroplanes from getting into his room. Dawn was
leaching away the darkness. He heard a taxi rattle past, saw tail-lights through the railings.
Sunday.
Are you chilling out today, Dr Tennent? Taking it easy? Enjoying fucking your bit of fluff?
Another picture of his mother caught his eye, one of his favourites. She was lying on a divan in a négligée, the tops of her breasts clearly showing. She was drinking a glass of champagne, smoking a cigarette from a long holder, and laughing.
He tried to remember the last time they had laughed together, but that page had been ripped out.
Dry lips. He needed a drink of water or something. He wondered if it was dry in the grave.
Down in the kitchen he removed the Pizza San Marco with wood-smoked ham and mushrooms from the microwave. He eyed some shrivelled red bits embedded in the melted cheese surface with suspicion. They looked like dried tomato skins he had seen in vomit.
He brought it to his nose and the odours were fine. It had been a while since he’d eaten or drunk anything. He’d had nothing for twelve hours before he began his surveillance of Dr Michael Tennent’s house, not wanting to have to break off to evacuate bodily fluids or substances.
NIL BY MOUTH. The signs that were hung on the ends of patients’ beds in the wards sometimes, when he was a medical student. He’d once managed to leave the sign on a grumpy man’s bed for five days and no one had questioned it.
There was an electric clock on the kitchen wall that made a faint click at one-second intervals. The fridge and freezers hummed. The noise in the room sounded like a wasp’s nest inside his head. A neon strip in one of the units had blown and needed replacing. The dishwasher needed emptying – he couldn’t remember when he had filled it, but the cycle-finished light was on. Dirty dishes were stacked in the sink and on the drainers. He couldn’t remember putting that stuff there – another page that had been ripped out.
He cut the pizza into four segments, put one on a plastic tray, with a jug of water, and went down the cellar steps into the gym, switched on the lights and walked across to the sauna.
As he opened the door, a blast of heat and the stench of excrement greeted him. Justin Flowering, still in the suit and hideous tie he had worn at his mother’s funeral, now blotched with dried blood, lay in the same position, pinned down by the bonds around his arms, midriff, thighs and ankles.