A Lovely Day to Die (16 page)

But her child would have a murderess for a mother. A
murderess.

Is not the womb of a murderess as soft and warm as any other? Is not her milk as sweet?

Wickedness cannot penetrate the barrier of the placenta, as thalidomide and all those dreadful drugs can. Deep inside her, unharmed, sealed off from all evil, her baby would grow and grow, innocent, perfect, like any other baby.

Wicked women have borne babies before now, and will again. Often, the babies have thrived. Always, they have had their moment under the sun, their strip of blue sky above them.

Half dozing over the dead telephone, Christine dreamed the night away. She no longer feared the police, nor the thunder of knocks upon the outer door, for in her dreams she was already inviolate, unassailable, the custodian of a process far greater and more ancient than any process of the law.

Q
UITE A FEW
of the children were joining in, or trying to join in, with the voice that blared from the microphone on the fore-deck; and the resultant din, together with the rapt, angelic expressions which seemed so often to belong with the most raucous and tuneless of the childish voices, made Patricia smile.

Some of the youngsters, of course, were openly guying the song, with cheeky gestures and ribald honkings—for after all, it wasn’t a
new
record any longer, it had been around for ages. But most of them—especially the younger ones—seemed earnest enough, standing wedged up against the boat rails or kneeling up on the slatted benches, solemnly belting out such of the words as they happened to remember across the expanse of brown, restless water through which the vessel was chugging languidly, carrying its load of Easter holiday-makers upstream towards Richmond and Hampton Court.

carolled the seven-year-old Lennie with all his might, his voice, it seemed to Patricia, soaring above those of the other children like a lark, like a nightingale: perfect pitch, perfect diction, and an indescribable purity of tone that brought tears to her eyes.

*

Or did all the mothers feel like this about their own particular child’s unique, incomparable screeching? That fat woman
opposite
, for instance, impatiently sloshing some sort of bright pink liquid into a cardboard beaker protruding from among a welter of
half-eaten crisps and melting chocolate—was she hearing in the strident bellowings of her overweight small daughter the same sort of heart-stopping poignancy as Patricia was aware of as she listened to Lennie?

Apparently not.

“Here y’are!” the woman scolded, thrusting the too-full beaker almost into the little girl’s face, right in the middle of a musical line. “Shut that row and drink up, we haven’t got all day … Eee—watch out what yer doin’, yer clumsy little cow!” she added sharply as the beaker, changing hands, slopped pink sticky liquid this way and that, spattering the child’s white socks and shiny best shoes. “There! Now look what you done! Din’ I say watch what yer doin’?”

At this point Father joined in, a taut, defeated-looking man in his forties, slumped on the bench, his eyes half-closed against the sun.

“You do what yer Mum tells you,” he ordered, barely turning his head. “Or I’ll bash yer!”—and then, turning on his wife with a tiny little spurt of spiteful energy:

“Cantcher leave the kid alone ever, nag, nag, nag?”

Reproof could hardly be distributed more equitably between two warring parties. He cuffed the child absent-mindedly, just for good measure, and then, family duty accomplished, he tilted his tired face towards the warmth of the spring sunshine once more, and closed his eyes.

“You just be’ave yerself!” he summed up.

*

But at least he’s saying
something
to the child, thought Patricia, with a sort of despairing envy. At least he’s
being
a father—he’s
involving
himself!—and she stole a furtive glance at Arnold who was sitting, as always on these family outings, a little way away from them. He was slewed round, almost with his back to them, and staring intently down, as she had known he would be, at the churning water. It was swirling past his field of vision so painlessly, so anonymously, stirring up no guilt in him, demanding nothing of him, neither attention, nor understanding, nor love.

*

Oh, but she was being unfair! It wasn’t that Arnold didn’t love Lennie—he loved his son deeply, painfully; but, alas, with a total inability to relate to him, either as father to son, or simply as adult to child.

It wasn’t anyone’s fault. It was just one of those things. Arnold should have had a quite different kind of a son, Patricia often reflected; a real little toughie, crazy about football; athletic in build, a right little dare-devil, such as Arnold himself had been. To a seven-year-old like that, Arnold could have been a marvellous father, helping him, encouraging him, coaching him at ball games on Sunday afternoons, and Oh, so proud of his every small achievement in field or playground. It wasn’t
his
fault that Lennie wasn’t that sort of a boy—but then, it wasn’t Lennie’s, either.

Arnold knew this perfectly well, of course. He realized just as clearly as Patricia did that you can’t alter a child, not in any fundamental way. You have to take his talents and abilities just as they are, and nurture them as best you can. It’s no good wishing he’d got another lot, quite different ones, of a kind that you’d maybe have been better at cultivating … Arnold understood all this, of course he did. He was no fool. And, to do him justice, he never voiced his disappointment, or took it out on the child. Not even to Patricia did he ever confess how much he sometimes longed for a different kind of a son.

*

But he
did
love
Lennie, Patricia assured herself. He really did. He’d have done anything for him. It was just that he had no idea what to talk to him about, how to play with him; how to make contact with a child so different from what he himself had been. The
imaginative
pretend-games that Lennie delighted in were a closed book to his father: they were not only beyond him, but they filled him with unease, and even a sort of distaste. He was quite unable to feel the sort of pride that Patricia felt at the vividness of their child’s imagination, at his quite remarkable power of amusing himself for hours on end with make-believe adventures and imaginary companions. To Patricia, her son’s unusual gifts were something to be cherished, and she encouraged him in every way she could,
often herself joining in the imaginary games and fantasies with gusto, whenever Arnold wasn’t around to be upset by it.

Surely encouragement was the right response to early signs of talent in whatever field? Might not Lennie one day be a great writer, a great poet ..?

“Mummy!”

Patricia roused herself from her reverie, and glanced down towards the earnest little figure at her side.

“Mummy, that song about Walking on the Water—the Jesus song they’ve just been playing—Did Jesus
really
walk on the water, Mummy? Really truly?”

Patricia hesitated. Lennie was always landing her with difficult philosophical questions like this, and it made her feel so inadequate. He was so precocious in some ways, and thoughtful far beyond his years. You couldn’t put him off with just any old answer, thought up on the spur of the moment, as you could with some children.

“Well,” she began carefully, “Perhaps not quite
really.
It’s more a beautiful kind of a story—a
thinking-
story,
if you know what I mean, to remind us of what a very special, unusual sort of a person Jesus must have been. And to remind us too, I suppose, of what wonderful things a person can do if he
really
tries—the wonderful things he can achieve—if only he doesn’t let himself get discouraged. If he has ‘faith’, the Bible says, but I suppose nowadays we’d call it ‘self-confidence’ …”

*

Usually, Lennie would have been only too delighted to engage in philosophical disputation on this sort of level: but this time he only frowned impatiently.

“You mean he
didn’t
walk on the water!” he interrupted scornfully, “Didn’t really do it at all!”

He paused, and then added witheringly: “How silly of him!
I
could walk on the water, easily! I know I could, Mummy! It’s easy!”

Patricia tried to keep her expression bland and cheerful. He wasn’t really trying to make mock of her, or of the parable; it was simply another of these pretend-games coming up, a new addition to their repertoire, and one in which she, as always, would be expected
to play a part. She glanced up to make sure that Arnold was out of hearing—he did hate this sort of thing so much—and then as she always tried to do, she threw herself whole-heartedly into the boy’s fantasy:

“All right, darling,” she said brightly, “that sounds a lovely game. I’ll be the disciple Peter, and you can be—”

“NO!”

The word exploded from the small, intent face with such violence that Patricia was completely taken aback. “
No,
Mummy,
not
a game! Not a silly, rotten Pretend! I mean
really.
Real
walking, on
real
water”—and before Patricia could see how it was happening, he was gone, away from her side and slipping through the rails only a foot or two from his father—who stood, as if paralysed, while his son plunged towards the water.

*

Patricia never knew whether it was she, or some stranger, who gave the alarm. Anyway, within seconds, people from all over the boat were surging to the side … there were screams, shouts, exclamations of horror … two or three bystanders were already stripping-off, ready to dive. Orders were barked, the boat
shuddered
and the water churned wildly as the engines were put into reverse; and rising above all the mechanical turmoil came the massed shouts and cries from hundreds of throats:

“Look ..!” “There ..!” “No, it isn’t ..!” “My God, look at that, they’ll never ..!”—and then, suddenly, silence.

Faces whitened. Mouths gaped open. No words were spoken: only a sort of sigh, like the rising of wind very far off, came from all that vast, watching crowd.

*

His first steps were hesitant, uncertain, as if walking was an exercise quite unfamiliar to him. He stumbled a little on the dancing, uneven water, then recovered himself, moving his feet delicately, cautiously as he picked his way among the ever-shifting dips and hummocks, his eyes downcast, anxiously measuring every step.

But then, surprisingly quickly, he seemed to gain confidence,
and skill. Soon he was skipping from crest to crest of the small, choppy waves, leaping and cavorting among them.

“Look, Mummy, look! I’m doing it!” he shrieked in triumph, hopping and jumping, higher and higher, faster and faster, whirling, pirouetting on his spindly little legs. “Look, Mummy, look!”

*

Of course, everyone was looking. Naturally. Hundreds and hundreds of them, all pushing, struggling, almost fighting to get a better view. The moment of the initial shock was over. Cameras were whipped out, cries of excitement once again filled the air, the tumult of wonder and incredulity echoing far up and down the river and reverberating from shore to shore.

*

And already, from goodness knows where, the reporters were gathering, clambering over obstacles, pushing their way through tight-packed crowds, all vying with each other for the scoop of the century. The parents, of course, were a prime target, the parents of the miracle-child. Around Patricia and Arnold questions flew like shrapnel.

When did you first realise he was different from other kids? Any other miracles—loaves-and-fishes, all that bit?

Are you Christians? You believe in the Second Coming?

… Could be the New Messiah, d’you think?

… You believe in Prayer?

… Turn water into wine, can he?

… Sent to Redeem the World ..?

… Not some sort of a trick, is it? Uri Geller sort of stuff?

… Or Levitation? Has he had lessons in Yoga?

… Or Transcendental Meditation?

*

But to all these questions the tiresome couple just shook their heads, helplessly; they stood there dumb as two fish amid the clamour. It was going to be impossible to get a decent interview out of either one of them, so dim they seemed, so slow in the uptake. Daft, really, as if they couldn’t take in a word that was said to them!
And, in a way, they couldn’t. The reporters were asking all the wrong questions anyway, nothing to do with what had actually happened. Amid all the hubbub, Arnold and Patricia stood silent, each of them with a hand still clutching the child-sized
spinal-carriage
which had gone with them everywhere for nearly seven years, and they watched their son with such joy, such thankfulness, as is beyond all imagining.

It wasn’t that he was walking on the water; that was nothing. It was that he was walking at all.