‘Just think of that,’ Mum said. ‘You’ll still have to bring your own dirty laundry downstairs and make your own bed, mind.’
Jim went to the loo afterwards and Dad joined him. In the corridor that led back to the servants’ hall they stopped to examine a sequence of old photographs. Each showed servants and family posing with either the front or back of the house as backdrop. The family sat on dining chairs on the gravel or lawn and the servants stood behind them, like staff and pupils in the annual school equivalent. Dogs were also present, sometimes obediently posing to the fore, sometimes wandering in a wilful blur further off. In some there were other people – more staff, or possibly just playful houseguests – smiling from upstairs windows. Dad peered closely, then pointed at the centre of one such group, at a formidable old lady swathed in black with a no less formidable baby, swathed in white, on her lap. The men on her either side were as unreadable behind beards and large moustaches as their ancestors would have been behind armour, but the old woman’s face – their wife and mother? – was quite visible and looked like Dad’s in the extreme seriousness he assumed when reading.
‘Your great-great-grandmother,’ he said. ‘That baby is my granny. I remember now she used to have a copy of this picture over her desk.’
‘Aren’t they killing?’ It was the owner’s wife, come to check on her daughters perhaps or simply on a break from manning the plant stall. She had a rounded, well-fed face, plump pearls and extremely neat clothes. She had a well-maintained look, lubricated against the shocks of life. She was, Jim realized, entirely unlike any woman he ever encountered at home.
‘Looking for long-lost relatives?’ she asked and Jim saw her do the usual little eye flick at the tall thin man and short foreign-looking boy.
‘We’ve found my father’s grandmother,’ Jim told her.
‘Oh what fun,’ she said. ‘It’s amazing how many people we get doing this. The Internet is going to make all that sort of research so much easier, isn’t it? And of course maids were listed on the census returns alongside their mistresses. My favourite’s that pudding-faced girl holding the pony.’
And as she clicked on along the corridor past them and pointedly unhooked and refastened a red silk rope that blocked entry into the rest of the house to mere visitors, something small but essential withered within him.
‘She thought your granny was a servant,’ he told Dad.
‘I know,’ Dad said. ‘But it doesn’t matter.’
It had been a long day out by their standards and they drove back to the caravan in silence. One of the good things about not having Carrie with them was being alone on the car’s back seat and being the better able to relish the dull passivity of being driven and not having to participate. He stared out at the passing scenery, shops he would never enter, people he would never meet, with the same pleasurable blankness he brought to watching bad television at friends’ houses, and felt himself get a hard-on in the same uninvolved way, stimulated by vibration and boredom rather than active thought.
He perceived how typical it was that his father should choose to make nothing of something that clearly mattered to him: the house, the family history, the line of inheritance that had wobbled with his grandmother being the only heir and been as good as wiped out now that the male heir was an American-Vietnamese rape-baby and no relation. It all mattered to Dad or they need not have visited. And yet, challenged, he crumpled into diffidence and denial when he could have said, perfectly politely,
my ancestors built this house so my family would quite like to see round it actually, at least the downstairs
. And then, by a connection that felt entirely natural, Jim perceived that it was the same with God. God clearly mattered to his father, he had built his life and his family’s lives around the church and its needs, he was prepared to earn less than even the miners used to, certainly not enough to let him buy back his ancestral home, not even enough to let them have a holiday in a nice cottage, or even a hotel in the Canaries for once, like normal people, instead of a week in a caravan so small you could have a table or a double bed but not both at once, so that they all had to go to bed at the same time, even if they weren’t all tired. And yet if challenged, faced, say, with a classmate’s father, like Mr Thomas, Teagan’s would-be dad, who said he never saw the point of church, Dad never made a fuss, never said,
but you must for the sake of your eternal soul. It matters, Mr Thomas. Truly it does. Just let me explain
. Rather, he would shrug – Jim had seen him do it – and say something inoffensive and basically meaningless like,
well, we all find our own way, don’t we
, because however important he thought it was, he thought it was more important not to make a fuss and risk making anybody, even for a moment, feel uncomfortable.
And as they were slowly bumping along the farm track to the pretty field where the static caravan was not quite shaded by an old oak tree, it came to Jim that he would never be lord of the manor or have the sort of wife who manned a plant stall and he would never go to heaven either because God was all rubbish, a bit like cream teas or trips to museums, just something people did and said
how lovely
about, regardless of what they really felt.
There!
he said to himself.
I don’t believe in God. That’s that.
It was more than not believing, he realized. That implied that some people did, that believing might be a valid option. In fact there were no options. There was no God. There was simply life followed at some entirely random point by death. There was, in fact, simply stuff and time. Nothing more. And the excitement, the beauty even of it was that stuff and time were still amazing.
There was no distant thunder and no sudden onset of cosmic terror. He did not in truth feel any more alone that evening than he had that morning, and no less related to his unrelated family. He simply knew he was alone, which he hadn’t done at breakfast.
He said nothing. To that extent, he began to realize, he
was
like his father; he would cause no bother for the rest of them. He wouldn’t make a scene about suddenly not believing, even though it was depressing to understand that from now on everything about his father’s life, its whole basis, would seem pointless to him. He wouldn’t even tell them unless they asked him directly, and that was highly unlikely. He would continue to go with them to church, at least until he left home, because that would be about supporting family now and avoiding conflict, nothing to do with God, but he knew he would never be confirmed. But that was fine too because he knew even now that Dad was too diffident to suggest it outright or even discuss it directly unless Jim brought it up.
‘Ham and salad for supper, I thought,’ Mum said as they came to a halt in the field and there was the caravan before them, a hot, little airless box like an off-white tomb. ‘And there are still those nice potatoes I can boil up.’
Terror came later that night. A fox cry woke him and he felt a sensation he had felt before when woken from nightmares or enduring a high temperature, of being too much awake, too much aware, as though the volume control on his senses had been suddenly turned too high for comfort.
He lay there, in the child’s bed that was too short and too narrow for him and so hemmed round it felt like a Formica-lined coffin, listening to the scary-sexy shrieks of the fox and the deep, regular breathing of his parents. He remembered in the instant that God no longer existed and began to enumerate in a kind of panic all the other things, the rights and musts, the duties and the oughts which presumably would crumble away without the idea of God and his huge approval (and its rarely mentioned opposite) to shore them up. Family. Responsibilities. Love, even. It was as though God were a vast ocean liner holed beyond repair beneath the waterline and all these other things were little tugs whose crews realized too late they were tied fast to the larger ship and about to be sucked from view.
And his mounting sense of fear was indistinguishable from his growing sense of disgust at the way his parents were simply lying there, obliviously sucking all the air from the caravan, and, just as obliviously, replacing it with their night fug. When he could bear it no more, he slipped out of bed and opened the caravan door as quietly as he could.
He walked away from the caravan and around it, enjoying the shock of dewy grass under his bare feet and against his pyjama bottoms. There was a moon. He saw a hunting owl. His fear and disgust were replaced with bewildering speed by a painful joy, fed by excitement at the realization that these intense surges of feeling must be part of what was involved in becoming an adult.
At last, when the cold in his feet began to hurt, he enjoyed a long, luxurious piss against a tree, because he could, then let himself back into the caravan and returned to bed, as silent and calm as a practised assassin.
Barnaby’s stepmother had left a message with one of his housemates that morning. The housemate had forgotten to write it down on the little blackboard they kept for the purpose in the kitchen, so Barnaby had spent the entire day studying in the history faculty and had even come home for a spot of lunch and returned to the library, all unawares. He rang her back as soon as the housemate had thought to pass on the message, then raced to catch the next train to Bristol. He had felt so disoriented on finally arriving into Temple Meads long after dark and in driving rain that he had to walk back up into the station a few minutes after leaving it and search for a street map because he had momentarily forgotten the route to the hospital. He had the name of the ward written down, at least, so was able to navigate his way swiftly through the corridors and staircases once he got there.
He did not recognize her at first. He had not been encouraged to visit since they had converted their house into flats and apparently had far less room for entertaining. He had done no more than speak to her on the telephone (and then fleetingly) for over two years.
‘I look a fright,’ she said, ‘but make-up takes so long and he can’t see me anyway. I still wear scent for him. He likes that.’ She kissed him on the cheek, which was even stranger than seeing her without make-up and with her roots growing out.
‘It makes you look rather sweet,’ he said honestly. ‘Approachable.’
She made a scoffing noise. Neither of these was an epithet she welcomed but it was true; with her toughly enamelled nails, shiny gold hair and painted features, she had always dressed the part of the wicked stepmother and handed him and Alice neat evidence that she was an interloper on their scruffy family. Living far apart from her, more alienated from his father than ever, he found his memory of her appearance had hardened into unchanging parody, so that it was startling to be confronted with a reality that had, of course, been ageing, and now seemed vulnerable, even motherly.
‘How is he?’ he asked her.
‘Not good. But he’s no longer agitated and the pain nurse or whatever they call her has been and adjusted the medication so he’s not suffering, or not so as you’d notice.’
‘Have you been here all day?’
She nodded.
‘You must be shattered, Marcia.’ It felt weird to say her name out loud after years of chuckling over it in secret, weirder still that she didn’t seem to register the piece of familiarity.
‘I’m done in. Would you mind sitting with him for a couple of hours? Just so I can slip home for a bit and shower and change and maybe eat something?’
‘Of course. No rush to get back. I slept on the train and I’ve had loads of coffee.’
‘You’re so young still.’ She touched his cheek and smiled sadly, another unnerving gesture. ‘Silly. I’d forgotten somehow. Maybe because your letters were always so serious. I won’t be long. An hour at the most. And he’ll probably just be dozing. Don’t look for one of your old arguments or even anything much in the conversation line. I’ll take you in to him.’
His father was in a room on his own. He was an unhealthy, deeply sallow colour and was plumbed into a catheter bag and a machine dispensing painkiller, Barnaby presumed.
‘Prof?’ she murmured and touched the back of his hand so that his eyelids fluttered. ‘I’m just slipping home to freshen up but look who’s here to see you.’
‘Hello,’ Barnaby said, finding himself unable to call his father anything. ‘It’s Barnaby.’
‘Touch him so he knows what side of the bed you’ll be sitting,’ she said and he touched his father’s forearm through his pyjamas and was shocked to find it as hard and skinny as a dog’s foreleg. ‘Back soon,’ she mouthed exaggeratedly and slipped out.
‘Sorry you’ve been in the wars,’ Barnaby said. ‘I’d have got here far earlier only I only got the … Marcia’s message when I got back from the library at about five. Why didn’t you tell anybody? They could have operated last year if you’d only said. The pain must have been …’
‘My body,’ his father said with enough of his old clarity to bring an end to the matter.
There was silence for a bit, broken only by the passing squeak of someone’s shoes on the corridor outside.
‘Has she gone?’ he asked then. ‘What did you two call her? The Butterfuck?’
‘That was Uncle James.’
‘You too.’
‘Sometimes,’ Barnaby confessed. ‘Yes. She’s gone but only to shower and change. She’s been here all day.’
‘Tell me about it. Thanks for coming.’
‘Don’t be silly.’
‘Never silly.’ His father broke off then to cry out sharply.
‘Dad?’
‘It’s OK. Pain. Amazing machine this. Amazing. Wish I’d had it last night.’
He was clutching some kind of control for the dispensing device, Barnaby realized, and had just squeezed it. There was a soft sound from the machine and his father sighed and closed his now sightless eyes.
Barnaby sat back in the chair. In his rush to pack and leave he had brought only one book and it was a scholarly one on the Manichean heresies, quite unreadable for pleasure or distraction. He pulled it out now from the zipper on his case and tried again but had to read the same paragraph over and over. He was extremely hungry. The train’s sandwiches had seemed criminally expensive so he had eaten nothing but an apple since lunchtime. His father had been admitted in a hurry, following a severe rectal haemorrhage, so it was no surprise to find no grapes on his nightstand. He sat on, overriding his own impulses, trying to see in the withered old man in winceyette the fierce but impressive bogeyman of boyhood. It lived on, he realized, only in the voice, implacable, slightly mocking. He could only imagine it had been pride that had driven his father to keep his illness a secret until it was too late to save him from it. It surely wasn’t fear.