A Sight for Sore Eyes (5 page)

Francine knew at once. She had never spoken of it with Julia, though she had with almost everyone else. She would have liked to try and put it away from her, bury it in the past and have it come back oniv in her dreams. Now Julia said that would be wrong. It must be talked over. She wasn't a rebellious child, but quiet and sweet, and above all anxious that her father should be happy. She came to Julia without protest because her father wanted her to. But she was desperate not to talk to Julia about that day. 'You think the man will lind YOU, don't you, Francine?' It had never crossed her mind. 'I know the reason why you don't want to talk about it. It is because you are afraid of the man finding you. Aren't I right?' Francine was anxious not to cry, but she did, she couldn't help herself. Julia took her into her arms and held her against her slippery white satin blouse, hugged her long and lovingly and stroked her hair. 'I will never let you come to any harm. Daddy will never let you come to harm. You know that now, don't you?' Nearly a year was to pass before Richard understood the cause of Julia's sudden decision to retire from practice, sell her house and move. At the time these seemed acts heaven-sent for his own purposes, or beautiful coincidences. One Saturday evening, when he and Francine were alone, when they had had their supper and had just finished listening to a CD of Britten's Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra, he said to her, 'Sweetheart, I want to ask you something. It's rather serious.' 'Is it about that day?' she said. He knew what she meant and he was taken aback. Had he been in danger of forgetting how much the past preyed on her mind? 'No, it's not about that. We've said everything there is to say about that.' She nodded, then, as if on an afterthought of doubt, shrugged her shoukiers. 'What I want to ask you is quite different. It's about the future, not the past, the time to come.' He waited, then said, 'How would you feel if I got married?' 'Married?' 'I'd like to get married. I will never forget your mother, you know that. I will never stop loving her. But I want to be married again, for your sake too. I expect you know who it is?' 'Flora,' she said. Her guesswork, as wide of the mark as could be, almost angered him. She was only a child. Still, to suppose him likely to marry an overweight frump with permed hair and red hands, a one-time State Enrolled Nurse with a Bristol accent... 'It's Julia.' He kept his patience. He even smiled, but without looking directly at her. 'I haven't asked her yet. I am asking your permission, Francine. I am saving, my dear little girl, may I marry our good friend Julia?' A parent who asks a child if he may marry again always intends to do so whatever the answer may be. It just makes things smoother if the answer is yes. Francine didn't know this, but she intuited it. If she had been five years older she would probably have said, I can't stop you, or, Do as you like, it's your life. But she was only nine and she loved the idea of seeing him happy. Once she had lost the power of speech and sometimes even now, though she had never confessed to anyone, she was afraid muteness might come back. One day she would wake up and be unable to speak. That had never happened and it wasn't happening now. Her failure to speak this time was a matter of choice. She looked at him in silence and nodded.

Chapter 6

All the years of his childhood Teddy had called at his grandmother s once a week for his pocket money. Both of them, by nature or conditioning, had cold temperaments and both were loners. Agnes Tawton had been relieved when her husband died and said so without shame. She no longer had someone living in the house whose wishes might not invariably accord with her own and who had occasionally demanded a modicum of her attention. She gave little of this to Teddy, but she gave him his pound. Sometimes his visit would pass without a word being exchanged beyond his thanks which she insisted on, which she demanded even before it reached his hand. If he stared at her in silence, his mouth clamped shut, she would snatch the money away and hold it behind her back. What do you say?' 'Thank you.' 'Thank you, Grandma.' 'Thank you, Grandma.' Often she didn't ask him in and if she did, offered him nothing to eat or drink. Their conversation, at these times, consisted in her bullying him with questions about his school work and picking his brains as to what went on in the Brex household, and in his monosyllabic if not quite dumb insolence. She was old, in her mid-seventies by the time Teddy was ten, but strong and spry. Though never invited, she occasionally came round to see her daughter, but even if this visit happened at the time. Teddy's weekly stipend was due, she would never pass over his pound. He had to call on her for that. So a relationship of a kind developed between these two apparently unfeeling people. Though each was uninterested in human nature - beyond sharing a general contempt for it - they probably knew each other better than either of them knew anyone else. As Teddy entered his teens and grew tall, and became highly personable, Agnes even softened her attitude towards him, occasionally making a remark that was neither censorious nor hectoring nor derisive. 'Cold out today,' she might say, or, with great satisfaction, 'You're going to be a lot taller than your dad.' It was therefore strange, beyond ordinary human understanding, that when Teddy was eighteen and off to college, Agnes blew it. She could have given him twice or even three times what he was getting - she could afford it - but instead, because he had his grant, she announced that his weekly pound was to stop. 'You've got more coming in than I have,' she said. Teddy made no reply, for he had no idea of his grandmother's income. 'Won't bother with me any more now, will you?' This was uttered in a tone of triumph. 'Probably not. 'Suit yourself,' said Agnes. When Keith asked why the house smelt of acetone Eileen knew for sure she shared her late father's disability. It was on her breath and perhaps coming out of her pores, but Jimmy hadn't noticed it. For a long time she had suspected. Knowing Tom Tawton's symptoms, she finally recognised what her constant raging thirst, dry skin and weariness must mean. She had been coping with thirst by drinking lager, pouring it down alternately with cans of Diet Coke. Her eves weren't what they had been either, but she had coped with that by buying herself glasses at Boots. Some degree of eyesight was essential if she was to continue with and finish the white lace counterpane. The time had come when ignoring things and pretending they weren't there was no longer going to work. She would have to do something. None of the men in the household showed any more interest in the state of her health after Keith had commented on the acetone smell. She would have been surprised if they had. In spite of the lager she had lost weight, for she had no appetite. 'I reckon I could get my ring on again,' she said to Jimmy as they were watching 'Aio, 'Aio one evening. 'You look at my finger.' But Jimmy didn't. He dodged round the hand she thrust in front of him, a hand so dry and the skin so flaky that it looked as if it had been dipped in a bag of flour. He leant in the other direction, peered at the screen and laughed throatily. Dressed in a red and grey crocheted skirt and jumper with a crocheted red cape and crocheted yellow peaked cap, Eileen set off to get the bus to her mother's. On the way she passed the doctor's surgery, newly renamed the medical centre, and she noticed it, she actually paused outside it, and read on the notice board the times at which patients could attend and directions for making appointments. But she passed on. She still remembered, after nineteen years, the fuss there had been over her failure to seek medical attention before and when Teddy was born, the contemptuous GP and the tight-lipped midwife. And she thought of what they would do if she went in there. Her knowledge of this was culled from television. She imagined the tests, the nagging, the humiliation, the adjurations to stop smoking. At the bus-stop she lit a cigarette. A woman who was also waiting fanned the smoke away with her hand and Eileen relieved her feelings by giving her a mouthful of abuse. By the time she got to her mother's she was very tired, not least because during the journey she had twice had to seek out public lavatories to cope with her lavish urination. When she heard what Eileen intended, Agnes made a feeble attempt to argue her out of it. But along with any warmth or real interest in the fate of others, she lacked persuasive powers. She wasn't sufficiently involved. 'You'll upset your insides,' she said. it's not my insides, is it? It's my leg I'm going to do it to.' 'Your dad's stuff will have gone off. It's been there five years.' But she couldn't stop Eileen going into the bathroom for the syringe and the ampoule. Eileen had watched her father do this so often that she knew exactly what it involved. Tom Tawton had left ample supplies of the stuff behind and Agnes had thrown out none of it, as the NHS practice nurse had instructed her to do. Eileen thought she could take some of it back with her and buy her own syringe. Searching through the medicine cabinet, she found a container labelled Tolbutamide. Remembering that this had once been prescribed for her father to take by mouth before his treatment had become intravenous, she swallowed a couple of capsules in water from the cold tap. It couldn't do any harm. Injecting herself was more of a challenge, but she had seen it done so she could do it. Afterwards, she went back to her mother and said she'd make them a cup of tea. She was going to stop taking sugar in her tea. 'It'll be a wrench,' she said, 'but I have to think of my health,' and then, because she had heard the phrase somewhere, or something like it, 'I owe it to Jimmy to think of my health.' In the kitchen, while the kettle was boiling, she had to sit down. She sat, felt her head swim, her vision blacken, her body quake, she slid to the floor and collapsed in a coma. Her mother, weary with waiting for her tea, fell asleep and failed to find her till five hours had passed. Home from college for the Easter break, Teddy found that the house was deserted by day. Jimmy had neglected to inform the authorities of his wife's death and continued to draw the full retirement pension for a married couple to which he had previously been entitled since he became sixty-five. At much the same time the law had changed and pubs stayed open all day. Jimmy went to the pub at ten in the morning and stayed there until six or seven in the evening. Always a hard worker Keith, who had been drawing his pension for a year longer, still worked as a plumber as '~e11, mostly for money in the back pocket. He was a serious earner, was Keith, having, for instance, made enough in the past year to take himself away on holiday to Lanzarote and build a carport on the concrete pad to shelter the Edsel from the elements. A good plumber, who will come whenever he is called on, when the tank in the loft leaks, when the lavatory cistern won't stop filling, is always in demand. So the house was empty and for the first time in his life Teddy had it to himself. He could have asked friends round, but he had no friends. Alfred Chance had been the nearest to a friend he ever had. Girls at college fancied him and made their feelings plain, but he repulsed them. He was a loner and he liked to think of himself as such. At first, when he was alone in the house, he explored and searched it in a way he had never had the opportunity to do before. It was very dirty and, because there was so much wool about and so many woollen garments, infested with moths. Woodworm were devouring the living-room furniture and from the television table had bored into the skirting board. Teddy closed his eyes and thought of the house as being eaten up by insects, boring and drilling and chewing, and he almost fancied he could hear their depredations as a range of steady hummings and buzzings on various different notes. Spiders were in the bath and silverfish wriggled across the floors. Ladybirds were concentrated in crimson clusters on the dirty curtains. From a distance they looked like scabs on skin. He went into Keith's room, not because there was anything in there he specially wanted to see or to check on, but rather in wonderment and fascinated disgust. An obscure pleasure was what he felt in simply contemplating the bed which was never made and on which the sheets were never changed. Since Eileen's death there was no one to do the washing and a heap of soiled clothes lay in one corner. Keith would wait until he had just one pair of trousers and one ragged T-shirt left and then he would put the pile of clothes into a bin-liner and take it down to the launderette. The room smelt of stale cigarette smoke, sweat, blue cheese and the dry, bitter, yellow stink of unwashed bedlinen. Normal-sized ashtrays weren't big enough for Keith and he used an old Pyrex casserole in which to deposit his ash and stub out his fag ends. It stood on the floor beside the bed. Teddy squatted down and looked underneath. From his childhood he remembered that Keith kept drink under there. He still did, a half-bottle of vodka, a whole one of gin, three cans of lager, still in their quadruple plastic collar. Keith stuck memos to himself on pink and blue Post-its all over the window-panes and the front of the tailboy. They had phone numbers of clients on them and addresses of sanitary goods suppliers. And on one wall were pinned photographs (cut out of library books) of Keith's heroes: Karl Benz and Gottlieb Daimler, originators of the motor vehicle, and of Ferdinand Porsche standing beside his People's Car in Hitler's Germany. Their prim, serious faces and spotless dress made a ludicrous contrast with the squalor of the room. Next door, Jimmy now slept alone. The bed was a larger version of his brother's. Jimmy had had a nose-bleed over one of the pillows; to judge by the colour and texture of the stain, some weeks before. It may have been this which attracted the flies, a dozen or so of which danced and bobbed against the closed window while a bluebottle, as big as a bee, zoomed frenziedly in diagonals across the room. Teddy looked inside the wardrobe. His mother's clothes smelt of old sheep. The tracks made by moth grubs already showed on the lumpy woollen surfaces and moth cocoons, grevish-white like mildew, nestled between the stitches. It was the colours she had used which fascinated and repelled Teddy. He knew something about colour and had been taught more. He knew, for instance, that what may look beautiful in nature, a primrose against dark-green ivy leaves, a blue butterfly on a pink rose, is less aesthetically acceptable in art or in textiles. Eileen had put lime-green next to scarlet and ochre beside purple, turquoise vied with peach and crimson jostled powder-blue. These conjunctions of colours hurt his eyes and made anger well up once more inside him. He moved to the dressing-table and stood there for a while, his hands pressing down on its glass-topped surface, his eves closed. His back was to the bed now, but it was present in his mind. In here they must have, occasionally must have, at least once must have, since he was born five years after they were married perhaps often must have, had sex. From what people had said at school he knew that everyone finds the idea of their parents having sex unimaginable, but in the case of his it was more unimaginable than usual. It made him shudder. He had slept in here till he was four, he vaguely remembered it, so perhaps they had done it in his presence. He kept his eyes shut. At twenty he was a virgin and not ashamed to be. If anyone had asked he would have admitted it proudly. He had read somewhere, in a newspaper probably, that 'saving oneself, preserving a state of virginity, was becoming fashionable. For once he didn't mind being a follower of fashion. As for saving himself for something or someone, the idea of marriage was ludicrous; marriage was this bedroom, those people, the smoke and the moths and the dining-room furniture. But he could imagine keeping himself pure and intact for - what? A creature as fair and untouched as himself. Turning round sharply, he opened his eyes and stared at his reflection. The fly-spotted mirror was losing its silvering in a kind of greenish ulceration round the edges, but this only served to throw his beauty into a starker relief. His likeness to his uncle Keith he had never observed and this was just as well; he would have repudiated it with fury. lie saw only a face and figure he never tired of admiring, that square jaw, those eyes and cheek-bones, that perfect nose and mouth, that black silk hair and the slim, strong body, hips and pelvis too narrow, it seemed, to contain all that was inside them. Yet it was scarcely vanity. There was no idea in his mind of improving on his looks or dressing for them or using them. He simply derived pleasure from the contemplation of himself as he did from looking at any object of beauty. He would no more want to flaunt himself or thrust himself upon anyone than he would want to set up a beloved piece of sculpture in the front garden or invite people in to look at a treasured painting on his wall. He was his. He was the only person he cared for as much as he cared for things. The flawlessness was marred only by the damage to his left hand. He had got into the habit of holding his hand with the little finger curled round and tucked into the palm. These days, or in circumstances where parents felt some responsibility for a child, they would have found that bit of finger and taken it with them to Accident and Emergency, and it would have been invisibly stitched on again. This lack of care, of interest, was another reason for hating them. He lowered his eyes and contemplated the clutter on the dressing-table. Nothing had been moved, nothing had been dusted, since his mother died. The place was kept as it had always been, as a shrine might be, but out of indifference, not devotion. An old Mason-Pearson hairbrush, its stiff black bristles clogged with Eileen's equally wiry but