Incarnate (37 page)

He was stamping his feet and slapping his forearms by the time the Oxford bus arrived. Nevertheless he left the bus when it reached the outskirts of Oxford, and walked through the elegant streets. Icy winds blew through the quadrangles, in one of which a guided tour had halted, heads tipped back to admire stone figures in their lairs; winds rattled the Georgian windows in the High Street. Domes and cupolas swelled against a sky like a flood of ice, Gothic pinnacles bristled, and Martin kept having to dodge bicycles as he gazed up. It must have been an hour before he reached the Randolph, where the receptionist gave him Molly’s message.

He called her and then, with a good deal of transatlantic difficulty, his mother. His father’s condition hadn’t changed. She said he wanted Martin, and Martin promised to be there as soon as he could. His initial panic was fading now that he knew his father was still alive, but it was giving way to a kind of nervous frustration. Of course he mustn’t blame Molly; coming to Oxford had been his idea. All the same, as he hurried out to find a travel agent’s he couldn’t help growing furious that he had wasted so much time.

36

D
ANNY
sat in the parlor and stared at the aquarium and struggled not to tell his mother where he had been on New Year’s Eve. He mustn’t care that neither she nor his father had addressed a complete sentence to him since then; he mustn’t care that he felt as if he were drowning in their silence and disapproval, felt as if their disapproval were
a
substance that covered him from head to foot and clogged his ears. He watched the fish swimming through the castle in the aquarium and thought he had never seen anything so stupid: the fish didn’t even know what a castle was. Thinking that was no good, because he knew his parents thought that he was even stupider and more contemptible. The only way to prove them wrong would be to tell them where he had been.

When he’d staggered down to Bayswater Road after copying Molly Wolfe’s address, he’d found he couldn’t afford a taxi. It had taken him nearly three hours to stumble home, he’d been sick all over his new suit outside Regent’s Park while revelers had cheered him on and woken all the monkeys in the zoo. When he’d picked up a handful of snow to clean himself he’d discovered that a dog had been there first, and after all that he had realized that Caledonian Road would have been a quicker way home. He’d reeled into the flat to find his mother calling the police. “Never mind the drunks, they can look after themselves, and it’s their own fault if they can’t. My son’s missing, don’t you understand?” When she had seen Danny, she’d walked away to bed, wheezing as if she would never again catch her breath. His father had stared at him until Danny was afraid of falling down from being unable to move. “By God. your mother was right about you,” was all that his father had said.

Let the spies tell his mother where he’d been on New Year’s Eve, she wouldn’t listen because she didn’t believe in them. All the same they were confusing him, making him feel he mustn’t say where he had been, making him forget that telling was the only way to get rid of the disapproval that was suffocating him. He was opening his mouth before he had thought what to say, when his mother said, “Shall we watch the war film?”

“It isn’t a war film, it’s some slushy thing,” his father grumbled.

“It must have a battle in it.
The Battle of the Villa Fiorita.”

“That’s a good film.” Danny had remembered what he’d read about it. and his crotch felt warm. “I’d like to see that,” he said.

His father ignored him, his mother gave him a sad helpless glance. “Maureen O’Hara’s in it,” she told his father. “You like her. You liked the one where John Wayne drags her to town by her hair.”

“The Silent Man,”
Danny said.

“That’s right. Danny, thank you. We’ll watch this one this afternoon then, shall we?”

“You’ll do whatever suits you, I expect,” his father growled and stumped away to the bathroom, scratching his stubbly chin so hard that Danny could still hear it in the hall. “The silent bloody man, good God. Pity there isn’t one here.”

“I can watch too, can’t I?” Danny said anxiously to his mother. “I won’t distract you or anything.”

“If you say you’re sorry and promise you’ll never do anything like that again.”

“I’m sorry and I promise.”

“Just never let me down again, Danny. I’m not in the health for it. You were nearly the death of me on New Year’s Eve.”

He hadn’t been, it wasn’t fair. Dr. Kent had if anyone had. Could she and Molly Wolfe have taken turns to keep him out so late that worrying would finish off his mother? Dr. Kent had said he wouldn’t feel free while his mother was alive. But he didn’t feel guilty now, because his mother had forgiven him. They had reckoned without her.

Later his father went to the pub so that he could smoke his cigarettes, and came back for lunch. He didn’t say a word to Danny while they washed and stacked the dishes, but when Danny joined his parents in front of the television, he growled, “Got you watching too, has she? At least while you’re here you can’t do much harm.” Danny thought he could hear how his father felt that at least Danny was i being unselfish, keeping his mother company while she watched the kind of film only she liked. Danny smiled at how everything was fitting together on his behalf.

When the film began, his father produced a bag of boiled sweets and gave them to Danny’s mother as if he’d bought them from an usherette. She sucked and wheezed and glanced about to make sure nobody was looking while she removed her bottom teeth to which a sweet had stuck, while Maureen O’Hara went to live with a concert pianist in Italy. Their children went on hunger strike to force them not to remarry, and it looked as if the scene was coming: “14-year-old Olivia Hussey goes across Rosanno Brazzi’s knee and has her skirt lifted for a few powerful smacks… .” That’s what the dictionary of spanking films had said. He sat back to give the wriggling in his trousers room.

The fish gulped at their floating food, Danny’s mother sucked her sweet and rattled her teeth, Rosanno Brazzi was forcing his daughter to eat. When she spat out her food on her plate, Danny knew this was it, and suddenly realized why he was nervous: suppose his mother saw the movement in his trousers’? Brazzi pulled the girl across his knee and spanked her—“About time too,” Danny’s mother said around her sweet—and then it was over, too quickly. She stalked away to a safe distance and began to curse her father in Italian. “I wouldn’t let you get away with that,” Danny muttered.

It looked as if Brazzi had heard him, for the actor jumped up and dragged her back to the chair. He unbuckled his belt before he forced her across his knee and slipped her knickers down. Danny pressed his spine into the easy chair as his penis rose, and could hear nothing but the cracks of the belt and the girl’s cries. It wasn’t until his mother said, “Is that the same girl?” that he realized something was wrong.

The scene wasn’t meant to go on like this. He was making it happen somehow. His parents frowned at it and shifted resentfully in their seats as Maureen O’Hara brought Brazzi a cane, and Danny knew what Dr. Kent had done: by reminding him of Oxford she’d weakened his hold on things so that they could change. He knew that when the pleading girl raised her face to the camera it would be Dr. Kent’s or Molly Wolfe’s. He was seized by a suffocating fear that his mother would realize he was making the film change. He staggered up from his chair, though his penis almost jerked him back into it, and switched off the television.

He was sitting down again before he saw he had achieved nothing. The girl was screaming as Maureen O’Hara used the cane. He forced himself not to grab the huge painful weight in his trousers as he limped back to the television and wrenched the plug out of the wall. For a moment, or much longer, that seemed to make no difference either, then the picture shrank reluctantly to a fading point of light. He was straightening up from the socket when his father threw him out of the way. “What the hell do you think you’re doing, you damned lunatic? Your mother was watching that and you knew she was.”

Danny limped bewildered to his room and slumped on the bed. His penis was as reluctant to shrink as the picture had been, but eventually it did. Had he been the only one to see the scene in the film? Was that Dr. Kent’s trick? He squeezed his eyes shut to try and stop his head throbbing. He heard the music at the end of the film, and then his father marched in and threw something on Danny’s bed.

It was a letter that had been opened. Danny was afraid to read it, even when his father had gone, in case someone had written to his parents that they had seen him in Soho. Then he realized it was addressed to him. He hadn’t received a letter for years, yet his parents were still opening his correspondence as if he hadn’t grown up. They were spying on him, just like his enemies. He tore the envelope as he fumbled out the letter, and wished he had something else to tear.

The letter was from Stuart Hay in Oxford, and it had been posted weeks before Christmas. His father must have kept it from him to protect him, and now had given it to him as a rebuke for the way he’d behaved, or because he felt Danny was no longer worth protecting. It wanted to know about aftereffects, if what Dr. Kent and the others had done was still affecting Danny. If Stuart Hay had known Danny’s address for so long. Dr. Kent must have known too. Beth of them were helping Molly Wolfe try to get hold of his mind.

They might have succeeded if his father hadn’t kept the letter. He knew at once what he had to do. The Hercules wouldn’t be open for hours. “I’m going now,” he said when he’d put on his coat, and almost thanked his father until he saw his blank furious look.

He ran through the streets, and half an hour later was in Soho hurrying past a line of disapproving women with placards. Dr. Kent opened her door before he reached it, and raised her eyebrows. “I’m glad you’ve come back, Danny.”

She wouldn’t be for long. Perhaps she sensed his mood, for she sat forward at her desk and gazed sharply at him. “What makes you keep coming back, do you think?”

For a moment he panicked, thinking that she knew. The draft up the stairs made his soaked feet ache and his ankles tremble. Then he saw that she was only trying to probe his mind. “I don’t want to come here anymore,” he said.

“Name your place. Anywhere at all if you think it’ll help.”

“The Hercules,” he said.

“Why?”

He had an answer he knew she would like, and so he didn’t stammer. “Because you said the films he makes me show made me how I am. I want you to come and see.”

“You think that may achieve something, do you?”

His grin was almost too strong for him, but he managed to keep it inside himself. “I know it will,” he said.

“Let’s both hope so. When?”

He realized just in time that he would need to think of an excuse to stay out late. “Next week,” he said fiercely, to show he wasn’t losing confidence.

“Monday?”

“Tuesday.” Monday seemed dangerously close. “Tues—day night after he’s gone home. I’ll meet you outside. Don’t come before eleven.” As soon as she agreed, he stood up. “I’ve got to go now or I’ll be late.”

Nevertheless he dawdled on the stairs once he had closed her door. Her question had got to him after all. Why
did
he keep coming here? It made him feel like his magazines did, excited by what was going to happen but always depressed afterward, disgusted with himself. This time that wouldn’t happen. At the Hercules they would be alone with nobody to hear.

He stepped into the court and a flash of light blinded him. A. woman had photographed him. He was surrounded by women with prams and placards: “People Not Pornography,” “Save Our Soho,” “Would You Live Next Door to a Whore?” They must think he’d been to a sex shop or a prostitute. “You mustn’t take my picture,” he said as calmly as he could. “I haven’t been to one of those.”

“Lost you way, did you?” said a woman with a baby strapped to her chest.

“No, I come here to see a doctor.”

The women began jeering at him. He was suddenly terrified that they would publish the photograph for his j mother to see. “I want my photograph,” he said loudly.

“Go on, you dirty bugger.” The woman with the camera held it out of reach. “Lay a finger on me and I’ll call the police.”

“I’ll bet that’s all he can lay,” Danny thought one of them said as he lurched at the camera. The woman stepped back, holding it above her head—stepped back onto a patch of ice. She fell with a thud that sounded to Danny like nothing so much as a bundle of newspapers, and the camera flew out of her hand, under the wheels of a car. The crunch of its destruction was the most satisfying sound he’d ever heard. He stared at her floundering on her back, he thought her face might sound like that if he stood on it, but there was no need to do that; the picture of him was destroyed and there was nothing they could do to him. He strode away, grinning at the threats and insults the woman shouted after him, grinning wider when one of them threw a piece of ice at him that missed and shattered on a passing car. As the driver halted and demanded what they thought they were playing at, Danny began to laugh softly as if he might never stop. The way he’d felt when the camera smashed was nothing to how he would feel next week, alone at last with Dr. Kent on his own ground.

37

T
HE GUARD
marched away from Buckingham Palace. The men’s eyes were invisible beneath the furry bullets of their hats, their mouths were almost hidden by their chin straps, and Molly wondered how the band could see the tiny scores clipped to their golden instruments. Terry Mace steadied himself against the balustrade around the Queen Victoria Memorial, zoomed in on the face of a guard and began to film. “Tell me again,” he said.

At least he wasn’t refusing. “What do you want to know?”

“The whole thing.” As he pressed his eye against the camera, the badges on his creaking jacket scraped together. “I’ll tell you now, I don’t want any more trouble with the police.”