Incarnate (7 page)

“I should be making sure you aren’t put off your work.”

“Christ, I can fight my own battles.” That brought him back to himself. “I didn’t mean that. You’ve been a tremendous help. I only meant I should be able to handle Terry. He reminds me of the Baptists. The university was overrun with them.”

“Oh?”

“Sure. Anyway, you don’t want to hear about my student days.”

“I don’t mind, if you feel like talking.”

“Snapping me out of it comes with the job?”

“You could say that.”

“Well, it’s fine with me,” he said, smiling suddenly. “How about dinner? Do you like Indian food? I haven’t had any since the last time I was here.”

“I’ll take you to the Standard.” She was startled by how pleased she felt that he had asked her out. “We can walk there,” she said.

The night was growing colder. A few stars glittered like ice above the lamps on Bayswater Road. “So tell me about your student days,” Molly said as they crossed a side street.

He took her arm. “My baptism of fire. All the time I was at college the Baptists were trying to get evolution taken off the syllabus. Evilution, they called it. I guess it’s pretty funny,” he admitted as she laughed, “but they could get to you if you weren’t careful. For instance, they’d say God created all the fossils to test everyone’s faith in the Bible. You’d find yourself arguing back that maybe the world was created just a moment ago, our memories and all, because how can anyone prove different? There’s a born-again millionaire in Texas who’s offering fifty thousand dollars to anyone who can prove evolution to him. A few years around that kind of thinking can loosen your grip on reality, believe me.”

In the Standard Molly ordered for both of them. “I was just thinking,” Martin said as the waiter marched away, “the last time I met any of the Baptists was after I’d made
The Unamericans.
This girl came up to me on the street in Chapel Hill. Right there in front of some people she said I should have dedicated it to Satan instead of to Larry.” He was staring at the table. “You asked me once about Larry.”

“I didn’t know you then.”

“So ask me now.”

Something had made him need to talk. She squeezed his hand. “Tell me whatever you like.”

He was silent for a while. “I really think he was jealous of me,” he said at last, uncomfortably. “He was two years older, you see, and I think he’d had time to get used to being king of the hill. I don’t mean he ever took it out on me. Maybe it would have helped if he had. No, he looked after me all the time. Really,” he said, taking a deep breath, “all he wanted was to make our father proud of him.”

He paused while the waiter brought a bottle of wine and struggled with the cork. “You have to understand my father,” he said. “Maybe you know there are Southerners who are still fighting the Civil War. Sabers on the wall and all that. Really what they’re doing is preserving the old ways. You look around and see why they might want to. There aren’t many gentlemen left—you couldn’t call me one.”

“Who couldn’t? I would.”

“You wouldn’t if you were a Southern lady.” He smiled wryly and touched her face, a gesture that seemed so intimate she felt dizzy. “What am I saying? I don’t mean you aren’t a lady, not at all. But our Southern ladies wouldn’t think much of a guy who got them into a pub brawl.” He put his fingers on her lips when she made to protest. “Want to hear a bad joke? Your people wanted me to call my series ‘A Yank in England.’ That would really have improved my father’s opinion of me.”

Before she knew what to do about the glimpse of his pain, he said quickly, ‘ ‘The trouble was he needed us to be like him. He taught Southern history at the University of North Carolina, and so he wanted us at least to go to college and know more than him about something. Well, Larry knew more about cars than anyone else I know. He was fixing them before he was old enough to drive them, he was planning to open his own repair shop just before he went to Vietnam, but none of that was any good to my father. And neither was I.”

He stared into the distance while the waiter unloaded a trolleyful of food. “He thought I was. I mean, I read all the books in the house and went to college. Then friends of mine started refusing to go to Vietnam and I went with them on peace marches. The Baptists went round wearing stars and stripes in their lapels and saying we should be proud to fight God’s war against communism. I filmed the police at a march and they smashed my camera. Some of that footage is in my film.”

His eyes clouded over, and he gave a short sour laugh. “Sometimes I wonder if that’s what made me committed— getting my camera smashed, not my friends dying in Vietnam at all.”

“I expect it was both.”

“Maybe. Anyway, my father heard about the marches and ordered me home, and we had the argument that must, have been happening all over America just then, me saying I might die for my country but wouldn’t kill for it, him saying he’d go himself if he was younger, I was the first coward in the family, he was glad his father was dead and couldn’t see how I’d grown up, other stuff you don’t want to hear. It wasn’t as though I’d even got my papers. I really think he would have backed off if I’d said I might think of enlisting. So eventually we finished yelling at each other and I started upstairs to my room, and Larry was telling my father he’d talk to me when my father said, ‘Whatever gave you the idea he’d listen to a goddamned dumb mechanic when he won’t even listen to me?’ That was the last time they ever spoke to each other. The next day Larry volunteered.”

Belatedly he realized he was eating. “This is very good,” he said, but Molly doubted he was tasting it; she was beyond tasting much herself. “He wrote to me and my mother a couple of times,” Martin went on. “He was never much good at writing—used to say that was one thing his hands weren’t good for. He said he was glad he’d gone instead of me, he could look after things out there while I got on with learning, there were enough of us dying. He wanted me to promise my mother I wouldn’t go, and her to make me promise. A rocket killed him in the jungle near someplace I never could pronounce.”

He dabbed at his mouth with his napkin, and then at his eyes. “I was home for the funeral when my draft card came. As soon as the funeral was over, I skipped to Canada and spent two years making my film.” He dug his fork into a piece of meat so hard that the tines screeched on the plate. “As if making it could wipe out what I’d done.”

“I don’t see why you should feel guilty.”

“Don’t you? I must have expressed myself badly, then.” Or had he left something out? He was withdrawing behind his smile. “This is wonderful,” he said. “Let’s eat.”

She felt as if she’d missed a point somewhere, but he encouraged her to talk about herself, and she told him about her childhood near Plymouth, about the smugglers’ coves and the inns with secret passages; Winston the bulldog who sat in the middle of the village street and would move just enough for a car to pass; about the summer day she’d lain on Dartmoor and watched the clouds until she had felt the world turning and the night she’d seen sailing ships in the moonlight (but that must have been a dream). And then she was on the edge of telling him about her dreams, but she held back. “Were your parents pleased you dedicated this last film to them?” she said.

“My mother was. My father, I guess not, if she even told him. I don’t hear from him. I know from her he’s pretty ill by now, his heart and too much booze. Something else I can take the credit for.”

“You shouldn’t be so hard on yourself,” Molly said, but she felt she wasn’t reaching his pain. She wished she could confide more of herself to him, reach him that way, but all she could think of to share were her dreams.

After the meal he walked her home. Queensway was crowded as a bazaar, Bayswater Road was almost deserted except for a turbaned cyclist and a few cars. A stone eagle on a pedestal guarded a private square, a crow like a tatter of the night flew into the park. As they turned the corner by the estate agent’s, she made up her mind not to invite him in for coffee; she would be too conscious of not being able to tell him about the dreams she used to have. She had forgotten how much it meant to her.

“Thanks a lot, Molly,” he said when they reached her gate. “I had a fine time. You’re good company. I’m lucky to know you.” He smiled and turned away quickly, up the hill toward Kensington and his flat, which MTV was paying for. She bolted the gate behind her, feeling oddly disappointed, and was at her, door when suddenly she wanted to call him back. Instead she strode furiously in to discover who was in her flat.

She snatched a letter from the doormat and stalked along the hall, shoving doors open and switching on lights. She’d find them this time, whoever they were, however they had got in. Wind chimes whispered phrases, her monkey gazed from the bed, the serving hatch gaped. Hadn’t she closed it last night? Apparently not. since nobody was in her flat. The secretaries from the second floor must be making her paranoid with their incessant borrowing—why, just the other day they’d banged on her door to borrow her phone directory, they’d rung the doorbell and thumped on the windows in case she couldn’t hear—but if that were the explanation, she wished it would start to be reassuring, for her nervousness reminded her too much of the time she hadn’t been able to sleep for fear of dreaming. She slammed the serving hatch and sat down to read her letter, and then she saw the name on the return address. As she stared at it, her heart pounding, the room seemed to darken with a panic that she hadn’t experienced for years.

7

B
Y THE TIME
Geoffrey left the auction, it was fifteen minutes later than when he had meant to start back. If anyone but Mr. Pelham had stopped him on his way to the rostrum, he would have made his excuses, but Mr. Pelham had the worst stammer Geoffrey had ever heard. It had taken him five minutes to tell Geoffrey that one of his c-customers had a s-s-s … a s-s-s … .” A stamp collection,” Geoffrey had suggested, since it had to be, but even then it had taken them five minutes to establish that the lady lived in Pett Bottom near Canterbury and wanted Geoffrey to price it next time he was in the area. It was all right, Geoffrey had minutes to spare, except that then he had to wait by the rostrum. By the time he was able to settle up for the collection he had bid for, his hands were sweating. Most of ail he hoped Joyce wouldn’t start to worry about him.

He swerved the Mini out of the car park in front of the mansion and drove through Windsor to the motorway. Boys in tailcoats trooped across the bridge to Eton, the college red as a robin beneath the clear blue November sky, no threat of sleet for days. A helicopter rose from the grounds of Windsor Castle, and stags raised heads like shrubs to watch.

On the motorway he made himself put his foot down, gradually as if he mightn’t notice. As the speedometer crept toward seventy, the Mini began to vibrate. He didn’t like driving so fast, but Joyce must need his support, otherwise she wouldn’t have asked him to be there. Today was crucial to her, that was why. She was all right now. He mustn’t let himself be troubled by how like eleven years ago this was.

He caught sight of himself in the mirror, his long almost rectangular face. “I love your wrinkly eyes,” Joyce had said in the days when they’d said such things, but the wrinkles were mostly of worry by now. It was no use, he couldn’t put the drive to Oxford out of his mind, the glare of his headlights on the interminable roads, his anxiety for Joyce. She had looked almost herself when the young man in the lab coat had taken Geoffrey to her, sitting with the others who’d looked lost and shaken and blank-faced with tranquilizers, something she would never let herself be fed. They had been well on their way home before she’d started glancing at the back seat as if she were afraid someone was behind her, and actually home when she’d demanded, “Where are we? Where is this?” She was better now, that was all that counted, and he tried to adjust the mirror so that he wouldn’t see his anxious eyes.

The motorway gave out at Chiswick. Traffic lights began to hold him up. Long before he reached the day center, the streets were narrow and dilapidated, with pedestrians and parked cars to make them narrower. In the distance above the precarious chimneys he could see home, the village on the hill. He parked in a side street and hurried back, past a video library displaying posters for
Kindergarten Rapist
and
They Eat Your Eyes,
to the day center.

Joyce wasn’t there. Her presence was, in the bright yellow walls, the paintings of dogs and cats and children, the check tablecloths on the long tables, the semicircle of easy chairs around the electric fire set into the far wall. But the walls were visibly damp now, for rain seeped in from the adjoining shops, which were boarded up and beginning to lose their windows. An old woman warming the stump of one leg by the fire picked up her crutch suspiciously as Geoffrey came in. an old man stumbled away from a table toward him. “Are you the police? Thank God you’ve come. I want you to tell the people to get out of my flat. They keep turning all the switches upside down. There are dozens of them. I don’t know how they dare. They won’t even let me get into bed.”

Fat, freckled Sally, the ex-nurse, intervened. “You threw them all out, Tom, don’t you remember? You told us they were so offended they said they would never come back.” She led him away as Geoffrey turned to Mark, Joyce’s other helper, a young poet who’d told Joyce he needed to do social work in order to grow. “Mrs. Churchill is at the public enquiry,” he said. “She hasn’t been gone long.”

The enquiry was being held in a school hall up the road. Geoffrey wished he’d gone straight there. He hadn’t been to the day center for months; the old people always made him scared of ending up like that himself. Joyce almost had, eleven years ago. If the two of them couldn’t age with dignity, he would rather that they didn’t age at all.

The school yard was crowded, though it was half-term. Pickets marched back and forth, waving placards—
“SAVE OUR SHOPS,” “THE PLANNERS ARE THE VANDALS”
—and chanting slogans. “Out! Out! Out!” was all that Geoffrey could distinguish. Shouts and an interrupted voice that kept beginning the same phrase led him past the empty classrooms, in one of which an orphaned exclamation mark stood on a blackboard, to the assembly hall.