Never Mind Miss Fox (3 page)

Clive placed the bet and joined them by the finishing post. Danny was standing behind Eliot and had wrapped both arms around her to keep her warm; her heels rested on the toes of his boots and she was leaning back against him, laughing.

Looking at them Clive felt a stab of pain that surprised him. He turned away to recover himself, before it showed on his face. These feelings were alarming; he did not want to name them. He was confused. He would have felt better with Martha here but nevertheless he was glad she was not. A mass of people stood and jostled him and he thought he might be trampled underfoot or lost like the frantic dog which trailed a scarlet lead and scanned the crowd, over and over, with worried eyes and a dipping, searching nose.

The noise was non-stop: talking, laughing, calling and shouting that grew to a chorus and then to a blurring, beating roar as the race began. Behind it the commentary fogged out of the loudspeaker but Clive could make neither head nor tail of it—how could anyone? It was deafening but incomprehensible—and nor could he see anything but heads, legs and mud.

“Come on, Mr. Bricks!” shouted Eliot. “Get a fucking move on!”

A tidy couple beside them turned at her voice with eyebrows raised and Danny said, “Sorry,” to them and then added, “I can't take her anywhere,” and squeezed Eliot until she yelped and wriggled in his grasp, wild with whisky and excitement. Clive, watching, felt a throb of anger.
She is not yours,
he thought. But whose?

The pulse of the crowd became more thunderous still. “Christ alive,” said Danny, leaning forward, “he's going to do it.”

He did not shout, but Eliot did: “Come on! Come on!”

Clive could not seem to raise his voice; he could not bear to hear his feeble bleat amid that dreadful roar. All around them people yelled, cursed, stamped and shook their fists and then in a gasp and a blur the two leading horses ground past the post, filthy and exhausted. At once the noise became an indeterminate groan of relief or disappointment. Eliot turned to Clive. “How much did you put on?”

“That tenner I had.”

“Only ten quid? Fuck! We could have minted it. What have we won?”

“What did you get? Nine to one? Something like that?” Danny quizzed him.

“Something like that,” lied Clive. It had been more like seven.

“Well, that's not bad,” said Eliot, rolling her eyes to the sky as she did the maths in her head. “Plenty for cakes and ale!” She snatched the betting slip from Clive's hand. “Come on, Pops,” she said, “let's go and fetch our winnings.”

But neither money nor beer could bring Clive back from where he teetered, at the edge of a blind rage. He sensed Danny and Eliot pulling away from him as if they had climbed into a little two-seater and left him standing at the curb.

“Why are you in such a grump?” Eliot asked him, back in the tent with more drinks.

“Because I should be working,” said Clive in a sulky voice. “I can't just piss about.”

“Piss about?” said Danny. “This is my office. I've made a killing today—you've brought me luck.” He ruffled Eliot's hair and planted a kiss on her hot cheek.

She blushed and stammered, “Have I?”

Clive had had enough—he wanted Eliot's joyous, laughing attention turned to him and if he could not have it, he wanted to go home. Now she was trying to pick a horse to back in the next race: “Some of these names are hilarious,” she said. “What about Miss Demeanor? That's got to be worth a fiver.”

“You're what my nan would call ‘a caution,'” commented Danny.

“Or, Frankly Marvelous? That's a good one for you. Hey, here's one for Clive,” she went on. “Rigger Tony. Geddit?
Rigatoni.
Isn't that a kind of pasta?” She turned to Danny. “Clive's real name is Tony but he hated it so he swapped.”

“Swapped it for Clive?” They both looked him over.

This was not the attention Clive had wanted. “No one calls me Tony anymore,” he said.

“My dad was called Tony,” said Danny. “He's dead now.”

“That's shitty,” sympathized Eliot. “I had a brother who died when I was a baby.”

In the silence that followed, Clive, with dark fury, considered his family: alive and well, and at home in Amersham. Peter would be in the garden, Val in the kitchen and Tom in his bedroom with the music on loud. They would eat a homemade curry later and then Tom would say, “I'm going out,” and his mother would try to stop him. “Must you?” she would say. “It's so cold. Don't you want to stay and watch a film with us?” Tom would kiss her and go, nonetheless.

“Amersham is so convenient,” Val always said. “It's only forty minutes to John Lewis on Oxford Street.”

This comment irritated Clive every time he heard it. “Mum, it's not. It's an hour to Baker Street, and then you have to change to the Bakerloo line, and there's the taxi from here to the station,
and
back again in the evening. It all mounts up.”

But his mother would play deaf, look away, and not respond.

Clive had never heard before about Eliot's dead brother—he wondered if she were even telling the truth. She was a climbing weed that twisted round them, rootless and threading, a clinging twine. She would attach herself to anyone. She had been Tom's—Martha's—his parents'—and then this morning—for a moment only—she had been his, but now she was Danny's. Danny had eclipsed them all.

“My dad was a bastard,” he was saying. “I was glad when he died.”

“My mum's a cow,” commiserated Eliot.

Clive was sick of the pair of them. “I want to go,” he said. “I'm cold.”

“You should drink more,” said Eliot.

“No—you should drink less.” He hated himself but he could not resist: “I don't fancy cleaning up your mess again.”

Eliot flushed and said nothing.

“You can both relax,” said Danny. “No one's going anywhere until I'm done.”

“I like your job,” said Eliot. “I'm going to be a concert pianist when I grow up, and Clive's going to be a barrister.”

“I'm grown-up already,” spluttered Clive.

“A barrister?” said Danny. “That's good—I can come to you when I get done for illegal gambling.”

Eliot giggled. “And I can come to you when I divorce my first millionaire.”

They both laughed.

“No you can't,” said Clive. “You'll need a solicitor—and anyway, it's a different kind of law.”

At last they were back in the car and Danny turned the heater to full blast. “Where's school?” he asked Eliot.

“Ugh,” she said, tipping her head back onto the headrest. “The other side of Swindon. Why?”

“Because we might as well drop you off.”

“Shit, that would be amazing,” said Eliot. “I was just thinking how much I didn't want to sit on that frigging bus.”

Eliot had got into the front—“Come on, Clive, be fair, you were in the front on the way”—and Clive the back. He was the toddler strapped into its seat; the dog kept behind a grille; the spare wheel in the boot. He stared at the backs of their heads and hated them.

On the road again, Danny switched on the radio and a piano concerto poured out like a torrent of water.

“Can we have this?” asked Eliot. “It's Brahms.”

Danny turned it up. “Brahms what?” he asked, impressed.

“Second piano concerto,” said Eliot. She tugged at her ear-lobe, self-conscious. “Not just a pretty face, you see,” she joked.

Clive could not bear it: “Proper little madam, aren't you?” he said, “with your hockey stick and your piano lessons.”

Eliot said nothing, and Danny reached forward and turned up the radio's volume.

They drove in silence until Eliot cleared her throat and said, “It's the next right turn.” As they pulled in between wrought-iron gates the headlights swept over what looked like miles of parkland.

“Blimey,” said Danny. “Can I stay too?”

Eliot giggled. “Only if you wear a skirt—no boys allowed.”

“I could teach you sums.”

“I wish,” sighed Eliot. She pointed into the dark and said, “Hockey pitches, tennis courts, running track. That's the science department”—they passed a jumble of modern buildings—“and that's the headmistress's house.” As they drew alongside a stolid little bungalow she added, “The stupid turd.”

At the end of a slick, black drive the car scrunched onto a lake of gravel. Danny pulled up in front of the house: a vast, sand-colored building which sheltered behind six towering columns. A flight of stone steps led up to the front door and on either side of the bottom stair lay a stone lion with crossed front paws and a “Have you been drinking?” expression.

“For Christ's sake,” Danny said, putting the car into park, “it's a bloody palace.” They all three sat in contemplative silence for a moment. Then Danny turned to face Eliot and asked, “Will you be all right?”

“Yes of course,” she said. “And thank you for a lovely day.” It was a different voice from the one which had demanded beer and cigarettes, and it sounded much younger. As she fiddled with the door handle Clive saw that she was trying not to cry.

“That's all right, pet,” said Danny. “It was fun, wasn't it?”

Eliot nodded.

“Here, you'd better take some fags,” said Danny. He handed her the pack from his pocket. “And what else? Have a look in the glove box.”

Eliot clicked open the glove compartment and pulled out a Twix. “Can I take this
and
the fags?” she asked, sounding happier. “I'll pay you back.”

Danny laughed. “Yes, you can.”

Clutching her presents Eliot turned in her seat. “'Bye, Clive,” she said. “See you in London. Come to my birthday, will you? Both of you? It's in a month.” She opened the door and got out. Then she said, “Oh shit, the coat,” and started to take it off.

“Keep it,” said Danny. “It suits you.”

“Really?” Eliot was ecstatic. “Thanks.” She put the cigarettes and the chocolate in her pocket and tied the belt tightly around herself.

“Hang on,” said Clive to Danny, “I'm going to get in the front.” He got out of the car and tried to grab Eliot's elbow as she turned away. “'Bye, Eliot,” he said. He had thought he might hug her but she had stepped just out of reach and was walking away from him, turning up the collar on her wonderful coat.

She sang out a loose “Goodbye” over her shoulder.

Clive watched her go up the steps, two by two, until Danny said, “Get in, will you? It's too bloody cold to hang about.”

Martha lifted her head and laughed when Clive told her they had been asked to Eliot's birthday party. “How sweet,” she said, poised above her revision.

“Do you want to go?”

“Go? Are you mad? I'm trying to get a First, Clive, not a degree in being a teenage dropout.”

“It's Primrose Hill. Isn't that your neck of the woods? Where your dad used to live?”

Martha gave a snort. “Believe me, Primrose Hill is a long way from Kilburn.”

D
id he remember Eliot Fox? In his London bedroom Clive folded his suit trousers neatly in half at the waist so that he could press the two legs together and smooth them over a wooden coat hanger which hung from a hook on the back of the bedroom door. He had left the jacket in the kitchen, slung over the back of a chair, and he wondered whether or not to retrieve it. What a lot of effort it all was.

He stood in his shirt, pants and socks and looked up at the trousers on their hanger until Martha said, “Earth to Clive?” and he turned to see her watching him, amused, wiping one eyelid with a cotton-wool ball.

“Sorry,” he said. “I was just trying to remember. She was Tom's friend, right?”

“Yes! God!” said Martha. She turned away again with her attention on the other eye. “I thought you'd be more interested—I can remember everything about her: she came to France, Tom was in love with her (but of course they were only about fifteen so it wasn't really
love
-love) and then she got the hots for Danny—remember him?—and Tom nearly went demented.”

“That's right,” said Clive. His voice sounded as pale as he imagined his face to be. “Now I remember.” But what to do about the jacket? He would leave it where it was, he decided. What harm could it come to in the kitchen overnight?

“Oh”—now Martha was rubbing cream into her hands—“and there's some other news, deadly dull: there are bats, having babies in the cottage roof. It's called a maternity colony—there are hundreds of the little buggers. Steve found them, looking for the leak. He says they're protected and he can't fix anything up there 'til they've gone.”

The next morning Clive ran all the way to his office in Chambers.

This was something he did once a week and considered quite normal, but it seemed to make other people as angry and defensive as if he had told them he was religious, or teetotal. “All the way to Chancery Lane?” they would comment, gaping at him. “Are you
mad?
That's
miles.
”

“About five and a half miles, if you go in a straight line,” Clive would say.

This morning, after he had changed and drunk a lot of water from the cooler, he walked into his colleague Belinda's office. “Have you got a minute?” he asked, and shut the door. He was no longer out of breath, but his heart beat very fast. “It's Eliot Fox,” he began.

It was only seven a.m. and Belinda's face was still cross-hatched with sleep. While he explained—“London—piano—Eliza”—she took off her glasses and rubbed at her eyes, and when he had finished she put the glasses back on and blinked up at him.

“Jesus,” she said. “It's your worst nightmare.”

Clive had already had the same thought, but when he heard it spoken aloud he flinched.

Belinda did not believe in coffee shops but she did believe in kettles, mugs and instant coffee. Clive watched the sugar dissolve from his teaspoon.

“There are two ways you can play it,” said Belinda. “The first is total denial. The wall.”

“Or?”

“Come clean.”

Come clean,
thought Clive. He pictured himself on his knees with a scrubbing brush. It would be no use; those stains were indelible. “How?” he asked.

“What do you mean, ‘how'?
Come clean.
Clean as a whistle: tell Martha everything.”

Piano lessons lasted forty-five minutes but, “For the last five,” said Miss Fox, “we'll listen to a bit of something. We only have this term together so we might as well enjoy ourselves.”

Eliza was not used to enjoying herself, and certainly not at school. She did not trust her luck: her lessons so far with Miss Fox had seemed too good to be true, so it was typical that they would only go on for one term. Her proper teacher, Mrs. Bridges, had gone off to have a baby—probably in a maternity colony, like one of the bats that Eliza and her mother had looked up on the computer—and Miss Fox was the substitute.

“You look too nice for a real teacher,” Eliza told her.

Miss Fox smiled. “That's a relief,” she said.

Eliza had been given a biscuit to nibble as she listened to Miss Fox play the piano for the last five minutes of the lesson. Lessons with Mrs. Bridges had not included biscuits, and even if they had the biscuits would not have been like this one. It was brittle and Italian, and contained pieces of almond. Eliza was not certain she liked it, but she knew it must be delicious and special because it came from Miss Fox. Pleasing her new teacher was all that she wanted to do, now and always, and so she wrapped her legs around the legs of the piano stool and thought of something nice to say when Miss Fox next paused in her playing.

The first thing that came into her head was, “I like your hair,” which also happened to be true.

“I like yours,” Miss Fox responded.

Now Eliza fingered the end of her ponytail, speechless with pleasure.

“What about this?” Miss Fox played a bit of something solemn. “Do you like that?”

Eliza wrinkled her nose. “It sounds like maths. Have you got a husband?” she asked quickly before Miss Fox began to play again. “Or children?”

“No. Have you got brothers or sisters?”

“No. Mum dropped me down the stairs by accident when I was little, so she didn't want any more babies after that.”

Miss Fox looked at her in the way that people tended to do when Eliza delivered this information. Eliza quite enjoyed the effect; Martha, if she overheard her daughter, did not.

“I was all right,” Eliza reassured her teacher, “but Mum was really upset for ages.”

“Yes,” said Miss Fox, “I expect she was.”

“It was all her fault, you see—she was supposed to be looking after me. I had to go and live in intensive care, in the hospital. I don't remember it but Dad does and so does Mum but she doesn't like to talk about it.”

There was no response to this.

“Dad says I'm the only child that ever got cleverer after falling on its head,” Eliza said, kicking the legs of the piano stool.

“That's right—you come top in everything, don't you?”

Eliza made a face. “Not swimming,” she said. “And coming top is kind of good and kind of bad. Mum, Dad and the teachers like me but everyone else hates my guts. It's not good to know stuff, at school. Or do stuff.”

Miss Fox did not try to argue or sympathize but instead played something else. “What about that—does that sound like maths?”

“No,” said Eliza, “that sounds nice—what is it?”

“They were both Bach,” replied Miss Fox. “From something called
The Well-Tempered Clavier.
It's my favorite piece of music.”

“It's a nice-sounding name,” said Eliza, thinking it over. “What's a ‘clavier'?”

“It's another word for a piano—an old-fashioned one. ‘Well-tempered' actually means ‘tuned.'”

“It sounds like the piano's in a very good mood,” said Eliza. Just then the bell rang in the corridor outside. “Yuck,” she added. “Now it really
is
maths.”

When Clive came home from work there was a bicycle chained to the railings outside the house. He stood and looked at it for a moment, suspicious and afraid.

If Belinda had been there she would have said, “You are insufficiently prepared for this meeting. Walk away. Pretend you got stuck at work. Come back when she is gone.”

Clive told his feet to take him away, but instead—
traitors!
—they took him up the steps to the front door and through it, into the communal hall where he was faced with a brimming tide of junk mail that tried to lap back over the threshold and into the open air. He waded through the leaflets and cellophane envelopes to the door of his flat, turned his key in the lock and pushed the door open an inch.
This is my home, and now Eliot Fox is in it.

Hearing voices and laughter he opened the gap a little wider. He cocked his head and listened to Martha's low murmur and Eliza's shrill interruption, “No,
no,
Mum—it's not there, I've already looked.” It sounded ordinary and harmless. Perhaps he had been mistaken; perhaps the bike was innocent. Encouraged, Clive walked forward into the flat.

The hallway was tight and small with hung-up coats and he imagined hiding (in a pocket, or folded into a pair of winter gloves, or tucked into Eliza's woolly hat and bundled onto a shelf) until the threat of Eliot Fox had passed, but again his feet took him forward. At the threshold of the next room—the kitchen—he teetered, holding his breath and wondering—
Is she here or is she not?
—and then there was a movement—the glimpse of a movement—in one corner. He turned his head.

The room was dim after the sunlit throb of the street. Clive could make out only a shape: something—someone—facing him with folded arms and a sharp silhouette. There was really nothing of her—just a narrow blade, resting on its point—and yet Eliot seemed to occupy the room, to take up more space than she ought and to leave him no air for himself.

She was alone. Martha and Eliza were downstairs. Now Clive felt short of breath.

The kettle came to a furious, rummaging boil and switched itself off. Into the silence Clive cowered and flinched before he spoke: “Eliot?” He peered at the shape of her, not trusting his vision.

She did not reply at once and there was a moment of suspension as if his words were traveling to her through the air in slow motion. But then in a quiet, cool voice she said, “I bet you wish you'd told her, Clive. What are we going to do now?”

Clive put out straying fingertips to steady himself on the back of a chair. He opened his mouth but whether to breathe or speak he did not know. He pictured himself turning over as he fell through the air from a great height—this was a dream he had had so many times before, for so many years, and he knew how it would be: it always ended just before he hit the ground and today—here—now—awake and before he could speak—

“Dad! Dad! Dad! Mum! It's Dad!”

—Eliza had run up the stairs and into the room to grab him by the hand.