Silent Children (6 page)

Perhaps Ian's mother didn't like being talked past, because she drew almost imperceptibly aside. "Will Charlotte come in for a glass of something?"

"I think she's best left in the car if we don't want hysterics."

"That must be hard on you," Ian's mother said with, he suspected, as much delight as sympathy. "What sort of crisis do eight-year-olds have these days?"

"Anything can turn into a drama. There's no knowing what until the curtain's up." He hesitated before saying "Don't let it bother you, but she got herself into rather a state on the way about coming here."

"I'm sorry to hear it. About what?"

"Well, obviously, about..." He waved at the kitchen. "You won't be too much longer, will you, Ian? We'll both end up with a headache if her highness decides to create."

"I'm surprised you told her at her age," Ian's mother said.

"I can promise you we didn't, but unfortunately she overheard Hilene reading some of your press coverage."

"Hilene can be rather audible, can't she? Are you waiting to be invited in?"

"I'd better stay where Charlotte can see me, otherwise her siren's liable to go off."

"That would never do. You might want to consider putting on a spurt, Ian, before anyone gets the impression I won't let your father in the house."

Ian dumped his drained glass in the sink and went upstairs to grab his shoulder bag, into which he threw his toothbrush and deodorant and skin soap and hairbrush and another pair of the jeans he was wearing and a Drilled Skulls T-shirt followed, to placate his mother, by socks and underpants for the morning. All that should be enough for an overnight stay, but he wasn't going to let anybody think he'd rushed because of Charlotte, and so he stalked to his window.

She was in the front passenger seat of the Peugeot, squandering the leg room he needed a lot more than she did. She'd drawn up her knees in a long dress like a tube of floral wallpaper, to wrap her arms around them, and was pressing her small, slightly pudgy face against the window, her breath swelling on the glass as though she were trapped beneath it. She was keeping a proprietary gaze on Ian's father, which made Ian bare his teeth just as she glanced up at him and showed him most of her tongue.

He'd shoved the window open, intending to yell one of the words she wasn't supposed to hear or know, when he realised what he'd done. Pushed that high, the sash always stuck. "Dad," he called, "can you fix this?"

"Can't your mother?"

"It's my window. I can't shut it."

"It won't matter overnight, will it? We're meant still to be panting for rain. It's not as though anyone is likely to—" Perhaps Ian's mother had communicated some rebuke to him, because all at once he dashed upstairs. "Let's get it dealt with and be on our damn."

The last word had greeted Charlotte's protest that was well on the way to a scream. "Don't, Roger. Roger, come back."

He sprinted to the window and ducked out. "Here I am, Charlotte. Just shutting this and I'll be there."

Perhaps she didn't hear him for her cries, because she only raised her voice. Either she'd forgotten how to operate the window or she was too busy clutching her knees and pressing her forehead against the glass, on which her breath kept transforming her face into a wide-mouthed blur. Her distress struck Ian as no more than she deserved, not least for being allowed to call his father by his first name. He watched as his father leaned hard on the sash and brought it down, muffling Charlotte's cries a little. "Are you ready, Ian?" his father was already saying. "Come along at once."

"Roger, where are you? Don't stay in there, please don't, please." Charlotte's pleas had drawn Ian's mother to the car, and she was trying to persuade the little girl to open the window as his father ran out of the house. The clamour stopped instantly, leaving the adults to sidle around each other at the gate while Ian trudged after his father.

"You want him back for dinner tomorrow, do you?" his father said.

"Of course." To Ian his mother said "Be good" as a preamble to an unavoidable kiss greeted by a giggle from Charlotte. She craned around to make a face at him as he sprawled onto the back seat, glimpsing the wink of a net curtain opposite the car. His father swung the car out of Jericho Close and used the mirror to frown at him. "Ian, did you do that on purpose?"

"No."

"Hmm." That was bad enough—the sound adults made when they didn't want you to be sure whether they believed you—but Charlotte made it worse. Dry-eyed as though she had never lost her composure, which Ian suspected to have been the case, she told him "My mummy says she doesn't know how you can bear to live there."

"Now, both of you try to get on together," his father said as she turned her back on Ian, and that was when he knew he hated her. He was glad he'd found a way to frighten her. He only wished, as long as he'd been accused of it, that he had meant to. Another time he would.

LARGE SUNNY ROOM IN FAMILY HOME;
FIVE MINUTES FROM TRAIN TO WEST END;
BREAKFAST AND EVENING MEAL IF REQUIRED

It had been her idea that Ian should stay overnight with his father and the rest of them, Leslie reminded herself. However unforgiving of his father she might be, she didn't want to pass that on to Ian. Her fury of a year ago occasionally flared up out of its ash, but she'd accepted that she would never be sure of the details of Roger's behaviour—whether while Leslie was being soothed by music in the basement of HMV, he'd begun by sympathising with his colleague on the top floor over the disintegration of her marriage and then had made more than his sympathy felt, or whether the cause and effect had been more the opposite—and there was no longer any point in caring. If she herself had turned out to be less or other than he'd thought he was marrying, that was surely part of the experience of marriage, and he should have talked to her about it instead of to Hilene, as Leslie was sure he had. Still, now all that mattered between them was that Ian didn't lose whatever relationship he needed with his father, and that was even worth her spending tonight by herself in the house.

So far that hadn't proved too daunting. Listening to favourite music without its being even slightly overshadowed by her sense of Ian's automatic dislike of it was a treat in itself. The Bach cello suite had emerged from introspection to celebrate with a dance, and then another. The final throaty chord faded, and as the last suite began she tore the page off the message pad and deposited the screwed-up wad on the plate with the remains of her lasagna.

LARGE SUNNY ROOM IN FRIENDLY HOUSE

Of course she would have to tell anybody who responded the history of the house, but when she imagined doing that, the advertisement hardly seemed worth writing. The only way of being sure to fail was not to try, and she'd learned never to be satisfied not to. She scrapped the page and started on another.

LARGE SUNNY ROOM IN SUBURBAN HOUSE;
FIVE MINUTES' WALK TO DIRECT LINE TO WEST END;
CONTINENTAL BREAKFAST AND EVENING MEAL IF REQUIRED

Room with view of sunset, the sight through the dining room window suggested she should have written. A version of the yellow afterglow had appeared in a bedroom over the wall at the end of the garden, and except for the area lit by the small chandelier dangling its tears above the table, her house was growing dark. She gathered her plate and utensils and tall glass printed with white lipstick that was milk and carried them to the sink.

As the fluorescent tube jittered alight the floor appeared to shift, and a shiver sent a tear down each of her cheeks. She was remembering the photograph of Harmony Duke she'd kept from the
Advertiser
—a school photograph in which the little girl had been even younger than she'd had the chance to be. The small bright-eyed face smiling proudly with a hint of self-consciousness had put Leslie in mind of Ian when he'd started school—Ian bringing home a painting of two big pink lollipops and one sucked small that she and Roger had realised just in time was a picture of the family, Ian helping her to garden by building a Lego scarecrow complete with a sign that said no slugs, Ian reading the squirrel walk sign in a nature reserve and solemnly commenting "Rabbits might know, but not squirrels." There were still moments when she glimpsed that innocent child in him, however hard he worked at denying it, and she thought it might be the basis of some of how he grew up, particularly if she didn't draw his resentful attention to it. There would be no growing up for Harmony Duke, no protracted clumsy adolescence. Leslie imagined Mrs. Duke calling Harmony's name into the growing dark, her voice turning harsh with rage that perhaps had given way to panic—she imagined calling Ian's name like that, and closed down her thoughts. As soon as she'd washed up her dinner things she walked no faster than she ordinarily would out of the kitchen, and kept her back to the darkness as the glow of the tube fluttered and died and the Bach danced itself to an end.

The compact disc lingered over the echo before halting with a faint whir. The abrupt silence, broken only by a whisper of movement in the kitchen—the contraction of the glass tube—caught her wondering what to do next. There was no use wishing she'd accepted Melinda's invitation to join her and her partner for a night on the town, not when Leslie wouldn't have known until she joined them how the girlfriend might feel about it. Time to watch one of her films Ian couldn't stand while she had the opportunity, and she turned off the compact disc player before slipping
Meet Me in St. Louis
into the video recorder.

She was able to lose herself in the film: the soft bright nostalgia, the colours more vivid than life, the sense of a family as close as surely some families were, the studio allowing Judy Garland to act her age at last, the seasons passing fast as a dream of a year... Winter came, and she found her head sinking in time with the large soft monotonous snowflakes, and started awake with a breathless impression that there was a lost child in the house.

Little Margaret O'Brien was smashing a family of snow people to bits because she and her family were about to move away from their home, but Leslie's impression seemed more real than the film, and perhaps as near as the unlit hall. She was holding her breath and straining her senses when the phone shrilled in the hall.

As it repeated itself she clutched at the remote control to pause the image on the screen. In the midst of the pale crumbling figures the little girl trembled—eager to be released from her unnatural stasis—as Leslie snatched the door open. The light from the room framed the lower half of the stairs and the phone on the table ahead of them, and helped her reach for the switch of the hall light, which drove the darkness back into the kitchen, where the concrete floor gleamed like exposed bone. Now she was fully awake, and as she lifted the receiver her sense of any presence other than herself was extinguished. "Leslie Ames," she said. "Hello?"

Several breaths invaded her ear before they admitted to having a voice—a man's, so far as she could judge. It didn't speak, only hummed a simple tune over and over, until she recognised that the low repetitive sound belonged to a lullaby. With it came the rhythmic noise of some kind of improvised percussion instrument held close to the phone, the kind of item someone might make to amuse a child: she thought the caller might be shaking a handful of small hard objects in his fist. She'd asked him several times who he was, and once what he wanted, when he expelled a breath in her ear and was gone.

She cut off the droning of the dead line and bent a fingernail against the digits that would identify the caller's number. When a recorded voice informed her that he had withheld it, she silenced the message and stared almost blindly down the hall. There was no point in pretending not to wish that soon she would have more company in the house.

"You're right," Melinda said. "He's watching us." Two red double-decker buses cruised by, close together as elephants on parade. Once they'd passed, the man was still staring fiercely across Oxford Street at the shop. His grey hair sprawled over the collar of an old tweed jacket, his fists bulged the pockets of a baggy pair of slacks the brown of dried mud. The fists jerked against his hips as he darted through a gap in a selection of taxis to the concrete island in the middle of the road, and from there to the crowded pavement. His large loose face, the redness of which was concentrated in the eyes and the nose swollen out of shape, bent heavily toward Leslie's advertisement in the bottom corner of the window full of Ives and Copland and Bernstein and Glass, then his gaze swung to meet hers as he pushed the door inward.

Her stomach tightened, yet she felt relieved. He was here to be confronted at last—he was more than just an impression that she was being watched. She'd suffered intermittently from that since the wordless phone call almost a fortnight ago; she'd begun to feel watched both inside and outside the house; and yesterday she'd been so convinced she had been followed to work that she'd spent too much of the day watching the street and growing tense whenever anyone seemed about to enter the shop. Now he had, and Melinda would hear whatever he had to say for himself, and if anything threatened to get out of hand they had company, a man of about Leslie's age who was peering at a leaflet he'd slipped out of a box from the secondhand rack. He didn't look up as the red-faced old man jabbed a finger at her, bestowing a smell of stale tweed. "Can't you do better than that?" he said in a voice that was mostly effortful breath.

She remembered how his displeased gaze had moved from her notice to her. She straightened her back and planted her hands on the counter. "What would you suggest?"

"Where do you think you are?"

Even if Leslie hadn't had enough of questions, Melinda had. "We're in our shop, and so are you. If there's something definite we can help you with—"

"You're in Britain. Better than that, you're in England. If you're supposed to be dealing in serious music, what's all this American stuff doing in your window?"

Leslie swallowed a laugh that might have come out hysterical. She was reflecting how much of her sense of the world her situation had invaded when he began to wave his hands as though invoking the kind of music he approved of, not the Copland ballet score that was dancing in the air. "It's beyond a joke. It's taking over," he complained. "There's nothing to see in Leicester Square but American films and American restaurants and hot-dog vans for people who talk like Americans and spell like them too, I don't doubt. We need a few laws to keep what's left English," he told the customer who'd abandoned squinting at the tiny print of the compact disc leaflet and was regarding him wide-eyed. "Don't you agree?"