Sunday Best (10 page)

‘Huh,' he said insolently, and once again I dreaded his return to school.

‘Pardon, Tommy?' I said.

But he made no answer. I made my way to the living-room.

‘Aren't you going to have a bath, then?' he sneered at me. I had to get things straight, and I went over to him and squatted down to his level, a position I would never have dreamed of assuming in the classroom. But I had to reprimand this boy, and at the same time remain sympathetic, and I reckoned that
my position was a neat compromise. ‘Now look, Tommy,' I said. ‘I know you're upset. It's a terrible thing for a boy to lose his father.'

‘Huh,' he said again, and I decided to let it pass.

‘But at the same time,' I said, rising to a standing position as my sympathy waned, ‘there is no need to be rude, to anybody, that is, not only to your form teacher. Do not forget, Tommy, that I am, after all, your teacher, and though I am willing to help you in every way, and to make allowances for you in your work and behaviour, there are no, and never will be, allowances made for insolence. Now do you understand?'

He scuffed his toe-caps with his heels. ‘My father isn't dead,' he challenged me, ‘and I wish 'e was.'

‘Were. Subjunctive,' I corrected him, and I heard the echo of my own childhood wish and wondered whether he could wish it hard enough, as hard as I had myself, to bring it about. I am a firm believer in the evil eye, but it is unnerving to think that the eye may be focused on a mistaken identity, and the need to clarify my position, as far as Tommy was concerned, became more and more urgent. I squatted down again. ‘Look, Tommy,' I said, ‘I am not your father. Get that absolutely clear. You know Mrs Verrey Smith,' I said. ‘You know we've been married for seventeen years. That's a lot more than your mother and father. Yet we have no children. And d'you know why, Tommy,' I whispered, hoping thereby to gain his sympathy. ‘Between you and me, Tommy, I cannot have children. It's as simple as that.'

He stared at me with disgust. ‘It's 'er wot can't 'ave them,' he said. ‘Mrs Verrey Smith. Everyone knows that.'

I wanted to strangle him. There was I, squatted, offering my infertility to a ten-year-old kid, and he threw it back in my face. Moreover, his logic told him that my wife's sterility was reason enough for me to sire elsewhere. ‘That's why,' he continued, ‘you 'ad it off with my Mum.'

I was horrified more at his language than at the matter of his words, and all I could do, short of killing him, was simply to deny it. ‘It's not true, Tommy,' I said. ‘Your mother and father had a quarrel. You heard it. And your father accused your mother of certain things, and your mother got so angry that, just to annoy him, she told him he was right. But she only did it because she was angry,' I pleaded, and the whole sorry tale
sounded so hollow and lacking in truth, I couldn't really expect Tommy to believe it.

‘Anyway,' he said, and I caught the sob in his voice, ‘I know 'he wasn't my Dad, but I miss 'im.'

I took his head in my hands. To hell with how he construed it. The boy was in pain, and no one could have done less than simply to acknowledge it. ‘I'll go and see your mother,' I said.

Mrs Johnson was alone. It seemed that she had not moved from the position in which I had last seen her. She looked up as I came in and smiled weakly. I went straight over to her. ‘How are things?' I said.

She shrugged her lovely shoulders. ‘I was wondering why you haven't been,' she said. ‘Tommy keeps talking about you. He knows. He heard everything. And he won't believe it when I tell him it isn't true.' Then, as a complete non-sequitur, ‘The cremation is on Thursday.'

‘You have to forgive me for my absence,' I said. ‘But we have Mr Parsons away from school, and I've been saddled with all his work. I'll come and see you in the evening. Will Tommy be going?'

‘No, he'll be staying with his aunt, Jack's sister,' she added.

I wondered how that lady fitted into Tommy's new family tree.

‘It's best for him to get away,' I said limply. ‘What are you going to do? After the funeral, I mean. Are you going to stay here?' I tried to hide the persuasion in my voice, but she'd caught it.

‘D'you think I ought to leave?'

I detected a distinct pleading in her voice, a helplessness, as if she were placing the decision for her whole future into my hands, and as if to confirm this, she laid her hand on my knee.

Now I want to make a few things clear at this point. I had nothing to do with that initial move. My knee just happened to be there, but it was she who put her hand on it, and a woman's hand on a man's knee, and a bereaved hand at that, can be the beginning of many things. And of course, my knee trembled. I defy any man to keep a stiff upper knee in such circumstances. She took it as response, as well she might. ‘D'you think I ought to leave?' she said again, with more of a challenge this time.

In response, I placed my hand on her knee, not crosswise
over hers, for that, I intuitively felt, would be asking for trouble, but lying as a parallel, a position slightly more thoroughbred, and still, though marginally so, excusable by affection. I should, of course, have taken the precaution of occupying my other hand, in my pocket perhaps, but since it was free, she took it, and placed it, quite logically I suppose, given as she was to symmetry, on her other knee. There was now no longer any need for conversation, for there was already enough between us, and it had nothing to do with love. I knew that for my part at least, it was lust. Nothing more, nothing less. And I assumed that for her it was likewise, prompted perhaps by a need to confirm herself once again amongst the living. But all this is irrelevant, since lust does not concern itself with motivation. On reflection, it is of course possible, that both of us, having been accused, thought that we might as well be guilty. And so our hands wandered, detached from all thought, manoeuvring a gradual state of undress.

And it was thus that Tommy, arriving slippered on the edge-to-edge, found us, fumbling, writhing and apart.

I looked at him, not immediately connecting the horror on his face with my own state of partial undress. And then I saw his mother's skirt hoiked up to her thigh, and I thought she was disgusting.

‘You're filthy and rotten,' he shouted at us both, ‘and I'm going to tell my Dad.' He drew his breath, stunned by his own horrible confusion. ‘I'm going to tell everybody,' he screamed. ‘Everybody. I'll shout it in the street.'

I clapped my hand over his mouth. ‘You don't understand,' was all I could say. ‘Your mother was overwrought.' I realized that at one time I had offered that plea for his mother before.

‘Overwrought,' he sobbed, and I found it hard to stifle a feeling that he couldn't even spell the word, ‘You're always saying that. But I'll tell everyone. I mean it. You're just dirty and rude. 'Er too,' he nodded in the direction of his overwrought mother who, by this time, had lowered her skirt.

‘You're not old enough to understand,' she said.

‘I don't care. You're rude and filthy, and I'm old enough to understand that, and I don't care if you are my father, or my teacher,' he was screaming again, ‘I'm going to tell them all in school, and the headmaster, too. You filthy rude things.'
His dearth of vocabulary infuriated him, and knowing my penchant for synonyms, he felt bound, out of spite if nothing else, to repeat himself again in the same manner. ‘Filthy and rude, both of you.'

He was over to the door, out of reach, and he gave himself a moment's pause. Breathless with rage, he stared at the floor. ‘A pair of fucking pigs, both of you.'

His mother crossed over to him, no longer the accused, and slapped him roundly across the face. ‘I don't know where you learn such language,' she said, ‘unless you pick it up at school.' She turned on me with a look of hatred, and the sudden alliance between the two of them frightened me. Tommy began to cry, and she too, burying their faces in each other's arms, and I knew I had to get out of there, and leave them both to their own explanations, their own mutual forgiveness. But there was one small practical point. Their entwined bodies were blocking the door. As I walked across the room, I noticed that my trousers were still unbuttoned. With one hand, I made myself respectable, while with the other, I tapped her on the shoulder. ‘Excuse me, please,' I said, and I edged my way between them and the door.

Once outside in the street, I felt as if I had just come out of a cloakroom, and I intended to give it no more importance than just that. I knew I'd left a mess behind, but I didn't care, because for some reason, I felt that neither of them would ever see me again. I suddenly felt very weary with my present way of life, and I knew that some decision had to be made to change it radically, though what change, or how to engineer it, I had no idea. But I knew that my life could not continue in its pretence much longer, and despite my depression, there was a certain excitement in the thought that some change was bound to come about, even, as I convinced myself, without my own participation. I had thoughts of going home and once more trying on my new Sundays, but pangs of that old father of mine, blunted the edge of that anticipation. All in all, I was lethargic with depression. I turned back to look at the Johnson house, and had it been on fire, it would not have moved me. I gave a fleeting thought to the two broken people inside and was furious with their gross interference with my life. I looked at my own house, but that too held nothing for me, save the delights of the ‘Femina Boutique', and that, after all, was something, in
spite of the rage that my father was pumping inside me. I grabbed the railings hard, trying to throttle his rude ghost, and then I felt myself weeping.

I am almost ashamed to write that word, for I am not a man given to tears. And still I have no notion of why I cried. I remember only that I wanted to rid myself of Mrs Johnson and her son, of my poor joyless and childless Joy, of my mother and father too, and of all the loud unhappiness that I had tunnelled into other people's lives. I'll say that word again. I wept uncontrollably, and I don't give it to you as a plea in mitigation. I'm a bastard really, and a sentimental one at that.

That last piece of confession took a great deal out of me, and it has taken some time to recover my old rotten self. There is not a great deal that is gentle in my nature, but occasionally it gets the upper hand. Not that I resent it. I simply do not know how to deal with it. Friends, such as I have, have told me to let it take its course, that I am a better man than I allow myself to be. But I dare not give way to whatever kindness is within me, for the virtue destroys my defences. In truth, I do not like myself very much. That, too, is a defence I suppose, for it makes pointless any attack you may wish to make on me. You are right. I am rotten, and deserve no one's concern, and if at any time I should be repentant of my behaviour, I beg you to ignore it. Remorse would be a lapse in me, as much as kindness. I hope we are now on the old footing again, and I can go back to my sorry tale.

On Thursday, the day of the funeral, it was raining. As a child, holding my mother's hand, and seeing a funeral in the rain, she would tell me that the world was weeping for the one who had died. So that when a cortège passed under a blazing sun, it was a devil going to his own, and the world was smiling. I never quite rid myself of this conviction, and occasionally it was shaken, as it was on that Thursday, when I couldn't understand how anyone could mourn the passing of a man like Johnson, who, when dead, looked uncommonly like my own father. I hoped it would clear up by the afternoon, not so much as a more fitting salute to Mr Johnson's obsequies, but because I feared spoiling my new Sundays, which were already laid out on my study couch in preparation for my first and probably fatal sortie.

That morning, my wife and I breakfasted together, an uncommon occurrence, and without any apparent design. I was relieved to hear that she was spending the whole day at Mrs Johnson's and would go to the funeral from there. That
would give me the privacy and the time to change my clothes in my study. I made a point of informing my wife yet again, that I would not be attending the funeral, owing to pressure of work, and that I would meet her at the Johnson house in the evening.

I laid my plans with infinite care. I could not afford to be discovered, certainly not before the sortie itself, and I cared little what happened afterwards. For some reason, I felt that post-production planning was not necessary.

I went to school by the back route and on arriving, went straight to the Cloth's study to ask permission to attend Mr Johnson's funeral in the afternoon. It was a slight risk, but I couldn't get the afternoon off for any other reason. It was a request that could hardly be refused by a man of God, and he was quick to grant it, and with his blessing, too, that I was to be party to a Christian gesture. As I was leaving, he called me back, and again I had the sinking feeling that I had been discovered. ‘I think perhaps I shall put in an appearance myself,' he said. The late Mr Johnson was a great asset to our Parent Teacher Association. It would be a gesture to his widow. So I shall see you there, Verrey Smith.' He turned back to his desk. ‘An unhappy occasion,' he muttered, ‘but in the midst of life, Mr Verrey Smith. You know how it is.' I left the room. I had not in any way prepared myself for this eventuality and I was a little worried as to how to accommodate the Cloth's presence at the funeral. Yet it did not occur to me to abandon my sortie as a woman. In fact, the promised attendance of the Reverend Richard Baines added to my excitement. If I could con Baines, I could con anybody.

During the course of the morning I had occasion to go to the stationery room to replenish my stock. On my way there I had to pass Baines's study, and I was surprised to find Mr Parsons standing outside in the attitude of a small unruly pupil awaiting his strapping. An encounter, and a dialogue of sorts, was unavoidable. I slowed down as I reached him, and for some reason stared at his fly, expecting, I suppose, to find him unbuttoned. But he stood there, respectable and very much on his dignity.