Sunday Best (7 page)

‘You changed,' she said. ‘You didn't have to bother.'

‘Thought I'd look decent for Mrs Bakewell,' I said, greeting her as she came in through the hall. She had decided to sulk, and her greeting was coldly polite, and I felt it my duty to jolly up the tea-party. I had let my wife down. I had insulted Mrs Bakewell. It was up to me to make amends.

‘What's the news next door, then?' I asked as my wife poured tea. ‘Poor Mrs Johnson. It's so young to be widowed.' I tried to strike a balance between a sympathy that might have betrayed me and a callousness that might have seemed feigned in order to protect myself.

‘She doesn't cry,' my wife offered. ‘Not a tear. I find that hard to understand.'

‘I don't think she realizes what's happened to her. It was so sudden,' Mrs Bakewell said meaningfully. ‘I mean, no one's too sure how it all happened.'

I felt her eyes on me. I dared not look at her, fearing that she had changed into Miss Price. ‘It was a heart-attack,' I said, stirring my tea, tho' I take no sugar. ‘That's what Mrs Johnson surmised. You don't suspect anything else?' I said, daring to look at her.

‘Well,' she said coolly, ‘it'll all be sorted out at the postmortem.' They both looked up at me quickly to catch my reaction. But a post-mortem on Mr Johnson was one of the few events of which I was not afraid. But I could not help but shiver at the recollection of my father's autopsy, how I sat nervous in the ante-room with my mother, melting with my guilt, tho' I knew that whatever they found in my father's cranium, there would be no traces of trip-wire.

‘The funeral will be delayed then,' I said. It was a logical reaction. I could be as bland as Miss Price if called upon. ‘Did you see Tommy?' I threw it off as casually as I could.

‘He was behaving very strangely, I thought,' my wife said, ‘almost as if he wanted to kill everybody there.'

‘And no doubt one who wasn't,' I thought. ‘Poor lad,' I said. Nobody could suspect my sympathies in that direction. ‘I suppose they'll have to sell the house,' I said hopefully.

‘It's not hers,' Mrs Bakewell said. ‘It belongs to the insurance company he worked for, and I gather she can stay in it at the present low rental. Well, she'd be a fool to move, wouldn't she? Where could she find a house for that money?'

I tried to recall Mrs Johnson's weeping breasts to give myself some joy of her staying. But I still thought of Australia as a better idea, and at a propitious moment, I would put it to her. ‘I don't know,' I said airily, ‘she's young, attractive, a woman like that should start a new life, go somewhere new, Australia or somewhere, marry again. A boy needs a man's hand.' There was no harm, I thought, in enrolling my wife and Mrs Bakewell in my antipodean campaign.

Neither reacted in the least to my suggestion, and their silence made me regret that I had put it forward.

‘There may be reasons that she has to stay here,' said Mrs Bakewell, and I knew that she was looking at me. I had nothing to feel guilty about but I had been accused, albeit by a little boy, and every chance remark was construed as knowledge of my guilt. I knew I had to pull myself out of this incipient paranoia if I was to keep my head until it had all blown over. But how could it ever resolve itself? What would convince Tommy that I was not his father? If his mother succeeded in persuading him, he would have to face the fact that his mother had lied. And for what purpose? A row, a quarrel. What great dimensions had such a quarrel that it merited such an outsize lie? We could both deny it to the boy, gently and appeasingly, but what evidence would he ever have in his life that our story were true? I was sorry for him. He could not even hate his father as I did. He could not even wish his father dead, because he could never be sure if his father had anticipated him.

I excused myself from the tea-table. I had once again to be alone, not with my Sundays, because my father was part of that deal, and I was too disturbed by Tommy's dilemma to confuse myself with my own depression. I reached my study and locked the door. I seriously toyed with the idea of admitting young Tom's paternity, and wondered whether he would grieve less if told of Mr Johnson's deception. I tried to imagine how I would feel if my father were suddenly discovered
to be somebody quite other than the one I knew, and whether I would still be plagued with those leprous thoughts that battened on my mind. I realized that whatever Tommy chose to accept, he was in a state of bereavement, and that only time, if he could give time, time, would lessen his grief. I picked up my wig where I had thrown it on to the divan, and twirled it around my finger, and I wished my father alive, so that I could wish him dead again.

My father was a butcher. He was born in a butcher's shop of a long-suffering mother, who helped her husband with the mince and easy cuts. My grandfather rushed her to the back of the shop, and finished off the delivery as he might have degutted a chicken. My father smelt of meat from his birth, and died with the smell still upon him. His six weeks' stay in hospital had kept him from sight of a carcass, but he departed to his Maker as high as he had arrived. I suppose a birth amongst offal must tamper somewhat with one's psyche, but I would not hate my father any the less if I understood him. People have been born in worse places than a butcher's shop, and have died mourned by their sons. In any case, the smell of one's father, whether of offal or aftershave, is the smell of neither of those sources, but the simple smell of fatherhood, and all else being equal, I might have loved my father whatever his effluvium.

When I was born, my father was already pushing forty, and was still known as the butcher's boy. I suppose it must have humiliated him, and I must make allowances for that too. When I was four, as my father had been born in that shop, so my grandfather died, full of blood and bread as he cleavered his last chop. My father laid him out in the back room out of sight of the customers and returned to the shop to close what were now his own shutters. I do not remember my grandfather, and so I have no recollection of my father except in the role of boss-man. But I do remember that we moved house and that the move took place shortly after my grandfather died. The move was in fact into his house, large dark quarters sprawling in the middle of a field some miles out of the town. It was too big for us, as it had been too big for him, ill-fashioned for economy. Most of the rooms would one day come in handy, but they never did but to pepper my childhood with cobwebs and ghosts. It would have been a relief to escape to the fields
had they not been my father's punishing grounds, and I saw them only as ice-cold confessionals open only on the bleak mornings of winter. I would no more have dreamt of playing there, winter or summer, than I would of shooting dice in the Tabernacle. So my bolt-hole was the attic room, where I slept and had nightmares of showering in icicles, my testicles solidified to stalactites. I was never, never, never warm, not even when my mother held me close after my father's programme to make a man of me. For she, poor soul, was too timid to show herself on my side, and as she held me, I felt the cold of her fear. And whenever I wished him dead, which was often, it was on her behalf as well as on my own. I knew nothing then of the relationship between my mother and my father. I learned later that she had much to tremble for on her own account, but as a small boy, I felt fear and cold as my sole right.

When I reached my tenth birthday, my bed-time was advanced, and I was up and having supper as my father came home from the shop. Often he was late and my mother would keep me up with her for company, and I knew, when we heard his key in the door, for her sake, to make myself scarce. But sometimes, he would come in through the back door, straight into the kitchen where we were sitting. He would be staggering, knocking himself on the sink-unit, against the stove. ‘Off to bed with you,' he hiccuped, and I weaved sharply out of his way to the door. But he was still shouting ‘Off to bed with you,' when I was already in my room and I could only surmise that the order referred to my mother. And shortly afterwards, I would hear her occasional slipper on the stair, muffled by my father's heavy boots. What went on in their bedroom I could only conclude was punishment. I could hear my father's heavy breathing and it reminded me of the way he panted when he pounded my chest those cold mornings in the fields. I wondered whether he was making a man out of my mother too. I cried for her, knowing that if this were his cause, she had a lot further to go than I. Again I wished him dead, and I wondered, probably for the first time, why I did not kill him. But having entertained such a thought, I could not get it off my mind. I never considered the means of his dispatch. I was satisfied solely with the intent. Little boys have gone to sleep on stranger thoughts and I offer no apology. Nowadays, my last wakeful thoughts are less murderous, and I must confess,
too guiltless to induce sleep. In my eleventh year, I slept like a log.

I don't know why I am telling you all this. The unease creeps upon me. Yet I cannot leave it for it is more to do with me than with my father. So I tell it to you for my own sake, and not in any way to let you into secrets which I have no intention of divulging. I have already told you that he was a drunk, and although on his homecoming he reeked of beer, the meat smell was still overpowering, as if the beer fumes only served to bring out the flavour of his calling. I never remember him sober but I remember times, when in his cups, he could be kind. But after my twelfth birthday, which seemed a turning point in my life, his intermittent kindness, such as it was, evaporated completely.

My birthday fell on their wedding anniversary, coincidence uneasy for celebration, and the idea was put about for a dinner-party, with a few close friends, theirs and mine. Which meant entirely theirs, for I had no friends, close or otherwise. But it meant presents and a late night, so I did not complain. My twelve years alone, and their fifteen together, the sentences running mainly concurrently, were to be celebrated in unison, and sensing the precarious state of their relationship, I rather hoped that in the joint celebration my future happiness would in no way be conditioned by theirs.

There were to be a dozen of us altogether, married couples, six pockets, so I could reckon on half a dozen presents. Preparations started a few days before, with my father offloading a large cut of meat into the refrigerator. He pinched my mother's bottom as he closed the door. I remember it very clearly for, for some reason. I intended that he should pay for it. He went into the dining-room and poured himself an unending drink, and then another and another. Between each glass, he would seek out my mother and pinch her with less than affection. I saw my mother wince and I told my father to stop it. He had never once been told what to do, and I expected the full treatment. But he didn't touch me. He staggered past the dining table and into the kitchen. I followed him because I feared he would take it out on my mother. But he brushed past her too, and went to the kitchen table where my mother had set out four large trifles, her speciality, which she had prepared for the celebration. And there and then, he unbuttoned his fly, and urinated into each one of
them, taking a drunk's meticulous care to give each bowl its proper ration.

I stood and watched him. I marvelled less at what he was doing, than the sight of his member, which I realized I was seeing for the first time. I think my self-aversion was born at that moment, and I looked towards my mother with an overpowering envy. She was crushed and broken, it was true, but she was at least a woman. I watched her as my father, still unbuttoned, left the room, and saw her gather up the bowls one by one, and pour the contents down the sink, as if it was something my father did every day, and that she would clean up after him. I knew then, that one day I would kill him, and I began for the first time to think of the means.

I suppose they must have made it up, because when my birthday arrived there were four new trifles, twelve guests, six presents and the promise of an enjoyable if not a memorable celebration. I don't remember who was there, but I do recall an overwhelming smell of meat, since they were all in the trade, and until you got used to it, our dining-room smelt like an
abattoir
in full blast. I remember the conversation being punctuated with surnames, although they were all close friends, and I wondered at that a little. There was wine and my father was in charge of it, and each time he got up to circle the table and fill the glasses, keeping his own to the brim, my mother trembled. But miraculously he held it down. I remember that he was slightly more than jolly, but in the general atmosphere of celebration, he was nothing uncommon. Intemperance is in the eye of the beholder, and blurred or sharp according to the sobriety of that eye. I myself, I suppose, after two unaccustomed glasses saw a jollity without menace, but I was afraid to look at my mother, because if there were a danger, I knew that she could smell it, and that it would show on her face. My father suggested some dancing and he made his unsure way towards the gramophone. Everything was prepared, and he needed only to drop the needle, which he did, somewhere in the middle of a painful cry of rejected love. It was a slow tune, and as I see it now, meant as a warm-up to what he hoped might materialize, and had nothing to do with my twelfth birthday, and in all decency, even less with his anniversary. He grabbed at one of the Missuses as a sign of permission that couples could split, which they did, my mother hovering timidly on the edge of the room, terrified of
two prospects, first of being asked to dance, and second, of not being asked at all. I remember toying with the idea of asking her myself, but I wasn't married to her, and it was hardly my duty. I was grateful that not only was she asked, but that two of the Misters awaited her favour. I watched them as they circled the room. I felt even then that my father was too close for comfort to the Missus of his choice, and I tried to attribute his wandering hands to his show of friendship. Again I was afraid to look at my mother. Her face was an accurate diviner and forecaster, and I dreaded what I might find there. The music stopped and my father clung to his woman for a while, and then, unwilling to let her go, dragged her over to the gramophone, and held her while he replayed the record. It saved the time of changing, and promised the same mood as before. I was bored, and what with repeats there was no indication that the record collection would soon be exhausted. When the song was over for the second time, my mother boldly crossed to the machine, and turned it off. ‘George is bored,' she said. ‘Let's all play a game.'