Swan River (17 page)

Many times he told the Georges and Ernest of his frustrations – especially of his inability to be master of his own home – and they sympathised; they knew that Sis could be difficult and knew what he didn't: that she had been near-destroyed by a man. And they thought Tom was a good man – he had an important job, earned more than any of them and, above all, tried hard to make Sis happy – but they, even Old George, couldn't tell Sis how to behave. She was an adult and a mother – and, more than that, their daughter and their sister; their loyalty was instinctive and lay far deeper than their reason.

Only he could persuade her and he tried many times, but he always failed. Once she reminded him that, a few years ago, soon after they were married, he had said that he would adjust his expectations. He couldn't remember saying that, but, in the end – sometime in 1895 – he did adjust them; he stopped suggesting that they live elsewhere – and his acceptance of defeat was probably more palatable because, long ago, he had begun to replace his dreams with drink.

His work – a place where he was respected and prized – was another consolation, and he made sure, for a while yet, that there the drink didn't hurt his reputation for diligence and good sense. His third consolation was his son, whom he loved as much as he loved Sis and who returned his love without question.

Sis's Aunt Kate gave him more than sympathy; she had always liked him and continued to stick up for him – he never drank excessively when he visited Braintree. On 25 April 1896 Sis and Kate talked in Kate's kitchen while Cliffie played with his cousin Kathleen. Sis moaned about Tom and his drinking.

‘Why Sis, you don't know how to manage him,' Kate said.

‘How can I love a drunken sot?'

‘But he wouldn't
be
one if you really loved him.'

* * * * *

On a cold morning as we trudged across a field, damp with melting frost, I asked my father if he really remembered the actual words spoken by his mother and Kate on 25 April 1896; Sis had mentioned the conversation in her diary, but he had written the words down just two years ago, early in 1962.

‘Completely. I do. I was standing outside the kitchen door in Braintree. I was playing hide-and-seek with Kathleen and two of her friends and I was seeking. I was going to go through the kitchen to the garden, but I stopped by the door and listened.' He walked a few more steps and stopped. ‘I would have been five.'

‘I reckon you were four. It was April 1896 according to your mum's diary.'

He looked at me. ‘Maybe… but it's remarkable how clear the memory is.' He went on walking and said over his shoulder, ‘Can't remember what happened last week, of course.'

Half an hour later we were sitting on a wet log on top of a hill looking at the Bristol Channel three miles away. My father was wearing an old honey-coloured duffel coat and smoking a roll-up. ‘Are you reading her diaries pretty thoroughly? A lot of it's very dull.'

‘Every word so far. But she didn't write so much after you were born.'

‘She didn't have so much time.' He pushed his hat back, put his hands on the log behind him, stretched out his legs and gazed at the view. ‘Beautiful. I knew there'd be a view from up here.' There was a line of small puffy clouds on the horizon and above them the sky was pale and streaked with white. Over our heads it was a rich blue and cloudless. The sea was dark and sparkling and to our right a river looped across flat fields.

He yawned and turned to me. ‘You know, I think I always blamed my father for the things that went wrong when I was a child. He was weak, relative to my mother… but it must was hard for him – he loved her, but she didn't really love him… She shouldn't have married him; she only did it on the rebound from that accursed Stanley Andrews. He's to blame… for whatever there is to blame anyone for. I don't blame my mother. I never did.' He looked away and down at the river below. ‘But now I feel that I don't blame my father either; I always have done. I grew up blaming him… because he wasn't there. But I see now. That was unfair.' He looked round at me and smiled. ‘But it's a good thing they did marry. Otherwise we wouldn't be here.'

He took my hand, and neither of us spoke for a while. He was looking across the fields to the sea, with his chin up and his hat still pushed to the back of his head. It was a strong profile, a high forehead and a prominent, curving nose. He pointed at a large bird circling over a wood, a buzzard he said.

Before we left, he made me stand in a patch of gorse and gaze resolutely at the horizon, so that he could take my photograph.

* * * * *

In June 1896 Sis discovered that she was pregnant. She was pleased, but cautious until August when she felt a movement inside her. Tom bought her a gold brooch – three long-stemmed flowers with rubies at their centres in the
art nouveau
style – and regularly came home early bringing flowers and chocolates. He went to the Norfolk Arms less often and for shorter periods, and the number of pubs he visited on Sunday mornings with Cliffie was reduced to two.

* * * * *

In the early hours of the morning of 13 February 1897, Cliffie was woken in his bed in his parents' room by his father. His mother wasn't feeling well and Little Alice was going to help to look after her; he was to go to bed in Little Alice's bed. His father carried him. It was warm where Little Alice had been lying and Cliffie soon fell back to sleep.

In the morning he was taken to neighbours and spent the day playing with their children. They were taking turns on the rocking horse in the late afternoon when he saw his father watching at the door. He looked tired but happy; Cliffie noticed the familiar creases on his temples. When he ran to him, he lifted him into his arms, took his pipe from his mouth and brushed Cliffie's face with his big moustache. ‘Time to go home, old chap. There's a present waiting for you.'

Cliffie was excited. He had forgotten his mother was ill. He wanted to know what the present was. He badly wanted a set of garden tools, so he could make his garden like Toppy's. As he walked along the wet pavement holding his father's hand in the failing winter light, his father said, ‘It's a little sister.'

‘A baby! Only a baby!'

16

Milkshake at the Sugar Bowl

A man in a brown suit came to collect the A35 at the end of July 1964. It hadn't been cleaned for a while but my father and I patted it lovingly on the bonnet; we had been many miles and discussed many important matters in it, and in the Easter holidays it had taken us to John o'Groats and back without breaking down. Parked beside it was my father's new car, a black, twelve-year-old Vauxhall Cresta with chrome strips on the bonnet and red leather seats. It had a pre-war look, tall and rounded. My father thought it was beautiful; I liked it for lots of reasons – it was spacious and filled with walnut and chrome, and, with his hat at a certain angle, it made my father look like James Cagney.

My father had retired. He had still been enjoying the job, but his legs were getting stiff, his deafness had worsened and he was annoyed with the management for their frequent raising of the thresholds at which he was awarded bonuses. He was seventy-two, had been working since he was sixteen and wanted to get away from ‘those bloody capitalists at head office'. He had earned a rest, he said, and would give more time to reading and writing.

He and I had toasted his retirement with cherry brandy the previous evening. The man in the brown suit driving off between the rhododendrons provided the only other ritual.

His request to keep the A35 had been turned down, but the firm paid him £500 to thank him for putting them ahead of their competitors in three counties. He used some of it to buy the Cresta, and soon drove it back to Buckinghamshire where he found a new home: part of a Georgian house in the old part of Beaconsfield, not far from Marlow. There I had a small room on the first floor next to his, with the same curtains and books, and a view of apple trees in a walled garden. The living room, the kitchen and an ancient willow-pattern lavatory were downstairs. We shared a bathroom with a woman and her son who lived in the rest of the house, but we washed and I cleaned my teeth in the kitchen sink.

My mother also began a new life that summer of 1964. She hadn't intended to live with Uncle Godfrey permanently. She got herself a clerical job at London University, and gained her longed-for independence, at the age of fifty-eight, by moving to her own flat, in a newly-built block in the Fulham Road near the ABC cinema. She was anxious about it because it had only one bedroom and I would have to sleep in the living room; she couldn't afford anything larger and remain in Chelsea where she had grown up and where so many of her relations still lived. I reassured her truthfully that this didn't worry me; after all, I lived in two other places and would only be there for a few weeks in a year.

After she moved, she began to join clubs and societies, notably a club for divorced people of both genders and an art group where, to judge from the strange images that soon covered the walls of the flat, she progressed rapidly from impressionism to pop art. She also joined the Over-seas League, a stuffy club off St James's, because, she said, she liked the people and she could stop off there when she was in the West End, which she was frequently, visiting art galleries and going to the theatre with other divorced people.

I asked her – while trying to sound amused and unconcerned, which I was until she answered – whether she brought any of the divorced men home while I was at school or at my father's. She gave me a coy look and replied ambiguously at first, but she warmed to the topic and informed me casually that it was normal for women in their late fifties to be interested in sex and, more disturbingly, that, despite his defects and the appearance given by their sleeping in separate rooms, my father had been an excellent lover – she had had her own bedroom all my life only because my father began to snore during the war. She even told me that when I was around, they had used a code: ‘I think I'll go to bed early tonight.'

Her candour was embarrassing but appreciated, and gave me a vision of the lives of adults; they just said something in code and someone who was sitting in an armchair reading the
Daily Telegraph
would go to bed with them. It seemed very worldly and for ever beyond my reach.

* * * * *

That autumn, after much argument on my father's part, a divorce settlement was reached whereby he benefited from a new law that required relatively wealthy ex-wives to pay alimony to hard-up ex-husbands. He had calculated that he could live off the state old-age pension, supplemented by a little social security to which, as someone with minimal savings and no income, he would be entitled. He therefore turned down regular monthly payments from my mother, accepted £3000 as a lump sum and spent it fast, on a luxurious fortnight alone in Paris and a two-month cruise as a passenger on a tramp steamer to the West Indies, from which he returned brown, grinning and with a thousand stories just in time for Christmas.

On the first Saturday in January 1965 I persuaded him to drive me the five miles from his new home to Marlow. I told him I wanted to see the town again. But more than that I wanted to see Deborah.

I was nervous as we set out in the Cresta. I hadn't seen her for two years and she hadn't replied to my letters. She was probably caught up with people – particularly boys – whom I didn't know, and I would be an awkward arrival from the past, but I wanted to see her; there was a chance that she would be the same, with the same easy empathy that I had always liked, and that our friendship could be resumed. I thought about entering the familiar shop. Her father would be standing behind the counter and would greet me in his restrained, friendly way, and her mother would be upstairs and effusive, but I couldn't imagine how Deborah might be. She was sixteen now.

My father was talking about the cheapness of salmons' heads at the fishmonger in Beaconsfield, unaware that I was clenching and unclenching my calf muscles to ease my tension. He had arranged to see his old friend and fellow budgerigar-fancier Wing Commander Hayes, and I planned to leave him to that and meet him later.

* * * * *

I walked slowly up the High Street, past the Sugar Bowl café, the florist, Mr Brown's grocery and my mother's old shop. I could see Mr Neame, the Brylcreemed manager my mother had taken on years before, standing in the back. Nothing had changed and, two doors up, the sweetshop looked the same.

I wasn't ready to go in. I walked quickly past, half-imagining that Deborah would run out, grab my hand and suggest a walk. I glanced at the window. It was filled with pastel-coloured lights, tinsel and boxes of chocolates. The panes were decorated with wispy triangles of cotton wool. I glimpsed warm yellow light and someone moving inside.

I crossed the road further up and walked back on the other side. A woman in a purple coat carrying a shopping bag came out, but the door with its advertisements for ice cream and cigarettes shut quickly behind her. The light was on upstairs and I could see the back of an upright chair. I walked on until I was opposite the Sugar Bowl, crossed the road again and walked back up as far the florist. I stared vacantly at the flowers on the pavement and thought about walking the other way and forgetting about Deborah.

I wondered why I was so apprehensive. I took my hands out of my pockets and walked quickly up the street. I stopped outside the sweetshop, turned up the collar of my donkey jacket and pushed on the door. A pudgy man with short hair looked up from behind the counter. There were no other customers. I looked towards the door that led to the stairs hoping that someone I knew would come through it.

‘Is Deborah around?'

He looked puzzled. ‘Deborah? No. No Deborahs.'

I walked towards him and rested my hand on the counter. ‘Deborah Baylis? Don't the Baylises own this shop any more…?'

His frown became a smile. ‘The Baylises! No. They went…ooh…eighteen months ago. We took it on a year ago September.'

‘Where did they go to?'

‘Just a minute.' Two small girls had come in and were holding up their money for packets of bubblegum.

‘Well… Someone told me they went to somewhere in Wiltshire.' He pulled at the back of his neck. ‘I never met them myself. Old man had a heart problem? Or something? The group bought the business. I'm just the manager.'

I thanked him and left, and walked towards the river. She could have written and told me her new address. I reached the end of the High Street and stood on the corner looking at the church and the bridge, and across at our old street with Burger's tea shop on the corner. I couldn't think where to go next. It was much too soon to meet my father.

I started walking through the park towards the river. In my vision of this day I didn't visit Richard – he hadn't answered my letter and wouldn't be interested in me any longer; I was going to spend time with Deborah. But now he seemed better than no one, and he might know where Deborah had gone. I turned back.

As I walked through the streets, I remembered that I had Deborah's last letter – from two summers ago – in my wallet. I took it out and looked at it as I walked. Though it didn't say much, I had been pleased to get it. It was mostly about how much she liked drawing and how she couldn't imagine me and my parents living in a caravan – she had drawn one with three people leaning out of the windows – and she said she hoped I'd come back to Marlow.

I had come back – too late. ‘How
stupid
.' I spoke out loud as I walked past the library. The letter ended ‘love Deborah' with a single kiss, as usual. I had taken more than six months to reply to it – and by then they had moved to Wiltshire. ‘How
bloody stupid
!'

Richard's mother answered the door and, once she recognised me, hugged me and asked me in. He'd be back soon. He'd be thrilled to see me; he was playing football at the recreation ground. ‘Your old team. Claremont Station. Adam, Bobby, Patrick. And there are some new ones now.'

I sat in her kitchen, and she put the kettle on and brought out a tin of biscuits. She told me I looked bigger and more handsome and asked after my parents. I told her about them separating. She looked concerned; it wasn't for her to say, but she would imagine that my father would be a difficult man to live with. She ironed some shirts as we chatted.

‘Look who's here.'

Richard looked startled, then took my hand and clapped me on the shoulder. He had grown more than I had; he was nearly six foot and looked broad and strong. His hair was the same, curly and sand-coloured, but there were dark patches on his upper lip and his jaw where he shaved. He hadn't much to say. He'd be leaving school next year. People in the town – Adam, Patrick and Dennis – were all OK. Claremont Station was second in the league.

‘We could still use you.' He looked at me earnestly for a moment, and for a few seconds I had a strange feeling of elation.

It quickly disappeared. ‘I can't. If I was lucky, I could play once every school holidays…No point, is there.'

He nodded and sipped his tea. ‘Shame.'

‘Do you know what happened to Deborah? Man in the sweetshop said they'd moved to Wiltshire.'

He smiled and raised his eyebrows knowingly. ‘She didn't write and tell you? Her dad had a heart attack in the shop. Taken off in an ambulance… She told me she was writing to you all the time. Told me you hated that school… I told you not to go there.' He grinned and shook his head. ‘I'm sorry I didn't write. I kept meaning to.'

‘Was her dad OK? Where did they go?'

His mother answered. ‘It wasn't too serious. He was in hospital in Wycombe for two weeks.' She put down her iron. ‘But he was told to rest… retire if he could. They went to live near her family – Wiltshire, I believe.' She picked up a shirt and shook it.

‘You don't know where in Wiltshire?'

I looked at them both, but neither of them knew. I couldn't think of much else to say to Richard. I left, telling them that I had to meet my father, but I had had another idea. It was possible that on a Saturday afternoon some of Deborah's girl friends would be in the Sugar Bowl – and, anyway, now that I was sixteen, it would be fun to sit there for a while.

It was steamy and crowded and had hardly changed – the same chrome and red plastic, circular revolving stools, formica tables and smell of sweet milk and tobacco smoke. I drank a chocolate milkshake and pretended to stare around aimlessly, while scrutinising the girls. I had only ever glimpsed the girls Deborah knew, in the street, as we passed and she waved or said ‘Hi'. I tried to remember. Sometimes she had stopped and chatted, and I had loitered, paying no attention.

There was a girl at a table, with two other girls. I thought I had seen her before. Perhaps I had – by the river, in the street, at a bus stop. But I tended to forget faces I had only seen once, fleetingly. I finished my drink

and stared into the mirror behind the bar, clenching my calves, fighting my nerves.

‘Excuse me, but did you used to know Deborah Baylis?' She had short blonde hair, and looked surprised and suspicious at the same time. ‘I was a good friend of hers until two years ago. I had to move away.'

She giggled then, and said she'd thought she'd seen me before. ‘David, isn't it?' She had been Deborah's best friend at the grammar. Deborah had often talked about me. She had moved to Chippenham in Wiltshire.

‘Do you know the address or phone – '

‘No. She said she'd send it, but she didn't.'

I thanked her and started to leave.

‘If you ever see her, tell her Teresa sends love.'

‘I will. Thanks.'

‘And tell her to send me a postcard.'

* * * * *

I called directory enquiries from my mother's telephone a few days later. My mother was in her bedroom.

‘Name please.'

‘Geoffrey Baylis.'

‘Address please.'

‘He's in Chippenham…Wiltshire. I don't know the whole address.'

‘I can't tell you the telephone number without the full address.' Her voice had the uninterested lilt of someone who says the same thing many times a day.