The Child's Child (6 page)

When Fay left, Andrew told me he was afraid James might kill himself before the trial. He talked about this relative of his, his grandfather’s brother, whose friend committed suicide, the people
The Child’s Child
is based on. Andrew thought it was because people found out the man was gay and abused him for it. I asked Andrew what James felt about Kevin Drake. I mean, James picked him out from a line of men and had no doubt about it, this was the man he saw repeatedly stab his friend Bashir. Did he have no feeling of the rightness of bearing witness against Drake for Bashir’s sake?

“I don’t know. I’ve tried that argument with him, but he says he doesn’t want to talk about it, yet this case and the trial and Drake and the other man are all we ever do talk about. You’ll say try to steer him onto another subject, and I’ve tried, God knows I’ve tried, but he never will, or if he’ll say a few words about something else, he’ll bring it straight back to this. D’you know what he calls it? My doom, is what he calls it. ‘Kevin Drake is my doom,’ he says.”

I asked if James was serious.

“Dead serious. He’s got no religion, as you know, but he talks about Kevin Drake being sent to be his doom. Drake was sent to kill Bashir because he was gay, and James says we were sent to witness the killing and that’s his doom.”

I asked about this ghost James had invented and which knocked on doors. It seemed in the same league with dooms.

“It’s so absurd,” said Andrew, “that it’s funny. Or it would be if the whole business wasn’t so wretched.” He took a great swig of the whisky he’d fetched. “I’m drinking too much as no doubt you’ve noticed. It’s what keeps me going. I dread he’ll kill himself, and of course I do my best to stop that.”

He couldn’t kill himself, I said, if he never went out and he hadn’t got the means in the house.

“What makes you think he never goes out? He goes out when we’re out. I’m sure he watches us and goes out. He used to use the hard stuff, not heroin, never that, and he stopped before he met me, but it’s prescription drugs now, mainly oxycodone. He’s collecting it now from this dealer he knows. It’s for his doom, to make his doom happen.”

M
Y THESIS PROGRESSED
—for good or ill. Good, I hoped. I was concentrating now on how the culture has changed out of all recognition, not the physical facts. None of those young women in the nineteenth-century novels went near a doctor, still less a hospital, when pregnant. Their periods stopped, I supposed, so they knew the worst had happened. But even if these girls had asked a doctor to examine them, what could he have found? Perhaps that the foetus was alive, but not much more than that. No scans in the middle of the nineteenth century, none in the middle of the twentieth, come to that. No means of measuring blood pressure. The interesting thing here, though, is that all of them belonged to the working class. They were all servants.

Are we to take this as showing that middle-class or upper-class girls never had babies outside marriage? Surely not. It has to be that the working-class ones were more often the victims of middle- or upper-class men because they were maids or children’s nurses or even governesses in landed families. Also that servants abounded in their thousands in cities and the country. The middle-class young women were accorded respect and in any case never left alone with a man. Impossible to imagine an Anne Elliot or a Dorothea Brooke ever putting herself in a position to be seduced. It seems that only in cases (such as in Trollope’s
Lady Anna
and
Dr. Wortle’s School
) where a women finds herself bigamously
married through no fault of her own can a middle-class woman have a child who turns out to be illegitimate. In fact, of all Victorian novelists, Trollope is the most rigidly on the side of married virtue. He seems to shock even himself with his invention of Mr. Scarborough, the landowner who has two sons; though both were born while he was married, he forges documents to prove his perfectly legal marriage, which took place before the birth of his elder son, in fact happened after it, then contrives to marry his wife again before the birth of the younger. And all this to enable him to by-pass an entail in the event his first son is a bad lot and his second a pillar of virtue. One wonders what he would have done if the latter had been a girl.

But in reality unmarried middle-class women did have babies. I thought of the two I knew of, Rebecca West and Dorothy Sayers, giving birth respectively in 1914 and 1924. In reality too, away from fiction, Fay said many people of her age have an aunt or a great-aunt who had a child outside marriage who was brought up by its grandmother as her own. So were West and Sayers unusual only in that they were middle-class? Carla would remind me not to get emotionally involved if she knew what I was thinking about, the terrible unhappiness of these women, forced by society to hear their children call a grandmother or an aunt “Mother.”

S
OMETHING HAPPENED
I never foresaw and wouldn’t have believed possible. Two things really, because the first and the minor happening was the ghost. It was in the very early morning, I suppose about four. I only say “about four” because my bedroom was in total darkness when there should have been pale green light on the bedside table. My digital clock had gone out. I reached for the switch on the bedlamp, but before my forefinger touched it, there came a soft knock on the door. Now I should have realised that this was a power cut and that either Andrew or James had knocked on my door because there was a power cut. But I who don’t believe in ghosts, of course I don’t, thought of what Andrew had told me and lay in bed, rigid and, for some mad reason, terrified. The clock suddenly leapt into life, its blinding lime-green digits flashing on and off. I got up to reset it, put on the bedroom central light to check all was well, and at last opened the door. No one was there. But it must have been ten minutes since the knock, so ghost or man, there hardly would have been.

The other thing, of far greater significance, of earthshaking moment you might say, was the next day in the afternoon. I had heard Andrew go to work at about eight, closing the front door infinitely quietly as was his new habit. I went off to the university, which all my students call the uni, to take some of them for a tutorial, the ones who had bothered to produce essays. They knew quite a lot about nineteenth-century women’s fiction and
women’s poetry, but nothing, it seemed to me, of nineteenth-century social history. One of them thought it was quite usual to possess a car in the 1890s, and another that divorce was much as it is now, easily and quickly obtained and the wife having custody of the children.

I came back into the house expecting to find it empty and planning on going online to find some nineteenth-century social-history websites and recommend them to my students. Instead I encountered James crouching on the floor in our hallway, waiting for Andrew.

Or so I supposed, but in fact he was waiting for me. And he was a sight, misery itself, the tears running down his cheeks, his back hunched, his hands fidgeting, wringing and twisting in front of him.

“I hoped you’d come,” he said. “I longed for you to come. I can’t stand being alone any longer.”

So I knelt on the floor beside him and put my arms round him, half-expecting to be shoved away. But he held me more tightly than I held him, his face pressed into my shoulder. I don’t know how long we stayed like that, several minutes certainly. Then we both got up, simultaneously it seemed, and I told him I was going to make us a cup of tea. He followed me into the kitchen, saying he couldn’t write, he’d tried but he had what he called “the grandmother of all writer’s blocks.” He could use the Internet for e-mails and research, or he could if he had anyone to send e-mails to or anything to discover, but he hadn’t. If he tried to write the novel he was halfway through, all that appeared was what happened in Old Compton Street that night, his friend attacked, stabbed, and kicked to the ground. He could describe Kevin Drake’s blue-and-silver trainers, soon to be splashed with blood, his bare, bony ankles and his frayed jeans. He could write the word Drake and the other man’s name, Gary, Drake used when they egged each other on and describe the distortion of their faces, red with meaningless,
unprovoked rage. But his novel that he wanted to write, all that was lost and gone. He told me this as we walked into the study, carrying our mugs of tea. In the weeks since that night in Soho he had grown thin, his once-handsome face like a skull, the tendons on his neck, ropes stretched taut.

“Even if I were capable of doing anything,” he said, “I’ve nothing to do. All I’ve done for years is write, and now I can’t. I’ve no outside interests, I don’t care for sport, and I’ve no hobbies. Do people have hobbies anymore? Train sets and stamp collections? Maybe they do, but I don’t.”

This was when I had an idea. I asked him if he would help me with the social-history websites, expecting a blunt no.

But he said, “You mean find some websites and go into them and see what they say?”

“I’d like someone from the outside to look at this stuff from a fresh perspective,” I said. Give him something to get interested in he’d never thought about before. This plan was just a stage in my amateur therapy. Let him do something,
instruct
someone even, all in the good cause of distracting him from those disproportionate fears. “What I’d like,” I went on lying, “is if you could sit beside me and tell me what you think. Would you do that?”

He would try, he said. He knew nothing about the Victorians or their social history. I fetched more tea for us, thinking that this might be the therapy Andrew was hoping for. I hated to think that my brother might stop loving him just when he obviously needed love so much.

I sat down at Verity’s computer, and James drew up a chair beside mine. I was told something I’d known for years, how to use a search engine. I told him the language defeated me. I was a purist when it came to language, and among other solecisms I didn’t care to use
access
as a verb. He told me I didn’t have to do it “in the great world” off-line. Think of it as a foreign language you’re learning, he said, and then it will be all right. A few websites were
found and I told him I didn’t want to have to go online every time I needed to refer to them. Print them out, he said, and I pretended never to have printed anything out, so he told me how, and soon we had a whole stack of quite useless sheets of paper that I didn’t need for my students and would never look at again.

But “helping” me like that did James a world of good. He already looked much better, said he would give me another lesson in using the Internet whenever I liked. I had a bottle of sherry in the cupboard that was here when we moved in. It’s an old-fashioned drink, but I suddenly had a fancy for it, so James and I each had a glass and he told me I had saved his life. The oxycodone was what I thought of, whether he was still using it, and if it might take the life I was supposed to have saved. I hadn’t yet thanked him but now I did, and he said it was nothing, as people do, and then he said, would I hold him in my arms again as I did when I found him in the hallway.

He was gay. I had never had any doubt about that, but doubt came quickly then. The kiss he gave me was a lover’s kiss, and the hands that began touching me were a lover’s. Why didn’t I stop him? Why didn’t I just say no gently and kindly, take my mouth away from his, slide away from under him, and remind him who and what we were? Andrew’s lover and Andrew’s sister. Trusted absolutely because trust was taken for granted, trust wasn’t even necessary to think about. So why didn’t I? Maybe because, skeletal though he had become, he was attractive. I’d noticed before, but I’d made myself not be affected by his attractions because he was gay and because he was Andrew’s. I forgot all that, yielded in silence and participated in silence. No arguing, no protest, no words at all, but a simple and intensely pleasurable giving and receiving.

We were on Verity’s sofa in Verity’s study, and because we made no sound but for a faint sigh, a quiet gasp, we came to a mutual climax on a deep, long sigh. He held me afterwards with
a tenderness I took for gratitude, and that surprised me. I moved away from him, expecting remorse, but none came and I thought to myself, it must have been the sherry, that unfamiliar, old drink that may have been Verity’s favoured tipple. The date would be right.

Still silent, we got back into those clothes we took off, and at last I said something. I said what was bound to be said sooner or later. “I thought you were entirely gay.”

“So did I.”

“But?”

“I was married once, so I suppose you could say I’m bisexual, but I haven’t been since my divorce, and I never think of myself that way. Grace—what a lovely name that is—Andrew must never know.”

Perhaps he wouldn’t mind. After all, it was over and we were not going to do it again. That I was sure of and sure too that Andrew would mind very much. “It won’t happen again. We should tell him it happened once.”

“No, Grace, no.”

“We must tell him, but we can take two days and a night to think about how we’ll do it.”

And that was what we were doing. Apart, of course, for I was in my part of the house, my living-room, and James was in Andrew’s part with Andrew. At about eight I heard them go out. I heard them talking as they crossed the hall where James sat hunched up in despair, and then I heard him laugh, a carefree, happy laugh, the like of which hadn’t been heard since the murder of Bashir.

W
HATEVER CONCLUSION
James may have come to, if he had thought about it at all, I knew we must tell Andrew or our failure to tell him would hang over all my relations with my brother and spoil them. He had to be told, whatever came of it. This was what I would tell James in the morning after Andrew had left for work. And in thinking this way I saw that I was already on the path to deception for I had never before thought of keeping a secret from Andrew. And such a secret.

But for the time being they had gone out and were having a happy time, if James’s laugh was anything to go by. This was the first time I’d heard him laugh for weeks. I had planned to use this evening reading at least the beginning of
The Child’s Child,
wondering if it might possibly be of use to me in my thesis, and anyway, I wanted to know what happens. But as I went into the study, a strange thing happened to me, or perhaps not strange at all. My thoughts went back to what had happened there a few hours ago, not with sentimentality or any enhanced view of my feelings for James, but with guilt and a degree of shame. What it came down to was, I shouldn’t have done it. I could have said no to him and sat up and hugged him again. Now I have forgotten why I did do it, but not forgotten that I did. One single act of sex can have a profound effect on one’s life, and now I had a quite reasonless fear that what James and I did was one of those acts and the effect would be cataclysmic.