“And who paid for it? James. And Dorothy, in a different way … No, I’m just stating facts, David, not criticising
you
.”
But this had long ago ceased to be a sore point with David. He said: “James and Jessica have so much money they wouldn’t have missed three times as much. Anyway, they adored doing it. And Dorothy—she complained about being used, but she’s been Amy’s nursemaid ever since she got fed up with us.”
“We just wanted to be better than everyone else, that’s all. We thought we were.”
“No, that’s how you are twisting it around now. All we wanted was—to be ourselves.”
“Oh, that’s all,” said Harriet airily, spitefully. “That’s all.”
“Yes. Don’t do it, Harriet, stop it.… Well, if you won’t, if you have to, then leave me out. I’m not going to be dragged back to the Middle Ages.”
“Is that where we’ve been dragged back to?”
Molly and Frederick came, bringing Helen. They had not, would not, forgive Harriet, but Helen must be considered. She
was doing well at school, an attractive, self-sufficient girl of sixteen. But cool, distant.
James brought Luke, eighteen years old, a handsome boy, quiet, reliable and steady. He was going to build boats, like his grandfather. He was a watcher, an observer, like his father.
Dorothy came with Jane, fourteen. Non-academic, but “none the worse for that,” as Dorothy insisted. “I could never pass an exam.” The “and look at me” was unspoken; but Dorothy would challenge them all simply by her presence. Which was less substantial than it had been. She was rather thin these days, and sat about a good deal. Paul, eleven years old, was histrionic, hysterical, always demanding attention. He talked a lot about his new school, a day-school, which he hated. He wanted to know why he couldn’t go to boarding-school like all the others. David said, forestalling James with a proud look, that he would pay for it.
“Surely it is time you sold this house,” Molly said, and what she was saying to her selfish daughter-in-law was “And then my son can stop killing himself working too hard for you.”
David came in quickly to support Harriet, “I agree with Harriet, we shouldn’t sell the house yet.”
“Well, what do you think is going to change?” asked Molly, cold. “Ben certainly isn’t.”
But privately David said something else. He would like the house sold.
“It’s being with Ben in a small house, just the thought of it,” said Harriet.
“It wouldn’t have to be a small house. But does it have to be the size of a hotel?”
David knew that even now, though it was foolish, she could not finally give up her dreams of the old life coming back.
Then that holiday was gone. A success, on the whole, for everyone tried hard. Except for Molly—so Harriet saw it. But
it was sad for both parents. They had to sit listening to talk about people they had not met, only heard of. Luke and Helen visited families of school friends. And these people could never be asked here.
In September of the year Ben became eleven, he went to the big school. It was 1986.
Harriet prepared herself for the telephone call that must come from the headmaster. It would be, she thought, towards the end of the first term. The new school would have been sent a report on Ben, from the headmistress who had so consistently refused to acknowledge that there was anything remarkable about him. “Ben Lovatt is not an academic child, but …” But what? “He tries hard.” Would that have been it? But he had long ago stopped trying to understand what he was taught, could hardly read or write, more than his name. He still tried to fit in, to copy others.
There was no telephone call, no letter. Ben, whom she examined for bruises every evening when he came home, seemed to have entered the tough and often brutal world of the secondary school without difficulty.
“Do you like this school, Ben?”
“Yes.”
“Better than the other school?”
“Yes.”
As everyone knows, all these schools have a layer, like a sediment, of the uneducable, the unassimilable, the hopeless, who move up the school from class to class, waiting for the happy moment when they can leave. And, more often than not, they are truants, to the relief of their teachers. Ben had at once become one of these.
Some weeks after he went to the big school, he brought home a large, shaggy dark youth, full of easy good nature. Harriet thought, John! And then, But he must be John’s brother! No;
Ben had been drawn to this boy, it was clear, first of all because of his memories of that happy time with John. But his name was Derek, and he was fifteen, soon to leave school. Why did he put up with Ben, years younger than he was? Harriet watched the two as they helped themselves to food from the refrigerator, made themselves tea, sat in front of the television, talking more than they watched. In fact, Ben seemed older than Derek. They ignored her. Just as when Ben was the mascot, the pet of the gang of youths, John’s gang, and had seemed to see only John, now his attention was for Derek. And, soon, for Billy, for Elvis, and for Vic, who came in a gang after school and sat around and fed themselves from the refrigerator.
Why did these big boys like Ben?
She would look at them, from the stairs perhaps, as she came down into the living-room, a group of youths, large, or thin, or plump, dark, fair, or redheaded—and among them Ben, squat, powerful, heavy-shouldered, with his bristly yellow hair growing in that strange pattern, with his watchful, alien eyes—and she thought, But he’s not really younger than they are! He’s much shorter, yes. But it almost seems that he dominates them. When they sat around the big family table, talking in their style, which was loud, raucous, jeering, jokey, they were always looking at Ben. Yet he spoke very little. When he did say something, it was never much more than Yes, or No. Take this! Get that! Give me—whatever it was, a sandwich, a bottle of Coke. And he watched them carefully all the time. He was the boss of this gang, whether they knew it or not.
They were a bunch of gangly, spotty, uncertain adolescents; he was a young adult. She had to conclude this finally, though for a while she believed that these poor children, who stayed together because they were found stupid, awkward, and unable to match up to their contemporaries, liked Ben because he was even clumsier and more inarticulate than they. No! She discovered
that “Ben Lovatt’s gang” was the most envied in the school, and a lot of boys, not only the truants and drop-outs, wanted to be part of it.
Harriet watched Ben with his followers and tried to imagine him among a group of his own kind, squatting in the mouth of a cave around roaring flames. Or a settlement of huts in a thick forest? No, Ben’s people were at home under the earth, she was sure, deep underground in black caverns lit by torches—that was more like it. Probably those peculiar eyes of his were adapted for quite different conditions of light.
She often sat in the kitchen, by herself, when they were across the low wall in the living-room, watching the box. They might sprawl there for hours, all afternoon and evening. They made tea, raided the refrigerator, went out to fetch pies, or chips, or pizzas. They did not seem to mind what they watched; they liked the afternoon soap operas, did not turn off the children’s programmes; but best of all they enjoyed the bloody fare of the evening. Shootings and killings and tortures and fighting: this is what fed them. She watched them watching—but it was more as if they were actually part of the stories on the screen. They were unconsciously tensing and flexing, faces grinning, or triumphant or cruel; and they let out groans or sighs or yells of excitement: “That’s it,
do
it!” “Carve him up!” “Kill him, slice him!” And the moans of excited participation as the bullets poured into a body, as blood spurted, as the tortured victim screamed.
These days the local newspapers were full of news of muggings, hold-ups, break-ins. Sometimes this gang, Ben among them, did not come into the Lovatts’ house for a whole day, two days, three.
“Where have you been, Ben?”
He replied indifferently, “Been with my friends.”
“Yes, but where?”
“Been around.”
In the park, in a café, in the cinema, and, when they could borrow (or steal?) motorbikes, off to some seaside town.
She thought of ringing the headmaster, but then: What is the point? If I were in his place, I’d be relieved they took themselves off.
The police? Ben in the hands of the police?
The gang always seemed to have plenty of money. More than once, dissatisfied with what they found in the refrigerator, they brought in feasts of food, and ate all evening. Derek (never Ben!) would offer her some.
“Like a bit of take-away, love?”
And she accepted, but sat apart from them, for she knew they would not want her too close.
There were rapes, too, among those news items.…
She examined those faces, trying to match them with what she had read. Ordinary young men’s faces; they all seemed older than fifteen, sixteen. Derek had a foolish look to him: at ugly moments on the screen he laughed a lot in a weak excitable way. Elvis was a lean, sharp blond youth, very polite, but a nasty customer, she thought, with eyes as cold as Ben’s. Billy was a hulk, stupid, with aggression in every movement. He would get so lost in the violence on the box that he would jump to his feet and seem almost to disappear into the screen—and then the others jeered at him, and he came to himself and sat down. He scared her. They all did. But, she thought, they weren’t all that intelligent. Perhaps Elvis was.… If they were stealing (or worse), then who planned it all, and looked after them?
Ben? “He does not know his own strength.” That formula had gone with him through school. How did he control the rages that she knew could overcome him? She was always covertly on the watch for cuts, bruises, wounds. All had them, but nothing very bad.
One morning, she came down the stairs to find Ben eating
breakfast with Derek. That time she said nothing, but knew she could expect more. Soon she found six of them at breakfast: she had heard them, very late, creep upstairs and find beds for themselves.
She stood by the table, looked at them bravely, ready to face them out, and said, “You aren’t just to sleep here, any time you feel like it.” They kept their heads down and went on eating.
“I mean it,” she insisted.
Derek said, laughing, intending to sound insolent, “Oh, sorry, sorry, sorry I’m
sure
. But we thought you wouldn’t mind.”
“I do mind,” she said.
“It’s a big house,” said Billy the lout, the one she was most afraid of. He did not look at her, but crammed food into his mouth, and made a noise eating.
“It’s not your house,” said Harriet.
“One day we’ll take it away from you,” said Elvis, laughing loudly.
“Oh, perhaps you will, yes.”
They all made “revolutionary” remarks like this, when they remembered.
“Come the revolution, we’ll …” “We’ll kill all the rich shits and then …” “There’s one law for the rich, and one for the poor, everybody knows
that.”
They would say these things amiably, with that air of repletion people use when copying what others do; when they are part of a popular mood or movement.
David came back from work late, these days, and sometimes did not come at all. He stayed with one of the people he worked with. It happened that he arrived early one night and found the gang, nine or ten of them, watching television, with beer cans, cartons of take-away Chinese, papers that had held fish and chips, all over the floor.
He said, “Clear that mess up.”
They slowly got to their feet and cleared it up. He was a man: the man of the house. Ben cleared up with them.
“That’s enough,” said David. “And now go home, all of you.”
They trailed off, and Ben went with them. Neither Harriet nor David said anything to stop him.
They had not been alone together for some time. Weeks, she thought. He wanted to say something, but was afraid to—afraid of arousing that dangerous anger of his?
“Can’t you see what is going to happen?” he finally asked, sitting down with a plate of whatever he could find in the refrigerator.
“You mean, they are going to be here more often?” “Yes, that’s what I mean. Can’t you see we should sell this place?”
“Yes, I know we should,” she said quietly, but he mistook her tone.
“For God’s sake, Harriet, what can you be waiting for? It’s crazy.…”
“The only thing I can think of now is that the children might be pleased we kept it.”
“We have no children, Harriet. Or, rather, I have no children.
You
have one child.”
She felt that he would not be saying this if he were here more often. She said, “There is something you aren’t seeing, David.”
“And what’s that?”
“Ben will leave. They’ll all be off, and Ben will go with them.”
He considered this; considered her, his jaws moving slowly as he ate. He looked very tired. He was also looking much older than he was, could easily be taken as sixty, rather than fifty. He was a grey, rather stooped, shadowy man, with a strained look, and a wary glance that expected trouble. This was what he was directing at her now.
“Why? They can come here any time they like, do what they like, help themselves to food.”
“It’s not exciting enough for them, that’s why. I think they’ll just drift off one day to London, or some big town. They went off for five days last week.”
“And Ben will go with them?”
“Ben will go with them.”
“And you won’t go after him and bring him back?”
She did not reply. This was unfair, and he must know it; after a moment or two, he said, “Sorry. I’m so tired I don’t know whether I’m coming or going.”
“When he’s gone, perhaps we could go and have a holiday together somewhere.”
“Well, perhaps we could.” This sounded as if he might even believe it, hope for it.
Later they lay side by side, not touching, and talked practically about arrangements for visiting Jane at her school. And there was Paul, at his, with a Parents’ Visiting Day.
They were alone in the big room where all the children but Ben had been born. Above them the emptiness of the upper floors, and the attic. Downstairs, the empty living-room and kitchen. They had locked the doors. If Ben decided to come home that night, he would have to ring.