The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy (20 page)

I was still annoyed with David for wasting my time and taking my money, but mostly I was angry with myself, for being used. I kept hidden in the crowd. I didn’t want him to see me. David was reciting poetry. Despite the cold, he had an ease, a charm, a radiance, that made people draw close and want to listen. I could see that. He smoked while he performed, and he had a bottle at his feet; once in a while he stooped to lift it and take a swig. When someone shouted out, ‘Pass the bottle round, David!’ he laughed and said, ‘Buy your own, sir.’ It seemed that quite a few people knew him.

David held some pages, but most of the time he didn’t refer to them. He performed in a deep and energetic voice that carried. From what I could gather, the poems were satirical pieces. Each time he finished one, the audience applauded rapturously. They clearly liked him and he knew that. At his feet he’d placed his fedora; a woman came forward and threw a few coins into it. I heard him say he would be publishing
his work soon, in a pamphlet, and a few people nodded to show they would be interested.

‘So this next one,’ David said, ‘is called “The Love Song of a Maid Who’s Never Had It”.’ People in the crowd laughed, and while they did he paused for another swig. ‘It’s sort of got a chorus and you can all, you know, join in.’ He slipped a silk scarf out of his jacket pocket and tied it in a knot under his chin. I assumed it was one of Maureen’s. Someone shouted, ‘Poof!’ David grinned and said, ‘Yeah, right.’ I moved closer.

In a high-pitched voice like a pantomime dame’s David began to recite words I knew. Words I had kept in my handbag until I lost them. My poems.

(‘I look at the world and I see only you’, that sort of thing. I can hardly bear to repeat them.)

Here came the chorus – this was nothing to do with me, but it had the crowd roaring – ‘My love is pure. I am your maid. Oh me, oh my, will I ever get laid?’

The crowd repeated the line in a raucous shout, and my face burned with the shame of it.

David went on to recite four more poems. I stayed only because what I heard hurt and confused me so much, I was unable to move. All of his poems were parodies of mine. All of them had the crowd jeering. By the end of the fifth poem, I couldn’t take any more. I turned and pushed my way free.

After that I began to run. Past the stalls, the children’s rides. I had my hand to my face so that no one would see. Once I was at the other side of the quay, I had to stop and sit on a bench. I pictured, across the
oily black water, the crowd laughing, and I felt stripped of clothes. I couldn’t help myself, I cried out loud in pain. Supposing you’d seen the poems? Worse. Supposing your wife had read them? I wanted to be in my flat, but I hadn’t the energy even to get up. The crowd began to wolf-whistle and applaud. I guessed David’s recital was over. I sat for a long time, watching people make their way home along the quay. Parents were carrying their children. A young woman shrieked when several men, I recognized them as reps, held her over the water as if to chuck her in. A horse dressed as a reindeer was walked to its box. The pubs began to fill. The Fayre was coming to an end.

‘Hey, you.’ A slim but firm long hand tugged at my shoulder and pulled me round. I got his smell, and I had to steady myself. ‘Were you there?’

I got up to go, but David came after me and stood in my path. I saw the black kohl lines around his eyes, the crimson stain on his lips. He’d coated his face in white pancake.

‘Do your parents know about this?’ I asked coldly.

He laughed and said, Probably not. He didn’t mention the letters or the money I’d sent or the visit he’d failed to make. He glanced over his shoulder at the Fayre. ‘It was good. People liked me. Got any cash?’

My jaw dropped, and he laughed again. ‘I’m joking.’ He showed me the hat. It was full of coins; there were notes in there too. ‘Do you want a drink? I’ll buy you one.’

‘No.’

‘Suit yourself.’ David shrugged and moved away. I watched him stroll up the street towards the off-licence.

That Monday, when I got in your car, I could barely look at you. You
asked if I was feeling peaky. Peaky? I snapped. What sort of a word was that? You smiled a little awkwardly and concentrated on the road ahead.

‘Doing anything nice for Christmas?’ you said. I didn’t reply.

We must have driven awhile in silence because I remember you pulling over in a lay-by. ‘Wait there,’ you said, and you got out to fetch a bag from the boot.

Once you were established back in the driving seat you told me to watch.

You lifted a red bauble out of the bag and tied it carefully over the rear-view mirror. It spun a little as you moved your hands. You pulled down the sun visor on my side and hung it with another bauble, a gold one this time. Then you hung a blue bauble from the indicator, and the last, a silver one, you tied to the jacket hook behind my seat.

‘Merry Christmas, Queenie,’ you said.

‘I don’t understand, David.’

It’s Boxing Day, and he has decided to pay me a surprise visit. He is standing at the communal door to the flats, offering a half-full bottle of Southern Comfort and a twig of holly. He’s shivering with the wet and the cold – he is wearing only a jacket and jeans and it’s pouring out there – but there is no way that young man is coming inside my home.

‘Peace offering?’ he says. He holds out the bottle.

His shirt is so wet the collar sticks like paper to his skin. I am about to shut the door and maybe he senses that, I don’t know, because he lifts his face so that I can see. He’s been crying.

Beyond him rain hits the street, the pavement, the estuary. Everything is drenched and grey, everything is water. Watching David,
his eyes red, his mouth bunched with sorrow, his body too tall for those wet clothes, I relent. ‘Come in, then.’

He leaves a wet trail all through the hall, into my flat and across my carpet, straight to the chair, where he sits with his ankles twisted one around the other, his arms pulled tight around his body. His knee is jigging up and down, up and down.

‘David, I’m angry with you,’ I say.

‘Yeah, I know.’ He shakes his wet hair, and rain droplets jump out over his clothes. ‘And I am sorry, Q. I’m really sorry.’

I make David tea. I fetch towels and a blanket. I keep busy so that I won’t have to sit and talk to him. It’s different, though, now that he’s inside my flat. He seems smaller. He drains the green teacup and refills it with Southern Comfort.

I sit on a cushion on the floor. OK, I tell him: Explain.

He talks all afternoon. He tells me about the course, the college, his life in Cambridge. He admits he’s been struggling with the work. He had a girlfriend, but she left him. Now he finds it’s easier to fit in with people if he’s drunk; it makes him more fun, less inhibited. But the work is suffering, of course. The parents don’t know this, but his tutors are on to him.

Reciting his poetry is a way of showing people who he is, he says, without upsetting them or putting them off. He does it at the student union and on the street. It’s like busking for intellectuals. He enjoys the attention it brings, as well as the cash.

‘I want people to notice me,’ he says. ‘The parents haven’t a clue.’

‘But you stole my poems, David. You made a mockery of them.’

He looks at me gently, with your eyes, and he says, simply, ‘I just
want someone to see me, Q. See who I really am.’

It is what we all want, in the end; to be seen.

‘Those poems you were reciting weren’t yours. So how can anyone see you in them? If they’re seeing anyone, it’s me.’

He laughs briefly, then speaks again, and it is with the same disarming honesty: ‘That’s it, though. You
are
seeing me, Q. You’re seeing I’m a fake.’

The anger I have felt, the sense of betrayal, melts away. I want to help this boy. I really do. ‘You have to show your heart, David.’ I place my hand on my own and I feel it throb against my palm.

After a moment he asks, ‘Is that what you were doing in your poetry? Showing your heart?’

This time I don’t answer.

David reaches for his bottle, untwists the cap and refills the green teacup with Southern Comfort. He wipes the bottle’s neck very carefully with his sleeve. I end up heating a Christmas pudding (for one) and sharing it with him by the fire. We eat it from plates on our laps. He tells me a little about his summer in Europe, and it’s only as the light goes that he asks, ‘Who were they for? Your poems?’

‘No one you know. I wrote them years ago.’

When I look up, he is watching me very carefully and smiling. He believes me. He does not realize I love his father. David pours me a cup of Southern Comfort, and I drink so fast the alcohol spikes my throat. ‘I just wanted to know for sure,’ he says.

Over the next few weeks, David rings a few times. He reverses the charges, of course, and tells me how he’s getting along at Cambridge. Since our conversation, he assures me, he’s been feeling better. More
grounded. He’s started writing his own poetry, he says, and he’s really pleased with what he’s done. It’s not funny any more; do I think that’s OK? I assure him that if he’s really expressing who he is, that is good. It’s really good. ‘Can I send them to you, Q?’ he asks.

Apparently there is someone he’s met at Cambridge who knows someone else, and the someone else has read the poems and thinks David has a big future. He’s got the ability to take a subject and push it to the edge. The first poems arrive the following day: a thick wad of them in a brown envelope.

I am going to be honest with you, Harold. David’s poems aren’t up to much. They’re full of clichés. Mostly unfinished. There is also a darkness to them that makes them appear self-indulgent. I write notes in the margins. Where his imagery is loose, I suggest new ideas. I am trying to do what I can to help. More poems arrive. They are more bleak. They talk about death, the black hole. Often he writes at the bottom, ‘For your eyes only!!!!’ He urges me not to tell the parents or he’ll never trust me again. ‘Your secret’s safe,’ I reassure him. Nevertheless I am concerned, and I don’t know how to tell you.

Easter comes and goes. I remember hiding small foil-wrapped chocolate eggs in your car for a surprise Easter egg hunt, but you go and sit on one and so we spend a long time in a café trying to clean off the mess.

David is home very briefly. When he goes back for the summer term, the poems start arriving again. I continue to help with new phrasing, and sometimes, I admit, I use the opportunity to make other suggestions too. Perhaps he should join a poetry group? Is he eating properly? If anyone had asked me what I was doing with David, I would
have explained: I was helping you by helping your son. I, too, had been an Oxbridge student. I, too, had parents who were in awe of my intelligence. I hoped David would find his feet; then I would casually drop into our conversation the whole truth about our dancing and my sending him cash, the poems and all the other things I had failed to admit to you. Told in hindsight, none of those things would seem so big because they would be safely in the past and David would be happy.

And so we continued to drive together, you and I. I watched you, brought you chocolate bars, little things to show I was there. And sometimes you took the long road home and pointed to the birds. We stopped once, do you remember, because you said you thought I looked pale. (I was. David had sent me a poem that morning about ‘the blue beasts’ in his mind.) We sat beneath a fig tree, but I was too miserable to speak. After a while, you began to collect figs and line them carefully along the empty lay-by. Had I ever played fig ball? you asked. When I said that no I hadn’t, you expressed surprise and told me it was very simple; it was like bowling, really, only with figs. ‘You can play it anywhere. I don’t know why it’s not an Olympic sport. And if you can’t find figs, you can do it with conkers.’

I was unexpectedly good at fig ball. ‘You see,’ you said. ‘You’re smiling again now.’

‘One day I will come here with my son.’

We are sitting outside the pub at Slapton Sands. I have sherry. You have a pint of lime-and-lemonade. A packet of crisps sits on the table between us. It must be summer – the end of David’s second year at Cambridge. The sea is very still, like polished glass, and the sky shines
silver too, broken intermittently by the flash of light from Start Point. ‘We’ll have a beer,’ you say. ‘Me and David.’

A beer? I think. Are you sure? As if reading my thoughts, you smile. ‘Or maybe a lemonade. We’ll talk. You know.’ Your blue eyes mist. ‘Man to man.’

‘That would be good,’ I say.

‘When you’re young it’s not so easy to talk with your father. But one day. One day he’ll be old like me. It will be easier to talk when we are old.’

I picture David wearing my mittens. I laugh. ‘I can’t imagine David in driving gloves, Harold.’ You look so sad, so unsure, I am trying to make you feel better but even before I get to the end of the remark, I realize what I’ve said. I wish I could cram the words back into my mouth. Instead I down what is left of my sherry.

‘I don’t understand,’ you say into the silence. ‘Have you met David?’ Very quietly the sea brushes the shore.

It would be so quick to say yes. Yes, Harold; yes, I have. You give it to me on a plate. We danced a few times, I could say. He telephones. Asks for money. It is not too late to come clean. It’s never too late – and then I think of my poems, the poems he lampooned, and I have no idea how to explain that I love you.

‘No,’ I say. I say it again, just in case the first one isn’t big enough. ‘No. I haven’t. I’ve never met him.’

You give a smile with a noise. Not big enough for a laugh, but warmer than a mere smile. ‘I think you’d like him. He’d definitely like you.’

It is all becoming too much.

Fire alarm

W
E WERE
woken very late by the fire alarm. One of the new patients was smoking and had caused a minor explosion in his oxygen tank. The night staff and the nuns wheeled us outside into the Well-being Garden and covered us with blankets, though it had been a warm day and the air was surprisingly mellow. I could smell the earthy sweetness of the hawthorn, the cow parsley, and the very first of the elderflowers.