The Right Man (30 page)

‘Ha!
All this Nerily business put an end to anything resembling a career years ago.

‘Look,
I’ve got to go,’ I said. ‘They’re coming out. I’ll catch you later.’ I said ‘catch
you later’. You see, I really am a yuppie.

Various
parents had accumulated on the street. One or two were sitting in double-parked
Volvo estates. Children holding tissue-paper collages and large poster-paint
pictures were coming out and being bustled away by mums, nannies, sisters and
one or two sheepish dads in summer suits. Liz was not there. The. nursery had
nearly emptied. A mum from one of the Volvo estates was extricating her two
children from the front playroom.

I stood
half in, half out of the open front door. A third child of hers sat in the
child-seat in the car. The woman was making more noise than all of the children
put together. A certain braying upper-middle-class type have naturally grating
and resonant voices — from being brought up in baronial dining halls, I presume
— and this woman had the kind of volume that would reach beyond the back of the
auditorium of the Olivier at the National and right out into the LWT car park
beyond.

‘It’s ainly
one week they’ll miss, so thet’s Ay Kay. You see,
all
the flights back
from the Dordogne are full. It’s a
nightmare
getting a seat at all. It’s
outrageous.’
I would like to be allowed to shoot her now, with a big
Clint Eastwood gun. Blow her, face across the nursery wall.

‘Hello,
Mr Mullin. Grace isn’t here.’ It was Rosie, Grace’s aptly named nursery
teacher. ‘She hasn’t been in all week. You can take her art folder if you like.’

I followed
Rosie into the playroom, feeling too large. Apart from all the furniture in
there being kiddy-sized, the staff and mums all seemed ‘to be smaller even than
me. I hung about testily at the doorway to the room. ‘Her collages are in the
art tray.

I didn’t
know where the art tray was, damn it, and hesitated a moment. The nobby mum
with the honking voice clocked my lost look, and as she bundled past me with
her brood, she stopped and looked up at me with a bitter look in her
Anglo-Saxon eyes. ‘You’re
learning,’
she said at me with a triumphant
and hateful lump in her throat. The ‘you’ in question presumably being all men
in general, and I suspect more specifically her nobby husband, wherever he was
right now. Probably shagging his secretary. God knows, I would too if I was married
to her.

I
couldn’t ask Rosie for more information without compromising my position. It
was bad enough that I obviously didn’t know Grace had been off school. What
kind of a parent must she think I am? I took Grace’s raffia pictures and got
out as quickly as I could. When a whole kindergarten do their glueing and
sticking and painting and then their efforts are hung on the wall, the results
all look pretty much the same, don’t they, except for the one that has your own
kid’s name at the bottom which somehow has a hidden signal in it, a message
which only you can read which tells you that actually your kid is a remarkable
individual, a genius maybe. Grace had drawn a large acorn growing into a big
oak which had stick-on tissue-paper leaves. And beside it was a squirrel. Rosie
had helped her write her name underneath.

In the
street I left another message on Liz’s machine, more querulous this time. Could
she please let me know what was going on? My battery was going flat, so I had
to leave it at that. Probably just as well. I went round to the house, our
house, and stupidly tried my key in the door, even though I knew she’d changed
the locks. I tried the bell. I felt less like Clint Eastwood than like Woody
Allen now, standing on my own doorstep ringing the bell with a stack of
coloured cards under my arm. I wished I was Jim Carrey, then I could have
pulled a stunt and abseiled up to Grace’s bedroom window. I left a note, a
brief one, and sloped away before the neighbours saw.

It was
hot as hell and the dog turds on the street were smouldering. I didn’t know
what to do and I hate that. I felt like an ice-cream, probably just for
comfort, but it was hot, so having an ice-cream would be normal. I was allowed
an ice-cream. Yes, I could have an ice-cream without looking like too much of a
failure sad-act, for Christ’s sake. I would have an ice—cream. I set off for
Bishop’s Park thinking of Mivvis. I needed a space to work out what to do. I
should do something. I couldn’t go back to Soho, or to Malcolm’s, I had to get
some result from my afternoon. Maybe I should just go to the park, have my
ice-cream and then shoot a lot of people at random. With my battery flat, I
couldn’t make a barrage of calls, which would have been my normal reaction to
crisis or uncertainty. I did, however, nip into the Langthorne Street phone box
and call Liz’s mum with the last twenty pence on my phone card.

‘Hello,
Joy, how are you? … Good good good. Look, I’m sorry to trouble you but I’m
trying to find out where Grace is. She hasn’t been into nursery for three days
and Liz isn’t returning my calls. I don’t know how much you know of what’s been
going on between me and her, but it’s not been, well… good for the last few
months. I don’t know what she’s told you, but I would like to know where my
daughter is.

‘What
did you expect, Guy?’

I didn’t
know how to react, so I gave a recalcitrant snigger. ‘Sorry?’ I said.

‘I’m
sure Liz knows what she’s doing, Guy. She’s perfectly capable of looking after
Grace.’

‘I’m
sure she is, Joy. I’d just like to know where she is, that’s all.’

‘You
should go away for a while, Guy, calm down, take a holiday, take a month off You
should leave Liz alone, for all of your sakes. Stop putting so much pressure on
her. Let her sort things out in her own time.’

‘I can’t
afford to go away, Joy, you know that.’ The tone of my voice was making me
sound more desperate than I was. No, that’s a lie. I was trembling in the
kiosk.

‘There’s
no point in losing your temper with me, Guy. Something I hear you do rather a
lot of these days. I’m very sad for you both at the moment, as a matter of
fact.
I
really thought she’d found the right man for her this time. But
…’

Oh yes,
Joy. You’d really know about finding the right man, having married three wrong
ones and road-tested several others for adequacy on the way. I didn’t say that.
I wish I had. I said, ‘I’m touched that you’re concerned for us, Joy, but I do
want to know where my daughter is, and if you know I think you should tell me.’

‘Get
real, Guy,’ she said, trying to sound modern I suppose. Obviously in her
opinion the way to bring up girls correctly is to secrete them from their
fathers. I hung up on her. Maybe she was right, I don’t know, maybe I should
just go walkabout, or on a world cruise, and become in Grace’s eyes a distant
figment. An enigmatic role model for her to cling to when in a few years time
she was considering whether to sniff that glue, or kick that old lady off the
pavement.

The tea
shop by the allotments was closed, so no Mivvi. I gulped from the water
fountain by the bowling green. The parakeets and rollers in the mini-aviary
squeaked and trilled, but their noise did not trouble me. My mind was singular.
I had something specific to worry about. The waste-paper bins had not been
emptied and sweet wrappers and lolly sticks were spattered on the paving
stones. A toddler was being hand-held along the top of the low wall by her
bored au pair. Other children on rollerblades had ordinary ice-creams, so the
van must be outside the gate on Stevenage Road, the street where BBC producers
live before being promoted to heads of department. I couldn’t think whether to
sit or stand, to move or be still. The lawns and benches were full of reclining
men with their shirts off and women lolling over them with their skirts hitched
up.

‘Aha! it’s
the wood-man!’ Tony was ambling up towards me, dressed only in his oily shorts
and brown work-boots. ‘I’m just off to the bushes to partake of this,’ he said,
and flashing his eyes at me he produced a large conical joint from behind his
ear. ‘And I was wondering if you would care to join me for a blow, compañero?’

‘Well,
I’ve got things I’m meant to be doing, so I shouldn’t really.’

‘Like
what?’

‘Well,
I’m supposed to be meeting a friend of mine for a drink, and …’

Under the
sweeping branches of an enormous cedar tree by the back of the duck pond, Tony
lit up. The smoke billowed upwards from the wider end of the joint and then two
thick jets of it came streaming out of his nostrils. Like the foam and twigs
and mud on the drowning man’s face.

‘Seen
the Green Man again lately?’ he asked.

‘No.’

‘Too
busy pandering and pimping to see what’s going on in the real world, eh?’

‘You
could put it like that. To be honest, at the moment I think I’m what could be
called well and truly fucked.’ I could tell him. He wasn’t in the biz.

He
passed me the whopper and I took a couple of puffs before handing it back to
him.

‘Help yourself,’
he said, but I declined any more.

‘I’m
looking for my daughter.’ It sounded rather dramaqueeny now said.

‘I
never told Mum and Dad this, but I’ve got a kid, I think. In Sweden somewhere.
I was seeing this girl when I was in Europe, I mean, it was real love, you
know, we both felt it and everything. Amazing sex. She took me back to see her
folks and that was it. They were some big fucking rich Swedish family, like
nearly royalty, and they told me where to get off. Made me sign papers and
everything saying that when she had the kid I would never come back or make a
claim on it or anything.’

‘That’s
ridiculous,’ I said.

‘As far
as they were concerned I just wasn’t the right kind of man for her, and I wasn’t
going to make her life difficult, you know, I loved her. So I just fucked off
like a puppy.’ He inhaled another huge gulp of the smoke. ‘But she was the only
one really, you know… the one. I often wonder what happened to her. The kid’d
be, oooh, seventeen now I should think. She wrote to me once, just after she’d
had him, Matthias, that’s what they called the poor little fucker. What sort of
a name’s that? Probably a right little banker by now.’

He
flicked the glowing end off, and folding over the loose top, put the joint back
over his ear.

‘Right,
that’s enough of that for now. Don’t want to get completely blotto. Not yet.’

I was
feeling a little woozy myself.

‘The
Bricklayer’s Arms opens at six. You coming or what? You can buy me a pint if
you behave yourself Ask your friend to come along. Or is it by any chance a
friend of the female persuasion?’

The
river was sluggish brown, as if it too was taking the afternoon off to
sunbathe. After Tony had popped into his shed to get his top — a T-shirt with a
Tibetan mandala on it over the words ‘Despair-Proof Vest’ — we passed by the
spot where the drowning man had disappeared. I stopped for a minute. Tony stood
respectfully in silence, looking out in the same direction as I was. I found
that my left thumbnail was scratching at my wedding ring. Maybe it had been
doing that for some weeks, but only now had I become aware of it. I took the
ring off slowly and chucked it hard into the steady plate of water. It was so
small that we didn’t see its plop. We walked on.

‘Yeah,’
said Tony presently, ‘life becomes much easier to bear once you make the
decision that women are crap.

That
thought was not quite the intention of my action. I told him so.

‘No, I
don’t mean crap as in stupid or wicked or inferior,’ he said. ‘I mean crap as
in the answer to it all. They’re not very good as drugs. Things go better once
you stop looking to a woman to make it all OK in your life. She can’t do that
for you’, Guido. You gotta do that for yourself’ I wished I could wear a
T-shirt like his.

Malcolm
Viner didn’t like the Bricklayer’s Arms, I could tell. He looked almost as out
of place there as I did, in his sleeveless shirt and slacks with his clean bald
head shining. He ordered himself a half of lager and bought me and Tony a
second pint each. It’s one of those small, dingy back-street jobs which exist
in a permanent dark-brown nicotine-sticky state of December. The bar staff and
clientele seem to go back a long way, having grown their impressive bellies
together over the years in there. As a concession to the free-market thinking
of the eighties and the yuppification of pubs across the land, they bunged four
half-broken plastic chairs on the pavement outside during the summer months.
Tony, Malcolm and I went out and sat on three of them, using the fourth as a
table.

‘OK,’
said Malcolm, ‘there are three claims a wife can have over you financially
speaking: one, the capital sum, i.e. a big wodge of cash if you’ve got it; two,
the right to accommodation provided by you; and three, maintenance. Then money
for child support comes over and above that.’

‘So
that’s four really, ain’t it?’ said Tony.

‘Well,
yes, but they try to separate child maintenance from the rest, even though in
practice it all ends up going to the mother.’

‘Can’t
I just give her half of everything and leave it at that?’ I said.