Perfect (21 page)

Jim watched from an upper-floor window as the children boarded their bus. When three of the boys turned round and noticed him, he waved and then he held up his tin of pineapple chunks so that they would remember who he was and that he liked his Christmas gift. The boys made a sign with two fingers.

‘Loony!’ they shouted. And they made startled faces, as if they were being fried.

The youth brass band, it turns out, have a medley that only really includes
three songs. They can do ‘Jingle Bells’ and ‘Away In A Manger’ as well as ‘She’ll Be Coming Round The Mountain’. This last is clearly their favourite and the pimply young man on cymbals shouts out ‘Yee-ha!’ every time they collide with the chorus. A tall green-coated woman marches through the door and past Jim. She stops suddenly and does a double-take.

‘Bloody hell,’ she says. ‘What have you come as?’

Jim is about to offer a leaflet when he realizes with a flood of panic who she is and another flood of panic that he is dressed in red velour with a mock-fur trimming.

Eileen undoes the big green buttons on her coat. The fabric shrinks back, revealing a purple skirt that puckers at her waist. ‘So how’s things, Jim? Still here?’

He attempts to nod as if being here is the thing he most wants. A passing shopper throws money in his bucket and Jim hides his large blue foot behind his more conventional trainer.

She says, ‘I was hoping I’d find you.’

‘Me?’

‘I wanted to say sorry. About the other week.’

He can’t look at her he is shaking so hard.

‘I didn’t see you. You came out from fucking nowhere. You were lucky I didn’t hit you.’

Jim tries to pretend he is cold. He tries to pretend he is so chilled he cannot hear properly. ‘Brrr,’ he says, rubbing his hands, although the gesture is so frantic he looks like a man washing his hands with invisible soap.

‘You all right?’ she says.

Fortunately the band begins a lively rendering of ‘I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day’ and she cannot hear his answer. This is not one of their rehearsed numbers. There are disagreements over tempo and also the length of the chorus so that one half of the band plays an entirely different
set of notes from the other. Inside the supermarket, the general manager peers towards the foyer. She adjusts a mouthpiece and talks into it. Jim makes a swiping movement across his neck only the white beard is in the way. ‘Can’t t-talk.’

‘I’m not surprised,’ says Eileen. ‘You’re covered in frigging tinsel.’ She glances in the direction of the manager and fetches a trolley. He admires the way she steers it, purposeful and fast. He admires the way she stops to examine a potted poinsettia and afterwards pulls such a face at a toddler that he kicks his feet and laughs.

On her way out Eileen drops something into his bucket. It is one of his leaflets. She has written all over it in capitals: I WILL WAIT 4 U IN CAR PARK AFTER WORK!!!

The capital letters shout themselves in his head. He studies the abundance of exclamation marks and wonders what they mean. If the message is in fact a joke.

J
AMES WAS DEEPLY
troubled by the news of Jeanie’s two stitches. ‘This is not good,’ he said. ‘It does not reflect well on your mother.’

‘But the accident was not her fault.’

‘All the same,’ said James. ‘If there is evidence of an actual wound, it makes things more complicated. Supposing Beverley goes to the police?’

‘She won’t do that. Beverley likes my mother. My mother was the only one who was nice to her.’

‘You are going to have to watch closely.’

‘But we are not going to see Beverley again.’

‘Hm,’ said James, and he twiddled his fringe to show he was thinking. ‘We have to set up a further meeting.’

The next morning Byron and his mother were walking up through the meadow after feeding the ducks. Lucy was still sleeping. Diana had climbed the fence to fetch eggs, and they carried them, one each, treading
carefully through the grass. The sun was not yet fully risen and, caught in the low, weak shaft of light, the dew shone silver over the meadow although the crust of earth beneath was hard and cracked. The ox-eye daisies made white pools on the lower hills while every tree sprang a black leak away from the sun’s light. The air smelt new and green like mint.

They talked a little about the summer holidays and how much they were looking forward to them. His mother suggested he should invite a friend for tea. ‘It seems a shame James doesn’t come any more,’ she said. ‘It must be almost a year.’

‘Everyone is busy. We have the scholarship work.’ He didn’t like to mention that, since the pond episode, James was no longer allowed to visit.

‘Friends are important. You need to look after them. I had lots once but I don’t any more.’

‘You do. You have all the mothers.’

For a moment she said nothing. Then she went, ‘Yes.’ Her agreement was flat, though, as if she wasn’t inside it. The rising sun threw stronger batches of light over the moor and its purples, pinks and greens began to shine so bright they looked painted by Lucy. ‘If I have no friends it’s my own fault,’ she said.

They walked on in silence. His mother’s words made him sad. It was like discovering he had lost something important without noticing he had dropped it. He thought of James’s insistence there should be another meeting with Beverley. He remembered too what his friend had told him about magic: how you could make a person believe a thing by showing them only one part of the truth, and hiding the other pieces. His pulse began to rush. He said, ‘Maybe Beverley could be your friend.’

His mother looked blank. Clearly she had no idea who he meant. When he explained he was thinking of the lady from Digby Road, she laughed.

‘Oh no. I don’t think so.’

‘Why not? She likes you.’

‘Because it’s not that simple, Byron.’

‘I don’t see why. It is for me and James.’

Diana stooped to pick a stem of oat grass, running her nail along the tip and scattering a feathery trail of seedheads, but she said no more about friends. He felt he had never seen her look so alone. He pointed out a pyramidal orchid and also a red admiral butterfly but she didn’t reply. She didn’t even glance up.

It was then he realized how unhappy she was. It was not simply because of the accident in Digby Road and Jeanie’s two stitches. There was another, deeper unhappiness that was to do with something else. He knew that grown-ups were sometimes unhappy with cause; when it came to certain things, there was no option. Death, for instance. There was no avoiding the pain of grief. His mother had not attended her mother’s funeral but she had cried when the news came. She had stood with her head inside her hands and shaken. And when his father had said, ‘That is enough now, Diana,’ she had dropped her hands and given him a look of such undiluted pain, her eyes all red and rimmed, her nose all slippery, that it was uncomfortable. It was like seeing her without clothes.

So this was how it felt to lose a parent. It was natural to be unhappy like that. But to discover his mother was also unhappy in a way that he sometimes was, because something to which he couldn’t even give a name was not right – that had not occurred to him before. There was a clear way to remedy the situation.

In the privacy of his bedroom, Byron took out James’s duplicate list of Diana’s attributes. Copying the handwriting, because it was somewhat neater than his own or indeed his mother’s, and flourishing the tails of the y’s and g’s with James-like loops, he began to write. He explained that he was Diana Hemmings, the kind lady who had been the driver of the Jaguar on that unfortunate morning in Digby Road. He hoped he was not
inconveniencing dear Beverley, he wrote, but he wondered if she would be so good as to accept an invitation for tea at Cranham House? He enclosed the telephone number, address and also a new decimal two-pence piece from his moneybox to cover her bus fare. He hoped it would be enough, he added, deleting the childish word ‘enough’ to replace it with the more professional-sounding ‘sufficient’. He signed the letter in his mother’s name. As a postscript he added an observation about the clemency of the weather. It was this sort of clever attention to detail, he felt, that marked him apart as a letter writer. In a further postscript he also asked her to destroy the message on reading. ‘
This is a private matter
,’ he wrote, ‘
between ourselves
.’

He knew the address, of course. There was no forgetting. Telling his mother it was his
Blue Peter
design, Byron asked for a stamp and posted the envelope that same afternoon.

The letter was a lie and Byron knew it, but as lies went, this was a kind one and could bring no harm. Besides, his experience of the truth had been stretched since Digby Road. It was difficult to discern the point where things strayed from one version of themselves into another. For the rest of the day he couldn’t sit still. Would Beverley receive the letter? Would she telephone? Several times he asked his mother how long the post took and the exact hour of the first and second delivery. That night he barely slept. He watched the school clock all day, waiting for the hands to move. He was too nervous to confide in James. The telephone rang the following afternoon.

‘Cranham 0612,’ said his mother from her glass table.

He couldn’t hear the whole conversation; his mother sounded cautious to begin with. ‘I’m sorry?’ she said. ‘Who are you?’ But after a while he heard her exclaim, ‘Yes, of course. That would be lovely.’ There was even a little polite laughter. Afterwards she put down the receiver and stood a few moments in the hall, deep in thought.

‘Anyone interesting?’ he said, sauntering casually down the stairs and following her to the kitchen.

‘Beverley’s coming tomorrow. She’s coming for tea.’

He didn’t know what to say and he wanted to laugh, only that would betray his secret so he had to do something else that was more of a cough. He couldn’t wait to tell James.

She said, ‘Did you write a letter, Byron?’

‘Me?’

‘Only Beverley mentioned an invitation.’

The heat flew to his face. ‘Maybe she was thinking of when we took her the presents. Maybe she got muddled because you gave her our telephone number. You told her to ring any time, remember?’

She seemed satisfied. Ducking her head inside the loops of her apron, she began pulling flour, eggs and sugar out of the cupboard. ‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘I’m being silly. It can’t do any harm inviting her for tea.’

James was less sure. This bewildered Byron. While James admitted that he had acted shrewdly in writing to Beverley, and that he was glad there would be another meeting, he wished Byron had suggested a neutral setting. ‘If you were meeting her in town, for instance, I could arrive as if by coincidence. I could wander in as if I was not expecting to find you and say, Oh hello there, and join in.’

‘But you could come for tea tomorrow at my house.’

‘Due to circumstances beyond my control, that is not possible sadly.’

Instead James issued Byron with a full set of instructions. He must take careful notes. Did he have a spare notebook? When Byron admitted he didn’t, James slipped a lined exercise book from his satchel. He unscrewed the lid from his fountain pen and wrote ‘Operation Perfect’ on the paper cover. Notes should include observations about the conversation, most importantly references to Jeanie’s injury, although the smallest and
seemingly most insignificant details should also be recorded. Byron must be as neat as possible and give references to dates and the time. ‘Also, do you have invisible ink at home? This must be confidential.’

Byron said he didn’t. He was saving Bazooka bubblegum wrappers for the X-ray ring but you needed a lot, he said. ‘And I am not allowed bubblegum.’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ said James. ‘Over the holidays I will send you a code.’ He added again that Jeanie’s stitches were a matter of concern; it was important to find out as much as possible about them. But he didn’t sound anxious about the prospect. If anything, he looked excited. He wrote his telephone number out carefully at the back of the exercise book and told Byron to ring as soon as there were developments. They must keep in regular contact over the summer, he said.

Byron noticed his mother appeared nervous when she came to collect him. The boys in the years above were singing and throwing their caps into the air, the mothers were taking photographs, and some had set up trestle tables for a leavers’ picnic, but Diana was in a hurry to get back to the car. At home she flew around the house, fetching clean napkins and making rounds of sandwiches that she wrapped tight in PVC film. She mentioned she would give the Jaguar one quick wash before she parked it in the garage, but then she grew so busy straightening chairs and checking her reflection that the car slipped her mind and remained parked in the drive.

Their guests were half an hour late. It transpired that Beverley had got off the bus too soon and had to walk the rest of the way through the lower fields. She stood at the front door, her hair stiff as a wedge (she had possibly used too much hairspray), in a short, brightly coloured dress that was patterned with large tropical flowers. She had painted her eyelids with turquoise, only the effect was of two thick rings above her eyes. Poking out from beneath the rim of her purple hat, her face looked top heavy.