Song at Twilight (7 page)

"Meursault," I read in a neat, round, childish, girl's hand, as I tried again to concentrate on the sixth form essays in front of me, "was condemned to death, not so much for the murder of the Arabs on the beach, as for not having cried at his mother's funeral… '

I wondered if Timothy would cry at his mother's funeral.
Aujourd'hui
,
maman
est
mode
.
Ou
peut
être
hier
… Suddenly I realised that Timothy reminded me very much of Meursault. He was like Meursault in almost every way. Timothy was an Outsider, a kind of free soul…

It must have been at about this point that I put down my pen and buried my head in my hands.

Perhaps it was living alone which finally warped the intelligence.

What on earth was I doing comparing my pupil to characters in fiction? Would I soon be seeing myself as Phaedra, guiltily in love with young, forbidden fruit?

"
C'est
Venus
toute
entière
à
sa
proie
attachée
… "

"Oh God," I thought, pushing the papers angrily away from me and getting up from the table. I must really be going mad. "It must be the winter," I thought… my age… the silence… the tedium of the children's essays.

Why did I keep thinking of love in that silly way? I was not interested in love except as a subject for literature.

Clearly I had a touch of 'flu'. It was hardly surprising at that time of year and with the weather as cold as it was. I would make myself a hot drink and go to bed. I would surely be more myself in the morning.

Sunday eventually came, and early in the afternoon, just as I was preparing tea, the doorbell rang. I looked at my watch. I had not expected Timothy for at least half an hour and even then he would probably be late as he was generally on the unpunctual side.

I took off my apron, glanced at myself in the hall mirror and patted my hair as I passed. Not looking any younger, I thought grimly, and hurried on to open the door, with Pansy yapping at my heels.

To my surprise, when I opened it, there, on the front step, stood Leo. He wore an enormous moth-eaten astrakhan coat which he could only have acquired at some flea-market – or perhaps Oxfam – and a Russian hat from beneath which escaped a few stray lilac and magenta curls. On his feet he had a pair of bright pink Wellington boots.

"Good gracious me!" I said. "What a surprise! Come on in."

Leo came in, took off his coat to reveal a blue boiler suit and gave me a big kiss.

"What
would
your father say?" I asked, gazing in amazement at him. "You look quite extraordinary!"

"He'd probably burst into tears," said Leo nonchalantly, and added, "What's for tea, Auntie?"

"Well," I replied somewhat hesitantly, "I was rather expecting Timothy – but it's a bit on the early side for him yet."

"The bad news," said Leo, sitting down at my kitchen table and staring greedily at a fruit cake I'd made the evening before, "is that Timothy's not coming. You've got me instead."

I felt, for an instant, a slight feeling of panic.

Why wasn't Timothy coming? What had happened? Why hadn't he let me know? Perhaps I had offended him in some way…

Then I managed to bring my attention back to Leo, sitting there looking at the cake, dressed in a boiler suit with his pink hair and pink boots and Russian hat.

"Go on," I said, "cut yourself a slice. I'll make the tea."

As I put the tea-leaves in the pot, I asked him what exactly had brought him to Blenkinsop's. Not just affection for his old aunt, I couldn't help thinking.

"Marietta Hooper's Porsche," he said.

Marietta! What a ridiculous name, I thought.

I said, "Not again!" I don't know why I said it, for I hate to catch people lying, and I dared not turn round to look at him.

Leo did what was possibly the best possible thing to do under the circumstances, which was to affect not to hear. 

"She lets me drive it,' he said. "Incredible car! Amazing acceleration!" He told me in how many fractions of a second it could go from 0 to 100 m.p.h. I was not interested.

"Why is she so keen to allow you to drive her car?" I asked, turning round at last and putting the teapot on the table.

"Lust," said Leo with a ludicrous wiggle of his shoulders.

"What on earth are you talking about?" I wanted to know, although in fact I knew, of course. It was just as I had imagined. Oh dear! I felt rather sick.

My hand began to tremble slightly as I poured the tea. I wasn't sure what to say. I am, I flatter myself, more worldly wise and a great deal less easily shockable than my brother, Victor, but I still felt that somehow I ought to be dissuading my young nephew from embarking on a career as a gigolo.

"I mean," said Leo, "that she fancies me something rotten."

"How can you be so sure?" I asked. "Perhaps she just lets you drive her car out of kindness."

"Perhaps," said Leo, "she leans her heavily scented body against mine and runs her hand up my thigh and her fingers through my amazingly beautiful curls out of kindness, too."

"Leo!" I said. "You are awful! I'm sure she doesn't." I was dreadfully embarrassed.

Leo leaned across the table and gave me a genuinely sweet smile.

"Don't worry, Auntie," he said, "there's no danger. She won't seduce me because, you see, women aren't my scene." He made a mocking, self-deprecatory camp gesture.

Then he suddenly looked serious and said kindly,

"I'm sorry, I haven't shocked you, have I?"

"Not in the least bit," I said. "I had half suspected it in any case. But it would shock me very much indeed if I thought you were leading Mrs Hooper on just for what you could get out of her. That would not be very nice." I paused and gave him what I hoped was a penetrating look, and said, "What exactly are you planning to get out of her?"

"Nothing," he said, "nothing." 

I gave him another long, hard stare.

It was time, I realised, that I came to the point.

"Leo," I said, "I saw you getting out of that car on the first night of term with Timothy and his mother. I don't mind the fact that you didn't come to see me but I do mind the fact that both you and Timothy lied to me. People only lie when they have something to hide."

Leo was back in his usual ebullient form in no time. Of course they had nothing to hide. They were in a tremendous hurry, didn't want to hurt me, had to pick up a puppy in Basingstoke, drop a case of champagne in Hampstead, collect a dress from the cleaners, make a transatlantic telephone call, go out to dinner, catch a train and a thousand other unlikely things. Of course they had had a puncture on the way down and on top of all that, poor Marietta had been suffering from an appalling headache all day long.

Mrs Hooper had come to take Timothy out today, and so Leo had taken the opportunity to come with her to see me and to make things up with me. Timothy and his mother were having tea in the town.

I didn't suppose for one minute that Leo had come for that reason alone and I told him so.

"Of course," he admitted, "I'm always quite pleased to see Timothy. He's a good kid." And then he went back to describing the joys of driving that horrible car.

Neither, when I came to think about it, did I suppose that Mrs Hooper had come just to take out her son. She had never, in so far as I could remember, shown any interest in taking him out from school before.

No. There was something not very nice going on. The mother wanted Leo and Leo wanted the son.

Truth, I thought to myself, is indeed stranger than fiction.

When Leo finally left, I said, as I kissed him goodbye,

"Please behave yourself Leo, and don't do anything silly."

"Me do something silly? Never!" he said. "Watch this," and he dived into the driving seat of the beastly Porsche which turned out to be parked right outside my front door, and with a spurt of low-slung power and a merry wave from the window, disappeared down the narrow street.

It was very cold outside. I shivered as I closed the front-door and drew the bolt.

The whole lot of them, I thought, worry me. They worry me to death. And when, just when would I next have a chance to see Timothy alone… ?

Chapter 7

April 28th

Patricia has an annoying habit of always telephoning with her latest dramas and worries just as I am on the point of going out.

Eric was away again for two or three days last week and by the time he came back I have to admit that I was beginning to miss his familiar, shambling figure coming up the path, although I did manage to get a certain amount of writing done while he was away. To tell the truth, I badly needed him, in my selfish way, to replace a cracked pane of glass in the bathroom window.

Eric is a very kind man and he came round to do that almost immediately. I was so grateful to him that I begged him to stay for lunch. I do not like to think of Eric being so often alone in his own house.

Lately I have been getting to know Eric rather better. We have been on several trips together and it seems to me that when he is away from home he relaxes and becomes more expansive. I am beginning to know a little more about him and to see a new and likeable side to him. A side which is strangely light-hearted for a man of his age – almost to the point of childishness.

I have discovered that Eric likes music and so one evening we drove down to Exeter together to hear a concert of Baroque music in the cathedral there, and we have plans to go to other concerts together in future.

When Eric came to replace my window pane he mentioned that while he was away he had gone with a friend to a wonderful performance of
The
Magic
Flute
. She was a great opera lover. 

She…?

I wondered with something closely resembling a pang of jealousy, who 'she' was.

But I must not be ridiculous. I have no claim to Eric's sole attention and, indeed, if I did have it, I would find it sorely irritating.

Our next plan was to go for a day to the South Coast. Neither of us had ever been to Lyme Regis. So on Tuesday morning (the day before yesterday) I was just putting on my coat and was about to leave the house when the telephone rang.

Needless to say it was Patricia and needless to say she was in tears again.

"Patricia, my dear," I said as kindly as I could, "you are lucky to have caught me. I am just about to go out."

Patricia paid no attention at all. As far as she was concerned I might not have spoken.

"Prudence," she said between gulped back tears, "you must come… it's Laurel again… I really don't know what to do with her… Victor is out of his mind with worry. He thinks we should call in a psychiatrist. What would you do? You must know about these things."

It always seems to Patricia that because of my experiences as a school teacher I have the ultimate answer to all adolescent problems. Anyway I realised that I was not going to get away in a hurry as she was deeply distressed and clearly had to talk to someone.

Laurel, it appears, is so angry with her father for steadfastly refusing to look at her for several weeks now, ever since she began shaving her head, that she has decided to make a protest. The protest involves walking around the house entirely naked whenever she is alone with her parents.

As far as I could see this can only be of inconvenience to Laurel herself, since she must feel not only cold, but utterly silly as well.

Anyway I hadn't heard the worst part of the whole thing. The worst part of the whole thing is that in order to show her sympathy with the Greenpeace movement Laurel has dyed her body hair green.

The picture is not a pretty one. Laurel is not a thin child and her head is at present as bald as an egg.

Patricia wept. There is nothing she can say which could possibly have any influence on the girl. Victor has taken to eating his meals in his bedroom for fear of encountering his daughter and whenever he does move about the house from one room to another, he does so with his eyes tight shut. As far as Patricia is concerned it is like living with two lunatics, although she admitted that the sight of Laurel alternately incenses and disgusts her to such an extent that she, too, has taken to closing her eyes when addressing her daughter.

For Patricia it is not so much the emerald green pubic hair as the pea-green under-arm hair that she finds really offensive. Had I any idea quite how many different shades of green there are…?

Patricia began to sound quite hysterical. She was sobbing as she talked, and she was talking quite incomprehensibly about spinach and sage and avocados and olive – yes olive – and beech and apple and lime and lettuce and moss and bottle… and even the sea got a mention. I thought she would go on for ever.

I was longing to put down the telephone and to go and meet Eric although I have to admit that this time even I was somewhat upset to hear of Laurel's excesses, and worried, too, by Patricia. She seemed to be hovering dangerously near the brink. She was apparently quite unable to stop crying.

The telephone is hardly the best medium for serious conversations of any kind, but when I finally managed to interrupt Patricia, I did my very best to console her.

There was no knowing to what ends teenagers were prepared to go to annoy their parents these days.

"But teenagers didn't exist when we were young," wailed Patricia.

"I know," I said, "of course they didn't. They were invented after the war and, like every other intolerable modern horror, brought over from America." 

I told her that I absolutely could not go and see her immediately as I was going out to lunch and for the afternoon with Eric.

She asked me where we were going and then begged me to come to supper in the evening.

After a long day I felt that I would really be too tired to go out again in the evening, but Patricia was insistent. We could have an early supper, she said, and I could bring Eric. We could come on our way back from Lyme Regis.

I wondered what Eric would make of Victor and Patricia and wondered, too, if I really wanted to effect an introduction. There is something to be said, I sometimes think, for keeping one's life compartmentalised. It also occurred to me that Eric might not want me to accept on his behalf.

But Patricia went on and on and eventually it seemed to me that the only way of getting her off the telephone was to agree to what she wanted.

We would come early, I said, on our way home from Lyme Regis, unless I rang to the contrary which I would only do if Eric couldn't for some reason come.

Patricia was delighted. She still sounded rather over-excited, but at least she had stopped crying. She was so relieved, she said, because it would mean that for this evening, if only for this evening, Laurel would put some clothes on and Victor would be able to have supper downstairs, even if he insisted on keeping his eyes shut to avoid seeing his daughter's bald head.

At last Patricia rang off. I looked at my watch. Poor Eric had been kept waiting. We were going in my car for a change and I had promised to come and pick him up.

I had to explain to Eric why I had so rudely kept him waiting and so, as we bowled along in my little car and rather against my better judgment, I embarked on the whole story about Laurel. Perhaps I felt that I owed it to him if he was to be dragged over to Victor's and Patricia's for supper, although it is not usual for me to discuss my family with outsiders.

Half way through the story about Laurel's pubic hair I found myself floundering about for words. I was not at all sure what Eric would make of so indelicate a story and thought, too, that he might well be shocked by my telling it. In fact Eric's reaction was one of tremendous mirth. I have never seen him laugh quite so heartily. When I told him that Patricia had insisted on our coming to supper, he was nothing short of overjoyed.

For a moment the old school-mistress in me came to the fore.

"Laurel will be properly dressed," I said, looking at him sharply, "when we get there."

"You have to give it to them," he said. "These young people – if you can't beat them, join them."

Eric is a man for whom a cliché is always a treasure. He produces them at every possible opportunity. They lard his conversation seemingly so as to protect him from the real world and its emotions: the devil you know… ; life is what you make it; it wouldn't do for us all to be the same; if you can't beat them, join them, and so on for ever. I wondered if, on this occasion, he had bothered to consider what he was saying for even one fraction of a second.

"The last thing we want to do in this instance," I said tartly, "is to join them."

I began to regret having told Eric about the episode at all. He had what I interpreted as a faintly salacious look on his face, which I found both distasteful and annoying and for which I knew that I was partly responsible. I did hope that our day out was not about to be spoiled.

I decided to change the subject.

"Have you seen
The
French
Lieutenant's
Woman
?" I asked brightly. "It was filmed in Lyme Regis, I believe."

The day had got off to a maddening start and I was feeling somewhat irritable and consequently annoyed with myself, but it was not long before Eric's good humour communicated itself to me. I don't know whether or not his cheerfulness was caused by my telling him about Laurel and by the knowledge that he was going to meet her in the evening. Perhaps he was just pleased to be going out.

It was a bright, windy day and we drove down to the coast through delightful countryside reaching Lyme by late morning, just in time to visit the fossil museum before having lunch in a pub. After lunch we enjoyed a walk along the Cob and then we set off home via Axmouth and Axminster. It was a long drive and Eric sat there beside me chattering and laughing and producing clichés all day long.

He talked about his son, which he had hardly ever done before. He spoke of how he had missed him a lot when he first went to Australia. But he was used to being without him now. You can't win them all, he said. And he talked about his own childhood in Hertfordshire, about his doctor father and his clever mother. His only brother, an identical twin of whom he was inordinately fond, was killed in a motor bicycle accident in early manhood. A shadow crossed the sun. He had been a young man full of promise with a talent for painting and a remarkable zest for life. It had been a terrible waste.

"Ah well," said Eric, "we'll all be dead in a hundred years."

"Much sooner than that," I replied, and Eric's spirits were instantly restored. The sun came out again.

We needed to stop for petrol and began to watch out for a garage on our side of the road. It was not very long before we came to a large, prosperous, modern-looking monstrosity with a shop attached.

As Eric filled the car with petrol I wandered into the shop, thinking that I might find a chamois leather. I had been meaning to buy one for the car for some time. I was searching blankly among a peculiar assortment of nylon knickers inscribed with vulgar slogans and cheap sherry glasses when Eric arrived to pay for the petrol.

We began to argue slightly about whose turn it was to pay when Eric suddenly said,

"How extraordinary! Listen to the tune they're playing. That takes me right back to my youth." And he began to sing, "When your heart's on fire, You must realise, Smoke gets in your eyes…” Before I knew what was happening I had allowed him to take me in his arms and there we went whirling around the shop floor.

I was dressed in my maroon, belted overcoat and was wearing flat, lace-up walking shoes on my rather large feet. Eric, who is a little shorter than I, was wearing his mack and some rather nasty brown plastic gloves with strange holes punched in the backs – presumably for purposes of aeration. He had a funny little narrow-brimmed tweed hat on his head and as we danced he peered at me intently over the rims of his spectacles.

We must have looked very peculiar to the woman at the till and to a young couple who were standing there hand in hand examining a display of cellophane-wrapped sandwiches.

It was all over in an instant and as we came to a halt by the till, I felt myself blushing to the roots of my hair. Without looking around, I disengaged myself from Eric and walked quickly out into the forecourt, leaving him to pay for the petrol. I had never done anything so extraordinary in all my life before.

When Eric got back into the car he laughed and then apologised. He hadn't intended to embarrass me. It didn't matter, I said. I was just rather surprised.

"You're only young once," he said. The more I see of Eric, the stranger I find him. He is not quite the dull, unimaginative man I initially took him for. But then, as he would say, you can't tell a book by its cover.

We drove on for a while in silence. It was as though Eric's euphoria had been spent in the dance. I caught sight of him out of the corner of my eye. He looked thoughtful. Perhaps he was thinking of his lost youth, lost wife, lost brother, lost child. I wondered. Perhaps he was just tired. Or perhaps he was thinking about his opera-going friend. I wondered about her too, but I dared not ask. What Eric did when he was away was none of my business.

I was certainly tired, and I was not particularly looking forward to an evening with Victor and Patricia. But at the very mention of Victor and Patricia, Eric came to life again.

He was really looking forward to meeting my brother and sister-in-law.