The Tell-Tale Heart Page 16

  Later, on the drive home, the car filled with the smell of sex, she’s dry-eyed and smiles a little and says, ‘Well, that’s done now, I suppose.’ Which makes me laugh.

  I say, ‘Not being funny but that’s an understatement. You could maybe go to prison for messing with a minor!’

  She smiles without opening her mouth, a little tight upcurl. She can see I’m not serious. We watch a muntjac deer lollop across the road, red eyes startled in our headlights. She’s pulled down her skirt, tucked in her pink jumper. Its done it’s done, she seems to be saying, as if she’s crossed a terrible line (she has, for sure), as if that’s the end of it. Like it’s a sad thing, final. But for me, it’s exciting. It’s just the start.

  Jo pulls over the car on a lay-by on the A10. She keeps the lights on and the engine running.

  ‘Drew, I know you’re sensible and you won’t tell anyone. I know you understand the risks. Actually although the legal age is sixteen, it’s eighteen when one of the – persons is a teacher or someone in a position of care over you . . . so you see. My position is – delicate. In a year’s time it will be different because you’re not in school any more; I’m not in that role. But I want you to fully know how much I tried to – how I tried not to take advantage—’

  ‘I didn’t rape you, though, did I?’

  Having it both ways, like I say. Doing it, or letting me, but not somehow fully admitting she did. What I remember is her grip on me. Her fingers grasping, steering: helping me out. Like firmly shining a torch towards a dark point that might not be found, otherwise. And the salty wetness again. I’m not stupid. If girls don’t want it they’d be tight, they’d be dry, they’d close their legs, they wouldn’t widen them like that and help you get a better entry. They wouldn’t moan and kiss your hair. They wouldn’t let you pound away and whisper Drew Drew in your ear and kiss you and suddenly tighten and jerk and arch just as you went off like a firework inside them. It makes me grin, and she sees this, and takes the handbrake off and sighs, as she joins the road again.

  ‘It can’t happen again. That’s all I’m saying. It’s a one-off.’

  ‘Yes, Miss.’

  ‘Don’t call me that.’

  ‘Yes, Miss Lavender.’

  She smacks my knee. I grab her left hand and hold it, only giving it back after the roundabout, which she whizzes over in fourth gear and then struggles to get up and running as normal again; to make a smooth drive home as if nothing, nothing at all has happened.

  Part Five

  They arrive with arms full of things. Helen has arranged to pick up Ben and give him a lift – another gesture of hers that strikes me as generous (why should she help me out, why should she help Lucy out?) – was she always like this; am I just noticing for the first time? They bring bottles wrapped in tissue, sliced turkey on a plate with a tea-towel over it; cheeses, a Christmas log (this from Alice, she made it herself, she says). Alice’s boyfriend, Jake, shuffles in, shakes my hand, makes good eye contact. Promising. They fill the tiny bland place with noise and smells – of outdoors: pine needles, cigarettes, orange peel – screaming laughter. It’s just the unaccustomed sound of girls, girlish voices, Alice and Helen, constantly bantering and giggling.

  Ben is shy, and gives little away. He sits silently through the screeching and mayhem of the meal with us and shyly answers ‘Yes’ and ‘No thanks’ to questions about salt or bread sauce and ‘Yeah, she’s doing fine, I think’ to Helen’s polite questions about his mother. His mobile goes more than once during the meal and each time he leaps up as if scalded and answers it outside. We hear him say, ‘Yeah, babe’ and ‘See you, babe’.

  ‘Do you think he’s going out with a pig?’ I say.

  Alice looks horrified: ‘Dad! Don’t be mean.’

  ‘You know, I mean Babe. The pig in that film,’ I hasten to explain. No one laughs. Ben rejoins us, a little flushed, and says nothing.

  Alice spoons a giant forkful of risotto up to her mouth. ‘I’m starving! I’ve been really good today.’

  ‘Why – did you join Amnesty International? Rescue a child from drowning?’ I ask her, eyes wide.

  ‘Dad!’ she says, speaking with her mouth full.

  ‘You know perfectly well what she means, Patrick.’ This is Helen. ‘She probably ate only a lettuce leaf all day.’

  ‘Ah. Being good. For women. So easy.’

  In the kitchen Helen, flushed from the wine, moves close, says in my ear: ‘Ben looks so like you at that age, Patrick, don’t you think? It’s unnerving.’

  ‘Is that right?’ I say, without turning round. She’s too close. Her breath is hot. I’m loading the dishwasher while Helen pours herself another glass of wine.

  ‘Although of course you’re now much heavier and greyer.’ She leans against the window, head on one side, narrowing her eyes, stroking the wineglass.

  ‘Yes. Thank you, Helen. I have looked in the mirror.’

  And then Helen does this extraordinary thing: puts her glass down, and kisses me. Stands on tiptoe (she’s shoeless) and reaches up and pulls my face to hers, and holds my head, and kisses me. She’s drunk, I taste the wine in her mouth, and feel the heat and sloppiness of her, her breasts pushing into my chest. A riot inside me: I’ve no idea what this is. I could push her off. Alice could walk in at any minute – the flat is tiny, after all, and they might even be able to see us, the kitchen door isn’t properly closed. I don’t know – I’m at a loss, for God’s sake. The room just lit up and my head is floating like I stuck it in one of those Chinese paper lanterns and it took off, vacated my body and all things tethered and earth-bound.

  This is the woman I’ve loved for most of my adult life. I say these words to myself. I don’t know if it will help. It’s hard to untangle a determined woman like Helen, and in mid-kiss, too.

  I eventually get to take a breath. ‘Helen. Do you think this is a good idea—’

  ‘It’s never a good idea. Never ever ever a good idea where you’re concerned, Patrick . . .’

  ‘No. So, shall we sober up? Shall I make us coffee?’

  Then she is sobbing: ‘I’m sorry! I’m sorry, I’m pissed—’

  ‘Helen, darling, nothing to be sorry about—’

  ‘I’m sorry!’

  ‘Yes, yes, don’t apologise, don’t cry, come on, I’m surely to blame, as usual.’

  ‘Yes. Actually, I was being mean. You do look very handsome . . . being grey suits you.’ She sniffs into the piece of kitchen roll I offer her.

  ‘Do I? Thank you. I think I was remarkably restrained, under the circumstances, don’t you?’

  I adjust myself inside my jeans and grin at her. ‘But, Helen, I have to say, you’re as gorgeous as ever.’

  Helen can’t resist smiling back. ‘A leopard never changes its spots,’ she says, sniffing.

  I notice again how unsubtle the overhead kitchen lighting is, how we could indeed have done with candles or lamps. It is a ferocious yellow medical lighting, like being back in ICU at the hospital. Showing up every fault. Yes, no doubt Helen’s right in her assessment of me, as in everything else. And yet. There is, after all, the small fact that I didn’t go ahead. I didn’t let her tongue get deeper into my mouth, I didn’t press on, take advantage.

  Later, when things are smooth again and we’re back at the table, eating more food, Alice says shyly that she’s been reading up about General Custer, the Boy General, that she thought she’d try and ‘see what Dad was always on about’ by trying to understand him, whether he was a hero or ‘one big loser’.

  ‘And what conclusion did you come to?’ I ask.

  ‘Well, like everything, I suppose it depends whose position you’re seeing it from.’

  ‘Yes. Of course. You, being a modern young woman, would no doubt take the part of the Native Americans and think he was utterly in the wrong in the first place, and wouldn’t be interested in whether he was a hero or an idiot as far as his own countrymen were concerned.’

  ‘Well, I’d want all the fa
cts. You presumably have those, since you’ve studied it for so long? No offence, Dad, but how long can one book take?’

  They laugh then. At least Alice and Helen do. Jake – the boyfriend – is a big bear of a youth, with a hearty manner and his best ‘meet the parents’ veneer. Probably wise not to risk a laugh at my expense. Ben is as mute as ever.

  ‘Well, I did find a new detail the other day that I mean to add. A transcribed interview with a Cheyenne woman who said that on the battlefield – after his death, this is – she and another woman came across the body of Custer and managed to stop a Sioux warrior from desecrating it. She then filled Custer’s ears with special cloth so that he might hear better – be wiser – in the afterlife. He’d broken a promise not to fight the Native Americans again.’

  Alice gets up from the table, gathers up plates. She scrapes the risotto messily, as she does everything. Young, slapdash, all the time in the world to mop up mistakes.

  ‘Yeah. That’s a nice detail. You must get that in your book. Didn’t they believe that an incomplete body could never get to heaven? Isn’t that why they scalped their enemies?’

  ‘God help me then, my body’s a bit of a hotchpotch.’

  ‘Or that poor boy!’ Alice blurts out, taking the stack of plates into the kitchen.

  ‘I haven’t heard you talk about your book like that for years—’ Helen begins to say to me and then looks embarrassed and rushes to join Alice in the kitchen, fetching the cheeseboard and clean plates, along with the great hunk of Stilton she brought.

  We each raise a glass of port in a toast: ‘To Patrick – to Dad!’

  ‘To you! To all of you – and to Dr Burns! And modern medicine!’

  ‘And to Drew Beamish,’ I say, to myself. I’m not sure if I say it out loud or not; I’m drunk. To you, lad. And I raise my glass again.

  Alice and this boy Jake leave in a cab, not long after midnight. Ben is staying over on the sofa in the living room; he’s brought his own sleeping bag. That leaves Helen. She’s in the kitchen, helping me unload the tiny dishwasher, so that we can load it again. She crouches in her tight jeans, flicks a strip of hair back behind her ear. She tries fitting a knife into the rack and out of the corner of my eye I see it jump out again, somehow manage to slice her, and then she’s bleeding from one finger and I have to go and find tissues and plasters.

  She holds out her hand like a child and I wind the plaster round her ring finger. ‘I don’t think you should drive, Helen. You’re way over the limit.’

  Helen nods. I tell her she can take my bed and I’ll take the floor. I’ll find some cushions from somewhere. I mean it. I honestly mean it, and I even offer her my pyjama top so that she can cover herself up and not tempt me with those fine, familiar breasts. Best intentions. She’s been making eyes at me all evening.

  She borrows my toothbrush and comes back into the room with her hair down and the pyjama shirt just skimming her thighs, and she sees me looking and gives me a drunken smile and a sort of shake of the head, mouthing: Oh no you don’t.

  ‘Just a cuddle, then,’ I say, slipping into the narrow single bed with her and wrapping my arms around her and breathing in the smooth warm-cool fabric feel of her and trying to unbutton the pyjama top and she says, ‘You! As if you could ever just cuddle,’ and so I start kissing her neck and mouth and just testing, that’s all, does anything melt, does she help me to undo any buttons, does anything seem to flow differently, or heat up, does she reach out and touch me, give me a sign and then suddenly yes, she does, she holds me in that unmistakable, resolute grip and I’m breathing in the Helenness of her – a smell that makes me dizzy with sadness, dizzy with the smell of blue hyacinths in a courtyard, in Oxford. She sighs and kisses me back and says, ‘Your face is like sandpaper; when did you last have a shave?’ and then, ‘Do you think we’ll regret this?’ and all I say is: ‘The new ticker seems to be holding up pretty well, it’s hammering blue bloody murder!’ and then we stop talking and the room contracts and all consciousness in me shifts gear, gathers in the one hot place. I dimly hear the shuddering squeak of the student bedsprings as I plunge myself into her, I dimly think of Ben in the front room and hope he’s sleeping soundly. The sex – Helen’s body – feels like going back to a house you grew up in as a child: everything indelible, you close your eyes and you get a jolt, remembering; but then – it’s also not the same at all, it never will be. You’re old. And someone else lives there now.

  Later, she sits up in bed and wants the light on. She always loved to talk in bed, at night, while I lay dozing and pretending to be listening. This time she says: ‘I hate being fifty. It’s all about them now, isn’t it, Alice and Ben, Jake. Their love affairs, the children they’ll have, the marriages, the careers. Their story. They’re the protagonists. We’re just the minor characters.’

  God, thanks, Helen. I’m trying to fight these thoughts, not go under. To her I say:

  ‘Are you fifty? Who’d have thought it,’ clasping her buttock.

  ‘So gallant . . . Be serious,’ Helen says.

  ‘Well, as I remember it you always had that notion. Even in the early days – what’s that quote? You always had – a presentiment of loss.’

  I close my eyes and lie back. Soon I can hear soft snoring; whether hers or mine, I’m not sure. I’m thinking, as I drift, about my mother and that poem I used to love: come back early or never come. My mother wore a yellow dress. Gently, gently, gentleness. And then vaguely conscious of the wet semen I’m lying in, my half-asleep, half-drifting thoughts turn to sperm, picturing, like a child, tadpoles swimming and that phrase of Alice’s: I didn’t ask to be born! And remembering that, as a very small boy, I asked Cushie once. Asked my mother how I was conceived. And, to her credit, she looked surprised, she laughed, I think, but she told me. A weekend. A weekend in Robin’s Hood Bay, she said, hiding a smile behind her hand. It was lovely there. And then she slapped my behind gently and told me not to be daft. And I remember thinking: Are we called up then, from somewhere, called forward, asked to assume a form? Did I in fact ask?

  Still later, in the early hours; Helen wakes me again, shoving me in the ribs and saying: ‘This doesn’t change a thing, you know that, don’t you, Patrick? Nothing is different.’ My bladder is full; I should go to the bathroom.

  ‘Hmm?’ For a moment I’ve lost my place, I think we are back in the other moment, the other conversation.

  ‘I don’t think I ever was much of a protagonist in my life,’ I say. ‘I think I was always just a subsidiary character.’

  ‘Patrick, you do understand, don’t you, that there’s too much . . . It’s taken me a long time to get over you. This can’t mean anything.’

  ‘I know that,’ I reply.

  She hasn’t bothered to put the light on, or sit up this time. I hear her breathing. I feel her warm breath on my face in the darkness, smell the wine, the coffee, smell my own sweat on her, my molecules mixing with hers. I would kiss her again, but what’s the point?

  I think of that time when we lived in Camden, what was it, eighteen years ago? When I told Helen about Lucy, that Lucy was pregnant. Honesty the best policy, I thought. Actually what I’d been missing was my closeness to Helen, the horrible feeling that in deceiving her I’d made a fool of her, changed her into someone else: a betrayed wife, an idiot. And I wanted the old, competent, intelligent, knowing Helen back.

  ‘How many weeks is she?’ she asks. Two upward frown-lines – a central V – deepening between her eyes.

  ‘She just had the twelve-week scan.’

  ‘And she lives near here?’

  ‘Stoke Newington. We met on a train.’

  Helen seems calm at first. Reasonable questions. Practical concerns. Our own baby daughter sleeping in her cot with the blue terry-cloth teddy, Helen studying for her Bar exams by then; a little less skinny in her suits, worrying about breast-milk stains on her cream blouse. And she goes out of the room and it’s summer, and she unlocks the door that leads to the roof garden,
and goes up. After a pause, I follow her up the ladder, phrases forming. I’m not going to leave you, if that’s what you’re worried about. Darling, it was nothing, she means nothing to me, but of course, I can’t stop her having the baby if she wants it.

  And on the roof Helen, reasonable, sensible Helen, is climbing astride the black-painted rail that surrounds the concrete square of roof terrace. The red tail lights of an aeroplane slide by like fish in a black tank. We’re on the fifth floor. Helen’s hair is flapping around her face; it’s windy. And she’s near the edge.

  ‘What’s to stop me?’ she says. ‘Why should I bother with anything? With you, Alice, any of it? Why should I stay – when I could go so easily?’

  ‘Helen—’

  I take a step towards her and see her foot, in her black ballet slippers, making contact with the dirty concrete floor, but shifting, lifting slightly, as if she intends to push off, leap over there, launch herself. I reach forward and grab her by the shoulder. She twists away from me and in her silky blouse she feels soft, slippery, already not quite there. But I hold firm; my fingers grip.

  ‘I’m sorry. Darling, it was nothing, she means nothing to me, but of course, I can’t stop her having the baby if she wants to keep it . . .’

  I try to pull her from her straddled position and succeed in an ugly toppling; she sort of crumples to the floor, but at least it’s my side of the railing. And then she stays there, rolled over, holding her knees, her face down so that I can’t see if she’s crying or laughing or whether she’s gone into some sort of spasm.

  ‘Helen, darling. Come downstairs, please. Come and have – a cup of tea. Don’t sit up here.’

  There’s nothing but hard surfaces below, and splattered pigeon shit.

  She stands up and allows herself to be steered past the failing plants that she herself planted – hopeless little green things with their coating of city dust – down the ladder and onto the warm carpeted safety of our top-floor landing. I lock the door to the roof garden and pocket the key, breathing out. Make a mental note to throw it away, or, better still, move somewhere without a roof garden.