The Tell-Tale Heart Page 19

  The sixth form centre is in a large bay-windowed old house, near the rail station. We’re shown into the Head’s office. After a brief chat about fees and the fact that Ben would be joining so late in the term, the Head – an avuncular type with a beard (I imagine him with a pipe too, though none is visible) – gets up and shakes Ben’s hand, the deal done. Ben looks up, startled, and the Head offers to ‘show us around’.

  We step into rooms with leather sofas, rooms that have paintings on the walls and fireplaces and the sense of being in someone’s front room. They smell of coffee beans, and new wool carpets, and shoe polish. Each room contains a smiley teacher and four or five black-haired boys in suits, bent over laptops.

  ‘We have a lot of Chinese students. It’s mostly a crammer for them to get into Oxbridge,’ the Head explains.

  Ben is as quiet as only Ben can be; but I’m comforting myself with the fact that he hasn’t said no and he’s managed to go the full hour without pulling his phone out of his pocket, biting his nails or smoking. It seems to help that it would take him exactly ten minutes for him to get from his bed to this homely classroom and that it being spring now the windows are full of green-budded trees and this place doesn’t, as Ben said as we walked up the gravel-filled drive, ‘seem like any school on this planet’. Result.

  Outside on the street he rolls a cigarette, licking the paper, shaking the tobacco into it. He offers it to me.

  ‘When are you going to give that up?’ I say.

  His phone starts trilling and he turns away, cupping one hand over his ear, to answer it. I can hear the tinny sounds of a female voice; it seems to be shrieking. It’s the same voice I’ve heard constantly. Ben doesn’t reply, he doesn’t call her ‘Babe’. And then suddenly, he shoves the phone at me.

  ‘She wants to talk to you.’

  ‘To me? Who?’

  ‘Mum. She says you’ve kidnapped me. You deal with it.’

  ‘Lucy?’ Why now? Has she only just noticed he’s gone?

  ‘Patrick!’ She’s sobbing. All conversations between us for years have been tight, controlled. It’s a long time since I’ve heard Lucy cry. And now I remember, she used to do it all the time.

  ‘What the bloody hell is Ben doing? Why is he staying with you for so long and refusing to come home? Now he’s saying he’s doing some – I don’t know – some fucking sixth-form course or something! How much is that costing? Fucking hell, Patrick. Has he left me, or what?’

  ‘Left you? He’s – we’ve decided it would make sense for him to resume his education. I thought you’d be pleased.’

  ‘Oh, he’s decided, has he? Or have you decided – because you want him now, you need him to keep you company, because you’re lonely now you’ve had a fucking operation and you can’t find anyone to shag and so you think it’s your turn—’

  ‘Lucy, I don’t know what you’re on about. Please. Calm down. I can barely understand you—’

  ‘Put him on! I WANT TO TALK TO MY SON!’

  I interrupt her with my gentlest voice, and after a moment she stops shouting and I hear her taking a deep breath. ‘Lucy,’ I persist. ‘It’s short term. You can visit us here at any time. I’m sorry, I should have told you. I should have asked you.’

  I’ve got her attention at last. I hold the phone close to my mouth.

  ‘But, you know, Lucy, you’ve done a great job with Ben. I’d like to say – well. All credit to you. He’s great, isn’t he? He’s funny, he’s smart, he’s good company. Well done. I like him!’

  Silence. The phone seems to give off some kind of fizz.

  ‘Lucy? Are you there?’

  Then: ‘Whoah. What’s up with you?’ she says, in a tone of astonishment.

  Ben comes wheeling back and snatches the phone from my hand and yells into it: ‘Give me a fucking break, will you!’ and stabs at the phone to switch it off, and whisks it back into his pocket. We stop in the street and stare at one another.

  ‘I feel obliged to say – that’s no way to talk to your mother,’ I mumble.

  I’m conscious that passers-by are looking at us oddly, that perhaps a net curtain in one of those cosy rooms in the sixth-form college we’re still beside will be twitching. I’m struggling not to think about Ben and Lucy, not to wonder if it was Lucy he kept calling Babe and, if it was, what does that say about the relationship they’ve got themselves into?

  There’s a strange moment when I think Ben is going to walk off, or punch me, or burst into tears. His brown eyes are huge, surprised at his own behaviour. Clearly, if I’ve never been grown-up before, then Ben’s never before been childish. I just released us both.

  He takes the roll-up from where he’s parked it above his ear, puts it back in his mouth and lights it again. When he’s taken a drag he says softly: ‘You know what she’s like. You must know.’ And I think: Yes, I do. And poor Ben. Of course I know. He’s been the man of the house, shouldering things I should have taken on, or rather: shouldering Lucy.

  I met Lucy on a train. She was working on a manuscript, and told me she was an editor. I rang her publisher to get her phone number; told them I was her cousin. Anyway, bizarrely, at some point when I was trying to seduce her, Lucy read the Tarot cards for me. I can’t remember if she proposed it or if I asked. I know she said she made money at music festivals reading cards; she had hennaed hair and a tattoo. I indulged her. She turned over card after card, all hilariously serious, cross-legged on her bedroom floor – she lived in a squat in Stoke Newington – and then all I had to do when she turned over that one – The Devil, it was, I remember it vividly – was stare at her and say: ‘Never mind that, I’ve been wanting to do this all night.’ A corny line. (There was something false from the start.) She went to get a tissue to wipe her lipstick off.

  She had an open, smiley mouth – nice to kiss, she tasted like aniseed – and she laughed easily, and told you every last thing she was thinking as if there was no edit of her internal monologue going on at all (I soon learned there wasn’t). She could be entertaining, she was loud and giddy, energetic in bed. But she could barely finish a coherent thought. She would veer off mid-sentence and trying to pin her down on a discussion, or a date, or a plan, soon drove me insane. It was exhilarating, distracting – her sudden exuberance, her bursts of dancing in the middle of a conversation, her unembarrassed way of telling you exactly what she felt about everyone and everything.

  One morning in Lucy’s poky kitchen, standing in my boxers about to cook us some breakfast, it occurred to me how sensible I’d been, what a success I’d made. I was taking eggs out of a cardboard box; there were four, one in my hand, three in the box. And I thought of the phrase, ‘Don’t put all your eggs in the same basket,’ and I was glad, reassured, because Lucy and I had a child, and we’d been together in secret ways on and off for a couple of years now, and there were others, too: a student with a mature outlook called Sandy, also the young wife of my Head of Department, a dark beauty called Therese. So – though admittedly the egg metaphor is all wrong – I hadn’t. Put them all in the same basket, I mean.

  I poured oil happily into a pan, whistling; cracked the egg into it, tried to pick out a fleck of shell by pressing it with the flat of my finger. The other three eggs sat perkily in their cone-shaped cardboard nests. A safety net might have been a better metaphor. Never mind, all I knew was that even if Helen died or left me I would be all right because there were others. I hadn’t put all my feelings in one place.

  But three, four years later, the mayhem of being in Lucy’s world was exhausting, and the calm order of Helen’s offered itself with renewed charms. Helen knew me, thought of that side of me as, well, a sort of a sickness, I think; something to do with me being a motherless boy. We even laughed – during the divorce, which was one of our chummiest times – about the day she caught me struggling into my trousers in our living room, with the window open and a blonde girl crouching on our patio outside. ‘The smell!’ Helen said, tears streaming. ‘I thought a fox had got in!
I thought that’s why the window was open.’ (I still maintained I’d been interviewing the girl – we needed an au pair for Alice.)

  I never believed that Helen might eventually, and not even in a unkind way, call time. And just say one day, rather gently: ‘Enough. Sorry, Patrick, I don’t think I can stand it any more.’

  Now I’m thinking: Ben is more like Helen than me. He could have been Helen’s child, not Lucy’s. The sensible one, the one always washing the glasses the morning after a devastating party. How could I have left him to be the sole keeper of Lucy, for so long?

  ‘Ashok dumped her,’ Ben says mildly, on the walk back to our flat.

  ‘Ah.’

  She wants me home so she can sit me in the kitchen and tell me what a bastard he is. All of them. Him. Me. You. Especially you.’

  ‘Yes. I can imagine.’

  We walk in silence after that. It’s not that Ben says nothing, I’ve learned. If you listen, and don’t interrupt him, he will offer information eventually. In his own time. Perhaps all those years with Lucy have taught him the merits of continence. To say something you mean, quietly, once, and without embellishment. Not to spill.

  Later, Alice asks me, ‘Why secondary schools? Why not go back to being an academic – no offence, Dad, but what do you know about kids?’

  ‘I was once a kid, you know.’ We’re walking along the Backs, Alice wheeling her bike over wet leaves, an ancient college presiding.

  ‘Like – hundreds of years ago, Dad. They’re not all bonny lads in boarding schools in Geordie-land who want to be successful, all eager to learn, you know. Like in your day.’

  ‘What a charming, hilarious version of my life you have!’

  ‘I’m just saying. It might be tough.’

  ‘I can deal with tough. Actually I’d really like to get stuck into something.’

  ‘But what about . . . you know, the harassment case? Won’t any new school do, like, some kind of police check?’

  A squirrel races out in front of us, stops dead at our feet, twirls theatrically, casts its tail around it like a seasoned actress whisking up her feather boa, and races away again. I stop and put my hand on the handle of Alice’s bike to make her stop too.

  ‘I’m not a bloody sex offender. Actually – apparently – Daisy withdrew her complaint.’

  ‘Oh. That’s good. I’m glad for you. I mean. Mum said . . . I had wondered if that was why you didn’t want to go back to London, if you were . . . you know. Good. That’s good then. Isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you can work on your book, can’t you.’

  I can, yes. I’d even been writing a little of it, today, thinking with some small pleasure about the idea of changing the title of my Custer book to Great Big Cock-ups and the Stupid Men Who Make Them. Or, more likely: Wisdom after Death – General Custer: A Re-Evaluation of his Legacy. I offer you whatever comfort I’ve come by honestly.

  (Would I be allowed to teach the kids about the Battle of Little Bighorn? Fights, battles: I know enough to know that’s how you draw in teenage boys, having spent these last few weeks on the Xbox and PlayStation with Ben. Helen has long pointed out the irony of all those loud voices deploring knife crime in London but saying nothing over posters everywhere to advertise Inglourious Basterds with Brad Pitt practically licking a sabre. There’s always an outcry when it’s girls and anorexia, she says, but no one protests when it’s boys’ weak spots being exploited. Still, perhaps I can exploit them in the interests of re-engaging them in education? But maybe it has to be an entirely British history curriculum, one of the reasons I needed to do the course – I have no idea what they’re taught in schools these days. Not that I’d concede this to Alice, of course.)

  At last, I am going to get to meet Ruth Beamish. Maureen brings me the letter. We’re having dinner in a Vietnamese restaurant in Cambridge and I’m drinking glass after glass of water to quell the chilli I just accidentally bit into, and in between gulps I’m telling her about my course, the other people on it, mostly much younger than me, but one guy, a banker, about my age, with the same idea. Maureen waits for me to stop coughing and talking and then she produces the letter from her handbag as if it was casual, the most casual thing, not sizzling with portent, with longed-for meaning. As if she’d almost forgotten about it.

  ‘Oh. I meant to give you this.’

  Dear Professor Robson,

  I’m the mother of your donor. You mentioned in the letter you sent me at the end of last year that you would be willing to help me. There is something you could do for me, if you are still willing. And if you would like to meet me, I think I’m ready now. As long as you don’t mind if we keep it short.

  Yours sincerely,

  Mrs Ruth Beamish, Jubilee Close, Black Drove, Littleport.

  Interesting, that line: ‘I’m the mother of your donor.’ As if I could have forgotten who she was. I protest to Maureen that I didn’t mention I would help Ruth Beamish, and then understanding dawns.

  ‘You didn’t give her my letter, did you? Did you give her that load of old Hallmark card bollocks you wanted me to write instead?’

  The sweet-faced Vietnamese restaurateur glances worriedly towards me; is that man going to make a scene? Maureen has the grace to look embarrassed, and to mumble sorry.

  I’m not mollified. ‘Hugs and tomorrows. I ask you. What’s wrong with a bit of plain-speaking?’

  ‘I’m sorry, I know, you’re right. It’s just that – in my job – it’s just that, I didn’t want her to be upset. Your letter was . . . unfeeling.’

  ‘You’re confusing feeling with clichéd shit! And now she wants me to do something for her and presumably I promised, and what the hell can it be?’

  Maureen stabs at a piece of chicken with her chopstick, starts to speak, but I interrupt her.

  ‘Ruth Beamish is bound to be upset, no matter how I sugar-coated it.’

  My voice is sharper than I intend and I see from Maureen’s quick glance down at her plate, her stumble as she goes to pick up a prawn with her chopsticks and fails, that she is stung.

  ‘Sorry,’ I say, hastily.

  The chopsticks pause at her mouth. ‘You know,’ Maureen says, bouncing back as usual, ‘I was once counselling this woman – over at Downham Market. And she just couldn’t talk about the really ghastly way her daughter died. She couldn’t tell me. And then one day, in the room with us, I felt it. Like I couldn’t breathe. I was coughing. It was a choking attack, my lungs burning. And so I said it. I said it nicely of course. Did her daughter die from an asthma attack? And this woman bursts into tears and it was like – the whole room felt freed up – and she goes at once, yes.’

  I consider this; what am I supposed to deduce?

  ‘Well, you know of course that’s easily explained,’ I suggest. ‘A kind of body transference – her transferring something unconscious or that can’t be acknowledged to you, and you “receiving” it, intuiting it. Surely your training taught you that?’

  She chews on her prawn. ‘Yes, OK. Not the spirit from her dead child speaking the unspeakable to us? No. But in the end, aren’t they the same thing? Just different explanations, different words used. Transference, counter–transference. OK. I mean, years ago, in the past, a heart that could live in the body of another would have been – freakish, wouldn’t it? Spooky and unreal. It still is for many people, not ordinary, not modern medicine or science. And it’s just the words in the end, isn’t it, just the words people are comfortable using.’

  Our relationship these days, now that it’s clear we’re not going to have a sexual one, is one of easy banter and friendship. Argument, yes, irritation – on my part, at least, I can’t speak for her – but also ease. I’m myself with Maureen, I realise, whatever that means. It’s what Helen used to say about the midwife who brought Alice into this world, a woman called Janet, who, to my great surprise, became close friends with Helen when they met again at some hospital fund-raiser years later.

  ‘God, Janet
’s seen me at my most vulnerable; I feel myself with her,’ Helen would say.

  So now that I’m going to Littleport again Maureen offers to come with me, ‘keep me company’. Once, I might have welcomed this. But no.

  If Ruth Beamish is brave enough, I can be. And I have another reason to go to Littleport. The course again. We’ve been encouraged to check out as many educational establishments as possible, including facilities for those children who had been permanently or temporarily excluded from school or are being educated ‘other than at school’. The Fenland Pupil Referral Unit. The place that Maureen let slip that Drew attended. I’m surprised to find myself excited. Maybe I’m not cut out for that kind of thing. Bleeding-heart liberal and all that – maybe it’s too late, not me. But I won’t know unless I give it a go.

  The landscape is no less surprising this time for being more familiar. It’s something to do with the gap between the word ‘rural’ and what it conjures in my head, and this. Giant pylons straddling the flats; houses dropped down any old where, like an American backwater. The forlorn pieces of abandoned farm machinery nesting in backyards; houses with their black-eyed windows, their gardens full of tyres or piles of beets for farm feed. I ask myself what it is about this unlovely landscape that still manages to charm me, that keeps making my mood lift, that makes me feel – what do I feel, staring at it? Calm and energised. Yes. I could even imagine, I’ve begun to imagine, I admit, living here. Houses here would be a fraction of the price of Cambridge. I would love the space, and the plainness. A fresh start. A clean-swept floor.

  A train keeps pace with the car; I wait at various railway crossings, suddenly filled with a strange longing for a cigarette, when I spot a rail worker in his high-vis coat, skulking near the tracks, smoking. The past might well be another country but it seems you can get there quite easily from King’s Cross.

  ‘This area of Cambridgeshire has a high proportion of five-to fourteen-year-olds. Residents tend to have fewer higher educational qualifications than the national average. A high proportion work in manufacturing, retail, or construction. Littleport has some of the highest scores for deprivation compared to other areas in the district . . .’