wife does it frequently, but I’m afraid I’m a bit out of date when it comes to all that.’
This was real progress. I even got a grudging ‘Bye’ out of her as she handed me my receipt, and I carried my shopping home, if not with a song in my heart, at least with a few random crotchets.
Over supper later I told Ben and Jude of the breakthrough of the day and made them laugh at my pathetic attempts at communicating with the poor girl.
‘But don’t you see?’ I said, made enthusiastic by the wine. ‘I got a smile! That’s the first one. You have no idea just what a triumph that is – until now only Warren the smooth has elicited any response at all – let alone a smile.’
‘Oh, come on, Dad – that’s not true. She’s been speaking to you loads – you never stop telling us.’
‘Well, yes, Ben. She has been speaking to me. I can’t deny it. But if you knew this girl – Judy, back me up on this, she really is the most unfortunate creature, isn’t she? – if you knew her, Ben, if you actually had to go and do the shopping as I do –’
‘Charlie, you don’t have to do it,’ Judy interrupted. ‘You know perfectly well you don’t. That just isn’t fair: it’s been you and this bizarre project of yours that’s led to this current shopping craze. I’ve never known you do so much. It’s quite marvellous, in fact.’
‘That may well be right, my dear,’ I went on, aware that Ben was looking at me with that slightly jaded expression he wears when I’m a little drunk. ‘That may well be true. But that is entirely beside the point. The crux of the case, I submit, is that I was challenged to make contact with this fantastically large and non-communicative person, and I have succeeded beyond all my wildest dreams.’
‘Who challenged you?’ Judy asked with a smile, helping herself to another glass of the Burgundy.
This stumped me for a moment, but I rallied quickly. ‘I did. I did’ – and I jabbed a finger in her direction – ‘and I may tell you, my dear wife, that to be challenged by yourself is perhaps the toughest assignment of all.’
There was a short silence, and then Judy suddenly snorted into her wine and giggled. ‘What are you talking about, Charlie?’
‘I really don’t know,’ I said, starting to laugh myself. My mind flashed back over the conversation and it seemed terribly funny all of a sudden. ‘I guess I’m just thrilled that I made fatty smile.’
This made Judy giggle even more, and Ben joined in too.
‘You’re really weird, Dad,’ he said, grinning at me across the table. ‘It’s like some Pygmalion trip or something. What the hell are you hoping to get out of it?’
‘I am aiming to communicate with someone less privileged than your good self, my dear son. My challenge,’ I went on, as we all laughed louder than ever, ‘is to create a little happiness within that – how shall I put it? – extraordinarily overadequate physical specimen.’
When I think how I used to speak about her it makes me shiver. May God – and she – forgive me.
I always thought I’d leave home as soon as I finished school, but somehow I seem still to be here. It’s partly for economic reasons, of course, and although I’ve taken enough part-time jobs over the past three or four months to pay for clothes and going out, it would be quite different if I had to find the rent and food and all that. But it really is time I started planning what I’m going to do with the rest of the year before I go up to Leeds. I know I want to travel, but I don’t want to stop my music, and lugging a cello round Europe would be a nightmare. It’ll work out.
Funnily enough, I think I’d miss Ben quite a bit as well if I was to move out. Although we used to row like hell when we were little, we get on OK now, and he’s actually quite a cool guy. He’s always been off his head, though, and lately he’s been even more strange than usual – shutting himself in his room instead of watching TV with the rest of us after supper for instance, and not really laughing when I do the silly jokes that used to make him giggle. I worry about him a bit.
As for Mum and Dad – it’s getting quite heavy the way they constantly needle each other. They’ve never been the sort to have arguments, and they still don’t, but Mum’s sarcasm and Dad’s annoying way of talking as if he’s in court all the time are getting on my nerves, and I can just see how they irritate each other. I used to envy my friends at school when they told me how their parents yelled and shouted and even threw things – it sounded so dramatic and kind of Italian, when my home was so quiet and boring. Sometimes I’d make things up about Mum and Dad fighting just to make them sound more interesting – I really wanted them to be divorced so’s I could be sent from one to another like Annabel. She used to get amazing presents from her father.
But now that it’s not quite so sunny at home I feel differently. I wish it could be just the way it used to be.
It was to be another couple of weeks before it happened – before it all changed, I mean.
I was in court – a long and rather dull case that had been dragging on for days. I was examining my own client: a woman who, if I am honest with myself, I knew quite clearly deserved never to see her children again. I was attempting to secure her some sort of limited access.
I was trying to convince the judge that the woman’s prolonged absences abroad away from her children had been justified by the demands of her work or some such, and, as I questioned her, I had been watching her elegant, manicured hand playing with her expensively streaked hair, forcing her to tilt her head as she peered at me resignedly from behind the shining blonde curtain.
I was far from confident that my client, vague and uninterested as she had appeared to be in our briefings, would remember our policy of explaining by her work schedule the weeks and months at a time that she had spent away from her family over the course of the previous years, and I had been irritated by her lack of cooperation in a process that I myself was not at all sure was valid. As I waited for her to answer, her head still now, her hand fiddling with a string of pearls round her neck, I found myself watching the way the ring she was wearing glittered as it caught the light. It reminded me of something, and gave me an uneasy feeling I couldn’t fathom. As she began to speak – detailing some justification that we had conjured up between us for her extensive holidays – she thrust her hand back into the blonde tresses, arranging and rearranging the fall of hair, clearly a nervous habit that was helping her to cope with the stress of her court appearance. The ring moved in and out, twinkling sporadically and mesmerically. What memory, lurking at the back of my mind, was being triggered by the sight of this gold and sapphire piece of jewellery?
It was, of course, Stacey’s ring. Remarkable how the mind can make connections without letting you know, how it can carry on a private conversation between memory and the subconscious until the nagging irritation of the discussion can no longer be ignored. That I should be surreptitiously reminded of a shop girl’s cheap bit of vulgar jewellery by the obviously expensive sapphire ring of the woman I was examining in court was strange enough; what was inexplicable was that the connection should be so disturbing. What should have merely caused me to smile in recognition made me frown in dread.
I pictured Stacey’s hand, and the ring half buried in the flesh. And it was then – I’m sure of it – exactly then, as I recalled the soft, white skin and the twinkling of those cheap little blue stones against the ludicrous rococo swirls of gold, that I knew everything had changed. Gone in one microsecond of terrible knowledge was all vestige of the so-called fatherly feelings that I’d professed for the girl. Gone, to be replaced in the same instant by a searing stab of desire so intense that I had to dip my head in sudden dizziness