Castle Of Bone (14 page)

“Did you have a good evening?” he asked politely. He was doing quite well listening to her telling him at length why it hadn’t been good, it had been terrible, when he noticed, to his horror, that the queue ahead of him had dwindled, and the last person in it, an old woman in a bulbous green hat, was handing over the money for a box of corn-plasters and a tin of blackcurrant lozenges. Any moment it would be his turn.

But he could not ask for the teat in front of Penn’s mother. Suppose she told
his
mother about it, too? What would they think? He tried desperately to imagine some other use for a teat for a baby’s bottle which might explain his buying one; unable to imagine any use at all, he mumbled something and almost ran across the shop to a display of extravagantly wrapped and ribboned soaps, at which he stared as if absorbed, actually seeing none of them.

“You’ll pay half as much again for the wrapping if you buy those,” said the voice of Penn’s mother behind him. “If you want it for a present, why don’t you buy some separately and wrap it yourself, a creative gent like you.”

Hugh continued to stare fixedly at three green heart-shaped cakes in a heart-shaped box, labelled “Amour – Springtime.”

“Can I
help
you,” came another voice, for the third time of asking, he realized; only he had been too agitated to notice.

“Help her,” he said, somewhat desperately, pointing at Penn’s mother. “I’m not in any hurry.”

“No, no, Hugh, I’m not in a hurry either. Get what you want,” she said solicitously, grinning at him in such a way, however, he wondered if she was teasing him; knowing Penn’s mother, most likely.

“Take
your time then,
sir,”
said the assistant, as pert as ever in her pink overall. Hugh, seeing no help for it, snatched from the rack before him the cheapest soap he could see, shaped like a lemon and wrapped in tissue paper.

“That’s twenty pence to you,
sir,
” she said. Reluctantly, hoping he’d still have enough left for the milk and the teat, he counted out the money. Anna and Jean must be wondering where he’d got to. But there was nothing he could do about that.

“Hope they took that baby back,” Penn’s mother threw at him then, making his stomach turn. “I don’t mind those two walking other people’s dogs. But
babies
.” But she turned to ask for a packet of Elastoplast as he gathered up his soap, he was able to escape without answering. He went next door to the newsagents and stood gazing at boxes of felt-tipped pens and black rubber insects. He had been afraid that Penn’s mother might follow him in there, too, but to his relief saw her leave the chemist’s, climb into her white Renault standing outside, and drive off smartly, as neat and direct a performance as any of Penn’s on some sport’s field – this could not be said of the way Hugh’s own mother drove. She waved as she went. Hugh was not sure whether the wave was meant for him or for some other acquaintance she had caught sight of along the street.

He went back to the chemist’s shop. It was empty now, to his relief.

“Large, medium or small?” asked the assistant, standing on a stool to get the teat from the shelf above the counter. She had her blond hair in a ponytail, he noticed.

“Large . . .
what
?” asked the baffled Hugh, removing his gaze to her (thick, he observed) ankles. “Hole, of course. In the teat. Large, medium or small. Wake up, dozy, make up your mind,” she urged as Hugh hesitated. “I can’t stand here all day, anyone would think you liked looking at my legs.” And she giggled, again; making Hugh think of Anna. She annoyed him as much as Anna. Anna liked annoying him, too.

He considered the smallness of the baby. “Small, I suppose,” he said at last.

“Got an addition to the family, then?” asked the assistant, putting the teat in a paper bag, her voice marginally more friendly. “Not exactly,” Hugh said, blushing again. He’d been about to add something lame about a friend’s baby, when he decided it was nothing to do with her. Why shouldn’t he buy a teat if he wanted, why should he have to explain? He handed over the money and emerged from the shop almost dizzy with relief, so dizzy indeed that he forgot the tin of milk till he was almost halfway home, and had to go back to the supermarket, where he found himself waiting at the checkout behind a woman buying a dozen tins of pilchards; for her children, it appeared, not cats. (If it had been her cats, she explained to Hugh, she would have bought the kind without tomato sauce.)

All he had left afterwards was one half pence. Penn’s going to have to pay me back, he thought, when all this is over. Yes.
Over
, he thought. He could not bear to imagine it would not all sort itself out in the end; how, though, he could not imagine. Any more than he could imagine what they were to do if they needed to buy anything else. But it was Penn they’d spent all the money on; so when things were sorted out, Penn would have to pay them back. Of course he could have the lemon soap if he wanted, Hugh thought. He certainly did not.

They fed the baby in Penn’s room, the one corresponding to Hugh’s in the next-door house. Anna said it would be safer, her mother wasn’t expected back till the afternoon. In Hugh’s house, their mother might turn up at any minute.

He shouldn’t have bought the teat with the small hole, it turned out; the smaller the baby, Jean said, the larger the hole had to be, because small babies sucked so much less powerfully. This one couldn’t get any milk at all through the small-holed teat; after sucking away valiantly for a minute or two, it began to howl. “How was I supposed to know what size to get?” said Hugh, disgustedly – all the same it was his idea that they enlarged the hole by heating a needle, and pushing that through. Next time the baby tried to suck it succeeded, judging by the contented gulps and the way the level of milk in the bottle began going down.

They took it in turns to give the bottle. Hugh did not think it was anything he wanted to do at first. But after he had watched both Anna and Jean first clutch the baby awkwardly till they grew used to it, then soften, become easier, when he saw how still they sat, how intently they gazed, smiling a little into the baby’s face, a great longing came over him to feed the baby too. At last he could bear it no longer, Jean’s turn in his view had lasted long enough; he took the baby firmly from her, sat down on Penn’s bed, baby in one hand, bottle in the other.

Its papery looking finger nails were surprisingly long and sharp. The clutch of its small fingers, the pull of its suck against the bottle made him feel strange; he felt the same awe as on first seeing the baby. At the same time he felt an unfamiliar softness and warmth. He must look as rapt, as intent, he thought, as Jean and Anna had. Neither of them objected to his feeding the baby. Indeed neither seemed surprised, though Jean looked worried at first, and afterwards teased him a little, fiddling as she did so with her brown-stoned brooch. Anna said nothing. She did not take her eyes off either of them, Hugh or the baby.

The small warmth of the baby against him becoming the more comfortable as time went on, his eyes began to wander round the room. He began to notice all over again the evidence of Penn’s sporting activities; a cricket bat, two tennis rackets, a squash racket, arranged in meticulous order; Penn was – had been – meticulously neat. On a shelf above there were books on sport, books on the sea by Masefield and Conrad, a whole series of novels by Alexander Kent, and a big old-fashioned edition of King Arthur and his Knights. Next to the books was a silver cup won for school athletics, pinned above the bed a row of photographs, of sportsmen mostly, footballers and cricketers, but also one of Jane Fonda, dressed in leather; all the familiar paraphenalia of Penn’s ordinary life.

It made Hugh miss wretchedly the real Penn. It made him ache. At the same time he saw all these things as he never had seen them before. Staring down at the baby’s clutching fingers, he could not imagine them big enough to hold the cricket bat or the rackets – compared to the baby these looked not only huge, they looked grotesque. He thought of Gulliver in Brobdingnag. From the baby’s eye view the graining of willow on the cricket bat, of oak on the bookshelves, was crude not to say coarse; the gut strings of the racket appeared swollen; disgusting, he thought. The books, too, were books for giants.

When Anna removed the baby from him, a moment later, firmly, saying “It’s my turn now,” he did not protest. He went to Penn’s bookshelves and took down the big volume of King Arthur and his Knights. He opened it at the end; to find a picture of an island covered in blossoming apple trees, of knights lying among them accompanied by beautiful maidens. In the distance was a castle; on the page opposite the word; Avalon. Paradise, it said; the place to which Arthur came and his knights, where they found immortality, so lived for ever in a golden world. Thomas the Rhymer might have left fairyland and the fairy queen and come back to the earth, but these knights did not leave Avalon; they would never have to face the kind of problems he was facing, Hugh thought enviously. How good, he thought, gazing at them hungrily, how much better to stay with the apple trees; apple trees of immortality, of course, that’s what the old man meant. Better to stay with the fairy queen, too, assuming she was part of Avalon; he thought she must be. Fairyland. Paradise. Avalon. They were all one and the same. But then he turned back to look at the room; at the baby; at his sister Jean and her friend, Anna, both gazing down at the baby with an expression on their faces he had never seen there before, and in a moment of unaccustomed warmth and affection, he was not so sure.

The baby took a long time to feed. At half-past eleven Jean said, with a gasp, “Look at the time. We’ll have to hurry or we won’t have time before lunch.” She and Anna decided to abandon the last ounce. The baby was almost asleep now, and kept on forgetting to suck.

It was Hugh’s idea that they should go back to the junk shop and certainly not his wish. But he had to admit he had no better ideas about what they should do. Nor, unwilling to confess his visit yesterday, quite why he did not know, could he justify his insistence it was likely to be a waste of time.

While organizing the feed, the simple pressure of activity had driven away their fear and apprehension. But walking down the hill it all came back. No one spoke. Every person they met might have been about to ask what they were doing with so small a baby, might threaten to take it away. The traffic had never seemed noisier, grinding past them, up and down the slope. As for the ordinary, familiar trees – Hugh looked at them as if for the first time in his life and thought – realized – that they were nothing more nor less than giant plants, and as such not ordinary or familiar at all; on the contrary. He might have been Gulliver again in the kingdom of the giants – not a comfortable feeling; not comfortable at all.

The shop was shut, and looked empty. The windows were so dusty it was hard to see anything beyond, even on the window itself. By pressing his face to the glass and screwing up his eyes Hugh could make out a few dim shapes, but that was all. The screen of dust might have been formed deliberately to hide them from the outside world. Other people must have come to the conclusion that the shop was empty too, because two posters with flowing lettering to advertise a pop group called Stoned Crow had been posed in one corner of the window.
CLOSED
, said the notice on the door.

Having got so far, in spite of his reluctance to come, Hugh did not intend to go away without seeing the old man. He took the door handle and rattled it furiously, at the same time knocking at the glass with his other hand. Jean and Anna stood a few paces behind him, Anna holding the baby.

“But if he’s
shut,
” Jean was saying despairingly.

On the other side of the door, within the shop, Hugh thought he discerned faint movements. Rage overcame him, he was determined to get an answer, rattling and knocking harder than ever. “You’ll break the door down,” Jean said anxiously. But the door had suddenly removed itself from his hands and stood wide open.

The old man blinked in the daylight, his voice came slight and querulous. “What do you want? Can’t you see I’m closed.”

Hugh said fiercely: “You’ve got to let us in.”

“Got to.
Got
to. I don’t understand that.”

“You know perfectly well who I am. You must help us, you must.” The old man looked at him with what appeared to be dislike. “Must,
must
. Must, is it?” He stared at each of them in turn. Hugh and Anna both stared back unblinkingly, but Jean, uneasily, turned away her head. He did not look at the baby in Anna’s arms, just touched it briefly with an expression across his face that Hugh could not read. The baby stirred but did not wake.

“Come in. If you
must
,” the old man said at last.

“We must,” Hugh said, and stepped across the threshold. The two girls followed him.

“You chose the cupboard yourself. You did not buy it because I persuaded you.”

Hugh did not reply. He was looking round the shop. As he had guessed when peering from outside it was even emptier than yesterday. There were still the objects – all with that same face – but fewer; there was still the same sense of recognition, yet if anything he could trace it even less than yesterday. The old man had disappeared again, and they stood in the middle of the shop waiting for his return. Hugh found himself overcome with unexpected embarrassment, wishing himself anywhere else but here. He shrank from the thought of having to explain himself again, of having to ask questions. He wished he could shut his eyes and vanish.