Encounters (34 page)

‘Better for seeing you, Col.’ She forced herself to release his hand, to walk away from him, wondering at this urge to cradle him which, even though he was a man, her youngest son stirred within her. Instead of looking at him she stared down at the Afghan rug, rippled a little by their feet, its lineny fringe tangled and flaccid, its colours warm only where the watery sun slanting through the front window touched it. She longed to pour herself a gin. ‘Where’ve you been lately?’ She tried to sound casual.

He had thrown himself down on the leather Chesterfield, all knees and elbows, and glancing cautiously at him she saw his shirt had lost a button and there was a dull shine of grease around the inside of his collar.

‘Here and there.’ He grinned wearily and sat forward, his fists locked, swinging down between his shins above the carpet. ‘I need some bread, Liz.’

She sighed, hearing Gareth’s voice echoing in her head: ‘Not another penny until you get a fucking job,’ and knowing she would not refuse walked, an automaton, programmed by mother love, to where her handbag lay on an armchair. She knew there was about forty or so pounds in it and she knew she would give him everything, even the loose change in her purse.

She knew he would be grateful; would return warmth for warmth and stay with her perhaps for a while. If she could get him to eat a few square meals while his father was away, that too would comfort her. She smiled down at him as he looked at the wad of notes in his hand, counting them between finger and thumb like a teller at the bank. Then he tucked them away into the top pocket of his shirt and buttoned the flap. His eyes, so like Gareth’s were a brilliant cornflower blue. ‘I need a hell of a lot more than that, Liz.’ There was no smile on his face, only the hard, weary lines of a man twice as old as he.

Drugs? Gambling? Crime? The possibilities flashed through her mind as she faced him, not believing the hard shine of the eyes, the new cynical twist to his lips as he waited.

‘Oh come on, Liz, don’t tell me you haven’t been salting away the housekeeping all these years. You must have thousands stashed somewhere.’

He didn’t believe her. He didn’t believe she had no private account, no hoard waiting to be spent gluttonously alone when his father was gone or divorced or dead, and there was no warm sympathy when, worn out at last by his browbeating she broke down and sobbed, only a calculating silence as he stared at her, knowing he must believe her.

But still he had not relinquished hope. He cast around the room, eyeing porcelain, the carriage clock on the mantelpiece, the rug itself and rejecting them in the knowledge that his father would miss them instantly.

‘Your jewellery! There must be some jewellery you could sell.’

‘No Colin, no …’ Her voice came from a thousand miles outside her head, distanced by fear and disbelief. But already he was bounding up the long curving flight of stairs, his hand skimming the banister, and bursting into the bedroom.

Her jewel box lay on her dressing table, unhidden in spite of Gareth’s oft repeated warnings about burglars, each piece inside warm from her skin, loved. She had never accepted much from him in the way of gifts but with each piece there was a memory, or an agony of its own.

With an exclamation of triumph Colin took the box and emptied it on to the bed. Pearls, lockets, rings, lay tangled on the sprigged pale duvet, and among them Hugh’s charm bracelet.

Never, in all her twenty-five years as a mother had Elizabeth struck one of her children, but now as she saw those thin pale hands picking avariciously over the milestones of her life something inside her seemed to snap. In a quick sweep of her hands she had gathered up the things and thrown them, all jumbled, into her pocket and she faced Colin her eyes blazing. The slap she dealt him across the face sent him reeling backwards, the imprint of her fingers first white and then red across his cheek and mouth.

‘Your father was right about you all along,’ she shrieked at him, her voice dumb, the sound coming from her mouth belonging to a stranger. ‘You are ungrateful; you are a scrounger; you’re no good. No good at all. Get out! Get out! Get out of this house before I call the police!’

And he had gone. Later, when the tears had stopped, she realized how nearly he had hit her back. The cold fury on his face had been almost insane as he looked at her, but he had said and done nothing and with that sole scrap she would comfort herself in the months and years to come. He had done nothing. One deep shuddering breath and he had turned and walked from the room, leaving the house by the front door which reverberated defiantly behind him from the slam.

On 28th March Colin was arrested and taken to Marylebone Police Station charged with conspiracy to defraud and Gareth put up bail for his son. Three weeks later as he chaired a meeting at the RIBA Gareth had collapsed with a massive stroke. Forty-eight hours later he was dead.

Elizabeth saw the next few months through a pale veil of valium, surrounded, as Colin was convicted and sent to prison for five years, by a warm protective trio of children who treated her like rare Dresden, sharing her out between them in a layer of impenetrable cotton wool. Once or twice she tried to fight her way to the surface, sensing sunlight through the mist which swam above her head, but each time she sank again, drowning in depression.

She stayed with Michael the most. He had married and had a little boy and when all else failed to reach her she warmed to those tiny clinging trusting hands. It was in this house, at the long untidy happy dining table where breakfast lay in a shower of toast crumbs and splattered groats, that she had nerved herself to reach for the
Telegraph
, wearily unfolding it to face a further instalment of the enquiry into Colin’s money-making débâcle, and seen a photograph of Hugh.

Stunned she stared at it. The hair, the eyes, the mouth – each had been sculpted and hardened and worn, but it was the same face. She glanced up guiltily at her daughter-in-law who was spooning scrambled egg into Crispin’s mouth.

‘If you’ll excuse me, Ann dear, I’ll take my coffee and the paper out on the porch for a while.’

She was quite unconscious of Ann’s stare; of the excitement which had been betrayed by her voice, of the fact that her movements, which for months had been slow and dreamlike, were suddenly electric with trembling.

On the straw chair on the porch she arranged her skirt with care and, turning to the side table, poured the slopped coffee back from the saucer into the cup. Then, cautiously, she looked again.

The photograph stared out at her from the page, the eyes direct and challenging. Her heart thumped a little with fear and she lowered her gaze to the caption.

‘Major General Sir Hugh Denniston
,’ it said, and below it:
‘Army Representative to join Whitehall Committee.’

Strange, that in all these years she had never known his full name, never known he was a war hero, a holder of the VC, that he had been repeatedly parachuted into France, had been captured, had, dear God, been tortured by the SS, was married, divorced, the father of two children, had headed this committee, that committee, been in Kenya, in Northern Ireland, in Rhodesia …

A gentle hand on hers made her realize suddenly that she was crying.

‘Liz? Liz, darling. What is it?’ Ann was kneeling at her feet.

Those tears, floodgates of misery and happiness, had released the straitjacket which had held her for so long and, sitting there on the porch with the sunlight slanting through the dew-wet plane trees, her arms around her daughter-in-law and her warm sticky grandchild, she relived those moments by the pond in Hereward’s Wood and looking up at the clear autumnal morning sky saw again the defiant crippled squadrons limping home, and progressing, knew that Gareth was dead and Colin was in prison.

It was Ann who rang him. His number had all the time been in the telephone directory.

She had waited until Elizabeth, newly alive, had gone to the hairdresser and then, her heart quaking a little lest the baby wake up and cry or the milkman call or Liz change her mind and return, Ann had picked up the receiver in her bedroom and begun to dial.

The phone was answered by a woman. Disappointed, Ann hesitated, then she asked for Hugh and he came to the phone. The woman was his daughter.

Somehow she had expected to be speaking to a dreamer and the incisive voice unnerved her. She began to feel a little foolish. Perhaps Liz had been right after all to dismiss laughing the notion of contacting him. Perhaps it was all much too late.

Floundering, the receiver slipping as her palm grew moist with embarrassment, she began her story. She began at the wrong end, with Gareth’s death, when all the time she had planned to say ‘Do you remember Hereward’s Pond and a girl with red hair?’, and the polite silence in the receiver rebuked her.

But he did remember. When at last she managed to say the right words the quality of his silence changed. She felt his stillness.

‘Elizabeth?’ The word sounded stiff and painful from his lips when at last she stopped gabbling and waited for a reply. That was all he said, ‘Elizabeth.’

‘Would you … that is, do you think you and she should meet?’ she asked tentatively after yet another silence.

‘Does she want to?’ he asked, and she could sense the piercing interrogation of his eyes on the other end of the telephone line.

‘She doesn’t know I’ve rung you,’ she confessed.

‘She didn’t want to ring herself, of course.’

‘No, she didn’t want to ring herself.’

It was Ann who suggested the hotel – the public place, the neutral ground – and who wrote the date in her own diary and then for three days was too appalled at her own temerity to confess to Liz just what she had done. And as she told her she knew at once she had been wrong. If Hugh and Liz should meet again, it should have been at the behest of fate in the cool secret thickets around Hereward’s Pond, or perhaps it should never happen at all, allowing each to remember a young golden image of the other and a dream to treasure in their heart.

‘I won’t go,’ she thought as she sat alone on the autumnal golden terrace at the back of Michael’s house. I’ll be ill. Or go away. I’ll go abroad.

She had stood before the mirror inside her wardrobe door for a long long time, staring hyper-critically at herself: the hair still auburn but a glossy darker colour now than it had ever been naturally; the figure neat, slim, good legs – legs are always the last part of a woman to ‘go’ Gareth always used to say, and she had gone around for weeks studying the thin elastic-controlled limbs of old ladies. Her eyes were still clear and needed glasses only for reading and television and her skin was good, pale now and no longer tanned. It was inside that she had not changed. Inside she was still that dreamy, vulnerable girl of seventeen, but would he know it? Would he recognize her at all?

Hugh’s picture was folded inside the lid of her dressing case and she took it out again and looked at it. They seemed to have worn well, he and she, but how much had they changed, really?

The
Vogue
lying open on her knee, she watched him approach her across the room. He had shown no visible sign of recognizing her but unerringly now he was threading his way towards her through the chairs and tables. And then at last he was standing before her.

‘I thought you might not recognize me,’ she said at last, looking up to meet his eyes.

‘Why not?’

She shrugged. ‘I must have changed. I feel different sometimes.’

‘Better or worse?’

‘Some of each. Won’t you have a drink? I don’t like drinking alone.’

He smiled, sitting down on the edge of the chair opposite hers, in the same movement beckoning the waiter and in some mysterious way conveying his order without even speaking.

‘I tried to find you, you know,’ he said. ‘But your grandparents had gone. No one seemed to know anything about you.’ He gave one small shrug which to her betrayed more eloquently than the most poignant speech the agonized months he had spent searching for her when at last he had returned to England after the war. He gave a sheepish grin. ‘This is one hell of a place to meet. I take it you don’t normally frequent West End hotels.’ He pronounced the word without an ‘h’.

‘It was Ann’s idea, remember?’

‘You get on well with your daughter-in-law?’

‘Very. She’s been very kind. Did she tell you my son, my other son, is in prison?’ She had to say it quickly, to get it over with, to stop Colin’s shadow hovering between them.

He leaned back slightly, reaching into his jacket pocket for a silver cigarette case.

‘What for?’ He tapped the cigarette on the case before returning the latter to his pocket and half turned to the waiter who, having set a double whisky down on the table before him, had produced a lighter.

‘Fraud.’ She sipped defensively at her champagne. ‘It was all in the papers. It killed my husband.’

‘I’m afraid I haven’t seen the papers much. I’ve just come back from Zimbabwe.’

The gentle look he gave her told her he didn’t mind. Not about Colin. He was part of her as were Gareth and Michael and little Crispin and the girls and all the last forty odd years.

‘Your husband, what did he do?’

‘He was the architect Gareth Sullivan.’

He frowned then, his glass half-way to his lips. ‘But I met him. I met him several times. He was on a committee with me once,’ and sitting forward, his elbows on his knees, he stared at her. ‘All this time, Liz, and I never knew.’