Goodnight Lady (75 page)

The lone guitarist was joined by two men on electric guitars, a drummer and a pianist. The blues beat picked up and Kerry belted out the chorus in a voice that was loud and clear.

 

Briony sat stunned as she listened to her sister’s voice, belting out the Janis Joplin number in her old inimitable style. This proved not only to Briony, but to everyone who heard Kerry, that she could indeed carry on singing ’til she dropped. She was over sixty years old yet she gave the song a new dimension, a new angle, and the band, who were all playing now as if their lives depended on it, were all feeling privileged to be in on this miraculous fact.

As she finished the number, the audience stood up and clapped the gaunt woman on stage who could still sing like an angel. The ovation was electric. John Peel came out and clapped with them. The place went wild. Even the cameramen were clapping.

Briony looked at Cissy and was not surprised to see she was crying.

Happier than she had been for a long time, Briony sat back in her seat and grasped Tommy’s hand. She squeezed it tightly. He leant towards her and brushed her cheek with his lips.

‘She can sing, Bri, no one can take that away from her, love.’

And Briony nodded at him furiously. Tommy was right. No one could ever take that away from her. Not even Kerry herself, and Christ himself knew she had tried.

 

Briony was humming the tune to herself all the next day. It seemed to her as if it was imprinted on her memory. She had heard it many times, but it had just sounded like a noise to her, a record for the young. Now it was a song for everyone.

Briony was humming it as she walked out of her house to her car. She felt light of spirit and light of foot. She felt quite youthful herself. This thought made her laugh. Tommy had gone to the dog track with Boysie, Daniel and Marcus, a pastime that was both recreational and profitable seeing as the twins owned it. She was driving over to see Kerry and Liselle. At least, that was what she’d planned until she saw the man standing on her drive.

The sun was in her eyes and she blinked furiously, walking over to the dark-coated figure. He seemed familiar to her somehow even though she couldn’t see his face. As she approached him, her heart stopped dead in her chest.

The man saw the reaction his presence caused and instinctively put out a hand to steady her. Briony grasped it as if she was a drowning woman, feeling the warmth of her son’s hand for the first time in many years.

‘Miss Briony Cavanagh.’ It was a statement not a question.

Briony felt a sensation in the pit of her stomach, a burning as if she had swallowed a bottle of acid.

‘Benedict.’

As soon as she uttered the word Benedict Dumas knew that it was all true. He had watched her for a year, following in her footsteps, observing her. He had hired private detectives to find out all about her business interests and still his thirst for knowledge had not been quenched. No matter how bad the news about her, how terrible she seemed, she had fascinated him. He had to know about her. Now he had to speak to her.

A mixture of contempt for her mingled with curiosity. She was his natural mother, she had borne him.

‘Come inside ... Come into the house ...’ Briony was finding it difficult to talk. He had sought her out, as she had always prayed. He had sought her out and he was here, on her doorstep, and the joy in her knew no bounds. He followed her silently into the house.

Cissy took one look at the man with Briony and her jaw dropped with shock. It was like looking at Briony. He had the same green eyes, the same shaped face, he even had a reddish tinge to his hair. This was Briony’s son, come home.

Briony shut the door and gestured for Benedict to take a seat. He sat down carefully, as if he might break the chair. Briony went to the drinks cabinet and poured two large brandies.

He accepted his without a word.

They surveyed one another for long, long minutes. Both acknowledging the likeness. Both wary, and yet greatly interested in the other, and both loth to show this fact. Finally, after what seemed an age, Briony broke the silence.

‘Who told you?’

‘My father.’

Briony savoured the sound of his voice, as she might have a delicious pastry or a longed-for drink of cool clean water.

‘Henry? Henry told you?’

Benedict shook his head. ‘He died last year. He mentioned it in his will. I never knew, never had any idea...’

Briony heard the hurt in him then, the hurt and the unpleasant shock the knowledge had apparently given him. It was a revelation that he hadn’t enjoyed, that much was evident.

‘It was a long time ago. Over fifty years actually, but you’d know that of, course.’

‘You were a child, a child prostitute ...’

Briony heard the words and the effect they had on her was like a blow. Her head was reeling. The way he had said them! And then anger came to her. It spewed into her head, and came out of her mouth like molten lava.

‘Listen here, Benedict Dumas, I was thirteen when you were born, thirteen years old! My father sold me to your father, it’s as simple as that. It was a business arrangement. My elder sister Eileen had gone to him first, God rest her, she never got over it. She died because of Henry Dumas, she died out of her mind!

‘Now you listen to me and you listen good. Your mother bought you from me. I was a kid, that’s all. I didn’t know what life had in store for me, I knew nothing, yet thanks to your father I knew everything! I bore you and I loved you, God help me, I loved you more than anything in the world, but circumstances were such that I had to give you up. It was another of the Dumas business deals.

‘Your father was incapable of sleeping with a grown woman, he liked little girls with no breasts and no knowledge of men. He bought and paid for them as other men would a grown prostitute. I’m sorry to shatter your illusions about him, but facts are facts. He shaped my life, Henry Dumas, he shaped it and left me half a woman who felt nothing for years.

‘Not a day has gone by since but I’ve thought of you, Ben. The only child of my body. I’m sorry if I don’t fit the bill, but that’s another thing I can’t do anything about.’

Benedict looked into her face and what he said didn’t really surprise her.

‘I hated Henry Dumas all my life. It’s funny, but my mother’s ... my adopted mother’s ... father was the only man I ever cared for. Yet now I know he was nothing to me really, no blood relation at all.’

Briony was sorry for her outburst, but this big handsome well-spoken man frightened her, even while she loved to look at him and hear his voice. He frightened her because she knew he was looking down his nose at her. Knew he would be ashamed of her,
was
ashamed of her and what she was. The knowledge made her want to cry.

‘Why did you come here? Why did you want to see me?’

She asked the question even though she was terrified of the answer.

‘I had to know you, I had to see you and talk to you. I had to know what stock I had come from, I had to know if you were as low as I had been told...’

Briony laughed then, a heartrending little sound that was nearly crying.

‘And am I?’

Benedict finished the brandy in one gulp and looked into the face so like his own.

‘Yes, you are.’

With that he stood up and left the room.

Briony heard his footsteps as he walked to the front door, she heard the crunch of his expensive boots as he walked across the gravel of the drive and away from her.

Then the tears did come and with them the burning heat of humiliation and shame.

He was her son, her boy. She still loved him with every ounce of her being.

 

Benedict walked from his mother’s house and down the drive in a state of terror and shock. He had seen her, spoken to her. He had sat in her house. The biggest impression she had made on him was the fact she looked the same age as him. They could have been brother and sister.

As he pulled open the door of his car and got into the driving seat, he felt his heartbeat begin to slow down. His pulse was not so erratic now and he took long deep breaths to calm himself.

She was so young.

Brother and sister.

The thoughts swirled around in his head, making him dizzy. He saw her then in his mind’s eye as a young girl, a very young girl of ten or eleven. He saw his father as he had seen him in countless old photos, taking the young girl as a grown man might a woman. Taking her as his right. After all, he had paid for her. He saw the frightened face, her crinkly red hair and those huge green eyes. The scene before his eyes sickened him, and the way he had hurt her sickened him more. But, oh, he had wanted to hurt her, that girl-woman who had borne him. He had wanted to make her hurt as he had been hurting for the last year.

But hadn’t she been hurting for fifty years? Over fifty years in fact. Since she had first come into contact with his father? Hadn’t he wanted to hurt her because she had abandoned him, given him to Isabel and Henry Dumas, when she was his flesh and he was hers. When they were mother and son?

Hadn’t he wanted to hurt her for every hurt inflicted on him by a father who couldn’t stand the sight of him, who had wickedly tortured the young boy in his care because he was the product of Briony Cavanagh and for no other reason but that? Because his mother had been a young girl, a young child, and Henry’s wife Isabel had bought his son from her because she wanted a baby so desperately?

And with the clarity of adulthood and hindsight Benedict realised that he himself had also been a stick to beat Henry Dumas with. A hold over him. Something Isabel could use to get her own back for the barrenness of her marriage and her life.

Wasn’t that why he had hurt the woman back in that house? No other reason but that? Because through her he had been hurting all his life?

And now through his meeting her, and what he had just done to her, he would carry on hurting, only this time the hurt would be tinged heavily with shame and guilt.

Yet, through her, now he had it all. A good education, a good marriage, two healthy children, more money than he could ever hope to spend, and a place in society that had culminated in his inheriting his grandfather’s peerage. Benedict Dumas, now Lord Barkham. He smiled a twisted smile at he thought. Lord Barkham begotten by a man’s twisted desire for young children.

It was a heavy burden to carry around with you day after day, and yet he knew he would have to. For his own children’s sakes.

He felt an urge to run back to that house and into that woman’s arms, to cry on her shoulder and hear that deep husky voice tell him everything would be fine. Instead, he started up his Daimler and drove home to Fenella and Natalie and his son Henry Dumas the second. Home to his real life, that wasn’t really his life, had never been his life.

At over fifty years old he felt like an orphan, and strange as human nature can be, after the revelations of last year, that felt quite good.

 

Delia was in the Jack of Spades, a small club in Soho that played jazz music, served warm beer, and turned a blind eye to the smoking of cannabis. She looked at the youth with her, about nineteen, with a three-day stubble on his chin. Already she wished she had never met him.

He loved the thought that she was related to Kerry Cavanagh. The name Cavanagh haunted Delia. Jimmy Sellars had loved the fact she was related to all those people whom he admired, the twins most of all. It was just a pity Delia herself didn’t garner the respect her cousins and her aunts did. Then she might be a bit happier.

She accepted the tiny piece of blotting paper from Andy and looked at it for a second before putting it on her thickly coated tongue. It had a little smiling face printed on it. The LSD was called California Sunshine and was about as good as you could get. She felt the need for the rush tonight, a deep inner need that had nothing to do with Andy, her aunts or her cousins.

This was between her and her brain.

The thought made her smile.

Everywhere she looked were Jimmy Sellars lookalikes. All smoking dope, dropping uppers and downers and acid. The smell of chemicals should be coming out of their pores by now, she reckoned. But she did miss Jimmy Boy, missed him a lot.

An hour later she was smashed out of her skull. The room had taken on rosy edges, faces were swimming before her eyes, faces that were like plasticine models. She lifted an arm and watched the strobing. Fifteen arms moved in perfect harmony together. She smiled to herself. All around her she could see a blue heat coming from the bodies. Bodies that were entwined, were moving with perfect clarity, and yet were not moving at all. Let’s hear it for California Sunshine, she thought to herself then. For being out of your box and still able to think.

Andy thrust a drink into her hand and she gulped at it gratefully, feeling the warm bubbles of lager as they made their way through her body. Every nerve was alive, every pore in her body could feel. That was what she loved most about LSD. Only when tripping could she really feel that aliveness, that being present feeling that deserted her when she was straight. When real life was just a bummer. When her feelings were deadened and frustrated by lack of chemicals. Whoever invented LSD should get the peace prize, should be feted and adored. Whoever made this synthetic feeling of happiness should be rewarded.

Such was Delia’s thinking when she bumped into the guy with the long black hair and the crooked grin.

Before she knew what was happening she was out of the club, was in a car then in a flat in Ilford, with Pink Floyd on the stereo and her own voice talking above it.

She was telling him all about her life, her child, and the death of her child’s father.

The man listened gently, prompting her now and then or asking her questions.