Judicial Whispers (30 page)

He got up again and stepped back, craning his neck to peer at the top of the wardrobe, where he could see the edge of
another cardboard box. He fetched a chair and brought the box down. For another half-hour he sat on the bed, going through his records, reading sleeve notes, rediscovering his forgotten self. The Everly Brothers, Elvis, Lesley Gore … Then, when he had left university, the Stones, Cream, Hendrix, the Beatles, Papa John Creach … There were tapes, too, compilation tapes he must have made at some time in his twenties, though he could now no longer remember doing so. But there was his handwriting, bold and young and obsessed with the music of his times, listing the contents of each tape carefully on its back and front. That had been before he discovered that tastes for opera and classical music were more positive social assets. How much he had discarded of his old self, and how ruthlessly. And for what? He went through the tapes slowly, marvelling, and put one aside with his photographs.

He had heard the front door slam a while ago when his mother came in, but it was nearly eight by the time he had put everything away, snapped off the light and closed the door on his past. He went down to the little sitting room, where his mother was knitting and watching a repeat of
Fawlty Towers.

‘Oh, good,’ said Leo, and settled down in an armchair in the darkened room. His mother always watched television with the lights off; she said it helped you to see better, and she could knit without even glancing at the needles.

‘It’s nearly finished,’ remarked his mother. ‘I would have called you when it came on, but I thought you must be enjoying yourself up there.’

Leo watched the closing exchanges between John Cleese and Prunella Scales with regret. He rarely watched television in London. Either he was busy, or working – anyway, it seemed rather a lonely thing to do, and not part of the self which he had constructed in London.

‘Switch it off,’ added his mother. ‘There’s only the news on,
and I don’t want that.’ She knitted, then said, ‘I haven’t made you any supper because I didn’t think you’d fancy much after a big lunch.’

‘I’ll make some cheese on toast later,’ said Leo, turning off the television and switching on a lamp in the corner of the room. He sat back down and there was companionable silence for a moment or two, broken only by the tapping of his mother’s needles as she worked.

‘So,’ she said, coming to the end of a row and turning her knitting, ‘how much did you find to throw away?’

‘Not a lot,’ replied Leo. ‘Well, that is, all my stuff from university can go – notes and things. I’ve put those boxes on the bed. And I can’t think why you’ve kept half of those clothes. I don’t think even the jumble sales would want them now.’

‘Oh, well … you know …’ murmured his mother. The firelight danced and glinted against the spectacles.

‘I found some interesting bits and pieces, though. And some photos.’ Leo got up and fetched them from the sideboard, where he had put them earlier. He brought them over to his mother’s chair. She took them from him, laying down her knitting and preparing herself with pleasure. She loved old photographs. Leo crouched beside her and they went through them together with little absorbed murmurs.

‘Oh, weren’t we all thin, then? … That’s that Llewellyn girl – been married three times, would you believe it?’

A pause.

‘There you are at my graduation. I remember thinking how young and pretty you looked. I was very proud of you.’

‘Cer i chwarae!
Mind, that was a nice hat … Yes.’

‘Oh God, look at the length of my trousers. You made me buy that suit. I hated it.’

‘A very nice suit. You look very nice … Now, what became of that boy? I remember his mother, lived over at the Rhydoul …’

They came at last to the picture of Leo’s father, which Leo had left in deliberately. Maeve stared at it impassively, critically. ‘I remember this picture,’ she said at last, in a matter-of-fact voice. ‘He had it taken before we were married. Where did you find it?’

‘With my things. I must have pinched it from a drawer when I was little, and kept it. I don’t remember.’

Maeve nodded her head as she looked at the photograph. ‘You were always asking after your dad. Always wanting to know things about him.’

‘And what did you tell me?’

‘Don’t you remember?’ Maeve glanced at him in surprise. Leo straightened up and went to sit down in the armchair. He shook his head. ‘Well, you were very young, I suppose. You never asked much when you got older. It wasn’t much that I used to tell you. Same as what I would tell you now, I suppose. He was a decent man, in his way. Always meant well. Just couldn’t fix on one thing for long. Not a job, not his family.’ She stared at the fire, her mind in the past. ‘Mind, he was clever. Oh, a great turn of speech, a great talker.’ She glanced at Leo. ‘So you come by that honestly.’ She looked back at the picture. ‘But a born philanderer. It was a temptation, I suppose, with those looks. He was so young when we married.
Chwarae teg
.’

‘You sound as though you don’t blame him,’ said Leo quietly, his chin resting on one hand.

Maeve gave an uncertain little grimace. ‘Can’t say as I do. Not now. I did at the time, though.’ There was a silence. ‘He broke my heart for me.’

Leo had a sudden memory of sitting on the hearthrug in that very room, when he was seven or so, his football cards spread out in front of him, his mother standing in the bay of the window, watching the street, waiting, waiting. Was that the time when he had never come back? Or was it just a random recollection?

Maeve glanced over at him and gave a wry smile. ‘No doubt you’ve broken a few in your time.’

Leo smiled back at her. ‘I shouldn’t like to think so,’ he replied. In the past, he had often thought of telling her – telling her what? That he would not marry, that there were to be no sweet little grandchildren for her, no fuss to be made, no christenings, no photos, no birthdays. But where was the point in telling her? Just let life roll on. Everyone had their own disappointments. That was what came of too many expectations. Maeve knew that.

‘I have to be getting back tomorrow,’ he said, gathering the photos together.

Maeve nodded. ‘Well, it was good to see you. I was thinking, though, that next year I might get over to see Clare and her family at Ruthin. I haven’t seen your cousins for a while now, and they’ve all got families. I should like to go. And this is a long way for you to come. The roads are bad at this time of year.’

He appreciated the little excuses she laid out for him. She would rather be in Ruthin with family, he knew. These Christmas visits were labours of love on both sides.

‘That’s true,’ he replied. There was a pause. ‘I could always pop up for a couple of days in summer, when work eases off. I’m hoping I won’t be quite so busy next year.’ He thought for a moment of telling her of his application to take silk, but his feelings about this were now so blackened with pessimism that he did not wish to tempt fate. ‘Or you could come down to London for a week or two. You’d like it, you know. I’ve always told you.’

Maeve wished he would not make this offer; she found the business of declining gracefully rather difficult. She had no wish to visit her son in London. She had stayed once overnight on her way to Devon to visit her brother, and she had not been comfortable. In London her son became a creature she could not fathom. She
was proud of him and his success, but she did not understand his world. She detected changes in his accent and manner which lent him a falseness she did not wish to witness. She remembered the first time she had been aware of the changes in him, when he had graduated from King’s and she had met all his university friends. Just like his father, she had thought, longing to be after the finer, brighter air of other worlds, new faces, connections, opportunities. That he ever came back to North Wales at all she took as a token of love for herself, and nothing else.

‘Well, we’ll see,’ she said easily, and rose from her chair. ‘Let’s do something about that cheese on toast.’

The next day Leo set off early, when the sky was raw and grey. He felt unaccountably depressed at the thought of the next few months. He thought of Rachel, and of the present he ought to take her, and on an inspiration he turned off at Llangollen and headed out through the grey-green countryside towards Llyn Mawr. When he stopped outside Nell’s cottage it had an air of blankness, of dereliction, that made him think she might no longer be there. He hadn’t been in touch for three years. Why should she still be there? But there was a fastness, a solidity about Nell that made him think she would not have moved.

No one answered his knock at the door, so eventually he turned the handle and went in. The door opened straight into what was Nell’s sitting room, a comfortable clutter of rugs and sofas and books. A large wooden table under the window was heaped with a tangle of fabrics, sketches, skeins of thread. Leo looked around uncertainly in the silence and then walked towards the door beneath the stair that led to the kitchen. As he went through, the door at the rear of the house opened and Nell came in from the back garden, wiping her plump hands on the edge of her caftan. She saw Leo framed in the doorway, and stopped in surprise.

‘Good God!’ She came forward, moving a chair aside and stepping closer to him. ‘Well, you’re a stranger.’

He leant forward and kissed her cheek. Like a soft, withered peach, he thought. He remembered how tight and smooth her skin had been twenty-six years ago, how sunburnt. She had been slender then, but with that fullness around the breasts and hips which promised what he saw now. Gone to seed, he thought. All that lovely, warm ripeness had swollen to fullness, to soft folds of flesh hidden beneath her caftan. Still pretty, though, with that wispy blonde hair, only faintly touched with grey, escaping from the cotton headband wound round her head. She looked like some exotic, overblown relic of the sixties. Which, of course, was what she was.

And Nell thought, how expensive he always smells. How desirable. It ached her to see how handsome he had become, how assured and elegant. Maturity became him. He had got better-looking with age, while she, she knew, was beyond reclaim. But she did not betray any of her thoughts. It was not part of the image which Nell projected to the world. Nell did not care. Nell was strong, independent, her own person. It doesn’t matter what you look like, she told people, it’s what’s inside that counts. And people would say, isn’t Nell marvellous? She’s really
comfortable
with herself, she doesn’t care what people think. But what Nell thought, at moments like this, was, God, give me back my youth. Just an hour of being what I once was, so that this man might want me, might undress me and I could let him look at me and love me without shame.

‘You look more like something from “Man in Vogue” every time I see you, Leo,’ she said, eyeing him from top to toe. ‘Cup of tea?’ She edged away towards the sink, her loose silk moccasins shuffling on the stone floor. ‘Or what about some whisky?’

‘I’m driving,’ replied Leo with a smile.

‘Stay for lunch,’ said Nell quickly.

‘All right. Thanks. Whisky, then.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘Eleven-thirty is just about civilised.’

Nell grunted and turned to the cupboard. ‘You don’t have to worry about that out here. You’re not in London now. I drink what I like, when I like. Get out of it, cat!’

Leo watched as she fetched the half-full bottle and two glasses. He loved Nell for the fact that she behaved in such a matter-of-fact manner. No twittering greetings of welcome, no gushing surprise. Just two glasses of whisky and normal conversation.

They sat and talked, mulling over the doings of mutual friends from Cambridge, the whisky warming them gradually, their eyes growing less wary of one another. It must always be at the back of our minds, thought Leo. Even when we’re eighty, if we meet, we’ll look at one another and think, ‘You were my first lover,’ and recall how it happened and how it was. Timeless. And yet we shall never mention it to one another now. It’s too precious to touch.

‘I’ll tell you why I came,’ said Leo after a while. ‘I mean, apart from wanting to see you,’ he added, while she gave a grimace of disbelief. ‘I wanted to buy one of your pieces. Something as a present for someone.’ She looked at him in faint surprise. ‘You do still make jewellery?’ he asked.

‘Oh, yes,’ she replied, nodding. She drained the last of her whisky. ‘I was in the workshop when you arrived. Come on out and have a look.’ She rose and Leo followed her out through the chilly, weedy yard to a low stone shed. They stepped inside, into warm air perfumed with paraffin. Nell went over to the workbench beneath the window. ‘Have a look,’ she said, then turned and fetched some pieces from a small safe below the table. Leo noticed the fleshy spread of her hips against the cotton folds of her dress as she bent, and thought of Rachel’s pale, slender body, its cool skin.

She spread the silver jewellery out on rolls of cotton wool
and he examined each in turn. ‘You do beautiful work,’ he murmured. ‘It’s very fine.’

She watched him, saw the way the white winter light glinted on his hair, and wondered, with fleeting pain, why things changed, why time was so cruel, so unfair. She wished Leo had not come. She knew how she would feel when he had gone.

Leo picked up a slender necklace of silver leaves, each different from the other, and held it up to the light. ‘I like this,’ he said.

Nell gave a lopsided smile. ‘You always did like the most expensive things,’ she said.

Leo unfastened the tiny catch, put the necklace around Nell’s neck and held it there. It lay against the crêpy swell of her bosom, the tiny furls of the leaves shining against her reddened skin. Nell felt suddenly horribly self-conscious. I am so big, she thought, I am so changed. And yet, I’m not. I’m still me inside. It was all she could do not to put her arms around him and hold him to her.

Leo eyed the necklace, imagining how it would look around Rachel’s neck, lying against her soft, translucent skin.

‘I want this,’ he said, removing the necklace from around Nell’s squat neck. ‘And because I’m disgustingly rich, you can add a couple of hundred to the price. To show how much I love and admire you.’