Lighthouse (9 page)

‘I know her,’ she said when she reached him. ‘You don’t want to be with her. You don’t want to be here.’ She ushered him towards the exit and he went with her without asking any questions. They were almost at the door when it banged open and a small man darted in, glaring at Futh and Angela as he pushed past them. He made a beeline for the shiny, sticky woman sunk into the soft sofa on the far side of the room, kicking the glass table in front of her as he arrived, making the cocktail glasses jump, and shouting, ‘Where is he? Where the fuck is he?’ But Futh was already halfway through the door. The man began to harass bystanders, who backed away. The woman remained on the sofa sipping her drink and eating crisps.

Futh, outside on the pavement with Angela, his heart racing, said, ‘My jacket’s inside.’ It was lying over the arm of the sofa. There was nothing in the pockets though – his wallet was in his hand – and it was not a cold night. He could still hear the small man shouting. He could hear things breaking.

‘You’d better go,’ said Angela.

‘You’d better come with me,’ said Futh as the fighting grew louder, moving closer.

‘You could come back to my house,’ said Angela.

Futh, remembering that Angela lived with her mother, said, ‘I’d like that. I’d like to meet your mother.’

‘She’ll have taken her sleeping pill by now,’ said Angela. ‘She’ll be out like a light until morning.’

People had started spilling out of the doors, escaping up and down the street, dispersing in pairs and groups, and Futh and Angela, moving on too now, looked like any other couple walking away.

He wakes again having dreamt about Angela. He knows that he should get up so as not to miss breakfast but he can’t bring himself to move. He lies there naked and dozing and drifting back into his dream, and he is still there when he hears, through his semi-sleep, a knock at the door. He opens his eyes but he is not certain that the knock was at his door or whether there was a knock at all. After only a couple of seconds, he hears the door being unlocked, sees from his bed the door handle turning, the door opening, and then a maid standing in the doorway, stopped in her tracks. Futh raises himself up on his elbows and smiles at her. The maid says nothing but gives him a look which makes him shrink and then she leaves the room, pulling the door to behind her.

He gets up, washes at the sink and then dresses, putting on his shorts and a clean short-sleeved shirt. He goes down to breakfast in his socks, with big plasters over his raw heels. The kitchen is closed but people are still finishing what is already out and Futh helps himself to the scraps. He eats some bread and cheese and pockets a hard-boiled egg in its shell for his lunch.

There are little vases of mixed flowers on each table, and he recognises, amongst other things, violets. He takes one out of his vase and puts it to his nose but he can’t smell anything.

He planted violets in the garden when he and Angela first moved into their house. There was a huge bed of them and yet there was no scent at all.

‘That’s violets for you,’ said Angela. ‘You can’t smell them.’

And so, to show her their scent, to demonstrate that you could smell them, he bought her a set of violet toiletries – bath oil, shampoo, soap, body lotion, eau de toilette. Angela looked at the gifts and said, ‘I’m not your mother.’

At the table next to his, an attractive young woman is sitting alone. It occurs to Futh that at the time of that first trip to Germany, his father would have been about the same age as Futh is now. Futh can’t imagine his newly single father – he can’t imagine himself – in a hotel bar or some other bar or just in passing, starting up a conversation with a strange woman which would lead to his taking her back to his hotel room. What had his father said?
My son’s asleep in the bedroom but there’s a bathroom?
Futh imagined conducting a conversation with the young woman at the next table. How did one move so quickly from
Hello
to a hotel bathroom?

He has always courted women slowly, over months, starting with coffee in cafés and walks in the park, moving on to restaurants and art galleries and museums, not that it always got even that far. With Angela it was different. She was the one to take him to bed. After that first time at her mother’s house, she came round to his place and when she arrived he took her coat and offered her a cup of tea and a scone and she rolled her eyes and said, ‘I’m not your mother.’

Occasionally, and always in bed, she would talk about this married man who had been her boyfriend. ‘He’s always under a car or taking something apart,’ she said after asking Futh whether he could look at her car, fix a headlight which wasn’t working, and discovering that he could not. ‘You’re all in your head. He’s more physical. Good with his hands.’ She always talked about him in the present tense.

Futh, coming to the end of his breakfast and glancing again at the young woman sitting at the next table, finds that she has been joined by her rather large boyfriend. Futh finishes and leaves.

He eats his hard-boiled egg in the woods, enjoying the shade. He remembers his father carefully shattering the shell of a boiled egg while he talked about the powder, the egg substitute, which he had been fed as a child. ‘It was OK,’ he said. ‘You make do.’

Futh had been anxious about spending a week with just his father, but, he had thought, how bad could a holiday be? And as it turned out, in spite of the ferry and the women in the hotel bathroom and his father saying, ‘We can do without her,’ and things like that, Futh enjoyed their holiday. Futh – taking an egg from his father and holding it in his hand for a moment to admire its perfection before bringing it to his opening mouth – did not want it to end, did not want to have to go home ever again.

In the months between the decision that he and Angela would separate and his actually moving out, Futh had been visiting the parks and art galleries and museums which the two of them had never in fact been to, keeping out of her way. He visited the aviary, saw the exhibitions, sat in the cafés, and felt very much like his adolescent self on his climbing frame in the dark, putting off the moment when he would have to climb down and go in.

In the meantime, Angela was packing his belongings into self-assembly cardboard boxes, and each time he came home he found more of them stacked up in the spare room in which he had recently been sleeping.

‘Come and keep me company,’ Gloria had said, standing on the other side of the fence in her nightie. She had not brought out the rubbish this time, she had just come out and walked over to where he was sitting on his climbing frame, and Futh wondered how easily she could see him from inside her house. He had thought himself pretty much invisible sitting there in the dark. He wondered if she had noticed him watching her.

Futh tried to decline her invitation, but she lingered, leaning over the fence, cajoling him. Futh was also alone and he’d had no supper. He imagined Gloria putting something nice on the table just for him. Agreeing then to go with her, he climbed down and clambered over the fence, following Gloria over her lawn and into her house.

He sat on a bench at her kitchen table and watched her making drinks – putting ice in two glasses, adding something, a liqueur, which made the ice crack and shift. She brought the glasses to the table and handed him one, sitting down beside him, and Futh moved along the bench, into the corner. He took a sip of his drink and turned his face away towards the open window, through which he could clearly see his climbing frame looming over the little fence, the cloud-blurred moon above it.

On the window ledge, there was a Venus flytrap, its bright red leaves wide open. Gloria, sitting down, seeing him looking at her plant, said, ‘It’s a beauty, isn’t it? Your daddy doesn’t like it but I just love it. It catches every little thing that comes by.’ Futh reached towards it, an outstretched finger poised to poke at a trap, to tickle its trigger hairs, to feel it close around him, and Gloria said, ‘Don’t do that.’ He withdrew his hand, turning back to his drink, trying a little bit more, and Gloria said, ‘It’s caught a moth.’ Futh looked. A trap had closed and there was something inside it, legs and the edges of wings poking out between the cilia. He wondered how it had managed that. He had not looked away for long. He was sorry to have missed it.

Years later, in his twenties, he would visit Japan, and he would see clingfilm-wrapped sea creatures in supermarket refrigerators slowly and uselessly moving their legs, and he would be reminded of the moth in the Venus flytrap in Gloria’s kitchen.

‘What happens now?’ he asked.

‘In a week or so,’ said Gloria, ‘the trap will open again. What’s left will blow away.’

As Futh watched the moth struggling between the plant’s tightly shut leaves, he felt a fingertip touching the back of his neck and the top of his back, underneath his T-shirt. ‘You’ve caught the sun,’ said Gloria. Futh stayed still, looking out at the darkness, feeling the slight weight of her touch on his skin, the warmth of her fingertip, and the line she had traced from the nape of his neck to the top of his spine, and then he heard her doing something on the far side of the kitchen and he realised that she was no longer touching him and probably had not been for a while.

Gloria was fetching more ice – returning to the table with the ice cubes already melting in her hand, water dripping between her fingers – and the bottle of whatever they were drinking. She encouraged Futh to finish the drink in front of him and then refreshed his glass. Sitting down again, she looked at him, cupped his face in her hands, and said, ‘I can see your daddy in you.’ From time to time, while they drank, she patted his knee or stroked his hair. When someone rang the doorbell, Futh jumped. Gloria stood and went to the front door.

Futh could not hear any voices. There was a porch with an internal door which Gloria had perhaps shut before opening the outer door. But he heard heavy footsteps going up the stairs. Gloria came back into the kitchen. ‘You shouldn’t be here,’ she said to Futh. ‘It’s past your bedtime.’ Leaving the kitchen again she said, without turning round, ‘Let yourself out,’ and she switched off the light as she went.

Futh felt a bit sick, like he did on ferries when the crazy carpet was seesawing under his feet. He stood up, holding on to the table, and then sat down again.

Some time later, he was still sitting there in the dark when he heard someone coming down the stairs, down the hallway, towards the kitchen. He expected to see Gloria coming through the doorway and was thrown when instead – smelling the pub before the light snapped on – he saw his father.

His father went to the fridge and took out a bottle of wine, and then opened the cupboard next to it and got out two glasses. Futh pressed his sunburnt back against the wall. His father, without noticing him, left the kitchen again.

Futh listened to his father’s footsteps going up the stairs. He did not move when he heard the creaking of the floorboards overhead, and then the bedsprings, nor when he heard again the floorboards and then footsteps on the stairs and in the hallway.

The kitchen light snapped on again and there was his father going to a drawer by the sink and taking out a bottle opener. And then his father swung round to face Futh at the table, and for a long moment they just looked at one another. His father broke the silence. ‘Go home,’ he said. Futh waited, and his father came a little closer and said, ‘Now.’

Futh stood up, slid along the bench and got himself to the back door. As he stepped off Gloria’s back doorstep, the kitchen light went out and he negotiated the plant pots and the bins in the dark. Climbing over the low fence into his own garden, coming down on the other side, he was sick into the empty flowerbed and onto the pitch-black grass.

His father has always made fun of him for not being able to hold his drink, as if he were not just the same. He ridiculed Futh for not knowing how to drive in his thirties, for still hitchhiking in his forties. When Futh finally took driving lessons and passed his test, his father criticised him for being the kind of driver who did not know the first thing about cars, for running out of petrol and for paying other men even to change a bulb in a headlight. And he mocked him for spending all day long trying to make paper smell like apples. ‘What’s the point of that?’ his father said. ‘You know you can buy actual apples?’ Futh told him about the millions of tiny perfume bottles whose scent would still be there in twenty years. His father said, ‘Real fucking apples. You can eat them.’

Futh’s first memory is of playing under the kitchen table while his mother stewed apples for his dinner. She had the radio on and was humming along while she peeled and cored and chopped the apples and put the pieces in a simmering pan, and the kitchen was full of music and sunlight and the smell of unadulterated apple.

He recalls asking Angela, after they were married, if she could make an apple crumble. Finding her in the kitchen the next day cooking apples, he stood at her shoulder while she worked and he told her about this memory of his mother, how the smell of the apples took him back, and he saw her jaw tighten. The apple crumble came out well, but she did not make it again.

Futh, with sore feet and no need to hurry, arrives at his hotel in the late afternoon. He goes straight up to his room where his suitcase is waiting for him. After showering and taking a nap he goes out again, into the balmy evening, to look around the town before dinner.