Old Sins (32 page)

‘It was a birthday present from his godfather,’ said Sue. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen him so excited about anything. He even took it to bed with him last night. He already has about a hundred and fifty bruises.’

‘Can we go down on the boardwalk and try Jamie’s board?’ said Miles. ‘Please, please. He says I can have a go on it.
Please.
’

‘OK,’ said Dean. ‘We’re coming. But don’t blame me if you fall and skin your knees, Miles. I’m sure it isn’t very easy.’

Miles made it look very easy very quickly. He took two tumbles in swift succession, and then suddenly got his balance and was away, swooping down the boardwalk, whooping with excitement.

‘Hey,’ said Jamie, ‘he’s real good. I took much longer than that. Miles, come back, come back,’ he yelled, and started running after Miles down the boardwalk; but Miles was far ahead, not stopping, gliding easily away, occasionally wobbling a little, a small, joyous, oddly graceful figure. At last he came back, panting, flushed, his eyes huge and starry.

‘Oh wow,’ he said, ‘was that neat. Was that neat. O, wow. Dad, can I have one, will you buy me one, please please I’ll be so good, I’ll do my homework and I’ll get good grades and I’ll help Mom with the dishes and I’ll . . . I’ll . . .’ (‘come fishing with you,’ he was about to say, but stopped, realizing it was not quite the most tactful thing to say and that anyway, if he had his way, he would never again sit on a boring lake with a boring fishing rod when he could be swooping along with the wind in his hair and the sun on his face, vying with the birds for speed).

‘You can not,’ said Dean firmly. ‘Not yet anyway. I don’t believe in letting little boys have things just whenever they want them.’

‘But can I have one for Christmas? That isn’t so far off?’

‘Maybe. I’ll have a word with Santa nearer Christmas time.’

‘No, I didn’t mean wait till Christmas, I mean have it now and not have a Christmas present. Please, Dad, please.’

‘No, Miles,’ said Lee sharply, ‘you can’t.’

‘But why not? I want one. I want one real bad.’

‘Lots of us want things real bad,’ said Sue Forrest, smiling, ‘but it doesn’t always get them for us.’

Miles looked at her thoughtfully and then turned again to his mother with his sweetest, most appealing smile. ‘Please, Mom. It would make me real happy.’

‘Miles,’ said Lee, ‘will you shut up. We said no. Now stop it.’ She was always a little alarmed by the way Miles went for what he wanted. He didn’t usually ask for much, but if something mattered to him he pursued it with a mixture of such charm and absolute determination, it was very hard to move or resist him.

‘Jamie,’ said Sue, eager to end a tedious family scene, ‘let Miles have another go on your board.’

‘I don’t want him to,’ said Jamie. ‘He’ll go off with it again. It’s my board.’

‘Yes, but you’ve had it for quite a while now, dear. All yesterday, all this morning.’

‘That’s not very long. Anyway, I need to practise.’

‘Jamie, that’s not very generous.’

‘I don’t care.’

‘It’s all right,’ said Miles suddenly, appearing to give in. ‘You take it, Jamie. You’re right. You do need to practise. I kind of got it quicker than you.’

The little shit, thought Sue; looking at Miles’ sweet smile. Who taught him to hurt like that?

‘Well, that’s real nice of you, Miles,’ she said with an effort, ‘but I’m sure you boys can share the board nicely. We’ll just sit here by the walk and watch you.’

But after half an hour the contrast between Jamie’s incessant painful clumsiness and Miles’ swift, easy confidence was more than any of them could bear. They all agreed to go home and watch the baseball game on TV.

Over dinner Miles tried again.

‘I’ll pay you interest on the loan for a skateboard,’ he said suddenly.

‘Oh, Miles, don’t be silly, what on earth do you know about interest?’ said Lee.

‘Enough to know it makes lending money worth while. You lend me ten dollars for a skateboard and I’ll pay you back fifteen in a year. That’s a fifty per cent profit you’d be making over twelve months. It’s a good deal.’

Lee laughed suddenly, ruffling his hair. ‘Maybe it is. But where would you get the money to repay a loan? And I don’t have ten right now. Not to lend, anyway,’ she added with a sigh. ‘Now be a good boy, Miles, and help me with the dishes.’

‘I don’t see why I have to. Why should I?’

‘Because it would be nice for me,’ said Lee, sharply hurt.

‘I don’t see why I should make things nice for you if you don’t make them nice for me,’ said Miles.

‘Miles,’ said Dean, looking up from the
Times.
‘Miles, you just apologize to your mother this instant. And get right on helping her.’

‘I don’t see why . . .’ Miles was interrupted by the phone. Dean picked it up, still glaring at him.

‘Dean Wilburn. Yes. Oh, Hugo, hi. How are you? Good good. Great to hear from you. Yeah, I’ll hold.’ He covered the mouthpiece and turned to Lee. ‘I was wondering when we’d be hearing from him again . . . Hugo, yes, hi. Sure, sure, we’ll be here. We’d love to see you. Lee would be thrilled, stay for a few days if you can.’

‘Not too many,’ said Lee sharply. She dreaded Hugo’s visits. They hung over her uncomplicated sunlit life a dark, uneasy shadow: not very frequent, to be sure, but inevitable, an irregularity in the year’s calendar, every two or three months. The very thought of them made her throat dry, her stomach contract, made her want to run, to hide, taking Miles with her. What she felt for Hugo these days was a fierce dislike, a deep resentment, mixed still with a sharp tug of sexual attraction. The mixture of emotions made her sullen, withdrawn, aggressive. She was always amazed he didn’t seem to care and Dean didn’t seem to notice. She lived in a state of permanent terror all the time he was in the house that he would say or do something, anything, that would arouse Dean’s suspicions; she was forced to admire, however grudgingly, his skill at deceit.

Nevertheless, skills faded, watchfulness could slip, memories falter; every second he was in the house she was sick with fear. He had not been for some time, not since May; he had been busy, he said, in England, neglecting his American company. They had had a couple of notes, there had been a card and a five-dollar bill for Miles on his birthday, a postcard from Scotland where he and Alice and the children had been having their holiday, and that had been all. She prayed fervently, every Sunday, every day almost that he would not come again; but the God who had given Miles blue eyes and blond hair plainly felt he had done enough for
her and had not seen fit to hear or at any rate answer that particular prayer.

‘Next Friday then,’ Dean was saying, ‘great. Lee will meet you, I’m sure. What’s that? OK, I’ll tell her to have dinner for you. Bye, Hugo.’

He put the phone down, beaming with pleasure; he enjoyed Hugo’s persistent friendship, felt it marked him out as a person of some interest and stature.

‘He’s coming next weekend, honey. On Friday. About dinner time. Won’t that be nice?’

‘Very nice,’ said Lee, walking to the fridge and getting out a bottle of beer, hoping Dean would not notice her shaking hand, her taut voice.

‘And Miles, I want you to be on your best behaviour next weekend,’ said Dean. ‘Mr Dashwood is coming from England and you know how he always likes to see you and hear about your schoolwork and so on. You be in real early for dinner on Friday and stay home Saturday, OK? No going out to play with Jamie or anyone. English kids are so polite. I don’t want you letting American ones down.’

‘I don’t really like Mr Dashwood,’ said Miles, scowling. ‘I don’t want to stay home and talk to him. Always asking me how I’m getting on and what grades I got and what I’m reading, and having to sit quiet at table while he drones on about his dumb kids in England. He’s so – so nosy.’

‘Miles, don’t be ridiculous,’ said Lee sharply. ‘Of course Mr Dashwood is interested in you, he’s known you all your life.’

‘Yeah, well I wish he hadn’t. And I’m going out with Jamie, no matter what you say.’

‘Miles, I am getting just a little bit tired of your behaviour,’ said Lee. ‘Just cut it out, will you. Mr Dashwood is our guest and he’s always very good to you and you have a duty to be courteous to him.’

‘I don’t see . . . why . . .’ Miles’ voice trailed gently off into an exquisite, thunderstruck silence. ‘Gee,’ he said. ‘Gee whizz, I’ll be nice to him. I’ll stay home Saturday, I sure will.’

‘Good,’ said Dean. ‘That’s better. That’s my boy.’

Lee looked at Miles sharply. He caught her eye and smiled at her, his sudden enchantingly sweet smile, his blue eyes wide, guileless.

‘I shall really like to see Mr Dashwood,’ he said slowly. ‘He’s real kind to me. I’d forgotten for a minute how kind he was.’

‘Miles,’ said Lee. ‘If you as much as say one word about wanting a skateboard to Mr Dashwood, I shall tan your hide. Real hard. I mean it.’

‘Don’t worry,’ said Miles, ‘you won’t need to. I won’t say one word. I swear it. But he’ll give me one just the same, I guess. He loves giving me things. Things I’m interested in. He’s interested in everything I’m interested in. He even said he’d take me on trips if I wanted to go. To England. He told me so.’ He stood up. ‘I’ll help you with the dishes now, Mom.’

‘OK,’ said Lee. She stood up, suddenly feeling sick.

‘Lee, are you all right, honey?’ said Dean. ‘You look a bit pale.’

Lee looked at him, and rushed to the toilet. She vomited violently and sat there on the floor, her head resting on her arm, for a long time.

Dean banged on the door. ‘Honey, are you OK? What is it?’

She came out slowly and sat down heavily on the couch.

‘Oh, it’s nothing, Dean. Must have been the swordfish. I’ll be OK. I’ll just go lie down for a while.’

She lay on the bed, twisting and turning, with waves of panic and dread going through her, rather like the fierce deepening waves of childbirth. She had been wrong, so wrong, to think that she could get away. Because Hugo was there. In the house. Growing up. Becoming more and more visible every day of her life.

London and New York, 1965–7

ROZ COULD REMEMBER
exactly when she had discovered her father didn’t love her. She had been six years old at the time and it was fixed in her memory as indelibly and certainly as her own name, and the fact that she was too tall for her age, and the least pretty girl in Miss Ballantine’s dancing class, and
therefore the one chosen to be the prince in the charity concert and not one of the pink and white princesses. And it had been no use her father telling her over and over again that he did love her, and trying to prove it to her with expensive presents and treats and holidays, just as it had been no use Miss Ballantine telling her she had been cast as the prince because she was better at dancing than all the others; she believed neither of them, and indeed she despised them both for trying to convince her of something that she and they knew perfectly well was so patently untrue.

She knew he didn’t love her because she had heard him say so. Well, perhaps not in so many words, but he had certainly admitted it. He had been having a row with her mother, shortly after she had married Peter Thetford; they had been shouting at one another in the drawing room of the house in Holland Park which Roz and Nanny and Eliza and Thetford all lived in, and which was so small you couldn’t help overhearing everything, and she certainly hadn’t intended not to overhear the row anyway. Rows were a good way of learning things. It was during a row between her mother and Thetford that she had learnt that he regarded her as a stuck-up bitch, and during another that he thought she had robbed him of any possibility of becoming a major force in politics (whatever that might mean). This particular row started when her father returned her to the house in Holland Park after she had spent the weekend with him. She never knew if it was worth the happiness of those weekends for the misery of their endings; they had such fun, the two of them. Sometimes in London, when he took her out shopping and bought her clothes that her mother strongly disapproved of, and to meals in smart restaurants like the Ritz, and let her stay up late, but more often they went to the country, to Marriotts where he was teaching her to ride, and had bought her her own pony called Miss Madam, because that was what Nanny Henry was always calling her. Nearly as excitingly, he took her for rides in some of his very special cars, the old ones with lamps sticking out of their fronts and roofs that opened like the hood of a pram, the Lanchester, and the Ford Model T and the Mercedes 60; he told her that as soon as she was big enough, probably about twelve years old, he would let her drive one of them round the
grounds of Marriotts, and that she would find out what driving a real car felt like.

They had the most wonderful time, those weekends; to have her father to herself seemed to Roz the most perfect happiness. She was very fond of her mother, indeed she supposed she loved her, although she hated Peter Thetford so much she found it very hard to forgive her mother for wanting to go and live with him, and forcing her to go and live with him too. But her father had always seemed to Roz the most perfect person; he was so good-looking, so much more good-looking than most of her friends’ fathers, and he wore such lovely clothes, and he was so good at telling her stories, and making her laugh and just knowing what she would most like to do. But more important than all those things, he seemed to value her company and her opinions; he never sent her off up to the nursery if she didn’t want to go, he would explain things to her about his company and the sort of things he was doing and wanting to do when she was a little tiny girl, and he told her it was never too early to learn and that one day it would be hers, because he was never ever going to have any other children, and that Roz was his heir.

‘Don’t be ridiculous, Julian,’ her mother had said the first time he had ever said this, when she had only been four years old, ‘how can you expect her to understand such a thing, and anyway, she’s an heiress, not an heir.’

And her father had looked at her, not her mother, and smiled, and said, ‘No, she is my heir. Roz will inherit the company, because she is my child and extremely clever and her sex is quite immaterial.’