The Immaculate (19 page)

He smirked, but turned away so she would not think him supercilious; there was so much in that one simple question. She was asking, “How can you really like such a noisy, smelly, busy place?” and “Isn't it simply pride that keeps you there? Now that your father's dead, wouldn't you rather come home?”

Jack knew that if his reply was at all half-hearted, his aunt would continue to probe at his uncertainty, subtly undermining his lifestyle. In order to paper over that particular crack before she could widen it any further, he replied with gusto, “Oh, I
love
it. It's such an exciting place to live—there's so much to do, so much to see. I've got a lovely flat and all my friends are there, and Gail, and my work. . . . I don't think I could live anywhere else now.”

His aunt merely grunted. Jack glanced at her and saw she was scowling; he wondered if that was because she realised he'd guessed her intention. Pretending not to notice, he said, “Look, why don't you come and visit me when I get back? It's only a few hours on the train. You could meet Gail. I'm sure you'd have a nice time.”

She pulled a face. “No,” she said a little sourly. “I don't think I'd like it. It's not for me.” She raised a bony hand and swept it at the windshield. “This is where I'm comfortable. I don't know how you put up with all those cars and people, all that pollution.”

“Oh, it's not half as bad as they make out.”

“Huh,” she muttered disparagingly and relapsed into silence.

They were getting close now. Jack could see the Butterworths' farm in a fold of land ahead. A wisp of smoke rose from the chimney like a thread of frayed wool. Cows speckled the field beyond the farmyard; Jack could hear them lowing as though playing at ghosts. He felt an urge to chat to allay his nervousness. “Do you ever speak to Molly Haynes nowadays?” he asked.

His aunt gave him a look that Jack could not quite read; it was somewhere between disappointment and exasperation. “Molly died last year,” she said flatly. “I'm surprised you didn't know.”

He felt like sinking into a hole in the earth. Knowing his face was reddening, he stammered, “Oh . . . n-no, I didn't know. What happened? I mean . . . what happened to her?”

“She had cancer,” Georgina said curtly. “In the throat.”

“Oh no,” Jack said again, but could think of nothing else to add. The last time something like this had happened had been early in his relationship with Gail. She'd been pestering him about his childhood again, and he'd got annoyed and said, “Well, you never talk about
your
parents. What's the matter? Are you ashamed of them or something?” Gail had glared at him, angry and hurt, had told him curtly that her father had died when she was four years old, her mother just a couple of years ago.

Jack became aware that his aunt was talking and adjusted his concentration. “I believe it was quite quick,” she was saying, “but I
am
surprised you didn't know.”

“Well . . . I . . . er . . . I lost touch with Molly a year or two ago,” Jack said. It was actually more like five, but he wasn't going to let his aunt know that. Immediately that thought was overlaid by another: perhaps she already
did
know and was testing him, in which case he would sound like a complete heel. “Or perhaps,” he blundered on, “it was longer than that. I can't really remember. I'm so busy nowadays time just seems to fly by.”

He resented his aunt for making him feel guilty like this. He had his own life to lead, didn't he? He couldn't be expected to stay in touch with everybody he'd ever known. Besides, communication was a two-way system. However, he knew that since he'd met Gail he'd happily become part of what he'd always despised: a couple. That was not a couple as in two individuals, but a couple as in an insular, self-contained unit. He'd lost or was losing touch with many of his pre-Gail friends. Even his best mate, Frank Dawson, was becoming a stranger now. They still went out occasionally, but it wasn't like the old times. They didn't seem to have that much in common now, and sometimes, in moments of piquant and usually drunken objectivity, Jack would hear himself talking and realise he was turning into a Gail-bore.

They passed the Butterworths' farm. Jack glanced at it, solid and rugged as though it had become part of the land itself, then he fixed his gaze on the road ahead. He knew that if he looked up he would see his father's house and he felt an almost superstitious desire to delay that moment as long as possible. Nevertheless, a block of shadow seemed to snatch at the edge of his vision; Jack knew it was the dark stone of the house contrasted against the sparkling sky.

“Do you remember the Butterworths, Jack?” asked Georgina.

Jack opened his mouth to reply and was surprised to find it dry and tacky. His tongue flickered between his gums and his lips, lubricating, unpeeling the two surfaces from one another.

He cleared his throat and said, “Oh, yes. There was the old man, wasn't there, and three sons? Martin, Edward and . . . what was the other one?”

“Gerard.”

“Gerard—that's right. They were big and blond-haired, and—”

“Jack, we're here,” his aunt said softly.

He stamped on the brake as if an animal had run in front of the car. He was aware of his tires sliding a little on the bumpy road, a billow of dust that quickly dispersed, his aunt lurching forward, then snapping back as the seat belt locked. A tingle of reaction scuttered up his legs, up his back, across his shoulders and down his arms. It settled in the palms of his hands, itching as if his skin had gone from cold to hot too quickly. The pores in his body seemed to gape and ooze sweat. “Sorry about that. Are you all right?” he said.

His aunt was frowning in pain, her eyes half-closed, kneading her breastbone with the tips of her fingers. “Why did you do that?” she said, grumpily but weakly. “Whatever were you thinking of?”

“I'm sorry,” he said again. “I don't know. I was daydreaming. . . . I'm sorry.”

“Were you trying to see me off as well?”

Jack knew she was joking, but bad-temperedly. “No,” he said, and added again, “I'm sorry.”

She glared at him a moment, then her expression softened. “Ah, well,” she said, “no real harm done.” She pointed over Jack's right shoulder. “What do you reckon of the old place then?”

For a moment, he actually felt reluctant to turn round. He smiled at his aunt and said, “Give me a chance,” before swivelling slowly.

And there was the house. At first Jack thought it was stirring, its roof splitting into a pattern of interconnected spines that were waving like tendrils. Then the light shifted, perspective imposed itself, and he saw that the tendrils were simply the peaks of the tallest trees in the woods behind the house. The house itself was as he remembered it, louring and inhospitable. There was no colour about the place, no flowers in the garden, no brightly painted door. Even the curtains at the windows appeared grey, like thick swathes of dust or cobweb. By contrast, the sky seemed almost impossibly blue—the colour of the sea on a holiday brochure. There were some alterations to the place, though, since the last time he had been here: a new wrought-iron gate to replace the rickety wooden one, the front lawn mowed stubble-close, revealing the dull mounds of intermittent molehills.

“Welcome to your luxurious holiday home,” he murmured. “Guaranteed to make your stay a happy one.”

“I've cleaned and aired the place for you,” his aunt said. “Well, with some help from young Tracey, the landlord's daughter from the Seven Stars. She was telling me she'd read all your books. I think you might have a fan there.”

Jack gave a vague smile.

“Shall we go inside?” said his aunt.

Jack took off his spectacles, slipped them into the inside pocket of his jacket, and got out of the car slowly. He turned to lever the front seat down and grab his suitcase from the back.

“Is there anything I can carry?” Georgina wanted to know, but Jack shook his head.

“No, there's just my laptop in the boot, but that can wait until later.”

Despite the gate being new, it still creaked; true to form, Jack thought wryly. As though this walk up the path to the front door meant nothing to him, he asked his aunt, “Will it be okay to park my car on the verge over there?”

“Oh, yes, I should think so,” she said, and took a key-ring containing two keys from her pocket. It was the same heavy wooden door, but with an extra lock. Thinking of her arthritis, Jack put down his suitcase and said, “Here, let me,” but she had already pushed the door open.

The smell that enveloped them when they stepped into the gloomy hall took him by surprise. The odour of tobacco and alcohol and of something sour and organic, like rank sweat and rotting vegetables, had been eradicated by the chemical tang of furniture polish, disinfectant and lemon-scented air freshener. It was certainly a far preferable smell to the one Jack had expected, though it nevertheless made him uncomfortable, for it seemed to suggest it was covering up something bad. His “dark and quirky imagination,” as
The Daily Mail
had once put it, began to shift into overdrive. Had he been told everything about his father's death or had his aunt left out a vital detail? Such as the fact that his father's dead body had remained undiscovered for some considerable time?

As if guessing his thoughts, Georgina said, “It's a bit stuffy, isn't it? I'll open a few windows.”

Jack smiled vaguely at her, put down his case and looked around. Being here made him feel very strange indeed. There was a weight in his stomach, as if his memories of childhood had congealed there.

The hall was exactly as he remembered it, so familiar that it could have been only a week or a month since he was last here; it seemed inconceivable that fifteen years had passed. The wide staircase was immediately in front of him, clinging to the right-hand wall; the corridor which slipped down the left side of it led to the vast kitchen and the dimly lit sitting room. At the bottom of the stairs was the wooden telephone table, scratched and battered. A red telephone—it looked like the exact same one that he'd used to call the ambulance for his father in 1989—sat atop a local telephone directory and Yellow Pages that seemed barely to have been touched. Curiously, Jack picked up the receiver and put it to his ear. He was oddly relieved to hear the familiar hum of the dial tone. The mouthpiece smelt of stale breath; his stomach turned slowly as he realised whose breath it must be. Behind the door were a row of coat hooks, none of which were presently occupied. There were four of them, ornate pieces of brass set on a wooden plate. Jack remembered his father always used to moan about having to traipse through to the kitchen every time he wanted his coat; eventually he'd remedied that by purchasing these hooks and putting them on the wall.

The wooden floor and stairs were uncarpeted, though Jack always recalled them being scuffed and muddied, not gleaming as they were now. Even without his spectacles he could see how the polish really brought out the deep red of the wood, the intricate whorls of the grain, the minute distortions in the floor's surface. He reached out his hand and cupped it around the carved wooden acorn atop the post at the foot of the stairs. He would always reach out instinctively for this when he was about to ascend and would use it to swing himself onto the second or third step. The memory of this little thing, which he used to do a dozen times a day and not even think about, was so sharp he could almost taste it. He felt his heartbeat snagging his breath, making him pant slightly, because just for a moment the passage of the last fifteen years seemed so quick and ephemeral and insignificant that it frightened him.

The wallpaper was the same—white with a squiggly blue pattern endlessly repeated—though it was more faded than Jack remembered it. However, it was cleaner, too: perhaps Aunt Georgina and her helper, Tracey, had even gone so far as to swab down the walls. At the top of the stairs early afternoon light spilled in through a window, saffron at the edges, misty white in the centre. All at once Jack shuddered and looked away. The place gave him the creeps. As if some presence . . .

“Memories,” he said out loud to quash the thought. “Bad memories, that's all.”

Georgina appeared at the end of the corridor and hobbled towards him. “That's better,” she said. “Nothing like a bit of fresh air to blow the cobwebs away.” She stopped some yards away and regarded him quizzically. “What's the matter, Jack? You look a little queer.”

Normally he would have found her choice of words amusing, but just now he didn't feel like making anything of it. “It's just this place,” he said. “Coming back . . . You know?”

She nodded, not unsympathetically. “It's been a long time, hasn't it?”

He nodded and smiled. He wanted to make some comment, to say something appropriate, but he couldn't think of anything and the moment passed.

“I expect it'll just take a bit of getting used to, that's all,” she said. “How about a nice cup of tea to get you settled in?”

Jack shrugged. “Okay.”

“Lovely. I'll put the kettle on if you'll make up a fire in the living room. It's a bit chilly in there. It doesn't get much light.”

She disappeared into the kitchen. Jack sighed and walked toward the sitting room. His recent dream came back to him, the house as some hostile, living entity, swallowing him whole, but he forced it to the back of his mind.

The sitting room was a little smaller than he remembered it, but apart from that it looked much the same. The carpet was brown—to absorb alcohol stains, thought Jack—and had obviously been recently cleaned. He couldn't recall what the old three-piece suite had been like, so was unsure whether this was the same one. It certainly looked old enough to have been. The fabric was faded and a little threadbare, the cushions shapeless as boulders. The dining table and chairs were in the same place as he remembered them, with the sideboard flush against the wall behind them. Again his dream came back to him: his father as the ogre in his book, his mother in her white gown, rising into the air as she gave birth to some twisted, nightmarish thing.