The Immaculate (27 page)

He gazed at the painting anew, as if trying to read some message to himself in it, or perhaps to glean some inkling of the personality behind the brush strokes. Not even his aunt had spoken very much about his mother, her sister. Perhaps it was painful for her, or she thought it would be so for him. A pebble formed in his throat. Jack lifted out the paintings one by one and examined each of them minutely before laying them aside. Beneath the paintings was a layer of cloth, a sheet. With nervous fingers Jack lifted it to see what was underneath.

This time there were books, encased in plastic dustcovers. Jack didn't have to look at the books too closely. He'd seen them numerous times before. He lifted out hardback and paperback editions of his own novels, followed by American editions and some from the Continent. There was even a Japanese paperback of
Consummation
and a limited edition of
Splinter Kiss,
which was bound in leather and slipcased. Jack knew the price for the limited edition had been £150; it was now worth two or three times that amount. He was stunned by the find. He couldn't have been more astonished had he discovered the original manuscript of an unpublished novel by H. P. Lovecraft. He stacked the books next to his mother's pictures and turned back to the chest. One more layer, again concealed beneath a white sheet.

Jack's initial thought after removing the sheet was that he was looking at paper that had perhaps been used for packing, but when he lifted some out he realised his mistake. These were notebooks, perhaps diaries. He opened the cover of the first one and saw a blue looping scrawl that he recognised as his father's handwriting. At the top of the page was a title, twice underlined:
Red Summer.
What was this? He began to read.

Time passed. Seconds into minutes into hours. Jack forgot about the dust and the dark, he forgot about his discomfort, hunched forward on a hard floor, brow furrowed as he deciphered his father's untidy longhand. These were
stories.
And not only that, they were good and varied stories. There was horror here, and science-fiction, and crime, and plenty that did not fit into any particular category. Depending on the subject matter they were funny or scary, poetic or colloquial, entrancing or hard-bitten, trivial or profound. The writing was good, the characters were people you cared about, the ideas were innovative, the plots clever and original. Each of the stories concluded with the words:
THE END by Terence Stone,
and then these words would be followed by a date. Jack flipped through the stories and counted them. There were one hundred and seventy-nine. The first was dated 9/9/89, the last 3/5/04. His father must have started writing a few weeks after Jack's departure and had written his final story less than two weeks ago. Jack thought of his father, old and bitter and sad, sitting down with a pen and a notebook (and probably a bottle of whiskey) and creating these stories, these beautiful things. It was such a tragic image, full of loneliness and desperation and a kind of nobility, that, suddenly overcome, he gathered up as many of the stories as he could, hugged them to his chest, bowed his head, and wept.

Someone shone a torch full into his face. Jack squinted at it, raised a hand feebly, wishing to push aside the light and go back to sleep. It had been warm and comfortable, this sleep, deep and long and without dreams. He felt loath to relinquish it. But the light jabbed beneath the lids of his eyes and prised them apart.

It was the sunshine, not a torch. There was a gap at the top of the curtains, a tiny isosceles triangle, and the sun had found it. Jack rolled onto his back to evade the probing beam. He groaned loudly as he did so, though only because he felt so well rested. Light filled the room like a promise. Birds gossiped, cows lowed in the distance. Jack would never have believed it possible here, but he actually felt calm, almost content. He propped himself on his elbows and looked across the room to where his father's notepads were heaped beside the bookcase.

They were like the expectations of a life never fulfilled and the sight of them saddened him. But by the same token Jack felt they would finally enable him to exorcise the ghost of his father, for here was the man's soul laid bare. Jack's lifelong fear had hinged on the image he had of his father. He had seen him as rage, hate, violence personified. Beneath this Jack had envisioned an emptiness, or at best a love that had grown black and stinking as a cancer with his mother's death.

But no. These stories now gave lie to that assumption. There was love in the man, there was tenderness. And Jack intended to savour it all—the humour, the sensitivity, the compassion that his father had restrained between the bland blue covers of some four dozen notepads. It was as though someone had said:
Your father is dead but here are his thoughts. Sift through them and take what you will.
It was as though Jack's yearning voice, his cry for help, had finally been acknowledged.

He got out of bed, belly not quite bulging over the band of his blue-and-white boxer shorts, and plodded to the window. He threw the curtains wide, allowing the sunlight to stream over him and into the room. The smell of grass and bark and soil and water, and perhaps even of the sunshine itself, was so rich, so exuberant, it made him giddy. Jack closed his eyes and felt the warmth of the sun lap at the delicate skin of his eyelids.

His anxiety, his trepidation, he found, was almost gone, or at the very least dormant; last night's discoveries had knocked his emotions sideways. He felt buffeted by revelation, felt as though parts of his mind, tight as buds for so many years, had now opened spectacularly, trumpets of blossom, of piercing unexpected colour that hurt his eyes. Born-again Christians must feel something like this, he thought. He looked out at the spring morning, at the tangled conjunction of blue sky and dark, intricately limbed trees, and he felt that he wanted to sing. He grinned at the image of someone walking past and surprising him while he stood there in his underwear, belting out,
Oh What A Beautiful Morning.

He went running. In lieu of a tracksuit, he dragged on the clothes he'd been wearing yesterday, laced up his trainers, and headed off into the woods. He was unwashed, tousle-haired and sour-breathed; he would never have set foot outside his home in London in such a state, but to do so here felt liberating.

The woods welcomed him as before. Sunlight danced in rhythm with his quick breath, the smell of foliage was like a lotion that eased the fire in his lungs. The ground seemed to cushion his footsteps, to protect his bones from jarring. Jack felt wonderful, his spirit unshackled as the wind.

He ran for twenty minutes, half an hour, forty minutes. Time slipped by as though it did not apply to him. Jack felt fresh and vibrant; he felt he could run forever. Undergrowth, stirred by his passing, fell back into place behind him as though covering his tracks.

Back at the house he took a long hot shower, shaved thoroughly, brushed his teeth and ate a large breakfast. He had carried his father's notepads downstairs and placed them on the floor in front of the television. He stared at them as he chewed toast spread with blackcurrant jam. Everything he had done so far this morning felt almost ritualistic, a preparation for what the entirety of the notebooks would reveal. After breakfast, he rang his aunt and asked her if she knew where his father had kept his legal documents. She told him that everything she had found that looked official she had put in the left-hand drawer of the sideboard in the sitting room. Jack looked in there and found every single item the solicitor had asked for; it seemed like a good omen. He put it all into a large brown envelope, which he sealed and addressed, then he curled up on the settee and began to work his way chronologically through his father's stories.

By lunchtime he had read sixteen of them, and each time he came to
THE END by Terence Stone,
Jack found his perception of his father had changed, had evolved, a little more. He began to think of his father's soul as a multifaceted jewel concealed by many doors. One story was the combination to a single door. At the end of each story the tumblers fell into place and that door swung open, revealing one more facet of the jewel.

Jack found that having his father's soul unveiled before him piece by piece was an experience both rewarding and traumatic. He felt exhilarated, enlightened, saddened, betrayed, exhausted. For lunch he ate cheese sandwiches and fruit, still reading. He would have liked to have remained in the house, reading his father's stories until he was finished, but the intensity of his emotions were becoming too much. He decided it would be a good idea to take a break, get away completely, give his mind time to assimilate the information. When he stepped out of the house the sun pierced his eyes and sparked the dull threat of a headache into life behind his temples. Squinting, Jack crossed to his car and got in. He put on his sunglasses, hoping to dampen the pain, and headed out of town.

He posted the letter to his father's solicitor, and then, using his
Skoob
as a guide, toured around some of the villages and small towns in the vicinity, hunting for secondhand bookshops. He often did this when his work was going badly and he never failed to find it therapeutic. Jack covered perhaps fifty or sixty miles, though he was never more than twenty miles from Beckford. The countryside was spectacular, the villages picturesque. Of the eleven bookshops he discovered, three had succumbed to half-day closing, four specialised only in antiquarian books, and one had been converted into a delicatessen. However, the remaining three were gems: by the time he headed back to Beckford, Jack was the owner of fourteen “new” books, among them a John D. MacDonald novel and a Charles Beaumont anthology, both of which he'd been looking for for ages.

He arrived back in Beckford just before five, and decided to call in at Taylor's for some provisions. Though he had vague plans to eat out tonight, he nevertheless needed a few bits and pieces—milk, matches, mineral water. In truth, he had had ample opportunity to buy these things already today, but he wanted to get them from Taylor's. He supposed what he really wanted was to see if the place had changed at all. Jack hadn't thought of Taylor's in years, had forgotten about it until yesterday when he had driven past it on his way back from the undertaker's. From the outside the place looked exactly the same. It had a blue, white and gold handpainted sign, which for some reason always reminded Jack of the corner shops in World War Two dramas.

Taylor's, however, was no mere corner shop—it was an all-purpose store, which he was delighted to see had survived the emergence of supermarkets, hypermarkets and shopping complexes. Jack had sometimes stopped for sweets here on his way home from school (when his aunt gave him the money for them, that was), and now and again, when he was really plush, he'd bought magazines and the odd paperback from the revolving book display.

Jack smiled at the memory. The contraption had been so ramshackle that if you pushed it round too fast it squealed like an injured mouse, and shed its books as a tree sheds autumn leaves. There was nothing, as far as Jack was concerned, that Taylor's didn't sell. The tightly packed shelves of the long, low, dingy room held everything from bicycle clips to baking powder, sherbet to shampoo.

When he pushed open the door he was delighted to hear the familiar
ting-a-ling
of the bell. He looked up. It even looked like the same bell, old and tarnished but still doing its job. The place smelled the same, too—a warm, unique mix of shoe polish and fresh bread and strawberries and a million other things. At the end of the room, standing behind a long counter, was a rosy-faced woman in her thirties wearing a floral apron. Jack smiled at her and she returned his silent greeting with a nod. He supposed it had been too much to hope that Mr. and Mrs. Taylor would still be running the shop. They had been old when Jack was a child; if they were still alive, they must be ancient now.

Though he knew what he wanted, he took his time, browsing amongst the shelves and racks and displays. The place really hadn't changed all that much, though obviously some things were different. Taylor's now sold CDs and DVDs, plastic
Star Wars
figures, squeaky dog-chews that were busts of Tony Blair and George Bush, Bart Simpson lunch boxes and computer games. One thing that did disappoint Jack was that the old revolving book display had been replaced with a newer, more streamlined model that neither creaked nor shuddered. As he slowly turned the display, lifting out the odd paperback and reading the blurb on the back cover, he heard the
ting-a-ling
of the doorbell behind him.

He glanced around casually, and then straightened, suddenly tense. Patty Bates, wearing a baggy tracksuit top and the same jeans he'd had on in the pub on Monday night, turned to close the door behind him. Jack turned back to the book display. If he ignored Bates, the guy probably wouldn't even notice him. He heard heavy footsteps behind him, the slightly laboured breathing of someone who was rapidly running to seed. A voice said almost directly into his ear, “You won't find any of yours on there.”

Jack turned to face Bates, forcing a smile onto his face. “I'm sorry?” he said, pretending not to recognise the bully (ex-bully?).

Bates snorted a disdainful laugh. “You will be, pal.”

Jack's smile faded, but he refused to be intimidated. He looked directly into Bates' stone-grey eyes, and said, “I'm afraid I don't know what you mean.”

Bates leaned closer, and now Jack could smell the stale tobacco on his breath. “You'll find out,” he said.

Jack shrugged, tried to look casual, even half-turned back to the book display as though dismissing Bates. “I really don't know what you're on about,” he said.

The publican grabbed Jack's arm just above the elbow and yanked him back. “Don't pretend you don't fucking know me. I saw you in my pub the other night, chatting up my daughter. I don't want to see you in there ever again. Do you understand?”