The Shape of Snakes (15 page)

"It's been on the calendar for ages," I said unsympathetically, handing him a cup of black coffee as he slumped into a chair, "so don't blame me if you never bother to read it."

"I don't feel well."

The boys were immediately solicitous, worried that "not feeling well" had more to do with Sam's coronary than too much to drink the night before. They fussed about him, staring anxiously into his face and patting him encouragingly on the shoulder as if that would somehow prevent another attack.

Sam eyed me with sudden mischief, as if seeing a way out of a nightmare weekend, so I gave him the Ranelagh glare.

"Don't even think about it," I warned, massaging my hangover. "You know my mother. Nothing prevents her turning up. And do not
dream
of disappearing off to bed. It's your job to charm her until the boys get back."

"Oh God!" he groaned theatrically, sinking his head into his hands. "She'll
kill
me. I've told her at least ten times that it was chance that brought us to Dorchester."

Luke and Tom eyed him curiously, wondering at this sudden reversal in their father's usually sanguine, if never very thrilled, acceptance of his mother-in-law.

"What's up?" asked Luke.

"Nothing," I said. "Dad's looking for trouble where it doesn't exist."

"We could call in sick," said Tom helpfully. "I quite like Gran."

"Only because you've never seen her breathing fire," muttered Sam. "She's even more scary than your mother when she's angry"-another mischievous glance in my direction-"probably because there's so much more of her."

I handed Tom a black plastic bag to start clearing the mess on the terrace. "Your father's being ridiculous. Granny adores him. He only has to smile and she's putty in his hands."

It didn't work out like that, of course. Nothing ever does. My father had taken his own advice-
of two evils choose the lesser
-and had tucked a magazine article on racially motivated murder into his overnight bag, which my mother unearthed and read when she decided unilaterally to repack their clothes into one large case. Dad swore it was an accident, but I didn't believe him any more than he would have believed that Sam had read my files "by accident." I remarked to him afterward that it was a damn good thing I hadn't ignored his letter of warning, otherwise we'd have had a repetition of the mother/son-in-law alliance of twenty years ago, but Dad just laughed and said Sam wasn't the kind of man to make the same mistake twice.

The article in question had been written in the wake of the official inquiry into the murder in London in 1993 of a young middle-class black man called Stephen Lawrence. The inquiry-not held until 1999-had condemned the police for "institutionalized racism" following the shoddy and lackluster investigation into Stephen's murder by a gang of youthful white supremacists, all known to the police, who escaped conviction because of the culture of legal carelessness that existed in regard to the deaths of black people. My mother might have thought it was a general interest story if my father hadn't taken the trouble to highlight a paragraph and make this note to me in the margin:
M. Some good points here. Suggest you contact the journalist re police apathy and violent treatment of offenders. N.B.: River of Blood speech, 1968-Annie Butts's murder, 1978.

The paragraph read:

By definition, to describe anything as "institutionalized" means the tradition is a deep-seated one, and this suggests that Stephen Lawrence's murder isn 't the only investigation to be bungled by a predominantly white police force, long riddled with apathy and indifference toward black victims. In the thirty-one years since Enoch Powell M.P. predicted war between the races in his notorious "River of Blood" speech, little has been done by police and government to address the issue of racially motivated attacks on Afro-Caribbeans and Asians. Indeed, many in these communities point to the number of black people who have died while in police custody or while resisting arrest, and argue that some of the worst treatment they receive is at the hands of the very people whose duty it is to protect them.

My mother sniffed a conspiracy immediately, and set out to prove it by berating my father nonstop all the way from Devon. By the time they reached our house she had worked herself into a fine fury, made worse by my father's stubborn refusal to comment. He hoped, I think, that good manners would prevail once they reached the farmhouse, but he had forgotten how much she enjoyed confrontation, particularly where her daughter was concerned. She assumed-with some justification-that Sam was as much in the dark as she was and, all too predictably, the full weight of her moral outrage descended on me.

She cornered me in the kitchen. "It's the deceit I can't stand," she said. "All your life you've been saying one thing and doing another. I wouldn't mind so much if you didn't involve other people in your lies. I remember the time you and that beastly little friend of yours ... Hazel Wright ... swore you'd spent the night at her house when the reality was you were both passed out, drunk, on the floor of some boy's bedroom." She clenched her fists at her sides. "You
promised
us," she declared aggressively. " 'A new start,' you said. No more recriminations. No more dragging the family down with your dreadful fantasies. And what do you do? Break your word at the first opportunity, then manipulate your father into helping you."

I put some glasses on a tray. "Is Dad still on the pink gins?" I asked her, searching the larder for Angostura bitters.

"Are you listening to me?"

"No." I raised my voice to reach the open French windows which led directly from the quarry-tiled kitchen on to the Portland flags of the terrace. "Sam! Find out if Dad wants his gin pink, will you?"

"He does," came the shout back. "Do you need a hand?"

"Not at the moment," I called, taking a lemon from the fruit bowl and cutting it in half.

"I'll talk to Sam if you insist on ignoring me," my mother warned. "I've already given your father a piece of my mind. God knows what he thought he was doing, encouraging you like this."

I watched her for a moment, wishing I hadn't inherited so many of her features. She was a good-looking woman, although she rarely smiled because of worries about wrinkles, but I'd done my damnedest in twenty years to wipe out the similarities between us-slimmed down, changed my hair color, forced a permanently cheerful expression to my face-but it was all just window dressing. Every time I saw her, I was seeing myself thirty years on, and my smile would become a little more fixed and my resolve not to leap to critical judgments a little more determined. It made me wonder who I really was, and whether I had any substance beyond a childish desire to prove I was a better person than she was. I recalled my father telling me once-as if it were something that needed saying-that my mother
did
love me, and I answered, "Of course she does, as long as I agree with her. Not otherwise."

"You're her proudest achievement," he had said simply. "If you reject her views, you reject her."

I turned one of the lemon halves on its side and sliced into the oozing flesh. "You look as if you've been sucking one of these." I murmured, "and if the wind changes you'll be stuck with that sour expression forever."

Her mouth turned down even further. "That's not funny."

"You found it funny when you said it to me."

There was a short silence.

"You have a cruel streak in you," she said. "You don't mind who you hurt, just as long as you can have your petty little revenges. I've often wondered where you get it from. There's no forgiveness in your nature. You brood over people's mistakes in a way that neither I nor your father has ever done."

I gave a laugh of genuine amusement. "My God! And this from elephant-brain who's just been quoting Hazel Wright at me. I was thirteen years old, Ma, and Hazel and I drank two shandies each before falling asleep on Bobby Simpkin's bed." I shook my head. "You wouldn't let it rest. I don't know what you thought we'd been doing but from that moment on, I had nothing but lectures on how no decent man would take on shop-soiled goods."

"There you go again," she snapped. "Always blaming others, never yourself."

I shrugged. "I was merely pointing out that my cruel streak, assuming it exists, comes from you."

"Have I ever broken my word? Do I lie?"

Maybe not
, I thought,
but I might prefer a fe\v white lies and broken promises to the painful recognition that she would rather I had been a son
. "The only promise I made," I reminded her, "was never to mention Annie Butts in front of you or Sam again, and the fact that you're now interpreting my keeping of that promise as deceit is hardly my fault."

"Then how did your father get caught up in it?"

"In what?"

"Whatever it is you're doing ... the reason you chose to come here despite the trouble I went to to find you a house in Devon."

"I didn't make the promise to Dad," I said, "and he wouldn't have accepted it if I had. He offered to help me before Sam and I left England, and he's been a tower of strength ever since. As a matter of fact, he's the one who spotted the ad for this place in the
Sunday Times
and phoned me in Cape Town to suggest we rent it for the summer."

Another silence, rather longer this time. She wanted to ask me why-much as Sam had done last night-but she was embarrassed to admit just how far she'd been excluded from our lives and decisions. Instead she adopted an injured air. "I hope you haven't turned Sam's sons against him as well," she said. ''That really would be unforgivable."

"I haven't turned anyone against him," I answered, searching the cupboards for a jug.

"Oh, for goodness' sake!" she said sharply. "Don't be so naive. When you persuaded your father to take your side against your husband's, you effectively set them at each other's throats."

"It was never a question of taking sides," I said, finding a glass carafe, "only a question of research. In any case you took Sam's side against mine, so Dad thought it reasonable for at least one of my parents to redress the balance."

"I did it for your own good. You were behaving like a spoiled child."

"How odd," I said with a laugh. "That's exactly what Dad said about Sam."

"That's nonsense. Your father and Sam used to get on like a house on fire until you insisted on jeopardizing your marriage over that wretched Negro." She paused. "Dad's worked hard to restore their relationship, which is why it's so unkind of you to persuade him to go behind Sam's back like this."

I cocked an ear to the rumble of relaxed conversation outside. "They're certainly not at each other's throats yet, so let's hope you're worrying unnecessarily."

"For how much longer? You can't have forgotten how upset Sam was in the wake of that woman's death. What on earth induced you to raise the whole sorry business so soon after his coronary? Do you want to cause another one?"

I filled the carafe with water and put it on the tray. "It doesn't seem to have worried him so far," I said mildly, "but feel free to ask him yourself if you don't believe me." I lifted the tray. "That's everything, I think. Could you bring the lemon?"

"Is that the only reason they're still together? Because your father has a sense of duty?"

I shook my head.

"What else is there?"

"Love," I said. "He's a very affectionate man and he never gives up on anyone."

"Like father like daughter then?"

I turned to look at him. "Is that how you see me?"

"Of course. How else would I see you?"
 

We talked about everything under the sun except Annie Butts, yet her presence was powerfully felt-in my father's refusal to meet my mother's eyes, in Sam's obvious discomfort every time the subject of Dorchester was raised, in my mother's dreadful attempts at flirtatiousness to reestablish a hold on her menfolk. When it became obvious that I was
de trap
as far as she was concerned, I took the hint and vanished inside to make lunch. Ten minutes later a monumental row erupted on the terrace. I caught it only in snatches but so much heat was generated, particularly between my parents, that their rapidly rising voices carried through to the kitchen.

It does me no credit to say I enjoyed every minute of it. But I did. It was the first of my petty little revenges and I raised a silent cheer when my father told my mother it was a pity her life was so bereft of interest that her only joy came from stirring up trouble within her family.

The silence that followed my reappearance on the terrace with trays of salad was interminable. I remember thinking there was a multitude of wasps that summer. I watched them drone in their black and yellow stripes around the spirit-sugared glasses, and wondered if there was a nest nearby that needed destroying. I also remember thinking that wasps were less harmful than people, and that a sting was a bagatelle compared with the poison of a long-suppressed grievance.

"Why does your father stay with her?" Sam asked me in bed that night.

"Once he signs up to something he always sees it through."
 

Letter from Dr. Joseph Elias, psychiatrist
at the Queen Victoria Hospital, Hong Kong-dated 1980

QUEEN VICTORIA HOSPITAL

Hong Kong
Dept. of Psychiatry