Wait Till I Tell You (16 page)

‘Girls are like people, I realised it late on,’ said the younger man to the older, who resembled him too much not to be linked to him by blood.

‘It will have been my fault you did not see that before. Though I can’t see the good it will do you to know it now.’

‘Why do you say
now
?’

‘You’ve already done your harm and it is late to begin any undoing.’

‘You know more than most that there is no undoing. At least I need do no more harm now.’ The young man spoke as though harm were something simple, like hammering.

The older man stood to open a window, with such urgency that he seemed in want of new air. The air that entered the train brought nothing new with it but dust more rural than the dust within.

‘You dramatise yourself, Findlay, a pointless thing to do in your profession and very tiring in hot weather.’ Sitting down, the older man pinched his trousers and flung his right leg over his left as though this gave depth to his paternal but unfatherly dictum.

‘Gum?’ rejoined his son, loosening a white tooth of chewing gum from its packet with his thumb and offering it gingerly to his father. It might have been the elegant old man in his cream linen who had been uncouth. But the reprimand was lost on Robert Meldrum who sat now looking at his son over his own, just touching, fingertips.

Knowing that his father was waiting for him to offend, Findlay shot five bits of gum into his own mouth and began to champ until his throat was flooded with minty saliva and his jaw was aching. Would it be the professional or the private life that was coming into the old man’s sights, he wondered, with the same dishonourable curiosity that led him to encourage people to repeat themselves indefinitely and to tell him stories he already knew.

‘I followed a trade all my life and I fear you are too good for that.’ The word ‘good’ carried none of its customary decent replete weight. Nor did it imply its opposite, merely something lightweight, skittering, inconsiderable.

‘Father, your life is not over,’ said Findlay, hoping to divert attention from his own life, still, he felt, hardly begun. He almost forgot himself and began to flatter the hard old man, as he might have someone he loved less and trusted more, enticing him into discussion of the past with some welcome slipway down into memory, ‘And what a life it has been, eh . . .’

‘No, you can’t catch me like that. Are you hungry at the stomach or is it the chewing you favour? If so, how odd. How unnatural indeed. You are like that.’ Findlay knew his father meant ‘you’ the young. He himself was seventy-two; Findlay forty years younger. ‘You are all appetite and no hunger. All temper and no rage.’

Only a man as stagy-looking as his father, black-browed, blue-eyed, white-haired, elongated but without idle languor, could speak in this public manner in a private place without self-consciousness. The natural dignity of his appearance had throughout his life lent authority to the actions and sayings of Robert Meldrum. Replacing the words in the mouth of a notional short man with clumps of hair, a man whom Findlay had begun to keep about him as a companion in subversion as a boy, was the way to subtract the awe inspired by his father’s stern Scots glamour. Although he would have denied the word, the older man exploited the quality, as a preacher might have, in mixed vanity and good faith.

Findlay was slighter than his father, but like him tall and blue-eyed, the eyes seemingly set in the sockets by sooty fingers. His hair was black as his father’s had been, but with needles of white at the back and sides. He was less dapper than his father, and as evidently clean to the pitch that actually repels dirt, rather than the holiday smartness that draws it and is ruined. Neither man wore a colour much beyond the neutral, although there was in Findlay’s inner jacket pocket, when it flapped open, a row of pencils, crocus yellow, each with a small pink eraser bound to its top with a band of gold metal. Once or twice his right hand went up to these pencils and rolled them like a toy or an instrument. Their small geared hexagons made a noise only Findlay heard.

None the less he failed to notice when his father, in a train, in summer, in England, leant his fine head against the rough blue nap of his seat, drowsed, slept, and, sometime before arrival at their undesired destination, died.

‘It’s unfortunate you married a man so far superior to yourself,’ said her husband.

There was a choice of replies to be made, but since it was breakfast time and their two children were watching Morag to see how she took Daddy’s joke, she said, ‘That is so, I’m afraid.’

Edward’s comment had been made in front of the children before, but never before, as now, stripped of the pretence of levity. It was clear that today would continue the bleak barracking of the night before, until he was out of the house. On his return it would, as clearly, resume. She began to attend to his wants with an assiduity that was part of the ugly bargain she had some months ago made with fate: she would tend to him scrupulously if one day she might be delivered from him. She squeezed oranges down on to the juice extractor as though they were the breasts of the martyred St Agatha.

The table had no place, indeed no room, for her, and it was her pleasure to wait on her family. The thought of eating with them confused her; who would fetch things if she sat down? If she did sit down, she would surely have to rise, so it was easier not to. She thought these small acts of abnegation would attune her children at an early age to the deceits of family life and, even more importantly, the real place of women: these inoculations she, being ironic, took as salutary, and they, being innocent, took for example.

When told she was inferior, it came naturally to scrutinise the superior object. Morag was inferior to a large man nearing forty who sat like a stranger among his possessions and children and whose umbrella, had this been a normal day, he would later forget, causing him to return and feel obliged to kiss her.

In the garden below their first-floor kitchen window a cat moved with rumpy stealth towards a fit-looking magpie that had settled under the denuded roses, among petals lying profuse over the sodden grass. The cat kept its belly from touching the ground, as it would not have on a dry day. Its dark tail and ears cast their shadow in the fresh wet sunlight, its creamy body appearing too blurred and soft to be stockinged and tipped in so sharp a mode. All through the grass were spiders’ webs still, though where the cat had been there was a bright trail though the webs’ slick silver.

When the Siamese laid low the maggot-pie the squawks and cawings came from both. The cat batted the smart but loutish bird, deriding it to death, then crunching at it with a besotted look as if to say, ‘Doesn’t it suit me?’ The big bird, now without its life, looked frivolous as a hat, but for the dainty giblets and bladders the cat was discarding from its feast. All the while wet petals fell with no sound and up in the kitchen the children, silenced by this pleasant domestic diversion as they had not been by their parent’s contained wretchedness, watched, staying their eating only to exchange old saws:

‘One for sorrow, two for joy,

Three for a girl, four for a boy,

Five for silver, six for gold,

Seven for a secret that’s never been told.’

Morag caught the boiling milk as it reached its height and poured it for her husband on to the freshly brewed decaffeinated coffee. On noticing that there was a drop of coffee on the saucer, she fetched a clean cloth and wiped it, making sure that she took the cloth from the pile that was composed of cloths that touched clean surfaces only; not floors, the sink, the table or anything that had not already been washed at least once – a system instituted by Edward.

So as to prepare Edward’s breakfast without distressing him, for he had washed his hair this morning as usual, she lit a candle, and set it in the sink to consume the frying smells from the children’s breakfast. No one could say she had not colluded in her own demotion from love object to servant. The extravagant acts of obedience and enslavement had, she thought, been a conduit of intimacy between them. Now these actions had set into resented habits and their certainly fetishistic significance had fallen away. Sometimes, when Edward was far from home and she was able to think about him with the balance bestowed by distance, she suspected that she had invented some of his more demanding stipulations in order at first to have more ways of pleasing him, and at length to have more things to blame him for.

She extracted the unsalted butter that only he was permitted, and cut off a small nut or knob, as the books told one a small piece of butter was dubbed. It was not to her especially lubricious stuff.

The butter went into its own brick-shaped, lidded pot, to avoid taking on the smells of other substances. The openness of butter to corruption is extreme, Edward had taught her; only let it see garlic, or melon.

In the early days of their marriage the serene freedom from confusion that her husband had represented, with his distaste for muddle or inappropriateness and his almost mystical sense of what was proper, had been a relief to her: like entering clean sheets for good. A man who knew where things should be put was a man to honour in untidy times.

Now, though, Morag had come to think of mess as having an energy if not sublime at any rate fully human. She had begun to cultivate people who lived in a manner abhorrent to Edward, so that she might sit at their sticky kitchen tables to hear them unpick their troubles as they cleaned their children’s faces with their own spit and a paper handkerchief and shook out cat litter, birdseed, flour and currants with impartial, unwashed hands. She fancied she saw a nobility and vigour she did not find in her own house in whose kitchen she never entertained.

‘What are these?’ Edward asked one evening after his bicycle ride home, his first bath and their wary kiss, during which he smelt her carefully and could guess almost her entire day from what he smelled.

Morag had once made an ebullient – the word occurred to her as she pitied herself for living with a man who did not love fun – an ebullient flower arrangement that included beautiful, fat, complicated globe artichokes. She had thrust their thick architectural stems deep into a vase and starred them about with blue cornflowers and asters the colour of plain chocolate.

Edward flinched when he saw it, at the whimsy as much as at the waste.

She set today’s egg before him, and ten toast soldiers. He had never stipulated that he liked ten, but in complaining to a friend one day of her husband’s ways, she had invented this one, and found herself complying.

‘A man so attentive to detail must be attentive in other ways,’ her friend had said, not wrongly, but displeasing Morag who was attached to her hobby of resentment. Her friend was anyway not to be trusted in the matter of men, changing her walk and lifting her tail and walking round the room only to stop, and softly pick things up to hold them against her cheek in the manner of a girl in an advertisement.

‘You two go and clean your teeth,’ Morag said to her children. She had retained enough tact not yet to enjoy displaying the faults in her marriage to its children, a stage that comes as a rule when the children can least begin to bear it.

Hearing her voice change, she said to Edward, while she took the crusts off his second piece of toast, placed it on a clean plate, and took away the used things before setting down a fresh knife, ‘Would you like a second egg?’

He had never said ‘Yes’ in answer to this question and did not do so now. He did not take more than three eggs in the week, making sure to include in this tally units of egg that might have been incorporated into other things he ingested, for example cakes. Morag’s question about the second egg therefore had to his ears something of the murderous in it.

‘If you want to kill me,’ he said, ‘continue to behave precisely as you have done for the past three months. You will find no one as good as me . . .’

She left before she heard this sentence end with the words, ‘for you.’

She left the house with her raincoat, her handbag and a pair of painful silver shoes she had worn to annoy Edward that morning, but which by the end of a day that included the plane south, a journey on the tube that had been almost alarmingly smooth, as though she would never have human feelings again, a hot train journey through a part of England that made her homesick already for Scotland, and a promising period of eavesdropping that ended with one of its participants’ disappointingly quiet death, annoyed her much more and burned her too, by virtue of their metallic finish.

Hard along the house’s dusty yellow length the scaffolding was set, carrying all the blows taken to fix it tight together up to Jean’s open window in the form of longitudinal shudderings and breathy irregular chimes. She was resting in a position that she had taught herself during the years of living in other people’s houses. Braced everywhere but the neck, her body was arranged in the least comfortable chair in the room. This choice might not have been understood by people unashamed of their own ease. Her wrists and hands curled, ready at any moment to push her up, over the chair’s splint-like arms. The plumbing of the house clanked and hissed without cease. In the sash window-frame of Jean’s thin high room lay flakes of paint like peeled bark. A tentative persistent lichen grew in on the sill. The scaffolding seemed bold, an expression of someone’s intention to hold things up against time.