Grasshopper Page 35

  ‘Now, darling, you know Joel Robinson is completely trustworthy.’

  ‘You mean he’d lie to the police for our sake and they’d believe him? I don’t think so.’ The scathing tone he used chilled my blood. ‘I’ll go on with the timetable. We have breakfast, we do some housework. This place is very clean, I don’t know if you’ve noticed? It’s clean because we’ve nothing else to do, and when the vacuum cleaner packs up, as it’s threatening to do, housework will take up more of our time because we’ll have to use a dustpan and brush. Jason’s probably watching a video while this goes on. We record our own videos for him, children’s programmes, animal stuff, so-called classic serials –’ he looked at me – ‘so long as they don’t have too much bum and tit in them.

  ‘Then we start lessons, not great fun for him, since he’s all alone with no companions. As to the one who’s not teaching, say it’s me, I look out of the window. I know more about the structure of plane trees than anyone now living, I’ve charted the life cycle of their leaves from day to day, I could write a thesis on it. When I’ve done my leaf study, sometimes I just lie down and sleep. We both sleep a lot, it ought to be doing us good but it doesn’t seem to. I’d sneak out to the shops before you so kindly took that job away from me.’ His resentful tone made it sound far from kind. ‘Now I don’t have to I use the time for reading, only we’ve read all Robinson’s books, none of which in any case would have been my choice.’

  ‘We’re lucky to have any books,’ Alison said. ‘We’re lucky to have the video.’

  ‘Oh, lucky. We’re not lucky, my dear, we’re bloody wretched.’ He looked back at Silver. ‘When we’ve had lunch, the other one of us gets on with the lessons. We can’t remember the things we should without textbooks, so very likely we’re giving him the wrong information. Never mind. We’re lucky. Afternoons always drag, don’t you think? Well, ours drag twice as slowly as most people’s. We have tea with biscuits, cake, anything. There are no scales here, thank God, but I can tell I’m putting on weight fast. I’ve put on a stone, I reckon, since we’ve been here. Alison’s always been one of those scraggy women. She could live on cream and chips and still stay thin.

  ‘Things are a bit grim after tea because there’s nothing left to do, nothing. Sometimes I just walk round the flat, into every room, in and out again, marching along, back to where I started from and then do it all over again. It drives Alison crazy.’

  I could tell from her expression that it did. She closed her eyes, shook her head a little.

  ‘Or I recite the multiplication table, which must be good for Jason if for no one else. He usually enlivens things at this time by asking why he can’t go out, he wants to go out, why can’t he see his friends, why can’t he go in the park? He can see the trees of a park from the kitchen window. We explain as best we can for the fiftieth or maybe the hundredth time. Then he says that if “the policemen”, I quote, want us to go back home it’s wrong, it’s breaking the law, not to go. I don’t know who told him there was such a thing as law, I’m sure I didn’t.

  ‘Thank God for the news at six. Thank God for the happy hour of six to seven. I try not to ask myself what we’ll do if the TV starts going the same way as the Hoover. Evenings are long, especially in this heat, we usually both have cold showers – like the flat, we’re terribly clean – and we still have unbroken television. What I like best are those programmes where you see happy sun-kissed people on beaches or hikers striding across the free hills of Derbyshire. Or drivers in fast cars disappearing into the sunset or birds in flight or–’

  ‘Don’t!’ Alison said it sharply, in an end-of-one’s-tether voice. ‘Don’t keep on about it. You must stop, I can’t stand it.’

  It was his turn now to close his eyes. He’d clenched his fists and bowed his head. We looked on helplessly. Alison got up and laid her hand on his shoulder. I thought he might shake it off angrily but he didn’t, he covered her hand with his own.

  Silver broke the silence by asking what we could get for them apart from food. He mentioned books, maybe a Walkman and batteries for it. Andrew’s diatribe had been quite enlightening and gave us ideas. How about writing pads and coloured chalks, flowers and plants, though these would be difficult to bring up the scaffolding, a chess set, patience cards, more jigsaws for Jason, news and comment periodicals like the Economist and the Spectator?

  ‘We have to watch our money,’ Andrew said in a chastened tone. Or perhaps getting all that off his chest had left him drained and tired. ‘But books, yes. They’ll have to be paperbacks.’ He wrote the titles on the food shopping list. ‘I’ve a Walkman but the batteries have run out.’

  ‘Could you possibly buy Jason a pair of trainers? If his feet go on growing at this rate, I’ll have to cut holes in his shoes.’

  We added shoes to the list and Andrew told us Jason’s size. ‘If only there was a way I could sell my father’s house. It’s mine now. It’ll fetch half a million. I’ve never needed the money so much.’

  ‘In ten years’ time,’ Alison said, and her words were cool and considered, ‘Jason will be eighteen. Then you’ll be able to sell it. No one will be able to take him away from you then. It’s only ten years.’

  Sitting here, writing to my husband in Africa, rereading his last letter and then transcribing these pages of diary very nearly word for word, I ask myself who I’m writing this account for. For anyone in particular? For anyone at all? Perhaps for my husband, who knows so much of it already. But there may be something peculiarly enjoyable in reading something one already knows, particularly if it’s a beloved person’s version of events, just as there is in rereading a book one is long familiar with. I read Jane Eyre at school, I did it for my GCSEs (called O-levels then), and it’s bringing me far more pleasure the second time round. Don’t think for a moment that I’m comparing myself to Charlotte Bronte. The only parallel between her writings and mine is in the pain and suffering. So neither can be an entirely pleasurable read, I fear.

  Still, we had had no unhappiness in our relationship up till then, Silver and I. Misery and discontent were for others. The occasional presence in the flat of pretty Judy cast only a faint shadow at first, as perhaps for Silver did Guy Wharton. From him I hadn’t heard for weeks, not surprising really since he’d no idea where I was. What became of the few letters which must have been sent to me at old Mrs Fisherton’s? Beryl never saw any. I asked her. So were they never taken down the staircase to the basement? If I thought about it, and I didn’t much, I supposed that Max or Selina forwarded my post to Suffolk. But this wasn’t so either. With a strange unaccountable (then) vindictiveness, they must have destroyed everything.

  I encountered Guy by chance, walking round the Clifton Nursery. The weather had cooled a little, it had rained, and Mrs Houghton wanted shrubs planted. I suggested a solanum and a climbing hydrangea, believing erroneously that my reading had made me an expert. Guy was at the counter paying for a pot plant and a birthday card. He said he was going out to lunch and the plant was for his hostess but since he was staying at his South Kensington flat and the lunch party was in Pimlico, it seemed unnecessarily out of his way. I wondered, though it was only romantic guesswork, if he had come on the off chance of seeing me. For all I knew, he paid frequent visits to Maida Vale with that end in view. His obvious delight at seeing me made it quite likely.

  We walked down to the canal and sat on a seat in the gardens at the top of Warwick Avenue. Because it was windy as well as sunny the water sparkled and danced. The houseboats bore their loads of flowers in tubs and boxes, lush by then and overgrown. Guy said, ‘I wrote to you a couple of times.’

  ‘I’ve moved. They didn’t send on my letters.’

  I told him I had dropped out of the Grand Union Polytechnic and become a gardener. The shock that piece of news gave him was plain to see. When his face was flushed he looked more than ever like Andrew Lane.

  ‘Don’t you think you should have done what I suggested and come and worked for my father?’
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br />   ‘I won’t be a gardener for ever,’ I said. ‘But I might be sitting behind a desk for ever if I became a secretary. Besides, Guy, can you see me in an office?’

  I was in my usual garb, jeans and trainers, a T-shirt with a face or an animal or slogan on it. My hair had grown very long, a great black cloak of it hanging halfway down my back. Needless to say perhaps, no make-up ever touched my face or varnish my nails and I smelt of Camay soap. He looked at me and said, ‘I can see you anywhere. I mean, in a dress and nice shoes and – well, I don’t know, the things girls wear.’ That made me laugh, but he was quite serious. ‘You’d always look lovely to me, Clodagh.’

  I’d have to tell him, I realized that, and I was seeking about for a form of words when he suggested we take the boat trip from Jason’s Wharf to Camden Lock. If we walked up there now we could catch the eleven-thirty boat. Or how about dinner that evening or tomorrow or the next night? Or dinner on all of them, he said.

  ‘I can’t go on a boat trip, Guy. I have to go and be a gardener. Besides –’ I looked at him, knowing he’d be hurt – ‘I have to tell you I’m living with someone at 15 Russia Road. I met him in April.’

  He nodded. ‘It was inevitable. Will it last?’

  What a question. For a moment I disliked him for asking it. ‘I don’t know. How should I know? I think it will.’

  ‘If we got engaged,’ he said, ‘I wouldn’t ask you to live with me. I wouldn’t think it right.’ I could think of no answer to that. ‘You might change your mind about this – this friend of yours. If you do, I want to be there.’

  I kissed him as we parted, though it was he not I who made that kiss intense. I broke away from him, shaking my head.

  ‘Can I still write to you sometimes?’

  I didn’t answer, forgetting I had given him my address. So we parted, he with his pot of calceolarias to the Warwick Avenue tube station, I to the Houghtons’. All afternoon, while I gave the lawn its weekly mowing and cut its edges as neatly as I could with a sharp spade, I thought about Guy as if I was in love with him, which I certainly was not. I dwelt on him with regret because he was so kind, so tolerant, so affectionate and so suitable. And I found him attractive. When he’d kissed me, as he had done once or twice, I’d been excited, I’d wanted more, only he was too proper to expect more on what he would have thought of as a short acquaintance. He was the only one who had stuck by me after the pylon. I believed he truly loved me and, in time, when I had cured him of a sexism he didn’t even know he had, I thought he’d have made an excellent husband.

  He would have wanted to change me, sit me at a desk, put me into ‘the things girls wear’, and I’d have tried to make him more open-minded, less prudish and conventional, freer, more laid-back. What I didn’t know then was that you can’t change people. Women, especially women, go into marriage expecting to be able to change their husbands, fit them into the desired mould. They are in for disappointment. The only man to marry is the man you wouldn’t change if change were possible, the one who is exactly what you want just as he is.

  Guy did write to me rather a lot after that. His letters embarrassed me and made me feel guilty and the last one I stuffed into my jeans pocket unread. Sitting on the roof with Silver the evening after my meeting with Guy, I told him all about it. He said very gently and, I thought, a little coolly – too coolly? – that we shouldn’t be totally exclusive, we had to have other friends. It wasn’t as if Guy expected sex with me – or did he? Not really, I said, not as far as I knew, though (and this I didn’t say) those kisses had been passionate enough.

  ‘You must do as you like, Clodagh. I’ve no rights over you.’

  That was hardly the reply I wanted, of course. It was the first time Silver had said anything to me that jarred. But did I really expect a relationship of perfect unblemished accord? We said no more. We picked up our bag of books and writing pads and jigsaw puzzles and our bag of videotape cassettes and magazines. Jason was waiting for us, actually outside the window. He made me squat down so that he could put his arms round my neck and hug me. I didn’t think it very safe for him to be on that balcony, which wasn’t really a balcony at all but an eighteen-inch-wide shelf with a three-foot-high parapet. The ground, a concreted area supporting a few wilted plants in stone troughs, lay fifty feet below. I marvelled at these parents, for it was as parents that they saw themselves, who sacrificed everything, home, careers, income, liberty, for the sake of a child yet failed to take the elementary precaution of warning him against risking his life on that narrow shelf.

  Of course, you could see how much he loved being out there. That ridge of masonry with its dusty floor was his garden, his park, his playground, his freedom. The fresh air, and it was fresh enough up above the treetops, made him unconsciously take deep breaths. But he came in with us willingly enough and the pair of red and blue trainers we had bought him distracted his attention from the open air. His large dark liquid eyes widened and he smiled, then laughed out loud. The book we had brought specially for him was a real book without illustrations and, wearing his new shoes, he settled down immediately to read it. Alison said it was past his bedtime and he asked her if he could read his new book in bed.

  Rather reluctantly, after Jason had been taken away, Andrew started to pay us for what we had brought. I say ‘started’ because Silver tried to stop him, saying that many of the things were our idea, he hadn’t asked us to get them. I don’t know if Andrew was mean by nature or if circumstances had made him cheese-paring, but he accepted Silver’s offer with relief. Deeply disapproving, I said nothing but the indignant glance I gave Silver told him everything I felt. With Alison’s permission, I went into Jason’s bedroom to say good night to him and, giving him a kiss, reflected on how much he undoubtedly loved Andrew and Alison, how happy he was with them, and wondered what would become of him when he was taken from them, as inevitably he would one day be.

  Or was it inevitable? Was there perhaps a way?

  25

  Elsie Almquist came round to Russia Road while I was conducting an agoraphobia therapy session with Liv. I was standing just inside the front door, trying to cajole her into taking a step outside. Clinging to my arm, she had begun shuffling over the threshold, her entire body shuddering, when her mother came across the road and up to the gate.

  The previous evening, before we went on the roofs, I had been to the Hindes’ house, rung the bell and, when a girl answered the door, said I was from Westminster City Council. I said I was carrying out a survey into what residents thought of the council’s waste-disposal system. At this point a woman came down the stairs and a man came out from the doorway on the left. Perhaps they had learnt something from their experiences with Liv, for James Hinde asked me to produce identification. I retreated, quite satisfied. Whoever that couple Liv saw in Russia Road might have been, they weren’t James and Claudia.

  But when Liv heard I had been to the Hindes’ house she was aghast. They’d have followed me, they’d trace me here, there was probably someone watching the house even now. We could only get her downstairs by posting Judy at one end of the street and Morna at the other. But neither of them, of course, were on the alert for a middle-aged Swedish woman with a worried expression and a London A-Z guide in her hand. Liv, who these days reacted like this to almost anything unexpected, screamed shrilly. I pushed her back into the house, asked Elsie Almquist in and got them both up the stairs.

  I know now that Liv was ill and that we were quite wrong to try and treat her ourselves. But we were very young. Getting her to a doctor was virtually impossible, while bringing a doctor or some psychiatric social worker to her never occurred to us. We never realized how close to the edge of paranoid schizophrenia she was. And her mother simply thought she was being difficult, ‘being a teenager’, when she rolled herself up into a ball in the place at the end of the sofa we had come to call ‘Liv’s corner’. She went over to her and shook her, taking her by the shoulder and jerking her arm back and forth. Liv reacted not by l
ifting her head or uncurling herself but by lashing out, striking her mother who was still bending over her a sharp blow on the chin.

  For poor Elsie this was an impossible situation. She eyed the room we were in, turning her head and swivelling her eyes, with an expression of pained dismay. What Elsie saw must have made her feel far worse than when she set out with her daughter’s address and her London guide. I don’t know that there were actually any mouse droppings on the ancient, greasy, grey, worn and deeply stained carpet, but there may have been. Cigarette ash sprinkled the top of every surface. Every chair had its woodwork scuffed and its upholstery threadbare, while the sofa might, if the vendor was lucky, have fetched £5 if sold from a Church Street pavement. The wallpaper was coming off and one evening Wim had hastened its disintegration by peeling quite a large area off in strips. At the open windows the high wind that had sprung up blew the frayed and dirty curtains out almost horizontally and tumbled on to the floor a week’s accumulated newspapers.

  Elsie couldn’t stop herself from shaking her head and shutting her eyes in despair. Judy and Morna came up the stairs, Silver came out from his bedroom, while she gazed, aghast. The next thing will be Wim arriving through the window, I thought. But he didn’t come and gradually Elsie seemed to take comfort from Silver’s presence, accepting a cup of tea from his hands (and sending it back because it had milk in it) and at last taking her eyes off her daughter.