Telescope

  ‘You’re not a stranger,’ I tell her.

  ‘To your parents I am,’ she answers.

  I point out that I’m merely reminiscing about my parents, as people do. The only difference is that talking isn’t easy, so I’m writing it down.

  ‘I know,’ says Ellen, ‘but somehow that makes a difference.’

  ‘Why?’ I ask her.

  She doesn’t know, but it does.

  ‘Think of it as my diary,’ I suggest. ‘If I’m happy for you to read it, what’s the problem?’

  She’s concerned that Charlie might not be pleased if he knew that she’d been told about things that his parents and grandparents had wanted to keep private. ‘I’m not a stranger, OK, but I’m an employee, not family. There are boundaries,’ she says.

  So I ask Charlie to take a look. He has no objections, of course, but he has no recollection of being lectured by little Celia on the hardships of motherhood. Neither does he think the sandwiches of Stanley and Emily were quite as grim as I make out. He has a memory of Emily presenting us with a huge bowl of peaches or cherries; this rings no bells with me.

  Charlie digs out some photos and Ellen brings them to me. Charlie can’t put his hand on the one of my mother sticking her tongue out, but the others are here: Margate pier, running down the hill, sitting on the rock in her polka-dot dress, holding fresh Charlie. There are several of baby Charles and the subsequent infants; it’s been many years since I’ve seen most of them. Ellen turns the pages slowly, as if fearful that the next spread will be the one to trigger an avalanche of sadness. ‘Is this all right?’ she asks, after the polka-dot snap, which is indeed the toughest.

  I wake up: I’m on a lounger on the terrace, and while I’ve been asleep Ellen has moved the screen to keep the shade on me. She’s on the phone, talking to Roy. Janina’s at work. Closing the phone, Ellen looks at me as if she thinks I’ve overheard something that requires explanation, and then she begins to talk. She talks for nearly an hour.

  In telling Charlie that she had separated from her husband, Ellen was perhaps slightly misleading in her choice of tense. Only when she came here did she leave the house in which she and Roy had been living for five years, initially as man and wife, latterly as largely autonomous co-occupants.

  They’d been having problems for such a long time, says Ellen, that they were in effect already living apart when Roy revealed, a few months ago, that he’d been involved with another woman. It had begun early last year, when his workmate Max suggested that, instead of going for their customary Wednesday evening pint together, they could, for a laugh, drop in on the speed-dating session that was going on in a room above the bar. Since his wife had walked out on him, two years ago, Max had not once enjoyed the pleasures of female company. He was desperate, but not as desperate, says Ellen, as a woman would have to be to settle for an evening with Max, who smokes thirty a day, is somewhere in the region of thirty percent above his optimum body weight (if the fish and chip shop closed down he’d starve to death), and is infrequently sober after 7 p.m. (Roy is the Wednesday night boozing partner – there’s a different one for each night of the week), and is in possession of less than a quarter of his hair, which he’s dyed darker than a squaddie’s boots. And he’s a boring little sod as well. He builds model aeroplanes and spends every weekend flying them.

  So Roy accompanied Max to the speed-dating event, where it would seem that Max took a fancy to Margaret the big-boobed sunbed-basted leg-waxer and fingernail technician, who responded by taking a fancy to his friend. The standard procedure at events like this, or so Ellen gathers from what she’s heard, is for the women to stay in their seats while the men (invariably the larger contingent) circle the room, taking turns to blather on about themselves and their various misfortunes, most of which are to be attributed to the women they’ve had the bad luck to encounter. Roy – she’ll say this much for him – is more a listener than a talker when you first meet him, so perhaps he stood out from the crowd in that respect. And of course he would have looked good alongside deadbeat Max. Anybody would. So Margaret and Roy hit it off, and things moved rapidly. On Sundays, when Roy was believed to be fishing (a routine observed throughout his marriage – Ellen even went along occasionally, and was never sure which was worse: staring at the water and waiting for something to happen; or watching the hideous fish gasping for air on the bank), he was in fact with Margaret. On Fridays, when he was supposed to be in the pub with whichever of his colleagues was in the mood for an after-work round or five, he was in the pub for no more than an hour, then he was with Margaret. Though he was coming home late, Ellen didn’t suspect anything. She heard him crashing about in his room, and thought he was drunk, that’s all. There wasn’t a clue in the way he talked to her – he was the same old miserable Roy, until one day he was noticeably glummer than usual. Sitting at the kitchen table with a plate of something that had come out of a can, he was stirring his food as if waiting to be asked what was the matter, so she asked him, and he told her he’d met Margaret, that it hadn’t been anything serious, and now it was over. He looked so sorry for himself, she wanted to punch him. ‘I’ve been an idiot,’ he told her, with a look that said he knew she couldn’t forgive him right now but if he kept this expression on his face for long enough then maybe she would at least start to. He told her everything, or what he said was everything. ‘You must hate me,’ he said, looking at his plate of can-contents as if it were a dollop of poison and that was all he deserved. She couldn’t bring herself to speak to him.

  Roy has had a great deal of practice at feeling sorry for himself, and is now very good at it. One of his favourite laments, first heard by Ellen a couple of weeks after they were married (she talks as if Roy came out of his shell as soon as the wedding was over, and was a far nicer person with the shell on) is that he didn’t listen to his father when he was a kid. ‘You’re a bright boy,’ his father would tell him, ‘but you need to work harder.’ His father wanted him to stay at school and get the most out of his education, but there was always something better than homework to do and Roy didn’t get on with the teachers, so he was out of school at the first opportunity. He should learn a proper trade, his father told him. His father was a plumber. As long as people have bowels they’ll need plumbers and plumbers earn decent money if they’re any good, his father always said, but young Roy couldn’t be bothered with an apprenticeship, and shoving his arm into a pipe full of crap never appealed much. He knew what he wanted to be: a long-distance lorry driver, like Uncle Terry, his father’s younger brother. His father wasn’t very close to his brother: Terry had been a handful as a boy, had later done time after helping himself to a vanload of jeans, and had developed into a severely sub-standard husband and father. Terry acknowledged that Trevor – Roy’s father – had grounds for holding a grudge or two against him (as a kid, for example, he’d sold Trev’s bike and pretended it had been stolen), but had no difficulty in persuading the boy Roy that the fundamental problem with his dad was that he simply didn’t understand the call of the road. Driving had been the making of Terry: being on his own gave him time to think (about what, however, was never precisely specified), and it was great to have a job in which you drove your office all over the place. Trevor still lived within ten miles of the estate they’d grown up on; he’d been to the Algarve once or twice, and that was about it. Terry, on the other hand, had been everywhere: he’d driven through the Alps more times than he could remember; he’d eaten great food on Spanish beaches; he’d seen forests in Germany, lakes in Switzerland, topless hitchhikers in the south of France. From time to time Uncle Terry would turn up and take Roy for a ride in his lorry – it was best when they went out at night, because Terry would turn all the lights on at once, so they were driving into this wide corridor of light, with the engine making a noise that made him feel unstoppable. Occasionally the cousins, Tom and Colin, would come along too, and Roy had the feeling that he got along with Uncle Terry better than his sons did. His parents pointed ou
t that the surly cousins were probably not best pleased that their father was away from home so much, just as Aunt Louise’s tendency to be a bit of a moaner might have something to do with her having to cope at home on her own so often, but more important to young Roy was the affinity he had with his uncle, to whose faults he remained blind until the day Terry failed to come home, having decided to start a new life with a woman in Birmingham in whose bed, it was revealed, Terry had for a long time been in the habit of recuperating from the rigours of the road.

  By then Roy had become a long-distance driver and had acquired a wife, Lauren. The marriage didn’t last long: Lauren couldn’t cope with the absences and (as Roy tells it) the lower than anticipated earnings. Not long after Lauren had fled, Roy was driving on the M3 when he fainted. He was unconscious for no more than a second or two, but the next thing he knew he was bearing down on a queue of cars and it was only by slewing across the road that he avoided shunting them. He came to rest within a yard of an open-top Saab, whose driver was so stricken with terror that her fingers had to be prised off the steering wheel. Tests followed; nothing was found, but he was kept off the road for a few months, as a precaution. A couple of years later, on a sweltering day somewhere to the south of Lyon, he blacked out completely, moments after bringing his lorry to a halt. A form of epilepsy was suspected, and his licence was revoked for five years, during which period he held down a desk job with a haulage company. Shortly before he was due to be allowed back behind the wheel of a truck, Roy keeled over at his desk, and that was the definitive end of his dream of a life on the motorways. He’s now a pen-pusher for a different haulier, a job that makes him stir-crazy. The world, as Ellen says, is stuffed with people who hate what they have to do for a living, but with Roy it’s as if he’s been singled out for unfair treatment. His first marriage broke up because he was on the road too much, and his second broke up because he wasn’t on the road at all – therefore, he can’t win. That’s the way he sees it, says Ellen. He carries on, she says, ‘like he’s an astronaut being forced to work in MacDonald’s.’

  Back to the main story. In the weeks following the revelation of the dalliance with Margaret, penitent Roy was often to be found in the kitchen, wearing his Death Row face. Evenings with Max were suspended; most Fridays he stayed away from the pub; some Sundays, even, he stayed at home. He thought they should have another go at making it work, he told her, as if everything had been absolutely fine until he’d made this one silly mistake, whereas in reality they’d slowly ground to a standstill a long time ago. When he’d told her about Margaret it was like turning off the life-support machine on someone who was never going to come round again. ‘I know you must hate me,’ he kept saying, but she didn’t hate him, she says. If anything, she was almost pleased that he’d done something to give them a push, otherwise God knows how long they’d have carried on as they were, living together only because they were too worn out by each other to make the effort to move out.

  With reluctance Ellen takes the laptop and reads what I’ve written. Five seconds later she’s frowning. ‘I didn’t mislead anyone,’ she tells me, then the face settles into an expression of mild disgruntlement. The eyes move quickly, simply to get it finished as soon as possible, but after a minute or so an approximation to a smile appears, at the description of Margaret. ‘Not exactly what I said, but it’s her all right,’ she says. She doesn’t remember saying that much about Roy in Terry’s lorry, and the idea of the life-support machine definitely didn’t come from her, but it’s what she meant all right. I promise her that I won’t write anything about her that I wouldn’t be happy for her to read.

  When I ask, she says firmly that she and Roy are never going to get back together, yet there’s a hint of over-emphasis in her insistence that Roy is deluding himself if he thinks there’s any chance of reconciliation. ‘It’s pathetic,’ she says, and I detect an exasperation with herself at being unable to rid herself of sympathy for him. ‘He thinks he’s the King of the Road, but the fact is he hardly knows how to make a slice of toast. A few weeks I’ve been gone, and it’s like he’s been stuck on a desert island. He looks terrible,’ she says, then winces at what she’s just said.

  In the course of a routine scan of the terrain I spy an old man who resembles very closely the old man I saw before, in the Land Rover, in the rain. He’s standing at a gate, beside a tractor, and seems to be involved in an altercation with the driver – the driver of the Land Rover, I’m almost certain. The faces are not perfectly legible from this range, but the gestures are clear: the driver’s arm goes sideways in a hurling motion several times; in reply, the walking stick is flourished with some vigour. The old man appears to be in mid-sentence when the tractor is driven off; he takes a swipe at the adjacent vegetation and sets off down the lane. I keep the lens trained on him as he tacks slowly from verge to verge, muttering all the way. The muttering is garnished with some snarling, directed at an imagined nuisance to his left. He’s about fifty yards away, nearing the house of the Mercedes, when an object in the gutter appears to seize his attention. He stoops; his free hand dangles above the tarmac, squeezing at the air. Having straightened as much as he can, he stirs the ground with the ferrule of the stick. Considering the problem, he scowls at the empty street, and is so immersed in perplexity that he doesn’t hear the young woman who’s cycling at speed down the lane he’s just descended until she’s past him. Too late he calls out to her – or perhaps she hears and, knowing who he is, decides not to stop. He remains at his post for at least five minutes, hunched in vulture-like vigilance over this portion of gutter, then help at last arrives: a car pulls out of the drive of the third house from where he’s standing, and he waves his stick at it as if he’s been adrift on a raft for a month and is seizing his last chance of rescue. The driver gets out of the car and, thinking something is seriously amiss, trots over to him. Directed by the stabbing of the stick, she bends to pick an item off the tarmac. She places it in the proffered hand, seeming to receive nothing more than a nod for the prompt performance of this civic duty. Smiling to herself, she returns to the car. The moment she leaves his side the old man takes a handkerchief from his pocket and starts polishing; that done, he turns the thing over and over on his palm, grimacing, disgusted by its failure to turn out to be anything better than a coin.

  Ambroise Paré on the thirteen causes of monsters: ‘The first is the glory of God; the second, his wrath; the third, too great a volume of semen; the fourth, too small a volume; the fifth, imagination; the sixth, constriction of the womb; the seventh, the inappropriate sitting position of the pregnant mother, who remains seated too long with her thighs crossed or pressed against her belly; the eighth, by a fall or blows struck against the belly of the pregnant mother; the ninth, hereditary or accidental illness; the tenth, by the decay or corruption of the semen; the eleventh, by the mingling of semen; the twelfth, by the scheming of vagrant beggars; the thirteenth, by demons.’

  The walk proves to be too ambitious: the gradient is more arduous than it appears from up here. Instead, I veer down the lane that leads to The Meadows – this, I learn from the billboard on the junction, is to be the name of the prestige development that is rising a short distance beyond the scope of my window. The name is emblazoned in an extravagant cursive script above an image of life as it shall be in this enclave of architectural easy listening. A computer-generated couple (he in blue polo shirt and fawn slacks; she in golden sun-dress), strolling on the smooth and lustrous pavement, are waving to another couple (he in red polo shirt and fawn slacks; she (approximately Asian, lest we jump to the wrong conclusion as to what the term ‘exclusive’ means in this context) in white sun-dress), who are taking the air on the slender balcony that fronts the upper storey of their spacious and highly desirable property. Four or five computer-generated executive cars are parked on a road that gleams like an avenue of lacquer. At the moment the road is a track of mud and gravel, not the easiest terrain to negotiate in the dark, and I’m about to t
urn back when there’s an owl’s cry from somewhere ahead – a peculiarly forthright cry, like a sound effect. (Aluminium clouds scudding across face of moon; cripple lost in contemplation of the interstellar vacancies: cue owl.) I aim the torch, and the beam strikes the timbers of an unfinished roof, producing a clatter of wings to the left of where I’m pointing. I rake the air with the light, sensing that the bird is flying towards the trees, but I can’t hit it. On the way back, however, I strike lucky. Hearing a disturbance in the grass beside the road, I halt and wait. Something is foraging along the ditch, twenty or thirty feet ahead, sniffing as it goes, then the sound of brushed grass stops, and there’s a patch of motion in the gloom directly in front of me. On with the torch, and it’s a direct hit: a hefty badger waddling down the road, exactly in the centre, as if steering by the white lines.

  Janina on the phone to Freddie, very displeased. ‘It takes less than an hour,’ she repeats; one would think she was talking to a builder who’d let her down yet again, rather than to her son. Ellen reports that Janina told her that Freddie was having to work all hours at the moment, and Ellen could see that she was embarrassed at having to make excuses for him. ‘What do you know about the boys?’ I ask her. She’s been told what they do for a living, but not much more.

  Ellen is convinced that Janina has something on her mind – other than the monster in the attic, that is. What has given rise to this suspicion? ‘I just have this feeling that there’s something going on. She’ll talk to me about you, but there’s something else, I think.’