Another four hours and we’d finished with Mum’s study. We finished the spreadsheet with a flourish, then we had beans on toast for lunch and between us we carted the boxes out to the car and I drove them to the university library.
When I got back I found to my pleasure that Silvia had done everything, the place was clean and tidy, our sheets and towels washed and dried, the kitchen gleaming and the study smelling of soap and fresh air. We divvied up the CDs and DVDs and oddments like the scented candles and pictures, and I swathed the portrait of Adrian Randall in bubble wrap and brown paper.
It was quite late when Silve dropped me at my house, and I was almost too tired to climb the stairs. The cats were glad to see me, complaining they’d been left to starve (they were still licking the crumbs of supper off their whiskers.) I put that portrait of Adrian Randall at the back of my wardrobe, took a long shower and was in bed within twenty minutes of opening the front door. I dreamed that Silvia and I were meeting the Queen Mother, and worrying that no one seemed to notice she was a little bit dead.
Twelve
Well, time did what it does best, and passed. My diary for those slow weeks contains nothing except reminders of business appointments, a couple of interviews for jobs, some work, and that I had two lunches and a mediocre shag with a girl I’d known vaguely for a while and ran into at my agent’s. Toby continued to cook me excellent dinners. I went to Silvia and PoorMatthew’s at least once a week, and played with Hugo who, now that he could crawl, had developed arms about twenty feet long, and tried to forget what Silve had told me about Evan Wilson. She and PoorMatthew seemed to be on particularly good terms, I noted. But that was it for the exciting and glamorous world of the actor.
Then in early April I got a letter from Granny, and another email from Dad, again CC’d to Silvia and Toby. It was Granny’s birthday on the 15th – would we all be there for the traditional lunch? “Do it for Gran’s sake if no one else’s,” Dad’s email concluded.
A round of phone calls, text and emails followed, and we agreed we had to go. The tradition was a Sunday lunch of all Granny’s favourite foods, followed by presents and the cake. Dad had asked us to come for the weekend – “at least from Saturday lunch to Sunday afternoon, and Quentin is coming too for Sunday lunch” – and we agreed that’d be bearable and it was time we were adult and kind about the whole thing. I was the only one who couldn’t make it for Saturday lunch, and the others wouldn’t go without me, so I was deputed to email Dad saying, expect us, including PoorMatthew and Hugo, for Saturday tea, and we all wrote nice little notes to Gran.
And so on the Saturday we drove in convoy down to Williamscourt, practising sweetness and light all the way. Of course as we drove in along the twisting drive we looked for changes, and saw none. Gran’s bulbs were out, and with the wisteria and clematis burgeoning away the front of the house wore its usual sunny-day prettiness.
I was rather touched that Dad was waiting on the front steps for us, and that when he saw it really was us his face lit up in a smile of pure delight. Normally he would have had the dogs with him, but they were absent and he was holding the hand of a black-haired child dressed in clumpy lace-up shoes, ironed trousers with turn-ups, and a Thomas the Tank engine jumper. Yes, well, Orlando. We’d braced ourselves, had decided to be friendly; wasn’t the kid’s fault, after all, he was the innocent party.
What no one had told us, not even the tabloids who’d picked up on Dad’s sudden marriage to Dr Strangelove, was that Orlando was child with Down Syndrome. He had the unmistakeable rather blurred features and the epicanthic fold of the eyelid that used to get these kids cruelly called mongoloids. I’d worked with some brilliant Down’s actors and knew the look very well. Some have endless health problems and/or are badly mentally affected, others are highly intelligent.
The moment I stopped the car and we got out Orlando tore loose from Dad’s hand and rushed clumsily towards us. “You ah my brubbers! Ja-ayk and Tobee.” His tongue seemed too big for his mouth – typical of Down’s – and he lisped and spluttered through splay teeth. But nothing could detract from the huge and simple joy in his face as he ran towards us. “My big brubbers! You come to see me at last!” He flung his arms around me – all I could think to say was “Hello, there” as I hugged him – and then around Toby, who rose to the occasion by returning the hug and saying, “Lannie, my man, hey, great to see you.” Orlando looked at him with adoration, and Toby ruffled his hair – silky black hair like Dad’s, but his eyes were brown, inherited I suppose from Dr Watson, whose eyes I’d never taken any notice of except to note that she had two of them.
Orlando was very difficult to resist, and not only because he was so heartbreakingly glad to see us. I gave him another hug, but Toby was already his favourite, Orlando gripped his hand as we moved up the steps to Dad. Then Silvia’s Range Rover stopped behind my car, and PoorMatthew got out, ready to help Silvia with Hugo. Orlando shrank back behind Dad. “Who’s that man? Do I like that man?”
“Of course you will,” said Dad. “That’s Matthew, remember I told you? He lives with Silvia – that’s she – and they have the little baby, Hugo.”
I could tell that the sight of Orlando had given Silvia and PoorMatthew a hell of a shock, but they were covering it well. Silvia lifted Hugo onto her hip, took PoorMatthew’s hand and, trying to look as if everything was usual, they walked up to the steps. “Hello,” Silvia said, and kissed Dad’s cheek. PoorMatthew gave him the usual handshake. “And so this is” (tiny beat) “Orlando. Hello there, dear. I am Silvia, this is Matthew, and this is my baby Hugo.”
“Ooooog.” He couldn’t manage the name. “I don’t know babies. Can it walk?”
“Almost.”
But no, here she came, clutching a tray of tea-things; at least in this she’d stuck to Williamscourt tradition and used the silver pot and jugs and the Spode plates. She said rather dithery (shy?) hellos to us all, and scurried back to the kitchen for something.
“Where’s Granny?” Silvia asked, just as the door opened and she came in. She kissed us all, and sat down, and for the first time in Williamscourt history silence reigned. Dad was the first to break it, saying heartily and rubbing his hands, “Well, here we all are!”
“Yes, here we all are. But where are the dogs?”
“Oh, er, Orlando gets asthma…”
“Not surprised,” said Silvia, “with all this bleach and crap in the air.” She sounded snuffly, and I noted that already her sinuses were puffy. Mum had never used any chemical cleansers, just soap and water, vinegar and baking soda, beeswax and elbow grease. Silvia told me once that during one of Mum’s absences she’d tried to cheat by using Mr Sheen and Spray & Wipe, and it had taken her chiropractor three visits to clear her immune system.
“Er, well,” said Dad, “and he tends to be a bit frightened of the dogs.”
Of poor ancient harmless almost toothless Kingsley, and yappy but adoring little Martin? Dad had rescued them both from the gas chamber and they’d repaid h
im with years of gentle goodwill and love.
“You haven’t got rid of them!”
“Oh no! Jesus, no. No, they, er, they tend to sleep in the, er, laundry room.”
Whatever else he might have said on the subject was cut short by Dr Demento returning with a tea trolley laden with goodies, letting Orlando pretend he was doing the pushing. As soon as he was in the room he wriggled onto the square sofa between me and Toby, and put his hands on our knees.
“Ah, tea!” said Granny, rubbing her hands as Dad had just done. “Well, Dawn dear, what have we got today?”
What we had got today was a choice between green tea and ordinary China; wholemeal scones with margarine and strawberry jam, carrot cake, date log, and cucumber or salmon sandwiches. Oh and chocolate biscuits, as a treat for Orlando. All homemade, Dawn dear was eager to assure us. We munched and drank and made appreciative noises, although the scones were heavy and the sandwiches hadn’t had the crusts cut off. (And yes, I do know how that sounds.) Dr Lecter made rather a production of cutting up all Orlando’s food into tiny squashy bits and giving him a plastic spoon; I was quite pleased to see him sneak four chocolate biscuits when she wasn’t looking, and eat them messily but normally. I gave him my hanky to wipe off the chocolate.
It was the quickest teatime in recorded history, and with the tea things removed we all sat and looked at one another. PoorMatthew and Gran did a good job of chatting about the garden, but none of the rest of us can do more than tell a rose from a daffodil, so soon the silence crept back again. At last to everyone’s relief Dad suggested a brisk walk over to the woods. Taking the hint, Toby and I said yes please, which meant Orlando wanted to come too, and Dr Zaius didn’t want to let him, and Granny said, “Oh, let the child get some fresh air for once,” and Dad said certainly Orlando must come, and after about an hour of arguing about boots and coats and changing Orlando’s shoes for wellies, we were outside.
Behind the house and kitchen garden is a sloping field (named The Field), which you’re welcome to call a lawn if you want to. It peters out into a small and heavily fenced wood, beyond which is an unexciting little stream. When we were young this was our play area. There was still a soccer/hockey goal at one end, and the ruins of our prized Great Escape tunnels, the tree house, Silvia’s Wendy house, a few croquet hoops lurking to break your ankle. As we followed the path from the house to The Field I asked Dad why he hadn’t brought the dogs. They loved playing out here.
“Oh, well, Orlando, and Dawn worries so much.”
He tried to make this sound matter-of-fact but there was so much shame and wistfulness in his eyes that I said, rather roughly, “Just get them. We can’t have a walk without them.” Something new came into his eyes and he ran off, and came back with both dogs dancing around him, ecstatic in his company, leaping to lick him and be patted. At once Orlando began to scream like a train whistle, flailing his arms around. Both dogs dropped, wary, frightened, ready to snarl. In unison as perfect as if we’d been rehearsing for weeks, Toby and I knelt beside Orlando and held his arms down, I patted his hair and Toby clamped a hand over his shrieking gob.
“Lannie,” said Toby, “they’re just Dad’s dogs. Dog-gies. Our friends. They want to play. They get frightened if you scream and wave your arms.”
“That’s right,” I chimed in. “They want to be your friends too. Look.” I snapped my fingers to Kingsley, and he came towards us, holding himself low and looking more than ever like Churchill on about 20 May 1940. I held out my hand for him to sniff, patted him, let him lick me, gave him a hug. Reassured, he panted and grinned. Toby did the same with Martin, and after a moment Orlando looked so interested we thought it safe to let him go. “Hold your hand out, low down, so they can sniff it and get to know you. Friend, Kingsley; friend, Martin.” Orlando extended a timid hand, stroked Kingsley’s head. I thought, oh, what if he really is asthmatic, goes into a bad attack, dies… ACTOR KILLS SECRET BROTHER IN DOG PLOT… Or, depending on the paper, DOWN, SAY MUTT AND JEFF.
But Orlando showed no signs of asthma, or of anything now but interest. Casually Toby said, “See? They’ll run around and play. They like football.” He kicked the old soccer ball by the goal, and both dogs shot off after it and chased it back to us.
“Dogs play football!” said Orlando, and kicked the ball again.
Dad and I left them to it and strolled on. Silvia and PoorMatthew were pottering along at Hugo’s pace – he could walk if they both held his hands, but every two or three steps he’d plop down on his bottom and eat a dandelion before pulling himself up again. Over his head his parents were deep in some apparently serious talk, happy to wander slowly along.
For a moment Dad and I watched Toby trying to teach Orlando to kick the ball, then as we moved on Dad touched my shoulder and said, “Well, at least I’ve got one normal son.”
I took a step away from him. “That’s the remark of a true cunt.”
I felt rather than saw him flinch. “I didn’t mean – oh, Jesus, Jaques…”
“Toby told me you’d given him hell about his being gay. He thinks you don’t love him any more. As for Orlando, well, I don’t know –”
“No,” he said very intensely, “you don’t know.” At the end of The Field was a very old fallen tree. Dad sat down on it and lit a cigarette. “Christ, that’s better,” he said after a drag or two.
“Won’t she let you smoke indoors?”
“Only in my study.”
Fuck, for a moment I thought he was going to cry. I sat down beside him, clenching my fists in my coat pockets so as not to lay a comforting hand on his shoulder or a left hook to his jaw.
He polished the ciggie off in a few desperate drags, and at once lit another. “All right,” he said. “Toby. You know and he should know that I am not homophobic. I know your sexuality is in your genes as much as the colour of your hair or whether you’re left- or right-handed. But – and you won’t understand this until you have kids of your own – from the moment your first child’s born you live in terror and helplessness. Can you keep them safe, alive, fit, happy, successful? You’d give your life for them, your organs, anything. But you can’t always be there, you can’t always keep them safe. You want them to be normal. Clever and successful but normal. And I know something like ten per cent of people are gay and that it’s fairly accepted now – but for everyone who adores Elton John or Stephen Fry there’s a skinhead with boots and a knife.
“And you see there was Ade. Adrian, my cousin. That awful day you came home from – from New York the aunts were talking about him. So all right he was gay – bi, really, I suppose, because he and Tia were… OK in that department. But he did like sex with men and he had some peculiar tastes.” He shot me a sideways glance, varnished with distaste. “BDSM, I think. He never went into details with me, thank God. Not my cup of tea at all.”
“Nor mine. Gay or straight.”
“Good. But the thing is, in the early seventies not a lot of men were out, Ade certainly wasn’t. But I learnt enough to know that he liked his sex with men rough and preferably anonymous. Perhaps not actual bondage or flaj, just… Finally he found a club for people who liked the same things. You know he was murdered? Stabbed in the street?” I nodded. “He was on his way home from that club when it happened. So was the victim after him, the one who survived. Not sure about the first three – there were five altogether. Killer never caught. And after the autopsy the cops told me – not Ade’s father or Tia, they couldn’t – that shortly before he died Ade had had homosexual sex in… let’s say in every possible way. So after that they just treated it as a queer killing and didn’t investigate too hard. That was 1973 for you.
“And I loved Ade, and I saw him dead on his front steps, so much fucking blood, and I can never quite forget it. Quentin was staying with Ade and Tia when it happened and all he could think to do was ring me up, I only lived five minutes away so I saw it all; Ade was dead when I got there but he’d managed to drag himself up onto the bottom step and dra
w a little heart in his own blood, for Tia. So when Toby told me he was gay, I didn’t have the sense to talk to quietly to him, I just remembered the literal streams of Ade’s blood, I’ve never since been able to watch Macbeth or violent TV, and Tia crying with Ade dead in her arms, and later the cops not quite smirking when they told me he was queer. I don’t think Toby’s into anything like that, is he?” It was a plea for reassurance rather than a question.
“I don’t know but I shouldn’t think so. Ask him. Tell him what you’ve told me.”
“I might. Yes. I might be able to now.” Pretending it was just smoke blowing into his eyes he rubbed the sleeve of his coat over his face. “If one of my kids thinks, ever thought, I don’t love them I’ve failed at everything.”
“He did say that you said you still love him.”
“Huh. I bet that cut a lot of ice.”
“Not a huge lot, no.” Orlando was still trying to kick a goal. Silvia and PoorMatthew had sat down to help Hugo make a daisy chain. They were some distance from us, so I asked, “Dad, what about Orlando? I mean, how could you be unfaithful to Mum and let that woman have a baby?”
“Oh. That. Yes.”
“Yes. That.”
“Hmm. Well, your mother and I loved each other dearly, we were friends, we suited each other, we stayed in love. But we had some tremendous fights, we knew how to hurt each other. We even separated a few times –”
“I didn’t know that!”
“Of course you didn’t, you twit,” Dad said with affectionate exasperation. “We were always back together after a week, and we always passed it off as one of us being away on business or something like that. You kids never noticed. We always made up, we knew we’d never part for good. But sometimes it was like Private Lives, we knew how to get up each other’s noses, blowing off steam with a good fight. Your mother broke a Crown Derby soup tureen over my head once. And things went a bit bad after my father died and I inherited this place, and we had to leave our London house and move in here and spend a fortune on fixing it up. And then you got that part in Relative Causes and Tia had to be with you a lot, chaperoning you and travelling and so on.