The Stranger's Child Part 19

'Oh, did he, right . . .' said Paul, busying himself with the taps and then with the damp curtain of roller towel.

'Prisoner of war,' said Geoff. 'He never talks about it, so for G.o.d's sake don't mention it.'

'Well, I wouldn't, would I,' said Paul, 'obviously.'

Geoff finished, jiggled, zipped up his wonderfully tight fly, and came over to the basins, where he looked at himself in the mirror with no sign of the dissatisfaction Paul had felt. He jutted his jaw, and turned his head both ways with a stroking hand. His roundish, full-lipped face was sharpened up by a pair of handsome sideburns, shaved forward at the bottom into dark points. 'Sorry to say,' he said, 'he's a bit of a nervous wreck. Pathetic, really. He ought to have a much bigger branch than this. Brilliant brain, they say, but can't take the strain. Feels he can't go anywhere alone. There's a word for it . . .'

'Yes. Agoraphobia?'

'That's it. Hence the girls walking him home.' He ran the hot tap and the geyser flared up again. 'At least he says that's the reason . . .' Paul found he was looking at him in the mirror, one eyebrow raised, and he sn.i.g.g.e.red and coloured and looked down. He wasn't nearly ready to joke about the other staff. He knew he had picked up on certain atmospheres between them, thought he glimpsed little histories; but any sort of s.e.xual joke seemed to threaten him with exposure too. He knew he couldn't bring them off. Geoff came up close to him to use the towel; he had a sharp five o'clock smell, smoke, bri-nylon and faded aftershave. 'Well, mustn't keep My Fair Lady waiting,' he said. He was walking out with a girl from the National Provincial, the rival bank across the square, a fact which the girls at the Midland seemed to think a bit off.

When Paul got back into the Public s.p.a.ce Mr Keeping was just coming out of the Manager's office. He held a light raincoat folded over his arm, and carried a dark brown trilby. Paul scanned him nervously for signs of his weakness, his wartime trauma. The dominant impression, of course, was his baldness, the great square blank of brow the home and symbol of that brilliant brain. Below it his features seemed rather small and provisional. He had dry, oddly rimless lips, and his smiles drew the corners of his mouth down with a confusing suggestion of distaste. When they were outside he stayed on the step to hear the successive m.u.f.fled shocks of the door being locked and bolted from within. Then he settled his hat, with a forward tilt, low on his brows. At once he had a charming and even mischievous look. His guarded grey eyes, in the shadow of the brim, now seemed almost playful. And with a little bow, a little questioning hesitation it was almost as though he expected Paul to take his arm they set off up the broad slope of the marketplace, Paul instead earnestly gripping his briefcase, while Mr Keeping, with his raincoat over his arm, had the air of a mildly curious visitor to the town.

Paul wished Geoff hadn't told him about Mr Keeping's mental problems and felt anxiously uncertain whether Mr Keeping himself would expect him to know about them. Smiling vaguely, he took in nothing of the shops and people he was staring at with such apparent alertness. His sense of the walk as an opportunity to get in the Manager's good books was undermined by his fear that he'd been singled out for some kind of correction or discomfiting pep-talk. He saw Hannah Gearing across the square climbing into the Shrivenham bus as if leaving him to his fate. 'And how is your mother?' said Mr Keeping.

'All right, thank you, sir,' said Paul. 'She manages pretty well.'

'I hope she can manage without you for the week.'

'Well, my aunt lives quite near us. It's not really a problem.' He was relieved but a little disconcerted by these kind questions. 'We're fairly used to it.'

'Terrible thing,' said Mr Keeping, raising his hat to an approaching lady with a murmur and his unsettling smile, as if to say he remembered exactly the size of her overdraft.

They went up into the quieter reaches of Church Walk, with its fanlights and front railings and lace curtains. A week ago Paul had known almost no one in the town, and now he had been put into an odd grim privileged relation with hundreds of them, over the counter, through the little mahogany doorway of his 'position'. He was their servant and also an adjudicator, a strange young man granted intimate knowledge of at least one aspect of their lives, which was how much money they had, or didn't have, and how much they wanted. He spoke to them courteously, amid tacit understandings, muted embarra.s.sments: the loan, the 'arrangement'. Now he glanced at Church Walk, grey veils of the curtains, glints of polished tables, porcelain, clocks, with a sense of arrangements reaching rooms-deep, years-deep into the shadows. Mr Keeping said nothing else, and seemed satisfied by silence.

Opposite the church they turned into an unmade road, Glebe Lane, with larger houses on one side and a view over a hedge into fields on the other. Long brambly strands of dog-roses swayed in the breeze along the top of the hedge. The lane had its own atmosphere, exclusive and a little neglected. It was odd to find yourself here two minutes from the centre of town. Gra.s.s and daisies grew patchily along the ridge of the road. Paul glanced through gateways at squareish villas set back behind gravel sweeps in broad gardens; between one or two of them humbler modern houses had been awkwardly inserted 'The Orchard', 'The Cottage'. 'This is a private road, you see, Paul,' said Mr Keeping, reverting to his ironical tone: 'hence the countless potholes and unchecked vegetation. I advise you never to bring a motor-car along here.' Paul felt he could pretty safely promise that. 'Here we are . . .' and they turned into the driveway of the penultimate house: the lane was sloping down already and narrowing, as if to lose itself in the approaching fields.

The house was another wide grey villa, with bay-windowed rooms either side of the front door, and its Victorian name, 'Carraveen', in stucco above it. The front door was wide open, as though the house had surrendered itself to the sunny day. A pale blue Morris Oxford stood in the drive with its windows down, and in its shadow a fat little Jack Russell lay on the gravel alternately panting and thinking. Paul squatted down to talk to the dog, which let him scratch it behind the ears but never really got interested. Mr Keeping had gone into the house, and it seemed so unlikely that he had simply forgotten him that Paul stood and waited with a consciously una.s.suming expression. He saw the drive had an In and an Out, not marked as such, but the fact sank down in him to some buried childhood idea of grandeur.

There was a thick flower-border, colourful but weedy and overgrown, around the edge of the drive, and over the top of it he looked into the garden beside the house, which stretched away through mysterious shadows of two or three large trees to a bright mown lawn that must run across the back. The whole place, at this indefinable time of day late afternoon, late June, work over but hours of sunlight still ahead made a peculiar impression on him. The time, like the light, seemed somehow viscous. He studied the name 'Carraveen', a bit like caravan, a bit like carrageen, the stuff his mother used to set a blancmange, but clearly romantic too, Scottish perhaps, some now completely forgotten home or holiday place that someone had loved long ago. He felt seduced, and delicately stifled, by something he couldn't yet explain. Through the left-hand bay-window he could see a grand piano in what appeared to be a dining-room, though the table in the centre was covered with books. The church clock struck the quarter-hour, and the silence afterwards seemed discreetly enhanced. Really all you could hear was the birds.

He heard a voice and looked again through the shadows to the bright back lawn, where he saw a woman in a wide straw hat with a red flower on the brim talking to someone out of view as she moved slowly towards the house. She was a largeish figure, in a shapeless blue dress, and carrying a large tapestry bag. Could this be the disdainful Mrs Keeping, mother of Julian and John? Surely too old. Mr Keeping's own mother perhaps, a friend or relative who was visiting. She stopped for a moment, as if stumped by what she'd just been told, and gazed at the ground, and then unseeingly along the side of the house, where she did in fact see Paul. She said something to the person now Paul heard another woman's voice and when she looked back he raised his head with a slight smile and then waved weakly, unsure if he wanted to announce himself or efface himself. There was another exchange, she nodded distantly, not exactly at Paul, and then strolled on out of view behind the house.

Paul went to the front door to call goodbye. He felt he'd been placed now as a low-level intruder, a peerer through other people's windows. A middle-aged woman with a wide pale face and black hair that was swept up and set in a stiff, broad helmet was coming towards him. 'Oh, h.e.l.lo,' he said, 'I'm Paul Bryant from the bank . . .'

She gave him a practical look. 'Did you want to see my husband?'

'Well, actually I've just walked here with him,' said Paul.

'Oh . . .' she said, with an air of momentary concession. She had strongly drawn black eyebrows which made her look hard to please. 'Was there something else?'

'Well, I don't know,' said Paul; and feeling he shouldn't be put in the wrong, 'He just left me here.'

'Ah . . . !' said Mrs Keeping, and half-turning she called out, 'Leslie!' Mr Keeping appeared at the end of the hall. 'This young man doesn't know if he's been dismissed or not' and she stared rather drolly at Paul, as if to say the joke was on everyone but her.

'Ah, yes,' said Mr Keeping. 'This is Paul Bryant. He's just joined us from Wantage.'

'From Wantage . . . !' said Mrs Keeping, as if this were droller still.

'We all have to come from somewhere, you know,' said Mr Keeping.

Paul had grown up in the mild but untested belief that Wantage was a fine little town. 'Well, sir, it was good enough for King Alfred,' he said.

Mrs Keeping half-allowed the protest, and the joke. 'Mmm, you're going back a bit,' she said. Though something else had occurred to her. She set her head on one side and frowned at his shoulders, his posture. 'How strong are you?' she said.

'Well, reasonably,' said Paul, confused by the scrutiny. 'Yes, I suppose . . .'

'Then I think I can use you. Come through,' a tiny glow of cajolement now in her tone.

'Paul may have other plans, darling,' said Mr Keeping, but in easy surrender to his wife.

'I shan't need him for long.'

'I've certainly got a couple of minutes,' said Paul.

They went down the hall and into the room at the end. 'I don't want my husband risking his back,' said Mrs Keeping. The sitting-room was densely furnished, large easy-chairs and sofas arm to arm on a thick gold carpet, nests of tables, standard-lamps, and a pair of surprising Victorian portraits, very large in the room, a woman in red and a man in black, looking out over the stereogram and the teak TV cabinet that flanked the fireplace. On top of the TV were several framed photos, in which Paul made out two boys, surely Julian and John, in yachting gear. They stepped out through the open french windows on to a wide patio. 'This is Mr Bryant,' said Mrs Keeping. 'You can leave your briefcase there.'

'Oh . . . right . . .' said Paul, nodding at the two females who were sitting in deckchairs. They were identified as 'My mother, Mrs Jacobs' this was the old lady in the straw hat, whom he'd already seen and 'Jenny Ralph . . . my niece, yes, my half-brother's daughter!' as if she'd just worked it out for the first time. Paul himself only pretended to do so, nodded again and murmured h.e.l.lo as he sidled past. Jenny Ralph was a frowning dark-haired girl a bit younger than he was, with a book and a notepad on her knee he felt himself sidestepping some sulky challenge she seemed to throw out.

The problem was a stone trough on the far side of the lawn, which had somehow slipped or been pushed off one of the two squat blocks it sat on, earth strewn on the gra.s.s and a clump of disoriented wallflowers, orangey-black, leaning out and up. 'I jolly well hope you can shift it,' said Mrs Keeping, with a return of her unjolly tone, almost as though Paul had pushed it over himself. 'I don't want it falling on Roger,' she said.

Paul stooped down and gave the trough a preliminary heave. The only effect of this was to rock it very slightly on the skewed axis of the other block. 'You don't want to bring the whole thing down,' said Mrs Keeping. She stood several yards away, perhaps to be clear of any such accident.

'No . . .' said Paul; and then, 'It's quite heavy actually, isn't it.'

'You'd stand a better chance with your jacket off.'

Paul obeyed, and seeing that Mrs Keeping showed no intention of taking the jacket from him hung it on a lichenous garden seat nearby. Without the jacket he felt even less able, his skinny frame more exposed. 'Right!' he said, and laughed rather fatuously. His hostess, as he tried to think of her, gave him a provisional sort of smile. He worked his hands in under the near corner of the trough, where it lay on the gra.s.s, but after a couple of hefts in the shuddering manner of a caber-t.o.s.s.e.r he could only raise it an inch and let it down again heavily just where it had been. He shook his head, and glanced across at the figures on the patio thirty yards off. Mr Keeping had joined his mother-in-law and niece, and they were gazing generally in his direction as they talked but, perhaps from politeness, not showing any detailed interest. He felt simultaneously important and completely insignificant.

'You're going to have to empty it, you know,' said Mrs Keeping, as though Paul had been actively refusing to do this.

He saw a certain stoical humour was going to be necessary a smiling surrender of his time and plans. 'Have you got a spade, please?' he said.

'You'll need something to put the soil on, of course. And do be careful with my wallflowers, won't you,' she said, with a hint of graciousness now they'd come to such niceties. 'Do you know, I'm going to get that girl involved.'

'Oh, I think I can manage . . .' said Paul.

'It will do her absolutely no harm,' said Mrs Keeping. 'She's going up to Oxford next term and she does nothing but sit and read. Her parents are in Malaya, which is why she's stuck with us' with a fairly clear suggestion she felt they were stuck with her. She moved off across the lawn, chin raised already, calling out.

Jenny Ralph took Paul off to the far side of the garden, and through a rustic arch into the sunless corner that sheltered the compost-heap and a cobweb-windowed shed. At first she treated him with the nervous snootiness of a child to an unknown servant. 'You should find whatever you need in there,' she said, watching him edge in among the clutter of the shed. The mower blocked the way, its bin caked at the rim with dung-like clots of dried gra.s.s. He reached over for a spade and kicked a loosely propped stack of canes that spilled and clattered ungraspably in every direction. There was a stifling smell of creosote and two-stroke fuel. 'It's rather h.e.l.l in there,' said Jenny from outside. She had a notably posh voice, but casual where her aunt was crisp. The accent was more striking, more revealing, in a young person. She sounded mildly fed up with it, but with no real intention of abandoning it.

'No, it's fine,' Paul called back. He covered the awkwardness he felt with a girl in a brisk bit of business, pa.s.sing out the spade, some old plastic sacks he must be five or six years older than her, but the advantage felt frail. Her poor skin and the oily shine of her dark curly hair were signs of the troubles he'd hardly emerged from himself. The fact that she wasn't especially pretty, though in some ways a relief, seemed also to put some subtly chivalrous pressure on him. He emerged, a trowel in his raised hand, just a little satirical.

'I don't suppose you want to be doing this for a minute,' Jenny said, with a slyly commiserating smile. 'I'm afraid they're always getting people involved.'

'Oh, I don't mind,' said Paul.

'You know it's a test. Aunt Corinna's always testing people, she can't help it. I've seen it ma.s.ses of times. I don't just mean on the piano, either.'

'Oh, have you?' said Paul, amused by her frankness, which seemed original and upper-cla.s.s too. He looked out nervously as they came on to the lawn. Aunt Corinna was in the far corner, inspecting a sagging trellis and, quite possibly, lining up further tasks or tests for him. Beside her a large weeping beech-tree spread awkwardly but romantically, a table sheltered under its skirts.

'You know she should have been a concert pianist. That's what everyone says, at least; I don't know if it's actually true. I mean anyone can say they should have been something. Anyway now she teaches the piano. She gets fantastic results, of course, though you can see the children are simply terrified of her. Julian says she's a s.a.d.i.s.t,' she said, a touch self-consciously.

'Oh . . . !' said Paul, with a frown and disparaging laugh and then, from the mention of anything taboo, a sure-fire, searching blush. Sometimes they ebbed unnoticed, sometimes kept coming, self-compounding. He stooped and half-hid himself spreading the plastic sacks on the gra.s.s. 'So Julian's her younger son,' he said, still with his back to her.

'Oh, John wouldn't say that, he's far too square.'

'So Julian isn't square . . . ?'

'What's Julian? Julian's sort of . . . elliptical.' They both laughed. 'Have I embarra.s.sed you?' said Jenny.

'Not at all,' said Paul, recovering. 'The whole of your family's new to me, you see. I'm from Wantage.'

'Oh, I see,' said Jenny as if this was in fact a bit of a drawback. 'Well, they're rather a nightmare to sort out . . . the old lady you met over there is my grandmother.'

'You mean Mrs Jacobs?'

'Yes, she married again when my father was quite small. She's been married three times.'

'Goodness.'

'I know . . . She's about to be seventy, and we're going to have a huge enormous party.'

Paul started gingerly unearthing the plants from the trough they trembled under this further a.s.sault on their dignity. He stood them, in their trailing tangle of earth and roots, on the old Fisons sack. Soft clots of some kind of manure, loosely forked into the soil, were still slightly slimy. 'I hope I'm doing this right,' he said.

'Oh, I should think so,' said Jenny, who like the others was watching but not exactly paying attention.

'So your aunt said you're going up to Oxford.' He tried to disguise his envy, if that's what it was, in a genial avuncular tone.

'Did she. Yes, I am.'

'What are you going to study?'

'I'm reading French at St Anne's.' She made it sound beautifully exclusive, the rich simplicity of the proper nouns. He had taken his mother all round Oxford, gaping at the colleges, as a kind of m.a.s.o.c.h.i.s.tic treat for both of them before he went off to Loughborough to train for the bank; but they hadn't bothered with the women's colleges. 'Julian's applying to Univ this year.'

'Mm, so you might be there together.'

'Which would be rather fab,' said Jenny.

When he'd dug out all the earth he rocked the trough with both hands and it moved more readily. Still, he laughed at the second looming failure. 'Here goes,' he said, and squatted down again. Over the lawn he saw Mrs Keeping bearing down, with her keen sense of timing. With a violent force that in the moment itself seemed almost comical he heaved up the great stone object and with a stifled shout he lodged it on its other block, on the edge of it at least, but the job was done. 'Aha!' said Mrs Keeping, 'we're getting there at last,' and as he held it steady and smiled almost devotedly up at her he felt it turn under his hand; if he hadn't jumped back in the second it slipped and fell it would have crushed his foot the block underneath had lurched over, and now the trough itself, ma.s.sive and unmoving, lay sideways on the gra.s.s. 'Oh G.o.d, are you all right?' said Jenny, gripping his arm with a welcome note of hysteria. Mrs Keeping herself made a kind of panting noise. 'Now we're jiggered,' she said. 'Oh look,' said Jenny, 'your hand's bleeding.' How it had happened he didn't know, and it was only now she said it that it began to hurt, a dull deep pang in the ball of the thumb and needle-like stinging of the grazed flesh. He supposed the pain had been held in check by the knowledge, so far his alone, that the trough had cracked in two.

Ten minutes later he found himself clown, hero, victim, he couldn't tell which in a low garden chair with a large gin-and-tonic in his right hand. His left hand was impressively bandaged, the fingers hard to move in their tight sheath. Mrs Keeping, with a smirk of remorse, had bandaged it herself, the remorse turning steadily more aggressive as the long strip of stuff was bound tighter and tighter. Now the family glanced at his hand with concern and regret and a touch of self-satisfaction. Paul, tongue-tied, reached out to scratch Roger the Jack Russell, who had come round to the back of the house and was sitting panting in one of the broad purple cushions of aubrietia which spread over the flagstones. Mr Keeping was in the drawing-room, fixing drinks for the others; he called out through the french windows, 'Your usual, darling?'

'Absolutely!' said Mrs Keeping, with a tight little laugh and shake of the head, as if to say she'd earned it. She perched on the wooden bench, and tore at the cellophane on a packet of Kensitas.

'And what about Daphne?'

'Gin and It!' shouted Mrs Jacobs, as if taking part in a game.

'Large one?'

'Vast!'

Paul and Jenny laughed at this, but Mrs Keeping gave a barely amused grunt. Mrs Jacobs was sitting facing Paul, and between them was a low metal-framed table with a mosaic top. Over the rim of the table he had, if he wanted it, a direct view into the beige-coloured mysteries of her underwear. In her shapeless sundress and wide floppy hat she had an air of collapse, but her expression was friendly and alert, if ready, with age and perhaps a degree of deafness, to let one or two things slip past her. She wore large gla.s.ses with clear lower rims and tops like tawny eyebrows. When her drink was set in front of her on the mosaic table, she gave it a keen but illusionless smile, as if to say she knew what would become of it. Her smile showed surprisingly brown teeth a smoker's smile that went with the smoky catch in her voice. 'Well, cheers!'

'Cheerio . . .' Mr Keeping sat down, still in his bank manager's suit, which made his own large g-and-t look slightly surreal.

'Cheers,' said Jenny.

'What are you drinking, child?' said Mrs Jacobs.

'Oh, cider, Granny . . .'

'I didn't know you liked cider.'

'Well, I don't particularly, but I'm not allowed spirits yet, and one has to get drunk on something, doesn't one.'

'I suppose one does . . .' said Mrs Jacobs, as if weighing up a completely new theory.

'Paul's just started at the bank this week, Daphne,' said Mr Keeping. 'He's joined us from Wantage.'

'Oh, I love Wantage,' said Mrs Jacobs; and after a moment, 'In fact I once ran away to Wantage.'

'Oh, Mother, really,' said Mrs Keeping.

'Just for a night or two, when your father was being especially beastly.' Paul had never heard anyone speak like this, and couldn't say at first if it was real or theatrical, truly sophisticated or simply embarra.s.sing. He glanced at Mrs Keeping, who was smiling tightly and batting her eyelids with contained impatience. 'I took you and Wilfie under my wing and drove like h.e.l.l to Wantage. We stayed with Mark for a day or two. Mark Gibbons, you know,' she said to Paul, 'the marvellous painter. We stayed with him till the heat died down.'

'Anyway,' muttered Mrs Keeping, drawing on her cigarette.

'We did, darling. You're probably too young to remember.' She sounded slightly wounded, but used to being so.

'You didn't know how to drive, Mother,' Mrs Keeping went on brightly, but unable to stop herself.

'Of course I could drive . . .'

Mrs Keeping blew out smoke with a hard humorous expression. 'We needn't bore Mr Bryant with our family nonsense,' she said.

Paul, in the first nice giddiness of a very strong gin-and-tonic, smiled, ducked his head, showed he didn't mind the mild bewilderment at unexplained names and facts. As often with older people he was both bored and unaccountably involved at the same time. 'No, no,' he said, and grinned at Mr Keeping, who surveyed the whole scene with quizzical composure. The evening had swollen to a shape entirely unimagined an hour before.

'You see, I think our family is jolly interesting,' said Mrs Jacobs. 'I think you underestimate its interest. You should take more pride in it.' She reached down beside her chair and brought up her bag, the large tapestry bag with wooden jaws that Paul had seen earlier. She started going through it.

Mrs Keeping sighed and was more conciliatory. 'Well, I am proud of one or two of them, Mother, you know that very well. Cecil's not exactly my cup of tea, but my father, for all his . . . oddities, has moments of genius.'

'Well, he's certainly very clever,' said Mrs Jacobs, brows lightly furrowed over her bag. Paul had the impression of a small-scale chaos of papers, powder compacts, gla.s.ses cases, pills. She stopped for a moment and looked up at him, her hand in the bag marking her place. 'Jenny's grandfather was a marvellous painter, too. You may have heard of him, Revel Ralph? No . . . he was, well, he was very different from Mark Gibbons. I suppose you'd say more decorative.'

'I think Mark's a bit over the hill, Granny,' said Jenny.

'Well, possibly, my dear, since he's almost as old as me.' Paul knew how old this was, of course, but didn't know if it was a secret. 'You probably think Revel's hopelessly old hat too.'