He came back to himself before the thought could reach deeper. He’d grown unaware of the music in the park, and now there was only clapping. He was awakened less by the discreet peal than by a sense that his body was about to expel some element it was no longer able to contain. His midriff strained itself up from the chair as the secret escaped him—a protracted vibrant belch that the applause faded just in time to isolate.
He excused himself as quickly and as blindly as he could—he had a childish half-awake notion that if he didn’t see he wouldn’t be seen either—but not before he glimpsed couples staring as if he’d strayed from the Imperial, which they barely tolerated for its appeal to tourists. Several pensioners on the main street frowned at his excessively boisterous progress, but he was anxious to take refuge in his room. Since Carol and Helen were busy in the kitchen, only shortness of breath delayed him on the stairs. He manhandled the door open and slumped against it, but took just one step towards the bed.
Whoever had tidied up had returned the mirror to the windowsill. It must be himself he could see in the oval glass, even if the face appeared to recede faster than he stumbled forward. Presumably his having rushed back to the hotel made him see the face dwindle beyond sight, carried helplessly into a blackness that had no basis in the room. He rubbed his eyes hard, and once the fog cleared he saw nothing in the mirror except his own confused face.
The marble hands had stored up warmth. They brought back the touch of flesh, which he’d avoided since losing his parents, not that he’d encountered much of it while they were alive. He planted the hands on the chest of drawers and turned the glass to the wall, then lay on top of the duvet, trying harder and more unsuccessfully to relax than he ever had after a day’s teaching, until the gong sent its vibrations through his nerves.
He didn’t eat much. Besides being wary of conjuring another belch, he felt though someone who knew more about him than he realized was observing him. When he took the last of his plates into the kitchen, Carol gave him a harassed disappointed blink. “Dinner was excellent,” he assured her, though it had been something of a repeat performance of last night’s, with cold beef understudying ham. “I’m just not very peckish. I expect I’m too excited at the prospect of a date with my favorite young lady.”
“Do you still want to go out with my uncle tonight?”
Helen had kept her back to his comment, but turned with a quick bright smile. “Yes please, Uncle Lionel.”
That was more like the girl he remembered. It lasted as far as the street, where he said “Shall we just go for an amble?”
“To the rides.”
“Best save those till I’ve been to the bank.”
“I’ve got some money. If we aren’t going to the rides I don’t want to go.”
He felt as if she knew he’d manufactured his excuse. “It’s your treat,” he said.
All the way along the promenade he had to remind himself that the screams from the tracks etched high on the glassy sunset expressed pleasure. The sight beyond the entrance to the amusement park of painted horses bobbing like flotsam on an ebb tide provided some relief. He halted by the old roundabout to regain his breath. “Shall we,” he said, and “go on here?”
Helen squashed her lower lip flat with its twin. “That’s for babies.”
He might have retorted that she hadn’t seemed to think so last year, but said “What shall it be, then?”
“The Cannonball.”
“I thought you didn’t care for roller coasters any more than I do.”
“That was when I was little. I like it now, and the Plunge of Peril, and Annihilation.”
“Will you be awfully offended if I watch?”
“No.” The starkness of the word appeared to rouse her pity for him, since she added “You can win me something, Uncle Lionel.”
He felt obliged to see her safely onto the roller coaster. Once she was installed in the middle carriage, next to a boy with an increasingly red face and the barest vestige of hair, Lionel headed for the sideshows. Too many of the prizes were composed of puffed-up rubber for his taste—he remembered a pink horse whose midriff had burst between his adolescent legs, dumping him in the sea—but they were out of reach of his skill. He had yet to ring a single bell or cast a quoit onto a hook when Helen indicated she was bound for the Plunge of Peril.
He was determined to win her a present. Eventually rolling several pounds’ worth of balls down a chute towards holes intermittently exposed by a perforated strip of wood gained him an owl of shaggy orange cloth. He would have felt more triumphant if he hadn’t realized he’d betrayed that he wouldn’t have needed to go to the bank. He was just in time to see Helen leave the Plunge of Peril
She glanced about but didn’t notice him behind a bunch of teddy bears pegged by their cauliflower ears. As he watched through the tangle of legs she shared a swift kiss with her companion, the red-faced boy crowned with grey skin, and tugged him in the direction of a virtually vertical roller coaster. Lionel didn’t intervene., not even when they staggered off the ride, though he was unsure whether he was being discreet or spying on them or at a loss how to approach them. He was pursuing them through the crowds when their way was blocked by two figures with the night gaping where their faces ought to be.
They were life-size cartoons of a man and a woman sufficiently ill-dressed to be homeless, painted on a flat with their faces cut out for the public to insert their own. Lionel saw Helen scamper to poke hers out above the woman’s body. Her grimace was meant to be funny—she was protruding at the boy the tongue she’d recently shared with him—but Lionel realized that too late to keep quiet. “Don’t,” he cried.
For a moment Helen’s face looked trapped by the oval. Perhaps her eyes were lolling leftward to send the boy that way, since that was the direction in which he absented himself. She emerged so innocently it angered Lionel. “I think it’s time we went back to your mother,” he said, and thrust the owl at Helen as she mooched after him. “This was for you.”
“Thanks.” On the promenade she lowered a mournful gaze to the dwarfish button-eyed rag-beaked soft-clawed orange lump, and then she risked saying, “Are you going to tell Mum?”
“Can you offer me any reason why I shouldn’t?”
“Because she’d never let me see Brandon again.”
“I thought that was already supposed to be the arrangement.”
“But I love him,” Helen protested, and began to weep.
“Good heavens now, no need for that. You can’t be in love at your age.” The trouble was that he had no idea when it was meant to start; it never had for him. “Do stop it, there’s a good girl,” he pleaded as couples bound for the amusement park began to frown more at him than Helen, and applied himself to taking some control. “I really don’t like being used when I haven’t even been consulted.”
“I won’t ever again, I promise.”
“I’ll hold you to it. Now can we make that the end of the tears? I shouldn’t think you’d like your mother wondering what the tragedy is.”
“I’ll stop if you promise not to tell.”
“We’ll see.”
He was ashamed to recognize that he might have undertaken more if she hadn’t dabbed her eyes dry with the owl, leaving a wet patch suggesting that the bird had disgraced itself; should Carol learn of Helen’s subterfuge she would also know he’d neglected to supervise her. Carol proved to be so intent on her business accounts that she simply transferred her glance of surprise from the clock to him. “I’ve a job for you as long as you’re here,” she told Helen, and Lionel took his sudden weariness to his room.