In the kitchen Malcolm finished Chapter Eight of Edwin Drood and eventually heard the Sunday papers arrive. He went to fetch them, glanced through them, and then made coffee and toast. He took a tray and the newspapers up to his wife.
‘I’ve brought you a cup of tea,’ Jessica said later that morning, in their son’s room. Sometimes he drank it, but often it was still there on the bedside table when she returned at lunchtime. He never carried the cup and saucer down to the kitchen himself and would apologize for that, wagging his head in irritation at his shortcomings.
He didn’t reply when she spoke about the tea. He stared at her and smiled. One hand was clenched close to his bearded face, the fingernails bitten, the fingers gnawed here and there. The room smelt of his sweat because he couldn’t bear to have the window open, nor indeed to have the blind up. He made his models with the electric light on, preferring that to daylight. In the room the models were everywhere: Hurricanes and Spitfires, sea-planes and Heinkel 178s, none of them finished. A month ago, on 25th May, they’d made an attempt to celebrate his twenty-fourth birthday.
She closed the door behind her. On the landing walls there was a wallpaper splashed with poppies and cornflowers, which ran down through the house. People often remarked on its pastoral freshness when Jessica opened the hall door to them, though others sometimes blinked. The hall had had a gloomy look before, the paintwork a shade of gravy. Doors and skirting-boards were brightly white now.
‘Let’s not go to the Morrishes’,’ Malcolm suggested in the kitchen, even though he’d put on his Sunday-morning-drinks clothes.
‘Of course we must,’ she said, not wanting to go to the Morrishes’ either. ‘I won’t be a minute.’
In the downstairs lavatory she applied eye-shadow. Her thin face had a shallow look if she didn’t make an effort with make-up; a bit of colour suited her, she reckoned, as it did the hall. She smeared on lipstick and pressed a tissue between her lips to clear away the surplus, continuing to examine her application of eye-shadow in the mirror above the washbasin. Dark hair, greying now, curved around her face. Her deep blue eyes still managed a sparkle that spread beauty into her features, transforming her: nondescript little thing, someone once had said, catching her in a tired moment.
In the kitchen she turned on the extractor tan above the electric cooker; pork chops were cooking slowly in the oven. ‘All right?’ she said, and Malcolm, idling over an advertisement for photochromic lenses, nodded and stood up.
Their son was dreaming now: he was there, on the bank of the river. Birds with blue plumage swooped over the water; through the foliage came the strum of a guitar. All the friends there’d been were there, in different coloured sleeping-bags, lying as he was. They were happy by the river because India was where the truth was, wrapped up in gentleness and beauty. Someone said that, and everyone else agreed.
Anthea Chalmers was at the Morrishes’, tall and elegant in green, long since divorced. She had a look of Bette Davis, eyes like soup-plates, that kind of mouth. The Livingstons were there also, and Susanna and David Maidstone, and the Unwins. So was Mr Fulmer, a sandy-complexioned man whom people were sorry for because his wife was a stick-in-the-mud and wouldn’t go to parties. June and Tom Highband were there, and the Taylor-Deeths, and Marcus Stire and his friend. There was a handful of faces that were unfamiliar to Jessica and Malcolm.
‘Hullo, hullo,’ their host called out, welcoming them with party joviality. The guests were passing from the sitting-room, through the french windows to the garden, all of them with glasses in their hands. The Morrishes – he pink and bluff, she pretty in a faded way – were busily making certain that these glasses contained precisely what people wanted. In the garden their French au pair boy was handing round bowls of nuts and shiny little biscuits from Japan. Children – the Morrishes’ and others’ – had congregated in a distant corner, by a tool-shed.
Jessica and Malcolm both asked for white wine, since chilled bottles of it stood there, inviting on a warm morning. They didn’t say much to the Morrishes, who clearly wanted to get things going before indulging in chat. They stepped out into the garden, where a mass of flowers spectacularly bloomed and the lawns were closely shorn.
‘Hi, Jessica,’ Marcus Stire’s friend said, a short, stout young man in a blue blazer. He’d made her black-bottom pie, he reported. He shook his head, implying disappointment with his version of the dish.
‘Hullo, stranger,’ Anthea Chalmers said to Malcolm.
She always seemed to pick him out. Ages ago he’d rejected the idea that a balding solicitor with glasses might possibly have some sensual attraction for her, even though all she ever talked to him about were sensual matters. She liked to get him into a corner, as she had done now, and had a way of turning interlopers away with a snakelike shift of her shoulders. She’d placed him with his back to the wall of the house, along which a creamy honeysuckle had been trained. A trellis to his right continued to support it; to his left, two old water-butts were swathed with purple clematis.
‘A pig,’ she said, referring to the man she’d once been married to. ‘And I told him, Malcolm. I’d sooner share a bed with a farmyard pig was precisely what I said. Needless to say, he became violent.’
Jessica, having discussed the preparation of black-bottom pie with Marcus Stire’s friend, smiled at the stout young man and passed on. The au pair boy offered her a Japanese biscuit and then a man she didn’t know remarked upon the weather. Could anything be nicer, he asked her, than a drink or two on a Sunday morning in a sunny London garden? He was a man in brown suede, expensively cut to disguise a certain paunchiness. He had damp eyes and a damp-looking moustache. He had well-packed jowls, and a sun-browned head that matched the shade of his clothes. A businessman, Jessica speculated, excessively rich, a tough performer in his business world. He began to talk about a house he owned near Estepona.
*
On the surface of the tea which Jessica had earlier brought her son a skin had formed, in which a small fly now struggled. Nothing else was happening in the room. The sound of breathing could hardly be heard, the dream about birds with blue plumage had abruptly ceased. Then – in that same abrupt manner, a repetition of the suddenness that in different ways affected this boy’s life – his eyes snapped open.
Through the gloom, and seeming larger than reality, the Spitfires and the Heinkels greeted his consciousness. He was in a room with aeroplanes, he told himself, and while he lay there nothing more impinged on his mind. Eventually he rose and began to dress, his youthful beard scanty and soft, quite like a bearded lady’s. Tears ran into it while slowly he pulled his clothes over his white flesh.
His T-shirt was pale blue, the paler message it bore almost washed away. Wham! it had said, the word noisily proclaimed against lightning flashes and the hooded figures of Batman and Robin. A joke all of it had been: those years had been full of jokes, with no one wanting to grow up, with that longing to be children for ever. Tears dripped from his beard to the T-shirt now; some fell on to his jeans. He turned the electric light on and then noticed the cup of tea by his bed. He drank it, swallowing the skin and the fly that had died in it. His tears did not distress him.
‘Well, that was it, Malcolm,’ Anthea Chalmers said. ‘I mean, no one enjoys a bedroom more than I do, but for God’s sake!’
Her soup-plate eyes rapidly blinked, her lips were held for a moment in a little knot. The man she’d married, she yet again revealed, had not been able to give her what she’d wanted and needed. Instead, intoxicated, he would return to their house at night and roar about from room to room. Often he armed himself with a bamboo cane. ‘Which he bought,’ she reminded Malcolm, ‘quite openly in a garden shop.’