‘You could have worn your mink,’ Isaac said. ‘I assume you’re travelling avec les fourrures.’
That was new too, the Franglais tag inserted with arch emphasis. I told him he was fifteen years out of date. ‘No one is wearing real fur any more.’ I noticed as he drew briefly abreast that he himself wore a long leather overcoat, bulging slightly at the middle buttons, a black leather coat turned up at the collar. How strange he looked, with his tonsured head and his little feet in pale tan moccasins.
The table we sat at was too small. It was Sunday night and we hadn’t booked. All the other tables seemed to have decent Swiss families of several harmonious generations. The children were blonde and quiet and good. The grandparents lorded it over the parents. Although I had spent my whole life attempting to escape this stereotype, for a second I saw it in a different light. How admirable they seemed compared to us, two guilty people with a childless son.
The restaurant was efficient and brightly-lit, which depressed Isaac’s level of malice somewhat. We all avoided the topic of Susy, though I could think of nothing else. For the first two courses and a bottle of wine Isaac managed to converse almost normally, asking us about the places we’d been, not exactly admiring the details we gave him but certainly listening, and filing them away. He seemed to have learned a lot about art. He made waspish comments about international galleries.
The dessert came, thickly piped with Chantilly, gentle, luscious, indulgent cream. The wine had moved fear further away. I thought it might be time to risk being nice, slipping in a little bit of flattery; it had always worked well when he was a teenager.
‘Good idea to give up the glasses,’ I said, appraising him as if he weren’t ugly. ‘You always had very nice eyes.’ In truth they looked larger than when I used to meet him charging blindly to the bathroom on schoolday mornings.
‘Are they soft or hard?’ Chris asked. He himself had worn contact lenses since the divorce. I suggested it, and he conceded.
‘You know what they say,’ Isaac smiled, and at first I thought the flirtation had worked. ‘Girls don’t make passes at guys who wear glasses.’
— At least, that’s what I thought he said, which was why I was astonished by Chris’s reaction, for he paused with his spoon halfway to his mouth, and the cream began to slip down his chin till he scooped it back up with an angry movement. Something important seemed to have happened, for Isaac’s face blazed with colour, and Chris was staring blankly at his plate as if he was concussed. I tried to smooth things over.
‘Of course they do,’ I said. ‘I ought to know. I made a pass at your father…’
Somehow I had made things worse with this. Isaac gobbled at me like a drowning turkey. He took a great swig of wine. Chris was picking at his cuticle.
‘Well, you and Dad aren’t gay,’ he blurted.
‘Of course we’re not. What has that got to do with it? What have glasses got to do with being gay?’ I started to realise as I finished the sentence, but my brain had given orders, the words kept coming.
‘He’s making some joke,’ said Christopher. ‘I think Alex misheard you. Gays don’t make passes at guys who wear glasses is what Isaac said, my dear.’ He sounded as if he was talking in his sleep.
Suddenly everything fitted, the voice, the clothes, the manner, the perm. I was flabbergasted, but I started to smile, I started to grin, I started to laugh.
‘Oh Isaac. You must have thought us terribly dim.’
‘He’s having us on,’ Chris insisted, dully. ‘He’s playing some awfully unfunny joke. How can you be gay? You were never gay. You don’t suddenly turn gay, just like that.’
‘Don’t be stupid, darling,’ I said. ‘Don’t take any notice of your father, Isaac. He’s a bit surprised, that’s all.’
‘Shut the fuck up,’ said Isaac, with venom. ‘Don’t interfere. It’s Dad I came to talk to, not you.’
‘Don’t be rude to her,’ Chris said. ‘She’s always been polite to you children.’
‘Polite is just about it,’ said Isaac. I suddenly realised that he was quite drunk, at the stage where frankness seems a glorious option. ‘Polite is all she ever managed to be.’
(I smiled, but I was afraid. I had taken in a breath, but it wouldn’t leak away again, it stayed in my chest, a hard, small fist.)
‘She never loved us. You never loved us.’ He turned his sharp blue eyes on me. Despite my fear, I observed it was makeup which made his eyes look bigger, less ordinary.
‘I didn’t want to try and usurp your mother. But I was very fond of you…’ False to my ear, and to his. I was panicking. I hate being attacked. I wanted to appease him; I wanted to kill him. I wanted him to die and leave us alone.
‘How sensitive and considerate,’ Isaac sneered, lip curling to show faintly dappled teeth. I had never been strict about chocolate, even his teeth I had not looked after. ‘My mother’s been dead for twenty years. So you needn’t restrain yourself any more.’ Another deep swig of white wine. A little ran down his chin like lymph, as if essential fluids were leaking away, deep wounds opening to let it all out. ‘Everyone knows you killed her, in any case, you and Dad between you.’
‘Isaac! That’s enough! You don’t know what you’re saying!’ Chris was angry now as he scarcely ever was, big hands clenching, face drained of blood. I knew quite certainly he wanted to hit Isaac. I hoped for one mad second he would. Then I imagined Isaac’s plump weak body collapsing. The ultimate horror; he killed his son.
I had to help. I had to make peace.
‘We have to stop this. Please. Both of you. It’s horrible. Forgive me, Isaac. I understand. I think I do. You and Susy must feel… I took your father away. And your mother’s death… I suppose… it’s inevitable you feel that. But I didn’t break up a happy marriage. There are things your father wouldn’t tell you. She was a manic depressive. Clinically. And she had affairs with his friends. Because she blamed him for her unhappiness. Then when she knew she was losing him, she suddenly wanted him back. And that was too late. He was in love with me. And everything else followed.’
‘Please,’ said Chris, no longer angry. ‘It’s all so long ago.’ He reached out across the cluttered tablecloth and took my hand. The salt fell over, a small landslide of snow, but we were holding hands, life crept back between us, a quiet promise that we would survive. But what about Isaac… what had we done to him?
He sat deflated, scraping at his dish, the very last slivers of creme Chantilly. Even his hands were plump. Yet the awareness recurred that he had grown smaller, somewhere, hiding underneath the flesh. And Isaac was homosexual. The boy I had lived with was not as I imagined. Chris’s son was gay.
‘Why have you really come?’ I asked. ‘Let’s have some coffee and some Armagnac.’ I released Chris’s fingers, and patted Isaac’s hand. To my surprise he didn’t brush me away.
‘You have understood, haven’t you?’ he asked, and his tone was no longer aggressive, not even defensive, it was plain tired. ‘Alex, you know I wasn’t joking. I’m gay. I couldn’t put that in a letter.’
‘So that’s why you came,’ said Chris. He sounded as flat as his son.
‘Not really.’
Over brandy and coffee the whole truth came out. We talked about Susy as though she were dead. Her story was dreary and predictable enough. The most recent abortion was two days ago, and this time the father was the cult’s grim leader. I had somehow always known that she would get into trouble, but I’d envisaged babies rather than abortions. Isaac emerged well from it all, if his account was to be believed. He’d left various messages we never got, he had bribed the cultists to leave for good, and now he had come out to find us.