53

In bringing his grandson back to recuperate in his care at The Roundel, Edward had acted with a rare impulsiveness that surprised him. During their drive from the airport, Alison had mentioned pneumonia, so he knew in part what to expect. The boy’s painful shortness of breath, his evident weakness, was like a TB sufferer’s. His obstinate graveyard humour and the effort laughter caused him, reminded Edward of long-stay unfortunates in the isolation hospital for whom there had been no hope of recovery. But nothing had prepared him for the emaciation. The shock of seeing Jamie hunched up against his pillows, distorted by weight loss, recalled the horrors of his first glimpse at pictures of liberated concentration camps. Only this was in colour and he could not look away and wait for it to pass.

On leaving the hospital, he had exchanged quiet words with the duty nurse, explaining his plans for Jamie, and confessing his ignorance of the disease’s nature. The leaflets she had given him contained more disturbing parallels; along with the bloody sputum he had begun to cough up, night sweats and a dramatic loss of energy had been the symptoms which had finally drawn the attention of the internment camp doctors to his pulmonary TB all those years ago.

Back in the late ’fifties, his self-disgust following the end of his affair with Myra had pitched him headlong towards a second breakdown, only this time the tools of self-negation were alcohol, overwork and compulsive womanising. What began in a swaggering, I’ll-show-her spirit swiftly achieved its own dangerous momentum. It had been Heini, of all people, then scarcely old enough to know much of suffering himself, who had intervened and diverted Edward towards the calm Kensington consulting room of Sonia Keppel. Over two long years, during which he had seen no-one and written nothing of worth, this small, enigmatic woman with her softly insistent voice and calculatedly self-effacing manner, had brought him to see how much misplaced guilt he had suppressed. With her guidance, he had come to a mature grieving and acceptance of the loss of his childhood as well as his family. She had led him, not to happiness exactly, but to an equilibrium based on self-knowledge rather than drugs or self-deluding denial.

‘You’ll never let this go, Edward-Eli,’ she had warned him. ‘You have this persistent sense of debt that’s positively Wagnerian. We’re both rational people so we don’t believe in curses. The funny thing with curses, though, is the damage they continue to do even if we don’t believe in them. Sometimes the only way to lift them is to suspend your rational dismissal and enter their crazy logic. Maybe all the months and money you’ve spent with me will get you nowhere and you’ll never stop hurting yourself for having been saved, until you save someone else.’

Trapped in a Rexbridge cinema watching the shuffling black and white lines of hollow-eyed concentration camp prisoners, he had been besieged by feelings of guilt and helplessness. Faced with his grandson’s living corpse however, he felt he could do something. Could this, he wondered, be his chance to lift the curse?

Having got the boy away, however, he saw immediately how futile was his impulse to ‘rescue’ him. Driving him out of London, the boy dozing in a blanket oblivious to their wintry surroundings, he was relentlessly reminded of Sally’s mercy mission to snatch him from the Rexbridge psychiatric unit. He imagined that she had felt a similar sense of impulsive daring, a similar fear of risk-taking and of blindly smothering love. He could not save Jamie, however. The ‘rescue’ evinced only a naive belief in the whole-some powers of the countryside over the perfidious influences of the city; the boy was as locked in his sickness as he was in his sickly perversion. Edward knew he spoke to his lover every day – he had occasionally stumbled in on their telephone calls. He was amazed, and sickened that, in full possession of the facts, the boy continued to cling to the very thing that was causing his death. He had initially thought that once they were alone together, he could set about getting to know Jamie properly as an adult, making up for lost time, wringing some meaning from the precious months left them. Instead he retreated to the musical territories they had shared during his grandson’s early boyhood.

‘I’m a coward,’ he told Miriam during her first visit to see how Jamie was progressing. She had appeared with quantities of food which she was packing into the freezer in The Roundel’s kitchen. Jamie was taking an after-lunch doze upstairs.

‘Do you expect me to contradict you?’ Her tone was suddenly abrasive.

Edward shrugged, opting for humour.

‘It would be nice,’ he said hopefully.

‘Well forget it. You were the same about Uncle Thomas.’

‘How do you mean? Thomas and I got on. I could always talk to Thomas.’

‘Exactly. You talked to him, not with him. You always kept him at arm’s length because of what he was and how he felt towards you. It embarrassed you.’

‘Oh really,’ Edward tried to wave her nonsense away with a hand and reach for his coffee. Miriam shut the freezer lid with a muffled bump.

‘Thomas loved you,’ she said. ‘And you could never accept that.’

‘Of course I accepted it. I mean, I couldn’t reciprocate but –’

‘You were relieved when he died and stopped making demands on you. You didn’t even get me out of school for his funeral and he was a better father to me than you ever were.’

‘Oh really?’

‘Yes. Really. Thomas talked with me. He wanted to know what I wanted, what I thought about things, who I wanted to be.’

‘And I didn’t?’

‘You never showed it if you did. You just wrote cheques, and waited for me to grow, like some impatient gardener.’

‘Ah.’ Edward smiled wearily at the table top.

‘Don’t laugh at me. You’re always laughing at me!’

‘I’m not laughing,’ he assured her. She sat heavily in a chair opposite him looking momentarily, strangely, like his mother, her cheeks flushed with irritation, her plump hands restlessly picking at things. She had never looked like Sally. Only Alison looked like Sally. ‘What does all this have to do with Jamie?’ he asked.

‘Everything,’ she said. ‘Your disgust, your fear, are neither here nor there. Just give him some space and show him some respect. I’m learning so much from all this and I think you could too if only you’d let yourself.’

‘I think I’m a little old to start learning.’

‘You haven’t had a serious illness since your early twenties. You’re strong as an ox. Right now, he’s older than you are.’

‘Don’t bully me. You always bully me.’

‘Somebody’s got to.’

‘I’m sorry,’ he insisted. ‘I can’t change the way I feel. You … You don’t like parsnips. I feel uncomfortable around homosexuals.’

‘There’s no comparison.’

‘Of course there is. It’s an irrational dislike. Maybe it’s a race memory. Whatever it is, simple good will won’t make it go away.’

‘At least try. For me.’

‘All right,’ he sighed. ‘For you. For my poor neglected daughter, I’ll try.’

‘Thank you.’

She smiled. He was fobbing her off. If he told of the churning revulsion he felt when he saw one man hold another’s hand or confessed that no number of documentaries could rid him of the gut belief that this disease was a direct result of puerile self-indulgence, she would probably pack her son into her expensive car and drive him off to Essex. Coward or no, he badly wanted Jamie at The Roundel. For there were other things he could not tell her – for all his bluff dismissals, he did recognise that he had failed her as a father. He could not tell her that the bewildered, helpless love he felt for her children was the only chance he had to redeem that failure. He was a man, after all, with all a man’s foolish, unfashionable pride.

Miriam became calmer. She poured herself a cup of coffee and reached into her shopping basket for a packet of chocolate biscuits which she opened between them.

‘I meant to tell you at the time,’ she said, ‘But I was so het up. I never spoke to Venetia Peake. I mean, of course I spoke to her but I never told her all those silly things about alcoholic nannies and parcelling me off to school, truly I didn’t. I think she got an Old Girls list from my year and tracked some people down. Josie Forbush or someone. Someone with a grudge.’

‘I did wonder,’ he confessed. ‘It was kind of you to protect me.’

Miriam made a small, non-committal noise in her throat and ate another biscuit.

‘She’s called, you know. Myra,’ he told her. ‘She’s called several times. I’ve only answered once.’

‘What does she want?’

He thought a moment.

‘I don’t know. I think perhaps she’s curious. She’d like to see me again. See how I’ve aged.’

‘That would be a shock for her, given the way she looks.’ Miriam looked across and saw that he was serious. ‘Don’t you want to see her?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘But it might be fun.’

‘Miriam, you can’t have it both ways. I thought Myra was meant to be the bugbear of your childhood dreams and a Hollywood monster.’

‘She is. She was. But still, it might be fun.’

‘I thought you found geriatric romance grotesque.’

‘Who said anything about romance?’ Miriam looked alarmed. ‘You could just see her. That’s all.’

‘So you could brag to Francis’s friends about meeting her?’

‘Not at all. God you’re so unfair sometimes! I wouldn’t even want to be there. Of course I wouldn’t. You could just meet for lunch, in London. She comes over to shop sometimes. I read it in a magazine. Now she could set you right on a few things; she does a lot of work for AIDS charities. Honestly, Dad, it might be fun. A trip down memory lane.’

‘I don’t think so.’

Edward trusted the glance he threw her was sufficiently withering.