“You do, you really do.”
Startled moments before Resnick recognized his former wife, before he recognized Elaine: sunken cheeks and patched skin, fiercely hacked hair, eyes that glowed back at him as if from the center of another face.
“Well,” Elaine said. “Old times. Me and you and Marian. This place.” She was standing unsteadily, never quite still. If she stops waving her arms, Resnick thought, she might fall down. “Pretty wonderful out there, the two of you, prancing about. The light fantastic. Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire.”
She smiled lopsidedly, slipped, and when Resnick reached out a hand to steady her, she flapped him away.
“Got to hand it to you, Marian,” she said. “The way you’ve prized him out of his shell. More than I could usually manage.”
Marian’s eyes focused on Resnick, distressed, appealing. Around them people were ceasing to drink or talk, no longer pretending not to be watching.
“One quick turn round the floor at the end of the evening,” Elaine was saying. “If I was lucky.” She smiled conspiratorially at Marian. “It gets like that towards the end. They lose interest. All of them. You’ll see.”
Marian looked away but it didn’t matter: the words weren’t really for her, and Resnick and Elaine both knew it.
“Elaine,” Resnick said. “Please.”
“Please, Charlie? Is that pretty-please, or is it the other kind?”
Resnick sighed and looked towards the floor.
“Don’t look so hangdog, Charlie. It’s just girl talk. Marian and I having a nice little chat …”
“Elaine,” Resnick said.
“Yes?”
“This isn’t the place.”
“Oh, but it is. You’re here. She’s here …”
“No.”
“Charlie, you’re not embarrassed? Don’t tell me you’re embarrassed? Not after watching Marian singing about a late lamented lover. Some people might have thought that was a bit of a spectacle, Marian pretending to be a sweet little virgin, but there you were, Charlie, clapping along with the rest of them.”
Tears of shame in her eyes, Marian pushed her way towards the exit. Resnick started after her, stopped, turned back.
“Difficult, isn’t it?” Elaine said. “Which way for that famous bleeding heart to jump? Your lover or your wife?”
“She’s not …”
“Your lover? I daresay. And I’m not your wife.”
The band had stopped playing. There were hardly any other voices to be heard.
“But you know all about that,” Elaine said, backing towards the dance floor, looking all around. “Charlie’s tragic divorce. You were at the wedding, some of you. Remember? Whom no man shall put asunder. Except you, Charlie. Not so much put asunder as shut out. And you know the reason? I expect you all know the reason, but just in case …”
“Elaine …”
“Just in case you don’t …”
“Elaine …”
“The reason was I didn’t want to have babies …”
“Elaine, for God’s sake!”
“Pretty little babies to make him tall and proud …”
Resnick slid his face slowly down into his hands.
“… and call him Da-da.”
Resnick didn’t move. Blood was pumping fiercely inside his head, against his ears and he didn’t move.
“What’s the matter, Charlie?” Elaine said. “Too near the truth?”
He lowered his hands, opened his eyes and looked at her, anger thick in his face.
“You’d rather everyone thought you chucked me out because you caught me on the mattress of someone else’s bed, fucking another man. They’d understand that, not, but not … No, Charlie, let me finish. Don’t pull me! Don’t touch me! Let me finish telling them what kind of a caring, compassionate man you really are. Let me tell them about the letters, Charlie. All the letters I sent you, the ones you never answered. All the times I rang up in pain and you hung up without a word.”
He wanted to strike her, hit her, wanted to smother her mouth, shelter from the taunt of her words and eyes. Her words broke over him as he turned and walked away.
“Stay and tell them about all that, Charlie. How you helped me with everything I’ve been going through. How you fucking helped …”
The sudden rush of cold air rocked him on his feet; a lorry climbing the hill missed a gear and he jumped. A black and white cab turned up from the city with its roof light shining and Resnick flagged it down, bundling himself into the warm upholstery of the back.
“Where to?” the driver asked.
“Anywhere,” Resnick said. “Just drive.”
Thirty-one
“Shit!” Calvin exclaimed, stepping barefooted into the splashes that his father had left around the toilet bowl. “Grown man, might have thought he’d’ve learned to piss straight!” He finished his own business, dabbed at the soles of his feet with a towel, tore off some sheets of paper and wiped up the floor. Might as well do the rest while I’m at it. Calvin used more paper around the rim and just a little way down into the bowl, dumped it inside and flushed. Now rinse your hands under the tap. Last thing he wanted to do, catch some kind of disease, end up in hospitaclass="underline" last place he wanted to be. Let those doctors get their hands on you and you never knew where it was going to end.
His father was in the kitchen, drinking black tea with lemon-his Sunday favorite-and reading his way through the News of the World. What was the matter with Sunday Sport, that’s what Calvin wanted to know? Women with 62-inch chests and three-headed babies, something truly gross to get the day on its way.
“You ready to eat?” his father asked, scarcely looking up.
“Just about.”
“Pancakes?”
“Why not?”
Every week the same little ritual. The batter was already mixed, buckwheat flour and plain, a nub of lard that his father would wipe round the inside of the pan, barely greasing it over before cooking each one. Sugar. Lemons. Strawberry jam. Calvin checked to see if there was any juice in the fridge, but was out of luck. He flicked on the kettle and reached for the huge caterer’s tin of Nescafe his father had found on one of his foraging trips. Special offers, past-the-sale-date bargains, he would cycle halfway across the city to save fifty pence.
“You got in late last night,” his father said, refolding the paper.
“So?”
“Nothing. Simply a remark.”
“Yeh, well,” Calvin said, stirring hard to prevent the powder from collecting on the top of his mug, “keep them to yourself, right?”
His father hummed a few bars of some old song Calvin vaguely recognized and lit the gas beneath the pan. “How was your mother?”
Calvin shrugged, hunched over his drink, thin-backed in black. “Same.”
“Sister?”
“Same.”
“Damn it, boy!”
“What?”
A rare anger flared briefly in Ridgemount’s eyes and then it was gone. Shaking his head, he turned back to the stove, tilting the pan this way and that before pouring in the first of the batter. Calvin read the soccer reports. His father shook the pan to make sure the pancake wasn’t sticking, tossed it through a lazy somersault, and set it back down on the gas for a final minute.
“Your mother and me, we were together a long time. I just want to know how she is.” He slid the pancake, speckled brown, on to Calvin’s plate. “That so difficult to understand?”
“Yes.”
His father shook his head slowly and looked away.
“She left you. Walked out. Now she’s living with some other bloke, won’t hear your name mentioned in the house. Minute I walk into it, he sods off down the garden into his shed or takes their pathetic dog for a walk. No, I don’t understand.”
“She had her reasons.”
“Yeh, didn’t she just!”
“Calvin …”
“Yeh?”
But his father was back at the stove, the next pancake soon on its way. “Marjorie,” he said, eyes on what he was doing, “she asked about me, didn’t she? Asked about her daddy?”
“Yes,” Calvin said, through a mouthful of breakfast, “course she did. I told her you were fine.”