I’ve gone woefully off the point, because looking back a few pages I see I didn’t get to the end of the Mr Hapgood story. He took Father’s clock away and stored it at the back of the shop. He reported that he had found out that it was a Vulliamy clock of 1788. Unfortunately, however, it had only a number (169) rather than the maker’s signature, indicating that it wasn’t among his best work. He showed me all this, how the number 169 wasn’t engraved on the backplate along with a signature like the finest examples, but punch struck on the reverse of the brass bob at the base of the pendulum, somewhere inconspicuous. It would have been signed if it had been a superior clock, he said, but it was still an attractive piece and could be worth as much as Ј150. It seemed an awful lot for a clock, I said. But inside I was thinking it didn’t sound like enough to go to university for three years. I hoped I was wrong. I hadn’t looked into it. Although Mother had rallied, a little- she had been up and about quite a bit in fact, supervising the people putting in her downstairs bathroom- it still hadn’t seemed the right time to raise it with her, the question of me leaving home. Did I say, it was always difficult to talk in that house? It was no easier with Father gone. With him gone there were no more kind little blinks or never-mind looks between us when Mother’s back was turned. So I didn’t broach the subject.
Mr Hapgood went on to say that it was very important to find the right buyer. Why didn’t I ask what he meant? I don’t know why, except that he made it sound as if I should already know, or as if there were a sort of buyer who was ‘right’ in some way over and above wanting the clock and having the money for it. He said that even though he himself wasn’t in the ‘mainstream antiques business’ I had done the right thing in coming to him, because he would see me right. For a start I wouldn’t be having to pay an ‘extortionate dealer’s premium’. I didn’t ask what that meant, either. But it might take a little while to find ‘the right buyer’, however, and he suggested that I pop in once or twice a week to see if there was any progress to report.
So I did. I must have been living in some fug that stopped me barely noticing, let alone minding, that there at the back of the shop, in the drowsy oil-stove heat, he always had more tea for me than progress to report, and soon a lot more cuddles than tea, and before long he said we were very good at comforting each other and cheering each other up, and could get even better. Soon enough his hands had been everywhere and I was confused by the way he seemed both a little impatient if I showed any reluctance, but at the same time pleased with me. He was gradual, and clever with his hands. So by the time he took my hand and put it down his trousers and made me keep it there, I was at the very least curious. And on the day he unbuttoned himself and showed me everything, I was almost as ready as he was to go (as he said, brandishing it) the whole hog. The whole hog did not take long, and was carried out in silence except for the creaking of the rickety old sofa. I remember thinking it was the sofa that was taking the brunt, because I felt in a curious way rather out of it and at a distance. Then Mr Hapgood was saying I should be on my way and I remember the slipperiness and the smell like raw potato that I thought was me, so that I was embarrassed and only too ready to go.
These days it would be called abuse, of course. But it was what he did later that still seems to me infinitely worse.
In the third week of May Michael unlocked the door at the back of the low stone pavilion by the pool. Old, trapped summer air poured out, peppery and slightly damp. White cotton curtains had been drawn against the French windows on the far side, so he crossed the room through the milky light and pulled them apart, finding the material just slightly tacky under his fingers. A few dead flies stuck in old webs in the curtain folds spun with the sudden movement; one or two fell and clicked faintly on the floor. He opened the French windows, strolled out onto the stone terrace, from which shallow blue steps led down into the water, and made his way to the end of the pool. Slowly he turned the handle at one end of the horizontal spindle that stretched the width of the poolside, and wound in the winter cover. After its last edge had been pulled free and was hanging dripping from the spindle, Michael crouched down and dipped his hand in the water. It was extremely cold, and the level of the water was lower than he expected, but he was surprised at how clean it looked.
Turning back on his bare feet, he could feel as soon as he reentered the pavilion that the sun was already striking the terracotta tiles of the floor and stirring up the faint reek of warming earth. Michael’s body tingled as he breathed it in. He liked the way the smell seemed to come to him almost through the soles of his feet. It was both fresh and fertile, so new, and made him think of earthy things that were workaday and practical, the slap of water over clay, human sweat, and the later, sweet baking of the sun on bricks and tiles. Yet the smell carried in it also a dank note, a threat from the sour underground it came from. Heavily and inexpressibly ancient, it was also lifeless, and although dead, it was at the same time so darkly erotic that Michael felt simultaneously animated and destabilised. It was not an unpleasant feeling. He smiled, thinking of Steph, picturing her unpeeled from her solid nursing bra and engrossed in the steady nursing of Charlie. She had become capable and authoritative on every practical detail of childcare and breastfeeding but if, when Charlie was nuzzled up and sucking from her, her attention would wander, a look of such distant, private sensuality would come over her face that Michael would find himself staring like a voyeur. Watching her made him feel quite helplessly joyful, as well as aroused. She did not seem to mind.
But the matter in hand was to get the pool working, and first he had to locate the machinery. He was hopeful that there would be some sort of instruction book that would tell him what to do, but if there wasn’t he had another idea. It would be well within his capabilities to ring up a pool maintenance outfit, posing as Oliver Standish-Cave of course, and get somebody round to do it for him. The idea rather appealed to him, in fact he had already rehearsed the mock-exasperation he would express at being ‘just hopeless I’m afraid’ at this kind of thing himself, and ‘a bit too snowed under to see to it personally’. But both Jean and Steph had looked worried when he had suggested it, and it would be, he had to admit, intensely satisfying to manage such an unfamiliar job by himself. He could see the admiration in their eyes already. He had discovered since coming here not just that he had a definite practical streak but that there was pleasure in having something to accomplish; he liked having a few projects on the go. So although his mind was quite ready to take him off further into his reverie, perhaps to the mental picture of Steph and Charlie naked in the water together, he turned his attention back to the place where he was standing.
Most of the room had been made into a space for lounging around in and was furnished in a kind of green and faded English garden style that he imagined Jean would like. Steph would like it less; perhaps once she had finished the nursery mural (she had said this morning that it would be ready by the end of the day, and was up there now painting, while Jean looked after Charlie) she might fancy doing something here. Something to do with water would be better than these white walls with prints of ferns, he thought, looking round at the bamboo sofas with their white and green cushions.