I wasn’t one of those who were silent by nature. I liked to talk, to argue if necessary, to see all sides of the question, but she had reduced me to using silence like a stringed instrument. I could only hope she would eventually wind down and shut her wicked little trap.
Not being part of the slanging match, I was the first to notice a young girl standing in the doorway. A satchel over her shoulders, she had straight black hair and grey-blue Cullen eyes, the image of my mother at that age, as I had seen from old photographs. She tended towards the same small mouth and slightly protruding teeth of Claudine, but there wasn’t a trace of Alfie anywhere. She nodded at me: “Who’s he, mam?”
Claudine did a quick come-down to normality. “An old friend who’s come to see me.”
Charlene took the hand I offered, and said: “You’re nice.”
I kissed her on the cheek, held her perhaps longer than I should. She was certainly mine, though I realised of course that every child was only its mother’s. “I heard you shouting at him with your big pan mouth,” she said to Claudine. “Just like you used to do to dad.”
Now I knew it all.
“You keep your opinions to yourself, or you’ll get a smack across the face. We were only talking about old times. Now come and get your tea.”
“I had it at grandma’s.” She turned back to me. “My name’s Charlene, but I hate it, so I tell everybody at school to call me Sam, and they do. I like that a lot better.” Her looks were plain, though she’d grow to be attractive because she knew what she wanted and would make sure she got it. “You really were going on at him, weren’t you? I can’t think why. It’s nice to have a visitor in the house now and again. We never did when dad was alive. I hope things change from now on.”
The air was steamy with unresolved nightmares, so I tried a diversion. “What’s your best subject at school, Sam?”
“Biology and maths.” She seemed grateful for the question. “Oh, and French. I love French.”
I dredged up a phrase or two from my travels with Frances, hoping I’d got it right and wasn’t called on to say more. “Moi aussi. J’aime beaucoup. J’était en vacance en France l’année passé.”
The effect was to set Sam aglow: “Oh, mam, he knows French. You never told me you knew somebody like that. It’s marvellous. Why didn’t you tell me?”
Even Claudine looked impressed, though grudgingly. Two gentle rises under Sam’s blouse showed that Claudine had bought her bras, which I thought a bit soon, though perhaps Sam had only put them on after Alfie had died. They made her look wanted, and I hoped she wouldn’t come to harm with all the snipe-nosed little Nottingham tykes (of which I had been one, I was well aware) trying to get her under the bushes. Maybe Claudine had already put her on the pill, and quite right, too. These days it was only sensible, yet I couldn’t altogether like it.
“My teacher’s French. She’s called Giselle, and I love her. I’m her favourite.”
Maybe I should go and give Giselle a talking to. But no, let be what will be, though I hoped Sam wouldn’t grow up to be like my mother. “The trouble is,” I said, “I have to be going soon. I only called for an hour, to say hello to your mother.”
“Oh, no, please, don’t go yet. I’ve only just met you. And you know French.”
When she came close for a real kiss an avalanche of love seemed to hold us close. She was my fourth child, but my eldest. “You can stop that,” Claudine shouted, “or I’ll call the police.”
Sam leapt away. “What for? Just because I like him. You spoil everything.”
I picked up my hat and coat. That’s how she was, and I can forgive almost everything, but saying she would call in the law when all I had done was kiss the girl she said was my daughter put the lid on it. “I’ll leave you to tell her who I am. And if you don’t, I’ll come back one day and do it myself.”
It pleased me to see her turn pale. Let her live under the Sword of Damocles, thinking any minute it might fall on her when I wrote and told Sam I was her father. I took a card with the Upper Mayhem address and pushed it into Sam’s hand. “If you need me, that’s where you can find me,” but Claudine snatched it away.
“Don’t go,” Sam said in her softest voice, while Claudine stood icily by, no longer knowing what to do or say in the situation.
“I have to. I’m up here on business, and must keep an appointment at the Council House. But we’ll meet another time. Just make sure you do well at school.”
“I’ll write to you in French, then.” She flipped the card away from Claudine’s hand, and looked at it. “Michael Cullen’s a nice name.”
“But I’ll answer in English,” I said. “My French has got a bit rusty since university.”
If the door hadn’t had hinges it would have fallen flat. I was outside, and never happier to put the place behind me, except I grieved for Sam having such a deadhead for a mother. Still, she had enough of the Cullen streak not to let it bother her for too long.
My heart was even so a metronome dancing between soft and hard rock as I walked back to Radford, rejecting a bus because I was calmer while giving my legs something to do. I didn’t want to love Sam too much in case she got to be the centre of my world, then I had the impulse to go back and tell her to pack up and come to live with me at Upper Mayhem, but Claudine would have the social workers, if not the police, on my back in no time, so I plodded on much of the way in bleak misery, a rare experience for me.
I had wondered, though, while making love to Claudine, and then after hugging my daughter, about living closer to them than London or my country place. But you can’t go home again, not even if the bell tolls only for you. Alfie had realised that when life became serious it was time to pack it in, and I didn’t want to go that way.
Storm clouds are always waiting, and if you can’t see them they’re lurking behind the horizon and ready to pounce in any case. You can’t look everywhere at once. I was no longer in the mood for tracing Gwen Bolsover, the other paramour of my youth, who had been ten years older than me. I’d leave the pleasure of finding out what had happened to her for another visit, if there was to be one, and meanwhile would sluice a few pints in the Plough. By the time I had slept it off in the morning the car would be ready.
Chapter Five
At Trent Bridge I forked into the left lane and turned west for Grantham, beads of water chased across the windscreen by Javert wipers. My ’flu or whatever had taken its miasma elsewhere, and I felt in top form passing the locale of Dropshort who had played the gentleman and rescued me the day before — though it had been no thanks to his trollop, who would have gone by with a wave of her knickers.
At the A1 turn-off George Delphick put up his thumb for a lift back to the carrot fields. I ignored his thieving of my mother’s posh chocolates, and hoped to bash his head in some other time. His two fingers lifted in the rear mirror as the Picaro shot by.
The weather always lightened going south on the Great North Road. My nose stopped running, the cigar gave off a roast beef aroma, and at eighty mph young Picaro purred like a she-cat on the batter, cruising along till Moggerhanger’s fake antique furniture warehouse was a fair way behind. In no hurry to reach Upper Mayhem I stopped at Moonshine Cross to take in fuel and food. My mother’s grit-cakes sopped up in raw milk at breakfast had left a belly ache that could only be annihilated with cornflakes and a full fry up.
From behind The Times I watched the indefatigable waitress, sprightly and robust, with clearly defined features, a pony tail behind like a horse’s, her carriage excellent as she smiled a way from table to table. Imagining her dressage as I rode her, I didn’t think she was English, since she was so pleasant at her work, and I imagined how succulent it would be to spend the rest of my life with her.