What to do about him, that was the question.
Banks stretched as he pulled out his bag and decided to start the day dressed simply, in jeans and a polo-neck sweater. He would change for the party later. Today was his parents’ big day, and Roy was due to come up from London. Banks resolved to be nice to Roy for his parents’ sake.
As Banks put his bag back in the wardrobe, he noticed some cardboard boxes on the far side. On his previous visit he had found some old records and diaries, which were still there, but now it looked as if there was more. Curious, he opened the other door and lifted a box out. The flaps were shut, but not sealed, and written across the top, in his mother’s inimitable scrawl, was his name: Alan. More childhood stuff, then.
On top he found yet more old school reports, from the grammar school this time, most of them urging him to try harder and assuring him he could do better if he only put his shoulder to the wheel etc. The reports were handwritten in black ink, and Banks occasionally had difficulty reading the comments. He remembered some of the teachers’ names – Mr Newman, Mr Phelps, Mr Hawtry – but most of them were a blur.
Along with the reports was a class photograph dated 14 May 1967. There they all were, three rows of teenage boys in their school uniforms. Banks remembered several of the faces: Steve Hill, Paul Major, Dave Grenfell, his best friends, then Tony Green, John McLeod, the school bully, and Ian Marston, who, so Banks’s mother had told him, committed suicide seven or eight years ago after his courier business failed. The rest of them he hardly remembered except for the odd feature here and there, such as a long, freckled face, a big nose, or prominent ears, but he couldn’t put a name to them. He had met up with Dave Grenfell and Paul Major on his previous visit, and he had found out then that Steve Hill had died of lung cancer, but what had become of everyone else he had no idea. Others would be dead, some would be dying, some would be successful, some would be failures, some would be criminals, many would be divorced. There was one angry-looking kid glaring into the camera with a cocky expression on his face, black hair just a little bit too long, tie slightly askew, top button undone against school regulations. Himself. Even more of a mystery than all the rest.
Next came a few school exercise books full of sums and compositions. One of them contained some poems Banks had written when he went through that stage of adolescence in which poetry was an acceptable means of expression as long as you kept it to yourself. It was with excruciating embarrassment that he looked over them again now, with the autumn rain starting to spatter against his bedroom window.
There were lines about the awkwardness of being an adolescent, love poems to Julie Christie and Judy Geeson, poems about how phony the world was. None of them rhymed, of course, nor were any overly concerned with metrics; the lines simply ended where he had decided to end them, for no other reason than that it looked like poetry on the page. There were no capital letters, either. Still, Banks reflected, from what he had seen that wasn’t a hell of a lot different from the sort of thing most published poets did today. Awful lines and images jumped out at him, such as ‘I feel like a corpse/in the coffin of your mind.’ What on earth had prompted him to write that? About what? He couldn’t even remember whose mind was supposed to be the coffin. And then there was a poem marked, ‘For Kay’, in which these immortal lines appeared:
i skimmed across
your life
like a pebble
on the water’s surface
i sank
quickly
the tide went out
What had he been thinking of? There was another image about her being ‘naked/on a sheepskin/by the crackling fire’, but as far as Banks could remember, they had never lain on a sheepskin rug, and electric fires, which everyone on the estate had, didn’t crackle. Poetic licence?
He remembered that first time up in this same room while his parents were out. The event was awkward and far less momentous for both of them than his imagination had convinced him it would be, but it went well enough in the end and they decided they liked it and would certainly try again. They got better and better over the next few months, stealing an hour or two here and there while parents were absent. Once they almost got caught when Kay’s mother came home sooner than expected from a dental appointment. They just managed to get their clothes on and tidy up the bed in time to tell her they’d been listening to records, though judging by the expression on Mrs Summerville’s face when she saw her daughter’s dishevelled hair, Banks didn’t think she was convinced. Kay told him later that that very evening she had got a lecture about the dangers of teenage pregnancy and what men think of women who haven’t ‘saved themselves’ for marriage, though no overt mention was made of Banks or that afternoon’s events, and nobody tried to stop them seeing one another.
Smiling at the memory, Banks slipped the exercise book of poetry into his overnight bag, determined to remember to feed it to the fire when he got back to his Gratly cottage. As he moved it, a newspaper cutting slipped out from between some of the unfilled pages. It was a report in the local paper on the disappearance of Graham Marshall, a school friend of Banks’s, and the reason for his visit home in the summer. Alongside the article was a photograph of Graham with his fair hair, melancholy expression and pale face, like some fin de siècle poet.
Banks moved on to the bottom of the box, where he found more old forty-fives, ones he had forgotten he had: Procol Harum’s ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’, ‘Juliet’ by the Four Pennies, ‘Hippy Hippy Shake’ by the Swinging Blue Jeans, the Lovin’ Spoonful’s ‘Summer in the City’, ‘Devil in Disguise’ by Elvis Presley and ‘Still I’m Sad’ by the Yardbirds.
Banks put the box back on top of one marked Roy and tiptoed downstairs into the kitchen for a cup of tea. His heart almost stopped when he saw Geoff Salisbury sitting at the kitchen table eating buttered toast.
‘Morning, Alan,’ Geoff said. ‘I’ve come to do some cleaning up. Already took your em and pee a cup of tea up, bless ’em. It’s a big day for them, you know. Like a cuppa yourself?’
Banks felt like saying he would make his own tea, but he remembered he hadn’t been able to find the tea bags. Instead, he got himself a mug. ‘Thanks,’ he grunted.
‘Not much of a morning person?’ Geoff asked. ‘Still, I imagine after a late night like you had you must be feeling even more tired. Your poor old mum was lying awake worrying where you’d got to.’ Salisbury winked. ‘Having a good time with that Summerville girl, were you?’
So Banks’s mother had already told Geoff that her son had been out with Kay Summerville and had not returned home until the early hours of the morning. He knew all this, and it wasn’t even nine o’clock yet. Geoff Salisbury was starting to get really annoying. Even though Banks hadn’t had a chance to call Annie back about criminal records, he decided that now would be as good a time as any to go on the offensive and make a couple of things clear to him.
‘I’m glad you’re here, actually,’ Banks said. ‘I’ve been wanting to have a quiet word with you.’
‘Oh? What about?’
‘Your sticky fingers.’
‘Come again?’