What could I do? I had been on the point of giving them a complete explanation — of narrating a more fantastic chain of events than I could ever have invented, in the hope that they would believe me and find some way of helping me out. But I couldn’t do that now. Once again, circumstances were sweeping me away, carrying me beyond the realm where decisions could be made and free will exercised.
‘He’s in the sitting-room at the moment,’ said Judith. ‘He won’t come out to see visitors. Don’t ask me why. It’s a phase he’s going through. You’ll find him ever so easy once you get talking to him. If he tries to throw things at you just give him a good smack. It usually works.’
Tony came into the kitchen, jingling the car keys.
‘Come on, love, we’re going to be late.’
Judith fetched her gloves and I followed them both to the front door.
‘Feel free to use the piano,’ said Tony. ‘I don’t think we’ll be back any later than four.’
‘Help yourself to biscuits,’ said Judith.
‘Play some records if you want,’ said Tony.
‘There’s beer in the cupboard,’ said Judith.
‘Have a nice time,’ I said. And then they were gone.
From the sitting-room I could hear a medley of little electronic pops and whistles and bubbling noises, which seemed to suggest that Benjamin was happily occupied with a video game. I put my head round the door just to make sure.
‘Hi,’ I said.
‘Hello.’
I think Benjamin must have been about eight at this stage. He was a cute little child, with a healthy face and a cheerful disposition, and he already showed signs of his parents’ intelligence. He never took his eyes off the television screen, but I didn’t feel that he was being rude.
‘I’m just going to go and play the piano.’
‘Fine.’
Tony had a really lovely upright piano which he had bought cheap at a sale from the Royal College of Music or somewhere. I had only ever played it a couple of times and it had made even my worst improvisations sound reasonable. To be able to spend a whole day with this piano was an absolute treat, in other words, but as soon as I sat down at it and opened the lid, a curious thing happened: I found that I couldn’t play. Even when I put my hands on the keys, chose a chord and took a deep breath, I couldn’t bring myself to sound the notes. I must have done this nearly a dozen times. I thought of standards, I thought of originals, I thought of classical pieces — but I couldn’t actually get any of them started. It was all too much. The murder, the flight from the police, that awful night in the cold, the realization that I was never going to see Madeline again — these things had been weighing down on me for too long, and all at once I caved in. I put my head in my hands and slumped forward on to the piano, and although I wasn’t really crying, my body shook with sobs.
I don’t think this lasted very long. The spasm soon passed, but I continued to lie across the keyboard, feeling oddly comfortable. I got up when I realized that Ben had come into the room and was staring at me. I don’t know how long he had been there.
‘I want to go for a walk,’ he said, solemnly.
*
Once Ben was suitably wrapped up in his little duffle coat and woollen hat and gloves, we stepped outside and I locked up the house.
‘Where do you want to go?’ I asked.
‘Let’s go down to the basin.’
It wasn’t a very good morning for a walk, in my opinion. It was far too cold, for one thing, and last night’s mist hadn’t entirely cleared yet. Of course, I also had my own reasons for not wanting to venture out, but I didn’t see that much harm could come from a quick excursion if it was going to keep Ben happy. It might even help to calm me down, since playing the piano (my usual form of therapy) seemed to be out of the question at the moment. The bleakness of those East London streets, the strange misty chill which lay over the whole area, harmonized pleasingly with my mood. I felt that I could smell mystery on every corner, and I enjoyed hearing the occasional, random sounds of a quiet Sunday morning — cars starting, children shouting — and seeing the fog roll back, way in the distance, over the grey and restless Thames.
‘Wow,’ said Benjamin. ‘What a massive piece of dog poo.’
I pulled him away from the offending object, which he had been inspecting with keen interest, and continued to hold his hand as we walked on. Before long, we found that we had come to a church: the vast, intimidating bulk of St George In The East.
‘Is it true,’ said Benjamin, as we walked past it, ‘that criminals and people can go inside a church, and the police can’t come and catch them?’
I stopped walking. I didn’t know whether this was still true or not, although I remembered once being told the same thing, many years ago. Sanctuary. It seemed a straw worth clutching at.
‘Let’s go inside,’ I said.
Benjamin, still holding my hand, seemed happy enough to follow me. As we got near to the doors I could hear the sound of ragged hymn-singing, but the thought that a service was in progress didn’t deter me for more than a few seconds.
‘Dad’ll be so cross if he knows that you took me to church,’ said Benjamin gleefully.
‘Why?’
‘He says that the church is a bourgeois conspiracy designed to preserve the existing social order.’
‘Does he?’ I said, rather taken aback. ‘He should really leave you to work these things out for yourself, you know. Come on, anyway.’
We seemed to have arrived in the middle of a sung communion: the church was about half full (mainly with old people) and they were singing ‘Immortal, Invisible’, with the choir adding eccentric harmonies apparently designed to confuse the rest of the congregation. Ben and I settled down in a pew near the back and joined the hymn just in time for the last line. The service still had about twenty minutes to run but I don’t think either of us paid very much attention to it. What I had said to Madeline all those months ago was true: I had been through a brief church-going phase when I was much younger (at the age when most of my friends were having adolescent love affairs — I don’t know why I should have been different), but I wasn’t religious by nature and my faith, such as it was, had faded away quickly and painlessly. The only thing I liked about religion now was the music it had inspired. So I didn’t go up to take communion with the rest of the congregation, and most of the time my thoughts were far removed from the words of the priest: when they weren’t spiralling around the events of the last twenty-four hours in a kind of daze, they were focused — oddly enough — on Benjamin.
He seemed to be poised between two different states, being both bored by the service and excited by the novelty of his unusual surroundings. Some of the time he squirmed in his seat and swung his legs restlessly over the edge of the pew; but sometimes he was content to settle against my side and stare up at the ceiling, or look around at the faces of the other worshippers, which presented a range of expressions from near-ecstasy to vacant inattention. The feeling of having a young child, trusting and dependent, resting at my side during a church service was (I need hardly say) the very last thing I had anticipated that morning. It was a long while, I realized, since I had spent any time at all in the company of children. I had shut myself off from even thinking about them. Had I ever fantasized, without admitting it to myself, about having children with Madeline? I tried to be honest, scratched around in the recesses of my most secret memories, but couldn’t see that I had. No, the only person I had ever discussed it with — and I could remember the conversation now: shy, serious, playful — was Stacey.
Benjamin and I stayed put while the congregation was leaving. After a few minutes, we had the church to ourselves.