Breaking and Entering Read online

  Bello:

  hidden talent rediscovered!

  Bello is a digital only imprint of Pan Macmillan, established to breathe life into previously published classic books.

  At Bello we believe in the timeless power of the imagination, of good story, narrative and entertainment and we want to use digital technology to ensure that many more readers can enjoy these books into the future.

  We publish in ebook and Print on Demand formats to bring these wonderful books to new audiences.

  About Bello:

  www.panmacmillan.com/imprints/bello

  About the author:

  www.panmacmillan.com/author/wendyperriam

  Contents

  Wendy Perriam

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty One

  Chapter Twenty Two

  Chapter Twenty Three

  Chapter Twenty Four

  Chapter Twenty Five

  Chapter Twenty Six

  Chapter Twenty Seven

  Chapter Twenty Eight

  Chapter Twenty Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty One

  Chapter Thirty Two

  Chapter Thirty Three

  Wendy Perriam

  Breaking and Entering

  Wendy Perriam

  Wendy Perriam has been writing since the age of five, completing her first ‘novel’ at eleven. Expelled from boarding school for heresy and told she was in Satan’s power, she escaped to Oxford, where she read History and also trod the boards. After a variety of offbeat jobs, ranging from artist’s model to carnation-disbudder, she now divides her time between teaching and writing. Having begun by writing poetry, she went on to publish 16 novels and 7 short-story collections, acclaimed for their power to disturb, divert and shock. She has also written extensively for newspapers and magazines, and was a regular contributor to radio programmes such as Stop the Week and Fourth Column.

  Perriam feels that her many conflicting life experiences – strict convent-school discipline and swinging-sixties wildness, marriage and divorce, infertility and motherhood, 9-to-5 conformity and periodic Bedlam – have helped shape her as a writer. ‘Writing allows for shadow-selves. I’m both the staid conformist matron and the slag; the well-organised author toiling at her desk and the madwoman shrieking in a straitjacket.’

  Dedication

  FOR RUTH AND ROGER HOLDSWORTH

  dear and generous friends

  and incomparable researchers!

  Epigraph

  The Angels keep their ancient places,—

  Turn but a stone, and start a wing!

  ’Tis ye, ’tis your estrangèd faces,

  That miss the many-splendoured thing.

  FRANCIS THOMPSON

  To be religious is to know that the facts of the world

  are not the end of the matter.

  WITTGENSTEIN

  Chapter One

  ‘No, no, no, no, no, no, no!’

  Daniel was wrenched from sleep, eyes opening to darkness, the taste of fear and curry in his mouth. A last wild ‘No!’ rumbled from the bedclothes. He raised his head, peered at the alarm clock, its illuminated figures precisely sharp in the soupy gloom of the bedroom. Five past bloody three.

  ‘Stop, Tom, stop! You’re hurting. That’s not a hedgehog-brush.’

  He turned over to the humped shape lying beside him, stroked his fingers slowly down its back. It stirred, but didn’t wake.

  ‘Tom, you mustn’t do that. It’s not the hedgehog-brush.’

  His wife talked in her sleep, mostly gibberish. If a nudge didn’t stop her, he usually replied. It seemed more polite, companionable. He opened his mouth to answer, but no words came out – nothing but a rasping croak. ‘Damn!’ he mouthed, instinctively massaging his neck. Last night’s sore throat was now full-blown laryngitis.

  Slowly, he sat up. His wife’s right breast had escaped her low-cut nightdress, a pale, enticing glimmer in the dark. He touched one finger against it, trying not to imagine Tom pawing at the other breast – or something lower down. The fellow was growing clearer in his mind: a hulk still in his thirties, with a head of hair so luxuriantly thick he had to brush it with a hedgehog. His hand fumbled through his own hair, stopping at the thinner patch on top. It was only fractionally thinner, nowhere near balding yet. Penny hadn’t said anything, probably hadn’t noticed, though it had been that way for months – part of being forty, he supposed. He had hated his last birthday. He had woken with a hangover, and Penny had bought him a sweater in an unflattering shade of purple, a colour he distrusted.

  ‘Lamb,’ she said. ‘Lamb custard.’

  Lamb chops, he corrected voicelessly. He could write a thesis on his wife’s nocturnal ramblings. ‘The hole in the German maid’; ‘the price of frogs’; ‘red Persil’. Hidden meanings, mumbo-jumbo surrealism. The names were always male: Tom tonight, Mark last week, and a chap called Stewart (Stuart?) had kept cropping up last year. He let his hand close against the breast, insisting on his rights. Jealousy was tiring, and in this case, pretty pointless.

  He squinted at the clock again, hoping he’d misread it. Three AM was waking-nightmare time. He had written a poem once called ‘Three O’Clock’; scribbled it with a pencil-stub at this same unnatural hour – though no one shared his bed then. He could still remember parts of it, the second verse more or less in full:

  It is always … (something, something)

  The few short hours oblivion and bliss

  and then awake like this,

  as furious midnight

  mauls me in its claws

  and hell has gaping jaws,

  and all the wrath

  the world has ever wrought,

  from banished Adam

  to baffled astronaut,

  is concentrated

  in this single howling hour,

  this holocaust of thought.

  He grimaced at the scansion, the sheer pretentiousness. Good job he’d stopped writing – or at least only innocuous reports now on Third World educational matters. He lay back beside his wife; his soft, inert, still rambling wife. Penelope the faithful, refusing any suitor but her Ulysses. Except she had always been a Penny, despite his objection to the shortening.

  If only sleep were infectious, so that he could catch her languid germ; even wake as she did, indulgently and slowly with long, luxurious yawns, instead of erupting into instant fretful consciousness; all the problems fastening on him like a brood of starving leeches. Probably better to get up and make some tea, find something for his throat.

  He stumbled to the bathroom, blinking as the light snapped on – a harsh fluorescent glare. The mirror wasn’t kind. His skin looked sallow; dark rings beneath his eyes, a dirty rash of stubble on his chin. He inspected his hair again. No different from last night, though follicles must shrivel every day, decaying with one’s brain cells. There was so much one could lose: teeth, hair, voice, erections, love. He searched the bathroom cupboard for some pastilles, sorting through his daughter’s stuff, feeling oddly touched by her box of heart-shaped soaps, the garish turquoise bubble bath which could only d
ry her skin.

  He drifted into her room, sat down on the empty bed, ran a regretful hand across the flat, unrumpled duvet. She had been away four days now. Had he lost his voice in sympathy with her? Or she lost hers as a rebuke to him? He tried to say her name aloud, irrationally angry when it came out as a grunt. If he thought in terms of punishment, then … No, stick to practicalities. It was tea he needed, not pastilles, something to soothe his larynx. He tried to swallow, gagged on broken glass, tiny jagged shards blocking his oesophagus.

  He crept down to the kitchen, which still smelt of last night’s curry. It seemed alien, unwelcoming, a room which didn’t know him. Things looked so different in the middle of the night – the dark panes reflecting nothing; an ordinary cup grotesque. He switched on the portable television, which they kept next to the microwave, so that Penny could watch ‘Breakfast News’ while he skimmed through the papers. Two forbidding-looking females were conversing on a sofa, conversing with no words. He adjusted the volume, wishing he could bring his own voice back by the mere flick of a switch.

  ‘But surely that’s the point, Ruth. I mean, Nietzsche was quite right about the death of God.’

  He turned God off, sat waiting for the kettle to whistle out its boil – or had that too lost its voice? Perhaps the non-existent deity had sent a plague on all of them: kettles, daughters, stepfathers.

  He took a tea-bag from the container labelled ‘SUGAR’. It had worried him at first, the way Penny broke the rules: stored used stamps in the tea-caddy, kept the sugar in its packet. But he was more accustomed now to his wife’s chaotic clutter: old letters in the spoon-drawer, piles of ironing on the chairs. He sniffed the milk – tolerably fresh – seized the kettle as it began to pant and splutter, unplugged it in mid-whistle. He dunked the tea-bag, watched the brown stain slowly ripple out, then pale and tremble as he shocked it with cold milk. He shut his eyes and sipped. Still difficult to swallow. It hurt his ear as well. But if he took the day off, there’d be endless complications. He had an important morning meeting with the UN Evaluation Team, followed by an equally important lunch with Juliet. Silent meeting, whispered lunch.

  He climbed up on a chair and rummaged for his cigarettes, which he’d put deliberately out of reach on the highest, least accessible shelf. He’d stopped smoking just last week, the day Pippa had departed for her grandma’s; made a pact with Whoever might control things: give me back my daughter – and her voice – and I’ll give up my Camels. He lit one from the gas, struggled to inhale, relaxing as the pain gave way to an exquisite surge of relief. Starved of nicotine for four whole days, he’d become increasingly uptight. Penny had bought him chewing-gum and some obnoxious herbal cigarettes he had consigned straight to the bin. And he could hardly chew gum at work, not whilst earnestly discussing the desperate lack of funds for teacher-training in Botswana.

  He rubbed the misted windowpane, peered out at the garden, which was only void and shadows. He still felt claustrophobic; the house tightening like a noose around his neck. He must get out, get air. He groped his way back upstairs, stripped off his pyjamas and put on a shirt and jeans. He knew Penny wouldn’t wake, but he scribbled her a note, in case: ‘Walking Rover. He was busting for a pee.’ It was a silly joke between them: the phantom dog (like phantom Tom) which needed its night exercise. He called it to heel as he set off down the silent street. He had never had a dog – he found them too exuberant. Penny was his dog: affectionate and loyal, with her wiry hair which needed constant grooming, her deep expressive eyes, the amazing way she trusted – trusted life, and him.

  The night was close, oppressive; yesterday’s humidity still hanging in the air. It was only the first week of June, yet London had been sweltering in a heatwave. He stood at the front gate, looking back at the house, then up and down the street. Thirty-three Elveley Road was home, though he often needed to remind himself. Some languages possessed no word for home, and he could understand that omission. Wasn’t it an arrogance to assume you belonged anywhere?

  He lit a second cigarette, then switched his gaze to the sky. The curdled mass of swarthy clouds seemed to be breathing very fast; as overwrought as he was. He couldn’t see a moon, but a few stars pricked the darkness. He tried some calculations in his head: this galaxy was only one of some one hundred thousand millions, and each galaxy contained a further hundred thousand million stars, which added up to … bewilderment. And, in looking at the stars, he was gazing into the distant past – a distinctly unsettling thought. He exhaled a curl of smoke, wondering what was going on at base. Were the stars which seemed so quiescent to him in fact burning out, collapsing?

  He cursed under his breath. He, too, was collapsing, or at least his normal life was. It was no better out of doors: the leeches clamped in place still, and sucking furiously. Yet this was friendly territory: the local shops where people knew his name, where he bought his cigarettes, or popped in for a takeaway. How odd that in a universe of Black Holes and Final Crunches people should still bother with pizzas or kebabs, set up businesses and restaurants, offer 10p off detergent, or four cans of beans for the price of three. If only there were a superstore where he could purchase a new self – an honest, virtuous Daniel who didn’t smoke or cheat on his wife; a Daniel with the sort of hair which was faithful unto death.

  He trudged on past the greengrocer’s, picking up a nectarine discarded in the gutter. Last time he’d seen Juliet, they’d had nectarines for lunch – a picnic in Soho Square, with two tramps sprawled beyond them, and a fret of pigeons squabbling at their feet. He shut his eyes, could see the teethmarks shining in her fruit, juice dripping on her hands – slender hands with varnished nails, not stubby paint-stained fingers like his wife’s. He looked down at his own hand, surprised to find the nectarine was mouldy, a huge purple bruise blemishing its flesh. Juliet’s flesh was always strangely cool. Even when the temperature was soaring in the eighties, she never seemed to sweat. He felt embarrassed sometimes by his own hot body, sticking to her thighs.

  If he walked on to the phone-box, he could leave a message for her: ‘I love you, Juliet.’ Except that wasn’t wise, and it was possibly untrue. If only his mistress and his daughter wouldn’t keep on tangling in his mind, each fighting for more space. Pippa wasn’t strictly his daughter, but that seemed to make no difference. He had always called her his, avoiding the term ‘step’ with all its evil connotations. Stepfathers rarely featured in the fairy tales, only wicked stepmothers, but he’d been wicked in his way. It was partly his fault that she never saw her real father, or so her grandma claimed. He hurled the rotten fruit away, then ground his cigarette beneath his heel. So much was his fault.

  Start again, he told himself, concentrate on simple things: the solid pavement, divided into squares; the plucky lamp-posts making light of darkness; his own agile, dogged shadow. He longed to speak to someone, if only to prove he still existed; was more than just a shadow. But there was not a soul around – no homeless tramps, no drunken party-goers lurching home. This particular part of Wandsworth was genteel: Victorian houses, rather cramped, admittedly, but adorned with tasteful hanging baskets and self-important burglar alarms; bay trees in rustic wooden tubs flanking the front steps. Maybe he should knock at one and beg to be let in, sleep beside a different wife, soothe a different child. Was Pippa still a child? ‘It’s her age,’ their GP said, everybody said. He sympathized. Thirteen and forty had certain things in common.

  He was almost at the phone-box. He passed it, then looped back, stood dithering at the door. He needn’t say ‘I love you’. He could simply make a joke, pretend to be her alarm-call. He pushed the heavy door, recoiling from the smell of pee. The receiver smelt as well, of someone else’s sweat; sat clammy in his hand. He dug out a cache of coins, inserted 20p. Juliet’s recorded voice sounded imperious and shrill. ‘…’ Please speak clearly after the bleep.’ Boss-pot, he grinned fondly. And what about the mum-blers, those who swallowed their words? Would she deign to ring them back, or respond only to the clear-sp
eakers? The bleep sang out three times. He opened his mouth to say ‘I love you’.

  Far from speaking clearly, he had no voice at all. He had totally forgotten, despite the pain in his throat. He coughed into the mouthpiece. Perhaps she’d recognize his cough, realize he was ill. Unlikely. He’d have to go to work, to get someone else to phone her and explain the laryngitis. You could hardly ask your wife to ring your mistress. He kicked out at the glass, glad he was wearing canvas shoes which didn’t protect his feet. He needed pain, deserved it. He stared at his blurred reflection in the glass, wondering for the umpteenth time what Juliet had seen in him, why she had asked him to that concert. Penny called him dishy, but it was not a word he used. How could you be sure whether you were even passable, let alone appealing, when you were always looking from the inside out?

  He stepped into the street again, glancing up as a plane droned overhead. It astonished him that people could actually sleep, hurtling through the stratosphere at four hundred miles an hour, when he couldn’t keep his own eyes shut in a securely grounded bed. He checked his watch: ten to four. It would be light in just an hour. June was merciful in that respect, at least. He crossed the road to Gascoigne-Pees and began to read the details of the properties. Estate agents were merciful as well, transforming faults into advantages. Small was ‘bijou’; dilapidated ‘quaint’. Perhaps he should employ one, to put a more favourable gloss on his own personal deficiencies – faithless revamped as ‘sensuous’; forty as ‘in his prime’. He started composing their advertisement for insertion in The Times: ‘Viewing highly recommended for this older-style but still attractive property, beautifully maintained, but requiring modernization and refurbishing. Many interesting features to suit discerning buyer.’ Or maybe something snappier: ‘Handsome semi-detached man of charm and character …’

  He wandered two doors on and stopped outside a jeweller’s, its glass protected by a latticework of steel. He peered in through the grid, glimpsed a display of wedding rings, each gold band nestling on a tiny blue silk cushion. He began counting in his head again; days, this time, not galaxies. Christ Almighty! It was their wedding anniversary tomorrow – no, today. A shrink would doubtless say he had forgotten it deliberately, but whatever the psychological complexities, it still left him in a sweat. He hadn’t bought a present or a card, hadn’t ordered flowers. Penny would wake before the shops were open, expect breakfast in bed, with a gift-wrapped package on the tray. He had produced it every year so far, so he could hardly stop at the seventh. Seven was a sacred number, which had always had a marvellous press: seven pillars of wisdom, seven wonders of the world, seven virtues, seventh heaven. On the minus side, however, there were the seven deadly sins. Not to mention the seven-year itch; himself the living proof of it.