Bird Inside Page 20

  She switched channels once again, back to the old movie; the two smiling sated lovers now sipping pink champagne. Of course they’d never get a hangover – or AIDS. The Keats Ode she’d done for A-level suddenly buzzed into her head. She had known it off by heart then, could still remember most of it.

  ‘All breathing human passion far above,

  That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloyed,

  A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.’

  Keats understood so well. Her head still burned from Christopher, her tongue felt raw and swollen; whereas the lovers in the film looked totally unscathed – the woman’s perfect make-up still triumphantly in place, her hair as neat as Amy’s when she’d just walked out of Snippers. She longed for life to be like that – a light romantic comedy with a simple happy ending.

  ‘Darling,’ breathed the goddess on the screen. ‘I’m going to have our baby.’

  ‘Mum!’ called someone else, a loud impatient yodelling voice, preceded by the slamming of two doors, and a fusillade from Byron.

  Jane swung round as a tall untidy man with reddish hair burst in through the door, loaded down with two bulging plastic carrier-bags, a dress-suit on a hanger, and a pile of files and books. ‘Hi!’ he said, stretching out a hand which didn’t reach her, then collapsing on the sofa and off-loading his possessions on the floor.

  ‘Hi,’ she echoed shyly, comparing the high forehead, the almost girlish mouth and ragged thatch of hair with their copy on the mantelpiece – Hadley, grinning sheepishly at an out-of-focus camera. She glanced back at the clearer lines of the flesh-and-blood duplicate, now sprawling with his feet up on the couch. Even without the photograph, she would have recognised immediately that this was Isobel’s son. They shared the same colouring, the same wayward wavy hair, the same eyes which changed from grey to green, according to the light; and though Hadley was much thinner, he, too, had a plumpish face, clumsy hands and feet, and several layers of disparate clothes, bulking out his slim and rangy figure.

  He fumbled for the chocolates, stuffed three into his mouth at once. ‘I’m Hadley, by the way,’ he said, pausing in his chewing, and pushing Byron off his dress-suit, which the dog was using as a rug.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I know.’

  ‘Oh, sorry. Have we met before? I sometimes get quite muddled.

  Mum knows so many people, and I’m not home that much these days. Where is Mum, by the way?’

  ‘She’s out, visiting a lady in the village.’

  ‘What, that dreadful Mrs Brooking, with the cats?’

  ‘No, someone called Avril, with arthritis.’

  ‘Never heard of her. Look, I’m frightfully sorry, but I don’t know your name, either.’

  ‘It’s okay,’ said Jane, glancing at his hands, which were large and freckled and dusted with fair hair. ‘We’ve never met. I’m Rose.’

  ‘Rose!’ He spun the name out, his voice rising with new interest. ‘I’ve heard a lot about you.’

  ‘Oh, dear.’

  ‘No, all good stuff, I promise. Mum’s raved about you on the phone. You’re a stained-glass artist, aren’t you?’

  ‘Well, I only …’

  ‘Don’t you work for Christopher – his new assistant, Mum said?’

  ‘No, not quite his assis …’

  ‘What d’you think about this window – the one he’s making for her? I’m not sure I approve. It’s costing nearly twenty grand, and when you think what you could do with all that cash – really make some difference not just to a fusty church with a dozen dear old souls shuffling in on Sundays to show off their best hats and sing a jolly hymn or two, but to some real human problem. The homeless, for example.’ He swung his legs down, as if to emphasise his point; Byron leaping up as well, his doggy face expectant, hoping for a second walk. ‘There must be several thousand dossers sleeping rough in London every night. Well, if Mum used her spare money on the soup-run, instead of … Byron, down! You’re hurting.’ He pushed the boxer’s paw off, an insistent paw nudging at his chest. ‘Well, maybe not the soup-run – Mum’s not into tramps – but some single-parent family or something. I mean, she could really change their life, maybe even …’

  Jane switched the movie off. It was difficult to concentrate with the lovers’ wild endearments panting through Hadley’s talk of tramps. He had veered off on a tangent now about how he’d left the church, and was trying to see if he could harmonise the quantum revolution with the idea of reincarnation. They seemed to have moved extraordinarily quickly from their first brief mumbled ‘Hi’s’ to what she’d call deep water; dispensed with the preliminaries, the painless trivialities which started off most normal conversations.

  Hadley clearly shared not just his mother’s colouring, but her gift of spinning words.

  ‘If you believe in reincarnation, Rose, you could say it doesn’t matter what you suffer in a life or two, because there are always several more to come, and maybe dossers are quite lucky compared with cockroaches or stag beetles, or things which just get trampled underfoot, but that’s a cop-out, don’t you think?’ He scratched roughly at his ankle, pushing up his trouser-leg and delving down his woolly scarlet sock. ‘I’m sorry to bang on about the homeless, but it’s not just tramps, you realise. There are crowds of kids still only in their teens camping out in cardboard boxes, or injecting drugs and rooting round old waste-bins for their nosh. Now surely you can’t tell me it’s more important for the nation to splurge its money on a new Turner for the Tate rather than get out and feed the hungry.’

  ‘Well, no, but …’ Jane broke off. She had used much the same arguments herself, and Christopher had shot her down, even called her facile, trotting out tired clichés with no real understanding of either art or economics. She could hardly take that caustic line with Hadley, so she tried cobbling up some brief defence, largely cribbed from Christopher, though lacking his high tone. ‘But maybe people need art,’ she began. ‘I mean, just as much as food, especially nowadays when all the stress is put on things like hand-outs and the dole, and no one seems to think in terms of man’s other higher needs, or ask if …’

  ‘You try and tell some starving bum about his higher needs, or fob him off with a still-life of three apples and a lemon, when he’s crying out for good red meat.’ Hadley removed his denim jacket, to reveal an orange sweatshirt with ‘Flamingos Do It On One Leg’ printed on the front.

  ‘But a lot of people have got their good red meat.’ The Mackenzies, for example. Jane’s voice petered out as she watched Hadley suck the strawberry cream from chocolate number seven. She doubted he’d been hungry in his life, and wasn’t it just a fraction hypocritical for him to champion the homeless, when he’d lived since pampered babyhood in a plush six-bedroomed house, overstuffed with treasures? He should move a few dossers or drug-injecting teens into his own empty room upstairs; an extensive room with a view of the large garden, and his second-best stereo left casually behind. But Christopher would regard that as totally irrelevant; insist that one should argue not from individual anecdote, but from sound objective principle. His voice was always clamouring in her head, unsettling her, confusing her, making her aware that she couldn’t hope to match him intellectually. It hurt to have her views dismissed as facile. But maybe most things were ‘tired clichés’ when you’d reached the age of sixty, heard it all before. At least Hadley saw the issues as fresh and wildly urgent. In fact, she felt more in tune with his line than the artist’s, so why was she opposing him? Because she didn’t want the Resurrection Window melted down to chicken noodle soup.

  ‘Look,’ she said, trying to see the window in her head, in the hope it might inspire her, fuel her arguments. ‘The radicals used to say pull down Covent Garden or close the National Gallery, and distribute all the money to the poor. But once the poor had blown it, we’d still be left with poverty, except now we’d have no paintings and no opera, to make life seem worthwhile, or …’ She broke off again, embarrassed. She had never been to an opera, hardly k
new the names of any, and even the National Gallery was unknown territory. She must sound really phoney, paraphrasing Christopher, without either his experience, or his bold command of words.

  Hadley pleated a chocolate-paper into a tiny concertina, offered it to Byron, who started whining with excitement. ‘How can opera make life worthwhile when the great mass of people don’t know Verdi from Neil Kinnock? Or pictures, for that matter. What difference does it make to Joe Bloggs on the dole that we’ve saved Poussin’s Finding of Moses for the nation?’

  Jane reached out for a toffee, to give herself a thinking-space. She had never heard of Poussin, but Christopher had claimed that it was vitally important that paintings were just there – as part of man’s achievement, the mysterious unique creations which raised him higher than mere animals, gave him a taste of the immortal. No – that was sex wasn’t it, not art? She was getting muddled, and not sure she believed it now, in any case. Her first brief taste of sex had seemed all too fiercely physical – sticking zips and probing tongues, the smell of perspiration, the taste of nicotine.

  ‘Look at Hitler,’ Hadley said, as if the Nazi Führer had just goose-stepped into the room. ‘He adored Wagner, didn’t he – probably played it in the gas chambers, and Goering was an art-collector, a highly cultured brute who nicked half the Renoirs from the French, and …’

  ‘Yes, but that proves nothing, does it? You can’t ban all art and music just because the Nazis happened to go for them. It’s like banning chocolate cake because it was the Yorkshire Ripper’s favourite.’

  ‘Was it?’ Hadley asked. ‘How on earth did you know that?’

  ‘I didn’t. I just made it up. But someone told me once that evil people almost always have a sweet tooth, as if they’re seeking in their diet what’s missing in their character.’ ‘Someone’ was the artist, and she was churning out his views again. His amazing store of knowledge was like an encyclopaedia in several different volumes, while her own mind was a puny Reader’s Digest.

  ‘Well, Hitler loved Sachertorte, so maybe there’s some truth in it.’

  ‘What’s Sachertorte?’ She recognised the word as German, though Hadley’s pronunciation left a lot to be desired.

  ‘Just the Viennese for chocolate cake.’ He laughed. ‘Actually, my father loved it, too, so that theory doesn’t wash. Whatever else, my father wasn’t evil.’ He paused a moment, flicked back his red hair. ‘You know, if I’m honest with myself, my objection to that window is probably less to do with principles, or cash, than with the fact I’m just a bit pissed off that Dad’s getting all the honour of a grand memorial window, when he … he …’

  ‘When he what?’ asked Jane, to fill the awkward silence.

  ‘Oh, nothing.’ Hadley shrugged. ‘It’s just that Dad and I never got along too well. He was always so damned busy, never had much time for us as kids. Yet how could I complain, when he was DOING GOOD, in capitals – tending to the sick and all that stuff. Other people needed him, you see, more than we were meant to – or allowed to. D’you know …’ He laughed again, shamefacedly this time. ‘I sometimes almost wished I had a Nazi for a father.’

  Jane shared his grin. ‘A Nazi who played Wagner while he guzzled chocolate cake?’ At least she knew who Wagner was. Christopher often played his hi-fi in the studio, and she had picked up names and titles, tried to match the composers to their works. Whatever her deficiencies, she was undoubtedly more knowledgeable than the Jane who’d fled from Shrepton just six weeks ago, a Jane who’d never heard of Bayreuth, and the Ring Cycle, let alone Stockhausen or Boulez.

  ‘I’m starving,’ Hadley announced, as if he’d tired at last of Hitler, Wagner and London’s plague of tramps. ‘I only really stopped off here to try to scrounge a meal. I’m on my way back to college. We stayed up half last night at this rather crazy ball, then crashed out at a friend’s pad just fifteen miles away. I did try to phone, but nobody was in.’

  ‘We went out for a walk.’

  ‘Poor you! I loathe Mum’s walks. They’re always sort of ambles with free nature-study lessons thrown in as a bonus.’

  ‘I didn’t get the nature study.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No.’ Or perhaps she should say yes. Illegitimate babies could be classed as nature study. Supposing she just blurted out what Isobel had told her? ‘Hey, Hadley, do you realise you’re not your mother’s second child, but actually her third? You’ve got an elder half-sister somewhere in the States.’ The idea really frightened her, though she would never dream of doing it. Secrets gave you power, the power to crush, destroy; to change beliefs, relationships; outlaw love and trust.

  ‘I suppose I could just raid the larder,’ Hadley mumbled, shaking out the last sweets from the box. ‘Did Mum say what’s for supper?’

  ‘Cheese on toast.’

  Hadley made a face. ‘We had caviare last night. And venison, and real out-of-season strawberries – huge fat luscious juicy ones almost as big as avocados.’

  ‘No wonder you feel so bad about the starving.’

  Hadley yelped with laughter. ‘Yeah. I like it! Come on, Rose, let’s go and do the soup-run. I’m sure Mum’s got cream of caviare.’

  ‘No,’ said Jane, rooting through the larder, while Hadley sat watching, feet up on the Aga. ‘Only spring vegetable, tomato, or a tin of beef and leek.’

  ‘Spring vegetable,’ chose Hadley. ‘It’s so damn cold outside, I like the thought of spring. They ought to make snowdrop soup, or crocus and narcissi.’

  ‘Spring vegetable’s a sham,’ said Jane, thinking back to her first month as a nomad, when breakfast, lunch and supper had been soup soup soup soup soup. ‘It’s just coloured water with odd bits of confetti floating on the top.’

  ‘Lots of food’s a sham – especially things in boxes. The pictures on the outside look fantastic, and inside it’s all ersatz. I suppose I was lucky to have Mum for nineteen years. She never buys that sort of muck. It’s only since I’ve been a student, catering for myself, that I’ve realised what a con it is.’

  Jane said nothing. She approved of Isobel’s cooking, but not her mess and muddle. The larder was chaotic – things like oven-cleaner mixed up with rice and cornflakes; flour and sugar spilling from their bags; sticky strawberry jam smeared across the biscuit tin. She had never really thought about her own mother’s tidy kitchen, her neat and well-scrubbed fridge, the regular and well-timed meals which appeared steaming on the table at the dot of one, or six; just taken them for granted. She was starving now, like Hadley; would have welcomed Amy’s bacon roll, or her steak and kidney pie. She didn’t know the time, had left her watch upstairs, but her parents might be sitting down to table exactly at this moment, the third chair empty, the pie too big for two of them. She could suddenly see the pie-funnel her mother always used – an elongated blackbird in ceramic, its head and neck stretched vertically, so that the gaping yellow beak appeared just above the pastry. She had loved it as a child, that surprising glimpse of glossy black when her mother cut the pie; the strange sight of a china bird standing in a pond of meat and gravy.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ asked Hadley, strolling to the cupboard to find a saucepan for the soup. ‘You look as if you’ve seen a ghost.’

  She shivered. Ghosts and shadows. Her parents might well fear her dead; a corpse by now, a wraith. She really ought to contact them, as Isobel had urged; at least tell them she was safe, stop them fretting, grieving. ‘Do you want cheese on toast as well?’ she asked, trying to change the subject, quash the thoughts and memories churning in her mind.

  ‘What do you mean, ‘‘as well’’? You make me sound a glutton!’ He grinned. ‘Mum had this awful friend who always said ‘‘Milk and sugar?’’ when she poured the tea; put such stress on the ‘‘and’’, you felt like a pig with all four feet in the trough if you dared to ask for both.’

  ‘Well, we could have buck rarebit – cheese on toast and eggs.’ Jane felt gratified by Hadley’s laugh. He seemed to laugh easily, enjoy her company. She was
doing rather better, now; no longer the shy booby she must have seemed at Adrian’s last night, but someone with opinions and rejoinders. Okay, the views weren’t quite her own, but at least she wasn’t sitting there in silence, or getting all tied up in knots, or blushing, as she often did with Christopher.

  ‘What’s it like, working with old Harville-Shaw?’ asked Hadley, as if he’d peered into her mind, and seen the artist sitting there, taking up his residence, filling the whole space.

  ‘Okay,’ she said, jibbing at the ‘old’, but determined to be cool and non-committal.

  ‘You live there, too, Mum said.’

  She nodded, sprinkling powdered soup onto the panful of cold water, and cursing her hot cheeks. Now she was blushing, and Hadley gazing straight into her face – no, through it to her mind again, so that he could probably see the artist lying on the bed with her, kissing her bare breasts, forcing his deft tongue …

  ‘Shall I make the toast?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, please.’ She turned away to hide the blush, but couldn’t shift her thoughts from mouths. Did Hadley have a girlfriend, thrust his tongue between her lips, tasting what she’d eaten; swap saliva with her? She had never known a kiss could be so intimate, so …

  ‘Dad always burnt the toast,’ said Hadley, meditatively, sliding bread into the toaster, and breaking up the kiss. ‘Regularly, each breakfast-time. Making the toast was the only thing he did around the house, his only contribution to the morning rush, yet he never seemed to really get the hang of it, not even with this automatic setting. I know it sounds dumb, Rose, but the thing I’ve missed most since he died is the sight of him standing rather glumly by the sink, scraping all the burnt bits off, and making so much mess, he …’ Hadley’s voice was wavering. Jane could tell he was upset; clearly missed this father who had always been too busy for him, and would now never see him graduate, or marry.