Purveyor of Enchantment, page 10
She had been told that she could stay up late with the others that evening to watch the film about the war. She had been excited at first because she liked staying up late and she liked films on television. She had wondered if there would be sweets. Sometimes, if there was a special programme her mother bought sweets to be eaten in front of the television. This was obviously a very special programme. Then, at half-past nine, just as it was about to begin, Aunt Mabel telephoned. In her rush, Clementine completely forgot that if Aunt Mabel called and it was before six, Mummy was out shopping, and if she called after six, Mummy was in the bathroom. ‘Sorry Aunt Mabel,’ Clementine had twittered, ‘Mummy is out shopping.’
‘Are you mad child?’ Her voice was so sharp Clementine had to move the receiver from one ear to the other. ‘I said, are you mad?’
Clementine had considered the question seriously, coming as it did from an expert on the subject.
‘No,’ she stated finally. Listening to her aunt, she hoped madness was not catching, like chickenpox or measles.
‘Do you hear me, child? I wish to speak to your mother. Now where is she? And what are you doing up at this hour? When your cousin Digby was your age he was in bed by seven-thirty sharp, every night without fail.’
Maybe some wicked fairy had put a spell on Aunt Mabel, Clementine had thought, or maybe Aunt Mabel was a wicked fairy herself. The thought was exciting.
Aunt Mabel’s voice made Clementine move the phone back to the other ear again. ‘Now for the last time, Clementine; this is Clementine isn’t it? Is your mother home or not?’
‘I’ll get her,’ Clementine had dropped the receiver on the carpet and run into the drawing-room.
She had heard her mother’s voice. ‘As you very well know, Mabel, I’m every bit as strict as you are, but I feel it’s absolutely essential that the children grow up with an awareness of what happened and what being Jewish . . . all right, part Jewish, means.’
At last they had settled down to watch. There had been no sweets. On the screen, young men like Uncle Timothy – the uncle who had died in the war and whom her brother was called after – ran across a beach, their hands thrown high in the air as they fell into the wet sand. Houses burnt black against an orange sky. Women wearing head scarves and shawls and heavy black coats walked along endless dusty roads, their children, looking like no children Clementine had ever seen, tagging along behind. One such child, a little girl, stepped out from a train, and a uniformed man with granite eyes put a soft, white long-fingered hand on her shoulder. Pillars of smoke rose into leaden skies as skeletal bodies were shoved into ovens that spewed out the flames of hell.
Apparently, Clementine had screamed. She could not remember that part herself, but according to her mother she had gone on screaming for quite a while. She did remember her mother muttering, ‘For once maybe bloody Mabel was right,’ as she put Clementine to bed with a mug ofwarm milk. Clementine had mumbled her prayer, the way she had been taught to do every night. ‘God who loves little children, look down at me. Wherever I go my happiness lies in Thine hands. Happiness comes and happiness goes, but he whom God loves is the happiest of all.’
Clementine had never really listened to the words before, she had simply mumbled away at them in an unthinking nightly ritual; a kind of insurance policy handed to her by her parents. Now she read them over and over to herself. ‘Happiness comes and happiness goes, he whom God loves is happiest of all.’
So how could you make sure that God loved you? So far, Clementine had been all right, but what if He changed His mind? What if He stopped loving her? Would she have to leave her room and her house and all her toys to tramp along the roads with her brothers and sister, their mother pushing the large Silver Cross pram piled high with saucepans and chairs and blankets, or worse still? She had pulled her blankets over her face, shielding herself against those huge staring eyes and the gaping flaming ovens.
Clementine hit the first note of the Warsaw Concerto, hard on the piano. She carried on playing for half an hour, wanting only to immerse her fretful mind in music. Finally, exhausted, she stopped playing and looked at her watch. It was time to go. She was about to fetch a bottle of South African red wine from the rack in the kitchen, when she remembered that Nathaniel was supposed to be a reformed alcoholic. Instead she brought out a box of Marabou chocolate she had brought with her from Sweden and, after a moment’s pause, she pulled off the black velvet ribbon which held her hair back in a pony-tail and wound it round the box instead. She grabbed her handbag and a black knitted wrap against the cold night air and set off for next door.
Seven
The moonlight had dimmed with the thickening clouds. From her chair, Clementine peered anxiously at Mr Scott. He kept telling her he was fine, but there he went again, she could just see through the darkness, wiping his forehead with his large red and white spotted handkerchief; the kind that little boys tie in a bundle on a stick when they run away from home. The colder and more worried she was getting, the more irritable she became. She walked up to the attic window and held her watch up to the faint light. It was one o’clock.
‘I thought Nathaniel was meant to be home by midnight,’ she muttered.
‘He is almost forty years old,’ Mr Scott pointed out mildly. ‘I don’t put a curfew on him.’
‘No, of course not,’ Clementine agreed with bad grace, ‘but if you say you’re going to come home around midnight, you should come home around midnight, for just this kind of reason.’
‘I don’t want to be seen to be overly defensive of my son,’ Mr Scott said, ‘but it seems a little bit unreasonable to expect him to foresee that his friend and his father would get themselves locked in an attic room while hiding from a burglar.’
But Clementine was not in a mood to be reasonable. Life was utterly unreliable; the only reliable thing about it being that it would be taken from you. So, given that indisputable fact, people turning up at midnight when they said midnight, was the least one could ask for.
‘The perimeters of existence are so utterly haphazard,’ she said, ‘that the only way of coping is to raise one’s own secure borders against the chaos outside. Nathaniel is the enemy of secure borders, he really is, in fact, he thinks a secure border is a come on.’ She sighed and threw herself down on her chair.
‘How, I ask you, can anyone as insecure as I, someone who doesn’t gamble on the National Lottery in case she wins and gets murdered for her money, make a life with a man like Nathaniel?’
Mr Scott did not answer.
There it was, Clementine thought; after years of emotional slumber you meet the man of your dreams and then you find that, quite frankly, you have nothing whatsoever to say to each other.
The oak refectory table in Mr Scott’s dining-room could seat twelve people comfortably. By implication it should seat three people even more comfortably, Clementine thought, but things did not work like that. Mr Scott, Nathaniel and Clementine sat at one end of the table with Mr Scott at the head. Further along were the empty seats where all the witty and fascinating guests should have been dining. The wine-coloured chintz curtains were drawn against the summer evening and the room was lit a little harshly by one of Mr Scott’s pewter lamps. The walls were covered with water-colour landscapes, most of them Italian, it seemed to Clementine, with their green rolling hills and exclamation-mark cypresses. Returning to the face that had gazed back at her through a thousand fantasies, she said, ‘We’ve had such a good summer, haven’t we?’
‘Absolutely,’ Nathaniel agreed.
‘We all love the sun,’ Mr Scott said, refilling their glasses with elderflower cordial. They had started dinner with a spicy mackerel pâté and thick triangles of toast, and now it was time for Mr Scott’s curry. Picking up a plate from the sideboard with one hand, he gesticulated with the other towards a large dish edged with wedges of hard-boiled eggs.
Nathaniel too got up from the table. ‘Clementine, would you like some wine?’
The answer to that, of course, was yes, she was dying for some, but she had manners, she knew the form.
Mr Scott’s grip tightened on the plate.
‘I’m very happy with this,’ she smiled, holding up her glass of cordial.
‘Not for me either, dear boy,’ Mr Scott said quickly, as he began to dish out. He placed the plate in front of Clementine. The curry smelt of coconut and cardamom. Nathaniel was rummaging through a drawer in the sideboard, when, with a little grunt of satisfaction, he pulled out a key and unlocked the cupboard below.
‘Nathaniel, old boy, why don’t you stick to soft.’ There was such desperation in Mr Scott’s quiet voice, that Clementine felt more like someone having accidentally stumbled into a private funeral than a guest at a supper party.
Nathaniel sighed and put the bottle down. ‘Well, Clementine, we’ve barely met and already you know my best kept secret: I’ve stopped drinking.’ He sat back down at the table and drained his glass of cordial.
Mr Scott, having finished serving, joined them at the table. ‘Yes, we all love sunshine,’ he said, and relief rose from his voice like the steam from the food.
‘Yet some people can’t get enough cold and rain after living in a hot climate,’ Clementine replied. She raised a forkful of curry to her lips and, shooting Nathaniel a glance under her eyelashes, she wondered if it might be a good idea, at this stage, to explain that normally she was no more boring than most women her age and class, it was just that tonight she was making an exception.
‘Aah, but it can get quite cold in the mountains,’ Mr Scott told her.
‘Do you like the heat?’ Clementine asked Nathaniel, as she was gripped again by some suicidal urge to keep a conversation going, however doomed.
‘Oh yes,’ he answered, and his fingers beat a silent tattoo against the edge of Mr Scott’s dining table.
Clementine raised her eyes to his, holding his gaze for a moment. Suddenly he shook his head and smiled.
‘In my opinion there’s not a woman born who can resist chocolate.’ Mr Scott beamed at her as he prepared to serve the chocolate mousse tart. ‘Am I not right?’
Wrong! Clementine had eaten too much already, and anyway, she was one of those people who had had too much chocolate as soon as she saw it. Her stomach turned at the sight of the large pastry shell with its sticky dark-brown filling.
‘Oh you’re right,’ she murmured, obediently, holding out her plate. ‘Who can resist chocolate?’
‘I won’t have any thanks,’ Nathaniel said. ‘I’m not used to eating this much.’
Clementine looked down as a full quarter of the tart landed on her plate. ‘And some cream,’ Mr Scott said pleasurably. She looked on helplessly as Mr Scott poured on a generous helping of double cream.
‘You must tell me about your work in Rwanda?’ she turned to Nathaniel as she lifted a large forkful of food to her mouth. Her spirits sank further. Only she could be relied upon to bring up the suffering of a people at war with her mouth full of chocolate cake. She swallowed as quickly as possible, rinsing down the rich sticky mess with a gulp of cordial.
‘It must have been very harrowing.’ The truth is, even when she was not pushing food into her mouth, she felt awkward around charitable causes. She was quite simply too big and healthy not to feel like a walking affront to the starving of the world.
While she waited for Nathaniel’s reply she felt Mr Scott’s eyes expectantly on her. She picked up another forkful of pudding, forcing herself to smile at Mr Scott. Turning back to Nathaniel she smuggled the food into her mouth, chewing with tiny movements of her jaw, as if that way, somehow, her appetite would seem less offensive.
‘Yes, it was harrowing,’ Nathaniel did not look at her as he answered, ‘but in my business I’m afraid no news is bad news.’
‘I feel so cheated,’ Clementine said. ‘I’ve felt cheated most of my life I suppose. There I was, toddling around my mother’s knees, thinking life was full of smiling mummies and daddies and Christmas trees and women in fur coats chasing after strong and handsome men. Then look,’ she spread out her large hands, ‘just look what the world is really like. I don’t know how anyone recovers from the shock of finding out.’
Nathaniel looked straight at her and then he laughed.
Confused by the sudden warmth in his eyes she said quickly, ‘So where’s your next trip going to be to, or don’t you know yet?’
‘I’m planning to stick around the UK for a while,’ Nathaniel said.
Clementine nodded sagely. ‘I know, there’s quite enough death and destruction here to keep you going for some time.’
‘There are more things in life to enjoy than death and destruction,’ Nathaniel said. He was sitting back in the chair, one leg crossed over the other, relaxed enough if one did not look too close. Clementine longed to lean across the table and grab his hand, stop his well-shaped fingers from their incessant drumming. ‘But seriously, you simply have to learn to look away.’
Clementine shovelled another large mouthful of chocolate into her mouth, wanting only to finish what was on her plate. She felt sick swallowing.
‘I reckon having my fairy tales illustrated by photographs rather than drawings would be pretty interesting,’ she said when she had finished swallowing. ‘Not people dressed up like the characters, all velvet gowns and gold crowns, but real images: a young woman gazing down from a top-floor window; a man charging down the street in his car.’ She thought of the busker outside Safeways. ‘A down-and-out slumped in a shop entrance.’ She smiled at Nathaniel. ‘You say fairy tales have nothing to do with real life, but surely you have to ask yourselfwhat curse turned a child like most others into a bundle of rags begging for pennies.’
‘I think the photographs are a capital idea,’ Mr Scott said and Clementine looked at Nathaniel for agreement.
‘Could work,’ was all he said. He stood up and began to clear the table.
What do you mean, ‘Could work’? Clementine wanted to yell after his disappearing back. It was a very good idea. So good it had taken her completely by surprise. He had no right to sit there with his nervous hands and his green eyes and say, ‘Could work.’
Standing up herself and picking up her empty plate, she told Mr Scott, ‘That was just the most delicious pudding I’ve eaten for a long time.’
‘Well then you must have some more.’ Mr Scott beamed at her as he pushed another large slice of chocolate tart onto her plate. ‘I don’t know what I was doing not offering you seconds. You sit down too,’ he said to Nathaniel who had returned to the dining-room. ‘Clementine is having some more pudding.’
For the first time Clementine saw something resembling admiration in Nathaniel’s eyes as he looked at her, and over what: her seemingly bottomless appetite? Resigned, she picked up her fork.
‘Family values,’ Jessica said to Clementine at the Chocolate House. They were enjoying the sunshine outside, as Mrs Challis had recently obtained permission to place three tables with chairs in the square.
‘It’s what Now is all about. It’s taken me a while to realize.’ She swallowed a great gulp of coffee, and slamming the cup down on the saucer, hauled a photo from her bag. ‘This is it. This is where it’s at.’ She handed the photo to Clementine, who took it, expecting a picture of Michael. But if that was her friend’s husband, it was a very bad likeness indeed. She peered down at the grey mass interrupted by a white line and some darker blobs.
‘My womb,’ Jessica declared.
Clementine dropped the photo and was left to crawl around the cobblestones to retrieve it. She handed it back to Jessica. ‘Is someone there?’
‘Do you mean, am I pregnant? No, not yet. But I will be.’ Jessica beamed at her. ‘Oh, Clementine, isn’t it wonderful? I just feel my whole life coming together. I should have listened to Michael earlier. As you know he’s wanted a family for years, but I was too into me. That’s all changing. Life’s about giving; projecting outwards.’
Mrs Challis clip-clopped her way across to their table. ‘If it’s plumbing you’re talking about,’ she said inexplicably, whipping a cloth from her apron pocket and rubbing vigorously at the table, ‘Derek is your man. He’s done a lovely job in my little bathroom it has to be said.’
Jessica looked alert, ‘Clementine you’ve got a problem with your shower, haven’t you?’
Clementine glared at her, but before she could protest, Mrs Challis continued. ‘You just let me know when it would be convenient for Derek to pop round and I’ll make sure he’s there. He’s very punctual, Derek.’ Straightening up, her eyes turned steely. Clementine followed her gaze across the square to the closed-down sports shop opposite. There, the busker she had seen outside Safeways the other day was taking up position, unslinging the guitar from across his shoulder and throwing the old bowler hat on the ground at his feet.
‘He’s nothing but a beggar. Living rough by the looks of him.’ Mrs Challis sucked her teeth and shook her head. ‘I never thought we’d see his sort here in Aldringham.’ She returned to her customers, switching her smile back on. ‘More coffee ladies?’
‘You do have a problem with your shower,’ Jessica insisted when she had gone. ‘You told me so yourself.’
Clementine leant closer to Jessica and hissed, ‘But I don’t want this Derek fixing it. I have a very bad feeling about him.’
‘Oh, you have bad feelings about everything,’ Jessica said impatiently.
Clementine sighed. This, of course, was true. ‘But I really do believe he’s a bad lot. These ghastly burglaries . . .’
‘What ghastly burglaries?’
‘Don’t say you haven’t read about them. There’s been two really violent ones in the last few weeks. The first one, in which this old lady got beaten to a pulp, was perpetrated by a man looking very much like Derek Fletcher.’
