24

There was a knock at the front door.

‘It’ll be canvassers,’ said Colette, ‘you answer it Aldous, you’re so good with them.’

‘Can’t someone else answer it?’

He looked around at the company in the crowded kitchen. There were many who could have answered it. James and Marilyn were over for lunch. Julian was back for one of his weekends at home, and Myra had come round to visit. It was a warm Saturday in May 1979, a week before the general election, but no one was talking about politics. They were talking instead about Julian and Myra’s plans to hitch-hike around Europe.

‘I’m not sure if I really should allow you,’ had been Colette’s instant response once the two had unveiled their plan. Julian didn’t seem to take this remark seriously, as though her permission had been the least of their problems. Aldous had been keen.

‘The boy’s nearly a captain, he’s been on boats out in the North Sea for goodness’ sake . . .’

‘It’s not Julian I’m worried about, it’s this girl. Do you think we should leave her in the charge of this Beano-reading sailor, in all these desperado countries – where did you say you were going?’

Julian reiterated a well-rehearsed list.

‘France, West Germany, East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia, Italy and then France again.’

‘And where have you got all the money for a trip like this?’

Aldous, having delayed answering the door for as long as seemed acceptable, was beginning to hope whoever it was might have gone away, when a second, louder knock came, dragging him reluctantly out of his chair. No one else seemed to have heard it, apart from Colette.

On the doorstep he met a tall, thin man with pouting, feminine lips. A blue rosette was attached to his lapel.

‘Good afternoon sir, I’m calling on behalf of the Conservative Party.’

‘Oh. Are you?’

‘I was wondering whether we could count on your vote in the forthcoming election.’

Aldous hesitated for a moment.

‘Of course,’ he said. ‘I’ve always voted for your party, actually.’

The man gave a beam of satisfaction that Aldous found rather rewarding.

‘That’s splendid sir. Thank you. Goodbye.’

Aldous returned to the kitchen feeling flushed.

Julian was explaining how cheaply they could live in Eastern Europe.

‘It would cost us practically nothing. Myra’s saved some money from her Saturday job, and I’ve got some saved . . .’

‘Surely you’re having enough adventures at sea without having to gallivant over dry land as well . . .’ Colette protested. But she suspected Julian was suffering some mild disillusion with his chosen career. He seemed to come home more and more, almost every weekend. He was gradually coming to understand that his Sealink sponsorship meant he had little prospect of working on anything other than cross-channel ferries for the foreseeable future. There was a chance of more exciting routes, such as Felixstowe to Copenhagen, or Hull to Bergen and other Scandinavian ports, but there were several years of cadetship to endure before that prospect. After the summer he was due to spend six months on the ferry from Dover to Calais, mainly on bridge-watch duties. He didn’t seem to be looking forward to it much.

‘You’ll need visas,’ said James, who was also in the kitchen, with Marilyn, ‘Half these countries might not let you in.’

‘I went to the Polish embassy yesterday, I’ve got all the forms . . .’

‘Who was at the door, darling?’ Colette called across the room to her husband.

‘Someone from the Conservative Party.’

‘I hope you told them to get lost,’ said James.

‘I certainly did.’

‘Because I’m leaving the country if they let that woman in.’

‘You’ll be leaving the country anyway,’ said Marilyn.

‘Why, where are you going?’ said Colette.

‘He’s my new research assistant,’ said Marilyn, laying a protective hand on James’s shoulder. ‘He’s coming with me to Venezuela in the summer.’

‘Only for a few weeks,’ said James.

‘What has happened to my family?’ moaned Colette, ‘Why are you all leaving the country? Juliette’s said she’s going to France in the summer . . .’

‘Everyone goes abroad these days,’ said Julian, ‘it’s not a big thing . . .’

There was another knock at the door. To everyone’s surprise Aldous went to answer it without a fuss.

There was a stocky, whiskery man on the doorstep with a Bobby Charlton combover. He had a red rosette on his lapel.

‘Good afternoon sir, I’m wondering if the Labour Party can rely on your vote this coming election.’

‘Of course,’ said Aldous, ‘I’ve always voted Labour actually.’

The man checked himself, as though he’d been prepared for an argument, then beamed, giving Aldous an even stronger sense of satisfaction than before. He’d found a foolproof way of dealing with political canvassers – express support and they simply disappear. He returned to the kitchen feeling slightly giddy.

‘I hope you told him I’ve got five pounds riding on this election,’ said James.

He went on to explain that he’d placed a bet with William Hill, at odds of six to one, on a Labour victory. Easy money, he said. He should have put more on, now he’d come to think about it.

‘Five pounds?’ said Marilyn, ‘I heard the Tories were ten points ahead.’

‘Yes, but if you compare the personal ratings of the leaders, Callaghan’s miles in front. When it comes to the crunch the British public would never let that stuck-up woman run the country.’

‘I don’t know why everyone’s getting so worked up about this election,’ said Colette, ‘nothing’s going to change.’

‘I suppose you’ll be voting for her,’ James then said to his mother. But Colette pulled a face of disgust at the idea, which delighted her children. For once mother and sons had found common political ground.

When a third knock was heard, Aldous thought he was entitled to delegate the answering to someone else. James agreed, and shortly returned.

‘There’s an enormous Irishwoman at the door asking for Myra,’ he said.

Myra went white.

‘Oh no. It’s my mum. Don’t tell her I’m here, please don’t.’

Colette went to the front door.

‘I’ve come for my daughter,’ the woman said. Colette saw Myra’s prettiness hidden somewhere in the puffy, worn features of the woman on the doorstep.

It turned out that Myra had been lying to her mother, saying that she was sleeping at a friend’s house. Her mother had discovered the deceit, so here she was.

‘She’s not here.’

Brown eyes stared at Colette, mother to mother.

‘You must understand, I can’t allow this to go on . . .’

A man in a city coat with a blotchy face was standing in the background, at the end of the path, looking with disdain at the tangled, rotting mess of the front garden.

‘Allow what to go on?’

‘I know you have different standards from us . . .’

Colette was suddenly absorbed by the woman’s clothes. A navy blue dress that ballooned around her enormous bosom, to which a red carnation was pinned. She had a sort of neckerchief affair around her neck – blue dots on white. It was as though she was en route to a wedding. She had dressed in her Sunday best to come here. How odd, thought Colette, that these council estate dwellers from the marshes of the Lee basin should feel such a frisson of feudal inferiority, that they should need to dress up to visit the avenues of Windhover Hill. Did they think they would be laughed at otherwise, would have the dogs set on them? It annoyed Colette deeply.

A small row ensued, sparked by the sense that she had of being criticized by this woman for being a drunk, a lapsed Catholic, for having her hair too long, for not keeping her front garden tidy, for the peeling paint on her front door. Seeing that Colette was about to slam it on her, the woman appealed again to their shared burden of motherhood.

‘Myra told me she preferred your house to her own home. How do you think that makes a mother feel? We’ve never seen eye to eye I’m afraid. She’s a very wilful girl . . .’

I wish I could trust you, thought Colette. I wish you were a real friend, and that I could talk to you about Janus, and we could share our sorrows about children slipping away from us. I wish that you weren’t the bloated, varicosed, uneducated, God-fearing, narrow-minded fool that you evidently are.

‘Myra is a nice girl. She’s a good girl,’ said Colette, ‘she is very sensible.’

Colette wished that Janus was here. He could have given this woman such a fright she would never have come back. As it was she bore the woman’s words, spoken, as they were, in a rough, southern Irish brogue, until the woman had said all she had to say, and then closed the door on her, promising to pass her message on to Myra if she saw her.

‘What’s all this about you two spending nights together without Myra’s mum’s permission?’ said Colette, half-laughing. Myra’s trembling face had become something she now treasured, in the light of what her mother had said. That she preferred this house to her own. Myra had said that to her own mother.

‘The woman’s mad,’ Julian said. ‘Since Myra spent a weekend at Gravesend she’s refused to talk to me. If I call for Myra at her house, her mother gives me hand-written notes instead. Look – I’ve still got one on me.’ He took a crumpled scrap of paper from his pocket.

Myra don’t want to see you

‘She doesn’t know I’m spending some weekends here. But now it’s the only way we can meet up.’

‘So that’s why you’ve been coming back so much. I thought it was because you were fed up with Gravesend.’

‘No,’ said Julian, surprised, ‘I love Gravesend.’

No one in the room was sure if he was serious.

‘So what does your mother think about you hitch-hiking around Europe with Julian?’ said Colette, turning her attention to Myra, who had now changed colour to lobster-red, deeply embarrassed at hearing her mother’s voice at the front door. ‘But I don’t suppose you’ve told her yet have you? What if she says no?’

‘Then Myra will make a rope of bed sheets . . .’ said Julian.

Colette thought about Myra’s mother a lot after that. She toyed with the possibility that the woman was right, that the two should be kept apart, not allowed to sleep with each other. But at the same time the thought was ridiculous. Myra was leaving school this summer. Julian was a sailor-to-be, living half away from home. And young people had different expectations these days.

‘There’s no point in trying to impose the standards of our generation on our own children,’ Aldous had said when she’d raised the matter with him. She thought it was true. There had been such sweeping changes since they were young, those prewar childhoods they’d spent seemed to belong to a remote past which today’s schoolchildren now studied in their history classes. But Colette didn’t really like it. She didn’t like the way children were growing up so fast.

‘Soon there won’t be any children. There will be babies, and then there will be small adults. That can’t be right, can it? We should be doing the opposite. Childhood should be made to last for as long as possible.’

And it did make her feel uncomfortable when her children would suddenly talk openly about sex.

‘I have just realized that music and sex are the same thing.’

Julian said this one Friday evening, having come downstairs after spending an hour in his bedroom with Myra, during which time a quiet, rhythmic underbeat had filled the house. When she’d first heard this noise Colette had thought there was something wrong with the pipes, or that there was someone up on the roof mending tiles. It was only when she’d discerned an accompanying squeaking noise, a human vocalization of ecstasy, that she realised what it was. Then she heard it everywhere. From James’s bedroom where he often spent the weekends, the witch-haired anthropologist giving similar mouse-like noises. Even from Juliette’s room once, though thankfully Juliette was silent. Instead it was Boris who provided the voice part, a series of deep groans, a noise she hadn’t heard since Janus had had toothache.

‘I’m going to write an essay on it,’ Julian went on, ‘all that music, it’s just sex. Rhythms building up, slowing down, building up, pausing, getting diverted, wandering, then the rhythms building up again, falling away, then a great climax at the end. That’s all it is.’

Colette had still not told anyone that she met Janus once a fortnight in The Coach and Horses. Everyone assumed they were meeting in Brimstone Park, and for this reason kept clear of the area on Sundays. Each time they met Janus seemed to have more good news to tell her. Another private concert booking. Promotion at the Steinway Showrooms. Meetings with old friends and colleagues from his college days.

‘But why are you still living in a probationer’s hostel?’

‘I’ve got it rent-free till the summer. What’s the point of paying for a flat until I have to? Anyway, I’m saving up a big deposit so I can get a nice place. A friend of mine has promised me a place in this big house in Holland Park. I’ve got over a thousand pounds saved thanks to these concerts I’ve been giving.’

‘Perhaps you’ll do a public recital soon?’

‘Yes, perhaps.’

When Janus went to the bar for another round of drinks, Colette froze at the sight of a face she recognized at another table. It was the solicitor’s clerk, the one who delivered the summons to Fernlight Avenue. He was sitting there in his casual clothes, a rough-looking leather jacket and ripped jeans, the antithesis of his legal self. He’d caught Colette’s eye and was giving her a wry, pitying smile, as if to say, after all we did for you, now you’ve gone and blown it.

But she hadn’t. The Coach and Horses was borderline. On the boundary of the legal and the illegal. And there was no stipulation that she could never see her son again. When he returned he was carrying the usual barley wine for his mother, but this time for himself he’d bought a half pint glass of something that looked like beer.

‘It’s only shandy,’ said Janus. ‘Less than half of it is beer. You can’t expect me to sit here for all these weeks watching you get tipsy on barley wines and not feel a desire for a little tipple myself. Anyway, the orange juice was getting to me, like it was with you. I was pissing orange juice last time.’

‘That man over there – don’t look!’

But Janus had already swung round to stare in the direction Colette had indicated. Luckily the clerk wasn’t looking.

‘What man?’

Colette suddenly became aware of the foolishness of drawing her son’s attention to the man whom he could reasonably hold responsible for ruining his life, albeit in the role of a functionary.

‘It doesn’t matter.’ Luckily Janus hadn’t recognized him. ‘I thought I knew him. He’s gone now.’

Janus eyed his mother suspiciously, while he swallowed his shandy. Colette noticed a shiver pass through his body as the alcohol took up its residence.

‘Just one shandy,’ said Colette.

‘Two,’ said Janus as he returned to the bar.

Colette wondered if she should make a dash for it. It had been a mistake to meet in the pub like this, but they had been carrying on for so long without Janus succumbing to the temptation of all-surrounding booze, that she’d thought everything was going to be all right. But now it looked as though he was going to get drunk speed-drinking shandies.

He returned with a pint this time.

‘No, Janus. This is going to far.’

‘Too far? It’s a soft drink, virtually.’

‘If that’s half beer you’ll have had three-quarters of a pint by the time you’ve finished it . . .’

‘What’s three-quarters of a pint? I used to have to have four special brews just to feel relaxed enough for proper drinking. This is no more potent than a bag of wine gums . . .’

‘I’m going,’ said Colette, picking up her bag and lifting her coat from the seat beside her, ‘I’ll see you in a fortnight, but I’m not staying here while you get drunk.’

Janus said nothing, but sat back and took another pull on his drink while Colette made her way out of the pub.

In the busy, bright air of Green Lanes, Colette walked quickly towards home, aware, soon after she left the pub, of footsteps hurrying behind her.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, pulling on her shoulder to make her stop. She turned and saw that his mouth was shining, and there were dark, splashy stains on his shirt. He had rapidly finished his pint before coming after her. ‘I promise I won’t do it again. You can’t blame me, I have to sit there, like I said, with you drinking, how could I not be tempted? How do you think it makes me feel, sitting here on the margin of my own neighbourhood, knowing I can never see my home again?’

Colette turned and walked on. Janus followed.

‘I feel like I’m stranded on a lonely island. That’s what the Romans did with people they didn’t like but couldn’t kill. They’d cast them away on a tiny, barren island until they died of loneliness. That’s what you’ve done to me, I’ve got nothing but seagulls for company . . .’

‘Janus, stop following me, you’re straying into forbidden territory. If you come any further you could be in trouble.’

‘I’m already in forbidden territory. That pub’s an eighth of a mile inside the exclusion zone. I’m deep inside forbidden territory. I have been every fortnight.’

‘Then we’ll have to stop using that pub. Janus, will you stop?’

Colette halted, but Janus went on. He walked a few yards further and then stopped. Turning, he beckoned to his mother to follow.

By now they were almost at Palmers Green Cathedral.

‘Just let me walk you a little way home,’ he said, ‘it won’t matter if anyone sees us. They wouldn’t recognize me anyway would they? I’ve walked round here loads of times. I’ve even walked past the house a couple of times.’

‘You’ve walked past the house? When?’

‘A few nights ago. I saw a pretty little girl go in. She had hair a bit like a pineapple. Who was that?’

‘Oh, you mean Myra. Julian’s girlfriend.’

‘You didn’t tell me Julian had a girlfriend.’

‘I didn’t think you’d be interested. You’ve never asked how Julian is, not once in all the meetings we’ve had.’

‘And you’ve never talked about him either . . .’

‘That’s because I’ve been waiting for you to ask about him . . .’

Colette stopped again.

‘Janus, there’s a bus stop over there. You go and wait there for the bus. You are not coming any nearer to Fernlight Avenue. I’ll see you in a fortnight, but if you come any closer to the house I’m going to go over to that phone box on the corner and call the police.’

Janus looked incredulously at his mother.

‘I’m only trying to have a conversation with you. You wouldn’t . . .’

Colette made towards the phone box.

‘All right,’ Janus laughed, ‘you’ve won your little game. Very well done. I’ll catch the bus,’ he was holding his hands up, palms out, in a surrendering gesture. ‘Say hallo to Julian for me,’ he called as he crossed the road, ‘and to Myra . . .’

Two weeks was a long time. Longer for Janus, Colette supposed, but long for her as well. It was long enough to have lost the thread of what had happened a fortnight before. When they met again in The Coach and Horses it was almost as if the differences of the previous meeting had been wiped from the slate, though both mother and son were back on the orange juice. By the meeting after that, Colette had forgotten about Janus’s drinking of shandies. She drank barley wines again. When Janus bought a shandy she thought little of it. Shandy, after a difficult introduction, had become acceptable in their lives.

By the summer it had become acceptable for Janus to drink two pints of weak lager and escort his mother up as far as the traffic lights at the cathedral. About half way home from the pub. He would give her a hug as green turned to red above them, and then cross the road to the bus stop.

One Sunday in late June, making the excuse that he needed some cigarettes, he walked with his mother past the cathedral and round the corner to the shop on Dorset Street. Inch by inch. Then this too became a routine. All through July he walked her to the corner of Dorset Street. It was only a ten-minute walk from here along Hoopers Lane to the house itself. Deep inside forbidden territory. Three-quarters of the way in. He was illegal.

He made his final push on a Sunday in mid August.

‘What are you doing?’ said Colette, finding that Janus, instead of departing along Dorset Street, as he usually did after buying his cigarettes, was walking with her down Hoopers Lane.

Janus just smiled. There was no excuse he could use. There was no shop he could pretend to visit, it was just houses all the way to Fernlight Avenue.

‘Just thought I’d like to see the old house . . .’

‘No.’

‘But you said everyone’s away. Julian’s in Hungary with Myra, you showed me his postcard. James is in Venezuela. Juliette and Boris are in Brittany, and dad’s in the middle of London somewhere.’

It was true. The house was empty, and would be until Aldous came home in the evening.

Colette walked on. Janus walked beside her.

‘This is madness, Janus. It’s madness.’

‘I agree,’ said Janus. ‘Don’t worry. I’ll just walk as far as the corner, and then I’ll go. It just makes me feel so safe being here, in these familiar surroundings, these familiar streets and houses. Hackney’s so bleak and desolate, the people are so gloomy looking.’

They reached the corner of Fernlight Avenue.

‘They lopped the limes,’ said Janus, noticing the mutilated trees that lined the road. ‘I wish they wouldn’t do that. Why can’t they just let the trees grow and grow?’

‘They do look funny,’ said Colette. The trees had lost all their lower branches leaving only narrow, vertical trunks above a crown of arthritically swollen stumps.

‘Can I just have a look at the piano?’ said Janus, having followed his mother to the front door itself.

‘If you promise me you’ll go straight away and never come back, then just this once,’ said Colette, who would rather get her son quickly inside than remonstrate with him publicly on the garden path.

‘Oh that old, familiar smell,’ said Janus once they were inside and the door had been closed, ‘that pleasing mixture of sweetness and decay, like overripe fruit. I’d forgotten that smell.’

‘You do promise, don’t you, that you’ll be gone in an hour?’

The thought of Aldous coming home while Janus was in the house terrified Colette. Aldous was very regular in his habits these days, however. He was never home on Sunday before six, and was usually later.

‘Of course. I just want to have a look at the old piano. Why don’t you make us a cup of tea?’

They walked into the music room. It was still stuffed with Janus’s belongings. Colette had told him about Juliette and Boris moving into his old room. He showed little interest in the junk, his attention being drawn solely towards the piano. Colette watched him. She was moved by the slow reverence with which he approached it, the cautiousness, as one might approach the hospital bed of a loved one. He reached out and rested his hand on the lowered lid, caressed it, stroking his hand all the way along the curved body of the instrument.

‘It looks terrible,’ he said, after a pause. It was the way in which the piano was surrounded by junk, by heaps of old clothes and piles of books, bin bags full of rubbish, that made it seem as though it was actually on a scrap heap. But it was also the injuries it had sustained over the years, the brutal treatment it had received at Janus’s own hands, when in times of rage and frustration he had attacked the piano. The deep scratches in its black finish, the broken music rest, the cracked and lost ivories. Then Janus looked at the keyboard and saw that someone had gummed the names of the notes to the keys.

‘Someone’s learning it,’ he said to himself, almost incredulously. ‘Who’s learning the piano?’

‘Julian is teaching himself,’ said Colette. ‘He’s doing quite well, considering.’

Colette left Janus at the piano and went to the kitchen to make some tea. As she was filling the kettle the music started, the wandering chromatic scales of the second étude, Opus 12. It was one of the first serious pieces he’d learnt as a child. The swiftness with which he’d learnt the Chopin studies had been one of the first signs that Janus’s abilities at the piano were exceptional. She may have been suffering from the exaggeration of nostalgia, but as far as she could recall he had just seemed to play these pieces straight off. Hearing the music again, the sweetness of it, the fluency, the expressiveness, after having so long endured the naive blunderings and hesitations of Julian’s playing, made her heart feel full and warm.

‘You have to cross your middle and marriage fingers until they hurt,’ said Janus as Colette re-entered the music room, where Janus was playing the piece for the third time. ‘This piano’s had it, I’m afraid. I’m so used to playing the Steinways in Wigmore Street that this old Bechstein feels like playing a barrel organ in comparison. The sound’s not too bad but the touch is very sticky.’

‘You could make any piano sound wonderful, Janus. Play that other study, the one I love, I can’t remember the number, it’s the shivery one.’

‘No. 7’ said Janus, ‘more fluttery than shivery, I’d say.’ He swept through the piece, ‘butterflies on the meadow.’

They spent almost an hour like this, Janus playing any pieces his mother requested, and explicating the complicated structure of this piece or the subtle impressionism of that piece. Colette didn’t think they’d ever talked like that before. There was no condescension in Janus’s voice, no lecturing, or sarcasm, or disdain. He was talking as a musician, passionate about his work, to an interested, intelligent audience, equally passionate.

After he finished playing, Janus spent a little while rummaging through his possessions. He found a box file, an old wooden one that was stuffed with scrappy documents.

‘I think I’ll take this,’ he said. ‘It’s some old letters and things. You can throw everything else away.’

Janus then left. He’d been in the house for exactly one hour.