Mother's Boys, page 8
‘Yes – it has.’ He tried to match the easy note that was in her voice. In the mirror beside the tub he watched himself as he spoke, saw the soapy lather oozing out from between his hands. ‘Are you still tired?’ he asked.
‘No, not at all. Not now. Now I just feel – wonderfully relaxed.’
While Kester washed his face and arms Judith put the towel aside and began to brush the tangles out of her hair. Then she came towards him, her hair hanging damp and heavy about her shoulders. Her skin glowed. He thought he had never seen her look more beautiful. She smiled at him, showing her white, even teeth. ‘Here – I’ll wash your back for you.’ She held out her hand and he put the cake of soap into it. He leaned forward a little and she sat on the edge of the tub. He felt the touch of her hand on his neck, soft and soothing, moving round and round, first with the soap and then without it, only the palm of her hand and her fingers on his tingling flesh, stirring up the lather. ‘You have such a beautiful skin,’ she murmured. ‘So soft, so smooth.’ Her hands went on moving, over his shoulders, beneath his arms, around the upper part of his ribcage, his chest, his neck. Then she took up the sponge and rinsed the suds away. Turning slightly to the right he watched the reflection in the mirror, seeing himself sitting there, Judith bending over him. He saw her lean forward; saw and felt the light kiss she planted on his left shoulder. He closed his eyes and lifted his face in the ecstasy of the moment. He could hear her breath close to his ear. A second later he opened his eyes and glanced down and saw that the soap had dispelled the suds and cleared the water. His member, stiff, tumescent, was clearly visible.
‘Kneel up.’
At her words he was overcome by panic.
‘. . . I can’t,’ he said.
‘Come on, kneel up, so I can do your lower back.’
‘I – I can’t,’ he said again. He did not dare look at her.
The next moment her hand had come over his shoulder and was moving down his chest and over his stomach. He felt the tips of her fingers touch the sparse pubic hair, and then touch him, touch him there, and then hold him, her long, slim fingers enclosing him with gentle tenderness.
‘You’re such a perfect, perfect boy,’ she said. Still holding him, she pressed her face against his wet, glistening body.
‘Yes, you are – and you’re my boy,’ she said. ‘My own perfect, perfect boy.’
Later, much later, he lay sleepless in bed. Beside him Michael slept soundly. Kester kept thinking of his mother.
After some time he slid quietly out of the bed, crept from the room and crossed the landing to his mother’s room. Silently he pushed open the door, as silently closing it behind him. He moved to the bed. As he did so he heard her voice.
‘Kester,’ she whispered in the stillness. ‘Is that you?’
‘Yes.’
‘I knew you’d come.’
Seconds later he was in the bed beside her, hungry mouth upon her own, hungry hands exploring her body. He lay upon her, and then felt her hand reach down, guiding him into the warm wetness below. When it was over, so soon, they lay clasped in one another’s arms.
In the morning Kester got up and went back to his own bed. Michael stirred, briefly waking as Kester got in beside him, then turned over and went back to sleep. For a minute or so Kester lay thinking of the night, and then he, too, slept again.
It was almost eleven before they sat around the breakfast table. They ate cornflakes, scrambled eggs and toast. From the cage the cockateel watched them with its round eyes. ‘Yes, my pretty little love,’ Judith said, looking over at the bird, ‘as soon as we’ve had breakfast we’re going to put you into your proper cage.’
When they had finished eating they left the breakfast dishes on the table and began to prepare the empty cage. When it was ready Judith moved to the smaller cage containing the bird. ‘How do we go about this?’ she said over her shoulder to the boys.
They eventually decided to open both cage doors and place the two cages together, the open doors face to face. It didn’t work, though. ‘The stupid bird won’t move,’ Michael said irritably. ‘Look at it – it just sits there, watching us.’
In an effort to get the bird to go from one cage to the other they gently shook the cage it was in, rattled it, and in despair even gave the bird gentle little prods with a pencil. Growing increasingly nervous and agitated, the bird remained on its perch. His impatience growing, Kester shook the smaller cage again and slapped his hand against the side. As he did so he knocked the cage askew on the table, and the bird, suddenly seeing the open door before it, darted towards it. Next moment, with a fluttering of wings, it was out in the room.
‘Oh, shit,’ Judith said. ‘Stupid little bastard.’
They watched as the bird fluttered around the room a couple of times and came to rest on the horn of the old phonograph. Without hesitating, Judith leapt forward and snatched the bird up in her hands. A second later, as she turned triumphantly to the two boys, the bird dipped its head and sank its sharply curving beak into the soft flesh of her hand.
She screamed out in pain, letting the bird go and putting her hand to her mouth. ‘Oh, God! Oh, Christ!’
‘Jude . . . Jude . . . !’ Kester moved quickly to her side, Michael following. When Judith took her hand away they saw that it was bleeding. Her eyes were screwed up in pain.
‘That fucking bird!’ Kester cried out and turned, glaring at the bird where it perched on a chair back.
Judith said pacifyingly: ‘I’m all right, darling, I’m all right. Don’t worry. Like you said, she’s just a little nervous. And it’s hardly surprising, is it? – not after what she’s just been through.’
Kester hardly heard her words. With rage burning inside him, he snatched up one of Judith’s sweaters from a nearby chair, moved forward, held the sweater high, aimed, and threw it. The bird, seeing it descending, tried too late to fly. A moment later bird and sweater had fallen to the carpet.
‘That’s good,’ Judith said with a sigh of relief, and then: ‘It’s okay, she won’t be hurt.’
On the carpet the sweater danced, bobbing up and down as the bird tried to escape. Then, a moment later, Kester was stepping forward and, his face contorted in fury, was raising his foot and bringing it down. For the space of a split second he could feel the resistance of the little moving body beneath the sole of his shoe. Then he felt and heard the bones crunch. He went on pounding the little heap beneath the sweater long after it held any vestige of life.
SIX
‘Well, here we are. At last.’
For the last half-hour their route had taken them through the winding, undulating roads of the Devonshire countryside. Now, having reached their destination, Robert turned the Citroën right off the lane, drove it between the gate posts and parked it in front of the house on the forecourt. The time was just after four o’clock. He had picked up the house keys from the owners of the post office in the village of Reston, some three miles back. Now as he switched off the engine he turned to Netta and gave a sigh of relief and satisfaction at their arrival. Behind him the children began to pile out. He quickly followed them and for a few moments they all stood looking up at the house. Then, after Robert had unlocked the front door they began to unload the suitcases and bags and the boxes of provisions they had picked up on the way, and to carry them inside.
The house with its whitewashed stone walls and grey slate roof was surrounded by farmland. It stood secluded from the other dwellings in the area, the nearest, a group of farm cottages, standing some three hundred yards away. Once a farmhouse, the house was set on the side of a hill halfway between the villages of Reston and Moxham. The many acres of farmland that had once belonged to it had long since been sold off to neighbouring farmers, the only remaining land belonging being that immediately beside and behind the house – a flower garden, a wide lawn, a kitchen garden and an orchard.
When Robert, Netta and the children had carried most of the luggage inside they looked around the interior. The house had been built in the mid-nineteenth century, but had since undergone various modifications, and it looked very comfortable. The ground floor was comprised of the kitchen, a very large living room with a dining annexe and, on the right of the hall, a sitting room (‘I suppose this is what they’d once called the parlour,’ Netta observed), and a bathroom. Upstairs were four bedrooms and another bathroom. The furniture throughout the house, though plain, looked comfortable and well cared for.
When the children had been designated their rooms they were left to unpack while Netta and Robert concentrated on organizing the kitchen and preparing a meal.
Upstairs at a window of the bedroom given over to himself and Michael, Kester stood and looked out over the forecourt and front garden. Behind him his own case was open but unpacked, only the photograph of Judith out of it and standing on the small table beside the double bed. Before him, beyond the shrubs that hid the lane from view, the fields and moorland stretched out to the horizon. He gave a deep sigh and shook his head.
Michael, busy unpacking, turned and looked at him. ‘What’s up?’
Kester shook his head again. ‘This place.’
Michael’s face showed a flicker of disappointment. ‘Don’t you like it?’
‘Do you?’
‘Well . . .’ Michael shrugged. ‘It seems all right. It’ll be okay.’
‘Okay? You must be joking. Have you looked around you? There’s going to be nothing to do. Fuck-all to do, and two weeks to do it in.’
Michael left his unpacking and joined Kester at the window. ‘Two weeks isn’t long,’ he said. ‘And it’ll probably turn out to be all right.’
Kester’s voice remained surly. ‘Two whole weeks in this God-forsaken hole.’ He shrugged. ‘But I suppose the time will pass eventually, though. I suppose we’ll find something to do.’
‘Yes, we will. It’ll be all right.’
‘Be good if Jude were here with us. Be all right then.’
‘Yes.’
‘And it wouldn’t be so bad if we were just here with Dad . . .’
As Kester spoke he saw Netta move into his view as she moved from the house to the car. He watched as she opened a rear door and leaned in.
‘There’s the fly in the ointment,’ he said. Slowly he shook his head. ‘Well, I don’t care how the others feel about her, but I know I’ll never be able to accept her. I know that now. Especially after what she’s done.’
A little pause and Michael asked ingenuously, ‘What has she done?’
Kester turned and gave him a withering glare. ‘How can you ask that?’
Michael said nothing. Down below Netta closed the car door and, holding a box under one arm, turned and moved out of sight, back towards the house.
‘Anyway,’ Kester sighed, ‘let’s get this holiday over, then we can go up to London and see Jude again.’
When he and Michael had finished their unpacking they went back downstairs and out into the rear garden. There they moved past the garage and the tool shed, up the path that cut through the lawn and the kitchen garden, past another shed, very old and ramshackle, and into the orchard. Beyond the orchard fence was a wild area, growing thick with weeds and brambles. Beyond that there was woodland and the spreading fields of the surrounding farmland.
Standing by the orchard fence, Kester gazed around him. ‘Well,’ he said grudgingly, ‘perhaps it won’t be so bad.’
Returning to the kitchen garden after a few minutes, they stopped and looked in the shed. It was full of garden implements and old junk – a battered old chest of drawers, boxes of ancient photographic plates, a strange, old-fashioned pram with huge wheels. As they poked around the dusty interior Kester turned and saw Ben standing in the doorway.
‘What are you doing here?’ he asked, ‘You were following us, weren’t you?’
Ben shook his head in protest. ‘No, I wasn’t. I came to tell you that Netta says tea will be ready in a few minutes.’
Netta had prepared a scratch meal of baked beans, sausages and bread-and-butter. They all ate hungrily. Afterwards, when the washing-up was done, they left the house to go for a walk.
After a rather overcast morning the afternoon had turned out warm and fine. From the gate they turned right onto the lane, heading for the narrow, winding road, where, careful of the occasional car that came by, they walked for a while in single file. After two or three minutes Robert, who led the way, pointed to a signpost indicating a footpath leading to the village of Moxham. ‘This’ll do,’ he said. Turning off to the left, they clambered over a stile and began to make their way along a fairly wide path that ran beside a field where neat bales of straw lay looking like huge unwrapped toffees on the ochre-coloured stubble. Robert, Netta and Daisy walked together, with Ben some few yards before them, trailing in the footsteps of his elder brothers who kept some little distance ahead. He had wanted to walk with Kester and Michael but Kester had refused, sending him back to the others.
Robert, though aware of Ben’s disappointment, refused to let it get to him, to ruffle the contentment and relief he felt at their arrival. The past few days had passed in a chaotic whirl of final preparations – and with four children to think of there had been a great many. Then, with everything ready he had driven to Gloucestershire, to Cirencester, to see his widowed mother in her small house on the outskirts of the town. And there he had found her in bed, suffering from a heavy cold, and his sister-in-law, Janet, wife of his brother Hal, ministering to her needs.
‘Why didn’t you tell me you weren’t well?’ he had said to his mother. ‘You should have phoned me.’
She had dismissed his words with a wave of her hand. ‘It’s only a cold. I’ll be all right soon. Besides, you’ve got enough to think about, getting ready for your holiday.’
In spite of her attempts to persuade him to the contrary, he realized that she was rather low in spirits. She seemed to be unusually conscious of her advancing years. She was eighty now, and, five years after a not very successful hip-joint-replacement operation, had become increasingly disabled over the past months. After he had sat with her for an hour or so she had insisted on getting up, and he had helped her downstairs where he had set a chair for her by the window. There, sighing, she had looked sadly out over the small front garden. Once for her a source of great pride and no small passion, the lawn and the herbaceous borders were clearly showing their increasing neglect.
‘I just can’t do it any more,’ she said. ‘I can’t bend. I can’t get down to it.’ The stairs, too, he learned, were presenting problems, and Janet told him that they had talked about bringing her bed downstairs.
An added difficulty, he discovered, was the fact that his mother’s eyesight was beginning to fade. Once an avid reader, she was finding such a relaxation more and more difficult, and was now relying increasingly on her radio and television for comfort.
When it was time to say goodbye he went to her side, bent and kissed her cheek. ‘I’ll see you soon.’
She smiled at him. ‘Have a good holiday. And come and see me afterwards. And bring Netta with you.’
‘I will.’ He had introduced Netta to his mother a couple of months earlier. His mother, never having approved of Judith, but merely having tolerated her for Robert’s sake, had taken to Netta at once.
When he left the house Janet walked with him to his car. ‘She’s growing so frail,’ he said. ‘I see such a change in her.’
Janet gave a nod, and a helpless little shrug. ‘I know. But what can you do? What can anybody do? It’s her age.’ After a pause she added, ‘Of course, we see her every day or two, but you don’t see her nearly as often so you’re bound to notice the change in her more easily.’
Robert wrote out the address of the house in Devonshire and gave it to Janet. ‘In case you need me,’ he said. ‘There’s no phone connected there, I’m afraid, but I can ring up from the village and see how she is.’ Janet put the slip of paper into her apron pocket. ‘Fine,’ she said, ‘but don’t worry about her. She’ll be okay. Take Netta and the children and go and relax. Go and have your holiday. I should think you need it.’
Now, walking beside the field in the light of the early evening sun, he turned to Netta and gave a little smile. She smiled back at him. His hand brushed hers, took it, held it. He bent his head to hers. ‘I love you very much,’ he murmured.
Her smile grew warmer. She pressed his hand. ‘I love you, too.’
They reached the village of Moxham after some twenty-five minutes. Stopping at a pub there, The Crown, the children sat at a rustic table in the garden while Robert and Netta went inside and brought out to them Cokes, lemonade and, in spite of the fact that they hadn’t long since eaten, crisps. Robert and Netta drank beer. They stayed there for almost an hour, talking of this and that, then made their way back towards the house.
By the time they reached the house it was almost eight-thirty and the sun was low on the horizon. Daisy was tired. She yawned as she sank down into a chair in the living room, and Robert said to her, ‘You and Ben had better have your baths and go straight to bed.’ There were no protests. It had been a long day. Soon after nine o’clock Ben and Daisy were tucked up in their beds in the room behind Robert and Netta’s. Standing at the side of Daisy’s bed Robert leaned over her and brushed a lock of dark hair back from her forehead. She gazed up at him sleepily and yawned, one hand grasping his own. ‘My little Daisy,’ he said, ‘ – she’s so tired.’
