A Spot of Bother Page 2

  Just so long as Katie didn’t marry him.

  4

  George poured mortar onto the square of hardboard and checked it for lumps with the blade of the trowel.

  It was like the fear of flying.

  He picked up a brick, mortared the underside, laid it and shifted it gently sideways so that it sat snug against the upright spirit level.

  It had not bothered him in the beginning, those bumpy rides on prop planes to Palma and Lisbon. His main memories were of sweaty prepackaged cheese and that roar as the toilet bowl opened into the stratosphere. Then the plane back from Lyon in 1979 had to be de-iced three times. At first he had noticed only that everyone in the departure lounge was driving him to distraction (Katie practicing handstands, Jean going to the duty-free shop after their gate number had been called, the young man opposite stroking his excessively long hair as if it were some kind of tame creature…). And when they boarded, something in the cloistered, chemical air of the cabin itself had made his chest feel tight. But only when they were taxiing to the runway did he realize that the plane was going to suffer some catastrophic mechanical failure mid-flight and that he was going to cartwheel earthward for several minutes inside a large steel tube with two hundred strangers who were crying and soiling themselves, then die in a tangerine fireball of twisted steel.

  He remembered Katie saying, “Mum, I think there’s something wrong with Dad,” but she seemed to be calling faintly from a tiny disk of sunlight at the top of a very deep well into which he had fallen.

  He stared doggedly at the seat back in front of him trying desperately to pretend that he was sitting in the living room at home. But every few minutes he would hear a sinister chime and see a little red light flashing in the bulkhead to his right, secretly informing the cabin crew that the pilot was wrestling with some fatal malfunction in the cockpit.

  It was not that he could not speak, more that speaking was something which happened in another world of which he had only the vaguest memory.

  At some point Jamie looked out of the window and said, “I think the wing’s coming off.” Jean hissed, “For God’s sake, grow up,” and George actually felt the rivets blowing and the fuselage dropping like a ton of hardcore.

  For several weeks afterward he was unable to see a plane overhead without feeling angry.

  It was a natural reaction. Human beings were not meant to be sealed into tins and fired through the sky by fan-assisted rockets.

  He laid a brick at the opposite corner then stretched a line between the tops of the two bricks to keep the course straight.

  Of course he felt appalling. That was what anxiety did, persuaded you to get out of dangerous situations fast. Leopards, big spiders, strange men coming across the river with spears. If anything it was other people who had the problem, sitting there reading the Daily Express and sucking boiled sweets as if they were on a large bus.

  But Jean liked sun. And driving to the south of France would wreck a holiday before it had begun. So he needed a strategy to prevent the horror taking hold in May and spiraling toward some kind of seizure at Heathrow in July. Squash, long walks, cinema, Tony Bennett at full volume, the first glass of red wine at six, a new Flashman novel.

  He heard voices and looked up. Jean, Katie and Ray were standing on the patio like dignitaries waiting for him to dock at some foreign quay.

  “George…?”

  “Coming.” He removed the excess mortar from around the newly laid brick, scraped the remainder back into the bucket and replaced the lid. He stood up and walked down the lawn, cleaning his hands on a rag.

  “Katie has some news,” said Jean, in the voice she used when she was ignoring the arthritis in her knee. “But she didn’t want to tell me until you were here.”

  “Ray and I are getting married,” said Katie.

  George had a brief out-of-body experience. He was looking down from fifteen feet above the patio, watching himself as he kissed Katie and shook Ray’s hand. It was like falling off that stepladder. The way time slowed down. The way your body knew instinctively how to protect your head with your arms.

  “I’ll put some champagne into the freezer,” Jean said, trotting back into the house.

  George reentered his body.

  “End of September,” said Ray. “Thought we’d keep it simple. Not put you folks to too much trouble.”

  “Right,” said George. “Right.”

  He would have to make a speech at the reception, a speech that said nice things about Ray. Jamie would refuse to come to the wedding. Jean would refuse to allow Jamie to refuse to come to the wedding. Ray was going to be a member of the family. They would see him all the time. Until they died. Or emigrated.

  What was Katie doing? You could not control children, he knew that. Making them eat vegetables was hard enough. But marrying Ray? She had a 2:1 in philosophy. And that chap who had climbed into her car in Leeds. She had given the police a part of his ear.

  Jacob appeared in the doorway wielding a bread knife. “I’m an effelant and I’m going to catch the train and…and…and…and this is my tusks.”

  Katie raised her eyebrows. “I’m not sure that’s an entirely good idea.”

  Jacob ran back into the kitchen squealing with joy. Katie stepped into the doorway after him. “Come here, monkey biscuits.”

  And George was alone with Ray.

  Ray’s brother was in jail.

  Ray worked for an engineering company which made high-spec camshaft milling machines. George had absolutely no idea what these were.

  “Well.”

  “Well.”

  Ray crossed his arms. “So, how’s the studio going?”

  “Hasn’t fallen down yet.” George crossed his arms, realized that he was copying Ray and uncrossed them. “Not that there’s enough of it to fall down.”

  They were silent for a very long time indeed. Ray rearranged three small pebbles on the flagstones with the toe of his right shoe. George’s stomach made an audible noise.

  Ray said, “I know what you’re thinking.”

  For a short, horrified moment George thought Ray might be telling the truth.

  “My being divorced and everything.” He pursed his lips and nodded slowly. “I’m a lucky guy, George. I know that. I’ll look after your daughter. You don’t need to worry on that score.”

  “Good,” said George.

  “We’d like to foot the bill,” said Ray, “unless you have any objections. I mean, you’ve already had to do it once.”

  “No. You shouldn’t have to pay,” said George, glad to be able to pull rank a little. “Katie’s our daughter. We should make sure she’s sent off in style.” Sent off? It made Katie sound like a ship.

  “Fair play to you,” said Ray.

  It wasn’t simply that Ray was working class, or that he spoke with a rather strong northern accent. George was not a snob, and whatever his background, Ray had certainly made good, judging by the size of his car and Katie’s descriptions of their house.

  The main problem, George felt, was Ray’s size. He looked like an ordinary person who had been magnified. He moved more slowly than other people, the way the larger animals in zoos did. Giraffes. Buffalo. He lowered his head to go through doorways and had what Jamie unkindly but accurately described as “strangler’s hands.”

  During thirty-five years on the fringes of the manufacturing industry George had worked with manly men of all stripes. Big men, men who could open beer bottles with their teeth, men who had killed people during active military service, men who, in Ted Monk’s charming phrase, would shag anything that stood still for long enough. And though he had never felt entirely at home in their company, he had rarely felt cowed. But when Ray visited, he was reminded of being with his older brother’s friends when he was fourteen, the suspicion that there was a secret code of manhood to which he was not privy.

  “Honeymoon?” asked George.

  “Barcelona,” said Ray.

  “Nice,” said George, who was b
riefly unable to remember which country Barcelona was in. “Very nice.”

  “Hope so,” said Ray. “Should be a bit cooler that time of year.”

  George asked how Ray’s work was going and Ray said they’d taken over a firm in Cardiff which made horizontal machining centers.

  And it was all right. George could do the bluff repartee about cars and sport if pressed. But it was like being a sheep in the Nativity play. No amount of applause was going to make the job seem dignified or stop him wanting to run home to a book about fossils.

  “They’ve got big clients in Germany. The company were trying to get me to shuttle back and forth to Munich. Knocked that one on the head. For obvious reasons.”

  The first time Katie had brought him home, Ray had run his finger along the rack of CDs above the television and said, “So you’re a jazz fan, Mr. Hall,” and George had felt as if Ray had unearthed a stack of pornographic magazines.

  Jean appeared at the door. “Are you going to get cleaned and changed before lunch?”

  George turned to Ray. “I’ll catch you later.” And he was away, through the kitchen, up the stairs and into the tiled quiet of the lockable bathroom.

  5

  They hated the idea. As predicted. Katie could tell.

  Well, they could live with it. Time was she’d have gone off the deep end. In fact, there was a part of her which missed being the person who went off the deep end. Like her standards were slipping. But you reached a stage where you realized it was a waste of energy trying to change your parents’ minds about anything, ever.

  Ray wasn’t an intellectual. He wasn’t the most beautiful man she’d ever met. But the most beautiful man she’d ever met had shat on her from a great height. And when Ray put his arms around her she felt safer than she’d felt for a long time.

  She remembered the grim lunch at Lucy’s. The toxic goulash Barry had made. His drunken friend groping her arse in the kitchen and Lucy having that asthma attack. Looking out the window and seeing Ray with Jacob on his shoulders, playing horses, running round the lawn, jumping over the upturned wheelbarrow. And weeping at the thought of going back to her tiny flat with the dead animal smell.

  Then he turned up at her door with a bunch of carnations, which freaked her out a bit. He didn’t want to come in. But she insisted. Out of embarrassment, mostly. Not wanting to take the flowers and shut the door in his face. She made him a coffee and he said he wasn’t good at chatting and she asked if he wanted to skip straight to the sex. But it sounded funnier inside her head than out. And in truth, if he’d said, “OK,” she might have accepted just because it was flattering to be wanted, in spite of the bags under her eyes and the Cotswold Wildlife Park T-shirt with the banana stains. But he meant it, about the chatting. He was good at mending the cassette player and cooking fried breakfasts and organizing expeditions to railway museums, and he preferred all of them to small talk.

  He had a temper. He’d put his hand through a door toward the end of his first marriage and severed two tendons in his wrist. But he was one of the gentlest men she knew.

  A month later he took them up to Hartlepool to visit his father and stepmother. They lived in a bungalow with a garden which Jacob thought was heaven on account of the three gnomes around the ornamental pond and the gazebo thing you could hide in.

  Alan and Barbara treated her like the squire’s daughter, which was unnerving till she realized they probably treated all strangers the same way. Alan had worked in a sweet factory for most of his life. When Ray’s mother died of cancer, he started going to the church he’d gone to as a boy and met Barbara who’d divorced her husband when he became an alcoholic (“took to drink” was the phrase she used, which made it sound like Morris Dancing or hedge laying).

  They seemed more like grandparents to Katie (though neither of her own grandfathers had tattoos). They belonged to an older world of deference and duty. They’d covered the wall of their living room with photos of Ray and Martin, the same number of each despite the unholy mess Martin had made of his life. There was a small cabinet of china figurines in the dining room and a fluffy U-shaped carpet around the base of the loo.

  Barbara cooked a stew, then grilled some fish fingers for Jacob when he complained about the “lumpy bits.” They asked what she did in London and she explained how she helped run an arts festival, and it sounded fey and crapulous. So she told the story of the drunken newsreader they’d booked the previous year, and remembered, just a little bit too late, the reason for Barbara’s divorce and didn’t even manage a graceful change of subject, just ground to an embarrassed halt. So Barbara changed the subject by asking what her parents did and Katie said Dad had recently retired from managing a small company. She was going to leave it there but Jacob said, “Grandpa makes swings,” so she had to explain that Shepherds built equipment for children’s playgrounds, which sounded better than running an arts festival, though not quite as solid as she wished.

  And maybe a couple of years ago she’d have felt uncomfortable and wanted to get back to London as fast as possible, but many of her childless London friends were beginning to seem a little fey and crapulous themselves, and it was good to spend time with people who’d brought up children of their own, and listened more than they talked, and thought gardening was more important than getting your hair cut.

  And maybe they were old-fashioned. Maybe Ray was old-fashioned. Maybe he didn’t like vacuuming. Maybe he always put the tampon box back into the bathroom cupboard. But Graham did tai chi and turned out to be a wanker.

  She didn’t give a toss what her parents thought. Besides, Mum was shagging one of Dad’s old colleagues, and Dad was pretending the silk scarves and the twinkle were all down to her having a new job after thirty years of motherhood and housework. So they weren’t in a position to lecture anyone when it came to relationships.

  Jesus, she didn’t even want to think about it.

  All she wanted was to get through lunch without too much friction and avoid some grisly woman-to-woman chat over the washing up.

  6

  Lunch went rather well, right up until dessert.

  There was a minor hiccup when George was changing out of his work clothes. He was about to remove his shirt and trousers when he remembered what they were hiding, and felt that horror-film lurch you got when the mirrored door of the wardrobe swung shut to reveal the zombie with the scythe standing behind the hero.

  He turned off the lights, pulled down the blinds and showered in darkness singing “Jerusalem.”

  As a result he walked downstairs feeling not only clean but proud of having taken such rapid and effective action. When he reached the dining room there was wine and conversation and Jacob pretending to be a helicopter and George was finally able to loosen his grip a little.

  His fear that Jean, being Jean, would make some well-meant but inappropriate comment, that Katie, being Katie, would rise to the bait and that the two of them would proceed to fight like cats proved unfounded. Katie talked about Barcelona (it was in Spain, of course, he remembered now), Ray was complimentary about the food (“Cracking soup, Mrs. Hall”) and Jacob made a runway out of cutlery so his bus could take off and got quite heated when George said that buses did not fly.

  They were halfway through the blackberry crumble, however, when the lesion began to itch like athlete’s foot. The word tumor came to mind and it was an ugly word which he did not want to be entertaining, but he was unable to remove it from his head.

  He could feel it growing as he sat at the table, too slowly perhaps for the naked eye to see, but growing nevertheless, like the bread mold he once kept in a jam jar on the windowsill in his bedroom as a boy.

  They were discussing wedding arrangements: caterers, photographers, invitations…This part of the conversation George understood. Then they began discussing whether to book a hotel (Katie and Ray’s preferred option) or hire a tent for the garden (the preferred option for Jacob who was very excited by the whole tent concept). At this point George
began to lose focus.

  Katie turned to him and said something like, “When will the studio be finished?” but she could have been speaking Hungarian. He could see her mouth moving but was unable to process the noise coming out of it.

  The accelerator was being pressed to the floor inside his head. The engine was screaming, the wheels were spinning and smoke was pouring off the tires, but he was going nowhere.

  He was unsure what happened next, but it was not elegant, it involved damage to crockery and ended up with him exiting rapidly through the back door.

  7

  There was a clatter of plates and Jean turned to find that George had vanished.

  After about five seconds of stunned silence Jacob looked up from his bus and said, “Where’s Grandpa?”

  “In the garden,” said Ray.

  “Right,” said Katie, her jaw hardening.

  Jean tried to head her off. “Katie…”

  But it was too late. Katie stood and marched out of the room to hunt her father down. There was a second short silence.

  “Is Mummy in the garden as well?” asked Jacob.

  Jean looked at Ray. “I’m sorry about this.”

  Ray looked at Jacob. “Bit of a fiery lady, your old mum.”

  “What’s fiery?” asked Jacob.

  “Gets cross, doesn’t she,” said Ray.

  Jacob thought for a few moments. “Can we get the submarine out?”

  “Come on, then, Captain.”

  When Ray and Jacob reached the landing Jean went into the kitchen and stood by the fridge, from where she could see Katie without being seen.

  “And water sprays out of the sprayer,” shouted Jacob from upstairs.

  “I don’t care what you think, Dad.” Katie was marching up and down the patio waving her arms around like a mad person in a film. “It’s my life. I’m going to marry Ray whether you like it or not.”