In the previous instalment: Church Row, London 1983, at the Seder Jonny told Jamie that Rachel had given up all her family wealth. Simon was generous and warm towards Jamie which caused Miles disquiet.
London, 1974
Dermot could, and would, give the month and year of any event in his uneventful and restricted life. It was as relevant and dear to him as the event itself, the stating of it just one part of his inability to imagine what it was like for others to listen to him.
Jamie wasn’t able to name the month or year Dermot moved from Beckenham to Millbank to live with them. The date was immaterial; the event was part of the scar,, rent across his experience of life, that had been made by Frank’s death. It changed his relationship with Pauline eternally. How she had allowed Dermot and his grandmother to work on her, he was never to understand. But then, Frank’s death altered her so completely that she seemed to have lost herself, and been replaced by a wraith.
‘Oh Pauline,’ his grandmother had wheedled, ‘he’s there on his own now. Just him in that house, now they’re both gone.’ She looked, sighing, at the prayer card for the repose of her sister’s soul with its mournful picture of Christ and his bleeding heart.
‘He won’t last like that. I know…I know…Monica did him no favours not letting him stand on his own two feet. But,’ another sigh and another look at Jesus gazing in sanctimony to the heavens, ‘he was always so sensitive. And it’s too late now, at his age. He’s lonely, Pauline, he’s lonely. And, love, you’ve got your little sewing room…you can move the Kenmore into your bedroom now…now it’s just…just you…’
At first, he’d come for lunch on Sundays (‘Don’t worry, Pauline, I’ll pop round in the morning and we can do it together,’ said his grandmother, rewarding her daughter, another layer of pressure), would always take the same trains to and from Beckenham Junction, always the same nondescript clothes on his little rodent-like frame, always the same newspaper with its insular, little England brandishments and stoking of anxieties about the way the country was going. Always a box of Cadbury’s Milk Tray for Pauline and his grandmother. All a habit set in stone after only a couple of weeks. In the event of train cancellation, he would ring from the telephone box (‘it’s just to the right of the station entrance so I don’t have to go far to ring’) to notify Pauline (‘change of plan. New estimated time of arrival at Victoria, Pauline’). Then, on his arrival, an analysis of the ins and outs of the delay in chronological order, revelling in the forensics of the subsequent journey.
The lunches eaten with an unexpected relish for one so dried up and buttoned in, examining and assessing the food on the plate, always the last potato taken, the last spoonful of cabbage, the remaining sprout – all snaffled up on to his plate with no regard for anyone else. The noise and energy of the chewing. The vigorous scraping of the spoon on the bowl to extract the last crumb of the steamed pudding and custard, the licking and looking at the spoon (was there anymore that could be smacked through those lips with that greedy tongue?). Jamie, at first, had watched this display in repulsed astonishment, but quickly it had become so unpleasant to every molecule in his body that he simply couldn’t allow himself look. Not even once. So he would spend the entire meal looking at the two women eat, his grandmother dabbing at the side of her mouth with the napkin brought from that stall with the Irish family on Strutton Ground (‘very nice chicken, you’ve got the skin just right this time, Pauline’), or out of the kitchen window onto the estate. Anywhere but at Dermot.
Pauline and her mother always at the sink after the meal. Dermot sitting in the chair that had been Frank’s. Reading his newspaper, tutting and sucking his teeth, his legs crossed at the knee. Jamie didn’t think he had ever seen Frank with his legs crossed; looking at Dermot, Jamie felt a recoiling, as from the smell of sulphur. Dermot, for his part, seemed impervious to Jamie’s presence – as if he played no part in his plan, his intentions.
Jamie had noticed that after that first time Sean and Vera had not come back for lunch on Sundays. At all. Jamie knew there was something odd about that, for he could remember them being there often before Frank had died. His father and Sean coming in from the pub just as Pauline and Vera were about to serve the lunch they’d cooked together. Laughing, joking, just everyone enjoying each other’s company. And it had made him happy to be with all these people he loved, all being happy together. Very different from that one meal, Sean and Vera watching Dermot, Vera trying to chat, Pauline’s mother chattering on, Sean silent and unsmiling apart from the times he’d give Jamie a wink and a nod. Sean had wanted to watch the game on the television after lunch, and Jamie had noted Dermot’s ostentatious tutting every time Sean yelled out at a missed goal, or leapt up punching the air (‘Get It In!! That’s it, my boy!! That’s it. Now give us another one, lads!’) and hugging Jamie. (‘See that…magic…boy…magic!’).
And then, it turned into much more than Sunday lunch. It was Dermot moving in. The Kenmore and the dressmaker’s dummy now in Pauline’s bedroom.
‘Well, this will do nicely enough, Pauline,’ he said. ‘As long as I’ve got room for another little chest of drawers for all my medicines…you will remember I can’t eat anything with arrowroot, won’t you…?’
That had been the definitive closing of the door on the past. The departure of the old Pauline through the door, and the arrival for ever of the new Pauline. Where has she gone? Where has she gone? Jamie asked himself in bed at night. He’d spent nights and nights over weeks asking himself the same question about Frank after she’d told him, sitting on the edge of the bed, that Frank had gone to the angels and that meant that they would never see him again, and that they would look after each other.
But now, it had changed. And Jamie no longer had any idea how to be.
Poor Jamie!