a kind of destructive electricity.
'Lo, Helen. How you been? Not seen yourself in ages. Too smart for you, are we?'
Bernadette Featherstone's greeting was offered from the depths of indifference, or so it sounded, surfacing against her better judgement; Helen found it cheering all the same. There was a party often in the bar, rowdy, post-races, post-wedding somewhere else, the revellers having found the only pub on a deserted road now had Bernadette to serve them with sullen efficiency.
`Where's Harold?' Helen asked, missing his presence leering over the counter.
Bernadette kept her eyes lowered, a posture that Helen did not know well enough to recognize as the symptom of a lie. 'Gone out with William. To the pictures.'
Oh.' Helen found that surprising, given her knowledge of the Featherstones' habits, unprecedented even, but why not? It was pleasing news. She accepted it as truth, no real reason to doubt it.
Bernadette passed her a glass of wine without glance or comment. She was not about to confess that dear Harold was snoring like a drunkard, dead to the world upstairs, the combined effect of a bender and a row with William, whose whereabouts were currently, not unusually, unknown. For once, Bernadette was conscious of her lack of control in her own family, bitter and ashamed of it. She was worried enough for her mind to be crossed with the idea of asking for help, but the thought died in passage.
If Helen had hoped for some biting conversation, perhaps a piece of invective, she was disappointed, but relieved all the same to retreat to a corner with a newspaper and book, only half of her waiting for Bailey; if she'd stayed at home, she would have waited with deathly, furious concentration.
`Himself coming down tonight, is he?' Bernadette shouted from the bar in the second tribute to manners.
`Maybe, maybe not. He'll please himself. I don't know.' `Bloody men,' yelled Bernadette, startling the customers, granting Helen a transitory sensation of solidarity.
She read, drank a second glass of wine, watched through the door daylight fading with reluctance, the sky clawing at the remnants of summer, conscious in herself of the trickling away of patience and concentration. She had resisted the impulse to swig a couple of large gins, but in the bloodstream of her thinking, the dry red wine provoked slow ideas, speculation, and the return of the restlessness that had driven her out of her home and into the harsh plush of the pub's seat.
With all this itching, she had deflected her mind from her own condition into thinking of William Featherstone. She remembered his reference to the summerhouse den, his retreat, a place that somehow offered him a curious safety and comfort. Helen felt a childish wish for the same sort of hiding place. She wondered if Bernadette knew of it, imagined she must; surely she did. There must be some place to which you consigned a child such as William with your blessing for his absence.
Helen's desire to see this refuge became suddenly overpowering; this impulse was not entirely the effect of the liquid, more the last resort of a weirder kind of stress. But the drink always had this kind of effect on her, making her wilfully stupid when she should have been cautious, active when passivity was appropriate, talkative when silence was better advised.
She wanted to see the den so much she did not have a choice; it was like that coat, there was no choice at all. There was this den, something to be discovered before darkness was complete, something to do. Professional solicitor plays amateur detective. How rude, how intrusive, how silly. She reflected she was merely curious after the most vulgar of fashions; she had no right to explore or trespass and would not have done so without the wine or the constant irritation of Bailey's absence. She got up and went to the bar.
`You trying to tank up or something?' said Bernadette briskly, avoiding her eye.
`Listen,' said Helen, 'you've got a summerhouse bar, something like that, in the garden, haven't you? Can I look at it?'
Bernadette blanched, grinned, and frowned in quick succession, looking in one moment the image of her uncertain son, mirroring his vulnerability. She forgot the obvious remark -
'What's it to you?' – and all the aggression that usually followed any question she regarded as impertinent. Her shoulders sagged and her face crumpled instead. There was bravado in her voice, but not in the way she stood, like a rag doll.
`Yes, there is. A bloody great shed. Want to buy it? It's William's, you know.' This she said in a great rush of confidence. 'At least I think it is.'
I know. He told me.' Tactless, thought Helen as she said it, very tactless.
Bernadette's face showed a whiplash of hurt. 'Did he, now? Well, I won't ask when and how, bugger never talks to me. Look all you want. Why should I bloody care? He never tells me anything, that boy, my bloody son. And if he's out there, send him in.'
`You said he was at the pictures.'
`So I did, so he is, of course, with his dad. Sorry I spoke. At the flicks.' Moving away in dismissal. 'Go on if you're going. Look out for the tree on the path. Sod you.'
It was this invitation that committed her; that and her own tactlessness dispatched her on a mission. Explore and report back, discover this den, since you already know more than Bernadette. Report back with reassurance if you dare, damn you, some hurt to be justified.
Crossing the dark path leading downhill from the kitchen, Helen was defensive rather than fearful, bold rather than afraid, ridiculously active in any pursuit rather than sitting still.
After clambering over the fallen tree, still visible in the semidarkness, she saw the shed looming before her and almost laughed out loud. It was a ridiculous lopsided structure, a Featherstone masterpiece. Oh, what a fine abandoned dream, lovable on sight, redolent of her own childhood, a place she would have adopted, woven ghosts for, dreamed of, kept a secret from sisters and brothers, loved.
Still aware of the unkindness of her mission, the rudeness in her curiosity, she determined not to linger despite her delight in this eccentricity. She would take one quick look around the back, a few more glances of furtive admiration. Then she'd go back inside, make peace with Bernadette, walk home, and face whatever music happened to be playing when she arrived. She was making for the window when the door of the shed creaked open like a prop in a horror film, and there, squinting into her own startled face, were the equally startled features of one William Featherstone.
`Who's that?'
She could not open her mouth.
Oh. It's you.' He stood with his arms by his sides like a gorilla, face in a frown of confusion, unable to decide between anger, irritation, and relief in the knowledge that the eyes which met his own were neither unfamiliar nor unsympathetic. He flushed with disappointment, searching his mind for some sort of precedent or rule that would cover this situation. Evie had never mentioned or rehearsed him for this: he did not know what to do, but found in the end that anger was impossible.
There was something here he liked; he could not remember what. He rubbed his hands across his eyes, felt exposed, while some strange code of manners afflicted him. Lumbering alongside the remnants of social graces forced into him as a child and all but forgotten now, there lingered his pride in the den itself, his own creation, something he had always yearned to show while knowing he could not. And Evie was not here to forbid it. At this time of night she would not come here, and if she did, she would be angry, he knew it. Yesterday she had abandoned him to this woman; today she might have done the same, no telling.
Helen smiled, the expression intended to cover a feeling of fear still half formed.
William found himself smiling in return. 'You'd better come in,' he said, and tugged her arm in clumsy invitation.
She was suddenly diffident, genuinely shy herself. 'Should I?' she asked. 'Are you sure? You don't have to show me..
`Course I'm sure. Come.' Some equally strange code of manners made it impossible for her to refuse.
He went back inside the shed. Helen followed, seeing herself in one brief glimpse in the window as the kind of character she had always hated in films, the one who walked off into the dark danger by herself with the whole audience shouting, 'Don't do that, you silly bitch. Can't you see it's the last thing you should do?' After negotiating the lethal steps and entering what appeared to be a kind of shallow grave, she found herself in a haven so bizarre she almost giggled with relief.
William lit the lamp before she descended the broken stepladder, something he could always do in the dark.
