Half Broken Things

you’re him, Mr What’s-his-name.’

‘Well, that’s not a problem, is it?’ Michael said. ‘I can do voices, remember.’

‘Yes, I know that,’ Steph said witheringly, ‘but you’ve got to know what he sounds like first, haven’t you?’

‘He’ll be posh, that’s all. Won’t he?’

Steph looked even more withering and said, ‘That’s not the only problem anyway. What about a signature? They might want a signature, when they deliver.’

They fretted along these lines until she said firmly, ‘No, it’s too risky. We need to get hold of cash and just pay for the oil. What would it cost? We could sell some of the stuff here, couldn’t we?’

‘Jean wouldn’t like that. She likes to have all her things round her. Anyway, we need the oil now, today.’

‘Okay, but all this office stuff, she doesn’t need that. We could flog some of the stuff in here, for a start. The smaller bits, like them.’ She nodded towards the disconnected fax and answering machines and moved across to inspect them. Michael watched her dumbly, with nothing better to suggest.

‘Michael,’ she said, peering into the answering machine, ‘there’s a tape in here. Reckon it’s got what’s-his- name’s voice on it?’

Within half an hour Michael had produced a very passable impersonation of Oliver Standish-Cave, whose voice on the tape had sounded unsurprisingly public school, yet surprisingly pleasant. It was true that there was only his ’Hello. This is the office line at Walden Manor, 01249-588671. Please leave a message at the tone and we will return your call as soon as we can’ to go on, but with Steph’s encouragement Michael quickly found both the vowels and the correct pitch of assumed authority. Steph tried it too, until they both collapsed with laughter. Steph was finding that laughing hard could make her pee in her knickers, just a little, and when she told Michael this, he said, ‘Oh how absolutely frightful, for Heaven’s sake, woman, contain yourself’ in Oliver Standish-Cave’s voice, and they collapsed all over again.

‘But even if you phone up for the oil,’ Steph said, ‘we’ll need to sign something when it comes, won’t we? There’ll be stuff to sign some time.’ The thought sobered them again. Further rummaging in the filing cabinet produced any number of examples of the swirling, enormous signature on receipts and photocopies of letters.

‘Give it over here,’ Steph said, with determination. ‘I’m good at art, remember.’

And forgery, it emerged. The trick, she discovered, was not only to copy the shape of the signature but to work quickly. Oliver Standish-Cave had long ago given up signing his name in discernible letters; Steph had little trouble with the double hillocks of his first two initials and the huge, pretentious letter C that embraced them. Then all she needed to do was place, at just the right point, the long waving line of the rest of his name. It looked like a small rolling field, and one flick of the pen to dot the I of Standish became a bird tossed in the sky above it. She sat and practised at the desk, covering sheet after sheet of paper, while Michael carried on through the filing cabinet. Absorbed, they looked up at each other from time to time. Quiet elation at what they were doing hung in the air.

‘I think I’ve got it now,’ Steph said eventually, holding up a page for Michael to see. He shook his head in impressed disbelief and she turned pink with pleasure. ‘Go on, Michael, ring them. Say you won’t be in when they deliver and they should drop the receipt through the door. Then you can just send it back signed.’

Michael’s mouth had gone dry and his heart began to pound in his throat. For a moment he felt so dislocated that he was back in his old life, about to become some not-Michael or another from Crockford’s Directory of the Clergy, his entire body flooded with fear. He wondered about asking Steph to leave the room while he spoke, just in case he couldn’t do it. What if his Oliver voice gave way, or if he bottled out and slammed down the receiver? What if he burst into tears, or laughed? But he wanted her to stay and watch him, because he was doing it for her. It was for her, for all of them really, because now they were all- Steph, Jean, even Miranda, and he sensed it also in himself- growing blurred around the edges, more like one another. It was the resemblances he noticed, not the differences. They were becoming so alike in warmth, in little affectionate attentions to one another, that they were at times almost indistinguishable, fused into a trusting conglomerate of needs, all equally expressed and met. Even Miranda as she lay awake and motionless in her Moses basket reminded him of Jean’s smiled thanks when he brought in a load of logs, or tightened a washer on a tap, and he felt it, too, in Steph’s languid arms round his neck and it was there, too, when his mouth touched her skin. Perhaps that was what a family was, a sort of large healthy organism made up of smaller ones who did not have to survive everything on their own, or merely for their own selves’ sake. Nothing important that he now did or thought or felt could occur in the absence of these other people. Steph probably knew this already, as she somehow knew other things that he did not tell her, and so while he lifted the receiver and dialled, she stayed. She seemed also to understand that the joking part was over. She walked over to the window and looked out at the garden so that he could not see her face. She turned to him just once, to whisper, ‘Tell them we’ve run out and it’s urgent.’

As he stood waiting for the telephone to be answered he watched the halo of light that blazed round her head. Her hair was smoothed and pinned up today, and she had dipped her head forwards and was resting her forehead against the glass. How was it possible that such a little thing, daylight slipping through a window and falling on the simple curve of a neck, could inspire him to vow to himself that he would never, ever leave her? Michael stared at her head. He could see the back of her earring. He had no idea what the earring itself looked like from the front (he supposed he ought to) but now he set himself to memorising every tiny detail of the back of the metal clip, the private pinch and squeeze of gold on her earlobe. It was delicious to him in a half-forbidden, unofficial way, that he should know the back of her ear. It was like being admitted backstage, surreptitiously and discreetly, to discover that the guile and artifice behind some spectacle was even more thrilling than what the audience saw. He understood both the earring and the ear; he could almost feel the nip as if it were his flesh the little claw was clinging to, or his own teeth tugging at the lobe. He pictured the skin beneath her hair from which her hundreds and hundreds of thousands of fair strands sprouted and grew. How many? And why? Why did they grow like that, unless to hang like long threads that she could collect up and brush and fix in this almost-falling- down way, exposing her neck, whose beauty almost stopped his heart? It was only hair and skin and skull, after all, she was made of the same things as everyone else on the planet. He imagined the fine white shell beneath the scalp, round and hard, and under the helmet of bone, the warm coiled brain that made her think and talk and move and laugh. The ordinariness, the miracle of her. The telephone was suddenly answered.

‘Ah, hello?’

Steph did not turn from the window.

‘Hello. Yes. We need some oil. Urgently, I’m afraid, we’re out. Yes, bit of a cold snap, took us unawares! Yes, it’s Standish-Cave, Walden Manor. That’s right.’

Michael sailed through the negotiations; fill up the tank, about 3,000 litres please, put the receipt through the door, and then he confirmed breezily that they could manage to wait until six o’clock. He thanked the person at the other end for helping them out of a spot. Just before he rang off the woman said, ‘And how’s your wife doing?’

‘Oh, oh. My wife? Oh, she’s, er…’ Michael looked up desperately at Steph, who turned just then and smiled at him, lifting and twisting a loose lock of her hair. Michael said, ‘Oh, she’s absolutely fine, thank you. Very well indeed.’

‘Oh, glad to hear it. Do tell her I was asking.’

***

Men were deceivers, ever. Shakespeare, but I can’t remember where from. Father would know. And only half right, because women aren’t above a bit of deception either. I have come to believe that just about anyone will deceive to get what they need, if they have no other way open to them. In that strict sense there is no difference between me, Michael and Steph, and Mr Hapgood (in other, crucial respects there is all the difference in the world). And people who think oh no, they could never do the kind of thing we did, well, perhaps they are just people who have never had to, and who lack the imagination to see that if one day they found themselves in the same circumstances, they probably would. People who have landed in another category, who have somehow got what they needed by easier means, are no different from us. No, that’s wrong, they are different. They are luckier, that is all. Not better.

What Mr Hapgood did was this. He came to see the clock the next afternoon after I’d got back from school. I thought it only polite to offer him a cup of tea in return for his the day before, and while I was making it he had a good look at the clock. He came into the kitchen while the tea was brewing and leaned against the draining board.