‘Head’s in there.’ Robert pointed to what looked like a cupboard. ‘Easier if you just go over the side. Not into the wind, though, or you’ll get your own back.’ He laughed coarsely.
Graham felt exposed and ridiculous as he faced the picturesque frontage of Bosham and peed. The beautiful row of houses looked somehow formal and disapproving. No doubt full of retired admirals and other sailing hearties armed with binoculars. A huge picture window on the end house seemed to gaze at him with particular disapprobation. When he had finished, he slunk back into the cabin, hearing Robert’s feet booming overhead as their owner went through an interminable sequence of checks on the deck.
Graham looked out dismally at the shifting rectangle of daylight visible through the hatch. The tiny high windows of the cabin were curtained and let in little light. The rigging chattered incessantly. The boat creaked and lurched in its endless irregular rhythm. He looked up at the grooves along which the top hatch ran, and longed for it to be closed. He looked at the Robson’s padlock on the vertical board and longed for it be locked up again. He longed to be on shore.
Eventually Robert Benham’s grinning face appeared at the opening. ‘They’ve done a good job. Usually do, but I have to check. Have to rely on the boatyard more than I’d like to. Don’t have the time myself.’
And at last the words Graham had been longing for. ‘O.K., let’s be on our way.’
The sensation of incipient nausea stayed with him through the evening, which was a pity, because Tara’s Chinese cookery matched her other accomplishments. Graham could not do justice to the perfect Peking duck or its spicy accessories, though he managed to keep up consumption of the excellent red wine Robert had produced.
He also had a couple of brandies, refusing Robert’s offer of a small cigar. ‘I enjoy one every now and then,’ his host asserted, as usual making his habits sound definitively correct. When the cocaine was again produced, Graham said he felt tired and went up to bed. Under the duvet, his last thought was of being threatened. There had still been no talk of work.
He was in a deep sleep before any creaking the others might set up could disturb him, but he woke at three with the sour taste of vomit in his mouth. He wasn’t actually sick and gradually the nausea passed, but he was left with that naked wakefulness that offers no hope of real rest for the remainder of the night. His mind became a corridor for a cavalcade of unwelcome thoughts.
He must have slept again eventually, because he was woken by a hearty Aran-sweatered Robert at seven. They needed an early start, the guest was reminded, because of the tides, and because Tara had a plane to catch in the afternoon; so if they were to get any time on the boat, they’d better move.
To Graham’s surprise, the actual sailing was enjoyable. Robert displayed no impatience with his guest’s ignorance of the sport; indeed he showed great generosity, constantly offering the tiller, flicking loose sheets which his guest had jammed, or calling warnings as the boom swung across. There was no attempt to score points or to crow about his and Tara’s practised expertise. Graham almost wished there had been. Cockiness from Robert would have given him a moral lever; generosity left him completely unmanned.
Tara had provided a picnic up to her usual standards and Robert supplied two bottles of crisp Sancerre from the cool-box. They finished up with coffee made on the little gas ring. The early April day showed promise of summer and his idyllic surroundings only made the meanness of Graham’s thoughts seem the more reprehensible.
Back to the cottage by three. Miraculously the other two had already packed and had to wait while Graham snatched his belongings together.
Then in the Scirocco fast but safely to Gatwick. Tara had contrived to compress everything into hand-luggage, and they arrived just as her flight was called. She kissed Robert in a casual way that implied deep trust, and disappeared, turning a few heads of television enthusiasts, through the departure gate.
Robert and Graham walked back to the car, parked illegally but unmolested, on double yellow lines. Now, thought Graham, now it comes. Now we get on to work, now I find out the purpose of the weekend.
But it didn’t come. Robert talked affably of irrelevancies, showing interest in Graham’s life, asking about his house, his family. Graham answered warily, waiting for the bite.
There was no bite. Robert parked the Scirocco outside the house in Boileau Avenue just before seven and refused the invitation to come in for a drink. ‘No, no, I’ll leave you to your family,’ he said, making the word sound subtly like an unfortunate physical handicap.
Graham stood on the kerb, suitcase in hand.
‘Well, um, thank you for. .’ No, he mustn’t say ‘having me’, that sounded too like a schoolboy.
Absurdly, he felt as if Robert was about to tip him, with an avuncular wink to shove a fiver into his hand. Thank you for a great weekend.’
‘My pleasure. You must come again.’
And the Scirocco was gone.
Confused, Graham walked slowly towards his front door. He felt obscurely shamed. Patronised. Put in his place.
And as he unwillingly reached for his keys, he realised that making him feel like that had been the object of the exercise.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Four unwelcome surprises were waiting for Graham as he entered the house.
The first was the sound of a female row issuing from the sitting-room. The second was the absence of response when he switched on the hall light. The darkness delayed impact on him of the third and fourth, which lay in envelopes on the hall table.
Since the raised voices from the sitting-room continued uninterrupted, he reckoned they hadn’t heard him come in. He couldn’t face all that yet, so started towards the stairs and the inadequate refuge of his ‘study’, a room optimistically described on the estate agent’s details as ‘fifth bedroom/ dressing-room’ and currently filled with lumber. At least it contained his swivel chair where he could sit for a while and make the adjustment from the conflicting emotions the weekend had stirred in him and the more predictable ones his family would arouse.
But that idea was scotched when he tried to switch on the landing light. Nothing. So it wasn’t just the bulb gone in the hall. A power-cut? He looked hopefully out of the semi-circle of coloured glass over the front door, but the glow of lights opposite told him only his house was affected. Something else wrong with the wiring, no doubt.
Sanctuary denied, he dropped his overnight case heavily on the hall floor to announce his arrival, and pushed open the sitting-room door.
There were no lights in there either, though unlit candles stood on the mantelpiece and shelves, suggesting the power failure had happened at least twenty-four hours earlier. But the curtains had not been drawn and the room was lit by the orange spillage from a street light. The effect was theatrical, something Lilian Hinchcliffe managed to achieve in most of her scenes.
For, though she was shrinking in an armchair in her ‘poor little widow’ pose, there was no doubt that it was Lilian’s scene. Her two daughters stood either side of her, tense as cats over a mousehole. The atmosphere in the room combined with the evidence of the unlit candles to suggest the row had been going on for some time.
And the antagonism between Lilian and Charmian had reached such a pitch that Graham’s entrance did not immediately stop their bitter hostilities.
‘. .how you have the nerve to call your own mother selfish — ’
‘Very easily. All my life I have never once seen you think of another person!’
‘How you can say that! Do you know what it’s like to hear that from a child you have looked after, brought up — ’
‘Fucked up, more likely.’
‘Now don’t use that language to me. Anyway, if we’re talking about selfishness, what about you?’
(Graham recognised one of his mother-in-law’s favourite ploys. If Lilian was criticised, she immediately referred the criticism to her attacker; if someone was commended, she immediately brought the commendation round to herself. For Lilian Hinchcliffe nothing existed in its own right, nothing was granted life except in a comparison which included her.)
