Never Mind Miss Fox Read online

  Clive was reeling from the direction this conversation had taken. His mind had gone blank and he stared down at the bowl for inspiration. Playing for time, he cleared his throat. “Bats?”

  Lifting the kettle Martha said, “For God’s sake, Clive, what’s the matter with you at the moment? The bats.”

  Clive rummaged with his spoon. Where were the chips of banana? They were the only thing that had any flavor. “We don’t know anything about Eliot,” he said when he had composed himself. “Are you happy for her to take Eliza? For the night? Home?”

  Martha fired back: “I wish she’d take me too.” She dunked her tea bag and flipped it into the sink. Everything happened faster when she was irritated. “Clive, we’ve known her since she was a kid and she’s a teacher—do you know the sort of checks they have to run on those poor people? I’d never be allowed to work in a school.”

  Clive was fighting the desire for a sudden, unspeakable violence. He wished he could pick up his cereal bowl and dash it against the wall—or against his own head—but instead he chose another weapon, and used it on his wife: “No,” he said. “You wouldn’t. They’re quite particular about mental health.” He chewed his mouthful with brisk attention.

  Martha folded as if she had been struck. She struggled to reply. “I can’t believe you said that.” Then she slid away, down the stairs, and he heard the bedroom door click shut.

  Clive crunched his breakfast. It made such a noise, in his mouth, and seemed to be taking forever. At last he had swallowed it all, and then Eliza came pattering up the stairs for her Shreddies.

  After her lunch—a bacon and avocado roll, a Snickers bar and a cup of tea—Belinda lay on the floor of her office for twenty minutes with a thick hardback book under her head.

  “It’s for my back,” she had told Clive the first time he discovered her. “I broke it when I was a kid.”

  “Falling out of a tree?” He had imagined a straw-haired, lawn-stained, country child.

  “No. Jumping out of a window.” The statement had wiped his mind.

  She lay quite still with her eyes shut and did not like to be disturbed, but today Clive had come to talk to her nonetheless, claiming special dispensation.

  “I don’t know what the hell I’m going to do,” he confessed. As he said it he felt better, but hearing it made him feel worse.

  “‘The only thing we have to fear,’” Belinda quoted to him now, from the floor, “‘is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.’ Although in your case,” she continued in her normal voice, “the fear is reasonable and justified.”

  “Don’t tell me what I already know,” Clive pleaded. “Tell me what to do.”

  “I’ve told you: wait for Eliot to tell and deny it, or tell Martha yourself.”

  “Eliot said she wouldn’t tell. ‘I won’t have to’—that’s what she said.”

  “Don’t you see? She doesn’t have to tell. You’re going to fall apart.”

  Clive was silent. Was Belinda enjoying this? Seeing him cornered? He was afraid and he wanted help but there was no refuge here. Belinda seemed to be unfurling a banner that did not protest his innocence but instead proclaimed his crimes.

  Now she pressed her fingertips together over her chest as if she were a medieval lady on a church tomb. “You’re in a hole, Clive. No two ways about it.” She spoke with relish; he could not doubt it any longer. This was unpleasant, Clive thought, and upsetting. He would not mention it again.

  Miss Fox—Eliot, now that they were friends—had made school better. Just at the moment, in fact, school was nicer than home: her parents were still having an argument—a silent one—and Eliza did not like to be in the same room as them both.

  Her father came to sit on her bed and talk about the concert. “Wouldn’t you rather come to the cottage with us?” he said. “I haven’t seen you all week.”

  Eliza said nothing. Because you’ve been working every night until bedtime, she was thinking.

  Every evening she had expected her father to come to her room, but he had not. She had heard him treading the floorboards in the kitchen above her head until she had either put on her headphones or fallen asleep. Now he was here, not to tell her he was sorry but to forbid her from doing what she most wanted. She knew that when he said, “Wouldn’t you rather?” it meant, “I want you to change your mind.”

  She frowned at the duvet. He was being unfair, she knew he was, but nonetheless he had brought guilt into the room with him and it was snouting and curling a place for itself on the bed. She pushed it away, cross and determined: if her father were going to shove, she would have to shove him back.

  “We will come, on Saturday. Like Mum said we could. Please, Dad,” she appealed. “Eliot’s my friend.”

  “She’s not your friend, she’s your teacher.” This came in a different voice. “We pay her to teach you the piano. A friend would be a little girl your own age who liked spending time with you.”

  “Eliot does.” Eliza was on the edge of tears—this was worse than the playground.

  “Eliza love,” Martha came in, “have you done your teeth?” She looked at them both, and stayed at the door. “What’s going on?”

  “Dad’s being horrible.”

  Later Eliza heard Martha shout, “What is your fucking problem?” all in one breath.

  The front door slammed. Eliza wondered who had gone out and her heart fluttered in her chest. She hoped it was her father and when she heard his shoes clop down the front steps to the road she was relieved.

  Mum came into the room and said, “I said you can go and you can. I’ll deal with Dad. But don’t mention it to him again, OK?”

  Eliza swallowed. In a mouse’s voice she said, “OK.”

  The end of the week arrived. Clive sat in his office and brooded. He fingered crisps from a packet on the desk and into his mouth where he let each one rest on his tongue like a communion wafer. When the caustic sting of flavoring began to burn, he crunched and swallowed.

  He liked this sensation—it was absorbing and short-lived. He liked to think of such things as crisps, a headache, or the weather. He liked to wonder if it would rain, and whether he would be caught out when it did. He liked the thoughts which bobbed at the surface, but not the shapes that lurked on the ocean floor.

  Carcasses on the seabed rotted in the end—he and Eliza had once watched a program about a dead whale. “Gross…” Eliza had said, her eyes like saucers and her face lit blue by the screen. “And amazing.”

  Clive tried to remember the peace of a life before Eliot. Eliza had, that morning, avoided talking to him again. “How long are you going to keep this up?” he had asked her. She had continued to eat her Shreddies, wearing her earphones and staring straight ahead. The silence was as clear a sound as if she had told him to get stuffed.

  Clive had said to Martha, “Eliza wears those things all the time.”

  “Yes,” Martha had replied.

  “She can’t hear a word I say.”

  “No.”

  She had said nothing else, and Clive had left to catch the Tube.

  With a blink Clive turned his thoughts instead to the weather.

  “Got your brolly?” the man in the corner shop had asked, cheerfully handing Clive his change. “It’s going to piss down all afternoon, apparently.”

  Rain was a nuisance. Martha and Eliza—driving straight from the school gates—would be halfway to the cottage by now, but Clive had to cross London to get to the station and he risked a soaking. He did not fancy sitting on the train in a puddle, and other people smelled of charity shops when they were wet.

  Outside the window the square dimmed from a gloomy afternoon to a night dark, a cupboard dark, as if the sun had not set but had been shut out by a closed door. Painted railings seemed to shine and window frames to glow, as they did at dusk. One front door turned the blood-soaked red of a toadstool and another the pungent milk-green of a moldering
corpse. There would—there must—be a storm. A dreadful silence had fallen and the whole lidded city seethed with static.

  Clive shifted from his seat to throw his rubbish away and to stand and stare at the window, wiping his hands on a napkin. He felt the creep and prickle of sweat under his hair.

  The sky split with a flash and a simultaneous crack-gulp-boom of thunder that made the building—and everyone in it—jump with nerves. “Christ almighty,” Clive heard Belinda say in the corridor. From others came fearful laughs and exclamations.

  The trees in the square—broad, sobbing planes—lifted the ends of their fingers all at once as a squall of wind caught their leaves underneath. A noise came from them, a great and glorious shushing like a wave pouring in over shingle.

  There followed a series of flat thunderclaps and then, after a short silence, a murderous-sounding crackle. Clive was afraid—not of the storm but of something at large in the air, something coming to catch him in its claws. His shirt clung to his ribs. He would go—he would go now. He slammed out of the door, hurried to the Underground, plunged down the steps and scampered into the fug.

  He was just in time. On the other side of London he emerged to find the city under a downpour and the station a slippery rink of puddles and newspaper pages. His train-carriage windows were sluiced by rain and steamed with vapor.

  It took a small disaster for commuters to make friends: people clucked, laughed and shook out their clothes.

  “Soaked!”

  “Drenched!”

  “Right down to my knickers!”

  Clive, dry as a bone, stared and listened from his seat. Why did I not get wet? He did not feel blessed but cursed: condemned to a ghostlike solitude.

  Part III

  6

  Clive had not intended to go to Eliot’s birthday party but when the day came he found himself at his parents’ home—on a laundry run—and with nothing to do that night. Tom was there, excited and jumpy about the evening to come, and Clive was jealous.

  Tom had not given up on Eliot and still loved her, not quite hopeless and not quite encouraged. “That naughty Eliot,” sighed Val. “She leads him on, poor Tom.”

  Clive had not told his brother about the day at the races. It would have been uncomfortable to tell and hard for Tom to hear, so he kept it to himself—quite tight against his chest.

  Watching Tom bob about in the kitchen, bothering his mother and making her laugh, Clive could read his brother’s mind—they all could: Perhaps tonight.

  “I might come too,” Clive offered. When he saw Tom’s surprised face turn towards him he knew that he did want to go. “Yes, I think I’ll come with you, to the party. She asked me, did you know that?”

  Tom pulled no punches: it was his big night and he did not want his brother there. “She asked you because she thinks you’re a sad act with no friends. She’s not expecting you to actually come. Anyway, what about exams? Aren’t you supposed to be working?”

  “I’ll take the night off.”

  Tom sat down at the kitchen table to lace his sneaker and did not say anything for a moment. Val looked from one son to the other but kept quiet. When Tom straightened up he said, “But—” He stopped and started again. “But everyone will be my age—apart from her parents. You won’t know anyone. It’ll be weird.”

  Clive stared at his reflection in the kitchen mirror. “Eliot said there were all sorts of different people going,” he said.

  Other grown-ups, was what she had laughed down the telephone. There might even be some as old as you. Hey—and listen: have you got a number for Danny? The words had struck and winded him.

  “You’ll probably chat up her mum or something,” continued Tom. “You’re all right when you’re with Martha, but on your own you can be a bit…” The sentence did not seem to have an end.

  Martha had gone to visit her father. “He sounded awful on the phone,” she had confessed to Clive that morning. “He sounded wasted.” She had filled Viv’s car with provisions—“I bet he hasn’t eaten proper food in weeks”—and pressed away through the Saturday traffic.

  She would have been baffled by Clive’s change of plan. “Eliot’s birthday party? But why?”

  I don’t have to tell her everything, Clive reasoned with his conscience.

  The two brothers shouted “’Bye, Mum,” over their shoulders as they went out of the front door and Clive heard, “Send her our love—” before the door slammed.

  They cycled to the station, tied up their bikes and caught the Tube.

  “It’s nice up here,” said Tom as they walked towards Primrose Hill. “I’m going to live in Camden when I’m older.”

  Tom was in love with everything about Eliot, thought Clive, and that included her family home and her postcode.

  Martha had been right when she had said that Kilburn and Primrose Hill were separated by more than geography. Eliot’s was a sturdy, square white cake of a house that stood, quite certain of itself and its position, in a proper garden of its own. From a glossy front door, stone steps led to a gate at the pavement.

  Inside, Clive was given champagne and Tom a glass of punch. “Punch for the young,” trilled Sabrina, Eliot’s mother. “Darling Tom,” she added, kissing him. “How’s my rotten daughter treating you? I wish you were in love with me.” She sighed and shimmered away in her silk drapery.

  “Nightmare woman,” said Tom, shaking his head. “She showed me her bush, once. It was unbelievably massive.” Then he sidled off to have his drink topped up by a friend.

  When Eliot saw Clive she said, “Clive!” as if he were the only person she had wanted to come to the party. She was glassy-eyed and dazed; starstruck with herself.

  A couple of hard-faced girlfriends had taken charge of her, holding her by the elbows and steering her round the house. The two friends stared and giggled at Clive, flirted with Eliot’s father and gazed with unblinking insolence at Sabrina before spotting Tom and separating him from the crowd, like mute, efficient sheepdogs. They herded him up the stairs in front of them and away to Eliot’s room.

  Tom did not try to win people over but with an unconscious, careless, laughing kindness he attracted them. His mother had called it his “magnet.”

  “It’s because he’s free,” Martha had said, watching Tom on the beach. “You can tell a mile off.”

  Now, as Tom was carried off upstairs by the sheepdogs, Clive felt conflicting thoughts strike him within like bits of flint: Those girls look mean—I wish they liked me—But they like Tom—I don’t care anyway. In the days before Martha that sensation—rummaging; cutting—had come often.

  As Tom had suspected, Clive did not know anyone here. He became aware that he was caught in a hopeless position: he did not wish to be dismissed by the teenagers as a boring grown-up but nor did he wish to be seen by the adults as an ignorant schoolboy. He wanted his own category: Oxford finalist.

  He discovered that if he walked into a room where adults stood in discussion he was regarded with cool disinterest. In the basement, teenagers looked up at him with incurious distrust from their draped positions over beanbags and cushions on the floor.

  He located Eliot’s bedroom: a shut door, a stink of fags, a noisy hubbub within. Clive knocked and pushed the door open a crack.

  “Who is it?” said an unfamiliar voice. Clive could see through the chink three girls lying pressed together like sardines across the bed. One of them held a bottle of vodka.

  “Clive. Can I come in?”

  A whispered consultation and then, “No!” shouted in unison. The door was kicked shut in his face and he heard their shrieks of laughter.

  Clive was feverish with discomfort and a needling terror. If Martha had been there she would have told him to go home. “Why stay?” she would have said. “You’re hating it; you’re miserable.” Give up, he told himself. Go home. No one will care—no one will even notice. Never mind his dignity; he wanted his bed.

  The decision made, Clive felt a great relief. He
opened the front door and took a breath of the clean, bright night—

  “Clive?”

  He peered into the garden. “Danny?”

  A tall figure, lit cigarette glowing between his teeth, was stepping up to the door with a click of his soles. “Leaving already?”

  “No,” lied Clive. “Just going to get some fags for Eliot.”

  “I’ve got loads,” came the reply, and somehow Clive was inside the house again with the door shut behind him and a brand-new drink in his hand.

  Danny moved with presidential confidence from room to room and Clive trod in his shadow like the lowly ambassador. Sabrina was greeted with a warm kiss on each cheek and the gentle clasp of a hand at her elbow. “Stunning,” murmured Danny to her and then, “How are you? Are they behaving themselves? Has anyone broken the law?”

  “Probably.” Sabrina giggled. “Have you seen Eliot? She’ll be so glad you’re here.”

  “I came back to see you,” said Danny, gazing down at her. “Eliot can wait.” His voice was glycerin-coated and his hand drifted to her waist.

  If she had had a tail, Sabrina would have whisked it. Clive, listening to their exchange and staring into the fireplace, thought he might be sick. He pictured a torrent of vomit quenching the blue gas flames. He allowed himself a fantasy: a jet of flame; her dress alight; Danny torched and squealing and he, Clive, laughing and laughing, all the way home on the Tube. He took a speculative suck at his drink.

  When Sabrina had departed, tipsy with compliments, to check on the caterers, Clive asked Danny, “How come you two are such pals?”