Exposure Read online

  He did not care now to debate whether this was normal or not. There was only one instinct in his body, one physical longing: mother. He could think only of his mother. His mother would understand; she would know. As he dialled the number a new chasm of self-pity opened within him and he cried out inarticulately from it.

  'Oh, Luke! Darling?' Rosalind said. 'Try to calm down, darling. Just try to breathe slowly. Will you do that?' She waited a few moments. 'There, that's a bit better, isn't it? What's happened, Luke?'

  He began to cry again and she said, 'Listen, you don't have to explain what's happened now if you don't want to.'

  'It's all just—just—ruined,' he said.

  'Oh, darling, you sound tired out. Would you like to come and stay at home for a few days, get yourself back on your feet? Would that be nice?'

  Luke could sense the permanent texture of home behind her—so unlike this hateful, wobbling stage-set in front of him now: the ostentatious plasma screen, the purple suede sofa with its horribly eloquent stains. He could smell his mother's floral scent down the phone. He stuttered and sniffed his way through the word 'yes'.

  'Shall I come and collect you, Luke? Would that be best?'

  'Mmm. Might be. Might be a good idea, Mum.'

  When he had put the phone down he switched off the TV and started to sob. He sobbed for forty minutes straight, as if this was work to be done, until he felt as if he had taken his broken heart for a long and arduous run.

  The buzzer went—on one of the outermost orbiting stars. He walked over to the entryphone, letting tears roll off his chin and splash on his dirty shirt, dropping his bare feet carelessly—thud, thud, thud—on the floor. This would be the sound of his existence from now on, he told himself: thud. He leant on the door and listened to his mother coming up the stairs.

  'Oh, goodness, Luke,' she said. She was genuinely shocked by his appearance. Her son looked gaunt, exhausted. The word 'dope' flashed through her mind. She held his front door open with her foot while he threw himself on to her.

  He buried his face in her hair, her scent, her soft cotton blouse.

  'Luke, darling,' she said again, half-questioningly.

  And he loved her, he loved her, he loved her. His heart was beating against her heart as he clung to her in the hallway. She was perfect as she always was—the gentle colours she wore reflecting the passing seasons and the quiet music of her existence. He liked to think of her glancing up at the sky and wondering if it was going to rain a litde for her roses.

  Why would it have occurred to him that there was anything wrong in her life? How could he have known that, just two days before, she had been telephoned in her own home by the police? Detective Inspector Pendry had been sorry to have to inform her that Mr Langford had been attacked by two youths with a baseball bat. She had not yet told either of her children. Somehow, she couldn't bear to and kept putting it off. It wasn't so much that she was afraid of worrying them, more, as she explained it to herself, that she wanted 'to get the whole thing straight' in her mind first. She shied away from the peculiar implications of this. Twice she had tried to get hold of her daughter, but she hated making recordings of her own voice and gladly allowed herself to be defeated by voicemail.

  The moment she replaced the receiver on DI Pendry, she grabbed her handbag and car keys. She ran up for Alistair's pyjamas and dressing-gown; she ran down for a bag of fresh fruit. Then she drove over to the hospital.

  This had happened to her husband! Not to a person on the six o'clock news—to Alistair. She spent the drive working herself up with the essential question: what kind of a world is it in which bad things happen to good people at night? When she arrived at the hospital she was so full of urgent tenderness and indignation that she was too impatient to listen to the nurse who led her along the corridor. She felt later that she had been ill-mannered and was ashamed of herself.

  But she would never forget walking through the door of Alistair's hospital room, and how her indignation fell away like a disappointed smile. Something in his expression, in the total absence of self-pity, the lack of any demand for her sympathy cut off her instincts at their root. The tears dried in her eyes. She felt stark, bereft of a vocabulary, as she sat beside his bed. She held his hand to prevent the scene falling apart—and he gave it to her for the same reason—but all she felt was a growing fear. She looked at his face—but only when he looked away. He said he couldn't bear to talk about what had happened just yet but that he was quite all right, as she could see. She observed the injured leg. Yes, this she could see.

  On the portable TV by his bed they watched a late-night programme about gardening in which he would normally have had no interest whatsoever. She sat there, knowing something had gone from their lives, knowing that this strange vigil was an ending to some aspect of innocence she had never thought to single out as corruptible.

  Two days had passed now and she was still letting her thoughts brush over this knowledge as fingers might brush over a lump, a telling abnormality in the skin.

  Rosalind found an overnight bag in her son's cupboard and filled it with T-shirts and jeans and clean socks and boxer shorts. Unconsciously she picked clothes he had worn at nineteen, when he had last belonged to her and lived inside the body of her home.

  Luke watched her for a while, until he had built up the courage to go and get his toothbrush and razor from the bathroom. This was the most dangerous room by far—it was a minefield of Arianneness: stray glossy blonde hairs, discarded makeup, an empty bottle of her shampoo in the bin. There were two smears of foundation on the basin—he noticed one in the shape of half a heart. He looked at the bottle of shampoo. The bottle said 'hair' to him and the word 'hair' said 'head' to him and the word 'head' said 'face'. And the mental picture he had of Arianne's face emitted a laser of pure white pain right into the centre of his body. He had to get out of the bathroom or die.

  'Come on, then, darling. Let's go home,' his mother called out. He followed her down the stairs, feeling he had come to the end of an unsuccessful experiment: adulthood.

  'So, how's Dad?' Luke asked, as he ate the cold pea and mint soup she had put in front of him. He looked out at the garden, at the antique roses, the honeysuckle, the orange blossom. He sighed, feeling like an invalid leaning back on a cool fresh pillow. Rosalind put down her spoon and pushed back her hair. 'I was actually going to call you and Sophie later today. Dad's not very well, Luke,' she said. 'He's actually staying in hospital for a few days because he's been hurt. It's nothing too serious, so don't panic.'

  'What? How? Was it an accident? A car crash? Oh, my God.'

  'No, no—it wasn't a car crash. He was attacked, Luke.'

  'Mugged? Dad was mugged?'

  She was glad merely to agree with this simple explanation.

  'Yes,' she said. 'Mugged. On his way back from Julian and Elise's. I wasn't there.'

  'Dad was mugged in Knightsbridge?'

  'Yes.'

  'I can't believe this. This is terrible.'

  'He's in hospital,' she said. 'They're taking very good care of him. His kneecap's been smashed and there's bruising all down his leg. But they said he can come home tomorrow so there's no need to panic.'

  'My God, Mum.'

  She stood up to fetch the jug of elderflower cordial. Luke felt there was something peculiar in her manner and wondered if she was protecting him, concealing how bad his father's injuries really were.

  She felt him staring at her and she jerked the kitchen window open a litde more. She said, 'The main thing is, he's going to be perfectly all right, Luke. Nothing's too serious. There was an extremely nice doctor. There really isn't any need to panic.' She put a few more ice cubes in the jug. 'Would you like some more elderflower? I find it very cooling. Incredible how this has all sprung up on us, isn't it?'

  Luke was about to agree with her grimly that, yes, this was a world of sudden car crashes and muggings and heartbreak—when he realized she was talking about the weather. The shock of the lite
ral sent his mind reeling in confusion. To him, the external world was merely an assortment of triggers for ideas more or less connected to the loss of Arianne. What else could account for the existential agonies he felt when he looked at his double bed, or for the sense of savaged ideals when he ran his fingers across his purple suede sofa? Most poignant of all, perhaps, were his meditations on the apples in the fruit bowl. They were her apples—and this was what apples made him feel, and so it would be with any apple for the rest of his life. Even the hot weather was a depiction of feverish grief.

  His mother said, 'Yes, apparently it's going to be over a hundred this weekend. Really scorching.'

  He tried to go through the things she had told him since he sat down at the table. First, that his father had been hurt and was in hospital. Second, that his father had been mugged. Third, that elderflower cordial was very cooling and it was going to be really scorching this weekend. What the hell was going on? He cleared his throat. 'Aren't you going to visit him, Mum?'

  'Oh, yes. No, absolutely. I'll go in a bit,' she said. 'You can go until seven thirty, so there's no rush.'

  No rush? Something was definitely wrong. This was not his mother. She sprang into action for the sick, she made soup, she put her cool hand on the perspiring forehead and insisted on plenty of fluids. She rushed— whatever the official visiting hours—as if she had been blessed with a brief opportunity to prove the strength of her love.

  But just as Rosalind did not dare to ask Alistair what accounted for his strange resignation, Luke did not dare to ask her. On a fundamental level this was the way their family survived. It was as if they all feared there would be a knock on the door one day, a grand repossession of the furniture and all the good memories, and the best they could do was keep quiet and hope not to attract attention prematurely. Only Luke's sister, Sophie, ignored or fought this instinct—and the other three found they couldn't look into her eyes when she slammed down her fork and screamed about communication over the dinner-table. Luke could never understand why she had to choose mealtimes anyway, and, moreover, why she even had a knack for choosing the meals their mother did best. Beef casserole followed by pear and almond tart with crème fraìche, for example, had been callously spoilt on more than three occasions.

  Rosalind smiled at her son. ' Oh, it's lovely having you, darling. Even if it's a sad reason it's lovely for me to have you.' Her eyes narrowed a litde, like someone struggling with an eye test, as she looked out at the garden. It had begun to dawn on her that she was going to have two men in the house to look after. Two men who would want lunch and supper. For a moment, this thought irritated her and she wanted to drive to the showroom on her own and go through the accounts. She did not want this double arrival of masculine emotion, which would be a demanding, ungovernable presence, like someone else's spoilt child.

  But years of maternal self-discipline, of putting her children's needs long before her own, brought Rosalind's focus sharply back to her son. Luke had always moved her to near-painful protectiveness. She stared intently at his face. 'Do you want to tell me about what happened, darling?' She stroked the hair off his forehead. 'Only if you want to ...'

  He looked down at his salad plate and toppled a pile of walnuts and rocket with his fork. 'Mum, I really love her,' he said. 'I really do.'

  She was intensely relieved that this was all it was. No disease, no dope addiction, she told herself. Just a wretched girl.

  'But Lucy loves you, Luke,' she told him. 'I've never seen a girl so obviously in love with someone before. Lucy adores you, darling. You know she does. I don't mean to underestimate this for a minute, but don't you think you might patch it up?'

  Luke felt deep shame. She had no idea what had been going on. How could he bring his filthy life before his mother? Shameful images consistent with such a life pulsed in his mind: Arianne in the bath with JJ and Laura, the little bag of Lucy's things under the sink with the oven-cleaner and the dishcloths, Arianne in her see-through negligee, trickling maple syrup up her thigh. The things he had done to her—in the car, in the hallway, before they had even got through the front door. He had smacked her bottom for her, just as she begged him to, calling her a 'naughty little girl'; he had suffered hours of torment handcuffed to the bedhead while she tried out underwear combinations and, occasionally, according to her whim, ran her tongue over all of his erogenous zones but one. And he had enacted a horrifying scene in the communal hallway of his apartment building—though it had honestly scared him that she wanted this—in which he was a rapist and she was a young girl coming home from school. Dirty things in public places. His mother would never forgive him.

  'This was another girl, Mum,' he said.

  'Oh. Not Lucy?'

  'No.'

  'But you were ...'

  'No, I know. But this was a different girl.' He lifted a spoonful of soup but his mouth soured with self-loathing and he lowered it again.

  'Do try to eat,' Rosalind said. She put some more cheese on his plate beside the untouched salad. 'It only makes things worse if you feel ill.'

  Luke had always enjoyed thinking that his mother didn't know how ugly life was. What he liked to think was that for her life was all about Christmas and their birthdays and the garden and Sunday lunch, and that a timeless aspect of her was perpetually engaged in cutting up carrot sticks for him and his sister. But now he found himself faced with a dilemma. For the first time in his life he would have liked her adult advice—or, at least, her adult sympathy—because she must know something about love, mustn't she, even if she was that much older? But he saw that to ask this of her would involve the loss of an ideal, that he would have to bring her out of her Eden. Just then, with principles crushed like muddy cigarette ends wherever he looked, this seemed too great a price.

  So, rather than tell her about Arianne, he spread butter on the walnut bread and ate plenty of green salad, like she said. He ate a bowl of strawberries and cream for pudding, like she said. With each mouthful, he felt he was taking in the peace of his mother, the sweet simplicity of his mother. He was not surprised he felt sleepy afterwards.

  'What about a snooze, Luke? I'll wake you up at about four so you'll sleep tonight.'

  'OK, Mum.' He stood up.

  'Good. I think it's just what you need. Oh, no, darling—leave all that. I'll stick it in the dishwasher. You go on up and snooze for a while.'

  Her word 'snooze', the vase of flowers she had put by his bed, the full stomach, the faint smell of her scent in every room of the house, the encapsulated story of his childhood ... He lay in the foetal position in the little single bed and then he fell asleep.

  It was his first uninterrupted hour of sleep since Arianne had left. He dreamt about his father being mugged. He dreamt the muggers had broken both his father's arms and legs and stripped him naked on the street. At first Luke felt devastated, vengeful. His face contracted with anger as he slept. But when the doctor told him that his father would need to be in hospital for a very long time, he felt oddly relieved. He felt lighter. It turned out that it was all for the best because, actually, he and his mother would live very happily in the house without his father. In fact, life would be altogether better without him. This was the conclusion of the dream.

  When he woke up it was to the sound of his mother knocking on his door. Luke felt disgusted by his own imagination, by the violence he seemed to have wished on his own father. Rosalind sat on the end of his bed and looked down at her hands. She had changed her shirt for a dark blue linen one. She had done something to make her hair more bouncy.

  'I'm going off to see Dad for a bit,' she said. 'I thought I might as well just go now. Then that's done, isn't it? Are you going to be OK, my darling?' she said.

  'I'll be fine.'

  'Will you have a nice bath? And I've left some tea-things out—those caramel biscuits you like.'

  They had been a passion when he was about twelve. 'Thank you. You're amazing, Mum.'

  'No. Not at all.' She tucked her hair
behind her ears. 'Far from it. Well, I'd better go.'

  'Dad is going to be all right, isn't he, Mum?'

  'Oh, yes. Yes, of course. They said he can come home tomorrow,' she told him again.

  'I just—I thought you might be trying not to worry me. You aren't just not saying how bad it is, are you?'

  'No, no ... It's just the kneecap and the bruising on the shin. Which is bad enough, of course. Poor old Dad.'

  'Has he seen the police? I mean, obviously the police are involved.'

  'Yes. Actually, they caught them—the two boys. Julian saw them run off and called the police in the nick of time.'

  'He actually saw them? So this was right near the house?'

  'I know. Awful to think of it, isn't it? Just down the road—beside Julian's car.'

  'What did they want? Money? Money, of course.'

  'I don't know, Luke. They didn't take anything,' she said.

  'What? Nothing?You're not going to tell me Julian scared them off?' He imagined his spindly, myopic godfather getting every last bit of mileage out of this.

  Rosalind smiled and shrugged at him, as if to imply that she understood his scepticism but that this was what had happened. In fact, she knew perfectly well that Julian had not scared them off. He had told Rosalind the two men were already running away when he came out of the house. They had just not taken anything. Julian had said he thought it was rather odd, and didn't she?

  'Look, I don't know much about it, darling. Dad hasn't wanted to talk about it yet,' she told Luke.

  'Really? Has he not?'

  Now nothing sounded right to him. His father was relentlessly logical—that legal mind of his would have sorted the facts from the impressions before he had even begun to feel the pain in his leg. ('That's not a coherent argument, Luke. It's all fuddled with emotion,' he heard his father tell him—as he had on so many occasions when Luke attempted to make conversation with him.) Instinctively, Luke thought that part of his father would simply enjoy an opportunity to show the nurses and the police what a great lawyer he was. This was how essentially weird Luke found Alistair. As a child, if ever he had cried, his father had been ready with a rational solution. This he would deliver in due course, when hysteria had subsided appropriately, with the full authority of his forensic detachment.