Contents
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Lynne Reid Banks
Title Page
Part One: Andy
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Interlude: Chris
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Part Two: Toby
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Interlude: John
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Part Three: David
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Postscript
The History of Vintage
Copyright
ABOUT THE BOOK
Jane’s son David is eight years old and Jane is filled with doubts as he grows up without a father. Toby, her first love, has gone to Israel after the collapse of his marriage to Melissa. Then there is Andy, close at hand, a complex personality with his own problem son. In the background is Terry, David’s father, an amorphous shadow hanging over them.
This intense, compassionate novel completes the the trilogy which began with The L-Shaped Room.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Lynne Reid Banks was born in London in 1929 and was evacuated to the Canadian prairies during the war. On her return to England she studied at RADA and was an actress in the early 1950s; later she became one of the first two women reporters on British television. Her first book, The L-Shaped Room, was published in 1960 and was an instant and lasting best-seller. Lynne Reid Banks is also a best-selling author of books for children and young adults. Her classic children’s novel, The Indian in the Cupboard, has sold over ten million copies worldwide. She lives in London.
ALSO BY LYNNE REID BANKS
The L-Shaped Room
The Backward Shadow
Fair Exchange
Dark Quartet
TWO IS LONELY
Lynne Reid Banks
PART ONE
ANDY
Chapter 1
IT HAD been an awful night and I came to in the morning, with the deepest physical reluctance, to find the alarm clock hatefully clamouring and my head and mouth and limbs giving me unmistakable messages of woe and protest as if I’d been on the worst sort of binge.
I hit the button on the clock so hard I knocked the thing off the bedside table, and heard the noisy ticking stop with the ringing as it hit the floor. I cursed hard, hating the world and everybody in it, and rolled over on my face. My eyes were sealed shut with tiredness; the morning sunlight streaming in over the downs was an affront. My mouth felt dry and my fingers swollen. The idea of getting up to face life and housecleaning and shop-keeping and being a mother, after being a mother the whole damned night when I should have been asleep, just seemed too bloody, bloody much.
It had been most nights now for weeks. Get David to bed at nine, and myself—exhausted from the day and from the night before and the days and nights before that—at ten thirty; two hours’ sleep, and then—the urgent, frightened, imperious cry: ‘Mummy! Mummy!’ If I didn’t respond, he would come into my room and into my bed. Once I had been so tired I hadn’t woken up sufficiently to take him back, coax him, sit with him, and do all the right and proper book-things; he had slept curled up next to me the whole night, and in my sleep I had wrapped my arms around him and held him close to me, a warm, alive, male presence against my breasts and stomach and thighs, moving a little sometimes in sleeping contentment, and I, befuddled, dreamt he was Toby and woke up in the morning with a sense of horror and shame, as if I’d debauched him . . . This feeling rebounded in anger against him and there was an awful scene, far more shameful to me and harmful to him than the physical companionship of the night . . . But I was tired. The tiredness was to blame. How can you go on, night after night, being patient, being kind, playing games he wants to play which are not really games but frightening manifestations of some deep inner disorder that you are afraid to let yourself guess at—wondering when, if ever, it is going to pass, what you can do about it, how to find out what is really the matter when he won’t tell you . . . Does he know? Do you really want to know? Because whose fault can it be but yours, who else can you blame—except the child himself, and you do blame him sometimes when the strain becomes too much—’David, you’re just putting it on, all this! I’m not coming in to you any more, you can yell as much as you like, you’re a big boy and this is all nonsense—’ And stopping at the look of mulish bewilderment on the small, loved face.
But even these basic considerations fade as the weeks go on; all you ask yourself then is, how can I go on, how can I stop myself hating the child for keeping me awake? Even the whys no longer seem to matter, only the how-longs have weight, because it’s like torture, it’s a constant rubbing friction on a relationship. The exhaustion, the bewilderment, the shame, made me short-tempered even during the day; my work suffered, my friends suffered, my child suffered. I suffered.
I’d taken him, first to a doctor, who after examining not David but me, prescribed a mild sleeping draught for him which I was afraid of but which in desperation I finally tried—unsuccessfully; then to a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist did examine him. She took several sessions over it. Then she examined me.
‘Has he ever asked about his father?’
‘At one time he used to ask a great deal, but that was—oh, three years ago. Now, he never mentions him.’
‘Doesn’t he notice that he’s different from other children in this respect?’
‘His closest friend—my partner’s daughter—is also fatherless. That helps him not to feel too isolated.’
‘In what way is she fatherless?’
‘He died.’
‘Does David know that his father is still living?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you say he never mentions him?’
‘Never.’
‘But you realise he must think about him.’
‘I’ve had no indications of it. Why should he hide his thoughts from me about that? He’s quite frank about everything else.’
‘Miss Graham, no doubt he gathered from your reaction when he was talking about it and asking questions that the subject made you uncomfortable.’
‘But it doesn’t.’
She said nothing to that. Whenever she said nothing, I came to take it as a sign that she thought I was fooling myself—or trying to fool her. At first it used to annoy me, but later, when I went over our conversations, I realised that she was very often right—certainly in this instance.
‘Does he tell you why he is afraid to sleep at night?’
‘He’s never told me he’s afraid to sleep. He just says he doesn’t want to sleep, or he can’t.’
‘That’s a child’s way of saying he’s afraid.’
‘But why has this come about only recently? Until he was six, he slept perfectly well.’
‘Until a child is six, he hardly realises he’s different from other children. Even the Thalidomide children were mentally and spiritually quite happy and satisfied until around that age.’
This violent comparison shocked me, as it was meant to.
‘David’s a normal child.’
‘During the day, he is. But night time for a child is rather like strong drinks for an adult. It brings truths to the surface which are otherwise kept hidden.’
‘But hundreds of children—thousands—’
‘Manage with only one parent? Oh yes. And some manage very well. And others don?
??t.’
‘Then you’re convinced that this—wakefulness of David’s is the result of his coming to realise that other children have fathers and that he hasn’t?’
She looked at me for a moment. She was a very unusual-looking woman, with a face like a caricature of a cat—high quizzical eyebrows, small snub nose, wide mouth like a cupid’s bow enormously attenuated at the ends, and short black hair clubbed into a youthful fringe. But she was over fifty, and the effect of the girlish hairdo was a little bizarre. However, she had the ‘right’ type of personality for a psychologist. She wasn’t a Freudian. I’d made sure of that first. All they do (Jo had told me, having been to one in her youth) is to sit and listen. I wanted practical advice. But getting it in this way was sometimes a bit more than I could readily take. It wasn’t so much what she said as the things she left me to figure out by myself from her silences, her mildly-raised eyebrows, her sudden, wry pursing of the lips, when the long corners would draw in suddenly and she would put the forefingers of both hands up to the place where her eyebrows joined. She seemed to be trying to conceal from me some impulse to frown in dismay or disapproval—no, disapproval is the wrong word; pity for what she saw me revealing, and which she could interpret. This sudden movement of the hands and mouth always put me on the alert to what I had just said.
‘Have you never thought of marrying?’
I laughed a bit. ‘I hear there are unmarried women who don’t think of marrying,’ I said, ‘but I’ve never known any personally.’
‘And in seven years, you’ve never met anyone . . .?’
It was I who was silent now. In seven years I had met several men. But the simple fact was that they were all—including Pietro with whom my relationship was strangely simple, and now Andy, with whom it was strangely complex—overshadowed by the two who pre-dated the birth of David: Terry, his father, and Toby.
Terry, looked back upon, seemed like a shadow, some deus ex machina who had set upon me like a legendary shower of rain and impregnated me on the solitary occasion of our mismating. He was no more solid in my memory than that, and I thought about him as little as possible, which was very little indeed. My only thoughts connected with him were watermarked with fear, fear that he would one day get so fed up with his barren second marriage that he would really set about finding us and would batten onto us—or even only onto David—laying claim to him in some way and upsetting us both beyond calculation.
Since the telephone conversation I had had with him several years before, I had had no contact with him, and yet from time to time, sinisterly as it seemed to me for I was anxious only to avoid all thought of him, he was brought to my attention. One day when I was leafing through a film magazine in the local launderette I had been thrown into confusion by suddenly coming upon a photo of Terry, a Terry somehow indefinably altered, not merely by years. I had sat there gazing at it numbly. ‘Terence Boyden, ex-rep actor who for the past seven years has neglected show business for the world of publishing, returns with a new smile (a new smile?) and, so he tells us, a film contract only waiting for his signature . . .’ I peered closer. Yes, it was new. The crooked front teeth were gone, replaced by artificial-looking straight ones . . . and some trick of the photographer’s light had invested his head with a sort of halo. He no longer looked quite male, or even quite human . . . I shivered and threw the thing down, grimacing, so that the woman at the next washing-machine opened her mouth to ask what was the matter . . .
And Toby?
I had told the psychiatrist the basic facts about Terry, but I had not mentioned Toby. Not mentioning Toby had become a deeply-ingrained habit with me over the past five years. Since Dottie’s departure for America, which more or less coincided with Toby’s marriage, I had shut him up inside me where he occasionally fought to get out like an imprisoned genie. But he was safer in than out. I did not talk about him, even to Jo, my friend and partner. It had been bad enough, Dottie knowing. Now there was no-one left in my life who knew, except John, and John, with his mysterious dark-continent insight, also seldom mentioned him.
I sighed heavily. ‘Yes, I’ve met men . . . quite a few. Never the right one, somehow.’
‘Right for whom?’ the psychiatrist asked.
‘For me, of course . . .’
Her fingers flew up and made a steeple under the sudden ridges between her eyebrows.
‘No, really!’ I protested. ‘A woman must choose a husband for herself, surely?’
She didn’t answer.
At the end of the counselling, she said: ‘David needs a father. He needs one very badly.’
I asked the question I feared to ask. ‘Will—will this terrible night-waking go on, then, until—I get married?’
‘Oh no! It can’t. You might never marry. He can’t keep it up indefinitely—physically, he must be getting tired, as you are. Besides, it’s a phase. But it’s a phase which, because of its very painfulness, is useful. You see you couldn’t just ignore it, as you may have done other signs and symptoms in the past. The point is that while it lasts, you must try to come to terms with his lack. And do something about it. Because one morning you’ll wake up after sleeping all through the night, and you may think to yourself, “Thank God, it’s over, he’s cured”, only of course he won’t be cured at all, it will just have gone to another place where it may not be so obvious but may be eating holes in him just the same. And later on he may eat even bigger holes in you than he is at the moment. Because everything that’s wrong in his life has to be your fault.’
‘You mean, it must seem so to him?’
She drew in the corners of her mouth, then spread them again quickly in a smile.
‘He’s a very bright child, you know,’ she said as she shook my hand.
‘I know. It’s something to be very grateful for.’
But she didn’t answer that, either, directly; she only said, ‘Well that depends how you look at it.’ Only then did it seem to me that she had said, ‘He’s a very bright child, you know’ as if she’d been saying, ‘Look out.’
And now here I was, still lying half-comatose at 8 a.m. swallowing down gall and wormwood with my weariness, dreading the moment when I would hear him pattering along the wooden corridor in his bare feet, the moment when he would leap on top of me expecting his morning romp or at the very least a cuddle and a cheerful face. I had a million things to do, and not the slightest will or energy to do any of them.
And I’d broken the god-damned alarm clock. I groaned aloud and turned my head sullenly towards the window. Without raising myself, since the bed was right against it, I could look out into the spring countryside.
I was so tired that the tiredness opened up a gaping chasm into the depths of my mind, where unnameable fears lay blackly, slimily writhing. I didn’t look, of course, but I knew they were visible—I could feel them moving there in my brain, going look-at-us, look-at-us. Suddenly I jerked upright and forced my attention onto the beauty outside the window. Green, with a backdrop of soft purplish hills, hedges that the farmers hadn’t yet cut down to make room for another yard of crops. No motorway, no blocks of flats or factories or building developments of any kind; not even an airport whose flight path led over my cottage. Not so much as a pylon. So much to love, so much to be grateful for . . . I felt the tears coming, tears not of gratitude but of loneliness and terror. It was day, and now David would be himself, he would go riding his pony with Amanda and laugh and be naughty and hug me or fight with me; he would eat with good appetite and I would look at his sturdy eight-year-old figure and be comforted; I would congratulate myself, I might even get smug again and think ‘Alone I did it!’—exult in him as my sole accomplishment. And then night would fall.
What if I’d been fooling myself all the time, all through the years of effort? And if I’d harmed David, if my life with David had been based on a mistake—if that achievement was nullified by an inner canker, what of my personal victory? Oh, but I already knew the hollowness of that. Not all the time; someti
mes I could kid myself about that too, and think I was happy and fulfilled. But not when I was tired, or depressed, and not in the cold darkness of the night when David was forcing me to be awake and aware of, instead of hiding in the merciful oblivion which had protected me before. To wake alone at night to a recurrent challenge—ineluctable physical and emotional demands—how it brought it home, the solitariness of a task meant to be shared!
And now I heard him coming. It had been a worse-than-usual night to which he had paid minimal tribute by sleeping in—not the four hours I would have slept if left to myself, but twenty minutes longer than usual. Now, with a child’s quick-recovery potential which even a healthy 36-year-old woman can only gape at with bitter envy, he was fully awake and ready for his day, untrammelled and (apparently) untroubled. His feet came thud, thudding up the carpetless stairs, and I heard the whirr of the spinning-wheel on the landing as he spun it. His morning ritual. (‘Has he any obsessive habits?’ ‘Yes, he spins the spinning-wheel every time he passes, and won’t throw out his gum till he’s chewed it at least a hundred times.’) And now, his head round the door.
And instantly, if temporarily, all the black anxiety and guilt and anger and even the weariness fell away, because of the dearness of him, the perfection. Small, dark, neat head; horizontal eyebrows cornering downwards at the outer ends, huge brown eyes, a smile of devastating potential . . . No, not quite perfect, for there were the two crooked teeth exactly where Terry’s had been. Lovely well-developed little body. Athletic, by God . . . There at last was something to thank Terry for. My own school memories are still blotted by run-off races where I couldn’t even beat the slowest, fattest child in the class to get into the relay team. . . . I could never quite believe in David’s ability to climb trees and run and ride—and jump, which he now did straight onto my stomach with both feet.
‘OW! God! Get off!’
He fell down on top of me and we wrestled briefly.
‘Can we go over to Amm’s today, Mummy?’