A Place Of Safety(97)

‘They?’

‘What’s the matter?’

‘Sorry. I just thought . . . Ann being so . . . usually more than one visitor . . .’

As her tongue floundered over the words, Louise’s heart beat a little faster. By asking a question to which she already knew the answer, she had taken the single step from honesty to trickery. She stared at her brother with dismay. They had never played these sorts of games. He stared back, his glance at first speculative then thickening into suspicion.

‘Someone has to drive Lionel. That’s all I meant by “they”.’

‘Oh, yes. Sorry. I didn’t think.’

‘What’s behind all this?’

‘Nothing. Just making conversation.’

‘No you’re not.’ He was on the verge of becoming angry. Louise tried to work out how best to extricate herself. Perhaps if she said she was tired and going to bed, he’d simply shrug and let go. With the old Val, there would have been no problem. But this new, damaged Val was so volatile, so ready to strike out blindly at real or imagined slights. And in this case he was right. She was not being straight with him and the suspicion was deserved. Wouldn’t it be better simply to tell him the truth?

‘I went to see Ann today.’

‘What?’

‘Around lunchtime.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘I couldn’t. It was so awful, Val. Tubes and drips and machinery . . . and poor Ann hardly there at all.’

‘Oh God, Lou.’

‘She’s dying, I know she is.’ Louise burst into a flood of tears. Val climbed out of the armchair, came over and put his arms round her as he had when she was a little girl. For a moment Louise allowed herself the comforting conceit that things were once more as they used to be. But then the longing for veracity, to have everything absolutely straight between them, drove her on.

‘They said . . .’ She was crying so much she could hardly speak. ‘He hadn’t been to see her at all . . .’

‘Who?’

‘Lionel.’

‘That’s ridiculous.’

‘Or even rung up.’

‘You talked to the wrong person. Reception changes all the time at these big places.’

‘This was the nurse at intensive care.’

Val withdrew then. First physically, the warm muscly flesh of his arms hardening until Louise felt she was being embraced by two curved planks of wood. Then disengaging his emotions.

‘I thought you’d stopped all this.’ Val’s voice was cold. He got up and moved away.

‘Val - don’t go!’

‘I thought you’d changed. That you’d begun to understand.’

‘I do,’ cried Louise.

‘Now you’re calling him a liar.’ He looked down at her with a detachment that was not entirely without sympathy. ‘I’ve asked Jax to come and live here, Louise. Whether you move out or not. You’ll just have to accept it.’

‘How can I accept something that makes you so unhappy?’

‘It’s not about being happy. It’s about being glad to be alive.’





After his sister had gone to bed and cried herself to sleep, Val sat near the window of his own room, gazing out at the great cedar tree in the driveway of the house opposite. Louise had wept so violently and for so long, he had thought she might make herself ill. Yet he did not go to her for he was unable to say what she longed to hear and knew his presence could only torment her further.

It was true what he had said about being glad to be alive. Equally true that, for a great deal of the time, he now experienced pain and fright. But the moment was long gone when he could have walked away. No question now of weighing distress against satisfaction and trying to decide if the game was worth the candle.

Dante had got it right. And von Aschenbach. Look, lust after, love and worship youth and beauty. Just don’t touch. But what about the ‘strife below the hipbones’, as he had somewhere read the sexual urge memorably described. It seemed to Val the more frequently his longing for Jax was satisfied, the more powerful it became. Tonight, sitting awkwardly in the untidy sitting room of the Old Rectory asking after Lawrence’s wife, Val had felt he was on fire.

Jax and Lionel sat facing him on a sofa that was splashed with red stains. Jax was drinking Coke, his tongue darting in and out of the glass like a fish. Each time he reached out for his glass, the dragonfly tattoo passed through a fall of light from a standard lamp and sprang to iridescent life. Lionel sat as in a waking dream: calm, smiling and looking at nothing and no one in particular.

Val did not stay long. He couldn’t bear having Jax within arm’s reach and not be able to touch him. The boy’s blazing blue eyes shone with sexual invitation. The flickering tongue, nothing but a sensual wind-up, was already driving Val mad. He prayed that Jax would offer to see him to the door, perhaps even come outside for a moment and stand close to him in the darkness. But Jax did not move. Just waved an ironical goodbye, lifting his glass.