Nature and Necessity Page 3

  If Anycock was expecting to be invited in for a cup of tea he was to be disappointed. With thunder creeping up the valley, and the water collecting in puddles at his feet, Anycock drew forward and pressed his face up to the glass and banged hard. ‘You said wait and I waited. Waited and gave you all the time you wanted, time and space and all that. Except that’s not what you really wanted, was it? All along you played me, Petula, putting me off and getting further away. You said wait but you didn’t wait, did you? Rushing to make your new life here, setting up a nest and getting yourself knocked up by that sharp bastard you always fancied. Give me a year or so you said, so I gave you a damn year, give me another and you got that too. Lord, you must have laughed at me, long and hard, taken me for a mug. I tell you now, I’m on to you, seen through it all, I have. And you should know this my girl. I’m never going to give you that divorce you crave so you can tell that spiv to stick his lawyers’ letters. No, I’m not going to let you go, not if we had forever. You’ll never be Mrs bloody Montague, you understand me, never… because I love you too much to let you go Petula, can’t you tell?’

  Looking dangerously near tears, Anycock cleared his throat and pointed at the tall figure inside, who was once his to have and hold. ‘I’ll never meet another like you Petula, no one will, it’s why I can’t let you go… it’s why I’ve come back for you.’ It was a speech rehearsed many times in the cold bed she had left him in and one he was indecently proud of – the words coming out just as he had meant them to, for once.

  A peal of laughter, quickly smothered, came from inside, reawakening Anycock’s ire.

  ‘Mock me will you? Oh, the things I could tell the world about you Petula…’ His voice rose with a righteous anger that came easily to him even in smaller matters. ‘For a proud man I wasn’t too proud to take, to take, well you know what you are, to take one of those for a wife.’

  Regan was to hear a lot about pride in the coming years, often from figures as compromised as Anycock, making her turn against the quality, or at least not take it very seriously from those who insisted upon it the loudest.

  ‘Lying is your calling card Petula. You practise on yourself in your sleep, but I believed, because you were beautiful and you’d have me. And you didn’t know how beautiful you were then, did you? It’s why I got you, why you took me. See, you always were full of piss and wind, running one racket or another, and I was your jolly farmer until you saw you could do a lot better than jolly! There were bigger game out there, weren’t there Petula m’love?’

  ‘Nonsense!’ whispered Petula, moving her hands from Regan’s ears to cover her eyes, ‘I made a second-best bed and refused to lie in it, he’s talking piffle. If he doesn’t go soon I’ll call the police.’

  ‘You going to call the police Petula, or are you going to get one of your lardy-dah friends to get his gamekeeper to thrash me? Or that doctor of yours maybe, oh he liked you too, to commit me eh? Is that it Petula, them men in white coats to take ol’ Rory away? I don’t think you want them here, them or anyone else! Because you don’t want them to know what I know about you, you dirty, well, you know what you are!’

  Petula switched her hands from Regan’s eyes back to muffling her ears again.

  ‘Jesus. What a bore. Go away, please go away.’

  ‘You’re a liar Petula! A liar that sells her body for gold!’

  ‘This is too much…’ Petula bit her lip yet remained frustratingly short of inspiration. For the first time in their association, the initiative remained squarely with Anycock, but how to get rid of the beast?

  ‘The tales you told me would make a harlot blush! Your parents the aristocrats, or was it royalty? I can’t remember! The cock-and-bull family crest you had me hang over the fireplace, the stories of your holidays with Princess Margaret and the Queen! And the truth? You want to hear the truth? A mad old gin dragon with dementia that I had to nurse in our field, who I had to put in my caravan and watch and feed! That was Mater! And Pater? Oh this is too good, too good! A card-sharping rake who’d made a run for it on the way to get a cigar from the shops, he had some sense after all. Sisters! Yes, sisters left behind in Singapore you never let me meet! Married millionaires did they? If they existed, if there ever was a Singapore. So much of it Petula, so much of it, one day this, the next one that. Only I remember everything Petula, m’love. And if you won’t come back, I won’t be the only one who does. Mark these words, I won’t go quietly this time. Twice bitten see? Damn you and your lawyers’ hush money!’

  ‘Regan, upstairs now, go quickly. Go.’

  Regan looked up at her mother and frowned quizzically.

  ‘Please, I know what I’m doing little one. He’s mad.’

  With sensual exertion Petula rose from her hiding place by the window, ushered Regan away and drew a deep breath, running a shaking hand through her tangled hair.

  Anycock squinted, aware of the movement and fearful that he may have gone too far. He had only meant to scare her a little, not scare her away again, but once he started talking he could not stop.

  ‘I can see you Petula, don’t you go trying anything. I don’t mean you harm, I only want what’s fair.’

  ‘Stay where you are,’ he heard her call through the glass.

  Hearing her voice again reminded Anycock of his pain, hidden for so many days and nights from the one who had caused it, and now free to soar as high as he could cast it.

  ‘I swear Petula, I’ve come to take you home, before your God and the Law, I’m still your lawfully wedded husband!’

  ‘Hush. You’ll wake the dead.’

  For many moments he stood there, wondering whether he had been tricked; it would make sense, she was probably escaping out of the front door with her brat. Then one of the many back doors facing the garden opened and Petula walked out unclothed, a northerly wind ploughing into her freckled breasts as hard lines of rain washed through the red thatch which formed a protective triangle round her sex. At once comforting and defiant, helpless but powerful, Petula’s propensity to throw herself at the mercy of the elements rarely failed her, cruel nature taking care of its own.

  ‘Sweet Jesus Petula, are you real?’

  ‘Rory, oh Rory.’

  With pagan immodesty she strode onto the grass, wet leaves squelching underfoot and hailstones falling all-about, yanked free Anycock’s trousers and got down to her knees. Anycock threw his head back, closed his eyes and sighed, ‘Have mercy, I’m only a man.’

  Soon they were rutting on the front lawn, pools of rain forming a bed of slippery grassy slush under their sodden bodies. A pair of toads hopped cautiously past Petula’s crossed fingers, her raised ankles slapping together painfully like clashing rocks on the bone. Pressing her face to one side, to avoid Anycock’s whiskey breath, Petula watched a grass-snake curling under a lavender bush for shelter, concentrating on it as if it were a poster, blutacked to the dentist’s ceiling. Its shiny wet scales reminded her of other more straightforward sexual experiences, its smoothness of past penises she would rather be on the business end of that dark afternoon. Holding on to the hairier part of Anycock’s comb-over, Petula controlled the urge to exhale impatiently, the overturned bucket of tripe she married potentially dangerous until neutralised by the panacean solace of ejaculation.

  Unbeknown to the actors, Regan saw it all. Whether it was hereditary nosiness or a child’s innocent interest she could never decide, a stool by the first-floor window the perfect aerial vantage to observe Anycock consume his fury in a four-minute rut, his buttocks hurrying towards climax like a pair of lobsters scuttling towards the water, sea-eagles circling dangerously overhead.

  ‘Peace Petula, give me peace…’

  Later, after they had had tea and a hurriedly intense conversation in lowered voices, Regan spied through a half-open door Petula hushing Anycock again like a baby, his sobbing face buried deep in her lap. ‘Shhhh now, you big lump, you’ll have to wait and see, I don’t even know what I want now, we’ll come good again though,
one day when we’re both ready. Shush. We need forever Rory boy, forever, you think in short lumps, short lumps of time. Time’s not one or two sugars, it’s a whole mountain of forever. I’ll never forget what you’ve done for me, I promise, never. We’ll always be together Rory boy, together in the most significant sense. But I need time, more time.’

  ‘I want you now Petula, blazes to later, now.’

  Petula laughed indulgently at the unsuccessful adult once more resorting to the greed and certainties of childhood, ‘Shuuush silly, shush. Later, there’ll be more later.’

  ‘You promise, you promise this time?’

  ‘Shuuush…’

  Like most problems Petula did not know how to solve, and preferred to bury in a blaze of hectic activity directed elsewhere, this one was tactically set aside, strategically worked around and ultimately, after some weeks, forgotten. Jasper (who later in life would decide his father was a labouring-class hero) and Evita had their names changed from Anycock to their mother’s maiden name, Tanner. Soon after, a stack of Petula’s old nighties appeared in a cardboard box at the end of the drive with a collection of letters that remained unopened. Of Anycock, Regan saw no more, his race with the storm never to be repeated.

  True to his word Anycock never granted a divorce, choosing unbroken hermitude in his shell of a dilapidated shepherd’s cottage instead. The matter of Petula’s marriage to Regan’s father was settled by her former husband’s thoughtful and timely suicide (assisted by gout, alcoholism and tuberculosis) two years later. It was a practical death that any man who had known pain like his would understand. The wedding of the woman he left behind occurred without an announcement in The Times or any fanfare, a handful of initiates invited to Glyndebourne one blazing hot weekend in July, the general public never needing to know that they were not invited to an event they thought was already a fact.

  In adulthood Regan was to say that it was impossible to know why Petula married her father without knowing why she did not want to be with Anycock. The colossal debts, red nose and farm repossession were obvious factors, but Regan knew that the man who had run with the storm knew too much, knew of the time before the sisters, and that her mother had given herself to him that day for them both. By her teens it became clearer to Regan that it was a sacrifice Petula expected a return on, and that in sisterhood, some acts were more magnanimous than others.

  *

  The mystery of her parents’ attraction would haunt Regan throughout her life. How could it not? If she grasped its nature she would at least see a reason for the pain it begat. Suffering could then be ennobled by logical necessity, it was the only way for it to serve a cause. As long as Petula was that cause Regan held firm; later the need for Petula and logic continued as no more than a nostalgic yearning, whereas suffering remained a perennial fact.

  Why Petula and her father made her was the second central question of Regan’s existence, following on from her mother’s origins, and would always be so as long as their purpose for doing so evaded her. As her psychiatrist would explain, ‘the postponement of loving until full knowledge is acquired ends in a substitution of the latter for the former,’ and so it proved, questions replacing feelings to no gratifying end. The separateness and distance that characterised her parents’ relations were as much a feature of growing up as the school run and successive pets, each parent inhabiting polar tips of passing stars. What light they might cast on their past life they chose to keep to themselves. And still her memory showed her films she could not square with Petula’s revisionism or her father’s silence on personal matters. There was a day, soon after Anycock’s run, when what she subsequently sought in vain was revealed to her, and for once, only once, there was no mystery; her parents were in love and acted like they were. Afterwards she would remember this day more in theory than practice (just as her father had admired her mother’s beauty), and later still doubt it altogether. But for one afternoon Petula and Noah Montague made fire in the air, the space between them thrilling, ominous and young.

  Hot weather had come very early and unexpectedly, the spring clouds as scattered and varied as a thousand differing destinies. Forecasters warned of tropical temperatures, a hosepipe ban was ignored and the seemingly pointless fashion for outdoor pools in Mockery Gap finally justified. Presiding at the centre of it all were her parents, resplendent in the twilight of their late twenties. Noah Montague sat cross-legged in a lotus position laughing, Petula was half submerged leaning on the pool’s edge, and Regan, separated through some accident in priorities, was eating a banana on her own. Others watched the star-crossed couple, athletic and lithe, her father a cross between a Satyr and the star of an adult film, naked save for the black synthetic slip and handlebar moustache, her mother an acid mermaid in a crimson bikini that her nipples stared through. From the darkness of the house overlooking the pool, the curtains drawn as neglected toddlers ranted themselves to distraction, Regan slipped past a stoned au-pair and called out to the adult world. No sound came out of her mouth, only the conviction that she might have been abandoned for good, that the sunny afternoon was infinity and that the moment she was trapped in was a black hole. Now her mother’s devotion seemed contingent, contingent on whether there was a man talking to her, since that was what Noah was and would always be to Regan, another man to whom she was supposed to feel closer than the rest.

  Brushing past the net curtains Regan made her way down the concrete patio unnoticed, her small steps taken with careful gravity. In spite of all the splashing and chatter, her parents’ voices were the most audible without being the loudest, the other speakers timing their silences with the consideration of eavesdroppers.

  Petula, though aware of an audience, seemed not to credit it with ears. ‘And I just couldn’t make him stop crying!’ she exclaimed. In the sun, and without makeup, she was lovelier than ever, and Regan waved her banana in the air hoping to catch her attention.

  ‘Really! No stop it. Really?’

  Noah laughed baring his teeth, conviviality and ruthlessness taking turns with the sunny disposition he was to maintain into old age. His was the look of a man who had been in extreme situations without drawing absolutist conclusions, and as such, remained slightly untouched by life, so far.

  ‘Mean to tell me he did, eh? Christ, poor fellow must be so far from self-respect that he can’t touch the sides anymore. Feel sorry for him, really.’

  His voice was lively and deep, words arriving in measured snorts and deliberate abbreviation. ‘There’s no malice there, a chump, goodish guy who can’t move on, world’s full of them. Lots of integrity, but integrity can be impractical. Really needs a nursemaid, not a woman. Could be dangerous though, if he’s done it once. Nursemaid is what he needs, to look after the poor fellow, give him a bit of mothering.’ There was no doubt that Noah wanted the opposite of being looked after, an air of putting others to amusing use inherent in his generosity, the same trope that Petula would eventually adopt to more selfish ends.

  ‘And that nursemaid was me. God, you’ve no idea Noah, no idea. Seeing him brought it all back of course, I’ve never been so scared, not of him but of that time. To have a whole time of your life that you can never have back just written off, you’ve no idea, no idea at all what that’s like. All that exposure to another soul and you can’t even put it to any use because you don’t want to even see them again! Such a waste!’ Petula was never scared of decontextualising truth if she thought it would create a favourable impression with her listener, but when she was as aroused as this she stuck to the facts. ‘No idea what I was doing,’ she repeated. ‘All done with now anyway, he got the message this time, he won’t be back. It took all he had to try it just this once.’

  Noah nodded approvingly, his eyes drawn to her broad shoulders and flatpack back. ‘Generally you can take the measure of a man by who he falls in love with, so he couldn’t have been a complete wrong un, old Rory, let’s give him that, eh?’

  Regan dropped her banana skin under a loun
ger and adjusted her armbands, already too small for her, the plastic tight and constrictive round her little arms.

  ‘Mummy,’ she said firmly, ‘I think you’ve been with that man for quite long enough in my opinion.’ It was something she had watched someone say on the television earlier that day and she was surprised at how quickly the opportunity to use it had arrived.

  Her mother threw her head back and laughed exaggeratedly. ‘The two of you? Amazing that such different men could fall for the same lady! I wonder what you both saw in me? Do tiresome men appreciate beauty? Or is it their miserable little sagas they love, looking to drag you in so as to dramatise the misery of their genes?’ She laughed again, a high-pitched crack of the whip that threatened to bring down a passing seagull, the noise and gesture, for all its unnerving vivacity, perfectly natural and a little frightening. So too were the strong intimations of sex, sealing the couple into their own world, away from their daughter and the rest of the party. Regan did not like how this invisible chemistry made her feel. Indeed, the spoken exchange between Petula and Noah, lacking physical contact, was more profoundly sexual than the deed she had observed between her mother and Anycock weeks before. Ignorant, as Regan still was, of what sex ‘meant’, all she could go on was what made her feel sick, and her mother drinking in Noah’s attention, rather than lying coldly under Anycock, was moving her to retch.

  ‘Mummy…’

  Noah had filled a plastic glass and, handing it to Petula, picked up his and toasted her. The lovers had taken self-regard to such a level that they looked like they were the guests they had been waiting for, everyone else a lesser version of their self-regard. The moment seemed deliberately staged for them. There was no rival centre of interest. Regan scanned the crowd with disapproval, blaming it for Noah’s chutzpah. Why were they letting him get away with stealing her mother? It was an audience that would be pruned, fallen out with and replaced in time, amounting to a ‘Mark One’ crowd unsure of their value. These men, more at home in the safer fashions of future decades, straining in their minimalist trunks, too-tight tops, outlandish sunglasses and clumsily parted bouffants, hardly knew what was expected of them. In awkward clusters they gathered round the pool as miscast accidents on the set of the wrong film. The women were the ones in ascendency, buoyed by tupperware and feminism, slowed down by husbands who would provide them with the security that would make the ensuing years so unsatisfyingly survivable. It seemed to Regan when she looked back that this was the juncture her parents were made for, their desire to dazzle and preen the spark that created but could not survive her. Narcissus and Echo, Noah and Petula, the attraction was the moment, unrepeatable, fated not to recur the next spring or the one after, however hot it got. Some crucial specific, so seasoned as to remain superficially apparent for years to come, would vanish, the metaphysics of memory slipping towards the materialism of the present, the balance of elements broken for good.