Prodigies Page 5

  Eventually, the fitting over, Philip was about to put on his hat, held out to him by the tailor, when suddenly, on one of the whims that became more and more frequent as he grew richer and richer, he said: ‘I’ve an idea. How about making a suit for this boy over here? He’s growing out of that one, and in any case it never amounted to much. Made in Jamaica and made – you’ll never believe this – by a black woman, I swear to God by a black woman, not by a man.’

  ‘Certainly, sir. Certainly. What sort of cloth did you have in mind? I’ve just received a new consignment of worsted from Bradford.’

  The discussion took a long time, as Philip fingered now one bale of cloth and now another. The measuring took almost as long, with Philip admonishing Sammy ‘Stand up straight, straight!’ as though the boy could not merely hear him but also understand him. When Sammy’s body still remained slouched – it was as though he were limply submitting himself to something painful or degrading – Alexine jumped up and taking hold of his shoulders eventually jerked him into the posture required. The two men laughed.

  As they left the shop, Alexine felt mortification surge up in her, like an acrid bile. Her father had never ordered any clothes for her, but here he was ordering a suit for the boy from a tailor known to be the most expensive and exclusive in the country. It was useless for her to tell herself that her father was hardly the person to choose the cloth and cut of a dress for a girl and that that was a task for her mother and Aunt Addy. Jealousy continued to simmer within her, until Philip took the two of them into a Swiss teashop recently opened and ordered for each a cake, piled high with whipped cream and surmounted by the last wild strawberries of the year, and a glass of lemonade.

  On the night before Philip’s departure on another of his journeys, this time to Spain, Portugal and Italy, Alexine, in the room next to his, could not sleep. Downstairs a farewell dinner party, for members of Harriet’s family and the closest of the family’s friends, was in progress. At one point, unable to hear what the distant voices were saying to each other, she crept out of bed and went to the top of the stairs. But strain though she might, she could make out only a little here and there. Philip’s voice, though by no means the loudest, dominated the others with its deep vibrancy. The Admiral’s eldest daughter’s laugh soared out, an eldritch shriek, whenever her brother-in-law said something that amused her in that whimsical, slightly mocking manner of his.

  When her legs and arms became chilly, Alexine returned once more to her bedroom, only to be awakened by the sound of her mother playing the piano. Alexine had already displayed a talent for a variety of things – languages, history, painting, calligraphy – but music was not one of them. Eventually she slept.

  What roused her was the sound of footsteps outside her door, hurried but firm, which she could only suppose must be her father’s. Then whoever it was – yes, it must be Papa – was mounting the narrow staircase that led up to the attics. She listened with beating heart, sensing something strange and even perhaps sinister, but not able to guess what it was. Then there were the sounds of footsteps descending, one set clearly once more her father’s and the other faint and draggingly irregular. Who was this second person, descending with Papa?

  She lay back again on her pillow and stared up at the ceiling, luminous in the moonlight that came through a window spider-webbed with a premature frost. Then she heard a sound, unmistakable and, in that context, late at night, when everyone had long since gone to bed, unnerving, even terrifying. It was Sammy, it could not be anyone else. It was the strange guttural, yelping sound that he made when he wished to refuse something or protest about something. Startled, she raised herself on her elbow, straining to hear more. After several seconds, the sound was repeated.

  She got out of bed and stood in the middle of the icy room, wondering what was happening and what she should do. Then she edged to the door and finally opened it. Gathering courage she crept down the corridor. Outside her father’s bedroom she halted, hands pressed to mouth. Then she said: ‘Father! Father!’ She repeated it more loudly. She put out a hand, hesitated, rapped, once, twice.

  She heard him cross the room swiftly, and then the door had been pulled open and they were facing each other. ‘ What are you doing?’ he demanded, with a mixture of astonishment and anger.

  ‘I heard – noises. I was frightened.’ She looked past him and saw Sammy, barefoot and in his nightshirt, seated rigidly on an edge of her father’s four-poster bed. One hand was gripping one of the inlaid satin-wood posts. His lips were drawn back oddly, to expose his teeth in what looked like the snarl of a cornered animal.

  Philip, his nightshirt revealing a gold cross on a chain, nestling in the grey hair of his chest – Alexine had never seen that cross before – came closer to her. He took her by the arm, tightened his grip on it, turned her round and began to lead her back along the corridor to her room. ‘There was nothing of which to be frightened. I heard a noise from Sammy’s room. He’d had a nightmare – at least I supposed that he’d had a nightmare, since he was making such a noise. So I went upstairs and brought him down to sleep with me.’

  She herself had heard nothing from Sammy’s attic, which was directly above her own room. If he had been making a noise and her father had heard him, then she would have heard him too. But she did not dare to say that, so clearly was Papa angry with her.

  ‘Now go to sleep! Go on!’

  He all but pushed her back into her room. Then he closed the door and she could hear him marching back to his own room and Sammy.

  Chapter Six

  PHILIP WAS GREY-FACED and almost silent at breakfast on the morning of his departure. Out of habit, he helped himself lavishly to the elaborate meal set out, as always, hot dishes above spirit stoves, on the heavily carved oak sideboard. But he ate with an effort, bleak eyes staring out of the window at the frost-whitened lawn that sloped up to a row of bare trees, and said hardly a word.

  ‘Are you feeling all right?’ Harriet asked him at one moment, when her attempt to make conversation had received little more than inert monosyllables – ‘ Yes’, ‘No’, ‘ Perhaps’, ‘Really?’ – in answer.

  ‘Of course I’m all right.’ He struggled to swallow some cheese. ‘What should be wrong with me? I’m thinking.’ He added: ‘I have a lot to think about.’ Feeling nauseated by all that he had forced himself to swallow, he was aware that not merely Harriet and Addy but also the two children were now looking at him – the women with darting glances from under lowered lids, Harriet and Sammy with their hurt, bewildered eyes directed fully at him.

  Suddenly he pushed his chair away from the table, the food less than half consumed, and jumped to his feet. ‘There are things I still have to see to.’ He hurried out of the room.

  ‘Is he all right?’ Addy asked.

  Harriet shrugged. ‘I hope so. He’s getting too old for all this travelling. He should retire – I keep telling him that.’

  ‘What would happen to the business?’

  ‘Well, the boys could see to it perfectly well.’ Harriet and Philip always referred to his two sons as ‘the boys’ even though they were both now middle-aged.

  ‘Could they? They haven’t got his gift.’

  ‘I sometimes think that his gift is really a curse,’ Harriet said quietly, pouring out some more coffee for herself.

  They were talking, as so often, as though Daan, standing beside the sideboard, the white napkin that was his badge of office over one arm, were merely an automaton.

  ‘Oh, look, mama! Papa is walking in the garden.’ Alexine pointed out of the window.

  Without either hat or coat, head bowed, Philip was slowly walking, large, white, ungloved hands clasped behind his back, up the lawn towards the stunted trees. All of them watched him. When he reached the trees, he put his hand to the bole of one, an elder, and then, as though exhausted, rested his body against it. He raised his head, he looked back at the house that for more than a decade had been the hub of his empire.

  ‘Wha
t is he doing? He’ll catch his death,’ Addy said.

  Again Harriet shrugged. Her impulse was to run out through the french windows and up the lawn to urge him to come in out of the icy cold. But she knew that, if she did that, she would only anger him, as she always did if she attempted to deflect him from a chosen course. She was peripheral to his life, she had realized for a long time, and she had come to accept that without either recrimination or pain, merely with an intermittent sorrow.

  Philip embraced the two children with a suffocating intensity of emotion, taking them in his arms and pressing them close against his chest, with such force that Sammy, hardly able to breathe, eventually squirmed to free himself. Alexine, in contrast, was as inert as one of her many rejected dolls. Within her there were feelings both of terror and of loss, such as she had never before experienced when her father had left on one of his journeys.

  Philip, though she did not suspect it, was consumed with the same emotions as herself. He knew, he could not have said why, that he would never return. Yes, this farewell, the icy wind buffeting them even under the porte-cochère, while one of the horses, a handsome bay mare presented to him by an English client, repeatedly shook her head violently from side to side and neighed as though in distress, was to be the last.

  ‘Be a good girl,’ he said and then gave a long sigh, as he set Alexine down.

  She tried to make a joke of a situation that she felt to be eerily beyond all of them. ‘Oh, no, Papa. I want to be a bad girl. That’s much more interesting.’

  Now he embraced Addy, with the formality that had always existed between them, and then, finally, Harriet, kissing her first lightly on the forehead and then on each cheek. ‘Don’t worry, my dear. I’ll soon be back.’

  ‘I really don’t know why you have to go on all these journeys.’ She spoke with uncharacteristic fretfulness. He stared at her, frowning. He was so used to her being always cheerful, calm and resourceful, whatever the occasion.

  ‘You know why I have to go,’ he said. His voice was hollow and listless. He blinked his eyes and then removed his pince-nez – he had only recently taking to wearing them – folded them and put them in the breast pocket of his jacket. Without them, the eyes looked small and myopic.

  With a sharp pang of sorrow, Harriet thought: ‘ He’s an old man!’

  Her lessons over, Alexine sat on at the schoolroom table, trying to concentrate on her Latin primer but unable to do so. As so often in the past days, she was thinking of her father. Where was he? What was he doing? Above all, why had he acted so strangely on that evening before his departure and at the departure itself? She wished, oh, how she wished that she could ask Sammy why she had found him seated like that, body rigid and lips drawn back from his teeth, late at night on an edge of the four-poster bed, the cone-shaped canopy above him looking as though it might at any moment crash down to snuff out his life.

  Of one thing she was sure. Her father was in danger. But what danger could possibly threaten him? He had been on so many of these journeys; his young male secretary, Hans, a shadowy, handsome, taciturn figure with a faint stammer, little more than a momentary hesitation, was, as so often, accompanying him; he travelled in the utmost luxury, always putting up in suites in the best hotel on offer; and, as he himself would often boast, he had never had a day’s illness in his life. But, for all that, she felt a constantly fluctuating anxiety.

  She jumped up from the schoolroom table, almost knocking over her chair, and hurried out. ‘Sammy! Sammy!’ Then, as so often, she realized the futifity of calling him. A maid, upstairs at work, leaned over the banisters to shout over them: ‘I think he’s in his room, miss. I heard him going up there.’

  Sammy lay out on his bed. He had not taken off even his shoes or the jacket of the suit that, at such expense, Philip had had tailored for him. His face was twisted sideways on the pillow, the eyes expressionless. He did not turn his head when Alexine walked in, since he did not hear her. Then she moved into the periphery of his vision and he started up. He stared at her for a moment in alarm, then the large mouth opened in a smile. He slung his legs off the bed, preparatory to getting off it. The room was full of that musky odour of his. It always excited her, so that, in the years ahead, whenever she smelled a similar odour, she would always think, with a sorrowful longing, of him.

  She beckoned, then mouthed: ‘Come, come, come!’

  Miraculously, he repeated what he could just recognize as ‘Come!’, the sound emerging from far back in his throat, almost like a cough. He knew, she was sure, that she was summoning him to the schoolroom.

  Some days before Alexine had asked Mademoiselle if Sammy might attend her lessons. But Mademoiselle had given a derisive laugh: ‘Chérie, what would be the point? He would take in nothing. And he would be a distraction for you. No, no, that’s not a good idea.’ When Alexine had appealed to Harriet, she too had at once dismissed the notion out of hand. ‘No, I’m sorry. The idea’s ridiculous. I know that, with your father away, the boy has little to occupy him. But he would be bored to tears, sitting there and hearing – and understanding – nothing. Mademoiselle is right.’

  ‘Please, Mama!’

  ‘No. I’ve said no.’

  ‘Please!’

  ‘No! No, no, no!’

  On this occasion, Alexine began by setting Sunny a simple sum. As, frowning, biting on the end of his pencil, he worked at it, she stared fixedly at him. With an intense exertion of her already formidable will, she was once more struggling, as she had repeatedly struggled in the past, to enter into a being so alien from her own. No use! She gave up, baffled and exasperated by her inability to communicate at anything deeper than a totally superficial level. Unlike any other member of the household, whether above or below stairs, she had developed an extraordinary instinct for what those inchoate noises that he effortfully jerked up from his diaphragm, were indicating. But, fatally, they indicated merely objects and actions, never thoughts or emotions. The desire to know what it was like to be someone other than herself, always an obsession with her from her earliest years, now became, in his case, an unappeasable longing.

  Eventually, he pushed the piece of paper towards her and watched her as she put a tick against one sum and then another. ‘Good,’ she mouthed at him, and his face then broke into a smile. ‘All correct.’

  For a while she set him some further tasks, this time of subtraction, at which he was less adept. Then she reached for the slate beside her and, taking up a piece of chalk, wrote on it in capital letters ‘RIDE?’ At once, relieved, he jumped to his feet. Riding was the one occupation at which he surpassed her. Back in Jamaica he must have had practice in it, she had decided, to show such mastery of even the edgiest of mounts. Philip would often say of him in mingled admiration and amazement, ‘ He’s a natural, an absolute natural.’

  The groom or the under-groom usually accompanied them on their rides. But that afternoon the former was ill and the latter had taken the bay mare to the blacksmith to be shod. They themselves therefore saddled the horses, before setting off, she ahead of him, across the polder in the greying autumn light. The air was damp, the sky low, but Alexine was filled with a mounting exhilaration, such as she often now felt when he and she went out riding together.

  At one point they saw two other riders in the misty distance, a girl who had been one of Alexine’s closest friends since childhood, and her mother, who had been one of Harriet’s. The two figures at once reined in their horses, then a moment later veered off in a different direction. Alexine realized that the mother must have decided that she and her daughter should avoid the nigger ragamuffin – as the girl, taking her cue from her mother, had, to Alexine’s indignation, more than once referred to Sammy.

  In a bid to escape from this uncomfortable realization, Alexine brought down her riding crop, urging her horse into a gallop. Her hair, long, lustrous and thick – she had inherited that hair from her mother – streamed behind her in the wind. Sammy galloped behind her.

  Fro
m a low, bedraggled clump of bushes, a skeletally thin dog emerged. On a number of occasions it had been caught foraging for food in the dustbins of the house; it was also suspected of having from time to time killed a chicken or a duck. Philip had said that he was going to shoot it, but Alexine, always tender-hearted to animals, had begged him not to do so. The dog now stood its ground, front legs wide apart and ears cocked, as the horses hurtled towards it. Then it began to bark on a single, high-pitched note. Alexine’s horse reared up and swerved away. Insecure from riding side-saddle, as her mother always insisted, Alexine knew herself to be falling, attempted to right her balance, and then crashed to the frozen earth. She felt a sulphurous taste at the contact, and simultaneously a fiery pain shooting up her left forearm.

  Sammy dismounted and ran towards her, while the two horses waited in total insouciance. The dog had slunk away, back into the bushes from which it had emerged. Sammy knelt down beside her, making incoherent noises. She endeavoured to smile. Had she broken her arm? She moved it. She decided that she had not done so, even though that brief, cautious movement had sent that fiery pain once again shooting up her forearm. She struggled to get to her feet, all at once aware that, since in her fall she had shattered the ice glazing a deep puddle, her skirt was spattered with mud.

  His face was extremely close to hers. Then his arm was around her. She leaned against it, and once more struggled, now with his assistance, to get to her feet. She had never before touched him, not once. She could feel the muscular hardness of his body so close to hers, and could smell, with a hallucinatory intensity, that musky odour of his. Suddenly, astoundingly, he was gripping her to him, both arms around her shoulders, his cheek against hers. She could feel all the violence of his desperation. Overcome with a momentary terror, she pushed him away from her and, a moment later, wished that she had not done so. Frowning, lips pursed, she rubbed at her arm, rubbed at it repeatedly, while he stared down at it. Then going to her horse, she made a number of efforts to remount. She was only able to do so when, putting his hands to her waist, he assisted her by half-lifting her up.