John Self
7th Apr 2006, 21:02
This follows part 2 (http://palimpsest.org.uk/forum/showthread.php?t=1139). In fact there is a long scene after that but before this, which is too long to reproduce here. It features Miles, with hopefully humorous misjudgement, taking his son Tom and Tom's weedy friend Daniel to his seedy 'gentlemen's club' for Tom's ninth birthday. Miles enjoys a private lap dance while the boys disappear and Miles fears they've been abducted by a pervert, with hilarious consequences etc. And then: - oh but first, a Twainish disclaimer against seeking plausible characterisation or rich thematic tapestries herein. If it makes you smile, it has achieved its purpose. And now I've set the bar low, watch me miss it.
In the end it wasn’t this that stopped Daniel from coming to their house, or seeing Tom at all. On the drive home from the club Miles, enriched with a bellyful of alcohol, didn’t quite catch the meaning of the road sign which with elegant luminescence pointed out a sharp bend ahead, and bounced the car onto the pavement into a wall. The vehicle’s nose instantaneously crumpled from Labrador to Pekingese, prompting Miles to reflect muddily on how lucky he was not to have bought one of those toughly constructed, expensive cars which could have brought the wall down on top of them. The presence of the wall too, very fortunately, prevented Tom and Daniel, unbelted, from being thrown out of the vehicle to cause a headache for the rescue services. Instead, with the windscreen pressed up to the wall like a framed picture, they simply bounced off it and back into the well of the car, sustaining fewer than twelve fractures between them. Miles, jack-knifed around the steering column, found oddly that there was a sharp pain in his back when he tried to turn to check on the boys, and that he couldn’t quite stretch to his mobile phone which had shot into the well of the passenger seat, even though a certain pulling looseness in his left shoulder made him feel that his arm might well be able to reach further than normal. As the minutes passed, however, and nothing happened to make things any worse as long as he remained very still, the urgency slipped away. Couldn’t he just … stay here? Isn’t everything OK, as it is? Then from somewhere nearby, he heard a series of sounds, like a call and response from mating birds. A brief, high-pitched pip, followed by a howl – although as they went on, it became hard to tell which led and which followed. Miles found the beeps and cries hypnotic, drawing him into head-injury sleep. It was Daniel, upside-down in the back, effortfully working through the menus on his mobile to call emergency services with three broken bones in his arm.
The accident led to several losses for Miles. His car and his licence. A month or two of sleep, while his neck and back toned down their screaming. His no-claims bonus, when Daniel’s parents pursued for what seemed like a very long time, and with needless tenacity, a personal injury claim against Miles. This gave Kitty the idea of doing the same for Tom, although his practically vulcanised resistance to injury meant that he was less shattered than the fragile Daniel, and his award of compensation proportionately lower. The only tiny hope that Miles dared to cherish was dashed too when he found that the money was held in trust by the court for Tom until he was eighteen, and he couldn’t get his hands on it at all.
“This is all the Americans’ fault,” he said one day in the study. Kitty was at the table writing what looked like a flow chart and so was, he considered, a captive audience. When she didn’t answer he said it again, a little more declamatory.
Kitty put down her pen and raised her eyes to him. “What do you mean, Miles?”
“All this litigious -” he searched for the word, “…ness. The claims culture. I mean when I was young and you had a scrape, you, you picked yourself up and dusted yourself off and pulled yourself together and…”
“Miles! It was hardly a scrape. The poor lad was like a jigsaw by all accounts. Not that you’d know. He could have a funny foot for the rest of his life apparently.”
“Not him. I mean Tom. It’s those parasites, so-called lawyers. This is all their fault.”
“They’re only doing what I asked them to.”
“There you are then. It’s all your fault.”
“Miles.” This was the tone which made Miles short for do shut up.
“But it wasn’t even a proper accident! I mean – it was an accident. Nobody hit the car, it wasn’t anyone’s fault… Why can’t people understand any more that sometimes accidents happen and it just isn’t anybody’s fault?”
“Miles,” Kitty said, perhaps more sympathetically this time – or just with resignation – “you tried to drive the car through a wall. It was all your fault.”
But this was something Miles didn’t understand. One of his other losses in the accident had been 36 hours of memory of the events leading to the crash. Tom’s birthday, the miniature tea party he wasn’t invited to, besting Kitty in an argument (if it earned that description), the escape to the club with its blend of priapic frustration and abduction anxiety – all had been shaken out of his head by the definitive thwack of the impact. Afterwards, on hearing ghoulish descriptions by the doctors of how close he had come to death, Miles pictured his head pulled back on his neck and set vibrating like a tuning fork. This supplanted the real experience, which was of an uneventful serenity so unusual to Miles that if he had been able to remember it, he would possibly have spent the rest of his life seeking out near-death collisions to replicate the effect. As it was, he accepted the optimistically grim descriptions given to him in hospital and settled on the accident as a pivot of trauma in his life. How Everything Changed. My Car Wreck Hell. Little Did I Know…
It was only when he returned home that he discovered that his credit card was missing. He patted his pockets and sawed drawers open and shut and skimmed his palms pointlessly down the backs of things; he considered and dismissed potential culprits in Kitty and Daniel and sticky-fingered paramedics. Finally he reported it to his card issuer, who cancelled the card with effect from close of business on the next bank working day and told Miles that charges of several thousand pounds had accrued in the last 48 hours. They transferred him, in accordance with normal practice, to the police regional card fraud unit, and without intent or desire Miles found he had become a victim of crime. He wallowed in this for a bit and in doing so discovered that he felt much worse about the theft than he had before. He indulged the feeling by staying in bed all day once or twice, and sloped around the house balancing an expression on his face which tried simultaneously to reluctantly decline sympathy and urge it on. Unfortunately Kitty didn’t notice – and if she had, thought Miles, would probably resist curiosity just to frustrate him – and Alicia was too well trained in overlooking even hurricane-strength atmospheres to pick up on such moderate signals. By this time Miles could no longer tell whether his feelings of victimhood were real or imagined and now genuinely felt that he needed cheering up. He decided to visit Tom in hospital. How could the sight of his son in plaster and traction not make him feel gratitude that his only loss – give or take a few transient memories – was financial?
Tom looked terrible. He was sallow and hollow-eyed. The bandages and hoists didn’t look as though they were restraining him – Miles would have expected his son to be flipping and thrashing – so much as supporting him, holding him together. The sight of him actually made Miles more depressed, and he decided to leave again after the shortest possible decent interval. He wondered how best to start an unmediated conversation with his son.
“So how’s the … uh”, he gestured vaguely at one of the plastered limbs. It was hard to decide where to begin. “Hm?”
Tom, his chin pressed down onto his chest, had a permanent frown as he looked at his father that suggested either intolerable pain or intolerable hatred. Miles hoped it was pain. Not hoped exactly.
“Still,” he said, smiling, “it’s not so bad when it happens at your age. Those bones of yours will be even stronger when they knit! Not like when you’re older. You get to a certain age and they just shoot you. Like a horse!” He wondered suddenly if Tom had a thing for horses. You had to be so careful. No: that was Kitty. Wasn’t it?
“The man said I’ll have to have pins in my leg,” said Tom in a throaty tone Miles strained to recognise.
“Oh. Well… I suppose you’ll be like one of your cyborgs then! All the –“
“And they’ll have to take them out and put new ones in every six months to let me grow properly. Otherwise” – he stopped for a moment to take two slow breaths – “I’ll have one leg a foot shorter than the other.”
Miles laughed at the image before he could stop himself. “Sorry. I thought you were making a joke there, son. A foot shorter! Ha ha.” He was pleased with this recovery. He was also feeling a little bit cheered up after all.
There was a pause, from which Miles understood that Tom had had enough of talking about himself. Change the subject, he thought, keep his mind active, keep the poor mite’s spirits up.
“I suppose you’ve heard about the trouble I’ve been having, too, son.”
Tom was just frowning again, but sedately, thought Miles.
“Some bastard stole my credit card when we had the accident.” He nodded solemnly. “The police are treating it very seriously. Thousands they’ve taken me for. Not that it’s the money! I think it must have been whoever rang for the ambulance. Some good Samaritan eh!”
Tom breathed stiffly. “It was Daniel rang them.”
“Ah no. No, no. You can’t blame him Tom,” Miles said with confidence because he had already done so and ruled it out.
Tom made a strange noise from his chest without opening his mouth. His eyes slipped closed. Miles looked at him for a moment, then hesitated before moving off in case it was some sort of battle of wills.
Only when Tom’s mouth suddenly dropped open in a way that Miles felt he had seen on TV, did he jump up and walk quickly to the ward office, where a woman in blue pressed buttons to summon a man in white and a flurry of activity began from which Miles, having set it in motion, seemed excluded.
After a time the doctor approached with a grim expression and led Miles into an empty side ward.
“What exactly was wrong with him when you called the emergency, Mr Winter?” he said.
“Well,” began Miles, “he went like that” – adopting the pose. “And then like that.” Then he straightened up again and said, “I mean – he’s going to be OK?”
The doctor sighed, or took a deep breath. Miles braced. “He … fell asleep.”
Miles thought: Oh my God. Kitty. “He’s. But. He. I was just talking to him.” He was surprised to find his throat closing up.
“No Mr Winter. He fell asleep.” The doctor smiled reflexively. The good news smile. “He was tired. A bit annoyed when we woke him actually. Think you’d better leave him for a while.”
Miles felt his chest unclutch. “Right. Of course.” He was being told to stop interfering. But something else had come back to him. “He was telling me about his leg? I didn’t realise…”
“A simple greenstick fracture of the left tibia, Mr Winter. I thought your wife would have told you. You were a bit out of it yourself when we were treating him.” The smile again.
“Oh, so no – um – rivets or wires or – anything…”
“Oh heavens no. Bones are like rubber at that age. He’ll be back to his trampolining in a few months. I just hope he sticks to trampolines this time!”
Miles must have looked blank, because the doctor said, “He told me he’s representing his school in gymnastics, on the trampoline?”
Miles looked over the doctor’s shoulder. “Oh. Yes.” It was possible, he supposed … – no it wasn’t. The idea of the sociopathic little bastard doing anything for his school was laughable. “I’d … better go and tell his mum the good news,” he added, reflecting the doctor’s smile back at him. The doctor nodded and moved soundlessly away.
Miles wound his way out of the hospital – across, round, down, across, round, down – into the car park and drove away. He thought about going back to the house to talk to Kitty about this taste Tom had acquired for lying. But what would be the point? She would deny it, or blame Miles, or ignore him. He was developing a headache, which seemed to be pulsing from the base of his skull through his brain out to just above his eyes. Women! he thought. Oh – and: Kids!
*
Miles found himself becoming despondent after the accident. He couldn’t afford to go to his club until his card was reissued (there seemed to be some delay, no doubt something to do with the ongoing police investigation to catch the thief, Miles thought optimistically), and when that option was removed he realised how little else there was that he liked doing.
“You’ll have to get a job,” said Kitty.
“I didn’t ask you,” he said, although in truth if he had wanted to ask her, to bring the subject up without bringing it up, this is just how he would have done it: displays of bank statements creased with worry and letters with financial logos across the kitchen table, instead of in his study where he normally did this kind of thing.
“This is my job,” he went on, after a pause to gather his documents around him possessively, but feeling less like a custodian of treasury records than a tramp on a park bench.
“What?” said Kitty. “This second childhood of yours? Getting up at lunchtime, driving like a joyrider, flirting like a teenager? I hate to think what you’ll be like when you hit puberty.”
“Flirting?” said Miles, taken unawares. He and Kitty hadn’t flirted for years. Often, for proper couples, fighting could turn to flirting, but there were no second acts in Miles and Kitty’s battles.
“Well, if you can call it that,” she said. “Wouldn’t do much for me, I must say. But then you never did, did you Miles? Do much for me.”
Miles gathered that whatever she was talking about, whatever it was he was supposed to have done, she was deliberately discussing it as though it was understood between them. It was a hopeless situation: if he humoured her – not caring what she thought about whatever it was – it was a tacit admission of guilt. If he queried her, innocently protested I don’t know what you’re talking about, it would sound like a badly rehearsed denial, plotted in tandem with the sin.
Fortunately he didn’t have to say anything, as Kitty could carry on the conversation without him speaking.
“I mean Miles,” she could Miles for miles when she wanted to jibe at him, “I know you pay girls for it anyway, but what surprises me is that you now expect them to do your washing and dusting as well.”
“What?” said Miles. He couldn’t help it.
“Oh yes, Miles,” Kitty smiled, misinterpreting him. “Your secret is safe with me. Although I can’t guarantee I won’t let it slip occasionally.” She was dipping into a drawer for something Miles couldn’t see. He leaned back to resist any impression that he might be craning his neck to see. “Did I say occasionally?”
Miles’s confusion was only increasing as Kitty sought to drip-feed her revelation. The washing and dusting comment was troubling him: could he have done something he had forgotten about? He didn’t think she could have been talking about his membership of the club. He considered that an unspoken understanding between them. He was right about the unspoken part: until now.
“Mmm. I had a policeman in the other day, you see.” Kitty slid shut the drawer and skimmed some shards of plastic across the surface of the table to him. Miles deftly assembled them, more through some childish completion impulse than to find out what it was, as he could tell even when they were skidding to a halt before him that it was his quartered credit card. He wished briefly that the card had been cut into nine, or sixteen – a more challenging puzzle to solve – just to give him more time before he had to say anything.
But once again he didn’t have to say anything. “Apparently, Miles, they found it in some … lap-dancing club.”
Miles looked at her, making an o with his mouth, interested, hopeful.
“Well, someone must have stolen it, I said.”
Miles nodded slowly, in a studied impression of realisation dawning. “Ah…”
“…Some tragic filthy old wanker who couldn’t do it with his wife any more so he had to resort to paying some Romanian halfwit half his age to jiggle her breasts in his face. Must have stolen it.”
Miles protested silently. Highest class establishment. Fully of age. English roses. One hundred per cent breast meat.
“And then this arrived.” Kitty was holding by its edges a cream-coloured envelope, thickly textured.
Miles knew that quality woven bond anywhere. Ever since the bank for the better class of customer had closed his account and he had been reduced to viewing his finances through window envelopes, there was only one organisation left which wrote to him on and in such extravagant paper. It was the stationery equivalent of fur coat and no knickers, a paper-thin (100gsm) veneer covering the blushes of their essential seediness. As Kitty flipped open the flap of the envelope Miles could see that it had already been broken.
“Did you,” he said, thinking to stand up but then thinking better of it, leaving his hands gripping the edge of the table in preparation, “open a letter addressed to me?” Even as he said it he felt like a teenager seeking to rely on just process against a parent who has uncovered years of secrets cleaning a bedroom.
“You can’t trust anyone these days, can you Miles.” Kitty pulled out the paper and unfolded it. It was stiff and looked as though it should carry something life-changing: a will, a deed.
“’Dear Mr Winter…’” began Kitty.
Even now, his fingers whitening against the table, Miles hoped the club might have exercised some discretion. We found this card and think it might be… We obtained your details from the police identity fraud unit… We enclose voucher for trial membership to make up for… You don’t know us but…
Kitty cleared her throat. “’Re: Membership No. 003492.’”
Miles’s head dropped a little.
“’We regret to advise that the Club Committee at its meeting on’” – Miles lifted his head again. Until now his main stressor had been Kitty confronting him about his membership. In reality, he saw now from the smirk on her face, she probably didn’t care much, was more amused by his embarrassment than angry. But what was this? – “’voted unanimously to terminate your membership under paragraph 7.2 of our terms and conditions.’”
Miles’s head dropped again. His mind raced to fill in the details as Kitty read them aloud. In reality he only remembered each detail as she mentioned it, but he felt he was just in advance of her, which let him think he was recovering his memories of the lost hours. That was something. Meanwhile Kitty related his sins in the eyes of the Club – and they had always seemed so non-judgemental – of giving his card to the girl for a private dance, then sodding off in a panic with Tom and Daniel without telling them to stop charging it (though Miles expected the girl found some other way to fill her time: doubling up, one way or another). Then reporting it stolen and all the upset that had caused: the financial loss to the Club of members who, faces flushed with anger and shame, had vowed never to return after the presence of uniformed police, taking of statements and so on, took the edge off their evening.
“’…never darken our floors again,’” concluded Kitty, folding the letter and slipping it tightly into the envelope, which she then smoothed in her hand, like a cushion or a cat. “Or words to that effect. How awful for you, Miles. You might have to have sex with someone you live with for a change!” Miles did stand up then, to snatch the envelope from Kitty, but also to protest at the suggestion that their ice-cold marital relations were unilateral. But then he was thrown entirely when Kitty added, as Alicia walked into the kitchen, “Ah, here she is! I’d better leave you to it.” Out she smartly marched.
*
Miles spent some time after that chewing over what Kitty had said that day, or what he could remember of it, or what he could remember of it that wasn’t simple vinegar-laced sarcasm or abuse. Every way he came at it led to one conclusion: that she was suggesting he had a thing going, or wanted to have a thing going, with Alicia. It seemed an insane notion. She was half his age. She was, frankly – he whispered this in his head, you know how people are these days – not quite his class. Plus they had nothing in common.
He thought of the girls in the Club.
Miles pondered some more on how Kitty could have come to this conclusion. He was fairly sure he hadn’t paid Alicia any more attention recently than usual; or indeed any attention at all. She was just there. She picked things up, she did things before and after he did things – prepared the table and cleaned up afterwards, or ironed his clothes before he wore them and washed them after he took them off. She chaperoned Tom while he did whatever he did most of the day: and then supervised his eating and washing and putting to bed. Unless Kitty did that, or both of them: Tom was probably a two-woman job. (Or one man, thought Miles.)
Put like that, he saw now that in the wheel of their family – the broken wheel – Alicia was the hub and he was just a spoke. She was central, a force, with knowledge of all the family members that no-one else shared. It was power: although probably not the sort of power, Miles thought, that aphrodisiacs are made of. But if he hadn’t been flirting with Alicia, then what was it that Kitty had seen? Could it be (his heart quickened a little, pathetically, at the thought of the thought) that Alicia was flirting with him? Women picked up on these things, after all, in a way that men didn’t. Miles in particular was hopelessly obtuse at this sort of thing: though in his defence, he hadn’t had many opportunities to practise lately, as Kitty would never stoop so low as to flirt with him, and the girls in the Club would never play that hard-to-get. It was not always so: when Miles and Kitty first met, at a College Ball, she gave out signals in every body language she knew, stroking her hair and aligning her toes and fingering her neckline – drawing attention, drawing down – so tirelessly that Miles thought she was one of those people who live on their nerves, can’t stay still. Except that they tended to be stringy, tendony, and Kitty clearly had some meat on her from the way she crossed and uncrossed her legs, repeatedly, and – now he noticed it – her cleavage… When he thought again about her masterful behaviour that night – literally instructing him on what to do to her and how, which was the moment he became absolutely certain he had pulled – it was hard to believe that it was the same woman with whom he now shared nothing but vengeful looks. What had happened to all that? To all those, for want of a better word, feelings?
Still, he thought, maybe he should look out for signals from Alicia in future. Maybe he should spend more time with Tom and her, get to know her a little better. And come to that, when had he last had his hair cut? In all of these ponderings, the one possibility he never gave consideration to – probably because it didn’t directly involve him – was that Kitty was accusing him of infidelity or intended infidelity to cover the evidence of her own.
*
In the days following the discovery that his membership of the Club had been cancelled, Miles adopted a stoic air. This was, he felt reasonably sure, probably – certainly – good for him. It would reduce his outgoings significantly. It would break his pathetic addiction to cheap (but expensive) sexual flurries with paid (but worth every penny) girls. Eventually. It might even rekindle relations between him and Kitty, though on reflection he wasn’t sure he wanted that, and was absolutely sure, on further reflection, that she didn’t.
However, in the weeks following, and months, the frustration became intolerable. He felt like a cow desperate to be milked, always minutes from bursting. He was determined not to pay for it again – at least, not until he could afford to; plus, the girls in the Club were hard to match. Once he had gone into the outskirts of the city, found a phone box and selected the most beautiful girl on the cards that lapped the windows and darkened the view. He detached her card and bent it in and out between his fingers as he punched in the number, nervous/confident as though it was a number taken in a nightclub days before.
Silence when the phone was answered and then, distantly, “…Hello?”
“Hello is that,” Miles looked at the card, “Terri?”
Another pause. “Sure honey,” the voice was American, and older than the picture. “I can get you Terri if that’s who you want.”
Miles hesitated.
“Or we have a lot of other sweet girls too, sir, something for all tastes.”
“Ah. Right. I just…” Miles was blushing furiously, glad no-one outside could see him through all the cards on the windows. “I was just…”
“You’re just looking for a little company,” the woman continued helpfully. He supposed that long silences were only permitted for the kind of calls you paid high for.
“Yes, but.” He looked at the girl on the card again. She was perfect: if a little unsubtle. A lot unsubtle. Would it have killed her to… “Is this Terri here? In the picture?”
“Well yes sir, that is representative of the girls we have available for you here.”
So it’s not her. Miles felt deflated, and then ashamed of himself. Even as he averted his eyes, he noticed the same girl on a range of other cards. It was unlikely, he thought (even as his pulse rose), that they were triplets… Looking around the phone box, he saw that this cloning was not unique. The dozens of cards around him had only a handful of girls in them, repeated in different colours and positions. It was like a game of happy families – in a sense. Maybe there were only six call girls in the entire city, spreading themselves thin.
“Sir?”
“Oh. Yes.”
“Would you like to make an arrangement with one of our girls? With Terri, or Nicole, or Symone…”
“Uh. Well… what do they look like?”
“You have the picture there sir.”
“What, they all look like this?” Triplets after all?
“Very much sir. All our girls are beauteous to behold.”
Miles was distracted by her friendly-formal manner. Beauteous? Behold? He was anticipating some terms and conditions in sonnet form to follow. But if you break it, consider it sold.
“Right. And … where are you?”
“No need to worry sir. We come to you.”
“Ah.” Miles looked upwards to think (spotting several more cards on the ceiling of the box: he noticed a girl just out of reach he quite liked the look of). Kitty wasn’t due for another trip to London for a week or two. “That might be difficult.”
“Where are you right now sir?”
Miles looked about him. Even with the festooned cards they would be visible to passers-by; the glass looked cold, the shelf uncomfortable, the dimensions cramped; and there was a certain odour. “No,” he said. “Oh no no.”
Suddenly the woman had a smile in her voice. “Ah, no sir. If you give me your location, I can recommend a hotel. Which can accommodate you and your personally selected girl very discreetly, sir.”
“Um,” said Miles, counting the cost. “Um…”
He made his excuses and left; or in fact, made up a booking (the lady had been so nice), made up a credit card number from batches of digits on the cards around him, and left, quickly.
He was determined not to pay for it again. But he was out of practice in the art of attracting sexual attention by any means other than cash or plastic. He had heard that women were attracted to men with children, and gave consideration to drafting Tom in: but then he thought about the disastrous night with him and Daniel in the Club, the memory of which was more vivid than ever; and besides, it wasn’t precisely the maternal type that he was looking for. He felt too old for the normal bar and club scene, where apparently everyone under the age of thirty had satisfactory sexual encounters on demand, judging from TV programmes and adverts. Tom wouldn’t be bringing girls home for a few years yet, and besides, even Miles would never stoop so low (although by the time he was, he might). He wondered idly – to a degree – whether he could reasonably persuade Alicia that some types of personal services fell within her terms of employment. Particularly if there was as much chemistry between them as Kitty seemed to think.
*
In the end he hit upon an idea which would solve the problems of access to women and shortage of cash. Miles decided to open their home – “our estate,” he said to Kitty – to the paying public. Within moments of hitting on the idea his head was filled with premonitions of young women: lithe and supple no doubt; foreign in all probability; perhaps an eastern European gymnastics troupe with some time to kill before their next exhibition tournament. During the tour he would catch the eye of the one who caught his eye, detain her at the end and offer a personal tour of some of the private bedchambers and the historical, um, erotical stories they held… He would not, of course, reduce himself to the level of one of the girls at the Club by charging the women for his attentions. In fact, if it became a deal-breaker, he wouldn’t rule out giving them their money back if it meant they agreed to go back upstairs with him.
“Don’t be ridiculous Miles, it’ll never work,” said Kitty, speaking about the opening the house to the public part of the plan, which was the only bit that Miles had explained to her.
“Why not?” he asked. This was the question Miles had found himself asking most commonly of Kitty in the long course of their marriage. It had become a catchphrase, almost. Hers was Why? They made an ineffective double act.
“Because…” began Kitty, then wishing she had placed the emphasis differently. Because was an answer in itself, particularly useful in dealing with Tom’s questions, but she had allowed herself to treat Miles like an adult and now she had to finish the sentence. And the problem was, she couldn’t think of any reasons why not. The house in itself was quite fascinating, both architecturally and historically. There had surely been no riper collection of misfits in one family down the years than the Winters; and misfits were fascinating, when you didn’t have to live with them. There had been all the gamblers, addicts and queers that Miles had told her about (she wondered now if this had been part of his seduction technique, or more accurately all of his seduction technique. It had worked), but more, low-key and interesting, that she had discovered through researches of her own. Unlike Miles, she occupied her idle hours – years – with something analogous to work: she now knew far more about Miles’s family history than he did, and her card index system of Winter genealogy was largely complete, with a full cast of tourist-friendly eccentrics.
There was Brougham Winter, who was responsible for having the present house built in the middle part of the 18th century. He had taken a mistress, which in those days was no social taboo, but omitted to tell her she was his mistress, and wooed and courted her with such efficiency that she agreed to marry him without his ever asking. He was a weak man, unable to oppose a woman (a Winter trait, thought Kitty), and allowed her to make all the necessary arrangements without ever managing to have the necessary conversation. With no backbone to do anything about it himself, he nursed a tiny hope that some godly force might intervene and prevent him from becoming a bigamist. A divorce: but that would be social death. Or a change in the law: and although he was acquainted with several members of both Houses, eyebrows and questions might be raised, in the country and (more importantly) at home, over his lobbying for a law to enable Englishmen to take a harem of wives. He was reduced, then, to hoping for a tragic intervention – death was so … uncontroversial – that his mistress might die before the ceremony. Or, since he did love her very much, that his wife might die. He loved her too, though, so there was always the possibility that he himself might die in time. In the end, none of the three did, which Brougham thought was statistically extraordinary.
So he married his mistress, Sarah, while still married to his wife, Katrin. He decided that the only way he could maintain the double life was by having a new house built, a seat for the Winters, with separate entrances, living quarters, rooms, and so on. And so for all the first year of his second marriage – which was the eleventh year of his first – both his wives were bundled off to family members elsewhere in the country while he lived on site. It was the happiest, and most peaceful, year of his life.
Despite being away from the site, both his wives felt their wishes and requirements known in the planning of the new two-family home. Katrin was insistent that the house must be in the Classical style, while Sarah showed equally unbending preference for a Gothic masterpiece. Architects were scrolled up and dismissed. Neither was moveable. To effect the perfect balancing act, Brougham Winter then had to demand to Katrin that his desires for a Gothic design must be taken into account; and to Sarah he pressed the case for Classical architecture. His own wishes are not recorded. In the end – he could not recall whether it was because he failed to persuade either wife to change her mind, or succeeded with both – the house was built in two distinct styles, Classical to the front and Gothic to the rear. The two interiors were not linked, and so Brougham Winter managed to pass several years with two wives in the same house – but, with a sense of economy rare elsewhere in his life, one set of household staff – without ever arousing their suspicion. On his death – suddenly, in his late forties, from unexplained heart failure – the two worlds collided, and exploded. The ensuing protracted legal disputes, not to mention property destruction, contributed to the rapid depletion of the Ellesmere estate.
Nonetheless it made the house an architectural curio, and gave it a selling point for sightseers. Other minor but notable Winters Kitty had come across included Harald, a non-inheriting half-brother, who secluded himself away from the world for most of his life to devote his energies and ambitions to the problem of heavier-than-air flight. He spent and borrowed from within the family and without, foregoing relationships, proper nutrition, and bathing, to design and build devices which no-one was allowed to see. Only when he had perfected the technique did he emerge into the world again, bearing a prototype of his ‘air hopper’ the Spring-Bird – “the world’s first artificial heavier-than-air flying machine!” – to a mixed reception, at the age of 86, in 1949.
And then there had been Greenbaum Winter, the nineteenth-century philanthropist whose altruistic desire to take care of society’s weakest members, led him to fill both sides of the property with the poor and sick of all ages. This had the short term effect, in the cramped rooms, of contaminating his beneficiaries with one another’s diseases, thus ending their torments from consumption and poxes swiftly, at least. However it did leave space in the house for more to replace them and be helped in their turn. The long term effect on Greenbaum was more considerable (to him): his household finances struggled to keep up with the cost of feeding, clothing, and burying his wards (not to mention the disappearance of family valuables to short-term guests), and the estate not only stood on the edge of bankruptcy, but leaned over the edge, windmilling its arms frantically. Pushed to desperation, and with the lawns starting to show the scars of too many half-hearted graves, Greenbaum was moved to agree to sell the bodies to an unnamed gentleman who with his business partners transported them away efficiently, for cash, during the night. Greenbaum’s deal brought him so much success that he had to accelerate his intake of the poor, huddled masses, and although the full scale and extent of his activities were not detected until after his death, their disclosure did diminish his philanthropic reputation.
In remembering these details, Kitty was coming round to Miles’s idea – which gave a shock of novelty in itself, and perversely made her like the idea more. She had an urge to revel in the magnanimity of the moral high ground. There was just one problem: to make it work, Miles would have to have as little involvement as possible.
In the end it wasn’t this that stopped Daniel from coming to their house, or seeing Tom at all. On the drive home from the club Miles, enriched with a bellyful of alcohol, didn’t quite catch the meaning of the road sign which with elegant luminescence pointed out a sharp bend ahead, and bounced the car onto the pavement into a wall. The vehicle’s nose instantaneously crumpled from Labrador to Pekingese, prompting Miles to reflect muddily on how lucky he was not to have bought one of those toughly constructed, expensive cars which could have brought the wall down on top of them. The presence of the wall too, very fortunately, prevented Tom and Daniel, unbelted, from being thrown out of the vehicle to cause a headache for the rescue services. Instead, with the windscreen pressed up to the wall like a framed picture, they simply bounced off it and back into the well of the car, sustaining fewer than twelve fractures between them. Miles, jack-knifed around the steering column, found oddly that there was a sharp pain in his back when he tried to turn to check on the boys, and that he couldn’t quite stretch to his mobile phone which had shot into the well of the passenger seat, even though a certain pulling looseness in his left shoulder made him feel that his arm might well be able to reach further than normal. As the minutes passed, however, and nothing happened to make things any worse as long as he remained very still, the urgency slipped away. Couldn’t he just … stay here? Isn’t everything OK, as it is? Then from somewhere nearby, he heard a series of sounds, like a call and response from mating birds. A brief, high-pitched pip, followed by a howl – although as they went on, it became hard to tell which led and which followed. Miles found the beeps and cries hypnotic, drawing him into head-injury sleep. It was Daniel, upside-down in the back, effortfully working through the menus on his mobile to call emergency services with three broken bones in his arm.
The accident led to several losses for Miles. His car and his licence. A month or two of sleep, while his neck and back toned down their screaming. His no-claims bonus, when Daniel’s parents pursued for what seemed like a very long time, and with needless tenacity, a personal injury claim against Miles. This gave Kitty the idea of doing the same for Tom, although his practically vulcanised resistance to injury meant that he was less shattered than the fragile Daniel, and his award of compensation proportionately lower. The only tiny hope that Miles dared to cherish was dashed too when he found that the money was held in trust by the court for Tom until he was eighteen, and he couldn’t get his hands on it at all.
“This is all the Americans’ fault,” he said one day in the study. Kitty was at the table writing what looked like a flow chart and so was, he considered, a captive audience. When she didn’t answer he said it again, a little more declamatory.
Kitty put down her pen and raised her eyes to him. “What do you mean, Miles?”
“All this litigious -” he searched for the word, “…ness. The claims culture. I mean when I was young and you had a scrape, you, you picked yourself up and dusted yourself off and pulled yourself together and…”
“Miles! It was hardly a scrape. The poor lad was like a jigsaw by all accounts. Not that you’d know. He could have a funny foot for the rest of his life apparently.”
“Not him. I mean Tom. It’s those parasites, so-called lawyers. This is all their fault.”
“They’re only doing what I asked them to.”
“There you are then. It’s all your fault.”
“Miles.” This was the tone which made Miles short for do shut up.
“But it wasn’t even a proper accident! I mean – it was an accident. Nobody hit the car, it wasn’t anyone’s fault… Why can’t people understand any more that sometimes accidents happen and it just isn’t anybody’s fault?”
“Miles,” Kitty said, perhaps more sympathetically this time – or just with resignation – “you tried to drive the car through a wall. It was all your fault.”
But this was something Miles didn’t understand. One of his other losses in the accident had been 36 hours of memory of the events leading to the crash. Tom’s birthday, the miniature tea party he wasn’t invited to, besting Kitty in an argument (if it earned that description), the escape to the club with its blend of priapic frustration and abduction anxiety – all had been shaken out of his head by the definitive thwack of the impact. Afterwards, on hearing ghoulish descriptions by the doctors of how close he had come to death, Miles pictured his head pulled back on his neck and set vibrating like a tuning fork. This supplanted the real experience, which was of an uneventful serenity so unusual to Miles that if he had been able to remember it, he would possibly have spent the rest of his life seeking out near-death collisions to replicate the effect. As it was, he accepted the optimistically grim descriptions given to him in hospital and settled on the accident as a pivot of trauma in his life. How Everything Changed. My Car Wreck Hell. Little Did I Know…
It was only when he returned home that he discovered that his credit card was missing. He patted his pockets and sawed drawers open and shut and skimmed his palms pointlessly down the backs of things; he considered and dismissed potential culprits in Kitty and Daniel and sticky-fingered paramedics. Finally he reported it to his card issuer, who cancelled the card with effect from close of business on the next bank working day and told Miles that charges of several thousand pounds had accrued in the last 48 hours. They transferred him, in accordance with normal practice, to the police regional card fraud unit, and without intent or desire Miles found he had become a victim of crime. He wallowed in this for a bit and in doing so discovered that he felt much worse about the theft than he had before. He indulged the feeling by staying in bed all day once or twice, and sloped around the house balancing an expression on his face which tried simultaneously to reluctantly decline sympathy and urge it on. Unfortunately Kitty didn’t notice – and if she had, thought Miles, would probably resist curiosity just to frustrate him – and Alicia was too well trained in overlooking even hurricane-strength atmospheres to pick up on such moderate signals. By this time Miles could no longer tell whether his feelings of victimhood were real or imagined and now genuinely felt that he needed cheering up. He decided to visit Tom in hospital. How could the sight of his son in plaster and traction not make him feel gratitude that his only loss – give or take a few transient memories – was financial?
Tom looked terrible. He was sallow and hollow-eyed. The bandages and hoists didn’t look as though they were restraining him – Miles would have expected his son to be flipping and thrashing – so much as supporting him, holding him together. The sight of him actually made Miles more depressed, and he decided to leave again after the shortest possible decent interval. He wondered how best to start an unmediated conversation with his son.
“So how’s the … uh”, he gestured vaguely at one of the plastered limbs. It was hard to decide where to begin. “Hm?”
Tom, his chin pressed down onto his chest, had a permanent frown as he looked at his father that suggested either intolerable pain or intolerable hatred. Miles hoped it was pain. Not hoped exactly.
“Still,” he said, smiling, “it’s not so bad when it happens at your age. Those bones of yours will be even stronger when they knit! Not like when you’re older. You get to a certain age and they just shoot you. Like a horse!” He wondered suddenly if Tom had a thing for horses. You had to be so careful. No: that was Kitty. Wasn’t it?
“The man said I’ll have to have pins in my leg,” said Tom in a throaty tone Miles strained to recognise.
“Oh. Well… I suppose you’ll be like one of your cyborgs then! All the –“
“And they’ll have to take them out and put new ones in every six months to let me grow properly. Otherwise” – he stopped for a moment to take two slow breaths – “I’ll have one leg a foot shorter than the other.”
Miles laughed at the image before he could stop himself. “Sorry. I thought you were making a joke there, son. A foot shorter! Ha ha.” He was pleased with this recovery. He was also feeling a little bit cheered up after all.
There was a pause, from which Miles understood that Tom had had enough of talking about himself. Change the subject, he thought, keep his mind active, keep the poor mite’s spirits up.
“I suppose you’ve heard about the trouble I’ve been having, too, son.”
Tom was just frowning again, but sedately, thought Miles.
“Some bastard stole my credit card when we had the accident.” He nodded solemnly. “The police are treating it very seriously. Thousands they’ve taken me for. Not that it’s the money! I think it must have been whoever rang for the ambulance. Some good Samaritan eh!”
Tom breathed stiffly. “It was Daniel rang them.”
“Ah no. No, no. You can’t blame him Tom,” Miles said with confidence because he had already done so and ruled it out.
Tom made a strange noise from his chest without opening his mouth. His eyes slipped closed. Miles looked at him for a moment, then hesitated before moving off in case it was some sort of battle of wills.
Only when Tom’s mouth suddenly dropped open in a way that Miles felt he had seen on TV, did he jump up and walk quickly to the ward office, where a woman in blue pressed buttons to summon a man in white and a flurry of activity began from which Miles, having set it in motion, seemed excluded.
After a time the doctor approached with a grim expression and led Miles into an empty side ward.
“What exactly was wrong with him when you called the emergency, Mr Winter?” he said.
“Well,” began Miles, “he went like that” – adopting the pose. “And then like that.” Then he straightened up again and said, “I mean – he’s going to be OK?”
The doctor sighed, or took a deep breath. Miles braced. “He … fell asleep.”
Miles thought: Oh my God. Kitty. “He’s. But. He. I was just talking to him.” He was surprised to find his throat closing up.
“No Mr Winter. He fell asleep.” The doctor smiled reflexively. The good news smile. “He was tired. A bit annoyed when we woke him actually. Think you’d better leave him for a while.”
Miles felt his chest unclutch. “Right. Of course.” He was being told to stop interfering. But something else had come back to him. “He was telling me about his leg? I didn’t realise…”
“A simple greenstick fracture of the left tibia, Mr Winter. I thought your wife would have told you. You were a bit out of it yourself when we were treating him.” The smile again.
“Oh, so no – um – rivets or wires or – anything…”
“Oh heavens no. Bones are like rubber at that age. He’ll be back to his trampolining in a few months. I just hope he sticks to trampolines this time!”
Miles must have looked blank, because the doctor said, “He told me he’s representing his school in gymnastics, on the trampoline?”
Miles looked over the doctor’s shoulder. “Oh. Yes.” It was possible, he supposed … – no it wasn’t. The idea of the sociopathic little bastard doing anything for his school was laughable. “I’d … better go and tell his mum the good news,” he added, reflecting the doctor’s smile back at him. The doctor nodded and moved soundlessly away.
Miles wound his way out of the hospital – across, round, down, across, round, down – into the car park and drove away. He thought about going back to the house to talk to Kitty about this taste Tom had acquired for lying. But what would be the point? She would deny it, or blame Miles, or ignore him. He was developing a headache, which seemed to be pulsing from the base of his skull through his brain out to just above his eyes. Women! he thought. Oh – and: Kids!
*
Miles found himself becoming despondent after the accident. He couldn’t afford to go to his club until his card was reissued (there seemed to be some delay, no doubt something to do with the ongoing police investigation to catch the thief, Miles thought optimistically), and when that option was removed he realised how little else there was that he liked doing.
“You’ll have to get a job,” said Kitty.
“I didn’t ask you,” he said, although in truth if he had wanted to ask her, to bring the subject up without bringing it up, this is just how he would have done it: displays of bank statements creased with worry and letters with financial logos across the kitchen table, instead of in his study where he normally did this kind of thing.
“This is my job,” he went on, after a pause to gather his documents around him possessively, but feeling less like a custodian of treasury records than a tramp on a park bench.
“What?” said Kitty. “This second childhood of yours? Getting up at lunchtime, driving like a joyrider, flirting like a teenager? I hate to think what you’ll be like when you hit puberty.”
“Flirting?” said Miles, taken unawares. He and Kitty hadn’t flirted for years. Often, for proper couples, fighting could turn to flirting, but there were no second acts in Miles and Kitty’s battles.
“Well, if you can call it that,” she said. “Wouldn’t do much for me, I must say. But then you never did, did you Miles? Do much for me.”
Miles gathered that whatever she was talking about, whatever it was he was supposed to have done, she was deliberately discussing it as though it was understood between them. It was a hopeless situation: if he humoured her – not caring what she thought about whatever it was – it was a tacit admission of guilt. If he queried her, innocently protested I don’t know what you’re talking about, it would sound like a badly rehearsed denial, plotted in tandem with the sin.
Fortunately he didn’t have to say anything, as Kitty could carry on the conversation without him speaking.
“I mean Miles,” she could Miles for miles when she wanted to jibe at him, “I know you pay girls for it anyway, but what surprises me is that you now expect them to do your washing and dusting as well.”
“What?” said Miles. He couldn’t help it.
“Oh yes, Miles,” Kitty smiled, misinterpreting him. “Your secret is safe with me. Although I can’t guarantee I won’t let it slip occasionally.” She was dipping into a drawer for something Miles couldn’t see. He leaned back to resist any impression that he might be craning his neck to see. “Did I say occasionally?”
Miles’s confusion was only increasing as Kitty sought to drip-feed her revelation. The washing and dusting comment was troubling him: could he have done something he had forgotten about? He didn’t think she could have been talking about his membership of the club. He considered that an unspoken understanding between them. He was right about the unspoken part: until now.
“Mmm. I had a policeman in the other day, you see.” Kitty slid shut the drawer and skimmed some shards of plastic across the surface of the table to him. Miles deftly assembled them, more through some childish completion impulse than to find out what it was, as he could tell even when they were skidding to a halt before him that it was his quartered credit card. He wished briefly that the card had been cut into nine, or sixteen – a more challenging puzzle to solve – just to give him more time before he had to say anything.
But once again he didn’t have to say anything. “Apparently, Miles, they found it in some … lap-dancing club.”
Miles looked at her, making an o with his mouth, interested, hopeful.
“Well, someone must have stolen it, I said.”
Miles nodded slowly, in a studied impression of realisation dawning. “Ah…”
“…Some tragic filthy old wanker who couldn’t do it with his wife any more so he had to resort to paying some Romanian halfwit half his age to jiggle her breasts in his face. Must have stolen it.”
Miles protested silently. Highest class establishment. Fully of age. English roses. One hundred per cent breast meat.
“And then this arrived.” Kitty was holding by its edges a cream-coloured envelope, thickly textured.
Miles knew that quality woven bond anywhere. Ever since the bank for the better class of customer had closed his account and he had been reduced to viewing his finances through window envelopes, there was only one organisation left which wrote to him on and in such extravagant paper. It was the stationery equivalent of fur coat and no knickers, a paper-thin (100gsm) veneer covering the blushes of their essential seediness. As Kitty flipped open the flap of the envelope Miles could see that it had already been broken.
“Did you,” he said, thinking to stand up but then thinking better of it, leaving his hands gripping the edge of the table in preparation, “open a letter addressed to me?” Even as he said it he felt like a teenager seeking to rely on just process against a parent who has uncovered years of secrets cleaning a bedroom.
“You can’t trust anyone these days, can you Miles.” Kitty pulled out the paper and unfolded it. It was stiff and looked as though it should carry something life-changing: a will, a deed.
“’Dear Mr Winter…’” began Kitty.
Even now, his fingers whitening against the table, Miles hoped the club might have exercised some discretion. We found this card and think it might be… We obtained your details from the police identity fraud unit… We enclose voucher for trial membership to make up for… You don’t know us but…
Kitty cleared her throat. “’Re: Membership No. 003492.’”
Miles’s head dropped a little.
“’We regret to advise that the Club Committee at its meeting on’” – Miles lifted his head again. Until now his main stressor had been Kitty confronting him about his membership. In reality, he saw now from the smirk on her face, she probably didn’t care much, was more amused by his embarrassment than angry. But what was this? – “’voted unanimously to terminate your membership under paragraph 7.2 of our terms and conditions.’”
Miles’s head dropped again. His mind raced to fill in the details as Kitty read them aloud. In reality he only remembered each detail as she mentioned it, but he felt he was just in advance of her, which let him think he was recovering his memories of the lost hours. That was something. Meanwhile Kitty related his sins in the eyes of the Club – and they had always seemed so non-judgemental – of giving his card to the girl for a private dance, then sodding off in a panic with Tom and Daniel without telling them to stop charging it (though Miles expected the girl found some other way to fill her time: doubling up, one way or another). Then reporting it stolen and all the upset that had caused: the financial loss to the Club of members who, faces flushed with anger and shame, had vowed never to return after the presence of uniformed police, taking of statements and so on, took the edge off their evening.
“’…never darken our floors again,’” concluded Kitty, folding the letter and slipping it tightly into the envelope, which she then smoothed in her hand, like a cushion or a cat. “Or words to that effect. How awful for you, Miles. You might have to have sex with someone you live with for a change!” Miles did stand up then, to snatch the envelope from Kitty, but also to protest at the suggestion that their ice-cold marital relations were unilateral. But then he was thrown entirely when Kitty added, as Alicia walked into the kitchen, “Ah, here she is! I’d better leave you to it.” Out she smartly marched.
*
Miles spent some time after that chewing over what Kitty had said that day, or what he could remember of it, or what he could remember of it that wasn’t simple vinegar-laced sarcasm or abuse. Every way he came at it led to one conclusion: that she was suggesting he had a thing going, or wanted to have a thing going, with Alicia. It seemed an insane notion. She was half his age. She was, frankly – he whispered this in his head, you know how people are these days – not quite his class. Plus they had nothing in common.
He thought of the girls in the Club.
Miles pondered some more on how Kitty could have come to this conclusion. He was fairly sure he hadn’t paid Alicia any more attention recently than usual; or indeed any attention at all. She was just there. She picked things up, she did things before and after he did things – prepared the table and cleaned up afterwards, or ironed his clothes before he wore them and washed them after he took them off. She chaperoned Tom while he did whatever he did most of the day: and then supervised his eating and washing and putting to bed. Unless Kitty did that, or both of them: Tom was probably a two-woman job. (Or one man, thought Miles.)
Put like that, he saw now that in the wheel of their family – the broken wheel – Alicia was the hub and he was just a spoke. She was central, a force, with knowledge of all the family members that no-one else shared. It was power: although probably not the sort of power, Miles thought, that aphrodisiacs are made of. But if he hadn’t been flirting with Alicia, then what was it that Kitty had seen? Could it be (his heart quickened a little, pathetically, at the thought of the thought) that Alicia was flirting with him? Women picked up on these things, after all, in a way that men didn’t. Miles in particular was hopelessly obtuse at this sort of thing: though in his defence, he hadn’t had many opportunities to practise lately, as Kitty would never stoop so low as to flirt with him, and the girls in the Club would never play that hard-to-get. It was not always so: when Miles and Kitty first met, at a College Ball, she gave out signals in every body language she knew, stroking her hair and aligning her toes and fingering her neckline – drawing attention, drawing down – so tirelessly that Miles thought she was one of those people who live on their nerves, can’t stay still. Except that they tended to be stringy, tendony, and Kitty clearly had some meat on her from the way she crossed and uncrossed her legs, repeatedly, and – now he noticed it – her cleavage… When he thought again about her masterful behaviour that night – literally instructing him on what to do to her and how, which was the moment he became absolutely certain he had pulled – it was hard to believe that it was the same woman with whom he now shared nothing but vengeful looks. What had happened to all that? To all those, for want of a better word, feelings?
Still, he thought, maybe he should look out for signals from Alicia in future. Maybe he should spend more time with Tom and her, get to know her a little better. And come to that, when had he last had his hair cut? In all of these ponderings, the one possibility he never gave consideration to – probably because it didn’t directly involve him – was that Kitty was accusing him of infidelity or intended infidelity to cover the evidence of her own.
*
In the days following the discovery that his membership of the Club had been cancelled, Miles adopted a stoic air. This was, he felt reasonably sure, probably – certainly – good for him. It would reduce his outgoings significantly. It would break his pathetic addiction to cheap (but expensive) sexual flurries with paid (but worth every penny) girls. Eventually. It might even rekindle relations between him and Kitty, though on reflection he wasn’t sure he wanted that, and was absolutely sure, on further reflection, that she didn’t.
However, in the weeks following, and months, the frustration became intolerable. He felt like a cow desperate to be milked, always minutes from bursting. He was determined not to pay for it again – at least, not until he could afford to; plus, the girls in the Club were hard to match. Once he had gone into the outskirts of the city, found a phone box and selected the most beautiful girl on the cards that lapped the windows and darkened the view. He detached her card and bent it in and out between his fingers as he punched in the number, nervous/confident as though it was a number taken in a nightclub days before.
Silence when the phone was answered and then, distantly, “…Hello?”
“Hello is that,” Miles looked at the card, “Terri?”
Another pause. “Sure honey,” the voice was American, and older than the picture. “I can get you Terri if that’s who you want.”
Miles hesitated.
“Or we have a lot of other sweet girls too, sir, something for all tastes.”
“Ah. Right. I just…” Miles was blushing furiously, glad no-one outside could see him through all the cards on the windows. “I was just…”
“You’re just looking for a little company,” the woman continued helpfully. He supposed that long silences were only permitted for the kind of calls you paid high for.
“Yes, but.” He looked at the girl on the card again. She was perfect: if a little unsubtle. A lot unsubtle. Would it have killed her to… “Is this Terri here? In the picture?”
“Well yes sir, that is representative of the girls we have available for you here.”
So it’s not her. Miles felt deflated, and then ashamed of himself. Even as he averted his eyes, he noticed the same girl on a range of other cards. It was unlikely, he thought (even as his pulse rose), that they were triplets… Looking around the phone box, he saw that this cloning was not unique. The dozens of cards around him had only a handful of girls in them, repeated in different colours and positions. It was like a game of happy families – in a sense. Maybe there were only six call girls in the entire city, spreading themselves thin.
“Sir?”
“Oh. Yes.”
“Would you like to make an arrangement with one of our girls? With Terri, or Nicole, or Symone…”
“Uh. Well… what do they look like?”
“You have the picture there sir.”
“What, they all look like this?” Triplets after all?
“Very much sir. All our girls are beauteous to behold.”
Miles was distracted by her friendly-formal manner. Beauteous? Behold? He was anticipating some terms and conditions in sonnet form to follow. But if you break it, consider it sold.
“Right. And … where are you?”
“No need to worry sir. We come to you.”
“Ah.” Miles looked upwards to think (spotting several more cards on the ceiling of the box: he noticed a girl just out of reach he quite liked the look of). Kitty wasn’t due for another trip to London for a week or two. “That might be difficult.”
“Where are you right now sir?”
Miles looked about him. Even with the festooned cards they would be visible to passers-by; the glass looked cold, the shelf uncomfortable, the dimensions cramped; and there was a certain odour. “No,” he said. “Oh no no.”
Suddenly the woman had a smile in her voice. “Ah, no sir. If you give me your location, I can recommend a hotel. Which can accommodate you and your personally selected girl very discreetly, sir.”
“Um,” said Miles, counting the cost. “Um…”
He made his excuses and left; or in fact, made up a booking (the lady had been so nice), made up a credit card number from batches of digits on the cards around him, and left, quickly.
He was determined not to pay for it again. But he was out of practice in the art of attracting sexual attention by any means other than cash or plastic. He had heard that women were attracted to men with children, and gave consideration to drafting Tom in: but then he thought about the disastrous night with him and Daniel in the Club, the memory of which was more vivid than ever; and besides, it wasn’t precisely the maternal type that he was looking for. He felt too old for the normal bar and club scene, where apparently everyone under the age of thirty had satisfactory sexual encounters on demand, judging from TV programmes and adverts. Tom wouldn’t be bringing girls home for a few years yet, and besides, even Miles would never stoop so low (although by the time he was, he might). He wondered idly – to a degree – whether he could reasonably persuade Alicia that some types of personal services fell within her terms of employment. Particularly if there was as much chemistry between them as Kitty seemed to think.
*
In the end he hit upon an idea which would solve the problems of access to women and shortage of cash. Miles decided to open their home – “our estate,” he said to Kitty – to the paying public. Within moments of hitting on the idea his head was filled with premonitions of young women: lithe and supple no doubt; foreign in all probability; perhaps an eastern European gymnastics troupe with some time to kill before their next exhibition tournament. During the tour he would catch the eye of the one who caught his eye, detain her at the end and offer a personal tour of some of the private bedchambers and the historical, um, erotical stories they held… He would not, of course, reduce himself to the level of one of the girls at the Club by charging the women for his attentions. In fact, if it became a deal-breaker, he wouldn’t rule out giving them their money back if it meant they agreed to go back upstairs with him.
“Don’t be ridiculous Miles, it’ll never work,” said Kitty, speaking about the opening the house to the public part of the plan, which was the only bit that Miles had explained to her.
“Why not?” he asked. This was the question Miles had found himself asking most commonly of Kitty in the long course of their marriage. It had become a catchphrase, almost. Hers was Why? They made an ineffective double act.
“Because…” began Kitty, then wishing she had placed the emphasis differently. Because was an answer in itself, particularly useful in dealing with Tom’s questions, but she had allowed herself to treat Miles like an adult and now she had to finish the sentence. And the problem was, she couldn’t think of any reasons why not. The house in itself was quite fascinating, both architecturally and historically. There had surely been no riper collection of misfits in one family down the years than the Winters; and misfits were fascinating, when you didn’t have to live with them. There had been all the gamblers, addicts and queers that Miles had told her about (she wondered now if this had been part of his seduction technique, or more accurately all of his seduction technique. It had worked), but more, low-key and interesting, that she had discovered through researches of her own. Unlike Miles, she occupied her idle hours – years – with something analogous to work: she now knew far more about Miles’s family history than he did, and her card index system of Winter genealogy was largely complete, with a full cast of tourist-friendly eccentrics.
There was Brougham Winter, who was responsible for having the present house built in the middle part of the 18th century. He had taken a mistress, which in those days was no social taboo, but omitted to tell her she was his mistress, and wooed and courted her with such efficiency that she agreed to marry him without his ever asking. He was a weak man, unable to oppose a woman (a Winter trait, thought Kitty), and allowed her to make all the necessary arrangements without ever managing to have the necessary conversation. With no backbone to do anything about it himself, he nursed a tiny hope that some godly force might intervene and prevent him from becoming a bigamist. A divorce: but that would be social death. Or a change in the law: and although he was acquainted with several members of both Houses, eyebrows and questions might be raised, in the country and (more importantly) at home, over his lobbying for a law to enable Englishmen to take a harem of wives. He was reduced, then, to hoping for a tragic intervention – death was so … uncontroversial – that his mistress might die before the ceremony. Or, since he did love her very much, that his wife might die. He loved her too, though, so there was always the possibility that he himself might die in time. In the end, none of the three did, which Brougham thought was statistically extraordinary.
So he married his mistress, Sarah, while still married to his wife, Katrin. He decided that the only way he could maintain the double life was by having a new house built, a seat for the Winters, with separate entrances, living quarters, rooms, and so on. And so for all the first year of his second marriage – which was the eleventh year of his first – both his wives were bundled off to family members elsewhere in the country while he lived on site. It was the happiest, and most peaceful, year of his life.
Despite being away from the site, both his wives felt their wishes and requirements known in the planning of the new two-family home. Katrin was insistent that the house must be in the Classical style, while Sarah showed equally unbending preference for a Gothic masterpiece. Architects were scrolled up and dismissed. Neither was moveable. To effect the perfect balancing act, Brougham Winter then had to demand to Katrin that his desires for a Gothic design must be taken into account; and to Sarah he pressed the case for Classical architecture. His own wishes are not recorded. In the end – he could not recall whether it was because he failed to persuade either wife to change her mind, or succeeded with both – the house was built in two distinct styles, Classical to the front and Gothic to the rear. The two interiors were not linked, and so Brougham Winter managed to pass several years with two wives in the same house – but, with a sense of economy rare elsewhere in his life, one set of household staff – without ever arousing their suspicion. On his death – suddenly, in his late forties, from unexplained heart failure – the two worlds collided, and exploded. The ensuing protracted legal disputes, not to mention property destruction, contributed to the rapid depletion of the Ellesmere estate.
Nonetheless it made the house an architectural curio, and gave it a selling point for sightseers. Other minor but notable Winters Kitty had come across included Harald, a non-inheriting half-brother, who secluded himself away from the world for most of his life to devote his energies and ambitions to the problem of heavier-than-air flight. He spent and borrowed from within the family and without, foregoing relationships, proper nutrition, and bathing, to design and build devices which no-one was allowed to see. Only when he had perfected the technique did he emerge into the world again, bearing a prototype of his ‘air hopper’ the Spring-Bird – “the world’s first artificial heavier-than-air flying machine!” – to a mixed reception, at the age of 86, in 1949.
And then there had been Greenbaum Winter, the nineteenth-century philanthropist whose altruistic desire to take care of society’s weakest members, led him to fill both sides of the property with the poor and sick of all ages. This had the short term effect, in the cramped rooms, of contaminating his beneficiaries with one another’s diseases, thus ending their torments from consumption and poxes swiftly, at least. However it did leave space in the house for more to replace them and be helped in their turn. The long term effect on Greenbaum was more considerable (to him): his household finances struggled to keep up with the cost of feeding, clothing, and burying his wards (not to mention the disappearance of family valuables to short-term guests), and the estate not only stood on the edge of bankruptcy, but leaned over the edge, windmilling its arms frantically. Pushed to desperation, and with the lawns starting to show the scars of too many half-hearted graves, Greenbaum was moved to agree to sell the bodies to an unnamed gentleman who with his business partners transported them away efficiently, for cash, during the night. Greenbaum’s deal brought him so much success that he had to accelerate his intake of the poor, huddled masses, and although the full scale and extent of his activities were not detected until after his death, their disclosure did diminish his philanthropic reputation.
In remembering these details, Kitty was coming round to Miles’s idea – which gave a shock of novelty in itself, and perversely made her like the idea more. She had an urge to revel in the magnanimity of the moral high ground. There was just one problem: to make it work, Miles would have to have as little involvement as possible.