The People on Privilege Hill Read online

  But the Last Supper is not to do with Christmas, even in a city dedicated to the Holy Blood.

  Then I saw that the glass in the niches was made up of coloured bottles and there were more bottles on the altar, some of them on their sides, and that the people sitting round the altar were using it as a bar, and that most of them were either drunk or drugged and were resting their heads on the altar or embracing each other or stroking each other, and one or two of them were lying about lopsided on the chancel floor.

  And it seemed to me that most of them had beaks or snouts, or claws and hoofs, and that their bodies were not the bodies of people but of eels and toads and serpents and leathery black lizards or blood-red scaly dragons, and that here and there was a horn and a tail.

  And I fled out of the church (the nightclub now) and passed the people on the steps and in the doorways. The snow had stopped falling and the stars shone out and on the church steps I saw the glitter of a syringe, and then, at the bottom, someone in the gutter, and the people in the doorways watching. And I ran away down the street towards the hotel.

  But I could not find the hotel.

  In the starlight of the great square of the city, no one was to be seen. The snow was untrodden. I must have dreamt all this, and still be dreaming.

  And so I began to pray that the dream would end.

  And all at once the bells of Bruges began to boom and bang and throb and echo about across the city, and I realised that I was wet and cold and awake.

  And I swear that what I have described to you is true.

  Then from all the streets around people began to appear and doors began to open on to the snow, and voices began to call to other voices and black tracks were trailed across the snow as the people walked towards the churches. They passed me without a word or a nod. I felt that I could not follow them.

  Instead, I turned and found myself going the way I had come, back towards the terrible things I’d seen, and I easily found the church with the sopped carpet down the steps, but the doors of the church were now shut.

  I looked about and I couldn’t see anyone in the doorways across the street. The girl with the syringe and the one who had laughed and all the rest were gone, except for the one girl, the one who was lying down all alone.

  So I went up the steps to her. She was very young, in poor clothes. She wore no ring. She was pregnant. In the last month. I thought at first that she was dead, but when I touched her she was not dead. Her eyes opened, and she said in Flemish and then in French and then in English—it was very strange—“Please help me to a hospital.”

  I looked up the steps towards the church, then down to the street, and at first there was nothing. The bells of the city were stopping now, first one and then another, until there was just one left, dong-donging high and clear. And then that too ceased.

  Then traffic seemed to start again somewhere and, almost self-consciously, a taxi came round the corner. It stopped for me, and I took the girl to the hospital and there I learned that Bruges is not entirely the city of Hieronymus Bosch.

  And I waited in the hospital all night for the child to be born, which it was, on Christmas morning.

  THE FLEDGLING

  Lester came wandering along the towpath in the moonlight feeling drunk, free and yet not altogether happy. It was late. He’d been playing music down the Painted Sailor on the quay. Tomorrow he was off to college.

  At his back-garden door in the high wall he couldn’t find his keys. Then he thought, It’ll be open. They wouldn’t have locked it.

  The door was locked. Glancing up to consider whether to try to climb over the wall, he found himself looking into the eyes of a severe and magnificent mallard drake standing in the ivy.

  “Hi,” said Lester. “They’ve locked me out. ‘Behold, I stand at the door and knock.’ But they’ve locked me out. And I’m leaving tomorrow.”

  He found his keys, dropped them on the gravel, fumbled about for them. “You’d have thought,” he said to the drake, “that they might have wanted me to stay home the night before I left. Eh? Not a word. They might have stood me a meal. Most parents do. But no. Mallard, THEY DO NOT COMMUNICATE.”

  He picked up the keys and found that the door in the garden wall had been open all the time.

  The house was in total darkness.

  “You would have thought,” he said—though the mallard had disappeared—“that they might have waited up. Well, I know it’s not forever and I’m not going far; but look, I’ve lived with them eighteen years. They’d have had a lodger in for a drink the night before he left, after eighteen years.”

  The back door was also unlocked and he went into the house and at once fell over a huge quantity of luggage piled up inside. What they doing with my stuff? This is my private property. Two suitcases! She must have been ironing shirts all day and she knows I don’t wear shirts.

  You can’t talk to her. She was ... my mother was ... she was great once. Beautiful. And she thought I was wonderful. And my father was someone. He doesn’t say a bloody word now. You’d think he was afraid of me.

  “They’re taking me, though,” he said. “As if it was a boarding school. I’ve got mates there already and it’s not fifty miles off, and I’m coming back often enough, but they’re taking me. And he’ll wear a suit. I know he’ll be in a suit.”

  On the landing he fell over a double bass.

  “Am I taking that? Apparently not. They’ve left it up here. Oh God! Going to bed. Crash.”

  Under the covers of the bed he had slept in since he was five years old, he wondered what bed he’d be in tomorrow night.

  Some six hours later his mother, Stella, was woken by a tremendous pandemonium in the garden. Squawking. Crashing. The breaking of branches. A cacophony of ducks. “It’s ducks fighting,” she said and was at the bedroom window.

  “Ducks aren’t great fighters.” Her husband was lying straight in their bed, nose to the ceiling. “They’re sober birds.” He had been awake for some time.

  “Well, there’s something horrible going on,” she said. “Oh God! I hope it’s not that cat. Or the fox.”

  “Why ducks?” said he.

  “Well, for God’s sake, Alec, they’re quacking.”

  “It is six in the morning,” said Alec. “You are hanging out of the bedroom window in the dawn. Ducks are quacking. What do you expect ducks to do?”

  “But we’re—. We thought they’d never come back. Ducks used to come here. The same ducks, year after year. They told us so when we bought it.”

  “I never believed all that stuff,” he said. “It was estate agent’s blurb. Ducks don’t lay where there’s no water to launch the ducklings. And this is October. No duck would be nesting in October.”

  “Well, they’re here,” said Stella, bringing her head in from outside the window. “Maybe the climate’s changed. Maybe they think it’s still summer. Or they may just be late parents, like we were. Maybe they’ll only produce one. Like us.”

  “God help them,” said Alec, “if they produce more.”

  Stella climbed back into bed, pressed up against him, considered; and got out again. She ran down to the garden on bare feet and walked on the grass in the autumn dew. A mallard drake with smart military chevrons of a beautiful dark blue was standing on the lawn regarding her.

  “Hello,” she said.

  The drake moved impatiently from one dark webbed foot to another, and turned his head about. He had a proprietorial look. At this time in the morning the garden was his. He quacked.

  Up on the wall top behind Stella, the stone wall was caked with old ivy. From inside it the kerfuffle began again, and two points of angry light shone out: the eyes of another duck. This duck and the drake glared at Stella, pinpointing her between them, like searchlights.

  The wild rebellion within the ivy ceased. The drake flew away and Stella went back to the house.

  “Alec! There are ducklings,” she said. “I heard them. I knew it! She’s trying to throw them out of th
e nest down behind the greenhouse and they’re complaining.”

  Over a silent breakfast she said, “You know, I thought Lester might have stayed in with us. His last day. I suppose he did come in last night?”

  At once, without a word, Alec left the table and went upstairs.

  He came down again carrying the double bass. “He’s there,” he said, “or anyway there’s a hump in the bed. This’ll have to go in, I suppose. Do you know if he’s taking his bike?”

  “Ask him.”

  “He’s dead to the world.”

  “If he is taking the bike, he’ll have to help you get it up on the car rack,” she said. “With your back. What about the double bass?”

  “Your guess is, as they say, as good as mine. I’ll leave it around.”

  Stella finished packing Lester’s suitcases and Alec carried them to the car. After lunch—Lester had just come down and was drinking Coke at the kitchen table—Stella went to the garage carrying Lester’s heavy video recorder and computer and boxes of loose tapes. This took three journeys and on the third one, a mother duck marched confidently out from behind the greenhouse, followed by twelve thistledown balls on legs. They rippled behind her in a wavering string.

  She hissed at Stella, and her babies squeaked and cheeped like schoolchildren on a nature walk.

  Stella lowered the computer to the ground.

  Alec’s voice shouted from the garage, “I’ve got the bike on top, but we’ll never get the ruddy double bass in. Where is the damned boy? What’s he doing?”

  Stella stretched her hand towards the immaculate ducklings who at once rushed to their mother and clustered round her feet like a pulsating soft cushion, and Stella saw that the mother duck was not in fact confident at all. It was bravado. This was her most desperate moment. “Open the door,” said the duck’s black, manic eye. “The door into the lane.”

  She seemed to know where it was and set off towards it.

  Stella followed and opened the door. With a serenade of quacking and squeaking the mother duck passed through followed by the long string of her perfect children. In a minute the whole parade had vanished into the greenery along the bank of the stream. A minute more, and there was a gentle splash followed by smaller splashes, as light as raindrops.

  Stella noticed the drake then, standing some way along the towpath watching. Then he, too, vanished into the reeds. There was a sense of completion.

  “Alec!” She ran to the garage. “Alec—did you hear them? I saw them! There were twelve. They’ve all swum off down the stream. The drake watched.”

  “You weren’t dreaming, I suppose?”

  “I don’t dream about ducklings. Or about anything now.”

  He struggled with the double bass, but it resisted a back seat in the car. He swore. Lester was somehow present, looking on and eating a pie.

  Alec quite suddenly gave up. “If you’re taking the double bass,” he said, “there won’t be room for all of us.”

  “O.K.,” said Lester.

  “So I shall stay at home. Right?”

  “Oh, O.K. Right,” said Lester. “Thanks, Dad. Bye, Dad,” and he crawled into the back of the small car. He was a huge young man.

  “Oh, Lester.” Stella saw that Alec’s hands were shaking. Alec was wearing what he wore only for weddings: a suit and tie. She had put on a dress and jacket. Neither knew much about colleges and they had not been sure whether they would be introduced to the principal. “Oh, Lester.” In the wing mirror, Stella saw Lester’s face looking relieved that his father was not coming.

  “If I’d had a few driving lessons,” her son said, “I needn’t have bothered you.”

  “Thank you! But we need the car ourselves. Your father has fastened the bike on top,” she said. “All alone,” she added.

  Alec lifted the double bass into the front seat and Stella clipped herself in behind the wheel.

  “Thanks, Dad. See you later, Dad,” said Lester.

  “Good luck then,” said Alec at the very last moment, just as the car turned into the lane, and Stella saw him come out after them and stand in the middle of the lane and wave to them; and she thought how thin Alec looked, his wrists skinny inside his suit. He was calling something after them, but they couldn’t hear him.

  We were old to have a child, she thought.

  And she hated Lester. This Lester. She longed for the Lester who used to come in cheerful from school shouting, “Mum? I’m home, Mum. Can I go out now?” Or, “You in, Mum? I’m top again.” Or, “Mum, where’s Dad? Is he going fishing?” Or, “I bought this for you, Mum.”

  She longed for the earlier Lester who liked her to read to him in bed. “Go on, Mum. Don’t stop now. Go on!” Or the earlier-still Lester, heavy and warm and teething; on her shoulder as she patted his back. Or the newborn Lester who had lain in his pram, gazing in wonder. Wonder at everything. At his own wrists. At leaves across the window, at the eyes of the cat, at the flames in the fire. The Lester who had stroked her face as he fed from her breast.

  They had reached the campus of the raw, new university. It was scarcely an hour from home but Stella had never been inside its wrought-iron gates, which were about the only things that appeared to be finished. Lester had been there only once, last year for the interview. She drove cautiously through a treeless desolation of pink tarmac, tentatively round weedy roundabouts. Mud and workmen’s tools were everywhere. Cement kerbstones held back rubble and were ticketed with signs and arrows for the future. In the distance there seemed to be a complex of drab prefabricated single-storey buildings. This was the wider world that Stella had been so proud that Lester was clever enough to inhabit.

  In the back, Lester thought, Oh, Christ, it’s dire. Media Studies. I’m doing Media Studies. I don’t have a clue about Media Studies. I ought to be doing Music. In a proper place. Why didn’t they suggest Music? They never suggest anything, my parents. They are uninterested. They turned sort of humble after I got all those A levels. They just do things for me, they never think of me. They are not interested in Lester, only in what Lester is like. When I was young they cared about my happiness. Now it’s all ironing shirts. And I’ll bet they’ll go out for dinner tonight when they’ve got rid of me. Well, I’m not staying here, in this place, right? It’s hell.

  “Where do you think we go?” she asked him.

  He didn’t know.

  As he sat silent in the back, she again examined her son in the driving mirror. The shaven head. The nose ring.

  He is a huge soft fledgling, she thought. Some sort of doleful young owl. And he’s fat.

  And utterly conventional, she thought. Totally self-absorbed. He has no feelings. You can’t get near him!

  Some students in black tracksuits came running by, their faces screwed up against the fine rain that had started to fall. One of them turned back.

  “Oh,” she called, “could you tell us where to go? I’m bringing my son. It’s his first term. Could you tell us where we have to—report?”

  “Sure,” said the wet runner and then, “Oh, hi, Les.”

  “Hi,” said Lester and broke from the shell of the car in one grateful spring. He walked round to the front and lifted out the double bass. “Bye, then, Ma. Thanks for the lift. See you.”

  “What?” she called after him. “What? Lester! Am I not even going to see your room?”

  “’Bye, Ma,” and he loped after his friend.

  “What about the bike?” she shouted. “All the luggage? The computers? Do I take it all home again?”

  She started the car, roared after him, catching him and his mate up outside the prefabs. “Lester! I will not be treated like this. Take your stuff out of my car and get the bike down. At once.”

  “O.K., Ma. Keep your hair on.”

  The two boys piled Lester’s possessions inside the tatty building. They seemed a little subdued and she sat on, not moving from her seat in the car.

  “Right,” she said, switching on the engine. “You can just get on with
it, Lester. I’ve done my bit and so has your father,” and she drove off.

  Then, some way down the pitiless asphalt in the gathering dark, she stopped the car again and rested her head against the steering wheel. A huge tract of her life passed sadly by.

  Feet came padding.

  “Ma! Hey, Ma? What’s the matter? Don’t cry. Ma—? Love you, Ma.”

  “I’m delighted to hear it,” she wept.

  “Ma, I’ll be coming home at the weekend you know.”

  “What?” (Oh, how her heart leapt!) “Will you? You didn’t tell us.”

  “Of course I am. I’m coming home every weekend for the next three years. Didn’t I say?”

  And he saw her heart sink now. Like a stone.

  SNAP

  At three o’clock in the morning over a hundred miles from home in a hotel I’d never heard of before that weekend, I broke my ankle in the bathroom of the en-suite bedroom where I was spending the night with my lover.

  He was my first lover. For thirty years I have been married to my husband, Ambrose, who was not my lover before marriage. We were both virgins. I had never been unfaithful to him before that night.

  My husband is a highly respected philatelist, often at foreign auctions and stamp collectors’ conferences. He is also what is called a music buff and goes to the opera all over Europe. I am not interested in stamps and like to listen to music alone, even though it was at a concert that we met.

  He was sitting in front of me and my friend Lizzie Fisher and I thought, What an enormous head! It’s like Beethoven’s.