Laidlaw

16

Ena lay in bed upstairs and listened to Laidlaw packing. His movements were so positive. He walked back and forth pacing out his purpose. In the silence of the house it was like someone doing sentry duty. It was a familiar event and she knew the ritual that he made of it, as if he was doing more than pack a suitcase. He was constructing a solution-kit — a tooth-brush missing and a crime might go unsolved. She hoped he was remembering to pack his migraine pills.

She wondered how often he had filled that suitcase. At first she had hated when it happened. Now, although she might use it as an official ground of complaint, she wasn’t sure that she didn’t feel relief. They were, she had decided, probably what incompatible meant.

He was so hard to live with. It was the demands he put on people that she found most difficult. Moral aggression, she called it to herself. It was as if his career as an amateur boxer had extended itself into his social life, though not on a physical basis. Seeing him walk into a room, she always thought: ‘Introducing in the red corner. .’

She heard Jackie whimper. Before she could rise, his father was coming up the stairs. She didn’t move. Jackie needed the lavatory. Jack took him and brought him back up to the small bedroom next to their own. As Jackie got back into bed, she heard him speak.

‘Was it a monster, Daddy?’

‘What are you talking about, son?’

‘The thing at the door when Margaret was in herself. Was it a monster?’

Jack answered very seriously.

‘No chance. It was the girl from down the road. Coming to baby-sit. Margaret let her in and the electricity came on. And they had a very good night.’

‘Sandra said it would likely be a monster.’

‘That’s how clever she is. There are no monsters, Jackie. No monsters, son.’

‘None at all?’

‘None at all.’

‘That’s good. I’m glad. I don’t like monsters, Daddy.’

‘You’re a sound judge, son. I wouldn’t fancy them myself if they were here. But there’s only people.’

Ena knew that for Jackie the certainty in his father’s voice had burned the monsters out of his room for the night like a blow-torch.

‘Good night, Daddy.’

‘Good night, Jackie.’

She heard Jack go back downstairs. She felt a brief longing for the way they had once been. But the questing intensity in him that had first attracted her was also what had separated them, because it had never stopped. She had thought it was looking for a destination of which she might be part. Now she felt convinced that the nearest he would get to a destination would be when they pulled his eyelids down. He worried everything into bone and then moved on.

She heard him coming back upstairs, coming to bed. Knight errant of the Crime Squad, she reflected bitterly. The trouble was, it occurred to her, that with him you never knew whether you were the maiden or the dragon.