When Sheridan arrived home and clandestinely kissed his mother’s nurse in the hall, he knew that even the asking was impossible.
And so he tarried, part curious, part terrified and part famished, stealing away for auto-satiation when impropriety threatened, and returning the gentleman.
At eleven-thirty on the night of the thirty-first of December, 1969, his mother upstairs in bed, Jennifer pulled her mouth from Sheridan’s and said, ‘Let’s open the champagne now, Sherry, and do something really special to see the sixties out.’
Sheridan looked at her nervously. The timing, it had to be said, was less than immaculate. He closed his eyes and listened to the groan of the WC refilling.
*
At perhaps two o’clock, Sheridan was abruptly woken.
‘What is it?’
‘She’s not back,’ Jennifer whispered anxiously.
‘Who’s … Oh right.’
‘And you’re snoring like a geriatric.’
‘Sorry.’
‘If you hadn’t drunk so much, you’d be awake and at your wits’ end too.’
‘Wrong,’ he said, somewhat irritably. ‘If you’d have joined me in a drink you might be asleep and not at your wits’ end. Goodnight.’
He dug his head defiantly back into the pillow and duly Jennifer snapped off the lamp. But it was too late. He was awake and remembering things about hearts and secretaries and bladders.
Jennifer coughed and turned, then coughed again. He tried to force things from his mind and fill it with sleep. Of course it was useless and the frustration made him more awake than ever. Jennifer shifted again. He waited for the cough.
‘Why is my life so consistently infuriating?’ he growled, flinging himself from the bed and swivelling into his dressing gown. ‘I suppose you want a f … f … flaming cup of tea?’
Ten minutes later Jennifer came out to join her husband in the garden. He ignored her.
‘Come on, there’s a good girl. Get it all out. I’ll fetch you some more water.’
‘Good girl!’ exploded Jennifer. She tailed him into the kitchen. ‘What in God’s name are you doing?’
‘She’s not well, Jennifer.’
‘I can see that much. And why do you suppose she’s not well?’
‘Tell me you’ve never had one over the eight and I’ll listen. In the meantime, I am attending to my daughter.’
‘For God’s sake, leave her. You can’t give her the idea we approve of this sort of thing.’
‘Please, Jennifer, let us argue about whether this constitutes a cardinal sin or is merely part of growing up in the morning. For now …’
Jennifer began to shake her head ferociously, then bellowed, ‘Good God, man, what’s happened to you?’ She paused – and for an insane moment Sheridan thought she must be fishing for a crossword clue – then turned and stormed up to bed.
A small police car tobogganed southbound on the unlit A68.
Through the sullen smog of the storm they saw a large white vehicle standing at an angle that seemed to suggest it had slewn off the road.
They drew up and aimed their headlights at Biddy.
‘Fuck me, it’s moving.’
This was so. The van was literally bouncing on its suspension.
They left the car, peered into the driving compartment and satisfied themselves that it was empty. Then they walked round to the back door.
The wind squealed like a banshee as it forced its way through the Cheviots. Yet above this they heard the rhythmic shrieks of the woman inside. And despite the brutal wash of rain they could nevertheless detect the aroma of alcohol and hashish wending from the hole in the van door.
One of the policemen lifted his fist intending to hammer on the door but the older one took a gentle hold of his arm.
‘They’ll be going nowhere tonight, son. ‘Ippies, I’ll not doubt, but ‘armless enough.’
At five that morning a splendid rainstorm cracked and flashed above Edingley. Sheridan, on the precipice of sleep, listened contentedly as lavish raindrops slapped into the fat leaves of the sycamore outside. He envisaged the tree lurching gleefully and clumsily manoeuvring its heavy limbs to catch the cool drops.
This was the first benevolent thought he’d had about the tree since learning that it was thieving moisture from the foundations of the house and would need to come down. And in his halcyon drowsiness he couldn’t decide whether subsidence should be classed as a separate, additional problem or one of the steps on the sardonic staircase that he was currently crashing down. Of course, Folucia (without question, an additional problem in her own right) had argued that the sycamore had more right to existence than the man-made construct of their home. And Jennifer made the clever suggestion that perhaps they could hire a team of men to dig it up and move it further down the garden.
As Sheridan slowly wakened, the lulling comfort of the rain’s thrum diminished. More than likely the bloody stuff was coming in through the window and corroding the paint work. Or rolling over the sill and detaching wallpaper. Rotting the carpet. Perhaps one of the drains had blocked. And he now pictured it, drop by pernicious drop, dislodging shards of plaster, purposefully weeding out clumps of lawn and turning the meticulously eclectic flowerbeds into Somme trenches. He envisaged the water level in the pond rising higher and higher until goldfish, mud, weeds and God knows what else spewed into the lake that his garden had become.
The bastard rain also reminded him that he had a bladder, so he climbed sluggishly from the bed and put on his dressing gown.
Stooped before the lavatory bowl, the nausea of waking billowed through his being. He faltered and reached out to the cistern for support. Feeling too groggy to make it back to bed, he sat on the floor for a short rest. And Sheridan Entwhistle had to confess to himself that he felt drastically unwell. Perhaps he’d mention this to the GP.
Immediately he regretted permitting thoughts of the doctor to enter his mind. Throughout Friday, he’d purposefully avoided the issue, repeatedly chiding himself that no amount of worrying would affect the toss of this particular coin. In fact, bar a squash match, worrying was just about the worst thing he could do at the moment. That is what it had said in the family health manual, so consequently, Sheridan considered, it must be achievable. So why the hell couldn’t he achieve it? Were other people better helmsmen of their own minds?
Sheridan recollected being at school. Whether it was his prep or his gym slippers that he had accidentally left in the dorm he couldn’t now recall, yet on one occasion he faced the housemaster on a charge of forgetfulness. The crime being venial, he was ordered to write two hundred lines. Still, the young Sheridan questioned his master. ‘How can it be my fault that a particular thought didn’t enter my mind?’ The master smiled benignly and told him that it was precisely because it wasn’t Sheridan’s fault that he must be punished. He didn’t understand. The master went on to explain that the nature of the punishment wasn’t retributive, rather corrective and would perhaps afford the boy greater mental discipline – and that mental discipline was one of the most enviable going in life. The heinous rigours of trigonometry, memorizing the strange stories in the Bible, Latin declensions, the staple diet of Polynesia – did such pursuits serve a purpose? Indeed they did – they served to discipline the heinous rovings of a young man’s mind.
So why, thirty years after suffering such asinine tortures,