Life_ An Exploded Diagram - Mal Peet [62]
Most evenings they would watch the television. Clem sat at the table, paying intermittent attention to the homework spread in front of him. Ruth and George sat on the new mock-leather sofa, George’s ashtray between them. Win sat on an uncomfortable wooden stool because it was small punishment of her flesh.
Sometimes (with increasing frequency, it seemed to them) there would be a program in which love raised its ugly head. A couple would confess it, and then their faces would come close together, a slow, ghastly prelude to the inevitable kiss and the fade-out that suggested they were Doing It. At these awful moments, the dread entered the living room of 11 Lovelace Road like a chilling fog. In response to it, Win would look down, muttering, and accelerate her knitting. George would frown and light another Player. Ruth’s plump neck would redden, and she would get to her feet.
“I can’t put up with this soppy old squit,” she’d say. “I’ll go an put the kettle on.”
And Clem returned to his homework until the embarrassing scene was over. Before, that is, Frankie happened to him. After, he gazed furtively at the screen from the shelter of his hand, afraid of the fear in the room, his poor heart tumbling to the memory of her parted lips and busy tongue.
TIME, LIKE EVERYTHING else, was against them. By mid-August, the fruit-picking season, and Frankie’s delicious penance, was at an end. Soon, very soon, there would be no more casual, urgent encounters with Clem in the nooks and fringes of her father’s fields. The inevitability of this disaster made them frantic and despairing by turns. How would they be able to speak to each other? How could they arrange to meet?
The telephone offered tantalizing possibilities that were fraught with risk. There were three phones at Bratton Manor: one in the morning room, Gerard Mortimer’s “center of operations”; another in the master bedroom, on Frankie’s parents’ bedside table; the third in the front hall. The morning room and her parents’ bedroom were more or less out of bounds. If Frankie were discovered using either of those phones, it would be immensely suspicious. If she used the hall phone, there was always the chance that she would be overheard by Mrs. Cutting, the housekeeper, or one of the two live-in maids, or one of the part-time staff. All this was complicated by the fact that the phones were all on the same line, which meant that a conversation on one phone could be overheard by anyone who picked up either of the others. Clem could not call her, of course. It was not proper for the youngest member of the household to answer the telephone. And if she did, thus arousing suspicion, her parents could simply ring the local operator and ask who had just called, and then the game would be up.
Despite all this, they settled on a desperate stratagem. Clem would be at home between three thirty and four thirty every weekday. Frankie would call him from the front hall phone sometime during this hour, it being a relatively unbusy part of the day at the manor, and say, “Tonight, quarter to eight,” or “Tomorrow, two o’clock.” (But she could not call on a Wednesday, because it was Ruth’s half day off from the chemist’s.) Clem would name the place. They’d hang up. Five seconds, at most. Even so, there were days when she dared not or could not make the call. Then Clem would spend the hour in an agony of waiting and the remainder of the day in numb despair. Naming the place was increasingly problematic. They’d abandoned their hiding place in Skeyton Woods. Twice they’d been almost discovered: once by warring young boys, then by a man with a dog. So, after his parents and Win had gone to work, he’d set off on his bike to reconnoiter places that were roughly equidistant from Millfields and the manor. He’d found one or two that might be suitable.