Take Nothing With You

by Patrick Gale

  Her brother, Ralph, now played with a Canadian string quartet and she envied him his career. His quartet wasn’t world-famous but it was constantly in work. He was on the less showy second violin line and quartet players perhaps felt less exposed than soloists did, but she was the first to admit that Ralph had the cool head she had always lacked.

  ‘I became too hysterical,’ she sighed. ‘Jean would have been disgusted,’ she added, referring to the teacher they had briefly shared.

  Naomi now looked sufficiently different to Naomi then, to Naomi the star, that she was never stopped in the street unless she was carrying her cello as an aide-memoire and, even then, walking beside her, Eustace had watched people think they recognized her then dismiss the notion. She had cut the hair that once had lashed dramatically across her shoulders into an elegant, lower maintenance bob, and was judiciously admitting silver to it. And she was now a healthy weight. As a student and performer, she had been twig-thin, with fatless arms in which every tendon could be seen.

  She spoke only rarely of her time as a performer, preferring to talk of the years before or since. Sometimes she referred to herself as a recovering performer and the details that she let slip since re-befriending him were akin to those of ruinous addiction. She had trouble with crowds and stress, occasionally melting away from a gathering without explanation or apology. She had trouble with her teeth, which had had their enamel fatally weakened in her performing days from the impossibility of not throwing up backstage before every concert.

  ‘It was that, or beta blocker dependency, in common with half the soloists out there. But I hated the blankness they brought on. I hated being sick but I was an adrenalin junkie and performing without it felt like performing on tranquillizers – the lack of nerves was nerve-wracking in itself!’

  Naomi worked hard with her academy students at impressing on them the need to stay grounded, to avoid becoming hooked on the performance high, to curb the impulse to lacerating self-criticism, just as they needed to remember to eat normally. But she knew it was a doomed challenge, that they thought she was teaching because she had been too weak to cope.

  ‘And I was, for Christ’s sake. I watch them sometimes,’ she had told him the other day, picking grapes off his bunch rather than pinching off a handful, precisely because she knew how much this irritated him. ‘I watch them when they’re lost in playing me some sonata finale or some cadenza or other, and all I see are those terrifying Olympic gymnasts, all spangles and killer attitude. And that’s just the boys.’

  It had been a while before Eustace realized that his friendship with Naomi had given him the sibling he had dreamed of in boyhood. Already long used to a brother, she unconsciously adopted the same manner with him that she did with Ralph: frank, dismissive, fiercely loyal. He worried that he would lose her, that she’d suddenly meet someone and move on, heedlessly in love. He had already decided that anyone new in his life would have to accept her as an intrinsic part of it, like a sister in fact. And he hoped she knew that her approval or disapproval would dictate any future he might have with Theo.

  When Eustace prodded her on the subject, she said that she felt it was time she put aside love, erotic love, as a recovering alcoholic progressively puts aside mouthwash, painkillers and even coffee.

  ‘I’m done with extremity,’ she claimed. But he wasn’t sure he entirely believed her. She still noticed men, builders, waiters, passers by; he saw her appreciate them. And she had a way of opening out to their attention, laying herself wide open sometimes, that worried him.

  He nearly missed the phone call to alert him to the imminent delivery of the radioactive iodine because his head was full of Naomi’s Brahms. Luckily the bedside telephone also had a flashing light, which he saw from the corner of his eye. An extremely polite nurse was calling to say his dose was ready and that they were on their way to deliver it. Eustace recognized the voice. It was the same Ghanaian man who had run through other formalities on his admission, weighing him to calculate his dosage precisely, taking his orders for lunch and supper.

  He knocked and entered shortly, his crisp uniform adding to the conscientious air he had of a priest-in-training. He bore before him a metal canister, like a modernist version of one of the three magi bearing precious gifts. A suited woman was with him.

  ‘Myrrh for time of burying,’ Eustace told them.

  ‘I’m sorry?’ the woman asked.

  ‘Nothing. Nervous joke.’

  ‘There is nothing to be nervous about, I assure you.’ The formality of the nurse’s manner was deeply soothing; he’d have done well in a euthanasia clinic. ‘This is Dr Searle, the hospital physicist.’

  ‘How do you do?’ she said, shaking Eustace’s hand. ‘You’ll see me and my Geiger counter later,’ she added. ‘For now I’m just here to oversee safe practice. This canister contains your dose of I-131. The layers of metal prevent the radioactivity contaminating anyone or anything in transit. The dose is in pill form.’

  ‘Are you good at pill swallowing?’ the nurse asked.

  ‘Expert,’ Eustace assured him. ‘If I have water.’

  ‘It is not so very large. I shall unscrew the canister in a moment then use this special wand to pick out the pill safely and pass it to you to swallow immediately. Do you understand me?’

  ‘Perfectly.’

  Dr Searle coughed, impatient perhaps, but the nurse smiled seraphically, giving Eustace the impression that he enjoyed both the ceremony and the playfulness. The nurse fetched a glass of water from the bathroom. It was unexpectedly hot.

  ‘Warm water helps with the uptake of the iodine,’ he explained. ‘After we give you the dose, you may experience some nausea. Constipation, diarrhoea or a dry mouth have also been reported. Most patients only experience a dry mouth. I’m afraid you can have nothing to eat or drink now for two hours, to ensure you absorb all the iodine. After that, it is business as usual and we’ll want you to drink lots of water to speed the radiation out of your system.’

  ‘How does it actually work?’ Eustace asked.

  Dr Searle answered. Eustace tried and failed to imagine the journey whereby a woman became a physicist in a hospital lab. It was hard to imagine her walking a dog or tending a flower garden. ‘Your thyroid absorbs any iodine in the blood. It continues to do that even when affected by a carcinoma. Although you had a thyroidectomy, the scan we performed afterwards showed you still have small pieces of thyroid left. These will now draw in the iodine and its radioactivity will destroy their cells. It’s a little like that poison you put down which ants carry back into their nests to feed their young.’

  Perhaps she was a gardener after all?

  Eustace indicated that he was ready and the nurse set the canister on a table, unscrewed its heavy lid then used his ingenious transparent wand to draw up the pill and pass it, at arm’s length, into Eustace’s cupped hands. Now it felt less like a magi’s gift than an administered sacrament. He rinsed it down with a good gulp of the warm water. The nurse took the glass from him and immediately ushered Dr Searle from the room. Soon after, Eustace heard the second door closing on him.

  He sat on the bed for a while, waiting to see if he’d feel sick but he didn’t. What he did feel, now that he was nil by mouth for two hours, was a hankering for a large glass of something crisp, some dolcelatte and oatcakes to go with it. Perhaps with some green olives. He returned to the chair, angling it directly to the window, thinking its view would distract him.

  He put the earphones back in and pressed play on the little MP3 player, but his thumb was too big for the delicate controls and it lurched over several tracks and was no longer playing Brahms. It was something contemporary for solo cello. It took him a second or two to place it. Then a melody emerged from the flashy accompanying figures and he recognized a sly encore written for Naomi by Thomas Adès or Mark-Anthony Turnage or some other playful genius. Over a crazily difficult introduction and background of pizzicato strumming, spread chords in the style of Bach, knocks on wood
and punchily rhythmic riffs worthy of Led Zeppelin, a tune emerged which any cellist could play after only a few lessons: the childishly simple and monotonous melody of I Will Survive .

  Although it invariably brought the house down, Naomi had never recorded it because of a difficulty with the holders of the rights to the original song. She had recorded this, he understood, just for him. When she reached the end, he could hear birdsong recorded through his garden windows as she murmured, ‘Get well soon, babe.’ He swiftly fiddled with the buttons to make the track play one more time.

  From where he sat, he could see the house where he lived so clearly he half-wondered if he’d suddenly spot Naomi at an upstairs window. But she would be downstairs, of course, teaching for most of the day. Years after moving in there, he still didn’t think of it in any way other than as Gilbert’s house or Maison Gilbert , as his lover had liked to call it.

  Although one was a lover and the other a pseudo-sister, Eustace could never remember Gilbert now without thinking of Naomi or think of Naomi for long without remembering Gilbert. Their presences and influences in his life were so enmeshed, he was always pulled up short by any reminder that they had never met.

  In his early twenties, when he had found himself earning far beyond what he felt was his worth as a mathematician in a banking firm, Eustace was scooped up at the end of a sweaty night in a club under Charing Cross by an older man who described himself as second generation South Ken French.

  ‘My name is Gilbert,’ he said, touching his chest and inclining his head with disarming formality.

  They danced to three songs, each pretending to enjoy the music, kissed extensively against an alley wall, made love on Gilbert’s sofa then showered before sitting up in bed half the night to talk. It was like finding the big brother he had never had. Worldly-wise, funny, Hollywood handsome, Gilbert was flattering, kept saying things like, ‘Why has no one else snapped you up yet? What’s wrong with you? There must be something wrong. Stay for lunch while I work out what it is!’

  The rest of the weekend vanished in a heady continuum of talk, sex, more talk, and so much kissing their faces became raw. In one of the intervals – ‘intermission’, Gilbert announced it, as though the bedroom were an old-fashioned cinema – he led Eustace around the house, showing him the paintings he was waiting to sell and seeing if he could guess the ones he half-hoped wouldn’t leave the house just yet.

  As Gilbert fed him little plates of luxury from the fridge – manchego, jamon serrano, white peaches ripe to juiciness – he asked, clearly fascinated, just what a quantitative analyst did and how it was that a bank made use of a mathematician if not simply to add and multiply numbers. He made Eustace draw explanatory equations on a notepad to demonstrate risk and the potentially enormous gains to be made from shouldering then subdividing other people’s debts. Gilbert was clever, but it was plain he did not really understand or take Eustace’s work especially seriously, as though banking were a game. And Eustace realized, with an unfamiliar pang, that this lightness in him recalled being a chubby little boy riding a Sunbeam Winkie with a flag on the handlebars back when his father was alive and still made light of everything.

  Emboldened by a large glass of icy Manzanilla, he made Gilbert explain his work in turn. Gilbert had two jobs: one as an expert on late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century British art at Christie’s and one as a private dealer. Most of the paintings in the house belonged temporarily to Gilbert but once in a while he would sell several simultaneously to the same collector.

  ‘A lot of my clients are completists. I introduce them to an artist whose work they like and then they want them all. And of course I work with several interior decorators. They love a set of paintings – it makes a bold statement and the repetitive colour palette is easier for them to work with than the visual macédoine of things people inherit.’ He pulled what Eustace would soon come to know as a very Gilbert face, expressing a blend of Gallic scorn and English amusement.

  Eustace finally returned home late on the Sunday night to the flat in Finsbury Park he shared with near-strangers. He was wearing clothes Gilbert had insisted he borrow and went to work as usual on the Monday, feeling lightheaded from lack of sleep and self-conscious about a persistently pink mouth and cheeks he was sure everyone was staring at. He spent that night at the flat after a ninety-minute phone conversation with Gilbert about nothing and everything then never slept there again; he moved in with Gilbert the following night.

  He earned well and could easily pay his way but Gilbert was casually generous. Perhaps precisely because he was a dealer, he had an almost negligent attitude to property.

  ‘It’s only stuff,’ he would say. ‘This is all that matters,’ kissing one of Eustace’s nipples, ‘and this,’ with a kiss to his forehead.

  Gilbert had been taken under the wing of an older lover back in the sixties and regarded it as only right that he should be passing on the favour now. He marked the morning after Eustace’s formally moving in with the opening of a joint bank account and, to Eustace’s bewilderment, by the roping-in of his cleaning lady to witness a fresh will leaving him house, contents and business.

  ‘We have to take steps to help ourselves,’ he said with a shrug. ‘No one else will,’ adding, with a characteristically Gilbertian twinkle, ‘these are all steps I can reverse if you fail to please . . .’

  They enjoyed just four years of unalloyed happiness before Gilbert had to be hospitalized with a bout of pneumonia, the first of a succession of debilitating HIV-related infections.

  Eustace had himself tested frequently, enduring the days’ long wait for the results to come through. Against all the odds, Gilbert had not passed on the virus.

  ‘Even my generosity has its limits,’ he joked on hearing the news.

  Eustace found himself rapidly becoming an expert in palliative care and took time off from work to nurse Gilbert, before impulsively throwing in his job. He sank his last bonus and savings into buying a bargain flat in Olympia that needed only better lighting and German taps. To improve it further, Gilbert added a few of his paintings and Eustace sold the place at an embarrassing profit, which he immediately rolled over into buying two more of what Gilbert called fixer-uppers in an up-and-coming area just south of the river. And so, with his heart and mind almost entirely focused on a shrinking man in a hospital bed, he ceased to be a quant and became a property developer.

  By the time Gilbert finally gave up the struggle, he was blind, prematurely demented and so light Eustace could easily hold him in his arms and carry him from bed to bath and back again while a nurse changed his sheets. Eustace’s life had undergone a radical transformation. His work suits and dress shirts were sidelined in his wardrobe for weddings and funerals and his days became like one extended weekend. The period of nursing Gilbert and the evident inability of some people to cope with his lover’s diagnosis swiftly cut their address book by a third. In the same period London property values continued to rise, unchecked by crises in the stock market or in banking. Eustace emerged into the nineties as a rich survivor from a war to which many of his neighbours remained oblivious. He became a keen gardener and theatregoer, an adeptly apolitical charity fundraiser. He changed his body shape by joining a gym, reclaimed control of his mind by learning and practising meditation and let Naomi bully him into taking up the cello again after a twenty-year gap. His hair turned prematurely silver and he took to having it cut short every week by a mournfully sexy Turkish barber who trimmed eyebrows and nose hair without being asked.

  He had flirtations and adventures but only one significant relationship after Gilbert. To the dismay of friends, of Naomi in particular, he became involved with Gwyn, a febrile, bad-tempered pharmacist he had befriended when volunteering on the ward where Gilbert had been a frequent patient. Gwyn was seriously ill when they met, and neither man had any reason to believe he would live another two years. But then the new combination therapies arrived, the AIDS wards began to empty of gay men, Gwyn’s symptoms
abated and his viral load shrank. They were forced to admit finally that their pairing had been based on the dubiously romantic assumption of it being cut short by Gwyn’s death.

  Gwyn’s legacy was to have infected Eustace in the process. Eustace would be on pills for life and was obliged to call in on a clinic for a battery of blood tests twice a year but otherwise, in the new coinage that was meaningless to those outside the gay sexual playground, he was said to be undetectable .

  CHAPTER SIX

  Grandpa died.

  It was

  entirely to be expected as he was nearly eighty-four and confused but it still came as a shock because he had given no warning signs and was in apparently robust health apart from the confusion. One of Eustace’s regular chores was to escort Grandpa on his constitutionals in case he lost his way, although this had happened only once, when he made the mistake of helping an even older man home with some bulky shopping, which took him too far from his usual route for landmarks to lead him back. As a rule his walk was unvarying: along the front to the right, past Knightstone Island, along Manilla Crescent and Birkett Road, past the Old Pier and then back along the higher route via Prince Consort Gardens and Grove Park, where he paused to feed the birds two slices of yesterday’s stale bread. Eustace had trouble keeping up with him. He tended to march wordlessly until they reached the ruined pier, where he invariably made some comment about trippers from Cardiff or said it reminded him of somewhere he had been during the War. When feeding the birds he would usually ask Eustace a question or two that seemed to reveal a residual sharpness beneath the mental fog. Did he only play French and German composers? Did he prefer playing on his own or with the school orchestra? Whatever answer Eustace gave seemed to give him food for thought as he would then fall silent, but sometimes he followed up with an apparently unrelated statement. The most recent of these was the pithy, ‘Awfully glad you never took to football; useless bloody waste of time.’