She had no sooner ended the call than her phone vibrated again and she picked up saying, ‘It’s not a good idea for us to talk yet.’
‘Juliet?’
She recognised the voice. It was not her husband’s. ‘Max?’
There was a pause before he replied. He said, ‘Listen, I’m sorry I’ve been out of touch for a few days. August died this afternoon.’
‘Oh God,’ she said. ‘How awful for you, Max. How did it happen?’
Juliet felt sympathy for Max at hearing this news, but what she mostly felt was relief. She had vaguely thought her landlord might be deliberately avoiding her, out of embarrassment at their clumsy, fumbling conclusion to the night of the exhibition opening. And if she was honest with herself, she had thought there was something genuinely sinister about his grandfather, even though her suspicion had never been proven. It was a harsh thing to think, but Juliet thought it anyway. Life in her apartment building would be more comfortable without that gaunt, staring sentinel who had occupied an address on the ninth floor that had looked like the junk shop from hell.
‘He was in poor health. You must have seen that for yourself.’
‘He seemed frail,’ she said, ‘but he didn’t look like a dying man.’
‘He’d had a number of small strokes, and they took their toll. Nobody lives for ever.’
‘So his death was not a shock to you?’
She heard Max clear his throat. ‘I cared for him. I was the only person close to him. It is sad, of course. But his death did not come as a shock and I think of it really as a release. A release from the life of an invalid.’
‘Of course.’ This news was a jolting reminder to Juliet that she was not the centre of the universe. The discovery that the world did not actually revolve around her should have helped with her feelings about Jack, should have put the pain into some sort of perspective. But it did not. Emotion did not respond to objectivity; not in her case, anyway.
‘Would you come to the funeral?’ Max said.
‘I hardly knew him,’ Juliet said, surprised. ‘We barely spoke.’
‘He would have been a friend to you, had he lived,’ Max said.
She thought about the old man’s unsettling stare, the domestic squalor that had surrounded him, the sickening smell of whisky roused to warmth by tea. She remembered then the gift basket, each item it contained carefully chosen and individually wrapped. It was true, wasn’t it? He had been kind in his clumsy way and she had reacted with disdain.
‘All right,’ she said, thinking that perhaps she had judged August too harshly.
‘It would mean a lot to me.’
‘Then of course I’ll come.’
‘Thank you.’
‘I’m very sorry, Max, for your loss.’
‘There are some things of his I need to dispense with. Actually, there is an enormous amount of stuff. There might be one or two pieces you could take. I couldn’t help noticing how empty your apartment looks.’
She thought just for a second about making a joke about being minimalist by aesthetic choice. But it wasn’t the time for wisecracks. Instead, she said, ‘When is the funeral?’
‘The day after tomorrow. In the afternoon.’
She nodded to herself. She could get someone to cover her shift. She was owed a few favours.
‘I’ll be there,’ she said. She felt slightly hypocritical saying it because she had not really liked the little she had known of the old man and would not sincerely mourn him. But she had the strong sense that Max was on his own now and the sense of obligation she felt to him was pretty substantial. She knew what it felt like to be alone, how desolate and terrifying that could be. For his sake, she would go.
‘When shall I come to your grandfather’s apartment?’
‘After the funeral, I suppose. I expect then would be most convenient for you.’
‘Yes, that sounds best.’
‘Thank you, Juliet. Sincerely, thank you.’
Fourteen
THERE WERE TWO funeral cars, the hearse and the black sedan that followed its sedate progress to the cemetery with Max and Juliet seated in their mourning attire in its rear.
Juliet had not attended a funeral since the death of her father. He had been cremated in a cardboard coffin after a humanist ceremony at a hippy commune in southern California. She remembered the smear of oily smoke from the incinerator against the bright blue of the sky. She had sweated then in her black wool suit in the West Coast summer sunshine.
She wouldn’t be sweating today. The air conditioning of the sedan made its leather interior as chilly as a refrigerator. She was glad she had worn her best coat and her gloves. They were warm as well as possessing the necessary formality.
Max sat next to her in a black cashmere coat over a black three-piece suit that was so immaculately tailored it reminded her of Mike’s comment about Max’s probable worth. He wore a dark grey necktie and she had seen him check the time on a gold wristwatch with a black alligator strap.
She couldn’t help looking at him as he sat next to her in the back of the car, their bodies about eight inches apart. She didn’t know him at all, but he was someone she would like to get to know: he was both physically attractive and somehow, innately mysterious.
Juliet wondered would it be frivolous to speak in the car; to make small talk with the grandson of the man whose funeral they were attending. She could not really gauge his emotional state from his appearance. He was dry-eyed and seemingly composed. Although he had told her that his grandfather’s death had been a release, things were different, when a loved one was lying in a box in the car in front of yours. Things were different when that box was to be buried in a hole dug in the ground and covered by dark earth for ever.
In the event it was Max who spoke first. He said, ‘Do you go to many funerals?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘This is the first since my father’s death almost a decade ago. Family doctors end up attending quite a few, especially in small communities. But my patients arrive and leave, alive or dead, as strangers.’
‘Do you enjoy your work?’
‘Very much.’
‘Do you ever make mistakes?’
She thought about this question. ‘You mean a mis-diagnosis?’
‘I mean have you ever killed someone who should have lived?’
Juliet did not much care for his turn of words. She actually thought it a rather extraordinary thing to ask. But she knew the honest answer to the question. ‘No,’ she said.
‘People must be in awe of you,’ he said.
‘Hospitals are full of doctors, Max. Med school churns out more and more every year. We’re pretty much two a penny.’
’When I met you, I got the impression you were proud of what you do. I was sure I could hear the pride unmistakably in your voice.’
‘I am proud of what I do,’ she said. ‘It’s just that what I do doesn’t make me anything special.’
They were silent again for a while. Juliet was relieved that the conversation had stopped. It had been uncomfortably close to an interrogation, despite its brevity. Then Max turned to look at her and smiled and said, ‘I think you’re special.’
She smiled back. It was a nice compliment. ‘Is that why you rented me the apartment?’
‘I think it probably is, Juliet. I have never really had a job of my own.’
‘You maintain your property.’
‘I mean a proper job.’
‘Your building must be worth a fortune.’
He shrugged. ‘I’ve inherited that. The acumen that went into buying it was my great-grandfather’s. I have never attended a job interview, or commuted to an office, or taken part in a training programme or a campaign or hit a target or earned a bonus. I’ve never had a colleague who wasn’t a close relative. Work is an alien world to me.’
‘Do you think you have missed out?’
‘Of course I have.’
‘Are you saying that you’re lonely, Max?’
‘If I am, then I will be lonelier with the absence of August from my life.’
Juliet nodded. She thought that this was true. But she remembered how socially at ease Max had seemed at the art opening. He had looked urbane and attractive and totally as though he belonged. He had appeared a damned sight more at ease there than she had felt.
She thought that if he wanted to, he could engage with the world much more fully than he did. Even if he didn’t want to, with August dead, as the sole owner of the building he would be obliged to. And not playing nursemaid to a sick old man would also free up his time.
Juliet thought the dividing line between romantic loner and deliberate recluse was quite a fine one. There was something deliberate, wasn’t there, about the isolation in which Max and his grandfather had chosen to live their lives. That was why she was in a single car and not leading a fleet of them to the cemetery. Where were August’s friends? He must have made friends in a lifetime spanning eighty years. They could not all have pre-deceased him. But if he had friends, they had shunned his funeral.
Max took her arm when they reached the cemetery. They followed the coffin to the graveside accompanied only by an undertaker stretching up to hold a sheltering umbrella over their bowed heads to keep them from the strengthening downpour.
The pall-bearers were paid professionals, familiar with the ritual of burial and used to the weight of a dead man’s casket. But August’s coffin was a gargantuan thing hewn from oak and they slithered and struggled under their burden to the plot. It was as though Max had tried to restore to him the stature and substance in death that illness and increasing age had deprived him of in life.
The clergyman read the funeral liturgy. Juliet knew so little about formal religion that she was not even aware of his denomination, yet another gap in her social education that her hippie parents had failed to address.
The headstone was a large marble tablet, several thousand dollars’ worth of engraved stone, she estimated, which Max must have had made well in advance of his grandfather’s death. It was much too substantial and elaborate to have been carved in the time since the old man had died. She supposed it had only been waiting to have the date of his departure from life chiselled into its polished surface.
Max had certainly prepared scrupulously for this occasion. It was so neatly and grandly accomplished, it was almost as if the timing had been predetermined. If it had, she thought he might have hired professional mourners, though. The two of them were so solitary at the graveside it was actually quite pitiful. And he could have chosen a better day. The rain was close to torrential. It was turning the piled earth scooped from the grave to mud.
At the end of the service, Max was invited to drop soil onto the coffin before the excavators trundled forward to do their mechanical job of filling it. He walked gingerly across the flap of artificial grass neatening the graveside and dumped down a handful of black mud with an expression that said that he found the task distasteful. The mud hit the casket lid with a watery thud. He grimaced and one of the burial professionals handed him a wad of Wet Wipes.
Grief affected people in different ways, Juliet mused on the way back. Some people defer or delay it. She thought that probably was what Max was doing. He had shown no emotion at all from the moment the car had picked them up outside the building to the end of the funeral. August had surely been father, mother, uncle and brother all rolled into one cantankerous old man, hadn’t he? Max had said he could be a pain in the ass, but he had also been the only living relative he possessed.
It had to be deferred grief. The alternative was too cold and disturbing for serious consideration.
He was so silent on the journey back, so lost to the possibility of conversation, that when he spoke she nearly jumped out of her skin.
‘Do you believe in an afterlife?’
‘I haven’t given it serious thought,’ she said. ‘On balance, I probably do. I expect the question will gain greater urgency when I’m older.’
‘Ghosts?’
She smiled. ‘Sometimes. Depends on whether I’ve caught a really spooky movie. If I’m in the right frame of mind I can entertain the possibility, yes.’ She thought about the man they had just seen buried, then roaming his familiar building, unaware that he was dead, a grim apparition defying physical laws. The image made her shudder. She said, ‘You?’
‘No. I saw my parents killed. They died in front of me. I was six years old. If they could have come back, they would have done, to take care of me. At least, my mother would have. There are not many certainties in life, Juliet. But I’m pretty sure of that.’
Fifteen
HALF AN HOUR later, Juliet found herself in August’s apartment for the second time in her life. It was hard to believe that she would never lay eyes on that strange old man again. She still had most of the toiletries he had put in his gift basket lying unwrapped in her living room.
She was used to mortality. But it was strange, thinking about a departed life when you were surrounded by the detritus of that life and August’s apartment was just so full of stuff. When someone died, all their wisdom and erudition, all the skills and learning accrued over their lifetime went with them. Their virtues and vices, their failings and their personal triumphs just disappeared into the ether. In a sense, it was as though they had never been there at all. But with his belongings August had contrived to leave more of himself behind than most people did.
Max threw open the curtain over a huge window with a panoramic view of the Bridge and the river and the glittering island beyond. Light splashed across the arrayed objects, artefacts, furnishings and keepsakes piled and clustered and mounted and framed everywhere Juliet looked. The last time she had been here, age and whisky had suggested a sort of squalor. In the sunlight it had a different character; she was aware of lovely paintings and exquisite antiques, some of them seemed very valuable.
Max was looking at her. He looked like an art connoisseur in his three-piece suit now that he had removed his overcoat, or an auctioneer from one of those impossibly snooty art dealers like Christie’s, maybe. He looked like a guy with a weekend house in the Hamptons and a serious yachting habit.
She could feel his eyes upon her, sense his observation, although she didn’t find the scrutiny uncomfortable. He was watching her in the same appreciative way as she was looking at some of the beautiful objects in the room. There was nothing salacious or crude about it. Eventually, she returned his look. She said, ‘Are you sure about this? Are you sure you want to do this?’
He nodded to her. ‘I know you need a new bed, at least.’
She had let that slip, about her reluctance to sleep in her marital bed, when he’d helped her with her things. He had remembered.
‘But some of this furniture is so beautiful. And it’s yours now.’
‘Pick what you want, Juliet. Take anything you want. The rest of it, I’m either going to sell, or throw away.’
‘God, at least let me pay you.’
‘No. Absolutely not. I don’t want to profit from you in that way. I don’t intend to take a penny from you for any of this. I merely thought I might be able to do you a favour.’
‘You’re doing me a lot of favours.’
‘Accompanying me to the funeral meant a lot. It was beyond kind.’
‘Then how about you let me buy you dinner? I’ve found a good place, terrific buzz, great young chef. You like jazz piano?’
Max grinned at her. He opened his arms. ‘I can cook,’ he said.
She smiled back at him. She didn’t know him, not yet. She had reservations, but almost everything she’d seen and heard so far, she liked.
She took a few items: an antique silver candelabra and a flower vase Max told her had been made in Utrecht in the late eighteenth century. She also took an original and unsigned painting that to her unschooled eye looked like a Dufy. Over the next couple of evenings she unpacked her things and brought some kind of domestic order to her apartment.
She hung the Dufy o
n her sitting-room wall where the light from the window would bathe it in the morning. It was a view of a harbour, probably on the Côte d’Azur and it had about its smudged waves and sun-bleached canvas of its painted boatsails a suggestion of Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night. She had read that one at Jack’s insistence in his early, failed attempt to encourage her to share his taste for fiction. Most fiction bored her but that novel, she had loved.
She filled her Utrecht vase with lilies. She lit the candles she had bought for the candelabra which glittered in the light of the flames after the thorough polish she had given it to take the tarnish off.
All in all, her home looked fabulous, she thought. There was something slightly imperious, a suggestion of real splendour, about the proportions of the rooms and all the scrolled plaster ornate on the walls and the alcoves and pediments present throughout. But her thrown cushions and rugs gave it a human dimension and it smelled of her scent and soap and the beeswax on the wooden floors; it now had this snug warmth about it that was entirely personal to her.
She couldn’t wait for Mike and Sydney to come over the following night and she was so excited about showing off her new apartment. Those items of his grandfather’s Max had so thoughtfully offered her had made the place complete and she was anticipating the visit from her closest friends with something approaching pride. She had a home. Her new life had a proper setting and therefore a proper beginning. Her home would resound to the music of laughter once Mike began his dinner table patter.
She had to resist the temptation to think that there should be four of them. Mike and Syd were great company but she knew that their presence there would emphasise her own rudely inflicted predicament as a somewhat reluctant single woman.
She considered inviting Max to make a four but thought the dynamic would be wrong. She’d hate it if he felt left out. Sitting with other people’s friends could be an isolating experience; he would not get the old jokes and fond references forged over years of friendship and confiding. And considering what he’d told her in the car she didn’t want to make him feel uncomfortable. And then there was the fact that his presence could give the evening an unwelcome air of sexual tension. Because there was no doubt that her intentions towards him were not entirely honourable.
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