The Twilight Hour

by Nicci Gerrard

  Peter stood up. He was still in his running gear, damp patches under his arms, down his chest, on his back. The sweat had cooled on him and he was clammily cold. He patted at his damp, tufty hair, trying to tame it, remembered his piratical beard; he’d been meaning to shave it off.

  ‘Oh well,’ he said. Why did it matter anyway?

  Jonah glided in through the door. He was smooth and lustrous, light on his feet – those feet in their classy shoes. Peter remembered a game he used to play with his mother on car journeys: what animal did people resemble? Jonah was a panther – or perhaps something underwater, streamlined and making no sound.

  ‘Good morning,’ he said, as if they’d said good night the evening before.

  ‘Hello Jonah.’ His voice was steady. He was waiting to find out what he felt: anger or grief. But he felt neither of these, just a steely determination to do this right.

  ‘Is there any of that coffee going?’

  ‘There is. Do you take milk?’

  ‘No.’

  Peter remembered how Jonah had always used words sparingly. He took a mug from the back of a cupboard; it had writing spiralling round it. ‘Shoo, clouds, shoo!’ he read. He poured some coffee out.

  Jonah took off his coat and hung it on the back of a chair. Under it, he wore a dark blue cardigan that looked soft and expensive. Then he introduced himself to Gail, who was partly obscured by the fridge door but looking out at him curiously.

  ‘Hello.’ He actually gave her what looked like a very small bow. Was it ironic? ‘I’m Jonah, one of Eleanor’s grandsons.’

  ‘Gail,’ said Gail, a lump of Parmesan in one hand and a bunch of celery in the other. ‘Your grandmother is still in bed. I took her coffee.’

  ‘And who are you?’ asked Jonah. He squatted beside the little boy who was halfway up the stool, legs at a dangerous angle; his face was red with effort and he looked worn out.

  ‘He’s Jamie,’ said Gail. ‘It’s a non-teaching day at school. He’s in Reception. I had to bring him. She doesn’t mind’ – with a small jerk of her head, to indicate she meant Eleanor – ‘she says she likes having young life in the house.’

  ‘Quite right,’ said Jonah. He took the boy under both arms and lifted him on to the stool, then took a seat himself. He had let his hair grow longer, though the back of his head was shaved, and he now sported a half-beard. He wore a single stud earring, and several rings on his fingers. Peter saw that his thumbnails were painted silver. On the inside of one wrist was a tiny tattoo that looked like a maze.

  Gail left the kitchen, her son trailing after her. Jonah lifted the mug and took a sip. He nodded. ‘Good,’ he said. Then he looked at Peter with his eyes like sloes, and menacing and dark as a tunnel you’d never get to the end of. ‘How’s it all going?’

  It could have meant anything: How are you? Is your life all right? Do you like being here? How’s the work progressing? Peter paused, considering which of these questions he wanted to answer. He wanted to behave with dignity both in the eyes of Jonah, and in his own eyes. He had loved Kaitlin and for a while, she had loved him too. But in his darkest days he had abandoned her and for many months been bereft, guilty, undone. Now he wanted to leave this house restored and thinking well of himself. It had been his task and his pledge to himself.

  ‘The job is going well,’ he said at last. ‘I haven’t finished yet. But I’ve gone through all the books. There are some valuable first editions that I’ve put in boxes for you to look at. You’ll have to come back later for any papers.’

  ‘Good.’ Jonah picked up a shiny green apple from a bowl in the middle of the table, rubbed it against his arm, and then took a large bite.

  ‘And I like being here, with your grandmother. She’s an extraordinary woman.’

  ‘Isn’t she. There aren’t many like her left.’

  ‘I don’t think there were ever many like her.’

  Jonah nodded approvingly. Peter took a mouthful of coffee, steadied himself.

  ‘I’ve been wondering: why did you ask me to come here, Jonah?’

  ‘Why? Well, for a start I knew you were at a bit of a loose end and also that you’d be good at it.’ Peter didn’t speak, but waited for him to continue. ‘But also, perhaps, to make amends.’

  ‘Ah. Did you do me wrong, then?’

  ‘Didn’t I?’

  ‘I don’t know. Kaitlin fell out of love with me, or at least, she saw that we were doing each other no good, that we were wounding each other. And she fell in love with you. I’m not sure of the order of things and nor am I sure I want to know. What should you have done?’

  ‘I thought I was supposed to say that to you.’

  ‘Oh.’ He put the mug down on the table and wiped the back of his hand across his mouth. He was starting to feel very cold now and needed his shower. ‘I don’t think I much care who says what to who any more.’

  ‘I suppose’, said Jonah slowly, ‘that I wanted you to be all right.’

  ‘So that you could feel all right as well?’

  ‘Maybe. Also, I rather like you.’ It was unexpected, as was the gladness that coursed through Peter when he heard the words.

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘Yes.’ There was a pause. ‘You don’t have to say anything.’

  ‘I don’t think I was going to.’

  They grinned at each other.

  ‘So let me ask you the same question: why did you agree to come?’

  ‘I wanted to face things, not hide from them. I’m tired of that. I want to get on with my life, that’s all. I don’t want to be in the grip of my past. Also, I thought it might be fun.’

  ‘Fun?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘It’s satisfying and absorbing. So I suppose you could call that fun.’ He looked down into his mug, then up again. ‘Is Kaitlin OK?’

  ‘She is.’

  ‘Good. Will you tell her—?’ He stopped. Tell her what? ‘Say that I send my best wishes.’ He had wanted to say blessings, but that seemed too much.

  ‘I will. She talks about you.’

  ‘Does she?’

  ‘Yes. She tells me stories.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Happy stories, mostly.’

  ‘That’s generous of her.’

  ‘Yes. Things you did together; things you said.’

  Jonah went over to the fridge and opened it. He examined the contents, seemed to decide against them, and shut it once more. Peter, watching him, was pleased with the way this was going. He felt open and clear-headed, full of a new kind of energy.

  ‘I come here every two weeks or so and I read poems to Gran.’

  ‘Oh. That’s nice.’

  ‘She loves poetry. She knows reams of it by heart, or at least, she used to. Perhaps she’s starting to forget.’

  ‘I don’t think she forgets much. She still plays the piano.’

  ‘Does she? Yes. And she’ll always have that. Music is the last thing to go.’

  ‘You’re talking about her as if she’s disappearing.’

  ‘When I was a boy I used to come here in the holidays, while my parents travelled. They were always travelling, in spite of my father’s position at the hospital. Conferences all over the world, I suppose, and my mother’s homeland. I would turn the globe that stands in the living room and spin it, watching all the countries they went to turning round and round. Anyway, when I stayed here, every evening at dusk, my grandparents would take a walk through the garden together. None of us went with them; they didn’t tell us not to, but we somehow knew that it was a private ritual; we wouldn’t be welcome. They would always take the same paths and stop in front of the same shrubs and trees. They usually held hands, but didn’t seem to talk much, just walked together in companionable, oddly courteous silence. They were always very polite with each other, very thoughtful. My father told me that it was the same when he was a boy as well. Every evening without fail – earlier in the winter because it gets dark, later in the summer �
�� they would enter the garden together. Even when my grandfather was very ill and weak, they would go out, hand in hand, and stand among the roses they loved, or under the hornbeam there, a tree that is many times older than my grandmother.’

  Peter said nothing. He had never heard Jonah talk so much.

  ‘When he died,’ Jonah continued, ‘I used to think of her here alone, as dusk fell, and wondered if she still took those walks through the garden, and if she did, what she thought about. Did he still accompany her; did she feel him beside her, like she feels the memory of her music in her fingers when she plays? And how long does it take for someone to disappear at last?’

  He stopped and looked at Peter, as if expecting him to provide an answer.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Peter.

  ‘Of course not.’ Jonah stood up in one easy motion. ‘And I’m keeping you from your shower.’

  ‘It’s all right.’

  ‘It’s been good to see you,’ said Jonah. And he put his hand – his long-fingered, beautiful scholar’s hand – on the top of Peter’s sweaty head and rested it there an instant, as if in benediction, then lifted his coat from the chair and left the kitchen.

  ‘Wow!’ Peter said out loud.

  Later, passing by the living room door, he heard Jonah’s voice, but he couldn’t hear what he was reading. He wondered what Eleanor’s favourite poems were, and imagined her sitting in the shade of the hornbeam tree with a volume of poetry, her dark head bent, her face wearing that faraway look he had seen in the photographs.

  He met Jonah again as he was leaving. He and Eleanor came to the junk room. Jonah’s arm was under Eleanor’s elbow, but Eleanor looked surprisingly sprightly, after last night’s exhaustion. There was a touch of colour in her cheeks; she wore a green silk scarf around her shoulders and ridiculous slippers with rosettes on them.

  ‘Hello,’ she said, smiling slightly to the left of him. ‘We’ll meet later, shall we?’

  ‘If that’s good for you.’

  ‘I was saying to Jonah that we will have a vast bonfire on my birthday, a conflagration of the past. You should be there.’

  ‘I don’t think—’

  ‘You should be there,’ she repeated. ‘You should meet all the people you’ve been studying and cataloguing.’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Fireworks,’ Eleanor said. ‘We shall have fireworks. The grandchildren can arrange it.’ She touched Jonah on his arm. ‘Don’t you agree, Jonah?’

  ‘That we should have fireworks?’

  ‘No, that Peter must be present.’

  ‘Oh, certainly.’ His tone was smooth, like polished marble off which meaning slides. Peter couldn’t tell if he was sincere or ironic. ‘And we should also have that great bonfire of the past. Send everything up in flames.’ He raised his gloved hand. ‘Goodbye.’

  12

  Peter and Eleanor sat beside the fire. Eleanor had a beautiful patterned shawl across her shoulders and a long necklace of amber beads around her neck; red wine glinted in their glasses. There was a little bowl of smoked almonds on the low table. Polly sat beside Peter and laid her head on his lap. He stroked her muzzle, hearing her heavy tail thump on the carpet.

  ‘What happened next?’ he asked.

  Two weeks later, on a Friday, Eleanor took the train home. It was May, and the following day was Meredith’s birthday. Because the weather was hot, Meredith had organised a picnic. They would walk across the fields to the river. People could bathe if they wanted. She had written to Eleanor two weeks before, saying she hoped she would be there – eighteen was a significant age, after all, even though it would be three years before she could vote. Her writing was round and neat. Eleanor could picture her writing it, the tip of her pink tongue on her upper lip, her forehead in a frown of concentration. She wrote that she hoped that Eleanor would bring her young man – those were her words, ‘young man’, as if she had lifted the phrase from Sally’s lips – since she was very eager to meet him, as were her father and Sally. Eleanor’s old friend Emma was going to be there. And, she added, there was someone she wanted Eleanor to meet as well.

  At first, Eleanor had hesitated over inviting Gil and when she finally did so, it was grudgingly, although he accepted enthusiastically and he would join them the following day. There was a part of Eleanor, a large part, that didn’t want to take Gil home with her. He was her secret life, the one she had made for herself in London. She didn’t know if she wanted him meeting her family, and she didn’t like the thought of them meeting him, approving of him, taking her to one side to congratulate her. Eleanor had told him about her family, but sparingly, just factual details: Robert owns a haberdashery that doesn’t bring in much money; Sally sews dresses, but only for her favoured customers; Meredith has trained to be a secretary. Her thoughts bumped against the fact of Merry. She remembered the time, when she was still living at home, when a young man, a boy really, had come to collect her. They were to go dancing. She was coming down the stairs in her satin pumps, excited, but Merry had rushed to answer the door. The pair had stood at the threshold, Merry gazing up at him in admiration, agreeing, exclaiming, giving her silver peals of enchanted laughter. Eleanor had seen the expression on the young man’s face: he was flattered and charmed; how could he not be? Merry was so agreeable, so pliant in her manner, hanging on every word. It wasn’t consciously manipulative; she behaved in the same way to women as well. She remained like a small, indulged child, wanting to like everyone and be liked in return. Liked, loved, adored. Eleanor thought of telling Gil that if he flirted with her sister or was at all captivated by her winsome, dimpling charms, then she would never see him again. But she decided not to give him the benefit of an advance warning; she would just watch him and see how he responded.

  It felt strange to be going home, she thought, as the train trundled through the green countryside, stopping at stations that stood empty in the golden light, rosebay willowherb growing at the end of the platform. Secret rivers and little back gardens. It felt as though she were being taken back to her childhood, the years reeling back, until at last she was stepping out on to the platform with her overnight bag and squinting through the dazzle of low evening light for Robert.

  More than seventy years later, she remembered everything. She was wearing the clothes she had worn for teaching, for she had come straight from the school: a black skirt and a white high-necked shirt, plain black shoes that needed to be taken to the cobbler to repair, for the soles were wearing out. She remembered seeing her stepfather coming out of the shadows to greet her, plumper and balder than she had remembered. How his thinning hair, damp from the heat, stood up in clumps, like a bird’s crest, and how he smelt of something that took her back to childhood times: wood smoke and pipe tobacco and bacon and a sour tang of sweat. The bristle of his cheek scratching against her skin. He was older, redder, more anxious. His quickness had become jerky, his cheerfulness like an insistent sprightliness that made her feel tense. She remembered the heat of the day, and how the road was dusty under the wheels of the little car, his pride and joy, and the leaves on the trees freshly opening in the dusky light.

  Sally met her at the door, wearing a white apron over her clothes. She had a smudge of cold cream down one wing of her nostril. There were new lines on her face, a couple of tiny hairs on her chin, and Eleanor noticed how she blinked often, as if to clear her vision. Perhaps all those years of sitting over swathes of silk and muslin had ruined her eyes early. She reached up and kissed Eleanor on one cheek and then the other. Her hands were cool but her face felt warm, flushed from the cooking. She smelt of biscuits and the flat-iron, a dry, domestic aroma that took Eleanor back to her earliest days, before Robert and Merry had swelled their little family.

  ‘Something smells good,’ said Eleanor.

  ‘I’m making us an egg and bacon pie. I know how you used to love it.’

  Did she? Eleanor made an approving noise.

  ‘And tomorrow you can help prepare for the pic
nic. Otherwise I don’t know how I’ll do it all in time. All the things Merry wants!’ She made a sound that combined exasperation with approval.

  ‘I’d be glad to.’

  ‘What time is your young man arriving?’

  ‘His name is Gil,’ said Eleanor, as she did every time. ‘At twenty minutes past midday. I’ll take my bag upstairs, shall I? I’ve Merry’s present with me; should I give it to her tonight?’ A silver locket on a slender chain, satisfyingly coiled inside a silk pouch.

  ‘Listen.’ Sally, running her hands up and down her apron. ‘I wanted to tell you, before you see her. We’re a bit worried about Merry. Could you perhaps have a word with her? Merry’s always listened to you.’

  ‘I’m not sure that’s true.’

  ‘Oh, it is.’

  ‘So why are you worried?’

  ‘You know how she is. Stubborn.’

  Yes. Eleanor knew how Merry could be stubborn.

  ‘She’s met a young man. She’s set her heart on him.’

  ‘Who is he?’

  ‘Oh.’ Sally sat down heavily in one of the chairs. ‘That’s the thing. We don’t really know anything about him, except—’ And here she dropped her voice, as though the thing were a secret scandal. ‘He was one of those that took the Red Train.’

  ‘You mean he went to Spain to fight?’ Eleanor felt a thrill of excitement running through her. She had read so much about all the poets and artists and idealists who’d gone to fight Franco, but she’d never actually met any of them.

  ‘Yes.’ Sally gave an outraged sniff. ‘And went and got injured of course. He doesn’t have a job, not anything steady. He writes things for magazines.’ She pulled a little face. ‘He’s here convalescing with some aunt or cousin. I don’t know. He’s not like any of the young people Merry knows. He has some strange ideas and just seems a bit, well, I don’t know how to put it. Odd.’ She looked beseechingly at Eleanor. ‘And he hasn’t got one coin to rub against another, though it doesn’t seem to bother him. Robert doesn’t trust him at all. He thinks he’s unstable.’