The Twilight Hour

by Nicci Gerrard

  ‘Rose. Yes. Don’t move.’

  He ran up the corridor, his feet banging in the silence, and hammered at the door of the room he knew Rose was in. There was no response, so he banged again and heard a sleepy enquiry. He opened the door. In the light that came in from the hall, he could make her out as she sat up, rubbing her eyes, her hair in a mussed tangle round her face.

  ‘What?’ she said, her voice thick with sleep.

  ‘It’s Eleanor. She’d like your help.’

  ‘Eleanor?’ She was out of bed in a flash. She was wearing pyjama bottoms and an old tee-shirt. ‘Is she ill?’

  ‘She says she’s just tired.’

  ‘Tired? Why is she awake? What time is it?’

  ‘We were talking. I don’t know what time it is.’

  Rose looked at her mobile by the side of her bed.

  ‘It’s half-past three,’ she said.

  ‘I didn’t know.’

  He followed her into Eleanor’s room. She was sitting where he had left her, but was looking quite peaceful. Her hands were in her lap.

  ‘Gran?’

  ‘I’m sorry to wake you. You must think me very selfish. I’m feeling better.’

  ‘You should have been in bed hours ago. Why on earth are you still up?’

  ‘I wanted to be up.’ There was a touch of asperity in her voice. ‘I was hoping you could help me off with my clothes.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Peter! Is that you there?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, go away. I don’t want you here to watch me undress.’

  ‘Sorry. Sleep well. I didn’t mean to keep you up.’

  ‘You didn’t keep me up. I kept myself.’

  ‘Sweet dreams,’ he said and she raised one hand to him.

  Rose left her and Eleanor lay in her bed, with the heavy pile of duvets over the top of her. She could still feel the press of Rose’s lips on her cheek. Her limbs ached with such tiredness that she couldn’t believe she would ever be free of it. Her bones were brittle and sore. Her stomach hurt and her throat felt as though something was lodged in it. There was a faint drumming in her head. Her cotton nightgown scraped at her skin like wire. It is tough being old, she thought, and then she thought: you have to be tough to be old. Or perhaps it’s the other way round and you have to be old to be tough. The young have no idea. She closed her unseeing eyes. She thought about being young again, when her limbs were pliant and her body had none of the jagged edges and chipped fragility it had now. She thought about running down a hill, about being on a bicycle with the wind in her hair, about swimming in the river, in the sea. One by one, you lose the things you hold most dear. She would never again lie in a graveyard in the late-afternoon sunlight with that beloved, remembered face above hers, staring down at her, and life streaming through her.

  She felt her old, battered, worn-out body relax in the warmth of her bed, and the sharp press of individual thoughts blur. She was in the land between wakefulness and sleep where time dissolves and the dead can return to life once more.

  Be with me now. When the quince tree is in blossom, its flowers loose, its petals unfurled, that is me, that is me opening at last. The scatter of the sun through its young leaves, tumbling in petals of light on the ground. Blades of grass against tender flesh. The imprint of swallows against a sky that never stops. Appalling blue. Your eyes and I fall upwards, drowning. Do not go. Touch me now. Face, neck, breasts. Your breath, honey and spice. I taste your words, I feel your pain, touch your happiness with my fingertips. Whose skin is this, whose desire? Where do I begin and end? I hurt with joy. I have traded my entire life for this moment. I put everything in the scales but you, and you outweighed them all. Do not go. Why did you ever go?

  They say that time is a river, stopping for no one, spilling its dams, sweeping everyone up in its currents. Sometimes deep and fast and clear; sometimes widening, slowing, so you can no longer see that it’s moving at all. But still it is implacable. And they say that time is a one-way journey; you set off in a jostling, hopeful crowd, but it thins as you travel, and at last you realize you’re alone. You’ve been alone all the time. You gather up burdens as you go, memories you have to carry and sins you can’t dislodge, but you can’t stop. You can’t go back.

  But they are wrong. Time is no longer a river or a lonely road; it is a sea inside me. The ebb and the flow, the tug of the cold moon that shines on its waters. Knowledge drops away; innocence returns; hope freshens. It is spring. I did not know what a long journey it would be to come home.

  17

  The next morning, Eleanor was not up when Peter went downstairs in his running things, and Thea and Rose were getting ready to leave. Tiredness made him cold. He put on layers of mismatched clothing, but however he bulked himself out he couldn’t get warm. Winter was coming; winter had arrived. The wind blowing in from the sea had a bite to it; it gusted down the chimneys and entered the rooms. The trees were almost bare. The ground was no longer muddily soft but carved in hard grooves; leaves were crisp on the ground and the light was thin and clear. Today he could understand why Eleanor had to leave this chilly, remote place. She needed to be in the flow of the world, surrounded by the warmth and noise of other people’s lives. Here she was like the last person aboard an abandoned old ship, living amid the memories of its crowded past.

  After his run and shower, he went into the junk room and looked around at all the boxes and bags and piles of books and files. On an impulse, he went to the corner of the room where the paperback books were stacked in piles ready for the family to inspect them. He scanned their spines and at last found the one he was looking for. Homage to Catalonia. The jacket was disintegrating and some of the pages loose. No one was going to want it; they’d just put it in the skip. He put it to one side. Thea and Rose left, looking in to say a brief goodbye, and the house sunk into a silence, save for the wind against the rattling panes. But then he heard Eleanor moving around upstairs, and the rattle of pans and china in the kitchen. There was a loud voice talking dramatically: either the radio or an audio book that kept her company through all the days she was alone here. He saw the home help’s car draw up, which meant that soon there would be a fire in the living room again, more food in the depleted fridge. Perhaps she would make one of her warming soups before she left.

  He fidgeted through the day. Most of what was left was the miscellaneous debris, the papers and letters and bits and pieces of Eleanor’s life that he’d been unable to find a category for. He considered scooping them all up and throwing them into a bag. What did it matter if a faded photograph of a woman in a severe skirt disappeared, or this group portrait taken somewhere up a mountain long ago, with its participants in breeches, carrying walking sticks was chucked carelessly away? Who would lay claim to them now? Yet there was something rather sad in the thought that people could simply disappear from memory like that: that this woman with her prudent mouth and her meticulous bun, this quaint walking party that looked as though the Titanic had never sunk, should be thrown on to the bonfire without even the attempt to identify them. He put them to one side, and rifled through assorted certificates: a first-aid course successfully undertaken, a swimming trial completed, a driving test passed, a stray MOT from twenty-two years ago, a parking fine, an eye test, a repeat prescription, a long-defunct pension policy, household insurance, a guarantee for a sit-on lawnmower dating back to 1977 and for a gas-fired boiler, child benefit forms, stray bank statements from long ago. Eleanor had told Peter to put anything financial in a pile to be handed over to Leon and he dutifully added these to the box in front of him.

  He felt dazed and appalled at the amount of bureaucracy involved in a life, and this was only looking at its last traces. He rarely opened letters from the bank or the student loan company, had long ago lost his paper driving licence and his National Insurance number; his mind closed down at the thought of a savings account (irrelevant since he had no money to save), and it occurred to him now that his passp
ort was probably about to run out or had already done so. Just the idea of filling out that form and making sure the writing fitted into the boxes, that his photograph was correct, made him feel itchy. He couldn’t begin to imagine himself in a life where he had a mortgage, a car, life insurance (or was it life assurance?), ISAs – he didn’t know what ISAs were, in fact, and couldn’t guess at what the acronym stood for, just had a vague sense that they were what sensible people invested in. They had portfolios. Stocks and shares. They followed the FTSE 100 index – what did that even mean? It was just a phrase he heard on Radio Four that made him think of jagged graphs and men in suits, shouting and waving their hands in the air like football hooligans. When his grandmother had died, she had left him £2,000. He had spent it at once, taking Kaitlin out for a ludicrously expensive meal where he had insisted, in spite of her giggling protestations, on buying a bottle of wine that cost about a pound a mouthful, and then blowing the rest on his bike. His bike was the only one of his possessions that he loved. It didn’t need a tax disc, or insurance, he didn’t need to pass a test to ride it, it came with no strings attached and gave him freedom.

  In the early evening, when it was already quite dark, Eleanor came to him and told him she was waiting for him in the living room. The fire had been burning there most of the day and Leon had put on two large logs before he left, which were blazing in the grate, giving out substantial heat. Peter took off his jersey first and then, surreptitiously, his odd socks.

  Eleanor told him to pour them both a glass of wine and they sat awhile in silence, with the companionable crackle of the fire and outside the windy darkness. The dog lay stretched between them, twitching in her sleep.

  ‘I’ll always remember this,’ Peter said at last.

  ‘That sounds rather elegiac.’

  ‘You’ve been kind to me.’

  ‘Nonsense. You’ve kept me company during these last days here and I’ve liked having you here.’ She paused for a moment. ‘I’ve liked talking to you,’ she continued. ‘Although to be honest I sometimes think it isn’t you that I’m talking to.’

  ‘Then to whom?’

  ‘Ghosts. Ghosts of the past. Michael. Gil. Myself – I mean the self that I used to be. Dead selves. When you’re old, time ceases to have the same meaning that it has when you are young, when it seems to run in one direction. Sometimes it feels that I’m not remembering so much as returning. That when I tell you what happened, I find myself back there, in those terrible days. Of course, all the time, I know who I am as well: old Eleanor Lee, sitting by the fire and recalling the young and foolish person she once was, like recalling a stranger. Can you drive?’

  ‘What?’ He was taken aback by the question.

  ‘Do you have a driving licence?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good. I don’t know why I didn’t think about it before. There’s an old car in the garage here. It’s still insured. Sometimes the grandchildren use it and sometimes my helpers need it to run errands.’

  ‘But why do you want me to drive it?’

  ‘I thought we could go on a trip.’

  ‘A trip?’

  ‘Must you repeat everything with that note of panic in your voice?’

  ‘Sorry. But what trip?’

  ‘To see my sister.’

  ‘Merry.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is it far?’

  ‘About fifty miles.’

  ‘I’m not actually sure if that’s a good idea, you know. I do have a driving licence but I haven’t driven for about three years, and even then I wasn’t a particularly good driver. I passed on my third attempt and that was probably because he had to fill some quota.’

  ‘You’ll be fine.’

  ‘I don’t know, Eleanor. You haven’t seen me driving.’

  ‘We’ll leave at about nine and even if you crawl along, we can be there before eleven. We can have a pub lunch on the way back. It’s been ages since I had a pub lunch. Gil and I used to have them often, on our travels. My children seem always to take me to stuffy restaurants or respectable teashops. I can have gammon and chips and treacle tart. And beer.’

  ‘What about my work?’

  ‘What about it? You’re nearly finished, aren’t you?’

  ‘Kind of.’

  ‘There are no more secrets there, Peter. You’ve found what I needed you to find. There’s nothing left to give me away.’

  18

  Eleanor walked back to her bedsit in a daze. She knew that she should feel guilty. And certainly guilt came down on her in curling, cresting waves, so that she could barely put one foot in front of the other and several times had to stop. At the same time she had to catch her breath not only from horror but from an exultation that rushed through her like a clean, strong wind. And then she was lifted up by a joy so tremendous and a delight so physical that she was borne forward by it, filled with a vigour that she had never experienced before. It seemed that there was some battle raging inside her and she couldn’t understand how her body could contain it, and how nobody passing her by could see it. How had she never known? How had nobody ever warned her? She tried to put the scene from her and simply walk, one foot in front of the other, fast enough to feel the ache in her calves, but she couldn’t prevent herself from going over what had happened. Her skin burned from his stubble and her lips were sore. Her flesh pulsed. Her stomach churned. Their time in the graveyard had been far more important than actual sex with Gil had been, labouring away in the darkness of her room. With Michael, she had abandoned herself – and a hot flush spread over her at the memory of how she had pressed her body against his and made queer whimpers and frightened, hoarse moans that were like no sounds she had ever uttered before, and how his fingers had opened up pleasure in her, sending desire gushing through her. For a few minutes, she would have done anything, yes anything, to assuage that agony of wanting. Like an animal, she thought now. If that old lady had returned, she couldn’t have stopped kissing him, holding him against her, arching herself against him and letting him touch her, feel her. Oh God.

  She paused for a moment and leant against the wall, trying to regain her composure. Her hair had come half-undone and when she put up a hand to rearrange it she found that there were blades of grass in it. What must she look like? She pulled her compact mirror from her bag and opened it. Her face stared at her, pale with glittering eyes and red-rubbed lips. She saw that there was a small bruise on her neck and buttoned her shirt higher to conceal it. She didn’t look like herself, not the self she usually presented to the world, so in control. Her boundaries were dissolving; her surface was rupturing. His tobacco-taste was in her mouth. Everything she kept locked away and safe was spilling out. She took a few deep breaths and told herself in her mother’s voice to pull herself together. Then she straightened her hair and powdered her nose. But still, she felt sure that anyone who saw her must guess. Gil would guess. But no, Gil was one of the people who would never guess, because he trusted her and was sure of her love for him. He knew, or thought he knew, that once she had pledged herself, she would always keep her word. He didn’t doubt his own love and he didn’t doubt hers. She had told him, not many days after returning from Merry’s picnic, that she was on her monthlies, but that in any case she thought they should wait before they had sex again until after they married. She didn’t feel safe with it even though he had been careful, she had explained, and also she didn’t really like the secrecy of the thing, creeping past Gladys’s and then Terence’s doors, scared the creak of her bed could be heard. She knew she was giving too many excuses at once, each one diluting the strength of the others, but Gil hadn’t noticed. He had put an arm round her and kissed her hairline, and said that of course he understood. He would wait, knowing that they would be together every night soon. He apologized if he had in any way made her feel pressured. Eleanor had laughed at him.

  ‘How could I have felt pressured? It was me who dragged you back to my rooms, if I remember.’

  ‘You h
ardly needed to drag me.’

  ‘In any case, you can’t present yourself as a cad, forcing yourself on some poor innocent woman.’

  At least she had made her excuses to Gil before she had kissed Michael in the churchyard. Otherwise, she would perhaps have gone to bed with him out of guilt and self-punishment, because she didn’t want to, because she hated herself.

  Eleanor let herself into the house. Gladys was standing in the hall, putting the phone back on its hook.

  ‘Eleanor!’ she said. ‘You’ve come just too late.’

  She gave everything she said a roguish air, raising her eyebrows, crinkling her face into a knowing smile. She smelt of sardines and cigarettes. There was a long rip down the seam of her pink cardigan.

  ‘Late for what?’

  ‘That was your young man on the phone.’

  The blood rushed to Eleanor’s face.

  ‘Gil?’ she asked.

  ‘Do you have other young men that I don’t know of?’

  ‘What did he want?’

  ‘He wanted to speak to you, of course.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘You look a bit flushed.’

  ‘Perhaps it’s the walk.’

  ‘That will be it. I told him you would call him.’

  ‘Thank you. I’ll do it later, not now.’

  ‘You haven’t had a lovers’ tiff, I hope?’

  ‘Of course not. I’m just a bit tired. I have a slight headache.’

  She went up the stairs, conscious of Gladys’s bright eyes on her. Gladys was fond of saying that she knew everything before it happened, and Eleanor almost believed it was true.

  She closed the curtains and took off all her clothes. They smelt faintly of him. Then she washed at the sink, sluicing cold water under her arms, between her legs, over her tingling face. The bruise on her neck was clearer now. She put a finger against it and felt the throb of her pulse there.