‘That’s when it becomes a busman’s holiday,’ he told me. ‘I have to give a couple of talks to the local writers, of whom there are many in that neck of the woods.’
‘Do you enjoy that?’ I was genuinely curious.
‘Yes … Yes, I do rather. And Americans are such a good audience. Appreciative. They’ll have taken the trouble to read some of my earlier stuff, they’ll do me the compliment of asking polite but searching questions, and they’ll buy the book in quantities.’ He pulled a funny, self-deprecating face. ‘Which between ourselves is the object of the exercise.’
I wanted to tell him I loved it when he talked dirty, but instead asked: ‘Is there anything in particular you’d like me to take care of while you’re away?’
‘Nothing in particular, no. Don’t feel you have to sit around here twiddling your thumbs but I’d deem it a huge favour if you could maintain a watching brief.’
‘“Don’t leave town.”’
‘If that’s not an imposition. Just keep the show on the road as only you know how.’
I was getting used to the idea that my role was to keep the show on the road, whatever that entailed at any given moment.
‘What about Percy?’
‘Well, I don’t want you to feel pinned down, especially at weekends, so for a small consideration I’ve arranged for a friend’s teenage son to pop in. He’s called Fergal by the way, Fergal Ayre.’
‘Are you sure? I don’t mind.’
‘No, no, that’s fine. You might want to go away, or do anything. I could have resorted to the cattery but I can’t face the guilt. And fifteen-year-olds can always use some cash.’
A couple of days before he was due to leave he got the news that the first of the E.J. Clays was going to be made into a TV drama. It had been under consideration for some time, and we occasionally amused ourselves by imagining its progress around the Beeb – discussions, feasibility studies, casting issues, reservations and so on – so when the news came through we were almost blasé. But not so blasé that Edwin didn’t feel a celebration was in order.
‘I think this calls for a glass of something amusing – would you like to come to lunch?’
We walked to a wine bar with a reputation for excellent wine and no-nonsense food – I’d never been there. Edwin ordered a bottle of Malbec.
‘I recommend the rare roast beef sandwich, on white, with horseradish or mustard.’
‘In that case, let’s see … I’ll have the roast beef on white, with wholegrain mustard.’
‘You won’t regret it. Except perhaps the wholegrain – filthy stuff.’
I’d learnt to know when he was teasing. He sometimes affected a cod-curmudgeonly persona that went with his appearance but was the opposite of the considerate, kind, and intuitive man I’d come to know.
‘Here’s to television!’
We clinked glasses. The Malbec was almost black, and alarmingly heady. I wasn’t a big drinker, and warned myself of the disinhibiting effects.
‘Who would you like to play Donna?’
‘God knows. I haven’t thought about it.’
‘It’s going to be strange seeing your characters as someone else sees them.’
‘And interesting. I shan’t object. I shall be a model author, pocket the cheque and keep my mouth shut.’
‘I bet all authors say that.’
‘Maybe, but – ah, here we are!’
Our sandwiches arrived – enormous, crusty and delicious and the first few mouthfuls put paid to conversation.
‘Good?’
I nodded. ‘Good!’
We concentrated on eating for the next five minutes, and he topped up our glasses, which were those tall, elegant chalices beloved of wine bars. I wished my hands weren’t so workmanlike, that I had long fingers and a perfect manicure to adorn the slender stem. He tilted his happily in front of his face.
‘Do you like this?’
‘Too much.’
‘I apologize for ordering in what many women would think of as a sexist manner.’
‘I’m glad you did; I don’t know a thing about wine.’
‘But you know what you like.’
‘Not always even that. I buy by price in the supermarket.’
‘Nothing wrong with that. The democratization of wine selection.’ We sipped reflectively, mellowing by the second.
‘Tell me, Flora,’ he said. ‘Are you happy in your work?’
‘Very.’
‘I do hope so, because I’d be awfully sorry to lose you.’
‘You won’t,’ I said, almost too quickly. ‘I mean, I don’t have any plans.’
‘I realize,’ he went on, ‘that I may be a rather annoying employer, and don’t say “not at all” – I know I am because the turnover in that little office has been fairly rapid.’
‘You’re not very directional,’ I said. ‘Some people might not like that, I suppose.’
‘Not very directional …’ He took off his specs and cleaned them on his napkin. His face looked vulnerable without the glasses, and younger. ‘Well and tactfully put. No, I’m not.’
‘But I’m fine with that. It suits me.’
He put the glasses back on. ‘How fortunate then, that we found each other.’
He left on the Saturday, so I wasn’t there to observe what kind of traveller he was – whether he was an organized packer and what departure rituals he engaged in. But when I let myself in – the first time I’d done so – on the Monday, the house was tidy and clean and Percy was lying in a pasha-like attitude in the sun on the drawing-room window seat; he looked at me as though I were something he’d brought in and discarded. In the kitchen there was a small amount of cat food and milk in the saucers by the back door, from which I inferred that Fergal had been, probably the previous evening if the received view of teenagers’ morning habits was correct.
There was quite a lot to occupy me at the moment – correspondence relating to the TV offer and connected to research for the next book; responses to readers and to book-related invitations. Edwin ran an old-fashioned but serviceable filing system which he’d asked me to ‘spring clean’ as he put it. He adopted the perfectly reasonable attitude that if he threw nothing away he would never lose it, but the paper had reached critical mass and he had given me authority to ‘chuck what’s neither use nor ornament’. I did ask if he’d like me to keep the ‘chuck’ pile for him to look at on his return, but he’d said ‘No, that would be fatal’.
The filing cabinet in my office wasn’t the problem; I was pretty much on top of that. It was the stuff that had accumulated in his study that he wanted me to be ruthless with. The motherlode of old paper was apparently to be found in a wooden chest, and on an armchair. For this purpose I’d been given special dispensation to go into the shed for which, apparently, I didn’t need a key.
By Wednesday I’d got a clear desk, and went with some trepidation across the garden – the grass needed cutting, it was like a meadow – and opened the door. I was prepared, I don’t know why, for Beethoven-like chaos, the material tumult of the creative process. But the inside of the shed was if anything rather austere. There was a table serving as a desk, a threadbare swivel chair, a pot-belly stove (repro, it was discreetly plugged in) and – more surprisingly – a bunch of roses in a jug. The roses shared the table top with a portable typewriter, an ancient Bakelite anglepoise lamp and a high-sided butler’s tray containing pens, pencils, sharpeners, paper clips, a torch, nightlights and matches, and a half-full bag of mints that were not, I observed from habit, Hopgood’s. There was no carpet (I could see the need for the stove) but a rather wonderful worn, faded Persian rug covered almost all of the floor. The door and the single large window were on the garden side of the building, two of the remaining walls were covered by bookcases, the third had a framed picture which I recognized as the original artwork for Edwin’s second novel, and a cork noticeboard covered mostly in what I at first took to be reviews but which on closer inspection turned out to be
newspaper stories which must have caught his author’s eye. A lost child … a mercy killing … an inexplicable car accident … a kidnapping … a survivor’s account of a house siege …
I took the trust placed in me seriously. The last thing I wanted to do was snoop, but the would-be snooper that lurks in all of us could see at a glance that this wasn’t the room of a secretive person, but of an almost innocently open one.
The armchair was one of those huge, saggy things that over time have begun to appear almost organic; it seemed to bear the slithery mass of papers in its arms like a fat old woman with a bundle of washing. The wooden chest, which must have started life as a blanket box, stood beneath the noticeboard, and I began with that. To begin with, I was slow and careful, but after five minutes I was discarding old utility bills, letters and brochures at high speed. By the time I’d done the same with the load on the armchair it was nearly two o’clock and I was suddenly famished. I decided to call it a day.
The phone was ringing as I opened the door of my flat.
‘Hello? Floss?’
A call from either of my parents, especially mid-week, was almost unprecedented. My father had to ask again, ‘That you, Floss?’
‘Yes, hello.’
‘You all right?’
‘Absolutely, I just walked in.’
‘Sorry to catch you on the hop, want me to ring back in a bit?’
‘No, this is fine.’ I sat down, gazing out of the window, adjusting. ‘It’s nice to hear from you.’
‘I’d like to say that I just rang to pass the time of day, catch up and so on, but I’m afraid that wouldn’t be exactly true.’
There was some kind of soundscape in the background – voices, a percussion of crockery.
‘Where are you?’
‘In a motorway cafe.’
‘One of your sales trips?’
‘Partly. Look, Floss … Jessie’s not well.’
He sounded stressed, urgent. I remembered that long-ago visit – how could I forget? But his tone was somehow unexpected and I in turn wasn’t sure how to react.
‘I’m sorry to hear that. But … well, she must be a huge age …’
‘Mid eighties.’
‘What’s the matter with her?’ I realized this sounded curt, and added, ‘What’s the diagnosis?’
‘Stroke.’
‘Is she in hospital?’
‘Yes, I’m on my way to visit her now.’
I remembered that chilling blankness, the sense of time crawling on its belly, the arthritic clock … The final fleeting expression of weaselly hostility in those deep-set little eyes
‘Will she know you?’
‘That’s not the point.’
I hadn’t intended to be heartless. ‘I’m sorry. Of course you must go, I didn’t mean—’
‘I just thought that as you met her, you ought to know.’
‘Of course. Thanks.’
The new awkwardness between us was excruciating. I wanted to say something, anything, to dispel it.
‘Is Zinny coming?’
‘No.’ A pause. ‘She didn’t really know her.’
‘She’ll know how you feel, though. She’ll have the G&T on ice when you get back.’
This was a stab at, if not levity, then at least normality, but it didn’t work.
‘Anyway. Sorry to be the bearer of bad tidings.’
I couldn’t tell him that I felt almost nothing. ‘Not at all. Thanks for—’
‘Better go or I won’t catch visiting hours.’
‘Say something from me, if you think she’ll—’
‘Bye, Floss.’
The quietness of my flat flowed back round me as I sat there with the phone dead in my hand. Now, too late, with the conversation over, I prickled all over with apprehension. The hairs on my bare arms stood up. I hadn’t known, and still didn’t, what the weight of that exchange had been. I sensed there had been a message behind the words, but I was unable to decipher it.
On an impulse I dialled our home number. Why I expected Zinny to be able to shed any light on the situation, I can’t imagine. She was not in the business of shedding light, most of all on any kind of emotional complication.
But anyway, that proved academic because, true to form, she wasn’t there.
ELEVEN
I didn’t bump into Fergal until the end of the week. It was disconcerting to know that until then he and I had been coming and going, each unseen by the other, according to our self-appointed rhythms. There must have been times when we missed each other by moments. I noticed that although he replenished the cat’s food and drink he didn’t clean the dishes. They were becoming crusty and smelly, and I couldn’t blame the fastidious Percy for sniffing and walking away.
It was while I was running hot water into the dishes on the Friday evening that I heard the front door open and close.
I turned the tap off. ‘Hello?’
There was no reply and whoever it was had a footstep like a Sioux. As I dried my hands on a tea towel he appeared in the kitchen doorway.
‘Fergal?’
‘Hi.’
‘I’m Flora, I work for Edwin. Nice to meet you.’
‘Hi,’ he said again. He was very tall and thin with a fuzz of red hair. His black t-shirt had some writing too small to read from where I stood.
‘I was just washing the cat dishes.’
‘Right …’ His voice had a middle-class open-throated timbre overlaid by the democratic twang of the local comprehensive. ‘Thanks. Sorry.’
‘No need to apologize, I just thought I might as well …’
‘Yeah, thanks.’
‘They’re in the sink,’ I said. ‘So, shall I leave you to it?’
‘Cheers.’
As he passed, I read the legend on his T-shirt: If you can read this, you’re too close. I clenched every muscle in the effort not to overstep the mark.
‘You’re coming in over the weekend, aren’t you?’ I asked.
‘Should be.’
What did that mean?
‘How far do you have to come?’ God but I was being boring. The age gap between us was an awkward one, both too narrow and wide enough to be a pain.
‘Brides Avenue. Near the Fields?’
He named one of the most salubrious areas in a city that had scarcely any that were not salubrious. The Fields referred to a grassy expanse of several acres that had once been wetlands, now reclaimed and grazed by horses and cows. It was also quite far away.
‘I come on my bike,’ he said, helping me out. He was moving the washing-up brush around on the encrusted dishes without making much difference.
‘That’s a lovely neighbourhood.’
‘It’s not bad.’ To my slight surprise he added: ‘What about you?’ And when I told him, he responded with, ‘I wouldn’t mind being there, you can walk into town.’
‘That’s true.’
He placed the still imperfectly washed dishes right way up, on top of each other on the work surface. I decided against intervention at this early stage.
‘How do you know Edwin – Professor Clayborne?’
He took the tea towel and began wiping off the water, along with the residue. ‘I don’t really. Well, I’ve met him a couple of times. My dad used to go climbing with him.’
‘Ah, right. That’s probably your father in some of the pictures around the place.’
‘Might be.’
‘They don’t go anymore?’
‘I’m not sure. Mum and Dad split up so … Don’t know really.’
I seemed to have gone from polite to intrusive in seconds, but he was opening a tin and didn’t seem bothered. I got the milk out of the fridge. Percy manifested himself, tail aloft, and opened a heart-shaped red mouth to emit strangulated squeaks of anticipation.
‘Right then,’ I said. ‘I’ll be off.’
‘See you.’
On the way home I reflected on this meeting, this small point of contact, Fergal and I each trailing our come
t’s tail of separate, complicated experience. I wondered when his parents had split up, and under what circumstances. And where Edwin stood in the mix – presumably if this arrangement had been made with Fergal’s mother he was on her side, broadly speaking. And yet the father had been his friend, his climbing companion, sharing long periods of time, and fun, and presumably danger … That would be hard to give up, surely? Perhaps he was one of those rare people who could maintain a foot in either camp. Or maybe Fergal’s parents were among the even rarer ones, as I understood it, whose separation was sufficiently amicable that friends weren’t obliged to take sides.
These thoughts brought my own parents to mind again, and specifically the recent conversation with my father. I rang, and he answered the phone.
‘Floss, what a surprise.’
‘How are you?’
‘Not so bad.’
‘How was Jessie?’
‘Oh God. Not good. Awful, to be honest. Completely out of it.’
‘I’m so sorry.’
I heard him sigh, and something else – he was lighting a cigarette, so maybe Zinny wasn’t there. ‘The trouble is, she could go on for ages like this.’
The obvious question about machines and switches hung in the air, but I didn’t ask it. ‘Is she … I suppose you don’t know … if she’s in pain?’
‘They say not. I’m going back at the end of next week.’ He sighed again, this time with a little vocalization. ‘Oh …’
‘I thought I might come down this weekend. Edwin’s away so there’ll be no rush on Monday morning. Would that be all right?’
‘Oh, I’m sure, that sounds … Hang on, I can hear Zinny, let me just …’
This was one of those moments when I hated them. The hand over the receiver, the private exchange about whether it would be OK for me to come. A hot flash of misery.
‘Floss? That would be great.’
‘I’ll be there in time for lunch.’
‘We’ll look forward to it.’
I noticed it at once – the difference, both in them and between them. My father looked pale and haunted. Zinny was if anything more carefully presented, and harder. Her hair was cut shorter and her nails were a shiny carmine. She was like a woman fighting back, though against what I couldn’t imagine. Perhaps it was the prospect of imminent retirement. In any event she wasted no time in announcing that we’d be going out to dinner that night: she didn’t feel like cooking and there was a new fish restaurant in Salting that they wanted to try.
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