‘Don’t go yet,’ he said.
‘What do you want?’
‘You.’
‘Why?’
‘When we’re together you’ll see.’
‘We won’t be.’
‘You’ll see what a connection there is between us.’
‘Connection?’ I said. ‘Do you realise how creepy you sound?’
He didn’t try and stop me going. We walked towards the gates of the cemetery. I watched our shadows precede us. They seemed to be holding hands.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said as we came out on to the road.
I looked at him.
‘I don’t mean to seem creepy. I’m just not very good at this.’ His lashes shadowed his eyes.
‘It’s OK,’ I said.
A gleam came through the shadow. ‘It’s just that you don’t often feel this strong. I’ve been searching for you for years.’
I looked into his warm brown eyes for any sign of sarcasm or craziness but he just seemed sad.
‘You’ve left the strawberries behind,’ I said.
‘They were for you.’
‘Better in season,’ I said. ‘A few more weeks and the English ones’ll be ready.’
‘Sorry. I thought …’
‘No, it was a nice thought.’
I wanted to put my arms round him. If it wasn’t for Charlie, I thought, just at that moment, only because of the strawberries, only because of the hurt in his eyes.
‘Goodbye,’ I said.
He shrugged but didn’t speak. I walked away. He didn’t follow me but I could feel his eyes on my back, a light pressure between my shoulder blades. I held my head up and walked like a dancer. At the crossing I looked back at him, still there, still watching. I lifted my hand to wave and stepped out to cross the road. There was a shout, and a squeal of brakes that sounded miles away, and then I felt a slam before the road came up to hit me.
I opened my eyes to find Charlie’s face hanging above me. A diamond came out of his eye winking through the blur. His hand squeezed mine. And next time I looked he wasn’t there.
Charlie brought me in a bunch of creamy freesias. The blur had gone. His face was tanned and there were new lines on his forehead. He smelt of sunshine and cut grass. He kissed my brow but I couldn’t feel it and only later realised it was because of the bandage.
Next time I woke Gita, a ward assistant, was arranging lilies in a vase. The smell was fatty and sweet.
‘Who’s popular then?’ she said when she saw my eyes open. ‘And look at all these.’ There was a hellish jostle of carnations: red, pink, yellow and orange. ‘Aren’t they jolly?’ She picked up the card. ‘From all at Green’s Robotics. Robotics, that sounds interesting.’
‘It’s not,’ I said. ‘Who are they from?’ I was looking at the lilies, which dwarfed Charlie’s freesias, smothering their delicate scent. It was hard for me to speak. Something had happened to my nose. I had to keep my mouth open to breathe and it was full of the waxy choke of the lilies.
Gita searched for a card. ‘Don’t know,’ she said. ‘It must have dropped off.’
‘Can you take them away?’ I asked.
‘But they’re beautiful!’ She gave me a look, sighed and lifted up the vase.
‘Give them to someone else,’ I said.
‘Some people don’t know when they’re lucky.’ She picked up the freesias.
‘Not those,’ I said. ‘Just the lilies.’ She had a mustard streak of pollen on the breast of her pink uniform. She took the vase. The flowers almost hid her face. I could hear the soles of her shoes unpeeling right down the corridor and the sound of double doors swinging open and shut.
I lay back and stared at the slim white freesias. I was tired out with the effort of speaking. When Charlie came back he told me what the doctor had told him: my nose was fractured, my eye-socket traumatised and I was concussed. No other injuries. I was lucky. Lucky! If I could have laughed I would have.
For a few days I dipped in and out of sleep, surfacing from time to time, when Charlie was there and once Rose and once Christine who brought me a box of Black Magic, a Get Well balloon and a big card signed by everybody at Green’s. I could just imagine it going from desk to desk with people saying ‘Who?’ then reaching for their pens.
Once I woke, startled to see Fay perched on the chair by the bed, feet dangling, handbag clamped to her lap. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘that was remarkably silly. Didn’t you get my lilies?’
‘Lilies?’
‘I’ll have to chase them up,’ she said. ‘I really pushed the boat out with those.’ She was all dressed up, with silver eye shadow and scarlet patches on her withered cheeks.
‘They do sometimes go astray,’ I said. ‘Sorry.’
‘Not your fault. But it’s one thing after another,’ she said. ‘Whatever next?’
I was too woozy to say much as I listened to her wonder what Charlie was going to do and complain about her feet. It was like having a mother or a mother-in-law. I didn’t care that she didn’t fuss or pretend to be fonder of me than she was. You can’t rush these things.
‘Have you looked in a mirror yet?’ she said.
I had been allowed up that morning to visit the bathroom and had caught sight of myself in the square of glass over the basin. I’d peered for a long time at the swollen lump of nose, the blackened ridge of eyebrow with its row of wiry insects’ legs, the flat and dirty hair. How Charlie could still love me like that, I don’t know, but yes I do know because I would love him whatever happened. If he were injured I would love him even more.
‘Well you’ll mend,’ she said. ‘Could have been worse. It’s Charlie I’m worried about. He’s really not himself, Nina, moping about, not eating.’
‘I’ll be home soon,’ I said. ‘I’ll look after him.’
‘It’s you that needs looking after.’
‘No, I’ll be fine,’ I said. And I meant it. ‘I’ll be fine. We’ll all be fine.’
I’d been alone in a side-ward at first but now I was recovering they moved me into one with eight beds. In the mornings it was all business – doctors, cleaners, bed changes – but in the afternoons people visited and I got a jolt like an electric shock each time I saw a tall dark shape.
‘Have you been keeping secrets?’ Charlie said one afternoon. He took my hand but I didn’t dare look at him.
‘It doesn’t matter, but you should have told me,’ he said.
It doesn’t matter, I thought. It doesn’t matter? I bent my lips into a smile. ‘What?’
He shook his head. ‘Women!’ he said and came quite close to laughing. ‘You’re so vain. What was it like before?’
‘What?’
‘Honestly, Nina!’ He did laugh then, for the first time since Dave died. ‘I was talking to the consultant – he mentioned – assuming I knew – that you’d had a nose job.’
‘Oh that.’ The hot prickle of a blush crawled up my neck and over my face. I wanted to say it was not vanity that made me do it, but I couldn’t tell him that.
‘I was embarrassed,’ I said.
‘That’s why you won’t show me any pictures of you from before!’ he said.
‘No. I told you. They went up in the fire.’
‘What was it like then?’
‘Huge,’ I said, ‘a huge great … hooter.’
‘How huge?’
I held my finger a stupid distance from my face and he grinned.
‘I wouldn’t do it now,’ I said.
‘When?’ he asked. ‘I mean how old were you?’
Gita came in. ‘More flowers,’ she said. ‘Will you accept these?’ She was carrying a bouquet of rosebuds, red and white.
‘Wow,’ Charlie said. ‘Who are they from?’
‘I’ll fetch a vase,’ she said.
‘What did she mean, will you accept these?’ he asked, burrowing through the buds looking for a card. I held my breath as he opened the tiny envelope.
‘Get Well Soon. R,’ he read. ‘Who?’<
br />
‘I don’t know,’ I said, thinking furiously, then, looking at the pursed little mouths of the flowers, said, ‘Rose. It will have been Rose.’
‘Your friend?’
‘Yes.’
‘Seems a bit excessive.’
‘She’s like that.’
‘Hmmm.’ He frowned.
‘She’s an extravagant person,’ I said.
‘Why don’t you ever bring her round?’
‘I dunno.’
‘What’s she like?’
‘All right. Nice.’
‘Invite her round sometime. It’s weird that I’ve never met any of your friends.’ He got up and roamed around my bed, went to the window and looked out. All I could see was sky.
‘Mum’s still upset about her lilies,’ he said.
‘I sent them away. I’m sorry. I don’t like the smell. I didn’t like to say.’
We sat in silence for a moment, then he narrowed his eyes at me. ‘So, what about the nose then? What was that all about?’
I swallowed. I was too tired. ‘I was different then,’ I said. ‘Anyway, what’s a person meant to say, “Hello, before we get to know each other any better, this is not my original nose?”’
‘I don’t like messing with nature,’ he said. ‘I would have talked you out of it – even if you’d looked like Pinocchio.’
Despite myself I felt the gurgle of a laugh in my throat.
‘I don’t know how you can bear to look at me now though,’ I said.
‘You’ll heal,’ he said.
‘Yes.’ I squeezed his hand. ‘And we’re going to be OK. We’ll get through this. Are we OK?’ I searched his face.
‘Okey-dokey,’ he said with hardly a pause at all.
Chapter 18
~
One drowsy August afternoon when the sea slumped against the breakwaters and the tourists moved in a drift of treacle along the promenade Jeffrey had asked her if she’d wait for him. ‘I’ll write to you all the time,’ he said, ‘and in the holidays I’ll be back.’ He said he didn’t want to go and leave her but he really had no choice.
‘Of course I’ll wait,’ she said. ‘I love you.’
It was the first time that word had been said. Perhaps the first time in her life. He breathed out as if he’d been punched in the stomach. ‘I love you too,’ he said. ‘Come on …’ They wound up steps through the Spa Gardens, past pensioners on benches, past scrubby shrubs and litter bins. Their hands were sticky with mingled sweat but still they held them. The word ‘love’ hovered round them like a bee.
‘Where are we going?’ she asked.
‘Ah ha,’ he said.
‘Where?’
‘Wait and see.’
They walked past a row of old ladies in wheelchairs, past an ice-cream van, round a corner and through a gate marked PRIVATE.
‘Are we allowed in here?’ she said and he said, ‘Of course not, that’s the point.’
They pushed between some overgrown bushes, the leathery green leaves spattered with white as if with paint, starting up a shock of little birds. They squeezed between more bushes, something thorny that snagged her sleeve, and emerged in a dank triangular space bordered on one side by the high wall of a building and on the other two by overgrown shrubs. There was no sunshine. The ground was blackish and litter-strewn and there was the sour reek of cat-pee.
‘What?’ she said.
‘Will you really wait for me?’ he said.
The corners of his mouth were chapped. There was a cluster of spots across his nose, but when he took his glasses off she saw herself reflected in the sweet brown of his eyes.
‘Of course.’
He kissed her and there was more pressure in the kiss, his lips taking charge, forcing hers open for the first time. She could feel a tremble in him. She hoped that he wasn’t going to want her to lie down in this gloomy place but he pulled away.
‘Look.’ He began kicking and scraping at the ground with the side of his shoe. He knelt down and swept with his hand and she thought he’d gone mad, brushing away grit and twigs and leaves – until she saw a circle appearing in the dirt, about three foot across, thick planks of wood painted with something black and grainy.
‘What is it?’ She stood looking down at him, at the dull thickness of his side-parted hair, at his long dirty fingers fumbling about. Love? It struck her that he looked like his father, that he would be, one day, his father, a music professor, and she could be a professor too, or at least she could be his wife.
He might become a famous concert pianist and she could be there, beside him in all the praise and riches, just as if she belonged.
Chapter 19
^
I went up to the hospital. There’s no security, not like in the hotel, anyone can just turn up at reception and get the ward number, no questions asked. You’d think there’d be more suspicion. I peered at her through a glass door. Her face was all bandages. She could have been anyone.
I might have gone back next day but I had a call from Dad wanting me to go home. I tried to put it off but he said Mum was in a bad way and was asking for me so of course I said yes. She is my number-one priority and Karen was safe and sound. She wasn’t going anywhere for a while.
Going home was like a trip back to the past. I’d never noticed the smell of the house before. Nothing I could name but it got up your nose, sad or defeated or somesuch. Everything was down at heel; no decoration or replacement for fifteen years. Stair-carpet a death-trap, frayed at the edges, paint chipped on the skirtings, dirt around the light-switches. They hadn’t the heart, of course, and it was all down to Karen. But soon, I thought, when all this was over they could have a makeover like on the telly. Get an expert in, new anything they wanted and all on yours truly.
It was afternoon and they were watching racing on TV, curtains shut to keep the sun off the screen, room choked up with Dad’s smoke.
He looked up at me from his armchair. ‘Hello, son.’
‘Hello, stranger,’ Mum said, ‘you’re looking smart.’ She held her head up so I could kiss her cheek. I’d forgotten how overweight she’d got, filling the armchair to overflowing.
Dad waited till his horse had lost. ‘I’ll put the kettle on,’ he said.
‘I’ll do it.’ I went into the kitchen. Minced meat thawing in a pan, a bag of spuds, so it would be shepherd’s pie. The pattern of flowers had almost rubbed off the plastic tablecloth; the cruet set, two swans, had lost their beaks. Karen had done this. Any feeling of softening in me about her, if there’d been any, died off then. I wanted to rub her face on the frayed carpet, the worn cloth, the hole in the line in front of the sink; grind it into her what she’d done to this family. If not for her … I shut my eyes and tried to see it. The house bright and decorated. Mum cheerful and energetic and full of flair. Isobel paying a visit – maybe with kiddies even. I’d be Uncle Mark and there might be a wife. We might be thinking of starting a family. Not quite yet a while, but it would be in the pipeline.
‘You all right?’ Dad said and I opened my eyes. ‘Good to see you,’ he said. ‘Too quiet about the place. Your mum’s been missing you.’
‘Has she?’
‘You been keeping your nose clean?’ He emptied the teapot into the sink and swilled it out. ‘None of your nonsense?’
‘How is she?’ I said.
He filled the teapot and covered it in its stained and matted tea cosy. He looked somehow different, hair a bit darker, younger even.
‘She’s been down,’ he said. ‘Trouble with her legs though the doctors can’t find anything wrong. As much as I can do to get her up the stairs. Vicious circle, she’s so heavy now she gets out of puff at the slightest thing and all the sitting around just makes her heavier.’ He took a Battenberg out of its packet and sliced it up.
‘Reason I wanted you to come; I need a bit of a break, son. A night or two off. Since you’ve been gone I’ve hardly been out of the house.’
‘I can stay a day or two,�
� I said.
‘See if you can distract her a bit, get her up and about.’
‘I’ll do my best,’ I promised, though I didn’t hold out much hope.
Dad went out at lunchtime next day. He was wearing jeans and I’d not seen him in jeans before except when he was on the ground under the car but these were a different type, new and dark blue, embarrassing the way they hugged against his flat behind and drooping privates. I said nothing and spent all afternoon pestering Mum to sit out in the garden.
It was nice out there, smell of flowers, birds singing, I’d forgotten all about how a garden feels in May what with being stuck in the city with my mind on other things.
‘How are you, Mum?’ I said when I’d got her across the grass and on to the bench.
‘Same as ever,’ she said. I worked it out and she’s only fifty-seven, not old, but the life she lives she might just as well be eighty. Hair all flat and grey and the rolls of fat, her little face perched on top of the mountain of her chest and neck.
‘You ought to get yourself out and about a bit,’ I said. ‘Why don’t I get you to the hairdresser’s? Or out for a run somewhere? We could go to Felixstowe—’ and then I stopped like a punch in the gut, what was I thinking? It had been the promenade I’d been envisioning, imagining her down there in the fresh sea air, and I had forgotten, for the first time ever, about Isobel and Karen.
She said nothing for a minute, just turned her face away. If I could have thought of anything then to please her, I would have done it. It was almost unbearable keeping it all bottled up. I nearly told her then that I’d found Karen and that I was going to make everything right. But then she looked back at me and said, in a meaningful voice, ‘I hope you’ve been keeping out of mischief.’ And the moment was gone.
I brought tea and biscuits out and we started a game of Uno but she was wheezing away what with the pollen and sweating in the sun so we soon got back inside in front of the telly and she had a tub of ice-cream in front of Countdown to help her cool off.
Dad came back in the early evening, flushed and rumpled. He wolfed down the chilli I’d made. We managed to get Mum up to the table, which was a bit of a victory; usually she stops in her armchair with a tray. He gave her a kiss when he came in and she looked up at him in a way that went right through me, so grateful he was back, beseeching you might term it.
Nina Todd Has Gone Page 7