‘There, that wasn’t so bad,’ says the priest.
‘It was very nice,’ says Felix.
‘Great thing about being a godparent - at least you can give them back at the end of the day!’ says the priest.
‘Exactly,’ agrees Felix.
‘Love ’em to bits but wouldn’t want one in the house!’
‘Quite.’
The priest laughs. Felix laughs too.
Behind him Abbie does not laugh. When the priest offers to shake her by the hand, she holds out the two burning candles, one in each glove, then circles past him and leaves. Later, when they climb into the car, after the smiling and the thanks and the goodbyes have ended, she will despair of her husband. ‘Is it any wonder I can’t get pregnant, if that’s how you feel.’
17
It was to be a week of surprises and shocks both at home and at work. Maybe the stars and planets were lined up in a particular direction, bringing about a new phase. Maybe it was a turn in the weather, a coolness entering the lungs and the blood, a chill in the marrow of the bones causing a change in mood. Maybe it was a biorhythmical blip, or the psycho-physical effects of the central heating, or a consequence of the dark nights drawing in. Felix didn’t think it was any of those things, but in the absence of a logical explanation, he allowed himself to speculate and to fantasize.
On Monday Marjorie was missing from the team meeting. Bernard glossed over her absence by agreeing that she wasn’t present but offering no explanation or apology. He had recently switched to a type of cherry-flavoured tobacco; even though he only smoked in his own office, the smell had already impregnated his clothing and radiated outwards as he sat at the head of the table, announcing the agenda.
‘Agendum,’ said Neville.
‘I beg your pardon, Neville.’
‘How many items will we be discussing?’
‘Just one, the allocation of cases.’
‘So it’s singular. Agendum.’
Mo snorted.
‘Is that animal noise something you’d like putting in the minutes, Mo? If so, I wonder if you could help me with the spelling,’ sneered Neville.
‘No. I just thought this was a team meeting. Not Call My Bluff.’
‘Well, if I’m writing this down I might as well use the English language as it was intended to be used. That is the criterion we should be working to, wouldn’t you say?’
Mo shook her head and mouthed a word in his direction. Neville tutted theatrically and wrote it down. Roy came in late, reeking of a less perfumed brand of tobacco. ‘Where’s Marjorie?’ he asked, glad that someone else hadn’t made it on time.
‘She’s not here,’ replied Bernard. ‘I think we should press ahead.’
Sandwiched between Old Holborn and Maraschino ready-rubbed, Thelma shrank in her chair until she was barely visible inside her thick winter coat. At one point she raised her mouth above the top button and croaked, ‘Is it pears?’
‘Is what pears?’
‘That smell.’
‘Cherries. My sister brought me two dozen packets back from New Orleans. It’s rather pleasant, don’t you think?’
He unzipped a small leather pouch and with his hand wafted the scent in Thelma’s direction. Like a rabbit that had seen a fox, she disappeared inside the burrow of her coat and wasn’t seen again until the end of the meeting. Afterwards, Felix went along to Marjorie’s office to deliver a memo, but her door was locked. Checking the rota, he saw that she hadn’t booked any leave, and Cathy on reception told him that she hadn’t phoned in sick or left any message regarding her whereabouts. There was still no word from her on Tuesday, and on Wednesday even Neville was worried enough to voice his concerns. ‘She might be lying at home with her throat cut and that spaniel of hers sniffing round the rotting corpse, thinking about its next meal.’
They were all in the staffroom at lunchtime and Thelma was just lifting a spoonful of tomato soup to her lips when the smell of ripe cherries entered the atmosphere, followed by Bernard carrying an orange Tupperware box.
‘Any news on Marjorie, boss?’ asked Roy.
‘Marjorie’s not here,’ he said, and turned away from them to unpack his lunch.
‘Will she be here on Friday, because she’s doing court duty?’ Felix wanted to know.
Sensing that Bernard knew more than he was saying, Neville went over to the door, removed the wooden chock that held it open and let it swing closed. Ambushed, Bernard busied himself with his meal, going through the elaborate process of removing the top slice of bread from each triangular sandwich and smearing the ham inside with a thin layer of English mustard. There were eight sandwiches in total, a fact made clear by the way he counted them on to a plate, arranging them in a pyramid formation with a hard-boiled egg placed ornamentally on top. This diversion bought him at least five minutes, at the end of which he produced a teapot from under the sink and asked if anyone wanted a cuppa. There were no takers. Having exhausted all options, and noticing that Neville was actually barring the door with his arms folded across his chest, he took a deep breath and turned around.
‘Er, bit awkward this. My line manager asked me to keep it quiet but, since you’re… er… concerned. About a colleague.’ He swallowed and pushed the plate of sandwiches to one side. ‘Mind if I smoke?’
Through clouds of fruit-scented fumes and between vigorous puffs on his pipe, Bernard explained that as of last Friday Marjorie was no longer a Social Services employee and would not be returning to her post. In preparation for her retirement, pensions section had been going back through her file and had noticed a few ‘irregularities, relating to qualifications, references, that sort of thing’.
‘Like she didn’t have any?’ prompted Neville.
‘Er, in a word, no.’
‘And how long had she been working here?’ asked Mo.
‘Thirty-two years.’
‘Bloody hell.’
‘Precisely.’
He shifted nervously from one foot to the next, cleared his throat, then gave a little speech of such confidence and clarity that not only did it surprise everyone in the room but it must have come as something of a shock to Bernard himself. ‘Now, I’m a quiet sort of person. I don’t ask much from my staff, and my staff don’t ask much from me either. For which I’m grateful. But if it comes to the attention of the court or the press that hundreds of adoption orders have been signed illegally through this office, or that hundreds of adoptive parents are not the true, legal guardians of their sons and daughters, then Marjorie Stanmore is not the only person who will fail to qualify for a superannuated, index-linked pension. I have six months to go and a sizeable deposit on a small property overlooking the sea above Colwyn Bay. And I can promise with absolute certainty that if my retirement plan gets flushed away between now and next May, then some, if not all, of you will be coming down the toilet with me. Therefore, I’ll do you the favour of staying in my office, topping up the coffee fund out of my own pocket, signing your preposterous expenses claims and turning a blind eye to everything else that goes on in this building, and in return you’ll do me the great honour of keeping your gobs well and truly shut. Now, Neville, if you don’t mind, I’d like to enjoy these sandwiches before I lose my appetite.’
Neville opened the door and, plate in hand, Bernard strode past him and marched off down the corridor, dragging his cherries with him.
‘So do you think he fancied her or something?’ said Neville, when Bernard was out of hearing.
No one answered.
‘Great speech, mind. Must be the tobacco. Are we sure he didn’t get it from Jamaica?’
‘Poor Marge,’ said Thelma, who stood up from her half-eaten bowl of soup and left the room, followed by Mo, who on the way past said to Neville, ‘You know what you are, don’t you? You’re a phenomenon.’
She was followed a minute later by Neville himself, but not before he had pointed out that if Bernard thought he was filling in for Marjorie at court on Friday he could whistle
for it.
Felix made a cup of tea for himself and Roy. Roy sat with his feet on the coffee table, trying to explain it to himself. The scar that ran diagonally across his brow appeared to be glowing with heat, as if a few moments of deep thinking had brought blood to his head.
‘Weird, isn’t it? Here’s me with my background, and there’s her, as sweet as they come and never hurt a fly, and it turns out she’s the dodgy one. What do you reckon to that, man?’
‘I think… I think we should have a collection,’ said Felix. ‘Send her some flowers.’
No one was in the mood for work that afternoon and Felix went home early. All this business with Marjorie had got him thinking about his own qualifications. Not whether he had any - he was pretty certain that the two years at college with a job as an ice-cream man every weekend wasn’t just a dream, otherwise he would never have served Abbie that ninety-nine with raspberry sauce and they would never have met. But where were the certificates? He looked in the bottom of the drawer where he kept his passport and record of inoculations, but they weren’t there. Neither were they in the bureau, or the lever-arch file with the insurance policies and television licence, and not in the bedside cabinet, although he did find a pair of binoculars he thought he’d left in a bird-hide in Cambridgeshire. He even looked in the shoebox under the bed where he kept the letters and the two little love gifts, and had just started to question his talent for never losing things when an image came to mind of pressing a faint crease along the middle of the certificates. And why? Because they wouldn’t fit in the small, rectangular drawer beneath the side mirror of the dressing table without being folded in half. There they were, right on top, and beneath them a bunch of other papers he hadn’t seen before, a couple of dozen sheets, some stapled together. When he opened them up he saw they were stories, or not stories so much as essays or articles on all sorts of strange but familiar themes. They had titles. Tides like The Driving Range, The BBQ, The Stag Night and The Sperm Test. The pages were handwritten, and the writing was Abbie’s.
It was Wednesday night. It was about half seven by the time they’d finished eating. Abbie was lying on the settee, watching telly. Felix sat down next to her and flicked through a couple of old magazines.
‘I was looking for my social work certificates today.’
‘Oh, yeah.’
‘Found them in the dressing table.’
She nodded but wasn’t really interested.
‘In the little drawer under the mirror.’
Still no answer.
‘The one like a secret compartment.’
No response.
‘Where you might put something, if it were a secret.’
She still hadn’t heard him, but must have sensed his eyes on her face, looking a little harder and a little longer than usual. And when she turned towards him, several seconds went by during which she replayed his comments in her head. Felix had noticed this in Abbie before, the ability to retrieve his words from her subconscious, even when she hadn’t been listening. It led to some bewildering disagreements, the most famous of which was an argument over a birthday present in which she swore blind that Felix had asked for a suede jacket not a leather one, even though at the time she was totally engrossed in an episode of Who Wants to be a Millionaire? the night the posh woman from London scooped the jackpot. If truth be told, Abbie was probably right. He’d drunk a couple of bottles of Old Peculiar on an empty stomach and could easily have said suede by mistake, although it was obvious to anyone who knew him that he was not a suede jacket sort of person. Luckily she had kept the receipt. The shop was happy to make the exchange. The replacement item hung in the wardrobe for almost a year unworn, suggesting to both of them that Felix wasn’t a leather jacket sort of person either. But it hadn’t been an argument about coolness and fashion. It was an argument about communication. About who said what. As for as she was concerned, he was quiet to the point of mutism, never telling her what was going on in his head, so if he did venture an opinion once in a while she sure as hell wouldn’t forget it. As for as he was concerned, what was the point in talking if she wasn’t going to listen?
But she was listening now, all right, and with her full and undivided attention.
‘Oh,’ she said.
She stood up, walked over to the window and looked out towards the garden, even though it was black outside and in all probability she could see little more than her own reflection.
‘So what did you think?’ she asked, with her back to him.
‘I don’t know. What are they?’
‘Just bits of writing,’ said Abbie.
‘But what are they for?’
‘I don’t know.’
They were avoiding the issue. Abbie continued to look towards the darkness outside.
‘They’re about me,’ said Felix.
She didn’t answer straight away. Then she said, ‘They’re about men. Aren’t they?’
‘But they’re things that have happened to me, things that I…’
‘Go on?’
He felt like he was walking into a trap. He could see the ground in front of him was nothing more than a thin layer of dry sticks camouflaged with leaves and grass, covering some enormous hole. But there was nowhere else to go other than forward.
‘Things I never even told you,’ he obliged.
‘Exactly.’
There was a long and heavy pause, broken eventually by Abbie.
‘The thing is, Felix, you talk in your sleep.’
‘I do not,’ he snapped. He didn’t know why it should be such an insult, but his instinctive reaction was to deny it.
‘OK, you don’t. Not in the way that some people do. But there’s this half an hour or so, just after you’ve dropped off, when I can ask you questions, and even though you’re asleep you tell me the answers.’
‘What?’ he said. This was ridiculous. It was an excuse. But where had she learned all those details, about the stag night and the driving range and… She must have been talking to Jed. Or Jed had been blabbing to Maxine, and Maxine had told Abbie.
‘Don’t you believe me?’
‘No, I don’t. It’s rubbish.’
‘I’ll prove it, then.’
‘How?’
Felix sat with his arms folded. He’d been told on one of his training courses that it was a defensive position to adopt. So what? He was on the defensive. He was under attack. Abbie on the other hand seemed to be moving to a point in the proceedings where she was actually enjoying herself. Her arms weren’t folded. She perched on the windowsill with her hands on the radiator, tapping her fingernails on the hollow metal.
‘What kind of week have you had at work so far?’ she asked.
Felix shrugged his shoulders. ‘Average.’
‘Average?’
‘Pretty much.’
‘Apart from the thing with Marjorie?’
Felix stared at her. ‘How did you know about that?’
‘You told me.’
‘When?’
‘Last night in bed. I asked you what had been happening at work. And you told me.’
Felix was dumbstruck. Dumbstruck in the true sense of the word - astonished into a state of silence. And also dumbstruck in the cartoon, comic-strip sense - with his mouth falling slowly open and his eyes widening in their sockets. Dumbstruck and also gobsmacked. He talked in his sleep. And judging by the evidence, he told the truth. What else had he told her? What did she know?
She came to sit next to him on the settee. ‘Don’t be cross.’
He felt relieved. If she was asking him not to be cross, that meant she wasn’t cross with him. And that was good, because that meant she didn’t know about Jed and the sperm. She would have been cross about that. He shook his head. ‘I’m not cross.’
‘But you’ve got to admit it’s a bit weird.’
‘What is? What’s weird?’
‘Well, when you’re awake you tell me nothing, but when you’re asleep you tell me everything
.’
‘What do you mean everything?’
He had folded his arms again and tried to casually unfold them.
‘Well, like someone getting sacked at work.’
Felix took a gulp of beer and kept hold of the glass and the bottle, to give his hands something to do. ‘I suppose so. When you put it like that.’
‘And the thing is, when you don’t tell me things I start to wonder what’s going on. What’s going on in your life and what’s going on in your head. Because, believe it or not, I love you and I’m very interested.’
Had he known it was a conversation about love, things might have got very strange and ended in a row. But having got all anxious and resistant, thinking it was a conversation about lying, suddenly they were holding hands on the settee.
Later, lying naked and huddled together, Abbie admitted that once, as he was falling asleep, she had asked him if there was anyone else. And with his eyes closed and his head on the pillow, he had answered, ‘No, and there never will be,’ and she’d realized at that moment they would always be together, no matter what happened.
The telly was still on, with the sound down. It was the only light. Its changing colours shimmered on the ceiling and the walls. Sometimes between programmes or between scenes the whole room went dark, but only for an instant, never long enough to believe in the blackness or feel that the evening had come to an end.
‘But why did you write all this stuff down?’ Felix asked quietly in her ear.
‘I just felt like it. You tell me something in your sleep and it gets my imagination going. You know, seeing it from the man’s point of view. I wanted to look at things from the other side. Do you think it’s good writing?’
‘Well, I only skimmed through, but…’
‘Do you think I could get it published? Because I’m sick of standing in the precinct in my long Johns and thermal gloves, asking men if they prefer roll-on or aerosol or how many times a minute they think about football. I send all the facts and figures off, and some halfwit in an office in London cobbles them together into an article. Why can’t I do that? The pieces I’ve written, they’re as good as anything in those magazines, aren’t they? Felix?’
The White Stuff Page 19