Nina set the pot containing the fat, prickly cactus down on the parched earth of Irene’s grave, its one red bloom a tongue of fire against the dust. ‘It’s not very beautiful,’ Nina admitted. ‘I only bought it because I thought it would last in the heat better than cut flowers. But then I was listening to the radio in the cab on the way here and the forecaster said the dry weather’s coming to an end.’
‘Not too soon, I hope,’ said Guy. ‘We’re off to Wales on Monday.’
‘No. After a week or so, the man said,’ Nina backtracked. ‘I think you’ll be safe.’
‘Perhaps James might come and see us some time when we get back,’ Guy suggested. ‘Once he’s up and about. Only if he wants to. Don’t pressurize him.’
‘As if I could,’ said Nina. She thrust her hands deep into the pockets of her shorts, dragging the canvas fabric tight across the dome of her stomach. ‘He does actually like you. You’ve converted him to D.H. Lawrence, by the way, for which I’m not sure I thank you.’
‘Oh?’ Guy laughed, pleased to think that his selection of tapes had hit the mark. In an attempt to demonstrate as broad a range of tastes as possible he had, after careful deliberation, settled on Sons and Lovers, an early Terry Pratchett, and Beloved.
‘I hope you don’t think this is a cheek,’ said Nina. ‘But I was going to ask if you and Jane wouldn’t mind being sort of unofficial godparents. I mean I don’t believe in God, myself, but . . .’
‘But I do,’ said Guy, surprised at his own vehemence. ‘I’d be honoured. Really.’
‘Perhaps you ought to talk it over with Jane. I mean obviously there’s not much to be done, now he’s eighteen – I mean for God’s sake don’t get him a silver napkin ring – but I’d like to think he could turn to you, as a man . . .’
‘Of course,’ said Guy. ‘Not that I’m any sort of role model, heaven knows. Still – in the important things like cricket and real ale . . .’ He was already planning that trip to Lords.
‘Good. That’s settled then.’
They had reached the cemetery gates. Guy paused, wondering whether to buy Jane a bouquet from the stall and to hell with the price. But what sort of person brought flowers away from a cemetery? She might take him for a grave-robber. He decided to stop on the way home and get chocolates instead. ‘Do you want a lift anywhere?’ he asked, quite forgetting that Jane had the car.
‘No. I’ll make my own way,’ said Nina, and she turned with a wave and walked back down Mortlake Road, like a confident woman, of infinite resources, with somewhere important to go.
44
‘Will you be happy to be back home?’ Jane asked, as she drove Harriet away from the hospital having witnessed a protracted farewell, in which all the nurses on the ward had been kissed and hugged goodbye at least once.
‘A little bit happy and a little bit sad,’ said Harriet, after giving the matter some thought.
‘Why sad?’
‘I liked the dinners. And the big television.’
‘What was so good about the dinners?’ Jane wanted to know. Even the smell of the food trolley had made her want to heave.
‘They were nice and cold,’ Harriet explained. She was firmly strapped in her car seat, and holding a helium balloon in the shape of a dolphin – a gift from Erica, which had arrived boxed and gift-wrapped on the ward with the message, ‘a present from the seaside’. It kept straying into Jane’s line of vision, blocking the rear window, but she had promised herself she wouldn’t nag, today of all days.
Guy and Sophie would be at home waiting for them by the time they arrived; Jane had bulked out the reception committee with a few of Harriet’s favourite dolls and teddies, placed on the stairs under a homemade banner saying WELCOME in Sophie’s careful script. Jane had made an unintentionally macabre cake in the shape of a bed in which a marzipan Harriet lay pinned beneath a white icing sheet, ‘like a corpse on a slab’, as Guy pointed out.
They would save the champagne for later, when James was out of hospital and well enough to visit. Now it was established that he wasn’t Guy’s son and had no special claim on his affections, she felt much more inclined to be friendly. In fact, when it occurred to her that James himself might have no particular reason or desire to pursue the acquaintance, she found herself unaccountably depressed, and prone to invent excuses for maintaining contact. Even Nina appeared in a new and more sympathetic light. Jane realized with some shame that until now she had allowed jealousy and mistrust to stifle any natural impulses towards friendship, despite sensing, in that very first meeting in the Windmill, how much she could like Nina if she let herself. It wouldn’t be easy to make amends inconspicuously – Nina would no doubt be sharp enough to interpret correctly this sudden thaw. Still, if she had half the insight Jane credited her with, she would understand and forgive.
As she turned the car into their road her reveries were interrupted by a squeal of delight from Harriet. ‘Look, that’s Erica’s car!’ Sure enough, the familiar form of the unwashed red estate was parked directly outside the house.
‘You’re right,’ said Jane, marvelling at Harriet’s ability to distinguish between similar makes and models of car. It was obviously a recent phenomenon of Western culture – the equivalent of the Inuit’s legendary classification of snow.
‘Have they come to play?’ Harriet asked, swivelling round in her seat as Jane drove on up the road in search of a parking spot.
‘I don’t know. We’ll see.’ They ran back the fifty yards towards Erica’s car together, Jane holding Harriet’s small suitcase, Harriet tugging her dolphin balloon behind her on its string. The front window had been left open, and on the driver’s seat was a large, hard-backed envelope addressed to Jane in black marker. Jane put her arm through the window to retrieve it, noticing with relief that the car’s interior, though not exactly clean, was at least free of junk. Along with a set of keys and registration documents, the package contained a photograph and a brief note from Erica, written on the back of an unpaid parking ticket.
Dear Jane
Sorry to have missed you. We fly up to Scotland to stay with my parents for a week, then we’re straight off to Kuwait. We’ve been thinking of you all, especially Harriet. I spoke to Guy on the phone and he told me she was doing well. Give her a hug from me and tell her to keep asking awkward questions.
You won’t want any reminders of that day, but here is the photo I took of you on the beach, to redress the imbalance on your mantelpiece. It’s nice, don’t you think? One of my best.
I’ll try to drop you a line with our address when we’re settled – though I’d be the first to admit I’m the world’s laziest correspondent. I didn’t even write a proper letter to Neil all the time he was away! Perhaps you’ll let me know how you’re getting on some time. Not that I have any doubts – you were always much more capable than you realized. Memories of our many conversations and the thrashing I gave you at table tennis will sustain me during my exile.
The car is yours to keep, sell or scrap as you please.
With love, Erica
The photograph, A4 size, showed Jane in crisp focus, perched delicately on a breakwater, straight-backed, hands between her knees, looking out to sea. Beside her, but out of her line of vision, stood a seagull, with the same erect pose, staring in the same direction. Behind them both were the blurred struts of the pier. The foreground was a collision of textures: coarse, shaggy seaweed and glossy, ruffled hair; pebbles pitted as though with woodworm, and wood smooth as stone, all picked out in the deepest blacks and the most luminous whites with a million shades of grey in between. Jane was delighted: Erica had made her look not just pretty, as she had hoped, but interesting, and who could ask for more from a portrait? She would put it in the sitting room alongside the one of Guy with the glasses and the grin, where it would serve as a talking point and a reminder of her absent friend.
‘Come on, Mummy,’ urged Harriet, who had skipped down the drive and was climbing on to the edge of a large terracotta p
ot of geraniums to reach the doorbell. Her fingers scrabbled, millimetres from their target, and then she slipped backwards into the geraniums. There was the crunch of tender stems snapping, and a squeal as Harriet lunged for the door handle to save herself, and let go of the balloon.
‘My dolphin!’ she wailed, as it soared skywards, clearing the fence and taking off up the road, propelled by tiny gusts of wind.
‘It’s all right. I’ll get it,’ said Jane, dropping the suitcase and photo and vaulting the front wall. The balloon was a few days old now and had lost some of its gas: otherwise its trajectory might have been more vertical, and Jane would have had no chance at all of catching its trailing ribbon, which was even now skimming the tops of the shrubs in the neighbouring gardens. She flung herself after it – Jane, who would never compromise her dignity by running for a bus in case she missed it – over fences and front lawns, oblivious to the rules of trespass and road safety, but the balloon seemed possessed by a demon. Every time she came within arm’s length the ribbon-tail would be twitched out of reach. Harriet’s cries of ‘Run faster, Mummy’, grew faint in her ears as she reached the bend in the road.
I’m not going to do it, she thought, as she watched the dolphin bump and nudge its way over a garage roof and out of sight. She felt suddenly limp with disappointment at the thought of facing Harriet empty-handed, and was seriously considering jogging ever onwards until she found a shop that sold its kind. Where had Erica bought it? Arbroath? Aberdeen?
As Jane stood contemplating her inglorious return, the dolphin reappeared a few houses down, bobbing and swaying as if enjoying the game, and then suddenly and miraculously came to a halt as its ribbon snagged a standard rose bush. It hovered there, bent-backed, like a giant comma in the air, giving Jane the crucial few seconds to swoop and reel it safely in.
‘Clever Mummy!’ Harriet called joyfully, as Jane approached the house, dishevelled but triumphant.
‘Come and see what we’ve got for tea,’ said Sophie, dragging Harriet indoors. Within a few moments the prized balloon would be abandoned as they set to arguing over who would eat the coveted marzipan cadaver from the top of the cake.
Guy, who had heard Harriet scrabbling at the front door, had watched the pursuit from the end of the path. If he was surprised to see his wife crashing through hedges like a hound after a fox he gave no sign of it. He held up Erica’s photograph, which he had retrieved from the dusty pavement where Jane had dropped it. ‘What’s this?’ he asked.
‘It’s me,’ said Jane. ‘Erica took it.’ She found her eye drawn to the black dustbins by the gate. In each one sat a china alsatian, its muzzle resting on the rim, the lid balanced on its pointed ears.
‘It’s lovely.’ He turned it away from the light to stop the sun’s glare bursting off the gloss. He squeezed her hand. ‘You look like somebody . . .’
‘That’s because I am Somebody.’ Jane smiled, returning the pressure, and they followed the girls back into the house.
Later, while he was reading Harriet and Sophie a bedtime story, Guy could hear Jane padding about on the landing. When he came out to see what was going on he found her moving all her bits and pieces from the spare room back into their bedroom. She was filing them away neatly in drawers and wardrobes where they belonged. A pair of cream satin pyjamas which he’d never seen before lay on the bed.
‘These are nice,’ he said, stroking the material with the back of his hand. ‘Are they new?’
She gave a guilty smile. ‘The nightie you bought me was a bit chilly. These are more me.’
‘That’s okay.’ He was so pleased to have her back. ‘Anything that’s You is fine by Me.’
A commotion outside drew him to the window. A group of children, a little older than Sophie, were roller-blading on the pavement below, deliberately crashing into one another and shrieking as they went over. Kids from his school. He tapped on the window and pointed at his watch face. It took them a second or two to realize who he was, and then they scrambled to their feet and skated off, terrified, staggering on their skinny foal’s legs.
Jane came up behind him and put her arms around his waist. As he felt her cool hands inside his shirt – not passionately, but lovingly, comfortingly there – he dared to feel a sense of optimism, and to picture a future in which, with patience, all manner of things might be well.
‘I see you’ve put the dogs out,’ Jane said, pointing at the bins. ‘They might get nicked.’
‘Why? Even the dustmen won’t take them,’ said Guy, and they started to laugh, the sort of dangerous uncontrolled laughter that can easily turn to hysterics and start to hurt. ‘No. What we need is an exorcist.’ His shoulders shook.
‘We’ll have to drive to Beachy Head and chuck them over the cliff,’ said Jane, wiping her eyes.
‘That’s going a bit out of our way. What about the Severn Bridge?’
They stood there at the open window for some time, arms around each other, enjoying the silence of the house, with the girls both safely asleep in the next room, and looking out at the evening sky which was feathered with high cirrus clouds – the first, unmistakable signs of a change in the weather.
A Dry Spell Page 38