by David Nobbs
Neither Derek Hammond’s life nor Seb Meikle’s life had been ruined, though.
Stop it. Had some great times with old Mike … Think of something else. Count sheep. Pretend to be making love to … no! Don’t. None of it was any use. All of it was confusion. His thoughts churned in circles.
Cancel Jane. That was a must. There was still a question that he needed to put to her, though. He would have to have that lunch.
He could phone her. There was absolutely no need to have lunch with her.
She had been beautiful. Tall, statuesque, a little intimidating. She would still be tall. She would still be statuesque. But would she still be beautiful? He would rather like to find out. Besides, if things with Helen didn’t … what? What was he thinking? He was rather dreading seeing her, because he was ashamed of his failure in bed on Sunday. That was all. Nothing more. Nothing serious.
No, there was absolutely no point in seeing Jane. He didn’t like her. And he knew for certain now that she had been in cahoots with Ed, that she had been a partner in the activities that had ruined his best friend, who was not a killer.
He would phone and cancel.
He felt relieved that he had made a decision. He turned over onto his left side again, stretched his legs, closed his eyes and made another attempt not to think about these things. He made a map, in his mind, of the faint, feathery cracks in the ceiling. He opened his eyes to see how accurate his map had been. Hopeless. Way off the mark.
Then, against all the odds, sleep came. With it came Mike, lunging at him with a bread knife. He sat up, wide awake in the empty room. This was ridiculous. His eyes felt as though they had sunk into his head, like his mother’s, but he wasn’t going to get any more sleep. There was no alternative but to get up.
It was seventeen minutes past five. What on earth was he going to do?
He padded down to the kitchen, made himself a cup of builder’s tea, unlocked the back door, and took his tea out into the narrow, elegant garden. The roofs of the houses were still touched with red. No leaf stirred. The dew lay silvery on every blade of the long grasses. The cast-iron bench was soaking. The gravel was darkened by moisture. The little Elizabeth Frink, their prize possession, was soaking. Diana, the huntress, was soaking. This was not the garden of a man who was big in packaging. This was Deborah’s garden.
He began to shiver. The morning was still surprisingly cold. Or was he just shivering with fright?
Mist was rising from every plant and every roof. It was a fairyland. He finished his tea, and went back inside. The house smelt of tiled floors. He switched the television on, then switched it off for fear that even at this early hour the pathologists would be about. I’m developing a pathological fear of pathologists, he told himself.
He switched the radio on. ‘… but my essential point about modern Britain’s decline is …’ He switched it off. It struck him how strange, how amazing, how magical the communication systems of the modern world are. A self-important prophet is intoning, you hear none of it, you switch the radio on, you hear nine words, they depress you beyond belief, you switch it off. The man drones on, his smug pessimism unaffected by your decision, but you can hear nothing.
How silent the house was. He put the kettle on, just to hear it whistle.
He thought of switching the radio back on, the radio was his friend, there were no pathologists on it, or, if there were, they were talking about pathology and not cutting people up. But he couldn’t, not here. He would need to shout at it. That was fine in the car, but if he shouted here it would wake – if not the dead – the neighbours.
He had a shower, washed his hair, dried it, got dressed. It was twenty-three minutes past six.
He actually thought about driving round and round Islington, with the radio on, shouting at it. He thought of going down to the Emirates Stadium and shouting, ‘Come on, you Spurs.’
He made his breakfast, put honey on all four half-slices, shouted, ‘That’s surprised you, hasn’t it?’ He ate the toast very slowly.
He took his pills.
He drank the herbal concoction that Holly prescribed to get rid of the dry cough that was a side effect of the pills.
He made himself a cup of black coffee to get rid of the taste in his mouth that was a side effect of the herbal concoction that Holly prescribed to get rid of the dry cough that was a side effect of the pills.
It was seven minutes to seven.
He went into his study and opened his address book. He went right through the book, making a list of people whom he thought that perhaps, marginally, he should have told about the time and place of the funeral.
He decided that if he telephoned them today, giving them only two days’ notice six days after Deborah’s death, the brighter among them might realise that they were marginal. Besides, already more people were coming than could be coped with by the chapel and the house.
He screwed up the list and tossed it towards the waste-paper basket.
He missed.
He found himself downstairs again, rummaging in a bureau, without any recollection of having decided to go there. He found a large envelope he didn’t think he had seen before. On it was written, in Deborah’s generous hand, ‘Glebeland, 1979’. He opened it, and found a large photo of a group of girls. There was Deborah, her beauty not yet quite formed, smiling with such vast optimism that he shuddered at the knowledge of her death. Helpfully, she had written the names of all the other girls under the photo. Amanda Castlebridge, hating to be photographed and making a silly face. Constance Thrabnot, no warmth in her narrow smile, so that her sticky end (which need not concern us) didn’t seem surprising. Grace Farsley, the one that got away, whom Deborah missed so much, her niceness, her openness, the warmth of her wide smile shining through from thirty years ago. He lingered over the photo, drinking in these girls and their hopes, and all the while the funeral was like a black spot in the barbecue sky, a black spot that was growing like something in science fiction, a black spot that would slowly spread all over the sky, that would bubble and suppurate and strangle.
Of course it was possible for him not to go to the funeral. He could just go to Brighton for the day. People would put it down to stress. He could get away with it.
Or he could just disappear altogether. Get away from all his tensions and escape to a new life.
These thoughts soon passed. There is no escape. Everywhere is somewhere else. Nowhere is nowhere.
At eight o’clock he wondered if it was too early to phone Jane and cancel lunch. He decided that it was.
Suddenly he remembered that he needed to transfer money from his business account to his personal account.
He dialled his bank’s automated business service. He had to answer several questions asked by a recorded voice. Account number. Sort code. Date of birth. Third and sixth letter of his security code. His mind went blank for a moment, then it came to him. Helen’s date of birth. 151174. He felt a sense of shock. 1974! He’d forgotten how young she was. She would still have time to find someone else.
He was impatient at the best of times, and now the voice-recognition system failed to recognise his voice three times, forcing him to repeat himself. When at last he was asked to wait for the next available advisor, he found he had to wait for more than three minutes. He was forced to listen to idiotic music constantly interrupted by another mechanical voice thanking him for the patience he hadn’t got.
When at last he got a human voice it was young, adenoidal and irritatingly friendly.
‘Good morning!’ she said. ‘My name is …’ She knew her name so well and had announced it so often that she gabbled it so fast that he had no idea what it was. And he could barely understand her thick Black Country whine anyway. ‘Do you mind if I call you James?’
He hesitated for just a moment, wondering whether to let it pass. But he was too irritated for that.
‘Yes, I do mind,’ he said. ‘I mind very much. How dare you presume an intimacy you haven’t earned? How dare
you force me into sounding like the kind of pompous prig I can’t abide?’
There was a brief silence.
‘How can I help you, Mr Hollinghurst?’ she said, in a thin, hurt voice.
He felt dreadful.
‘I just want to transfer some money from my business account to my personal account.’
‘Certainly, Mr Hollinghurst. I can do that for you.’
May as well try to be polite, make amends.
‘Thank you very much.’
‘How has your morning been so far, Mr Hollinghurst?’
Replies whizzed through his mind like combinations on a fruit machine. ‘Fucking awful.’ ‘Mind your own business.’ ‘Do me a favour, get on with it, I’m paying for this call.’ ‘Lonely, my wife’s just died.’
He couldn’t. He had to make amends. This slip of a girl was forcing him, a Managing Director, to make amends. That was what was so intolerable.
‘Not very good, to be honest. Which is why I was so short with you. I really don’t think there’s any reason why we should be on first-name terms. But then I’m from an older generation, and the generation before mine, my father’s generation, didn’t even call their close friends by their Christian names. But I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have been so rude.’
Who’s talking too much and building up the phone bill now?
‘That’s all right, Mr Hollinghurst. How much money do you want to transfer?’
When he had finished the call, James sat at his desk for almost four minutes, motionless. His chat with the girl at the call centre had upset him. Next week he faced another haircut. An eleven-year-old girl would wash his hair, wetting the collar of his shirt in the process, and she would ask him, ‘Are you doing anything exciting this weekend?’ and he would want to scream at her, and the person he should scream at was the creator of the training courses that taught these people how to deal with the public.
But he had been even more shaken by something else, by something he had thought while talking to the voice-recognition system. He’d forgotten how young she was. She would still have time to find someone else. What had he been thinking about? She had him. They were for ever.
He desperately needed to get out of the house. He decided to pop down to the travel agent’s, get some brochures, start thinking about what cruise they could go on and pretend to have met on.
He would never forget his visit to the travel agent’s, which was as hot and airless and boxlike as a holiday hotel room.
He smiled at the staff, mumbled, ‘Just looking,’ and set himself to work. There were so many brochures, such large ships, so many facilities. He could see within minutes that the industry was going in a way that was not for him. The latest ships were the largest. The thought of three thousand people disgorging themselves into some quiet port revolted him. He had seen big ships arriving in Venice, dwarfing the palaces, destroying the unity of the place they were bringing people to see. There were whirlpool spas, golf simulators, bungee trampolines, champagne bars, all-night food, chocolate festivals, art auctions, nightclubs, champagne fountains, casinos, posh restaurants in the names of celebrity chefs who had probably never stepped on board. The vulgarity was staggering, and, since most of the cruises began and finished in Southampton, which involved crossing Biscay twice, for much of the time the passengers would probably be staggering too. He couldn’t see himself and Helen on these ships.
Then there were really smart ships, top of the range, altogether more tasteful, but, he still felt, they were dealing only in a rather more tasteful vulgarity. He could feel the soft, carpeted pampering, the anodyne background music in the lifts, the excesses on the table, the galloping consumption of the passengers, however well-bred and discreet it might be. No, somehow, for some reason, he couldn’t see himself and Helen on those ships either.
There were other, altogether more promising cruise lines, smaller ships, ships for people who wanted to explore the world, ships with lecturers who knew about the places they were visiting, ships that James liked the sound of, ships that would eventually be squeezed out in an industry increasingly being run by people who thought that profit was the whole point of it all, rather than being the necessary and admittedly pleasurable ingredient that made all the other pleasures possible.
When he felt that he couldn’t quite see himself and Helen performing their little charade with their separate cabins on one of these ships, he began to be worried. He realised that the charade was never going to happen, wouldn’t work. He took the brochures back to the shelves. He was shaking.
When he said, ‘Thank you very much,’ he could hear a tremor in his voice.
He knew then that it wasn’t just the cruise that wasn’t going to take place. It was his life with Helen that wasn’t going to take place. Perhaps, he thought, he had never truly wanted her, he had only wanted to want her.
He knew now why he had been dreading this evening so much.
When he went outside he walked into a wall of heat; the heat was already bouncing off the pavement, and it was still early morning.
He felt faint. He had to clutch at the traffic lights at the pedestrian crossing, and when the lights turned green he was afraid to cross. He felt in that moment that the lights would never be green for him again. He thought of Helen and he felt sad, scared and ashamed. He thought of the rest of his life and he felt bewildered.
He had only spoken two sentences, nobody had spoken to him at all, but he would never forget his visit to the travel agent’s.
By the time he got home it was thirteen minutes past eleven. He didn’t see how it could be. It didn’t make sense. It hadn’t been long past eight when he’d transferred his money. All he’d done was walk to the travel agent’s – ten minutes? Fifteen top whack? – and back again. Well, he’d had to wait quite a while for the travel agent’s to open. And he had looked through quite a few brochures. Oh, and then, because he’d felt so weak, he’d gone to a greasy spoon, had a cup of tea and a bacon sarnie. He must have sat there for longer than he’d thought, enjoying the banality, hiding in the crowd, wondering how to handle his meeting with Helen tonight.
What had he been thinking of, having a bacon sarnie when he was going out to lunch? Oh, of course. He had decided to cancel the lunch.
He wondered if it was too late to phone Jane and cancel lunch. He decided that it was.
Quarter past eleven. Jane had suggested an Italian restaurant that was ‘a bit above the average. And Nino will look after us.’ She was the sort of person who would have lots of Ninos around. She was the sort of person who made sure she was looked after. God, he hated her.
No, he didn’t. That was unfair. What he hated was the fact that the first woman he had made love to was a woman like that.
Sixteen minutes past eleven. He only needed to allow forty minutes to get to the restaurant. That left sixty-four minutes unaccounted for. And they would go slowly, the bastards, you could count on that. James hated to be late, hated to be rushed, but he wasn’t obsessed with time. Until today. He had never known a day when he had been so conscious of the passage of time, or one when time had behaved so capriciously, so cruelly, so teasingly.
How would he fill the next sixty-three minutes? Yes, another minute had passed with all the pace of a snail on its day off.
Calmness, James. That’s the key. This is the only moment in this day when there is any real prospect of calm. Relax. Let your mind go blank.
His mind would not go blank for sixty-two minutes without help. Where would he find help?
He switched the television on.
At first he watched calmly. At first he found the tedium exquisite. He was in a time capsule. Time passed very very slowly, but it did pass, and it passed without incident. But then he felt the first stirrings of distant anger. He began to feel trapped in his capsule. The anger built. It struck him that he had rants the way other people had fits. He needed to break out of the capsule. He needed to release his anger.
He stood up.
; ‘Who in their right mind,’ he shouted, ‘would want to watch a programme about a tedious badly dressed young couple with moderate IQs and charisma bypasses being shown by a smarmy young estate agent with two O levels round three very ordinary houses with cramped kitchens and brown window frames in dreary countryside on the outskirts of ugly towns and enthusing about all three and buying none of them?’
He felt better after his rant.
‘Oh, well,’ he said, much more quietly but still out loud, as he switched the television off, ‘at least there wasn’t any blood, and there wasn’t a pathologist in sight.’
More than once he was tempted to ask the taxi driver to turn round. There wasn’t any point in seeing Jane. It was her just as much as Ed that he had deliberately cut out of his social life. She had to have been a willing accomplice in Ed’s ruthless bankruptcies.
But then, each time he was tempted, he realised that there was something inescapably intriguing in meeting again, after many years, one’s first love.
Once he’d realised that he was going to meet her, he’d felt a growing excitement.
Could it be that he thought that he might be able to have an affair with her? Surely not? With Deborah not yet cremated. With Helen not yet dispatched. Unthinkable.
But they were both widowed and perhaps in time they would rekindle that old flame.
Then he realised why he really wanted to see her. He wanted to confess. He ached to tell her all about his affair with Helen. Pour out the guilt that sat on his stomach like a surfeit of cheese. Tell her what he had told nobody else and what he could tell nobody else. He realised, as they turned a corner by a Wren church, how powerful was the seductiveness of confession. Perhaps that was why Tony Blair had become a Catholic. He had so much to confess.
He would tell Jane of their first meeting, the first time they made love, the snatched moments in foreign cities, her lonely hotel dinners while he talked styrofoam and sex with men, how their love flourished not in Venice and Paris but mainly in Bridgend and Kilmarnock, in hotels that were not called Majestic or Splendide but Premier and Comfort Inn. He would tell her of the secrecy, the lies, the narrow escapes. He would tell her how essential those things had become to him. He would tell her how, last Sunday, he had failed for the first time in bed. Well, possibly by that time he would have told her too much.