by Patrick Gale
She thought a moment.
‘No,’ she said, meaning ‘I’m not sure,’ and she looked up at him, ‘but I’m glad you told me.’ He sat on the window seat beside her.
‘Darling,’ he said and they kissed. He looked at the photographs with her for a while. He said nothing but she could hear the slight snort he always made when he smiled.
‘Peter?’
‘Yes.’
‘Don’t think me stupid, but your visits to Marcus are real, aren’t they?’
‘Of course!’ he laughed.
‘And the squash games with Jake are the only other thing you do away … away from me?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘And I won’t be doing those much now.’
She understood what he meant and kissed him back to show she did.
‘Funny,’ she said. ‘When Robin used to bring him home for weekends and things I thought he was so nice – rather serious and loyal and things – and now he’s faintly pathetic.’
‘Mmm,’ said Peter. ‘Even dull.’ He kissed her.
‘Before you cook me supper,’ she said.
‘Mmm?’
‘Shall we go upstairs and change a little?’
‘Mmm.’
Groping one another, half-crippled with desire, they made their way towards their bedroom. She had forgotten that Robin was home however and, giggling with nerves, they had to hide in her study until he left the house. Robin called her name twice before hurrying out.
Twenty-Two
‘No. Poor Venetia couldn’t make it, they’ve sent her on location again already. Such a shame. Good for her, though. I’ll just see how things are next door.’
Candida left her guests alone in the twilit conservatory. She took a quick look in the dining-room – Samantha’s place settings tended towards the erratic – then moved quickly to the kitchen. Madame Rostand’s latest delivery, noisettes d’agneau fourrés en croûte was already in the oven, which was risky as some guests, including Jake, had yet to arrive. Candida stirred the mint sabayon nervously, having made it herself, then took little bowls of chilled soup from the fridge and arranged them on a tray. She had made the soup herself, too. The deceptive simplicity of carrot blended with coriander and a hint of Jerusalem artichoke was an appeal to Robin’s new asceticism. The evening would finish with one of Samantha’s remarkably good summer puddings.
The front door opened and shut.
‘Jake?’ she hissed.
He came in looking tired, crumpled, less than adorable.
‘Sorry,’ he said.
‘I said seven-thirty,’ she reminded him.
‘And I said sorry.’
‘It doesn’t matter. Venetia’s cancelled and Robin and Faber are late. Heini too.’
‘I don’t know why you had to ask those two.’
‘I’d like Gilda to meet Faber and Robin’s my oldest friend,’ she said. ‘And yours.’
‘But I took him out for lunch only the other day.’
‘Well, I wasn’t there, was I?’
He slumped to a chair and watched her being fast.
‘And they’re so in love,’ he complained.
‘So?’
‘Calf love’s disgusting at our age.’
She stopped in mid-action to check his suit.
‘Are you going to wear that?’ she asked.
‘Well, I … Who else is here?’
‘Never mind,’ she said. ‘There’s no time.’
The doorbell rang.
‘That’ll be them.’
‘It could be Heini.’
‘It’ll be them. You go. I’ll finish this.’
Jake went to let in young love. Candida feverishly scattered chopped coriander across the soup bowls then ran after him. Robin and Faber were both in white. Entirely in white.
‘Faber. Robin,’ she noted.
‘We’re very, very late, aren’t we,’ Robin told Jake smugly. ‘I never used to have the self-control.’ His hair was neat and his beard had gone. Faber’s influence, she decided.
‘You look lovely,’ said Faber, holding her fingertips and admiring her admirable dress.
‘Is that white stuff muslin?’ asked Robin, moving in beside him.
‘Yes,’ she said, holding out some of the fabric and looking down at it, ‘And the silver’s just sort of splashed on with a brush. The dry cleaners will have a fit. And look at you two, all in white. I could eat you both.’
Faber chuckled, Robin licked his lips and Jake, embarrassed, led them to meet the others. Candida went upstairs to find Jasper. Samantha had just finished getting him ready for bed.
‘Perdy-M’s out for the count,’ she told her mistress.
‘Thank God,’ said Candida then held out her hand to her son. ‘Come along darling,’ she said. ‘Come and say goodnight to everyone.’
‘No,’ said Jasper.
‘I’ll read you a story,’ Samantha suggested.
‘All right.’
Candida took his hot newly-washed hand in hers and led him downstairs. Heads turned as they reached the top of the few steps into the conservatory and the geranium air was full of warm greetings and affected surprise.
‘We’ve just come to say goodnight,’ said Candida.
‘You off already?’ asked Robin.
‘It’s the holy man,’ said Jasper, pleased. ‘Do I have to go to bed?’
‘Yes, darling. Say goodnight.’
Jasper looked around at his parents’ guests.
‘Bye,’ he said and was passed back to Samantha who was waiting behind in the candle-lit shadows.
‘Not too long a story,’ Candida told her. ‘He’s running rather late. Now,’ she went on, turning back, ‘Has everybody met?’
‘Er. I don’t think I have.’ Tanned and tiny, Uncle Heini was grinning at her from a capacious reclining-chair.
‘Heini!’ she bent to kiss him. ‘I didn’t see you arrive.’
‘I came in through the garden,’ he chuckled, ‘Your wallflowers smell so beautiful.’ He turned to the others to explain. ‘They’re always at their best on their way out,’ he told them. ‘Like old men.’
‘Now everyone, this is Heinrich Liebermann.’
‘Heini, please,’ he said.
‘Heini, then. A dear friend of my grandmother’s. He’s normally unget-atable in the Aegean, so we’re honoured. Heini this is Gilda, my friend from work.’
‘Oh, I remember you,’ Robin told her.
‘And this is Steve, Gilda’s … Gilda’s friend.’
‘Hi,’ said Steve.
‘Ja,’ said Heini.
‘Jake you know, of course, and this is Faber Washington.’
‘Now why do I know your name?’
‘You probably saw the painting on the landing,’ said Faber quickly, and turned away.
‘Of course.’
‘And this is Robin, my childhood friend.’
‘Her granny brought you to tea once at my granny’s,’ said Robin. Heini looked puzzled. ‘At Charmouth,’ Robin added. ‘You had very baggy shorts on and a panama and you insisted on getting the old motor-mower going to do the lawn.’
Heini turned to Candida for confirmation.
‘But this is not that little boy … Irma’s grandson?’
‘Yes,’ she nodded, ‘Robin Maitland.’
‘Ah so, the holy man!’ Heini exclaimed and roared with laughter. ‘He sits by me, ja?’
‘Yup. OK, Uncle Heini,’ said Jake, standing. ‘Darling, do you need a hand?’
‘No, it’s all ready. Come in, everyone, and sit.’
They followed her, Gilda chatting busily to Faber, who she had suddenly recognised as someone everyone would soon be dying to know. Steve, lost, was feigning interest in geraniums. Jake rescued him, took him in earnest, and started telling him the story of a lemon-scented plant that was a cutting of a cutting once picked off by Uncle Heini for Candida’s grandmother from a parent plant at Buckingham Palace. Steve thought this was meant to be a joke and the story got
quite out of hand.
‘Now. Sit wherever you like,’ Candida told them, ‘No bossy set places, except that I go here as it’s nearest the door and Jake goes there because he understands the awkward legs.’
‘And Uncle Heinrich and I are going to sit together.’
When Candida returned with another bottle of wine for Jake to pour and her tray of carrot soup, she was pleased to see that she would have Robin and Faber on either side of her. Faber was still trapped by Gilda, Jake and Steve were busy boring one another, so she enjoyed her soup and hung on the edge of Robin’s conversation with her ancient godfather.
‘So you became a monk?’ said Heini.
‘Not exactly,’ Robin told him.
‘But you spent eight years in a monastery?’
‘Precisely.’
‘He’s been living on Whelm, Heini,’ Candida offered. ‘You know? The little island?’
‘On Whelm, but not of it,’ said Robin.
‘And you find England much changed?’ Heini asked, dabbing some soup off his chin.
‘It’s as though I’ve been asleep for a century,’ said Robin. ‘Delicious soup, Candy. Nice and simple.’
‘Thank you, Dob.’
‘Ja. Sehr gut.’
‘Thank you, Uncle Heini.’
‘Perhaps I’m being paranoid,’ said Robin, ‘but it’s like some old science fiction film; the people I thought I knew have been replaced by near perfect replicas who pretend that nothing has changed.’
‘But now they all have the razor mouths and little mean eyes of sharks, ja?’
‘You noticed too! So I’m not paranoid?’
‘Why you think I move to a tiny island on the Aegean? So, it’s too hot and my skin is like brown paper but,’ Heini smiled seraphically, ‘no sharks. They don’t even holiday there, it’s too cheap for them. Nothing but dolphins.’
‘Have I got a mouth like a shark, Dob?’ she asked.
‘Robin.’
‘Sorry. Robin. Have I?’
‘Well …’ Robin smiled cruelly at her. ‘Not exactly, but you’ve grown a shark’s skin.’
‘They can flay a man just by brushing past him,’ added Heini.
‘I’m not sure I like that,’ she said.
‘You couldn’t help it, Liebchen. You had to survive.’
‘And how wonderfully you did it,’ said Robin. ‘My old Candy, mud on her knees and sultanas in her pockets, now a mother of two, household name and national sex symbol.’
‘Candida,’ she corrected him, but he had turned back to Heini.
‘It’s not just friends,’ he said. ‘Strangers have changed too. The streets are full of sharp young men with unkind faces and the girls … I went into a pub I used to like, over in Chelsea, and found myself in a sea of them, all blonde and about seventeen and it was all, oh, horrible, sex-and-money. No. Not even sex, it was just money and sex with money. Everything’s gone hard and shiny and fast. Like that dreadful new magazine.’
‘Capital,’ prompted Gilda.
‘Jake’s doing the promotion for that,’ said Candida.
‘No soul,’ Faber put in. Then he caught Heini’s eye and seemed to dive back into his talk with Gilda.
‘Has it changed or have I just got old overnight?’
‘Oh, it’s changed,’ said Candida, feeling obscurely riled. ‘We’ve all changed, but I think it’s for the better. Now people do instead of sit around and think. I hated all that passive communing. You’ll change too. If you stick it out. Could I have everyone’s bowls?’ She took the table’s bowls and went to fetch the noisettes d’agneau while Jake poured wine.
Samantha was sitting in the kitchen watching a personal finance programme on the small television. She took the bowls from Candida and loaded them into the dishwasher. As directed, she had already arranged pretty circles of cucumber, mint and thin-sliced new potato on seven plates.
‘Want me to serve up, Candy?’
‘Yes, please, Sam,’ Candida told her. ‘You could take it through for me. I’m just going up to have a look at Perdita.’
‘Right you are.’
Perdita was sound asleep. Candida looked at her long and hard before stroking her scant hair. Then she went to her bathroom, locked the door and took some small pills supplied her on a regular basis by a studio technician to whom she had once confessed stage fright. She sat on the edge of the bath waiting for them to take effect. She began to feel her blood hum through her and was suddenly as acutely aware of her posture and the arrangement of her limbs as if she had been watching her beauty on a studio monitor.
‘You want him so much,’ she whispered and she could feel the breath hissing between her lips as they formed the words. ‘You want him but he’s Faber’s now. Look at me.’ She looked in the mirror. ‘You are attractive, you are unavailable and, Candida, you are calm.’ She stood, shook out her dress and stuck out her tongue. The coating on the pills had stained it blue. She scrubbed at it briefly with a toothbrush then let herself out and went back to join the party. ‘Sleeping like a lamb,’ she told Faber. ‘Now tell me all about your Iras. Is it true she’s actually writing a novel?’
She tried hard. She even did well. She gave Faber all her attention and drew out Gilda on her divorce. Once Samantha’s summer pudding had arrived, she even swopped places with Jake and drew out Steve on the subject of his Hong Kong youth, which was really quite interesting. She was constantly aware of her childhood friend, however. His voice rose warmly above Faber’s baritone and Heini’s childish fluting and occasionally someone would call out to her, making her look across the table and see his teasing eyes on her reply. When at last she steered them into the drawing-room she could suffer it no longer. When Jake offered to fetch coffee she said,
‘No, you sit there, darling, you’ve had far too hard a day,’ which raised a laugh. ‘Dob can help me,’ she said, ‘now that he’s one of the disapproving unemployed.’
‘Robin,’ he said.
‘Dob!’ she insisted. ‘We may have changed, but you haven’t.’ This raised another, less certain laugh.
He followed her to the kitchen.
‘Delicious grub,’ he said. ‘You are clever – career and haute cuisine too.’
‘Well, Samantha made the pudding.’
‘The soup was best.’
‘Did you really think so?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good.’
‘You didn’t need any help doing this at all. Did you?’ He gestured to the tray where Samantha had already laid out coffee cups, saucers, sugar and milk before retiring, with a thriller, to bed. ‘Your slave had done it all already.’
‘We pay her a very tidy sum. But no, I just wanted to talk to you away from all the chatter.’
‘Oh, good.’ He pulled himself up onto a work surface, popped some coffee sugar in his mouth, and sat up there, looking expectant. She filled the cafetière with boiling water then went to stand before him.
‘I just,’ she said, looking down and tapping softly at his kneecaps with her knuckles, ‘I just wanted to say how happy I am about you and Faber. I think it’s a match made in Heaven.’
He stopped playing, stopped teasing, drew her between his thighs and kissed her once on the forehead.
‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘That’s very, very sweet.’
‘I am attractive,’ she thought, feeling his hands on her shoulders and smelling him faintly through his loose white shirt. ‘I am unavailable and I am utterly calm. And this hurts.’ She pulled back and took one of his hands in hers. It was heavy with wine. ‘Welcome back,’ she said and kissed the back of it gently. ‘Robin. Dob died, didn’t he?’
‘Eight years ago,’ he said. As she lifted the tray he jumped down. ‘Let me,’ he muttered and took the cafetière from her to lighten her load.
‘Ah, caffeine,’ said Steve as they came into the drawing room. ‘Just what the doctor ordered.’
‘It’s decaffeinated I’m afraid, Steve.’
‘That’s all right,�
� said Steve, crestfallen.
‘Faber and Heini are upstairs looking at the picture,’ said Jake.
‘I’ll get them,’ said Robin.
‘No,’ Candida was at the door before him. ‘Let me.’ She gave him a discreet smile and he gave way.
Heini and Faber were standing on the landing before Faber’s painting, the old man dwarfed by the younger. Each stared upwards and they seemed not to hear her approach.
‘I think it’s time you talked to our mutual friend,’ Heini said.
‘I don’t see what business it is of yours.’
‘I hadn’t seen him or you for several years until today but, as I say,’ Heini went on, unruffled, ‘our friendship is mutual. He’s very ill. He wants to see you.’
‘Did he say so?’
‘Not in so many words. But I understood …’
‘You don’t understand anything!’ Faber rebuked him and turned away to see Candida waiting at the head of the stairs.
‘Ssh,’ she whispered, ‘You’ll wake Jasper.’
‘A lovely painting, Liebchen. A truly lovely painting,’ said Heini. ‘So much family feeling.’
He remained looking up at the canvas but Faber strode past Candida and down the stairs. Minutes later, as she and Heini stood watching her sleeping baby, she heard the sounds of young love leaving.
Twenty-Three
As Saturdays brought a rush of visitors, the Friends of the Hospital flower-stall had already closed for lack of stock. Peter scoured the local supermarkets and found a lurid bucketful of plastic-wrapped bouquets. He chose the least offensive, a thin clutch of freesia with a frond of unlikely fern, in the hope that at least it might still have some scent to it. Riding up to Marcus’s ward in the lift, he tore off the plastic wrapping, chose a deep yellow bloom that had scarcely opened, and offered the rest of the bunch to the one person in the lift whose hands were empty.
‘Here,’ he told him, ‘I only need the one.’ The man looked at him with deep suspicion but accepted the flowers and was gingerly sniffing them when he left the lift.
Marcus’s body had been taken over by machinery. He had a drip feeding his arm on one side and a tube, emerging from under his sheet on the other, was draining something from him into a bag on the floor. He was wired to a beige machine on wheels that clicked and hummed, and since Peter’s last visit he had suffered the pain and indignity of having a pipe thrust down his throat by way of his nose.