by Patrick Gale
‘Lou!’
Lucas ran to meet her and caught her up in a hug. He had put on a bit of weight. He smelled different. Rather expensive.
‘You look wonderful,’ he said. He sniffed. ‘Is that L’Heure Bleue?’
‘Shalimar,’ she laughed. ‘I have a few drops left in a very old birthday bottle.’
Looking at her he shook his head, kindly disbelieving. ‘You haven’t changed a bit. Heidi said you’d got all imposing.’
‘And haven’t I?’
‘Sorry.’
‘Damn.’
He turned to draw over his companion. ‘Sophie, this is Rustam. Rustam, meet my boyhood playmate.’
‘How do you do?’
‘Hello.’
Rustam was handsome, a slightly older man for a change, forty-five or six to Lucas’s forty, and with a beautifully cut grizzled beard that made him look like an Iranian temple statue. They had met through their work at the United Nations, where Lucas was a translator, and now divided their lives between New York and Mumbai. She had heard all the details by e-mail but this was Rustam’s first visit to England, to Lucas’s roots.
Lucas had been much married but either to impossible neurotics or to boys so young they bored him. Apparently this relationship with Rustam was the real thing, serious, for keeps. She hoped so. Certainly they fitted together. With age, Lucas’s face had revealed a middle-Eastern bone structure like his father’s. He and Rustam might have been brothers. She thought of Jack, so much taller than her that the only way of avoiding absurdity in their wedding photograph had been for him to sweep her up in his arms.
Rustam was looking around at Flint Quad as she opened the front door for them.
‘I’ll give you a tour after lunch, if you like,’ she told him.
‘That would be great, Sophie. Thank you.’ His accent was neither Mumbai nor Yale but a subtle, shifting blend of the two. She felt self-conscious walking ahead of him up the stairs. ‘This is all amazing,’ he said as they reached the first floor. ‘You live in a castle.’
‘With early twentieth-century wiring and plumbing that predates George Eliot. The great thing is it goes with the job so we pay no maintenance and when something breaks, the school fixes it.’
‘And you were a Scholar here?’
‘A Daughter. The girls are called Daughters. Yes. So I lived over there by the edge of the Chapel.’ She pointed out of the sitting room window to the staircase on the opposite corner of the quad. ‘And it was a lot less comfortable than this.’
‘Have you made changes?’ Lucas asked, handing them both the wine she had given him to uncork.
‘They all have proper baths now, not just the Daughters. And there’s more heating. Just a bit.’
‘And you send some of them to Heidi, she said.’
Sophie sighed. She sipped her wine. ‘Cheers m’dears. Yes. I do. She does wonders. We had an anorexic last year, Rustam, who’s now back to eight stone and sitting Oxbridge in the autumn. And Heidi’s been helping one of the boys whose brother died recently.’
‘They didn’t offer therapy in our day,’ Lucas told Rustam, pulling a face.
‘Christ, Lou,’ Sophie said. ‘Think of the difference if they had!’ and they fell silent a moment, thinking. ‘How do you find her?’ she asked him.
‘Great. I find her great and indomitable and rather … She’s getting a bit creaky but she’s seventy-one so …’
‘I was so sorry to hear about Carmel.’
‘Thanks. She’s pulling through, I think. The chemo was hell but she’ll make it. She’s tough.’ Lucas’s sister had recently been diagnosed with breast cancer, a family curse which Heidi too had weathered in her time.
‘I don’t think I’m still friends with anyone from my schooldays,’ Rustam said when they sat down. ‘Did you two never lose touch?’
‘Oh, well,’ Lucas said with a shrug. ‘We had to grow up a bit.’
‘We lost touch for a while after school,’ Sophie explained. ‘We ended up in different schools and universities but, well … It was Simon’s funeral, wasn’t it, Lou?’
‘That’s right.’
‘So we were inseparable, then we were wrenched apart to grow up a bit and then we met up on the other side of feminism, you could say, and picked up the pieces. But you two live so far away!’
‘So do you. You could always come and stay. Cheap flights and so on.’
‘I know. We could. We must. Oh,’ she broke off to explain. ‘Jack can’t join us for lunch as he’s playing the organ for a christening service then he has to referee a match but he said please stay long enough for tea so he can lay eyes on you. You don’t have to rush off do you?’
‘I told Heidi not to expect us till six,’ Rustam said.
‘Rustam is an inveterate sightseer,’ Lucas warned her.
Sophie laughed. ‘Fantastic! Chapel-roof tour, the lot.’
They gave her photographs and greetings from Kimiko and her girlfriend, who had recently made it to Manhattan from San Francisco, then they ate lunch. Lucas complimented her on the food even though she insisted all she had done was shop, reheat and arrange. Rustam explained that for New Yorkers, going to that much trouble constituted a dinner party. She heard about his street children initiative in Mumbai and suggested he come back to give the pupils a talk about it.
‘They don’t have compulsory Chapel every Sunday now,’ she said. ‘We have so many non-Christian parents – not just Muslims and Hindus, we even have a few Pagans from Devon – that it was getting silly. So every third Sunday now they have an inspiring talk by somebody trying to make a difference. My secret plan is that it will provoke more of them to work for charities in their gap years instead of simply following each other around the same backpacking trail. Do you need volunteers?’
‘Graduates only, I’m afraid,’ Rustam said. ‘Kids can never come for long enough.’
‘Huh!’ Lucas said. ‘Four weeks of you on their case, of course they want to run away to Goa.’
‘And they need too much mothering,’ Rustam went on, ignoring him. ‘Eighteen seems to have got a lot younger, than it used to be.’
‘Or just maybe,’ Lucas said, ‘we’ve got a bit older. I liked Chapel, anyway. And I’m Jewish.’
‘You didn’t like Chapel,’ she reminded him. ‘You liked bell-ringers. Which reminds me.’ She glanced at her watch. ‘Come and see something.’
She left the dining table and went to the window. About thirty feet away to their right people in Sunday best were coming through the Chapel doors. A photographer was waving them towards a sunlit buttress for a group shot.
‘What is it?’ Lucas asked. ‘What are we looking at? Bad fashion?’
‘Try these,’ she said and handed him her old army binoculars. She found them invaluable when she or Jack wanted to collar a certain pupil after meals and didn’t want to hang around the quad in the wind and rain.
‘Eurgh!’ Lucas said, peering. ‘Dodgy hats. Very dodgy. Oh. Are they American? That one’s so thin and … Oh. Oh my God, Sophie!’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It is. Let me look again.’
She grabbed the binoculars for another closer look.
‘That’s Chris Miller. He was never friends with him. And David Crisp, for God’s sake. Do you think he’s changed? He hasn’t got much fatter. You always said he’d get fat.’
‘I said women would start fancying him and he’d turn into a vet.’
‘Well he’s never a vet. The competition is far too stiff.’
‘Excuse me?’ Rustam asked. ‘Translation?’
‘It’s Charlie,’ Lucas told him.
‘The Charlie? Your friend, Charlie?’
‘His son’s being christened,’ Sophie explained. ‘He’s got two little girls already but apparently girls don’t count.’
‘Who did he marry? Let me see.’ Lucas grabbed the binoculars again.
‘I’m going down. This is an historic occasion.’ Rustam unpacked his camera and screwed on a big
zoom lens.
‘You can’t!’ Sophie gasped. ‘They’ll see.’
‘They’ll see an Indian. They’ll assume I’m a tourist,’ Rustam said with a mischievous smile and went downstairs.
Sophie found Jack’s lightweight birdwatching glasses so they could both watch and each could know what the other was commenting on.
Charlie had married a Vanilla, not one of the Vanillas but a woman from the same mould, tall, thin, blonde and as bossy as his sisters – to judge from all the pointing and pushing that was going on. The Girls were there, both in hats. The one with the husband had put on weight and apparently had two teenage boys who didn’t want to be in the photograph. The other one was alone but still thin. She had charge of Charlie’s first two children, cruelly dressed-up, overlooked little things.
‘Which was the thin one? Jenny?’
‘I could never tell. She wasn’t that thin when we knew them.’
‘And where’s the brother? I liked him.’
‘Tim. You fancied Tim.’
‘Do you think he died? Oh God. That would make Charlie Lord of the Manor. Maybe he just escaped. I hope he got well away. Back to the ashram. Or the love of a strong woman.’
Simultaneously they said, ‘But I want to see …’ and simultaneously had their wish granted, a shock that choked the laughter in their throats. Mrs Somborne-Abbot emerged from the Chapel between the Chaplain and Jack, who was clutching a book-token-sized envelope. She had shrunk. She was a little old lady with white hair and a black stick.
‘How could we have been so scared of her all this time?’ Lucas asked. ‘She’s almost sweet.’
‘You want to go down and introduce yourself?’
‘You want a bikini wax? Oh. Oh my God. I love that man.’
‘That’s my husband, Lou.’
‘No, Phi. Him too. But look!’
Rustam was amiably wandering past the family group, taking photographs as though they were an ancient monument.
For a moment Sophie and Lucas lowered their binoculars to look at each other.
‘Even in my twenties I used to ring her up sometimes and just listen,’ Sophie admitted.
‘Me too. “Hello? Hello?” I still get bad dreams about her.’
‘The Bastard and the Jew.’
They started looking again.
‘What’s he doing here? Why have the christening here?’ Lucas asked.
They watched Charlie gazing around him at Schola from the middle of the busy group until his wife tapped him to attention for the camera.
‘It matters to him,’ Sophie said. ‘It’s a boy. Maybe he wants him to come here one day.’
‘Christ.’
‘He looks sort of –’
‘Normal?’
‘Well. Yes.’
‘Does she look happy to you?’
‘The wife or the mother?’
‘The wife.’
‘She looks busy. And thin.’
‘They were married here too, you know,’ Sophie said. ‘I checked in the records.’
‘And she’s called … Louisa.’
‘Lucia.’
‘Lucetta. That’s it, Lucetta. Like Hardy.’
‘You keep tabs on him too!’
‘Of course I do.’
‘I thought it was just me.’
Photographs taken, the group was herded out of the quad via the Slipe.
‘They’ve booked Founder’s Room for lunch,’ she told him. ‘Sherry then buffet. Shall we go down? Say hello. Show him we’re still alive.’
‘Yes. Why not? We’re not children, after all. Actually no. I couldn’t possibly.’
‘Oh go on. How’s my hair? Do I look imposing again? I want to look imposing.’
They dithered so long they missed their chance. When they opened the front door and glanced out, the party had vanished, Jack with them, and Rustam was wandering around the quad taking photographs.
Relieved, Sophie linked arms with Lucas and led him over to Rustam so they could begin their tour. They needed him to stop them slipping into a slough of unexpected melancholy. Her lunchtime surprise had backfired. She didn’t want Lucas to think it was the only reason she had asked him and Rustam to visit. It was pure coincidence although, in the seconds after she glanced at Jack’s desk diary and discovered that Charlie and Lucas were to overlap, she fantasized that destiny was at work. Why did Charlie still fascinate them when all he represented was shame, betrayal, wasted friendship?
‘Maybe he’ll lose all significance now we’ve seen him,’ she said as they waited for Rustam to come back to them from photographing some Daughters playing cards on a sofa. She knew Lucas knew who she was talking about. ‘Maybe. Now that the past has joined the present.’
‘Phi? Was there a memorial?’ he asked her, changing tack but not exactly.
She shook her head. ‘I’ve looked and looked. Chapel. Both cloisters. Nothing. Maybe he got a tree. There’ll be something in the estate church, though. Where the rest of the family are.’
‘But the school did nothing with words on it.’
‘No.’
They showed Rustam the Chapel, then a typical chamber with its burrows and posters, the traditional mix of scholasticism and anarchy. They entered the cloisters, glancing fearfully across to Founder’s Room where the christening lunch was in progress. They visited the Chantry then climbed the tower to the ringing-chamber and gallery. At last, with the Bell Captain’s kind permission, they climbed up through his study and onto the chapel roof.
Rustam was delighted and clambered across the leading to take close-up shots of weathered gargoyles and pinnacles.
‘He’s gorgeous,’ she murmured.
‘Thank you. It’s a shame we can’t breed. Parsees are an endangered race.’
‘You could adopt.’
‘Yes,’ he said wistfully. ‘Yes, we could. If only we didn’t have to travel. Rustam was asking about your mother and I couldn’t remember. Did you ever track her down in the end?’
‘Yes,’ she said, admiring the familiar view. ‘You know, I discovered I had two of them.’
‘You’re joking!’
‘Your mother is whoever makes you feel safe and teaches you who you are, gives you that sense of legitimacy. I realized I had Margaret, who’d always been there for me. And this place.’
‘Sweet.’ Lucas hugged her and planted a kiss in her hair.
There was a click as Rustam took their picture.
‘Not fair!’ she called out. ‘I should be taking yours.’ But he was off across the roof again.
‘I never asked you,’ Lucas said with a nod towards the little door by which they had come out. ‘Did you get it in the end, the way you’d planned?’
‘Jonty Mortimer’s study?’ She laughed sadly. ‘No way. I worked for it. Christ, I worked in that last year but I came second to bloody Bunsen.’
‘Shame.’
‘I tried to convince myself they’d marked me down a bit because they weren’t ready to have a Daughter rule the roost. And I’d have been a hopeless Senior Prefect anyway. I was an anarchist and I hated team games.’
‘Yes, but how about now?’
‘This year it’s a boy, as you saw, but next year I have plans … She’ll be perfect.’
‘Does she know?’
Sophie shook her head. ‘Which is why she’s perfect.’
They were leaning against the tower wall rather than one of the outer parapets. She realized they were both reaching the age where good balance could not be taken for granted. Rustam photographed them again, with them looking at him this time, then Sophie took over the camera and photographed them with their arms about each other and the Chapel tower looming behind them.
Rustam kissed Lucas during the second shot and Lucas looked entirely happy which made Sophie feel tearfully mother-of-the-bride-ish. He had been forced to put half the world between him and this place to find happiness, she mused, and still he thought of it all the time. They kissed again. She caught hers
elf glancing around anxiously and was ashamed.
‘We should show Rustam the Warden’s Garden,’ she told them.
‘Of course,’ Lucas said.
‘It’s looking wonderful now. No, you first.’
She, on the other hand, had found it was only by coming back that she became free to grow up and grow on. Tatham’s was a home and a job to her now, as well as a mother, but no longer a kind of curse.
There were shouts as they came through Cloister Gate.
‘Oh God,’ Lucas breathed. ‘TatCoFo.’
‘What’s that?’ Rustam asked.
‘Nothing really. A cross between football and gladiatorial combat. Someone dancing on my grave.’
The day was perfect: late March, blue sky, scudding, cotton-wool clouds and a vigorous breeze in the plane trees. As they skirted the cloister wall, heading for the bridge over the river, they paused to watch a few minutes of Jack’s TatCoFo match, the flying mud, the reckless, joyous self-violence of fifteen-year-olds who had yet to see a broken neck or a protruding shin bone.
Turning again, they passed the great circle on the turf where the charring from Illumina’s bonfire would last into early summer. She saw Rustam tap Lucas’s elbow and ask softly, ‘Is that where …?’ to which Lucas merely nodded.
It was enough to reassure her that they had a deeply shared life already, a life in which completed sentences were becoming as superfluous as good manners. And that, like her, Lucas was not about to forget.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
This being a fantasy not a memoir, I have seen fit to rearrange 1970s opera schedules and record and film releases to suit the story’s purpose.
My heartfelt thanks, however, go to Nick Hay and Rupert Tyler for all the true bits of our shared history they have, wittingly and unwittingly, helped me dredge up, to Celia Gale, who once again was an invaluable source of information, to Ellie Gale for the notebooks and to Susanna Martelli, Ahmed Hussein and Fali Pavri for their cultural input. Patricia Parkin, Clare Reihill and Caradoc King are the best godparents a newborn could wish for.