‘I think that there might have been a mistake.’
‘And whose mistake would that be?’
‘Sarah’s.’
‘Now now now,’ he said, wagging a finger. ‘That’s bad. Can’t answer back, can she? And I think if anyone’s in a position to know who put the bun in a woman’s oven, it’s the woman herself, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, but—’ I started to answer.
‘Unless you’re suggesting—?’
‘I’m not suggesting anything,’ I floundered.
‘Oh yes you are,’ he said, sternly, but then he laughed and tapped me on the shoulder with a loose fist. ‘It’s all right,’ he said, ‘I’m having a bit of fun with you. You want your bits of paper and you’ll have your bits of paper. I’ll show you. Don’t worry.’ He smiled widely – the smile of a young man who was making allowances for an old chap’s crankiness. ‘I have everything you need, but I didn’t want to carry it around, not on a day like this. Wouldn’t do to get it all soggy, would it? Tell you what – come to my place and I’ll set your mind at rest. Why don’t you give me your number?’ he suggested. I didn’t even have to shake my head. ‘No. You don’t want to. That’s cool. Fine. Doesn’t matter. You’ve got my number, and I know where to find you,’ he said, but casually, with no implication of threat. ‘OK. You give me a call when you’re ready. Next week, say? Wednesday, Thursday. Now, back to work,’ he said, and before he turned away he gave me a small slap on the back, for encouragement.
4
The weekend after the conversation in Russell Square Gardens, Eleanor and Gerry came to us for Sunday lunch. I was in the bedroom when they drove up. Looking out, I saw Eleanor talking to Gerry in the car: she was lightly stroking the back of his head and talking to him, while he stared ahead, nodding, as if he were about to undergo a surgical procedure and Eleanor was assuring him it was going to be nothing like as bad as he thought. He doesn’t dislike us – or rather, he definitely likes Aileen. She’s the next best thing to his wife, as he’s been known to tell her. But Gerry’s career has been blighted ever since fifteen years of systems management with a very major publishing company came to an end with the Great Warehousing Disaster, when the computers went berserk at the vast new purpose-built facility in deep Northamptonshire, and started spewing out stock figures that bore not the slightest relation to reality. Six months later the computers still weren’t functioning, so Gerry – though he’d expressed his doubts about the software people long before zero hour but had been overruled by his boss – was invited to fall on his sword. Now he was back where he’d been before his adventure in publishing, in the food business, facilitating the dispatch of frozen edibles to all corners of the country. His boss, of course, had survived the cull. It was humiliating, and resentment was smouldering in him like a fire in the base of a peat bog.
We had half an hour to wait before the roast was ready, so Eleanor requested a tour of the house: last time they’d been here we’d only just moved in and the place had been in chaos. Aileen led the way, with Gerry bringing up the rear. Eleanor loved what we’d done with the bedroom; she went to the window to take a look at the view, as you might do when you’re shown into your five-star hotel room in Venice; Gerry followed suit, dutifully approving of what he could see. The bathroom so excited Eleanor that she clapped her hands at the sight of it – the shower was so amazing, she said, she was tempted to try it out right away. With a fingertip Gerry slid the shower door open and shut two or three times, hoping it would jam.
At the table, Eleanor talked for an hour with barely an interruption, about the latest round of back-stabbings in Human Resources. The introduction of certain characters necessitated a quantity of background information, which in turn tended to prompt another lengthy digression. Many people, I think, find Aileen rather abrupt. She has a way of cutting to the heart of the matter, which is a great asset in her line of work – if there’s an irregularity in a client’s accounting procedures, Aileen can spot it as quickly as an X-ray at airport security will spot a knife in a briefcase. In social situations she is likewise uncompromising. ‘What do you mean exactly?’ she’ll ask. ‘I don’t understand the point you’re making,’ she might interrupt. For some she’s too blunt, but I’ve always greatly liked her directness. Eleanor, however, has been granted a lifetime amnesty – Aileen can never bring herself to encourage her sister to hurry things along. On this occasion such encouragement was urgently needed: never concise, Eleanor tends to lose focus after a glass of wine, and now she was on her second glass. Perhaps, in my state of mind, I was less tolerant of Eleanor’s ramblings than usual. Lost in the convolutions of who had said what to whom at which meeting, I excused myself and escaped to the bathroom.
I sat on the edge of the bath for a while, examining my face in the mirror, trying to read signs of dishonesty there. I looked tired, and I felt tired: had a bed been on offer, I could have slept for the rest of the afternoon. I filled the basin with cold water and lowered my face into it. That done, I looked tired and a shade greyer. Having rehearsed an attentive expression, I returned to the table.
There had been a change of subject in my absence: Eleanor had moved on to the burgeoning career of Sean, who had been informed on Friday that he was in line for a promotion in the very near future. So her son’s ascent through the ranks of one of the country’s biggest suppliers of office equipment has commenced satisfactorily; the family schedule anticipates his arrival at the senior executive level of a top-drawer retail organisation within a couple of decades.
Eleanor sees life as a succession of precisely defined stages: infancy – the groundwork of character-building; childhood – fun combined with consolidation of identity; adolescence – a period in which one should expect to pass through episodes of confusion before emerging into the clear light of Who You Are; adulthood – the forty-odd years (God willing) in which one accrues a family and works hard to achieve one’s goals (steady ascent of the career ladder; accumulation of sufficient material goods for comfortable living) prior to the well-deserved reward of retirement. Coming to the threshold between stage two and stage three, Eleanor had been fully prepared. She had made a clear-eyed assessment of her strengths and weaknesses: she was not as smart as her older sister, but she had a temperament that was well attuned to rules and regulations, and she was a good listener, a patient and sympathetic listener, a ‘people person’. She consulted a careers adviser, who suggested that she might investigate the opportunities offered by personnel work, and Eleanor knew immediately that this woman had hit the nail on the head. (This was, after all, the very same adviser who had set Aileen on the road to accountancy, which was turning out to have been a sensible choice. Perhaps less sensible, though, was Aileen’s relationship with a woodworker whose handiwork might have been impressive but whose financial status seemed somewhat precarious, to put it mildly.)
By the age of eighteen Eleanor had more or less finalised her image of her ideal life-partner: he was to be nice-looking but not too much so (a handsome man will always let you down); he must want to have children (but not too many); he would have a good job and be happy in it (but workaholics need not apply); he would be dark-haired (Gerry used to fit the bill); not short (Gerry is five feet eleven); and neither a teetotaller nor a boozer. Prepared to wait for the right man, she refused to panic as her twenty-ninth year expired. As if by magic, Gerry appeared in the month of her thirtieth birthday, and marriage followed quickly. Without delay they applied themselves to child-creation, and all went smoothly: the son was born within the year, the daughter two years later. Sean, after an interlude of teenage truculence, has proved to be a young man who has his feet on the ground and his head screwed on the right way. Cerys, however, was something of a concern. Her parents’ feelings about the imminent show were ambivalent.
‘Of course Cerys has talent,’ said Eleanor. ‘But so many young women have talent,’ she went on, with a wince of pained and tender sympathy, as though it were her daughter she was addressing. �
��You turn on the TV and you see lots of them: talented young actresses, very pretty most of them. You see these girls and you think: “That one’s got something. That one’s going to be a star.” And then what happens? Nine times out of ten that’s the last you’ll ever see of them.’
‘On the scrapheap at thirty,’ Gerry confirmed, cutting his last slice of beef as if the meat had come from a beast against which he’d held some sort of grievance. ‘Panto in Whitehaven, if they’re lucky.’
But Aileen thought that Cerys’s ambition was commendable – she would be taking a risk if she went to drama school, certainly, but what would life be without an element of risk? ‘If it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work,’ she said. ‘She’s young. If she doesn’t take a chance now, she’ll regret it later. You wouldn’t want that, would you? And who knows? Perhaps she’ll be the one out of ten. She might do it. Good luck to her, I say.’
Eleanor shrugged, as if to say, weakly, ‘Maybe you’re right.’ She does not like to contradict her sister, and when it comes to Cerys and Sean a degree of tact is always required, because childless Aileen, she believes, has a special attachment to her niece and nephew, a deep affection that will never lose its tinge of sadness. During the infancies of her children, Eleanor’s pride in their achievements was always somewhat tempered, out of consideration for Aileen, who for years had failed to conceive, whereas Eleanor had become pregnant within a matter of weeks of deciding that the time had come to start a family. This self-restraint became less noticeable over the years, but there is nevertheless still a certain delicacy whenever Cerys and Sean are discussed, even though Aileen has been assuring her sister since the kids were toddlers that she and I are reconciled to our situation – more than reconciled, in fact. We are happy on our own, Aileen has often told her. We have a good life; we’ve done a lot of things we couldn’t have done if we’d had children; if we’d been that desperate for a child, we might have thought about adoption, but we hadn’t been desperate; it was a misfortune that happened to some people, and it had happened to us; it wasn’t a disaster. Nothing Aileen could say, however, would ever convince Eleanor that we would not have been even happier had things worked out differently, and that we know that this is the case. And so, on the subject of Cerys and her enthusiasm for the stage, Aileen was allowed to have the last word. Even Gerry smiled, as if to say that he hoped against hope that Aileen’s optimism would turn out to have been justified.
The morning had been overcast but now the clouds had broken up and the garden was taking the brunt of the sunlight. Eleanor proposed to Aileen an inspection of the flowerbeds; it seemed that she wanted a word in private. I volunteered to take care of the coffee; Gerry, also picking up the hint, said he’d stay inside, as he couldn’t tell a begonia from a bonsai unless there was label on it, and, besides, he wouldn’t mind taking a look at the Grand Prix. He turned on the TV but didn’t immediately sit down. Instead, for a minute or so he watched his wife and Aileen as they sauntered across the lawn, arm in arm, Eleanor talking, Aileen listening with what appeared to be some concern. I made a remark that was intended as a friendly gesture towards my brother-in-law: ‘God knows what they find to talk about. You’d think they hadn’t seen each other for months.’ Gerry gave a light snort, a minimal expression of amusement, then went over to the sofa and fell into it.
Reaching for the remote control, he said: ‘I can tell you what they’re talking about. They’re talking about me.’ He found the channel he wanted and raised the volume a little before continuing. Addressing the screen, he told me that he’d let the side down a bit at the previous weekend’s party, the one for which Eleanor had bought the dress. The couple whose anniversary was being celebrated were nice enough people, he said, and most of the other guests had seemed bearable, but he just hadn’t been in the mood for chit-chat, so he’d taken himself off to a quiet corner, behind the marquee, where Eleanor had found him later, sitting against a tree with a champagne bottle in his hand. ‘I’d been missing for an hour, apparently. She wasn’t amused. But I’d had a nice time. The time simply flew by,’ he said, waving the remote control woozily.
‘I’m useless at big events as well,’ I told him. ‘I’d have joined you under the tree,’ I said. The semi-joke was not acknowledged.
We watched the race for a while. He asked me how the shops were doing – he always says ‘the shops’, never ‘the business’. The shops were doing all right, I said. He suggested that I might soon be feeling the pinch, if the recession kicks in. Then he revised his analysis, observing that ‘your kind of punters are recession-proof, aren’t they?’ This wasn’t quite true, I said: some of our customers were wealthy; most weren’t. Gerry surveyed the room as I was talking, seeing yet more evidence that life hadn’t dealt him a fair hand. His eye alighted on the Glo-Ball floor lamp. ‘How much would that set me back, then?’ he enquired. The answer was more or less what he’d expected. ‘I couldn’t live with something like that,’ he said. ‘I’m a bit of a fogey, I suppose. I like shades on my lights.’
Until this day I hadn’t known that Gerry had an interest in Formula One. I’d assumed that he was watching the race as an alternative to talking to me, but it turned out that he knew his stuff. He explained why Driver A would soon be making up ground, and why Driver B would start to fall off the pace. ‘That guy’s going into the pits on the next lap, and when he comes out he’ll be in sixth place,’ he said, and the guy duly went into the pits and emerged in sixth place. For a few more minutes we watched the cars processing at high speed, and then, with no preamble, Gerry started to tell about how his mother had been taught to drive by a man who raced sports cars at the weekends. Gerry was eight or nine years old at the time, and one night this man had taken Gerry and his mother to an unfinished stretch of motorway, where a newly tuned car was waiting to be tested. Gerry had been strapped into passenger seat with belts that gripped him like the tentacles of an octopus, and they’d gone roaring up and down the tarmac. ‘Middle of the night. Blackness all around. Just the headlights, trained on this strip of virgin tarmac,’ said Gerry, holding his hands out, palms upright and parallel, and smiling into the space between them, as though seeing the limitless expanse of pristine road. ‘Going like the clappers. Over a ton. And this bloke steering the thing into the beams, calm as you like, perfectly relaxed. The noise was incredible. I can’t tell you. I had school the next day and I couldn’t hear a bloody thing. Spent all day saying: “Beg pardon, sir?” One of the best hours of my life.’ I’d never heard this before. ‘It was fantastic,’ said Gerry, looking at me for the first time since our wives had gone outside. It seemed that he was offering the story by way of apology for being so badly out of sorts.
Before I could come up with a response, he said: ‘I hear you’re going to be on the telly.’
‘That’s right,’ I said.
‘When?’
‘Not clear yet.’
‘OK,’ he said, and that was the end of that.
Eleanor came back into the room with Aileen and sat down beside her husband. She tucked a hand under his arm and pulled it gently into her side. ‘How much longer is this on for?’ she asked.
‘Ages,’ said Gerry. ‘I’m not really watching it.’ Half an hour later they left.
I helped Aileen to clear up. She seemed preoccupied. I asked her what was on her mind. She was worried about her sister, she said, coolly, and her sister was worried about Gerry. ‘He’s depressed,’ she said.
‘He seems fed up all right,’ I agreed. Continuing to load the dishwasher, Aileen made no response. ‘He told me about the party,’ I added.
‘What party?’ asked Aileen, as if keeping a pointless conversation going.
‘The anniversary bash.’
‘OK.’
‘Overdid the hospitality, he said. Is that what Eleanor was talking to you about?’
‘She mentioned it,’ said Aileen.
Evidently there was no more to be said on this topic, so I changed tack. ‘He was telling me about
his mother’s driving instructor, the racing driver. Blasting up and down the motorway at night, with little Gerry in the passenger seat. You heard that one?’
‘Yes,’ said Aileen, closing the dishwasher’s door with emphasis. ‘So have you,’ she said, now facing me. ‘We’ve both heard it before.’
‘I’m sure I haven’t,’ I said. ‘I wouldn’t have forgotten it.’
‘I’m positive you’ve heard it,’ Aileen stated, giving me a look that I thought was going to be followed by a question such as: ‘Now, are you going to tell me what’s going on?’ Instead, what she said was: ‘Perhaps you weren’t listening then, either.’
The rebuke was welcome – it invited a minor disagreement, which would camouflage the unease that I was feeling. So I said: ‘Well, I thought your sister went on a bit.’
‘I told you,’ said Aileen firmly. ‘She’s anxious about Gerry. When she’s anxious she tends to labour the point.’
‘I lost the thread once or twice.’
‘That was obvious.’
‘I don’t think Eleanor noticed, though.’
‘Oh, she did.’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘She did.’
‘She said something to you?’ I asked.
‘She noticed. Take my word for it,’ said Aileen, moving towards the door.
I apologised for not making more of an effort. ‘I’ll do better next time,’ I said.
‘I hope so,’ she replied. She left me in the kitchen and I stood there for a while, at the sink, looking out at the garden, trying to recall when we’d last had an exchange that might be described as discordant, and I couldn’t remember.
5
Sam was waiting for me outside Bermondsey station. From there we walked to a side-street, where we got into a Toyota pickup that looked as though it had been pelted with rocks and driven through mud on a daily basis for the past year. Some oil had been spilled on the passenger seat, he explained, which was why it was covered with a thick layer of newspapers; I sat on a picture of a big-breasted girl wearing nothing but a football scarf. In the footwell there were three or four polystyrene beakers, a dozen cigarette butts and a couple of screwdrivers. It took only a few minutes to reach Sam’s home, which turned out to be a small caravan, parked on the edge of an area waste ground, near the Old Kent Road. ‘Lovely spot, don’t you think?’ he said as we pulled up. Low mounds of rubbish lay all around the caravan, apparently the residue of a huge tip that had recently been cleared. Tractor tracks weaved around the mounds, through pools of brown water that were iridescent with oil and petrol. A fridge lay at an angle close to the caravan, with a mattress underneath it, surrounded by wads of newsprint. The caravan itself was a tatty old thing: the windows were streaked with grime, a fringe of moss ran along the gutter, and the walls were dented and rust-pocked. A pile of breeze blocks served as front-door steps. The hinges screeched when Sam yanked the door open. ‘Welcome,’ he said cheerily, jumping down so that I could enter first.
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