Spencer's List

by Lissa Evans

  ‘Or – what about this, Tom – maybe they’re sending Robodoc back to college.’

  ‘I must examinate you,’ said Tom, in a Dalek voice.

  ‘Examinate!! Examinate!!’ They revolved around the kitchen for a while, blasting imaginary patients.

  ‘Or what about the nit nurse –’

  ‘Or that glue bloke –’

  ‘So go on, Mum, who’s it for then?’ asked Tom, coaxingly, after they had run through the entire surgery.

  ‘Well…’ She dried her hands slowly and looked at her sons; their faces were turned towards her but she wondered who they were seeing. ‘You know, there is one person you haven’t mentioned.’

  ‘Who, Dr Petty?’

  ‘No,’ she said patiently, and then, when it was clear that they were never, ever going to arrive at the correct answer unprompted, she told them.

  ‘You?’

  She had never seen them look so identical, jaws sagging, eyes like marbles.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, defensively. ‘After all, I used to be one, didn’t I? I got two As and a B.’

  ‘But –’ it was, inevitably, Tom who found his voice first ‘– you’re too old, aren’t you?’

  ‘Not necessarily.’ It was Spencer who had shown her, casually one day at lunchtime, a couple of months ago now, a newspaper article about a woman of fifty who had just qualified as a doctor. ‘She hadn’t even done sciences at school,’ he’d said, and Iris had secretly taken the paper home with her and cut out the picture of the comfortably pear-shaped heroine, standing by the hospital steps in her white coat, poised to add to the growing good with unhistoric acts.

  ‘I’m only thinking about it,’ she said. ‘I’ve no idea if I’d get a place. Or a grant. I wasn’t going to tell you yet, but…’ But I have some pride, she thought.

  She could see the idea sifting through their heads, being sampled and tested, like a dud coin for toothmarks.

  ‘Wouldn’t it be weird, though?’ said Robin. ‘Like, everybody else would be eighteen.’

  ‘I spend quite a lot of my time with eighteen-year-olds, you know,’ she said, gently.

  ‘Durrrrrr,’ said Tom, to his brother.

  They looked at her again, weighing, testing.

  ‘You never said anything about it before.’

  ‘I never seriously thought about it before.’

  ‘So why are you doing it now?’

  She hesitated. ‘Because I’ve realized it’s possible,’ she said, and then – because it was a better and truer answer – ‘because I’m tired of small changes.’

  ‘You’d be a better doctor than Petty,’ said Robin. ‘He doesn’t listen to anything. And you’d be better than Robodoc.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she said.

  ‘My arse would be better than Robodoc,’ said Tom. ‘Hey, Mum’ – struck by a happy thought – ‘you can have our grants. We don’t mind not going to college, do we Rob?’

  ‘No,’ said Robin, keenly. ‘You can go instead of us.’

  ‘Yeah, you can move out and we can keep the flat,’ added Tom.

  ‘Now let’s not –’

  The back door opened and her father came in and stamped his feet on the mat, at first with his usual thoroughness, and then with a gradual diminution of effort as he sensed the atmosphere.

  ‘Is something the matter?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ she said, brightly. ‘Would you like some breakfast?’

  ‘Not for me, thank you. I’ve had my oats.’ There was a stifled laugh from one of the boys.

  ‘I’m sorry about opening your letter, Iris.’

  ‘That’s all right.’

  ‘Something for work, was it?’ He had started taking off his shoes, but her prolonged silence made him look up. The twins glanced between their mother and grandfather as if at a tennis match; Iris dithered over her serve.

  ‘Well, no,’ she said at last, unable to prevaricate. ‘Actually, it was for me.’

  She had expected surprise. What she hadn’t expected was that her father’s face, defined by those long, sad, disappointed grooves which not even Tammy had managed to French-polish away, would flower into amazement and pride and joy. ‘Oh Iris,’ he said. ‘Oh Iris.’

  ‘Lady Muck!’ said Niall as they passed mid-Serpentine. Spencer, sitting in the stern with one hand trailing indolently in the frigid water, gave a gracious wave with the other.

  ‘Meet you back at the jetty in ten minutes,’ shouted Nick, his arm tightly round his daughter, as Fran’s strenuous rowing stretched the distance between the boats. There was a sudden wail from Nina, and Spencer craned round to see the Beefeater once again bobbing in their wake.

  ‘Third time,’ said Fran.

  ‘Are you trying to break some kind of record?’ asked Spencer, as the far shore shot towards them.

  ‘I know how keen you are…. on doing things properly,’ she said between oar strokes, ‘so I thought we should at least…. go once round the block…. Fuck!’ She caught a crab and the oar bounced out of her hand. ‘Ow. Shit.’

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Yeah.’ She shook her hand and swore a bit more, and picked up the oars again with a less determined air.

  ‘I’ll still count it,’ said Spencer, ‘even if we don’t go all the way round. I counted the fish market, and I didn’t get there till two minutes before it closed.’ A flat-faced man had given him an unsold coley before slamming a grille in his face. ‘It still got a tick.’

  ‘Spence, I meant to ask you something about the list – why did it say “a” cockney pub, instead of “the” cockney pub?’

  He felt his mouth curve into a smile.

  ‘What?’ she said, intrigued. ‘What did I miss?’

  ‘I never told you about that, did I?’ He had wanted to keep that evening to himself for a while, to mull over its implications in private, and then he had got in the way of a spade and the moment for sharing had been postponed.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I met the Hypothetical Blinking Man again.’

  She dropped both oars. ‘Fuck getting to the other side. Tell me about it. When? Where? What was it like?’

  ‘Well…’ He leaned back against the gunwale and looked at her eager face. ‘I think there might be rather more than ten minutes’ worth.’ He checked his watch. ‘Five now.’

  ‘Summarize.’ she ordered. ‘Stick to the facts. Keep it concise. Where did you meet him the first time?’

  ‘On a London Pride tour-bus.’

  ‘How did you get talking?’

  He wondered how to put it. ‘We shared a nun,’ he said.

  Questions boiled on Fran’s lips.

  ‘Four minutes,’ said Spencer, meanly.

  ‘All right, we’ll do that later.’ She made a visible effort. ‘Who got back in touch first?’

  ‘A friend of his did. An American who’d been there at the…. the nun incident. He told me to meet them in the Cockney Pub.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘I went to the wrong one.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘I went to the right one.’

  ‘How long now?’

  ‘Three and a half minutes.’

  ‘OK, you can take this bit more slowly. All yours.’ She folded her arms and waited to be entertained.

  Spencer ran through the events in his head. The first few minutes had been a cavalcade of embarrassment, the thought of which still made him blush. ‘You’ve got to picture the scene,’ he said. ‘It’s not like a pub at all – it’s more like a theatre, and there’s a box office outside. It costs ten pounds for a ticket.’ The woman in the feathered hat who had taken the money had said to him with open derision, ‘It’s all coach parties in there, you know, it’s not a club.’ His ticket had been torn by a man in a bowler hat and braces and then Spencer had walked through a swing-door and found himself in hell.

  ‘They pick on late-comers,’ he said. ‘Or they picked on me, anyway. There’s a little stage with tables all around, and waitresses d
ressed as pearly queens, and when I went in there were two men singing “Any Old Iron”…’ The noise had been gigantic, cacophonous in the confined space, and it had taken him a few seconds to realize that everyone had turned round to look at him. ‘And then –’ He baulked at the next bit.

  ‘Tell me tell me,’ said Fran.

  ‘They made me get up on stage.’ He remembered feebly bleating, ‘I’ve come to meet some friends,’ and then stumbling up a couple of steps and finding himself facing a wall of heat and light and dimly discernible faces.

  ‘To do what? Sing?’

  ‘No. I had to push a pram full of scrap metal round the stage. And wear a hat. And every time they sang “you look sweet, talk about a treat” I had to throw toffees into the audience.’ It had been like some acid nightmare of his youth and had gone on for at least five verses. The sight of Reuben dancing into the footlights shouting, ‘He’s with us, give the poor man back to us!’ had been a vision more beautiful than he could express and he had been led like a lamb through the applauding audience to the mercifully secluded table at the back of the room. ‘Us’ had been Reuben and Greg and Miles, the latter still amiably blinking, his moustache now nearer Groucho than Orwell – an improvement, oddly enough.

  ‘So what happened then?’ asked Fran. ‘Did you meet him – your man?’

  ‘Yes, I met him. We had a nice evening.’

  ‘And? Is there an and?’

  ‘Well. That’s the funny thing.’ It had been a nice evening – inevitably dominated by Reuben, still vibrating with the thrill of having given evidence in a real live courtroom earlier that day (‘They wear wigs, they really and truly wear wigs!’) – a friendly, flirty, silly evening, a perfect way to dip a toe into something which might become deeper. ‘I liked him very much, I really did.’

  ‘But? Not fanciable?’

  ‘It’s not that. It’s just – he’s quiet and sweet and unobtrusive, and –’ he shrugged, a little embarrassed at the admission ‘– I realized I don’t want someone like that. Maybe I did when Mark was around, maybe I could only look for a contrast. But now he’s gone I want…’ not another Mark. Mark was irreplaceable – he had his own stained-glass window in Spencer’s head through which the world would always be coloured – and God knows he didn’t want a repeat of the tearing jealousy that had shot through their relationship, but he wanted… ‘– someone I can’t ignore. Someone who changes everything. Someone bigger than me.’

  Fran lifted an oar and clopped it onto the water again.

  ‘Where are you going to find someone like that, Spence?’

  ‘I don’t know. Do you think I’m making life difficult for myself?’

  ‘Life is difficult,’ she said. ‘Nothing’s ever as simple as you think it’s going to be.’

  Watching her start to row again, Spencer thought that that was probably as much philosophy as he would ever hear from Fran and, like her, it was short and to the point.

  ‘So what about you?’ he asked, as the jetty and the small, bouncing figure of Nina came into view. ‘What are you looking for? What do you want?’

  The oars rose and fell twice more while she considered the question, her eyes intent upon some inner list. ‘I want a big garden,’ she said at last, with decision. ‘A really huge garden. South facing. And someone to dig it with.’

  ‘Anyone in particular?’

  She shook her head. ‘I’m going to find the garden first. One thing at a time, Spence.’

  From the window of her bedroom, a half-opened bill in her hand, Iris watched her father show Tammy his new fence, put up to forestall any boundary discussions – or indeed, any casual intercourse whatsoever – with the new neighbours. Mr Hickey, once he was deemed sane enough to be discharged from the local psychiatric hospital, was being moved to somewhere less controversial, but her father wanted to take no chances. He tested a section with his hand, and then inspected it dourly while Tammy chattered and bobbed next to him, a robin beside a stump; they looked oddly comfortable together. Tammy had confided in Iris recently that she had always gone for ‘serious men’. ‘I like them to have a dark side, dear,’ she’d said cosily, over the washing-up, ‘a little bit of mystery. I never knew what my Hammy was thinking and it kept me on my toes. So to speak.’ She had actually winked at that point and Iris had resisted the temptation to run from the kitchen with her hands over her ears shouting ‘please, please don’t tell me any more’ and instead had smiled back.

  The inspection finished, her father turned towards the house and, glancing upwards, caught Iris’s eye. His expression softened, and Tammy offered a little wave, and they disappeared from her field of vision.

  She had come upstairs partly to escape that expression, the huge leaping excess of joy with which he had greeted her inchoate plan, and which even the boys had noticed. ‘No pressure there, Mum,’ as Tom had remarked sardonically when her father hurried off to phone Tammy with the news.

  ‘I might not get in,’ Iris had said, almost to herself, and Robin had laughed.

  ‘You sound just like me, Mum. Of course you’ll get in.’

  ‘But what if I don’t?’ Like an old, familiar satchel, she had felt the weight of her father’s expectations.

  ‘Well…’ He’d shrugged, untroubled by that particular burden. ‘You could go and do something else, couldn’t you?’

  ‘Like juggling,’ Tom had suggested.

  She finished unfolding the bill, glanced at the total and set it to one side with the rest of the post. Only the package from Bethesda College and the slim grey envelope remained to be opened; she hesitated between one unknown and another and then, bracing herself, picked up the former, unpeeled the flap, and slowly withdrew the contents as though they might bite if roughly handled. It took her a moment to assimilate what she was holding, and then she was swept by a wave of relief, followed by one of disappointment. What she had half hoped for, half dreaded was a specific answer to her general question – an address, a telephone number, a cheery letter from Lyle Kravitz promising to ring up his old buddy Conrad with the news that she’d been asking about him. Here, instead, was a cheaply produced magazine and stapled to it a compliments slip which suggested, in perky handwriting, that the Bethesda alumnus association (most recent copy of the journal enclosed) might help her with her enquiry. She detached the slip and flattened out the creased cover of The Valedictorian. ‘Jesus is Lord’ it said, in smaller letters under the title, as if crediting the proprietor. The cover photograph was captioned ‘White Water Bonding’ and showed a group of middle-aged people – old Bethusians, presumably – propelling a raft along a churning gorge. The contents page listed accounts of weddings and christenings, dances and fund-raising evenings, and the message from the editor was a paeon to the latest triumph of the college football team.

  With mild curiosity she began to flick through the magazine. The Old Bethusian social calendar was crowded with healthy pursuits, many of which she would have assumed had died with Mark Twain: cook outs, hay rides, dinner dances with charity raffles, frog-jumping contests, Christmas Concerts and covered-pie parties. Paging slowly through, she looked carefully at the faces in the crowded snapshots, their features blasted to pale uniformity by the flashgun. None seemed even vaguely familiar, but then of course Conrad might have changed out of all recognition, he might be fat, bald, pony-tailed, bearded, it was even possible he might be dead; she turned the penultimate page and saw, with an impact that seemed to scoop the air from her lungs, that he was none of those things. A little more jowly, perhaps, his hair thinner, the odd crow’s-foot pinching the corner of his eyes, but fundamentally unchanged. ‘Afterword’ – said the headline – ‘last page thoughts with the Reverend Blett’. Fundamentally unchanged apart, that is, from the dog collar. It was a byline photograph, a head and shoulders that took up nearly a quarter of the page, and Conrad was smiling slightly, his eyes fixed on a high and distant horizon. ‘I spent last week at a conference’ ran the text ‘– no, don’t yawn, don’t turn
away, because it was a vital conference, centering on one of the most important issues that our church can deal with – a Bible-centered approach to family planning.’

  Spencer stood by the glass wall of the Bat Zone and watched chunks of darkness detach themselves from the ceiling and fly in great loops around the interior. He was trying to remember something that Mark had once said about bats, some caustic comment about the size of their ears and their resemblance to an ex-lover of Spencer’s, but the exact phrase, and what had prompted it, kept slipping from his mind; whether it was due to time or concussion he wasn’t sure, but he realized that he could no longer rely on Mark’s internal commentary, running like a bass line under every thought. It was as if he were further away now, shouting through cupped hands, and only some of his words were audible. Big ears, he thought, no chin, high-pitched squeaks. Perhaps it had been Reinhardt.

  He heard the rumble of a buggy and turned to see Nick and a sleeping Nina approaching.

  ‘We’ve found it,’ whispered Nick. ‘It’s in the other wing. And it’s much bigger than I thought.’

  It wasn’t until the afternoon that Iris remembered the grey envelope. She had not read any more of Conrad’s article – had not tried to find out where a split condom slotted into the Reverend Blett’s world view – but instead had smuggled The Valedictorian out of the house in a shopping bag and buried it deep within a skip half a mile from Alma Road, safely removed from where the products of a non-Bible-centered approach to family planning could ever see it. Her lovely, accidental boys.

  If they ever decided that they wanted to know more, then she could point them in the right direction, but for now she thought they could probably amble on without him; the idea of using Conrad as an example – a lure to lead them towards academia – seemed ridiculous now, a panicky manoeuvre from another era. In any case, they had always done exactly as they wanted, had walked their own path in matching size thirteens and used their combined charm and weight to shoulder down any door they fancied opening.