The Race

by Nina Allan

  The house was in our father’s name still, but I knew he would agree to anything Derek wanted – he no longer had the energy to fight him. I didn’t know much about the ins and outs of house-buying, but it wasn’t difficult to put two and two together and realise that Derek most likely wanted to get things underway before Dad became too ill to deal with the paperwork. It was Dad who’d have to sign on the dotted line, after all. It was either that or get wound up in probate for months and months, and I knew Derek hated to be made to wait, for anything.

  Linda was just sitting there, silently smiling. I realised she hadn’t spoken a word the whole time I’d been there. A strange little shiver went through me as I wondered if she was dumb, a real life version of Hans Andersen’s Little Mermaid, who gave up her voice so she could get closer to the prince she loved.

  I always hated that story, mainly because I could never get over how stupid and selfish the prince was, but in any case Linda turned out to be nothing of the sort. She could speak just fine. She was nice, too. Derek seemed keen for Linda and me to get to know one another, and in the days following my return to Laton Road we ended up spending a fair amount of time together. I was surprised to discover how well we got on. The day before Christmas Eve, Linda invited me over to her flat in St Leonards so she could show me the present she’d bought for Derek, a gorgeously expensive cashmere sweater she’d dithered over for hours in some London boutique.

  It was ridiculously beautiful. When Derek finally tried it on, on Christmas morning, it seemed to transform him.

  “What do you reckon?” Linda said. “Do you think he’ll like it?”

  “You’re joking, aren’t you?” I said. “He’s going to love it.”

  Linda’s flat was part of a large house at the top end of London Road. The flat had its own private entrance, which you reached by climbing a twisting wrought iron staircase at the back of the house. The flat’s two reception rooms were long and narrow, almost as if they’d been squeezed out of the main house and on to a ledge overlooking the garden. The bathroom on the other hand was enormous, with a claw-footed cast iron bath and a porcelain sink so large you could have drowned a dog in it. There were pretty glass bottles of perfume and lotion everywhere, and all the floorboards in the flat were sanded and varnished. There was the waxy, clean scent of furniture polish. Everything shone.

  The flat seemed to be Linda’s perfect habitat, Linda personified. I found it hard to imagine her ever wanting to leave.

  She made us celebratory cocktails in crystal glasses, champagne with something purple in it, and tiny gold hearts that slowly dissolved in a ball of pink fizz.

  “Happy Christmas,” Linda said. She put on a CD, a string quartet playing slightly off key, accompanied by the sound of children’s voices. Normally I wouldn’t have said much, but the drink made me talkative.

  “Are you really engaged to Derek?” I said. It was the question I’d been dying to ask for days, even though I was slightly scared of learning the answer. We were sitting side by side on Linda’s sofa, drinks in hand and shoes off, bosom buddies. The sofa was cream-coloured, draped with a sheet of woven fabric Linda told me she’d brought back from a trip to Morocco.

  She turned to look at me. She was cradling her glass in both hands and gazing at me in a forthright, appraising way that made me think at first that she was angry. Then she said something strange.

  “Nothing’s been decided yet. Derek and I only met in October. It’s early days.”

  “But the ring?” I said.

  “That’s just a private joke. Derek spotted it in an antique shop in Birmingham. He said he knew he had to buy it for me the moment he saw it. I put it on my wedding finger because that was the finger it fitted. When you came in the other day, Derek had only just given it to me. He said it was an early Christmas present. I had no idea he was going to tell you we were engaged.” She held up her hand and twisted it from side to side, making the ring sparkle in the light from several floor lamps.

  At least that explained her silence. She’d been totally flummoxed.

  “You’ve discussed it since, though?” I insisted. “You have told him you thought he was joking?”

  “It’s not the kind of thing you need to explain, is it? Not when you’re close to someone. Derek knows how I feel about marriage. We’ll take things as they come, see what happens.”

  Linda smiled at me hopefully, as if that settled everything. I had the feeling she was looking to me for reassurance, that she wanted me to agree that yes, of course my brother would understand that the whole engagement thing was a joke, a private understanding between the two of them, that it could never have been for real or at least not yet. I felt numbness spreading through me, body and mind, worming its tendrils into my muscles like the dissolving golden hearts in the purple champagne.

  It’s the drink, I thought, knowing it wasn’t.

  “What was Derek doing in Birmingham, anyway?” I managed to say.

  “Oh, I don’t know. Something to do with a piano. He was back by eleven though. He hates having to stay in hotels.”

  She was right about that, at least. Derek never spent a night away from home if he could help it. I remember feeling surprised that Linda knew this about my brother, the kind of detail that was unimportant in itself but the fact that she’d picked up on it seemed to mean at the very least that she genuinely cared about him.

  Perhaps she did love him, after all. Perhaps everything would turn out all right.

  As I was leaving the flat to go back to Laton Road, Linda asked if she could have my address in London, and my phone number.

  “It would be nice to keep in touch, don’t you think?” she said. What I thought was that it was odd, because we hardly knew each other, but I gave them to her anyway. I didn’t expect to actually hear from her. I thought it was just the kind of thing that people say on the spur of the moment.

  ~*~

  I was wrong about that, though. I didn’t hear anything for ages, from her or from Derek, but then just after the Easter vacation I had a phone call from Linda, asking if she could come up to town and take me to lunch one day. I was surprised, but said yes, partly because I wasn’t quick enough to think of an excuse not to, but also because I was curious to hear how things were going. We arranged a suitable time, and then three days later there I was, meeting her at Charing Cross as if we were old friends. She arrived just after midday, dressed in a button-up black jumpsuit that would have looked ridiculously unflattering on most people but made Linda look like a Vogue cover model. The jumpsuit’s buttons were silver, and shaped like thistles.

  “You look amazing,” I said. I kissed her cheek.

  “It’s vintage,” Linda said. “A bit sixties, isn’t it? Do you really like it?”

  “On you I do,” I said.

  She laughed, and hugged me around the shoulders. “Where shall we go?”

  We ended up in a small Italian cafe close to Leicester Square.

  “So, how’s college?” Linda asked. I snapped a breadstick in half and said things were fine.

  “I got a 2:1 for my Queen Matilda essay,” I said, but I could tell from the way she kept staring past me and out of the window that she wasn’t really interested.

  “Have you made any special friends yet?” she asked. She gave a nervous little laugh and shook back her hair. She was wearing purple eyeliner, and eye shadow in a delicate mauve colour. I noticed belatedly how tired she was looking. I began telling her about Robyn, and the violent row she’d recently got into with a guy in her tutor group, but Linda cut me short almost at once.

  “I don’t mean that, I mean boyfriends.”

  “No boyfriends,” I said. “Sorry.” It wasn’t true, actually, because earlier in the spring semester I had met Peter. Peter was a mathematician and Robyn’s new house mate, a big guy with John Lennon glasses and beautiful hands. Robyn told me he’d once wanted to be a pianist, and it was true that every time I passed by his room I heard music coming out of it, CDs of elabo
rate-sounding keyboard works performed by musicians I’d never heard of, Glenn Gould and Sviatoslav Richter and Maria Yudina. The music fascinated me. I started dropping in on Peter to find out what he was listening to, and we became friendly from there. His room was outlandishly neat, the tartan bed cover spread smoothly over twin pillows, the rows of complicated-looking textbooks all in order. He spoke slowly and in fits and starts, as if he were struggling to express ideas that had only just occurred to him. He never talked about the work he was doing, and when Robyn told me he’d won several high-profile mathematics contests in his early teens it came as a genuine surprise.

  He always seemed pleased to see me, and I found him curiously restful to be with. The way the smile spread gradually across the curves of his gentle moon face was like the sun coming out. He and Robyn seemed to get on very well. They were as different in temperament as you could imagine, but they both enjoyed locking swords over points of politics or philosophy and once they got started they didn’t hold back. Their discussions unnerved me at first because they seemed so hostile, but I soon learned that so far as they were concerned that was part of the fun. Once they were finished they’d make Irish coffee and put on a romcom and it was like all the shouting and point-scoring had never happened.

  They were like opposite twins. I know that phrase makes no sense, but that’s how it was. In a way, Peter and Robyn became my surrogate family. I was spending more and more time round at their place and one weekend in late March, when Robyn had gone home to Cambridge to visit her mother, I ended up staying over. Peter and I hunkered down on the sofa and watched all five Planet of the Apes videos, one after the other. By the time Battle for the Planet of the Apes had finished it was two o’clock in the morning and we were both very drunk. I was supposed to be sleeping in Robyn’s room, but I ended up collapsing on Peter’s bed and just not leaving. We wrestled for a bit, just pissing about, and then Peter suddenly asked me if I would sleep with him.

  “Couldn’t you just give me a handjob? I’m so desperate for a fuck I’m going crazy.”

  I was surprised, how easy it was. I liked Peter so much I couldn’t bear to say no. I knew how embarrassed he would be the next day, and the thought of how that might spoil our friendship made me decide it might be better if I just went through with it. We turned out the lights then got under the covers and slipped out of our clothes. Peter’s body was large and broad and his flabby stomach was soft as a girl’s but his hands were lovely, dextrous as a dancer’s. They reminded me of Linda’s hands. Peter groaned loudly when he came, like someone had just dropped a rock on his foot, and afterwards was so sweet and so seemingly grateful that I felt glad we’d done it. We talked on and on for hours, in whispers even though the flat was empty apart from the two of us.

  From then on we were kind of an item and I suppose it showed. “Oh fuck,” Robyn said when she returned from Cambridge and found us cuddling on the sofa. “Just don’t go all lovey-dovey on me, that’s all I’m asking.”

  I wasn’t sure if Peter and I would stay together, but even then I found it difficult to imagine my life without him. Things were so different from the way they had been with Tim. With Tim there had been this thing, this high-octane yearning uncertainty, the sense that something was expected of us, ready or not. With Peter, sex just happened and it was no big deal. It was my friendship with Peter, more than anything else, that made me see that Derek and what Derek had done to me didn’t have to define the way I thought and felt.

  Being with Peter showed me that I could say no to Derek controlling my life, the same way I’d have said no to Derek raping me, if I’d known how. Slowly I began to realise that my brother’s opinions and his violence and his cruelty could be relegated to a part of my mind where they no longer held any active influence over my future. I think that’s why when Linda asked me if I had a boyfriend I said no. I didn’t want the news getting back to Derek. I didn’t want Derek to know anything about me or about my new life or what I was doing.

  “There just isn’t time, not with all the essay-writing and everything.” I said to her. I tried to laugh it off, to make it seem unimportant, but Linda’s question made me feel uncomfortable and embarrassed. I sensed it wasn’t me we were talking about, that already we’d moved on to something else, the thing, whatever it was, that had prompted Linda to ask to see me in the first place.

  “That’s a shame,” Linda said. “College should be fun, shouldn’t it? It’s no fun if it’s all about work.” She glanced quickly around the restaurant. “Listen, Christy, do you mind if I ask you something?”

  “What’s wrong?” I said. For a minute I thought she was going to tell me my father had died, but then I realised almost at once that didn’t make sense. Dad being dead wouldn’t have made her start acting antsy the way she was. She wouldn’t have bothered coming up to London to tell me, either. It was hardly big news that he was on the way out. Derek would have phoned me instead.

  “It’s Derek,” Linda said. “He’s all set on me selling my flat, but I don’t want to do that. I think we should wait, you know, with your dad being so ill and everything. But every time I suggest putting it off he gets all in a state. I’m in a bit of a fix, actually. I was wondering if you’d mind having a word with him.”

  “He won’t listen to me,” I said hurriedly. “We’re not all that close.”

  I realised that Derek and I hadn’t had a proper conversation, just the two of us together, since his assault on me. Most likely we never could now, not ever. I couldn’t tell Linda that, though. And what I knew for sure was that the idea of me advising him to back off from Linda was simply ridiculous. He would tell me to piss off out of his business and that would be that. I felt annoyed with Linda for not seeing that, for even suggesting it. The whole thing was her fault anyway, for letting Derek believe they were engaged. My stomach felt bound in a knot, like a woodlouse someone had prodded with a piece of twig. Linda clasped her hands together on the Formica tabletop then started fiddling with her rings, the diamond-and-pearl cluster Derek had given her and another one I hadn’t seen before, a narrow gold band set with a tiny arrow of yellow quartz.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “This is my problem. I know you tried to warn me. I’ve been so stupid.”

  “Is there anywhere you could go?” I said.

  “Go? What do you mean?”

  “Nothing,” I replied. I felt stupid for even mentioning it. “I just thought that if you went away for a while he might calm down.”

  “That’s just crazy though. I can’t let him rule my life like that. Anyway, there’s my job.” She turned away from me and started fumbling in her handbag. I thought she was looking for cigarettes, but after a moment’s searching she pulled out an envelope. It was grimy and slightly crumpled, bent at the corners. She glanced quickly at the front of it then handed it to me across the table.

  “I found this in the glove compartment of Derek’s van,” she said. “It’s addressed to you, and I thought that you should have it.”

  The envelope had an Oxford postmark and had been torn open along the top. I recognised Tim’s handwriting immediately.

  “I haven’t read it, in case you’re wondering,” Linda said. “It was like that when I found it.”

  I wanted to ask her how come she’d been poking about in Derek’s glove compartment in the first place, but I couldn’t speak. I took the letter out of its envelope and unfolded it. Dear Christy, I read. I keep hoping that I’m going to hear from you. I don’t understand what’s happened. The letter was dated the April of the year before. I’d stopped writing to Tim in the December. I remembered how I’d felt, that aching emptiness. It was horrible to know that Tim had gone on writing and waiting and hoping, longer even than I had. That he’d believed in me even when, unbeknownst to him, the version of me he was writing to no longer existed.

  My thoughts were racing. I wished that Linda would leave, so I could read the rest of Tim’s letter in private. I wondered how many other letters there had bee
n, if Derek had hidden these also or simply destroyed them. Over the next couple of days I tried to write to Tim, to explain what had been done to us and to say sorry. I must have started two-dozen letters in total, but I never finished any of them and in the end I gave up. It was all too late. Besides, there was Peter to think about.

  “Are you okay, Christy?” Linda said.

  I nodded.

  “It’s from a friend,” I said. “I must have mislaid it somehow.”

  “I suppose,” Linda said. She gave me a look. “It’s funny how it ended up in Derek’s van though, isn’t it?”

  We stared at one another for a moment in silence, then Linda told me she’d stopped being in love with my brother and probably never had been. There was someone else.

  “His name’s Alex Adeyemi,” she said. “We were together for ages before I met Derek, but things went wrong for a bit and we weren’t seeing each other, so when Derek asked me out I said okay. That wasn’t fair on Derek, I see that now. Alex got back in contact just after Christmas and I agreed to meet him. He wants us to get back together permanently. Everything’s such a mess.”

  “What are you going to do?” I said. I felt shaky inside, kind of sick. Some of it was Tim still, but mainly it was Linda and what she’d just told me. I couldn’t believe what she’d done, her stupidity. I realised she didn’t know my brother at all. She had no idea what he could be like when he got angry, what he was capable of.

  When he found out about this Alex guy he was going to go berserk.

  “I’ll have to tell him, won’t I?” Linda said. “Tell him it’s over.”

  “Tell who? Alex?”

  “No, of course not. I have to tell Derek. It would never have worked out, anyway. We’re two totally different people.” She sighed, and once again I saw how tired she looked. “There has to be a way to make him see that.”

  “What about Alex?” I said. “What does he think?”

  She shifted in her seat, looking uncomfortable. “I haven’t told him. About Derek, I mean. I didn’t want to complicate things. I’ve been able to keep up the pretence until now because Alex doesn’t want to pressure me – he still thinks of himself as the guilty party, I suppose. He must know something’s not right though. I feel awful, making excuses all the time about why I can’t see him. I can’t keep on with it.”