by Francis King
‘Yes. What you thinking, Meg?’
‘Why don’t you become my lodger?’ When she had said that, wholly on an impulse, she was as astonished as he was.
He stared at her, with obvious pleasure. ‘You think good idea?’
‘Yes. Why not? It’s not much of a room. You can have a look at it. The original idea was that my sister should have it and take care of me after – well, after the person who had been taking care of me upped and scarpered. But then she met this man – he’s her second husband, her first died, cancer, poor chap – and he had a flat of his own, up in Highgate, really posh.’ Mehmet was staring at her, saying nothing; but that pleasure was still there on his pale, handsome face, so that she felt suddenly joyful, as though she were about to set off, now, now, on some wonderful journey, of the kind that she no longer even contemplated, since getting over to Tesco or the newsagents had become more than enough of a journey for her. ‘I’d not charge you much. My sister tells me that I could get as much as, oh, fifty, sixty quid a week for that room, but if you were prepared to give me a hand now and then, I’d, well, I’d charge you, say, thirty … Well, how about it?’
As though on an impulse, he jumped to his feet. ‘Maybe I can see the room?’
‘Of course you can! No one wants to buy a pig in a poke. It’s over there, down the passage, first on the right. The room at the end is where I hang out. Go on! Have a dekko! It’s rather dark, looking out on the well, and at present it’s full of junk and there are things in the wardrobe …’
She did not say that the things in the wardrobe were clothes belonging to her husband, a purser on a cruise ship, who had gone off one day for work on a cruise of the Caribbean and had never returned. Her sister Sylvia had made enquiries of the firm, only to learn that, the cruise over, he had totally vanished, leaving with them an address which turned out to be false, so that inevitably his employment had come to an end. With, a mixture of sentimentality and superstition she had hung on to the clothes, even from time to time dragging them out of the wardrobe and giving them a brush when she felt strong enough to do so, despite constant urgings from Sylvia to chuck them out. ‘He’s not going to come back, my girl. You’d better face up to that. And good riddance!’
‘Well, what do you think of it?’, she shouted out to him, at the moment when he had begun to weave his way through yellowing stacks of newspapers, a pile of cooking utensils, packing cases, and broken bits of furniture until he had at last reached the threadbare, brown velvet curtains, faded at the edges, which he then tugged back before throwing up the window to let in a sharply invigorating blast of cold air. This room also had a smell; but it was not that one of long since spilled milk but a strangely earthy one, as of rotting vegetation and damp soil under overgrown trees in a sunless corner of a garden. He leaned far out of the window, breathing in deeply, then closed it, tugged the curtains back, and re-emerged.
‘Well, what do you think of it?’ she repeated as he appeared in the doorway of the sitting room. ‘You could give it a lick of paint. Did you see the washbasin? It’s got its own washbasin and h and c. It’s also got a radiator – though it began to leak the last time I put it on. We can tell Mr Bagley about that. He’s supposed to see to things of that kind. The h and c and the heating are both provided by the Council. Well?’
He nodded, he smiled; and immediately she once again experienced a buffeting of joy, as though she were standing on a quayside, a salt wind blowing in her face, before embarking on that wonderful voyage that she would now never take.
‘Do you really think you’d be happy here?’
‘Why not? Much better room than room I leave. Why not?’ he repeated and then he burst into laughter, as though he had caught the infection of her joy.
‘As I said, it needs a lick of paint. But you could see to that, couldn’t you? You look like the do-it-yourself kind. And it hasn’t been hoovered for, oh, donkey’s years. But if I give my Fiona – my home help – a little present, I’m sure she’d be only too happy to make it spick and span for you after having finished with looking after me. She’s a nice soul, not all that bright but always willing to oblige. I know you and she’ll hit it off.’
‘I can hoover room myself.’
‘I’d always heard that Muslim men thought housework was only for women.’
He smiled. ‘I live for long time in England.’
‘Well, if that’s fixed, you’d better run along and get your things. Are they at your former place?’
He hesitated. ‘No. I leave them with friend. Safer.’
‘Is the – the friend far from here?’ She wondered whether the friend was male or female, English or Albanian, but shrank from asking, in case he thought it nosey of her.
‘Not far.’
‘Can you carry them over?’
‘Maybe.’ He was dubious. ‘Maybe I make two journeys. Or take taxi.’
If he was thinking of a taxi, then clearly he could not be skint.
As he was about to go out of the room, he turned back. ‘Oh, Mrs, Mrs –’
‘Meg.’
‘Yes. Meg. I wonder – you – you want – want deposit?’ He was embarrassed, poor love, she could see that at once.
She waved a hand in the air. ‘That’s not necessary. I have a feeling I can trust you.’ She had said that to other people in the past, and her trust had been abused. But, as Sylvia often told her, she would never learn.
‘But if you wish –’
‘No, no! I trust you, I trust you!’ She lunged out for the handbag on the table before her. ‘Here! Take my keys. Then you can let yourself in. This – ’ she held it up – ‘is the Banham for the front door of the block. And this’ – she held up another, smaller key – ‘is the Yale for the door of this flat. Tomorrow I’ll look out an extra pair of keys I’ve got put away somewhere. Or you can have another pair cut. Do you think you can manage?’
‘Of course! No problem.’
When he had gone, Meg poured herself another cup of tea. By now it was not merely black and bitter but also lukewarm. But she did not mind. She sipped and sipped again, holding the breakfast cup up to her lips in both hands and then sipping greedily from it. Its design of large marigolds was a Clarice Cliff one, though she did not know that, having bought it long ago, soon after her marriage, in a Rainham junk shop. She had not experienced such joy for ages and ages – not since there had been that flash on the telly that Eric’s ship was on fire, somewhere in the North Sea, and she had foolishly jumped to the conclusion that she was never going to see him again, and then, lo and behold, the Swedes had rescued everyone and in no time at all he had been flown back to Gatwick and there he was, safe and sound, and she was holding him in her arms, half crying and half laughing, while he kept saying ‘Easy, girl! Easy!’ That was before the MS had been diagnosed of course, although even then she was getting those weird pins and needles in her fingers and toes and that feeling that she was wearing a too-tight pair of stockings.
As Meg now waited for Mehmet to return, she began to go over in her mind everything that had happened before that last conversation that she and Eric had had together. Her reverie began with the visit that the two of them had paid to University College Hospital, where that specialist, the Chinaman, with the thick glasses and outsize trainers below trousers that were too long for his extremely short legs, just a boy he had seemed, had first told her and Eric ‘I’m afraid the news isn’t all that good’ and then gone on to describe precisely what multiple sclerosis was. He had told her that, at present, no one could claim to have a cure for the disease, but that many people – and she was probably one of them – never suffered the more severe symptoms. In any case the progress was a slow one and there were usually remissions. He had had to explain that last word to her, as he usually had to explain it to the stunned, bewildered patients who sat across from his desk. He always hated this part of his job and often wished that he could merely hand them a sheet of paper and tell them ‘Read this,’ while he went out of the room.
When they had reached home, Eric announced: ‘Well, let’s have a cuppa.’
She sank into the armchair, its springs still intact, and bounced there, as though the up-and-down movement somehow appeased her, as such an up-and-down movement in the arms of its mother appeases a fractious child. ‘Three spoonfuls!’ she called out. Usually she took two.
‘Righty ho!’ Then he muttered, so softly that she did not hear: ‘You’ve always been an extravagant one. Talk of beggars on horseback!’
She reached out a hand – odd, as the tips of her fingers met the saucer, they felt even more numb than when they had set off that morning for the hospital – and murmured: ‘Lovely. Just what I needed. That tea in the hospital made me want to puke. You’d have thought they could have done better than that.’
He dragged an upright chair over to the table and then sat on it back to front. It maddened her when he did that, she could not have said why. But this time she let it pass without any comment. ‘Poor old dear,’ he said, genuinely compassionate. ‘ It’s been a rough day.’
She stared into the teacup. The corners of her mouth sagged, she blinked two or three times rapidly in succession. He knew these as the signals that she was about to break down. But this time, to his amazement, no tears followed. ‘It’s a death sentence,’ she said.
‘Nonsense. Don’t talk such rubbish!’ His Essex accent became more pronounced, as it always did when she had managed to upset him. A hand went up and flicked away, with a finicky gesture, a lock of sparse, gingery hair that had fallen across his forehead. When she had first married him, there had been something girlish about him, as her mother had unkindly remarked; now there was something spinsterly. ‘ You heard what the doctor said. Yes, there’s no cure – no cure as such – but there are these, these remission things, and in any case he doesn’t think you have the severe kind of the disease. I don’t see it as a death sentence, not at all. Look on it as a life sentence.’ He gave a nervous, hiccoughing little laugh.
She shook her head. She knew. She could even now view the road ahead, constantly darkening, to its end.
Meg made an effort to stir herself out of this recollection – the mental equivalent to the effort that she made every morning to clamber out of bed with the assistance of the hoists that the Council people had installed for her. You’re getting morbid, my girl! Then she sank back again into the past, as she would often sink back into her bed, incapable, at least for the time being, of making any further effort.
At first Eric had been wonderful. He stopped going away on the cruise ships and got a job as a night porter at a hotel in Sussex Gardens. ‘It’s little better than a knocking shop,’ he would tell people. But the tips were good and he was able to spend the days with Meg, the worsening of whose condition had begun to accelerate. As Mehmet was to do later, Eric would help her in and out of the bath, even dry her failing, constantly fattening body. He would press her to have another cuppa, a slice of cake, a fag – where was the harm in it? She might as well enjoy herself while she could. In those days she did not have the motorized wheelchair. Eric would push her out in the one that maddened her with its creaking. He would oil the wheels but somehow that doleful whine just went on and on. He would push her to the cemetery – she would joke ‘I’m not quite ready to come here yet!’ – to the shops and to that Italian café in which a pretty little Italian girl with a scar down her right cheek (what had caused it, they would wonder to each other with an almost obsessive repetition) used to work. Eric would joke with the girl, with a lot of innuendoes, which would make Meg eventually protest: ‘Oh, give over, do! Do you have to be so vulgar? Can’t you see that the poor dear is getting embarrassed?’ But Meg didn’t really mind. He had to have his fun. There was little fun that she could now give him. The truth was that fun, that sort of fun, was something she no longer enjoyed or even wanted. She often planned to ask the specialist if that was usual with MS but then, in the event, she was always too embarrassed to do so. The times when Eric wanted that sort of fun became rarer and rarer. Perhaps he was finding it somewhere else? Perhaps in that hotel which he so often described as ‘ almost a knocking shop’? If so – well, good luck to him!
It had been a terrible jolt to her, almost as bad as when the specialist had first told her what was wrong with her, when he broke it to her that he had applied to go back on a cruise ship. ‘But why, why?’ she demanded. ‘I know that hotel isn’t perfect, but you always say there’s not all that much to do at night, that for most of the time you can kip. And with the tips the money’s good. Isn’t it?’
He did not answer, staring unhappily down at the thin, nicotine-stained hands that he was clasping in his lap.
‘Isn’t it?’
‘It’s not the money,’ he said at last. ‘The truth is – I get bored there. The same routine, day after day – or, rather, night after night. I want to get moving again, not sitting around on my bum. That’s the truth of it,’ he added, a steely note of defiance in his voice.
‘And what about me? How am I going to manage?’ But she put these two questions merely to herself.
Ten days later, he had found a job. It was not ideal, he said – a cut-price cruise on a small ship that was due to be scrapped, to an area, the Caribbean, that he knew like the back of his hand. But there it was, better that than nothing.
On the evening before his departure, they sat unhappily in front of the television set, their eyes on The Weakest Link but really taking in nothing, as he brooded and she fumed. Then suddenly, as though, having long simmered, a kettle all at once boiled over, she cried out: ‘I don’t understand it’.
He looked mournfully across at her with his bloodshot eyes. ‘Don’t understand what, love?’
‘How can you do this to me?’
‘Do what?’
‘Do what?’ Cruelly, she mimicked him. She had always been a good mimic, sending the other people present into gales of laughter in the days when she and he still went to parties and the local. ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake! I never thought you’d give up on me. No, I never thought that.’
There was a long silence. Then he nodded his long, narrow head, nodded it again. ‘ The problem is – the problem …’
‘Yes, well what is the problem? What is the fucking problem?’ He hated to hear her swear, it was different for a man but a woman shouldn’t swear. He would often tell her that – which was why, in moments of anger with him, she made a point of swearing.
He got up slowly, one hand to the small of his back as so often when he was suffering from lumbago, and switched off the television. He groaned as he sat down again. He looked across at her. ‘Oh, Meg!’ There was both pity and reproach in the words, a bitter-sweet confection. Then he said the terrible words. ‘I just can’t cope any more.’
‘What d’you mean?’
He stared at the blank television screen, one hand going up to scratch with the nail of a long, narrow forefinger at first his pointed chin and then at a nostril. ‘I thought I could but I can’t. It’s the end of that road. I can’t trudge along it any more. That’s the truth, Meg.’
She stared at him, her face mottled with rage and desperation. ‘So you can’t cope! You can’t bloody cope! Do you think that coping is more difficult for you than for me? I have to cope, I have to bloody cope. There’s no alternative to coping, not for me!’
He hung his head. Then, with a grimace, he got up off his chair again, body once more bowed over and hand once more pressed to the small of his back, and went across to her. He knelt beside her
, took her right hand in his right, and then with his left began to stroke it. ‘You’re the one who can always cope. You’re the strong one, Meg. You know that.’
‘But I don’t want to be the strong one! Can’t you see that?’
‘Poor Meg!’ He rested his head on her knee, the head turned sideways, the eyes shut. There was dandruff, she noticed, among the ginger-grey wisps of hair. She had bought him that treatment that she had seen advertised on the telly but would he use it regularly? Oh, no. He was too bloody lazy. In a sudden fury, she pushed him away, so that he sprawled across the carpet. ‘Oh, you make me sick! Even sicker than I am with this bloody MS. I wouldn’t be surprised if you didn’t bring it on.’
From the floor he gazed up at her with a stricken expression which slowly, as he got first to his knees and then, putting out a hand to support himself with the table, to his feet, became adamantine, almost cruel. He walked slowly out of the room into the room that was eventually, four years later, to be let to someone else, so totally unlike him. Meg began to cry, first softly, as though practising something unfamiliar to herself, and then in gust after gust, each louder than the preceding one. She expected the noise would bring him back, but it did not do so. Instead, she heard the sound of the radio, the weather forecast for shipping. What interest could that have for him?
When the time came, eleven days later, for his departure, it was with a guilty awkwardness that, as he put his thin arms around her, he said: ‘You’ll be all right, old girl. And the money will come through, I fixed all that. And I’ll telephone,’ he added. ‘However expensive it is, I’ll telephone.’
She gently released herself from him. ‘I’m sorry about all that carry on,’ she said. He stared at her, sparse, gingery eyebrows drawn together, as though he did not understand to what she was referring, and so she went on: ‘I can cope. Don’t worry. I can always cope.’
He again took her in his arms, even though he sensed a resistance like an iron rod going right through her otherwise pliant being. ‘Of course you can cope. You’re strong. You’re really strong. Nothing’s going to get you down for long. Nothing. You know that.’