by Francis King
Now she did swing her legs out of the bed, her nightdress rucked up to her knees. God, she must look a fright! And at this hour too! Frantically, she smoothed down her hair with both hands and then stooped for her slippers.
She could hear his deep, vibrant voice: ‘I look for Dr Carter. Excuse me – she live here?’
‘Oh, yes, she lives here, this is our house. But whether … I’m not sure if she’s gone out or not,’ Audrey lied. ‘Or she may be busy. If so, she’ll be upstairs.’
‘It does not matter. I brought her present. She know why. A return for – for something kind.’
Marilyn jumped off the bed, grabbed her dressing gown and frantically thrust her arms into it. Then, still tying the cord, she hurried down the stairs.
Audrey turned at the sound of her descent. Her eyes widened and her mouth opened in astonishment that Marilyn should appear dishevelled and in a dressing gown for someone who must be hardly known to her. ‘Oh, Marilyn, this – this gentleman has brought you some flowers.’
Beyond Audrey, Marilyn could now see Mehmet. His pale face was upturned to her, not vulnerable and bewildered like Audrey’s, but totally self-assured. Luminous, that was the word for it she thought. ‘ Good morning, Dr Carter. I am sorry I wake you.’ Even before she had reached the bottom step he was holding out the flowers. It was a vast bunch, a variety of flowers in various shades of pink. She had never liked pink flowers.
‘Oh, no, no. I wasn’t asleep. But on Saturday we have an agency to look after the practice and so I take it easy. I was reading,’ she added. ‘I get so little time for reading.’
He pushed the bunch of flowers towards her. ‘For you.’
‘For me? But what a lot of flowers! They must have cost a fortune.’
‘Too little for all you do for me.’
‘But that was nothing.’
Audrey continued to stand, arms folded, a little apart from them. As they talked, she looked at each of them in turn, with a bewildered, almost frightened look on her face. Marilyn had seen that look on the faces of patients who were about to undergo some strange and therefore dreaded procedure – a prostate examination, an endoscopy, even a simple drawing of a specimen of blood.
‘It was very much.’
Again he held out the bunch, with a pleading, placating look, almost as though he were coaxing a nervous animal. This time she took it. The smell of the hothouse blooms was languorous and sweet. She wondered if the florist had sprayed them. Florists sometimes did that, she had heard. She looked down at them. ‘Lovely. How very kind of you. We seldom buy flowers for the house, because I’m too lazy and Audrey has an allergy.’
As though to confirm this last statement, Audrey suddenly sneezed and sneezed again, raising a forefinger to her nose and then pressing the side of it up against its tip.
‘I’ll put them in my study. Or bedroom. At this time of year, it’s lovely to have flowers to look at. The garden is so bleak.’
He smiled and nodded, clearly delighted.
‘How did you find me?’
‘First to the surgery. No one there, just – just Spanish lady.’
‘Carmen,’ Audrey said, like a teacher correcting a pupil.
‘She tell me you not come today. But she give me this address and tell me how I walk here. Not far!’
Marilyn had repeatedly told Carmen on no account to reveal her home address to anyone. She would have to have a word with her on Monday.
‘I look in directory – telephone directory. Many Carters – no Dr Marilyn Carter.’
So he had remembered her Christian name. ‘We’re ex-directory. In some ways it’s a boon, in some ways a nuisance. My – my husband wanted it that way and I’ve never done anything about changing it. If there’s an emergency, the agency has this number.’
‘You are married?’
She resented the question; but then she reminded herself that probably in the culture from which he came to be inquisitive was not impolite but merely an indication of concern.
‘Was. My husband is dead. I’m a widow.’
‘I am sorry.’
Audrey intervened: ‘ You know, Marilyn, you shouldn’t be standing around in this draughty hall in your nightdress and dressing gown. Particularly when there are all these colds and flu about.’
‘No, I suppose not.’ Marilyn restrained herself from snapping back that colds and flu were caused by viruses, not by standing around in draughty places. She had been wanting to offer him a cup of coffee. But that was out of the question with Audrey present, even though at this hour Audrey and she would be thinking of their elevenses. Indeed, the coffee might already be percolating.
‘I go now.’ He turned towards the door, then turned back. ‘ Maybe I see you again?’ He put the question hesitantly, with a note of pleading in his voice.
‘Yes. Maybe.’ Because of Audrey, she showed none of the pleasure that she felt at the suggestion. Why on earth did she have to go on standing there, arms crossed, with that vaguely puzzled, vaguely disapproving look on her face?
‘I give address and telephone number?’
She already had his address and telephone number on the computer. Had he forgotten that or did he want to ensure that she had them here, in her home, instead of at her place of work? ‘Well, yes. If you’d like to. Yes. Thanks.’
He drew a piece of paper out of the breast pocket of his tweed jacket, which he was wearing with an open, blue-and-white check shirt. Wasn’t he cold, dressed like that, with no tie or scarf, no overcoat and no sweater under the jacket? ‘Please.’ He held it out.
Amazed, she realized that he had already prepared the piece of paper. There was the name ‘Mehmet Ahmeti’ and under it an address and an outer London telephone number. Did he really imagine that she was going to take the initiative of getting in touch with him? She put out a hand, took the piece of paper, and thrust it into the pocket of her dressing gown. All at once she knew that, despite the seeming triviality of a piece of paper having been passed from one of them to the other, something fateful had happened.
On an impulse, she said: ‘I’d better give you my number. You have the surgery number of course. I mean the number at this house.’
‘Oh, please!’ He was eager.
As he said this, Audrey turned and began to retreat to the back of the hall. Then she was descending the stairs to her basement.
Marilyn found a pad and biro in their usual place by the telephone. Audrey saw to it that both were always there, as she also, each morning, made it her task to tear off from the pad any out-of-date jottings. Marilyn wrote ‘Dr Carter’, crossed that out, and then wrote ‘Marilyn Carter’. Below the name she wrote the number.
He stared down at the paper when she handed it to him. ‘Marilyn Carter,’ he said. ‘I like name Marilyn. Marilyn Monroe,’ he added and laughed.
‘I’m afraid I’m nothing, like her.’
‘She no good doctor.’
‘And I’d be no good as a sex symbol.’
They both laughed, then shifted awkwardly, their eyes lowered. Marilyn stepped past him and opened the front door. An icy blast stung her bare legs. He gazed momentarily at her with eyes that seemed to have lost their dangerous glitter and become soft and gentle. Then he gave a little shrug and walked past her and out.
‘Thank you again for the lovely flowers. I’ll get Audrey – my sister-in-law – to arrange them for me. Even if they do make her sneeze! I’m no good at arranging flowers. Thank you, thank you so much.’ She was really thanking him not merely for the flowers but for having made the effort of finding out where she lived and coming so far, and, even more crucially, for having redeemed yet another weekend with too little to do and too much to think about.
Standing on the bottom of the cracked steps, he turned to acknowledge her thanks. ‘ Il n’y a pas de quoi.’ He raised a hand in farewell, the fingers oddly curved, almost as though they were trying to snatch at something invisible. ‘ Au revoir!’
‘Au revoir!’
As, having reluctantly closed the door, she prepared to go upstairs again, she saw Audrey emerging from the basement. Audrey walked towards her, her expression a mixture of anxiety and disapproval. She held out her large, capable hands – a man‘s hands, her father would describe them.
‘Let me have the flowers. I’ll arrange them. Even if they do make me sneeze.’
Chapter Six
When Jacek got the job at the car wash, Mehmet had already been working there for several weeks. He was the first person that Jacek noticed, apart from Mr Klingsman. This was partly because Mehmet was so much at his ease, partly because he was so handsome and strong, and partly because he looked so smart in his white overalls and trainers. But chiefly it was because, alone of all the workers, Mr Klingsman treated him as if he were both an equal and a friend.
On that first day, stooped beside a ramshackle Escort in a hangar-like building full of cars, vans and weary workers, Jacek from time to time twisted round his head to peer, with grudging envy, through a wide, low plate-glass window into Mr Klingsman’s untidy office, littered with files, opened and unopened letters, ancient girlie magazines, overfull ashtrays and heavy-duty cups containing the dregs of cups of coffee days old. He was fascinated by the sight of the two men, the owner and his favourite employee, chatting together. Each was smoking a cigarette. Mehmet was sitting upright, one leg crossed high over the other, in the revolving chair beside Mr Klingsman’s desk. Mr Klingsman was lolling back in a dilapidated sofa, his huge stomach stuck out in front of him and the buttons of his shirt all but bursting from the fabric strained tight across his prodigious embonpoint. Mehmet was doing most of the talking, Mr Klingsman most of the laughing.
When Mehmet at last returned to work, Mr Klingsman followed him out of the office. ‘I don’t give you a chance with that one,’ Jacek heard Mr Klingsman tell Mehmet in that accent which Jacek took to be German, to which Mehmet replied ‘Want to bet?’ Both men laughed and then Mr Klingsman shouted out ‘Oh, get on with it, you stupid bugger!’
When Mehmet did get on with it, there was no doubt that he was one of the most efficient of the workers. But he took many such breaks. He would also spend a lot of time chatting to the customers. When other workers did this, Mr Klingsman would soon nip out of his office to ask of the customer ‘Is there any problem?’ or to tell the worker ‘You won’t be long over that, will you? We’ve got a real rush ahead of us,’ or something of that kind. But he never interrupted Mehmet.
That first morning, soon after eleven, a middle-aged blonde in dark glasses drove up in a long Mercedes coupé of a kind that Jacek, who had had little experience of luxury cars in his native Poland, had never seen before. All the workers stopped what they were doing to stare first at the car and then at her. Mr Klingsman did not send Roberto, a tiny, grubby, unshaven Italian, who was free, to deal with this new arrival, but summoned Mehmet from another job. She and Mehmet at once began a long conversation. She leaned negligently against the car, in her black-and-white check trouser suit, her tongue moving constantly round her lips when she was not talking or smiling. He stood opposite to her, his hands encased in the pink rubber gloves that, along with the constantly laundered white overalls, made Jacek think of a surgeon. Mehmet smiled, nodded, smiled again, then burst into laughter. The woman was talking in so low a voice, her head close to Mehmet’s, that maddeningly Jacek could hear only a word here and there.
After the woman had gone, Mr Klingsman emerged from his office, scratching at his crotch. ‘She’s loaded that one,’ he told Mehmet, who had already opened the door of the car preparatory to cleaning the interior. ‘English but married to a Greek. He’s too busy running his restaurants to give her what she wants, if you ask me.’
‘What you suggest? I give it to her?’
Both men laughed, Mehmet briefly, no more than a chuckle, and Mr Klingsman in an explosion of mirth hardly merited by the remark. Jacek wondered if he and Mr Klingsman would ever come to laugh together like that. Forlornly he doubted it.
Tips were important to all the men, since the pay, £3.50 per hour, was so niggardly. All tips were meant to go into a tronc, kept in the office, but when a tip was unusually large, then most of the men – Roberto was one of the few exceptions – would surreptitiously keep back a quarter or even a half of it. Jacek soon learned that often the largest cars brought the smallest tips. On his first day, a diminutive man with a button nose and sticking out ears, in a baseball cap worn back to front, had arrived in what was clearly a new BMW. Jacek, who was the only worker who was doing nothing and who was therefore summoned over by Mr Klingsman to deal with this customer, at once assumed that he must be the chauffeur of the car. But most of the other workers at once recognized him for one of the most popular and durable of television comedians and as a consequence kept pausing in their work to stare at him.
To Jacek the man was curt in his instructions, gesticulating with white, pudgy hands laden with rings. It was only after he had strutted off that one of the other workers, an elderly Indian called Selim, called out to Jacek ‘Did you recognize him? That cap and those glasses don’t fool nobody’, and then, amazed by the Pole’s ignorance, told him the comedian’s name and the title of the sitcom in which he was appearing.
Jacek worked harder at that BMW than he had ever worked before. But, returning, the man barely glanced at it. Having gone into the office to pay Mr Klingsman, he clambered on to the two cushions placed on the driving seat and started the engine. Then, with a grimace, he wriggled round, plunged one of those pudgy, heavily beringed hands into his trouser pocket and eventually, after a lot of fiddling and more grimacing, came up with a fifty p piece. He lowered the electric window to pass this to Jacek. ‘Thank you, sir,’ Jacek said. The man did not look at him at any time during this transaction.
‘How much? How much?’ Selim called across, and the other workers were soon halting at their tasks to ask the same. Jacek held up the coin, with a rueful smile. Few of them believed that that was the total sum. They assumed that, by some brilliant feat of legerdemain, Jacek had contrived to magic away the major part of the tip.
Jacek, who in childhood had acquired a latent anti-Semitism from his prematurely widowed mother, was surprised to discover that the taxi drivers, many of whom were Jewish, were the most lavish tippers. Were not Jews supposed to be stingy? This lavishness was most apparent during the night shift, when they would bring in their cabs because a drunk had either vomited or, less frequently, urinated in them. ‘Sorry about that,’ they would say to whichever worker had the unenviable task of mopping up and scrubbing, before they went off to the Cypriot greasy spoon, open for twenty-four hours of each day, up an alley behind the car wash. The stink would often make Jacek’s empty stomach heave. But he did not mind that. The tip in those instances would often be as much as five or ten pounds.
Jacek did not like to leave his English girlfriend, Polly, for the night shift, since, as an assistant in a branch of Next, she inevitably worked days. But the overtime and the tips made it vital for him to do so, if he was to fulfil the task that he had set himself in coming to England. He had imagined that it would not take him long to complete that task. He had not reckoned on the smallness of the wages paid to illegal workers and the much higher cost of living. If his accommodation had not been free in Polly’s little flat, it would hardly have been worth his while to stay in Britain.
Mehmet also preferred to work night shifts, presumably for the same reason. He was on the best of terms with the taxi drivers, greeting many of them by name, joking with them, and telling them ‘No problem, no problem!’ when they apologized for the disgusting state of a cab. Late one night, when both men were on duty, Jacek was so tired that he could hardly lift his short, bow legs, let alone a pail of water or a vacuum cleaner. All at once he was roused from his stupor by Mehmet shouting out gleefully to a departing taxi driver: ‘Now what this, what this?’ He was waving something, held between thumb and forefinger, in the air.
The taxi driver, a
pear-shaped, totally bald man who, like Mehmet and Jacek, liked to work nights because that way there was more money and less hassle, turned, peered and then threw up his hands as he burst into laughter. ‘ Nothing to do with me, mate! Must have been one of the clients.’ He put the last word into derisive inverted commas. ‘Why not wash it out and use it yourself? Waste not, want not.’
Mehmet raised his arm and threw the object at the driver. It fell short of him and sploshed on to the concrete. Jacek then saw that it was a condom. Would Mehmet retrieve it and put it in the rubbish bin? He never did. Later Mr Klingsman picked on Roberto – he was always picking on Roberto – to do so.
That was the night when, for the first time, Mehmet and Jacek had a conversation, as distinct from a few hurried words. By three o’clock business was so slack that Mr Klingsman told the two men that they could knock off for half an hour.
‘Hungry?’ Mehmet asked Jacek, when they accidentally coincided while the former was hanging up a hose and the latter squeezing out a sponge.
Jacek was hungry, but he shook his head. He made it a rule never to spend money in the café where the other men and their taxi driver customers congregated. If he spent money there, then his period of exile and servitude would become even longer. From time to time Polly would tease him for what she saw as his stinginess. It irritated her that he did not even help out with the rent. Her teasing sometimes had an acrid taste to it – ‘What do you do with all that money you make? I’m beginning to think you’ve got another girlfriend.’ Since, fortunately, he had never told her of his wife and daughter in Katowice, he would merely reply to that often asked question: ‘You know, Polly darling, I want make enough money to buy little flat or maybe a little house.’ ‘And you expect me to go to Poland to live in it?’ No, he did not expect that, he did not even want that. But he never told her so.