The Nick of Time

by Francis King

  Meg eventually ceased to listen, merely grunting or nodding her head from time to time.

  At last Sylvia looked at her watch. ‘Well, Meg dear, it’s been lovely to hear all your news and to see you so much better. But I really must be making tracks if I’m to get my Paul his lunch on time. You know how obsessive he is about punctuality.’

  Meg knew only too well. She had more than once sent him into a rage when she had failed to be ready when he had called for her in the car. ‘He’s been made redundant now, hasn’t he?’

  Sylvia did not care to be reminded of this bad news among so much that was good. ‘Well, he’d half decided to go anyway. There are so many things he wants to do. On his own, not as part of a large organization. He’s always been so independent-minded.’

  Bloody-minded, Meg thought. ‘Give him my love,’ she said. ‘It’s an age since I saw him.’

  ‘It was a pity you decided not to come to us for Christmas. It was one of our best. Goose instead of turkey was a brilliant idea.’

  ‘Well, I was so poorly then. But maybe next year … If this remission continues.’

  ‘One day Paul and I want to come in the car and drive you to somewhere like Kew. At Kew they have these chairs you can borrow, and we could push you around in one. You ought to get out more. It must be awful being cooped up in this tiny little flat day after day.’

  ‘I do manage to get out from time to time now that I’m so much better.’ By now Meg was fuming. The condescension of it!

  ‘Well, just up the road to Safeway is hardly getting out.’ Sylvia struggled into her overcoat and began to do up the vast brass buttons. Meg looked enviously at her sister’s small, narrow feet. She always wore good shoes and she was wearing good shoes now, low-heeled, their leather supple and glossy.

  When Sylvia swung open the front door – she had stooped before doing that to pick up some letters, saying ‘I’m afraid these all look like bills’ – there, on the doorstep was Mehmet in a tracksuit, breathless and with beads of sweat on his forehead, nose and high cheekbones. He had been out jogging.

  Meg greeted him with delight. ‘Hello, Mehmet. You must have been running very fast to get back so quickly. Or did you cut your usual route short?’

  ‘No, Mamma. Just the same.’ He was looking at Sylvia, his mouth open and his chest heaving, and Sylvia was looking at him.

  ‘Sylvia, this is Mehmet. My lodger,’ Meg added needlessly. ‘Mehmet, this is Sylvia – my sister. You two have never met each other.’

  ‘Delighted to meet you, Mehmet.’ Sylvia put out a gloved hand. She was taking in the still heaving chest – how muscular it was! – the slightly hooked nose, the mat of close-cropped, black hair. Despite the striking alabaster of the skin, there was something negroid about his looks, she decided, no doubt of that. But it only added to his attraction. ‘Meg’s been telling me how kind you’ve been to her.’

  ‘Mamma very kind to me.’

  Sylvia was not sure if she liked all this Mamma business. ‘She’s also told me of your job problems. I’ll keep an eye out. My husband might well hear of something. You’re not too particular, are you?’

  Mehmet shook his head. ‘Not at all. I take anything, anything.’

  ‘Perhaps at my husband’s club … I know they have a lot of foreign waiters there.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘You wouldn’t mind a job as a waiter?’

  Again he shook his head. ‘Any job. I been waiter.’

  Meg was glad that he had said that and not kitchen porter.

  ‘Oh, good!’

  Mehmet accompanied Sylvia down the steps to her car and then the two of them began to talk together, looking each other up and down and smiling away at each other, as though Meg were invisible. Finally Sylvia got into the driving seat and Mehmet, with a lot of shouting and beckoning, saw her out from the narrow space in which the car had been hemmed in by some inconsiderate van driver. Meg felt twinge after twinge of jealousy. She might not have been there. It was only to Mehmet that Sylvia waved when the car had finally been extricated and began to move off.

  ‘Your little sister very attractive,’ Mehmet said, as he walked back into the sitting room.

  ‘She is not my little sister. She’s three years older than I am.’

  ‘She looks – ’ he began with uncharacteristic tactlessness.

  ‘Yes, I know, I know. She looks like a hundred dollars and I’m just a mess. But she’s always had it easy. And, yes, I’ll admit, she took all her chances, while I just … Oh, well. No use crying over spilled milk.’

  When she collapsed into a chair, a look of intense disgruntlement on her face, he came and perched himself on its arm. He leaned over, placed his cheek against hers, and hugged her. She could smell the sweat from the exertion of his run and the aftershave from that bottle that he kept, one of many ranged tidily one beside the other, on ‘his’ shelf in the bathroom. She had felt exasperated with him for paying that rubbishy Sylvia so much attention and all but ignoring her. But there was no doubt that in the end he could always make things right.

  Chapter Eight

  There was still a nip of winter in the air, but now that the days were rapidly lengthening Marilyn had begun to feel less depressed. In December it had been like going into a long, eerily dripping tunnel, unsure whether one would ever emerge. And now she had emerged. She began to hum to herself – what was it? Something trite and perky. Oh, yes, ‘ The Sun Has Got His Hat On’, that was it. Not long before That had happened, she and Ed had gone to that old musical, Mr Cinders, at the King’s Head. She had thought the show awfully silly but he had loved it. Strange that a man so serious should have had such an appetite for silly things.

  ‘Hey! Hey!’ She heard the voice and, though she could not see from whom it was coming, she recognized at once, from something thrillingly distinctive about its resonant timbre, that it could only be Mehmet. At that moment she was passing Gloucester Road Station and, as she looked across the road, she saw him standing precisely where he had been standing, at the entrance, only a few weeks before. Was it just a coincidence that, living so far away in Dalston, he should twice have been standing at precisely that place? Or could it be that he regularly met someone there?

  Weaving perilously between the rushing cars, he raced across the road to join her. ‘ Dr Carter! You remember?’

  ‘Of course.’ How could I forget you? She peered at his face. ‘That’s healed well. I’m proud of my needlework. You can hardly see the scars.’

  ‘How long? Three, four weeks? I want to telephone, but …’

  I wanted to telephone too, often, often. ‘But what?’

  ‘Maybe you too busy. Maybe you do not want to see me again. Which way you walking?’

  Surely he must know? He must have seen the direction in which she had been going. ‘Home. It’s been a long day. Most of my days are long,’ she added.

  ‘Mine too. Which worse – too little work, too much work?’

  ‘You’ve got too much work?’

  ‘Too little.’ He pointed ahead of them. ‘ I walk with you?’

  ‘If you like.’ She at once wished that she had shown more enthusiasm. She certainly felt it, but an uneasy caution had restrained her. ‘But weren’t you – weren’t you waiting for someone?’

  ‘Me?’ He frowned, pulled down the corners of his mouth, shook his head. ‘No one. No.’

  Then why was he standing alone outside the Underground station, just as she had seen him standing alone outside it on that previous occasion?

  ‘I never thought that we would meet by chance here. Now, if I had had some reason to go to Dalston …’

  ‘You remember I live there!’

  ‘Yes, I remember. I’ve never been there,’ she added.

  ‘No reason to go. Ugly. Slum.’

  ‘You say you have too little work. Why’s that?’ They had begun to walk, he remaining so close to her in the crowded street that she had the choice of either brushing against the shop windows or br
ushing against him. She zigzagged between the two.

  ‘I did not tell truth. I do not have too little work. I have no work.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry. Why’s that? Is it that –?’

  He merely shrugged and then, obviously eager to change the subject, said: ‘Wonderful. Almost seven o’clock and not yet darkness.’

  ‘Yes, I have this glorious sense of relief when the days begin to lengthen.’ She also had a glorious sense of relief because, after so many days of thinking about him, she was walking so close at his side. At one moment their hands brushed against each other, at another his left shoulder brushed against her right. Probably, with any other companion, she would not even have been aware of the fugitive touch and go of these contacts. But a sharp, almost painful hyperaesthesia gave them all the significance of an embrace or a caress.

  Ever since he had called at the house with the flowers, she had been intermittently wondering in what sort of conditions he lived in that district of northern London of which she must have vaguely heard the name but of which she knew nothing.

  ‘What brings you all the way from Dalston to Kensington?’

  ‘A job. Hope of a job. But – no good. No vacancy.’

  ‘Have you been looking for a job for some time?’

  ‘From time to time, yes, I look for job.’ From time to time. The answer struck her as odd: either one was looking for a job or one was not looking for one.

  ‘Has it been difficult?’

  ‘Yes. Difficult. For East European – jobs not easy here. People think East Europeans dishonest, lazy, no good.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think so.’

  ‘Yes. English are racist people. Very racist.’ His mood had suddenly darkened, and his face, when she looked up at it, had darkened with it. Livid – that was the word that came to her mind; but livid not merely with rage but also with indignation and resentment.

  ‘Do you have a family over here?’

  ‘No. No family.’ He was peremptory. Did that mean that he possessed no family or that the whole family was in Albania?

  ‘So you live alone?’ she persisted. She felt ashamed of this inquisitiveness – she was not naturally an inquisitive person – but she had to find out everything she could about him.

  ‘No. Not alone.’

  ‘With other Albanians?’

  ‘No.’ He hesitated, clearly reluctant to tell her anything more. Then he said grudgingly: ‘I am lodger. With English lady!’

  ‘And that’s OK?’

  ‘OK?’

  ‘I mean – you’re happy there, it suits you?’

  ‘I must be happy there. I have not enough money for my own flat. But – she is good woman. Kind.’ Once again she turned her head and looked up at his face. It was no longer angry, indignant or resentful; but she could see, from the slightly compressed lips and the frown, that he did not like to be asked all these questions. He went on: ‘She is sick. Illness called MS.’

  ‘Well, yes, I know about MS. Two of my patients suffer from it.’

  ‘Of course you know about it. You are doctor.’

  ‘Poor woman. Is she seriously ill?’

  ‘Once. Now – she has remission. She is brave,’ he added. ‘Very brave.’ There was no doubt of the sincerity of the tribute. Marilyn at once wondered: How old was this woman? Was his relationship with her merely one of lodger and landlady?

  They were nearing the Regency house, a tall, narrow building, one of a row, which was covered in ivy, damp in winter and dusty in summer. Audrey and she were always saying that they must get someone to cut back the ivy but neither did so. ‘Would you like to come in for a drink?’

  Without any hesitation – as though the whole object of accompanying her had been eventually to secure that invitation – he said ‘Why not? I am free. No more interviews for jobs, nothing.’

  Marilyn could see the light on in the basement window; she could even hear the distant rumble of the television news. She hoped that Audrey would be too absorbed in it – ‘I must know what’s going on’ she would constantly say, even if what was going on was merely some arid debate in the Commons or an account of Bush’s most recent speech – to rush upstairs.

  But, as soon as she and Mehmet had entered the hall, even before Marilyn had taken off her coat, Audrey was calling out: ‘Hello! Late again!’ and was hurrying up. When she saw Mehmet, as she crested the last step, she froze, a hand going up to her mouth as though to stifle something that she knew she must not say.

  ‘You remember Mr – Mr –’ At first, only his first name, Mehmet, came to her. That was how, in her reveries, she always thought of him. ‘Mr – Mr Ahmati.’

  ‘Ahmeti,’ Mehmet corrected. Smiling, in no way disconcerted by Audrey’s sudden emergence, he went towards her, holding out his hand.

  ‘You are Dr Carter’s sister, yes?’

  ‘Sister-in-law. She was married to my brother. I’m Miss Carter – Audrey Carter.’

  ‘We met each other when I bring flowers.’

  ‘That’s right.’ Audrey was staring at him in a way – wary, almost hostile – that both irritated Marilyn and made her feel uneasy.

  ‘We ran into each other by the station. So I asked Mr Ahmati – Mr Ahmeti – in for a drink. I certainly need one after all that work. Why don’t you join us?’

  There was a momentary hesitation. Then Audrey said: ‘You know I rarely drink before supper. And there’s some news from Afghanistan. I don’t want to miss anything. It’s ghastly, what’s going on there.’

  ‘It’s ghastly what’s going on all over the world,’ Marilyn said. Unlike Audrey, always so quick to feel for the misfortunes of others, she could not work herself up into a state of anger or even compassion over unknown people suffering in some far-distant country.

  ‘Well …’ Audrey gave Mehmet a nod and then turned back to Marilyn: ‘ What time would you like to eat?’

  ‘Oh, about the usual time. Eight. Eight-thirty. Whenever suits you.’

  ‘All right. Let’s say eight-thirty.’

  At that, Audrey was gone.

  ‘Do sit down.’ Marilyn pointed to a Queen Anne chair, inherited, along with some other antique furniture, from an aunt. ‘That’s more comfortable than it looks.’

  He shifted uneasily in it. Then he laid his head back: ‘Very comfortable.’

  ‘Yes, I like it. And it looks so good. Even though it’s due for reupholstery.’

  When asked what he wanted to drink, he said some beer. She then had to tell him that there was none, she and Audrey never drank it. ‘ Never mind. I drink what you drink.’

  ‘I drink vodka. Too much of it, I’m afraid. I thought that Muslims didn’t drink alcohol.’

  He laughed. ‘ They are not allowed to drink alcohol. But that is something different. What you say? – when in Rome, do what Romans do.’ Again he laughed.

  ‘You have a good grasp of proverbs.’

  ‘Please?’

  She did not explain. ‘Most people pay lip-service to one set of rules and live by a totally different set.’ But not Audrey, she thought; and not Ed. It was that that had differentiated the two siblings from her and why she had always felt morally inferior to them. As she and Audrey sat watching the news on the television, Marilyn would sigh and then exclaim angrily or despairingly ‘ How can people do such things to each other?’ But it was Audrey who, often watching in silence, would later write the cheque, join the demonstration, or sell the flags on some windy, noisy corner of a street.

  He frowned at her remark, making little or nothing of it. ‘In my country many people drink. They are Muslim, they think good Muslims, but they drink.’ He raised his glass of vodka and tonic. ‘Santé!’ Then he sipped from it. ‘Bitter!’ He sipped again. ‘When I drink vodka, I drink with orange juice. Bitter, bitter!’ He pulled a theatrical expression of disgust.

  She laughed. ‘That’s the point about tonic. It’s bitter.’

  As though to avoid any more questions about his life, he now began to question her
about hers. Had she been born in London? Where did she train to become a doctor? Had she found it difficult? How much had it cost? Were her parents opposed to such a career? She began to weary of the inquisition, wondering what possible interest her answers could have for him.

  Then the questions became more insidious. It was like a police interrogation, she thought: first the innocuous questions about name, address, profession and so on; and then the questions which lead to a conviction of the person being interrogated.

  ‘You are married, Dr Carter?’

  ‘Was.’

  ‘You are divorced?’

  She shook her head. ‘No. My husband died.’ She jumped off the sofa in which she had been sitting and splashed some more vodka into her half-full glass. She wondered what he, a Muslim, would make of a woman drinking so much alcohol. She gulped, then gasped as the fire caught hold first in her throat and then in her stomach. Whatever happened, she was not going to talk to him about That. She never talked to anyone about That, except to Audrey or to her friend Vicky at extreme moments of guilt or despair.

  ‘And you have no children?’ Suddenly his voice was soft, gentle, soothing. It was as though he had intuited the horror and anguish that she was determined to hide from him.

  She shook her head. After all, it was not a lie. She had no children now. Carol was also dead. ‘None.’

  He looked across at her, his body leaning forward in the chair, the tumbler clasped in both his hands. Irrelevantly, she once again noticed how beautifully manicured they were. Did he pay someone to manicure them for him, as her father-in-law, in his vanity, did every week? ‘It is pity,’ he said slowly.

  ‘What is a pity?’ She became suddenly fearful. What was he going to come out with next?

  ‘That you have no children. You must have children. You will be good mother. Yes, I think so.’ He nodded at her.

  ‘Oh, I’m far too busy to start to have children! And anyway at my age …’

  ‘What you say? You not old! Thirty – thirty-five – yes?’

  ‘Thirty-seven.’

  ‘You do not seem so.’

  ‘I feel so. Sometimes much more than thirty-seven.’ She gave a small, abrupt laugh. ‘A hundred even.’