by Francis King
Neither of them paid any attention to the hat, as she kissed him lightly first on one cheek and then on the other. He felt an excruciating longing and a no less excruciating regret. The two things remained with him not merely in the moment when she released him, but also as he waved goodbye to her, stooped, breathing heavily, to pick up the hat, and then, with quickening strides (now no Mervyn by his side, to slow him down with his snail’s pace, as he had done that morning) and made his way back to his seat.
Audrey had kicked off her shoes and was reclining on the sofa, her eyes shut. At the sound of his entry, she opened her eyes, swung her legs down from the sofa and tugged at her skirt.
‘I was taking a nap. It must have been that excellent Fleurie you gave us.’
‘The last time I opened a bottle of that, my friend – friend in inverted commas – Mervyn drank most of it. On that occasion I had been hoping to make it last for dinner as well. He’s the sort of man who, on the rare occasions when he invites you to a restaurant, always chooses the second cheapest wine on the list. But he recognizes a good wine when someone else has bought it.’
‘Pity that Marilyn had to rush off like that. I don’t know what’s eating her. This morning she told me she had nothing to do all day.’
‘She wasn’t herself.’
‘When some people aren’t themselves, it’s a good thing. But that can’t be said of her.’
‘What do you think is up?’
‘Well, it could be this toy boy.’
‘Toy boy?’
‘I’m only joking. But she’s palled up with an Albanian, and from time to time he comes to the house.’
Laurence plonked himself down into a chair. He felt breathless, giddy and vaguely sick, as he did when he had hurried at a near-run, instead of slowly walked, up the stairs at an Underground station. In each case it was his heart that was the cause: the heart that had a defective valve and the heart that constantly ached with his yearning for his former daughter-in-law. ‘Who is this Albanian?’
‘Search me! Apparently she sewed up his face after he was involved in what sounds like a brawl, and he then brought round what must have been an extremely expensive bunch of flowers.’
‘And she sees this – this creature regularly?’
‘Regularly? I don’t know. I’m so often out. But she certainly sees him often. Well, fairly often.’
‘And you’ve met him?’
Audrey nodded. ‘From time to time.’
Laurence picked at the William Morris fabric over the arm of his chair, with those beautifully manicured, long nails of his. He was making a successful effort to appear to be only vaguely interested. In the poker game of diplomatic negotiations he had always been regarded as a master. ‘What’s he like?’
‘Oh, handsome. In a lush way. Full of charm. Well-mannered. What else can I say about him?’
‘You don’t like him.’ It was a statement, not a question. He knew her so well, the dislike was obvious to him.
‘No, I don’t like him. But I can’t really say why. He’s never done – or said – anything objectionable in front of me. But somehow … Oh, I’m probably doing him an injustice! I try to see as little of him as possible,’ she went on.
‘But, as you say, Marilyn sees a lot?’
‘Quite a lot.’
‘Well, I suppose it’s good that at last she’s emerging from her shell.’
‘If a snail emerges from its shell, then there’s all the more likelihood that a bird will gobble it up.’
He considered that, bloodhound eyes fixed intently on their own reflection in the Regency mirror above her head. She turned her head, wondering what he was staring at. ‘Well, I suppose no harm will come of it.’
‘With luck – no.’ She paused, gave a crooked smile. ‘She once described him to me as a dream. That’s what he is for her, I think. A dream that became reality. But when that happens, the dream can also become a nightmare.’
‘Oh, no, no! Don’t be so pessimistic’
After tea, Audrey said: ‘What about your toenails? I’ve brought the scissors. Those strong ones, you know the ones I mean.’
‘Oh, don’t let’s bother with that. We can do it on your next visit.’
‘But I haven’t done them for yonks. Or have you found someone here to do them for you?’
‘Good God no!’
‘Well, then …’ She knelt down before him and began to untie the laces of his left shoe and then to ease it off.
He pulled a face, as though the removal of the shoe had been as painful as the pulling away of a sticking plaster.
‘Put your foot up here,’ she ordered, pointing to a low stool, on which he had piled magazines and newspapers. One of these newspapers, a Times with its crossword half-done, she unfolded and draped over the others.
He did as she had told him. Then, with disgust, he looked down at his misshapen toes, the yellow nails curled round them like horn. If these little piggies went to market, no one would want to buy them. ‘Why does one have to become so revolting when one grows old?’
‘Oh, don’t be so silly!’ With difficulty, gritting her teeth and pressing down hard on the scissors, she began to cut the thick, obstinately resistant nail on his big toe.
He thought: ‘ Thank God Marilyn can’t see this’, forgetting that daily, as a doctor, she saw far worse.
When she had finished, Audrey’s face was red and glistening from the exertion. She was a good woman, he thought with grudging admiration and gratitude, doing something so disgusting for him of her own free will.
He had hoped that, after that, she would leave. But, instead, having folded up the copy of The Times with the clippings and stuffed it into the wastepaper basket, she once again settled herself. Wearily he let his head loll back against the cushion behind it and closed his eyes. But, failing to take the hint, she went on talking, at first once again about her work in the Oxfam shop and then about a group of Somali refugees whom she had befriended. At long last, she said: ‘Well, I think I really must be going. I’m sorry to cut things so short, but I promised the vicar to do something about the bazaar for him.’
He chuckled. ‘I like that – cut things so short.’ But she had intended no pun.
He did not walk down to the gates with her, as he had done with Marilyn. Instead, as she kissed him on the cheek in the doorway to his set of rooms, something odd and alarming happened. She was saying: ‘Well, goodbye, Father. Take care of yourself. I’ll come to see you again soon’; and then he heard the voice of a ghostly presence somewhere close to him reply: ‘I’ve seen enough of you,’ and realized, with a start, that the ghostly presence had spoken in his voice and could only be himself. What – or who – had possessed him?
Fortunately – and amazingly – she had either failed to hear what he had said or, having heard it, had failed to take it in, occupied as she was with doing up the buttons of her overcoat. That task completed, she looked at him with a vaguely sad, affectionate smile and murmured ‘Dear Father’.
Once she had gone, striding purposefully down the garden, on to which a filmy evening mist was settling, he asked himself: What on earth made me say that? Had he intended the words or had some slip of the tongue changed ‘ I’ve not seen enough of you’ into ‘I’ve seen enough of you’? He was intelligent enough to know that it is often through slips of the tongue that people come nearest to telling the truth.
Chapter Ten
Vicky carefully spread butter on a slice of ciabatta and then bit into it. She chewed for a while, gazing at Marilyn. Then she said: ‘You know – you’re somehow different.’
That was shrewd of her, Marilyn thought; but she had always been shrewd. That was why she had been so successful a psychiatrist before her marriage to an even more successful dermatologist and her retirement to produce a brood of virtually indistinguishable female children, all with gypsy-black hair, wide foreheads and small, turned-up noses, who constantly raced about the ancient Spitalfields house like dementedly hyperac
tive mice. After That had happened, Marilyn had, in effect, undergone therapy with Vicky, even though Vicky had already retired and even though, close friends as they were from student days, there was never any question of money changing hands.
‘Am I?’
Again Vicky scrutinised her. ‘ Yep. Definitely. You’re happy. At last – after so long – you’re happy again.’
‘Maybe.’ Marilyn considered it, head on one side. Then she said: ‘Yes, I think you’re right. But one has to differentiate between contented and happy.’
‘How d’you mean?’
‘Well, so many people – people like my father-in-law for example – tell one that the happiest period of their lives was during the war. But few people were contented then. They didn’t have enough food, there was so little to buy, they had to put up with the discomfort of sleeping in shelters or Nissen huts, they were constantly afraid that they might get killed or that people close to them might get killed. That wasn’t contentment, of course it wasn’t. But for many people that was happiness. Why?’
‘Because life had a purpose?’
‘Yes. And because at long last they were fully, willy-nilly, engaged in it. Well, that’s how I feel now. I’m not contented for most of the time. But, yes, I am happy.’
The tables were so close to each other in this new and unaccountably fashionable restaurant, and the low ceiling so reverberant that Marilyn was suddenly aware that she was shouting all this across the table. Briefly she felt as embarrassed as she would have been if, on a crazy impulse, she had stripped at a party. Then she realized that everyone else was also shouting and therefore no one could overhear her.
‘I’m so glad, Marilyn. You were always a naturally happy person, weren’t you? I mean I never knew you to be depressed, not even for a moment, however badly things were going. And then – then of course it all changed, when that ghastly thing happened. It’s wonderful that you’ve got back your zest for life. I always knew you would in the end. I always said so. Remember?’
Marilyn nodded. Then she was overcome by the need to confide in Vicky, as she had so often done in the past and, as on this particular matter, she knew that she could never confide in Audrey, close though they were. ‘Someone has come into my life and totally changed it. Or totally changed me. Just like that. Almost overnight.’
‘Someone? Be more specific.’ There were times, in the course of her sturdy, steady marriage to a man so busy that in a single day she often saw him for little more than an hour altogether, when Vicky briefly and guiltily wished for a similar someone.
‘He’s totally unsuitable for me. Albanian. Eleven years younger than I am. With none of my interests. Loves football and even from time to time plays it with cronies in Finsbury Park. Hates classical music. Reads the Sun. Constantly gambles on horses and the lottery. We have nothing in common. It’s – mysterious. Audrey even thinks he’s sinister,’ she added. ‘ Sinister?’
‘Oh, of course, he isn’t really. But she’s got that into her head. And that can make things even more difficult than they might have been. He’s sharp and he’s twigged that she doesn’t like him – even though she tries not to show it. He says she’s a racist. But that’s nonsense. If she were a racist, she would hardly spend so much time on her Kurds and Somalis and all her other lame dogs.’
‘You’re in love with him?’
Marilyn chewed on a piece of her steak for a while, then swallowed. She put her head on one side, considering. She felt as though she were back in Vicky’s sitting-room, during that grey, chill, seemingly endless winter, when she would face up to question after question and probe deeper and deeper into her inmost being for an answer. It was like an agonizing and agonized scrabbling about in one’s own bleeding guts, she had once told Vicky, hitting on a simile that she now found totally disgusting. Meanwhile, outside the sitting-room or over it, there would be the sounds – laughter, thudding feet, shouts, screams – of ‘the girls’ (that was how Vicky always referred to them) racing about in the state of happiness that she herself felt that she would never again inhabit.
‘You’re in love with him?’ Vicky repeated, more insistently. It was important for her, she did not know why, to establish this.
‘Am I? Oh, I don’t know. But I’m infatuated with him. Absolutely.’ Marilyn looked at her watch. ‘In two hours and nine minutes he is going to come to the house. Unlike most East Europeans – certainly my East European patients – he is always punctual. Well, almost always. And – and though I love being here with you, eating this delicious lunch at your expense and confiding once again in you, I want even more to be with him. I want the time to fly. I just can’t wait.’
Vicky smiled. ‘What is it you’re waiting for. Sex?’ It was years since she herself had had sex in the afternoon.
Marilyn nodded. ‘Yes. Sex. Wonderful sex. The most wonderful sex I’ve ever had. More wonderful than I’d ever imagined it could be. I’d often heard that phrase multiple orgasms, but until he came along I’d absolutely no conception of what it really meant. With Ed there were even times – as you know – when there was no orgasm at all.’ She looked around her. Was anyone listening? Could anyone hear? She giggled. ‘ Yes, the earth constantly moves for me – and him – in 11 Standish Grove.’
‘Lucky you.’
‘Yes, lucky, lucky me. I can’t believe my luck. So much so, that I keep asking myself if it can possibly hold.’
‘Why shouldn’t it?’
‘Well, my luck ran into the sand once before. It might do so again. Yes?’
‘Don’t think about that. Just enjoy yourself. Oh, I do envy you! I’d love to have a lover.’ Vicky laughed. Then she said: ‘A pudding? Or shall we think of our figures and just settle for coffee.’
‘I ought really to have a pudding – the sweetest and stickiest on offer. Mehmet says I’m far too thin. But I won’t.’
Walking home, Marilyn began to regret having confided in Vicky. Never try to tell your love … It had been as though she had passed over to her some extremely valuable and also extremely fragile possession – a Shang dynasty vase, a Roman gold-glass ewer – for her inspection. There was no possibility that she would steal it but she could so easily, through a single clumsy move, destroy it.
As she entered the house, Marilyn at once heard the sound of music from the basement. Hell! Either she had miscalculated and this was not the Saturday on which, in a change of schedule to accommodate a colleague, Audrey was to have been at the shop, or else the schedule had suffered a last minute change.
Whatever she was doing – dressing, cooking, cleaning, reading, writing, sometimes even sleeping – Audrey had to do it to noise. It was as though silence terrified her, as solitude terrified other people. ‘Oh, do turn that off!’ Laurence would often bawl out to her in exasperation in the days when she was living in the Brompton Square house. Marilyn was often tempted to shout out the same. But today she was glad of the noise. If Audrey were in the basement, with her wireless blasting away, then she was the less likely to hear what was going on above her. But just to know that she was down there was in itself inhibiting and embarrassing.
Mehmet always brought some present. Sometimes it was a bottle of wine or of sherry, sometimes a box of chocolates, sometimes – as this afternoon – a bunch of flowers. He held out the flowers to her, as she opened the door; but, taking no notice of them, she threw herself at him, her arms going round him and gripping him to her, as though she were drowning. ‘It seems so long!’
‘Is that my fault?’ He put out a hand behind him and pushed the front door closed.
‘No, mine, mine. I wish I could see you every hour of every day. But my work keeps me …’ She broke off. ‘And yesterday there was my father-in-law to visit, far, far away in Wimbledon.’ It was not really far, but Mehmet would not know that, she thought. ‘Oh, it’s lovely to see you.’ Again she kissed him. ‘You smell so good.’
‘For you.’ Again he held out the flowers.
‘Oh, but Mehmet …
’ She pressed the huge bunch against her chest, and then looked up at him in both gratitude and reproach. ‘They’re so beautiful. But I don’t need these presents, and certainly not presents so expensive. You didn’t have to buy me all these roses. Just a small bunch of daffodils would have been fine.’
He shook his head. ‘That is not Albanian way. I told you. Many times.’
‘I wish it were. Couldn’t you adopt the English way now that you live in England? No presents or small presents.’
She went into the sitting-room, laying the flowers down on a chair, and he followed her. Coming up close behind her, he put his arms tightly around her waist and hugged her. With a giddying surge of excitement, she felt the hardness of his erection against her. She turned. ‘ Oh, Mehmet!’ She picked up the flowers. ‘ Let me just put these in water.’
‘Leave them. Later.’
‘But …’
‘Later.’
‘When you have so much difficulty in finding regular work, please, please don’t spend money on me. Please. It’s so sweet of you but you really mustn’t do it.’
‘It is Albanian way,’ he repeated. Then he grabbed her arm roughly, so that she was to find a mark on it, deepening from red, through purple, to yellow in the days ahead. ‘Upstairs.’
‘But don’t you want a drink first?’
She wanted him to say no and that was what he did. Then he repeated: ‘Upstairs.’
Later, in the fine rain that had started to fall, they went out together to the cinema. By now she knew the sort of films that he liked: gangster films, noisy with the firing of guns and the crashings of cars; science-fiction films, lurid with visitors from other planets, animals, insects and even humans grotesquely mutated, and voyages into far-distant galaxies; soft-porn films, heaving with naked bodies. These were the sort of films that she herself had always hated. He would sit through all this rubbish so much absorbed that he would be unaware that, repeatedly, she was turning her head to watch him, in thrall to the beauty of his high cheekbones, his broad forehead and his thick, black hair, all intermittently revealed in the flickering illumination of the wide screen.