The Nick of Time

by Francis King

  They collect up their belongings, but Ed, who is always forgetting things, forgets the guidebook and has to race back for it. Their hired car has acquired a ticket in their absence and Ed promptly tears it up, not realizing that eventually Marilyn, long back in England, will be pursued by the car-hire firm for the fine. He throws the pieces to the wind, before opening the door by the driving seat.

  ‘No, darling. Let me drive. You drank most of that bottle and you had those Stregas afterwards.’

  ‘I’m not drunk, you know.’

  ‘No. But you might be breathalysed. Let me drive.’

  ‘Oh, very well. Then I’ll have a zizz beside Carol.’ He is a good driver and he thinks Marilyn a bad one. When she offered to take over from him on the exhausting drive from Genoa to Florence, he refused: ‘It tires me far more to sit watching you drive than to drive myself.’ He leans over to Carol and puts an arm round her shoulder. Marilyn knows that the nine-year-old girl has reached an age when she hates to be touched, even by her mother. There is a look of apprehension and distaste on her face but she manages not to jerk away.

  ‘We’d better make for the autostrada,’ Ed says. He yawns. The wine and the Stregas have made him feel muzzy.

  ‘Oh, no! I thought we’d agreed on those sideroads. I loathe autostradas, with their unending billboards. One hardly gets a glimpse of the countryside.’

  ‘What hour do you think we’ll get to Rome?’

  ‘It’s not that far.’

  Marilyn gets her own way. But not before the argument has degenerated into a squabble. Ed tells her ‘ You always have to do what you want,’ and she retaliates ‘It’s what we agreed. But you never stick to an agreement.’ Suddenly, in the middle of it all, Carol screams ‘Oh, do shut up, shut up!’ Ed then tells Carol that he won’t put up with that sort of thing. Now they are driving down a narrow, pot-holed road, with dry, beige, humped hills on either side, virtually no other traffic, and no sign of even a house or a village. Marilyn always imagined that the whole of this area would be one of white houses gleaming out of the vivid green of chestnuts and elms or the subdued grey of olives. There is something sinister about this landscape, as though she had inadvertently strayed from one time zone into another and had arrived, without at first realizing it, into a world that had suffered a nuclear holocaust. She looks over her shoulder and sees that both Carol and Ed are asleep. His arm is still around her shoulder; their faces look strangely shiny and pale. She begins to hum to herself, to keep her spirits up. The tune she hums is ‘Volare’. One rarely hears it in England now, but she has already heard it three times in Italy – once in a roadside trattoria, once as a background to the din in a supermarket, and once just now from a loudspeaker outside a leather shop near the Piazza Repubblica.

  The road has now ceased its serpentine wriggling, it unspools straight ahead of her. Far away, through a heat-haze, she can see an articulated lorry. Then, as it approaches, she can make out that the driver is wearing dark glasses and a bright-red cap. She hears the hooting, but who is hooting whom she is not sure. The hooting is extraordinarily loud, like the vastly magnified braying of a donkey. From around the lorry, she sees the low-slung Alfa Romeo jerking out into her path and then rushing towards her. She wrenches at the wheel. She turns it to the right, not to the left, because that is the only way that she herself is going to survive.

  Marilyn had so often gone over it all both in her mind, as she had done now, or in conversation with Audrey and Vicky. Repeatedly the two women told her, as did others – the Italian nurses and the doctor, the Italian police officer, Laurence who had at once flown out to bury his son and granddaughter, but more importantly, to be beside the woman with whom he was already besotted – that she could not possibly blame herself, it had been an instinctive not a rational choice, it was what everyone would have done in the circumstances. But she did blame herself. Even now, as she awaited Mehmet’s return from his shower, she blamed herself.

  ‘What is this?’ He was in a fury as, towel draped around him at the waist, he strode into the room. He thrust a sheet of paper out at her. When she took it, it was damp to the touch. It was a pale-blue sheet of the kind that Audrey used for writing the letters that took up so much of her leisure time. On it she had written:

  TO THOSE WHOM IT MAY CONCERN

  please leave this place as you would like to find it

  that means clean

  do not, repeat do not, squat on the lavatory seat

  in civilized countries it is usual to sit there

  thank you

  Beneath this, Audrey had signed her name: Audrey Carter.

  It was ludicrous and yet also appalling. How could someone like Audrey, so sweet-natured, tolerant and (as so many people so often said) good, have brought herself to write something so disgusting?

  Marilyn shook her head. ‘I don’t understand.’ It was only a statement of the truth.

  ‘Who is this woman?’

  ‘What do you mean? You know who she is. My sister-in-law. The sister of my – my dead husband. What can I say? I don’t know what’s come over her. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Is house hers?’

  ‘Partly’

  ‘Why you share house with her?’

  ‘Because it’s always worked out well like that. And we’re – we’ve always been good friends. After the death of my husband – and my daughter – she was extremely kind to me. She – saved me.’

  ‘Saved you? What you mean?’

  She could not bring herself to tell him about those terrible months after That. She remained silent.

  ‘If she write again same thing – I kill her!’

  ‘Oh, don’t be silly. It’s not all that important. Just don’t use that bathroom. Use only mine.’

  ‘But I want shower,’ he retorted stubbornly.

  ‘Yes, I know. It’s a nuisance. But I want to avoid all this trouble. I’ll buy you a shower attachment. Tomorrow. Promise.’

  ‘I like proper shower. Not attachment. After sex, shower. Shower,’ he repeated more loudly. He was like an obstinate child, she thought – like Carol at her most difficult.

  ‘Yes, I’m sorry. But there it is. The pair of you don’t seem able to agree like civilized people.’

  ‘So Albanians not civilized! I say before, you racist, very racist.’

  She put a hand to her forehead. ‘ Oh, please, Mehmet! It must be almost three o’clock. I have to work tomorrow. Early. Do let me get some sleep.’

  ‘I no understand,’ he muttered, as he left the room.

  Despite Marilyn’s prohibition, Mehmet would from time to time use the basement bathroom. A week, two weeks would pass and he would never go near it; and then, suddenly, after he had left her bedroom ostensibly to go to the upstairs bathroom, she would hear him descend the stairs. Clearly his twin objectives were to annoy Audrey and to defy Marilyn.

  On one such occasion she asked him: ‘Have you forgotten what I told you?’ and he then pretended not to understand, frowning in feigned bewilderment and asking ‘What you mean?’ When she told him what she meant, he again feigned bewilderment: ‘You make mistake, Marilyn. I use bathroom upstairs, your bathroom.’

  On another such occasion, she even jumped out of bed, on hearing him descend, and called out after him: ‘ No, no! Mehmet! Use my bathroom. Mine!’ He turned nonchalantly at the landing. ‘I go get Evening Standard. I want see football.’ He was lying, of course, but she had no heart to pursue the matter.

  Mehmet had left late on the Sunday, saying that early the next morning he had to be at King’s Cross for an interview for a job in a pub. Marilyn and Audrey had breakfast together.

  From both the stiff way that Audrey moved about the kitchen, fetching more toast from the toaster and more coffee from the percolator, and from her refusal to enter into any conversation other than with a clipped ‘Yes’, ‘No’ or ‘Oh, really?’, Marilyn knew, from the experiences of the months since Mehmet had entered their lives, that a storm was imminent.

&nbs
p; Finally, having refilled their cups with coffee for the third time, Audrey said: ‘You know, Marilyn, I wish that you could somehow control that rent boy of yours.’

  Marilyn was at first stunned by the crudity of it. As she later said to Vicky, when telling her of the incident, Audrey was the last person whom one would expect to talk like that. Then Marilyn felt anger surge up within her, with such violence that she gulped for air. Later, she thought: Now I know what it really means when one says that someone has taken one’s breath away. ‘What did you say?’

  Coolly, looking into Marilyn’s glaring eyes, Audrey repeated it.

  ‘Oh. I see. Well, what precisely is it that my rent boy – as you so elegantly put it – has done to need my control?’

  ‘This morning he left an extremely offensive message on my bathroom mirror.’ She rose. ‘ Come and see it!’ She beckoned. ‘Come! Come!’

  Marilyn sighed, put down her napkin, and also rose. She followed Audrey down the narrow basement corridor to the bathroom.

  ‘Look!’

  Marilyn looked. On the mirror, Mehmet had used what had presumably been one of her own lipsticks – Audrey never used any make-up other than powder – to scrawl, in what might have been mistaken for the handwriting of a young child: WHY NO FUCK ORF! FUCK ORF! BITCH!

  How could two adults behave like this? Marilyn put hands to her temples. She groaned audibly. ‘Oh, I don’t know. I just don’t know.’

  ‘If you must have that rent boy in the house, then surely –’

  ‘Do not use that term! I will not have that term! Mehmet is not a rent boy’

  ‘You’d have fooled me,’ Audrey replied with cool malevolence.

  ‘He doesn’t work because the Home Office in its wisdom doesn’t allow him to work. So, inevitably, I have to help him. That doesn’t make him into a rent boy. A rent boy, in case you didn’t know, is a prostitute. Many men support their partners, some women support theirs. That doesn’t mean that the partners are prostitutes.’

  ‘Oh, I see,’ Audrey said with heavy sarcasm. ‘Please forgive me. Thank you for enlightening me.’

  ‘I’ll have another word with him.’

  ‘No amount of words will make any difference. Not with that one.’

  ‘Now, if you’ll stop wasting any more of my time, I must get off to work.’

  Marilyn strode to the stairs and then, as though she were escaping from a fire or flood in the basement, raced up them.

  Chapter Fifteen

  It had been a boring dinner, the six of them, all men, seated round an oval table in one corner of the sparsely occupied, cavernous dining-room. There had been some animation as they had argued about the terms of the Taiwan contract but, once they had reached agreement about that, everything became increasingly listless. At one point Neil and Noel were aroused as they spoke about the girls in a Singapore brothel to which they had gone together before the clean-up, but, perhaps because they became embarrassed at Adrian’s presence, knowing him to be gay, they soon dropped the subject. Even the food, usually so good in this club that Adrian had often thought of moving to, was poor that night: elaborate in its presentation on vast Rosenheim plates, which in turn rested on shield-like metal platters, but the soup lukewarm, the steak tough, the salsify overcooked, the bombs surprise leaking its surprise from having clearly been left for too long out of the refrigerator in the heat of the summer evening. Not unpredictably, pleading early starts the following morning, they broke up prematurely.

  ‘Have you got your car with you?’ Noel asked in the courtyard, his car keys at the ready.

  Adrian shook his head. ‘Being serviced.’

  ‘What’s wrong with that BMW of yours? It’s always being serviced. Anyway, let me give you a lift.’

  ‘But I’m not on your route.’

  ‘Never mind. I can go out of my way. Laura won’t be home yet. She was going to the National Theatre with a girlfriend and having dinner afterwards.’

  Adrian considered. Why doom himself to another half-hour of being bored by this puffy, red-faced man in the too tight suit, the jacket of which constantly scuffed up over the shoulder blades when he raised his arms? With his sort of income, surely he could afford a decent tailor? Adrian noticed clothes, and spent a lot of money on his own. ‘ That’s awfully kind of you, Noel.’ Although none of them cared much for any of the others, they were constantly using each other’s first names in order to create an impression of matiness. ‘But it’s such a lovely evening, I think I’ll walk.’

  ‘OK, Adrian. As you like. I wouldn’t want to walk on an evening as hot as this. But it’s up to you.’ Noel sounded vaguely huffy and that worried Adrian. He had to keep on the right side of him, at least for the present, since he was the second most important person in the deal.

  ‘It was good to see you, Noel. And thanks again for the dinner. It was terrific. When we next meet, it must be with me at the East India.’

  ‘I look forward to that, Adrian.’

  ‘That was a useful evening’s work, Jack.’

  ‘Take care, Adrian.’

  ‘We must meet soon, Peter.’

  ‘Terrific, Adrian.’

  ‘I’ll fax you all those details first thing tomorrow, Pat.’

  ‘Do that, Adrian.’

  ‘All the best to Maureen and the kids, Neil.’

  ‘Sure you don’t want that lift, Adrian? I’d be only too happy to oblige.’

  The hearty, male voices – the tone and timbre of which he could never quite emulate – at last fell silent and he had got away, to strut down Oxford Street towards his flat, overlooking Hyde Park, just beyond Marble Arch. Christ, this evening was a scorcher. He had been an idiot not to accept Noel’s offer. His feet were swollen, so that his slender, supple brogues felt as though they had been custom-made for someone with a shoe-size even smaller than his. The high collar of his blue-and-white shirt felt like a damp bandage round his neck, and he was conscious – that was the worst of wearing a raw silk suit, tailored in Hong Kong, as light as this one – of a dampness spreading under his arms, no doubt soon to be embarrassingly visible.

  At Selfridges he paused to look in at a window. He needed a new, larger, more versatile microwave for the Sussex cottage. That one looked reasonably priced. Having examined the microwave and another, cheaper one next to it, he then ruefully inspected his reflection in the glass of the window. He must really try to eat less; at forty-two it was disgusting to look so pear-shaped. He put a hand up to his hair. He had thought that having a No. 2 cut would make the rapidly increasing baldness less obvious, but it had only made it more so. He had better let it grow again.

  Silently, someone had slid up and halted beside him, ostensibly also to look at the microwaves. They examined each other’s reflections. No, no good at all. Certainly young, certainly presentable; but Adrian had no use for that sort of swish, lanky type. With his dark hair, worn almost to the shoulders, and his dark complexion, pocked here and there with acne, he looked as though he came from the Mediterranean. Rent? Probably. Had he been the right type, Adrian would not have cared if he were rent or not. But, as he would often say, it was no use buying a pig for a poke.

  The young man drew out a cigarette packet. ‘You couldn’t possibly oblige me with a light, could you?’ The words came out with a slight lisp, in a vaguely foreign accent.

  ‘Sorry.’ Adrian was abrupt. If the type wasn’t right, he could never be bothered to be amiable. It was the same when, on his Far East trips, some importunate street vendor approached him. An abrupt, even contemptuous Sorry, then a turning on his heel.

  As Adrian moved off, he drew a handkerchief out of his trouser pocket and mopped at his face. He wished that he did not sweat so much. Disgusting! It was hardly a come-on. It was because of the constant sweating in this weather that he had splashed himself with so much Caron Pour Un Homme before setting forth to the club. Later, he had realised that that had been a mistake. The potent smell must have confirmed the others in the conclusion that they h
ad already reached about his sexuality.

  For a short while the boy trailed after him; then, like a stray dog, following now one person and then another, he was diverted by an elderly man in shorts and baseball cap worn back to front, an American tourist by the look of him, who was ambling along, a hand to the camera slung round his neck, no doubt in fear that someone would try to snatch it from him.

  Adrian had reached Marble Arch. Should he go into the Quebec or not? Most people called it the Elephants’ Graveyard, but for him and his friends it had become Jurassic Park, after young, beautiful and amusingly waspish Siegfried, now dying of AIDS, had first called it that. It was Siegfried who had also first called Adrian ‘The Queen of the Night’. Adrian had not really liked the nickname, even though he had pretended that it amused him. He had always taken so much care not to look or behave like a queen. Apart from anything else, it was bad for business.

  He dithered for a while, walking on as far the Underground station and then – oh, what the hell, on a night like this he would never be able to get to sleep anyway – returning, at a far quicker pace, back to the pub. But having entered it, he at once thought ‘What am I doing here?’ By now many of the customers were familiar to him and he would toy with the fantasy that, at closing time, they merely dossed down, to resume their drinking and chatter as soon as the bar had once more opened the following day.

  He had long since become used to the various types jumbled together here: elderly regulars who, for the most part shabby and forlorn, looked like the sort of people whose sole occupation was to collect supermarket trolleys or to sit on park benches and read the Sun; rent boys, in tattered jeans and sneakers, with tattooed arms, muscular shoulders and savagely bitten nails; slim, sleek Indians; Cockneys with drooping jowls and beer bellies; loquacious students from the provinces, eyelids fluttering and mouths pulled into extravagant moues; a few men as well-dressed, prosperous-looking, self-contained and self-conscious as himself; a number of edgy, ingratiating tourists, peering around and flitting hither and thither.