by Sarah Rayne
‘I’m kind of . . . I kind of . . . I’d rather not . . .’ falters Xavier.
The fund-raiser, with her shiny skin and imploring eyes, has been trained to expect lukewarm responses; indeed, her rehearsed spiel is custom-written to incorporate them.
‘Now I know what you’re thinking, money’s tight at the moment, I need to look after number one first and foremost.’
Xavier has the disconcerting impression that the girl is scarcely aware of the words she’s saying, like a high-school actor racing through a chunk of Shakespeare.
‘It’s not that, really, it’s just . . .’
In his peripheral vision Xavier can see Mel approaching down the hill, with Jamie stooping to pick up some filthy item from the pavement, indifferent to her coaxing. She slows up as they near the front door. Xavier is now standing with Mel on one side, the fund-raiser right in front of him, and Jamie scampering around, throwing his new toy – a leaf – out in front of him, stooping to pick it up, throwing it into the air again.
‘Don’t go in the road, Jamie,’ says Mel.
‘So anyway, what I wanted to say to you today,’ the fundraiser tries to resume.
‘Sorry, am I interrupting?’ Mel asks Xavier.
‘Actually, this is something you might be interested in as well,’ says the girl, turning the beam of her eyes upon Mel. ‘I’ve just been talking to this gentleman – I don’t know your name yet—’
‘Xavier.’
‘I’ve just been talking to Xavier about a great way to help—’
‘JAMIE, MIND THE ROAD,’ yells Mel, her voice ragged. She turns to the girl. ‘Listen, I’m sorry, but I’ve just had to sell some of his books on eBay for fifty pence each.’ She points to Jamie. ‘I don’t think I can.’
‘OK, that’s cool,’ says the girl hastily; she’s already decided Xavier is the one to concentrate on. She turns back to him. ‘So would it be possible to come inside and tell you a bit more about this?’
Xavier stands, irresolute.
‘I’m, er . . .’
At the top of the hill Pippa appears, on a bicycle, her patterned dress streaming out on either side as her strong legs ease off the pedals for the descent. All three of them turn to watch her. The dress, with its pattern of daisies against a green background, was bought by Pippa’s gran on the King’s Road in 1956, during what proved to be her only ever visit to London. She has a black cycle-helmet on, but even this seems like some kind of antique: it is comically, impractically large, sitting on her head like a dinosaur’s egg; beneath it, her hair gusts about in wild tufts. She wrestles the bike to a screechy halt, jumps nimbly from the saddle and surveys the group on the doorstep.
‘Christ knows why I ride this thing about with my bloody knees the way they are,’ Pippa says to no one in particular, and then to everyone, ‘What’s going on here then?’
‘I was just telling everyone about a great way to help,’ the girl begins yet again, somewhat uncertainly; this has all become more complicated than she imagined.
‘You’re trying to sign them up for donations?’ asks Pippa, removing the helmet. Her hair is a tangle of straw, her cheeks flushed from the ride.
‘Well, what we do . . .’ the girl says, faltering at the sight of this tall, big-bosomed woman, who brushes down her dress and looks straight at her with pale blue eyes.
Pippa points at Xavier.
‘Do you want to sign up or not?’
Xavier shifts his weight from one foot to the other.
‘I’m not entirely, um . . .’
‘All right.’ Pippa addresses the fund-raiser. ‘Do you have a website?’
‘We do,’ says the girl, ‘but—’
‘All right,’ says Pippa again. ‘He’ll have a look at the website and get in touch if he wants to sign up, how about that?’
The girl is already looking to the next door, the next street; this one has been enough trouble for now. She supplies the web address in a quick breath and departs, clipboard under arm, while Pippa leads Mel, Jamie and Xavier inside.
‘Thanks,’ Xavier mutters. ‘I’m not great with those sort of people. It’s hard to say no.’
‘It’s not that hard,’ says Pippa.
‘Well, yes, you made it look pretty easy.’
‘Don’t forget your post.’ Pippa stoops to pick up a couple of letters from the floor; Xavier glances momentarily at the line of her wide thighs beneath the vintage dress. ‘Honestly. I don’t know what you do when I’m not here.’
They drink tea in the lounge. Pippa drains hers in three gulps.
‘It’s thirsty work, biking about.’
‘How was your week?’ asks Xavier, bringing in the teapot to refill her cup.
‘Oh, up and down. Me sister’s ill with something so I’ve had to look after her and me mum’s all upset about me uncle who’s a bastard. But it’s been all right.’ She looks at Xavier over the rim of the mug. ‘So, is she in love with you?’
‘Sorry?’
‘The girl downstairs with the mad kid.’
Xavier feels his cheeks warming, but he doesn’t turn away; he doesn’t want this ridiculous idea to gain credence from his reaction. ‘We hardly know each other.’
‘She looks at you in this doe-eyed way,’ Pippa observes coolly, ‘and she talked about you sort of fondly when I borrowed the Hoover that time. I’ve seen it a lot, single mothers. Anyway, it’s none of my business, pet.’
‘I don’t think . . . I mean, she seems nice,’ says Xavier. ‘Not sure we’re each other’s type.’
‘What is your type?’
He takes Pippa’s empty-again mug from her hand and it clinks together with his. ‘I don’t know. I don’t know if people have a “type”, even. My last proper girlfriend, I suppose, in Australia, was kind of . . . I probably shouldn’t use the phrase “my ideal woman”, but that kind of thing.’
‘What was she like?’
Xavier is surprised by how easy it is to slip into an intimate discussion with Pippa; something about her blunt style of questioning reminds him of Australians, maybe.
‘She was . . . I don’t know. It’s hard to describe. We knew each other all the way from school, from nine years old, so I almost didn’t stop to think what she was actually like.’
‘Well, tell me five things about her. Then I’ll start cleaning.’
‘OK. She was – well, very foul-mouthed. Always swearing.’
‘Worse than me?’
He grins.
‘About the same as you. But just coarse in general. Like, we had these friends, Bec and Russell, who were trying to get pregnant for ages, and Matilda would always ask them how the sex was going, in all kinds of, er, crude ways. Until we realized actually, maybe they had a problem, and then she eased off.’
‘That is the danger with jokes about sex,’ Pippa agrees.
‘Um, apart from that . . .’ Xavier considers. ‘Well, she often walked naked around the house. I suppose that goes in with her rudeness. She was a very good cook. She had a lot of freckles.’
‘More than me?’
‘Far more. English people don’t know what freckles are. She did trampolining as a hobby. She used to get nosebleeds sometimes. Will that do?’
‘That will do,’ Pippa says, unzipping the blue-and-yellow laundry bag and assembling her infantry line of sprays and scourers. Xavier retreats to the study and listens to the now-familiar sounds: running water, bottles puffing out detergents, objects being pummelled and scraped and coerced into neatness.
Xavier has never found it easy to concentrate whilst Pippa is cleaning. Today, he ought to be writing his tepid review of the film, and dealing with emails. There is another email from Clive Donald: in this one, he uses the phrase mounting desperation, and implies that Xavier’s show is one of his only sources of comfort. As always, Xavier has little choice but to remove the teacher, however guiltily, from his thoughts.
Near the end of Pippa’s stint, he goes into the hall, and finds her standing there before a
rarely accessed cupboard, a photograph in her hand.
‘I was kind of running out of things to do,’ says Pippa, ‘because the place is quite neat already, so, I, er . . .’ She gestures at the cupboard, in which Xavier stashed a motley collection of belongings when he first moved in; boxes, bags, useless but not quite disposable things, all of them dormant beneath a curtain of dust.
‘You’re brave to venture in there.’
‘Nothing escapes me,’ says Pippa. ‘One of the people I clean for, I’ve got him to change his phone plan.’ She counts the tasks up on her fingers. ‘I’ve sorted out his Sky TV, I’ve organized his contents insurance. And I’m going to get rid of his girlfriend for him. You’re getting off lightly if I just tidy your stuff up a bit.’
‘When you say “get rid of” his girlfriend,’ Xavier begins.
‘I don’t mean kill her!’ They both laugh. ‘Yes, he’s too much of a coward to chuck her even though she’s a sponging bitch. I’m going to engineer a situation and have a word.’ She rubs her nose thoughtfully. ‘If that doesn’t work then I will have to kill her.’
There is a pause as she sees Xavier glance at the photo in her hand.
‘Can I be really nosy, pet? Is one of these Matilda?’
He studies the picture, which he didn’t know he still had; it must have fluttered out of some box or other. It’s of Chris and Matilda, Bec and Russell, at York Minster, during their grand tour of Europe in the summer of 2002. They’re all gazing down at the ground, as if from a great height, although they are obviously just standing in the nave of the enormous church. Bec wears a dress from Harvey Nichols. Russell’s round face, beneath a baseball cap, looks as if it might crack with the width of his smile. Chris has two weeks’ beard. Matilda – he points to her – is wearing a tiara they bought for a joke at Harrods, and a low-cut vest top.
‘That’s her.’
‘She’s very pretty.’
‘Yes.’ Xavier coughs. ‘The reason for the photo is . . . those two, Bec and Russell, like I said, they always desperately wanted a baby, and it took years, and the day before we went to York, Bec found out she was pregnant. We were all going to climb the tower in York Minster and then she said casually: oh, I’d better not, being pregnant and all. That was how she broke the news. Matilda and I went crazy.
‘So then we were all on a high and we got someone to take this photo of us, pretending we’d climbed the tower and we were looking at the view, even though we weren’t. It was kind of funny at the time.’
Pippa looks more closely at the photo and Xavier remembers the four of them in the restaurant in York, just after Bec’s revelation.
‘I just thought there was something wrong with me,’ Bec said, ‘I thought it was never going to happen.’ She swallowed hard, several times. There was a pause.
‘Hey, is this where you cry?’ asked Matilda. ‘We’ve never seen you cry.’
‘This is the best chance you’ll ever get,’ Chris chipped in.
Bec began to laugh, but it was a high, slightly hysterical laugh.
‘Shut up.’
‘Come on, you monster,’ Matilda persisted, jabbing her. ‘This is the biggest moment of all our lives. Cry.’
‘Shut up, Mat!’ Bec, uncharacteristically ruffled and even slightly pink, grinned into a menu, hiding her face.
They continued the joke all the way through dinner until Russell said, ‘Oh, I’ll just poke her in the eye, shall I?’ He leaned indelicately across with his fork and upset a carafe of wine, and with Chris’s help a thin-lipped waiter mopped up the damage as the group held back raucous laughs.
The sudden, rather heavy silence between Xavier and Pippa – though it could be that he imagines the heaviness – is broken by a staccato series of machine-gun screams from Jamie downstairs. The two of them glance at the floorboards, which feel as though they are only just holding back the noise, as if Jamie’s piercing, one-note voice were the shaft of a drill about to come boring through the floor and attack them. Mel’s voice rises in a plea for quiet.
‘Do you ever think of going down and lending a hand?’
‘I do, actually, but, you know, it’s none of my business.’
‘You do tend to keep your nose out of things, don’t you?’ Pippa remarks.
‘I don’t go butting in, no.’ Xavier feels a pressure to defend his inactivity. ‘I tend to think, you know, things will kind of take their course.’
‘That’s a nice way of saying you can’t be arsed.’ She says it with gentle mockery.
‘It’s not about being . . . arsed. I just think – well, I don’t know. People often overestimate how much difference they can make.’
‘I think people underestimate it. You can change someone’s life without even knowing it.’
‘Well, yeah. But if you didn’t then it would probably change anyway.’
Pippa’s hands reach down to touch her knees.
‘I can’t do that. If I just said oh well, I’ll let events take their course, I’d just have to accept that I’m a failed athlete with shit knees, condemned to be a cleaner until I retire or die from exhaustion.’
Xavier doesn’t know what to say.
Pippa makes a wry face.
‘I’m sorry, pet. That was OTT. I mean, I like cleaning. I like being the best at it. I’d try to be the best at whatever I was doing.’
‘I admire that,’ says Xavier quietly.
It has been an oddly weighty conversation and, before there can be another pause, he hands her the envelope, which he prepared earlier, no awkward foraging around for cash this time. They hesitate; for a strange second it feels as though they might shake hands.
‘I’ll see you out,’ says Xavier, and the two of them go down the stairs.
As Pippa mounts her bicycle, he experiences a flickering regret that she is leaving.
‘Same time next week?’
‘Same time next week.’
He watches her, upright in the saddle, her dress threatening to get caught in the spokes as she ploughs uphill, the arthritic knees, her thighs, haunches and buttocks flexing like components of an engine as she works the pedals, almost standing up fully at the steepest part of the incline. She stops at the top of the hill to let a speeding car past and glances back. Xavier waves and wonders where she’s going next.
VI
The following Wednesday is showery and full of nasty winds like most of its month-mates. Pippa has to go from her little flat in North-east London to Marylebone; Maggie Reiss, the psychotherapist, has to travel in the opposite direction. The day turns out to be difficult for both of them.
Pippa’s problems begin at three in the morning, when her sister Wendy wakes her up, complaining of nausea. She has a particular dread of being sick, which dates back to childhood, when she once vomited up the walls of her bedroom: dark walls which seemed to close in on her. Pippa makes her younger sister a pot of tea and the two of them sit at the kitchen table, half listening to a radio show where someone has called in to say what he would do if he had three wishes.
‘We should call in,’ says Pippa.
‘I don’t know what I’d do with three wishes.’ Wendy frowns.
‘Well, you could kill Kevin with the first one.’
‘And then . . .?’
‘I don’t know, kill him again with the second one. Third one, you could maybe get us a popcorn-maker or something.’
They laugh. Pippa grips Wendy’s arm. Unlike Pippa, Wendy is thin, rather wasted-looking, with delicate features. Pippa chats to her about anything she can think of. By half past four, Wendy’s feeling better, and feels ready to trust herself to sleep. Pippa is so tired by now that she can’t even muster the energy to take off her dressing gown: she slumps on top of the bed like a suitcase someone has dumped there.
Maggie Reiss sleeps well, waking at seven thirty. Today she will present a paper to a conference in the Soho Hotel, attend a Pilates class and, of course, see four clients: the first, a supermodel, at the model’s home in Mu
swell Hill; the other three in the office. The model pays extra for the privilege of a home visit. Maggie leaves the house feeling reasonably optimistic about the next few hours. This is, however, to be the last day of her professional career.
Pippa is up again at eight, ready for the day’s first job, carpet-cleaning for a landlady whose last tenants, by the sound of it, befouled the place in ways she dreads to imagine.
Wendy is already sitting at the kitchen table, fully dressed.
‘Pippa?’
‘What are you doing up?’
‘Will you come with me to the doctor on Saturday?’
‘Of course. Why?’
Wendy doesn’t say anything but looks down at the table, or rather, as if she can see straight through it to the floor.
‘Oh Jesus.’
Pippa sits down next to her sister and wonders who it was, that guy from the blind date, presumably, the Scottish lad. You fucking idiot, she thinks, but says nothing, just slides her hand over Wendy’s, and leaves it there.
‘How . . .?’
‘I forgot to take a pill, I think. Maybe two.’
‘Wendy—’
‘I know.’
‘Have you told him?’
‘He’s not answering his phone.’
The clock ticks on. Pippa is going to have to cycle like mad and probably turn up all sweaty and have the landlady look askance at her as usual.
‘Well,’ says Pippa, brightly, ‘maybe you’ll . . . maybe you’ll not be, after all. Maybe it’s just late or your clock’s all fucked up or who knows what.’
Wendy nods, but then looks her sister in the eyes.