by Sarah Rayne
But the thought of Murray on his own, mooching in corners, inelegantly jutting into conversations, overeagerly quoting film lines or catchphrases from comedy shows in lieu of his own bons mots . . . Xavier finds the image as painfully easy to imagine as ever. He particularly hates the idea of people talking about Murray behind his back, exchanging wry glances of relief as he goes off to another room.
‘Sounds good,’ says Xavier.
‘Brilliant.’ Murray sounds relieved. ‘It’ll be a blast. She’s got this friend who’s just joined as a locum or something, and hopefully she’s going to be there. Honestly, Xavier, you would not believe . . .’ He shakes his head and works his hands in a vague mime meant to evoke a large pair of breasts.
‘You’re a real romantic, Murray.’
Murray laughs.
‘So I was thinking of getting a cab, so I can . . .’ This mime, hands tipping imaginary cans of beer back towards his throat, is easier to decode. ‘So if I cer, cer, come and pick you up at, maybe . . .’
Xavier suddenly remembers.
‘Ah. Shit. Actually, mate, I’m . . . I’ve got someone coming round Saturday night.’
‘Someone coming round?’ Murray raises his eyebrows, baffled. ‘Like a . . . like a wer, woman?’
‘No, no, er, well, yes,’ Xavier blusters, ‘she is a woman, but it’s not . . . it’s just a . . .’ How is he meant to explain that a lady is visiting, to carry out scarcely necessary cleaning, on Saturday night? ‘She’s just a friend.’
‘Well, bring her along.’ Xavier can see Murray’s hopeful eyes converting this problem into an opportunity. ‘Is she . . . is she . . .?’
Xavier makes a rueful face.
‘It would be awkward to bring her.’ The lie, if it is a lie, is already becoming more complicated with each second of its existence. ‘It’s someone I haven’t seen for a while, so, I think, I think she’ll want to, er, stay in.’
Murray’s amiable face clouds.
‘I mean,’ Xavier placates, ‘we could always come along afterwards. Later, I mean.’
‘Yeah. Of course.’ Murray makes a good stab at a nonchalant wink. ‘That’ll be cool.’
There’s a pause.
‘Back in ter, two minutes. Coffee?’
Xavier hears his friend’s footsteps in the unoccupied, strip-lit corridor outside, the steps heavy and rather sad, he thinks, but overrules himself: there’s no such thing as ‘sad footsteps’, it’s just the sentimental weakness of the late night, and anyhow, what is he meant to do, attach himself to Murray twenty-four-seven to steer him away from every potential embarrassment? Xavier feels flustered and somehow irritated with himself; he knows he handled the conversation as if he had something to hide. A couple of emails come in at once and he slides into Murray’s seat to read them, grateful for the distraction.
Saturday is mild, at last: the cold has finally loosened its grip on the year. Xavier wakes early, not because of Jamie, for once; not wholly because of bad dreams either. The walls of the house are running through their litany of creaks and sighs, the muttering to nobody.
Xavier spends the day quietly, writing two of his columns for next week. He listens to the football scores starting to come in at ten to five, and then at five exactly the final round-up of results, intoned by the announcer as gravely as a list of casualties. The sky outside scrolls through a limited palette of greys. Darkness is falling and listless rain greets Xavier when he walks to the corner shop for provisions.
The Indian man is in a good mood: his daughter has announced her engagement, he tells Xavier.
‘Very nice man, very rich. Very rich.’ The shopkeeper cackles suddenly, flashing white rows of teeth.
‘I don’t need . . .’ Xavier begins, because he’s brought his own bag, but the shopkeeper, packing for him, pays no heed, continuing instead to discuss the startling salary of the man who will, in three years’ time, make his funeral arrangements. Pippa rings the doorbell right on time today; he sees her coming down the hill, watches her from his window, a big, aged colourless raincoat wrapped around her. Her head is bowed, as if she is studying the rain-darkened pavement in front of her. She moves slowly, without the usual sense of vigorous purpose.
Xavier rushes down to the door.
‘You’re wet!’
‘It’s raining, pet.’ Her voice is rather flat, he thinks.
Xavier steps aside to let her past.
‘You don’t have an umbrella?’
‘I don’t like them.’
She ascends the stairs, still heavy-legged, removing her raincoat. Underneath it she is wearing a jumper with blue and white horizontal stripes, and jeans, above which the top of her knickers catches Xavier’s eye as he walks behind her: they have a pattern of bright-red lips.
‘They just get in the way, umbrellas, you bash people with them, they flip inside out at the first bit of wind, you have to find a place to prop them to dry, and they drip everywhere,’ she declaims from inside the flat as she waits for Xavier to catch up. ‘And then you forget you’ve brought the bloody thing and you leave it somewhere.’
Xavier grins, knowing before he even sees her that she is counting these irritations off on her fingers.
He goes into the kitchen to put the kettle on. Under the gathering roar of steam he pads stealthily into the hall and, looking into the lounge, can see that Pippa has sunk down into the sofa, head slumped again, as if asleep.
‘Are you all right?’
Pippa flinches and jerks upright at the sound of his voice.
‘Oh, yes, yes. Don’t mind me, pet. I’m just a little bit tired.’
Xavier brings in a tray of tea and biscuits and sets it carefully in front of her. He has a hunch about the cause of Pippa’s fatigue.
‘How’s your sister?’
Pippa looks up slowly, her pale, almost translucent eyes hooking onto Xavier’s.
‘She’s gone and got herself pregnant. Or rather, some guy has gone and got her pregnant.’ She gives her own joke a tiny wistful smile. ‘Either way, it’s . . . well, it’s not a great piece of news.’
She puts a hand over her eyes and for an alarming second he thinks she might cry, however unlike her that seems; but all she does is slide the hand down and down from her eyes to the base of her chin, in a single, exhausted movement.
‘I feel like me face is falling off, I’m that tired.’
‘What’s she going to do about the . . . the baby?’
Pippa shakes her head hopelessly.
‘She can’t have it. We’ve not got a pot to piss in, as I’ve said before. Let alone another pot for a baby to piss in.’
‘So will she . . .?’ Xavier makes an inadequate gesture.
‘You don’t know my sister. She’d go mad if she got rid of it. Mad with guilt, or get freaked out by the operation itself, or whatever. She’s much more sensitive than me.’ Appropriately, her accent manhandles the word sensitive, chewing up the defenceless ‘t’.
‘So . . .’
‘So I don’t know what to do.’
‘Well, without wanting to be harsh, it’s her that got into this position. Not you.’
Pippa shrugs, massaging one wrist with her other hand.
‘Her having a problem is the same as me having one. She’s me sister.’
For the first time in months Xavier thinks of his older brothers, Rick and Steve. They were always just a little too old for Chris, they had their standard jokes locked down for ten years before he appeared; they had their cricket games he was too small to join in with. They both forgot his twenty-first birthday.
Xavier pats Pippa’s knee and experiences an unexpected bolt of feeling for her, somewhere between fear and exhilaration.
‘Have you eaten?’
She rubs her eyes and looks warily at him.
‘No, well, no, not really.’
‘Would you like – I could get a takeaway.’
Pippa blows a blade of whitish hair out of her eye and her cheeks flush slightly. She looks
like a kid for a moment, Xavier thinks.
‘Really?’
‘Yes, why not?’
‘Because I’m meant to be cleaning your flat, on a professional basis.’ She bites her lip to warp a coming grin. ‘Not stuffing me face.’
‘You don’t have to stuff your face. You can eat delicately if you want.’
This time she laughs out loud.
‘Do I look like I’m capable of doing that?’
Xavier fishes in his pocket, and is reassured by a soft bundle of cash.
‘Do you like Chinese?’
‘Chinese would be amazing. I’ll still do the same amount of cleaning, by the way.’ Her face is suddenly serious again. ‘I’ll do more afterwards.’
‘Don’t be silly. Just relax for once and we’ll have some food.’
Pippa starts to protest, but her stomach interrupts, growling plaintively. Her freckles float on another brief blush.
Xavier laughs.
‘See? You can’t argue with that. I’ll be back soon.’ He reaches for his keys. ‘Stay there and try not to clean anything.’
As he walks back down Bayham Road with two plastic bags from the Chinese place, where the staff expressionlessly gazed at a small wall-mounted TV, Xavier wonders what he is playing at. Neon rain streams down in front of the street lights. He goes into the Indian man’s shop – ‘Nice to see you once more, sir,’ says the father of the bride-to-be – and comes out with a bottle of wine. Halfway back, he remembers that there’s already one in the kitchen.
With a tightening of chest muscles he wonders whether Pippa has set the table, even lit candles or something. Has he been an idiot, essentially asking her to dinner? I didn’t ask her to dinner, Xavier answers his own internal critic, she was here anyway, and I’m giving her dinner because she’s obviously hungry and done in, and it’s a bloody takeaway in a bag. When he gets back Pippa has, in any case, not made any arrangements for dining. She’s in the bathroom on her hands and knees, spraying the porcelain sink and then swiping it with a cloth. The toilet is already champing on a mouthful of bleach, the bath gleams with a whiteness inconceivable just a few weeks before.
‘’I’ve done the bedroom and I’ve made a start on the study and I’ll obviously do the kitchen once we’ve eaten and whatnot,’ she says, as Xavier appears and catches her eye in the bathroom mirror. Her striped jumper has slipped down around her shoulders.
He quickly redirects his gaze to the gleaming fittings.
‘I thought I told you to have a break.’
‘This is a break. I’m barely doing anything.’
They sit at Xavier’s little dining table, eating chicken in lurid sauces, vegetables exhausted from boiling, straight out of the polythene containers. They don’t talk; Pippa eats, thinks Xavier, as if she had just been released from jail. She piles forkfuls into her mouth, breaks prawn crackers in two and uses them to scoop up leftovers.
When Xavier reaches capacity, half a mountain of rice still on his plate, she looks at him as if at a Scrabble opponent who has made a scarcely believable tactical mistake.
‘You’re not going to eat the rest of that?’
‘I couldn’t.’
‘I could.’ She eases his plate across the tabletop towards her.
Xavier is pouring wine.
‘Do you drink wine?’
‘Of course. I’ll drink anything.’
She pauses with a forkful of rice halfway to her mouth and watches Xavier fill her glass.
‘Do I look really bad?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, just coming into your house and – I told you I’d stuff me face. Just laying into the food like an absolute pig and guzzling down your wine . . .’
‘You haven’t done that yet.’
‘So you’re saying I have eaten like a pig?’
Xavier chuckles.
‘Of course not. Just someone who is really hungry.’
‘I’ll be the size of a marquee tomorrow.’
‘We’ll see. I reckon you might find you’re still the size of a normal woman.’ How twee of me, he thinks, the habits of the radio show encroaching into everyday life.
‘Normal women don’t have tits like these.’
‘Maybe not, but the average dress size is 16, you know.’
‘Who wants to be average?’
‘Point taken.’ Xavier sloshes the glasses full again.
‘How do you know so much about dress sizes, anyway?’
‘I’m a tailor,’ says Xavier, and somehow it seems very funny to them both.
Looking back, Xavier won’t be able to remember whether there was a conscious decision to open the second bottle, who fetched it in, who uncorked it; not that alcohol will destroy the memory – neither of them gets drunk enough for that – but it imposes its own narrative, it seems to oil the edges of the night so that one scene slips into another. The two of them sit on the sofa, side by side, like sixth-formers. Actually, probably not like sixth-formers, thinks Xavier; sixth-formers would just go for it. Whatever ‘it’ is.
Pippa leans across and touches his lips with a finger.
‘Go like this.’
‘What?’
‘You’ve got wine all over your lips.’
Xavier does as he’s told and cringes, briefly, thinking about Murray, who always sports a wine-encrusted mouth at parties. He remembers with a brief spasm of guilt Murray’s sister’s party – he will be there now, he’s no doubt sent a text. Xavier doesn’t even know where his phone is, probably down behind the sofa cushions. Well, Murray is going to have to look after himself.
‘Are you all right, pet?’
‘Yes, I was just looking for my phone. But, I, er, I don’t actually want to find it.’
‘I’m the same, I’ve sort of deliberately parted company with mine.’ Pippa grimaces. ‘I don’t want me sister on at me to know when I’m coming home.’
‘What did you tell her when you went out?’
‘I told her we’d see what happened.’
‘And what is happening?’
Pippa’s eyelashes flicker.
The first kiss is short and diffident, the second exploratory, the third long, so long that, when they finally come apart, they look momentarily disorientated, like surfacing swimmers.
After a long silence, echoed outside, downstairs, everywhere, Pippa says, ‘Well, speed dating isn’t quite as quick as they claim. But it does seem to work.’
They spend half an hour kissing on the sofa, kisses that taste of wine. Xavier slides Pippa’s jumper over her shoulders, over her head, stroking her strong, freckled arms, kissing the very tip of her cleavage, which is much firmer than he imagined, closing his eyes as she kisses his neck. No more than that, for now; neither of them wants to be hasty, each minute of this is worth many minutes of regular life.
Then something moves heavily upstairs, voices are raised, and – nudged by the rest of the universe, which had briefly, discreetly turned the other way for a moment – the two of them look at each other as if only now conscious of what has just happened. Pippa runs her hands dazedly through her tousled hair. Xavier sits up a little straighter; his back hurts. Pippa wipes her mouth with her hand. Xavier gets up to go to the toilet. By the time he comes back, the springs which held in place the extraordinary atmosphere of the last half-hour – at the same time narcotic and adrenalized – have slackened, and the two of them look at each other, still excitedly, but with an edginess, like two people who have reached a dangerous agreement.
‘I should, I should really be going back,’ Pippa murmurs. ‘I’ve not even done the kitchen.’
Xavier, amused, reaches out to take her hand.
‘I wouldn’t worry about that. If you start looking at it from a cleaning point of view, it’s been quite an unprofessional visit.’
She doesn’t smile at the joke; for a moment he fears he has offended her.
‘Sorry, I didn’t mean . . .’
‘No, no, it’s fine, I’m just
thinking about me sister.’
As the pragmatic consideration of everything outside this room steadily reasserts itself, Pippa looks so tired that Xavier wants nothing more than to put her to bed and tuck her in. He smirks inwardly at the bravado of this thought even as it’s forming: she’s not the sort of person you ‘put’ anywhere. But he can at least get her a cab home.
He squeezes her hand.
‘You know, it will be all right, with your sister. Things will turn out all right.’ I’m still a little drunk, thinks Xavier, surprised; the words are marginally slower than usual in taking form, and once uttered they sit self-consciously in the air, like misspelled words waiting to be found out on the page.
‘Well, we’ll see.’
‘People always find a way to manage, they can cope with anything.’
‘I don’t want to be “coping”.’ Pippa lets out a long slow breath. ‘That’s what everyone said when me knees packed up. “You’ll cope.” That’s what I always say to myself when I have to do six cleaning jobs in a day and then I come home and Wendy’s left the washing up. I’d like to get to the stage where life isn’t always a struggle. Anyway. Don’t listen to me, I’m terrible for it. Talking on.’
‘You’ve done a great job so far. I mean, this is what life is, “coping”.’ Xavier labours to get the conversational point, which he’s sure is a good one, to stand up. ‘Not many people come through their lives without a fair amount of problems, sooner or later. My dad once said . . . well, anyway. Some manage and some don’t. It’s what life’s about.’
Pippa’s mouth twitches into a smile, the meaning of which he can’t quite assess.
‘Are you going to use that?’
‘Sorry?’
‘On your radio show. You sounded just like your radio show for a minute.’
Xavier’s mouth is dry.
‘How do you know about that?’
‘I heard you the other night.’
He doesn’t know why this makes him uncomfortable, but as usual the breach of anonymity is like a torch shining into his eyes, and the room suddenly seems too bright, the light from the bulb queasy and glaring, like the lights in a cheap hotel.