by Sarah Rayne
‘So, the joys of drinks on Saturday night,’ says Murray, as the news and weather rolls.
Anthony, one of the directors of the company that owns the radio station – their boss’s boss – is stepping down this weekend after thirty-three years; there are drinks in a dowdy pub just around the back of the BT Tower on Tottenham Court Road. It’s the sort of event nobody looks forward to – probably not even the person leaving – but Anthony’s successor, a bright young man called Paul Quillam with ideas to ‘take things forward’, is going to be there, and their absence would be noted more certainly than their presence.
‘I can hardly wait,’ says Xavier.
‘Do you want to mer, mer, meet up beforehand? Have a couple of drinks before it starts?’
‘Good idea. I think we should be at least two ahead of everyone else.’
‘Ber . . . back on air in thirty seconds. There’s a caller who says she’s got something very important to tell you. Iris?’
The name rings a bell, thinks Xavier.
‘Or maybe we should start a new topic? She could be a bit . . .’ Murray spirals an index finger towards his temple.
‘No, put her on.’
No sooner has he heard her twinkly, paper-thin voice than Xavier remembers the caller.
‘I was the old lady in Walthamstow. I called a few weeks ago . . .’
‘Yes, of course. So, how is The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire?’
‘It’s still declining, I’m afraid.’
‘Is it indeed,’ says Xavier. ‘Well, let’s hope they find a way to turn it around. Now then, Iris, last time you called, you told us a story about a gentleman called Tony. He’d been the love of your life, but got away from you for – what was it, fifty years? And then you saw him again.’
‘Yes. You encouraged me to try to meet him again. Actually, you asked him to come forward, if he was listening.’
‘So, Iris, don’t keep us in suspense. Have there been any developments?’
Xavier pictures her in her ground-floor flat in East London, twirling the cord of her old-fashioned telephone around her bony fingers.
‘Well, Xavier, there was nothing for weeks. He didn’t contact me. I thought oh dear, obviously he doesn’t listen to the show . . .’
‘Well, I find that hard to believe,’ says Xavier, deadpan. ‘As far as we know, everyone in London listens to it.’
‘That’s what I would have hoped!’ Iris giggles. ‘So I started sort of hanging about, I suppose you would call it, near the place where we’d previously met. I can tell you, if you’re an old lady it’s not easy to just hang about. People keep asking if you’re all right. Two different young men tried to help me across the road.’
Murray: ‘Nice to hear cher, cher, cher, cher . . .’
‘Chivalry isn’t dead,’ Xavier agrees.
‘It is nice,’ Iris says, ‘but in this case, rather inconvenient. Anyway, I’d almost given up hope. But I remembered your encouragement, Xavier, and thought damn it, I’m not going to be beaten. I remembered that last time I saw Tony he’d been picking up a prescription for his wife, and it was a Friday. So on Fridays, I would find an excuse to go to Boots. Last Friday I went in, pretending to look at umbrellas – not much use a lady my age pretending to look at make-up – and there he was! And if I’m honest, well, he looked pretty chuffed to see me. We went for a cup of tea and a bite to eat!’
‘This is tremendous news, Iris.’ Xavier grins, genuinely pleased. ‘And are you going to keep seeing each other?’
‘Well, of course he’s married and I’m widowed and whatnot, so certain things aren’t appropriate . . .’
‘No, you won’t be running away to Barbados or anything?’
‘Goodness me, no.’ Iris giggles again, and there is no difference, Xavier thinks, between the young woman who met Tony in 1950 and the one calling in now; the high-spirited 1950 version is still serving people in the grocery shop, even though the shop no longer stands where it did; somehow, each individual moment goes on existing, somewhere.
‘But you will keep seeing each other? And you will keep calling in and letting us know?’
Iris’s voice, once more, has a dusting of mischief about it.
‘Perhaps we will. Perhaps we will ask you, like that Edith lady, to respect our privacy . . .’
Xavier and Murray both laugh.
Murray has started to set up the next caller when Iris adds, ‘I must thank you, Xavier. I would never – without you, I . . . Well, thank you.’
Xavier can’t help but smile as they say their goodbyes. Before he knows it, he has allowed the surge in mood to dictate his next, surprising words.
‘So, we’ve heard a touching story of a reunion here on Late Lines, and now I’m going to try to initiate another one. Pippa, if you happen to be listening, please get in touch. What happened was entirely my fault. I’d very much like to see you again.’
‘And next up, here is . . . er, here’s another song,’ Murray stumbles.
As soon as the opening chords fade up he speaks:
‘Wer, wer, wer, where did that come from?’
Xavier shuffles in his swivel chair and stares into the layers of sediment at the depths of his coffee cup.
‘Been on my mind.’
‘Who the hell is Pippa?’
‘A girl.’
‘The girl you had that date with, the Aussie?’
‘No, another one. The, er, my cleaner.’
Murray stares at him, tugging at his curly forelock in perplexity.
‘You’ve been having it with your cleaner?’
‘It’s not that sort of situation really. It was a one-off thing.’
‘You had a one-night stand with your cleaner?’
‘We didn’t sleep together. I screwed it up.’
Murray shakes his head slowly.
‘I’ve only just got used to you having a cleaner, let alone fucking her.’
‘Me too.’ Xavier coughs. ‘Anyway, we didn’t. We didn’t do that.’
Over the remaining hour, they receive an exceptional number of calls and emails and texts from the listeners. Who is Pippa? people demand to know. Tell us more. What happened? Is it a serious relationship? But there is no correspondence from the one person Xavier hoped to provoke, and by the end of the night the exhilaration of his uncharacteristic appeal has faded, replaced by the queasiness of having revealed too much of himself too easily. Murray and Xavier drive home without speaking, tangled in their respective thoughts.
*
As for Pippa, she gets up two hours after Xavier goes to bed. Her first appointment is at nine, at the rich lady’s house in Marylebone; she’s living in it with her partner and son until she finds a new tenant, and wants to keep it, as she puts it, ‘spick and span’. The radio is on when Pippa comes down for breakfast: Wendy doesn’t ever seem to learn to switch things off, to make these small economies. They’re talking about the World Athletics Championships in Berlin, which Pippa, had things gone differently, might have been preparing for now. Perhaps Xavier was right after all, reads the graffiti on a wall of Pippa’s tired mind, perhaps everyone would be best off just accepting what they’re given.
Pippa spends four hours scrubbing stains out of the carpet, dusting vases, hoovering around a teenager who avoids meeting her eye and refuses to pick up any of the clothes, magazines, bags or bric-a-brac littering his floor like jetsam brought in by the tide. The landlady makes several pots of tea but doesn’t offer Pippa a drink. At the end of the session, Pippa has to take five black bags of rubbish out to a skip at the end of the street, her knees creaking each time as she bends to pick one up. Am I missing something, Pippa wonders, feeling light rain on the back of her neck, or was I always cut out for this?
Clive Donald also heard the report about British medal hopes as he got ready to leave the house this morning, but it failed to interest him. As Pippa dusts and scrubs, Clive drops a series of hints in the staff room that he ‘may not be around for too much lon
ger’ and that there ‘could be some news soon’. He has been stockpiling sleeping pills at home; he’s been on websites where mostly much younger people discuss such topics as how many pills it takes to kill you. Everyone is preoccupied with the impending school inspection, and no real conversation develops from the hints.
At lunchtime, Pippa gets a sandwich from the garage across the road. She has to do another four-hour clean this afternoon, in Bayswater, not far away, and she’s then waitressing down in Surrey. She’ll have to get the overground from Victoria or something. She can see in advance the squashed corridors of the commuter train, the kid with hissing headphones leaning back against her, the superior looks of the high earners heading home to their satellite towns.
On Saturday morning Xavier – having checked his inbox in vain for anything from Pippa – is boiling the kettle when he hears Mel’s worn voice downstairs, and the usual thudding sounds of Jamie being dragged inside against his will. He goes downstairs.
Jamie is screaming, waggling his legs furiously like an octopus caught in a net.
‘No! No! No!’ Jamie protests.
He squirms out of Mel’s grip and back towards the front door, and is about to escape, but Xavier bounds down the stairs and reaches over his three-year-old neighbour to slam the door just in time. Jamie yells in disappointment. The two adults exchange a look of triumph at their narrow victory over the tiny opponent.
‘Thank you.’ Mel wearily scoops her hair out of her eyes. ‘This is becoming a habit.’
‘You’re welcome.’ Xavier eyes her shopping bags. ‘I could have gone to the shops for you.’
‘Oh, no, you’ve already been very—’ Mel breaks into coughing. ‘You must get the impression I can barely support myself.’
‘You support yourself and a child. That’s more than I can manage.’
Mel smiles. It’s their second successful conversation in the past few days. I’m doing well, Xavier thinks.
He makes himself some lunch and wonders what to do with the afternoon, before the evening’s drinks. The only previous time he met Anthony was a few months into his partnership with Murray, when the old man, eager to meet the new talent, invited him to a ‘liquid lunch’ in Holborn. Xavier remembers Anthony’s red-wine-and-meat face, the nostrils flaring uncomfortably wide.
He has almost decided to go for a long walk when the doorbell rings. He goes downstairs again. He can hear Mel explaining, ‘No, it’s for the man above . . . for Xavier, that’s right.’ The TV is on at high volume. Xavier opens the door and there, in her shapeless raincoat and with her blue-and-yellow laundry bag at her feet, is Pippa.
Xavier has to resist his initial urge to grab her. He can feel a frantic pulse in his neck, hear it in his ear.
‘Aren’t you going to invite me in?’
She’s past him and on her way up the stairs before Xavier can respond. Following in her wake he makes a mental tour of the flat, scanning the rooms for order and correctness.
‘I can’t stay long, I’ve got to be in Kentish Town in an hour, which I know isn’t very far, but the buses are totally unreliable round here, and half the time they don’t let you on, or something goes wrong, anyway I can’t be late, but I thought I might drop in because apparently me sister heard you refer to a lady on the radio who might be me.’
She turns to him in the hall and they stand and look at one another. Pippa drops her eyes away from his glance. Xavier brushes one of his hands against hers. He notices her chipped fingernails.
‘I didn’t think I’d see you again.’
‘You upset me.’ Pippa’s eyes flicker around, predatory, in search of dirt.
‘I know. I texted you, I called you—’
‘My phone,’ says Pippa imperiously, ‘has been wedged down the back of your sofa since that night.’
Xavier looks incredulously at her as she leads him into the lounge and casually peels the cushions off the sofa, exposing its forlorn-looking frame. She plunges her arm into the gap and fishes out the phone which has nestled there since she left this room two weeks ago, undisturbed by messages since its battery petered out, and undetected by Xavier who’s hardly been in the room since the events of that night.
‘You’ve not had a phone for two weeks?’
‘I have what is known as a landline,’ Pippa says loftily. ‘I give that number to all my clients.’
‘But all their numbers and everything—’
‘Well, yes, it has been inconvenient.’
He’s about to ask why she didn’t simply buy a new one, but remembers that this is the sort of question someone with a comforting amount of money might ask too glibly.
‘That’s why I’ve come back to get it. It took me a couple of days to notice it was gone, and then I had to work out where it would be’ – she counts off on her fingers, he notes with an internal shiver of familiarity – ‘and then I had to find time to come over here and get it, and then I had to work out whether I actually wanted to see you.’
‘And . . .?’
‘And I did.’
She leans against the arm of the sofa and Xavier takes her hand, handling it like china.
‘I’m really sorry.’
‘You already said that.’
‘Do you want a cup of tea?’
‘I’ve not got time, pet.’
She coughs.
‘But thanks for mentioning me on the show.’
Xavier feels the unstoppable kindling of a fire in his lower stomach, spreading into his groin, as he pictures her breasts, her thighs beneath the sack-like outfit, regresses to the half-hour they spent, on this spot, in each other’s arms. He can almost summon the taste of her mouth.
‘Can I see you? Whenever you can. I realize you have a lot on. Just, any time.’
She blinks a couple of times.
‘That would be nice. Give me a call.’
‘On the mobile or the landline?’
Pippa laughs.
‘Whichever you like.’
She glances at her watch and is gone, down the stairs, out of the door. Xavier waves to her as she hauls herself onto the saddle of her bike, then watches her all the way up the hill, her raincoat flapping on either side of her, legs urging the pedals forwards.
By the time he reaches his pre-drinks appointment with Murray, Xavier is cushioned by a mood so close to euphoria that he could imagine he’d had a bottle of wine already. On the underground he glances benignly at a mouthy gang of girls dispersed around the carriage, whose yells shoot like tennis balls over the heads of the spectators trapped in between.
In the bar-restaurant where they meet, he doesn’t flinch at the officious waiter who asks if he’s planning to eat, and then says, ‘No one just for drinks, it’s Saturday night. You have to eat.’
‘OK, I’ll eat something.’
‘It’s a bit of a bloody cheek,’ laments Murray, who has made the best of the situation by ordering a huge plate of lasagne with side orders of chips and olives, as well as a basket of garlic bread.
‘I guess they have to make a living,’ says Xavier mildly.
‘What’s put you in such a good mood?’
‘I don’t know. I guess I was in a pretty bad mood for a while. This is a kind of comeback.’
‘When you say “a while” . . .’
‘About five years.’
They laugh. Murray doesn’t immediately press him on the subject, but Xavier soon feels like returning to it. Maybe there’s something about this street that inspires confidences; it was a few doors down from here last week that Maggie Reiss revealed the secret affair of her politician client and Edith Thorne.
Murray listens, his front teeth hooking down onto his bottom lip in a bite that suggests considerable envy.
‘So it’s on again? You’re going to . . .?’
‘We’ve said we’ll see each other next week.’
‘So this is, like, a proper relationship?’
‘It’s much too early to say that. It’s only just saved itsel
f from being a proper disaster.’
But Xavier looks to Murray as if he’s rather more confident than that implies. Disconcerted, Murray hacks up the lasagne, as if it were food he had captured himself, and studies his friend, trying to think of witty ways to tease him. Nothing comes to mind, and in the time it takes Xavier to order, Murray has finished an almost-full glass of wine, poured himself another, and drunk most of that too.
Once in the dowdy pub, they go off on separate socializing circuits. Xavier uncharacteristically takes his eye off Murray, who heads straight for the forest of elbows at the bar. The radio station has paid a tab of £200 which he immediately sets about depleting.
Xavier shakes hands with Anthony, whose nostrils are as unhappily capacious as ever.
‘Excellent show, excellent show,’ he says, pumping Xavier’s hand like someone operating a well; his wedding ring presses hard against Xavier’s finger.
Xavier can’t tell whether Anthony has actually listened to the show in the past years, but it doesn’t matter. Before long he is introduced to the new man in the job, Paul Quillam, who is in his early forties with a boyish dimple when he smiles, and raffishly untidy hair. He introduces himself as a ‘great admirer’ of Xavier’s, and with the practised ease of someone who is perpetually arranging discreet conversations, steers him into an empty function room adjacent to the main bar.
‘I hope you don’t mind me talking shop on a Saturday night, very dull,’ says Paul Quillam, not bothering to sound as if he means this.
‘No, it’s fine,’ says Xavier.
‘Now here’s the thing. I’m a big fan of yours, as I’ve already said. I think I can speak for pretty much everyone here when I say that we’re very impressed with what you’ve done; you’ve made the overnight shift, basically a graveyard, into something really special.’
‘Thanks.’ Xavier’s never sure how to respond to the routine flattery that comes before a conversation of this nature reaches its spike of importance.
Luckily, Quillam is ready to get straight to the point.
‘What I’m wondering – what I’ve already been talking to people about – is whether we can harness what you’ve got, and bring it to a bigger audience. I know you’re probably very happy where you are,’ he says, pre-emptively raising a hand to bat away objections. ‘I know you’re very settled at midnight to four. I’m just saying – I’m aware others would like to poach you, but we see you as a prized asset, and I’d like you to have a status which reflects that. Does that make sense? Do you mind if I smoke, by the way?’