by Patrick Gale
‘I gathered,’ said Dawn.
‘He says to tell you he’s still expecting you for tea at five.’
‘Right.’
‘Awful news, though,’ Lydia hurried on, unwilling to contemplate the thought that Fergus and Dawn were actually friends. ‘Poor Mrs Chattock had another stroke last night. The Bishop found her when he got back from the television studios. She can’t talk and they don’t think there’s much chance of her walking again.’
Dawn clicked her tongue in sympathy.
‘Fancy,’ she said. ‘Poor old soul.’
‘How many of those things are you making?’ enquired Lydia, pointing at the patties and remembering that she was in the thick of a panic.
‘Two each, then two pineapple ones each, half a stuffed christophine each, a couple of fried plantains each and then rice salad. Oh, and there’s the turkey too.’
‘Lordy.’
‘I thought West Indians ate goat.’
‘Dawn really.’ Lydia laughed and went to wake her husband.
Their room was in chaos. She had sat up half Friday night to finish her dress. She had held a secret hope that, too ‘young’ or no, Tobit might announce that he would give her one of his own to wear, but no offer had been forthcoming. The pink dummy, its dials adjusted so as to make it all too three-dimensional a record of her vital statistics, stood garbed in her handiwork. Clive had pronounced the dress ‘charming’ but he had no visual sense whatever and had been wanting her to come to bed. Tobit would praise her needlework, but condemn the garment as a ‘bit hippyish’ and she suspected he would be right. The carpet around it was littered with scraps of velvet and corduroy, swirls of thread, pins, lining and frayed interfacing. Since she had slipped out two hours ago, Clive had rolled over to invade as much bedspace as possible. His face was buried full in the pillows, arms and legs lying starfishwise. He had tried to wake and failed, for one hand lay on a handful of essays, scooped up from the pile he had been cursing over as she sewed last night. She switched on the bedside radio and turned up the volume slightly from its six a.m. level. Then she crawled around the carpet, wastepaper basket under one arm, kaftan riding high, to claw up the rags of material.
It was not meant to happen like this. Long ago – it seemed so very long ago – when Tobit had asked them up to London for the weekend and they had met his rather sweet flatmate and made certain discoveries involving sleeping arrangements, she had resigned herself to the idea that It would never happen at all. Still, she had a fertile imagination and she had decided that It, albeit a strictly hypothetical It, would consist of early summer flowers, frothy white frocks, several handpicked bridesmaids, a page boy or two, a long, silk-lined marquee in the Warden’s garden at Tatham’s. And lots of friends and ghastly relations in their best clothes, and proper invitations and the choir singing Mozart and maybe even a Thirties jazz band in a corner of the garden. That was how, in the realm of Lydia’s hypothesis, her son would make his symbolic departure from her life. Not like. Well. At least it was June and they would have early summer flowers.
Clive rolled on to her side of the bed, furling the duvet about him. Soon he would become overheated and get up in a foul mood. His temper had been untrustworthy all week, ever since they had had Tobit and Gloire to supper. When she had ticked off that dreadful American drunk outside the house last night, he had almost rounded on her. She stacked the essays he had marked in one heap and those awaiting his attention in another.
‘Clive?’
‘Mmh?’
‘Clive, darling, it’s half past eight. I told Emma you’d pick up the flowers at nine-fifteen.’
‘Mmh. Lovely,’ he mumbled, groping with a hairy hand for the back of his neck which, finding, he rubbed.
Mr DelMonica stared hard at the wilting croissant, foil-wrapped butter pats and miniature plastic pots of jam on the linen before him.
‘And what,’ he asked, ‘is this?’
‘Breakfast, sir,’ said the waiter.
‘Take it away, would you, before my wife sees it.’
‘Sir?’
‘Yes. She’d work up a rage and she’s a Big Woman. What fruit do you have?’
‘Fruit sir?’
‘Yes. Bring us two plates, two knives and a large selection of all the fruit this historic dump can provide.’
‘Sir.’
The waiter whisked away the apology for a breakfast and glided across the muffling pile. He returned in a few seconds to ask if Mr DelMonica would mind moving to the table in the alcove.
‘Why the Hell?’ asked Mr DelMonica, curiousity replacing the storm in his voice.
‘Well you see, sir,’ hissed the waiter, ‘we don’t want to upset the other residents. Strictly speaking, fruit other than grapefruit segments, isn’t on the menu until lunchtime.’
‘You don’t say!’ laughed Mr DelMonica, adding in a mutter, ‘Sick country she’s marrying into.’ He moved however, and soon got down to the more serious business of slicing a pineapple and musing on the paragon that was his wife.
On finishing his economics studies at Yale, he had found a strong sleeping partner in one of his white fellow graduates and, with the latter’s aid, had set up his inordinately successful firm importing Japanese technology to the West Indies and West Indian rum to Japan. Josephine had walked, impeccably uniformed, up the aisle on one of his island-hopping flights and had arranged his blanket in so accommodating a manner that he had bought her a flat in a comfortable suburb of his native Kingston. Whenever their visits there coincided, and their mutual obsession ensured that this was more often than not, he would crawl over the mattress towards her and lay a fat pearl on her belly button. Before long they had made a necklace. By the time they had made a double rope, she was demanding a ring to match. She announced her intention to fly in the face of her fellow Martiniquaises and be the first of her family’s women not to give birth out of wedlock.
A staunch believer in the dignity of labour, he had waited until their daughter, Gloire, could safely be left in the hands of an imported Scottish nanny, then made his wife the senior shareholder in a firm importing high French fashion to all parts of the Caribbean. Josephine’s business sense was as keen as her piety and by now she had paid him back in full and made herself a discreet tycoon. Gloire, to whom they had never ceased to be grateful for bringing them together in such a substantial state of bliss, demanded rather more of life than hard cash. Fiercely independent, she had made a moderate success of her years at Vassar then had come to London to study medicine at a place she called Barts. All of which made the sudden announcement of her intention to marry a white, English dress designer all the more surprising.
‘Hello,’ said Clive.
‘Mr Hart,’ said Emma. ‘You’ve come for the flowers.’
‘Yes.’
‘Let’s go and see what I can find you. I told Lydia, you should have mentioned the other day that you’d be needing some. I could have brought them round and spared you the time.’
‘Well actually at that stage I didn’t know we were going to be doing flowers at all.’
‘But you can’t have a wedding without flowers,’ she protested, picking up a basket and her secateurs from the porch. ‘Even a little one.’ The sun was warm above another sagging grey sky. Bees hummed dangerously beneath an apple tree. Tiny beads of sweat stood above Emma’s unkissed lips and broke out beneath Clive’s thick but receded hairline. ‘Shame it isn’t sunnier for it,’ she went on, gathering some greenery.
‘Well, you never know,’ he replied.
‘How about some of this greenhouse jasmine? It arranges so well and smells so good.’
‘Lovely.’
‘I don’t know what they put in our water but Barrowers always seem to get flowers earlier and longer than anyone else. Now what else? Some lilac, of course, and I’ve loads of alchemilla.’
She was too young to be doing this, Clive thought. The long tweed skirt, the sensible gardening shoes, the way she kept her hair back with
practical pins and kept to surname terms with every man she knew; none of these could disguise her neglected youth. She had come straight back from Durham or Edinburgh, he forgot which, to nurse her father through his last illness and had never seemed to want to move on. She lived in his old house with his old books and his old cats. The old smells of tobacco and sickness had long been expunged with pots of jasmine and bowls of dried flowers, but she wore his old gardening hat if the sun were out. The easy speed she attained on his old bicycle (the late Dean had always ridden his late wife’s) and the brilliance of her occasional smile, however, betrayed her cruel lack of years. She seemed to be losing touch with all the spheres of reference for one of her age. When he had found her so unexpectedly dressed up the other day it had been in the elegance of some three decades ago.
‘You’re too young to be doing this.’
‘What?’ She was stretching up for some sprays of philadelphus.
‘So kind of you to be doing this.’
‘Nonsense. It’s a special occasion.’ She draped the philadelphus across a now full basket. ‘It would be silly if Lydia spent a fortune in a florist’s when these are going to waste here.’
‘All the same … It’s …’ He took the basket from her. ‘Oh. Thanks. I’ll bring it straight back. I only wish we could invite you but, you see, Tobit doesn’t want any fuss.’
‘Of course he doesn’t. Do give him my love, though.’
‘No,’ Clive thought. ‘Anyone but him. Give it to me. Run into the streets and give it. Give it all out.’
‘If he remembers me, that is,’ she continued. ‘Time stands so still here. It’s quite a shock to have him grow up all of a sudden and she … I … Sorry, I can’t remember her name.’
‘Gloire.’
‘Yes, Gloire. Lovely name. There are no coloured people here, so I think it’s a good thing.’ She licked the sweat off her lips with a little darting movement of her tongue and pushed a pin more firmly into her hair. ‘So lovely.’
Clive was uncertain what to say next so he left and hurried to the Tatham’s chantry. Twelfth-century, set amid cloisters of distinction, the interior of the little building had been wrecked by the agents of the Gothic Revival. The effect of sitting on the bottom of an unwashed fishtank was made doubly eerie by clamorous rumours that a School of Night among Tathamites held regular black masses in the place. The sunnier main chapel however was too large for a quiet wedding and, as Lydia had implied, the use of the chantry was a rare privilege worthy of abject gratitude.
With two Victorian columns and a quantity of Oasis, brought in the back of the car, Clive did his skilful utmost to make the chantry festive but only succeeded in elevating it from Satanic crypt to Los Angelic funeral parlour. He stood back, scowled and set about rearranging. A small scholar walked in who, on second glance, proved to be female.
‘Sorry, sir,’ she said. ‘Is it all right if I have my piano practice?’
‘Fine, er …’ He remembered her name. ‘Fine, Jermyn. Go ahead.’
‘Thank you, sir.’
The diminutive creature, typically spidery and repressed, carefully took off her gown then clambered on to the piano stool and launched unexpectedly into a furious Scarlatti sonata. Clive wound flowers around a column and thought of the son he was not to lose and the daughter he was rather going to gain.
He had been surprised at the news of the impending marriage but not shocked as Lydia had been, just as he had been surprised but not shocked when Tobit had embarked on simultaneous careers of uranism and haute couture. The boy had always faintly bored him, however, and this he did find shocking. A child who shone could stir one’s pride. A child who rebelled could be fought with. A child born crippled could be loved. A child born plain could be sent to expensive schools. But a child who bored one? The thought was appalling, the prospect of this day on which a father must show pride, love and interest in generous quantities, not less so.
Gloire. He must concentrate on Gloire. Her febrile charms and subsequent sly behaviour had captivated him. Were their lives differently placed, her warmth and intelligence might have held him in thrall. Were it not unutterably bourgeois, were it not perilously close to a demonstration of paternal interest, he would say that Tobit had managed to arouse his passionate envy.
After slicing off its skin with her knife, Josephine bore the last morsel of peach to her mouth on her fork. She patted her chin with the corner of a napkin then gently scraped Mr DelMonica’s calf with a crocodile toe.
‘What you say we skip the big Norman church and go back upstairs to change?’ she said.
A stray drop of juice glistened on one of her plumper pearls.
‘If it’s a choice between some old building and my wife,’ he replied, meeting her stare, ‘I’ll go settle up then see her in her room.’
42
Soon after noon, Madeleine slunk down from her bedroom where she had been lurking with old magazines all morning and with a portable television most of last night. Mum had left for work soon after breakfast so that she could drop in at the hospital to see a friend of hers who had just had a stroke. She had told Madeleine that Evan was out to lunch with Goody Goody Hamilton and leaving either tonight or first thing tomorrow morning. Last night she had also told her about his professional tragedy and it was this which had scared her away rather than any embarrassment over her loss of temper in the car. What did one say to someone whose worst nightmare had just come true? While writing her thesis she had shut each page in a drawer as she finished it in case she dropped a mug of coffee or spilled a glass of wine. Madeleine sympathized, therefore, but found the victim of such a crisis none the less unapproachable. At school she had choked a beautiful friendship by refusing to talk about a friend’s bereavement. It was not that she was selfish, only that she was easily awed.
And yes she did feel a mite foolish after her little display yesterday. She could so easily have explained that he had misunderstood and that it was not an abortion she sought but professional reassurance as an unfit chainsmoker on the brink of maternity. Instead she had chosen to take umbrage at his ‘typically male’ attitude to the sanctity of the womb. It was only when she had been half way back to Barrowcester that she had replayed their exchange in her mind and found traces of his having said that he cared for her. She had singled out this portion and re-run it in her head several times both last night and this morning and had now dismissed it as being pseudo-paternal, protective posturing of a piece with his attitude towards whatever she was incubating.
She was ready to be on her way. The trouble was that there was nowhere to go but back to London and, as always after a few days of pretty, peaceful, loathsome Barrowcester, it required a good deal of auto-hypnosis to convince herself that Earls Court was a more desirable residence than her mother’s. Lying in a pleasant stupor in the bath just now, she had brewed up a delightful scenario in which one of her colleagues at the Warburg, or some beneficent old Barrowcester trout telephoned to offer her the use of an isolated cottage near the sea for the duration of her pregnancy. She would recklessly give up her room in the flat in Earls Court, pack a case full of books, divert her magazine subscriptions and retire to the sea to knit baby clothes and write a book about eroticism, shamelessly cashing in on her recent ordeal. Sadly, most of her colleagues were as unlikely as she to own cottages by the sea, and the beneficence of old trouts in Barrowcester never stretched beyond their infernal ‘little somethings’ which conveyed so much and cost so little. Also she had never learned to knit. The book, however, was not a bad idea. There had already been two telephone calls from high priests of trash offering obscene sums for the exclusive rights to her story. She had turned these all down since her animosity towards Edmund was tempered with affectionate memories of a scandalous good time. A certain wily foresight, which she was quite content to have misread as high-minded restraint, told her that her notoriety, however bankable, would feed her longer if she invested it steadily and in small portions.
Perhap
s she would remain in Barrowcester for a time and write the book here. She could pay her mother rent and possibly move into the granny flat to give the two of them a modicum of independence. The thought was thrilling in a way, because so dangerous. She might be a far cry from a Goody Goody Hamilton now, but what if she were still here in a year’s time? Earls Court, while the respirational equivalent of thirty a day for her growing baby, was at least safer from her own point of view. So, she would do her packing (throw things into a holdall), take her mother out for lunch then catch an evening train back to London. She would be brave and return to a flat full of fading yuccas, curling Venice carnival posters and Georgene’s motorbike gear. But first she meant to leave Evan a propitiatory note.
She pushed open the door to the granny flat. He had splashed himself with aftershave before keeping his appointment with Goody Goody Hamilton; its tang still hung on the air. She cast around in the mess for some paper and a pen and saw his paperwork – or what remained of it – on the desk by the garden window of the bedroom. She strolled over, with a frown at the savaged curtains, and took a seat. There was a pad of file paper in his briefcase. She pulled it out and started to write on the top sheet.
‘Dear Evan,
‘Mum has just told me about yesterday’s horror. There’s not a great deal one can say, but I exclaim in sympathy and …’
No. That was altogether too facetious. She tore off the first sheet and started afresh.
‘Dear Evan,
‘I’m so very sorry. I had been going to apologize for my ridiculous rudeness to you yesterday – you were only trying to help, I know – when Mum told me about your manuscript. Suddenly I realize that I must be the last thing on your mind. At least when someone dies, one can share their memories; with a “dead” book that no one else has read, you are so alone. I hope you managed to salvage something, and have no doubt that, with your brain, it will be more an irritation than a labour to rewrite the thing. I shall be in London most of the summer. Will leave you my numbers and address in hope that you’ll get in touch when you’re back there. It would be good to meet for a …’