The Facts of Life

by Patrick Gale

  ‘What will you do about, you know, back there?’ he asked.

  ‘Ring the police when I get in.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘They tried to rape me. I saw their faces, their clothes. I heard their names. I could give good descriptions. I’ve even got a witness, now.’

  ‘Oh no,’ he shook his head.

  ‘But surely?’

  ‘Please,’ he said, stopping to lay a huge, beseeching hand on her forearm. ‘Don’t call the police.’

  ‘But I should. They might do it again.’

  ‘They won’t. Not after what I did to them.’

  ‘It would make me feel safer.’

  ‘I’ll protect you.’

  ‘Oh well, now I feel a lot safer.’

  ‘I’ll protect you,’ he repeated, challenging her cynicism. She caught that expression in his eyes again. True. Sober. Lost for words, she turned and they continued on their way in companionable silence.

  ‘Well,’ she said, as they reached her door. ‘Good night. Are you sure you won’t let me give you something? The price of a pint at least?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘Don’t drink much,’ he said. ‘And I’ve money of my own. In you go.’

  He watched her turn her key in the lock and let herself in, something she had been trying to persuade taxi drivers to do for years. ‘Goodnight,’ she said, ‘And thank you.’

  She set a bath to run then walked briskly round the house drawing curtains. When she came to pull the ones at the front, she glanced down and saw him lying on the broken council-issue bench across the way from her house, gazing up at the sky. She stared for a moment, astonished, then twitched the curtain closed. Greatly though the Cynthia in her rebelled against it, his guarding presence did make her feel safer. It relaxed her to the point where she found it safe to cry. Weeping, she tore off her clothes and stuffed them all in the kitchen dustbin. Ignoring the telephone, which rang twice, she lay weeping in her richly scented bath until she could cry no more and the water began to cool. Wrapped in her dressing gown, preparing to tumble into bed, she looked out of the bedroom window again, assuming he would have gone by now. He was still there.

  Though she often felt only half-alive, and was regarded by the more powerful women in her life as a sort of listless child, Alison had a powerful will when she found the courage to assert it. Occasionally a strong resolve formed in her mind and with it, an utter calm and clarity of vision. Sure of purpose, she would do what she had to do.

  He stirred from slumber at her touch, blinked awake, then sat up, astonished to find her out on the pavement in her dressing gown.

  ‘What? Oh! What is it?’ he mumbled, rubbing his hair. ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘You can’t sleep here,’ she said. ‘It’s absurd.’

  ‘I nodded off. You want me to move on, then?’

  ‘No. But don’t you have anywhere to go?’

  ‘I lost the key to my bedsit chasing that wanker back there. I can get another one tomorrow, when the caretaker’s in. It’s not cold though. I’ll be okay here.’

  ‘No. You must come inside. Come on. I’ve got a spare room that I never use. I know that sounds disgustingly middle class, and I suppose it is, and I am.’

  ‘But …’ He sat back upright on the bench, looking at her, running a hand across his dusty hair and frowning with uncertainty. ‘You don’t know anything about me. You don’t know who I am.’

  ‘You saved my life. Come on. I’m still hot from my bath. I’ll catch my death out here.’

  She pulled gently on his sleeve and he stood, towering over her once more, stooping slightly as though his height shamed him.

  Leaning out of his kitchen window to water his tubs of herbs, the priest saw her lead the huge man inside and smiled to himself. He tweaked off a sprig of rosemary, sniffed it, then, turning back into the sitting room held it out to his friend who was watching an old film on television.

  ‘Here,’ he said. ‘Smell.’

  36

  ‘You did what?’

  ‘I asked him in. Offered him the spare room. I couldn’t leave him outside. He’s been there three, no, four nights now. It’s fun!’

  Alison had no sooner begun to tell her story than she wished she had held her peace. Jamie was looking amazed and slightly prurient, Miriam stunned and disapproving and Francis, whose face could never be called expressive, simply looked shocked. The weekend had gone fairly well until this point, with everyone on their best behaviour. She had helped Miriam cook lunch, avoided teasing her about her unsuccessful but doubtless expensive new hairstyle and carefully parried her attempts at unnervingly intimate ‘girl talk’. Relaxed by too much wine however, she had started to tell them all about Sam and, having started, had been unable to stop on account of their relentless interrogation. She had given them an edited version, made the attack sound like a simple, random mugging.

  ‘Why didn’t you just give him some money?’ Francis asked.

  ‘He doesn’t need money,’ she insisted. ‘He gets building work. He has savings.’

  ‘Typical scrounger,’ Francis declared. ‘These homeless people are all the same.’

  ‘No! You don’t understand,’ Alison was appalled. ‘You’re not listening.’

  ‘Let him get a flat,’ Francis went on.

  ‘She doesn’t want him to,’ Jamie put in playfully. ‘She’s taken a shine to him.’

  ‘You shut up,’ she snapped, patiently turning back to Francis. ‘He’s got a bedsit in some awful hostel,’ she explained.

  He shrugged brutally, pouring himself some more coffee.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he sighed, tapping the back of Miriam’s chair in passing. ‘Your children.’

  ‘But we get on, I like having him around and I’ve given him a key,’ Alison continued, desperate not to let him rile her.

  ‘Your idealism’s great, Angel,’ Miriam enthused. ‘Just great. I think it’s awful – all these people on the streets – but isn’t it, well, a bit risky for you?’

  Alison rounded on her.

  ‘I told you. He’s not homeless. I only thought he was because of how he looked and where I met him. He’s not even on the dole.’

  ‘No. But …’

  ‘Oh please!’

  ‘I mean,’ Miriam went on, ‘if he disappeared, you wouldn’t know where to get hold of him.’

  ‘So? He probably will disappear. I don’t think he’s really comfortable being back in a house. He goes on these huge, restless walks. To Epping Forest. Greenwich. All about the city. He hardly sleeps. I don’t know how he finds the energy to work.’

  She smiled across at Jamie, apologising with her eyes for not having told him before, in the privacy of his car.

  ‘It makes me feel quite safe at night,’ she said. ‘Like having a big security guard in the place.’

  Jamie merely raised an eyebrow at this as he sipped at his cup, teasing her over its gold-leafed brim. He forgave her. Alison stood and went to the French windows to look out at Francis’s immaculate, mower-striped lawn. He threw a party out there every summer for his grateful clients. He hired staff, put up a marquee, Miriam wore a hat, people cried in bathrooms and there was always a fight over the ‘children’s’ failure to attend.

  ‘Honestly,’ she said. ‘I wish I’d never brought it up.’ She knew Miriam would be throwing a look at Jamie behind her back; one of her ‘is-everything-okay-really?’ looks. ‘If I’d wanted a normal lodger,’ she added, ‘I’d have advertised for one ages ago and ended up with some drip with a dying yucca, a soap allergy and a cash-flow problem.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Angel.’ Her mother’s voice reached out at her across the room like a plucking finger. ‘I didn’t mean to get heavy. You tell her, Jamie. It’s only that we never see you and I worry.’

  ‘Well don’t. All right?’

  ‘Fine. Pardon my caring.’

  The telephone rang. Mother and children looked studiously in opposite directions and listened to Francis answe
ring it. Jamie helped himself to a chocolate from a box on the unplayed piano.

  ‘Henchley Manor,’ Francis announced pompously.

  ‘Since when?’ Jamie asked and Miriam shushed him conspiratorially, regaining lost ground at her husband’s expense.

  ‘It’s for you.’ Francis turned and held out the receiver. ‘From America.’

  ‘If it’s that bloody woman again about …’ Miriam fell silent as she reached him, finishing her sentence with an eloquent glare. She cleared her throat and pushed back her hair. ‘Hello? … Yes, this is Miriam Deakins speaking … I thought I told you! … No. Absolutely no. I know nothing and I don’t think there’s anything more to find out.’

  She dropped the receiver smartly back into its cradle. Francis touched her shoulder, bending his head towards her. She took his hand and squeezed it briefly. Alison watched, still fascinated, despite herself, by any evidence that might explain the mysterious dynamics of her mother’s marriage.

  ‘Who was it?’ she asked, happy to deflect attention away from herself once more.

  ‘That wretched Holly wood journalist again, Call-Me-Venetia.’

  ‘Which?’ Jamie asked, opening a colour supplement as he stifled a post-lunch yawn.

  Miriam poured herself a brandy and flopped back on to the sofa. Francis came to stand behind her, rubbing her neck with a thick, proprietorial hand. Alison watched his unreadable expression and wondered, as she often had since her mother had married him, whether he found them all intimidating. She feared the depressing truth was that he found them merely stupid and wantonly irrational in their behaviour.

  ‘The one writing the biography of Myra Toye,’ Miriam explained. ‘She spent hours at The Roundel with poor Dad. – almost an entire day, rooting through boxes and papers he’d stashed away. And now she keeps asking what I know. As if I’d know anything. The book’s due out soon in any case. She’s probably just pestering me for more information to help publicise it.’

  ‘Why on earth would she ask you?’ Alison asked.

  ‘Did Grandpa know her then?’ Jamie added, suddenly interested. Francis sighed histrionically, indicating that this was ground that had already been gone over thoroughly and had bored him the first time around. He left the room and turned on a satellite sports programme next door.

  ‘No,’ Miriam insisted, ignoring his departure. ‘I’d have remembered. I mean, he knew her to chat to – like he knew Vivien Leigh and Margaret Lockwood. Poor Vivien came to the house several times before she died. She was always sweet to me. But that Toye creature wasn’t a friend or anything. Silly tarty woman, she’s become. Grotesque. Plastic surgery’s obscene.’

  ‘Oh I think she’s good!’ Jamie protested. ‘And she hasn’t had surgery. I read an interview. And it’s amazing how she’s got herself a second career so late on in life. She must be, what, sixty? Seventy? Grandpa’s age, at least.’

  ‘Eighty. She looks eighty,’ Miriam insisted.

  ‘Never. She’d pass for fifty-five in Mulroney Park. Her body’s amazing.’

  ‘You don’t watch that trash?’ his mother asked.

  ‘Every week,’ Jamie admitted. ‘I’m completely hooked.’

  ‘I’m going out for a bit,’ Alison murmured. ‘Come on dogs.’

  She pushed open a French window and Miriam’s nervy, overbred red setters slipped eagerly out with her, charging ahead in a clumsy race to pee on Francis’s mock-Georgian urns and scuff up the perfection of his daisy-less lawn. Sunday weighed heavily on her as it always did there. She longed for proper countryside, unmanicured, bleak and windy. She thought with envy of her grandfather. Having made his feelings towards his son-in-law amicably clear at an early stage in the courtship, he lived happily on in his studio and his flat, spared these stifling weekends at his daughter’s bogus manor, as if they were some meat from which he had a religious dispensation. Alison smiled to herself, thinking how little truck Sam would have with Francis and Miriam’s pretensions.

  The morning after the attack – she could not, would not think of it as rape – she was momentarily startled to find the huge man drinking tea in her kitchen. He was utterly calm and unsmiling, however, and his calm proved infectious.

  ‘Hope I didn’t wake you,’ he said. ‘I tend to get up with the sun.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Is that tea still drinkable?’

  As answer, he poured her a mugful. She cupped it in her hands and sipped. Then she found her hands were shaking and she had to set it down.

  ‘Hell,’ she said, mopping scalded fingers with a tea towel. He furrowed his brow in sympathy.

  ‘Bastards,’ he muttered. ‘They won’t come after you again, though.’

  ‘Maybe not,’ she said. ‘But they’ll probably go after someone else. I really should go to the police.’

  He sighed wearily.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You should.’

  ‘You’ll come with me? You saw them, after all.’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I said last night. I’ll make myself scarce. Thanks for the tea and everything, though.’ He pushed back his chair.

  ‘No,’ she said hurriedly, acutely aware now that the last thing she wanted was to be left alone, even in the banality of a weekday morning. ‘Don’t worry. I won’t. There must be hundreds of people who look like them in any case. But why don’t you want me to?’

  He kept on out into the hall.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Don’t go. Please. Stay for a bit.’

  ‘I can’t answer questions,’ he told her, suddenly angry, ‘and it’s not fair on you to expect you not to ask.’

  ‘That’s my problem. I won’t ask.’ She held open the kitchen door to him respectfully. ‘Please?’

  For what felt like a full minute, he seemed to read her face, registering what he saw there with minute alterations in his own, ironic expression.

  ‘Please,’ she said again and at last something in him relaxed and he walked past her back to the kitchen. His legs were so long that they stretched out right below the table when he sat and under the chairs on the other side. The leather on one of his boots had worn down so that a steel toecap shone dully through it.

  ‘Good,’ she told him, sitting too. ‘I’m Alison.’

  ‘I’m Sam,’ he said.

  ‘Suits you,’ she said.

  ‘So they tell me.’

  For the first time, he smiled. It was a lovely, sexy smile, that dimpled his cheeks and made little creases around his eyes. Alison had grown up surrounded by men with unkempt beards and long hair, so she remained vulnerable to the charms of naked male grins. She feared he had shaved with one of the blunt disposable razors she used on her legs and hoped it had not hurt him.

  ‘Do you want some breakfast?’ she added. ‘I can never face anything but there’s bread and so on.’

  ‘I’ll grab a bacon sandwich in a caff on my way in,’ he said. ‘I should go.’ He glanced at the kitchen clock. ‘I’m going to be late.’

  ‘Where are you working? Sorry. That’s a question, isn’t it?’

  ‘The new hospital,’ he said. ‘Where the glue factory used to be.’

  ‘I should leave too,’ she told him. ‘We can go together.’

  ‘You’ll be all right going out?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she admitted. ‘But I’d rather be in the office than out here on my own. I can get a taxi home if I’m going to be late. And I’ve too many things to get done today. I’ll go to pieces later, when there’s time. It’s okay. That’s a joke. Here, take the spare key,’ she said impulsively. ‘I often have to work late and I don’t want you waiting out there on that bench.’

  He took the key and looked at it in the palm of his hand, puzzled.

  ‘Are you sure you know what you’re doing here?’ he asked.

  ‘Not really.’ She reached for her bag of still unread manuscript. ‘But it feels right.’

  ‘But you don’t know me or anything about me.’

  ‘You’re Sam. I trust you.’

 
; ‘I’ve already got a place to live at the hostel.’

  ‘But do you like it there?’

  Sam paused a moment, then snorted.

  ‘It’s bloody horrible. Sarajevo under siege.’

  ‘So stay here. There’s nothing worth stealing anyway, I’ve been burgled so often. Not that I think you would.’

  ‘I wouldn’t. But still …’ He hesitated.

  ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Or we’ll both be late.’

  As they parted company outside the tube station, he plucked, quite unselfconsciously, at her jacket sleeve, holding her back by him.

  ‘I might not come back tonight,’ he said. ‘It’s … I … I can’t explain but –’

  ‘It’s all right,’ she assured him, light-headed from risk and an empty stomach. ‘Keep the key in case.’

  But he had come back. And the night after that. He came home reddish-grey with building dust, leaving a faint tang of sweat behind him in the kitchen while he paused for a cup of tea before taking a shower and falling into a deep sleep in a chair or on the sofa. He usually woke again after a couple of hours, half-way through the evening. He shaved with a noisy, battery-powered razor he carried in one of the deep pockets of his coat. Apart from the odd finger-print, he moved through her small household leaving remarkably few traces, fastidious as a large but graceful cat, comforting, in his strongly felt presence, as a dog.

  ‘But he’s a man!’ the Cynthia within said when she caught her mind tidying him away in this emasculating fashion. ‘He must have appetites, needs. He’ll soon start making demands.’ But Sam seemed more self-contained and less demanding than any man or woman she had ever met. He let slip certain pieces of information. He had a savings account where he stored his wages for safekeeping. He owned no clothes other than the ones he stood up in and a second set of shirt, socks and underwear, which he carried screwed up in another pocket of his coat. A precious spare pair of jeans was retrieved from the hostel. He had a blue shirt and a red one, and was scrupulous in washing each set of clothes with a bar of soap on the night he took it off. Alison envied him the simplicity of this system, being tyrannised herself by a large wardrobe, much of it bought for momentary psychological comfort rather than long-term physical necessity, and much of it deemed unwearable. He asked her no questions about herself, which was strangely liberating, allowing her to exist for him just as she appeared, there, then, simply. He was keenly aware of his surroundings, however, and openly curious about things he found lying about the house. Books, mainly, and house-plants and compact discs. He regularly listened to whatever disc she left in the player, content to play it over and over until she changed it. And she knew he had occasionally looked at the manuscripts she brought home because, turning their pages at her office desk, she had found signs of his work-dusty touch on their pages.