by Patrick Gale
‘The record company will be thrilled,’ she pointed out drily.
‘Really? Yes. I suppose they will. Do you think I come out of it badly?’
Alison picked the paper up again and glanced at the relevant paragraphs.
‘No,’ she said. ‘Sadly but not badly. Except for the nanny bit, but everyone will forgive you that as it’s a period detail.’
‘Well that bit’s all exaggerated. Some friend of Miriam’s probably told her something. Miriam’s now saying, “But how could she? All the nannies were such angels!”’
He laughed at his own impersonation. Alison poured them both more coffee. She had already drunk too much. She could feel her hands wanting to shake. She forced herself to confront the unpalatable.
‘Were you terribly hurt when it finished?’ she said. ‘She doesn’t give any details here.’
He nodded and for a moment she thought he was not going to reply, then he sighed.
‘I’d never been rejected before. Sally dying was pure loss. Senseless and altogether different. This was calculated. First rejection is hard at any age. And it was such a very physical thing. I think those always end in anger more than sorrow. The scales really do fall from your eyes and you wonder what on earth you saw in the person, and how you could possibly have degraded yourself so in front of others.’
‘What did you say in the last letter? They don’t quote it.’
‘The last letter?’
‘Yes. She says – Where is it?’ Alison scanned the newsprint. ‘Yes. She says “His last letter to her was among the bitterest she would ever receive …”’
He furrowed his brow, touched his temple.
‘God. I can’t remember. It was so long ago. Probably something very vindictive. I knew all her weak points by then.’
They sat for a while in thoughtful silence, listening to the lazy courtship of pigeons on The Roundel’s roof. Then the telephone rang again, only this time it was hers.
‘Hell,’ she said, getting up. ‘Now she’s probably ringing to see whose side I’m going to be on.’
‘Don’t answer,’ he suggested. ‘Sometimes I don’t answer for hours on end. I put a cushion over it.’
‘I know,’ she said firmly, patting his shoulder as she headed back to the house and feeling her anger at him threaten to rise again. ‘It can be extremely irritating.’
The hall floor was cold under her feet.
‘I’m coming, I’m coming,’ she grumbled and snatched up the receiver, answering far more brusquely than she had intended. ‘Yes? Hello?’
There was a static-filled pause, announcing a very long distance call, then a woman’s voice, smoky, oddly familiar, asked, ‘Now who’s that?’
The accent was English but wore signs of American influence, like a deep, creasing tan.
‘It’s Alison,’ Alison said. ‘Alison Pepper.’
‘Ah,’ said the voice, then ‘Ah!’ with fuller understanding. ‘Are you a new wife, then, or what?’
‘I’m sorry?’ Alison laughed at the improbability of it.
‘Is it possible for me to talk to Teddy?’
‘Teddy?’
‘Edward, then. I want to talk to Edward Pepper. May I?’
‘But of course. I’m so sorry. You’ve come in on a different line. He’s in the garden. Hang on. Who should I say is calling?’
‘Just tell him Myra.’
‘Oh,’ Alison said sheepishly. ‘Right!’
The call might as well have come from her dead grandmother it startled her so. She found herself setting down the receiver very carefully so as not to cause a clunk in the famously bejewelled ear. She stood staring at the phone for a second or two, debating whether to break off the connection in a feeble attempt to abort whatever process might be about to start. Then she remembered that her family’s involvement with Myra Toye was now being read about in hairdressers’ across the country. Again she thought of floods and their inexorability.
Her grandfather seemed equally shocked at the news and began to dither until she reminded him it was a call from the depths of the Californian night. She resisted the temptation to eavesdrop on such a topical reunion and flopped back into her chair pretending to read a scathing review of a new Domina Feraldi play. He returned very quickly, avoiding her impudently enquiring gaze, and began to read as well. When he broke the silence, it was without looking up from the article before him.
‘I hung up,’ he said. ‘I didn’t speak to her. If she calls again, which I don’t suppose she will, but if she should, could you say I’m away or something?’
‘Yes,’ she promised him, confused and strangely disappointed. ‘Of course I will.’
It was rare for him to show any Germanic severity en famille, but when he did, as now, it commanded her immediate respect, because it was in such contrast to his usual manner.
The subject of the affair was indefinitely closed between them. The time when she might have protested against his destruction of her last veil of innocence was past. She knew he expected her not to tell her mother about the call, and pledged him her silent allegiance, marvelling, as she did so, at the capacity of the human mind to feel pain decades after a wound’s infliction. At least, when he had dishonoured Sally’s memory, it was not for some casual flirtation. At least it was for something that had made him suffer. At least, in the cheapest sense, he had not got away with it.
43
Jamie’s existence had been transformed. From the first tentative admission that he was in love, he felt as though an opaque layer had been peeled away, leaving its colours brighter, its every sensation more acute. Overnight his life fell into two discrete sections; the time before and the time since, and he was enabled to see now that the contentment he had felt before was no more than a pleasure in sustained control and stasis, as far removed from the real happiness he felt now as a boiled sweet from a blood orange. Lying awake at night in Sam’s arms – for however happy, his sleep remained fitful – he felt the slow, warm fall and rise of the other’s chest against his cheek and dared to register relief.
Beginning a slow colonisation of Jamie’s flat and possessions, Sam had begun to investigate seams of Jamie’s record collection, long neglected since the advent of compact discs, and had unearthed an album of Billie Holiday songs. He had only played it once before, declaring her voice ‘miserable as fuck’ and moving on to other things. Jamie kept returning to it, however, charmed afresh, despite the embarrassment of not remembering who the Julian was who had so keenly inscribed the sleeve in making the record a present. One song in particular began to speak to him, its lyrics – however cynically Holiday sang them – falling on his ear refreshed with new relevance. He found it pestering him at odd times of day.
‘Just in time,’ he sang in his mind, washing out the bath or riding the glass lift to a meeting at Lloyd’s, ‘I found you just in time.’
Once, after Sam had rung him at work from a call box to clarify some detail of their plans for the evening, his secretary had caught him humming the old melody out loud as he scanned the figures on his monitor. Where he would once have glowered the mocking smile off her face, he now found he could disarm her mockery by smiling easily back. She had a lover too. Not a builder, but a working man, a carpenter. She had shyly confessed over one too many birthday drinks, ‘My dad thinks I should aim higher now that I work here. But it’s no good, Jamie. I like the feel of his hands.’
The feel of his hands, Jamie thought, tossing his magazine back on to the waiting room table and reaching instead for the Financial Times. He made a dim attempt to read a report on the performance of a Swiss coffee and chocolate giant Francis had been recommending, then tried instead to summon up the feel of Sam’s hands, their cuts, their dusty callouses, the unexpected softness of their palms as they brushed across his armpits or the nape of his neck, but all he could summon up was dread. Suddenly the receptionist was at his side, taking away his emptied coffee cup.
‘Mr Pepper. Mr Pepper? Dr Penney will se
e you now.’
Jamie was never ill. It was something doctors always commented on, glancing over his notes. Once the usual childhood ailments and teenage vaccinations were out of the way, his only brushes with medicine had been for accidental damage – concussion after falling off his bicycle, a tetanus injection and stitches after an undramatic but messy brush with some barbed wire, and that nasty fracture sustained on a skiing holiday which had led to a short spell in a German hospital. He had colds like the next man, of course, hangovers, the rare crisis of food poisoning or ’flu, but he was never ill; not what he thought of as properly ill. He ate carefully, he took vitamins and he kept fit. This meant that the unease with which he faced his rare encounters with a doctor was accompanied by an inappropriate excitement at the novelty of the experience.
Not only had he found Sam just in time, he had dared, like a fool, to lower his guard, having found him, and feel safe, immune to his old bachelor fears. The mark might have been there for weeks, for all he knew. In his new reassurance, he had stopped his former obsessive monitoring of skin tone and weight gain. He only found the thing because he had caught athlete’s foot after the two of them had been swimming in a public baths one weekend. Upending one foot and then the other to shake fungicide over them, he found a mark, below his toes, slightly larger than a fifty pence piece, raised a little above the surrounding skin, the colour of a recent blackberry stain. He could not tell if the soreness was caused by the athlete’s foot which had made some of the skin between his toes crack. He tried to hide it from Sam but found he couldn’t and thrust it out for his inspection in bed one evening.
‘Was that there before?’ he asked.
‘Course,’ Sam said. ‘It’s just a mole.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Well I think it was there before. I quite like it.’
Jamie watched in alarm as Sam lowered his bristled chin to kiss the thing. While content to use condoms at Jamie’s insistence, he seemed utterly without anxiety, either from ignorance or bravado. Jamie tried to take shelter beneath his lover’s confidence but his own fear leaked through and chilled him by degrees.
‘If you’re so worried, take it to a doctor,’ Sam said.
‘But I’m never ill.’
‘So? You’re not ill now. But go if it makes you stop worrying. I hate you like this.’
Sam made it sound so simple, but to Jamie the very act of taking the blemish to someone qualified to pronounce on it gave his fear a fleshly dimension he would not countenance.
Then Fate took the initiative out of his hands. The syndicate was changing its employees’ private health insurance arrangements and all personnel were required to have a health check with a doctor approved by the insurers – hence his visit to Dr Penney. This was, they had all been assured, purely a formality. Steeling himself, Jamie called at Dr Penney’s well-appointed consulting rooms one lunch hour, allowed the first part of the examination to run its unruffled course then pulled off shoe and sock and asked, ‘Should I be worried about this?’
Dr Penney frowned and prodded.
‘Tender?’ he asked.
‘Yes. Rather.’
‘And it’s new?’
‘Yes.’
‘Mmm. It’s only a mole but it’s rather big. Probably nothing to worry about, but I think we should whisk it off just the same. Lie on the couch over there.’
And he and his nurse had removed the mole then and there under local anaesthetic, leaving Jamie with a neat row of stitches, a temporary limp and a tremendous sense of relief.
‘Berk,’ Sam jeered kindly when Jamie finally spoke the thought that had been going through his mind for weeks. ‘Told you it was nothing. Now peel us another orange.’
Only days later, Dr Penney had telephoned the office to ask him to call back, ‘on a matter of some urgency’.
‘How’re the stitches?’ he asked, waving Jamie into his seat. He was a smartly dressed, irredeemably plain man and, Jamie thought, wryly, rather young to have power over life and death. He probably specialised in health insurance work because it paid well, was impersonal and strictly limited in the strains it could place upon his medical knowledge and social inhibitions.
‘Fine,’ Jamie told him. ‘A bit sore, but they’re holding. I’ve kept them out of water, like you said. I just wash round them with a flannel.’
‘Good. Good.’ Dr Penney opened a file then closed it again, as though fearful of revealing a second too early what lay hidden there. He evidently felt extremely uncomfortable about what he was about to say.
‘Do you have a regular GP? I see these notes date from when you were still at school.’
‘Not really. I’m never ill,’ Jamie said.
‘So I see. Right. Good. Well. The prognosis on the mole we removed was fine. Quite benign but probably just as well that we took it off, since it was getting large and causing you discomfort.’ Dr Penney tidied one of his firmly ironed cuffs, patting the gold link, then met Jamie’s eye again.
‘Yes?’ Jamie prompted him.
‘But there’s other news that’s less good, I’m afraid.’
‘Ah.’
‘I’m afraid I’ll have to refuse you for the health insurance and I don’t think you’ll be covered any longer by the former policy except for accidents and routine operations. Not for sickness.’
Jamie’s mouth ran suddenly dry.
‘Why not?’ he croaked, knowing, as he asked, what he was about to hear, he had rehearsed the scene so often during his wakeful nights.
‘Your blood showed evidence of a contact with the HIV virus. Now this doesn’t mean you’re sick. It doesn’t even mean you have AIDS. As yet we know very little. There are no dangerous symptoms or anything. This simply means you’ve been in contact –’
‘Please,’ Jamie broke in, standing. ‘Spare me the spiel.’
‘I think you should speak to a counsellor. I can refer you –’
‘Just … Just spell it out for me. Just once,’ Jamie insisted. ‘I’m HIV positive, aren’t I?’
‘Yes.’
‘Which means, insofar as medicine has anything but deaths to go by, that at some stage, in the near or distant future, barring a miracle, I’ll develop AIDS.’
‘Not necessarily.’
‘Oh come on! Probable. Say it’s probable.’
Jamie pushed back his chair impatiently. Dr Penney stood too now, backing off slightly behind his desk, as though fearing Jamie might be about to hit him. Or bite him.
‘Are you married?’ Jamie asked him.
‘Yes,’ the doctor blurted.
‘Children?’
‘Two. Boy and a girl.’ Dr Penney gestured spasmodically at a silver frame on a corner of his desk.
‘Then I suspect,’ Jamie told him, ‘that I may be in a position to know far more about this subject than you.’
And he left.
He had not been back at his desk an hour – plunging with automatic efficiency into the streams of figures and risk appraisals – when Nick Godfreys arrived at his elbow asking if he might have a word in private. In his inner sanctum, which was furnished like a bright twelve-year-old’s idea of how a senior executive’s office should be, he assumed a sickening impersonation of man-to-manliness.
‘Brian Penney just called me, Jamie,’ he said, swivelling his chair. ‘I can’t say how sorry I am.’
‘He told you?’ Jamie felt suddenly clear-headed with rage.
‘He was right to. As our medical adviser, he has to apprise me of anything that might endanger my staff. Look, I’m afraid we’ll have to let you go. Obviously there’s no need to work out your notice. You’ll have the rest of this year’s salary in full. And, er, I’ll tell the others you’ve been headhunted.’
‘Well thanks, Nick. That’s big of you.’
‘The least we can do,’ Godfreys went on, impervious to the sarcasm. He shook his head, phonily rueful. ‘I can’t say how sorry I am. You’ve done some great work. We’ll miss you. You’ll be in my pray
ers.’
‘That’s it?’ Jamie asked. ‘I just stop. Now?’
Godfreys lowered his voice as though discreetly pointing out an unzipped trouser fly.
‘I think it would be best,’ he said.
Jamie left immediately, with no goodbyes and no explanations. There was nothing of his to clear from his desk that could not be slipped into his jacket pockets – a few pens, a chic calculator Miriam had given him as a starting-work present. It was mid-afternoon, so he had the unwonted experience of being able to sit on the train home. He held himself tightly in check, his mind watchfully numb, until he was able to lean the door to the flat firmly closed behind him. He slipped off his jacket then wandered across the flat removing tie, shirt, shoes, trousers, letting them lie where they fell, until, naked, he dropped heavily on to his bed and blocked out the daylight with the duvet and an armful of pillow.
He had never known the hard anguish of bereavement, but he cried now as for a friend’s death. He shook with anger at the injustice of it all, moaned into the mattress, fell asleep, exhausted, the sheet below his face drenched with brine and snot, only to wake again, remember why he was there and begin to cry afresh. Trauma worked on him like a drug: the afternoon and early evening dissolved in spasms of shocked self-pity and merciful blanks of temporary obliteration.
When Sam arrived, grimy from work, and let himself in with the key he had only held for three weeks or so, he saw the discarded clothes and Jamie’s sleeping form outlined by the bedding. He took a quick shower then slid into bed as well. Expecting a sleepily loving embrace, he found himself tugged instead into a kind of battle as Jamie, eyes half-glued with congealing tears, incoherently explained the situation. Desperate, confused, Jamie lashed out at him, tried to drive him away, with all the querulous urgency of a parent persuading a playful child away from a precipice.
‘This isn’t your problem,’ he kept saying. ‘There’s no need to get involved. Just clear out. I don’t need you. You’re probably still fine. Just back out now. Go. Fuck off. It’s not your problem.’