by Patrick Gale
‘Hi,’ she said. ‘I’m back in the land of the living. How are things? Did you sort out the lease problem?’
‘Nope.’ Sandy’s tone was cheerful but resigned to the worst. ‘And the council turned down our appeal against the grant cut. We’ve got until Friday, then we’re out.’
‘But can’t you run it from home? As a temporary measure?’
‘In theory, yes, of course. It’s my home after all. But the girls have been having kitchen table conferences behind my back and they’ve all voted to move out if the helpline moves in. I need their rent, Alison. I dunno. Maybe I’ve done enough now. Maybe it’s someone else’s turn.’
Alison pushed the jacket proof to one side and brought out the notebook she had been scribbling in on her way to the office.
‘Don’t scream at me,’ she began, ‘but I think I might have a solution.’
‘You’ve found us a squat?’
‘Not exactly.’
‘Is it legal?’
‘Perfectly. There’s a peppercorn rent. There’s even a garden. And there’s all the space you need to go on with your idea of a drop-in centre. Only … Sandy what do you think about a kind of holiday place for people affected by the virus? Not just PWAs, but everybody. Doctors. Nurses. Carers. Sisters.’
There was a pause as Sandy took this in.
‘I think it sounds suspiciously wonderful. What’s the catch?’
‘Well the helpline wouldn’t be a problem, but it might be a bit remote for people to just drop in. I think they’d have to come and stay.’
Alison made more calls; to her grandfather, to the bank, to her building society, to the Rexbridge Area Health Authority. Still on a roll, she dialled a number from memory, hoping to catch Sam at the flat. A stranger answered, a man.
‘Hello?’
‘Oh. Hello.’
‘Sophie?’
‘Er. No. It’s Alison. I think I must have the wrong number.’ Suddenly the man was apologetic.
‘Oh. No. You haven’t. He’s gone out for a moment. Sorry. I only answered because I’m expecting a call from my secretary. I’m just measuring up for the details.’
‘Sorry. I don’t quite understand.’
‘Colin Liddell. Tuckett and Hood estate agents?’
‘Oh. Oh I see. Well, when he gets back, could you tell him Alison rang and she’s coming over right away?’
‘Of course. He shouldn’t be long. I’ll tell him.’
She threw a few things she wanted back in her bag, including the notepad which she had now covered with telephone numbers, facts and figures.
‘You aren’t going out already?’ her secretary asked.
‘Yes, Toby. I am.’
‘But you’ve a meeting with Cynthia at twelve.’
‘Well you should have done your job and reminded me about it before, shouldn’t you? I can’t think of everything. You’ll just have to make my excuses and rejig it for tomorrow. I’ll be back tomorrow. Say I’m wild with grief. And while you’re at it, pull your finger out and answer some letters for me. That’s what you’re paid for. I’ve made piles; yesses on the right, noes on the left. And check that jacket proof through for me. It should have been faxed back last week. It’s not good enough, Toby.’
‘Sorry, Alison. Is everything else … all right?’
‘Yes, thank you,’ she said firmly. ‘It’s all lovely. I just have to go out.’
She made her taxi driver take the fast route, plunging down south of the river early on rather than trailing along the Embankment through Westminster. She tipped him precisely and waited for every penny of her change; she was about to join Sandy on a permanent economy drive. She ran to the bank of doorbells and Sam buzzed her in. There was a handful of post in the hall addressed to Jamie which he had ignored. She snatched it up and threw herself up the stairs two at a time. Arriving, breathless, at the open door, she walked in to find Sam alone again, packing a suitcase.
‘Hi,’ he said, still packing.
‘Hi.’ She put the letters on the kitchen worktop. ‘You got my message.’
‘Yes.’
‘Are you letting this out?’
‘Selling it.’
This was more than she had expected. Her mind was racing with possibilities. Her first thought, when she heard the estate agent’s voice, was that he had found someone new. It was right that he should, of course. He would have to, sooner or later, she supposed. Some man or some woman. But the brief misconception had rattled her. And now the flat. She understood his wish to sell it, it was so irredeemably Jamie’s, and the proceeds from the sale would change his life entirely. It was only that his action seemed abrupt, even dishonouring. She sat on the sofa, watching the man who had come to her with only two shirts in his possession, carefully fold away a whole colourful heap of clothes.
‘What’s wrong?’ he asked, sensing her watching him.
‘I – Where are you going, Sam?’
‘I had a long talk with Edward. I’ve decided to go back home. To Plymouth. I need to see my mum, my brother, sort things out, lay a few ghosts. Maybe there’ll be some work for me. I dunno. I might end up renting a place out in the country somewhere.’ He sighed. ‘You lot have given me a taste for that now. It feels wrong being back in a city.’
‘Don’t go, Sam.’
‘What?’
‘I don’t want you to go.’
‘Oh. Well.’ He shrugged. ‘I’m sorry. I don’t want this flat, Alison. I never wanted it. You can have the money. Give it to your precious helpline or something.’
‘Didn’t you want to stay on with us?’
‘Yes. Sure I did. But you’ve got your life to lead and so’s Edward. We can’t all just sit around missing Jamie.’
‘Who says we’d sit around?’
‘Well, I’d sit around. It was different when Jamie was down there. Now, well, I feel like a bit of a third leg. Edward’s got work that’s always taking him away. You’ve got your job up here. I’d go out of my box down there on my own with nothing to do.’
She was mad to have come here. Hearing the measured coolness of his words, watching him going about his business, reawakened the inappropriate anger she had felt in the days before the funeral. He had known about her fainting and cutting herself, how could he not with a lachrymose Miriam on the premises, yet he had said nothing. If anything, he had seemed resolutely colder towards her, not touching her, not meeting her eye, saying nothing more than occasion demanded of him. She had rushed over to see him on nothing more than the wings of infatuation, eagerly laying herself open to abuse. She would have to tell Sandy, she realised now, to make her feelings for him a thing apart from herself, something they could pick over and be appalled and eventually amused at. Anger at him and at herself coloured her voice with a tremble as she said. ‘I’m not sure I’ve got a job any more.’
He left the suitcase, turning to her, all attention now. He cared on some level, at least.
‘They haven’t sacked you?’
‘No. And I haven’t handed in my notice. But I might later on today or tomorrow. Oh Sam, listen. Please listen. I –’
‘Hey. Calm down.’ He chuckled, briefly his old self. He sat on the other end of the sofa, up on the arm, his big shoeless feet pressing into the cushions. ‘There,’ he said, holding wide his palms, ‘I’m listening.’
‘A respite centre,’ she said, uncertain how to start, so plunging straight to the heart of her idea. She would let this alone sway or lose him – if he was interested in the project she knew he could make a valuable contribution and her own untrustworthy feelings would simply have to be subordinated to the common good. ‘An AIDS and HIV respite centre,’ she said. ‘We turn The Roundel into one. Not a hospice. We can’t provide any medical care or drugs or anything, but we can have people to stay when they need a break and can’t face an ordinary hotel full of healthy people and noisy children.’
‘How do you pay for it?’
‘I made a few calls, just theoretical ones, t
o see how people would react to it in principle, and I reckon we could persuade local health authorities to pay for people from their area to travel down and pay for their board and lodging. We’d have to get care workers to make referrals and so on. I mean the whole thing obviously needs looking into closely, but I think it could work. Sandy’s always been saying the helpline could do more. Well now it can. We can base the helpline there-they’re about to lose their space in any case.’
‘Is that it?’
‘That’s it.’
He thought for a moment.
‘Jamie was very happy there. Before he got sick, I mean. He said it helped him. Old Eds is always saying he thinks it’s a healing place.’ He paused, sighed. ‘I think it’s a good idea. But why do you need to tell me? Is it the flat? I’ve already said you can have the money. It would help with all the improvements you’d have to make; new bathrooms and stuff.’
‘Sam. Sam! It’s you. We need you. I’d need your help.’ Why was she persuading him? Had she no pride? Evidently not. ‘You know the house,’ she went on. ‘You know about building.’
‘I’m not an architect.’
‘So? We get an architect if we need one. And we’ll have to talk to planners too, over change of use and so on. But you can build. You could choose your own workmen and oversee the work. And then, if you were happy to, you could stay on and help in other ways. Jesus, you’ve just had more experience than most volunteers ever get.’
‘I’m not sure I could go through all that again. Even with strangers.’
‘But you’d help with the building?’
‘I dunno.’
He stood, restless, nervously shaking out his long limbs as he walked over to the window and its view of the grey-brown river. She jumped up to follow him.
‘Please,’ she said, reaching up to touch his shoulder. ‘Having you would mean more than having the money.’
‘Well that’s a lie for a start,’ he laughed bitterly.
‘Okay. So we’ll need every pound we can beg and borrow. But the sentiment’s true. We’ll need you too. Please, Sam.’ She took a deep breath. ‘This has nothing to do with what happened on my birthday. I promise. It’s because you’re family.’
He sighed wearily, staring at the river.
‘I’ll help you,’ he said, ‘but only if you take some of the money from the flat as well.’
‘Oh Sam.’ She hugged him hard, her face in his chest. ‘Oh. Oh I’m so glad. You’re family now. You really are. You can’t go!’ She laughed, close to tears in her relief. Then she realised he was holding her as hard as she was holding him. She leant back in his arms to look up at him. ‘Thank you,’ she said.
‘If you’re going to leave your job,’ he said, rocking her slightly, ‘maybe now is the time for you to have a baby.’
She gasped, on the brink of indignation, then perceived that, from some old-fashioned delicacy, Miriam had refrained from even mentioning the fainting. Relieved that his silence had not been coldness, she kept her counsel and forced hilarity.
‘That was what Jamie kept on saying!’ she exclaimed. ‘He even suggested you could be the father, I really didn’t know what to –’
‘It’s okay,’ he said, still holding her. ‘He was on and on at me about it too. Sometimes it got me so pissed off I was tempted to call his bluff, you know? Threaten to move into your room just to see what he’d do. After … you know. After your birthday, I even thought he knew what had happened, as if he’d set the whole thing up.’
She laughed, then bit her lip, remembering a conversation with Jamie in the garden and feeling tearful at the upsurge of emotions she had begun to tamp down.
‘He was very conventional, in his way,’ she stammered. ‘Roses round the door, babies in the nursery. If he’d been my sister, he’d have been insufferable. Dear Jamie. I miss him so much it’s like a physical pain. I keep wanting to ring him up.’
‘I dreamed I did,’ he said, slipping his arms down to hold her around the small of her back, gazing sideways at the river again. ‘At least, I dreamed he called me. He was banging on and on – you know how he did.’
‘I know.’ She knew. She knew too that he was utterly oblivious to the effect he had on her. She knew he managed to see her ‘birthday treat’ purely in terms of his having taken advantage, with no breath of encouragement from her.
‘And then he said he had to go and hung up, and I realised I’d forgotten to ask what his new number was. It’s going to take so much time,’ he went on. ‘I can’t imagine how much.’
‘But it’s okay,’ she said, hoping she did not sound bitter. ‘You’ll survive.’
‘You too,’ he said. ‘With a little help from your friends.’
He kissed her once, on the lips, before releasing her. It was not a brother’s kiss but neither was it that of a lover; it was more like the kiss of a new, interested acquaintance.
‘I’ll drive down to Plymouth this afternoon,’ he said. ‘I have to. I’ve got things I never finished down there.’
‘But you’ll come back?’
‘I promise,’ he said. ‘Maybe even before the end of the week. For all I know they’ll have moved away somewhere and I won’t be able to find them.’
She shivered, then pulled on an old jersey of Jamie’s. It smelled faintly of him; the sweet, slightly buttery smell he gave off when he was hot. She would take it away with her to wear in bed. She pulled her feet up on to the sofa cushions and hugged herself. Watching Sam finish packing, she knew she was probably allowing her mind to chase mere possibilities down a path to certain pain, but what else could she do? As she had insisted earlier, he was family now. As for the child she was carrying within her, she had come with half a mind to tell him about it – partly because she felt he had a right to know, partly because it might have proved a means of holding him by her, however low. She knew now she would never tell him. If he stayed he would stay for her, not out of a misplaced sense of duty that would only sour his feelings towards her. For the child, she could pretend its father was in San Francisco; a lie that lay, after all, a hair’s breadth from probability. Many people had seen her leave Sandy’s party with – what was his name? – with Bruce. None of them knew him, none of them were to know she had not carried on seeing him for a while …
An unfamiliar warmth began to well up inside her; a painless contraction of excitement. In deciding not to tell him she had at last smothered the Good Child within. She had achieved a pleasure, a secret treasure, entirely for herself. She might tell her conscience she was keeping silent because it was unfair to burden Sam and unfair to their unborn child to foist an unwilling father on it, but her primary impulse was richly, giddily self-serving.
Sam looked up from his shirt-folding, saw her face and smiled hesitantly. She sensed with a start that she had been sitting there beaming to herself like a crazy woman. She recalled that she still had a series of HIV tests to take, and held the thought as her anchor on unromantic reality.
62
The mezzo singing Keziah began a slow dance across the front of the stage in front of Job’s throne.
‘The lord taketh and he giveth away,’ she sang. ‘Blessed be the name of the Lord.’
The choreographer had cleverly given her over-head handclaps to point up the increasingly frenetic cross-rhythms of the finale.
Leaning on the rail at the front of the dress circle, Edward marvelled that she could produce such a bell-like tone while clapping and actually dance rather well at the same time. Like most of the younger generation of singers, she seemed to have been taking acting lessons too; something considered way above and beyond the call of duty among the student singers who had first performed the piece.
The soprano Jemima began to mimic Keziah’s movements precisely. ‘He wounds but he binds up,’ she sang. ‘He smites but his hands heal.’
Then the contralto joined them. Edward had met her in the coffee break earlier. She was a young black American. Elegant and thin – something contraltos
never were in his day – her voice was so exciting, even when she was merely speaking, that he found himself wishing there had been time to rewrite her meagre role. This would have been impossible, of course, now that Thomas was no longer around to expand the libretto. Watching her glide across the stage, kicking out the golden fabric of her costume and upstaging the other two with imperious hand-claps that must have been deafening at close range, he wondered whether she would be available to sing the Chicago première of his Yeats setting in place of the counter tenor. Jamie would have appreciated her, he knew. She had the nebulous but instantly recognisable quality he had called camp.
He glanced at his watch. Sandy was late. Suddenly he realised the music had stopped and everyone was looking up at him.
‘Edward?’ the conductor was calling. ‘Was the balance any better that time?’
‘Much,’ Edward called back, miming a hand-clap over his head then making a thumb’s up sign before sitting back down. The three daughters now took a rest so the orchestra could run back over the fiendish passage during one of Job’s curses. The baritone, not one of Edward’s favourites, stood on the lip of the stage, arms folded.
‘Let the stars of his dawn be dark,’ he sang, saving his voice on the high A. ‘Let it hope for light but have none, nor see the eyelids of the morning; because it did not shut the doors of my mother’s womb nor hide trouble from my eyes!’
The baritone broke off, dragging the orchestra with him, troubled by a disturbance at one of the doors in the stalls as some fool made an noisy entrance. Edward squinted downstairs into the gloom and recognised Sandy, following a small woman in a headscarf and dark glasses. He waved to her to come upstairs and the two women disappeared back through the door.
‘From the top again, please, Anthony,’ the conductor called, pointedly adding, ‘Quiet please, everyone. Time is short. The dress has to start at two-thirty sharp.’
He had brought Job out of hiding and made Alison a present of it. This was partly inspired by his conversation with Sam in the sickroom back in the autumn, partly by Alison’s extraordinary decision to jack in her career in order, as she put it, to ‘do something useful’. All the royalties from its performances around the world and its imminent recording were to be hers and Sandy’s, to spend on The Roundel as they saw fit.