‘An oddity? Why?’
‘Because you told me your age without a fuss. Most women make dramas or go all coy and stupid.’.
‘Men do that too. Peter’s eight years older than I am and he gets livid if people find out.’
‘Peter?’
‘My husband.’
There was a little silence and she felt his hand on her arm slacken its grip, and she thought – that’s it, he’s remembered who he is and who I am and we’ve stopped being just ourselves and started to be other people’s property again; and that thought made her angry, and she felt her cheeks redden a little.
‘He’s often stupid like that,’ she said, and tilted her chin challengingly, as if she was daring him to be disgusted by her disloyalty. ‘As if it mattered how old people are.’
‘Yes,’ he said, and stared down at her, and she watched his gaze move across her face, from her hairline, down the shape of her jaw to her chin, up to her mouth, her nose and finally to her eyes, and as their gaze met the redness in her cheeks rose, but it wasn’t anger this time.
‘This is bloody mad,’ Ben said suddenly, very loudly, and let go of her arm. ‘Up all night working and now standing here talking nonsense instead of getting ourselves wrapped round some coffee. We’d better go.’
‘Yes,’ she said, and as he let go of her arm, began to pull her coat on more tidily, fiddling with the buttons busily, again needing not to look at him. ‘I’ll go ahead, shall I? I want to get a shower, and I can in the physio’s room. It should be unlocked by now.’
He was beside his own locker now, hanging up his white coat, pulling out his jacket, and he didn’t look round as he spoke.
‘Yes, fine. See you in the canteen … I won’t be long.’ And she turned and almost ran out of the laboratories and into the misty dampness of the morning air.
She felt extraordinary: light-headed and yet very alert, shaking as though she’d just been involved in some major physical exertion, like running up several flights of stairs, but at the same time both alarmed and elated. It was very strange, and she stopped running and stood still in the middle of the almost empty car park and stared up at the sky, taking deep breaths of the raw air to calm herself, to bring a sense of immediacy back into her body which felt like someone else’s, so odd were the mixed sensations. She concentrated her mind on the sky, making a powerful effort to get rid of her confusing feelings, and gazed at the wide expanse fringed with the dark shapes of the hospital’s scattered buildings. It was filled with grey rags of cloud moving swiftly against a darker greyness, and the last few leaves on the trees that edged the car park fluttered a little forlornly as the wind sliced through the tracery of naked branches. The feeling of being someone else, of inhabiting a strange body far from going away became more intense, and she stared harder at the moving clouds, still concentrating, and then suddenly the clouds seemed to stop moving; it was the ground she was standing on that was shifting, rushing away beneath her feet so fast that it made her giddy, and she swayed a little and almost fell, putting her hands out in front of her to hold herself still in a madly spinning world – and then he was there. He must have followed her more closely than she had expected him to, and been walking across the car park behind her, and now he held on to her so tightly that his fingers hurt her shoulders as she swayed in the chill morning air and tried to keep her balance.
‘Here, you really are tired, aren’t you? You’d better take the rest of the day off, Jessie. I shouldn’t have let you stay so late … I’m sorry.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said. ‘It’s just … I was stupid. I was staring at the sky. It made me feel giddy. I’ll be fine. A bit of breakfast and I’ll be fine.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he said again, and she shook her head at him. It was fading now, the sense of confusion, the light-headedness. The world was again a stable solid place, not a ball spinning crazily, threatening to hurl her off into space.
‘Not your fault. Come on. Breakfast.’
And he nodded, and tucked his hand into the crook of her elbow and half-led her, half-carried her towards the main block and the night staff canteen.
‘You can have your shower after you’ve been fed,’ he said as they pushed open the battered double plastic doors that led into the hospital via the Accident and Emergency Department. ‘Your blood sugar’s probably almost nil. I’m sure mine is. I lech after thick buttered toast and bacon as I’ve never leched before.’
‘Yes,’ she said, breathless with the speed of their progress. ‘And coffee and marmalade and orange juice and ….’
‘Then more toast and bacon. Come on. If we don’t eat soon, I shall start biting lumps out of the next person who passes us.’ And as one of the cleaners, a particularly large woman who waddled as she walked, passed them they both laughed, and at last she felt normal again. It was all right. She’d had a mad moment because she was tired, no more than that. Nothing special had happened between them. Nothing at all.
But though she kept telling herself that for the rest of that day, and for the days that followed, she didn’t believe it. And she didn’t really want to.
11
All the way up the motorway, Peter glowed with self-approval. When he’d left his hotel at six o’clock he’d already been pretty pleased with himself, bustling out of his room and down to the main lobby to chivvy the sleepy night receptionist to produce his bill, carefully checking it and querying dubious items, instead of just scribbling a cheque the way most people would at that hour of the morning, and then getting the car out of the car park and into the quiet street while it was still dark, but by the time he was really on his way he felt marvellous.
He’d shown her, that was the thing, he told himself over and over again as he threaded his way out of the tangle of streets round King’s Cross, where he had found a hotel that had managed to be smart and yet not exorbitant – not for him the fancier establishments around Oxford Street preferred by some of his more extravagant colleagues – and on his way westwards to the motorway; he’d shown her. She must have had a really dreadful night, fretting over him, knowing how angry he was, because he’d promised to come home last night, and instead he’d chosen, of his own free will, he’d chosen to stay in London another night.
‘I was asked to a rather high-level meeting, and then a party – a very select one,’ he’d tell her, and he rehearsed the scene in his mind’s eye, how he’d be sitting there at the breakfast table spruce and ready for a day’s work while she was still bleary eyed, perhaps even tear-stained from her lonely worrying night without him. ‘And I decided to go. You hadn’t seemed to care whether you were with me or not, so I thought – well, why not? She won’t mind if I stay away another night! Still, I came home early. Didn’t want to fret you too much, my dear. Wouldn’t do to upset you too much.’
Oh, he’d be magnanimous, affectionate, make her realize just how stupid she’d been not to go with him, to expose him to all those stupid men asking him where she was, giving him knowing winks when he said he’d decided to come on his own this year – oh, he’d make her realize, all right, but he’d be good about it.
That was the thing, to be good about it. And he let his mind slide agreeably further into the fantasy as he pushed through the heavier traffic going round Southampton and thickening as the darkness thinned in the eastern sky, and found himself seeing her throwing herself into his arms, crying on his neck, begging him to forgive her, promising never to let him go away without her again, promising to give up her stupid job – he might even have time to take her back to bed, just a half-hour quickie, that was all, before going to work – and he let his speed creep up a good ten miles past the speed limit at the thought. It was worth bending the law a little sometimes.
The house was very still as he turned the car into the drive and switched off the engine, and he got out and stood there, his case in his hand, listening. It was a quiet road, theirs – that was the way he liked to live, and he’d set out to find a house in a nice select
sort of avenue – and usually he could hear sounds from inside his own home when he stood in the drive; the distant clatter of dishes in the kitchen, say, or the remote wail of Radio Three (and usually it irritated him that she always had that on; it was almost as though she was sneering at him because he didn’t like that sort of music) but this morning there was nothing, and mentally he revised his scenario.
She wouldn’t be sitting alone and forlorn in the kitchen, as he’d seen her all the way home; she’d be in bed still, sleeping the exhausted sleep of someone who has lain awake for hours weeping, and only dropped off eventually as the dawn chorus began, and he started to whistle softly between his teeth, and dug from his pocket his front-door keys and went rattling along the path briskly to let himself in.
The chain was up inside the front door, and he frowned sharply, and looked at his watch. It was just eight o’clock; surely, surely she couldn’t have left for work already? It was crazy – she couldn’t have, not after worrying why he hadn’t come home last night at the time he said he would, not being able to find the hotel he was in – he’d deliberately not told her which it was, deliberately not phoned her himself – surely she couldn’t just have gone off to her damned job as usual?
He set his suitcase down on the doorstep and leaned his thumb on the bell, listening to it pealing tinnily inside the empty house, and knowing there was no one there to answer, but wanting to display his right to make such a noise, peal after peal. The silence mocked him as he stood there afterwards, waiting, and he swore and went round to the side path to make his way to the back door. But the side gate was locked too and he stood there baffled. She, who always had forgotten to lock that gate however often he’d told her to, pointing out that though it might lead only to the back garden, still it could be a barrier to a would-be burglar, she who had told him he was a fusspot because he’d insisted on it, had chosen today, of all days, to remember!
He contemplated climbing over the fence in which the gate was so neatly and firmly set, and then abandoned that; not in a good office suit. And even if he did, what then? The back door to the house was probably locked too; if she’d chained the front door and left via the back door, she must surely have remembered to lock it even though she knew he didn’t carry a back door key. Mustn’t she?
But there was always the possibility she hadn’t, and determined now to get in, no matter what, he went to the car and got out the big spanner with the jemmy end, the one he always carried in case he couldn’t get the rims off a wheel when he had to change a flat, and forced open the back gate with it, working out how much it was going to cost to get it repaired even as he did it.
And of course the back door was locked, and the only way he could possibly get in would be by breaking a window, and surely that wasn’t necessary?
She wasn’t there, that was the thing, and for the first time since she’d started that bloody job, he cursed himself for not taking more of an interest in it. He didn’t know exactly where in the hospital she worked; only that it was a Minster Hospital laboratory, and he had no intention of trailing round the place like a maudlin schoolboy looking for her. A phone call, perhaps; someone there surely should be able to track her down? He turned back to the house to look up at it, wanting badly to get in, to soothe his now thoroughly rattled sense of the Tightness of things by being among his own possessions on his own territory, and he leaned against the kitchen window fiddling with the hinge, wondering if he could, perhaps, get that off, get in without doing too much damage; and then felt, rather than saw or heard, that Mrs Fenning next door had come out to her patio and was standing there listening, perhaps watching him through a chink in the heavy fence. And he took a deep breath and turned sharply on his heel and went back to the car.
He’d go to the office now; stop on the way at the King’s Head for a bite of breakfast, the breakfast he’d planned to have with her, and then get to work dead on time as usual. Tonight he’d sort out this business with Jessie, but it wouldn’t be the scene he’d planned. By God, it wouldn’t. The magnanimity that had propelled him so happily up the motorway was quite dispelled. Tonight she’d be told to give up that damned job, and there was an end of it. He’d had more than enough, more than any decent man should have to put up with. And so he’d tell her.
Disastrous as the start of the day had been, there was worse to come. He had his breakfast at the King’s Head, and singularly nasty it was – burnt bacon and leathery eggs and soggy toast – and he’d tried to complain about that, and all the satisfaction he’d got had been a mouthful of abuse from a tired and bored waitress, and that had made him later than he liked to be; and then, when he got to the car park, some idiot of a woman driver had managed to block the entrance by getting too close to the ticket machine and being too scared to drive either forwards or backwards. By the time she was extricated and he was able to park his own car, it was ten-oh-five, and then two lifts were out of order and he had to wait interminably to get up to the seventh floor. So he was thoroughly ruffled when he slammed in through the big double doors to the Environmental Services section at almost a quarter past ten to find Miss Price sitting at her desk and waiting for him with her eyes glinting with malicious pleasure.
‘Mr Wilmington’s asked for you three times already this morning,’ she announced in that maddeningly off-hand voice she used when she had something really nasty to impart. ‘He is steaming! I’d go straight in, if I were you.’
‘But you’re not, are you?’ he snapped. ‘Unfortunately for you, you lack the ability.’ And he went down to his office, to take off his coat and hang it up with exaggerated slowness, refusing to be browbeaten by Wilmington or by that bitch Price; and then, in spite of himself, went hurrying along the corridor to Wilmington’s office.
And found the usual annoyance he felt when he walked into it compounded twice over by the fact that the man had a new desk. It was bad enough he had twice as much floor space as Peter did, and an armchair and a coffee table to boot; he was only one grade senior, for God’s sake, what right did they have to treat him as though he was the bloody Angel Gabriel? Now, seeing the large slab of excessively modern black-stained ash and chrome, Peter felt his face actually whiten as he controlled the fury that bubbled in him.
‘Well?’ he said as curtly as he could, ‘I gather you wanted me? I’ve a lot to do ….’
‘I imagine you have after a week off.’ Wilmington leaned back in the fancy matching chair that complemented the hateful desk and lifted his brows at him. ‘All the same, first things first.’
‘I haven’t been off,’ Peter said furiously. ‘I was at the annual conference, as you well know. Damned hard work it was too.’
‘Go and tell that to Establishment branch. They might believe it. Me, I’ve been to these conferences, and I know what they are. Miller’s Cat country, Miller’s Cat. All wind and water. People leaping around spouting nonsense – they don’t know, half of ’em, whether they’re on this earth or Fuller’s.’ Wilmington had some time ago decided that archaic slang was the acme of wit, and used it constantly. ‘Now, Hurst, I’ve got a large and meaty bone to pick with you.’
‘Have you indeed,’ Peter said savagely.
‘Indeed I have,’ Wilmington said, his high good humour showing in every line of his face. Peter Hurst usually managed to avoid situations which gave him any cause to exercise his authority, and now here he was with a real beauty with which to beat him about the head. ‘You’ve dropped yourself right in it, my old squire, right in the jolly old mire. Two weeks ago, or thereabouts, I sent a memo to you asking you to see some people who wanted to present a petition about animals, remember?’
Peter stared at him, completely blank. He had no memory of it at all. ‘Animals?’ he said. ‘What the hell do I have to do with animals?’
‘Our furry friends, scientific research for the use of,’ Wilmington said. ‘These people were steamed up about it. Wanted to see me, but I had a council sub-committee meeting and couldn’t see them. So I delega
ted to you, m’dear old boy.
Delegated to you. And what did you do?’
‘Yes,’ Peter said slowly. ‘Yes, I remember. Bunch of old women, a couple of kids – I passed it back to you to deal with.’
‘Oh, no you didn’t, old man. That pig won’t fly. Not nohow. You put it in your In Abeyance file, that’s what you did. These people then went to the local paper, said they’d delivered this petition and had it ignored, and then took ’em some photographs they said they got of this place where furry friends, scientific research for the use of, were being clobbered by mad scientists. We’ve had that man Lloyd sniffing about and generally making a pest of himself, and he got himself into Chanter’s office and made a great drama over it. So Chanter sends for the file and no one can find it for an hour, while Lloyd sits tight in his office generally wiping his eyes and reminding him that the paper supported him all through that sewage-farm drama and if he wants to go on getting local support he’d better pull out the proverbial digit. By the time your Miss Price extricates the file from the bottom of your In Abeyance, Chanter is fit to be tied and after your blood. Hoping to have your guts for garters.’
‘Not mine,’ Peter said promptly. ‘Yours. It was your appointment and you signed it. I did my best, and passed the file back to you for action. As for saying it was in my In Abeyance file – rubbish. That damned Price woman obviously failed to act on an instruction and return it to you. I’ll deal with her.’
‘You’d better deal with Chanter too,’ Wilmington said jovially. ‘And the best of British luck to you, me old china, the best of British!’
The session with Chanter was even worse, and Peter emerged from his office at well after twelve white with contained fury – a man could be rude to a chap just one grade his senior, but Chanter, the head of the entire department, had to be treated much more circumspectly – to find that Miss Price had been tipped off by Wilmington that Peter was about to drop the blame on her, and was absent from her desk.
The Virus Man Page 11