‘I’m so sorry,’ I say, ‘I forgot about the time. Isn’t Lynette here? She’s supposed to be here, she told me she would be, she swore she’d only be an hour late.’
‘I told her to take the day off. Car trouble. She’d to go the bank for an overdraft.’
I note he is dressed and shaved and that there is no smell from his bag.
‘Did Mrs Larkin help you to—?’ I begin.
‘I looked after myself.’
Even so, I see Mrs Larkin’s paw marks all over the kitchen. Everything has been tidied away; damp teacloths folded at the edge of the sink and her rubber gloves pegged from an overhead utensil rack, so that they hang like cows’ udders – a habit that really annoys me.
I wonder if he called her or if she just appeared out of nowhere, as she sometimes likes to do.
The kettle is on, beginning to boil. ‘Is that for tea?’ I ask and move towards it. ‘You want tea?’
‘I can manage,’ he says, giving the wheelchair a deft little turn and reaching out for the kettle. He makes old-fashioned tea, scoops of leaves from a caddy, a scalded pot, a strainer, milk, sugar. Everything laid out and prepared in advance.
‘Oh God, I forgot your newspaper. I’m sorry, I can go back down now and—’
‘It’s all right,’ he says. ‘Mrs Larkin brought it.’
‘Of course.’
‘Would you like a cup?’ he asks and I can’t resist the novelty of having my father make old-fashioned tea for me, in the kitchen. In the kitchen.
There is a silence in the room although it’s not as jagged as I might have expected. Still we could do with a buffer. I look for the dog and there he is, standing at the glass panel of the back door, looking in at me. He lifts a limp paw and makes three effete scratches on the wooden frame.
‘He’s much better now,’ my father says, and then niftily glides past me to the door and lets the dog in. ‘Mrs Larkin gave him bread and soup. I think the plainer diet may suit him better.’
The dog comes to me and I try not to fuss too much over him.
‘Hello, Boy,’ I say and give his head a couple of cool-handed pats. The dog licks my wrist and then goes to my father, who surprises me by the affection he shows, outdoing me by quite a few degrees – ruffling the dog’s head, stroking his back, playing tenderly with his ears.
He turns away, lifts the teapot and pours two mugs of tea. He hands me one and says: ‘Yes, there’s another couple of years left in the old dog yet.’
Our eyes catch and I wonder, just for a second, if he may be making some sort of a joke.
‘I bought turbot for dinner,’ I say and then look away, because if he has just made a joke, I don’t know what to do with it.
‘Ah,’ he says, ‘actually, I’ve already eaten.’
‘Mrs…?’
‘Yes. Stew. A rather big plate of it, I’m afraid.’
He deals with his tea, and I notice he takes only one spoonful of sugar – a spoonful less than I have been giving him for the past few months. Then he lifts the mug with one hand while the other begins reversing his wheelchair towards the door. Once there, he holds the door open himself then, in a three-point turn, leaves the kitchen for the sitting room.
I put the turbot in the fridge and take my mug of tea upstairs. The dog follows.
On my dressing table is yet another page torn from my mother’s telephone message pad, the pad so old by now it could almost be a collector’s item. My mother would have bought this pad when I was very small and she was acting as a sort of secretary for my father – before he could afford an office in town and the salary for a real one. There is something almost childish about the pad, as if it’s come from a ‘Let’s Play Office’ set. I can’t bring myself to throw it out but, at the same time, wish Mrs Larkin would stop using it.
On each page there are three lines to be filled in – Telephone call from: Taken by: Received on: – and there is a space at the bottom for the message itself.
The message is from Michael. That’s all it says: Michael called 2 p.m.
I open the drawer and place it along with the other messages I have received through Mrs Larkin. One from the vet’s secretary, three from the bank. One from Lynette. And two from Brenda Caudwell. Brendie’s messages are scrunched up into two angry little balls.
I lie on the bed and the dog lies on the rug and cocks an eye at me now and then. I am crying – but so what? Lately I am often crying or on the verge of doing so anyway. It’s just something that comes on me and without warning, a bit like the lewd thoughts I can find myself entertaining about some unsuspecting man, often young enough to be my son. It’s the hormones, I suppose. The hormones in reverse. The last splurge before they go tumbling down the hill.
The dog lifts his head and looks at me as if to say – what this time?
He is used to my poor-little-me tears by now. They are never too tragic; no choking sobs or sense that my heart is bursting at the seams. Just a resigned sort of loneliness that, this time, happens to be for Michael. We both know this will pass soon enough.
‘I can’t believe he remembered the number. I can’t believe he bothered to find me. Again,’ I say.
The dog is unmoved; he settles his head back down on his front paws, gives a small contented whine and begins to snooze.
The last time Michael Shillman found me was in New York. He found me before the age of the Internet when, to find someone in New York – someone who didn’t want to be found anyhow – you would almost need to be a trained detective.
It was shortly before I went into business with Serena – I would have been about thirty-six, Michael around the thirty mark.
I was working in a small, upmarket French restaurant at the time where, one rung from the top, I was answerable only to the owner.
I had got there by working longer and harder than anyone else and the fact that I was one of the few in the business who wasn’t using drugs probably helped too. I held onto that position by being something of an uptight bitch who tolerated slackness in neither work nor behaviour.
One morning the receptionist came into my office and told me there was somebody in the bar area waiting to see me. We’d been recruiting new staff – and the notice had made it clear that the hours for the interview were between four and six in the afternoon. ‘Obviously thinks he can cut ahead of the rest,’ I said. ‘Let him come back, or let him wait.’
He waited.
The Michael Shillman I remembered was a toothy boy who seemed to be soldered onto his racing bike; his shoulders forever pushing into the distance, his head craning side to side. He passed messages between myself, Agatha and Rachel. He kept watch while we raided his parents’ cocktail cabinet or while Rachel stole money and cigarettes from her mother’s purse. He was quick-witted, had an innocent face which kept the adults at bay and was a boy who didn’t mind breaking the rules for the sake of adventure.
I came out of the office and thought, there’s a good-looking waiter looking for work – let’s hope his resumé looks as good as he does. But it was little Michael Shillman, my friend’s younger brother, maybe five or six years younger than me. Except he was now big Michael Shillman, and handsome and dark and tall like his father, and funny like his sister and clever like his mother, and I had always liked him in a big sisterly sort of way – until I saw him standing there beside the bar grinning at me, and the big sister part took a jump out the window.
I ended up taking the afternoon off, we went drinking and then we went to bed. The next day, he said, ‘How do you feel?’
‘Hungover,’ I said.
‘I know. But do you feel – you know, awkward…?’
‘Awkward?’
‘Embarrassed in any way?’
I thought for a moment and said, ‘No, actually. Do you?’
And he said, ‘Not in the least.’
And then we nearly fell out of the bed laughing.
I called in sick – my first sick day ever – even though everyone had seen us go off toge
ther and knew exactly what Miss Tightass had been up to. I just didn’t care. We stayed in bed all day. We stayed in bed the following day, and I would have stayed for many days more, only he had to go back to work on a construction site in Queens and so I went back to the restaurant.
We were together for almost six months. During that time, we often talked about Agatha and everything that had happened. We talked about it a lot. It became a sort of project, each of us bringing a little something to it every time we met. But we moved slowly. I only knew so much, Michael even less. And of course, there was that one thing I could never tell him. Even so, neither of us knew the full story. Nobody did – except maybe Agatha.
We asked each other questions. I asked how his parents found out and about their reaction. He told me that his mother took the call in the middle of the night. The call came from my father. A short while later, Mr Caudwell knocked on the door with news from the hospital.
‘Then there was that meeting in your house,’ Michael said.
‘There were three meetings. One with all the parents and us. Another one with just the fathers – and me.’
‘What was that like?’
‘Oh, Jesus! A mini court case with all these questions over and over. Then I was sent to my room. They were afraid, though. I could see that. Afraid of the scandal, the newspapers. The legal implications – as Caudwell and my father kept saying. The final meeting was between Serena and my father.’
‘You ran away,’ Michael said. ‘I remember, everyone out with flashlights, looking for you all over the valley.’
‘Jonathan told them where to find me.’
‘Then you were gone.’
‘Then I was gone, off in a taxi with Serena and Patty.’
One night we were walking home from a restaurant and Michael asked me if it was true that Karl Donegan was the father of Agatha’s child.
I said, ‘Well, she was always in his house.’
‘But does that mean he’s the father?’
I shrugged. ‘Everyone thought so, anyhow.’
‘Did you?’
I said, ‘I suppose…’
I was glad we were out of the restaurant, that I was walking beside him when he asked me instead of facing him across a table. It was the only deliberate lie I ever told him.
One afternoon in bed – almost always in bed – he told me about the Shillmans. A few days after I left with Serena and Patty, they left; first the neighbourhood, and then about a week afterwards they were at the airport and heading for a new life in London, where his father had managed to find another job. The week in between was spent in a country hotel about an hour’s drive away from their own house. They took two rooms. Rachel and Mrs Shillman slept in one. Danny, Mr Shillman and Michael took the other. Rachel never stopped crying the whole time they were there. He never knew if his parents went back to the house – it wasn’t discussed. But his father did go out a lot during that time. The car was sold; he spent a lot of time on the phone. Eventually, he found a job.
‘It’s not a patch on my old job,’ he heard his father tell his mother, ‘but it’s a fresh start.’
‘Is it?’ his mother said. ‘Oh, is it, really?’
He remembered this because it was one of the few conversations his parents had during that time. One way or another, the whole thing was a big strain on their marriage. About a year after they moved to London, they split up.
In the end, it was an argument over Mrs Shillman, of all people, that would break us up. Marvellous Martha, and I sticking up for her. Michael was telling me about the split. She was the one to leave the house. Rachel was left to take care of the family. His father really hit the bottle then, ran out of money, eventually gave up working altogether, died a few years later.
He had already told me how Rachel was an overweight nurse living in Australia and how Danny was something of a drifter but for the past two months had been working as a doorman in a bar in Barcelona.
‘And your mother?’ I asked.
‘She still lives in London.’
‘Do you see her?’
‘When I have to. I find it too much having to listen to her rewrite history. She joined AA, you know. They tell them they need to look after themselves before they can look after anyone else. They allow them complete exoneration. It’s okay that you fucked everyone up while you were drinking. But you can also swan off and let everyone else clean up all your shit. I sometimes think it gave her the excuse she’d always been waiting for – to leave us.’
‘I don’t think you should blame your mother for everything,’ I said.
‘She fucked off. Danny was only a little boy. My father was a good man up till then.’
‘I just don’t think it’s fair to say she’s completely to blame.’
‘Oh, what the fuck do you know about it?’ he said.
And that was pretty much that.
Michael is still my friend. I can call him if I want – as long as I call him in work and not at home: his wife doesn’t care for me. I can meet him for an occasional coffee. He is someone who understands me. We haven’t gone to bed in years – we never did after we broke up – and there have been many men between my sheets since then. But yet in a way we have remained intimate. In many ways we are more intimate now than we were when we used to lie naked sniffing each other and screwing around the clock. Michael knows me as much as anyone could. He knows the bits I keep hidden, even from myself. Maybe that’s what bothers his wife.
I wipe my little tears for Michael, flap the side of the quilt over my legs and stare up at my little scrap of the sky. I wonder if I could call him now and what time it is in New York and if it’s snowing. And then, like the dog at my feet, I’m asleep.
When I come back downstairs, I’m not sure how much later, I discover my list is missing. The kitchen is so tidy, there is no point in looking but I do anyway: in the drawers, then the cupboards, then between the pages of my mother’s old cookery books, which have, despite my note, been neatly inserted back into their box. I try the kitchen bin – empty: the pouch of a new black plastic bag neatly puckered inside.
On the table, the large brown envelope sits alone, surrounded by shiny laminated wood; the crest of the American lawyers stamped on the top right-hand corner. There is no way my father could have missed it.
Cursing Mrs Larkin, I go out to the yard and begin rummaging through the recycling bin that’s supposed to be exclusively for waste paper. I know my father can see me through the French doors, but I don’t care. I want my list. Eventually, I do find it, soiled and stinking in a plastic bag in the other bin along with the everyday garbage.
I pinch the corner of it and shake it out. It’s my list. My list. I take it back inside, smooth it out, brush off a few tealeaves, mop a damp stain with a paper towel.
I take the rest of the groceries out of the bag and put them away for tomorrow’s recipes: lemons, unsalted butter, a lobe of foie gras. Then I unwrap the two new ramekin dishes I’ve bought for the soufflé. I remove the fish from the fridge: a soft, cold, futile pile on my hand. I open it out on the kitchen table and Mr Turbot, in his brown speckled coat, shows me a sulky profile. I could throw him out. Or I could cook him anyway. It’s a large fish, too big for one – but if I don’t cook it tonight, it stays on the list.
Shallots, white wine vinegar. Knife. I lift the enamel pot out of the cupboard.
Piano notes strike into the house and I hear his brisk fingers trot up and down the flights of scales. I fetch the ice bucket and pile in the cubes. By the time I open the sitting-room door, I’m walking through the first fragile rays of Debussy’s moonlight.
I place the glass down beside him and he stops playing.
‘You’re not having one yourself tonight?’ he asks and I shake my head.
‘Keeping a clear head then?’
And I nod my head.
He takes a sip from his drink. ‘That turbot,’ he says, ‘if you’re still making it, I might try a bit – that is if you don’t m
ind.’
‘Not in the least,’ I say.
As I leave the room, I casually say, ‘I have some papers from my lawyers in New York. I wonder if you’d mind taking a look at them later on?’
‘Not in the least,’ he says, echoing my own reply.
*
I open the fish along the spine and begin to ease the fillets from the bone. It’s been a while since I’ve performed such a task and I need to hold my nerve. Behind me, the piano music is steady and measured.
When I was a child, I believed no one could play the piano like my father. I used to think that, instead of prancing around courtrooms in silly wigs and gowns, he should be playing on a concert stage or at least have his own television programme. I know now that he is a competent pianist: he plays safe but he plays without distinction.
I stop working the knife for a moment while I listen to him enter and then scramble through that tricky batch of notes at that last bend in the piece, and I find myself worrying for him. It’s unlikely he’ll falter or make a mistake – he has practised this piece so many times in his life, even more in recent days. But he plays it as if he is searching for something and I think, now, that is what makes me uneasy.
I want to go into him and tell him what Simon Fischer said to me a long time ago – ‘It’s not the moonlight that makes the music, honey, but the sea that moves beneath it.’
But then, there are many things I would like to be able to tell him. Many things I wish he would tell me. We are leaving so much unsaid between us, and it feels mutually disrespectful somehow. As if I’m handing him a bag of my dirty underwear and he is handing me a bag of his.
I stand back and look down at my own little piece of work laid out on the slab. I lift a roll of green flecked butter in my hand, insert it under the turbot’s dank skin, pleased and more than a little proud that I have managed to keep it intact.
After dinner, I take away the clean plate on the tray and bring him the envelope. By the time I come back in, maybe ten minutes later with his evening mug of tea, he is sitting at his desk, specs down on nose, pen angled in one hand, thumb pressing down on the top of it, click after urgent click.
The Lives of Women Page 20