by Patrick Gale
LOVE LETTER
Darling. You always said – you probably don’t remember – we should never call each other that because it’s what people call lovers they no longer love. So I’m sorry but I like it. I like its sturdy Saxon feel. Would deorling be less offensive? (Don’t be impressed – just looked that up on the net.)
Your wonderful little visit to find me at work, totally unlooked for, unhoped for, unearned, has sent my mood rocketing and sod work, blow patients, I want to share it with you. You know I’m hopeless on the phone and not much better at explaining myself face to face. There are already several versions of this torn up in the office bin and still I’m stumbling.
We couldn’t talk when you visited but perhaps that was a good thing if it stopped me blurting things that should be said with care. But now that I’ve had a while to think everything seems so clear, so simple suddenly, as if you’d blown the clouds away and all the shades of grey were gone.
I love you and I want to be with you always, whatever it takes and whatever compromises or sacrifices that involves me in and mess that means wading through.
Bobby will cope. He’ll adjust and cope, of course he will. It’s taken this time of worry and not talking to make me see I had my priorities in a twist and I’ve been crazily overprotective of him. Change is a part of living and he has to get used to it if he’s to have independence.
But all of this assumes agreement on your part. Typical male bloody arrogance, I can hear you say. My behaviour has offered you an insult that would perfectly entitle you to tell me to bog off. Oh but I hope you won’t. Can you ever forgive me? Can we somehow not forget but draw a line, at least, and start again? Christ, I hope so.
I probably won’t post this, my deorling. I think I’m too shy. Either that or I’m just rehearsing on paper, building up my courage for the things I need to tell you. I love you and all will be well. All my love. Absolutely all of it. Bx
EVENSONG
It was a perfect evening, a sky of intense blue, swifts swooping down across the Close’s lawns after flies, a handful of the local youth, blasted by cider and sun, flopped across one another beneath the lime trees.
Laura parked in a disabled space by the long run of flying buttresses along the great nave’s southern flank. She could hear the choir rehearsing in a nearby chamber as she unfolded her mother’s walker and rolled it up to the passenger door.
Scorning as ever to go into the cathedral with the tourists and face embarrassment at the begging boxes – which, in any case, represented a big detour if one was aiming for the quire – Mummy struck out for the passage called the Slype where a sort of service entrance was tucked away from public view. She had once stood behind one of the canons as he let them both in there and had memorized the code for the lock, OISJBN850H, as a mnemonic.
‘Once I was 16. Joy! But now am 85. Oh Hell!’ she told herself as she punched letters and digits into a little pad. And in they went, through the south transept, past the angels kneeling around the Wilberforce tomb and up the steps to the quire by the quickest route. There was a wheelchair lift but Mummy disliked that as it was on the far side of the building, and preferred to tug herself up the stairs by the handrail while Laura walked close beside her just in case, carrying the walker.
They were greeted by a sideswoman as though they were regulars, which perhaps they had become by now, and found themselves seats, thrones effectively, in the choir stalls. Laura still found it hard to believe that such splendid, ancient seats, just feet from choir and clergy and each a museum piece, were available to the public. She looked around her defensively, prepared as ever for some verger or official to move them on.
Religion had played no part, good or bad, in her life until now. She was raised in carefully scientific godlessness and sent to schools where RE was judiciously ecumenical and thus deeply confusing and dull. Apart from the most obvious, primary school bits like Adam and Eve, Jonah and the Whale or David and Goliath, she was quite unfamiliar with the Bible, especially with its New Testament, her school in Camden having been eager not to offend its Jewish constituency. So she had always felt disadvantaged visiting art galleries and churches on holiday because so much of the painting and sculpture was a literature she could barely read.
Slipping into Evensong, like good quality chocolate biscuits and George II side tables, was one of the luxurious tastes Mummy had acquired in widowhood. She claimed she had simply been exploring the cathedral one afternoon during her first year in the city when the service was announced. She was making her way to one of the exits along with the other flustered godless when the choir began singing an introit. The beauty of the music forced her to take a seat to listen, if only from a distance. She had come back several afternoons after that, always sitting well outside the quire so she could enjoy the music and words but not feel implicated in the act of worship.
‘But then I thought, This is silly. Who am I so scared of? I don’t care what people think; my faith or lack of it is entirely my affair.’
So she took to sitting in the quire with everyone else and soon discovered one didn’t have to sit in the boring modern chairs towards the altar but could sit in the stalls, on tough tapestry cushions, above exquisite misericords, and while away the service’s drier intervals admiring the carvings on every side – oak huntsmen, animals, leaves and fruit. She remained in her seat for the prayers, but then, looking around, she saw that kneeling was beyond many of the older worshippers and beneath the dignity of many of the younger ones. She stood for the creed, however, with everyone else.
When Laura first attended with her she was astounded at this. ‘But it’s mumbo-jumbo!’
‘Yes.’
‘But you know all the words!’
‘Of course. I was a nicely-brought-up girl. I attended confirmation classes at St Swithun’s for a year when I was twelve and was confirmed at thirteen, by the Bishop of Winchester in this very cathedral.’
‘But you don’t believe it now?’
‘I’m not sure I believed it then. I was just being obedient. You got confirmed in the same spirit that you got married, in the fond hope that something solid would follow on the heels of faith. And since I don’t believe, I don’t see the harm in saying the words. They’re nice words. Certainty is so reassuring. And it seems courteous, somehow, like joining in a native custom. If we were in a Hindu temple or among Zoroastrians, I expect I’d try to fall in with whatever they were doing in the same way. To be polite. The music and the building are so beautiful it seems a cheap enough offering in return.’
Laura did her best to remain her father’s daughter. She looked pointedly about her or even read inappropriate parts of the prayer book or cathedral pamphlets during the prayers and remained staunchly seated when all around her stood and faced east for the creed. But it was hard. She didn’t like people staring, didn’t like to draw attention to herself. And, for all his brave words about bigotry and patriarchy and opiate of the masses, her father never faced the enemy on home ground. So she compromised and took to standing and facing east like everyone else, but kept her silence and resisted the cowardly urge to move her lips and did not rise to Mummy’s mischievous offer to teach her the words.
‘I could teach you the Catechism too. I tested myself when I couldn’t sleep the other night and found I can still remember it all.’
Creed aside, it was a wonderfully undemanding ritual, almost a concert. The music varied hugely, from sparse polyphonic or even plainchant settings used on nights when only men’s voices were available through lush Victorian settings and turn of the century tearjerkers to challenging contemporary ones. There was no tedious sermon, no tub-thumping hymn. After several exposures, Laura found she was enjoying the psalms, with their frequent bouts of despair or indignation, and the unexpected charms of the readings. Much of it meant nothing to her but she still found she could appreciate it, much as she had appreciated displays in the Institut du Monde Arabe without understanding a word of Arabic script.
At that time of year she enjoyed looking up from her magnificent seat to explore the farther reaches of vaulting and tracery with her eyes. In the winter months there was a different pleasure to be had from the vast darkness of the church around them and the sense of the quire as a pool of light in a forest of nocturnal stone.
The words, especially those of the nunc dimittis and the repeated references to night and stillness – the busy world is hushed, the fever of life is over – the inevitable identification of the end of the day with the end of life, tended to bring on a curious fit of nostalgia or species of homesickness, a dwelling on chances past and friends lost, that could make her tearful if she didn’t guard against it.
Tonight, inspired by her thoughts of his rejected furniture and the box of old photographs she had so casually discarded, she found herself thinking about her father and when she had last seen him alive. She touched a hand to her shirt pocket and was reassured to feel his picture in there.
He had marked the early weeks of his ‘voluntary’ redundancy by catching the Eurostar to visit her in Paris. It was a tremendous bother at the time, as she was involved in a messy love affair with a divorced client who was trying to get serious just when she was preparing to ditch him. Her apartment was tiny – not suited to guests who needed a bedroom of their own. She slept on the sofa so that Dad could have her room, and gave up three days to show him the city which, astonishingly, he had never visited.
She had never spent so long with him without her mother, and the things about him and her parents’ relationship the visit threatened to reveal made her nervous and tetchy. There was a limit to how much sightseeing she could make him do and at regular intervals they had to sit on park benches or at café tables and he would talk. More disturbingly he would ask direct questions, like how was she, no but really, in herself. And did she have someone special at the moment. And then there would be heavy sighs, which she knew were partly his way of showing he knew she was holding back the truth from him but also her cue to ask him things in turn. It was a cue she harshly overlooked to talk brightly about what they would do next.
Looking back she wondered if he had already known he was ill, if he had been settling emotional accounts. The classic behaviour for a living husband in such a position would surely have been to wring some kind of assurance from her that she would look after her widowed mother. Instead he seemed to be implying that he had learnt things, sad lessons, he wished he had known at her age. But she spent the visit parrying and deflecting his conversational advances and masking herself emotionally.
It had been very odd. When there were three of them as a family, her instinct, her role almost, had always been to take his part. Poor Dad. Overlooked. Undervalued. But without her mother there as a mock adversary, so much brighter than either of them, so much more assured, the polarity shifted and she found herself reacting as though he were a sort of predator on her feelings.
And then he dropped dead on an Underground escalator, only weeks after his visit.
Of course, what he had been trying to say, she suspected now, was, Are you lonely? I don’t want you to be lonely because I still am and it’s a terrible thing.
Her automatic view of her childhood, her account for others at dinner tables, was that she had been the interloper, the infant gooseberry, in a great, unmarried love story. It was a story she still told herself because it was a comfort and required nothing of her: that he had come from the wrong side of the tracks and saved a brilliant woman from a stultifying future. From things she let slip, it was a story her mother told herself too. But the truth was possibly sadder: that he had indeed offered an escape route but that, once escaped into their unconventional ménage, she left him behind. It was never pretended he was her intellectual equal. He never rose above the level of lecturer, and that at a lowly polytechnic. He was never invited to conferences, never asked to contribute articles to New Society or Tribune.
For her mother, research was all. Her obsession with proving or disproving the existence of prions, for instance; teaching was something she always regarded as a necessary evil, secondary to the formation and supervision of a team of research students. Whereas he loved his students, clearly, and relished his role as a sensible, avuncular mentor in their messy, risky lives. For him they were, undoubtedly, the extra children he couldn’t have – a demanding, exasperating, extended family – and being eased out of their midst by his employers must have been shattering to him, a huge bereavement.
And now her mother had all but erased him from the picture. He lived on in bits of Laura, of course, in the photograph albums and, oddly, in the one thing he had given Mummy beside an escape route: the freedom she felt in shedding her clothes.
The anthem that evening was a chunk of the Brahms German Requiem, rendered into clumsily Teutonic English: How Lovely Are Thy Dwellings Fair. Laura was just thinking how pootling the accompaniment sounded reduced to an organ from the full, rich orchestration when there was a loud sniff from Mummy followed by a frantic scrabbling in pockets. She was doing her best not to cry. Another, fruitier sniff followed.
Laura had a clean handkerchief on her and passed her that. Mummy took it. Her face was hidden by the outcrop of carved oak between them but she patted Laura’s thigh in thanks.
Once they were all standing to let the choir and clergy process out and then variously kneeling or slumping or bowing heads for whatever improvised prayer people felt obliged to offer up by way of a private closing paragraph, she seemed herself again.
They shook the hands of a smiley canon, were greeted, without handshakes, by the Dean and once again Laura held the walker while Mummy made heavy use of the long, time-smoothed handrail.
‘I’m fine,’ she said in response to Laura’s tentative enquiries once they were back out in the Slype. ‘Bloody Brahms, that’s all. Pavlov’s dog. I need a drink. Did you manage to buy another bag of those nice cheese straws at the WI?’
LOVING MEMORY
Blissed out, tie tugged loose and jacket over one shoulder because of the heat, Ben strolled down the Romsey Road and cut left to walk home under the trees across the top of Oram’s Arbour. When not framing letters to Laura he had spent the afternoon having repeatedly to remind himself not to smile or laugh inappropriately as patients confided their stories or presented their symptoms. Finally he could see the way forward and the sense of freedom after days mired in guilt and uncertainty was as intoxicating as the June air.
A gang of children was playing a haphazard game of rounders on the grass, assisted by a demented, spring-heeled terrier which ran, barking, wherever the ball was pitched or struck, and attracting impotent glares and a few comments from commuters obliged to follow the path through the game’s middle on their way to the station. The grass had been cut that afternoon and the Arbour was still full of its scent and the children’s running feet and calves were spattered with it. Ben watched for a minute or two, enchanted, but soon moved on because children made him think about Chloë and he didn’t want thoughts of her impinging on his happily irresponsible mood.
Bobby was waiting for him, smartly dressed, hands all but on hips in agitation.
‘Come on,’ he said. ‘It starts in half an hour.’
‘What does?’
‘Shirley’s thing. You’d forgotten.’
‘Yes. Sorry. Damn.’
‘Where are you going?’
‘I’ve got to shower. I’m filthy from work.’
‘No time!’
‘Got to. Have a drink. I’ll be ready in five minutes.’
He raced to the bathroom, cursing his midsummer languor on the way home. He had forgotten entirely, even though people from work would be going and had probably said things to remind him if only he had been paying attention.
Bobby knew Shirley because she’d been the volunteer teacher who finally dragged him through his English and Maths GCSEs in his early twenties. She was one of Winchester’s very few HIV patients to die in recent memory, discounting those who die
d in accidents or of other illnesses. Most responded well to antiretroviral therapy. Even patients only brought onto the drugs in the late stages of full-blown AIDS tended to display a dramatically quick improvement in immunity. Most treated at an earlier stage soon had HIV viral loads that were undetectable and CD4 counts that were little below normal. Shirley might have done better had she been diagnosed earlier but she was an old school radical and when her husband died from AIDS, well before the antiretrovirals were available, she had flatly refused an HIV test out of a kind of solidarity. And she had continued to do so, insisting she was fine and that she preferred to assume she was HIV positive than to risk being told she wasn’t and so feel excluded from her husband’s fate. Finally diagnosed with AIDS when what she had taken for seasonal flu turned into a nasty bout of pneumonia, she then proved to be one of the extremely rare cases to respond poorly to antiretrovirals. They tried her with a different drug cocktail, as she gleefully put it, but her T cell count continued to sink. Then she had succumbed to cerebral lymphoma and died in just three weeks.
In the early days of HIV it was a given that the staff on AIDS wards had to unlearn some of their training in professional detachment. They saw the same patients in extremis off and on over such a long period it was impossible not to become at least a little involved emotionally and the patients and their loved ones came to expect it. There was far less professional trauma now than when the wards seemed to offer nothing but death or death postponed, so Shirley’s death had rattled everyone.
‘Okay,’ Ben called down, dashing from bathroom to bedroom in his towel. ‘Nearly there!’
He grabbed smartish weekend clothes. Shirley was wildly informal and would have found nothing wrong in his attending a memorial service in open-necked shirt and a linen jacket instead of stifling in his work suit as Bobby would surely do. He stamped into shoes, snatched up his car keys and bounded down the narrow stairs. ‘Ready! Bobby?’ There was no sign of him. ‘Bob?’ he called back up the stairs to Bobby’s room then saw him coming in from the street. ‘Where’d you get to?’