The Whole Day Through

by Patrick Gale

  ‘Your mum’s engagement ring?’

  ‘Yes. Will you…? Does it fit?’

  She slipped it onto her ring finger. She looked at it in the light, smiled at him. ‘My hands are sturdier than you imagine,’ she said. ‘It’s really lovely, Ben.’ She sniffed and dabbed away a tear with a fistful of sheet. ‘Silly,’ she told herself. ‘Sorry. I wish I’d met her.’

  ‘I wish she’d met you. I should have brought you home the very first Christmas. What were we thinking of staying in that freezing house in Oxford?’

  ‘We were trying to be grown up. Playing house.’

  He took her hand again to look at the ring on it. He worried it might look mean. He knew nothing about jewellery. It had never occurred to him until now that his father’s taste might have been suspect. ‘I mean, I can’t ask you,’ he said. ‘I’m not free to ask you properly. Not yet.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘But can I ask you to, well, sort of wait?’

  She looked him full in the face and it was a kind of promise mixed with challenge. ‘Of course,’ she said.

  ‘Good.’

  ‘I’m going nowhere.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘What about your brother?’

  ‘Oh…I can’t pretend Bobby needs me nearly as much as I’d convinced myself he did. Bobby’ll be just fine. He’ll be glad to get shot of me. He might even have the love of a good man. As soon as I get back I want you two to meet.’

  ‘That’ll be nice.’

  She clung to him for a minute or two then kissed his shoulder abruptly and got up. ‘I must get back,’ she said. ‘I told her I was going for a walk. Even though she was half-asleep when I left, she’ll start to worry if I don’t come back. There are always drunken students in the streets around us on a Friday and she’ll be on edge with the noise.’

  ‘I’ll walk you back.’

  ‘No need.’

  But he did. She waited out on the pavement while he quickly paid for the room then they walked arm in arm up the dark little passage beside the hotel garden, around the back of Searle’s House and through the odd mixture of converted barracks buildings and incongruous, slightly Toytown housing that had been thrown up since the regiment moved out. He won a little extra time by persuading her into a diversion up to the old parade ground where regimented lavender bushes and conifers now stood in for companies on parade and a curiously desolate fountain was playing vigorously in the middle of a large, round pond. He told her how he remembered lying in bed on summer nights as a small boy, hearing the marching band practising there. They happened to be passing the pond as the automated system switched off the flow for the night so the last jet of water fell beside them with a distinctly unromantic noise, like the emptying of a slops bucket.

  ‘Wish,’ he told her, squeezing her arm, but she ran a tidying hand through her hair and sighed.

  ‘Oh. Me? I’m all wished out.’

  ‘Hope, then.’

  ‘Hmm,’ she said and he wished he’d had the self-possession to hold his tongue.

  They followed a path off the parade ground through a narrow arch in one of the new buildings thrown up to echo the old, and down a flight of steps and all too suddenly were on St James Lane and just across the road from her mother’s house.

  ‘When are you off?’ she asked.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ he said. ‘Best to seize the nettle over the weekend.’

  ‘I hate goodbyes,’ she admitted. ‘I’m rubbish at them.’

  ‘So don’t bother. Who knows, I might be back on Sunday or even tomorrow night. We can speak.’

  It was as though he wanted to raise his spirits as much as hers but she wouldn’t be drawn. She raised the hand with his mother’s ring on it and touched the side of his face. ‘Bye, Beautiful,’ she said and slipped across the road before he could catch her or hold her or even think of anything to say back. She let herself in through the gate and was lost to view.

  He walked a short way down the hill until he was far enough away to glimpse the little Gothic windows on the house’s first floor. One of them was already lit so perhaps Professor Jellicoe had stayed up reading or simply fallen asleep over her book. He imagined Laura going in to her and gently slipping a copy of Haemorrhagic Fever and Primate Lesions out of her grasp before turning out the light.

  But the light stayed on so perhaps her mother was still awake and asking after her walk or calling out for a nightcap or painkillers. And then, at last, the second window lit up and he had a fleeting glimpse of her, through a tangle of rose branches, reaching up to tug the curtains across. He knew, because she had confided her habit to him, that if he waited long enough he would see her light go out and her hands drawing the curtains back again because she liked to wake to the sunlight rather than to an alarm. But he sensed that would have been creepy of him.

  Rather than head for home across the barracks and have to pass the desolate pool again, he climbed the hill a little further, crossing the railway bridge, and walked back along St James Terrace, a row of prettily gardened houses that faced the barracks across a pedestrian path and the railway cutting. A late express flew by beneath as he walked, heading for the coast. He looked down into the cutting to see its lit up, seemingly empty carriages flashing by far below and its retreating sound seemed suddenly to name his despair.

  It did not occur to him until he woke the following morning, at dawn but still far too late for it to be of any use, that he could have driven up to London immediately after leaving her, driven up, lain in wait in the car and let himself into the hall just before the postman. Or even waylaid the postman on the doorstep with a cheerful greeting and an offer to carry the letters in for him.

  Advance strategy had never been his strong point.

  NIGHTCAP

  Between putting Mummy to bed and going to bed herself had become what Laura thought of as her time. Even though she was often exhausted and ready for an early night herself, it felt important to do something that had nothing to do with her mother, if only to admit defeat after half an hour. She could download and answer e-mails, read a book or watch television; she was addicted to violent police forensics dramas Mummy abhorred and would have talked through. But what she usually did was the one thing her mother could no longer do: take a walk. She liked walking. She used to walk the pavements of the Marais for hours, especially at night. It was something she missed. And it was good to get out and see some life.

  Not that there was much of this on Winchester’s residential streets at nine forty-five on a Friday. She might meet a smattering of noisy students, a few impatient dog walkers, the occasional late commuter walking from the station. But it was a city where people were slow to draw their curtains at night, especially in the summer when darkness stole on slyly, and after nearly two years of living there she had yet to grow blasé about the intimate visions this offered. Domestic lives in central Paris were hidden from view in apartments high above pavement level and even so were tucked behind shutters. And she had retained her Parisian insouciance about staring.

  Tonight she felt more than usually restless and the storm had created a freshness and promise in the night, so she walked further than usual. She walked down the hill to Southgate Street then cut through the network of sporadically lit side streets towards the floodlit cathedral that seemed to float above the houses like a great ghostly boat.

  Walking past mothy, scented gardens like the one she had left at home, she stared in at families talking over wreckages of meals, at wordless, slumped couples lit by television, at a woman intently reading in an armchair. She surprised a man and woman who had slipped out from a noisy dinner party to smoke and flirt and sensed from their hostile stares that she had been watching them with a kind of hunger, and moved hastily on.

  Then she stood for a few minutes looking up from Great Minster Street at the cathedral’s west end, near where she knew there was a funny-sad tombstone for a militiaman who had died from drinking too much cold small beer. She walked on, between s
ome busy pubs, past the Butter Cross and up the high street. She climbed the hill at a brisk pace, relishing the exercise to her calves, past the law courts and Great Hall. Her intention had been to cut left through the old barracks for home but an impulse led her on, over the railway bridge and to the right, across the deserted reaches of Oram’s Arbour.

  She had done this several times: gone to stand outside the house in Fulflood where Ben had taken her occasionally. She was careful not to do it so often as to make it a ritual but she was aware there was a ritualistic element to the excursion; she needed to see the little house, remind herself it was real and, of course, reassure herself he wasn’t there.

  Bobby was still there. He still didn’t know who she was, naturally, as they’d never been introduced, but she had seen him walking around the house occasionally, sometimes alone, sometimes with his big friend. The first time she had seen him in the house she immediately recognized him as the man from the station newsagents and thereafter she made a point of buying something from him whenever she was passing through to visit clients or friends in London. She would buy a paper from him, or a paper and a coffee as well, so as to have a chance to exchange a few words. She never said much more than, ‘Chilly today, isn’t it?’ or ‘Maybe I’ll be a devil and have one of those flapjacks too,’ or ‘What an elegant tie!’ and he said little back and probably didn’t remember her from one exchange to the next, but he was always pleasant and she had come to feel that keeping an eye on him was somehow important. Had he not been in the shop or had she come to the house and found it empty and up for sale suddenly, something small but crucial in her would have died on the spot.

  Bobby was there tonight. He and his big friend were on the sofa in the tiny living room watching television. She could hear the programme noise through their open window, a girl band singing, she decided. They had made some changes recently. The windows and door had been repainted. The little patch between the front of the house and the pavement railings had been carefully filled with very clean gravel and there was lavender growing in pots there, and a little clipped bay tree. They had acquired a cat, too, which startled her by suddenly banging out through the cat flap they had cut in the front door.

  All was well. Reassured, she walked back along the top of the Arbour, down the hill and home along St James Terrace.

  The temperature was rising again and walking had made her warm. She hoped another storm wasn’t brewing. As she let herself in at the gate with a practised lack of clatter, she glanced up and saw her mother’s window was dark.

  The wine with supper had been rather good. She pulled out the rubber stopper and poured herself another glass of it then carried that and a couple of cheese straws back into the garden along with a cushion. She sat in her mother’s usual chair, the most comfortable one, kicked off her shoes and stretched out her legs. She sipped her wine, munched a biscuit and lay back staring at where the stars would be if only someone would turn the street-lamps off. There was a song thrush that regularly mistook the nearest lamp for the onset of dawn and would sing as strongly and sweetly as any nightingale, but tonight, so far, he was silent.

  Ben had been gone exactly a year to the week and she had heard nothing. Not a call, not a letter.

  She had decided, the morning after they said goodbye, that she would not contact him but would give him all the time he needed. Then, as the days passed and she still heard nothing, she tried ringing him at the hospital and was told he no longer worked there. Fired up by that, she rang the Chelsea and Westminster and waited long enough for the receptionist to say, ‘Putting you through now,’ before she hung up.

  She still had his mobile number stored on her mobile of course. As days turned to weeks, she felt more and more tempted to ring it. She thought about ringing then hanging up at once so that her name would appear, pang-inducingly, in his missed calls log. She thought about simply texting him a question mark.

  Then, when she had drunk too much over supper one night and realized she was highly likely to ring him and cry or say something demeaning to either or both of them, she deleted his number from her telephone. She regretted this of course, doubly so in the sobriety of morning. She could still have reached him through work but that would have seemed forlorn somehow, or underhand, like the behaviour of a stalker or someone jilted.

  And she did not feel jilted, even one year on. Ben was weak or, fatal combination, weak and good. Jilting implied, if not malice, then aforethought and he was considerate to a fault and not a planner. As he had confessed all those months ago in the restaurant, he was not the powerful one in his marriage, not when Chloë was near enough to influence him.

  As the weeks wore on Laura realized that whatever offstage battle had taken place, she had lost. Chloë might not love him more, but her love, it seemed, had proved the most tenacious. And, who knew, perhaps she had surprised them both with her strength of feeling. Perhaps it had taken such a crisis for him finally to fall in love with her and he had woken to the novel wonder of her as a man returning from a fever would be astounded at the mundane pleasure of grapes or daisies.

  Laura owned no photographs of him, not even old ones, and her mental ones were already so fuzzy about the edges that, in dreams, his manly self became disturbingly conflated with the boyish version she seemed to remember more distinctly. Awake, she often thought of his mouth and chin, in close-up; the fetching little gap between his front teeth. But always, loving as she did like a blind woman, it was his voice and his scent that came first when she thought of him.

  The glimpse she had caught of Chloë at the hospital, however, had etched itself onto her memory and showed no signs of fading.

  It had been a shock because Chloë had aged, of course. Without him at her side to make a terrible sense of the moment, Laura would not have recognized her. The coltish blonde in the perfect, wafty frocks, her nemesis from her miserable last weeks at Oxford, had become a woman, with womanly, even childbearing, hips, and less Botticelli hair, dyed a few shades darker and pushed off her face with an Alice band. But what had upset Laura so was seeing that Chloë, Mrs Ben Patterson, who had driven all the way from London bearing her sadly exquisite little birthday cake, had looked kind, and loving and pained. Here was a wife whose husband was having some kind of breakdown or going off the rails but who was prepared to wait for, forgive and even rescue him should the need arise.

  As a student, Chloë had maddened girls and melted boys because she was too rich to feel privileged and too pretty to care. Like the fictitious girl of an advertiser’s vision, she seemed to have an infinity of alluring possibilities open to her. As an adult, it seemed, those possibilities had evaporated in the heat of love, all her potential had been invested in someone beside herself.

  That new image of her had quite eclipsed the old one of her younger self in insouciant triumph. In her troubled hours, Laura summoned it up and found it commanded more respect than resentment. When she pictured that eloquent, wordless little scene in the hospital car park, Ben was now no more than a manly prop, a handsome enough figure in a well-cut suit, but one with his back to the audience. The compassionate focus was all on Chloë. In the instant when she tried to kiss his lips and he moved his face so that she only kissed his brow, she shut her lovely eyes in pain.

  Laura took off the ring and set it on the ground beside her, beneath one of the pots of lilies. Then she scrabbled with her fingers and pulled aside a good fistful or more of gravel, pushed the ring into the hole she had made and buried it. She stood, nose freshly filled with the lilies’ scent, took another sip of her wine and set the glass down on a little table.

  Her cotton dress slipped off easily and she draped it over the table beside the glass. She stood there in her underwear for a minute, getting used to the idea, to the oddly pleasing conjunction of hearing occasional voices or car noise from the road beyond the wall with the tingly sensation of night air on her bare skin. She felt gooseflesh rise on her thighs and arms and her scalp stir in anticipation then she un
hooked her bra and scooped off her pants as well.

  She walked a little, slowly, wary of the possibility of snails under bare feet, over to the summerhouse and back, towards the house and back. It felt good. She had forgotten how good. She felt as intensely alive as her mother had looked earlier, coming in from the rain. She tried sitting in the chair again, the way she so often saw her mother do, a woman in a garden chair who just happened to have nothing on. It was, perhaps, a little colder than was comfortable. She was unlikely to stay there for long.

  Impulsively she drank the rest of her wine then stood abruptly and scrabbled in the gravel beneath the lily pot for some minutes until she had retrieved the ring. She rinsed it in the birdbath nearby and slipped it back on her finger. In only a year, the skin around it had formed a calloused ridge there so that the ring slipping back into place seemed to complete her.

  Some students were coming up the hill, boys, singing the Match of the Day theme and laughing as they kicked a beer can back and forth. Startled, Laura snatched up her clothes and shoes and hurried inside.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  I owe a huge debt to my mother and sister, who live in Winchester but otherwise in no way resemble the mother and daughter in this book, for their forbearance in letting me draw inspiration both from their relationship of mutual support and from the vigour with which my mother has met the challenges osteoporosis has thrown at her. A novelist in the family is rarely a reassuring thing but they bear me with fortitude…

  Thanks are due to Dr Simon Worrell for his generous assistance in so patiently guiding me through a clinical venereologist’s daily routine and to Rose in Bideford for her lovely reminiscences of family naturist holidays.

  Thanks, too, to my second family – my book family – to Caradoc King, Patricia Parkin and Clare Reihill, for their judicious advice and loving support.