by Patrick Gale
‘Look!’ Wexel shouted in her ear as they pulled up the school drive. ‘There’s a man in the window!’
‘Nonsense,’ Angel said. ‘It was probably just a shadow or a curtain.’
‘There’s a man. There. Look!’
Sure enough, as they pulled closer a man came out of the front door to greet them and she saw that it was Richard.
‘It’s a friend of mine,’ she told them rapidly, suppressing a sudden urge to leave them locked into the car and lead him into the house. ‘A good friend. He must have come to stay.’ She felt herself beaming as she opened the car door. ‘How on earth did you get here?’ she asked him, aching to give him more than the perfunctory hug and a peck she allowed.
‘Taxi from the station,’ he told her. ‘Emptied my wallet so I hope you’re not going to turn me away. I found a back door unlocked and let myself in. What an old barn! So. Who’s this?’
She introduced him to the girls who were staring, then led the way to the kitchen and food.
It had proved impossible to take his leave after Christmas instead because officers with children apparently took priority. Faced with the options of moping alone in Baron’s Court or visiting his parents, he had decided to surprise her. While the girls took their baths, she showed him around and had the pleasure of defiling the tiny, old maid’s bedroom that had been her cell these last months. They were both indecently excited at making love with the sounds of the girls singing and splashing in the washroom below, and at having to be quiet and quick. She bathed her cheeks with a flannel soaked in freezing water in an effort to still their burning while he watched from the bed, smug and smoking. The room smelled frankly male of a sudden. She tidied her clothes and hair and, fighting off further advances, slipped downstairs again to make supper and prepare the way.
Wexel was first down, cheeks even pinker than usual from her bath, and took an unsqueamish pleasure in slicing the three bloody steaks into pieces for a pie that would serve four. When some blood splashed onto her dressing gown she merely giggled. Angel had planned on bribing her, buying her discretion with treats, but found the girls’ connivance offered without asking.
‘Is Richard your boyfriend, Miss?’
‘Yes. He’s my fiancé.’
‘He’s very handsome.’
‘Thank you, Lotta.’
‘You needn’t worry. We won’t tell anyone he was here. Alice says she’ll feel safer tonight having a man about the house.’ Wexel laughed again at the smutty innuendo of what she had just said, or possibly at the absurdity of Adams’ girlish confidence.
As auditions for fatherhood went, Richard’s was a success. As if responding to careful gender programming, the girls took to him the moment they learned he was a cavalry officer. They teased him like an older brother, swung on his big hands as if they had known him all their lives and, it seemed, accorded Angel new respect by association. Richard appeared genuinely to enjoy their company — he had always had an immature streak — and could hardly wait until supper was over so as to play hide and seek and murder in the dark around the cavernous, empty classrooms. In this, however, he had the ulterior motive of ensuring they were thoroughly exhausted by nine o’clock and begging for bed so as to leave him the more adult pleasure of exhausting his appetite for Angel.
The next morning, conditioned by Sandhurst, he was up early and left Angel for a lie in while he thrilled ‘the chubby Hungarian thing’ by taking her riding. The weather was clear, even thinly sunny, by the time they returned so the rest of the day was spent in taking a long ramble across the moor, broken by a pub lunch and several stops for thermos coffee and custard creams. He tested their map reading, their knowledge of birds and geology and — supreme nobility — gave Adams a piggyback ride when she grew too tired to walk any further. Angel began to feel slightly left out of the fun and found herself planning that, as and when she did marry him, she would bring forth men children only. She reminded herself, however, that it was important to keep the girls sweet. One word of this escapade when they returned next term and she would be job hunting without a reference. Announcing that it was important to Adams’ iron levels, she let Richard serve the girls red wine with their supper and knew their discretion was purchased for another night at least.
Letting him read them a bedtime ghost story was not such a good idea, however. Wine-doped, they seemed on the brink of sleep when Angel left them, but she and Richard had not progressed far beyond the slow unbuttoning stage, when the night was rent with distant screams. Cursing, buttoning her blouse up again, Angel hurried down her bedroom stairs and along the dormitory corridor to find Adams almost frenzied with terror and Wexel watching her with the same calm cheerfulness she had brought to the slicing of steak and rolling of pie crust. She calmed Adams but could not break her insistence that she sleep with Angel and Wexel sleep elsewhere. Angel was secretly furious but sensed the child’s implacability and knew the night would be interrupted repeatedly until she gave in. Wexel was curiously compliant.
‘Poor Alice,’ she said. ‘If it helps you sleep. But honestly, it was only a silly story. It’s all right, Miss. You sleep here and I’ll go in the sick bay. There’s still a bed made up.’
‘Very well,’ Angel sighed. ‘This is incredibly irritating of you, Adams. I hope you realize that.’
‘Sorry, Miss.’
‘I’ll just settle Wexel in over there and I’ll be back. Don’t worry. I’ll leave all the lights on.’
‘Sorry,’ she told Richard, with a kiss. ‘I think she’s a bit drunk actually. You’ll just have to watch TV if you can’t sleep. There’s a portable next door in Matron’s room and she keeps her sherry in the cupboard in her bathroom. Adams will fall asleep soon. I’ll probably be able to slip back to you during the night.’
‘You’d better,’ he growled and playfully nibbled the side of her neck, ‘or I’ll get restless and come and find you and who knows whose bed I might stumble into.’
Sadly, she proved as deeply affected by wine and fresh air as her nervous charge and after five or so minutes of lying in the dormitory listening to Adams’ adenoidal breathing, Angel fell into a slumber deep as the darkness around her. When she awoke, with a start, the clock over the stable yard gate was striking seven. For a while she lay there, assessing how her need for sleep weighed against the pleasure of tip-toeing back along the corridor and up to Richard’s musky bed. He would stir slightly in his sleep, mumble faindy. She would rouse him slowly with small, nuzzling kisses and the judicious touch of her dawn-chilled fingers…
She rose and pulled her dressing gown about her. Adams was snoring, far from fear. Climbing the stairs to her bedroom, carefully avoiding the stair that creaked, Angel reflected that this was probably far more fun than Baron’s Court. She opened the door as softly as she could, eager to surprise him by touch rather than sound. Then she froze, unable to believe what she thought she saw in the grey dawn light.
He lay spreadeagled on the bed on his back, one arm trailing over the mattress’ side. His eyes were open but fixed dreamily on the ceiling. Lotta Wexel was crouched over his naked body, her back to the door, eagerly chewing at the bridge of muscle across his armpit. As Angel darted back from the doorway, he let out a helpless groan of desire.
Mind reeling through scenario after nightmare scenario, Angel walked swiftly then ran back to the dormitory. Adams showed no sign of waking at her approach. Angel lay on the bed without taking off her dressing gown. This was absurd. Ridiculous. It was unthinkable that he should do such a thing and unlikely that Wexel, for all her insufferable bumptiousness, would prove so pliable to his will. After five, maybe six, minutes of indignant soul-searching, Angel sat up and walked back along the corridor. Either she was seeing things, delusions brought on by too much rat-trap cheese at dinner and his flirtatious references to impatient bed-hopping, or she was compelled to act, however compromised her professional position already was.
Checking first on the sick bay, she almost laughed aloud with relie
f. Wexel was fast asleep there, one of her pillows tumbled onto the floor, one chubby foot protruding from the bedclothes. Vowing to say nothing to him for fear he should think her quite mad, Angel passed on to Richard, who was also deep in dreams, and woke him with teasing slowness, rousing him delectably as planned.
Angel was the last to wake in the morning, finding herself sprawled in bed alone and naked with a pleasantly bruised feeling in her groin to remind her she had not been alone for long. She packed swiftly and came down to find Richard frying up a hearty farewell breakfast for the girls. He led them in singing songs and playing games most of the way home, although Alice Adams soon retreated into a doze in her comer of the back seat. Angel dropped him off at his parents’ house on the way, pausing for a lingering kiss in their shrubbery and a promise that he would ring her at her own parents’ house that night.
It was already dark when she pulled the Morris up at a meter outside the Wexels’ Mayfair hotel. Leaving Alice to sleep beneath a blanket, she ushered Lotta into the lobby while a porter unfastened the trunk from the roof-rack. She was surprised to find she had grown almost fond of the girl, intensely irritating as she was. The parents proved surprisingly elegant. The mother was sparely chic, with dark hair tied back and fat pearls glistening at her neck. Mr Wexel was taller and broader even than Richard, with bright eyes and a closely clipped beard. It was hard to imagine that boisterous Lotta could have anything to do with them. Then they kissed the child and Angel saw a strong family resemblance in the mother’s profile and the father’s busy glance.
‘And this is Miss Voysey. She’s given us such a good time.’
‘Enchanté.’
Mr Wexel did not quite kiss Angel’s hand but he bowed over it minutely and held it a fraction too long for comfort, raising his black eyes to hers and causing her a spasm of erotic perturbation. Mrs Wexel and Lotta had slipped outside to check on the trunk and say goodbye to Adams.
‘Such a sweet child,’ Mrs Wexel told Angel. ‘But so thin and pale one could see moonlight through her,’ and she laughed a well-bred phantom of Lotta’s red-blooded guffaw.
Returning to the car, eager to make headway because snow had been forecast, Angel found Adams awake and trembling. She had locked all the doors from the inside.
‘Let me in, Alice. Quickly. That’s it.’
‘Can we go now, Miss?’
‘Of course. We’ll be there in an hour. Really, what a performance! Did you take your iron pill?’
‘Yes, Miss.’
‘Good girl.’
Before they had reached the motorway out of Chiswick, Adams was already fast asleep again, her legs drawn up so that she was lying the width of the back seat. Angel reached back to pull the travel rug over her for warmth. It began to snow, just as Mr Wexel had prophesied. The flurries fell thicker and faster until Angel was half-blinded by the conical glare they made before the headlamps and was reduced to driving at a crawl. Desperate for coffee and something sweet to fortify her, and anxious to ring ahead to her parents and tell them not to worry if she was late, she pulled off into the motorway services at Fleet.
Turning round as she unfastened her seat belt, she tried to stir Adams gently and found that she couldn’t wake her.
‘Adams? Adams!’ Fear made her reach instinctively to the formality of term time. ‘Adams, wake up.’
She grasped at the girl’s skinny wrist, felt the sides of her neck. There was a pulse, only a faint one but she was alive. Terrified that the child she thought was sleeping peacefully had slid into a coma, she locked the car and sprinted across to a bank of telephones outside a fast food restaurant to summon an ambulance. She was about to return to the car when a certain apprehension made her fumble in her bag for Richard’s number at his parent’s house. His mother answered and chided her for not having come in for tea when she dropped him off.
‘Sorry,’ Angel said. ‘I’d have loved to but I was so late and I had some children to drop off too. Is he there? Could I have a word?’
‘I’m sorry, dear.’
‘Has he gone out?’
‘Oh no. He’s taken to his bed and he’s only just managed to fall asleep. Nothing much wrong with him but he came over all weak and dizzy so I tucked him up with some hot whisky and lemon and the electric blanket. He’s just caught a slight chill, I expect, walking on those moors.’
The ambulance was held up in the snow. Alice Adams was dead on arrival at the hospital. Angel arrived at her parents hours later, after a terrible blur of forms to be signed, calls to be made and statements to be given. Climbing from the Morris in her parents’ garage, numb from cold and emotional exhaustion, she saw she had the girl’s redundant trunk still strapped to the roof rack. The leather label flapped in the breeze that was flinging snow through the open doors and, watching its feeble motions, Angel thought of Kay Flanders and how she had died, as the letter to parents put it, quietly, in her sleep.
BORNEO
for Nick Hay
BEE TOOK A SANDWICH, doing her best to fill the gap left behind, and opened the French windows onto the garden. She stood on the steps for a moment then saw that the whirligig clothesline was still out, laden with knickers and bras. Stuffing the sandwich into her mouth, she strode out to remove the wretched thing from disapproving view.
Tony had died on a draughty Sunday in late autumn. They had some friends to lunch after Eucharist, then the two of them had gone up on the downs to walk off the blackberry and apple crumble. The wind had been so strong that they played games, leaning into it, yelling to make themselves heard. Tony’s deputy, Mike, was playing at Evensong so there had been no rush. When they came home, he had sat down to watch the new Trollope serial while she made a pot of tea. She had walked in with the tray to find him lying on the floor, his face twisted, dribbling at the pain. His hands had pressed at his temples as if his head were trying to burst. When the nurse had let her in to kiss her husband goodbye, Bee had seen bruises from the pressure of his own fingertips.
‘Coo-eee.’
Bee spun around with a handful of knickers. Mrs de Vere was standing there in a tea cosy hat and second-hand coat. Sturdy, black NHS specs glinting in the sun.
‘Mrs de Vere. How lovely.’
Mrs de Vere was not meant to be here. Thursday mornings were usually the time for Bee’s Afghanistan bandage parties. She would pour out coffee for a collection of the more lonely or immobile women of the area (picking them up by car, where necessary) while they cut up old sheets into bandages for her to send to refugee camps. In fact, Bee had not got around to sending any bandages for months, and was stockpiling the things in a fertilizer bag in the basement. She thought she had put off all her regulars. Evidently this one had slipped through the diplomatic net. A pronounced outcast, on account of her thick Dutch accent, disgusting mothbally smell and jealous obsession with the Bishop (whom she was rumoured to have followed from post to post since his ordination), Mrs de Vere was not coffee morning material.
‘I was not going to come this morning, on account of my arthritis you see, but I heard that you were having a coffee morning next week so I thought today I make a special effort for the little Afghans, yes?’ she burbled.
‘Of course. How kind. Actually, I’m giving a coffee morning today as well,’ said Bee, hoping that her breathing through her mouth was not too evident. ‘So I thought I could find you a chair near the fire and give you a sheet and let you get on with it. There’ll be all your friends here. Let’s go in, shall we, and find you a cup of coffee. You like it made with milk, don’t you?’
Dinah had yet to appear with the rest of the cups and saucers. Bee prayed that the guests would not arrive in a rush. She ensconced her unexpected visitor in the gloomier corner by the dining room fire and found her a pair of scissors and an old sheet. Mrs de Vere would insist on humming Lutheran hymns as she worked. Perhaps the spitting of the logs would cover it.
Everyone had been marvellous, of course. They had all heard within hours, without her breathing a
word, and for the next month she was surrounded by a cushioned wall of comfort. Bee had seen this in operation on others, been a press-ganged accessory to it herself. She had imagined she would react angrily, stifled by the crushing affection. Her submission, in the event, surprised her. The house had reeked of flowers. Every hour brought another fistful of cards and letters. She was honoured with gifts, as one miraculous; packets of home-made fudge, the solace of chocolate cakes, deep-frozen cassoulets for one, books of poetry with the relevant pages kindly earmarked. There was a small bunch of friends who had sent or brought something every day; a token of love. Once she started to venture out, she could subside into tears in the most unsuitable places, like the public library, secure in the knowledge that someone in the vicinity who knew would rush over with hugs and murmurings. She had never realized before how many of them had suffered. Tony’s hideous death brought such a quantity of pain and doubt to the surface that the community had seemed irrevocably altered. Her affection for it was not increased, but she approached it with new-found respect. That they had all felt the agony of bereavement at first-hand was only natural, far more interesting was the chemistry in death that caused so many of them to lay bare the poverty of their faith. Not a batch of consolations arrived but contained one astonishing recognition of the insane cruelty of existence, of the seeming impossibility of any but a psychopathic deity. The strongest of the latter were written on diocesan notepaper. Bee was an atheist. It was her best kept secret. Only Reuben knew. She had meant to confess to Tony, but his cheerful faith had disarmed her, and then he had died. The spate of avowals in the wake of his death had implicated her in the community. This was the first cord that bound her in. The second had been their guilt.