When Will There Be Good News?

by Kate Atkinson

  Patrick and Samantha had nice things: the Wedgwood, the canteen of silver cutlery, the damask tablecloths, the napkin rings, the crystal glasses. Wedding-present stuff, the goods and chattels of a traditional marriage. Louise’s possessions looked like a refugee’s beside his, a refugee who spent a lot of time in IKEA. When she had first opened the linen chest (a linen chest — who had a linen chest? Patrick and Samantha, that was who), she had felt alarmed at the neatly starched and ironed contents that looked as if they hadn’t been given an airing since Samantha last sat in the driving seat of her car.

  Louise remembered a ballad or poem set in some long-ago time when a wedding had taken place in a great house and all the guests had played hide-and-seek as part of the celebrations (imagine that now). The new bride had hidden in a huge chest in a remote part of the house where no one had thought to look for her. The lid of the chest had a hidden spring and could be opened only from the outside, and she suffocated inside it before she’d even had her wedding night. Years later they found her skeleton, dressed in all her wedding finery. Buried alive—but then some relationships were like that too. Who knew, perhaps the poor bride had been better off dead. Alison Needler said her ex-husband would have kept her “in a locked box if he could have.” “The Mistletoe Bride,” that was what it was called. If you waited long enough, your memory always caught up with you. One day it wouldn’t.

  “Sweetheart?” Patrick was standing over her, smiling. He had opened another bottle of the wine and went round the table like a waiter, refilling the crystal glasses. He gave her shoulder a little squeeze and she returned his smile. He was far too good for her. Too nice. It made her want to behave badly, to see how far she could push him, to smash the niceness. A bit of a problem with intimacy perhaps, Louise?

  “Well, cheers again,” Patrick said when he sat down. They all chinked their glasses and the crystal rang out like a bell. Calling her home. Not this home, some other home she hadn’t discovered yet.

  “Cheers,” Tim said, and Louise said, “Slainte,” just to remind them that they were in her country now.

  She ran her finger round the rim of the crystal. Samantha’s crystal.

  “Louise?”

  “Mmm?”

  “I was just saying to Patrick,” Bridget said, “that you must come and visit us in the summer.”

  “That would be great, I’ve never been to Eastbourne. Are you near the beach?”

  “Wimborne actually. It’s not on the coast,” Bridget said. Inside Bridget’s smug and well-upholstered middle-class body, there might be a perfectly decent human being. Or not.

  Louise knocked back the rest of the wine in her glass and searched for her own inner adult. Found her. Lost her again.

  There’s ice cream in the freezer,” Patrick said. “Cherry Garcia,” he said to Bridget. “Is that okay with you?”

  “What does that mean?” she said querulously. “I’ve never understood.”

  “The Grateful Dead,” Patrick said. “Never your kind of music, Bridie. As I seem to remember, you were more of a Partridge Family fan.”

  “And you weren’t?” Louise said to him. “You don’t seem like you were ever a Deadhead to me.”

  “Sometimes I wonder who you think you married,” he said. What did that mean? He stood up and began to clear the plates. The food, cold and congealed, looked disgusting now.

  “I’ll get the ice cream,” Louise said, jumping up so quickly that she nearly knocked Tim’s glass over. She managed to catch it just in time.

  “Good save,” he murmured. He was so English. A different class of person from Louise. Louise had a knee-jerk reaction to the accent of a dominant culture. It was funny how sometimes you could realize you were all alone in a roomful of people. Well, four people, one of whom was you. Stranger in a strange land, a Ruth amongst an alien middle-class corn.

  Instead of going straight to the kitchen, she ran up the stairs to her bedroom (their bedroom) and took her ring out of the safe. The safe had been a proviso of the insurance company because of the value of the diamond. When she changed her insurance, the new insurance company insisted that Louise install a monitored security system and a safe, “For the ring, Mrs. Brennan,” the girl on the other end of the phone said. Louise had never been called Mrs. in her life and couldn’t believe the amount of bile that shot into her system at the word, and not just at that word, but to add insult to injury, the girl had called her by Patrick’s surname as if she were chattel. She was baffled by women who changed their names when they got married — your name was the closest thing to your self. Sometimes your name was all you had. Joanna Hunter changed her name when she married, but then you would, wouldn’t you? But at least she could cling to the epithet of Doctor to give her an identity. If Louise were in Joanna Hunter’s shoes, she would have changed her name long before marriage. She wouldn’t have wanted to be known forever as that little girl lost in the bloody field of wheat. Louise might not have had an idyllic childhood but it had been a whole lot better than Joanna Hunter’s.

  “That would be Detective Chief Inspector Monroe,” she said coldly to the girl from the insurance company. “Not Mrs. Brennan.”

  Louise only found out afterwards that Patrick had bought the diamond ring with some of the money invested from Samantha’s life insurance. Truly a blood diamond, after all.

  She didn’t often wear the big diamond, just occasionally if they were going out somewhere. He made her go out places, theater, restaurants, opera, concerts, dinner parties — even, God help her, to charity fund-raisers where the rich and richer hobnobbed at two thousand a table. Kilts and ceilidhs, Louise’s idea of hell. Still, it made her realize how narrow she had let her life become, it had been just Archie, work, and her cat, although not necessarily in that order. And now her cat was dead and Archie had spread his wings. “Live your life, Louise,” Patrick said, “don’t endure it.”

  She didn’t wear her wedding ring either. Patrick wore his. He never mentioned her unworn wedding ring or the diamond in the safe. Lying in bed at night Louise could see the rings glinting in the dark, even when the safe was shut. Band of gold. Band around the heart. Heart of darkness. Darkness evermore.

  There had been another man once. The kind of man she could have imagined standing shoulder to shoulder with, a comrade in arms, but they had been as chaste as protagonists in an Austen novel. All sense and no sensibility, no persuasion at all. She had kept vaguely in touch with Jackson, but it had been going nowhere because it had nowhere to go. He’d had a pregnant girlfriend and neither of them had talked about the consequences of that in their occasional drunken, late-night texts. Then the pregnant girlfriend dumped him and told him it wasn’t his baby and they hadn’t talked about the consequences of that either. Perhaps it was only Louise who had been drunk. She wasn’t a drinker, not really (“Only days with a y in them”), she would never go down the same path as her mother, but sometimes, before she met Patrick, she had found herself looking forward to pouring the first drink of the evening in a way that went beyond pleasant anticipation. Now her drinking followed Patrick’s civilized regime, a glass or two of a good red with a meal. Just as well, she made a maudlin drunk.

  Patrick believed in the health-giving properties of red wine. He had embraced the Red Wine Diet, buying cases of some French wine that was going to make him live forever. He went for a swim five mornings a week, played golf twice a week, had a positive attitude every day of the week. It was like living with an alien pretending to be human. He was solicitous about her health too (“Ever thought of doing yoga? Tai chi? Something meditative?”). He didn’t want to be widowed a second time. A surgeon seeing off two wives in a row, it wouldn’t look good.

  She slipped the ring on her finger. Let Bridget see that her price might not be above rubies, but she was worth a three-and-a-half-carat piece of ice. She added her wedding ring, and her finger felt suddenly weighed down. The rings were tight. For a second she thought they had shrunk, until she realized that it was mo
re likely that her finger had grown bigger.

  Catching sight of herself in the mirror, she felt shocked — her skin was alabaster and her eyes were huge and black, as if she’d been taking belladonna. At her temple a large vein throbbed like a worm buried beneath her skin. She looked like someone who had been in a terrible accident.

  She had heard the phone ringing insistently downstairs, and by the time she came reluctantly down, Patrick was in the hallway, pulling on his Berghaus and making eagerly for the door. “There’s been a train crash,” he said to her. “A bad one. All hands on deck tonight,” he added cheerfully. “Coming?”

  Funny Old World

  Reggie Chase, as small as a mouse, as quiet as a house with no one home. She was absentmindedly scratching the top of Banjo’s head. Homer was open on her lap, but she was watching Coronation Street. She had almost finished an old box of violet creams that she’d rummaged out of the back of one of Ms. MacDonald’s kitchen cupboards (any port in a storm). She checked the clock. Ms. MacDonald would be home soon.

  She could hear a train approaching, the noise muted at first by the wind and then growing louder and louder. Not the usual train noise, but a great rumbling wave of sound that seemed to be rolling towards the house. Reggie leapt instinctively to her feet, she had the feeling that the train was actually going to come through the house. Then another higher-pitched sound, as if a giant hand were clawing a giant blackboard with giant fingernails, and finally a tremendous bang, like an explosive clap of thunder. The apocalypse had come to town.

  And then . . . nothing. The gas fire hissed, Banjo snored and grunted, the rain continued to throw itself against the living-room window. The Coronation Street theme music started up for the credits. Reggie, book in hand, a half-eaten violet cream in her mouth, was still standing in the middle of the floor, poised for flight. For a moment it was as if nothing had happened.

  Then she heard voices and doors banging as people from the neighboring houses ran into the street. Reggie opened the front door and stuck her head out into the wind and rain. “A train’s crashed,” a man said to her. “Right out back.” Reggie picked up the phone in the hall and dialed 999. Dr. Hunter had told her that in an emergency everyone presumed that someone else would call. Reggie wasn’t going to be that person who presumed.

  “Back soon,” she said to Banjo, pulling on her jacket. She picked up the big torch that Ms. MacDonald kept by the fuse box at the front door, put the house keys in her pocket, pulled the door shut behind her, and ran out into the rain. The world wasn’t going to end this night. Not if Reggie had anything to do with it.

  What larks, Reggie!

  The Celestial City

  The tunnel was white, not black. Not so much a tunnel as a corridor. It was very brightly lit. And there were seats, white molded plastic benches that seemed to be part of the wall. He was sitting on one as if he were waiting for something. It reminded him of a scene from a science-fiction film. Jackson expected that at any minute his sister or his brother would appear and invite him to follow them into the light. He knew it was altered temporal-lobe function or oxygen deprivation to his brain as his body shut down. Or even an excess of ketamine — he’d read somewhere about that, National Geographic probably. Still, it was a surprise when it happened to you. You would think it would feel like a cliché or a dream, but it didn’t. He was at ease, in a way that he didn’t ever remember feeling when he was alive. It no longer mattered that he wasn’t in control. He wondered what was going to happen next.

  On cue, his sister suddenly appeared, sitting next to him on the bench. She touched the back of his hand and smiled at him. Neither of them spoke, there was nothing to say and everything to say at the same time. Words would never have been able to convey what he was feeling, even if he had been able to speak, which he wasn’t.

  He was experiencing euphoria. It had never happened to him before, even at the happiest times in his life — when he was in love, when Marlee was born — any possibility of clear, uncut joy had been fogged by the anxiety. He had never floated free of the world’s cares before. He hoped it was going to go on forever.

  His sister moved her face close to his and he thought she was going to kiss him on the lips but instead she breathed into his mouth. His sister’s signature scent was violets — she wore April Violet cologne and her favorite chocolates were violet creams, even the sight of which made Jackson feel sick when he was a boy — so he wasn’t surprised that her breath tasted of violets. He felt as if he had inhaled the Holy Ghost. But then he felt himself being pulled out of the tunnel, away from Niamh, and he had to fight to resist. She stood up and started to walk away. He exhaled the Holy Ghost and shut his mouth so it couldn’t get back in. He stood up and followed his sister.

  Some slippage, some interruption in the space-time continuum. Something had punched him in the chest, incredibly hard. He wasn’t in the white corridor. He was in the Land of Pain. And then, just as suddenly, he was back in the white corridor, his sister walking ahead, looking over her shoulder, beckoning to him. He wanted to tell her that it was okay, he was coming, but he still couldn’t speak. More than anything in the world, he wanted to follow his sister. Wherever it was, it was going to be the best thing that had ever happened to him.

  Something jackhammered him in the chest again. He felt suddenly furious. Who was doing this, who was trying to stop him from going with his sister?

  III

  Tomorrow

  The Dogs They Left Behind

  What did he mean, she’d gone away? Gone away? Gone away where? And why? “To see an elderly aunt who’s been taken ill,” he’d said. She’d never mentioned having an aunt, let alone one who might get ill.

  “She’s only just been taken ill,” Mr. Hunter said impatiently, as if Reggie were a nuisance, as if it were she who had phoned him at half past six in the morning, waking in a fumbling daze of sleep, unable to understand why Mr. Hunter was on the other end of the phone, saying, “You don’t need to come in today.” For a moment Reggie thought it must be something to do with the train crash, and then — worse — that something had happened to Dr. Hunter or the baby — or, worst of all, that Dr. Hunter and the baby had been involved in the train crash in some way. But no, he had phoned at an unearthly hour to tell her about a sick aunt.

  “What aunt?” Reggie puzzled. “She’s never mentioned an aunt.”

  “Well, I don’t expect Jo tells you everything,” Mr. Hunter said.

  “So everything’s definitely okay with Dr. Hunter and the baby?” Reggie said. “They’re not ill or anything?”

  “Of course not,” Mr. Hunter said. “Why should they be?”

  “When did Dr. Hunter leave?”

  “She drove down last night.”

  “Down?”

  “To Yorkshire.”

  “Where in Yorkshire?”

  “Hawes, since you must know every detail.”

  “Whores?”

  “H-a-w-e-s. Can we stop this catechism now? Tell you what, take a wee holiday, Reggie. Jo will be back in a few days. She’ll phone you then.”

  Why hadn’t Dr. Hunter phoned her, that was the question. Dr. Hunter always had her mobile with her, she called it her “lifeline.” She used it for everything — the house phone “belonged to Neil,” she always said. But then perhaps she had been driving, in too much of a hurry to get to this mysterious aunt to stop and call Reggie. But Dr. Hunter wasn’t the kind of person not to call you. It made Reggie feel dismissed, a bit like a servant. When had she left? “Last night,” Mr. Hunter said.

  It would have been darkest dark when she drove away. Reggie imagined Dr. Hunter plowing through the night, through the rain, the baby asleep in the car seat in the back, or awake and noisily distracting Dr. Hunter from the road ahead while she scrabbled in the baby-bag for a mini-oatcake to keep him quiet while the Tweenies’ Greatest Hits (the baby’s favorite) added further to the potential accident scenario. It was funny that Dr. Hunter had driven down to Yorkshire at the same t
ime the train hurtled away from it into disaster, into Reggie’s life.

  Reggie had an aunt in Australia — her mother’s sister, Linda. “Never close, Linda and me,” Reggie’s mother used to say. When Mum died, Reggie had to endure an awkward phone call with Linda. “Never close, your mum and me,” Linda echoed. “But I’m sorry for your loss,” as if it wasn’t her loss at all but Reggie’s alone to bear. Before the phone call, Reggie had wondered if Linda would invite her to come over to Australia to live or at least to stay for a holiday (“Oh, you poor thing, come here and let me look after you”), but clearly this thought had never even entered Linda’s mind (“Well, take care of yourself then, Regina.”).

  The day suddenly stretched emptily ahead. “It’ll be nice for you to have some time off,” Mr. Hunter said, but it wasn’t nice at all. Reggie didn’t want time off. She wanted to see Dr. Hunter and the baby, she wanted to tell Dr. Hunter about what had happened last night — the train crash, Ms. MacDonald, the man. Especially the man, because, if you thought about it, the fact that the man was alive (if he was still alive) was all down not to Reggie but to Dr. Hunter.

  All night — or what little was left of it by the time she got to bed — Reggie had tossed restlessly in the unfamiliar surroundings of Ms. MacDonald’s back bedroom, going over the events of the last hours and bursting with excitement at the idea of telling them to Dr. Hunter. Well, perhaps excitement was the wrong word, terrible things had happened on that railway track, but Reggie had been involved in them, a witness and a participant. People she knew had died. People she didn’t know had died. Drama — that was a better word. And she needed to tell someone about the drama. More specifically, she needed to tell Dr. Hunter about it because Dr. Hunter was the only person she knew who was interested in her life now that Mum had gone.