Take Nothing With You

by Patrick Gale

  ‘Have you been up all night?’ he asked eventually.

  Mercifully his father turned the radio down slightly.

  ‘I slept a bit,’ he said. ‘In a motorway service station somewhere. When I started falling asleep at the wheel.’ He let out one of his abrupt laughs that was all nerves and no delight. ‘It’s a six-or seven-hour drive from here to Bristol,’ he added.

  ‘Could we maybe have some breakfast somewhere?’ Eustace asked.

  ‘Didn’t you get any?’

  ‘No. I was just about to when you arrived.’

  The battling scents of air freshener and unwashed father on a yawningly empty stomach were beginning to make him feel queasy.

  ‘Good idea,’ his father said eventually. ‘There’s a place I noticed between Berwick and Newcastle.’

  Eustace wound down his window a tiny bit. It was hot in the car and he was starting to sweat. He concentrated on breathing slowly and training his gaze on the distance. It was a shock, after the rarefied atmosphere of Ancrum and the course to be suddenly passing wool shops and butchers, to be seeing men, women and children on the street doing everyday things, none of them giving a moment’s thought to Schubert’s last agonies or the finer points of how developing a stronger fourth finger on the left hand could improve one’s tuning. He realized that the people he had begun to think of as new friends, and not just Turlough, would think less of them for that and promptly felt guilty by association. In a similar way he realized he was resenting his mother for having had the accident more than he was worrying about her chances of survival, and that made him feel nauseous as well as bad.

  They stopped at last at a roadside café where the hire car was dwarfed by parked lorries. He hesitated about leaving the cello in the car. Touchingly his father seemed to read his mind.

  ‘We can get a table by the window so you can keep an eye out,’ he said.

  It was a relief to be out of the car and the smell of baked beans and fried bacon made him ravenously hungry. Without consulting him, his father ordered two full Englishes and a pot of tea from the waitress. She seemed to guess from a glance at the state of his father that they represented a family in crisis and brought them their tea immediately with a basket of buttered toast on the house. When she brought their cooked breakfasts, the helpings were huge, with fried bread and sautéed potatoes as well as everything else. Eustace shocked himself by eating almost everything: even the mushrooms, which he’d spoiled with a squirt of fartily expelled ketchup from the plastic tomato between them. It was all good, the best cooked breakfast he had ever eaten, even the worryingly pink sausage. Coming up for air, gulping the rich, brown tea the waitress had poured for them both, actually saying, Shall I be mother?, he saw his father had barely touched his but was cutting things up on his plate and moving them indecisively around.

  ‘Dad?’ he asked. ‘Aren’t you hungry? I thought you were hungry.’

  ‘Not very,’ his father said. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘That’s all right.’

  He didn’t know why he was politely accepting his father’s apology when he’d done nothing wrong and, in any case, was wasting his money not Eustace’s.

  ‘Where did it happen?’ he asked, because he didn’t like the way his father had fallen so quiet since they had sat down. He thought perhaps he was intimidated by the lorry drivers reading their newspapers and smoking at the tables all around them. He was never a very manly man but Eustace knew that talking about cars and roads was a manly thing to do so thought it might help.

  ‘She was on the motorway the other side of Bristol. Heading towards London,’ his father said quietly.

  Eustace found he was picturing his childhood jigsaw of England, in which each county, even tiny Rutland and two-part Flint, was a separate piece illustrating principal activities and produce. He pictured his mother’s car on it as a toy one. In the wrong place.

  ‘But why?’ he asked. ‘Where was she going?’

  He had been fiddling with a last piece of toast, although he was quite full and couldn’t imagine wanting to eat again for hours, but now looked up and saw his father’s normally quizzical, smiling face crumpling up in tears. He glanced around and saw a lorry driver notice and look hastily back at his tabloid. His father let out a sort of sob, almost a honk, and there was a big drip on the end of his nose that spooled out as Eustace watched, and landed in the egg he had cut open and left to congeal.

  All at once the motherly waitress was at their side. She had come from behind Eustace, taking him by surprise. ‘Is everything all right with the food, only you’ve not—’

  ‘It’s fine,’ Eustace told her. ‘Delicious. Thank you.’

  She frowned minutely – little more than a twitch of disapproval – and placed the bill down between them on a custard coloured saucer. But then, talking to Eustace, she added, ‘There’s a nice, clean washroom out the back if your daddy wants to freshen up.’ And she topped up Eustace’s tea from the big brown pot.

  His father took the hint, after she had moved on.

  ‘Won’t be a tick,’ he said and left Eustace at the table while he went in search of the lavatories. He couldn’t shave out there, obviously, but he must have washed his face in the sink because his eyes looked clearer again when he came back and the front of his hair was wet. ‘Right,’ he said brightly, then he sat down and ate his cold breakfast slightly too fast to look entirely normal. Then he settled their bill and led the way back to the car, belching.

  Eustace spotted the air-freshening device that was smelling so vile as they climbed back in. His father saw it too and shocked him by tossing it out of the window as they drove off. It was only a cheap cardboard thing from some garage but it was litter and they were not a family who dropped litter, ever. In fact he had known his father pick other people’s litter up and hand it back through their car windows saying, ‘I think you dropped this . . .’

  They drove for six hours. More. They listened to the radio all the way and ate the Jelly Babies his father bought when they stopped for petrol. But Eustace asked no more questions and his father said absolutely nothing. Guiltily, Eustace found himself glancing at his watch as the day passed, picturing what was happening at Ancrum, the practising, the stopping for coffee and banana bread, the serious, competitive talk over soupy lunch. He tried to picture Jean Curwen playing his part with the others, then wished he hadn’t because she played so well, even the mere second cello line. It would make the Schubert remarkable and something that would be talked about on the train home the next day. It would certainly eclipse any talk of Eustace and his abrupt departure.

  At the hospital Eustace insisted on bringing his cello inside. The hire car was newer than their old one and had locks that worked but he suddenly knew there could be nothing worse than to come back out and find the instrument gone, or damaged in some freak accident. His father respected his wishes and winced when a larky hospital porter in the lift looked at the cello case and said,

  ‘You come to give us all a tune, then?’

  His mother was in Intensive Care. Her hair had been cut so savagely short that it stood up in tufts. There were stitches near her hairline and little cuts all over her face and neck, from the glass presumably. And there was an ugly bruise peeping out from the top of her hospital gown. She wore no lipstick. Had a nurse not guided them to the bed, Eustace would not have recognized her. She was unconscious.

  He found himself waiting for her breaths and realized they were coming more slowly than usual, perhaps more slowly even than in sleep. There were tubes attached to her he did not care to examine or speculate about.

  His father went off to one side of the room to talk, very quietly, with a doctor.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Eustace couldn’t sleep. There was no reason for this. He had carefully avoided coffee. Though, of course, the lack of wine with his hospital supper meant he had gone to bed without the usual glass or three to send him off. The street seemed noisy, which was a nonsense because, even allowing
for the Cromwell Road’s thunder of traffic just around the corner, the room was soundproofed and he could hear no more than the vibration of taxi engines as cabs slowed or idled in passing. Perhaps it was the lack of usual noise that made him wakeful. No chatter of departing guests, no passing pedestrians talking loudly on their mobile phones, no beeps and clicks of cars being locked or unlocked. The bed was perfectly comfortable and supportive but it was a hospital bed, not his own. And he missed Joyce who, though nominally curled beneath the outer layer of her whippet bed beneath the bedroom radiator, had acquired a sly habit of insinuating herself on to her master’s bed once he was asleep and nestling in ever closer beneath his arm or behind the crook of his knees.

  Perhaps he had spent too many hours in bed already when he should have made a point of spending at least the afternoon and evening sitting upright in the room’s unappealing wipe-down armchair?

  He got up, walked about, performed a few of the stretches they’d been taught in Boot Camp, drank another glass of water, had a piss then tried going back to bed. This time he actively tried to stay awake, which had worked for him in the past.

  He pictured Theo, heard his rumbling voice and the teasing, deadpan humour Eustace was slowly learning to read. Although they had spoken now for hours on Skype, during which Theo had occasionally stepped back from the screen to fetch something to show him, Eustace’s impression of his body remained hazy. He knew he was fit and had a neatly furred chest and a long scar under one forearm from when he had been knocked off his racing bike by a car as a teenager. He knew, if the app hadn’t lied, that Theo was five foot eleven, slightly shorter than him. But he had no mental sense of his scale, having really only seen him in close up through a small screen, had no sense whether he would be wiry or bulky, whether he had the legs of a runner or a rugby player.

  It was odd, too, to have no idea of how Theo smelled. He had confessed to him on one of their last conversations before they left the frank environment of the app for the politer one of face-to-face conversation, that the nearest he came to a kink was liking the smell of a man’s fresh musk, to which Theo had swiftly responded with a photograph of his sweat patches after a dawn run about the camp. He had offered to send Eustace a dirty T-shirt and Eustace had been regretting ever since his coyness in batting the offer aside with a silly joke.

  He watched a breeze stir the lamp-lit leaves of the plane tree outside his window and worried that he wanted their meeting to be a success so badly that his need would doom it. He knew now that Naomi was right, in the way Naomi always was, and that he had been wrong not to tell Theo about the cancer in advance. This way their first date would be about sickness not happy anticipation. He thought about ringing him but it was the middle of the night and Theo would be in transit somewhere, inhibited among strangers. Quite possibly he wouldn’t answer. Then Eustace remembered he had no mobile with him and had not memorized Theo’s number, so couldn’t have used the payphone, even had he thought to buy credit for it before his wallet was taken beyond the lead-lined walls.

  He sat up, fluffed and turned his pillows, lay back and calmed himself with a mental slideshow of the modestly rare selfies Theo had sent him since their courtship began. He reminded himself that one of the first things they had established they had in common was that they were both quite shy and self-critical. He imagined them on the houseboat at Bembridge, imagined them kissing on deck in the moonlight, water lapping below them, halyards clinking against masts in the harbour around them.

  Then he tried to imagine Theo meeting his mother and stopped when he realized they were meeting, and getting on infuriatingly well, at his funeral. He tried not to think of himself as having cancer or being radioactive, so of course did both. He tried not to think about his mother.

  Like most cumbersome journeys, the one to visit her had shrunk, with repetition and familiarity, to a fairly painless commute. Circle Line to Paddington, train to Bristol Temple Meads, Number 8 bus to Clifton then a ten-minute walk towards the downs. The weekly duty visit had reintroduced him to the pleasure of reading and, since her second widowing, he had been working his way through the novels that had once so enthralled Vernon.

  She lived in one of the huge, Bath stone houses out towards the zoo that might have been built for ambassadors, had Bristol been a capital. Like so much architectural pretension in the district, they were a testament to just how much money the city once generated through slaves and sugar. He vividly recalled how, in his youth, many such houses had reached their nadir, as communes and squats and student digs, their gardens forbiddingly jungly, their decoration anarchic. But property values had escalated as steeply here as in London, and it was as though the entire district had been scrubbed to newly built freshness. With their electric gates, discreet, shoe-level lighting and glimpses of security systems, it was likely that many of the houses there had been restored to a degree of luxury far above their original architect’s fantasies.

  Any irony in his mother having ended up in a retirement home having nominally run one herself for years was annulled by Downs Court being as far removed from cabbage water, commodes and TV lounges as a five-star country retreat was from a two-star seaside guesthouse. Each resident had their own suite with the use, at a cost, of extra bedrooms should they have guests. Breakfast was brought to their bedsides on a tray. Three-choice lunches and dinners, cooked by a talented chef, were served in the dining room or available as room service. There were on-site nursing staff, a hairdresser and beautician, a brace of handsome masseurs, classes in yoga and more vigorous exercise, a tennis court (with handsome coach) and an indoor pool. In short it was a luxury hotel and, though Eustace had nothing to do with the man in life, he was grateful to Second Husband for posthumously settling monthly accounts that must have been eye-wateringly expensive. He had never seen his mother naked and never seen her bank statements.

  It was all part of the double-damask service of the place that visitors to Downs Court could not simply march in off the street and knock on a relative’s door. Several of the residents had dementia and all were rich so, by way of protection, visitors had to give their names at the reception desk and be escorted, much as though visiting the CEO of a multinational. The escort, usually pretty, female and English – though the masseurs and tennis coach were male Slavs, he gathered – would knock at the door and, despite having called ahead from the reception desk, would then slip in alone, for all the world as though fearful of interrupting the resident in a delicate merger deal, before coming back to say with a smile, ‘She’s expecting you.’

  Eustace had observed that the world was divided between those who could not stop remembering, made wary or resentful by memories they could not shake or injuries they would not forgive, and those, like his mother, whose graceful progress was oiled by a selective memory. She had a breathtaking flair for ignoring the tasteless or painful and, seemingly, if she retained any conscience, having one that was efficiently smoothed by the progress of time. Time heals all had always struck him as a dictum favoured by the complacent. The version he and Naomi preferred was Time picks every scab .

  ‘Darling!’

  He was always darling to her now, and they always hugged and kissed like mother and son in a sitcom, which was odd as he didn’t remember her doing either in his childhood.

  She looked immaculate. He suspected she had her hair and nails seen to every week out of boredom and because it gave her someone to talk to. She turned off the vast television. She had never been a reader – she read the Daily Telegraph only nominally, having a way of folding it aside after a cursory flick with a sigh at the stupidity of the World . She had never been fond of television either, usually leaving the room when he had watched it with his father and implying that an interest in it was vaguely low, but she had now become an avid viewer. He was grateful for this as it lubricated his visits when they could pass a companionable hour watching people choose new houses in the country or sell unwanted antiques to pay for cruises.

  ‘I li
ke your hair,’ he said.

  ‘Thank you. They only took a little off. It’s not too short? The horror of scraggy old necks!’

  ‘It’s fine. It looks soigné .’

  ‘Oh good. Sit.’

  He sat and let her fiddle with her espresso machine, although he would have to fetch the filled cups across to the table when she was done as her hands would shake and spill them. When alone, she drank her coffee standing up by the machine, he knew. He gazed out through her sliding doors at the terrace and the lawn beyond. It was all flawless and entirely without charm or character, like a face robbed of interest by plastic surgery.

  She swore she had never been under the knife, though he clearly recalled her and Second Husband attending his father’s funeral fresh from a ‘holiday’ with faintly oriental looks they had not possessed on departure. It did not bother him. It was her life, her face, her money. He suspected the beautician, as bored as all the residents, gave them all injections to amuse herself. The area beside his mother’s mouth and eyes sometimes took on an unnatural, sausage skin smoothness. It all seemed a little pointless when her shuffling gait, withered shanks and rounded shoulders proclaimed her a woman fast approaching ninety.

  He fetched the coffee and a saucer of chef-baked biscuits only he would eat, although she would be sure to say how good they were.

  ‘So,’ she asked, once they were settled. ‘How are things? Did you sell that last flat to the Russian?’

  ‘I did,’ he said. ‘Mrs Lee was furious as she wanted the whole building.’

  ‘Better a Russian than a Chinese. They’re everywhere. Not here, thank God.’

  ‘You can’t say that.’

  ‘It’s my house. I can say what I like.’

  The racism, like the money, had come from Second Husband. Or perhaps he had merely helped give it voice.