For dinner they had the identical menu. This was two-thirds laziness, or exhaustion, on Roger’s part, and one-third practicality, since there wasn’t much else to cook: most of the fridge was occupied by a goose, bought by Arabella ‘to eat on Christmas Day’, and delivered on Christmas Eve. Her plan was obviously in place by the time she did this, so the whole goose thing was part of her strategy to first deceive her husband, then taunt him. It was one thing to be abandoned by your wife over Christmas, another to have the enormous American-style, almost walk-in fridge two-thirds-full of goose. Besides, as Arabella knew perfectly well, Roger hated goose. So for Christmas dinner he ate the boys’ leftover eggs and peanut butter, followed by a cheese sandwich, followed by two packets of crisps, and washed down with a bottle of Veuve Clicquot La Grande Dame 1990, which was supposed to be the pre-Christmas-lunch aperitif. That, too, turned out to be a mistake, because Roger then had to cope with the last few hours of the day half-cut. Christmas Day spent alone with his children was, in Roger’s considered view, the longest, hardest, most boring day of his life. The one good thing was that the boys had only once or twice asked after Arabella. It was as if, in the general mayhem of Christmas, they had barely noticed she wasn’t there. Hah! Roger was very much looking forward to telling her that.
Boxing Day was slightly better. It began later, for a start: Josh didn’t come thudding down the stairs until seven o’clock. Roger woke before he came into the room, and felt as if he had been awake already, but still, seven was better than six. Better still, Joshua, instead of immediately launching into demands and complaints, got into bed with Roger and snuggled up against him for a full fifteen minutes. That was a good feeling; it was a long time since Roger had felt himself still against the extraordinary density and heat of his son’s small warm body. Then Joshua began jabbing him with his finger and saying ‘bokfas, bokfas’, which meant breakfast, and they came downstairs for chocolate cereal and the day’s first burst of television.
The children’s TV presenters still seemed to be coked out of their brains. Roger still envied them. Conrad came down at about eight, and his second day in full solo charge of his boys was in full swing. They went to Starbucks to get a triple-shot espresso (Roger), a cream-based java chip Frappuccino (Conrad) and a steamed-milk babycino (Joshua). Conrad managed to knock the fire extinguisher off the wall outside the disabled toilet while Joshua had distracted Roger by trying to climb up and/or push over a stool, but the extinguisher didn’t go off, which was another good omen for the day. They went for a walk on the Common, which was as empty as Roger had ever seen it. At one point, on their way to the dog-free zone to kick a football about, he walked past a young woman pushing a pram – middle-class, she was, as Roger registered without bothering to examine how he decoded that fact: something about her scarf, or her pram, or her hair – and she gave him a look of unqualified approval. Roger thought for a moment how he must look: dad shoving along a pushchair with one small boy in it, wrapped up in a coat and hugging a football; second small boy trotting alongside. The likely diagnosis would be, thoughtful father taking his sons for a Boxing Day walk while Mum has a well-deserved lie-in. Well, bollocks to that, thought Roger, and before he’d realised it the thought made him scowl at the nice, and distinctly fit-looking, middle-class mum.
It was windy on the bare Common, and colder than Roger had expected. There were no other children out today; only one or two addicted joggers. They gave up after about ten minutes and headed for home.
‘Hot chocolate?’ said Roger, realising, as he spoke the words, that he didn’t in fact know how to make hot chocolate. How hard could it be? And maybe the tin would have instructions. But the boys had decided they were too cold to make that sort of decision. Joshua got back in his pushchair and made a token attempt at doing up the buckle before Roger helped him out. Conrad zipped up his own coat and pulled the hood over his head, then put his hands deep in his coat pockets with his shoulders hunched. He looked like a very small mugger.
Walking back across the Common, all three of them now crouching into themselves to keep warm, Conrad said:
‘Witches’ knickers.’
Roger thought he must have misheard.
‘What?’
Conrad pointed towards some trees, twitching in the stiff December wind.
‘Witches’ knickers.’
Roger looked. The clump of trees had three white plastic bin bags in them, thrashing and dervishing in the black branches. Witches’ knickers. He laughed for the first time in two days. Later they all became tired and cross with each other – a typical Boxing Day. But at least it wasn’t as bad as Christmas.
Help arrived the next day. It came as more than a pleasant surprise when the Hungarian nanny, promised by the agency when Roger finally got through at nine, rang on the doorbell at quarter to eleven, and turned out to be a tall, pretty, well-spoken dark-haired girl in her mid-twenties. Matya. According to the agency, she had OK English and good references and a strong rapport with small children. As soon as he looked at her Roger felt ill with relief. He also did what he unconsciously did whenever he was attracted to a woman, and stretched to his full height.
When Matya came in the sitting room, the first thing she did, Roger noticed (after also noticing her startlingly good bum in tight jeans, once she’d taken her coat off), was look for the children. It was interesting, because most people coming in the room looked at the fancy decor and fancy stuff. Joshua and Conrad were having one of their infrequent five-minute episodes of getting on well, while the younger boy passed bits of Duplo to the elder, who was building what seemed to be a zoo.
‘Let me brief you,’ said Roger firmly. He introduced Conrad and Joshua, but Matya barely seemed to need the introduction; she was down on her knees beside the boys, discussing in her soft Hungarian accent the best way of getting the gorilla to stand on the back of the crocodile. All in all, for Roger it was like the moment in an action movie when the helicopter rescue crew gets to the special forces team deep behind enemy lines, and the viewer finally gets the feeling that, just possibly, and against all odds, everything is going to turn out all right for the good guy.
Part Two
April 2008
31
Spring was coming. At number 42, the crocuses Petunia Howe had planted the previous autumn, before she began to feel peculiar, had come and gone. The hollyhocks and delphiniums which she had planted to come up in the summer weren’t visible yet, so the garden was less colourful than she liked it to be; the lawn was looking scruffy, too. She didn’t like to ask her daughter to mow the lawn and there was no one else to do it. Even so, there was a sense that spring was here: when it was warm enough to have the window open – which at the sheltered back of the house it already was, some of the time – she could feel the distinctive texture of the new season’s air, its fructifying softness. Petunia had always loved that feeling. She didn’t think that you had to divide the world into spring or autumn people, because she loved them both, but if you had to pin her down she would have said she was a spring person. By May or certainly June, the cranesbill would be out, the Queen Anne’s lace would be beginning, and the irises would be in full flower; the lily of the valley would be everywhere; the garden would be vivid and intimate with colour and growth, the way she liked it – with a sense of profusion, generosity, so many different things going on that it verged on being untidy. She liked to sit in her chair by the window in her bedroom and look down into the garden and imagine how it was going to be. It was hard to accept – it was impossible to get her head around – the fact that she was dying and would be dead by high summer. Her consultant had told her so.
He had done so the way he did everything else, awkwardly. It was as if he was remembering to try not to be brusque but not quite managing it. The brain tumour he had said needed ‘eliminating’ as a possible illness turned out to be what she actually had. The business about ‘elimination’ was, she now realised, doctor-speak for ‘this is probably what you’ve go
t’. She had a large tumour, one which had, he said, grown surprisingly quickly for someone her age.
‘I’ve got cancer,’ Petunia had said, with a sensation that she had bumped into something. People talked about the floor opening up beneath you, or the ground falling from beneath your feet, and things like that, but that wasn’t how Petunia felt; she felt as if she had walked into something invisible. Something which had always been there but which she hadn’t been able, and still wasn’t able, to see.
‘Not strictly,’ the doctor said, having visibly had a small struggle over whether or not he should factually correct a dying woman over a point of terminology, before giving in to the impulse to do so. ‘Brain tumour is not a form of cancer. But you do have a tumour and I am sorry to say there is evidence that it is growing.’
Evidence – a heavy word.
The doctor said that the tumour was too big to operate on but that they could treat it with chemotherapy. Or rather that they could ‘perhaps’ treat it with chemotherapy. Many years ago, after watching her friend Margerie Talbot – who had lived at 51, where the Younts now lived – suffer horribly with the treatment for cancer and then die anyway, Petunia had resolved never to have chemotherapy. Now, sitting in the doctor’s consulting office on the eighteenth floor of the hospital tower block, she was interested to notice that the practice was no different from the theory: she felt no temptation to accept the offer of treatment. Not that it was an especially tempting offer. It was something like six weeks’ treatment for six extra months of life – Petunia couldn’t now remember the exact details of the calculation but she could remember at the time thinking how strangely similar it was to the extended warranty offers, £5.99 a month for three years’ extra coverage, which had used to make Albert so reliably furious.
‘No,’ said Petunia. ‘Thank you, but no.’
‘You don’t have to decide here and now,’ the doctor had said.
‘Well, I have decided, and it’s no,’ said Petunia. The consultant looked, for the first and only time, a little taken aback. And that was the last time she had seen him.
The doctor’s verdict was a shock. But at some level it was not a surprise. Things had suddenly got much worse in February. At the core of it was a feeling that this illness was different from any other she had ever had. Every other time she had been ill, there had always been a distance between her and what was wrong with her; she was over here, her illness was over there, and even when she had been deeply ill, delirious with flu and fever, say, she had known that the illness was not her. Her being and its being were separate. That was different this time. The symptoms were not spectacular, but Petunia knew that the sickness was very intimate, it was entwined with her thoughts and perceptions and deepest self. The shadow on her sight spread and grew darker, and then Petunia was dizzy and weak and at times couldn’t do anything much: walk, or even get out of bed. She was taken into hospital. At times she could barely see. For a short period there she had uncontrollable hiccups, so much so that the other patients on the ward complained.
After two weeks things stabilised slightly and she was sent home to die. Her daughter Mary moved down from Maldon to look after her. The alternative would have been moving to Essex to stay with Mary and her family while she died, but there was something creepy about Mary’s house (though of course Petunia didn’t admit that this was the reason), something cold and sterile and unwelcoming and not-right. Mary spent most of her time cleaning and putting things away – she always had – and this habit was harder to bear on foreign territory. At Pepys Road, Mary spent most of the day doing things somewhere else in the house, but came when Petunia called her. That was shamefully often. She sometimes could manage to get to the loo in the night, but sometimes could not, and when that happened she had to call for Mary, who was sleeping in the single bed in an adjacent room which had once been Albert’s den and now was nothing much, except the room which had once been Albert’s den. But Mary was a deep sleeper and even though mother and daughter both left their doors open she often didn’t hear her mother call until Petunia was almost losing her voice with shouting for her. And then they had the trip to the bathroom to negotiate. Petunia hated this, and Mary hated it too.
There was palliative care available, either at home or in a hospice, when Petunia was actually dying. But she wasn’t quite there yet. The rate at which she was dying seemed to have slowed down sharply since her daughter had come home.
Petunia could hear a rattling from the kitchen downstairs. Mary had a very low tolerance for mess but a high one for noise, or at least a high one for the noise she generated herself. She banged and crashed, she left the radio on turned up loud wherever she went; even the Hoover seemed to make more noise when she was using it. Now she was, Petunia knew because it was eleven o’clock, slamming cupboard doors, rattling saucers, banging a tray down on the table, and thumping the kettle down on the worktop, all by way of making herself and her mother a cup of tea. So she would be coming upstairs in about five minutes. Petunia was glad of it. She and Mary didn’t have much to say to each other but the way in which her daughter’s routines broke up the day was welcome.
The specific manner in which the tumour had affected her brain meant that Petunia could not read. She did not want to watch television and she only intermittently wanted to talk; and when she did, Mary tended not to be there. So she spent the day in a state of pure being, a state closer to infancy than any she had experienced since. There were moments when she was afraid, and moments when she felt actual panic, terror, at the thought of dying. At other times when she thought of her death she felt a generalised sense of loss, strangely non-specific: not about the things she would no longer experience, because so many of these things had already faded. Her sense of taste and smell had gone funny, so coffee and tea and bacon and flowers were no longer themselves; or if they were themselves, the sense-impressions were no longer accurately recorded by her brain; they were lost in synaptic translation. But it wasn’t anything specific she felt she was losing: it wasn’t that she was losing this day, this light, this breeze, this spring. It was a general sense of loss connected to nothing and everything. She was simply losing, losing it all. She was on a boat drifting away from the dock. There were moments when it wasn’t even an unpleasant sensation, when she felt safe with herself. At other moments she felt suffocated with a sadness that made her feel choked up and short of breath and so came to seem another symptom of her final illness.
32
Shit flows downhill. This basic principle of institutional life had landed a fat folder labelled ‘Investigation: We Want What You Have’ on the desk of Detective Inspector Mill of the Metropolitan Police. It had gone like this: half a dozen residents of Pepys Road had first complained to the local council and, to no one’s surprise, had come up blank, so then they had written to their MP; the MP wrote to the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police; the Commissioner sent a note to the divisional commander; the divisional commander had forwarded it to the nearest station commander, based at Clapham South; and the station commander had dumped the issue onto Mill. That was why he was now sitting looking at this folder. A cup of revolting percolated coffee was cooling on the desk next to the file, with a stack of report forms on the other side next to his charging mobile and a copy of yesterday’s Metro.
A person who wasn’t used to it would have found it impossible to work in that room. Not a single other body in it was in a state of silence and rest. Two dozen Met officers were in constant motion, most of them also talking, joshing, making off-colour jokes, often while simultaneously keying data into computers, or flicking through files, or dialling phone numbers, or eating muffins, or lobbing crumpled paper into the bin, or carrying piles of forms from one end of the office to the other. It was mayhem. Mill liked that about it.
He found himself asking the first thing he always asked about any piece of work: why me? It wasn’t an idle question. Mill was not, demographically or psychologically, a typical policeman. He was a Clas
sics graduate from Oxford, both the town and the university, the son of two teachers, who had joined the police as an experiment on himself, for reasons which he often speculated about – observing himself as from a distance – but still didn’t understand. He wanted to scratch an itch to do with authority, his need for it, his desire to have it, his liking of hierarchy and order. It was that thing the centurion says to Jesus: ‘For I also am a man set under authority, having under me soldiers, and I say unto one, Go, and he goeth; and to another, Come, and he cometh; and to my servant, Do this, and he doeth it.’ Yes. That felt right to him. Five years out of university, on the graduate fast track up through the ranks, he was very aware of the ways in which his colleagues thought he might be a wanker; not that he was a wanker all the time, but that, through the cocktail of class and education, he had the kind of perspectives and opportunities which meant that he might at any moment say or do something wanky. As if being in the police was for him a lifestyle choice, rather than a fundamental expression of who he was. He resented that they saw him like that, while admitting, deep down, that it was also fair enough. So he learned to be careful.
Mill wanted to make a difference, whatever that meant – it was a phrase he thought about a lot. He was a Christian – had never stopped being one, had been one since childhood – and wanted to lead a good life. But you had to think about what that meant. To make a difference presumably meant either to do something that other people couldn’t or wouldn’t do, or to do their jobs in a way which was better than the way they did it. So it was a marginal difference. It was the difference between the kind of policeman he was and the kind someone else would have been. If he was, say, 15 per cent better than the other person who would have been Detective Inspector at his station, then that was the difference he was making, that 15 per cent. That was his marginal utility. Was it enough? There were days when he felt it was and days when he felt it wasn’t. His girlfriend Janie thought he was mad to have wanted to go into the police, and was only now, four years in, beginning to accept the idea that it might in some bizarre way suit him.
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