Girl on the Landing

by Paul Torday

  The thing I remember most about that journey was how the autostrada plunged into dark tunnels and then the next minute we were back in blinding sunlight, glimpsing fairy-tale towns that clung to the steep sides of hills above the soft blue of the sea.

  I recalled this image as I lay in bed one morning a couple of days later. It was a Saturday, and I had the luxury of a lie-in as I waited for Michael to come back with the papers and fresh croissants from the bakery around the corner. My life was suddenly in blinding sunshine and everything was new and magical.

  Years ago, when Michael had asked me to marry him, I suppose the question I had asked myself was not ‘Do I love him?’ but ‘Have I the strength to stay with him?’ If nothing else, ten years of marriage had demonstrated that at least I had commitment, although in my bleaker moments I thought it might just be inertia.

  I heard Michael open the door of the flat and call out ‘Darling, I’m back,’ and I turned over lazily in bed and realised all at once how happy I was. With that realisation came another: a consciousness that Michael had always loved me, and just hadn’t known how to show it. What had changed? He was showing it now, in every way. I didn’t care, for the moment, why it had happened; I was just grateful that it had. He came into the bedroom with a breakfast tray and put it down carefully on the bed beside me.

  I used to dread weekends; most of the time they were an endless desert to be crossed with only Michael for company. I used to look forward to Monday mornings, and the week-long escape to the office. Now suddenly it was the other way round. The column on the property market seemed a pointless waste of my life. The prices went up. The dreary little basement flats that you couldn’t give away ten years earlier were now being sold for unimaginable amounts of money, and I had to explain why all this was a good thing that would go on for ever. I didn’t believe any of it any more. The articles I wrote seemed increasingly to be part of a fantasy world; the reality was my life at home.

  I was also beginning to think that I didn’t really like my job. I certainly didn’t like Celia, the woman I worked for. And time spent in the office was time spent away from Michael. I knew that if I asked him, he would say that there was no need for me to work, that the money I earned made no difference. I tucked the thought away: it was a conversation we might have one day.

  That night, as Michael lay asleep beside me, something woke me up. The curtains weren’t fully drawn and there was enough light from the street to show me what had disturbed me. Michael was sound asleep, but his hands were moving. I sat up in bed and looked at him.

  His hands fluttered like birds, moving so quickly I could scarcely follow them, making signs and shapes that I could not understand; yet the movements were peculiarly expressive. All the time the rest of Michael lay absolutely motionless. As I watched I thought there was something almost hypnotic in the movement of his hands, something beautiful that I could not quite understand. There was so much I did not understand about Michael. How could that be? I felt myself becoming drowsy, and then sank back into sleep. In my dreams I saw the shadows of running deer, and dancing hares, portrayed by hands that threw shadows against the wall of a cave in flickering firelight. It was only in the morning, when I was watching Michael knot his tie, that the memory of the birdlike movements of his hands came back to me.

  The following weekend, Michael took me away on a long-planned (and long-dreaded) excursion to stay with one of his Grouchers acquaintances, Jimmy Bass. I remembered Jimmy from previous Grouchers parties and shoot weekends. He was one of those men who is always cast in the role of the group clown, who always ends up smiling sheepishly while others make jokes at his expense. Michael once told me that Jimmy Bass was known at Grouchers as ‘Jimmy Bolognese’, an unkind reference to the earlier Bass of the Basso family whose sterling work as pasta importers had laid the foundations of the Basso fortune. Michael had never found the nicknames funny, and Jimmy liked him for it.

  At any rate, Jimmy was well off, and a bachelor. Michael said that Jimmy had never married because he knew any sensible wife would ban him from having lunch and dinner at Grouchers five days a week. The club was the centre of his world. Now it was his fiftieth birthday, and most of the club had been asked to attend a drinks party at his house in Suffolk. As a particular honour, we had been included in a smaller number of guests who were invited to stay the night. I had not been looking forward to the weekend, to put it mildly; now, with Michael in this new, affectionate frame of mind, it did not seem too bad a prospect after all.

  Jimmy’s house was a handsome eighteenth-century building, with a central block fronted by a portico, and two small wings. It sat in grounds of a few acres, looking down towards a small village at the bottom of the valley. At the rear of the house was a large terrace, beyond which a marquee had been erected, where we were all to sit down to dinner later on.

  Although we were well into autumn, it was an unusually warm and still evening, and before dinner the guests spilled out from the house with their drinks on to the terraced lawn. Jimmy was at the centre of a knot of guests, looking large and sleek in a maroon velvet smoking jacket. Michael and I stood together, waiting until we found someone we both wanted to talk to, like the Robinsons or the Martins.

  Just then I caught sight of Anna Martin weaving her way towards us. I turned to Michael and said, ‘Oh, darling, there’s Anna,’ except that Michael wasn’t there. Seconds ago I had felt his hand on the small of my back as he steered me gently to an empty patch of lawn where the crowd was not so thick. In fact I could have sworn that when I turned my head and caught sight of Anna, he had been only a foot away. Now, he was nowhere.

  ‘Oh, Elizabeth, there you are,’ said Anna, taking a pack of cigarettes out of her handbag and lighting one. ‘Where’s Michael? David is stuck in the house talking club politics. I couldn’t bear it so I came looking for you.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said ‘He was here a second ago’.

  Anna was looking over my shoulder and said, ‘Well, he’s at the far end of the lawn now. Talking to that dark-haired girl.’

  I turned around and could see Michael some way off, talking to someone, but then a group of people moved between us and I lost sight of him.

  ‘Come on, let’s go and find out who his new girlfriend is,’ said Anna in a malicious tone of voice.

  Then suddenly Michael’s hand was on my back again. I started violently and when I turned he was smiling and shaking drops of liquid from his left hand where my sudden movement had caused him to spill some of the wine he had been holding. He had given one glass to Anna; now he gave the second to me.

  ‘Who were you talking to over there?’ I asked.

  ‘I was just getting you two a fresh drink,’ he replied. I looked at Anna, but she simply shook her head. There was a puzzled look in her eyes.

  One minute Michael had been fifty yards away. The next he had been standing right beside me. I could not see how he could have done it. I didn’t think I had been looking at someone else. Michael’s height, the stoop of his shoulders, the attitude of his head as he listened to the dark-haired girl were all unmistakable, at least to me. Yet I must have been looking at someone else.

  ‘Let’s go into the marquee,’ said Michael. ‘People are starting to sit down for dinner and we don’t even know where our places are yet.’

  The next morning after breakfast, when most of the other guests had either left or had retired to the drawing room to read the papers and doze, I dragged Michael outside with me and marched him around the garden. As soon as we were some distance from the house, I turned to him and began to speak, but he held up his hand. ‘Listen,’ he said. I heard a faint cheeping near by and suddenly two partridge whirred out of the rough grass beyond the path. Michael smiled.

  ‘See how well they hid themselves. They were right there, and we could not see them.’ Then he paused, waiting for me to speak. I hesitated for a moment. I was about to ask a question from which there was no going back. I felt like Pandora, opening the b
ox; but I had to know the answer.

  Without any preamble I said, ‘Darling, what’s Serendipozan? And why are you taking it?’

  For a moment, Michael looked as if he might tell me to mind my own business. A chilly expression settled on his face and his grey eyes seemed to darken. But then he said, ‘I’m not taking anything, darling.’

  ‘But you were.’

  He steered me towards a wooden bench and we sat down.

  ‘Yes, I was.’

  I wondered whether I was to be subjected to one of the famous Michael silences, but then he continued.

  ‘When I was a child, I was considered a little odd.’

  ‘Odd how?’

  ‘Eccentric odd. I used to invent imaginary friends to play with. You were an only child, so I’m sure you understand.’

  I took his hand. It felt cold.

  ‘Yes, I do,’ I said. ‘So you used to invent imaginary friends. What sort of friends were they?’

  ‘I can’t remember the first ones,’ said Michael, ‘but later on I used to imagine I met people in the woods above Beinn Caorrun, people who must have died around ten thousand years ago. I used to hear their voices in my head; see them in my head. They told me things, showed me how to use powers I didn’t know I had.’

  ‘That is a bit different,’ I said. ‘My imaginary friends were mostly straight out of whatever girl’s comic I was reading at the time. What powers?’

  Michael shook his head. ‘You wouldn’t understand.’

  ‘I might.’

  ‘It sounds so strange now. Powers of concealment, of hunting without being seen. How to ward off evil with the branches and berries of the rowan tree.’

  ‘Very imaginative of you, darling,’ I said. ‘Much more creative than dreaming about Black Beauty or being a Thunderbird.’

  Michael looked at me. ‘It wasn’t imaginative, not as far as I was concerned. It was what they told me.’

  There was a pause. I waited for him to answer my original question.

  ‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘as I grew older it didn’t seem appropriate for me to go wandering around telling everyone about the people in the woods. My parents were spooked by it. Mrs McLeish was always ready to listen, and she tried to teach me to be cautious about what I said and to whom I said it, but in the end they decided I had to have treatment.’

  There was a silence. A pigeon fluttered down on to the lawn and started pecking at the grass. Far away I could hear car doors shutting as Jimmy’s guests began to take their leave. I hoped no one would come and disturb us, as it would break Michael’s train of thought.

  ‘So what happened then?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s a long story. It was felt I had behavioural problems. They tried various different things and eventually Alex Grant sent me to a man called Stephen Gunnerton, in Harley Street.’

  Stephen Gunnerton. That name again.

  ‘What does “behavioural problems” mean?’

  Michael looked surprised by the question.

  ‘I thought I’d explained. Hearing voices, that sort of thing. I wasn’t normal, that was the point, and these days you have to be normal.’

  His voice sounded bitter, but he was smiling as he said the words.

  ‘Stephen put me on some stuff called Serendipozan. It was the very latest thing in neuroleptics. That’s the proper name for the kind of drugs that modify behaviour. Serendipozan re-engineers your brain chemistry. It switches things off, and it switches things on, until you fit a programme designed by some clever Swiss scientist in Basel. It makes you normal, all right - so normal you can hardly remember your own name. But that doesn’t matter, you see, because if you’re normal, you’re just like everyone else.’

  I thought about this. There was a great deal I didn’t understand, and a great deal that I wasn’t being told. I concentrated on my next question.

  ‘So, why did you stop taking it?’

  Michael looked at me.

  ‘Because of us; because we’ve been married for ten years and you must have been feeling as if you had married a zombie. The years have passed by, and we should have been having fun together, we should have had children. I don’t know how you’ve stood it, but you have. The drug takes away one’s spirit, one’s individuality, one’s enjoyment of life. And in the end it will probably kill the patient anyway. These things have side effects that include heart failure and Parkinson’s. Side effects?’

  He clenched his jaw as he spoke, almost grinding his teeth, and I could sense the sudden, tearing rage in him. Then he spoke more quietly.

  ‘When I was on the stuff, Elizabeth, it was as if I was watching the world on an old black-and-white TV with a faulty aerial: now I’m off it, everything’s High Definition, ten million pixels, Surround Sound. I feel part of the world again. I feel myself again.’

  ‘And there are no side effects from coming off it?’

  ‘None that I’m aware of. Nothing I can’t handle.’

  Which was it? I wondered. Aloud I said, ‘Have you told anyone you’re not taking the drug any more?’

  Michael thought about that for a moment.

  ‘No, but you’re right, I ought to. I think I’ll go and see Alex Grant.’

  We sat for a while on the bench without talking, while the pale cold light of a late autumn morning grew around us, the scent of overripe apples and gentle decay wafting our from Jimmy’s apple orchard near by. I waited to see whether Michael would say any more.

  ‘They meant well, when they put me on those drugs,’ he said finally. ‘From their point of view, they probably felt they had no choice. But they took my life away from me. Now I feel as if I’ve been given it back. It’s so important that I take this chance. I feel - I know - that there’s a reason in all this, a purpose.’

  He smiled again and stopped speaking. After a few moments more, we stood up and began to walk back to the house.

  There was no one in the drawing room. We went upstairs to our bedroom and picked up our cases, which we had packed after breakfast. We were met on the landing by Jimmy’s butler, Silvio. He took the bags from our hands and said, ‘Allow me, Mr Gascoigne. I will put them in your car. Mr Bass is in the marquee, sir, if you want to say goodbye to him.’

  A folded twenty-pound note changed hands. We went back downstairs and out across the lawn. There, in the huge tent, a scene of disarray greeted us. The caterers appeared to have cleared up some of the mess, but empty magnums of champagne and random glasses stood on tables here and there, and streamers of coloured paper from Party Poppers lay all over the floor. At the far end of the marquee a trestle table had been laid for a dozen or so people, and next to it was a side table groaning with cold leftovers from the night before: salads, poached salmon, cold chicken, cold lobster, plates of asparagus, bowls of strawberries and other unseasonable luxuries.

  Jimmy was sitting on his own at the table. He looked wrecked. His eyes were red and he had not shaved very well. He wore elephantine jeans and a generous V-necked pullover, with a large napkin tucked into the V. Everyone else who had been staying appeared to have gone. Jimmy waved a fork at us, bidding us to approach.

  ‘Oh God,’ said Michael. ‘We’re going to have to have lunch with him. We can’t leave him on his own.’

  ‘Come and join me,’ said Jimmy, in a voice that sounded jollier than he looked. ‘Loads of good things to eat. Have a glass of champagne. There’s plenty left. Sit down here, next to me, Elizabeth. Michael will get you some lobster.’

  There was no way out. We sat and lunched with Jimmy, although it was scarcely noon, the three of us sitting at one end of the long table amid the desolation and debris of the abandoned marquee. Jimmy seemed oblivious to the fact that, apart from us, every single one of his guests had abandoned him before Sunday lunch. Between mouthfuls of lobster he kept saying, ‘I shouldn’t say so myself, but not many people know how to entertain the way I do. Don’t you think so, Elizabeth?’

  It was painful.

  ‘Yes, Jimmy,’ I said. ‘It wa
s unforgettable.’

  Neither Michael nor I was hungry, but we pecked away at some food and drank a glass of wine. Jimmy ate and talked, sometimes both at the same time. He said, ‘Jolly good gathering of kindred spirits, don’t you think, Michael?’

  I removed a fleck of his lobster from my pullover.

  ‘A very memorable evening,’ agreed Michael. ‘The party of the year, I should think.’

  ‘The party of the year!’ said Jimmy. ‘Well, it is kind of you to say so. I think you are probably right. I will admit no expense was spared. Nothing but the best for my fellow members of Grouchers. Top champagne, top wines, top lobster straight from Billingsgate. Might as well spend it as let the taxman get it,’ said Jimmy, smiling. Behind his smile I thought I could see him weighing up the cost against the grace conferred upon him by the presence of so many members of the club at his house.