The Twilight Hour

by Nicci Gerrard

  ‘Fuck,’ said Peter. ‘Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.’

  There was a muffled sound beside him. He turned and put a hand on Eleanor’s arm, leaning towards her.

  ‘Are you all right, Eleanor? God, I’m so sorry. Are you hurt at all? Don’t cry.’

  She wasn’t crying, but laughing. Her thin shoulders shook. Tears stood in the corners of her blind eyes.

  The man had got out of his car. He was burly and red-faced. Peter got out too.

  ‘Hello there,’ he said.

  ‘What did you think you were playing at?’ roared the man.

  ‘I don’t know. Is there any damage done?’

  ‘Damage! Look.’

  Peter looked and could see a tiny scrape along the gleaming silver bonnet of the man’s obviously swish car – though he knew nothing about cars and cared even less.

  ‘It could have been worse,’ he said. He had taken a dislike to this bellowing person.

  ‘You shouldn’t be let loose on the road.’

  ‘Excuse me.’ Eleanor’s voice, steady and cool. She stood in front of them, leaning on her stick, her white hair blowing. ‘You crashed into us. That seems very clear. Now you are trying to blame my young friend for your own reckless driving.’

  The man stared from Peter to her, his face darkening.

  ‘Is our car damaged, Peter?’ she continued.

  Peter leant forward, squinting. The car was so old and scraped anyway that one more mark wouldn’t make any difference.

  ‘I don’t think so. Nothing to speak of.’

  ‘In which case,’ said Eleanor to the man, ‘we will not call the police or need your insurance details. But I suggest you pay more attention next time. And,’ she held up a hand to stop him from interrupting, ‘don’t try and bully people into taking the blame for something that was entirely your responsibility. Come on, Peter.’

  They climbed back into the car.

  ‘Wow!’ said Peter.

  ‘Off we go,’ said Eleanor.

  ‘I was going a bit too slowly, you know. I braked.’

  ‘Go faster, then.’

  ‘But he was a wanker.’

  ‘Yes,’ she agreed serenely. ‘He was certainly a wanker.’

  ‘Shall I drive you back home?’

  ‘Whatever put that idea into your head?’

  ‘I’m not sure I’m safe.’

  ‘I feel entirely confident.’

  It took them two hours to drive the fifty miles. They stopped halfway to fill up with petrol and Peter sat on the damp grass verge and smoked a cigarette to calm himself down. After that, he suddenly found driving easier, as if the road had broadened and the car had shaken off its nervy, spasmodic mood and had become obedient. He was almost enjoying himself. Eleanor made him describe what he could see out of the window: the fens, the windmill, the flat, glistening sea in the distance; the small towns with gabled red-brick houses that looked Dutch rather than English. Looking at them for her made them more vivid for him, so that many years later he would be able to recall their drive together. They passed through a large wood full of oak trees, leaves pattering down on the top of the car; Eleanor insisted they stop so that she could stand underneath the vault of the great trees and breathe in the rich smell of decay.

  ‘Can you smell it?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Mushrooms and moss and dead leaves. What’s your favourite smell?’

  ‘My favourite smell?’ Sometimes she reminded him of a child.

  ‘Yes. Coffee, mown grass, baking bread, roses?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Kaitlin after sex, he thought, turning to light a cigarette. His grandmother’s face powder. Petrol. Hot sun on skin. Man-made things.

  The home was on the outskirts of a small and windswept town near the coast. It was a newish complex in raw yellow brick and looked resolutely institutional in spite of all attempts to make it personal.

  Peter opened the passenger door and helped Eleanor out.

  ‘Shall I wait in the car?’

  ‘Come in if you’d like.’

  Peter hesitated. He was intensely curious to see Meredith.

  ‘Won’t she mind?’ he asked. ‘I mean, it’ll seem a bit strange.’

  ‘No, she won’t mind. She won’t know.’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘It will help me,’ said Eleanor.

  ‘All right.’

  Everything was clean and new. He glimpsed through a half-open door a salon where several women were having their hair cut or curled. In another room, some kind of sing-song was going on, a young man with hefty shoulders thumping out tunes on the piano. It all seemed cheerful and purposeful, and it made Peter’s spirits sink. Would this be the kind of place Eleanor would be? He couldn’t imagine her here, in this bright, warm, brisk place, but then he couldn’t imagine her anywhere but in her old house, sitting by the fire while the wind blew down the chimneys and rooks shouted in the trees and darkness rolled in.

  Mrs Meredith Hartley had a round face and small, plump hands. With her grey hair tied back in a meagre ponytail and her faded blue eyes, she looked many years younger than Eleanor. She was sitting in a chair near the window, from which it was possible to see a snatch of sea, with a tartan blanket over her knees and a pink shawl over her shoulders. There was a miniature cyclamen on the table in front of her, and a vase of purple dried flowers on the shelf by her bed; they looked stiff and ancient. She looked at Eleanor and Peter, brightly vague, and patted her hair with one hand. She had stubby fingers whose nails were corrugated, and a deep dimple in her cheek when she smiled. She wasn’t really smiling at them, but through them. The smiling was a habit, a reflex created by a lifetime of being friendly, polite and winning. She had small yellow teeth.

  He watched as Eleanor crossed the room and stooped to plant a kiss on the top of Meredith’s head.

  ‘Lovely,’ said Meredith. ‘Golly.’

  ‘It’s me. Eleanor.’ Meredith didn’t react at once, so Eleanor said: ‘Your big sister.’

  ‘Sis?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I’ve come to say hello.’

  ‘I’m not stupid, you know.’

  ‘Of course you’re not. We’ve just popped in for a quick visit.’

  ‘I’ll teach you.’

  ‘What will you teach me?’ asked Eleanor calmly.

  Merry giggled, a sharp fragment of laughter like someone tapping a glass once for attention.

  ‘That would be telling. So nice of you to come. Who would have thought it?’

  ‘And I’ve brought a friend with me. This is Peter.’

  Peter held out his hand and Meredith looked at it, her smile widening. He wasn’t sure what to do next, with his hand held out and a smile locked on his face, so he picked up her small hand and pressed it, then placed it back on her lap, but she suddenly gripped his fingers, keeping him there.

  ‘Do you like me?’ she said. ‘Really like me, I mean?’

  ‘Um, well, yes, of course. I’m very pleased to meet you. Eleanor’s told me about you.’

  ‘Silly me.’ And she gave her tiny laugh, like a cracked high bell splitting its peal. ‘Silly, silly me.’

  ‘Oh no! Not at all.’

  ‘Is Daddy here?’

  ‘No. That is—’ He faltered and threw an appealing glance at Eleanor, although of course she couldn’t see it.

  ‘Where’s Daddy?’

  ‘That’s all over, Merry,’ said Eleanor, standing at the side of her sister. ‘That part of our life is done with. We’re old, you and I.’

  Meredith laughed again, louder this time.

  ‘You would say that.’ She tugged at Peter’s fingers and gave a smile that was flirtatious and vicious. ‘She’s jealous, you see. Boys do like me. I don’t know why. I could still have him if I wanted. Don’t think it’s not true. And Clive Baines has always been madly fond of me. Poor Clive. Quite besotted. Where is he?’

  ‘Clive died in the war.’

  Pet
er didn’t understand why Eleanor had to tell her – surely it was kindest to pretend that everyone was still alive, still young, still in love with her. But Meredith simply said, ‘Dear, dear; poor Clive,’ in a comfortable tone, squeezing Peter’s fingers confidingly. He had had enough of his awkward, back-stiffening bow, and now tugged his hand from her and backed away, but was stopped in his tracks by her wail of protest that grew, like a siren coming closer. Her mouth was a round hole, her sparse eyebrows were raised, her face mottled into a caricature of distress. Her plump hands made fists.

  Without warning, to quieten her, Eleanor began to sing ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’, and after a few husky notes, Meredith joined in, tearfully at first, and in a high, quavering voice. Peter stared at them, a feeling of grim hilarity growing, forcing its way up his throat. He gave an unfortunate snort; Eleanor pointed her cane at him warningly, but sang on. At the end, there was a brief pause. Laughter still wormed in Peter’s stomach. Eleanor took off her coat and let it slither to the floor; she found the edge of the other chair and sat down on it, very straight-backed. Her face was carved with deep grooves and she seemed angry. Meredith, however, had cheered up. She giggled – there was no other word for it – and then took a deep breath and started to sing ‘Silent Night’. But soon she petered out, began again, came to a final halt.

  ‘Sing “Abide With Me”,’ she said. ‘I like that one. Daddy sings it. You can play it on the piano.’

  ‘I can’t remember the words,’ said Eleanor.

  ‘“Abide With Me”,’ repeated her sister, almost petulantly. ‘Oh Lord, Abide with me. Through cloud and sunshine. In my early youth.’

  Eleanor frowned. She sat up straighter in her chair and began to sing, not looking towards either Meredith or Peter, but out of the window that was probably for her just a rectangle of grey light. Not tunefully, almost as though she were chanting it, she sang the hymn right through, remembering all the words and barely hesitating. Every so often, Meredith joined in and then lost the thread again. ‘Change and decay,’ she warbled. ‘Come not in terrors.’ She echoed words at the end of sentences or lines: ‘sting’, ‘victory’, ‘flee’. They paid no attention to Peter or to each other; there was a locked-in quality about them both that was unsettling and distressing. The song, with all its wrong notes and echoed words, became an elegy and an incantation. They were two old women looking back at themselves and two little girls looking forward to the selves they had become.

  After the first verse, Peter didn’t look at either of the two women. It didn’t seem right. It almost felt indecent to be in the room and he was spooked. He stared at the photos arranged on the tall chest of drawers: there were none of Eleanor. He assumed the faded full-length portrait of a chubby man in a hat and suit was her father, Eleanor’s stepfather, and the head-and-shoulders tinted one with ringletted hair was Meredith herself as a pretty little girl – the girl who could still make Eleanor’s face take on a sour cast. The rest were obviously of Meredith’s husband, Wilfred Hartley, and her stepchildren and then their children as well.

  Then suddenly Peter froze. There was a tiny, framed portrait of a young man and he knew, though how he knew he couldn’t say, that it was him. He wanted to step forward and examine it but didn’t dare move while this appalling dirge was going on. He could see indeterminate-coloured hair, wide-apart eyes, a thin face, and that was all. He took a few shuffling steps, coughing to cover the noise, and was closer. ‘I need Thy presence every passing hour,’ sang Eleanor, and he moved closer still. He met the gaze of the young man, hooded and enquiring. His mouth was slightly open, as if he was about to speak; his hair hung over his forehead. He looked ordinary enough, the kind of face you see every day, but he’d been loved by these two women, thought Peter; he’d loved Eleanor and lain with her under the quince tree. He’d drunk whisky by a window and been full of yearning.

  ‘In life, in death, O Lord, abide with me.’

  Eleanor stopped singing and stood up, stumbling as she did so. Peter hurried to her side and steadied her, finding her cane.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Perfectly. It’s time to go.’

  ‘So soon?’ said Meredith in a blank tone, back to being the gracious hostess. ‘Dear, dear. Do come again. Any time.’

  Peter picked up the long green coat from the floor and helped Eleanor into it. He avoided giving Meredith his hand; just ducked and shuffled and said how pleased he had been to see her. Eleanor patted her shoulder and left without saying anything more.

  In the pub they stopped at, she ordered half a pint of beer and a lasagne that she barely touched, though she had been eagerly anticipating her lunch out. She talked to Peter – who had a spicy tomato juice and a cheese bap in front of him – without pause, about how her mother had met Stanley Baldwin, about Clement Attlee and Harold Wilson, about her job training teachers, about the Cuban Missile Crisis, Vietnam, rationing and powdered milk, about Gil’s hatred of lifts and underground trains, about picking soft fruit when she was a girl to supplement her mother’s income. She described the first time she had been on an aeroplane (in 1947), and the last, eight years ago when she had been to Granada because everyone should go to the Alhambra before they died. It was the most beautiful building in all the world, she said; it was like maths and poetry combined. Peter had never known her like this: normally when Eleanor talked, it was as though she were following the secret river of her feelings and thoughts. Now she talked as though she were trying not to think or feel at all. She did not want to dip the bucket down into the well of memory, but instead was throwing out events like stepping stones over which she could cross without falling into the deep waters of the past.

  All of a sudden, she stopped mid-sentence, as if she had come up against a hard object.

  ‘What?’ asked Peter, but she just shook her head slowly from side to side, as though she were trying to clear it. He was horrified to see tears in her eyes that she made no attempt to wipe away.

  ‘Gil used to say there’s no fool like an old fool,’ she said, trying to smile. ‘I’m an old fool.’ She found her cane and planted it on the floor, rising slowly. ‘Come on. Time to go home.’

  20

  ‘I will not’ was the refrain hammering against her skull through the day, as she stood by the blackboard or wandered between the paired desks where the children laboured over their handwriting. She heard Lizzie’s snuffling breath as she drew her thick nib down the page, or placed a forefinger between each word to make the spacing correct. She could see the nits in Mary-Jane’s hair and the flea scabs on Susan’s legs. ‘I will not.’ A fat fly buzzed. Her head ached in the heat. She opened the classroom windows and let the breeze blow through.

  At six o’clock, she was standing in the grubby studio in Shoreditch that Emma’s boyfriend rented, looking in a desultory fashion through the murky and depressing canvases while Emma and Anthony argued in ferocious whispers in the corner. At seven o’clock she was drinking a glass of milk in the café where she had sat with Michael just two days ago and staring out of the window at the people who flowed past. At just past eight o’clock she was in her rooms, listening to Terence’s wracking cough beneath her, on and on, and wondering if she should go downstairs and see if he needed anything. At half-past eight she was washing her hair over the sink, uncomfortable trickles of water running under her collar. She looked at Michael’s letter once more, though she knew it by heart: Tomorrow evening, by the quince tree. I’ll be there as soon after six as I can. I will wait for you until nine xxxx She let herself feel once more his hand on her leg, his lips on her wrist, his eyes on her. She pushed away the memory, but it was like trying to stop a flood. It entered her through every pore. Please.

  And just before nine, when the danger was surely past, when it was too late to change her mind, she tore out of her room, down the stairs in a clatter, past Gladys who was opening the door inquisitively as she hurtled out of the front door, hatless and coatless, her hair still damp, down to the mai
n road. Eleanor tried to stop a passing cab but it went by without slowing. There were no buses in sight so she ran, pain sloshing in her skull and an ache beneath her ribs. Her shoes were slightly too large and kept slipping. The clock on the old church told her it was fifteen minutes past nine. He would be long gone.

  And he was. The churchyard lay in its twilight, a secret garden of the dead, and she arrived at the quince tree to find there was nobody there. She gazed around her, desolate. She would never be able to find him: she didn’t even know his last name, had no notion of an address or a contact for him – except for Merry, of course, who was inconsolable because he had disappeared from her life without a forwarding address or a letter to say goodbye. Eleanor let herself down on to the damp ground beneath the tree. Too late. She had done everything wrong, she shouldn’t have come or she shouldn’t have hesitated, and now she would never see him again. He would be swallowed up by the war that was coming. It was over and it had never begun.

  She stood up and coiled her hair back on to the nape of her neck with hands that still shook slightly. She brushed the grass from her skirt and walked slowly towards the gates. A little boy in shorts that were too large for him and a snotty nose stood on the pavement crying, but when Eleanor bent down towards him he said he was just waiting for his daddy who was in the public house across the road. She felt calm at last, calm and dull, with a dazed sense that something momentous had not happened to her; she had let it pass.

  But when she turned to go home, she saw a figure, tiny in the distance, yet with something about it that made her breathing shallow. A slight asymmetry in the way that it moved in and out of the shadows cast by the buildings, heading towards the cranes on the horizon. She walked quickly towards it, and then ran. For a moment, she lost it among the people coming towards her. Lost him, for now she was almost sure. A thin man in a shabby suit with a small but unmistakable limp. A cigarette in one hand, a tiny wisp of blue smoke disappearing. She didn’t let herself think, just followed him and only when she was a few steps away did she slow, try to catch her breath. And then she drew alongside him and put a hand on his arm and he swung round towards her and stopped. He didn’t seem pleased, just stared at her.