by Mavis Cheek
Polly was summoned.
'Your mother does not need to come up here’ he said, very firmly ‘I am coping very well, everyone is helping and being very kind, and I do not need her.'
'Just as well’ said Polly laconically. 'Because she's in no shape.'
'Good’ said her father. 'You keep her that way'
Polly felt this was not quite the right way to put it but the end result was the same. She was sorry to hear that her father was coping but - well - she had done her best...
Patrick put down the receiver.
Polly put down the receiver.
Polly turned to her mother, who was last seen reclining, still pink and feverish, in her bed. Polly was surprised, therefore, to see her upright, pulling out drawers and slapping a holdall onto the tumbled bedclothes.
"You are to stay put, Mother’ said Polly. 'Dad's asked me to make sure of it.'
'You and whose army?' said Peggy As if she didn't know exactly, bell, book and candle, the kind of relationship Patrick and Audrey used to have - and not just in childhood either. 'Get the office on the line, please. I want a car. Now.'
'I think you might be delirious,' said her daughter.
With a strength that no member of the family had ever seen, let alone experienced, Peggy pushed her daughter out of the way and picked up the telephone herself.
'Car,' she said. 'To Sir Patrick Parker's place. Now. Going to Coventry. Yup. Co-ven-try... I know the time. But I want it here now - or sooner.'
The receiver was replaced. Into the holdall went an odd assortment of garments, in Polly's opinion - a disgusting, black see-through nightie, a suspender belt, and an assortment of frilly horrors among them. And when her mother, staggering a little from the exertion, emerged from the en-suite ten minutes later she wore, below her ghastly face - that looked, so thought her daughter, like a rouged phantom - a leather mini-skirt and crocheted top that left very little to the imagination.
‘I really don't think -' said Polly.
But the doorbell rang.
'Best you don't, then,' said her mother, staggering off on the spindliest of high heels, and down the stairs, with the bag bumping along behind her. The door closed. And frail Peggy Boxer As Was was gone.
'Who was that?' Audrey asked disingenuously.
He had better come clean. After all, they were adults. He sat himself down a little gingerly on the front-room sofa. He was half expecting his mother to pop her head around the door. He handed Audrey a whisky. Quite a large one. 'Did you know,' he said firmly, 'that I married Peggy Boxer?'
'As Was?' she said, and she nodded.
It was all she could do not to chuck her whisky at him. How could he possibly think that she would not know? How could he possibly have forgotten lying in bed beside her as he explained? Did she know? Indeed. She smiled at him sweetly. The smile of a serpent. He looked relieved. ‘I wasn't sure if you knew or not,' he said, with some relief.
'Yes,' she said, 'I did know that.'
'She doesn't - really - understand me,' he said.
Audrey burst out laughing again.
He looked hurt and retreated back along the leatherette. 'No’ he said, hurt, 'she doesn't.'
She pulled herself together. 'Sorry’ she said, 'it's the emotion of seeing you. And you have two fine children. A boy and a girl.'
Patrick was touched. He felt emotional - if that was the right word - seeing her, too. 'Oh yes. Two children. And they certainly don't understand me.'
She put out her hand to reassure him.
'You always understood me’ he said, a slight peevishness creeping into his voice. 'You were always interested in what I did. I liked that ...' he added, wistfully.
Not only brilliant in the forgetful department, she thought, smiling away at him, but bloody brilliant in the area of creative hypocrisy, too.
'Oh, Audrey’ he said (it was partly the emotions of the day, partly the whisky - and partly . . .) 'You knew me so well. . . There is - I think - perhaps - unfinished business between us?'
She closed her eyes and gritted her teeth. In the deepening dusk it was hard to see her expression but it was clearly one of strong emotion. Little shoe, she thought softly, soon, but not yet. She kept her handbag right by her and a tiny piece of pale blue tissue paper peeked out.
After a moment she opened her eyes again and said quite firmly, 'It's only now that I realise how well I did know you.' He slid back towards her again.
She smiled encouragingly. 'And you are right. We do have unfinished business.' She ran her fingertips over his cheek and gave him an encouraging smile. How much she had loved him.
He was encouraged. ‘I want -' he said.
Outside in the street a couple stomped by, laughing. It was a raw, alien sound in that room.
'All I want’ he murmured, 'is to relax with you. Go to bed with you. Like we used to ...'
And she was tempted, very tempted. There was absolutely nothing in the world to stop them now.
'Actually’ she said, standing up, 'what I want at the moment is a bit of a walk.'
Delayed gratification. She knew about that, too. She'd delayed hers by over thirty years.
It is the same for a jewel thief who can only wear the stolen ruby at night when there is no one to see, or for the purloiner of a Great Painting who can only hang it in their cellar and enjoy it alone . . . Peggy Boxer As Was had never, really, felt Patrick was hers. She had stolen him. He was her ruby, her Great Painting - what her mother called the Feather in Her Cap. But always, somewhere in the back of her mind, she was aware of Audrey Wapshott. And she always feared that one day she would come back and claim what she considered still to be hers. Florence had told her often enough. Audrey would never forgive her. Audrey would have her revenge.
And now it was true. She had heard that laugh, and she had heard the faintest hint of guilt in her husband's voice. He who could do no wrong was about to. The laugh was Audrey's all right, but it was not the laugh of one who is polite, cold, distant, separated by the past - it was reckless, amused ...
She had never felt more ill, nor more determined. In the car she goaded the driver to go faster as if she were travelling in some eighteenth-century coach with four greys and a snapping, jingling harness. She always had a penchant for romantic novels (not that she told Patrick) and had been quite relieved after Barbara Cartland died to see a very pink portrait of the novelist, called post-modern, in the Royal College's Graduate show. So she couldn't be all bad. Not that any of that mattered now. All that mattered now was to get to Coventry and save her marriage. 'Drive faster,' she shouted again. If it wasn't a harness jingling it must be her teeth. 'Go on - faster,' she yelled to the driver. 'Faster, faster, faster..'
The driver immediately braked and slowed and pulled into a layby. He turned. He smiled. He said, 'Lady Parker, your husband would not welcome it if both of us were to be found at dawn tomorrow spread all over the A40 ...'
'He might,' said Peggy miserably.
He started up the car again and they drove the next fifty miles or so in silence. Silence, all save for the chewing of Peggy Boxer As Was's once impeccable nails. As were.
During their walk, as Audrey reacquainted herself with familiar places, she asked Patrick if he did not feel nostalgic. Perhaps a little sad. Patrick said that the whole of Coventry made him sad and that he never wanted to come here again. They had even asked him, he told her, to redesign the Town Hall. And had offered him the keys of the city for it. As if he would.
'You wouldn't even come to visit Florence's last resting place?' she asked.
‘I don't feel anything for her,' he said helplessly.
'Do you feel anything for me?'
He stared at her. 'I don't know,' he said.
She was thinking of some of her favourite bridges. The Pont Neuf in Paris, the Rialto, the Ponte Vecchio, the tragic bridge of Mostar, Brooklyn, Ironbridge, the perfection of the Punt da Suransuns at Viamala, the broken twelfth-century bridge of St Benezet in Avignon, the C
ampo Volantin in Bilbao - she had not realised that she knew of so many - or that she cared about them. She fell in love with Patrick at Ironbridge, and Edwin, in his last months of life, proposed marriage to her on the Pont Neuf. Bridges were powerful things. ‘I saw a poster once,' she said, 'about an exhibition of town planning.'
'Oh really?' he said, politely.
"The poster,' she said, 'was from some design exhibition somewhere - and it said, "Ask not what kind of a bridge to build, but whether you need one.'"
Patrick stared at her. 'Are you mad?' he said. 'If there is a void to be crossed, there is a bridge to be built.'
She walked him to his father's grave. It was dark now and she felt it was time.
'Lilly will be buried next to him,' she said.
'What about my mother?'
Audrey smiled. ‘I have arranged it'
He said nothing.
'And you will make them a monument. Lilly and George.' Then he laughed, and it was not the whisky. ‘I don't do little things like that,' he said. ‘I don't know how.' 'You will,' she said.
But he shook his head. ‘I thought you understood,' he said bleakly. He suddenly felt very empty. And old. They walked back to the house in silence. In the kitchen they sat at the table. 'A drink?' he said.
'How about', said Audrey ironically, 'a nice cup of tea?' 'Yes,' said Patrick.
He waited for her to say that she would do the honours. But she did not. There was nothing else for it. Audrey sat at the kitchen table while Patrick made a pot of tea, staring about him until the kettle boiled.
It was still, very much, his mother's domain. Draped over the scrubbed wooden table was the ancient and worn oilcloth - an oilcloth in that peculiarly unappetising shade of dull green that is never seen in nature and made even more dull by years of wiping. Florence's colour.
He was not very certain of the tea-making procedure but she looked away at each mistake - at the unwarmed pot into which he shovelled four heaped spoons of loose-leaf, at the small amount of boiling water that followed them, at the uncovered pot, sitting on the chill of the old wooden draining board in the back door's draught... She kept her mouth shut. It was not her job. He gazed at her and then back at his watch. They waited for five minutes during which time he took the lid off the pot three times and stirred it vigorously, peering in as if the steamy depth would yield up secrets.
'How much longer?' he asked.
'For what?'
"The tea. To brew?'
'Depends how you like it,' she said, quite indifferently, and tapped the waiting cups and saucers. 'How do you like it?' he asked. 'As it comes,' she said.
At which point he gave up and poured. Tea grouts floated on the top of the orangey-brown liquid.
'Lovely,' she said. In a voice that suggested she was looking at six-day-old Kattomeat. 'Lovely' And she thought - he can build ten thousand bridges and they'll all stay up - but he can't make a cup of tea. Just as he could not turn a heel.
And he thought - well she should have offered to help - I'm a bridge builder not a bloody caterer -
They both smiled at each other a little uneasily.
She pushed the scummy tea away from her. Her handbag, so potent with its little piece of pale blue tissue peeking out, was on the table between them. Right there on Florence's old green cloth. He did the same, pausing to collect two glasses from the draining board and the whisky from the pantry. He poured them each a tot.
'Do you love anyone, Patrick?' she asked. 'I mean, we buried your mother today and you seem - well -'
‘I have a lot on my mind,' he said, the whisky relaxing him. 'I'm waiting for a letter.' Love, he thought. I love my work.
Then he asked, 'Have you seen the Sistine Chapel?' In such a way that she nearly said, 'Is the Pope a Catholic?' But years of diplomacy forbore. 'Oh once or twice,' fairly calmly.
He nodded. 'Michelangelo understood how it is to be what I am. He has a poem called something like "Costei pur si delibra" - they gave me a copy when I picked up my medal.'
'Woman without boundaries ...?' she said, half to herself.
He was surprised. 'You know Italian?'
'Poco,' she said sharply, keeping her hands firmly around her glass in case she really did throw it this time. 'Continuare ...'
'He likens his art to "This savage woman, by no strictures bound, who has ruled that I'm to burn, die, suffer, though the sins she scolds weigh but an ounce or two ... "'
'Patrick’ she said, 'You have never burned for anything.'
'I'm burning now’ he said. 'For the Millennium Bridge.' Whisky and Brunel made a powerful dynamic. 'My darling.'
She knew that the endearment was not for her.
'We all have one great moment in us, and that will be mine’ he said.
'You have just buried your mother, Patrick’ she said. 'Don't you feel anything?'
He looked at her, dry-eyed, shrugged, and said nothing.
'Your great moment won't be the building of another bloody-well-bugger-it bridge,' she said, so viciously that it made him jump. 'Your great moment will be when you shed a genuine tear.'
‘I can't do a gravestone, Aud. I can't. It's just too trivial.'
'Well just you memento mori, Patrick, that's all I can say'
He refilled their glasses. They were both wondering what to do next when into the stillness and the calm came the sound of the front-door knocker thundering through the house as if Mephistopheles himself had arrived to claim his prize of one damned soul. Or "This savage woman by no strictures bound ...' And Patrick thought - surely not - it couldn't be - did he hear the frenzied tones of his wife ...?
5
The Godiva Principle
There is no Mostarian who has not made love near the Old Bridge. Jasna
And then came 9 November 1993. General Slobodan Praljak, a man from Mostar, a theatre director, was the commander of the Croat forces. Their tanks fired 68 shells of 100mm calibre at the bridge in two days... After the 68th shell the old bridge could hold no more. It gave in to shelling at 10.16 a.m. With a horrible crash the gracious white arch collapsed into the Neretva River. Centuries collapsed, a friend of mine wrote. Our lives collapsed.
Lucy Blakstad, Bridge: The Architecture of Connection
It took some calming down, the situation. On opening the door and expecting to find nothing more than some well-wishers, or religious doorsteppers, or someone arriving with late condolences, Patrick had the breath barged out of him as Peggy Boxer As Was flew past him, along the passage and up the stairs ... He assumed she needed the bathroom but he heard her opening and shutting the bedroom doors. Wrenching and slamming would be nearer the descriptive truth of it... Unlike her - he thought idly - she was usually so quiet.
On the step stood the driver, Johnson, whom Patrick knew well. They had often used him. He looked agitated. Patrick asked why. It was Johnson's opinion that Lady Parker was very unwell - that the flu was causing a serious malfunction - that a doctor would do the trick. And then Johnson, looking quite nervous, retreated.
'On the account, then,' called Patrick, as normally as he could under the circumstances, and he waved the man into the car before turning back. The last door upstairs was flung open and then slammed before Peggy came whipping down the stairs again -dressed, he noticed for the first time, in an odd assortment of clothes.
Plainly she was very ill indeed.
'You'd better come and sit down,' he said, quite at a loss to do more.
'Where is she?' hissed his wife. 'Who?'
'You know who ... her...'
He thought for a moment. There could only be one explanation. Florence. His wife had become demented. 'Why, in the churchyard,' he answered soothingly.
'Liar!' yelled his wife. Her face ran with sweat, white and glistening; she looked dangerous. Delirious.
Patrick wondered if he should slap her. Round the face or on the back - or somewhere ... 'She is at rest,' he said. ‘It is all over.'
'She'll never be at rest, that one,
' shrieked his wife. 'Never.'
Johnson was right. No wonder he'd backed off. Patrick felt helpless in the face of what was clear, mental derangement. He stood there, involuntarily blocking her way down the passage to the kitchen. 'Perhaps you should get into bed?' he said nervously.
'After she's been in there?'
'Well - there are other bedrooms,' said Patrick, not unreasonably. ‘I could put you in my old bed - that's made up - if the other one puts you off...'
Peggy then went several shades of increasingly pale, shiny beige.
'You are not well,' he said, and advanced to hold her.
But Peggy Boxer had seen Gaslight. She knew what could happen when a husband said that to his wife.
