She stewed on it for a week. She didn’t mention it to Alan. The car could have been a write-off and he wouldn’t have noticed. Anyway, he had his hands full with the show. The next Tuesday she made an effort to be a little more formal — normally they were casual, just slacks and something warm like a fleece. This time she wore a new purple silk blouse and an old pin-striped trouser suit. She pinned the silver rose brooch that Alan had given her for their thirtieth anniversary to the lapel. Roses were Sally’s favorite flower. Shirley had made sure that her hospital room always had a vase or two of them.
After they had organized the coffee and got the chairs in a circle, she stood up. “I just want to say something,” she said in a clear voice. Everybody looked expectant, as if she was going to announce that she had had some kind of breakthrough. That sometimes happened in meetings but it was normally a false alarm — real breakthroughs were few and far between.
“It’s about my car. The maroon Golf.”
Before Shirley could go on, Joanne leapt in.
“That’s so odd,” she said. “Like synergy. I felt Neil in the car tonight.” Joanne saw signs in everything. She believed that on the day you die your spirit goes into someone who has just been born.
“It’s nothing like that,” Shirley said crisply.
But Joanne was not to be stopped. “If it’s the same car you’ve had since Sally…”
“It’s not the same car, Joanne. We change it every three years. Somebody scratched it in the car park. Last week, last Tuesday.”
“What do you mean?” Ella, the Welsh girl, squeaked.
“I mean that someone scratched my car in the car park and hasn’t had the courage to own up. Right through the paintwork down to the metal.”
There was a silence. Everyone looked awkward. Maybe there’s such a thing as collective guilt, Shirley thought.
“It wasn’t me,” one of the men said.
“Nobody thinks it was necessarily you,” she said. “But it was someone.”
The other man, David, spoke up in his quiet voice. “What would you like to do, Shirley?”
“I’d really like someone to own up.”
David nodded his head. “I see,” he said. He rarely said anything. He was an engineer. His wife had been a chronic invalid for twenty years before she died. He had told Shirley that he felt he hadn’t done enough for her. A lot of people came to the group looking for forgiveness.
Once, in the early days of the group, he had asked her out for coffee. After some small talk he had said that, owing to his wife’s illness, they had not been able to have marital relations for many years and now she had passed on he felt he should rectify this gap in his life. He said he had the feeling that Shirley might possibly be unfulfilled in that area, too, and wondered whether there might be an arrangement they could make together, possibly in the afternoons if that suited her. He said it so politely and diffidently that she didn’t take offense. If you don’t ask, you don’t get, she thought. But she said no, that was not really the kind of thing she was looking for from the group.
“Maybe you did it yourself and just didn’t notice,” Ella said.
“I’m scrupulously careful about my car. And other people’s, for that matter.”
“I suppose you want to interrogate everybody. Like the Gestapo.”
“As I’m Jewish it’s unlikely that I would behave like the Gestapo.”
“I was really feeling something when I got here, now it’s just gone,” Ella whelped. “You’re bringing negative energy in here.”
“Ella,” she said, “if you want to be strictly accurate about it, I think you’ll find that the person who pranged my side panel created the negative energy.”
Then everybody began talking at once. There was more energy in the hall, negative or not, than there had been for months. Ella began to cry. Joanne was on her feet jabbing her finger at Shirley. Even the woman in the wheelchair was moving around. She had been drunk when she crashed the car and killed her husband.
Finally, David spoke, softly as ever, and everyone fell silent. Shirley had always thought he had a rather commanding presence.
“Here’s what I think we should do, Shirley. Why don’t you all sit down, and we’ll go round the group and everyone can say whether they did or didn’t scrape Shirley’s car.”
“Why should we do that?” someone said.
“So we can get this over with and move on to what we’re here for,” David said calmly.
There was silence. Shirley had never seen so many angry-looking people.
“All right?” he said. “Shall we start?”
Shirley thought he did it very professionally. He was deliberate, not rushing it, giving everybody time to think. But, of course, they all said no.
Finally, to her surprise, he said, “I have to ask you, too, Shirley. It’s only fair. Did you do it yourself?”
“Of course I didn’t,” she said.
“It’s possible to deflect guilt,” he said. “A lot of us here know that.”
She spoke as deliberately as she could: “No. I did not scratch my own car.”
Then there was silence. Everyone seemed to be looking at the floor. “What would you like to do now, Shirley?” David said.
“Just because everyone denies it does not mean that somebody didn’t do it.”
Ella snorted, “Do you want to attach electrodes to our private parts, Shirley?”
There were a lot of sniggers, but Shirley was not going to be laughed at for asking something perfectly reasonable. She got up and said, “I have to say I’m very disappointed. I think I’ll give tonight a miss. I’ll see you all next week.”
She took her coat and walked out of the hall. She hoped that if a stranger had watched her leave they would have thought, How dignified, but when she got outside she had a little weep.
She was going to make herself forget about the car. She did not want next week’s Group meeting to be sullied by it. She still thought that the Group could help her. Everything else had failed her: the spiritual advisers, clairvoyants, psychics, mediums, whatever you wanted to call them, whom she had seen over the years. They had all failed to deliver. You can’t really ask for your money back, she thought. They don’t offer a guarantee. But even if a coin comes up heads a thousand times in a row, it could just as easily come up tails the next time. All she knew was that Sally was too strong and vital a person not to be somewhere. She had glimpsed her once a long time ago and she knew that she might be able to do it again.
What was odd was that Alan wasn’t at home when she arrived home from the Group. He was always there with an open bottle of wine and something simple like sandwiches. Then she realized: she had only been out for forty-five minutes. The Tuesday-night group normally lasted about two hours so he must have thought he had time to go out and do whatever he was doing.
She went to the bathroom to redo her face. Her eyes looked like a panda’s. As she looked into the mirror she saw a scrunched-up ball of paper in the corner that had obviously missed the wastepaper bin. She reached down and picked it up. Without unfolding it, she knew it was one of those small-print leaflets about side effects you get in a box of pills. She was a doctor’s daughter; she could spot anything medical from five hundred paces. She had heard about Viagra, of course: you could hardly pick up a magazine these days without some article about how it had changed people’s lives.
She sat down on the lavatory and felt tears come into her eyes. She dabbed them with some loo paper. She didn’t want to have to do her makeup again. There were so many things going through her head. It was like finding a secret message in a bottle and it made her want to take Alan in her arms and hold him close. She wanted to say, “Oh, my darling, I don’t mind, I never minded. You gave me — you still give me — so much.” She could understand his reasoning in getting the pills — “out of practice” hardly covered it — but why after all these years? What was the tectonic shift in Alan that made him choose today to bring it back into their
lives? It wasn’t that she felt unfulfilled exactly, but she felt less soft — dried-up and less giving than she once did. Despite what David said to her the night they had had coffee she hoped that there wasn’t some aura of discontent flowing out of her, some cry for comfort pitched at dog-whistle frequency that only a middle-aged engineer with sharp hearing could pick up.
She rarely thought about that side of their marriage, but if she did she would say that it had not precisely vanished but that they had put it in a Swiss bank vault and somehow the combination had gone missing. Now Alan was trying to find it again and she loved him for it even though she was not sure that she could just flick that switch after all this time. It was like a surprise party being given for her and she didn’t know if she could conjure up the requisite wide-eyed amazement, but if it meant that much to Alan she would try.
They had shared so much. You could not take that away or diminish it. She had heard that the death of a child could break a marriage. She understood that. You recover and you don’t recover. A shared pool of grief could drown you both, could have you fighting against each other to get to the surface. Maybe it was easier not to share it. Maybe that was why they had survived. But there was a price to be paid: not everything could go on as it had before.
She knew that people were meant to think about sex four times a minute or something ridiculous. She didn’t. She wasn’t sure she ever had. It was never really like that with Alan and her. Of course he was attractive, or at least she found him so. He was the first person she had slept with. She had done other things with other people, quite a lot of things with quite a lot of other people, but he had got the prize. That was how people looked at it then.
You would never know it from reading the papers but there were other bonds that held people together. It was not all rumpled sheets. She and Alan were so close that you could scarcely fit a sheet of paper between them. They had grown up together — from the age of thirteen they were at school together with Joseph. Alan was shy and didn’t have a lot of friends apart from him, and Shirley had dragged them out of their shell. She was still doing it.
Normally, when she got back from the Group, she and Alan sat and talked for a while. She liked to wind down: the Group could be very intense sometimes. The one thing she and Alan had always done was talk. That was something that never stopped after Sally died, although they never talked about her. She wondered what they would say tonight.
Alan got back just before ten. He looked surprised to see her. He said he had been round at Joseph’s trying to fix the last song, despite having worked on it all day. It hadn’t gone well, apparently, and Alan seemed down. There was a lot of pressure: they were heading to Manchester next week.
Alan seemed distracted. She had to ask him twice if he wanted some wine. To her surprise they did not sit and talk. He said he was going straight to bed. As he passed behind her chair he put his hand on her shoulder and gave it a little squeeze.
She did not normally have a bath in the evening but she thought it would be a good idea to have one tonight just to be on the safe side. She was feeling rather tense, anyway. Maybe she took too long, because by the time she came out of the bathroom, Alan was asleep in his bed.
She woke early, before it was light, and went downstairs to make herself some coffee. There was a white envelope on the mat, no stamp. It had been delivered by hand.
Dear Shirley,
This is rather awkward, I’m afraid. After you left tonight, we had an informal chat and the general consensus was that the Group feels awkward about your continuing involvement at our Tuesday sessions. Without naming any names, some people feel that the kind of positive energy we need so badly has been compromised by the upset over your car, and that it will be some time before we can get back on track. I hope you will understand.
Yours very sincerely,
David Arbuthnot
She felt her eyes welling up. She had to reply to the letter, but she was not going to let them know that she was upset. She sat down at her computer:
To: All members of the Tuesday Night Group
From: Shirley Isaacs
I don’t think it is beyond the powers of our Group to extend the same courtesy and respect we employ when trying to reach those we have loved and lost to our dealings with the living.
I think that for many of you, guilt is an integral part of the need to make contact. From the bottom of my heart I hope you succeed. All I would say to the person who damaged my car is: Please don’t add more guilt to your life. It’s such a burden.
Luckily for me, I don’t seem to have the “Guilt Gene” that many of you have. My daughter, Sally, and I could not have been closer and more bonded by love. All I’ve ever wanted is to let her know that I love her as much as I did from the day she was born to the day when the brutal disease of anorexia extinguished her like a candle. While the Group has been helpful on occasion, I can just as easily do my own work in moments of quiet reflection.
I wish you all the very best of luck.
They would need it. What a sorry lot they were. She didn’t tell Alan about David’s letter, but it was he who solved the puzzle. On the way up to Manchester with Joseph — naturally, all Kevin Lever ran to was second-class so they were scrabbling to find seats on a crowded train — Alan was putting her bag on the luggage rack when he turned to her and said, “Oh, I forgot — I used your car while mine was in the garage and I bashed the side on the gate post. I’ll sort it out when we get back. Sorry.”
She wasn’t really annoyed. Her departure from the Group was clearly meant to be, and she wasn’t going to weep for it. Anyway, by the time they got to Manchester, there was more than that to worry about.
Maurice
A YEAR BEFORE, in the freezing winter of 1946, a bus had skidded off the road on an icy patch and plowed into the wall of the school, its nose going right into one of the storerooms by the porter’s lodge. Maurice liked to think of the runaway bus as an attack on the school by the forces of real life. If only it had crashed all the way through to the cloisters and lain there like a great beached whale blocking the path to the school chapel: that would have been a symbol nobody could ignore.
Because of the wartime shortage of building materials, the roadside wall had not been repaired, simply patched up and boarded, but Maurice knew how to ease himself in, which of the planks had some give to it. Although he had never found anyone else in there, he was clearly not the only person to use it. The rubble-strewn floor was dotted with cigarette butts, and old newspapers crackled underfoot. Once he had trodden on a used rubber. Of course the place was out of bounds — some feeble punishment would be meted out to him if he was caught — but what was not out of bounds at King George, what transgression did not go unpunished? This was his secret place. This was where he had worked out his plan for the Communist Society.
Some weeks after the choir debacle he was sitting there on a dirty concrete block smoking a cigarette he had stolen from his father’s silver case. It was almost time to head to the Assembly Hall. Today was Open Day, always held at the end of the summer term, when the next term’s intake of new boys was brought by their parents to tour the school. Among the other activities of the day — a lecture by the headmaster, a gymnastics display in the quadrangle, a march-past by the school corps — the school societies all set up stands in the hall to entice the new boys to join.
When Maurice put in his application for his society to the committee, headed by Mr. Costello, they began putting up obstacles immediately. First, they rejected it because they said there should be two proposers, not one. Several people he asked to help him laughed in his face. Finally, he had to twist Arthur’s arm to get him to cosign the form, waving away his objection that he already had his hands full with the Rowing Society.
Then, even with two proposers, the committee rejected the application on the grounds that societies were meant to promote hobbies and interests, not to encourage political affiliation. When he pointed out that there was already
a Conservative Society, Mr. Costello said that it was because of the special circumstances of the head boy being the son of Godalming’s MP. He knew there was nothing to be gained by arguing the point. He resubmitted the application calling it the Russian Society, and, on the basis that it was going to concentrate on literature and music, it was grudgingly allowed.
It was going to be a big day for him. He felt nervous and unsure, but there was something he always did which calmed himself down. He took the pencil case out of his satchel and removed the dull, silver dividers. He rolled up his sleeve and ran the points along the skin of his inner arm. They left thin white lines, and a pleasant, itchy feeling. This was just the preliminary, he was just drawing the map. His favored pattern was the shape of a noughts and crosses board. He pressed harder now, and the skin broke, like the meniscus on a glass of water. The pleasure was in the precision of the angles, the way the lines slowly bubbled up with red. This time, there was not a lot of blood. Maybe his system was sluggish and tired. Maybe his body was conserving its strength for what might happen later. He mopped his wrist with some tissue paper, pulled down the sleeve of his shirt and buttoned it up. There would be a stain, but it would be hidden by his jacket and he could scrub it later so that his mother would not see the blood when she did the wash.
When he got to the hall, there was a lot of activity. People were milling around, setting up trestle tables and pinning posters to the wall. His stand was between the Fencing Society and the Model Soldier Society. He unrolled the huge red banner he had painted on a big square of canvas with “Russian Society” stenciled in black letters at the top, stood on a chair and painstakingly nailed it to the wall. He placed his old gramophone on the table in front of the stand and laid “The Internationale” on the turntable. The music began and he waited.
The Songs Page 7
