The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2015 Edition
Page 28
“Connor and Elsa’s kid,” I say.
Her face clears. “Oh, that Lindsay. You should have said. The guilty passion of your youth. She must be grown up by now, isn’t she?”
“She’s only three, four years younger than I am.”
Dverna becomes concerned. “What was she phoning about? Not good news—I can see that on your face. Nothing’s happened to Connor or Elsa, has it? They’re okay?”
“They’re fine.” Dverna has met them perhaps half a dozen times, spoken with them lots on the phone. They were the much younger friends of my parents. Since I was a late child, they seemed not quite like adults to me when I was growing up. Of course they were at our wedding—that was the first time Dverna met them. Connor McBride flirted outrageously with my bride, which was exactly what Dverna needed that day, some of my family being frosty and barely polite to her. Ever since then she’s called Connor her secret lover while Elsa has called her the co-respondent.
“Then what was it?” She puts the paper down on top of a Rorschach pattern of toast crumbs.
“I don’t know how to explain this.”
“Madame Dverna, enchanted avatar of distant dimensions, can listen, and guide you through these arcane waters. Spill.”
She leans forward, going cross-eyed.
“Maybe it’s Madame Dverna the mystic wotsit I need,” I say.
I’m lost for where to begin. I’m also a bit worried she might pull my head off before I’ve got this properly explained, if I don’t start at the right place. But she’s my best friend as well as my wife.
“Lindsay’s pregnant.”
Dverna uncrosses her eyes in order to roll them. “And you’re shocked your First True Love should do such a thing? She’s not five any longer, Nick. Why has it got anything to do with you?”
My First True Love. Dverna’s heard the story often enough. Once upon a time I was about eight years old and my parents’ car broke down in the middle of nowhere. It was another Sunday, which in those times meant that in the Western Highlands of Scotland there wasn’t a garage that would answer your knock at the door. It was one of those days when your breath made clouds. Luckily a country bus came by, and we ended up at some grim hotel with grim three-foot-thick walls built out of grim dirty red granite sometime before Julius Caesar venied, vidied or vicied. And, as my father discovered to his fury once he’d signed us in, it was a temperance hotel. The next morning he found out it was going to take a week to fix the car, although it was late in the day before the local garage dared tell him this. The last bus to civilisation had gone. Dad wasn’t going to spend another night in a place that broke the Good Lord’s Eleventh Commandment—Thou Shalt Have a Bar—and so he began phoning around to see if there was “any escape from this hellhole.”
A few hours later, by which time I was asleep on my mother’s knee in the hotel’s sitting room, Connor and Elsa turned up, ready to give us a lift home. There was a lot of laughter as they piled us all into their car, which was one of those old black monstrosities that looked as if it should have a belowdecks, and I ended up in the back seat jammed next to their infant daughter, Lindsay, whom of course they couldn’t have left at home.
During a long drive through the fading light and into the darkness I fell in love with this magical creature. She seemed, so far as I was concerned, hardly to belong to the physical world. Her parents had bundled her all up in white blankets against the cold of the oncoming night, and her face was almost as pale. For a while she wouldn’t speak to me, but eventually she prattled happily enough.
By the time we got home my eight-year-old soul was hers.
And then I never saw her again. Well, not for years—which is as long as never when you’re that age.
In my teens I saw Connor and Elsa several times. They’d drifted apart from my parents—one family to Wales, the other to Sussex—and then, when the phones got cheaper, somehow the distances got shorter. I enjoyed their visits, or when we visited them. Mostly Lindsay wasn’t a part of those weekends—she had a school that prided itself on organising foreign trips during the vacation periods. There was a day when I must have been about twenty when I was passing through Edinburgh—the McBrides had moved back up north by then—and they bought me a bad lunch at the Balmoral Hotel. Lindsay was there too, with a very silent boyfriend. “But you promised you’d wait for me!” I wailed, then realised I’d embarrassed her.
Which was sort of the way it was. I still cherish that long drive through the night in the back of the car, and there’s still always a place inside me where an eight-year-old boy is awestricken by the ethereal five-year-old girl and the ethereal five-year-old girl’s rare smile. It was a genuine falling in love, and I never want to lose it. Yet, as the years have gone by, I’ve barely ever thought of Lindsay. It’s her parents who’re my friends. That scowly day in an Edinburgh hotel is the way I think of the real Lindsay.
On the other hand, I recognised her voice immediately when I picked up the phone a few minutes ago.
“It seems it may have something to do with me,” I tell Dverna. “She says I’m the father.”
“That’s impossible,” says Dverna, after an extraordinarily long while. I’m pleased to find my head not pulled off.
“That’s what I told her,” I say.
“How far gone is she?”
“Three months, a bit over.”
“You’ve not been sneaking out at nights, have you?”
It’s a joke question. Lindsay was calling from the family home in Edinburgh. We live in Bristol.
“But of course,” I say, loving my wife.
“The girl must have fallen off her trolley.”
I grab Dverna’s half-drunk black coffee, which is cold, and take a gulp. “She must be. Only . . . ”
“This had better be good, Nick.”
“She didn’t sound nuts.”
“Did she sound like that woman out of Fatal Attraction? What’s her name? Glenn Ford?”
“Close, but no ceegar,” I say, then return to the subject. “She sounded quite calm. That’s the odd thing. She was phoning me up just to let me know there was a sprog on the way, and that it was mine. She wasn’t asking me for anything, doesn’t expect me to show any interest in the child unless I want to—just thought it was right for her to tell me.”
“And you believe her?”
The question surprises me. It hasn’t occurred to me not to believe Lindsay. She’s still, I suppose, an angel who descended to earth for a while long ago to sit in the back of a car with a small Scottish boy.
I pick my words carefully. “She wasn’t lying. I believe she was telling the truth she remembers. Only . . . only it’s not a truth I was ever part of.”
“Wasn’t it about three months ago you were supposed to be up there?”
Dverna’s small brown feet squirm away from me. She crosses to the fridge door, with its mass of bunting.
“Here it is. July seventh to ninth. You were supposed to be having a meeting in Edinburgh with the Sitemaster Hotel Group, only you had the summer flu instead.”
“And I lost the job,” I say. “But I thought that was earlier. March, April.”
Dverna clicks her tongue. “Nope. July it was. You were going to stay with Connor and Elsa.”
“Lindsay says I did.”
“Ah,” says Dverna.
“I haven’t been to Edinburgh in five years, maybe seven,” I say.
“And you weren’t there three months ago. It is incised into my brain that you weren’t there three months ago. You spent ten days either sitting on the lav or lying in your bed looking pale and deathly boring and telling me from time to time that, should this be your final descent into the abyss, I was to remember our love had been immortal.”
“That’s not what Lindsay says. She says I was in Scotland.”
“Then she’s wrong.”
For a second longer I think Dverna is still hugely amused by the whole situation—her husband having his chain pulled by a long-ago memory—but then I
see she’s frightened by the way I seem as puzzled as she is.
“You’ll be wanting to see her?” says Dverna, making the question sound like a death sentence. She clears her throat. “In fact, you need to see her. This is something you need to solve, isn’t it?”
“They’re coming down to London next week so Connor and Elsa can go to the new Waterhouse exhibition. While they’re getting culture, she said, maybe she and I could—”
Another mercurial change of mood. “This isn’t all a stupid game, is it, Nick?”
I look out through the french window and over a back garden where there are no scattered children’s toys to a hedge that is more brown than green.
“How could you think that?” I say.
“I’m coming up towards thirty with frightening speed. Maybe you want to trade me in for a new model.”
“You’ve got to be joking.”
I’m appalled she could think any such thing. I thought I was an open book to her, that she could read my innermost thoughts. I guess we all have ideals like that, then are disillusioned when we discover the boundaries between one human and the next are, no matter how close we think we are, impermeable. I can’t even imagine being tempted by “a new model.” Oh, sure, as she knows, sometimes I feel spears of lust when I see a smile or a well occupied pair of tight jeans, but lust is easy and cheap and superficial. Dverna makes me lust, too, lust like a dog in the noonday sun, but that’s only one percent or less of what she is in my life.
“I’ve got these wobbly bits on my hips.”
“They’re one—two—of the reasons I love you.”
“Are you saying I’ve got wobbly bits on my hips? Heartless bastard. So what day is it you’re going up to London?”
“Thursday. I said I’d meet her at that restaurant on the Serpentine . . . ”
Dverna puts the back of her wrist to her forehead in a caricature of cheated grief. “Oh, spare me, spare me, spare me the details of your assignations with this . . . this . . . this floozy!”
I’m wondering if I should maybe phone Connor or Elsa and try to work into the conversation a question about whether their daughter’s receiving any kind of treatment. Somehow, though, it would seem like a betrayal. I decide to put the decision on this one off until after I’ve seen Lindsay herself. As I told Dverna, she didn’t sound nuts on the phone.
What I don’t say to my wife is that I asked Lindsay, “How’re we going to recognise each other after all this time?” and she replied, “Don’t you think, in the circumstances, that’s rather an inappropriate remark?”
On Thursday morning we leave the house together, me taking a taxi to Bristol Temple Meads station, Dverna setting off on foot to work. She teaches science at Mowberry Comprehensive—or, as she likes to describe it in a loud voice to obnoxious people at parties, “I work in a madrassa where we take young terrorists and brainwash them until they become children.”
“See you this evening,” she says. She’s trying to sound light about it, but I can hear her worry.
“I’ll call you from the train to let you know when I’ll be home.” She looks cold, although it’s not a cold morning. “I’ll try for the six-oh-three, as usual.”
She glances at the sky. “Hope the weather’s nice for you.”
I’m conscious of the taxi driver waiting, tapping his fingers on the wheel.
“Dverna?”
“Yes?”
I put a finger under her chin and tilt her face up so I can kiss the tip of her small brown nose. She squeezes my free hand very tightly.
“There can only ever be you,” I say to her.
“I should hope so.”
She walks away quickly, her hard-heeled work shoes going clicky-click-click on the paving stones.
I’m lucky enough to get a table by the window, so that while I’m waiting for Lindsay to appear I can look out over the sunshiny water at the families in rowing boats. Ducks paddle along in their tranquil fashion or spearhead for the shore whenever they spot someone they sense has brought breadcrumbs to share.
Lindsay doesn’t keep me waiting long.
A slight dip in the volume of conversation in the room makes me turn away from the view of the Serpentine to see the young woman coming in through the door. She raises a hand to the maître d’ to say that, no, she doesn’t want to give him the white summer jacket she’s wearing, and smiles in my direction. She points me out to him and then starts across the restaurant towards me, the maître d’ floundering in her wake.
Standing, I pull a chair out for her. I’m suddenly as nervous as an adolescent on his first date.
Lindsay kisses my cheek lightly and sits. Under the white jacket she’s wearing a full-length white dress, almost like a bridal gown. Or an angel’s tunic. With her pale clothing and pale skin, I feel I should be seeing her not here in the modern world but winged and androgenous in a Renaissance painting. The only colour is around the dress’s neck, where there’s a chain of pale green leaves embroidered in lace. What I’m trying not to do, as I sit down, is stare at her face.
It’s quite square, and white as snow. A few small freckles across the bridge of her nose. Her eyes are the same blue I remember from that long-ago night drive across Scotland; they have that slight lack of focus which the eyes of longsighted people sometimes have. She has a very mobile mouth; her lips are never still, even when the rest of her face is in repose. She wears her dark, curly hair to shoulder-length; her eyebrows are even darker than her hair. There’s not a trace of makeup on her face, the only colour being small tinges of pink at the peak of her cheekbones, and yet there seems to be a glow about her, that aura which pregnant women sometimes acquire.
She is as beautiful as she was when we first met, when she was five and I was eight.
And this is what’s puzzling me as we make the usual small talk—aren’t we both looking splendid, yes, I had a good train ride, she walked across the park from Marble Arch tube station, oh, we could have walked together if we’d known because I came on foot from Paddington. I can see a clear line of descent, as it were, from the magical child who was bundled up warm in the back seat of the car, all those years ago, to the woman sitting across from me. What I can’t see, though, is any way the glowering adolescent I annoyed over a bad meal in Edinburgh could have become the Lindsay in front of me. Just to begin with, she appears several inches shorter than she was then—although I put that down to the way ungainly teenagers seem to have longer limbs than ordinary human beings do.
We order a light lunch—salads, a bottle of some innocuous German white wine. I’m not really in the mood for eating. I’m entranced by this creature, just as I once was. If I were younger, I’d say I was falling in love with her, but it isn’t that. I wish in a way it were. That would be, somehow, easier to cope with.
What I do know is that, if indeed Lindsay is pregnant, then I’m not the father. We spent no night of passion together. I know this for a certainty. In the old tales men lost themselves in Faeryland and dallied with the Queen, yet later forgot entirely their lovemaking. They forgot only because the Queen could cast a spell upon their minds; otherwise they’d have remembered everything until the last breath left their body. It would surely be this way with Lindsay. Surely there’d be some kind of body-memory? Surely?
Yet who she is is a mystery to me. I hardly dare even touch her hand.
We wait until the food’s arrived before, moving carefully and warily like participants in a minuet, we approach the reason for our being here.
“I’m not asking you to bear any . . . paternal responsibility, Nick,” she says, spearing a slice of tomato.
“Before we even start going into that,” I say, “I think we need to sort out what actually happened.”
“You said that on the phone.”
“Tell me the story from your side.”
“You’re serious?”
“I really am.”
She smiles. “I’m not sure I like the notion of having to remind you.”
She sighs, and reaches out her hand to place it over mine on the table. Her touch is cool and dry, as I imagined it would be.
“Well, you remember, back in July, you came and stayed with us for that business meeting you—”
“No, Lindsay. I don’t remember that. I had to cancel. I had the flu.”
“You seemed a little under the weather, but—”
“I was in Bristol. I never even got as far as the station. I had to cancel my appointment, and I lost the job because of it.” Not that there weren’t plenty of other jobs, because there’s always demand for a freelance accountant, but the Sitemaster contract was one I’d been particularly keen to nail down. C’est la vie.
“I’m trying to tell you something,” says Lindsay.
“Sorry. I shouldn’t have interrupted.”
“You were a little under the weather, I said. I don’t mean you were sniffling or feverish, or anything like that. You seemed a little . . . confused, maybe? There was something artificial about you, as if you were playing a role, like one does in front of people one doesn’t know very well. Dad said later you seemed so out of kilter with your normal self he could have passed you in the street without recognising you. Me, I hadn’t seen you since I was, what, fourteen, fifteen, so you didn’t seem so strange to me, but I could still tell . . . ” She takes a deep breath. “You don’t do drugs, do you?”
“Just single malt whisky, and then not often enough.”
“We wondered, the three of us, after you’d left, if that was why you seemed so . . . Of course, Mum and Dad didn’t know what else had happened while you were there.” She stares at me meaningfully with those cloudy blue eyes.
The McBrides have one of those big old tall houses a couple of miles south of Edinburgh’s centre, built of red sandstone and built to last. Most of the other houses up and down the street have been converted for flats or into hotels—well, bed-and-breakfasts, really. Where the McBrides sometimes put houseguests is in a small stone shed at the bottom of the back garden—a “guest chalet,” as Elsa likes grandly to call it. It was probably a stable at one point. Now it has a comfortable little bedroom, with a loo and a shower room off it. Just right for a night or three; any longer and it’d start to get claustrophobic, I’d guess. But there’s more privacy than in the main house.