by Paul Magrs
‘You can see it’s still her,’ Winnie said. ‘She’s still pale and skinny. She’s got that same slightly bent nose. She used to say her dad had hit her.’ Even though she was in a smart, dark, quite obviously expensive trouser suit, it was plain to Winnie, at least, where Ada had come from. The dirty house next door. The rough family that the whole street was ashamed of.
The air was all clattering silver and clinking crystal, and the scents of stuffing and bread sauce and molten, glistening vegetables. Across the Rainbow Room, shrieks of delight were going up as the first few bangs went off. ‘They’re pulling crackers!’ Winnie said, scandalised. Simon was surprised, too. He had expected a Literary Lunch to be a more solemn, intellectual affair.
Then Kelly and Simon and Marcia and Karen and the rest of their table were brandishing crackers and making Winnie join in and soon everyone in the room was wearing tissue paper party hats.
These hats stayed on, too — some of them at a more jaunty angle — through the rich, heavy puddings, the red wine, the dessert wine, the sherry afterwards. After all of this, everyone sat back and suddenly an unobtrusive little man was standing up on the podium and making them applaud the kitchen staff and the waiting staff, and then he was giving a long, rambling speech, full of praise for Ada Jones.
‘That unassuming local lass who left the region so long ago, to make her own particular mark on the much wider world out there…’ There was a ripple of polite amusement then: Ada was scowling in open contempt at his words. Her readers — used to her sense of humour; her impatience with snobs and buffoons — lapped up every ironic twitch of her eyebrows. The hotel manager grew flustered and raced to the end of his toadying speech and, at last, to thunderous applause, left the floor open for Ada Jones.
She didn’t move very far. She simply stood up, in front of her chair. She didn’t do anything to grab their attention at all. She placed her hands on the tablecloth in front of her and leaned forward slightly, as if at a lectern. She was smiling and glancing at every table in turn. They had miked her up and so her wheezing breath came issuing out of the loudspeakers set into the walls at discreet intervals. She was gathering up her breath and it was obvious that there was something not quite right with her lungs. Her chest sounded like a clock that had been wound up too tight: all the cogs and springs were clicking and cracking and longing to chime. Ada coughed — too close to the microphone — and the sound boomed and bounced around the room. She covered her mouth with her hand and raised the glass tumbler to her lips.
Simon noticed that, in her wispy, white hair, she was wearing a single, girlish clip, to keep it out of her face, and that touched him, for some reason. It was as if Ada had never changed her hairstyle since she was a little girl.
‘I am amazed,’ Ada began. ‘I’m amazed to see so many of you here.’ They all jumped at the sound of her voice. Alter all her wheezing they had expected a very small, whispering voice, conserving her air. But Ada had the loudest, most booming voice they had ever heard. Only Winnie was smiling in recognition.
‘I’ve never really given readings on my home turf,’ Ada said. ‘I didn’t think anyone would come out to see me. It’s fantastically difficult to imagine, when you get to my state of ancientness and decrepitude, to imagine anyone wanting to see you at all.’
Simon looked along the table and saw that his gran was staring at Ada, and she looked pleased, perplexed and disturbed all at the same time. Others, too, were alarmed at how unwell Ada seemed to be. Kelly had told Simon that this was likely to be the last public appearance that Ada was determined to make, but he hadn’t absorbed the truth of that. Here, though, Ada looked a lot more ill than anyone had expected. Simon thought Ada looked a great deal older than his gran.
When Ada picked up the new hardback to read from, the thick, luridly colourful novel seemed almost too heavy for her. The bear like man beside Ada inched forward and, for a moment, it seemed that he was going to hold the book up for her, in front of her nose.
Her tiny hands were chapped and red. Her skin seemed so thin that her nerves and veins were almost visible, pulsing away inside of her.
Ada read in a strong, forthright voice. Her accent crept back as she lost herself in her own story, and took all of her sated, tipsy, party-hatted audience with her. Back, back into the past. The new novel returned her to the location of her very first book; to the setting of her youth. Simon’s heart beat faster and his temples pounded with booze fumes and sadness as he realised that Ada was revisiting the old streets and houses, and revelling in the tarry, salty scents of the coastline, and the cawing of the gulls, and of mammies shouting on doorsteps for the kids to come home as night fell.
Ada read for almost an hour, wracked with coughing fits, asking her large companion to refill her glass now and then with her ‘special water’ (laughter then — he filled it with Russian vodka and bottled tonic water that he pulled out of a carrier bag kept under the table). But even with all these distractions the spell didn’t break. Ada held their attention and their imagination and kept them all trapped in that past. For that afternoon, everyone — Simon, Kelly, Winnie, the ladies, the wine waiters and booksellers — they were all playing out at teatime, some time in the middle of the last century: playing in the wrong places, down by the sand dunes and the docks, with a gang of rough girls. For her last novel Ada had returned them all to the very beginning.
When she finished Simon realised that everyone else was applauding rowdily, happily, and they were all getting up, to leave their places at table, to get into the queue to buy the new book and have it personally signed. Simon was still in a daze, still back there running wild in the past, with scabby knees and unwashed hair. He turned to see that his gran had tears running down her face, making runnels through the powder.
‘I’m making a show’ of myself,’ she gasped, when Simon tapped her arm.
‘Let’s go and meet her,’ he smiled.
It turned out that everyone who had eaten lunch and listened to Ada read wanted to buy the new hardback. ‘No wonder she’s a bestseller,’ Kelly said. ‘They’re grabbing them up, look.’
Winnie, Kelly and Simon got into place, near the very back of the queue. Others, more used to the form at these events, had dashed into position almost as soon as Ada had closed her book.
‘Wasn’t she wonderful?’ Simon grinned. ‘It was great, wasn’t it? Hearing it in her actual voice. It was like being back there…’ He looked at his gran, who was beaming, tight lipped. She looked pleased and proud, he thought. As if Ada was her protégée — which, he thought, she was, in a way. ‘Her new novel sounds good, doesn’t it?’ Simon asked her.
Winnie nodded firmly.
‘You’ve got to get a copy…’
She shook her head. ‘I never buy hardbacks. Twenty pounds! I can wait for the paperback. That’ll do for me.’
Simon was amazed. ‘But… it’s about… your home, again. She’s gone back to your childhood again. You have to have it now…’
His gran gave him a complacent smile. ‘I can wait. I’ve waited this long, haven’t I? To go back to the beginning. I think I can wait a bit more.’
‘Have you heard this?’ Simon turned to Kelly. ‘She won’t buy the book. They’ll chuck her out of the queue…’
Kelly smiled and shrugged. She was carrying the box of books sent by Terrance.
‘I’ll wait,’ Winnie said again. ‘Maybe I’ll wait until it comes into the Exchange.’
There was a bit of a fracas with one of the booksellers — a very young and trendy woman — who claimed that they weren’t allowed to get their old novels signed by Ms Jones. Ms Jones was on an exceedingly tight schedule and had no time to sign anyone’s old books. All Ms Jones would be signing today were the pristine copies of her new book, plenty of which were available for sale.
Kelly wasn’t to be browbeaten. ‘Forget it, love,’ she told the bookseller. ‘We’ve paid forty quid each to be here. And Mrs Thompson here is a very old friend of Ms Jones. Probably
her oldest friend in the world. So, if Mrs Thompson wanted her bum signing, never mind her old books, that’s what would happen, OK?’
The young woman blanched. She wasn’t used to dealing with Kelly’s sort. Not at events like this. ‘Anyway,’ said Kelly, ‘what’s so wrong with old books, eh?’
The bookseller looked down at the box Kelly was carrying, and shuddered as if she, too — just like Grandad Ray — thought of old books as tiny little coffins, full of dust, dead ideas, germs and lice. But she stopped bothering Kelly, Winnie and Simon, and went off to sell more new books.
‘I thought she was going to throw us out,’ Winnie sighed. ‘That would have been something.’ She grinned, and started to tell them the tale of how she and Ada had been chucked out of the Central Library, the first time they had visited it. How they’d been caught looking at pictures in medical books and giggling under the stone dome of the reference room, unaware that their giggles were being magnified, amplified and bounced around the whole building.
‘She won’t even know me now,’ Winnie said nervously, as the queue inched forward and their ears were filled with chattering and squealing and a tense expectancy that felt exactly like queueing for Santa Claus’s grotto in the old department stores. ‘But I’ll be able to tell her that I remember her. Even without all of her fame and success. I’d have known that tiny urchin anywhere.’
It took more than an hour for the queue to dwindle down and for the end to be in sight. It seemed that every reader there wanted to linger and have a proper conversation with Ada Jones; to make that personal, human connection. Simon suspected that all of them had read the same article as Kelly, and had learned that this would most likely be Ada’s final public appearance.
As they came into view of her, they could see that her strength was flagging. She was a small figure hunched on that ridiculous golden throne, her hands busy at work signing messages in the books. She seemed feeble but, Simon realised, there was a great fortitude about her, too — as if all that was keeping her going was sheer force of will.
That idea certainly fitted with the Ada his gran had talked about and the Ada he was starting to know from her novels.
The bumbling, bald, bear like man was still standing at Ada’s right hand. He was there to open the books for her and to keep her glass of ‘special water’ topped up. ‘That must be her husband,’ Winnie said. ‘The way she’s bossing him about like that. Eric, I think he’s called. Very posh. But look — he’s got his shirt buttons fastened up wrong…’
It was true, there was a bulging flap of open shirt, displaying his paunch to the queue of ladies. There was something affably eccentric and blimpish about this Eric that Simon warmed to. He could hear Ada’s husband’s fruity, slurred, cultivated voice contributing to the various excitable greetings. He was gently and subtly keeping the queue moving; keeping everyone happy.
At last it was their turn to come face to face with the doll-like figure on the golden chair. Kelly slid the box of fifteen books onto the table and started to pull them out, one at a time. Simon was embarrassed bv her determination. Ada looked completely shattered by now. This close up, her complexion was waxen and her cheeks were sunken. But her eyes were blazing a brilliant green with interest.
Winnie had lost her nerve. To Simon’s astonishment she started to pretend to be just any other punter.
‘I hope you won’t mind,’ she said meekly. ‘But I’ve brought a number of older books I’d like to have signed. I’m a very great fan, you see, and…’
Winnie kept her head down and all of the others were staring at her. Winnie blushed, aware of their attention. She pulled the lapels of her cream jacket together, fussily, over the ruffles of her best blouse and looked up, unsurely. Straight into the emerald green, sparkling, amused eyes of Ada Jones.
Ada laughed. ‘How dare you stand there, pretending not to be you!’ She cackled loudly and this turned quickly into a cough. Eric patted her back firmly till the coughs subsided. Ada narrowed her eves. ‘It is you, isn’t it?’
Winnie looked surprised. ‘What? You recognised me?’ She turned on Simon and Kelly. ‘You told her? You let her know I’d be here…?’
‘No!’ Simon laughed, protesting.
Ada wheezed and grinned, and wheezed some more. ‘No, I recognised you for myself, you daft old witch. Of course I did! Sitting there like Lady Muck, all dolled up and looking down your snooty nose at everyone. Why, it had to be you.’
‘Me! Looking down my nose!’ cried Winnie.
‘Yes! You always did! You always went on like you ruled the world.’ Ada was on her feet now, somewhat unsteadily. Reaching out across the signing table with her red and purple-veined hands. ‘Winnie,’ she gasped. ‘My God, woman. I’ve missed you.’
Simon and Kelly stood back then, as the two women embraced and sobbed loudly and clung to each other. Simon turned to look at Kelly, and all the amazed-looking booksellers and others still hanging about in the Rainbow Room, and now he could feel his own tears coming up to choke him.
Seventeen
Ray rolled over to the other side of the bed. To Winnie’s side. He wasn’t over this side very much. By late afternoon he was so bored that seeing how the world looked from this different vantage point seemed like an interesting thing to do. Next thing he knew, he was sitting up and going through the drawer in Winnie’s bedside cabinet. This was sacrosanct. It was the kind of thing that Ray would never normally dream of doing.
But this was an emergency, really, wasn’t it? His wife was out there somewhere, running around and getting up to who knew what. She was enjoying herself and couldn’t even bring herself to tell him what she was doing. I’m going to lose her, Ray thought. After all these long years and the things — some of them terrible — that we’ve been through. I’m going to wind up losing her, even at this late stage.
He rummaged and ransacked and rifled through Winnie’s private things: the junk jewellery and hair clips and tickets and programmes and coins and souvenirs and keepsakes. Beetling his brows and peering blearily, with no real clue what he was looking for, Ray examined it all. Her passport, sixteen years out of date. The photograph in the back looked like it was of another woman altogether.
He found notes. Silly little love notes scrawled on yellowing paper. He read them and his heart jumped up in justifiable ire, and a sudden blast of righteous jealousy. Until he realised that they were his own notes to Winnie. He recognised the handwriting, then the cantankerous, mocking tone. They hadn’t really been love letters at all. They were about mundane things: reminders, lists. But she had kept them, all the same. She was a strange, old, secretive bird.
He found her membership card for that place, too. The Great Big Book Exchange. Ray fingered the small grey card thoughtfully, reading the address neatly printed on the back. That was the great, good place, wasn’t it? The place where that Kelly worked. The shop that none of them could get enough of. They escaped there. They went to it like it was their sanctuary, like it was paradise. They went there to escape from this place; their lives; him.
Well. One day he’d just have to go there himself, wouldn’t lie? And then he would see what all the fuss was about. Maybe then he would see the point.
He pulled on his slippers and eased himself out of bed, back onto his feet. He hadn’t spent much time up and about this past week, and the effort of walking into the hall made him reel with dizziness. What he could do with was a drink. There’d be some cans left in the fridge.
He made his way there, turning the Book Exchange membership card round and round in his hand as he went.
Perhaps that’s where they were today. They had dressed up for some special thing at that shop. Some kind of celebration. That’s what it was.
Something that had nothing to do with him. Nothing to do with him at all.
Simon felt a bit like he did when he was bunking off school.
.All the rules had changed. They had become reckless and spontaneous and they didn’t know where they would e
nd up next. He liked this feeling. Today it was like he and Kelly and his gran were a part of the in-crowd, sitting with Ada as she finished up business with the last of the literary-lunchers, and then with the booksellers and the hotel people.
Ada’s husband Erie made sure they had some more sherry as the dining room was cleaned up around them and there came the echoing, clashing shouts and bangs of the debris being cleared away.
This was being behind the scenes. Ada — looking tired and drawn and like she would brook no arguments — had told them that they weren’t to go shooting off anywhere. They weren’t to disappear. She had said that Winnie and her grandson and his friend had to come home with her that very evening. Erie would be driving them: they had the car; he just needed to fetch it around to the front of the hotel. He would do so in just a minute, once they had finished up business. Ada really wanted Winnie to come back with her, to her house on the coast. It was only about ninety miles away, not far.
Winnie had, of course, been delighted. And fairly dumbstruck, too, Simon was amused to see. His gran had been dreading this reunion, in one way — in case it had all gone wrong, and Ada had rejected her. But this was all perfect. It seemed that Ada wanted them, really wanted them, to come and see her home. She was promising that Eric was a marvellous cook and host. He would look after them all. ‘And I’m a fantastically sick old lady, so I don’t have time or energy to beg you or cajole you,’ Ada warned.
‘You won’t need to,’ said Winnie firmly. She had her box of books (and Ada’s new novel — gladly signed as a gift to her) on her lap. ‘We’ll just need to give my husband a ring .. When Ada turned to speak to her publicist, Winnie hissed at Simon: ‘Would you talk to your grandad, Simon? I can’t face it just now.’
Simon sighed. ‘He probably won’t even come to the phone.’
