by Lissa Evans
‘Hello, Callum,’ said Spencer, depressed. He was aware of the rapt attention of the entire waiting room.
‘Will you look at my head?’ He started fumbling with the dressing.
‘Not just now,’ said Spencer. ‘How did you get the cut?’
‘I did it with a tin opener.’
A Mexican wave of revolted whispers flowed along the row of seats.
‘Best fucking doctor ever,’ said Callum again, this time as a general announcement. ‘He’s the one I want to see. No offence to the robot man – what’s he called, Stainer? – but I want to see this man.’
‘Dr Carroll’s just going,’ said Iris, quickly. ‘He was only on a visit, he’s not working here.’
Spencer shot her a grateful look.
‘Until February the first,’ added Ayesha, as if Iris had just said something rather stupid. ‘Then he’s working here. Then you can come back.’ She closed the appointments book with a snap and turned to Spencer. ‘That’s right, isn’t it, Dr Spencer?’
13
The precipitation that rattled softly against the classroom window wasn’t really snow – the tiny white flakes were actually jagged pieces of ice which stung when they hit bare skin – but it looked enough like snow to have utterly distracted a class of ten-year-olds who were supposed to be engaged in botany-related artwork. Heads were craned towards the window, voices more usually dripping with infant ennui raised in thrilled speculation about sledging and death by frostbite.
‘Will we be snowed in all night, Miss?’ asked a small girl, hope in her voice.
‘All right’ said Fran, bowing to the inevitable. ‘Put the tops back on the paint pots very carefully –’ she watched hawkishly while this was done ‘– and now slowly and without running you can go over to the window and have a look.’
There was immediate chaos, twenty-two chairs shoved backwards in unison, twenty-two voices raised in instant conversation. Fran stood aside as they stampeded past. It had been too cold to take the class outside, and instead she had been supervising the creation of a Christmas frieze, messily involving gold and silver paint and a couple of bin bags full of autumn leaves, dried and kept for this very purpose. She was not particularly happy with the result so far – the paint was too runny and, far from festively illustrating their delicate skeletal structure, the frieze was a jumble of leaf-shaped blotches and unintentional fingerprints. This was partly the fault of the children’s own teacher, a self-styled art expert who had urged her to let the class experiment with the correct thickness of paint (‘it’s important for them to grasp the point of your request’) and then abdicated all responsibility for the ensuing mess (‘it was just a suggestion’). He was sitting in the corner now, flipping through a copy of British Trees and looking bored.
Fran joined the children by the window.
Through the icy rain, the farm looked bleak and shuttered. Hagwood was battening down the hatches for winter, stepping up its provision of indoor activities and laying off part-time staff. Porky was the only visible animal, standing by his trough with his ears blowing in front of him like pennants. As she watched he took an excited step forward, snout raised, and a few seconds later Barry came round the corner of the hen house with a laden bucket, his head dipped against the wind.
‘That man’s going to feed the pig,’ said Fran, ever alert for educational possibilities.
‘What man?’
‘What’s he going to give him?’
‘What pig?’
‘He’s going to give him some hard little chunks, a bit like biscuits but not sweet. They’re called pig nuts and they’re very crunchy and full of vitamins.’
As she spoke, Barry slipped in a patch of mud and fell over, distributing pig nuts over a wide area. There was a shout of delighted laughter from the class and he looked up to see twenty-three pairs of eyes watching his ignominy. Fran turned away and clapped her hands.
‘OK, let’s get back to work.’
‘Oh Miss, we want to see him pick them all up.’
‘No, we’ve had a break now so let’s get back to work. We’ve only got twenty minutes before you go back to the coach.’
‘Ohhhhh.’
As they meandered back to the tables, she kept half an eye on the window. The hail was getting stronger, sweeping up the hill in successive curtains, alternately obscuring and revealing the cars on the flyover. Barry, plastered in mud, had abandoned the spilled feed and was tramping back to the store for another load, leaving Porky making anxious little runs up and down the sty.
It was three weeks since she had told Barry – straightforwardly, efficiently – that she was not and never would be interested. They had been labelling jars of wild-flower seed at the time, and Barry had gone very quiet, printing and peeling labels in doleful silence and – she discovered afterwards – sticking most of them on upside down. ‘Is there anyone else?’ he’d asked, after a while, and for once Duncan had come in handy; with only a slight adjustment of reality she was able to cast him in the role of Odysseus, for whom she was patiently waiting, forswearing all others. Barry had glumly accepted this, and although she had half expected him to revert to his old, lazy, complacent self, he had – to his credit – kept up a modicum of the new dynamism. He was, however, still fairly useless and while it was true that any member of staff could have been unlucky enough to fall flat on their face in front of a score of children, the odds would always be on Barry.
The children had settled back into their chairs, and Fran glanced at the clock; there was just enough time for a final stab at accuracy.
‘Right, now I want you to make up one last mix of paint, but only after you’ve listened very carefully to my instructions. Pick up the little powder scoop and fill it as far as the second mark. Which mark did I say?’
‘THE SECOND MARK,’ droned the class in ragged unison. Over in the corner, their teacher shrugged disapprovingly.
A quarter of an hour later, Class 3L departed with noisy reluctance, leaving behind them twenty yards of gilded splodges, three gloves and a hanky, stiff with snot. Fran donned a pair of Marigolds and started to peel paint-sodden leaves from the floor. She hated this part of the winter, the dreary emptiness of the farm landscape, the enforced confinement and massed coughing of the classroom, the continual strain that Christmas decoration manufacture put on her minimal artistic talent.
‘Fran? Ah Fran, I thought you might be… er…’
She looked up to see Claud hovering in the doorway. He was wearing his favourite blue jumper with the red cow on the front, rumoured to have been knitted by his mother.
‘Hi. What’s the problem?’
‘There’s a phonecall for you in the staff area… er, it’s rather a noisy line so it took me a while to…’
‘Thanks, Claud.’ She had already peeled off her gloves and squeezed past him, feeling a little troubled; no one ever phoned her at work.
Barry was in the staffroom, trying to warm his hands under the hot tap. He nodded sadly at her as she picked up the phone.
‘Hello?’
The distinctive, rasping voice came over the roar of traffic. ‘Hello, little Fran.’
‘Duncan?’ Barry stiffened like a pointer sighting game.
‘How are you, Fran?’
‘Me? I’m fine.’ She was disconcerted, he didn’t normally deal in pleasantries. ‘How about you?’
‘I need to talk to you, Fran. Can I come and see you?’
‘Come and see me? You mean, come back to England?’
‘I’m here now. I’m at a petrol station on the A28, waiting for a lift.’
‘What?’ Over by the sink, Barry was pretending not to listen.
‘I spent the last two days hitching to the Netherlands and then I got the first ferry I could. I have to see you, Fran, when can I see you?’
She caught Barry’s eye and pointed towards the door. He nodded and started to move very slowly.
‘Fran?’
‘Oh – er – come straight to t
he house. I’ll try and get off early. I could probably be there by four.’ She realized, with a pang of relief, that it was Tuesday – choir practice – and Peter and Sylvie would be out.
‘OK. I’ll be there.’
‘Are you all right, Duncan? I mean, what’s going on?’
There was a pause, during which she could hear the hoots of a reversing lorry. ‘I have to see you, Fran, I have to talk to you, there’s something I’ve got to say,’ he said in a rush, and put the phone down.
‘Blimey.’ She stared at the receiver for a moment, still absorbing the conversation.
‘I’ll cover for you if you want to get off.’ It was Barry, who had almost, but not quite, got as far as the door.
‘Oh you heard that, did you?’ she said sarcastically. ‘OK then. Thanks. I’ll check it with Claud.’
‘I hope everything’s all right. With Duncan.’
‘Well, obviously you’ll be the first to know.’
He brightened slightly, and she sighed. ‘Just kidding, Barry.’
She arrived back home at five past four to find the doorstep empty and a copy of the Dalston Advertiser on the mat. Mr Tibbs was lying on the floor of the hall as if just dropped from a height and he mewed creakily as she stepped over him. He had two or three favourite spots in the house, all of which were inconvenient to the other occupants, and one of which (fourth stair from the top) was actually dangerous. One morning Sylvie had caught Fran gently trying to lever him off the latter with a slippered foot, and had been reproachful.
‘What am I supposed to do, jump over him?’ Fran had asked.
‘You can pick him up,’ Sylvie had said, bracing herself before doing so. ‘He’s a gentle old pussy cat and he loves being picked up, don’t you, Tibbsy?’ He had lain in her arms, inert, like a fun-fur bolster.
Sylvie had been living in the house for more than a month now. There was nothing obtrusive about her presence; she was tidy, quiet and ate almost nothing while still taking a share of the cooking and washing-up. She spent most of her evenings in the room she shared with Peter; she never watched TV, she listened to the radio at barely audible volume and she played the piano so beautifully that Fran would sometimes sit on the stairs to listen to her practise. She had even chipped in some rent, considerably easing the burden of their ever-expanding mortgage payment.
The downside was this: she held hands with Peter almost all the time, even at dinner, making Fran feel perpetually like an unwanted third; she reacted to almost any setback (running out of cat food; forgetting someone’s birthday) by bursting into tears and then getting a headache, forcing the rest of the household to walk round on tiptoe and converse in whispers; she thought that Mr Tibbs was a human being; and she used the phrase ‘you’re so practical, Fran’ at least once a day, generally in a context which implied that the word ‘practical’ could be substituted by the words ‘unimaginative’, ‘insensitive’ or ‘crass’. Fran had never felt so self-conscious, so lumpen, so loud.
And this was in contrast to Peter’s radiant, almost tangible happiness; when he looked at Sylvie, there was clearly an angelic choir on the soundtrack, and vaseline on the lens.
There had been, so far, no indication as to when she might be moving out again.
‘Any luck with flat-hunting, Sylvie?’ Fran had asked last week, in passing, and Sylvie had drooped her head, and reached across the breakfast table to take Peter’s hand.
‘Sylvie’s a little bit upset,’ Peter had said.
‘Why?’
‘She’s just seen this.’ He had pushed over a copy of the Advertiser and pointed to the front page. Under the headline ‘Local woman lay Dead in Basement for Five weeks’ was a summary of the coroner’s report into the death of Constancia Hackett, complete with lurid sub-headings.
Fran had read it through slowly. She herself had not found it easy to shake off the image that she’d seen through the letter box that day, after Sylvie had scrambled, gasping, back up the stairs to the street – the yellow fingers curling round a door frame into the hall, the cloud of little black flies.
‘No one realized,’ Sylvie had said in a small voice, squeezing Peter’s hand. ‘She had a heart problem but no one checked how she was or wondered why they hadn’t seen her. And that’s awful, isn’t it?’ She had looked intensely at Fran, her grey eyes beginning to blur.
‘Yes, it is,’ Fran had replied, meaning it, and then had felt disconcerted by how wooden that ‘yes it is’ had sounded. She had become so used to automatically agreeing with Sylvie’s airy generalizations and pointless fancies that she appeared to have forgotten how to be sincere.
‘And I don’t want to live in a place like that,’ Sylvie had continued, ‘a place where people don’t care about each other.’ A tear had plopped onto the table, and then another. Peter had looked anguished, and Fran had nodded, and been sympathetic, and had realized that this was not the time to ask whether, in that case, Sylvie intended to stay in Stapleton Road indefinitely, or to speculate on where, short of Shangri-La, she intended to look for her next flat. Sometimes, she’d accepted reluctantly, it was best just to shut up.
By a quarter to six, Duncan had still not arrived. Fran had put a couple of potatoes in the oven, tidied round a bit (not that he would ever notice), considered – and then rejected – squeezing a spot on her chin, and re-read his last two letters. Both had been posted from a small town near Hamburg, where he seemed to have halted his Southern progress. He had been there for at least a month, and the local landscape was becoming familiar to her through his photographs – flooded meadows, distant cooling towers, Friesian cows and half-timbered farmhouses that looked oddly two-dimensional, as if they’d been thrown up on a Hollywood backlot. It didn’t look – to her eye – particularly striking or memorable, but his letters were lyrical about the fusion of the industrial and the rural. ‘A sinuous dark form, twisted against the sky. Is it a tower? Or is it the trunk of a leafless tree?’ as he had written on the back of one of the pictures. A tower, she would have said, from the evidence of the vast billboard next to it, advertising electric power. Duncan always laughed when she pointed out that kind of thing. ‘Factwoman’ he called her.
Now that she looked at the recent letters again, she realized that they contained even less information than normal. Usually, she could count on a few personal nuggets wedged between the acres of poetic maundering – her eye would snag on the word ‘tent’ or ‘money’ and she’d find a sentence or two about soggy groundsheets, or the non-availability of dope in rural Finland. She might even, occasionally, see the answer to one of the list of questions she always appended to her own letters: ‘Have you seen any storks?’ for instance, or ‘Do you have enough waterproof clothing?’ The Hamburg letters, however, contained not a shred of anything factual, no hint that he was about to abandon his journey and fly west for winter, and no clue as to his reason. They were pure streams of consciousness, paeons to the environment, lacking even the lustful reveries that had spiced up previous efforts.
She returned the letters to their envelopes and poured herself a glass of wine. What if he’d had enough of the EU project, and wanted to revert to his old work pattern? Would he want to resume the relationship where they’d left off, and if so what should she do about it? Or what if the problem were financial and he needed a loan? Should she give him a nominal amount to tide him over? Or should she tell him to get stuffed?
Or what if – God help her – he wanted to move in until this crisis, whatever it was, blew over? It would be Withnail and Prince Charles all over again, this time with the addition of Tinkerbell. She tried to imagine the four of them sitting down to a meal together, attempting to find topics in common. Maybe he’d find a soulmate in Sylvie, a fellow traveller down the pathway of the spirit. Maybe not, though. Despite the poetry, there was something very earthy about Duncan; fragility was not a quality she’d ever heard him admire.
She topped up her wine glass. If she’d missed anything about him over the last few months,
it was his physical presence. He was a big bloke, tall, broad-shouldered; when she put her arms round him, they barely met. She liked big blokes, liked the reassurance of always being able to hear where they were – the heavy footsteps, the creak of chairs. She thought she’d probably eventually settle down with a big bloke. Though not Duncan, obviously.
By seven o’clock, the potatoes were on the cusp between crispy and adamantine, and Fran was on her third glass of wine. She was standing in the dark by the window of her bedroom, from where she could see the junction with the main road. Three 92As had swung round the corner since she had started her vigil, but no one had got off and she was beginning to worry. The weather had worsened and the orange halo of the street light was filled with slanting snow, the flakes too wet to settle on the pavement but showing fleetingly white along the tops of the privet hedges. She glanced in the opposite direction to the High Road and saw him immediately, slogging into the wind, hands in pockets and his head well down against the sleet.
It was lucky that she put on the landing light before running downstairs, because the cat was couched in his favourite position, his back lethally flush with the stair above. She pushed him off with an impatient foot and hurtled past to the front door.
Duncan was bearded, soaked, and frozen – so cold that she had to take his rucksack off for him, and undo the buttons on his (non-waterproof) coat.
‘Fucking English drivers,’ he said, barely able to move his lips, as she peeled off the coat and unwound a sodden scarf. ‘Once it started getting dark no one would stop. I had to walk from Walthamstow.’
‘You did what? Why didn’t you get a bus? Or the tube?’
‘No money.’
‘You could have ordered a cab – I’d have paid.’
‘Didn’t think of it. I just wanted to get here.’
‘Honestly, Duncan.’ She rubbed his reddened hands between her own with a vigour heightened by exasperation; walking six miles through sleet was the kind of pointless dramatic gesture that almost defined him. ‘I’m going to run you a bath, it’s the only way you’ll get warm.’
