Sweets From Morocco

by Jo Verity

  ‘Of course.’

  When she saw Lewis, wan-faced and bewildered, emasculated by the hospital gown, she wanted to whisk him away from the prodding and the poking and the paraphernalia of illness. But she had no getaway car, engine running, stationed outside the hospital gates; no miracle man waiting to administer a magic cure. All she could do was hijack his attention. So she cross-questioned him about their father’s ‘friend’, in the hope of geeing him up, but he seemed apathetic and uninterested, satisfied to take the new friendship at face value.

  Pulling the blanket up to her chin, she closed her eyes. They were back in Medway Avenue, in the bedroom they’d shared during those months when Gran was living with them. Night after night, they’d lain whispering in the dark, pretending not to hear their mother crying, kidding each other that it would all come right in the end.

  ‘Talk to me, Lewis. Tell me things I ought to know.’

  He began, with typical Lewis earnestness, to reel off tedious statistics.

  ‘No, things that will help me make sense of my life.’

  She wanted to say that it – the ‘it’ that was her life – was all such a disappointment and she ached to share her regrets; to have him tell her that it wasn’t her fault – at least not all of it – and that there was still plenty of time to have babies and write wonderful books; to fall in love with kind, patient Dan and to kick the drinking. Most of all she wanted him to know how she’d nearly – so nearly – freed herself from Rundle.

  But Lewis was ill and it would be unforgivable to dump all that on him. Surrounded by tubes and charts and bottles of Lucozade, she felt weary and anxious as she watched her brother fall asleep.

  Kirsty unloaded the rucksack on to Lewis’s bed, ‘Pyjamas. Dressing gown. Slippers.’ A discouraging permanence descended with the growing pile of homely items.

  ‘Thanks, love.’

  She studied his face. ‘You look better than you did yesterday.’

  ‘I feel better.’

  He told her everything that had happened in the twenty-four hours since she’d left him there, keeping it light, as if by so doing he could hoodwink his body in to believing that there was nothing wrong with it after all.

  ‘It was nice to see Tessa this afternoon.’

  ‘She said she was going to come, but I wasn’t sure…’

  ‘Yes. And she might stay tonight. I told her you’d be home by eight-thirty.’

  ‘She’s not coming in this evening, then?’

  ‘No. She thought we’d like some time to ourselves.’

  ‘That was considerate of her.’

  In fact Lewis had discouraged Tessa from returning for evening visiting. The truth was that she could, within a second, switch from genial companion to prickly adversary. The last thing he needed was to be caught in the crossfire between her and Kirsty and have his blood pressure soar.

  Kirsty sat on the chair next to the bed, leaning forward, her head resting on his hand, her eyes closed. She’d recently had her hair cut in a shaggy bob. He hadn’t said anything to her, but he’d preferred it as it used to be, longer and unfussy, more the way a child would wear it. She looked worn out, freckles prominent on her pale cheeks, lips dry and flaky. He knew that she would have gone to work at some ridiculously early hour to compensate for the time she’d lost yesterday whilst the hospital staff ground slowly through the admission procedure.

  She raised her head and frowned, as though she’d heard an unexplained noise. ‘You didn’t tell Tessa about the baby, did you?’

  ‘Of course not. We agreed that we’d wait a bit, didn’t we?’

  ‘Yes. But your sister has a spooky knack of reading your mind. And you’re useless at lying. It’s one of the things I love most about you.’ She yawned. ‘I’ll just have to throw up discreetly in the morning if she’s there.’

  ‘You’ll have left by the time she surfaces. No doubt, as we speak, she’s in a pub somewhere. I wish she’d get help before the boozing gets out of control,’ he said.

  ‘It’s not your job to worry about that, Lewis. Particularly at the moment.’

  He wished he didn’t worry but if wishes were horses then buggers would ride as Mrs Channing might have put it.

  ‘How did he seem to you?’ Kirsty asked.

  ‘Jaded. Battered. But anyone would feel ropey in that dreary hole,’ Tessa replied. ‘Are you sure it’s okay if I stay? I’ll pop in and see him tomorrow afternoon, then go straight to the station.’

  ‘No problem. As long as you don’t mind being surrounded by toys.’

  Toys? Ah, yes. It was easy to forget that Lewis had two daughters; that she had two nieces.

  ‘How are the girls? D’you see much of them?’

  ‘They don’t come often. They’re timid little things. No sooner do they acclimatise to being here, than it’s time for them to go home. I don’t think they like me much, but that’s of no consequence. Did you know that Andrea has re-married? An old flame from her schooldays, apparently.’

  ‘Pity she didn’t marry him in the first place. Lewis did mention it but everything to do with Andrea is eminently forgettable.’

  Tessa watched her sister-in-law preparing supper, breaking four eggs carefully in to the Pyrex bowl, re-wrapping the butter before returning it to the fridge, filling the pepper grinder.

  ‘How can you stay so calm? Aren’t you frantic with worry?’

  ‘Of course I am. But there’s nothing to be gained by my getting all steamed up. And we’ve still got to eat.’ Kirsty slid an omelette on to Tessa’s plate. ‘I’m lucky, I suppose. I’m good at compartmentalising. It comes from the work I do. For example, I have to put Mr Jones’s boundary dispute completely out of my mind before I open the file on Mr Smith’s probate case. I sometimes have a dozen cases in various stages of completion. I’d go nuts if they were all swilling around my brain at the same time.’

  ‘But this isn’t Mr Jones we’re talking about, it’s Lewis and he’s lying half dead in that fucking hospital—’

  ‘Thanks, Tessa.’

  Tessa pressed her fingertips against her lips. ‘Sorry. Sorry. It’s just that it breaks my heart to see him in that bed, all tubes and God knows what. He doesn’t deserve it.’ She drew in a breath then expelled it slowly. ‘Let’s talk about something else.’

  ‘Let’s.’ Kirsty set down her knife and fork. ‘How are things with you? It’s months since we saw you.’

  ‘Me? I’m fine, thanks. Everything’s good.’ But no sooner were the words out than anxiety, alcohol and Kirsty’s steady gaze made restraint impossible. ‘That’s bollocks, actually.’

  ‘D’you need to talk about it?’

  Was there any point in confiding to someone who could ‘compartmentalise’ that her whole life had gone down the pan when she was ten years old? To be specific, when her parents had, irresponsibly, produced a third child, then, even more irresponsibly, lost him. If Gordon had never existed, she might have been – would have been – a different person. She could have done anything – discovered a galaxy, or a cure for a killer disease, or played Lady Macbeth at Stratford, or won the Nobel Prize for something or another. What’s more, her poor mother wouldn’t have lost her grip on the world and thus been lost to her children. God, it was all so precarious.

  Kirsty wasn’t one for histrionics so Tessa kept it factual. ‘I was eighteen when I left home. No doubt Lewis has given you his version of what happened that night. I got a job with Jay and Liza Costello, looking after their children if you can call it that. We spent the summer in Cornwall then later we decamped to Ireland with a crowd of their friends. Artists. Writers. That’s when I first met Dan, although he didn’t make much of an impression on me at the time. It was a magic summer. Everyone was buzzing with ideas; everything was possible.

  ‘I stayed with them for a while but things got a bit … messy. So I went to London to try my luck. For a couple of years I fooled myself that I was having the time of my life. I really thought it was the beginning of something fant
astic, what with the success of the book and everything. But it didn’t last long. Merely surviving seems to have become an end in itself. Nothing excites me any more.’ Except Rundle. ‘Sometimes it hardly seems worth the effort.’ Tired of the sound of her own whining, she threw her head back and shrieked, ‘Screw them all, the whole bastard lot of them.’

  Kirsty, seemingly unfazed by this outburst, spoke softly. ‘Look, Tessa, you’re young, beautiful and certainly not stupid. You could do anything you put your mind to. I don’t want to hurt your feelings but it seems to me that you’re like the little ball in one of those maze puzzles, forever chasing off down blind alleys. You need to focus on a goal – it doesn’t have to be anything earth-shattering – and apply all that energy and intelligence to achieving it. God … that sounded like a pep talk to the Lower Fifth.’ She paused as if expecting a further outburst, then, when it didn’t come, she continued, ‘I don’t know Dan well but I’m sure he’d support you in whatever you want do.’

  ‘No. A pep talk is what I need. On the hour, every hour. And you’re right. Dan would be supportive. Poor Dan,’ Tessa smiled ruefully, ‘he’s kind, patient and sensitive. Quite rich and famous, too. What more could a woman want? Everything would be simple if I could fall in love with him. He says I can take as long as I like which makes me feel even shittier.’ She was near to tears.

  Kirsty passed her a tissue. ‘Spending all that time on your own, in front of the typewriter, can’t help. Maybe you should get away for a while; see it all from a distance.’

  Tessa blew her nose and smiled forlornly. ‘Stop navel gazing and bugger off to Tierra del Fuego, is that what you’re saying?’

  They watched the ten o’clock news. Iran and Iraq seemed to be involved in a war, although Tessa had only a sketchy idea where those countries were and no idea at all why it was important. She’d never found foreign affairs, or politics in general come to that, of much interest and was surprised to see how seriously Kirsty took it all. Presumably lawyers needed to keep abreast of the world. Tessa had always inhabited the shady regions of ‘the system’. She’d never joined a union or put money in to a pension or owned property. Any money she’d earned, she’d spent. She’d never filled in a tax return or paid a National Insurance stamp until Dan insisted that she did, or rather did it for her.

  ‘I’m off to bed,’ Kirsty announced. ‘Could you take those things in for Lewis tomorrow?’ She pointed at a carrier bag on the hallstand. ‘He was muttering about sending work in for his A Level group and he wants his books. It’ll help him pass the time.’

  Tessa lay in bed. She’d had a stupid row with Dan before she left. Something to do with an unpaid bill. She ought to let him know she was staying the night but he’d be asleep now and, besides, one of the conditions of her moving in with him had been that she needn’t explain where she was or with whom.

  In the bedroom next door Kirsty coughed. What would it be like to have her sister-in-law’s sense of purpose, her certainty and self-assurance? It seemed unfair that as well as those attributes she had Lewis. A plane throbbed low overhead making its descent to the airport. Was Lewis still awake? Was he listening to the plane too? She got out of bed and went to the window, looking out across the twinkling conurbation towards where she guessed the hospital might be.

  The following morning, the mystery was solved. The consultant, complete with an entourage of medical students, swept in to the ward and revealed to Lewis that he had kidney stones.

  ‘Is that good or bad?’ Tessa asked when, on the dot of two-thirty, she arrived at his bedside with a bulging carrier bag.

  ‘Good, I think. Better than the alternatives anyway. I’ve got to drink gallons of water and take something to make my urine more alkaline. And I can go home as soon as Kirsty brings my clothes in.’

  Tessa frowned. ‘But I could have done that.’

  Lewis said nothing, giving her time to work out that it was Kirsty’s place to take him home.

  ‘What’s in the bag?’ he asked.

  She peered into the plastic bag as though checking that its contents had not been transformed during her bus ride from house to hospital. ‘Maths books. Pens. Paper. And…’ she grinned, pulling something out with a rabbit-from-a-hat style flourish,‘ta-daah.’ She tossed a bag of humbugs in to his lap.

  Chapter 30

  After the second miscarriage, Kirsty announced that she wasn’t prepared to try again. Lewis had assumed that they would make the decision together but he had no right to persuade her to go through it for a third time. He wasn’t sure how he was supposed to be. Should he give her ‘space’? It was an expression he didn’t care for. It conjured up the spectre of a tightrope walker swaying on a high wire, almost sure to fall. Should he arrange lots of events to keep her busy? Encourage her to parade her feelings for all to see? They talked about counting blessings and how lucky they were to have each other but it seemed horribly like dialogue from a second-rate play. For the first time since they met, they were holding back from each other and made him feel wretched.

  ‘Don’t worry, Lewis. I’m fine. Honestly,’ she said, and he felt undermined by her self-reliance.

  Those who knew about the failed pregnancies were sympathetic but embarrassed. They might have been more comfortable had she been suffering from gangrene or diabetes but miscarriage combined an unpalatable mix of sex, death and ‘women’s problems’. Tessa was the only one to say what she was thinking. ‘You must be devastated. When I think of all the irresponsible morons breeding like rabbits … It’s so sad and so unfair. You should adopt. Lovely people like you, you’d have no trouble at all. There are so many unwanted children in the world who’d love to have you as parents.’

  All the while, a quiet but persistent voice nagged away inside Lewis’s head, insinuating, oh so softly, that Kirsty might be a tiny bit relieved at the way it had turned out.

  Dick Swinburne reached retirement age. He’d been a Post Office employee since leaving school at fifteen. On the day he finished – his sixty-fifth birthday – the head of his section presented him with a barometer and a cheque for seventy-five pounds. And that was that.

  He invited the family to join him for a celebratory Sunday lunch at The Salmon’s Leap, a pub a few miles out of the town. ‘MY TREAT,’ he’d added in red capitals across the corner of the photocopied invitations.

  Lewis felt that Kirsty had gone back to work too soon. She looked washed out and had no appetite. She was preoccupied, often pausing mid-sentence to stare out of the window, losing the thread of what she was saying.

  ‘No need for you to come, love. Why don’t you have a quiet day at home?’ he said. ‘Everyone would understand.’

  ‘Don’t treat me as an invalid, Lewis. I want to come. It’ll do me good to do something normal.’

  ‘Something normal’ wasn’t how Lewis would describe it. His parents had only given parties when there was no way of wriggling out of them. Throw a party. The phrase suggested vigour and lack of inhibition. Arbitrary celebrations were out of the question but birthdays and anniversaries were irritating blips, like molehills on a perfect lawn and Christmas could not be sidestepped. Whenever paper serviettes and crackers had appeared in the Swinburne house so did an invisible hand, hovering above the festivities, ready to clamp down at the first sign of abandon. This made his father’s invitation all the more significant.

  Tessa and Dan said they were coming and Lewis suggested they club together to buy a gift for their father.

  ‘That’s ridiculous,’ Tessa scoffed, ‘it’s only a family get-together. And what would we get him? A pen and pencil set? An engraved tankard?’

  Kirsty, practical as ever, suggested that Lewis buy something as back up. ‘You can leave it in the car. See how it goes. You can always give it to him for Christmas. Even your family gives Christmas presents.’

  Lewis chose a Roberts radio that worked on mains or battery. He signed the gift card ‘To Dad, Happy Listening, from Lewis, Tessa, Kirsty and Dan.’

 
; He’d planned to be there in good time, to prime Tessa about the radio and catch up on things but his schedule went adrift when they were held up behind a bicycle race and arrived twenty minutes late.

  The Salmon’s Leap, with its oak beams and horse brasses, might have been a wonderful refuge on dank winter evenings but it was too gloomy for a June day. Coming in from the sunlight, it was a few seconds before his eyes adjusted and the shadowy figures became distinct. Tessa. Uncle Frank. Dan. Beyond them, his father and Barbara chatting to a man and two women he didn’t know.

  His father joined them, kissing Kirsty on the cheek and shaking Lewis’s hand. He wore the charcoal grey suit which Lewis was sure he’d worn at their mother’s funeral and this, teamed with white shirt and striped tie, made him look like an assistant bank manager who had wandered in to the wrong function.

  ‘We were getting concerned, Lewis. Thought there might be a problem. But you’re here now so we can get started.’

  The dining room smelled of gravy and overcooked cauliflower. ‘The Swinburne Party’ picked its way to the empty table in the far corner of the room, Lewis manoeuvring so that he was sitting between Kirsty and his sister.

  It was the first opportunity he’d had to speak to Tessa and, leaning close, he whispered, ‘Who are they?’ nodding towards the three strangers.

  She directed her reply with the back of her hand, ‘Barbara’s daughters. And son-in-law.’

  Dick Swinburne was on his feet, fiddling with his shirt cuffs, clearing his throat. ‘I know it’s customary for the speeches to come after the meal but on this rather special occasion I’m going to break with tradition.’

  First he spoke about the joy of being part of a wonderful family – a family that Lewis found it hard to recognise. Next he embarked on a series of clichés about ‘life’s ups and downs’. ‘But the important thing is never to give up. Hope springs eternal. Life is what you make it.’