The Nick of Time

by Francis King

  The young man stared up at her. Then he squinted down at the two packets of sandwiches. Having appraised them, he tugged at the piece of rope around the bitch’s neck, jerking her inquisitive muzzle away, while pulling a face expressing his affront. In a parody of her well-bred voice, he said: ‘How very kind of you, madam! But no, I don’t think that I’d really like them.’ Then all at once the voice dropped its mocking gentility and became nasal and brutal: ‘Oh, fuck off! Just fuck off, you stupid cow! What d’you think I am – a pigeon or a pig, to be fed on your scraps?’

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry. I just thought …’

  Audrey hurried off, with thumping heart and a sensation of everything – passersby, traffic, the portly newspaper vendor under his flapping canvas awning at the corner – deliquescing into a murky torrent before her eyes. Then slowly she recovered. Well, yes, she supposed that it was only natural that he should resent that kind of charity, the modem equivalent of a Lady Bountiful arriving at some labourer’s fetid cottage, where the children were all pale and emaciated and ailing with a variety of sicknesses, carrying with her a basket containing a nourishing broth and some religious tracts. It was clumsy of her and, yes, insulting to hold out those sandwiches, among the cheapest on offer, when what she should have given him was some money, preferably a five or even ten pound note. But I’m not that rich, she protested to herself, and then gave the answer: But you’re far richer than that poor boy.

  Later Audrey was to demonstrate her goodness by telling the woman who was on duty with her in the shop and who, eyes blurred and lips parched, was suffering another of her frequent migraines, to go home and go to bed. No, no, she could manage perfectly well on her own, Thursday was always a slack day.

  Later still, she was again to demonstrate that goodness when she glimpsed out of the comer of her eye – she was serving another customer, the Brazilian cleaner from the next-door house – that an elderly, well-spoken man, who shuffled almost daily into the shop with a grave, sometimes even sepulchral ‘Good day to you, ladies,’ before going over to the bookshelf where he would browse for as long as twenty minutes on end, was surreptitiously slipping into a pocket of his worn, dark-blue, overlong Crombie overcoat not one but two paperbacks off the shelves. ‘ Excuse me,’ she said to the Brazilian woman, preparatory to tackling the perpetrator of this blatant act of shoplifting. But then she changed her mind. What was the point of humiliating the poor old chap for the sake of two battered paperbacks, priced at 50p each? At that, she turned back to the Brazilian. But as though he had somehow mysteriously intuited that she had seen him, the old man was already hurrying at a sideways shuffle out of the shop, his head lowered, without his usual ‘Well, goodbye then,’ or his frequent ‘That was really quite a rewarding little visit.’

  After the Brazilian had at last gone, bearing with her three Pyrex dishes for which she had tried to knock down the price (‘No, I’m sorry, the prices on all items are fixed’), Audrey went over to the till, took a pound coin out of her handbag, which was hidden under the counter below it, and then dropped the coin into the till. Oxfam was not going to lose the price of those paperbacks.

  Her long day at last over, Audrey arrived back home, breathless and her lips blue from the walk through the autumn chill. But it was once again her goodness, the automatic pilot on which she always travelled through life, that immediately sent her up the stairs, to make sure that everything was in order in Marilyn’s room before she returned. Audrey not merely accepted Marilyn’s untidiness – the papers piled higgledy-piggledy on the desk by the window and even on a comer of her dressing table, the clothes all over the place, the unmade bed with the half-drunk glass of whisky and water on the floor beside it – but even welcomed it, albeit unconsciously, since it gave her goodness free rein.

  She began on the bed and then, since the effort of that had made her once more breathless, she sat down at the desk and began to work at sorting the papers, placing bills in one heap, opened letters in another, unopened envelopes in yet another. From time to time a foreign stamp would catch her eye. Later she would have to remind Marilyn to save those stamps for her – something Marilyn usually forgot. The constantly ailing, eight-year-old son of that nice Indian couple, the Patels, who ran the paper shop, was already a collector of stamps. It was touching to see how proud his parents were of his hobby. It was chiefly that pride that had impelled her to give him a stamp album, eliciting from his mother: ‘But Miss Carter, it is not even his birthday today!’

  Having finished her tidying, Audrey began on her preparations for supper. A vegetarian, she overcame her scruples, as she habitually did, and prepared for Marilyn, though not for herself, some shepherd’s pie, since Marilyn always expected meat or fish for what she regarded as her chief meal of the day.

  After that, she once again looked at her watch. What could have happened? If Marilyn had been planning to go out for the evening, she surely would have said so? In the immediate aftermath of the tragedy, when only she, Audrey, had fully realized how sick the poor dear was, totally destroyed as it seemed, Marilyn would often fail to appear until long after Audrey had expected her. When asked what she had been doing or where she had been, she would either make no answer, turning her head aside with a sharp intake of breath and an impatient grimace, or else reply with something like ‘Oh, walking, just walking,’ ‘I wanted a breath of fresh air,’ ‘I needed to be alone to try to sort things out,’ or, even more alarmingly, on one occasion merely ‘I can’t remember. I honestly can’t remember.’ Often, after one of these fugues, she would for a brief time display a febrile gaiety, talking and laughing too much and too loudly in the little kitchen, until Audrey felt that she would drown in the cascade of din. Then, as though an invisible hand had suddenly switched off a glaring light, Marilyn would abruptly retreat back into the shadows in which so much of her life was passing.

  It was in the immediate aftermath of the tragedy that Audrey had come to share the house, now far too large for a single occupant. As though a train had been derailed twice in succession, the lease of her own flat in Dulwich had come to an end only shortly after she had been made redundant, at the age of fifty-four, from the publishing firm in which she had worked for twenty-two years. Her father, who had at first tried to dissuade her from taking so drastic a step, warning her that the most effective way to ruin a friendship was to share either a holiday or a house, had eventually stumped up the money to have the basement turned from a labyrinth of small, interlocking rooms, empty but for the often forgotten things haphazardly stored in them, into a large, low-ceilinged bedroom overlooking the narrow garden, an even larger sitting-room overlooking the street, and a combined lavatory and shower room. In effect, Audrey had her own flat. ‘That way you two are less likely to get on each other’s nerves,’ he told the two women, to which Marilyn replied ‘But Audrey has no nerves.’ Audrey did not know whether that was intended as a compliment or not. Since her father laughed at the remark, probably not.

  In fact, they had never got on each other’s nerves, chiefly because their lives touched each other so little. On the rare occasions when they did so, however, those totally different lives would suddenly and briefly intermesh, so that Audrey, who as an adult had always lived for others but rarely with others, would feel that here was an intimacy, created even more by shared grief and guilt than by physical proximity, such as she had never known before. Whether she liked such intimacy, she could not be sure. It was like suddenly shooting up in a funicular to the top of a mountain, and then feeling simultaneously excited by the magnificent panorama all at once revealed to one and terrified that one would be overcome by a crazy, irresistible impulse to hurl oneself down into the abyss below.

  Again Audrey looked at her watch. Usually so calm, she felt a rising panic, of a kind that, of all the people whom she knew, only Marilyn was able to induce in her. It was three or four months since the last time that Marilyn had been so late without any explanation. Audrey opened the oven door, saw that the crust of the s
hepherd’s pie had begun to blacken, and turned down the gas. Then she went over to the refrigerator and jerked out the ice tray, which had got stuck to the base of the freezer. Marilyn would constantly fill the tray too full and so inevitably spill part of the water when replacing it. Audrey was surprised that someone so impractical should be so good a doctor. She herself was wonderfully efficient at doing all the things – mending fuses, testing the smoke alarms, videoing television programmes, changing clocks from winter to summer time and back again – at which Marilyn was such a duffer. But, good heavens, she could not conceive of ever having been a doctor.

  Audrey seated herself at the kitchen table and, pushing to one side the setting which she had laid for herself, placed her elbows on the worn formica and then rested her chin in her palms. No one had ever thought her pretty but in recent years people had often thought her handsome. Her hair, blonde streaked with grey, curling up at the edges on either side of the square, strong-jawed face, had not thinned with the years but was still as vigorous as when she had worn it loose to the shoulders. Her eyebrows were also thick – more than once her father had asked why she did not pluck them or at least trim them – and beneath them the gaze of her widely-spaced grey eyes was calm, assured and reassuring. Her colleagues had been amazed when the conglomerate that had taken over the small publishing firm had made her, of all people, redundant. It could only have been because of her age, they decided. She was intelligent, totally reliable and, of course, such a good woman.

  Although so many others now thought of her as handsome, that was never how she had thought of herself. The problem for her had always been her adored and envied older brother, Ed. As a young boy, with his impish, triangular face, spattered with freckles, and skinny, gawky frame, he was physically unimpressive, and so he had remained into his late forties when, after a dissolved marriage to an Indonesian girl met when he was working on an assignment in East Timor, he had married Marilyn. But although Marilyn was then almost twenty years younger, no one, despite his appearance, was impelled to ask what she saw in him. Everyone knew. From his earliest years, he had had charm, and, as his and Audrey’s father Laurence, also a man of irresistible charm, would often remark: Blessed are the charmers, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Audrey, wishing for that charm for herself, would often try to analyze what was its source. Eventually she decided that it derived from a ready wit and the even readier interest and sympathy that Ed gave the impression of bringing, with an undiscriminating eagerness, to every encounter. Were the interest and sympathy genuine? Audrey would often ask herself that question and she once, while he was still alive, also put it to Marilyn – who was affronted by it, answering emphatically, even indignantly: ‘Of course they’re genuine! What an idea!’

  Ed’s charm had, all through their childhood, done her the disservice of throwing her charmlessness into even bolder relief. She was too stiff, too much lacking in any sense of fun and, above all, too honest in everything she said, however discouraging or depressing, for anyone to feel an instant attraction to her, as they did to Ed. People said that it took a long time to get to know her. It also took a long time to understand her and even longer to appreciate her.

  Because of the cruelty of the contrast between the plain, emotionally gauche girl and the attractive, emotionally agile boy, there were often times when she hated her brother. But far deeper than that hatred was her love for him. He was the person that she most wanted to be with – and to be. All through the years when he zigzagged about the world seeking out danger and disaster, she would keep scrapbook after scrapbook of the journalism that he, along with everyone else, regarded as admirable but ephemeral. Now that he was dead, she would take up one of those scrapbooks at random and peer down, often with eyes made misty and unfocused with the imminence of tears never shed, at some photograph of him – in boots, parka and jaunty fur hat, in khaki shorts and open-necked, short-sleeved shirt, in ill-fitting dinner-jacket to accept an award for distinguished services to journalism. She would even read the account of some long-forgotten campaign in some remote corner of Africa, or of some insurrection, smashed with cold-hearted despatch, in some no less remote corner of the Soviet Union, with total, aching absorption.

  It was their love for Ed, so different in every way, that had brought Marilyn and Audrey so closely together after the tragedy and had finally determined that, once so remote from each other both emotionally and geographically, they should share the same roof. But, as Audrey was the first to acknowledge, Marilyn’s furious, hysterical grief was on a scale totally different from her own restrained, fatalistic one. Audrey had for so long expected to read of Ed’s sudden death – by bomb, by bullet, by execution, by infection – that when it had finally occurred, it came as no surprise. But to Marilyn it was as astonishing as if a meteorite had fallen out of the sky to obliterate him.

  Ah, there she was! Audrey could hear the key in the lock of the front door and then that abrupt, nervous cough – almost a way of saying ‘Here I am’ – that had intermittently afflicted her ever since Ed’s death.

  ‘Is that you?’ Audrey called out, not knowing that that question, like so many other things said by her, always irritated Marilyn. After all, since no one else lived in the house and the cleaning woman always came on Tuesday and Friday mornings, who else could it be?

  ‘Yes, it’s me.’

  ‘What happened to you?’

  Marilyn came into the kitchen, slinging her large bag off her shoulder and pushing her pronged fringe of dark-brown hair off her pale forehead. ‘Oh, I had an emergency. That silly girl Carmen should have told him to go to casualty at the Chelsea and Westminster – he wasn’t even on our list – but as always she let her good nature get the better of her.’

  ‘Yes, it is a good nature.’

  ‘Oh, yes! But sometimes I wish it were a little less so. Instead of getting home on time from a particularly unrewarding day, I spent half an hour doing needlework.’

  ‘Needlework?’

  ‘On the man’s wounds. He said he’d fallen, but it was obvious to me that he’d been in what the papers call an affray. Affray – that’s a word that no one ever actually uses in conversation, do they?’

  As Audrey stooped to place the plates in the oven, Marilyn rose from the chair into which she had so recently collapsed and said tersely: ‘ I must get a drink.’

  Audrey wanted to protest ‘Oh, must you?’, since she rarely drank herself and never liked to see Marilyn do so. But she had trained herself to stop putting that question, since it made Marilyn angry.

  When Marilyn returned, already sipping from the tumbler half full, as always, with vodka, Audrey asked: ‘Would you like some ice?’

  ‘Why not?’

  Audrey began to move towards the refrigerator, but Marilyn forestalled her, putting down the tumbler and hurrying over. ‘I’ll get it. You’re tired.’

  ‘Well, so are you – after such a long day.’

  But the strange thing to Audrey was that, though Marilyn had looked so pale when she had first come into the kitchen and though her eyes had had that disturbingly unfocused look that always indicated that she had suffered too long a day of too much work, she did not seem to be truly tired, not as she so often was, even at the weekends when an agency took over from the practice.

  After Audrey had served her sister-in-law with the shepherd’s pie and some runner beans and then set down for herself a small, crumpled tomato-and-asparagus quiche (she had unwisely packed it at the bottom of her shopping bag, where it had rested all day), she surreptitiously glanced across the table between each mouthful of food. The two women often ate in a comfortable silence, each following her own train of reverie; but for Audrey there was no comfort in the silence now. Something had happened. Audrey sensed it; but she did not know why she sensed it or what it was. It emanated from Marilyn, so close across the table from her, like a cobwebby ectoplasm, a scent still faintly lingering in a room long shut, or a trilling of so high a frequency that the human ear co
uld barely catch it. But what, what?

  ‘How was your day otherwise – apart from the needlework?’ Audrey so much wanted to discover what that something was.

  ‘Oh, like all my days.’ Marilyn reached out for another slice of wholemeal bread (she preferred white but it was wholemeal that Audrey always bought) and began to butter it. ‘Tiring, boring. It’s not a good combination – patient and impatient doctor. If I were capable of doing anything else for the same financial return, I’d do it.’

  Marilyn had often said the same thing or approximately the same thing in the past and Audrey had never had any reason to disbelieve her. But she disbelieved her now.

  Yes, something had happened.

  In the days that followed, that something did not disperse and grow mute for Audrey but, instead, became more and more insistent. She was exasperated both by her inability to define it and her reluctance to ask Marilyn to do so.