The Nick of Time

by Francis King

  Suddenly he had jumped up from his chair and, glass in hand, had placed himself beside her on the sofa. It was so narrow that it was usually only when the room was full of party guests that two people ever occupied it at the same time.

  ‘Why you say such nonsense?’

  She made no answer, merely staring down into her glass. She felt vaguely light-headed, with an insistent throbbing between her eyes, and wondered whether the cause was such a strong drink on an empty stomach or the shock of the way in which he was talking to her. She might have been someone known to him for years.

  ‘I think your work not good for you.’ It was something that she had herself often thought after That. Some people, Audrey among them, had even tried to persuade to give up her job, at least for a year or so. After all, the insurance had brought in enough for her to survive on it for a time, and her father-in-law had told her ‘You can always call on me if you’re in any need.’ ‘It is – how you say? – depressing work. You are always with those who are sick, old. Very depressing.’

  ‘If I didn’t have something to occupy me, then things might be even worse.’

  ‘Then find something else to occupy you. You are so – so sad. I must say this. Sad.’ SAD. That was what nowadays one called her sort of depression. Seasonal affective disorder. But there was never really a close season for her depression. It merely waned for a while as the daylight waxed.

  ‘I’m not sad at all.’

  ‘You must learn smile. Please.’ Suddenly he put out a hand and took her chin in it. She tried to jerk her head away but he held it firmly. ‘ Smile for me! Smile!’

  Again, panicky, she tried to jerk her head away. ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Yes!’

  Then his head was approaching hers, with an extraordinary, inevitable slowness. She looked into his eyes, still struggling to turn her head aside. He put his lips to hers. She could feel his tongue against them, then pushing between them. All at once, with a sense both of relief and abasement, she gave way.

  ‘You will call me?’

  They stood together in the hall. He said it in a whisper.

  She nodded. ‘Yes. Yes!’ She, too, whispered. Then she wondered:

  Why are we whispering? So little had happened, a few kisses, some hurried caresses. All the time she had been conscious that Audrey must already be in the basement kitchen, preparing the supper. Should she invite him? No, she did not want Audrey to be any part of-this.

  ‘Or I call you.’

  ‘But not at the surgery, please. One never knows who’s listening in there. Ring me here, if you want to. But remember, if it’s – she made a downward pointing gesture to indicate the basement flat and Audrey in it – ‘then be very careful what you say. Just say that you want to talk to Dr Carter. Or leave a message for Dr Carter.’

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘How are you going home? I don’t – don’t drive now or I’d offer you a lift. Audrey drives me if an emergency crops up – or I have a minicab. A minicab is inconvenient and expensive for a doctor, but there it is. Thank goodness the surgery is so close.’

  ‘I will take Underground train and then bus. But first – I have some things to do here.’

  She wondered about the nature of these ‘things’. Once again the suspicion slithered into her mind that somewhere in this district he had a girlfriend. It would be odd if a man of his age, and one so handsome, didn’t have one.

  ‘Goodbye.’

  She put her face forward, knowing that he would kiss her. But this time, instead of putting his lips to her mouth, he merely brushed them, a faint, fleeting touch, against first one cheek and then the other. ‘Goodbye, Marilyn.’ He pronounced her name as though it were Mary-Lynne. Like that, it sounded odd, even faintly ludicrous to her.

  ‘Goodbye, Mehmet.’

  As she was about to go back into the sitting room, having quietly shut the front door, she heard Audrey’s clear, loud voice: ‘Marilyn! Marilyn! He’s gone, has he?’

  ‘Yes, he’s gone.’

  ‘Then I’ll dish up.’

  ‘I’ll be down in a moment.’

  Standing before the cheval glass that had also been inherited from her aunt, Marilyn nervously smoothed down her hair, straightened her skirt, and did up the top button of her blouse. When lovely woman stoops to folly … Except that the folly had been so brief and trivial, no more than what she and Ed had committed when, teenage neighbours, they had snogged together (she had always hated the ugliness of that word) on a sofa before the television set in the absence of the parents of one or other of the households.

  The table was carefully laid, as always. Nothing would have to be fetched as an afterthought, as on those rare occasions when Marilyn had laid it. The clean napkins were there in their silver rings, each with its engraved initials; the mats were the ones, reproductions of Monet water-lily paintings, that a grateful patient had presented to Marilyn after she had spent the best part of a night by her bedside, nursing her through an agonizing bout of biliary colic; the glasses for the wine were highly polished, after having been washed by hand by Audrey, who said that they were too good to trust to the dishwasher.

  ‘This soup is terrific,’ Marilyn said.

  ‘I’m glad it’s all right. I made it out of some odds and ends in the fridge. I wasn’t sure how it would work out.’

  Their conversation was stilted, as it rarely was, except after one of their infrequent and transient rows.

  Marilyn was conscious that Audrey was surreptitiously examining her as, with one of those large, capable hands of hers, the nails cut short and unpainted, she raised spoonful after spoonful of soup to her lips. What was she looking for? What did she suspect?

  ‘He seems a nice enough man,’ Audrey said all at once as, her soup finished, she laid down her spoon with a decisive click. ‘And he has such an attractive smile. I’m always affected by smiles.’

  ‘Yes, it is an attractive smile. Smiles depend so much on teeth.’

  ‘He has good teeth, yes. Except for that broken one.’

  ‘Like yours. I wish mine were better.’

  To Marilyn the conversation was becoming more and more absurd.

  ‘What does he do exactly?’

  ‘Well, at present – nothing.’

  ‘Then how does he keep himself?’

  ‘I’ve no idea. We’re not on the sort of terms that would allow me to ask him.’

  ‘He looks prosperous. Nicely dressed. Expensively dressed.’

  ‘Perhaps he is prosperous.’

  ‘Yes, that’s not impossible.’

  That was the end of the conversation about Mehmet, at least for that evening. But the unease that it created in Marilyn, a kind of repeatedly surging and then ebbing discomfort, remained with her until, long after she had gone to bed and turned off the light, she at last rocked off, as on some lethargic tide, into a sleep constantly interrupted by terrifying dreams of That.

  Chapter Nine

  Laurence shaved with even more care that morning and spent even longer than usual on deciding what he would wear. Whether he wore the brown suit with the Liberty tie or the more formal, dark blue pinstripe one with the Pierre Balmain tie, was something that Marilyn would not notice. Hers was now only a perfunctory interest in him. Whereas Audrey would trek out to Wimbledon at least once each week, bringing with her a home-made cake or jar of marmalade or some book that she had enjoyed and that he himself would certainly not enjoy, Marilyn came seldom and brought nothing. But he was, as always on these occasions, still dressing for Marilyn and not for his daughter.

  These mornings he would emerge from sleep early but slowly and reluctantly, as though he were some moribund fish being dragged by an unseen angler from the sludge at the bottom of a river. The bed was narrow, the room – one of two assigned to him by an ancient and extremely rich charity – was small. As he swung his long, purple-veined legs out from under the bedclothes, he would stare down despondently at them, wriggling the toes, and then ask himself: ‘ W
hat’s wrong with you today?’ But this morning, as on every morning when Marilyn was due to pay one of her rare visits to the Grange, he instead told himself with joy: ‘She’s coming.’ So happy did he feel that, for once, he did not brood over the mystery of why, yet again, he had enjoyed – or was it suffered? – the marathon dream.

  Careful not to nick himself, as he so often did, he moved the cut-throat razor down his left cheek and peered with bloodhound eyes at his dim reflection in the steamed-up bathroom mirror. As he did so, his joy became even more intense. But then he thought: Steady old boy. She doesn’t care a damn about an old fart like you. Never has, never will. It will never get you anywhere. But, for all that, there had been times when he had managed to fool himself that it might get him somewhere – or even all the way.

  He had become Marilyn’s patient eleven years ago, when, eager and fresh, she had just joined the practice, and he was still living in the Brompton Square house, spacious and crammed with objects (almost all now sold!) picked up on his various postings abroad. He had been going to Lawson for years, ever since he had decided that, on his pension, he could no longer afford a private doctor. But Lawson had been on holiday and so, instead, Laurence had found himself faced by this incredibly sweet and attractive girl, her thick, curly brown hair parted in the middle and fastened on either side with large amber clips and her smile at once shy and welcoming. She did not seem to be in any hurry, as Lawson always was, his initial expression of assumed sympathy changing first to abstraction, while he fidgeted with papers on his desk – no doubt he was already thinking of the next patient to come – and then to irritation (Oh, get on with it, get on with it! that expression said). Laurence, his stick between his legs and his hands resting, one on top of the other, over it, for once took his time with this newcomer. He did not want to hurry, and she did not seem to expect or want him to.

  ‘It’s made me feel better just to talk to you,’ he said at the end. It was no empty compliment; he did feel better.

  Marilyn got up and opened the door for him. It was something she rarely did for a patient. Then she once again gave him that singularly sweet smile of hers, the full lips turning up at the ends and small wrinkles, like fine cobwebs, appearing under her eyes. As he smiled back at her, he was suddenly reminded of an adored Norland nurse of more than sixty years previously. After three or four weeks, this nurse had mysteriously disappeared, overnight, without any goodbye to him, to be replaced by another, far older nurse, to whom his mother would refer behind her back, partly in mockery but chiefly in respect, as ‘The Dragon’. When he asked what had become of the Dragon’s predecessor, his mother had told him, in the tone, which she used only when administering a reprimand: ‘ She had other things to do.’ What other things, he had asked; to which his mother had replied ‘Oh, things, things,’ and his father had added ‘Forget about her.’ But he had never been able to forget about her.

  After that first, fortuitous meeting, Laurence had always asked to see Marilyn and not Lawson; with the result that, when he ran across Lawson in the bridge club to which they both belonged, there was a shifty embarrassment on his own side and a cold hurt on Lawson’s. ‘The good thing is that she’s prepared to listen,’ he told both Audrey, then living with him in the overlarge house, and many of his friends. But if that was the good thing, the wonderful thing was that, for the first time since his wife had died (a little whimper, a hand stretched out as though in appeal, and then a clattering lunge across the dining-room table, so that a glass of wine went flying, its contents looking like arterial blood on the white damask), he felt actually excited by a woman. Paradoxically, when his wife had been alive, many women – shop assistants, bus conductresses, bank clerks, figures glimpsed only momentarily as they hurried down a street towards him or boarded an Underground train – would each day fill him with a heaving, giddying excitement at often no more than a glimpse of the light on a cheekbone, the tautness of a calf, the swell of a breast, the arch of an eyebrow. But when she had died, that appetite had also died, until, totally unaware of what she was doing, Marilyn had arrived to revive it.

  It was obvious to him, during those first days, that Marilyn had taken to him. When he entered the consulting room, her vaguely worried frown would relax and she would jump up from her chair and greet him with something like: ‘Hello, Sir Laurence! You’re looking very natty today,’ or ‘I can see that those pills bucked you up.’ To the last of these his reply, with a roguish toss of the head and a smile under the neatly-cropped moustache, was ‘ It’s you who bucks me up, not those blasted pills. Those pills give me the most god-awful indigestion.’

  One day, after the protracted consultation had at last juddered to its close, he said to her, as he drew on a chamois glove of the same old ivory shade as his professionally manicured fingernails: ‘There was something a little embarrassing that I wanted to ask you, my dear.’

  She had become used to that preamble from elderly men. It usually meant that they were worried about their sexual shortcomings – or, all too often, no comings at all.

  ‘Nothing embarrasses me,’ she said. She gave the giggle which, overnight it seemed, she lost forever after That had happened. ‘I’ve heard it all. What is it?’

  ‘Well, it’s not really all that embarrassing. The thing is that I’ve had an invitation to a Royal Garden Party and it’s for both myself and, yes, my poor dead wife. Odd that they should have got that wrong, but there it is. Anyway, I wonder if you would like to come with me? I’ve asked my daughter but she’s far too much of a republican to be tempted. And I can’t really think of anyone else. How about it?’ He looked across, head tilted to one side, with a coaxing smile.

  ‘Do you want me to impersonate your wife?’

  His long, narrow, still handsome face, bisected by the clipped white moustache that made many people assume that he must have retired from the army, not the Foreign Service, began to redden. ‘Oh, good God, no. I’ll tell the gang at Buck House that I’d like to bring you as, well, my companion, and ask if that’s all right. I know one or two people in the office there – one is a former colleague, in fact I was his boss in Vienna. So I don’t think there should be any problem.’

  Marilyn hesitated, as she tapped on her lips with the biro with which she had just written him a prescription. Then impetuously she said: ‘Well, it might be fun! What do I have to wear?’

  At that time, she dressed carelessly and informally. Because of that, he had for a while hesitated whether to issue the invitation or not. It would be embarrassing if she turned up without a hat or in unpolished shoes or in the sort of rough, serviceable coat and skirt that she was wearing now. ‘ Well, it is a party,’ he said. ‘And a royal one. So I suppose …’

  ‘I’ve got it. I’ll dress as though I were going to some posh wedding.’

  ‘Yes. Yes, that ought to be fine. Good, good.’ He was relieved.

  He told her the date and the time at which he would pick her up. ‘I don’t think I’ll take my old banger. It won’t look too good. I think I’ll hire a car with a driver.’

  ‘It all sounds tremendously grand.’

  Her playful irony was lost on him. ‘Oh, there’s nothing to be nervous about.’

  ‘And terribly expensive.’

  ‘One likes to make a splash from time to time. And why not? I’m a widower now and both my children are earning well.’

  Having arrived home from the garden party – he had first dropped Marilyn off at the surgery, since she had said that there were some things she had to see to – Laurence told Audrey that his companion had ‘really turned up trumps’. She had been elegantly but unshowily dressed, he said, and her cartwheel hat had been a triumph. ‘If she had really been my wife, I’d have felt tremendously proud of her,’ he concluded.

  Without looking up from the table, which she had started to lay for supper, Audrey said: ‘I’ve seen her only once or twice – when Dr Lawson couldn’t see me. She never struck me as anything special. But then,’ she added in
a small, carefully enunciated voice, ‘of course I’m not a man.’

  ‘She certainly looked special this afternoon.’

  That was the beginning of the friendship between Laurence and Marilyn. He was fond of good food and, having soon learned that she was also fond of it, he would invite her to meetings of the Wine and Food Society, to his club (‘ I think that, as clubs go, it probably has one of the finest kitchens and cellars in London’), or to one of the half-dozen or so restaurants that he had frequented often enough to be sure of a good table, a fulsome greeting and assiduous service. It was a wonderful moment for him when Marilyn leaned across the table at Incognico and said: ‘I love eating out with you. Everyone treats you like royalty.’

  Their meetings became more frequent and more intimate. Now he would ask her round to the house for a drink before they had eaten or back for one after they had done so. Halfheartedly he would from time to time suggest that Audrey might like to come along too, but she rarely accepted. Tactful of her, he would decide approvingly. But then the thought would come to him: Perhaps the old girl doesn’t like Marilyn? Children were often resentful when a widowed parent suddenly took up with someone else.

  Once, as they entered the house, he and Marilyn were both laughing at something he had just said, and on an impulse, in an upsurge of happiness, he put his arm around her and hugged her to him. Immediately, he became aware that Audrey, emerging from the basement with his hot-water bottle, had seen them. She was curt in her greeting to Marilyn and she paid no attention whatever to him. Hugs of this kind, an occasional grasping of her hand or a fugitive patting of her cheek, were as far as he ever allowed himself to go. He did not want to make a fool of himself; he did not want to shock her and so lose her. So far from being annoyed or disconcerted by these contacts, Marilyn seemed to welcome them – but not, he despondently acknowledged, as indications of his love for her, of which she had clearly guessed nothing, but merely as tokens of friendship.