The Nick of Time

by Francis King

  One evening, emboldened by sharing a bottle of Chablis and then one of claret with her at his club, he had said: ‘ Wouldn’t it be rather fun to go to Paris? I haven’t been there since my wife died. I know this delightful little hotel by the Palais Royal. Nothing grand, but well run, very well run, and comfortable. Why not take a weekend off and let me – let me treat you? I was once en poste in Paris, you know, in the days of Duff and Diana. I could show you a lot of things you won’t have seen before, and I’ve bags of friends there – French friends, not English – who would be certain to push out the boat for us.’

  He broke off when he took in the look of stricken embarrassment on her face.

  ‘I’m so busy at present. I mean, even at the weekends. I often have to go into the surgery on a Saturday or Sunday in order to see to the backlog of paperwork.’

  ‘Oh, dear.’ The sigh and the two monosyllables did not do justice to the depth of his disappointment and dread. Had he spoiled it all between them? He had an impulse to assure her: ‘I’m not suggesting a dirty weekend, you know. I just thought it would be fun for us to be there together as friends.’ But that, he knew, would only have made it worse.

  A few weeks after that the calamity happened: Ed returned from Africa, yellow and emaciated but in surprisingly jaunty spirits, for treatment for some sort of persistently malevolent tummy bug that he had picked up in Senegal. When away on one of his already perilous assignments, he was reckless about what he ate, neglected to have the prescribed inoculations and to swallow the prescribed pills, and would as often as not drink water from the tap. After his release from the Hospital for Tropical Diseases, it was to Marilyn that he inevitably went for his weekly check-ups. Soon, she was visiting the house more as his guest than as Laurence’s.

  Now it was three of them – and sometimes four, if Ed had succeeded in persuading Audrey, his closest friend, as he would often declare, to come along too – who went to dine at Laurence’s club, or at Rules, the Ivy or L’Etoile. Laurence mused with increasing bitterness that the old intimacy and comradeship between him and Marilyn was inexorably being eroded. It was to Ed that she now usually addressed her conversation; and it was his jokes that provoked her loudest laughter. Laurence had always thought that laugh of hers, so joyous and free, one of the most attractive things about her. But when he heard it now, it scraped on his nerves, in the same way that the inane laughter from some unseen television comedy, reverberating up from Audrey’s room, scraped on them.

  Then came the evening when Ed, dressed with unusual elegance in a charcoal-grey suit and black brogues, his hair carefully brushed, had put his head round the door of the sitting-room and announced to Laurence and Audrey ‘ Well, I’m off now.’

  Audrey looked up from her needlework, surprised ‘ Where are you going?’

  ‘Oh, gosh, I thought I’d told you. I won’t be in to dinner. I’m taking Marilyn to this awards party. You know, the one for the trade. At the Dorchester.’

  ‘Are you getting an award?’

  ‘Doubt it. Apparently I’m shortlisted.’

  ‘Why on earth didn’t you tell us?’ Leonard demanded.

  ‘I thought I had. Anyway – it’s no big deal.’

  When he had gone, Audrey said: ‘ I needn’t have bought that second steak.’ Laurence could see that she was upset. In the days before Marilyn had entered their lives, it was she whom Ed would have taken to the dinner.

  ‘Fancy not telling us. He really is extraordinary.’

  ‘Oh, you know how vague and forgetful he is. It amazes me that he ever gets to any war on time to cover it.’

  Laurence could not sleep that night. He lay awake waiting to hear the crisp click of Ed’s key in the door and his firm tread up the stairs. It was long after two o’clock when he did so. That sort of dinner could not have ended so late. What had he and Marilyn been doing in the meantime? He felt jealousy rising up in him like an acid vomit. Intermittently, it was always to be there now, a poisonous, viscous mass usually just below his diaphragm, to surge up unexpectedly into his throat and even into his mouth and behind his eyes. That he and Marilyn had never exchanged anything more than the most conventional of kisses, at the start of one of their evenings together and at its end, had never mattered until then; but the thought that she and his son might have made love was disgusting and devastating.

  It was from that time of raging jealousy and abject despair that he had begun to have the marathon dream. A good shot and an even better horseman, he had never been any bloody use when forced to run at Eton. But now he would often dream that he was taking part in a marathon and, racing ahead, the wind in his face and the asphalt like rubber under the soles of his old-fashioned gym shoes, he would soon leave the rest of the field far, far behind him, until at last triumphantly, the crowds roaring around him, he breasted the tape. What did the dream mean, he would wonder each time that he had it? In all the races for which he had entered, he had never been up there among the leaders. At Magdalene, he had been thought lucky to get a 2.1; he would never have been accepted for the Foreign Service if repeated vacations in his maternal grandmother’s house in the Auvergne had not enabled him to acquire near-perfect French; he had married not the woman whom he had really loved but, as a compensation for her perfunctory rejection of him, her sister; and, despite all his and his family’s friendships with influential people, he had never progressed beyond the rank of counsellor before his premature retirement. Did he dream the marathon dream precisely because in every marathon for which he had entered in life he had so ignominiously brought up the rear?

  Now Laurence began to wish that Ed would be sent off on another assignment, as far away as possible. There were even times, in the early hours of the morning when, still sleepless, his mouth rancid, his silk pyjamas drenched in sweat, he would wish that on that next assignment some stray bullet or some lethal bug would get his son, finish him off, eradicate him.

  It was bloody stupid that in the high-ceilinged dining room, its three long tables gleaming under the neon lighting necessary even for a summer morning, everyone should always be obliged to occupy the same place at every meal. Laurence’s was between a wizened former chartered accountant, so deaf that, despite his two hearing aids, he had given up on any attempt at conversation, other than a muttered good morning and from time to time a querulous request to be passed something out of his reach, and a former Foreign Service colleague, Mervyn.

  ‘Good morning, Mervyn.’ Because he was so soon to see Marilyn, Laurence’s greeting was cheerier than usual.

  ‘Good morning.’ Mervyn looked up from his bowl of prunes. ‘And how is Sir Laurence Bart this morning?’

  Laurence always detected a sly mockery in that ‘Bart’ – a reminder that, unlike his colleague, who had ended his career as Head of Protocol and therefore with a knighthood, he had merely inherited his ‘Sir’ and had done no better through his own efforts than a CBE.

  ‘Not too bad, not too bad, thank you.’

  ‘We’re very endimanché this morning? Do we have visitors or are we planning a trip to the smoke?’

  ‘Am I dressed any differently from usual?’ But Laurence had certainly dressed with more care. At least, he thought, I haven’t let myself go as you have – no tie, collar frayed, scuffed shoes, sagging pullover, dandruff on the shoulders of a suit that would certainly be rejected by Oxfam.

  Mervyn put out a hand and tweaked towards him one of the two newspapers that Laurence had placed on the table beside him. ‘You don’t mind, old chap?’ he said, as he said every morning. Usually, Laurence responded to this request merely with a grunt. But today he said: ‘It beats me why you don’t order a paper like everyone else.’

  ‘What would be the point?’ Mervyn replied amiably, opening The Times. ‘I’m in no hurry, and between us all here we must buy dozens and dozens of papers. Why waste the money?’ Mervyn had always been obsessed with lineage, treating every social occasion as though it were a launch party for the latest edition of Debrett. No
w he was no less obsessed with spending as little as possible.

  ‘You have far more money to waste than I have.’ It exasperated Laurence that this silly little man should not merely have earned a bigger pension but should also have handled his investments so much more astutely.

  ‘Waste not, want not.’

  How could this double first and triple blue have shrivelled up into someone so pitiful and ludicrous? In his exasperation, Laurence totally forgot to retrieve The Times when leaving the table.

  Later, in the lavatory, right hand holding his trousers at half mast just above his knees, Laurence examined the five small Turner watercolours hanging there – three of Venice under an azure sky, two of the Alps under a livid one – as he did every morning. He drew constant solace both from their perfection and from his canniness in having saved them from the rapacious demands of Lloyds. He was absolutely broke, he’d tell people, those sharks had stripped every ounce of flesh off his body. But eventually, he would comfort himself, Marilyn would discover the value of the three Venice views, and Audrey of the two Alpine ones.

  Having flicked through the Telegraph with mounting disgust – there was now something irredeemably middle class about it, he thought – he lumbered to his feet and decided that he had better set off for the village to buy the cakes for Audrey’s and Marilyn’s tea, or, at least, for Audrey’s, since Marilyn had a way of departing soon after lunch on some flimsy pretext or another.

  That day of late spring, the gardens looked particularly beautiful. They, along with the two sturdy girls who tended them, were for him the chief solace for being incarcerated in this luxurious boneyard.

  ‘Bart! Bart!’

  Blast! Mervyn, having lowered the copy of The Times, was calling to him from a bench under a weeping willow beside the artificial stream that bisected the lower part of the garden.

  Laurence was going to ignore him and hurry on, despite an impulse to march up and snatch away the paper. But Mervyn persisted, his plummy voice cracking as he raised it. ‘ Sir Laurence Bart! Where are you off to in such a hurry?’

  ‘To the shops.’

  ‘Oh, in that case, I wonder if you’d …’ Mervyn got to his feet. Laurence guessed what would follow. Would Laurence be a dear fellow and buy him some shaving cream (stamps, shoelaces, sherry)? Unfortunately, Mervyn would continue, he had no cash on him, he’d left his wallet in yesterday’s jacket, but he’d settle just as soon as Laurence got back. This settlement was never in fact achieved before a lot of reminders. But this time Mervyn changed his mind before making his request. ‘On second thoughts – I might as well walk there with you. Internal affairs are not progressing as smoothly as they should – despite a more liberal helping than usual of prunes over brekkies. So perhaps a leisurely walk – not to say, your always stimulating conversation – might hasten them along.’

  Oh, hell. The problem of living in an institution where you were obliged to see the same people, willy-nilly, day after day was that you could not be rude to them. Laurence, who wanted to say ‘Frankly, I’d prefer to go alone,’ instead said nothing.

  Once they had reached the village, Laurence decided to shake Mervyn off. He pointed at his bank: ‘ I’ve got to go in there to have a word with the manager about something. We’d better go our separate ways.’

  ‘Oh, all right.’ Mervyn looked despondent. ‘Well, I’ll see you at luncheon.’

  ‘Not today. I have my daughter and daughter-in-law coming.’ Host and guests were accorded a table to themselves in a corner of the hall so dark that it seemed as if the management of this all-male foundation wished deliberately to conceal them.

  Mervyn pulled a face. ‘It’s at least a month since any of my three daughters deigned to visit me. I often feel like King Lear.’

  Over lunch, Marilyn struck Laurence as being more than usually distracted and distant. She ate a few mouthfuls of food and then gave up. Admittedly the school dinner provided by the college – toad-in-the-hole, lumpy mashed potato, what were not so much spring greens as autumn ones, a steamed treacle pudding – fell far below the standards set by the restaurants to which he had taken her in that now long-ago, paradisal past, or even set by Audrey; but Marilyn had never before rejected it quite so decisively. Repeatedly Laurence attempted to drag her into the conversation and no less repeatedly she resisted his efforts, replying merely with a Yes, No or I suppose so. When the pudding arrived, she pushed it aside and, to his amazement, took out a packet of untipped Camels.

  ‘I’ve never seen you smoke before.’

  ‘Oh, I do from time to time.’

  ‘I’m afraid smoking’s not allowed in hall. Don’t you remember? So many of these old gents suffer from asthma, emphysema or heart trouble that I suppose there’s some sense in the prohibition. Not that I mind smoking in the least,’ he added, as she irritably pushed the packet back into her bag.

  The three of them adjourned to his tiny sitting-room, made to seem even tinier by the jumbo pieces imported into it from the Brompton Square house. ‘Isn’t this room just a wee bit over-furnished?’ Mervyn had commented mockingly on his first visit there. Marilyn puffed at first one cigarette and then another. Laurence had said that he did not in the least mind smoking, but that was because she was the one who was wishing to smoke. In fact, he thought it a disgusting occupation.

  ‘Why don’t you have one?’

  ‘Oh, I’m far too old to start acquiring new habits. My old ones are quite bad enough. But thank you all the same.’

  One of Marilyn’s legs swung with metronome regularity above the other. He stared at them with melancholy concupiscence, as Audrey began to narrate one of her boring stories about doings at the charity shop. He had always noticed women’s legs, and been conscious that his wife’s were unattractively bowed – no doubt as a result of a regime of constant riding from childhood.

  It was only a few minutes after two when Marilyn, without any warning, jumped to her feet. ‘Well, it’s been lovely seeing you, Laurence. And looking so well.’

  ‘Do I look well? I wish that I felt it. Anni ruunt, Postume, Postume, The years that pass are lost to me, lost to me …’ Then he realized the fatuity of quoting Horace to these two women. That ass Mervyn might have given an appreciative chuckle.

  Having told Audrey ‘I’ll just accompany Marilyn to the gate, I shan’t be a moment,’ Laurence walked with her down through the garden. The spring flowers under trees just putting forth vividly green shoots, seemed extraordinarily bright, even dazzling, so that, looking at the daffodils on a bank, he put up a hand to shield his eyes.

  All at once Marilyn slipped an arm through his. Surprised, he patted her hand. The contact, he was convinced, was not merely a physical one. After a long period, when her life seemed to have swerved away from his, he felt that once more, however briefly, it had touched it.

  ‘In many ways you’re lucky to be here. Aren’t you?’

  ‘Lucky? No, my dear. I see now that coming here was the greatest mistake of my life.’

  ‘But you had to sell the house. There was no other way. Or that’s what Ed and Audrey told me.’

  ‘Oh, yes I had to sell it.’ He spoke as though he were savouring something extremely bitter on his tongue. ‘ Those buggers who ran the syndicate saw to that. But it would have been better to have rented a basement room than to have landed up here. I could even have slotted myself in with Audrey in that little flat in Barons Court.’ After Audrey had moved, to his amazement, into the Kensington house with Marilyn, he had even thought of deserting the Grange and asking them if he might join them – after all, he had put up some of the money, out of his dwindling resources, to help Audrey to redeem the basement for her use; but then he had decided not to risk the humiliation of what he thought would be, all too probably, a refusal.

  ‘But everything always strikes me as so pleasant here. I know that your rooms are rather cramped, but you don’t have to bother about anything, do you?’

  ‘The worst thing about old age is not havin
g to bother about anything. If one is bothering about things, then one is still alive. And not already embarked on the process of dying,’ he added.

  ‘Oh, poor Laurence!’ She squeezed his arm, genuinely concerned and sad for him, as she had not been for a long time.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said. (Now come on, pull yourself together, stop all this self-pity!) ‘I think I must be more depressed than usual today. Perhaps that perfectly ghastly lunch depressed me. They spend so much money on having resident nurses, resident gardeners, even a resident seamstress for God’s sake, but they can’t get hold of a half-decent cook, resident or not.’

  ‘You must come and see us soon. Then Audrey can cook you something you really like – or we can take you out to one of the neighbourhood restaurants.’

  ‘Yes, I’d like that. I’d like that a lot.’ The two women now invited him less and less often to the house.

  At the high, elaborate wrought-iron gates, he said: ‘Maybe I’ll walk you to the station.’ It had been like old times, he was thinking, their leisurely walk down through the spring flowers and then under the trees by the stream, with her arm always in his and her still lithe body always so close.

  ‘Oh, no, don’t bother about that. Thank you.’ Why, oh why, did she now have to spoil it all? ‘You’ve got Audrey waiting for you. And it’s such a dreary trek, all up and down hill past such ugly little houses.’

  ‘Well, if you really think …’ he mumbled despondently.

  Then, suddenly, she made it all all right again. ‘Dear Laurence.’ She was putting up her face to his, so far above hers that she had to strain on tiptoe. ‘Forgive me if I’ve seemed to be, well, not entirely with you today. But it was nothing to do with you. I’ve – I’ve had something on my mind.’

  ‘Something serious?’

  She laughed. ‘I hope not. Who knows?’

  ‘Something you can tell me?’

  ‘Well, I could tell you. But there wouldn’t be any point. You couldn’t do anything about it – though I know that you’d try.’ She reached up an arm and pulled his head down towards her, tipping off his old, perpetually serviceable Lock’s brown trilby as she did so.