The Nick of Time

by Francis King

  Later still they went to the Italian restaurant that, she had now learned, was his favourite. When they had first gone there, he had whispered to her that he was sure that their pallid, lethargic waitress was Albanian. She had then asked him ‘Why don’t you talk to her in Albanian?’ He had answered angrily, with a vigorous shaking of his head: ‘ No, no! I no want her know I am Albanian.’ Foolishly, she had pursued the subject: ‘Why not?’, for him to retort even more angrily: ‘You know I am illegal!’ What did he imagine? That discovering that he was an Albanian illegally in the country, the young, awkward, constantly yawning waitress, perhaps herself without a work permit, would at once go to a telephone and report him? It was absurd. But she decided that it was better to say nothing further.

  As always, he ate vast amounts. She herself hardly touched her pasta, happy to transfer most of it from her plate to his; and later, when her lamb cutlets arrived, she began to do the same thing. ‘Why you no eat?’ he asked in an accusatory voice, as he so often did on such occasions.

  ‘Because I have such a small appetite. You know that, darling. And because I had a huge lunch with my girlfriend.’ She always said ‘girlfriend’, not merely ‘friend’, because by now she had experienced his jealousy.

  ‘Who this friend?’ He was clearly suspicious.

  ‘Vicky. You’ve heard me speak of Vicky. She and I were students together. She used to be a psychiatrist.’

  He shook his head. ‘I no hear of her.’

  ‘Of course you have.’

  Fortunately his moods quickly changed. He began to talk about the people met that afternoon at the betting shop to which, she had long since come to realize, he went almost every day. ‘Is it a good idea to waste money on horses?’ she had once asked him. ‘I do not waste money,’ he had retorted. ‘Small bet, often I win.’ Then he had added: ‘I do not go for bet. I have friends there. Talk, laugh, smoke together. Good.’ It was, she thought, the downmarket equivalent of Laurence’s club.

  Listening to him now, she thought once again how well he talked – provided he was not in one of those moods when he began to spit out his fury at having no work or residence permits, at some slight or insult (often, she suspected, imagined) from someone encountered in a shop, on a bus or in the street, or at the general racism, as he blackly and bleakly saw it, of the British. He was so observant of the oddities of the people around him; and despite the recurrent inadequacies of his English, he constantly had the ability to come out with some arresting simile or observation.

  Arm in arm they left the restaurant at shortly after eleven.

  Suddenly he said: ‘ I come back with you?’

  Oh, God! she thought. We’ve been through all this before.

  ‘Better not. Sorry.’

  ‘You have guest room – two guest room.’

  ‘True. But – well – my sister-in-law …’

  ‘Does she own house?’

  ‘No. We both do.’

  They were repeating virtually verbatim an increasingly acrimonious conversation of only a few days before.

  ‘Why she tell you I cannot sleep in house?’

  ‘She hasn’t told me. The subject has never come up between us. But somehow I feel … Another time.’

  ‘I think she is racist, very racist.’

  ‘Not at all. She does a lot of work with – and for – foreign people. Rwandans, Kurds, Somalis. Please, Mehmet. We’ve had a lovely evening.’

  ‘I am your lover. I cannot sleep in your house. Strange.’ He frowned, brooding on it. He had released her arm from his and now he moved away from her, so that a passerby walking towards them on the narrow pavement opted to walk not round them but between them.

  ‘Try to understand.’

  But she knew, with a sudden feeling of hopelessness, that he would never try, and that, if he did try, he would almost certainly not succeed.

  The rain had ceased. Suddenly he looked up into the sky, halted, put out a hand to grab her wrist and jerk her to him, and then pointed upwards. ‘Look! Moon! A new moon! A beautiful new moon! For us a beautiful new life!’

  There was something disturbing about these abrupt changes of mood. But she was too much moved, as he now put his cheek against hers, both of them looking upwards at the brilliant shaving of light in a sky now vast in its total emptiness, to dwell on that.

  As they approached the Underground station, he once again halted and turned to her. ‘Marilyn.’ (He still pronounced it, as he was always to pronounce it, ‘Mary-Lynne’.) ‘Something I must say.’

  ‘Yes?’ He was hesitating. ‘What is it?’ she prompted.

  ‘You will not be angry?’

  ‘Why should I be angry? Of course not.’

  ‘Marilyn – I ask something of you.’

  ‘Yes?’

  Embarrassed, he bit on his lower lip, eyes lowered. Then he looked up: ‘Please – lend me some money. Twenty, thirty pounds,’ he went on. ‘ I have problem. My landlady – I owe money, money for rent. If I do not pay soon, then I must go.’

  ‘Have you had no work at all?’ He had always told her that he lived by taking casual work in restaurants, sometimes as a waiter, more often as a kitchen hand.

  Gloomily he shook his head. ‘Nothing. Not for seven, eight days. I am sorry, Marilyn. What can I do? You are my only friend in England. And my family …’ He shrugged. ‘Poor. Father dead. Brother in army.’ It was the first time that he had ever mentioned his family to her.

  ‘I’m not sure what I’ve got on me. I’d like to help you, of course I would.’ She put up a hand and rubbed at her forehead. The she lowered the hand to the clasp of her bag. ‘How much is it that you want?’

  ‘Twenty, thirty?’

  ‘I’d better give you fifty.’

  His face lit up. ‘You are friend, true friend! I promise soon, maybe next week, when I find more work …’

  ‘Don’t worry about it.’

  She was embarrassed as, at the entrance of the station, she began to count out the notes. What would the passersby think? Then she told herself that they were in far too much of hurry to get home and to bed to think anything.

  To her amazement, he himself began to count the notes after she had given them to him. Then he pushed them into the back pocket of his trousers, not into the wallet that he usually carried in the breast pocket of his jacket. He smiled at her. ‘You are very kind to me, Marilyn. Always very kind.’

  ‘You are very kind to me. Always very kind.’

  He took her in his arms and kissed her on the mouth. Then, still holding her with one arm, he put up a hand and, with extreme tenderness, stroked her hair.

  ‘You’re a wonderful lover,’ she whispered. ‘The best.’

  ‘Only a lover?’

  ‘No, no! Much, much more.’

  At first she had been disconcerted to be asked for the money. But as she walked home – he had offered to accompany her but she had said no, it was such a long journey to Dalston, he might miss his connections – she realized that that act of handing over the notes had brought with it its own odd, even shameful but also wonderfully exhilarating thrill. What did fifty pounds matter? Last week she had spent more than that on having her hair done by that man recommended by Vicky.

  Chapter Eleven

  Meg was thinking, as so often now, about the past. Going back into it was like sailing up a river, leaving behind a landscape shrouded in mist and gradually moving into one gleaming with sunshine.

  That must have been the happiest day of her life, that Easter Monday, oh, ages ago, when she and Eric had been marooned in that gondola high up above the Bank Holiday crowds at Alexandra Palace. It was he who had persuaded her to go on the Ferris wheel – ‘ Oh, come on, Meg! You can’t chicken out. It’s perfectly safe.’ Peering down, with a mounting nausea, and then throwing an arm around him and pressing her face against his bony shoulder, she had thought: This is it. What a way to go! But, eventually, after some minutes had crawled past, she had released him, sat up, pulled down her ru
cked-up skirt, and even managed a nervous giggle. ‘What a lark!’

  He patted her knee in comfort. ‘That’s my girl. No problem. They’ll get us down in a jiffy. There are some kids down there’ – he pointed but she did not dare to look – ‘and they’re taking it all as a joke. And an old granny. Look!’ Still she did not look. ‘ It’s lucky you had that wee before we came up.’ He was always taking the mickey over her inability to last out as long as he could. ‘ Your bladder must be made of rubber,’ she would tell him.

  Suddenly he turned to her. ‘Since we’ve been stuck up here together for so long, how’s about our getting stuck together forever?’ He said it in a conversational tone of voice, as though he were asking her: How’s about us going down to the Kingsland Road for a Kentucky Fried Chicken? The result was that at first she was bewildered, not taking in his drift. Even with Eric for company, she could think of nothing more awful than a lifetime stuck up here on the Ferris wheel.

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘I’m asking if you’ll let me make an honest woman of you.’

  She stared at him for a second, then let out a squeal. It was something totally unexpected. When they came to the end of an evening together, he had always given her the chastest of kisses, no more than a brushing of a cheek with his lips except on the one occasion when, tipsy after Sylvia’s wedding reception, he had caught her coming out of the bathroom, had pushed her back into it and had then started smacking his lips all over her face while at the same time grabbing at a breast. Despite that single onslaught, Meg had sometimes moodily and even despairingly wondered whether Sylvia might not have been right when she had told her airily: ‘Oh, do put him out of your mind. It should be obvious to anyone that he’s not the marrying kind.’ Well, now with this apology for a proposal, high in the air above London, he had shown that Sylvia was wrong. He was the marrying kind. He was going to marry her.

  Yes, that had been the happiest day of her life, no doubt about it. But, once her long reverie had ended, she suddenly felt down, really down again, almost as though she had fallen off that bloody Ferris wheel. Early that morning, waking her, Fiona had telephoned to say that one of her kids was sick, she had to take her to the doctor and so she would have to come another day, she could not now say when. Meg looked forward to these visits, Fiona always cheered her up. Then the post had brought a devastating telephone bill, which had shown two calls to Mantua, one to Lyons, and one to Barcelona. All had gone on for several minutes. At first she was furious that such mistakes could be made. But then she had thought: Might not Mehmet have made the calls? If so, he was a naughty boy not to have asked her first and not to have settled with her. Except that, with a lot of rent now being overdue (‘You’re an utter idiot to put up with it’ Sylvia had told her), how could he have settled a telephone bill when he could not pay her even a promised instalment?

  But worse than either of these two shocks had been her fear that the remission might be over. All the previous night she had suffered cramps and spasms, and that, she remembered, was how she had first known, long before the diagnosis of MS, that something was going wrong with the bodily machinery in which she had always had such faith. At breakfast, she had said to Mehmet: ‘Do you remember that Sandie Shaw number ‘Puppet on a String’? No, of course you wouldn’t, being Albanian and so young. But that’s how I felt all through the bleeding night. Jerked one way, jerked the other – as though this invisible giant was jerking me. Diabolical.’ Then she realized that, checking his lottery numbers in the Sun that he went out each morning to buy, for some reason insisting that no, he did not want it delivered along with her Mail, he wasn’t really listening to her. People didn’t like to hear about other people’s illnesses, they only liked to talk about their own. She had learned that in the course of innumerable visits to Dr Karapiet and to the hospital.

  Now, as so often, she waited for Mehmet to return, looking repeatedly at that old-fashioned, oversize watch, its large figures phosphorus green, that Eric had left behind. When Mehmet had departed that morning, first bending over her, as he always did, to give her a kiss on the forehead, then saying ‘ I’m off then, Mamma,’ and finally, newspaper under arm, striding to the door, she had called out after him: ‘Hey!’ She did not really know why she had done that. She guessed that it might have been her way of saying to him ‘Help me!’ ‘Yes, Mamma?’ He came back into the room. He spoke considerately, his face was serene, he seemed not to be in a hurry or flurry; but she could glimpse in his eyes a look of impatience. She had to think of something to say. ‘You haven’t told me where you’re going and what time you’ll be back.’ The look of impatience did not leave the eyes, it merely intensified, accentuated by a small frown. Then in the same amiable, calm voice, he answered: ‘I have people to see. Maybe job. Other things too.’ He was always vague like that. ‘ I come back evening. As usual,’ he added. But what time in the evening? she had wanted to pursue. But by now she knew that that would only annoy him. ‘OK, love,’ she said.

  What could have happened to him? But the truth was, she told herself, that he was often late like this and nothing had happened to him – or, at least nothing that he would tell her. She managed to get to her feet with difficulty and then all but toppled over, putting out a hand to the back of a chair only in the nick of time. As she tottered to the kitchen – should she get the crutches that had stood, unused, beside the hatstand for so long? – she savoured that phrase, the nick of time. Why nick? Then she thought: Nick means a little cut. And that is what time does to one, it gives one these endless little cuts, until sooner or later one of them finishes one off. Another thought came to her: Nick means a prison. Time was the prison from which there was never an escape – until, well, something like this bloody MS at last prised open the door of one’s cell.

  She stretched up for the teapot on its shelf and again almost toppled over. Then with clumsy hands – I’m all thumbs today, she thought, and these thumbs had the added disadvantage of being numb at their tips – she filled the kettle. It was at that moment that she heard his key in the door.

  ‘Mehmet! Come and join me for a cup of tea or coffee.’

  He looked pale and worried, poor dear, with grey, glistening rings under his eyes. He had been looking like that for some days now. But his smile was cheerful. ‘Let me get it, Mamma, you go and sit down. Yes? You had that bad night.’ So she had done him an injustice. While checking his lottery numbers, he had clearly taken in what she had been telling him.

  He placed the tray on the table, pushing to one side some of the old magazines and newspapers, and then he began to pour out the tea. ‘ Mine first,’ he said. He liked his tea without milk and weak. ‘Milk in first for Mamma.’

  They sipped their tea in silence. Then he asked: ‘What sort of day did Mamma have?’

  ‘Oh, a day like any other day. I didn’t feel up to going out. And Fiona let me down. That girl of hers has something wrong with her again. She’s never really well, poor little thing.’ She sighed and added: ‘It’s a boring life, and it’s boring to talk about it.’ Then she hated herself for the self-pity of it. When she sat with other MS patients at the hospital, she always avoided those who were self-pitying. ‘And what about your day?’

  He shook his head. ‘I hear of one job, only one job. No good. I met Indian from car wash. Crazy man. He was sacked from car wash, now works as office cleaner. He tells me about it. Terrible pay, start work at five, sometimes four.’

  ‘But it would be something, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘No, no. Too little money.’ It was no use arguing with him, he always knew his own mind.

  Then suddenly he brightened. He put down his cup and leaned towards her. ‘ I have idea, beautiful idea. Paper say that tomorrow hot, sunny. We go to Brighton.’

  ‘To Brighton?’ She had not been there since, as a child, she had paid a weekend visit during the school summer holidays to a cousin of her mother. She did not even know if the cousin were still alive or not. After her marriage to Eric, she had
lost touch with so many of her relations, because of her resentment of the sniffy way in which they would treat him. ‘Are you crazy? What would we be doing in Brighton?’

  ‘What everyone else does in Brighton. Enjoying ourselves. Come on, Mamma!’ He put out a hand and gripped hers in entreaty. ‘Fun. Let us have some fun.’

  Suddenly, forgetting the aches, the cramps, the unsteadiness and, worst of all, that terrible puppet-on-a-string feeling, she smiled at him in radiant acceptance. ‘OK! Why not?’

  All through the day, he was an absolute angel to her, even though, admittedly, it had been a shock when, at Victoria, he had first placed her on a chair outside a café, then brought her a cup of coffee and, then going down on his hunkers beside her, had said: ‘Now I will buy tickets, please wait for me. But, Mamma – forgive me – Mehmet has no money. Money all gone.’ He laughed but the laugh was an embarrassed one and she at once felt a pang of compassion for him.

  ‘Of course, love.’ She scrabbled in her bag and eventually produced a twenty-pound note. ‘Will that be enough?’

  ‘Maybe another ten. I do not know.’

  ‘No problem.’ Then, as she handed over the second note, she said: ‘I suppose there’s one of those cash dispenser things at Brighton?’

  He laughed. ‘Yes, many, many. Do not worry!’

  He continued to be assiduous in his attentions to her, supporting her with one hand as they walked to platform 19, while the other hand gripped the straps of her handbag; asking her whether she wanted to face the engine or have her back to it; offering her a choice of newspaper, even though he knew that the Mail was her favourite. Having read his Sun for a while, he put it down and now stared out of the window and now looked, smiling, over to her. Each time that he smiled at her, she smiled back. Yes, he was a dear, a real dear, so considerate, with such beautiful manners. One could see, she told herself as she now often did, that in his own country he must have come from a posh family.