The Nick of Time

by Francis King

  Silence. Then, wearily: ‘How much do you need?’

  ‘Fifty pounds?’

  ‘Fifty! I gave you fifty –’

  ‘What I do? I have no work. I try, try. No use. No permit, no work.’

  ‘Poor Mehmet. It’s awful for you. But you know, I’m not …’ She broke off: What was she going to say? ‘I’m not rich,’ Audrey guessed. ‘Oh, well, let’s see what I’ve got. We can always go to the cashpoint.… Yes. Here it is. Fifty.’ She was obviously counting out the notes

  ‘How do I thank you? How? It is terrible for me …’

  ‘Yes, borrowing money is always humiliating.’ (So, all too often, is lending it, Audrey thought). ‘I do wish that there was some solution for you.’

  ‘Only solution is go home.’ He said it bitterly.

  ‘Oh, no! We can’t think of that. No, no!’

  ‘You are very kind to me.’

  A long silence followed. Audrey imagined that they were embracing up there in the draughty hall above her. Then she heard Marilyn give a brief, high-pitched, girlish laugh, not at all like her usual one.

  The front door opened, the front door closed.

  Audrey returned for a few minutes to the silver. But she could not concentrate on it. The smell of the polish was beginning to nauseate her, and her head was throbbing. She got up and wandered out into the corridor. Then, after a brief struggle with herself, she began to mount the stairs at a rapidly increasing speed. She threw open the door of Marilyn’s room, put a hand to the light switch, and stood on the threshold looking in. She might have been a passerby staring at a traffic accident. Her mouth was open and a hand was pressed to her chest. Her face was greenish in the light from the landing.

  A tangle of sheet and blankets seemed to be on the verge of slipping off the wide double bed to the floor. When they had first moved into the house together, Audrey had wondered why, since the room was so small, Marilyn had insisted on a bed so large. Now she knew. There was a rank smell of sweat and sex, and mingling with it the scent, sweetly dizzying, which she had come always to associate with his presence, so that, entering the house, she would at once know that he either was there or had recently been there.

  Again she looked at the bed. It was there that, after That had happened, Marilyn would so often retreat, like a wounded animal to its lair, either to sob quietly or to lie on her back, absolutely silent and motionless, and stare up at the ceiling. Audrey would go into her and would sit on the edge of the bed and try, sometimes with some small success and sometimes with no success at all, to comfort her. She would put a hand to her forehead or to her hair, stroking them while she murmured the usual trite things – there, there, you’ve got to try to put it behind you, you have to make a fresh start, you can’t go on like this forever. Marilyn had accepted her in this role of comforter, as she had refused to accept Laurence, who had once been so much closer to her. That had always puzzled Audrey and not merely puzzled but also lacerated him. ‘I sometimes think that she hates me now,’ he once told Audrey. ‘ What on earth have I done?’ ‘ She’s not herself,’ Audrey said. ‘You have to understand.’ But she, like Laurence, could not understand the sudden aversion.

  Audrey looked around the room, at the undrawn curtains, the comb thrown down on the desk instead of on the dressing table, the soiled tights dangling over a chair. Then she looked at the floor and saw the screwed-up balls of tissue.

  She pulled a face of disgust and retreated on to the landing, tugging the door shut behind her, as on some suddenly discovered fire. She began to run down the stairs.

  Soon after that, Audrey realized that Mehmet’s visits had come to follow a timetable. There was the Wednesday visit, when he would arrive late, after Marilyn’s return from the surgery, would have a quick drink with her, retire with her to the bedroom, and would then go out with her for the evening, not to return. There was the weekend visit, when he would arrive soon after lunch, he and Marilyn would follow no regular programme, and he would not leave until Sunday evening or even Monday morning. The Wednesday visit was bad enough; but the weekend visit was the one that she really dreaded and hated. Each time, she told Laurence, she felt as though the house were being violated, and so – though she did not tell him this – in some subtle, dreadful way, was she.

  The first time that he stayed for the weekend, Marilyn amazingly gave no warning to Audrey. But, propped up in bed with the latest Ruth Rendell, Audrey knew that he was there from the vague sounds that lapped around her. She kept thinking Now he will go, but he never did. The vague sounds died away and eventually she fell into an uneasy sleep, half-expecting that they might flood back to awake her.

  Audrey was, as usual on a Sunday morning, the first to start on breakfast. She had all but finished when Marilyn joined her, in dressing gown and slippers. Stretching indolently, yawning and then rubbing with the back of a hand at an eye, she made Audrey think: You’re the cat that’s been at the cream.

  ‘How are things today?’

  ‘I didn’t sleep so well,’ Audrey replied in what she had intended to be an amiable tone but which emerged with a veiled hostility.

  ‘Oh, poor you!’

  Marilyn went to the kitchen cupboard and began to fetch down cereal bowl, plate, cup and saucer.

  ‘What are you doing? I’ve laid for you.’ But Audrey knew perfectly well what she was doing.

  Marilyn turned, cereal bowl in hand, and gave an awkward smile. ‘ We have an overnight visitor.’ Audrey stared at her. ‘Mehmet.’ Still Audrey stared. ‘It was too late for him to trek back to Dalston, with all those changes. So I made him stay the night.’

  I bet that didn’t require much making, Audrey thought. But she restrained herself. ‘Is he still asleep?’

  ‘Yes. He was snoring his head off when I left him.’ Marilyn, having finished laying the place for Mehmet, now set about making toast and more coffee for herself. She sat down, composed, clearly at ease with the world and herself. Audrey, her breakfast finished, picked up the Observer.

  ‘You don’t like him.’

  ‘I hardly know him.’

  ‘I think he’d like to get to know you better.’

  Audrey went on reading.

  ‘Do try. It would make it all so much easier for me.’

  The calm, sweet reasonableness of the appeal briefly touched Audrey. But still she said nothing. She got up and began to stack her used breakfast things in the dishwasher. ‘Are you in to lunch?’

  Marilyn considered. ‘No. No, I don’t think so. It might be better if we took ourselves out. I thought I might show him Greenwich. He’s never been there. We could take the Light Railway one way and come back by boat.’ On an impulse she added: ‘Why don’t you join us?’

  ‘Thank you. But I want to go to church and then I want to pay a visit to that Rwandan family …’

  Marilyn bit into a piece of toast. Then she looked up at Audrey: ‘I’d so much like you and Mehmet to be friends. Do try!’

  Audrey had no intention of trying.

  When, late in evening, Mehmet had left, Marilyn and Audrey, both about to go to bed, coincided on the stairs to the basement, Marilyn coming up from them with a glass of hot milk and Audrey going down them with the newspaper she had fetched from the sitting-room.

  ‘You’re late going to bed,’ Marilyn said.

  ‘So are you.’ Audrey began to retreat backwards up the stairs, to enable Marilyn to pass.

  ‘I hope Mehmet won’t miss his last connections. I tried to get him to stay but he wouldn’t. He feels so responsible for his landlady – I can’t think why, since she’s constantly demanding the rent.’

  ‘That doesn’t seem unreasonable of her,’ Audrey said dryly.

  Marilyn decided to treat that as a joke. She laughed. ‘No, I suppose not.’

  The two women were now together in the hall. Audrey picked up an ashtray, in which Mehmet had stubbed out one of his Kingsize Lights. She stared down into it. ‘Did he sleep in Laurence’s room?’ It was really their gu
estroom, and Laurence rarely used it; but they kept up the fiction that it was his, since clearly that gave him pleasure.

  ‘Yes. I can’t take the snoring. It keeps me awake. So that seemed to be better. In any case, he likes to sleep late and I don’t – or, rather, can’t.’

  Audrey was about to go down the stairs, when Marilyn said: ‘Oh, by the way – there’s something I wanted to ask you.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Would you mind awfully if he used the basement shower? I mean – just for a shower. He’ll take care not to use it when you want it.’

  ‘Why can’t he use your bathroom?’ Audrey had always regarded the bathroom in the basement as hers, even though Laurence or an occasional guest might use it when Marilyn was occupying the upstairs one.

  ‘Well, of course, he can. For washing his hands, shaving, other things. But he much prefers a shower to a bath. He thinks that baths never leave one really clean, since one lies around in water full of one’s washed-off dirt. It’s logical, I suppose.’

  ‘I’d really rather –’

  ‘Oh, come on, Audrey! What harm can it do? I’ll tell him to leave everything as he finds it.’ She laughed. ‘ He’s totally house-trained, you know.’

  Audrey began to make her way down the stairs. She said nothing more, not even goodnight. She was aware of Marilyn standing motionless above her, mug of milk in hand, looking down.

  The next Sunday morning Audrey got up deliberately early, long before the paperboy had arrived. She did not wish to coincide with Marilyn, much less with Mehmet, for breakfast. She carefully laid places for herself and Marilyn, as she had always done in the past. But she laid no place for Mehmet. He – or Marilyn, if she was determined to continue to make a fool of herself – could do that.

  Chapter Thirteen

  ‘Where is Marilyn?’

  Laurence, standing under the porch to the quadrangle where he had his rooms, said the words even before he had greeted Audrey, who was trudging, plastic bag in hand, up the drive towards him. Then, realizing that she might be offended, he quickly said: ‘Hello, my dear. Lovely to see you.’ He extended his cheek for her to kiss, making no attempt to kiss her back.

  ‘Hello, Father.’ Her voice was listless. ‘I had those shoes repaired for you.’ She held out the bag. ‘Rather a lot of money.’

  ‘Well, Lobbs always were expensive. But one has to have their shoes repaired by them.’ Then, unable to contain himself, he repeated, as he took the plastic bag from her: ‘Where is Marilyn?’

  ‘She couldn’t come. She sent her love.’

  Audrey began to walk ahead of him towards the quadrangle. He noticed with a pang, as he followed her, that she was not carrying herself as she usually did, but bowed as though under some invisible burden. ‘Couldn’t come? But she sent that message last time that she would certainly be here this time.’

  ‘Well, you know how things are now.’

  ‘That rascal?’

  Audrey did not answer.

  ‘I’d like to meet him. I’d soon tell him to go about his business.’

  ‘He hasn’t got a business. That’s the problem. Unless being a rent boy is a business.’

  Laurence pondered on that; but it was not until he had hung up her overcoat that he summoned up the courage to pursue it. ‘Does Marilyn – does she support this Mehmet?’

  Audrey nodded. ‘To all intents and purposes.’

  ‘H’m.’ He was digesting that, in disgust. ‘A glass of sherry wine?’ He was constantly railing against the sloppiness of young people, otherwise well-bred and well-educated, who spoke of ‘ a sherry’, used the word ‘gay’ instead of ‘queer’, and were incapable of differentiating between ‘ uninterested’ and ‘disinterested.’

  ‘I’d rather have some vodka and tonic.’

  ‘Then vodka and tonic it shall be. For you and, yes, also I think for me.’

  After a few mouthfuls of his drink, he could not resist returning to the subject of Marilyn and Mehmet, just as, sleepless during the long nights, he had not been able to resist scratching at the patch of senile eczema on his right elbow, until it had acquired the bluish-red colour of an uncooked steak. ‘So you think that that chap is bleeding Marilyn white?’

  Audrey laughed. ‘Oh, I wouldn’t put it as strongly as that. But she seems to be his chief – perhaps his only – financial support. He dresses extremely well, you know. I can’t think how he manages that. And whenever he comes to the house, he comes with some present. Bought with the money she has given him, I imagine.’

  As though to denigrate Mehmet was a conspiracy on which, by tacit agreement, both of them had now entered, Audrey began to tell her father about a discovery that she had made in the guestroom. Last Saturday Marilyn had gone out to meet Mehmet, instead of waiting for him to come to the house. The two of them were ‘apparently’ – in fact, Audrey had overheard Marilyn reveal this on the telephone – going to an early cinema. ‘ I had to go upstairs to your room – the room that he now takes over – for something or other, and there, on the dressing table, I saw these notes laid out. Five twenties.’

  ‘A hundred, you mean?’

  ‘A hundred. She had obviously left them there for him.’

  ‘So she makes him an allowance?’

  ‘You could call it that.’

  He shook his head. ‘Poor Marilyn.’ He stared down into his glass. He felt a rage not only against this bloody Albanian but also, bewilderingly, against his daughter. A case of wanting to shoot the messenger? Then that rage was obliterated by his sorrow for Marilyn. How could she have got herself into such a humiliating and potentially dangerous situation?

  Audrey had miraculously tuned into his thoughts. ‘I can’t understand it. Marilyn has always struck me as being so levelheaded. Sensible. Yes, I know she has that drink problem but after all she went through …’ She sighed. ‘Poor dear.’

  ‘I never see her now.’

  ‘I hardly ever see her. She’s so busy with her patients during the week and so busy with him at every weekend.’

  Eventually Laurence looked at his watch and decided that they had better toddle along to lunch. He was not going to inflict another ghastly meal in hall on her but instead was going to take her into the village to a recently-opened Japanese restaurant. Did she feel adventurous enough to try Japanese food? Audrey had already tried it as the guest of the Australian woman who worked at the shop, and she hated it. But she said Yes, of course, that sounded fun.

  Laurence was in a fretful, uncommunicative mood as, his arm linked in hers, they made their way down through the gardens to the road below. At one point, he halted and pointed with his stick. ‘Look at those wretched camellias. There was hardly a single blossom on them this year. Or last year. Every year I tell those girls who look after the garden that camellias don’t blossom if one cuts them right back, and then each year they do precisely that. I can’t think why they call this place a College when no one is capable of learning anything at it.’

  Soon after they had begun on their sushi, he threw down his chopsticks and said: ‘This place was a mistake!’

  ‘Oh, I rather like it,’ Audrey said, though she agreed with him.

  ‘And it’s bloody expensive!’

  If Marilyn had been his guest, he reminded himself, he would not have worried about its being expensive. At that, he felt a brief stab of guilt. Why couldn’t he be nicer to this only surviving child of his? He brooded on that question, hardly aware of what she was saying, as she started on some wearisome account of an old man who tottered into the shop almost every day to filch the cheapest of paperbacks.

  He had been jealous – yes, he had long since acknowledged that to himself – of Audrey during those days when Marilyn hadn’t wanted even to see him, let alone talk to him, but would nonetheless welcome Audrey. Sometimes during those terrible days he would stand outside Marilyn’s bedroom and, unknown to the two women inside it, would listen to the stronger comforting the weaker. He had then so much wanted to be the one
who was saying the soothing, strengthening things that Audrey was saying.

  He roused himself from this bitter reverie to hear Audrey concluding: ‘… I never do anything about the poor old chap. He looks so lonely and frail. What does it matter if we lose one or two paperbacks at fifty p each? I just put what’s owed into the till, out of my own pocket.’

  He stared at her, with his vacant, bloodhound eyes. ‘ Fifty p?’ he repeated automatically, just to demonstrate that he was still a party to the conversation. ‘And you say Marilyn is dishing out eighty pounds each week to him?’

  ‘Worse. A hundred.’

  He knew that she was thinking: How vague he’s getting, can this be the beginning of Alzheimer’s?

  ‘I must tell you something. Rather amusing. Old Mervyn – you know whom I mean, once Head of Protocol? – had this guest to lunch the other day and asked me to join them. The guest – Sir Somebody or Other – is an eminent – all these consultants are eminent, have you noticed? – an eminent gerontologist. You know what that means? Of course you do – you’re an educated woman, Roedean, St Anne’s and all that. Well, he was talking about some mutual friend of theirs and he said ‘‘ I’m afraid he’s suffering from Alzheimer’s.’’ So-as a joke, of course – I said to him, I said, Oh, Sir Somebody or Other, do tell me, I can never remember, I can never remember, what is Alzheimer’s? And, do you know, quite serious, he began to explain to me – patiently, as though to a child – at absolutely enormous length.’

  He looked up at her and laughed, but his eyes were stricken and sorrowful.

  Dutifully, she managed to laugh back.

  After the pretty, sulky waitress, whom Laurence had declared to be Chinese not Japanese, had taken away their half-emptied plates of soy-saturated food and their half-drunk cups of pale-yellow tea, Laurence called for the bill. ‘Yes, pretty steep, pretty steep,’ he sighed. It was so much easier to be lavish to someone with whom you were in love. He threw down some notes and said: ‘ They don’t deserve a tip as large as that, but I can’t be bothered to wait for the change. It’ll be an age in coming, the service is so slow. I’ll walk you to the station.’