The Nick of Time

by Francis King

  He could see from the hurt expression on Audrey’s face that she had been expecting to return, as she usually did, to the college for tea, but he was feeling tired and depressed and his neck was worrying him again.

  ‘I can find my own way there,’ she said in a vaguely offended tone.

  ‘No, I’d like to go with you,’ he assured her, now guiltily eager to make amends.

  They walked in silence through streets that were surprisingly – and to him in his sombre mood, eerily – empty. Then all at once, apropos of nothing, he exclaimed: ‘What a rum do!’

  She looked at him interrogatively.

  ‘This business of Marilyn and her rent boy.’

  Audrey sighed. She wanted, he knew, always to be fair to everyone – as though that were ever possible in a life made up of illogical likes and dislikes and preferences and prejudices. ‘ Well, I suppose that men constantly pay women for sex – with presents if not with money. So why shouldn’t a woman do the same with a man?’

  ‘You’re very emancipated.’ He said it tardy.

  Although she begged him not to, he insisted on using his OAP pass to descend with her to the platform. After a few seconds there, he put his hand into his pocket, pulled out two pound coins, and hurried over to a slot machine. He returned with two chocolate bars. He held out one. ‘For you.’

  ‘For me? Oh, I don’t think I can eat it. Why not keep both for yourself?’

  Unlike him, she had never had a sweet tooth. His sweet tooth was strongest when, as now, he felt unhappy.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Quite sure.’

  The trivial refusal intensified his dejection.

  Walking up through the garden, Laurence swivelled his head from side to side. Each turn brought with it a spasm of pain, but he went on with the swivelling. The physical pain obliterated the emotional one of longing and loss. Who would have supposed that a seventy-nine year old man would be capable of an intensity of passion such as had always eluded him in his philandering youth?

  Suddenly breathless, he sank on to a bench. He looked down over a serene expanse of flowers and trees to the noisy road below it. He shut his eyes, appalled by the contrast, as he had never been before.

  Yesterday, he had been to see the doctor, who visited the institution every day at eleven, to ask if he could not do anything about his neck. The doctor, who was young, with plump, pink hands and a strange sideways glance, had said: ‘Well, Sir Laurence, you’ve had the X-rays which have shown nothing seriously amiss, just the degeneration common at your age. You have had four weeks of physiotherapy. I am afraid that all that’s left is taking the painkillers. Since you turned down my suggestion of wearing a collar.’

  ‘No, that I won’t do. I refuse to go round looking like a dog.’ He bit his lower lip, scowling. ‘So you can do nothing more for me?’

  The doctor shook his head. ‘ That’s about the score.’ He looked up and gave a nervous smile. ‘I’m afraid you’ve just got to live with it.’

  ‘When I was young, doctors were always telling me that I’d grow out of it. Now they constantly tell me that I’ll just have to live with it. Growing old’s no fun.’

  ‘Well, I’m sure it has its compensations.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know.’ Again he gave his nervous laugh. ‘Having a free travel pass for one thing.’

  Now, going over the conversation, Laurence thought: This crazy obsession with Marilyn is really like an illness. I’ll have to live with – and die with – it. Just as I’ll have to live with – and die with – this bloody pain in my neck. Then the disconcerting thought came to him: But do I really want to be cured? The last time that he had seen Marilyn, more than three weeks ago, she had spoken of those of her patients who were, as she put it, in love with their illnesses and so were determined not to be separated from them. A young AIDS patient, who refused to follow the ferocious regimen of thirty pills per day prescribed to him; an old woman who went on smoking even though her emphysema was so acute that she became breathless merely when she walked down the corridor from her bedroom to the lavatory; a sufferer from skin cancer, who spent every holiday on some foreign beach tanning his muscular body: all regarded their illnesses as capricious, demanding lovers, to whom they could not even attempt to say goodbye, whatever the eventually lethal cruelties that they inflicted.

  Was that, Laurence asked himself, how he felt about his obsession with Marilyn?

  For a while, hands clasped over his stomach and eyes half-closed, he brooded on it. Then he was aroused by a voice calling: ‘ Bart! Bart! I say, Bart!’ Mervyn was hurrying over to the bench. ‘I’m in luck – seeing you like this. I’ve run out of stamps and I must catch the post. You couldn’t spare me a stamp, could you, old chap?’

  Chapter Fourteen

  Amazingly, Andy’s novel had been accepted. Even more amazingly his recently acquired agent had managed to extract an advance of a hundred thousand pounds. When, less than two months before, Carmen had brought Marilyn the news that the agent had decided to take him on, she had been euphoric. Now, with this far more exciting news, she seemed merely to be dazed, repeating over and over ‘Dr Carter, I cannot believe it.’

  ‘I suppose you’ll now want to leave us,’ Marilyn said, forgetting that, for all her sweetness, ardour and impetuousness, the Spanish girl was essentially level-headed and shrewd.

  ‘Oh, no, Dr Carter! We wish to buy flat, we wish to have baby. I have waited so long for flat and for baby. One hundred thousand is not so much money, not for such things.’

  Marilyn nodded approvingly. In similar circumstances, she would have thrown up her job and to hell with it. ‘You’re a sensible girl.’

  ‘Andy is so happy!’

  ‘I’m sure he is. He has every reason to be.’

  A few days later, Carmen asked Marilyn if she would come to a celebratory party on the following Saturday. Andy’s closest friend was the owner of a restaurant out west beyond Shepherd’s Bush, and he would provide all the food. Andy would buy the drinks.

  ‘Well, yes, I’d love to come. I’ve always wanted to meet Andy – and I want to meet him even more now that he’s about to become a famous author. But there’s a problem, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Your friend?’ Carmen promptly asked.

  Marilyn was taken aback. How did Carmen know about Mehmet? Presumably, if she knew about him, then everyone at the surgery must do so. She herself rarely took part in the gossip constantly circulating there; but she knew that, surprisingly, her partner Jack did. It must be he who had been the source of the news. He had once called at the house on a Saturday afternoon, to make one of his fussy interventions about a patient whom she had seen on his behalf; and there, on the steps just behind him, Mehmet had all at once appeared. Inevitably, she had had to introduce them to each other. Probably he had later talked to the oldest of the three receptionists, a member, like Laurence in the past, of his bridge club, and she in turn must have talked to the others.

  ‘Well, yes, I have a friend coming to stay for the weekend. I can hardly leave him.’

  ‘Bring him, Dr Carter!’

  ‘Well, I’m not sure whether …’

  ‘Please! Bring him! No problem. Everyone is friendly. He will enjoy.’

  ‘All right. Thank you.’

  At lunch that day, before Mehmet’s arrival, Audrey was taciturn, almost sullen. Then suddenly she said, in an oddly stilted way: ‘ I wonder if I might ask something of you, Marilyn.’

  ‘Yes. What is it?’

  ‘It’s about the shower. You know that he – he has now taken to using it.’ Audrey could rarely bring herself to utter Mehmet’s name.

  Marilyn already sensed trouble. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘But only for a few minutes each day. Just for a shower, nothing else.’

  ‘Well, it’s not always only for a shower. Not last Wednesday evening. He had the shower after you both had …’ Her voice trailed away ‘But he also …’ She shrugged one shoulder, hesitating
how to go on. She had never found it easy to talk about bodily functions. ‘Well, it’s not all that pleasant to find one’s loo choked up with lavatory paper. And – other things.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry. I’ll have to have a word with him about it.’

  ‘Perhaps I’m becoming a fussy old maid. But there it is. I do like to have things clean around me. Particularly such intimate things,’ she added.

  ‘Yes, of course.’ So far Marilyn had been placatory, but she could not keep it up. After a brief silence, she said: ‘Actually Mehmet – like most Muslims – is fanatical about cleanliness. He’s always washing. If the loo is clogged with paper that may be because he’s used not to sitting on a loo seat but to squatting. Muslims squat – well, many of them. So he might feel it dirty to sit on a seat without first covering it with paper.’

  ‘Perhaps you should buy him one those ghastly chenille cover things. To put his mind at rest.’

  Marilyn was taken aback by the acidity of the tone. It was rare for Audrey to speak like that. ‘ Perhaps I should. But meanwhile – please bear with him.’

  ‘And please tell him to take more care.’

  Marilyn decided to tell him nothing.

  The restaurant, called The Rake’s Progress, was a long, narrow, brightly lit shed, with hefty, bare pine tables and chairs to match, and a bar, followed by a kitchen, at its farthest end. Andy and Carmen were seated at a table, just in front of the bar, which had been set out for eight. There was a carafe of white wine at one end and a carafe of red at the other. Carmen jumped to her feet, her full, shiny purple skirt swirling around her, and ran to Marilyn to embrace her. ‘Dr Carter! I am so happy, happy!’ The happiness was genuine. Then, before Marilyn could introduce Mehmet, she swung round to him. ‘I remember!’ She put out a hand to shake his. ‘You remember me? Carmen?’

  ‘Of course.’

  Marilyn thought: How self-composed he is, how dignified. In his charcoal-grey suit – the only suit that he possessed, she imagined – his beautifully laundered white shirt, subdued blue-and-grey tie, and shiny moccasins, anyone might mistake him for a wealthy foreign businessman. He smiled, then bowed to Carmen.

  Impulsively, Carmen raised her hand, seamed from housework, its short-cut nails unvarnished, up to his forehead and touched it. ‘No scar! Wonderful! Dr Carter is the best!’

  Andy was standing stiffly behind her. With his square head, its sandy hair cropped close to the skull, his square body on short sturdy legs, and his large, thick-fingered hands, he gave an immediate impression of strength and vitality. He might, in his combats and sneakers, have been mistaken for an army physical training instructor. It was therefore a surprise when he spoke, in a pernickety, high-pitched voice that might have been that of one of Laurence’s former colleagues at the Foreign Office.

  ‘Good evening, Marilyn. I’ve heard so much about you. You have a real fan in Carmen.’ He turned. ‘And this is Mehmet, I take it. Glad you could make it, Mehmet.’ He shook Mehmet’s hand, but had not shaken Marilyn’s. ‘Sit yourselves down. Have a drink. The others are certain to be late.’

  ‘This is wonderful news we’re celebrating,’ Marilyn said, when he had handed each of them a glass of wine.

  ‘Yes. The most I’d ever hoped for was a thousand, not a hundred thousand. That’s the luck of the draw, I suppose.’

  ‘Well, merit must have had a lot to do with it. What’s the title?’

  ‘The Knacker’s Yard. It’s, well, autobiographical, I suppose. My father was – is – a butcher. Well, in the meat trade. In the vacations I used to work for him. In the book, there’s this character – a character not all that different from me. He has this long, up-and-down affair. And then – then he kills’ – he gave a little smile – ‘ butchers – his girlfriend. Which is appropriate, I suppose, seeing that he’s a butcher.’

  Marilyn laughed. ‘I hope the killing isn’t also autobiographical.’

  He stared at her, unsure whether she was joking or not. Then he laughed and shook his head vigorously: ‘Oh, no, no, heavens no!’

  At that moment the owner of the restaurant thrust aside an intervening curtain and appeared from the kitchen with a bowl of cashew nuts and another of olives. Having set down the bowls, he stooped and put one arm round Carmen’s shoulders and another around Andy’s, as though they were all three posing for a photograph. ‘This is Brian,’ Andy said. ‘Brian Raikes.’ So that, Marilyn realized, was why the restaurant was called The Rake’s Progress. ‘He runs – and owns – this place. My best – and oldest – friend. We went to school together.’

  Brian raised a hand. ‘Hi!’

  ‘Business doesn’t look so good tonight,’ Andy said.

  ‘Oh, give it a chance. You’re too early. Didn’t you know that? It’s not fashionable to arrive so early these days. It’s barely eight o’clock.’

  Andy’s agent, Sarah, a blonde, middle-aged woman with a large, sagging bosom and wide hips, in a skirt reaching almost to the ground, was the next to arrive, accompanied by a much younger, rangy, twitchy man, introduced by her as ‘my partner, Val’. Val eventually revealed that he was a sound-recordist for the BBC.

  ‘Isn’t it absolutely super about Andy’s book?’ Sarah said to Mehmet when, introductions over, she had sat down next to him.

  ‘It is wonderful.’ He was withdrawn, yet polite. Marilyn again felt proud of him. What on earth did Audrey have against someone both so willing and so able to fit in with others?

  ‘I wish I could earn that sort of money,’ Val said in his husky, almost inaudible voice. ‘Perhaps I ought to have become a novelist.’

  ‘It is not something one becomes, sweetie. One does not become a novelist in the way that one becomes a doctor, or a civil servant, or – or a literary agent. Does one?’ Sarah turned to Andy.

  Val gave a nervous smile. ‘Sorry’ he muttered, at the same time as Andy said: ‘One certainly does not. The, er, profession chooses one – not vice versa.’

  ‘Like marriages, writers are made in heaven. Or, at least, all my writers are,’ Sarah added with a laugh. She turned to Mehmet. ‘What do you do, Mehmet?’ She had the professional’s knack of remembering other people’s names and using them.

  Marilyn wondered whether he would reply that he was doing nothing because he was not allowed to do anything. But with a smile and no hesitation at all, he said: ‘I am student.’

  ‘And what are you studying?’

  ‘English.’

  ‘Well, I must say you’re English is very good.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  By an extraordinary coincidence, the final guest turned out to be Gilbert Strawson, a cousin of Ed’s mother. With him was his tiny, pretty, giggly Thai wife. Of Gilbert, Marilyn remembered that Laurence had once remarked: ‘When I first met Gilbert the Filbert he was called the Golden Boy of English letters. But I fear that with the passing of the years it has become more and more apparent that the gold was merely brass.’ At Marilyn’s last encounter with him, he had been working as literary editor of one of the quality Sundays, she could not remember which. He also wrote finely crafted, highly knowledgeable reviews, the intention of which often struck her as being not so much to give a fair assessment of the book under consideration as to establish his own intellectual and moral superiority to the author. Marilyn had, from the first, taken against him; but she acknowledged that she had had no reason to do so, since he had never been anything other than amiable to her. In the past, she had always shared his own view that he was remarkably handsome, but now the combination of a beaky nose, old age and alopecia had made him look like a moulting rooster.

  Soon, Brian, assisted by a girl who looked to be no more than fourteen or fifteen, and a waiter who, when persistently questioned by Sarah, finally admitted reluctantly that he came from Romania – might he, too, be an illegal, Marilyn wondered – had started to bring on an unremarkable first course of smoked mackerel with wedges of lime.

  ‘Well, Marilyn, it’s certainly a pleasure to see you after s
o long,’ Gilbert turned to say to her, smoothing his napkin over his thighs. ‘Wasn’t the last time at poor old Edward’s funeral?’

  ‘Yes, that’s right.’ But Marilyn could remember virtually nothing of the occasion, other than that, throughout the ceremony out at Putney Vale Crematorium and later at an increasingly raucous gathering in the huge, L-shaped sitting-room of Laurence’s house, she had felt an extraordinary chill even on that day of heatwave, so that from time to time she had had to control her teeth from chattering. Since she hated to talk about Ed – unlike some of her bereaved friends who would talk endlessly of dead husbands, wives, children, siblings, parents – she now abruptly swerved away from the subject to ask: ‘How do you and Andy know each other?’

  ‘Yes, it must seem rather strange. Different generations, different backgrounds. He won a Christmas short-story competition – no, I’m wrong, he didn’t win it, he was runner-up – which, for my sins, I’d organized for the paper. There was a party when the stories were eventually collected in a book, and he – he came over and made himself known to me. The attractive little Carmen wasn’t with him. After that, well, he seemed to want to keep up, and I eventually pushed some reviewing his way. He’s rather a good reviewer. Surprisingly perhaps.’

  ‘It’s wonderful news about his book.’

  ‘Yes, isn’t it? I had the same sort of luck when I was just down from Cambridge. Not, I mean, an advance of anything like that size. But my, er, apprentice novel was generally, well, yes, acclaimed. But fame is so capricious. After that, I’m afraid it was downhill all the way.’ He stretched across the table to grab another slice of bread. Despite his elegant slimness, he had always been greedy, Marilyn remembered.

  For a while he munched at the bread in silence. Then, suddenly, he dropped what was left of it on to the table and put his hands over his face.

  First surprised and then concerned, Marilyn stared at him. ‘Are you all right?’ she eventually asked.