by Francis King
You will no doubt be astonished to hear that it was I who, in a moment of madness, shopped your friend Mehmet to the immigration people. When I did so, I had genuinely duped myself into thinking that that was what was best for you. You were the person to whom I felt closest in an increasingly lonely life, and I did not want that man to go on exploiting you. But now I realize that my motives were far more complex. I was – yes, I see it now, I have to acknowledge it – jealous of him because you gave him so much and gave me so little. It was when Audrey drove me past the house where he lived that the idea first came to me. At the time, it seemed so right. Now it seems so horribly wrong.
On the few occasions when we now meet, I can see how desperately unhappy you are. It is like a replay of the ghastly aftermath of the accident. And this time you do not have Audrey at hand to console you, since I have been the cause of the terrible rift between you. I only wish that I could offer some consolation. Perhaps this letter will help. I so much hope so. Perhaps it will also help me, relieving me of a devastating burden of guilt. A selfish thought but then, as you will know by now, I am a selfish man …
At that point he broke off. He stared down at what he had written, his face contorted like a child’s on the verge of crying. He could not cope with this insatiable longing and this unrelenting hatred of himself. But something, an even stronger hatred of Mehmet or a ferocious pride or perhaps both of them together, prevented him from going on with his confession. He snatched at the sheet and began to tear it up.
As he turned his head sharply to jettison the fragments of paper into the waste-paper basket beside him, he felt an agonising pain down his neck and then across his right shoulder and into his arm.
Then the pain was battering, frenzied blow on blow, in his chest.
Chapter Twenty Three
On her way back from Laurence’s funeral, Marilyn called in at the Patels to see how their son, whom they called Johnny, was getting on. The previous year he had contracted malaria when the family had returned to India for a holiday, and now he still suffered episodes of fever.
His eyes had bruise-like shadows under them as he stared up at her with what struck her as fatalistic resignation. He was shivering uncontrollably and she could see that his pyjama jacket and the pillowcase behind him were both damp with sweat. A sweetish odour, as of honey, hung around him. Her diabetic patients often smelled the same.
She put a hand to his forehead. The skin seemed strangely loose, as though it had been crumpled, on someone so young. ‘Are you feeling better today?’
He nodded without conviction.
‘He won’t eat,’ his mother said. ‘I’ve tried everything, all his favourite dishes.’
‘Never mind. Just get him to drink lots of juice or water. The appetite will return.’
Marilyn picked up the game of Nintendo lying on the bed, beside a stamp album. If she had ever known that Audrey had given the album to him, she had forgotten. ‘What about this?’
‘He doesn’t seem to be interested.’ Mrs Patel’s upper lip trembled. ‘I am at my wit’s end,’ she added and abruptly turned away.
Outside the room, Marilyn said: ‘If the temperature hasn’t fallen tomorrow, I think he’d better go back to the hospital.’
‘But he hates leaving home. You know that.’ She spoke with despairing anger.
‘It probably won’t be necessary. I expect that the fever will just burn itself out, as it’s done before. This is the one of the few malaria cases I’ve ever had to treat, but the usual thing is that, over the years, the attacks come less and less often. The body builds up a defence, you see. Then eventually the fever burns itself out.’
Mrs Patel was staring at her in bewilderment. She might have been talking gibberish.
On the doorstep, next to the entrance to the shop, Mrs Patel asked: ‘How is Miss Carter getting on?’
‘Oh, fine. I haven’t seen her for a while, I’ve been so busy,’ Marilyn lied. She shrank from speaking of the funeral, at which Mervyn had given a skilful address, by turns laudatory and humorous, and at which she and Audrey had hardly spoken to each other. On leaving the subsequent reception at the college, the two women had then gone their separate ways, without even a goodbye. ‘But, yes, I think all’s going well with her.’
‘We miss her, all of us miss her. She’s such a lovely lady.’
As always now when she returned to the house, Marilyn was at once repelled by its silence and emptiness. She might have been some stranger, house agent’s particulars in hand, entering to view premises long unoccupied. Audrey no longer called up from the stairs ‘Is that you, Marilyn?’ That had always vaguely irritated her – after all, who else could it be? – but now its absence only added to her feeling of eerie dislocation.
She peered into the letter box, wondering if the second post might not have brought something from him. She envisaged it: an airmail envelope, torn at one edge, addressed to her in his childish scrawl, with a number of large, garish stamps plastered all over it. But there was nothing there but a flier about pizza delivery from a newly opened restaurant, a reminder (FINAL NOTICE) about an unpaid electricity bill, and a card from Vicky, who was on holiday for a week with her husband and brood of daughters in Cornwall.
How untidy everything had become! I’m a slut, she told herself, as she gathered up a used coffee cup from the previous evening and a full waste-paper basket from the previous day, preparatory to taking them downstairs. In the past, the kitchen table would already have been laid for supper – for herself and Audrey if Mehmet were not coming, for herself alone if he were. This evening, she opened the door to Audrey’s room, as she often now did, and smelled the damp. Basement rooms often smelled like that, if no one lived in them and the central heating was off. Perhaps she should switch it on, extravagant though that would be. Now that she had that overdraft because of those iniquitously high fees paid out to the lawyers, and Audrey was no longer sharing the expenses of the household, she had to be careful.
‘I think it better if I move out,’ Audrey had said, after more than a week had passed during which they had barely spoken to each other.
‘Oh, I don’t think that necessary. What’s done can’t be undone.’
‘Yes. Exactly. That’s why I think I’d better move out.’
‘If you really want that.’
‘Yes. Yes, I do.’
Soon after that Audrey had moved into what Laurence called ‘a hateful little cubby hole in darkest Fulham.’ She had also moved from the Oxfam shop in Kensington to one nearer the cubbyhole. ‘How is she?’ Marilyn had asked Laurence on what was to prove her last visit to him, two days before his death, and he had replied ‘Oh, she’s aged, she’s aged. But haven’t we all?’ Marilyn knew that she herself had certainly aged. She had acquired a slight stoop, the backs of her hands were wrinkled, and there was now a faint cobweb of lines under eyes that had become both larger and lustreless.
She took two eggs out of the fridge, preparatory to making an omelette. Audrey’s omelettes had always been so feathery. Somehow she herself could never acquire the knack. But the idea of eating nauseated her and she left the eggs lying out on the kitchen table. ‘What’s the matter with you?’ Jack had said to her only the day before. ‘You’ve got so thin. Would you like me to check things out?’ ‘No, thank you, Jack. I’m perfectly all right. I want to lose weight. I’m on a diet.’ He shook his head and gave her a rueful smile. He did not believe her. No doubt he had heard gossip about Mehmet’s disappearance.
As she stared ruefully down into the sink, with its unwashed pans, cheese-grater and cafetière, the thought suddenly came to her: She would go and see Meg. It was far too long since she had done so; and, though they never spoke of Mehmet other than to ask each other if they had had any news from him and to speculate about what he might be doing, Marilyn now inexplicably found in her presence the same kind of consolation that she had once found in Audrey’s. Perhaps, in each case, the consolation of goodness? Except that, in the end, Aud
rey’s goodness had turned to wickedness.
In the almost empty Underground carriage, she read the slogan opposite ‘It’s good to talk.’ But she could not talk, not even to the people – Carmen, Vicky, Jack, Laurence – who clearly wanted to talk to her, in an attempt to rouse someone once so vivacious from her dull, drooping apathy. Eventually it will burn itself out. Would this infection that she had contracted from an unexpected patient in her surgery late one autumn evening just a little short of a year ago ever burn itself out? In despair, she often thought: ‘No, I have to live with it and die with it.’
Lost in reverie she almost missed her stop. She rushed to the doors and just managed to slip through them as they were closing. Well, there’s some advantage in getting so thin, she thought.
Outside the station she decided to buy Meg some flowers. She was about to opt for some chrysanthemums, but then she thought, remembering the flowers at Ed’s and Carol’s and now Laurence’s funeral, no, chrysanthemums smell of death, and opted for white roses. Although she kept reminding herself that she must economize, it was not in her nature to do so and she spent far too much on far too many of the pinched, waxen blooms.
It was she who had persuaded this charity to take in Meg even though, as the director had pointed out, ‘ Dalston is really far outside our catchment area.’ Two of her patients were also resident there, and one had recently died there. The building was a square, purpose-built, red-brick one, set back from the squat, semi-detached houses, each wearing a gable like a witch’s hat, on either side of it. Once the home had occupied a large Edwardian house left to the charity by a benefactor, but it had been far too uneconomic to run and had eventually been sold for conversion into luxury flats. The new building consisted of three floors of tiny bed-sitting rooms, each with its even tinier bathroom and lavatory. The doors to the rooms were wide, giving wheelchair access, and everywhere there were the latest gadgets to help the disabled. Meg would often say wistfully that she missed her flat, and then, visibly shaking off that regret, would remark on how well they looked after her, how much easier it was to move around, and how happily she got on with the other inhabitants.
‘Oh, you’re in bed!’
‘Yes, I began the day feeling rather ropey. It’s this weather, I shouldn’t wonder. There was a real nip in the air when I opened the lav window, and you can feel the damp even here in this room. I ought to make more of an effort, but there’s not the same reason to do so, now that all my needs are being looked after. It’s not like it was in the flat.’
Marilyn was holding out the roses.
‘Are those for me?’
‘Of course.’
‘I’ve never received a bunch as large as that in my whole life. Oh, you are kind.’
‘I’ll put them in water in the washbasin, shall I? I’ll put them in a vase for you before I go.’
‘Oh, Micky can do that.’ Marilyn did not know if Micky was a man or a woman.
Having deposited the flowers, Marilyn sat down in the wheelchair by the bed. That was the most comfortable place in the room, apart from the armchair. She had always, she could not have said why, been reluctant to take the armchair, even when Meg was, as now, lying in bed. Somehow, she thought of that chair as Meg’s, so that to sit in it was, in some subtle way, to usurp it.
‘Yes, it’s been one of my bad days,’ Meg said. ‘But in general, you know I really believe I am about to have another of those remission things. My speaking is so much better, everyone tells me that, and it’s a long time since I’ve had that puppet-on-a-string feeling. My eyes are better too – none of that blurring, so that I have no problem with my Mail.’
Would she herself ever have a remission, Marilyn was thinking, as she said: ‘Oh, but that’s, wonderful, wonderful.’
‘Maybe one day soon I’ll be able to move back into a flat of my own.’
‘Yes, let’s hope so.’
‘Oh, but I’m forgetting! One thing else has really cheered me. Can you believe it? At last!’ With difficulty she raised a leaden arm and pointed. ‘Take a look over there!’
Marilyn looked. On the mantelpiece, between a pale-blue teddy bear and a cut-glass ashtray, a picture postcard had been propped. Without looking at it, Marilyn knew at once from whom it had come.
‘Take a look at it!’
Reluctantly, Marilyn got out of the chair and walked across.
She looked first at the picture, which showed the yawning entrance to a tomb – ‘Luxor, Valley of the Queens’ she read – against a garish orange sunset. Then she turned the card over to look at the postmark. She assumed that the postmark would be Egypt, but it was Dubai. Dubai? What on earth was he doing in Dubai?
The card had been forwarded, presumably by Mr Bagley, from the Dalston block of flats. The message was scrawled in his usual childish capital letters.
HI! GREETINGS TO MAMMA FROM HER SUN. HOPE ALL WELL. ALL FINE WITH ME. LOVE. MEHMET.
‘There’s no address,’ Marilyn said, the card still in her hand. She looked at it again. There was a terrible pathos about that SUN. Brooding on it later on the train home, the words had come unbidden into her mind O sole mio … ‘ He doesn’t say what he’s doing. Or why he’s in Dubai or why he was in Egypt. Nothing.’
‘Well, at least he’s written,’ Meg said, thinking, as she so often did, of Eric, who never wrote. ‘And he says he’s fine.’
Marilyn replaced the card, taking a long time, tongue between teeth, to balance it just right between the pale-blue teddy bear and the vase.
‘Haven’t you heard from him too?’ Meg asked.
‘No.’
‘Well, I expect you will. Posts are so bad from those countries. Where is this Dubai? Do you think that he has any friends there?’
‘Probably. Yes. Oh, yes.’
Copyright
First published in 2003 by Arcadia
This edition published 2013 by Bello
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