‘I’ve always been a bit suspicious of people who can’t stand their own company.’
‘And you can obviously stand yours. I’d go further. I’d say you were flourishing, Christopher.’
‘I don’t know about that. You seem fine.’
‘Solitude has its place. But you can get too much of a good thing.’
‘Yes. I’m sure.’
‘Have you found that out yet?’
‘I didn’t need to.’
‘That’s the kind of thing I’m talking about. The thing to have in common is a caste of mind. Not dominoes or bird watching or... or... whatever. The rest is incidental.’
The waitress returns with the receipt. He welcomes the distraction. He doesn’t think he knew Marjory’s caste of mind after a lifetime of contact, such as it was. He wouldn’t presume to know someone else’s after the brief exposure he and Vanessa have had to one another. But, he thinks, perhaps that’s him, and Marjory and Vanessa. Perhaps with Marjory there wasn’t any caste of mind beyond what he gleaned. Perhaps Vanessa is emotionally clairvoyant. Perhaps she reads him like a book because he’s obvious. Vanessa smiles sadly, accepts the slip of paper and crushes it into her saucer when the girl leaves.
‘Thank you for the coffee.’
‘Your turn next time.’ It is on the tip of her tongue before she stops it. The effort of suppression has allowed sincerity to skip the queue. ‘Don’t you want someone?’ There is an intonation, a note of entreaty, she can’t take back. They both know she means ‘Don’t you want me?’ He looks more puzzled than alarmed. Want? Want has never come into it since his mother’s death. It never occurred to him since that his wanting anything could divert the world by a fraction.
‘I’m sorry, I’ve no idea what I want or if it even mattered.’
The contents of her handbag suddenly preoccupy her. She rummages for half a minute and looks up with a counterfeit smile. Her courage touches him.
‘Your dog must be bored.’
‘Oh, I wouldn’t worry about that. He’s beyond fatalism. However,’ again pulling himself up, ‘I must be going.’
Ideally he would have liked another twenty minutes to gather his strength, but he feels the most diplomatic thing he can do is leave. Having untied the dog he turns ponderously to wave goodbye. She is a vague silhouette behind the mirror of the opposite façade that a burst of sunlight intrudes between them. She smiles at his chivalry, knowing from his sudden shadow and narrowed eyes that he probably can’t see her. There is a confusion in his retreat as the dog takes the other side of the lamp post and doubles back with the shortened lead, encircling Christopher’s ankles.
He executes a clumsy pirouette and walks in the dog’s wake to extricate them both. She feels this display of patience has aged her ten years on the spot.
* * *
Summer has arrived in a profusion of metropolitan blooms and the smell of mown suburban lawns. It is the first summer Marjory hasn’t seen and, realistically, the last Felicity will endure. The departure of Mrs Griggs has occasioned more than just the mantle of dust. Christopher is now stimulated by a routine. He has discovered something known as a ‘service wash’, and a cheerful young woman who delivers his ironing pressed to military standard. The purchase of a microwave has opened vistas. The Hoover lurked beneath the stairs. He found it. The day starts with a walk on the common with the dog and establishes a cheerful momentum of its own, with the rota of things needing to be done. The phone rings. Usually it is someone from the Indian sub-continent trying to sell him something. It is Sister Judith.
‘I think you’d better come in.’
‘How bad is she?’
‘Don’t loiter. If you can’t find someone to take care of the dog I’ll do it.’
When he rounds the bed with the dog at the quarter light, she’s waiting for him. As he gets out she gets in, and nods towards the building. Her abruptness forestalls further questions. Without the dog he doesn’t have to walk around the outside. It’s the first time he’s used these antiseptic corridors. As he approaches the door George steps out, rubs one shining toecap against a calf, straightens his tie and sees Christopher. A look of anger crosses his face and he walks wordlessly past.
Felicity looks every bit as bad as he expected, although he hadn’t imagined the febrile brightness of her eyes. Perhaps consciousness heightens before it fades. Perhaps he won’t have to do all the talking as he has recently.
‘I just met George. He wasn’t pleased.’
‘I don’t care.’
‘Even so, pretty rotten luck considering all the number of times we’ve managed to avoid one another.’ He stops. They both know how this reasoning goes.
‘Is the air nice outside?’
‘Beautiful. English summer. Rupert Brooke weather.’
‘Ironic, that I got to see it, such as I can, and Marjory didn’t. She always looked so healthy. I’ve looked like a less unwell version of this for ages. I always thought she found my illness a bit distasteful, or a deliberate means of drawing attention to myself. George does too. Where’s the dog?’
‘Sister Judith.’
‘Listen to me,’ she says, needlessly. It’s why he’s here. Her quota of remaining words is now so finite he feels he can count them down, like clock chimes. ‘I’ve been thinking. I used to wonder if we were kindred spirits or just similarly marooned. You don’t have to say anything because it doesn’t matter. I know you care for me but I love you, and if I had to sum up the one achievement in my life I was glad of it’s my time with you. This illness brought us together, and it’s almost worth it. And I’m glad you’ve behaved impeccably and I know you still would have, even if I were in full health and you were free with Marjory gone. Where’s the dog?’
‘Sister Judith.’
‘Ah. Can I see him?’
He is apprehensive about leaving her. How much has that just cost? He doesn’t want her to go alone, without someone there, without him there, holding her hand. He goes out the window and returns five minutes later with Sister Judith and the dog. At the sight Sister Judith gestures him to stay where he is and leans over the bed.
‘Is she gone?’
‘No. But you both have to go.’
‘Will you please do something for me? If she wakes will you please tell her I felt the same way?’
‘Yes.’
‘You will remember?’
‘I said yes, didn’t I?’ She exhales, matter of factly. ‘Sorry.’
He has hit the rush hour, as London debouches, and trundles home in sporadic second gear burps. He forages through the fridge and stops to open the French windows. The scent of barbecuing meat hangs tantalisingly on the evening air. It is too much for the dog, who plunges like a torpedo through the privet hedge that separates Christopher from his neighbour. Christopher groans now he is compelled to go next door and drag the dog away from two comparative strangers, who should be better known to him.
Both back gardens of identical houses are accessible only via the house, or from a gate set in the back wall which runs the length of the terrace. There is a similar wall that the rear gardens of the houses opposite back onto, the narrow lane between yielding the odd desiccated condom, and sprouting intermittent vegetation between Victorian cobbles. So Christopher is obliged to walk the length of his immaculate garden, enter theirs, and run the gauntlet of their hostile scrutiny as he approaches the barbecue. His gate opens easily. Theirs gives two inches to the shunt of his shoulder, and yields the rest of the arc with a rusty groan. Christopher stands in the gap, apologetic, glasses flashing back twin suns.
‘Christopher! You’ve timed it well. Your dog doesn’t seem to have eaten. If you haven’t either come and join us.’
It is a woman’s voice, floating through the smoke. She is sitting at a ramshackle table, the surface burned and scarred with usage. The man stands beside the barbecue wielding tongs that he snaps with an excess of virtuosity. He is wearing a plastic apron depicting a woman’s basque and tassled
breasts. As he passes the man, Christopher accepts the hand extended towards him. As he disengages he is surprised to find he is holding a bottle of beer. He puts this on the table and extends the same hand to the woman. She deflects this, stands, puts her arms around him and says, ‘We were sorry to hear.’
‘Hear, hear’ the man echoes.
Christopher is ashamed.
They are called Deborah and Oscar Bennett. They moved in eight years ago, with two moderately boisterous sons. Marjory stood at her bedroom window, taking inventory of their furniture. The younger boy was in his late teens, the other three years older. They played their music as loudly as people of that ago do, but the volume was no cause for scandal. On chance meetings they were mannerly, helpful, articulate and, as far as Marjory was concerned, exasperatingly difficult to qualify. The parents were no better. They drove a car as ramshackle as their furniture. Marjory was happy to brand them as philistines until one Sunday morning she heard husband and wife improvise a duet that incensed her with its plangency. Further disconcerting revelations came to light. Oscar had something to do with Covent Garden. Even if only in an administrative capacity, some of the vicarious status rubbed off. Marjory’s coffee morning cronies thought so. Deborah improvised some kind of studio in an outhouse, and obviously cared more about applying paint than cosmetics. She even had the temerity to go out for last-minute groceries with smudges of paint on her hands and hair. It was convenient for Marjory to brand them as unrealistic and self-indulgent bohemians, and she was foolish to hint as much to Christopher across the dinner table when he remarked, with devastating casualness: ‘You don’t afford a place round here with your head in the clouds. Besides, I bumped into the boys yesterday. Delightful. The older one’s reading law and the younger’s been offered a place at Cambridge next year. Medicine. That can’t be cheap for the parents. Be silly not to...’
‘Not to what?’ she said, very quietly.
‘Accept the place at Cambridge.’
She hated everything about them. She hated how his obvious love for his wife was compounded by his easy and public intimacies with his children: he kissed them with the verve of an Italian. She hated how these displays seemed only to gratify the neighbours, and cause them to reflect on their own English reticence, as if reserve is a sin. And if that wasn’t enough the wife flirted with journalism, and supplemented their income with ad hoc pieces in women’s magazines. While Marjory struggled, unsuccessfully, to publish an open letter in the community bulletin, she had to endure the humiliation of sitting in the hairdresser and having the familiar name pointed out to her from the well-thumbed page. The sons’ intelligence was undeniable and, as Christopher remarked with infuriating pragmatism: ‘They didn’t pick their brains off the ground.’
It’s hard enough to be overtaken by someone who has worked harder, run a better race. It’s harder still to be beaten by an undeserving victor, whose natural ability no amount of effort on your side will compensate for. But it’s intolerable to be completely eclipsed by someone who isn’t even aware of the competition.
Christopher had no idea. The everyday pleasantries began to falter when Marjory stopped acknowledging their ‘good morning’s. At first oblivious, he continued in his affable exchanges. When the younger son left for Cambridge, Christopher met him at the garden gate with a congratulations card and a book token. He hadn’t made any attempt to hide the gesture. When a thank you letter arrived and he revealed the gift, he was stunned by her glacial hostility.
The neighbours took the hint. They kept their greetings brief after that, continuing to walk while talking, so that the front door or the car marked a conclusion. Marjory pushed her advantage too far after the two couples smiled fleetingly at one another in the High Street: ‘Just because their son’s a doctor all of a sudden we’re not good enough.’
He let her arm, which had seized his for solidarity when they hove into sight, drop. He had belittled himself even though his motives, to honour a vow, had been good. He knew people aren’t revealed in the large, premeditated actions but by trivialities. He saw, fully. It was a shock. If he thought it would have done any good he would have turned on his heel, walked back and apologised. They have no reason to be magnanimous but here he is, with her arms round his old body, and the sweating beer awaiting him. She sits him down.
‘Thank you for the card.’
‘No worries, mate.’ Oscar experiments with an Australian accent.
‘Nevertheless...’ His intensity is obvious.
‘It was only a card. We’re not going to redeem your mortgage.’
‘I have to apologise for my husband. His manners are deplorable.’
‘Are they fuck.’
‘Oscar thinks it avant-garde to swear. He’d sound like the Archbishop of Canterbury if we lived in a slum, so he swears at a suburban barbecue with all the Volvos lined up.’
‘Do you want me to take you outside and give you a slap?’
‘We are outside, dear.’ Turning to Christopher, ‘Men go funny at a certain age. As long as he doesn’t present a bad example to the boys.’
Pleased at one of the good reminiscences this sparks he asks: ‘How are they?’
‘Able to see through their father.’
Oscar cooks. The first experimental sausages are incinerated. They test them on the dog who disdains them too. Oscar squeezes lemon over the grilling sardines.
‘Christopher, why don’t you go and fetch two of those beautiful cigars you’ve been teasing us with for the past few months. And get one for yourself. I’ll smoke Deborah’s.’
Back in the kitchen Christopher picks up a bottle of white wine, less for its grassy credentials than its topaz shadow. As he reaches for the cigars he hears laughter from the barbecue. Thinking back over his marriage he can’t recall a single memory of tenderness interrupted. He pockets the cigars and makes his slow way back up the garden path.
* * *
The phone pulls him from a restless sleep. Once he had retrieved one bottle he went back for another two. His sleep has been troubled and the reason for it isn’t likely to improve his mood. The dog lies leaden across his legs. The ringing seems to get more insistent as he fumbles for his glasses and locates the receiver.
‘Hello?’
‘It’s me, Christopher. She’s gone.’
It takes him a minute to realise that Sister Judith is speaking. He has never heard her voice catch before, and he realises how articulate the pause is. He has been drinking and she has gone. He wasn’t there, worse, he wasn’t thinking about her. He has no right to the credentials she credited him with.
‘I’m so sorry.’
‘I am too. You’d think in this line of work you’d get used to this.’ There is another pause. He tries to think of something comforting that doesn’t sound trite. The phone goes dead.
Five days later he rises unusually early. Spare keys to see to the dog have been left with Deborah. He didn’t want to impose on a friendship so recently re-established, but had no choice. A brief taxi ride runs him to the station. Dandelions grow in verdant sidings. A cultivated blur of colour overflows hanging baskets suspended the length of the platform. Early as it is for him, the worst of the suburban crush is over. Phalanxes of suburban gardens and intermittent park land begin to accelerate past. In the distance a brindled cow stares meditatively from an Alpine meadow, beneath a strapline advertising processed cheese. Green peters out until it becomes the exception, confined to urban rectangles, window boxes and exuberant weeds. Children, whose faces collectively exhibit all the colours of the brindled cow, vibrate on the playground tarmac. He feels a pang for them in their urban fastness, so different from the expanses that gave scope to his childhood imagination. He can still recall summer waves of itinerant hop pickers. Residential gives way to commercial. A gas works looms; an acre of flashing windscreens of deposited cars; low-rise office units and seated people in thrall to computer screens; Hungerford Bridge; the Thames rippling through a latticework of girders; Charin
g Cross.
He emerges from the station to a sparkling rain in the summer sunshine, waits his turn, umbrella raised, mentally rehearsing the address till his turn comes.
‘St Patrick’s, Soho Square please.’
He has the only taciturn taxi driver in the whole of London, perhaps disgruntled at the shortness of the fare, perhaps taking his cue from Christopher’s subfusc suit and black tie. He would have walked, but lateness is one of Christopher’s cardinal sins. On a card he has the address of the crematorium. He will order another taxi if necessary. Sister Judith has told him not to worry. ‘All else fails, you can cadge a lift with us.’ This was said two nights ago, dictating the details over the phone, while he found a pen and wrote with copperplate slowness. He is pleased her manner has reverted to its former brusque geniality.
The place is as surprising as Felicity’s dormant piety. He thinks the interior would have pleased her. Had she any association with this place, or do you take what you posthumously get? He’s sure George won’t be able to answer. And there he is, at the front of the meagre congregation, casting intermittent backward looks, taking inventory. He looks uncomfortable in this numinous place. Behind George are a number of local people, and on the other side of the aisle, unidentifiable from the back in their drab habits, are the Sisters. He sits behind them in solidarity, trying to pick out the youthful frame of Judith, till she turns and winks at him. He smiles. From his peripheral vision he notes that George has registered the exchange.
The service is longer and more elaborate that he imagined. He stands, kneels, sits, in concert with the nuns, is drowsily mesmerised by the responsorial psalm, intones hymns he scarcely knows and feels a mixture of piety and boredom. The chink of the censer and perfume of the incense adds to the unreality of the situation. He can’t come to grips with the conclusion that an entire abbreviated life is contained in that frivolous box. Marjory’s send-off didn’t give rise to this sense of absurdity, or existential mirth. The idea is so singular he wants to laugh out loud, and suppresses his mirth with tremors that run the length of the otherwise empty pew. He is reprieved by the sign of peace, when the clairvoyant Sister Judith turns and shakes his hand with a grip like Achilles. That sobers him.
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