The Whole Day Through

by Patrick Gale

  Her friends did their best to put her off him. Tris claimed to find him uptight and boring. Amber drew attention to little physical details like the way he sweated with nerves when she and Tris were quizzing him or the way he wore old-fashioned leather shoes, half-brogues in fact, when most of them were in pointy ankle boots or Converse trainers. This being long before mobile phones, they all used to keep sheets of paper pinned to their doors so that disappointed callers could leave messages. Laura took to hiding from the others – easily done since they were incapable of climbing her long staircase without chattering on the way – and the messages left on her sheet grew shorter and ever less amusing.

  Laura was fairly sure Ben’s friends were no more supportive than hers, although he was far too loyal to say so. She couldn’t have been less like the privately educated girls his group favoured – girls with long, well-brushed hair, girls who wore dresses without irony, curiously unanimated girl-goddesses like Chloë Burstow who were unfailingly polite but exuded that supreme confidence born of knowing they knew how to behave in every situation, girls who saw nothing wrong with being called girls. His friends behaved towards her the way their mothers had taught them, boys giving up chairs and opening doors, girls tirelessly finding one thing she was wearing or carrying, however insignificant, they could praise. If she encountered them without Ben, however, accidentally sitting among them at dinner or breakfast, for instance, they were rude in the non-specific way of the well-brought-up.

  None of this mattered. When she and Ben were alone together, they fitted and it felt so right it barely warranted discussion. They adjusted in no time to functioning as students with their brains fogged by sleep deprivation and sex. In the Christmas and then the Easter holidays they rented space in an acquaintance’s Jericho house – that very house in Southmoor Road where the party had thrown them together. There they played at everyday domesticity, buying and cooking food together, sharing a sofa to watch telly, going to bed early and actually reading there: sweetly mundane activities from the non-student world. Those were her clearest memories of their time together – not their lovemaking, although they went at that with all the abundant compulsiveness of youth, but their playing house.

  ‘Damn!’ Her mother’s voice. ‘Ow!’

  Laura looked up to find Mummy teetering by the house door with a cup of coffee in either hand instead of her walking frame. She was spilling one of the mugs and had scalded her hand.

  ‘Damn,’ Laura echoed her, noting down the time in her client book then slipping out of the shed. ‘Sorry,’ she called. ‘Lost all track of time. Here. Let me take those then we can see to your hand. Lovely dress.’

  ‘Yes. I like it.’

  The scald wasn’t serious as it was only reheated breakfast coffee and Mummy hadn’t learnt how to use the microwave properly. They drank what was left, leaning in the kitchen, and munching the sort of luxurious, old lady biscuits she would never have bought while Laura’s father was still alive, then Laura drove her to the hospital.

  Mummy had an old, sun-bleached Austin Allegro, once cherry red, now a sort of bird-spattered pink, which Laura was insured to drive now that her own driving days seemed to have passed. Mummy had modified her passenger seat with an old round leather cushion on top of a plastic carrier bag, which made it easier for her to swivel her inflexible legs in and out at either end of the journey. Now that walking any distance was beyond her, outings in the car, however routine or banal, took on the character of jaunts and were a source of excitement. Laura would force herself to drive slowly so her mother could notice things and comment on them.

  The Falls Clinic was actually a thinly disguised research project. In exchange for submitting to various tests of reflex, cognition and short-term memory, patients – all of whom had suffered damaging falls in the past three years – were given a two-course lunch and were taught techniques for reaching for things they had dropped and put through exercises to improve their ability at righting themselves after a tumble and sometimes, to Mummy’s disgust, to sharpen their mental focus.

  Mummy disliked it because the nurses called her by her Christian name without asking and because the other patients tended to be too woolly in the head to provide much social stimulus. But she respected the value of scientific research and enjoyed the ping-pong – a game at which she had learnt to excel at Summerglades.

  Laura treasured the precious three hours of solitude the clinic gave her but suspected she did not make the best use of them. Some of the patients were brought by ambulance or hospital car but a few were always dropped off by their carers and she couldn’t help making comparisons. Did she look as worn already as that one or as thin lipped and humourless as that? She noted the way some were wildly overprotective of their charges and others almost off-hand. Apart from one younger sibling, who didn’t look far off needing hip-protective pants herself, they were all, she guessed, dutiful children or children-in-law. It was heartening to imagine these people seizing the next three hours as an opportunity to embrace afresh activities set aside as no longer feasible – riding motorbikes, attending life classes, having daylight liaisons with other able-bodied persons – but she suspected that most would pass the time in a state of shocked vacancy, reading a newspaper perhaps or simply lying on their sofas staring at the ceiling, wondering where their lives and energy had gone. The saddest would spend the parentless interval catching up on housework and household shopping and so avoid dangerous introspection entirely.

  She realized she had never found out which part of the hospital housed Ben’s GUM clinic and was so busy scanning the signs around her that she drove off in a lurching rush, earning herself a glare from a woman battling to fit a walking frame into the rear of her hatchback without scratching new paintwork.

  She chose to have a sandwich and fruit at her desk, for all the world as if she were working in a busy office, not her mother’s garden shed. By picking-up time, she would have sorted the screenwriter/poet’s paperwork, entered the figures in her computer and compiled several more awkward questions to ask her.

  LUNCH BREAK

  Periodically – it felt like once a month but was probably less – all GUM and HIV staff were expected to attend a drugs lunch in a seminar room in the hospital’s main buildings. They had endured these at Ben’s Chelsea and Westminster job too and the format was drearily familiar. A drugs company laid on a spread of sandwiches, fruit and chocolate bars in exchange for the chance to promote the virtues of new or infinitesimally improved products, to answer questions and to dole out samples and promotional freebies rarely more tempting than pens, notepads and the very occasional tee shirt. Both the GUM clinic and the HIV one were under constant pressure from the hospital’s management to keep within budget and were obliged to seek best value for money at every turn so these grim little sessions were a necessary evil. Ben had learnt that the trick was to pile his plate with lunch, sit at the back, ask one question to ensure his presence had registered then sink into a state of restorative torpor such as he hadn’t enjoyed since school divinity lessons.

  Today he could neither relax as he would like nor concentrate for once on the drug reps’ presentations. He ate his sandwiches and gulped his lukewarm apple juice but found he could not forget it was a Friday. Laura would be calling in to drop her mother off at the geriatric clinic.

  Chloë always said he had a lousy memory, and he played along with her image of him as the absent-minded boffin who forgot his own birthday, because it suited him and marital acquiescence was easier than trying to change her opinion. Secretly he had always believed his memory was a useful mental sieve, sifting out the things that mattered – phone numbers, pin numbers, the Latin names of viruses and pseudo-Greek ones of drugs. His memory discarded dinner-party conversations even as they were unspooling around him, and he was ruthless, despite his best efforts, at refusing to store the names and even faces of people he didn’t respect or simply hoped never to meet again. But he had always thought his ability to recollect events
was better than average and liked to think he would make a useful eyewitness in a court case.

  In the weeks after they rediscovered each other, Laura laid waste this idea he had of himself. With quiet ruthlessness, she brought him to see that what he thought of as the historical truth of their shared history was only a version, a narrative he had unconsciously shaped to cause the least pain for others and least blame for himself.

  He did not recognize her immediately – twenty years had passed and they were in a hospital corridor, after all, not a reunion in college, so he was not looking for old faces. He emerged from a crowded lift and she was standing several yards away. She had caught something – a piece of gravel perhaps – in her shoe and was balancing on one foot while she lifted the other behind her and twisted around to free her heel of its irritation. He didn’t normally notice clothes – not such a strong eyewitness after all, perhaps – but he remembered her sleeveless dress was simple and fairly short, the colour of a favourite pair of suede shoes Chloë had forcibly retired and not let him replace, a brown somewhere between bread crust and butterscotch. It was either very well cut or she had an excellent figure; without her inside it would surely have looked like a sack. Her arms and legs were lightly tanned and her short hair hung across her face as she arched backwards. She was anonymous and elegant, and elegance in a busy general hospital was as unexpected as dancing.

  Then she stood upright again, glanced at her watch and looked about her, looking straight through him, with a hot, cross expression on her face, and he was sure it was her, even with the shorter, discreetly coloured hair. She took a step or two away from him then stopped and repeated the gesture because whatever was wrong in her shoe was still not right, and he looked again at her heel and flexing calf muscle and out of nowhere had a vivid recollection of how it felt when she pressed the sole of her foot into the much bigger sole of his as they lay end to end on a sofa and laughed and said, ‘I can actually see you all the way round!’

  He called her name, or said it tentatively, thinking that if it wasn’t her he could walk on and pretend he was calling out to someone else. And she looked round. It was definitely her, but she still looked straight through him and he thought twenty years and remembered he was in a suit and getting his father’s jowls and had greying hair. He was tempted to duck back into the crowd and walk swiftly in the opposite direction.

  When she did recognize him it was such a relief he asked her out before he had gathered his wits sufficiently to be nervous. She glanced at his wedding ring, much as he did with patients, but she said yes, in a day or two, and they took out their mobiles to exchange numbers.

  They never went on dates as students; they were too poor. Like all their peers they went about things in the reverse order to the practice of their parents’ generation. They had sex, realized they got on really well then fell in love. His recollection was that the love part in their case had been naïve and simple, consisting largely of saying I do love you a lot, usually when in bed, and hardly carried over at all into their daily lives as students. She continued to see her friends, he his, and the two groups had no common ground. He remembered the relationship as existing within a kind of bubble. He remembered no great trauma at its ending, simply a kind of regretful, muted cadence as the relentlessly realistic demands of medicine took over. Compared to his courtship of Chloë, whom he only took up with after finals, it was a delicate, dreamlike affair conducted largely at night.

  Chloë was all for the bright pragmatism of day and in many ways, looking back, it was she who courted him. She shyly got a mutual friend – a school friend who hated one of Laura’s friends for some reason – to introduce them as she confessed to having a spare ticket to their college’s ball. She took him to meet her parents – the bullying, newly titled surgeon and his polite, browbeaten shadow of a wife – and he remembered wondering if Chloë were programmed to marry medicine. Then the physical infatuation he felt with her, the disgracefully blokeish pleasure and pride her proximity aroused in him, was reinforced by the potent persuasion of suddenly feeling his life joined up. His friends knew her friends and both sides heartily approved the match. And it was a match, in their eyes, whereas the other, the thing with Laura, his mates had treated as odd, dirty fun, as if he’d had a girlfriend who wasn’t even a student…

  All of which made them sound hateful but they weren’t. They were lovely, decent people. They cared. But far more than he, the anomalous scholarship cuckoo in their midst, they were products of careful upbringing, insistently trained to conform, or only to rebel within carefully circumscribed parameters, and inculcated with a deep sense of insecurity when away from their own kind.

  He had thought of none of this for years, twenty years, until he took Laura on a date to a restaurant where, characteristically, she insisted in advance she would be paying her share in a way that Chloë, despite a hefty trust fund, never had.

  They had exchanged numbers and made a vague agreement to go out once she had had time to settle her mother back home and time to settle in herself, but he could have avoided ringing her and ignored her call if she rang him. They had run into each other just when he was especially depressed about his marriage, however, just beginning to admit to himself that it had been a mistake, so it seemed like a piece of fate. He had retained few close friends and they were all married, child-bearingly and happily so, apparently, and to voice doubts about a marriage to anyone in such a tight-knit group of people was to unstopper a baleful genie. Laura stood in isolation from the rest of his life and always had. And exes, even exes not seen in twenty years, surely knew one and understood one in ways friends never could. It was only supper, he told himself, an innocent, catch-up supper. If he told her about him and Chloë it would go no further and anyone, even Chloë, would understand friends who hadn’t seen each other in twenty years wanting to catch up.

  Laura was a friend. That was his overwhelming sense in the redfaced minutes after running into her in the hospital – not that she was a former girlfriend but that she was a long-lost boon companion. Nonetheless, when Chloë rang on the afternoon of their supper and left a message – some mundane query about service charges in their block of flats – he texted her back an answer rather than risk ringing her, for fear that he might blurt out with whom he was about to spend the evening.

  Luckily the restaurant was not too quiet. It was on the raised ground floor of a handsome Georgian house in a row of such houses near the county court, most of which were given over to barristers’ chambers and estate agents. The atmosphere was clubbily masculine and unfussy – with dark wood, white linen, candlelight and pretty young waitresses who sounded as though their fathers might eat there. He ordered calf’s liver, she a rare steak without the chips and, since neither of them was driving, they shared a bottle of claret. Then their waitress left them alone to talk and the twenty-year gap came home to him afresh.

  They were edgily polite at first, re-establishing that Laura had moved there from Paris to care for her mother, he from London to care for his brother, then she had seemed to challenge him.

  ‘So you went and married Chloë Burstow,’ she said.

  ‘Yes,’ he said and heard himself apologize.

  ‘Are you?’ she asked. ‘Sorry, I mean?’

  ‘Of course. I…I…’ He fell silent.

  She topped up his wine. ‘She always scared me, you know.’

  ‘No! Who? Chloë?’

  ‘Yes. She was so composed, so grown up. We all wanted to hate her, of course, because she was rich and did modelling. So we used to bitch and say how she was so reserved because she was actually very thick. People claimed she’d failed Oxbridge but then somehow been found miraculously to have passed it after all once Daddy made a donation to the college.’

  ‘Mummy. It’s her mother that had the money. She married down but, because he got a handle for services to medicine, people didn’t always realize.’

  ‘Ah, bon?’

  ‘And Chloë isn’t stupid, not at
all. She’s just not…’ He shuffled his wineglass.

  ‘Clever,’ Laura supplied.

  ‘No,’ he admitted then glanced up. ‘You’re laughing at me, aren’t you?’

  ‘I’m in deadly earnest.’

  ‘It’s odd,’ he said. ‘I can’t think clearly when I’m near her. My only power in the marriage comes when we’re apart. She may not be a brain surgeon but there’s a persuasive strength to her that…’ He broke off, seeing Laura was frowning. ‘Sorry. This is the last thing you want to talk about.’

  ‘Nonsense. It’s your last twenty years. What else are we going to talk about?’

  Then she smiled with a bracing kind of solicitude and he knew he could tell her anything. ‘I think the marriage is probably over,’ he admitted. He had told nobody this until then. ‘We’re not divorced or anything. But having to move here for a bit because of Bobby and being without her has made me see things more clearly. It’s only a question of time and courage. We never loved each other. Not really. I think we both see that now.’

  ‘Honestly?’ she asked.

  ‘No,’ he admitted slowly, as much to himself as her. ‘I think she probably loves me. In some awful way I think she loves me more as she senses me withdrawing from her. Her father’s such a bastard I benefit by comparison without even trying. She sort of needs me to balance him. She thinks I’m good. The Good Doctor.’

  ‘And aren’t you?’

  ‘I’m just a doctor who hasn’t put money first. That hardly makes me a saint. But she…We haven’t spoken properly, not honestly, for ages. She forwards my mail and sometimes scribbles cross little notes on the back of it.’

  ‘Doesn’t she ring you?’

  He sighed.

  She smiled wistfully. ‘Oh dear. Of course she rings. Are there children?’