One Good Turn

by Kate Atkinson

  “How’s Graham?” Pam asked.

  “Oh, you know,” Gloria said. “He’s Graham.” That was the truth of it, Graham was Graham, there was nothing more, nor less, that Gloria could say about her husband.

  “There’s a police car,” Pam said, standing on tiptoe to get a better look. “I can see a man on the ground. He looks dead.” She sounded thrilled.

  Gloria had fallen to dwelling a lot on death recently. Her elder sister had died at the beginning of the year, and then a few weeks ago she had received a postcard from an old school friend, informing her that one of their group had recently succumbed to cancer. The message “Jill passed last week. The first of us to go!” seemed unnecessarily jaunty. Gloria was fifty-nine and wondered who would be the last to go and whether it was a competition.

  “Policewomen,” Pam trilled happily.

  An ambulance nosed its way cautiously through the crowd. The queue had shuffled on considerably so now they could see the police car. One of the policewomen shouted at the crowd not to go into the venue but to stay where they were because the police would be collecting statements from them about the “incident.” Undeterred, the crowd continued to move in a slow stream into the venue.

  Gloria had been brought up in a northern town. Larry, her father, a morose yet earnest man, sold insurance door-to-door to people who could barely afford it. Gloria didn’t think people did that anymore. Her past already seemed an antiquated curiosity—a virtual space recreated by the museum of the future. When he was at home and not lugging his ancient briefcase from one unfriendly doorstep to another, her father had spent his time slumped in front of the fire, devouring detective novels and sipping conservatively from a half-pint glass mug of beer. Her mother, Thelma, worked part-time in a local chemist’s shop. For work, she wore a knee-length white coat, the medical nature of which she offset with a large pair of pearl-and-gilt earrings. She claimed that working in a chemist made her privy to everyone’s intimate secrets, but as far as the young Gloria could tell she spent her time selling insoles and cotton wool, and the most excitement she derived from the job was arranging the Christmas window with tinsel and Yardley gift boxes.

  Gloria’s parents led drab, listless lives that the wearing of pearl-and-gilt earrings and the reading of detective novels did little to enliven. Gloria presumed her life would be quite different—that glorious things would happen to her (as her name implied), that she would be illuminated within and without and her path would scorch like a comet’s. This did not happen!

  Beryl and Jock, Graham’s parents, were not that different from Gloria’s own parents, they had more money and were further up the social ladder, but they had the same basic low expectations of life. They lived in a pleasant “Edinburgh bungalow” in Corstorphine, and Jock owned a relatively modest building firm from which he had made a decent living. Graham himself had done a year of civil engineering at Napier (“waste of fucking time”) before joining his father in the business. Within a decade he was in the boardroom of his own large empire, HATTER HOMES—REAL HOMES FOR REAL PEOPLE. Gloria had thought that slogan up many years ago and now really wished that she hadn’t.

  Graham and Gloria had married in Edinburgh rather than in Gloria’s hometown (Gloria had come to Edinburgh as a student), and her parents traveled up on a Cheap Day Return and were away again as soon as the cake was cut. The cake was Graham’s mother’s Christmas cake, hastily converted for the wedding. Beryl always made her cake in September and left it swaddled in white cloths in the larder to mature, tenderly unwrapping it every week and adding a baptismal slug of brandy. By the time Christmas came around, the white cloths were stained the color of mahogany. Beryl fretted over the cake for the wedding, as it was still far from its nativity (they were married at the end of October), but she put on a stalwart face and decked it out in marzipan and royal icing as usual. In place of the centerpiece snowman, a plastic bridal couple was caught in the act of an unconvincing waltz. Everyone presumed Gloria was pregnant (she wasn’t), as if that would be the only reason Graham would have married her.

  Perhaps their decision to marry in a register office had thrown the parents off balance, “But it’s not as if we’re Christians, Gloria,” Graham had said, which was true. Graham was an aggressive atheist, and Gloria—born one-quarter Leeds Jewish and one-quarter Irish Catholic, and raised a West Yorkshire Baptist—was a passive agnostic, although, for want of anything better, “Church of Scotland” was what she had put on her hospital admission form when she had to have a bunion removed two years ago, privately at the Murrayfield. If she imagined God at all, it was as a vague entity that hung around behind her left shoulder, rather like a nagging parrot.

  Long ago, Gloria was sitting on a bar stool in a pub on the George IV Bridge in Edinburgh, wearing (unbelievable though it now seemed) a daringly short miniskirt, self-consciously smoking an Embassy and drinking a gin-and-orange and hoping she looked pretty while around her raged a heated student conversation about Marxism. Tim, her boyfriend at the time—a gangly youth with a white boy’s Afro before Afros of any kind were fashionable—was one of the most vociferous of the group, waving his hands around every time he said “exchange of commodities” or “the rate of surplus value” while Gloria sipped her gin-and-orange and nodded sagely, hoping that no one would expect her to contribute because she hadn’t the faintest idea what they were talking about. She was in the second year of her degree, studying history but in a lackadaisical kind of manner that ignored the political (the Declaration of Arbroath and Tennis-Court Oaths) in favor of the romantic (Rob Roy, Marie Antoinette) and that didn’t endear her to the teaching staff.

  She couldn’t remember Tim’s surname now, all she could remember about him was his great cloud of hair, like a dandelion clock. Tim declared to the group that they were all working class now. Gloria frowned because she didn’t want to be working class, but everyone around her was murmuring in agreement—although there wasn’t one of them who wasn’t the offspring of a doctor or a lawyer or a businessman—when a loud voice announced, “That’s shite. You’d be nothing without capitalism. Capitalism has saved mankind.”And that was Graham.

  He was wearing a sheepskin coat, a secondhand-car salesman’s kind of coat, and drinking a pint on his own in a corner of the bar. He had seemed like a man, but he hadn’t even reached his twenty-fifth birthday, which Gloria could see now was nothing.

  And then he downed his beer and turned to her and said, “Are you coming?” and she’d slipped off her bar stool and followed him like a little dog because he was so forceful and attractive compared to someone with dandelion-clock hair.

  And now it was all coming to an end. Yesterday the Specialist Fraud Unit had made an unexpected but polite appearance at Hatter Homes’ headquarters on Queensferry Road, and now Graham feared that they were about to throw a light into every murky corner of his business dealings. He had arrived home late, the worse for wear, downed a double of Macallan without even tasting it, and then slumped on the sofa, staring at the television like a blind man. Gloria fried for him a lamb chop with leftover potatoes and said, “Did they find your secret books, then?” and he laughed grimly and said, “They’ll never find my secrets, Gloria,” but for the first time in the thirty-nine years Gloria had known him, he didn’t sound cocky. They were coming for him, and he knew it.

  It was the field that had done it for him. He had bought a greenbelt site that had no planning permission attached to it, he had got the land cheaply—land without planning permission is just a field, after all—but then, hey presto, six months later the planning permission was granted and now a hideous estate of two-, three-, and four-bedroom “family homes” was under construction on the northeastern outskirts of town.

  A tidy little sum to someone in the planning department was all it had taken, the kind of transaction Graham had done a hundred times before, “greasing the wheels,” he called it. For Graham it had been a little thing, his corruption was so much wider and deeper and far-reaching th
an a green field on the edge of town. But it was the littlest things that often brought big men down.

  Once the ambulance containing the Peugeot driver had disappeared, the policewomen started to take statements from the crowd. “Hopefully we’ll get something on the CCTV,” one of them said, indicating a camera that Gloria hadn’t noticed, high up on a wall. Gloria liked the idea that there were cameras watching everyone everywhere. Last year Graham had installed a new state-of-the-art security system in the house—cameras and infrared sensors and panic buttons and goodness knows what else. Gloria was fond of the helpful little robots that patrolled her garden with their spying eyes. Once, the eye of God watched people, now it was the camera lens.

  “There was a dog,” Pam said, fluffing her apricot-tinted hair self-consciously.

  “Everyone remembers the dog,” the policewoman sighed. “I have several very accurate descriptions of the dog, but the Honda driver is variously described as ‘dark, fair, tall, short, skinny, fat, midtwenties, fiftyish.’ No one even took down his car’s registration number. You would think someone would have managed that.”

  “You would,” Gloria agreed. “You would think that.”

  They were too late now for the BBC radio showcase. Pam was delighted that they had been entertained by drama rather than comedy.

  “And I’ve got the Book Festival on Thursday,” she said. “You’re sure you don’t want to come?” Pam was a fan of some crime writer who was reading at the Book Festival. Gloria had no enthusiasm for crime writing, it had sucked the life out of her father, and anyway wasn’t there enough crime in the world without adding to it, even if it was only fictional?

  “It’s just a bit of escapism,” Pam said defensively.

  If you needed to escape, in Gloria’s opinion, then you just got in a car and drove away. Gloria’s favorite novel still resolutely remained Anne of Green Gables, which, when she was young, had represented a mode of being that, although ideal, hadn’t yet become impossible.

  “We could go for a nice cup of tea somewhere,” Pam said, but Gloria excused herself, saying, “Things to do at home,” and Pam said, “What things?”

  “Just things,” Gloria said. She was in an eBay auction for a pair of Staffordshire greyhounds that closed in two hours and she wanted to be in there at the finish.

  “My, but you’re a woman of secrets, Gloria.”

  “No, I’m not,” Gloria said.

  4

  Bright lights suddenly illuminated a white square, making the surrounding darkness seem even blacker. Six people walked into the square from all directions, they walked fast, crisscrossing one another in a way that made him think of soldiers performing a complex drill display on the parade ground. One of them stopped and began to swing his arms and rotate his shoulders as if getting ready for strenuous physical exercise. All six of them began to speak nonsense. “Unique New York, unique New York, unique New York,” a man said, and a woman answered, “Rubber baby buggy bumpers, rubber baby buggy bumpers,” while doing some kind of tai chi. The man who had been swinging his arms now addressed empty air, speaking rapidly without pausing for breath. “Thou-sleepst-worse-than-if-a-mouse-should-be-forced-to-take-up-her-lodging-in-a-cat’s-ear-a-little-infant-that-breeds-his-teeth-should-lie-with-thee-would-cry-out-as-if-thou-were-the-unquiet-bedfellow.” A woman stopped in the middle of her mad walking and declared, “Floppy fluffy puppies, floppy fluffy puppies, floppy fluffy puppies.” It was like watching the inmates of an old-fashioned asylum.

  A man walked out of the darkness and into the square of light, clapped his hands, and said, “Okay, everyone, if you’ve finished your warm-up, can we get on with the dress, please?”

  Jackson wondered if this was a good time to make his presence known. The actors—the “company”—had spent the morning doing the technical run-through. This afternoon they were having the dress rehearsal, and Jackson had been hoping that he could take Julia to lunch before then, but the actors were already attired alike in brown-and-gray shifts that looked like potato sacks. His heart sank at the sight of them. Theater, for Jackson, although of course he would never say this to any of them, was a good pantomime, preferably attended in the company of an enthusiastic child.

  The actors had arrived yesterday, they had been rehearsing in London for three weeks, and he was finally introduced to them for the first time last night in a pub. They had all gone into raptures— one of them, a woman older than Jackson, had jumped up and down in a parody of a small child, and another (already he had forgotten their names) dropped dramatically to her knees with her hands raised up in prayer to him and said, “Our savior.” Jackson had squirmed inwardly, he didn’t really know how to deal with thespian types, they made him feel staid and grown-up. Julia was standing in the background (for once) and acknowledged his discomfort by winking at him in a way that might have been salacious, but he couldn’t really tell because he had recently (finally) admitted to himself that he needed spectacles. The beginning of the end, downhill from now on.

  The actors were a small ad hoc group based in London, and Jackson had stepped in when at the eleventh hour they lost their funding to bring their play to the Edinburgh Fringe. Not out of any love of theater but because Julia had wheedled and cajoled in her usual over-the-top fashion, which was unnecessary—all she had needed to do was ask. It was the first real acting job she’d had in a while, and he had begun to wonder to himself (never to her, God forbid) why she called herself an actress when she hardly ever acted. When she thought she was about to lose this part at the last moment because of the lack of money, she had been plunged into a profound gloom that was so uncharacteristic of her that Jackson felt impelled to cheer her up.

  The play, Looking for the Equator in Greenland, was Czech (or maybe Slovakian, Jackson hadn’t really been listening), an existentialist, abstract, impenetrable thing that was about neither the equator nor Greenland (nor indeed about looking for anything). Julia had brought the script over to France and asked him to read it, watching him while he did so, saying, “What do you think?” every ten minutes or so as if he knew anything at all about theater. Which he didn’t. “Seems . . . fine,” he said helplessly.

  “So you think I should take the job?”

  “God, yes,” he said a little too promptly. In retrospect, he realized there was no question of her not taking the job and wondered if she’d known from the beginning that funding was going to be a nightmare and had wanted him to feel involved with the play in some way. She wasn’t a manipulative person, quite the opposite, but sometimes she had a way of looking ahead that surprised him. “And if we’re successful you’ll get your money back,” she said cheerfully when he offered. “And you never know—you might make a profit.” In your dreams, Jackson thought, but he didn’t say that.

  “Our angel,”Tobias, the director, had called him last night, embracing him in a queeny hug. Tobias was more camp than a Scout jamboree. Jackson had nothing against gays, he just wished that sometimes they wouldn’t be quite so gay, especially when being introduced to him in what had turned out, unfortunately, to be a good old-fashioned macho Scottish pub. Their “savior,” their “angel”—so much religious language from people who weren’t in any way religious. Jackson knew himself to be neither a savior nor an angel. He was just a guy. A guy who had more money than they did.

  Julia spotted him and waved him over. She looked flushed and her left eyelid was twitching, usually a sign she was wound too tightly. Her lipstick had almost worn off and her body was camouflaged by the sackcloth-and-ashes costume so that she didn’t really look like Julia at all. Jackson guessed that the morning hadn’t gone well. Nonetheless she gave him a big, smiley hug (say what you like about Julia, she was a real trouper), and he wrapped his arms round her and heard her breathing, wet and shallow. The “venue” where they had their makeshift theater was below ground level in the underbelly of a centuries-old building that was a warren of damp stone passages scuttling off in all directions, and he wondered if Julia could s
urvive down here without dying of consumption.

  “No lunch, then?” he said.

  She shook her head. “We haven’t even finished teching properly. We’re going to have to work through lunch. How was your morning?”

  “I took a walk,” Jackson said, “went to a museum and the Camera Obscura. Had a look at the grave of Greyfriar’s Bobby—”

  “Oh.” Julia made a tragic face. The mention of a dog, any dog, always provoked an emotional reflex in Julia. The idea of a dead dog upped the ante on the emotion considerably. The idea of a dead faithful dog was almost more than she could handle.

  “Yeah, I paid him your respects,” Jackson said. “And I saw the new Parliament Building as well.”

  “What was it like?”

  “I don’t know. New. Odd.”

  He could see she wasn’t really listening. “Shall I stay?” he asked. She looked panicked and said quickly, “I don’t want you to see the show until press night. It’s still a bit rough around the edges.” Julia was always upbeat about any piece of work, so he understood that “a bit rough around the edges” translated as “bloody awful.”This fact went unacknowledged between them. He could see wrinkles round her eyes that he didn’t remember being there two years ago. She stood on tiptoes to be kissed and said, “You have my permission to scarper. Go and have a good time.”

  Jackson kissed her chastely on the forehead. Last night, after the pub, he’d been expecting to have heroic sex with Julia the moment they got through the door of the rented flat in Marchmont that the promoters had found for her. New locations always tended to make her peppy where sex was concerned, but instead she said, “I’m going to die, sweetie, if I don’t go to sleep this very second.” It wasn’t like Julia not to want sex, Julia always wanted sex.