Easy Meat (32 page)

“One, sir?” the waitress asked, friendly enough.

“Er, I’m meeting somebody.”

She gave Resnick a look that seemed to signify “as if” and consigned him to a table near the coffee machine, where she promptly forgot about him till Stella walked in. Stella in a bright top, colored tights and clumpy boots, and a skirt so short as to be hardly worthy of the name.

Resnick half rose to greet her, embarrassed by her youthful attractiveness and conscious of those eyes watching from behind dark glasses, weighing up the nature of their relationship.

“How’s your mum holding up?” Resnick asked, once Stella had sat down.

“Oh, you know, pretty well considering. Sometimes I think it still hasn’t properly sunk in. Maybe it won’t while I’m still around.”

“How long’s that likely to be?”

“I ought to go back, oh, the end of the week.”

Resnick ordered a double espresso and Stella a fizzy mineral water and a piece of chocolate cake that came, small and rich, marooned in the middle of a large white plate.

For ten minutes or so they talked about nothing very much, Resnick relaxed enough now to enjoy Stella’s company, the way she would throw back her head and laugh aloud at one of her own anecdotes about college. They think I’m her father, he thought, sneaking an hour off work to spend with his daughter, one of her rare visits home from university.

“I don’t know what to call you,” Stella said, suddenly. “I know my dad always used to call you Charlie.”

“Charlie’s fine.”

But she shook her head. “Not serious enough.”

“Is that what I am?”

“Aren’t you?” Cake finished, she surprised him by taking a packet of cigarettes from her bag, signaling to the waitress for an ashtray. “You see, you’re disapproving.”

“Am I?”

“Yes.” Drawing the first lungful of smoke down deep. “You think, nice young girl, into the environment, ought to be taking care of her body in the same way. Something like that, anyway.”

Resnick supposed she might be right.

“You’re not—what’s the word?—frivolous, are you, Charlie? You have to do things for a reason.”

Despite himself, almost as if to disprove her, Resnick laughed. “How do you know, I mean, here you are, the first time I’ve seen you in years. Certainly the first time we’ve ever …”

“Been alone.”

“Had a proper conversation …”

“And I’m analyzing you.”

“Yes.”

She smiled. “Charlie, I don’t just know about trees. The reason we’re here, for instance, it’s not casual. You didn’t call me on the spur of the moment. Not that there’d be anything wrong in that, but you just wouldn’t do it.” She grinned. “Even if it occurred to you, you’d hold back. Too many possible complications.”

Uncomfortable, Resnick looked round for the waitress. “D’you want anything else? I’m going to have another espresso.”

She watched him while he ordered, waited while the waitress cleared their used crockery away. “Well? I’m right, aren’t I?”

Resnick leaned forward. “I wanted to ask you …”

“Yes?”

“Your parents, they had separate rooms.”

“Yes, Dad’s insomnia …”

“And this first happened when?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Two or three years ago, maybe. But why do you want to know?”

“You were still living at home then, when they made this decision?”

“Doing A levels, yes.”

“And did they say much, d’you remember, about why they were going to make this change?”

“Yes, like I said, my dad, he couldn’t sleep properly, he thought it would be best for my mum, they both thought it would be …” Stella broke off abruptly and reached for another cigarette; there were things she didn’t want to see forming behind her eyes. “You think something was going on, don’t you? You think he was having an affair? My dad. That’s what you were on about the other day, all that fuss about that phone call. God, Charlie! You think he was sleeping around.”

Slowly, Resnick shook his head. “I don’t know.”

Stella shook her head and laughed. “You didn’t know him very well after all. He just wasn’t like that. I know that’s what you’d expect me to say, but it’s true. He just wasn’t. Apart from anything else, there was all that religion. His preaching. Even if he’d been tempted, he’d never have let himself.” She held the smoke inside her mouth, releasing it through her nose. “If it was either of them having an affair, it would have been Mum. Not him.”

It was Resnick’s turn to be surprised. For some moments, he tried to imagine Margaret, small, dumpy Margaret … “Why do you say that?” he asked.

“Because she was the one who had nothing else.”

“She had children, you.”

Stella laughed again, brittle and raw. “I was seventeen, eighteen, my brothers had long left home. I had this boyfriend, older than me. We were sleeping together. Mum and I we never talked about it, but she must have known. It’s not so difficult to imagine what that’s like, your baby girl out there having sex and enjoying it, night after night, and you … I doubt if she and Dad had done it for years.”

Resnick’s mind was on overtime. “What you’re saying …”

“Do I know it for a fact? No, not at all. I certainly didn’t think it at the time. But then I would have been so wrapped up in what was happening to me, I think she could have done it on the kitchen table and I’d hardly have noticed.” She giggled, suddenly young again. “Well, I think I might have noticed that.”

She stubbed out her half-smoked cigarette. “About Mum, you won’t need to say anything, will you? Ask her, I mean? It probably isn’t true, none of it. Just my fertile imagination and besides, even if there was some truth in it, it couldn’t have anything to do with what happened to my dad, could it? I mean, how could it?”

Resnick shook his head. “I don’t know. But you’re right, it’s difficult to see.”

“Then you won’t say anything to her, to my mum?”

“I shouldn’t think so.”

Stella beamed and ordered a hot chocolate. “You notice a bit of a theme here?” she asked. “Hot chocolate, chocolate cake.” And then, “All those times you used to come round to the house with Dad, I used to hang around, follow you from room to room. I always wanted you to notice me, but you never did.”

“I’m sorry, I …”

“I used to think you were lovely. I had this photograph of you, I’d cut it from the paper. I used to keep it in my room, hidden in case anyone saw it. You never even noticed I was there.”

Resnick was blushing. “God, Stella, you were about twelve.”

Stella laughed, spilling hot chocolate over the table. “I can’t help it, I was advanced for my age.” She was dabbing at the table with her napkin. “Now I’ve shocked you.”

“No.”

“Yes, I have. All these steamy revelations about the Aston family women in one afternoon?

The waitress was weighing in with a cloth, murmuring something about coming back to mop the floor. Stella scraped back her chair, smoothing down her skirt onto royal-blue thighs. “I think we ought to go, don’t you? Before we turn this place into a wreck.”

Resnick thanked the waitress and paid the bill.

On the cobbled street outside, for a moment Stella took his arm. “So, Charlie—I like calling you that now—how about you, have you got a girlfriend or what?”

It took him a while to answer. “Yes,” he said. “At least, I think so.”

“Ooh.” Stella laughed. “I should make sure, if I were you. You never know, whoever she is, she might not see it that way at all.”

Thirty-seven

He saw her rounding the corner into Broad Street, hurrying a little, but not so much that she didn’t pause to check her reflection in the window of an Italian restaurant: a linen jacket over a pale-blue top, dark-blue, wide-cut linen trousers. She looked, Resnick thought, lovely.

“Charlie, I’m sorry I’m late.”

“No, it’s me. I was early.”

In a slightly proprietorial way, Hannah touched her lips to his cheek. “I phoned ahead,” she said, “and reserved two tickets, just in case.”

Resnick reached for his wallet, but she stopped him, her fingers circling his wrist. “My treat.”

They took their seats just as the film was about to start. A street scene in what Resnick presumed was New York: the Alfreton Road it certainly was not. Too bright, too brash, too fast-moving—all those garish signs and yellow cabs. But then the camera followed a number of the people into the calmer space of an old theater, men and women dressed casually, greeting one another as old friends. Actors, Resnick supposed. Hannah had told him—all she had said by way of warning—it was about actors rehearsing a Russian play. Well that, he supposed, was what this was.

A fortyish man complaining to an older woman about how hard he has been having to work, so many jobs, different times of the day. When they sat down, she asked him if he would like a drink, and the man shook his head ruefully and told her he was trying to stop drinking vodka in the middle of the day.

Vodka: Resnick’s attention perked up. And as they continued to talk, this couple, their language barely changing, he gradually realized that what he was hearing was the beginning of the play. Without announcement or much preamble, the thing itself had begun. Uncle Vanya. They were watching it now.

For close to two hours, Resnick fidgeted a little in his seat—legs too long, body weight not distributed quite right—but his attention rarely wavered from the screen; and when it did, it was only to glance across at Hannah, her close profile, the degree to which she was held rapt. Near the end, the way she pulled a tissue from her bag and dabbed away the tears.

“Well, Charlie, what did you think of that?” They were on their way downstairs, people milling round them in a haze of conversation.

What did he think?

That he had recognized them, these people, quarrelling endlessly about the estate on which they lived and worked, promises not clearly made and never kept, love which remained undeclared until it was too late. The best hopes of their lives had passed them by because they had been afraid to act. To speak. To say what they felt. These people he knew.

“I mean,” they were down at the ground floor now, others spilling round them on all sides, “did you like it? The film.”

Smiling, Resnick surprised her by taking her arm. “Yes, I did. Now,” steering her over towards the Café Bar, “did you say something about eating in here?”

It was busy but they found a table close against the back wall and Resnick ate small pieces of chicken steeped in garlic, while Hannah picked at something spicy with red peppers and aubergine and talked about the film. Resnick content for the most part to listen, sneak occasional glances around the room, chip in the odd word or two, sip his wine.

“Come on,” he said, outside, “let’s get a cab. I’ll see you home.”

“It’s a nice night,” Hannah said. “We could walk.”

And they did, through the square and up Derby Road, Hannah asking him about his marriage, what had happened, no need for him to talk about it if he didn’t want to or if it made him feel uncomfortable, it wasn’t any of her business, but talk he did, mapping the slow shifts of his and Elaine’s relationship in a way that moved her, as she had been moved earlier, in the cinema. His slow, careful telling of it affecting her with the pain it still rekindled for him, the sense, still there, of loss; the generosity, finally, with which he spoke about Elaine, despite her leaving him, falling in love with another man.

“Do you ever hear from her, Charlie?”

“Not really, no.”

They were crossing at the lights below the Savoy, not so far to go, down past the small hotel and then a left turn onto the path beside the park which led to Hannah’s house. Which was where, some fifty yards along, the man stumbled out of the bushes directly in front of them, Hannah jumping back with a stifled scream and Resnick instantly on guard, adrenaline firing in. The man swayed, face a pale blur in the light from the upstairs windows opposite, and then made to hurry past, but when Resnick moved across to block his path, raised a hand to detain him, he cowered back and began to shout.

“It’s okay, it’s okay,” Resnick said, cautiously moving close, the man not shouting now, but mumbling over and over, words draining into one another, “Keepbackkeepbackkeepback.”

He made a sudden dart, trying to squeeze past between Resnick and the fence and Resnick caught him by the arm and swung him round and all resistance went out of the man and he cried. There were cuts, Resnick could see now, high on his face, a broad gash above his left eye, a graze all down one cheek.

“It’s all right,” Resnick said quietly, and then, to the man, taking another careful step towards him, “No one’s going to hurt you, it’s okay.”

“What can we do?” Hannah asked anxiously.

“Nip home. Phone for an ambulance.”

The man began to scream.

“Go on,” Resnick said, Hannah hesitating. “Do it now.”

“Not the hospital,” the man was moaning. “Please not.”

“Why don’t we take him to my place?” Hannah said. “He could sit down a minute, calm down. The hospital’s only up the road after all.”

Resnick was thinking, thinking about the marks on the man’s face, how they might have been caused. “All right,” he said. “Maybe that’s best.”

Hannah moved past him to the man, who flinched when she made as if to touch him, but agreed finally to walk beside her towards the terraced houses at the end, walking slowly as if each step hurt.

He was older than Resnick had first judged, mid-thirties he now would have said, wearing black jeans with patches of dirt down one side and below the knees, a collarless black shirt spotted with blood, white Nike Air trainers with a blue stripe.

“Here.” Hannah coming towards him with a dampened cloth to wipe away some of the blood, the man sitting up to her kitchen table, blinking at the light.

Resnick stopped her with her name, not loud but firm, and she looked across at him, head tilted in a question. “Gloves,” Resnick said. “Kitchen gloves, something like that. Use them. Just in case.”

Hannah hesitated on the verge of questioning him, challenging, then did as he said. While she cleaned the man up, Resnick made tea.

“What’s your name?” Hannah asked, and when he didn’t reply, said, “I’m Hannah. Hannah Campbell, this is my house.”