Exposure (53 page)

'No. She comes when she can,' Alistair said, speaking mechanically, and then feeling fraudulent for implying an intimacy with the facts of Ivy's life.

As they turned a last corner, past a desk with a dispensary, a receptionist and a few attendant nurses, Julia said, 'I do hope I haven't rushed you. We're brisk walkers, nurses. What have you done to your poor leg?'

'Me? I ... The kneecap and shin are injured,' Alistair said.

He watched her wait for a moment, and then, having seen that no further explanation was coming, she said sympathetically, 'Dear me. How painful. Well, here we are. This is Geoff's room. Just come out if there are any problems and one of the nurses at the desk will assist you right away.'

'Yes. Thank you.'

She was still looking at him. 'Mr Langford, you seem a little ... Are you OK?'

'Oh, perfectly. Thank you very much,' he said.

She took her hand off his arm and he watched her walk away to the desk. She leant over the counter, playfully tilting back her lower leg, and took a sweet out of a bag by the phone.

'Oy, you—get your own!' The receptionist laughed, snatching the packet away.

Alistair turned away from them and knocked. He got no reply, but as he leant towards the door, he thought he could hear voices and wondered if Geoff already had a visitor. He glanced back at the laughing nurses, hating them for their obliviousness. He was appalled at the casual way he had been abandoned at the door, subject to such profound uncertainties.
Were
there other people in the room? Why had the dreadful impropriety of this not occurred to the nurse?

He pushed the door open anyway, and immediately opposite him sat Geoff. In the first few moments of sensory comprehension, Alistair saw that he had become a very old man. He was much more drastically aged than Ivy, though there could only have been a few years between them. A portable radio was playing on the bedside table, which accounted for the voices he had heard in the room.

Geoff looked up at him and, divided by a deep cleft between his brows, his face appeared to crack with anguish. 'Oh, no,' he said simply.

Why was the fist always aimed so accurately at Alistair's heart? He cleared his throat and said, 'Geoff, I'm so sorry this is unexpected.'

Geoff shook his head and glanced down. 'Oh, no,' he said again.

Alistair felt unable to support his own weight any more and sat down on the end of the bed. 'Look, I'm sorry. I've obviously shocked you. I knew I would, really. How does one break a silence quietly? You know why I'm here, of course, I went to see Ivy yesterday and we had a long talk. I—' He broke off. From the window there was a view of the edge of the forecourt and one side of the lawn. It lay beyond a corridor formed by two walls. A car passed through this sunny gap, and the woman driver waved at someone who must have been on the forecourt, waving back. At the end of the lawn, the chestnut trees were moving in the wind.

'I'm finding it hard to know what to say,' Alistair said. He was aware that Geoff was still intermittently shaking his head. Had he been imaginatively equipped to picture this scene, Geoff's reaction would have been the realization of a nightmare.

'Oh, God, you must understand why I needed to come. Don't you?' Alistair said desperately. 'I'm getting old now too, but it's—well, it's never too late. Please, Geoff,' he said, 'are you angry? For God's sake, please don't be angry with Ivy.'

At last Geoff looked at him. He pointed at the radio. 'The cricket,' he said sadly, 'and it looks like rain.'

Alistair listened to the radio voices for a moment. It was not a cricket match at all—it was some kind of cookery programme. 'Then beat the egg whites until they're stiff' said a brisk, female voice.

'Oh, no,' Geoff said. 'He says it looks like rain.'

Alistair put his head in his hands. In the background, the female voice went on, 'Take an orange and grate the zest, being careful not to cut into the white pith underneath. Orange zest is very high in vitamin C, so you can feel you're looking after yourself as well as making a lovely pudding.'

When Alistair took his hands from his face, he saw that Geoff had fallen asleep. Very gently, and with a kind of ceremonial reverence destined only to be noticed by himself, Alistair switched off the radio.

Why had Ivy not warned him? When she told him Geoff had become 'too much' for her, he had not imagined this. How could he have imagined this? He looked at the old man's peaceful, sleeping face: the anxiety about the cricket had fallen away and the deep cleft between the brows had softened. 'Well,' Alistair said gently, 'I'm your son. And that makes you my father.'

He glanced around him for a moment—at a photograph of Ivy on the chest of drawers, which, without anyone noticing it, had slipped sideways in its frame, half obscuring her face; he looked at Geoff's comb and toothbrush and at the little crucifix standing beside them. Alistair imagined Ivy had probably brought the crucifix in. He walked over to it and picked it up, taking in the effeminate little figure with the down-hanging head.

Growing older had brought a paradoxical understanding to Alistair. On the one hand, on peaceful Sunday afternoons, when he remembered his youthful arrogance and the elaborate means by which it had been schooled out of him, he was aware of a composition, of an artist whose sense of proportion lay far beyond the bounds of his own self-pity and desire. But, on the other hand, when he went over recent events, so many of them acquiring their narrative significance only by weird fluke, they seemed to him to have been generated by chance, by a computer, perhaps, spewing mathematical possibilities.

He turned back to the sleeping old man in the chair. Dear old Geoff. Dear 'tempted' Geoff with his corner shop and his piles of coloured pencils and his sugary fingers and his shoulders for riding on and his paper aeroplanes and his pint of bitter and his 'girls'...

And it had been too late, after all.

This did not suggest an eye for composition! At best the whole idea was recklessly unfinished, tossed out at humanity as if to solve an amusing after-dinner conundrum. If God existed, Alistair thought, He was not a great artist: He was a brandy-swilling dilettante with a comical frame of mind.

Alistair ran his fingers over the little arms and legs, the tiny wrists nailed to the cross. A faint memory stirred in him. Instantly he was sure he had seen this figure of Jesus often before. Wasn't it the one that had once stood by his mother's bed? Surely it was the one he had learnt to say his prayers in front of as a child?

What on earth was it doing here? He could not recall its having been in the box of his mother's possessions, which he had left for Ivy to go through. And, in fact, when he thought about it, he knew Ivy had never been much of a believer, so it was unlikely she had either been given it by her friend before death or chosen it afterwards as a memento. No, Ivy would have chosen a brooch,
a headscarf, one of the hide china dogs to remember her old friend June.

There was only one explanation. His mother had given her little crucifix to Geoff herself. This act, with its implied slow music of shared guilt and sympathy, and of enduring attachment, moved Alistair deeply.

Luke's own beauty came as a surprise to him. He had not shaved or washed his hair for two weeks. He stood in a bath towel in front of the mirror and studied his sharp, handsome face for a moment, the dark-blond hair with its platinum streaks, the lightly tanned flawless skin, the neat symmetrical mouth and large grey eyes he had inherited from his mother. Losing weight had made his cheekbones stand out and he looked supernaturally lean as a film star. His stomach was flat and smooth and muscular. He took no personal satisfaction in these observations—except in the sense that they made him feel well prepared, well armed.

He patted on some aftershave, then he went into the bedroom and put on a sky blue cotton shirt and a pair of cream linen trousers. He chose a brown leather belt, his white gold and opal cufflinks and a pair of worn tan loafers. He looked at his reflection—Eurotrash to a T; effortless elegance achieved only with much idle consideration and at great expense. He would fit in perfectly. In fact, he would look better than Jamie Turnbull who had rather vulgar taste in clothes, who wore designer labels and silk shirts and indulged in celebrity-style caprices, like flip-flops and Nehru collars and diamond pinkie rings. Well-brought-up people who had been to good schools wouldn't dream of dressing like that, he thought.

He took the gun out of his desk drawer along with the last of the Zylamaprone
^TM
. The party didn't start until eight thirty, and since he hardly wanted to arrive on the dot, he had plenty of time for a joint. There was only a tiny bit of stale marijuana left, so along with it he crumbled almost a whole cigarette into a king size Rizla and, having crushed up the Zylie with the back of his hairbrush, sprinkled the powder on top. He was still not sure it really did anything—there was no raised heartbeat or chomping of the teeth or other obvious signs of euphoria, but he had been encouraged by the large number of 'Zylie-face' addiction-support sites: '
www.yourkidsandzylamaprone.com
' had contained an incredible list of warnings, and people were not idiots after all—they must be doing it for something.

On the desk was the gold invitation to the Lapis-Lazuli opening party. He had managed to get it through Caroline Selwyn, the plain, brainy friend of Jessica's, who had worked with his sister at the
Telegraph.
They had bumped into each other at Zaza's. The brilliant idea that Caroline, who had never been popular or fashionable while they were at university, might have access to party invitations because of her work had occurred to Luke as he watched her come through the rotating doors.

He knew Caroline had always been interested in him. She used to visit Jessica when he and Ludo shared a house with her and it had been obvious she was always hoping to see him, too. Caroline had gone silent whenever he walked into the kitchen, which had made him uncomfortable. She was one of those girls who had crushes rather than boyfriends, and he knew Jessica was always trying to persuade her to see this made her unhappy. It must be difficult for ugly people, he thought, with a genuine twitch of compassion in his heart. It wasn't as if being ugly made you fancy other ugly people.

He waved at Caroline from his vantage-point at the bar at Zaza's. So, she still had the acne, he noticed, which was just bad luck at twenty-eight.

Having enacted his side of the reunion and suavely bought her a Cosmopolitan, he said, 'So, do you, like, get invitations to all the big parties and stuff?'

'Why would ... Oh, what, through the
Telegraph,
you mean? Because I'm a journalist?'

He nodded and she watched him take a creamy gulp of his cocktail and lick his lips.

'Oh. Well, you see, I'm actually not that sort of journalist. I write features—um, you know, the commenty bits—and I do this column. Political stuff, really. Not very
showbiz,
I'm afraid.'

'Oh. Oh, right,' Luke said, making it clear she had disappointed him. He knew Caroline thought he was thick, but he also knew she wanted him anyway—for his eyes and his mouth and his legs. He thought he could probably have asked her to come home with him now. 'Oh, that's a shame,' he said.

He lit a cigarette and blew the smoke away from her over his shoulder. Surely she could use a little initiative on his behalf, he thought. In the corner of his eye, he saw Caroline's hand move unconsciously across the bar counter, as if to draw him back.

'No, but I mean I can
get
them,' she said. 'I can
get
invitations—
easy.
Tash, the girl who does the diary, she's always got loads. Actually, it might be Sash—I should find out. Why? Where d'you want to go?'

'Oh, it's just this bar opening.' He turned back to her and smiled shyly. Then he shrugged, letting his hair fall into his eyes. He eyed her through it, then pushed it back with both hands, turning the gesture into a stretch that lifted his shirt an inch or two above his leather belt.

His stomach was boyishly smooth and brown and her mouth watered at the sight of it. She would have liked to pour the creamy cocktail over it and lick up the sweet rivers as they ran over that chest, round that sculpted back... 'A bar opening? Well, I'm sure it's no problem. I can just ask Tash—or Sash—if you want me to...' she said.

'Really? Do you really think so?
God,
that's cool of you.'

It had always been easy for Luke to get girls to do things for him. The ones he went out with at university had often done his washing and come by to cook supper. There had been a group. Sophie referred to them as Sweetie, Darling, Poppet and Dumb-Sloane, his four 'intellectual dwarfs'. He was aware that his father thought the girls he saw were idiots, too. It gave Luke immense pleasure to think the old bastard would have been sick with jealousy if he had met Arianne.

The invitation to the party had arrived in the post a week ago, with a note from Caroline giving him her phone number and suggesting they 'try not to lose touch again'. It seemed an odd phrase—they never had been 'in touch'. He hadn't been aware of the existence of Caroline Selwyn even once since bumping into her eight years ago when she had been revising for finals with Jessica in the Duke of Clarence.

Luke put down the invitation. It was still only nine o'clock and he went to the kitchen, took a beer from the fridge and stood on the garden steps to smoke the Zylie joint. He looked over at the annexe and thought Mila was probably sleeping deeply after another hard day's vacuuming and ironing. He wondered what her surprise had been. And what had she and Goran been arguing about? Was it really so important they couldn't even let him in? It was his annexe, after all.

But he was not really upset about that—possessions, ownership had a limited value to him at the moment. It was just that it had seemed so unfair to have nothing but that weird glimpse through the doorway at what had become a sanctuary for him. He needed access to these other young people because a sleepless night was like solitary confinement. And it was always particularly hard after he had admitted that Arianne could only be in bed and that there was no chance of bumping into her somewhere. Goran and Mila were his only effective distraction from pain. For a second, he wondered if he actually needed them more than they needed him.