Facing the Tank (17 page)

‘I’ll ring you soon then. Bye. And thanks.’

‘Bye.’ She replaced the receiver. ‘What good timing,’ she said.

‘Yes,’ replied Crispin, helping himself to the second large slice of cake. ‘I haven’t seen Jeremy in ages. Does he ever come down here?’

‘No. Not really. He’s awfully busy and high-powered nowadays and I think he likes to collapse at weekends.’ Jeremy had a house in Camden which Emma had never seen. That, and the fact that he had a lodger who was a vet were all that she knew about his private life. ‘Maybe we can coax him down on one of your
exeats
, though.’

‘That would be great,’ said Crispin, rubbing Rousillou’s honey-coloured stomach as the cat stretched languorously and rolled on to his back to give the boy better access. ‘It is odd being a a boarder,’ he said.

‘How do you mean?’

‘Well I feel so stupid because all the other new boys, sorry, new
men
in my house have boarded since they were seven and a half or eight. For them, going away to school for twelve weeks at a stretch is like being sent to stay in a rather basic hotel. It’s so
hard
getting to sleep in a room full of people muttering and whispering. I’ve only been to hospital once, when Granny thought I had appendicitis, and it’s just like that. It doesn’t get quiet until about one in the morning and then I have to get up at six forty-five to wake people.’

‘Poor thing! Every morning?’

‘Not Sundays. It depends on how early they want waking. I’m a sort of human alarm clock. And the other thing I hate is that it’s almost impossible to be alone.’

‘But that apart, you’re not too miserable?’ Emma smiled at him, teasing. ‘You’re not homesick?’

‘Not at
all!
’

The floodgates truly opened now. Emma took a second thin slice of chocolate biscuit cake and decided that the most godmotherly thing was to listen. She sat for half an hour, occasionally clipping off another sliver of cake, and listened to Crispin’s heartfelt condemnation of family life. His father was cold and uncommunicative, he said, his mother manipulative and temperamental and his sisters stupid and irritatingly high-spirited. The only thing he seemed to miss about home was cake at teatime and the silent fidelity of his dog, Lottie, who was to have puppies any day now.

Crispin leaped up to go at half past five, realizing that he was going to be late for high tea in school, and thanked Emma profusely for her hospitality. She saw him to the door and pressed on him the remaining half of the cake along with a bag of grapes, because to ply a godson with nothing but chocolate seemed a mite irresponsible. When he had closed the garden gate and she was fluffing out the cushions on the sofa, she remembered that he had left with Fergus Gibson’s handkerchief.

She set the tea things back on the kitchen table then took up the cake plate. Bending forward, she licked off the remaining crumbs of chocolate although she was already feeling sick.

She went to sit by the telephone and dialled the number of an old Edinburgh friend who had drifted into corporate finance. She glanced at her watch, though, saw that it was still too early to call at a cheap rate, and hung up before anyone could answer. On the telephone pad she had scribbled,

‘Boredom, tedium, melancholy, melancholia, uninterest, flatness, staleness, leadenness, inactivity, repetition, wearisomeness, satiety (12).’

She took up the pencil that lay there, thought for a moment, then added, ‘
taedium vitae
, insipidity, indifference, irksomeness, disgust, monotony (18).’

Fergus was kneeling on a fertilizer bag in a corner of the Gardens of Remembrance. He stretched out to the back of the little rose bed before him and tugged up the last weed. He emptied a bucketful of compost around the bases of the bushes and dug it in with a hand fork. The soil was dry so he walked to a tap hidden along with a wheelbarrow and a dustbin in a spinney of laurels and brought back a bucketful of water which he tipped around the bed. The roses were fleshy pink monsters with a name like Passion Tiger or Lady Jayne. Planted by mistake, or through wilful ignorance on the gardener’s part of his request for something old fashioned and white, he had had to leave them there. The prospect of tearing out plants that had fed on one’s lover’s ashes was abhorrent. As the months passed and the bushes grew sleek and glossy, he had continued to tend them but did so with disgusted resentment, as a child might learn to tolerate a blooming stepmother in lieu of a finer, thinner creature who was no more. He cherished a secret desire that one day he would drive over the Roman Bridge, park the car at the gates and walk the bosky length of these gardens of cypress, rhododendron and mourning laurel to find Roger’s roses slashed to death by a vandal’s blade and trampled by an unwittingly discerning boot. He had grown half-used to the replacement of Roger with Passion Tiger as he had grown half-used to the substitution of dying lover by all-too-lingering parent.

Roger had been half Barrower. He had grown up in Liverpool where his father was a shipping clerk, but his mother had been a Barrower born. When the two men fell for the place during a day trip one summer then bought a house in Tracer Street it was thus a manner of homecoming. They had met in Liverpool. Fergus had almost finished a half-hearted training in an architect’s office and Roger was designing textiles in a cooperative while working as a waiter so as not to starve. They had shared a house in gentrified Toxteth where they ran a ‘design’ shop, selling wallpapers, fabrics and the occasional obelisk, all-purpose bust or marble-topped table to their largely academic neighbours. The business succeeded after a fashion, eked out by Fergus’ freelance architectural work, but after eight or nine years they were both tired of Liverpool. Barrowcester’s leafy precincts offered the perfect antidote to the Mersey. The cathedral city was also a perfect site for the interior design consultancy they had always hoped to set up. Since Barrowcester had become a commuter town there was an increasing number of Barrowers blessed with the money to redecorate their houses but neither the time nor the energy to do so themselves. These leaped on Fergus’ and Roger’s services, chequebooks waving in the wind, as did those keen to decorate themselves but greedy to buy from the more ‘exclusive’ range of papers and fabrics with which Drink-water and Gibson Design Consultants could supply them.

They had lived there only two years when Roger fell ill. At first they had assumed it was glandular fever or hepatitis. His glands had swollen and felt sore and he had become listless, no sooner out of bed than ready to collapse again in exhausted sleep. Then he had started to lose weight. Ever slightly on the plump side, he had been delighted. Rallying from his languor, he had laughed as he pulled on pair after pair of once-outgrown trousers and joked that it was worth being off-colour occasionally if the results were so flattering. But the weight had continued to fall off him. Literally. Flesh dropped where muscle had once held it firm, as if his body were being aged at a supernatural rate. Fergus would wake in the night to find himself drenched in the sweat that was coursing off his lover’s limbs, and wake in the morning to see a hollow-cheeked, sunken-eyed face across the pillow that he scarcely recognized.

Roger’s fear of death was intense; he was one of those men who swore that they had never had a day’s illness in their life, from the superstitious hope that reiteration might assume the power of prophecy. After weeks of hiding behind excuses of a recurrence of glandular fever, he ventured to Saint Boniface’s Infirmary. Tests were run and he was found to be half-eaten by a colony of cancers that had mistaken his lymph system for public transport. By the doctor’s calculations, the damage had begun at about the time Fergus and Roger came to Barrowcester househunting. Death had been creeping up on them for two years, and they were left like children trying to fight back an insidious high tide with bucket and spade. There was nothing to be done, so Roger came home with jars of drugs, a
House and Garden
he had stolen from the waiting room, and six months to live. The high tide took him into a kind of coma of pain after only two and swept him away a fortnight later.

Barrowcester had a sympathy system that sprang into action on the first sign of suffering, as a concerted campaign of presents and visitations; kindness clustered on kindness around the sufferer like so many stifling antibodies. Anxious to be spared such attentions, Fergus had grieved in near silence and took advantage of the fact that, in their discreet, privet-shaded minds, everyone from Roger’s mother to Lydia Hart (whom he had always regarded as a friend) had assumed that he and Roger had been partners only in business, who shared a house for reasons of bachelor economy. To occupy his wheeling mind, Fergus had prepared a vast tea for Roger’s family when they descended for the funeral, only to receive ‘don’t let us keep you’ looks when they decided that he had outstayed his welcome on the scene of their mourning.

‘There’s something you should know,’ he had told them. ‘Roger and I were lovers and he didn’t die of cancer; it was AIDS.’

He still felt guilty about that extra touch. He had felt it was wrong not to let them know that their son had died loving and beloved, but he had found their grim self-satisfaction and hackneyed grief too maddening for tasteful restraint. Inspired by the faces of ogling shock they turned on him and by the thought of how Roger would have laughed, he plied them with detail after gory detail. They had positively fled, leaving home-made cakes uneaten. In seven weeks, the height of their devotion had been a flight of hideous get-well cards and a basket of bruised, mundane fruit. Charged with the confessional spirit, he had thought of enlightening Barrowcester (though without the extra touch), but forbore; a hard, glistening corner of him remained good at business and had doubts about the breadth of the Barrowcesterian mind.

Reasonless guilt at being the partner left behind, led him to grim fantasies that Roger’s cancers were a new variety, somehow contagious, or even that in a retributive masterstroke, the hellish lie told to Roger’s family should become fact and AIDS take him in its hydra-handed grip. He began to read obsessively anything with the four beguilingly kind initials in it. Victims lingered month after month, he read, suffering indignities normally spared their fellows; skin infections found on birds and fish, throat infections that barely touched a hamster, attacks on the brain and on the very tissues that made a body look human. Fergus’ appetite knew no satisfaction. He read trash. He read inflammatory lies. He read of a man in the South so overrun with sores that, beating down despair with good cheer, the nurses had nicknamed him Mulberry. The man had burst, though, which had spoiled the joke rather.

To be abandoned as caretaker of the relics of so much happiness, condemned by habit to lie to one side of a double bed, to continue to buy the biscuits he had never liked and to watch the programmes he had never found amusing, seemed a far slower ending than any tortures a hellish disease could inflict. Now that the weeks were passing once more at their old fast rate, however, and he found himself still with the bloom of health about him, Fergus had admitted a draught of hope. The remorse swiftly attendant on this obliged him to conduct a merciless daily search for the fatal symptoms. He had begun to weigh himself every day and never soaped himself in the bath without feeling for swollen glands. Since he was condemned either way, to death or to deadly guilt, each slight drop in weight, each bout of flu, each hot, sleepless night charged him with simultaneous thrills of reprieve and death-row despair.

A formerly healthy libido had shrivelled to obsolescence. He masturbated once a week, from a tidy dislike of wet dreams. He found he could do this with a mind clear of fantasy. Indeed, it was less disturbing to concentrate on anything that would not reawaken death-lust associations; a choice of curtain fittings, for instance, or a new stuffing for chicken breasts. He masturbated into clean white handkerchiefs which were then scrupulously boiled and ironed. The only one he never used was the one with an F in the corner, given him by Roger, the one he had lost somewhere.

Fergus’ sole confidante and pal, Dawn Harper, was waiting on his doorstep when he parked the car. For want of close, sane relatives, he loved her.

‘Hi,’ she said with her sympathetic scowl.

‘Hello, Harpy,’ he said, patting her shoulder and taking out his keys. ‘Have you been waiting long?’

‘Yes. You stayed to brood, didn’t you?’

‘No. Honestly. I just weeded then came away.’

‘They haven’t died, then?’

‘No. Worst luck.’

‘You should let me go over there one night with a spade to do them in,’ she suggested, as he opened the door and waved her past him. ‘Still, I suppose I should just do it without telling …’ Dawn’s voice trailed off. Fergus’ mother was standing in the hall in her nightdress. Her hair, face, arms and dwindled bosom were smeared with excrement. ‘Shit,’ Dawn stated.

‘Mother,’ said Fergus.

‘None of you will own up to it but I
know
you all do it differently from me,’ said Lilias Gibson and started to cry.

Dawn and Fergus froze, watching the silent oh-oh-oh her mouth was forming. The stench seemed to double as Fergus stared. It was Dawn who started forward first.

‘Harpy, you can’t,’ said Fergus, laying a restraining hand on her arm. She threw him a challenging glance. ‘Actually, I’m not sure I could,’ he conceded and released her.

‘Come along, Mrs Gibson,’ she said, steering his mother up the stairs, one hand set firm on her mercifully clean back. ‘I think you need a quick shower.’

Fergus stood listening to the sounds of his mother being driven into the bathroom and of the shower being turned on. A chunk of turd caught his eye on the piece of carpet where she had greeted them. Shocked into action, he hurried to the kitchen, donned a pair of rubber gloves, removed the offending object on a coal scuttle then, having searched for more, flung open every available window and squirted the air with some of the
parfum d’ambiance
he always presented to clients at the end of a job. Finally he set to work with a bucket of scalding water, carpet shampoo and an old rag. As he came back from tossing both said rag and the rubber gloves into the dustbin, he found Dawn coming downstairs.

‘She’s back in bed,’ she announced.

‘Harpy, you’re an angel.’

‘I know. Give me a phone book and the usual.’

‘Who do you want to phone?’

‘Give.’

He found the local directory and left her with it on a sofa while he went to mix her a brandy and soda. He switched on the kettle for a tea for himself then took her the drink.

‘Thanks,’ she said then held out the directory, a stout forefinger pointing to an entry. ‘Ring them,’ she added.

‘“Brooklea”’ he read, ‘“Rest home, Brwcstr 657211.” Harpy, I can’t.’

‘You’ve got to,’ she replied, sipping her drink. ‘You can’t cope.’

‘I’ll do it later, maybe.’

‘Now, Fergus,’ she said. ‘I’m not doing
that
for you many more times.’ On ‘that’ she jerked her head towards the ceiling. He sighed surrender, walked to the telephone and dialled Barrowcester 657211. He spoke to a nurse who said that yes indeed they did have a vacancy and no there was no waiting list at the moment on account of a long hard winter. She told him that Matron could show him round tomorrow and discuss terms. Did he have power of attorney, she asked him. No? Well they advised all their clients to obtain it so as to facilitate transfer of funds. Fergus arranged to see Matron tomorrow afternoon. He then rang his solicitor and arranged to see her tomorrow morning.

While he was on the telephone, Dawn had been to the kitchen and made him a pot of tea and a plate of Marmite soldiers for two. He lay on the sofa with his head on a cushion in her lap and, while a woman on the television showed them how to make a kite from two bamboo rods and one of father’s old shirts, Dawn stroked his thinning hair and fed him.

‘What did you do last night, Harpy?’ he asked her.

‘Sat in the garden in the nuddy and waited for the Devil,’ she admitted and he laughed, desperately unhappy.