Facing the Tank (7 page)

‘Mother?’

Fergus stood in the doorway of Lilias Gibson’s room. The old woman was slumped sideways against her pillows. Between her dashingly military wedding photograph and a silver-framed one of her adopted Nigerian chiefling, the early morning tea he had brought her before leaving remained untouched.

‘Mother? Are you asleep?’

Fergus advanced to the bedstead. A huge round mirror on the wall to stage left of her bed reflected the touching scene; rapidly greying interior designer peering concerned at snow-white, unconscious ex-missionary.

‘Mother?’

Still she lay, her head dangling in mid-air. Her hair, still brushed out for the night, formed a lacquer-stiffened cloud around her tiny skull. The draught through the open door caused it to drift slightly. Its whiteness and that of the pillows made her ancient skin seem a warm, toffee brown.

‘Please no. Mother?’ He reached out and touched her neck with his fingertips. The skin was still warm. ‘Mother!’ he shouted. He took her firmly by the shoulders and swung her into a more dignified vertical, pulling the pillows around her to hold her in place. Even with her shoulders upright, her head continued to loll drunkenly. He pressed his ear to where he thought her heart should be. Nothing. He moved his head. Nothing. He didn’t bother with a pulse. He could never find those anyway. ‘Oh Ma,’ he said quietly and sat on the side of the bed.

He wondered what he should do now. Dr Morton had been in the Patron’s chapel so it was pointless to call him out yet. There was no hurry now. What did one
do
with a dead mother? What did one do with a dead anybody? He had been so firm about politely refusing offers of help from Mrs Moore, Lydia Hart and co. that he could hardly call them in now, at the grisly last. It was difficult to picture Lydia having anything to do with a corpse.

Oh Mother. You’ve become a corpse.

Fergus’s eye turned across the room he had prepared for her before he met her flight from Lagos in November. Her photographs, some on the table, some on the mantelshelf. Her Bible, of course, sun-baked from the new widow’s proselytizing trips into the African bush. The wardrobe full of long-outdated winter clothes he had had sent down from Inverness for her. He had unpacked them so carefully and she had never been well enough to get up and wear them again. The mirror and the bed, placed so that she could see the Cathedral, in reflection, from her pillows. In her brief hours of sanity she had lain there identifying the silhouettes of birds flying around its twin towers. Her
Guide to British Birds
, signed by her friend the author, lay on the carpet beside her brown corduroy slippers and the WI Book.

Brightening, Fergus bent down and took up the latter. Ever since she married his father at eighteen and left her native Dundee for his family’s farm near Inverness, she had made a collection of recipes, advice pages, natural remedies and nursing hints and glued them into this great black volume. She called it the W I Book because the original idea, and many of the pamphlets, came from the Women’s Institute to which the young and inexperienced Mrs Gibson was introduced by dour Mrs Gibson senior. Over the years, for son as much as mother, the black tome had come to represent security in crisis. When he had a toothache or had cut his knee or was simply feeling low, he had only to reach for the W I Book. It had helped when Granny Gibson was bitten by an adder, it would help now.

Fergus opened the book on his lap and turned to the back pages where, in her flawless antiquated copperplate, his mother had kept an index of everything she pasted in. He turned to D for death and O for old, without success. Then his eye landed on L and found an entry under Last Offices – page 75. Seventy-five was early on in the collection. The black-bordered pamphlet must have been given to her when her father-in-law died of a heart attack. Fergus read.

‘The first action should be to remove any hot-water bottles from the bed and all pillows bar one.’ He pulled her hot-water bottle out and emptied the tepid water into her bedroom basin. Then, holding her shrunken shoulders out of the way, he removed all pillows bar one and laid her gently back on that. Her mouth fell open and he tried in vain to close it. Clicking his tongue he returned to the book and read on, hoping for advice about mouths. ‘Close the eyelids with wet cotton wool if possible and straighten the limbs. Clean and replace any dentures, tucking a pillow firmly under the lower jaw until mouth can remain closed of its own accord.’ So. Her false teeth were still soaking by the sink. He had had plenty of practice at taking those in and out for her over the last months, and was no longer squeamish. Fergus took a pillow from the floor, after dealing with the teeth, and tucked it firmly under the jaw. The corpse was less alarming with a shut mouth. ‘Cover the face with the sheet,’ the sage wives advised none the less, ‘and prepare all requirements for the final laying-out. While doing this it is advisable to find out the relatives’ wishes regarding any personal jewellery such as the wedding ring.’ There was a list of ‘requirements’ such as towels, soap and hot water, all of which were to hand. Jewellery, he assumed, had all been left to her fertile Scottish nieces. ‘Remove remaining bedclothes leaving top sheet to cover.’

He pulled off the quilt and draped it over the landing banisters to air before starting to untuck the blankets. God bless the W I. It was like having a capable nurse in the room; starchy but comforting because her knowledge was absolute and so bore one up.

Her body beneath the lone white sheet was slight as an old cat’s. He had grown used to it after countless bed baths but, suddenly so still, it seemed frailer than ever. He was not going to cry. She had been dying too long. She had been so unlike herself for so long that the corpse before him was not her. She had been mercifully removed from all these indignities some time before she left Lagos.

Christmas had been when the lavatorial obsession had set in. No sooner did Dr Morton declare her physically well at Easter than she started her refusal to leave the bed even to hobble on his arm to the bathroom. Easter also saw her lapse into a hateful second infancy. She must have been a
horrible
baby. It was only when Lydia had kindly had words with Dr Morton behind Fergus’ back that the latter had discreetly delivered a large box of disposable nappies for the elderly and infirm.

No. He was not going to cry. He did need to blow his nose, however. His hands shook and he dropped the handkerchief. As he stooped to pick it up, his head level with the mattress, Mrs Gibson let fly a long and expressive fart and proceeded to laugh uproariously from under her white sheet. Fergus watched her mouth opening and closing on the cotton, then pulled back her shroud and saw the monstrous glee in her eyes.

‘Devil!’ he shouted, pulling the pillow from under her jaw and preparing to hit her with it. She only laughed the louder, dribbling and farting some more, so instead he tucked it back behind her shoulders and unrolled the blankets over her again. With her giggling in his ears, he worked his way along both sides of the mattress, tucking the bedding back in and making perfect hospital corners, then walked out and shut the door. Slumped on the landing floor and pulling her quilt off the banisters and over his head, he tried to cry.

‘Faster!’ yelled Gloire. The air poured over the windscreen and into her artfully straightened mane. ‘Faster for Chrissakes!’ Tobit Hart flattened the accelerator as her brown hand clamped harder on his inner thigh. ‘Faster. Oh. Oh God! Yes. Please.
Now
!’ As the engine neared apoplexy Tobit blared the horn for a full eight seconds as his fiancée subsided in vanilla-scented ecstasy beside him. ‘I love you when you drive,’ she confessed at last.

‘I love you back,’ he returned and pressed his lips to the pale inside of her nearest wrist.

‘Child of nature, huh?’

‘More. Much more,’ he said and smiled at himself in the mirror. She took his left hand from the wheel and bit lightly at the fleshy part of its thumb.

‘My candy-coated conversion,’ she said and nibbled. ‘What have you told Lydia and Clive about their future in-laws?’

‘Not a lot,’ he replied. There was a pause before a grin laid bare his teeth. ‘They don’t even know about you.’

‘Oh Jesus,’ she murmured.

‘This is a surprise visit,’ he went on.

Gloire laughed, then threw back her head and yelled into the motorway wind.

She had strolled into his shop in Marylebone two months ago and ordered a white evening dress.

‘I trust the design entirely to you,’ she said, leaning an elbow on the anatomy textbook she had been clutching, ‘but it has to be easy to pee in.’

She left her improbably Hollywood name and a Chelsea phone number then walked out. Somehow she had found out his home number and rang him there the following night at eleven.

‘Good evening to you too,’ she said. ‘Tell me about my new dress.’ Her voice was softly American.

‘I think it should have a slit in it to show off your spine,’ he said, lolling on the carpet and remembering her languid good looks.

‘When can I have a fitting?’

‘I’ll ring you.’

‘When can I have a fitting, Tobit?’

‘Tuesday at five-thirty, Gloire.’

‘Perfect.’

‘Is that really your name?’

She arrived on Tuesday at five-thirty and stripped to ivory bra and panties as soon as they were in the fitting room. He stood her on a footstool and sheathed her in white silk and net.

‘This isn’t a ball gown,’ she complained.

‘It’s better. There are pins,’ he threatened her, ‘so don’t move or you’ll bleed and wreck it.’

It clung to her almost immodestly low then flung out a skirt that would lift out at the slightest turn of her hips. He walked slowly round her, scowling with concentration and making adjustments with a needle and thread while she gazed angelic into the middle distance. As he worked his way down the back, arranging the fabric window so that her vertebrae were teasingly framed, he found ‘kiss me here’ and an X written small with eye pencil on her skin. He stooped and kissed the X where a light down marked the descent to her buttocks, then crouched to pin up the hem.

‘How does it look?’ she asked.

‘Perfect,’ he said. ‘Come by tomorrow at six and it’ll be ready.’

‘Do you take American Express?’

‘No. But it’s yours if you’ll buy me dinner and meet my parents.’

‘I bet you say that to all the broads.’ She twitched her narrow shoulders and sent the half-made garment rustling around the stool at her feet.

‘Funnily enough,’ he said, handing her down, ‘you’d be the first.’

She kicked the fitting room door shut, he pulled down the blind, and they got to know each other at length on a mound of taffeta.

Tobit was officially gay, insofar as that is what his parents, friends, acquaintance and colleagues assumed him to be. As far as he was concerned, his sex life had bordered on the non-existent for so long that he was not anything. His friend, Seth, could argue till his head fell off that sexuality was defined by desire and not its fulfilment, Tobit remained unconvinced.

He had first fallen in lust with the carpentry master at school. As part of a last-year project, a group of pupils, Tobit included, had built a pavilion. Tim Tunning had supervised them and on the first day of work, when Tim was correcting the angle of his saw, Tobit’s humdrum adolescent vision focused itself in an unexpected direction. Encouraged by the school philosophy of free thinking and open discussion, he had run around telling everyone of his new discovery, delighted at last to have found something interesting about himself. Word reached Tim Tunning in no time and he invited Tobit to his cottage for a glass of home-brewed beer and had explained that, while he was just an ordinary heterosexual carpenter with a wife and two kids, he really appreciated Tobit’s affection and hoped they could be friends. Tobit was overjoyed at this paltry reciprocation but, as intended, the earnest pursuit of friendship stifled physical desire. By the end of the year, his interest in the carpentry teacher was several degrees cooler than the carpentry teacher’s growing, confused interest in him.

At art school he had shared a bed with his flatmate. They were too poor to afford the rent on a two-bedroom flat, they were good friends and it was pleasant to share a bed because they could talk for hours without either of them freezing his feet or having to say goodnight. When his parents came to visit and had overinterpreted the situation, Tobit did not disillusion them. He assumed he would have a lover sooner or later and it was convenient to get the parental enlightenment ordeal over and done with. Five or so years later, however, a lover had not yet come his way. Several had tried to, but they had proved so unsatisfactory, had come and gone so rapidly that none of them had counted. With each man who was rejected as too insipid, dull, pig-headed or highbrow, Tobit’s romantic standards became more difficult to satisfy and the intervals between disappointments grew increasingly lengthy. By the time that the first AIDS tremors were hitting London, bringing with them the much-vaunted death of promiscuity and
soi-disant
return of drawing room introductions and old-fashioned courtship, Tobit was joking with a trace of rancour that he was a founder member of the swelling league of Born-again Virgins. Thanks to his mother’s loan and the contacts she pushed his way, celibacy was easy. The more he stayed in the more he earned, and the more he earned the easier it was to entertain at home and so avoid the nightclub snare.

Then came Gloire. The extraordinary resurgence of lust that came in her wake could hardly be explained away by the purity of the months preceding her arrival since what she offered was so far removed from the objects of his abstention. As she teased, he had not had biblical knowledge of what he was missing. From what he had overheard and from what he had seen in films (for Tobit never read) the essential quality of the female body was softness and this had always repelled him as carrying distastefully maternal overtones. Gloire’s body was firm to the point of rigidity. She was a keen athlete and the only thing in her bedroom besides her bed was a sleekly challenging rowing machine. Even her buttocks were hard. Tobit swam in the summer and occasionally played tennis, but he felt flabby by comparison. Since he had read little, he assumed that this was how most heterosexual men must feel all the time. The first thing he had seen as they left his shop to go back to her flat and try it again was an attractive man so, however loudly bells had rung, he had no illusions about being converted. While Gloire was the exception that proved the rule, she was yet sufficiently exceptional for the rule to be waived indefinitely.

After the second, even more bell-ridden round of love-making, she had gazed at him as he lay slowly panting and laughed.

‘You could grow to like this, huh?’ and he thought he had detected a tone of pride and was glad to be as exceptional for her as she for him. Then she had peeled them a post-coital orange because neither of them smoked. ‘Jesus, I’m foolish,’ she had sighed.

‘What?’

‘I’m gonna have to do better than this.’

‘What? Tell me.’ He grinned then saw that she was serious.

‘When did you last … like … lay a
guy
? she asked.

‘God. I don’t know.’

‘Think, Tobit.’

‘Er …’ He had no idea. Yes he had. Four or five months ago there had been that dreary model from Los Angeles. Not a very wise choice. Oh God. Suddenly he saw what she was driving at and lied. ‘If you’re worrying about that, don’t. I had the test three months ago and the results were negative.’

‘Where did you go?’ she pursued, still serious, and he was reminded that she was a professional. He thought fast.

‘That clap clinic off Charlotte Street.’

‘Thank Christ for that,’ she said, relieved. ‘Am I dumb or am I dumb? But that’s a great relief.’

‘Why.’

She popped the last segment of orange into his mouth and tweaked the end of his nose.

‘Because the lady is
not
partial to latex.’

He had dumbly sworn then and there to hasten to said clinic the next morning to make a half-truth of his lie. He had put off having the AIDS test ever since his friends had started to take it. The more he had heard them bragging that they had been proved ‘safe’ the more likely it had seemed that he would be the one person they all knew who won the booby prize. Every day for a week after his test he came to Gloire or she came to him and they made extensive love. They hardly talked but when they did he found that she was far, far brighter than he and this seemed to please them both. He was also disturbed to find that the result of his lie – that he seemed a little more her murderer every time he entered her – seemed to lend a sharper edge to his pleasure. Then he opened a plain brown envelope one morning that requested he return to the clinic as soon as possible.

Tobit was not courageous. He had given the clinic a false name and told them he had lost his medical card. He had known as soon as he opened the envelope that he would not be going back there. Why bother? They would sit him in a little room with a cactus on the table, and a well-trained social worker would say that his blood showed signs of contamination by the HTLVII virus and would he please stay calm and give them his complete sex history so that they could call in the relevant people for tests.

‘I’ll tell Gloire when I see her tonight,’ he thought, but it took courage to tell someone you think you are beginning to love and who you hope is beginning to love you that you are almost certain to develop symptoms of an almost certainly fatal disease and that, thanks to your cowardice so, almost certainly, are they. That night she drove round to his flat. He kissed her. She kissed him. They fell on to his bed chewing at each other’s lips and tearing off each other’s clothes; he was now not surprised to find the experience even more pleasurable. ‘Maybe I’ll tell her tomorrow,’ he thought but tomorrow she had spoken first.

‘You know I said I was worried about us and AIDS,’ she murmured and for a moment he thought she was going to say she had had the test too. She would be the first woman to announce that she had AIDS-infected blood and be greeted by cheers.

‘Yes?’ he said.

‘Well I was reading a report today and it was even more depressing than most. It said that they weren’t sure now how accurate the blood tests are. It said that a researcher in London had taken eight different tests in two weeks and come out negative in six and positive in two.’

‘No!’ exclaimed Tobit, not understanding.

‘That means,’ she continued, seeing that he didn’t, ‘that your test could well have been wrong and that we’re both infected.’ He understood now and said nothing. ‘Curiously,’ she said and played with one of his hands, ‘I’m not all that sure that I care any more. I mean, it’s too late. If we die now we die; as long as we don’t fool around, we can’t load the dice against us any more than they already are.’

‘We could always … er.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘No latex. That risk I’m prepared to take.’

And they laughed because they might be going to die and began to make love again because they were both so glad that she hated latex.

‘Would you marry me?’ she asked suddenly, pulling back from him. ‘If I asked you, that is.’

‘Why?’ he demanded, running a finger up and down one of her collar bones.

‘That’s not a very flattering reaction.’

‘No. But why?’

‘Well,’ she grabbed his hand to stop him tickling her and started to play with it again. It reminded him of being small and having his fingernails cut; the only action of hers that recalled his mother. Possibly this was because his mother was not black. ‘Well to be honest it’s partly because I’d like to marry someone over here because I’d like to become a UK citizen for work.’

‘I thought you said there was more money for research over there.’

‘There is but I don’t want to research; I want to be a doctor. I’m just a nurse at heart, with an extra qualification or two to cover up.’ She paused. ‘And the other reason is altogether less straightforward.’

‘What?’

‘What what what,’ she mimicked, giggling.

‘What?’ he pursued, serious in his turn.

‘I’d like it to be you I marry.’

‘But I’m gay.’

‘Not any more, you’re not.’

‘Yes I am. At least, I’m fairly sure.’

‘Not with me you’re not and if you laid a finger on anyone else, man or woman, once we were married, I’d inject you with something lethal.’