Jubilate (34 page)

‘Have they changed the lighting?’ I ask Jamie, who shakes his head. ‘Or rearranged the seats?’

‘What’s wrong?’ Sophie asks. ‘Will there be a continuity problem?’

‘Only in the commentary. I was too quick to run this place down. It wasn’t designed to be a jewelled chapel for the elite. It has to house thousands of people every day.’

They look at me in astonishment. ‘You didn’t eat any dodgy mushrooms on your walk, did you, chief?’ Jamie asks.

‘Ha ha! All I’m saying is that we shouldn’t compare it with
Westminster Abbey when its job is to be more like Wembley Stadium.’

A steward checks our permit with undue officiousness before steering us into a recess beside the choir, from which we film the procession as it files down the nave. The profusion of priests and bishops is much as before, the key difference being that the Cardinal bringing up the rear carries a golden monstrance, shaped like a
sunburst
. As he places it on the altar, I feel a lump in my throat, which is no less real for stemming from nostalgia rather than faith.

The service is as incomprehensible as its predecessor, with only the occasional English passage and French word (
seigneur, dieu, ciel
) to keep me on course. Somehow I find the mystification less
irritating
than before. The prayers provide a setting for my own reflections as my mind, no longer confined by the concrete, soars to the peak of the Pyrenees.

As soon as we are back outside, I take my leave of the crew and arrange to meet them at eight for the evening’s concert.

‘Communing with nature again, chief?’ Jamie asks slyly.

‘Not at all. I’m rehearsing my party piece.’

‘You’re not thinking of performing?’ Sophie asks incredulously.

‘Stranger things have been known.’

‘What are you planning to do?’

‘Wait and see! I did wonder about a chorus of ‘When Irish Eyes Are Smiling’ accompanied by Frank on the spoons, but I couldn’t answer for the consequences.’

‘It’s official,’ Sophie says, ‘you’re out of your mind.’

Leaving Sophie shocked, Jewel worried and Jamie unflatteringly excited, I walk to the top of the ramp where, once again, I find myself waiting for the Pattersons to emerge from the church.

‘I wonder if I might borrow Richard?’ I ask, after some desultory chatter.

‘Like a library book?’ Richard asks.

‘To interview?’ Patricia asks.

‘It’s part of our surprise.’

‘I have to go with him,’ Richard says.

‘I don’t see why not,’ Gillian says, ‘but it’s half past six. There’s only an hour before dinner.’

‘That’ll be enough.’

‘I have to go!’ Richard grasps my arm with a force that makes me tremble for Gillian. I struggle to keep up my smile as I prise him off.

‘Take care of him,’ Patricia says anxiously.

‘I’m not a library book!’ Richard shouts back as we walk away.

Patricia’s words haunt me as I lead him down the riverbank. Is it guilt that makes a mother’s routine concern sound so desperate? Richard may not be the only obstacle to my happiness, but he is the greatest. It would take a saint not to speculate on his – on its – being removed. I watch him clamber on to the low stone wall, stretching out his arms and feigning a wobble as though on a tightrope. If he were to fall, or if I were to stumble and knock him off … but he is too strong and the water too shallow. On the other hand, if he were to try the same trick on the main bridge with its fifty foot drop … This is wrong! Even to fantasise about his death is a denial of everything I believe: everything I am. But what’s the alternative? I can’t just wave Gillian goodbye at the airport as though she were Louisa or Maggie. She is worth fighting for; we are worth fighting for. As if to show me that the fight is more equal than I might suppose, the strains of a Spanish prayer float across from the Grotto. I have love on my side; Richard has God.

‘Where are we going?’ he asks. ‘This is boring.’

‘Wouldn’t you rather we rehearsed – practised – outdoors,
enjoying
the weather? We can’t go back to the Acceuil since Gillian might hear.’ Nor can we go back to my hotel, since the mere idea of Richard lumbering about the room in which I made love to Gillian fills me with revulsion.

‘I don’t like
kindergarten
,’ he says, jumping down on to the path.

‘What?’

‘In the song. It’s a silly word.’

‘Oh, I see. Of course. But it’s a rhyme. “When you were only
starting
to go to kindergarten …”’

‘Why can’t it be farting?’

‘That wouldn’t be very nice. Remember it’s about Gillian.’

‘She farts.’

‘That’s enough now!’

‘She pretends it’s me but it’s not. Sometimes in bed …’ He puts his lips together and trumpets a fart.

‘It’s
kindergarten
, all right? We do it properly or not at all.’

He doesn’t have to die. We could put him in a home: a private one with his own room and furniture. Money wouldn’t be an issue. According to Gillian, they did very well from the sale of the family firm. The key thing is to make her see that it would be for his benefit as much as for ours. He would be far happier among people like himself: look how quickly he bonded with Nigel! If all else fails, I could move in with them. We could build the husband equivalent of a granny flat, an annexe for him to live in with a carer. Gillian could keep an eye on them during the day.

Since when did my fantasies become so functional?

We arrive at the thicket where I interviewed Tadeusz. ‘How about here?’ I ask.

‘I don’t like trees.’

‘All trees or just this one?’

‘Trees with low-down branches. Branches should be up in the air.’

‘How about here then?’ As I lead him towards a silver birch, its slender trunk rising to a crest of dense foliage, I blot out the image of a falling branch inducing another haemorrhage.

‘Why are you shaking your head?’ Richard asks.

‘Am I?’ I reply, unaware that the image was so close to the surface. ‘Sometimes I try to push away a nasty idea that’s stuck.’

‘Me too.’

‘Really?’

‘Only it won’t always go.’

As soon as we have settled on a spot, I run through the lyric, which he insists that he knows by heart. I am surprised to find him so alert, and wonder if he has made sense of it or simply learnt it by rote. I then run through the tune, assuring him that it will be easier when we have the guitar accompaniment.

‘Will we have to play it?’ he asks anxiously.

‘Don’t worry. I’ll speak to one of the brancardiers.’

We struggle to match the words to the tune and it is immediately clear that, for all his bravado, his knowledge of the song is limited to the first two lines, which he repeats again and again in the same self-congratulatory croak. He grows frustrated and fractious at my efforts to assist him, stumbling over every other word until I realise
that the best I can hope is to sing the song alone, with him as a kind of echo. Trusting that he may fare better with the movement, I
demonstrate
a simple routine – falling on one knee at the end of a verse and throwing out my arms minstrel style – which I ask him to copy. His crude parody makes me despair of both his cloddishness and a tribute that risks descending into farce. Nevertheless I refuse to give up, even when he starts to rebel.

‘Singing to a baby’s stupid,’ he says, tugging at a creeper.

‘Not a baby, a woman. A woman you love who was once a baby.’

‘Gilly.’

‘If she’s the woman you love,’ I say, longing for a confession that might exonerate me.

‘Of course. I love her more than the whole world, more than all the stars in the sky.’

‘More than all the heartbeats in the history of mankind?’ I ask, horrified that she might have shared the thought with him.

‘What?’ he asks, with reassuring bemusement.

‘Just another way of saying the same thing.’

‘Why are you singing it,’ he asks abruptly, ‘if we’re singing to Gilly?’

‘I’m not. I’m here to help you. You wouldn’t want to sing on your own, would you?’

‘Yes … no … yes … no.’ He seems to be genuinely torn, as he rips the creeper from the trunk.

‘Hey, what’s the matter? Don’t worry. You’re doing fine.’ He slumps to the ground, head in hands, looking more lost than ever.

‘I try – I try so hard, but sometimes I do things wrong,’ he says, as if letting me into a secret. ‘Sometimes my head’s not right.’ A tear rolls down his cheek. ‘I used to be different once.’ He gazes up at me. ‘I used to be like you.’

I crouch beside him, feeling a profound need to be on his level.

‘Do you remember those times?’

‘Of course. I’m not stupid.’

‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean …’

‘Gilly shows me pictures and I remember the day we got married.’

‘She shows you that, does she?’ I try to squeeze the pain out of my voice.

‘We had a cake with three floors. Some was sent abroad.’

‘To your family?’

‘We had all my family. All Gilly’s family. All my friends. And my best friend, Jonathan.’

‘Your best man?’

‘That’s what I said! He made a speech. Everyone laughed, except Mother. Gilly can’t remember what it was. She should.’

‘Well, you can’t either.’

‘But she has the pictures. She won’t let me see him any more.’

‘Jonathan?’

‘She won’t let him take me out on our own.’

‘Why’s that?’

He gives me a sharp look. ‘Sometimes my head makes me do wrong things.’ He says it so plaintively that, despite knowing what those wrong things are, I cannot hate him.

‘You’re not the only bloke to do things wrong; it’s part of being a man: part of being a male that is, not part of being a human being,’ I add quickly, even though the distinction will be lost on him.

A young couple walk past, hand-in-hand. Richard watches them with a glint in his eye. ‘Shall we meet some girls?’

‘What?’

‘Just you and me. Not Nigel.’

‘What girls? Where?’

‘In a bar,’ he says impatiently. ‘You’ve got some money.’

Half of me wants to help him to whatever solace he can find; the other half wants to throttle him. ‘What about Gillian? Won’t she be upset?’

‘She’s always upset. But we won’t ask her.’ He chuckles
uproariously
, as if at a private joke.

‘We can’t today. We don’t have time. We have to go back to the Acceuil to sing at the concert … the party.’

‘She’s always telling me what to do. I used to be her boss, now she’s mine.’

‘Yes, you’ve said that already.’

‘Did I?’ His face darkens and he bangs his head against the trunk. My murderous fantasy returns to shame me and I wrench him away.

‘Don’t worry, mate. Everyone repeats things all the time.’

‘Do you?’ He looks at me hopefully. ‘All the time?’

‘Never stop. Come on!’ I stand and pull him up with me. ‘Don’t forget to go over your words again in your head,’ I say, leading him out of the thicket. ‘But don’t let anyone hear or it’ll spoil the surprise.’

I deliver Richard back to the Acceuil in time for dinner, finding Gillian by the Jubilate nurses’ station, talking to Lucja and Sister Anne.

‘At last!’ she says. ‘I thought you’d kidnapped him.’

‘I’m not a kid!’ Richard says resentfully. Gillian ignores him.

‘Right now, is someone going to tell me what’s going on?’

‘Our lips are sealed,’ I reply. ‘Aren’t they, Rich?’ He shows his agreement by pulling his lips over his teeth and muttering
incoherently
through them.

‘I’ll find out, I warn you. I always do,’ she says, in schoolmarmish tones that I find disturbingly sexy.

‘Remember, Rich, we men must stick together.’ He mumbles and mimes his assent, while the shadow passing over Gillian’s face makes me wish that I had chosen a less loaded phrase.

‘Well, now that you’ve set my husband against me,’ she says lightly, ‘do you have any other tricks up your sleeve?’

‘Up my sleeve. In my shirt. Wherever,’ I reply, with a smile that I trust will placate the nun while enticing her.

‘Right, Richard,’ she says, bundling him into the dining room. ‘Food! That is if you deign to open your mouth.’

I return to the hotel, where the lingering fumes of sweat in the lift send me racing to the shower. I scrub and scour and brush and floss and dab and squirt, with an eye less to the farewell concert than the more intimate celebration with which I intend to follow it, before joining the crew in the bar, where I immediately order a round in a bid both to honour my promise to Jamie and to make up for my earlier absence. Sophie is glum, having failed to hear from Giles all day despite repeated texting, and Jamie’s ‘Give the guy a break – he might have been pissed and banged up in jail,’ is no help. She has nonetheless dressed for the party, with a spangly black top and plum velvet trousers. Jewel has put on a khaki cotton sweater with leather patches, which should bring back memories for Louisa, and a calf-length denim skirt with oversized buttons down the side.
Jamie wears his usual plaid shirt and frayed jeans, along with a
neckerchief
pushed through a leather ring that makes him look like an aged and hirsute boy scout.

We make our way to the Acceuil and up to the rudimentarily decorated dining room, which exudes the same strained cheer as a hospital ward at Christmas. Before the concert starts, I have to
finalise
two arrangements. First, I seek out Alan, the young brancardier who, having taken on the lion’s share of the guitar accompaniment at the services, is now moving into the secular field. I find him in the day room rehearsing ‘Danny Boy’ with Sheila Clunes, who lacks the brogue which alone might make its mawkishness palatable. I
congratulate
her with all the sincerity I can muster, although this clearly fails to compensate for my refusal to include her in the film.

‘I’m not talking to you,’ she says. ‘Where’s my pusher?’ Her shout brings a young handmaiden rushing down the corridor to wheel her away.

‘I know where I’d like to push her,’ I say to Alan, who looks shocked to hear such feelings, even in jest. ‘I wonder if you’d also play for Richard Patterson and me, well him really. I’m just helping him to serenade his wife. “You Must Have Been A Beautiful Baby.” Do you know it?’