The Likes of Us (54 page)

‘You'd know how long it's been if you'd lived every day of it like I have.'

‘Me heart bleeds.'

‘I want to see her, Eric.'

Eric shook his head. ‘No. You can't.'

‘Has she said so?'

‘She doesn't want to see you.'

‘Has she said so?' he asked again. ‘Does she know I'm out?'

‘We don't talk about you.'

‘She must have known my time was about up.'

‘We've never talked about it.'

‘So you didn't tell her I'd been in touch with you?'

‘No.'

‘What are you scared of?'

‘Raking up what's dead and buried.'

‘Hasn't she got a mind of her own? Since when did you do her thinking for her?'

‘I look after her now.'

‘You're taking a lot on yourself.'

‘If you think she's still pinin' for you, you're mistaken.'

‘I'd like her to speak for herself, Eric.'

‘After what you did? You must be barmy to think she'd give you the time o' day.'

‘What's to stop me waiting on the street for her?'

‘I can always set the police onto you. They'd make you leave us alone.'

‘You'd enjoy that, wouldn't you? But she'd have to know then. Why don't you just do it the easy way and give her a message: tell her I'd like to see her.'

‘What will you do when she says no?'

‘I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.'

‘Christ!' Eric said, ‘but you do fancy yourself, don't you? All this has learned you nowt, has it?'

‘I've done my time, Eric. I've paid for what I did.'

‘Paid? They've let you out, but who says you've paid? Do you think she thinks you've paid?'

‘That's up to her to say. You can't talk for her on that.' He paused while he drank, long and deep. ‘You're taking too much on yourself, Eric. Tell her I want to see her.'

‘You haven't even asked how she is. D'you think time's stood still for everybody while you've been inside?'

‘Have her looks started to go, then? Do you make enough to give her what she wants, or has she been working her fingers to the bone for you?'

‘We do all right.'

‘I should doubt it, from the look of that clapped-out wreck you drove up in.'

‘It happened to be the one in the yard with the keys in it. Tomorrow it could just as easy be a Merc.'

‘Go on, Eric, impress me. You buy cars at auction, patch 'em up and flog 'em for a few quid more to suckers who don't know any better.'

‘And what bright golden future have you come out of nick to? I don't know whether you've heard, but we're in a recession. There's over three million unemployed. What have you got to offer her, even if she wanted it?'

‘Who says I want to offer her anything? Who says I want her?'

‘What the hell do you want, then?'

‘I want to see her. How is she?'

Eric took a deep breath. ‘She's dying.'

‘You what?'

‘It's cancer.'

‘Go on.'

‘It started a couple of years ago, in one breast. They hoped they'd caught it in time.'

‘I don't believe you.'

‘Believe what you like. I never knew it was like that. Sometimes she's nearly like normal, except she's thinner and easy tired. Other times she has to stop in bed. Soon she'll be in bed for good – for
what time there is left.'

‘How long do they give her?'

‘She won't see another Christmas.'

 

‘Steak sandwich and chips, Mrs Brewster.' The landlady put the plate on the table with a knife and a fork wrapped in a paper napkin. ‘I hope I haven't kept you waiting.'

‘No, no. No hurry. I'm just nicely ready for it now. You're quiet today.'

‘There'll be a few more in later. But it's the schools' half-term. We're always a bit quieter then.'

‘Maisie...' Mrs Brewster leaned in over the table as the woman turned to go. ‘Do you know that chap over there, the one looking this way?'

‘Can't say I know either of them. I noticed them as I came through from the kitchen. They're not falling out, are they?'

‘They're not bothering anybody else, if they are. No, he seemed to know me and I've this feeling I ought to know him.'

‘Didn't you ask him who he was?'

‘I gave him plenty of chance to tell me, but he didn't let on. It's these blessed eyes of mine lately; they miss so much they wouldn't have missed at one time. He said he used to live here.'

‘Well, of course, we haven't been here long.'

‘No, well...'

‘Have you got everything you want? Would you like some mustard, or vinegar?'

‘No, just salt and pepper. Thank you.'

 

He tapped his empty glass with a fingernail and waited for Eric to take the hint.

‘D'you want another?'

‘How much is brandy these days?'

‘About the same as this.'

‘Wouldn't wan
t
you to be out of pocket. I'll have a brandy.'

‘Any particular brand?'

‘I'm not fussy.'

He was feeling light in the head, as though dizziness might strike him if he stood up. Well, he was out of practice. But two pints of lager shouldn't have got to him like that.

Cancer. And they'd already had the knife into her.

Across the room Mrs Brewster was eating her food and wiping juice from her chin with her paper serviette. She twisted her head and looked at him. The sunlight through the window behind her turned her glasses into two impenetrable discs of reflected light, but he thought her mouth curved in a little smile.

She had not smiled that day he had faced her in the magistrates' court in the town hall, when they sent him up to the crown court on a charge too grave for them to try. Her mouth had worked then as the police gave the evidence and she heard just what he'd done. He'd thought she was having all on not to be sick. There was more than one in the room that day who would cheerfully have marched him out to the marketplace and topped him there and then. And now she couldn't place him.

Eric had got the drinks and paid for them. He left them on the bar and went through the door he had entered by. As the landlord stepped into the back room, the other man suddenly got up and walked to the bar. He took the brandy and threw it back in one; then, without looking at Mrs Brewster, he went out.

There were doors in the passage marked LADIES and GENTS. He walked past them and into the street.

 

Mrs Brewster tried to poke a scrap of lettuce from under her top denture with her tongue. She would have to go and rinse it. She drank the last quarter-inch of her Guinness and considered whether or not to buy a glass of port. It was dull in the Bird in Hand today. Boring. She would have been better occupied in eating a snack at home while watching
Pebble Mill at One
on television.

One of the men came back, the one who had come in last. He went to the bar counter and only looked behind him at the table where he had been sitting when he saw the empty brandy glass.

‘He went out,' Mrs Brewster said.

‘Oh.'

This man remained standing at the bar. He bit at one of his fingernails before drinking.

‘He must have gone,' Mrs Brewster said.

‘Yes... Aye...'

‘Should I know him?' Mrs Brewster asked; but the man was now in a study and seemed not to have heard her. Then he suddenly turned his head.

‘Did you say something?'

‘I said I thought I ought to know him.'

‘Oh, he's nobody you'd be interested in, love,' Eric said.

The Middle of the Journey

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dear Monica,

So you heard. I didn't want to alarm you or upset you without real cause so I decided I'd wait until I had something positive to tell you. I've always known how fond you are of Raymond, though it was believing your friendship for me came first that led me to unburden myself to you all those years ago and only afterwards did I realise that I'd not behaved with the last ounce of tact in choosing you as my confessor. But then, confession itself can often be construed as a selfish act, can't it, and what in the end are friends for was what you said to me yourself at the time. So here I go again, because at the moment you can only know what everyone else knows, not what else came out of it.

We were driving up the A1 to Yorkshire and I was telling Raymond that I couldn't remember travelling so far north in England since I'd visited my Aunt Lally, in Harrogate, as a child. But, of course, I could. ‘I've passed through on the train to Scotland, but that hardly counts.'

Raymond said the trains are so frequent and fast nowadays he'd been tempted to suggest we should travel that way.

‘You'd have had to pay carriage on the wine,' I reminded him.

‘True. And they're just that bit off the beaten track, which would have put them to the trouble of meeting us.'

The man we were going to stay with has a house in the country, with a large cellar. He had put it to Raymond that with the number of free-house pubs and well-to-do families in the area an agency for quality wines could be run from his home, and Raymond, looking for a foothold in that region, had agreed to give it a try, though he had wondered aloud to me whether our host's immediate interest extended any further than the possibility of making enough profit to cover his own wine bill.

‘Anyway, with the car,' I pointed out, ‘we can leave when we like, should anything go wrong.'

‘Wrong?'

‘If we're bored by them, or they're bored by us; or the food's awful, or the beds are damp.'

‘You're becoming a regular fusspot, Nora.'

‘No, I'm not. But I do know the minimum I need to keep me comfortable and contented, and I can't throw myself into these adventures with the blithe abandon I used to.'

‘Adventures! A weekend in the country with a potential customer? Blithe abandon? Whenever did blithe abandon win over your natural caution?'

‘You'd be surprised,' I wanted to say, ‘astounded if I confessed to you now.' I hadn't thought about if for years. Well, not let it preoccupy me for more than two or three consecutive minutes. It was only this journey to that part of the country which had brought it back. Not that we were going to the same part exactly, either: it was a good thirty miles away. I'd checked it on the map before telling myself that it wouldn't have mattered if we'd been bound for the same hotel: no one would have been likely to remember after all that time.

But I remembered: I remembered more than I'd known I could, giving myself the luxury of sitting down and letting myself remember; safe now at this distance of years.

Raymond was telling me what the country was like: ‘Farming land; great sweeps of it. Rich. Well wooded in parts. It's not like the Dales, you know. People who don't know Yorkshire think everything outside the cities is barren moors and the Dales.'

Oh, yes, the Dales. The weather had been atrocious, but we had hardly cared. We had walked in wind and rain and exclaimed as occasional sunshine lit vistas we had resigned ourselves to not seeing. Four bracing days, three blissful nights. (Did I tell you all this? Enough of it, anyway.) It seemed to me like abandon, though I'd banished guilt by an act of will. Raymond was on a buying trip in France. Douglas and I were a long way from home, and he had chosen well: a place he'd called on a couple of years before and remembered. I'd tried teasing him, asking him if he'd brought someone else here, before.

‘It struck me as a good place for a honeymoon.'

A honeymoon. Ah...

‘Not for young people who need nightlife, theatres, bright lights,' he said, ‘but for a mature couple who are content with each other.'

Yes, a honeymoon...

Douglas, as you know, had married and divorced young. ‘It didn't take,' he said. ‘Thank goodness we were both sensible enough to let go before any lasting damage was done.' He'd been bitten once and now trod warily. I was no threat to him. We didn't speak of the future – not then. The present was everything and life too short to deny ourselves the pleasure we gave each other. Many a lasting marriage has been under-pinned by a little outside
excitement, I'd told myself. Douglas had seemed to understand; to want and expect no more than that.

Until he spoke of honeymoons, and then, the imagination being what it is, my thoughts began to reconstruct our affair as a trial run for a venture on which I knew we both would have happily embarked were there nothing in the way.

Only Raymond, of course. No children, and likely to be none. Not much passion, either, if the truth be told – and now was the time to tell it – but a gentle, companionable union which I'd thought contained all I should ever need for the rest of my life.

‘Do whatever you think is best for you,' you said to me. ‘Do it and abide by it.' And only much later did it occur to me how hard it might have been for you not to say straight out, ‘Go with Douglas, if you want him so much.' For that would have freed Raymond so that you and he might... Well, not then, but later, in the fullness of time. (Am I imagining all that? Forgive me if I am. But you may never have allowed yourself to frame the thought so clearly.)

Raymond came back from France with tales of the wife of the vineyard owner he had bought from. ‘She seemed to me to be a woman who had all a woman could reasonably hope for: good looks, three healthy children, a well-to-do and respected husband who obviously loves her. And what is she? A cold, arrogant shrew. If he didn't love her so much and hadn't his work, which is his passion, I suspect he would have to acknowledge that she does her level best to make his life a misery. All I could think of was how very, very lucky I am to have you and how very, very easy it must be to make a mistake that could ruin one's life.'

He wanted me that night and something in me responded so that I opened myself freely and worked to quicken our feeling. He was grateful. ‘Well, old girl,' he said afterwards, ‘I rather think you must have been missing me.'

Douglas said I wanted both of them. ‘I want you,' I told him, ‘but I can't hurt him.'

‘You're going to have to choose.'

‘Oh, why didn't you say all this at the beginning?'

‘I didn't know at the beginning. But now you must choose.'

‘Not yet, Douglas,' I said. ‘Please, not just yet.'

And then one day, as you know, I went to where he should have been and he wasn't there. I waited for his message – I had to leave it to him. None came. It was over.

Perhaps you can see that for Raymond to tease me about my ‘natural caution' was to tempt me, with the ache long gone, to diminish my sacrifice: to let in the small voice which insinuated that caution had indeed been my prime motive, that saving virtue of common sense which had told me, even in deepest thrall, which side my bread was buttered on.

Because I did get my reward, you know. I got what I'd always wanted as a girl: marriage to a gentle and totally reliable man and a civilised life in which I could read the books I wanted to read, see the films and the plays, take my seat at the opera, travel, tend my garden, entertain his friends, mine, ours, in a home where money was never a pressing problem.

So why was I feeling so strongly at this late stage (because of where we were going, because of the memories the journey had resurrected, because of his light-hearted jibe about my ‘caution'?) the urge to tell him how it had all been bought and paid for?

I offered to drive for a spell, but I knew he didn't want me to. He didn't mind long journeys so long as he was at the wheel, but he was a poor passenger and soon began that tuneless humming that might have sounded to others like contentment, but which I knew as a sure sign he was ill at ease.

I, on the other hand, perfectly relaxed physically, felt sleep reach for me. As my head rolled and jerked, Raymond said why didn't I let the seat down and take a nap.

‘Sure you don't mind?'

‘Not a bit.'

‘I always feel such a cheat, napping while someone else is driving.'

‘And I always say I don't mind.'

‘Well, if you won't let me drive.'

‘Take your nap. I'll put the radio on.'

‘We can stop for coffee whenever you wish.'

 

I knew in my sleep that the car had stopped, which was what woke me. I took in slowly as I stretched and yawned that we were not on a hotel or snack-bar forecourt, but by the roadside, as a massive container lorry whooshed by with a warning blare of horn, shuddering even the sturdy Volvo where it stood, and drowning for the moment the inane voices on a local radio phone-in programme.

I turned my head, starting to ask ‘What... ?' and sitting bolt upright as I saw him.

He couldn't speak. I wasn't even sure he could hear me. The spasm seemed to have left him; his hands still clung to the wheel and his eyes stared straight ahead, looking at God only knew what, out of a face bloated with a colour the like of which I'd never seen before and hope and pray I shall never see again.

There was no moving him to get to the wheel myself. I wondered how much warning he'd had and as I switched off the radio and loosened his tie and spoke to him again, I knew that I had no idea at all how to take the first steps in such an emergency; I mean what was dangerous, what might make the difference between life and death.

I made out what looked like a pub sign some way in front and opened the door. ‘Raymond, I'm going to get help.' As I got out I thought to reach back, turn off the ignition and switch on the hazard warning lights. Then I ran, stumbling at first along the rough grass shoulder before I risked taking to the edge of the road itself.

 

The doctor was explaining to me: ‘A lot of things – even familiar things – have become jumbled – scrambled, you could call it – in his mind. He couldn't get his own name right this morning.'

‘Good lord!'

‘He's not going out of his mind,' he went on quickly. ‘You mustn't worry about that. It's quite a common effect of a seizure and in a day or two it should sort itself out.'

‘He is going to be all right, isn't he?'

‘Oh, yes; with treatment and rest he should be back to normal quite soon. I say normal, though you'll both have to regard what's happened as a warning and see that he adjusts his way of life accordingly.'

It was the first time I'd spoken with this man – the specialist. At first it had been the staff in Casualty, too brisk and preoccupied to tell me anything.

‘You don't live hereabouts?'

‘No, our home's in Surrey. We were on our way to visit some business connections of my husband's, in Yorkshire.'

‘But you've found a place to stay?'

‘I'm in a motel, just outside town. They have my phone number on the ward.'

I wanted to ask him more, but I guessed he'd told me all he could – or wanted to – for the present. His telephone pinged as though it was about to ring. He moved some papers on his desk. He was a busy man. I got up and left him.

Devilishly expensive it was, too, the place I'd booked myself into that first fraught day, taking the easiest course and choosing from the hotel guide that Raymond carried in the car. Comfortable, of course, with a private bathroom, colour television and a refrigerator stocked with enough drink to keep anyone paralytic for a week. And a drink was what I felt I needed, limp as I was with relief that Raymond was going to be all right, and suspended now in a kind of limbo, not knowing how long we must stay in this strange place halfway to our destination.

I chose whisky. I mustn't get drunk. A couple in my present state would make me tipsy. Oh God! Oh, thank God, thank God he was going to be all right (and he is, Monica, he is; I assure you). Just how much I needed him had been made plain to me on that roadside as the ambulancemen took him from the car and I stood, transfixed by pure terror at the possibility of losing him.

It was the weekend now. Raymond's office was closed and I couldn't remember the home telephone number of his partner. I must also ring the Ascoughs, who would be wondering what on earth had happened to us.

‘I need some phone numbers, Raymond,' I'd said to him at the hospital.

His address book would be in his briefcase, which was now with our luggage, in my motel room. The case was one of those rigid-framed leather ones with numbered tumbler locks.

But all he'd done was smile, in a distant, dreamy fashion, as though he were far away, in a private place I couldn't reach. I'd hesitated to press him. And if, as the specialist had said, he couldn't unscramble his own name, how could his confused mind be expected to yield the six figures which would open the case?

I put the case on the low table and looked at it. With so many arbitrary combinations of figures assigned one in this computer age surely for himself he would have chosen a sequence he could readily recall. I tried his birthday. No. His office telephone number was seven figures. I tried the first six, then the last. I did the same with our home number, then I had a drink of whisky and looked out of the window. It was a lovely day. The land was green. I'd promised myself some country walks while Raymond did his business. What could the Ascoughs be thinking?

It was lunchtime, but I didn't feel like going to the restaurant. Ringing room service, I ordered soup and a salad sandwich. Coffee or tea I could make here in the room.