The White Room (27 page)

‘I was supposed to be going out tonight.'

Sharon's voice was cold and clear, unaffected by sleep. Jack suspected she had been awake all along, biding her time, waiting for her moment.

He felt anger and guilt well within him, bubble grittily to the surface. He swallowed them both down.

‘Sorry,' he said, as neutrally as possible. ‘I had to do something. Couldn't be avoided.'

‘You could have let me know.'

‘I tried phoning you this afternoon. You were out.'

Sharon sighed. Jack was sure it was to expel some anger.

‘So I had to change all my plans because you decided you had something to do.'

The guilt was dissipating. Jack felt only anger now. He tried to keep his voice down.

‘He'll have to see you another night, then.' Jack felt bile in his chest when he spoke. Before Sharon could answer he continued: ‘Kenny Bell's died. Ralph needed some help.'

Jack felt Sharon bite back her retort. Instead she asked how. He told her. Her mood subsided slightly.

‘When's the funeral?' she said.

‘Probably next week some time. Jean's making the arrangements.' Jack lay on his back, stared at the ceiling. ‘Are you going?'

Sharon paused before answering.

‘Yes.'

They lay in silence for a while.

‘So what did Ralph have you doing?' said Sharon eventually.

‘Letting people know. He couldn't get in touch with—' he swallowed, hoped Sharon wouldn't pick up on his hesitation, write too much into it ‘—with Joanne. They couldn't reach her. No phone.' He tried to keep his voice inflectionless. ‘So I had to go round there.'

‘So that's where you've been all this time. Round at Joanne Bell's.'

Jack felt anger rise within him again. Defensive anger this time.

‘Yes, I have. She's just lost her brother, for God's sake. She needed … somebody with her.'

Sharon gave a short, harsh laugh.

‘With the students all night. I'll bet they enjoyed that. Must have been like one of their dads visiting.'

Even in the dark Jack knew his face was flushed. His body was shaking with anger. He thought of all the times Sharon had gone out wearing clothes that he thought were too young for her, depth of make-up increasing with age, running ever faster to chase her disappearing youth.

‘You—' he said, then stopped himself. He didn't want an argument. Not now. He didn't trust himself not to say something he would regret. One hasty phrase and the house of cards would come crashing down.

‘What?'

‘Nothing. It doesn't matter. Go to sleep.'

Jack heard Sharon sigh, settle her body down. Thinking she had scored a victory with her words.

‘That's a night out on my own you owe me, though.'

‘Good night.'

Jack lay there, too wound up to sleep. He knew Sharon would be doing the same. The more he thought, the angrier he became. So he tried to ignore her, let her words go. Think of something else. Something happier.

Joanne.

He smiled at the thought of her. He wondered where she was, what she was doing. In bed, probably. Trying not to be too upset about Kenny. Thinking of him, hopefully. Wondering what would happen next.

I'll be here. You'll always have me to come to. Whenever you want me.

He smiled to himself, looked forward to seeing her again.

Joanne.

Like he had been brought back to life.

He smiled again.

And was soon asleep.

Rain lashed down, wind whipped, chilled through to bone. Fell with biblical fury on the Gosforth golf courses, made them unplayable and inhospitable, spread past the greens to the cemetery.

Kenny Bell's funeral.

Dark during the daytime: black-clad figures huddled beneath black umbrellas, became indistinct, blurred shapes. The rain and wind bleached foreground and background to variously graded misty hues of grey: distant buildings, winter-denuded trees and hedges, granite headstones. Up close, the rain turned the grass underfoot into marshy, swampy mud.

Jack shivered, thought no amount of heat or light could ever warm him or dry him again. He held an umbrella over himself and Sharon, cold forcing them together. He was glad Isaac, at school then the childminder's, had been spared this. Wished he had himself.

The coffin was supported, anticipating descent. The Catholic priest, old and rotund, held his book in shaking hands, spoke in trembling tones, went as fast as decorum would allow. He was shivering beneath his frocked layers, his large face aiming for sternness, showing severe discomfort. Saying: man had but a short time to live. Subtextually communicating: in this weather, that's not short enough.

The gathering was sparse: friends and family of Ralph and Jean, staff from the nursing home. Kenny had no friends of his own.

Jack's attention wandered from the priest to the mourners. A family portrait: the Bells.

Ralph and Jean Bell stood numbly, eyes transfixed by the coffin, the hole in the ground. Jean looked paler than Jack had ever seen her: skin leached of colour and almost translucent, like a thin veil covering the dead-eyed skull beneath. She moved like an animated corpse, a shrunken physical shell from which the soul had departed. Absent to the quick: only her ghost present.

Ralph was different. His size, always large, was tipping over into corpulence. Jack knew, from the increasingly rare visits Ralph made into work, that the man was drinking heavily: his purple, blotched face and ruined nose attesting to that. But there was more: like a centuries-old oak attacked by lichen and insects, something seemed to be eating Ralph away from the inside. Guilt, Jack surmised, burning through his old friend like acid or syphilis. Jack had tried talking to the man on many occasions, losing count over the months and years, but to no avail. An iron door would descend, locking Ralph in, Jack and the world out.

Next to them, but not too near, stood Johnny. Statue-still, hands in pockets, the rain hitting his cropped blond head, rivering down his face. His expression seemed curiously beatific: like a stained-glass suffering saint. The rapture of pain. Jack shivered.

At the other side of Ralph and Jean: Joanne.

His lover.

Face tipped down towards the coffin. Radiating strength for her parents, casting secret glances at Jack. Jack returning them. Her long hair, tied with a dark, silken sash, was soaked. Her overcoat, old and mannish, had water dripping from its fringes. Every movement she made squeezed a small stream from the heavy fabric. Eyes panda-black, rain-ruined.

She looked beautiful.

Jack wanted her. Even at the graveside, cold and wet. He wanted her. Desire incarnate. He longed for her with his body and heart. They had been together several times, proving their union to be no one off. He could dress it up with different words and emotions, but he was falling in love.

Life with Sharon had drifted into an uneasy truce. Separate lives. Never questioning each other. Marking nights out on the kitchen calendar. Holding their home together by a delicate web of shattered dreams, broken promises, marital duty and Isaac. Their marriage was work. Their pleasure elsewhere.

Sharon moved, shuffled foot to foot, reminded Jack she was still there. She moved her shivering body towards his, huddled for warmth. Joanne looked across at him, her face displaying an unhappiness that had nothing to do with her brother's burial. He looked back at her, apologizing, hoped his face, his mind communicated the fact of who he really wanted to be with.

The priest moved to the end of his address.

Ashes to ashes.

Dust to dust.

The coffin was lowered. He threw earth on to the wooden lid. Rain-sodden and muddied, it hit the wood with a wet slap, left his hand with a filthy stain.

He concluded and, after wiping his hand on his cassock, shook hands with Ralph and Jean, then quickly disappeared.

‘If you'd like to come back to my mam and dad's house,' said Joanne against the wind, ‘you're all welcome.'

She left the graveside with her parents.

Jack watched them walk away, both supported by Joanne. Like they had buried more than their son, he thought. A part of their past had died and an uncertain future had been born.

The other mourners followed at a respectful distance, trudging through the wind and rain like broken, failed explorers lost in an arctic blizzard wilderness, dwindling into a fog of static.

Jack sighed, rolled over on his back, smiled. Joanne stroked his chest hair, smiled also.

‘I needed that,' she said.

‘So did I.'

Back at Joanne's flat. Rain still pounding outside, rattling the window frames, candles and warmth inside. An incense stick burning. Keeping the world at bay.

Bottle of wine by the bed. Two half-drunk glasses.

Earlier, the wake at the Bells' house:

Lighted gas fires carried an unused smell, like burning dust.

Curtains pulled close and overhead lights increased the mausoleum atmosphere.

Wet mourners steamed and shivered.

Finger food and bone-china tea. Something stronger for those who wanted it.

In the hall, an incongruous Christmas tree stood, sad and sparsely festive.

Conversation in small, hushed tones: platitudes and clichés of bereavement.

Ralph and Jean can get on with their lives.

It's a blessing really.

They lost him a long time ago, if you're being honest.

No celebrating or mourning the loss of Kenny for his own sake. No mention or knowledge of his life.

No Dan Smith. ‘Sends his regards,' Ralph had said. ‘Out of the country. Some Scandinavian place.'

Everyone drinking up, eating up, hurrying off as quickly as possible.

Joanne asks Jack into the garage, the pretence of reaching down stored spirits.

They were on each other, mouths and hands devouring. Her nearness made his thighs tremble.

‘I've wanted you all day,' Jack said, gasping.

‘Likewise.'

They kissed again. She asked him round to her place that evening.

‘Won't they need you? I notice Johnny left pretty quickly.'

‘I do what I can for them, but sometimes I have to think of myself. I have needs as well,' she said. ‘Enormous needs. I need you.'

They had kissed again.

Later, on the way home in the car, he told Sharon he would be out that night.

‘You didn't mark it on the calendar,' she said. ‘What if I'd planned to go out tonight?'

‘It's not on the calendar. And I said it first.'

A little thrill of petty triumph ran through him. Sharon sat still, staring ahead, her features like an injection-moulded mask.

He checked himself. How had they reached that situation? Both lying to each other, scoring points, wounding but never going in for the kill? How? He didn't know. And he didn't know if there was any way back from it. Or if he wanted there to be.

‘Hold me,' Joanne said, her small, quiet voice breaking into his thoughts, ‘just hold me.'

He did so.

‘Trying day,' he said.

She sighed.

‘Wouldn't want to go through that again in a hurry.'

She lit herself a cigarette, blew smoke at the ceiling.

‘Funerals,' she said, ‘make you think, don't they? I mean, not just about Mam and Dad and that, seeing they're all right, but the really important stuff. The big stuff.'

‘You mean why are we here? That sort of thing?'

‘Yeah. Why are we here, what's life for, all that.'

Jack gave a small smile. The candle shadows gave his face a sad aspect. He took a sip from his wine glass.

‘If you can answer that one,' he said, replacing the glass on the floor, ‘you'll make a fortune.'

‘Don't you have any answers at all?'

‘I don't know. I thought I did.' The wine, the shadows, were loosening his tongue. Loosening the dusty chains that kept his memories locked up. ‘When I was your age, I was in the army. Just coming out. Second World War. Europe.' He sighed. ‘I saw some things.'

Joanne propped herself up on one elbow, interested.

‘What sort of things?'

He avoided answering, made an issue of taking a mouthful of wine.

‘What sort of things?'

‘Belsen,' he said eventually.

‘The concentration camp?'

Jack nodded. ‘I was there at the end. The liberation.' Another sigh.

‘What was it like?' Joanne's voice was quiet again.

Jack opened his mouth to speak, but no sound came out. He struggled with memories, found himself back there. The images again. The Pathé horror newsreel.

Cranking up again, flickering back to half-life.

He spoke as he watched.

‘I couldn't …'

The stick people. Men, women and children. Skin shrunken down to their bones. Faces skeletal. Eyes filled with terror.

‘I don't want you to …'

The crunch of bone underfoot. The slap and slip of boot on sun-dried, leathery skin.

‘It's not fair for you … to …'

Squashed into bunks smaller than veal crates.

Bodies piled high, bulldozed into graves.

‘To …'

Bones and flesh, just ashes in the furnace.

‘Jack? You're shivering. Come here …'

Joanne stubbed out her cigarette, put her arms around him. Jack went willingly, his body shaking.

‘Sorry …' His words were whispers. ‘I thought I was … over … it … but the memories, they're …'

‘It's all right.'

Rocking him.

‘Still there …'

‘It's all right. You're here now. With me.'

Jack held on to her, gripping hard to her as if she was the last precipice of life before falling into the abyss. They lay like that until, with a forceful sigh, the tense rigidity left Jack's body and he flopped back against the mattress, cold sweat pinpricking his skin.

‘I'm sorry,' he said again.

‘You needn't be. You're here with me.'