Wrote For Luck (3 page)

A
s he came back through the French windows he could see the three of them perched on the bench at the end of the tiny lawn. Hemmed in on three sides – the gardens came tightly packed in this part of Putney – they looked oddly detached, unworried by the badly stacked barbecue a few feet away, which was diffusing gusts of pearlgrey smoke, or the juddering music centre beyond the fence.

He stood looking at them irresolutely for a moment – Lucy sat a little to one side, the others were bent towards each other like conspiring sisters – and then straightened up, guiding himself and the tray through the obstacle course of protruding doorstep, scattered paperbacks, a rickety sun-lounger with a frayed canopy. The mild, but sharply accented, voices came drifting into earshot.

‘But of course Toby was always a flake… Didn’t Emma used to say that was the second most important thing you had to remember about him?’

‘What was the first thing?’

‘Darling, it’s not really a fit subject for the back garden.’

He moved slowly across the patch of uncut, emerald-shaded grass into the shadow thrown by the garden’s solitary ash tree. Three months into knowing Lucy, a month into being elevated to the status of Lucy’s ‘partner’ (forty-two seemed a bit old for being described as somebody’s boyfriend) his
antennae were finely tuned to this kind of conversational shorthand.

He had a feeling that ‘flake’ meant something different from the usages of his own late twenties. Like ‘smart’, ‘solid’ and ‘clever’, ‘flake’ was a word that Lucy could coat with layers of an irony he’d not yet been able to penetrate.

There was an upturned flagstone next to the bench, where somebody had left a packet of Silk Cut and a paperback called
Bitchpack Confidential
. He lowered the tray gingerly on to the rough surface and stood up, leaning one arm on the dolls’-house-sized garden shed, shading his eyes against the strong Easter Bank Holiday sun.

Seeing him for the first time, the girls looked up.

‘Well done that man,’ Serena said.

There was no point in denying that Serena made him uncomfortable. Not only was she younger than the others – twenty-six, maybe, or twenty-seven – but she reminded him of Naomi, his ex-wife. A much younger Naomi, that ghost from his early London days, sunbathing on the roof of the Clerkenwell flat or watching
Live Aid
on TV, dressed only in a pair of tracksuit bottoms, before the Nineties nonsense had gathered them up and defiled the memory of it all.

Curiously enough, he still had Naomi’s last letter – two years old now, predating the final ransom demand from the lawyers – in his jacket pocket back upstairs, a disintegrating talisman of past time, never to be surrendered.

He stood there a bit awkwardly, feigning an interest in the grill, until he noticed that Lucy was patting the unoccupied nine inches of bench between her and Charlotte.

Lowering himself warily into it, he caught Lucy’s eye. It was the usual glance, one he remembered from the small hours: friendly, complicit, meaning; so far as he could deduce,
Don’t worry about my friends
, or
All this is incidental to us
. Like ‘smart’, ‘solid’ and ‘clever’, you could never be quite sure that your interpretation was the correct one, that some important part of the linguistic equation hadn’t escaped you.

‘Oh no!’ Lucy said suddenly. ‘Bugger and damnation.’

‘What’s the matter?’

‘Left my sunglasses inside somewhere.’

That was another thing about this tribe of twenty-somethings, he reflected – their habit of framing momentary irritations in the language of cataclysm. Really serious things, on the other hand, featured high up on the roster of evasion and concealment: ‘rather an upset’ (a written-off car); ‘a little problem at home’ (somebody’s mother’s cancer).

‘I’ll get them,’ he announced.

‘There’s really no need,’ Lucy said.

‘And the other thing about Toby,’ Serena volunteered breathlessly, ‘was that you never knew whether to take all that stuff about his parents abusing him as a child seriously or not.’

Back inside the house he made his way stealthily along the cramped corridor that ran from the kitchen to the sitting-room. Here it was unexpectedly cool, and the Sunday papers lay strewn across the sofa. He flipped one or two of the sheets over – there was nothing there except the keys to Lucy’s BMW – then began to riffle through the pile of oddments on the mantelpiece.

Long experience had told him that mantelpieces – this was a jumbo-sized version running beneath a Claude-style landscape of rolling woods and hillside bowers – were an infallible guide to personality. This one harboured several invitations couched in varying degrees of formality:
Brigadier and Mrs Tom Slater-Sutherland request the pleasure
…
The partners of Ernst & Young… Come to Emma’s 30th
… a picture of Lucy in a swimsuit standing uncomfortably close to a square-jawed man with wavy hair and a superior smile whose identity hadn’t yet been divulged to him, and a letter from Lucy’s mother folded inside a cutting from
Gloucestershire Homes and Gardens
.

In the end he found the sunglasses on the hall table, half hidden under a pile of letters addressed to Mr Gavin Henderson, Lucy’s ex-boyfriend, ‘downsized’ from the premises – this was Lucy’s joke – some months before.

There was something unsettling him, he realised as he padded back along the corridor with the sunglasses curled up in his outstretched hand like an outsize beetle, something that had nothing to do with Gavin Henderson, the supercilious hunk on the beach, or the tiredness produced by yesterday afternoon’s case work and having to drive the children back to Reading in the evening, something from long ago that was trying to force its way out.

There were more photographs clustered on the pin-board above the telephone table: Lucy in a ballgown, at some awayday organised by her law firm, with her parents – gnarled but county-ish – outside an ivy-clad Cotswold pub. Her skin, he noticed, was extraordinary – unworn, the colour of mother-of-pearl, as if the whole of her upper body had just been
released from some protective shell. Slightly to his surprise he found himself quivering with what was, presumably, however middle-aged and worn-down, desire. Lucy was twenty-nine.

In the kitchen Serena stood briskly unpacking chicken drumsticks from a series of Tupperware boxes. Feeling a sudden need to ingratiate himself with her, he reached into the fridge and started pulling out the lettuces and tomatoes he’d bought last night on the way back from Reading.

‘Actually,’ Serena said, ‘I was going to leave them for a bit later on. If you don’t mind.’ She was a tall, bony girl with piles of corn-coloured hair who worked in a shop that sold Art Deco furniture. Still trying to fasten on to the memory that had risen above the sight of Gavin Henderson’s unclaimed post, he collected up the salad and put it back. Outside, he could see Lucy crouched over the grill with a handful of firelighters, shooing the smoke away with her fingers.

‘You know,’ Serena said with the same brisk efficiency, ‘I think it’s perfectly brilliant of Lu to have discovered you. Where did she say the two of you got together?’

For some reason, the thought of having to explain the complex chain of coincidence that had brought the legal firm where he worked and the legal firm where Lucy worked into temporary proximity was too exhausting to be borne. ‘It was a work thing,’ he temporised.

‘Oh, a work thing,’ said Serena. ‘I know all about work things. Now,
these
need to go out
there
.’

He went back across the grass, jokily bearing the plate of chicken drumsticks on one hand like a waiter. Nudged into being by the picture above the mantelpiece, the memory
was taking concrete shape now: dense banks of trees moving into the distance, crumbling stone, Naomi running in front of him on the path. He’d tried to get together with Naomi again a year ago, but it hadn’t worked. It was too late now. Lucy was still bending over the grill, plump knees drawn up under her chin.

‘I can’t get the wretched thing to work. It just gushes smoke.’

‘You’ve overloaded it. Look. Take some of the charcoal out and let the air circulate.’

‘Bugger and damnation! It’s gone all over my shorts.’

Scooping up some half-charred firelighters with a garden trowel, then repositioning the metal grill on its plinths, as Lucy dabbed at her knees with a paper napkin, he considered this unexpected vista of past time: Naomi’s face, the trees running on into the horizon. From nowhere, half a dozen other images from that day in Ireland fell smartly into place: driving along the wide, open highway from Dublin to Cork; granite poking up through the green hills. Something else struck him and he said: ‘I meant to tell you. I talked to Paul and he said we can have the cottage next weekend.’

‘It sounds nice.’

There were other people arriving now, and he watched them lounging forward over the lawn. The men, who had names like Danny and Ben, he assumed were younger versions of himself: junior managers in accountancy firms, apprentice lawyers. They hunkered down on the grass, cradling glasses of wine in their hands, or went into the kitchen and twitted Serena about the food.

The chicken flared beneath his hand. He thought about next weekend and what sort of a time he could expect. Lucy’s sunglasses lay on the bench beside him. Charlotte looked up from a conversation she was having with one of the apprentice lawyers. ‘Oh poor you,’ she said. ‘You seem to be doing all the work.’

It was two o’clock now. He wondered what the children were doing, and whether he oughtn’t to be spending Easter with them rather than in a suburban garden with a horde of people he hardly knew. Without warning, the name of the place where they’d had the picnic and Naomi had danced ahead of him down the forest path stole into his head: Loftholdingswood. It had always struck him as a beautiful name. Twelve years later it seemed more beautiful still.

Lucy had disappeared back inside the house. As he badly wanted a drink and there was none to hand he supposed he had better follow her. Serena passed him on the patio. ‘Sterling work,’ she said. Did it sound patronising? He couldn’t tell. The kitchen was full of Dannys and Bens. Professionally, he had evolved a technique for dealing with men a decade and more younger than himself: man-to-man, while encouraging an awareness of responsibilities on both sides. The Dannys and Bens were affable. They said things like, ‘Absolutely right’, and, ‘Where’s bloody Nigel got to, then?’

Back in the garden Lucy and Serena were deep in conversation again on the bench. He saw that the grill had nearly extinguished itself: smoke rose vertically into the dead air. Grinning at the memory of the woods, Naomi’s rapt, unfallen
smile, he moved towards it, hearing the voices drift back on the air.

‘A bit… long in the tooth.’

‘
Honestly
, Lu.’

‘Of course, he’s very attentive. But it takes simply ages to do anything, where it
matters
. I mean… You just have to lie there and think of England.’

‘God, all this smoke.’

He bent over the grill and studiously, almost reverently, began to rake the charcoal back and forth, waiting confidently for the pale streaks of heat – like memory, he thought – to take root and flicker. In a bit he would go home and phone the children. It was their voices, he realised suddenly, that he wanted to hear.

—2002

H
e came by so early that the sun had climbed only half-way to its accustomed place above the slatted roofs of Mr O’Hagan’s building on the far side of the street, and her mother, her voice detached and ghost-ridden behind the bedroom door, said nervously, ‘Who’s that, Ruthie, calling at this hour?’ and she paused in the brushing of her hair before the big oval mirror that hung in the sitting room and replied, ‘Now mother, you know that it’s only Huey,’ punctuating the words with strokes of the brush, and then looked curiously into the mirror as the last echoes of the three smart raps at the door faded into nothing, as if she had never seen herself before and wondered who in all of Chicago the pale-faced girl in the floral print dress could be. There was warm, molten light pouring in through the street window, making the room look dusty and confined, and as she went to the door her eye fell on such things as old newspapers, a handbill for the state agricultural fair, a card that a girl who shared her workbench at Lonigan’s had given her, all of them irradiated by the light and somehow magical and aglow.

When she opened the door he was standing a little way back on the landing at what her mother would have called ‘a respectful distance’, and she smiled and said: ‘You must have gotten up really early to be here by now.’ ‘That’s right,’ he
said gravely – he was always grave when he saw her – ‘I guess it was six o’clock or so. It’s pretty interesting around then, you know,’ he went on hurriedly, as if this getting up early were a mark of light-mindedness, ‘I mean, there are fellows in suits waiting for the streetcars and you wonder where it is they’re going.’ ‘I suppose there are all kinds of things people have to do,’ she said. ‘That’s right,’ he said, and then, tired of all this abstract talk, ‘How are you, Ruthie?’ ‘I’m very well,’ she said. ‘I almost didn’t get the day off, but then Mr Lonigan remembered he owed me for that Saturday I had to go in back in the fall so I guess everything worked out.’ ‘I guess it did,’ he said. He was wearing the blue-and-white striped jacket and the flat straw boater that made him look like just a little like one of the soda-jerks at the fountain in Pennsylvania Square, and he had a brown paper parcel in his left hand that contained his bathing things. Back in the apartment she could hear her mother moving round the kitchen, the noise of a kettle being filled, the thump of a cat being evicted from a chair. Somewhere in the distance a door slammed shut.

‘Why don’t you come in and have some breakfast?’ she said. ‘You must be hungry if you got up at six.’ ‘Don’t let me put you to any trouble,’ he said. He had taken off his straw boater and was twirling the brim anxiously around his forefinger, and his Adam’s Apple stuck out of his throat like a tomahawk. He lived way over on the East Side in one of the new projects and she had met him at a dance given by the Young Women’s League of St Francis. ‘Oh, it’s no trouble,’ she said, smiling suddenly at the promise of the day before them, the thought of Wabash Avenue and its summer crowds,
girls and their dates flocking into the streetcars, and he caught something of the excitement in her voice and came almost blithely through the apartment door to stand in the vestibule shaking imaginary specks of dirt off his shoes and look benevolently at the clutch of umbrellas and her father’s ulster and the piled-up boots that her brothers had left there, as if this profusion of objects accorded with every idea he had ever possessed of domestic comfort. She could not take him into the parlour, for it was full of dressmakers’ samples, laid out anyhow over the sofa and the chairs, and so she led him into the kitchen, which was full of steam and heat and the smell of baking soda, where her mother looked up from the stove and said, ‘Is that you Huey? Gracious but it’s early.’ Mrs Christie did not like Huey. She had tried to, but she could not manage it. She said there were too many Catholics and the APA had the right idea. And Huey, knowing this, was frightened of her.

It was going to be a hot day, for the Fourth of July flags, not yet taken down from the drug store that ran along the front of Mr O’Hagan’s building, drooped listlessly towards the street, and the air coming from off the lake through the open window was warm and full of grit. ‘Huey, how are your folks?’ her mother asked as she handed out the cups of coffee, and, looking round the tiny kitchen, with its faded poster advertising the Chicago Grand Exposition, the grocery list pinned up on the cupboard door, the cat gone to ground in its basket, she saw that it was exactly the same as it had always been and that not even the introduction of Huey could lend it novelty. Huey was nervous with his coffee. He blew on its
surface to cool it, spilled some of it onto his saucer and then poured the liquid that had spilled back into his cup, and all the while Mrs Christie watched and judged him. Later, when he was gone, she would say: ‘He’s a nice young fellow, I dare say, but he can’t manage himself.’ ‘They’re all pretty well, I guess,’ he said, when he had dealt with the spilled coffee. ‘Although my mother’s not so good.’ Huey’s mother was never very well. She had a goitre in her throat and an abscess on her leg that needed to be dressed twice a week at the doctor’s surgery. This was another thing Mrs Christie had against Huey: bad health was a moral failing. The coffee was nearly all drunk up now, and in the silence that followed she could hear the creak of his shoes as he rocked back and forth on his feet. She wondered if her mother had finished with Huey yet, but Mrs Christie had her trump card still to play. She waited until Huey had set down his coffee cup in such a way as to send another little rivulet of liquid over the saucer’s edge and onto the kitchen table and said in what was meant to be a conversational tone: ‘Of course, Ruthie got her letter just the other day.’ ‘Why, that’s great,’ Huey said, with the same air of pious absorption he brought to a baseball game on the radio or a cinema newsreel. ‘I’m certainly pleased to hear that.’ She stood there by the kitchen table as the cat looked up enquiringly from its refuge, her mother canny and belligerent, Huey pained and conciliatory, and wished that all this could stop. ‘That’s right,’ Mrs Christie said proudly. ‘Some girls, they just got standard letters. But Ruthie, she had the principal write to her personally. Now I call that well-mannered.’ ‘Oh mother,’ she protested, ‘there’s no reason to
make such a thing about Mrs O’Riordan writing to me. It’s only because there was a doubt about me going.’ ‘Nonsense,’ Mrs Christie said triumphantly. ‘She wrote because you scored so high in the test and she wanted to tell you so. Isn’t that right, don’t you think, Huey?’ ‘Yes, I’m sure that’s so,’ Huey said anxiously, knowing that some game was being played with him but not yet able to see what it was.

Having watched Huey spill his tea, satisfied herself that his mother was still ill and wrought upon him the triumph of the letter, the fight went out of Mrs Christie. She had carried her point, established her moral superiority: the young people could make of this what they chose. ‘Ruthie,’ she said, deciding to leave abstract questions of etiquette for practical necessity, ‘if you are going out in this heat, I absolutely insist that you wear a hat. Think what Mrs O’Riordan would say if you turned up on the first day looking like a field hand.’ Mrs Christie had been raised in rural Illinois: ‘field hand’ was about the worst insult she could think of. And so she went back to her bedroom and fetched the straw bonnet she had bought for her holiday the previous year and wove a piece of ribbon around it, which the
Ladies’ Home Journal
had said was a sure-fire remedy against dullness. When she came back to the kitchen her mother was gone and there was only Huey twirling his boater in his hand and staring seriously at the picture of Herbert Hoover, gleaned from the
Sun-Tribune
, that had been stuck to the larder door. ‘Your mother’s in the parlour,’ he said. In the early days he had called her ‘your ma’. This had got back to Mrs Christie and been appropriately ridiculed. ‘She said not to say goodbye. Maybe we ought to
go.’ ‘Yes, maybe we should,’ she said. She was annoyed about the spilled coffee and the letter. The ribbon had come adrift from the back of her hat and she wound it carefully up again, round and round her finger, and then pushed the knot into a little crevice in the brim, all the while following him down the staircase and out onto the sidewalk.

It was still not much more than 8am, but already the street was showing signs of life. The Italian family who owned the drug store were out taking down the shutters, and there were old men with elaborately oiled hair in summer jackets labouring past with newspapers under their arms. ‘Those eye-ties sure get everywhere,’ Huey said, as if to suggest that such work, though not for him personally, would do very well for inferior races, and, wanting to conciliate him, to recompense him for the quarter-hour spent with her mother, she said: ‘Yes, they surely do.’ The streetcar stop was a block away and they went on rapidly, past the advertisement hoardings and big, high buildings out of whose upper windows men in shirt-sleeves leaned at forty-five degree angles with their elbows on the sills, with the heat growing stronger at every step, and she thought of the other girls at Lonigan’s, heads down over the green baize work-table, with Mary Daley, to whose care these commissions usually fell, collecting up two cent pieces to buy a pitcher of lemonade, and realised that in four weeks time, or maybe only three, she would not be there any more and Mr Lonigan would have to get by without her. The awareness of this impending revolution in her life scared her, and she said: ‘How are you getting on with your job, Huey? Is it going any better?’ And Huey, who worked for a man who had
invented a patented sanitary drinking cup, frowned and said seriously: ‘I should say it is. That Mr Banahan is a live-wire. Do you know what he did the other day? He took a crate of cups down to the Loop, stood on a trestle table and shouted at people about how great they were. Sold the whole crate, too. Yes, he’s a real live-wire, and I’m proud to be working for him even if it is only a commission job.’ The position with Mr Banahan was Huey’s third commission job. Previously he had sold brushes and a curious kind of vacuum cleaner that did not need plugging into an electrical circuit.

When they reached the streetcar stop there was already a crowd of people waiting: a priest in a cassock with a grocery sack, labouring men with bags of tools slung over their shoulders, a tall fellow with an unnaturally pale face in a suit of overalls whom the other passengers studiously avoided. ‘Jeez,’ Huey said, wrinkling his nose and divining the cause of this ostracism, ‘will you smell that guy? It’s no wonder nobody wants to stand next to him.’ ‘I expect he works at the meatpacking plant,’ she said, having caught the scent of fertiliser. ‘I don’t suppose it’s anything he can help.’ Nevertheless, it was a very powerful smell and she found herself edging further down the line. The streetcar came clattering up with the sun gleaming off its iron fender and the light blazing into its deep green windows and carried them away, and she sat looking out at the familiar streets and the dusty store-fronts and the street corners, where fat cops stood sunning themselves before the pink-and-white striped awnings and there were vendors out with milk-cans and packets of candy, thinking that the college at Wheaton would be very different to this, and wondering
how she would find it, and what the other girls would be like. Huey, with his mouth half open, sat watching the traffic, and counting the Cadillacs, which was the automobile he favoured, or would have favoured, had the privilege of driving one ever been allowed him. It was hotter than ever, and the people in the street – the groups of girls talking to each other, and the negro women weighed down under grocery sacks with bored children toiling in their wake – seemed far away, as if the windows of the streetcar were made not of glass but of some dense, viscous membrane cutting her off from the teeming world around her and turning her in on herself. Back home her mother would be brewing herself a pot of green tea, reading the newspaper and going in every so often to ask her father if he intended to get out of bed. Mr Christie worked on the night-shift at the telephone exchange and was not always amenable to these enquiries.

‘Jeez,’ Huey said again, ‘but I could use a soda.’ Beneath his striped jacket there was already sweat welling up in the arm-pits of his shirt. The shirt was too small for him and there was a red crease showing where it dug into his neck. If he took his shirt off when they got to the beach it would look as if he had tried to hang himself. ‘Did you ask Mr Banahan about the secretary’s job?’ she asked, and Huey frowned again, not liking – for all the pride he took in working for Mr Banahan – to be reminded of these things on a day given over to pleasure. ‘Sure I did,’ he said. ‘You don’t think I’m the type of guy to let a chance like that slip, do you? You bet I asked him. And he was nice as pie. Told me what a fine young man I was and how he appreciated my efforts, but
that everything was pretty tough right now and they needed a qualified man. So I guess it’ll go to some cake eater who’s done his time at night school, yes sir, and not to yours truly.’ It was a long speech for Huey and the tomahawk of his Adam’s Apple went working up and down again as he said it. She had only once been to the apartment on the East Side, where his mother lay in bed all afternoon eating candy out of a paper bag and his father sat listening to the boxing matches on the radio. Mostly they sat in cafés together, or prowled around the early evening streets.

The number of people in the streetcar had thinned out by now. The priest had gone, and the man in the blue overalls who smelled of fertiliser. There was a black puddle on the floor that looked like spilled ink. The advertisements that ran along the car at the level of her head were for carbolic soap and pocket zip-fasteners and a magazine called
Modern Pictorial
which promised to ‘lift the lid on Hollywood’. The remaining passengers were all destined for the lakeside, too. They had bundled up towels under their arms, and some of them carried little wicker baskets and flasks. She wished she had had a wicker basket to bring, but Mrs Christie had said they were unnecessarily expensive. There were six or seven couples in the same degree of proximity as Huey and herself, and she examined them surreptitiously, one by one, and decided that three of the men were better-looking than Huey and three worse, and one of them – a bald man with almost no eyebrows and variegated teeth – so ugly that it was a wonder he was allowed out. The streetcar was slowing down in sight of its final stop, and she found herself lapsing into her favourite
day-dream, which was of being married to a grey-haired but still youthful man in a dark suit, who called her ‘Ruth’ and ‘my dear’ instead of ‘Ruthie’ and established her in a neat plasterboard house with a white picket fence somewhere in the Sixties, where the coloured maid sometimes brought her drinks on a silver tray and Mrs Christie occasionally, but only occasionally, came to supper on Sunday evenings, when there would, additionally, be ‘company’. She knew that it was foolish to chase these phantoms, but she could not help it. They had sustained her through her time at Lonigan’s and she suspected they would see her through her time at the college at Wheaton as well.