That Was Then Read online

  ‘But you’ll be home for Christmas, will you?’

  ‘I should think so.’

  ‘I hope so.’

  ‘I shall certainly try, Mother. Thank God, here it is. Bye.’ She gave me a quick, I’m-outta-here sort of kiss. And remember, Barkis is willing.’

  My early-morning brain was still catching up with this allusion as the train pulled out, and it was rounding the London-bound bend when I realised she had been referring to Charles McNally. And so had had, as always, the last word.

  That Wednesday saw the first of the sales containing Mrs Rymer’s things. All bar one exceeded expectation, and the Ruskin vase which only barely made its reserve was one of a divided pair, so it was hardly surprising. As well as the usual formal documentation for Mrs Rymer junior I wrote a note to her mother-in-law telling her the good news, and promising that after the second sale we would go out to lunch.

  On Thursday Clive brought Bernard Whiteley’s clothes back and came up to see me. It was a stormy evening and we drank Scotch in the sitting room with the rain lashing the windows and the white horses tossing their wild manes furiously in the unseasonal, whistling dark.

  ‘How’s the exercise going?’ I asked. The understanding smile in my voice anticipated a very different answer from the one I got.

  ‘Making progress,’ he said, ‘thank you for asking. I have seen the error of my ways and begun using the students’ track.’

  ‘Good for you!’

  ‘As you know I dread the proximity of others more athletic than myself – whose numbers are legion – but no one spares me a second glance. All too dedicated I suppose. And at least I am someone whom even the weakest can overtake, so I am serving a useful social purpose.’

  ‘I’m very impressed,’ I said. ‘ I thought your earlier experience would put you off completely.’

  ‘No, no, I’m quite determined.’

  ‘You will feel much better for it, I’m sure.’

  ‘I couldn’t feel much worse, Eve.’ He pulled a rueful face. ‘ Vanity, vanity, all is … Catherine, the dear girl, is giving me every encouragement.’

  ‘It does help to have moral support,’ I agreed.

  He sighed gustily. ‘I bumped into Helen at a performance of The Trojan Woman.…’

  I waited. His lips were pressed together, but his cheek was working slightly.

  ‘How was she?’

  ‘Startled. Couldn’t wait to get away, really.’

  ‘You’re not surprised, surely.’

  I saw, too late, that this remark, intended as consoling, could be taken in two ways.

  ‘No,’ said Clive, in a voice heavy with gloomy irony. ‘ I am not.’

  ‘I didn’t mean—’

  ‘I know you didn’t Eve, you are a true friend. But I did.’

  ‘Do you fancy getting in a Chinese?’ asked Ben on Saturday night.

  ‘Why not?’ I replied, though his suggestion struck me as one of those verbal forms that would have been open to the wildest misconstruction as little as forty years ago.

  ‘I’ll get an assortment, yeah? My treat.’

  ‘Yeah – yes. Great. When are you going out?’

  ‘I’m not.’

  ‘Good lord!’

  He ruffled my hair. ‘Thought I’d stay in and keep the old dot company.’

  ‘And the rest . .!’

  ‘No,’ he said, shrugging into his magnificently dilapidated leather jacket. ‘ Sophie’s gone to see her mum for the weekend, so I reckon why shouldn’t I see mine.’

  Can you wonder I loved him?

  He came back from the Lotus Palace three-quarters of an hour later with enough food for about half a dozen people. The weather was still wild, and he staggered in through the door like some latter day Paul Revere, hair slicked to brow, drops streaming from his jacket, boots muddied, the prize in his arms.

  I was all ready, with plates heated, hotplate switched on, cold beers and chopsticks to hand.

  ‘Right,’ said Ben. ‘Let’s get stuck in.’

  We ate for the first ten minutes or so in a silence punctuated only by grunts and lip-smackings of appreciation. This, I thought, was a way you could only eat with family. Forget mealtimes being occasions of social intercourse and bonding, when parents and children could talk through their feelings and the events of the day. This was open-it-up, dollop-it-out and shovel-it-down time. Instead of napkins we had a roll of kitchen towel on the table, and we drank the beer out of the cans.

  We both slowed at about the same time.

  ‘Good old Palace,’ I said, ‘hits the spot every time.’

  In endorsement of this encomium, Ben belched. Since childhood he’d had the ability to adjust the volume, pitch and duration of his burps to form a kind of primitive musical sequence. I both admired and deplored this small talent.

  ‘Ben …’ I reproved, when he’d finished.

  ‘What? You can’t beat it. And Sophie doesn’t like Chinese, so I was in danger of getting withdrawal systems.’

  This was the first comment that came within hailing distance of the topic I most wanted to discuss, so I swiftly latched on to it.

  ‘How is she?’ I asked.

  ‘OK.’

  ‘I like Sophie.’ I snapped open another can. I felt freed by the atmosphere of cosy contentment that prevailed in here, with the elements snarling and swooping ineffectually outside the window. ‘She’s a sweetie.’

  ‘Yeah.’ He pushed his plate aside. ‘Mum—’

  The phone rang and I got up. ‘Don’t go away.’

  He lit a cigarette as I picked up the receiver. ‘Hello?’

  ‘Eve, it’s Sabine.’ Her voice was warm and bustlingly vivacious. I pictured a fragrant dinner party in full swing in a neighbouring room. ‘You’re going to think this is the most peculiar question on a Saturday evening, but is Ben with you?’

  I looked across at where he sat, elbows on the table, tapping ash into the remains of the Sechuan Chicken with Cashews. It was rather pleasing to be talking about him in his presence without his knowing.

  ‘Yes as a matter of fact.’

  ‘Oh good. I gambled on him being there – with Sophie away. I expect he’s going out, is he?’

  ‘Not that I know of.’

  ‘Eve, do you think I might have a word? Only I have a message for him from his beloved!’ She gave a rippling, throaty laugh. Her good humour was infectious and I smiled at Ben who was paying no attention.

  ‘Hang on.’ I held out the receiver, facing him. ‘ It’s for you.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘One of your many women.’

  He hitched his chair along and took the receiver. I helped myself to some more food.

  ‘Oh … right. OK … Well, thanks for that, Sabine. Sure …’ He turned to me, eyebrows raised, listening to the other end. ‘Do you want another word with Eve? Yeah, I’ll do that … Bye.’

  He put the phone down and stubbed out his half-smoked cigarette. ‘Seconds, nice one. It’s true what they say about Chinese – ten minutes later you can eat it all over again.’ He began shovelling egg fu yung on to his plate.

  ‘So how is she?’

  ‘You know Sabine – all gush and garters.’

  ‘No, no – Sophie.’

  ‘Oh, she’s in a flap about some notes or other that she can’t locate at her mum’s, and thinks she may have brought down after all. She needs her mind putting at rest, I may go over to their place and conduct a search.’

  ‘Can’t they do it?’

  ‘What, Sabine and Martin, poking around in Sophie’s room? I don’t think so.’

  I took his point. ‘So, what – you’ll pop over tomorrow? It’s a disgusting night.’

  ‘My thinking exactly.’

  Heroically, we managed to eat most of the food and I surprised myself by having a third beer while Ben had scarcely breached his second.

  ‘I really enjoyed that,’ I said. ‘Thanks, love.’

  ‘Fancy a coffee? A cuppa?’

&nb
sp; ‘Coffee would be nice.’

  ‘Stay right there—’ he put out a restraining hand – ‘I’ve started so I’ll finish.’

  I curled up in an armchair near the window, comfortably between the storm and the mellow warmth of the flat, listening to Ben stalk back and forth doing what I knew would be an adequate, if not a brilliant job. I told myself, as I’d told Mel, that I was pretty lucky.

  Ben’s hand, holding a mug of coffee, appeared in front of my lace. ‘There you go.’

  ‘Thanks – aren’t you having one?’

  ‘No, I’ll pass.’

  ‘Take a look in the paper, I think they’ve got that film on, the Robert de Niro one none of us got to see at the flicks.…’

  Ben picked up the paper and passed it to me. I suddenly knew what he was going to say.

  ‘Look, I think I’m going to pop up there and see if I can find Sophe’s notes.’

  ‘Of course you are,’ I said indulgently, and shamelessly echoed Mel’s comment: ‘It never ceases to amaze me what people will do for love.’

  I watched the de Niro film, and it was fair to middling: I only fell asleep once, and missed very little that was germaine to the plot. At eleven p.m. I switched everything off except the hall light (an ingrained habit) and took my teacup out to the kitchen. The swing-bin bulged with tin foil, greasy styrofoam and beer cans – the chopsticks were in the sink. It looked like the postscript to England v Holland on Sky: I liked the less-orderly picture of myself that it showed, even if it wasn’t typical.

  I went to bed, read half a page of a riveting new novel about incest and fell soundly asleep with my glasses beneath my face.

  When I woke up, the sense of cosy wellbeing had gone. The light was still on, my glasses had made a deep furrow in my face and my bladder was bursting with all that beer.

  I staggered out into the passage and down to the loo. As I emerged, Ben came in through the front door. He closed it very softly behind him, turned and started visibly when he saw me.

  ‘Mum—! Sorry, did I disturb you?’

  ‘No, beer and Chinese disturbed me.’

  ‘Oh, OK … night then.’

  He turned the hall light out. We passed each other as we went to our rooms. There was still a breath of cold air hanging around him, it made me shiver when his jacket brushed my sleeve. I got into bed and turned the lamp out. In the sudden black the numerals on the alarm clock showed bright and clear: it was three a. m.

  I turned away from it and closed my eyes. Inside my little flat there was no sound. Ben’s arrival might have been an hallucination, so completely had he been reabsorbed. But in the thick, sea-brushed darkness a host of unformed questions flittered and dived like bats.

  Chapter Eleven

  Until, in the ensuing days and weeks, I came to look back on that night, I’d never understood the expression ‘a sea change’. At the time I was conscious of no great shift or alteration, just an unease, as though somewhere in the back of my head a door had been left open to admit a cold, disturbing draught, and those pestering bats.

  It was only with hindsight that I came to recognise the defining moment after which nothing was to be the same. Some of this had to do with a change in perception, a different way of seeing things that was forced on me by events. And yet, I kept remembering the words of Clive’s new friend: ‘ It doesn’t have to be like this’. She of course meant that he had it in his power to change what he didn’t like. In my case the words had a more sinister ring, a grim warning against complacency.

  For I was complacent, I see that now. I was virtually anaesthetised by complacency, blinded by it. The very next morning I closed my mind, and that banging door at the back of it, on the unsettling sensations of the night and carried on regardless.

  I got up, had my bath, and knocked on Ben’s door on my way back to my room. Pushing it open I saw Algy the bear lying amongst the debris on the floor, his stubby arms and legs pointing at the ceiling. A sweet, silly pang of nostalgia swept over me, and I went over and picked him up.

  ‘Hey,’ I said, ‘sleeping beauty – time to get up.’ I pushed Algy down into the crook of Ben’s shoulder, but he shrugged him off and burrowed his face into the pillow with a groan. Smiling, I pulled back the curtains and dropped Algy at the foot of the bed.

  It was the usual routine. During the fifteen minutes it took me to get dressed and made up I called Ben another half a dozen times without effect. Then when I went to get breakfast he would suddenly be there – clothed, washed and (sometimes) shaved. We moved about the kitchen in a kind of silent dance, passing and repassing each other on our familiar routes to the kettle, the fridge, the sink, the cupboard, after which Ben sat on the edge of the sofa with his black coffee, banana and cigarette watching The Big Breakfast, while I consumed tea and bran flakes to the accompaniment of Today on Radio Four. Ten minutes after that we were ready to leave. On the pavement at the back of Cliff Mansions we parted company – Ben usually walked, there was no point in taking the beetle into the town centre – and I drove to Bouvier’s.

  This morning he waited till I was behind the wheel and then leaned both hands on the roof, and said: ‘May not see you tonight, Sophie’s picking me up from work.’

  ‘She’s back today then?’ I asked stupidly.

  ‘Looks like it.’ He stood up, raised a hand. ‘Don’t wait up.’

  I hadn’t, for years. He didn’t have to say that.

  I called Helen from work in the late afternoon and asked if she’d like to come out for a drink. She said why not, nothing else in the diary – big enthusiasm by her standards – so I arranged to pick her up.

  When I got there I was amazed to find that she must have been looking out for me, for she came out of the door when I hadn’t even switched the engine off and was in the passenger seat before you could say knife.

  We went to the least rebarbative of the village pubs and I bought her a large malt, and myself a ginger beer shandy. She, as usual, had omitted to bring any money. In spite of being so eager to get out her silence was positively Trappist, and I found myself telling her, slightly desperately, about the de Niro film I’d watched the previous evening. As I did so she gazed at me through her smoke as though I was speaking a foreign language of which she understood just barely enough. But I must have engaged her interest a little, for when I’d finished she broke with all known precedent.

  ‘I don’t suppose you could stand going to the pictures now, could you?’ she asked, with such an air of utter exhaustion that it took me a moment to take the idea on board.

  I regrouped. ‘Good idea – was there something in particular you wanted to see?’

  ‘What is there?’

  ‘I mean – Woody Allen? Tarantino? Disney?’

  ‘Something amusing …?’

  It turned out she hadn’t been to the cinema for something like thirty years. She was quite fazed by the Warner Multiplex and kept murmuring ‘Oh my God’ as though we were amid the brothels of Bangkok.

  I chose Steve Martin, whom I’d always thought funny, and who had also been on for a couple of weeks already so it was easy to get tickets. Determined that Helen should have the full experience I also bought popcorn and Coke.

  She sat in the dark with the casket of popcorn unopened on her knee and the Coke with its still-wrapped straw clutched in one hand like a talisman. She never took her eyes off the screen, but neither did she display the smallest flicker of amusement. Rather embarrassed by my own bursts of laughter – I was a herd animal who laughed more when others did so – I toned them down to slightly superior muted chuckles. But at the end she said: ‘ That was quite good’ and I felt I’d scored a major hit.

  As we shuffled out of the auditorium she was still carrying the popcorn and Coke, and I said ‘You can leave those here, you know.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ she replied. ‘I’ve paid for them.’

  I forebore to remind her that this wasn’t true. She placed them carefully in the footwell of the car while we went into the K
ing James for another drink and a sandwich. The whole thing had turned into what by Helen’s standards was definitely a Big Night Out.

  There didn’t seem much point in not diving straight in, so over the prawn in marie rose on brown, I did.

  ‘I gather you bumped into Clive the other day.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘He’s hellbent on self-improvement, did he tell you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘He’s taken up—’

  ‘Self-improvement? That doesn’t sound like Clive.’

  ‘Well I can assure you he has,’ I went on, encouraged by this show of interest. ‘He’s really going for the corpore sano.’

  ‘There was never anything the matter with his mind,’ Helen reminded me.

  ‘No indeed.’ I made a quick decision, and went on: ‘It appears he’s met this woman who’s a great believer in the links between the two, and it’s persuaded him that taking a little exercise might change his life.’

  ‘That’ll be Catherine,’ said Helen, holding a match to her cigarette with a trembling hand.

  I was taken aback. ‘Do you know her then?’

  ‘I know who she is. Don’t particularly want to know any more, but I’m sure she’s just what Clive needs.’

  ‘They’re only friends,’ I assured her, perhaps a little too quickly.

  ‘I don’t doubt it.’

  She tipped her head back as she exhaled, studying the ceiling. Her neck looked long and white and vulnerable.

  ‘Kerridge is cooling, by the way.’

  This was like Mel’s ‘Barkis is willing’ – coming as it did without build-up or preamble it took a second to sink in. When it did I tried to keep the delight out of my voice.

  ‘Oh, Helen.…’

  ‘It was never case of if, only when.’

  ‘You’re wonderfully philosophical.’

  ‘I wouldn’t say that.’

  She seemed almost to be laughing, but when I looked at her face her eyes had a treacherous shine.

  ‘I’m so sorry.’

  ‘I doubt that, Eve. Anyway, it hasn’t happened yet. It’s just a train in the distance, but I can hear it, and I know it’s for me.’