Authors: J.M. Gregson
For
the first time since they had sat down, she took her eyes off Keane and looked at the other two men, sitting together anxious on the sofa. ‘I’m doing my best, aren’t I, me boys?’
Gerald
Sangster was irritated by the way she dropped the Irish accent on to the last phrase. It seemed as if she was applying a deliberate taunt to those who cherished her in front of this man who had caused her illness. He said, ‘We thought we’d get her into the garden today with the sun out, perhaps get her at least as far as the gate, but ...’ He stopped helplessly, realizing too late that he had fallen into the old trap of speaking about her as if she were not there with them.
‘...
But I’m not a very good patient, I’m afraid.’ Her brilliant black eyes were back on Raymond Keane. ‘I mean to be good, of course, but then I let people down. But then you’d know all about that sort of thing.’ It was the first barb she had offered him, delivered with a dazzling smile which removed every line from her face. For that moment, she dropped at least ten of her thirty-six years, seeming again an ingenuous, vulnerable girl.
Keane
did not know how to manage this. He wished only that he had never come here; he had never envisaged anything like this. He would not have minded her having a go at him, flinging her hurt and resentment in a final exchange, which would have closed this particular chapter in his book. But that would have been in private. He had not thought of her like this, an invalid with an audience who watched over her, listening and weighing his every reaction, exploiting her position as he had never seen her do in the days of their intimacy.
Raymond
looked at Zoe, sitting silent and apparently composed beside him. He said desperately, ‘We just thought we’d call in whilst we were in the area for the weekend, you see.’ He was speaking apologetically to the two men in the room, not to Moira. And Dermot, taking his cue, bustled away to bring in the tea and the slices of cake.
It
was like a more sinister mad hatter’s tea party, Zoe thought later, with herself in the role of Alice and only Moira seeming to know the rules. The four sane people in the room exchanged whatever small talk they could manage, about the splendour of the winter day outside, about Dermot’s domestic expertise, about the convenience of this neat modern house on the edge of the village.
And
all the time the four of them were listening for the interventions of the fifth voice in the room. Moira’s contributions had a strange awareness, an insight into the anxieties which lay beneath the polite exchanges. She behaved like an intelligent but vulnerable child, who understood none of the rules of safe adult conversation. When Dermot spoke of the convenience of a modern house, she said abruptly, ‘I prefer old cottages. Like Raymond’s. We had some good times there, you know.’
The
last phrase was darted without warning at Zoe. The new woman in Raymond Keane’s life studied the pattern on her china cup resolutely and refused to be drawn into a reply. She remembered her early medical experience of young people hooked on drugs, who often had this brittle, uninhibited confidence after a fix. She would like to have known what if any medication Moira Yates was receiving for her agoraphobia. Despite herself, Zoe found she was fighting images of Raymond in bed with this startling woman. And she knew in that moment that this had been Moira’s intention.
Raymond
Keane found himself applying the rules he had adopted for his public exchanges to his private life. ‘If you’re on a loser, cut your losses quickly,’ was one of the rules he applied to political exchanges. On this occasion, he could not call briskly for another question. He looked at his watch and said, ‘Well, we mustn’t trade on your hospitality for too long.’ He pushed his cup and saucer on to the small table beside his chair and pulled himself clumsily to his feet. ‘Busy weekend, I’m afraid!’
‘
I’m sure it is.’ Moira had not taken her dark eyes from Zoe’s face. She now allowed her gaze to travel down the curves of the blonde woman’s slim figure. Her small, knowing smile degenerated momentarily into something very near a leer. Then she rose in turn and stood facing Raymond Keane. ‘I shall watch your career with interest. From afar, of course.’
‘
Thank you. Thank you. And when you are better, which I’m sure will be soon now, you must come and have lunch in the House one day.’
He
was more nervous than he could remember being in years, and his sentiments dropped into the abruptly silent room like the most hollow of political platitudes. Everyone was standing now, but no one helped him out, no one offered a crutch for his feeble stumblings. The two men saw no reason to rescue a man they disliked, and Zoe was aware that any intervention from her could only make matters worse.
She
knew now that Raymond and this woman had been very close, that he had treated her shabbily when Zoe came into his life. He had pretended to her that his affair with Moira was finished when he met her. He had come here today to dismiss her finally from his life—and found that she had turned the tables completely upon him. This was Moira Yates’s dismissal of Raymond Keane.
And
for the second time that day, Zoe found she had no wish to rescue Raymond from a situation he had brought upon himself.
It
was obvious that the other woman in the room was enjoying being the central, unpredictable figure in the scene of Keane’s discomfiture. As she ushered them into the hall, Moira addressed her words of dismissal to Keane alone. ‘It’s been good to see you again. And to find you so little changed. I wish I could say the same for myself.’
It
was a blatant invitation to frame a denial, and Keane was unwise enough to fall for it. ‘You look as beautiful as ever. I’m sure you’ll be back to normal by the time we meet again.’
She
neither nodded nor denied it, but threw him the last and most dazzling of her smiles, underlining with it the falseness of his compliment. None of the people there believed that he would ever visit her again.
Zoe
did not look back, but Raymond Keane could not resist the temptation to turn towards the house as he reached the gate. Moira, the woman who nowadays shied away from even an open window, was standing in the doorway of the house, an actress playing out the final effect of a scene she had dominated, that brilliant farewell smile still fixed firmly upon her features.
Only
the two men who stood behind her in the darkness of the hall saw the tears upon her cheeks as she shut the door and turned back towards them. ‘I did well, didn’t I?’ she said.
It was Sunday afternoon when Raymond Keane took Zoe Renwick to see Moira Yates, the woman she had displaced in his affections. By the evening of the following Wednesday, the embarrassment of that meeting seemed already more than three days behind him.
It
is easy for an MP to keep busy, to remind himself that private concerns should be submerged beneath the swirling waters of national events. And these last three days of the parliamentary session had not been without their satisfactions. He had voted in a two-line whip motion on defence cuts. He had managed to ask a ‘planted’ question of his leader at Prime Minister’s Question Time on the Tuesday—in effect it had merely offered congratulations to the PM on his prompt actions to quell the latest urban riot.
His
question had meant that the nation—or at least that fraction of it that chose to listen to
Yesterday
in
Parliament
—had heard his clear articulation and confident tones amidst the bear garden of Question Time and the Speaker’s ritual calls for order. More important, the fact that he had been suggested by the Party hierarchy to be this conduit of admiration for the PM confirmed that he was a coming man, in other people’s minds as well as his own.
That
Wednesday, he even concluded some action on behalf of a troublesome constituent of his, Joseph Walsh. He had been taken aback by the man’s vehemence at his clinic in the constituency, but not for long. Politicians were perforce accustomed to dealing with the occasional harmless loony, who thought an MP could achieve far more for them than the system actually permitted. And the man had lost his daughter, after all. He deserved a certain amount of consideration, even if nothing could be achieved for him.
Raymond
had asked the appropriate written questions of the appropriate minister, and received the appropriate answers in writing from the civil servants in her department. Now he wrote to Joseph Walsh and told him nothing could be done, enclosing a copy of the minister’s reply to demonstrate how diligently he had pursued the matter.
A
busy week so far, then, but not without its modest achievements. Raymond allowed himself a bottle of the excellent parliamentary claret with his dinner. With parliament now suspended for the Christmas recess, there was time for a little relaxation. He began to plan out his movements for the next three weeks.
*
On the following morning, in the neat modern house in Gloucestershire, Dermot Yates watched his sister anxiously, assessing the effects of the visit of Moira’s former lover and his new mistress upon the invalid in his care.
Moira
had seemed exhausted after her brilliant performance—Dermot could only see it as that—in discomforting Raymond Keane. She had been all intensity, full of a sustained, almost unnatural concentration upon the part she had chosen for herself, whilst Keane and that strangely dignified blonde woman had been in the house. But the effort had told: she had been very quiet since Sunday, moving about the house like a convalescent who had pushed herself beyond what her resources will support.
Thursday
was one of those quiet December days when the sun shines softly through the leafless trees and the day is unnaturally mild. Dermot tried unsuccessfully to get his sister out into the garden, to breathe the air which had once been such a delight to her, so necessary a part of her life.
She
made the coffee for them in mid-morning, and he was pleased by this departure from the lethargy which had dropped its hand upon her like a malign presence over the last months. She opened the window to call in her elder brother from the garden and he was emboldened by this small concession the agoraphobic was making to the outside world to keep her there while he spoke. He said, ‘We could have our coffee on the terrace, I think, if you put your sheepskin coat on. It’s sheltered there, and the sun is right on it at present.’
Moira
regarded him for a moment with a simple, uncomplicated love, even looked with seeming longing at the spot he had indicated, where the honey-coloured sun poured softly into an alcove, around which the brown clematis stems intertwined with a climbing rose which still carried its last three obstinate blooms, as if refusing to believe the calendar. Then she shook her head firmly, and he saw her shutting him as well as the suggestion out with the movement. ‘I can’t, Dermot. Not yet.’ She shut the window carefully in his face, as if the security of her self-imposed prison was supremely important to her again.
He
had to go through the kitchen to the dining room to make contact with her again. He found her putting ginger biscuits upon a plate. She pushed them towards him, then grabbed one and dunked it suddenly into her own mug of coffee, dismissing further argument with that abrupt gesture. It was uncharacteristic of her, too, he thought. He could not remember seeing her dunk biscuits in tea or coffee since she was a child. She looked for a moment at her brother’s troubled face and said, ‘I’ll be all right soon, I think. I’m feeling better each day now.’
He
was not convinced; but how could he tell her tactfully that her actions did not support that view? She turned away from him and went over to the shelves of books that ran from floor to ceiling on the other side of the dining room. She stood motionless whilst he studied the upright back, which had remained erect over many a mettlesome horse, marvelling at this stillness in a woman who had always been so active. He wondered what was going on in her mind, for he did not think she was looking at the books at all. He had left his rubber boots at the door when he came in from the garden. Now he set down his beaker and moved across the carpeted room on silent, stockinged feet to study the profile he knew so well.
He
had half expected the eyes to be filled with tears. Instead, he found that an odd half-smile sat upon her lips. And the dark eyes, though as unseeing as he had expected, were dry and brilliant.
In
the next hour, the doctor would be making his weekly call. Dermot was suddenly glad of that support. But this did not seem the moment to remind Moira of the visit.
*
Twenty miles away from Moira Yates, in a bungalow with a large, well-kept garden on the edge of Oldford, another woman was drinking coffee. But Christine Lambert sat alone, and she was scarcely conscious of whether she drank her coffee or not.
Indeed,
when she remembered it, after staring for a long time at the movements of a robin in the winter garden, she found it was almost cold. She leant towards the table beside her and picked up the letter again, with its official heading, its bland, impersonal wording, its unconvincing assurance that this second summons was not necessarily anything to be anxious about. ‘Not necessarily,’ she repeated aloud to herself, fastening with her teacher’s practised expertise on the key phrase in this welter of bureaucratic reassurance.