* * *
H
ILARY LOOKED
out the window as she filled the kettle and watched without surprise as Leech plodded across the grass and waited by the door. She opened it and nodded him in without smiling. It was too much to smile when she did not
feel either fully awake or at all welcoming, and since Ivan was not yet down she did not have to find the energy to pretend. Ivan’s raw diet seemed to be helping with the nausea though, or perhaps it was the ginger tea or the acupressure he regularly did on her arms. Quite possibly it was just the loving care he was now giving her that made her feel better. At the thought, she smiled fondly at Leech who, in answer, slid into his usual seat at the table in one corner. A smile meant there was a good chance of breakfast.
Hilary had already set out on a chopping board what looked to Leech like far too much fruit, when Ivan appeared in the doorway. He smiled at Leech, opened the fridge and pulled out from the back a torn plastic packet, holding it up between one finger and thumb.
‘This wants using up,’ he said. ‘Leech can have this, can’t he, Hil?’ Hilary peered at the packet and nodded. She could not, either in conscience or in Health & Safety, put such elderly bacon before B&B guests, if they had had any. Ivan said brightly, ‘I’ll do it. Want some fried bread with that, Leech?’
Leech nodded happily. Breakfast, when it came a few minutes later, was the best he had ever had. The bacon was good. And the fried bread, although brown, had been fried by Ivan, which made it a once-in-a-lifetime breakfast.
‘A once-in-a-lifetime breakfast,’ he said throatily, watching Ivan and Hilary eat the last of their fruit. He had not noticed the silence, but noticed now that Ivan and Hilary exchanged a look. Hilary got up and began clearing plates.
‘We’ve got something to tell you,’ Ivan said, and hesitated. ‘Something that’s going to happen soon.’
But Leech was too clever for that. He nodded and spluttered, trying to talk too fast. ‘I know. I know. A big
thing’s happening.’ His voice was rusty from under-use. ‘Today. The eclipse. That’s happening today, yeah? Once in a lifetime. See? I know.’ He sat back, beaming with pride.
Ivan and Hilary looked at each other again, worried. Ivan said gently, ‘The eclipse was yesterday, man. Remember? You were with me. We watched it together. Hilary was at the clinic. All right, man?’
Leech stared at him. Slowly, he shook his head. He might remember and he might not. ‘Yeah,’ he said, so as not to disappoint Ivan.
‘The thing is, the summer’s going to be over soon, isn’t it,’ Hilary stated. ‘The weather’s going to change, isn’t it? It’ll be too cold for the hut, soon.’
She was now wiping round the sink with an antiseptic-soaked paper towel from a plastic box. Ivan watched while Leech, who may or may not have taken in what she was saying, looked down at his empty plate.
‘I mean you’ve been very welcome,’ she said, with the merest emphasis on ‘been’. ‘Ever so welcome, really, hasn’t he, Ivan?’
Her eyes pleaded with Ivan to do the next bit for her. Ivan drew in a deep, reluctant breath. ‘It’s been good to have you, man,’ he said. ‘Really good. I mean, I really appreciated the help, it was great having you. The radicchio this year—wow!’
Leech’s face brightened and he looked up, nodding. ‘Yeah! And the … the strawberries! Yeah, they were good.’
‘They were! They were really good. We don’t want you to think that we don’t really, really appreciate it. Do we, Hil?’
Leech nodded with satisfaction and returned to his plate, prodding up single crumbs of bread with one forefinger and putting them in his mouth.
‘It’s just that,’ Hilary began again, knowing that Ivan had done his worst and she could look to him for no more, ‘well, we did say. I mean, there’s still lots of picking to do so maybe you could help out now and then but the really busy time’s over, isn’t it. And do you remember Ivan told you that we’re going to have a baby?’ She allowed herself a smile and a lift in her voice. She looked at Ivan and the now customary look of private joy was exchanged, a look which said in a glance, yes of course everybody’s pleased for us but nobody else knows how happy we
really
are.
Leech frowned. There was a familiarity in the statement that made him suppose that it had cropped up before. Hilary lifted his plate away and wiped hard with her antiseptic paper at the place where it had been. Depositing the plate on the side of the sink she turned and looked hard at Ivan once more. He responded with an encouraging smile. She sighed. ‘The thing is, we’ve been quite happy to have you here, you know, for meals and washing and the odd bath and so on.’ Leech nodded as if to say it was nothing, he’d been pleased to oblige. ‘Only with the baby, it’ll be more difficult. Do you see?’
Leech did not, and was studying the table top. ‘And as I say the summer’s nearly over, so you couldn’t go on staying in the hut anyway. It’ll be too cold soon. It’s been ever so cold anyway, this summer, you can’t have been that comfortable. We wouldn’t feel right, you staying in that hut much longer.’
Leech wiped his hand back and forth over his mouth, considering. He looked up at Ivan. ‘Can kip in the house, then, can I?’
Ivan could tell by Hilary’s face as she turned to the sink and turned on the hot tap that she was not going to say the
next bit. ‘Hilary’s saying,’ he said, looking at her back rather than at Leech’s stone eyes, ‘Hilary’s saying that it’s maybe time to think about where you’re going to go next. After here. It’s time to move on, do you see? Hilary’s worried about you in the hut. Because we’ll be a bit crowded with the baby, see what I mean?’ When Leech did not reply he said as firmly as he could, ‘You can’t kip here. I mean, we’ll see what we can do, getting you sorted and that, but you can’t kip here really, no.’
‘Oh, we’ll definitely get you sorted with something,’ Hilary cried quickly, turning back from the sink. ‘I mean there’s no question of throwing you out. I mean, we’re not
like
that. But the baby … well, everything’s going to be a bit upside down for a while, I expect.’
She drew breath to ask if he understood, and thought better of it. He would not, and if he said as much it would change nothing except how bad she felt, by making her feel even worse. But Leech had to go. It had crossed her mind earlier in the year that when she took in the B&B sign at the end of August, Leech could perhaps have the smaller room. She assumed, because he sometimes had a packet of cigs and the odd can of Coke, that he got a little money from somewhere, benefit probably, so she would be able to negotiate a bit from him to cover food and hot water. And even in the winter he could carry on being a real help to Ivan, so that he would never get over-tired and would be less prone to episodes. Three in the house would be quite bearable, she had anticipated, since Leech’s company was no more demanding than having a soporific cat or a stuffed fox in the room with you. But baby put an entirely different cast on her plans. Her anxiety for the unborn child was being channelled into an obsession about keeping a
spotlessly clean house, an aspiration incompatible with having as a lodger the likes of Leech, who did not have so much as a toothbrush let alone normal domestic standards. She was intent also on realising the picture she had created in her mind of herself, Ivan and the baby, as happy and self-contained as a secular nativity scene, the perfect nuclear family whose ruthless exclusivity she would protect from Leech or anyone else as if it were, indeed, holy.
It was not in Leech to make suggestions so he sat, awaiting orders. Hilary chose to take his impassivity for acceptance and said brightly, ‘Good! So, suppose we said the end of August, then? That’s enough time, isn’t it? End of August,’ she repeated.
‘Coming?’ Ivan was now at the back door, holding it open. ‘There’s plenty to lift.’ Leech embraced the normality of being told what to do and stepped past him out on to the concrete path. ‘I’ll be along in a minute,’ Ivan said.
Leech turned and made off across the grass to the gap in the hedge that led to the fruit cages and the garden beyond. His loping walk could have indicated that he was entirely relaxed about his impending homelessness, or that he had not taken it in.
Ivan wrapped his arms round Hilary and snuggled into her neck. His skin’s scent reminded her of a lovely clean sheep. It was too early to feel any bump yet but Hilary, sheltering in the safety of her tall husband, imagined with quiet excitement what it would be like when Ivan would also feel, embracing her like this, the hard little pillow of fluid that their precious one was swimming in and later, the cheeky little kicks that he would take against his bony belly when she hugged him hard.
F
ROM WHERE HE
was lying under the white silk canopy in the Wisteria bedroom James could count any number of painted blossoms on the wall opposite, but he stopped at sixty-two and got up. He slipped off his bathrobe with an enthusiastic jerk of the arms that took him a little by surprise, turned sideways to the mirror and closed the connecting door into his bathroom firmly, as if to prevent the trailing flowers from following him in, set the shower on pulse and turned to the mirror to look at himself before it steamed up. On the mirrored wall a full-length, gloomier but slimmer James looked back at him. He had to conclude that his shape was somewhat improved. It must be the lack of caffeine that was encouraging his head to buzz slightly but this morning James felt, for the first time since his arrival, optimistic. The faint stirring in his limbs, sometimes quite a strong jerking that he could not always control, was the first sign of energy that he had felt since his moment of lust for Stephen Golightly.
He stepped into the shower. There would be plenty of opportunity to feast his eyes on the doctor again this afternoon, he recalled, lifting his face into the hot needles of water, because the clinic was having its Open Day. Sister Yvonne had
been reassuring the patients all week that they would hardly notice a thing, dispelling the vision in James’s head of fluttering bunting, a tea tent and wheelchair races, but he realised how bored he must be if, after just five days of enforced rest and no stimulation except visualising his illness in clay, the thought of a glimpse of people from the outside world seemed rather dazzling. For one afternoon in August when the clinic was generally quiet (most patients, it seemed, managing to fit in their physical collapses so as not to disrupt their summer holidays) Dr Golightly allowed a small number of visitors, invariably people ‘interested’ but so far resistant to the temptation of a stay, to make an accompanied tour of the premises. He and Sister Yvonne called it Awareness Raising, James called it Marketing and resolved, as he shaved, to find some amusement in it.
In his smaller room on the other side of the house Warwick too was shaving with even more care than usual, and deciding to wear his crimson and pale blue cravat in honour of the day. The blue was almost the same colour as his eyes, while his complexion, rather livid when he had first arrived, had now paled to a milkier tone which could even be flattered by the red. He leaned closer into the mirror and reassured himself that the red did not pick out the rims of his eyes too closely. Not that Bunny’s eyesight would be equal to an observation of such nicety, Warwick knew, but she took a view about things like that. Naked but for the cravat, he hummed to his reflection in the mirror as he knotted it over his Adam’s apple, enjoying the soft rasp of the silk, anticipating her reaction to its unusual pattern of exotic flowers. She would want to know exactly what the red flowers were—peonies, he thought—and she would ask where he had got it from. He now remembered with a
slightly embarrassed cough that he had bought the cravat in Thailand at the end of a rather disgraceful holiday about five years ago, and now rehearsed the white lie that he had picked it up in a street market in Hong Kong or Singapore.
As he continued dressing he noted his still-fine legs, his hairy shoulders, and a barrel chest whose musculature was still basically firm under a layer of what he called cladding. Inevitably as the years wore on there were fewer items of personal attractiveness deserving of his daily mental tick, but Warwick could still take a pride, not least in the fine-looking appendage which dangled heavily beneath the slight overhang of his torso. As he fed it carefully into his underpants he hoped again that it would not be invited to see service in his conquest of Bunny Fernandez because sex with Bunny, while possible and perhaps even enjoyable, would definitely involve the use of his imagination. Although he hoped that she, too, was beyond all that sort of thing and like him, in pursuit of a partnership in which his flagging libido would be an irrelevance, he supposed he could, if she were to make it a requirement of their permanent liaison, be made use of in that way. He worried though, because it sometimes took him the best part of an hour to get a result, that it might call for more serious and sustained application than Bunny was capable of to coax a performance out of it, at least a performance that ended on a high note, as it were. But his fear that Bunny might take her affection and her share portfolio elsewhere if he were put to the test and found wilting, would be enough, he thought, smirking, to stiffen his resolve.
Now that he was almost genuinely fond of her and had grown bolder, sensing her obvious attachment to him, Warwick had begun to flatter himself that he sometimes
understood her. He understood, for example, the compliment that she paid him in confiding her shortsightedness to him. And it was the only physical failing to which she was prepared to admit, because myopia was not for her a symptom of old age but a rather feminine, lovable little imperfection that brought out the protector in men. And about that, as about so many other things, she was right, of course.
Blind as a bat, darling! I can just about see to sign my name
, she had giggled in a secret whisper. Warwick hoped, more devoutly than it would be wise to let on, that she was right about that, too. All he would have to do would be to point out the dotted line and persuade her of the rest.