Incarnate (8 page)

The hall was full of people, many of whom were shouting at the three men on the stage. “The purpose of this meeting,” the man on the left began yet again. Geoffrey peered through the chalky air and saw Joyce at the end of a row of four of her old folk, her square face and bright gray eyes intent on the stage. She snatched off her spectacles as he came up. “We haven’t had a chance to speak yet,” she whispered. “Just you wait.”

She was wearing her blue suit with slacks, she smelled of the cool sweet perfume she always used, but her face was drawn, the wave in her gray hair looked nothing like permanent now. Perhaps she was wondering if she had been right to bring the old folk: one old lady was rearranging the contents of her handbag, all wrapped in cellophane; one old man was nodding off. He started awake as the right-hand man on the stage shouted “Order!”, cutting off his colleague in the middle of his phrase. “May we please take your points one at a time.”

Joyce stood up so quickly that Geoffrey, squatting beside her, almost lost his balance. “I run a day care center for elderly people,” she said, jamming her spectacles back on her nose and folding her arms. “Some of them have nowhere else to go. Some of them are afraid to be at home by themselves. I don’t think you can realize that you’re proposing to close down the only place these people have to meet their friends, or do you just not care?” Her voice was rising, and Geoffrey wished he could take her hand, to calm himself as much as her. “We’ve had no offer whatsoever of alternative accommodation,” she said.

“I believe many of the local churches have provisions for the elderly,” the left-hand man said, and the chairman nodded. “Thank you for putting your point, Mrs. Churchill.”

“Not so fast. It’s time you heard from the people whose lives you’ll be damaging.” Joyce was beckoning the old lady with the handbag to stand up. “That’s it, Mrs. Madden. You tell them.”

Mrs. Madden jumped up when she heard her name, and dropped her handbag. Pension book and hairbrush and purse spilled over the floorboards, cellophane rustling. “Oh, my things,” she cried, and fell to her knees. Joyce’s fingers began to clutch at the air as if she had been robbed, and Geoffrey was reaching for her hand when the old man beside Mrs. Madden sprang to his feet. “I’ll tell them.”

For a while it seemed he would only shake his finger at the stage. “You listen, you,” he shouted as the chairman made to acknowledge someone else. “Mrs. Churchill looks after us Methuselahs when the rest of you would like to have us put to sleep. You give her somewhere and be quick about it, she’s doing a job you ought to be doing. I’m one of the lucky ones, I’ve a home to go to, and do you know where? Fifteen floors up a tower block, thirty flights of stairs that stink of piss and none of the lifts ever working. They want to knock it down now and about time too, but where are they going to put me?”

“That’s fine, Arthur. Sit down now,” Joyce hissed, but he wasn’t listening. “Going to leave me in there,” he shouted, “while they knock it down, are they?”

The old lady next to him joined in. “That’s right, they don’t care a toss about us. They let the muggers and the rapists roam the streets and tell them not to be such naughty boys. You aren’t even safe in your own bed anymore. I
beg
your pardon, Mrs. Churchill, I won’t be quiet, you brought me here to talk.” Half a dozen people were shouting now, and the one who shouted loudest won: a barrel of a man who turned out to own the video library. Joyce sank into her seat as he accused the planners of letting the area run down until half the property was beyond repair, so that they could buy it cheap. “You did well,” Geoffrey murmured, gripping her hand, dismayed to find it so cold and shaky. “You made your point. I’m sure it will be in the papers.”

She let go of his hand and helped Mrs. Madden retrieve her things, and was placating the old people when the meeting came to an abrupt end. “Look after them for me while I talk to the reporters,” she said, and was gone before Geoffrey could speak. He sat uncomfortably next to Mrs. Madden and said, “We’ll just wait for Joyce,” and hoped that would be all that was required of him. He marveled yet again that Joyce had taken on this work and wondered yet again if she had taken on too much. Thank the Lord, she was coming back.

He didn’t feel they were on the way home until the car had climbed the hill above the shabby roofs. A bridge carried Hornsey Lane a hundred feet above the ravine of Archway Road, and then they were on the summit, in the High Street of Highgate, where the wind blew the rumbling of London away. There was the wine bar that had once been Geoffrey’s shop, near the steep dark slope of Swain’s Lane that led to the cemetery, the forest prying open the graves. He turned the car past Castle Yard, where cottages brandished fenders at the traffic, and parked in front of their Georgian house.

He followed her up the path between the neat flower beds. She hurried into the house so hastily that she trod on a letter without noticing and almost tripped over the vacuum cleaner. He had to struggle with the albums he’d bought outside Windsor as he closed the door, and so he had time to read the return address on the envelope. He snatched it from the mat and stuffed it into his pocket just as she emerged from the kitchen. Thank God, she must think the letter was for him. “What was wrong?” he said.

“I thought I heard the kettle boiling.” She grimaced at her silliness. “I don’t know what I could have been dreaming of.”

“It isn’t worth worrying about.”

“I didn’t say it was.” She frowned at the vacuum cleaner and wheeled it back to the hall cupboard. “Don’t get too engrossed,” she said as he carried the albums upstairs. “I’ve put the stew on. Half an hour.”

His office was next to the guest room. Windows were lighting up on Muswell Hill like sparks reviving a fire; the gutted shell of Alexandra Palace was a dark blotch. He laid the albums on his baize-topped desk and took out the letter. It was unthinkable that he should open a letter addressed to her. He locked it away in the safe and tried not to wonder what it said.

He leafed through the first of the albums and wished that he hadn’t made so much of her hearing the kettle. She never left the vacuum cleaner out. but she must be worrying about the day center, that was all. He stared at the dark wallpaper and the Gibbons catalogs that always made him feel cozy, at home, and wondered what she was doing downstairs. He was glad when she called him to dinner.

Her mother’s Wedgwood gleamed through the glass of the dresser in the dining room. She seemed happier now, ladling out the stew while he poured chilled apple juice from the jug. “We’ll find somewhere,” she said. “They can’t just close us down without giving us somewhere else.”

“I’m sure you won’t let them.”

“They’d better believe it,” she said with a fierce grin that looked more like her. “And if we should be closed down before they give us somewhere, I’ll just have to bring my old folk round here.”

He almost choked on a piece of potato. “I hope that won’t be necessary,” he said as soon as he could.

“I only said
if.
They wouldn’t be in your way, they’d stay downstairs. I suppose you could put up with them using the toilet when they had to. I should think you’d want to help.”

“You know damn well I’ll help you if I can.” Why, he’d sold his shop in order to buy her the lease on the disused butcher’s because she’d once told him that she’d dreamed of looking after the old folk down the hill, it was a scandal that nobody did. He would have done anything to bring her back to herself, he would have given her a child if he had been able. “If you have to bring them here,” he said, “I won’t stand in your way.”

She was suddenly laughing. “You are a sport, there’s not another like you, but oh, I wish you could see your face! It isn’t doomsday yet, not quite. I’ll be at the planning offices first thing in the morning and I won’t leave until I get some sense out of them. If they’re going to be difficult, they’ll find I can be difficult too.”

After dinner they sat reading. No doubt the old folk would like the paintings of cats and curly-haired infants, the china animals next to the photograph of her parents as a young couple, but how could they all fit into the living room? It wasn’t half the size of the day center. That troubled him as he tried to read
Philatelist’s Weekly,
her not thinking of it did too, and so did her reading one Agatha Christie while another lay next to her chair. Soon she began to nod. “I’m going up,” she said the third time her head jerked.

“I’ll be up shortly.” He waited so as not to overhear her on the toilet, then he strolled through the house, trying the windows and outer doors. She wasn’t quite asleep when he eased himself into bed. “We’ll have somewhere by next year,” she said, her words slurring. “Sally and Mark can look after things for a couple of weeks. How would you like to drive across America? Love to. Keep us young. You’re only as young as you feel,” she mumbled, and was asleep.

He lay and stared at the bar of dimness opposite the gap between the curtains. The sky was murmuring, an airplane was dwindling among the stars. Surely she would find somewhere before she grew frustrated; he didn’t dare think what that might do to her now. He was remembering the day she had told him about her dreams, not long after they were married: remembered sitting on a bench outside a pub on Jersey, watching sheep flock toward the coast of the tiny island, the white wall at his back so hot that he’d had to sit on the edge of the bench, and suddenly Joyce had said. “What would you do if you knew that ship out there was going to sink?” He’d had no proper answer to that, then or now—certainly not once she’d made him realize how frustrating it must be to know that there would be a fire, a train wreck, a motorway pileup, and never to be able to convince the right people in time. Almost always she didn’t even know who they might be, and when she did they wouldn’t listen. That frustration had led her to Oxford, and now he said a silent prayer that she would never dream again.

He was turning uneasily in bed, reliving that desperate time and wishing that he could sleep. All their doctor had been able to give her were tranquilizers and a lecture about getting mixed up with that sort of thing. He’d advised Geoffrey to sue the Foundation for Applied Psychological Research, but that would have meant reminding her, when all Geoffrey had wanted was for her to come back to herself. It had been days before they’d had a conversation that pretended she was mending, weeks before she had gone out shopping, but suddenly one morning she had pushed the breakfast tray back at him. “Look at you taking care of the old crock, I should be the one who’s taking care of someone.” And she had been Joyce again, not a promise or a hope; she had even survived the ordeal of going back to nursing only to find that they no longer trusted her. She was whole now, that was what mattered, and he wouldn’t let anyone touch her, especially not Stuart Hay, whom Geoffrey had instantly disliked that night in Oxford, Stuart Hay whose letter was locked in the safe. No, Joyce must never see that. His resolve made him feel that everything was under control. He would sleep as soon as whoever was padding along the street went away.

A draft stirred the curtains, and he felt as if the room were shifting. He turned on his side, slipping an arm around Joyce’s waist. He dragged the blanket over his ear just as he heard a stair creak.

He was out of bed so quickly that the blanket tugged at Joyce. “What’s wrong?” she mumbled. “Where are you?”

“Won’t be long. Go back to sleep.” The possibility that she might hear almost caused him to panic. The sounds were going downstairs; they sounded less like footsteps than lumps of fat plopping on the carpet. Two stairs creaked one after another. Joyce turned back on her side, and he tiptoed onto the landing, closed the door, switched on the light above the stairs.

Now the sounds were in the street. He must have been half-asleep to believe that they had been anywhere else, especially since none of the stairs creaked as he crept down. They never creaked. He -unchained the front door and slid back the bolt.

The street was deserted. All the Georgian houses were dark. A sliver of moon was hooked in the glass of some of the upper windows. The sounds were vanishing beyond the bend that led downhill, and for a moment he saw a figure that made him think of a baby that was just learning to walk. If it looked like a baby at that distance, it must still be larger than he was, which was nonsense, especially since he’d thought it was naked—naked and fat and doughy white. Of course there had been nothing at all.

He bolted and chained the door, and stopped halfway upstairs to check that he had. The public enquiry and the letter from Oxford must have made him nervous. He slipped into bed again and squeezed Joyce’s waist. Hay and his kind were what she must be protected from, not half-awake nonsense. In a few minutes he felt calm, and was asleep.

He woke before Joyce did. He bathed and shaved and dressed, then he brought her a cup of tea. He had to say “Joyce” several times before she woke and peered at the alarm clock that had failed to wake either of them. “Why did you let me sleep? I told you I wanted to be out first thing.”

“Well, I thought—” He didn’t want to imply that he needed to be concerned for her. At last he said, “I overslept.”

“Oh, never mind.” She gulped a scalding mouthful as if that would wake her up. “You can be getting the paper while I make breakfast. Let’s see what they have to say about us.”

A van was dumping a bundle of papers outside the newsagent’s on the High Street. Geoffrey waited while the newsagent found a razor blade and cut the string around the newspapers. He read the morning edition as he walked home: nothing on the front page, but even Joyce couldn’t have expected that; nothing on the first six, seven, eight pages… . He was beginning to crumple the pages as he turned them, and one tore. He almost missed the item, it was so insignificant. “Uproar at Meeting” said the tiny headline on page ten. There was no mention of any of the points Joyce had made.

He wished he could throw it away, but that would never do. Nevertheless he stood for a while on the garden path listening to the mutter of London down the hill before he took her the paper. Breakfast was in the oven, and she was watching the midmorning news on MTV. “Nothing,” she said, gesturing at the television, and barely glanced at the report when he handed it over. “That’s all they think of us, is it? They’ll sit up and take notice before I’ve finished. I have to get going.” But he could tell that she was battling frustration, for all her refusal to be disappointed. She switched off the television. “You should just see the stuff they broadcast as if it’s important news. It isn’t how important you are that matters, it’s who you know. If only I knew someone there,” she said.