September Starlings (7 page)

‘Quite.’ What wouldn’t I give now for the sound of his
tuneless whistle floating down two flights of stairs? I used to moan about the whirring noises, about his tone-deafness. I wish he were here now, humming, whirring, polishing a perfect diamond.

‘Laura?’

‘Yes?’

She clears her throat, shuffles towards the edge of her seat as if seeking privacy in a room filled by people. ‘He must have relatives. Wherever he was born … Look, Les tried to talk to him once, tried to work out where Ben had come from and—’

‘Why?’

She lifts a hand in a gesture that is meant to be casual, nonchalant. ‘It’s only natural to want to know where a good friend comes from. I mean, he’s not English, is he?’

I stand, walk to the drawer where I keep the Silk Cut. Although I have not smoked for years, I always keep fresh tobacco in the house in case I crack. But I won’t crack, I’m not the cracking type. Which is why that breakdown was so terrifying.

‘Don’t smoke,’ she begs. She’s a member of ASH and can be very boring about it. Most people with a mission manage to be tedious at times.

I choose my words, pick them over before speaking. ‘Ruth, I’ll smoke if I want to, so don’t start rocking the hobby horse.’ There’s some Wrigley’s next to the cigarettes, and I take time to unwrap a piece, chew for a few seconds while I learn the lines. ‘What doesn’t matter is where Ben comes from. Wherever it is, he has never expressed the desire to return or to contact anyone there. It hasn’t mattered to me. And where I came from never mattered to him.’ The chewing gum is ancient. I put it in the rubbish where it belongs.

‘Sorry,’ she mumbles.

‘It’s OK, don’t worry. But as far as we are concerned, our lives began when we met. He pulled me out of hell, never asked what I’d done, what sin I’d committed to merit damnation. So I never asked about the pain behind
his eyes.’ He made me face Tommo, though. Yes, he knew a lot about me, much more than I ever discovered about him.

She swallows. ‘I’ve seen the agony in his face, too. But only recently.’

Ruth knows, then. Ruth recognizes his misery.

‘It’s awful, isn’t it?’ It’s good to talk to someone who has seen his fear, who understands the dilemma. He’s remembering something, living it again. ‘I don’t know what to say to him, Ruth, don’t know how to comfort the man I love.’

She touches my hand, guides me into the chair. ‘Are you feeling guilty again? Are you? Is it because of Robert?’

The smile on my face does not touch my eyes. I can feel them cold and dead as they reflect Ben’s unhappiness. ‘That’s one thing I’m easy about. When we married, Ben instructed me to take a lover if necessary. “I’m old already,” he said. “Don’t leave me, but find comfort if I get worn out.” He got worn out, Ruth.’ The tears brim and threaten again. ‘I needed Robert before I was ill. Now, he’s surplus to requirements. All things change after you’ve expected to die. All my years from now will be a bonus. It’s time for reassessment, and Robert’s not a part of my future.’

‘Have you told him that?’

‘No. He’ll catch on in a year or two. Young men are so … slow to learn. All those qualifications and he doesn’t understand the word no.’

Ruth chews her lip for a second. ‘You wonder what it’s all been about, don’t you? Like Ben – I mean, he’s worked damned hard, made a good life for both of you – and look what happens.’

‘I know.’ He sits upstairs with a small fortune in this country, God knows how much abroad. He cannot write a cheque. He cannot write his name. He toiled, he saved, he prospered, he got confused.

‘I’m sorry if I’ve been indelicate,’ she says.

At last, I can smile properly. ‘Ruth, you always were
about as delicate as an elephant in clog-irons. Will you stay for a bite of brunch?’

‘No, I’m roasting pork. Les can’t even butter a scone, you know. As a New Man, poor old Les is hopeless.’

‘Trade him in.’

She shakes her head. ‘Can’t. I’m the sort that gets used to toothache after a while. Take care.’

After she has disappeared down the path, I hang out more of Ben’s washing. The birds are still quarrelling, chattering over a few scraps. He doesn’t hear them, even though his chair is near the window. I want to enter his mind, share the terror, hold his hand through dark days. There is nothing I can do and the knowledge of my uselessness is strangling me.

The stairs are like Everest, there to be conquered. But I push myself, throw open his door, place myself at his feet. ‘Ben! Where are you? Look at me, please.’ I hold his face in my hands, watch closely as his eyes fail to focus. ‘Tell me about it. Speak to me.’ Oh God, I am shaking a sick man!

‘No matter,’ he says. ‘No matter. He will come for us.’

‘Who? Ben, who will come for us?’

He sniffs, licks dry lips, blinks rapidly. ‘Have you found it yet, Laura?’

‘Yes, that’s right, Ben. I’m Laura, your wife. Where have you been while I have needed you? I was ill and you didn’t visit me. I went out of my mind after my body was mended and you still didn’t come. Where are you? Where the hell are you?’

He is humming, and his deafness of tone has not improved.

‘Ben. What do you think about? Tell me. Tell me about what frightened you all those years ago. Who are you? Where did you come from and why? Ben.’

The tuneless noise stops. ‘I burned my arm.’

‘Yes.’ I lift the sleeve and look at the old purple scar. ‘How did that happen?’

‘It is all written down.’

‘Ben—’

‘I don’t like frozen peas. They don’t listen, you know. I said several times that I eat only fresh vegetables.’

My heart pounds. He is talking about the here and now, about the nursing home. ‘Are the meals terrible? What do you have for breakfast?’

He nods sagely. ‘It is all written down. Strawberry yoghurt.’

I have failed again. He sleeps, moans, snores softly. Even his snoring has lost heart. Somewhere inside this figure is my husband. And I can’t find him. I can touch him, see him, hear him. But he is no longer of this world.

After lunch, Ruth’s husband arrives to carry Ben downstairs, bundles him into an armchair that I have covered in plastic sheeting. The sweat drips from Les’s hair, runs down his face like tears. ‘He’s still putting weight on. Mind, I suppose he feels heavier with being so limp.’ He straightens, pushes a wet and stringy length of hair from his damp face. ‘I’ll come back this afternoon and carry him upstairs again.’

Ben studies us with eyes that are untypically alert. ‘I can walk,’ he says, the tone imperious. He stands, stumbles over the dropped car rug, rights himself slowly. The legs are uncertain, jellyish. A large paunch throws him off-balance again, and he sinks into the chair. ‘
Rien ne va plus
,’ he mutters, the voice conveying acceptance rather than hopelessness.

‘Sounds like a bloody Monte Carlo croupier,’ remarks Les, his face half-hidden by a handkerchief. He emerges, less moist but still hot. ‘Is he a gambler?’

‘I don’t know.’ That is the truth. Ben came, went, came home again. Sometimes, he phoned or wrote to say when he would be home. Occasionally, an operator would talk to me, the English broken and brushed with foreign tones. I don’t know. When we were together, I didn’t think about where Ben had been, always understood that I should not ask. During separations, I wrote Georgina Dawn’s books,
shopped, improved the house, looked after children and animals. My husband is a stranger, a beloved and broken man who remains a mystery to me, though I have held him in my arms and shared the laughter and the loving.

Les touches my shoulder. ‘Are you all right, girl?’ He’s very much a builder, is constructed like one of his thrown-together houses, straightish, tallish, but not very well appointed. Les always manages to smell of sand, cement and putty, even when he’s dressed up. We took him to a wedding once, and when he knelt in the pew, a screwdriver and a couple of washers clattered from a pocket of his good suit and rolled across the aisle, cheering up the proceedings no end. Today, Les is a bundle of rags, T-shirt, jeans, a tatty maroon cardigan. ‘You look a bit pale, love,’ he says.

Tenderness cuts me these days, makes me brusque, puts me on my guard. ‘I’m fine.’

He blinks, turns his head slightly, as if trying to hide his grief. ‘We’d have been out at West Lancs now, me and him.’ He jerks a gnarled thumb towards my husband. ‘After our nine holes, we used to skip the rest and sit in the clubhouse. Ben always had to be near a window with his binoculars. He loved a round of golf, even if he did spend half the time looking at the sky through the bloody binoculars. Him and his birds. They called him Birdy at the club, and it was nothing to do with his score card. I sometimes wonder what we’ve done wrong. I mean, why did he have to finish up like that? It’s no life for him, worse for you in a way.’ The thick lower lip trembles. ‘He’s a good man.’

Ben stirs himself. ‘Sarah,’ he announces. ‘Light brown hair, ribbons. Running in the sand … dog.’

I kneel, rub life into waxy hands. The weather is fair, predictably so because the forecast last night predicted storms. But there’s a chill in the air, the crisp nip of autumn, and Ben gets cold so easily. I turn on the fan heater, angle it towards him. ‘Sarah is Les’s daughter, Ben. She used to run on the sands with you and Hector.
Do you remember Hector? He was a great dane – we had him before Chewbacca.’

‘Thousands of them,’ says Ben sleepily. ‘Millions. Where did they all come from? And under the stove …’ The eyes fix on me, yet I know that he is seeing somebody else. ‘The singing is so beautiful. Why is she angry? Why should the singing have to stop?’ He nods, snores, is gone again.

Les shuffles towards the door. ‘Wharrabloodymess.’ The exclamation tumbles from his tongue as one angry, bruised word. He slips back into the bowels of Liverpool’s demolished slums when he is disturbed or worried. Twelve children, two rooms up, two down, a tin bath on a nail in the yard, accents like warm molasses. Out of such beginnings Les clawed his way until he owned his own business, until he managed to buy out several competitors. One of his favourite sayings to Ruth is, ‘Well, we’re all right now, don’t want for nothing, queen.’

‘Thanks,’ I call to his disappearing back. He can’t cope with the deterioration of his nearest friend, and I can’t offer comfort. I hold back, because there are no words for Les.

I find a book of cheques, pay bills, write to my agent whose hand is outstretched for Georgina Dawn’s next
magnum opus
. Perhaps this time he will get 10 per cent of nothing, as I am too busy to write. And I’m working towards some kind of decision, trying to clear a path to the future. The pen pauses. I am remembering the day when he realized, when my poor husband began to talk about his ‘gaps’. ‘I am not always with you, Laura,’ he said. ‘So you must take care of all domestic bills, gas and rates and so on. I’ll show you how it’s done …’

I sat here then, in my house by the sea, and I held out my arms, gathered him to me as if he were a child. There were papers for me to sign, witnesses to find. On that day, I removed from him the last of his small powers, the final shreds of his ragged dignity. He never went abroad again, seldom groomed himself, needed to be prompted to eat, to
sleep, to put on the right clothes. He needed to be taught how to pretend to be alive.

The phone rings, startles me. Like a frightened rabbit, I am bolt upright, listening to the instrument’s shrill cry. There’s an extra edge to it, an urgency. It’s my mother. Even from the bottom of the garden, or from the shore, I imagine that I can identify my mother’s demanding ring.

‘Laura?’ Annoyed, lively. God help me. Ben just sleeps on, has reached a place where she can no longer find him.

‘Hello, Mother.’

A sniff, deep and meaningful. An iciness seems to travel along the wire and into my hand. Sometimes, my imagination plays tricks with me. ‘You’ve not been to see me,’ she whines. ‘It’s Monday and you’ve not been.’ She would have made a fabulous diva had she been able to sing.

I will be patient. ‘I told you last week. It’s a holiday, so I’m keeping Ben for a bit longer.’

‘What for? What bloody good will that be to him? He’s only tenpence in the bob, so it doesn’t matter where he is.’ The Bolton accent is stronger of late, as if she needs to be markedly different while living here among the Scousers. When I was a child, she was sometimes – not always – quite the lady. ‘Oh, my husband has a chemist’s shop on Blackburn Road, he’s a qualified dispenser, you know.’ And she deteriorated even further, became a total embarrassment when he made his fortune in McNally’s Cooling Tea. ‘He’s a genius, my husband, on a par with Einstein for brains.’ All her life, she’s been trying to prove something. To me, to my poor old dad, to anyone else who stood still long enough to be judged a captive audience. She certainly never told her husband that he was clever, never praised any soul who was actually within earshot.

I try to relax. This is the woman who gave birth to me, clothed me, fed me, ruined my life, drove my father to a premature grave. ‘I’ll come tomorrow.’

‘I’ve no cigarettes,’ she screams.

With the receiver held at a decent interval from an
aching ear, I wait while she wades through the compulsory lecture on my selfishness, my lack of consideration for a good mother, my unfeeling attitude towards a sick old woman.

I suck a mint while lending half an ear to what looks like becoming yet another revised version of the statutory sermon. Her monologue is a well-rehearsed one, contains all the familiar words, though not necessarily in the same order as last time. At last, a gap between words. ‘Smoking is bad for you, Mother,’ I manage. ‘You know what the doctor said to you last month—’

‘Don’t you tell me how to live my life!’ The blast of her temper cuts through my slow, careful speech. ‘All those holidays you’ve had lately without a thought for me. Remember, I can change my will any time, and that’ll be you in rags. I want my bloody fags and you’d best go and get me some.’

It’s no use. It’s no use telling her that my ‘holidays’ were spent in hospital. That would just give her pleasure, would allow her to gloat about being in better condition than a woman who is thirty years her junior. And I need her money like a fish needs a bicycle. The writing has made me comfortable, while Ben has signed a small fortune to my name. Still, there’s no point in telling her that she’s completely useless. The last will and testament of Liza McNally is her only weapon, and she wields it like a sabre. Her sole pleasure in life is gleaned from the suffering of others.