Authors: Patrick Gale
She saw him framed in the studio’s picture window, by the piano keyboard, telephone receiver in hand. Talking, he turned back into the room. He was agitated but hiding it. She could tell because he kept touching his free fingers to his temple, which he always did, unconsciously, at stressful moments. He hung up and stood there for a moment, watching the telephone as though waiting for it to ring again. Then he disappeared from view to emerge at the door with a fresh jug of coffee.
She found she could not face him at that moment. Turning aside with a vague wave, she hurried back into The Roundel and up to her room. She sat on the bed, then lay down and stared at the ceiling, her heart racing. This was the room, she had often heard, where he had taken refuge during the flood that had torn Sally from him. The change she felt in her view of him was no less violent than the one worked by the unnatural tides that had swept boats to the level of this room’s sill and had dragged a car down the bank of the Rexbridge road.
That her grandfather had known great love and been more or less in celibate mourning for it ever since, was one of the simple certainties on which her life was founded – like the warmth of the sun or the sweetness of sugar. Now that she was forced to examine it, the myth was of a sentimental flimsiness she would not have accepted even in the most romantic of her company’s fiction. She had always assumed the tragedy of Sally’s loss had enriched his creativity, even though it overshadowed the possibility of his enjoying any other woman. To have this faith betrayed by so much casual Saturday journalese left her breathless, confused and angry. She had only told him half the truth in the restaurant the other night. Certainly she might have idealised his marriage – perhaps it was not so special to him, or perhaps it
was
and he was simply lonely afterwards. There was no law against widowers remarrying or finding consolation. What she did
not
idealise was her view of Sally. From her earliest girlhood there had been witnesses enough to give her a detailed portrait of her grandmother. The more she heard of Sally’s feistiness and independence, the more she felt out of sympathy with her own chaotic and all too dependent mother. Sally’s memory had usurped Miriam’s place, and she had become a spectral surrogate parent, the kind of woman Alison hoped to be. Now she was forced to see her as a dead wife, nothing more, a pallid rival to a more potent heroine, her small, domestic achievements long since outrun by the grander ones of a surviving husband.
Alison walked to the bathroom and flushed the loo so as to acquire a pretext for her sudden withdrawal, then descended the stairs to rejoin her grandfather. Faced with a dilemma, she habitually asked herself what Sally would have done. In this case, she realised, Sally would have shrugged, not unlike Cynthia, and said, ‘He’s a man. Men’s needs are simpler than ours and they’re harder to deny. Besides,’ this with the laugh Alison had never heard, ‘being dead, I wasn’t much use by that time.’
This revelation had brought her grandfather into a new focus. He had become less a grandparent – with all the sentimental castration the status implied – more a man.
‘You’ve read it?’ he said as he sat down beside her again.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Had she?’
‘And how. She’s reacting out of all proportion. She started saying, “Don’t worry, I’ll pack a suitcase and drive up” as though there were some crisis on, like a death or a press siege.’
‘Oh no!’
‘It’s all right. I put her off. I said you were here to answer the telephone and protect me. It’s not as if it’s in a tabloid anyway. When she goes to church tomorrow and finds she isn’t mobbed she’ll probably be disappointed and blame me for not hiring myself a press agent. I’m sorry if you feel I deceived you.’
Alison paused for a moment, to think. He
had
deceived her. It certainly felt that way.
‘You didn’t,’ she said. ‘Not really. You just held back the truth. May I ask why you told her anything, though? Couldn’t you have just kept quiet? None of us need
ever
have known!’ She heard a trace of anger enter her voice.
‘To be honest, I wasn’t sure just how detailed the book would be and I didn’t want to do more damage than was necessary.’ He looked at her benignly, mocking her caution, oblivious to her wrath. ‘In fact, I did precious little. Miss Peake already had my letters. She was obviously a most determined researcher and she was plainly going to tell the story with or without my help. When she confronted me with what she knew, I thought the least I could do was make sure she gave a balanced account. Your mother thinks I should have kept quiet. She says it will cause “difficulties for poor Frank” though how, I can’t imagine. Anyway, I’m not ashamed and I don’t see why she should be, or you. It’s all true. It happened. I’m actually rather proud about it.’
They laughed, he more than her. She fancied he was relieved at something. Perhaps there were still
more
embarrassing details the biographer had left out, though discretion hardly seemed to be her keynote.
‘The record company will be thrilled,’ she pointed out drily.
‘Really? Yes. I suppose they will. Do you think I come out of it badly?’
Alison picked the paper up again and glanced at the relevant paragraphs.
‘No,’ she said. ‘Sadly but not badly. Except for the nanny bit, but everyone will forgive you that as it’s a period detail.’
‘Well that bit’s all exaggerated. Some friend of Miriam’s probably told her something. Miriam’s now saying, “But how
could
she? All the nannies were such
angels
!”’
He laughed at his own impersonation. Alison poured them both more coffee. She had already drunk too much. She could feel her hands wanting to shake. She forced herself to confront the unpalatable.
‘Were you terribly hurt when it finished?’ she said. ‘She doesn’t give any details here.’
He nodded and for a moment she thought he was not going to reply, then he sighed.
‘I’d never been rejected before. Sally dying was pure loss. Senseless and altogether different. This was calculated. First rejection is hard at any age. And it was such a very physical thing. I think those always end in anger more than sorrow. The scales really do fall from your eyes and you wonder what on earth you saw in the person, and how you could possibly have degraded yourself so in front of others.’
‘What did you say in the last letter? They don’t quote it.’
‘The last letter?’
‘Yes. She says – Where is it?’ Alison scanned the newsprint. ‘Yes. She says “His last letter to her was among the bitterest she would ever receive …”’
He furrowed his brow, touched his temple.
‘God.
I
can’t remember. It was so long ago. Probably something very vindictive. I knew all her weak points by then.’
They sat for a while in thoughtful silence, listening to the lazy courtship of pigeons on The Roundel’s roof. Then the telephone rang again, only this time it was hers.
‘Hell,’ she said, getting up. ‘Now she’s probably ringing to see whose side I’m going to be on.’
‘Don’t answer,’ he suggested. ‘Sometimes I don’t answer for hours on end. I put a cushion over it.’
‘I know,’ she said firmly, patting his shoulder as she headed back to the house and feeling her anger at him threaten to rise again. ‘It can be extremely irritating.’
The hall floor was cold under her feet.
‘I’m coming, I’m coming,’ she grumbled and snatched up the receiver, answering far more brusquely than she had intended. ‘Yes? Hello?’
There was a static-filled pause, announcing a very long distance call, then a woman’s voice, smoky, oddly familiar, asked, ‘Now who’s that?’
The accent was English but wore signs of American influence, like a deep, creasing tan.
‘It’s Alison,’ Alison said. ‘Alison Pepper.’
‘Ah,’ said the voice, then ‘
Ah
!’ with fuller understanding. ‘Are you a new wife, then, or what?’
‘I’m sorry?’ Alison laughed at the improbability of it.
‘Is it possible for me to talk to Teddy?’
‘
Teddy
?’
‘Edward, then. I want to talk to Edward Pepper. May I?’
‘But of course. I’m so sorry. You’ve come in on a different line. He’s in the garden. Hang on. Who should I say is calling?’
‘Just tell him Myra.’
‘Oh,’ Alison said sheepishly. ‘Right!’
The call might as well have come from her dead grandmother it startled her so. She found herself setting down the receiver very carefully so as not to cause a clunk in the famously bejewelled ear. She stood staring at the phone for a second or two, debating whether to break off the connection in a feeble attempt to abort whatever process might be about to start. Then she remembered that her family’s involvement with Myra Toye was now being read about in hairdressers’ across the country. Again she thought of floods and their inexorability.
Her grandfather seemed equally shocked at the news and began to dither until she reminded him it was a call from the depths of the Californian night. She resisted the temptation to eavesdrop on such a topical reunion and flopped back into her chair pretending to read a scathing review of a new Domina Feraldi play. He returned very quickly, avoiding her impudently enquiring gaze, and began to read as well. When he broke the silence, it was without looking up from the article before him.
‘I hung up,’ he said. ‘I didn’t speak to her. If she calls again, which I don’t suppose she will, but
if
she should, could you say I’m away or something?’
‘Yes,’ she promised him, confused and strangely disappointed. ‘Of course I will.’
It was rare for him to show any Germanic severity
en famille
, but when he did, as now, it commanded her immediate respect, because it was in such contrast to his usual manner.
The subject of the affair was indefinitely closed between them. The time when she might have protested against his destruction of her last veil of innocence was past. She knew he expected her not to tell her mother about the call, and pledged him her silent allegiance, marvelling, as she did so, at the capacity of the human mind to feel pain decades after a wound’s infliction. At least, when he had dishonoured Sally’s memory, it was not for some casual flirtation. At least it was for something that had made him suffer. At least, in the cheapest sense, he had not got away with it.
Jamie’s existence had been transformed. From the first tentative admission that he was in love, he felt as though an opaque layer had been peeled away, leaving its colours brighter, its every sensation more acute. Overnight his life fell into two discrete sections; the time before and the time since, and he was enabled to see now that the contentment he had felt before was no more than a pleasure in sustained control and stasis, as far removed from the real happiness he felt now as a boiled sweet from a blood orange. Lying awake at night in Sam’s arms – for however happy, his sleep remained fitful – he felt the slow, warm fall and rise of the other’s chest against his cheek and dared to register relief.
Beginning a slow colonisation of Jamie’s flat and possessions, Sam had begun to investigate seams of Jamie’s record collection, long neglected since the advent of compact discs, and had unearthed an album of Billie Holiday songs. He had only played it once before, declaring her voice ‘miserable as fuck’ and moving on to other things. Jamie kept returning to it, however, charmed afresh, despite the embarrassment of not remembering who the Julian was who had so keenly inscribed the sleeve in making the record a present. One song in particular began to speak to him, its lyrics – however cynically Holiday sang them – falling on his ear refreshed with new relevance. He found it pestering him at odd times of day.
‘Just in time,’ he sang in his mind, washing out the bath or riding the glass lift to a meeting at Lloyd’s, ‘I found you just in time.’
Once, after Sam had rung him at work from a call box to clarify some detail of their plans for the evening, his secretary had caught him humming the old melody out loud as he scanned the figures on his monitor. Where he would once have glowered the mocking smile off her face, he now found he could disarm her mockery by smiling easily back. She had a lover too. Not a builder, but a working man, a carpenter. She had shyly confessed over one too many birthday drinks, ‘My dad thinks I should aim higher now that I work here. But it’s no good, Jamie. I like the feel of his hands.’
The feel of his hands
, Jamie thought, tossing his magazine back on to the waiting room table and reaching instead for the
Financial Times
. He made a dim attempt to read a report on the performance of a Swiss coffee and chocolate giant Francis had been recommending, then tried instead to summon up the feel of Sam’s hands, their cuts, their dusty callouses, the unexpected softness of their palms as they brushed across his armpits or the nape of his neck, but all he could summon up was dread. Suddenly the receptionist was at his side, taking away his emptied coffee cup.
‘Mr Pepper. Mr Pepper? Dr Penney will see you now.’
Jamie was never ill. It was something doctors always commented on, glancing over his notes. Once the usual childhood ailments and teenage vaccinations were out of the way, his only brushes with medicine had been for accidental damage – concussion after falling off his bicycle, a tetanus injection and stitches after an undramatic but messy brush with some barbed wire, and that nasty fracture sustained on a skiing holiday which had led to a short spell in a German hospital. He had colds like the next man, of course, hangovers, the rare crisis of food poisoning or ’flu, but he was never ill; not what he thought of as properly ill. He ate carefully, he took vitamins and he kept fit. This meant that the unease with which he faced his rare encounters with a doctor was accompanied by an inappropriate excitement at the novelty of the experience.