Authors: Patrick Gale
‘I thought you got on. He seemed to think you had.’
‘Then he’s dimmer than I imagined. I was being polite.’
‘Just because he’s working class –’
‘That has nothing to do with it.’
‘Granny was working class.’
‘Sally was a doctor.’
‘So? She got lucky.’
‘There is no comparison.’
‘Her mother was a factory hand,’ she reminded him indignantly. ‘Yours was a bloody professor. I’m sorry if the memory offends you but I think there’s every comparison.’
Indignation made her voice waver. Coming soon after Jamie’s revelation and the frantic protectiveness it aroused in her, her grandfather’s lofty unconcern, his trivialisation of a relationship she knew to be crucial, outraged her. He made no reply to her outburst, but merely grunted.
For a few minutes they worked on wordlessly, Alison seething, he, humming an unplaceable tune under his breath. When the telephone rang, she made to answer it, but he gestured her away from it with a violent backward slash of his hand, as though it were a scorpion. They waited through six long rings before his machine took the call. There were the usual clicks then Myra Toye’s unmistakably smoky tones emerged from the tinny loudspeaker. Her words were rambling, her tone angry and apologetic by turns. They each pretended to continue with what they had been doing but Alison could tell he was listening as acutely as she was.
‘Teddy darling?’ said the voice. ‘Teddy are you there? It’s me. Myra. Myra Toye. Who else? Ha! It’s the middle of the night. I couldn’t sleep and I started reading that fucking awful book. Christ I let her choose some unflattering pictures. And that awful one of me in your flat – you must have given them that. Do you hate me so very much? Sorry, darling, I’m a bit woozy. Found some pills somewhere that hadn’t been flushed away with the rest. Yes I know I shouldn’t, but I don’t drink any more. Anyway. What? Oh. Yes. Do you? Do you hate me so much? I don’t hate you. I mean, you must have realised the things I could have told her and didn’t, like that time at the studio party for –’
‘Stupid woman,’ her grandfather hissed. He unplugged the machine, cutting off the famous voice mid-flow. Alison had come down the ladder again.
‘I don’t think it was pills,’ she said. ‘She sounded drunk. And so sad. Terribly sad. Poor woman. You’d never think that –’
‘She’s an actress, remember?’ he said bitterly. ‘She was probably sober as a judge and making the call while someone did her hair. And forget what she said. The book left out nothing. Nothing at all.’ He coughed, abashed at his own petulance. ‘I’ll make us some coffee. Did you eat any breakfast? Do you want lunch?’
‘Just coffee would be fine,’ she said. ‘Maybe some toast.’
She had been on the point of leaving him to stew in his sour memories and unjust opinions, but he suddenly seemed vulnerable, pottering about his kitchen opening and closing cupboard doors without finding what he wanted, touching his temple as though trying to remember something. She stayed on, reminded that his life was not quite the uncomplicated triumphant ascent Jamie would enviously have it.
Sandy was predictably appalled when Alison told her Godfreys had sacked Jamie and of the medical indiscretion which had led to his doing so. She was also revolted at Jamie’s willingness to accept this as his proper lot, and went hotfoot to his flat to tell him so, dragging his embarrassed sister in her wake.
‘I honestly don’t care any more,’ he explained to her. ‘I was angry then, but things are turning out all right now.’
‘Listen, you,’ she retorted. ‘You may be crippled with self-hatred and have juicy savings to rely on, but at least let me go for that shit of a doctor. Otherwise he’ll only do it to someone else with a thinner financial cushion. He probably already has.’
So Jamie allowed her to resume solicitor status and proceed on his behalf. Her enquiries, however, revealed that during his relief over the mole analysis, he had signed a release form whose small print agreed to make all results of the medical examination available to both his employer and potential health insurers. There was some small satisfaction, however, in knowing that Dr Penney’s name had been added to the helpline’s medical and legal blacklist, and circulated to the compilers of others.
Protesting, in the face of Sam’s concern, that he was not letting himself go now that he was married and settled down, Jamie stopped going to the gym and let his membership there lapse. Try as they both might to ignore it, he had lost weight and did not seem able to put it back on, at least, not with the kind of muscle that helped him blend in unregarded in the showers. He seemed to be sweating himself away into their marriage bed. When he woke in the night, brine running from every pore, he slipped out of bed, took a quick shower and returned to Sam’s frightened but wordless embrace. They had clean sheets as often as guests in a luxury hotel and pretended it was done for pleasure and not from necessity. Jamie bought himself a metal and black leatherette construction called an abdominal board, on which he was supposed to perform daily sit-ups to preserve what remained of his washboard stomach, but the sit-ups made him breathless, which scared him. So he left the board out for show and made do with leisurely bike rides around Battersea Park or up to the King’s Road.
Around the time that Sandy was trying to make a legal case for unfair dismissal or breach of confidentiality, Alison urged Jamie into attending an HIV support group on the basis that he had started to offload emotional problems on to Sam that could be more comfortably and usefully shouldered by other people in a similar position. Obedient and detached, he had gone to sit in a room lent by the local genito-urinary clinic, where a mainly male group was encouraged by a sweet-faced Welsh facilitator called Geraint to voice its angers and despairs. For the first few weeks, Jamie found himself paralysed by shyness. He saw several faces familiar to him from his old world of saunas and bars, and the sudden lurch from beer-blurred, stylised anonymity to the harshly lit, brutally sober particularity of saying things like, ‘Good evening, I’m Rory and I’m
really
angry,’ seemed intolerable.
Geraint knew his job well, however. Each week he caught Jamie’s eye as he walked in, offered him a quiet smile of welcome and said, ‘Hello there, Jamie,’ just to show he’d remembered his name. Then, one-day, mid-way through a heated discussion of blame started by a woman infected by her bisexual husband, Geraint took advantage of a brief lull to turn to the corner where Jamie was growing dozy by the radiator and ask, ‘So what about you, Jamie? We haven’t heard from you in a while.’
‘Me?’
‘Yes. What do
you
think?’
Taken completely by surprise, Jamie blurted out all sorts of things he had not even realised he was feeling. He said he had not told his mother or his grandfather yet because he thought they would blame him and that maybe they’d be right.
‘My grandfather’s generation didn’t sleep around and they’re only just starting to die from natural causes.’
‘Oh no?’ someone piped up. ‘How’d they catch so much syphilis, then?’
‘What about TB?’ someone else added. ‘That was treated like a dirty disease.’
‘Vivien Leigh died of that as late as the sixties,’ the woman pointed out.
‘You should blame your mother before she blames you,’ a younger, American woman insisted. ‘It was all that Free Love and drug-taking that gave you the space to live such a risky life.’
‘But I don’t care about how I was living,’ Jamie cut back in again as the discussion turned into an unexpectedly angry session of recrimination and counter-recrimination. ‘I don’t regret a thing. Not a single fuck. I’d have them all again.’
‘But you’d wear a condom this time, right?’ Geraint asked. He was trying to lighten the tone but Jamie wouldn’t let him.
‘Maybe,’ he said, shrugging. ‘Maybe not.’ This unleashed another storm of disagreement.
The next week he felt he couldn’t go back. Alison was anxious that he still needed the group’s so-called support, but he found there was less to offload on to Sam than there had been. He knew from various indigestible books he had borrowed from Alison that he was meant to be passing from shock to refusal to anger to depression and so on, before reaching acceptance, but all he felt, a lot of the time, was a kind of flatness. He had always imagined this was how he would feel in the minutes following the declaration of atomic war; the rooms and streets around him would be raucous with last minute sex, confessions of crime, love and hatred. Shops would be pointlessly looted and the air would buzz with the forging of frantic bargains with the various available deities, but Jamie had always anticipated that he would just sit quietly by the television, waiting for the first pictures and feeling sort of
flat
.
By slow degrees he stopped sitting around ‘waiting to die’, as Sam put it in an angry moment, and began making a conscious effort to get out and do things he had never done before. He joined the local library and began to devour novels so famous he was almost ashamed to be seen reading them in public. He took boats to see the huge silver shells of the Thames Barrier, to pant round the palm house at Kew and to sail through Docklands to Greenwich. He went greyhound racing, gave Sam four hundred pounds and made him place it all on fruitless bets. He sat, detached and observant, through afternoon screenings of punitive subtitled films and even persuaded Sam to sit through a new production of
King Lear
, which neither of them greatly enjoyed or entirely understood. He reached a point, however, when he felt he had exhausted the possibilities of at least the reasonable items on his mental list of Things To Do Before Sickness Sets In. All the discovery and self-improvement started to feel suspiciously like activities to ward off fear – cosmic waiting room syndrome. If he was truly to do as Geraint urged and live with the virus rather than wait for it to swallow his life away – live with it simply, contentedly even, as one might learn to live with a silver streak in one’s hair or a new scar on one’s cheek – he had to reenter daily life. But how? He stopped reading Jane Austen and forced himself to read new novels, harsh with realities. He read about psychotic killers, incest, cannibalism, insanity. He read novels about sick people, men with cancer, mothers with AIDS.
‘The trouble is,’ he tried to explain to Sam, ‘they’re all written for people who are well and feel bad about it. You know how they’ll end before you begin.’
He preferred, he decided, novels that ended with a betrothal or a birth, and returned to his voyage through the works of Jane Austen, George Eliot and Mrs Gaskell. Unlike the rude health of others, which he still found hard to take on bad days, convincingly happy endings were not an insult. They had never seemed more important.
The last melancholy days of summer shaded into a dazzling autumn. Sam’s work finished at the new hospital and he took Jamie to admire the gleaming building, lit up as the carpet fitters, painters and electricians worked through the night to meet the contractor’s deadline. Sam followed a tip from some friends and moved to work on a new riverside housing estate in Wandsworth, which meant they would be granted more precious minutes in bed in the mornings. After a week of dramatic storms, the clocks went back, autumn hardened prematurely into winter and Jamie decided it was time to take a job again.
Rather than lose face by returning to the City now that his bridges with that area of his past had been so satisfactorily burned, he opted instead for working in the classical department of a big West End music shop. His early training had left him with a fairly broad musical knowledge and his former salary had allowed him to acquire enough experience of the best performers and recordings to bluff credibly where his knowledge wore thin. As Alison had found in applying to Pharos, the mere mention of his grandfather’s name during the interview did the rest.
Work was now an entirely different experience. He could wear whatever he liked. He could drink tea in bed with Sam before he set out and admit to having done so once he got there – although such domestic details, however enviable, were tame compared with the adventures recounted by some of his colleagues. His personality was no longer split between his work self and the self he expressed elsewhere. He now felt he was truly himself most of the time. The only exceptions, jarring with the new, cautiously preserved equilibrium of his days, were encounters with his mother. To Alison’s dismay, he now shunned his grandfather and The Roundel. Ironically, the memory of his grandfather’s disgust remained a useful goad, spurring him on to rid his life of pretence and wasted social effort.
When Jamie told Alison that he and Sam had a regular, careful sex life still, he was being economical with the truth. For a while after Sam had tested negative, they had had no sex life at all.
‘It didn’t make any difference before,’ Sam told the health worker. ‘Why should it now?’
‘Just be prepared,’ she said. ‘That’s all. With some couples it’s not a problem, with others, it’s like a layer of permafrost slicing the bed in two.’
Sure enough, the frost descended that first evening. They had a romantic night in. Curled on the sofa together, the fridge full of beer for Sam and fruit juice for Jamie, they guzzled an Indian takeaway and quietly watched two horror videos in a row. One of Sam’s closely guarded secrets was that, despite his bravado, scary films reduced him to vulnerable jelly. Nervous hand-clutching during the second, nastier film, led to reassuring fondling until, with the video pouring forth its shrieks and scenes of gore to an empty room, they were rolling around on top of the bed, trying to kiss and kick jeans off at the same time.