The Liverpool Trilogy (16 page)

She sat in her car for a long time. Mother’s friend would be at Stoneyhurst by now. The two of them were to have champagne and fancy nibbles to celebrate the fact that Tallows was about to be handed over to a charity. Yet Liz knew that her mother was worried about Daddy. ‘God, I feel so alone,’ she whispered. ‘I never felt so bloody lonely in my life.’

She’d seen her father, and she’d spoken to Mother, and Mother was not available at present. There were friends, of course, but she couldn’t speak about the current situation to people who were miles away, many abroad, some working. Simon? He was on call. Her brothers were out on the town with the girls next door, and Liz felt terribly isolated. She was supposed to return to her digs in Manchester, a large house lent to community players who were currently performing in the parks. But some actors never stopped acting, and she didn’t want fake sympathy from anyone.

Acting was definitely in her. Blood and bone, she was a performer, but she didn’t actually like many of her fellows. The ‘mwah’ crowd, as she termed the fussier members of her profession, were difficult to know. It was almost as if they had no true self, no core. Perhaps they had deliberately wiped the hard drive so that they could ‘be’ whatever was asked of them. Most of her favourite companions were studying at various colleges attached to London University, and they covered a range of subjects from sciences to politics and right through all the arts. They were the true people, but they were all part of her other life, the one that was totally unconnected with the north, with her family and all its problems.

But yes, the show had to go on. She looked at the building that contained her male parent, turned the ignition key and drove out of the car park. Sometimes, a person had to bear aloneness. Sometimes, one had to become an adult. But oh, how she wanted her mother.

Champagne loosened tongues and clothing. David removed his jacket, took off the tie, undid his cuffs and rolled his sleeves to the elbows. Lucy kicked away her shoes and threw a pearl choker on the mantelpiece. She would not be beaten at Scrabble by a visitor whose young life she had saved so many times that he should be grateful. And he was cheating. She was absolutely sure that he was pulling the wool. Well, almost absolutely sure, that was. She saw a gleam in his eyes that bragged about superiority of mind and the ability to fool his companion.

This was serious business. Locked in mortal combat, they sat on either side of the kitchen table, each glaring at the other.

‘Challenge if you wish,’ he said. ‘But those are true medical words, I can assure you. This one’s a fungus closely related to thrush—’

‘Starling?’ she suggested. ‘Crow, blackbird?’

‘You’ll be sorry you mocked me, Lucy. And this other word’s a surgical instrument I found very useful for unblocking my kitchen sink.’

She cursed under her breath. ‘Medical bits and pieces should be banned. I mean, you’re shoving Xs and Zs all over the place – how the hell am I to know whether you’re cheating? It’s years since I was involved in medicine – you’ve invented loads of illnesses since I was a slip of a nurse. But those words do not look real.’

‘They’re real.’

‘They’re not.’

He shrugged. ‘Challenge, then. You are within your rights to call me out, but your forfeit will be expensive when I am proved correct.’

She stared hard at her adversary. He was not the sort of man with whom she would wish to play poker. ‘I think you’re a lying toad,’ she pronounced. ‘What sort of word is that? Look at the length of it. Another couple of letters and it would be in the fireplace.’

He rooted in a pocket and retrieved a tape measure. ‘Five and a bit inches. That’s not long. I mean, these tiles are quite large. In a medical dictionary, it would be just about an inch. And we all know size isn’t everything.’

‘What the hell are you doing with a tape measure in your pocket? What else do you have? You’re ruining a perfectly decent pair of trousers.’

‘Yes, Mother.’ He produced a couple of fluffy Mint Imperials, a sock, some string, a small packet of Kleenex and several tangled rubber bands.

‘No improvement in that department, then,’ Lucy said.

He explained that the rubber bands and string were for holding together patient notes when they got bulky, the sock was a stray, but a clean one, and the Kleenex were self-explanatory. He had no idea about the sweets, but he judged them to be a decent vintage and quite edible once held under a running cold tap for a few minutes. ‘What are pockets for? To keep things in, Lucy. Don’t go all matriarchal – my mother failed to train me. And they’re my bloody pockets.’

‘No caterpillars?’

‘Not on this occasion. I’ll go outside and find some if you like.’

‘What about the tape measure?’

‘Ah.’ He stood up and stretched his arms. ‘Sometimes, they lose a lot of weight. I measure ankles and wrists when they’re asleep. So brave, those kids. But I like to upset them as little as possible.’

Scrabble and arguments forgotten, Lucy walked into the living room and sat in an armchair. He followed, and she watched while he shoved all the detritus back inside his trouser pockets, marvelled at how the grown man had hung on to some of his childhood characteristics. He’d always been a hoarder. And now, he collected children. Sick children. Was this a penance he had imposed on himself for abandoning his own son? ‘David?’

‘What?’

‘Do you ever get lonely?’

He shrugged. ‘Yes, of course I do. So I keep busy, try to be useful, try to make a difference to children whose lives would be a damned sight shorter without people like me. I do what needs to be done. Then I go home tired enough to sleep.’

‘And there’s been no other woman since Anne died?’

After a short pause, he delivered an answer to the one woman for whom he had rediscovered feelings. ‘No. I can’t. I don’t mean it would be a physical impossibility – I know I still function, but that sort of closeness is something I’d never manage to take lightly. She died. Tim’s death drew a thick, black line under hers. Lucy, I couldn’t go through that again. To love someone as much as I loved her, to lose another . . . No.’

‘So you believe that anyone who gets close to you is destined to die prematurely? Do you carry some dreadful contagion?’

He laughed, though there was no joy in the sound. ‘Daft, isn’t it? At least I’m not afraid of my feminine side. Most men want sex and don’t see beyond it, but I’m one of the few who need to be in love and who fall in love through sex. So I avoid it.’

This, Lucy decided, was role reversal at its strangest. In her heart, she was a free woman. Any contact she might have with any other man would be morally OK, as long as he was single. She found David delightful, desirable and funny, but she could make no move on him, since he was also terrified. And she wasn’t truly ready, either.

‘The kiss was lovely,’ he said. ‘Clumsy, silly, but wonderful. Afterwards, when you had left Tallows, a very fierce hope burnt inside me for all of three or four minutes.’

‘Yes, David.’

‘Yes what?’

‘I was burnt, too. By the kiss. Look at me. Stop avoiding eye contact. Stop being afraid of me. There is a compromise, and it’s staring both of us in the face.’

‘Is it?’

She remembered now how he had driven her crackers as a child. He always weighed his options thoroughly, though the elements he included in the recipe were not necessarily the right ones. A deep thinker even then, he would wander along the B roads in his mind, while faster routes, the motorways, were often ignored. ‘How many times a month do you come to the children’s hospital and to hospices in the Liverpool area? Take a room here. As long as you let me win at Scrabble, I’ll give you a special rate.’

His jaw dropped for a few seconds.

‘Close your mouth, David. There’s a bus coming.’

‘Live with you?’

‘I mean alongside, not with as in sharing a bed. Just to give us the chance to get to know one another.’ He was doing it again. He’d gone for a walk down all the unpaved alleys in his brain, was failing completely to take a quicker, more sensible route. Why did he insist on making everything so complicated? ‘What are you thinking about now?’ she asked.

‘Samson.’

‘Why? Are you planning to go for a haircut?’

‘Eh?’

‘I give up.’ She went to make a pot of tea. David Vincent was a typical mad professor. He had gone biblical, so she had simply gone. But he had followed her. She could feel him standing behind her, could hear him breathing.

‘What?’ she asked, apropos of nothing.

‘There’s Smokey,’ he said.

‘And Delilah,’ she replied quickly.

‘What?’

‘Samson and Delilah. Didn’t she cut his hair and make the temple fall down or something? I tend to get her confused with the other one – dance of the seven veils.’ Lucy could be obtuse if she made an effort, so she was making that effort.

‘Salome,’ he said. ‘Wanted the head of John the Baptist on a plate.’

She shrugged. ‘I’d settle for a curry, but there’s no accounting for taste.’

‘Louisa?’

‘Yes?’

‘Samson’s my dog. He’s a black Labrador. My neighbour usually looks after him while I’m working, though I sometimes take him with me. He’s very good with . . . with death. When I’m losing a patient, it’s a case of bugger the germs and let Samson in. If the child wakes, the family and my dog get the last smile. And for some reason I’ve never completely worked out, he comforts the bereaved.’

This man was leading an almost incredibly sad life. Lucy turned away from his pain and poured hot water into the teapot. He was far too sensitive a soul for the career he had chosen, yet she understood him perfectly. The children didn’t all die. Many juvenile leukaemias were stoppable, so he saw good stuff as well as bad. But the bad certainly stayed with him. She wanted to shake him, and she wanted to comfort him. But no, that would be too maternal, and she didn’t need another child.

When the tea had been carried through to the living room, Lucy reclaimed her chair and waited for him to be seated. ‘So you’re planning to go through life without taking any kind of risk, David?’

‘I stumble,’ he replied. ‘I muddle along trying not to think, except about my work. Set in my ways, I suppose. And I tend to keep my distance.’ He lowered his tone. ‘But I’m still just a man, Lucy. If I were to stay here for any length of time, I’d get fond of you. I’m already fond. And none of us has to dig very deep to find the animal in us. Two glasses of my champagne are in your rubber plant container for safe keeping. Sorry. I have to drive home. I daren’t stay. And Samson’s in the car. His hobby’s people-watching.’

Lucy sighed. Whatever had the rubber plant done to deserve that? She stood and walked to the front window. ‘It’s time you let that dog out of the car. Glad you left the window down for him. Bring him in.’

‘But—’

‘Bring him in, David.’

He looked at the cat, who was curled peacefully in his basket. ‘Smokey won’t—’

‘Bring him in.’ She separated the three syllables as if talking to a small boy. ‘For once, do something unusual. Let’s take a walk on the wild side.’

She sat and waited until the beautiful black dog led his master back into the house. The canine’s leathery nose lifted and sniffed the air. He could smell cat.

‘Stay where you are, David,’ Lucy said. ‘Watch and learn. Samson’s a Labrador, a breed that’s non-aggressive for the most part. And Smokey had a problem, you see. His mother died, and we needed to feed him with a dropper. No sleep for nights on end. To keep him warm when he grew a bit larger, we shoved him in with the dog.’ She lowered her voice to a whisper. ‘My cat thinks he’s a dog, so he chases other cats. Our old Butch has been dead for years, but Smokey hasn’t forgotten that dogs are not his enemy. Don’t tell him the truth, please. Never, ever tell my cat that he isn’t a dog.’

When Samson had curled beside the cat’s basket, David returned to the sofa. ‘I can’t hide behind the dog, then.’

‘No. A few months ago, I would have been the one in hiding. I was terrified of life until I actually moved out and did something about myself. Change is sometimes required.’

Looking at her was painful. She was so beautiful, so kind and lively and amusing. A part of him wanted to give up everything – the job, the house, the monotonous existence that was safe and predictable. But he didn’t know how to let go, how to stop trying, researching, fighting for remissions and cures. ‘So when Tallows is ready, you will stay there sometimes?’

‘Yes. As long as you teach me enough of the medical side, I can even help – read to them, play with them. I don’t want to nurse, but I’d like to know some of the rules in case there’s a crisis.’

Whatever he did, Lucy was going to be in his life. She was giving him a house, for goodness’ sake, was allowing the charity to use a valuable property that would make a difference in so many lives. Anne would have done the same. But she wasn’t another Anne – she was Louisa, and he wanted her, and wanted not to want her.

He was too intense. Sometimes, he suspected that he hovered on the brink of obsessive-compulsive, because he worked too hard, played too seldom and was very tidy in his professional life. At home, however, he lived in a tip. Should a microbiologist stumble into David’s private life, he would doubtless discover enough cultures to form a small sub-continent. It would have to be cleaned. It would have to be cleaned in case Lucy visited him.

‘Where’s my room?’ he asked.

‘First half-landing, door on the right. The door on the left is your bathroom. It isn’t en suite, but it’s the biggest one up there. I’ll feed these animals.’

He watched while an orderly queue of two formed in the doorway. The cat was at the front, because this was his house; the dog, displaying all the gentle humour for which his breed was famous, wagged his tail hopefully. The dishes were placed together on the floor. Smokey went to his own, while Samson waited until Lucy had finished topping up his dinner with wholemeal pasta. Then he stood next to Smokey and ate.

‘They could use you at the United Nations,’ David told his hostess.

‘No,’ she replied. ‘They’d be much better off with Labradors. We are the only animal that kills for recreation. Apart from minks – they’re almost as unpleasant as humans. And I’m not that keen on crocodiles, though I’m sure they’d represent some of these neo-Nazis that keep springing up from time to time – Saddam Hussein and Robert Mugabe types?’