Authors: Nicci French
'Jane,' Carolyn said, 'I didn't come here to debate disabled politics on the pavement. And I'm not bargaining. I'm simply here to make sure you understand the council's policy on access in new buildings. You should have been told about this already.'
'What needs doing?' I asked wearily. 'I mean specifically.'
'I'd show you myself if I could get into the premises,' said Carolyn icily. 'You'll have to arrange an appointment with another member of my department.'
'Who funds the extra equipment?'
'Who funds the fire escape, Jane?' Carolyn asked sarcastically. 'Who funds the double-glazing?'
I felt a small stab of rage at her unfairness.
'If I were Mies van der Rohe, you wouldn't be forcing me to put ramps across every angle.'
'I would if he were designing a building in this borough,' said Carolyn.
'Who's Mies van der thingy?' asked Emily, when we were back in the car.
'He's probably the main reason I became an architect. His buildings were based on complete mathematical clarity, straight lines, metal and glass. His greatest building was for an exhibition in Barcelona in the twenties. The building was so pure in form that Mies wouldn't even allow a wall where pictures could be hung because that would have violated its perfection.'
'That's not much good for an exhibition,' Emily protested.
'No,' I admitted. 'I don't think he would have had any more success with this hostel than I have. When I went into architecture, we still thought it might be a way of transforming people's lives. That doesn't seem particularly fashionable at the moment.'
'What are you going to do?'
'I think I'm too old to retrain as a civil liberties lawyer.'
'No, I mean with the hostel.'
'Oh, the usual. Put some things in, take some things out. Lose a little bit more of my original inspiration. I haven't lost hope entirely. Slashing my budget is partly their way of showing that they still intend this hostel to get built.'
We drove back to my office and I introduced Emily to Duncan and he showed her how to move his drawing board up and down. I dictated a couple of letters which it would have been quicker to type myself. We made coffee and I told Emily a bit about the profession and what I could remember of the training and we gossiped and then I drove her back to Kentish Town a little after lunch. I went in with her and had a cup of coffee with Peggy. She was always worried about things. She was worried about Paul's documentary, with which she was refusing to have anything at all to do. She was worried about Martha, and I couldn't think of anything to say about that. She was worried about Alan making a complete fool of himself, but I told her that that wasn't worth bothering about. And she was even a little worried about
me.
Paul had told her about my therapy and she wanted to discuss it with me.
'As you know, I had years of therapy after Paul walked out,' she told me. 'After about two years, I plucked up courage and looked around and my analyst was asleep.'
'Yes, you've told me about that, Peggy,' I said. 'I think it's quite common.'
'It was a waste of money all the same. I decided that pills would be cheaper and more convenient. I was prescribed Prozac, I got through my crisis and I took the girls to Kos. I worked out that the holiday cost less than three months' therapy. Admittedly, when I was there I felt that I'd need about three years' therapy to recover, the way that the girls behaved with all those waiters buzzing around them like bees round a honey pot.'
'What are you saying, Peggy? Do you think I'm wasting my time?'
'No, it's just that I suppose I'm surprised. You were always the strong one. Also, now you mustn't get offended by this, I don't understand what you're doing. You were the one who suddenly decided to break up with Claud. He was shattered, he's desperate about it. Now you're feeling bad about it and looking for help. Not only that, Paul tells me you're going around stirring things up about Natalie. I don't understand what you're doing, Jane, I really don't.'
I felt an acid ache of rage in my stomach and I wanted to shout at Peggy or hit her but I've never been any good at Mediterranean displays of emotion, much as I've always envied them. And I felt that Peggy was right, in a way. I responded with icy calm.
'Maybe I don't understand what I'm doing myself, Peggy. Maybe that's what I'm trying to find out.'
The cocktail glass in the freezer, and the jug and the spoon. The gin of course should be there for at least a couple of days so that it pours viscous. For that reason, something like Gordon's Export Gin, the one with the yellow label that you get in duty free, is essential. Anything weaker, like the Gordon's domestic in the green bottle, and it will freeze, defeating the point. A few drops, perhaps a teaspoon, not more, of dry vermouth, then a slosh of gin into the jug which is so cold you can scarcely hold the handle. The briefest of stirs. A fat slice of lemon peel, twisted to release some of the oil, into the frosty glass, then submerge it in the harsh, icy liquid. If there is any liquid left in the jug, it can be returned to the freezer for the second glass.
Later that evening I snapped the polythene off a new packet of cigarettes and rinsed the ashtray in the sink. I opened a tin of black olives and tipped them into a small ramekin. They were pitted. I didn't want to have to concentrate on anything this evening. I took them, along with my dry martini, so cold that it seemed to be steaming like a witch's potion, and sat in front of the television. I switched it to a channel at random and watched without paying attention.
The drink took effect almost from the first sip and a pleasant numb sensation sank through me. I do some of my best thinking while sitting in the audience at an orchestral concert or wandering round a gallery ostensibly looking at pictures or, as here, half drunk, half watching a TV programme. I had been shaken by what Peggy had said. I am a person who likes to be visibly in the right, I really want to do the right thing, and I realised that I must seem - to Peggy and others - like a person self-indulgently doing the wrong thing. I was relying on Duncan's good nature when I neglected my work. I was relying on my sessions with Alex Dermot-Brown to relieve me of the responsibility for the decision I had made. I was carrying out some halfbaked investigation into the Martello family... Why? As revenge? I had things to do, and there were things I was looking for. But I didn't know what they were. Would it be better to drop it all and return to my life and make a go of it there with the stoicism that I'd always prided myself on?
I went to the freezer and emptied the remains of the drink into my glass, which was now wet and warm. I stopped thinking and the television programme began to take shape, like a picture coming into focus. A woman - rather striking, except that her eyebrows were drawn too fine - was talking about the family as the basis of society.
'Just as a leaky house is better than no house,' she said, 'an imperfect marriage is better than a broken marriage. The single most destructive social issue of our time is the feckless and selfish behaviour of parents who place their own convenience before the future of their children.'
There was loud applause.
'Fuck off,' I yelled at the screen.
'Sir Giles,' said the chairman.
Sir Giles was a man in a grey suit.
'Jill Cavendish is quite right,' he said, 'and we should none of us be ashamed to say quite categorically that this is a moral issue. And if our church leaders are not willing to give guidance on this, then it is time for us, the politicians, to act. As we know, there are young teenage girls who are quite deliberately becoming pregnant as a quick, easy way of getting a council flat. They are deliberately choosing a life on the dole at the expense of the rest of us. As a result, whole generations of children are growing up without moral guidance, without a father to guide them. No wonder these children turn to crime.
'I think, ladies and gentlemen, it is time for the ordinary men and women of this country to stand up and say to the socialists, "This is what you have brought us to. This is the logical result of your policies, of the disregard for morality and the family that we saw in the 1960s." They tell us to understand the plight of these feckless women. If you ask me, we should understand a little less and punish a little more. When I was a boy, a young girl knew that if she got pregnant she would be out on the street, an outcast. Perhaps we've got something to learn from those days. I'll tell you this: if young girls knew that there was no housing for them, no dole money, then there'd be a darn sight fewer single mothers.'
'Wanker,' I said and threw my cigarette packet at the screen, missing wildly.
The applause from the audience was even more fervent than before and the chairman struggled to make himself heard.
'We also have with us Dr Caspar Holt, who apart from being a philosopher also happens to be a single father with custody of a young daughter. Dr Holt, what's your response to Sir Giles?'
The camera cut to the nervous-looking face of a middle-aged man who seemed familiar from somewhere or other.
'I'm not sure I've got one, really,' he said. 'I distrust easy answers to complicated social problems. But I can't help thinking that if Sir Giles Whittell really believes that young girls are getting pregnant as a matter of financial calculation, he should ask himself who created this individualist culture in which anything except the selfish struggle for maximum financial gain is literally unintelligible. I'm also, well,
amused
by the belief that the very rich can only be encouraged by giving them even more money while the very poor should be encouraged by taking their money away.'
I started clapping.
'Hear hear.'
There was no other applause at all and the speaker was immediately subject to barracking from all sides. Then I remembered who he was. He was the man I had sat next to during Alan's debacle at the ICA. I had the impression that I had been rude to him. I felt a stab of remorse. I went to the desk in the corner and searched through a pile of postcards. A grotesque nude by George Grosz. Too explicit.
The Annunciation
by Fra Angelico. Too austere. Watercolours of British mice. Too twee.
The Flaying of Marsyas
by Titian. Too much like the way I felt.
The Reverend Robert Walker Skating on Duddingston Loch.
That was about right. I turned it over and removed some dried Blu Tack, a reminder that it had once been attached to the wall above my desk. 'Dear Caspar Holt,' - I was stuck and looked back at the screen where he was now murmuring something about nursery education and being shouted down - 'I was the woman who was rude to you at the ICA. I'm writing this while watching you being sensible and brave on TV. I'm sorry that the one time I met you I behaved not very well. This isn't very coherent but you're saying the sorts of things I want to say but never think of at the time. Yours, Jane Martello.' I found a stamp in my purse and went straight out and posted the card. I needed some fresh air. The cold of the evening felt good, insofar as I could feel it.
Seventeen
'Do you remember how you used to come here to play?'
Although it was bitterly cold, Martha had insisted that we walk round the garden together. We stood by the giant oak tree, inside whose vast, hollow trunk we had hidden as children. I rubbed my hand over the mossy bark.
'Here's where Claud and Theo and Paul carved their initials. We thought they'd last for as long as the tree. They've nearly disappeared.'
We walked on in silence. I felt that I was treading in the footsteps of my childhood. The barns, the fallen trees, the stone walls, the herb garden, the flat patch where there used to be a swing, the skeletal branches, emaciated shrubs. When the wind blew Martha's jacket flat against her body, I realised how thin she'd become.
'Are you all right, Martha?'
She stooped gracefully to pluck up a weed.
'I have cancer, Jane.' She held up her hand to stop me from saying anything. 'I've known for a long time. It started as breast cancer, but it's spread.'
I took her chilly hand in my own and stroked it. The wind rushed at us from over the brow of the hill.
'What do the doctors say? What are they doing?'
'Not much. I mean, they don't say much, let me draw my own conclusions. And I'm not going to have chemotherapy or radiotherapy or anything, except pain relief of course. I'm sixty-seven, Jane, that's a good time to get cancer: it advances more slowly.' She laughed. 'I'll probably die of a stroke at ninety-three.' Then, more soberly: 'I hope so. I can't imagine Alan managing very well on his own.'
'I'm sorry. I'm really so sorry, Martha. I wish that there was something that I could do.'
We walked back towards the house hand in hand.
'Martha,' I said abruptly, 'do you wish that the body had never been found?'
She looked at me strangely.
'That's not a question that makes any sense,' she replied at last. 'We found Natalie, and that's that. If you mean, was I
happier
before that, then the answer is yes, of course I was. I was even happy, sometimes. When Natalie was found, I had to start the mourning all over again. That old raw grief.'
She pushed open the back door.
'Let me make you some tea.'
'I'll make it,' I said.
'I'm not dying yet, Jane; sit down.'
I sat at the kitchen table, and noticed that Martha had made piles of all the children's books she had illustrated over the years. There were dozens. I started leafing through them. The pictures were familiar, of course, my own children had grown up on them, but still as wonderful as ever: funny, crowded and very colourful. She loved drawing large families: energetic grannies and harassed-looking parents and hordes of minute children with scabby knees and messy hair. There was lots of food in her illustrations -- the kind of food that children love, like sticky chocolate cake, and wobbly purple jellies with bright yellow custard on top; mountains of spaghetti quivering on plates. And she loved drawing children running wild: over one double page spread a line of tiny, paunchy toddlers marched in red wellingtons; on another, children's faces peered joyously through the branches of trees. I paused at a drawing of a small girl holding a daisy chain, while a stupendous orange sun set behind her. It was unusual for Martha to draw children on their own-usually they were outnumbering and overpowering the adults.