The Sunlight on the Garden (16 page)

‘Shall I do that for you?' she asked

‘Oh, not I can manage. Thank you.'

When he decided to go to bed at his usual hour of eleven, she still had not returned. He double-locked the front door and put the chain across. She had her key to the basement door. He wondered, with a vague, nagging unease, what she and ‘my friend' were doing. He continued to wonder as he lay out, covered only by a sheet, and tried to will himself to sleep. He thought of those nipples, briefly glimpsed but vividly remembered as they pushed up through the brassiere, and of those long, bare, oh so beautiful legs. For the first time he was not merely taking pleasure in her youth and her attractiveness, but also longing, with an urgency oddly not unlike the pressure of his bladder that now so often aroused him from sleep, to possess those two things.

Because of the heat, he had left his bedroom door wide open. But for that and his preternatural alertness that night, he would not, a usually heavy sleeper, have heard the sound of the basement door being opened and a brief titter followed by only four audible words (‘ Whoops! I nearly tripped') in a voice not hers.
She had brought him back
.

He stared up at the ceiling, the back of his hand to his clammy forehead. Then, with a groan, he raised himself and swung his legs out of the bed. The two Nitrazepam tablets, fetched from his dressing-table drawer, felt oddly cold in his sweating palm. Even with repeated gulps of luke-warm water from the glass by his bedside he had difficulty in swallowing them.

He was sitting in the kitchen,
The Times
open on the table beside him. She dashed in.

‘I'm late, late, late! Why didn't you wake me?'

He looked up, smiled. He gave no answer. Then he said: ‘You came home at some unearthly hour.'

‘Yes, my friend insisted on dinner at a restaurant way out towards Acton, and then the service was unbelievably slow.'

‘I heard your friend.'

Standing, she had been pouring out coffee from the hastily snatched coffee pot into a cup. The pouring stopped. ‘Heard him?'

‘Both of you.' He raised his eyebrows in quizzical interrogation.

‘Yes, he came in for a moment or two. He wanted me to lend him that DVD of
Chinatown
.'

‘I see.'

He knew that she knew that he did not believe her.

‘It was rather a boring evening, I'm afraid. He's not exactly a ball of fire.'

‘I'd love to meet him. See what he's like. You know, sometimes I almost feel jealous of him.'

She gave a nervous laugh. ‘ He's nothing much. Civil servants tend to be boring. But he's kind. And he puts up with all my faults and demands.'

‘Ah, well.'

She gulped at the coffee, then set down the cup. The clink of cup on saucer seemed to him abnormally loud. He almost expected one or other or both to shatter in the collision.

‘Well – see you this evening. I won't be late!'

Then she had gone.

He picked up his cup, tucked
The Times
under his arm, and padded up the stairs and out into the garden. The sun had reached only a far triangle of it. Good! He settled himself in one of the deck chairs, the cup on the ground beside him and
The Times
across his chest. He shut his eyes. He could sleep now. That was what he most wanted. It must be the lingering effect of the pills. He no longer felt any unease, any suppressed rage, any desire to have it out with her. He even felt happy.

It was another year, another summer.

He was lying out, full length, on one of the two deckchairs in the garden and watched her as she walked towards him with the two glasses of Pimm's, frosted with ice, that she had just made for them in the kitchen. He had taught her how to do it. Amazingly she had never heard of a Pimm's, much less known how to make one, until then.

‘Thanks.'

She had stooped over him as she handed him the glass. The flimsy cotton dress, low-cut in front, had fallen away briefly to reveal one of her breasts.

He sipped and stared up at the sky, blue with trails of white cloud scurrying across it.

‘What a day! What a summer!'

‘Yes, indeed,' he said. ‘ For me – a bonus.'

Again he sipped. Then he shut his eyes. His hip had ceased to ache, he felt totally relaxed. Oddly magnified he could hear the throbbing song of a bird in the tree above him. He could also hear the regular lisp of falling water.

He opened his eyes and swivelled his head to look at her. ‘You were right about the fountain. It's wonderful just to sit here and listen to it.'

‘And what about the paving?'

‘Yes, you were right about that too. This is now the sort of garden that wins prizes.'

She rested her head against the back of her chair and sighed. She looked up at the house. ‘ I've come to love this house. A dream house. I can hardly believe something like this exists in the heart of London. So beautiful, so quiet. And yet the High Street is only a few minutes away.'

‘Last night I had a thought. I've pondered what should happen to the house when I've gone. I love it too. I was born here, you know. My wife died here. I used to think that it should go to my niece. But she'd only sell it. She and that American financier of hers have that huge house in Hampstead. He could buy a house like this with what he earns in a single year. Anyway, what do they ever do for me? I'm lucky if I see them once a month. So – so …' He paused. ‘ I want you to have it. A dream house for a dream daughter.'

‘
Me
?'

‘Well, you
are
my adopted daughter. And I know you'd cherish it – as I want it to go on being cherished.'

She leapt up from her chair and stooped over him. ‘Oh, you darling! You darling, you darling! Do you really mean this?'

He nodded his head. ‘But I have one condition.'

‘Yes?'

‘I want you to stay with me till – well, till it's all over.'

‘Well, of course! Of course!'

She kissed him on one cheek and then other.

‘Of course!' she repeated.

He was to give a lecture on ‘ Eastern Europe and the EU' to a society at his old Oxford college.

‘I wished I didn't have to go. It's an effort. It's a bore.'

‘Then don't go. Cancel.'

‘Oh, I can't do that. Not now.'

‘I could ring up for you. Say that you're ill. How about that? I'm a good liar.'

‘No. I must keep my word.

‘Are they paying you?'

‘No. Just expenses.'

‘Well, there you are!'

During the dinner that followed his lecture, he was suddenly assailed by the desire to be once more back at home. With Ana. Why not? He wanted to hear only her quiet voice, instead of this Babel of voices of people asking him what he thought of this, that and the other or putting forth their own strident views. He wanted just to look at her. He wanted to know that she was sleeping only a short distance away from him. He was supposed to be spending the night in the college, but the bus from Gloucester Green would take him to Notting Hill Gate in not much over an hour. He got up from the table as soon as he decently could. He had a dentist's appointment the following morning, he lied. He had come to the conclusion that he would rather go to bed late than get up early. He thought he'd go back now.

As he walked towards the house, he saw, with an upsurge of joy, that, though it was now almost one o'clock, the light showed behind the curtains of her bedroom window. He would be able to exchange a few words with her before he went to sleep. But then the thought came to him like a sudden upsurge of bile at the back of the throat: Perhaps Henry was with her? He put his key in the door and entered. From downstairs, he heard the sound of Liszt's Mephisto Waltz No. 1 blaring overloud from the CD player that he had given her for a recent birthday. Some time before he had told her that he wanted to educate her in classical music. He had even persuaded her to accompany him to concerts at the Wigmore Hall. She would hardly be playing that sort of music if Henry were down there, he thought. He stood for a while listening to what, amplified to this degree, sounded like a demonic battering.

The door to her bedroom, at the bottom of the stairs, was open and, from here at their top, he could see her, standing on a small step-ladder that she had placed against the vast Victorian breakfront wardrobe that had once been his mother's. Ana had often said that it was far too large for the room, making it seem cramped. He had agreed with her. But he was sentimental about it. He did not know where else he could put it and he did not want to get rid of it.

He all but called her name. But instead he remained motionless at the top of the stairs and watched her. She was reaching up. She was either placing or replacing something behind one of the two elaborately carved finials surmounting the wardrobe. He continued to watch her as she clambered down the ladder, folded it and rested against the wall beside her. It was only then that he called out: ‘Ana! Are you there?'

‘You're back!' she cried out. ‘I thought you said—'

‘I decided not to stay the night. I saw that you had the light on.'

‘Yes, I was listening to this wonderful music.'

‘Far too loud!'

‘I never heard you come in.'

She turned off the music. She asked him about the lecture and the dinner that followed it, she perched on the edge of her bed and he in the one armchair in the room. At one moment she leaned forward to pick up an open pen on the desk beside her and replaced its cap. She continued to hold the pen as they talked.

He did not ask her what she had been doing with the stepladder. Without knowing why, he did not wish to reveal to her his puzzlement and unease.

When she had gone to work, he went down to the basement.

This was something that he would now often do. Suddenly, as though seized by a raging fever, he would succumb to a restlessness that made him wander aimlessly from one room to another, fling himself down on to a deckchair in the garden and then jump up a few seconds later, venture out to buy something for which there was no immediate demand, or toss about on top of the bed hurriedly made by Ana before her departure. Then he would finally give way to the clamorous need so long resisted. He would creep down the stairs, as though she were still in the house and must not suspect what he was doing, and, with accelerating heart, would enter her room.

Perhaps because, unlike him, she so rarely opened the window, he would then be at once assailed by her smell. He would breathe it in deeply, dizzied by it. After that he would start on what he thought of as a quest, though he could not have defined what was its object. He would pick up her lipstick, open it and stare down at it for seconds on end. He would pull out drawers and inspect their contents, even though he now knew exactly what they would contain. She was in the habit of throwing her dirty clothes on to the floor of either one half or the other of the breakfront wardrobe. With a sudden access of breathlessness he would stoop and forage. Then he would bury his face in the object, greedily inhaling its odour.

When, at last sated, he had climbed back up the stairs, the boiling tide of the fever would begin to ebb. At the same time his blood would seem to be similarly ebbing from his body, leaving him feeling inert and cold. Days would then pass, until yet another attack shook him out of his calm daily routine of reading, listening to music, writing long letters to friends whom he now rarely saw, and obsessively completing a number of different crossword puzzles.

Today, his search was not random but focused. He had carried down the stepladder with him. Now he placed it against the breakfront wardrobe, noticing, as he did so, that just below the finial there was the smudge of a palm-print on the highly polished mahogany. Hers, he thought. Swaying a little – his balance was poor these days – he clambered on to the ladder. One step. Two steps. There was a space behind the finial, grey with dust. In it, there lay what looked like a large ledger. He peered down. On the cover of the ledger she had inscribed in her childish hand ‘My Diary!'. It struck him as odd that she had followed the two words with an exclamation mark.

He scooped the ledger up in both hands and, once again precariously swaying, descended the ladder. He perched on the edge of the bed (during his secret visits he had so often stretched himself out on this bed in a mingled anguish and abandonment of longing) and raised the cover tentatively, as though he already sensed what lay beneath it.

Dear Diary
… Those were the first words. He had never supposed that anyone nowadays addressed a diary in that way.
I am beginning you as I begin my new life here in what must be one of the most beautiful small houses in London, perhaps in the whole of England or even in the whole world! And there's this secret garden. Unfortunately it's now in a ghastly state. But I'm already doing something about it. At first MR did not want me to change a single thing but I'm beginning to win him over
. MR? It took him a few seconds to realise that the initials stood for himself.

He turned over a few pages.
Even though he's so ancient, he's really not at all bad looking. Sometimes I even think that I could fancy him! I can see why Mamma fell for him. Or did she? In those days, when things were so bad – who knows
?

He sat there, on and on, unaware of the discomfort of leaning forward on the edge of the bed with the ledger resting on his knees. He turned pages at random, back and forth, reading now a few sentences here, now a few sentences there.

H. was thoroughly fed up this evening. He would hardly talk, hardly eat. Then he exploded. He hated what he called This hole and corner business. But what else is one to do? Tell me, Dear Diary. I tried to explain that we must see this thing through. Now that I know for sure that the house is going to be mine it would be MADNESS to throw it all away. Neither H. nor I will ever earn enough to get on the property ladder, the way things are going. We MUST think of the FUTURE!!!