The View from Here (19 page)

“It's a small hospital,” I explained. “They try to keep the working areas quiet.”

Sally's arm was delicately turned and lifted and inspected, then X-rayed, laid tender and disembodied on the cold metal plate. There was no break. Just some swelling and a few bruises. This news, delivered by the doctor as if it were the miraculous and unexpected outcome of an arduous procedure, cheered me enormously. The guilt that Mason and I had just discussed, without discussing it, could subside. Things would get back to normal.

“Just a little rest,” the doctor instructed. And then, in English, “Take it easy.”

I laughed, and Sally said thank you with a ladylike nod of her head.

As we made our way along the corridor that led back to the reception area, I said, “Well, that is good news,” with inappropriate enthusiasm.

Sally, her shoes clicking softly on the yellow linoleum, turned her head to me without breaking her stride and gave me a look of pure and absolute disdain.

“I did tell you,” Sally teased Mason a moment later, “that there was no need for so much fuss. It's just a sprain.”

“Great,” he said with a grin. “Let's get a drink to celebrate.”

We went to the Blue Moon for beers and fried chicken. Sally had Mason slice hers into neat triangles, so that she could manage not too awkwardly with her left hand.

“I saw you all here,” I said in response to a flashed smile of Mason's as he passed Sally's plate back to her, “one night just before I met you.”

“I know.” Sally indicated the corner table with a nod over her glass. “You were just over there.”

I felt deflated. It had seemed till then that I had a secret, something of my own, over them. I'd thought, telling it, that I was letting them in on something. Happily, Mason, surprised, asked, “Did you?”

But it was just then that I remembered I should have been at a lesson with Letty. “What time is it?” I asked, pointlessly, knowing it made no difference now. “I should have been teaching this morning,” I explained. “I forgot.”

“Aah,” said Mason sweetly. “And there we were, dragging you to the hospital. Sorry.”

I smiled. “Don't worry,” I said, speaking only to him. “I'll walk over now and explain. I'll meet you back here. In twenty-five minutes or so.”

As I stood to go, Sally asked smoothly, “You have an apartment nearby, don't you, Frankie? So you wouldn't be stuck if we left.”

I was shocked. I held motionless for a second, too unnerved to reply. Was Sally throwing me out? It struck me, suddenly and thunderously, that she could. My eyes twitched to Mason, but he didn't catch them.

“No need for that,” Ned said pleasantly. “You guys have another drink, and I'll drive Frankie. We'll be back in a shake.”

I looked at him, and my heart fluttered with a rush of gratitude.

Letty came to the door and I explained about the American lady who had hurt her wrist and needed to go to hospital.

“Poor American lady,” she said.

I felt uncomfortable, standing there while she held the screen door back, her face all sympathy, the porch wood spongy under my feet. I cut her off, declining her offer of a cold drink and quickly rescheduling the lesson, inclining my head to indicate Ned waiting for me in the car.

“All hunky-dory?” he asked when I got back in beside him.

“Yes, thanks.”

He started the engine and then he looked at me as if he might begin one of his fatherly chats.

“Home, James,” I said jokily, avoiding it.

At the Blue Moon Sally stood as soon as she saw us, though Bee Bee's glass was still half full.

“I'm really very tired,” she said. “Let's go back to what's left of the day.”

I felt, inexplicably, as if all the disruption so far had been my fault. In the car I was quiet. Everybody was. When we passed Cactus Roy, Bee Bee said, “Somebody ought to buy that guy a decent hat.” That, at least, got a laugh.

• • •

I think I have already said that the house that Phillip and I live in now is quite big, rambling even. We bought from a fellow who had made a lot of money in bonds. I had no idea what that meant at the time. I still don't really. Anyway, the bond-money man had invested in country life, but it hadn't suited him, and he was keen to feel pavement under his feet again, so we'd got a better deal than we'd hoped. I remember having the feeling when we first saw it, that feeling people often say they get when they look at a house, that it would be ours, even though the original price, before the negotiation, had been out of our reach.

We both wanted it. I knew that before we'd even been upstairs, before we'd met the bond-money man's children, who came rushing down them just as we were about to go up, a cheerful gaggle of tumble-haired blondes. Passing us, they shouted hello, one after the other, as if they knew us, as if they knew everyone in the world. I realize now that those children reminded me of other children, but the past was too recent then for me to want to recognize that.

The bond-money man's wife had sat in the kitchen while we looked around, smoking cigarettes and talking to another woman who looked just like her, same clothes, same hair. A sister, perhaps, although women friends are like that sometimes too. They grow similar. Sonia and I, after all, own the same shoes, and Catherine's green cast iron cookware matches mine exactly, and we all like the same films. It's part of how we learn, how we become what we become, that mimicry of other women. We are not like men, who so often leave school and preserve their hairstyles and nicknames intact for life. Instead we dart from fad to fad. I tried to dress like Sonia, to lay a table the way Catherine did; I copied hairstyles from magazines. All foolishness, all innocence. I long for that now.

Before we lived here, before I owned any green cast iron cookware, we lived in Phillip's first house, nearer to his parents. Before that he'd lived in a flat on a busy road in London, where Chloe had been born. This house, though, is the one that marked her childhood. This is the house where the brown felt owl she made at Saturday Club is still stuck on the inside of the pantry door; this is the house with her paddling pool in the shed; this is the house where we buried the spaniel and she planted the cross on the spot, “Beezle” painted across it in wobbly blue letters. Josee will not want to live here. I wonder, will Phillip sell?

The fact of the house's size and the comfortable spread of the downstairs rooms meant that I was not limited in terms of numbers for my party. It sounds rather childish, doesn't it? My party. But that is what it was. I cannot think of a more sophisticated term, or a more appropriate one. It wasn't a celebration really, and it was more than a gathering. A lot more. It became—and this will sound melodramatic, but it is no less true for that—my reason for living. It gave me a point on the horizon to head for, and I did so with all the strength I could muster. Which, it turned out, was a good deal.

When you are ill, everything is taken from you. I don't just mean the full stop that inevitably halts this kind of illness, my kind. I am referring to the control over day-to-day life that slips from your grasp as the illness progresses. I had not cooked a meal in my own home for months; the party gave me something to take charge of. Something that was mine again.

Carla, Phillip's P.A., helped me a lot with things like getting the invitations printed, and I liked her friendly but impersonal way of dealing with me. She was helpful, but businesslike, rather than desperate to please me, which was the tone that had begun to characterize some of my interactions with people who are closer to me. It was Carla who found the jazz band. She had a friend, she said, a saxophonist who played with some other musicians quite regularly. Would I like them for our party? I would, I said, very much.

I suggested to Phillip that we ought to send Carla flowers or something for all the extra work she was doing, a thank you. I was conscious that her duties had probably expanded with Phillip not in the office anyway, and now here I was on the telephone with her every day, more than once usually. He laughed.

“I pay her enough to take three foreign holidays a year as it is,” he said. “She lives like a duchess; she can take on a bit of extra work without a standing ovation.”

I laughed too. “Let's send something anyway.”

We did. We made one of those joint phone calls where one person dials while the other calls out the number, and then the caller consults constantly with the second person over his shoulder so that the conversation becomes threeway and immensely irritating for the stranger on the line, but amusing, unifying, for the conspiring pair. You have those light moments no matter what, don't you? It's how you recognize the dark ones.

“Roses?” Phillip asked me, mouthpiece at his chin.

I agreed. “ White,” I said, thinking that they would be from a hothouse at that time of year and have no scent.

Carla was very pleased with the roses and called to say so as soon as they were delivered. She was the envy of the office, she assured us, and then she told me that they would do to stir her boyfriend up a bit too if she didn't tell him who they were from. He needed a bit of a nudge now and then, she claimed, a bit of a kick in the behind. And I thought, rather sadly, that women, young women especially, will go to all sorts of lengths to complicate their relationships with men, as if life will not hand them enough complications all by itself in time.

With Carla's help I planned that party with the kind of precision that some women, particularly nowadays, reserve for their weddings. I had not had a wedding that required the hiring of caterers. Phillip and I had been married at the Register Office in Grantham and had lunch in the private room at the Carpenter's Arms afterward with ten of our friends. I'd invited all of those friends to the party, even Mandy and Todd, who had gotten divorced five years later and with whom we'd lost touch soon after that. I'd invited them both.

The only part of the party plan that had not gone well was the apricot dress. I tried it on, with Chloe's help, two Saturdays in advance, and we had both agreed that it wasn't right. I don't know what Chloe's reasons were, but I thought it made me look jaundiced. I had begun to imagine that I looked jaundiced a lot of the time. I didn't, not then, but I knew what looking jaundiced signified for somebody in my condition, and fear can make you see things. Chloe said, “Would you like something new?” I wanted to answer, No, what was the point of something new when I was unlikely to see the crocuses? Because the failure of the apricot dress was a blow, and I had felt deflated just then. But I knew that Chloe could not take it. Her face warned off all talk of endings, or last times, so I said that perhaps I would.

Chloe drove me, carefully, into Grantham in her father's car; it was too big for her, but comfortable for me. We parked just outside a little shop that a woman named Judith runs off the high street. Judith is overly tanned and talkative to match, and she has run that shop for the whole eighteen years that we've lived here. It is the kind of ladies' dress shop that most English market towns offer, lots of good cloth skirts and too-floaty outfits for more formal occasions—nieces' weddings, say. I didn't hold out much hope. But the universe can smile in the smallest and most surprising corners, can't it? Judith produced, with a flourish, of course, and a flush of advice, a dove gray sheath dress with three-quarter sleeves and a funnel neck.

“It would look lovely with your pearls,” Chloe said.

Pearls for tears, I thought. My mother used to say that. My mother who'd had so many more tears in her life than pearls, but so many more pearls, I reflected, than she'd ever acknowledged.

I looked at Chloe, so eager, so keen for our little excursion to be a success, and back at the beaming Judith, who was holding the gray dress by the hanger, spread across her other arm like a tablecloth.

It was a very nice dress. We bought it. Then, pleased with ourselves, we went into the coffee shop in the alley. The coffee shop in the alley suffers from lack of passing trade and changes hands on a regular basis. It was under new management again, judging by the fresh décor, which seemed to be an attempt at a Caribbean theme, uncomfortably laid over the Olde English oaky style of the previous incarnation. But I was ready to sit down so we went in anyway and ordered muffins and coffee from the new young owner, whose enthusiasm for the muffins was painful and all the more poignant given that we were the only customers.

The muffins, though, like the dress, turned out to be a surprise and did taste of banana. I was about to comment on this to Chloe when she said, “Ed has asked me to marry him.”

I looked at her. She was not looking at me but fussing with her paper napkin. It was pink, candy pink like a child's bridesmaid's dress.

“Do you want to marry Ed?” I asked.

“I hadn't really thought about it very much before he asked me,” she said, meeting my eyes then, “but now I think maybe I do. I don't know. I mean, is there a way that you know? I don't mean all that daft stuff about wanting a wedding and having a husband and everything. I can see the appeal of all that, and I do…I really do love Ed; he's a wonderful man, but it is big, isn't it? It's a big thing to do, and I don't want to make a mistake. I suppose I always thought I would just know, and there'd be no doubts.”

“And it would all be happily ever after,” I said.

She nodded, smiling at herself.

“It won't matter who you marry, sweetheart. You'll have doubts. At some point you'll have doubts.”

She seemed a bit surprised, and perhaps my tone had been overly sober, lacking in the reassuring tenor that has been a constant in my dealings with her. Her father and I have always gone to such lengths to protect her from things. Our own arguments, petty as they seem now, were always kept at a distance. We have presented her with a terribly hopeful picture of marriage. Perhaps we shouldn't have.