‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I didn’t know anything about it.’ I had distinguished none of the various sounds associated with this episode in the general muffled background noise of the party.
There was a knock on the door of my study and Marcia put her head round it. ‘Mother, the Jessops are going. Do you want to say goodbye?’
‘Already?’ Fred exclaimed. She turned fiercely on me. ‘You see? You’ve driven people away, you and your father between you.’ She swept out of the room past Marcia, who shot me a hostile look and hurried after her. I followed at a slower pace.
Actually the Jessops had double-booked themselves and apologised profusely for leaving early. Most of the other guests were enjoying their puddings and showed no sign of wanting to leave, and most had had enough to drink not to be worried by a bit of falling down and broken glass in the kitchen. But Fred had an idea of how a party should be conducted, with elegance and decorum, and between us Dad and I had wrecked this one in her eyes. When she had said goodbye to the Jessops she went back into the drawing room, and from the hall, where I skulked dejectedly, I saw her chatting and smiling serenely, but I had no doubt that inwardly she was still seething and that I would be in her bad books for some considerable time.
The doorbell chimed. Who the hell could that be coming to the party at this hour, I wondered. ‘I’ll get it,’ I called out to anyone who might be listening, and went to open the front door. Alex Loom was standing in the porch, in her shiny black quilted coat and a red knitted pixie hat, holding a bunch of cut flowers wrapped in cellophane.
‘Hi!’ she said, with a smile. ‘I guess you’re surprised to see me.’
‘I thought you were supposed to be in America,’ I said.
‘That was the plan,’ she said. ‘But Heathrow was socked in. After waiting two days for my flight, I gave up. Can I come in? I
was
invited.’
‘The party’s nearly over,’ I said stupidly, as if I hoped this would make her go away.
‘Who is it, darling?’ said Fred from behind my back.The ‘darling’, I knew, was purely for appearance’s sake, and implied no melting of her resentment. ‘Oh, it’s you, Alex!’ she cried. ‘Let the poor girl in, for goodness’ sake. Come in! Come in! What on earth are you doing here? I thought you were going home for Christmas.’
Alex explained that her flight had been delayed several times and eventually cancelled, and as she couldn’t get on another one that would have enabled her to get home in time for Christmas, she gave up, caught an airport-link bus, just about the only public transport running, and got back to her flat late on Christmas Day. ‘So I thought you wouldn’t mind if I took up your party invitation after all,’ she said.
‘Of course not - we’re delighted to see you, aren’t we, darling?’ I responded to Fred’s question with a forced grin and nod. ‘But why so late?’ she asked Alex.
‘I wanted to get some flowers, but it proved harder than I’d figured,’ Alex said, handing the bunch to Fred. ‘I’m not used to the English Boxing Day, with everything shut. I got a taxi to drive me around and we finally found a flower stall outside a cemetery.’
‘Well, you really shouldn’t have taken the trouble, but thank you so much, they’re lovely,’ said Fred.
‘What cemetery was that?’ I asked.
‘I’ve no idea,’ Alex said with a smile.
‘Stop asking Alex silly questions, darling, and take her coat.’ Fred thrust the slippery black nylon coat into my arms and led Alex off to the dining room, saying, ‘Now come and have some lunch, there’s still plenty left.’
I was pretty hungry myself, having eaten nothing but a few nuts and nibbles snatched between my conversation pieces, and after hanging up Alex’s coat I followed them into the dining room. Alex, a glass of white wine in her hand, was already entertaining a little group of guests with tales of the horrors of Heathrow - queues snaking out of the terminals into the open air, people sleeping slumped over their luggage or prostrate on the floors, distraught parents with crying babies and children . . . We had seen it all on the TV news of course, but there is nothing like a personal report from the front line to bring home its horrors and fill one with profound gratitude at not having been there. Fred brought Alex a plate of steaming Thai chicken curry from the hostess trolley and stayed to listen. I foraged for myself.
I’m not sure I believe Alex’s story about driving round the city looking for flowers. If she got them from a cemetery she is more likely to have pinched them from a grave in the church-yard at the end of Rectory Road than paid for them. I think she intended to be late. By being the last guest to arrive she could very naturally be the last one to leave. In fact she lingered long after everybody else except the family had gone, and made herself useful clearing up the dirty glasses and dishes and stacking them in the dishwasher. Fred invited her to stay on for a cup of tea and she accepted readily. By the end of the afternoon, to my dismay, she had made herself thoroughly at home, and was effortlessly addressing everybody by their first names. I had to admire her conversational resourcefulness. She could talk money to Giles and babies to Nicola, and property to Jim and Ben, and make-up to Maxine. She even managed to charm Ben without making Maxine jealous, and Marcia, who might have been more resistant, had gone home soon after lunch with Peter and the children. Of the family party only Anne, I thought, regarded Alex with faint suspicion.
Eventually she said she guessed it was time she was on her way, and asked if we could call a taxi. ‘You don’t want to spend any more money on taxis,’ Fred said, ‘and besides you could wait for ever on Boxing Day. Desmond will run you home, won’t you, darling?’ Before I could reply she added unsmilingly: ‘Or are you too drunk?’
‘I’m not at all drunk,’ I said stiffly. It was in fact nearly three hours since I had had my last glass of Savigny-les-Beaune, and I felt quite sober, even if in breathalyser terms I probably wasn’t. Ben said
he
certainly was over the limit, otherwise he would have been glad to oblige, and Giles had gone upstairs with Nicola to bath their baby, so to prevent Fred from offering herself I insisted on acting as Alex’s chauffeur. With a stern, ‘Well, if you’re quite sure . . .’ Fred acquiesced.
So I found myself alone with Alex. For someone who had just spent two days in an airport trying unsuccessfully to join her family for Christmas she seemed in remarkably good spirits. She chattered away in the car about how great the party had been and what a lovely family I had, remarks to which I made minimal responses. When I drew up in the car park behind Wharfside Court, she said: ‘You haven’t asked me how my research is going.’
‘How is it going?’
‘Very well. I’ve just made a very interesting discovery. In all the specimen suicide notes I’ve collected, the word “suicide” itself very rarely occurs. Less than two per cent. A few more talk about killing themselves. About half the writers refer to dying, or wanting to die, and the rest pussyfoot around the subject, imply what they’re going to do by “saying goodbye”, or “I won’t be a burden to you any more”, and so on. Or they use euphemisms like “catch the bus” - “CTB” for short. But almost none of them says they’re committing suicide. What do you make of that?’
‘It reminds me of a saying of Borges,’ I said. ‘“In a riddle to which the answer is ‘chess’, the only forbidden word is
chess
.”’
‘That’s great!’ she said. ‘I could use that. But what do you make of it?’
I thought for a moment. ‘Perhaps “suicide” seems too impersonal, too detached, too forensic a word to convey the intensity of their emotions at the time, especially as you have to combine it with the very legalistic word “commit” to make it into a verb. You can’t say, “I’m going to suicide,” or “I’m going to suicide myself ”. “Suicide” is just a noun, and a learned, Latinate one. “Die” is a simple, basic verb which goes back to the Anglo-Saxon roots of English, and must have its equivalent in every known natural language. It almost defines the human condition, whereas “suicide” categorises the act as something marginal, deviant, aberrant. That may be part of the reason.’
‘Hey - that’s awesome! You’re really good, Desmond. Can I use that?’ As I hesitated, wondering whether to say, ‘
I’m sure you will anyway,’
she added: ‘With an acknowledgement, of course.’
‘Actually, I’d rather you didn’t acknowledge any help from me,’ I said.
‘OK, if that’s the way you want it,’ she said cheerfully.
Once again I felt that in trying to suppress any suggestion of an agreement between us I had somehow affirmed its continuation.
‘Will you come up for a coffee?’ she said.
‘No,’ I said.
‘Well then - thanks for the ride. And the party.’ She leaned over from the passenger seat and kissed me on the cheek. I felt her hand on my thigh. ‘Sure you won’t come up?’ she breathed into my ear.
‘No thanks,’ I said. She slipped quickly out of the car, and I watched her cross the car park in her long shiny black coat, wondering what might have happened if I had accepted her invitation. As she reached the corner of the building she turned, waved, and disappeared from my view.
15
27
th
December
. Dad was not on the best of form this morning. He had slept badly, claiming that he had to get up five times last night ‘for the Usual’, while ‘the Other’ was troubling him in a different way. ‘I think it had a binding effect on me, that curry,’ he confided to Cecilia over morning coffee. We were sitting round the kitchen table, because Fred had been cleaning spots of wine and curry from the carpets in the other rooms and nobody was to walk on them until the damp patches were dry. They were marked with squares of kitchen roll like a minefield. ‘You’d think it would be the opposite, wouldn’t you?’ Dad said.
‘I’m sure I don’t know, Mr Bates,’ said Cecilia, ostentatiously wiping her lips with a napkin, as a vain hint Dad should do the same: he had acquired a moustache of white foam from the cappuccino Fred had made him.
‘Dad, your mouth,’ I said, miming the required operation.
‘What? Oh, right. Nice cup of coffee, Winifred, but the bubbles get up my nose.’ He drew out of his trouser pocket a large, wrinkled, none-too-clean cotton handkerchief, wiped his mouth and blew his nose noisily. ‘I need a drop of liquid paraffin,’ he said. ‘Have you got any?’
‘Isn’t paraffin always liquid?’ Fred asked. ‘I think we’ve got some in the greenhouse.’
‘What? You mean pink paraffin for stoves? Gawd, that would be the finish of me. No dear, I mean the liquid paraffin you get from the chemist’s. Best remedy for constipation there is.’
‘Oh,’ said Fred.
‘We’ll get some when we go out this afternoon, Dad,’ I said in an effort to steer him away from the topic.
‘Why, where are we going?’
‘To look at Blydale House. You remember - I showed you the brochure in London, the last time we had lunch.’
A look of sulky displeasure came over his face. ‘I’m not moving into one of those places,’ he said.
‘You promised to look at it,’ I said. ‘I’ve made an appointment at three o’clock.’
We argued for a while. To give Fred and her mother their due, they supported me in pressing on him the advantages of moving into Blydale House or something like it, though I’m sure that neither of them viewed the prospect of his being a near neighbour and frequent visitor to our home with any enthusiasm. ‘All right, I’ll look,’ he said, in the end. ‘But it’s a waste of time.’
He accompanied me and the Warden of Blydale House on a tour of the building with an air of silent, sardonic detachment, walking a pace or two behind us, leaving me to ask all the questions and hardly attending to Mrs Wilson’s answers. She is a pleasant, middle-aged woman, obviously well used to handling recalcitrant old people.There isn’t a vacant room in the place at present, but she had obtained permission from one of the residents for us to peep into his bed-sitting room while he was having his tea in the lounge. She unlocked the door for us. I stood at the threshold and called Dad, who was feigning interest in a watercolour on the corridor wall, to come and have a look. It was smaller than the photograph in the brochure had suggested, but clean and neat. There was a sofa bed with cushions, an armchair, a fitted wardrobe and chest of drawers, an occasional table with one upright chair, and a television in one corner.
‘Cosy, isn’t it?’ I said.
Dad sniffed and said nothing.
Mrs Wilson pointed out the door to the en suite bathroom. ‘Actually it has a walk-in shower, not a bath. And a toilet of course.’
‘You mean there’s no bath?’ Dad said. It was the first detail that had stung him into speech.
‘We think showers are safer,’ Mrs Wilson said. ‘There’s a rail for you to hold on to, and a folding seat if you prefer to sit down.’
Dad shook his head. ‘A shower’s not the same as a bath,’ he said. In old age he has reverted to the once-a-week bath night of his early life, an epic event which takes hours rather than minutes, generating huge amounts of steam and condensation in the bathroom.
‘We do have one bathroom with a chair-lift,’ Mrs Wilson said, ‘though it’s mainly for the use of people in wheelchairs.’
‘I’m not a wheelchair case yet,’ Dad said. Mrs Wilson smiled and said she could see that.
We viewed the communal dining room, where two women in blue overalls were laying the tables for the evening meal, and the lounge, where afternoon tea and biscuits were being dispensed from a trolley to the residents, sitting upright in high-backed armchairs. A few were chatting to each other. Most sat alone and silent, lost in - what? Thought? Memories? Worries? Or just lost? A flicker of interest lit up their eyes as we came into the room, then faded. We looked at a noticeboard on which the times of whist drives, bingo sessions and keep-fit classes were displayed.