Could Ray be drunk? At ten in the morning? George could not smell any alcohol, but Ray did not seem completely in control of himself. And this was the man who was driving him home.
“You know what?” asked Ray, sitting down on the edge of the bed beside George.
“What?” said George quietly, not really wanting to know the answer.
“I think you might be the sanest member of the family,” said Ray. “Apart from Jamie. He seems to have his head screwed on properly. And he’s a homosexual.”
The little Oriental man was staring at them. George crossed his fingers and hoped his English was not good.
“Has something happened at home?” asked George, tentatively.
“Jean and Katie were yelling at each other over the breakfast table. I suggested that everyone calm down a little and was told to quote fuck off unquote.”
“By Jean?” asked George, not quite able to believe this.
“By Katie,” said Ray.
“And what was this argument about?” asked George. He was beginning to regret having passed Dr. Forman’s test. A few more days in hospital seemed suddenly rather inviting.
“Katie doesn’t want to get married,” said Ray. “Which will probably be a relief to you.”
George had no clue how to answer this. He toyed with the idea of falling off the bed so that someone else would come and rescue him, but decided against it.
“So I said I’d pick you up. Seemed a lot easier than staying at the house.” Ray took a deep breath. “Sorry. Shouldn’t be taking it out on you. Been a bit stressful recently.”
The two of them sat side by side for a few moments, like a pair of elderly gentlemen on a park bench.
“Anyway,” said Ray. “We’d better get you home, or they’ll wonder where we’ve got to.” He stood up. “You going to need any help getting into those clothes?”
For a fraction of a second George thought Ray was about to start removing his hospital pajamas and the prospect was so unnerving that George found himself emitting an audible squeak. But Ray simply pulled the curtains around George’s bed and went off to fetch a nurse.
78
Katie felt wrung out.
You expected crises to resolve stuff, to put it into perspective. But they didn’t. When they’d got to Peterborough she’d imagined staying for a few days, a week maybe, just her and Jacob. Keep an eye on Dad and make sure he wasn’t planning to hack something else off. Give Mum a hand. Be a better daughter and atone for the guilt about disappearing last time.
But when Dad got back with Ray and told everyone they could go home, she was relieved. Another day in that house and they were going to kill each other.
The wheelchair was a shock, but Dad seemed strangely buoyant. Even Mum seemed keener on looking after him on her own than sharing the house with her children.
As they were leaving, Katie steeled herself and apologized.
Mum said, “Let’s just forget about it, shall we.”
And Dad overcompensated by saying, “Thank you for coming. It was lovely to see you,” despite the fact that this was the first time he had actually been awake in her presence.
Which reminded Jacob that he hadn’t given Grandpa his chocolate buttons. So Ray went outside and retrieved the packet from the glove compartment and Dad made a show of opening it and eating a couple and declaring that they were delicious despite the fact that the car heater seemed to have fused them into a kind of brown porridge.
They drifted to their cars and drove away and Ray and Jacob played I Spy for half an hour and Katie found that she was actually looking forward to getting back to the house she’d been so desperate to get away from only the day before.
When they arrived Ray and Jacob put the train set together on the living-room floor while she made supper. She bathed Jacob and Ray put him to bed.
Neither of them had the energy to argue and they spent the next few days playing the role of dutiful parents so as not to trouble Jacob. And she could see them turning slowly into the people they were pretending to be, the problem they were meant to solve drifting slowly into the background, the two of them turning into a team whose job it was to bring up a child and run a household despite the fact that they had nothing in common, having conversations about what was needed from Tesco and what they were going to do at the weekend, going to bed and putting out the light and rolling away from each other and trying not to dream about the lives they could have led.
79
Jean canceled work.
She really hadn’t known what to expect when George came out of hospital. In the event he seemed surprisingly normal. He apologized for all the upset he had caused and said he was feeling a good deal better than he had done for some time.
She asked whether he wanted to talk about what had happened, but he told her there was no need to worry. She said he should tell her if he ever started feeling the same way again and he reassured her that he wasn’t going to feel the same way again. Pretty soon it became clear that Dr. Parris had got things out of proportion and that her more paranoid imaginings had been unfounded.
He was still in a lot of pain, clearly. But he was determined not to use the wheelchair. So she spent most of that week helping him out of bed and in and out of his salt bath and holding his hand as he made his way downstairs, then driving him back and forth to the surgery to have his dressing changed.
After three or four days he was moving around on his own, and by the beginning of the second week he was able to drive the car, so she went back into work, telling him that he could call her at any time if he needed help.
She rang the florists and the caterers and the car hire company and canceled them. The florists were downright rude, so she found herself telling the caterers and the car people that her daughter had been taken seriously ill and they were so understanding it made her feel worse than being shouted at.
She couldn’t face ringing guests and telling them the wedding was off, so she decided to leave it for a few days.
And it was good. Obviously it was good. Only days ago she thought their lives were falling to pieces. And now they were getting slowly back to normal. She couldn’t have asked for any more.
But she sat at the kitchen table some evenings and thought about the washing and the cooking and the cleaning and she could feel something dark and heavy weighing on her, and just getting up to put the kettle on was like wading through deep water.
She was depressed. And it was not something she was used to feeling. She worried. She coped. She got cross. But she was never down for more than a few hours at a time.
It was uncharitable, but she couldn’t help wishing there was more wrong with George. That he needed her more. But in no time at all he was back out in the studio, laying bricks and sawing wood.
She felt as if she was lost at sea. George was on his island over there. And David was on another island. And Katie. And Jamie. All of them with solid ground under their feet. And she was drifting between them, the tide slowly dragging her farther and farther away.
She drove over to David’s house the following week and parked round the corner. She was about to get out of the car when she realized she couldn’t do it. When they’d first got together it seemed like the beginning of a new life, something different and exciting, an escape. But she could see it now for what it was, an affair, like any other affair, tawdry and cheap, a selfish compensation for the mess her real life had become.
She imagined sitting in the staff room at St. John’s, drinking tea and eating Garibaldi biscuits with Sally and Bea and Miss Cottingham and felt, for the first time, as if she bore some kind of stain, that they would be able to look at her and see what she had been doing.
She was being silly. She knew that. They were no different from other people. She knew, for a fact, that Bea’s son was in some kind of trouble with drugs. But it seemed wrong that she should be making love with David one afternoon and teaching children to read the following morning. And if she had to make the
choice between the two she would have chosen David without hesitation, but that seemed even worse.
She drove away and rang David later that evening to apologize. He was charming and sympathetic and said he understood what she must be going through. But he didn’t. She could hear it in his voice.
80
George was lying on the bed with his trousers off, having his dressing changed.
The practice nurse was rather attractive, if a little on the plump side. He had always liked women in uniforms. Samantha, that was her name. Cheerful, too, without being talkative.
In truth, he was going to miss these sessions when they came to an end in a couple of weeks’ time. It was like having one’s hair cut. Except that he always had his hair cut by an elderly Cypriot man and it was a lot less painful.
The nurse peeled back the large plaster over the wound. “OK, Mr. Hall. Time to grit your teeth.”
George took hold of the edges of the bed.
The nurse pulled the end of the bandage. The first couple of feet of pink ribbon came away smoothly. Then it snagged. George did anagrams of the word bandage in his head. The nurse gave a gentle yank and the remains of the bandage lifted free of the wound making him say something he would never normally say in front of a woman. “I’m sorry about that.”
“No apology needed.”
The nurse held the old dressing up. It looked like a large conker that had been soaked in blood and lemon curd. She dropped it into the little swing bin by the side of the bed. “Let’s get you a clean one.”
George lay back and closed his eyes.
He rather liked the pain now that he had got used to it. He knew what it was going to be like and how long it was going to last. And as it ebbed away his head felt unnaturally clear for five or ten minutes, as if his brain had been hosed clean.
From a nearby room he heard someone say, “Scoliosis of the spine.”
He was relieved about the wedding. It was sad for Katie. Or perhaps it was a relief for her, too. They had not been able to talk much during her visit. And to be honest they rarely talked about that kind of thing. Though Ray did seem a little strange at the hospital, which only served to confirm his uneasiness about the relationship.
Either way George was glad that the house was not going to be invaded by a marquee full of strangers. He was still feeling a little too fragile to relish the prospect of standing up and speechifying.
Jean seemed rather relieved, too.
Poor Jean. He really had put her through the wringer. She had not seemed like her usual self over the past few days. She was clearly still worried about him. Seeing that carpet every day probably did not help.
But he was out of the bedroom, they were having conversations, and he was able to do a few chores round the house. When he was a little fitter he would take her out for dinner. He had heard good reports about that new restaurant in Oundle. Excellent fish, apparently.
“There,” said Samantha, “that’s you done.”
“Thank you,” said George.
“Come on, let’s sit you up.”
He would buy Jean some flowers on the way home, something he had not done in a very long time. That would cheer her up.
Then he would ring the carpet fitters.
81
Jamie was waiting for a prospective buyer in the Prince’s Avenue flat, the one where he’d met Tony for the first time.
The owners were moving to Kuala Lumpur. They were tidy and childless, thank goodness. No abstract expressionistic ballpoint pen on the skirting boards, no scree of toys on the dining-room floor (Shona was showing a couple round the Finchley four-bed when the woman twisted her ankle on a Power Ranger Dino Thunder Bike). Worked in the city and hardly touched the place from what he could see. You could have licked the cooker. IKEA furniture. Bland prints in brushed steel frames. Soulless but salable.
He walked into the kitchen, touched the paintwork with the tips of his fingers and remembered watching Tony with a brush in his hand, before they’d even talked, when he was still a beautiful stranger.
Jamie could see now, with absolute clarity, what he’d done.
He’d bided his time. He’d got away. He’d built a little world in which he felt safe. And it was orbiting far out, unconnected to anyone. It was cold and it was dark and he had no idea how to make it swing back toward the sun.
There’d been a moment, in Peterborough, shortly after Katie punched him, when he realized that he needed these people. Katie, Mum, Dad, Jacob. They drove him up the wall sometimes. But they’d been with him all the way. They were a part of him.
Now he’d lost Tony and he was drifting. He needed a place he could go when he was in trouble. He needed someone he could call in the small hours.
He’d fucked it up. Those horrible scenes in the dining room. His mother saying, “You know nothing.” She was right. They were strangers. He’d made them into strangers. Deliberately. What right did he have to tell them how they should run their lives? He had made damn sure they had no right to tell him how he should run his.
The bell rang.
Shit.
He took a deep breath, counted to ten, put his selling brain in and answered the door to a man with a very obvious toupee.
82
Katie had just finished the washing up.
Jacob was in bed. And Ray was sitting at the kitchen table putting new batteries into the cordless phone. She turned round and leant against the sink, drying her hands on a tea towel.
Ray clicked the back of the phone into place. “We have to do something.”
She said, “I know,” and it felt good, finally, to talk about the subject instead of sniping about nursery runs and the lack of tea bags.
Ray said, “I don’t mind how we work this out.” He tilted his chair backward and slotted the phone into its cradle. “Just so long as it doesn’t involve going anywhere near your family.”
For a fraction of a second she wondered whether she ought to be offended. But she couldn’t because Ray was right, their behavior had been abysmal. Then it struck her as actually quite funny and she realized she was laughing. “I’m so sorry about putting you through all of that.”
“It was…educational,” said Ray.
She couldn’t tell from his expression whether he was amused or not so she stopped laughing.
“Told your dad he seemed like the sanest person in the whole family.” Ray stood one of the old batteries on its end. “Put the wind up him a bit.” He stood the other battery on its end next to the first. “I hope he’s OK.”
“Fingers crossed.”
“Jamie’s a decent bloke,” said Ray.
“Yeh.”
“We had a good talk. In the garden.”
“About?” asked Katie.
“Me and you. Him and Tony.”
“Uh-huh.” It seemed a bit risky to ask for details.
“I always thought, you know, being gay, he would be weirder.”
“Probably best not to say that to Jamie.”
Ray looked up at her. “I might be stupid. But I’m not that stupid.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”
“Come here, you,” said Ray. He pushed his chair back.
She went and sat on his lap and he put his arms round her and that was it. Like the world flipping inside out.
This was where she was meant to be.
She could feel every muscle in her body relaxing. She touched his face. “I’ve been so horrible to you.”
“You’ve been appalling,” said Ray. “But I still love you.”
“Just hold me.”
He pulled her close and she buried her face in his shoulder and cried.
“It’s OK,” said Ray, rubbing her back gently. “It’s OK.”
How had she been so blind? He’d seen her family at their worst and taken it all with good grace. Even with the wedding canceled.
But he hadn’t changed. He was the same person he’d been all along. The kindest, most dependable, most h
onorable person in her life.
This was her family. Ray and Jacob.
She felt stupid and relieved and guilty and happy and sad and slightly wobbly on account of feeling so many things at the same time. “I love you.”
“It’s all right,” said Ray. “You don’t have to say it.”
“No. I mean it. I really do.”
“Let’s not say anything for a bit, OK? It gets too complicated when we argue.”
“I’m not arguing,” said Katie.
He lifted her head and put a finger on her lips to stop her speaking and kissed her. It was the first time they had kissed properly in weeks.
He led her upstairs and they made love until Jacob had a nightmare about an angry blue dog and they had to stop rather quickly.
83
When Jamie got home from work he rang Tony. No answer. He rang Tony’s mobile and left a message asking him to ring back.
He cleaned the kitchen and ate supper in front of a film about a giant alligator in a lake in Maine. Tony didn’t ring back.
He rang Tony’s flat early the following morning. No answer. He rang Tony’s mobile at lunchtime and left another message, keeping it as simple and straightforward as possible.
He went swimming after work to stop himself waiting for the return call. He did sixty lengths and came out feeling exhausted and relaxed for five whole minutes.
He tried ringing the flat again when he got home but to no avail.
He was tempted to go round and knock on the door. But he was beginning to think Tony was avoiding him and he didn’t want another scene.
It wasn’t sadness. Or not like any sadness he’d felt before. It was as if someone had died. It was just a thing to be lived with in the hope that it would get slowly less painful.
He kept ringing, every morning and every night. But he no longer expected an answer. It was a ritual. Something that gave shape to the day.
He’d retreated to a small room somewhere deep inside his head, running on autopilot. Getting up. Going to work. Coming home.