Chapter nineteen #3
And it was so stupid, because Beth was kind, and she wouldn’t say no in a hurtful way, but once he’d asked, he couldn’t ask again. It would embarrass them both.
‘What?’ she said brightly.
‘I was wondering how you were getting on with the write-ups,’ he finished lamely. ‘If there was anything interesting – anything you think we should discuss?’
She looked at him, thoughtful, and bit her beautiful pink lip. Lewis was filled with a hopeless desire.
‘Actually, yes,’ she said. ‘There’s something I wanted to discuss.’
‘Beth!’ The door was flung open and the tiny figure of Linda Horrobin appeared. ‘And Tomsk! We’ve been looking forward to this all day, haven’t we, Bill? Bill’s put his dog socks on specially! Are you two going to come in? We have B.I.S.C.U.I.T.S,’ she added, in a conspiratorial undertone.
The dog looked up at Beth hopefully.
Lewis felt an irrational double rejection.
‘Not for me, I hope,’ said Beth, with a regretful pat of her hips.
‘You’re perfect,’ he blurted out, to the surprise of both of them.
‘Isn’t she just?’ said Linda Horrobin happily. ‘Bill says Beth reminds him of Diana Dors. Now, come in.’
‘If only I got a reception like this everywhere!’ Beth put a hand on Lewis’s arm.
It felt like the same gentle ‘hand on arm’ the nurses gave the residents, a reassuring contact, nothing more.
Yesterday it would have set sparks scorching across his skin; now it felt different.
Sisterly. He’d felt enough of those to know what they meant, that kind ‘don’t make me say the words’ gesture his female friends at college had made, forestalling any awkwardness. ‘I’ll catch up with you another time.’
Just beyond the door, he could see Bill Horrobin, sitting upright in his chair, white hair freshly brushed, eagerly waiting for the arrival of Tomsk and Beth. There were no words, but his eyes darted between Linda, and the dog. Always back to Linda.
‘I’ll just . . .’ Lewis indicated over his shoulder. ‘Lots to do.’
Beth smiled.
Lewis smiled back, but inside the cloud had gone over his heart, and it had started to rain.
If you could go back in time and say anything to someone, what would it be?
The clearest memories I have of Nessy are the first time I saw her, and the last time.
The last time was almost five years to the day from the first. That was the only significant thing about that week; everything else was just as normal, or as normal as Geraldine’s house ever was.
I’d finished my course, and started working full time, selling ad space for a pirate radio station.
My job involved lots of parties, and meeting people, and talking.
I was great at talking, and even better at not getting hangovers – those were the only two useful things I’d got from my dad.
I had a reputation for being good with celebrities, but it was because I was too embarrassed to wear my glasses to parties, so I never recognised anyone – Nessy often had to take me to one side to tell me who I’d been chatting to.
I’d been offered a couple of jobs in London off the back of these chance encounters – that was how things happened in those days: you’d have a stoned conversation with a hippie about electronic brain interference, and the next day a Rolls Royce would appear outside your office with a single apple inside, and an invitation to have tea with John Lennon.
One guy wanted me to help set up an advertising agency aimed at teenagers, but I said no.
Nessy was only halfway through her teacher-training course at that point, and our plan was to move to London together.
That had been the plan for so long we used to look at A-Zs and choose the streets we’d buy our house in, when we won the Pools.
Geraldine would tell us stories about some areas that’d make your hair curl – so they were top of our lists.
That week I’d had a telephone call about a real, serious job with a media agency in Soho.
Ness was almost qualified, so I’d said to her: why not look for teaching positions in London?
We knew her parents would say no, but she said she’d talk to them, maybe if the school was posh enough, they’d come round to the idea.
She didn’t moan about them as much as she had done in the beginning, so I assumed they’d finally accepted that she was going to do something different with her life.
Not be the dutiful daughter they expected her to be.
In her own way, she had as much to escape from as I had – neither of us were doing what our families thought we should.
It was a normal Friday night for us. I’d gone out to get our usual curry order from the New Delhi tandoori house. Same dishes every week, for the two of us, plus Geraldine, and the Pauls, and whoever else was around.
When I left, they were all sitting at the kitchen table, shrieking their way through The Sound of Music soundtrack album, which Geraldine used to put on the record player most Friday nights.
We loved a singalong. Nessy was playing the spoons, and one of the Pauls was wearing a nun’s habit, miming the Mother Superior parts.
I could hear the singing through the open windows all the way down the street.
When I walked back down the street half an hour later, with two bags of the finest curry in Manchester, there was no singing. That was unusual. Once Geraldine had finished The Sound of Music, she often put on The Jungle Book or West Side Story. The singing only stopped when the sherry ran out.
I couldn’t hear anyone talking when I opened the front door.
The house was deathly silent, like the Marie Celeste, but I assumed they were playing a trick on me.
We used to do that to Geraldine – hide under tables and make humming noises, or pretend to move in slow motion to make her think she’d dropped acid.
Stupid stuff, really, but we thought we were hilarious, as kids always do.
And then I heard the voice. In the kitchen. At first I thought it was the radio, the World Service, or maybe one of the Pauls doing an impression of Peter Sellers.
I can’t remember now exactly what he was saying, but I can remember tiptoeing down the hall and looking through the open door to see Geraldine, and the Pauls, and Geraldine’s friend Mavis, frozen at the table like waxworks.
A bloke with a big red face was sitting in my seat, chatting away as if it was completely normal to talk for sentence after sentence without any interruption from anyone else.
He seemed perfectly at ease sitting there in a tweed jacket and a hat, despite the fact that everyone else was in tie-dye and crocheted waistcoats.
He looked more like an actor than either of the two Pauls ever would, except he was playing the part of a public-school idiot, and not very well either.
Nessy wasn’t at the table. She was standing at the sink, her back to everyone.
She was washing up – she never washed up – and she was wearing an apron over her miniskirt.
She never wore an apron either. Her shoulders were shaking, and I couldn’t tell if that was because she was washing up so furiously, or there was something else going on.
I don’t know how, but suddenly I knew.
‘Ah!’ The man saw me, and stood up. ‘Curry. Tremendous. Do they deliver in the city? How modern.’
Geraldine stood up quickly too. ‘Darling, this is Raymond. Raymond, this is—’
I remember the bone-crunch of the handshake, the disinterest in hearing who I was in his haste to impose himself.
‘Hello there, don’t worry, I won’t be joining for supper, I’m here on a rescue mission.
I need to whisk this one away.’ He nodded towards Nessy as if she was a child he was collecting from a minder.
‘Nessy’s father has been taken ill.’ I remember Geraldine signalling with her plucked eyebrows. ‘Unfortunately she seems to have missed the messages for her to call home, so Raymond’s come to collect her.’
‘It’s very good of you to drive all this way, at this time of the night,’ observed Mavis. Who had remained seated, three cats on her lap, port and lemon in front of her.
‘That’s what fiancés are for! Coming to the rescue of the damsel in distress!’ boomed this total stranger. ‘Chop chop, poppet. I told your mother I’d have you back before midnight. Your poor dad’s asking for you.’
Poppet. Chop chop, poppet.
Nessy turned round at the sink, but she didn’t look at him. She gazed in my direction with a face that still haunts me now.
The life had drained from her face, leaving her eyes blank. She was like a ghost. A ghost of herself. I felt sick.
‘Ooh, fiancé,’ marvelled Mavis. ‘You kept that quiet, Nessy.’
It was so obvious. She hadn’t renegotiated her life with her parents.
She’d just built a fence so I couldn’t see it.
And I hadn’t wanted to see it. I never went home to Longhampton, because this was my home now, but she did, and she never talked about what happened when she went back, because I didn’t want to know.
Slowly Nessy took off Geraldine’s silly frilly apron, without breaking my gaze.
I didn’t need to turn my head to know the Pauls were staring between us, back and forth, as if they were at a tennis match.
My eyes couldn’t move from hers. Her unhappiness was loud in my own chest, as real as the unhappiness I felt myself. Did she feel that too, I wondered? Was she going to say something?
‘You do look drained,’ said Mavis. ‘Has it come as a shock, your dad being unwell?’
I knew as well as Nessy did that her dad was probably hale and hearty and sinking pints in the Feathers. He’d done this before, inventing these family crises when she hadn’t been home as often as they’d like. But he’d never sent her fiancé to get her.
This was a statement. The party’s over, it said. Your real life wants you back.
She said nothing.
I put the bags of curry down on the table, and left the room. The house. The street. I don’t know where I went, but my feet kept moving.
When I came back, Nessy had gone, and so had he.
When I went into our room, her clothes had gone, but what broke my heart was that she’d taken one of the china dogs we’d bought together at a flea market.
They were like us, she said; a matching pair of spaniels, with chains round our necks that we’d snapped.
Now only mine sat there on the shelf by the bed. A half. Worth nothing.
The following week, I packed my bags and moved to London.
If I could go back to that moment now, with the few scraps of wisdom I’ve gained over the years, would I say something? To her, or to him?
It’s certainly the only time in my life when I saw, right then, that the world as I knew it was shifting, and in a moment it would have changed forever. You don’t often get those moments, when you actually see the background of your life moving like the scenery on a stage.
Even now I know there was nothing I could say. I could have fought and demanded but it would have made no difference. Some moments in life turn on a sixpence; some are like tectonic plates, starting years before and moving so slowly you can’t even see.
But if I could go back, I would open my arms and hug Nessy even as she was leaving, hug her really tightly, and hope that she’d somehow understand that these arms would never stop wanting to hold her, that this heart would never stop loving her, and that no matter where we drifted on these tides of life, what we’d shared together would be like a lighthouse.
A lighthouse of love, a light we could always navigate back to.
If we wanted. If the tides ever came right again.