Miss You

SIX Gus

December1997

As the days grew shorter, I began to feel as if London was my home. Autumn sharpened the experience of living in the city. We came out of our afternoon lectures into darkness, with street lights sparkling in the rain and the air steaming with appetizing wafts of spicy food. Shivering throngs at dripping bus stops were cheerfully united in suffering. In summer, it felt more like being a tourist; if you were there as winter approached, it was because you had to be.

On Bonfire Night Lucy, Toby and I joined the crowds of people trudging up Primrose Hill and gazed over the vast, illuminated map of London spread out below us. As we oohed and aahed at the firework display, it was obvious that Toby and I both fancied Lucy. There was an unspoken competition between us, which she pretended not to see.

On the first day of the holidays, most of the students loaded up with dirty laundry and headed out of town. Lucy was eager to see her family, Toby to be reunited with his school friends; Nash was flying off to see her father. Everyone else was looking forward to the thing I was dreading: Christmas at home.

I kept finding reasons not to leave, spending mornings studying in the library for the January exams, and afternoons in the National Gallery, working my way from the Renaissance to fin-de-siècle Paris. When I discovered that the National Theatre had a batch of cheap tickets available on the day for the evening performance, I headed south instead of north on my morning run, crossing the steely grey Thames as the first commuters began to spill across the bridge, and standing in the box-office queue, with the cold river air slicing through to my bones.

The day before Christmas Eve, it occurred to me that I hadn’t yet bought any presents, which provided an excuse to delay my departure for another few hours. In the past, my mother had always bought our presents for us: from me, after-dinner mints for her and liqueur chocolates for my father. From Ross, a collection of guest soaps and a set of golf balls. The theory was that we paid her back out of our pocket money, but we never did. We were responsible for wrapping, although paper, scissors and tape were thoughtfully placed on our beds beside the gifts, and on Christmas morning she would feign surprise as the parcels were opened. This year, I was determined that my mother would be genuinely delighted when she opened her gift from me, even though I didn’t have the slightest idea what to buy her.

I made my way to Selfridges, where we used to be taken to see Father Christmas as children. Afterwards, my father, Ross and I would tuck into generous salt-beef sandwiches with lashings of mustard at the Brass Rail, while my mother sought advice about face creams and tested lipstick colors on the back of her hand in the perfumery department. Then we’d drive down Regent Street, Ross and me in the back seat, craning our heads to see the lights.

The old-fashioned revolving door at the center of the store triggered a memory of Ross pushing as fast as he could to whirl unsuspecting shoppers off-balance. One section of the ground floor was a sturdy, masculine kind of place where I found a range of gifts for men and bought a matching tartan-covered hip-flask and scorecard holder in a faux-wooden box. On the more feminine side of the store, I chose a Yardley boxed set of talc and bath oil tied with lavender ribbon and stood in the line for the cashier.

In front of me, there was a tall woman with a fidgety little girl in one hand and a couple of boxes in the other. Her gift sets looked much more sophisticated than mine and I became a little anxious about the Yardley. She was talking to the child so patiently that I was about to pluck up the courage to ask her opinion, but then it was her turn at the till, and, as she delved into her shoulder bag, the little girl shot off through the legs of the shoppers.

I was suddenly at the front of the queue.

“Can I help you?”

I picked up the black, blue and silver box the woman had abandoned and weighed it against mine.

“Girlfriend or mother?” demanded the shop assistant.

I could feel the color spreading across my face and burning the tips of my ears.

“Mother,” I murmured.

A small, knowing smile completed my humiliation.

“Probably safer with the Yardley, then,” she said, taking it from my hand.

For a moment, I was tempted to buy the other box out of sheer defiance. Perhaps my mother was younger and trendier than she assumed? Perhaps I would give it to Lucy? We’d made tentative plans to meet up between Christmas and New Year. But I had no idea what perfume, if any, she used.

My father picked me up at the station, leaning across the passenger seat to open my door.

“They’re saying it might snow.” He was something of an amateur weather forecaster and there was a mahogany barometer in our hall, but the statement was freighted with deeper layers of meaning.

“Let’s hope not,” I said.

We both sat in silence, staring straight ahead as if to face down any stray snowflakes for the duration of the short drive home.

There was the usual wreath of holly and tartan ribbon on the door and a real Christmas tree in the hall, but the Blue Peter advent crown that Ross and I had made the winter we both had measles had been retired. My mother emerged from the kitchen in her festive apron. Her hands were covered in flour, so we air-kissed, and then she looked me up and down as if she was expecting me to have changed.

At supper, in our rarely used dining room, my father was eager to catch me out with questions about the working of organs and glands. I remembered him behaving in a similar way towards Ross early on in his training. Perhaps Nash was right about him being a failed doctor? Ross had been more combative than me, unafraid to challenge him. My reticence simply made my father more persistent. And yet, when my mother said, “For goodness’ sake, leave him alone, Gordon!” I almost wished he would keep going, because the silence in the room was so acute, it was like an inaudible scream of pain.

The dining table was polished to a high shine, the glasses and cutlery twinkled. With all her attention to cleanliness and propriety, my mother had made the place as sterile as my father’s surgery.

“More wine?” asked my mother.

I had barely touched my glass, but hers had been filled and emptied three times. The neck of the bottle tinkled slightly against its rim. My father stared at it. She put the bottle carefully down and picked up her glass. Then the doorbell rang.

“Who on earth?” said my father.

“Probably carol singers!” My mother seemed almost feverish at the distraction. When she opened the front door, the sound that filtered through to the dining room from the hall was not a song, but an exaggerated squeal of delight.

“What a lovely surprise!” Her voice became louder as she walked down the hall towards the dining room. “Guess who, Gordon? Angus?”

Ross’s girlfriend Charlotte followed her into the room. She was wearing a long lilac coat with a shawl collar that on anyone less elegant or slim might have looked like a dressing gown, but made her look like a film star. She was holding a cube wrapped in incongruously cheap and cheerful wrapping paper.

“Please don’t get up!” she said. “I don’t want to disturb your supper.”

“You’re not!” I blurted, ridiculously grateful to her for changing the dynamic.

“Let me get you a drink!” My father clicked into the jovial-host mode I’d forgotten he was capable of.

The dining room felt nice, normal again.

“Something soft.” Charlotte put down the parcel and slid off soft black leather gloves. “I’m in my car.”

“Your own car? How exciting!” said my mother.

“It’s just a little Peugeot.”

My father opened a bottle of tonic water. Ice cubes cracked in the glass as the fizz frothed over them and a faint, bitter aroma drifted across the table. “Peugeot, eh?”

With a shrug of Charlotte’s shoulders, her coat hung itself over the back of her chair, revealing a slippery satin lining. Underneath she was wearing a plain black polo neck and black jeans. Her long hair was so black and shiny, it almost looked blue; her complexion was flawless. In the photo of her and Ross on the living-room mantelpiece, dressed up as the Addams family for a Halloween ball, there was something almost vampiric about her beauty, but now, with her lips pale from the cold, she was like a model shot by David Bailey in the sixties: stunning, and somehow a tiny bit vulnerable.

“So you’re a fully qualified doctor now?” said my father.

The pale lips formed a thin smile.

“Any areas you’re keen to specialize in? General practice?”

“Cardiac surgery,” she replied, evenly.

For some reason, I let out a little snort of laughter.

I’d been in awe of Charlotte from the first time Ross brought her home the summer at the end of his second year. My dad had just built the hot tub on the decking. Charlotte had worn a tiny white bikini. I’d never seen a woman wearing so little before. She’d been tantalizingly aloof. I couldn’t even tell if she’d noticed me behind her film-star sunglasses.

“How are you enjoying medicine, Angus?” she asked.

“Fine. Hard work, obviously,” I mumbled, thirteen years old again.

“Not as hard as being a heart surgeon,” my mother said. “Goodness! I should think that’s the most difficult—”

“It’s a competitive area,” Charlotte acknowledged.

“I wonder...,” my mother began.

Her eyes had the watery, unfocused look that meant she was thinking about what path Ross would have chosen.

“Anyway,” said Charlotte, taking a sip of her tonic water, “that’s for the future.”

“Good to have ambitions, nevertheless,” said my father. It didn’t sound as though he rated her chances. “So, you’re going home for Christmas?”

Her mother’s house was just a few miles from ours, though Charlotte and Ross had met at uni.

“I’ve fucked women on five continents,” he’d told me once, as he shaved before a date. “When the finest fuck lives five minutes down the road.”

“Just today and tomorrow. I’m working Christmas Day,” Charlotte replied.

“Welcome to real life!” said my father.

I could think of only one Christmas when he had been called upon to prescribe antibiotics for an abscess.

“And New Year?” my mother asked quietly.

“Yes, New Year too.”

“Probably just as well,” said my father.

“Yes,” said Charlotte.

The silence seemed endless.

“How lovely of you to come to see us, though! Gordon, isn’t it lovely?”

Charlotte pushed the parcel towards my mother.

“Just a little something,” she said.

“You shouldn’t have! But how lovely!” said my mother. “I must go and get yours.”

From the length of time she was out of the room, I wondered if my mother really had purchased a gift for Charlotte, or whether she was wrapping something up that she had bought on the off-chance that, even with all her meticulous Christmas lists, she had overlooked someone.

“Where are you living?” I asked Charlotte, to break the silence.

“Battersea. Do you know it?”

“No.”

“It’s quite convenient.”

“I’ve been to the National Theatre.”

To produce this howling non sequitur, my thought processes had jumped from Battersea to the only place I knew south of the river.

Charlotte regarded me disdainfully.

“Lucky you,” she said, with a thin edge of irony.

“You can get cheap tickets on the day,” I said, for the benefit of my father, who was looking perplexed. “I run,” I added.

“I run too,” said Charlotte.

“Perhaps you’ll run into each other!” my father tried to join in, but his attempt at a joke simply closed the conversation down.

My mother returned with a soft parcel and handed it to Charlotte.

“Shall I open it now?” Charlotte asked.

She tore the paper to reveal a red knitted glove and scarf set from Marks Spencer.

“Mmm,” she said, draping the scarf around her neck. “This will keep me nice and warm!”

She pointed at the cube on the table, which my mother unwrapped to reveal a box with a pink amaryllis on it.

“You plant the bulb and it shoots up a lovely flower,” Charlotte said.

“I’ve always wondered if they work,” said my mother doubtfully, turning the box over and peering at the instructions.

“Of course they work!” I said, dismayed to see that Charlotte was slipping her narrow shoulders into the satiny sleeves of her coat. The knitted red scarf looked as discordant against her outfit as the parcel had when she came in. I wondered how far she would drive down the road before taking it off.

“Well, I must be getting going,” she said.

Charlotte air-kissed my mother, then, after holding out her hand to be shaken, stiffly allowed my father to give her a hug.

So that there was no question of looking as if I was expecting a kiss or hug myself, I rushed to the front door to see her out.

“Thanks for coming,” I said. “Cheered them up no end.”

Charlotte looked up at me. Her eyes, I noticed, were a greeny color, like a cat’s.

“You’ve grown so tall, Angus,” she said. “Goodness, I think you’re bigger than Ross now.”

“He’d hate that!”

It just came out, and I was immediately ashamed that I had made the only reference to him irreverent.

Charlotte’s forehead was furrowed with a small frown, as if she was considering the truth of the proposition, and then, to my great relief, she smiled, a genuine smile, as if remembering something pleasant.

“You’re absolutely right! He would!” she said, and gave my arm a tiny squeeze before stepping out into the cold.

Although it was just the three of us, my mother was up before dawn on Christmas Day to put a huge turkey in the oven. I hadn’t slept well and went downstairs as soon as I heard the clanking of baking trays. The kitchen was already swathed in a warm mist of offal from the giblets she was boiling for gravy. I drank the cup of tea she put in front of me, and told her I was going for a run.

“Blow away the cobwebs,” she said.

Outside, the air was opaque with freezing fog, the pavement laced with frost which stuck slightly to the soles of my running shoes. With zero visibility, I found myself jogging slowly, as if some primal instinct had kicked in, causing my brain to think me blind and in need of protection from obstacles that might loom in my path. I couldn’t get up to the precious speed where thought left my body and nothing mattered but the pounding rhythm of feet hitting the ground.

Suddenly aware of another person’s steps, I slowed to a halt.

Perhaps you’ll run into each other!

A man I didn’t know ran past. He must have eaten garlic the night before. The acrid odor hung in the still whiteness as his labored breaths receded into silence.

There was a smell of burning when I returned to the house. My mother was standing over the kitchen sink scrubbing at the blackened giblet pan. She didn’t look around as I stood in the doorway, but from the angle of her shoulders, I could tell she was crying.

I showered for a long time, enjoying the hot water streaming over my cold face.

When I came downstairs, my father was sitting at the kitchen table in his usual Christmas casual attire: thick tweedy sweater over checked shirt and corduroy trousers.

I’d noticed a slight air of impatience about him since my return, like a man waiting beside a motorway for the rescue service to turn up.

My mother brandished one of her Christmas platters. “Smoked salmon and champagne?”

“It’s a bit early, isn’t it?” he said.

“Some of us have been up for hours!”

I had heard the same exchange every Christmas morning for as long as I could remember.

“Well, you only live once!” was my father’s standard reply. But obviously he wasn’t going to say it this year.

Previously, I had been allowed only half a glass of champagne, but at eighteen, it appeared I could have as much as I wanted. It slipped down my throat like cream.

“It hardly seems worth lighting the fire in the living room,” my mother was saying.

For the last few years, that had been Ross’s job. I couldn’t decide whether she was hinting that I should do it this year, or indicating that she would be happier not to go in the living room, where we’d be surrounded by photos of him.

“Why don’t we have our presents in the kitchen?” I suggested.

“Nice and warm,” said my father immediately.

“Why ever not?” My mother seemed almost excited about the break with tradition.

She had bought me a pair of pajamas, a voucher for ten driving lessons at the British School of Motoring, and, from my father, a pedometer.

“Let’s have a look,” he demanded, making it clear that it was the first time he had seen it.

“It counts how many paces you’ve done!” said my mother.

I would never use it, but I recognized the thought that had gone into the gift. I could almost hear her saying to her Women’s Institute friends, “I can’t think of a thing for Angus. All he does these days is run!”

My father appeared satisfied with his gift from me, but there was something about the way my mother said, “Oh! Lavender!” when she unwrapped hers that made me realize that she didn’t like the fragrance. She turned the pretty box over and over in her hands.

“Ross always used to buy me Yardley guest soaps,” she whispered, throatily.

A barb of resentment stabbed through the cotton-wool cocoon the champagne had spun around me.

No, he didn’t! I wanted to say. You did! Why does he have to be a saint?

The clock ticked on the wall. The turkey spat and sizzled in the oven.

“Good Lord, is that the time?” my father suddenly said. “I said I’d have nine holes with Brian!”

“Why don’t you take Angus along?” my mother suggested.

I sensed a slight hesitation.

“Would you like to come?”

I knew that he would have preferred me to say no, but my mother seemed equally keen for me to go.

I waited in the hall for him to come downstairs, jangling his car keys amid a powerful waft of some cologne I’d never smelled on him before.

We drove several miles to his golf club. There were a few diehards in the club lounge, and a lone woman sitting at a table by the log fire. As I pushed open the door, she glanced up expectantly, then down again when I was not the person she was waiting for.

“What’ll it be?” My father put an arm around my shoulder, ushering me towards the bar.

I asked for a half of bitter, knowing he wouldn’t hesitate to voice his thoughts about lager drinkers to anyone who would listen.

“Two halves of your best!” he said loudly to the bartender, then turned to me. “Don’t think we’ve had a proper drink together, have we?”

“I don’t think so.”

We both knew we hadn’t. My eighteenth birthday in April had come and gone without anyone really noticing it.

“Pubs in London any good or are you more of a wine-bar man?” he asked.

“I haven’t been to that many.”

“Cheaper at the Union, eh?”

I wasn’t sure if he wanted me to be a hearty drinker or whether it was a trap.

“I suppose so!”

“He supposes so!” said my father, as if to invite the others at the bar into our manly tête-à-tête.

There were a few smiles but no takers.

He drained his glass.

“Another?” I asked.

“Better not,” he said. “Not when I’m driving. Look, while you’re finishing up, I just need to point Percy.”

I stood at the bar, trying to ignore the drainy taste of the warm ale as I gulped it back.

My father returned with the woman I’d noticed when we came in.

“Angus, would you believe it! This is Samantha, my new nurse at the practice!”

“Not that new!” she said with a little laugh, looking at him, not me, as we shook hands.

Like most dental nurses I had encountered, she was pretty, in a clinical sort of way, with short hair, good teeth and sensible little stud earrings. She was wearing tight, clean jeans tucked into leather boots, and a pale blue fluffy jumper. A silk scarf with a navy border and a pattern of gold buckles was draped around her shoulders, slightly at odds with the rest of her outfit. I imagined it was his Christmas present to her. She wasn’t yet the age for silk scarves.

“How long is it now?” my father was asking her.

“Seven months,” she said.

“Is it really? So, you’re a member here, are you?” he asked, as if anyone was going to believe that she was the sort of girl who would nip out on her own to practice her swing on Christmas morning.

“Daddy is,” she replied. “I’m spending Christmas with my parents.” She caught my eye for the first time, as if we both knew what a pain that was. “I really should be getting back.”

In the car on the way home, I couldn’t decide what I felt, if I felt anything at all. If Samantha was the way he had found some comfort, then good for him. I guessed she wasn’t the first. My mother probably suspected—she had been his nurse herself—so perhaps her suggestion that I accompany him had been mischievous? One thing I was clear about was that she would not want to be told by me.

“Samantha seems nice,” I ventured, with a hint of complicity.

“What? Oh, yes, she’s not bad at all,” my father replied, keeping his eyes focused on the road.

There was a yellowy glimmer of impending snow in the fading light.

As we turned into our drive, my father suddenly remembered his alibi.

“I don’t know where Brian got to!” he exclaimed.

“We were rather late,” I said.

My father turned and gave me the kind of blokey smile I had only ever seen him give to Ross.

“That must be it!”

“A girl called to speak to you,” my mother announced as the two of us walked into the hall.

“Oh?” said my father.

“Not you, Gordon. Angus! A girl.”

“A girl, eh?” My father smiled at me again.

“Did you get her name?” I asked.

“Did you get her name!” he echoed, delightedly. In a sentence I had gone from being the son he was unsure about to Casanova.

“It wasn’t a good line. She said she’d call again later. I hope not while we’re eating.”

The phone rang as my mother was offering me custard, cream or both with my Christmas pudding.

“It’s for you!” said my father, giving me a wink as he passed the handset over.

I took it in the hall, my heart racing a little as I cleared my throat before speaking. But it wasn’t Lucy, it was Nash.

“So, how’s things? Are you having a good one?”

“Fine,” I said. “Pretty quiet. How about you?”

“Bloody disaster! I’ve only been here two days. Dad’s new girlfriend is a bitch. I don’t know a soul! Look, Dad says he’ll pay for a friend to fly over for New Year...?”

“Where are you, exactly?” I asked, thinking New York, Brussels or one of the many other cities where Nash’s father owned property.

“The chalet in Val d’Isère,” she said. “You ski, don’t you?”

“No,” I lied. “So I wouldn’t be the best—”

“Oh, come on, Gus. Think croissants, good coffee and oodles of red wine. Please, pretty please?”

“Sorry... I just can’t, Nash. Thanks for the offer...”

I put down the phone, and stared at the bunting of Christmas cards festooning the hall. Snow on churches, snow on trees, snowy Bruegel scenes of skaters, a snow-encrusted branch with a robin perched on it, glittering snow on the roof of the nativity stable—did it actually snow in the Middle East?—a cute Labrador puppy with a red bobble hat, skidding in snow. Row after row of soft, white images twinkling their snowy greetings. Had no one thought?

I saw Ross’s face glancing back at me through the thickly falling snow, his teeth white, his eyes hidden behind mirror ski goggles. There were flakes settling on his dark, swept-back hair.

“What offer’s this, then?” my father asked when I returned to the table.

My mind replayed the conversation with Nash, in case there was anything else they’d overheard that I was going to have to explain.

“Nothing,” I said.

“Nothing, eh?”

I hated the idea of the two of us being men with secrets.

“Look, do you mind if I save this for later? I’m stuffed...”

He shot me a wounded glance. Our bubble of matey bonhomie had been fragile, and now I’d popped it.

In my bedroom, I stared at the snowflakes falling past the window, thinking of this time one year ago.

The snow had started to fall as the light faded. It wasn’t safe to ski off-piste, but it was sheer madness if you couldn’t even see where you were going.

“Why did you come up, if you didn’t want to ski down?” Ross demanded.

My brother’s strategy was always to make me feel stupid first.

“I thought you wanted to go down the usual way...”

“We’ve done ‘the usual way,’” he whined, mocking me.

“Not in these conditions. It’ll still be fairly dangerous...”

“‘Still be fairly dangerous’!”Another mocking echo, then the inevitable taunt that never failed to spur me into doing things I didn’t want to do. “God, you’re such a fucking wuss!”

Ross looked down the slope. I looked down the slope. Then he looked at me, his eyes gleaming with the challenge.

“Last one to the bottom gets the drinks in!” He pulled his goggles down and was off, straight to “Go!” when I was still at “Ready!” just like every race we’d ever run.

I almost followed. I almost followed. But I did not follow.

I’d heard the taunts so often, they’d lost their power. I didn’t even ski down the marked run. The little wave of triumph ebbed away as I stood alone in the bubble, drifting slowly down through the dense fog, as if I’d finally accepted defeat.

Back at the hotel, I sat in the window of the bar, staring out into zero visibility.

After a few minutes, Mum and Dad found me. She’d been in the spa all afternoon and was looking rather pink and shiny; he’d called it a day after the snow came in and had already showered and changed for dinner.

“Where’s Ross?”

“He wanted to ski down. I’d had enough.”

I didn’t tell them about Ross going off-piste. Didn’t see the point in worrying them unnecessarily.

After about an hour, Mum started getting fidgety and looking at her watch every few minutes.

“He’s probably bumped into someone and gone for a drink,” I suggested.

“He’s probably gone back to the room to dry off,” said Dad.

“It seems to be clearing up now,” said Mum. “Perhaps he took shelter and waited for it to pass over?”

We were all keen to imagine possible scenarios that would explain the unnatural delay.

I think perhaps all of us were frightened of Ross. My mother didn’t dare to be thought of as a worrier; my dad reveled in his older son’s courage and prowess and didn’t want to be seen to be questioning that; my own growing anxiety was compounded by not having told them the full facts.

“Do you think we should alert someone?” I finally asked. “It’s just that I think he was planning to ski off-piste...”

“What? Why the hell didn’t you say before?”

My father had already decided to blame me.

By the time we’d ascertained what we were supposed to do in the circumstances and the rescue team had set off, three hours had passed since I’d last seen my brother. They found him at nine o’clock that night, still alive but hypothermic, with a shattered arm and catastrophic head injuries. It appeared that, just a minute or so after we’d parted, Ross had skied into a tree at speed. They were able to pinpoint the time because the watch on his broken arm had stopped. I always pictured him hurtling through the whiteness, glancing back over his shoulder to see if I was catching him up, losing the crucial split second he needed to avoid the suddenly looming obstacle.

“Why did you let him go...?” my mother screamed at me when she saw the stretcher.

“...alone?” added my father.

They must have known that I couldn’t have stopped him, but they needed someone to blame and they couldn’t blame Ross, because Ross was clearly going to die. And those who die young must always be heroes.