Birthday (15 page)

In the hospital she heard sounds telling her he wanted to die, and she stroked the white brow, his almost weightless body hidden by the sheet. ‘I can't help you to do a thing like that. I just can't. What shall I do if you pass away?' Guilt at thinking it was best for him to die kept them closer. ‘What will I have to live for after you've gone?'

‘I shall have to live for myself,' was in her mind as she took the final step into the large room crowded with people to celebrate her birthday.

Her head turned left and right. She took her time assessing those she knew, or hadn't seen for a while, or those of her own family, an expression altering from shock to suspicious delight while letting out a little cry.

The small teeth, as she smiled, were too even not to be false, the subtly fluctuating features showing not so much astonishment as that a trick had been played (which it had) whose purpose she needed time to think about. Such solicitousness for her well being seemed less deserved because so unexpected. Drawn into a trap, she didn't know what to say. Those in the room wanted to hear words that she couldn't yet get from her lips, like what a wonderful family they were to have set up such fairy-tale splendour, arranged to celebrate the end of her ordeal.

Age had drawn lines on her forehead which he remembered emphasized as well on the young girl, after his telling an obvious lie, or weaving a clumsy fantasy to divert her from going somewhere he did not want to follow, or even only to astound her out of silence. A smile transformed the skin on her sometimes melancholy face, the same now as she looked over the culinary abundance brought by the women and spread over the table: sausages, slices of ham, sandwiches, various salads, and a large iced cake with a single candle in the middle as if to make it easy for her when so much had formerly been hard, or as if all the years looking after George were to be extinguished in a single breath. Or maybe it was to mark Year One of her new life.

She took in what had been done, lips half opened as if to speak, but once more changing her mind, not wanting them to think she was too astounded by their secret efforts. The scene would make a precious memory, and he thought that whoever awarded campaign medals for the Battle of Life weren't knowing or willing enough to give one to such as her. Maybe those calling happy birthday thought the same, taking her hand before letting others have their turn. She had registered him in that long preliminary gaze.

‘You'd better go and claim your kiss,' Arthur said.

The small box in his pocket, with its silver Celtic cross in a bed of cotton wool, had seemed the right present. Anything more elaborate would be showy, or facetious, or lack significance – not be worthy of her. No way of telling, it would have to do, too late to drive back and get something else. He had traipsed around Covent Garden, browsing at every stall till the glittering merchandise half blinded him. After a cup of watery coffee between forays he thought he might not go to the party, feeling so little enthusiasm in searching assiduously for token or trinket. Now, he was in the same room with her, and knew they had to talk.

‘Let the mob go first,' he said to Arthur. He foresaw a sad smile at the memory of their early days when he gave her the present: a press of the hand, even a quick kiss, though he had no right to one, nor even much desire. After saying hello he was only here to watch, an outsider if ever there was one, foolishly conspicuous, yet as welcome as anybody else. At the same time he felt as shy as a youth, and she the first girl he must try to get off with.

Jenny left whoever she was talking to, and stood before him. ‘I'm ever so glad you're here. You're the biggest surprise of all.'

‘I jumped at the opportunity to see you.'

‘I didn't expect to see you tonight, but I was hoping to meet you again some time.'

They'd played a game in her parlour after making love, or when sitting a few feet apart on a fallen tree at the edge of a field smelling of cornstalks at the end of summer, of looking deep and long into each other's eyes, and whoever blinked first didn't love the other. He looked away, wondering how it was that lost loves endured the longest.

‘And you drove all the way up from London especially?'

‘I couldn't not. As soon as I heard about the party.' He smiled, for it was true enough, but how genuine did it sound to her? She must know he'd come to see his family at the same time. ‘I got a letter from your daughter, and put the date in my diary, in big red letters.'

She held one of his hands in hers. ‘I'm glad you did. I can't tell you how much.'

If he gave her the small container in his pocket she would need to take her hands from his to see what it was. Yet he had to. ‘I brought you this. Happy birthday!'

She held the box, as if to make sure it was hers and would not be taken back, but didn't open it to see what was inside, which disappointed him, as if she thought it too insignificant. Or maybe she wanted to make the most of their meeting, and didn't want to lose the warmth of his hands either. ‘I'm still dazed about what I've found here tonight – and not only this' – she waved towards the tables. ‘I feel like a young girl again. But if only we could look as young as we feel! I'm seventy, I know, but I don't feel it at the moment.'

‘I suppose if anybody does feel their age they're dead from the neck up. But I thought you must be about forty when you came up the stairs. You were a real picture. I'll never forget it. Forty's all you looked.'

Such teasing could do no harm, since she knew the score, though her smile showed a multitude of emotions. ‘Ah, well, there are times when I feel a hundred.'

‘The same for all of us. But I've heard about your life. I can imagine what it was like.'

‘Can you?'

Well, he'd asked for that. Of course he couldn't. Idle talk was out of place. Her tone said that he didn't and never could, and he knew she was on the point of saying he didn't know one half, when she said it. Nothing more, either, that he could respond with, too great a gap, always had been, so much water under the bridge, such cruel differences separating them. It needed all the time of the years not spent together for them to say any more.

She put the present into her black handbag. ‘My eldest son's over there. Come with me and meet him.' Her warm hand drew him between two women, who smiled as if wondering whether the birthday would turn into a wedding.

‘Ronald,' Jenny said, ‘I want you to meet Brian. He's a very old friend of mine.'

Tall and tending to corpulence, he wore a navy-blue waistcoated suit, white shirt and a colourful reddish tie, stood with amiable dignity, his back to the bar, an aspect of being pleased with life, as if he scorned to question that there could be anything more to know about himself than had been obvious from birth, confident that such an attitude had done nothing but good – a prosperous hardworking man who took no nonsense from anybody but could be kindly as well.

The handshake was firm, his smile as if offering to be a friend for life, and that if he wasn't taken up it could be no fault of his. ‘She's often told us about you.'

‘I hope I didn't sound too much of a villain.'

He laughed. ‘No, it was the other way, mostly.'

If proof of belonging was that you had no secrets among the people you mixed with, then he was surely one of them. ‘Thank God for that!'

‘Ronald has his own business,' Jenny said, with some pride.

‘It sounds very grand.' He let his cigarette ash fall to the floor. ‘It's just a family thing, though we do well enough, a place called Leen Technology. I deal in software and superpower, you might say. I suppose you're all plugged into computers, with your job?'

‘Not yet.' Brian held up his pen. ‘This is the smallest word processor in the world! But when I do get wired up, and I'll have to, sooner or later, I'll call you.'

Ronald gave him his card. ‘Anytime. I'll sort out the best deal for you, as a friend of the family, plus all the advice to get yourself on line.'

Jenny introduced him to Ronald's wife Sylvia, a tall woman wearing a black and white dotted dress, with blonde hair pulled close to her head and ending in a short ponytail over the back of her neck. She had the full figure of a woman in her forties, worth getting to know, he thought, with those interesting lips and opaque cornflower blue eyes, his usual quick look confirming her as the most attractive woman in the room, though he didn't suppose, to go by her cool handshake, that he would get very far in trying to become more acquainted, especially at a 70th birthday party when he was known to be the same age.

‘Brian's come up specially from London,' Jenny said, which fact brought a smile from Sylvia: ‘That was good of you.'

He hoped to hear more, but she looked with a proud kind of vacancy into the crowd, sure she missed nothing by standing aloof. ‘I wanted to see her,' he said, though he hadn't thought of her for months or even years at a time. ‘She's always meant a lot to me.'

‘It's the same for the rest of us,' Sylvia said.

When Ronald offered him a drink he wanted to say yes, talk to him more, soak down a few jars in his and Sylvia's company, but was tugged away by some perverse instinct which nine times out of ten led him to refuse whatever might turn out to be enjoyable: ‘Thanks, but I've got one at our table over there.'

‘Any time you like, and it'll be my pleasure.'

They shook hands on it, and Jenny walked with her daughter-in-law to another part of the room.

The man with the microphone bellowed out words with the sincerity of an old-fashioned tuppenny hop. ‘You can't hear yourself think over that racket,' Arthur said, ‘never mind talk.'

The lyrics knocked at the back of his head, telling about love not being all it was said to be when a sweetheart walked off with your best friend. His performance enlivened the party, such a noise level that no one could hear unless they were shouted at, the pitch only normal to people whose ears had been battered by it all their lives, but the coarse-grained emery paper scraping back and forth across Brian's skull honed away what brains were inside.

Double-glazed windows in London cut down noise, but if he opened a window for a lungful of petrol-soaked air, the grinding of cars and thump of pneumatic drills, the screaming bandsaws from renovations in the next house, forced him to turn up Radio Three more than he cared to. Stereo systems in open-topped cars belted out jungle music that shook the backbone, and he craved a three-o-three Short Lee Enfield service rifle to pot one of the tyres, and kill the driver when he got out to look. People preferred overwhelming noise to quiet thoughts that would drive them insane, not knowing that only silence enabled you to be yourself.

‘If I open a pub door and hear this,' Arthur shouted, ‘I slam the bogger shut, and find another where it's quiet. The factory was bad, but this'll send me deaf if I stay much longer.' Avril was pale from the effort of leaving the house, and Arthur knew he must get her back to rest, whatever she said about not wanting to spoil their evening. ‘I don't think I can stand it much longer,' Eileen said.

The decibel count wiped away all functions of the brain or mind, eyes swivelling and hands twitching to close on the singer's throat. Brian wondered how much more he could take, and whether it could be used as a reason to leave. ‘I'm glad I'm not the only one who thinks so.'

‘It's not a bad performance,' Derek bawled. ‘At least it's got some melody' – though agreeing it was too loud. ‘I thought he was miming, but it's him right enough. They must have headhunted him from a miners' welfare.'

Arthur said he would have one more pint. ‘The noise makes it taste soapy.' Derek went for them, but Brian looked into the mass, hoping yet not hoping to see Jenny, though enough had been said, the experience tasted, time to cut, thinking he wouldn't find her yet impelled to try.

A bridgehead into the crush, careful not to knock drinks or tread on toes, he parted a man and a woman shouting to each other through their smiles. The noise seemed to blind as well as deafen. He waved to Ronald at the bar, and went to him, putting his ear close to get the response ‘I'm looking for Jenny.'

‘She must be somewhere. I'm sure we haven't lost her. Try another recce: you'll find her.'

She was talking to a man and his wife. ‘I have to go now,' he said.

‘You needn't shout. I can hear you.' Maybe everybody had ears that noise couldn't chasten. ‘I'm sorry you're going,' she said. ‘I really am.'

‘We'll leave you to your old flame,' the woman gave a dirty laugh, and pulled her husband away.

‘I'd like to stay, but I can see you've got lots to keep you busy. And Arthur's wife isn't feeling well. She's on chemotherapy.' To mention the noise would grate against the perfection of her party, and she might remind him of the indescribable sounds of the Goose Fair, or the dances at the youth club, or the bedlam in some of the pubs when singing began on a Saturday night.

‘Oh, I'm ever so sorry to hear that. I hope she'll be all right. But you haven't had anything to eat.' She pointed to food heaped on the large trestle table, where people were loading their paper plates. ‘You must be starving.'

‘No, I'm not, love.'

She held his hands. ‘Of all the people! If I'd known about the party I still wouldn't have expected you. They're such devils, springing it on me like this. When I came up the stairs I thought I was just going to have a meal with Ronald and Sylvia.'

‘They're fond of you, that's why they did it.'

‘I know. They've always been good to me.'

‘And you've been good to them.'

‘I don't know about that, though I did bring seven of 'em up. And I do love them all.'

He wondered if she would have stayed with George for so long if they'd had no children, then he knew that she would, on feeling the intense warmth from her hands. ‘I'll call for you at home next time, but I'll phone first so that you won't get such a shock.'