Golden Hour (10 page)

“Whatever you like, darling. How long are you staying, Toby?”

Toby lowers the sandwich from his mouth and gives Laura a slow smile.

“Not long at all,” he says. “Couple of nights. If that's okay.”

“He can go in Jack's room,” says Carrie. “He's Jack's friend.”

Henry has now had the opportunity to take in their unexpected guest.

“So you've been traveling,” he says. “Gap year, is it?”

“That sort of thing.”

“So which college are you heading to?”

“No college.”

“Oh, right. Straight into earning your living, eh?”

“No earning. Just living.”

He says it so simply it silences them all. Carrie is entranced. Everything he says and does seems to her to be perfect.

“You must have indulgent parents,” says Henry.

“I suppose so,” says Toby. “I never met my father. I haven't spoken to my mother for years.”

Another silence. Toby finishes his sandwich.

“Come on,” says Carrie. “I'll show you where you can sleep.”

He follows her upstairs. Jack's room looks uncharacteristically tidy. His teddy bear has been put on the neatly made bed.

“You can use my bathroom,” says Carrie. “It's still called the children's bathroom. I'll get you a towel.”

“That's your room, is it?”

He's looking through the half-open door of Carrie's room. On the far wall hangs Anthony Armitage's portrait of her. Toby is staring at it. He moves to the doorway to see it better. He looks from the portrait to Carrie.

“It was done ages ago,” says Carrie.

“It's good,” says Toby.

“Yes. It's good.”

She leaves him to have a shower and a rest, but as he does so she tracks his every sound. She can't help herself. He fascinates her. She hears the splash of the water and its gurgle as it drains. She pictures him naked, glistening, toweling himself. She hears the bathroom door open, and his light footsteps, and the door to Jack's room close.

Will he lie down on the bed and sleep? For how long?

She tries to recall him from prep-school days, but she barely knew him. He was Jack's friend. She's not heard Jack mention him since.

The things he says.
No earning, just living
. And those eyes! He's not beautiful, but he's something else that's so much more potent. He's unique. He's like no one she's ever met.

She wonders what he makes of her. Just some boring girl. Carrie knows there's nothing special about her, not at first
glance anyway. She's not pretty and she's not a clever talker. Whatever she has that makes her interesting is hidden from view. She's never shown her songs to anyone, or sung them to anyone.

I'd better be a friend of yours, he said. And he liked the portrait. Not many do.

Then there are footsteps across the landing and a tap on her door.

“Yes?”

He looks into her room. His hair is wet from his shower, slick to his head, and he's wearing Jack's bathrobe. He looks fresh and young.

“You think Jack would mind if I borrowed some of his clothes while I get mine washed?”

“No, of course not,” says Carrie.

“Okay if I lie down for a while?”

“Sleep as much as you want. Do you want to be woken for lunch?”

“For supper, maybe.”

He goes back to Jack's room. Carrie sits on her bed and shivers.

I was wrong. He's beautiful.

She puts her arms round herself and hugs herself tight. She rocks from side to side on the bed. She's trying to stop it happening but already it's too late. She's caught. It's going to hurt and there's nothing she can do to stop it.

The program went out yesterday evening on Radio 5, but thanks to the wonders of the Internet she can catch up with it today in the privacy of her study. Not her study: Liz Dickinson is anxious not to let it be established that this former back pantry is adequate as her work space. She's only camping here until they can convert the old cart lodge into an office for Alan. Then she in her turn can take over the room that seems to have been known, by the previous occupants, as the parlor. What on earth do you do in a parlor?

She navigates on her laptop through the BBC website. The program is called
Men's Hour
and is billed as the male rejoinder to the venerable
Woman's Hour
. Mark, her section editor, has asked for five hundred words.

Before clicking on Listen Again, putting off the moment when she has to concentrate, Liz calls her mother's carer, Bridget, again, and again she gets no answer. Then, seeking further cause to avoid her work, she remembers that she hasn't checked with Alan about Saturday evening. She jumps up and crosses through the living room, where her son Caspar is lying on the floor making something strange out of Lego. You pay a fortune for private education and they spend half their life on holiday.

“Mum,” he says, in a reasonable sort of voice, “I need to take more exercise.”

“What are you talking about, Cas?”

“I thought you could take me to the skate park.”

“Not now, darling. I just can't.”

This is the one downside to their move, from Cas's point of view. He had just started to get good on his skateboard. Liz recalls guiltily that promises were made.

“Maybe Dad can take you.”

She finds Alan staring out of the parlor window.

“The Broads have asked us to dinner on Saturday. I said yes.”

“Why? What about Cas?”

He sounds aggrieved, as she knew he would.

“You like Henry. We'll find a baby-sitter.”

“Look at that!” he says, pointing accusingly out of the window at the golden day, at the sun on the distant Downs. “How am I supposed to work?”

“Don't work,” says Liz. “Go and watch them shooting your film.”

One of Alan's screenplays is actually being filmed at last, and he's so conflicted about his work that he won't go and visit the set. He keeps shifting his reason for not going, but Liz knows him well. The screenplay changed so much in development that he feels it's no longer his baby, or perhaps that it's some kind of bastard baby. He talks about it angrily, as if he hates it. Liz tries to be sympathetic, but as a working journalist herself she's all too used to the compromises of the game. You do the work, you take the money, and you move on.

“They don't want the writer hanging round,” says Alan.

“They're not going to send you away. Come on. Go and say hello to your dog.”

The dog, a sheepdog, is the only part of the story that has remained from the long-ago first draft. Now in its final form
it's a talking dog. This has become something of a family joke. Cas wants to know how it talks.

“It won't really talk,” says Alan. “It's just film trickery.”

The fact is he's embarrassed. In the film the dog swears.

“Go on,” says Liz. “Take Cas.”

“Maybe tomorrow,” says Alan.

He's done nothing at all to settle himself in the parlor. It's a pretty room, square in shape, with two deeply recessed windows that look out toward the Downs. Being Alan, he finds the view distracting. When the cart lodge is converted he's going to have a window that looks across the yard toward the house. This conversion is more Liz's idea than Alan's. Left to himself he would never change anything.

“You haven't picked up a call from Bridget, have you?”

“I haven't picked up a call from anyone.”

Alan never answers the phone if she's in the house. What does that say about him? You could call it a kind of trust, that he's content for her to be the gatekeeper to his life. But it feels more like evasion.

“I don't know what's happened to Bridget,” says Liz. “She just abandoned my mother last night.”

“You'd better ask her.”

“I've left endless messages. I don't understand. I thought she was more responsible than that. It means I'll have to go round and deal with Mum myself.”

Alan nods, but he's not listening. He heard it all last night, and gave such sympathy as he could then. His mind's on other things. Or avoiding other things.

“If you won't go and see your film, then take Cas to the skate park.”

“Yes, okay. I don't mind doing that.”

Liz returns to her desk. She picks up a biro and clicks on the
program and starts listening again. A little to her surprise, it turns out to be quite interesting. Andy McNab, once of the SAS, talks convincingly about how he loves his wife but “wants the chance to hang out with his mates.” He wants to be all lads together. Her mind drifts. She thinks about Alan. Why doesn't he have a gang of mates? He never goes to the pub. Maybe that's why he gets so low. Maybe he needs male friends. What is it men talk about when they're on their own? In the old days, when the ladies withdrew from the dinner table, leaving the men to their port and cigars, what did the men talk about? Politics? Sex?

Liz's biro scribbles away, jotting down thoughts in note form to work up into her article.

Can men and women ever really be friends? Isn't it always about something else? A silent dialogue conducted alongside or beneath the audible conversation, an exchange of signals sent and received. Am I still attractive? Do I still exist as a sexual being? God knows, it's not as if we want to be forever seducing. But helpless in the grip of our self-doubt we smile and dimple in mixed company. Is that why we prefer to gather in gender-segregated groups? The girls out on the town, the lads watching the match, the hen party, the stag party, which by the way should be called the cock party. There's a comfort in not being on show, and why shouldn't the boys feel it as much as the girls? The laddish pubs and the gentish clubs, not bastions of male superiority after all, but hiding places.

Men's fear of women. A theme to write up one day. Look at the great world religions, Christianity, Islam, Judaism: all obsessed with maintaining men's dominance over women. No wonder they're all in crisis. Women priests, homosexuality, child abuse, abortion, contraception, veiling, stoning for adultery. What is organized religion but an enormous prison built by men to contain the threat of women?

A little over-ambitious for five hundred words. She has paused Listen Again to make notes. Now, before she can resume
Men's Hour
, the doorbell rings.

Why is it always me who gets interrupted? Why does Alan assume I'll answer the doorbell?

Liz realizes then that she's criticizing Alan to herself a lot of the time these days, and it scares her. She doesn't want to turn into a nagging wife. Also she has only to think back nine years to her former life to regain the shock of gratitude his love once gave her. And truth to tell, she still experiences a little tremble of happiness every night when she gets into bed and there he is—always in bed first—and she feels the warmth of his body beside hers. Not exactly a sexual happiness: it's more a kind of comforting, a nightly reminder that she's not alone. And there's the sex, too. So much chatter about sex these days it's hard to know how important it really is. Americans say to each other in bed, “Do you want to fool around?” Sex as folly, sex as a childish game.

We fool around, Alan and me, and as the years go by it seems more and more precious.

Liz opens the front door and there's Bridget, her mother's carer.

“Oh, Bridget! There you are!”

“I thought I'd best come round,” she says.

She speaks slowly and ponderously, as if this is an official matter. Liz takes her into the kitchen and puts on the kettle for tea. Bridget sits down at the kitchen table, folding her hands in her cumbersome lap. She wears tracksuit trousers and a fawn-colored woolen cardigan with a zip.

“What on earth happened, Bridget?” says Liz.

She intends to put the question in a neutral tone, but somehow her actual feelings come through. Bridget senses the accusation.

“I did as I was asked,” says Bridget, her broad fleshy features setting into a stubborn scowl. “Your mum, she can be a devil.”

“You know I found her on the floor? God knows how long she'd been there. She says you walked out on her.”

“She told me she'd put herself to bed. You go away, she told me.”

Bridget has gone a little pink and is breathing faster.

“She told you she'd put herself to bed?”

“I do my best,” says Bridget. “I like to give good service. She asked me to go and I went.”

“But Bridget, you know she needs help going to bed.”

“I know it, of course I know it. Time to come to bed, Mrs. D, I told her. But she won't do it. You go away, she says to me. No please or thank you, like I'm a dog to be shooed out of the house. And then I was an hour past my time, and I've got a life too, not that you'd know it. Come to bed, Mrs. D, I told her. Go away, she says. What am I to do? I can't pick her up with my own arms and carry her to bed like a baby. She's got a will, that mum of yours, oh she's got a will. I can't make her do something if she don't want to do it. I didn't like leaving her there in the garden, it was dark by the time I left, but what was I to do? Stay there all night? You know I take my responsibilities serious, Liz, you know I do. But your mum, she's got a deal of spirit, don't get me wrong, but oh, she's got a will.”

“She refused to let you put her to bed?”

“Again and again and again.”

Liz feels gripped by a helpless rage. After all the efforts she's made to find a carer, after the false starts and the wrong choices, she had thought that at last it was working. Bridget might not be the most lively of companions, but she is conscientious and reliable. And now it's all going wrong.

“Do you know why she didn't want you to put her to bed?”

“She gets a devil in her, is all I can say. She's like a naughty child, that's what she's like. She won't be told. But she speaks her mind all right. I'm not going to speak to her disrespectful, but she can treat me like dirt.”