The Facts of Life (30 page)

Mr and Mrs Banks were marooned on the sofa by the piano, his wheelchair folded away as though to prevent escape. Plates of cake and biscuits clustered with several cooling cups of tea on the low table before them, votive offerings laid out to appease the bereaved for whom no-one could find sufficient words. Women passing before them composed their faces into kind smiles, men limited themselves to awestruck nods; attentions which isolated the couple still further. She had at last folded back her veil and her eyes flicked around the scene before her, the only living things in a face stony with tension. Thomas approached and managed a few sentences but even the need to react with nods and murmurs seemed to cause her and her husband pain, so he retreated, leaving his slice of seed cake – a confection he had never liked – on their impromptu altar.

He found Edward in the child’s bedroom, watching her as she somehow managed to sleep through the social roar.

‘We three,’ Thomas thought as he saw Edward’s expression soften on seeing who had come in. The young man held one hand spread, protective, on his daughter’s back. ‘We three alone.’ The blood quickened in him. There was a tightness in his chest. When Edward had lodged with him he used to slip into his bedroom some mornings when he was taking his bath, to kneel on the hard, worn rug beside the narrow bed and press his face into the sheets to breathe in their faint trace of male musk. He would do that again. He would do more. He didn’t care what people said. His gossiping students. The other fellows at Tompion. If he could be wife, husband, father, friend to the man before him, the world could go hang.

‘Sorry,’ Edward murmured. ‘I was hiding.’

‘Why not?’ Thomas said, shutting the door behind him. He stood nearby for a moment, looking down at the sleeping child then walked over to the small, barred window to hide the emotions he felt sure were emblazoned on his face. Someone on the landing met a friend and singly failed to disguise their unseemly laughter as a cough.

‘Well say something, Thomas,’ Edward said. ‘I can’t believe
you’re
at a loss for words.’

‘Actually I … I think I probably am,’ Thomas told him.

‘Please. Try.’

‘Well I …’ Thomas turned back to the window, looked out at the water-scarred landscape. ‘There’s no blame,’ he said at last.

‘Where?’

‘Here. In this. That’s the beautiful strength of natural disasters, plagues, acts of God, whatever; they sweep all before them. They’re inexorable. They leave no space for if-onlys. They’re nobody’s fault.’

‘Except God’s.’

‘Oh. Him. Well even He isn’t to blame. Not really. It’s like a momentary lapse of concentration. A trace of His human side.’

Thomas stopped rambling. The preposterous image of a benignly bearded deity hung between them for a few seconds, then Edward stood abruptly and went to examine himself critically in the looking-glass. His voice had one of its rare moments of faintly Germanic inflection.

‘Thomas, this is of no help whatsoever.’

‘No. It isn’t. Sorry.’

Thomas sat on the edge of the bed. After a moment, Edward came back and slumped beside him. His lack of tears was terrifying, a supreme exercise of control.

‘I can’t bear to lose Miriam too,’ he said.

‘Why should you?’

‘Think, Thomas. She needs a mother. A woman to love her. They were talking about it last night. Miriam already has a bed at Sally’s parents’. A drawer full of clothes. But Sally’s mother is too old, really. I don’t think she’s well.’ Almost absently, Edward took Thomas’s hand again and pressed it between his. Thomas felt a tremendous urge to lift the other hand and stroke Edward’s cheek. He had never felt so tempted by danger. With one touch he might destroy everything. He raised his other hand but found it reaching instead for the folded note in his pocket.

‘Here,’ he said. ‘There was a late delivery of flowers at the church. Beautiful ones. Lilies. Rosemary for remembrance. This was with them.’

‘Yes?’ Edward took the note, releasing Thomas’s hand. He held it unopened on his knees.

‘It’s really not a problem,’ Thomas assured him. ‘Of course Mrs Banks wants to help, and of course she’ll want to have Miriam to stay occasionally, take her for walks and so on. But she’s not strong or young enough to do it full time. All you need is a nanny. There are agencies. Reputable ones. So I’m told. Obviously you’d have to pay the woman you hired to live in, but money need not be a problem.’

‘You really think so?’ Edward’s face lit up. The thought had clearly never occurred to him and he had been worrying himself into a state of needless turmoil. Thomas relished the advantage of wisdom. ‘Would you help me?’ Edward asked.

‘Of
course
I’ll help. Edward, you must realise I’d do anything –’

‘And you think a nanny would be prepared to come and live out here? There’s no question of my moving, you see.’

Thomas could only hesitate.

‘Well … Well yes. Of course she would,’ he said.

A handful of words like so many bullets had torn his dream to tawdry ribbons. Edward talked on, his mind entering a comfortable channel, about the legal impossibility of selling The Roundel, of how rooted he was there now, of how it now belonged to Miriam. Miriam woke at the excitement in his voice and he lifted her free of her bedding. Her eyes focused sleepily on Thomas, a hint of challenge in their stirring curiosity. Thomas stared back at her and, as he sensed the exclusivity of the bond between father and daughter, muttered automatic promises to seek recommendations among the wives of other senior fellows.

Together they walked out onto the landing and down the stairs to where there was soon a circle of admiring arms stretching out to caress the now boisterous child. When Mrs Banks had stirred from her sofa, seizing on a role, and taken Miriam from his arms, Edward opened the envelope and read the note. Thomas was perplexed to see two quite different emotions reflected on his face. First he blushed and began to fold the note away again then, seeing Thomas watching him, he smiled and displayed what seemed like manufactured amazement, showing the note to the people around him, avoiding Thomas’s gaze.

‘Myra Toye!’ he exclaimed. ‘Myra Toye and Sir Julius sent flowers and even wrote a letter with them. Look! Wasn’t that kind?’

Thomas thought he seemed quite disproportionately pleased with what was surely a routine gesture from an assiduous professional, and felt a stab of jealousy. He fed Edward’s pleasure, however, and with it his own disapproval, by explaining that she had insisted the florist deliver the flowers to the church himself, all the way from the studios, so that Edward should receive a note in her own hand. Others exclaimed, impressed, and asked to see the ordinary scrap of paper which, by the mere addition of a certain name, had been transformed for them into a thing of worth.

After another cup of tea and a second, this time inescapable, slice of seed cake, it was with a certain gratitude that Thomas saw the same, broad-shouldered cab-driver walk hesitantly through the front door. His sly, inquisitive smile as Thomas greeted him and suggested they stop off for a drink on their drive back into Rexbridge, suggested that, romantic disappointments notwithstanding, life would not be entirely without unexpected treats.

They reminded me of photographs of the victims of the Holocaust concentration camps at the end of the ’39–’45 war. They were mostly in their middle twenties … I wanted some way of dignifying their deaths. I longed for music, poetry; something which would restore to them some of their human dignity.

Dr Anne Bailey, describing her
first encounter with AIDS in Uganda

THE PLAGUE, CHANNEL 4
,
WORLD AIDS DAY, 1993

Edward had been failing to concentrate on his work all morning and when he heard tyres on gravel and looked up to see an unfamiliar car swing up the drive, he left the sequencer with a kind of relief and went out to meet it. Ordinarily he would have received such a person, if at all, at his flat in London. Over the years, he had kept the flat studiously impersonal, the kind of place one could lend to visiting colleagues or let out for a year with the minimum of preparation. Journalists eagerly agreed to meet him there only to be sent away disappointed by the lack of photographs, or mementoes. But this one, the biographer, with all the worrying Jamesian overtones her profession carried, had telephoned beseechingly once too often and had caught him, exhausted and uncaring, after a three-week European tour. Then his record company’s publicist had joined forces with her and Edward’s weakened resistance had crumbled. So here she was.

She was young, svelte, freshly dressed. Unaware that he was padding over the garden behind her, she took a pocket camera from her briefcase and snapped a few quick photographs of the house. When she heard him cough, she slipped the camera away, surreptitious as a thief. For a second he caught the frown on her unguarded face, then she looked up, turned a bright, almost friendly, smile upon him and came to shake his hand.

‘Mr Pepper. What an honour. I’m Venetia. Venetia Peake.’

Her quick appraisal of his face was palpable, like the brisk strokes of a nurse’s flannel.

‘Come on in,’ he told her. ‘I’ll make us some coffee.’

She seemed disappointed that they were heading away from The Roundel.

‘I haven’t lived in there for decades,’ he explained. ‘It’s always belonged to women, and I was only ever a caretaker. My daughter lived there for a while, with a group of her friends in the late sixties. A commune of sorts, though rather half-hearted. She got married a few years ago and moved away, so my grandchildren use the place. They both live in London so it’s quite peaceful here again.’

‘Don’t you ever get lonely?’

‘I love to be alone.’

They arrived at the single storey studio whose modern bricks had almost disappeared beneath a cushion of clematis and rampaging jasmine. He smiled, waving her in. ‘Besides,’ he added, ‘this place is a damned sight cheaper to heat.’

‘Doesn’t the river ever flood?’

She realised too late the gaffe she had just made.

‘Frequently,’ he told her, amused at her little discomfited pout. ‘That’s why I had them build this on a bank. Do you take milk?’ She shook her head, pausing to note a slightly battered Oscar statuette doing duty as a doorstop.

‘I thought you had two,’ she said.

‘I use the other as a paperweight,’ he told her, gesturing towards his desk. She arranged herself on a sofa and took some files and a tape recorder from her bag. He served the coffee then sat across from her. Now that girls were wearing short skirts yet again, they had taken to sitting the way their grandmothers were taught to do, with ankles crossed and legs tucked chastely to the side. She had good legs. Nervous again, he tried to seize the initiative. ‘So tell me. How’s Myra?’

‘Fine. Radiant. Hard at work on a fourth series. Do you watch it?’

‘Afraid not.’ He glanced around them in explanation. ‘I don’t watch anything.’ The studio had always been a television-free zone. He occasionally sneaked an evening in front of the one his granddaughter had installed in The Roundel, but there was no need for this journalist to know that, not least because it was often Myra’s old films that he watched.

‘She says hello by the way,’ Venetia Peake continued. ‘Sends her love.’

Edward merely raised his eyebrows and nodded noncommittal acceptance.

‘So she knows we’re going to talk?’

‘Yes, but not how deeply.’

Edward stalled, unsettled by the threat of steel in her tone.

‘I don’t quite see what I can tell you,’ he began. ‘Myra and I saw each other at the studios of course, but I’m not sure there’s much I can add to the anecdotes you’ll already have.’

Ignoring his disclaimers, she clicked down the record button on her dictation machine and a little microphone popped out of it towards him.

‘You don’t mind?’ she asked. He shrugged. ‘Perhaps we should start with some photographs from around forty-eight and forty-nine. I want to be sure I’ve identified them right. Who’s this?’ Edward looked and smiled. It was Myra in aviator gear clowning with Howard Winks.

‘He was a lighting man called Howard Winks. This was during
Reach for the Stars
. He died in a fire in fifty-seven. Bad heart.’

‘And how about this?’

Edward looked again. Myra linking arms with two men in dark overcoats and hats.

‘The one on the left is Sam Hirsch,’ he told her. ‘I recognise the one on the right but I can’t remember his name. Jim? John?’

‘James?’ she prompted.

‘That’s it. James something. James McBean. He did makeup. Sam was hair.’

‘Myra and her Boys, eh?’

‘That sort of thing, yes.’ Edward thought back, remembering raucous laughter and the hot, dark undertow of his jealousy. ‘Myra with her Boys.’

She produced more photographs, six or seven. Two he could not place at all. In one, Myra was being kissed by someone, clearly unaware of the photographer.

‘And what about this?’

Another of Myra. Myra curled in a chair in an outsize man’s dressing gown and little else, one small foot caught in surprising detail against the dark fabric of the chair cover.