The Facts of Life (42 page)

‘But he wasn’t yours. You said he wasn’t interested and that I could have a go.’

‘Well I didn’t mean it,
all right
?’ she snapped. She was as shocked as he that she had suddenly blurted her true feelings, and only just managed to veil the awkwardness with a wry, ‘Had you fooled for a moment, didn’t I? So. Tell Momma,’ she mocked on, thorns tightening around her heart. ‘You’re really truly smitten?’

‘I dream about him,’ he admitted. ‘I keep seeing him in the street and finding it’s just a lookalike, someone with his hair or his red shirt. It’s as though I’ve been bitten by a vampire and gotten sick.’

‘That’s not funny.’

‘But you know what I mean.’

‘I’ve never been there,’ she said grimly. ‘But I read a lot of novels. You’re in love.’

‘But I
can’t
be.’

‘Why should
you
be immune?’

‘Well
you
are.’

‘I’m not immune,’ she explained ruefully. ‘I’m just naturally good at dodging the darts.’

‘You
did
want him too, though. Didn’t you?’ he asked, touching her sleeve across the table in a way that riled her hugely.

‘For a while,’ she confessed, ‘then I stopped. It’s stopped hurting. But you already knew that. At least I sincerely hope you did.’

‘Do you mind me … you know?’

‘Would it make any difference if I did?’

‘Alison, I –’

‘James,
please
,’ she protested with a bitter laugh. ‘I was joking! Do stop casting me as the vengeful frustrated harpy! Why should I mind?’ Even as she spoke the words, she saw again the truth in them and felt her face soften towards him. There had been many occasions, throughout their entwined lives, when she had needed to prove she was not the fierce older sister of his imaginings – when he had spilled modelling paint on her pink dress, when he had drawn pictures in the margins of her schoolbooks, when he had blabbed some secret of theirs to Miriam, when she had caught him, aged eight or nine, curled in an upstairs corner wrapped in one of the better-looking Beards’ dirty workshirts, believing himself unobserved. Remembering these times, she saw his face lighten under her kinder gaze.

‘Why should I be anything but happy for you?’ she asked, adding, to dilute the sugar, ‘And now you’ve got me sounding like Ol’ Big Hair.’

‘But I’m
not
happy,’ he said. ‘I’m fast becoming a wreck. It’s only been a week and I swear I’m already losing weight. I’ve tried looking at other men and I don’t feel a thing. I look like shit. I feel like someone in one of those unreadable Judith Lamb books you like.’

‘Ah,’ she said, mocking him, ‘but I have your passport to Oz.’

She enjoyed smiling mysteriously. For a second his interest kindled then was quenched by doubt.

‘How do you mean?’ From his weary tone, he plainly thought she was teasing.

‘I can’t promise that he’ll be interested back, but I’d imagine you’ll stand a better chance if he sees you’ve gone to the trouble of tracking him down, and that you’re prepared to make a public fool of yourself.’ She turned the screw on his suffering.
As close to vengeful, frustrated harpy as I get
, she thought, wryly.

‘But how do I find him?’ he pleaded.

‘I know which building site he’s working on.’

She laughed as Jamie made to leave the wine bar on an immediate search. She had never seen him at the mercy of his emotions before. The spectacle had her utterly beguiled.

‘He won’t be there now, you prat,’ she chuckled.

‘Course not.’ He sank sadly back to his chair. She stroked his hand, touched his cheek.

‘He’ll keep another night, surely?’

‘You don’t know what I’m going through.’

‘Oh, for pity’s sake, you’re not the first.’

‘Yes but –’

‘Look.’ She took a napkin from a glass on the table, found her pen and drew him a thumbnail sketch, showing how to find the hospital building site. ‘It’s not that far from Lloyd’s,’ she pointed out. ‘You can walk there straight after work. You can even nip over in your lunch hour if you’re truly so desperate.’

Jamie took the napkin and pored over it, then smiled his old, hunter’s smile.

‘Thanks,’ he said, almost shyly. ‘Thanks, Ali.’

‘It’s just a napkin,’ she scoffed. ‘You’ve still got the hard bit to do.’

But he was carefully folding the scarlet paper into his wallet, not listening. She raised her glass.

‘Here’s to true love,’ she murmured, ‘and the happy stability of the single state.’

They finished the bottle between them, lapsing via his guilty questions about the concert, into a rare wallow in reminiscences of the old, messy days, before Miriam had married. She recalled the times when he returned for the school holidays, slowly reacclimatising to the patchouli-scented, bead-fringed chaos where, as a pupil at a local day school, she had waited impatient months, the solitary child. He remembered the long heady days of their summer holidays when they had been left in charge of the commune’s craft stall in Rexbridge market, unwisely judged mature enough to mind it on their own. Giggling at their gloomy corner table, long after their candle had burnt out and the other office workers had staggered off into the night, they indulged in the game of which they never tired – guessing, from an old group photograph Alison carried, talismanic, in her wallet, which of the Beards could have been their fathers.

Alone again, in a late tube train home, she watched a boy and girl who had remained standing even though the carriage was almost empty, so as to be able to lean against a glass partition and kiss. The wine began to have its usual depressive effect on her mood. She looked away and stared in the other direction. A much older couple, together some twenty-five or thirty years, she would guess, sat with great bags of shopping on their laps, intently discussing something. They were forever interrupting each other, their voices softly interleaving, the pacing of their phrases unconsciously worn to a perfect fit from years of proximity. Alison perceived a kind of deflated tenderness between them. The woman looked up and caught her staring, so she turned aside and read a short, dejected poem on a poster overhead, then fell to returning her reflection’s look of hollow-eyed reproach.

Like one admitting at last to middle age, or the need for more sensible hair, she realised she had become one of those women who spent so much free time with homosexual men that she uprooted herself from the possibility of any but a vicarious fulfilment. Now that she had stooped to pandering for her brother and a man she had wanted for herself, her past denials of the pathetic truth were futile. She thought of taking out her address book to prove that she had plenty of heterosexual male friends, but knew in advance they would all be either married, hopeless or dull. She could not stop working at the helpline – for better or worse, the people there were her intimates. Forcing herself to list the options left her, she came up with only two: to make a vow to accept every social opportunity that came her way, however unpromising, or to step off the romantic treadmill altogether and convince herself that she was spoilt for straight men and that her happiness did not depend on the unforeseeable arrival of that elusive He. Both options seemed equally tragic, but the second at least preserved her pride and self-rule. Appalled at the pattern her life had assumed, she toyed with the idea of asking someone to recommend a psychotherapist. Therapy, Cynthia was forever saying, was like the Tarot; best approached when one had a single, burning issue to resolve. Women who prefer men who prefer men seemed as hot an issue as any.

The first thing she noticed when she let herself in was the lingering smell of burnt toast, the second was Sam’s old coat, slung over the back of a kitchen chair. Music was coming from upstairs. Something bright, new and American her grandfather had given her, with a warning that it was banal, but which she liked playing as she drifted off to sleep. She found Sam flat out across the sofa, still dusty from the site, one arm thrown across his sleeping eyes against the glare from the lamp by which he had been reading. She stood watching him for a moment, wondering whether she was kind, or indeed right, to unleash on him the complications her brother would surely bring. Then she faded out the music, clicked off the lamp and retreated to her empty bed.

‘This is my bed,’ she told herself. ‘My comfortable bed. My bed which I am
lucky
to have all to myself.’

She lay there, hands hugged for comfort between her thighs, and wondered, as she had often caught herself wondering that summer, whether she wanted a child, a new job or an uncomplicated lover and whether the three were, by their very natures, mutually exclusive. Perhaps, she thought, as she drifted off to sleep, it would be wisest to leave the visit to a therapist until she could make up her mind.

The site lay on the eastern perimeter of the City or the western fringe of the East End – depending on one’s priorities – where banks and trading houses began to give way to lower-rent businesses and still lower-rent housing and the mixture of private and public domains was nicely reflected in a scattering of sinisterly stylish eighteenth century churches. The new hospital was rising from the derelict shells of a Victorian glue factory and a tannery, which had once added their distinctive stenches to the ripe London air. The design was clean and white, not so very different from the great new offices in Docklands. In order to help pay back some of the building costs, there was to be a shopping precinct under the hospital at street level, with restaurants and boutiques to tempt visitors away from their troubles and into debt. The ambulance and mortuary exits were to be placed considerately down a side street and the chimney outlet from the incinerator was cunningly designed so as to recycle valuable energy back into the heating system. The locals might have been grateful for the erection of this gleaming temple to health and commerce had two perfectly serviceable Victorian hospitals, admittedly without shopping precincts, not been closed down in the area the previous year. The same building contractor was due to move on to the older buildings once the new one was finished, to begin converting their unwieldy red-brick spaces into ‘novelty’ flat-office hybrids coyly dubbed
ateliers
.

Alison had been joking when she suggested Jamie would have time to visit the site in his lunch hour, but he had contemplated doing so in all seriousness. He had spent the night in a fever of erotic anticipation, the morning in turmoil at his inability to focus on the urgent work in hand. He had forgotten, however, that it was his secretary’s birthday and had been forced to spend the lunch hour in liquid cheer with her and other colleagues. At last, at around four, he could bear it no longer and, pretending to have thrown up in the gents and be ‘not feeling too hot’, he sloped off early. He no longer needed Alison’s rudimentary map, having already compared it with the
A to Z
and scorched the relevant details onto his memory. It took him nearly twenty minutes to reach the place, weaving across streams of pre-rush hour traffic, diving crossly through slow-moving clots of fellow pedestrians. He was panting slightly when he arrived.

Jostled by shoppers and schoolchildren, he stood his ground beside a bus shelter and scanned the network of scaffolding. It was definitely worth a resounding ‘oooh’ – icons of hackneyed homoerotic fantasy were everywhere. Scantily clad in cut-away shorts and heavy boots, three labourers heaved a pre-constructed window frame into place. A fourth, on the level above, his thick arms ending in grotesque padded gloves, his barrel chest spattered with mortar, carried a concrete block as lightly as if it were styrofoam. There were so many men at work that he had to force his eyes to search the site systematically, one level, one section, at a time. He wished he were in jeans and an old tee-shirt. Dressed in his suit, he felt like the Dirk Bogarde character in
Victim
. He remembered, with disgust, a conversation at Sunday night’s Holland Park dinner party where his barrister host had rolled his eyes discussing the latest ‘piece of rough’ he claimed to have seduced. He tugged off his tie and rolled it into a pocket then slung his jacket over one shoulder. Now he felt like the Dirk Bogarde character on holiday.

At last he saw him. He had passed over him twice, not recognising him because he had shucked his coat and shirt, but his eye was suddenly drawn back to the grimy bandanna tied around Sam’s neck. As he watched, Sam stopped in his work beside a cement mixer to pull off the piece of scarlet cloth and wipe his face with it. He wasn’t tanned all over like the other builders – evidently it was rare for heat to overthrow his modesty – and once Jamie had spotted him, his paler skin made him easy to find again in the toing and froing high on the walkways that encompassed the bright, emerging walls. As Sam tied the bandanna back about his neck, he seemed to notice Jamie down on the pavement and froze for a moment. Jamie could wait no longer and raised an arm.

‘Hi!’ he shouted. ‘Sam! Hi!’

At this distance it was hard to gauge Sam’s expression but as his hands dropped back from his neck, he raised one of them in a kind of American Indian greeting, then glanced about him. Jamie tried to beckon him down to street level but Sam shook his head then pointed to the site office Portakabin and beckoned in turn. It was a test.

‘Very well,’ Jamie thought. As he began to cross the road, he glanced back up and saw that Sam had gone back to work.

‘I’ve come to see, er, Sam,’ he told the woman behind the rudimentary desk. She looked him up and down but betrayed no surprise. Her accent was breathily west-coast Irish. ‘You’ll need one of these, love,’ she said, handing him a yellow hard hat. ‘Sign the book,’ she added, ‘and don’t keep him long.’