The Facts of Life (57 page)

After a few sharp rebukes, Miriam stopped crying on him and began to make herself useful, arranging and watering flowers, filling his little fridge with nutritious goodies – which he usually fed to other patients, the way he had distributed cake at choir school, to curry favour and ward off envy. She chatted to other morning visitors on her way up and down the corridor and made Jamie take exercise, walking slowly at his side, while he made his halting progress to the day room or the balcony, throwing him smiles of patient encouragement as though he were a valiant toddler again, leaning on his home-made pushcart. She tried to excuse Francis’s non-appearance, now saying he was dreadfully busy, now that he had a horror of hospitals.

‘He sent a card,’ Jamie silenced her. ‘A card with horses on it. That’s enough. I never wanted him to visit me when I was well, why should I start now?’

Miriam also started harping on about the Beards. No more sure than she had ever been which was his father, she nonetheless felt it her duty, as his mother, to give them all the chance of contacting him. He had no desire to hear from any of them, but encouraged her because the process of tracking them down gave her an occupation and Alison a source of amusement. Unfortunately the results of her research only depressed her. Two Beards had died of accidental overdoses and one in a sailing accident. One had become a successful Chicago restaurateur who sent Jamie a signed copy of his recipe book, and one had evaporated into the clouds of Tibetan Buddhism, leaving a trail of bad debts and a Californian indictment for mail fraud. Jamie said he hoped his father was the one who died at sea, because it was a romantic yet clean way to go, and they left the paternity hunt at that.

Miriam tried to teach him to paint. Amid the books and flowers and chocolates, someone had given him a sketch pad and a small set of watercolours. Jamie had no visual gift and quickly lost interest, but he soon found that the paints kept Miriam quiet. Ostensibly still teaching him by example, she executed little paintings of the view from his window, of bowls, of flowers, once, disastrously, of him. She rediscovered her old ability and soon, for all her shy protests, the nurses were pinning her work among the timetables on their noticeboard and circulating it among the other patients. She had to buy herself a second block of paper and became something of a ward celebrity.

Visiting in her lunch hours, Alison was often in too much of a rush to stay long, but she kept Jamie supplied with newspapers and magazines. She seemed anxious lest he lose touch with current affairs. He had never been so well informed to so little purpose. If she resented the extra time that Miriam spent with him, she hid it well. She never cried. Sometimes he wished she would, because he feared she was crying on Sam, who was less able to take it. The mask of resolute cheerfulness she wore in his presence fitted her ill. On several occasions it even drove him to behave badly with her, mounting displays of depression and unconstructive petulance so as to goad her into a more honest reaction.

Jamie had never felt that he and Sandy had much in common. He had always regarded her merely as an adjunct of his sister and was slightly perturbed when she began to call in without Alison, sometimes with friends, sometimes alone, always on the pretext of dropping in on the way to visiting somebody else. She made no attempt to hide what she was feeling. If she was in a bad mood, she dumped her feelings on his bed like so much heavy shopping, if her mood was high, she brought him ice creams in the shape of feet, trashy novels or spotted bandannas to wear in his pyjama pocket. She talked baldly about the progress of his ill health and made him do the same. He found they had more in common than he had imagined, and encouraged her in turn to regale him with details of her erotic conquests, finding he was as hungry for them as Alison had once been for his.

Sam’s visits were entirely different from any of the others. He was obviously frightened by what was happening, and Jamie found that he was having to reassure his lover rather than vice versa. As far as possible, their evenings together in hospital began to mimic ordinary evenings together in the flat. Sam would pace around a bit, drinking beer from a can, then flop on the bed and, between hugs and kisses, recount the comforting banalities of his day. They would eat, then, often not talking at all, they would lie arm in arm to watch television. He never left before Jamie had fallen asleep, however long this took. Sometimes Jamie woke again as Sam pulled his arm out from beneath him and the sight of the stolid figure stealing from the darkened room filled him with an unspeakable regret. Once he teased Sam that he must be looking elsewhere for sex. Sam was as furious as he was scandalised, however, his anger frightening in so confined a space. Having conjured up the possibility, though, Jamie returned repeatedly to it when he could not sleep, wondering how he would react if Sam were unfaithful. He suspected he would feel a kind of release; it would make him officially invalid, relieved of normal social duties and responses. Alison confided that sometimes, after visiting the hospital, Sam came to spend the night back at her house in Bow. She said it was because he felt unhappy being in the flat on his own, but Jamie wondered if it were not Sam’s way of removing himself from the temptation of having so discreet a love-nest at his disposal.

When he wasn’t being visited, Jamie found it impossible to avoid encounters with others on the ward unless he pretended to be asleep – a pretence which frequently melted into the real thing.

‘We have nothing in common but a medical affliction,’ he told Alison. ‘I don’t see why we should all be expected to get on. It’s Belsen up here, not a holiday camp, for Christ’s sake!’

But gradually his curiosity and the social divisiveness of their common condition got the better of his reluctance. Several of the twenty or so patients were, like him, walking wounded, and would drift in and out of each other’s rooms exchanging gossip, comparing symptoms and treatments, discussing visitors. Often they were accompanied by militant buddies or cheery but painfully tactful volunteers. One of these wore a badge saying
POSITIVE
, as though to assure patients he was one of them too and could be trusted. One of the more politically minded patients had even had HIV tattooed on his forearm. Relentlessly, Jamie found himself drawn into a kind of exclusive brotherhood founded on the ravages of an unexclusive virus.

For better or worse, this socialising slipped into all the spaces in his day when he was not being visited, emphasising the otherness, the healthiness of his visitors. When the two worlds overlapped, as when Sam arrived and froze in the doorway, finding him chatting to a patient whose body now displayed more purple lesion than healthy skin, or when his room was invaded by a shriekingly effeminate posse of two ex-waiters and a chorus boy during one of Miriam’s tranquil painting sessions, he felt guilty as an outwitted adulterer. Of course there were women on the floor too, and even, briefly, a pitifully undersized child, but these were often kept from joining in with garrulous ward society by the haunted, hostile presence of their families. Jamie once slipped into a woman’s room to return a video of
Come Into My Parlour
she had lent him. Her relatives were gathered around her bed in a premature wake. The stares with which they answered his polite greeting were so heavy with blame that he found himself shaking uncontrollably on his way back to his bed.

Christmas in Marrackech had not provided the restful break Edward had expected. Certainly the weather was delightful – like a warm, English spring – and the house Heini had borrowed was a lovely affair. It had big white and blue rooms built around a succession of miraculously quiet pools, gardens and courtyards where one could pass whole days oblivious to the grime and bustle in the alleyways beyond the high walls. Heini had not explained, however, that the house belonged to one of his more outrageous friends, an aristocrat who had put the respectable responsibilities of England behind him to seek as it were the wilder shores of love. The house was a temple to homoerotica. Thomas, of course, had possessed several such pieces, but had always camouflaged them among images of more conventional couplings. Here, wherever Edward’s eye or hand came to rest, there seemed to be a rippling Greek torso or willowy Hylas. Even in his bedroom, especially selected for him at Heini’s assurance that it held the calmest decor, the pretty watercolours proved on closer inspection to be of two-headed Cornish lads diving off rocks and romping by waterholes. Everything was in exquisite taste but the whole was so overtly thematic as to be oppressive to the unpersuaded mind. When, during dinner on the first evening, Heini began to tell a woman friend about his unexpected encounter with Edward’s grandson at a ball and how charming his young friend Sam had turned out to be, Edward flared up saying he thought the pair of them had behaved dreadfully, flaunting themselves in public. He also confessed he had not spoken to Jamie since. He had made a foolish spectacle of himself, not only bringing a jarring note into the festive proceedings but drawing on himself the woman’s only slightly indignant curiosity. She mocked him all evening as an interesting specimen of antiquated attitudes which was doubly galling for his sensing that she was right. For his part, Heini had seemed disappointed, even hurt, by his outburst. Edward saw why in the days that followed.

Heini began spending an inordinate amount of time with Mustapha, their host’s servant. Edward did his utmost not to notice and not to mind, passing peaceful days swimming and reading, but Heini’s clumsily disguised dalliance became a teasing presence forever on the edge of his vision. He had always known Heini was not the marrying sort, but whatever Heini did for pleasure, he had always done in secret and it was something he had had the good grace never to discuss. Now that an occasion patently had arrived where it needed at least acknowledging, Edward found himself tongue-tied. As the holiday progressed and Heini’s subterfuges – sudden ‘shopping’ excursions, ‘tedious’ visits to Mustapha’s family farm – came to seem increasingly pathetic, Edward caught himself wondering whether there might not be courage and even courtesy in the more honest approach Jamie had tried to take with him. He made several false starts on a letter to his grandson, tearing each one up when he felt it began to betray too much the struggle between his revulsion and his love. He saw no way out. As with Heini, what had been acceptable as a mere idea had become far harder to stomach when fleshed out and paraded beneath his gaze.

When his stay reached an end, he left Heini to enjoy a further week alone with Mustapha and his liberal women friends and flew back to Heathrow determined to do
something
to make his peace with his grandson, but had no clear idea what form this should take. He had bought Jamie a late Christmas present of a Moroccan bowl with a deep blue glaze and a crude brass rim. The fact that this was bought in Mustapha’s brother’s shop made this single purchase a sop to two guilts. He believed that the present would at least provide an excuse for he and Jamie to meet.

He wheeled his trolley out through customs and past the usual faintly accusatory line-up of chauffeurs holding hand-painted signs for passengers they had never met, and was startled to find Alison waiting for him. She tried to ask him how his trip had gone and said something about having left her car somewhere illegal and then, quite unexpectedly threw her arms round him and wept where they stood on the crowded concourse. Passers-by paid them little heed, hot displays of emotion and tearful reunions being idiomatic to so multicultural and nervous a setting. When she had regained enough control to blurt out why she was there and where she was about to drive him, he felt suddenly that they must be as glaring a presence in the crowd as a towering pair of naked Masai.

As she drove him into town, he asked her over and over the same bald questions, unable to digest her calm replies. She led him as far as the nursing station on Jamie’s ward then pointed the way and said, ‘I think it’s better if you go the rest of the way on your own and take your time. I’ll wait downstairs.’

He walked slowly along the gaudily decorated corridor. When a nurse asked if she could help him he was aware that he was still clutching some luggage and she had assumed him to be a newly arrived patient.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Could you tell me where I can find my grandson, James? Jamie. Jamie Pepper, that is.’

The tinsel and paperchains still strung about the place in wilful profusion highlit rather than disguised the wretched atmosphere. Recalling other hospitals – visits to his sister with her ruined mind, his old friend Thomas devoured by cancer, his parents-in-law wide-eyed with fear and his own imprisonment – he remembered asking similar questions and vainly entertained an irrational hope that she would deny all knowledge of the names he gave and send him cheerfully back to a life unscarred by alteration.

‘Of course,’ she said. ‘He’s down here past the Christmas tree. He’ll be so pleased you came.’

Sandy was passing on an especially satisfactory piece of scandal concerning a cabinet member who had been sounding forth against single mothers, when the door opened and his grandfather stood there, tanned and clutching a suitcase.

‘I came straight from the airport,’ he said.

‘Grandpa!’ Jamie was staggered. ‘I don’t think you’ve met. Sandy. My grandfather. Edward.’

‘Pleased to meet you.’ Sandy shook his grandfather’s hand. He nodded, eyes darting to the curious braids in what remained of her hair and down to her multiply pierced ear. ‘Er. I should be going,’ she added over her shoulder.

‘Don’t you want tea?’ Jamie asked her, not wanting to be left alone with his grandfather just yet having had so little time to prepare himself. ‘The trolley comes around soon.’