The Facts of Life (71 page)

‘Sam. Sam! It’s you. We need
you
. I’d need your help.’ Why was she persuading him? Had she no pride? Evidently not. ‘You know the house,’ she went on. ‘You know about building.’

‘I’m not an architect.’

‘So? We get an architect if we need one. And we’ll have to talk to planners too, over change of use and so on. But you can build. You could choose your own workmen and oversee the work. And then, if you were happy to, you could stay on and help in other ways. Jesus, you’ve just had more experience than most volunteers ever get.’

‘I’m not sure I could go through all that again. Even with strangers.’

‘But you’d help with the building?’

‘I dunno.’

He stood, restless, nervously shaking out his long limbs as he walked over to the window and its view of the grey-brown river. She jumped up to follow him.

‘Please,’ she said, reaching up to touch his shoulder. ‘Having you would mean more than having the money.’

‘Well
that’s
a lie for a start,’ he laughed bitterly.

‘Okay. So we’ll need every pound we can beg and borrow. But the sentiment’s true. We’ll need you too. Please, Sam.’ She took a deep breath. ‘This has nothing to do with what happened on my birthday. I promise. It’s because you’re family.’

He sighed wearily, staring at the river.

‘I’ll help you,’ he said, ‘but only if you take some of the money from the flat as well.’

‘Oh Sam.’ She hugged him hard, her face in his chest. ‘Oh. Oh I’m so glad. You’re family now. You really are. You can’t go!’ She laughed, close to tears in her relief. Then she realised he was holding her as hard as she was holding him. She leant back in his arms to look up at him. ‘Thank you,’ she said.

‘If you’re going to leave your job,’ he said, rocking her slightly, ‘maybe now is the time for you to have a baby.’

She gasped, on the brink of indignation, then perceived that, from some old-fashioned delicacy, Miriam had refrained from even mentioning the fainting. Relieved that his silence had not been coldness, she kept her counsel and forced hilarity.

‘That was what Jamie kept on saying!’ she exclaimed. ‘He even suggested you could be the father, I really didn’t know what to –’

‘It’s okay,’ he said, still holding her. ‘He was on and on at
me
about it too. Sometimes it got me so pissed off I was tempted to call his bluff, you know? Threaten to move into your room just to see what he’d do. After … you know. After your birthday, I even thought he knew what had happened, as if he’d set the whole thing up.’

She laughed, then bit her lip, remembering a conversation with Jamie in the garden and feeling tearful at the upsurge of emotions she had begun to tamp down.

‘He was very conventional, in his way,’ she stammered. ‘Roses round the door, babies in the nursery. If he’d been my sister, he’d have been insufferable. Dear Jamie. I miss him so much it’s like a physical pain. I keep wanting to ring him up.’

‘I dreamed I did,’ he said, slipping his arms down to hold her around the small of her back, gazing sideways at the river again. ‘At least, I dreamed he called me. He was banging on and on – you know how he did.’

‘I know.’ She knew. She knew too that he was utterly oblivious to the effect he had on her. She knew he managed to see her ‘birthday treat’ purely in terms of his having taken advantage, with no breath of encouragement from her.

‘And then he said he had to go and hung up, and I realised I’d forgotten to ask what his new number was. It’s going to take so much time,’ he went on. ‘I can’t imagine how much.’

‘But it’s okay,’ she said, hoping she did not sound bitter. ‘You’ll survive.’

‘You too,’ he said. ‘With a little help from your friends.’

He kissed her once, on the lips, before releasing her. It was not a brother’s kiss but neither was it that of a lover; it was more like the kiss of a new, interested acquaintance.

‘I’ll drive down to Plymouth this afternoon,’ he said. ‘I have to. I’ve got things I never finished down there.’

‘But you’ll come back?’

‘I promise,’ he said. ‘Maybe even before the end of the week. For all I know they’ll have moved away somewhere and I won’t be able to find them.’

She shivered, then pulled on an old jersey of Jamie’s. It smelled faintly of him; the sweet, slightly buttery smell he gave off when he was hot. She would take it away with her to wear in bed. She pulled her feet up on to the sofa cushions and hugged herself. Watching Sam finish packing, she knew she was probably allowing her mind to chase mere possibilities down a path to certain pain, but what else could she do? As she had insisted earlier, he was family now. As for the child she was carrying within her, she had come with half a mind to tell him about it – partly because she felt he had a right to know, partly because it might have proved a means of holding him by her, however low. She knew now she would never tell him. If he stayed he would stay for her, not out of a misplaced sense of duty that would only sour his feelings towards her. For the child, she could pretend its father was in San Francisco; a lie that lay, after all, a hair’s breadth from probability. Many people had seen her leave Sandy’s party with – what was his name? – with Bruce. None of them knew him, none of them were to know she had not carried on seeing him for a while …

An unfamiliar warmth began to well up inside her; a painless contraction of excitement. In deciding not to tell him she had at last smothered the Good Child within. She had achieved a pleasure, a secret treasure, entirely for herself. She might tell her conscience she was keeping silent because it was unfair to burden Sam and unfair to their unborn child to foist an unwilling father on it, but her primary impulse was richly, giddily self-serving.

Sam looked up from his shirt-folding, saw her face and smiled hesitantly. She sensed with a start that she had been sitting there beaming to herself like a crazy woman. She recalled that she still had a series of HIV tests to take, and held the thought as her anchor on unromantic reality.

The mezzo singing Keziah began a slow dance across the front of the stage in front of Job’s throne.

‘
The lord taketh and he giveth away
,’ she sang. ‘
Blessed be the name of the Lord
.’

The choreographer had cleverly given her over-head handclaps to point up the increasingly frenetic cross-rhythms of the finale.

Leaning on the rail at the front of the dress circle, Edward marvelled that she could produce such a bell-like tone while clapping and actually dance rather well at the same time. Like most of the younger generation of singers, she seemed to have been taking acting lessons too; something considered way above and beyond the call of duty among the student singers who had first performed the piece.

The soprano Jemima began to mimic Keziah’s movements precisely. ‘
He wounds but he binds up
,’ she sang. ‘
He smites but his hands heal
.’

Then the contralto joined them. Edward had met her in the coffee break earlier. She was a young black American. Elegant and thin – something contraltos never were in his day – her voice was so exciting, even when she was merely speaking, that he found himself wishing there had been time to rewrite her meagre role. This would have been impossible, of course, now that Thomas was no longer around to expand the libretto. Watching her glide across the stage, kicking out the golden fabric of her costume and upstaging the other two with imperious hand-claps that must have been deafening at close range, he wondered whether she would be available to sing the Chicago première of his Yeats setting in place of the counter tenor. Jamie would have appreciated her, he knew. She had the nebulous but instantly recognisable quality he had called camp.

He glanced at his watch. Sandy was late. Suddenly he realised the music had stopped and everyone was looking up at him.

‘Edward?’ the conductor was calling. ‘Was the balance any better that time?’

‘Much,’ Edward called back, miming a hand-clap over his head then making a thumb’s up sign before sitting back down. The three daughters now took a rest so the orchestra could run back over the fiendish passage during one of Job’s curses. The baritone, not one of Edward’s favourites, stood on the lip of the stage, arms folded.

‘
Let the stars of his dawn be dark
,’ he sang, saving his voice on the high A. ‘
Let it hope for light but have none, nor see the eyelids of the morning; because it did not shut the doors of my mother’s womb nor hide trouble from my eyes
!’

The baritone broke off, dragging the orchestra with him, troubled by a disturbance at one of the doors in the stalls as some fool made an noisy entrance. Edward squinted downstairs into the gloom and recognised Sandy, following a small woman in a headscarf and dark glasses. He waved to her to come upstairs and the two women disappeared back through the door.

‘From the top again, please, Anthony,’ the conductor called, pointedly adding, ‘Quiet
please
, everyone. Time is short. The dress has to start at two-thirty sharp.’

He had brought
Job
out of hiding and made Alison a present of it. This was partly inspired by his conversation with Sam in the sickroom back in the autumn, partly by Alison’s extraordinary decision to jack in her career in order, as she put it, to ‘do something useful’. All the royalties from its performances around the world and its imminent recording were to be hers and Sandy’s, to spend on The Roundel as they saw fit.

He had been astonished at the swift reaction to the few phone calls he had asked his agent to make. Covent Garden, San Francisco and Amsterdam had raced the little work into their schedules, the London opera house actually shelving several performances of an undersubscribed Bellini revival to make way for it. At first he cynically assumed this haste had something to do with the fashionable AIDS charity tag that came with the piece, but as he set about some speedy reorchestrations to allow for performances in auditoria larger than a mere college dining hall, he was forced to reasses the vigour of what he had always thought of as his sick child. Watching these last, slightly edgy rehearsals, he was surprised to feel so unembarrassed. Certainly the director and choreographer had dressed the piece up in the most flattering fashion. Dance now played an almost continuous part, dancers being used on a huge, empty stage to form breathing, shifting scenery about the singers. The costumes had been designed by a sympathetic young couturier, who had lent his services for the good cause, and the producer presented the story less as a faithful rendition of a biblical book than as a haunting dream-sequence. Time had also transformed the music. Compared to much of what was being written now, not least by himself, the music he remembered as being violent to no purpose had an almost Straussian lushness in parts, and an intoxicated, youthful brashness in others. Listening, he felt profound regret at the impossibility of Sally’s being able to hear it, and felt Thomas’s absence keenly too. Miriam’s harsh words about his attitude towards Thomas had struck home, although he was too proud to let her see it. Reading the libretto afresh made a circle of time and rendered the memory of its witty and loving author as sharp as recollections of recent weeks. The climactic moment when Job’s daughters were restored to him from the grave had, needless to say, acquired overtones that were hard for its composer to bear.

Inevitably the press and publicity office had been busy. Much was being made in profiles and articles of the arbitrary cruelty with which Sally had been taken from him and of the recent death of his beloved grandson. One, headed
The Great Survivor
, had crassly given equal weight to the deaths of his parents-in-law and Thomas, when, if he were frank, they had scarcely touched him at all. Several interviewers had surprised him by asking what seemed to him unpardonably intrusive questions concerning his attitude to both Thomas’s and Jamie’s sexuality. They were raking up his time in hospital too, looking through
Job
for signs of incipient breakdown and references to Judaism and the Holocaust.

The first night was to be a typically showy affair with people eager to pay extra so as to be seen to be patronising a charity while hobnobbing with celebrities. At least one member of the royal family was to attend, to Miriam’s great excitement, as was the Israeli prime minister and the new health minister, her predecessor having been disgraced after a lengthy trial-by-press. Rumour had it that there was to be a demonstration by AIDS activists in the foyer, but Sandy had promised to use her contacts to persuade them to keep it on the picturesque side of disruptive, with nothing noisier than a die-in.

Sandy had come along to introduce him to the charity’s honorary chairwoman who was keen to meet him. He expected at best a more discreet lesbian than herself, at worst, some tiresome society do-gooder of the species he had all too often encountered in America, with a wealthy husband and too much free time. At first glance, however, the thickly befurred creature she beckoned him up the aisle to meet put him more in mind of Dr Pertwee, she seemed so small and birdlike. At second glance, she was younger and considerably more glamorous. Her skin was pale to the point of whiteness against her dark glasses and sable coat. Smiling slightly without showing her teeth, she slipped off her blue silk headscarf, which seemed like a tablecloth in her tiny, jewelled hands. She revealed blonde hair that was no less amazing for being so patently unreal for someone of her age. Gold glistened at both her ears, around her neck and on her fingers.