The Kindness (6 page)

Katie turned to him. ‘I’m in the village most of the time now,’ she said. ‘Can’t I help? You know, chivvy the builders, or something?’

Julia’s response was huffy, he thought, and almost certainly audible. Arthur jumped from the playhouse roof and Katie dived to deal with his nose. The boy squirmed in her grasp.

‘Billy, you come back down too,’ she said.

Mira wrapped the ribbon around a dinosaur’s tail like a bandage. She yawned and Julia went to her, scooping her up like a baby.

A nurse rattled by with a trolley. Julian turned to Katie and nodded. ‘Thanks,’ he mouthed.

Later, in the hospital cafeteria, Julia worked herself into a rage. ‘How could she look at Mira like that?’

He was tired, the fluorescent lights sucking the life out of him. Everything tasted faintly of hand sanitiser.

‘Does she not think it might be just a bit distressing for Mira when people walk in and start blubbing like that?’

Julian held up a hand to her. ‘Stop that, Julia, please,’ he said. ‘I think she was trying very hard to be breezy. It was a shock. I should’ve prepared her better.’

‘And did she ask a single thing about how Mira’s treatment is going?’ Fresh tears were pooling in Julia’s eyes and he leant across to blot them with a paper napkin, but she pulled away. She was so thin that the necklace she had taken to wearing, a tiny gold sun, swung from her clavicles. He couldn’t remember where it was from, this necklace. She touched it often, running the gold sun back and forth along its fine chain during their meetings with the consultant.

‘Don’t forget, it’s difficult for other people too,’ he said while she drained her tea in one angry gulp. ‘It was good of her to bring the boys. Look how happy Mira was to see them.’

Julia stood up, brushing imaginary crumbs from her lap.

‘All she asked about was Firdaws,’ she said, gathering her purse from the table and marching out of the cafeteria and along the corridor to the lifts. He caught up, but she’d already pressed the button and the doors were sealing her off. He stood watching the arrow rise to Mira’s ward on the ninth floor. There Julia would settle herself on the camp bed in his sheets from the night before with her hand reaching up to hold Mira’s. He in turn would go to Barnes where he would have to deal with Jenna’s juddering nerves and talk business with Michael, because Michael always had so much to tell him. He would be back for breakfast, but still he felt abandoned when Julia huffed off, and shaken, as he stood there staring at the lift, that she hadn’t kissed him.

She kissed him with tears the next morning. But then: ‘Hey, I can’t even begin to think about this,’ batted him away as soon as he brought up the subject of Firdaws. It had been a bad night on the ward, he didn’t need her to tell him: it showed in the reds of her eyes. Mira had woken several times complaining of pains and refused breakfast. A child, Oscar, had fitted in the night and was in PICU. Oscar was on his third bout of chemo and, despite being nearly six and interested only in the train set, often played with Mira.

‘He’s still down there in Intensive Care.’ Julia wouldn’t stop spinning that sun on its chain, her eyes had run dry and the tip of her nose looked raw in a face that was mainly sallow. They left Mira sleeping and went down in the lift.

They silently sipped their coffee while people came and went, trays crashing, cutlery clattering. Someone walked in whistling. After a while Julia sighed, rubbed her forehead, then mashed her eye sockets with the heels of her hands.

‘Look, I don’t care, OK? If Katie’s so keen to help, why don’t the two of you just get on and get it done.’

‘Right. I get the message. I won’t bother you with it.’ He ripped the corner from his croissant and stuffed it into his mouth to staunch his words. Their eyes met until he made her look away. He was thinking only of Mira leaving the hospital and getting her home to the fresh air of Firdaws, her familiar things, her books by her bedside and her dinosaur lamp . . . He couldn’t stop himself smiling as he chewed.

He met Katie two nights later. The hotel was in Marylebone: red pelargoniums along every window ledge, a carpet of mustard- and ketchup-coloured swirls. He waited for her at the bar and felt a stab of dislike that took him by surprise when she entered in a shiny blue dress, so tight that it creased along her thighs as she walked. He felt it again when she kissed him and he inhaled the forced nostalgia of the hyacinth scent she had worn as a teenager.

She was wearing pink lipstick and he reached instinctively to wipe where her mouth had touched his cheek. The sight of her made him ache for Julia. He thought of Julia beside Mira’s bed, the straggly rook’s nest that her beautiful hair had become scrunched in that band at the back of her head, the long tail of her leather belt without which her trousers would fall down.

Katie led Julian from the bar to a corner table. The bar waiter knew her name and Julian cocked an eyebrow. ‘I’ve had to stay here a few times when Adrian’s had the boys,’ she said. ‘It’s not worth going all the way back to Horton, not with all the delays on the line at this time of year.’ Then, flushing slightly: ‘Besides, I intend to empty our joint account before he gets any funny ideas about spending it all on holidays with
her
.’

Julian gulped and asked for a whisky, a drink he didn’t especially like. Katie ran a finger along the condensation on her wine glass. Now they were alone, she questioned him closely about Mira’s treatment and listened intently. Now they were alone she called him Jude, as she had in the old days, and he was glad Julia was not there to hear it.

‘It must be awful to watch them doing all this stuff to her,’ she said, reaching for the back of his hand.

‘Mira’s so brave, honestly it’s endless. Some days are better than others. Poor little thing has hardly stopped sleeping today. And every time she wakes up there are pains in her tummy and legs.’

Katie’s hand came to rest on the back of his wrist. ‘It was good the boys got to see her. They miss her,’ she said.

‘She’s supposed to be able to go home, but every time it looks as if things are going well, something else goes wrong,’ he said, pulling his arm away and in one movement swallowing the burning whisky and signalling to the barman for another.

‘There’s still weeks more treatment and the operation to come and, whatever’s been happening, that tiny girl hasn’t complained, not once.’ He felt his eyes sting at the thought of Mira’s courage and stood up to bolt for the Gents. Katie got to her feet too, reaching up and bringing him close enough to comfort.

‘She’s a real fighter,’ she said, her head only reaching his chest despite her heels.

He could feel the press of her breasts, her warm breath through his shirt and tears sprang from his eyes.

She pressed him closer still, her hyacinth scent cloying. He took a step back and pushed her away.

At the basin he splashed his face with water. ‘Right,’ he told his reflection. ‘This was probably a mistake.’

And yet . . . Firdaws did need to be put right by the time Mira got home, and that could be soon. Now the Nicholsons’ kitchen had been demolished, someone had to be on site sorting it out. He turned off the tap and, looking in the mirror, told himself he saw an honourable man. Patting his face dry with a paper towel he offered himself a parting shot: ‘She said it would make her
happy
to help,’ and pushed through the swing doors and back into the bar feeling much better.

It appeared that a slim man in a leather jacket had already noticed Katie all alone at their corner table, probably took her for a hooker (Julian immediately regretted the unkindness of the thought). The man was handing Katie a business card; she was tucking her hair behind her ear, briefly studying the card, eyes reaching up to return the man’s smile. Julian stalled at the bar, reading a joke from a mat. The man was pointing to Katie’s glass and in a moment that lasted no longer than the flare of a match Julian was back in Paris with Julia: a darker, moodier bar than this, with red-leather banquettes and dimly lit chandeliers, trance music, spice-scented candles and Julia shamefully seducing a stranger in a brown corduroy suit for his enjoyment. He shook his head to clear it of the memory as Katie waved at him and the man moved smoothly away to the lifts.

‘I see you’ve pulled already,’ Julian said.

How would he have managed without her? Between them Katie and Penny Webster knew all the right locals. While he and Julia struggled on at the hospital, dust was cleared at Firdaws, cupboards painted the correct shade of apple green, the glazed tiles above the worktop were the exact smooth buttermilk. The kitchen was put back together with historical accuracy because in almost ten years Katie hadn’t forgotten a thing, sending him photographs of their progress (which Julia refused to look at, infuriating him until he snapped: ‘Must you keep sulking? Someone’s got to do it’). Katie found a cream enamel Rayburn at the architectural-salvage place, the same model as the one the Nicholsons had junked; perhaps even the very one, it had been there a while. The pottery animals were ready and waiting with their twins on the shelves of the Welsh dresser, the saucepans on their nails above the cooker, the wasp traps ready for invasion along the sills. Everything put right and not a sign that the Nicholsons had ever been at liberty to wreak their ideal-home fantasies upon the place.

The drive to Woodford is gory. A pheasant flies out of the hedge intent on suicide. Julian has counted six pheasants, eight rabbits and two squashed foxes since he left Firdaws and now ahead here’s a badger on the verge. He can’t help but slow down to study it. Flies frenzy at a patch of congealed blood beneath its ear and in the grimy runnels of its cheeks, the stains like dried tears.

One of Julian’s least favourite childhood memories is of a dead badger in the lane almost directly in front of the Firdaws. The evening they found it, his mother went to Horseman’s Field with the dogs and heard the crying of its babies deep inside the sett and could do nothing to help. The next morning their crying was very faint and by the following lunchtime they were silent. That night she cooked Julian the same supper twice.

Then, one full moon, when they were just sixteen, he and Katie watched some young badgers playing in Horseman’s Field. They’d scattered Maltesers around the mouth of the sett because his friend Peace Convoy Raph told them that’s what badgers liked best. Maltesers and a full harvest moon. As dusk fell they sat together, Katie and him, listening to the various hootings and screechings. They were wrapped in a blanket because the evening had grown chilly. Mist slid from the river as the darkness settled around then. They remained motionless beneath the dampening blanket, her head on his shoulder until finally they were rewarded by a pair of badgers who came sniffing the air, picking through the grass and roots, snouting out the Maltesers, scampering and somersaulting.

He and Katie walked up from the field still huddled together beneath their blanket cloak, their breath a single cloud. The mist had seeped right into their bones and it seemed the most natural thing in the world for them to warm up together in his narrow bed. The tip of her nose was as cold as a frosted button. He stifled a scream when she rested her icy feet between his warm thighs and again when she leant across and her slippery hair tickled his face. She had never stayed overnight at Firdaws before. In their haste they hadn’t drawn the curtains and from his bed they could watch the night uncurl and trace the silvered outlines of the trees. She slept with her head on his chest while he grinned to himself in the afterglow, the moon at the window like a peeping Tom.

The Nicholsons converted that bedroom into a bathroom, complete with an egg-shaped stone bath. He refused to go in there, though Julia claimed to like it and took long soaks with the door locked.

Once the builders finished ripping it out, Katie rang him at his mother’s to let him know that his old room was ready for painting. Julia was at the hospital and didn’t have to witness his delight that she remembered. ‘Robin’s-egg blue?’ The room would be just as it was, even the original midnight-blue muslin curtains embroidered with silver stars that – joy – she’d found in a box in the attic. She’d easily get them repaired and rehung. Katie had thought of everything. Every picture was restored to its rightful hook. Mira’s new room was all ready for her return to Firdaws post-treatment: her things, her books, her teddies, her dinosaur lamp. He had written to Katie to thank her. That would have to do.

Driving on through Woodford, the people on the pavement appear slow and drunk as if the sunshine is something that must be waded through. Trailing children whine for ice-cream, men with proud bellies emerge from the Six Bells car park with their shirts off; one of them stumbles into the road, his friend waves at the dog. Julian can’t face the choice of the big supermarket’s shelves, so heads out of town for Lipton’s corner shop, scooping up biscuits, butter, bread, chewing gum, tomato soup and cans of disgusting dog food. At the off-licence he decides to buy some big bottles of R White’s as well as more wine and beer: he’s been quenching his thirst too often with bottles of beer throughout the heat of the last days and nights. He almost forgets tobacco.

Fresh road kill lines the route home. He drives with all the windows open because the heat has defeated his cooling system. The dog pants on the seat beside him, tongue lolling. Sweat pricks the nape of his neck; the back of his T-shirt is pasted to the seat. He lifts his arm, sniffs his own stench and curses. Now that Penny Webster has spotted him, what’s the likelihood he’ll find Katie waiting when he gets home?