The Kings of Eternity (23 page)

By the time the taxi pulled into Carla’s street, I was near to tears, and what I saw through the windscreen as we drove along the street did not improve my mood.

“Stop here!” I said, fifty yards from her flat.

I paid the fare and stepped out into the rain.

Another taxi was pulling out from before Carla’s flat, and I had recognised the person who had hurried down the steps and ducked into the vehicle.

I walked steadily through the downpour, trying to assess my thoughts and feelings. Jealous rage, of course, but more: a feeling of vindication, and the notion that now I had reason enough to end it all, to draw a line beneath a relationship that had never truly worked but which I had held on to for reasons of insecurity and pride.

I climbed the steps to her ground floor flat and knocked on the door.

She answered almost immediately. “Jonathon. You’re early. Just look at you. You’re soaked!”

I pushed past her into the hall, then moved through to the lounge. The bedroom was adjacent. I crossed to the door and stared through. The bed showed no sign of having been slept in, or rather used - but then she knew that I was coming, and would have made it before I arrived.

I turned to see her watching me from the door.

There was a challenge in her stare.

“What was he doing here?” I asked.

She let out a sigh, as much to say that she was tired of this old game.

“Jonathon,” she said, holding my gaze, “I don’t have to answer for every minute of my life. I’ll see who I want to see, when I want to see them, and neither you nor anyone else will stop me.”

“It was Ticehurst, wasn’t it?”

“Alastair and I are in a play together, or were you too drunk last night to notice? The director changed a scene today. There was no afternoon rehearsal scheduled, so Al came round here to go over the revised script.” She pointed to an occasional table where, sure enough, a dog-eared playscript sat. “See?”

“Are you having an affair with him?”

“My God!” She looked away.

“Tell me. I want to know the truth. I can take it. I’d rather know for certain than wallow in a limbo of uncertainty.”

“Good line!” she snapped. “Use it in the next novel!”

“Are you having an affair, for God’s sake!”

She leaned forward, her fists balled before her. “No, I am not having an affair with Alastair Ticehurst! We’re good friends, and have been for years, and we’re both actors, and he’s a good person despite what you might think - and I’m not going to have my life dictated to by someone who for some reason is eaten up by insane jealousy!” She was crying now, the words coming on a torrent of exasperated tears.

“Last night, you were holding his hand.”

“He was holding
my
hand, for God’s sake!”

“You looked like you were enjoying it!”

“I was drunk! We’d just had four curtain calls!”

“And before we left the bar... you even made me wait outside while no doubt you arranged this little rendezvous today!”

She could not hold back the tears. “Why are you doing this to me? You’re making me ill! How many times have I told you, I love you and only you, and of course I have friends, and some of them happen to be men, and Al is a friend. But that’s all there is to it. I love you, for God’s sake!”

I shook my head. I wanted to believe her, but jealousy is insane, as she said, and jealousy does not believe in anything other than the thing that fuels it. In my case it was fuelled by inadequacy and immaturity, and there was nothing I could do, no matter how hard I tried, to see past the naïve rage that consumed me. Perhaps, deep down, all I wanted was to be freed from the chains of a complex relationship that I could no longer handle.

I pushed past her, through the door and along the hall.

“Jonathon, we need to talk!” She said, hurrying after me.

I turned on the threshold. “The only reason you say you love me,” I said then with venom, “is because you want what my father’s leaving me!”

She stared at me, stricken, and I knew that I should have held my tongue. My guilt began at that very instant.

She shook her head. “Jonathon...” she implored.

I ignored her. I strode from the house and down the steps, then turned along the street and walked though the rain without once looking back, and in retrospect I am not proud of myself, and can only cite immaturity as an extenuating factor, which is no excuse at all.

I walked all the way home, regardless of the rain, the exercise working as some kind of catharsis. I stripped off my soaking clothes, dried myself and changed, then made a fire and slept before it on the settee, unable to use the bed where, just the week before, Carla and I had made love.

I slept badly, and woke in the early hours only to experience that occasional existential dread which grips when the defences are down, when the mind is empty of all the everyday trivia that keeps our thoughts from dwelling on the brevity of our lives, the inevitability of our ends, and those of everyone we know and care about. At these times our souls are empty vessels, to be filled in the dark hours preceding dawn with the sour wine of mortality, the realisation that we are all of us doomed and that there is nothing we can do to avoid this terrible fact.

I sat up and turned on the light and tried to shake from my head these nihilistic thoughts of death and extinction. I paced the room, then made myself a pot of tea. In time, as stray small thoughts replaced the vacuum, I became sane again, and tried to settle down, albeit with the light left on and the fire prodded back into life.

I was dozing, later, when the phone rang.

It was a doctor from the clinic who informed me that my father had taken a turn for the worse, and suggested that I should come in.

It was the call I had been fearing for so long, and yet as I dressed and rang for a taxi I realised that I was not filled with dread, as I had expected I might be: it was almost a relief. I only hoped that his passing would be painless.

I recall little of the taxi ride through the quiet dawn streets of London: a few grey figures, hurrying to work, the occasional scarlet bus looming through the fog. My thoughts were strained and confused, alternating between the plight of my father, and my treatment of Carla.

And then I was climbing the familiar steps, and realising with relief that this would be the last time I would make the journey.

An unfamiliar nurse showed me to my father’s room, and then withdrew. I approached diffidently, fearful then of what I should find.

He lay propped on three pillows, and he was either asleep or unconscious. I took his hand. I recall the shock that I felt then: his hand was cold, and I feared that he had died before my arrival, that he had slipped into oblivion alone.

But his fingers twitched in mine and I felt a sudden start of relief that I would be there to see him from this world.

A little later a doctor entered the room and whispered to me: a resume of my father’s condition, what I might expect. I recall only that the doctor said my father was on a heavy dose of morphine, but that he was still conscious. He said something about his condition; that although the tumour itself was not causing him pain, its pressure upon certain centres of the brain was provoking phantom pains in different areas of his body. I asked how long he might remain like this, and he replied that it could be only a matter of hours.

I returned to the bed and squeezed my father’s hand. His breath was uneven, ragged.

“Can you hear me?” I asked, leaning forward. I felt almost guilty, as if a passing nurse might reprimand me for harassing him.

I wanted some acknowledgement that he knew I was with him, that he was not alone.

I saw the book on the bedside table, my third novel. I picked it up and noted that a marker was positioned three pages from the end, and it was this simple fact, and not the sight of my father on his death bed, that brought tears to my eyes.

This was my first real experience of death. I was fourteen when my mother died, but my father had kept me away from the hospital during her final days: he felt, he told me later, that there were some things a young boy should not be made to endure. I recall that when he returned from the hospital with news of her passing, the entire episode had an extraordinary air of unreality; it was weeks before I fully understood the fact that I would never again see my mother, that her physical presence would no longer be a part of my life; that, now, she existed only in my memories.

I started as I felt his fingers tighten upon my hand.

He turned his head on the pillow; his eyes were open, and looking at me. He smiled. “Jonathon.” A whisper was all he could manage.

I squeezed his hand, not wanting to break down and cry.

“Jonathon,” he said, “I’m proud of you.”

“I...” I began, wanting to talk to him, but at a loss quite what to say. “Are you in pain?”

He managed to shake his head. “No pain at all. Wonderful. Calm and peaceful. Will... will you do something for me?”

“What?” I tried to imagine what I might possibly do for him - and, when he told me, I realised that it was both perfect and right.

“Haven’t finished your book. A few pages to go. Please, read them to me, Jonathon.”

I took the book and opened it and gazed down at the words I had written more than two years before. Always when I re-read my published work I was struck at once with amazement at what I wrote, and then disappointment as I remembered what came next: it was a kind of
déjà vu
that did not allow me to gain the same enjoyment from my own novels as I did from those of other writers.

I read slowly; perhaps subconsciously I feared reaching the end of the book. I concluded the story of an isolated writer living in a remote Greek island, and how over the period of a long, hot summer he allowed his reserve and inhibitions to fall so that he might come to love a woman in need of his affection.

“
Like all lonely men,
” I read, “
Maitland had feared living out his life without finding that which for want of a better word the romantics call true love...
”

From time to time I looked up; my father was watching me, his lips moving as he silently repeated the words to himself.

I arrived at the last line, and read, my throat burning, my eyes wet with unshed tears, “
They sat and stared out over the bay, at the constellations massed over the far headland, and it seemed to them that the stars were beckoning.
”

I closed the book and took my father’s hand.

He died one hour later; he had been squeezing my fingers for long minutes, the only indication, I interpreted, that he was either feeling pain or fearing the end - and then I heard a crackle or rattle in his breathing, and his fingers gave up their grip on mine. I was watching him all this time, but there was no facial indication that life had passed from him. I wondered at the exact instant he had died, whether with the mechanical failing of his body his thoughts had died too, or if perhaps his thoughts and memories had lingered, dwindling one by one.

I sat for a long time, holding his hand. It might have been hours; I have no idea. At last I was startled by the touch of a nurse’s hand on my shoulder. I stood and left the room, and only later, in the street, did I realise that I was still clutching my father’s copy of my novel.

I took a taxi through the grey and lifeless streets of London to Battersea, and the phone was summoning me as I arrived at the flat.

“We need to talk, Jonathon,” Carla said.

“I hardly think this is the time-” I began.

“I don’t want to lose you.”

“You should have thought of that before carrying on with-” It was out before I could check myself.

“Please, we need to sort things out. There’s been a terrible misunderstanding. Jonathon, please.”

I said, surprising myself, “I’m going abroad next week. I’ll be away for a few months. Working on the book.” I paused, then went on, “I’m sorry. It wasn’t working. You need to find someone more... more suited to you. I don’t know what you see in me anyway.”

“Isn’t that for me to decide?”

“We’re forever arguing.”

“We can talk that through.”

“Please, I need to...” I almost told her then about my father - but the last thing I wanted was her sympathy.

“Will you promise me that you’ll call before you leave, Jonathon?”

I hesitated. “I promise,” I lied, and replaced the receiver.

I brewed myself a tea and sat before the fire, staring into the flames and contemplating the future. I thought of the novel I was working on - or, rather, which I was not working on. Fortunately the deadline was not until the end of the year. I could complete the book in six months, if I did indeed leave England, found somewhere warm, peaceful and quiet, where I might concentrate for a while.

The phone rang, and I almost ignored it. I imagined it was Carla again.

I snatched up the receiver. “Yes?”

“There have been further developments,” Vaughan informed me, and my heart began a laboured pounding. “Charles wants to see us at the Grange. Can you be ready in thirty minutes?”

“Of course.”

“I’ll pick you up from Battersea. See you then.” He cut the connection.

“Edward,” I began, wanting to question him about what these mysterious ‘further developments’ might entail - but he had replaced the receiver.

Intrigued, and glad of the diversion, I changed and packed an overnight bag for my stay at Cranley Grange.

Vaughan’s Austin 16 rolled up half an hour later, and I hurried down the steps and slipped into the passenger seat.

“Well?” I asked. “What is it? What did Charles have to say?”

He glanced at me as he pulled from the kerb. “I didn’t speak with him. He rang while I was out, unfortunately, and left a message with my housekeeper. She reported that Charles had simply said, ‘developments at Cranley Grange’. That was the extent of it.”

I stared out at the passing pedestrians on Oxford Street; they seemed a million miles away, their cares and concerns those of another species.

“What on earth might have happened?” I thought aloud. “Perhaps the Vark have indeed come in search of Kathan?”