The Last Gift (21 page)

‘The therapy has helped him. He is talking all the time. I can hardly cope with his stories,’ her mother said, but she had paused for a good moment before replying. Then her voice dropped to a whisper, ‘He gets upset about this war in Iraq, like he has just realised what is going on in the world. I suppose that means he is getting better, doesn’t it? Now he’s sitting in there shouting abuse at the TV. He does that whenever the news is on, these insane murderers and so on. That’s how improved he is. I can’t talk for long, he’ll make a fuss about the phone. Never mind about his fuss, how are you? Tell me about what you’ve been doing. Jamal is coming to see us this weekend.’

So Anna decided she would go as well. She had not been for nearly five months, not since they moved to Brighton, although she rang regularly and was in daily (almost) email touch with Jamal. Nothing important could have slipped by her. But five months was a long time. It had never been that long before. She had been busy with teaching, of course, but school had shut for a month and she had been delaying plans to go visiting in Norwich. She knew that Nick would not be coming, and she would rather he didn’t anyway, especially if Ba was playing up. In any case, Nick would get bored and frustrated about not being able to work. He had to work at least one day of the weekend to feel that he was coping. He was in London that evening, going out to dinner with a conference crowd and then staying over with friends. She wondered if that counted as work. Anna had never been to an academic conference, and did not know if dinner among academics was like a seminar, with the clever ones talking and the dull ones listening, or pretending to listen. Nick made conferences sound arduous and wearing, and made the dinners sound like torture and the other delegates dull and half-baked (which was exactly his description). Why did he go to so many then? It was his work. Anna hesitated over whether she should worry about this staying over with unnamed friends and decided not to. There were going to be many more events like that, and if she worried about them, she was going to drive herself mad. Something was coming to the boil between them, she sensed that. There was something going on that she could not be sure about.

She supposed that sooner or later Nick would start having affairs, if he had not started already. He had always had a roving eye, and whenever he saw an attractive woman, he took a long surreptitious look at her breasts while Anna pretended not to notice. Perhaps all men were like that. Now that he was going to so many conferences and events in the name of work, she guessed that the affairs would start. Perhaps that is what the partner left at home always thinks. It was not really a decision she could make, not to worry, but she was not sure how to anticipate her reaction to this outcome that she was imagining to be inevitable. What was she going to do when she found out, if she found out? She could imagine that – you could live with someone like Nick and have a good idea that he was up to things when he went away, but have no knowledge of what he did. What would you do then? Confront him with hollow accusations? Ignore him and turn bitter inside? Take lovers yourself? Maybe what she would do was not the kind of thing she could anticipate, and she’d just have to go along with it and see how she felt. But it was bound to happen, sooner or later. Nick was a flirt. He carried on a major flirt with Beverley next door, and although they treated it as a joke, Anna thought they got a frisson out of it, teasing and flattering, and hugging and kissing at the end of it all. One of these days . . . how long had she been thinking like this?

Beverley was the woman they had seen working in her garden the day they moved in, and a few days later Anna caught up with her on the pavement outside their houses and they got into conversation. She looked in her late thirties or so, had heavily permed blonde hair, and on that Saturday morning, she was wearing tight jeans and a baggy wide-necked jumper, which had slipped off her right shoulder as it was intended to. She worked for the City Council in the town planning office, approving domestic conversions of properties, extensions, lofts, French doors, that kind of thing. Beverley quickly told her about the other neighbours either side and across the road from them. Tony and Beth, she’s a doctor. She works in the practice round the corner and he is a teacher. Shaun and Robyn, he’s an estate agent and she’s at home now with the kids. That house there, he’s a painter. You can go in there and take a look during Art Week, when all the painters open their houses to visitors. I don’t know what his partner does. In that house is Sophie, she lives on benefit. She rushes around all day as if she’s busy but she does bugger all, just living off the rest of us. And that at number
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is Edwina, she’s ninety-eight years old and deaf as a doorknob but she goes for her ramble along the street and around the shops on the main road every day, rain or shine. My daughter Billie sometimes plays her music loud, especially if I’m not in. Take no notice of her. She makes an unbearable fuss if you ask her to turn it down. If you need anything just come round, any time. Tell that to your gorgeous man as well. So where have you moved from then? Beverley asked, prompting a little disclosure on Anna’s part in return for all the information she had been freely offered.

They heard raised voices from her house on some evenings, mostly Beverley shouting and snarling, and the lower rumble of a man’s voice. Anna had seen a man calling at her house on more than one occasion. He was a dark-haired man in a smart suit, and the first time she saw him he double-parked his sleek new-looking Saab and crossed the street without so much as glancing either right or left. He was carrying a picture frame in one hand, the back of it was turned towards her, and from its ornate look Anna guessed it was a painting. She assumed that he was the man Beverley was shouting at and barging into furniture about in the night. She imagined that he would not have shouted back, but would have talked with sinister self-assurance while waiting for Beverley to finish ranting.

On another of those occasions she had seen him stop at the door for a few moments, dressed in a dinner jacket with a white silk scarf around his neck, like a gangster on the way to an event to which she was not invited. For someone with a training in literature, it was impossible for Anna not to sketch in the rest of the story for herself, in which Beverley was the powerless mistress of a wealthy art dealer with dubious connections. Anna had not heard much of the daughter’s loud music that she had been warned about, a couple of times on a Sunday morning maybe. She heard Beverley when she was in a hectoring frame of mind or when she was talking on the phone late at night, when she heard not so much the words but the lover’s tone and the loud brazen laughter. One night just recently, the shouting had reached a new pitch, and the rumble of the man’s voice rose to a roar. Then Anna heard the daughter shouting,
Stop it! Stop it!
and a little while later the front door slamming and someone sobbing loudly. It sounded like Beverley.

She was not sure exactly why she was wary of Beverley, perhaps because of the frantic way she flirted with Nick, or perhaps because she could stand unabashed at her window and watch what went on in the street, and later, when the moment came, did not hesitate to provide a summary of what she had compiled from her observations. She thought that in times of trouble Beverley would be a denouncer.

Nick did not see that at all. He thought she was good fun but maybe a bit nosy. ‘She’s all right,’ he said.

When they decided to move to Brighton, Anna had seen it as a big decision, a commitment, like saying that they planned to be together for a long time. The thought of having a child had been in her mind for a while, and after they moved, after the gesture of permanence that they had made, the thought became more pressing than it had been before. They had been together for nearly three years, their lives were good, and Nick was beginning to make his way in his career. It was a good time to think about a child. When she said this to Nick, he looked interested but sceptical. What’s the rush, he said. It made her think. Having a child had seemed the next thing to do, perhaps prompted by expectations she had internalised without question, as well as by an instinct she had not reflected on. When she did reflect, she began to consider what it was that was good about their lives. Nick was attractive and intelligent, and he made her feel beautiful and desirable. The sex was good. She loved sex, had loved it since she went to university and discovered its absorbing pleasure and its easy availability. The experience liberated her from the fears she had absorbed from her parents, from her Ba and his immigrant anxieties, his obsessive desire to escape notice, his secretiveness. Her pleasure in sex made her feel sophisticated and worldly, and somehow that she belonged here. Nick was also good company, he knew how to move in the world, how to charm. He wasn’t tense, or violent, or too domineering. He wasn’t.

As she considered this summary of his virtues, she began to feel the emergence of a rebellious reluctance in her. She was tempted to suppress the thought but she did not, and it took time for the thought to emerge fully, which was that she did not want to have a child with Nick. One minute she was considering having a child with him and the next she was having serious doubts about him. What an idiot she was! She did not want to be tied to him for good, as she would be if she had a child with him. She did not want Ralph and Jill to be part of her life for ever. Or Laura, or Uncle Digby. She did not want to live with their particular brand of knowingness and self-assurance for the rest of her days. It was a frightening thought at first, this anticipation of the end between them, but she became used to it, and with his increasing distraction Nick helped her to become used to his absence. Perhaps it was intentional, to get her used to the end without acknowledging to her that that was what he was doing. No, she did not think that likely. He had too much ego for that kind of thoughtfulness. So there, she was beginning to allow herself to think cruelly about him.

He was happier since starting his academic job, flippant in a new way. She could feel the confidence growing in him. He did not always explain himself as he used to, and did not always listen when she talked, interrupting her when he had tired of listening to her. He did not interrupt her often, but she felt it every time he did, because the bluntness of it was something new in the way they were together. It did not happen at once, this new casualness, because if it had done she would have been unable to suppress the hurt and they would have argued. It happened slowly, and she was able to tolerate his off-handedness as part of his distraction, coping with a new job, the pressure of new routines. She too was busy with her supply teaching job, and the bustle in their lives disguised the worst of his patronising airs, as she came to think of them in time. She could not believe that he was not aware of his manner, and assumed that quite quickly since their move, in the few months since they left London, she had begun to bore him. Was she exaggerating? It might be a phase that might pass, but it depressed her, and made something sour inside her, and it was then that her reluctance about having a child with Nick began to emerge. Sometimes they went for a day or two without touching, which had never happened before between them, and she wondered what it was exactly that made the distance between them. Was it also her doing?

When he first told her about this conference in London, he said he would probably come back in the evening. Then just as he was leaving in the morning, he told her he was staying the night with some of his old university friends, but would call her if plans changed. There was nothing much in all that, but she did not like it that he did not feel it necessary to ask or explain. It was a sign of something, she was sure. She hated that these pathetic grievances occupied her mind, she hated that she felt she was turning petty and watchful, like a neglected wife who had no option but to endure.

Jamal neglected his desk the next day, spending the morning sleeping off the night before. Every time he surfaced he could not believe that Lena was lying there beside him. Then finally he woke up and saw that she had gone, but he could hear the slight hiss of the plumbing and guessed she was in her room showering. In the afternoon they walked to Sainsbury’s to buy supplies for a celebration dinner. As they were leaving, they saw a man walking on the pavement give way at the knees and fall slowly to the ground. His face hit the pavement with a dull thud. Lena gasped and put out a hand as if to restrain Jamal from rushing forward. It was a momentary gesture and she withdrew her hand when she saw the look of surprise in his eyes. He hurried to the fallen man, oranges and vegetables scattered around him, and knelt on the pavement beside him. He saw at once who it was. His eyes were shut and blood seeped out from under his head.

‘It’s our neighbour. Get help,’ he said to Lena, pointing towards the store. He saw that the man’s face was screwed up in pain, and that the grimace made his face more lined than it had seemed from a distance. He asked him: ‘Can you hear me?’ and the man nodded slightly, with some difficulty, his neck twisted on the ground. After a moment he opened his eyes, and Jamal was not sure if he should move him or leave him as he was until someone who knew what to do came along. He might have had a stroke and the worst thing might be to move him. Or perhaps he was drunk. A thin line of dark liquid was running out of the corner of his mouth and he could not tell if it was blood or vomited wine. ‘Can you turn over on your side?’ he asked, remembering from somewhere that this was the best position if he were to vomit. ‘I’ll help you, see if you can turn over on your side.’ The man did as he was told and turned his body so that he was lying on his side. Jamal thought he looked very uncomfortable and did not know whether he should ask him to move back the way he had been. Just then two female staff came running out of the store with Lena behind them. They turned the man over on his back, then lifted his head off the ground and rested it on a rolled-up Sainsbury’s jacket. Blood was running down the side of his face and out of his mouth, and he had a deep cut on his temple. He looked at Jamal and his eyes moved fractionally. When the ambulance arrived, one of the paramedics sniffed near the old man’s mouth to see if he was drunk and then shook his head at his colleague. They hustled the man on to a stretcher and fitted him with an oxygen mask in the van.