The White Family (8 page)

‘That’s Shirley, that is,’ said Alfred. ‘I can’t stop her wasting her money.’

‘She was looking very smart. She always does.’ May couldn’t resist a glance at Dirk’s dirty jeans.

‘These are my work clothes,’ he said, flushing. ‘I had to come here straight from work. We have to stay open late because the frigging Pakis do.’

‘Will you shush,’ May hissed, one eye on Pamela. ‘Shirley asked after you. She always does.’ (Then she thought about it, and realized she didn’t.)

Alfred’s voice got that preachy sound. ‘You always used to be so close to your sister.’

Dirk glowered at him. ‘You know what happened. It was you that said it, we had to make a stand.’

In a small clear voice that seemed to come from a dream in which she was someone stronger and braver, May said, ‘I liked Kojo. And I like Elroy. And Kojo was very good to you. You forget how many times you got your tea round at their house.’ She ran out of steam, surprised at herself.

‘I never denied I got my tea.’

‘She’ll meet someone soon, and settle down,’ said Alfred. ‘Everything’s going to turn out for the best.’

May thought, let all be well, be well … Tennyson was hopeful rather than certain:

Oh yet we trust that somehow good

Will be the final goal of ill

To pangs of nature, sins of will,

Defects of doubt, and taints of blood …

And what did he mean by ‘taints of blood’?

Seeing Dirk had shaken Shirley. The hospital foyer was huge and cold.

I used to love him
. I adored that boy. But what’s he turned into? A thug. A – fascist. Worse than Dad, without Dad’s excuses.

She wasn’t quite ready to go out into the dark and struggle through the wind across the wild black car park. She sank down on to an empty seat, picked up a magazine and stared at it blindly.

When her focus returned, she was looking at furs. Two pages of red and blond winter furs. ‘There are the whingers and the whiners, yes. There are the dowdies, the dated, the dull … And there’s you. Daring to be a babe. Ready for fun. Purring for fur … You, babelicious in the new seal-skin …’ The heart-shaped face of the journalist looked all of seventeen years old, and brainless.

Still the furs were pretty, thought Shirley. Soft. Elroy might like to see me in furs … But she knew it was just a fantasy.

No one wore furs. It just wasn’t done. No one, that is, except rich foreign women you saw getting out of cabs with dark glasses and fussy expensive designer handbags. Arab men’s women, she thought, contemptuously, then caught herself thinking it and was ashamed.

So she was a bigot like the rest of her family.

We all like to think we’re better than someone.

She knew what people said about her. ‘Shirley White goes with black men.’ They never got over their excitement about it, though she’d been married to Kojo for nearly eight years. As if a marriage was just about sex.

I liked being married. I liked the comfort.

Her parents had been married for over forty years. What would her mother do if Dad died? Shirley remembered all too clearly the blank exhaustion when Kojo was dying. The sense that part of her body was missing.

But they’ve been lucky. They’ve had nearly half a century.

She slapped the magazine shut with a sigh.

As she focused on the big automatic doors that would let her out into the night again, they opened, as if by the power of thought. A man came in and blinked at the light.

Suddenly familiar. White, thickset, with golden skin and dark wavy hair. Handsome in a rugged, crumpled sort of way. Heavy eyebrows, frowning towards her.

‘Isn’t it – Shirley? It’s Thomas Lovell. ‘Do you remember me …?’

It was Darren’s friend.

‘Have you come to see Dad? That’s very kind. I saw you on the television, you know. When your book came out. Some time ago.’ Of course, it was Thomas who saw Dad fall. Used to be a writer. Then he became – What? – something sensible. Yes, a librarian.

‘It must be ten years since we met.’

‘Probably Darren’s second wedding.’

‘Yes.’

Simultaneously, they both remembered that they had got drunk and flirted with each other. They had possibly kissed. They had certainly danced. Shirley’s spirits began to rise.

‘He’s on his third marriage by now, you know. None of us got invited to the last one. They ran off to Bali. Very glamorous … You didn’t come to my wedding, did you? I can’t remember if I asked you.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘But didn’t I hear –?’

‘My husband died three years ago. Cancer.’

‘I’m so sorry.’ He really looked sorry.

‘My little brother’s just gone up to the ward.’

‘I’d better give them some time together.’

On impulse Shirley said, ‘Good idea. Come and have a cup of tea in the café.’

Two bored black women were standing by the till, which was full of ravenous young doctors in white coats, furiously feeding haunted faces. It was a banqueting hall for ghosts. The tables and chairs were of royal blue plastic, which made chill reflections on their skin.

‘Hot meal arl finish,’ one of the black women told them. There remained some cupcakes, two squashed jam-tarts, some ginger biscuits and some cling-wrapped salads, half-decomposed, like overcooked spinach.

‘Just tea, I think,’ said Thomas. ‘Can’t say I fancy anything else.’

They sat down at the only table free of white-coated inmates stripping their plates. ‘They’re like a plague of locusts,’ she said.

‘Stress,’ he said. ‘Exhaustion. They’ve probably been working twenty hours already.’

‘I suppose you just expect them to have good manners. Seeing as they’re professionals.’ She saw on his face a kind of disappointment.

‘Professionals are the rudest of all. In fact, they have qualifications in rudeness.’

‘I haven’t got any qualifications.’ (Why did I have to tell him that?)

‘I’ve got lots but I don’t really use them.’

‘I’d have thought you’d need them, to look after books. And to write a book, like you did.’

‘Oh, any fool can be a writer.’

‘Lots of people would love to be in your shoes,’ she said. ‘People admire writers.’

‘Do they, still?’

‘Well our house is crammed wall to wall with books’ – (Kojo’s books, if she was honest. Why was she trying to impress him? But Shirley herself had once been a reader, when she was young, doing teacher training.) Thomas was looking inside her coat, his eyes slipping down the cream silk of her blouse. His kind of woman would be thin and sharp.

‘Is Darren coming home?’ he asked.

‘Well he doesn’t exactly keep in touch with me. Of course he doesn’t, with his high-powered lifestyle.’ She made herself smile, to cover her chagrin.

‘I never hear from him, either.’

On the other side of the canteen, there was something going on. The voice of one of the attendants was becoming steadily shriller. ‘Because it gone six o’clock already and dis kitchen not doin’ any more cookin’ –’

A man with his back to them was making a scene. ‘You’re supposed to serve cooked meals between five and seven. Which means there should be an hour to go –’ A slim blond woman dressed in pink was plucking ineffectually at his shoulder.

The black woman jabbed the air with her finger. ‘I can’t help what nonsense de notice say. The doctors come eat the lot. And that’s that.’

It struck Shirley and Thomas at the same moment, and their eyes met, briefly, apprehensive, as the man snatched up his bleak tray in disgust and turned, with a little flounce of anger and tiredness
– It was Darren, of course
. Darren’s tanned face, which gaped and grew pinker the moment he saw them. He had come after all, the prodigal son. ‘Darren White, Voice of the Left, Man of the People’, as the papers called him. A jet-lagged man with an American twang, making a mean little scene in a café.

He swept up to them in a gale of tension, handsome from a distance, gaunt close up. His hair had subtly changed colour, Shirley realized; the grey in his curls had disappeared. His face underneath was tighter, older, the lines set hard in a mask of tan. ‘Hello,’ he said. ‘Hi everyone,’ as if there were too many of them to manage individually. ‘I’m just trying to get some
morsel
of sustenance out of the bloody NHS.’ His wife hovered behind him, pretty, uncertain, her pink suit fitting like an elegant glove, her hair hanging bobbed, healthy, expensive. ‘This is Susie,’ he said, gesturing angrily. ‘My new wife. She couldn’t eat a thing on the plane. Of course neither of us eats red meat, and the veggie stuff was drowning in saturated fat. We made a special effort to get here today – I had an interview to do in Madrid. Mum sounded so damn frightened last time we spoke. Then two minutes after we get to the bedside the consultant turfs us out –’ He was plainly trying to get a grip on himself. ‘Sit down,’ he ordered his wife over his shoulder. ‘This is Shirley, my sister. And Thomas Lovell. I’d forgotten you two knew each other.’

‘Shirley,’ said the woman with an enormous smile that revealed big teeth and polished pink gums. She took both Shirley’s hands in hers, and squeezed them hard, meaningfully. ‘I know this is a difficult time for you. And Thomas. I’ve heard so much about you, Tom.’

‘
Thomas
,’ Darren corrected her, swiftly, annoyed.

‘You’re not American,’ Shirley said. She smiled at Susie, wanting to help her.

‘I’ve lived there fifteen years,’ Susie said. ‘My mother thinks I sound completely American.’

‘Where are the children?’ Shirley asked. Darren had two children by each of his first two marriages. Susie’s face registered it as a reproach. ‘I had – I mean, we had – the kids last weekend. Both lots actually. They’re great. But kids aren’t good in hospitals.’

‘I didn’t mean …’ Shirley trickled away. ‘I’ve never met them, believe it or not.’

‘Darren,’ said Thomas. ‘Long time no see.’ He had got to his feet to greet his friend. They were almost the same height, two tall, dark men. After an awkward pause, they shook hands vigorously, like two boxers not exhausted by their fight.

‘Darren always said you two were like brothers,’ Susie remarked, encouragingly.

But a voice cut in from behind their backs, a new voice, thin, resentful, nasal. ‘I’m his brother,’ Dirk complained. ‘I’m his brother. He hasn’t introduced me.’

Shirley couldn’t escape him. He butted in, anxious, albino under the angry fluorescent.

‘Dirk,’ said Darren, switching instantly into a social smile, his tan creasing. ‘It’s great to see you. You disappeared. This is my little brother, Susie. You were by the bed, but you suddenly vanished –’

‘Had to go to the toilet,’ Dirk said, simply. ‘I thought you’d have waited. Hello, Shirley.’

And then they were all there, the whole family.

‘How long is it since we were all together?’ Shirley asked, but nobody answered, busy finding chairs, stowing coats and bags, glad of the respite from each other.

All of us are here. Me, my two brothers. We were never all together. We don’t know how to do it
.

The café was quietening down at last. The locusts had eaten, and were flocking away, muttering ferociously, back down the corridors, a flapping of jaws and creased white wings. The Whites were left at their table in the window, lost in a desert of royal blue plastic, Darren still too wound up to sit down, Susie perched gingerly, an acid-pink flamingo, on a chair she appeared to fear was dirty, Shirley feeling like a giant by comparison, clumsy, creamy, too heavy to move, Thomas disappearing to fetch a pot of tea, and Dirk sidling grimly round the table to escape the women and be near his brother, his brother who was taller, richer, browner, Darren who was more of a man than him.

‘So that’s a full house,’ Shirley repeated brightly. ‘All the family together at last.’

Not true, of course, she realized at once. The next generation wasn’t there. None of them had met Darren’s children. Shirley herself didn’t have any. And if, by a miracle, I manage it with Elroy, I doubt if this family will ever accept them – And Dirk – is Dirk. Impossible.

Without any children they were curiously stranded, middle-aged people who were children themselves.

And where were the parents? No Dad. No Mum. It foreshadowed the future, when they would be gone. So who was meant to look after them?

Thomas put the teapot in front of her.

‘I’ll be mother,’ said Shirley, gratefully.

‘One-Stop Shop!’ It still struck Thomas as strange to see the large yellow notice on the front of the library, though it had been there for two years now. A library, after all, was not a shop. That was the point of it; you borrowed, then returned, and the things you borrowed belonged to everyone. The ethos of shops was opposed to libraries … As he’d tried to explain to the councillor who unveiled the plan for the One-Stop Shop, in one of the long Monday morning meetings that left them scratchy with frustration and boredom. ‘It’s a question of perceived social need,’ said the man, who had already used the phrase a dozen times. ‘We have to react to social need. We don’t want to get too hung up on books.’

So the One-Stop Shop, the public face of the council, had simply come to perch, inelegantly, just inside the front doors of the library, where previously there were book displays. The librarians had resisted the loss of territory, but now they were almost used to it. Thomas reflected that the notice chimed well with one Suneeta had installed on the stairs: ‘Customers may expect to be serviced rapidly and politely by library staff.’ Visions of swift and silent sex performed by librarians on special tables.

In Thomas’s lifetime, the official term had changed from ‘readers’, to ‘borrowers’, to ‘users’, and now to ‘customers’, which somehow meant less. Not that it mattered. They were ‘punters’ to the staff.

Did he like the public? – Occasionally. At any rate, he believed in them. But thank God you only had to be on the Inquiry Desk one hour in two, on a rota. You couldn’t hide, sitting out at the front, though having the computers did help them to look busy. There was a combination lock on the librarians’ office, where they worked and chatted out of public view, put on it after one of the alcoholics burst in with a can of meths and a lighter, in the eighties … Thomas wasn’t a coward, he had never been a coward, but libraries did attract people with grievances. That young man King, the other day, with his long list of inflammatory titles. The old man who came up to the desk this morning and hissed, full of spittle, ‘How do you spell “action”?’ When Thomas told him, he stared in disbelief, then shouted in a fury, ‘But where’s the s? Where’s the bloody s?’