The Whole Day Through (2 page)

The facts were cruel in their simplicity: Mummy needed a carer, no one but Laura could fill the role and, as she could do her work anywhere and had no ties, there was no good reason why she should not move in. Not that she
had
moved in. Not properly. Most of her boxed-up belongings remained stacked at the back of the garage, a shadowy and increasingly damp promise that the situation might yet change.

She lost her temper so rarely that the sensation was entirely unfamiliar and felt like the onset of some tumultuous fit or sickness. She was incapable of violence but the social worker, a waxy-haired boy in a shiny suit, was eminently slappable, not least because of the way his intonation rose at the end of every sentence. As he asked his unnecessarily personal questions, he spoke entirely in second-hand phrases so that it was tempting to assume his thoughts were not his own either. She focused on getting through his little grilling as quickly as possible, resisting the impulse to take issue with the necessity of his knowing what she earned or what her mother’s marital status was.

‘She’s single,’ she told him.

‘Divorced, is that?’

‘No. Single. My parents never married. And my father’s dead.’

‘Ah.’

She watched his fat fist grasp his pen to form the word
widow
. Strictly speaking, an unmarried woman couldn’t be a widow, but she let it pass. All that mattered was to get out of his cubby-hole of an office and out of the hospital’s stifling atmosphere and, in her indignation, she heard herself telling him things he hadn’t even asked and which only taxed his limited understanding and further delayed her escape.

When she finally broke free, having had to agree to an inspection of her mother’s house for tripping hazards and other risks that might be modified, she felt her
unvoiced anger breaking out at last as a flush on her face and a tremor in her hands and jaw and a sense that everything around her – the visitors with their reused plastic bags, the too chirpy porters, the nurses sullen with exhaustion, the amateur art lining the corridor along which she strode – seemed an affront to her senses.

She had picked up a piece of gravel in her shoe when passing between buildings, which was suddenly digging sharply into her heel. She had paused to pick it out when some man called out her name. She looked around her but took in no faces in the crowd. Then she realized that of course no one knew her here and she had simply overheard a stranger calling to a different Laura, and this irritated her further.

‘Laura?’ he called again and she turned and saw a handsome man in a suit who was clearly addressing her.

She didn’t recognize him at first. In fact she fleetingly mistook him for a BBC foreign correspondent, and wondered how he knew her. He hadn’t lost all his hair or become immensely fat but they had not seen each other for over twenty years and the boy had become a man. Hair she remembered as chestnut was now turning grey. But as soon as he smiled she recognized him from the little gap between his front teeth and the way just one cheek dimpled. She recognized, too, the modest way he then gave his name as though she was struggling to place him. She imagined he had a full minute in which to place her before calling out to her.

‘Of course!’ She laughed. ‘It’s seeing you so suddenly and out of context,’ and they hugged and he kissed her on either cheek then laughed as she automatically moved for a third. ‘Oh my God!’

‘I know,’ he said, pulling back to take her in. ‘Twenty years. How did that happen?’

‘Stop it,’ she said. ‘I’m ancient,’ but he ignored her, still staring, smiling.

For a second or two they just stared, smiling selfconsciously, as each took in the effects of all that time on the other’s face. The longer she looked, the more recognizable he became, as though all that time were suddenly nothing. All that mess, the jobs and places and stupid, pointless relationships she hadn’t known were pointless at the time; it sprang together like a stretched band suddenly released. Following hard on her anger with the social worker, the sensation left her lightheaded, as if drunk, and she giggled nervously.

‘I’d heard you lived in Paris,’ he said.

‘Well, you’re supposed to be in London,’ she countered, walking on and drawing him with her. ‘I’m visiting my mother. Well, looking after her really.’

‘Nothing serious?’

‘Broken ankle and a touch of exposure,’ she said flippantly. ‘General crumble. You know the sort of thing.’

‘I’m sorry. I didn’t know she lived here.’

‘She didn’t. I mean, when I…when we were…’

‘Ah.’

Whenever friends in Paris, women friends, got her talking about past relationships it was always the one with Phil she spoke of as having the most importance, not the earlier one with Ben. The liaison with Phil had been bruising and dramatic and was the reason she had moved to Paris, so naturally it loomed large in her version of herself and her becoming. Brought abruptly face to face with Ben again, she realized, however, that she had been shielding their youthful shared history from scrutiny, perhaps as much to avoid analysing it herself as to protect it from a picking-over and possible belittling by others.

‘How about you?’ she asked.

‘Long story. But I’m working here at the moment.’

‘My turn to say “Ah”.’

They had reached the door to the car park. There was a cherry tree in blossom nearby and sugar-pink petals had blown into the doorway and been trodden into the doormat like soggy confetti.

Ben stepped to one side and smiled as she turned to look at him. ‘It took me a second or two to…’ he began. ‘I like you with shorter hair.’

‘Thanks. Paris.’

And so, with a married man’s confidence, she realized now, he had asked if they could meet again and in a rush she found they were meeting for dinner the following week, once she had got her mother home again and settled back into a routine.

She drank the last of her tea and set her mug with a clink against last night’s wineglass. She made herself sit
up and start dressing. If she wasn’t careful, those few seconds, in which Ben asked her out and looked so becomingly delighted when she said yes, tended to replay themselves in her mind, useless and flattering.

Her eagerness shamed her, naturally. She was no longer a gawky student but a forty-something honorary
Parisienne
, a woman used to men and schooled in sangfroid. A gesture towards cool, even an initial refusal, would have set her value a little higher.

Pants
, she told herself.
Bra
. Not long ago underwear had mattered to her and the possibility that someone else might remove it had been reason enough to spend almost as much on it as on the layers that kept it from view. Underwear still loomed large, but now it was her mother’s: five extraordinarily expensive pairs of white pants reinforced with hollow plastic hip-armour to prevent breakages. Such was the significance of these garments, so dire the warnings on every side of old women who broke their hips or pelvises and
were never the same again
, that Mummy grew extremely anxious if there weren’t at least one pair clean for night-time and one for emergencies. Which meant that laundry was washed and hung out every day rather than just once a week and the gentle knocking together of hip-protectors on the washing line had become as much a part of the garden’s sounds as birdsong or wind in the graveyard beeches. Amid such a routine, Laura’s handful of elegant, hand-wash-only ensembles had slipped to the back of the drawer in favour of serviceable cotton things – once
schoolgirl white – that could be added to the daily washes to help make up a load.

Today’s pants, the first to come to hand, were emergency ones from Monoprix, sagging at the waist now, and had turned dispiritingly grey, but no one would know that but her. Which was, she told herself bracingly, a kind of liberation.

Some time in the early hours, Ben was woken by thumping from Bobby’s room – thumping, the sound of a breaking glass or mug, then Bobby’s characteristic muddle of swearing and laughter.

‘Bob?’ he called out. ‘Bobby? You okay?’ ‘I’m fine,’ Bobby called back, in their mother’s voice, and giggled; then all was quiet again.

Ben had been in the Winchester house for nearly nine weeks now and still found at such moments he was startled afresh to find he was not in bed with his wife but lying alone in another city. He rolled over onto his front, stretching out an arm to where Chloë would have been, and encircled a spare pillow in her stead. The deepest, darkest reaches of the night, when there was least risk of speech, had become the time when his marriage to her felt least insecure.

Then he fell deeply asleep again, worn out by four days of overburdened clinics, and he dreamed of Laura. They were together, back in the amazingly big room she landed in her last year at New College, on the top floor of New Building overlooking a length of the old city wall and Chapel roof and the bell tower. With his adult eyes he saw it and thought,
Christ, what an incredible view!
but he was blasé in the dream, as was she, taking such blessings for granted or as some kind of right won through exams and hard work. But her bed was vast and lapped in linen, like something from a good hotel, not the broken-backed single of reality, so pitiful and noisy they used to pull its mattress onto the floor or simply make love down there, furled in her duvet and getting little friction burns from the nasty nylon carpet.

So there they were, naked and together in her college room with the usual student gestures towards sophistication – a jug of real coffee under one of those horrible paper filter funnels nobody used any more, grapes, brie, a bottle of college port – yet they were their adult selves, he forty-eight to her forty-something, both a bit lived in.

She wasn’t beautiful when they were students, not like Chloë, who had notoriously or famously spent her gap year modelling for Ralph Lauren. Even at the time, or especially at the time – with the brutally calibrating eye of untried youth – he looked around and made comparisons and saw that, judged by the accepted norms, Laura was funny-looking, her face on the bony side of feline,
her eyes cartoonishly large, her body so boyishly flat and slim it seemed instantly familiar when he first slept with her and lacking in the challenge or mystery he had expected.

Twenty years on she still wasn’t exactly beautiful. She had still barely acquired curves but, with maturity, her features were revealed as extraordinary in the way that some actors’ were – almost better in close-up, at kissing distance, than when viewed across a room. She had learnt somewhere to present herself differently, so that abrupt verbal shyness was turned to sexy reticence. She had acquired an allure.

But that new, shorter hair she had probably had for years but which still surprised him with the glimpses it gave of her neck was catching the sun and he was hard as anything and just wanted to keep her there or rather to eat her out and fuck her and keep her there because, this being a dream, he was quite without inhibition and they were both so much better in bed than they ever were as students. But she kept pulling away and saying she had to go, she really had to go. That yes, yes, she loved him back and wanted him too, so, so badly and right now but that she really had to go.

Then the alarm went and she said, ‘There. You see? The alarm. Now you’ve made us both late and your wife’ll kill us.’ Whereupon the alarm went and he woke up with a throbbing groin and a sharp sense of regret.

This was not his room, although he had been sleeping in it for two months. It was his mother’s room. He had
made changes, done his best to defeminize it with white paint and a purge of her unapologetically trashy taste in fiction. The floral bedspread and cushions had gone to Oxfam. As had the make-up mirror and the lace curtains. But it was still her room, even with a pile of
BMJ
s and
Lancet
s on the bedside table and his shaving things and toothbrush at the grimy edge of the sink.

His own, his old, room, tiny by comparison, had been turned long ago into a sort of snug with the stereo system in it so that their mother could have somewhere to retreat from Bobby when she needed a little peace.

The house had never seemed so small when he was growing up and Bobby was a child, although even then Bobby’s clamorous personality had seemed to fill the place. But after his and Chloë’s flat on Battersea Park, it felt astonishingly cramped and he appreciated for the first time their mother’s sacrifices.

Before Bobby arrived, an unexpected late baby and just possibly a misguided attempt to revive a flagging marriage, she had taught in a good little primary school out in St Cross and their father was a partner in a busy dental practice on St Giles Hill. With Bobby’s diagnosis everything changed. She threw in her job to become his full-time speech therapist and carer, saying it was important and they’d cope. Perhaps Father had been leaving her anyway? Perhaps he’d found his second son too overwhelming a disappointment? Perhaps it was just lust? When Ben was twelve to Bob’s two, their father announced he was in love with a temporary dental nurse
and moving to live with her and her family in Durban. It was, he said, entirely beyond his control.

Ben recalled no fights, no screaming rows, only the sudden disappearance, his mother’s explanation and a great, exhausted sorrow. As part of the divorce settlement, their father paid Ben’s remaining fees at Pilgrims’, the little prep school in the shadow of the cathedral, but he had been living beyond his means and, to avoid picking up a huge mortgage, they were obliged to leave their old house in Edgar Road and move to a gardenless back street in a sad area called Fulflood, on the wrong side of Oram’s Arbour, near the station.

Fulflood wasn’t a sad area any more. Every house for streets around had been lovingly renovated beyond its original status, every poky yard given a brave Mediterranean makeover. But the house remained small, and back then it must have seemed pretty miserable.

His Friday shirt, the slightly dashing violet one with white stripes, was waiting on its hanger. It wasn’t that he had a specific shirt for every day of the week, which would have been really sad, but he always washed his work shirts on a Saturday and ironed them on a Sunday so he was never short of a shirt on a weekday. Which was only slightly sad.