One Good Turn (28 page)
Martin felt a burning pain, like indigestion, beneath his rib cage. He recognized it as guilt even though he was innocent. Of this, at least. But did it matter? Guilt was guilt. It had to be assigned somewhere. Paid for somehow. If there was cosmic justice at work, and Martin was inclined to think there was, then at the end of the day the weights had to balance. An eye for an eye.
“Last night?” Campbell prompted.
“Well,” Martin said, “there was a man with a baseball bat.” It
sounded like the beginning of a story that could go anywhere—
and he was a champion player in the major league
. Or sad—
and when he found out that he was dying, he willed the bat to his favorite grandson
.The shape that the real tale had taken seemed unbelievable in compar-ison to its fictional alternatives. In the end Martin didn’t mention the gun, he could see it might be considered a detail too far.
B
ill, the gardener, appeared like an apparition at the French windows, giving Gloria a start. It had begun to spit with rain out-side, but Bill never seemed to notice the weather. Whenever Gloria commented on it,
“Isn’t it a lovely morning?”
or
“Goodness, it’s cold today,”
and so on, he would glance around with a perplexed expression on his face, as if he were trying to see something invisible. It seemed an odd trait in a gardener, surely the weather should be part of his nature? She offered him coffee, as usual, although he had never in five years accepted. Bill always brought a khaki canvas satchel in which he carried an old-fashioned thermos flask and various greaseproof paper packets of food—sandwiches, Gloria supposed, and cake, perhaps a hard-boiled egg, all prepared by his wife.
Gloria used to prepare a packed lunch for Graham. That was a long time ago, when the world was much younger and Gloria took pride in making “traybake” cakes and sausage rolls and filling little Tupperware containers with lettuce and tomato and carrot batons, all for Graham to consume mindlessly in a lay-by somewhere. Or perhaps he just threw the contents of the little Tupper-ware containers in the nearest bin and went and ate scampi and chips in a pub with an eager-breasted woman. Sometimes Gloria wondered where she had been when feminism occurred—in the kitchen making interesting packed lunches, presumably. Of course, Graham hadn’t eaten a packed lunch in decades, wasn’t eating at all now, instead had mysterious substances added and subtracted from his body by tubes, like an astronaut.
Gloria wondered why Bill wasn’t unwrapping his little paper parcels of food in the privacy of the shed. He cleared his throat in a self-conscious way. He was very small, like a jockey, and he made Gloria feel like an elephant.
“Can I help you with something?” she asked him. He was always “Bill,” while she was always “Mrs. Hatter,” and she had long ago given up saying, “Call me Gloria.” He used to work for some kind of aristocrat in the Borders and was more comfortable in a mistress/servant relationship. Gloria almost expected him to tug his forelock.
She was distracted by the sight of a smear of chocolate on her white blouse. She supposed it was from the chocolate digestives she had breakfasted on. She imagined the little factory of cells that was her body taking in the chocolate and fat and flour (and prob-ably carcinogenic additives) and sending them off on conveyor belts to different processing rooms. This industry, dedicated to the greater good that was Gloria, was run on cooperative, profit-sharing lines. In this model Gloria factory, the cells were a cheer-ful, happy workforce who sang along to
Worker’s Playtime
from a Tannoy radio. They were unionized and benefited from subsidized housing and health care and never became entangled in the factory machinery and mangled to death like her brother, Jonathan.
Bill’s wife, it turned out, had a brain that was “turning into a sponge,” according to Bill, and therefore he was going to have to give up coming on Wednesdays (“if you don’t mind, Mrs. Hatter”) and tend his sponge-brain wife instead of Gloria’s garden. Gloria thought about mentioning Graham’s present condition to him— having a damaged spouse was the first thing they had found in common—but they had already had the longest conversation they had ever had, and she decided he probably couldn’t bear any more.
The phone rang for the hundredth time. Bill didn’t question Gloria standing patiently, waiting for it to stop. Gloria wondered what it would have been like to have been married to such a passive man. Infuriating, probably. Say what you like about Graham, he had given her a good run for her money.
After he’d delivered his news, Bill disappeared into his shed and, presumably, ate his lunch as usual, because thirty minutes later he emerged, brushing crumbs from his mustache, and began to aerate the lawn with a device that looked like an instrument of torture. Gloria made herself a cheese-and-chutney sandwich (gooseberry chutney, her own recipe, the gooseberries picked a few weeks ago out at Stenton Farm) and ate it standing at the kitchen counter and then went into the hall and listened to the messages on the answering machine. There were so many now that the latter ones had erased the earlier ones. Gloria thought this was how her own memory worked, except the opposite way round.
Everyone wanted Graham for one reason or another. His ab-sence was causing a rising tide of panic in the Hatter Homes’ offices, already under mental siege from the Fraud Unit.
“You’ve not done a Robert Maxwell, have you?”
said the fraught voice of his sec-ond in command, Gareth Lawson.
Pam fluttering,
“Oh, Gloria, can I have your recipe for Turkish cheesecake, I know I’ve written it down somewhere but I can’t put my hands on it.”
It was a very good recipe—a packet of Philadelphia, a tin of Fussell’s sterilized cream, and half a dozen eggs beaten together and poured into a caramel-coated mold and cooked gently in a bain-marie. It was the kind of recipe a person treasured once they had been given it. Pam would not be getting it off Gloria a second time.
A short barking,
“Graham, still in fucking Thurso?”
from Murdo Miller, endless
“Mother? Mother, where are you?”
from Emily. An abrasive West Coast voice that Gloria recognized as their account-ant, saying,
“What’s going on,Graham? You’re not answering your mo-bile, you didn’t turn up at our meeting yesterday.”
The stentorian tones of Alistair Crichton blared,
“Where the fuck are you, Graham? You seem to have disappeared off the face of the fucking planet.”
Gloria thought that she wouldn’t like to be a criminal appearing in his court. A judge who, if he were judged himself, would be found seriously wanting. “Justice has nothing to do with the law,” he once remarked airily to her over a tray of canapés at some “do” or other.
“Graham, why aren’t you answering your mobile? We have to talk, do you understand? I hope you’re not bailing out on me.”
The phone rang before this message was finished, and the an-swering machine summarily ditched Sheriff Crichton and began recording the unhappy tones of Christine Tennant, Graham’s long-suffering secretary of ten years. (“PA, actually, Gloria,” she con-tinually, apologetically, corrected, but Gloria knew that if you typed and took notes and answered a phone, you were a secretary. Call a spade a spade.) Her usual rather whiny tones now had a near-hysterical edge to them.
“Gloria, everyone’s looking for Graham, he’s really needed here. Do you know how I can contact him in Thurso?”
Over the years, Gloria had occasionally wondered if Graham had ever had sex with Christine Tennant, she had been with him for ten years, after all, yet still seemed unnaturally enamored of him, surely only a woman suffering from unrequited passion could remain that fond of Graham. On the other hand, Graham was a man of clichés, and therefore sleeping with his secretary would be the kind of thing he would do. That would be a rather good epitaph for his headstone. GRAHAM HATTER—A MAN OF CLICHéS. You didn’t have headstones if you were cremated, did you? You had nothing, an epitaph written on the wind and water.
Of course, the first thing you did when someone was missing was phone the hospitals, everyone knew that, yet it never seemed to have crossed the mind of any of these people who were so des-perate to get their hands on Graham, when all this time he was simply lying there on his catafalque in the ICU, hidden in plain sight, waiting to be discovered.
Gloria’s eye was caught by something, a flicker in the rhodo-dendrons, a flash of something reflective catching the light. She reached for the binoculars that she kept handy for bird-watching. It took her a while to adjust the binoculars, but then the glossy green leaves came suddenly into focus, revealing a face, Ovidian among the greenery. The face melted back into the foliage. At any rate she was sure now that it wasn’t a bear or a horse. Nor was it a woman metamorphosed into a tree, or vice versa. Gloria strode out into the garden, scattering sparrows in her wake, but when she reached the rhododendrons there was no intruder, only Bill uri-nating discreetly in the shrubbery.
T
he electronic gates swung open to let Gloria’s red Golf out. She always felt as if she were making a getaway from a crime when she drove through them. She headed for George Street, where the parking gods found her a space right outside Gray’s, where she bought a radiator key and a Stain Devil (for chewing gum, glue, and nail varnish) before schlepping along to the Royal Bank on the corner of Castle Street, where she withdrew her five hundred pounds for the day.
When she returned, Bill was packing up, putting his tools in the boot of his car. Although they had every kind of tool possible in the shed, Bill preferred to bring his own with him, some of them looked so old they could have been displayed in an agricultural museum.
“Well,”he said laconically, “I’ll be going, then.”Gloria supposed that if she hadn’t returned when she had, he would have left with-out even saying good-bye. Five years and all she got was “I’ll be going, then.” Graham’s last words to her had been something sim-ilar, she tried to remember what he had said to her yesterday morning.
“I’ll probably be late”
—nothing new there, something about
“the fucking fraud cops,”
and then
“I’m off now.”
How prescient of him.
She should give Bill a farewell gift of some kind, she should have bought something in town but she never thought of it. She could give him money, but money always seemed an impersonal gift. From an early age, both Ewan and Emily had asked for money for their birthdays and Christmases. Gloria liked to give gifts, not money. Money was good but it wasn’t
personal
. It was business.
Bill slammed the boot of his car shut, and she said, “No, wait a minute,” and hurried inside the house to look for something suit-able. It was hard to know what a man of so few words might like, she considered a pair of dainty Staffordshire dalmatians sitting pertly on royal blue cushions—he looked like a man who might like dogs—or a nice limited-edition Moorcroft vase? Then she remembered him standing at the French windows one day—he had never once crossed the threshold in five years—admiring the stag at bay on the wall. She unhooked the painting from the wall, it was much heavier than it looked, and carried it outside to Bill.
He was reluctant to take it. “Worth a lot, Mrs. Hatter,” he mumbled shyly.
“Not
that
much,” Gloria said. “Come on, take it, God doesn’t give with two hands.” She thought of Bill’s wife with her spongy brain. Sometimes God seemed to give a little with one hand and take away a lot with the other.
Eventually he was persuaded into giving a home to the doomed stag, sliding it into his boot on top of his tools before driving away for the last time. Gloria had neither liked nor disliked him, but now she felt a surprising pang of sorrow that she would never see him again. Even though they barely interacted with each other, she thought of Wednesday as “Bill’s day.” Monday was “hospice day,” when Gloria put on a ludicrously cheerful smile and trundled a tea trolley round the local hospice—good china, homemade bis-cuits—everything nice because they were dying and they knew it.
Friday was “Beryl’s day.” It seemed now that Beryl would out-last her son. She lived in a nursing home just a few streets away, and Gloria visited her there every Friday afternoon, although Beryl had no idea who Gloria was, as her brain had also softened into a sponge. Gloria felt her own brain turning into something harder, less friendly, coral perhaps. They had seen “brain coral” on holiday in the Maldives when Gloria had made a timid foray into the underwater world of snorkeling. She had worn an old navy blue one-piece that she wore for swimming in Warriston Baths and was acutely aware of the way in which, from shoulder to hip, her body had taken on the prowed shape of a lizard’s. Every other woman on the hot white beach seemed to be slim and brown and wearing a tiny expensive bikini.
They always took a tropical holiday in January—the Seychelles, Mauritius, Thailand—staying at the most expensive hotels, waited on hand and foot. Graham liked being a rich man, liked people to see that he was a rich man. If he recovered, if he lived, perish the thought, could he bear to be a poor man? Probably not. So Death might be a Good Thing for him.
There had been a lot of Russians staying in their hotel in the Maldives. The women were thin and blond and taken up with children, while the men were big and hairy and reminded Glo-ria of walrus, basking all day long in their gold jewelry, oily skins, and swimwear that was too tight. “Gangsters,” Graham said to Gloria matter-of-factly. Gloria was puzzled as to whom the Russian men reminded her of until she realized it was Gra-ham. They out-Grahamed Graham, which was quite an achievement.
The last time Gloria had had sex with Graham was in the Maldives, on the tight white coverlet of the bed under a tropical hard-wood ceiling spiraled into the shape of a snail. It had been an awkward and slightly confrontational act.
Gloria wondered if anyone would visit
her
if she was in a nursing home, she couldn’t imagine Emily turning up regularly with new underwear, hand cream, a potted hyacinth. She couldn’t imagine Emily sitting opposite her, week in, week out, brushing her hair, massaging her hands, keeping up a one-sided meaning-less conversation. She couldn’t imagine Ewan visiting her at all.