The Essence of the Thing (12 page)

46

‘How’s Nicola then?’

‘You
saw
how she was.’

‘She seems perfectly okay to me, I don’t know why you’ve been making such a song and dance. Rails, and God knows what else.’

‘For heaven’s sake. Are you totally insensitive, or what? She’s putting on a brave face. A
very
brave face. She’s grief-stricken, that’s how she
actually
is.’

‘Are you serious, or are you serious?’

‘Right both times. Seriously, she is completely grief-stricken. She has her episodes of calm and lucidity, but then—she just caves in. She’s suffering from shock, clinical shock. It actually
is
a sort of bereavement.’

‘Oh.’

‘So just watch it, okay? Be gentle.’

‘I’m always gentle.’

‘And watch what you say.’

‘All this for that wimp Jonathan.’

‘She really loves him, you see. She really does. She gave him her heart and he broke it.’

‘It’s pure Country and Western. I might write a song, make us all rich. She gave him her heart and he broke it. I like it. Guy can have a horse. Whizzy!’

‘Just so long as you don’t
dare
try it out in front of Nicola. Remember what I said. Okay?’

‘Yeah, yeah, sure. Look, that’s enough Nicola for one day, okay? Could you hit that light? I’m falling…a…sleep…it’s been a long, long…day…’

And tomorrow will probably be just as long, thought Susannah in the darkness. Bloody Jonathan. Miserable sod.

Nicola, too, lying in her strange bed in Susannah’s workroom—at the top of the house, overlooking the back garden—was thinking of Jonathan. No amount of solitary thought, no amount of discussion with Susannah, however apparently reasonable their conclusions, exhausted the subject. Nicola was haunted by the suspicion that there was something she had not seen or even imagined; that there was something dreadfully wrong which had escaped her perception entirely: and yet no amount of thought or discussion might ever discover it. But this night as every night, as many times during the day, she once more entered the maze of remembrance in the hope of finding, this time, the path to the beast which might lurk at its heart. Perhaps Susannah was right in saying that there was a rock in Jonathan’s head: but was it not possible, wondered Nicola, that the rock was in her own head? and that Jonathan, seeing or sensing its presence, had been right to say to himself, I don’t actually love her; let’s make an end of it.

But that being so, she wished—how she wished—that there had been some other way of doing so. The cruelty of his cold indifference had lacerated her. It was something she would remember with horror and shame all her days. It almost convinced her that it was indeed she who was at fault, and the worst of it all was that she could not see how, or where, or why. It was after three o’clock before she finally slept. So passed her first night away from the home whose loss compounded the grief which was engulfing her whole self.

47

It was a blustery, uncertain sort of day, with rushing clouds which seemed on the point of foregathering and darkening only to scatter again and admit the sunshine: one could not decide whether to go out or if so how far.

‘We’ll just go for a quick run on the Common,’ said Susannah, ‘okay?’

Nicola was drying up the luncheon things and said nothing. She would do whatever was decided. She did not want to be awkward. Guy began to offer other more ambitious not to say altogether unrealistic suggestions; the doorbell rang.

‘I’ll go,’ said Nicola unexpectedly.

Susannah, eyebrows raised, threw Geoffrey a meaningful look: what had she told him?

Nicola opened the door. Before her was a short rather plump rather ginger-haired and bearded man with a baby in a pushchair.

He gave her a startled look. ‘Oh!’ he said. ‘Geoffrey not in? Or Susannah?’

On being assured that they were he came in, pushing the baby before him, without further ceremony, Nicola (her heart thumping with a terrible disappointment) returning to the kitchen to summon her hosts. Out they came.

‘Oh, Sam,’ they said. ‘Nicola, this is Sam. And this is little Chloe. Hello, Chloe. Come into the sitting room, Sam.’

The sitting room—knocked through—occupied virtually all of the ground floor, the kitchen having been thrown out at the rear. Sam wheeled the baby into a corner and put on the brake and they all sat down.

‘Will you have some coffee?’ said Susannah. ‘I was just about to make some. We’ve only just finished lunch.’

‘I don’t mind if I do,’ said Sam. ‘As long as you’re making it anyway.’

He looked around the room, especially at the pictures hanging on the walls, with a frankly speculative glance, as if checking to see whether anything new and/or valuable had come into it since his last visit.

‘Still got that Hodgkin, I see,’ he remarked. He often said this, as if to say, you must be doing all right, if you can afford
not to sell
a Hodgkin.

Geoffrey played up to this with gusto. ‘Yep,’ he said, with an air of oleaginous self-satisfaction. ‘Still got it!’ He all but smacked his lips.

It was a very small Hodgkin and they’d bought it with a windfall about a million years ago, before acquiring a mortgage and a child and all that pertains thereto, but Sam didn’t take any of that into account.

‘Saw a very tasty little Sutton the other day,’ he said. ‘Couldn’t afford it, of course.’ He gave a sort of snort which implied better than any words could do not only the utter unlikelihood that such as he might afford such a thing but also the evident turpitude of anyone who could.

‘Ah,’ said Geoffrey cheerfully, to all appearances oblivious of these implications, ‘a Sutton; yes. We haven’t got a Sutton.’ As if by mere oversight: a gap yet to be filled in a catholic—yet serious— collection. ‘How much were they asking?’

‘Oh, you know,’ said Sam glumly, ‘five figures. More than that I’m not prepared to say.’ If I can’t have it, he seemed to imply, I’ll be damned if you shall. I won’t even tell you where it is, so there.

‘Cork Street, was it?’ said Geoffrey innocently. ‘Who
is
his dealer these days?’ As if he genuinely required to know.

‘Frankly, I don’t exactly remember,’ said Sam, almost ill-temperedly. ‘One of those rascals, does it matter which?’ He had Geoffrey there; he looked around the room again as if to change the subject. ‘That chair’s new, isn’t it?’ he said, almost accusingly.

‘Not really,’ said Geoffrey, all consolation. ‘Only new to this room. We had it upstairs.’

‘Oh, yes?’ said Sam, as if to say, that’s the rich for you: chairs all over the place; upstairs
and
downstairs.

‘Nice, though, isn’t it?’ said Geoffrey urbanely. ‘Arts and Crafts. We managed to get in early there. Couldn’t afford it now, of course.’

‘No,’ said Sam abruptly. ‘I should think
not
.’

Susannah had returned with the coffee halfway through all this and had been throwing warning looks at Geoffrey, who had been ignoring them. She now seized her opportunity. ‘How do you like it?’ she asked her guest, having seen to Nicola already. ‘Milk? Sugar?’

‘Yes,’ said Sam. ‘Please. The lot.’ Take them for all they’ve got.

The funniest part of all, as Susannah and Geoffrey later explained to Nicola, who had taken in all these proceedings with wide-eyed wonder, was that Sam, being a colleague of Geoffrey’s, was on exactly the same salary scale; although of course it was possible that Helen earned less than Susannah. It was also of course possible that she earned more. But there was little enough in it: in plain fact, Sam and Helen were as rich as they, and they as poor as Sam and Helen.

Guy, perhaps infected by Sam’s need to be plied with all the luxuries of this world, perhaps on his own account, now enquired whether they might not now have a chocolate and was given leave to fetch the box, with which he returned at approximately the speed of light. Nicola having refused one they were offered to Sam.

‘Hmmm,’ he said, as if to say, chocolates, too.

His hand hovered over the contents, and he chose one. He raised it nearly to eye level before eating it, as if to determine its provenance, and then it vanished into his mouth.

‘I say!’ he exclaimed. ‘This chocolate is the business all right!’

His frank delight made up for almost all his former malice: Susannah all but forgave him while Geoffrey having so revelled in the game had nothing to forgive.

‘Yes,’ said Susannah. ‘They’re a present from Nicola. Fortnum’s, you see. Brilliant, aren’t they?’ She stopped herself just in time from observing that you get what you pay for. ‘Have another,’ she said.

‘All right,’ said Sam. ‘Just one.’

The disregarded baby now let out a yell.

‘Oh, she wants one too!’ cried the heretofore silent and wondering Nicola.

‘No,’ said Sam abruptly. ‘She can’t. They’re too rich for her, she’ll be sick.’

The baby began to wail.

‘Just a tiny bit, then,’ said Nicola. ‘I’ll give her a tiny bit out of mine.’

She took the smallest one she could see, actually a chocolate-covered almond, and bit off a piece of the chocolate which she gave to the baby, who instantly ceased her clamour and smiled and waved her arms joyfully. Then she began to look around, as if for more; her smile faded and she began tentatively to wail anew.

‘She’ll never shut up now,’ said Sam crossly. ‘I was hoping she’d doze off while I’m here.’ That was his social life down the tubes for the afternoon.

‘Would you like me to take her out?’ said Nicola. ‘I could take her out for a walk if you like.’

This offer surprised them all, especially Sam. He had so far paid Nicola no attention whatever, although she was in fact the only new and valuable item in the room since his last visit.

He turned his head and looked at her, genuinely astounded. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘If you like. Yes, if you like. Yes, that would be very nice. If you’re sure you can manage her.’

You’d have thought she was a Doberman.

‘Yes, we’ll manage,’ said Nicola. ‘I’ll just get my jacket.’

The baby had stopped her tentative wailing and was listening with interest to this exchange, and she now kicked her legs in evident approval of the conclusion it had reached. When Nicola returned and began to wheel the pushchair out of the room she waved her arms joyfully again and uttered several small shrieks of happiness, and the two left the house.

48

‘I wonder what has happened on the Jonathan and Nicola front.’

‘What front? Where?’

‘I told you. He’s given her the push. Or he had when last heard from. Or rather, of. I was just wondering if they’ve managed to patch it up.’

‘Oh, I expect so. He can’t afford to screw up at his age. Got to settle down sooner or later, make a few copies of the old DNA before the packaging passes its use-by date, it’s what we’re here for.’

‘Oh, that’s funny, I thought we were here to pursue goodness, truth and beauty.’

‘No, no, that’s just an optional extra, it’s only the DNA thingy which is obligatory. Time Jonathan got on with it.’

‘Perhaps he just doesn’t want to.’

‘Well it’s not really any of our business. Speaking of which—’ Alfred put down his coffee cup and moved slightly closer to Lizzie, ‘I don’t suppose you’ve given any more thought to the matter of a sibling for Henrietta, have you?’ He was looking rather sad.

Lizzie put her head on his shoulder. ‘It’s awfully difficult,’ she said, ‘to find the time. You must understand.’

‘Yes, yes, I know that,’ said Alfred. ‘But it always will be. And eventually it will be too late altogether.’ He looked even sadder.

‘I’m sorry, Alf,’ said Lizzie. ‘I really can’t think of doing it now. This is a really crucial time for indies. Perhaps in about six months. That’s the best I can say right now.’

‘Okay,’ said Alfred, still sad, but resigned. ‘Okay. What can I say?’

‘Look on the bright side,’ said Lizzie.

‘Which is that?’

‘You know what a child can do to a marriage. I mean, we are happy as we are, wouldn’t you say?’

‘Of course I would. I wouldn’t want us to have another sprog otherwise.’

‘Yes, but what if another sprog were to ruin everything? It wouldn’t be worth the price, then.’

‘No, of course not, but why on earth should it?’

‘Well, it can happen. Look at the Maclises.’

‘Oh. Them. Well, but—’

‘They were perfectly okay until they had Percy, and by the time he was walking it was all down the tubes. Awful. Poor Claire.’

‘Well, poor Alex if it comes to that. He rang me the other day by the way; he wants to ply me with strong drink and pick my brains, he’s doing a big piece about the Lloyd’s thing.’

‘Are you going to oblige him?’

‘I dare say I shall, I’m an obliging sort of chap as you know.’

‘Obligation, it’s an interesting idea, isn’t it? It’s so very human. I’m sure animals have no sense of obligation. Which reminds me, I think I’m obliged to telephone Nicola and see if everything is all right, considering how upset she was when I saw her.’

‘Oh, do it then if you must and get it over with.’

‘Yes, but I’m afraid of getting Jonathan, which would be awkward, because he presumably doesn’t know that I know, and I couldn’t tell him that I did, and I have nothing else to say to him; it’s Nicola I really need to speak to.’

‘If she doesn’t answer just say sorry wrong number and hang up.’

‘You’ve done this before, haven’t you?’

‘Once or twice. In my rash and turbulent youth.’

‘I think the best thing is to wait and ring her at work.’

‘Yes, all right, you do that then.’

But naturally, what with one thing and another, this being, truly, a crucial time for indies, she forgot to—not that it mattered at all seriously.

49

‘Will she be able to manage?’ asked Sam, typically inspecting the bolt on the stable door with the horse already a good three fields away.

‘Probably,’ Geoffrey assured him; ‘very probably.’

‘Of course she will,’ said Susannah hastily. ‘She’s got nieces and nephews, she’s very experienced; she even used to look after Guy sometimes. Guy, perhaps it might be a good idea if you were to ride after them on the bike and make sure Nicola knows how to get to the Common in case she wants to go there. And we need some milk, so you might get that for me, would you?’

‘Oh, all right,’ said Guy without much enthusiasm.

‘Thank you, darling,’ said his mother.

He sloped off and a moment afterwards they heard him leaving.

‘Obliging sort of kid you’ve got there,’ said Sam. Was there no end to their privileges?

Geoffrey pulled his face into an expression of judiciousness. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘We feel, that—instil the aesthetic sense, and everything else will take care of itself. It seems to have worked, so far.’ He paused and then turned to his wife. ‘Wouldn’t you say, Susannah?’

She ignored him and turned to Sam. ‘How are things round at Cardamon Road? How is Helen?’

‘Oh, as far as Helen is concerned, she is the reason for my bringing Chloe here. Can you take that child out for a walk, she said to me, I need some space. Space! In a house with six-plus rooms, she needs space!’

‘I suppose she meant time,’ said Susannah. ‘How is the house?’ At least I got out of that pretty quickly, she thought. Sam had been looking oppressed; but his expression did not now brighten. Oh dear, now what, thought Susannah: out, but not far enough out.

‘That house,’ said Sam heavily, ‘is my Waterloo.’

The association at this juncture of Sam with Napoleon was unspeakably ludicrous; Geoffrey and Susannah both began to laugh helplessly. After one very disconcerted moment Sam himself began to join them and was soon laughing as heartily as they.

Having (however inadvertently) picked up the ball he now ran with it, treating them to a wild catalogue of mishap and disaster such as only a
bricoleur
can provide. Tears veritably pouring down their faces, they begged for respite, but he showed no mercy, and continued to sit, now glum-faced and hopeless, piling Pelion upon Ossa.

‘And with all that,’ he concluded at last, ‘I still haven’t managed even to touch the top floor.
Status quo ante
, right down to the kitchen sink. That top front room was meant to be Chloe’s bedroom, with a study for me at the back, much as you’ve got here; but as it is she’s right next door to us. No wonder our sex life has hit the buffers. Not that it wouldn’t have done anyway, but every little helps.’

‘Still, the kitchen must be looking pretty good,’ said Susannah quickly.

‘Ha!’ Sam ejaculated mirthlessly. ‘It’s the charnel house of all my good intentions and all my fundamental optimism. If that’s the sort of thing you go in for, it looks bloody good. Other than that, I could choke on it.’ And he fixed them with a belligerent glare, as if defying them—or anyone else—to provoke him into doing so.

His hosts began to laugh again and were soon almost as helpless as before.

‘Lastly,’ said Sam, ‘in any case, to look on the bright side, I’m going to have to pull in my horns for a bit—’ Horns! It was too much, tears came into their eyes again; Sam looked from one to the other in blank astonishment and finding no ready explanation for their renewed mirth continued: ‘—because we’ve run into a cash-flow fuck-up, don’t ask me how. But I really don’t know which is worse, carrying on as I’ve been doing in the futile hope of finishing, some day, or stopping the show
pro tem
. If there’s one thing I know about doing it yourself, it’s that it costs a bloody fortune. In fact we’re thinking of letting the top floor to some student or other desperate character. With that back room still fitted up as a kitchen, of sorts, they wouldn’t be too much in the way, they’d only have to share the bathroom. That’s what we’ll probably do, after Easter.’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Susannah. ‘Easter. Are you going away?’

‘If you can call going to my parents
going away
,’ said Sam. ‘It doesn’t fulfil any of the essential conditions except for the tiresome ones. Still, we’ll be shot of Chloe, in the main. She’ll be taken over lock, stock and barrel. That’s something. Too bad we can’t just send her by herself, to be collected at the other end like any other livestock, but BR won’t wear it. No wonder they’ve gone to the wall. They won’t provide the services the punters really need. So we’ve got to take her ourselves and hang about until it’s time to bring her back again.’

‘Where do they live, again?’ asked Susannah.

‘Cornwall,’ said Sam morosely.

You’d have thought the name designated one of the kingdom’s most notorious hell-holes.

‘Sounds lovely,’ said Susannah firmly.

‘Oh, it’s lovely enough,’ said Sam, as if loveliness were the merest and most paltry of attributes.

‘What more could one ask?’ said Geoffrey rhetorically.

‘Ah,’ said Sam. ‘If I only knew.’

Meanwhile, as they all immediately, perfectly, understood, he was asking anyway.

The crystalline moment was shattered by the front door bell.

‘That will be Nicola,’ said Susannah.

‘And with any luck, Chloe too,’ added Geoffrey. ‘I’ll just go and see.’

‘I suppose she’ll be sopping wet,’ said Sam lugubriously. ‘That baby should be hooked up directly to Thames Water, I swear. Then the rest of us might get a bit of peace.’

‘The duck,’ said Susannah fondly. ‘The little precious.’

‘Ha!’ said Sam. ‘
So you say
.’