The Sunlight on the Garden (14 page)

‘What use does the fool think he will be?' Joy asked. Usually so placid, she amazed me with the tone, harsh with anger, with which she asked the question.

I shrugged. ‘I suppose in some way he feels responsible.'

‘Of course he feels responsible! He ought to feel responsible! If he hadn't encouraged that boy … And now he's dead. That's clear. He's dead.' Suddenly she began to sob with a gulping, jerky frenzy. Then she rushed into the stateroom, leaving me alone. I went to the rail and stared down at the crowd. More and more of them began to stare up at me in still, silent hostility – as though it were I who had held out that fifty-dollar bribe.

When Sonny at last returned, I expected him to be shaken and shocked by the realisation that, however indirectly, he had been the cause of a death. When, to my amazement, he revealed that the boy was suffering from nothing worse than concussion and a shattered cheekbone, I expected him to show the jubilation of relief. What I never expected was his air of stupefied bewilderment. Frowning out at the by now deserted beach, across which the shadows of the straggly trees behind it were lengthening as the huge sun sank, he would answer each of our questions – Was the hospital far away? Would the shattered cheekbone require an operation? When did they think that the boy would come out of his coma? – with two or three tetchy words. It was as though he were trying to work out some difficult problem and did not wish to be interrupted. Eventually the gong reverberated tinnily for dinner. He picked up his glass of neat vodka – it must have been his fourth or fifth since his return – and said: ‘You both go. I've no appetite.'

As we walked towards the dining-hall, Joy said: ‘What a relief! He could never have lived with himself if the boy had died.'

‘But it's so extraordinary. I felt sure that he must have broken his neck.'

The ship was to sail at midnight. Sonny and I walked along the deserted quay, until all at once I glimpsed that triangle of blood, now no longer luridly glistening but dried almost to black.

‘I thought he was dead, I really thought he was dead.'

Sonny halted, turned to me. Although the night was cool and we had been merely ambling along, there were beads of sweat on his forehead. ‘He
was
dead,' he said. ‘That's what I don't understand. The doctor told me he was dead. He
was
dead.'

‘That doctor never struck me as in the least bit competent.'

‘He
was
dead.'

‘Well, it was certainly a miracle that after a fall like that …'

‘Yes. Yes.' Again he halted, gripped my arm. ‘A miracle. That was what it was.'

‘As I looked down, I was willing him not to be dead – willing it, willing it!' I confessed. ‘But I find that, when I will things, they never happen.'

He shook his head. ‘I thought for a time that I was willing it too – as I sat beside him in the ambulance. But I wasn't. I was begging – entreating – someone that he shouldn't be dead. But whom was I begging – entreating? That's what's so strange. And who heard me? Who heard me? Who heard me and came up with that miracle?'

When – at Joy's, never Sonny's, invitation – I subsequently visited the vast, over-furnished house in Brampton Square, Sonny was rarely present. Either he had hidden himself away in his room or he had deliberately gone out to avoid me, I decided. Joy, embarrassed and anxious, would make some excuse – at the last minute he had had to take charge of a relative on a visit from the States, he had been detained by business in Paris, he had missed a train. On one occasion, ignoring whatever such excuse she had just come up with, I asked: ‘Is something the matter with him?'

‘Oh, no! No! He's – all right.' She was flustered and hesitant. Her face began to redden.

Eventually we lost touch with each other. Twice, at widely spaced intervals, Joy invited me round and, for perfectly legitimate reasons, I had to refuse. I stopped dropping in, as I once used sometimes to do if I had been shopping in the area. I did not invite them back. Friendships have a natural cycle that often ends in a withering away and then a total dissolution. Perhaps ruthlessly, I have always thought it pointless to keep them on a life-support system beyond their natural expiry date.

Last week at a dinner-party I found myself sitting opposite an elderly man whom, I remembered, I had met many years before at a typically lavish, rowdy cocktail party given by Sonny and Joy. He was Sonny's stockbroker. Inevitably I asked after the couple. ‘Sonny now seems uninterested in all the things that interested him before,' he told me in his precise, metallic voice. ‘Doesn't go to the theatre, doesn't play golf, doesn't go to parties, doesn't give parties. Doesn't hunt women, doesn't gamble. Can you imagine that? Sonny no longer chasing a skirt, Sonny no longer gambling. And only two or three years ago he was constantly in pursuit of someone or other, and would make or lose twenty grand at the tables in a night.'

‘What do you think is the reason for the change?'

The man shrugged. ‘I sometimes wonder if he hasn't had some sort of breakdown.' I stared at him in incredulity. Sonny had always seemed to me far too mentally and emotionally robust for a breakdown. ‘People do, you know,' he said. ‘The very rich far more often than the very poor. But – amazingly – he seems to be happy. As though he had received some wonderful news that he can't tell us about. So perhaps it isn't a nervous breakdown. Perhaps it's something else at which we can only guess. Who knows?'

I have just been for a walk in nearby Holland Park. There's an arbour there, with a long bench, where the winos congregate. Usually I try to avoid passing that way, because it embarrasses me when they shout out at me for money. Today, bunched together at one end of the bench, two disheveled, red-faced men were drinking from cans. On another bench not far distant, an old man with grey, untidy hair, in a rumpled suit and scuffed brogues, was slouched, swollen hands on knees and legs thrust out. He might have been mistaken for a wino himself. Eyes closed, he had uptilted his blotchy, heavily lined face to the sun. He was smiling, not at me or at anyone else, in beatific contentment.

It was Sonny. I paused, stared at him. His eyes remained closed, the smile broadened. Then feeling, I could not have said why, that he had entered a region where I, friends far closer, and perhaps even Joy could no longer follow, I hurried away.

‘That's right.' She must be one of those people who wanted to sell one double-glazing, interest one in some dodgy investment, or persuade one to give to a charity of which one had never heard. ‘Yes? What is it you want?'

‘You won't know who I am. I don't imagine you'll remember after all these years.'

‘Well, tell me.'

‘I'm the daughter of Denisa Popescu. You know who I mean?'

‘Of course.'

‘I'm Ana. Ana Williamson. The Williamson is the name of my ex.' She gave an embarrassed laugh. ‘Long ago I heard that we were neighbours.'

‘You heard? How did you hear?'

‘Oh, someone told me. Maybe my mother. And then today – I don't know why – I looked in the telephone book and there I found your number. I thought you'd be ex-directory. But you weren't.'

‘Is your mother with you?'

‘No. No, she died two, three years ago. I thought you might have known.'

‘No. No one told me. We had – lost touch. It's all so long ago, that stay of mine in Bucharest.'

‘My mother said that you had once told her that it was the happiest time of your life.'

He had told many women that this or that time was the happiest. ‘I was young. Well, comparatively young.'

‘My mother told me never to get in touch with you.'

‘I can't think why she told you that.'

A silence. Each waited for the other.

Then she said: ‘It would be nice if we could meet?'

He wanted to say ‘ Why?' He wanted to say ‘No, I don't really think so.' Then he relented: ‘ Yes. If you'd like that. Of course. Why not?'

That night he dreamed of Denisa. He had not thought of her for twenty and more years. They were trying to get into a museum, a towering Gothic building dripping with ivy, which was locked. She repeatedly rang the bell, she rattled a vast iron ring of a door handle, she banged with a fist. Then she snatched his hand and dragged him round the building to a side door. That too was locked. ‘But they said someone would be here to open it for us,' she burst out. ‘What's the matter with this country?'

What's the matter with this country
? It was something that she had often cried out in frustration and fury.

He woke. The eiderdown had slipped off his bed. He was cold. Almost everything in those far-off days was wrong with the country. One of those things was Denisa herself – or, rather, her role. He had soon realised that, so fluent in English, so critical of the regime and so free in her comings and goings, she must be a plant. Later she even confessed it to him – ‘I just report things of no importance. If I didn't report something, then I'd have to leave the job. And stop seeing you. You understand that, don't you?' Of course he understood it. He might have then sent her packing. But, alone in Romania because his wife did not think it a suitable place for an ailing child constantly requiring expert medical attention, he had needed Denisa.

As he shaved, with the cutthroat razor that, innately conservative, he still preferred, he wondered what Denisa's daughter would be like.
His
daughter too? He stared at his reflection in the glass, opened his eyes wide, slowly shook his head. He remembered how, after a day of ski-ing under a pale-blue, cloudless sky, she had told him, turning her head on the pillow and smiling: ‘I have a surprise for you.'

When she had revealed to him the nature of the surprise, he had answered: ‘And I have a surprise for you.'

‘Yes?' There was a tinny note of apprehension in her voice.

‘It's not something I like to talk about. But medically it's impossible I'm the father. Our child has a genetic disorder. Inherited from me. So – a few years ago I had an operation. A vasectomy. You know what that is? One didn't want to take a risk.' He often spoke of himself as ‘one.'

After that he could not feel the same towards her, nor she towards him. But their affair continued until, a few weeks later, he moved on to another diplomatic posting. She never spoke again about the pregnancy during those weeks, but in the desultory correspondence that for a brief period had followed his departure, she had told him of the birth of a daughter and of her determination not to give her up for adoption, as her family had urged her to do.

‘Let me carry that for you.'

‘No, it's not really –'

‘Please. Let me!'

‘Oh, all right,'

She had already picked up the tray from the kitchen table.

‘You have a beautiful garden.'

‘Very small.'

‘But beautiful.' Without being asked she began to pour out the tea.

‘People – friends, busybody neighbours – keep telling me that I ought to have all these trees pruned. One gets so little sunlight.'

‘I think they're right.'

‘But I don't want more sunlight.'

‘Maybe one day I'll do some pruning for you. I'm a good gardener. But now I live in an attic flat and so I have no garden. My ex has the garden now. It was our garden, now it's his.' The tone was humorous, without any bitterness. The pale blonde hairs on her strong forearms glistened in the afternoon sunlight. Suddenly he was pierced by a memory. It was of his mother lying out on a deckchair on the top deck of the Lloyd Triestino liner that brought them back home from India when he was a child. Pale blonde hairs glistened on her bare forearms. The child had put out a tentative hand and brushed the back of it against those hairs. At the contact, he had felt a shiver of delight.

He stared up at this woman who was deliberately cutting the chocolate cake, her lower lip drawn between her teeth as though she were concentrating on some difficult task. As soon as he had opened the door to her, he had been tantalised by a resemblance that he could not define. Now it had come to him: She looked like his mother – the same eyebrows, each at first a straight line and then a rising one, the same almost gaunt cheek-bones, the same uptilted nose with the slightly flared nostrils. But he was fancying that resemblance! She was in no way related to his mother. She was the daughter of Denisa and some lover of hers.

‘I know nothing about you. First, tell me what you do.'

She was receptionist at a medical centre, she told him. It was, he realised, not far from his house; he had often passed it and had wondered whether he should not register there, since he was dissatisfied with repeatedly having to wait for an appointment at the one to which he went. The trouble was that she had no real qualifications, she said. Without qualifications it was difficult to get the sort of job she wanted – in publishing, in broadcasting. She had married at seventeen. She talked of the marriage, troubled and brief. A mistake, she said.

‘And you? Do you live alone here?'

‘Yes, since my wife died. That was four, no, five years ago. Time flies when one is old, one loses account of it.'

‘You have a son. I remember my mother told me that.'

‘
Had
. Died years and years ago.'

‘You don't mind living alone?' She jumped up to refill his teacup.

‘One gets used to it. In fact, in the end one rather prefers it. For a time after my wife's death a cousin of mine volunteered to come here as housekeeper. No good. Nothing wrong with her, decent woman, always kind, but it just didn't work. In the event, one had to make an excuse to end the agreement. Poor soul – the excuse didn't convince her, I'm afraid.'

She was looking round the garden. ‘This lawn will never grow properly. Too much shade. Why not have it paved?'