The Whole Day Through (17 page)

He came there almost at once, even though he knew she could not possibly get away without notice like this until her mother was in bed, because simply sitting at home watching the clock would have been beyond him. But waiting in a hotel room proved little better. Everything about it suggested self-indulgence – albeit on a lesser scale than their old room – and could not have chimed less well with his mood. A soulless motel just off
the M3 with a bar haunted by sales reps might have been more apt or a sordid room over a pub, the sort where one collected a key from an ask-no-questions landlord. He doubted Winchester offered either these days, if indeed it ever had.

At least it was dark at last so he felt he could draw the heavy curtains without it seeming odd. He kicked off his shoes and tried lying on the bed. Then he tried sitting up in the solitary, button-backed armchair but that proved toughly ornamental. Nerves had stopped him touching the casserole he had reheated but now that smells from the restaurant were reaching him he was seized with an inappropriate hunger. He ate the packet of crisps from the mini-bar. Then the nuts. Then he felt ashamed and hid the wrappers far under the bed in case she saw them and thought him insensitive.

Finally she rang him on his mobile to say she was on her way.

He bit his tongue to stop himself calling her
darling
in his nervousness. ‘It’s room eleven,’ he said. He knew she’d rather come straight up than face the fluster of dealing with a receptionist. But then he couldn’t bear to wait in the room a moment longer and he hurried downstairs to watch for her from the hotel steps.

The noise from the restaurant and bar’s open windows behind him, moneyed, Friday-nightish, made him feel peculiarly self-conscious and alone so he waved when he saw her emerge from the leafy short cut she liked to take across the old Green Jackets’ barracks.

She waved back and he was so happy to see her again so soon that he almost forgot why he was there. Every time he saw her was a kind of reminder. It wasn’t that he forgot how she looked in between meetings but that his thoughts of her were so intertwined now with his memories of her younger self. Her every reappearance before him was a reminder that she was self-assured now, purposeful and debonair. To see her was to remember how much of her adult life was still hidden from him. Tonight she had on an ethnic necklace he had admired on her before, outsized silver beads which jangled against her as she broke into a run to join him. She seized his hand and kissed it. He drew her to him and kissed her forehead. Her hair smelled of lavender. And fried onions. ‘You always smell so good,’ he said.

‘That’ll be the supper I cooked earlier. Someone was saying the other day how wearing scent to attract a man is a waste of time and what women should really do is fry bacon just before leaving the house.’

He kissed her again and playfully sniffed her hair. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t stand it in the room on my own.’

‘Let’s see if it’s better with two of us.’

‘Let’s.’

She drew him in after her and said a lively hello to the young man on reception duty.

‘We’ve already checked in,’ Ben told him and hurried up the stairs after her. She had changed out of the dress she had on earlier. She wore black trousers made of some
kind of linen and a very simple, tailored white shirt, untucked, through which he could see the outline of her bra as she climbed ahead of him.

‘Room twelve, isn’t it?’ she called, starting to open the wrong door.

‘Eleven,’ he hissed. ‘Here!’ and she ran back to him, giggling.

They made love, of course. How could they not? Although it felt to him like a kind of treachery when he had planned to be gravely respectful. They both became wildly overheated, amidst all the bedding and drapes, and at one point she sprang panting away from him and dragged back all the curtains and threw up the little windows so that they ended with the noise and lights of Southgate Street all about them and it was almost like having the bed out on a balcony. Then they raided the mini-bar and started to kiss again.

‘I wrote to you,’ he admitted. ‘I wrote you several drafts and even made a fair copy in my very best doctor’s handwriting.’

‘Oh yes?’

He could hear she was smiling in anticipation but he realized he couldn’t possibly tell her where the letter had gone.

‘So what did you write?’ she asked. She had taken off her heavy Moroccan beads finally because they were bothering her but was amusing herself by rubbing their silvery ridges along his thigh. In the flickering lights from outside she looked thirty or younger, her eyes dark and
glistening. He reached out to turn the bedside lamp on but she stayed his hand. ‘Please,’ she said. ‘Not yet.’

‘I wrote that I loved you,’ he said. ‘I said I realized I always had. That I hoped you could forgive me for having been such an idiot and hurt you so.’

‘Ssh,’ she said. ‘How can you ask? It’s the past now.’

‘It matters.’

He saw her smile, or rather, he heard the little outrush of breath and saw the glisten of her teeth. ‘You’re such a
boy
sometimes,’ she said. ‘This is all that matters. Us. Here and now.’

‘You never told me who your mother was.’

‘Why should I have? She was just my mother.’

‘Yes, but…’ He wondered how to continue. The temptation to break off was intense. ‘I had met her before, you know. Years ago. At Oxford. In our last year. She knew the warden or someone there.’

‘Did you really meet her? We led very separate lives then. She came up for work things quite often but I didn’t encourage her to contact me. I was too wrapped up in the selfish pleasures of being a student to want her ticking me off or cutting me down to size in front of my friends. She won’t remember. She met hundreds of students a year, probably.’

‘Why didn’t you boast about her?’

‘She wasn’t exactly cool, even then. Especially then.’

And he saw that it would be monstrous to tell her of her mother’s entirely innocent role in the unlacing of
their love. That particular vial of poison was to be his alone.

‘I’m afraid,’ Laura went on, mockingly, ‘you probably made a much smaller impression on her than she did on you. She liked you as a grown-up, though. The other day. You must have pressed the virology button when I wasn’t listening.’

‘Really?’

‘Her G spot, socially. A man could have all the charm of Goebbels but if he murmured
Porcine Circovirus
or
Lymphocytic Choriomeningitis
, she’d bat her eyelashes and move a little closer. It’s amazing, really, that my dad even got as far as a first date.’ She laughed to herself. ‘Poor Dad. He was such a saint, really.’

He took the hand that was holding the beads and clutched it to his lips to draw her attention back. ‘Laura?’ he told her. ‘I’ve got to go home.’

‘Bobby?’

‘No. Battersea home. Back to the fucking flat and…back to Chloë. I’ve got to deal with her and stop being such a coward. It’s not fair to either of you.’

‘So it isn’t all over.’

‘It
is
.’ And maybe it was, he told himself. ‘It is in my head but I’ve got to bring it home to her. You saw her the other day.’

‘She still loves you.’

‘God. Maybe. I suppose. She’s…She’s not very bright and she’s extremely…She’s used to being loved. Her father…’

She cut him off. ‘You’ll be back soon, though. Next week. The hospital.’

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I expect so. Hope so. If I don’t handle it right she’ll make our lives hell, though. I might grab a few days’ leave so I can do it right.’

‘Oh.’

She pulled the sheet up and withdrew slightly, watching him. Now he turned the bedside light on.

‘Please, no,’ she said.

‘I’ve got to,’ he said. ‘Just for a second or two. Here. I’ll dim it.’

He extricated himself from the tangle of sheets and went over to where his trousers had ended up, deep in the slithery mound of tossed aside damask cushions and quilted bedspread. He reached into the pocket for the little jeweller’s box and climbed back on the bed. ‘Here,’ he said.

He took her hand, slipped the box into her palm and pressed them both against his heart because he couldn’t speak and was afraid of crying. She had never seen him weep.

‘What is it?’ she said, frowning slightly. ‘God, Ben, what?’ She withdrew her hand and looked at the box and opened it. ‘Ben?’

‘It probably doesn’t fit.’

‘It’s lovely.’

‘And it’s probably fifty years’ bad luck because he walked out on her.’

‘Your mum’s engagement ring?’

‘Yes. Will you…? Does it fit?’

She slipped it onto her ring finger. She looked at it in the light, smiled at him. ‘My hands are sturdier than you imagine,’ she said. ‘It’s really lovely, Ben.’ She sniffed and dabbed away a tear with a fistful of sheet. ‘Silly,’ she told herself. ‘Sorry. I wish I’d met her.’

‘I wish she’d met you. I should have brought you home the very first Christmas. What were we thinking of staying in that freezing house in Oxford?’

‘We were trying to be grown up. Playing house.’

He took her hand again to look at the ring on it. He worried it might look mean. He knew nothing about jewellery. It had never occurred to him until now that his father’s taste might have been suspect. ‘I mean, I can’t ask you,’ he said. ‘I’m not free to ask you properly. Not yet.’

‘I know.’

‘But can I ask you to, well, sort of wait?’

She looked him full in the face and it was a kind of promise mixed with challenge. ‘Of course,’ she said.

‘Good.’

‘I’m going nowhere.’

‘Good.’

‘What about your brother?’

‘Oh…I can’t pretend Bobby needs me nearly as much as I’d convinced myself he did. Bobby’ll be just fine. He’ll be glad to get shot of me. He might even have the love of a good man. As soon as I get back I want you two to meet.’

‘That’ll be nice.’

She clung to him for a minute or two then kissed his shoulder abruptly and got up. ‘I must get back,’ she said. ‘I told her I was going for a walk. Even though she was half-asleep when I left, she’ll start to worry if I don’t come back. There are always drunken students in the streets around us on a Friday and she’ll be on edge with the noise.’

‘I’ll walk you back.’

‘No need.’

But he did. She waited out on the pavement while he quickly paid for the room then they walked arm in arm up the dark little passage beside the hotel garden, around the back of Searle’s House and through the odd mixture of converted barracks buildings and incongruous, slightly Toytown housing that had been thrown up since the regiment moved out. He won a little extra time by persuading her into a diversion up to the old parade ground where regimented lavender bushes and conifers now stood in for companies on parade and a curiously desolate fountain was playing vigorously in the middle of a large, round pond. He told her how he remembered lying in bed on summer nights as a small boy, hearing the marching band practising there. They happened to be passing the pond as the automated system switched off the flow for the night so the last jet of water fell beside them with a distinctly unromantic noise, like the emptying of a slops bucket.

‘Wish,’ he told her, squeezing her arm, but she ran a tidying hand through her hair and sighed.

‘Oh. Me? I’m all wished out.’

‘Hope, then.’

‘Hmm,’ she said and he wished he’d had the self-possession to hold his tongue.

They followed a path off the parade ground through a narrow arch in one of the new buildings thrown up to echo the old, and down a flight of steps and all too suddenly were on St James Lane and just across the road from her mother’s house.

‘When are you off?’ she asked.

‘Tomorrow,’ he said. ‘Best to seize the nettle over the weekend.’

‘I hate goodbyes,’ she admitted. ‘I’m rubbish at them.’

‘So don’t bother. Who knows, I might be back on Sunday or even tomorrow night. We can speak.’

It was as though he wanted to raise his spirits as much as hers but she wouldn’t be drawn. She raised the hand with his mother’s ring on it and touched the side of his face. ‘Bye, Beautiful,’ she said and slipped across the road before he could catch her or hold her or even think of anything to say back. She let herself in through the gate and was lost to view.

He walked a short way down the hill until he was far enough away to glimpse the little Gothic windows on the house’s first floor. One of them was already lit so perhaps Professor Jellicoe had stayed up reading or simply fallen
asleep over her book. He imagined Laura going in to her and gently slipping a copy of
Haemorrhagic Fever and Primate Lesions
out of her grasp before turning out the light.

But the light stayed on so perhaps her mother was still awake and asking after her walk or calling out for a nightcap or painkillers. And then, at last, the second window lit up and he had a fleeting glimpse of her, through a tangle of rose branches, reaching up to tug the curtains across. He knew, because she had confided her habit to him, that if he waited long enough he would see her light go out and her hands drawing the curtains back again because she liked to wake to the sunlight rather than to an alarm. But he sensed that would have been creepy of him.

Rather than head for home across the barracks and have to pass the desolate pool again, he climbed the hill a little further, crossing the railway bridge, and walked back along St James Terrace, a row of prettily gardened houses that faced the barracks across a pedestrian path and the railway cutting. A late express flew by beneath as he walked, heading for the coast. He looked down into the cutting to see its lit up, seemingly empty carriages flashing by far below and its retreating sound seemed suddenly to name his despair.

It did not occur to him until he woke the following morning, at dawn but still far too late for it to be of any use, that he could have driven up to London immediately after leaving her, driven up, lain in wait in the car and let
himself into the hall just before the postman. Or even waylaid the postman on the doorstep with a cheerful greeting and an offer to carry the letters in for him.

Advance strategy had never been his strong point.