The Whole Day Through (6 page)

Thanks to the examples of Hollywood and European royalty, however, AIDS and its related charities became fashionable for a while and Chloë found a way to make the situation work for her. Through her connections she had walked into a job in a merchant bank. In her free time, though, she took part in fundraisers, she volunteered as a driver for patients and she gave up every fourth Saturday to work for the AIDS equivalent of meals-on-wheels. But then the predicted holocaust failed to materialize, at least among the moneyed white, and the charities shifted their focus as Ben’s wards were filled with less easily huggable sufferers, increasingly refugees – many of them conflict-numbed rape victims from Rwanda, Zimbabwe and Sudan and their infected babies – and drug addicts, who the volunteers had to learn to call drug users.

But in a way Ben would never have predicted, Chloë discovered that she liked being involved on more than just a fundraising level. She liked getting her hands dirty, at least metaphorically. She enjoyed the unpredictable human contact. Whether this was because she was developing a taste for doing good or simply that she was discovering there was a pleasure to be had in goading her father, he couldn’t have said.

The turning point came when St Stephen’s was closed for its grand rebuilding as the Chelsea and Westminster. While Ben and his patients were temporarily rehomed,
Chloë startled him by negotiating only part-time employment at the bank so as to volunteer two days a week at a school for the mentally disabled – a Special School – in Wandsworth. Banking was boring, she said. She had enjoyed her contact with the children on the ward and wanted something more challenging in her life. They could cope financially – her mother had bought them the flat as a wedding present – and the new work, which could turn into a career if she decided to take some formal training and commit to it, made her happier and easier to live with.

What neither of them had foreseen was the hunger it stirred in her for motherhood. From the day they met she had always been meticulous in her birth control, adamant that the thought of motherhood repelled her. This had saddened him a little at first but only because it felt like a rejection of him but he had long since grown not just used to the idea but secretly relieved by it. Perhaps it wasn’t as much of a volte-face as it seemed? Perhaps she had been becoming broody for years but not admitting it to herself?

Had she simply become pregnant the usual way, unexpectedly and without advance discussion or planning, their marriage might have trundled on in its uneventful, unsurprising way. Her coming off the pill had seemed so dramatic. They had actually celebrated it and convinced themselves a pregnancy would make itself known in a matter of weeks. But with each month that passed, each disappointing period, the matter changed from ground
for joy to being a subject best avoided. At last she submitted to some tests and found she couldn’t conceive, or not easily. Given the high failure rate in couples over forty, the doctors they saw were actively discouraging about their seeking IVF.

Inspired by days spent with some of the more beguiling toddlers at the Special School, Chloë then hit on the idea not just that they should file for adoption but that they should actively seek to adopt a baby with what were euphemistically called special needs. She was tenacious and pursued the idea alone, finding out all the details, littering the normally tidy flat with pamphlets and forms. And, all unwittingly, she brought Ben to the shocking realization that he didn’t want to have a child with her, still less adopt one. Passion had cooled, as passion did, but he assumed that love, a steady, undramatic kind of love, would take its place. Had he loved her, he would surely have wanted to raise a family with her. He would surely at least have masked his lack of enthusiasm so as to make her happy. Instead he found he couldn’t pretend. He found a way through the situation, of course, protesting that they could find another specialist, both have more tests, that they could even investigate getting IVF privately. And he told her that a disabled child would be so demanding she would have to give up everything else she liked doing.

‘Think of my mum,’ he told her. ‘Think of Bobby.’

‘I am thinking of Bobby,’ she countered. ‘Bobby’s lovely.’

So now he felt even guiltier, for not only did he not love his beautiful wife but he appeared to be retrospectively rejecting his own brother.

On and off, for what felt like weeks, they argued in exhausting circles until sometimes it seemed to Ben that she too had sensed what the situation had revealed about his feelings towards her and was goading him to a confession. The more opposition she faced – and in a rash moment he had drawn her parents into the discussion, so the opposition was considerable – the more determined she became until her simple faith in the rightness of what she wanted them to do and their ability to do it came to seem almost religious.

Relief arrived from an unexpected quarter when his mother grew sick. No one had expected her to die. She developed ovarian cancer. She had an ovarectomy and hysterectomy and underwent chemotherapy, which appeared to have worked. But then the cancer recurred, this time in her spine, and, still weakened by treatment of the initial outbreak, she declined further intervention and deteriorated and died with bewildering speed.

Diverted from their own cares, both Chloë and Ben visited the sad little household regularly throughout her illness and the aftermath of her death, Ben often electing to stay for weekends because Bobby was so miserable. It soon became apparent that Bobby could not cope without his mother or was too depressed to try. They fixed him up with care workers to call in every day to see how he was, to check he was eating and cleaning properly,
but he hated that and wouldn’t let them in half the time. So, egged on by Chloë, whose bank had made major donations to the place, Ben took him on a trial visit to a residential community in Devon, a sort of village where people with Down’s Syndrome and other learning challenges were supposed to enjoy a kind of idyllic independence farming and making pots and rugs. But Bobby fled back to Winchester in days, saying he hated the country, loathed handicrafts and didn’t see why he should be
stuck with a load of mongs
. And once again he showed every sign of depression, not eating, not getting up, not showing up for work and even getting repeatedly drunk and abusive.

There seemed no choice left them, since Bobby vociferously refused to be prised out of his childhood home again, even to join Chloë and Ben in London, and Ben had moved to join him in Winchester until the crisis had passed and a long-term solution could be found. At first he commuted, living with Bobby in Winchester and catching a daily train, Tube and bus to the Chelsea and Westminster, but a couple of daytime crises, the second of which involved a clumsy overdose of aspirins, convinced him to take the Winchester job so he could be never more than fifteen minutes from his brother’s side.

Chloë claimed she understood but there was an obdurate quality to her acceptance. She did not offer to come with him and when, a little late, he suggested she could, that they could let the flat to cover the costs of commuting, she only said a sad, ‘Well, let’s see.’

She had visited him a few times and he had visited her but it was so horrible that suddenly it felt like just that –
visiting
– not like the simple resumption of married continuity. His mother’s house was so small and there was so little privacy with Bobby about the place. The last time he slipped up to London for a weekend they had hideously unsuccessful sex (definitely
not
lovemaking) after which he actually found himself weeping in the bathroom. They had been so studiously considerate towards one another, so cheerily evasive, in the hours that were left them, that he could barely wait to get away again. It was as though there was a dead thing in the flat with them and they were each avoiding raising the subject of its smell.

In the name of brotherly love, Ben had taken a large pay cut, going from being an HIV consultant in the Chelsea and Westminster to a staff grade GUM and HIV doctor saddled with a level of donkey work in overburdened clinics of a kind he had not known in years. He had dimly hoped some kind of mutual transfer might be negotiable – a temporary one, of course; he clung, for Chloë’s sake, to the idea that all this upheaval was temporary – but Winchester was a desirable posting because of the good schools and, as yet, there were no senior vacancies, even temporary ones.

He had slowly helped Bobby back to stability, helped him find a new job, broadened his horizons by buying him a computer, installing a Wi-Fi system in the house and teaching him how to use them both. He had unwit
tingly shown him the way to the mixed delights of online gay dating but was now beginning to wonder whether he had not wrought a subtler change simply by offering masculine company to a man too long boyed by his mother.

Chloë had visited just once since the bad sex episode. Bobby adored her and she was amused by him in short measures, although Ben suspected her brother-in-law’s late-flowering sexuality was something she found hard to stomach. When Bobby was out of the way, she had once again raised the adoption question and, instead of arguing, Ben had found himself shrugging and saying,

‘It’ll be your child. You must do what you think right.’

His tone of weary defeat, even apathy, had startled her into friendly evasion, as the bad sex had before, and they had both almost fallen on Bobby with gratitude when he returned to divert them.

Ben had just begun to admit to himself that he was happier away from Chloë than with her but that Bobby was no longer sufficient excuse for their living apart when he ran into Laura in the hospital.

While the days remained warm enough, Laura maintained a little office for herself in the summerhouse at the far corner of the garden. Her mother had only ever used it as a potting shed and, unlike Laura’s father, had never been a tidy shed keeper. Spades and forks were jumbled together with all a keen gardener’s practical detritus: tangles of tar scented twine, stakes, some still with snail shells on the top to protect the gardener’s eyes, seed trays, sacks of compost, sand and vermiculite and an insane quantity of plastic flowerpots. Her mother seemed to have passed beyond the stage of doing much propagation so Laura had cleared and wiped the home-made kitchen table from her childhood, one of several bits of furniture her father had built, which stood by the summerhouse window and swept away several generations of corpse-heavy cobwebs from the glass. It made a pleasant, fair weather work space, removed
from the distractions of the house but not so far that she wouldn’t know if Mummy got into trouble.

Her father had never lived in Winchester – this was the house Mummy bought after his death – but the shed reminded Laura of him, not just its scents of creosote and earth and seaweed fertilizer but her mother’s cavalier way with precious tools, which he would have itched to tidy. He had been dead over ten years now but still she felt she had not mourned him as she ought. Possibly this was because Mummy had required so little of her in the weeks after his death, had made no consoling demands. Possibly it was because Laura had been living in Paris at the time, in a place not associated with him. But now she was forever being surprised by memories of him or stumbling on things unexpectedly associated with him and trying Mummy’s patience with her insistence on discussing minute details of the distant past.

She had never planned to become an accountant and still hesitated to call herself one since what she did felt like little more than bookkeeping. She had read maths at Oxford but made a mess of her finals, then rather lost her way in life. Short of money at the end of a long spell of erratic temping, she drifted into a job that involved bookkeeping and found she took a certain cool pleasure in it. She was put through accountancy exams by the firm she worked for and passed them easily, but she disliked corporate life. Contemporaries who had ended up in more artistic jobs, as chaotically freelance journalists, graphic designers, decorators and novelists, began paying
her to do their accounts and tax returns for them. Soon they had recommended her to enough friends and colleagues that she found she could leave the tedious firm and work for herself with only a small loss of income. In London then Paris she proceeded to make a living in a way she could never have foreseen. E-mail and online tax returns had freed her, more than ever, to work wherever she chose to live.

She specialized in hopeless cases – the sort of people who hid their bank statements unopened behind the breadbin and couldn’t work out a simple percentage even on a calculator, had they possessed one, the sort of people who had yet to notice that both their laptop and mobile phone had calculators built into their software. She took on their messy lives and interesting jobs and ensured that, in one simple area, at least, they became orderly and predictable. It wasn’t a career. It would lead her nowhere and meant nothing to her emotionally but it paid her bills and gave her the quiet satisfaction of knowing that, like a dry cleaner’s or a baker’s, her skills would always be needed.

This morning’s client was a typical case, a fairly successful screenwriter and poet – not a friend – who, once a year, sent Laura a huge Jiffy bag into which she had stuffed twelve months of bank and credit-card statements, invoices, royalty statements and receipts for absolutely everything. Having sorted the large paperwork into calendar order, Laura proceeded to do the same with the receipts, smoothing them out, taking a
magnifying glass and annotating pencil to the ones she couldn’t immediately decipher and discarding any that were plainly never going to be offset against the client’s tax bill.

She had a system involving twelve multicoloured wire post trays, one for each month, and a little notebook in which she meticulously noted the client’s name and the time at which each bout of work on their behalf began and ended. She even had a stopwatch for work-related phone calls. Most of her clients worked from home and, nervous about capital gains tax, needed reassurance as to what percentage of domestic bills they could claim back and what proportion of their car and petrol expenses should count for work and what for private use. Some, like the piano tuner, the cello teacher and the graphic designers, drove a lot as part of their jobs; others, like the screenwriter/poet, hardly used their cars for work at all and made a great effort to post letters or buy stationery on every trip in the car so that the trip could at least partially count as work related.