The Whole Day Through (7 page)

The screenwriter/poet either lived in a huge house or appeared to have refurnished and decorated her study several times in as many years. She would probably have been appalled to know how closely Laura noted this expenditure and how far reaching were her powers of recall. In fact Laura couldn’t have cared less so long as the numbers made sense and were recorded in the right places. The figures involved were relatively tiny and would be most unlikely ever to attract an inspector’s
attention. Nevertheless she felt it her duty to keep clients on their toes by asking perhaps two awkward questions a year about the hotel bill from Mauritius (research for a thriller involving a soured honeymoon, apparently) or the four-figure one from an Italian lighting designer (so tricky to find the reading lamp that really
works
for one) if only to be sure they had an explanation in place.

She often heard people say that doing their accounts or filing their tax returns brought on an attack of paranoia but for her it was merely a combination of paperwork and number shuffling and she had always found numbers as soothing as wind in long grass. It was the certainty of them, the known-ness, especially now, that was so welcome. Would her mother lose her mind but live for ever? How would they cope if ever they needed a hoist or a walk-in shower or if Laura’s health failed her? Quite unanswerable. But fifty-five percent of someone’s annual motoring expenses or seventy-five percent of their total telephone costs was simply calculated and tidily delivered to its rightful little box. Only the playful balancing-out of quadratic equations would have soothed her more.

The danger, of course, was that the work – especially the sorting of papers – was so undemanding that it left part of her mind free to roam, usually her memory.

Ben wasn’t her first boyfriend, or her first lover. But the moment they met, at a raucous student party she and two friends had gate-crashed, and he kissed her on a pile
of coats in a candlelit bedroom, he made his predecessors seem provisional. They came from different backgrounds. He was a sporty public school medic, a few years her senior, she was one of a small, twitchy state school gang who had unexpectedly found themselves in a bastion of privilege. Being with him, however, felt irreducibly right.

They were a gang of three that had formed when they were assigned rooms on the same landing in their first year. Laura, who had only recently been able to make her U official, Tris, short for Tristram, who was gay and Mancunian and actually a secret Steve, and Amber, who was short and spiteful and had always been Amber.

Amber and Tris had found each other a few days earlier and badly needed a third to balance them out so Laura, who was in need of camouflage, had little choice in the matter. Tris was a chemist and Amber was reading English but the three of them became inseparable and went everywhere together. The only thing that threatened their uneasy camaraderie was other people in the shape of sex and so long as dirt was duly and promptly dished and the potential boyfriends reduced to
shags
, other people were no threat. In the messily exploratory way of students it was usually sex, not love. The group’s relentless cross-questioning and commentary nipped any threat of love in the bud.

Unsmiling and sarcastic, Amber needed to be bad. She was highly sexed, available and eye-wateringly unfussy. She rarely slept with the same boy twice unless she could
rest assured they were only coming back for more because they thought she was easy. She despised boyfriends and fidelity as bourgeois but tended to get weepy and aggressive if the subject of rape arose. She wheedled the
Dr Zhivago
story out of Laura (which Laura immediately regretted as it felt like handing her ammunition) and pointed out she had got off lightly since she could have been christened Tonya, after the character played by Geraldine Chaplin in the film, who didn’t even get a theme.

Tris was far sunnier and thought of himself as romantic. He tended to fall only for boys who overlooked him or were too straight even to notice the way he was looking at them. When anyone did have the temerity to sleep with him, he despised them so vociferously afterwards Laura suspected he was actually rather hopeless in bed and just lay there like an ailing seal until it was over.

When Ben led her past them up the stairs of the ramshackle party house in Southmoor Road, she caught them watching with almost comical indignation and smiled at them. Nobody had ever led her by the hand before. She was still smiling when they knocked on her door in college the following afternoon, having lain in wait to watch for her eventual return, demanding tea and details. Tris was wounded because he had always wanted Ben for himself, claiming to have heard on good authority he was bisexual, but was placated by the news there was, at least, a camp younger brother. Amber
sensed intuitively why Laura wasn’t prepared to give details.

‘Oh fuck,’ she said. ‘Tonya thinks he’s special. Tris? Fig rolls, darling. Now. Was he all choked up and repressed? Did he swear when he came? That sort usually does, as if you’ve tricked them into lowering their guard. Christ, he didn’t read you Rupert Brooke, did he? Stop
smiling
, Lazza, or I’ll break something you love.’

But all Laura would say was that it was lovely. That
he
was lovely.

He was quite noisy in bed, in fact. He kept gasping and crying out.

‘Shush!’ she said at first. ‘Quiet!’ Beside herself with embarrassment at the thought that everyone on his staircase would hear. It was a bit over the top, but then she saw he really couldn’t help it and that pleasure seized him and had to find a voice. He cried out into her hair and her pillow and she found it touching and felt thrillingly adult suddenly, both aroused and protective.

Her friends did their best to put her off him. Tris claimed to find him uptight and boring. Amber drew attention to little physical details like the way he sweated with nerves when she and Tris were quizzing him or the way he wore old-fashioned leather shoes, half-brogues in fact, when most of them were in pointy ankle boots or Converse trainers. This being long before mobile phones, they all used to keep sheets of paper pinned to their doors so that disappointed callers could
leave messages. Laura took to hiding from the others – easily done since they were incapable of climbing her long staircase without chattering on the way – and the messages left on her sheet grew shorter and ever less amusing.

Laura was fairly sure Ben’s friends were no more supportive than hers, although he was far too loyal to say so. She couldn’t have been less like the privately educated girls his group favoured – girls with long, well-brushed hair, girls who wore dresses without irony, curiously unanimated girl-goddesses like Chloë Burstow who were unfailingly polite but exuded that supreme confidence born of knowing they knew how to behave in every situation, girls who saw nothing wrong with being called girls. His friends behaved towards her the way their mothers had taught them, boys giving up chairs and opening doors, girls tirelessly finding one thing she was wearing or carrying, however insignificant, they could praise. If she encountered them without Ben, however, accidentally sitting among them at dinner or breakfast, for instance, they were rude in the non-specific way of the well-brought-up.

None of this mattered. When she and Ben were alone together, they fitted and it felt so right it barely warranted discussion. They adjusted in no time to functioning as students with their brains fogged by sleep deprivation and sex. In the Christmas and then the Easter holidays they rented space in an acquaintance’s Jericho house – that very house in Southmoor Road where the party had
thrown them together. There they played at everyday domesticity, buying and cooking food together, sharing a sofa to watch telly, going to bed early and actually reading there: sweetly mundane activities from the non-student world. Those were her clearest memories of their time together – not their lovemaking, although they went at that with all the abundant compulsiveness of youth, but their playing house.

‘Damn!’ Her mother’s voice. ‘Ow!’

Laura looked up to find Mummy teetering by the house door with a cup of coffee in either hand instead of her walking frame. She was spilling one of the mugs and had scalded her hand.

‘Damn,’ Laura echoed her, noting down the time in her client book then slipping out of the shed. ‘Sorry,’ she called. ‘Lost all track of time. Here. Let me take those then we can see to your hand. Lovely dress.’

‘Yes. I like it.’

The scald wasn’t serious as it was only reheated breakfast coffee and Mummy hadn’t learnt how to use the microwave properly. They drank what was left, leaning in the kitchen, and munching the sort of luxurious, old lady biscuits she would never have bought while Laura’s father was still alive, then Laura drove her to the hospital.

Mummy had an old, sun-bleached Austin Allegro, once cherry red, now a sort of bird-spattered pink, which Laura was insured to drive now that her own
driving days seemed to have passed. Mummy had modified her passenger seat with an old round leather cushion on top of a plastic carrier bag, which made it easier for her to swivel her inflexible legs in and out at either end of the journey. Now that walking any distance was beyond her, outings in the car, however routine or banal, took on the character of jaunts and were a source of excitement. Laura would force herself to drive slowly so her mother could notice things and comment on them.

The Falls Clinic was actually a thinly disguised research project. In exchange for submitting to various tests of reflex, cognition and short-term memory, patients – all of whom had suffered damaging falls in the past three years – were given a two-course lunch and were taught techniques for reaching for things they had dropped and put through exercises to improve their ability at righting themselves after a tumble and sometimes, to Mummy’s disgust, to sharpen their mental focus.

Mummy disliked it because the nurses called her by her Christian name without asking and because the other patients tended to be too woolly in the head to provide much social stimulus. But she respected the value of scientific research and enjoyed the ping-pong – a game at which she had learnt to excel at Summerglades.

Laura treasured the precious three hours of solitude the clinic gave her but suspected she did not make the best use of them. Some of the patients were brought
by ambulance or hospital car but a few were always dropped off by their carers and she couldn’t help making comparisons. Did she look as worn already as that one or as thin lipped and humourless as that? She noted the way some were wildly overprotective of their charges and others almost off-hand. Apart from one younger sibling, who didn’t look far off needing hip-protective pants herself, they were all, she guessed, dutiful children or children-in-law. It was heartening to imagine these people seizing the next three hours as an opportunity to embrace afresh activities set aside as no longer feasible – riding motorbikes, attending life classes, having daylight liaisons with other able-bodied persons – but she suspected that most would pass the time in a state of shocked vacancy, reading a newspaper perhaps or simply lying on their sofas staring at the ceiling, wondering where their lives and energy had gone. The saddest would spend the parentless interval
catching up
on housework and household shopping and so avoid dangerous introspection entirely.

She realized she had never found out which part of the hospital housed Ben’s GUM clinic and was so busy scanning the signs around her that she drove off in a lurching rush, earning herself a glare from a woman battling to fit a walking frame into the rear of her hatchback without scratching new paintwork.

She chose to have a sandwich and fruit at her desk, for all the world as if she were working in a busy office,
not her mother’s garden shed. By picking-up time, she would have sorted the screenwriter/poet’s paperwork, entered the figures in her computer and compiled several more awkward questions to ask her.

Periodically – it felt like once a month but was probably less – all GUM and HIV staff were expected to attend a drugs lunch in a seminar room in the hospital’s main buildings. They had endured these at Ben’s Chelsea and Westminster job too and the format was drearily familiar. A drugs company laid on a spread of sandwiches, fruit and chocolate bars in exchange for the chance to promote the virtues of new or infinitesimally improved products, to answer questions and to dole out samples and promotional freebies rarely more tempting than pens, notepads and the very occasional tee shirt. Both the GUM clinic and the HIV one were under constant pressure from the hospital’s management to keep within budget and were obliged to seek best value for money at every turn so these grim little sessions were a necessary evil. Ben had learnt that the trick was to pile his plate with lunch, sit at the back, ask one question to ensure his
presence had registered then sink into a state of restorative torpor such as he hadn’t enjoyed since school divinity lessons.

Today he could neither relax as he would like nor concentrate for once on the drug reps’ presentations. He ate his sandwiches and gulped his lukewarm apple juice but found he could not forget it was a Friday. Laura would be calling in to drop her mother off at the geriatric clinic.

Chloë always said he had a lousy memory, and he played along with her image of him as the absent-minded boffin who forgot his own birthday, because it suited him and marital acquiescence was easier than trying to change her opinion. Secretly he had always believed his memory was a useful mental sieve, sifting out the things that mattered – phone numbers, pin numbers, the Latin names of viruses and pseudo-Greek ones of drugs. His memory discarded dinner-party conversations even as they were unspooling around him, and he was ruthless, despite his best efforts, at refusing to store the names and even faces of people he didn’t respect or simply hoped never to meet again. But he had always thought his ability to recollect events was better than average and liked to think he would make a useful eyewitness in a court case.