“Go on . . .”
“We’re sitting back to back. We realize we need a bottle opener for our beers. And Diane pushes her back against me to try and get to her feet. And she nearly falls, and we’re just giggling, and giddy in the heat. She walks up to these strangers—a couple—to borrow their lighter. She knows this trick where you can use one to open a bottle. She cracks the tops off and hands the lighter back. She’s walking back to me, and I can see her but I can still see the couple, too. They’re both looking at her. It’s like she’s left an impression on them in that moment that means they’ll be thinking about her for the rest of the day. And I realize how lucky I am, and how I never want this day to end.”
Andrew was startled. Both at the clarity of what he’d just pictured, and by the tears pooling fast under his eyelids. When he finally opened his eyes, Peggy was looking away. After a moment, he said, “Why did you want to know that?”
Peggy smiled sadly.
“Because when I try and do the same thing, I can’t seem to see anything. It’s that more than anything that’s making me think I can’t see a happy ending. The truth is I’ve given Steve an ultimatum: to clean up his act or that’s it. Trouble being, I don’t really know which way I want things to go. Ah well, I’m sure whatever happens will be for the best.”
Andrew was feeling a peculiar mixture of emotions. Anger at the big flapping daffodil, and pain at the sight of Peggy, her posture slumped slightly, her defiance undermined by her watering eyes. But there was something else there, too. It struck him that, up until now, he’d been too eager to find an excuse to get close to Peggy, that this had been far too much about him and the fear of where his life was heading. Part of him had wanted a reason to be able to step in and be there for her, which meant perhaps part of him hadn’t cared if she was upset. Well, if he was going to be that cynical and selfish, then he didn’t deserve a friend. And now, as he desperately searched for something reassuring to say to Peggy, he realized the pain he was feeling concealed a different truth. In that moment, he didn’t care about himself. All he wanted to do was make Peggy happy. The pain was there because he didn’t know how.
— CHAPTER 14 —
The following fortnight was dominated by death. The coroner seemed to be on the phone practically every hour, struggling to remember which cases she’d discussed with them. (“We talked about Terrence Decker, right? Newbury Road? Choked on a marshmallow? Oh, no, wait, that was someone else. Or possibly a dream I had.”)
Such was the glut of property inspections they were having to do, at times Andrew and Peggy regretfully sacrificed respectfulness for pragmatism, sorting through the chaos and the mess or the soulless, empty rooms as quickly as possible. The houses varied from a cramped maisonette complete with a dead rat sporting a grotesque grin on its face, to a seven-bedroom house backing out onto a park, its interior overwhelmed with cobwebs, every room feeling pregnant with secrets.
Peggy had been struggling even before the frequency of the inspections increased. Whether Steve had messed up again and she’d been forced to act on her ultimatum, Andrew wasn’t sure. The first time he’d seen her returning from the loos in the office with puffy red eyes he’d started to ask her if she was all right, but she very calmly interrupted and asked him a question about an upcoming job. From then on, every time he saw her looking upset or happened to hear her in the stairwell having an angry phone call, he made sure to make her a cup of tea, or e-mail something silly and distracting about Keith’s latest hygiene horror. He even attempted to bake some biscuits, but the end results had resembled something a child might use for snowman’s eyes, so he had abandoned them in favor of shop-bought. Somehow, it just didn’t seem enough.
During a brief respite in the break-out area one afternoon, eating what Peggy referred to as “alternative bananas” (a Twix and a KitKat Chunky, respectively), Andrew happened to mention Ella Fitzgerald.
“She that jazz one?” Peggy said through a mouthful of nougat.
“‘That jazz one’?” Andrew said. He was about to admonish Peggy for her description, but then an idea struck him. People still liked getting mix tapes, didn’t they? And what could be better than Ella to cheer someone up? If she could have the same effect on Peggy as she’d had on him over the years, it could even be a revelation, a cornerstone of comfort like it had been for him since he’d first listened to her all those years ago. And so began a series of agonizing evenings spent trying to choose songs that perfectly encapsulated Ella’s essence. He wanted to capture the whole spectrum—upbeat and downbeat numbers, polished and loose—but also just how joyously, infectiously funny she could be on her live albums. The outtakes and the between-song badinage meant as much to him as the most soaring melody.
After evening five, he began to wonder if it was actually an impossible task. There was never going to be the perfect tape. He’d just have to hope what he’d chosen would have the right sort of alchemy to make it a source of comfort to Peggy whenever she needed it. He decided to give himself one more night to finish it, eventually collapsing into bed way past midnight, his stomach rumbling angrily, at which point he realized he’d been so ensconced he’d forgotten to have any dinner.
When he presented the end result to Peggy on the stairs outside the office he affected an air of nonchalance to try to hide the nagging voice telling him this might have been a weird thing for him to have done. “By the way, I knocked up an Ella Fitzgerald mix tape for you. Just chose a few songs I thought you would like. No pressure, of course, to listen to it straightaway, or even over the next few days, or weeks, or whatever.”
“Ah, thanks, pet,” Peggy said. “I solemnly swear to listen to it within the next few days, or weeks, or whatever.” She turned the CD over and read the back. It had taken seven attempts for Andrew to write the tracks out in acceptably neat handwriting. He realized Peggy was looking at him with a twinkle in her eyes. “How long did it take for you to ‘knock this up,’ out of interest?” she said.
Andrew blew a dismissive and unintentionally wet raspberry. “Couple of hours, I suppose.”
Peggy opened her bag and dropped the CD inside.
“I’ve no doubt you’re an excellent mix-tape maker, Andrew Smith. But you’re a terrible liar.” And with that she walked calmly into the office. Andrew stood there for a moment, grinning, albeit slightly confused as to why it felt like Peggy had taken his stomach, heart and several other vital organs with her as she’d left.
—
There’s nothing like a PowerPoint presentation to stamp out green shoots of happiness, especially one involving sound and visual effects. Cameron was particularly pleased at getting letters to spiral onto the screen soundtracked by typewriter clacks, jauntily revealing that there had been an increase of 28 percent of elderly people describing themselves as feeling lonely and/or isolated. His pièce de résistance was an embedded YouTube clip of a midnineties sketch-show skit that bore no relevance to the presentation but was just, he explained, “a bit of fun.” They sat there in rigid silence, apart from Cameron, who chuckled away with increasing desperation. Just as it seemed the damn thing was finally about to end, an e-mail notification appeared in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen:
Mark Fellowes
Re: potential cutbacks
Cameron immediately scrabbled to close the window. But it was too late. The rest of the sketch played on, the studio audience’s laughter horribly at odds with the new atmosphere. Andrew couldn’t work out if anyone was going to say something. Clearly also anticipating this, Cameron shut down his laptop and made a swift exit, like someone who’s just given a short statement outside court escaping the paparazzi, ignoring Meredith, who’d started to ask him the obvious question of what that e-mail had been about.