“Heard? I just came to see how you and Alfie were getting on. I’m only up for the day.”
“I think you’d better come in.” She stepped back, and I followed, keeping my hands from her arse because something suggested it wasn’t the time. “You and Alfie have a nice little home. You must be very happy here. Does he still work at Golden’s place?”
She turned, and faced me squarely. “You really haven’t heard yet?”
What could I say? “Not a word. What is it?” I felt a fool, knowing I ought to have got some news or other.
A wad of tissue from her sleeve mopped up the waterworks. “He died, six months ago.”
I was shocked, pole-axed, plain slammed. A slice of childhood and youth gone to pieces. I’d always thought Alfie would live forever, like me, and could only tell her so. If friends from so early on didn’t, who could you trust to do so? I asked, my tone as if blaming her, though I didn’t mean it that way: “What happened?”
She stood a few feet away, to tell the story as if for the umpteenth time. “He had a sore throat last year, and it wouldn’t go away. I made him see the doctor. I bullied him no end. He hadn’t been to one before in his life. Anyway I got him to go, and the doctor said he’d only got a bad cold, which would go away soon. It kept on, though, and Alfie thought he wasn’t being told the truth, and that the doctor knew he’d got cancer of the throat. When he went back to the surgery the doctor only laughed, and said again that all he had to do was wait long enough and it would go away. When Alfie went a third time he sent him for tests, and they didn’t show anything wrong, but Alfie wouldn’t be convinced, and got more and more miserable. I talked and talked, but it made no difference. Then one night he went out for a walk. I asked him where he was going, but he wouldn’t say. He never came back. They found him floating in Martin’s Pond three days later. He never had cancer at all.”
She fell into my arms, and I was beginning to wish I had never left London. “Oh, Michael!”
Poor daft Alfie. If I’d been there the idea of topping himself would have been knocked smartly on the head. “Didn’t he have pals at work to put him right?”
“One or two, but even they began to believe him after a while. He’d tell them again and again, with this mad look in his eyes. The more they tried to talk him out of it the more he said he knew he’d got it. He told me one night that the doctor had been to talk to them, and they were all laughing behind his back. Then he would only think they were trying to cheer him up. If only the doctor had given him some pills to calm him down.”
“You can’t blame the doctor.” I pressed her close for a kiss on the forehead, as much to console myself as her. Alfie would never think of hurting anyone, but he had done worse damage to himself, and damned those he had left behind even more. He didn’t have the endurance to wait for Fate to do him in, and wasn’t in his right mind to wonder how those he loved would manage when he’d gone.
Suicide is the worst crime you can commit, yet looking back I realised that Alfie couldn’t have done anything except kill himself, only waiting for what he saw as a reason. Why had he left it so late? We’d known each other from playing ragball at six or seven in the schoolyard. He had no father — as the saying went — only a stout mother who loved him more than if he’d had two fathers. In spite of that I couldn’t help thinking how good it was that he had killed himself sooner rather than later, because if he had found out that Claudine’s child wasn’t his he might have taken her and the daughter with him.
Yet it was anger more than guilt that wouldn’t go away, and I decided that if there was an afterlife I’d give him a pasting he’d never forget when I got there. On the other hand if he’d done nothing else he had proved himself to be a man who knew his own mind, and had died on his own terms. Having to think in such a way was my temperament, so I mumbled into Claudine’s ear to show how much I was affected by her plight, suitably adult condolences that opened her lips on mine, and I wasn’t slow in melting my grief with hers.
“It was so awful, Michael.”
“He was my oldest friend,” I said. “I liked him more than any other kid. We were as close as brothers”—which I supposed was why I had played the dirtiest trick of all on him, and if that didn’t make us close I couldn’t think what would. I kissed her again. “I’ll never believe he’s gone. Not like that, anyway. It’s terrible. I can’t believe it.”
On the sofa, face to face and holding hands, she kissed me as if I was the only comfort she’d had since Alfie’s death. “I’ll never get over it, I can tell you that.”
My arms went around her. “I didn’t imagine in a hundred years I’d hear such tragic news when I rang the bell. I was looking forward to a happy reunion, talking to you both about old times. The three of us would have gone for a night on the town, laughing and drinking together.” The more I went on the wetter her lovely but foxy face became, arms firmly around me. The only way to stop her tears was to lean back with her.
“I’m so wound up, Michael, I don’t know what to do. I’m even wound up when I’m sleeping. I don’t know what to do.”
I did. The pitchblend of misery was the breeding ground of lust. It seemed I had come into the world to do Alfie down, though now that he was out of the world it couldn’t much matter what I did with Claudine, could only look on her as a farewell gift from someone who all those years ago hadn’t realised it had been mine.
The settee was long enough for her while I was kissing her ears, but it wouldn’t suffice for me when fully stretched out. “Let’s go to your bed,” I said.
Her eyes stayed closed as she led the way into the room smelling of scent you sprayed over the bath. She slipped off her drawers with no help from me, and went for my zip like a banana girl in the Amazonian rainforest. My underpants got tangled in trousers, socks and shoes till I reached to push the whole lot away. Even at my age I’d never quite worked out how to avoid that hiatus in the proceedings, when both parties were in so much of a hurry.
“I can’t believe you’re here with me, Michael.”
I could. It was like old times, a nostalgic flush of homeland and youth coming so powerfully back I didn’t wonder whether it was love or not, my head of steam blotting the whole world out. In up to the hilt, I stopped to unleash her breasts, then went into the sweetest coupling I’d had since having her so many years ago, only this time her second coming with its gobbling pressures and variations seemed to last far longer, fired not so much by me being in the cockpit but by her not knowing who or where she was due to the shock of Alfie’s death. Either that or she also wanted to obliterate the present by getting back to the days when she’d only known me in the way she was knowing me now, so I stopped wondering whether or not I was doing the right thing.
Her eyes were at all eight points of the compass while doing up her clothes. We’d both come so much that the disinfectant bluebell aroma had been satisfactorily vanquished, and she had no need to rush for the aerosol, since Alfie wasn’t in a state to kick open the door and sniff suspiciously. She fell into my arms. “I’ve always loved you and only you. Even when Alfie used to get on top of me I’d think of how we used to do it in mam and dad’s lovely big bed.”
What a slut, to come out with that, and Alfie not yet rotted into dust. Yet I had to feel sorry for her, and hoped she wouldn’t waste her life on such as me from now on. We smooched our way back to the living room, not as light as before, with gunmetal clouds wafting across the large windows. She sat in a chair, facing me on the settee. I had hoped to be left alone for a few minutes while she made a cup of tea in the kitchen, and shimmied in with a plate of biscuits. But such hospitality wasn’t in her mind. “You know Charlene’s yours, don’t you, Michael?”