Sarah looked terrible and wonderful. She’d lost some weight, and she’d been crying more than was good for her. They’d told her that her father was dead twelve hours before, and at that moment I wanted to put my arm round her more than I’ve ever wanted to do anything. But it wouldn’t have been right. I don’t know why.
We sat in silence for a while, looking out over the water. The cabin-cruisers had switched off their lights, and the ducks had turned in long ago. Either side of the moon stain, the river was black and quiet.
‘So,’ she said. ‘Yeah,’ I said.
There was another long silence, as we thought about what had to be said. It was like a big concrete ball that you know you’ve got to lift. You can walk round and round looking for a place to take hold of it, but it just isn’t there.
Sarah had the first try.
‘Be honest. You didn’t believe us, did you?’
She nearly laughed, so I nearly answered by saying that she hadn’t believed that I wasn’t trying to kill her father. I stopped myself in time.
‘No, I didn’t,’ I said.
‘You thought we were a joke. Mad pair of Americans seeing ghosts in the night.’
‘Something like that.’
She started to cry again, and I sat and waited until the squall passed. When it did, I lit a couple of cigarettes and handed her one. She drew on it heavily, and then flicked nonexistent ash into the river every few seconds. I watched her and pretended not to.
‘Sarah,’ I said. ‘I’m very sorry. For everything. For what’s happened. And for you. I want…’ I couldn’t for the life of me think of the right thing to say. I just felt I ought to be saying something. ‘I want to put things right, somehow. I mean, I know that your father…’
She looked up at me and smiled, to tell me not to worry. ‘But there’s always a choice,’ I blundered on, ‘between doing the right thing or the wrong thing, no matter what’s happened. And I want to do the right thing. Do you understand?’
She nodded. Which was damn good of her, because I hadn’t the faintest idea what I meant. I had too many things to say, and too small a brain to sort them out with. Post Office, three days before Christmas, that was my head.
She sighed.
‘He was a good man, Thomas.’ Well, what do you say?
‘I’m sure he was,’ I said. ‘I liked him.’ That was true. ‘Didn’t really know it until a year ago,’ she said. ‘You kind of don’t think of your parents as being anything, do you? Good or bad. They’re just there.’ She paused. ‘Until they’re not.’
We stared at the river for a while. ‘Your parents alive?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘My father died when I was thirteen. Heart attack. My mother four years ago.’
‘I’m sorry.’ I couldn’t believe it. She was being polite, in the middle of all this.
‘That’s all right,’ I said. ‘She was sixty-eight.’
Sarah leaned towards me and I realised I’d been speaking very softly. I’m not sure why. Maybe it was respect for her grief, or perhaps I didn’t want my voice to puncture the little composure she had.
‘What’s your favourite memory of your mother?’
It wasn’t a sad question. It really sounded as if she wanted to know, as if she was getting ready to enjoy some story of my childhood.
‘Favourite memory.’ I thought for a moment. ‘Every day, between seven andeight o’clock in the evening.’
‘Why?’
‘She’d have a gin and tonic.Seven o’clock on the dot. Just one. And for that hour she became the happiest, funniest woman I’ve ever known.’
‘What about afterwards?’
‘Sad,’ I said. ‘No other word for it. She was a very sad woman, my mother. Sad about my father, and about herself. If I’d been her doctor, I’d have prescribed gin six times a day.’ For a moment, I felt like I wanted to cry. It passed. ‘What about you?’
She didn’t have to think very hard for hers, but she waited anyway, playing it over in her mind and making herself smile. ‘I don’t have any happy memories of my mother. She started fucking her tennis coach when I was twelve and disappeared the next summer. Best thing that ever happened to us. My father,’ and she closed her eyes at the warmth of the memory, ‘taught my brother and me to play chess. When we were eight or nine. Michael was good, took it up real quick. I was pretty good, too, but Michael was better. But when we were learning, my dad used to play us without his queen. He’d always take the black pieces and he’d always play without the queen. And as Michael and me got better and better, he never took the piece back. Kept playing without his queen, even when Michael was beating him in ten moves. Got to the point where Michael could have played without his own queen and still won. But my dad just kept on, losing game after game, and never once played with a full set of pieces.’
She laughed, and the movement of it stretched her out until she was lying back, resting on her elbows.
‘On Dad’s fiftieth birthday, Michael gave him a black queen, in a little wooden box. He cried. Weird, seeing your dad cry. But I think it just gave him so much pleasure to see us learn, and get strong, that he never wanted to lose the feeling of it. He wanted us to win.’
And then, suddenly, the tears arrived in a huge wave, crashing over her and shaking her thin body until she could hardly breathe. I lay down and put my arms around her, squeezing her tight to shield her from everything.
‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘Everything is all right.’ But of course it wasn’t all right. Not by miles.
Sixteen
With skill she vibrates her eternal tongue, For ever most divinely in the wrong.
EDWARD YOUNG
There was a bomb scare on the flight out toPrague. No bomb, but lots of scare.
We were just settling ourselves into our seats when the pilot’s voice came over the intercom, telling us to deplane with all possible speed. No ‘ladies and gentlemen, on behalf of British Airways,’ or anything like that. Just get off the plane now.
We hung around in a lilac-painted room, with ten fewer chairs than there were passengers and no music to play by, and you weren’t allowed to smoke. I was, though. A uniformed woman with a lot of make-up told me to put it out, but I explained that I was asthmatic and the cigarette was a herbal dilation remedy I had to take whenever I was under stress. Everybody hated me for that, the smokers even more than the non-smokers.
When we finally shuffled back on to the aircraft, we all looked under our seats, worried that the sniffer dog might have had a cold that day, and that somewhere there was a little black hold-all that all the searchers had missed.
There once was a man who went to see a psychiatrist, crippled by a fear of flying. His phobia was based on the belief that there would be a bomb on any plane he boarded. The psychiatrist tried to shift the phobia but couldn’t, so he sent his patient to a statistician. The statistician prodded a calculator and informed the man that the odds against there being a bomb on board the next flight he took were half a million to one. The man still wasn’t happy, and sat there convinced that he’d be on that one plane out of half a million. So the statistician prodded the calculator again and said ‘all right, would you feel safer if the odds were ten million to one against?’ The man said, yes, of course he would. So the statistician said ‘the odds against there being two, separate, unrelated bombs on board your next flight are exactly ten million to one against.’ The man looked puzzled, and said ‘that’s all well and good, but how does it help me?’ The statistician replied: ‘It’s very simple. You take a bomb on board with you.’