♦
When you are speaking to an older person, said Alex, show that you are very alert and are paying due attention to what is being said to you.
What’s this? Dominic opened the fizzy water.
Pictorial Knowledge.
Benjy, mate, this is you, said Alex. To loll awkwardly, ask for sentences to be repeated, be inattentive and uninterested is sheer bad manners.
Can you clear some space, please? Richard bore the chicken aloft.
That looks delicious. Dominic rubbed his hands.
Broadly speaking we should take a bath every day whenever that is possible.
Alex…
In the absence of a bath, a quick sponge down and then a brisk rub with a rough towel does a great deal of good.
Daisy, said Richard, are you going to say grace?
It’s all right, I don’t have to.
Go on, said Richard, I’m getting rather fond of it.
Melissa looked at the chicken with disdain.
Dominic said, Worry not, it was smothered with a silk pillow after a long, fruitful and contented life.
It’s OK, said Benjy, because chickens aren’t very intelligent.
Some people aren’t very intelligent and we don’t eat them, said Melissa.
Mentally Handicapped Person Pie, said Benjy.
That is not funny, said Angela.
It is a bit funny, said Alex.
Richard returned with the roasted vegetables, borne similarly aloft.
I think it’s an amazing vocation, being a teacher, said Louisa.
Vocation, thought Angela. Maybe that was what she’d lost.
But Dominic and Richard were talking about Raglan. And then I realised, said Dominic. It featured in The Song Remains the Same.
He’s improving my mind, said Louisa. He takes me to galleries. Museums, operas. She leant in close. Alex could smell her perfume and see her breasts inside her shirt. I’m not so keen on the opera.
Melissa stared at her plate but she had lost the power to influence the atmosphere in the room. Richard patted her forearm gently and she didn’t protest.
I felt rather deserted when you ran off across the road.
I’m sorry, said Daisy. The desire to save Melissa. It seemed laughable now.
What’s the most horrible way to die? asked Benjy.
Huntington’s disease, said Richard. You go insane and lose control of your body slowly over many years. You can’t sleep, you can’t swallow, you can’t speak, you suffer from epileptic fits and there’s no cure.
But Benjy had meant it to be a funny question.
♦
A young doctor had stood beside her bed and explained why the foetus was deformed. He seemed pleased with himself for knowing the biology behind such a rare syndrome. She got the impression that she was meant to feel pleased, too, for having won some kind of perverse jackpot. The following morning they took the lift to the ground floor and entered a world full of mothers and pregnant women. She felt angry with them for parading their prizes so brazenly, and relieved that she herself had not become the mother of that thing. She cried and Dominic comforted her but he never asked why she needed comfort, because it was obvious, surely. She combed her memory to discover what she’d done wrong. She’d smoked during that first month. She’d stumbled getting off a bus on Upper Street. If only she could find the fault then perhaps she could turn back time and do things differently and arrive at the present moment all over again but with a baby sleeping in the empty cot.
Dominic came back into the bedroom holding his toothpaste and brush. What’s the matter?
I look at people and I think they’re Karen.
He remembered his grandmother dying when he was eight, seeing her everywhere. All those old ladies with white hair.
I think she’s still alive. Out there. Watching. Waiting.
He was tired and this was scaring him. She’s not out there, Angela. She’s not watching. Had she ever been alive?
Don’t you think about her?
Sometimes. Though he rarely did.
I hear her voice.
How long have you been thinking like this?
Not so much before, but recently…
You’ve got a real daughter.
I know.
And you give her such a hard time.
Dom…
It’s not about the religion, is it?
Please, not now.
You’re angry with her. He felt the giddy excitement of climbing a great tower and seeing the shape of the maze through which he had stumbled for so long. She’s not a consolation prize. She’s a human being.
♦
Louisa sat on the edge of the bath, the little yellow tub of face cream in her hand. Melissa’s disappearance had rattled her, not so much the thought of what might have happened as what else she might do, what else she might or might not say. Hard to believe it now, the facts blurred by the alcohol she’d drunk to blunt the unexpected loneliness after Craig walked out. Fifteen men, or thereabouts. She wasn’t greatly interested in counting. One in the back seat of his BMW, with his trousers round his knees, his hand over her mouth, calling her a dirty bitch so she wondered if it counted as rape, though rape meant saying No, not just thinking it, which meant having some actual self-respect. One of them was a scaffolder. Blind drunk every time.
Annie had taken her to Raoul’s that first weekend and she could feel them circling now Craig’s scent was fading. Annie said she was punishing herself, but some things were just accidents. You took the wrong path and night fell. She never drank at home but the places she went for company were places where you drank, and if you were scared of going home you kept on drinking. Melissa encouraged her rebellion at first, then came back from a friend’s house one morning to find a man she didn’t recognise sitting at the breakfast table and said, Who the fuck is this? and Louisa couldn’t say anything because, in truth, she didn’t know who it was, not really. Even now she can’t bring a name to mind. Or a face.
She didn’t fall for Richard so much as grab him as she was swept past, fighting to keep her head above the water. They didn’t have sex for six weeks while she waited for the result of an AIDS test. He thought she was just being old-fashioned. She thought that if she let go of the past it would be carried away by that same flood, but it was dawning on her for the first time that she would have to tell him before Melissa did. Forgive and forget. She was beginning to understand what it meant. You couldn’t do the forgetting until someone else had done the forgiving.