Colouring In (18 page)

Then darkness. Darkness, and a face came into that darkness. Gary’s face – just like it does in my nightmares. Was Gary checking I wasn’t dead just before he ran off, or was it an hallucination? I’ll never know. The wailing of an ambulance siren was going up and down in my head like a see-saw. Hurting so much, I think I cried out. Then nothing.

Next thing I knew, Mrs. G was by my side. She was holding my unbandaged hand. She was saying something but I can’t recall her words. It was nice having her there, against the throbbing pain in my head. At one moment I saw Mr. G beside her. Then a nurse came and gave me an injection and I must have slept.

So now I do remember most of it. I’m glad of that. Besides, it could have been worse. In the morning I’ll be able to tell them what I know. Perhaps I’ll have to describe it all to a policeman, not that they’re very interested these days. Too many muggings to cope with. But I won’t give them Gary’s name. I’ll keep my suspicions to myself. If Gary thought I was the one to have put the police on to him, Lord knows what he might do. So I’ll not mention Gary, not even to Mrs. G.

I’ll ring for the nurse, now: see if she’ll give me a bit more of that whatever it was for the pain.

Dan was rather quiet at supper. Tired, I think. Perhaps we’d become used to Bert being there and had to accustom ourselves to being on our own again.

About 9.30 – I’d just finished clearing up and had settled down with the paper – the telephone rang. The hospital. A Mrs. Gwen Bishop, they said, had been mugged, and was admitted a couple of hours ago. They understood I was her next of kin. She was asking for me, could I come round? She was in shock, but conscious.

Dan said he’d wait till Bert returned so that Sylvie would not be left on her own. Then he’d join me.

I drove very fast, goaded by the swarms of terrifying thoughts that leap into action on hearing bad news. Shamefully, one of the thoughts was – what would we do without Gwen? God make her all right. I never like to think of her having to leave one day. Now that possibility twisted through my mind … alarming.

I ran through corridors, was confused by lights and notices.

Lost. At one moment, crossing an internal bridge with a bright blue rubber floor, I sensed it was coming towards me rather than I was moving along it. Despite my hurried walking, I appeared to be standing still. But I can’t have been, for eventually the bridge was crossed and I found the ward.

Even faced by the plight of others, I thought, we cannot banish ourselves. I despised myself.

Gwen was in a bed at the far end of the ward. Her head was bandaged: one eye only visible, and beneath it a bruised and swollen cheek. Her left arm, lying on the bedclothes, was bandaged to the elbow. The other, which seemed to be all right, was bent. Her hand moved up and down a few inches of the pillowcase as if testing and disliking the rough cotton stuff. Her uncovered eye was shut. I moved her hand down from the pillow, held it. I felt the roughness of her skin – well, I thought, ridiculously at such a moment, she always refuses to wear rubber gloves. The feel of her skin on a hand I knew so well was shocking. She didn’t stir.

I mumbled something about how she was going to be fine. Even as I said the words I wondered at their pointlessness: cliché comfort surely deceives no one, and yet the victim would feel deprived if no consoling words were offered. Human inadequacy, at such times! ‘You’re not to worry about anything,’ I added. ‘We’ll take care of you.’

I’ve no idea if Gwen knew I was there. I sat looking at the exposed bit of her face, its familiar lines now strange with bruises and swellings. It was the first time I had ever seen her looking pitifully old. Her hair was scraped back so that I could see a patch of white hair, which I’d never seen before, behind her ear. I hated being privy to this: discovering a secret while she was helpless. I went on rubbing her knuckles with my thumb, and occasionally murmuring things.

There were few lights on in the ward and a kind of semi-silence smeary with the noises of illness: a groan here, the creaking of a bed there that spoke of the pain with which some turn was made. A single nurse floated by from time to time, apparently not looking at her patients, but then stopping, surprisingly, by a bed. It was intolerably hot, airless. There was a smell of strong tea and disinfectant against the deeper scent of sweating bodies that had lain too long in rumpled sheets.

I’d no idea how long I sat there, or what the time was. Dan arrived. He stood beside me, looking down on Gwen, a muscle in his jaw clenching and unclenching. He asked no questions. Then the floating nurse stopped by us, said she wanted to settle Gwen for the night. As I stood up, Gwen opened her visible eye. The small twitch of her mouth perhaps meant she knew we were there.

We left the nurse to give Gwen her pills and said we’d be back in the morning. Dan had come to the hospital by taxi so that he could drive me home. I was glad of that. I was glad to be in the passenger seat beside him, safe.

At home we found Bert sitting by the kitchen window, anxious. Dan poured glasses of brandy. We sat up for a long time. Through our desultory talk, only of how best we could help Gwen, I looked at Bert and found it hard to believe that anything untoward had happened between us. Never again, I now knew, would there be another flaring of whatever it was I had felt for him in that moment on the stairs. Whatever it had been was totally – mercifully – obscured by the vital matter now confronting us all: Gwen.

Carlotta calmed down a little after the gabbling in the bathroom. By the time we got to the kitchen her descriptions of what she envisaged in place of all the old stuff were painstakingly detailed and slow. Back among the dustsheets of the sitting room at last, I suggested we had something to eat. We could walk to the nearest place, an Italian trattoria, in the King’s Road.

Carlotta pondered this idea for a long time in silence. Then she agreed – with some reluctance, I thought. I was relieved to leave the house … and all thoughts of interior decoration.

Over
ravioli alle vongole
we shared a bottle of mineral water – she didn’t want any wine, and suddenly I didn’t either. I told her she was doing an excellent job and I was very grateful. I approved her budget and wrote her a large cheque so she could keep paying the builders and so on. Then I suggested it would be best if I didn’t come again till it was all finished. ‘Very well,’ she said. ‘You’ll have to leave the green to me. It’ll all be about another three weeks.’ I could move back then, though there would still be details to complete.

‘You show great trust in me,’ she added, with a smile.

‘I do,’ I said.

It was a low-key occasion: no awkwardness, but no electric current, either. Her strange strip act was not mentioned: it might never have happened. She didn’t ask how I was doing with the Grants, nor did she enquire about my future plans. We talked about the mime scene in
Giselle
, which she’d been to see the night before. She said that the great majority of audiences had no idea of what was going on. But, she added, she was lucky enough to be one of those who did. She’s full of arcane scraps of knowledge, Carlotta. I like it when she comes up with such surprises.

I had the feeling she was controlling herself, determined to deny me any signals. It was impossible to guess what was going on in her mind, and I didn’t much care. Dinner was passing easily enough.

It wasn’t till our second espressos she apologised for her strange behaviour in the bedroom.

‘So
stupid of me,’ she said. ‘Very poor joke, very poor taste.’ She didn’t know what had overcome her. But she was always making mistakes. I assured her I was too, though not quite of the same order. We both laughed. I urged her not to give the matter another thought. It was forgotten.

It wasn’t entirely, of course. Back at her car I wondered if she might ask me to her flat for a drink. Unclouded by wine, I was feeling wakeful. I wouldn’t have minded seeing her breasts again, closer. But had she invited me, I daresay we would have ended up predictably. I haven’t slept with anyone for weeks now, and a man can only go for so long without a reminder from his loins. It would have been straight fucking with Carlotta: there would have been no pretence of love. How could there be? My love is reserved entirely for Isabel. Beside her car, I ran an index finger down the line of small buttons that crouched between Carlotta’s breasts. She backed away. Said goodnight and thank you, without so much as a kiss on the cheek – my turn to be rejected, I suppose. I didn’t much mind. Just needed a moment to re-adjust. Then, in the car, driving back to Dan and Isabel, I thought why am I even
thinking
of fucking Carlotta when I feel as I do about Isabel?

Thank God, though, it didn’t happen. I arrived back soon after ten to find Dan alone, apparently waiting for me. He briefly explained about Gwen and said now I was there to baby-sit, he had to rush to join Isabel at the hospital.

When he’d gone, I poured myself a glass of brandy. Gwen, mugged? I hardly knew Gwen, scarcely saw her, though she’d been delighted by the £20 I slipped her yesterday. How absolutely bloody awful for her. London, these days… worse than New York. I needed music.

I put on Borodin’s D major quartet. In its melancholy nocturne I always find an antidote to my own low spirits. Then I sat in the chair by the window, looking out at the garden. The trees were roughly-shaped gatherings of intense darkness against the semi-darkness of the London summer sky. There was a smell of jasmine that I knew would always remind me of Isabel.

‘What now?’ I thought.

Perhaps this dreadful event would shift things in a way I could not guess at. Perhaps it would provide a pointer, a direction. But what that would be, for all my reflection, I still did not know and could not guess. I sat there with the music until Isabel and Dan returned. Isabel was very pale, very quiet. I knew that whatever the changes turned out to be, they would not shift my love for her. Gwen’s brutal mugging, and its consequences, could make no difference for my – yes – deepening love for Isabel.

I poured glasses of brandy for her and Dan. They were plainly shaken. We sat up very late, conjecturing in the hopeless way that people do after an event that has no explanation. Was Gwen a random choice, or was it a planned attack for some reason we could not guess at? We could not answer our own questions.

In my room, still very awake after the turbulent evening, I sat at the desk looking onto the same view as the one downstairs: wondering, wondering. The sky paled. The trees lightened. I could see their leaves again. Without bothering to undress, I lay on the bed.

I went with Mama after school to see poor Gwen in hospital. It was her second or third day there I think, and only the second time I’ve ever been in a hospital. It was absolutely horrible – the smell, a sort of sick-making sweet smell seeping out under a disguise of disinfectant. Mama didn’t seem to notice it so I didn’t say anything.

Gwen was at the end of a very big ward. As we walked down it I didn’t look too hard at the people in the other beds. I didn’t want to see a lot of blood and stuff, or people groaning in pain. Gwen was sitting up, most of her face covered in dressings, and her arm bandaged. The bit of her face I could see was the colour of a thunderstorm, all green and yellow, the skin. And her eye was bright red as if it was filled with blood which couldn’t get out. But she smiled at us and said how good it was of us to come. She said she was much better, feeling brighter. I remembered how whenever I was recovering from a cold or something she would ask me if I was feeling brighter. We sat by her bed on nasty plastic chairs. The old woman in the next bed coughed all the time.

While she and Mama were talking I looked at the bedside table. There were two very big bunches of flowers with small white cards beside them – Mama’s writing on one, and Bert’s on the other. There was also a vase of marigolds, the orangest orange I’d ever seen. Beside it was a big card with a picture of a cartoon lion which wasn’t very funny. I don’t suppose I should have, but I picked it up and looked inside. There was a message written in smudgy biro. It was from someone called Gary who said he’d heard about Gwen’s troubles from the lady who lived in the flat beneath her, and had guessed she must have gone to this hospital and hoped the card would reach her. He said he was so sorry, and wished her a speedy recovery, and he would be in touch again one day but for the moment he had business in Yarmouth. When I put the card back Gwen smiled and said it was from a friend. Then she handed me the only other card with a picture, a boring pot of geraniums, and said it was from her son up north. She still hadn’t heard from her daughter, though the hospital had rung her yesterday and left a message. Mama said something like I expect she’ll call soon. But I’ve never ever heard Gwen even mention her daughter, so there’s probably some trouble there and she’ll be jolly lucky if she ever hears from her.

I gave Gwen the piece of Chanel soap Mama had bought for me and she was really pleased. She said it was very extravagant but it was just what she wanted as the hospital didn’t run to nice soap, and the towels were like sackcloth, whatever that is.

We didn’t stay long. Mama said we shouldn’t tire Gwen. She leant over and said something I couldn’t hear because the old woman was coughing so much. But Gwen seemed to be disagreeing with Mama, and wagged her unbandaged finger. Then I bent over Gwen to kiss her goodbye. I’ve only ever kissed her on Christmas Eve, before, to thank her for a present, and I found it quite hard, putting my mouth on those horrible coloured bruises. I shut my eyes and managed it quickly – I mean, I had to do it. I sort of love Gwen. I don’t know what we’d do without her. She smelt strongly of tea. When I stood up again I think I saw a tear in her red eye.

I have to admit I was mega glad, like, to leave the hospital. I asked Mama what would happen to Gwen when she came out. Surely she wouldn’t be able to manage on her own? Mama said she had been thinking hard about all that, and had come up with a plan. I said she ought really to come to us, but where would she go? With Bert in the spare room…