Laying the Ghost (3 page)

2

Changes

(David Bowie)

‘I KNOW HOW
she bloody feels,’ Alex had muttered on that long-ago day when he and Nell had watched Princess Diana confiding to the biggest TV audience in history that there were three people in her marriage. Nell had laughed, told him to leave it alone, for heaven’s sake; it was years ago and he was the one she’d married, wasn’t he?

Alex had given her the usual look and she’d gone into the kitchen to pour more wine and have a private moment of wondering what Patrick was doing now. That time she’d pictured him living on a remote island, possibly in the Outer Hebrides, painting lonely landscapes and communing with otters and deer. No women were in this scene, though she’d allowed him an amicable parting of
the
ways from maybe two or three over the years. No children, though – he’d always been a hundred per cent sure on that one.

When Nell first met Patrick, they were both eighteen, starting their first day as art students. His look had been somewhere between early Sting and the prettiest one from Duran Duran – all floppy blond hair and too much black eyeliner and casually flamboyant clothes that gave him an attractively piratical look. There were so many boys like him at the time. Nell liked the type. It was a softer look than punk, but not yet the trainee-accountant-on-a-weekend image that would define the New Romantics; vain, certainly, but having spent five school years boarding with girls of varying levels of hygiene awareness she knew what she
didn’t
want in a potential life partner. Never again, she’d vowed the day she left school, would she share premises with anyone who let their hair become filthy enough to smell of stale cheese, or whose sweaty-hockey-match-to-shower ratio was less than one-to-one.

Nell fancied Patrick the moment she walked into the Oxford Poly (as it then was) Graphics department and saw him slumped on the old sofa in the corner, apparently asleep. It wasn’t what you’d expect from a first-year – as all the group assembled in this room were. Everyone else was alert, upright, prowling, eyeing each other for cool-rating and the possibility of friendship. To Nell, who was mildly frightened of just about everything and everyone
on
that first day, Patrick’s don’t-care detachment gave him a thrilling aura of confidence and superiority. If he was so casually at home on day one in a new college, he could presumably be enviably comfortable anywhere; she wanted to hang out next to him, to see if that blissful self-assurance was catching.

Patrick’s long, stretched-out body was wrapped in a multicoloured coat of velvet patchwork and he wore lime green snakeskin boots. Beside him on the sofa was a very battered old black leather cowboy hat. You’d need supreme confidence to wear that too, she’d thought, guessing it would look so wonderful on this slim and elegant boy that by the end of term at least three doting acolytes would have bought cheap and less stylish versions of it.

She was immediately certain she had never seen anyone quite as desirable as him before and wished she’d had more practice at sex so that when she eventually got him into her bed (and she was very, very determined here) she would be skilled enough to ensure he’d want a return visit. That was the trouble with girls’-boarding-school life – it was hardly what anyone would term an all-round education, whatever the fancy prospectus claimed. Lacrosse and Latin were all very well, but they completely failed to give you an edge over sexier, worldly-wise day-school girls.

Nell’s experience of sex to date had been just one
fumbled
summer with another ex-boarding-school pupil – Marcus from the village – who was equally desperate to get the sex qualifications sorted. Both had been using the few months between A levels and college as a crash-course learning opportunity and had spent many stifling hours in the dark in Marcus’s attic den, nervously getting the hang of each other’s body geography. Their parents were bridge-and-tennis friends and there had been an uncomfortable (but unmentioned – something here to be thankful for) underlying certainty that this was very much an arranged and approved-of coupling, that each set of parents had considered this match suitable enough to get the sexual basics out of the way before the two of them moved on to their next stage of education: Marcus to Bristol (law) and Nell to Oxford (art and design). Nell’s mother Gillian was a practical sort: she made sure her daughter left for Oxford equipped with a full driving licence, a copy of Delia Smith’s
One is Fun
and twelve different-sized sable paintbrushes. It seemed highly likely that Nell’s loss of virginity had also been orchestrated in the interest of getting another practicality achieved before the start of term.

‘Criminal, those boots. What a fuckin’ disgusting waste of snakes.’ A girl who smelled of charity-shop mothballs glared across at the beautiful dozing boy.

‘Is it?’ Nell immediately challenged. She looked at the girl and saw, in spite of the glare, a potential rival. This
girl,
all pins, rips, lace and Doc Martens, was taking notice of the lovely boy. She might be finding fault but she’d clocked him – couldn’t take her eyes off him. This was only one step away from a change of mind and serious opposition.

‘You know what?’ Nell took a chance, brazenly staking her own claim rather than heading safely for the making-a-friend option. ‘I can’t think of a better use for snakes.’

And so had begun five years of defending Patrick against many, many a critic.

Ed was early for once. Today he wouldn’t be sloping late into the college with the most laid-back of the students (the hungover, the oversleepers, the bus-shelter dope-smokers) and having the principal give him that look that said it was bad enough for the college’s image that he dressed like a Kensington Market hippie, circa 1970 – unpunctuality could be the excuse she needed to get him out and smarten the Literature staff up to standards more in keeping with a thriving business. He stashed a heap of marked essays (War poetry – to be dealt with no more than three at a time in order not to feel suicidal), his iPod and a Doors CD to play in the car into his bag, and took a quick glance out of the window at what the weather was doing. The all-enveloping army coat might be needed, or maybe the biker jacket. Next door’s Golf, he noted, was
back
in the shared driveway. Mimi and Nell were just going into their house.

‘Oh good. Next door are home,’ Ed commented to his brother. He backed away from the window; he didn’t want to be thought snooping, not by Nell. He’d see her later, at the Mitchells’ party, and would ask her how the holiday went. He hoped it had been therapeutic – she deserved some fun after putting up with a bastard husband for so long. And he wasn’t nosy, of course not. He was just being neighbourly, and in his opinion there should be plenty more of that. If you insisted on minding your own business and never taking an interest, the whole area would end up anonymous, dead. Of course he knew it was all right for him, he was only around here in south-west London in term-time and on weekdays. He’d got his place down in Dorset to take off to for peace and solitude whenever he felt like it, but you wouldn’t want it all day, every day, nobody talking to anyone else.

‘We knew they’d be back today. It’s written on the calendar, just above the Mitchells’ bash. Funny day to have a party, you’d think they’d wait till the weekend.’ Charles didn’t look up from his sudoku. Today was Wednesday so the rating was Fiendish. If he didn’t finish it by the time breakfast was over, the day would be spoiled. That ever-present background worry about Alzheimer’s setting in would creep up over the hours, and by late afternoon he would be able to picture the exact layout of his future care
home,
the slurried shades of beige on the thin, murkily floral carpet, the dull pictures on the walls – washed-out landscapes of places that looked too cold to visit – the lumpy ochre paint on the banister rails, the spider plants on top of the bookshelves. The terrible, terrible lack of books. There were people younger than him moving into those places, taking their few final-years possessions through the Doorway to Death. He shivered slightly, feeling the ghost of his future sliding by. ‘Whatever happened to spider plants?’ he asked his brother. ‘Everyone had them at one time, didn’t they? You don’t see them any more. I suppose they went the way of peacock chairs and wooden-handled steak knives.’

‘Spider plant:
Chlorophytum comosum
“variegatum”,’ Ed told him instantly. Charles used to know the Latin name of just about any plant, but recently he’d had trouble recalling some of them. He was a good fifteen years older than Ed: was this a sign that his brain was beginning to delete chunks of information? Ed hoped not. He knew the idea of mental decline worried Charles. Well, it worried everyone in time, he supposed. Even he, still only at the beginning of his fifties, went into a slight panic when he forgot what he’d gone into a room for. The worst thing was, being older and more forgetful meant you also forgot that you’d always done this; even children could sometimes be seen hovering, trying to remember what they’d intended to do next. His daughter Tamsin had done this
ever
since she was small and she seemed, at nearly thirty, still to have the full use of a functioning brain.

‘Trust you to know that,’ Charles grunted. The bottom right-hand square of the puzzle wasn’t working out. There seemed nowhere for the eight to go. Please, he asked God fervently, don’t let this be a cock-up. Not on a Wednesday, not when the hardest puzzles of the week were yet to come. Was this a sign?

‘Did they look tanned?’ Charles asked. Perhaps if he had one more cup of coffee his brain might be kick-started back into rhythm.

‘What? Nell and Mimi? Hard to say. I only saw them for a second. You’ll be able to see for yourself tonight – I know the Mitchells invited Nell to their do.’ Ed glanced out of the window again, wondering if she would be too tired to go. The Mitchells had invited half the street – which must mean they had some God-awful new consumer durable they wanted admired – but Nell might not be keen to dress up to celebrate a long marriage when hers had just collapsed. No, he thought, she’d probably put in an appearance, to be polite. He’d make sure he talked to her, be cheerful, because if she
did
turn up it would be a defiant and brave act. Neighbours might prefer to keep their private lives private, but the departure of Alex definitely came under Public Knowledge. The Mitchell house would be full of people asking Nell how she was feeling, all agog that she might come up with something
more
eye-opening and intimate than ‘jet-lagged’. The sad irony of a wedding anniversary wouldn’t go unmentioned either, especially by the women. They could be such nasty things.

‘She’s left the car out on the drive. I don’t suppose she’ll bother much with the garage now Alex has gone. I hope she fills it up with his leftover possessions. I wonder if she’s cut the sleeves off his suits like that woman in the papers a few years back? If that’s a book she’s taking a leaf out of, we could be in line for his wine collection. We should keep an eye on the front doorstep.’

‘Unlikely.’ Charles folded
The Times
carefully and turned to the main section. There was still the crossword to be tackled – one final chance for his intellect to redeem itself. Ed could do a lot worse than to start doing those himself. It was all very well playing Led Zeppelin at full volume and reminding yourself of long-ago dope-addled days, but it wouldn’t keep the brain cells ticking over. In fact, Ed was lucky he
had
brain cells. He’d been quite a wild worry in his time. ‘If she’s got any sense she’ll drink her way through his cellar in no time – if you can call it anything so grand, that cupboard under their stairs. Alex was no connoisseur; there’ll be nothing worth hanging on to. Christmas before last, at that party they had, I’m sure I saw a
wine box
on the kitchen table.’

‘I expect it would have been one that a guest brought.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous. Whoever would take wine in a box
to
a party? Surely a decent bottle of claret would be the very least. Or champagne.’

‘Well, students would, kids,’ Ed decreed. ‘It was probably some friend of Sebastian’s.’ He hoped this didn’t add up to defending the appalling Alex. Too smooth by three-quarters, that one, and certain to have had an entire string of extramarital women on the go, not just the one he went off to live with. Men like that, sleek and always rushing, forever gabbling into their phones as if every word they uttered was monumentally important, it was a mystery how they found time for complicated sex lives. Businesswise they were the type described as ‘thrusting’, as if that was a good thing to be. Not so good when it crossed over into their private life, was it? Too ironically apt a description.

The new woman wouldn’t last, in his considered opinion. Alex would tire. He would either move on to a different one or come to regret opting out of what must have been a pretty comfortable nest. A man preferred the familiar as life moved towards its later stages. Alex would come to realize this in a year or two, when the new one was making noises about starting a family and he was wondering why he was losing touch with the one he’d already got. He would see the whole thing coming round and going round again, and he’d feel dismal and despairing and full of regret. If Nell wanted her miserable excuse for a husband back she only had to wait it out, but Ed
sincerely
hoped she wouldn’t bother. He, so conveniently next door, could be useful to her, now she was living alone. He would make sure she knew he was always there to take in oversize mail and parcels, to feed her cat when she was away, mend the fence after a gale and such. She might even fancy going out for a drink or meal sometime, just casual, nothing intense. He’d like to be useful and there weren’t so many opportunities for that, these days, not since Tamsin had grown up.

Well, it wasn’t the trauma it might have been, coming home to this Alex-free house. Maybe the mugging had reduced the impact, which made it a strange small mercy to be grateful for. Nell phoned and cancelled the one credit card the boy had made off with (like many shops, it seemed he didn’t take American Express – and he had scorned the John Lewis store card too, making off with only the Topshop one). She then wandered from hallway (calmly blue) to sitting room (dark wood floor, Designers Guild turquoise, pink and lilac-vibrant – her insistence, Alex’s surrender) to kitchen (trippily patterned burr oak, honed black granite) and through to the conservatory in a jet-lagged daze, clutching a bundle of mail that seemed to be mostly junk, bills and catalogues, and half-expecting (and half-dreading) to find evidence that Alex hadn’t packed up and gone after all.