The Whole Day Through (11 page)

Laura knew she should make a start on the next client’s figures but the afternoon light slanting across her own bedroom was too alluring and she kicked off her shoes and lay down too as Mummy’s deep
breathing from next door edged into regular, wistful snores.

She wouldn’t sleep – she held out against the temptation of afternoon naps even when living in Paris – but she would let herself lie down for a few minutes, fully clothed, on top of the bedding. She listened to the snores, the birdsong, the electronic chirrup of a distant lorry’s reversing signal and stared at the still unfamiliar furniture and pictures in her room. Pretty watercolours in battered gilt frames, a chest of drawers with a dressing table mirror on it topped by a little bird and some carved ribbon and a wardrobe, all in dark, richly polished wood. And a Globe-Wernicke bookcase.

Along with the summerhouse table, these bookcases, now scattered around the house, were the only objects Laura remembered from her childhood that her mother had retained. Heavier and more practical than the Georgian furniture, with glass doors that folded ingeniously over the tops of each row of books (as a child she called them
book garages
), they were incongruous and didn’t really ‘go’ but her mother had always appreciated their way of keeping books free of dust.

The rest of it – pictures, tables, chairs, even beds – had belonged to Laura’s maternal grandparents. She knew nothing about antiques, having grown up in a house where all furniture apart from the book garages was either built by her father or bought at Habitat.

Her father was a war orphan and her mother had broken off with (or been cast out by – the story varied)
her family when she moved in with him. It was only all these years later, in her forties, that Laura saw the emotional significance of the modern furnishings with which she grew up. From what she could gather, Dad and Mummy came of violently different stock. His parents had run a political bookshop in Camden – bombed with his already war-widowed mother in its basement. He was not-quite-adopted for two years by the schoolmaster’s family in Bournemouth who had taken him in as an evacuee, who ensured that he stuck with grammar school and made it through to the London School of Economics where he studied political science. Which was where, at some sort of political debate, he met Mummy.

She came of hunting Hampshire squirearchy and had bucked family tradition by not only having a brain but insisting on nurturing it. She had bullied her parents into semi-submission by claiming she was going to learn to treat horses at the Royal Veterinary College but had tricked them and jumped courses to study biology at Imperial, with every intention of specializing in viruses. She had been obsessed with these since a missionary had visited St Swithun’s to lecture on leprosy.

She wasn’t an only child – there was a brother farming in New Zealand and one who had stayed in Hampshire but showed an alarming preference for antiques and old women to marriage and horseflesh – but she was the only daughter and the protected youngest and her parents were disgusted when she not only took up with
a bearded, rootless left-winger, and sociologist to boot, but moved in with him. She proved immune to both emotional blackmail and financial disinheritance and severed all ties with them as soon as they threatened to with her.

She had no great desire for motherhood and was living with a man who convinced her that the family was a patriarchal evil at the root of most of the modern world’s ills, from poverty to depression, and she used multiple contraceptive methods, on the belt and braces principle. By the time Laura startled the household with her arrival, Mummy was a professor at Imperial College and a then fairly elderly thirty-five and Dad was a lecturer at South Bank Poly. They were a radical couple so set in their domestic ways it always surprised people to learn they weren’t married.

Laura had an odd childhood. It wasn’t an unhappy one – she had intellectual, adult attention and books and excellent health – but she was never assertive enough to be any good at making friends her own age. Friendships, if they came, were thrust upon her, not chosen. A brother or sister would have helped but Dad had a vasectomy after she was born – which was explained to her, with diagrams – so most of her hours outside school were spent alone or in the company of adults, usually clever ones with limited social skills. Hence, perhaps, her ready acceptance of tribal life at Summerglades.

She had never forgotten her bouts of sick terror when she went up to Oxford. Aggressively shy, she studied
hard because anything else involved socializing. Weeks had passed before she realized nobody would notice in so big an organization if she had no friends, and nobody would care. And she lowered her guard, which was how Amber and Tris came to annex her.

It transpired that relations with her mother’s family weren’t entirely severed after all. Or possibly they merely slipped down below the level of male radar, to an occasional exchange of postcards or Christmas letters between mother and daughter. Laura was never introduced to her uncles or grandparents and, prompted by her father, tended to think of them, if she thought of them at all, as the Enemy. When her grandfather died, Mummy only broke the news after taking herself off to Itchen Abbas for the funeral. Laura and Dad surprised her at the kitchen table in her best dark suit and court shoes, with pink eyes, the order of service and her father’s old watch. After that she took to slipping down to Hampshire for lunch roughly once a month, something Dad hated but was powerless to stop. Mummy at least respected the way things stood and didn’t press very hard for Laura to join her. Laura was in her late teens, studying like fury for Oxbridge and reliably bolshie.

‘She’d love to see you, you know,’ was all Mummy said. ‘Aren’t you curious? She’s your only surviving grandparent, after all.’

‘She’s never wanted to see me before,’ was all Laura said. ‘Why should I suddenly want to see her?’ and the subject was closed.

She was thirty and living in Paris when Dad died, just months into a reluctant redundancy. Mummy was more or less retired by then, no longer supervising any PhD students, a resentful sort of consultant on a couple of research projects, nothing more. Within the year she had sold the house in Ripplevale Grove and moved to Winchester and this house, dumping or selling virtually every article of furniture in the old place and furnishing her new one with things inherited from the unmarried antique dealer brother, who had died. Any gaps were then filled with leavings of her mother’s when her mother elected to sell the family house in Itchen Abbas and move to a tiny flat in a gracious sheltered housing development in Kingsworthy.

These pictures and furniture, elegant, discreet, what Mummy bluntly called
good
, were all Laura would ever know of the family she had refused to meet. It was all beautiful in its very English way, but when Mummy died, Laura decided, she would probably keep the book garages but sell every stick of the rest.

She started awake, glanced at her clock and saw she had barely nodded off but she forced herself upright just the same. It was a condition of living with her mother that she was tired all the time, forever nodding off in armchairs or at her desk, as though the sleepiness of old age were contagious. There were thirty-five years between them – compared to Mummy she should be an amazon – and yet it was Mummy, increasingly, who seemed the livelier one, the one keenest to be up and
doing. ‘Perhaps I’m sickening,’ she thought. ‘Perhaps I’m clinically depressed?’

As if affirming the point, came the clunk of her mother flopping down on the stair-lift seat followed by the descending buzz of its motor.

Laura crossed to the bathroom and gave her teeth a quick brush to rid her mouth of staleness. Her mother was without vanity so the bathroom mirror was pleasantly small, soap-splashed and badly lit. It was easy to avoid meeting one’s eye as one brushed, rinsed and spat.

Something in his drug-company sandwich had brought on a thirst. Ben downed a glass of water at his sink then filled it and carried it back to his desk and drank the rest of it there. Like the other rooms where he worked, this one was bald of personal touches – no photographs, no possessions, nothing he couldn’t carry out again in his bag or pockets – he had taken such a tumble in status in order to work here that he simply worked wherever the nurses put him.

Whichever half of the day wasn’t devoted to the GUM clinic was given over to the separate HIV one. Fifteen years ago the two would have shared premises and appointment hours but this had never really been appropriate. Of course, new patients were often identified as a result of an HIV test conducted as part of a standard STD screening or treatment but HIV positive patients, whether they were still asymptomatic or had become ill
were, thank God, usually long-term ones these days, requiring at least regular blood tests and check-ups to monitor their T cell levels and whatever drugs cocktail they were on, whereas a patient with syphilis might come to the GUM clinic just once in a lifetime.

Most of the HIV patients were sufficiently relaxed not to use pseudonyms. They were being seen regularly and doctors and staff in the department had won their confidence, but there were always exceptions: the man terrified he would lose his life insurance if word somehow got out, the woman Ben had seen only that afternoon, who he suspected was still keeping her HIV status from her husband and children.

So it was no surprise to glance down to his next appointment and find a Mrs Jones listed. Usually the patient’s notes were enough to jog his memory or at least give him enough information not to cause offence through ignorance. But this Mrs Jones had no notes, only a pristine folder, on which a paperclipped slip declared her a
new pt
, with a blank sheet of A4 inside it. Ben finished his water then buzzed the nurses’ station.

‘Hi, Sherry. Mrs Jones who’s due in next. Is she a transfer?’

‘Hang on, Ben.’ Sherry could be heard conferring with a colleague. ‘Yup,’ she said. ‘No notes. She’s a fresh referral, just moved to the area.’

‘Ah. Okay.’

He stepped outside and walked along the short corridor to the waiting area. This doubled as the reception
area for the adjacent HIV ward so was always fairly busy with visitors calling in or waiting to take discharged patients home. He dodged a toddler who was stomping in pursuit of a jingling rubber ball and scanned the faces. ‘Mrs Jones?’

It was her. Of course it was. She stood, suppressing a smile and shook his offered hand.

How could he ever have thought she was funny-looking? With her honey-brown limbs and long neck she was lovely to him now, and the shy way she ducked her head slightly as she met his eye so that her hair shaded her face made him want to kiss her on the spot. ‘This way, please,’ he told her and led the way around the corner and along the corridor back to his room. He never spoke to patients until they were safely inside, to protect their confidentiality, but this was impossible with her. He had to say something. Words were bubbling up and he struggled to make them appropriate as colleagues and nurses were everywhere.

‘We’ve no notes for you yet,’ he stammered.

‘No,’ she said, her voice similarly wavery. ‘I’ve moved here unexpectedly. From Paris.’

‘Paris? That explains it. In here please.’

He had barely closed the door than she was kissing him. By some delicious miracle the door had a lock.

‘I’m sorry,’ she murmured, coming up for air. ‘So sorry.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s me. It’s all me. Such a coward. I’m. Oh. I’m…’ And they had to kiss more. It was intolerable not to.

‘How long have we…?’ she began

‘Fifteen minutes,’ he said. ‘Absolute max. We really shouldn’t.’

But with a couple of quick, efficient gestures she had undone her dress and stepped out of it. She had on dark green French lingerie he remembered from an earlier date. It was impossibly predictable and corny of him but he found it deeply exciting. ‘Oh Christ,’ he said. ‘Hang on,’ he said and dropped the blinds. They were high up but window cleaners had a way of appearing unannounced.

She was clambering onto the examination couch. Her bare feet squeaked on its vinyl upholstery.

‘This is so bad,’ he whispered.

‘I know.’ She smiled and put up a hand to stop him undoing his tie. ‘No,’ she muttered. ‘No time. Keep everything on.’

It was all over in five minutes or less. She was on fire and he barely had to touch her. A cleaner had unknowingly released the brake on the couch wheels and their rocking moved it some distance. As he tidied himself up she slipped back into her dress and shoes and sat demurely in the chair she’d have taken as a patient, and repaired her hair with a comb. He sat before her and took one of her hands between his and kissed its fingertips.

‘Oh God,’ he said.

‘I know,’ she said.

‘Paris, eh?’

‘Yup.’

‘You’d better…’

‘Go. Yes. I know.’

‘But can I see you?’

‘Yes. Oh yes. Don’t be silly. No more nonsense.’

‘No. I’ll…We’ll…’

She reclaimed her hand, briefly cupped his jaw in it and stood. ‘Of course we will. Everything.’

‘Everything’s going to be fine, isn’t it?’

‘Yes.’

She kissed his brow then let herself out. He twisted the blind control and the sunlight fell back in harsh bands. Then he refilled his water glass and drained it. Before he washed his hands in lurid pink Hibiscrub, he raised his fingers to his mouth and nose and breathed and, hot water steaming the mirror before him, let out a kind of sob then cleared his throat and pretended to cough.

‘You slept too,’ her mother said.

‘I didn’t mean to.’

Mummy reached up and gently patted the back of Laura’s head. ‘Hair standing up a bit,’ she said.

These moments of solicitude or tenderness between them were becoming more common but were still so unusual, so out of character, that Laura did not know how to deal with them. ‘Shall we have tea in the garden?’ she said. ‘I bought a lemon drizzle cake at the WI.’

‘Oh good.’