The Whole Day Through (13 page)

‘I could teach you the Catechism too. I tested myself when I couldn’t sleep the other night and found I can still remember it all.’

Creed aside, it was a wonderfully undemanding ritual, almost a concert. The music varied hugely, from sparse polyphonic or even plainchant settings used on nights when only men’s voices were available through lush Victorian settings and turn of the century tearjerkers to challenging contemporary ones. There was no tedious sermon, no tub-thumping hymn. After several exposures, Laura found she was enjoying the psalms, with their frequent bouts of despair or indignation, and the unexpected charms of the readings. Much of it meant nothing to her but she still found she could appreciate it, much as she had appreciated displays in the Institut du Monde Arabe without understanding a word of Arabic script.

At that time of year she enjoyed looking up from her magnificent seat to explore the farther reaches of vaulting and tracery with her eyes. In the winter months there was a different pleasure to be had from the vast darkness of the church around them and the sense of the quire as a pool of light in a forest of nocturnal stone.

The words, especially those of the nunc dimittis and the repeated references to night and stillness –
the busy world is hushed, the fever of life is over
– the inevitable identification of the end of the day with the end of life, tended to bring on a curious fit of nostalgia or species of homesickness, a dwelling on chances past and friends lost, that could make her tearful if she didn’t guard against it.

Tonight, inspired by her thoughts of his rejected furniture and the box of old photographs she had so casually discarded, she found herself thinking about her father and when she had last seen him alive. She touched a hand to her shirt pocket and was reassured to feel his picture in there.

He had marked the early weeks of his ‘voluntary’ redundancy by catching the Eurostar to visit her in Paris. It was a tremendous bother at the time, as she was involved in a messy love affair with a divorced client who was trying to get serious just when she was preparing to ditch him. Her apartment was tiny – not suited to guests who needed a bedroom of their own. She slept on the sofa so that Dad could have her room, and gave up three days to show him the city which, astonishingly, he had never visited.

She had never spent so long with him without her mother, and the things about him and her parents’ relationship the visit threatened to reveal made her nervous and tetchy. There was a limit to how much sightseeing she could make him do and at regular intervals they had
to sit on park benches or at café tables and he would talk. More disturbingly he would ask direct questions, like how was she, no but really, in herself. And did she have someone special at the moment. And then there would be heavy sighs, which she knew were partly his way of showing he knew she was holding back the truth from him but also her cue to ask him things in turn. It was a cue she harshly overlooked to talk brightly about what they would do next.

Looking back she wondered if he had already known he was ill, if he had been settling emotional accounts. The classic behaviour for a living husband in such a position would surely have been to wring some kind of assurance from her that she would look after her widowed mother. Instead he seemed to be implying that he had learnt things, sad lessons, he wished he had known at her age. But she spent the visit parrying and deflecting his conversational advances and masking herself emotionally.

It had been very odd. When there were three of them as a family, her instinct, her role almost, had always been to take his part.
Poor Dad. Overlooked. Undervalued
. But without her mother there as a mock adversary, so much brighter than either of them, so much more assured, the polarity shifted and she found herself reacting as though he were a sort of predator on her feelings.

And then he dropped dead on an Underground escalator, only weeks after his visit.

Of course, what he had been trying to say, she suspected now, was,
Are you lonely? I don’t want you to be lonely because I still am and it’s a terrible thing.

Her automatic view of her childhood, her account for others at dinner tables, was that she had been the interloper, the infant gooseberry, in a great, unmarried love story. It was a story she still told herself because it was a comfort and required nothing of her: that he had come from the wrong side of the tracks and saved a brilliant woman from a stultifying future. From things she let slip, it was a story her mother told herself too. But the truth was possibly sadder: that he had indeed offered an escape route but that, once escaped into their unconventional ménage, she left him behind. It was never pretended he was her intellectual equal. He never rose above the level of lecturer, and that at a lowly polytechnic. He was never invited to conferences, never asked to contribute articles to
New Society
or
Tribune
.

For her mother, research was all. Her obsession with proving or disproving the existence of prions, for instance; teaching was something she always regarded as a necessary evil, secondary to the formation and supervision of a team of research students. Whereas he loved his students, clearly, and relished his role as a sensible, avuncular mentor in their messy, risky lives. For him they were, undoubtedly, the extra children he couldn’t have – a demanding, exasperating, extended family – and being eased out of their midst by his employers must have been shattering to him, a huge bereavement.

And now her mother had all but erased him from the picture. He lived on in bits of Laura, of course, in the photograph albums and, oddly, in the one thing he had given Mummy beside an escape route: the freedom she felt in shedding her clothes.

The anthem that evening was a chunk of the Brahms
German Requiem
, rendered into clumsily Teutonic English:
How Lovely Are Thy Dwellings Fair
. Laura was just thinking how pootling the accompaniment sounded reduced to an organ from the full, rich orchestration when there was a loud sniff from Mummy followed by a frantic scrabbling in pockets. She was doing her best not to cry. Another, fruitier sniff followed.

Laura had a clean handkerchief on her and passed her that. Mummy took it. Her face was hidden by the outcrop of carved oak between them but she patted Laura’s thigh in thanks.

Once they were all standing to let the choir and clergy process out and then variously kneeling or slumping or bowing heads for whatever improvised prayer people felt obliged to offer up by way of a private closing paragraph, she seemed herself again.

They shook the hands of a smiley canon, were greeted, without handshakes, by the Dean and once again Laura held the walker while Mummy made heavy use of the long, time-smoothed handrail.

‘I’m fine,’ she said in response to Laura’s tentative enquiries once they were back out in the Slype. ‘Bloody
Brahms, that’s all. Pavlov’s dog. I need a drink. Did you manage to buy another bag of those nice cheese straws at the WI?’

Blissed out, tie tugged loose and jacket over one shoulder because of the heat, Ben strolled down the Romsey Road and cut left to walk home under the trees across the top of Oram’s Arbour. When not framing letters to Laura he had spent the afternoon having repeatedly to remind himself not to smile or laugh inappropriately as patients confided their stories or presented their symptoms. Finally he could see the way forward and the sense of freedom after days mired in guilt and uncertainty was as intoxicating as the June air.

A gang of children was playing a haphazard game of rounders on the grass, assisted by a demented, spring-heeled terrier which ran, barking, wherever the ball was pitched or struck, and attracting impotent glares and a few comments from commuters obliged to follow the path through the game’s middle on their way to the station. The grass had been cut that afternoon and the Arbour
was still full of its scent and the children’s running feet and calves were spattered with it. Ben watched for a minute or two, enchanted, but soon moved on because children made him think about Chloë and he didn’t want thoughts of her impinging on his happily irresponsible mood.

Bobby was waiting for him, smartly dressed, hands all but on hips in agitation.

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘It starts in half an hour.’

‘What does?’

‘Shirley’s thing. You’d forgotten.’

‘Yes. Sorry. Damn.’

‘Where are you going?’

‘I’ve got to shower. I’m filthy from work.’

‘No time!’

‘Got to. Have a drink. I’ll be ready in five minutes.’

He raced to the bathroom, cursing his midsummer languor on the way home. He had forgotten entirely, even though people from work would be going and had probably said things to remind him if only he had been paying attention.

Bobby knew Shirley because she’d been the volunteer teacher who finally dragged him through his English and Maths GCSEs in his early twenties. She was one of Winchester’s very few HIV patients to die in recent memory, discounting those who died in accidents or of other illnesses. Most responded well to antiretroviral therapy. Even patients only brought onto the drugs in the late stages of full-blown AIDS tended to display a
dramatically quick improvement in immunity. Most treated at an earlier stage soon had HIV viral loads that were undetectable and CD4 counts that were little below normal. Shirley might have done better had she been diagnosed earlier but she was an old school radical and when her husband died from AIDS, well before the antiretrovirals were available, she had flatly refused an HIV test out of a kind of solidarity. And she had continued to do so, insisting she was fine and that she preferred to assume she was HIV positive than to risk being told she wasn’t and so feel excluded from her husband’s fate. Finally diagnosed with AIDS when what she had taken for seasonal flu turned into a nasty bout of pneumonia, she then proved to be one of the extremely rare cases to respond poorly to antiretrovirals. They tried her with a different
drug cocktail
, as she gleefully put it, but her T cell count continued to sink. Then she had succumbed to cerebral lymphoma and died in just three weeks.

In the early days of HIV it was a given that the staff on AIDS wards had to unlearn some of their training in professional detachment. They saw the same patients in extremis off and on over such a long period it was impossible not to become at least a little involved emotionally and the patients and their loved ones came to expect it. There was far less professional trauma now than when the wards seemed to offer nothing but death or death postponed, so Shirley’s death had rattled everyone.

‘Okay,’ Ben called down, dashing from bathroom to bedroom in his towel. ‘Nearly there!’

He grabbed smartish weekend clothes. Shirley was wildly informal and would have found nothing wrong in his attending a memorial service in open-necked shirt and a linen jacket instead of stifling in his work suit as Bobby would surely do. He stamped into shoes, snatched up his car keys and bounded down the narrow stairs. ‘Ready! Bobby?’ There was no sign of him. ‘Bob?’ he called back up the stairs to Bobby’s room then saw him coming in from the street. ‘Where’d you get to?’

‘Nowhere,’ Bobby said but he was smiling wickedly.

‘What have you been doing?’

‘Nothing!’ Bobby grinned even more. He had never been able to keep secrets because of his tendency to smile when under tension.

‘Okay. Come on or we’ll really be late.’

The car had been driven so rarely lately its windows were streaked with dust and debris from the trees. Ben had forgotten to fill the windscreen wash bottle so using the wipers only made their view more smeary. He drove as fast as he dared, peering between the patches of murk while Bobby sang to himself.

St Cross was a village, or former village, on the other side of Winchester and the city centre had a one-way system that would have taken far too long to navigate at that time of day, so Ben drove them onto the Romsey Road then headed right to the edge of the hospital
campus before driving left down St James Lane and onto a series of well heeled residential streets that led out to the south. Which meant they had to turn right outside Professor Jellicoe’s house.

Cars were coming uphill so they were obliged to wait a moment or two.

‘I’ve got to know the people that live in there,’ Ben ventured.

‘In there?’ Bobby said, looking across at the wall and gate. ‘I’ve always liked the look of that place. Really private. What’s it like inside?’

‘Lovely. The old lady’s a naturist.’

‘Oh. What’s that?’

‘She likes leaving all her clothes off. That’s why she lives there.’

‘That’s so cool. Is she your friend?’

‘Er. No. I know her daughter, Laura.’

‘Oh. You can turn now, Ben.’

‘Oh yeah. So I can.’

Parking in St Cross was usually a challenge but so many people were expected that permission had been given for cars to park in a nearby field. A couple of jolly women in bright pink were stationed on the turning down to the church with signs saying
Shirley’s Send-Off This Way!!
They waved Ben through a gate in the fence.

It was a handsome old church, much of it Norman, and from some angles looked almost like the cathedral in miniature. It formed the centrepiece of St Cross Hospital,
the almshouse foundation immortalized by Trollope, open to widowers and bachelors of the diocese. The ringing of bells, the old gateways and quadrangles, cloistered walk and sunny terraces and general air of rosebushed ease put Ben in mind of an Oxford college and touched his good mood with sweet regret. He resolved to bring Laura on a walk down there, perhaps across the water meadows to a nearby pub, next time they were both free.

People were still arriving so they weren’t quite the last. Ben saw several men in pink or lilac shirts and had yet to spot a woman in funereal colours.

‘Is there a theme going on with the clothes?’ he asked.

‘Shirley liked pink.’

‘Shirley was blind.’

‘She liked the way it sounded.’

Bobby, he noticed now, had changed since that morning into a shell-pink shirt and a dove-grey silk tie with pink spots. ‘You might have warned me,’ he said.