Trio (19 page)

It was her first trip to Brazil, though she had been to Mexico a few years before. It would be dark soon, and suddenly, no gradual dusk like at home, but that sudden dramatic plunge from blazing light to rich indigo night with a brazen sunset in-between. She sipped her lemonade and picked up the book she was reading. Once the sun had set she would shower and change. The anticipation of the evening to come made her smile. John, the Canadian guest, had wined and dined her for two nights. Third time lucky. Her experiences had taught her to take things at a moderate pace, at first anyway. She wanted a man who was prepared to get to know her a bit, to make intelligent conversation with a woman and enjoy her company as well as want to take her to bed. She didn’t always meet someone on her holidays and she still enjoyed the pleasure of new sights and sounds and food and music. Being somewhere totally foreign. But a liaison made the trip something special. Back home the whole area of relationships was like a minefield. She had enjoyed a few brief flings but nothing that had ever gelled. Her status got in the way all too often. She was good at her job, good at the finances and good with people. Management skills had come easily to her and she was being selected more and more often for sensitive negotiations.

As the other women in the bank settled down and made full use of attractive maternity and parenthood packages or began to try dating agencies in their desire to find Mr Right, Pamela found herself reasonably content with a solo life. There were times when she felt lonely but many more when she was alone and at ease with it. She had good friends too, easily enough to fill a dinner table with when she chose to entertain. And she had her sailing.

She knew Lilian fretted about her. She didn’t say much but Pamela knew she longed for grandchildren. Pamela couldn’t think of a worse reason for having children than to please someone else.

She finished her drink and watched the purple and orange daubs of the sunset slide behind the tree canopy. For now this suited her. Freedom and the security of a good career. And the opportunity to be whoever the hell she liked with the men she met on her holidays.

It was time to get ready for John. She felt excitement ripple through her belly and into her breasts and her thighs. She had four nights left and she knew John was booked in for another week. If it all went as she hoped the remainder of her holiday would pass in a blur of sexual indulgence. Nights spent in the shuttered heat of the room and days spent in anticipation, with trips to the market, the mountains and the beach acting as interruptions to one long, shameless fuck.

The lights in the garden came on, coloured bulbs like Fiesta time. The noise of the crickets grew louder and shriller. She would wear the cream silk to set off her tan. All so much simpler than at home. No need to worry about the future, no questions about ‘the relationship’. If all went well the future would be a handful of sexy memories and nothing else. She picked up her book and opened the screen door. Not long now.

Joan

Joan was working. Her desk was in front of the big bay window on the first floor. What most people would have called the master bedroom.

‘But I have no master,’ she had joked to Penny when she first showed her round. Only mistresses.

From her vantage point she could watch the tide come in and the boats inch their way across the bay. In the summer the tourists would come but this was her favourite season, with the winter sun like a ball of mercury, silvering the grey waves, and the clouds racing each other across the sky.

The room was spacious but warm. As well as her desk, it held a piano, a guitar, a bank of musical recording equipment and, either side of the open fireplace, shelves full of books. Many of these were collections of photographs. They were a source of ideas for her. ‘Every Turn (Twists A Little Deeper)’ had come to her one day while she was still down in London, flicking through a book. The photographs were black and white – street scenes, portraits and close-ups of natural elements, pebbles, the bark of a tree, reflections on water. She could never have explained the process by which these images became words, themes or tunes. It just happened. And ‘Every Turn’ had sprung almost fully formed, a morning’s work.

That song had reached number three for three weeks and then been snapped up for a car commercial. Serious money. Today though she was making slower progress. She had the germ of an idea but she could see it as an image more clearly at this stage than she could hear it – footsteps in the snow, stillness, a parting. Not a dance number then, she thought wryly. She wanted a cigarette. If she had a smoke she would concentrate better. But Penny would never forgive her.

She saw the postman appear round the bend at the foot of the hill. Watched him wheel the bike up the steep slope, stop next door to deliver something and then disappear from view as he approached her front door. She heard the snap of the letterbox and the slap as the letters hit the floor.

A diversion. Time for coffee anyway. There were two letters – the contracts she was expecting from her agent and a gas bill. A postcard too. Berlin, Lena.

She read it while the kettle boiled, fussing over Kelly, the border collie that had moved in with Penny. A puppy then, but grey around the muzzle now. A grand old lady of ten. Seventy in dog years.

Darling Joan,

      We’re coming to London in February (must be crazy). M has an exhibition at the Tate. Will you come? We are still doing great with the gallery. How are you both? Any news about your Berlin trip?

      Kiss kiss,

      L

Joan laughed to herself. She’d been promising to visit her old friend ever since Lena returned to Germany the spring after they met.

She took her coffee back upstairs, settled at her desk. She could see a tanker out on the horizon and nearer a trawler with a cloud of gulls trailing it. The sky was darkening the waves a steely pewter now.

She looked at the mishmash of words on the paper. Nothing caught at her, nothing tugged further ideas. It was like fishing, she thought, trying to trap the words that swam inside her, haul them out into the light of day.

The phone interrupted her.

‘Joan? It's Rachel. Can you ask Mum to ring me when she gets in?’

‘Fine. How’s things?’

‘Oh –’ Rachel sounded disconcerted to be asked – ‘so-so.’

‘Anything I can help with?’

‘No. Nothing.’

‘I’ll tell her to ring.’

‘Thanks.’

‘She wants me to go over there,’ Penny said.

‘Why?’

‘She wouldn’t say why. Probably more problems with that pig of a landlord. I’ll go now. Do you mind eating later?’ She sounded relaxed about it but Joan knew that her demeanor concealed anxiety at the unusual summons from her daughter.

It was late, very late, when Penny returned. Joan had eaten an omelette and toast earlier, then returned to work. Preferring that to the dross on television. When she finally saw Penny’s car creeping up the hill she went downstairs and switched the kettle on.

Penny looked exhausted, the grey pallor almost matching the grey that streaked her hair.

We’re all getting so old, Joan thought. Me, Penny, the dog.

Penny sat at the table and rested her chin on her hands. ‘She’s pregnant.’

‘Oh, no!’

‘After all I taught her, drummed into her . . .’ Her voice rose in frustration. ‘A one-night stand. No protection. She could have HIV as well, for all we know.’

‘What does she want to do?’ She leant against the counter, waiting for the kettle.

‘She’s all over the place, Joan. Talking about whether to keep it or have an abortion. She’s nineteen. She can barely look after herself let alone a baby. What was she thinking of?’

I was nineteen, Joan thought.

‘Oh, Joan, I’m sorry,’ Penny exclaimed.

Joan wondered whether she had spoken aloud.

‘But there’s the pill nowadays and you can get Durex all over the place. How can I help her?’

Joan grimaced, turned for cups. Put them down. ‘Stand by her, whatever she decides. That’s all anyone can do.’ She took a big breath, held it in. Christ, she thought, I’d kill for a cigarette.

Pamela

Summer 1990 Pamela spent crewing on the boat with Marge and Felix. They went from Wales to Southern Spain and into North Africa. After three exhilarating, exhausting weeks she was on the last leg of her journey home. She’d left her car at home to save bother parking and got the train to London from Portsmouth and then the London to Chester service. It was one of the old models. Shabby inside and out. There was little to see through the dusty windows. It was unreasonably hot and a peculiar stale, spicy smell filled the air as if someone had spilt curry on one of the heaters a long time ago.

She had the carriage to herself now. The couple who’d got on with her at Euston had left at Rugby. Not long to go. Taxi out to the cottage, a bath, some proper tea. Strange how it never tasted the same elsewhere, even with the same brand tea bags. It’s the water, Lilian would say, but even that didn’t seem plausible. How could all the water in every major city worldwide, and in all the other places she’d been to, be so different from home. Surely by the law of averages there’d be something similar in mineral composition or whatever in one of them.

Work tomorrow: back into drawing up plans for their strategy in Germany now that reunification was imminent, and there’d be all sorts of fallout linked to the Guinness scandal; they’d need to ensure their own house was in order so they weren’t open to fraud on such a scale. Enough. She would not think about that now. Still on leave. She would think about Carlos instead. She could still feel where he had been, remember what a tease he had been, kissing her dizzy, till she was begging him to do more, to touch her.

Her mobile trilled. It was handy in her bag.

‘Hello?’ She shook her hair clear of the set to hear better.

‘Is that Miss Gough? Pamela Gough?’

‘Yes.’ Her first thought was that someone from the office had got her days mixed up, ringing to fix an appointment for her boss. She’d switch off after this.

‘You’re related to Mrs Lilian Gough?’

Panic dried her mouth. ‘I’m her daughter.’ She felt the train sashay to the side, stared at the wooden window frame where someone had scratched T-e-r. She stared at the meaningless letters. Her heart went cold.

‘This is Manchester Royal Infirmary. I’m ringing about your mother. She was admitted here a short while ago. She wasn’t conscious. I’m very sorry to give you such bad news but your mother passed away a few minutes after she was admitted. I’m sorry.’

Pamela watched the letters spin and stretch and pool. She watched her own foot jerking with a will of its own. She felt a pull, increasing pressure as though she was being sucked underwater.

‘Will you be coming to the hospital?’

‘Yes.’

‘Ask for Main Reception, they’ll page me, June Kennedy.’

Pamela replied, the words saying themselves, as though there were two of her in the carriage. ‘I’ll be there as soon as I can. I’m on the train from London, the Chester train. It might take me a while.’

‘No problem.’

‘What was it?’

‘Most likely a heart attack. It’s still to be confirmed.’

‘Thank you.’

‘I’ll see you later, and please accept my condolences. It must be a terrible shock.’

‘Yes.’

She felt blank then, as though someone had slapped all feeling from her. T-e-r. Terrible. Terrified. Terminal. Mum’s dead, my mother’s dead. If she could only pull the communication cord. Stop the train, stop time. Back up a bit. To before she knew. Turn off her mobile and go home to her cottage and have that bath and a gourmet frozen dinner and then ring Mum. ‘I’m back. It was wonderful.’

Whenever she had imagined this it had been so different. A long, slow decline, an illness, sitting at her bedside. The dilemma of care homes and sheltered housing. Visiting, nursing. In all her fantasies there had always been time to say goodbye.

It was horrible seeing her but she had to do it. She had never seen Peter and what he might have looked like had haunted her as a child. She had imagined his skeleton showing through or a scary look on his face. She had to view Lilian now to make it real and so she’d not plague herself with fancy notions of how she looked. They went into the room. Lilian was laid out on a trolley, a sheet up to her shoulders. She looked false. As though someone had made a poor copy of her. Her face was slumped, her mouth pulled down, she looked sulky or grumpy. Nothing like her usual expression. Her eyes were closed, no hint remained of their cat-like quality, the beautiful green colour. No glasses on now. Her hands looked more real – the familiar way her nails were bitten down. The wedding ring and engagement ring still there. Grief broke over her and with it came a whirl of bitterness, a flood of rage and fear.