The Keys to the Street (10 page)

It was possible to have been too happy. He knew that now and because, at first, after it first happened, he lamented that he had been as happy as that, wished his had been a bad or broken marriage, his children ugly and stupid, because of these indefensible thoughts he had cut himself off from everything, expelled his family from his mind, and then expelled everything else from his life. The idea was to have nothing to remind him, to make everything different; no roof over his head, no job, no friends, no social life, no familiar things around him. If he was going to run away, and he was, it had to be a proper running away, complete, absolute, the old life shed in every aspect.

Until the fair girl spoke to him and he spoke to her.

•   •   •

He had been up to Primrose Hill where nuns give out tea and bread and butter to the homeless at five in the afternoon. It was in some novel of Graham Greene’s that he had come upon that phrase “a phony and a fake,” and he applied it often to himself. For he had a home he had put into the hands of agents and sold. The money derived from that sale stopped him using the hostels and the day centers, to which others had a better right than he, it stopped him taking money passersby offered him, but he drew the line at the nuns’ tea. He drank the tea and ate the bread and butter and left a pound coin on the table.

A lot of Irishmen were up there from the gloomy Victorian hostel in Camden Town. Their life expectancy, he had read somewhere in Talisman Press days, was forty-seven. The meths would do for
them, that and the cold and the poor diet. What you learn when you drop out of life! Roman wandered down Regent’s Park Road and took St. Mark’s Bridge over the canal. He counted seven houseboats moored alongside each other in Cumberland Basin and one in front of the Chinese teahouse. On its flat roof a woman lay sunbathing in a green bikini.

The finger of the minaret pointed into a pale blue sky on which the tiny clouds made a net. He thought of Omar Khayyám and the sultan’s turret caught in a noose of light. The sun made the mosque’s golden roof too bright to look at. He crossed the Outer Circle and came into the Broad Walk. It was wild and thickly treed up here, no flowerbeds, the neat lawns distant.

Roman sat down for a while on one of the seats by Sir Cowasjee Jehangir’s drinking fountain. An engraved legend told him it had been put there from gratitude for a benevolent Raj’s mercy to Parsis. A man’s face in stone looked out from the column above the inscription. Since its foundation, how many thousands had drunk its water, how many horses once refreshed themselves at its troughs? The Parsis placed their dead on towers of silence for the vultures to take, to eat and pick their bones. He had been so placed, awaiting his fate.

From the zoo behind him came an animal sound, a loud grunt or trumpeting. He and Sally had never brought their children to the zoo but had taken them only to parkland where the big cats run free, to Woburn and Longleat. Slipping into his meditative mood, his remembering time, he recalled the Longleat day, the glorious weather, Elizabeth drawing pictures of a lioness and cubs on her sketch pad, the whole of it rather marred for him by his ridiculous anxiety.

The car’s windows opened automatically at the press of a switch, they weren’t the wind-down kind. He had heard of those windows going wrong, of sticking either in the open or the shut position. What if something should go wrong, one of the children open a window and the window refuse to close again? If lions surrounded the car, if the car broke down … Later, when they were home again, he
discovered that Sally had been thinking in just the same way, with exactly the same fears. But it was often so. They had shared thoughts, fears, happiness, read each other’s minds.

Strange then that he had never prevised what had actually happened to his children, to his wife. His fears had been no more than fantasies or sops to a providence in whom he had no belief. They were never actual anticipations of real disaster with the corollary of: What will I do if they are all taken from me? How will I feel? How will I survive? And when it happened he had been without fear for some time, had rid himself of all but normal anxiety now Elizabeth was nearly fifteen and Daniel eight.

Roman did not usually think of that day. He did not relive the moments in which the news had been brought to him. For one thing, he could hardly remember what his feelings had been. An amnesia had descended and left him with a memory of beforehand and—horribly, agonizingly—twelve hours afterward. The lost hours between he no longer tried to recapture. But he did think sometimes, and he thought now, as he got up again and walked away from the stone column, the tower of silence, of that later aftermath, of the awful recurring disbelief, of sleep that came so readily and so easily, sleep in which everything could be buried, but which had to be resisted, for when he woke the truth returned as fresh and new as when it was first told him. Sleep, which is supposed to be a blessing, the “balm of hurt minds,” could be a curse too. Who would want a painkilling drug that when its effects wore off, brought worse suffering?

It was different now. Denial was past and forgetfulness never came. He lay down to sleep on some doorstep in the full acceptance of what had happened and his waking was to the naked knowledge of their doom and his fate. There was no longer room for illusion. But in those early days, before he took to the street, he would wake in the morning, turn to the pillow beside his, and wonder where Sally was, up so early. Then, like some slow rumbling explosion,
growing in magnitude before the final roar, it had all returned to him and he groaned aloud his irrepressible pain. He whimpered and groaned and relived his homecoming that evening, the arrival of the police on his doorstep, their kindness and their total inability to soften what they called “the blow.” That was when he had taken his decision to deny, expel, bury, pretend.

Now he had reached a point in the progression of his survival when he could control his memories. He was no longer at the mercy of these things bursting and breaking into the fabric of his general sadness. They were there, always there, the trigger of his madness, but he need not relive them or see what in reality he had never seen, the crash explode, metallic and black and red, on his inner eye. He could expel them and think instead of another happy time, of Daniel’s last birthday, dinner at McDonald’s for fifteen little kids and
Beauty and the Beast
at the cinema afterward. Elizabeth had come, a great concession, a considerable kindness, from a teenager to a small boy.…

Roman turned into Chester Road and entered the Inner Circle by the golden gates. Sally had always liked the rose garden, but later than this, a month later, while the roses were in bud and when their scent was still a delicate breath on the air. The precision of the garden had pleased her, its order, the considerable taste that had gone into its arrangement.

He left the gardens by the gate at the Open Air Theatre and walked on. As he crossed the long bridge over the northern arm of the lake he heard footsteps behind him and looked back. It was the fair girl. She was late, she was running, and he wondered if she was meeting someone.

It surprised him very much that she spoke to him. This was their third encounter and in any other circumstances that would have been enough to merit a greeting. But Roman had learned that street people merit nothing and those who see them every day still ignore them with averted eyes. Thousands never see them at all, any more
than they notice the litter that lies everywhere. So when she smiled and said, “Hello,” he was too astonished to reply. He could only stare at her.

“It’s a lovely day,” she said.

He found his lost voice. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, it is. Lovely.”

Instead of continuing to walk, he paused and leaned against the parapet of the bridge. He didn’t want her to think he was following her and perhaps be frightened. For a moment she had made him feel like a man again, an insider, and he was not at all sure that he wanted that.

•   •   •

The Rose Garden Restaurant had a romantic sound. It turned out to be a building like a cluster of mushrooms, little domed roofs bunched together, and on a terrace little hexagonal tables. Mary took care to approach from the direction he wouldn’t expect her to come from. She wanted to see him before he saw her. Not that there was any idea in her mind of turning tail if it should be someone who appeared uncongenial sitting there, but rather to prepare herself. Preparations were a commonplace in her life. She prepared herself before opening them for what might be inside envelopes, before answering the phone, before meeting someone new. She must make sure. She must compose her face, her smile. There might be several lone men sitting at tables, waiting for women. All she knew of him was from that photograph and that he was six years younger than herself.

He would expect her to come from the Inner Circle or perhaps up the path and past the kiosk on Holme Green. Instead, she came out of the gardens. Most of the tables outside the restaurant were occupied, couples, foursomes, two men together, three women together, one man alone, but he was forty at least. She was standing still now, her eyes traveling from table to table. Then she saw him. It was a boy she expected but this was a man, yet unmistakably the original of the photograph. Unexpected heat came up into her face and she felt it
color her cheeks. As she had thought, he was watching for her to come from past the lake and across the road, but he turned his head as if that flush had communicated itself to him. She moved then and made her way to his table. He stood up and held out both his hands, a tall, very thin man.

“Mary Jago,” she said.

“Leo Nash,” he said, “or Oliver.”

He had dropped his left arm as if he thought the act of taking both her hands, which he had evidently planned to do, was too forward. She put her hand into his and found it cold. He looked older than his age, a little worn, which was natural after so much illness and stress and surely fear. His features would have been handsome but for his pallor. Light gray eyes met her green eyes and she thought, with a little shock, that he and she were alike to look at, they might have been brother and sister.

“Now I’m here and you’re here,” he said, “I don’t know what to say. And that’s ridiculous because I’ve rehearsed things to say so many times. I’ve made speeches to myself, trying to express my gratitude, but I’m dumbstruck in your presence.”

“Not quite.” She tried a laugh but she was breathless. “I’d call you highly articulate.”

“Only in a nothing-to-say kind of way. At least I can ask you if you’d like some tea. Would you? Or a drink? Or tea and cakes? What would you like?”

He hadn’t a phone, which meant he was seriously poor. His clothes were just the young man’s uniform, jeans, a T-shirt, a sweatshirt draped over his shoulders, giving nothing away.

“Tea would be fine,” she said.

While he gave the order to a waitress, she sat looking at him in silence. Whatever she had expected, it was not this. His appearance, yes, but not her feelings. The knowledge that this fragile, thin, pale man’s body contained the marrow from her own bones, a healing
elixir that had restored his health, affected her so profoundly that she felt almost faint.

She hung forward in her chair and closed her eyes. It was as if she had slept with him the night before for the first time—no, it was more than that, almost as if she were in love with him.…

He spoke gently, “Are you all right?”

Her hands were over her eyes. She took them away and looked at him. His face was concerned, a little taken aback. “I’m sorry,” she said. “You must think me an awful fool.”

He shook his head. “You expected someone different?”

“Oddly enough, no. I can’t say I expected you but you’re not a surprise. I had your photograph.” She made a great effort. “I mean, I’d prepared myself to see you and I had a good idea what you’d be like, but really seeing you, really sitting here with you—well, it’s a strange sensation.”

“Strange, but good. For me, at any rate.”

“Would you—would you tell me how it’s been for you. I mean, your recovery. Or is that an intrusion on your—well, your privacy?”

He laughed, but gently. She was finding it hard not to look directly into those clear gray eyes. The spell of them was broken by the arrival of tea. Cakes came for him, fruit tarts, a cream horn.

“I am supposed to eat a lot,” he said. “Eat well, they’re always saying to me. I expect they mean fruit and vegetables, not cream cakes.”

This time she could smile. “Would you tell me about it?”

“The transplant, do you mean?”

“Yes, I think so. The whole thing. Your illness, the transplant, all of it. I want to hear. From you.”

“Wouldn’t that be very self-indulgent on my part?”

Her self-confidence was growing. “Think of it as indulging me.”

“All right. That certainly makes it easier.”

He hesitated. He was eating a cream slice with a child’s enjoyment.
It amused her to see him lick the cream from his fingers, look up, and give her a wide frank smile.

“I’d just finished university,” he said. “I was looking for work, I was getting anxious I’d never find anything, and at first I thought the pain was—well, nerves. That’s how it started, with this awful pain.” He wrinkled up his eyes, remembering. “A sharp pain in my side. I thought it was nerves and then I thought it was appendicitis. I went to my GP and he said it was gastroenteritis. But I’d never had anything like it before, I couldn’t believe what he said. Then the pain got intense, acute. Do you really want to hear this?”

“Of course I do.”

“I’ve got an older brother. He’s important to me—he’s like a best friend. I told him and he rushed me to Emergency. The hospital found my spleen was three times its normal size. It had a lot to cope with. It had taken over the function of my white blood cells. They told my brother and then they told me.”

“It must have been a great shock.”

“Like being stunned by a totally unexpected blow. One minute I was a normal healthy man, or so I thought, a man with a pain in his stomach, and then—this. They operated and took out my spleen. They told me I had AML—acute myeloid leukemia. I thought it was a death sentence.”