Bachelor Boys (27 page)

Read Bachelor Boys Online

Authors: Kate Saunders

BOOK: Bachelor Boys
8.03Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
“I'm afraid so. I got it at the last minute. The original Wishee-Washee's gone down with shingles.”
“Well, I hope the money's okay.”
Fritz leaned against the white Formica counter. “Not bad.”
“It all helps,” I offered.
He smiled at me—one of his rare, intimate smiles. “I know it's ridiculous. But I honestly don't mind making a dick of myself. All I care about is getting by until we sell the house.”
“Shouldn't I be helping a bit more? I don't feel as if I'm doing enough.”
“Oh, Cassie. You have no idea how much you're helping.” He surprised me by putting his arms around me. “It helps me to see you, to hear you—” He bent his head down to kiss me. We kissed for a long time. We drank at each other's mouths, gulping thirstily at life. I wanted to press every cell of his body into mine. I wanted to climb inside him. When he pulled his face away, my entire being was blushing, from the core outward.
He held my shoulders. “Cassie,” he said breathlessly, “I'm going to ask you the most enormous favor. I won't hold it against you if you say no, but it's for Phoebe.”
I said, “You know I'll do anything.”
“She's still fretting about me, and I can't bear it.” His grip tightened. “This is the favor. Would you let me tell her we're engaged?”
I had just breath enough to squeak, “Sorry?”
“We don't have to go through with it—just tell her.”
“You want me to pretend to be engaged to you? You want to lie to Phoebe?” I was hurt that Fritz obviously didn't truly want me, but found myself struggling with a perverse desire to laugh. “We can't!”
“Why not? Think how happy it would make her!”
“I can't lie to her, Fritz.” This was true. I didn't mean it in the honorable, George Washington sense, either. I meant that I really couldn't lie to
Phoebe—even when dying, she'd see through me in a second. “We'd never get away with it.”
“But Cassie, if we could convince her, it would remove her one final worry—she wouldn't have a single care left in the world.” He lowered his voice. It became dangerously caressing. “I'd find it a very easy part to play. It would be a very convincing portrayal of a man in love.” He went on staring down into my face, holding my shoulders. “You're very lovely, Cass. She knows I fancy you.”
“You fancy lots of people.”
He laughed softly, not at all shamefaced. “All right—she knows you fancy me.”
“Oh, really?”
“Don't try to deny it. Here we both are, Grimble—young and strong and extremely attractive. Of course we fancy each other. We wouldn't be natural if we didn't. Now, where's the harm in playing it up a little?”
When he put it this way, it was hard to see the harm. And I had to admit, seeing Fritz and me together would send Phoebe into the next world on a cloud of bliss.
“All right,” I said. “Let's go for it. Let's finish the job in style.”
“Thanks, you won't regret it.” He planted one solemn kiss on my forehead. “Try not to contradict my account of our courtship.”
“Oh, I can't wait. I bet it's romantic.”
He said, “Seriously, thanks.”
I said, “Seriously, you know I'd do anything to make her happy.”
“Don't say anything to Ben and Annabel, by the way. I'll fill them in later.”
“Okay.”
Without another word, we took the champagne and the glasses back to Phoebe's room.
We drank the champagne. I fed Phoebe her usual tiny sip, which she rolled slowly round her tongue. Ben and Annabel left soon afterward. Ben had a concert with Neil. He said he would come back when it was over. He leaned over the bed to kiss Phoebe.
She whispered, “I hope the concert goes well.”
“I'm coming back later. I'll tell you all about it—don't I always?” He blew her another kiss at the door.
Phoebe's eyes followed Ben out of the room. She smiled to herself, and her lips moved.
Fritz asked, “What?”
She hadn't been talking to us. Her clouded eyes cleared. She drew Fritz into focus.
He flicked a look at me and took my hand. This was our moment. When it came to the point, I was ridiculously nervous.
“Mum,” Fritz said. “Darling, Cassie and I have something to tell you. We've discovered that we absolutely adore each other. We're getting married.”
I think of this as the single most rewarding moment of my life. As I watched, joy poured into her wrecked body, filling her dim eyes with light.
She whispered, “Wonderful.” Her eyes turned toward me. “You're just the right girl for him. I always knew it.”
Fritz said, “Yes, you were right all along. Now you can stop fretting that Cassie won't have anyone to look after her. Because I'll be doing it.”
Phoebe's lips, faintly curved into a beatific smile, moved.
“Sorry, darling—can't hear.” Fritz put his ear close to her mouth. “What is it?”
“Granny's ring.”
“Oh, you mean the one with the sapphires. You want me to give it to Cass.”
Phoebe whispered, “It will look so sweet on her little paw.”
“You're right,” Fritz said, smiling at me. “It could've been made for her.”
“And the pearl necklace is in the top drawer. I've been saving it for your bride.”
There was so much I wanted to say, and I didn't need to say it. Phoebe and I gazed our love into each other's eyes, straight through the vein and into the heart. I bent over the bed and planted a kiss on her thin cheek. The texture of her skin felt different—tepid, and a little clammy.
“Darling Cassie.” Phoebe gave me a sleepy smile. “My little brown bear. How happy you've made me.”
I had made her happy. What else mattered? I gave her another longer
kiss. The backs of my eyes were hurting, and I left the room before anyone saw.
Fritz followed me out into the corridor. He held my arm. “Cass, wait. Are you okay?”
“Of course.” I had to go home to cry. Tears were wrong in this place, because they belonged to the world.
He wouldn't let me go. “Are you sure?”
“Yes. Absolutely sure. For God's sake, don't worry about me.”
“You saw her. We made her happy.”
“We mustn't spoil the effect now,” I said. “I'll wear the ring for a bit, if you want.”
Fritz said, “Good idea—she'll adore that. I'll fetch it when I go home for a shower.”
 
But he didn't go home, and the blue forget-me-not ring stayed in the drawer.
The call came when I was at work, at about three o'clock the following afternoon.
It was Fritz, and he simply said, “She's gone.”
W
herever I seek for her now in this world, she cannot be found; no more than a flower or a leaf which withered twenty years ago.
That's not me. Poor Charlotte Brontë, high priestess of bereavement, wrote those words, but they express my despair at the finality of it all. How did I feel? Be patient with me. Remembering means going back into that peculiar emotional soup of dread, relief, horror, elation and sheer unreality.
At the exact moment of the phone call, all I could think about was Fritz. He was as calm as ever, but I knew there was a world of desolation waiting to claim him.
“Are you all right? And Ben?” I ached for both of them, still trying to bury my own anguish under a show of efficiency. “Where are you? Tell me what I can do to help.”
“Come to the house,” he said. “We need you.”
“I'll be right there.”
I put the phone down.
My three colleagues were standing in a mournful cluster behind me—they had sensed the bad news like a hive of bees.
I said, “Phoebe's gone. Apparently she slipped into a coma last night. It happened about half an hour ago. Fritz says it was very peaceful. Both the boys were with her.”
I was calm, and I thought I was very collected. But I blundered around the office in a glassy-eyed daze, finding all kinds of pointless
things that had to be done before I could leave. I had to be pulled together and pushed out of the door by my dear old colleagues.
Betsy, her eyes leaking tears, put motherly arms around me and made me a cup of tea. Shay put in a slug of something from the flask in his pocket. Puffin ran downstairs to fetch me a cab. All three of them had a whip-round when I remembered I had no cash. In the middle of that dark afternoon, I rode through town in a taxi, watching all the thickskinned immortals milling around me. I had imagined I would be inconsolable when it happened, yet I didn't break down. It didn't seem real. There had to be another development. The drama couldn't be over.
Annabel opened the door to me. We clasped each other wordlessly. I followed her into Phoebe's kitchen. The fact that it didn't look at all strange was immensely strange. She could so easily have been asleep upstairs.
I don't remember much fine detail for ages after that. I do remember an atmosphere of excitement and elation, of bustle and urgency and domestic catastrophe, of us all milling about thanking each other—God knows for what.
I remember Ben sobbing on Fritz's shoulder, and Fritz's arms clasped protectively around him. I remember Annabel, with such gentleness, making us all cups of tea, her mouth and her eyes full. I remember no fewer than seven inconsolable neighbors calling round with bottles of red wine. I don't know why mourning and red wine should go together, but this was what people assumed we would need. I remember that we knocked it back like medicine, without getting remotely drunk.
We sat at the table, talking and drinking furiously. At most points, one or other of us would be in tears. Sometimes we were all in tears. And then we'd all be shrieking with laughter. Grief, when it is this pure, puts you in a curiously elevated place. We had traveled with Phoebe this far into the light, and not yet accepted that we could go no further.
At midnight, Annabel (who needed to sleep as much as she ate) told Ben it was time to go downstairs to the basement and to bed.
Poor Ben was exhausted. Neither he nor Fritz had had a proper night's sleep in days. I was deeply thankful that he had Annabel to lean on
now. Her love wrapped and wadded him like a warm cocoon—a spiritual Cotton House.
Ben said, “But I can't—shouldn't I—” He stopped, and looked bewildered. “I keep forgetting, there's nothing to do. I keep getting worried because we're not listening for her.”
Annabel murmured, “Oh sweetheart! But you can rest now. You can let me take care of you.”
Ben said, “Okay, precious one.”
The minute the basement door closed behind this pair of turtledoves, Fritz assumed a mournful, faintly gormless expression, and echoed, “Okay, precious one.”
“Stop it.” I was laughing.
“Sorry, Grimble. But even in these tragic circumstances, I can't help noticing that my brother is a great big wendy.”
“You're awful.”
“Why? I'm just as bereaved as he is.”
This was true. Though Fritz didn't show his feelings in the way that Ben did, I knew he was struggling angrily with sorrow.
I poured him more red wine.
“Thanks,” he said. “And Cassie—thanks for doing the engagement thing. She went out without a care in the world, and it's entirely due to you. We can break off our betrothal now.”
“I won't sue you for breach of promise,” I said. We smiled painfully. Our false engagement looked faintly comic now. We both wondered how much we had really meant to each other during our charade, but this was not the right time to ask.
Fritz said he wasn't hungry, but I made him cheese and onion on toast anyway, from Phoebe's recipe. While I prepared the food, he gradually sank into a dark, weary silence.
We were both starving, and both of us were full after a few mouthfuls. Yet more red wine was consumed, and no amount of it could make us drunk. And then Fritz told me the story of Phoebe's last hours. It poured out of him like the confession of a man who has witnessed a cross between a car smash and an apparition of the Blessed Virgin.
The details of a death are as intimate (and as universal) as the details of sex. That is to say, it was the usual sort of death, and it would be wrong to
reveal any more. All anyone needs to know, to put the last stitches into the sampler of Phoebe's life on earth, is that she died as gracefully as she had done everything.
 
I had expected to hear Phoebe's voice inside my head, and there was nothing. When I needed her most, and sent out the most desperate calls for some sign that she was still among us, the silence was as endless as the universe.
I dressed for the funeral with an angry sense that I'd been conned. Life was shit. What was the point of it, when death came along and ruined everything? And knowing about death, how could the world go on?
I didn't want to wear black. Somehow, black was too somber to be associated with Phoebe, and too theatrical, like dressing up. I wore the gray suit I'd bought for the wedding, mainly because it was clean. I dithered over tights and shoes. Would fishnets make my grieving seem insincere? How long could I bear to stand around on high heels? As for the vexed question of lipstick—well, my Brownie Book of Poise contained nothing about suitable makeup for a funeral. But I had to smear something on my ghastly white lips, and I dithered further over which color made me look least tubercular. I was nauseous and giddy from lack of sleep.
In the end I had to hurry, because George wanted to get into the bathroom. Yes, Ruth and George were staying with me for two nights. I'd dreaded this, and it turned out to be comforting. Sometimes, when the void was blackest, the contemplation of my own loneliness drove me to despair. Ruth knew this, and made me aware of belonging to her. Perhaps because of dear old George, who couldn't help being cheerful (he hummed and pom-pommed round the flat all day), my mother and I talked with less caution than usual.
“You should make an effort to go out more, you know,” Ruth had said, on the night before the funeral. “You have a gregarious nature. You can't spend all your time shuttling between here and the office. This isn't a good time to be solitary.”
“I don't want to be solitary,” I said. “But all my friends are deep in coupledom, and madly happy—and when I go round to their houses, I feel like Banquo. And I don't have the energy for polite conversation. What I crave is intimacy, and there's nobody I can be intimate with.”
Ruth said, “Careful. In that state, you'll marry the first man who asks.”
I assured her that I would be cautious. I had not told her about my short, ghostly engagement to Fritz. Neither of us had mentioned this again. Yet it had left me with an aching awareness of how much I loved him.
Oh Phoebe, where are you? You left before it was over.
 
Phoebe's funeral was held in the biggest chapel at the Golders Green Crematorium; a hangar of varnished wood, unctuous hush and sterile flowers. I remember a large courtyard, crammed with lively people, and undertakers chatting amiably beside an empty hearse. Fritz and Ben, resplendently handsome in their dinner party suits, were being accosted by practically everyone they had ever met—from Dr. Nboki (father of Claudette) who had delivered them, to their teachers, schoolmates, colleagues, friends and neighbors. We were all here because we had loved Phoebe, and lost her.
I was frozen with disappointment. Somehow, deep in my subconscious, I had hoped that Phoebe—something of Phoebe, at least—would be here to say a proper good-bye. And she was more absent than ever. Her voice was not on the rolling air, nor where the waters run, nor bloody anywhere. The reality of never seeing her again began to bite.
Once again, I'm remembering a lot of it in a series of snapshots—faces and voices, scraps of impressions. The day was cold. My smart suit was thin. I couldn't stop shivering. I had intended to sit with Ruth and George. At the last minute, however, when the great crowd began to move toward the wooden seats, an arm went round my waist.
Fritz said, “Come and sit with us. She was yours too.”
I was immensely, humbly grateful for this recognition. I joined Ben and Annabel at the front. Annabel took my chilled hand.
Ben whispered, “Hi, Cassie.”
“Hi, Ben. How are you?”
“I don't know. How're you?”
I didn't know either. How were any of us? At this moment, I didn't think I would ever feel like shedding tears. I could only stare at the pale wood of the coffin, and the smooth edges of its brass handles, and wonder
idly who had ordered the heap of white roses on the lid. I could not connect it with Phoebe—except when suddenly assaulted by a lightning vision of her body lying inside it, which would make me momentarily giddy. I looked in my bag for the packet of tissues I had bought at the newsagent's, placed it on the little ledge in front of me and immediately felt stupid. They looked melodramatic, as if I were claiming too high a place in the order of grieving. I dropped them back in my bag.
It was a good funeral. We had hymns—“The Day Thou Gavest, Lord, Has Ended,” and “Jerusalem.” Neil sang “The Land of the Leal,” raising an aching lump in my throat. Ben stood up to read his mother's best-beloved poem, Keats's “Ode to a Nightingale.” He read it very well, inviting us to hear Phoebe herself as Philomel, her sweet voice fading over the glades into the next valley.
And all this time the coffin lay a few feet in front of us, terrible and undeniable.
The kind vicar who had married Ben and Annabel made a little speech about a character called Phoebe, who seemed to bear only the vaguest resemblance to the Phoebe I had loved. I drew a breath that came out as a sob.
Fritz whispered, “Chin up, Grimble,” and passed me a tissue.
The vicar nodded to him. Fritz stood up. The packed chapel fell eerily silent as he took his place at the lectern, beside the ghastly coffin. I thought how strong he looked, and how beautiful, and how incredibly, ridiculously proud of him Phoebe would have been.
Fritz suddenly smiled. The smile cut through the atmosphere like a blade of light.
He said, “I'm supposed to be telling you what Phoebe was like—but you all knew her. And you know she wouldn't want to be remembered in a funereal sort of way. That wasn't her at all. So I don't think we should say good-bye to her like this, because our grief is our problem—it shouldn't have anything to do with the essence of Phoebe. Father David did all the stuff about her being a perfect mother. Now I want everyone to think about what it was like to know her.”
He spoke—with a gentle humor, full of affection—about her sense of fun, her soft heart and her innocent love of interference. He reminded us that Phoebe had been a leading Nosy Parker, and that knowing her had
often involved maddening amounts of trouble. He told famous stories of her daftness.
“For instance, the Christmas when she had a terrible dream about burglars stealing all our presents. She was so convinced this would happen that she slept under the tree on Christmas Eve, clutching the poker. Dad was absolutely furious to find her there in the morning.”
The lump in my throat had begun to soften. I found that I was smiling. Yes, I remembered that particular Christmas. I'd gone round for lunch (I was always included), and Jimmy had met me in a state of boiling indignation. “I tell you, Cassie, if that daft woman so much as mentions ever again that she's had a prophetic dream, I'll divorce her.” I'd already heard the shouting through the wall, and wondered what was up.
“It wasn't a famous life, or a distinguished life,” Fritz said. “But it was full of achievement because it was a happy and satisfied life—and because she had such a gift for sharing the happiness. The fact of knowing Phoebe made people's lives better, and I can't think of a greater achievement than that. Wherever Phoebe was, there was light and laughter—and hospitality. If she could, she'd have sat the whole world at her table, and fed them until they begged for mercy.”

Other books

The Bartender's Tale by Doig, Ivan
Blood Red Roses by Lin Anderson
Soon Be Free by Lois Ruby
Lady Bridget's Diary by Maya Rodale
Crackhead by Lisa Lennox
Traficantes de dinero by Arthur Hailey
Aztec Century by Christopher Evans