Blind Date (8 page)

Now it
was so near, she was afraid of going home. She was better, stronger, by degrees, and still afraid of the opinion of the world.

H
azel approved of Patsy's car because it was loud. Red, noisy, fast, sleek and eminently noticeable. A short, low-fronted dress rode far up on her thighs as she sat in the passenger seat, arm resting on the open window, black glasses over her eyes. Her hair was coloured auburn; it shone like metal in the sun.

They had skirted Exeter, disliked Exmouth; they had stopped for coffee and cursed the caravans which littered the roads like lumbering beetles. The roads were narrow, the luxury of speed forgotten. Here and there, Patsy pulled aside to allow for something bigger, although she usually assumed the right of way was hers. Drivers waved, nodded, smiled; they failed to blow horns, even when she was in the wrong. Road rage was a feature of another planet.

“Why are they so polite?” Hazel asked.

“Because they are. Look! There's the sea! Isn't it wonderful?”

“I can't swim,” Hazel said.

They roared down the narrow street, too fast amid Friday lunchtime stares. Patsy wore white shorts and a cropped red top which matched her car, her hair a mass of curls messed into volume by the wind. She was awed by the prettiness of it all, yet still felt superior.

“Angela would love this,” she announced.

“Your Elisabeth doesn't.”

“Lizzie doesn't know how to be happy.”

The words
were out of her mouth, carried in a slipstream of resentment. A friend of hers, and Lizzie had been a good friend once, was not quite supposed to be a friend in need. Hazel would never be that and Hazel was along for the ride. Purpose; rescue Lizzie from her mother, who would not or could not take her all that distance, selfish cow, whereas Elisabeth herself must not take the train unaided, so here they were. Something like that. Patsy did not want to see Lizzie, first met in a shared flat another lifetime ago, in any other state than the one she remembered best, namely drunk, rudely cheerful and sportingly healthy. The way she had been before her sister had … died, for want of a better word. And now, this … clumsiness, turning her into a loser.

Quite what it was about Mrs. Kennedy which put Hazel on the defensive immediately was something she could not pinpoint afterwards: perhaps it was the rigid dignity and lack of warmth, so alien to Hazel's own style, but her response was to act the clown. She found herself gaping at the staircase and coming over like a gorblimey Cockney released from school to view the interior of a celebrity house featured in
Hello
magazine. “Oooh, what a lovely pitcher! Innit big in ‘ere! S'nice, innit, Pat?” But Patsy would not meet her eye. Instead she steadfastly smiled, behaving like a visiting politician until a small dog sniffed wetly round her ankles, then grabbed her calf with two, surprisingly strong paws and began to hump at her leg until she kicked it away roughly. It scuttled and slid into a corner where it barked with loud indignation. Two light grazes appeared on Patsy's waxed calf.

“You'll stay to lunch, of course?” Diana Kennedy murmured.

No cannibal would have wished to roast Elisabeth herself. She had the kind of extreme slenderness which Patsy could only associate with anorexic models, her skin like translucent china, her body like a jangle of wires, moving stiffly, all her athletic grace gone. Walking them round the garden like a tour guide, delighted to see them, grateful, attempting to be natural, she infected them all with itchy awkwardness. They were brown and she was pale, like a plant which had grown long and thin in the dark. The twisted neck reminded Patsy of a cockerel. She found herself speaking loudly, laughing a lot, out of her depth. Lunch amounted to cold ham, limp salad, and a bottle of warm-looking wine plonked in the middle of the dining table, defying anyone to take out the cork. Hazel hinted that a beer would be ever so nice: lager was produced, another following when she downed the first in one. The horrible dog examined toes under the table, and a small boy sat on Elisabeth's left, very close to her, casting venomous looks in the direction of the strangers. As the plates were cleared, appetite depleted rather than satisfied, the boy ceased to lean against Elisabeth, arranged himself bolt upright in his fine chair, clutching the arms of it and weeping. He made no sound in this process; no-one commented, he simply wept. Elisabeth's left hand grasped his and held it until the weeping ceased, as if she was holding him to some agreement, some mutual resolve forged long in advance. The room was cool, but Patsy sweated profusely. Diana Kennedy, dressed in her loose trousers and top, remained irritatingly serene.

Elisabeth's
luggage was small enough to fill half the tiny boot of the car, until the boy, no longer weeping, brought her a bag of stones, double-wrapped inside pitted polythene bags which looked as if they had been used a thousand times. He placed the bag alongside hers, carefully, while his grandmother went indoors to fetch a cardigan for Elisabeth. “You might be cold,” she murmured when she came back, and then Elisabeth looked as if she might weep, too, oh Christ. The boy was steaming off into the house once his gift was delivered, possibly to hide the resurgence of tears, while the dog barked.

“Get us
out of here,” Hazel murmured.

She had that slight, lunchtime indigestion, the result of a passable quantity of lager which was not quite enough to ensure either sleep or wakefulness. She got inside the car, her churlishness worsening by the second, aware that both she and Patsy had worn all the wrong things and behaved in the wrong way and this friend, who was Patsy's rather than hers, might, just possibly, be ashamed of them. Lizzie was clasping Mummy, gingerly. The frozen old bitch wasn't crying: she was patting her daughter's back like someone trying to bring up wind in a baby while keeping some distance from any mess which might come out of its mouth.

T
hey set off into the green distance, Elisabeth waving frantically to a couple of indiscriminately old people outside a shop. All three of them were obscurely irritated in an understated way, two of them for having to feel sympathetic in the face of Elisabeth's obvious frailty, the third for having to accept it. They dared not ask her questions. In the backseat by request, Elisabeth turned and looked at the sea until it disappeared from sight.

“So, Lizzie,” Hazel asked, uninhibited by the closer ties of friendship, “how are you going to manage in that weird place of yours? All them steps.” She hadn't seen the place, only heard it described in unflattering detail. A signpost to the M5, invitation to civilization, cheered her enormously.

“Oh, I'll manage. The exercise will do me good.”

“Do you think this is wise?” Patsy asked, too late. “Are you sure your mother wanted you to go?”

“Oh yes, she wanted me to go, she just didn't think she should want it. I wanted to go. I don't want Matthew to miss me too much.” She did not expand and they did not persist.

As they drew
nearer London, Patsy began to consider the enormity of what they had done. They had taken a sick young woman, albeit at her own request, to deposit her back in her own rented home, a place so eccentric it defied belief. Patsy toyed with the idea of responsibility, irritated by it. This was not the Lizzie she had known: this one was vulnerable. As if reading her mind, Lizzie leant forward, tapped her shoulder.

“I
shall
be all right, you know. Don't worry, I've worked it out, really I have. Don't be so maudlin. You've haven't kidnapped me, you've been very kind. If it all gets too much, I can go back. But I'm sick to death of myself. Tell me news. How's the love life?”

That was better. Elisabeth hungry for gossip, wanting other people to be happy, the way she always had, curious, never jealous Lizzie. Patsy and Hazel exchanged a meaningful look.

“The state of the love life is abysmal,” Patsy stated cheerfully. “As it was before you left the scene, only worse. Not that you were coming out to play much, were you?”

“No.”

“So Hazel and I and Angela, we've decided to take positive action. We're all enrolling with a dating agency. At least, two of us are, tomorrow … Angela's being a bit wet about it. It may not sound momentous to you, but it is. What do you think?”

Looking in the rear-view mirror, all she could see was a pale face, transfixed by horror, the twist of the neck accentuated.

“I'm not sure that's a clever idea. You're joking, aren't you?”

Patsy was
suddenly angry. Stuck in her own car with a friend who wasn't even pretending to be fun.

“We've thought about it for weeks, and that's all you can say? Is it wise?” she mimicked. “Wiser than living alone or living with Mummy and getting yourself mugged, isn't it?”

Twenty miles of silence later, and then there was an apologetic laugh from the back.

“You're right, of course you are. Just keep me posted, will you? You don't have to nursemaid me, but I do want to know. Send me signals from the outside world, won't you? Until I can join it.”

T
hey called it her ivory tower. This was where Elisabeth lived, without the blessing of belief, in a church. Not, as Patsy might have approved, a glossy conversion no longer inhabited by the ghost of a previous congregation. This was a disused, slightly abused church, set back off the street with a passage down each side where weeds grew out of old gravel. It was disused only in the sense it no longer had parishioners. It was available for use: a soup kitchen at Christmas; meetings twice a week; band practices; exhibitions. The Reverend Flynn liked the exhibitions best. Even when they contained sculptures he did not understand, photographs he could not comprehend, items made of wire which he shuddered to examine and an audience who failed to notice the other surroundings, it was still a time when the glorious space came into its own for another kind of worship. He thought that was the proper, long-term future for a place which had been through so many incarnations since its early Victorian optimism. Victorian planning had erred. The tower looked as if it was simply glued onto the church, an after-thought, with no direct access from one to the other and, without working bells, no particular use.

Letting
a helpful policewoman live in the tower bad seemed a good idea once upon a time, subject, like everything else in his worried mind, to second and third thoughts.

Reverend Flynn was here now, all fuss and anxious smiles, dwarfed by a posse of women, standing well back from them, uncertain of the odds and taken by surprise. He was not an old man; he simply looked as if forty years of constant movement had extended themselves into baldness and a twitch.

“Ah! Here you are! Well, what a surprise! Dear, dear me! Are you well, my dear? Yes, you are. No, you're not.”

He wore an expression of acute anxiety, as if he had trodden on a nail and was trying to define the pain. Many moons since Elisabeth had helped him out with the vandals, yes. She had noticed the accommodation, yes. She had suggested herself as caretaker, yes, yes, and she paid rent, yes, but there was always a mute suspicion of anyone who wanted to live in the belfry. Although the general lack of fuss, the presence of a person about the place and a whole number of other, positive factors which whizzed in and out of mind like the parish accounts, made him pleased, all things considered, if only there were time to consider them.

“Hallo, vicar,” Elisabeth said. “When will you ever stop putting your foot in your mouth? How's things?”

“Terrible. I didn't think you'd ever come back. I've prayed for you.”

“Thanks,” Elisabeth said, grinning in a way which reassured, despite the twist in her neck. “I'm sure that's made all the difference. Can you help me upstairs?”

He turned
towards the others. Their look gave them away; he had seen it before. They wanted to go: they had done enough for one day. Patsy looked up at the front of the church and shivered. The church establishment, once a wonderful joke now spooked her: she could not stand the steps or the remnants of times past. And even if eccentricity in a friend was admirable, this was too much. She handed Revd Flynn a bag of groceries: Hazel put the bag of stones by the side door, equally unwilling to go further. They kissed goodbye airy kisses, not devoid of emotion. Promises to call hung on the air.

“Welcome home,” said Flynn.

There was only one way in and one way out: a thick wooden side door. A tall person would bend to go through it and then onwards and slowly upwards, through the foot of the tower via steep spiralling steps, to the next door. About thirty feet of cold, uneven steps, then another door, entering into a huge absurdly high-ceilinged room which had once been the bell ringers' chamber. No-one had rung the bells for more than a decade. The ropes were still looped against the wall. There were elements about the place of a child's playground. Father Flynn dropped the bag he had manouevred up the steps before him and sat with a plumph! on a futon sofa. Then he patted a cushion and looked at it curiously.

“Do you know,” he said, “every time I come here, I remember it's not so bad. Your lovely friend keeps it so clean:
so
useful. However did you get this up these steps? I always meant to ask.”

“You don't get anything up those steps, Father. Except your own body with a small burden. Everything has to be of the kind which comes apart into small pieces. Probably makes this place highly appropriate for me, now.” There was a sheen of perspiration on her forehead; it worried him. The temperature inside was cool, even though the early evening sun slanted through the enormous leaded window of plain glass. The place had missed her, although it looked welcoming. Her friend, lovely man, had seen to that. She would surely be gone by winter, Flynn thought. She
would
have to be, and he should really tell her now what the surveyor had said about the bells. His heart sank unaccountably then rose again as his eye took in the creature comforts she had provided for herself in here. Rugs on the wooden floor. A kitchenette, consisting of two electric rings, a microwave and a tiny fridge. The rudimentary bathroom in the alcove had been there since the Church had begun to convert the place to give it potential for a dwelling, and then given up.