Dead Romantic (2 page)

As always, Madeleine was struck by the unattractiveness of his voice, its slack South Coast vowels. And again by his very ordinariness. He was not particularly good-looking. Tall, stooped in the doorway, his thinning hair ruffled as if he had just got up. He wore a grubby T-shirt and jeans, his working clothes. He was a plasterer by trade, and his large hands were permanently cracked and scored with engrained dust.

As always, Madeleine tried to smother her reaction to him, smother the feeling that Aggie had married so far beneath herself, that she had taken irreversible steps over some Rubicon of class. Aggie had perhaps not been in much of a position to make choices. With the stigma of Laura and the two children of her failed first marriage, perhaps she should have been grateful to find anyone willing to take on such a full family package. And Aggie herself never complained, never seemed struck by the incongruity of her situation, by the disparity between her education and that of her husband. Maybe, in some way Madeleine could not understand, Keith made Aggie happy.

‘Came home and found your wife in the bath,' said Madeleine, with a little giggle.

‘Er, yes.' Keith flushed, and turned abruptly away towards the kitchen. ‘You making tea, sweetie?'

Madeleine winced at the endearment.

Aggie confirmed, unnecessarily, that she was indeed making tea. Keith hovered in the hall, uncertain where to go.

‘Do come in and sit down,' said Madeleine.

Awkwardly, as if he were not in his own house, Keith obeyed. He flashed a brief, meaningless smile at his sister-in-law, but said nothing. He was not a talker, Keith. It was always Madeleine who had to make the effort to get any sort of conversation started.

‘How's work?'

‘Oh, you know. All right. Doing a new block of flats down Lancing.'

‘Ah yes.' The conversation swirled in an eddy. Madeleine always had difficulty in finding follow-up questions on the subject of plastering. She had tried in the past, but found the attractions and satisfactions of the job so alien to her that she never got far. She also got the impression that Keith had no particular desire to talk about his work, anyway, which made her efforts a little dispiriting.

Fortunately, before Madeleine forced herself into some redundant enquiry about the merits of plasterboard, Aggie came in from the kitchen with a tray of tea. She poured it in silence, knowing well the milk and sugar requirements of the other two. Madeleine took a sip and, as ever, tried not to recoil at the taste. Keith liked his tea Indian and strong, and so that was how tea was always made in his household. ‘Workman's tea.' Madeleine could not stop the phrase from forming in her mind.

Aggie did not sit down with her cup. ‘I'd better go upstairs and get dressed after my, er, bath.'

As she spoke, she flashed a smile, almost a wink, at her husband, and Keith's lips seemed to twitch. Madeleine did not enquire; she was uninterested in their private jokes.

She made a couple more valiant efforts at conversation with Keith, but the feedback she received was so minimal that soon silence had reasserted itself. After a couple of minutes of this, Keith drained his cup noisily and rose to his full height. ‘Snooker tonight. Got to check out my gear.'

And he went out through the kitchen to the shed in the back garden.

Madeleine lay back on the sofa and stretched out her toes. She felt tired, but it was a warm, cosy tiredness. There was something warm and cosy in her mind too, a glow of thought that every now and then flared into a little jet of excitement.

Aggie had cooked goulash. She had two completely different styles of cooking, the traditional English meat and two veg, that Keith favoured, and a more interesting repertoire that came from her home background and her more middle-class former marriage. Apparently without strain or awareness of any incongruity, she would switch from one to the other according to her company. Because Madeleine was there on her own, Aggie had cooked goulash. Had Keith also been present, they would all have eaten chops with mashed potatoes, carrots and peas.

As Madeleine had this thought, she realised how rarely she and Keith actually
were
there together for a meal. Whenever she was round, he seemed to be off somewhere . . . snooker, darts, the pub. It was an arrangement that suited her well, but for the first time she wondered whether he deliberately avoided her. This raised the question of Keith and Aggie talking about her together, actually discussing her. She did not like the idea and put it from her mind. Some things she preferred not to think about.

She watched Aggie as her sister cleared the plates and went out to the kitchen. Again the pity welled up. Life seemed to have dealt Aggie such a lousy hand: first, her unexceptional looks; then, the illegitimate daughter; continuing problems with unsuitable men. Even the pregnancies, the fruits of her relationships, had not been trouble- free. A baby lost at four months; an incompetent cervix, the doctors had said. And the two children of her former marriage only born after seven months of lying on her back (during the second of which periods Aggie's first husband had found time for a new distraction, a dental nurse, for whom he left her). Aggie's seemed to be a history of gynaecological disaster. She had even reacted badly to the pill, and been taken off it after an alarming rise in blood pressure.

As ever, by comparison, Madeleine felt herself privileged. She also felt something else, an emotion she did not choose to define, but which in her rare moments of introspection threatened to be identified as glee.

As ever, when this cycle of thought started, it climaxed in pity for the fact that Aggie had never known real love, love that worked.

At least Madeleine had had that.

‘Any dishy students in this new lot?' asked the object of her pity, entering with the fruit-bowl.

Madeleine tinkled a laugh. ‘Certainly not the Iranian with mumps. He has a five o'clock shadow the minute after he's shaved. A distinctly prickly prospect.'

‘Others?'

‘There's a rather sweet boy who's just started with me. Got disastrous grades in his A-levels at Sixth Form College in the summer. Mother desperate for him to get to university – and, since his grades aren't good enough for anywhere else, she's set her sights on Oxford, of all places. Seems to think I can pull the famous trick yet again.' Madeleine sighed at the extravagance of such expectations, yet there was no humility in the sigh.

‘And do you think you can?'

‘Have to see. He's certainly not stupid. Whether he could carry off the interview, I don't know. Very nervous. You know, that coltish jumpiness of adolescence.'

‘Name?'

‘Grigson. Paul Grigson.'

‘No doubt already got a crush on you.'

Another tinkly laugh. ‘Oh, I don't know.'

But she did not deny the possibility. It didn't seem important whether or not an eighteen-year-old dreamt of her. But there was something else in her life, something new, that could, perhaps, be very important.

She damped down the thought, and let out a dramatic sigh. ‘It's John's birthday today.'

Aggie looked properly solemn at the reference.

‘He would have been thirty-nine.'

‘So how long is it. . .?'

‘Nineteen years. Nineteen years and three weeks since he died.'

Aggie was respectfully silent, as she always was when John Kaczmarek was mentioned. It was as if she knew that nothing she might say could compete with her sister's memory, Madeleine's experience of real love, of love that had worked. But for John's premature death from leukemia, no doubt Madeleine too would be married, Madeleine too would have children of her own.

The older sister looked up to see that Aggie was yawning.

‘Sorry, Maddy. It's been terribly busy in the surgery this week. Some sort of virus going round. Everyone seems to have been in.' Aggie worked part-time as a receptionist for a local group practice. The money was not good and, for someone as conscientious as Aggie, the hours tended to escalate.

‘Yes, I've had a busy week too,' said Madeleine. ‘The trouble is, however much one tries not to, one does find oneself empathising with one's students, going through it all with them. The Jean Brodie syndrome, I suppose.'

‘Sorry?'

‘Living through one's students. Like Jean Brodie. As in
The Prime of
. . . Muriel Spark.'

Aggie shook her head. Of course, she had never read much. And, since she had been married to Keith, hardly at all. Madeleine noticed again that there were no books to be seen in the small sitting-room.

‘Oh, never mind,' she said.

Just before she left, Madeleine went upstairs to the bathroom. Floating in the lavatory bowl, with a knot neatly tied in it, was a pink condom.

She flushed it away before sitting down, and put it from her mind. Some things she preferred not to think about.

Back in her Kemp Town house, Madeleine had a protracted bath. She washed her hair and lay back so that the long tendrils lay tickling on her shoulders. Their redness rippled with the water and she found herself thinking of the death of Ophelia. Gertrude's report of the suicide from
Hamlet
came into her mind. The poetry, like the bath-water, gave her a warm feeling. She looked up at the stripped pine shelves from which a profusion of pot-plants dangled. As she half-closed her unlensed eyes, the plants looked satisfyingly like a willow growing aslant a brook.

And the thought of death brought to life the other thought she had been nursing all day, the warm thought of a new love.

The electric blanket had warmed her single bed and she slipped blissfully under the duvet. She drowsed, and the warm thought of love was still with her.

Her hand slipped unconsciously to the greater warmth beneath her nightdress as she dreamed of the day when she would shed the pampered burden of her virginity.

Chapter 3

Bernard Hopkins was lucky to find a vacant meter a hundred yards away and he parked his five-year-old brown Austin Maxi there. The drive from his house in Henfield had not taken long; he was lucky to be able to come in after the rush-hour. Anyone who watched him getting out of the car would have seen a tall man with an air of privacy about him. His dark brown eyes looked thoughtful, even pained. His brown hair had given in to grey at the temples, but the effect was not unattractive.

As he strode up the steep incline towards the school, he felt the stiff breeze from the sea behind him, but it was not cold. Definitely autumnal, but one of those glowing, hopeful autumnal days. He felt a little bubble of optimism rising in him. This time it was going to work. This time he could put past failures firmly behind him; this time it would be all right.

The white portico of the school had been overpainted many times as the salt air flaked off successive layers, and now it had the thick, blurred outline of cake icing. The railings to either side had also been painted many times, but not recently enough; from their feet, through cracked black paint, rust bled its stains onto the stone. The large door, with impressive brass knocker and letter-box, had also been painted too long ago. The white paint was greyish and, since the door was left on the latch all day, there was a patch worn bare by a long trail of students pushing their uninterested way inside.

At the side of the door a brass plate, giving an old-fashioned, dependable image like that of a country solicitor, bore the legend: ‘GARRETTWAY SCHOOL OF LANGUAGES. Principal: J.P.G. GARRETT, M.A.'

Eschewing the worn patch on the door, Bernard Hopkins put his hand on the brass door-handle and walked inside.

The hall had once been magnificent, but now its proportions were destroyed by the new walls which cut randomly through the fine cornices and bosses of the ceiling. The walls were painted institutional grey, marginally relieved by the darker grey on the flat boarded doors which fire regulations had demanded.

The balance of the fine staircase up to the first floor had been upset by encroaching partitions and the one feature left untouched by ‘improvement', the floor of black and white tiles, looked sadly diminished in this setting, like a monochrome television test-card.

A couple of chipboard notice-boards by the front door were dotted with cards offering accommodation, coloured sheets advertising discotheques, plays, Indian takeaways and minicabs. But there were not many. Nor was there any evidence of students, except for one abandoned file lying on a table. It was one of the school's slack periods; the busy time would come in the summer.

In each of the fire-officer-approved doors was an eye-level window of wired glass, but through only one of the four did light shine. Bernard could not resist moving along the wall to peer into the classroom.

The room was what the Garrettway brochure described as ‘one of our ultra-modern language laboratories, equipped with all of the latest electronic technology'. But Bernard did not see the person he hoped for behind the tutorial desk. Instead, there sat a grubby young man of about thirty, a member of the staff to whom Bernard had not yet been introduced. The young man was engaged in an exhaustive picking of his nose, eyes fixed on some abstract point in the ceiling. Three desks in the front row were occupied by sad Japanese businessmen who wore earphones and occasionally mouthed in tentative bewilderment.

Bernard went upstairs.

‘Good morning, Mrs Franklin,' he said to the fifty-five- year-old trouser-suit behind the large manual typewriter in the outer office.

‘Good morning, Mr Hopkins. Not so cold this morning.'

‘No. We're lucky. Bit of an Indian summer.'

‘Yes.' She composed her face into an expression of concern. ‘And how's Shirley today?'

Stella Franklin always made a point of finding out the details of people's families and asking after them. She thought of this as solicitude; others had described it as nosiness.

‘Much the same,' Bernard replied.

‘Change in the weather doesn't make any difference to her?'