One Good Turn (26 page)

He imagined how his local market in France would look this morning, overflowing with tomatoes, basil, cheeses, figs, and big, fat French peaches, ripe enough to burst. No wonder northerners were miserable buggers, evolving for thousands of years on har-vests of wet grains and thin gruels.

Julia hadn’t looked as though she’d eaten at all yesterday, she’d had a “drink” with Richard Mott at lunchtime. Still, having seen him, Jackson now felt relatively safe from any rivalry with him, no way would Julia be attracted to anyone that untalented. The guy had
died
onstage.

Propped up against the kettle was a note from Julia. Her bold hand announced simply,
See you later, love J
. Her initial was accompanied by only one kiss and no exclamation points, she was a person who used exclamation points liberally, she said they made everything seem more friendly. Jackson thought they made every-thing seem startling but found that he missed them when they weren’t there. He was being overanalytical, there wasn’t much you could read into
See you later, love J
. Was there? The absence of ex-clamation points, the paucity of Xs, the initial rather than a name, the vagaries of time and place of “see you later”—see him later where?

She’d had a preview (but had she?) and then he remembered her saying that Tobias was giving them “notes,”he was sure she had nothing this evening. He could cook her penne pasta with pesto, a good salad, strawberries—no, she preferred raspberries. Some Gorgonzola, she liked that, he couldn’t abide it. A bottle of champagne. Or would champagne feel too celebratory? Would it high-light the fact that they had very little to celebrate? When had he started thinking so much?

He had a shower, a shave, changed his clothes. He didn’t quite feel like a new man, but he looked a lot better than the shabby criminal who had stood up in court. His face was unmarked, which was something to be grateful for. He would have liked to strap his hand up—more for aesthetic reasons than anything else— but it wasn’t a good idea to compress bruises. He’d done enough first aid in the field courses to know a few things about fixing peo-ple up. He flexed his hand a few times—agonizing, but it still worked. He would have known by now if there’d been any bro-ken bones.

His boots were still damp from yesterday, but there was not much he could do about that, he’d experienced worse. At least the boots and the bruises were hard evidence of the fight with Honda Man. The girl in the water, on the other hand, hadn’t left a trace in his life. He was beginning to doubt his own experience. Maybe he
had
hallucinated the whole incident out at Cramond. Maybe he had wanted something to happen, something interesting, so he had fabricated it. Who knew what weird things the brain was ca-pable of? But no, he had touched her pale skin, he had looked into her sightless sea-green eyes. He had to believe the evidence of his senses. She was real and she was dead, and she was out there somewhere.

A
fter fueling up on coffee and a proper breakfast at Toast round the corner from the flat, he set off to walk in to town across the Meadows.

There were a lot of people on the Meadows, none of them doing anything that could be called useful. Didn’t any of these people have jobs to go to? There were Japanese drummers, a group of mostly middle-aged people (Scots, by their pallor) doing tai chi—Jackson didn’t get tai chi, it looked okay on television when you saw people doing it in China, but in Scotland it looked, let’s face it, arsy. There were some people dressed like extras from
Braveheart
, lolling around on the grass in a way that would have made William Wallace shudder. “Reenacters”—he knew that’s what they were called. Julia had done reenactments for a couple of weeks last summer, playing Nell Gwyn for some National Trust place (“for a pittance and the oranges”). Julia “rented herself out by the hour” (her words) on any number of mundane jobs, from banqueting wench to bingo caller. All jobs were acting, she claimed, whether you were a prostitute or a shopgirl, you were in a role. “And what about when you’re being Julia?” he asked.

“Oh,” she said, “that’s the greatest show on earth, sweetie.”

He had another cup of coffee as he walked, dispensed from a kiosk that used to be a blue police box, a Tardis. It was a strange world, Jackson thought. Yes, siree.

Edinburgh was like a city where no one worked, where every-one spent their time
playing
. And so many young people, not one of them more than twenty-five, looking carefree and careless in a way that irritated him. He wanted to tell them that no matter how golden they were feeling now, life was going to disappoint them on a daily basis. It was going to wipe the smiles off their faces. Jack-son was alarmed by this surge of something bitter, the black bile of envy, if he wasn’t mistaken. It wasn’t his, it belonged to his father. He could hardly claim it as his when his own life consisted of nothing more taxing than doing laps in his turquoise swimming pool.

A young guy in one of those idiotic jester’s hats was blocking the path in front of Jackson. He was practicing juggling with three oranges, almost as if Jackson had conjured him up by thinking of Nell Gwyn. Julia was perfect for Nell Gwyn, of course, her curvy, busty figure, her compulsion to flirt. She sent him a photograph of her in costume, her tightly corseted breasts, as round as oranges, although considerably bigger, being offered up to the camera in a way that was extraordinarily provocative. Jackson wondered who took the photograph. “What do you do when you’re Nell Gwyn?” he’d asked, and she put on a kind of yokel accent, Devon or Somerset, and said,
“Oranges, who’ll buy my lovely oranges?

“Nell Gwyn wasn’t really an orange seller,” Julia said, “she was actually a bona fide actress.”

“Just like you,” Jackson said. It had possibly sounded more sar-castic than he’d intended. Or perhaps it had sounded as exactly as sarcastic as he’d intended. Julia would have made a perfect mistress for a king, a perfect mistress for any man. And a terrible wife. He knew that in his heart, that was what made it worse.

Stifling a desire to shoulder Juggling Boy off the path, Jackson scowled at him and said, “Excuse me,” in a pointed, sarcastic tone. It would have been no trouble for Jackson to have simply walked round the boy on the grass like everyone else, but it was the
principle
of the thing. Paths were for people to walk on, not for idiots in hats to juggle on.

Juggling Boy said nothing but moved slowly to the side, his eyes never leaving the oranges. Jackson bumped into him as he walked past, catching his elbow, and the oranges went rolling in three different directions across the grass. “Sorry about that,” Jackson said, unable to keep the pleasure off his face.

“Wanker,” the boy muttered after him. Jackson turned on his heel and marched back, planting himself on the path. “What did you say?” he asked, sticking his face menacingly near the boy’s. Adrenaline chased the bile in his bloodstream, a little voice in his head accompanied it, saying,
Bring it on
. He had an uncomfortable flashback to last night, to Terence Smith’s jeering, ugly features.

The boy took a step back in alarm and whined, “Nothing, man. I didn’t say anything.” He looked cowed and sullen, and Jackson realized that the boy couldn’t be more than sixteen or sev-enteen, almost a child (although Jackson had joined the army at that age, a boy soldier who thought he was a real man). He remembered Terence Smith yesterday, stepping out of the car with his baseball bat swinging in anger. This is what road rage felt like. Path rage. Jackson laughed, a sudden unexpected harshness that made the boy flinch. Sheepishly, Jackson chased after the oranges, picked them up, and handed them back. The boy took them gingerly, as if they might be hand grenades. “Sorry,” Jackson said, and he walked away quickly to spare the boy any more humiliation.
You bastard
, Jackson said to himself,
you total fucking bastard
. He was turning into his enemy, his own worst version of himself.

25

M
artin filled up on petrol at a garage on Leith Walk. He had been relieved to find his car still waiting for him like a patient pony in the corral—his brain was in some kind of nervy overdrive, jumping terrible metaphorical somersaults. It took him half an hour to find the car, as Richard Mott’s instructions weren’t exactly helpful—
“Your car’s parked in front of Macbet on Leith Walk. Cheers, R,”
scrawled on the envelope that his ticket had been in yesterday. When he found the car, it was plastered with parking tickets.

At the petrol pump next to his, a small boy in the backseat of a Toyota was making faces at him, horrible, imbecilic faces that made Martin speculate the child was handicapped in some way. The mother was in the shop, paying for her petrol, and Martin wondered if he would dare to leave a child alone in a car. If the car was locked, it might catch fire (all that petrol), and the child would burn to death. If it wasn’t locked, someone might steal the child or it might slip out of the car and run onto the road and be crushed under the wheels of a lorry. One of the compensations for not having a child of his own was that he wasn’t responsible for making life-and-death decisions on its behalf.

If you were a woman and you couldn’t find a partner, you could always go to a sperm bank, but what could a man do? Apart from buying a wife, he supposed you could pay a woman to bear your baby, but it was still a commercial transaction, and how would you ever explain that to a child when it asked who its mother was? He supposed you could lie, but you always got caught out in lies, even if it was only by yourself.

Perhaps he
should
have become a monk, at least then he would have had a social life. Brother Martin. He would perhaps run the infirmary, wandering in the walled herb garden, tending the me-dicinal plants, the bees humming gently, the tolling of a bell somewhere, the scent of lavender and rosemary in the warm air. From the chapel wafted the soothing sounds of plainsong or Gregorian chant—were they the same thing, and if not, what was the differ-ence between them? The simple meals in the refectory, bread and soup, sweet apples and plums from the monastery’s own orchards. On Fridays, a fat carp from the fishponds. Hurrying through the cold cloisters in winter, his breath like white clouds in the icy air of the chapter house. Of course, he was thinking of a pre-Reformation monastic life, wasn’t he? Another time, another place, a hybrid of the Cadfael novels and the “Eve of St. Agnes” rather than a historic reality. And anyway, there was no such thing as “historic reality,” reality was this nanosecond, right now, not even a breath but an atom of a breath, the littlest, littlest thing. Before and after didn’t exist. Everyone was clinging on by their finger-nails to the thread from which they were hanging.

His nameless, imaginary wife, a woman who had come with no price attached (although it was above that of rubies), lived with him in a cottage that was in a perfect village from which you could get up to London in an hour if you so wished. The cottage they lived in was chintzy and had beams and a lovely garden and was very like Mrs. Miniver’s. Martin had recently watched the sequel to
Mrs. Miniver
—
The Miniver Story
—on early morning TCM and was still nursing an outrage that they had killed off poor Greer Garson
for no reason whatsoever
, as if there were no further use for her in the postwar world. Which there wasn’t, of course, but that wasn’t the point. And she hadn’t even fought back against her un-named (but obviously cancer) illness, her only concern was to make her death no bother to anyone else. No sickness, vomiting, blood, and pus, no brain matter spattered round her living room, no raging against the dying of the light, she just kissed her hus-band good-bye, went up the stairs, and closed her bedroom door. Death wasn’t like that. Death happened when you least expected it. It was an argument in the street, it was a crazy Russian girl opening her mouth to scream. The littlest thing.

His noble postwar wife knew, Miniver-like, how to mend and make-do, she knew how to soothe troubled brows and how to lift drooping spirits, she had known tragedy but she was stoic in the face of it. She smelled of lilies of the valley.

It was usually early spring, the sky pale and austere, the wind sharp, new daffodil shoots spearing their way out of their earth silos in the garden outside. It was also nearly always Sunday morning for some reason (probably to do with spending weekends in a boarding school). A leg of lamb (no animal was harmed in the making of this fantasy) was sizzling in the old cream Aga in the kitchen. Martin had already chopped mint, grown in their own garden. They sat in the living room, in armchairs covered in William Morris’s “StrawberryThief ”fabric, and each drank a small sherry while listening to a recording of the
Goldberg Variations
.This woman with no name harmoniously shared his taste in all music, poetry, drama. After they had eaten their lamb (with gravy and peas and roast potatoes), they had a homemade custard tart—a trembling pale yellow with a freckling of nutmeg. Then they did the washing up together at the old-fashioned porcelain sink. She washed, he dried, Peter/David put away
(“The serving spoons go in this drawer, darling”)
. And then they shook the crumbs from the tablecloth and went for a walk, naming the birds and the early spring flowers, climbing over stiles, splashing through puddles. Laughing. They should have a dog, a friendly terrier full of vim. A boy’s best friend. When they came home, flushed and fit, they would drink tea and eat something homemade and delicious from the cake-tin.

In the evening they made sandwiches from the leftover lamb and did a jigsaw together or listened to the radio, and after Peter/David was in bed they each read their books, or they played a duet together, her on the piano, him on the oboe. To his ever-lasting sorrow he had never learned a musical instrument, but in his imagination he was proficient, occasionally inspired. She did a lot of knitting—Peter/David’s Fair Isle sweaters and rather effeminate cardigans for Martin. In winter they sat by a roaring coal fire, sometimes Martin would toast pikelets or teacakes on a brass toasting fork. He liked to read poetry to her occasionally, nothing too modern.