Playing for the Ashes (91 page)

“I’ll be eight years old,” Hadiyyah said. “We’re to have strawberry ice cream and chocolate cakes. You don’t need to bring a present. I expect I’ll have others. Mummy’ll send something from Ontario. That’s in Canada. She’s on holiday, but she knows it’s my birthday and she knows what I want. I told her before she left, didn’t I, Dad?”

“Indeed you did.” Azhar reached for her hand and enclosed it in his own. “And now that you have delivered your invitation to your friend, perhaps it would be best for you to say good night.”

“Will you come?” Hadiyyah asked. “We’ll have such fun. We will.”

Barbara looked from anxious child to sober father. She wondered what waters were running here.

“Chocolate cakes,” the girl said. “Strawberry ice cream.”

“Hadiyyah.” Azhar spoke the name quietly.

Barbara said, “Yeah. I’ll come.”

The reward was her smile. Hadiyyah skipped back. She pulled on her father’s hand to draw him in the direction of their flat. “Seven o’clock,” she said. “You won’t forget, will you?”

“I won’t forget.”

“Thank you, Barbara Havers,” Taymullah Azhar said simply.

“It’s Barbara. Just Barbara,” she replied.

He nodded. He gently guided his daughter back to the path. She shot ahead of him, plaits flying round her like twitching ropes. “Birthday, birthday, birthday,” she sang.

Barbara watched them until they disappeared round the side of the main house. She shut the door. She looked at the sun
flo
wer invitation. She shook her head.

Three weeks and four days, she realised, without a word and without a smile. Who would have thought her first friend in the neighbourhood would turn out to be an eight-year-old girl?

OLIVIA

I
’ve rested for nearly an hour. I should go to bed but I’ve started to think that if I go to my room without finishing this when I’m so close to the end, I’ll lose heart.

Chris wandered out of his room a while ago. His eyes were red-rimmed like they always are when he first wakes up, so I knew he’d been dozing. He had on his striped pyjama bottoms and nothing else. He stood in the doorway of the galley, blinked to clear his eyes. He yawned.

“Reading. Dropped off like a stone. I’m getting old.” He went to the sink and poured himself a glass of water. He didn’t drink. Instead, he leaned over and sloshed the water against his neck and into his hair, which he ruf
fle
d vigourously.

“What’re you reading?” I asked him.

“
Atlas Shrugged
. The speech.”

“Again?” I shuddered. “No wonder you dropped off.”

“What I’ve always wanted to know is…” He yawned again and stretched his arms above his head. He absently scratched at the sparce hair growing in the shape of a feather from his navel to his chest. He looked bonier than ever.

“What you’ve wondered?” I prompted.

“How long would it take a bloke to talk for sixty-three pages?”

“Any bloke who needs sixty-three pages to make his point isn’t worth listening to,” I said. I laid my pencil on the table and concentrated hard on making both hands
fis
ts. “‘Who is John Galt?’ isn’t the question unless the answer is ‘Who cares?’”

Chris chuckled. He came to my chair and said, “Scooting forward here,” and he moved me towards the edge and slipped in behind me.

“I’ll fall,” I said.

“I’ve got you. Lean back.” He pulled me against him and locked his arms round my waist. He rested his chin on my shoulder. I could feel him breathing against my neck. I touched my head to his. “Go to bed,” I said. “I can cope.”

He kept one arm round me, holding me on the chair. He stroked the side of my neck with his other hand. “I was dreaming,” he murmured. “I was back in school with Lloyd-George Marley.”

“Distant relation of Bob?”

“So he claimed. We were facing off a pack of yobs used to hang about the taxi rank near our comprehensive. National Front blokes, these were. Metal-toed boots, the whole bit.” His voice was soft. His fingers worked the stiff muscles at the base of my neck. “We came round a corner—Lloyd-George and I—and we saw these blokes, see? And I knew they wanted a dust-up. Not with me, with Lloyd-George. They wanted to bloody him, send a message to his kind. Go back to where you came from, you fucking jungle bunnies. You’re polluting the river of our pure English blood. They had knuckle-dusters on. They were swinging chains. I knew we were in for it.”

“What’d you do?”

“I tried to yell for Lloyd-George to run, like you do in dreams. But nothing came out.

He just kept walking towards them. And they kept coming on. I caught him up and grabbed him. I said let’s go, let’s go. I wanted to run. He wanted to fi ght.”

“And?”

“I woke up.”

“Lucky you.”

“That’s not it.”

“Why?”

I felt his arm tighten round me. “I was glad not to have to decide, Livie.”

I twisted to look at him. His nighttime stubble was the colour of cinnamon against his skin. “It doesn’t matter,” I said. “It was a dream. You woke up.”

“It matters.”

I could feel his heart beating against me. “It’s okay,” I said.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “All this. What it costs.”

“Everything costs something.”

“But not this much.”

“I don’t know about that.” I patted his hand and let my eyes close. The galley light was bright as a flare against my eyelids. Still, I fell asleep.

Chris held me the while. When the cramps woke me up, he slid off the chair and saw to my legs. Sometimes I say to him when this is all over he can find a job as a professional masseur. He says either that or a bread maker. “Good at kneading, I am,” Chris says. “So am I,” I say. And there’s the truth of it. Disease makes one conscious of need. It wipes out any thought of independence, of I’ll-show-them, of here’s-my-life-in-yourface.

Which brings me to Mother.

It was one thing to make the decision to tell Mother about ALS. It was another to do the actual telling. After I decided to do it that night with Chris and Max on the barge, I put it off for a month. I drifted from one scenario to another. I thought I’d ask her to meet me in a public place, perhaps that Italian restaurant on Argyll Road. I’d order risotto—which would give me the least trouble from plate to mouth—and drink two glasses of wine to loosen up. Perhaps I’d order a whole bottle and share it with her. When she was mildly lit, I’d break the news. I’d get there early, before her, and ask the waiter to put my walker out of sight. She’d be miffed that I didn’t get to my feet when I saw her, but once she knew why, she’d forgive the affront.

Or I’d ask her to the barge and have Chris and Max there so she could see how my life had changed in recent years. Max would engage her in conversation about cricket, about the pressing responsibilities of factory management, about Victoriana and his passionate attachment to things antique, which he would cooperatively manufacture for the occasion. Chris would be Chris, sitting on the bottom step of the stairs feeding a bit of banana to Panda, which Pan would cooperatively munch while all the time wondering why she was being given such an unexpected treat. I’d have Toast on one side of me and Beans on the other. They’d rather be with Chris but I’d put dog biscuits into my pockets and slip them onto the floor between their paws every now and again when Mother glanced away. We’d present ourselves as a picture of harmony: friends, fellows, compatriots. We’d win her support.

Or I’d have my doctor phone. “Mrs. Whitelaw,” he’d say, “this is Stewart Alderson. I’m phoning about your daughter Olivia. May we arrange an appointment?” She’d want to know what it was about. He’d tell her he didn’t wish to go into it over the phone. I’d already be in his office when she arrived. She’d see the walker next to my chair. She’d say, “My God. Olivia. What is this, Olivia?” The doctor would speak as I kept my eyes lowered.

I played out each one of these fantasy reconciliations to its logical conclusion. But every time, the conclusion was the same. Mother won, I lost. The circumstances of the meeting itself put me at a disadvantage. The only way I could come out the winner was to meet with Mother under conditions in which she would be forced to shine with compassion, love, and forgiveness. She had to
want
to look good. Since I couldn’t reasonably hope that she’d have any desire of looking good for my bene
fit
, I knew that when she and I finally met, Kenneth Fleming would have to be there. So I would have to go to Kensington.

Chris wanted to accompany me, but since I’d lied to him about already having phoned Mother, I couldn’t have him with me when she and I met for the first time. So I waited until I knew he had an assault planned, and that same night was the night I chose to announce over dinner that Mother was expecting me at half past ten. He could drop me off in Kensington, I told him, on his way to the research lab in Northampton. I went on hastily to say that it didn’t matter if he didn’t come for me until the early hours of the morning, as would be necessary if he was out on ARM business. Mother and I had plenty to discuss and she, I said, was as eager to mend our fences as was I. It wasn’t an encounter that could be got through in a single hour or two. We had ten years of estrangement to make up for, didn’t we?

He said with some reluctance, “I don’t know, Livie. I don’t like the idea of you being stranded there. What if things don’t work out?”

I’d already broken the ice, I told him. What wasn’t to work out? I was hardly in a position to start a row with Mother. I was going to see her hat in hand. I was the beggar. She was the chooser. Etcetera, etcetera.

“And if she wants to get nasty?”

“She’s not likely to brawl with a cripple, is she? Not in front of her toyboy.”

But Fleming might encourage her, Chris pointed out. Fleming might not want to see their situation disturbed as it was likely to be disturbed if Mother and I were to make peace with each other.

“If Kenneth wants to brawl with a cripple,” I said, “I’ll just phone Max. He can fetch me. All right?”

Chris agreed without liking it.

At twenty-five past ten, we rattled into Staffordshire Terrace. As usual, there wasn’t a vacant parking space anywhere, so Chris left the motor running and came round to help me out. He stood the walker in the street, lifted me down to it, said, “Steady?” To which I lied brightly, “As Gibraltar in a gale.”

There were seven steps to be managed to get to the door. Together we managed them. We stood on the porch. There were lights on in the dining room. The bay window glowed. Above it, in the drawing room, more lights shone. Chris reached past me to push the bell.

I said, “Wait,” and flashed him a smile. “Want to catch my breath.” And build my courage. We waited.

I could hear music coming from an open window somewhere above us, nearby. Mother had planted star jasmine in the window box outside the dining room, and it draped a curtain of long, blooming tendrils to overhang the ground-floor windows beneath it. I took a deep breath of the flowers’ fragrance and said, “Listen, Chris. I can manage the rest alone. You go on.”

“I’ll just get you settled.”

“No need to trouble. Mother’ll do that herself.”

“Don’t be difficult, Livie.” He patted my shoulder, reached past me, and rang the bell.

I thought, That cuts it. I wondered what on earth I was going to say to smooth over Mother’s shock when she saw me, uninvited, unexpected, and unforeseen. Chris wasn’t going to like having been lied to.

Thirty seconds passed. Chris rang the bell again. Another thirty seconds and he said, “I thought you told me—”

“She’s probably in the loo,” I said. I took the key from my pocket and prayed that she hadn’t changed the lock on the door. She hadn’t.

Once inside the entry, with Chris standing behind me in the doorway, I called, “Mother? It’s Olivia. I’m here.”

The music we’d heard from the porch was coming from upstairs. Frank Sinatra singing “My Way.” Old Blue Eyes crooning was enough to cause someone up above to miss the front doorbell as well as my voice.

Chris said, “She’s above. Shall I fetch her, then?”

“She’s never seen you, Chris. You’ll scare her to death.”

“If she knows you’re coming—”

“She thinks I’m coming alone. No! Chris, don’t!” as he made for the stairway at the end of the corridor.

He called out, “Mrs. Whitelaw?” as he began to climb. “It’s Chris Faraday. I’ve brought Livie. Mrs. Whitelaw? I’ve brought Livie.”

He disappeared where the stairs turn at the first mezzanine. I groaned and hobbled into the dining room. There was nothing for it now but to face the music, which wasn’t going to be supplied by Frank Sinatra and wasn’t going to play sweetly for anyone.

I had to place myself in a position of relative power. I shuffled through the adjoining door into the morning room where against one wall my great-grandmother’s ghastly double spoon-backed settee has sat in velvet-andwalnut elegance since the 1850s. This would do.