The Bellwether Revivals (18 page)

Paulsen removed his hat, but didn’t speak.

‘What happened between the two of you?’

The old man hardly moved. His eyes surveyed the road. ‘I was completely and utterly in love with that boy. And he was in love with me.’ He stared dead ahead, not even blinking. ‘After what I did to him, it’s incredible he still wants to talk to me.’

It was strange that he still referred to Crest as a boy, as if a younger version of him still existed somewhere.

‘What happened?’

‘It doesn’t matter what happened. It was stupid and childish, and I’m not proud of it. I made a fool of myself. It was all very ugly. But there’s no point dwelling on ancient history. I’ve made my peace with it now.’

‘I’ve never seen you as happy as you looked today.’

‘Ah, you’ve a good heart, son, you know that? It’s funny, in some ways, you remind me of him—of how he used to be.’ Paulsen looked at him warmly. ‘I can’t tell you how good it felt to see Herb again, face to face. I still love him, not in the same way. I think we’ve become very different people, him and me—but, oh, that boy was the greatest love of my life. He meant everything to me. Still does.’ Paulsen gave a quiet sigh through his nose. He rolled the brim of his panama around in his fingers as if preparing a pizza dough. ‘He looked so ill, didn’t he? Did you see his eyes? They used to be so bright and clear. They were practically dead already.’

‘Is he sick?’

‘Very.’ He tapped at his temple. ‘Brain tumour.’

‘Oh no, I’m so sorry.’

‘Hardly your fault. If anyone’s to blame it’s the pathetic excuse for a god we have up there. I’m nearly twenty years older than Herb—I’ve known him since he was eighteen. You’d think I’d be the one to go first, wouldn’t you? But no. Sod the rightful order of things. If there’s any kind of god up there, he’s one cruel, miserable old bugger.’

The news that Herbert Crest was dying did not come as a surprise to Oscar. He’d suspected it the moment he saw him arriving at The Orchard, seen it in the ghostly pallor of his lips, the grey circles around his eyes, the sound of his breathing, as if each inhalation brought a wave of pain. But it unsettled him to have these suspicions confirmed. By the time the old man finished telling him about Crest’s illness—the surgeries, the chemo, the joy that came with the short remissions and the despair that came with the relapses—he felt utterly deflated.

‘I’ll never complain about anything ever again,’ the old man said. ‘Not when I think of Herb struggling like that. I know he’s not the only one out there with a tumour, but seeing what it’s done to him, well, it just brings it all home to me. I’m a lucky man. I’ve never thought of myself as lucky before. I’m just so glad I got to see him again.’ The doctors had given Crest no more than two years to live, and that time had almost passed. He was visiting every person that he’d ever loved, Paulsen said, so that he could tell them how important they were to him—and, most of all, to say goodbye. ‘I was third on his list. That’s good enough for me. Even if it all ends up in this book of his, I don’t care.’

‘He’s writing about it? About dying?’

‘Sort of,’ Paulsen said. ‘Sounded to me like it’s more about wanting to survive. What was the title he had? Oh, damn, it’s gone clean out of my mind.’

‘He looked too sick to be writing anything. It’s a wonder they even let him on a plane.’

‘He lives in London now.’

‘Oh.’

‘Been here the last few years. Strange to think of him being here all that time, on the same shores. I always thought he was an ocean away.’

They stopped at traffic lights on Barton Road. A parade of cyclists wheeled over the pedestrian crossing, their coat-tails
billowing behind them. Oscar could hardly hear the engine, and he wondered if he had stalled it, but when he pressed the accelerator it gave out a tinny rev.

‘I can’t remember the title he had for the life of me. Oh, my stupid old brain.’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘Yes it does. Once the short-term memory goes, that’s it, I’m done for.’ Paulsen thought hard; his face was one big crease of concentration. ‘I can remember the publisher. Spector and Tillman. But the title. Damn, what was it?’

The lights blinked green and Oscar moved the minibus forwards. Turning onto Queen’s Road, he could see the outline of Cedarbrook in the distance, and as they drew towards it the shape swelled upwards and outwards. It was lit from the ground with floodlights, and the angles of the beams against the bricks reminded him of the Bellwether house. He steered through the open gates, driving around the side of the building, parking in the back yard, amid a fleet of other buses. It felt like he was a cruise-ship captain coming home to dock.

A lamp was on at the nurses’ station, and one of new auxiliaries was sitting there filing her nails. She brought out the day book and Oscar signed his name beside ‘Paulsen, Abraham’. He put the old man in the stairlift and walked him, step by step, back to his room. He took off Paulsen’s jacket and shoes and pulled the blanket over him as he lay down and closed his eyes. ‘Sleep well,’ he said. Hanging the old man’s jacket over the armchair, he felt something in the outer pocket—a crackle of paper behind the lining, crisp under his fingers. He checked that Paulsen was asleep before taking it out.

It was the letter from Herbert Crest. There was a shakiness to the handwriting he hadn’t noticed before. The ink was blotted with rainspots. On the back of the envelope, there was a printed gold label with his name and address: ‘Dr Herbert Crest, 41 Cartwright Gardens, Bloomsbury, London WC1 2BQ’. Oscar
pushed it back into the old man’s jacket, drew the curtains, and left.

Downstairs, the auxiliary was still filing her nails. He went around the desk and sat down beside her. The computer screen was blinking with a spam ad for online poker. She peered over his shoulder as he brought up the web browser and typed ‘herbert crest spector tillman’ into the search engine.

There was a direct link to Herbert Crest on the Spector & Tillman site. When the page uploaded, a small black-and-white photo appeared in the top right corner of the screen. Crest was gaunt-faced but still had a dusting of thin white hair and the sharp tendons of his neck were hidden behind a turtleneck sweater. He was leaning the weight of his head on his chin and clutching a pair of frameless spectacles in his fingers. Underneath, there was a block of text:

When the call came, Oscar was dreaming of his parents’ house. The ground-floor windows were swirled with white chalk and an endless spray of orange butterflies was funnelling out of the open doorway. As he made his way along the path, he could see his father sitting in the living room on a raggedy sofa, dressed in hessian pyjamas; the butterflies seemed to form a halo around him. His mother was in the kitchen, fixing the handle of a broken pan, and just when he was about to call out to her, the buzz of his phone on the nightstand pulled him awake.

A brittle, distant voice came over the line: ‘Oscar, I know it’s late, but you need to get to Downing as soon as you can.’ There was no hint of emergency in Eden’s tone. ‘There’s been an accident. Iris is hurt.’

Oscar found it difficult to speak. When he tried, the words refused to come out, and he could only make a short, desperate sigh that amplified in the receiver. He managed to gather himself enough to say: ‘What happened?’

‘It’s all this fog,’ Eden said. ‘She was knocked over. A van, they’re saying. Wait a sec—’ There was a scratch as Eden covered
the mouthpiece, and Oscar could hear a muted mumbling. ‘Sorry. Policewoman was telling me something. I’ll meet you by the porters’ lodge, okay? Be quick.’ The line went dead.

He threw on some clothes and hurried out into the night. While he’d been sleeping, a thick fog had descended over the town and he could hardly see what was in front of him as he ran. Tips of buildings peeped out of the whiteness. Things that he’d never even noticed before—chimney pots, TV aerials, skylights—he now relied upon to guide him, like some pilot with broken instruments, flying by dead reckoning. Pavements he’d walked along every day on his way home now seemed treacherous and unfamiliar. He followed them as well as he could, running harder than he’d ever run, unsure of his direction. The fog made the city a foreign country. He ran almost by memory, fingering shop windows along Regent Street, metal railings, bits of wall, slowing when he felt the pavement was about to end. The mist was cool against his face and the air felt dense and hard to breathe. He didn’t stop running, though his lungs burned and his muscles ached.

Outside the gates of Downing College, the blue lights of a police car flashed solemnly. From a distance, the pulsing light seemed downy and mild, but when he got closer to the porters’ lodge, the blueness was colder, harder, cracking the night apart with steady blinks. A uniformed policewoman was sitting inside the squad car. The engine was running and she was speaking into the radio on her collar. He could see Jane now, too, pacing near the college gates. Eden was with her, hands buried deep in the pockets of his overcoat.

‘Oh, Oscar, thank God!’ Jane strode towards him and hugged him tightly. ‘Don’t worry, don’t worry, she’s alright. She’s alive. But she’s been injured quite badly.’

He couldn’t catch his breath. He felt sick. ‘Where is she?’

‘Addenbrooke’s. Her parents are with her.’

The squad car moved away from the kerb, making a three-point turn in the road.

He looked at Eden. ‘What the hell happened to her?’

‘There’s no need to sound so accusatory. This is hardly
my
fault.’ Eden arranged the lapels of his overcoat. ‘All I know is what the police told me. A van hit her, somewhere on Silver Street.’

‘
When?
’

‘Two, three hours ago. She was on her way to meet us,’ Eden said, nodding towards the fog-cloaked grounds of the college. ‘We were all playing mah-jong in Marcus’s room, and the next minute this policewoman shows up.’

‘Did they catch the driver?’

‘It was a hit and run—in thick fog—they’ve got no chance.’

The urge to run was still in Oscar’s feet. His head was thrumming. ‘I need to get to the hospital,’ he said. ‘Now.’

‘We
all
need to get there. Why the bloody hell do you think I called you?’

‘I’ll drive us,’ Jane said. ‘Don’t worry. Everything will be okay. There’s no need for any bickering.’

Oscar had to wait with Eden at the Downing gates while Jane fetched the car. He was too anxious to talk, imagining Iris on the quiet bend of Silver Street, alone and terrified. He began to kick at the kerbstone.

‘You know,’ Eden said, looking past him, ‘she was lucky—her cello case took the brunt of it.’ Eden removed a handkerchief from his pocket and blotted the tip of his nose. ‘Then again, if she’d ditched that group weeks ago, like I told her to, she wouldn’t have been coming home from practice in the dark.’

‘All I care about is that she’s okay,’ Oscar said. ‘That’s all any of us should be thinking of right now.’

Eden kept quiet. There was no brotherly concern in his manner; he was leaning nonchalantly against the iron gate, investigating his handkerchief, as if it were a tourist map. ‘My parents are with her. If she was in any danger, they would’ve sent for me by now.’

‘Sent for you?’

‘Yes,’ Eden said, turning his eyes to the quadrangle. ‘They’d have sent a car for me, or one of my mother’s church friends would’ve come to get me. But they haven’t, so she must be okay.’

‘I wish I could say that put my mind at ease.’

‘Just putting things in perspective,’ Eden said.

The swirling fog showed no signs of breaking, but Oscar could see a flurry of shadows near the library. He was glad when Yin and Marcus emerged from the mist, heading for the porters’ lodge. They both seemed tired and downcast, but Yin’s face was particularly ruddy, his shoulders slouched in his puffer jacket. ‘That’s the whole point,’ he was saying to Marcus, who trailed behind him, ‘the last time we played mah-jong I had my bike stolen. I’m telling you it’s cursed or something. We can’t play it any more.’

‘Accidents happen,’ Marcus said. ‘Don’t get all Chinese about this.’

‘What’s
that
supposed to mean?’

‘If you want to blame anything, blame the weather,’ said Eden, stepping towards them. ‘And the fact that my sister can’t look both ways before she crosses the road.’

Yin folded his arms. ‘Man, I can’t believe you’re making jokes about this. She’s really hurt.’

‘Gallows humour, Yinny, not lack of concern. You’re starting to sound like Oscar.’

‘She was talking to the paramedics,’ Marcus said. ‘That’s a good sign.’

‘We better hope so,’ Yin said.

Oscar saw headlights approaching from the Hills Road junction. ‘Is that her? Is that Jane?’

‘Settle down,’ Eden said, squinting into the darkness. ‘Plenty of room for all of us.’

The Bellwethers were already sitting in the empty A&E waiting room when Oscar and the others arrived. Theo had an arm
around his wife’s shoulder and she was pressing her head into the slope of his neck, eyelids closed. They were dressed as if they’d been pulled out of some grand occasion to be there—he in a dinner suit with the bow tie slightly askew, and she in a sequined gown and a diaphanous wrap that concealed the ageing skin of her shoulders. Theo was idly flipping through a magazine on his knee, one-handed. He didn’t get out of his chair when the five of them entered the room, just raised his chin at them. Mrs Bellwether stirred, levelling herself.