The Weeping Women Hotel (23 page)

Toby
became so confused at the sight of his sister-in-law that his play became
erratic and finally he got given a yellow card and had a penalty awarded
against him by the referee for fouling two players on his own ream.

‘Toby,
you twat!’ his team captain shouted at him. ‘You’re playing as if it’s
February!’

Harriet was waiting for
him at the gate after he’d showered and changed out of his football kit and
into his street clothes.

As he
walked towards her with a team mate Toby said, ‘See that girl over there on the
other side of the pitch waving to me?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Don’t
you think she’s the most fantastically, unbelievably beautiful creature that
you’ve ever seen in your entire life?’

The
other guy took his team mate’s question as a serious enquiry between men so he
stopped and, staring hard at Harriet, looked her up and down. Finally he
responded meditatively, saying, ‘Well, she’s got a nice body, obviously fit,
decent-sized, shapely tits and all that, nice face, but I’d have to say on balance
no, Toby. I mean she’s very pretty, I’ll give you that, but to me a woman’s got
to have …‘

‘Why
was that bloke staring at me like that?’ Harriet asked when he reached her.

‘He
thought he knew you from a camping holiday he went on in
Cornwall
last year.’

‘By the
look he was giving me it was a Turkish brothel he thought he knew me from.’

‘Well,
he did say it had been a very nice holiday.’ As Harriet embraced Toby he gave
her a kiss on the cheek and there was the feared crackle of static on his lips.

‘Ow,
bastard!’ he shouted.

‘Sorry,
Tobes,’ she said, ‘static?’

‘Yeah.
Should have stopped by now.’

‘But
you’re shivering as well. Why are you shivering?’ she asked, rubbing his arm.
‘It’s not cold.’

‘I’m
OK, maybe a bit of a chill, that’s all.’

‘So
anyway,’ Harriet said, ‘I just thought I’d come and say hello, see how you’re
doing and take you for a drink, maybe have something to eat at the Cod. I don’t
seem to have seen so much of you lately You used always to be dropping into the
shop with tears you’d made in your clothes. What’s happened? Judging by those
flying tackles you made, your physical coordination hasn’t improved any Aren’t
the players wearing the same shirts as you supposed to be on the same side?’

‘That’s
it,’ he replied, ‘you women never understand the rules of football.’ Then Toby
said, ‘Look, can we go somewhere else, not the Admiral Cod?’

‘I
suppose so,’ she replied. ‘Are there other places?’

‘One or
two. Let’s walk for a bit.’

She linked her arm through
his and they strolled out of the neighbourhood of the park. Crossing over the
bridge that spanned the railway line they walked up a hill lined with Turkish
greengrocers and bakeries, their open shopfronts strung with light bulbs
throwing their light on to high piles of colourful fruit and vegetables. To
Toby it seemed strange to be able to buy a melon this late into the night. Next
they passed through an area of dark and silent Edwardian villas until finally
they came to another parade of shops facing another park almost identical to
their own neighbourhood amongst which there remained an old-fashioned Italian
restaurant: a restaurant that served food that was authentically Italian in the
same way that a Swiss roll was authentically Swiss.

The
restaurant’s manager had written some samples from its menu on a chalk board
outside on the pavement and had put a little circle before each of the dishes,
making it appear as if the board was singing the praises of the food in a
Puccini opera: ‘O Seafood Salad,’ it sang, ‘O Spaghetti Pomodoro, O Veal, O
Tiramisu.’

Normally
a restaurant of this type would be completely invisible to people such as Toby
and Harriet, their senses being tuned to stripped floorboards, metal lamps and
exotic floral displays — that said ‘food’ to them. It was only perhaps because
his perceptions were in a heightened, disturbed state that the pink tablecloths
and breadsticks of this place were visible. ‘Let’s go in here!’ Toby shouted.

‘Where?’
asked Harriet, looking around.

‘Here,
this place, here,’ he said, indicating the Italian restaurant.

‘S’pose
so,’ replied his sister-in-law. Then, deciding to treat it as a lark, she said,
‘Yeah, why not?’

A
waiter who’d been standing in the doorway looking mournfully up and down the
street darted inside as they approached.

‘Have
you booked?’ the manager asked as they came through the door though the place
was almost completely empty except for some elderly couples and two old men in
blazers eating alone.

‘No,
but if you could fit us in …’ Harriet asked, smiling winningly at the man.

He
simpered back at her and the couple were shown to what Toby imagined was the
best table, in the window overlooking this other park, where they ordered pâté
from a tin and then pasta with sauce that came from a big jar while they drank
nasty red wine.

‘This
should really be in a flask wrapped in straw,’ he said of their drink.

‘I think
the straw’s on the inside, in the wine,’ Harriet replied. Then she asked, ‘You
drinking again then, Tobes?’

‘Oh
yeah,’ he said casually, ‘I can take the odd drink, you know, it’s not a
problem for me or anything.’

‘Really?’
she asked, sounding unconvinced.

‘No, I
don’t think drink was my main problem.’

‘I
dunno — you were pretty mental when you drank.’

‘What,
more mental than I am now?’

‘Differently
mental, it was like you drank to dissolve yourself.’

‘Well,
I’ve got it under control now.’

‘OK, if
you say so.

‘Yeah.’
Then he suddenly said, ‘Hat?’

‘Yes?’

‘I’ve
been thinking about being tested.’

‘What,
like doing your GCSEs again or a degree from the Open University?’

‘No,
not that. See … last week I was at one of those dinner parties we go to all
the bloody time and found myself staring one by one at the people there and
wondering who the hell they were. Do you ever get that?’

‘No, I
don’t think so. Everybody I know seems a bit too real if anything.’

‘No,
right … So anyway, I dunno, before I married Helen I’d had my own gang of
mates, great mates like Tom Tom Culshaw.’

‘The
one who’s now the life and soul of a Zimbabwean prison?’

‘That’s
the fellow. But I let them go, my good mates, and allowed Helen to drift me
towards this crowd. Do you know, over dinner they spent nearly three hours
moaning about the number of parking tickets, speeding points and fines for
driving in bus lanes that they’d picked up in the last week or so?’

‘You’d
think they’d stop doing it seeing as they get fined all the time.’

‘No,
that never occurs to them. But all this moaning, Hat! They acted like getting a
parking ticket was the worst thing that had ever happened to them. Then I
realised — it was! The shock of getting their car towed away after they’d
parked it outside the American Embassy was the worst thing that had ever
happened to them! How can you have a sense of proportion if that’s true? It
made me think how people in the past had such tough lives: wars, disease,
strikes, those stiff celluloid collars.

‘These
days we aren’t tested … well, men mostly I’m thinking about. I suppose women
still have childbirth, but in the past men grew up through being proven in
conflict. Hundreds of years ago, right? Life was really short. A man’s life
expectancy was something like fifteen. There were admirals in the navy who were
nine years old yet they still thought nothing of setting off on a trip to
Australia
that took four years just to
look for a particularly interesting kind of grapefruit. Four years which was
maybe a fifth of their life! Nowadays we expect to live until we’re a hundred
and yet we go mental because the tube train stops in a tunnel for five minutes
— and we try and sue the authorities for compensation for the emotional
distress they’ve caused us. In times of conflict a man can find out exactly who
he is. So I got to wondering whether there might not be some way in which I can
test myself, find out what I’d do if faced with a crisis. Is there some war or
something I could go to? There must be some sort of adventure …’

‘Like
what?’ Harriet asked. ‘I mean all that stuff like rollerblading along the
Great Wall of China
for charity is a major
cause of third world debt, you know.’

‘Er,
right,’ Toby said. Really, he had only told her all this stuff to make himself
seem more exciting. He had perhaps had a distant sense that some day he might
go off on an adventure but not any time soon, yet her taking it seriously made
it seem real.

Harriet
reached out and took his hand. ‘I think that’s great, Toby,’ she said. ‘You
find your adventure.’

‘Well,
you’ve been an inspiration to me, Hat, you’ve turned your life around so why
shouldn’t I do the same?’

‘Yeah,
you go for it, Tobes,’ and she reached out and embraced him, getting tomato
sauce on her breasts as she leant over their food. Toby would have liked to
order another bottle of wine but decided he couldn’t in front of Harriet.
Looking across the empty tables to ask for another bottle of mineral water
instead, he saw the entire waiting staff of the restaurant clustered in a
greasy-jacketed clump in an alcove by the dumb waiter smiling fondly at him and
his date. In the 1960s when it had first opened, a new and exciting venue of
previously unimaginable sophistication, this restaurant had regularly been the
location for such scenes, agitated handsome men and beautiful women holding
hands, suddenly embracing and talking wildly about important things. It
gladdened the hearts of the elderly Portuguese who ran the restaurant to see a
young couple re-enacting such a romantic scene now, making them wonder whether
their doomed restaurant might not be coming back into fashion.

In the last couple of
years a plague of street furniture had broken out around the park: there were
at least four pedestrian crossings around the boundary road each with its own
set of flashing, beeping traffic lights, zigzag lines either side of the
traffic lights, black and white stripes traversing the road, nasty little
fences around the crossing and uneven red pimpled tiles for blind people to
trip over on the pavement facing the crossings. There were speed bumps of
random height down the centre of the road with white triangles painted on their
lumpy surfaces, on poles at the roadside there were signs saying the many
things you weren’t allowed to do and the times when you weren’t allowed to do
them and there were so many more lines, yellow lines, double yellow lines, red
lines and more white zigzags painted on the road surface. The disruption in
Harriet’s field of vision was such that sometimes, like now, it made her feel
as though she was in the first stages of a. migraine, there was a foggy
pressure in her head and a fuzziness around the edges of her vision. She’d
walked Toby back to his house and was now heading home herself. Reflecting on
their conversation, she reckoned it had been safe to encourage him to seek
adventure even though the idea of Toby going on any sort of expedition would be
catastrophic. Luckily there was no chance of him giving up his easy comfortable
life and looking for any kind of dangerous test that would stretch him: she
loved Toby but had no illusions that he was the kind of man to go on an adventure
and, more than that, her sister would never let him.

To get
away from the fuzzy lines Harriet crossed the road and cut through the
north-west corner of the park, heading towards her building. She wondered
whether Toby fancied her — maybe he always had done and that was why he’d spent
so much time in her shop, but right away her mind, snapping shut on this
disturbing thought like a mousetrap, told her she was probably making it up or
he maybe only had a little crush on her that would fade in a few weeks.
Temporary relief swept through Harriet and the indistinct terror that she might
have caused Toby to fall in love with her receded. It was as if a plane had
suddenly dropped with a thump and a peculiar high-pitched noise had come from
the engine and then the cabin crew rapidly began putting stuff away even though
they were in the middle of serving dinner. Yet after a few tense seconds level
flight resumes and slowly the cabin crew recommence serving dinner but their
faces are like wax and their smiles are printed on.

Dark
trees in the attitude of preying insects hung over her path and through their
budding branches she fancied the welcoming lights of her upstairs room could be
seen, the battered punchbag hanging from her ceiling like a tubby suicide. From
the brittle undergrowth there came a rustling and sibilant voices that
whispered foul obscenities but she didn’t feel the least bit afraid.

As well as great financial
wealth donated by rich, bird-loving patrons, Warbird also owned a good deal of
property. Indeed, though Helen kept it quiet, they held the leases on a number
of shops in the parade facing the park, including the hardware store. Recently
that lease had come to an end and the general improvements in the area coupled
with the new, wealthier people moving in meant that the charity was in a
position to raise the rent considerably. Unfortunately this was more than the
old tenant could afford to pay so, after a brief fight, they were sadly forced
to evict him.