The Whole Day Through (9 page)

He stirred in sugar he never normally took, because her sudden direct glance had made him nervous. ‘Et alors,’ he said in his best schoolboy accent and he felt her toe brush his calf.

‘Thought you’d never ask,’ she said.

Where to go was a problem. Her mother was a light sleeper apparently and he was anxious not to unsettle Bobby having not long found him a job and established a steady domestic routine with him. It was Laura who gently pointed out that the restaurant was part of a hotel, much used by visiting lawyers and unlikely to blanch at an impromptu booking.

He was jaded by years of marriage but suspected their first bedroom reunion was a disaster. He was far too eager and they were both freshly conscious of how their bodies had aged in twenty years. He was no longer a sportsman.

‘Do you mind?’ she asked, reaching for the bedside light switch and he said,

‘Not at all,’ and was frankly relieved but then he tripped on her discarded shoes and they managed to bump noses quite painfully and one of numerous pillows sent her glass of water flying, which gave the bed an untimely wet patch.

But when they were finished, passion clumsily spent, and able simply to lie there, an amazing calm came over him, a certainty and sense of rightness, as though his
whole being had sighed
at long bloody last
. He held her close, breathed the scent in her hair and thought,
enhanced mouse
.

‘What?’ she murmured.

‘I didn’t say anything.’

‘You laughed at something.’

‘I feel as though I just came home,’ he said. ‘That’s all. Oh God.’

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘That.’ And she turned the lamp back on and discovered it had a built-in dimmer so they lay for what felt like hours but was only about forty minutes, talking quietly, patching up torn years, until Laura, who had been conscientiously clock watching, sighed and slipped away from him and into the shower.

So it started.

In the weeks that followed they returned several times to the hotel because it was a treat and felt like a space outside time, unlike their respective lodgings. But it was expensive and evenings could be difficult as her mother and Bobby were home and needed feeding. Urgency helped them overcome their fear of daylight and they took to snatching time together during Ben’s lunch hour, when Bobby was safely at work. They usually hurried to his house where they drew ineffective curtains and defied the thinness of the walls but on Fridays her mother attended the Falls Clinic for three hours and Laura would drive him back down St James Lane for a precious forty-five minutes in the middle, to the little, feminine Eden she shared with the old woman.

He was tantalized by the glimpses he got of her mother about the place as Laura hurried him through the house to her room, especially from the journals piled by her chair, and would have liked to meet her, not least because she was a virologist and he had never quite lost his boyhood fascination with her subject. But he was reminded soon after meeting Laura again of her ingrained habit of secrecy and way of keeping people in discrete compartments. As a student she had dismissed any enquiries about her parents – ‘He’s a bearded sociologist, she studies viruses. Blah. Not interesting.’ – with a vigour that made him wonder if she did not struggle to emerge from their shadow. In this respect she had changed little as an adult and, although he had never suffered from overbearing parents, Chloë and her father had taught him to respect a person’s desire to be judged on their own merit, accepted as an individual, not as a mere adjunct to a family.

‘Time enough,’ he thought. ‘We can meet when she’s ready.’

By degrees she let slip or he wrung out of her the shaming truth about their past; that the apparent aplomb with which she accepted their split as students had been youthful bravado. In fact she had gone to pieces, in her restrained way, and found herself unable to sit her finals.

She clearly hadn’t meant to tell him but he stupidly blundered on with quizzing her about why she had never pursued her career in maths, or not in the expected way,
given the degree she was taking and how well she had been doing, and finally she said,

‘Because I never sat the bloody degree, okay? I pretended. Amber and Tris thought I was sitting my papers. I came to breakfast in my silly subfusc like everyone else, even got sick with nerves, but then I just walked around or sat in cafés and the cinema. I went to one paper and it was so hideous just sitting there writing nothing that I couldn’t stand any more.’

‘But surely you could have told someone? Got counselling?’

‘It wasn’t like that back then. Don’t you remember anything? Even kids who pretended to be sick or mad had to sit their papers in hospital.’

She was right. He remembered then the chilling old myth of the student who in desperation tipped boiling water over his hands to avoid having to sit a philosophy paper, being compelled to dictate his essays instead.

‘You should have told me,’ he said.

‘Don’t be stupid,’ she said. ‘You were running after Chloë by then, doing a Brideshead. I might have been going to pieces but I had my pride.’

They were in his bed at the time, in the half-light shed through unlined curtains. They had not long made love and their mingling warmth and scents and the touch of her hand through his hair softened by a few degrees the sudden harshness of her tone, but he found he could not answer her. And his silence, followed a minute later by
her abrupt departure, with her clothes, for the bathroom, felt like their first row.

And then, just a week ago, the stupidest thing happened. It was his birthday and, yes, he had completely forgotten. It was a Friday, Falls Clinic day, and Laura was going to collect him from the hospital at lunchtime. But, at the end of his morning clinic, Chloë showed up, out of the blue, with a ridiculously exquisite birthday cake from the Southwark pâtisserie she favoured. He emerged from writing-up his final patient of the morning and there she was, sitting in the men’s waiting room, chatting affably with one of the camper nurses. (Gay men loved Chloë, effortlessly undone and enslaved by her combination of beauty and apparent vulnerability.)

Coming upon her without warning in that setting, amongst the free condom baskets and the chlamydia pamphlets, would have been startling at any time but it was doubly so when he had spent the morning only half-listening to patients as he thought about what Laura had told him and how he must tell Chloë all, cease this wounding ambiguity and make a clean break with her. And suddenly there she was, the cruelly peremptory answer to an unspoken wish, and his resolve left him at the sight of her. She looked particularly smart and groomed, as though for lunch with girlfriends, and brave, as though calling in like this had taken courage. They kissed, he thanked her for the cake, which they both knew would be wolfed by the nurses that afternoon, and
steered her away from the clinic and up the hill towards her car.

‘I know you’re busy. I know you’re working,’ she said. ‘I just didn’t want you to think I’d forgotten.’ She didn’t make demands or a scene or deliver an ultimatum or a solicitor’s letter. She didn’t even want to stay for lunch. Possibly she was on her way to visiting someone else – she was a mistress of barely conscious multi-tasking and had a way of judiciously measuring out appointments in advance. But it was a lovely gesture, a sweet one by her lights, given how tense their last parting had been. Her timing couldn’t have been worse, however, because, as he walked her back to her car, apologizing for being so hopeless and uncommunicative and beginning to suggest it was time they talked things through but that a snatched lunch hour was not the moment, he saw Laura watching them from a sunny bench by the main building’s back entrance.

‘I know,’ Chloë sighed. ‘You’re right. Don’t apologize. I’ve been hopeless too. I’m such a coward. Bye, Ben. Happy birthday.’ She reached up with the hand that was already holding her car keys and brought his head down to hers.

Thinking she was going to kiss him on the lips, aware, from the glimpse he had over her shoulder, of Laura walking smartly back to her mother’s car, he half-flinched and she was obliged to press her lips quickly to his forehead in a clumsy kind of blessing.

As soon as she sped off, he turned towards Laura, but she drove off too without looking at him.

‘Wait!’ he shouted. ‘Laura!’

He wouldn’t have caught her, only she was held up by a traffic snarl at the exit and had to wind down her window when he ran up and tapped on it, panting.

‘I’ve done this,’ she told him, and held a palm up when he started to speak. ‘No. Sorry, Ben. I’ve been a bit on the side. Been one for years. I could write the handbook. But I was never
your
mistress. You were always different, better, for all your faults, and I’d rather keep it that way. Sorry.’ And she drove off.

He knew her mobile number. He gave her time to reach home then rang it. But she must have seen his name flash up and pressed ignore. Whenever he tried ringing her, as the afternoon clinic dragged on, it was the same. He tried texting her but got no further than
Please, Laura
before deleting his message unsent. He wrote her three letters over the Saturday, thinking he could drop off a letter by hand under cover of darkness, but he posted none of them. Her quiet hurt had cut to the quick of him as Chloë’s sarcasm and accusations had never done.

Finally, on the Sunday afternoon, he could bear it no longer and decided simply to call round, face humiliation or rejection, anything to have the opportunity of seeing her again.

Perhaps because they had always been in such a hurry to reach her bed he had not noticed before how securely
the little house was enclosed. From some way down the hill one could glimpse the upper windows’ white-painted Gothic frames but nothing could be seen from closer to but flinty wall and an impenetrable thicket of hedge shrubs topped by a lush tangle of roses. There was a gate in the wall, a door in effect, tall and firmly bolted. Cautiously, thinking it might be purely a decorative antique, he pulled a brass knob and was startled to find he had set a bell jangling fairly close to.

‘Bugger!’ said an old woman’s voice from somewhere nearby then called out imperiously, ‘Are you expecting anyone?’ The distant answer was too faint for him to make out. ‘Me neither,’ said the voice. ‘Oh well.’

What sounded like a shed door was opened then shut and then, abruptly, a little door half-opened behind a grille in the gate’s middle and the old woman’s voice asked if she could help him.

‘I hope so,’ he said. ‘I’ve come to see Laura, if she’s in. I’m Ben Patterson, an old Oxford friend of hers.’

‘Well, how lovely. She didn’t say. You must have tea.’

She slammed the little window closed again and opened the gate to admit him. She had on a faded but still elegant garment – a housecoat? Surely not a dressing gown? He assumed she was quite naked underneath but her manner, and years of practice, meant that one had no idea. She wore Dr Scholl sandals whose wooden heels clacked against the brick path as she shuffled ahead of him, leaning on her walker. ‘My legs don’t work any
more,’ she called over her shoulder. ‘So dull. Laura? Your friend Ben has come for tea. Isn’t that nice?’

‘I don’t remember you,’ she went on as Laura called out a pale-faced
hi
from the front door which made him feel at once that he had broken an unspoken rule by barging in, ‘but then it was a long time ago and Laura always enjoyed her secrets. Or not secrets exactly but keeping us all in separate compartments. Even her father and me she told quite different things.’

But Ben remembered her. He thought he was mistaken at first. There were a lot of highly educated women of her generation with a similarly distinguished manner; an air of high confidence and what their mothers would have thought an unfeminine directness of conversation born of making their way against considerable opposition in a largely masculine field. One met such women in any senior common room and on many a hospital board. So he might have been mistaken.

Laura emerged into the garden with a tray of tea things and cake and greeted him with a quick hug, as cool as a spy, betraying no trace of what had recently passed between them. She went through the motions of catching up, asking what had brought him to Winchester, offering her condolences on his mother’s death, asking with concern how his brother was coping. Before carrying the teapot inside to refill it she explained to her mother that Ben was a venereologist and to Ben that virology had always been her mother’s specialism.

‘I thought I knew you,’ he said. ‘It’s Professor Jellicoe, isn’t it?’

‘That’s right. But I’m sorry I…’

‘I’d never realized – with you having a different surname to Laura. I mean, I knew her mother was a virologist but I didn’t know she was you. If you see what I mean. Oh, there’s no reason why you should remember me,’ he heard himself blathering on. ‘It was a long time ago.’ And, as Laura began to walk back from the house, he diverted Professor Jellicoe, lest she think him quite unhinged, with a question about the latest research into a link between herpes simplex and Alzheimer’s. But he was reeling and took his leave soon after his third cup and second slice of cake.

He had thought what? That Laura had only to see him in the gateway to relent? That she would snatch a moment’s conference with him to unsay hasty words, to arrange another date? Instead she mutely encouraged her mother to join her in waving him off so that they weren’t left alone for one instant. The folly and egotism of his little visit weighed hard on him in the night which followed. But not quite so hard as the cowardly memories it had finally dragged out from the shadows.

Of course the old woman didn’t remember him. He meant nothing to her. He was just another of the countless students she encountered every week, not faceless exactly but interchangeable in the way the young became as one aged. (Ben had the same problem already with
medical students and student nurses – names and faces no sooner imprinted on his consciousness than a fresh batch took their place.)

It had been his last term, with the medical finals only days from starting and, as very occasionally happened, a group of particularly promising students was invited for Sunday lunch in the warden’s lodgings. He remembered he had resented his own invitation deeply because he had detailed revision plans which accounted for every spare hour or two and the hours swallowed by sherry and lunch and coffee and polite chat afterwards would necessitate rearranging his timetable or covering some topic in less detail than he had intended.