Undue Influence (11 page)

By unspoken common consent we walked in silence, up Harley Street to the edge of the park, before turning back again in the direction of Cavendish Square. But this area was irritatingly devoid of passers-by. Life was what we wanted. More life! ‘We should have some coffee, at least,’ said Wiggy, and we walked the length of Wigmore Street in search of it. In the
café where I remembered eating a toasted sandwich we sat down gratefully at the back, away from the door, Wiggy with her unopened sketch pad, still in its plastic bag, on her knees. ‘How awful if I’d forgotten it,’ she said. ‘We could never have gone back.’

‘No,’ I agreed. ‘We can’t go back.’

That this had now been decided by what seemed like an outside force was something of a relief. We relaxed, ordered more coffee, eventually a Danish pastry. All round us the evening was merely beginning. Two girls at the next table seemed to be discussing a colleague. ‘She tried to talk her way out of it,’ said one. ‘She didn’t know I’d caught on.’

‘I never liked her,’ said her friend. ‘Still, you have to make allowances, don’t you?’ ‘Not me,’ said the first one virtuously. ‘I never make allowances.’ She lit a king-size cigarette, and sat back, challenging anyone who might conceivably suggest that she should. I was impressed. Wiggy, aware of my growing interest in their conversation, brought me back to the matter in hand with a discreet warning look.

‘We might send her some flowers,’ she said.

‘Good idea. I’ll get on to it.’

‘Roses, I think, don’t you?’

‘Yes, she’d like that.’

We were both disturbed by the evening’s events. Even the girl at the next table seemed threatening. Embarrassment, I knew, would come later. We should not have intruded into the Gibsons’ private drama, and yet we had been invited to do so. Their need for an audience—or perhaps for help—had made itself felt throughout. It occurred to me that for all their uninviting, even forbidding manners they wanted some sort of encouragement that neither of them was equipped to provide. Perhaps anyone would have done. But in the end we had let them down. It was probable that at this stage no one could have
helped. I thought with some irritation of Martin’s mother in Norfolk. Surely she might have put in an appearance? But she ‘didn’t get on’ with Cynthia, and this I translated as a total breach. And tomorrow was Sunday, when the nurse would not be there. I longed to eliminate Sunday, thinking of the two of them, polite and terrified, in their dark flat.

Suddenly the noise of the café seemed unbearable. I wanted to be out in the beautiful air, savouring the last of the evening. The following day would be Sunday for me as well, a day on which nothing happened, or could be expected to happen. There was another complication: when would Martin get in touch? He had left his telephone number on the note posted on my typewriter, but given his temperament, his agonized sensibility, I knew that he would not welcome an inquiry. We had indeed been witnesses, but to something we could not talk about. This would prevent him from appearing in the basement again, and no doubt from telling me more about himself. The emphasis had shifted once more back to Cynthia. (The weak exert a tyranny denied to the more robust.) At least that was how I now saw it. Irritation, so ready to surface, was curiously absent. My imagination failed me, put to flight by a more insistent reality.

‘Are you all right?’ asked Wiggy.

I collected myself. ‘I’m fine.’

Wigmore Street was blue with the last of the evening. We both breathed in deeply.

‘I’ll ring you tomorrow,’ said Wiggy. But in fact we were both anxious to be alone.

As it turned out Sunday was not so bad. It was enough just to be intact. I took a long walk round Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens in the afternoon, and like the Colliers ate a substantial meal when I returned home. I felt guiltily safe. I went to bed early and slept deeply. On the Monday morning
I went to Selfridges and ordered some pink roses. On the card I wrote, ‘With love from Claire and Wiggy’. This seemed adequate until I remembered that if Cynthia were somehow restored to relative health, as I hoped, she would have already forgotten who we were.

Eight

I waited uneasily for something to happen. Was it in order for me to telephone and inquire? Or was the situation so embarrassing that it was better to revert to my status as occasional, even random visitor? I thought that there might have been some acknowledgement of the flowers, until, like my mother, I reflected that flowers often fail to arrive, or arrive on the wrong day, at the wrong address. Indeed, given these potential mishaps, I wondered whether the flowers had not been a mistake, or that they had not in fact been delivered. In which case no acknowledgement could be expected. In retrospect it seemed to me that the flowers had struck a false note, that it would have been better for all of us, Martin and Cynthia included, that that particular visit had not taken place. Nevertheless the onus seemed to be on the Gibsons, or at least on Martin, to get in touch. If he did not it was because there was no reason for him to do so. We were, after all, completely marginal. I concluded that the Gibsons had retreated into their peculiarly watertight relationship. Either that or the flowers (which may not after all have arrived) had been registered as some sort of error, both formal and over-eager. In any event there was no indication that either Wiggy or I was needed, even remembered. This was both a relief and a puzzle. Yet try
as I might—and I did try quite hard—I did not see that there was any further role for me to play.

One evening I got home from the shop to find a message on my machine. ‘Hi! This is Sue? Mrs Gibson’s nurse? I’m sorry to have to tell you that Mrs Gibson passed away last Wednesday. Mr Gibson asked me to let you know. He can’t come to the phone right now. Bye.’

I was enormously, even disproportionately shocked. That a woman whom I had suspected of the direst stratagems had actually died seemed to me an outrage. In fact any death is an outrage. The death even of a stranger connects one with one’s own losses. My hands were shaking as I dialled Wiggy’s number. Interestingly, she was as shocked as I was, though she had less stake in the matter.

‘What should we do?’ she asked, genuinely at a loss.

‘We ought to offer sympathy. Pay our respects, or whatever people say in these circumstances.’

‘Yes, but they’ll have had the funeral, won’t they?’

‘I certainly hope so. And anyway it would have been private. After all they didn’t seem to know anyone.’

‘Strange, that. She never mentioned anyone else.’

‘We may have answered a passing need.’

‘No more than that, surely. I don’t see any reason why we should get in touch any more. We’ll have to write, of course.’

‘I think we should go round. Show our faces.’

‘Claire …’

‘A brief visit, of course. I thought Saturday. Just to be tactful.’

And to see that everything is in order, I thought. Or not.

We agreed that we would go to Weymouth Street on the following Saturday afternoon, when Martin would presumably have composed himself. What would it signify for him, this
death, annihilation or freedom? I imagined him emerging from the gloom of that flat like Lazarus from the tomb, a free man, but a man with no experience of freedom. How would he use it? Or would it simply take him the rest of his life to get used to the idea? What did one do with freedom anyway, when it was unacceptable, as it undoubtedly was in this instance? Freedom requires courage, and he had none. Without courage freedom declines into existential anxiety, the panic that had briefly afflicted me when I had stood alone in the flat on hearing of my mother’s death. I had recovered, or so I thought. But Martin, I suspected, would not manage so easily. His propensity for guilt, and his obvious loneliness, would stand in the way. Particularly the loneliness. That was why my instinct for turning up in person seemed to me to be the right one. I did not speculate further on my motives. Indeed in that moment of awe at the malign workings of fate I did not speculate at all.

On the Saturday afternoon the door was opened to us by the nurse, still in her white coat. Apart from the coat she looked vaguely dishevelled, or rather less composed. Her face was paler than I remembered it, and the earrings had gone. It occurred to me that she might be genuinely upset by Cynthia’s death. In essence they were the same sort of women, flirtatious, frivolous, flippant. Their camaraderie may have been authentic, although the tone of their exchanges would have driven a serious person mad. But perhaps it is essential to keep up a pretence of recovery just around the corner when someone is ill. This necessitates falsity, all manner of lies, draws patient and nurse together in a terrible complicity, or rather one that seems terrible to outsiders. Apart from the necessary subterfuge this girl struck me as innocent. She would simply have followed the rules that Cynthia had set down. These would
have involved above all monstrous flattery, which would have been quite in order, given the circumstances. That the nurse could manage this gave some indication, I thought, of her own character. Both she and her patient were in some sense female and more female than I was. They were female in a rather old-fashioned way, arch, teasing, happy to be deploying those obsolete instinctive skills even when there was no man around on whom to practise them.

I could never manage that, which explained why I had failed to come up to Cynthia’s standards. Wiggy too is entirely unpretentious. And yet our faces had ached with the effort of supplying some of the hysterical appreciation on which the sick woman had come to rely. Quite simply, we were not part of the conspiracy. She must have considered us intolerably slow-witted. No wonder she had expressed disappointment, justifiably so in her own estimation. And the flowers would have been another awkward touch, funereal. I felt ashamed, slightly disgraced, felt wrong in being present on this Saturday afternoon, when ordinary people were at leisure, when Wiggy and I would soon be at leisure ourselves. In the dark hallway, where we stood uncertainly, there was no indication how we were to proceed. I even thought it better if we simply left a message and made our thankful way home. But this thought was ridiculous. And besides it looked furtive. Already our whispered conversation seemed out of place, like the gossip of servants. Apart from ourselves there was no sign of anyone else being present.

‘You’re still here, then?’ I asked the nurse.

She made a face. ‘Looks like it,’ she said. There was no further explanation.

‘Who is it?’ came a voice from the bedroom. A woman’s voice. We were still standing in the hall.

The nurse sighed, more at the sound of the voice than at the necessity of explaining our presence. ‘You’d better come in,’ she said.

In the drawing-room the opaline lamps were lit, although it was broad daylight outside. But these rooms had always seemed intolerably dark, which may have accounted for Martin’s low spirits. It occurred to me that he must have loathed the flat, which had no doubt been a wedding present from Cynthia’s parents, whom I remembered locating in Orchard Street. The dog had had to go, she said. No wonder: there was no room for an animal in the midst of all these appointments. And maybe even Martin had rebelled at walking a small dog up and down Harley Street. He was hardly a man for a run in the park. No doubt Cynthia had been much affected. She was the sort of woman who would have whispered confidences into the dog’s ear. I thought of both Martin and the dog, imprisoned. And yet Martin had the freedom of the streets, at least in the daytime; she had allowed him that. No doubt I was wrong in imputing lack of feeling to Cynthia. It was not feeling she lacked but sympathy, or rather empathy. She simply could not see what it was like to be another person.

‘Who is it?’ said the voice again, rudely, I thought.

A woman who bore a ghostly resemblance to Martin himself entered the room. We introduced ourselves, explained our visit.

‘Good of you,’ the woman said dismissively.

‘If you could just tell Martin we called …?’

An eyebrow was raised. ‘You know my son?’

This then was the famous or infamous mother, the perpetrator of the original injury, and no doubt of others before and since.

‘You must be Mrs Gibson,’ I said. ‘I see the resemblance.’

‘Hayter. Elizabeth Hayter.’

‘Mrs Hayter. I’m sorry we’ve called at an awkward moment.’

She gave in, collapsed into a chair, passed a worn hand over her careful silver-blond hair. ‘It’s all awkward,’ she said. ‘I really shouldn’t be here myself. I certainly can’t stay any longer. My husband won’t stand for it.’

‘We just wondered if there was anything we could do,’ said Wiggy, although we had not thought anything of the kind.

‘If only you could,’ said Mrs Hayter, who seemed all at once to accept our presence. ‘Martin has completely collapsed. At least I think that is what he has done. Naturally he won’t speak to me. It seems he won’t speak to anyone. He’s in bed. I think he must be having some sort of breakdown. Get us some tea, would you?’ she said to the nurse.

‘I can’t really say I ever got on with my, with his wife,’ she went on. ‘She struck me as silly and selfish. And she made no effort.’ This was rather what I had thought but in view of the woman’s death the thought was now inappropriate. ‘Not that Martin knew how to deal with that sort of woman.’ She gave a brief laugh. ‘With any sort of woman. He belongs in a book-lined study.’ She made it sound like padded cell. ‘And I really can’t spend any more time here. My husband gets upset when I’m away.’