Well, maybe not quite that far; but the first move contains all that is to come, or all that will not come, which is even more daunting. Lifelong joy or lifelong loneliness lie tightly twined in those few brief words. The burden is too great, the risk too terrible. Matt knows he dare not make the move.
It’s a bit late to expect the girls to come knocking on your door.
His mother’s words haunt him. We’ll see, he says to himself. We’ll see about that.
The pipe work sealed once more, he opens the water valves and tests the system. The pump starts up with a slight shudder. The water streams out of the shower. He checks that the thermostat is performing as it should, turning up the setting until the water scalds his hand and then down again. Then he shuts off the shower and cleans up the grease marks he has left.
He’s aware as he packs away his tools that he’s moving slowly. What am I waiting for? Nothing is going to happen unless I make it happen. There’s no war on any more.
Matt envies his granddad, who met the love of his life in a bombed-out building in the Blitz. He pulled her out of a hole in the ground and carried her in his arms down a flaming street, or so he said. So of course they fell in love and were married.
I could carry Meg in my arms across a universe in flames. But I can’t speak a few simple words.
They manage things better in other countries. Your parents make a match for you, with someone you’ve never met. They let you meet, and if you’re not totally turned off you say, Okay, why not? The love comes later. Anyone can love anyone, really, if they try.
So why do I know that Meg is the one for me?
Because of the way she looked when she was crying. No, I knew earlier than that. Truth to tell I knew before I even saw her. I knew from the sound of her voice. Can’t say how or why. She just sounded right.
He can delay no more. He opens the bathroom door and joins her in the lounge. She’s sitting on the sofa with her eyes closed listening to the radio. A Brahms trio.
Her eyes jump open as she hears him come in. She reaches out and switches off the radio.
‘All done,’ he says.
‘Oh, that’s wonderful. Thank you so much.’ She gets up, avoiding his gaze, and looks round for her handbag. ‘How much do I owe you?’
‘Well, the pump was £109. It’s a very straightforward job. I quoted you £150, didn’t I?’
‘That doesn’t seem enough. Are you sure?’
‘Yes, that’ll be fine.’
She writes him out a cheque. Her hand is shaking. Her face is very pale. In a moment she’ll tear out the cheque and give it to him, and he’ll pick up his tools and his shoes and go. Then the greatest test his life has yet offered him will have come and gone and he will have failed.
‘There,’ she says.
The sound of the cheque being torn from its stub fills the universe.
‘I’m so grateful,’ she says.
He takes the cheque and pushes it unseen into a pocket. He picks up his tools with one hand, his shoes with the other. Four steps between where he stands now, by the little white coffee table, and the door.
‘Any time,’ he says. ‘You’ve got my number.’
One step. There’s a humming sound in his ears. He feels flushed, short of breath. Maybe I’ll faint, and she’ll have to revive me. But of course he’s not going to faint.
A second step. Time moving slowly.
Dithering in the doorway like my dad. But not in the doorway yet.
She goes ahead of him, opens the door for him, can’t wait for him to go. Or a kindness, seeing that both his hands are full.
Someone has left a window open in the stairwell. A gust of cold air rushes in to the centrally heated flat. It picks up some papers resting on a music stand in the corner and flutters them onto the floor by his feet.
He puts down his shoes to pick up the papers. Sheet music. Handel.
‘Are you a musician?’ he says.
‘Oh, no,’ she says. ‘I just sing in a local choir.’
‘I play the violin.’
‘Do you?’
She looks at him with startled eyes.
‘I’ve played Handel. His Violin Sonata in A major.’
‘I didn’t know Handel wrote violin sonatas.’
‘Oh, yes. All the composers who write for the voice write for the violin too. It’s the closest instrument to the voice. The sound is made in the same way, really. A violin has a part called the voice box. It’s different for every instrument. There’s a tiny part in a violin called the sound post, it goes just under the right-hand foot of the bridge, its position makes all the difference to the instrument’s tone. Move it as little as a quarter of a millimetre and it changes everything.’
He knows he should stop talking but he can’t. She’s gazing at him wide-eyed.
‘There’s a special tool called a sound-post-setter which slips in through the F-holes, the sound holes, and goes round the corner to grasp the sound post and lets you move it. There are special dedicated tools for everything to do with making violins. I have a spoon gouge made by J. Spiller that I found in an antique shop, a junk shop really, I only paid a fiver for it, and it’s the best you can get. I was so happy when I took it home.’
He stops as abruptly as he started, and finds he’s standing in the open doorway, his eyes on the floor, breathing rapidly. His cheeks are hot and his back is cold in the wind.
I’m a nutter, he thinks. What on earth do I think I’m doing?
‘Do you make violins?’ she says.
‘Restore,’ he says. ‘I restore old violins.’
‘That’s amazing,’ she says. ‘I had no idea.’
‘No,’ he says, still looking down.
‘Why?’ she says. Wonder in her voice.
‘It’s just something I do,’ he says. ‘I have a shed out the back, where I keep all my tools. I like to go out there and work.’
He looks up then and finds her eyes fixed on him with such an intense gaze, as if she truly wants to understand him, that he says, ‘I could show you, if you like.’
‘Your shed?’
‘The violins. The tools.’
As he says it he hears himself and drops his eyes again. The violins, the tools: why would she want to see all that?
‘Would you?’ she says. ‘I’d love to see how you work on the violins.’
‘I’ve got about forty instruments. Some in pieces.’
‘Forty violins!’
He’s breathing deeply now. He feels suddenly buoyant, like a balloon. He wants to soar.
‘You could come over tomorrow evening.’
There: the dangerous words are out. No flash of lightning. No end of the world.
‘I’d really like that,’ she says.
He has asked her to come and see his violins. She has said yes. The first highest most unclimbable wall has tumbled before them. Now it can all begin.
He tells her where to come. They agree a time: seven o’clock tomorrow evening. He picks up his shoes and his tools and leaves her flat.
Outside there’s an icy wind blowing across the car park. Matt Early smiles at the wind, he hugs the wind, the beautiful wind that blew the sheets of music to his feet. This late afternoon December wind is his blitz, his miracle, his matchmaker. Meg knows nothing of how close he came to leaving her without a word. Maybe one day in years to come, sitting side by side in a house they share together, listening to the roaring of a south-westerly outside, he’ll tell her why she must always be grateful to the wind. She’ll say, Oh, but we would have sorted things out one way or another. But he knows this isn’t true. It takes some outside agency to get things started. An accident, a break in the pattern.
My God! I told her about the sound-post-setter! She must think I’m insane.
He drives home smiling to himself.
31
As the train pulls in to Gatwick Belinda becomes ever more silent. It’s not nerves, or fear; she’s focusing her energy. Already her mind is reaching
forward to the coming encounter. What she has been calling to herself ‘a bit of a laugh’ has grown into an event of significance, a test of something that matters to her very much.
Have I still got it? Or am I old now?
‘Good luck,’ says Laura. ‘Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do. Not that there’s much I wouldn’t do. In fact, I can’t think of a single thing.’
‘I wouldn’t go camping,’ says Belinda.
‘Yes, you’re right. There are limits.’
They smile at each other. The doors go pip-pip-pip.
‘Hey ho,’ says Belinda. ‘Away we go.’
She gives Laura a last wave as she crosses the platform to the escalator. At the top a short blank passage leads to automatic doors. They open before her, as if controlled by her will, ushering her into a space that seems no longer to be located within her everyday world. Above the check-in desks the flight destinations cast their magic spell: Orlando, Agadir, Faro, Kos. Distant gleams of sunshine and sensuality, the sheer otherness of the names flickers in this brightly lit and thronging hall. A ceaseless stream of passengers with trolleys or hauling wheeled suitcases flows across her path. People in an airport are no more beautiful than elsewhere, but they have about them an aura of soiled glamour that suits Belinda’s mood. Their lives are in flux. No social expectations bind these hurrying forms. They come from everywhere, go to everywhere, free from memory or obligation. The arrivals hall shivers with rootlessness.
Belinda looks for signs to the Hilton hotel and finds none. At the information desk she’s told to head for the coach station, where there will be signs. She joins the stream of arriving passengers, her own lack of luggage marking her out as an alien among aliens, and rides the travelator past a long red Virgin advertisement. The travelator moves too slowly. She starts walking on it, carried forward by her own power and by the motion of the conveyor beneath her. This makes her think of the greater motion that propels her, the spinning of the earth. And the planet’s orbit round the sun. Everything is in motion. Everything on the point of departure.
Caution. You are reaching the end of the conveyor.
Yeah, right. Slow down. I’m not jetting away for a holiday romance. Not seventeen any more. Kenny’ll take one look and send for the cocoa.
But what if …
All those years ago, the rumour shared in girly whispers among her group of friends. Jimmy Kennaway has a really big one. Like, Oh boy! That is big!
The coach station is down one level. She descends the long ramp in a stream of screeching trolleys. Here at last she finds a sign to the Hilton, discreetly tucked beneath the arrows pointing to the Short Stay Car Parks and the Pick-up Point. That could be quite funny if she stopped to think about it, but she’s not stopping and she’s not thinking. On past the Orange Car Park. Turn left into the final approach: a wide white windowless walkway that rises gently towards the hotel entrance.
It seems to Belinda that her flight has now begun. This is takeoff. With each step she’s leaving her former life behind. Somewhere below her now, rapidly dwindling from sight, is the land where Tom had his fling. Now it’s my turn.
Do I really mean that?
Hey, no one’s listening. It’s just me here. Who do I think I’m fooling? I’m a bad girl out to have some fun.
Christ, that takes me back. I was a bad girl once. Those were the days.
At the end of the walkway she finds herself passing through a Costa coffee bar. A cluster of men, all wearing suits, all with their ties removed, are talking to each other in low voices. Beyond the bar the hotel lobby proper opens up, an atrium of sorts, though without the grandeur the term implies. On three sides of a long rectangle rise open corridors of hotel rooms. Above, vaults of grey and grubby glass.
For the first time it strikes Belinda that she’s not sure exactly where she and Kenny are to meet.
She cruises the lobby looking for him. Or rather, since she has no idea what he looks like these days, looking for a man who looks like he’s looking for her. One or two of them glance up as she goes by, but then look away again.
Then she recalls that she’s to ask for him. She goes to the concierge’s desk. A screen on the wall is running Sky News. British banks admit losses in the Madoff fraud.
‘I wonder if you have a message for me. I’m Belinda Redknapp.’
A shiny-faced concierge consults a screen concealed before her at waist level, as if casting her gaze down in respectful modesty. Yes, there is a message. Mr Kennaway is in Room 1229. She dials the room and speaks into an unseen microphone, now looking a little to Belinda’s left and into the distance.
On the TV there’s a picture of a house in Dorset with a giant Christmas tree that comes out through the roof. How did they do that? You wouldn’t cut a hole in your roof for a Christmas tree, would you?
‘Miss Redknapp is in the lobby, sir. Certainly, sir.’
The concierge turns to Belinda with a smile that glistens with hostility.
‘Through Costa’s. Take a left. Room 1229.’
She looks down once more at her concealed screen. Belinda is dismissed.
What’s her problem? What does she think I am, a hooker or something?
This possible misunderstanding rather boosts Belinda’s self-esteem. As she walks back through the coffee bar she catches sight of herself in a glass divider screen. I could pass for forty in a dim light.
The promised corridor opens directly off the café. It stretches away into the distance, offering door after door as if reflected in parallel mirrors, identical and infinite. The carpet is ginger and cream, the doors pale blond veneer. She can feel her heart beating. The truth is she loves hotels, even corporate clones like this one. Their rooms offer anonymity and privacy, which is odd when you think how close they are one to another. How do they soundproof them? Behind any of these doors anything could be happening, and no one else would know. But it’s not hard to guess. What do you find behind every door? A room with a big wide bed. No wonder hotels are sexy.
Now she has reached Room 1229. She stands before it, preparing herself. The first look will tell all. He’ll open the door, he’ll see her, and … What? Will his face register a momentary flicker of disappointment? She wishes now she’d sent him a picture of herself as she is today. But how could she? That would have been too open an admission that they are meeting for a date. And anyway, he’s not stupid. He knows she’s over fifty. Even if she’s still seventeen inside.
So am I really going to do this?
Do what? It’s only a catch-up with an old friend.
She knocks on the door.
‘Belinda?’ A deep voice from within.
‘Yes.’
‘Door’s open. Come on in.’
She opens the door. She comes on in.
The room is in semi-darkness, the curtains drawn over the tall windows. A blond-wood desk. A flat-screen TV. The only light comes from a lamp with a boxy cream-coloured shade standing on the far bedside table.
The bed almost fills the room. The bedspread is dark blue. The pillows white. And lying on the bed, stark naked, is a man with a bald head and an erection. And, Oh boy! That is big!
‘Surprise, surprise!’ he says.
Yes, it’s a surprise.
‘Making up for lost time,’ he says.
She stands motionless, the door still open behind her. She knows she should turn and leave, at once, but for the moment shock has frozen her to the spot.
‘Shut the door,’ says Kenny. ‘Hell of a draught.’
She shuts the door. She’s in the room with a naked middle-aged man in a state of arousal, and she’s shut the door. I must be mad, she thinks. But what are you supposed to do in these circumstances?
She realizes she must speak. Whatever she says now must lay the groundwork for her exit. Dinner waiting to be cooked, Chloe waiting to be fed, Tom waiting …
‘Hello, Kenny,’ she says.
She hears herself with surprise. There seems to be a disconnect between what sh
e wants to do and what she actually does. Who’s in charge here?
‘Hello, sunshine,’ he says. ‘Come and be friendly.’
He pats the side of the bed. His voice is a soft blur in her mind. He wants to be friendly. The habit of a lifetime prompts her to respond with answering friendliness. Already it’s too late to say, What are you doing there? She had just the one chance and she missed it. Perhaps she should have screamed. But why? She’s not a Victorian spinster.
On one point Belinda is crystal clear. This naked stranger does not excite her. His well-advertised desire does not arouse in her an answering desire.
Yet here she is, crossing the room like a sleepwalker, sitting down by him on the side of the bed, all to be friendly. She is held in the iron grip of politeness.
‘You know what’s so bloody wonderful about growing older?’ he says. ‘You don’t have to pretend any more.’
‘No,’ says Belinda, pretending.
‘You have no idea how much I’ve been looking forward to this,’ he says. ‘I swear, I’ve been hard for days.’
He pats his enormous cock with a broad hairy hand.
‘That’s nice,’ says Belinda.
She has no idea why she’s saying these trite and pointless things, except that they seem to come naturally. Like when some friend does her hair in a new way that makes her look like a dead lesbian and you say, ‘Love the hair.’ It’s just the way the world works.
Kenny puts an arm round her waist.
‘One of my lifetime regrets,’ he says. ‘That you never got to meet Matey down here.’
Matey. Oh, God.
He holds his cock in his hand and wags it at her, speaking as he does so in a growly mock-Cockney voice.
‘Wotcher, Belinda. I’m Matey.’
‘Hello, Matey,’ she answers helplessly.
‘Shake ’ands, sweetheart,’ says Matey.
Kenny takes her hand and places it on his cock. The cock feels warm and hard against her palm. In order not to look at it she looks at Kenny’s face, and because he’s smiling, she smiles.
Up to now she has avoided taking in the details of his appearance. The very first glance told her the Kenny she has treasured down the years has gone. Now in his place she sees a slack-jawed face, flushed cheeks, hairs growing out of both nostrils, one discoloured tooth. And that smile.