Just then he leant forward and turned on the radio. It was soul music, late night music. You’re the one I nee-heed, baby, throbbed the voice, silky smooth. Inappropriate perhaps for these suburban streets, but reviving the magic of last night it suddenly seemed appropriate for them.
Without you-hoo honey I can’t go on-hon. The heater warmed them; the seats seemed softer; they relaxed. The mood of the dark elastic music spread over and around them, filling the car and reducing their nocturnal separation to just a few minutes, a pause of no importance. Even the driving gloves looked friendlier.
The empty streets fled past. Sockittome sockittome sockittome! Geoff turned and smiled at her. What did it matter that the sky was grey?
They arrived in record time and drew up with a flourish. At the fortress façade of the school Claire could see many faces pressed against the windows, and was glad for Holly’s sake that they were arriving in such OK style. After all, when most people arrived in shamingly posh and sedate cars, to be whisked off in a flaming red sports job … Holly, released by a shadowy matron, raced towards them.
‘Hiya! What a super car!’
‘Isn’t it,’ said Claire. ‘This is Geoff. He’s very kindly brought me down.’
‘Squash in,’ said Geoff. ‘There’s just enough room in the back.’ Because of the threatening sky the hood was up, and Holly, waving goodbye to all those eager and impressed faces, scrambled on to the tiny back ledge.
Slowly they drove along the coast road. ‘Well,’ said Geoff. ‘What are the plans? What’s Eastbourne got to offer?’
‘Last time,’ said Holly, ‘Claire took me on to the Downs and we found an old barn and jumped in the hay. And then she drew some pictures for me on the cover of her exercise book, then we had a lovely picnic and then we read Beano.’
‘Oh dear!’ Claire glanced at Geoff. ‘How silly it sounds.’ Put so baldly, such a lovely day did sound on the infantile side, but it had been fun.
‘Yes … well.’ Geoff cleared his throat.
‘Oh goodness, we won’t do that today,’ said Claire quickly. ‘What would you like to do, Geoff?’
‘Yes, well, I can’t quite see myself jumping in the hay I’m afraid.’ He laughed, glancing down at his two trouserlegs, each with its centre crease. ‘I don’t think I’d be very good at it. What would Holly like to do?’
‘Just muck about,’ she said.
‘Ah.’ He pondered this one.
‘She means just sort of play about,’ said Claire, and stopped. Impossible to muck about with Geoff there, so adult and unknown. For he did seem like that; now that the radio was off and Holly was breathing down their necks and outside it had got so very much greyer and chillier, that warm car-spell seemed to have broken and she felt quite stiff with him again. She looked at her watch and to her relief it said eleven o’clock. Only an hour before they could reasonably have lunch.
‘Let’s drive around and look at the houses,’ she said. ‘And then we can go up on to the Downs and look for somewhere nice to have our picnic.’ That solved that, then.
The picnic was not a success. Looking back on it, Claire realized that she should have abandoned the whole idea as soon as she knew Geoff was coming.
The weather didn’t help, of course. It was drizzling now, gently but relentlessly, and they had to park beside a bus shelter, a cement edifice with mists on all sides, so that Claire could set up the apparatus inside it.
‘Doughnuts?’ gasped Holly. ‘Real doughnuts?’
‘Amazing, aren’t they,’ said Claire. ‘Look, they come out of the tin all squishy. I can’t believe they’re doughnuts at all.’
‘Er, are you going to fry them?’ asked Geoff, looking chilly on a wooden bench. ‘What happens if somebody comes along. I mean, won’t it look rather odd?’
‘We’ll give ’em a bite,’ said Holly. ‘Lucky things.’
Claire laid the first lump of dough in the fat. It spluttered and hissed. Geoff, who’d approached, flinched back and wiped his trousers.
‘Oh dear!’ cried Claire. ‘Has it splashed you?’
‘Don’t worry, they’re old.’ Geoff sat down again on his bench and gazed at the bizarre little ceremony.
‘Ooh look!’ shrieked Holly. ‘It’s puffing up!’
It was. Magically, it was puffing up into a real doughnut. Claire put the next lump of dough in the pan and stole a glance at Geoff. He looked cold and uneasy on his bench.
‘Geoff, let’s start on the sandwiches!’ she called in the bright tones she sometimes used at school. ‘Here!’ She unwrapped them. ‘And I’ve made us some coffee.’ She uncorked the Thermos. ‘Holly, you look after the doughnuts.’
She sat down next to Geoff. ‘I’m sorry it’s not very glamorous,’ she laughed. ‘I didn’t know you were coming, you see.’
‘Don’t worry. It all looks great fun. It is great fun.’
He munched his sandwich, and as he munched he was thinking, she was sure, of a cosy lunch for two in some roadside pub … glowing fire, beer, chicken in the basket or perhaps steak …
‘Quite a curious meal you’re eating over there, Holly,’ he said.
‘Mmm,’ mumbled Holly, mouth smeared with cream slice.
Afterwards they all sat in the car.
‘What would you like to do now?’ asked Claire. It was still drizzling, of course.
Holly suggested: ‘We can always roll the tyres down the hill.’
‘What?’ asked Geoff.
‘Just up the road there are lots of old tyres. They’re at the top of a hill and we can roll them down.’
There was a silence, a long one. Then Geoff asked: ‘Why?’
‘It’s fun. We can have races.’
Another silence. Then Geoff rallied, rubbing his hands and trying to look keen. ‘Right then!’
‘Of course not,’ said Claire quickly. ‘Let’s, well, we can … there’s lots to do.’ But her mind was a total blank.
‘We can do it in the rain,’ Holly persisted. ‘It’s even better in the rain, so long as you’re not a sissy about getting wet. They go faster, you see.’
Another silence. Out of the corner of her eye Claire could see Geoff taking a stealthy look at his watch. She cast her eyes over the Downs with their shifting veils of rain. They gave her back no answers. How annoyed she felt! Annoyed with herself for dragging Geoff down to Eastbourne and offering him nothing more exciting than freezing to death in a concrete bus shelter. She’d lost him for good; he’d never telephone her after this. And she felt annoyed that she’d spoilt Holly’s day, because if they’d been alone then the bus shelter and the tyre-rolling would have been fun. Afterwards they’d have gone back to school and dried out in Holly’s dorm. Then perhaps she would have helped Holly sew the pincushions shaped like mice that were suddenly and passionately fashionable amongst her friends. Difficult to imagine Geoff sewing pincushions.
She gazed along the red bonnet, glistening with moisture. And if I were alone with Geoff, she thought, we could have driven to a pub with confidential lighting, and held hands under the table, and talked like we talked last night. Just for a second she actually resented Holly.
‘Oh well,’ she said briskly. ‘It is awful weather, isn’t it. Perhaps we’d better take you back to school, Holly.’
Geoff started up the car and they drove back across the Downs, through the grey and shifting rain. Oh dear, thought Claire, a sister’s day and a lover’s day. Both so nice, but how stupid of me to think they could possibly mix.
But surprisingly enough, when they’d said goodbye to Holly and she’d disappeared back into the fortress, things relaxed in the car. Perhaps it was relief at being alone; perhaps it was that, now Geoff had seen her messed up in the rain with wind-purpled hands and all that careful eyeshadow smudged, the last shred of unreal party glamour, which was nice but which didn’t really suit them, was washed away, revealing something more durable underneath. And perhaps, too, it was that Geoff had entered, brief and unsatisfactory though that ent
ry had been, into the closed world of the two sisters – a strange place rarely glimpsed even by their parents – and so had entered into a secret.
Whatever the reason, they talked. As the trees loomed up out of the mist and flashed by, he talked about his job (an accountant), his flat (a nice room in Bayswater), his family (just a mother), and about how he’d once wanted to do all sorts of things but had somehow ended up doing a business course instead.
And when they’d arrived back in Clapham and stopped outside her flat, the rain that blotted out the landscape no longer seemed a depressing backcloth. Instead it seemed to enfold them in their own cocoon of murmuring heater and sudden closeness, and to prompt them at last to stretch out their arms and kiss each other, cold noses and all, across the difficult bucket seats.
ten
BECAUSE LAURA HAD never given her blood she felt alert and uneasy when the morning came. She had no idea what the day had in store, no idea at all. In fact, as she stood in her room, one arm in and one arm out of her coat, she nearly gave up the whole plan. If she had, the next few months would have been considerably different. But she didn’t. Don’t be feeble, she told herself, doing up the buttons.
Outside it was densely foggy. Nothing was visible but the pavement in front of her. It was one of those days when you can’t see the houses that surround you, you can just feel them in your bones, as you can feel it in your bones when there is someone standing behind you and not speaking.
Iron gates loomed and she was in the park. Pavement was replaced by grass; sounds faded. First-gear noises from cars grinding up the hill grew fainter, muffled in mist, and were replaced by birdsong ringing in the air around her. She met no one. Looking up she could make out the glow of the sun and, very faintly, the web-like branches of the trees. Like the red webs inside her body.
Dreamlike, it seemed. She, Laura, usually so substantial with coat and shoes and money in her pocket felt vanished away, leaving only a miraculous body, blood vessels under the skin; complex busy blood vessels, webs of them. As if I’m a sacrifice, she thought. Perhaps they felt like this on the way to the blood-stained altar, walking in their white robes through a silent world. This day seemed portentous.
‘HOI! Wotcha think you’re doing!’
A car brushed by. Laura leapt back on to the pavement, dreams scattered. The main road. The fog was lifting, the street busy and the clinic, when she arrived, quite unsacrificial.
‘Good morning, dear,’ said a pleasant plain receptionist. Laura was shown into a waiting-room which looked quite ordinary really – potted plants, a stout woman making tea, piles of Punch and Woman’s Realm. But she still felt odd, what with the fog, and the fact that she was missing a whole morning’s seminar and, above all, the unknown in store for her behind that closed door. And also odd because, since some time yesterday morning, she hadn’t said a word to a living soul. It startled her to realize it. Living in her bedsit, she had not used her voice for twenty-four hours. Long silent afternoons, long silent evenings.
‘Miss Jenkins?’
Laura grabbed a Woman’s Realm as a sort of reassurance. Whatever took place behind that closed door, she could always bury herself in ‘Cakes for that Festive Occasion’.
She was in a room full of motionless figures on beds. She didn’t look too closely. Clutching her magazine, she lay down where she was told. She thought of Tony Hancock and closed her eyes.
Once the thing had gone into her vein, she felt able to open them again. She stole a glance down. There it hung, a plastic sack, reddening already and rocking ever so gently from side to side. As if becoming just a touch tipsy with her blood. Ugh.
To avoid this she looked at the other people who lay like beached whales on either side of her. Her two neighbours, in particular, she inspected with curiosity. Were they surviving? On one side lay a gaunt leathery woman, her eyes closed. Not a flicker. She looked definitely yellow. Perhaps she’s dead, thought Laura. Perhaps they’ve forgotten to stop her pump thing and it’s just going on and on till she’s drained.
She turned to the left. He was younger and he looked relaxed yet somehow incongruous, as if someone had put him there by mistake. Perhaps it was the way he was wiggling his toes in their holey socks. Plus his wild hair spread all over the dainty white pillow. Not what Woman’s Realm would choose for a hero.
She was thinking this when a nurse approached him and released his arm. He sat up, scratching his head and saying something to the nurse that made her laugh in that humouring nurse-like way, as if he were a silly child.
Once he had left the room she could concentrate on her arm, which after all wasn’t half as bad as she thought. To be absolutely honest, it didn’t actually hurt; just a benign firmness, a smiling pressure in the grasp of the rubber round her vein. Against the wall stood a fridge. The nurse opened it and Laura glimpsed a row of fat red sacks, each smug with its treasure. Her neighbour’s sack, identical to them, was placed at the end of the row and the door was closed.
Five minutes was an awful long time to do nothing in. She tried to turn the pages of Woman’s Realm but they were too floppy to be managed with one hand. So she listened to the tactful little hum of the machine busy at her arm, and gazed up at the ceiling.
‘All over, dear.’ The nurse stilled the swinging bag and dismantled the apparatus. It relinquished its vein with a sigh.
‘Now sit up carefully, dear, just in case you feel a little dizzy.’
Laura hoped she would feel a little dizzy, as proof of her loss, but she didn’t. She watched her sack being put into the fridge next to his, touching it. This made her feel odd, as if he and she were already acquainted.
He hadn’t left. He was still in the waiting-room, sitting in a chair and rolling a cigarette.
‘Reckon we deserve a Guinness after that,’ he said, looking at his cup of tea. ‘Could manage a pint nicely.’ He was growing a moustache, Laura noticed, a tentative moustache; its shadow on his face looked curiously mannish.
The stout woman set down another cup of tea for Laura and turned to him. ‘Now you know,’ she said, shaking her finger, ‘that there’s no smoking for half an hour after giving blood.’
‘It’s me nerves, me nerves,’ he said.
She chuckled. However corny they were being, everyone got pampered in this room just for five minutes.
‘Well, be it on your own head,’ she said. ‘Don’t ask me to catch you if you faint.’
‘She will,’ he replied, looking at Laura. ‘Won’t you?’
Yes, thought Laura. She smiled into her teacup.
The stout lady went back to her urn. Now they were alone, Laura wondered what she could say. He looked content enough, idly turning the pages of her Woman’s Realm and raising his eyebrows at some pictures of Princess Anne. Nice eyebrows; humorous, quizzical ones. She would ask him a question.
‘Have you been here before?’
‘Yeah. It’s me only good deed for mankind.’
‘I was terrified at first, but there’s nothing to it, is there?’
‘Right. And they give me time off, too, to come here. If there was Guinness it’d be perfect.’
He stubbed out his cigarette, pocketed a couple of biscuits and stood up. Laura stood up too, perhaps because vistas of his less good deeds intrigued her. She would leave at the same time.
Outside it was sunny. He stood still and considered for a moment; then he turned to the right and wandered along the pavement. Why shouldn’t she turn to the right also? The only alternative was turning to the left. She looked at his back view; he was ambling along as if he didn’t mind her catching him up. Ah, now he’d stopped; he was munching a biscuit. Why not, Laura? The sun’s shining; be bold. Fifty-fifty chance you’d be walking this way anyway.
She caught him up.
‘Have a biscuit,’ he said, offering her the other one.
It startled her, how pleased she was. She took it and they both ambled along, munching. One biscuit each; it was nice.
Outside
a supermarket she stopped. She had some shopping to do. She also had the desire to test the bond between them. Would the thread snap? She mumbled something and went in.
For a moment she was pleased that he had followed; then she was gripped by her usual paralysis. She always felt like this in supermarkets; it was something to do with the pitiless lighting and long perspective of little packets. She never knew what to choose. The packets dismayed her too; the earth’s fruits dismantled and reassembled into economy-sized plastic squares. Masses and masses of them, rows and rows.
Clutching her wire basket, she hovered. There were only a few people about, preoccupied and boring-looking, like people usually look in supermarkets.
He held up a tin, eyebrows raised hopefully. ‘Have these,’ he said. ‘Such a classy label.’ Marron Purée, it was; its picture was embellished with leaves. He dropped it into her basket.
Hands in pockets he shambled along the row of frozen meats, looking as incongruous here as he’d looked in the clinic, enquiring and messy, altogether rather cheering in the sterile aisles. Definitely not preoccupied and boring.
‘Could you find me some sausages?’ she dared to ask.
He rummaged amongst the frosty packets and found her some – beef ones, she didn’t like those, and far too many just for one – but she took them. He went off, eyeing the shelves.
‘Treacle you must have,’ he called out. ‘Reminds me of me youth.’ He put the tin in her basket. ‘Hey, and a bottle of this. What a kitsch colour. I like it.’
‘But I don’t like it. It’s raspberry cordial.’
‘Put it on your mantelpiece and admire it. Give it a home.’ He put it into her basket and wandered off again. She looked down at her odd little collection.
He was holding up another tin. ‘Must try these.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I’ve never tasted them before. Whole Guavas. From Malaysia. Somebody must buy them after all that; think of them bumping about on donkeys, and packing cases, and –’
‘– stick ’em in, then.’