In a Good Light (46 page)

‘So that night I waited till Cassie was asleep,' Penny was saying, ‘and John was slumped in front of the telly – it was
Farewell, My Lovely,
funnily enough – and I switched it off and said, “Do you want to leave me?” And he sat looking at the dead TV for about ten seconds and then said, “Yes please.”'

‘Just like that?'

‘Just like that. It was unbelievably civilised.' She gave a little snort of self-mockery. ‘So I said, “In that case you'd better go while Cassie's asleep.” So he packed a bag and was gone within ten minutes. And then I lay down on the floor and howled like a beast.'

‘Oh no!'

Penny laughed at my tragic expression. ‘It's okay. That was more than two years ago. I'm fine now. Good riddance. I'm just a bit overweight from all that comfort eating.' She patted her hips. ‘And I'll tell you something. That first year of being alone was a lot better than the last year of our marriage.'

‘What's the moral of this story?' I asked, sensing that further demonstrations of pity were superfluous.

Penny drew her features into a mask of deep consideration. ‘I'm buggered if I know,' she said.

I wondered if she would ever get around to asking about Christian, or whether I would have to bring his name up myself, but eventually, after enquiring about Mum and Dad, and hearing their stories, she said, ‘Now tell me about your brother.' She had gathered, from that feature about me in the
Guardian
that we lived together in eccentric seclusion, shored up by a rigid structure of routines and rituals, and I was able to confirm that this had, until lately, been the case. I didn't, couldn't explain about Geoff, but I did tell her about the new and unwelcome influence of Elaine.

‘So having given him the best years of your life, as it were, you are now facing imminent eviction, physical and emotional,' was Penny's blunt diagnosis of my predicament. ‘No wonder you're pissed off.' Put that way it made me sound rather selfish.

‘I'm not pissed off with Christian,' I said, trying to frame a defence. ‘I'm delighted that he's happy. I just can't seem to hit it off with Elaine. And that's going to be a barrier between us.'

‘Poor old Elaine,' Penny tittered.

‘Why poor old Elaine?' I said. ‘Poor old me.'

‘I'd hate to have you as an adversary. You'd be worse than ten mothers-in-law.'

‘What do you mean?'

‘Well, you've got that same unbreakable bond with Christian, but you're also young and smart and pretty and sarcastic and opinionated. Oh no, my sympathies are all with her.'

‘You don't paint a very flattering portrait of my character,' I said. And you don't even know the half of it! I thought, beating back a tide of self-disgust.

‘I've always been your biggest fan,' she replied, glancing at her watch, and then jumped to her feet. ‘God, is that the time? I've got to pick up Cass. You'll stay till we get back, won't you? She's dying to meet you properly. Make yourself at home. Oh, and can you keep an eye on my tree-man? If he comes down see if he wants a cup of tea.' And she snatched up her keys and bolted out of the door. It only occurred to me once she'd gone that there was no good reason why I shouldn't have accompanied her, and I felt an inexplicable twinge of resentment at having been abandoned.

There is something slightly menacing about the silence of an unfamiliar house. I paced from room to room, in search of an innocent diversion. It was almost impossible not to pry. My wanderings took me back to the kitchen, where I read all the correspondence tacked to the memo board – mostly spelling lists for Cassie, school newsletters, reminders about piano exams and dental appointments, party invitations and lists of emergency phone numbers. So much administrative support for one small girl!

I noticed on the window ledge the agate egg displayed on a pewter napkin ring, and wondered whether Penny had
produced it especially for the occasion: it looked somewhat less dusty than the surrounding ornaments.

To make myself useful I did the washing up from lunch, managing in the process to splash my suede skirt with droplets of eggy water from the omelette pan. In the course of putting the crockery away I located the dishwasher, hidden in one of the units. As I filled the kettle, another express train roared through the cutting, slaughtering the peace of the afternoon. High up in the poplar the tree-man swayed dangerously, balanced, legs apart, between two of the slenderest vertical branches that could possibly support a man's weight. He was working with his back to me, and a combination of woolly hat, earphones and the buzz saw made him deaf to my shouts from the patio, but I could see he'd nearly finished, so I carried his cup of tea down the garden, my high heels collecting a ruff of mud and grass with each step.

A cold, low sun was shining in my eyes as I approached the piles of fallen branches. I could see the decapitated trees silhouetted against the platinum blond of the sky. Far above me the man reeled in his chainsaw and in a sweeping stroke sliced through the one remaining bough. Too late I realised it wasn't roped; too late the man turned and saw me; too late I struggled to free the heels of my boots from the sticky clay into which they'd sunk.

‘Look out!' he shouted, futilely, as the branch came down like a javelin, catching me on the shoulder and knocking me to the ground. Trees, sky, man: all disintegrated in a blizzard of pain. My hand raged as if on fire; I could feel the wetness of blood pooled in my palm, and then, worse than all, I tried to move my legs but nothing happened. I started to scream and scream.

A voice said, ‘Are you all right?' then ‘
Esther!'
and the coloured fragments slowly reassembled themselves before my eyes to form a face I recognised.

‘Hello, Donovan,' I said to the tree-man, who had now entered my dream in this strangely transfigured state. ‘I think you've killed me.'

MY CLAIM TO
be mortally injured turned out to be an overstatement, but my identification of the culprit was spot on, and so there came about an additional reunion that day which, though unexpected on both sides, nevertheless could not properly be called a coincidence.

It was Donovan who reassured me, once he'd lifted the amputated branch from my legs, that my inability to move them was due not to paralysis, but to the spiked heels of my boots, which had bent back to snapping point as I fell, pegging me to the ground. The absurdity of this image was something I could only appreciate later: pain tends to override subtler sensations.

It was Donovan who helped me to hobble up the garden, and made me run my hand under the cold tap until it ached. The burning and wetness I had experienced turned out to be attributable to nothing more gory than spilt tea.

‘I didn't realise it was you up there,' I said, flexing my
fingers. Every time I tried to withdraw my hand from the stream of tap water, Donovan took my wrist and firmly put it back again. ‘Penny never said.'

‘Well, it's nice to see you again, Esther,' he replied. ‘Though perhaps not in these circumstances.' As soon as the shock of emergency was past, his apologies began to contain an element of reproach. ‘You know it is actually considered quite dangerous to stand under a tree while it's being cut down.'

I gave him a baleful look, but he just smiled. Now that the fog of pain had dispersed I could see clearly how little he'd altered. Unlike Penny, he was just as I remembered him, his skin maybe slightly weathered from a life spent out of doors. In fact, when I tried to picture his eighteen-year-old self, I found I couldn't visualise anything but the face before me. Strange the way memories age to keep pace with the march of time. Voices, of course, never change, and although there was nothing particularly distinctive about Donovan's – classless, regionless – I would have recognised it anywhere.

‘Do you do this sort of thing for a living?' I said. ‘Or is it a one-off?'

‘Both. I do gardening for a job, but this is just a favour for Penny. I didn't know you were going to be here. I didn't even know you were still in touch.'

‘We weren't – until this afternoon.'

‘Ah. That explains why Penny was so adamant that the trees had to be done today,' Donovan said, as much to himself as to me. Having decided that my hand was sufficiently chilled, he set about making us a cup of tea, assembling the necessary ingredients in a manner that showed complete familiarity with the contents of the cupboards. He even knew where the paracetamol lived. It occurred to me,
with a spontaneous surge of dismay, that perhaps he and Penny were a couple.

‘You seem very at home here,' I said, watching him dump the mashed teabags in the bin. ‘You must know Penny quite well.'

‘I do. We'd exchanged addresses that time she ran my car off the road – for the insurance claim. And then about a year later she got back in contact. I went to their wedding. We've been good friends ever since. In fact, I'm Cassie's godfather.' He said this with a hint of pride that I found completely disarming.

‘I didn't know you even believed in God,' I said, accepting two paracetamol and sending them on their way with a gulp of hot tea, which made tears spring to my eyes.

‘Ah, well, there's a lot you don't know about me,' he replied. My hand, which was palm up on the table, had started to hurt again now that it was dry. As I looked at the red scald mark my fingers gave an involuntary twitch.

‘Is that still hurting?' Donovan asked.

‘It's okay. I don't think I'll be able to work for a day or two though.'

‘Oh God, of course, you're a painter aren't you?' he said, looking stricken with guilt. ‘That's going to be a bit of a problem isn't it?'

‘I wasn't thinking about that,' I said, pinching an imaginary paintbrush, and making a few experimental strokes. ‘It's the waitressing I'm worried about.'

‘You do waitressing? Really?' He seemed surprised by this, although to my mind it was no more menial than gardening. I started to tell him about Rowena's, and that led on to an account of my life with Christian, to which he listened with an almost unnerving attentiveness.

‘You must be some kind of saint,' he said. ‘Don't you ever feel bitter about all the opportunities you've missed because of living with Christian?'

‘No, no, it's not a sacrifice. We're like best mates.'

‘But do you have to do everything for him? Even personal stuff?'

‘No, he's not helpless. He can do most things himself. And he's got a carer. He can get around in his wheelchair fine, he can do housework, cooking. He could go out more: he's got a specially modified car, but he doesn't like going anywhere too far on his own because there's always a chance he'll get stuck, and he'd rather die than ask a stranger for help.'

‘I should have come to see him,' said Donovan. ‘I must have been down at the caravan when it happened, and then I went off to the Pyrenees with some friends and lived there for a while, so I didn't even know until ages after the event.'

‘What were you doing there?'

‘Fruit-picking, cleaning cars, odd jobs, begging. There were four of us living in a VW van. It wasn't very civilised.'

This was how Penny found us when she returned with Cassie – sitting at the kitchen table, talking away like the best of friends.

‘Jesus, what happened to you?' she demanded. ‘Did Donovan push you into a ditch?'

‘Practically,' I replied, ignoring his indignant expression. I suppose my appearance had deteriorated in her absence: I had discarded my crippled boots and snagged tights, and there were grass stains and welts of mud on my white shirt and suede skirt. I began to think living above a dry-cleaner's might not be such a bad idea after all.

‘You didn't mention you were expecting company, Penny,' Donovan said drily. ‘I expect you forgot.'

‘Oh no,' she replied sweetly. ‘I thought it would be a nice surprise. I didn't think you were going to beat her up. That wasn't in the plan.'

‘Hello, I'm Cassie,' said Cassie, who had stood by unacknowledged for what was, to an eight-year-old, an unconscionable length of time. ‘You came to my school.'

‘Hello, I remember you,' I said. ‘You asked some very intelligent questions.'

Satisfied, she turned to Donovan. ‘You said next time you came you'd put up my mirror.'

‘Done it.'

She beamed. ‘Are you sleeping over?'

‘No, I am not “sleeping over”, madam,' Donovan replied. ‘Haven't you got any homework to do?'

‘Only piano practice. You can come and listen if you want.'

‘Excuse me,' he said to us, removing his boots and following her down the carpeted hallway in his socks.

‘They get on brilliantly,' said Penny, as the plink-plonk of an elementary two-handed exercise issued from the sitting room. ‘He's great with kids. He and his wife couldn't have any of their own,' she added in a whisper. ‘Did he tell you that?'

I shook my head. I was thinking how defenceless men look without shoes. ‘We didn't get on to him,' I said. ‘I was too busy talking about me.'

‘They did all these tests,' she went on, ‘and they couldn't find anything wrong with either of them individually. But they seemed to have this one in a million incompatibility, like their genes were allergic to each other.'

‘How awful. Can't they adopt?'

‘Unfortunately it didn't come to that. I think the marriage
was under too much strain. When John left me Donovan was spending a lot of time round here propping me up, which didn't exactly help, and then his wife had an affair with a guy she met at the gym, and she got pregnant, like straight away. So that was that.'

‘Eek.' What a bunch of amateurs we had turned out to be in the art of relationships. Two wrecked divorcees and someone's bit on the side.