The Facts of Life (58 page)

‘No. Honestly.’ She picked up her bag. ‘I promised I’d see Shirley too. I’ll grab a cup in her room.’

She kissed him swiftly on the lips, flashed a nervous smile at his grandfather as she left and all but curtsied. He suddenly seemed very tall, his hair very white and flowing as he loomed in the corner by the bathroom door, staring like an Old Testament patriarch. Remembering the change in his appearance since their last meeting, Jamie realised how great a shock his weight-loss must be, and tried to establish a light atmosphere.

‘Yes,’ he said, as his grandfather remained silent, ‘I’ve lost a lot of weight and I look like Death itself. You’d better sit down and get used to it.’

His grandfather stepped forward and sank into the armchair nearer the bed, never taking his eyes off Jamie.

‘How was your holiday?’ Jamie asked.

‘Fine. I brought you this.’

He unwrapped a glistening blue bowl and set it on the windowsill, far from Jamie’s reach.

‘Thanks,’ Jamie told him. ‘It’s lovely. You look well. Bet you had a better Christmas than us.’

‘Did you catch it from your … from Sam?’

‘No. I haven’t known him long enough and anyway, he’s testing negative.’

‘Who then?’

Jamie shrugged.

‘Who wants to know?’ he asked.

‘I’ll break their neck,’ his grandfather said gravely.

Jamie laughed softly at him.

‘Honestly! It isn’t like that. It takes time to show up. It’s hard to pinpoint.’

His grandfather raised a hand as though to strike someone, but let it fall back on the chair arm as the spasm of impotent fury passed.

‘Damn,’ he hissed. ‘You’re so young still.’

‘Yes. But I’m not dead yet and I’m not dying.’ Jamie’s tone was studiedly calm. The anger he had always planned to show once they met again had been usurped by a need to reassure and shield. ‘I’ll be out of here in a few days, then I’ll get my energy back and get on with life again.’

‘I could kill him. Whoever he is.’

‘Grandpa,
stop
it!’ Jamie begged, his laughter a little forced now. After days of good behaviour from his visitors, even Sandy, the old man’s naked emotion left him no time to armour his vulnerability. ‘You sound like someone whose teenage daughter’s got pregnant. But of course. She did. She was here this morning, in fact. She’ll be sorry she missed you.’ Jamie’s tone was mocking, and yet the image had often occurred to him, that someone had impregnated him with this vile offspring, with its long gestation period and monstrous ability to use its host to sire progeny in others even before it had made its presence felt.

‘Sorry. I’m sorry. I –’ His grandfather broke off, dropping his face and briefly touching his right temple before pulling a hand through his shock of hair. When he looked up he seemed younger, almost boisterously healthy, his African tan flushed pink by emotion and the heat of the room. It was easy, for a few seconds, to see how he must have looked at Jamie’s age, just as it was easy, in Jamie’s sickness to see how
he
would look were he allowed to age to his sixties and beyond.

‘Is your friend ill too?’

‘No. I told you. He’s still testing negative. We’ve been careful.’

‘And he’s still … around?’

‘Yes. He’s on a new site, in Wandsworth. He comes in every night.’

‘He must love you, then.’ His grandfather spoke as though the possibility were fresh to his understanding.

‘I suppose he must.’

‘Do you love him?’

‘Yes.’

His grandfather absorbed this.

‘I don’t understand,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘No-one expects you to.’

‘Maybe it’s age.’

‘Maybe.’

‘I think –’ His grandfather sighed deeply, looking out of the window where rain was lashing the glass. For an awful moment Jamie thought he was going to break down or start shouting again, but he merely took a breath and looked back to the bed. ‘I think Sally would have understood. Your grandmother was entirely
open
to new things. She had no prejudice.’

Jamie only nodded. He pictured the old man driving back to his empty flat or out of London to his empty studio beside The Roundel. Normally he imagined his grandfather in a shifting crowd of old friends, admirers, colleagues, musicians, concert agents. He imagined him grateful for the odd day of solitude. Now he received a new, sharp sensation of a kind of bustling loneliness within him, a loneliness grown adept, with the years, at covering its own tracks.

‘Your friend Miss Toye has quite a fan club here,’ he joked. ‘When
Mulroney Park
comes on, they practically take the phones off the hook. They were very impressed that my grandfather had had an affair with the woman. It made me quite proud of you.’

His grandfather gave a strained smile and promptly changed tack.

‘You say you’ll be out in a few days?’ he asked.

‘Yes. They need the bed. I’ll be very weak for a bit. I had to give up my job in the record shop. They’d have me back, I think – they, er, they have no prejudices either – but I’ll need the rest. I sleep for hours. I’d probably nod off behind the counter.’

‘You must come home to The Roundel. Be quiet there. Your flat is no good. You need to get out of the city. I think The Roundel’s special … It’s a healing place. I’ve nothing much on. Nothing I can’t postpone or cancel.’

‘Grandpa, I –’

‘I can take care of you, Jamie.’

‘Are you
rescuing
me, then?’

‘Yes.’ The old man smiled at last, surprised at the unexpected truth. His tone was wry, as though making a sly reference to an old family joke. ‘Yes. I will rescue you.’

‘I’ll … I’ll have to talk to Sam about it this evening.’

‘Oh. Of course. I’d forgotten. Talk to him by all means. Perhaps he has plans for you.’

‘Can I call you tomorrow?’

He nodded. On rising he still made no move to touch Jamie or embrace him. Why should he? Theirs had never been a relationship of touch and a sudden change now, even after their recent estrangement, would ring false. But he held him with his big, dreamer’s eyes for a moment and Jamie once again pictured him as a young man, resolute, passionate, fighting against the degradation thrust upon him by foreigners and against the insidious bacillus in his lungs.

Shattered from the unexpected encounter, he slid into a deep sleep where he sat, upright against the pillows. He dreamed of water again but this time it was a river. He was lying back on cushions in a shallow boat and a young, dark-haired man he knew to be his grandfather was vigorously punting them upstream in dazzling summer sunshine. He felt very tired in the boat but utterly safe, utterly trusting.

Influenced perhaps by the afterglow of the dream, he had expected Sam to feel jealous of his grandfather’s suggested intervention. He had forgotten Sam’s earlier enthusiasm for the house and his suggestion that they all go to live there.

‘Fine,’ Sam said at once. ‘I’ve a couple of weeks to go on site. Alison and I were worried about you being at home on your own. Go. Will it be warm enough?’

‘Sure,’ Jamie nodded. ‘There’s central heating. If the house gets cold I can always go and sleep in the studio. He’s got a sofa-bed in the main room over there.’

So it was decided. Jamie left the hospital and was driven home by a hospital volunteer. He spent a shattering afternoon packing a suitcase, amazed and furious at how long it took him. Then he allowed his grandfather to rescue him from urban temptation and unwholesomeness. Alison ascertained there was a clinic in Rexbridge he could attend as an outpatient and had the ward sister contact it to send on his details. Sandy made relevant enquiries to check that the local GP, should Jamie need him, was not on any blacklists. Miriam, meanwhile, having got so into the swing of visiting the ward every morning, applied to the volunteer coordinator and was delighted to be asked if she would give watercolour classes to any patients who had a yen to learn.

Rather than making do with teenage leftovers, Jamie was to establish himself at The Roundel for the first time in his adult life, surrounding himself with his favourite clothes and discs and books. He was no sooner over the threshold than he realised he was going to be there for longer than the fortnight agreed with Sam. The old house claimed him. His grandfather’s cleaner had been in. The place was sweet with the lavender and petrol smell of furniture wax, its air still tangy with glass cleaner. Rugs bore the satisfying marks of recent hoovering. Woodwork glowed.

Tired after the drive, weary too of his grandfather’s watchfulness, Jamie made himself a cup of tea then took himself off to bed with the radio and a new copy of
Hello
. He unpacked the idol from the suitcase and set her in the middle of the bedroom mantel-shelf so she could command the room. The bed was made up with fresh sheets that smelled of soap. There was a small pile of mail at the bedside. He set the magazine aside and opened the envelopes. Several contained get-well cards from local acquaintances who doubtless knew he had been ill but had no idea what with. Alison might, he reflected, have allowed it to be assumed that the pneumonia was a result of weak lungs inherited from his grandfather. There were the usual sorts of stale letters addressed to one’s childhood home – school newsletters appealing for retirement presents and contributions to building funds, a flier advertising reductions in the Rexbridge store where he had bought his pinstripe suit.

He saved the most interesting-looking envelope until last. The stamp was German and, as he tore out the thin sheet of paper, he inevitably fell to thinking of Germans he had been to bed with and to whom he might rashly have granted his address in younger and less guarded times. Prepared for unconvincing expressions of enduring affection or roundabout requests for invitations to stay, he was nonetheless disappointed to find a formal, typewritten note on official paper. The notepaper bore the name of the hospital where he had been taken for his leg to be mended after his skiing accident. He remembered sleepless nights in a half-empty ward, an awkward visit from a representative of his holiday insurance company and one from the friends he had been skiing with, who were embarrassed at being obliged to return home without him. He remembered the very specific pain and then the intolerable itching of the stitched gash in his calf, encased in plaster. His tourist’s German had improved a little during his recuperation – forced as he was to resort to German gossip magazines for his entertainment in lieu of further visitors or anything to read in English – but it was insufficient to master the formal sentences in the letter. He understood
We regret, dear sir, it is our duty to inform you
and
blood
and a reference to a firm of lawyers in Bonn. Assuming it was some tedious technicality arising from his long since settled insurance claim, he placed it on one side and returned to reading an article about the health minister’s daughter and her plans for transforming Godfreys’s mansion once they returned from their Jamaican honeymoon.

It was only the next morning that, feeling stronger, buoyed up by a change of scene, he tracked down Alison’s old German dictionary and began to piece the sense of the letter together. It had nothing to do with holiday insurance. He was being respectfully informed that, in the wake of a national scare, residual supplies of HIV-infected blood had been traced to the hospital’s bank, dating from before the period in which he had been admitted to its casualty department. They saw from their records that he had received a transfusion following severe loss of blood during his accident and subsequent operation to repair the bone. It was thus faintly possible that he had been placed at risk of accidental infection. They would strongly advise his applying for an HIV test at once. They added, in an elliptical slur on his nature, that it was, of course, so long ago now that any unfortunate infection showing up in his blood could most probably be traced to more than one possible source. While the hospital was declaring itself immune from legal blame, having since been closed down, re-opened and privatised with new staff, any enquiries of a legal nature might be referred to a firm in Bonn who were representing the government department directly responsible for the testing of blood supplies. Et cetera.

Jamie read and reread the letter, in whose margins he had scribbled his stumbling translation, astonished that it could say so much in so few words and with so little attempt to dress up its message in softening conditional clauses or sympathetic expressions. Then he took it to the fireplace and set fire to it in the grate, watched by the inscrutable idol. He thought about this news when Alison rang during a quiet moment in her office in the afternoon, thought about it again when Sam rang sweetly to say nothing in particular after work. He thought about it especially when, with the utmost caution and deliberation, his grandfather asked him over supper whether there was any chance that he might have passed the virus on to anybody he knew. He decided, however, to tell nobody. Not Sam. Not anyone.

There had been much talk of innocent victims. Iniquitous talk implying, by its choice of epithets, that the majority of people were, on the contrary, entirely to blame for their HIV infections or, worse, entirely deserving of them. Jamie knew with a strong, irrational certainty, that his infection
had
come from the blood transfusion, but far from feeling the helplessness of outraged innocence, he felt the anger and shame of betrayed trust. He was indignant at the letter’s implications, feeling like a soldier coming round in a field hospital to find he had been bayonetted ignominiously in the back while fleeing a battleground. To die from such a cause – and he was dying, he knew, despite the talk of living and continuance he felt obliged to offer Alison and Sandy – to die thus was somehow more painful, futile and less
honourable
than to die from an old-fashioned sexual infection. He did not want to become like the women and children on the ward, surrounded by vengeful kin, isolated by his new blamelessness from the one thing that might give his death a value.