The Race (20 page)

“You can leave your stuff, that’s fine,” she said. “It’s just my brother and his wife in your room, they won’t hurt a thing.”

I dreaded returning to Hastings. I hadn’t been in contact with Derek all term, except to tell him I’d be home for Christmas. I had no idea how things would be there. The first surprise was Derek himself, who seemed so chatty and so cheerful I barely recognised him. The second was that he had a new girlfriend. You didn’t have to be a mastermind to see the two were connected.

“Hey, Sis,” Derek said. “This is Linda. We just got engaged.”

They were sitting side by side at the kitchen table. They both had mugs of coffee in front of them, and I noticed they were looking at property details, those print-offs of houses for sale you get given by estate agents. Derek never called me Sis, for a start, but I didn’t dwell on the weirdness of that just then, because most of my attention was focussed on Linda.

Linda had the same very fine, pale hair as Monica, but instead of wearing it short and cut close to her head she had it long, almost down to her waist. She had that white, kind of blotting paper skin you can see all the veins through. Her forehead bulged outwards slightly, fixing her with a look of almost permanent anxiety. She was very skinny, and there was something otherworldly about her. She was one of those women you absolutely cannot help staring at.

If Derek had told me she was a visiting member of an alien race I might even have believed him.

Linda was a dancer. She taught modern dance and ballet at a private studio in St Leonards. I think she and Derek met in a bar, though I don’t know for sure. I could see at once that Derek was smitten, and I mean seriously. The way he looked at her, it was as if he had an engine running inside him and I knew it meant trouble. When I first saw Linda sitting there next to Derek at our kitchen table the image that sprang to my mind was of the porcelain ballerina in the china cabinet at Charlotte House, the pretty glazed ornament that Derek had said was Capodimonte.

I remembered the way Derek had cradled the figurine between his hands, the tense excitement in his eyes as he gazed at her.

When Derek said they were engaged I thought he was joking. Then I saw the ring on Linda’s finger, a cluster of diamonds and pearls, intricate and delicate, like the sweet-scented alyssum flowers in our backyard that forced their way up through cracks in the concrete in early summer. It was a beautiful piece of jewellery, an antique – I knew Derek would never have bought anything from a high street jeweller.

The ring suited Linda’s hand perfectly.

“It’s lovely to meet you,” I said.

Linda smiled, and I realised she was nervous. More nervous than I was, probably.

“We’re selling the house,” Derek said. He drew the various sheets of property details towards him across the table and began sorting them into a pile. “We want to get somewhere together, somewhere decent. This place is fucked.”

“What about Dad?” I said. It was the only question I could think of that felt safe to ask.

“Dad? He’ll come with us, of course. There’ll be plenty of room for you too, obviously.”

He spoke impatiently, as if my questions were irrelevant, a minor annoyance. I was in college now anyway, and both of us knew Dad wouldn’t live much longer. The news of the move should have pleased me but it didn’t. I felt there was too much riding on it. I also didn’t like the nervy, all-or-nothing way Derek was behaving.

“When’s this supposed to be happening?” I looked directly at Linda as I spoke, hoping to get some kind of reaction out of her, but once again it was Derek who answered.

“We’ll be putting the house on the market at the end of January. Dad’s agreed.”

The house was in our father’s name still, but I knew he would agree to anything Derek wanted – he no longer had the energy to fight him. I didn’t know much about the ins and outs of house-buying, but it wasn’t difficult to put two and two together and realise that Derek most likely wanted to get things underway before Dad became too ill to deal with the paperwork. It was Dad who’d have to sign on the dotted line, after all. It was either that or get wound up in probate for months and months, and I knew Derek hated to be made to wait, for anything.

Linda was just sitting there, silently smiling. I realised she hadn’t spoken a word the whole time I’d been there. A strange little shiver went through me as I wondered if she was dumb, a real life version of Hans Andersen’s Little Mermaid, who gave up her voice so she could get closer to the prince she loved.

I always hated that story, mainly because I could never get over how stupid and selfish the prince was, but in any case Linda turned out to be nothing of the sort. She could speak just fine. She was nice, too. Derek seemed keen for Linda and me to get to know one another, and in the days following my return to Laton Road we ended up spending a fair amount of time together. I was surprised to discover how well we got on. The day before Christmas Eve, Linda invited me over to her flat in St Leonards so she could show me the present she’d bought for Derek, a gorgeously expensive cashmere sweater she’d dithered over for hours in some London boutique.

It was ridiculously beautiful. When Derek finally tried it on, on Christmas morning, it seemed to transform him.

“What do you reckon?” Linda said. “Do you think he’ll like it?”

“You’re joking, aren’t you?” I said. “He’s going to love it.”

Linda’s flat was part of a large house at the top end of London Road. The flat had its own private entrance, which you reached by climbing a twisting wrought iron staircase at the back of the house. The flat’s two reception rooms were long and narrow, almost as if they’d been squeezed out of the main house and on to a ledge overlooking the garden. The bathroom on the other hand was enormous, with a claw-footed cast iron bath and a porcelain sink so large you could have drowned a dog in it. There were pretty glass bottles of perfume and lotion everywhere, and all the floorboards in the flat were sanded and varnished. There was the waxy, clean scent of furniture polish. Everything shone.

The flat seemed to be Linda’s perfect habitat, Linda personified. I found it hard to imagine her ever wanting to leave.

She made us celebratory cocktails in crystal glasses, champagne with something purple in it, and tiny gold hearts that slowly dissolved in a ball of pink fizz.

“Happy Christmas,” Linda said. She put on a CD, a string quartet playing slightly off key, accompanied by the sound of children’s voices. Normally I wouldn’t have said much, but the drink made me talkative.

“Are you really engaged to Derek?” I said. It was the question I’d been dying to ask for days, even though I was slightly scared of learning the answer. We were sitting side by side on Linda’s sofa, drinks in hand and shoes off, bosom buddies. The sofa was cream-coloured, draped with a sheet of woven fabric Linda told me she’d brought back from a trip to Morocco.

She turned to look at me. She was cradling her glass in both hands and gazing at me in a forthright, appraising way that made me think at first that she was angry. Then she said something strange.

“Nothing’s been decided yet. Derek and I only met in October. It’s early days.”

“But the ring?” I said.

“That’s just a private joke. Derek spotted it in an antique shop in Birmingham. He said he knew he had to buy it for me the moment he saw it. I put it on my wedding finger because that was the finger it fitted. When you came in the other day, Derek had only just given it to me. He said it was an early Christmas present. I had no idea he was going to tell you we were engaged.” She held up her hand and twisted it from side to side, making the ring sparkle in the light from several floor lamps.

At least that explained her silence. She’d been totally flummoxed.

“You’ve discussed it since, though?” I insisted. “You have told him you thought he was joking?”

“It’s not the kind of thing you need to explain, is it? Not when you’re close to someone. Derek knows how I feel about marriage. We’ll take things as they come, see what happens.”

Linda smiled at me hopefully, as if that settled everything. I had the feeling she was looking to me for reassurance, that she wanted me to agree that yes, of course my brother would understand that the whole engagement thing was a joke, a private understanding between the two of them, that it could never have been for real or at least not yet. I felt numbness spreading through me, body and mind, worming its tendrils into my muscles like the dissolving golden hearts in the purple champagne.

It’s the drink, I thought, knowing it wasn’t.

“What was Derek doing in Birmingham, anyway?” I managed to say.

“Oh, I don’t know. Something to do with a piano. He was back by eleven though. He hates having to stay in hotels.”

She was right about that, at least. Derek never spent a night away from home if he could help it. I remember feeling surprised that Linda knew this about my brother, the kind of detail that was unimportant in itself but the fact that she’d picked up on it seemed to mean at the very least that she genuinely cared about him.

Perhaps she did love him, after all. Perhaps everything would turn out all right.

As I was leaving the flat to go back to Laton Road, Linda asked if she could have my address in London, and my phone number.

“It would be nice to keep in touch, don’t you think?” she said. What I thought was that it was odd, because we hardly knew each other, but I gave them to her anyway. I didn’t expect to actually hear from her. I thought it was just the kind of thing that people say on the spur of the moment.

~*~

I was wrong about that, though. I didn’t hear anything for ages, from her or from Derek, but then just after the Easter vacation I had a phone call from Linda, asking if she could come up to town and take me to lunch one day. I was surprised, but said yes, partly because I wasn’t quick enough to think of an excuse not to, but also because I was curious to hear how things were going. We arranged a suitable time, and then three days later there I was, meeting her at Charing Cross as if we were old friends. She arrived just after midday, dressed in a button-up black jumpsuit that would have looked ridiculously unflattering on most people but made Linda look like a
Vogue
cover model. The jumpsuit’s buttons were silver, and shaped like thistles.

“You look amazing,” I said. I kissed her cheek.

“It’s vintage,” Linda said. “A bit sixties, isn’t it? Do you really like it?”

“On you I do,” I said.

She laughed, and hugged me around the shoulders. “Where shall we go?”

We ended up in a small Italian cafe close to Leicester Square.

“So, how’s college?” Linda asked. I snapped a breadstick in half and said things were fine.

“I got a 2:1 for my Queen Matilda essay,” I said, but I could tell from the way she kept staring past me and out of the window that she wasn’t really interested.

“Have you made any special friends yet?” she asked. She gave a nervous little laugh and shook back her hair. She was wearing purple eyeliner, and eye shadow in a delicate mauve colour. I noticed belatedly how tired she was looking. I began telling her about Robyn, and the violent row she’d recently got into with a guy in her tutor group, but Linda cut me short almost at once.

“I don’t mean that, I mean boyfriends.”

“No boyfriends,” I said. “Sorry.” It wasn’t true, actually, because earlier in the spring semester I had met Peter. Peter was a mathematician and Robyn’s new house mate, a big guy with John Lennon glasses and beautiful hands. Robyn told me he’d once wanted to be a pianist, and it was true that every time I passed by his room I heard music coming out of it, CDs of elaborate-sounding keyboard works performed by musicians I’d never heard of, Glenn Gould and Sviatoslav Richter and Maria Yudina. The music fascinated me. I started dropping in on Peter to find out what he was listening to, and we became friendly from there. His room was outlandishly neat, the tartan bed cover spread smoothly over twin pillows, the rows of complicated-looking textbooks all in order. He spoke slowly and in fits and starts, as if he were struggling to express ideas that had only just occurred to him. He never talked about the work he was doing, and when Robyn told me he’d won several high-profile mathematics contests in his early teens it came as a genuine surprise.

He always seemed pleased to see me, and I found him curiously restful to be with. The way the smile spread gradually across the curves of his gentle moon face was like the sun coming out. He and Robyn seemed to get on very well. They were as different in temperament as you could imagine, but they both enjoyed locking swords over points of politics or philosophy and once they got started they didn’t hold back. Their discussions unnerved me at first because they seemed so hostile, but I soon learned that so far as they were concerned that was part of the fun. Once they were finished they’d make Irish coffee and put on a romcom and it was like all the shouting and point-scoring had never happened.

They were like opposite twins. I know that phrase makes no sense, but that’s how it was. In a way, Peter and Robyn became my surrogate family. I was spending more and more time round at their place and one weekend in late March, when Robyn had gone home to Cambridge to visit her mother, I ended up staying over. Peter and I hunkered down on the sofa and watched all five
Planet of the Apes
videos, one after the other. By the time
Battle for the Planet of the Apes
had finished it was two o’clock in the morning and we were both very drunk. I was supposed to be sleeping in Robyn’s room, but I ended up collapsing on Peter’s bed and just not leaving. We wrestled for a bit, just pissing about, and then Peter suddenly asked me if I would sleep with him.

“Couldn’t you just give me a handjob? I’m so desperate for a fuck I’m going crazy.”

I was surprised, how easy it was. I liked Peter so much I couldn’t bear to say no. I knew how embarrassed he would be the next day, and the thought of how that might spoil our friendship made me decide it might be better if I just went through with it. We turned out the lights then got under the covers and slipped out of our clothes. Peter’s body was large and broad and his flabby stomach was soft as a girl’s but his hands were lovely, dextrous as a dancer’s. They reminded me of Linda’s hands. Peter groaned loudly when he came, like someone had just dropped a rock on his foot, and afterwards was so sweet and so seemingly grateful that I felt glad we’d done it. We talked on and on for hours, in whispers even though the flat was empty apart from the two of us.