One Good Turn Page 8

Gloria regretted not having had a white wedding with all the trimmings, because now she would be in possession of a big, white leather-bound album of photographs to look back on, photographs that showed she’d once had a family who cared about her more than she realized at the time, and in the album everyone would be looking their best forever. And Gloria herself would be at the center of it all, radiant and thin and unaware of how her life was already slipping out from under her feet. Gloria was surprised Graham had been in an Apex, that wasn’t his style at all.

  It had, in fact, been more of a brown wedding. Graham was dressed in an up-to-the-minute suit in a color that, when Gloria was a child, everyone had blithely referred to as “nigger-brown.” Gloria wore a fur coat that she had bought in a secondhand shop in the Grassmarket. The coat was forties-style, made from Canadian beaver at a time when people didn’t think about whether or not it was wrong to wear fur. Although Gloria would no longer wish to wear the skin of another animal on top of her own, the way she looked at it now, the beavers were already long dead and had lived the happy, uncomplicated life of Canadian beavers before the war.

  If Gloria had had the white leather-bound album of photographs, her mother, father, and elder sister would all have been preserved within its pages. As well as “first to go” Jill, of course, who had traveled up with the posse of school friends and drunk into the night, long after everyone else had gone to bed. Gloria’s brother, Jonathan, would not have been in the photographs because he died when he was eighteen. Gloria was only fourteen when Jonathan died, and the child in her had presumed he would come back eventually. Now that she was older and understood that he was never coming back, she missed him more than when he died.

  As she watched the young policewomen climb back into their patrol car, Gloria thought about Graham in a hotel room, lying on a double bed with a veneer headboard, flicking through the TV channels while he ate steak and chips, a pathetic little garnish of a salad, half a bottle of claret—while he waited for a woman to come and perform professional sex. How many times had he betrayed her in this sleazy fashion while she sat at home with only the Bang and Olufsen Avant wide-screen for company? Hadn’t she known it in some way, in her heart of hearts? Innocence was no excuse for ignorance.

  Gloria had happened to glance down at that moment and notice she was wearing a boxy cashmere camel cardigan from Jenners that had brass buttons that could only be described as tedious. She realized that she was wearing the kind of clothes that her mother would have worn if she’d had more money. The matronly cashmere seemed to confirm something that Gloria had suspected for some time, that she had gone straight from youth to old age and had somehow managed to omit the good bit in between.

  It was not an unfamiliar feeling. Gloria often had the impression that her life was a series of rooms that she walked into when everyone else had just left. The war had been over for only a year when she was born, and it still loomed large in their household. Her father had fought “with Monty”—as if they had stood side by side in battle while her mother had engaged on the home front, heroically growing vegetables and keeping chickens. Gloria grew up feeling she had just missed something momentous that would never come again (which was true, of course) and that her life was thereby diminished. She felt much the same about the sixties. Her formative years had taken place in a no-man’s-land between two revolutionary epochs. By the time the sixties were in full swing, Gloria was married and writing grocery lists on wipe-clean “memo-boards.”

  If Gloria could have gone back, she would not have slipped off that bar stool in the pub on George IV Bridge and followed Graham. Instead she would have finished her degree, moved down to London and worn heels and little business suits (kept her figure), drunk a lot on the weekends, had sex with so many different men that she would never be able to remember their names, let alone their faces. She noticed the time and realized that the eBay auction had closed. She wondered if she had been outbid on her Staffordshire greyhounds. Trust Graham to spoil things even when he was at death’s door.

  On the drive to the new infirmary out at Little France, Gloria had practiced the kind of conversation she would have with Graham. Despite the fact that Gemma and Clare had told her he was unconscious, Gloria hadn’t really foreseen that this would be a hindrance to his talking. Graham talked, it was what made him Graham, so when she saw him in the A and E, linked up to an array of blinking, beeping monitors, she was still expecting him to open his eyes and say something typically Grahamesque (“You took your fucking time, Gloria”). So his absolute passivity was puzzling.

  The A and E consultant explained that Graham’s heart had gone into “overload” and stopped. His “system” had been “down” a long time, resulting in his current state of suspended animation, which he might or might not recover from. “We reckon,” the consultant said to Gloria, “that roughly one in a hundred men die during sexual intercourse. The pulse of a man having sex with his wife is ninety beats

  a minute. With a mistress it rises to one hundred and sixty.”

  “And with a call girl?” Gloria asked.

  “Oh, through the roof, I imagine,” the consultant said cheerfully. “Of course, he might have been revived quicker if he hadn’t been tied up.”

  “Tied up?”

  “The girl with him attempted to resuscitate him, she seems quite the inventive sort.”

  “Tied up?”

  Gloria discovered the inventive call girl in question, the clown-aliased “Jojo,” still hanging around in the A and E waiting room. Her real name was “Tatiana,” apparently.

  “I’m Gloria,” Gloria said.

  “Hello, Gloria,”Tatiana said, her overripe Ls making the greeting seem slightly sinister, like that of a James Bond villainess.

  “His wife,” Gloria added, for clarification.

  “I know. Graham talks about you.”

  Gloria wondered at what point in the transaction between Graham and a call girl that her name would crop up. Before, after—during?

  “Not during,”Tatiana said. “He can’t speak during.” She raised expressive eyebrows in response to Gloria’s unspoken query. “Gag,” she said finally.

  “Gag?” Gloria murmured over a coffee and a Danish in the hospital’s café. It was the first time she had been in the new infirmary and felt slightly disoriented by the fact that it was just like a shopping mall.

  “Stops the screaming,” Tatiana said matter-of-factly, unrolling the pinwheel of a pain au raisin before delicately chewing on it in a way that reminded Gloria of the squirrels in her garden. Gloria frowned, trying to imagine how you could be tied down on an Apex bed. Impossible, surely? (No bedposts.)

  “What does he say,” she asked, “when he can speak?”

  Tatiana shrugged. “This and that.”

  Gloria said, “Where are you from?” and Tatiana said, “Tollcross,” and Gloria said, “No, I mean originally,” and the girl looked at her with her catty green eyes and said, “From Russia, I am Russian,” and for a moment Gloria had a glimpse of endless forests of thin birch trees and the insides of smoky foreign coffeehouses, although she supposed the girl was more likely to have lived in a concrete highrise in some horrendously bleak suburb.

  She was dressed in jeans and a vest top, not working clothes, surely. “No,” she said, “here is costume,” indicating the contents of the large bag she had with her. Gloria caught a glimpse of buckles and leather and some kind of corset that, for a surreal moment, brought to Gloria’s mind an image of her mother’s flesh-pink surgical Camp corset. “He likes to be submissive,” Tatiana yawned. “Powerful men, they’re all the same. Graham and his friends. Idyots.”

  His friends? “Oh, lord.” She thought of Pam’s husband, Murdo. She thought of Pam tootling around town in her brand-new Audi A8, going to her bridge club, her health club, Plaisir du Chocolat for afternoon tea. While Murdo was doing—what? Gloria shuddered to think.

  She sighed. Was this what Graham really wanted, not Windsmoor and Country Casuals, not
tedious brass buttons, but a woman young enough to be his own daughter, trussing him up like a turkey? It was strange how something you weren’t expecting could, nonetheless, turn out to be no surprise at all.

  Gloria noticed that Tatiana was wearing a tiny gold crucifix in each ear. Was she religious? Were Russians religious now that they weren’t Communists? You couldn’t ask, people never did. Not in Britain. On holiday in Mauritius, the driver taking them from the airport to the hotel asked Gloria, “Do you pray?” just like that, five minutes after picking them up and loading their suitcases in the boot. “Sometimes,” she replied, which wasn’t really true, but she sensed he would be disappointed to learn she was godless.

  Gloria had never understood why you would want to wear an instrument of torture and death as an ornament. You may as well wear a noose or a guillotine. At least Tatiana’s earrings were plain, no twin dying bodies of Christ writhing on them. Did the crucifixes ever put the clients off ? Jews, Muslims, atheists, vampires— how did they feel?

  Her father, Tatiana volunteered suddenly, had been a “great clown.” (So perhaps it did explain her nom de guerre in some way.) In the West, she said, they thought clowns were “slapstick fools,” but in Russia they were “existential artists.” She drooped with a sudden Slavic melancholy and offered Gloria a piece of gum, which Gloria declined.

  “So not funny, then?” Gloria said, taking five hundred pounds from an ATM in the hospital corridor. Gloria had been removing five hundred pounds a day from an ATM for the last six months. She kept the money in a black plastic garbage bag in her wardrobe. Seventy-two thousand so far in twenty-pound notes. It took up a surprisingly small amount of room. Gloria wondered how much space a million would occupy. Gloria liked cash, it was tangible, it didn’t pretend to be something else. Graham also liked cash. Graham liked cash a little too much, vast amounts of it swilled around in the Hatter Homes’ accounts and came out as clean as new white linen. Graham had eschewed the old-fashioned way— launderettes and sunbed shops—that his friend Murdo still adhered to. Pam seemed blissfully unaware that the Jean Muir and Ballantyne cashmere that clothed her back were bought with funny money. Ignorance was not innocence.

  Gloria divided the money from the ATM between herself and Tatiana. They had, after all, both earned Graham’s money in their own ways. In the seventies, women had marched for “Wages for Housework.” Wages for sex seemed to make more sense. Housework had to be done whether you liked it or not, but sex was optional.

  “Oh, no, I don’t have sex with them,” Tatiana said. She laughed as if this were the most ridiculous thing she had ever heard. “I’m not an idyot, Gloria.”

  “But you charge money?”

  “Sure. It’s business. Everything is business.” Tatiana rubbed her thumb and forefinger together in the universal language of money.

  “So, what do they pay you for . . . exactly?”

  “Slapped around. Tied up. Beaten. Given orders, made to do things.”

  “What kind of things?”

  “You know.”

  “No, I can’t even begin to imagine.”

  “Lick my boots, crawl on floor, eat like dog.”

  “Nothing useful, then, like hoovering?”

  Who knew—all these years Gloria could have been spanking Graham and making him eat like a dog? And be paid for it!

  “In Russia I worked in bank,” Tatiana said darkly, as if a bank were the most dangerous place in the world to work. “In Russia I was hungry.” She had very mobile features, Gloria noticed, and she wondered if it had anything to do with her clowning father.

  In exchange for the cash, from somewhere inside the confines of her bra, Tatiana produced a little pink card and wrote on the back of it a mobile number and “Ask for Jojo.” She handed the card to Gloria. On the front, it was engraved in black lettering with FA-VORS—WE DO WHAT YOU WANT US TO DO! The exclamation point gave the impression that Favors would provide entertainers and balloons for a child’s party. Again with the clowns, Gloria thought. She had seen that logo somewhere, surely. Wasn’t “Favors” a cleaning agency? Gloria had noticed their pink vans around her neighborhood, and Pam had used them when her own cleaner had a bladder prolapse last year. Gloria had always done her own cleaning, she liked cleaning. It filled in the hours in a useful way.

  “Yeah, sure.” Tatiana shrugged. “They’ll do cleaning if that’s what you want.” “Cleaning” seemed to take on a whole new meaning in Tatiana’s lugubrious accent, as if it were, paradoxically, a filthy (if not slightly macabre) activity.

  The card was still warm from nestling next to Tatiana’s breasts, and Gloria was reminded of collecting eggs from beneath the chickens her mother kept in the back garden, long after war and necessity were done with. Tatiana tucked the money inside her bra. Gloria also frequently carried valuables within the armor of her underwear in the belief that even the boldest mugger was unlikely to brave the rampart of her postmenopausal 42EE Triumph “Doreen.”

  They walked together to the entrance of the shopping mall / hospital, and on the way Gloria bought a pint of milk, a book of stamps, and a magazine from a shop. She wouldn’t have been surprised to find a car wash out the back somewhere.

  The entrance was a huge air lock at the front of the building where people hung around, using their mobiles, waiting for taxis and lifts, or getting a break from whatever birth or death or routine mundanity had brought them here. A couple of patients in dressing gowns and slippers stared glumly through the rain-spotted glass at the outside world. On the other side of the glass, the smokers stared back inside, equally glum.

  It felt cold outside after the hothouse atmosphere of the hospital. Tatiana shivered, and Gloria offered her own three-quarter-length green Dannimac. It made Gloria look like the clone of every other middle-aged woman, but on Tatiana the coat gained a strange un-Dannimac-like glamour. She snapped gum and smoked a cigarette while she made a call on her mobile, speaking very quickly in Russian. Gloria felt a little tug of admiration. Tatiana was so much more interesting than her own daughter.

  “This was a surprise for you,” Tatiana said when she finished the call.

  “Well, yes,” Gloria agreed, “you could say that. I always imagined him going on the golf course. Not that he’s actually gone yet, of course.”

  Tatiana patted her on the shoulder and said, “Don’t worry, Gloria. He will soon.”

  “You think?”

  Tatiana gazed off into the distance like a soothsayer and said, “Trust me.” Then she gave another little shiver that seemed to have nothing to do with the weather and said, “Now I have to go.” She slipped off Gloria’s Dannimac in an elegant, if rather theatrical, way that made Gloria wonder if she had trained as a ballet dancer, but Tatiana shook her head and, handing back the coat, said, “Trapeze.”

  The last Gloria saw of Tatiana, she was getting into a car with blacked-out windows that had pulled up stealthily at the curb. For a minute Gloria thought it was Graham’s car, but then she remembered where he was.

  9

  The nurse with the nice smile sought Martin out in the waiting room. She sat down next to him, and for a moment Martin thought that she was going to tell him that Paul Bradley had died. Would he have to arrange the funeral now that he was somehow responsible for him?

  “He’s going to be a little while yet,” she said. “We’re just waiting on the doctor coming back, then he’ll probably be discharged.”

  “Discharged?” Martin was astonished, he remembered Paul Bradley in the ambulance, blood from his head staining the baby-blanket shroud he was wrapped in. He still thought of him as someone who was wrestling with oblivion.

  “The head wound’s only superficial, there’s no fracture. There’s no reason he can’t go home as long as you can be there to keep an eye on him for the rest of the night. We ask that when people have been unconscious, no matter how briefly.”

  She was still smiling at him, so he said, “Right. Okay. No problem. Thank you—?”

  “
Sarah.”

  “Sarah. Thank you, Sarah.” She seemed very young and small, the epitome of neatness, her blond hair smoothed into the kind of tight bun that ballerinas wore.

  “He said you were a hero,” she said.

  “He was wrong.”

  Sarah smiled, but he wasn’t sure at what. She cocked her head to one side, a sparrow of a girl. “You look familiar,” she said.

  “Do I?” He knew he had a forgettable face. He was a forgettable person, a perpetual disappointment to people when he met them in the flesh.

  “Oh, you’re so short!” one woman declared during question time after a reading last year. “Isn’t he?” she said, turning to the rest of the audience for validation, which was quick in forthcoming, everyone nodding and smiling at him as if he had just turned from man to boy in front of their eyes. He was five foot eight, hardly a midget.

  Did he write like a short man? How did short men write? He had never had a photograph on his jackets, and he suspected it was because his publishers didn’t think it would help sell the books. “Oh, no,” Melanie said, “it’s to make you more mysterious.” For his most recent book, they had changed their minds, sending up a celebrated photographer to try to capture something “more atmospheric.” (“Sex him up” was the actual phrase, used on an e-mail that had been mistakenly forwarded to Martin. Or at least he hoped it was a mistake.) The photographer, a woman, had suggested Blackford Pond to him with the aim of taking moody black-and-white shots beneath winter trees. “Think of something really sad,” she instructed him while mothers with small children in tow, there to feed the ducks and swans, regarded them with open curiosity. Martin couldn’t do sad-to-order, sadness was a random visual spring tapped by accident—RSPCA adverts showing dead kittens, old documentary shots of piles of spectacles and suitcases, Haydn’s Second Cello Concerto. The maudlin, the terrible, and the sublime all producing the same watery reaction in him.

  “Something in your own life,” the celebrity photographer cajoled. “How did it feel when you left the priesthood, for example? That must have been difficult.” And Martin, uncharacteristically rebellious, said, “I’m not doing this.”