Comfort Zone

4 (#ulink_08015741-0ad3-5764-87f8-97ebcb270a25)

Kate Standish Returns (#ulink_08015741-0ad3-5764-87f8-97ebcb270a25)

A bright morning greets Justin as he lies in bed. He looks out on his garden and finds it brimming with blossom. The apple trees, plum trees, cherry trees, all blossoming. He is particularly fond of the cherry trees. He planted them as seeds and tended them, transplanting, then eventually planting out the saplings to form a short avenue. Something strikes him as odd about this spring and summer. Finally, while struggling to sit up, he realizes what it is: he has not heard a single cuckoo with its haunting call: once the very voice of early summer. He sits on the side of the bed, considering getting to his feet. He remembers that Eleanor yesterday had said something about Britain continuing. He could not remember what exactly she had said; indeed, he could scarcely remember yesterday. But after all, when you thought about it: To the East, President Putin turning Russia into a gangster state. To the West, at least thirty-two youngsters shot up on campus, victims of crazies and gun culture. Yes, with all its faults, there was much to be said for Britain. Then … that fatal madness of invading Iraq …

His thoughts drift as on a light breeze. Only rarely now does he conjure up the past. When his parents float into mental view, that view concentrates mainly on his plump little mother, with her good humour and generosity. Her kindness once had to centre on attempts to console Janet and him when their only child, David, was born with Down’s syndrome. His mother had wept with them. They had looked after and loved David. He deflected his attention from Janet’s illness and death as being still too painful. That deeper despair had lingered for years, remaining for ever as a quietly incurable regret. As counterpoint, his love for Kate Standish existed more as an atmosphere, an atmosphere embracing him, than as anything as individual as a thought. He gulped her love down without analysis. He thought of the pallor, the symmetry of her lovely buttocks. Dearest Kate Standish – the happiest chance ever to befall a man … Chance. The roll of the dice … His good fortune still enlivening him, he leans over and switches on the bedside radio.

Some mornings on, some mornings off, depending how he feels. This morning, the English cricket team is playing someone or other and losing – ‘because of bad fielding’, says the commentator. Putting on a pair of socks and a dressing-gown, Justin moves slowly downstairs to get himself a cup of tea. Legs are stiff. He goes down one step at a time. He tells himself he is not feeling lonely. He wonders what his old mother would say if she could see him, coping on his own. How long had she been dead now? He thinks again of Kate Standish, due to return from Egypt any day. He longs to see her again. Yet he is not desperate. They love – this is the miracle that continuously thrills him – they love each other so completely … but cannot verbalize it. He only knows that this love in old age is such a wondrous gift, beyond speech – yet he and Kate often talk about it, exclaiming how their lives have been changed, how each has changed the other’s life for the better. Though they are not slaves to their delight, yet a sense of joy prevails. They greatly care for each other’s looks, bodies, ways of speech … Their love, their particular love, makes them feel wonderful. They spend almost every day apart, alone. Both have work to do. Yet they meet together most evenings and sleep together most weekends. And he adores and admires his Kate Standish as much as he knows how – marvels, yet is certain – that she loves her Justin. Her early life had been one of difficulty. Kate had two brothers older than she was. A week before her third birthday, the three children and their mother had been turned out of their house. The father, Stan Standish, had sold the house over their heads in order to launch a hire-car business. They never saw him again, although Kate did think she glimpsed him once, helping an old woman out of the back of a cab. Kate’s mother established them in one room in Stoke Newington. She went out to work, comforting herself with a bottle of beer every evening. Kate looked after her brothers. They were sad and self-pitying. Justin made Kate laugh by claiming that when young lovers first got together, the sweet nothings they whispered to each other were complaints about their parents. Even older lovers did it. No doubt it was Kate’s hard-learned expertise with deprived children which had led her to set up the refuge in El Aiyat. Wonderful, wonderful Kate Standish! That this extraordinary woman should … Oh, everything … She had been rather formal, rather correct, rather spinsterish, at first. And he had dared to grab her, to dance with her in her kitchen and sing to her – ‘Oh, you beautiful doll, you great big beautiful doll …’ And they had become delighted with each other – and consequently themselves – for all of three years now. And that delight grew. And she was coming home. The radio in the kitchen announces that some police officers needed to carry tasers. He is preoccupied with his thoughts of Kate, but the word ‘taser’ catches his attention. Or is it ‘tazer’? You can’t determine by just hearing it spoken. A rather nice word, though, as words go. Perhaps it is a corruption of ‘blazer’. People don’t wear blazers as they used to.

Moving at a snail’s pace, commenting to himself, ‘I’m moving at a sodding snail’s pace,’ Justin carries his mug of tea into the study. The mug says ‘Carlisle’ on it, printed in blue, above a picture of Carlisle Hall. It is his memento of that day, long past, when Janet and he had visited that northern city. He has owned it for many years and fears that, inevitably, he will break it one day. Shit happens. Today the venerable mug remains intact. He sits at the desk that catches the morning sun when there is sun, and switches on his iMac. With the tea, he washes down the two diuretic pills he has been clutching, the furosemide and the spironolactone, which latter is marketed under the patent name of Aldactone. It will be about an hour before their effects are felt. Few emails appear on the computer screen, most of them boring, either trying to sell Viagra or asking for money. The consolation is one from Eliza Blair. Eliza is no relation to the present Prime Minister Tony Blair. She is young, intelligent, beautiful, lively and a pupil at Swarthmore College in the USA. Justin met her on his travels. She has just had her first story published, and rejoices in the fact. Justin shares her rejoicing at a distance. He hopes her life will be a success.

He potters about, adjusting a few of the piles of paper in his study. He can hear Maude’s radio upstairs. All today, but for Maude, he will be alone, as if on a desert island, unless the builders happen to turn up. This he does not greatly regret, because he will have time to prepare his lecture for the day after tomorrow, when he addresses a group of Christian ladies in a nearby church. He is not looking forward very much to this occasion. After he has showered and dressed, he walks round his garden. This always brings contentment, although Justin sees much that is neglected. He pulls up a strand of bindweed as he passes. A molehill has appeared on the upper lawn. The birds sing in the bushes. A pigeon cries monotonously ‘Walpole stinks, Walpole stinks’ – or so he imagines. But which Walpole is the bird criticizing? Horace Walpole, author of The Castle of Otranto, Robert Walpole, Prime Minister, or Hugh Walpole, author of Jeremy at Crale?

That sad creature, Hughes, had by chance directed him to the Book of Ezekiel. He rested on a bench in his courtyard and looked into the old Bible that had belonged to his mother. I heard also the noise of the wings of the living creatures that touched one another, and the noise of the wheels over against them, and the noise of a great rushing. So the spirit lifted me up and took me away … No doubt of it. Stark raving. But beautifully expressed. The noise of the wings of the living creatures … The living creatures. What if Om Haldar were no longer among the living … Not many weeks ago, Maude had suggested that the young woman should come and live with them in their house. She could have the spare room for her own and be more comfortable than in the Fitzgeralds’ summerhouse. Justin rejected the idea indignantly, saying he refused to have his peace disturbed. His thought was that Kate would not like it, although he did not say so. Now a parallel case occurred to him. His aunt Phoebe, long dead, lived in a small house in St Clements. No garden. When World War Two broke out, there were many Jews trying to escape the cruelties of Nazi Germany. Two little sisters had been brought to Phoebe’s door by a charity worker. Phoebe had taken them in. Phoebe had loved and cared for those troubled and displaced girls. In consequence, the girls had grown to make their way in the English world, successful, well regarded, one as a lawyer, the other as an academic historian. Justin clutched his cheeks. He felt the shame of it that he had turned Om Haldar away. She might well have proved a parallel case with the children from Czechoslovakia. ‘Oh God, I am such a selfish bastard,’ he reproached himself aloud – but quietly, in case the neighbours overheard.

He spent some while ripping ivy off a trellis before returning to his study. There, a woodlouse was crawling over the carpet. Justin liked woodlice and would never harm them, but he believed that each female woodlouse could lay a thousand eggs at a time. Since he could not tell the sex of this particular louse, he dropped it gently out of the window to the earth below, before settling down to compose his lecture. He banished the thought of Om Haldar from his mind.

Breakfast was a small bowl of one of the many kinds of Kellogg’s cornflakes, with some canned raspberries added and milk poured on top. No cream nowadays. Kate had counselled against it to help control Justin’s weight. He washed down his daily diuretic pills with a glass of Volvic water. He unlocked the side gate in case the builders arrived, and stood for a minute or two in the sun of the courtyard. The morning sun shone in the back of the house and the evening sun in the front. It circumnavigated No. 29 during the planet’s daily duties. While he was standing there, Scalli arrived to do the cleaning and deal with his washing. They exchanged a few words. Justin apologized for taking the name of her god in vain. He felt too embarrassed to accuse her of the disappearance of the bodhisattva. It was a trivial matter compared with the disappearance of Om Haldar.

‘How is your son David?’ Scalli enquired. He said that Dave remained much as ever. Regarding her gravely, he enquired after Skrita.

‘Oh, she is so bad. She needs her mother to be by her. She has messed her bed in the night and so they hate her. Were they never sick? That I ask myself, that they don’t have pity?’ She went more thoroughly into the events of the night, from which it could be inferred that her daughter had an anal fissure. Once in the safety of his study, Justin checked his emails. Again, not a word from his agent. Not a word from Kate. Going to the other desk, on which his older computer stood, he began to tap out a sentence or two for his talk to the Christian ladies on Thursday. This he had intended to do for weeks. He continually put it off. Procrastination was the very making of time. Today the task must be faced. One possible subject was the prevalence of chance in people’s lives. It could be some kind of mischance which had overtaken Om Haldar. Her disappearance brought all that to mind again. He had used the theme of Chance in a TV documentary he once produced. But, according to his interpretation, chance ruled out religious belief. It was not the kind of theme to offer Christian ladies on a sunny afternoon. He decided instead to talk about ancient inventions which had reinforced civilized values – notably, the restaurant and the orchestra.

Justin recalled that Marie had once played violin in the Oxford Symphony Orchestra. He phoned her in order to check on a few details, and then they chatted for a while. Something Marie said reminded Justin that mention had been made of Ken’s sister Catherine.

‘Is Catherine married? Why doesn’t she come and live in England, or have she and Ken quarrelled?’

There was a silence on the line, until Marie said, ‘It wasn’t quite like that, dear. Best to leave that subject behind a closed door, comprendez?’ So Justin returned to his lecture notes.

Once he had decided upon a subject, the piece flowed easily. The doorbell rang. There stood his accountant, John Stephens. Justin had forgotten the appointment. He might once have been vexed by the interruption of his thought. But it was accountancy, in a way, which kept him afloat. He welcomed John in and got them both cups of coffee. Instant coffee. Douwe Egberts. ‘I see the old Anchor has closed down,’ John said. ‘There’s a For Sale board up.’

‘It’s not much of a loss. People living nearby were always complaining about the noise.’

John was a pleasant man. He wore a grey suit and tie, as became a respectable accountant, and made the collection of documents for VAT as painless as possible, despite Justin’s awful muddle of papers on both his desks. John was also Justin’s lady love’s accountant. Justin’s lady love – when not in Egypt administrating the Aten Trust in El Aiyat – lived nearby, in Scabbard Lane. Justin had lent Kate his Toyota while her car was being repaired; the Toyota was locked in her garage. He needed to take a suit to the cleaner and he wished to go into town to buy a particular book. When he asked John if he would mind giving him a lift, the accountant readily agreed. Justin suffered from getting into and out of cars, so John kindly carried his suit into the cleaner’s for him. As they drove into Oxford, John talked of this and that; his character was on display. One focus for his interest was the sale of the site of the Anchor, currently awaiting demolition. He delivered Justin to the very door of Blackwell’s bookshop. ‘Tremendously good of you!’ Justin exclaimed. He was amazed by John’s kindness and the kindness of others.

The assistant in Blackwell’s was agreeable. They did not stock the book Justin was after, but the assistant looked it up on the computer. ‘The British Occupation of Indonesia, 1945–46. By Richard Macmillan. Routledge/Curzon. Seventy-five pounds.’

‘Heavens! Seventy-five pounds!’ Justin exclaimed. ‘I’m going to have to look at it in a library before I stump up seventy-five pounds for it. Keen though I am to read it.’

‘It is a bit steep,’ the assistant agreed. ‘And no paperback available.’

But when the troops disembarked at Padang Docks, he said to himself, they had no idea that this was Indonesia. To them, it was just Bali. Sixty years ago, still vivid in mind … Bali! Had it been Bali and not Padang? He was unsure. And supposing Om Haldar had lost her memory and was wandering lost somewhere nearby? He ought to do something. Even though it was not exactly his business.

Making his way slowly to Queen Street, Justin stopped at the Gents in Market Street to relieve himself. In Queen Street, he went into Marks & Spencer to buy a packet of their Rich Tea Fingers. He invariably ate one Rich Tea Finger with his early morning mug of tea. He picked up one or two other things on the way. That was how stores made their profits – from human greed. He also bought a Lemon Loaf Cake. One of the things he disliked about capitalism was the way in which it encouraged greed. All commercial television was founded and funded on greed. With that profound thought, he crossed the road and climbed on a No. 8 bus for Headington. His left leg was painful today, both above and below the knee. It still hurt even when he was sitting down. He wondered how many other people on the bus were concealing aches and pains. Perhaps you keep quiet about it in the hope of arriving at an imagined Heaven after death, when aches and pains are swept away, along with the Oxford Bus Company and all.

When he entered his house, he found the phone was ringing. He rushed for it.

‘Oh, you’re there! Thank goodness! Justin, dear, I am back early and I’ve had a shock. Can you come round?’

‘Kate! Are you okay, Kate?’

‘Yes, yes, please come round.’

‘I’m on my way.’ As he dumped his plastic bag full of Marks & Sparks goodies, he caught sight, through the kitchen window, of Maude wandering about the lawn. Like a lost soul, he thought, with some distaste.

Kate’s house was brick built, probably about 1875, in an imitation cottage style. It had a rustic porch, covered by honeysuckle, and a smart kitchen at the rear, recently added and installed by Kate. The house was approached by a shingled drive, fringed by pyrocantha and laurel. Before Justin had reached the door, Kate came out on the drive and flung her arms round him. She was a fair-haired woman in her early seventies, sturdily built, grey-eyed, her face showing a few wrinkles and browned by the Egyptian sun. She was wearing a light khaki suit, crumpled from her travels.

‘I had a fright,’ she said, when they had finished kissing. ‘I’m really being silly about it.’ She hugged him. ‘Oh, good to see you again.’

‘And you, darling. I have missed you so much.’ As always there was an air about her as if something pleasant was about to happen, even as if there was something pleasant happening at that very moment. He marvelled at it; it was an air he never quite achieved. Kate explained that a taxi had brought her to her gate. As she was walking up the drive with her luggage, she saw a black dog lying sprawled by the porch. It wagged its tail in a lazy way. The shock came when she got up to the porch and found a man sitting on the bench there, in the shade. He gave every appearance of having settled in for good. ‘He seemed apologetic, but did not move. He asked me if I wanted a gardener.’

‘Oh! Don’t tell me …’ Justin enquired what the man looked like. Kate said he was nondescript, untidy and dirty, wearing a yellow jacket with torn jeans. Justin said his name was Hughes. He seemed to be a wanderer. A vagabond – and a nuisance.

‘That would be he,’ Kate said. ‘He said he liked the look of my house, and had never had a house of his own. He said that hundreds of people were murdered for their houses every year. That did scare me, and the way he looked at me. I told him I needed to get indoors because I had an appointment with a police inspector. He did then get up and move out of the porch. As I was picking up my luggage, he said that his dog – who was tied on a length of rope – needed a drink of water. Could he bring it in?’

‘I hope you didn’t let him in!’ said Justin.

‘I certainly didn’t!’ Kate said she had bundled in with her luggage and hastily locked the door behind her. Hughes stared in the window. She got a cereal bowl, filled it with water for the dog, and offered it through the window. He took the bowl with one hand and tried to grab her wrist with the other. She remembered him saying, ‘Let me in – I won’t hurt you. I never hurt no one.’ But she managed to bang his wrist against the edge of the window and then slam it shut.

‘Very nasty for you, darling,’ Justin commented. ‘But he didn’t threaten violence, did he? Did he clear off then?’

‘He sort of hung about and then he disappeared.’

‘Did you ring the police?’

‘I rang you!’

They went inside. Kate sat on his knee and they kissed and cuddled each other.

‘It’s so good to have you back.’

‘Oh, I missed you. But I was busy.’ And so on.

‘How’s David?’

‘As usual. It’s time I went to see him again.’

‘I’ve heard you say that before.’

He looked down at the ground. ‘For once, things have been happening here,’ he told her. ‘A woman from Saudi or somewhere has disappeared. And they are beginning to demolish the Anchor.’ He paused before saying with a laugh, ‘And Ken and Marie took me to see a strange old lady in Elden House. It’s been a full life, despite your absence.’ He was determined not to tell her how much he missed her. That would seem wimpish.

‘And how’s Maude?’

‘She’s okay. Could become – well, Muslim.’

‘Couldn’t she go into Elden House?’

‘Can’t afford it.’