After Everything Page 12

  Peter grabbed a wooden spoon and held it up as a microphone. He was well on his way through a rendition of ‘Boulder to Birmingham’ when Frieda flicked him on the backside with a tea cloth and laughed. ‘Move on, my baby, to the new century, the new music – Adele, Kings of Leon.’

  ‘Or best of all,’ said Peter, putting down the spoon and reaching for a glass of water, ‘the new silence.’

  Frieda’s upper lip was beaded with perspiration. He gently wiped it dry with his forefinger and embraced her. He loved the feel of her, her ampleness and softness and her smell: slightly salty with that smell of amber soap blended with it. She never wore scent, yet another thing he found tantalising.

  All his women before Frieda wore scent like a suit of armour. He could identify and date his affairs by smell alone. Light floral scents during his twenties. Then fruity warm scents and after that the powerful overbearing perfumes of the eighties, which he loathed because they permeated everything and made him want to gasp for air. No one before Frieda had come to him smelling of themselves.

  The tarte tatin was out of the oven and the chicken almost cooked when Penny arrived. Peter hadn’t seen her since she’d moved to France. He barely recognised the plump grey-haired matron at the door, dressed for the garden in shapeless trousers, sensible flat-heeled shoes and a kind of flapping jacket in varying shades of beige.

  Almost defiantly anti-fashion, he thought, as he picked up her tapestry holdall and walked her through to the kitchen. How incongruous she looked against the stainless steel worktops and lacquered cupboards, how different from Frieda’s geometric chic.

  The two women looked each other up and down, in that female manner which took less than a second to clock the shape of calves and ankles, size of girth and manner of dress. They smiled. Despite their differences, they seemed to like each other. He was relieved.

  After the business of showing Penny her room and the small bathroom off it, and pouring glasses of wine amid desultory chat, they went into the sitting room.

  ‘Thank you for this. It’s very kind and I appreciate it,’ said Penny. Her voice was still clear and girlish, the only thing about her that had not changed. She sighed and stretched her legs. Surprisingly hairy legs, Peter noticed.

  ‘It’s been a bit of a day.’ Penny sipped her wine. ‘God, that’s good. Where on earth do you think Sandy has gone? Maybe he ran away to avoid seeing his ex-wife.’ She giggled in a way Peter couldn’t remember.

  Frieda smiled. ‘Don’t tell Angie that when she and Tim arrive. You’ll be in for an hour-long sermon on the benefits of truth and reconciliation.’

  Peter tried to decide what was different about Penny. Her appearance, of course, but there was something else, something invisible yet apparent. It was as if by losing her looks she had found herself. All the old shy self-consciousness had disappeared. In its place was a wry good humour. It suited her, made her sexy. Did she have a lover? he wondered.

  Even the appearance of Angie and Tim, and the relentless concern shown by both towards Penny and the missing Sandy, failed to perturb her.

  ‘It must be so hard for you, Penny,’ Angie kept saying. ‘Has he got any money? Did he take his phone? Has anyone called the police? Has he contacted the children?’ Her voice rose excitedly with each unanswered question.

  ‘I tried his mobile, but it’s turned off. So who knows,’ replied Penny, helping herself to more chicken. ‘There’s no point calling the police just yet. He’ll show up when he’s ready. I haven’t contacted Emily and Matthew yet. There’s no point in making them worried. I just hope he appears sooner rather than later. I can’t abuse Frieda’s hospitality and stay here indefinitely. Besides, I’ve left the vegetable garden half-planted. If it doesn’t rain, my carrot seedlings will perish.’

  Peter saw the disbelieving look passed between Angie and Tim and then Frieda’s quick wink in his direction. The wink told him that Angie and Tim, the seamless married couple, were beginning to annoy her. Frieda had already smiled politely through Angie’s description of her preferred version of chicken stuffed under the skin, which involved olives. Frieda disliked olives in food and also disliked talking about recipes while eating. It was trivial, he knew, but Peter loved knowing this about Frieda and even more, he loved the fact that no one else at the table could guess her thoughts except him. He refilled everyone’s glass.

  ‘That’s a joke,’ said Penny. ‘Sort of. I have come here to try to help. But all of you need to understand Sandy isn’t part of my life anymore. His problems aren’t my problems. I only care enough to try to help him if he wants to be helped.’

  ‘But what if he’s done something?’ Tim asked. ‘Something harmful to himself? I’ve already been to the flat. It doesn’t look as if he’s been there. Surely we should be out looking for him? We’ll never forgive ourselves if we don’t try to find him.’

  Angie took his hand. ‘Tim’s right. I think we need to take this much more seriously.’

  ‘He probably just forgot to tell anyone,’ replied Penny. ‘He is approaching sixty after all and I don’t think Sandy is the self-harming type, despite the accident.’

  She spoke in a measured way, but her foot was drumming on the floor. Frieda must have noticed as well, and offered cheese as a diversion. ‘Cheddar. I thought you might like it as a change from goat and all the runny stuff.’

  Chapter 18

  Back at Waterloo Station after he’d visited his mother, Sandy had stood under the timetable boards, buffeted by waves of rush-hour commuters. He’d wanted to ring Jeremy, or Peter or Tim, but his mobile was dead. He missed Penny. The groups of teenagers lolling on the edges of the concourse reminded him of Matthew and Emily. He thought about going home, but he couldn’t face his own squalor, and the certainty that he would start drinking once he shut the door behind him. So he walked along to the departure board and bought a ticket to Axminster.

  Three and a half hours later, he was standing in the foyer of a rundown hotel on the beachfront at Lyme Regis. The receptionist looked him up and down.

  ‘No luggage?’ he asked.

  Sandy shook his head and paid for two nights. His room was at the back and overlooked a dank courtyard. He lay on the bed flicking through television channels and watching the cobwebs in the corner of the ceiling eddy in the draught from the window. The room was mean and uncomfortable, with a cramped bathroom smelling of mould. It suited his mood and he fell into a deep dreamless sleep until morning. He stayed in bed until the afternoon, then walked aimlessly up and down the Cobb looking at the boats. The wind was pure and cold, laced with salt. Only the most intrepid of tourists came at this time of year.

  Margot had taken him here for a fortnight each August. She rented a house on the hill and each day the two of them walked down to the seafront through the park. On the way back, he was allowed an ice-cream. His mother bought one as well and they ate them as they walked. It was the only time he ever saw his mother eat in public.

  ‘Such a shame,’ she would say, beaming between licks and slurps, ‘that your father is too busy to join us here.’ She would take his free hand and swing it back and forth.

  He suddenly craved a double whisky, salivating at the thought of it warming the back of his throat and slipping down to his stomach. He lurked at the door of a pub for some minutes, trying to fool himself that he’d only have the one. He visualised the half-full glass, the boozy smell, the quiver as he lifted the glass to his mouth. But then he recalled what everyone at the meetings had said about alcohol and depression. He remembered Justin’s acronym of HALT: hungry, angry, lonely, tired? Take care! Images of the hospital rushed back: the nausea, the vomiting and the black headaches. He crossed the road to a café and gorged himself on a greasy kebab and chips, washed down with lemonade and a Zoloft. He found a pharmacy and bought a razor, toothbrush and toothpaste before returning to his room, to more mindless television.

  He knew he couldn’t stay here, away from everything and everyone, indefinitely. Apart from anything e
lse, he couldn’t afford it. But Sandy was tired of himself and the business of relentless self-examination. In this anonymous box of a room, its bland cream walls and cheap ribbed carpet, there was some respite. He was just another person in just another room. He thought of Carolyn, what had happened. Again, it seemed a dream; that someone else had walked into her house, made love to her and listened to her secrets. A kind and loving dream, one to cherish, but he didn’t want to see her again. The feeling would be mutual. He was sure of it. Their lives were so different, an unequal and flawed equation in every way.

  Sometime after midnight, he flicked onto MTV, to some dusted-off collection of clips entitled, Where Are They Now? Whirling around in his ridiculous cape was Joe Fleetfield, miming ‘Never Give Up’.

  One of Sandy’s biggest and best songs, three million singles sold, his very own take on sprung rhythm, released a week before ‘Let’s Dance’. Not the best timing in the world – who could compete with the dual talents of David Bowie and Nile Rodgers? Nor did it have the thrill of the new, like a Jim Steinman song for Bonnie Tyler, or the mellow harmonies of The Eagles. But even to his jaundiced and critical ear, it still sounded respectable. After so many years, it still worked. A shame about selling that particular part of his catalogue, but the bank wouldn’t increase his overdraft and he’d needed the money to pay an enormous tax bill.

  He’d written the song in the car, on the way back from seeing a house in Richmond that Penny wanted to buy. She wanted somewhere with its own garden, not a communal one. But the house, tucked away in the Vineyard, was too expensive. By comparison, Onslow Gardens was a bargain.

  The traffic had slowed to a crawl on the Hammersmith flyover and he was tapping his fingers on the steering wheel when a series of notes came into his head, like the swell of a wave. Then another came, and another. By the time he got home, it was all there. He sat at the kitchen piano and turned on the tape recorder while Penny cooked supper. He wrote the lyrics later that night, after everyone had gone to bed.

  Jenny, are you leaving,

  The sadness behind you, grieving

  For the love that never came,

  Don’t cry, I’ll try,

  My love, my love, the future won’t be the same

  As the past.

  Undoubtedly corny and it owed more than a little to old Gerard’s ‘Spring and Fall: to a Young Child’, but no one would have made the connection except him. Even that snotty Craig Pritchard at NME said if Sandy Ellison kept composing like that, he’d be sure of a place in the pop canon. He mentioned the album Sandy had written for Kate Mostyn, said his work was classic poetry, not just tunes with lyrics. Best of all, they said he understood the weird beauty of the human heart. How good was that from a magazine that normally poured vitriol on pop music?

  Sandy read every word of the article at least a hundred times on the day of publication and had read it again countless times since. There were times when he believed every word. He knew he could turn a pretty phrase into a catchy verse, and he knew when the hook of a chorus would transform a pleasant tune into something people couldn’t stop humming on the bus, when a string section would bring tears to a teenager’s eyes.

  At other times, later on, he was not so sure. Could he take eternal credit and feel a lifelong sense of accomplishment for something that popped into his head during a traffic jam and took all of twenty minutes to complete? What would have happened if he’d been cruising along the M4, the long bit without services between Reading and Heathrow? He’d have forgotten all about his artful little finger tapping on the wheel, the half-formed notes in his head, long before he reached London. His biggest hit would never have been written and he’d never have known.

  It seemed to him that he had very little to do with the entire process. Songs came calling, uninvited but always welcome. All Sandy had to do was keep the door open. The monster he wrote for Kate Mostyn came to him in the bath. He was washing his hair when he remembered what a girl had said once, about him liking her, but not enough to make it worthwhile. He wrote at least five songs while mowing the lawn when they had that cottage near Tim and Angie. Something about walking up and down in straight lines.

  He knew his songs weren’t symphonies, or even sinfonias. He’d never sweated, pondered or deliberated on anything. Now, in this fleahole, his life deconstructed by group therapy, Sandy saw his success as nothing more than fantastical will-o’-the-wisp serendipity.

  He heaved himself off the bed and into the bathroom. A quick pee and into bed again. It took all of three steps. On the small television screen, Joe was striding around the stage, flicking his cape like a demented matador in preparation for the big ending. Eighteen takes for that one, each time Sandy asking for a bit more, just that little bit more. About 2 am, he’d called Joe out of the isolation booth and given him a piece of paper with each verb underlined in thick black marker pen.

  ‘I don’t want you to emphasise the pronouns,’ said Sandy. ‘I want you to emphasise the verbs.’

  Joe looked puzzled. He lit a cigarette and watched as the line of smoke floated above their heads to merge with the thick blue fug under the studio lights.

  ‘The doing words,’ said Sandy. ‘Grieving. Leaving. The words that mean you’re doing something, feeling something. Okay?’

  Joe stubbed out his cigarette and went back into the booth. Sandy’s grammar lesson was worth it. The producer and sound engineer had been pissed off until they replayed the final mix and agreed with him about the verbs. When they also agreed that the half sob in the last line was not such a bad idea, Sandy saw the opportunity to persuade them to insert some birdsong at the beginning, as a nod to two of his heroes: Hopkins and Stevie Wonder, who’d done the same thing for Minnie Riperton some years before.

  It was July, he remembered, almost dawn when recording finished. Everyone else had already left. He was in the foyer of Olympic Studios, waiting for the driver to take him back to Onslow Gardens. The usual thick summer mist lay across Church Street. Perhaps it had something to do with Barnes being on the river. He was so sure that the song would be a hit and it was.

  ‘How do you know?’ Penny had asked sleepily when he got home. ‘How can you be so sure?’

  ‘Trust me,’ he replied and smiled, turning towards her in the warm bed.

  Someone, maybe Peter, had recently told him Fleetfield was living on a council estate, bloated and unrecognisable. Perhaps their lives hadn’t diverged as much as he’d imagined. He turned off the television and fell into another deep sleep. The next morning, he caught the bus to Axminster and then the train to Waterloo.

  There was a worrying moment on the way back to Battersea when he thought he might not be back in his flat in time for the news and Catherine, but he made it with half an hour to spare. The answering machine blinked at him. Three messages. The first two were from Peter and Tim, asking him to call and let them know that he was safe. The third was from Penny.

  ‘Just because I come to town, you don’t have to leave,’ she said. But there was a smile in her voice. ‘Seriously, we’re worried about where you are, how you are. Give me a call when you get in, please. I’m on my mobile.’

  Buoyed that they cared enough to worry, Sandy spent the remaining minutes before the news ringing everyone back and apologising in a jovial way for going AWOL.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said to Penny. ‘It was a spur of the moment decision. I didn’t think to let anyone know. I didn’t think anyone would worry.’

  She laughed. ‘Of course we worry when you disappear. Particularly since … well, you know. As long as you’re all right. Emily tells me you’re going to meetings, group therapy. That’s good to hear. You take care of yourself.’

  ‘I’m trying,’ he replied. ‘Let’s have a quick coffee before you fly back?’

  Was there a flicker of a pause, or did he imagine it?

  ‘Sure,’ she said. ‘Ten o’clock, the place opposite South Kensington Tube? I can go on to the airport from there.’

  Ir
rationally pleased, he turned on the television and admired Catherine’s skilful dissection of a fibbing politician. Her lipstick matched her blouse. She looked well.

  He ate a large bowl of pasta and let its bland taste fill him like a warm bath. The last forty-eight hours had been confusing. Now that he was back home, it was hard to work out why he’d run away. It wasn’t all to do with the overdue visit to his mother. He knew he was scared, terrified even, of two words. Hope was a word he’d come to despise. Hope was rubbish. Hope was the refuge of fools. Whatever he considered himself to be, it wasn’t a fool. The second word, truth, was best left unexamined. No one knew what it was anyway. Everything was subjective.

  He had to get a grip, cut back on the Zoloft. He was beginning to sound like Penny. Tim had always said they were turning into a bunch of old women, crying at the cinema while women became the new men, enjoying their strength as the steel entered their hearts. Perhaps Tim was right. And yet as much as Sandy tried to slide back into his accustomed thought patterns, he couldn’t.

  mattman5@hotmail.com

  To: emily.ellison@gmail.com

  Money mounting up. Surprising how much you can save in the clean and clear mode. Almost enough for a flight to Delhi. I looked at the visa application online. They want to know every last detail about you. It’ll take forever to fill in, so I may as well start now. It’s good for six months. All quiet in Sarlat and Battersea, as far as I can make out.

  Don’t go off and live in a cave or anything until I get there. There are goddamn phonies everywhere, you know. Miss you sis.

  Chapter 19

  She waited until all the passengers had pushed through the departure gate, then followed the last straggler and gave her boarding pass to the surly stewardess. ‘Passport,’ the woman snapped, as Penny fumbled in her bag. ‘You’ll need to hurry. The gate’s shutting now.’

  Penny scurried down the stairs and onto the crowded bus. After half an hour listening to mothers attempting to quieten their screaming babies and watching children bash each other with their backpacks, the bus finally lurched towards the plane.