EVEN AS HE WAS TELLING THE story about Judy Marshall, Rick was wondering how much of it was true. It was quite possible that he’d elaborated details in his head over the years. He’d had fantasies about the encounter in the empty periods between wives and girlfriends, before the wonders of Internet dating had filled those times of boredom and misery. It had happened after the school play. His parents had been away – his dad had been a GP and his mother an anaesthetist and there’d been a medical conference somewhere – so of course he’d decided he’d have the post-performance party at his house. He might not have been chosen to be the star of the show – and that still rankled – but he could throw a party that people would remember long after some dreary school play. His folks wouldn’t be happy when they found out, but he was an only child, spoiled rotten, and they’d get over it.
He’d snogged the teacher. No doubt about that. He remembered an intense conversation about Russian literature, just the two of them in the kitchen after most of his friends had left. She’d fixed him with those stary, intense eyes, and his attention had wandered when she started talking about authors he’d never heard of, never mind read. He’d reached out and kissed her. And she’d responded, hadn’t she? Of course she had. He’d been pissed, naturally, but then so had she.
‘After you lot all buggered off,’ he said now, ‘I took her upstairs. We had sex in my parents’ bed, if you really want to know.’
Of course they wanted to know. Even Phil, who pretended to disapprove, was hanging on his every word. This was what he’d missed since the BBC had axed his show. The audience. Rick needed immediate feedback, a live response. A pre-record was never the same. He always said that he was a serious journalist and he was. But he was a serious journalist who needed to interact with his readers and viewers.
Trouble was, he couldn’t remember being with the teacher in his parents’ room. He knew he’d woken up there, alone the next morning, the sheets crumpled and the room smelling of fags and stale beer, but the rest was just a blur, a blank.
‘So,’ Lou asked, ‘what was she like?’
He was tempted to continue the tale. The words were already in his head: Judy Marshall saying how brilliant it was. He was. That she’d had the best time in her life. But in the end, he looked at Annie, who seemed miles away, hardly interested. And he remembered that he was supposed to be careful now about what he said. These were all close friends, but even close friends leaked to the press. He couldn’t afford any more lurid stories.
‘Honestly, Lou?’ Rick smiled. ‘I really can’t remember.’ A pause. ‘You’ll have to read all about it when my book comes out. It’s fiction naturally, but very definitely based on fact. You’ll find our pasts very much brought back to life. All our secrets, actually, finally seeing the light of day.’
Of course, they all demanded more details. He could tell they were intrigued. Some of them a little anxious, which they deserved to be. Just you wait, he thought. Just you wait.
They drifted off to bed soon after that. The rest of them had become elderly, not just in their bodies, but in their minds. Phil asked if anyone wanted a herbal tea before they turned in. Rick thought that summed him up. Phil might live in London, but he was hardly cosmopolitan.
Although his parish was officially Central London, in reality it felt suburban, a bit left-behind. Rick had been to the red-brick rectory for supper a few times. Philip had invited him after both his divorces, offering sympathy and Christian comfort. He’d gone because anything was better than staying in his flat. He hated being on his own. They’d been best friends at school, even before Only Connect, and Rick had seen more of him than anyone else over the years. He still couldn’t quite get used to Philip at work though, dressed up in a black dress with the clergyman’s collar. As if he was still performing in a weird school play. Or a pantomime.
Rick’s room felt chilly after the warmth of the common room. He supposed the heating was on a timer and had been switched off. The place had stopped being a convent even before Only Connect, but there was still an air of the frugal. Hardship was something to be embraced, not avoided. Before the convent, it had been two farmworkers’ cottages, and Rick supposed that they must have been pretty primitive too.
A religious order had taken the place over after the war. Three nuns had lived in one of the cottages. He’d researched their history and they’d been attached to the island’s priory, spreading the word about St Cuthbert, following in the footsteps of the monks who’d lived in the monastery in the Middle Ages. They hadn’t been part of an enclosed order – there were no cells or cloisters – and only the little chapel, which the islanders had built for them in the field next door, had any sense of the religious. Rick thought the place must almost have been like a student house-share. Three women, working during the day and coming back to the cottage to eat and sleep together. And, he supposed, to pray.
Then the adjoining cottage had come up for sale and the sisters obtained funding to knock through and extend, to form a place of retreat. Not just for religious groups who came from all over the country to experience the island and its history, but for educational and cultural purposes. The only stipulation had been the dusk time of silence in the tiny chapel. That had been written into the contract signed by everyone who came to stay.
The nuns had moved on. The accommodation had been upgraded a little since the group’s first visit as teenagers. He always bagged the downstairs bedroom, the only single large enough to swing a cat. It was part of the more modern extension, created from an attached outbuilding. It had a long window with a view out to the fairy tale castle on its hill, a vaulted ceiling crossed by sturdy beams. He looked out of the window now and looked up at a sky full of stars, the space dizzying, terrifying.
He hadn’t slept here on that first weekend. It must have been used by Judy Marshall or the fierce older woman who’d run the place. His room had contained two sets of bunks, metal-framed with stained mattresses thin as cardboard, which had since been replaced. He’d shared with Philip and two boys whose names he’d forgotten and who’d not really participated in any of the sessions. All he could remember was their acne and the gruesome snoring. Yet he’d been able to go straight to sleep and hadn’t woken until Philip had shouted that breakfast was ready the next morning.
These days, it seemed, he hardly slept at all. He’d been obsessed with dying when he was a small boy. He’d banged his head against the pillow in an attempt to drive away the thoughts. How was it possible not to exist? How could he not exist? As a teenager, the preoccupation was still there, but he’d hidden it more skilfully, turning the obsession into an intellectual pose, a cloak to hide his real terror. Charlotte, his first serious girlfriend and his first wife, had mocked his nightmares.
‘Why do you always talk about dying?’
He’d laughed off the question, made more pretentious noises, thrown in a reference to Sartre. She’d ignored the response and returned to painting her toenails with a focus that made that act the most important thing in the universe. More important, certainly, than any abstract notion of life and death.
As an adult he’d always been a bad sleeper. Things had got worse after the last divorce. Now he was getting older and there was the real possibility of death. Rick could cope with the prospect of illness and pain, but a world existing without him terrified and haunted him, especially at night. Even if he dropped off to sleep soon after going to bed, he woke several times, his heart racing, his muscles tense. Astonished, it seemed, to find himself still alive. He thought that was how he would die in the end: a sudden, violent jerk to consciousness would trigger a heart attack. He’d been prescribed blood pressure tablets but had stopped taking them because they had unpleasant side effects – they stopped him making love effectively – and he was as obsessed with sex as he was with death.
Rick supposed there were worse ways to go than a fatal heart attack. Anything, surely, would be better than descending into dementia like Ken. The cloudy eyes and unfocused thoughts, the restless twitching of the hands. That was surely a kind of death. It was as if Ken was disappearing almost before their eyes but becoming at the same time deeper and more nuanced. In health, Ken had been an uncomplicated soul, a husband, a primary school head teacher, a good dad. He’d loved his football and his music, been steady in his happiness. Almost complacent. Now hidden anxieties were emerging and Rick wondered if they’d always been there.
He left the curtains open. He felt close to the landscape outside and even this far from the sea, he fancied he could hear the suck of water on shingle. He undressed. It was a matter of pride that he hadn’t worn pyjamas since the age of six and he pulled the duvet round him to keep out the chill. It was still so cold that he worried sleep would be impossible, so he went into the shower room and put on the dressing gown, which had been hanging on a hook behind the door. From his bed, he could see the black, starless shape of the hill and the light-spangled sky behind it. A tawny owl was calling in the woodland at the other side of the house.
His phone rang. He looked at the number, but didn’t recognize it. Usually, he didn’t bother answering calls like that, but so late at night? It might be an emergency.
‘Hello.’ He realized that he was quite drunk now and his speech was slurred.
There was a rush of angry words at the other end. A voice he thought he almost recognized.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
He switched off his phone and shook his head to clear the memory of the bitterness at the other end of the line. Some mad person. Since the allegations had been made, he’d had a few of those calls. They weren’t worth bothering with. It was the price of fame. Soon, the bastards would realize he was more of a victim than his accusers.
As he drifted off, it occurred to him that he could come home now that his show had been pulled. He could work on his book anywhere, and he’d already planned that most of the action would take place in the North-East. Phil might soon retire north. He’d spoken of it. Annie was here so he’d have a friend. Here, in the end, he might sleep.