Cedarbrook was typically quiet when Oscar arrived on Monday morning, an hour early for his shift. The lobby was empty as always, and the lights had yet to be switched on at the nurses’ station. A cleaner’s cart stood at the foot of the stairs and a short, broad-shouldered Filipina woman he’d never seen before was dousing the seat of the stairlift with disinfectant spray. The place was still half-asleep: thirty-four beds were still thick with dreams. In the dim light of the staff room, he made himself a coffee, browsed the front and back pages of the paper so he’d have something to discuss with Deeraj and the other nurses later. Then he went to find Jean in her office, to hand in the time sheets she’d been asking him for since the start of the month. She had her own little room marked MATRON, between the kitchen and the parlour, and he knew she’d be there sitting at her desk with her portable TV on as always, watching a repeat of some American sitcom with the volume down low and laughing her dockyard laugh.
It was when he got to the parlour that he saw Dr Paulsen. He was sitting dull-eyed in a wingback near the window. A plate of scrambled eggs was set on the tray-table in front of him and he was peering down at it vacantly, turning his plastic spoon around in his right hand. The features of his face were drawn to the left as if they were caught on a fishhook. There was an atlas of foodstains on the front of his pyjama top. He looked like he’d been sitting there for hours.
‘You’re down early, aren’t you?’ Oscar called out, but the old man didn’t move a muscle. ‘Dr Paulsen?’
Slow as the winching of a crane, Paulsen moved his right eye to look up at him. His body stayed rigid, apart from the spoon he kept turning around in his dry fingers—flick, flick, flick.
‘Dr Paulsen, are you alright?’
Flick, flick, flick.
The eggs were cold to the touch. When Oscar went to move the plate, the old man didn’t try to stop him, and after it was taken away, he just gazed down at the space where it used to be, probing the corner of his mouth with his tongue. ‘I’m going to get you some more, okay?’ Oscar said. ‘I’m going to get you some more.’ A numb feeling was starting to gather in his feet. He felt something clutching at his heart, trying to drown it, like the way his cousin Terry used to duck his head under the water at the swimming pool to time how long he could hold his breath.
Flick, flick, flick.
‘Just wait there. I’ll be back.’
Jean was sitting at her desk just like he knew she would be. The clock in the corner of her TV screen read 7:06. ‘Hello, lovey,’ she said. ‘Can’t pay you any extra for being early, you know.’
His voice was steady, even. ‘Is everything okay with Dr Paulsen? I just saw him in the parlour.’
‘Right. Him. He’s in a bad way, I’m afraid. Been leaving you messages all week. Haven’t you been home?’
‘No. I’ve been—I went on holiday.’
‘Anywhere nice?’
He looked back at her blankly.
She gestured at the empty chair in front of her and he sat down. ‘Well, sorry, it’s not good news.’ With her eyes on the television, she talked him through the whole thing very matter-of-factly. Late on Wednesday night, she said, Dr Paulsen had had another stroke. ‘It was a big ’un, too. Not a TIA, a proper ischaemic.’ She smiled at the TV. Canned laughter filled the room. She clicked it off and turned to look at him, putting on a serious face, assuming a proper tone. ‘Doctor reckons he had a full-on thrombosis in his brain. That’s why his left side’s a bit, you know, tensed up. He should be alright in a few months, but who knows? Hard to know anything for sure when it comes to strokes.’ She tilted her head, reached out her hand. ‘Aw, lovey, I know you two are close. I did leave messages for you. But there’s nothing you could’ve done about it, even if you’d been here.’
When he went back into the parlour, Paulsen was still in the wingback, peering down at the empty tray-table, and still absently twirling the plastic spoon in his right hand.
He crouched down beside his chair. ‘Dr Paulsen, it’s Oscar. I know you remember me. I know you understand.’ The old man didn’t move anything but the thumb and finger of his right hand around the spoon. His left side was tight, unbending. ‘I’m going to take you upstairs and get you dressed, okay? We can’t have you down here all day looking like you’ve just crawled out of bed. That wouldn’t do now, would it? A man has to have standards.’ He went to take the spoon from Paulsen’s hand, but the old man wouldn’t let go—his fingers viced around it and Oscar couldn’t wrest it from his grip. The old man grunted, and flung out his right arm. It nearly struck Oscar on the side of the head. ‘Mine. Mine,’ he slurred.
‘Alright, okay, you keep hold of it.’
Oscar didn’t know what to do. Upstairs, he struggled to get the sleeve of a clean jumper over the old man’s arm. The jumper hung half on, half off his shoulder—a saddening Argyle sling.
For the rest of the day, Oscar felt lost. The corridors of Cedarbrook seemed endless. He could barely bring himself to visit Paulsen all afternoon. It was too difficult to watch him sitting there, staring into space with those big snuffed-out eyes and a lengthening trickle of drool in the corner of his mouth; his jaw was like a glovebox with a broken hinge. But despite how low the sight of Paulsen made him feel—and despite how much the guilt weighed on his shoulders—he forced himself to go up to his room every hour to make sure he was okay. The old man had nobody else.
Later that night, Oscar put his head around the door one last time before the end of his shift. Paulsen was lying flat on his bed with an arm across his ribs, the spoon at rest between his fingers. There was a sombre darkness in the room; the curtains were drawn. He thought the old man was finally sleeping, so he went to lay a blanket over him, but as soon as the fabric touched Paulsen’s skin, his right eye opened.
‘Didn’t mean to disturb you. Go back to sleep.’
Paulsen made a movement with his arm, lifting the spoon up and releasing it. ‘Okay, Herbert,’ he said, shutting his eyelid slowly. ‘Okay, Herb.’
Oscar was surprised by the strength of Crest’s voice on the answer machine. He skipped past four messages from Jean and was about to delete the fifth when suddenly he heard a bright and cheery intonation fizzing in the speakers: ‘Oscar, hey—just Herbert. Letting you know I’m doing fine. Call back if you want to. Bye for now!’
He expected Andrea to pick up when he rang back, but Crest answered the phone himself with a merry, ‘Hey there, kiddo, good of you to call,’ and waded right into telling him about how much he’d written that day. He talked with the enthusiasm of a schoolboy, one sentence spilling into the next, barely stopping for breath: ‘I’m a little giddy here. Things are really going great with the book right now. Six thousand words today and counting, can you believe that? The old brain feels like it’s firing again, not just ticking over.’ Then he said: ‘Hey, tell you what: I’d like to send you what I have so far. Just the intro, maybe; I don’t know. I wouldn’t usually share anything before it’s ready, but, oh boy, it’s been a really great day. I’m on such a high.’ Finally, Crest exhaled—more of a sigh than an outward breath—and that’s when he said, ‘Sorry to talk so much. What’s happening with you, kid?’
Oscar explained what had happened to Dr Paulsen and Crest took a long moment to respond. All the joie de vivre seemed to leave his voice through the sudden puncture in his heart. ‘I—I really—God, I really don’t know what to say to that. Boy, oh boy. Poor Bram, huh?’ Oscar invited him to Cedarbrook, but Crest seemed reluctant to pay a visit. ‘I hate those places,’ he said, ‘they give me the jitters. Besides, I’m not sure I have the time right now, with the book and everything. We’ll see, huh?’
Oscar went on trying to convince him, though he sensed it was a lost cause. ‘It would mean so much to him if you came. I just feel so bad about it all. If I’d just been there …’
‘Oscar. Stop. Believe me, thinking about What Ifs will drive you crazy.’ Crest went quiet then, deliberating on things. He made short little clucking sounds with his tongue. ‘Look, maybe I can make it out to see him sometime this week. I guess I owe Bram that much. Leave it with me.’
At the Great Gate of Trinity College, Iris stood waiting. The soft light of the porters’ lodge pooled on the flagstones at her feet. She had on a royal-blue evening dress with a white satin shawl and the luminous wire of her headphones hung in a V against her bare neck. Seeing Oscar, she removed the tiny buds from her ears, coiled the wire up quickly, and put the old Walkman into her glitzy little handbag. She took his hand and kissed him squarely on the mouth. ‘Where’s your suit?’ she said, gesturing at his jeans and leather jacket; his worn-in trainers. ‘It’s a Formal. It’s meant to be, you know, formal.’ Behind her, the impeccable lawns of Trinity were dusted with a fine, forgotten rain.
For a moment, all he could do was look at her. She had taken him by surprise with the dress and the tiny diamond earrings. The way she’d drawn her fringe across her forehead in a side-parting made her look older, less studious. ‘What’s the matter, sweetheart? What is it?’
He told her about Dr Paulsen and she comforted him with whispers of sympathy, pressing her nose upon his temple. ‘Oh, I’m so sorry, Oscar. I feel silly now, dressed like this. We’ll go another time. There’d be nothing worse than a formal right now, all that tightness and etiquette.’ She took his hand again, kissed his cheek. ‘Come on, let’s go to mine. I need to change out of these clothes.’
‘What about the others?’
‘They won’t mind.’ She glanced across the empty court towards the college buildings, where silhouettes of men in dinner jackets stood chatting with vague outlines of girls in evening gowns. ‘Probably won’t even know we’re missing.’
Part of him still wanted to go inside. The formal dinner had been his idea, after all. Last week, Jane had mentioned that the BA Society at her college held formals over the holidays and he’d been so enthusiastic about attending that Jane had gone to the trouble of arranging tickets for everybody: ‘It’d be a nice, low-key introduction to the formal scene,’ she’d said, ‘and then, if you want, we can take you to a bigger do when term starts.’ Even Eden had agreed to go. ‘It’ll be worth it just to see Oscar in a white collar,’ was how he’d put it.
Thinking about their week at the Bellwether house was the only thing that took Oscar’s mind off Dr Paulsen. He missed them, the comfort of being among the flock. He remembered how Yin and Marcus would come out to sit with him and Iris on the rectory porch each night after Crest went home, chewing cigar-tips, swirling brandy, picking the wax from the citronella candles. They would hardly talk, just watch the motion of the clouds across the moon, timing the pulses of the stars above them. Yin had a way of making Oscar feel at ease by saying nothing at all, just by leaning back on his chair-legs, venting cigar smoke from his nostrils. Sometimes, they would play Pontoon or Hearts, and Marcus would go ballistic every time he lost a hand: ‘Fuck you, Iggy, and your fucking jack of diamonds! How many of those fucking jacks of diamonds can you get in one game!’ Jane would hear the commotion and come down from the house in her pyjamas, leaving Eden in bed. She’d refuse to be dealt in to whatever game they were playing, but she’d talk to them while they eyed their cards, bringing smiles to their faces with her commentary.
There was a strange solace in being a part of the flock. Oscar liked the way they considered even the most pedestrian of subjects from an intellectual angle: ‘What’s surprising about badminton,’ Marcus would revel in telling them, ‘is that it goes back centuries. Started in ancient Greece, worked its way through India, to Britain, via the army. The rules haven’t changed since the eighteen hundreds.’
Oscar couldn’t help but enjoy the sheer unpredictability of their discussions, how Jane would start out by asking Iris a simple question: ‘Are your parents going to build out any further towards the road?’ and Iris would answer: ‘God, I hope not. It’s already like Last Year at Marienbad around here.’ Then Marcus would give his forthright opinion: ‘Ugh! I hate that pretentious piece of nonsense—hate it. I get a headache every time I see it. Alain Resnais stinks. He’s got a decent aesthetic eye but that doesn’t give him licence to be incoherent,’ and he would segue into a diatribe on the sadness he felt about the obsolescence of celluloid film and the soulless digitalisation of photography; this would lead into Yin pondering the extinction of the audio cassette, how he couldn’t imagine a world where a guy couldn’t give his girlfriend a mix-tape on her birthday, and Oscar would chime in then with a few opinions of his own. When Eden wasn’t there, they could all talk like this—ruminate on matters, get their points of view across without being interrupted.
And yet part of him missed the simple quiet of those punt-rides with Eden, too, the brightness of the spring sun on their faces, the sight of birds winging across the river. He liked the way Eden would hum along so tunefully to the Boston Pops on the ghetto blaster. When he thought about the week in Grantchester—leaving out the madness of what took place each night in the organ house—he was sure it had been the best week of his life.
It was too late to go to the formal now. He was underdressed and unprepared. ‘Come on,’ Iris said, wrapping her shawl around his neck, pulling him close. ‘I know what you need.’ She kissed him hard on the mouth.
They walked to Harvey Road. There were few cars on the streets but there were plenty of people out for a stroll in the gathering dark—couples about their age, holding hands; packs of polo-shirted men heading for the centre of town, drenched in cologne. At the end of Regent Street, she said: ‘I was reading your poem today. I really think it’s a lovely thing. You should write more.’
‘Maybe,’ he said.
‘I mean it. You have talent.’ She looked towards the changing traffic lights in the distance. ‘A concession to a coming afternoon. That’s so perfect. I cry every time I read it.’
‘You’re just trying to make me feel better.’
‘I mean every word. You could do so much more, Oscar. God knows you can’t be a care assistant your whole life.’
He stopped.
She looked at him and he couldn’t tell if her expression was apologetic or incredulous. ‘There’s nothing wrong with being a care assistant, it’s just—oh, come on, you know what I mean. I’m saying you could be more than that. If you wanted to be.’
‘There’s no way I could be a poet. That’s a pipe dream.’
‘I’m not saying you should be a poet. I’m saying you should write more poetry, that’s all. You should do whatever makes you happy.’
‘Things don’t work that way in the real world. Trust me.’
She seemed hurt by this, creasing up her mouth. He felt her fingers reaching for his hand. Then her head fell against his shoulder, sighing. ‘I’m just trying to support you. I know you think about this stuff, too. You keep it all inside, but I know you think about it. And I know you don’t want to be at Cedarbrook forever.’
‘Maybe I do. There’s nothing wrong with that.’
‘No, look, of course not. It doesn’t matter to me what you are—I don’t care if you’re a bloody sea fisherman—but it matters to me that you’re fulfilled, and I’m not sure are.’
He didn’t want to get into an argument. How simple it was for her to say these things to him, to drop slogans like Do whatever makes you happy into the conversation, as if happiness and fulfilment were easy things to acquire. To Iris, the world was a clear-cut place where anything could be achieved with a little perseverance, or the right connections. Failure didn’t scare her, because she had the crashmat of her inheritance to fall back on. She had the comfort of knowing the house she lived in was her own, bought and paid for by parents who spent more money on cognac than most people could retire on.
Sometimes, it seemed that Iris had gone through life so weightlessly that she couldn’t imagine the kinds of struggles other people had. It wasn’t that she couldn’t identify the most wretched poverty when she saw it—the distended bellies of Lesothoan families plagued by famine, Romanian orphans crammed eleven to a cot—and he knew that when these things flashed up on the news, she felt the sorrow profoundly and was moved to help. But she often seemed unaware of the regular, financial stresses of ordinary people: the constant hustle for that little bit of extra money to fix a broken boiler, to buy another school jumper, to pay the orthodontist’s fees. If he asked her the price of petrol, she probably wouldn’t know it, but she could tell him everything about the distillation of petroleum and the importance of renewable energy. There were times when he couldn’t help but resent her for what she had, for the nineteen years of good schooling, skiing holidays, fine dining; for being told every day that she could have whatever made her happy. But he’d come to realise how wrong it was to resent her for these things. Because they were the same things he wanted for himself, the same things he would like to afford his own children one day. To begrudge Iris her ideal life was just plain jealousy, the kind of bitterness that had ruined his father. He had to bite down on his tongue sometimes to remind himself of that.
‘I’m fine,’ he told her. ‘It’s just been a bad day and I don’t want to talk about it, okay?’
‘Okay, okay.’
They were quiet for the rest of the walk. When they got to the house, she went upstairs and ran a bath. She asked him if he wanted to get in with her, but he said he was too tired. ‘Oh,’ she said, glassy-eyed, ‘well, if you change your mind …’ He waited for her in the bedroom, reading her revision notes and the scrawled comments in the margins of the textbooks on her pillow. He looked at the display of St Mary’s School rosettes that were pinned up on her notice board: First Prize (Latin), First Prize (French), First Prize (Music). There was a photo of her parents in a gold enamelled frame on her bedside table. He would always turn it away when he opened the drawer to get a condom, and he’d always find it set up again in the morning: the faces of her ambitions.
She came in from the bathroom with a white towel wrapped around her, and the skin of her shoulders mottled, beaded with water. For a moment, she sat at her dresser, brushing her hair, and he watched her, trying to imagine her fifty years from now, wondering if he would still feel the same exhilaration at the sight of her. And he realised how easy it was to picture her that way, still tidying her hair with the same little gestures of her brush, half-naked in the shade of some future bedroom.
‘Will you play for me?’ he asked.
She kept on brushing her hair. ‘Now? I’m not even dressed.’
‘It doesn’t matter. I just want to hear you.’
And so she went to get her cello from the corner. She took off her towel and sat at the foot of the bed with her back towards him. She played something he’d never heard before—a plaintive, drawling tune with notes so low they rattled the perfume bottles on her dresser. He watched the slow flight of her shoulder blades as she bowed. It was all he needed to make that dry ache inside him disappear.