I called my friend Alison collect, at the Royal Society for the Prevention of Handicap, where she worked. The French operator did not really wish to connect us, and let me know it, but my will prevailed upon hers.
‘Alison!’ I say, expecting warmth, pleasure, ‘where have you beens, what’s been going ons, oh you wild mad impetuous thing; are you okays’ and so forth. But no: her voice is cold.
‘Oh, it’s you, Sandra. I’m just off to a meeting.’ Now I live in fear of offending my friends. I don’t have so many I can afford to lose them. If I don’t hear from them for a time I get nervous: I think what have I done, what have I said: if they’re curt or quick or off to meetings I’m sure it’s my fault.
‘I’m phoning from France.’
‘Oh, that’s where you are. What do you want?’
‘I want you to do something for me.’
‘That figures.’
I consider this. The phone gives three sharp peeps to remind me that time is money. So much the French do for each other. An old man with a gnarled face and wearing a dusty black beret peers through the glass at me. Perhaps he is the ghost of Tourist France. He dribbles a little and goes away, leaving a wet patch on the glass, but that may still be an effect, rather than a fact, like Robin’s Hiroshima shadow earlier.
‘Alison, what’s the matter?’
‘Nothing’s the matter, just some things are more important than others, and the hydrocephaly rate is up 2.8 per cent over last year, and another eight children without brains were born in the London Regional Authority in the last quarter.’
‘A statistical anomaly.’
‘I certainly hope so. I heard you’d run off to France; I thought you’d be back by now.’
‘This is for keeps.’
‘So you keep saying. Actually, I am rather cross with you, Sandra.’
‘Why?’ My heart beats faster. The dribble has evaporated, leaving a milky patch on the glass. I think he was real.
‘I’ve settled down: it’s time you did. You’re – how old – forty-five?’
‘Forty-two.’
‘And I don’t like being taken advantage of. I don’t like being your raw material. And poor Matthew! You’ve led him such a dance, Sandra.’ And this is my friend. He’s been getting at her. Ringing her up, putting his side of the story. It isn’t a story, of course, only an event: but he’s trained to make consecutive sense out of random happenings, and get people put away for years as a result. He’s a hot-shot for the prosecution: a no-hoper for the defence.
‘Raw material, Alison?’
‘A story you wrote, Sandra. At least, I suppose you did. It’s my life story and in this week’s Nursing Times for all the world to see.’
So there it was. They’d actually published my ‘A Libation of Blood’ and Alison, the spoilsport, was kicking up a fuss.
‘You just flail about,’ she says, ‘making trouble for everyone. Why don’t you have a baby and settle down?’
‘Because it might be in fashion and not have a brain,’ I say, and she has the grace to laugh – she’s not hopeless, Alison, and I’m curling and uncurling inside with joy, and can’t show it. A story published! Only in the Nursing Times, it’s true, and who’s going to read that, except by bad luck Alison herself. It must be something to do with her job, I suppose. ‘Nursing of the paediatric problem case’ or some such article, drawn to her attention. But it’s a beginning. Will Jack mind me being a writer? Will he encourage my talent, or stifle it? I reckon he’ll be all right, so long as I write about my friends, not him. ‘The story’s not about you, Alison, not really,’ I say, more craven because she is my friend, than I would be with a colleague, an acquaintance, a stranger.
‘Oh yes,’ she says coolly, ‘separated from her husband, pregnant with twins and in genetic counselling, and nothing at all to do with me! I really must get to this meeting. I can’t sit gossiping all day.’
‘This is not gossiping,’ I say. ‘Robin’s birthday’s coming up. Will you visit his grave for me and tidy up?’
There is a long silence.
‘No,’ says Alison. ‘Do it yourself.’
Alison’s end
Alison put the phone down, and then picked it up and called her boyfriend. What was his name? I had to remember back to my story in the Nursing Times – I could hardly give the poor man a face, let alone his name – though I’d met him a dozen times or so. (Truly acceptable good kind men seem to me somehow anonymous: or perhaps it is that I don’t truly believe in them.) Yes of course Bobby – a steady enough name, in fiction as in life. Lucky old Alison, mother of more than enough, now with Bobby.
Alison put the phone down and then picked it up and called Bobby. (What I am writing now is, of course, wishful thinking. This is how I imagined it, walking down the dusty, bungalow-and-geranium lined French road, towards the market square, the heat of the pavement seeping through the thin soles of my canvas shoes, upset, trying not to cry. And perhaps, who’s to say, I get it right.)
Alison put the phone down and then picked it up and called Bobby at the BBC.
‘Bobby,’ she said, ‘Sandra just rang from France.’
‘That’s nice,’ said Bobby. ‘What’s she doing in France?’
‘Don’t you remember,’ said Alison. ‘She left Matthew a couple of weeks back and ran off somewhere with someone and the Sun was in our front garden trying to find out all about it.’
‘Darling,’ said Bobby, ‘I can’t keep up with your friends. My friends are not like yours, thank God.’
‘And I was upset and put the phone down on her.’
‘Then call her back and say you’re sorry. Do you mind, darling, I’m in the middle of a recording. The spina bifida scandal.’
‘Well, I’m supposed to be at a meeting about hydrocephalus funding.’
‘They can’t start without you.’
‘Nor can your lot start without you. And I can’t call her back because she was in some village in France in a phone box. Poor Sandra. I’m afraid I upset her.’
‘What did she want?’
‘She wanted me to tidy up her brother’s grave. You know, the mad one who died. And I said no.’
‘But why?’
‘She can’t go on using her family as an excuse for ever.’
That’s enough of that conversation. You get to the painful point and it’s time to move on.
I’ll take up Bobby and Alison’s conversation later on that evening, as they sit in front of the fire, or more likely, lean side by side against the rail of the oil-fired Aga, warming their bums. (Forget it’s mid-summer. This is author’s licence. It’s my first novel.)
‘Of course I’ll go and do the grave,’ said Alison.
‘Do you know where it is?’
‘I was at the funeral. Poor Sandra. Her mother was there with her keepers: they’d let her out for the occasion. She didn’t even recognise Sandra. Her own daughter!’
‘What about her father?’
‘Men never played a large part in her early life.’
‘She’s making up for it now.’
‘Yes,’ said Alison. ‘And biting the hands that feed her.’
Ouch. I’ll take them on to in bed, after love.
‘What really gets me,’ said Alison, ‘is that story about me and you. She’s using us.’
‘What story?’
Let her get out of her nice warm bed and go all the way downstairs in her nightie, stubbing her toe on a child’s toy, to find a copy of the Nursing Times. Then let Bobby have to sit up in bed and read it, first finding his glasses. They’ll be tired in the morning.
‘What’s wrong with that?’ said Bobby. ‘It’s a good story. It’s based on you and me, but perfectly affectionate, and very nice about your mother. I like the title. You’re being much too sensitive.’
‘Now I feel dreadful,’ said Alison. ‘Supposing she needs me? I think I’ll brave Matthew in the morning and try to find out where she is and go over to France and bring her home.’
‘That’s better. That’s what friends are for. What about our work?’ asked Bobby, suddenly cautious, like his author.
‘It’s a Bank Holiday weekend,’ said Alison, and though her author is aware that there isn’t such a weekend so early in August, she chooses to overlook this inconvenient fact. Thus plot makes liars of us all. I shall put Alison and Bobby’s story ‘A Libation of Blood’ in the appendices. Turn to it now, if you so wish. Otherwise continue with the main narrative.
Jennifer’s story ‘Come On, Everyone’ – the one I stopped writing when faced by Robin’s ghost, as a consequence of which I made the painful phone call to Alison, is the second story in the appendices. I have even changed Sandy’s profession in the interest of his anonymity, and because I am becoming more prudent. I really like Jennifer (on the whole) and don’t want to upset her.