Rad accepted my offer to put him up in my flat until the boat was repaired. He brought with him a few clothes, a toothbrush and a razor in one of those climbing-frame rucksacks that students take on their travels. In fact it was the rucksack Rad took on his trip to Rome with Nicky and Frances and the infamous portaloo tent. I hated seeing it propped by the front door, trailing its straps. ‘It makes me think you’re about to go off somewhere,’ I said, and Rad laughed. Uneasily.
Three Men in a Boat had perished in the fire. ‘You’ll always be associated in my mind with unfinished books,’ Rad said. ‘Narziss and Goldmund, Huck Finn and now this.’ He had also lost his new chair, along with the rest of the contents of the main cabin. ‘You see what happens when I start getting all greedy and acquisitive,’ was his interpretation.
‘It was putting that crappy old drier too close to the heater that caused the fire. Not greed.’
‘Which wouldn’t have happened if our clothes hadn’t got wet. Which wouldn’t have happened if you hadn’t made us sprint half-way round Kew Gardens in the pissing rain.’
He affected to find the flat shockingly luxurious, but was in fact rather glad to be able to stand upright in the shower, and lie flat out on the couch watching television. And he nearly died laughing when he found my rowing machine in the spare room. ‘The perfect sport for the non-swimmer,’ he said. ‘What are you practising for, exactly? Henley?’
Sometimes when I came home in the early evening after a rehearsal or a day’s teaching I might find him in the kitchen concocting something disgusting for dinner – pork chops in mushroom soup, for example, or baked beans with mackerel – and we’d eat together at the kitchen table before I went off to my concert.
One morning after a week or so of this I woke up in the early hours to find the bed beside me empty and Rad standing by the window looking out at the flats opposite. Before we’d fallen asleep we’d been talking about the circumstances of my expulsion from the Radley household, and we’d managed to laugh at the memory of Growth swinging by his teeth from the back of my dress while we’d ranted at one another.
‘If you knew how bad I felt after you’d gone,’ Rad had said. ‘It wasn’t you I was angry with, not really. It was Dad. But you can’t finish with your dad.’
‘You could have answered the phone or come to the door. I gave you so many chances.’
‘I know, I know. But I’d dug myself such a hole, I just couldn’t climb out. It was easier to stay there and suffer. I would have come round and apologised eventually, I know I would. I always meant to. But then after Birdie died it seemed unacceptable – well, wrong – even to consider my own happiness. I thought, I can’t use this as an excuse to get back to you. It would be obscene to profit from her death in any way. I chose misery instead.’
When I woke up and saw him silhouetted against the curtains, there in my room, I had that same sense of dread that you get when the phone rings in the middle of the night: blood roaring in the ears, pulse racing. I don’t know you, I thought.
‘Are you all right?’ I whispered. It occurred to me that he might be sleepwalking.
He started and then his shoulders slumped a little. ‘Yes. Fine.’ He came and sat back on the bed, not quite facing me. ‘Oh God, look.’ He risked a glance at me. ‘I haven’t been completely honest with you.’ And at these words the temperature in the room dropped to zero. My mother had been right all along.
‘You’ve got HIV,’ I said, pulling the sheets up around me.
‘No, no, it’s nothing like that. Where did you get that idea?’
‘What then?’
‘I’m … I’m going back to Senegal.’
‘When?’
‘July. Sooner if I’m up to it.’
‘For good?’
‘No, no. Just a year. Eighteen months at the most. I’ve got to get a new water-aid project running. Then I’m out of there.’
‘How long have you known?’
‘A few weeks after the accident one of the directors came to visit me in hospital and practically begged me. That’s why they’ve been so accommodating about my sick leave. I said okay the day I came out.’
‘You could have told me.’
‘I know. I should have, and I selfishly didn’t. I’d ask you to come with me, but I know you’ve got your own career …’
‘You could ask anyway.’
‘Come with me?’
‘I can’t. I’ve got my own career. And my parents. And a cat.’
He gave me a crooked smile. ‘There you are.’
‘Can’t they send someone else?’
He shook his head. ‘I am the someone else. The first person they sent has cracked up. Don’t try to talk me out of it. I’m definitely going.’
I nodded slowly, trying to work out what eighteen months felt like. What was I doing eighteen months ago? ‘Why did you buy the houseboat if you knew you were leaving again?’
‘I’ve got to have somewhere to live when I come back. And I wanted to prove to myself that I am going to come back.’
‘Did you have to choose the middle of the night to tell me about this? I won’t sleep now.’
‘I’m sorry. I’ve been trying to pick my moment for days. I kept waiting until you were in a really good mood, but then I’d lose my nerve because I didn’t want to spoil things. But time’s running out now because someone’s bound to mention it at Mum’s party tomorrow.’
‘And you didn’t want me making a scene in front of the guests?’
‘You’re not a scene-maker.’
‘You’re right. I haven’t got the energy,’ I said, lying back on the pillow with my arms across my face.
‘If it’s any consolation I wouldn’t have taken the job if I’d known you were going to reappear like this.’
‘But you’d already met me once at the Barbican by then.’
‘You were masquerading as a married woman. That didn’t give me much grounds for optimism.’
‘If you’d bothered to do the smallest bit of research …’
‘Oh, forgive me for not applying myself better. Anyway,’ he added, ‘it seemed perfectly logical to me that you’d be married. I mean, who wouldn’t want to marry you?’
‘You, for a start,’ I said, rolling over on to my stomach and pretending to try and sleep.
‘Yes I would. I mean, I do.’
I lay very still with my face on the pillow waiting for the punchline, the pulled plug.
‘We could get married before I go,’ he said. ‘If we get a move on.’
Not even vaguely funny, I thought. Very substandard. After a minute or two Rad tapped me on the shoulder. ‘Are you awake?’
‘Are you serious?’
‘Are you interested?’
‘You don’t believe in marriage.’
‘Okay, I admit that I’ve never seen the need for it. Living together would be enough for me. But if we can’t actually live together – for a while at least – I can see that it might be reassuring to be married.’
‘People will think we’re mad. Getting married and then living in different countries.’
‘But that’s fine, because when you reached thirty you stopped worrying about other people’s opinions, remember? And I never started, so –’
‘This is going to offend my mother’s sense of propriety.’
‘Can I take that as a Yes?’ said Rad.