Whatever the village might once have been, it had forgotten long ago. Perched on a bluff above a winding, unpretentious river, the Chilterns crumpled on the eastern horizon, it ought to have been appealing, the apple of an estate agent’s eye. There was a decent Norman church, a sprinkling of thatched cottages, even a Georgian manor house mentioned in Pevsner. But it was blighted by a thirties council estate, bus-shelters doused in graffiti and a playground with peeling swings, where hard-faced young mothers smoked their fags while their kids screamed expletives in competition with the birdsong.
The farm was on the outskirts, but with its back turned against the village, somehow not quite part of it. It looked run-down; shabby barns with corrugated iron roofs streaked with birdshit, the fossils of elderly tractors beached in the fields. The small farmhouse was pebble-dashed in grey; yellowing net curtains at every window to repel the curiosity of the passer-by; an ironic precaution since anyone would have quickened their step at the sight of it. Dolores’ vowels might have suggested some Laurie Lee idyll, but the reality of the place where she’d grown up had no such romance.
We sat in the Merc outside the farm gate. This was as far as we were going, she said. She’d no idea if Mr Potts were at home. There wasn’t going to be any meeting of her two Dads; she enjoyed a good soap-opera but flatly refused to appear in one. So we’d just driven round and about; I’d been shown her primary school, her secondary school, the local Asda where she’d worked in the holidays, the dog-eared antique shop where she’d lost her virginity to a middle-aged dealer she’d always assumed to be gay. She’d flaunted herself and got more than she’d bargained for; including a pregnancy swiftly followed by a termination. Her parents had known nothing. Her mother would have thrown herself under the combine harvester. Jesus, I’d been a grandfather for about five minutes and known nothing about it.
‘There were times I wished Mama had aborted me,’ said Dolores, peering at the farmhouse from behind a vast pair of shades. ‘She wasn’t exactly a million laughs. That whole Catholic number, you know? No control over their own lives. Do what the old arsehole in Rome tells you to do. Fuck that.’
‘But surely it’s thanks to all that stuff that she didn’t abort you?’ I said it with a grin, to mask the horror that had coursed through me at the thought of it. ‘So three Hail Marys for the old arsehole. But I’m sorry you and your mother didn’t get along.’
‘Actually no, we were quite close in some ways but I was her shame too you see. Only Mr Potts ever knew in fact and she wasn’t much bothered about that. It was God knowing that really did her in. You want to go see her now?’
‘Sorry?’
‘She’s in the churchyard,’ said Dolores. ‘I thought you might like to renew your acquaintance. In fact, I insist that you do.’
I’d not reckoned on this; I’d just suggested a sentimental journey as a possible way of kick-starting the bonding process. She’d agreed but only under pressure. There was still that arm’s-length thing going on. I’d no clear idea how she felt towards me. On the night of the big disclosure, she’d said she’d just come to take a look at me. Was that it then? Was that all it would ever be? Maybe it was just her generation and its armour-plated obsession with its own agenda. She’d hardly even raised an eyebrow when she’d heard about the death of Caravaggio; just said ‘shit’ and begun talking about a copper beech that might need felling. I wondered how you got through to Dolores Potts.
I parked the Merc carelessly close to a gang of feral schoolgirls and followed Dolores through a lychgate and up a sloping path lined with graves. In front of us, the church tower leaned back against a mouse-grey sky. Dolores veered off among the tombstones. Her mother, garlanded with freshly-laid flowers, lay in the shelter of the perimeter wall. On the other side of it, somebody’s TV pumped out of an open window. Fern Britton was talking about cystitis.
Cristina Gomez Potts. 1963–2010.
I looked at the headstone and tried, yet again, to bring the face into focus. Dolores had shown me an old photograph but it hadn’t helped much. All I recalled were a couple of dates, me half-pissed, another naked body lying on a bed waiting for me to prove myself a proper man. I suppose I’d never been bothered about the faces. Just like I’d never registered Vic’s.
‘Isn’t this nice?’ said Dolores sitting on an adjacent tomb and lighting up. ‘The family together at last.’
She stared at her mother’s grave then back at me. Suddenly her expression changed from its usual disengaged serenity. She looked desperately uncomfortable.
‘This was a mistake,’ she announced, leaping up and grinding her fag beneath her red stiletto. ‘Come on, let’s go.’
Something made me grab her arm as she moved past me. Mascara was trickling down her cheek.
‘You fucked up her life,’ she shouted. ‘She only got forty-seven years of it and you fucked it up for her. She fell in love with you and let you screw her. The good Catholic girl. Didn’t you even notice she was a virgin? Then you just disappeared. On to the next one, yeah? But every day for the rest of her life Mama looked at me and saw you. That was why she loved me and why she was so hard on me too.’
‘I had no idea …’ I said. ‘If I’d known … I meant her no harm …’
‘People never do, do they?’
‘I was a bit screwed up, that’s all.’
‘And you still are, aren’t you? Twenty-six years later, you came on to me. Isn’t it time you accepted yourself? It’s unbelievable in this day and age, it really is. Anyway, you’re now one of the most famous shirtlifters in the country, so what’s the bloody point? Grow up Daddy before you grow old.’
Dolores turned away from me. She scraped a match across the scabby catafalque of some ancient nobleman and lit up again.
‘I just wanted the whole shebang,’ I said. ‘It’s what I’d been brought up to expect. To have anything I wanted; like kids for example. Instead, I lost everything.’
‘Oh it’s always about you, isn’t it?’ she snapped. ‘Rory Blaine, centre of the fucking universe. So your grandmother dumped you cos you were a poof. I wormed it out of Elspeth. Big deal. Cry me a river. Well you walked away from my mother. You’d been injured and then you caused injury because of it. Even if you didn’t mean it, the pain still happened. So you’re quits with life, aren’t you? Now butch up and get over it.’
Dolores walked back to the grave, knelt down and crossed herself.
‘I thought you didn’t subscribe to all that,’ I said.
‘I don’t, but she’d like to see me here doing it, so what the hell.’
I wondered if I should kneel down too but just stood there awkwardly. On the other side of the wall, Fern Britton had moved on to teenage truancy. A boy called Shane was explaining why school was a load of bollocks.
‘Your photograph’s in there among the bones,’ said Dolores, ‘along with her rosary and a fragment of stone from the cathedral in Sevilla. I put it there myself. Mr Potts doesn’t know.’
‘Jesus.’
‘I guess if Cupid’s arrow hits you hard, you’re fucked,’ she said. ‘I wonder what it’s like.’
‘I’m told you hear trumpets,’ I said.
A young curate, scarce out of short trousers but already balding, held open the lychgate to let us pass. He smiled in that automatic way and hoped we’d enjoyed our time with God today.
‘Well did you enjoy it?’ I asked Dolores as we reached the car. ‘Getting all that off your capacious chest?’
‘Not really.’
‘You don’t hate me then?’
‘Maybe, right after Mama died, but only for about five minutes. And when I came to Mount Royal I soon realized you were just a messed-up bloke like the rest of them. Then I discovered I kind of liked you too. But I wanted you to know about this, which is why I agreed to this little awayday. Anyway, whatever I’ve said, you’re still my Dad. Now let’s get the hell out of here before we bump into the other one.’
I glanced back across at the churchyard and in that moment Cristina Gomez’s face came to me at last. She’d tripped over a cable in the office and twisted her ankle. I’d scooped her up in my arms like Rhett Butler and carried her to the first aid room. She’d been wincing and laughing at the same time. She’d had a high tinkling laugh. I could see her big dark eyes, the ones she’d given to her daughter, and feel her breath on my cheek.
For a moment, I thought my new-found ability to blub, so far revealed only to Elspeth’s lap, was going to prove itself again. Instead I just stared back at the churchyard till Dolores came round and took me in her arms. This time there was no tension in her body as I held her.
‘Come on Daddy,’ she said, rubbing my back like she was burping a baby. ‘Time for drinkies.’
I’d booked lunch at a posh place nearby; a Tudor inn with bulging walls, guarded by regiments of box pyramids and glossy young men who valet-parked your car. Dolores was just as at home as she’d been in the Ritz. I wondered how the girl from the drab farmhouse had transformed herself into what she was now. How long it had taken. What the trigger had been. Or maybe I knew the answer to that last one now.
We needed to talk about trivialities. Vic was recording his duet with Elton soon. Did I think Vic would let her tag along? I said to ask him herself. I hadn’t spoken to Vic in the three days since our melodrama in the Wilderness. I had no idea where we went from here. I’d been finding reasons to escape from the house; yesterday I’d gate-crashed Curtis Powell’s group outing to the V&A, today I was here with Dolores. It couldn’t go on.
Over the pudding, she announced she was going away for a long weekend. An old client had a new estate above Monte Carlo. He wanted her advice and she’d always been interested in Mediterranean planting. More of a challenge than England’s rain-soaked earth, she said. Tougher odds. She liked that. She hoped I didn’t mind her doing the odd outside commission. I lied and said I didn’t.
She asked if I’d heard from Faisal and I told her I hadn’t. She looked at me from beneath her long Spanish lashes and toyed with her sorbet.
‘Well,’ she sighed eventually, ‘I think you’ve had a lucky escape.’
‘So you said in your note,’ I replied, mildly irritated. ‘Maybe everyone has a view? What’s Bruce Willis’s opinion? Have the Chamber-Laddies taken a vote?’
‘He was a decent guy, but not exactly a comfortable presence, was he?’
‘Maybe not. But at least, he was a presence. I happened to need that. Or I thought I did.’
‘I think you still do,’ she said. ‘Just choose more carefully next time. You understand feng shui? The way things are positioned in relation to each other? It’s quite useful when you’re planning a garden. Well I reckon you can apply it to people too. We get too close to some, too distant from others or just see them from the wrong angle. And all the time we could create a much happier space for ourselves if we simply repositioned.’
‘Isn’t that a bit rich coming from someone whose default position in relation to others is horizontal?’
Dolores threw back her head and laughed louder than people were expected to when paying these prices.
‘Yeah but that’s the position I’ve chosen for myself, right now at least. I’ll change it when it suits me. Anyway, how dare you presume it’s horizontal?’
One of the glossy boys swept the Merc up to the entrance and handed Dolores inside. She asked if his mother knew he was out. He was smitten. We twisted back along the lanes that led to the motorway As I accelerated towards London, Dolores reclined her seat and dozed off.
I’d called Ms Prada’s office yesterday. She was no longer in Lanzarote but had extended her itinerary to take in Madeira. Useless. We were nearly at High Wycombe when I swung the car onto the hard shoulder and slammed to a halt. Dolores sat bolt upright and swore. I stared ahead out through the windscreen and told her everything that had happened in the Wilderness three nights and thirty years ago. I left nothing out. When I finished, I turned to look at her. She smiled back at me, shaking her spiky black head.
‘Wow, that’s the most beautiful story I’ve ever heard,’ she said.
A Highways Agency patrol van pulled up behind us. The driver knocked on the window and asked if we needed any assistance. Couldn’t people have a private conversation these days, I asked? He said he’d report me for unauthorized use of the hard shoulder. I told him to bugger off.
‘You’ve done it again, haven’t you?’ said Dolores.
‘Fucking surveillance society.’
‘No, I mean you’ve made somebody else love you,’ she said. ‘Think very hard before you turn your back this time. You’ve got form, remember?’
We didn’t speak again till the gates of Mount Royal swung open before us. Then she repeated what she’d said earlier.
‘Just reposition yourself. That’s all you’ve got to do.’
*
‘The boy has come back,’ said Lord Billy, peering out the window of the Breakfast Room as he heaped scrambled eggs onto his plate.
I followed his gaze and saw the old Peugeot trundle into the East Court and park bang up against the Merc. Faisal had always done that, even when there was loads of space; an unsubtle dig at what he considered my vulgar materialism. Two suitcases came out of the boot and disappeared into the flat. Shite. And I’d been having such a nice breakfast.
I’m never exactly great first thing but now, three or four times a week, this was where I started the day. Vic had suggested it and, on the days when I wasn’t there, he’d make sure he was. He’d said it would engender ésprit de corps and demonstrate the management’s commitment to customer care. The Breakfast Room was one of the few spaces in Mount Royal you might have called cosy. On bright mornings, the sun poured itself onto your cornflakes, a factor which had led Robin Bradbury-Ross to ban the hanging of any first-rate pictures. So instead of grim Madonnas or martyred saints, the yellow flock walls were cheered by Edwardian water-colours of seaside resorts. Littlehampton looked particularly nice.
Most of the guys appeared for breakfast. There were four well-spaced round tables, so those who didn’t want to chat could hide behind their newspaper. Lord Billy often sat alone; he seemed to read Nancy Mitford on a constant loop, splashing coffee on his djellabah and exclaiming how droll it was. Nancy herself had once dubbed him the seventh Mitford Girl; a compliment he treasured above any other.
Marcus Leigh was always there, in blazer and tie at half past eight, his day meticulously mapped out by lunch at his beloved Reform, an exhibition or a matinee or a trip out to Cheltenham to visit his centenarian nanny. He’d lightened up a bit lately, competing with Curtis Powell to see who could finish The Times crossword quickest. Curtis was nearly always first for breakfast, sweaty and smug from his jog, still in tracksuit, baseball cap and matching heart-rate monitor; though Beau never appeared, because Angela Lansbury had told him a star never faced the public before ten. Mr Lim would sit quietly behind his pebble-glasses, sipping tea and issuing dire warnings to anyone drinking orange juice, slow suicide for the enamel. The Toffee Twins would be side by side as usual, Jacob fussing to make sure Jasper had a full cup and seconds of sausage and bacon, which Jasper always took without thanking him.
The Archdeacon had just been complaining about a note slipped under his door during the night. It was headed ‘Miss Wishart Suggests …’ and it turned out they’d all been getting them on a regular basis. The notes were eclectic, from reprimands over unfinished meals and alcohol intake to disapproval over returning in the wee small hours, in which case the culprit would be advised to have an early night and perhaps even a purgative. The Archdeacon said his note was of too intimate a nature to disclose, but that it concerned bed-linen. Miss Wishart was a servant he said and perhaps I might like to remind her of that? I tried to imagine myself doing so.
This morning I’d been sitting beside Gentleman Jim. He was the only one who appealed to my blokeish side. I hated cricket, but we talked about rugby; I’d offered to take him to see the gay team. He loved to go hiking in Scotland too, it reminded him of New Zealand. He’d shyly suggested we might go up there together sometime and I’d surprised myself by agreeing. I’d been away too long. He’d been nattering about a possible itinerary when Lord Billy had looked out the window.
‘The boy has come back,’ he said again, louder this time, assuming I hadn’t heard.
A hush had fallen in the Breakfast Room, broken only by the crunching of toast. I went on talking to Gentleman Jim about the sunset over Loch Maree, till he placed his palm on the back of my hand and rubbed it briskly, as if I’d just come in from the cold.
‘Courage, mate,’ he said.
I smiled and got up. As I passed his table, Marcus Leigh reached out and squeezed my fingers without glancing up from The Times. In the lobby, a voice called down from the top of the East Stairs. Two floors above, Beau and his belly were leaning over the balustrade. He was wearing a bathrobe that was about three sizes too small.
‘Hey babe, I saw the midget arrive,’ he shouted. ‘Just wanted to say we all love you. You gotta know that by now.’
I reached the front door of the flat as Faisal was coming back out to his car. We approached each other, eyes not meeting, like on that first date outside Covent Garden tube. He was sorry for being earlier than we’d agreed but he had a lot to get through today. He’d just get more suitcases from the car and come back in a minute. I went up and put the kettle on.
He sipped his coffee in a chair as far from mine as possible. He was flying to the Sudan tonight. He’d arranged extended leave from the hospital and was going to work with his friend Ruby. I imagined her, sitting outside a tent with a smirk on her fat face, saying that she’d told him so.
Things in Slough had gone from bad to worse. His father had been readmitted to hospital and the truth about Faisal’s sexuality had finally exploded into his wider family. His father’s brothers had arrived at Khan’s Tools & Hardware and demanded that his mother leave with them; she’d resisted at first but they’d more or less dragged her off. His uncles intended to look after the business. It had all been pretty awful.
‘So I’m running,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a Blue in that, remember? I know it’s cowardly, but I don’t know what else to do. I seem to be the cause of so much grief I think it’s best if I remove myself for a while.’
‘Leaving your mother to the bigots?’ I said. ‘I’ll survive without you Faisal, but will she?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I’ve been trying to save her from them for years, but they’re too powerful for me.’
He got up to get the coffee pot. He tried to tickle Alma’s chin but she leapt away. She’d never taken to Faisal.
‘I’m really sorry about the other day,’ he said over his shoulder. ‘I still care very much for you and I always will.’
He came and sat on the Berber rug at my feet and took both my hands in his. ‘Rory, I just don’t know where I fit,’ he said. ‘It’s not in Khan’s Tools & Hardware, I always knew that. It’s not in this big house with these rich old men. I always knew that too. But I thought that maybe it could be right here, in this flat with you, hermetically sealed against everything and everybody. But that was cloud-cuckoo land. They were all in here with us, weren’t they? So maybe the only place Faisal Khan really belongs is beside a hospital bed with a stethoscope in my hand, a reassuring smile on my face and up to my arse in little black babies. Anyway, that’s how it feels right now, so that’s where I’m going.’
He stood up and drained his cup. A removal van would be coming in a few days to take his bigger stuff into storage. He looked down at his precious Berber rug, the old coffee stains still visible.
‘Shame we couldn’t rescue that,’ he said. ‘Chuck it out if you want.’
We went downstairs to the bedroom. The glitzy clothes I’d bought him were still on the rails. He ran his hand along the suits and jackets then closed the doors.
‘I’ll not be wanting those,’ he said. ‘They were just the props for being Rory Blaine’s boyfriend, weren’t they? Or “paramour”, as your devoted Vic once put it. But I guess I was wrong for the part.’
‘So it’s life with Ruby from now on then?’
‘No, it’s life with Faisal,’ he replied. ‘Just me. Just me and the stuff I do best. For a while, anyway.’
‘Don’t wander out there alone for too long,’ I said.
‘Well at least you’ll not be alone, will you?’ he said ‘That’s partly what makes it possible for me to leave. You’ll be okay now, Rory.’
‘You going to say goodbye to anybody?’ I asked. ‘Elspeth, Dolores and Big Frankie even? I know they’d like it.’
‘No, but give them all my very best. I really mean that.’
I took him in my arms. It was all so familiar; the smell and feel of him, the reflex bending of my knees. It had lasted just over eighteen months.
Together we filled his cases with more stuff and carried them out into the East Court. He stared across at the house for a moment; figures darted away from the windows of the Breakfast Room.
‘Well I guess Lazarus isn’t going to rise after all,’ he said. ‘But try and watch their diets and get them in the pool a couple of times a week, yeah? All their medical notes are in a file in the desk and you’ll need to fix up another private GP quickly. Now listen, Marcus Leigh has just been for some tests. It’s possible he has the beginnings of Parkinson’s. Results next week, but you don’t know that unless he chooses to tell you. Just wanted you to be aware, okay? He might be needing a lot of support.’
‘He’ll get it,’ I said.
‘You’d not throw him out, would you? Later on, if things get worse? I know that was supposed to be the rule.’
‘No, I’d not do that now,’ I said.
He promised to email me from the Sudan then handed me his keys to the flat. I refused to take them. There was always a room for him here, I said. But he pushed them into my palm and closed my fingers.
‘And hey, thanks for the laughs,’ he said. ‘I’d not had enough of those till I met you. Everything had always seemed too important. Maybe it still does. But I’ll try and do better from now on.’
He got into his car and, without looking at me again, turned towards the arch below the Clock Tower. As I watched it go, the old Peugeot morphed into another car, in the same place but in another time. A Ford Capri, with seats of cracked beige leather, driven by a sweaty man with long hair, a droopy moustache and wide lapels, hired to take me to Euston to catch the train back to Glenlyon. It’d been a fine late summer morning, just like this one. For a second, I closed my eyes against the image and, when I opened them, Faisal was gone.
Suddenly the East Court became Dodge City when the gunfight was over. The citizens popped out again and bustled about their business. Doors were opened and windows flung wide. Elspeth shook out her duster and waved down at me. Big Frankie passed with bin-liners of rubbish and a cheery wink. The Post Office van swung under the Clock Tower and one of the Chamber-Laddies zoomed in late on his rollerblades.
‘There’s some soggy scrambled eggs still left,’ said a voice behind me. ‘I hear your breakfast got interrupted.’
It’d been five days since I’d left him in the Wilderness as the dusk came down.
‘Thanks. That’d be good,’ I said.
Vic turned and preceded me into the house, holding open the East Door and ushering me in with a mock bow.
‘All right?’ he asked as I passed through.
‘Yes thanks, Victor,’ I replied. And I knew that I was. Sort of.
Hilarity spilled out of the Breakfast Room. Gentleman Jim had been trying to sing a Scottish song for Curtis Powell and failing to remember the lyrics. When they saw me the laughter was replaced by tight smiles, shyly lobbed in my direction. But I knew every daft word of the song, verses and all. It didn’t take long to teach them the chorus and ten minutes later I was leading fifteen elderly homosexuals in an uninhibited rendition of Donald, Where’s Yer Troosers? Amazing the power of community singing to lift the spirits. It had worked for Baden-Powell and his boys and today it worked for Rory Blaine and his.
‘Jeez, toots, you can sing,’ said Vic.
*
After breakfast I went to check my emails. There was one from Dolores, away on her jaunt to Monte Carlo. It was the dream project, she said. It could make her reputation. Trouble was they were insisting on it being full-time. So with regret she was handing in her resignation at Mount Royal. She’d be back in a few days but had wanted to let me know at once. She hoped I’d understand. She was sure I’d want the best for her.