When the World Was Steady Page 5

  ‘I’ve been in all day, you know. And I had biscuits for tea just now.’

  ‘Mother, you’re not supposed to.’

  ‘Supposed to, supposed to! Virginia, I could die tomorrow. Aren’t you out this evening?’

  ‘The meeting’s not till nine, because Angelica’s working late this week. She’s on holiday from next Monday.’

  ‘Speaking of holiday?’

  ‘I’ve told you. I just don’t know. Simon’s off starting next week, Selina the week after, which has the office almost empty …’

  Mrs Simpson sucked her dentures loudly and rustled the newspaper pages in exasperation. Virginia noticed that her mother’s bosom was uneven.

  ‘Mum,’ she said, reaching out to adjust the prostheses through her mother’s silky blouse, ‘they’re lopsided.’

  Mrs Simpson slapped her daughter’s hands away. ‘I’m not going out, thank you very much. And I don’t believe we’re expecting company. So if I choose to have one breast rakishly higher than the other I would thank you to leave me alone. Now go and water the plants.’

  Virginia took the key to the downstairs flat and left her mother rocking slightly in the fading light, glasses slipped to the end of her nose, arms crossed protectively over her chest.

  It was Mrs Simpson who had volunteered to water their neighbour’s flowers while the woman and her boy were visiting family in Sweden, but of course it was Virginia who had to do the work. In the unusually hot summer, Mrs Simpson—Melody to her friends, an oddly soft name for so hard a woman—barely moved from her chair. She had even given up on the shopping. All the neighbours were asking after her. She had taken to accosting passing acquaintances and even strangers, from the window, and sending them on errands, the proceeds of which she hauled up in the basket. She had even set up a little winch on the window-ledge to facilitate ups and downs.

  Mrs Reece from two doors down had told Virginia that her mother was now lowering Bella, the tabby, in the basket, and then lowering the keys to stunned pedestrians in order that they might let Bella in again. It was only a matter of time, Mrs Reece pointed out, till Melody let the keys into the hands of hooligans who would take advantage.

  Was it the heat that was making her mother so eccentric? Virginia’s mother had rarely made scenes in public, a fact for which Virginia had always been grateful. She wasn’t sure how she felt about living with a local oddity.

  She considered these things as she doused the houseplants. So many worries clamoured for her attention. Her mother’s sudden insanity wasn’t the only thing. There was this issue of the summer holiday. Mrs Simpson had always been content with a week of having Virginia at home and possibly a couple of days with cousins in East Anglia, or at the most a weekend in Hastings or Brighton—and once, in a time of great daring, Cornwall. Now she had taken it into her head that she wanted to go to Scotland for a week. And, not one for half measures, she insisted that Edinburgh was very nice but barely Scotland: she meant the Hebrides. She wanted to go to Skye.

  Her people—Virginia’s people too—were from Skye on her mother’s side, and Melody wanted to see the place again after more than forty years. Virginia didn’t know how to respond. She thought at first the whim would pass, but it didn’t. Like the other strangenesses, it grew in her mother over the weeks, and hardened. Whenever the subject came up, Mrs Simpson’s eyes got a glitter to them and her chin set itself tight.

  And then there was the office: everything there was in a state of disarray, initiated in part by Virginia’s half-formed decision—taken after three halves of cider in the pub around the corner on the occasion, two months previously, of Martin, the assistant’s birthday—that she was infatuated with Simon Ramsbottom, her colleague for over seven years, her direct superior for six months, and a married man.

  How or why she had allowed this to happen she could not now recall. Love—or its shadow—had been excised long ago from the range of her emotions, after the trouble, the bad time in her youth. She had, for all of a decade now, settled her substantial share of love on God, to whom it rightly belonged. That a smidgen of it, however tiny, should have slipped from her control and latched on to Simon was bewildering and regrettable, and not simply as a point of principle. She knew that Simon could sense her growing confusion, and she knew also that her behaviour was distinctly unprofessional. Sometimes she would be discussing forthcoming interviews with him, or the progress of new staff, when suddenly she would picture him naked in his chair and imagine that she heard him crooning softly to her to climb over the desk. Whereupon she would lose track of the conversation and blush violently, whether more from the titillation or the horror of the fantasy she was never sure. Truth be told, she had never found Simon in the least physically attractive: he was squat and runcible and slightly foolish. Which made it all the more upsetting that she couldn’t get him off her mind.

  She had not sinned in anything but thought, and had been praying hard for the restitution of her reason. Everyone—or at least all the women—in her Bible study meetings had been praying too. She had contemplated talking to her minister about it, but felt there would be something odd about a woman of her age and prominence in the church discussing love with the timid Reverend, whose fire was only for God and only in the pulpit, as it should be. Her mother, if she told her, would only hiss and roll her eyes and say ‘poppycock’ to the lot of it, torments and all, the way she said ‘poppycock’ and ‘balderdash’ to God.

  ‘If there was a God,’ Mrs Simpson would say when asked and only then, ‘You, Virginia, would be married, and Emmy would still be married, and your father would still be living, and the world wouldn’t be warring and starving to death.’ She always said this with a certain amount of satisfaction and sucking of her teeth, as though to imply that she was perfectly content that all these things were so and that she would rather have them that way than contend with her Maker.

  As things stood, Virginia confided very little in her mother. Summer always prompted irritation and distance between them, but this month of June, so hot and anxious, was particularly bad. And not half over yet.

  The television was, as every night, audible on the landing when Virginia got back upstairs. Her mother now sat bathed in the set’s blue light with a tumbler of whisky against her knee.

  ‘You’re not supposed to,’ Virginia almost said, but what was the point? Mother was right, she might die tomorrow, and what would the comment do but cause friction? She was resigned to her mother dying unsaved, as resigned, that is, as a good Christian can be, but she did not like the thought that her mother might die while she and Virginia were in the midst of a tiff. For this reason bad terms were to be avoided as often as possible. This said, Mrs Simpson had not shown any signs of ill health, not a day of it, since her double mastectomy many, many years before, for what had proved to be benign tumours anyway.

  As she fried the haddock, Virginia alternated between anticipation and despondency: anticipation at the prospect of her meeting, and a feeling akin to despair over her mother’s silence, a despair she knew to be unreasonable—her mother had always been and would always be moody—but couldn’t help.

  ‘It’s not a fish I much like, haddock,’ was the first thing Mrs Simpson said. ‘Fish does make the flat smell.’

  This was too much. ‘If you would do some shopping, Mother, which you are perfectly capable of, you might find—’

  ‘I was going to say, if you had let me finish, that for all that you’ve cooked it very nicely. I’m quite enjoying it.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘It’s odd about smells,’ Mrs Simpson said. ‘They’re so strong in the heat. I’ve never thought of old Bella smelling, but lately there’s a real animal smell around. Have you noticed?’

  Virginia waited. It was bound to be a complaint about something.

  ‘No? It’s mostly in the daytime of course, so you wouldn’t. When the sun streams in. I thought maybe there was a dead mouse somewhere.’

  ‘Don’t be absurd! We’v
e lived in this building ten years and we’ve never had a mouse. In south London, after the war, we had mice. But not here. Unless you think they’re crawling out of Regent’s Park or down from the Heath and climbing up our stairwell? Maybe cadging a ride in the basket?’

  This was Virginia’s first real remark about the basket, and her mother chose to ignore it. After a pause she said, ‘The other thing I thought, Virginia, is that maybe the smell is me. I don’t know whether suddenly, with all this heat, I haven’t begun to smell old. The whiff of death on me, you know? Like old people’s homes or flats where old ladies live alone. Old ladies like me.’

  ‘If that’s what you think, maybe you’d better start bathing more often.’ Virginia said this as lightly as she could. But her mother’s comment seemed a breach of the decorum that kept them both going. Mortality was not an open subject, or certainly Virginia had always assumed it was not. ‘I’ll believe in the dead mouse before I can accept that kind of nonsense. I’ve got to go, Mum, or I’ll be late.’

  ‘Your book’s by the front door,’ Mrs Simpson said. She never called it a Bible, always ‘a book’, or ‘the book’, with no hint of a capital letter. ‘I’ll do the washing-up.’

  The Bible study group to which Virginia belonged met once a week on Wednesdays in the flat of a secretary named Angelica Trumbull, just up the road from Chalk Farm tube station and only a few minutes’ walk from the Simpsons’ in Primrose Hill. Although it was ostensibly an ecumenical meeting, everyone who attended regularly was affiliated with the Church of England, and, more than that, with St Luke’s church in Belsize Park. The exception was a young Hindu student who had arrived in Britain less than a year before; he lived downstairs from Angelica and occasionally sat in on the meetings just for company. In his mid-twenties—like Angelica—he was subject to some scrutiny by the others in the group, several of whom were convinced he was paying court to his hostess.

  Virginia, who had actually taken a little time to talk to Nikhil, was not of this contingent. She found in him a sensitive and lonely soul and she entertained hopes of awakening him to the miracle of Christian fellowship, although she did concede that to date he was more interested in the general conversation and the cakes and coffee than in any discussion of the gospel.

  Not that they always discussed the Bible itself: sometimes they discussed particular teachings or leaders—John Wimber, say, of whom Angelica was an avid follower, or Billy Graham—or even particular sermons. On evenings when the Reverend couldn’t make it, they talked about his sermons and whether they, as representatives of the congregation, agreed with them. Usually they did, unanimously, but they refrained from holding these conversations when he was present for fear of embarrassing him. Reverend Thompson, a slight, balding man in his late thirties, was unflappable about the Lord and his beliefs, but easily flustered in his person.

  As for the regulars, besides Nikhil and the Reverend there were seven of them, sometimes eight. There was Janet, a Christian counsellor; Janet’s husband Alistair, who could only make it sometimes, being a doctor and often on call; Mrs Hammond who, though much older than Mrs Simpson, was brave and unflagging in her attendance; Stephen Mills and Philip Taylor, two theology students at the University of London, slender, excitable young men with sharp senses of humour; Frieda Watson, a strong-minded divorcee of about Virginia’s age; Angelica; and, of course, Virginia herself.

  It was an odd collection of people. They themselves marvelled openly at their diversity in age and occupation. Almost weekly Mrs Hammond could be counted on to open the meeting by saying, ‘Blessed are we who allow our Lord Jesus Christ into our hearts! Where else but through the Lord could an old woman like me still be growing and learning and sharing with people like you?’—at this moment she clasped her gnarled hands with great fervour—‘Let’s start by offering the Lord Jesus a prayer of thanks!’

  To which the Reverend, when present, would say, ‘Quite right, Mrs Hammond, quite right.’ Occasionally one of the theology students would throw out an ‘Alleluia’ or an ‘Amen’ in the background to reinforce the general enthusiasm.

  But in fact, Virginia was not so optimistic about the harmony of their group, and didn’t feel the Lord was doing his bit to smooth things out. The Lord was testing her, it seemed, on the very ground where she should feel safest.

  It had to do with the occasional ‘Alleluia’. That background affirmation always sounded false, sarcastic even. Virginia was upset by the theology students.

  Stephen and Philip had appeared together, out of nowhere, one Sunday just after Easter, at St Luke’s. They were inseparable, almost interchangeable, disconcertingly similar in their mannerisms and their affectations. It hadn’t initially occurred to Virginia to think of them as ‘that sort’, although Angelica had whispered something about it almost the first time she saw them in church. But knowing this (as by now she felt she did), and áware that if they knew anything about the word of the Lord (which as theology students they must) then they were condemning themselves to damnation—in the light of all this, Virginia had a hard time accepting their presence.

  ‘But Reverend,’ she wanted to say but couldn’t, ‘they are emissaries of Satan.’

  He would have said only that affectation was not necessarily any indication of sin. He would have said they were taking the first step towards the salvation of their souls and were to be encouraged rather than shunned.

  But Virginia—who had turned to God precisely because her distressing experience had revealed human nature to be fallible, sly and, well, fallen—was less trusting. She had observed them, both at church and in the group, and she didn’t think they were taking any steps towards salvation at all. What she had observed was that the group—herself included—was being observed. Mrs Hammond’s heartfelt call to prayer was being recorded as a sociological phenomenon for some assigned essay at the university on evangelism within the Anglican church. Virginia was almost certain.

  She had talked about it with Angelica, who understood her distress at finding the seeds of Satan in the one secure corner of her life. Angelica was Virginia’s closest ally and dearest friend in the group, and for Virginia, Angelica was the truth of harmony through the Lord that Mrs Hammond praised so. For although the two women were similar in many ways, and Virginia sometimes thought she saw in her friend her own younger self, only worldlier and better equipped to cope, it was difficult to conceive of any purpose other than the Lord’s work that could have brought them together.

  Angelica Trumbull, at twenty-eight, twenty-three years Virginia’s junior and technically young enough to be her daughter, was a source of true inspiration. Like Virginia, she had behind her a veiled tragedy, to which she occasionally referred, but some years ago she had found God, and this oblique evil had lifted, leaving a heavyset but attractive young woman with the face of a cherub and a cascading mass of blonde curls, who shouldered the responsibilities of her single life with a quiet eagerness. An eagerness, indeed, that Virginia, who often felt defeated despite all the Lord’s blessings, would not admit even to herself that she envied.

  Angelica was utterly nice. Or perhaps, Virginia thought as she climbed the hill in the fading heat with her leather-bound Bible in her sweaty palm, ‘utterly’ was not the right word: she had too much fun with Angelica for either to be utterly nice, and there had been conversations after which she felt sullied and repentant. But then, it was not always possible to be both truthful and nice, and her friendship with Angelica was about God’s truth.

  When Virginia reached Angelica’s house, she saw that there was no light in the window of her friend’s flat. She looked at her watch: it was ten minutes before the hour, and obviously Angelica had been delayed at the office. Dusk was upon the buildings and trees and the rows of parked cars like a fine powder, and Virginia stood at the foot of the house steps unsure of where to go. At the corner there was a pub with frosted windows, from which faint strains of music and a hubbub drifted back towards her. Behind the glass, the light wavered, jos
tling shadows like a tempestuous sea. Virginia didn’t want to go there. She turned a full circle, slowly, peering into ordered living-rooms and bright kitchens where people mimed the acts of real life: a couple standing in front of the television, the woman absently drying a dish with a striped tea-towel; two young people waving their hands in argument, mouths flicking open and shut soundlessly; an elderly man reaching up to fiddle with curtains and pull them shut. He stopped to look back at her, and Virginia felt conspicuous and forlorn.

  She had somehow hoped that in this moment of turning, Angelica would have been spirited home, and that there would now be light and suggestions of bustle from the top of the house, but there was nothing. The old fellow was still staring, from one house over, and under his gaze Virginia climbed the steps and pressed the Trumbull buzzer. She imagined that she heard the echo of it, and then the silence that followed in the empty flat above. It was almost nine now, but none of the others were visible along the street—not even Philip and Stephen, who were always prompt, unwilling to miss a sociologically important minute—and so Virginia pressed the buzzer beneath Trumbull, marked ‘Gupta’.

  His ‘yes’ was wary, and as she explained herself, Virginia found she was patting nervously at her flat, greyed hair, and leaning perhaps too close to the intercom. But Nikhil buzzed her in at once, and when she reached his landing she found him already standing, arm outstretched, in the doorway of his flat.

  He was awkward, and his large ears were almost pink as he welcomed her. Virginia found his discomfort in some measure reassuring and relaxing. ‘Of course, of course,’ he said to nothing at all. ‘Sit down. Come in. We will wait together for Angelica to return.’

  His flat was the same as Angelica’s, but while hers was her own, peach and yellow and elegantly appointed, Nikhil Gupta’s was rented and spartan, with only a hideous vinyl suite and Formica table. His books and papers were scattered in disarray across all flat surfaces, and the only personal item in sight was a large framed photograph on the mantel. Virginia examined it, while Nikhil cleared a place on one of the vinyl armchairs, which proved, beneath the papers, to be peeling and stained.