‘A long time. He’s a good man,’ she added, as if I’d said otherwise.
We were drinking brandies, a quiet piano concerto floating through from the gramophone in the other room. Quick closed her eyes, and she was so still, neither of us speaking, that I thought she’d dropped to sleep, the glow from the electric table--light beside her turning her face orange. She didn’t strike me as the kind of person to invite a guest over and then fall asleep in the middle of a conversation. She was in her fifties, not her nineties, but it was peaceful to watch her in repose and I didn’t wish to disturb. I wondered why she was so interested in me – placing my story in the magazine, the invitations to lunch, the solicitous questions over Lawrie and my future.
The electric fire was switched on, although it was a mild October. Quick even had on a shawl. I felt the brandy overheating my body and thought maybe I should leave, and I was on the point of rising from my chair when Quick said, her eyes still closed – ‘Did you ever talk to Lawrie Scott about his mother?’
I sat back down. ‘His mother?’
Her eyes snapped open and I saw their leonine intent. ‘Yes. His mother.’
I thought about the suicide, and realized with a shock that it might have taken place in one of the very rooms I’d wandered through. Sitting here, I suddenly missed Lawrie. I wanted us to start again – a trip to the cinema, a walk in the park – but I had no idea how on earth to make it possible. I couldn’t let him float adrift as well as Cynth.
‘He didn’t talk about her at all,’ I lied.
‘Then he must be thinking about her an awful lot. I’d lay money on it, if I were a betting man. Grief’s a pressure cooker if you don’t deal with it. One day, you simply explode.’
‘Do you?’
She drained her brandy glass. ‘Things crumble. Bit by bit. They shift, you don’t notice. Then you notice. Jesus Christ, my legs are broken but I never moved my feet. And all the time, it’s been coming towards you, Odelle – orchestrated in the hearts of strangers, or a God you’ll never meet. Then one day, a stone is hurled – and by accident or design, that stone hits the car window of a powerful idiot who wants revenge, or who wants to impress his mistress, and – whoosh – the foot soldiers move in. The next day, your village is burning down, and because of stupidity, because of sex, there’s a coffin for your bed.’
I couldn’t think how to reply to this. Sex, death, coffins – how many brandies had she had? I didn’t see what this had to do with Lawrie at all. I stared into the electric bars.
Quick leaned forward, and the arms of her chair creaked. ‘Odelle, do you trust me?’
‘Trust you with what?’
She leaned back again, visibly frustrated. ‘You don’t, then. If you did, you would have just said yes.’
‘I’m a cautious person. That’s all.’
‘I trust you, you know. I know you’re someone I can trust.’
I think I was supposed to be grateful, but instead I felt a simmering unease. The bars of the fire were making me hotter and hotter, and I was tired, and she was in a strange mood.
Quick sighed. ‘It’s my fault. For all my conversations with you, I’m probably even more guarded than you are.’
I couldn’t disagree with this, so I didn’t try and persuade her otherwise.
‘I’m not well,’ she said. ‘I’m not very well at all.’
IT WAS CANCER, SHE SAID. Late stage, pancreatic cancer with an inevitable outcome. My own body ached at these words, which was selfish, but entirely predictable. I assumed that the outrageous fact of her cancer had made Quick want someone at home with her like this – a desire which had possibly surprised her and made her even more brusque. Quick, who had been alone with her secrets for so many years, no longer wished to be alone. Perhaps submitting my story, and therefore making me obliged to her, was a baroque plan to satisfy her simple need for company? If your life is running out, such decisions may not seem so invasive or dramatic, and you willingly commit. I realized too, that this was why she spoke to Edmund Reede with no fear of reprisal. She knew she was soon to be reprised entirely.
And I do think, looking back, that Quick perhaps regarded me as the child she never had, as someone who would perpetuate her essence after death. She told me at our first meeting that I reminded her of someone she used to know. I suspect that person was the closest companion she ever had. I’ll never be sure of this, and she never mentioned a name, but her expression when she said those words makes me think that it was so. It was a tender look, mingled with terror, as if to come too close to me would lose whatever she’d lost all over again.
Sitting in that overheated front room, I realized quite how thin she was, how tired. And although I probably thought it unfair that someone should suffer something like that alone, I don’t imagine I cried in front of her. Quick was not someone you would sob in front of unless you absolutely had to, and when it was a question of her own pain and loss, you might feel a monstrous booby to cry when she herself was dry--eyed, dragging on the cigarettes that were helping to kill her. She was a curio, out of her time, not given to standard emotion – and in her presence, you did what Quick did.
‘Well, say something,’ she said.
‘Does Mr Reede know?’ I asked.
Quick snorted. ‘God, no. And he’s not to.’
‘Does anyone else know?’
‘No one else, but don’t worry, I haven’t told you because I want you to be my nursemaid.’
‘Why have you told me?’
Quick reached for the brandy bottle and refilled her glass. ‘Do you know, I got my diagnosis the day you started at the Skelton?’
‘Goodness me,’ I said. I remembered Quick coming up to my desk that first day; her flushed face, the way she batted away the porter’s questions over her absence from work.
‘Indeed,’ she said. ‘A day of ups and downs. Death imminent, followed by Odelle Bastien.’