Ben heads out of St Matthew’s Convent grinning like a fool. Mother Superior Lawrence was a doll and he’s pretty sure he caught a twinkle in those old grey eyes of hers. It is 5.30 p.m., 9.30 a.m. in California, although, he thinks, he should drop that thought and get used to what time it is here – here where he actually is.
One thing he already loves about England is how civilised everyone is. The mother superior really couldn’t have been sweeter, serving him tea and biscuits in a cute little annexe full of antique furniture and pictures of JC, and talking to him for longer than he had any right to ask her to. She even let him use the phone so he could call ahead to the hotel. The wind is in his sails – turns out his mother left her address with the sisters years ago. She wants to find him; why else would she leave it? But the request for contact has to come from him. She lives near, so near, barely half an hour’s drive, according to the nun. This country is so small! Tomorrow he should be well on his way to finding her. His hotel is in the same town, a place called Runcorn.
He crosses from the red-brick gothic monolith that is the convent and gets into his hire car.
Steadfastly he repeats the process of studying his map book and noting down the roads he needs. Looks like there’s a river or a canal of some sort there; it might be pretty, he might even get to wander along there with her while she tells him her story and he tells her his. When he is satisfied he can find the way, he starts the car. He is getting hungry. He hopes the hotel does room service.
Chapter Twenty
With the Ripper at large, it was no wonder they were all paranoid – Christopher, Adam, those girls. The whole country was in the grip of it. I remember the feeling of dread. Dread. If I could bring myself to speak, that would be the word with which I might start. Maybe the question is not how are you feeling but what are you feeling? That I could answer. I need nouns, not adjectives: guilt, shame, regret. If you can’t talk, then write. At first I couldn’t, the meds were too strong, but bit by bit I’ve crawled my way towards it, and now that I’ve started, I find I can’t stop. I look forward to it – or do I? Is it simply a habit I can’t break, like a biscuit with a cup of coffee?
When I think about Christopher volunteering to be Adam’s alibi, I realise that was a turning point for him. Something was sealed between them in that crucial moment. Without it, would they ever have had their evening of confidences and become so very close? Needless to say, this kind of friendship was new to Christopher. He’d already told me that he’d not had a best friend at school nor a lover of any real kind – it’s only now that I find myself thinking about that and wondering why I didn’t think about it more at the time. And as with anything good that happened to him now, he wondered whether Phyllis lay at the root, whether having found someone like her had opened him wide enough to allow room for someone like Adam.
‘I wonder if friendship or love or whatever is not a finite thing but something that under the right conditions grows and multiplies; you know, like cells in a Petri dish,’ he once said to me.
I know he looked forward to Adam getting home from his evening shifts, when they would make tea and toast and smoke and talk, sometimes until the early hours of the morning. In these moments, as with Phyllis, he felt a warmth that was physical, he told me, as if his insides had been lined with fur.
Adam’s father drank – too much, it transpired during one of their many long conversations. He was a miner; the work was hard and dirty, the conditions poor.
‘He’s got emphysema now,’ said Adam, one leg over the armchair in their student kitchen-cum-living-room. ‘Won’t see fifty. Most of his life spent underground, and for what? Couldn’t even take joy in raising his kids. Hates the fact I got to uni, hates it. Couldn’t stand the sight of me then – now, well…’
‘My father’s a bit that way,’ Christopher confessed. ‘I think he’d prefer it if I knew how to unblock a drain or wire a plug.’ He stared into his tea. The merest grey tinge of the meniscus broke when he put his mouth to it. ‘Words were what did for my family,’ he added, voicing a thought he had not known was there. ‘The lack of them anyway. If they’d spoken to me sooner, I wouldn’t have grown up feeling like a guest in my own house. Like an imposter.’
Adam was at that point the only person who knew about the situation regarding both of Christopher’s families
‘I can see how you’ve ended up where you are,’ he said after a moment. ‘But sooner or later it might be best to tell Jack and Margaret. These things have a way of coming back to bite you on the arse.’
‘I will,’ Christopher replied. ‘One day, when I find the right moment, I’ll tell them everything.’
In this way, late into the night, they unfolded their worlds like maps, the better to study their roads, rivers and contours. Like this, they hoped, they would be able to find their way through to something clearer – a destination of sorts.
* * *
It was in the August of that summer that Christopher went with Phyllis, David and the boys to Pembrokeshire. They had rented a bungalow in Tenby, in the grounds of a farm. Inside, the rooms smelled faintly of damp – a homely smell once the gas fire was lit, an alarming process involving a taper, the leaning back with one’s arm outstretched and the waiting for a loud woof as the gas blew orange.
‘Bloody hell,’ were David’s words the first evening, after he had succeeded in lighting the fire. ‘Nearly took my bloody eyebrows off, that thing.’
Outside, chickens scratched at the courtyard and, in the communal garden, a rather forlorn badminton net sagged between two trees. Phyllis pronounced the place perfect, and while David went off exploring with the boys, Christopher helped her to unpack. She had brought foodstuffs in a cardboard box and in the quaint pine kitchen brought out a brick-like object wrapped in foil.
‘Do you like fruit cake, Chris?’ She smiled at him and wiggled her eyebrows in mischief.
‘I love fruit cake.’
‘What say you and I have a piece with a cuppa, while the others aren’t looking?’
He smiled back, the lightness, almost fizziness he felt around her returning as it always did.
‘Sounds like a good idea.’ He made to sit down but stopped himself. ‘Ah, I almost forgot.’ From his jacket pocket he pulled the gift he had brought for her. ‘I made this tape for you. It’s from Adam’s record collection actually. It’s a selection of disco hits. I know you like disco.’
Phyllis cooed with delight and dashed to fetch the portable tape player she had brought. After a moment of static, Donna Summer’s ‘I Feel Love’ pulsed in the cramped space. Immediately Phyllis threw up her arms so that her bright green T-shirt rose up, exposing her white belly, her belly button. She danced like that around the kitchen.
‘I love it!’ she cried. ‘What else is on here?’