Gil’s skin was mottled, the inside of his arm bruised. She pulled the pyjama top out from behind his shoulders and inched his other arm out from the sleeve, being careful with his still-bandaged wrist. His eyes were screwed shut, his jaw working.
Louise held out the dress that Flora had draped over the chair. When Flora looked up, Gabriel and Jonathan were watching. “Why don’t you pour the whiskey?” she said.
“More,” Gil said.
“More whiskey?” Flora whispered, looking into his eyes, and he raised his to hers.
“More music,” he said, as she pulled the pink dress over her father’s head, smoothing it around him.
Gabriel turned the music up again so that it swamped them and the room, overwhelming the noise of the rain and Gil’s laboured breathing, which sounded like the last gasps of the mackerel on the road. Jonathan passed around the glasses and the two cups. And Gil, with a tumbler gripped in his fist, held up his shaking arm and, one by one, Louise, Jonathan, Gabriel, and lastly Flora chinked against it and drank.
Chapter 42
THE SWIMMING PAVILION, 1ST JULY 1992, 5:00 AM
Gil,
Yesterday evening Jonathan and I were the last customers in the bar of the Alpine Hotel in London. At the bar Jonathan ordered a whiskey. The woman who served him was stuffed into what the management must have thought was traditional Swiss costume: an apron and dirndl, the tight-laced bodice forcing her breasts over the top like risen muffins. Her hair was plaited and coiled around her head, and I wondered if they only hired barmaids with long blonde hair and whether that was legal. I asked for a glass of white wine, but Jonathan bought a bottle. We sat opposite each other on uncomfortable wooden chairs, a punched-out heart in each backrest.
“Happy birthday, again,” Jonathan said, and we chinked glasses.
Over dinner we’d talked about how he was still single, how his writing was going, and how he had to get up at six the next morning to catch a flight to Addis Ababa. I told him about the death and burial of Annie and we’d raised our glasses to her memory. There was only one subject left now.
“You need to decide,” he said. “Take him back or get divorced and move out. That house has always felt like Gil’s to me, stuffed with his mother’s old furniture and all those books. I remember being surprised there was even room for you and the girls, when they came along.”
“That’s because your oversized body was always hanging off either end of the sofa.” We drank. A wash of nostalgia for those months when I was pregnant with Nan swept over me. “Not to London, though,” I said, imagining you with Louise at that very moment in the same city, in her bed, in her body. I banished the image. “I don’t think the children would be happy moving. Nan wants to go into nursing, and we couldn’t leave yet, anyway, not until after her exams, and God knows about Flora. I’d have to suggest the opposite and then she might do what I wanted. I had to pay Nan more than the going rate to get her to babysit her sister tonight.” I drank again.
“You could come and live with me.”
I choked on the wine I was swallowing. “But you don’t even have a house, Jonathan. You’ve been sleeping on people’s sofas for the whole of your life.”
“I do, in Ireland.”
“What are you saying?”
“I don’t know.” He let go of his glass and rubbed both his hands through his hair so it stood up from his head. “Just that I want something better for you, that you deserve something better.”
“That’s what you’ve always said, but none of this is your fault. Everything that’s happened I’ve let happen. There’s no one else to blame except myself.”
“That’s not true and you know it. Gil had the affair,” Jonathan said. I glanced at him and then away. “Affairs,” he corrected. “And he chose to include that dedication; he wrote that book. Gil, always the risk taker.”
I stared at my glass, didn’t dare look him in the eye. “But I knew what he was like,” I said. “You warned me that first night at his party, remember?”
“Did I?” Jonathan waved his empty whiskey glass at the woman behind the bar. She clasped the top of her bodice and pulled it upwards with both hands; it didn’t move. She came over with another whiskey on a silver tray.
“If you can’t blame Gil,” Jonathan said, “then you should blame me.”
“What do you mean?”
“I reintroduced them, Gil and Louise. At a party he invited me to. I brought her along. They didn’t like each other much before that, did they? God, remember your wedding? I never thought the two of them would turn into something serious. He’s an idiot. I’m sorry.”
“I have to make myself stop thinking about them. What they’re doing, where they are.” I rolled the stem of my glass between my fingers. “It’s torture, even after all these months.”