where he used to wait to collect her on their few and nervous nights out. But the blank facade of the house had told him nothing he did not already know.
Once or twice a year since then, he had made a point of driving down that street. He never saw her. No doubt she was long gone. A FOR SALE sign had been planted in the front garden. She had married, moved away; her father (he supposed) was dead. She had gone south, emigrated, spun off into outer space.
Then they had moved to Buckingham Avenue themselves, to the dilapidated house that had come so cheap. All his weekends were devoted to DIY. On weekday evenings he would stumble about in the twilit garden, a stone inside his chest. It was like being consigned to purgatory, and still expected to go on schoolmastering.
But his heart was harder now. The sclerotic process had taken him over entirely and made him no longer the man he was, but a much more friable, brittle organism, with a shortened lifespan for any emotion. He had no feelings, since then; none that lasted, or meant anything.
Sylvia’s voice broke in on his thoughts. “Give me your keys, Colin. I’ll drive. You look shaken up.”
“…Actions which,” said Sister, “in a younger and ambulant pervert would no doubt lead to criminal proceedings. Only just before the weekend he was found with his hand up the skirt of one of the cleaners, an elderly and respectable person called Mrs. Wilmot.”
“I feel ashamed,” Isabel said.
“Don’t blame yourself, Mrs. Ryan,” Sister said, in a tone which suggested that of course she should do so.
“He’s in what they call his second childhood. Maybe I should have brought him up better.”
“The vices do become compounded,” the nurse said complacently. “The eccentricities, the little tics. It’s in the babe in arms, Mrs. Ryan, and at the end of a life, that we see the true character revealed. Can I offer you a cup of tea?”
“No thanks. But in view of this behaviour of his, wouldn’t it be better to have him on an open ward where you can see what he’s up to? Surely you’re increasing the problem by keeping him in a private room?”
“Why, bless you, Mrs. Ryan, your father has no compunction about what he does in public.”
“He disgusts me,” Isabel said. “He’d be better dead. I wish he were.”
A token reproof came and went on Sister’s face. Isabel’s voice was frayed; it quivered. Leaning forward to replace the file, Sister caught a whiff of the alcohol on her breath. Only seven o’clock in the evening, and not the first time, either. A young woman like that, with a husband and every advantage. She had room, to talk about disgust.
When they got home, Colin went straight upstairs. He could not get Isabel out of his mind. Sylvia was in the kitchen making some coffee, and Florence was with her, lamenting the future and the lives they would lead if the hospital decided to pursue its intention of discharging its long-term patients into the care of their relatives. Poor Florence: mass unemployment had saved her career, and now another item of state policy was threatening to undo her. It wouldn’t happen, Sylvia was saying; the old lass was too far gone, they could not discharge her while she thought she was May of Teck, and given a week or two she would no doubt lapse into her usual vegetable state.
Colin met Suzanne, hanging about aimlessly at the top of the stairs. “There’s no point skulking around,” he told her. “Don’t you want to know what’s happened with your grandma? I suppose you take no interest.”
Suzanne’s eyes were swollen and puffy, and her lips were raw, as if someone had hit her. “What now?” Colin asked.
“I phoned him. Jim.”
“And what did Jim say?”
Fresh tears began instantly to trickle down her cheeks and off the end of her nose. She put out the tip of her tongue and tasted one, as if sampling the quality of her grievance. “I can guess,” Colin said. “Why don’t you have a lie-down? I’ll see you later.”
He went into his bedroom and closed the door. He sat down on the bed, catching the faint rise and fall of the women’s voices below, waiting for a moment in case his daughter burst in after him. When he heard her bedroom door close, he stood up and went over to his chest of drawers. He slid open the small drawer, top left, and groped about, searching for his photograph. After a moment he pulled the drawer out fully and began to turn over his possessions, slowly at first and then with an increasing sense of urgency. Still nothing. He bent and peered into the back of the drawer, then slid it out completely and upended it onto the bed. Systematically he worked through his worn socks and unworn ties. There was an old address book, long superseded, its leaves curling at the edges, full of the large looped handwriting of his earlier self. He took it by the spine and held it up, shaking it to see if the photograph would fall out, but the only result was a yellow scrap of paper. He picked it up: PRIZE DRAW, CHRISTMAS FAYRE 1963, ST. DAVID’S SCHOOL, ARLINGTON ROAD. 1st Prize, Bottle of Whisky, 2nd Prize, Bottle of Sherry, 3rd Prize, Box of Chocolates. His heart beating faster, he began to fling his possessions into little piles on the duvet cover, and when this disclosed nothing he began to toss them into the wastepaper basket, the packs of shoelaces and the small predecimal coins and the bottles of aftershave, all unspent, all unopened, all the detritus of a half-used life. Soon the wastepaper basket was over-flowing, and there was almost nothing left on the bed. What there was left, he threw back into the drawer, picked it up, and replaced it. No sooner had he closed it than he opened it and searched it again, but the lining paper now showed its white spaces, there was no possibility…he tore the paper out, patted his hand over the wood. Nothing, still nothing. It had gone then. He scooped up the scraps of lining paper from his feet and compacted them into a ball. He was about to toss it into the rubbish, but instead, clinging to a last hope, he overturned the wastepaper basket onto the floor. The cap of one of the aftershave bottles came off and rolled under the wardrobe. Sitting on the end of the bed, bent double, he sifted through the rubbish at his feet. Nothing again. So it was not there. Gone. So Sylvia had taken it. He felt little need or inclination to raise his head from between his knees. Why not just stay like that? At least for some hours.
He had no idea, of course, when she might possibly have removed the photograph. He had not been in the habit of checking that it was there. He thought it was a fragment of Isabel, salvaged and indestructible, but it was not indestructible at all. He had not been in the habit of taking it out to look at it; he had been in the habit of knowing it was there.
He had been a fool then; he knew that Sylvia might come upon it. It was more likely than not. But somewhere inside, perhaps he hoped that Sylvia would be redeemed, that finding the photograph and dimly comprehending its meaning, she would no more remove it than one would remove flowers from an enemy’s grave. Survival was the only victory; surely she would see that.
But this was unrealistic. Whoever thought there was anything dim about Sylvia’s comprehension? Had she
