One Good Turn

8

Gloria opened her front door and found herself face-to-face with another pair of policewomen. They looked very like the two from earlier in the day, as if they had all come out of the same box.

“Mrs. Hatter?” one of them said, her face already adjusted to bad news. “Mrs. Gloria Hatter?”

Graham was not, as Gloria had thought, in a crisis meeting with his accountants in Charlotte Square. Instead he was in Accident and Emergency at the new Royal Infirmary, having succumbed to a heart attack in an Apex hotel room in the company of someone who apparently went by the name “Jojo.” “Jojo” was the name of a clown, in Gloria’s opinion, although it turned out that she was actually a call girl, which was simply another way of saying “whore.”

“Call a spade a spade,” Gloria sighed.

The policewomen (“PC Clare Deponio and this is PC Gemma Nash”) looked like teenagers who had hired police uniforms for a fancy dress party. “A simple phone call would have done,” Gloria said to them. She made them all tea, and they sat on the peach-damask sofa in her peach-themed living room, balancing the Royal Doulton cups and saucers primly on their knees, politely nibbling on Gloria’s homemade shortbread. Gloria was sure they had much better things to do, yet they seemed grateful for the space. “It makes a change,” one of them (“Clare”) said. They were very busy, Gemma said, because of a bout of summer “flu” that was “knocking down” the Lothian and Borders Police “like ninepins.”

“You have a nice house,” Clare said appreciatively. Gloria looked around the peach-themed living room and tried to see it through a stranger’s eyes. She wondered what she would miss if it was all taken away from her. The Moorcroft? The Chinese carpets? The Staffordshire ornaments? She was fond of her collection of Staffordshire. She wouldn’t miss the picture above the fireplace, a nineteenth-century painting of the stag-at-bay variety, depicting a terrified stag cornered by a pack of crazed hounds-a sixtieth birthday present to Graham from Murdo Miller. And she certainly wouldn’t miss the ugly Scottish Businessman of the Year Award that took pride of place on the mantelpiece. It sat next to a photograph of Graham and Gloria on their wedding day, which, as it happened, was the only photograph they had from that day. If there was a fire and Graham had to choose between saving his wedding photograph and his Scottish Businessman of the Year Award, Gloria had no doubt that he would save the unattractive resin sculpture. In fact, if it came to a choice between saving the award and saving Gloria, she was pretty sure he would choose it over her.

The policewoman named Clare picked up the wedding photograph and said, with a sympathetic tilt of the head as if Graham were already written off, “Is this your man?” Gloria wondered if it was odd that she was drinking tea from a delicate Doulton cup when she should have been rushing dramatically to the A and E to fulfill her spousal duties. The unavoidable fact of Jojo seemed to have hobbled the imperative. A stain on the triumphant possibility of Graham’s death.

Gloria took the photograph from Clare and scrutinized it. “Thirty-nine years ago,” Gloria said.

Gemma said, “You should get a long-service medal,” and Clare said, “Christ, that’s a long time, excuse my French. It’s a shame,” she added, “what’s happened, the way he was found and everything. Not nice for you.”

“They’re all tossers,” Gemma, the plain one of the two, murmured.

The heavy silver frame of the wedding-day photograph couldn’t disguise the fact that it hadn’t been shot by a professional. It had yellowed with age and looked like a snap taken by a rather incompetent relative (which it was). Gloria wondered at the inertia on the part of both sets of parents that had resulted in no true record of the day.

Gloria regretted not having had a white wedding with all the trimmings, because now she would be in possession of a big, white leather-bound album of photographs to look back on, photographs that showed she’d once had a family who cared about her more than she realized at the time, and in the album everyone would be looking their best forever. And Gloria herself would be at the center of it all, radiant and thin and unaware of how her life was already slipping out from under her feet. Gloria was surprised Graham had been in an Apex, that wasn’t his style at all.

It had, in fact, been more of a brown wedding. Graham was dressed in an up-to-the-minute suit in a color that, when Gloria was a child, everyone had blithely referred to as “nigger-brown.” Gloria wore a fur coat that she had bought in a secondhand shop in the Grassmarket. The coat was forties-style, made from Canadian beaver at a time when people didn’t think about whether or not it was wrong to wear fur. Although Gloria would no longer wish to wear the skin of another animal on top of her own, the way she looked at it now, the beavers were already long dead and had lived the happy, uncomplicated life of Canadian beavers before the war.

If Gloria had had the white leather-bound album of photographs, her mother, father, and elder sister would all have been preserved within its pages. As well as “first to go” Jill, of course, who had traveled up with the posse of school friends and drunk into the night, long after everyone else had gone to bed. Gloria’s brother, Jonathan, would not have been in the photographs because he died when he was eighteen. Gloria was only fourteen when Jonathan died, and the child in her had presumed he would come back eventually. Now that she was older and understood that he was never coming back, she missed him more than when he died.

As she watched the young policewomen climb back into their patrol car, Gloria thought about Graham in a hotel room, lying on a double bed with a veneer headboard, flicking through the TV channels while he ate steak and chips, a pathetic little garnish of a salad, half a bottle of claret-while he waited for a woman to come and perform professional sex. How many times had he betrayed her in this sleazy fashion while she sat at home with only the Bang and Olufsen Avant wide-screen for company? Hadn’t she known it in some way, in her heart of hearts? Innocence was no excuse for ignorance.

Gloria had happened to glance down at that moment and notice she was wearing a boxy cashmere camel cardigan from Jenners that had brass buttons that could only be described as tedious. She realized that she was wearing the kind of clothes that her mother would have worn if she’d had more money. The matronly cashmere seemed to confirm something that Gloria had suspected for some time, that she had gone straight from youth to old age and had somehow managed to omit the good bit in between.

It was not an unfamiliar feeling. Gloria often had the impression that her life was a series of rooms that she walked into when everyone else had just left. The war had been over for only a year when she was born, and it still loomed large in their household. Her father had fought “with Monty”-as if they had stood side by side in battle while her mother had engaged on the home front, heroically growing vegetables and keeping chickens. Gloria grew up feeling she had just missed something momentous that would never come again (which was true, of course) and that her life was thereby diminished. She felt much the same about the sixties. Her formative years had taken place in a no-man’s-land between two revolutionary epochs. By the time the sixties were in full swing, Gloria was married and writing grocery lists on wipe-clean “memo-boards.”

If Gloria could have gone back, she would not have slipped off that bar stool in the pub on George IV Bridge and followed Graham. Instead she would have finished her degree, moved down to London and worn heels and little business suits (kept her figure), drunk a lot on the weekends, had sex with so many different men that she would never be able to remember their names, let alone their faces. She noticed the time and realized that the eBay auction had closed. She wondered if she had been outbid on her Staffordshire greyhounds. Trust Graham to spoil things even when he was at death’s door.

On the drive to the new infirmary out at Little France, Gloria had practiced the kind of conversation she would have with Graham. Despite the fact that Gemma and Clare had told her he was unconscious, Gloria hadn’t really foreseen that this would be a hindrance to his talking. Graham talked, it was what made him Graham, so when she saw him in the A and E, linked up to an array of blinking, beeping monitors, she was still expecting him to open his eyes and say something typically Grahamesque (“You took your fucking time, Gloria”). So his absolute passivity was puzzling.

The A and E consultant explained that Graham’s heart had gone into “overload” and stopped. His “system” had been “down” a long time, resulting in his current state of suspended animation, which he might or might not recover from. “We reckon,” the consultant said to Gloria, “that roughly one in a hundred men die during sexual intercourse. The pulse of a man having sex with his wife is ninety beats a minute. With a mistress it rises to one hundred and sixty.”

“And with a call girl?” Gloria asked.

“Oh, through the roof, I imagine,” the consultant said cheerfully. “Of course, he might have been revived quicker if he hadn’t been tied up.”