One Good Turn

the light. She reached for the binoculars that she kept handy for bird-watching. It took her a while to adjust the binoculars, but then the glossy green leaves came suddenly into focus, revealing a face, Ovidian among the greenery. The face melted back into the foliage. At any rate she was sure now that it wasn’t a bear or a horse. Nor was it a woman metamorphosed into a tree, or vice versa. Gloria strode out into the garden, scattering sparrows in her wake, but when she reached the rhododendrons there was no intruder, only Bill uri-nating discreetly in the shrubbery.

The electronic gates swung open to let Gloria’s red Golf out. She always felt as if she were making a getaway from a crime when she drove through them. She headed for George Street, where the parking gods found her a space right outside Gray’s, where she bought a radiator key and a Stain Devil (for chewing gum, glue, and nail varnish) before schlepping along to the Royal Bank on the corner of Castle Street, where she withdrew her five hundred pounds for the day.

When she returned, Bill was packing up, putting his tools in the boot of his car. Although they had every kind of tool possible in the shed, Bill preferred to bring his own with him, some of them looked so old they could have been displayed in an agricultural museum.

“Well,”he said laconically, “I’ll be going, then.”Gloria supposed that if she hadn’t returned when she had, he would have left with-out even saying good-bye. Five years and all she got was “I’ll be going, then.” Graham’s last words to her had been something sim-ilar, she tried to remember what he had said to her yesterday morning. “I’ll probably be late”-nothing new there, something about “the fucking fraud cops,” and then “I’m off now.” How prescient of him.

She should give Bill a farewell gift of some kind, she should have bought something in town but she never thought of it. She could give him money, but money always seemed an impersonal gift. From an early age, both Ewan and Emily had asked for money for their birthdays and Christmases. Gloria liked to give gifts, not money. Money was good but it wasn’t personal. It was business.

Bill slammed the boot of his car shut, and she said, “No, wait a minute,” and hurried inside the house to look for something suit-able. It was hard to know what a man of so few words might like, she considered a pair of dainty Staffordshire dalmatians sitting pertly on royal blue cushions-he looked like a man who might like dogs-or a nice limited-edition Moorcroft vase? Then she remembered him standing at the French windows one day-he had never once crossed the threshold in five years-admiring the stag at bay on the wall. She unhooked the painting from the wall, it was much heavier than it looked, and carried it outside to Bill.

He was reluctant to take it. “Worth a lot, Mrs. Hatter,” he mumbled shyly.

“Not that much,” Gloria said. “Come on, take it, God doesn’t give with two hands.” She thought of Bill’s wife with her spongy brain. Sometimes God seemed to give a little with one hand and take away a lot with the other.

Eventually he was persuaded into giving a home to the doomed stag, sliding it into his boot on top of his tools before driving away for the last time. Gloria had neither liked nor disliked him, but now she felt a surprising pang of sorrow that she would never see him again. Even though they barely interacted with each other, she thought of Wednesday as “Bill’s day.” Monday was “hospice day,” when Gloria put on a ludicrously cheerful smile and trundled a tea trolley round the local hospice-good china, homemade bis-cuits-everything nice because they were dying and they knew it.

Friday was “Beryl’s day.” It seemed now that Beryl would out-last her son. She lived in a nursing home just a few streets away, and Gloria visited her there every Friday afternoon, although Beryl had no idea who Gloria was, as her brain had also softened into a sponge. Gloria felt her own brain turning into something harder, less friendly, coral perhaps. They had seen “brain coral” on holiday in the Maldives when Gloria had made a timid foray into the underwater world of snorkeling. She had worn an old navy blue one-piece that she wore for swimming in Warriston Baths and was acutely aware of the way in which, from shoulder to hip, her body had taken on the prowed shape of a lizard’s. Every other woman on the hot white beach seemed to be slim and brown and wearing a tiny expensive bikini.

They always took a tropical holiday in January-the Seychelles, Mauritius, Thailand-staying at the most expensive hotels, waited on hand and foot. Graham liked being a rich man, liked people to see that he was a rich man. If he recovered, if he lived, perish the thought, could he bear to be a poor man? Probably not. So Death might be a Good Thing for him.

There had been a lot of Russians staying in their hotel in the Maldives. The women were thin and blond and taken up with children, while the men were big and hairy and reminded Glo-ria of walrus, basking all day long in their gold jewelry, oily skins, and swimwear that was too tight. “Gangsters,” Graham said to Gloria matter-of- factly. Gloria was puzzled as to whom the Russian men reminded her of until she realized it was Gra-ham. They out-Grahamed Graham, which was quite an achievement.

The last time Gloria had had sex with Graham was in the Maldives, on the tight white coverlet of the bed under a tropical hard-wood ceiling spiraled into the shape of a snail. It had been an awkward and slightly confrontational act.

Gloria wondered if anyone would visit her if she was in a nursing home, she couldn’t imagine Emily turning up regularly with new underwear, hand cream, a potted hyacinth. She couldn’t imagine Emily sitting opposite her, week in, week out, brushing her hair, massaging her hands, keeping up a one-sided meaning-less conversation. She couldn’t imagine Ewan visiting her at all.

The phone was ringing. Gloria went into the hall and looked at it. It was developing a personality of its own- irritating and un-forgiving, not unlike the voice now shouting “Mother!” into the answering machine. The Evening News was poking like a tongue through the letter box, and Gloria tugged it out and glanced through it while Emily continued with her one-note, two-syllable chant-she had done this as a child, a repetitive mantra, “Mummy-mummy-mummy-mummy,” but when Gloria asked her what she wanted, she would shrug and look blank and say, “Nothing.”

“Mother! Mother! Mother! I know you’re there, pick up the phone. Pick up the phone or I’ll call the police. Mother, mother, mother, mother.”

The last time they had all been together as a family was Christ-mas. Ewan worked for an environmental agency and had flown home from Patagonia. Working for the environment didn’t mean Ewan was a particularly nice person. He was very self-righteous about the fact that he didn’t want any part of Graham’s business empire, which apparently was playing its own small part in the “global capitalist conspiracy.” That didn’t stop him from taking money from Graham whenever he was home. Ewan had always been a disappointment to Graham, never interested in the tenets of Scottish religion-alcohol, football, feeling badly done by- that formed the backbone of Graham’s faith. Graham was about to fulfill his lifetime ambition of owning a Premier League foot-ball team when fate tagged him yesterday-he had the unsigned contracts with him in his briefcase when he collapsed beneath Tatiana.

When Ewan had declared himself a member of the Green Party, his father’s only comment was “Silly little fucker.” Emily had no principles at all when it came to Graham’s money. Of course, Gra-ham should have been grooming her to take over, she would have made an excellent capitalist profiteer.

Emily had been a lovely child, sweetness and light, a child who worshipped Gloria and everything she did. And then one day Emily woke up and she was thirteen, and she’d been thirteen ever since as far as Gloria could make out. She was thirty-seven now and married with a child of her own, but motherhood had, if any-thing, served only to sour her disposition even further. She lived in Basingstoke with her husband, Nick (“project development manager in IT”-what did that mean?), and devoted a lot of time to harboring grudges.

The main topic of conversation for both Ewan and Emily at Christmas had been how much their lives had changed, evolved, grown. Yet from one year to the next they expected Gloria to stay exactly the same. If she mentioned anything new in her life-“I’ve joined a gym” (she had tried, and failed, at a class called “Nifty Fifties”; after that there was “Sensational Sixties”; after sixty there didn’t seem to be anything) or “I was thinking of doing French conversation at the French Institute”-their response was always the same: “Oh, Mother,” said in an exasperated tone, as if she were a particularly stupid child.

Last Christmas Eve, when Graham was still a fully functioning member of the family and not yet an astronaut floating through space, she had been in the kitchen making the chocolate log, they always had a chocolate log on Christmas Day along with the pudding. Gloria made a roulade mix, no flour, only eggs and sugar but heavy with expensive chocolate, and when it was cooked she rolled it up with whipped cream and chestnut puree and then