Losing My Identity Page 14

  ‘I got the most awful row. I suppose my parents envisaged their investment in having a doctor in the family vanishing up the Swanee.’

  ‘Hmmm.’

  ‘What?’ he said.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘I can tell there’s something still troubling you. I told you – you can ask. I don’t want to feel I’m holding out on you.’

  ‘Well, if you were so unhappy you bought this place as a bolthole, and you spent a lot of time here, why didn’t you get divorced?’

  He looked helpless for a moment. ‘I’m an emotional coward, I suppose. Guilty as charged. I hadn’t met anyone else. Not anyone serious. It didn’t seem to matter.’ He leapt up and put on his usual choice of music.

  ‘Dance with me,’ he said, holding out his arms.’

  ‘I haven’t danced – not real dancing – since I was a teenager, I think.’

  ‘Neither have I. Let’s try.’

  They made a reasonable fist of it. No treading on each other’s toes. They discovered they’d both been sent, as schoolchildren, to classes at the Albert Ballroom on Bath Street – Hari on Thursdays and Leila on Tuesdays. ‘We only ever got to dance with boys from the Boys’ High,’ she complained. ‘Whatever happened to the Albert anyway?’

  ‘Burned down in the ’70s. We move well together. That’s because you’re not too bolshie to let me lead. We could go to classes. Latin American. I think that’d be fun.’

  Leila made a non-committal sound. But he was right: they did move well together. She fell to wondering if he was right about the other thing: about how much better it’d have been if they’d met when they were eighteen.

  ‘I hear there’s a tango bar in the Merchant City,’ he added suddenly. ‘We could spec that out.’

  ‘Can you see people our age in a tango bar?’

  ‘I can, actually. Good exercise. I read some research that shows dancing is terrifically good for the brain as well as the backside. And the heart. I think they do classes at this tango place. I’m keen to give it a go.’

  They continued to sway around his sitting room to ‘Homage à Tonton Ferrer’, careful not to tread on a rabbit.

  ‘Hari – why are we both still here, do you think?’

  He held her at arm’s length. ‘What – alive?’

  ‘No, here. In Glasgow. We were both cut out to be high fliers, yet here we are, not a mile from where we started out.’ She was remembering how she used to lose it with Sam, because of the way he frittered away his remarkable intellectual gifts.

  Hari wasn’t going to play that game. ‘What’s wrong with that? Where would you prefer to be?’

  ‘Nowhere in particular. But we must represent an awful lot of lost opportunities.’

  ‘We could always move elsewhere now. Together.’

  ‘I don’t mean I want to move. Obviously I don’t, or I would have. It’s just – isn’t it odd that people like us haven’t moved on.’

  He looked hurt. ‘I consider I’ve moved on. I’ve reached the top of my profession. I don’t imagine I’d feel more fulfilled if I’d gone to London or New York or Melbourne, or whatever.’

  ‘Don’t go huffy on me. I know you’ve done exceptionally well.’

  ‘I’m not a restless person. I didn’t think you were either? Restless isn’t a desirable quality, in my book.’

  Greer had been restless, although she’d remained thirled to Glasgow, to the same house, all her life. Possibly discontented, more than restless. Sam on the other hand! He’d become like a caged animal if he was in one place for longer than a few months. He’d been like that all the years she’d known him. As he’d grown older, he’d become increasingly nomadic rather than more settled.

  Eva had been the steady one.

  ‘We’re steady people,’ Hari continued. ‘Steady is a desirable quality. Anyway – you’ve lived elsewhere. Why did you come back?’

  Leila wasn’t sure she knew the answer to that. Inertia? She needed to jolly him back to the good mood he’d been in. ‘To meet you, silly.’

  His brow uncreased. ‘You’ve answered your own question. Karma brought us both here, in the same place again, but together this time. Bedtime, my love.’

  He certainly had stamina. But as Leila tried to stifle squeals of pleasure (those neighbours!), she felt he was fading a little. Well, that was a familiar feeling. And she didn’t want Hari to fail that way. Not ever. She reached round and pressed just there. It worked its magic, as it always did with Sam. And it was Sam who’d taught her that trick.

  She mused on the difference between men and women. A woman, subjected to the same treatment, would have paused to think ‘What the ****? Who? Where? When?’ Hari just went for it. Maybe he thinks vets know about these things because we have to give stallions and bulls and rams a bit of help? She wanted to giggle, but knew she mustn’t.

  After they’d got back together, sex with Sam had been less about chemistry, more like civil engineering. Hydraulics and physics. But then, Sam had been far more elderly at thirty-eight than Hari was at sixty-four. Chain-smoking and heavy drinking are not a good recipe for tapping the fountain of youth.

  Hari lay in her arms, spent. ‘You’re a magician,’ he said. ‘You’ve made me young again.’

  ‘Nonsense. You’re just realising your potential as a very sexy man.’

  He raised himself on his elbow. ‘You think I am?’

  ‘Of course you are. Stop fishing for compliments.’

  ‘But only with you, Leila. I told you, I’ve been pretty well celibate for a very long time.’

  ‘Snap.’

  Her mind was anything but calm. She was a realist. Playing teenagers was a zero-sum game.

  She suddenly threw back the covers, even the sheet. ‘Hot flush.’ She tried to keep the duvet tucked around him.

  ‘Really? When did you stop?’

  ‘Not till surprisingly recently. When I was fifty-six.’ What a waste…

  He became morose. ‘If only we’d met when I was young and virile!’

  ‘You’re not doing so badly.’

  ‘If we’d even met twenty years ago.’

  But it had sent her into the slough of despond too. Thinking, if only.

  ‘Twenty years ago, it would have been a disaster. You were married. This is what we’ve got, Hari. It’s all. It’s enough.’

  He cuddled her close. ‘Sleep now. I guess we both have work tomorrow.’

  ‘Mmm. I have to drive up to Thurso.’

  Up on his elbow again. ‘Thurso? You surely don’t get up there and back in one day?’

  ‘Of course I don’t. I need to drive up tomorrow, and I should get one farm visit in. Then one to Lairg, then to Forres. Home by Wednesday night, possibly. If I get held up, I might not drive back till Thursday. I won’t miss choir, don’t worry.’

  He sighed and threw himself back down. ‘I’d hoped you might stay with me again before then.’

  ‘Well, I can’t. I have to work. You know I do.’

  ‘I didn’t expect you to be away so soon.’

  What’s sauce for the goose, my friend… He’d already told her he also had to travel frequently, for conferences, or when he’d been called as an expert witness in a murder trial where there was a stabbing. His services were increasingly sought in London. He had also been called to help out in cases of mass deaths – the July 2005 bombing in the capital, the container-load of dead migrants in Dover in 2000.

  ‘Hari, it’s too soon for us to spend more than our weekends together. I’m used to my own company. I can’t get used to being part of a couple overnight.’

  ‘It’s been two nights,’ he said sleepily. ‘You can’t blame me for wanting to have you beside me. I don’t want to waste any more time. Will you stay with me on Thursday night then?’

  ‘I suppose. Do you want to go to the cottage again at the weekend?’

  ‘As long as I don’t have to sleep in the spare room.’

  ‘I’ll think about it. Go to sleep now. We need to be up e
arly if you meant it about going swimming.’

  I’m too set in my ways. I’m too old to want to be with him every night. I think. I can’t make up my mind whether the arm tucked possessively round my waist is protecting me or imprisoning me.

  All her sleepiness had fled. She reached across and surreptitiously switched on the tiny radio she had parked on the bedside table, and slid an earbud into her ear. While she half-listened, she ruminated on how it might have been if they had met when they were teenagers. (She was sure they had never met in those days; she’d have remembered. She had seen his graduation photo…) Her life would certainly have been different.

  They might have become tired of each other years ago.

  Leila knew she was never at her best at six-thirty in the morning.

  ‘Come on,’ Hari chivvied her. ‘It’ll help set you up for the day. It’s one of the few times you can guarantee the place will be quiet.’

  Arriving early, they had the entire pool to themselves for the first quarter of an hour.

  Arlington Baths! It had changed very little in fifty years.

  Hari sported what looked like a diver’s watch on his wrist.

  ‘Waterproof pager,’ he said. ‘It’s one of my few concessions to technology that can trace me. It means I’m not having to clock-watch while I’m here, supposed to be relaxing. Anyway, my customers don’t complain if I’m a few minutes late.’

  Leila hadn’t swum competitively since her first year at university. But she was determined to keep up with him. They raced up and down the pool, as she matched him stroke for stroke. She could tell from his grin that he appreciated that.

  The main difference was that, by the end of ten lengths, she was severely out of breath and he wasn’t.

  ‘I need to work on getting fitter,’ she said. ‘I think you’re letting me win.’

  ‘I’ll be your personal trainer.’

  Cocky, or what! She almost resolved to practice during the week so that she could beat him fair and square. ‘I have a Bryan Evans watercolour of this place. It’s called In at the deep end.’

  A slight frown. ‘I didn’t see that?’

  ‘It’s in my bedroom.’

  ‘Ah. I’m hoping I might become better acquainted with that room someday soon.’

  ‘You reckon? I used to come here on Wednesday afternoons when I was at school, you know. A few of us got permission to do that instead of playing stupid team games.’

  ‘Maybe we even met in those days right enough? Though I’m pretty sure I’d have remembered. I’ve been a member since I was twelve. Even when I was away in Birmingham, I kept up my membership.’

  ‘I let mine lapse as soon as I left Glasgow for the first time.’

  ‘But you enjoy swimming?’

  ‘Of course I do.’

  She had almost drowned in that pool, in 1962. That’s why she’d bought the Evans watercolour, when she spied it in a McTear’s auction.

  She hadn’t been able to swim properly, but she’d still been determined to try the trapeze contraptions that swung out well over the deep end. That day, her hands started to slip almost as soon as she’d pushed off from the platform. She’d fallen, well out of her depth. She had dog-paddled frantically, but couldn’t make any headway to reach the side of the crowded pool. She managed to grab a small plastic ball that floated past, and clung to it, but her head kept slipping under the water. No one noticed. She was merely one more shrieking child among many. It was probably only moments, but it had felt like a lifetime. Just as she was becoming too tired to keep paddling and shouting, the pool attendants spotted her and came running. They pulled her to the side using a pole with a loop on the end – the same sort of contraption that was used to trap a vicious wild animal – lifted her out tenderly, and made a fuss of her, wrapping her in warm towels, and giving her cups of sugar-heavy tea in their wee staff room.

  She’d gone home, as she’d done since the age of ten, to an empty flat – the archetypal latch-key child. Her mother worked in a rented studio on the south side of town. (‘When did you ever hear of anyone being harmed in their own home here?’ Greer had asked her one time when she complained. ‘You’re perfectly safe, once you’re in, and locked the door behind you.’)

  When she told Greer about her mishap, the response was, ‘What they should have done was make you get straight back in.’

  She’d bought the painting to remind her that she had survived, rather than being found as a limp, water-wrinkled body at the bottom of the pool when the session closed for the day. And there was always a reason for surviving. Once upon a time, she’d thought the reason had been Sam…

  Leila was relieved to see that safety arrangements for swimmers had moved on a great deal since her schooldays.

  She noted that Hari dressed for work as if he was going to the Board meeting of a Fortune 500 company. She commented on it. He said it was because he never knew whom he’d have to speak to, over the day.

  Eleven

  Leila had been keen to keep their relationship a secret as far as the Kelvin Chorale was concerned. Hari maintained it would be impossible, even in the short term.

  ‘I know you’re a cool customer, but there’s no way I can pretend we hardly know each other,’ he said. ‘We’re a couple, for God’s sake. We’re going home to sleep in the same bed afterwards. What’s to hide?’

  ‘It’s none of their business.’

  ‘It isn’t. But it’s our business. I want to shout it from the rooftops. You genuinely think that if we arrive and leave separately we’re going to fool anyone?’

  She agreed reluctantly that they should walk in together the following week. A few of their fellow-choristers smiled knowingly. Phyllida tried to hide her chagrin. At the coffee-break, Hari took Leila’s hand as they made their way to the refreshment table. ‘See?’ he murmured in her ear. ‘Not so bad, was it?’

  The jury was out on that one, as far as she was concerned. She was still trying it out for size: Hari and Leila. Leila and Hari.

  ‘Will we come back to the choir after the summer?’ she asked, as they left, once more hand in hand.

  ‘Only if you want to. If we both want to. Otherwise, we can find something else to do together. I’m still up for the tango lessons.’

  It wasn’t until they had spent several weekends together – mostly at Hari’s flat, one more at the cottage – that he first stayed overnight at Roseisle Drive. She basked in a glow of satisfaction, watching him at her breakfast table, drinking tea and eating fruit and reading the blurb on her skin-conditioning tablets.

  ‘You think they’re a real snake-oil job, don’t you?’

  He set down the packet and smiled. ‘Not at all. The ingredients are all important for good nutrition. And you’re walking proof that they work. Or else you simply have excellent genes. You know, I think it may be the latter. Either way, you have good skin. Very few lines. Maybe I should take these too.’

  ‘You’re not exactly wrinkly yourself.’

  ‘Black don’t crack, Asian don’t raisin,’ they said in chorus, then grinned at each other. ‘I guess we’re somewhere in between,’ Hari added.

  ‘You realise you’re very probably the first man ever to spend the night in this house?’

  He was startled.

  ‘I’m sure my mother and Grannie moved in when it was very new. Grannie certainly would never have had a man here. She wasn’t the greatest fan of your sex. And I’m sure my father never slept here. So there. You’re honoured.’

  But she felt a vague discontentment descend. The flat had always been her sanctuary. Her man-free sanctuary. She wasn’t at all sure she wanted to play house with Hari there. Or anywhere else, for that matter.

  ‘Hari – if someone died alone, and the person who signed the certificate said it was natural causes, there wouldn’t be any need for a post-mortem, would there?’

  He frowned. ‘Of course not. Otherwise, we’d be snowed under. Why do you ask?’

  ‘And if someone died of a he
art attack, but the GP hadn’t been treating them for any heart problem, would he still sign the certificate? I mean, how would he be sure?’

  He stood up, and walked behind her chair, laying his hands on her shoulders. ‘What is it? Tell me exactly what you’re wanting to know.’

  She told him about her mother, about the handwritten sheets, about the fact she’d spent the last five years wondering if she had driven Greer to not wanting to go on living.

  ‘Leila, if he wrote myocardial infarction on the death certificate, then he’d been treating her for heart problems.’

  ‘He wouldn’t have put that because it seemed feasible?’

  She was remembering rumours of the odd rogue vet who’d diagnose strange and unlikely causes of death for cats – and even the occasional dog – that had clearly died from picking up illegal poisons, in practices where farmers and gamekeepers constituted most of the paying clientele…

  ‘Never!’ Hari sounded utterly confident. ‘If he’d suspected anything else, he’d have been duty-bound to follow it up. Have you been worrying about it all these years?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Foolish girl! Why didn’t you ask me sooner? I could at least have set your mind at rest months ago. Do you still have this handwritten story?’

  ‘I burned it.’

  ‘The most sensible thing to do.’

  ‘I should have come home and been there for her. You looked after your mother.’

  ‘My mother had always been there for me. And looking after her didn’t mean I had to give up my career or change my lifestyle. We’re all different, Leila.’ He was deep in thought for a moment. ‘You’ve let this play on your mind far too much. What was this story she’d written?’

  ‘It was about the sick mother abandoned by an uncaring daughter who paid for the older woman’s creature comforts, but never visited. It was very melodramatic. I can’t recall any of the exact wording.’

  Once upon a time. That’s how all the bedtime stories from her childhood started, because Greer couldn’t be bothered to make up her own ones, for all her creativity.