The Cost of Living

I saw your eyes twitching. I hoped you'd wake up.

Such a voice. Each vowel a journey,  a voice like the sweet lower notes of a cello, heard in a warm bath, whiskey in hand. A voice which has sold thousands of mortgages, packet soups, cars and air fresheners, has introduced popular classics on a mid-morning radio show, and coached reluctant viewers on the savagery that exists beyond the curtains of their living rooms. Specifically familiar to her, but part of the national experience, instantly recognisable though unseen. She hasn't seen him much recently either. 

The bed shifts, all by itself, lifting her by the shoulders and straightening her legs. Just an inch or so. Not an unpleasant sensation. The painkillers have her floating a little. She smiles and nods off briefly. He's still there when she opens her eyes again.

Dad? she says. Where's Mum?

Gone to get a sandwich.

Did you fight?

Not much.

She turns to look out of the window, tries to turn but there is pain still, unmasked by whatever they're giving her. She looks at the wallpaper instead. Very beautiful and expensive she thinks, gold with branches of cherry in bloom.  She finds herself in a garden

somewhere just after the rain.  A crooked old man is talking to her in a language she doesn't know. 

He is telling a story, she realises.  Why?  She has heard all of his stories.  Why is he here?  Impossible old man.

So, knees knocking, fully expecting to be sent down, I enter the Master's sanctuary. A cave of books. The smell of pipe smoke.

He conjures the quintessence of this remembered space with a twist of his fingers.  Straight from the RSC, that gesture, she thinks. My Leontes was universally applauded.

Denton, is it? he says. Sit down old chap. Need a favour, and Clarke says you're the man.

Nobby Clarke was the porter, you see, knew all the ins and outs. Fat fellow. Liverpudlian.

Tells me you're down to London every fortnight. Is that right?

Yes sir, I tell him.  My sister's not been well. Which was quite true of course. Never saw me graduate.

Sorry to hear that. Let me show you something. Opens a box on his desk. There are two 

rather dirty-looking wine glasses inside, nestling in velvet.

Need to get these cleaned.

I suppose I could have a go, sir.

Very plucky of you Denton, he says, but you can keep your Brillo pad in your pocket. These are Cristallo, do you know what that is?

Some kind of glass, sir.

Spot on.  From Venice, four hundred years ago.

Really?

Yes, the age of Caravaggio, Tintoretto, all that crowd.

The bed moves again, cradling her. She feels trapped, almost.

A thin-lipped, sour-faced old fellow he was, the Master, but quite a card with it. It's not a matter of national importance, he says, but I've heard you're a safe pair of hands. I want you to take this box to a pal of mine at the V & A. Didn't have a clue where that was. I suppose I still do that, for a living I mean, pretend I know what I'm talking about. 

How do I get there? 

Take a cab from Paddington, he says. 

She dozes again, struggling to remember who is who. Doesn't matter. It's more like music.  She must have heard this voice in utero, absorbed its rhythms there. She sang to her own children, hummed along to Mozart as well, supposed to make them brighter. Both out of the country now, free from their grandfather's incantations, and bright enough.

So they usher me through some important looking doors, with No Admittance to the Public painted on 'em in gold leaf, to another old man's office. More books and leather.  He looks the part, brass spectacles, white goatee.

You're the young man Sir David has sent me then. Well, let's have a look. Opens the box and marvels at these two grubby glasses. 

He wondered if you might be able to clean them. Thought it might take a while so said to leave them with you.

She was out of danger, Mum had said. No-one's out of danger, she wanted to explain, we are all terribly, terribly fragile. But she had been too exhausted or medicated or both to speak so she smiled instead. She interrupts him, panicked suddenly.

Where's Mum gone?

She'll be back in a moment, poppet. Gone to the cafe. You were asleep so she thought

you'd be safe with me.                                                       

They are silent for a while. She calms herself by watching him. Downcast, twiddling his thumbs. He is the only person she has ever seen who actually twiddles his thumbs, which is odd, she thinks, given the currency of the expression. A big man on a small chair. She got his height but not his breadth. Spliced genes: Dad's hair too, Mum's eyes (monochrome crescents) and narrow, round shoulders. Her ex-husband had once compared her to a wading bird. She had laughed at the time but the distorting mirror of their divorce reflected back ambivalence as malice, wit as unkindness. All the men in her life scattered, her son in Hong Kong, Tim with someone shorter, blonder, less stooped (but at least not punishingly younger) and Dad, well for once Dad was here. She ought to be kind to him.

You were telling me about the glasses. 

The drip glugs quietly and the bed moves. Her father's thumbs cease whirling and he looks back up at her like a large, grateful dog. 

So I leave the box with the curator chap and hop on the tube to see your Grandparents and Kitty. She was never very strong, poor old thing. And then I make a date with Mum

and we go out dancing and before I know it I'm back up at Oxford in a tutorial on Piers Plowman or somesuch and I give the Master the change from his quid and a debrief and don't think any more about it. Mission accomplished. 

A nurse enters, preceded by a brisk knock. In rubber slippers which match her overalls.  She takes a look at the notes at the end of the bed and checks the monitoring equipment and the drip.

How you feeling? Okay? Any pain?        

I'm a bit sore when I move my head. 

The nurse leans over her and adjusts the drip. Magda. Polish presumably. Something birdlike about her too, thick, curly hair pulled away from her face, like a crest, and a raptor's nose. No kinship between them really; the young nurse belongs to the world of the upright, the ambulant and athletic. She looks as if she might go and play netball after her shift. Do they have netball in Poland?

I be back later. Let me know if you need anything. There's a button. 

Ah, yes.

She tries to turn, but is stopped once more by a rumour of pain. She reaches for where she thinks the call button will be, groping like the blind heroine of a cheap thriller. There.  She rests her fingers on it for a moment. 

How did you and Mum used to travel around town? Not in the Hillman, surely.

By tube, mostly, like anyone. Everyone smoking as if their lives depended on it. Filthy. Got some funny looks sometimes, her being, well, exotic. If we were going out of town Dad would let me borrow the Jag. Very occasionally. We didn't get the Hillman until after you were born. And it was pretty knackered then.

She can't imagine him on the underground, silent amongst his crowding peers. He seems too big for it, his presence too operatic to be plagued by beggars, buskers and body odour.    

She met Tim on the Victoria Line, of course. His long arm reaching between the carriages,  pushing through the void to tap her on the shoulder. Your jumper's still got the label on.  Thanking him, reaching for the unseen tag and yanking it off. Standing on adjacent escalators at Warren Street, him laughing. I'm not following you, I promise. From their very first moments together telling her she'd got it wrong, pointing out her absent-mindedness.

Her father is staring at her hand on the call button, daring her, almost, to press it. Willing her to misbehave.

The glasses, Dad. He nods.

A couple of weeks into Hilary and the Master summons me again. Denton, I need you to retrieve those goblets, there's no-one else I can trust. Think nothing of it, I tell him. I'm your man. He gives me another quid, tells me to get a receipt.

Will that cover it?

What's that, man?

The repair? 

Never mind about the repair, Denton, the curator and I will sort that out between us. 

Old boys' club, she says.

Exactly.  All pretty straightforward until it starts to snow, and the snow gets tramped down by thousands of chilly undergraduates.  By Friday it's five below and George Street is like an ice rink.  I'm convinced I'm going to break my neck before I get to the station.

Her hands are shaking.  She lifts them from the bed covers and looks at them, as if they belong to someone else. 

What happened, Dad?

Don't rush me, sweetheart.

No, I mean what happened to me?  How did I end up here?

Did your mother not explain?

I didn't ask.

An exhalation, which is neither a sigh nor a whistle but is both of these things.

They think you might have tripped or passed out.  At work.  Went down pretty hard.  One of your students found you at the bottom of a flight of stairs. 

Did I break my neck?

No, darling.  Your neck's okay.  Just sprained, they think.  Her disembodied hands, still quivering, shape themselves into a gesture of inquiry.  Why all this?

You banged your head.  A nasty one.  They thought they might have to operate, but  your skull's too thick, he laughs.  They've got you wrapped up like a Punjabi, though. 

Her hands to her head now, finding the bandage.

Fuck, she says.  How's Mum doing? 

Scared, worried.  As ever.  At least you've given her something to fret about. 

Dad...

Sorry. She feels a pang of unwonted tenderness towards her mother, imagines her lost and beige, wandering the corridors. A corncrake blown in through an open fire exit, pecking at a stale bun.

Where's my bag? He retrieves it, noisily, from the bedside table and hands it up to her.  She finds her phone and unlocks it, searches for her mother's number. Before she calls

she opens the camera and reverses its gaze. Her face, or something like it, on the screen.    One black eye, no make-up, her hair sticking straight out above the bandage. She looks like a street lunatic, a shaman down on their luck. She starts to swear again but swallows it, in obscure, belated deference to her father, and says Oh dear, instead. The phone freezes, as if in horror at what it is displaying, and expires. 

Dad, can you ring Mum and find out what's keeping her? I think she might be lost.

I can try, darling, but I think she may have blocked my number. 

Really? 

Well, let's try. She watches his long, thick thumb scroll through the contacts.    

Tomoyu? Yes, she's awake. Just about. Where are you? 

Her mother is in the room when she wakes again. She smiles at her parents, and tries to remember how long it has been since she has seen them together. Ben's christening?  Getting on for twenty years, anyway. There is, she notes, something comic about the difference between their physical presences. Dad occupying every cubic inch of available space, asserting that he is more than just a voice. Mum next to him, disappearing into her chair. He could probably eat her, if he put his mind to it.

Hello Mum. Her mother answers by resting a hand on the edge of the bed. Dad was just telling me a story. About his Oxford days.

Oh.

Not a rude story. At least not so far. Was I asleep for long?

I got back about half an hour ago, darling. Her mother's voice has its own charm.  From sweetness came forth strength.

That long? It's the drugs, I think. My neck hurts most of all. Funny that. Not my head but my neck. 

The room is silent for a moment. She finds that it makes her uncomfortable. 

Dad, she says.

Darling?

You were skidding through Oxford in the snow. Her mother nods as if to say, oh it's that story.

Well, it was rather like the previous weekend, but backwards. Went to see Kitty, she was better, we thought. Took your Mum to the pictures.

What did you see? They look at each other, some happy energy passing between them, something she doesn't remember ever having seen. Their eyes separate and fix on the wallpaper as they try to remember. It's not important, she begins to say, but two hands – one large and fleshy, the other slight and clawlike – are immediately raised to hush her. It has become very important, suddenly, that they nail this down. The moments before her.  When they were still happy. 

Peter Sellers, her mother says.

Yes, yes. Inspector Clouseau. Bloody funny.

The Pink Panther, they say at once, as if they'd rehearsed it.

And went for Chinese food afterwards, do you remember?  Her father nods.

All the waiters looked like Cato. 

Slightly racist, Dad.

No, I mean they were all dressed like that. Black pyjamas. So I had a super evening with Mum and went back to the V & A in the morning. The old curator chap beckons me in and there's the box on his desk. He opens it, takes out one of the glasses and holds it up to the light. Finally, I can see what all the fuss is about. This thing is exquisite now it's clean. A hint of blue to it, and beautifully proportioned, golden ratio at work or whatever. Observe, the Prof says, these very fine lines. This is crizzling. The word stuck with me, obviously. I have cleaned the goblets but there is nothing to be done with the crizzling. This is the worst of the two. He hands one to me for a second. It seems solid enough, but what do I know? Be very careful with them, the slightest knock could cause them to shatter altogether. So he puts the glass back in the velvet.  Shuts the box and hands it to me.  I'm literally shaking, thinking about negotiating the steps, getting in and out of a taxi, on and off a train, skating back down George Street to  college. The old man puts a hand on my shoulder.  For heaven's sake don't drop the box, he says, and sees me out. 

Cato wasn't in the first film, her mother says. It was the one with David Niven we saw. She watches her father contain himself, and is reminded of a python swallowing a goat.

I'm sure you're right, darling, he says. It probably wasn't snowing either. 

She feels faintly reassured. This is how things are supposed to be with them. Dad doing the talking, Mum saying very little but always managing to undermine him somehow with

inconvenient matters of fact. It was an Irish Wolfhound, not a Great Dane. I doubt she would have eaten it, she's a Muslim. Dad barely suppressing his rage, Mum barely concealing her delight at having thwarted him. Pulling against each other, like biceps and triceps, and so functioning. Until she told him she was leaving and he moved his girlfriend in a week later.  A month or so after her twelfth birthday, just before she went back to school. Dans les grandes vacances ma mère a décidé qu'elle ne voulait plus habiter avec mon père. A relief, really. Her own marriage had lasted a little longer, hardly a source of pride. And Tim had been the one to pack his bags.

It was very cold, I remember, her mother says. You had a college scarf and you put it around my neck when we left the cinema. It was rather itchy.

Her father smiles, the crisis has passed. 

So I sit in the taxi  with this thing on my lap, wincing at every pothole we go over and then I have to wait on a freezing bench at Paddington, trying not to shiver, and my train's delayed because of the weather.

She is so tired. But warm. She pities young, scarfless Dick Denton, risking hypothermia for the sake of a couple of ancient objets d'art, sees her father slimmer, healthier, red of lip, cheek and nose, his breath visible against the thick air of the concourse.

Wasn't there a waiting room?

Yes, but it was terribly crowded, as you can imagine, and I couldn't risk getting nudged by a stray suitcase or whatever.

You poor thing.

We get on the six fifteen, eventually, and it's still bloody freezing on the train, some

problem  with the heating, and again I've got this box balanced on my knees, expecting a derailment or an emergency stop at any moment. Nothing but black out of the window, nothing to focus on but not dropping the box. 

We get to Didcot and a chap gets on and sits down opposite me, lights his pipe. He's had a couple of drinks, I can smell it on him. He looks at me for a bit, then he leans forward and says What's in the box?  And as he says this he TAPS it.  Like this, TAP TAP, twice, with the tips of his fingers. I'm ready to knock him into the middle of next week, of course, but I'm somewhat hindered by my precious cargo. The fellow takes one look at my face and scarpers off into the next carriage.

She finds herself laughing at this. The restrained laughter she employs for her colleagues' jokes in lectures. In that context more of a signal to others that a joke has, in fact, been made. She has seen her father's face redden with murderous intent, but he has never lashed out, not at her nor, she is sure, at her mother who latterly has taken to sharing the worst episodes from their doomed union with her daughter. No mention of wife-beating, though his other faults were extensive in scope and degree. Her mother is smiling too.

Were you ever in a real fight, Dad?

Me? Handbags on the rugby pitch, maybe, as a callow youth. And plenty of swordplay on the boards. But no, people have tended to keep out of my way. Just as well really, I don't think I've got the stomach for it.

She rather admires him for this, this rare interval of self-reflection in which he manages to see himself in a less than heroic light. 

Were they okay, the glasses?

At this point, as far as I know, they remain virgo intacta. 

He has returned to the remembered present of his story. Shame on her for dragging him away.

I safely disembark amongst the dreaming spires, thinking that by now it's too late to trouble the Master but there's a note in my pigeonhole instructing me to visit him at any time before midnight.  So I trudge, very carefully, along to his lodgings.  He opens the door himself, I'm half expecting him to be in some Victorian sleep getup, like Scrooge, but he's still wearing his suit and an expression of cosmic indignation. He wasn't much of a smiler.  He looks at me, looks at the box, puts two and two together.

Denton, he says. Do come in, old chap. You must be frozen.

Somewhat, I tell him. He brings me back into his study, where there's still quite a fire going.  I put the box on his desk along with the change from his quid.

Let's have a look, shall we? He opens the box. Magnificent, he says. Takes one out, examines it.  Puts it back.  Consummatum est, Denton.  A job well done.  Comes out from behind his desk and shakes my hand.  As he does so we hear a sharp pop – her father puts one stout forefinger into the side of his mouth and flicks it out – not loud, like that.  Could have come from the fire.  Then another – the same gesture – and the Master's eyebrows go up, like two grey caterpillars, levitating.

Oh dear, says her mother. 

Nothing but dust.  It's as if they've evaporated, somehow.  My knees start shaking again and I'm sure that it's somehow going to be my fault and he's going to send me down or tear me a new one at the very least.  He stands there looking at the box, which is, to all intents and purposes empty now.  Then he leans forward against the desk and his shoulders start to shake, and eventually I realise that he's laughing.  I daren't laugh along, of course. 

Magda reappears.  She watches the younger woman as she moves around the bed.  She is real, she thinks, for everyone who occupies this bed.  Am I real to her?  Or just a passing symptom, floating on the sheets.  Today a head injury, next week a knee replacement, a tonsillectomy.  With a shiver she pictures her father telling the same story, in the same place, holding her mother's hand.  And there she is, on the bed, deceased.  A moral in parallel, returned, like a piece of sixteenth century cristallo, unto dust.  Or as good as. 

We'll have to say you dropped them, you understand. 

Not quite sure what you mean, I tell him. 

Accidental damage, he says.  Not insured otherwise.  Might buy a couple of cases of the good stuff for the college cellar, no?  Laughing the whole time, he was. 

She need to rest, Magda says.  Five minutes, okay?  They mumble and nod.

We should let you sleep, darling.  Her mother presses her hand. 

I always wondered, he continues, rising slowly, if I was set up.  It was the time for that sort

 of thing.  JFK, Jack Ruby.

You were a patsy, Dad? 

Never occurred to me at the time, obviously, you just go along with these things. But when I thought about it later I wondered.  Was I meant to fail?

Magda is standing by the door now, applying pressure.  They lean over and kiss her in turn. 

I'll see you in the morning, darling, her mother says.

Yes, says her father.  Not really committing to anything, as has been his way for as long as she can remember. 

Then they are gone, empty air and two chairs left behind, and it is as if the latent pain in the side of her neck, which she has experienced for the most part as a kind of pressure, departs with them. It could also be that Magda has tweaked the drip to help her sleep again. She wonders if the tension and discomfort she felt was not a symptom of the fall but of having the two of them there. His half-disguised reluctance and her anxious solicitude. Either way it was good to be alone, to reinhabit her habitual state.

This room was really all she needed.  With its soft lighting and bionic bed.  There was free Wi-Fi and the food would presumably be as tasteful as the wallpaper.  She might enjoy an occasional visitor, perhaps coming to an arrangement with Magda that no-one should be allowed to stay for longer than twenty minutes.  Nothing much to see out of the window,

not until Spring anyway, and that was five months off.  Keep the blinds down until then.  No real rush, is there?  She chuckled to herself, buoyant.  

Why that story?  He probably didn't know himself.  Introspection wasn't his thing. He was Polonius, and had never been Hamlet.  If she pressed him on it he would probably say, Oh, y'know, every cloud has a silver lining, something of that sort.  It was a harmless enough story, she supposes, but even in her present mildly euphoric condition there is something about it which nags at her.  The thing of beauty with a fatal flaw, a commonplace idea, a cliché really.  But what was the parallel that her father, if only subconsciously, was drawing?  Was she the gorgeous object?  Probably not.  He had never been terribly enthusiastic about her appearance.  Marriage, his or hers? Love itself?  This seems the most likely, she thinks.  Imagines him delivering his velvet-voiced thesis on the fragility of human affection.  Nothing lasts forever, that's what life has taught me.

And this, in the end, was the only story.  Never mind a stranger coming to town, or a heroic quest, the truth behind any fiction was that things ended.  Existence meant finitude.  In my beginning is my end.  She feels her heart flicker slightly at this helix of thought.  

Magda appears at the push of a button.

Do you I might have some hot chocolate, and some biscuits, perhaps?

Sure, I bring you.  Five minutes.

The woods decay, the woods decay and fall.  In a sense though, she reasons, biting into a piece of shortbread, she is bucking the trend.  Reversing the curse. Extremely good shortbread, she says aloud.  Because something pretty serious has happened to her.  And now she is healing.  Almost everyone is getting worse and she is getting better.  Time-travelling, almost.  She sips the last of her hot chocolate and lets her broken head push back into the pillow behind her.  Like a hotel pillow, from a nice hotel.

It has rained again, she notices. Close to evening now. The clouds have cleared but the sun is already below the acers. The path, darkened by rain, is in shadow. The old man is there, thin and stooped like a crane, in his black pyjamas. He is worrying at the soil with a narrow spade. When he sees her he pushes the tool into the earth and gestures to her. Follow me.  

She walks beside him along the path. Above them the trees, none particularly tall, reach towards each other but do not touch. There is light still between the trees and the sky a deep, late afternoon blue. He is talking, the old man, softly, and she nods from time to time as if she understands. She doesn't understand but she agrees somehow. The curves of the path are mannered, artificial, as if something is being deliberately concealed.

The old man's patter ceases. The path widens and turns. A flight of shallow steps, formed from crazed stone, rises between low box hedges up to a temple. Water drips from the trees. The red tiles on the roof of the temple glow in the fading sunlight. The old man indicates that he will walk no further then spreads his hand, as far as his worn joints will allow, in the direction of the temple doors. He nods.

The steps are uneven and slippery with dewfall or rain. She walks up them with care, turning midway to check that the old man is still there. When she reaches the doors she looks behind once more. The old man nods to her, bends at the waist, exaggerating his stoop, then walks away.

She pushes the left hand door which swings open silently. She enters the temple and closes the door behind her. It is very dark. Her eyes adjust to the lack of light.