Jon McGregor - This Isn't the Sort of Thing That Happens to Someone Like You

‘You have the space though.’

‘Well, perhaps.’

‘I just rather wondered whether you couldn’t use the extra hands about the place. You know. I realise money’s not quite the thing at the moment, but there could be other forms of payment. Help, you know. Connections.’

‘I’m not sure, really.’

‘I do have a strong back, even now. There’s lots I could do.’

‘I have people who come and help, thank you. I manage.’

‘It’s just that, you know how it is. Things are rather difficult. In town. I thought we might be able to help each other out. At a difficult moment. For old times’ sake. A mutually beneficial arrangement, you know.’

‘I don’t think it’s very practical, actually.’

‘It’s completely practical!’

‘Excuse me.’

‘Oh, now.’

‘I think the bus may be leaving soon.’

‘Look, sorry.’

‘I wouldn’t want you to miss it.’

‘Will you think about it though? Will you be in touch?’

‘I think you’d better get on. If you’re to catch that bus.’

‘Mary, will you think about it?’

‘Thank you very much for the flowers. They really are lovely. I do appreciate the trouble you must have gone to in finding them.’

‘Mary, please.’

She moved into the hallway and held out his coat, waiting for him to put his shoes back on. She held it out between them, as though to forestall him. She couldn’t bear a scene. He opened the door and took his coat and ducked his head beneath the falling snow. He didn’t look at her as he left. She closed the door to keep the heat in. She watched him through the spyhole. The lens made him appear warped, smaller than he really was.

Grantham

And then there was the American woman he’d offered the spare room to that time, without question or thought or apparent consideration of the fact that Catherine might at least like to have been told. The first she’d known about it had been when she’d got home from work and found the woman standing there in the hallway, looking not at all surprised or uncomfortable, eating natural yoghurt straight from the pot and waiting for whatever it was that Catherine was going to say. Which had of course been nothing more than a faintly quizzical hello? Holding the front door open behind her, the rain blowing in from the garden and something like smugness or amusement lingering on the American woman’s face for just a moment before she finally acknowledged Catherine with a quietly unconcerned hello of her own. And carried on eating the yoghurt. And made no attempt to explain herself.

A strange-looking woman, she remembered. Very slim, and very pale, with rubbed-red eyes and mismatched layers of clothing; a long cotton dress, a man’s checked shirt, a college scarf, a beige raincoat. Sandals. No make-up. She looked at first as though she might be in her sixties, but Michael said later that he’d thought she was closer to forty-five. Which was their own age at the time, in fact.

‘Can I help you?’ Catherine had asked, only slightly more pointedly — strange, this reluctance to be more direct, to say who the hell are you and do you mind getting out of my house — and the woman had shaken her head, and smiled graciously, and said, ‘Oh, no, thank you, your husband’s been very kind already.’ Holding up the yoghurt spoon to demonstrate what kindness she’d been shown. At which point Michael had appeared, loitering purposefully in the study doorway, and Catherine had understood the situation, had gone straight through to the kitchen without another word to take off her wet coat and sit at the table and wait for something like an explanation while the woman drifted away upstairs.

The woman had been in a bit of a situation, apparently. That was what she’d told Michael, and that was what he told Catherine when he followed her through to the kitchen and sat at the table to explain. She wasn’t someone who went about asking like this, she’d told him, but she wasn’t sure what else she could do. She’d come over for some medical treatment, she’d heard that the hospital here was a world-renowned centre for people with her condition, and of course she hadn’t thought she’d need worry about accommodation, it being a hospital and everything, only now there’d been some difficulty about being admitted, a difficulty she was never very clear about but which seemed to involve documents she didn’t have, and she should have foreseen that, of course, she knew she should, but people with her condition tended to grab at possibilities and this is a world-renowned centre we’re talking about at the hospital here and logistics came second to hope sometimes, Michael understood that, didn’t he? But the thing was she’d spent all her money getting here and so just for now she was in this sort of, well, this situation. If he knew what she was saying.

That first conversation had taken place at the church. People often went there looking for help, and Michael almost always gave them something: food, or money, or the address of somewhere else they could go. Sometimes it was enough that he didn’t just shut the door in their faces, that he listened to their long explanations of funerals to be attended, school trips to be paid for, faulty gas meters and lost cheques and misunderstandings over benefit forms. He wasn’t naive; he knew when to say no. It was just that he didn’t always think being spun a yarn was a good enough reason for not doing what he could to help. It’s the desperate ones who come up with the best stories , he used to say, and Catherine had admired him for this, once, for his refusal to let cynicism accumulate with each knock at the church office door. She wasn’t capable of such a refusal, she knew. She’d grown cynical in her own job a long time ago, listening to students mumble excuses about late and inadequate coursework, attending departmental meetings where people used phrases like rebranding the undergraduate experience . And then coming home from one of those meetings to find a strange American woman eating yoghurt in her hallway.

They’d had people staying before, of course. That wasn’t new. Lodgers, friends of friends, people like this woman who just turned up at the church needing somewhere to stay. Catherine didn’t usually mind. Vicarages were big houses, and they had plenty of spare rooms. Michael seemed to consider it as much a part of his job as the visiting, the preaching, the offering of communion; or not even as part of his job so much as part of his life. What does our faith mean, if we don’t do these things for even the least among us? She’d heard him say that in his sermons, many times, and she’d been thrilled by how sincerely he’d seemed to mean it, once.

She’d asked him how long the American woman was going to stay and he’d said not long. A couple of nights, three at most. Maybe four. She’d asked him why he hadn’t talked to her first, and he’d said he hadn’t really had the chance and didn’t she trust his judgment? She’d asked what sort of condition the woman had that would bring her all this way to find treatment, and he’d said that he wasn’t sure, that the woman hadn’t been specific but that he’d got the impression it was some kind of bone disease. Something quite rare, he’d said, and she’d raised her eyebrows, and made a disbelieving face, and said that he wasn’t making any sense, the story didn’t make any sense. Which he’d pretended to ignore, and so when they’d made dinner then it had been in a bristling near-silence. Catherine boiling and draining and mashing the potatoes, adding butter and milk and salt. Michael turning the sausages under the grill, setting the table, stirring the gravy, disappearing upstairs to ask the woman to join them, coming back to report that she’d said she wasn’t hungry and she didn’t want to put them out. Moving around each other with a practised ease, passing forks and spoons and stock cubes from hand to hand without needing to be asked, and by the time they were sitting at the table and giving thanks her irritation had faded enough for her to be able to check what the woman’s name was. Michael said he didn’t know. He hadn’t asked, or she hadn’t said, and the whole time she was there they only ever referred to her as this woman or the American woman or most of the time just a shorthanded her or she. When are you going to talk to her . What’s she doing here. How much longer is she going to stay.