Maggie Gee - The White Family

‘I never denied I got my tea.’

‘She’ll meet someone soon, and settle down,’ said Alfred. ‘Everything’s going to turn out for the best.’

May thought, let all be well, be well … Tennyson was hopeful rather than certain:

Oh yet we trust that somehow good

Will be the final goal of ill

To pangs of nature, sins of will,

Defects of doubt, and taints of blood …

And what did he mean by ‘taints of blood’?

Seeing Dirk had shaken Shirley. The hospital foyer was huge and cold.

I used to love him . I adored that boy. But what’s he turned into? A thug. A — fascist. Worse than Dad, without Dad’s excuses.

She wasn’t quite ready to go out into the dark and struggle through the wind across the wild black car park. She sank down on to an empty seat, picked up a magazine and stared at it blindly.

When her focus returned, she was looking at furs. Two pages of red and blond winter furs. ‘There are the whingers and the whiners, yes. There are the dowdies, the dated, the dull … And there’s you. Daring to be a babe. Ready for fun. Purring for fur … You, babelicious in the new seal-skin …’ The heart-shaped face of the journalist looked all of seventeen years old, and brainless.

Still the furs were pretty, thought Shirley. Soft. Elroy might like to see me in furs … But she knew it was just a fantasy.

No one wore furs. It just wasn’t done. No one, that is, except rich foreign women you saw getting out of cabs with dark glasses and fussy expensive designer handbags. Arab men’s women, she thought, contemptuously, then caught herself thinking it and was ashamed.

So she was a bigot like the rest of her family.

We all like to think we’re better than someone.

She knew what people said about her. ‘Shirley White goes with black men.’ They never got over their excitement about it, though she’d been married to Kojo for nearly eight years. As if a marriage was just about sex.

I liked being married. I liked the comfort.

Her parents had been married for over forty years. What would her mother do if Dad died? Shirley remembered all too clearly the blank exhaustion when Kojo was dying. The sense that part of her body was missing.

But they’ve been lucky. They’ve had nearly half a century.

She slapped the magazine shut with a sigh.

As she focused on the big automatic doors that would let her out into the night again, they opened, as if by the power of thought. A man came in and blinked at the light.

Suddenly familiar. White, thickset, with golden skin and dark wavy hair. Handsome in a rugged, crumpled sort of way. Heavy eyebrows, frowning towards her.

‘Isn’t it — Shirley? It’s Thomas Lovell. ‘Do you remember me …?’

It was Darren’s friend.

‘Have you come to see Dad? That’s very kind. I saw you on the television, you know. When your book came out. Some time ago.’ Of course, it was Thomas who saw Dad fall. Used to be a writer. Then he became — What? — something sensible. Yes, a librarian.

‘It must be ten years since we met.’

‘Probably Darren’s second wedding.’

‘Yes.’

Simultaneously, they both remembered that they had got drunk and flirted with each other. They had possibly kissed. They had certainly danced. Shirley’s spirits began to rise.

‘He’s on his third marriage by now, you know. None of us got invited to the last one. They ran off to Bali. Very glamorous … You didn’t come to my wedding, did you? I can’t remember if I asked you.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘But didn’t I hear —?’

‘My husband died three years ago. Cancer.’

‘I’m so sorry.’ He really looked sorry.

‘My little brother’s just gone up to the ward.’

‘I’d better give them some time together.’

On impulse Shirley said, ‘Good idea. Come and have a cup of tea in the café.’

Two bored black women were standing by the till, which was full of ravenous young doctors in white coats, furiously feeding haunted faces. It was a banqueting hall for ghosts. The tables and chairs were of royal blue plastic, which made chill reflections on their skin.

‘Hot meal arl finish,’ one of the black women told them. There remained some cupcakes, two squashed jam-tarts, some ginger biscuits and some cling-wrapped salads, half-decomposed, like overcooked spinach.

‘Just tea, I think,’ said Thomas. ‘Can’t say I fancy anything else.’

They sat down at the only table free of white-coated inmates stripping their plates. ‘They’re like a plague of locusts,’ she said.

‘Stress,’ he said. ‘Exhaustion. They’ve probably been working twenty hours already.’

‘I suppose you just expect them to have good manners. Seeing as they’re professionals.’ She saw on his face a kind of disappointment.

‘Professionals are the rudest of all. In fact, they have qualifications in rudeness.’

‘I haven’t got any qualifications.’ (Why did I have to tell him that?)

‘I’ve got lots but I don’t really use them.’

‘I’d have thought you’d need them, to look after books. And to write a book, like you did.’

‘Oh, any fool can be a writer.’

‘Lots of people would love to be in your shoes,’ she said. ‘People admire writers.’

‘Do they, still?’

‘Well our house is crammed wall to wall with books’ — (Kojo’s books, if she was honest. Why was she trying to impress him? But Shirley herself had once been a reader, when she was young, doing teacher training.) Thomas was looking inside her coat, his eyes slipping down the cream silk of her blouse. His kind of woman would be thin and sharp.

‘Is Darren coming home?’ he asked.

‘Well he doesn’t exactly keep in touch with me. Of course he doesn’t, with his high-powered lifestyle.’ She made herself smile, to cover her chagrin.

‘I never hear from him, either.’

On the other side of the canteen, there was something going on. The voice of one of the attendants was becoming steadily shriller. ‘Because it gone six o’clock already and dis kitchen not doin’ any more cookin’ —’

A man with his back to them was making a scene. ‘You’re supposed to serve cooked meals between five and seven. Which means there should be an hour to go —’ A slim blond woman dressed in pink was plucking ineffectually at his shoulder.

The black woman jabbed the air with her finger. ‘I can’t help what nonsense de notice say. The doctors come eat the lot. And that’s that.’

It struck Shirley and Thomas at the same moment, and their eyes met, briefly, apprehensive, as the man snatched up his bleak tray in disgust and turned, with a little flounce of anger and tiredness — It was Darren, of course . Darren’s tanned face, which gaped and grew pinker the moment he saw them. He had come after all, the prodigal son. ‘Darren White, Voice of the Left, Man of the People’, as the papers called him. A jet-lagged man with an American twang, making a mean little scene in a café.

He swept up to them in a gale of tension, handsome from a distance, gaunt close up. His hair had subtly changed colour, Shirley realized; the grey in his curls had disappeared. His face underneath was tighter, older, the lines set hard in a mask of tan. ‘Hello,’ he said. ‘Hi everyone,’ as if there were too many of them to manage individually. ‘I’m just trying to get some morsel of sustenance out of the bloody NHS.’ His wife hovered behind him, pretty, uncertain, her pink suit fitting like an elegant glove, her hair hanging bobbed, healthy, expensive. ‘This is Susie,’ he said, gesturing angrily. ‘My new wife. She couldn’t eat a thing on the plane. Of course neither of us eats red meat, and the veggie stuff was drowning in saturated fat. We made a special effort to get here today — I had an interview to do in Madrid. Mum sounded so damn frightened last time we spoke. Then two minutes after we get to the bedside the consultant turfs us out —’ He was plainly trying to get a grip on himself. ‘Sit down,’ he ordered his wife over his shoulder. ‘This is Shirley, my sister. And Thomas Lovell. I’d forgotten you two knew each other.’