The Taxi Queue Read online

  Richard remained in the basement, failing to join the guests who were making their way up the stairs, talking and laughing as they went. Because he was feeling lethargic, Richard sat down at the kitchen table. Among the used plates, glasses and platters, two bottles of wine stood, half finished. The catering girls had abandoned the dishes and were occupied with making coffee and tea at the other end of the kitchen. Richard helped himself to the wine, filling up his glass, thinking, cloudily, how pleasant it was to smell coffee and drink alcohol. Better than the opposite, which brought back memories of childhood holidays with his mother and father – car journeys on A roads and the ritual of stopping off for morning coffee in pubs. Morning coffee. The words – the concept – encapsulated those holidays. Always the feeling of prissy isolation, sitting round a small polished table overcrowded with cups and saucers, while the regulars stood at ease by the bar, drinking pints. Afterwards, there was the drama of asking the barman if he would fill up the dog bowl with tap water. Tap water, in case the barman decided on another kind, maybe from the soda siphon. His mother would produce the brown earthenware bowl from her bag and hand it over. Once they had been given the water, out they’d all troop, two grown-ups, one boy and a slopping dog bowl. No question of slipping out unobtrusively. The dogs would start to bark as they approached the car, then fall out of the hatchback, wagging their tails, as soon as Father raised the door.

  Richard cradled the glass in his hands. The sound of the piano vibrated through the floorboards – the scrape of chairs and thumps made by people shifting about. Robbie’s voice was less ample from a distance, but still reverberant. The medley began with ‘Sweet By and By’, and moved on through ‘Amazing Grace’ and ‘My Shepherd Will Supply My Need’. Richard enjoyed listening from below, happy to suffer the imbalance of instrument and voice for the benefit of not being part of the crowd and, if he were honest, not having to look at the Pattersons. He reached across the table and, although he didn’t particularly like hard-boiled quails’ eggs, picked up a couple that had been left on a plate and munched them. After a moment’s break, Jennifer began playing again. Her hands came down on the keys and – unexpectedly, but as if in response – Richard’s head sank down on to the table. Richard, tasting egg in his mouth, heard Robbie’s voice through the inebriated roar in his ears.

  The catering girls, on the far side of the kitchen, started humming along. They stopped when they noticed Richard, resting on the table, and looked at each other with concern. Then the coffee machine reached its climax and they shrugged their shoulders and got on with counting cups.

  3

  THE PHASE THAT Richard hadn’t got stuck in was his youthful affair with Jamie Nevis. It had only lasted a few months. Jamie had been different from Richard, less self-conscious, less cautious. Jamie wore sleeveless T-shirts, army trousers and charity shop jackets. He tied a narrow strip of velvet round his right wrist. Richard wore what he considered to be normal clothes – cords and neutral shirts bought from department stores – not actually chosen by his mother, but with her in mind. Richard never told Jamie that he loved him. He believed that he needed to keep checks in place for the sake of his long-term happiness. Richard’s parents didn’t talk of sexuality, or – much – of love. ‘So and so’s an attractive woman’ was the nearest his father came to it, accompanied by a mild clearing of the throat and a quick glance at his wife, as if the adjective had been an unwise choice. Not everyone was in step, every step of the way, with the prevailing sexual freedoms. There was slippage between social history and personal history, especially in the Epworth family.

  Richard was twenty-one and Jamie nineteen when they met. Boys, both of them. Jamie the more clued-up of the two. The meeting took place on the Oxford-to-London bus. Richard had gone home to Abingdon for his mother’s birthday – an unavoidable engagement that required him, by custom and practice, to give presents to the two dogs as well as to Mother. He was on his way back to London. He boarded the bus from Oxford bus station at six o’clock on the Sunday evening. The aisle of the bus was crammed with people. Richard waited while individuals in front of him in the queue inserted themselves into the high-backed seats. He found a single space towards the back next to someone with a book open on his knee. Books were generally a good protection against conversation but a short way along the M40 the person – Jamie Nevis – spoke to him. He asked Richard if he knew that Wilde’s half-sisters had caught fire. Richard had no idea what he was talking about. He had met people before who suddenly passed on random information. They were usually hoping to make a short art film or had recently started writing a novel. Richard was doped by Sunday lunch, his brain befuddled. Twenty-four hours was the usual recovery period after a home visit. ‘I can’t believe it,’ Jamie said. ‘Everyone knows about Reading gaol but no one knows about the sisters. They’re getting ready to go to a party, twirling round in front of the fireplace; first one’s set alight, then the next.’

  ‘I don’t suppose they had a fire extinguisher handy,’ Richard said.

  Jamie laughed. ‘No. They died. I’ve got half-sisters – in Essex.’

  Richard was confused. He looked out of the window across the aisle and beyond the next set of seats. In the dim light he could make out the chalk sides of the hill that the motorway sliced through. No sign of girls carelessly dancing by a log fire. No sign of Reading. He realised who Wilde was, Wilde with an ‘e’, but it was too late. When he turned back, Jamie’s eyes were closed and he had fallen asleep. Richard must have slept too because, apart from odd moments of consciousness when his chin jerked down on to his chest, he didn’t wake up until they reached Grosvenor Gardens in Victoria. The bus staggered to a stop. People began to stand up and move forward down the aisle. Richard looked out on to the dark drizzly evening. By nine o’clock on Monday morning he had to have answered a revision question on bounded rationality. ‘Short answers will suffice for the micro-economics paper,’ his tutor had said. ‘But make sure they’re spot on.’ Richard thought of his room in the student house near the Oval, the dismal programming of Sunday evening television, the lack of beer and clean shirts. He patted the backpack that rested in his lap and, through the canvas, felt the brick-shaped package of foil-wrapped leftovers that had been pressed on him by his mother. Eventually he and Jamie Nevis were the only two left on the bus. The driver began locking up the cash box and operating the winder that changed the bus destination back to Oxford. ‘Shall we go somewhere for a drink?’ Jamie said.

  The glass doors to the Federation, across the river in Vauxhall, were automatic, gliding apart, so there was no hanging around, half in, half out.

  ‘Funny smell,’ Jamie said. ‘But you get used to it.’ The bar had been his choice.

  ‘What is it? Petroleum-based materials? Recently set cement?’ Richard asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Jamie said.

  ‘It’s supposed to be bad for you, isn’t it? New building sickness.’

  Jamie inhaled slowly. ‘Is it? What’s supposed to happen to you?’

  ‘I don’t know. Headaches. Asthma. That sort of thing probably.’

  ‘I never get headaches,’ Jamie said. ‘I never get ill.’

  They were walking across the empty floor. The walls to either side rose upwards into blackness. The lighted bar, with a handful of people gathered round it and unoccupied low-level seating to each side, formed a tableau in the distance. Change of use became commonplace later – banks converted to bars and schools to residential blocks – but such transformation seemed sophisticated then. The Federation had only been open a month.

  ‘Extraordinary place,’ Richard said. ‘Like a cathedral. Everything happening at the far end.’

  ‘A working men’s club, not a cathedral. They stripped the inside out and made it over. I like it,’ Jamie said. ‘Weird music, though. Haven’t you been here?’ He moved away from Richard, stretched out his arms horizontally and turned round slowly, completing a circle. That was the first time Richard really noticed Jamie’s cl
othes, the narrow strip of velvet round his right wrist.

  They were three-quarters of the way through their second pint of beer when Jamie glanced at his watch. It was a nice old sixties Ingersoll that had to be wound. Jamie had already shown it to Richard. He had found it at a boot fair in Essex, near where his family lived. It turned out that he and Richard were both at London University, though at different colleges, reading different subjects. They had swapped information about student life and cheap eating places. Richard had been describing the birthday weekend, meaning to make it sound funny. Jamie had laughed, out of sympathy, not because he found the story amusing. Then the talk petered out. The corner seat where they were sitting was in shadow, dark enough for the luminous paint on the watch numbers to glow. The watch showed half past ten.

  ‘Say something,’ Richard said, staring into the glass.

  ‘How do you usually meet people?’ Jamie said rather loudly.

  Richard downed his beer. He knew Jamie didn’t mean people. ‘I don’t.’

  ‘There are no hidden microphones.’

  ‘I’m not gay,’ Richard said.

  ‘Don’t worry about it.’

  ‘Do you want something else to drink?’ Richard asked, after a few moments of silence.

  ‘No, thank you.’ Jamie got to his feet.

  ‘It hasn’t been a great conversation on my part. I’m sorry,’ Richard said.

  Jamie smiled and shrugged his shoulders. ‘It was all right.’

  Richard stood up too. He put on his coat and buttoned it. Doing up buttons makes some people look like children. Perhaps it’s the way they do it. They show a sort of concentration that makes them look vulnerable. For some reason Richard saw that in himself and fixed the particular image in his mind. He still remembered it, nearly twenty years later, though other pictures that he would have preferred to retain had gone for ever. He picked up his backpack containing the bag of leftovers. But then he was reluctant to move.

  ‘Shall we go?’ Jamie said.

  ‘Where?’ The question seemed to come from nowhere.

  ‘Mine?’ Jamie said.

  When Jamie was dying, Richard promised God he’d give him up. It wasn’t a wager – not an either/or promise. He made it when the message got through to him that Jamie was in University College Hospital with acute viral meningitis. If Jamie had survived the terrible fever it would have held, and if he had died, inescapably, the same. The promise needed to be unconditional. It was as if he had been trying to impose a counterweight to Jamie’s soaring temperature; a strike for equilibrium. Richard hadn’t, at that time, been conspicuously Christian – just timidly and conventionally brought up. He hadn’t ‘closed the deal’ as Paula and Hartley would have said – or prayed the prayer asking Jesus to come into his life. That had come later after he had started going out with Vivienne. The emergency appeal to God, at the time of Jamie’s illness, had somehow been primitive, straight from the gut. He had wanted to give something – out of love – and that was all he had to give. The willed attempt at forgetting had begun then. It was the only way he could cope. After returning from the funeral – a dreamlike assembling of strangers and friends at a crematorium in Essex – Richard looked one last time at the photographs. There were twelve of them, in a yellow Kodak packet, all taken on a day trip to Brighton. He walked to Vauxhall Bridge and threw them into the Thames. Richard had never visited Jamie’s family – they were among the strangers – and as far as he knew, no one had ever guessed that he and Jamie were lovers.

  Richard survived the turbulent period after Jamie’s death, though at the time he didn’t care about survival. All his everyday actions slowed down, and split into moments of time so tenuous that the days and nights were endless and their shape unrecognisable. He took to his bed at unsuitable times. He moved slowly and aimlessly. He nearly said inappropriate things. He felt on the point of tears. It was as if he were trapped in a lift, with his own thoughts blaring out from an intercom. He let it be known that a friend had died suddenly. He implied an old friend, though he and Jamie had only known each other for a short time. Nothing less than an old friend would have explained his sadness. Of all his circle, Paula and Hartley showed the least alarm. They made their way to the Oval at regular and dependable intervals; brought food, tidied his room, opened windows. They talked to his parents and tutors on his behalf, and tuned out the worried sounds from their messages before they relayed them back to Richard. When Richard revived enough to listen, and even when he barely listened, Paula and Hartley told him who had sent their love and who had been praying for him – all in the same reassuring tone of voice. He came to appreciate these benign communiqués that involved no evident obligation. It was like a return to childhood: receiving Christmas and birthday presents from people he didn’t know.

  He couldn’t put a date to a week, or even a month, when he knew he was better. Over time, tiredness became bearable tiredness and anxiety merged with boredom. The waves of grief grew further apart. He managed to sit his final exams. He went on a walking holiday in the Pyrenees. He became articled to a firm of accountants. Paula introduced him to Vivienne and when they became engaged he joined St Dunstan’s. He came to believe in the power of prayer which, combined with some dependable resilience of his own, saw him through.

  4

  RICHARD HAD SHUT up the Abe episode in a box that he was determined never to open. As a husband and a Christian, he was appalled at what had happened, but the part of him that was pure Epworth pragmatist considered that the best way to deal with the encounter was to vow that it would never happen again and forget about it. This worked for a week or so, but through February and March, different breaches occurred in Richard’s defences, old memories and new fantasies. Richard could hardly distinguish them. Their comfort as mental relief was compromised by his inability to control them. Abe, or men resembling Abe, walked into his thoughts: young men with springy hair and an easy way of talking. Then there was more to control, because the spectres also had to be extinguished. After the family returned home from skiing, Richard avoided the guest bedroom where he and Abe had slept – though sometimes all he wanted to do was to go in and lie quietly on the bed.

  There were layers of permission in his fantasies that were like interleaves. Richard came across them: thin, almost opaque, sheets between one page of his thoughts and the next. To steady himself, he kept returning to the weather on that January evening. Epworths could cope with weather. But the topic blew itself out and he moved on to the chance encounter, the way Abe had arrived at his house. It had been simple but also complicated – like a dream mixed up with a weird mathematical probability problem. What was the likelihood of something like that happening? The timing soothed him – the way the flow had created itself. He remembered Abe’s careless questions about the girls, and his own anxious queasiness as he heard them spoken of. He had replied to the questions. The queasiness passed. His best memory was of Abe, in the darkness of the taxi, with his hands clasped behind the back of his head, his legs stretching across the taxi floor – the posture of businessmen when feigning contemplation.

  Richard had taken the sheets to the express laundry. He had checked and rechecked the guest bedroom and bathroom – believing that he was bound either to have missed or created some domestic discrepancy that Vivienne would home in on. On the correct day he turned up at Heathrow Airport, joining the po-faced men behind the rope at Arrivals who were carrying boards or makeshift notices bearing wonkily inscribed names. He scanned the incoming passengers emerging from the Customs Hall and saw his wife and daughters before they saw him. In that split second he panicked at not being recognised – afraid that he had turned into a stranger. Then the girls started grinning and waving. They came running towards him. Vivienne, tussling with the luggage on wheels, finally noticed him. By the time she reached him and he was hugging her, he had forgotten the blank look on her face that suggested he might not have been her husband.

  His blunder, it turned out, had been f
ailing to take down the Christmas decorations. He had got into trouble for that – past Twelfth Night, past Epiphany. Vivienne had said that they had never left Christmas decorations up beyond the due date. Richard claimed that he had lived entirely in the kitchen and the bedroom while she and the girls were away. He said he had forgotten to go into the other rooms. Vivienne had nodded, as if she believed him, but it was clear that she felt exposed. To what, Richard wasn’t quite sure. Bad luck didn’t come into it. Or good luck. In the circumstances he felt unable to press the point. He looked on while Vivienne stripped the dried-up tree. First the decorations, then the lights, which she unwound, beginning at the top, until she had a tangle of green wire and tiny bulbs festooned round one arm. A pile of crisp pine needles collected on the floor and yet more fell into the decorations box, which had once contained the computer printer and still bore its name and outline on the side. Having pulled the plug from the socket, Vivienne placed the tangle in the top of the box and pushed down the flaps. Richard had closed his ears to the possible scrunch. Vivienne had looked up at him rather defiantly and said that if it turned out that the lights had shattered, they would simply have to go to John Lewis next December and buy new.

  Several times Richard came close to dialling the mobile number Abe had given him and which he had committed to memory. He had looked at it often enough to have it by heart. He wanted to hear Abe’s voice – the deadpan delivery that suddenly activated. The thought of Abe answering the phone in person stopped him. Since he hadn’t made the call, what did ‘coming close to’ mean? He could make no sense of the words that he used to describe his unguarded intentions; it pained him to use them.