The Taxi Queue Read online

  So far, his work hadn’t been affected but weariness, free time, ordinary days at home laid him open. Richard valued his family. For him it came first. Fractures to his contentment, during the twelve years of his marriage, had been infrequent; caused by a look, a touch that changed the rhythm of his thoughts. He had never acted on the strange uneasiness that came over him, so there was nothing to remind him once the moment had passed. The notion of Men Seeking Men in the personal columns, or by any other means, was as alien to him as the equivalent Men Seeking Women. He disapproved of affairs between married men and their secretaries, or female colleagues, and he would have disapproved of an affair between a married man and another man even more, if he had heard of such a thing in the office. He wasn’t, and never had been, on the lookout. It was as if he were on a bridge which he knew to be safe, well above the waterline, when, for no reason that he could understand or predict, he felt the bridge breaking. Until meeting Abe he had held steady.

  On the afternoon of Easter Monday Richard drove up to Harrow-on-the-Hill to drop off Bethany and Martha at a birthday party. The village, as people called it, was only a mile or so away from where the Epworths lived but, apart from delivering the girls to social events, Richard had little reason to go there. He hadn’t been for over a year; certainly not since January.

  Richard knew that he had reached the right house when he saw the red and orange balloons attached to the gatepost, the 4x4s, pavement-parked, and children clambering down from them. He let the girls out of the car and they ran across the gravelled drive and in through a door with a fanlight above it. Decent-sized family houses ‘on-the-Hill’ were out of his price bracket, which was why he and Vivienne had ended up with a less desirable postcode, off Sudbury Hill, in one of the new executive homes that backed on to the grounds of a private hospital. Compared with some of his colleagues in the City, his income was modest. He never got the huge bonuses. No one did in his department. It was a backwater that had, so far, escaped being the focus of an initiative.

  As he had taken no exercise at all on Easter Day and was still feeling thick-headed from Paula’s lunch, Richard decided that rather than drive home and set out again later he would go for a walk. Having manoeuvred the car into a proper parking space, he left a message for Vivienne, explaining what he was doing, then switched off his phone. He got out and locked the car door. He looked up and down the street as he inserted coins in the meter. There was a woman on a bicycle and a man with a dog; no one he recognised. Meeting anyone by chance always gave Richard a jolt – like the time he had met a colleague’s secretary, Tricia, at the customer services desk at the Marks and Spencer at Finsbury Pavement and had suddenly found himself explaining why he was returning the pack of socks in his hand. Turning a corner and coming across Abe would have immobilised him. He would have felt an agonising level of embarrassment and come out with some idiotic remark. No, he wasn’t expecting to meet Abe.

  Richard walked down the high street, pausing to look at the headless models in the window of the school outfitter’s. They posed against wood panels, in their blazers and trousers, rugby shirts and shorts – personifications of right conduct that wouldn’t last once they got a boy inside them. The atmosphere of Harrow had always seemed to him stifling, in spite of its airy position. The inescapable school buildings – the aesthetic mix of guest house and nineteenth-century town prison – made the village feel enclosed.

  Abe and Kirsty’s living arrangements had charmed him – the anachronism. The old-fashioned house share with a sibling and the unapologetic way Abe had announced it meant a lot to him. People sometimes go back to live with their parents but not many join up with a brother or sister for a second bout. It had been good to discover that not everyone in their twenties conformed to the same pattern – Richard had lagged behind himself, in various departments, at that age. His choice of music, films and clothes had been dull. Sub-optimal. Only his willingness to learn – and please – had saved him. And then, once he was married, Vivienne’s good taste and influence.

  Richard guessed that Kirsty must be a good earner, probably older than Abe and generous enough to give her brother a helping hand financially. Even so, their house must be small – two and a half beds at the most – because property prices in the village were high. He wondered what Kirsty looked like and if he would see enough family resemblance to know her if he passed her in the street. Remembering the mother’s peculiar Egyptian hobby, he somehow imagined the daughter as black-haired and carefully made up around the eyes. Richard allowed himself a few uncomplicated pictures of Abe: happy ones, different from the troubling images that plagued him at home. They were like old-style holiday snaps. Abe in a thick jersey wearing his beanie hat and balancing an upturned broom on the flat of his hand. Abe shaking the snow from the silver fir tree under a bright blue sky – cheery snow scenes pictures. They were set in his garden and had never happened. These thoughts went round his head, about Abe and the sister, but somehow missing the point – skirting round his awkward feelings of longing and guilt. He caught sight of himself in the glass of another shop, a middle-aged man wearing pale jeans and a dark shirt; dressed down for bank holiday, lacking the usual weekday suit.

  Richard climbed up to the churchyard and self-consciously admired the view, then, taking a steep footpath down again, he headed for the quiet residential roads on the western slope of the hill where the houses were more modest. He was enjoying his walk. He told himself that the advantages of building on a hill are the changes of level: unexpected juxtapositions, roofs and chimneys below, front gardens looking up. This was as true in Harrow as in Tuscany. He concentrated on outward things. Richard made no claims to possessing an artist’s eye, but today he appreciated the way buildings fitted together. His instinct, when going along a street, was to estimate property prices to the nearest five thousand pounds. He made the usual appraisal now but, with time on his hands, he went on to look in a less mercantile way – at houses through windows. He imagined the inhabitants and paid attention to the faces he passed. He realised what little notice he took of his own neighbourhood – getting into the car, pulling out of the drive – and why Vivienne was sometimes incredulous at his inadequate observation.

  As Richard walked along, the motion of his steps and the shafts of weak sunshine that appeared between the roofs put him in good spirits. He felt less rushed than for weeks and seemed to be acquiring another, calmer identity. He imagined returning to the Hill on future occasions. He decided that whenever the girls needed to be ferried to parties or French club he would drop them off, drive over to Harrow, park the car on the lower slopes, where he wouldn’t be clamped, and have a wander around until it was time to collect them. He might try one of the pubs for a pint of beer, or even have a haircut.

  He was passing a row of flat-fronted Victorian cottages when an old fellow with a walking stick addressed him. ‘Rain’s holding off for you,’ he said. Richard agreed. He was pleased to be greeted. A few minutes later he heard a woman singing. It was an unselfconscious, private sound and came from inside one of the cottages. The song was unaccompanied – perfect to his ears. Richard didn’t slow down. He went on to the end of the road, then retraced his steps. The singing had stopped by the time he returned. Richard scanned the front of the cottage – only two storeys high, he could take it in at a glance. Number twelve was similar to the others in the street; built of yellow London stock bricks with three windows – all open, two up, one down – and a solid-looking front door. There was a bicycle and a wheelie bin in the narrow front yard. A solitary pot containing a small shrub, tipped with brown leaves, stood by the path. The gate was broken, tied to its hinges by a piece of wire. In the window of the front room was a stone cat, tall and regal, Egyptian-looking, even with its back turned. Its ears strained upwards, as if tracking a flock of birds flying overhead. Seeing the cat, Richard flinched, as if he’d been slapped round the head. His shirt went damp under his arms and across his back.

  He walked down the
hill and made his way to the car. He unlocked the door and almost crawled into the driver’s seat. He felt contained sitting there, soothed by the familiar smell of the leather seats, the arrangement of the dashboard, the leftover twirl of paper from a roll of Extra Strong Mints in the dip between the two front seats. He was aware that the association of singing and a stone cat was random, and that there was nothing logical or causal linking them. The overwhelming feeling that he was standing in front of Abe’s house had come more from his pulse – which was only now slowing down – and a buzzing in his brain, than from any rational explanation. He didn’t move until a traffic warden tapped on the window and pointed at the meter. Then he nodded, put on his seat belt, turned the key in the ignition and drove away.

  Julian’s mother was very understanding when Richard turned up nearly half an hour after the party had ended. All the other children had already been collected. Richard apologised and Julian’s mother went to call the girls. The hall he waited in was splendid, like the entrance to a house people pay to look around. The paintings were lit with individual lights in the form of brass shells, and the walls were covered in some silky cloth. He stood and gaped, at a loss without a ticket. At a loss altogether. Bethany and Martha were watching a DVD, finishing the birthday cake. Julian’s mother hurried them out, ignoring the crumbs that they shed as they ran across the huge Chinese rug. No one made Julian come and say goodbye. He was said to be upstairs getting into his combats, preparing to go to the RAF museum at Hendon for the birthday treat.

  5

  SOMEONE TOLD ABE that Declan Driscol was on a concert tour of Germany, but he couldn’t have been because Abe saw him one evening on the Festival Terrace at the South Bank. A crowd of mesmerised passers-by had gathered in a semicircle round him and another group were sitting on the steps of Hungerford footbridge. Abe joined the outer part of the circle and looked on. Declan’s long fingers were buckled over his recorder. He sucked in his cheeks until they nearly touched. Abe liked Pachelbel’s Canon – the eight notes that repeated for ever – but he felt apart from whatever was drawing the crowd. He kept his mouth closed and hummed along, ‘Declan Driscol still owes me a fiver; Declan Driscol still owes . . .’ He hadn’t seen Declan for months. He had left Iverdale Road one day and never come back. Declan had once spoken of ‘the path to improvisation’. Abe supposed he was now on it – whatever it was.

  Abe was in a strange mood. The house-warming period had come to an end. He couldn’t afford to give any more parties. He couldn’t afford to go out. He had overspent. For the first time since he was about eight years old he stopped thinking about sex in a spirit of curiosity – when and how it would happen. At home, he set fire to small bits of paper in ashtrays – pieces of till roll that had ended up in his pocket, receipts and tube tickets. Declan’s dusty Irish drifter looks, as he played his recorder by the Thames, had no effect on him. Abe felt as unresponsive as a piece of old toast.

  Needing to do something real, Abe gave in his notice to the health insurance company. His meeting with the boss was a waste of time – not worth psyching himself up for. Liam was genial and nodded to show he was listening. He didn’t try to persuade Abe to stay or insist he take gardening leave. He smiled when he opened the door to show Abe out and gave him a comradely cuff on the back. Abe wandered across to the lift, got out at the third floor and walked back to his office. That was it: over like a jab at the doctor’s. Four years ended in five minutes. Holly came across and hugged him and said that if he was going she would quit too. Then she went off to a meeting. Ben had already left for a presentation in the Midlands.

  Abe expected to feel elated at the prospect of freedom but instead he found himself living in a kind of border zone, which he wasn’t allowed to leave and where very little went on. He commuted to Reading from Monday to Friday as usual, but every day he felt as if he had made a bad choice of holiday – arriving in a grey place in dull weather. In less than a month he would be gone. Away from the pictures of tanned young men lying on daybeds in their boxer shorts and Grandma doing a more than competent star jump in a pair of bright pyjamas – those fit types who sexed up not only the client brochures but also the company documents, the interior walls of the building, the inside of the lift. He wanted to scrawl BOLLOCKS across them with an indelible pen. He wondered whether car insurance might not, in fact, be a cleaner sort of business. At least no one ever suggested that cars enjoyed going in for repair.

  The Saturday after Abe had resigned, Gloria asked herself over to Iverdale Road. She turned up in the afternoon. Abe went into the kitchen to make some tea and when he came back, holding two mugs, Gloria was sitting very upright, perched on the edge of his sumptuous vintage swivel chair. Abe had bought the chair in Hoxton. It was velvety, the colour of blackberries and covered in silvery diamond-shaped stitching. Gloria wasn’t taking advantage of the chair’s swivelling properties. ‘You’re in debt, aren’t you?’ she said. ‘Anyway.’

  Abe knew Gloria’s habit of asking a question as if she were a telephone waking him in the night, but he was still caught off guard. ‘I’ve got a loan from the bank. Don’t worry about it. I spoke to a woman and it’s cool.’ He handed her one of the mugs.

  ‘Thank you. What was her name?’

  ‘Whose name?’

  ‘The woman at the bank.’

  Abe walked across the room and sat down heavily on the sofa. ‘I don’t know. Gemma or something. Yes, I think it was Gemma,’ he said.

  Gloria always wanted to know everyone’s name. It came from teaching and dealing with the public. Without names you were shouting into the wind. Gloria worked at a beauty treatment centre and had certificates to prove her competence in laser hair removal, non-surgical face lifts, waxing, piercing. She also taught in local authority adult education classes. ‘Singing for Everyone’ it was called in the brochure. She had been a singer once – folk and jazz – and had done a few festivals. ‘Everyone’ was the category Abe fell into. He could sing along but not sing. If his mum and sister were in any sense artists, he was stuck with the colouring in.

  ‘She was nice to you, was she? Helpful?’ Gloria asked, with an edge to her voice.

  ‘Yes, really nice,’ he said.

  ‘Do you have credit cards, Abe?’

  ‘Only a couple. They’re not a problem.’

  Gloria suited the chair: tiny and symmetrical in the centre of it, her feet, in a pair of red leather boots, neatly lined up and barely touching the floor. Though slight, with a skin like thin ice, she had always been as strong as two parents combined. When he was a little boy Abe had focused on her blemishes. The freckle on her left cheekbone that was larger than the general peppering on her translucent skin, the bottom front teeth that slightly overlapped, the scar on the back of her head that she had acquired from falling backwards off a wall and which Abe had only been able to find by pulling different sections of her hair apart at the roots. But since he had stopped examining her so closely he had seen that she was, for a human being, remarkably harmonious. Only cats stared at you with such levelness.

  ‘You look sweet sitting there, Mum,’ he said. ‘I might give you that chair.’

  ‘Have you even looked for another job?’ she asked.

  ‘’Course I have. I’ve got all sorts of ideas.’

  ‘Anything real?’

  ‘Well, obviously nothing definite, because travelling up and down to Reading and working all day long I can’t go looking in a real way.’ He paused. ‘This is really tedious. Can we stop talking about it?’

  Gloria’s only mushiness had started in New Age bookshops. She browsed in several sections, including channelling, crystals and subtle energy. She collected magical and spiritual texts. They originated from various sources, Egyptian, Celtic, Native American. On balance, Gloria favoured the Egyptian. She set the words to chants and practised her singing on them – musical sun salutations – up and down the keys. She answered ads in esoteric magazines to gather more material: Harness the Power of Ba, Heart-we
ighing: are you ready for it?, Hen kai pan: beginners welcome (we’re all beginners!). The leaflets turned up in her house, slipped behind radiators or wedged in the windows as draught preventers. Abe thought the hobby was barmy but he understood that a person can’t be strong in every area of life. Something has to give.

  ‘How’s the chanting going?’ Abe asked.

  Gloria ignored him. ‘Why are you stopping work, Abe?’

  ‘No particular reason. I’ve been there long enough. Four years.’

  ‘You worry me.’

  ‘Don’t waste your time, Mum.’

  ‘Don’t waste yours.’ Gloria got up from the chair and started wandering around the room. Her boots were flat with soft soles and hardly made a sound as she walked across the boards. Abe saw her twice over, once in reality and once reflected in the huge, driftwood-framed mirror that covered one wall. The window frames were rotting; it was depressing to see an extra set of them. Certain aspects of the Iverdale Road house were starting to grate on Abe. His pieces of furniture, from interesting parts of London, deserved better than the tatty shell that contained them. It was like having a mouth full of expensive dentistry in a scarred, sunken face.

  Gloria didn’t glance at her reflection. For someone who worked part-time in the beauty trade she was surprisingly unconcerned about looks. Nor, at that moment, did she seem interested in Abe’s daybed or matt nickel floor lights – his last purchases before the money ran out. Abe had tidied up before she arrived. He had collected up the ashtrays, full of charred pieces of paper. There was nothing out of place.

  Gloria picked up one of the lemons that was lying in a black enamelled bowl on the table, rubbed it between her hands and sniffed it. ‘Abe, is there a cigarette?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes. I’ll get you one. Sit down, Mum,’ he said. He went out of the room and came back with a single cigarette and a lighter. He threw them over to her one at a time. She caught them and stood contemplating him.