passes. It’s natural.’
‘Natural?’ the girl said. ‘There was nothing natural about that fucker. If I hear any more about my bastard dad I’ll see you outside and sort you out.’
The trade gasped, right across the hall. The manager was moving in, but anyone could see he didn’t fancy his chances. Al seemed quite cool. She started chatting, saying anything and nothing – now, after all, would have been a good time for a breakthrough ditty from Margaret Rose. It was the woman’s two friends who calmed her; they waved away the vague boy with the mike, dabbed at her cheeks with a screwed-up tissue, and persuaded her back into her seat, where she muttered and fumed.
Now Alison’s attention crossed the hall, rested on another woman, not young, who had a husband with her: a heavy man, ill at ease. ‘Yes, this lady. You have a child in spirit world.’
The woman said politely, no, no children. She said it as if she had said it many times before; as if she were standing at a turnstile, buying admission tickets and refusing the half-price.
‘I can see there are none earthside, but I’m talking about the little boy you lost. Well, I say little boy. Of course, he’s a man now. He’s telling me we have to go back to, back a good few years, we’re talking here thirty years and more. And it was hard for you, I know, because you were very young, darling, and you cried and cried, didn’t you? Yes, of course you did.’
In these situations, Al kept her nerve; she’d had practice. Even the people at the other side of the hall, craning for a view, knew something was up and fell quiet. The seconds stretched out. In time, the woman’s mouth moved.
‘On the mike, darling. Talk to the mike. Speak up, speak out, don’t be afraid. There isn’t anybody here who isn’t sharing your pain.’
Am I? Colette asked herself. I’m not sure I am.
‘It was a miscarriage,’ the woman said. ‘I never, I never saw. It wasn’t, they didn’t, and so I didn’t – ’
‘Didn’t know it was a little boy. But,’ Al said softly, ‘you know now.’ She turned her head to encompass the hall: ‘You see, we have to recognise that it wasn’t a very compassionate world back then. Times have changed, and for that we can all be thankful. I’m sure those nurses and doctors were doing their best, and they didn’t mean to hurt you, but the fact is, you weren’t given a chance to grieve.’
The woman hunched forward. Tears sprang out of her eyes. The heavy husband moved forward, as if to catch them. The hall was rapt.
‘What I want you to know is this.’ Al’s voice was calm, unhurried, without the touch of tenderness that would overwhelm the woman entirely; dignified and precise, she might have been querying a grocery bill. ‘That little boy of yours is a fine young man now. He knows you never held him. He knows that’s not your fault. He knows how your heart aches. He knows how you’ve thought of him,’ Al dropped her voice, ‘always, always, without missing a day. He’s telling me this, from spirit. He understands what happened. He’s opening his arms to you, and he’s holding you now.’
Another woman, in the row behind, began to sob. Al had to be careful, at this point, to minimise the risk of mass hysteria. Women, Colette thought: as if she weren’t one. But Alison knew just how far she could take it. She was on form tonight; experience tells. ‘And he doesn’t forget your husband,’ she told the woman. ‘He says hello to his dad.’ It’s the right note, braced, unsentimental: ‘Hello, Dad.’ The trade sighed, a low mass sigh. ‘And the point is, and he wants you to know this, that though you’ve never been there to look after him, and though of course there’s no substitute for a mother’s love, your little boy has been cared for and cherished, because you’ve got people in spirit who’ve always been there for him – your own grandma? And there’s another lady, very dear to your family, who passed the year you were married.’ She hesitated. ‘Bear with me, I’m trying for her name. I get the colour of a jewel. I get a taste of sherry. Sherry, that’s not a jewel, is it? Oh, I know, it’s a glass of port. Ruby. Does that name mean anything to you?’
The woman nodded, again and again and again: as if she could never nod enough. Her husband whispered to her, ‘Ruby, you know – Eddie’s first wife?’ The mike picked it up. ‘I know, I know,’ she muttered. She gripped his hand. Her fluttering breath registered. You could almost hear her heart.
‘She’s got a parcel for you,’ Al said. ‘No, wait, she’s got two.’
‘She gave us two wedding presents. An electric blanket and some sheets.’
‘Well,’ Al said, ‘if Ruby kept you so warm and cosy, I think you could trust her with your baby.’ She threw it out to the audience. ‘What do you say?’
They began to clap: sporadically, then with gathering force. Weeping broke out again. Al lifted her arm. Obedient to a strange gravity, the lucky opals rose and fell. She’d saved her best effect till last. ‘And he wants you to know, this little boy of yours who’s a fine young man now, that in spirit he goes by the name you chose for him, the name you had planned to give him…if it, if he, if he was a boy. Which was,’ she pauses, ‘correct me if I’m wrong, which was Alistair.’
‘Was it?’ said the heavy husband: he was still on the mike, though he didn’t know it. The woman nodded. ‘Would you like to answer me?’ Al asked pleasantly.
The man cleared his throat, then spoke straight into the mike. ‘Alistair. She says that’s right. That was her choice. Yes.’
Unseeing, he handed the mike to his neighbour. The woman got to her feet, and the heavy man led her away, as if she were an invalid, her handkerchief held over her mouth. They exited, to a fresh storm of applause.
‘Steroid rage, I expect,’ Al said. ‘Did you see those muscles of hers?’ She was sitting up in her hotel bed, dabbing cream on her face. ‘Look, Col, as you quite well know, everything that can go wrong for me out there, has gone wrong at sometime. I can cope. I can weather it. I don’t want you getting stressed.’
‘I’m not stressed. I just think it’s a landmark. The first time anybody’s threatened to beat you up.’
‘The first time while you’ve been with me, maybe. That’s why I gave up working in London.’ Al sat back against the pillows, her eyes closed; she pushed the hair back from her forehead, and Colette saw the jagged scar at her hairline, dead white against ivory. ‘Who needs it? A fight every night. And the trade pawing you when you try to leave, so you miss the last train home. I like to get home. But you know that, Col.’
She doesn’t like night driving, either; so when they’re outside the ring of the M25, there’s nothing for it except to put up somewhere, the two of them in a twin room. A bed and breakfast is no good because Al can’t last through till breakfast, so for preference they need a hotel that will do food through the night. Sometimes they take pre-packed sandwiches, but it’s joyless for Al, sitting up in bed at 4 a.m., sliding a finger into the plastic triangle to fish out the damp bread. There’s a lot of sadness in hotel rooms, soaked up by the soft furnishings: a lot of loneliness and guilt and regret. A lot of ghosts too: whiskery chambermaids stumping down the corridors on their bad legs, tippling night porters who’ve collapsed on the job, guests who’ve drowned in the bath or suffered a stroke in their beds. When they check into a room Alison stands on the threshold and sniffs the atmosphere, inhales it: and her eyes travel dubiously around. More than once, Colette has shot down to reception to ask for a different room. ‘What’s the problem?’ the receptionists will say (sometimes adding ‘madam’) and Colette,
