Short Story: As They Lay Down

Short Story: As They Lay Down

She closed the curtains to kill the sunlight then returned to his bedside. She could cry, him being brought home like this. At such times she really, really did not like her husband.

"I was cold, so cold, Anne," he said. The little boy appeal for sympathy wasn't much more than a whisper.

"You were drunk," she said, "and you still are. You're lucky you're not sleeping it off in the police station. Why do you have to let that bloody man get you so absolutely totalled every time he comes?"

"Ben's my friend," unnaturally slow, the actor's voice; tired, slurring, hurting. "He's always been my friend." There was a pause, then, "How about you?"

She didn't feel like answering that one.

"I suppose he's gone back to the Big City, this friend of yours, having left you to fall asleep in some ditch and get picked up and brought home by the Law. Thank God you weren't trying to drive. I suppose your car's still there. How I hate all this. You call yourselves, well, artists! There's another word … my God, you're fifty two, William!" She called him William when she wasn't OK with him, like now. She stood up. "Anyway, I'm going shopping, remember? Oh, don't worry, I'll be back in time to cook your dinner."

"Wait a minute," he whispered, "look, it wasn't Ben's fault; he didn't stay long. A bunch of them in the pub. Old pals. Mike Drayton and those, you know? Quiz night?" He was waiting but she didn't ask. "We won again. But listen, Ben and me, we're partners. So we do have to talk, the two of us. That's what made us pretty OK, and that's what makes you the Lady of the bloody Manor, Anne. Oh, my God; my head!" The ordinary features on the balding head looked too dry, too tight, too pale; unshaven stubble pricking out hair by hair around the greying goatee.

She said, knowing her own cruelty, the cruelty that came from anger, "Oh do come on! You're just another B List Celeb, William. And the two of you - you're putting together scripts for East Street soap episodes. When you aren't - aren't like this, that is. Oh, and your old plays that mostly don't get played any more because they're rubbish, probably. Writer! Thank God you managed to get yourself all the acting, that's all I can say."

She turned away, slammed shut the door to guest bedroom one behind her. Going downstairs she told herself she had every right to be angry. But not with herself, not for the guilt. Why should she be the one to feel guilty? Excited, yes; guilty, no.

The actor dramatist William Shaftesbury closed his eyes against the pulsating pain and the late Winter sunlight. Through a latticework of thin, winter-bare branches he saw again the pre-dawn sky with its cold queen of a moon and her retinue of stars - and the concerned, good humoured faces of the two local policemen, bending over him, lifting him up, one to each of his arms. “We'll have to stop meeting you like this, sir,' one of them was saying, 'Folk'll be starting to talk.”

Anne Shaftesbury listened to the air-rush whisper of steel on steel, tried to relax, watching the countryside changing into manicured parkland, more slowly into the dulled nothingness of suburban development, finally into the sparkling glass, sky grey concrete and all the colours of the inner city. She focussed on her image in the carriage window, instinctively put up a hand to lift and pat her hair into shape. Not too bad; very good really; well, for nearly sixty. Sixty! She cut off the incipient panic with thoughts of her long time lover, still eager for that which still she was. Would he remember her birthday? He usually did, even if only through a surreptitious telephone call or with a last minute bunch of flowers if Willy was away. She had to admit her husband had always remembered wherever he might have been at the time. Oh Willie! He really hadn't looked good this morning, a tattered old nondescript standing at the door propped up between those two large uniforms. Perhaps she should have stayed at home with him today? Perhaps, this one time, she should have ignored the lure of Thomas' studiedly casual invitation; 'If you happen to be in Town on Tuesday give me a call, Anne; why don't we have some lunch?' She smiled. The star-bound government officer still spoke like the respectful young tenant who would never dream, when Willie was away working, of leaving his room, making his way through the darkened big house, tapping on her bedroom door; who had never then moved on to slip, so late at night and with so much urgent need, into the dark anonymity of his twenty years older landlady's guest-room bed. She swallowed, shifted her hips. 'Lunch'! That was a good word for it. You shouldn't still be having these feelings, she told herself, but the inner voice stuck there, high up in her throat. She swallowed again as her journey jerked and rattled to its close.

Out in the station concourse she switched on her mobile, glanced around, called her ex-lodger at his Government Office. Well, to hell with Willie.

"I'm no alcoholic." William opened his eyes, realising he'd spoken out aloud. "Oh, Christ." He was feeling truly awful, Food poisoning? Something he'd eaten in the pub? Anne would laugh at him for that but there'd be no joy in the laughter, only scorn. Where was she when he needed her? Bloody shopping, their bank account going into fast reverse! He groaned, turning himself over against the protest of his head, taking extra care with the damaged right knee. He pulled the duvet up around his ears to shut out the muted sounds of the garden and the village beyond, re-closed his eyes against all things in here dimly seen.

Yes, there they all were, his people; the miscellany of those who had come to their lives through his own life. The two newest arrivals were here in the foreground talking to each other, of course not realising they were under observation. He strained to hear them, to observe their every facet of behaviour. He should get out of bed, switch on his PC, write down their words and his own words. He wanted to make the words sing the line, skip-dance down the page. And soon enough he could feel the stubbled smile that had visited his face whilst listening to his lovers and hearing their words seeing all his own words.

And so to sleep, perchance to dream …

She liked this just as much as what had gone before; she liked the feel of herself against his newly spent body, herself unspent and now totally if temporarily in command. She brushed her fingers down the side of his face and on down his neck, as yet so little lined, then moved her right breast into the softest of contacts with his left one. His eyes opened. Without expression he lifted his wrist to ascertain the time. She had known he would.

"Christ, I've got to go," he said, as she'd known he would.

"No late lunch for us today, Thomas?"

"I told you. I have this meeting. The Minister …"

"Yes, Prime Minister," she said, giggling. "Far be it from little old me to interrupt any Affairs of State."

"It's not like that. You know it's not." He wasn't amused. Thomas Green didn't do amused. With still youthful fluidity he moved away from her, got off the bed, began to dress.

"Yes," she murmured, "I know it isn't." But it was.

He closed the bathroom door behind him but still she could hear the sounds of his toiletry merging into the muted rush and bustle of the city, the rattle of a trolley being pushed past the room. 'A base for my shopping forays,' she'd explained to reception, but lightly, like some of the other ladies up for the day from Hicksville. The receptionist could not have cared any more or any less, whatever the given reason. She drew herself up from beneath the covers, placed her elbow on the pillows to support her head with her hand, awaiting his return Venus reclining.

Immaculate once more, Under Secretary to the Minister without Portfolio Thomas Green sat himself down on the edge of the bed, searched for and found her free hand. "Anne, we have to talk," he said, frowning. "Trouble is, there's not much time."

"Oh yes, dear?" So, finally, here it came, just as she'd known one day it must.

"Look, we have to call time, don't you think? On us?" He looked at her, employing his most earnest of expressions, reached out with his other hand to brush away a stray lock of her hair.

She blinked, tried to misunderstand, turn it into a joke; "You mean, until you next …"

"No Willy's supposed to be retired now. He's home with you, Anne. It was really good when he was away all the time and I had my room at your place, working at the Town Hall. But now?"

"But now you're no longer our or anyone else's tenant and you've climbed most of the way up to the mountain top and you can't afford any 'trouble' at this stage, is that it?" She withdrew her hand, pulled up the duvet to cover herself. "Or perhaps you've found something more to your taste, perhaps something a bit nearer your own age, Thomas?"

"Anne, please." He got to his feet, carefully buttoning his pinstriped jacket. "You know how much you mean to me. But equally we both also know your husband is terribly well connected and that, well, there'll be no divorce … You understand me, I know you do."

"Oh yes, I understand you," she sat up, then, very straight, for he was not looking at her body. "You're worried about lovely Willy. Let me tell you, he has about as much interest in me - all the years he's been running hither and yon, probably shagging everything he can get his hands on while I've been the little woman at home bringing up the girls and burying his son; burying his son when he couldn't even get home for the funeral!" She wanted to cry and, oh, how she hated herself for the self-pity in that.

"I'm sorry, Anne. Like everyone else I know all about it, him being away and out of reach in one of his godforsaken outposts when - when your little boy died. I know how you felt when the media were telling everybody how sad that was but how, well all those adventures for some kind of a genius."

"Genius!"

"Not that I agree with them. I'm sorry." He turned away, walked to the door, opened it, looked back at her. "Anyway, I'm sure we'll be seeing each other."

"Yes, of course," she whispered. "Go on, then. Please? Just don’t say it's been good, that's all."

"Bye, Anne." Still not looking at her he waved his hand once then closed the door behind him.

She glimpsed herself in the mirror on the wall opposite the foot of the bed, lay back down, drew the covers up over her head and let go of the tears. He hadn't even tried to say it, hadn't tried to say that it had been good. For him this long time screwing of his ancient landlady - ex-ancient landlady - in the extended absences of her famous husband had simply been some necessary indiscretion; some very natural if long-time diversion.

Willie tried to sit up. The clock said two o clock; filtered light told him it had to be two in the afternoon. The number one guest room, was it? Yes. Well, all right. She must have exiled him again into the very best bed. This private joke of their's was getting to be as familiar a territory as their proper, second best, marital bed; the bed that had once been her mother's; the one in which she had taught him, (told him,) exactly how he had to love his much more experienced lover. The second best bed in which they'd gone on to squirm and wriggle and hump and laugh and vocalise their way through all the early married years. The one in which his seed had sought and three times had found her own. 'How nice to have you home, Mister Willy,' she would say and then he could tell everything was all right with them. 'Would you like to join me in our second best bed?' she might go on to say. With Anne, joking always equalled loving, invariably led on to the wonder of that matching of hands and bodies and minds and everything. Always he had loved her, that he knew. He had to have a drink of water. His mouth… the bathroom seemed such a very long way away.

By the time she'd slept a little and showered, got herself dressed and made up, tidied the room and paid her dues it was two o’clock and too late for a proper lunch. But she was hungry and sad and angry. Frightened, too; frightened by the passage of time and the passage of her life. And tired because she'd hardly slept last night with Willie still out, and with the promise of this - assignation.

Anyway she'd get a quick something at the Café Bleu then make her way home, see what she could do for him, her writer, support part actor or whatever. He who, aged eighteen all those years ago when a girl's (woman's) missed period almost always equalled wedding bells, had managed to impregnate his eight years older first time lover. Accidentally on purpose on her part because she might really have been in love with him. No, she told herself, had been in love with him, and with his youth, and definitely with the concept of getting married.

She bought herself a magazine, found a nice bright corner in the still busy café and ordered a quiche and a pot of coffee. Halfway through her second cup and well into a piece intriguingly headlined, 'Big X After The Big M', she became conscious of someone standing over her. She looked up, irritated, at a smiling Ben Thompson. He said, "Good afternoon, Anne. Mind if I join you?"

"Help yourself," she said, unsmiling.

He pulled out a chair, sat down. "Not a bad old day for April."

"No."

He signalled the waitress. "How was my partner in crime this morning?"

"How on earth do you think he was?" she said.

"Oh dear not very good then?"

"No, Ben, not very good."

"I'm sorry." He looked up at the young waitress, who had recognised him, naturally. "Cappuccino, please? And for you, Anne?"

"No thanks."

"Thank you." In the silence he drummed the tips of the fingers of his right hand on the glass table top, then; "I take it you know he's working on something new?"

"Is he?" she said, "Oh, I'm sorry. I thought he'd come home to retire."

"It's really good, this one. Brilliant in fact, although he says it himself whose original idea it was."

For the first time it occurred to her that this meeting had not been by accident. She said, "Come on, Ben, what's happening here? You don't just want to talk theatre and stuff with me. Why are you here?"

He sighed, and now the smile had gone. "There's no easy way to say this." He stopped, nodded his thanks to the girl delivering his mug of coffee. "I have to be a little concerned about - well, about the two of you, Anne. Because you are my friends. Both of you."

"What?"

"Look, I hate this - how was everything at the Holiday Inn?"

She drained her cup, picked up her handbag, glanced towards the door.

"How was Tom Green?"

Desperately she looked around for the waitress, said, "What?" again.

"Relax, dear lady. I'm here to help, OK?"

"How did you - do you know?"

"Paparazzi. You know, like the little man over there? The one who's job in life it is to pick up on events at hotels? He followed you here, called the newspaper to ask about how much for the story? 'Top Civil Servant In Sex Romp With Mrs Willy,' that sort of thing, you know?"

She followed his eyes. A nondescript man was looking at her over the brim of his cup. The man lowered the cup, grinned and nodded, moved his hand from side to side, palm out. Something in her chest clenched into a spasm.

"Luckily it seems this call was his first shot at making money out of it so there's no-one else in the bidding. Not yet. The Ed's an old chum of mine, of Willy's, too. But this - Anne, I'm afraid it's going to cost."

"Please?" she whispered, "Please, Ben, will you deal with it for me?" Suddenly the sweet smells of this place and the babble of talk and the over-animated faces and Ben's face, too, all of it was making her ill. "Whatever it costs me, OK?"

He nodded, spooning his cappuccino.

"Look, I want to take a walk. Over in the park. Can I see you when - after - by the lake?"

"Of course," he said. He reached over to touch her hand. Involuntarily she recoiled. He smiled. "Don't alarm yourself, Anne. It's going to be all right."

Somehow he'd made it to the loo before his stomach finally decided to part with its content. It came up in waves, acid bile stinging the soft membranes inside his throat and his nose. When he thought it might finally be over he got up off his knees, exclaiming against the lash of pain from the one he'd damaged. He put his mouth to the cold tap, swilled water around and around, expelled it down the waste pipe. His head and the inside of his chest were banging away in some kind of uncomfortable disharmony. It was so hot in here. He wiped his face, threw the towel into the laundry basket, hobbled oh so slowly to the top of the stairs. Tea. A cup of hot tea and a biscuit. And then? Switch on the computer to process those words? But his head, good Jesus Christ, his head. He felt his knee giving, his foot slipping, hand ripping away from the banister under the energy of the unchecked fall. His shoulder hit something. He was tumbling, violently out of control, tumbling and hitting things and then it was dark and without any more sensation and William Shaftesbury was back amongst his people.

Grey-bellied cloud hurried low across the trees. Now there was no sun it was cold. She shivered, turned up the collar of her coat. Ben presented her with the bread roll he'd brought over from the café. She fed it a bit at a time to the pretty little grey and yellow fluff-balls and the adult ducks, bobbing and scurrying like nicely painted clockwork toys across the choppy surface of the water. She let him talk, let him explain how much it had cost her - had cost them, her and William. She didn't worry about the money. So much had come into their bank account and was still piling into it, mostly from his Hollywood years. But Willie would notice. Even now the quite famous Willie could not rid himself of his old penny counting. Oh yes, he'd notice all right.

"You can make out the cheque to one of my overseas accounts," Ben said, as if reading her mind. "It will be quite anonymous. You're buying yourself a pension annuity, OK?"

Miserably she looked up at the craggy features of her husband's friend. "I'm so sorry, Ben. I mean, about putting you through all this. Anyway it's finished, as it happens. Thomas finished it today. Before - " They were never far away, the tears. "But I feel so, so shabby."

"Well you could say feeling shabby, that's traditional," he said. "Look, there are no perfect people. We all know that, even if most of us don't ever want to acknowledge it." They strolled on along the lakeside pathway. "That's what we like about fiction, Anne. In fiction we're allowed inside a place where uncomplicated is good and visible and safe and where perfection is allowed - indeed, encouraged - where people seldom take a hard crap or do any of the other very inelegant things, you know?"

"Ben Thompson!"

"It's true. Fiction is for heroes and for the Gods we all know we are not but would like to be. And nobody does fiction better than your old fellow." He looked down at her. "Because in his stuff there are no absolutes other than the writing itself. All the shades of grey. I'm telling you, Anne, some of the stuff he does, it's going to live on and on."

"You think so, Ben?"

"Your old man can take us right out to the stars, my dear Anne Shaftesbury." He kicked at a paper cup, print-faded and crumpled. "And inside, as well, into the hearts of all kinds of people. Including oneself, whatever one is. That's my view, anyway, and so here endeth the first lesson."

She stopped, shivered again, looked up into his face. "Do you think - in all fairness - do you think I ought to leave him, Ben?" But she knew they both knew she was looking for the negative. She threw the last of the bread to a bobble of ducklings. A big, multicoloured drake rushed in, scattering all before him.

"No," Ben said. "I think you should own up to loving him just as much as he loves you."

"But, Ben, he's had plenty of lovers if that's what you want to call them, hasn't he? You can be honest with me. God knows, I'm in no position …"

"'Love's spark comes from the nature of our God the tending of its fire to careless Man', right? Isn't that one of the things he wrote? Sometimes we're not very good with our part, are we? Yes, of course he's had lovers. As I said there can be no perfection in what we are. Only, if we are born very lucky, (whatever that is,) in what we do." He stopped, turned to her, catching hold of both of her hands and grinning his grin. "Take me, for instance. Or not. You know, I could fancy you myself." He laughed softly. "Come on now, cheer up dear heart; I reckon we both need to make tracks."

"Oh, Ben," she said. A gaggle of ducks, or whatever you called a group of them, flew low over the water, quacking comically. In a series of splashes and wing shakings the birds touched down but there was no more bread for them.

He could see through the glass in the front door that it was almost dark. Late afternoon then. He tried to move, aiming to reach the hall telephone. No use. Whenever he tried it was like fireworks exploding inside his head. Really remarkable. Had he broke his neck? How very, very stupid of him. But he was not that uncomfortable provided he did not move at all, not one little bit of him, here on the polish-perfumed, hard wood flooring of the hallway.

"Oh, Anne!" he muttered, "Anne, Anne."

Seconds or minutes or hours … a key turned in the door lock. He was forced to shut his eyes against the sudden force of electric light. He heard the small, agonised gasp, the high heels quick-clacking towards him. He could smell her perfume. "Anne?" his voice was no more than a murmur.

"Willy? Oh my God, Willy, what’s happened to you? Don't move now, I'm going to call for an ambulance."

"Anne?"

"What?"

"Come back please? I want to talk."

"Oh, Willy," she said. He thought she might be crying.

After she'd made the call she took off her coat and, very gently as instructed she laid herself down next to her husband. She put her coat over them both and her arm across him to help keep him warm. "Please don't say anything now, Willy. There'll be bags of time later. Just try to relax. They told me not to move you," she said. "They're going to be here very soon."

"That's good," he muttered. "I think I've broken my neck."

"Yes," she said.

"Anne?"

"Yes, Willy?"

"It doesn't hurt if I stay still. Not afraid, only of hurting you. Done enough of that. Listen, if I go … I've taken care of Susan. And Judith. You'll have most." That almost inaudible sound might have been his attempt at a laugh. "Including the second best bed."

She lifted her head to kiss his cheek.

His voice was the merest whisper. "But my work; the manuscripts in the files. The PC. Destroy them. Burn it. Will you do that for me, wife?"

"Oh, Willie, there's no need - but why?"

"Pop culture," he muttered. "Could have done better. Could have been a contender." She knew how he was afraid to laugh now. " Doesn't owe us… Enough damage… To us all, our little boy, you know?"

"Shush… I shall do what you want if it ever comes to it but now there'll be no need," she said. "The medics will soon be here and then you'll be all right, Willy. They're going to make you all right and you'll soon be home again and back in our good old second best bed." She lifted her head to look at him and he turned his eyes to her and, yes, yes, she could see the laughter that was there in her husband.

William Shaftesbury heard the dying wail of the arriving ambulance. Anne got up to let them in. He didn't want to see them seeing him like this so he closed his eyes. For a while he could feel and he could hear them fussing and probing around but as soon as they began to move him came the explosion and he could only marvel at this light of purest white and at how easily he now seemed to be able to move.

He turned around and they were there, behind him as he knew they'd be, all his people; the inherently good ones always with something of ungodliness in them and the really bad ones with his or her inbuilt streak of something better the mean ones and the marvellous ones and those of all the things between, but few without grace. He nodded, smiling; "Now come along with me," he told them; "because now is the time for us to go."

Naturally she'd looked for him in the funeral congregation but Thomas, of course, had not turned up. Ben had done the eulogy. It had been a very fine one, all were agreed on that. "He was not just for our time but for all time", was one of the more elegant things she remembered him saying about her late husband. Whilst preparing the bonfire at the back of the garden she thought about what Ben had told her afterwards, when she'd told him she was going home to burn everything because that had been her promise to Willie. She thought about how Ben had started to argue but, seeing her expression, had stopped and said how very sorry he was to hear that, but that he understood. She thought about how he'd said it wouldn't matter much because most of the scripts would still be around somewhere and he, Ben, with some of their actor friends would in time be able get most of it together.

First the twigs and the branches and the petrol then the whoof as it all went up at her first match, thrown from a distance. She had to move around to dodge the gouts of swirling, wind driven smoke. It stung her eyes, excused her tears.

She threw the PC box on to the top of its blazing pyre. One by one, all his files followed. She saw his handwriting on their covers, on many of the thousands of type covered, heat curling pages, blackening then red and then gone. One by one; file after file, batch after batch of pages.

She could feel the heat of the fire on her face and the drying of her tears. Briefly she noticed one of the file titles; 'A Midsummer Night's Dream.' Yes, that's what it all had been. A midsummer night's dream as they'd lain down.