Cold Light

Fourteen

Graham Milllington had met his wife in the Ladies’ lavatory of Creek Road Primary School, a little after eleven in the morning and caught short in the middle of a talk to forty-seven ten-year-olds. Millington, not his wife.

One thing he hated above all others, worse than charging into the ruck of a Friday night bar-room fight with glass flying, barging into the Trent End on a Saturday afternoon to collar the smart-arse bastard who’s just felled the visiting goalie with a sharpened fifty-pence piece to the head, was standing in front of a class of kids in his best suit and behavior, lecturing them on the dangers of solvent abuse and underage drinking. Knowing sneers on their scrubbed little faces.

And this particular morning, fielding the usual sporadic questions about airplane glue and which brands set to work fastest, he was overcome by a sharp sudden pain deep behind his scrotum, an urgent message that he needed to pee.

“I wonder …” he stammered to the deputy headteacher, sitting at the corner table, filling out what suspiciously resembled a job application. “Could you …?”

The nature of Millington’s discomfort was clear for all to see.

“First right down the corridor, second left.”

Millington remembered it wrong, first right, first left instead. He was just easing himself through his fly, looking wildly for the appropriate stall, when, with a swift whoosh of water, Madeleine Johnstone stepped out from the cubicle in her bottle-green Laura Ashley dress, pale green tights, sensible shoes.

“Sorry, I …”

“Here,” Madeleine said, pushing open the cubicle door, “you’d better go in here.” And then, as he dived past her, slamming the door shut and fumbling the bolt across, “I’ll keep watch outside.”

Something wrong, she thought, out there in the corridor surrounded by all that project work on Third World hunger, a man of his age with problems of the prostate.

He had met her next in the Victoria Centre, Madeleine backing out of the Early Learning Centre, weighed down with plastic bags of presents for her sister with the twins, Millington whistling his way across to Thorntons, mind set on a quarter-pound of peppermint creams, maybe the odd Viennese Whirl.

“Sorry!” as he cannoned into her and a slew of carefully designed and educationally approved packages spilled around his feet.

He knew that she had recognized him by the way her eyes flickered downwards in the direction of his trousers, checking that he wasn’t flashing at her in artificially reproduced daylight.

Millington picked up a package of brightly colored balls (eighteen months to three years) and set it in her hand. She suggested tea and led him to the coffee bar in Next, where he perched uncomfortably on a black leather stool and ate a tea cake that tasted oddly of lemon.

“It’s because they use the same board,” Madeleine explained, “for making the salad and buttering those.”

The girl who served them was black and disdainful and her dark hair was curled like spun glass.

“She lovely, isn’t she?” Madeleine said, following Millington’s hopeless gaze.

Even Millington, perhaps not the most sensitive of men, understood this meant what about me? Look at me.

Madeleine was broad at the shoulders, narrow to the hips, good strong calves that suggested lots of schoolgirl hockey or netball or both. She had brown hair a few shades short of chestnut, a healthy down on her upper lip, eyes that were disconcertingly blue. A complexion like that, Millington wagered a week’s wages she came from somewhere south, Sussex or Kent or farther southwest, soft winds and cream.

Some detective, it had taken him till now to check the third finger of her left hand.

“They’re not for me, if that’s what you’re thinking.” Madeleine glanced at the bags by her feet “My sister. Twins. It runs in the family.”

Something inside Millington shuddered.

“It’s considered old-fashioned, nowadays, isn’t it?” Madeleine said. “For men to wear wedding rings.”

They hadn’t been able to have children. Not so far. Not for want of trying. Whatever was in the family, the genes, the almost careless fecundity of her several sisters, it wasn’t there for them. They had had therapy, tests, everything short of acupuncture, the thought of which had reduced Millington’s eyes to tears. “Graham, they don’t put the needle there.” It hadn’t mattered; acupuncture was out.

Madeleine applied for promotion and was rewarded; she embarked upon a never-ending series of self-improvement classes, everything from Chinese cuisine through European languages to British Visionary art and beyond. On the kitchen wall she kept a chart, color-coded, on which she annotated the ages and birthdays of her nieces and nephews so that none would go uncelebrated, unremarked.

Christmas, in her parents’ vast house in Taunton, had been a maelstrom of unrestrained young middle-class voices, each intent on clamoring its instant needs above the rest. Madeleine and her sisters had sat around the oak table that had once graced the refectory of a nearby abbey and laughed about old photographs, old jokes. And all around them, in and out and up and down, the children ran and ran, with only the occasional, “Oh, Jeremy!” “Oh, Tabetha! Now see what you’ve done!” to acknowledge they were there at all.

Millington had listened to her father’s ideas on law and order and the breakdown of family, the lack of respect for authority and the failure of religion, the seemingly equivalent evils of the single-parent family and the admission of women priests into the Church. Even grace on Christmas Day had been accompanied by a sideswipe at leniency towards young offenders, before sinking the knife deep inside the bird.

“Are you all right?” Madeleine asked from time to time, passing him by chance.

“Me? Yes, of course. Fine.”

And then she had been off again, attention tugged away by some tousled three-year-old pulling at her sleeve. “Oh, yes, Miranda, that’s lovely! Let’s go and show it to Granny, shall we?”

He had been seeking refuge in the bathroom when he had heard the news, trimming the ends of his moustache for want of something better to do. The small Roberts portable, dusted with talcum powder on the shelf, had been left on low. Hearing the city’s name, he had turned the volume up. A young woman who had gone missing on Christmas Eve; the parents’ concern; police investigations proceeding.

Millington had used the drawing-room phone. “Graham, sir. Wondering if I could be any use.”

“How soon can you get here?” Resnick had said. Millington grinning as he weaved his way between small children, opening doors, looking for his wife so he could tell her sorry, but there was no alternative, he was leaving.