Gladys’s eighty-ninth birthday approached. He bought her a little silver box with an embossed cherub from a stall in the Portobello Road, a huge bunch of dahlias from Kensington Park Road and a card with yachts on it from a W H Smith branch.
On the day itself, Gladys Lee wore a new costume, green tweed with a green velvet collar. The pearls were in evidence, also the digital watch. When he called at three o’clock she was feeling well, she told him, and sat with a large-print book beside her on the chaise-longue.
‘We’ll have a small Cossack immediately, without fooling about with the preliminaries,’ she said. ‘And by the way, I observe that you are neglecting yourself these days, Hugh. Your suit is very crumpled. Your shoes need a polish.’
He had not noticed. ‘Sorry.’
‘There are some awful people about nowadays. You should not be one of them. You are not like that. Regular haircuts are as important as regular baths.’
As he was shuffling the dahlias into vases under her instruction and manoeuvring round the obstacles in her room, he realised that her furniture had been allowed to accumulate without thought. There was a way to arrange everything which would improve her life. The chaise-longue on which Gladys habitually sat could be moved to the other side of the long window, so that she would see more sunlight outside, as well as a wider and more lively prospect.
For a moment Billing stood with the flowers in his hand. He surveyed the dresser, the many shelves, the chairs, the side tables with their freight of vases and wood carvings, the dim Impressionist paintings on the walls. He saw how it could all remain the same, while allowing the old lady easier access to the door and – if the ornate electric fire were shifted slightly – freedom from the draught of which she complained. That night, instead of roving, he worked with his pens and coloured felt tips, replanning her room.
Gladys Lee regarded Billing over her spectacles. ‘I don’t particularly wish to move a thing. It is preferable that time should not pass in this room. I have become set in my ways. For that reason, if no other, we had better execute your plan. I might even approve the result, I suppose.’
Billing gently insisted on her retiring to her bedroom whilst he carried out the rearrangements. His master touch was to bring in secretly from outside a full-length mirror which he had bought on the cheap from a dealer. He screwed the mirror to the wall just inside her living room door. As she sat gazing out of the window, Gladys would need only to turn her head to see most of her treasures, either directly or by reflection. Smiling, he went to fetch her.
Gladys professed herself delighted with everything.
‘You are a wonderful and imaginative man, Hugh,’ she said, touching his arm fondly.
He repeated the words to himself that night. A moon sailed overhead, flooding the streets of London with its silver dust. Just to see it in its course inexplicably lifted his spirits. He roamed as far as the Tower of London, repeating, ‘Jimmy, you’re a wonderful and imaginative man.’ The words were like a song. Once, far in the distance, somewhere up the river, he heard the haunting bugle call, counterpointing his song.
Next evening, as he sat down facing her, Gladys said, ‘You’ve transformed my room, Hugh, dear. I have always preserved a view of life which I cannot express in words, I’m afraid. It concerns a connection between all things in our lives. You understand my meaning?’
‘My life has been very disconnected, I’m afraid.’
‘I believe that the spiritual is a metaphor for the physical and, equally, that the physical is a metaphor for the spiritual. You felt compelled to transform my room and I had to accept it – as I would have done from nobody else, Hugh – because of the way you have transformed my life. Can you stay a little longer than usual this evening?’
The question alarmed him. He glanced at her brass clock and said, ‘I’m a bit short of time.’
‘Not so short as I.’
They regarded each other.
‘There is no reason to look startled. I shall never impose on you. Even if I were tempted to do so, I should not, for fear you would disappear for ever – though in my case, for ever is not a particularly long time. What was I going to say?’
Sometimes her conversation ran off the tracks. On this occasion, with an effort, she brought it back.
‘Yes, you always say your life is very disconnected. I listen to what you tell me, Hugh, dear, though you may not think so. Your life is much more connected than you know and you would be more content if you perceived its connections. Perhaps it is my duty to reveal those connections to you.’
Billing blinked a bit. ‘I’m not complaining about my life, Gladys, dear.’
‘Ah, well, you should, I’m afraid. You should shape your life as you shape my room. It’s the only life you’ll get. You don’t believe in that nonsense about reincarnation, I hope, do you? In a civilised community like ours, life should be shaped, much as a work of art. One’s hope of remaining intact lies in preserving a continuity. An artistic continuity, since you and I are not religious.’
‘Life is continuous. Even my life.’ He was pleasantly mystified.
Her book slipped to the floor. She motioned him to leave it there, lest his movement distract her.
‘By continuity, I mean that we remain in touch with all the vitalising moments of various periods, dear, right back to childhood.’
He sighed. ‘My childhood was rather short of vitalising moments. I prefer not to think of it.’
She raised her feet slowly, bending forward in pain, and brought them slowly to rest on the damask of the chaise-longue.
‘I climbed out of bed in the night, do you know. There was a beautiful moon, but I heard a fearful crash somewhere. Fearful. It sounded nearby and it continued for a long while. Like a Zeppelin crashing.
‘I went out on the landing, yes, yes, the curtains really need to be dry-cleaned, and I think I went out into the street. Did I? I can’t recall now, it’s all so long ago, but there she was. She was smiling. It’s no good arguing, I said. I saw her so clearly …’
Gladys lapsed into abstraction, but after a few seconds resumed.
‘There was nobody about at all. Just the moon. I wondered that everyone wasn’t out in the street, just as in Stockholm, because it was such a noise. I don’t mean Stockholm, I mean Madrid. What did I say Stockholm for? One of the big airliners from Heathrow had crashed on Shepherd’s Bush. I could hear it – appalling.
‘It caught fire and kept on and on ploughing through row after row of houses, burning like a torch. You could watch all the people jumping clear and skyscrapers falling. I’ve never seen anything like it before. I rang your phone number and eventually a very grumpy man answered, but he said you weren’t in. He said it was four in the morning and I should go back to bed, although it was as light as day. It was a wonder the plane didn’t strike this house. They come over so low, you know. Perhaps they are German. Where are they all going?’
‘I hope you weren’t frightened, Gladys. It was just something you imagined.’ He regarded her anxiously, picturing her frail figure alone in the moonlit street, trying to place in the sky the rending noises she heard in her head. Possibly the crashing airliner was a herald of one of her ‘attacks’ of which she had once guardedly spoken. When the cells of the brain stem collapsed from lack of oxygen, perhaps they both sounded like, and actually were, an air disaster, exemplifying what she had said about the spiritual and physical being metaphors for one another.