Laura was short, compact, and olive brown. Her eyes were liquid brown and huge, her mouth was full – largely with gleaming teeth. Her hair was that particular coppery brown reserved for the Mediterranean. Laura projected a sense of humour, and a slight cast to one eye added a sexy nonconformism. She had the personality to fill a room and overwhelmed Dryden in the time it took to reorder the tortellini. In many ways she was his opposite: sensual, emotional, and a natural actor. She sprang from a family which had never failed to support her, which had never withheld its love, and she placed complete trust in those she loved as a result. Within a month Dryden had slipped effortlessly into this group assuming, unawares, a terrible responsibility.
Her father, a miniature Italian bandit perpetually dressed in a white cook’s apron, specialized in home-made pasta, fresh figs, and fruity sparkling wine for a small, but plump, group of expatriates. Laura never weighed more than seven stone, harbouring a morbid fear of ending up like the tribe of aunts which ate at the café on Sundays: black widows who brushed both sides of the corridor as they struggled out after a light meal that had taken two hours to eat. Her four younger brothers were slim and fit and Laura’s teenage life as a surrogate mother, while her own worked in the café, had left her little room for indulgence. She concentrated, instead, on the smell and texture of food. She would sit and wait for others to start a meal, taking in the flavours by scent. She breathed food and broke it, like good bread, to enjoy the physical sensations of eating. She filled their flat with fragrances of food, crushing coffee beans and pounding peppercorns, getting Dryden to make a larder below the stairs with a mesh window to let the aromas of cheeses, vegetables and herbs permeate their home.
So each day he brought fresh food. He poured two glasses of wine, always the light Frascati she loved, a little ceremony of hope. He brought music too and set the timer on the CD player to bring the sound on for a few hours each day – at dusk, and in mid-morning when he knew that if Laura was listening she would want the company of Motown and Verdi.
He always made himself look once at Laura’s face. A deathmask: quite unlike the real thing, but more compelling than a favourite snapshot. He always thought she looked frosted: dusted perhaps with a light covering of caster sugar, a perfect face set on the surface of a wedding cake.
Then he turned the lights down and sat looking out into the gardens. Tonight the frost was already white on the trees. The effects of the alcohol were fading fast. It was late but the sounds of the hospital continued: a trolley squeaked past in the corridor, somewhere teacups clinked, and a nurse’s sensible shoes tapped past on the lino outside the door. In the room above Roy Barnett was sleeping off his beer while his heart tip-tapped to an irregular beat.
Dryden’s routine started with reading out the cards, the letters, or sometimes just a newspaper. The doctors said from the start that he should talk to Laura. At first he had taken her hand and constructed animated one-way conversations. He’d almost believed them himself in those first weeks, desperately misunderstanding every facial tick as a subtle appeal to understanding. But with time his speeches had become soliloquies, delivered with no real conviction that they were ever heard.
But he never lied. He told her often that he had not deserted her that night. That he had been powerless to help. But he feared she couldn’t hear, and if she couldn’t hear then she must still believe he had put his life before hers. That was the thought which brought him back each night to talk to her. The first sentence was always awkward: like the opening line of a bad play delivered to a half-empty theatre. Stagy, inappropriate, and inevitably feeble. Before delivering it he allowed himself a single cigarette – the only one of the day. Greek, acrid, and cinder hot. He projected the smoke out now into the still air of the room for Laura to smell.
‘And I thought it was going to be a Tesco trolley – shows how wrong I can be.’
He glanced at the bed. The coppery hair was lifeless and artificial. Laura’s breathing whistled slightly like a cat’s.
‘A great story – at last. They’d even be interested in this one on the News. The body of a man found dumped in the boot of a car and then run into the river. Neck broken – snapped – his head nearly severed. The river freezes and wraps him in an ice cube. There’s only one set of tyre marks leading to the spot. The ice stops the river traffic so it could have been there for weeks – anyway there’s virtually none in winter – but kids spotted it skating.’
Dryden stubbed the cigarette, disliking the habit as he did at the end of every smoke.