Beyond Black: A Novel by Hilary Mantel Read Free Book Online Page B

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 can 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 some time. 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.”
    But 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 prepacked sandwiches, but it’s joy-less 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, stiff with hostility and fright, will say, “Why do you