by Helen Kitson
‘More cake?’
‘Not right now, thanks. It is lovely. I’ve been thinking, we haven’t really discussed terms. I mean, is it okay for me to use the kitchen?’
‘You’re welcome to eat with me if you want to.’
I couldn’t, after all, bear the thought of him eating alone in his room. I’d lay the table properly – the good tablecloth, the silver cutlery…
Candles? Roses?
He gave a timid laugh, his eyes nervous. ‘It’s kind of weird, this, isn’t it? I never really thought what it would be like. We barely know each other, do we?’
Yes, it was odd. We were nothing to each other, but here we were, living together; not quite friends, not quite anything.
‘Do you need to let anyone know where you are?’ I asked. ‘You should let them know you’re safe.’
‘I made the necessary phone calls while you were out. It’s fine.’ A soft, kind smile. ‘You’ve been so good. I hope you don’t feel I’m taking advantage of you. I mean, foisting myself on you like this. I’m sure you were just being polite.’
At this point Pushkin made an appearance, slinking out from underneath a flowery armchair. She’d made herself scarce since Simon’s arrival. Not even her favourite pouch of food had coaxed her from her hiding place. She stared at the intruder, her body hunched up, nose sniffing the air.
‘She’s sizing me up,’ he said. He made no move to pet her, which pleased me. Cats must make up their minds about people in their own time. And for my part I refused to make any “I think she likes you” type comments. Maybe she would, maybe she wouldn’t.
Maybe I would, maybe I wouldn’t.
Two days later I began to realise the extent to which Simon had made himself at home. He went out, ostensibly to the station to check on the trains, and came back with a portable typewriter he’d bought on impulse from a junk shop.
Morevale was a large, sprawling village with a population of four thousand or so, many of whom lived on the housing estates that had been built in the sixties, although many more lived in the remoter areas on the other side of Minster Hill, which dominated the landscape for miles around. These days, most people travelled by car to do their shopping in Shrewsbury, but we did have a relatively busy main street that lacked only a shop selling Barbour jackets to make it more or less identical to any other rural high street.
The junk shop where Simon found the typewriter had been there since I was a child, though it had expanded over the years and was something of a honeypot for anyone searching for quirky objects of the type so beloved of Bargain Hunt participants. Madeleine had loved it; she’d enjoyed buying things that horrified her parents: a moth-eaten stuffed crow, a death mask, a creepy doll in the form of a grinning clown with demonic eyes. They were missing from her room after she died, so I assumed her parents had binned them.
‘I hope you didn’t pay much for that,’ I said to Simon, examining the typewriter he’d bought. I’d owned a similar one when I was in my early teens. It wasn’t antique or even a particularly good model.
‘I’ve always wanted one of these,’ he said. ‘When I saw it, I couldn’t resist. I’ve got a laptop, but you can’t pretend to be Ernest Hemingway when you’re tapping on a computer keyboard – you need good, solid keys that make a noise when they hit the paper.’
The macho writer literally forcing words on to the page, making his mark. I amused myself with an image of Simon crouching over his typewriter, pretending to be a genius. Maybe he’d pour himself a glass of whiskey and leave it sitting on his desk for inspiration.
‘I like the sound of people typing,’ I said.
He sat on the edge of the sofa, hands loosely touching. ‘This is just your standard portable job. I’ve always fancied one of those huge black iron things – you know the sort?’
I nodded. ‘They weigh a ton. Hardly portable.’
‘Maybe I should try writing longhand.’
‘Why? The words won’t be more authentic for having been written with a fountain pen.’
He gazed at me, appraisingly. ‘There are so many things I want to ask you. Things you probably won’t want to talk about.’
‘We’ll have to see how it goes, won’t we? I might end up revealing all kinds of secrets.’ I spoke lightly, teasingly, but I think we both appreciated the weight of my words. ‘Did you get as far as the station?’ I asked. ‘Did you find out about the trains?’
‘Yeah,’ he said, pushing his fingers through that silky hair I loved so much. ‘Would it be a terrible imposition if I stayed for just a couple more days? The thing is, I haven’t been entirely straight with you.’
My scalp prickled. ‘Go on.’
‘I don’t have my own place; I still live with my parents. Only we had a massive bust-up. I told them I was going to spend a few weeks with a mate of mine who lives in Carlisle, but I don’t really want to go there. Can I stay here, just till the heat dies down at home? I promise I won’t be a nuisance. And I’ve got everything I need in my rucksack if you don’t mind me sticking a few clothes in your washing machine.’
He must have thought I was a pushover and he wouldn’t have been wrong. The way he looked at me; his blue, blue eyes. How could he not realise how I felt about him? Was it loneliness, the absence of a man in my life that made me so susceptible? Was I that pathetic, that soft a target? I told myself to keep my guard up, to be wary. I couldn’t let him see what he was doing to me. I avoided standing close to him in case I should find myself reaching out to touch him.
What had he done to me?
‘If it hadn’t snowed, you’d have gone to Carlisle, I suppose?’
‘I guess.’ He grinned disarmingly. ‘But it’s nicer here than in Carlisle.’
On Sunday morning he insisted on going out to pick up a newspaper before I’d started to prepare breakfast. While he was out, I couldn’t resist sneaking into his room to see what he’d made of it. His typewriter sat on the dressing table. I had an old typing chair he could have, and a small table if he wanted it. Beside his typewriter was a Moleskine notebook. I was tempted to imagine it filled with lines of deathless adolescent prose, but what did I know? For all I knew, he might have been a genius.
I felt rotten for snooping, even though it was my house and I’d not so much as tampered with a drawer. When he returned with fresh croissants from the little artisan bakery, I felt even more guilty.
‘I didn’t expect you to get up so early,’ I said. Perhaps it was only teenagers who slept in until lunchtime.
‘I don’t like the deadness of Sundays, but it’s worse if you don’t make an effort. Have you got any jam?’
I pointed to a cupboard, pleased we were in agreement on the subject of Sunday. It was a day I’d always disliked – that back-to-school-tomorrow feeling that never goes – but if I dragged around all day in a dressing gown I felt more like an invalid than someone taking it easy.
My kitchen was just big enough to accommodate a table that barely seated two people. We had to sit with our legs to one side to avoid bumping knees.
‘I like your crockery,’ he said.
Nothing matched. All the plates and bowls were inherited from my grandmother. We’re not talking Clarice Cliff, just ordinary china that people ate from in the forties and fifties. Occasionally I toyed with the idea of treating myself to a proper antique service, but I’d probably have been too nervous to use it.
‘I like everything about your house. It’s got style. Real style, I mean, not something copied from a magazine.’
He was flattering me and I was vain enough to fall for it.
After breakfast we tidied up and settled ourselves in the sitting room with the papers. Normally I wouldn’t have bothered with a Sunday paper, a bloated mass of themed sections and supplements, but it passed the time.
It was only after dinner (shop-bought pizzas), when it was getting dark and we sat down with a bottle of wine and chatted, that I began to feel more relaxed with him.
‘I almost left and g
ot on the next train after lunch,’ he admitted. ‘You were totally pleasant and polite, but it’s like you were a cat flexing its claws, waiting for the right moment to lash out.’
‘Goodness, was I really that bad?’
He shrugged, gently swirling the wine in his glass. ‘I can understand it. I think I’m quite easy to live with, but you don’t really want me here, I know that.’
‘I’m used to my own company.’
‘And prefer it?’
‘On the whole, yes. I’m sorry if I made you feel unwelcome. I was trying very hard to do the opposite, but clearly I failed.’
He stretched out a leg, touched Pushkin with his foot and wriggled his toes in her fur.
‘It doesn’t matter. Honest. But I really do like it here – the house, the village, everything.’
Me? Did he like me?
‘If you can bear to have me around,’ he continued, ‘I’ll do my best to respect your personal space.’
‘I’d hate you to think I resent you being here. I don’t.’
He grinned. ‘You worry too much. You surely don’t care what I think about you? I’m a nobody, nothing I say really matters.’
I wondered how well we would learn to read each other and which of us would learn the most, and gain the most, from the exercise.
I topped up our glasses and asked him, for no particular reason, if he liked Baudelaire.
‘Get drunk and stay that way. On what? On wine, poetry, virtue, whatever. But get drunk.’
He smiled and clinked his glass against mine and I thought, yes, it will be all right, if only we can stay drunk – on wine, on poetry, whatever.
But it wouldn’t be all right, would it? I told myself we could never be more than friends, at best, but as soon as I got into bed and closed my eyes, the fantasies emerged out of the darkness. I pictured him walking into my room, our eyes locking, reading the same desires there. Idiotic enough to sleep naked in the ridiculous hope this would happen. Giving myself to him, tasting him, feeling his heart beat against mine. My hand sliding between my legs, the moment when reality and fantasy merged. And then tears of self-pity, emptiness, a grinding sense of loss for what could never be.
He must never know, never guess. I would be ordinary with him, give him no reason to believe I thought him extraordinary. And he wasn’t; he was a young man like millions of others. Brash, gauche, unaware of all the nuances of human behaviour. It would likely never cross his mind that a woman twenty years his senior would think of him in sexual terms. I staked everything on this thought. Somehow I must teach myself to write this off as a crush. It would pass, it was nothing, I was old enough to know better.
But I wasn’t.
Chapter Five
I paused for a moment before inserting my key into the lock. Simon and I had breakfasted together and he’d told me he intended to use my absence to explore the village and then perhaps “bash out” something on the typewriter.
‘I want to talk to you about my writing,’ he’d said, ‘but I don’t want to be pushy. I mean, I don’t expect you to read what I write or anything, but any tips you might have—’
‘Maybe. I don’t know. I’ll think about it.’
Madeleine was the only person I’d ever talked to about writing, unless one counts the journalists who’d interviewed me during my brief glory days. Too young properly to appreciate what I’d achieved, I’d resented the repetitive questions, the prying into my “backstory”, and most of all the inevitable “What are you working on now?”
But of course Simon wasn’t interested in any of that. I didn’t think the young were necessarily more selfish than the rest of us, but it would have been strange if he hadn’t been interested in me for what I could do for him as an adviser, mentor, networker. He was sadly mistaken if he believed I had any privileged contacts in publishing. I had none. I’d never had an agent and my editor had probably retired by now. Even if she hadn’t, I would bet she had only the haziest recollection of me. Any friendship that might have developed between us had been knocked dead when she tried to persuade me to write a memoir about my friendship with Madeleine.
‘It would plug the gap between this novel and the next, if you’re struggling,’ she’d said.
‘How can I? I’ve never come to terms with losing her.’
‘Writing about it might help.’
‘No. Absolutely not.’
‘You won’t even consider it? I could help you – we could brainstorm ideas.’
A lump in my throat, I had shaken my head, very much wanting to chuck at her the plate of biscuits she always provided at our meetings. Somehow I’d found my way back to Paddington station, grateful my carriage wasn’t packed, so I could hunch into a corner seat and gaze tearfully at the passing scenery, the fields of cattle and sheep, the bleak beauty of the British countryside at the fag-end of autumn.
Madeleine, Madeleine… How can I put you into words?
She and I sat next to each other on our first day at infants’ school. People said we looked alike and it wasn’t long before we pretended we were sisters. Both of us only children, we instinctively understood each other’s need for quiet time away from the big groups of children who shrieked and argued and pushed one another over on the playing field.
I can’t, of course, remember what it felt like to be a child, but I do know that Madeleine was always there, always willing to stick up for me, always ready with a comforting arm whenever I was upset. She was the first to congratulate me when our teacher chose the poem I’d written to read out in assembly. The teacher made a point of talking to my mum at home time, telling her how impressed she was with the poem. In later years I used to tell journalists that was the moment I knew I wanted to be a writer, but I doubt it was as clear-cut as that. Here, I might have thought as a young child, is something I can do for which I can earn praise from other people.
Madeleine and I spent hours in her bedroom writing stories. The first ones, I seem to recall, were brief character sketches of our parents, our teachers – vignettes based on the small dramas of our lives. We then moved on to writing stories about things we wanted to happen. Cue tales along the rags-to-riches meeting-a-handsome-prince lines. Often I would write the stories and Madeleine would illustrate them. We talked about working together when we were adults, collaborating on children’s books. Naturally they would be brilliant and we would become rich and famous.
Our friendship survived secondary school and puberty, though Madeleine lost interest in our stories, dismissing them as kids’ stuff. For a while she wanted to be a vet, then a barrister. She was the clever one and her parents, unlike mine, were ambitious for their daughter. They paid for flute lessons, dancing classes, Girl Guides. Everything she did she excelled at, but nothing held her interest for long.
I, meanwhile, continued to write in secret, frustrated at my inability to come up with anything original. My poems were either sentimental or hopelessly pedestrian. My stories fizzled out after the first couple of paragraphs.
‘Show me some, then.’ Madeleine lying on my bed on her stomach, legs crossed in the air. After school, both of us still in our school uniforms, only the ties discarded. The air sweet with the smell of her Juicy Fruit chewing gum. She held out a hand, a charm bracelet hanging loosely from her wrist, her long nails painted pearly pink.
‘You’ll only laugh.’
‘When have I ever laughed at you?’ Her deep-set dark eyes ringed with kohl, a bit smudged. Her Theda Bara look, she called it.
I handed her the ring-binder, decorated with pictures of famous writers, in which I kept my poems.
We were fourteen and I hadn’t shown her anything I’d written since we’d started secondary school. As she read, she twisted her hair around a forefinger. I wanted to lock myself in the bathroom until she’d finished. She liked reading, but she never appeared to be overly bookish, her preference being for the glitzy Danielle Steel type of novel, embossed covers with the titles in foil lettering. That’s what she claimed
and those were the only books I ever saw her reading. It wasn’t until I was allowed access to her room after her death that I found a cupboard stacked with books I’d never guessed she’d owned: Flaubert, Jorge Luis Borges, Christina Stead, Dorothy Richardson and dozens more, some of them so obscure I’d never heard of them, let alone read them. I didn’t understand why she’d kept them a secret from me. She’d have told me if she had a drug habit, but wouldn’t tell me that she read serious literature.
‘These are pretty good,’ she said as she leafed through the ring-binder. ‘Very clever.’
The right words, but the lack of enthusiasm in her tone was damning. I think I’d have preferred her to laugh at me.
‘They need work, I know that.’ I had to say that, even though I thought them perfect.
‘They’re a bit Plathish.’
Of course they were. Who else would a moody schoolgirl try to emulate? Madeleine had teased me often enough for my Plath fixation, calling me a Plathologist when I lingered too long over the facts of the poet’s suicide. One of our few arguments was over the issue of whether or not she had intended to take her own life. Madeleine insisted Plath had intended to be found.
‘It was a classic cry for help,’ she maintained. She thought suicide was a wicked, selfish act that accomplished nothing except the grief of innocent people. I accused her of being unfeeling, lacking in understanding, the disagreement escalating until it reached the tipping point and we didn’t speak for several days.
It was she who offered the olive branch, making light of the argument.
‘I don’t want us to fall out ever again. If we start arguing, one of us must say “Pax” and we’ll talk about something else, okay?’
We both stayed on at school for A-levels, though I’d scraped through with the minimum number of GCSEs required. Madeleine had achieved nine, all As except maths. That one B dented her pride, and we came near to arguing again when she went into hysterics over it.