by Helen Kitson
But then he said, ‘And what about your lovers?’
‘My what?’
‘Tell me about them. Who were they, and what happened to them?’
‘I—’
‘I’ll share mine if you’ll share yours.’ His smile was almost cheeky, but that didn’t stop me feeling the situation had tilted in the wrong direction.
‘Why do you want to know?’ I set down my cup and scooped up Pushkin, hoping the rhythmic action of stroking her fur would restore some sense of order.
He shrugged. ‘I’m interested in human nature. I can’t begin to understand you until I know what kind of men have shared your life.’
I doubted that was true. Wasn’t it even rather a sexist thing to say? Or was I in danger of misreading and over-analysing everything he said?
‘No one has truly shared my life. I’ve never lived with anyone.’
‘All right, then. What was your last lover called?’
‘Russell. He was married. He took me to Paris, but it rained.’
He laughed, as I’d hoped he would. ‘I like the idea of Paris in the rain,’ he said. ‘I’ve never been, but I would like to, and I hope it rains when I go.’ A pause, and then, ‘He went back to his wife?’
‘He never left her.’ I hoped I didn’t sound bitter. If I’d examined my feelings carefully, I would have realised quite soon after meeting Russell that we were a bad match. I’d known his wife – impossible not to in a village, albeit our sprawling village was as large as some towns – although I’d never done more than pass the time of day with her. If she knew about me and her husband, she never let on.
‘And before him?’
I gazed at my hands, my ringless fingers, my carefully-trimmed nails. ‘Why go there? The past is—’
‘I know. I’ve read The Go-Between.’
‘You’re young enough not to have a past in any real sense.’
He raised his eyebrows. ‘Says you.’
‘Sorry. That was patronising.’
A rueful smile. ‘I probably deserved it. But I’m no nearer to knowing who you really are.’
‘You can fire questions at me and I might even answer most of them, but that’s not how you get to know someone.’
‘No.’ His voice soft, filled with meaning. He touched his cup, but didn’t pick it up. ‘I think we should go for that drive. Or visit your vicar. Both, if you like. And then, tonight, we should buy some booze and get seriously pissed, and then I might learn who you are.’
‘“Get drunk and stay that way”? All right. But you might regret it.’
He pushed back his golden, silken hair and shook his head.
We decided to save the drive for another day, since it was now nearly three o’clock. I wasn’t entirely happy about the prospect of taking Simon to meet Mr Latham; it felt too much like a parody of taking a boyfriend home to meet one’s parents. What I feared was not the vicar’s disapproval – or his approval, for that matter – but, rather, that I would find myself imitating too closely and grotesquely the nervous teenage girl whose role I was mimicking.
‘How should I address him?’ Simon asked on the walk to the vicarage. ‘Do I call him sir?’
‘Just Mr Latham will do.’
‘Nice place,’ he said once we’d reached the rectory.
‘It’s only his for as long as he’s vicar here. Apparently there’s a Church of England scheme to help retired vicars find somewhere to live. They’re encouraged to retire to somewhere outside of the parish where they worked.’ This, I felt, was one reason why Mr Latham would be vicar here for as long as he was able. I’d done a bit of Googling, curious to know what kind of salary he earned, and discovered he was probably on around £25,000 a year. No family or expensive hobbies, so I imagined he saved a good deal from his earnings.
‘So soon?’ Mr Latham said when I knocked at his door and introduced Simon.
‘Is this a bad time?’
‘Not at all! Do, please, come in – both of you. Shall I make coffee? Or would you prefer tea?’
‘We’re fine, thank you,’ I said. The kitchen was my domain. Mr Latham and I had never sat down together as equals and I shrank from doing so now.
He ushered us into the living room.
‘It’s a nice place, this,’ Simon said, sitting down.
‘Far too big, of course. And it can never feel entirely like your own home. It isn’t, after all. Still, I can’t complain. Miss Price tells me you’re a student – English literature, is that correct?’
‘Sort of. Did you always know you wanted to be a vicar?’
‘Not at all. I wanted to be an engineer. Have you settled in all right?’
‘Yes, thanks. It’s a pretty village. Not that I want to outstay my welcome. I ought to be moving on soon. I’m running out of clothes for one thing.’
‘It is indeed a very pretty village; I’m glad someone of your tender years appreciates it. I’ve been very happy here. Tell me, would you be interested in seeing my collection of Mary Webb books? I have a couple of rather fine first editions.’
I watched them discuss Mary Webb with some relief, pleased they’d found a topic of mutual interest, wondering why I cared. Did it matter so much that Mr Latham should like Simon?
We left after forty-five minutes or so.
‘Well, what did you think of my vicar?’
Simon grinned. ‘He’s exactly as he ought to be. Sweet and sincere. If it’s an act, it’s a bloody good one.’
‘Why should it be an act?’
‘No reason. Just me being cynical.’
We made a detour to buy wine and food from the local Spar.
‘I love places like this,’ Simon said, grabbing two bottles of Pinot Noir. ‘They sell all kinds of unexpected things.’
‘I preferred the old days when you had proper corner shops that weren’t run by multinationals.’
‘You’re a romantic.’
‘No, just old.’
‘Daft,’ he said, nudging me with his elbow. ‘Fancy a spag bol for dinner? I can do a vegetarian one.’
He insisted on cooking the entire meal himself. My job was to lay the table, which we’d dragged into the living room.
‘You do like red wine, don’t you?’ he asked.
‘Yes, it’s fine.’
‘It always seems more grown up, somehow, than white.’
Over dinner we talked about books: our favourite authors, our guilty pleasures, the books we most wished we’d written.
‘So why didn’t you go to university?’ he asked.
‘The simple answer is I don’t know. Maybe I should have done.’
He cleared away the plates and refilled our glasses. We put the table back into the kitchen and sat side by side on the sofa: a dangerous thing to do, though Pushkin sat between us, a curled-up chaperone.
‘You don’t give much away, do you?’ Simon said, wine glass in one hand, the other stroking the cat’s head. ‘Have you ever had a best friend in whom you confided everything?’
Madeleine. ‘Yes, I did. But she died.’
‘Long ago?’
‘More than twenty years ago.’
‘It must have been rough.’
‘It was. I’d rather not talk about it.’
‘Sure; sure.’
For a while we sat in silence, sipping our wine, Madeleine as well as the cat between us. I couldn’t bring myself to share Madeleine with him. Nor did I wish him to take on the role of confidant. If I started spilling secrets, I feared I might drown in them.
‘Drink up,’ he said, picking up the bottle and holding it out, ready to top up my glass.
‘I shouldn’t… I oughtn’t.’
‘Speak to me, Gabrielle.’
I took a big gulp of wine. ‘Ask me something, then.’
‘What were you like when you were seventeen?’
‘Why seventeen?’
‘Why not?’
‘All right. I was ordinary. I read a lot of books, I listened to depressing musi
c, I dyed my hair black, I lost my virginity.’ Deliberately provoking him. Blame it on the wine.
He took a long, slow sip, then looked me straight in the eye.
‘And what was that like, Gabrielle?’
I shrugged. ‘He was no one special, just some guy I got off with at a party. It was at someone’s house – big house, the dad was a solicitor. I’ve no idea whose bedroom we were in. We’d smoked a few joints downstairs, then we went upstairs and into the first room we came across. He found a box filled with records, proper vinyl ones, and he put on an old Sisters of Mercy single.’
‘Go on.’ His gaze was intense. ‘What was his name?’
‘James. I think he was Scottish. Nice looking. But when I saw him again the next evening, he didn’t want to know. Blanked me.’ Odd how much that still hurt, after all these years. ‘What about you? Your first time?’
‘It was at a party. It’s always a party, isn’t it? She was the host’s sister. She was the only one who wasn’t drinking. I was in the kitchen, bored out of my skull, in the middle of phoning for a taxi. She took the phone off me, killed the call. Grabbed my arm, took me outside. Said she wanted to show me the flowers her mother grew in this greenhouse thing at the bottom of the garden.’
‘You were interested in plants, were you?’ I said. Keep it light; don’t think about Simon, that girl touching him, holding him, so easy, just kill the phone call…
He grinned. ‘Couldn’t have cared less about the plants. Great monstrous things they were, like triffids; they didn’t look real. You know what hothouses are like, all that heat and humidity, and this terrific smell coming from the plants: kind of fleshy, if you know what I mean.’
I did. I could see the plants, feel the hot, clammy air on my skin, the smell of rainforest flowers.
‘She pulled up her dress. No knickers. She was surrounded by all these plants, I felt leaves and tendrils and things brushing against me; it was like the plants were trying to devour us. And afterwards, she just pulled her dress down and took me back into the house. She never said a word, neither of us did. She handed my phone to me, smiled, and walked away.’
‘I’m guessing she was older than you.’
‘Twenty-eight, something like that. I was eighteen, she seemed really sophisticated; it was like something in a movie. She lived in London; I never saw her again.’
It sounded so much like a scene from a film that I wondered if he’d made it up. Too much like a stereotypical zipless fuck, too perfect in its details. I told myself it wasn’t true, that he’d invented the scenario to turn me on. Why else would he want to talk about sex? But hadn’t I started it?
‘You haven’t told me what yours was like,’ he said.
‘Uncomfortable. Embarrassing.’ It should have been comical, but wasn’t, the fact that I’d lost my virginity while Andrew Eldritch sang the death-in-sex “Bury Me Deep” in that sombre bass-baritone voice of his that would have made a nursery rhyme sound ominous and funereal.
‘You’ll have to do better than that,’ Simon said. ‘Did you take all your clothes off? Did he kiss you? Did it hurt?’
I couldn’t do this. This was not a conversation we should have been having. Was he as aroused as I was? Why was he doing this?
Simon’s voice now quiet, almost a whisper: ‘Did he make you come?’
My eyes locked on his. I spoke in a whisper too: ‘What do you want from me, Simon? What do you want me to say?’ How could we move past this, and how could we put down our glasses and return to chatting about books?
‘Only the truth. Honesty. Did he?’
One word. Yes or no. Honesty didn’t enter in to it. He’d asked one question, but in his eyes there was another much more dangerous one. Yes! I wanted to scream, but I couldn’t take that risk.
‘No.’
‘No,’ he repeated. Softly, oh so softly, he reached out to touch my hair, his thumb brushing against my cheek. ‘The wine has stained your teeth. I’ll wash up, shall I?’
‘You can leave it, if you want.’
He shook his head, his fringe falling gently over one eye. ‘Best not. It always looks worse in the morning, doesn’t it?’
Chapter Seven
The last person I ever expected to hear from again was Russell. Six months earlier we’d parted in acrimonious circumstances with much shouting and name-calling on both sides. I was dead to him, he’d said, and the feeling was mutual.
He phoned in the morning around ten. I’d sat down with a cup of coffee having first taken one upstairs to Simon, who had decided to work on his novel.
‘I’m at work,’ Russell said. ‘I can’t talk for long.’
‘Why do you want to talk at all? Surely we’ve nothing to say to each other.’
‘It’s my wife. She’s found out about us.’
‘There is no “us”. And how can she have found out?’
He gave me some rigmarole about credit card bills and letters relating to his – our – trip to Paris.
‘I told her it was over, that it never amounted to much—’
‘Well, thanks!’
‘The point is, for as long as I’ve known her she’s wanted me to take her to Paris and we never got there. We should have gone there for our honeymoon, but by then she was pregnant. Terrible morning sickness. She didn’t feel up to it.’
‘I don’t need to know all this, Russell. Why are you phoning me? This is your problem, not mine.’ Your affair, your rules.
‘I just needed someone to talk to. You’ve no idea what it’s like.’
Of course I hadn’t. I’d never been married, never had to deal with the compromises and petty resentments that most marriages, I imagine, entailed. I’d always known Russell was married and that I had no prospect of any kind of a future with him, even if I’d wanted it. If he’d been found out while he and I were still seeing each other, the affair would not have survived, and I certainly didn’t want to become embroiled in his tawdry marital problems now that we were apart.
‘I’m sorry, it must be hellish, but I should have thought I’d be the last person you’d want to speak to.’
‘There isn’t anyone else. She says she wants a divorce. I’m sure she doesn’t mean it, she’ll change her mind once she calms down. But in the meantime, it’s bleak.’
Well, yes, it would be. Perhaps the wagon would stutter to a halt, or else pick up and drive off at top speed. Either way, I’d already hopped off and wasn’t about to scramble back on.
‘I don’t want to get involved. I don’t want to know,’ I said. My coffee was cooling and I wasn’t sure I could be bothered to make a fresh one. I could hear the muffled sound of Simon hitting the typewriter keys. What story was he telling? Whose?
And then, ‘Are you seeing anyone?’ Russell asked.
‘No business of yours.’
‘No. Quite right. Do you ever think about me?’
I was in no mood for maudlin reminiscences. ‘Rarely.’ Enough time had passed for any wounds to have healed, so that I could feel little more than a kind of disinterested contempt. I hadn’t the patience to prolong this phone call, which could benefit neither of us. ‘I’m sorry things have turned out badly,’ I said, ‘but I can’t offer you anything.’
‘I’d very much like to see you again. Just someone to talk to.’
‘That wouldn’t be a good idea.’ I didn’t want to be unkind; I’ve never seen the point of cruelty for the sake of it, but his suggestion was ridiculous and he must be made to see that. ‘Honestly, there would be no point.’
For all I knew, Simon might have been typing the same word over and over, but I was glad for the sound that reminded me I wasn’t alone, that I needn’t accede to Russell’s suggestion simply for the sake of having someone to talk to.
‘For God’s sake, Gab, I only want to talk to you!’
It seemed little enough to ask. Would he have understood the reasons for my disinclination? I was no longer in his game, no longer bound by his rules. He had no right to expect any
thing from me, no right even to ask. He’d untied me as easily as a slip knot, would have resented me if I’d made any attempts to contact him once he’d ended our relationship. We were neither lovers nor friends.
‘I don’t want to argue with you. You ended it between us and I accepted that. Why can’t you accept that I don’t want to see you now?’
It even crossed my mind that he wanted me as a reserve in case his wife followed through with her threat to divorce him.
‘At least say you’ll think about it. I wouldn’t expect anything from you.’
‘You’re already expecting too much.’
‘Is it so terrible for me to admit that I’ve missed you?’
‘That’s not why you phoned, though, is it? If your wife hadn’t found out, we wouldn’t be speaking now.’
‘There is someone else, isn’t there? Why else would you not want to see me?’
Lost for words, I reached out and touched my coffee cup. Stone cold. Nothing I said to Russell was likely to get through to him, to pierce that bullet-proof vest of insensitivity. Old habits, though: one doesn’t hang up until both parties have said goodbye.
‘I thought you said you couldn’t talk for long?’ I said. I pictured him sitting in the staff room of whichever school he now worked at, teachers gazing at him quizzically as they wandered in to make hot drinks during their breaks.
‘I know. I’ve got a pile of marking to do and another lesson in ten minutes.’
‘You’d better go, then.’
‘But nothing’s settled.’
‘It is as far as I’m concerned. Do I have to be blunt? I don’t want to see you. Not because it would upset me – don’t think I’ve been pining for you or anything like that. Your problems bore me, Russell.’
I thought I heard a sharp intake of breath, but I might have been mistaken. Was he going to tell me I’d changed, that I’d become a cold, hard bitch? No doubt that’s what he thought.
The wasted coffee was a nuisance, but I was rather enjoying being the cool one, the one in charge for a change. His life was, so he thought, falling to pieces. He expected me to provide the dustpan and brush, the bandages, the sweet tea and biscuits. I would do no such thing.