She swam until the water was not salt, but sweet: river water flowing from an inland lake, brackish and warm. She swam up the furtive channels of the mighty flooded river and watched the water change from deep brown to amber to golden; and become warmer. Only after swimming for what seemed like hours and hours, a lifetime, did Lady Emily’s waterlogged feet scrabble gently in soft sand, as she stood upright, and waded to the shore.
She was on a little beach, a half-crescent of white sand bordered with the thick tangle of undergrowth. As she paused, uncertain, a tiny snake, brilliantly striped, slithered away from her shadow into the tangle of knotted branches, creepers and roots. Lady Emily crossed her arms over her naked breasts and felt the equatorial sun burn the salty skin of her back.
There was a man in the shadow of the trees, watching her. Lady Emily stepped forward, out of the water, her bare feet moving without fear across the hot sand, stepping without hesitation into the undergrowth to stand before him. Then she lowered her arms and let him see her nakedness.
Wordlessly he stepped towards her and rested his light brown hands on her bare shoulders. At his touch Lady Emily closed her eyes. She felt the softness of his lips on her neck, his caress brush down over her breast, the faint flickering promise of his tongue at her navel, then he bore her down to the ground and his fingers and then his tongue penetrated deep inside her. Lady Emily groaned and twisted her hands in his dark curly hair, pulling him closer and closer. She slid her hands over his shoulders and down his naked back, pulling him up so that she could kiss his wet mouth which tasted of brine and river water. She pulled at his loincloth and it tumbled away. She gave a little moan of desire and opened herself to him, flowing into the rhythm and sounds of lust, moving with him, just as she had swum towards him: with easy purposeful, powerful motions until her muscles clenched and held, and pleasure flooded through her like flood water down a dry river bank.
‘Twenty,’ Lady Emily said with quiet satisfaction. She heaved herself out of the pool and sat for a moment on the side, feeling the water drain from her thick costume, enjoying the tremor of tiredness in her old body, and the glazed luxurious half-drunk rapture in her mind. She smiled and whispered, like an incantation: ‘Enjoy. Enjoy.’
The If Game
‘If you were my mistress I’d drive you home and cook your breakfast,’ James said. His roguish smile warned her not to take him too seriously. ‘We’d go back to your flat, and I’d cook your breakfast for you.’
Before them were two plates of eggs and bacon: the best the canteen could provide. They had both finished their morning shifts – he had been under the hot lights of the television studio, while she worked in the newsroom of the radio station on the floor above. They often met for breakfast, the studios were darkened and quiet in the early winter mornings. A couple of times that winter it had snowed and they had watched the white flakes against the dark sky. Then he had started playing the If game.
‘Oh, if I were your mistress I should live in a hotel,’ Sarah replied. ‘You would come back to my suite and we would have champagne and croissants.’
‘I would bring you champagne and croissants to your flat,’ he said, making the game more immediate. ‘Serve them to you in your bath. D’you have a bath when you get home? I long for one but the twins are nearly always in the bathroom and by the time they’re out, I’m caught up with something else.’
‘I have a bath and then I have a sleep,’ she said. ‘There are some benefits to being a single woman.’
‘There are no benefits at all to being a married man. I work all the hours God sends, and then I can’t get into my own bathroom. The only benefit would be a delicious secret affair with a wonderful mistress.’ He looked at her and smiled his wicked smile. ‘You.’
‘Oh, I think I would like that,’ she said. She pushed her plate away and lit a cigarette. She looked at him from under her eyelashes. ‘You could pamper me.’
He felt suddenly excited and confident. ‘If you were my mistress I should pamper you enormously,’ he said. ‘Enormously.’
She gave a quick schoolgirl giggle at the double entendre, and he felt more and more certain that soon, she would say ‘yes’.
‘Well!’ he said lightly. He felt the quick rush of adrenaline, like a gambler when he impulsively stakes a fortune on a single number. He was addicted to the thrill of seduction. ‘What about tomorrow?’
When she looked up at him he could almost hear the click of the croupier’s wheel. ‘Champagne,’ she stipulated. ‘And croissants.’
‘Lanson black label,’ he promised.
‘If you were my wife I should spend all day in bed with you,’ he said. ‘These early morning shifts are killers.’
They were in Sarah’s bed as usual. From the window of her little flat she could see the fat buds of a horse chestnut tree, splitting under the pressure of the bursting leaves. She stroked a finger down the recessed line of his spine.
‘If I were your wife I should collect you from the studio and take you home to bed,’ she promised.
‘Not with a pair of twins in the house,’ James said. He got out of bed and stretched. ‘If I get this London job, you could move to London too.’ He slipped on his shirt and pulled on his trousers. ‘I’d only go home at the weekends.’
‘If I were your wife I’d keep you where I could see you,’ she remarked. She sat up in bed and clasped her knees. Her arms and shoulders were lightly tanned. She had gone to North Africa at the end of February with a girlfriend. She had lain in the sun all day and dreamed of him. She had refused to dance, to drink, or go sailing, with other men because they were not him. She was, instinctively, a faithful woman.
‘If you were my wife I’d stay home,’ he said with a smile, pulling on his socks. He stepped into his shoes. He kept his aftershave, hairbrush, and deodorant on her dressing table. In her bathroom was his toothbrush, his towelling robe, his favourite soap.
‘You’re going to the reception tonight, aren’t you?’ he asked. He slipped his jacket on and smoothed his tie, looking at himself in her mirror once more. His good looks were his career qualifications, he checked them as a clever man might do IQ tests.
‘I’ve been invited,’ she said. ‘But isn’t Miriam coming?’
He shook his head. ‘Babysitter crisis,’ he said. ‘Shall we meet there and go on for dinner? She won’t expect me home till late.’
‘Lovely,’ she said. At once her plans for the day and evening were drastically reshaped. She would wear a different dress, she would skip lunch. She would get her hair done. She would change the sheets on the bed in case he chose to come back after dinner. She was careful to keep the excitement from her voice that the If game had become a game of planning a future together. ‘If we were both in London we could get a flat.’
He smiled for her but it was the mirror which caught the glow. ‘I don’t see why not,’ he said. ‘We’d have to be discreet, but it could probably be managed. Miriam would never leave Bristol. She’s a home-town girl. If I’m going to London it’ll have to be alone – or with you.’
Sarah slid from the bed and stood behind him, her arms embracing him, her warm thin body against him. ‘With me,’ she said fervently. ‘With me.’
They rented a small flat in a modern block. He told Miriam he had a place, little more than a bedsit, nothing special. He moved in the day after one of the twins fell off his tricycle. Miriam spent all day and most of the night at the hospital while the doctors X-rayed and then set the boy’s broken arm and wrist. James had been forced to pack for himself, and to leave an empty house. ‘If I were your wife you’d come first,’ Sarah said.
James was soothed by the flat. Sarah had worked hard all weekend. It was furnished in a light airy style, the walls were pale distemper. There was an expensive hi-fi in one corner and a small television. The floors were shiny boards with occasional bright rugs. Sarah had spent the best part of her first month’s wages on it. ‘If you were my wife we would be lovers first and parents afte
r.’ He took her in his arms. ‘I think we should christen the bedroom,’ he said. ‘Don’t you?’
That summer was the best time for them. They met as clandestine lovers on Monday night, and they parted with regret on Friday morning. They played house together – cooking exotic and experimental foods, picnicking in the sitting room, breakfasting in bed. James found his new job hard; he made no friends. He was glad to come home to Sarah, who loyally watched his film reports and praised them. She was promoted in the radio newsroom and would often phone him during the day with a tip-off of a story about to break. James thus gained a reputation for being a competent news journalist and kept his job past the first trial month.
Sarah was lonely at the weekends when he went home. She visited galleries or exhibitions – mentally noting the ones he might enjoy. She went alone to film previews, to the theatre. She walked in Kensington Gardens. She joined an aerobics class. She got through the interminable Sundays by reading all the newspapers and dozing all afternoon on the flat’s tiny sunny balcony. She turned down invitations from men because they were not James, and because she thought it unfair to use them as stop gaps.
She often walked in Kensington Gardens and watched the children playing. One day a little boy stumbled and fell almost at her feet. She bent down and picked him up. He was warm and light. His body was chunky and compact. His legs were working like clockwork before she even replaced him on the ground. She set him upright and he staggered off, fired with determination. His mother smiled her thanks. Sarah smiled back but she was suddenly stricken with deep desire. She wanted a child of her own.
The If game changed – it became a threat. ‘If you had a child we would have to give up the flat,’ James said. ‘If you had a child you would have to give up work.’
The leaves in the park started falling. The children were bulky parcels, wrapped in bright anoraks and duffle coats. Their faces were bright as holly berries in the cold air. Sarah longed to wrap up her own child warmly. ‘If you had a child it would ruin your career,’ James warned.
Sarah’s weekends became bleak. She joined a gym and sweated on a training bench every Saturday afternoon. She grew fit and tightly muscled without pleasure. Her breasts were small and neat, dry. Her stomach was flat, her womb empty. She started to hate the waste of her monthly flow of blood. Next year she would be thirty-four.
‘If I don’t have a child soon it will be too late,’ she said.
Christmas was the worst day of her life. James telephoned her on Christmas Day from the call box at the end of his road while walking with the twins on their new bikes. ‘If I could be with you I would.’
She could hear them calling to him. He had arranged for flowers to be delivered and a bottle of champagne. He had left her a present, gift-wrapped under their tiny plastic tree. Sarah stayed in bed all Christmas Day, willing the time to pass.
It was after Christmas, during a flurry of cold weather, that she started to drop her contraceptive pills, one a night, carefully down the toilet. When the weather warmed and the croci flowered in great golden slushy pools under the dripping trees of the park, she knew she was pregnant. The If game changed again – becoming a game of bluff.
‘If I left Miriam she would die,’ James said. ‘If I left my family the twins would be damaged.’
Sarah was sick in the mornings but she walked to work across the park and smiled at women with prams.
James was warned at the studio that his work was not good enough. One of the twins had a bout of food poisoning and James took a week’s holiday and went home to help Miriam.
‘If you won’t have a termination, I don’t know how we can go on,’ he said before he went. ‘We can’t spoil our lives for an accident.’
Sarah bought two new larger bras and a couple of baggy tops. She spoke to her boss about freelance shifts and found a small house at the unfashionable end of Hackney. She found a lodger who would help with the baby in return for cheap rent.
James missed a major story on his first day back and said he was sick of the pressures of national news.
‘If I went back to Bristol I could walk into the evening news presenter job,’ he said. ‘I’ve got experience of a national newsroom now.’
‘You mean to leave me and go back to Miriam,’ Sarah said, stating the obvious.
‘Oh no,’ James said. The If game in its final phase was one of empty promises. ‘If I worked in Bristol it would make no difference to us. If I lived at home again it would change nothing between us.’
In the autumn he transferred back to his old studio and went home to Miriam and the twins. Miriam greeted his return without excitement. She was remote from him, a cool woman. James found his interest stimulated by her indifference. She was not like his wife, she was like a stranger.
He bought her little gifts, bottles of wine, and small bouquets of flowers. She accepted them calmly, in the same way that she received squashy papier mâché models from the twins’ art classes.
James telephoned Sarah every morning from the studio and visited her once a week. She was growing large with her pregnancy, she was often tired. Her little house’s roof leaked, she had noisy neighbours. Sometimes she refused to make love. James caught the train home with relief. Now the twins were older they were in bed by eight and the evenings were quiet and ordered. Miriam cooked dinner for him and they listened to classical music. Miriam was going back to work as a graphic designer. James watched her growing independence with fascination.
‘If you were my mistress,’ he started. Miriam was sitting opposite him, there were candles on the table and the sweet honeyed smell of roasting chicken. Miriam was wearing a flowing kaftan and underneath, he thought, perhaps nothing. She looked more like a mistress than a wife. James felt the old, irresistible urge to play, to beguile, to seduce. ‘If you were my mistress …’
Miriam smiled her confident wife’s smile. She knew him very, very well. ‘Oh no,’ she said firmly, shaking her head. ‘I should never be such a fool as that.’
The Conjuring Trick
First the cars: Gary drove a BMW, which was a perk of his job with the finance company. Stella drove her own Metro, she worked with a public relations company. She had bought it herself – £800 down and repayments over five years. Now the pensions: Gary had a complicated scheme set up by a syndicate at work. When he received a large bonus he transferred half of it straight into the pension fund. Stella had a personal equity plan which deducted £100 every month from her account.
Their speech was full of movement and geography. Stella’s savings were solid as a rock but Gary’s could go through the roof. They spoke of ideas that would run and run, a difficulty was being stuck between a rock and a hard place. Their imagery was that of pioneers, facing adventure and hardship. The excitement in their language concealed the fact that he was a dealer in the city, and she wrote advertising copy. They were completely impregnated with the values of the 1980s, they thought that growth – indeed excess – was never ending.
They had met at a dinner party and each had seen in the other the same sharp acquisitive bright face, like the one which smiled out of their own mirror every morning. Other people commented on the resemblance too, and when they were courting – which was hurried but exciting – they dressed alike to enhance the resemblance. They chose their clothes together, in shops like Gap and Principles and Next – shops which served and confirmed their taste of what was, and what was not, attractive. They paid with credit cards, and let the debts mount up.
They married in the spring of 1987 and bought their house a year later. Gary’s reputation for astute business practice and Stella’s flair were demonstrated in their choice. It was a big tumbling-down vicarage in the town centre, surrounded by a large derelict garden and a high red-brick wall. They had offered, and withdrawn their offer, produced a damning survey, put in a spoiler bid, and finally beaten the vendors (the Church of England at its least triumphant) down to a minimum price. Even so they were forced to cash in their pensions
to pay the deposit, obtain a maximum mortgage, and top up the loan from a finance company. When they finally opened a bottle of champagne, surrounded by packing cases in the large echoing drawing room, they owed a breathtaking sum.
It didn’t seem to matter, there was always more credit. They ripped out the old kitchen, including the working coal range, and put in slim tall units: slate grey with smoked glass. They took out a loan with another company to pay for the central heating. They re-tiled the roof, they underpinned the walls, they put in a damp course. They carpeted throughout, they curtained the tall draughty windows. Carpets and curtains were all grey or white, all the furniture was a uniform matte black. At the end of 1989 the house was worth four times the purchase price. If they had sold then, they would have shown a profit of more than £200,000.
‘We’ll hold on,’ Gary said. There was no need for them to sell. Gary’s commission was rising and keeping pace with the loan payments, Stella’s job was secure and her prospects of promotion were good. They took out a loan secured against the new value of the house and went on holiday to the Caribbean. They loved the place so much that they bought a time-share apartment, a small deposit and the rest to pay over ten years. They offered the house as security on the loan. ‘You’ve got to keep your capital liquid,’ Gary said, who understood about these things.
And then the world slumped and all the rules, all the scenery was different, even the language was different. People no longer spoke like pioneers, they talked like defeated soldiers of retrenching, and pulling back, of managed failure and cutting losses. Gary was ‘let go’ – but he had nowhere to go. They took away his car, and the new double garage with the electric door stood half empty. They made Stella redundant and then re-employed her as a freelance. She had to work from home, and pay her own tax and expenses. She did not dare to complain.
Bread and Chocolate Page 6