After Purple

by Wendy Perriam

  There were terrible, tepid silences in between our tiny sips of coffee. Adrian had been tackling the critics’ reaction to the new biography of Gladstone, but it was really Leo’s name which hung across the table. The longer I went on munching mixed cheese biscuits, the longer I could pretend he was just down the road at the Classic dissecting the new Buñuel, or had been given a ticket for the New York City Ballet, or was dining with the philatelist. “Gone away” could simply mean a day trip.

  “Enjoyed your holiday?” asked Janet. She was the sort of person who used words like “holiday” in a tone of sour recrimination, as if she’d been given all your work to do while you lolled about in hopeless self-indulgence. It was the same with “birthday” or “pay-rise” or “sabbatical”. Janet slaved while you blew out the candle or hogged all the icing or jetted to the sun.

  “It wasn ‘t a holiday,” I said. I didn’t add “I went for a miracle”. She probably liked men limp. The only miracles she believed in were the ones in the commercials — Washing Whiter Than White, Cleaning Round The Bend, Spreading Straight From The Fridge. Adrian was staring at his plate. The silence was thick and damp and lumpy like the sauce. Even the Camembert was only a ruin now — a tangle of rinds and a shred of silver paper. I couldn’t bear it any longer. The whole of south-west London seemed to be holding its breath.

  I pushed my plate away and flung back my chair. “Where’s Leo, then?” I shouted.

  There was the sort of hush in which hundreds of pins could have dropped and both Adrian and Janet would have rushed to pick them up, to prevent them having to answer.

  Then Janet said, “We don’t …” and Adrian said, “He couldn’t …” at exactly the same moment. They both stopped and laughed rather forcedly, and Janet said, “You tell her” and Adrian said, “No, no, please go on, I’m sorry”, and a few more hundred thousand pins dropped and I grabbed another biscuit and held tight on to it to stop my hands from shaking.

  “You see, Thea dear, he should never really have sent you there if he couldn’t pay the bill.”

  “Wouldn’t pay, you mean.” Janet banged her cup down.

  “Ssshh, Janet, there’s no need to …”

  “Couldn’t, wouldn’t … what difference does it make in any case? All I know is that’s not your responsibility, Adrian, not any more, it isn’t. The National Health was good enough for me, Thea, and I had complications. I can’t think why he had to choose a private hospital.”

  “Safer,” Adrian mumbled. “Less publicity.”

  “Oh, of course,” cooed Janet. “The nuns would hush things up for him, wouldn’t they?”

  “What d’ you mean?” I said. “The casualty was closed at Hammersmith. I had to go to St Maur’s.”

  “Had to? At a hundred and twenty pounds a day! I suppose you had to have a room of your own, and four-course meals, and all the frills, and top-notch specialists. I might have said the same, Thea, but it wouldn’t have got me far.”

  I glanced at her cherry lips, her strawberry cheeks. She’d been eating four-course meals since the day she was weaned, even in the womb, perhaps. I nudged my denture with my tongue to make it slip a bit. “Actually,” I said, “I didn’t have much of a mouth to eat at all.”

  “I’m sorry about that, Thea. Of course I am. We both are.” (I hated that “both”. I could almost see the Morton Ring of Confidence binding spouse and spouse together.) “But it only makes Leo’s behaviour all the more despicable.”

  “What’s he done, for heaven’s sake? Where’s he gone?” My biscuit was just a shattered mass of crumbs now, as Leo dwindled further and further away from me.

  “Do you realise, Thea, how much that total bill was?”

  “Yes,” I lied. I didn’t, but I couldn’t bear to see Janet purse her lips over all those accusing noughts. X-rays and stitches and Confession and Raspberry Ripple would all be charged as extras. It wasn’t just Janet — it had always been the same with Adrian — totting up extravagances, nagging about waste. He’d made me keep accounts in little red-ruled cash books with carbons underneath. “Don’t buy English Cheddar. Brown eggs are a con.” Bills took all the pleasure out of life. All that soapy Irish cheese and sparrow-size anaemic eggs and slaving away at extra coaching to pay for night-storage heaters which were never hot when you wanted them, and buying dreary things like toilet rolls in bulk, so you hadn’t got the cash for impulse Baskin-Robbins.

  Leo didn’t live like that. Leo got credit from Pakistani grocers and shopped at Fortnum’s with money he owed the Inland Revenue. Leo had guts and spirit and the most expensive cheeses in London. If he avoided bills, it was only because he opposed them on principle. The hospital thing was probably just his gesture against the Catholic Church, or against the iniquities of private medicine or the sex life of the nuns.

  I was feeling better all the time. It was only a matter of a paltry little bill, not the death or accident I’d dreaded. Leo was merely hiding somewhere to escape his creditors. Or maybe the nuns had forced him to get a proper full-time job. He was probably doing overtime — that’s why he was out. Even if it was a residential job, he’d soon be back with the money in his hands. Janet and Adrian treated bills like some disaster — I had feared a real one.

  “Don’t worry,” I said airily. “They’ll sort it out between them.”

  “Oh, will they?” Janet banged the drawer shut. “Well, it certainly won’t be any thanks to you, Thea. You didn’t exactly help matters, by filling in the form with Adrian as your husband. The Accounts Department were totally confused. You shouldn’t be so careless.”

  I suppose she thought I muddled up my men by mistake, like all those dreary medieval kings, endless Henrys and Edwards with only their numbers to distinguish them. Oh, no! I had every right to claim Adrian as my husband. He was far more mine than hers. I’d lived with him nearly six and a quarter years, whereas she was just a beginner. Adrian and I had screwed one thousand nine hundred and fifty-three times. I grinned to myself. I doubt if Janet had even made three figures.

  “It’s not funny, Thea.” Janet crashed the cups together and flung them on a tray. “Adrian’s got enough to worry about without getting mixed up with summonses.”

  “Summonses?” It was a strange word like blancmange, a word you could choose as a mantra and say over and over until the world calmed down again and Leo returned from his residential job. I should have left a note for him, so he could phone me at Twickenham and meet him on the next train back again.

  “Yes, I’m afraid they’re suing him, Thea.” That was Adrian.

  He seemed smaller, somehow, when Janet took the floor. She looked as if she’d like to pile him on her tray and stack him with the cups.

  “But he’s got a job,” I objected. “He’s working overtime. He’ll pay.”

  “Pay!” brayed Janet. “You must be joking. He’s already sent the bill back twice. He said it was nothing to do with him at all and that he signed the form in a state of shock and under pressure, without even understanding what it meant.”

  “Oh, I see …” Perhaps I could get a job and pay myself. Worth it, just to have him back again. I’d be his saviour then — drag him out of hiding, redeem him from the law courts.

  “Look, leave it to me,” I said. “I’ll go to the Burton Bureau in the morning. They’ve got a job still waiting for me more or less. Receptionist in Mayfair. I owe it to Leo, really. I mean I …”

  “Owe it to him? Have you any idea what … ?”

  “Janet, I’d rather you …”

  “I’m sorry, Adrian, but I think she ought to hear.”

  “Yes, but not just at the moment, when she’s …”

  Janet cut him short. “D’you know what he told the nuns, Thea? That he hardly knew you at all. He was simply an odd acquaintance who happened to be around when you fell.”

  Odd acquaintance. Fell. The words crashed like a paperweight against my mouth. Janet hadn’t noticed. She was shaking out the tablecloth as if it were Leo’s limp and mangled bo
dy. Adrian came and sat beside me on the sofa. His whole body seemed to bend and ache towards me. I could see “darlings” seeping out of him, but he had to dam them up again when Janet flounced and frowned.

  “Where … is … he?” I whispered. I tried to get the words out straight, but my mouth was wounded again and all the syllables seemed to stick and jar together. Adrian was almost holding my hand. He had inched his fingers along the sofa until our thumbs were touching, then left them there until Janet turned her back.

  “He’s … er … left the country, Thea.”

  “Run away,” rammed Janet. Words like holiday and birthday sounded almost friendly now, compared with the venom she squeezed into those three short syllables.

  Gone away run away summonses blancmange. Nothing meant anything any more. Words were just strings of letters curdling in my head — halibut left the country odd acquaintance fell … I hadn’t got a lover any more or a religion or a husband. I hadn’t even got a bed or house or a shelter any more. Not even a front door key.

  “Er … did he leave me a … ?”

  “No,” pounced Janet. “He left nothing. No explanation, no apology, no address, no …”

  “So how d’you know he’s gone, then?” Still hope. Still a tiny trickle of hope. He might be at the Classic. Or even at the ballet. People gave him tickets to the ballet.

  “Look,” I shouted. “He may be simply out. He’s often out in the evenings. I did try Otto’s, but that was earlier. He could be back there now. It’s only business, actually. You see, Otto’s a sort of expert on …”

  “Otto — ” Janet lingered over the name as if it were one of the germs her latest cleaner hadn’t reached — “has gone with him.”

  “Oh,” I said. Otto. Odd acquaintance. I tried to think of shoe-boxes in Finchley. Only business. Only Chinese porcelain. They’d probably gone together to inspect a vase. It could even be a phoenix. Perhaps Leo had planned a surprise for me — another feng huang preening its wings in greeting as I walked in tired from Lourdes. I’d spoilt the thing by arriving back too soon, but he wouldn’t have to know that. I could stay at Adrian’s till Saturday and then slink back as if I’d just stepped off the plane and find him and the phoenix risen from the ashes.

  Funny, though, that he’d been in touch with Janet. He’d never met her in his life. Otto didn’t bother with people who knew nothing about Ming celadons or eighteenth-century monochromes or blanc de chine or hua shih. All Janet collected were twopence-off coupons cut out from Woman’s Realm or new superior foot deodorants. I stared at her pursed lips, her podgy hands. She was lying to me, that was it. She was furious about the bill and trying to get her own back. She was probably even jealous because she’d guessed that I had wilder comes than she could. All she wanted was to scare me out of the house.

  “I don’t believe a word of it,” I yelled. “Leo wouldn’t confide in you. You haven’t even met him. He’d never come down here. And Otto even less. Just because you’re …”

  “Hush, Thea.” Adrian inched his fingers a centimetre nearer.

  “Leo phoned, darling. It was the day you went away yourself — the Saturday. The call was very brief. He just said …”

  “Brief? Downright rude, I’d call it, if he didn’t happen to be a friend of yours.” Janet was furious about that “darling” and was trying to pay me back. She made the word “friend” sound like the Gestapo.

  “Janet, I’d rather handle this myself.”

  “She’s got to know sometime, Adrian. You can’t wrap her in cotton wool for ever.”

  So I was “her” now, was I, just to make it clear all further “darlings” would be confiscated. She turned to face me, her huge breasts quivering through the smock. “Leo simply said that he had to go abroad, so you couldn’t live there any longer. No explanations. Nothing. I think he expected Adrian to take you in, there and then. Doesn’t he realise Adrian’s married, Thea? I mean, it’s a bit of a cheek, isn’t it, to …”

  “Look, why don’t we leave it till the morning?” Adrian’s voice sounded grey and almost wounded. One hand grasped my own, the other limped lamely after Janet. He seemed to be physically torn between the two of us. “We’ll all feel better then.”

  Janet totally ignored him. “Well, anyway, Adrian was decent enough to catch the very next train up there and try and sort things out. It was most inconvenient, in fact. We had to cancel a very long-standing …”

  “Janet, I don’t see any reason to …” Adrian was slumped in on himself, spine hunched and flinching like an old man’s. Janet dislodged him from the sofa and sat down there herself.

  “Leo wasn’t in, of course. Or if he was, he wouldn’t open the door. Adrian left a note and phoned at least six times, all through that day and the next. But not a squeak from anyone. So yesterday, up he goes again. This time, I went with him. It’s not just a question of where you’re going to live, Thea — Leo may believe in bigamy, but I’m still a bit old-fashioned, I’m afraid — it’s this whole hospital business. I’m not having Adrian saddled with lawsuits and unpleasantnesses just because your … boyfriend decides to …”

  “He’s not my boyfriend,” I whispered. Odd acquaintance. Wildman. Lover, husband, God. Her hips were oozing into mine, her plump pink thighs edging me into the corner of the sofa. I could smell hair lacquer and Johnson’s baby powder.

  “Well, this time there was someone in, but it wasn’t Leo — oh, no — it was Otto’s brother, a most unsavoury chap called Jochen, wearing a sort of smock thing. He told us Leo and Otto had already left the country, if you please. He was furious with them himself. Otto owed him money and Leo had promised to sell some valuable pictures for him, which had simply vanished without trace. And there the two of them were, hitch-hiking to Kashmir, would you believe it.”

  “Kashmir,” I whispered, trying out the word. It was simply a hole, a gash, a cry of pain. Words were meaning less and less every minute. I didn’t even know where Kashmir was, except it was far too far. Somewhere strange and foreign and difficult, without a happy ending. So it was nothing to do with Chinese porcelain or shoe-boxes in Finchley. Nothing to do with business. More like an elopement or a tryst. I could see Otto bending over Leo’s thighs in a lay-by off the autoroute. Other words were slicing through my brain — obscene, forbidden words — consummation, honeymoon.

  The coffee and the Camembert were curdling with Kashmir in my stomach. I was car-sick as I sped along the motorways, sobbing and retching in the passenger seat, not daring to look round. If I squinted into the driving mirror, I could see Leo and Otto tangled up together in the back, one heaving shape beneath the car rug.

  “Please,” I said. “I’d like to go to bed.”

  Janet was double wrapping the last three Crawford’s biscuits. They would probably stretch to Adrian’s lunch tomorrow, with half a gherkin and the cheese rinds.

  “Bed?” she winced. She made it sound obscene. I hadn’t said bed with Adrian, for heaven’s sake. They had a spare room at the back where all their guests were segregated. Adrian and I had used it as a lumber room. We’d even screwed there sometimes, on the floorboards.

  I dared not think of screwing. It reminded me of Leo — his long, thin, open, thrusting legs, and Otto underneath them. I turned to Adrian. Janet had pushed a tiny brush-and-pan set into his hands. He was meant to be clearing the crumbs off the table with it, but he was so distressed, he was missing most of them. I closed my eyes. Leo and Otto had arrived in Istanbul and were standing thigh to thigh in a small sleazy bathroom. Otto took his shaving brush and teased it down Leo’s chin, across his chest, down further to his …

  “I don’t feel well,” I faltered. “I must lie down.”

  Adrian stopped sweeping. “Thea …” he murmured. I could see a “darling” sneaking out, but he swept it strictly up again. “You see, Janet thought it might be more … well … convenient if you …” His voice tailed off. The crumbs fell on the floor.

  “Yes?” I prompted. I fixed my gaze unflinchingly
on the pupil of his left eye and challenged him and Janet to turn me out. It’s a trick I learnt with dogs. It intimidates even fierce Alsatians. Karma’s the only dog it’s never worked with. I wondered what they’d done with him. You can’t take half an Afghan hound to Kashmir. I could hear him howling in my head.

  Adrian had dropped the brush and was twisting his thumbs together the way he does when he has to tell a boy he’s been expelled. I never heard what Janet thought, what chill little guest-house or cosy prison cell she’d booked for me, as far away from Twickenham as possible.

  “Look, Jan,” he whispered. “She’d better stay here. Please. Just tonight. She’s shocked.”

  Oh, so it was Jan, now, was it. He’d be darlinging her next, snuggling up to those double-bolster breasts while I shivered in the spare room, and Leo and Otto coupled in the back of a lorry speeding towards the border, one coat flung over their two panting bodies …

  Adrian was still whispering. He’d never learnt to do it softly enough. “You take her up, Jan. She looks awful.”

  Janet marched me into the spare room which was cold and so square-rule tidy, it seemed to recoil from me in distaste. Everything was green and slippery. There was a green satin bedspread and a matching pond-green frill concealing the legs of the dressing-table. The walls were shiny and the ceiling glared. Even the Kleenex were green, those fancy-packaged ones meant only for admiring, not for weeping into. There was a fringed shade on the bedside light, the colour of a sick weeping willow, and green crocheted doilies smirking on the dressing-table. Everywhere I looked, Leo and Otto were whispering in comers, snuggling under blankets, slipping off their clothes. I held on to the wardrobe and tried to find my way back from Kashmir. It was cold and dark and lonely on the roads.

  Janet flicked a non-existent speck of dust from the bedside table and turned the counterpane down, as if she feared I might contaminate it. I undressed in front of her. My legs were longer than hers and at least I had a waist. If she could parade her Devon-cream complexion at any hour of the day or night, and point those vast tits at me across the table, then it was time I answered back. Leo liked small breasts. More like a man, I suppose. I could see his hands caressing Otto’s nipples. I stood there naked while Janet pursed her lips and stared at a picture of a vase (green) of flowers (mauve) which hung just above the bed.