A Rival Creation

by Marika Cobbold

  ‘I thought it was all those biscuits you kept eating.’ Ted’s voice came muffled. ‘All those long walks I could never join you on. That’s when you were… seeing that boy?’

  Anita nodded. ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered, taking another step closer, holding out her hand again. Ted remained still. She touched his shoulder lightly. ‘I’m keeping the baby. My parents are going to help look after him, provided I stay on and finish my A-levels.’ With a sudden flush of pride she added, ‘My projection is two As and a B.’ She lowered her eyes. ‘They’ve agreed to me seeing Paul too. It’s all worked out really well for us.’

  ‘I should have seen through it. That phoney accent for a start. You kept losing it. Your story was full of holes.’ Ted looked up at her, his eyes prickling with held-back tears. ‘You’re right, I wanted nothing more than to be deceived, to be confirmed in all my beliefs and prejudices. Veena the refugee was as much my creation as yours.’ He got up clumsily from the steps and walked, head bent, into the vestry.

  ‘Ted, don’t leave like that,’ Anita called after him, but he closed the door and turned the key in the lock.

  Liberty stretched in her upholstered desk chair, pushing the back of her head against the padded head-rest. Love was truly the opium of womankind. Nowadays when she thought of Hemingway shooting himself, she wondered if he would have gone through with it if he had had a love like hers. Then again, men were great pigeon-holers, stashing away the different components of their existence into the neat little compartments that made up their beings. With women it was messier. Women’s minds and hearts were like an intricate construction of sluices and canals, each flowing into the other. Love invariably flooded the whole system. Now was that bad or good? She stretched out her legs in front of her, pointing and flexing her feet. ‘Good toes and naughty toes,’ she crooned in the carefully enunciated tones of Miss Dubois, her childhood dance teacher. ‘Good toes and naughty toes.’

  Every evening other than Wednesday this week, Oscar had come over on his way home from work. He had not been able to stay very long, just long enough for them to make love and talk a little. Oscar was unusual amongst the men she had known in that he seemed actually to enjoy conversation. He liked to find out what she thought about things and why.

  ‘I don’t want to be sexist or anything,’ she had said to him the other night, ‘but in my experience most men view conversation rather like the application of deodorant; something they do to keep the peace, although they can’t for the life of them see what all the fuss is about.’

  Each evening after he had gone she would return for a little while to the bed, lying down on his side, her arms round the pillow where his head had been just minutes earlier, going over each word he had said, trying to recapture each caress and the expression on his face when they made love.

  Today, like every day for the last week or so, she was working on the translation of a two-part fantasy novel for teenagers, work rejected by a fellow translator as too much for the tight dead-line. It had been offered to Liberty with a bonus payment if it was finished by the second week in January. Liberty thought you can get through an awful lot of work if you’re broke enough, so she worked hard in five-hour stints with only a short break for lunch. The moment seven o’clock came though, she would switch off the computer and begin her wait for Oscar.

  She could not concentrate on reading or even on television. Always given to dreaming, both in her sleep and when wide awake in the middle of the day, she dreamed away the waiting time instead, drifting round the rooms, polishing and polishing again, every piece of wooden furniture in the house until it shone, until she could see the outline of her face in the wooden surfaces and the rooms smelt of beeswax. Always mindful of her grandmother’s advice, ‘As long as your good furniture is polished and there are flowers in every room, there’s no need to go on cleaning,’ she gave no time to tidying or washing floors, but she bought flowers from the supermarket, and found some in the garden where white hydrangeas still flowered amongst dying leaves.

  She finished a chapter just as the old kitchen wall clock struck seven and, setting the computer to Print, she got up to make herself a cup of tea before sitting down again to write to Johnny. She could see that it was a letter daubed with happiness, but she did not tell Johnny the reason for it, he would only worry about her getting hurt again. She licked the stamp and was about to stick it down when the doorbell rang, one short signal. She jumped up from the chair and hurried to the front door. As she opened it, a gust of icy wind almost blew her off her feet.

  ‘Oscar,’ she put her hand out and pulled him inside, burying her face in his thick coat, teasing herself by putting off the moment when she could look up at him.

  ‘Hey,’ Oscar pushed her out to arm’s length. ‘Is everything all right?’

  She smiled. ‘You know you’re so gorgeous that if I had invented you, you wouldn’t be believed.’

  Oscar was taking his coat and scarf off, but now he turned back to her with a surprised look in his blue eyes.

  ‘Well let’s not argue about it,’ Liberty said, standing on tip-toe to kiss him.

  In the middle of their love-making that evening, there was music. Liberty opened her eyes. That was not supposed to happen in life, only in bad films. She closed her eyes again, clasping Oscar’s back and burying her face in his shoulder.

  ‘Ding Dong Merrily on High, In Heav’n the Bells are Ringing. Ding Dong…’

  Oscar relaxed his grip round her waist. ‘Glor or or or or or or ia, Hosanna in Excelsis.’

  That was it! They both sat up, misty-eyed, hair tumbled.

  ‘Aah a hahaha aah, Aah a hahahahaha…’ the song rose into the night sky outside the open bedroom window.

  ‘Carol singers.’ Liberty scrambled from the bed, and pulled on jeans and a sweatshirt. ‘You wait here,’ she whispered before hurrying downstairs.

  The carol singers were hammering away on ‘We Three Kings’ when Liberty opened the front door, dishevelled but smiling. ‘Sherry?’ she called to them. ‘I’m sure you’d like some sherry.’

  The singers, led by Neville Pyke and a self-conscious looking Ted Brain, crowded into the hall where Liberty had hastily assembled every glass she owned and a full bottle. She disappeared out to the kitchen to find some juice for the three children in the choir and as she came back, she stopped in the hallway to look with satisfaction at the singers that crowded in her hall, red-cheeked and wrapped up against the cold December night.

  ‘This is so nice,’ she muttered as she walked around pouring drinks, ‘so very nice.’ She thought of Oscar waiting for her upstairs like a half unwrapped present and she gave a little shudder of excitement. It was moments like these that made life worth the effort.

  ‘Oh dear,’ Neville peered at her. ‘We’ve let the cold in, haven’t we?’

  Liberty just shook her head and smiled. The glasses were empty and the singers donned their gloves and hats and bustled off once more into the night, singing ‘Jingle Bells’ as they went. Liberty stayed a moment in the doorway looking after them, before locking the door and hurrying back upstairs to Oscar.

  Village Diary

  Tollymead: The carol singing around the village last week was a great success with everyone, singers and householders alike, having an excellent time raising £165 towards the minibus. Miss Scott had to rush back to London as a burst pipe flooded her Knightsbridge mews house, but Pat Simpson, who is also acting as treasurer for the Minibus Fund, kindly took over the arrangements.

  So, the unkind person who suggested there was more community spirit in the Serbo-Croat district of New York than in Tollymead can go eat his hat.

  When does pornography become art, and vice versa? The question is vexing the artistic community (yes, there is one) in Tollymead, as well as chucking a spanner in the workings of true love. Oliver Bliss was so pleased with his portrait of his fiancée, Laura Brown, that he decided to exhibit it at the forthcoming Christmas Bazaar and Art Exhibition. However, Laura, who p
osed with little else than her long hair and a fishtail constructed from plain and coloured tin foil – the kind they wrap those little chocolate sardines in – feels the painting is too revealing and should not be seen in public.

  Personally I feel that as the painting is quite beautiful, it should be exhibited, but then again, I never understood all the fuss about Sharon Stone parting her knees during a police interview when her habit of killing people seemed so much more offensive.

  Twenty-four

  On the twelfth day of Christmas, Liberty sat in Evelyn’s kitchen drinking coffee from a chipped butterfly-painted mug. The January sun came straight and low through the window, showing up the dirt on the leaded panes and forming a pattern on the Formica table.

  ‘I can’t stand it,’ Evelyn complained. ‘Kindness is spreading like a damn rash through the place; nothing is sacred. The other day I was coming back from town and this woman, a complete stranger although she said she knew me, rushed up and offered to help me carry my shopping inside. It was like some terrible scene from an Australian soap opera.’

  Liberty laughed. ‘So village spirit is rising like the good ole phoenix from the ashes?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Evelyn snapped, taking a noisy gulp of coffee. ‘What I do want to know is, do I look decrepit?’

  ‘No, of course not,’ Liberty said, ‘but it’s nice to be helped.’

  ‘It’s only nice when you know you don’t need it. Of course I blame this blasted competition. I can’t think what Oscar can have been thinking of.’ She looked sternly at Liberty. ‘Let me rephrase that. I know exactly what he has been thinking of… and you can stop smirking, he’s not yours.’ She reached across the table and put her hand over Liberty’s. ‘My dear child, you do understand he isn’t yours?’

  ‘I spent Christmas on my own, didn’t I?’ Liberty answered, sounding even to herself like a cross child. ‘Well, not completely on my own. I had Hamish. It wasn’t much fun actually. The people I loved and liked were not there and I was left with someone I love but can’t stand.’

  ‘Oh, your father isn’t that bad. How is he anyway?’

  Liberty thought for a moment. ‘You could say that he’s searching for his true self, which in his case could take up the rest of his life. He’s retiring at the end of the summer term and he’s devastated. He’s like Mr Chips on speed. Without Tollymead Manor he’s nothing, or that’s what he suspects. I’ve tried to make him take up some hobby, but he always flits from interest to interest, the only thing that’s been solid is his teaching. He’s quite a good amateur artist, so I encouraged him to take part in the Christmas Bazaar Art Exhibition. I even put a picture in myself. It wasn’t very good, but his was bought.’

  ‘I know, nice water-colour of the bridge. So which was yours? I don’t remember seeing it.’

  ‘Oh, quite a big canvas with an awful lot of little people doing different things and in the centre an old man seated at a table with a huge matchstick model of Winchester Cathedral in front of him.’

  ‘Oh, that one.’

  ‘It didn’t sell.’

  ‘No, I expect it didn’t.’

  ‘It was wrong to imagine you can slip out of one passion and into another like a snake changing skins.’

  ‘Well I don’t know,’ Evelyn said. ‘Some great writers have become great painters.’

  ‘Ah, but only when they were great writers already, that’s the snag.’ She sat back in the chair and with a sigh undid the top button of her black jeans. ‘I’m getting fat.’

  ‘Oh my dear girl, you’re pregnant.’

  Liberty smiled. ‘Nice thought, but I’m not. It’s just that I’m happier. Happiness makes me hungry.’

  Evelyn had a compassionate look in her eyes when she said, ‘And to think that you were always such a scrawny little thing. You’ve got this round face, so one forgets.’

  Liberty was thinking of Oscar. He was thin – strong but thin. There was something touching about his body, just as Johnnie’s had seemed to her infinitely touching, when he had hovered on the brink of adulthood, tall, with huge feet but a child’s face. With Oscar it was the other way, a body full of power, hovering on the brink of decline; the beginnings of a tummy, the muscular arms that softened in repose, the slight thickening of the jawline.

  ‘And what about when Victoria finds out?’

  ‘She won’t.’

  ‘I have no time for that girl, but I don’t approve of adultery.’

  ‘I know,’ Liberty sighed. ‘I do agree with you in principle, it’s just that some of my best relationships have been adulterous.’ She looked into Evelyn’s eyes that were sad and disapproving both at once. ‘I’m sorry,’ she mumbled. ‘I didn’t mean to be flippant.’ She looked down at her hands, scratching at the scar. Then she looked up again. ‘Oh Evelyn, what do you want me to do? Flee the country from some channel port under cover of darkness, my golden curls hidden beneath an unbecoming scarf, one of those with a pattern of stirrups all over it to add to my sufferings, my sacrifice misunderstood by everyone due to a complete and selfless absence of any form of explanation?’

  ‘You don’t need me to tell you what would be right,’ Evelyn said. ‘You know very well.’

  Liberty threw herself back in the chair as if Evelyn had slapped her face. ‘No, no I don’t know and I won’t do it, whatever it is. No-one can ask me that.’

  Liberty had not seen Oscar since Christmas Eve. He and Victoria had gone skiing, as they did each winter, and Liberty had got a postcard with a picture of snow-covered Alps and a small chapel with a tall spire surrounded by pine trees in the foreground. There was not much scope for intimacies on a postcard, but sometimes at night she would look at it and wonder if all those erect images of Alps and trees and church spires carried a special message to her.

  When Oscar did come, the first evening he was back, she asked him, making him laugh before he’d even had time to remove his coat.

  ‘I can’t say, my darling, that I thought of it in those terms.’ He put his arms round her and pulled her close. ‘But now you mention it, it was most probably subconscious. Very Freudian indeed.’

  Liberty was laughing too, but she was pressing so close to him it was as if she was trying to disappear into him like a disembodied soul into a new body.

  In bed, sitting with her back against Oscar’s arm she asked, ‘Why did you marry Victoria? Why did you wait so long and then marry the wrong woman?’

  Oscar stared out at the room in silence and finally he said, ‘I needed someone to fall in love with.’ He kissed the top of Liberty’s head and she could feel his breath on her hair.

  ‘Victoria always looked as if she might be everything you are but she is not. Everyone told me what a lucky dog I was and there wasn’t a man I knew who wasn’t half in love with her. That sort of thing is very seductive.’

  ‘It can’t be easy being Victoria. I mean apart from me sleeping with her husband, she walks through life wrapped up all wrong. I like Belgian chocolates but if I found some inside a box from Tiffany’s, I’d be disappointed. It doesn’t make the chocolate any less delicious.’

  ‘You’re kinder than I am,’ Oscar said.

  ‘No I’m not. I’m just used to seeing the other person’s point of view. That’s why I’m no good at arguing and why I should have been a good writer. By the time I get a chance to put my views across, I’ve already come round to the other person’s way of thinking.’ She paused. ‘Do you think I’m self-centred?’

  Oscar turned round, one leg on either side of her hips, facing her. ‘Yes, yes I do.’

  ‘Oh. Right.’

  ‘But I forgive you.’

  ‘I’d forgive myself that and much more besides if I was a good writer.’

  ‘Well I forgive you because you’re so wonderful in bed.’ He bent down and kissed her.

  ‘“Oscar kissed her expertly but tenderly, his firm lips covering hers,”’ she smirked.

  ‘Piss off.’ Oscar straightened up. Suddenly serious, he sa
id, ‘We can’t go on like this you know.’

  ‘“Liberty steeled herself against what was to come, her small pointed chin set.”’

  He looked at her unsmiling. ‘I want us to be together all the time, not just in secretive little snatches, however delightful those snatches are.’

  Liberty looked into his eyes and said only half joking, ‘Let’s run away to a crofter’s cottage in the Hebrides and live for each other, two giant Valiums in each other’s troubled lives.’

  Oscar let go of her shoulders. ‘Is that how you see me, like a giant tranquillizer?’

  Liberty smiled sweetly up at him. ‘That’s right; a Valium with a willy.’

  ‘Bloody charming.’

  Liberty kept looking into his eyes that seemed a darker shade of blue all of a sudden.

  ‘You know it’s not true,’ she said, stroking his hair away from his forehead. ‘After I stopped writing, before you loved me, my life was like a bad painting: the kind in which you find a landscape and you know it’s meant to be of hills and valleys and shades and light, but all you can actually see is flat. When I was writing everything had a point, even if it was just the point of being put into words. Every sight and sound was flavoursome and full of possibilities. I could cut and paste and polish before putting them back together again in shapes that pleased me. It didn’t make me see the meaning of life, but it stopped me worrying about there being none. Your love has given that back to me.’ She shook him gently by the shoulders. ‘Do you understand that you’ve given shape and substance to the flat landscape that was my life?’

  The doorbell rang, once, twice, and with a sigh Liberty slipped off the bed and, throwing on a long sweater, ran downstairs. Opening the door on the chain she asked, ‘Who is it?’