He slapped his thigh. ‘Got you!’
Outside the window the clock chimed again. Sitting there amongst the toys I thought: Why did you never do this with me properly? At the proper time?
‘Your turn,’ he said. ‘Stop day-dreaming.’
I pulled out a stick. My throat felt tight and there was an ache in my chest.
‘Whoops!’ he cried. ‘Bad luck.’
I felt a hand slide around my waist. The fingers squeezed me. He shifted himself nearer me, so our sides were touching.
‘Silly game, isn’t it,’ he said.
I moved back, disentangling myself. ‘I must go.’
‘But we haven’t finished.’ He looked at me, his face pink from bending over the game.
I climbed to my feet. ‘Mum’ll be worried.’
‘Come on, you’re a big girl now.’ He held up his hand. ‘Come on, sit down.’
‘No.’
He winked. ‘Strict, is she?’
I shrugged. He climbed to his feet and stood beside me. We were the same height.
‘What about a kiss then?’
I looked into his eyes. Then his face loomed closer. I moved my head; his lips brushed my cheek. I felt them, warm and wet. I bent down and picked up my handbag. My hands were shaking.
‘Must go,’ I said, my voice light.
He probably blamed my reluctance on my age. He saw me to the door, his hand resting on my hip. ‘Can I see you home?’
‘No.’ I paused. ‘I mean, no thanks.’
He opened the door. ‘I’m leaving tomorrow, but I’ll be back next month. Know what I’d love to do?’
‘What?’
‘Take you down to the pier. Never been to the pier. Eat ice-creams.’ He squeezed my waist, and kissed my cheek. ‘Know something?’
‘What?’ I whispered.
‘You make me feel years younger.’ He paused. ‘Will you come?’
I nodded. ‘OK,’ I said.
He buttoned me into my coat, and smoothed down the collar. He stroked my hair. ‘You’re a lovely girl,’ he murmured. ‘Tell your Mum to keep you locked up. Say I said so.’
I couldn’t bear to wait at the lift, so I made for the stairs. As I went he called: ‘Tell her it’s my fault you’re late, that you’re a naughty girl.’ His voice grew fainter, ‘Tell her I’m the one to blame.’
Six weeks took an age to pass. I had looked at the ledger in Reception; he was booked for 15 April.
Donna was sleeping better, but for the first time in my life I slept badly. I had such strong dreams they woke me up. I would lie there next to her calm face and gaze at the orange light that filtered down from the street. I had put his piece of paper under my pile of sweaters. That was all I had of him, so far. I said nothing to my Mum.
On 15 April Eddie knocked on the bathroom door.
‘You’re planning to stay there all day?’
I was washing my hair. ‘Go away!’ I shouted.
At seven o’clock prompt I was on station in the Coffee Shop. They had redecorated it on a medieval theme and I wore a wench’s costume. It pinched.
Time dragged. Eight … eight fourteen … Each time I looked at my watch only a minute had passed.
Nine thirty. The doors swung open. It wasn’t him. Business was slow that night; the place was nearly empty.
Ten thirty. The last customer left.
Eleven …
At eleven thirty I closed up and took the cash to Dennis in Reception.
‘Not got a smile for me?’
I ignored him and went home.
When I got back Mum was watching the midnight movie. I was going to my room but she called: ‘Had a flutter today.’
I nodded, but she turned.
‘Don’t you want to see what I’ve bought?’ She reached down and passed me a carrier-bag. ‘Put it on Lucky Boy and he won, so I went mad at Ramsdens.’
I stared at her. ‘Ramsdens?’
‘Go on. Look. It’s for little Donna.’
I went over, opened the carrier-bag and took out a huge blue teddy bear.
‘Cost a bomb,’ she said, ‘but what the hell.’
Next day I made inquiries at Reception. He’d checked in, they said, during the afternoon as usual. But then he had come back at six and checked out again.
Later I went to Ramsdens and asked if the Merriworld representative had visited the day before.
The girl thought for a moment, then nodded. ‘That’s right – Jim.’ She paused to scratch her ear-lobe. ‘Sunny Jim.’
‘So he came?’
She pursed her lips. ‘Came and went.’
‘What do you mean?’
She looked at me. ‘What’s it to you?’
‘Nothing.’
She shrugged. ‘Dunno what got into him. Left in a hurry.’
He had seen Mum. He’d seen her buying the bloody teddy bear.
He didn’t come back. Not once he knew she was in Brighton. At Ramsdens, six weeks later, there was a new rep called Terry. I checked up. Not that I had much hope; after all, he had scarpered once before.
But Donna smiled. It wasn’t because of the teddy; she was too young to appreciate that, though Mum would like to believe it.
And it wasn’t wind, I could tell. It was me. She smiled at me.
• The Wrong Side •
THEY WERE STUCK behind two French lorries, an English caravan and one of those grey corrugated Citroëns you always get stuck behind. Exhaust fumes blew around their windscreen. It was hot. They had the windows open and Bach playing, telling them about order and patience.
‘Well?’ Leonard asked, at the wheel. He steered out a little, so she could look.
‘Yes, fine,’ she started. ‘No.’
Leonard swerved back into line.
‘Sorry,’ she said.
Bach stopped; with a click the machine stuck out its tongue.
‘Other side?’ she asked, taking out the cassette.
‘We’ve just had it.’
‘Ah.’ She leaned to the side, peering out. ‘Try again.’
He drew out.
‘Now!’ she said.
He changed gear; they roared past the Citroën, the caravan and two lorries. She gradually unclenched. Years ago, on another holiday, Leonard had compared French roads to chronic catarrh: ‘That slow build-up of phlegm, then a good cough and a spit and you’re clear, ah but it’s only temporary.’
They were driving south. They had left behind those drab, straight towns lined with telegraph poles. Now the farmhouses looked crumbly and baked. On the walls, barely visible, were faded ads for SUZE. They were passing the first fields of sunflowers; even today they lifted her heart. Their dark discs were all turned the way that she and Leonard were going. ‘And half the United Kingdom,’ he said, ‘is going too.’
They slowed down behind a lorry heaped with tyres. Leonard leant her way.
‘Now!’ she said.
He swerved out. She felt a frisson of power, being in the passenger seat. For that split second he needed her. They shared a fear for their lives. One of the few things, it seemed, that remained for them to share.
A worse fear was that at some point he would put this into words. It was not a fact until he did so. To herself she could pretend it did not exist – to herself she could pretend anything. (Just another of the traits he found so irritating.)
‘Where after Doué?’ He changed down.
They were driving through some suburbs. DOUÉ said the sign. SA PISCINE. SES EGLISES. She scrabbled for the map, which had fallen to the floor. One holiday they had applied this criterion to England, noting the passing sights. ‘Sa Tesco monumentale’, ‘ses car-parques multi-storeys’, with the children mute in the rear seat. It had lasted from Mill Hill to Rugby.
‘Doué … Doué …’
Anxiety made her flustered. She had folded the map wrong, of course. Red N roads to Rouen, to Travaine, ran in all directions like bloodveins.
‘… Hang on …’
They had reached the
centre of town. Leonard pulled up. Behind, a car hooted. He jerked forward, drove the car around the corner, and stopped. He took the map from her and shook it out, slapping it with his hand. It was ridiculous, of course, that the driver should have to do the map-reading. In Leonard’s place she would be annoyed too. Doué. Ses anglais chauds et irrités.
‘Thoars. We go to Thoars.’ He kept his finger on the map, like a schoolmaster, as he passed it to her.
They drove out of Doué. Once, long ago, he had found her map confusions endearing. That holiday in England, the mad, leisured spiral of their conversation, the married inconsequence of it. Rugby. Ses anglais heureux. Here in France, as they drove down the wrong side of the road, their children having grown up and vacated the rear seats, she thought how subtly the right side changes to the wrong. A process, indeed, that could take twenty-three years of marriage and be acknowledged by neither of them. Once upon a time her optimism had cheered him. Once he had compared it to sap, moving up and warming his heart. ‘You call a bottle half-empty,’ she had said to him once, ‘and I call it half-full.’ He shook his head. ‘You, my dear, call it three-quarters full.’
At some point his word for this charming trait had changed. Perhaps, for fairness’ sake, she should not call it the wrong side – just the other side, like a photograph slowly turning back into a negative, the blacks turning to white and the whites to black. Now he called it ‘fudging’ or ‘fooling herself’ and implied that such anxious brightness was less fetching in a woman of forty-three. Which increased it, of course.
Anxiety was the taste of her days. Here, on holiday with the gourmet Leonard, it was anxiety that the restaurants should be neither too full, too empty, nor too populated with the English. That her reactions should be as he predicted, yet not predictably dull. That, when they picnicked, the mosquito should bite not Leonard but herself. She never paused to consider the restaurant itself, or whether the bite hurt. She had not thought of this for years, what with Leonard and the children. Which of course had made her duller. Sometimes she felt eroded into a shell of anxious acquiescence. Hollow, and forty-three, and getting fat.
Leonard had not put on any weight. He was tall and gaunt, with the drained good looks that handsome men achieve beyond their prime. Giscard had just been defeated in the elections; Leonard had the same air of ruined distinction. In his case, though, it was not through dealing in politics but in second-hand books.
She looked at his profile. He drove efficiently. Their car was a white Rover. In England he enjoyed the deference of short-sighted motorists who mistook them for a police car; it made overtaking so easy. Here in France, of course, this did not work. They were taking the D routes to avoid, with limited success, the lorries and the English. They were travelling down to the Lot valley, the one further south than the Dordogne, to avoid the English too. Half London, he said, was in the Dordogne now, its villages full of Volvo station-wagons and children with bad manners and Rubik cubes. He reacted to British cars as if discovering a slug in the salad of France. His dread was to enter some wayside café and find it full of puce rucksacks and Birmingham accents. She had asked: ‘What about them finding it full of us?’
Like herself – one day she might dare tell him – like herself the English were on the wrong side. An English car driving too fast was foolishly reckless and insensitive to rural calme; a French car doing the same just displayed Gallic verve. Mysteriously, French caravans were OK; he was charmed by such dedication to la vie urbaine en plein air. Identical English caravans, however, were just suburban. She felt some sympathy for her fellow Brits; besides, like them, her French was not as good as Leonard’s.
‘Now!’ she said from her position of power. Leonard overtook the van. It was midday. Their white bonnet dazzled her. She kept her finger on the map and said: ‘We’re getting near the crease.’
‘Tecreese? Where’s that?’
Had he forgotten? ‘The crease in the map.’
After all, it was five years since they had been to France. During holidays they had always stopped, for a celebratory drink or picnic, at the place halfway down France where the map folded, like travellers pausing at the equator. On their old Michelin map this could be, depending on the route south, just below Mirebeau, Chatellerault, or several other places she had now forgotten. After the crease one felt it was downhill all the way. Leonard had once suggested that the local départements should install morale-boosting placards: VOUS AVEZ PASSEZ LE FOLD in five languages.
‘Ah,’ he said. ‘You mean it’s time for lunch.’
They had already bought the picnic; the car smelt of ripening cheese and warm upholstery. She started watching out, as inevitably the road became verged with hypermarkets called Monsieur Meuble.
‘Now,’ she said. Then as he slowed down: ‘Perhaps not.’ Everyone dithered over picnic sites, she had once pointed out with spirit. Finally, miles further south than the fold, they found a canal. It was lined with poplar trees which in England depressed Leonard, reminding him of being bullied on the school rugby field, but which he liked in France, being so French. They drove over a bridge, which meant they could picnic on the other side from the road. There was nobody else about.
Leonard stopped the car. They opened the boot and unpacked the old tartan picnic rug. Leonard searched in the dashboard for the corkscrew. She laid things out. Behind them was a bush; under it she caught sight of scrumpled rubbish and old Evian bottles. She willed him not to notice them – at least not until it was time to leave. Holidays made her so tense. There was this pressure for everything to be all right. Whereas, as she knew, happiness could not be ordered on time. It swept over her at the least expected moment – not during the candlelit dinner but after it, with the striplight glaring, when they bumped into each other with some joke, and damp tea-towels. When was the last time that she and Leonard had been happy? When had she not been anxious?
They spread out the rug and sat down. Leonard had just uncorked the Corbières when a car stopped on the other side of the canal. She felt Leonard straighten beside her. A man, woman and two children climbed out and began to set up their picnic on the opposite bank.
After a pause Leonard said: ‘We must move.’
‘We can’t. We’ve just got everything out.’ Across the water the children called to each other in high London whines. ‘Anyway, it would look rude.’
They did not move. They unwrapped the pâté and ate in silence. They were sitting in the shade of the poplar. Opposite, the English family sat in the sunlight. She did not resent them. Across the water she heard the man, quite clearly, tell the little boy not to put his fingers in the yoghurt. Munching her quiche, she envied them the simple complications of their lives. She envied that era when her own children were small; when she had actually complained about being needed too much by all three of them. Once, years ago, they had gone camping. Leonard had sunbathed on the new lilo they had bought and for one whole afternoon had walked around with a sticker on his back saying DO NOT OVER-INFLATE. In the end the children had told him, spluttering with giggles. In those days she had not been afraid of his reaction.
Across the water the children laughed, and then started squabbling. Oh, those days when the children were young, when their future lay ahead, when anything was possible. She thought of Anthea and John. Leonard found them both deeply dull, his own children.
Last year, driving home from a duty visit to John, he had said: ‘One has to admire the logic. Our son’s become a woman and our daughter’s become a man.’ There was a cruel truth in this but surely a father shouldn’t say it, summing them up so neatly, like tying a parcel. Ever since then she had seen John as – well – pale and pliable. Her son was a buyer for ladies’ shoes and lived in Northampton. He lived with his fiancée Cath – Leonard said that they even managed not to do this racily. She was a solid girl who wore cardigans – Crimplene Cath, Leonard called her. She sat on John’s knee for hours, fiddling with his hair. The only time they showed signs of life was when she
read their horoscopes from the Daily Express.
Anthea worked as a blacksmith in Dorking. To be exact, an assistant blacksmith which, Leonard said, even denied his daughter the fleeting fame of being featured in a Sunday supplement. The forge never saw a horse. It turned out lamp brackets and toasting forks and wrought-iron gates for the sort of house Leonard called Hendon Hacienda. Anthea was large and gruff and never seemed to have a boyfriend, and said what she meant.
By late afternoon they had reached the Périgord, région gastronomique. The light was softer now and the countryside itself seemed sunk into repletion. Leonard, a convert to la nouvelle cuisine, had inspected his Gault Millau guide and planned stops for tonight’s and tomorrow’s meals. She still felt full from the picnic but she knew she would eat a heavy meal tonight, filling herself. Tomorrow they were going to the most acclaimed restaurant for hundreds of miles, Le Beau Rivage. Eating out used to be a shared celebration, but in recent years the pleasure had drained from it … him testing, her tense. The less they had to say, the more elaborately they ate.
Billboards stood beside the road. ICI! PTÉ DE FOIS GRAS. Giant wooden geese cast their shadow upon prefabricated huts with their wayside car parks. Poor geese, force-fed. Stuffed and stuffed, unable to escape. Leonard and she had a drink in a café, before dinner. She shuffled through the postcard stand. Amongst the slyly captioned pigs, the costumed peasants and the Dordogne rustics drinking wine out of soup bowls there was a photo of a goose, jammed by the neck in a wooden box.
She gazed at it. ‘I won’t eat pâté again. Darling, it’s so cruel. Look they’ve even got a postcard of it.’
‘Their unsentimentality,’ he said, ‘is refreshing. Look over there.’ He gestured out of the window. Outside, at the crossroads, signs pointed in all directions including ABATTOIR.
‘Ugh. Not before supper.’
‘Oh Anna, fudging again.’ He sipped his kir. ‘My dear old Anna. Don’t you ever think?’
She wanted not to think. Then she would realize how frightened she was.
The fear had been growing for months. It was worse now he had decided to take her alone on holiday, like this. Usually they shared a villa with Tim and Margot, or she accompanied him on buying trips around Britain and visited her nieces and long-lost families who once lived next door. It was more than the routine anxiety – she had grown used to that. It was fear – fear that he had brought her here to talk.
Smile Page 2