Smile

by Deborah Moggach

  And I haven’t quite got him. Oh yes, I’ve got this man screwing on the last leg, leaning back on his haunches, with a grunt, to rub his eye. We make love with panic, to catch up with lost time. There’s so much catching-up to do, it seems such a monumental task. But he won’t show me where to begin.

  All those years that Diana and his daughters had him. All those Sunday lunches, all those squabbles about who’s watching what on the TV, all those incomprehensible family jokes … The eleven thousand nights, I’ve worked it out, that Diana shared his bed.

  He doesn’t suspect me of being jealous. I don’t suppose anyone does. It’s a part of my love, it mingles with it like poisoned air. I’m jealous of Diana, you see … I can admit it on the page. I envy her the past.

  ‘So chic,’ says Stephanie, running her finger over the white table. ‘They’ll be putting you in House and Garden.’

  We have brown paper napkins. Mine is shredded in my lap. I’m rolling it into little pellets, like rabbit droppings. I do like Stephanie. We’ve met before, in a pub. She’s spirited and sharp. It’s sad that we’ll never be able to be friends.

  ‘I like the blinds,’ she says. ‘Where did you get them?’

  We tell her. None of us is interested. We’ve finished the duck. Shall I tell you what we’ve been talking about so far? The flat. Whether we have use of the garden (we don’t). Where we bought the sofa. Carefully, politely, we have talked around objects. God, we’re polite. But it’s easier to make a joke about the gays downstairs than approach the subject of ourselves.

  Robert is waiting for her to go. Then he’ll have another scotch. It’s so sad, that it’ll be a relief when his daughter leaves. So easy for us, once she’s gone.

  Stephanie has a lively face; bright eyes under a thick fringe. I can imagine her at twelve; I don’t believe she’s changed much. I roll the pellets. Robert will stick this through. I won’t.

  I clear my throat. After all, it’s hardly adventurous. ‘Robert says you always went to the Isle of Wight for your holidays.’

  ‘That’s right,’ she says.

  ‘I found a photo – you and Sophie sitting on a dinosaur.’

  She leans forward, smiling. ‘Let’s have a look.’

  I get up and fetch it from the drawer. It’s amongst Robert’s bags of nails – a buff envelope of snaps. Album rejects, odds and ends. I asked him about this one; he told me about the Isle of Wight but not enough, never enough.

  Stephanie takes it, pushing back her fringe. ‘That place!’ For the first time her face looks open and eager. She’s off her guard. ‘Monster Park. We’d drag Mum and Dad there day after day. We’d make them promise, didn’t we, Dad?’

  Robert nods.

  ‘You could climb all over the dinosaurs,’ she laughs. ‘Nobody stopped you. You could climb up their tails and slide down their necks.’ She inspects the photo. ‘Their backs were smooth as glass from all the children’s bottoms.’ She looks up. ‘I remember you two hanging around, all fidgety. Children always take too long. Once I got stuck, remember?’

  He nods. ‘Weird place … Probably closed down now.’ He pauses. ‘Who’s for coffee?’

  Diana

  Steph and I are going to Venice. Just for a week, for a treat. It’s one of those packages. I’ve never been to Venice. I would never have got organized if it wasn’t for Steph.

  She understands why I don’t care to go anywhere familiar. She doesn’t want to either. When the girls were small we’d go to the coast – Devon, Kent, the Isle of Wight. That was their favourite. The Babbidge Hotel was right on the beach, perfect for children. On Saturday night they’d have a band and Robert would dance with the girls, grave and sunburnt and tall.

  I think about the past every waking moment. And there’s Robert, sloughing it off like an old skin. That’s what people say, when they’ve seen him. Steph went to dinner there last week.

  Steph has all these ideas. She says men can forget, they travel light because they can impregnate but not reproduce. They can move on, intact, while the women cope with the results. It’s such a shock, having to apply all this theoretical stuff to Robert – all these opinions we both used to laugh at. Dear, familiar Robert – nowadays he’s fitting into these ready-made slots, so very neatly.

  On the way to Luton Airport we pass a hoarding. My heart quickens. It shows Jessie in a bikini. She’s caramel-coloured and lounging on a raft: NIVEA BRONZING GEL.

  ‘Imagine –’ says Steph and stops.

  I know: imagine those long brown legs wrapped around my husband.

  ‘Looks monstrous from this angle,’ says Steph. ‘Monster legs.’

  We’ve passed it. I do imagine that side of things – it would be foolish to pretend I didn’t. But not quite as Steph supposes. As I said, the sickness catches me suddenly, off guard. After all, there’s everything to make me jealous. She’s beautiful, young, intelligent – yes, I forgot to tell you that. Once I found two theatre stubs in Robert’s jacket pocket – corny, corny, Steph said. It was a studio theatre in Hammersmith – an experimental place. I knew Robert would never have gone there by choice. Steph, when I told her, said the tickets were the cultural equivalent of the sideburns.

  No, I’m jealous of all that. Of course I am. But I’ve been young. I was considered good-looking. Robert and I had a marvellous sex life. I enjoy the growing beauty of my girls. People envy someone like Jessie because of their own missed opportunities, their own unfulfilment. I don’t feel that.

  We’re driving into the long-term car park. It’s a huge field, adazzle with cars. The sky is blue. No – what I envy is not quite Jessie’s youth, but her newness. The way that whatever she does will be different. Different from what I did, different from what Robert has known. They have shared no past, to dull with repetition the present … That’s what makes me feel helpless.

  Jessie

  We almost had our first quarrel about this holiday. You see, Robert wants to take me to Italy. He wants to go to Rome and Venice. He’s never been to Venice. It does sound lovely – I do want to go. Part of our near-quarrel was that he nearly accused me of being ungracious. I tried to explain about the Isle of Wight. He thought I was mad, when we could go anywhere in the world, when we could see the Sistine Chapel together. I said, pompously, that I didn’t want to discover Michelangelo, I wanted to discover him.

  We made it up, of course, in bed. Actually, on the rug. I couldn’t quite explain it in words – that the whole thing seems slightly unreal. We’re marooned in the present, like a perpetual holiday. Cut off from the past – munching our tandoori take-aways, from their foil bags, on our shiny white table.

  We settled it. We’d go to the Isle of Wight for the weekend, then next month, in August, we’ll go to Italy. ‘For our real holiday,’ he said.

  So here we are. Not in the Babbidge Hotel, of course. Somewhere more expensive, without any children at all. It’s a windy, cloudy afternoon. Mellowed by an excellent lunch, including a bottle of 1971 Margaux, he’s taking me to the Monster Park. I think he’s humouring me.

  It’s not called the Monster Park, actually, it’s called Slipper Chine. Chine’s the word they use around here, he says, for a cliff creek. It’s an incredible place. The park is very steep, almost a cliff itself, with zig-zag paths winding down through the bushes, and trees battered by the wind. Below, far down, we can see the white waves.

  ‘Where are the dinosaurs?’

  ‘Further down.’

  We make our descent. I’m wobbling on my high heels; the wind whips my hair against my face. There are a few people about – mothers in anoraks, children shouting and running ahead. There’s nobody like us. The gulls cry; parents cry out to their children.

  ‘Did your girls run away?’

  ‘Frequently.’

  We pass large, mechanical models of nursery rhymes. Each one is set amongst the bushes, in a dusty clearing.

  ‘Look, Robert!’

  Humpty Dumpty is sitting on a plaster wall, tipping forwards and b
ack. Creak … creak … and the leaves rustling in the wind. Humpty has thick, red lips; he leers.

  Robert squeezes my arm. ‘Isn’t it kitsch? I love watching you – you’re like a child.’

  Don’t look at me, look at this place. ‘Was it like this?’

  He nods. ‘Didn’t realize it was so shabby.’

  Turning the corner, the wind hits us. We stagger sideways and clutch the handrail.

  ‘Look,’ he says. ‘The paths have eroded since then.’ Below, one path has cracked and broken away. It’s fenced off, with a diversion. ‘This whole place is sliding into the sea.’ Far below, we can hear the breakers.

  We pass a model village. The tiny church is playing music, faint in the wind. It’s weird, making our way down the path. The models are either too small, like the toy church, or else monster-size, like Humpty’s great peeling egg-head, creaking backwards and forwards. I think of children, running off and getting lost. I feel like Alice in Wonderland, shrinking and then swelling in this tilted landscape … creeping down this steep maze of paths, down the hill, down through the labyrinth of childhood.

  ‘Tell me about it,’ I say loudly. ‘Which ones did the girls like best?’

  He says something. The wind whips his words away.

  ‘What?’ I shout. There’s a gale blowing up.

  ‘I’ve forgotten!’ he shouts back.

  We come across a pokerwork sign: DINOSAURS THIS WAY. We walk down the path.

  ‘Oh look!’

  A giant head is gazing down at us. It has glass eyes. Its huge body stands amongst the bushes. DIPLODOCUS, says the label.

  ‘They’ve had to prop him up.’ Robert points to the scaffolding wedged against the creature’s flanks. It has become very cold. A fine mist has drifted in from the sea and most of the other people seem to have gone.

  ‘We should be getting back!’ shouts Robert. ‘You must be freezing in that dress.’

  ‘Just a bit more!’

  He replies but the wind blows the words away. We walk on down. Through the bushes other monsters are revealed – horned beasts standing in the clearings, looking startlingly real. TYRANNOSAURUS REX is reared up on his hind legs.

  ‘I can’t see the one in the photo!’ I shout. ‘Which is it?’

  ‘How can I remember?’

  The path is steep; I hold on to the rail. ‘It looks like that one.’

  It’s a monster lizard, low on the ground, with a thick tail. I pull Robert to a stop. The mist is thicker here.

  ‘Isn’t this it?’

  ‘I don’t know!’ he shouts in my ear.

  ‘You’re not interested!’ My voice rises shrilly. ‘I’m more interested in your family than you are!’

  He turns away. I can’t hear.

  ‘What?’

  He turns back. ‘Don’t you tell me what my feelings are!’

  ‘Have you got any? Sometimes I wonder. You seem so numb.’

  He lets go my arm. ‘Listen to me, Jessica. Just listen, will you? What do you want me to say? That I had a miserable life until you came along? That’s what you want?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Because if you do, I can’t oblige. Understand?’

  ‘But –’

  He suddenly shouts: ‘If you must know, it was bloody marvellous with the girls! Oh yes, ups and downs, but bloody marvellous.’

  ‘But I’m glad. I don’t want you to have been miserable.’

  ‘I was also rather happy with my wife. For a good many years, anyway –’

  ‘I know!’

  He turns; the wind whips away his words.

  ‘What?’ I screech.

  He turns back. ‘I always thought you were so free,’ he yells. ‘So unfettered.’

  ‘I don’t want to fetter you, I –’

  ‘Come on, it’s freezing.’ He’s breathing heavily; his face is flushed. He turns and starts walking up the path.

  ‘I don’t!’ I’m clattering along behind. ‘I love you … I can’t help …’

  He’s striding up the path. I’m breathless. Huge bodies appear out of the mist. I’m shocked by the bitterness I’ve uncovered in him. I’m also shocked by my own greed. Worse is my jealousy of his wife who has had so much, even a thousand more quarrels than I could possibly have. These monster feelings, we’ve kept them well hidden.

  ‘Wait!’ I call.

  He can’t hear me. He’s striding ahead. I stumble after him.

  ‘Robert!’ I yell. For the first time in five months he’s ignoring me. I can’t catch my breath.

  He’s stopped at a bench. He sits down, suddenly.

  ‘Darling!’ I’m hurrying up to him. It’s all right. He’s stopped for me.

  I get nearer. He’s leaning forward, looking thoughtfully at the path. We didn’t mean it, either of us. We won’t talk about it again. I sit down. He’s gazing at the tarmac; I put my arm around him.

  I begin: ‘Robert, I didn’t mean …’

  He’s whispering something. I stop. There’s something wrong.

  ‘Robert?’

  He’s not looking at the path. I realize now that his eyes are clenched shut. I lean nearer.

  He whispers: ‘Chest.’

  Diana

  I met her at the funeral. We happened to come out of the porch together, and said a few words.

  Do you know, there was a photo of us two, rather blurred, in the local paper. Jessie and myself. Caught for a moment together. We’ll never meet again.

  I put it in the album. I need to keep anything connected with him. Once or twice I’ve looked at it. After all, she was a part of Robert. I don’t feel any emotion about her, except pity. She blames herself for his heart attack, you see. I never dared ask her how it happened, in case she’d have to say they were making love.

  I feel pity too, for another reason. We both loved him. But who has the most, now, to remember?

  I had thirty years.

  • Snake Girl •

  EVERYONE LIKED JOHNNIE. Always a smile, and first with the drinks at the Sind Club bar. Last to leave, too, but then he lived alone and where else would he go?

  He would horse around with the kids, as well, at the Sind Club pool. His jokes were sometimes of a robust nature, for down in the bazaar he knew a supplier of plastic masks. Mothers liked him because they could dreamily give themselves up to the sun. Their children called him uncle and chased him, whooping, through the verandas. Turbaned bearers stepped aside. ‘He’s never grown up,’ parents said, as they sipped lime sodas under the dusty palms. ‘He’s a child himself.’ Sometimes, when they were posted elsewhere, as they inevitably were, they told their children to send him a postcard. Sometimes they remembered.

  Nobody knew when he had come to Pakistan. He was simply one of the fixtures and fittings: a lean man in a beige bush-jacket, who could tell a newcomer where to buy the best Beluchi carpets and who knew all the reels for Burns Night. This happened once a year at the Consulate; he was paired off with career secretaries of uncertain age and American divorcees who chomped on menthol cigarettes and sometimes, unsuccessfully, asked him back to their place. There was Johnnie, blurred in the corner of a hundred snapshots, caught for ever in a lost episode in people’s lives – before Washington, before London again, before their divorce and the dispersal of their growing children. ‘Isn’t that him?’ they’d point. Fixed, his face, eager to please in the blinking rabbit glare. Passingly, they felt curious.

  He had an ageless, leathery look, from decades in the sun. He was a bachelor, and one of those innocents who survive surprisingly well in a devious country. How old was he: forty-five? fifty-five? He wasn’t secretive; it’s just that if one does not offer information there are others more ready with their own, busy selves. Johnnie was a spectator, and one of that rare breed: a truly modest man.

  He was British; a pilot with PIA. Few people knew his real name; he had been nicknamed Johnnie Walker on account of the whisky which in those days cost Rs 300 per bottle on the black market. At his shindigs there
was always plenty of that, what with his airline connections and his legendary generosity. And plenty of homemade beer, which he brewed in buckets and called hooch. His cronies slapped him on the back; the Pakistani ones called him ‘old chap’.

  Why had he never married? Jokingly he said that he’d missed his connection and the flight was never called. Besides, he was always somewhere else – Frankfurt one day, New York the next, standing the crew a drink in the bar of some intercontinental hotel. He wore the glazed bonhomie, the laundered pleasantness, of the permanently jetlagged. He returned with perfume for the plainest girls at the British Consulate, who thanked him wistfully. If people paused to wonder, they decided that his true love was planes – after all, the flight deck of a DC10 was simpler than any woman. And what could beat the romance of flying – lights blipping, that vast blue space above, arriving only to depart, the sweet angst of loss flavouring every encounter? He adored his job, that was plain; just look at his flat.

  You had to duck to get into the living-room. This was due to the model planes suspended from the ceiling. Hurricanes, Spitfires, Mosquitoes – civilian and military aircraft, revolving slowly in the breeze from the fan. Otherwise his flat had a transitory air. It was situated on the new beach road outside the city: Route 43, that so far led nowhere. Apartment blocks had been built along it but in those days, the mid-seventies, they had not yet been completed; most were still concrete cells with electrical wires knotted from the ceiling, and a view of the sea. The parking spaces in front were edged with oil drums, from each of which drooped a bougainvillea bush.

  Hot wind blew, sand against concrete. Behind the flats stretched the grey desert.

  ‘One day,’ he joked, ‘this’ll be the Third World’s answer to Malibu Beach.’ People asked him if he felt lonely, living with the few other pioneers in Phase One, and he replied: ‘Me, lonely? With the best view in Pakistan?’

  He said the sun setting over the Arabian Ocean was beautiful, but most sundowns he was to be found at the Sind Club bar.