The Love of My Life

by Louise Douglas

  ‘There was just paperwork, exam guidelines, pens, stationery, stuff like that.’

  ‘No secret diary?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No revolver?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No stash of hash?’

  I giggled. ‘No.’

  ‘No saucy letters from besotted students?’

  ‘Stop it now.’

  ‘No women’s underwear?’

  ‘Shut up, Marc.’

  ‘I’m just showing an interest in your career.’

  ‘Yeah, right.’

  ‘And did you know that what you just said is the only example in the English language of two positives being used to denote a negative? I heard it on Radio Four.’

  This was something Luca did. All the time, he would hear something on the radio, or see something on TV, or read something, or somebody would tell him some quirky fact, and he would file it in his memory and regurgitate it at an appropriate moment. It amused me. I found it endearing.

  There was a flash of lightning and Marc’s face gleamed electric-white for a tiny second. I felt the beginning of a headache in my temples. As if he sensed my discomfort, Marc leaned over the table and stroked the side of my face very gently with the backs of his fingers. I closed my eyes and leaned in to his touch.

  He whispered something. I wasn’t sure what he said, but before I could ask, the café’s bodybuilder chef brought two mugs of tea to our table.

  ‘How’re you doing, baby?’ he asked. Over the past weeks we had become friends, this muscled, tattooed man, and I. He didn’t know the details, and was too sensitive to ask, but he knew I’d had some kind of a bad time. He gave Marc a sidelong glance as if to enquire if this man were the root of my troubles.

  ‘This is Marc, my brother-in-law,’ I said.

  ‘Pleased to meet you,’ said the chef, wiping his right hand on his apron and offering it to Marc.

  ‘Marc runs the restaurant in Portiston, Marinella’s,’ I ventured.

  ‘Oh yeah? I know it. On the seafront? Bet that’s a little goldmine,’ said the bodybuilder.

  ‘It’s not bad,’ said Marc.

  ‘Double negative denoting a positive,’ I pointed out.

  Marc’s face relaxed into a smile and then he laughed, out loud. The chef looked perplexed.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘It’s just something we were talking about.’

  ‘Yeah, well, I’ll catch up with you guys later,’ he said.

  We sat in silence, holding hands. Outside rain streamed down the window-glass; inside the panes were steamed up so it was hard to make out the details of the faces of the people who rushed by, chins down, hands in their pockets, hurrying for shelter. I licked the sugar from my lips, which were still a little swollen from our love-making earlier. I wonder if it showed. I wonder if the chef knew what was going on.

  I saw Marc’s eyes flicker upwards to read the clock behind me. He would have to go soon, in order to fulfil whatever obligation he had used as his alibi for this afternoon. I tried to look as if I hadn’t noticed, but loneliness came at me in a rush. The tea had gone cool and anyway it was too milky and the storm which had previously been thrilling was now simply enervating.

  ‘God, I’m tired,’ I whispered, longing for my bed and the oblivion of sleep, and I remembered, with a rush of pleasure, that there was plenty of alcohol in the flat, a nice glass of red wine to start maybe and then gin and lemonade to send me to sleep, and I wondered if Sundays had always been like this and of course they hadn’t.

  When Luca was alive, Sundays were our best days. Our lazy, lie-in-bed days, our coffee and chocolate-spread-on-toast days, our sleepy amble-round-a-market-or-a-park days, our hands-held days, our snoozing-in-front-of-the-TV days. Sometimes we talked of what it would have been like if we had had children. We imagined taking them to do entertaining but educational things, but probably we would have been useless parents. We were too disorganized, too selfish. In my heart I knew that no Sundays could be better than the ones we shared, just Luca and I. The only thing that spoiled them was the prospect of Monday on the horizon. Still, we drank wine on Sunday evenings, in celebration of the weekend and in preparation for the week that was to follow. Luca said it was a waste to have a hangover on a weekend; he said you might as well have it during working hours, not in your own time.

  Luca worked in a restaurant in Covent Garden. He enjoyed the buzz and the business, and the banter with the clientele. There was none of the rigmarole associated with being part of the only restaurant in a small seaside town: none of the community politics, or having to remember everyone’s name and what was going on in their lives so that you could make polite, friendly chit-chat. Instead, Luca revelled in the anonymity of the big city, and the variety of people he met, and their different tastes and languages and manners. He got on well with the owner and knew how much the mark-up was on each dish, and his ambition was to open a place of his own. A café with food, not a restaurant, somewhere that did good-quality sandwiches, soups and salads at lunchtimes, and simple early suppers in the evenings to attract the working crowd, not the drinking crowd. He had his eye on a fish-and-chip shop that we knew was coming up for sale not far from where we lived, in Bow. What with the Olympics coming and everything, he thought it was the perfect venue for his enterprise. He was going to call it ‘Liv’s’.

  ‘Liv?’

  ‘Sorry, what?’

  ‘I’m sorry but I have to go.’

  ‘Yes, of course. Of course you do.’

  I stood up and unhooked my coat from the back of the chair. Marc helped me into it, kissing my hair as he did so.

  ‘This is crap,’ he said.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I’ll sort something out,’ he said. ‘I’ll take you away for the weekend. We’ll go somewhere nice, away from here. We’ll go somewhere where we don’t have to keep looking over our shoulders or watching the clock.’

  ‘That would be nice.’

  As we went out into the storm, I glanced over my shoulder and saw the chef watching us. He was rubbing his chin with his fingers. I wondered what went through his mind as Marc and I, our fingers trickling apart like they were playing scales on a piano, turned in opposite directions out of the café.

  twenty-five

  April turned into May, a pretty, fertile May when everything turned green at the same time and the honeyed smell of the blossom on the city hedgerows was as intoxicating as the sunshine. The pavements around the university buildings were speckled with pink petals and students displayed their bellies and the edges of their underwear, innocent and optimistic as the baby birds which squawked in their nests in the eaves. The office workers packed sandwiches to eat in the departmental gardens at lunchtimes where the young people sunbathed and talked on their mobile phones and canoodled, their fingers hooked into the waistbands of each other’s jeans.

  In the evenings, in my flat, I longed for a garden. I wondered what was happening in the yard behind our house in London. Last summer, it had been full of pots. Luca had grown potatoes, peppers, tomatoes, basil, coriander and courgettes. I had grown freesias, geraniums and roses. It had been a horticultural division of labour and gender: he did practical plants, I did pretty ones. He cultivated the vegetables and then he cooked them. I forgot to water mine. If it hadn’t been for Luca, my roses would have been destroyed by greenfly.

  ‘Look at them, Liv,’ he said, combing a baby rose leaf between his thumb and forefinger. ‘It’s crawling with greenfly. Imagine how that must feel to this poor plant.’

  His fingers were stained green and grungy with crushed insects. I imagined being the rose, the irritation, the pain of these little creatures burrowing and scurrying and chomping into my new buds. What a slow, miserable death that would be. Shamed into action, I became obsessive about wiping down the leaves myself, ridding my plants of pests. By July, my roses were lovely.

  There were tenants in the house now. It was unlikely that they would bother with my plants. I couldn’t real
ly expect them to water them, feed them, and wipe the greenfly from their leaves. Lynnette would call round and retrieve the pots if I asked her, but she wouldn’t nurture them as we had done. Why should she?

  Lacking a garden, but craving fresh air and flowers, I went to the cemetery, which was lush with new growth. As I walked the path up the hill millions of tiny insects clouded before me and the birds sang in the trees like it was the first spring ever. I felt like lying down on the grass beside Luca’s grave and enjoying the late-afternoon sun. The grass was golden with buttercups and tiny purple flowers like pansies, and it looked dry and friendly and comfortable. The cemetery was full of people though, living people, and I thought I might alarm them if I lay down. So I stood, for a moment, hoping the sunshine was permeating the soil down to where Luca lay, and then I changed the water in the pickled-onion jar and threw away the carcasses of the poor dead flowers that had been turning to slime inside it and replaced them with yellow tulips. The flowers, I knew, wouldn’t last long, but the yellow petals on the greening soil of the grave would be pretty. The general effect was one of colour and optimism. I smiled, pleased. Luca’s grave looked like an Impressionist painting.

  Afterwards I went to the café for a glass of wine and a plate of bread and olives. The café was loud with made-up women in high heels, heady on hair gel and the prospect of a night out. The chef slipped me a smile and a bruschetta.

  Some evenings I drove to Portiston and wandered along the beach, watching the sun fading over the sea. I remembered somebody, Maurizio perhaps, holding me by the shoulders as a child and telling me to listen for the hissing sound when the hot sun dipped its toes into the cold water. The sunlight disappeared from Seal Island and the constant cloud which shrouded its nightly departure was, according to the voice in my ear, the steam sent up from the bubbling, boiling water. Now I sat on the pebbles and threw stones into the darkening water. Each time I went to Portiston, I intended to go into Marinella’s, but each time I changed my mind. I couldn’t bear the thought of looking into Nathalie’s distrustful eyes. Portiston made me feel more alone, but I could not stay away.

  twenty-six

  When she left university, Lynnette found a job with a music-publishing company in London, and after that she only came back to Portiston for the occasional weekend, and she was different, completely different.

  Her visits were ever shorter and sweeter, and when she left, the tall old house felt empty, bereft and miserable. She had started mentioning a man, Sean, and I think both Mum and I knew that soon we would lose her to London for ever.

  When Lynnette was there, our home was not exactly full of chat, but it was livelier and more colourful. I had somebody to talk to and a reason to be at home. When Georgie came to Portiston during the university holidays, I also had a reason to be out.

  The year I turned seventeen, we couldn’t keep our hands off each other. We had the best time. He would sound the horn as the ferry approached the beach, and I would make up an excuse (where necessary) and run down to meet him. Once the incoming cars were unloaded, there was nearly an hour before the return journey. While the outgoing cars queued in the car park, Georgie and I would hide beneath the ramp and have urgent, exciting sex. We littered the beach with our condoms, like some kind of pale, fragile sea creatures, vulnerable and slimy, washed up on the pebbles. God, I really thought I loved Georgie, the oily ferry smell of him, the gap in his teeth, the way he spat into the waves, his thin, feral body, his narrow face. In the evenings, he wanted to go to the pub, but none of the pubs in Portiston would serve me because the proprietors had all known me since I was knee high and, being good Christians, respected my mother’s views on alcohol. So instead I rode on the back of Georgie’s Yamaha into the countryside, and shivered as I drank cider in shabby pub gardens. I ached for him when we were together and when we were apart.

  And then the academic holidays were over, and Georgie was gone. When he left, I lapsed into a sullen bad temper, missing the sex and the dope and the motorbike and wrapping myself in the oily denim jacket he had given me.

  My mother no longer suffered from migraine. Instead, she filled her days with church business and Mr Hensley. She was a member of various committees and societies. She helped with the flowers and organized coffee mornings to raise funds for the new roof. Laboriously, she made tapestry covers to replace the worn fabric on the hassocks. At least once a week a group of elderly women and men, all of them older than Mum, would arrive at the house to drink milky coffee and eat water biscuits while they worked their way through an agenda or agreed upon a rota for some church chore or other. Mr Hensley liked to preside over these meetings, but I don’t know why the committee put up with him. Everything about him irritated me: the way he rocked on his heels, the way his trousers were shiny at the knees and just a little too short so that when he sat down you could see the ginger hairs on his bony little ankles, his big, flappy ears, his red turkey-skin neck, the officious and nauseating way he was constantly clearing the phlegm from the back of his throat, spitting it into his handkerchief and then examining the contents.

  It made me feel queasy just touching anything he had touched. I was sure he was not the sort of man to wash his hands after he’d been to the lavatory. I began to make an inventory in my head of everything Mr Hensley had handled, even the furniture he had used, and I avoided contact with polluted items. Because I could never be certain if cutlery was clean, I only ate food that I had prepared, or that I could eat with my fingers. As a result, I lost weight. I knew I looked good skinny. I longed for Georgie. I wanted to see myself reflected in his eyes.

  Mum was, I think, as happy as she had ever been, even though it was perfectly obvious that she missed Lynnette dreadfully. Every time my sister left, Mum would spend two days cleaning her room, washing the curtains and bedclothes and generally making it as nice as possible for when Lynnette came back.

  I never exactly felt like she resented me, but I knew she would be happy when I, too, flew the nest. But we were all right. As long as I behaved reasonably sensibly, left the house looking presentable and didn’t give her cause to worry about what the neighbours might think, Mum and I could rub along together fine.

  The regularity of our domestic routine left when Lynnette did. Mum didn’t bother making meals for the two of us, for which I was relieved and grateful. I didn’t feel hard done by; instead I was happy to see to myself, making my own sandwiches, grating my own cheese and heating my own cans of tomato soup, washing all the implements and crockery before I started to erase any trace of Mr Hensley’s fingerprints.

  She lived her life and I lived mine.

  Apart from the church meetings, our house was a quiet house. Mum sometimes listened to Radio Two (Terry Wogan made her smile) but she had an aversion to both teenagers and what she termed ‘modern’ music. So I never had friends back, and tended to creep around in my socks while Mum was at home.

  It was a different matter when she went out. Then I would turn the radio up good and loud, and dance in the living room, choreographing my own steps, swinging and twirling and jumping on and off the furniture.

  I would run upstairs and try on lots of different clothes. I would pin my hair up, pull it back, plait it, loop it, knot it, make bunches, straighten it, wave it and make kinks in it. Then I would experiment with make-up and pull faces at myself in the mirror. Sexy faces, pouty come-hither faces, angry faces, fuck-off faces, bored faces, tragedy faces and lunatic faces. Then, dressed like a rock star, I’d fly downstairs again to turn the music up even louder and pogo to some retro punk while I made myself something to eat in the kitchen. I was always hungry when I was on my own; I couldn’t eat a thing when Mum and Mr Hensley were in the house.

  Sometimes, I would spend hours on the phone talking to Anneli, lying on my stomach on the hall floor, swinging my feet and sharing secrets. I told her what I had done with Georgie and she was horrified, and thrilled, in equal measure. By now, her relationship with Marc had become, by mutual agreement,
a close friendship and nothing more. Yet still she was welcomed backstage at Marinella’s as if she were one of them, and she told me what was going on in the family, how the plans for Carlo and Sheila’s wedding were progressing, how Nathalie and Angela were thick as thieves, whispering and plotting. They were delicious conversations.

  My favourite pastime outside school was my diary. It wasn’t a proper diary, but a blue hardback notebook full of lined paper. I wrote in it religiously. Some days there were just a few words. Other days, I spent ages recording a complete, illustrated account of events, thoughts, feelings, even song lyrics. If I had had the slightest idea of the trouble this would lead to, I wouldn’t have bothered.

  twenty-seven

  ‘How are you getting on?’

  The professor was looking, for him, almost cheerful. He was jingling his car keys and obviously had news to impart. It was a Wednesday afternoon.

  ‘Fine,’ I said. ‘The more I learn, the more I’m enjoying this.’

  ‘Would you buy it, if it were a book?’ he asked.

  ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘And I’d give it to all my friends for Christmas.’

  ‘Good, good.’

  ‘I’m sure it would be a bestseller.’

  ‘All right, don’t over-egg the pudding. Where are you up to?’

  ‘Well, it’s not exactly in order, but I’m up to the bit where Marian Rutherford comes to England to visit her publisher.’

  ‘You come from Portiston, don’t you?’

  I nodded.

  ‘So would you mind driving me there this afternoon? I need to take some pictures of the publisher’s house.’