One Day, Someday

by Lynne Barrett-Lee

And too bloody right. I will get my car. But even so, it was a stupid, senseless, ridiculous thing to have done. Doesn’t matter how rich Mr Joe De bloody laney is, it’s scandalous to think that he’s just going to have to walk into a car showroom and cough up nine thousand pounds for a car. Stupid man.

  The hotel lobby is vast, chilly and quietly unwelcoming. We thread past the massed monster holdalls of what I assume is a visiting antipodean ice-hockey team and I wait while Joe makes enquiries of the frosty mannequin at the reception desk. I am not altogether sure why I’m here. I don’t doubt that all of these three men are perfectly competent English speakers, or that I will have absolutely nothing in the way of a contribution to make to whatever boiler-related matters they are here to discuss. This, Joe explained on the way, is a meeting to sort out the timescale and schedule for the work he is contracted to do for the Luxotel Group this year. It is, no doubt, a lucrative deal. Luxotel have a hotel in just about every place in France you might wish to fetch up, plus a fair sprinkling around the rest of Europe. Moreover, it seems they are in an acquisitive frame of mind. They are negotiating on five sites alone this month, two of them in the UK. I don’t know what the figures are, but there is clearly big money afoot.

  Hmm. Which is just as well.

  Correction. I am altogether sure why I am here. I am here as garnish.

  Luxotel’s operations director is called Jean Paul Deschamp. He is a tall, stringy man in his forties or fifties, with suspiciously black hair and a mustard linen suit. He looks a bit like a sherbet fountain, and I take an instant dislike to him. It’s not something I’m generally given to, but no sooner has Joe made introductions and explained that I speak French than Monsieur Deschamp starts speaking to me in it (very rude - we’re in company and, moreover, in Cardiff, not Cannes), and with a content and manner that make it abundantly clear that what he’d most like to do is not thrash out boiler jargon but whip off my blouse and fondle my breasts.

  ‘Look,’ I tell Joe, during a lull in which Monsieur Deschamp has gone to take charge of a fax and the other men are engaged in earnest debate about feed vents or zone valves or something, ‘wouldn’t it be better if I went back to the office and got on with some of the work that’s piling up there? It’s not as if you need me to drive you back or anything, and you certainly don’t need me here to translate.’

  He shakes his head. ‘I’d rather you stayed,’ he says, nodding at the Gallic huddle then winking at me. ‘Help oil the wheels and so forth.’

  ‘Oil the wheels how, precisely?’

  I’m still very angry, and my glance is more pointed, but he either doesn’t see it, or chooses to ignore it. The latter, I suspect, because he then says, ‘Monsieur Deschamp has suggested that we might adjourn to the restaurant in a while and continue our negotiations over a late lunch. I don’t suppose you would care to—’

  I shake my head. It is now ten past three. ‘You suppose absolutely right.’

  ‘Well, no wonder she bloody left him is all I can say.’

  Del, who has been removing the flesh from a cold roast chicken while clucking sympathetically at the many and varied irritations that have punctuated my day, pulls a bone from its bottom and holds it aloft. ‘Tsh! Calm down!’ she says. ‘Make a wish or something.’

  I close my eyes and do as instructed: a short but heartfelt one involving Monsieur Deschamp’s genitalia and a Magimix. Then say, ‘I think I’m going to resign, actually. I really can’t see myself driving Joe Delaney around for weeks on end. Can you? He’s such a grouch, Del. And we just don’t get on.’

  ‘Joe? A grouch? Nonsense! He’s lovely!’

  ‘He may be lovely when you run into him at your suburban dinner parties, Del, he may be the dish of the moment wherever he goes - which is all about, according to Iona - but he’s not like that at work. Plus he’s given up smoking, which makes it doubly bad. Not that I’d know. I suspect he’d be this bad anyway. Look, the bottom line is that he’s opinionated and bossy and—’

  She clucks. ‘Oh, and you never are, of course.’

  I bristle. ‘Not like he is, I’m not. And I’m fed up with driving him around.’

  ‘But you love driving,’ she reminds me. ‘And you are driving an XJR, for God’s sake. Have you any idea how much that car is worth, Lu? Ben dribbles every time he claps eyes on it.’

  ‘So why doesn’t he get one, then? He could afford it.’

  ‘Over my dead body. I’ve got a conservatory planned. Anyway, the point is that it can’t possibly be any less tedious than sitting in an office typing up French boiler specifications, can it?’ She wipes her hands on a damp J-cloth and puts on the kettle. ‘Besides, we’re only talking about a few weeks, aren’t we? And then you’ll get your new car, and then, well, after that it’ll only be a couple of months and you’ll be off to university to do your access course. It must beat supply teaching, surely?’

  I am beginning to wonder if Del hadn’t been right all along. That it would have been more sensible simply to continue with the teaching job I had in the first place. This just isn’t how I imagined these months would be. I was going to have fun. I was going to work somewhere other than a sprawling comprehensive full of nihilistic juveniles. Spend some time with adults. And not just to squabble over who’d cover who in their non-contact periods. Do lunch in town. Go for drinks after work - on Leo’s Tae Kwon Do night, at any rate, I’d figured. But it isn’t going to be, is it? It’s too late for that. Either I stick with JDL or I have to find another temporary job.

  And if I do that, what will happen about my car? And what will happen about his car? Especially now it looks like he’s going to have to go out and buy me a new car. And when will he go out and buy me a new car? And what will I do in the meantime? And will he really just go out and get me a new one - just like that? I can imagine all the conversations inherent in such a situation and none of them fill me with even a smidgen of confidence. Oh, God, why does life have to be so complicated all of a sudden?

  I will worry about it on Monday.

  And when I get home, guess what? More flowers for me. But this lot - and, oh, yes, absolutely to be expected - are from the very same posh florist I was on to yesterday. God, they must be raking it in. These, a confection of lilies and roses and strange hairy seed pods, bear a deckle-edged card with a flowery motif that says: Sorry for the hassle. Joan.

  7

  I was, I presumed, supposed to be impressed. Or, if not impressed, at least mollified a little. Flowers are flowers when all is said and done and, had I not already had the irises from Stefan, perhaps I would have looked upon Joe’s overblown offering a little more kindly. But I wasn’t and I didn’t. Creep. Didn’t at all. Not least because he hadn’t even bothered to order them himself: he’d obviously called Iona on his mobile after I’d left the hotel and had her phone and do it. Joan indeed. And partly because it was a tangible reminder of everything I didn’t like about him. His notion that everything woman-related could be solved via forty quid’s worth of posh flowers. I pulled out the roses and put the rest in the downstairs toilet. I detest the scent of lilies.

  Saturday 28 April

  Stefan’s flat was on the fourth floor of a crumbling yet rather august Victorian mansion block a short walk from the college. It had big sashed bay windows and a grand pillared entrance, which was flanked by a pair of twiggy, time-expired buddleias. Like much elegant housing that has been purloined by developers and turned into flats, it had the rather sad air of a place gone to seed. But still rather beguiling, in its dignified neglect. Almost as if those who chose to make this place their home were above the garish lure of twentieth-century comforts. On a higher intellectual plane, somehow. I ran my finger down the faded list of names by the doorbells. And there was Llewellyn. I took a breath and pressed.

  Stefan, whose one small concession to twentieth-century comforts was a padded saddle on his bike, was wearing a pair of dirty ripped cut-offs and a clean white vest that said Meat is Murder on the front. Coils of blond chest
hair peeked out of the top, and everywhere, everywhere, his sinewy limbs seemed to bulge and contract like beasts held in chains. He took me by the hand and pulled me wordlessly into the hallway, where I half fell over his bike in the gloom. My pulse was going thump, thump, thump in my wrist.

  He ushered me into a faintly sweet-smelling room at the front and placed me carefully, as one might a game-show contestant, in front of a very big painting. And then put a finger to his lips and went, ‘sssh!’

  Obediently, I shushed.

  For five whole minutes.

  ‘Hmm,’ he said, finally, ‘it’s way, way from perfect, but I think I have managed to capture the Zeitgeist.’

  He stepped back a pace and tilted his head to one side. ‘Thoughts, then? Impressions? Does it speak to you, Lu?’

  We were standing in what I assume Stefan - were he not so endearingly unpretentious - would call his studio. It was large and airy with a floor-boarded floor and a paint-splattered table, and other large canvases ranged around, all facing the walls. And I mean large as in really large. As in a good ten times bigger than the diminutive watercolours I crafted so carefully at my kitchen table. Which seemed suddenly insignificant and amateurish by comparison. Not proper art, somehow. The scale here was breathtaking. It put me in mind of a book I’d read to Leo, in which a tiny dragon, not believed in by anyone, eventually grew so large in an effort to get someone’s attention that mums, dads, the baker, the milkman, just about everyone, had to notice him. Chiefly because he ran off with the house on his back. Was this how art eventually got for people like Stefan? Was sheer scale the barometer of success? Because you really couldn’t miss the one in front of us now. It was propped up against two ladder-back chairs, and was the size of a double-bed mattress. It must have used up a hell of a lot of paint. If not a lot of different colours.

  ‘Hmm,’ I said, playing for time while I tried desperately to fix my eye upon something identifiable in what seemed, on first inspection, to be nothing more complicated than a pale blue background with a vaguely spherical daub of darker blue paint in the middle. A balloon, perhaps? A puddle? This was simply not fair. I had not expected Pissarro exactly, but how could a man who raved with such fervour about the impressionists do a painting that chiefly consisted of a blue blob? ‘Oh dear,’ I said. ‘I’m not sure I’m the person to be asking, I don’t really know a great deal about modern art.’

  Stefan drew back his arms and laced his fingers behind his head. ‘Mod-ern art?’ he said, grinning - though, it appeared, a little self-consciously, which helped take the edge off my dismay. ‘And what’s that when it’s at home? Is there such a thing?’ He dropped his arms again then draped one languidly around my shoulders. ‘Look there,’ he said, pointing to the (blue) blob in the centre of the (blue) canvas that was marginally darker (blue) than the (blue) area that surrounded it. ‘Does that colour,’ yep, blue, ‘really say “modern” to you? Doesn’t it say “depth”? “Weight of repressed humanity” perhaps? “Melancholia”?’

  It said blue. Oh dear. Must try to do better. Because he really wasn’t joking. I tried to remember something of our conversation about colour in class on Tuesday, but all I could think of was how heavy and warm Stefan’s arm felt against my neck. Like a python. Like a … like a … I cleared my throat and tried to think. ‘I think …’ I began ‘… err. It’s a beautiful colour. And, err, set against the backdrop of the—

  ‘Backdrop?’ He frowned at this. ‘You see that as backdrop?’ His arm slipped from my shoulder as he stepped back yet another pace. ‘Hmmm,’ he said. ‘Ye-es. Fair point. Fair point. But do you not get a sense of that area falling away from you somehow?’

  He made sweeping movements with his arms to illustrate. I couldn’t work out which area was doing the falling exactly, but it seemed that ‘falling away’ was the impression of choice. So I nodded. ‘Oh, God, yes,’ I enthused dutifully, warming to my task and feeling an increasing (and, all right, almost hysterical) sense of abandon about it. What did it matter what I said? As long as I responded. As long as I - yes! Didn’t I read that somewhere? As long as I had a relationship with it. I cleared my throat again. It was getting dry from all the intellectual stress. ‘Yes,’ I repeated. ‘When I say “backdrop” I mean as in the sense that, err, space - the universe - is the backdrop to the drama of a black hole. You know? There’s that sense, that obvious sense, obviously, of the background being deep and impenetrable, and yet the depth of a black hole is - well -‘ Oh, God. Floundering here a bit. well, about as absolute as a falling away can get. You know? Infinite.’

  I could hear a fly plopping dolefully back and forth against the window behind us. Perhaps I had enthused too much. It seemed an age before Stefan answered.

  ‘Infinite,’ he repeated thoughtfully, pulling out the rubber band that had been holding his hair and sending it skittering across the floor. ‘I like that, Lu. I hadn’t really thought of it in those terms but I think I can see where you’re coming from.’

  He could? So at least one of us could, at any rate. I turned and nodded, and tried to smile knowingly at him, attempting to convey the impression that where I was coming from was a challenging and mysterious place with a mind of its own and a full set of imaginative and interpretative faculties, rather than where I was actually coming from, which was a place inhabited mainly by butterflies and goose pimples and meringues. He shuffled up close behind me and rested his chin in the crook of my shoulder. Our shadows swayed a little in front of us, deepening the deeper blue and muddying the pale. His hair swung in a fragrant veil against my face.

  ‘You know,’ he said, snaking both arms around my midriff, ‘I don’t know what it is exactly, but there is something in this painting that I find incredibly erotic. Can you sense it? Is it the tonal gradation, perhaps? I wasn’t aware of it as I was creating it. But it’s there, isn’t it? A definite luminosity in the way the blues melt together. Very sensual. Very organic. Very intense.’ He lifted an arm and, collecting one of mine on the way, moved it to draw a slow arc in the air that followed the curve that delineated the central area of colour. ‘There,’ he said. ‘Yes?’

  Yes? I tried to get to grips with the intensity of it all, but it was hard. Chiefly because while his breath felt so soft against my cheek, his pelvis felt so hard against my bottom.

  ‘Um. There, you mean? That spot at the edge there? Where all those feathery brush strokes are? Um, well, I—’ Oh, God. I couldn’t concentrate at all.

  Sighing, he returned my arm to its original position, tucking his hand underneath my own so that it rested snugly against my ribcage. I could feel a pulse throbbing beneath it. His or mine? It was difficult to tell.

  ‘I’m so glad you like it, Lu. Art - the business of creating art - is such a prickly and capricious bedfellow. You struggle to bring something meaningful and valid into being, something that manages both to embody the universal experience and at the same time contribute a unique perceptual energy - you know? But no one ever seems to get the point of anything any more. Not unless you’re a Chapman or an Emin - and, frankly, I sometimes wonder if theirs isn’t a spurious kind of recognition anyway. But it’s understanding, isn’t it? That’s all I really strive for. Commercial recognition would be lovely, of course. Validation would be welcome. But chiefly it’s understanding I crave. Still,’ he moved his head a little so that his cheek brushed mine, ‘at least this one has a home now.’

  I wondered if he was drunk. And about to present it to me. And how I’d get it in the car. But then he said, ‘Exo.’

  ‘Exo?’

  I could feel his head nodding against mine.

  ‘The new fitness centre down in the bay?’ It rang some sort of bell. Had it been in the papers? ‘My friend Lydon,’ he went on, ‘has designed the interior and he’s commissioned some work from me. This study,’ he pointed towards it, ‘which will hang in the atrium, of course.’ It certainly wouldn’t work in a chip shop in Splott. ‘And a series for the salon and treatment rooms. They’ve given me a
pretty free hand with theme and interpretation, of course, but they’re after work that will reflect the post-millennial mindset - you know? So I’m staying largely with the blue end of the spectrum, obviously.’ Why obviously? Why? ‘Lord, I’m warm. Warm and just a little discombobulated. Aren’t you? Let me grab us both a drink, yes? Beer OK?’

  He released me and, as I turned to face him, looked at me with something almost like shyness, and bent his mouth to my ear.

  ‘ “Love me”,’ he whispered suddenly. ‘“Not as the girls of heaven love their airy lovers, nor the mermaiden her salty lovers in the sea. Love me”,’ He paused here and took a breath. ‘ “And lift your mask”.’

  My expression must have signalled that I was at a loss to know quite what to make of this, because he then added, ‘Dylan, Lu. Right then. Beer.’

  Which he then went to get.

  He returned a few moments later, carrying a hairy fawn blanket and, as promised, two beers. Kingfisher beer. In bottles that had already coated themselves with a wet dappling of spangly droplets. ‘Most thrilling chilled,’ the label informed me. I took mine and, at his instruction, sat down on the sofa that was wedged into the bay. It didn’t quite fit, and the gap between sofa-back and wall had become home to yet more of his canvases. So many paintings. I wondered what of. I sipped at the beer while he reached out behind me, turned the lock and pushed open the window. A swirl of cool air played on my neck and a penny dropped somewhere, with a clang.

  ‘Dylan Thomas!’ I announced, feeling rather pleased with myself.

  His brows lifted in admiration. ‘You do know it, then!’ He swivelled round and sat down beside me, slipping his free hand once again around my shoulder.

  ‘So,’ he said, ‘your mask, Lu. Do you feel ready to lift it for me?’ He gestured towards the blanket, which he’d dumped on the floor beside us.

  I sucked at my beer bottle happily. (It hadn’t been the most intractable of puzzles but, nevertheless, I had almost said Bob.) I was just about to add that I didn’t actually feel I was hiding behind one when he said, ‘Right. Let’s get on, shall we?’