One Day, Someday

by Lynne Barrett-Lee

  We grab a couple of cappuccinos from a cafe on St Mary Street, and head off towards the castle, Aurelie pushing her teddy in the buggy. If Iona has noticed that I’m not quite myself, she is obviously going to make no mention of the fact. Which is absolutely fine by me.

  ‘She seems very fond of you,’ I remark, as we sit ourselves down on a bench.

  Iona rolls up the sleeves of Aurélie’s jacket and produces a plastic bag from underneath the buggy. ‘Oh, and I of her, lovely,’ she answers, tearing the bread inside into little pieces. ‘There we are! She’s a poppet, aren’t you, sweetie? It’s a privilege to be able to spend time with her.’

  I watch as she toddles off, the bag clutched tightly in her pudgy little hand. ‘And it must be a big help to Lily right now, with a new baby to look after. How is she doing?’

  ‘Oh, she’s a real natural, that one. Well, you’ve only to look at little Aurelie here to see that. Good as gold, she is. Always has been.’

  ‘I suppose you’ve known them for quite a while.’

  She nods. ‘Lily came to work for Joe when Aurélie was, oh, couldn’t have been more than a few weeks old. She’d given up her job - she taught French at night school - and I think she’d hoped to stay at home for a bit. But they couldn’t afford it. Not on Malcolm’s money. They’d set their hearts on a little house, see. And they don’t pay teachers terribly well, do they?’

  I shake my head. ‘Tell me about it.’

  ‘Oh, of course, you’d know all about that, wouldn’t you? How on earth have you managed all this time?’

  ‘Oh, we got by. My father helped me out with a deposit for a flat, and once Leo started school I was able to buy a place near my sister. She’s been so fantastic - she looks after Leo after school for me. Simeon, my nephew, is an only child too. They’re more like brothers than cousins. I don’t know how I would have managed without Del, to be honest.’

  ‘That’s the thing, isn’t it? Having family around. But no one seems to stay in the same place any more these days, do they? That’s half Lily and Malcolm’s problem. They’ve no one really. Lily’s mother’s in France, of course, and Malcolm’s parents live in Snodland. They do what they can, of course, but it’s not the same, is it? Not the same as having them close by. It’s a bit of a struggle at times. So I like to help out.’

  I pull off my cardigan to give the sun a chance to breathe some warmth into me. ‘Do you look after Aurélie much, then?’

  ‘Oh, nowhere near as much as I’d like. But, well, work and all that. Have to earn a crust. But I try to babysit when I can - give them a chance to get out a bit. It’s no bother, what with Dai working nights most weekends. I look forward to it.’

  ‘I’m sure she does as well. You must be like a grandmother to her.’

  She smiles a happy smile. ‘I’d like to think so. Not that I’d want to take the place of her real grandparents or anything. Of course I wouldn’t. But I think it’s good for a little one to have someone, well, someone like me around - do this sort of thing with them. Bit of time. Few sweeties. Outings and everything. Always too busy when your own are little, aren’t you? You must find that yourself, I should think, what with being on your own and having to work full time.’ I nod. ‘And then all of a sudden they’re all grown-up and you wonder where the time’s gone. Suddenly they’re adults and they don’t need you any more. And then you start thinking how lovely it’ll be once they have little ones of their own.’ She sighs. ‘Oh, I know you shouldn’t, but you do, don’t you? It’s only natural. But it doesn’t always work out that way, eh? Still, I get to borrow little Aurélie here, so I count myself lucky.’

  ‘Nick’s your only child, is he?’

  She nods. ‘And he’s a lovely lad, Lu. Lovely. We’re both very proud of him. And his boyfriend, Howard - he’s a teacher, too, funnily enough - seems like a very nice lad as well. Very polite. Very friendly. And they seem settled. That’s the main thing. We went to them for Christmas last year. And it was a proper home. No babies, obviously, but two enormous great dogs. Played hell with Dai’s chest, but it’s nice to see. And I’m used to things now. Come here, sweetheart,’ she calls, ‘let’s look after Nonni for you, shall we? Don’t want him getting pecked, do we?’

  Aurélie gives her the teddy and I suddenly realize it’s the one Joe bought for the baby. But then something strikes me. He hadn’t bought it for the baby at all. He’d bought it for her.

  Iona starts rootling in her bag. ‘Anyway, let’s have a look at what we’ve got in here, then, shall we?’ She smiles at me. ‘Lily’s packed us a little picnic.’ She pulls out a small plastic box. ‘Let’s see. Ooh, quiche. Would you like some? Lily makes lovely quiches. And you look like you could do with something inside you.’

  I’m not really hungry, but I realize I haven’t eaten anything since yesterday evening, so I accept the thick hunk of quiche she proffers.

  She gives me a piece of kitchen roll to go with it. It has a pattern of little blue hens on the edge. ‘Now,’ she says, through her mouthful, ‘I’ve been dying to hear all about it. Did you have a lovely time making the television show?’

  When we get back to the office, there is a man on the floor fiddling with the photocopier and a faint whiff of smoke in the air.

  ‘Hello, what’s happened here, then?’ asks Iona. She narrows her eyes. ‘You haven’t been smoking, have you, Joe?’

  ‘No, I bloody haven’t!’ he growls. ‘I was just sitting in my office, minding my own business when that bloody thing blew up!’

  ‘Blew up?’

  ‘Well, not blew up in a particularly explosive sense, but was certainly on fire. I’d set it to run off some application forms. Lucky I hadn’t gone out or anything, or God only knows what might have happened.’

  The man on the floor grunts then teases something out and sits back on his heels. ‘As I thought,’ he remarks, holding it up and scrutinizing it. ‘Foreign body in the jiminy-doodah (or something).’ He gestures to Aurelie and winks knowingly at us. ‘You’ve not let the little one loose around here, have you? Looks very like a dolly’s hairbrush to me.’

  Joe was meeting up with a friend after work and didn’t need to be taken home, so when Leo and I got back it was still fairly early. And still light, so I conceded to his request to be allowed to go and get his bike out for half an hour while I made dinner. But so immersed was I in my melancholic thoughts that I had completely forgotten there was a certain important something that I had forgotten to do first. Moments later he was back in the kitchen.

  ‘Mum! Mum! Come and see what’s happened in the garage! You will not believe it!’

  Oh, shit.

  By the time I’d cleared the last of the debris into a bin-liner, it was almost nine. And by the time I managed to persuade Leo that, no, we had not been the victims of a frenzied hammer attack and that, no, these bits of painted canvas and board were absolutely nothing to do with the pictures Auntie Del had had put up in her bedroom by the people from the television, and that, well, yes, OK, I knew he wasn’t a complete derr-brain and that, OK, I had been telling a fib, they were Auntie Del’s paintings and, yes, they were the ones that had been done by Stefan, and that though, yes, it did look rather like someone had attacked them with no small degree of enthusiasm, this wasn’t in fact the case, and that the truth was, regrettably, that Auntie Del had decided they didn’t really go with her bedroom after all and that she had given them back to me to give back to Stefan and that, oh, deary me, I had had a bit of an accident, in that I had put them down on the garage floor and somehow driven the Jag over them by mistake and made a terrible mess and that it really would be best if he kept it to himself because, after all, Stefan wouldn’t know they weren’t still hanging in Auntie Del’s bedroom anyway, and that there was no sense in upsetting him needlessly, was there? … It was almost ten.

  I was quite, quite sure he didn’t believe a word of it, but needs must where parenting is concerned and, anyway, I also knew that he would have forgotten all about it in
the morning.

  ‘Joe?’

  It’s by now almost ten thirty and I’m busy considering whether the director’s cut of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre (with previously unseen footage, etc.) might be a therapeutic way to draw the week to a close when my internal debate is interrupted by the jangle of the phone.

  ‘Yep,’ I hear him say. ‘Sorry - crrrrrrrrch - to both - crrrrrrrrch - you. I’ve - oh, hol - crrrrrch - n—’ I can hear muffled scrapes then a bang.

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘On my mobile. In the pub. In the Flag and Fulcrum to be precise. Just outside the Flag and Fulcrum now, in actual fact. Just had dinner. There’s only so many varieties of ready meals you can stomach in a week. There, that’s better. Can you hear me OK now? Yes? Anyway, you OK?’

  The Flag and Fulcrum is a pub down in Queen Street. A very trendy pub. The sort of pub where young-buck management types gather to eat tapas at lunchtime, and again to drink pints of Export at five thirty most nights, before stumbling home with a typist if they’re lucky, or a takeaway curry if not. The sort of place I had once fondly imagined I might find myself sitting outside after work sometimes. Sipping Sauvignon blanc. In a well-cut suit from Next. With a girlfriend from the office. Iona, maybe? No. I wonder what he’s doing there so late. I wonder what kind of friend he was seeing.

  ‘Yes,’ I tell him. ‘I’m fine. Is there something up?’

  ‘No, no. Just thought I’d give you a call. I remembered I’ve got to meet with one of the engineers first thing Monday. Got to go on site with him. Wondered if you could pick me up a little earlier, that’s all.’

  It occurs to me that this is a strange time to be calling to sort out what’s happening next Monday. ‘Yes, that’ll be OK,’ I tell him. ‘As long as it’s not too early. What sort of time?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. Seven thirty? Something like that? If you can manage it. Anyway—’

  ‘I’ll check with Del. But I’m sure that’ll be fine. Anyway …’

  There is a short pause. Then he says, ‘What are you up to?’

  ‘Nothing much. I was just about to go to bed, actually. Long day. Anyway—’

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry. Did I call a bit late?’

  ‘No. That’s OK. Anyway—’

  ‘And are you all right?’

  ‘Yes, I’m fine, Joe. Anyway—’

  ‘Good. Only I thought I should just check. You haven’t seemed, well, yourself. And, well, with what you said this morning about that tutor of yours, I just—’

  ‘Not “of mine” Joe. Anyway—’

  ‘Exactly. So I just wanted to let you know that—’

  ‘Joe, I told you. I’m OK. You really don’t need to worry. My shambolic love-life is really something you shouldn’t concern yourself with. It’s very sweet of you and everything but, well … Anyway—’

  ‘Sweet!’ He laughs. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever been called that before. I’ve been called plenty of things in my time, believe me, and “sweet” has never been one of them. So I’ll take that as a compliment. Doing anything nice this weekend?’

  ‘Cleaning my house. Buying food and so on. Washing. Anyway, if that was all, then—’

  ‘Lu, hold up. One question.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Why won’t you talk to me?’ he says.

  Just like that.

  And I don’t even know. ‘Look, it’s not you, Joe, particularly,’ I lie. ‘I just don’t really want to talk to anybody right now. I’m just tired, OK?’ There is silence for a second.

  ‘Fair enough,’ he says. ‘Night.’ And the line goes stone dead.

  Inexplicably, I feel guilty. And it makes me cry.

  15

  Tuesday 22 May

  Six o’clock. Class time.

  I thought about not going. Thought long and hard about not going. Thought long and hard about giving up altogether, because I don’t wish to put my stomach through any more mangles. But in the end I decided that I had paid good money to be guided in forming my impressions of the impressionists and was not going to have some bloody tousle-haired sex-maniac goblin git hippie low-life preventing me from doing so. So mad at myself about Stefan. So mad about the fact that I’ve been duped. Again. So mad about the fact that I’m still so immature and stupid and utterly gormless that have been unable to see what has been staring me in the face from day one. That I have been merely a diversionary sex-conquest project. A shag, for want of a more poetic expression. Now filed, no doubt, under D, for ‘done that one’. Not to mention ‘dingbat’ and ‘dodo’ and ‘dunce’. Or Dylan, for that matter. Dylan bloody Thomas. No offence, Mr Thomas, but poems, indeed.

  Then I thought something else. I thought about him not going. It occurred to me that there was every possibility that Stefan would not appear to take the class anyway. That the best course of action in the face of having angry rampaging cast-off on day’s horizon would surely be to call in sick and have someone else take the class. The more I thought about this the more likely it seemed. Were I Stefan, I decided to myself as I marched up Park Place, I would keep well out of my way for a while.

  It was with surprise, therefore, that I arrived at the museum, not only to find him sitting outside with his clipboard, bold as you like, but leaping up and scootling over to greet me - arms open wide, smile full of sunshine, hair full of an unseasonal Cardiff-based mistral and circling his head like a basket of snakes. But then again, not such a shock once I thought about it, because the one person who didn’t know about me-and-Stefan’s demise was, it occurred to me, Stefan. How would he?

  ‘Hello-ee!’ he sang, flicking the mane to one side. How girly. How sad. ‘How you?’ he enquired.

  This was Tuesday. I hadn’t seen him since the previous Thursday. Not a sniff of a phone call for the best part of a week. Perhaps I had missed some fundamental shift in relationship dynamics, because if his current manner was anything to go by, this was obviously to be considered normal behaviour. There was, it seemed, nothing up between us. Nothing at all. He put a hand on the small of my back, rubbed it around a little, then slipped it southwards and started directing me back towards the museum. Just like that. Bastard. Hello-ee indeed.

  ‘So,’ I said, shunting my bag to my shoulder and knocking his palm off my bottom, ‘did she like them?’

  He blinked. ‘Did who like what?’ he asked.

  I considered responding, ‘That bitch off the telly’ and ‘What d’you think, arse-face? The size of your nuts?’ But I didn’t. Because you don’t. Instead, I smiled and said, ‘Tia Slater, of course. Your creation-abduction series, wasn’t it?’ I loaded the words with as much haughty disdain as I could manage, but he was obviously having none of it.

  ‘Oh those,’ he said, smiling broadly and shifting his clipboard from one hand to the other. ‘My Abstraction-Creation series. Yes. Yes, she did. Very much, as a matter of fact. Looks like I might have a few sales on my hands there. She’s going to arrange for me to go down and meet up with the owner. Take some smaller studies for her to look at.’

  I watched another student walking carefully up the far side of the steps. And I thought about the smaller studies that were residing in a bin-bag in my garage. Substantially smaller studies, in fact. ‘Is that right?’ I said, feeling an unexpected smile cross my face. ‘Well, that’s nice, isn’t it? So it’s been quite a productive exercise for you, then, hasn’t it? Good for you. Are we going straight in?’

  He turned around at the foot of the steps, blocking my route.

  ‘Have you got the car with you?’ he asked.

  His hand was sliding up the sleeve of my jacket. A very intimate thing for it to be doing.

  I ignored it. ‘Of course I have.’

  ‘Excellent. I wondered if you could run me back with you. Pick up my bike and stuff. And if you hadn’t any other plans, I thought we might, well, I don’t know. It’s a nice evening. How about we stroll down for a walk in the woods or something? I don’t know. What do you think?’

  I looked him sq
uare in the eye. ‘You, me and Leo, you mean.’

  ‘Um. Er. Well, yes. Yes. Why not? Or we could maybe just go back to your place and …’

  And? And? Well? He shuffled about on his feet and scooped his hair out of his face again. Why didn’t he just have it bloody cut?

  ‘Actually Lu,’ he went on, ‘I wanted to ask you a favour. I had a call from Mand yesterday.’

  Oh! Mand, is it? First-name terms now, are we? Big luvvie pals, eh?

  ‘And it seems she’s got a friend who’s a commissioning arts editor for the BBC and who’s looking for artists to profile for a new documentary series they’re making. Charting the influence of the major twentieth-century movements on the work of contemporary artists, and Mand’s told her about my work and, well, actually, I was wondering if your sister would mind if I had my Abstract Expressionist paintings back. I know it’s a little cheeky of me, but it turns out they could be - well, anyway. I could find her some others, of course. Do you think she’d mind?’

  Oh. I see.

  Hmm. I stopped ignoring the wheedling-hand dynamic and placed one of my own on his arm. And squeezed it affectionately.

  ‘How exciting,’ I cooed. ‘You’ll be hung in Tate Modern before you can say Pollocks. And I’m sure she wouldn’t mind. And of course come up. That would be lovely. Tell you what, we can ask her when we stop off to pick up Leo, can’t we? Oh, look, there’s Cerys.’ I glanced at my watch. ‘It’s gone six. Shouldn’t we go in?’

  Well, now. Wasn’t he just the man of the moment? Wasn’t he just the bright young thing? Damien Hirst? Yesterday’s fishmonger. Tracey Emin? Get back into your bed. Move over, you guys, because Stefan Llewellyn is about to take Brit Art to dazzling new levels of blobby creativity. Come marvel at his new spin on Crustacean Extrusion! Let Ablution Expulsion get under your skin! That was about the size of it, anyway. Encouraged by my apparent enthusiasm for his impending elevation to minor iconic status (and the four million plus expected viewing figures) he burbled his narcissistic bollocks for most of the way to Del’s. Though shrewdly (and luckily - I had not hatched a plan yet), elected not to come in. He’d leave Del to me, he said, and wait in the car.