‘Do you do this sort of thing for a living?’ I said. ‘Or is it a one-off?’
‘Both. I do gardening for a job, but this is just a favour for Penny. I didn’t know you were going to be here. I didn’t even know you were still in touch.’
‘We weren’t – until this afternoon.’
‘Ah. That explains why Penny was so adamant that the trees had to be done today,’ Donovan said, as much to himself as to me. Having decided that my hand was sufficiently chilled, he set about making us a cup of tea, assembling the necessary ingredients in a manner that showed complete familiarity with the contents of the cupboards. He even knew where the paracetamol lived. It occurred to me, with a spontaneous surge of dismay, that perhaps he and Penny were a couple.
‘You seem very at home here,’ I said, watching him dump the mashed teabags in the bin. ‘You must know Penny quite well.’
‘I do. We’d exchanged addresses that time she ran my car off the road – for the insurance claim. And then about a year later she got back in contact. I went to their wedding. We’ve been good friends ever since. In fact, I’m Cassie’s godfather.’ He said this with a hint of pride that I found completely disarming.
‘I didn’t know you even believed in God,’ I said, accepting two paracetamol and sending them on their way with a gulp of hot tea, which made tears spring to my eyes.
‘Ah, well, there’s a lot you don’t know about me,’ he replied. My hand, which was palm up on the table, had started to hurt again now that it was dry. As I looked at the red scald mark my fingers gave an involuntary twitch.
‘Is that still hurting?’ Donovan asked.
‘It’s okay. I don’t think I’ll be able to work for a day or two though.’
‘Oh God, of course, you’re a painter aren’t you?’ he said, looking stricken with guilt. ‘That’s going to be a bit of a problem isn’t it?’
‘I wasn’t thinking about that,’ I said, pinching an imaginary paintbrush, and making a few experimental strokes. ‘It’s the waitressing I’m worried about.’
‘You do waitressing? Really?’ He seemed surprised by this, although to my mind it was no more menial than gardening. I started to tell him about Rowena’s, and that led on to an account of my life with Christian, to which he listened with an almost unnerving attentiveness.
‘You must be some kind of saint,’ he said. ‘Don’t you ever feel bitter about all the opportunities you’ve missed because of living with Christian?’
‘No, no, it’s not a sacrifice. We’re like best mates.’
‘But do you have to do everything for him? Even personal stuff?’
‘No, he’s not helpless. He can do most things himself. And he’s got a carer. He can get around in his wheelchair fine, he can do housework, cooking. He could go out more: he’s got a specially modified car, but he doesn’t like going anywhere too far on his own because there’s always a chance he’ll get stuck, and he’d rather die than ask a stranger for help.’
‘I should have come to see him,’ said Donovan. ‘I must have been down at the caravan when it happened, and then I went off to the Pyrenees with some friends and lived there for a while, so I didn’t even know until ages after the event.’
‘What were you doing there?’
‘Fruit-picking, cleaning cars, odd jobs, begging. There were four of us living in a VW van. It wasn’t very civilised.’
This was how Penny found us when she returned with Cassie – sitting at the kitchen table, talking away like the best of friends.
‘Jesus, what happened to you?’ she demanded. ‘Did Donovan push you into a ditch?’
‘Practically,’ I replied, ignoring his indignant expression. I suppose my appearance had deteriorated in her absence: I had discarded my crippled boots and snagged tights, and there were grass stains and welts of mud on my white shirt and suede skirt. I began to think living above a dry-cleaner’s might not be such a bad idea after all.
‘You didn’t mention you were expecting company, Penny,’ Donovan said drily. ‘I expect you forgot.’
‘Oh no,’ she replied sweetly. ‘I thought it would be a nice surprise. I didn’t think you were going to beat her up. That wasn’t in the plan.’
‘Hello, I’m Cassie,’ said Cassie, who had stood by unacknowledged for what was, to an eight-year-old, an unconscionable length of time. ‘You came to my school.’
‘Hello, I remember you,’ I said. ‘You asked some very intelligent questions.’
Satisfied, she turned to Donovan. ‘You said next time you came you’d put up my mirror.’
‘Done it.’
She beamed. ‘Are you sleeping over?’
‘No, I am not “sleeping over”, madam,’ Donovan replied. ‘Haven’t you got any homework to do?’
‘Only piano practice. You can come and listen if you want.’
‘Excuse me,’ he said to us, removing his boots and following her down the carpeted hallway in his socks.
‘They get on brilliantly,’ said Penny, as the plink-plonk of an elementary two-handed exercise issued from the sitting room. ‘He’s great with kids. He and his wife couldn’t have any of their own,’ she added in a whisper. ‘Did he tell you that?’
I shook my head. I was thinking how defenceless men look without shoes. ‘We didn’t get on to him,’ I said. ‘I was too busy talking about me.’
‘They did all these tests,’ she went on, ‘and they couldn’t find anything wrong with either of them individually. But they seemed to have this one in a million incompatibility, like their genes were allergic to each other.’
‘How awful. Can’t they adopt?’
‘Unfortunately it didn’t come to that. I think the marriage was under too much strain. When John left me Donovan was spending a lot of time round here propping me up, which didn’t exactly help, and then his wife had an affair with a guy she met at the gym, and she got pregnant, like straight away. So that was that.’
‘Eek.’ What a bunch of amateurs we had turned out to be in the art of relationships. Two wrecked divorcees and someone’s bit on the side.
‘Anyway, we sort of helped to scrape each other off the floor,’ said Penny, flexing her long, ringless fingers.
Oh really? I thought.
The condition of my hand and shoulder meant driving was out of the question, so various possibilities were put forward, which would result in both me and my car getting home.
Finally Penny, the great organiser, decided that Donovan should drive me in the truck, while she and Cassie followed behind in my car. Donovan would then bring them both back to Weybridge. Beyond that, she didn’t elaborate: perhaps he was, after all, ‘sleeping over’.
I had rung Rowena to warn her I wouldn’t be coming in to work and she had accepted my excuses with a very ill grace. ‘Friday night,’ she wailed. ‘Where am I going to get someone at this short notice?’ And then, ‘What’s wrong with your other hand?’
In what was left of the daylight, Donovan sawed the lengths of poplar trunk into logs, and dragged the thinner branches up the garden to the front of the house. Penny helped him feed them into the shredder, which chewed them to a coarse sawdust and sprayed them into the bed of the truck. I was excused on account of my injuries, so I played Yahtzee with Cassie instead, and then acted incredulous while she ran through her repertoire of card tricks.
‘Shall I tell you how I did it?’ she’d say, when I’d overdone the bafflement.
‘No – magicians never tell,’ I said. ‘It’s a rule.’
‘Oh.’ She looked disappointed: she’d been desperate to give up her secrets. ‘I’ve already told Lauren,’ she added, in a worried tone.
‘Who’s Lauren?’
‘My best friend. I hate her,’ she replied, managing to distil the curious and complex flavour of childhood attachments in six short words. I could feel the idea of a book struggling to be born. The cover illustration was clearly before me: one of my scratchy pen and ink drawings of a girl with a blue-black nimbus of rage
throbbing about her head. It wouldn’t be a pretty-princess sort of book, but it would be true.
‘Do you think you can love and hate someone at the same time?’ I asked her.
She had begun building the bottom layer of a house of cards, making rows of trestles, supported at the sides and bridged, one to another. I held my breath. It was such a flimsy structure. ‘Yes,’ she said, without needing any time to think. ‘Daddy.’
‘Oh. Right.’ I didn’t know whether it was wise to reopen this particular wound, but she pressed on. ‘When he left I hated him for upsetting Mummy. But when he came to take me out he was just the same as he always was. Actually he was nicer; he didn’t ever tell me off or smack me.’
‘I used to know your daddy,’ I said. ‘A long time ago.’
‘I know. Mummy told me. Did you know Donovan, too?’
‘Yes. I’ve known Donovan since I was, well, younger than you.’
‘I wish Donovan would marry Mummy,’ she sighed, beginning on the second storey. ‘Then he could stay here all the time.’
Again that stab of dismay. ‘Do you think he will?’
‘No,’ Cassie shook her head with a look of resignation that seemed to convey all the wisdom of antiquity. ‘Nothing I want to happen ever happens.’ Her hand trembled, and the card she was holding snicked the corner of the structure so that the whole thing caved in, flopping gracefully onto the carpet.
‘I hope her driving’s improved,’ I said, glancing fearfully in Donovan’s wing-mirror as Penny got behind the wheel of my car and pulled out into the road behind us. ‘I’ve only got third party insurance.’
Donovan laughed. ‘Could be an expensive day out for you. First I ruin your clothes, then Penny writes off your car. You may end up wishing you’d stayed in bed.’
‘Oh, I wouldn’t go that far. It’s been a very interesting day. Cassie even gave me an idea for a book.’
‘She’s great, isn’t she?’
‘Yes, she comes out with these little gems in such a solemn voice. And what’s weird is, she looks more like Penny than Penny does. If you see what I mean.’
Donovan smiled at this observation. ‘Better she takes after Penny than Wart.’
‘You don’t like him?’
‘Not much.’
‘Penny told me all about their break-up. It seems like he treated her pretty badly.’
‘And what she doesn’t know is that it wasn’t the first time. Or the second.’
‘How do you know that?’
‘He used to tell me. We’d play squash and go for a pint every so often, and I’d hear all about the latest woman he was screwing. It put me in a really difficult position.’
‘I can imagine.’ We were having to talk in awkwardly raised voices because of the noise of the engine. The interior of the cab smelled of petrol and rust; and there was a snaking crack across my side of the windscreen, giving it a curious, bifocal effect. A gust of cold air blew through a gap at the top of his window where the rubber had perished. Between us the gear stick juddered madly. Donovan had to catch it and calm it down before he could change gear.
‘Then it got so that he would have a quick game of squash and then rush off to meet whoever-she-was-at-the-time,’ he went on. ‘I said no way was I going to be his alibi, and things were a bit cool between us after that. Penny was always more my friend than him.’
‘Do you still see him?’
‘No. I reckon in the last two years I’ve lost at least fifty per cent of my friends to divorce – theirs or mine. It’s like the Black Death.’
I couldn’t help laughing.
‘It’s true. Sharing out the Wedgwood and the fish knives is a breeze. It’s carving up your mates that’s the real killer.’
‘Penny did mention that you’d been married,’ I said, instinctively turning round to check that they were still following. Cassie returned my wave.
‘I suppose she gave you all the sordid details,’ Donovan said, frowning.
‘Oh, well, more or less,’ I admitted, since indiscretions were already flowing freely.
‘It was all that infertility treatment that caused the problem. Endless, endless tests, and the monthly dashing of hopes. We were perfectly happy before that. But it seemed to poison every part of our lives.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that. You’d make a good father, I’m sure.’
‘Well, Dad provided me with an excellent model of what not to do.’
‘Anyway, it’s not too late. It’s never too late for a man.’
Donovan gave me a sideways glance. ‘Have you never felt the call of motherhood? Or is it another sacrifice you’ve made for Christian?’
We were on to the M25 now, and the need to project our voices and occasionally repeat ourselves wasn’t ideally conducive to exchanging these confidences. ‘Sometimes I think it would be nice,’ I replied. ‘Like seeing Cassie today. Anyway, my circumstances are a bit complicated. My boyfriend is already married to someone else.’ I shouldn’t have brought Geoff into the conversation. I should have known that after what we’d been discussing it wasn’t a revelation that was likely to impress. But Donovan had spoken frankly and I felt obliged to reciprocate. Besides, I wanted to correct any impression I might have given of being immemorially unloved.
‘Oh?’ Donovan sounded quite taken aback. ‘Does his wife know?’
‘God, no. Of course not.’
‘Have they got children?’
‘Yes – a boy and a girl. Teenagers. I don’t know them: we’ve never met.’
‘How long has it been going on?’
‘Four years.’
‘Four years! Does he keep promising he’ll leave her, and then not doing it?’
‘No, no, nothing like that. I don’t want him to leave her. I don’t want her to be hurt.’
Donovan shook his head over this, flummoxed. ‘I can see what’s in it for him. But what’s in it for you?’
‘Well. It’s a relationship. Friendship. Sex. Conversation. Admiration. You know.’ Ahead of us I could see ranks of brake lights flashing. Gradually the traffic slowed to a crawl and then stopped altogether.
‘Where did you meet him?’
‘He was my GP. He’s not any more,’ I added hastily. ‘He made me switch surgeries immediately, for ethical reasons.’
‘So he takes his professional oath seriously, but not his marriage vows. Interesting.’ I could sense disapproval coming off him like static. It was the second time today I’d been made to feel like a social pariah, a peddler of misery in the same camp as the despicable Wart, and I didn’t like it one bit.
‘You sound shocked,’ I said.
‘You weren’t expecting a round of applause, were you? I’ve been on the receiving end of adultery and it sucks, believe me.’ He wasn’t ranting in any way, but the friendly atmosphere had definitely chilled.
‘You can’t compare individual cases . . .’
‘Plus, I saw what it did to Mum. So did you. It destroyed years of her life.’
In a minute I was going to be blamed for Donovan’s rotten childhood. ‘That’s why I’m very anxious that Geoff’s wife never knows. I’m not a threat to their marriage. I’m really not.’
‘How do you know she doesn’t already suspect? Aren’t women supposed to be gifted with all this intuition?’
‘You said yourself that Penny didn’t know about all Wart’s other women,’ I reminded him.
‘Okay,’ he conceded. ‘But she found out enough to wreck the marriage in the end.’
‘Anyway, strictly speaking, I’m not the one committing adultery. I’ve not broken any vows.’ A more feeble piece of self-justification it would be hard to imagine. Donovan raised his eyebrows and gave me a cynical, sidelong look.
‘What do your parents think?’
I was forced to concede that I hadn’t actually told them.
‘Ah, so you obviously do have a troubled conscience.’
‘Of course I do,’ I said impatiently. ‘But if I did tell them I
know what they’d say. What Jesus said: “Let he who is free from sin cast the first stone,” and all that.’ I thought this was an inspired riposte, which would silence him on the subject for ever.
Donovan nodded. ‘Yeah, but he also said, “Go and sin no more . . .”’
‘Look, I didn’t intend to get into a discussion about my morals,’ I snapped. ‘I wish I’d never mentioned it now.’ I slumped back in my seat and stared out at the columns of traffic trundling forwards, inch by inch, as though shackled together. Just my luck to be stuck in the front of a truck in the rush hour with a religious zealot.
‘Sorry,’ said Donovan. ‘It was an interesting subject. I got carried away.’ Silence settled over us. I continued to gaze out of the window at the necklace of red and white lights threading away into the dusk – an infinity of little tin boxes on wheels – and I thought what I always think when driving on a motorway: so many people whose lives will never intersect with mine.
At last we reached the Caterham turn-off and Donovan spoke. ‘Will Christian be in when we get there? It’d be great to see him.’
‘Until very recently I’d have said: “It’s Friday, so yes, he certainly will.” But he’s in the grip of New Love right now so his behaviour’s no longer predictable. All his routines are up the spout.’
‘Lucky him,’ said Donovan.
‘He used to be a complete hermit. And wild horses wouldn’t have got him inside a theatre. Now he’s off to the Barbican every five minutes. He can’t get enough of old Shakespeare. And someone in the house is reading W.B. Yeats, and it’s not me.’
‘God,’ said Donovan. ‘It sounds terminal.’
‘I think it may be. He’s been going out with Dad for a curry and some man-talk every Thursday for at least a decade, and last week he forgot. Just completely forgot to turn up!’
‘How is your dad, by the way? He was always so good. A saint, really.’
‘He’s fine. Retired, pottering about.’ I explained about his breakdown and recovery, and his and Mum’s unorthodox living arrangements. ‘Since Mum’s gone he’s rediscovered fun. He actually spends money on himself. Little treats like dates and Belgian chocolates and parmesan.’ I described the incident with the designer trunks.
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