Cleo

by Helen Brown

  “Good idea. I’ll do it.”

  I didn’t. For several reasons. It never feels good to lie; saying my aunt had died might tempt fate—I was very fond of Aunt Lila; Cleo approved of him and…there wasn’t really a fourth reason, apart from the memory of that extraordinary kiss.

  Considering how many awkward and embarrassing things had happened on that first so-called date he was fool enough to sign up for more. He had to be mad. Or special. Or mad in a special way, or the other way around.

  I often told the kids that anything’s worth trying if your chances are better than winning Lotto. Yet the possibility of there being more to the toy boy beyond his perfectly groomed surface was almost zero. On the other hand, he’d called my bluff a couple of times. Maybe I’d underestimated him.

  Despite Nicole’s assurances there was no future in it, the dinner became the first of many. And I was facing a dilemma. I was beginning to enjoy the company of multifaceted Philip. If our relationship went any further, it could no longer be classified as a one-night stand, even in the loosest terms. After all, the whole point of a one-night stand is it’s impersonal, possibly unsatisfactory, and therefore not worth repeating. Sleeping with him now would be tantamount to disobeying the shrink’s instructions.

  Besides which, there were other more uncomfortable matters to consider. A woman who has given birth three times is unwilling if not insane to expose her body, especially if she has avoided the rigors of the gym. “Drop a dress size in one week” diets invariably ended in “gain two sizes a week later.” After the birth of a child the female form arranges itself in mounds and folds that can charitably be described as “interesting” to artists such as Renoir and Rubens. After the birth of three, her body is more or less a Henry Moore sculpture carved in sponge rubber. A young man whose greatest physical imperfection was a subtly crooked nose (due to a rugby injury) had every reason to be warned against the dangers of unraveling acres of unruly womanly flesh. Yet, like Livingstone in search of the source of the Nile, he refused to give up.

  I gradually began to understand why queen-size sheets were invented. They’re the Western woman’s equivalent of the Muslim female’s chador. With careful planning, a queen-size sheet can be arranged to cover the entire body and head with just a slit from which the eyes can peer out. “Gosh,” she says, trying to sound offhand as she peers through the slit at the impossibly toned male body, “these sheets have a mind of their own.” The other merciful invention is the light switch. Due to a condition that has afflicted her since childhood, known as Extreme Sensitivity of the Eyes to Artificial Light, it must be switched off. My body was no longer a temple. It was a garden for the blind.

  It was during a lull in one of these nonvisual encounters that he invited me to spend a weekend at his family’s holiday cottage on the shores of Lake Taupo. This was starting to sound scarily on the edge of being beyond a several-night stand to something complicated.

  “But I’ll have the…”

  “Make it one of the weekends you don’t have the kids.”

  He’d finally accepted the kids were sacred turf, part of a separate life he was banned from.

  “But…there’s no one to look after the cat.”

  “Cleo can come along with us, if she doesn’t get carsick.”

  I told him Cleo adored riding in cars. So a couple of weeks later on a Friday night after work she jumped eagerly into the old Audi. Perched on my knee, she watched the countryside spinning past. As we headed towards the lake the hills turned gold, then crimson, before drenching themselves in deepest violet.

  We arrived at the cottage after dark. The Taupo night wrapped around us like black velvet, making us blind but heighten ing our other senses. The air was heavy with piney smells. There was a spike of distant snow on the breeze. I could hear the intimate lap of waves licking the shore. The outline of the wooden house was plain and modest. Even though I couldn’t see it properly, the place had unmistakable soul. Like a child on a mystery adventure I followed the thread of Philip’s torchlight to a flyscreen door.

  “Just a minute,” he said. “There’s a special hiding place for the key.”

  He disappeared around the side of the house and emerged with the key soon after. “Here we go,” he said, sliding it in the lock. “Damn!”

  “What’s happened?”

  “It’s okay,” he said. “I’ve just broken the key.”

  “Oh. Is that okay?”

  “It’s stuck in the lock.”

  “Can’t we break a window?”

  “That would set the alarm off.”

  “Let’s do it, then.”

  “I can’t remember the code.”

  We stood for what seemed several minutes in the dark together, Cleo tucked under my arm. Our courtship, if that’s what it was, seemed destined to be laced with complications.

  “We’ll just have to stay in a motel,” he sighed. “I’ll call a locksmith in the morning.”

  The sign outside the motel said “No Pets.” Cleo was smuggled through the lobby inside my handbag, without so much as a mew. Next morning, we met the wry, smiling locksmith at the cottage.

  Nestled on the lake’s edge, the old house had been in Philip’s family for three generations. With French doors opening onto a stretch of grass running down to a pumice-laden beach, the setting was more spectacular than anything I’d imagined the previous night. The lake sparkled blue as a Sri Lankan sapphire. A sage-green island rose like an afterthought in the distance.

  Cleo stretched gleefully in front of a driftwood fire while Philip and I walked along the river track. We paused at a bend where the river widened and spilled over rocks. Ferns bent over the water’s edge to admire their reflections. A group of midges hung expectantly in the air. If Philip wanted to understand who I was, sooner or later he’d have to know about Sam. There was a possibility the information would destroy our burgeoning romance. To take on an older woman is one thing. Add a couple of readymade kids and the scenario becomes more complicated. If Philip was willing to wade in any deeper, he’d need to try to understand the emotional picture of what it might be like to lose a child. Even if we spent the rest of our lives together and had our own children, there would always be part of me that would remain fenced off from him. The part that loved and grieved for Sam.

  “There’s something I need to tell you,” I said, concentrating on a powder puff of cloud in the distance. “Rob and Lydia had an older brother…”

  Th e edges of the cloud started peeling away as if it was about to dissolve into the sky. A breeze spiked off the mountains. I shivered inside my city rain jacket. If I’d had more outdoor experience I would’ve thought to bring gloves to a place like this in the depths of winter.

  “I know about Sam,” he replied quietly.

  “How?” I asked, surprised.

  “I read the articles you wrote around the time it happened.”

  “Really? What was an army boy doing reading that sort of thing?”

  “Your stories were very moving,” he said, staring up at the same cloud for what seemed a long time. “Tell me about Sam.” He took my hand and rubbed it warm.

  “Are you sure you want to know?”

  He kissed my fingers, cocooned them in his and tucked them protectively in the pocket of his Gore-Tex jacket. “Absolutely.”

  As we trudged the rest of the river track with my hand nestled in his pocket he listened to Sam’s story, the funny bits, the sad. I told him how losing a child was like having an arm or leg lopped off, except probably worse. Th at I wasn’t sure how profoundly the experience had affected me, that in fact it still did. No matter how logical I tried to be, how squarely I faced the facts Sam no longer existed, I often continued to set an extra place at the table, and would probably do so for the rest of my life. No doubt there were mothers all over the world officially “recovered” from their grief who did the same thing.

  I would have forgiven him if he’d said one of the old clichés like “I can’t imagine w
hat it must’ve been like” or one of the newer ones like “you must be so strong.” But he simply listened. For that I was grateful.

  Cleo was waiting in the glow of the fire when we returned.

  “And this cat, she’s part of it all,” Philip said, scooping her into his arms. “She’s your connection to Sam, isn’t she?”

  Purring loudly, Cleo stretched a lazy paw and patted his neck. She yawned and snuggled into his chest. There was nowhere else she, or I, wanted to be.

  Later in the day we went fishing in a dinghy, against a backdrop of mountains tinged candy-floss pink in the sunset. A plump rainbow trout provided dinner for all three of us. We drank red wine and laughed. From a “ticks in boxes” perspective we had little in common, yet we shared something Philip had recognized from the start. We were both strong individuals, unwilling or unable to belong to an in-crowd. In my case, even the out-crowd wouldn’t have me. It seemed incredible that Philip hadn’t turned away from Sam’s story or the scar of my grief. He’d intuited Cleo’s part in it, too.

  I began to realize I was falling in love.

  Respect

  A cat demands to be treated as an equal. She expects nothing less. Patronize a feline at your peril.

  Carrying out a secret affair in a newsroom is like working in a chocolate factory and trying to stay skinny.

  “There’s someone called Dustin on the phone for you,” said Nicole, cool and quizzical.

  To make ourselves feel more relaxed about our age difference I’d summoned up famous historical love affairs in which the woman was considerably older—Cleopatra and Antony, Yoko and John, and of course, Mrs. Robinson and Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate.

  Philip used the code name Dustin when he called me at the office. At his work I left messages that Mrs. Robinson had called.

  “Who’s Dustin?” Nicole probed.

  “Distant cousin.”

  “Oh well, I suppose it’s good you’ve moved on from that toy boy.”

  The times Philip and I spent together were growing more precious. I looked forward to them the way a child counts the days till Christmas. After two months of clandestine meetings, I wondered how much longer I’d be able to keep my life so neatly compartmentalized. Whenever he stayed the night while the kids were in residence, I woke him before dawn and made sure he creaked safely out the front door before an impressionable eye flicked open. The last thing I wanted was for them to have to deal with a transient adult male. Yet on our weekends alone together I’d see him looking so comfortable with Cleo draped over his knee it felt like he’d always been part of my emotional framework. Always—a risky word in anyone’s language.

  “So when do I get to meet the kids?” he asked. “You’ve told me so much about them it’s like I know them already.”

  “Soon.” Cleo looked up at me from his lap and winked.

  “In twenty years’ time?”

  “Not here at the house. I don’t want them thinking you’re invading their territory.”

  “Okay. Let’s get together on neutral ground. There’s a new pizza parlor in town.”

  He’d obviously thought it through. How could I possibly object to a casual meeting in a pizza parlor? I was in love with Philip, but had ongoing proof that romantic love is like a swimming pool. People fall into it and scramble out of it wet and disheveled, usually in one piece but damaged, all the time.

  The love for my children was a different beast altogether. It was fierce and unfathomable. I’d willingly fight to the death for them. Besides, he had no hope of comprehending the grief I carried for Sam. Not that I wanted him to shoulder my sadness in any way, but if he wanted to be part of our lives he needed to acknowledge its existence.

  He had every reason to turn around and run. But if he burst into my children’s lives and abandoned them brokenhearted I’d tear his limbs off, preferably one at a time, slowly and with no pain relief whatsoever.

  Rob slipped into his favorite sweatshirt, several sizes too big for him, with USA emblazoned on the front. I buckled Lydia’s red shoes, licked a tissue and wiped mysterious goo off her cheek.

  “Try and be well behaved,” I instructed them. “He’s not used to children.”

  “What sort of person isn’t used to children?” asked Rob. “Anyway, I’m not a kid anymore.”

  The pizza parlor was carved out of the ground under a shopping arcade. Descending a fake marble staircase, complete with wrought-iron railings, the kids seemed impressed. Quiet at least. I was grateful the place hadn’t been open long enough to reek of tired fat. Fake ivy clambered over polystyrene columns. Red and white checked tablecloths screamed at the glistening cash register. It felt like a movie set, with us as an unlikely set of actors auditioning for the role of Family Group.

  I was relieved when the waiter escorted us to a discreet table under the stairs. Anyone from work could turn up at a joint like this. It would be through the office like chickenpox by Monday morning—“Brown and Toyboy Test Drive Family Outing. Has She Lost Plot?!”

  We ordered pizza and Coke. Rob was no longer a bubbly kid; he’d elongated into a thirteen-year-old with a tank full of testosterone. He was sullen, silent and determined to show no interest in someone who wasn’t used to children. I’d warned Philip it was a difficult age. Lydia, who had insisted on wearing three strands of beads around her neck, vacuumed her glass until it was almost empty. Philip seemed slightly unnerved when her slurping noises echoed against the plastic wall panels.

  “Don’t do that!” I hissed at the child.

  “Why not? It’s fun.”

  “It’s not polite.”

  “But this is,” she said, lifting the straw from her glass and tipping the remains of her Coke onto her tartan skirt.

  “No, it’s not!” I said, dabbing her skirt with a paper napkin. I glanced at Philip, who was studying the menu as if it was a legal document. Now he surely understood why I never wanted this collision of realities to take place.

  “Haven’t you got a mother?” Lydia asked, kicking the table leg and making the cutlery hiccup.

  “Yes, I do,” he said, lowering the menu to welcome the first unsolicited contact from the children.

  “Why don’t you go home and be with her?”

  Silence. I waited for Philip to scrape his chair back and run.

  “She’s busy tonight.”

  “Tell her not to be. We’ve got our mother. You’ve got yours. You don’t need our mother, too.”

  “Strangers in the Night” dribbled out of a nearby speaker. To the untrained ear the recording had been made inside a shipping container, with musicians scraping instruments made of tin cans. Their Muzak was a welcome silence filler.

  Philip’s attention moved to the paper place mats with games printed on them. He asked Rob if he’d like to play snakes and ladders. (Not snakes and ladders! I wanted to tell Philip. Rob grew out of that years ago. He thinks it’s a game for babies!) But it wasn’t Philip’s fault he hadn’t kept pace with child development. I held my breath waiting for the inevitable combination of rejection and scorn to catapult across the table.

  “I’d rather play this,” Rob said, indicating a mass of dots arranged in rectangles. I hadn’t seen the game before, but it looked brutally competitive. Each player was allowed one pencil stroke to join two dots at a time, gradually amassing territories of fully formed rectangles. Whoever gained the largest number of completed rectangles won the game. This was the restaurant place mat version of war.

  The game started casually enough for me to munch through a triangle of Hawaiian pizza while concentrating on keeping Lydia’s mouth full so no more conversational frogs could leap out of it.

  To keep the atmosphere cheerful I read from a section of the menu about the history of pizza, since its humble beginnings when the Greeks first came up with the idea of decorating flat bread.

  “The real turning point was in the early nineteenth century, when a Neapolitan baker called Raffaele Esposito decided to make a bread that would stand o
ut from everyone else’s. He started by just adding cheese…”

  I was, of course, reading all this while surreptitiously monitoring the battle taking place between the two men in my life. Rob claimed a cluster of rectangles in the right-hand corner. Philip filled in a strip on the other side. The game was evenly matched.

  “After a while he started putting sauce under the cheese. He let the dough fluff out to the shape of a pie…”

  Rob’s territory was spreading across the square. Philip, on the other hand, appeared to be making listless progress on his side. My lips wanted to smile, but I tried to keep them in a straight line. Philip was demonstrating unexpected maturity by letting Rob win. Maybe he was stepfather material after all. He certainly looked the part in his corduroy trousers and fisherman’s knit jumper.

  “Everyone loved Esposito’s pizza so much he was asked to create a special one for the King and Queen of Italy. He made one in the colors of the Italian flag—red sauce, white cheese, green basil…”

  The two blocks of rectangles moved closer together. Their pencils flashed like swords. It was starting to look like a draw. That would be okay, I thought, as long as Rob’s dignity was kept intact. There was hardly any free space left now.

  “He named his pizza Margherita, after the queen…”

  The tension was unbearable.

  “The new Margherita pizza was a huge hit.”

  I didn’t dare watch the last few strokes. I knew it was over when I heard two pencils clatter onto the tabletop.

  “You won,” said Rob, with a brave smile.

  “You what?!” I said, turning to Philip.

  “It was a tough game,” he said, shrugging with an unmistakable glint of satisfaction.

  A tough game? Didn’t he understand there’s no such thing as a tough game when children were involved, especially my children? My kids’ lives were tough enough without some jerk in pseudo stepdad corduroys turning up and knocking their self-esteem around.