Love Is a Four Letter Word

by Claire Calman

  It seemed a bit of a waste, however, now that she was there. The noticeboard’s list of classes for that evening offered Be Your Own Accountant (who could resist?); Italian/Intermediate (possibly interesting, but she hadn’t yet progressed much past grazie and spaghetti al pesto and Alessandra would be bound to go on about it and correct her pronunciation); Polish Folk-Dancing (checked watch: class nearly finished); and Life Drawing/All levels (starting in 30 seconds). Probably not many men, but she would enjoy herself anyway, and she needn’t tell anyone; she hadn’t sat in an actual class since she’d been at art school but she had loved that complete absorption in the task. When she drew, she was entirely focused, her concentration lasered into looking, really seeing, and interpreting her three-dimensional vision into two dimensions. She hurtled along the corridors, trying to find the right room. Why did these places always have peculiar names or numbers for rooms? The one she wanted was called WG4, but there didn’t seem to be a WG1, 2 or 3.

  She finally tracked it down in an annexe and leapt into the room in the middle of the tutor’s introductory blurb. He said they must all call him JT and ask as many questions as they liked. Despite the fact that the tutor insisted on calling himself by initials, he seemed to be OK. ‘Erm …?’ Bella found herself saying to avoid using JT, which sounded like a cleaning product or a megalomaniac boss who thought he was being chummy with his staff. How could anyone say ‘Call me JT’ and not sound embarrassed? ‘Erm’ suggested they all start with a quick fifteen-minute study before moving on to a longer pose.

  The model disrobed and moved into a standing position, leaning forward with his leg on a chair. There, she was getting to be with a naked man after all, and without any of that awful awkwardness. No having to laugh at laborious puns, no discovering he thought foreplay meant ten minutes of energetic rummaging in her pubes, no cystitis, no having to introduce him to her mother. Marvellous.

  Bella rootled in her bag for the stubby end of a pencil. How odd it was, she thought; as soon as you really started to look, to draw, you no longer saw a naked person. The model became simply a skeleton overlaid with flesh, a collection of volumes and planes, areas of light and shadow. If only she could reduce people to this simplicity the rest of the time: the angle of a leg, the curve of a shoulder, the weight of hand on hip. It wasn’t that drawing was easy – far from it; how would she manage to convey that foreshortened foot, for a start, without it appearing deformed? And do his dangly bits without making them look like chicken giblets? But if you really looked, you did start to learn, you did get better at making sense of it. You could make some personal interpretation that was akin to the reality. Yet you could live on the planet for a thousand years – well, thirty-three, but she bet it didn’t get any easier – and still find other people, and yourself, a total mystery. She dismissed the thought as fruitless, focused her attention on the model and lost herself in drawing.

  When it was time for the model’s break, Bella noticed the room around her, the other people in the class, as if she had awoken from a trance, forms coming into focus. Blinked as if the lights had been switched on suddenly. Found it hard to speak for a moment or two, her head still filled with pictures, shapes. Saw the words as symbols in her mind first before she could translate them into sounds, the letters only abstract lines and curves for a second as if they were pictures rather than meaningful language. Drawing was rather like being in love, she decided, the completeness of it, no need for anything else.

  She was aware of a presence at her left shoulder. JT, checking her progress. He nodded, approving.

  ‘I take it you’re not exactly a beginner,’ he said.

  7

  Sunday. The day designed for the sole purpose of reminding all single people on the planet just how sad and lonely they really were. It wasn’t as if she had a shortage of things to do. There was the small matter of the boxes, for a start. It was weeks now since she’d moved in and she was still surrounded by her cardboard cityscape. But what was the point of unpacking everything when it would all have to be repacked when she got around to having the damp done? She couldn’t descend on Viv and Nick again. Viv kept saying it was fine, but the other evening Nick had remarked that they needn’t bother having any children now because they had Bella: no need to worry about getting her into a decent school – no need to fund her through college – no arguments about her staying out late or hogging the phone for hours. Fantastic, he’d said, why hadn’t anyone else thought of it? Why put yourself through all those years of anxiety and heartache when you could just adopt a thirty-three-year-old who could cook and everything? Hilarious. My, how she’d laughed.

  She got out her list. ‘Sort out house’, it said. ‘Sort out garden’. They both seemed a bit epic for a Sunday morning. ‘Damp’. She underlined it firmly to give herself the feeling that she was somehow hastening its progress. Added ‘Chase Mr Bowman again’ as a sub-entry beneath it. ‘Crack in wall/studio’. That was obviously more of a DIY project, more of a get-someone-else-in-to-sort-it-out sort of thing. ‘Shower curtain’, the list continued. ‘Blind for bathroom’. Ah, that was more like it. She could manage a little light selecting of shower curtains. Habitat wasn’t open till noon. Plenty of time to whizz round and have a quick tidy-up. After a spot of breakfast.

  A breakfast tray was assembled with cornflakes and cold milk, tea, a toasted muffin; she whapped a tape of The Philadelphia Story into the video and settled back into the sofa.

  That was the trouble with the world today: there were no men like Cary Grant any more. Or she’d have quite happily settled for James Stewart. It was coming up to the moment when – the night before she’s going to marry another man – he kisses Katharine Hepburn before they head off for a drunken moonlit swim.

  ‘It can’t be anything like love, can it?’ he whispered into her hair.

  ‘No, no, it mustn’t be, it can’t!’ Hepburn breathed, leaning against a tree, her face bathed in moonlight.

  ‘Would it be … inconvenient?’ drawled Stewart.

  ‘Terribly!’

  And she even managed to look beautiful when she was drunk.

  Bella clicked off the television and leant her head back against the cushions. What if she never found another man, never mind Mr Perfect, just anyone at all? She’d become one of those single women who fuss over their cats as if they were babies and go on group holidays to Thailand to learn about batik. After a while, friends would give up all hope of ever matching her up with someone and would think of her with pity, while telling her how much they envied her her freedom – how wonderful to be able to do her own thing all the time – she could jet off to New York without having to cross-check diaries six months in advance – no need to spend her entire life in I-hoovered-so-you-wash-up negotiations – no squabbling about who took out the rubbish last time – no being questioned about why she had spent quite so much money on a linen jacket and didn’t she already have a jacket anyway, did she really need another one? – no endless debates about whether it would be betraying their socialist principles to send the children to private school, not that they wouldn’t prefer a state school of course, but Lottie was just so bright and she’d never get enough attention in those outsize classes, it wouldn’t be fair – how wonderful it must be to be able to stretch out in bed, never waking cold and coverless at three in the morning and have to wrestle a small corner of duvet from the snoring pig next to her.

  Good grief, it was nearly noon now. She must, must, must do something constructive. Go sketching or something. JT had said they should all be drawing every day – ‘… an indispensable routine, like brushing your teeth.’ Her gaze fell on a small section of peeling wall above the skirting, awaiting the attentions of the damp man (she imagined him as having some mild but unpalatable complaint, possibly of a fungal nature). Then on the boxes again. Perhaps she could pass them off as an intentional part of the décor; it might become fashionable: Designer Clutter. Sunday supplements would devote pages to artfully arranged boxes of junk, t
heir contents spilling onto the floor in close-up grainy photographs displaying the essence of blasé chic. She was reminded about the quest for a shower curtain. Surely, if she owned one, she would become one of those dynamic morning people who leap out of bed at six a.m. to shower then eat yoghurt in the lotus position, rather than loitering in the bath for over an hour reading and fantasizing. She would go to Habitat now, right this very minute, then come back and take a good hard look at the garden.

  Patrick had hated Habitat, loathed it as he loathed any kind of shopping that didn’t involve the acquisition of food, claiming colour-blindness, taste-blindness, any impairment he could think of to be excused – ‘You go, Bel. You’re good at that sort of thing. It all looks the same to me.’ She had been genuinely baffled, as if he’d claimed not to be able to tell the difference between fruit cake and prawn cocktail. How could someone not mind what their surroundings looked like? Surely, a house was like a wonderful, three-dimensional painting to be composed: the juxtaposition of colours, the contrasting of textures, the fall of light, the frisson of a controlled clash. ‘A quilt’s a quilt,’ said Patrick. ‘If I’m underneath it and asleep, why should I care what it looks like?’ Bella bit her lip; why did she always miss him most when she was remembering something annoying about him?

  If Bella had thought about it properly, she’d have realized that Habitat was no sensible place for a single person to go at the weekend. Now she knew the dark and horrible truth: Habitat was the core, the pit of woe at the centre of Sunday Hell. She had never seen so many couples; they must be growing them in pods in the basement. They were Clone Couples with quarrytiled kitchens, shiny espresso machines, terracotta bread crocks and ‘wacky’ fish-shaped soap dishes. They had loose-weave, crumpled curtains and loose-weave, crumpled jackets and loose-weave, crumpled children. It was all part of the master plot to make you fulfil your role as a consumer (whatever did happen to the good old customer?) correctly and spend, spend, spend. In supermarkets, they put sweets and chocolate by the till at grabbable height so that your hand will reach out and take a triple pack of walnut whips of its own accord; in home-furnishings stores, they extrude perfect, ready-made families onto the shop floor so that you, the Sad Single, will be inspired by these visions of familial bliss. You start to feel warm, broody, generous; if only you buy a set of rustic peasant coffee mugs, a Mediterranean juice jug and a checked tablecloth with matching napkins, surely you too will acquire a co-ordinating Perfect Husband and Children set and resulting Perfect Life.

  She couldn’t so much as circumnavigate a sofa without falling over a buggy or having a small, dungareed person trundle straight into her knees; often, said small person would try to carry on like a wind-up toy, proof she was sure that they were fuelled by some sinister unseen power source. And what were all those toys for? It was supposed to be a furniture shop. She didn’t want to be looking at corduroy camels or jolly sacks o’ bricks or cute baby seals with please-don’t-club-me-mister big dark eyes. She caught herself actually starting to walk towards the till holding a small fluffy pig – for herself. She was just giving it a little piggy voice in her head, with excited squeals – ‘Ee, ee, are you taking me home?’ – when she looked down and saw it in her hand. A soft toy. She was as appalled as if she’d suddenly realized that she’d walked out without paying. It was the thin end of the wedge. Next stop: forty cutesy, squidgy creatures with sweet names all piled up on the pillows. Then she’d end up having late-night conversations with them and keeping photos of them in her wallet. At her previous job, she had worked with someone who had brought a teddy bear into the studio and held out its paw for her to shake – a woman who otherwise looked perfectly sane and normal. No thank you. She would not turn into Soft Toy Woman. How could you – how could anyone have cuddly toys on a double bed? Wasn’t there something just the teensiest bit weird about it? A tad Lolita-ish? Paedophiles’ delight?

  She phoned Viv to report the incident and turn herself in.

  ‘But you didn’t actually buy one, right?’

  ‘No, but I hovered dangerously on the brink. And, and, and – even after I realized how close I had come, I thought maybe I could still get it and keep it under the pillow – as if that didn’t count. Shoot me now, before it’s too late.’

  Viv’s voice dropped to a whisper as she confided that Nick had a toy.

  ‘He hasn’t!’

  ‘He has. God, I shouldn’t be telling you this. Breathe a word and you’re a dead woman. It’s a little fluffy dog, but it’s OK because he’s had it since he was small. It’s called Max.’

  ‘It’s not called anything. It’s fur fabric and fluff.’

  ‘Don’t be so intolerant. It’s really quite sweet. He makes it bounce on my tummy and do somersaults.’

  ‘Perverts!’ Viv might as well have said they wore traffic-warden uniforms in bed or liked to wee on each other. ‘If there was one other cynical old bitch in the world I thought I could rely on – no, don’t try to defend yourselves, you’re only making it worse. This is a sad, sad day.’

  Bella resolved to restrict future visits to the Danger Zone to late-night closing day, which was when professional, single women who wore smart, coordinating items with proper lapels and waistbands rather than big, shapeless sacky things over leggings went to look at lamp bases in the evening because they had no-one to eat dinner with.

  Annoyingly, the prospect of sorting out her studio looked just as daunting that afternoon as it had every other day. What about the garden? That was marginally more appealing. She went to see the current state of play from behind the safety of the French windows. She leant her forehead against the cool of the glass and squished her nose flat like a child wanting to be let out to play. No doubt about it, it was getting worse.

  When she’d first viewed the house, the garden had seemed merely rather dull: a tired patch of lawn, some straggly, nondescript shrubs, a few tangly climbers. How could things have got out of hand so quickly? It was becoming increasingly difficult even to see to the other end. This wouldn’t have bothered her if she’d had an acre or more; presumably, it must be one of the penalties of being wealthy – not being able to see the boundaries of the grounds, feeling tired by the time you’d reached the end of the corridor. But this was of modest dimensions, barely enough room to swing a snail. It was embarrassing. She must exert some sort of control while she could still get out there. Soon the triffids would be nosing up to the French windows, their tendrils skittering across the glass; the ivy would wind itself around the house like a boa constrictor, tightening its grip, sealing her in. She’d be like Sleeping Beauty, circled by a barrier of briars, waiting for her true prince, the only man brave enough to battle through.

  Where on earth should she start? She’d need a machete, a compass and a Boys’ Own Survival Guide out there. Have to tie a length of string to the doorhandle so she could find her way back to the house. Perhaps Viv would give her a hand. But she and Nick already had their hands full trying to repaint their bedroom. The lawn looked as sad as uncombed hair scraped across a bald patch. It desperately needed mowing – all she needed was a mower. And that enormous monster bush needed hacking back – if only she had a pair of secateurs. She retrieved her list from the kitchen drawer. ‘Garden centre’, she added ‘– get tools’.

  The garden centre was busy; there were people buying sheds and hefting sacks of compost into car boots and tying trellis panels to their roof-racks, a hive of industry. Even watching them made Bella feel tired. Retired couples bent lovingly over shrubs and rose bushes, as curious and nurturing about a prospective purchase as over a new grandchild. Bella passed a woman of about sixty wearing jeans and a multicoloured waistcoat. ‘Now, you’re a nice little fellow,’ the woman was saying to a variegated holly as Bella went by. ‘That’s what I’ll be like,’ thought Bella, ‘Wearing clothes thirty years too young for me and chatting to plants. I bet she’s got cats.’

  Perhaps she should simplify the whole garden – just have lawn and a small tr
ee and a couple of tubs. Then the small tree would become a large tree and overshadow the whole garden so she couldn’t even see out, like buying a sweet little mongrel puppy only to watch it grow and grow until you realized it had been born of a great Dane and sired by a buffalo.

  She would definitely have to sort out the garden properly before it was worth spending much on plants, she realized, because there was nowhere to plant them in its current state. In the meantime, she chose a few small pots of herbs to cheer herself up. While paying, she noticed a sign by the till advertising the services of a garden designer: ‘Time to turn over a new leaf? If your garden’s more of a jinx than a joy, don’t stay indoors and cry. Whether your taste tends towards the traditional or the avant-garde, simple or stupendous, I’ll help you create your ideal garden and turn your dreams into reality – at a reasonable cost.’ It offered a free initial consultation, without obligation. She noted down the name and phone number.

  Planting out her herbs to avoid the greater evil of doing her laundry, Bella resolved to phone the garden man immediately. It was Sunday, so he probably wouldn’t be there, was probably yet another person out having a wonderful day in the bosom of his family, carrying his youngest on his shoulders, taking the older one to kick a ball around at the park. Exchanging smug smiles with his slender wife as she stirred the gravy, the children grinning impishly as they tucked in heartily to a mound of Brussels sprouts. The Sunday lunches of her own childhood had been rather different. Her mother’s frown as she subdued a rogue lump in the gravy, concentrating as she added a dose of red wine to the pan. The heavy cutlery, awkward in Bella’s childish hands, the fine china, immaculate tablecloth. Her own quiet face, pale moon in a cloud of dark hair. Her father’s rich voice, talking, soothing, bridging the silences, playing a game of make-believe, Happy Families.