I went out into the garden. We needed to plant our baskets and tubs for the summer, but if Glyn, whose task this usually was, was going to be indisposed over the weekend I could see a trip to the garden centre looming. I wondered whether I could prevail on Josh to mow the lawn for a consideration. Verity would always do it for nothing, but that, I told myself, wasn’t the point. It would be good for Josh’s soul, as well as his wallet – an argument which would surely carry some weight with Verity herself … The ‘ Isobel’ rose showed no signs of growth.
I sat down on one of the deckchairs which had been left out overnight but had dried off in the sun. At once the phone rang. For a moment or two I ignored it, unaccustomed to there being no one but me to answer. It was only (somewhat ironically) Glyn’s strangled cry from the bedroom window which finally sparked me to action.
‘Okay!’ I called. ‘I’ve got it!’
‘Hallo,’ said Patrick. ‘Just done the four-minute mile?’
My skin prickled. ‘I was out in the garden.’ I tried to remember whether I’d left the bedroom door open and if so how much could be heard. ‘Can you hang on a moment? I haven’t got a pen.’
I put the receiver down, went into Glyn’s office, pushed the door to behind me and lifted the phone in there. ‘Right, I’m here.’
‘Are you able to talk?’
‘For heaven’s sake,’ I protested, ‘what would you have done if someone else had answered?’
‘I’d have said, ‘‘May I speak to Laura Lewis, please?’’ And if they asked who it was I’d have said, ‘‘Patrick Lynch.’’ I’m funny like that.’
‘It makes me very nervous.’
‘You could have called me. When can you come round again?’ As he spoke, the doorbell sounded.
There’s someone at the door – hang on!’
‘Call me back.’ He hung up without giving me time to argue.
I opened the door.
‘Liam!’
He came in. ‘May I come in?’
‘Yes, do.’
Liam had acquired one of the least sympathetic haircuts imaginable – so savagely short that it revealed the sites of several small scars and accentuated his pale and hunted look. ‘Is she here?’
‘Becca?’ He looked at me, not sarcastically but woefully, as if lacking the energy to speak. ‘No – no, she’s not. There’s only me and Glyn here, and he’s got some fluey thing that’s going round.’
‘I know, I’m sorry I dumped on him earlier but I needed to talk.’
‘I’m sure you did,’ I said sympathetically. ‘ But I don’t know where Becca is.’
‘With one of her many admirers, I suppose,’ said Liam with savage self-pity.
‘I very much doubt it at this time of day. She’s more likely to be somewhere with the kids—’ I realized too late that this wasn’t the smartest thing to say. Liam’s gaunt, sharp features seemed to blur with emotion. I’m sorry.’
In a gesture that was very like one of Sinead’s, he put his forearm across his eyes, but I could still see his working mouth. ‘Excuse me …’
Glyn appeared at the top of the stairs in his yellow Hong Kong happy coat.
‘Go back to bed,’ I said briskly. ‘It’s Liam.’
‘Does he want to come up?’
‘Of course not, you’ve got flu, get back into bed.’
‘No, come on, we were talking earlier, it’s the least I can do.’
‘Liam?’
Liam lowered his arm and looked soulfully up at Glyn. His eyes were red. ‘I’m sorry … it’s your friendly neighbourhood emotional wreck.’
‘Meet your physical equivalent. Come up, why don’t you, and we can compare symptoms.’
‘Thanks.’ Liam took the stairs two at a time with long, awkward strides. Glyn’s face reappeared momentarily over the banister.
‘Who was it on the phone?’
‘Not for you.’
‘See how I’m treated?’ he said to Liam. ‘It runs in the family.’
I went back into the office and dialled Patrick’s number. I could hear the patter of a keyboard as he answered.
‘Patrick?’
‘Mm?’
‘Can I come round tomorrow afternoon?’
‘I’ll look forward to it.’
I realized, as I put the phone down, that I could no longer think of Patrick as an aberration, an isolated incident or a one-night stand. The last minute had blown that luxury away. As I emerged into the hall I heard the faint drone of Liam’s voice, telling Glyn all about his broken heart.
Chapter Ten
‘Don’t expect me to massage your guilt-trip,’ said Susan over club sandwiches at the King James Wine Bar. ‘No can do.’
‘I never asked you to do any such thing,’ I protested. ‘And I’m not on a guilt-trip.’
‘You’d like to be, though.’ Susan flapped her paper napkin at me as she munched and swallowed. ‘You’re a bit put out that you don’t feel worse about what you’re doing. Especially when I’m living like a nun. Tell me, is all this extra-curricular activity having a knock-on effect on your marital relations?’
‘How do you mean?’
‘For better or worse – to hijack a phrase?’
‘Neither – no change.’
‘Now, I find that really interesting,’ said Susan, eyes narrowing as she charged our glasses with an impertinent New Zealand chardonnay. ‘I always imagined that when two people share the deep, deep peace of the double bed for as long as you two have, any outside input would make if not waves at least very noticeable ripples.’
‘I’m very careful,’ I said. ‘Very careful.’
‘I’d have thought that alone would have aroused suspicion. But I mean, don’t you want to try out your newfound expertise on the old man? Doesn’t he notice a certain something about you?’
‘I don’t believe so – I hope not.’
She scrunched up her napkin and dropped it on her plate.
‘You don’t ever get the urge to tell him everything?’
‘No!’
‘You don’t feel you owe it to your husband to be honest?’ Susan went on, with one of those swift changes of tack which made me dizzy.
‘On the contrary,’ I said, ‘I think honesty would be absolutely fatal.’
‘For who?’
‘All of us.’
I took a generous draught of chardonnay while she scrutinized me. ‘You know,’ she mused, ‘it’s very interesting. You surprise me, Laura, you know that? You have a real old-fashioned courtesan’s mentality.’
‘Oh, please!’ I had to laugh. ‘ Hardly!’
‘No, you have. I can see you now, gliding back and forth along the corridors of country houses at the turn of the century, with a long plait and a taper. All clandestine lust and public composure, the height of discretion, the nadir of hypocrisy—’
‘Steady on!’
‘No, it’s a compliment – I think. I’m impressed by your sangfroid.’
‘It’s far from ‘‘froid’’, I assure you.’ She was so quick to slap a witty label on me, and I never had time to make her understand the byzantine complexities of my life. What she saw as a dull, scrubby plain (currently enlivened by a craggy peak) was actually a savage landscape of forests, rapids, screes and ravines through which I – roped, as it were, to the rest of the family – had to negotiate a safe path on a daily basis. In many respects my visits to Calcutta Road were the equivalent of peaceful green clearings in this hazardous terrain. When I was with Patrick, I knew where I was. At home I was charting unknown territory. I had not told Susan, for instance, that although Glyn and I had not made love in weeks the sexual tension between us was almost palpable. We were holding back. It was as if our bodies, familiar to one another through a quarter of a century of marriage, recognized some sea change in the status quo and reacted accordingly.
Susan studied me, and then said quietly, ‘Are you sure you haven’t failed to look where you’re going, and fallen in love?’
&
nbsp; Had I?
I went home via St Michael and All Angels, and communed for a moment with Isobel, the still small voice of calm. But on this occasion she held herself aloof. The clean white stone gave nothing away.
I went through into the Peace and walked slowly round the pond. A few hopeful mallards scudded across the surface and bobbed along next to me for a while in case I should be concealing a sliced loaf about my person. One of them had a flotilla of pussy-willow ducklings in tow. They made me want to cry.
I didn’t think I was in love with Patrick, and he had made no protestations other than those of desire. I sensed that every time I walked out of his door his life picked up where it had left off a couple of hours earlier, and seamlessly. Whereas I – I remembered things: like the book he was reading (Gore Vidal), and his brand of cigarettes (Marlboro) and that he put brown sugar in his tea. I knew what brand of cat food Peaches preferred, and where he kept the corkscrew, and that he put used matches back in the box. I was a married woman, after all – self-trained to notice inconsequential things in case they should ever come in useful.
I sat down on a seat near the water and remembered the day before yesterday, when I’d tried to find out more, without success.
‘Have you never been married?’ I’d asked. We were both dressed and downstairs in the kitchen. He was expecting me to leave.
‘No, never.’
‘Is that because you didn’t want to or because things went wrong?’
‘Never met anyone I wanted to live with.’
‘So you’re a sentimental old fool who believes in love,’ I said, knowing it had to be completely untrue.
‘Yes.’ He looked rather pleased with this assessment. ‘I suppose I must be.’
We were sitting at the table, which was a clutter of newspapers, loose change, pencils, opened mail and coffee mugs. I put out my hand and placed it on the back of his neck and pulled him towards me for a kiss. His own hand met my breast as he leaned forward, and I could feel my nipple start into his palm. Over recent weeks the expression ‘turned on’ had meant something to me. I had become an unstable substance which, when touched by Patrick, lit up. His body was completely different from my husband’s, but curiously more like my own. Glyn was spare and close to the bone, he felt the cold. Patrick was fleshy and weighty, and always warm. Sex with Glyn had always been about ourselves, and who we were and the choices we had made. With Patrick it was the complete and shocking loss of self, ecstatic, but repellent and fearful too.
I read a review in the Sunday Times of a new biography of Oscar Wilde. In it was quoted the phrase Wilde used to describe sex with male prostitutes – ‘feasting with panthers’. It resonated in my head for days.
But in love?
He had scraped his chair round and now had his other arm round me. Enclosed by his warm, quick-breathing mass, I at once flared up, like a match protected by a cupped hand. It happened every time. He allowed something in me which normally I did not allow, or even recognize.
‘I’m going,’ I said, and my protest was like a sleepy child’s, small and without emphasis.
‘I’m coming,’ he grunted. ‘Hold me now … now … now …’
Before I left I had to go and sponge my skirt and wash my hands in the small cloakroom off the hall. I had that light, tired feeling that often follows an energetic swim. My face, reflected in the mirror over the basin, was flushed, and my mouth looked as though a giant thumb had smudged its outlines. I stared back at this reflection. It was creepy, like one of those computer-generated images where one face is superimposed on another and then blended with it to create a synthesis which is at once neither and both. I remembered one Christmas when I was about three, when my father bought a half-mask, comprising only a nose, eyebrows and glasses, and sat down to lunch wearing it, for a joke. I had never been so terrified. A complete disguise, no matter how bizarre, would have been less horrific than this mutation which was recognizably my father, but horribly altered.
I slooshed the frightening face with cold water and tidied up my eye make-up. I turned the cloakroom light off without looking in the mirror again.
When I emerged into the hall Lili was there.
‘Hi,’ she said briefly, on her way into the sitting-room.
‘Bye, Laura,’ called Patrick from beyond her. ‘Be in touch.’
I had not been in touch, but I knew I would. Tomorrow probably, if Patrick didn’t call first. We never fixed a next time, we seemed to go in for a series of cliffhangers. There was always the possibility that this time would be the last. Childish, really.
I got up from the seat and left the Peace. I was in something with Patrick – deep in – but it wasn’t love. And I was in marriage with Glyn – deep in – and I was only just beginning to know what that might be.
I got back to find Josh and three of his friends sprawled out on the grass in the garden. They were smoking dope quite openly – its evocative smell wafted in through the kitchen door – and listening to the Red Indian dance music on a portable tape-deck. There were no girls present – Josh was peculiarly ascetic in that regard – but the four of them presented a picture of complete tranquillity and contentment. Slipping out of my shoes in the kitchen, I reflected that if this was the conflict, anxiety and anger of nineties youth we could all do with some of it. I would have gone and sat out there with them if it wouldn’t have ruined Josh’s afternoon.
Glyn came through from the office. It was hot, and he was wearing shorts and flip-flops.
‘Good day?’ he asked, getting the orange juice out of the fridge. ‘How was Susan?’
‘Ebullient, as ever.’
‘Before I forget, another of the Old Rats phoned. The plumptious Bunny.’
‘Oh really?’ I hadn’t seen Bunny since our party. ‘What did she want?’
‘To talk to you. Urgently. From her tone I suspect goss of a high order. Drink?’
‘Right. Thanks.’
Glyn leaned back on the sink and gave a small backward jerk of the head in the direction of the garden. ‘Is that pot?’
‘Can’t you smell it?’
‘I’ll go and have a word.’
‘It seems a shame,’ I said. ‘They look so peaceful.’
‘Well, they would, wouldn’t they? We remember. But the stuff’s not legal and that’s our garden. It only takes one neighbour to decide to be a good citizen … I’d better.’
Glyn surprised me sometimes. I watched as he went out into the garden. He sat down on the grass by Josh. He looked like one of them, only healthier. I took my orange juice, collected the phone from the hall and went into the sitting-room. As I sat with my feet curled up on the sofa, mailing Bunny’s number, I heard Glyn come in. On his way back to the office he put his head round the door.
‘Message received and understood. Let’s hope Plod isn’t on his way round as we speak.’
‘Let’s hope so,’ I agreed. ‘Bunny?’ Glyn closed the door discreetly. ‘Bunny, it’s me, Laura.’
‘Laura, it’s so sweet of you to ring.’ Her voice was strained.
‘Not at all. Glyn said it was urgent.’
‘Bless him. It’s only urgent in the sense that I think I’m going completely mad.’
Join the club, I thought. ‘Come on. Bunny, you’re the sanest woman I know.’
‘George and I are splitting up.’
‘What? I was genuinely astonished. ‘ But you mustn’t!’
‘It’s not a case of mustn’t. We are. We have.’
‘You’ve separated?’
‘Not formally – legally – but we’re going to. I’m going to get a divorce.’
‘For God’s sake, Bunny, why? You had such a good relationship – it worked so well.’
‘It did, didn’t it?’ She sounded bewildered. ‘It wasn’t just me that thought that, then?’
‘No! We all thought that. You made it work.’
‘Well.’ There was a horrible pause during which I knew she was fighting for control. ‘Looks li
ke we didn’t, after all.’
‘But why?’ I said again. ‘What went wrong?’
‘George had a secret life. That’s the only way I can put it. A horrible secret life.’
Horrible? It was hard to imagine the workaholic, money-motivated George having anything as exotic or time-consuming as a single secret, let alone a whole secret life, and a horrible one at that.
I chose my words carefully, and according to what I’d heard people say in films. ‘Do you want to tell me about it?’
‘Not over the phone if you don’t mind. I need to hold you with my glittering eye. Could we meet? Have lunch or something?’
‘Of course. When?’
The day she suggested – the Friday of the following week – was the day of the Guys ’n’ Dolls anniversary riverboat party. In for a penny in for a pound, I thought.
‘That’d be fine. I have to be in town that evening for something else.’
‘Could you bear the flat?’ She had an apartment off Harley Street.
‘Very easily,’ I said.
‘Only it’s safe, and discreet,’ she pleaded as though I’d raised some objection. ‘And who knows, I may not have it much longer. I’ll raid Marks and Sparks for something nice.’
I made pasta and Glyn and I had ours in the garden. Josh and co. refused the pasta and then came down and laid waste every source of carbohydrate in the kitchen, leaving a blizzard of crumbs, a slick of butter, an archipelago of puddled milk and two empty cereal packets.
‘What was up with Bunny?’ asked Glyn, leaning back in his deckchair. ‘Or aren’t you allowed to say?’
‘She and George have split up.’
‘That’s awful.’
‘It is, rather.’
‘I’m shocked. Why?’
‘Apparently,’ I said, ‘he has what she described as a horrible secret life. But I won’t have any details till I meet her next Friday.’
Life After Lunch Page 17