‘Hello,’ said Nina, ignoring Hugo and looking at Guy. ‘You’re the man with the performing dog.’
‘You’re the woman with . . .’ but Guy couldn’t think of anything funny or even accurate to say. He hadn’t forgotten her face. It, and the rest of her, had figured in many of his daydreams.
‘Oh, Nina,’ called Hugo from deep within the house. ‘This is Guy. He’s coming on the desert trip with us. Aren’t you, Guy?’
‘Is he?’ said Nina, smiling. ‘He doesn’t look terribly convinced.’
‘Oh,’ said Guy, shaking himself up. This was the moment. There would be other bad decisions, of course. But this was the one that would echo down the years, so that even as an old man he would remember standing there on the threshold, saying, ‘Yes. I’m coming. It’s all decided.’
20
Jane lay in bed watching the luminous hands of the clock stretch the minutes into hours, and experiencing a growing sense of kinship with all those other people in the world outside who were awake while others slept. Shift-workers and nursing mothers and jet-lagged travellers and fellow insomniacs and the man in the 24-hour garage round the corner who was always on the telephone whenever you tried to pay. Beside her Guy was sleeping peacefully, one hand under his cheek like a child. He’d been up in the loft until late, raking the heavens with his telescope. Looking for God, Jane supposed. Insomnia was generally more his department: worrying about work, chewing over some confrontation, making lists for the morning. Since giving up her job she’d been free of all that. Her anxieties about the children weren’t the sort to interrupt sleep. They were vast, cosmic, unspecific fears, not niggling little matters which required any action on her part. She resisted the temptation to prod Guy awake, as he would take it as an invitation to make love, and that was the last thing she wanted, though it might have induced the necessary weariness to send her off. Instead she slipped out of bed, as stealthily as possible. Guy was much more apt to share his insomnia by thrashing from side to side and, if that failed to rouse her, by switching on his reading light.
Jane felt for her dressing gown in the wardrobe, setting the metal hangers jangling. It was old now and balding in places, and still had a scorched patch on the front from that match-head. Guy hated it because it made her look like a bag lady, and was always offering to buy her a new one – something silky and semi-transparent and dry-clean only, no thank you. She checked the girls before going downstairs. Sophie had climbed in with Harriet; their faces were side by side on the pillow, and the dim glow from the comfort light gave them a grey, ghostly look. Like the Princes in the Tower, Jane thought, and then shivered at her morbid imagination. She watched them for a moment or two to reassure herself that the bedclothes were rising and falling, and then withdrew hastily as Harriet started to stir. She didn’t want to wake them; they looked so lovely asleep. So trusting and defenceless and ignorant of all the horrors of the world. She wished she could sustain these tender feelings throughout the day: they usually evaporated over breakfast.
It was Erica, or rather the thought of her, that was keeping Jane awake. It had been exactly the same on the last two occasions. Her pleasure in Erica’s company had swiftly been replaced by agitation and depression: agitation that she, Jane, had failed to acquit herself as a dazzling and entertaining companion, and depression that there was no knowing when or if she might have another chance. It was most perplexing. None of Jane’s other friends induced this sort of response. It would never occur to her to wonder whether Suzanne, for instance, found her witty and amusing, and it wouldn’t trouble Jane if six months passed between meetings. The last time Jane had felt like this was over a boy called Trevor whom she had met on holiday in Cornwall, aged fifteen. He had taken her phone number but not given his own, and the feelings of impatience and anxiety with which she fretted away the days waiting for him to call, now, at a distance of sixteen years, seemed horribly familiar. She had had no way of contacting him. His surname was Smith and he came from Cheshunt; that was all she knew. He had phoned, eventually. Despair turned to euphoria. They had arranged to meet on the steps outside the National Gallery but, again, she hadn’t the confidence to ask for his number. He didn’t turn up, of course, and she was plunged back into that abyss of despair whose depths were only emphasized by the feeble glimmer of hope that he might soon ring and explain. It was the hope that was hardest to bear: once that had perished, recovery was possible.
Downstairs Jane stood in the kitchen making a cup of tea, feeling the chill from the tiled floor boring into the soles of her feet, and flinching from the roar of the kettle in the silence. Perhaps I’m turning into a lesbian, Jane thought. Perhaps it’s oestrogen depletion or something. She reined in this fantastical line of reasoning. No. You either were or you weren’t, and she wasn’t. She tried to imagine what it would be like to kiss Erica, and felt her face automatically pucker into a grimace – it was like the first grapefruit segment of the morning. No, she had no impulses in that direction, no physical interest in Erica at all.
In the sitting room Jane switched on one of the small table lamps, resisting her usual impulse to rearrange the furniture in the quest for more floor space. She sat on the couch, her bare feet tucked underneath her, listening to the heartbeat of the house: the hum of the fridge, the twanging pipes, the breath of the wind through the kitchen vent. She thought of Gregory, lying on his own couch, unable to move for fear of setting off the burglar alarm, and wondered whether Erica was asleep, Will and Yorrick tucked in beside her, or up and pacing the floor, already on the first nicotine chew of the day.
She closed her eyes and allowed herself to rehearse the daydream that had been keeping her awake earlier. As a fantasy it was pretty unambitious, even she could see that. Not the sort of thing to feature in those anthologies of female erotica which Suzanne was always reading. It involved her and Erica of course. They were in a cabin somewhere, near a lake or a river. For some reason there were no children around. This was a flaw as far as Jane was concerned. Unless the plot was feasible it was impossible to get really engrossed; she’d have to work on that bit. They had been for a long walk through the woods and had returned, tired, to the cabin, which was warm and clean and tastefully furnished and free of clutter. They had eaten, and were now sitting at opposite ends of a long couch, finishing a bottle of wine and reading their separate books. Between them on the seat was a large box of chocolates, which they would kick back and forth to one another. They didn’t converse; there was nothing to be said. Just at the moment when Jane was starting to feel drowsy, Erica closed her book and said she was going to bed. Through an open doorway was another room, containing twin beds made up with white linen sheets. When Jane returned from the bathroom – for even in her fantasies she would not let herself go to bed without cleaning her teeth – Erica was already in bed. Just before she turned the light out Erica reached across the gap and squeezed Jane’s hand and a look of complete understanding passed between them. Then they dropped hands, and turned over, and Jane slept, dreamless and undisturbed all night, the deepest and most refreshing sleep of her life.
Jane sat up with a start. She had dozed off right there on the couch with her teacup in her lap.
‘Are you all right?’ said the voice that had woken her. She scrambled to the bottom of the stairs. Guy was leaning over the banisters, a worried look on his face.
‘I couldn’t sleep,’ she whispered back. ‘I didn’t want to disturb you.’ Now she was properly awake and unfolded from her warm patch in the armchair she realized how cold it was in the unheated sitting room. Her bones felt brittle with cold.
‘Neither could I,’ said Guy – his standard response, even though she’d listened to him snoring away for hours. ‘Are you coming back to bed?’
She nodded and climbed the stairs.
‘I’ll hold on to you,’ Guy offered, throwing back the duvet and then recoiling from her frozen limbs. ‘Aargh. Keep away. You’re like a corpse.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said
Jane, through chattering teeth. ‘I can’t help it.’
After a second or two he relented. ‘Come on, then. I’ll try and thaw you out,’ he said, pulling her towards him and wincing at the touch of her skinny arms: dry winter branches rimed with frost.
21
‘No.’ Hugo was emphatic. ‘No, no, no.’ A vein was throbbing in his temple and his face was an even deeper shade of red than usual.
I shouldn’t have asked his advice, Nina was thinking. I should have just gone ahead and done it.
They were sitting in the roof garden at Biba, where Nina had a Saturday job. She was wearing a huge pair of dark glasses and a floppy straw hat to keep off the sun. Hugo was just sweltering. It was going to be in the nineties again.
‘Don’t even think about it. How am I going to replace Martin at this short notice? Four is the absolute minimum. It was only by a sheer fluke that I managed to persuade Guy to come at the last minute.’
It was me that persuaded him, not you, you fool, thought Nina, but instead she said, ‘I didn’t say Martin shouldn’t come. I just said I want to break up with him before we go. If I do it now he might be over it by the time we leave.’
‘In ten days? Are you mad? He’ll be a blubbering wreck and you know it. What sort of atmosphere is that going to create? It’ll be horrendous. No. I absolutely forbid it.’ Hugo mopped his brow.
‘I don’t need your permission to split up with my own boyfriend,’ Nina said, indignantly, beating off a wasp.
‘So why did you ask me then?’ Hugo demanded. He pressed his cold beer glass against one cheek then the other. The sweat patches under his arms had spread and merged with the one at his chest.
‘Because . . . because I’m polite and considerate,’ said Nina.
‘Well, good. So be polite and considerate and don’t do anything until we get back. Six weeks isn’t going to make any difference.’
‘It is to me. Especially now I’ve admitted to you that I’ve gone off him. I’ll be playing the part of his girlfriend in bad faith, and you’ll know it.’ Nina fanned herself with her hat. She had hitched up her long skirt so that her legs might catch the sun, but they had now started to tingle.
‘Oh come on, it’s not as if you hate the bloke,’ said Hugo.
‘No, of course not. I’m very fond of him. But . . . but he’s so annoying sometimes.’
‘You’re not seeing someone else, are you?’ asked Hugo, squinting at her under his hand.
‘No. Nothing like that. I just want to be free.’
‘Did this suddenly come on last night?’ Hugo wanted to know.
‘No, no. It’s been sort of dawning on me for weeks.’
‘Well, why didn’t you do something about it weeks ago? It’s too late now.’
‘Because I didn’t realize it was happening. I didn’t wake up one morning and think, uh-oh, I don’t love Martin any more. It crept up on me.’ Nina finished her bottle of Coke and glanced at her watch. Her lunch-break was nearly over.
‘Look, Nina.’ Hugo mastered his impatience. ‘You’ve no idea how much effort I’ve put into arranging this trip. It’s not like a holiday that you can put off and do some other time. My PhD depends on this research. I wanted you and Martin to come because you’re my friends and I thought we’d have a laugh. And because Martin can drive, of course. If I’d known you weren’t solid as a rock I wouldn’t even have considered asking you. But it’s done now and we’re going and you’ll just have to put up with his annoying little ways for a few more weeks.’
Nina gave a mutinous sigh but didn’t raise any further objections. Encouraged by this, Hugo pressed on. ‘Anyway, after a week of being cooped up in the Land Rover we’ll all be getting on each other’s nerves.’
‘Well, two out of three of you are on mine already,’ Nina retorted. ‘And we haven’t even set off yet.’
Hugo ignored this remark. ‘So we’ll just have to be extra tolerant and co-operative. Exercise a bit of give and take.’
Nina lifted her sunglasses above her eyebrows to give Hugo the full benefit of her best sardonic look.
‘All right,’ he conceded. ‘Let’s keep it simple. You lot give and I’ll take.’
II
22
They spent the first night at Nemours, just south of Paris. Guy had been instructed to present himself at Hugo’s at 6 a.m. on the 1st of July with his passport and luggage, which was to be kept to a minimum. There had been one preliminary planning meeting in the Princess Louise at which Guy and Martin had been introduced, and duties and responsibilities allocated by Hugo. The division of labour was as follows: compilation tapes for the journey: Martin. First aid kit: Nina. International driving licences: Guy. Provisions, equipment, maps, tickets, visas, sponsorship, insurance, everything else: Hugo.
‘You’re a born delegator, aren’t you, Hugo?’ Nina had observed.
When Guy arrived the hallway was already full of boxes and bags, access to the stairs was blocked and the front door was trapped open. There were tents, sleeping bags, a primus stove, pots and pans, several plastic canisters for water, ranging rods, anemometers, shovels and picks and other equipment borrowed from the Geography Department at UCL, ex-army camp-beds, Nina’s guitar and hundreds of packets and tins of non-perishable and unenticing food. Martin had started carrying the heavier items out to the Land Rover, which was double-parked outside. Attached to the front bumper was a large plastic tiger, which Hugo had stolen from the forecourt of an Esso garage.
‘These boxes fit nicely on the roof-rack,’ Martin said, on his fourth trip. ‘All the loose stuff can go inside. What do you reckon?’
‘Oh, yes, whatever you think,’ Guy replied. Left to himself he would have put the lighter stuff up on the roof and the heavy boxes inside, but he wasn’t going to start asserting himself this early in the trip. He was just the spare driver, the makeweight.
‘What’s in here?’ he asked, pointing to a large cardboard box with the royal warrant on the side. Hugo was coming down the stairs, a pair of John Lennon-style round sunglasses balanced on his forehead, above his regular spectacles. He was holding a clipboard. ‘Oh, didn’t I tell you I managed to get sponsorship from Tate & Lyle? Well, that’s it.’
Guy opened the box. Inside were forty-eight tins of golden syrup. ‘Useful,’ he said, closing it again.
‘We’re not actually taking them with us, are we?’ asked Martin, staggering past with a huge drum of powdered milk.
‘I thought they might come in handy as presents – you know, for helpful border guards and friendly Tuaregs,’ said Hugo.
Guy pulled a face. ‘I thought cigarettes were the international currency of bribery – not syrup.’
‘We’re not giving our fags away,’ said Hugo, horrified. ‘Which reminds me, we must get our duty-free limit on the boat or we’ll be reduced to smoking donkey dung.’ He climbed over the barricade of luggage to where Guy was still standing holding his rucksack and a football in a string bag.
‘What’s that?’ he asked.
‘It’s a football, Hugo,’ Martin explained patiently.
‘I thought we could just kick it around if we get bored,’ said Guy. Hugo raised his eyes to heaven and wrote Kickball on his list and then ticked it off methodically.
From the basement came the sound of water draining from a bath, and then a door opened and Nina came padding up the stairs in a towel, leaving a trail of damp footprints on the lino.
Hugo looked at his watch and sighed theatrically. Nina gave the three men a winning smile. ‘I had to,’ she said. ‘It might be the last wash I have for six weeks.’
It took an hour to pack, according to Martin’s method, and then halfway to Ramsgate, after the Land Rover had nearly blown over in the cross wind on the A2, it had taken another hour to repack. Hugo had wanted to know whose bright idea it was to put the heavy stuff on the roof.
‘Guy and I discussed it and thought it would be best,’ said Martin, in what Guy thought was a rather free interpretation of their
exchange on the subject. He made no attempt to contradict him, though. He didn’t want to give Martin any grounds for disliking him. Yet. He’d just been reading an account of a canoeing trip down the Zambezi. The author recommended keeping a diary as a means of palliating petty grievances. It afforded the writer a little relief without wrecking the atmosphere. It was essential, he said, to maintain an illusion of co-operation, not to backbite or split into factions. Guy had packed a notebook and pen with this in mind.
‘I feel a bit of a fraud,’ he said to Nina on the ferry, while Martin and Hugo were off buying duty-frees. ‘I’m not even a geographer. I don’t know what use I’m going to be when we get there.’
‘That’s all right,’ said Nina, laying down a worn copy of A Glastonbury Romance. ‘He specifically wanted a non-specialist. That way he knows you won’t steal his research.’
‘It wouldn’t have occurred to me,’ said Guy.
‘Well, it occurred to Hugo,’ said Nina. ‘Because that’s what he’d do.’
‘Have you known him long?’ Guy asked.
‘About a year and a half. Though it feels longer. We were neighbours for my first year, but he was such a recluse it was a while before I bumped into him. You were at school together, weren’t you?’
‘Briefly. Until he was promoted.’
‘What was he like?’
‘Well.’ Guy didn’t want to be disloyal, but then swapping confidences with Nina was, after all, what he’d come for. ‘Clever, but bullied. He tended to get up people’s noses.’
‘So he hasn’t changed, then?’
‘No,’ Guy admitted with a laugh. ‘He blends in better as an adult, for some reason. He was like an old man at school, but he seems to be getting younger with the passing years. Wait till we’re middle-aged – he’ll be skipping around in short trousers.’
A Dry Spell Page 19