Wishful Thinking

by Jemma Harvey

  ‘Was it heart?’ I asked. ‘I don’t want to be over-optimistic, but these things can be genetic, can’t they?’

  ‘As it happens, it was,’ Georgie said. ‘I did ask Neville if he’d inherited the condition, but he just laughed. I think he was a bit shocked at my asking, though. Why is it nobody ever takes my ad seriously?’

  Lin and I were silent, feeling comment would be superfluous.

  ‘So where did he take you?’ I resumed presently.

  And: ‘Is he as nice as you thought?’ from Lin.

  ‘We had cocktails at The Savoy and dinner at Quo Vadis,’ Georgie related. ‘And, yes, he’s very nice.’

  ‘Nice and fanciable or nice and unfanciable?’ Lin demanded.

  ‘Fanciable,’ Georgie insisted. ‘The impossible combination. He’s got a palatial flat in Cadogan Gardens, he’s going to buy a house in the Dordogne, and he drives a Saab with a Jaguar on the side. You don’t get more fanciable than that.’

  ‘How do you know his flat’s palatial?’ I said suspiciously.

  ‘I went back for a nightcap,’ Georgie confessed.

  ‘And bedsocks?’

  ‘Not funny. We had a kiss and cuddle, that was all; then I got a taxi home. Anyway, why’re you fighting Cal’s corner? You’re supposed to be on my side. You’re supposed to tell me that married men are a bad idea, and I should get myself a decent single guy. You’re supposed to tell me I’m being had for a sucker.’

  ‘Cal loves you,’ Lin said unhappily.

  ‘You love him,’ I averred.

  ‘He’s married,’ Georgie retorted. ‘Married, married. He’s not planning to leave his wife. He doesn’t even bother to lie about it. All I’ll ever get is all I’ve got – crumbs of his time and attention. What happens when I’m older, and my looks start to go, and he doesn’t lust after me so much? I’ll become someone he feels he must visit because he always has, a habit, a chore, and then there’ll be nothing left.’ She was clutching her glass so hard I could see the whites of her knuckles. ‘I won’t wait around for that. I’m not going to be suckered all my life. I married Franco in a whirl of romantic folly; I’m not letting Cupid make a fool of me again. Besides,’ she added, relaxing a little, ‘I might fall in love with Neville. He wants to take me for a week in Mallorca. Mountains, olive groves, de luxe hotel. Sounds like a good place for falling in love.’

  ‘Majorca?’ I said sceptically, pronouncing the J.

  ‘Mallorca,’ corrected Georgie, not pronouncing the Ls. ‘They spell it differently now. You’re behind the times, Cookie. These days, they’ve changed the image as well as the spelling. The lager-louts have all gone to Cyprus; Mallorca’s very upmarket now. Neville was telling me all about it. He’s been several years running.’

  ‘Who’s Neville?’ said a voice. A flat, hard voice, familiar and unfamiliar.

  Cal.

  Lin and I looked at each other and then, with one accord, down into our glasses.

  I heard Georgie say: ‘He’s a man I’m seeing.’

  ‘You didn’t mention it.’

  I nudged Lin’s leg with my foot. ‘This is where we get off.’ We vacated our seats, moving towards the bar. Cal slid along the empty bench without a word of thanks or a glance in our direction. I don’t think he even registered we’d been there. His face had a tight look, as if someone had wound up a spring inside him, tensing his muscles, pulling flesh against bone. His features were compressed, even the eyes and eyebrows, all thin and taut. The same tightness was evident in the scrunch of his shoulders.

  We didn’t watch.

  Georgie told us about it afterwards.

  ‘How long have you been seeing this bloke?’ Cal asked, in a carefully level tone.

  ‘Does it matter?’ He made an impatient gesture. ‘Not long.’

  ‘Are you sleeping with him?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Not yet?’

  ‘He wants to take me on holiday,’ Georgie repeated.

  ‘So I heard.’

  ‘That usually includes sex.’ She paused, fishing for the right words to say what she meant; but there weren’t any right words. Only wrong ones. ‘He’s attractive . . . and attracted to me . . . and unattached. You’ve got a wife – children – responsibilities – commitments. I don’t fit in. I’m not part of the long-term picture. You’ve said some nice things to me, but ultimately, they’re not worth a damn.’

  ‘D’you think I didn’t mean what I said?’

  ‘It isn’t relevant.’ Her voice was light, brittle. You could have cracked it with a feather. ‘Words don’t count. Actions count. Your most consistent action is to go home to your wife. It’s easy to say you love someone. It’s much harder to act it.’

  ‘You really don’t get it, do you? I act it every moment – every moment that I can – but I can’t walk away from everything. My responsibilities – my commitments – my children. I can’t just . . . leave.’

  ‘The boy stood on the burning deck,’ she said. ‘Bully for you.’ He flinched from her sudden flippancy, as if she had struck him. ‘You’re married, I’m single. That’s the way you want it. I’m a single woman, free to go out with other men. Neville offers me—’

  ‘Security?’

  ‘Maybe. Maybe just . . . fun.’ She knew that would hurt him, and it did. She saw the hurt in his eyes.

  She wanted to hurt.

  ‘This is it, then,’ he said.

  ‘Yes.’

  They sat staring at each other, unmoving. Their discussion wound down like an old-fashioned gramophone.

  ‘This. Is. It.’

  ‘Um.’

  At two o’clock they walked back to work, side by side, not touching, not speaking. They parted on a monosyllable, without a kiss, diverging to their separate offices, where neither got anything done for the rest of the day.

  It wasn’t that simple, of course. They kept bumping into each other, talking, arguing, covering the same ground, again and again, over coffee at Ransome, over drinks in pub and wine bar. Cal was by turns angry, hurt, bitter, desperate, contrite. Georgie was contrite, desperate, bitter, hurt, angry. It seemed to get them nowhere, and it drove the rest of us to despair. We wanted to help, but they were beyond human aid, and all we could do was to watch them grinding away at each other’s self-control until one of them snapped, usually Georgie. She would rage at him with the fury of someone who’s trying to blot out her own inner voice, while he wrapped himself in an icy, brooding quiet which kept everyone at a distance. He vented his feelings on the Design Department – who rapidly succumbed to something resembling Gulf War Syndrome – and anyone else rash enough to put their head above the parapet. One hapless writer, calling to complain about the background colour for his dust jacket, was crushed without finesse. (Mind you, any input from writers on dust-jacket artwork is invariably crushed, usually at editorial level, but finesse is supposed to be involved.)

  ‘Why does it have to be green?’

  ‘Because I say so.’

  ‘But look—’ the writer clearly had a death-wish ‘– I just don’t see my whole literary concept as being best represented in green.’

  ‘Fuck the fucking concept. It’s fucking green and it’s staying fucking green and that’s that.’

  ‘Ah.’

  Most people gave the Design Department a wide berth. Even Alistair, wandering in to demand something tasteful for one of his pet protégés at Porgy, re-emerged wearing the stunned expression of a man who has just strolled inadvertently into a tiger’s cage. In Publicity, Georgie remained charming, injecting extra husk into her huskiest tones and flashing dazzling smiles down the telephone at people who couldn’t see them, but her surface glitter was unnatural and she would lose her thread in mid-sentence, or listen for five minutes with apparent attention before murmuring vaguely: ‘What?’ However, any suggestion that she should abandon her prospective trip with Neville evoked a violent response. ‘Why?’ she would say, her voice rising. ‘I’m single, he’s single – why shouldn’t
I go with him? Why shouldn’t I have some fun?’

  ‘You have fun with Cal,’ Lin said unwisely.

  ‘When he has the time,’ Georgie retorted, with a savagery out of all proportion to the words.

  It didn’t look good.

  On Friday, I left, adjuring Lin to keep the peace.

  ‘What peace?’ she sighed.

  ‘Well . . . keep the pieces, then. We’ll stick them together when I get back.’

  I was trying to sound upbeat, but it didn’t come out right. There are few things more distressing, in an everyday context, than the sight of two people you like, who you know love each other, wantonly tearing their relationship apart. But there was nothing I could do to stop it, and I was off on holiday, and utterly determined to leave all my worries behind. Ransome Harber and its denizens were a long way from the Isles of Greece, and I was going to take advantage of that distance. No more agonising over Georgie and Cal, no more babysitting, no more bumping into Nigel on the social circuit, no more Jerry Beauman. (Especially no more Jerry Beauman.) At least for a fortnight. At home I packed my new bikini, clothes, books, suntan oil. I left my upstairs neighbour several tins of cat food and comprehensive instructions on feeding Mandy. I refused to look Mandy in the eye. (I never can when I’m going away.) There are times when I wonder if going on holiday is more trouble than it’s worth.

  At an unearthly hour on Saturday morning I set off for the airport, too sleepy even to fantasise about the possibilities of a Cretan romance.

  I noted earlier that everyone who is reading this book has probably been on a diet at some time in their life. The same can be said for going to Greece. It’s one of those things that most people do, sooner or later. When I was a child I dreamed of visiting the haunts of legend and history: the Athens of Theseus and Themistocles, Odysseus’ Ithaca, the Oracle at Delphi (although in those days I thought this was in India). But somehow, as I got older, my priorities deteriorated. Now – like most people – I want sun, sand, sea, and lots of booze. The Isles of Greece offer, relatively cheaply, picturesque beaches, a relaxed attitude to nudity, and bars that stay open most of the night, with bronzed, god-like natives as an added extra. While some of those amenities must have been available in the classical era – no wonder Jason and Odysseus spent so much time island-hopping instead of getting on with the job – both the wildness and the grandeur of the mythical world seem to have somehow been lost. And, as a tourist, I know it’s my fault. Sinead and I did visit Knossos, nursing the kind of hangovers that made the bull-paintings quiver on the walls, but there was little atmosphere left in the sun-baked ruins: the visitors had driven it away.

  In any case, it was much too hot for sight-seeing. Back on the beach at Plakias, we concentrated on the important issues: the careful build-up of a tan, no pink, no peeling, dipping in the Med to cool off, eying up the talent and hopefully being eyed up in our turn. ‘You’ve lost weight,’ Sinead commented inevitably, early in the proceedings. She didn’t sound critical, she sounded envious. My heart warmed. I had forgotten how much I liked her. ‘You look terrific.’

  I’d been to Greece before, naturally, but I’d never taken so many clothes off. On the beach, I’d worn a one-piece which wrapped itself around my spare tyres (like Michelin Man, I’d had more than one) like skin round a sausage. Off it, I’d covered up in loose floppy garments which hid both my bulges and my assets. Now, I felt voluptuous. I didn’t even have acres of pallor to put on view: Jerry Beauman’s roof terrace had given me a base coat. I don’t tan very dark, but, I reminded myself, dark tans are out of vogue: they give you wrinkles and skin cancer. I topped up at night with fake and went a beautiful golden colour. And for the first time in my life I was conscious of men looking at me, not because I took up space in the landscape but because they wanted to. It was a heavenly sensation. In London, even though, lately, some guys had looked at me with admiration, the climate of fevered work and frantic socialising left little time for the mating game. Relationships, too, tend to be fevered and frantic: the chat-ups, the let-downs, speed-dating, affairs (like Georgie’s) squeezed into the corners between other commitments. But in Greece, it’s all about sex. The beach, the booze, the body-pampering. Even if you don’t do it, that’s still what it’s about. You put yourself on show, you lure and allure, you sun yourself in reflected desire. There’s no work to get in the way, no frenzied pressures of urban life. In the past, I’d always been an onlooker on the scene, but now I was part of it, I was doing some of the alluring, feeling myself desired, and I blossomed. Who wouldn’t?

  It was easy – even amusing – telling Sinead about Nigel, including the bad bits. She laughed and laughed over the dénouement with Rachel.

  ‘Thank God you’re rid of him,’ she said. ‘It’s transformed you. I always knew you’d be beautiful if you gave yourself the chance.’

  I’m not beautiful, I know that, but it was nice of her to say it.

  It was the second week when my Achilles turned up. He didn’t resemble Hugh Jackman or Colin Firth, but still, Nature had done a good job. His jaw fell somewhere between the pocket torch and the lantern, his hair was dark and gelled into uplift, his eyes – actually, I didn’t really notice his eyes. He had the sort of tan that, if he made a habit of it, would turn his skin to leather in ten years’ time, but who cared? This was now. He looked particularly good in swimming trunks. On introduction, he turned out to be English and resident in Nottingham. (‘That’s okay,’ Sinead said. ‘Far enough away so you won’t be bothered with him when you get back home.’) His name was Mike. I asked him about Robin Hood, which was all I knew about Nottingham. He asked me about Dick Whittington, which (he said) was almost all he knew about London. It was a promising beginning. We drank long cocktails in assorted colours with even more assorted contents and shared the inevitable speculation as to what the little umbrella was really for.

  ‘To keep the flies out,’ Mike suggested brilliantly.

  ‘It’s not doing a very good job,’ I said, pointing to something black floating in my drink. On closer inspection, however, it proved to be half a grape.

  After an hour or more of this sort of conversation we naturally felt we knew each other frightfully well, though the cocktails may have had something to do with that. We strolled down to the beach, swam under the stars (the sea was decidedly chilly), and then sprawled on the sand at the water’s edge, embracing passionately, like Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr in From Here to Eternity. Rolling around on the beach is an overrated activity: the sand gets into every crevice in your body, and there are few things more disagreeable than gritty buttocks. I was relieved when we headed back to the bar, and still more relieved when I realised the presence of Sinead meant I couldn’t invite him back to our room.

  (‘D’you want to invite him back to our room?’ Sinead hissed. ‘I could stay out for an hour or two.’)

  The next evening we went to the local disco, and he grabbed me from behind, his body swaying in rhythm with mine, at least in theory, his hands cupping my breasts. I could feel his barely suppressed erection pushing against my bottom. It should have been wildly exciting, but somehow it wasn’t. The thing about fantasy sex was that Russell Crowe, Hugh Jackman et al were familiar, and imaginary; this was real, and unfamiliar, and I wasn’t comfortable with it. Even without the sandy bum. I began to wonder if the core problem with my career as a sex goddess was that I simply didn’t have the temperament for it. Georgie, I thought, would’ve been dancing crotch to crotch by now.

  ‘My mate’s shagging that flat-chested blonde in the blue T-shirt, so I’ve got the room to myself tonight,’ Mike murmured in my ear. Not exactly my idea of sweet nothings, but no matter.

  ‘But what about her friend?’ I asked.

  ‘The brunette with the eyebrow stud? She’s at it with one of the local boys. He’s got his own place.’

  I’d forgotten Greece was like that. It’s different when you’re not part of the chain.

  I escaped somehow, clutching at Sinead
for succour. She told me I was a fool, and we needed to make the most of life before we hit thirty and creeping eld did whatever it is creeping eld does. (It sounded like a relative of ground elder, but I think it’s a Shakespearian term for old age.) I said I would rather be thirty than in bed with Mike, which she couldn’t understand. ‘You’re looking gorgeous,’ she said, ‘and it’s all going to waste.’

  The night after I saw him chatting up another bosom, evidently also from the big city. ‘All I know about London is Dick Whittington,’ I heard him say.

  The bosom quivered responsively.

  So much for holiday romance, I thought.

  While I was in Greece Georgie had finally taken the plunge and flown to Mallorca with Neville. They were staying in the west of the island on the edge of Deia, a location more than a cut above Plucky Arse. The Hotel Es Moli was stacked in layers against the mountainside, with several tiers of garden, restaurant terrace, bar terrace and pool terrace rising one above the other. The bedroom had French windows opening on to a crumbly stone balcony – at least, it looked crumbly, though Georgie hoped that was merely artistic effect – with a view of steep slopes intersecting in a V, enclosing a blue triangle of sea. The village rambled picturesquely down one slope; olive groves plumed the other. It all resembled a rather tasteful postcard. ‘It’s beautiful,’ Georgie said, with genuine approval. Privately, she was wondering about the sleeping arrangements. The room was twin-bedded, and she had never shared a twin-bedded room with a man before. What was the etiquette? Would he expect to leap from his bed into hers without so much as a by-your-leave? Would he want to push the beds together? (Fatal: he or she was bound to slip down the gap.) Would he want her to do the leaping?

  Neville asked her which bed she would like, and she chose the one nearest the window, and then wished she’d picked the bathroom side as it would be easier to get to the loo without being waylaid. But she was here to be waylaid, wasn’t she? Or at any rate, laid . . .

  They unpacked, and found there was nowhere near enough hanging space in the wardrobe for Georgie’s clothes. Neville chivalrously gave up a couple of hangers. (He’s chivalrous, thought Georgie. Maybe he won’t try to leap at all.)