Exquisite

by Sarah Stovell

  ‘You certainly don’t strike me as a waster, though.’

  ‘Oh, I’m not. I get very frustrated with him. I hadn’t realised he was like this at first. I thought he was … you know, alternative but driven. Anyway, I gave up my job after I met him. It was probably a bad move, but I wanted to write a book. And it still seems like a fine idea, until I meet up with everyone I was at university with. They’ve all got stuff now: careers, cars, houses. And then there’s me, skint, trying a different life, and although they never say anything, I can tell they’re thinking, You’re a bloody idiot, Alice. I sometimes feel as if I’ve been in the school play and got so high on the applause, I gave everything up and moved to Hollywood.’

  Bo laughed. ‘You’ve done the right thing.’

  ‘Really? I’m not sure. It was just after my mother died. I probably wasn’t thinking things through properly.’

  ‘Oh, Alice. I’m sorry. You’re very young to have lost your mother.’

  I shook my head. ‘It’s OK. We weren’t close. I hadn’t seen her for years.’

  Bo said nothing, but looked at me with interest, as though she were waiting for me to say more.

  ‘It’s fine,’ I said.

  Bo said, ‘It’s no wonder, then, that you find yourself drawn to stories about mothers. It’s normal after an event like that.’

  ‘Possibly.’

  ‘Was it … Tell me to go away if you don’t want to talk about it … but was it as you described it in your work?’

  ‘More or less. Her last words to me were “put it right”.’

  ‘What do you think she meant by that?’

  ‘She meant: find a nice man, get married, have babies, don’t beat them, don’t get divorced.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Really. I only lived with her till I was eleven. I went to foster parents after that.’

  ‘Wow. You’ve turned out well.’

  I smiled. ‘You’ve known me three days.’

  ‘I can still tell.’

  ‘But marriage is a long way off for me, anyway. I haven’t been with anyone longer than six months.’

  ‘You will.’

  I shrugged. ‘Maybe,’ I said, and felt a heaviness inside me. This thing with Jake. It hadn’t been a disaster, not like the others, but it wasn’t what I’d been hoping for. ‘We’ll see. How old are your children?’

  ‘Lola’s eight and Maggie is six.’

  ‘Cool names.’

  ‘Cool girls.’

  ‘Do you miss them when you’re here?’

  ‘Yes, sometimes. But motherhood is demanding. It’s relentless. It does you good to get a break from it sometimes. To be yourself, as you used to be.’

  I nodded.

  ‘Make the most of these child-free years, Alice,’ Bo continued. ‘Really. You’ll never get this time again. Once they arrive, everything is about them. It’s great, of course; it’s fabulous in so many ways, but you will slip down your priorities list. So many women get lost that way. Build up your life as a writer before you have kids; you’ll have a much better chance of preserving it if you do.’

  ‘I don’t think I will have children, though,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t you like them?’

  ‘Oh, I like them; I just can’t be trusted to bring them up sane.’

  ‘I used to think like that. My own mother is a nightmare – possibly not as big a nightmare as yours, but a nightmare nonetheless – and I used to worry that I’d be like her. But I’ve learnt you don’t have to be: The future isn’t written in stone because of your past. You can change it. You will change it. You can be the mother you wanted for yourself.’

  I looked at her. I’d been speaking to this woman for less than half and hour, and in that time, it felt as though she’d stripped off my skin and seen right to the very heart of me. It was exhilarating, in a way. And frightening.

  7

  Bo

  I knew the effect I was having on this young woman. I made sure our eyes met as we spoke and could see her, wide-eyed and attentive, and in my thrall: I was the older, wiser writer who was telling her, right here, right now, that she was brilliant.

  The two of us were alone, engaged in the one-to-one tutorial that came as part of the course package. Fifteen hours’ whole-group tuition, and half an hour alone with the tutor. It was exhausting being the tutor in these circumstances, dealing with all the desperate, breakable egos, the big dreams that would mostly come to nothing. I used to think of it as my duty – some kind of moral obligation – to spell out the difficulties of the publishing world to my students. But I soon found that this attitude did me no favours; they didn’t want to hear it. They wanted to knock out their work, send it off and make millions. That was their dream, and nothing I said could talk them down from it. If I tried, they took against me; they thought I was arrogant, showing off: I might have made it, but don’t ever think you will.

  So nowadays, I didn’t bother with such warnings. I told students what they wanted to hear and sent them away again, delusions intact. It was only when I found real talent that I bothered spelling it out at all, and that was what I did now, with Alice. ‘You must keep on going,’ I said, passing her work back to her. ‘You must never give up, even if it takes you ten years of hard slog to get noticed.’

  ‘Ten years? Really?’

  ‘Or longer. Maybe fifteen. This is a rocky world, Alice, and you need to find a way to navigate it without getting lost. In my experience, that way is to just keep on going, shrug off failures and take nothing personally. It’s hard.’

  ‘OK,’ Alice said.

  I reached across the desk and touched Alice’s hand lightly. ‘You have brilliance in you Alice,’ I said, truthfully. ‘I can see it. But I worry you can’t see it in yourself; and I’m afraid you won’t succeed in this world without confidence and determination. You need to set your sights on where you want to be and make sure every step you take is a step closer to that goal. Forget about men. Romance will only hold you back. Be on your own, and be strong. Set up home with someone if you want to, get married if you want a cosy life, but make your true love your work, and then you’ll find that the whole world loves you. I know you can do it.’

  Alice looked away from me but she didn’t pull her hand from mine. I had told her only good things about her work. I wanted to reach her. I wanted to be liked by her. And I knew how to do it.

  Alice was twenty-five, the same age as the girl I still thought of as Willow. Even now, my heart lurched at the memory of her. I had thought I’d be able to let her go once I’d had Lola and Maggie, but it didn’t happen. For weeks after each child’s birth, I’d wept and wept for the baby that had once been Willow.

  I turned my attention back to Alice. ‘Take it from me: You will be a star,’ I said.

  Alice blushed. ‘Thank you.’

  I went on holding her hand, knowing she was taking me seriously.

  She was full of possibility.

  Alice was a star in so many ways. Everyone loved her. Even the women who at first had taken a dislike to her – because she was so young, and deliberately sensational, and yet in every way more than their equal – came round to her in the end. She was witty and clever and brought an energy the week would have lacked without her. She made all those people in their fifties feel twenty-five again. They were grateful for it.

  But I was worried about her. I had an urge to reach out and take her home with me. It would pass, though, once I was back in Grasmere with the girls and locked into the routine of cooking, school runs, homework, stories … It was just this week off from parenting. The mother in me had clearly become desperate for someone to tend to. I wanted to give the girl a decent bed to sleep in, wanted to feed her properly, wanted to give her everything she needed to make her productive and then push her out into the world. Because the world was where she needed to be – not hidden away in some damp, greasy bedsit that cost more than she earned, or visiting a boyfriend whose only redeeming feature seemed to be that he�
�d never hit her.

  Alice was fragile, I could see that. And she was weighed down by an awful history, which I could sense, but which she couldn’t yet bring herself to confide to me. She hadn’t learnt yet how to use an abusive past – how to shut herself off and cast herself in mystery. It made her artless, endearing. Easy to reach. I knew I could do it; it wouldn’t take much. But what would come pouring out of her? All that grief for her mother. It would be immense. It would be unstoppable. I wouldn’t have the strength or the skill to hold her up.

  I sighed as I made a pile of everybody’s work for recycling, then took myself out to the barn where they were waiting for me. It was the last night: a showcase when the students drank too much and read the best of the work they’d written over the week. Until now, I’d taken myself away early in the evenings, not been part of the wild socialising that Alice had usually been at the heart of. Once, she’d fallen asleep on a sofa in the barn, and someone had to go and get her for the morning’s workshop. She’d been miraculously lucid, despite that.

  One of the women was dancing when I walked in. She moved like a stripper. Her book was about a stripper, and now here she was, almost being one. No one seemed able to pluck an idea from the air and make fiction from it. Everything was just a constant drone about their own tedious lives.

  I sat down beside Alice. She looked at me with raised eyebrows. What the fuck is this? she asked, silently.

  Exactly, I answered.

  The woman stopped dancing. Someone poured wine. The students took it in turns to stand up and read. Alice’s piece, of course, was excellent. The girl had no idea how good she was. Because of this, I thought, she was at risk; at risk of wasting it all on the mechanics of just getting through her life – the poverty, the loneliness, the cycle of bad men who drained her energy as if they were babies.

  The two of us had talked a lot since Wednesday, when we’d gone for a walk along the cliff path, and it had dawned on me then that I missed all this – the easy company of another female, the sort I’d had so much of when the girls were preschool age. I loved the Lake District, really loved it, but there was no denying its remoteness.

  But still, I had Gus and the girls.

  I’d spoken to them on Skype earlier. They told me they were making dinner the next day, to welcome me home.

  ‘That’s lovely,’ I said. ‘What are you making?’

  ‘It’s a surprise,’ Lola said at the same time that Maggie said, ‘Pancakes.’

  Then Maggie disappeared for a moment; and when she came back, she held up an index card on which she’d written, in glitter glue of all colours, ‘Welkoom home, Mummy’.

  I couldn’t wait to see them. I’d been gone too long.

  Alice finished her reading and sat down again. She looked flushed and relieved it was all over.

  I patted her thigh. ‘You were great,’ I whispered.

  She smiled; a genuine, deep smile. She refilled her wine glass and offered some to me. Together, we sipped our way through the last two readings and clapped politely at the end. Then I stood up to congratulate everyone and tell them what a great week it had been, and how much I’d enjoyed it, how I wished them well for their futures and looked forward to seeing their books in the shops. Here, deliberately, I fixed my eyes on Alice. I’m talking to you. Listen to what I am saying. Don’t waste this.

  It was half past nine. I collected my bag from beneath my chair and moved as if to leave.

  I felt a hand on my arm. ‘Don’t go to bed yet,’ Alice was saying. She was rolling a joint. ‘It’s the last night. Stay up and get pissed.’

  I sat down, let someone refill my glass, listened as Ben came up to Alice and told her he hadn’t smoked a joint for twenty years, and would she mind letting him have some? Alice obliged, of course, and I watched as he took the joint from her fingers as lightly as if he were touching velvet or lace. The end was marked with her lip gloss. He held it to his mouth and drew on it. God, he fancied her. That was obvious. But he was fifty-six, married, five kids. I wanted to beat him away. Take your vagrant cock elsewhere.

  The evening wore on. Everyone’s spirits were high. In the end, I pulled Alice away and took her outside. I handed her one of the cards I’d had made up months ago, useful for when I was forced into city networking events with booksellers and journalists. It had my contact details and a thumbnail image of one of my book covers.

  ‘Keep in touch with me,’ I said. ‘I want you to keep writing. Try a little every day – five hundred words – then email it to me at the end of every week. Then I’ll look at it. I want to help you, Alice. There was no one to help me when I was younger…’

  Alice took the card from my hand, and looked taken aback. ‘Thank you.’ she said. ‘I—’

  And suddenly I found myself held tight in the girl’s embrace. It shocked me, this feeling of warm, adult affection, of being clasped against a body strong enough not to demand anything from me. I was unused to it.

  I kissed her cheek. ‘I’m glad I met you, Alice,’ I said, and meant it.

  I went to bed that night and found my half-conscious thoughts were full of her. The girl, with all her wit and crystal fragility, was here now, under my skin, where no one had been for years.

  8

  Alice

  I sat on the train back to Brighton, feeling as though I’d been taken under someone’s wing but not knowing quite why. Bo Luxton – successful, talented, rich – appeared to have warmed to me, Alice Dark – unemployed, unskilled, impoverished. I looked at the business card in my hand.

  Bo Luxton

  ‘The Riddlepit’, Nr Grasmere, Cumbria

  Bo@BoLuxton.co.uk

  07965 324762

  She’d said goodbye to me that morning, as I joined Ben and the others in a taxi to Alnmouth station. She’d held me at arm’s length, looked at me and then repeated her words from the previous night. ‘Keep in touch.’ Then she’d leaned forwards kissed me, and I’d been aware of her nearness, the smell of her, the skin of her cheek as it brushed mine. It made me catch my breath.

  I’m starstruck, I realised. The thought made me laugh. Twenty-five years old and I felt the way a preteen with a backstage pass to a One Direction gig would feel.

  Roll with it, I thought. It will pass.

  Because it would pass, of course. This train was the hinge between the creative, seductive week I’d just had and the life I was going back to. Already, I could feel my spirits starting to sag. Jake the Waster was waiting for me, half-drunk on Special Brew, his clothes unwashed, tobacco down his trousers. I wasn’t sure I could bear it.

  The train pulled into the station and I walked down to Churchill Square and then further on, to the sea front. It was a longer route than the High Street way, but I felt as though I was missing something integral, something that mature people like Bo and Ben all had – some sense of being rooted in their environment. They took note of places. Any time they felt like it, they would be able to sit down and write about the sea, and not just some generic version involving ships and azure waves, but the details, the specifics. Hell, I thought, they’d probably get to the heart of it, the very essence of the sea, creating a vision no one had seen before.

  I was not part of my environment like they were. I was passing through it, paying it no attention at all. That was what was wrong with my bedsit, I thought now. There was nothing there but a bed, a box that served as a table and a fabric wardrobe from Argos that housed two pairs of jeans, some tops and a few leftovers from the days when I used to pretend I liked clubbing. Everything about it carried a feeling of transience, a sense that it could all be dismantled in an instant and moved somewhere else.

  I needed to settle. I needed to get rid of Jake, move out of my bedsit, earn money, acquire the things other people had that marked them out as grown-ups: knickers that matched my bras; my own transport; a living-room rug.

  The seafront was crowded. It was half past five. The daytime drinkers were now crossing over with the early-evening drinkers,
and the dregs of the Home Counties day-trippers still hung around the craft shops under the arches. Ahead of me, the black skeleton of the West Pier cast its eerie beauty over the water.

  I half expected to see Jake as I walked. On sunny days, he often set up on the beach towards Hove. It was more chilled, he said, than standing at the entrance to the Lanes, with all the buses and taxis belching their fumes into his face, polluting the pure colours of his art.

  But he wasn’t there. I decided to head straight to the house on Brunswick Street East, instead of my bedsit. He probably wouldn’t be back yet from wherever he’d spent his afternoon (Jake’s life was lived in half-days, rather than days), but I could chat to Maria and wait for him, then go home later, once I’d dumped him. Because I would dump him. Dump him and live, or not dump him and rot. It was a stark choice, like the one between capitalism and the Earth.

  As I walked, I planned what I’d say:

  – You’re lovely; but I need someone I can rely on not to shit themselves at the end of a night out.

  – You need a woman who’s prepared to be your mother *and* to fuck you. I don’t really want to do either.

  – I know it’s shallow, but I would just like the experience of being seduced with champagne and oysters instead of Special Brew and Cheese Footballs.

  He was home when I got there, standing at the worktop, chopping vegetables. I’d never seen anyone chop vegetables like Jake. He did it with the laborious care of a heart surgeon, at a rate of two carrots per half hour. It drove me mad.

  He looked up and beamed when he saw me. ‘Baby,’ he said, and came over and kissed me, his lips tasting only faintly of weed.

  ‘Hi.’

  ‘Was it good?’

  I nodded. ‘Great,’ I said, because how could I explain what the week had been like?

  ‘I’m cooking for you, to celebrate. Do you want a drink?’ He opened the fridge. ‘I’ve only got Stella.’