‘Is that full enough, do you think?’ Della stepped back, frowning, to assess her handiwork, brush and tongs still poised.
‘Oh, yes. It’s fine.’ Hilary’s voice competed with the singer’s, an ardent breathless girl, repeating and repeating the pains of earthly love. There had been so many questions since she’d stepped into the salon. Would she like a half-fringe or a full fringe; full on top, or flat? Which shampoo did she prefer? And how about a protein treatment first? Her own private questions were every bit as difficult. Was this the self she wanted, the self Liz had said to think about, to choose with care, discernment, make sure that it was right? And would Ivan think it right, or despise her for going through such agony in such a trivial cause?
Liz herself seemed sure, had already praised the colour and the style, came over now, to admire it once again. They were all surrounding her: the shampoo girl, the other young assistants, the manager, two clients who had just come in, Liz herself, and Della. ‘Fantastic!’ was the verdict. Universal.
‘It’s fantastic!’ Robert said, moving closer, so he could touch one curving wing. ‘You look totally transformed, Hilary. I mean, don’t get me wrong, you were pretty before, but this is something else. I just can’t …’
Hilary cursed herself for blushing. These last few weeks, she’d hardly blushed at all, assumed she’d overcome the habit, yet Robert’s praise, his presence, had reduced her to a bashful tongue-tied schoolgirl once again. It had been something of a shock to find him on the doorstep when they returned from the hairdresser’s at only four o’clock. Liz had simply laughed.
‘Trust you, Bob! Last time we invited you, you don’t show up at all, and this time, you come for tea, instead of dinner. I know I said we’re eating early, but I didn’t mean that early! Okay, come in, but don’t expect my full attention. I’ve got a hell of a lot to do still. And I’ll need Hilary to help.’
Robert shrugged his coat off, presented Liz with wine and handmade chocolates. ‘You both look far too glamorous to be slaving in the kitchen.’
‘You don’t look bad yourself, Bob. I like the Kuwaiti tan.’
Hilary dared to raise her eyes. She had hardly glanced at Robert yet, simply been aware of him as too tall, too male, too close. He, too, looked very different, and it wasn’t just a matter of the sun-bleached hair, the tan. She had met him only the once, dismissed him as a man she didn’t like, and that dislike had somehow influenced the picture in her mind. She was thrown now by the reality, and especially by his face, which she had remembered as much slacker, a weak man’s face, a drinker’s. In fact, it had great strength – a complicated face, in one way conventionally handsome, with its thick fair hair, its slatey-coloured eyes, which seemed to mix steel-blue and sombre grey, the generous full-ripped mouth. But the eyes were wary, troubled, dark-shadowed underneath, as if he hadn’t slept; seemed to contradict the easy grin, the eager voice, the boyish thatch of hair. And the lines around his mouth weren’t just simple laugh-lines, but suggested discontent, and even bitterness.
He was wearing a black shirt beneath a light-olive corduroy suit; the expensive and distinguished clothes counterbalanced by his casual open shirt-neck, the lack of any tie, the coarse fair hairs tangling at the throat. More hairs on his hands, bronzed intrusive hands, one stretched across the scrubbed pine kitchen table, as if reaching for her own. She edged away a little, picked up a second peeler. Liz was paring apples for a pudding, Robert sitting opposite, broad back to the window, so that the waves of weak spring sunlight broke across his shoulders, as if he were giving off light and heat himself. He licked his finger, dipped it in a spill of sugar, slowly sucked it clean. ‘I love your dress, Hilary. It’s a really happy blue.’
How could blue be happy? Was he mocking her? Or was it a real compliment? Compliments appalled her. She always felt unworthy of them, had no idea what to do or say. It was easier with Ivan. When he’d told her she was pretty, it had sounded genuine, unforced, whereas Robert’s tone was always slightly stagy, as if he were sending himself up. How different the two men were – Ivan, dark and lean, a controlled and serious person with his soothing voice, skilled hands; Robert, fair and brawny, with some impetuous boisterous quality, like those huge unruly dogs she’d seen on Wandsworth Common, straining at their leashes, or leaping on a ball.
‘Damn!’ said Liz, sniffing a sliced apple. ‘I’ve used the garlic knife. Now we’ll have apple garlic flan instead of tarte aux pommes. The meal’s awash in garlic, as it is. That bouillabaisse alone took fifteen cloves.’
‘Good God!’ Robert rocked his chair back, convulsing sun and shadow. ‘What’s Ivan trying to do – lose us all our friends? If it was my birthday, which it isn’t, I’d stick to something safe, like fillet steak.’
‘Ivan’s more romantic.’ Liz rummaged for the lemon squeezer, the astringent tang of lemon suddenly covering all the other smells – fish stock, garlic, freesias. ‘This cookbook I’m using says Venus invented bouillabaisse. Isn’t that nice? There’s even a poem written in its honour, sixteen verses long. I’d read it out at dinner, if it wasn’t all in French.’
‘More romantic’ Hilary smiled to herself, wound a loop of apple peel round and round her finger, like a ring. She kept listening for the sound of the front gate. Ivan had gone out all day, but was expected back at teatime. ‘Teatime’ could mean anything – four, five, or even six. She always felt a sense of sweet relief when he was back indoors, safely in his room, as if a missing part had been restored, her own semi-self completed. She was aware of Robert watching her, as she peeled her final apple, feared another compliment, racked her brain for something to say first, something not a cliché. Liz couldn’t help her out, was hunting for a flan tin, head inside a cupboard, hadn’t even noticed there was silence.
‘Er … how’s your car?’ she asked, at last, and desperately. ‘Did they ever manage to repair it?’
‘No, I’m afraid we had to part. A case of major incompatibility. I’ve got a new one now, more obedient altogether. Perhaps you’d like to try it sometime. Hey! Why not now – this minute? I know I’m in the way here, but if Liz could spare you for an hour or two, we could go out for a drive, maybe have some tea together.’
Hilary gripped the table edge, as if to clamp herself to something fixed, immobile. A drive was quite impossible. To be imprisoned in a car with a man she hardly knew, driven miles away from Liz and Cranleigh Gardens, all she felt was safety; to spend two whole hours with him, have to keep on talking, answering his questions, fobbing off his compliments. She grabbed the peeler, removed a second layer of skin from her already naked apple, as if to prove she was still needed; glanced at Liz imploringly, tried to frown and shake her head, without Robert noticing.
‘No, I’m sorry, Bob. Hilary’s my sous chef and the only help I’ve got. Di’s at the shop, you see, and Della never finishes till six o’clock, at least. And we seem to have got terribly behindhand, which I’m sure is partly your fault. We can’t concentrate on anything with your gorgeous hulk distracting us. Look, tell you what, could you be an angel and nip out to the supermarket and get me half a pint of cream?’
Hilary said nothing. She had bought the cream this morning, two whole pints of it. The supermarket was crowded on a Saturday; long queues at all the checkouts, no parking space for miles. By the time he’d struggled back, there would be no chance whatsoever of their fitting in a drive. She smiled into her mangled pile of apple flesh.
‘That was cruel,’ grinned Liz, once they’d heard his car accelerate away. ‘He looked really hurt, poor lad. You realise he’s quite smitten.’
‘What d’you mean?’
‘Look, I know Bob pretty well, love, almost like a brother, and it’s obvious that he’s hooked. Actually, he was pretty damn intrigued the first time he set eyes on you. Oh, I didn’t tell you then. He made me promise not to. But he rang up the next morning and asked me all about you – who you were, where you lived, and why on earth you’d scarpered in the middle of the meal.’
‘Bolted, run away.’
Hilary was crimson. To be reminded of that shaming meal, when she’d cowered like a convict with bare legs and butchered hair. Liz must be inventing things. No man could be intrigued by such a dumb and gormless ninny. ‘But I hardly said a word, Liz, just …’
‘That’s exactly what intrigued him – the fact you were so shy, so unlike those other pushy girls. “Untouched”, was how he put it. Funny that, he’d no idea you were a nun – nor had any of us – yet he somehow put his finger on it.’
Hilary collected up the peelings, swept them in the waste-bin. ‘And he doesn’t know now, I hope.’
It was Liz’s turn to look embarrassed. ‘Well, I did just mention it. Don’t go mad – he was bound to find out anyway. I mean, Della would have said, or even Luke. And what’s the point of hiding it? It’s not a crime. If it was me who’d been a nun, I’d shout it from the rooftops, be bloody proud I was Reverend Mother Liz.’
Hilary laughed, tried to imagine Liz as Mother Abbess, with her newly coiffed and coloured hair, her emerald linen trouser-suit, her cheerful casual ‘bloodys’. Why allow Robert to destroy her peace of mind? Liz was bound to be exaggerating his apparent interest in her, and even if she weren’t, she was too concerned with Ivan to have any heart or mind left for any other man. She swept up the pool of sugar on the table, which Robert had been shaping into letters, dispersed his white and ghostly ‘H’. ‘Shall I lay the table now?’ she asked. Best to use her energies preparing for the birthday – preparing the room, the meal, herself.
‘No, it’s far too early. Luke and Stephen have got to have their tea first, and Stephen won’t be in for at least another hour. I do hope Luke’s okay. He’s been stuck up in his room all afternoon, and was really stroppy, earlier, when his father brought him round. I don’t know what’s got in to him – unless it’s another row at home.’ Liz was whipping cream with brandy, flecks spraying on her blouse. ‘You know, I worry sometimes that I’m only making things more complicated by offering him a bed here. I mean, originally I tried to help, but the kid must feel uprooted, spending some days here and some days there, and never really knowing which and when. Look, could you be a darling and go and check on him? Try one of your magpie stories. They always go down well.’
Hilary walked slowly up the stairs. She had been worried about Luke herself. He was waking in the night still, often sullen and bad-tempered after school; then he’d vanish for a week or more, return to his own home, until a phone call from his mother begged Liz to help her out again. If she ever tried to question him, he’d stall; seemed to resent her curiosity about his unconventional home, which Liz had now described in much more detail – the handicapped sister who shared his mother with him, a thirty-one-year-old baby weighing nearly thirteen stone; the tide of elder children who had now all left the nest, but who returned frequently and raucously with their own spouses, kids and problems; the constant rows, the mess. His father ran a breaker’s yard in Wandsworth, a country lad by origin, who also kept rabbits, ferrets, hens. As far as she could gather, the livestock shared the house, and no one seemed to bother much about trivial things like cleaning. The mother seemed most shadowy of all, though Luke had once passionately defended her, when Della made some critical remark – the only time she’d heard him raise his voice.
She knocked softly on his door. ‘Can I come in?’
‘No.’
‘Oh, go on, let me in. Don’t you want to see my hair?’ She pushed the door, put just her head round, struck a comic pose. ‘There. What d’you think? Do you like it?’
Silence.
‘It’s so bright, you’ll need your sunglasses.’
He didn’t smile. He was lying on the floor, face down, scrunched-up sheets of drawing paper littered all around him, one picture half-completed. She edged in a cautious yard or two, peered down at the drawing. He usually drew cars: cars in pieces, smashed cars, cars piled in heaps like junk. That was understandable, when his back garden was a scrap yard, but now he’d drawn a human wreck – a burly, vicious-looking man, with his purple face punched in, his whole body bent and twisted. His father? She’d never met Joe Craddock – had missed him when he called this morning – but from all accounts, he was not an easy man.
‘That’s a funny picture, Luke. Who’s it meant to be?’
He didn’t answer, used both his hands to hide the drawing. The red crayon on his fingers looked like blood. There was real blood on his knee, congealing round a graze. His hair was now so long it fell across his face. He had blocked her out entirely – with his hair, his hands, his silence.
‘Do you want a magpie story – Son of Droopy-Wing?’
He snapped a crayon in half.
‘Don’t do that, you’ll spoil them. Here, let me have some paper. I used to do a lot of drawing once.’
He raised his head, the faintest stir of interest dislodging his dark scowl. ‘What, when you was a nun?’
‘Yes. It was called illumination.’
‘Is that Latin?’
‘No. Well, yes, I suppose it is. Illuminatio. We had to decorate these manuscripts.’
‘What’s manuscripts?’
‘Sort of books. We drew little coloured pictures on the pages.’
‘I did that once and the teacher slapped my wrists. She used a metal ruler.’ He crumpled up his drawing, passed her a clean sheet. ‘Do nuns get slapped?’
‘Well, not with metal rulers.’ She paused, could hardly explain self-flagellation, or spiritual abnegation, the slapping down of lust and pride and self. Though she was tempted sometimes to tell this child not magpie tales and fables, but true stories about her life at Brignor, which he treated with more gravity than Liz or Della did. His own religious faith seemed tenuous. His father was aggressively non-Catholic – resented his sick wife’s sick religion, to use Liz’s damning phrase. Yet religion might have helped the boy, as it had helped her as a child; holding out a whole new world of ritual, colour, drama, which could transcend the dreary nag and squall of home. She herself had feasted on the liturgy, long before she was old enough to understand it rationally; had got drunk on solemn music, drugged on clouds of incense.
‘What’s that?’ asked Luke, squinting at her paper.
‘It’s meant to be a magpie, but it looks more like a peacock. I’ve overdone the tail. Hey, have you seen their nest today? It’s huge! The male’s still bringing twigs and things – well, hardly twigs. Some of them are two foot long and he can barely stagger back with them. Perhaps we’ll leave him out some bits of silver paper, so …’ She swung round at the knock. Liz and Della never knocked. ‘Come in,’ she called, half-rising from the rug.
‘So what’s happened to the sous chef?’
She was blushing instantly, registered the veiled rebuke behind Robert’s jokey tone. He always made her nervous, but now she knew he was what Liz described as ‘smitten’ she felt even more self-conscious. He was meant to be at Tesco’s, a good mile or two away, not sneaking up to find her on the top floor of the house. He swooped into the room, hair dishevelled, jacket half shrugged off.
‘I rushed back with the cream, bought it at another shop, just along the road, almost broke a leg hotfooting it back here, and what do I find? Both the hard-pressed cooks have disappeared.’ He grinned, plumped down on the bed. ‘Or is this an official tea break, as laid down in your union rules? If so, I’ll stay to tea.’ He made a flamboyant gesture of drinking from a cup. Luke giggled, copied him.
‘What’s this, then?’ He picked up the peacock-magpie, traced its sweeping tail. ‘That’s good, Luke, bloody good! You’ve really got a flair.’
‘It’s not mine, it’s Hilary’s.’
In the tiny pause which followed, she could feel his own embarrassment; tried to fill the gap by describing the pair of magpies in the larch tree up the road, their huge domed nest right up at the top, which swayed with every gust, yet … She could hear her voice sounding breathy, almost false. Why
did Robert affect her in this way? All the progress she had made seemed to be unravelling in an instant, as she stumbled over toys and words in her effort to avoid him. He was too big for this child’s room, seemed to threaten and invade it, blocking out the light from the one small window, breathing all its air. She faltered by the door. She couldn’t just walk out. It would look too rude, too obvious.
Luke seemed, less concerned. He was peering over Robert’s shoulder, pointing at the bird. ‘It’s meant to be a magpie – probably Droopy-Wing. Or maybe Mrs Swagger-Tail. She’s the female. They’re a family, you see. They used to live in this funny place called Brignor, but they weren’t allowed to go outside the walls, so they flew all the way down here and …’
Hilary recognised her own words, prayed that Luke would stop. It was rare for him to talk so much, least of all to strangers. Though Robert seemed so thoroughly relaxed with him, he could have been his father – except the two looked quite mismatched; Luke’s face pale and peaky beside Robert’s bracing tan; his bird-bones dwarfed by Robert’s bulk.
Robert suddenly slipped down off the bed, grabbed some crayons, a sheet of paper, and began to draw with total concentration, squatting on the rug like a child himself, brows drawn down and frowning, tongue trapped between his teeth. Hilary took a step towards him, leaning over to see what he was drawing; far less apprehensive now his eyes were on the paper, rather than on her. She watched, astonished, as a magpie hatched in minutes from his hand – strutting, preening, feather by black feather – beak gleaming, eye alert. The female took more time. He spent longer on her tail, using blue and purple to tip and gloss the feathers, then shading them with green. The fledgling sprang between them next – an eager, gangling, clumsy bird, with a squat and almost comic tail, a wide-gape beak which seemed to shriek for worms. He finally drew a worm, a flaccid writhe of flesh, which seemed impossible to coax from any crayon.
Devils, for a change Page 21