The first smell that assailed her when she blundered in was, inexplicably, wet dog. The heavy door of the pub swung closed behind her with a dry whinge, shutting out the sludge-grey day, the rain falling in large, spiteful drops, the sky a low frown, the air mistily dank. The place was blessedly deserted, a sanctuary, gloomy as a church. She threaded her way around the low lounge tables with their carefully arranged little stools set out on a square of livid carpet. They had a patient, expectant air. Unpeopled, they seemed ridiculously miniature, like nursery furniture. The only other patron sat at the bar with the introverted slump of a lone drinker. She deposited her things on one of the baby tables – her flapping umbrella, her damp briefcase, her sodden handbag – and made her way to the counter.
‘What’ll it be, love?’ the barman asked, his fist muffled in a towel as he polished pint glasses. Business was slow. It was late afternoon, mid-winter. She blew on her hands ruddy from the cold. She’d intended only to have a coffee but the encounter with Louis had so shaken her that she changed her mind.
‘A hot port,’ she said.
It wasn’t the first time she’d bumped into Louis since the split. It was a small city, after all, too bloody small. This time he had spotted her (she would have avoided him if she had seen him first) and must have had to run to catch up with her on the street, tapping her on the arm. She turned swiftly, thinking someone was trying to pick her pocket. When she saw it was him, a reflux of fondness rose in her throat that made her eyes smart. When, she wondered, do you get to the end of feeling? He was wearing his donkey jacket, the collar up around his ears to keep off the rain, hands thrust into the pockets. The scarf she’d given him last birthday was bundled about his chin. His hair was plastered over his crown and rivulets of rain were trickling down his face. She half expected him to stick his tongue out to catch them; that was the sort of clownish thing he did.
‘Will you let me under your umbrella, Miss?’ he asked.
It was a ridiculous transparent thing she’d bought hurriedly when the downpour started. Like walking around with a glazed version of St Peter’s on her head. But there wasn’t room for two beneath it. She peered at Louis through the speckled plastic.
‘I can’t talk to you like that,’ he said. ‘Take it down.’
She struggled to deflate it. Finally he took it and did it for her.
‘How are you?’ he asked.
‘Fine, and you?’
‘Oh, you know …’ He’d shrugged and looked at her wryly.
It was as if they were back at the beginning again, feeling their way into intimacy. But it was the opposite. There was so little that could be said without falling into habitual ease that they had to resort to this stilted code. Or silence. Damp crowds parted for them. She fixed on the pooled pavement.
‘Norah,’ he said, always a prelude to some declaration. He extricated a hand and made to touch her cheek.
No, no, she would not let herself be seduced. Not by mere fondness, though there was nothing mere about it; it was hardier than desire, more contagious than lust. And then she saw he wasn’t wearing his ring. She didn’t even have to remark upon it; he knew she had noticed. It was as if she had caught him out in a lie.
‘It’s been six months,’ he said, ‘I didn’t see the point any more.’
It was the same tone he might use with his students. Patient, entreating, reasonable. He clenched his hand into a fist and thrust it back into his pocket. This, she thought, is how you get to the end of feeling; other people do it for you. She turned on her heel and strode off, leaving him there, drenched on the street, calling after her.
‘Miss?’ The barman set her drink down on the bar.
The hunkered-down figure raised his head as she approached and she watched his features in the intricately scrolled mirrors behind the bar materialise into someone familiar, distantly familiar. My God, she thought, it’s Hugh Grove. Or an older version of him. His over-long hair (he’d always been vain about his dark mane) was a salty grey, his face thinner than she remembered, shadows in the hollows of his cheeks, a downward drift to his features. Don’t recognise me, she prayed.
‘Norah Elworthy,’ he said and swivelled around on the stool to face her. Too late. She looked at him directly in the hope that flinty defiance might ward him off.
‘I’m right, amn’t I?’ he said, peering at her blearily though she couldn’t be sure if that was due to the drink or the dimness of the interior. ‘Norah Elworthy.’
Then he laughed. It was less a laugh than a lewd wheeze.
‘Hugh,’ she said evenly.
He patted the stool beside him.
‘Come and join me,’ he said.
She did as she was bid – old habits die hard, she thought grimly. Why did they make these damned stools so high, she thought, as she freed the trapped wings of her coat from underneath her.
‘I’ll get that, Dec,’ Hugh said to the barman – of course, he would know the barman by name. ‘And sling some brandy into it, for God’s sake. Look at this woman, she’s perished.’ He fished in his pocket and passed over a note. The barman sidled off and the register rang merrily. Hugh looked at her sidelong.
‘Of all the gin joints in all the world …’ he started and laughed again. ‘It must be ten years …’
‘Twelve,’ she said miserably, depressed by her own exactitude.
She caught a glimpse of herself in the mirrors behind the counter. She’d been to the hairdresser the day before and her hair still bore the stylist’s taming hand. It had the helmety appearance that passed for adult grooming, though she always felt prim emerging from the salon and longed, perversely, for it to go back to its unruly self. The coat was a mulberry colour with a large collar; in the glass she looked like a buttoned-up cardinal. Then she checked herself. What am I doing, making an inventory of myself for the benefit of Hugh Grove.
‘Cheers!’ Hugh said.
Norah lifted her drink and they clinked.
‘So, how the hell are you, Norah Elworthy?’ And he laughed that combustive laugh as if he had swallowed flame.
She didn’t answer. Once, she remembered, she had been painfully in love with Hugh Grove.
‘Married, I see,’ he went on, gazing at her ring finger. He cupped his hand over hers. Their wedding bands clacked. ‘Me, too,’ he added ruefully. ‘Sort of.’
‘Wasn’t that always the way, Hugh?’ she said, emboldened by the first surge of alcohol. This was the way she had longed to speak to him back then. Saucy, jaded.
‘Well, you’ve changed,’ he said, withdrawing his hand. ‘Time was when you wouldn’t have said boo to a goose.’
‘I got over that,’ she said.
They contemplated their drinks – his almost finished pint, her ruby balloon.
‘Still in Claims?’
‘Yeah.’ He nodded and sighed. ‘Not upwardly mobile like you, Miss Hotshot! You moved on pretty quick smart.’
‘Well, there were reasons for that.’
After that Christmas she had applied for a transfer. Something had come up in Agriculture and she took it, swapping the jobless for the landed, serving her apprenticeship among headage payments and milk quotas. Hugh clapped his thighs and signalled to the barman.
‘You’ll have another?’
Without waiting for an answer he ordered again.
‘So who’s this husband of yours? Not Dan Gildea, I hope?’
‘No,’ she replied, ‘as I recall, that was verboten. Isn’t that what you said?’
‘Oh God, you’re not going to start quoting me back to myself, are you?’
The second order came and she tossed back the first quickly in the hope that she could briskly extricate herself from the encounter. It was getting on for five. If Louis were still at home, he would be waiting for her. He always cooked on a Thursday – hearty stews with cheap cuts, always too much for just the two of them.
‘What does he do, then, your hubby?’
She sipped cautiously on the second drink.
Steady, steady she told herself, but her cheeks were already aflame.
‘He’s a teacher,’ she said.
She felt herself slipping back into the monosyllabic prison of her youth when this man had had the power to reduce her to silent confusion. She didn’t want to go back there.
‘And you? Where are you now?’ he enquired, nodding towards the briefcase still slung with the rest of her stuff on the table behind them.
‘Education,’ she said.
‘Well, you look like a girl who’s educated herself.’
‘As opposed to waiting for someone like you to do it, you mean?’
‘Now, now, Norah,’ he said and raised his hands in surrender. ‘I never laid a hand on you.’ He laughed again and she saw red.
‘You know, Hugh, these days you could be had up for what you did,’ she said.
‘For warning you off Dan Gildea? I was doing you a corporal work of mercy there.’
‘Not Dan Gildea. I’m not talking about him.’
‘What so?’
‘You know,’ she said.
‘What?’ he said playfully but she could hear irritation in it. ‘What am I being blamed for now?’
We sound like a married couple, she thought, bickering over drinks. She wished she hadn’t said anything. This was an old grievance that had long ago lost its potency. But it was too late now.
‘The magazine, Hugh, that’s what I’m talking about.’
‘Oh that,’ he said and looked at her bashfully. His eyes in this light seemed wounded and murky. There was a thin brown line of porter residue on his lips. ‘How did you know it was me?’
‘Who else?’
‘You never let on.’
A third brandy and port materialised in front of her. She had no memory of Hugh ordering and it registered dimly with her that it was her round.
‘I wasn’t a complete greenhorn,’ she said, ‘despite what you thought.’
‘Oh come on, Norah, you were as pure as the driven snow; that’s what made you so attractive.’
‘Look, Hugh, you made my life a misery, isn’t that enough for you?’
‘I didn’t do anything to you. If you were bloody miserable I can’t help it …’
‘Let me tell you a story, Hugh …’
He grimaced and reached for his pint.
‘God, Norah, I think I preferred you when you were giving me the silent treatment.’
‘When I was a kid, I was probably eleven, maybe twelve, I was coming home from school and passed this man on the street. He looked quite normal coming towards me, he had a shirt and an overcoat but as he drew closer I could see that his flies were open, baring all … and I wasn’t shocked, not really, I was fascinated, though I knew I shouldn’t be. I’d never seen, you know, an adult …’
‘Prick?’ Hugh interjected.
‘ … yes, and I was mesmerised by all the hair. I’d never thought there’d be so much hair. So anyway, he passes me by and I’m determined I’m not going to look at him, look at his face, I mean.’
Hugh laughed uproariously, which degenerated into a coughing fit.
‘And after he passed, I knew, I don’t know how I knew because at that age I knew nothing, but I knew I mustn’t look back at him, that I mustn’t give him the satisfaction …’
‘So you’re equating me with a flasher?’
‘If the cap fits,’ she said. How was she going to get home? She was really sloshed now.
‘I often think of those photos. Couldn’t get them out of my head. To tell you the truth, I was as fascinated by them as by my friend on the street. I kept the magazine. Still have it, in fact.’
‘Jesus!’
She didn’t tell him that the images often came to her mind unbidden when Louis made his careful advances and she felt the familiar heave of dread that accompanied his well-meaning tenderness.
‘Truth is, Hugh, I had a terrible crush on you then, which just goes to prove there’s no accounting for taste.’
It seemed a paltry thing once said, not the great admission she’d often rehearsed. How much easier it would be if we could simply say things, she thought, when they needed to be said. Hugh looked at her blankly.
‘You didn’t know?’ she asked.
‘No,’ he said, ‘it’s not that. It’s just that night, the night of the party, I had a room booked in the Parliament.’
‘With my name on it?’
‘Yep, but, you know in the end, I couldn’t do it.’
‘What – deflower me?’
‘Yes,’ he said sighing.
‘What stopped you?’
‘You were just too … innocent.’
‘I thought that’s the way you liked them,’ she said. She couldn’t stop it now, this parrying tone.
‘But … and I know this is going to sound corny, you were different.’
‘Oh please, Hugh, don’t …’
‘Norah,’ he said and grasped for her hand. ‘I mean it.’
‘Then I might have believed it, but not now. The irony is that if you’d made a move then, I would have said yes.’
This time both of them laughed.
The pub began to fill up with after-work drinkers. At six, the barman turned the lights on and the mood changed with it. There was a crush at the bar now, bodies pressing up against them, orders being shouted out, money changing hands over their heads. A lounge girl came on duty, a small dark creature, hair scraped into a fierce-looking ponytail, concealer on her cheeks vainly applied to hide teenage acne. Her nails, Norah noticed when she sidled up beside them with her loaded tray, were bitten down to the quick. She and the barman had something going, or at least he thought they had, he kept on calling her ‘Michelle love’ and Norah noticed the girl bravely trying to hide her steely contempt. Norah smiled at her, trying in some way to reassure her, but she felt grotesque with drink now as if all her gestures were huge and exaggerated and crude. Their conversation had run out of steam but Norah wasn’t capable of winding up the evening. When Hugh went off to the lavatory, she contemplated gathering her things and making off into the night. But there was no dignified way to end this. Hugh returned and before he could settle back on to his perch, she said, ‘Why don’t we do it now?’
‘Do what?’
‘The room in the Parliament,’ she said. ‘Why don’t we do it now?’
‘Aren’t you married?’
‘What’s this, Hugh, an attack of scruples?’
‘Seriously, though …’
‘This has nothing to do with Louis … this belongs to a time before him. This is something I wanted all those years ago and couldn’t have. Now, I can. There seems a justice in that, a sweetness …’ The sweetness sprang from revenge, she thought, but she didn’t say that. ‘It’ll be a kind of reprise, an encore.’
‘It can’t be an encore,’ he said. ‘It never happened the first time.’
The crowd surged behind them. In the mirrors she could see hands raised with notes crumpled in them.
‘What do you say, Hugh Grove?’
She felt a kind of power now as if she’d got the upper hand.
‘What would be the point, after all this time?’ he asked.
It hadn’t occurred to her that she might be the one doing the persuading.
‘Oh, Norah dear, the world has done its job on you, alright,’ he said, bleary-eyed.
‘Well, then,’ she said, touching his arm, feeling suddenly sorry for him, ‘you don’t have to feel responsible for it.’
‘Oh God, Norah, I don’t know …’
‘Is that a yes, then?’
He smiled wearily but he agreed, as she knew he would.
* * *
The night of the Christmas party Elaine was still up when he got home. She’d dressed the Christmas tree and was sitting in the darkened sitting room, the fairy lights flickering on and off among the silvered baubles. She’d had a bath and was sitting on the sofa with the TV on but the sound low so as not to wake Hugh Junior who was just after his n
ight feed and asleep in the Moses basket at her feet. She smelled of bath salts – almond blossom, was it, or passion flower – and there was a dampness in her cleavage just visible beneath the folds of her white towelling dressing gown. It parted at the knees and he could see the tiny reddened tributaries of veins around her knees. The rewards of childbirth, she’d said ruefully more than once. She looked up when he came in but said nothing, merely opened her arms and Hugh fell upon her gratefully like a man saved.
THE GREAT WALL
‘Get in!’ he ordered.
Owen stood, damp, on the cobbled quay, hands on hips. Below him the ornate prow of the black gondola and the upturned face of the gondolier, beaming. A professional rictus. The choppy water glinted. Her stomach heaved.
‘Murph,’ Owen warned. ‘I’ll go without you.’
In that moment, she despised him. His doughy face and his squinty glasses and his sandy hair standing on end. His little paunch and his embarrassed-looking legs in crumpled shorts. There was no end to her catalogue of contempt.
‘Venice,’ he had said that morning, towelling his damp hair and looking out of the high casement window overlooking the canal. ‘City of lovers …’
She had expected a roll call of masterpieces; Giorgione’s La Tempesta, Bellini’s Madonnas, Titian’s Presentation of the Virgin.
‘Canals, gondolas,’ he went on.
‘Gondolas?’ Wingbeat of alarm. Wingbeat of memory.
‘Well, it is what Venice is famous for. We’ll have to take a spin in one at some stage.’
Rock and lurch of water. A pair of splintered glasses.
When Owen went down to breakfast ahead of her, she rang her mother.
‘Is all well in the bedchamber?’ her mother had asked.
* * *
It was Owen who had insisted they wait; part of his deference to her culture. He often spoke about her culture – it made her think of the laboratory – though she had grown up in the same suburb, albeit that the Devoys owned a semi-detached, half red-brick on Prosperity Drive and she lived in a flat over Uncle’s takeaway in the village. Her notion of village was the dim memory of her grandmother’s house, part of a rickety huddle, drenched and rotten. In time, Uncle had graduated from the modest quarters over the shop, leaving the place to Kim’s mother.
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