Such loyalty. Serena admired it. She noticed that Michael used the word ‘heart’ a lot, also the word ‘guts’. An honest, simple, conventional man, she thought, but comfortable with emotions.
‘Difficult, that committee. I thought I covered everything.’ He left a questioning silence at the end of the statement.
‘I don’t really know enough about broadcasting to give you a useful opinion.’
‘People tend to think media issues are just sexy, don’t they? Then they get to the nitty-gritty, find it’s technical and they’re bored. I could feel their eyes glazing – do you think they managed to grasp anything?’
‘Oh, sure. They were making notes all the time – especially when you were talking about ownership and ethics.’
‘And you could follow, yes?’
‘Well, yes. I could. It seemed quite simple to me. I felt they were lost for good lines of argument; you made everything so clear they were casting around for loose ends to question you on.’ She was flattered to have her opinion asked. It was quite a novelty in her life. At ChildAid, as in the office where she had worked before, people never asked the opinion of the public relations officer until it was too late.
‘The committee seemed pretty satisfied in the end.’ By instinct, he was testing her softness. Michael was drawn to what he called a kind woman, meaning one with a strong instinct to soothe, reassure, even flatter away a man’s fears.
‘They were impressed. They were right with you, I could see that.’ She tried not to say any more for fear of betraying how little she herself had considered what went on behind the day’s news bulletins.
‘Good. Good. Marianne, what have I got this evening?’ The question was unnecessary; he always knew his schedule. Marianne consulted the organizer and confirmed that the night was free, finishing with a prim compression of her lips.
‘Good,’ said Michael, and looked out of the window, tapping his long fingers on the arm-rest. Suddenly he made the car stop, and disappeared into a sports shop, coming out with a purchase. ‘Shin pads. My son is starting to get serious about football.’ She was impressed that in the midst of such important affairs he would remember a minor deficiency in his son’s sports kit.
When they arrived at their destination he sent Marianne to his office to make some calls and turned to Serena as they walked down the corridor. ‘This is likely to take some time – would you like dinner afterwards? Or is there someone you need to get home to?’
‘There’s no one at home,’ she told him, feeling as if someone else were saying the words. ‘Dinner would be fine – how kind of you.’
‘Good.’ He managed to make the word embrace both counts. Had Michael been asked, at that moment, if he had any sexual intention towards Serena, he would have said no. He was running on instinct. Had Serena been asked, she would have said probably, and that only because she had been brought up to be modest. She would have meant definitely. Sad because of his wife, flattering but nothing she intended to get into. Serena had heard the stories, although no one had mentioned his warmth, the way he got involved in his programmes, as if he really cared. He was a good man, and good to be with, but that was all.
‘I’ll never be really sophisticated, I still think it’s glamorous, telephoning by the swimming pool.’ Half-comatose in the heat, Grace lay on her stomach and watched the bees working her lavender hedge. The energetic morning sun was frying her shoulders agreeably. ‘Marie-Laure wants to put you in for the Iron Man Triathlon. What you lose on the running, your sperm will make up on the swimming.’
Her husband chuckled in the handset. ‘What else did she have to say?’
‘I’m in the hop, spit and jump. Every day I have to spit into a plastic tube and test it with a dipstick.’
‘Never seems to run out of ideas, does she, Marie-Laure?’
‘Nope. I tried spitting this morning but my mouth was dry.’ She rolled onto her back, but the sun reflected from the surface of the pool glared in her eyes, so she sat up and looked for her hat.
‘You need something to get the juices flowing. I’ve got some fantastic sausages, and some trout for lunch.’
‘Haven’t you done enough cooking for one week?’
‘Never. Anyway, it’ll save you shopping.’
‘What about tomorrow? And Sunday?’
‘Oh, yes … we have an invitation for Sunday.’
‘Who?’
‘Surprise.’
‘Don’t tease, who?’
‘I’ll tell you when I see you. Got to go now, no more points on the card.’ The line was cut with a decisive whine. She smiled, picturing Nick’s large form in his pink polo shirt and too-new jeans, his face already reddened from the southern sun, climbing awkwardly into his car in the stinking heat haze of a gas station in high summer.
Afterwards she recalled the merest shadow of misgiving, because Nick never held back anything, but at the time she dismissed the doubt, starving it in favour of the fondness she felt for him. Marriage seemed to be a question of cultivating the right emotions.
A low cloud, the only one in the entire sky, cut out the sun for a few minutes. The Alhambra was a village house, and the village occupied the highest hill in a spine of smaller peaks, almost a thousand feet above sea level. Banks of cloud rolled in from the distant Atlantic, broke up over the Pyrenees and did not reform until past these foothills. The altitude saved them from the stifling air of the low-lying land, but without the sun the air had an alpine crispness, even in August. Grace shivered and switched off the phone.
Nick was the most lovable of men, and yet she did not love him. Precisely, Grace did not know if she loved her husband. Her judgements were stern, and harsher of herself than others; she felt that if you had to ask if what you felt was love, then it was not, it was something less.
This was affection. This was respect, and trust. It was liking, but perhaps not more than that, it was too quiet. She had mistrusted it, and expected it to sour quickly once the first flush was over, but instead it had endured, becoming a smooth, broad emotion which sweetened her life but had no power to overwhelm it. Sometimes, she felt ashamed of having married him. Because she had been thirty-four years old and wistful for children, she had done it. She was afraid that love was finished for her; she was also afraid that it was not, and would find her out one day and force her to hurt this blameless soul. Her best hope was that now she had loved enough, and had earned at least some years of peace.
They had bought this house for the sake of peace. The deep peace of rural decay – Grace joked about it, as she joked about everything, but it had lulled her very well. They had wanted a summer retreat; she wanted Nick to restore himself after the long months at his work.
In her own work the deadline guillotined each day; if she had been careless there was a point, every twenty-four hours, after which nothing more could be done and the next day all mistakes would be forgotten. Nick’s work had no deadlines. Of course, his patients died. Attached to a paediatric HIV clinic, he saw babies and children face death every day. His field was research – not caring for these tragic infants or smoothing their journey to the next world, merely observing them. Much of his day passed in abstract thought, much of it in tedious laboratory procedures. It astonished her that he was never careless, never permitted himself a mistake, but acted always as if every patient could be saved. He gave too much of himself, and by the summer he was pale and drained.
Grace had planned to escape from her newspaper. After Michael the daily fever of news had subjected her life to a healing madness. Once she was with Nick, being called at any time, in any place, to follow a story which nine times out of ten was of no significance seemed futile, and when she broke arrangements with Nick he was incapable of understanding. Her editor was a resentful man who felt his life lacked pleasure; he presumed foreign correspondents to be sitting on some shady plaza with a leisurely drink while their colleagues sweated, and liked to keep them on their toes.
Anywhere else in France a h
oliday would inevitably have been spoiled by the office, calling to demand a report on flash floods, forest fires or a blighted vintage, but nothing ever happened in Gascony, not even natural disasters. It was a blank tract on the newsroom map, where the farmers had better things to do than demonstrate and there was not so much as one fascist mayor capable of making a speech fit for a headline.
In the roasting silence of midday, she heard the purr of her husband’s Peugeot, and the crunch of its tyres as he turned into the lane to leave the car in the shade of the church tower. With his suitcase in one hand and an assortment of shopping bags in the other, he squeezed through the side gate, eyes bright with mischief.
‘Stay there – don’t get up.’ He dropped the case and most of the bags, bringing one with him to her side. ‘I brought you a present – here, you have to try this…’
‘What have you got in there?’ She sat up on one elbow, dizzy with the heat; he was rummaging among the ice packs in the eskimo bag. Other men bought such equipment to take beer to football matches; Nick kept his in the car to bring pâté and cream cakes home in perfect condition.
‘The best thing we learned all week – all week – was what to do with a pomegranate. Watch.’ Out of the bag, he produced a round red fruit and a small knife. ‘You make a tiny cut in the skin, like this, then you crush it …’ His strong fingers pinched the rosy globe all over. ‘Then you suck it – here, try …’ He held the fruit out to her and obediently she put her hand over his, closed her mouth around the cut in the skin and felt the cool juice spurt into her mouth. It was sweet but fresh-tasting. ‘Isn’t that delicious? The most refreshing taste you could possibly imagine, isn’t it? And so near, no drips, none of that bitter pith, nature’s own juice box …’
‘Mmmh,’ was all she could manage to reply while he steadily squeezed out more juice for her. Eventually he let her hold the fruit herself. ‘Delicious,’ she agreed. ‘I always wondered if you were really meant to fiddle around with all those pips.’
‘Say hello properly.’
‘Hello properly.’ She reached up and kissed him, her lips now cool, his warm and dried in the sun. ‘I’ll come in with you, it’s too hot out here.’
Sitting in the kitchen, enjoying the pomegranate and the cold tiles under her feet, she watched him energetically stowing new-bought treasures in the cupboards and drawers.
‘I found this Galician cheese …’ It must have weighed at least two kilos, a hard yellow round wrapped in newspaper. ‘And some quince paste to go with it …’ Flat dark red packets were stacked beside the cheese. ‘And the best chorizo I’ve ever tasted, quite mild but very spicy …’ Tall as he was, he had to fetch a chair to hang the sausage from a hook in the ceiling. ‘And these extraordinary black peppers …’ Temporarily at least, these were hung around his neck. ‘And a pot of savory because nobody watered the last one …’ The aromatic plant was installed outside the door, next to the tarragon and marjoram. ‘Now, will trout be all right for you? Steamed in lettuce leaves? It looks pretty, pink and green … Can you see a lettuce, I know I had one somewhere …’
Still half-asleep from sunbathing, she let her head rest on her arms on the table and watched him fondly. Cooking relaxed him like nothing else; he bustled around the kitchen in a world of his own, inviting her to admire the fish and advise him on the precise state of her appetite, but in fact wrapped up completely in the delight of making a meal. He was not the most fastidious of cooks, but as he cleared up the debris he scattered all around him and always forbade her to wash up she had no complaints.
When the trout were a luscious memory and they had agreed that a translucent slice of quince paste was the perfect addition to a slice of hard mountain cheese, when the dishes were stacked in a workmanlike pile and Nick had brewed coffee, when they had decided that it was still too hot to go outside and were moving into the sitting room, she remembered the question of Sunday.
‘So tell me, what is this surprise you’ve planned?’
‘Ah.’ He had been about to sink into his favourite seat, a brocade wing chair, lumpy and worn, an early junk-shop extravagance which had loyally accompanied her throughout most of her life. Instead, he stood in front of the cavernous fireplace.
‘Lunch on Sunday, you said someone had invited us.’
‘Yes. Look – ah – you’ll never guess who I met at this – thing. It was marvellous, she was just as I’d imagined, exactly …’ The words tumbled out in a nervous rush.
Foreboding squeezed her stomach, curdling the comforting after-lunch glow, making her throat feel obstructed. ‘Yes,’ she encouraged him.
‘You know who it was, don’t you?’ Now he was trying to be playful, hoping against the cold warning of her face that she would be able to share his delight. ‘It was Jane Knight.’
She turned away from him, shocked, wanting to hide her face, wishing the name back into his mouth, the meeting back into the future. Too late. They were facts, events, they were lying there in the present, irreversible.
‘We don’t have to go, of course we don’t have to go. I know how you feel about her husband.’ Nick stood swaying from one foot to another in sudden misery, like a wretched circus bear. The words were in her mouth to tell him he knew nothing of the kind. Early on, she had tried to explain to him, wanting him to understand the great scar that lay across her life, but he could not really hear her. His own feelings were not complex. All he retained was the idea that she was somehow opposed to Michael Knight.
She kept her back to him, watching their reflection on the far wall in a spotted old mirror which she had bought for its fantastic gothic frame.
‘It was just a casual invitation. She gave me their number, I can always call and say we’ve got something else on.’
How can I look so strong when I am so weak? Her face, a blurred reflection in the old glass, was heroic. She carried herself proudly and her eyes were always steady. Her dark hair curled strongly away from her forehead, setting off its breadth, and the width of her cheekbones, the long firm sweep of her jaw. She looked like a patrician Roman wife, a heroic matriarch defending her honour, when she felt like howling with panic and crawling under something to hide.
It was difficult to turn around. She had a subliminal vision of a chasm behind her, a huge fissure opened in the ground in seconds by an earthquake; if she turned around she would look into it, lose her balance and fall in. ‘Nobody has anything on around here in August. We chose this place for the peace and quiet.’
‘So, if she doesn’t believe me, that isn’t the end of the world. She’s a nice woman, she’ll just think … well …’ His sandy eyebrows peaked with distress. ‘Well, it doesn’t matter what Jane Knight thinks. Perhaps she’s thought better of inviting us by now. Oh, I’m sorry, it’s all my fault, my love, I ought to have realized how you’d feel. We’d got along famously over our salt cod casserole, like people do on these foodie things, and I was flattered, I really was.’
‘You really rate her, don’t you?’
‘I was surprised she was there, I thought it was just for amateurs. I mean, I read her every week in the Sunday paper right from the beginning, I’ve got all her cookbooks. After I got divorced, the first thing I ever cooked was Jane Knight’s omelette paysanne. My life isn’t like yours, I don’t meet famous people every day …’
‘You know I hate you saying things like that.’ She turned towards him at last, anger giving her the strength, and folded her arms around her body, feeling cold. She had furnished the room in cool blue linen, a good colour with sunlight, and the massive walls and small windows kept out the summer heat. The room was always dusky, with lamps throwing deep shadows on the whitewash, leaving the corners dark.
They were standing a wary, distance apart. ‘It annoys me that you think my life is so important,’ she said. ‘You know all I do is turn in whatever trivia the editor requires. If I go to a press conference and see a junior minister in the distance, that’s the biggest thrill of the week.’
‘All I mean is that I was too bowled over to think. We’d been getting along famously and she was just carried away by the enthusiasm of the moment, and invited us. It wasn’t a big thought-out thing.’
My husband and my former lover’s wife got along famously. Even in her distress, Grace was moved to smile. The passion of the moment was forever carrying Nick away. In Paris, he was a different man, silent and intense, profoundly caring of his infant patients. Her memory was forever imprinted with the picture of his great red hands around a newborn baby, his fingers as thick as its arms. Once that intimate contact with life and death ceased, and he was at leisure, he became an eruption of good nature and crashed about like a young gun dog, ever alert to pleasure and careless of where he put his great paws. His absolute loyalty was yours; in return he would gratefully accept an occasional thump in the ribs as a token of your love.
He was running on. ‘We were just swapping stories of how we found our houses, we realized how close we were, she said she’d like to see you again …’
‘We aren’t close to the Knights, how can we be close?’ Why wasn’t he angry? The situation threatened them, challenged their bond, but Nick never defended himself as harder men did. She heard the pitch of her voice rise, felt the resurrection of the old Grace, the woman she had left behind when she left Michael. ‘Their place must be hundreds of miles, hours away at least, half a day …’ She checked herself, she was protesting too much. If now she revealed that Michael Knight had been her lover it would appear as a long-established deception.
‘Look, don’t worry. I’ll just tell her it’s too far, too far just for lunch.’
‘Suppose she asks us to stay?’
‘Then we can always say no. Honestly, it isn’t a big deal. I left it open, I didn’t know how you’d feel.’ Now his shoulders drooped and his back bowed under the weight of regret for the pain he was causing.
‘I don’t know how I feel, either. Can we talk about it tomorrow?’
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