The Lover

by Amanda Brookfield

  The call to Frances inviting her to spend the weekend at a friend’s cottage on the Isle of Wight had followed on from a largely unsatisfactory attempt to air some of these complicated grievances. As well as being obviously irritated at the suggestion that his own version of mourning was not demonstrative enough for his wife’s more extravagant tastes, Alistair had voiced the upsetting opinion that Libby’s eagerness to be supportive was dangerously close to pestering.

  ‘Of course she won’t want to come away for a jolly weekend with us.’

  ‘It needn’t be jolly.’

  ‘Oh, well in that case why are we bothering to go at all?’

  ‘You know what I mean.’

  ‘No, I’m not sure I do. You seem to think that Frances being miserable under our scrutiny is better than allowing her to be miserable on her own. Which is probably what she wants.’

  ‘I don’t think she knows what she wants.’

  ‘I’m sure you’re right and it’s up to us to give her the space to find out.’

  ‘I’m going to call anyway, just to ask, just to show we care…’

  ‘She knows we care,’ muttered Alistair, ramming dirty dinner plates into the dishwasher and angrily sweeping aside condiments and unused cutlery in order to create a space large enough to accommodate a set of plans on a loft conversion in Hythe.

  ‘Thank you, Libby,’ said Frances firmly, ‘but it feels too soon…to go anywhere. It’s very sweet of you to ask.’

  ‘But are you all right?’ pressed Libby, feeling helpless and wanting reassurance for her own sake. Across the room, Alistair rolled his eyes at the ceiling. His wife turned back to the sink and pointedly stuck a finger in her ear. ‘I mean, of course you’re not all right, but are you…coping?’

  Frances stared out of the sitting-room window. Three geese were streaking across the sky. Black arrows on a white board. Sharp, fast and focused. Watching them, she felt a twist of envy at the obvious clarity of their destination, their purposefulness. ‘Coping…? Yes, of course, keeping busy, you know…’ She looked round the sitting room. Old papers lay strewn across the sofa, a blue sock of Felix’s was poking out from under an armchair. Her tea mug from that morning was still sitting on the coffee table, gathering a fine head of white scum. Things she would normally have done without thinking she no longer wanted to do. The hours, the days, her life, had lost their structure. The lethargy afflicting her was so crushing that sometimes she had to remind herself to blink.

  Libby hung up the kitchen phone feeling unreassured but helpless. That Frances had reacted according to her husband’s predictions did little to soften her feelings towards him.

  ‘It’ll take time,’ he said quietly, adding after a moment’s pause, ‘especially for a woman like Frances.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean? “A woman like Frances”.’ Libby picked a bruised apple out of the fruit bowl and angrily plucked out the stalk.

  Alistair sighed, sensing conflict, but too sure of the veracity of his opinions to be deterred from expressing them. ‘A woman who so clearly needs a man, whose entire life has been dictated by nothing but the humdrum demands of her family.’

  ‘She’s always had other interests too, you know, like her drawing and helping out with those Feed The Children people…’

  Alistair raised one eyebrow and made a pencil note of something in the top, right-hand corner of the piece of paper in front of him. His silence communicated what Libby knew but out of some perverse sense of loyalty was unwilling to acknowledge, that while never in all their years of acquaintance appearing idle or inactive, Frances Copeland had never actually done very much beyond the modest demands of her small family.

  ‘I’ve only ever worked because we need the money.’

  ‘No you haven’t.’ Alistair put down his pencil. ‘You work because your instincts for survival as an individual have always driven you to seek fulfilment outside the blissful womb of domesticity which regularly threatens to throttle us. You’ve perfected your juggling act because it gives you satisfaction to do so, because you are the kind of woman who can happily exist within the stimuli of her own motivations, the kind of woman who, should she find herself bereaved, would have little trouble in picking up the pieces and carrying on. You don’t need me, Libby. It’s one of the things I find most attractive about you.’

  Libby opened her mouth to speak but closed it round the apple instead, disarmed and exasperated.

  ‘Frances needs a man,’ he continued, ‘someone not only to look after, but also to define her. Her best hope is to meet someone else and begin again. Which isn’t to say that I don’t feel enormous sympathy for her plight. I do.’ He picked up his pencil and tested the sharpness of the lead with his fingertip. ‘She is the very worst kind of person this could have happened to. And in case you have any doubt on the matter, I miss Paul enormously. He was a good man, a good friend.’

  Having bitten into the bruise by mistake, Libby chewed and swallowed slowly. She hated her husband’s calmness, his self-control, but admired him for it too. She was also secretly pleased at his image of her as so independent and capable. He had never said anything quite like that before, not in so many words. ‘So Frances needs a new man,’ she murmured, going to sit opposite him at the table and placing both elbows on top of his papers so he had to look at her.

  ‘Actually, an old-fashioned one would suit her best,’ Alistair replied, smiling to show that he detected the softening in her attitude and welcomed it. ‘And of course, lots of support from her friends too. I know you want to help her, love.’

  Libby reached forward and gently eased his glasses off his face. ‘We could both do with an early night…it’s been a hard week.’

  ‘Hm…’ He kissed the tip of her nose. ‘And where are our brood exactly?’

  Libby raised four fingers. ‘Away, out, doing homework and watching TV.’ She folded his glasses and slipped them into their case, whispering, ‘Even we independent types have need of our menfolk sometimes.’ Taking hold of his tie she pulled him towards her side of the table. They kissed, with the slow unhurried pleasure of mutual familiarity. Later on in bed they were rougher and less tender. Perhaps because it was several weeks since they had last found the energy for sex. Perhaps because of some dim connection to the events of the previous week, the need to reassert themselves against the threat of their own mortality.

  Frances meanwhile continued to sit staring at the telephone, puzzling over her longing for interruption from the outside world and the repellence she felt the moment any arrived. Even the television, the most obvious relief for her new solitude, seemed too abrasive a companion for the fragile emptiness of her mind. Not because murders and hospital dramas were in any way upsetting, but because their glib portrayals of emotional states and the subsequent menus of consequences seemed false, flat and irrelevant. As the days dragged by, it felt increasingly to Frances as if in real life there were no consequences, that she could continue to sit on the sofa forever, with nothing but dull, pointless willpower to trigger the necessity of doing anything else. Her only, somewhat surprising release, was sleep. The exhaustion of misery was a new discovery, lately even precluding the necessity of Dr Leigham’s little white pills.

  Leaving the dirty coffee mug and the remains of the sandwich she had half eaten by way of supper, Frances dragged herself into a standing position and headed for the stairs. Since she had not moved from the house all day there was no point in checking locks and bolts. Re-reading letters of condolence, one load of washing – on the half-load button – these were her sole achievements of fifteen hours. The washing had not even made it onto the line, though she had spent some considerable time staring at the rotary dryer, spinning useless and empty in the brisk autumn breeze. The thought of her underwear and two shirts, pegged alone outside had been too much to bear. She had stuffed them into the tumble dryer instead, guilty at the extravagance of closing the door on so light a load.

  Chapter Four

  Three weeks
later Frances awoke, as she always did, to a split second of heavenly vacancy before the memory of her new circumstances came flooding in, each time as terrible as the last. Now that it was late September, the bedroom felt unpleasantly chilly in the mornings, a problem which raising the temperature on the thermostat seemed to have gone no way towards solving. The radiators, unused since the beginning of the summer, were lukewarm and full of gurgles. She would have to phone British Gas. The thought even of something so mundane, filled her with unreasonable dread.

  Struggling to an upright position, she took a sip of water and turned on her bedside light. Although it was only six o’clock, she felt wide awake, tense at the prospect of another day alone. Next to her alarm clock was a list she had written the night before, a pitiful token gesture at injecting some sense of order into the blankness inside her head.

  Visit grave

  See vicar

  Call lawyer

  Buy food

  Picking up a pen lying beside her water glass, she added, Call British Gas, before putting the list down again. Though it was pointless and exhausting she then allowed herself to cry, reaching for one of Paul’s hankies, which she had taken to stowing in her bedside drawer.

  Since the funeral she had only visited the graveside once and derived little solace from the experience. The flowers and wreaths had looked wind-battered and sad. Replacing them with a small arrangement of roses from the garden, had generated not comfort but a sense of futility. Instead of feeling closer to Paul she had felt, if anything, more removed. There was more intimacy to be had at home, in the faint aroma of aftershave on his dressing gown, in the loop of his handwriting on a letter or the flyleaf of a book. Not being an adherent to the notion of the life hereafter, Frances accepted that even this sense of proximity would inevitably fade with time, that it did not evince anything beyond the physical remains of what had once been a life.

  The unwelcome sense of obligation with regard to Reverend Aldridge arose from his having made an impromptu house-visit the week before. During the course of a cup of tea and a stale Hobnob he had emitted gentle utterings about the omniscience of God’s love and the existence of bereavement support groups. ‘Help is all around you,’ he had said, pressing her hand between his palms and peering at her kindly from under the shelf of his grey bushy eyebrows.

  ‘Thank you,’ Frances had murmured, unable to prevent herself wondering whether the eyebrows grew vertically of their own accord, or were steered that way by their owner out of some misguided sense of vanity.

  ‘You are welcome any time at the vicarage, or indeed at St Martin’s. Please call round whenever you want. The Lord’s house is for all travellers, whatever their origins or destination.’

  You mean even if they don’t believe in him, and never go to church except for funerals and weddings Frances had wanted to say, but didn’t because it would have seemed ungrateful and unkind. The necessity of considering other people’s feelings was one of the more irksome and unexpected aspects of her stricken state. As with Libby telephoning each day and the grocer in Leybourne High Street recounting the minutiae of his wife’s battle against thrombosis, Frances felt bound to accept the reverend’s consolation in the spirit in which it was so clearly intended. Spurred by such impulses, wanting only to be released from the immediate stress of the moment, she had declared, ‘I will call round, I most certainly will,’ and then looked at her watch with a cry of exclamation, as if the position of the hands on the dial still meant something to her.

  Calling the lawyers was merely another prong in this strategy of survival and deception, the aim being in this instance to promote an impression of understanding and control, when in reality she felt very little of either. While transplanting his career to the countryside, Paul had retained a London firm of solicitors to act on the family’s behalf. The man who had contacted Frances, both by letter and once by phone, was called Hugo Gerard. In the not too distant future a meeting would be required he explained, his voice resonating with the clipped intimidating confidence of the English public school, so that Frances could sign various documents relating to the will and a few other technical matters. He had described what the matters were, but Frances had lost concentration half-way through, distracted both by a lack of familiarity with the vocabulary and a sudden pressing, almost hysterical sense of unreality.

  Picking up her list again, she wrote LIBBY in capital letters across the bottom of the piece of paper and then blew her nose. Coping with the attention of her closest friend was proving almost hardest of all. Since the invitation to the Isle of Wight she had backed off a bit – only telephoning as opposed to suggesting actual meetings – but still with enough frequency to make Frances feel uncomfortable. It seemed incredible that in the once normal, now distant world of their previous lives, whole weeks had slipped by quite naturally without them talking or seeing each other. Now she felt as if Libby were watching her, scrutinising every inflexion for signs of rallying or recovery. Not being able to deliver even a faltering start to such a process only made Frances long all the more to be left alone. But it made her feel bad too, because of Libby trying so hard and getting nothing in return. Sighing, Frances drew a large question mark next to Libby’s name, which, after a little more doodling became a flower, linking up via a grapevine of stems and leaves to all the other items on her sorry list, until the words themselves were barely legible.

  In recent days she had even started shying away from running the gauntlet of Leybourne high street for her groceries. Instead, she had taken to scurrying around the soothingly vast and impersonal aisles of the new Tesco supermarket, whose opening had caused such a furore amongst the Leybourne retailers the year before. Her wants were so meagre that after watching them rattle around in the bottom of a trolley, she had switched to a hand-basket instead. Standing in line at the express checkout, she stared at the queues of mothers and wives packing mountains of weekly shopping with a sense of wonder that she herself had once led a life along similar lines. Sometimes she wanted to shout at their gloomy faces, to warn them to enjoy what they had, because it wasn’t safe and wouldn’t last.

  Even hearing from Daisy and Felix, who called regularly, was something Frances found hard. Not because she did not want to talk to them, but because she guessed that the frequency of their calls related to concern for her rather than any genuine impulse to discuss matters arising from their own lives. The idea of becoming a gloomy millstone of a mother filled her with horror. Interesting futures beckoned for both her offspring and she was desperate that each should feel free to march towards them. So when Felix suggested popping home for the weekend she put him off. And when Daisy put forward dates for a trip across the Channel she said she would be busy seeing Felix.

  After propping her list against her alarm clock, Frances decided to eat up some of the long morning by going to the graveyard on foot instead of by car. The bridlepath along the bottom of the garden led eventually into the grid of back lanes running into the old part of Leybourne, where St Martin’s medieval profile dominated the skyline. It was the most attractive end of the town, full of thatched cottages and timbered almshouses, the ancient nucleus of a community which had long since spreadeagled itself in a contrastingly ungainly fashion for several miles further down the road. On the far side of town a plot had recently been assigned for another hundred council homes, together with a large roundabout destined to forge a link with the main road to Hexford and the coast. The Taverners, whose converted farmhouse was only a few hundred yards from the proposed site, had been amongst the many local protesters at these plans. But the council were going ahead anyway, armed with government housing quotas and talk of splintering families needing roofs over their heads.

  Frances walked quickly, clutching her newspaper bundle of garden flowers to her chest. The weather was cloudy, and damp enough to make the wisps of hair escaping from her headscarf twist into little curls. Slowed by the weight of the mud clogging the soles of her boots, and the need to step onto
the grass verge in order to escape the puddle spray of passing cars, it took a good forty minutes to complete her journey. At the bottom of the lane leading up to the church, the heavy clang of the church door caused her to look up. Reverend Aldridge was striding down towards the roadside gate, a pair of white trainers poking somewhat incongruously from under the black hem of his cassock. Acting on reflexes she had no time to analyse, Frances quickly side-stepped behind a broad-bellied chestnut tree. She pressed herself hard against the cold damp bark, praying either that she had not been seen or that the vicar would have the grace to ignore the eccentricity of an unhinged widow. Hearing the light tap of his footsteps recede, she relaxed and opened her eyes. Strewn around her feet were scores of spiky green conker cases, many of them split, revealing glimpses of the polished mahogany inside. She stood on one with the ball of her foot, pressing hard until the conker popped out, rolling away under a cluster of wet leaves.

  A moment later she remembered that the vicar was on her list, that the best, the only, way of getting people to leave her alone in the long term was to make them believe she was all right. Pulling back her shoulders and taking a deep breath she hurriedly emerged from her hiding place, only to find the road empty and the church gate swinging, its rusty hinges squeaking faintly in the stillness of the morning.

  The mound of earth still looked fresh. The roses from her previous visit had collapsed over the edge of the metal vase. The few petals that remained were flattened with rain and trailing in the earth. Crouching down, Frances began briskly plucking out the dead stems and inserting the fresher offerings from the folds of her newspaper. Petals scattered like torn scraps of tissue. She tried to concentrate on feeling close to Paul, but could not think beyond the stiffness in her knees and the fact of his once imposing body rotting just a couple of metres beneath her feet, his finger and toenails growing unchecked in the silky lining of the coffin. The thought triggered an image as vivid as any she had experienced, of Paul sitting up in bed trimming his nails with a pair of staple-like clippers and then noisily, irritatingly, buffing them into neat semicircles with a metal nail file, scattering specks of white dust across the sheets.