The Lover

by Amanda Brookfield

  ‘But Sal…what the hell?’

  ‘Surprise,’ she shrieked, going onto the tips of her trainers and flinging her arms round his neck. ‘I couldn’t bear another day of not seeing you.’

  He hugged her briefly, breaking off for an anxious look at his watch. ‘I wish you’d told me. In fact it’s incredible you found me, I only came back because I forgot my file. I’m bloody late actually.’ He ran both his hands back through his hair, which had grown rather long, flopping over his ears in a way that Sally couldn’t help thinking looked a bit affected.

  ‘Surely you could skip whatever it is, just this once.’ She had to trot to keep up with him as he punched in the door code and set off up the staircase, taking two steps at a time. ‘I’m skipping the whole bloody day.’

  ‘Are you?’ He paused for a moment, genuinely impressed, before the enormity of what she had said sank in. ‘What on earth did you tell everybody?’

  Sally shook her head happily. ‘Nothing. I just came. Why, what would you like me to have told them?’ she added slyly, knowing that she was trespassing on sensitive ground. Felix had always argued more strongly for keeping their relationship secret. Not just because of the sex side of things, but because of apprehension about laying themselves open to the general mirth and curiosity of their respective families. Though Sally agreed, there was a part of her that would have loved to proclaim her feelings through a megaphone from the top of St Martin’s spire.

  Felix’s room was stuffy and very untidy. A partition separated a bed and basin from a walled desk unit and a couple of muddy orange chairs. There were papers and clothes everywhere, strewn around empty biscuit packets and dirty mugs. Felix, cursing loudly, eventually found what he was looking for.

  ‘I’ve got a tutorial with the main man, I simply can’t miss it. I’ll be back as soon as I can. An hour and a half, no more.’ He kissed her on the mouth. ‘See you soon.’

  ‘Felix…’

  He stopped half-way through the door, looking so Sally could not help noticing, impatient.

  ‘Are you glad I came?’

  ‘Of course, Sal.’ He ran back and kissed her again. ‘I’ll show you just how glad when I get back…that is if you’ve got any…’

  She patted her bag sheepishly. ‘I collected remaining supplies from the bridge.’

  The time passed slowly. Sally smoked five of the packet of ten Marlboro Lights she had bought at the station and browsed through the mess, looking for clues, though for what exactly she wasn’t sure. Pinned to a small cork board in front of the desk unit were several invitations to parties, but also a small passport photograph of the pair of them, taken on a wet afternoon in Hexford when they had sneaked off to the cinema. Although tiny, no more than a pinpoint in the room, the sight of it cheered her enormously, as did the memory of larking in the supermarket photo booth, adopting silly poses and getting so hysterical that a man in uniform had asked them to move along.

  It was a good hour and a half before Felix burst back in looking windswept and businesslike. ‘I’ve got until half past two,’ he announced, unzipping his flies and beginning to peel off his jeans. ‘There’s a lecture on Keynes – miles away – but I’ve got to go – bloody economics is so much harder than I was expecting, if it wasn’t for Jerry next door—’ He stopped, bare-legged, one sock in hand, aware suddenly that she had not moved from the desk chair. ‘Do you want to make love?’

  ‘Of course,’ Sally whispered, slowly slipping her arms out of her sweatshirt, wishing they were somewhere else other than a poky room in the middle of a world she did not understand and in which she could play no part.

  The bed was soft and squeaky and narrow. Sally found herself longing for the hard ground under the bridge, the tingle of the outside air on her bare skin. It took some effort to wrest her thoughts to the present, to remind herself that she was with the boy she loved, committing a reckless act of her own making. Afterwards there was barely time to talk. Felix produced half a loaf of sliced bread and near empty tub of peanut butter. They ate quickly, spending most of the time discussing which train she could catch and whether she should call home. Felix insisted she should, but made her promise to say she had spent the time window shopping in Hexford. ‘And next time, tell me you’re coming,’ he pleaded, ‘then we can sort out a day when I have more free time.’ Sally had trekked back to the station feeling more suffused than ever by all the doubts she had so hoped her adventure might banish.

  Her eventual homecoming was predictably grim: a muted reception of real anger, led not by her mother whose repertoire of noisy explosions Sally would have found almost reassuring, but by her jaw-clenched father. They were disappointed, he said, bitterly disappointed in her selfishness, her foolhardiness, her complete disregard for the feelings of others. There followed silence, bucketfuls of it, even from her siblings, who eyed her with a sort of admiring horror, scuttling past her as if she had contracted some infectious disease. Where she had gone was barely questioned. Following Felix’s advice, she said she had been to Hexford, cruising shopping malls and the waterfront, seeking time and space to be herself.

  ‘Next time try the garden,’ her father had growled. ‘And for the next month you can do extra chores for free.’

  Sally had retreated to her room more miserable than she could ever remember being in her life. For once, not even the thought of Felix cheered her up. The long-imagined fantasy of thrilling him with a whirlwind visit had fizzled into the most unsatisfactory of realities. He hadn’t seemed pleased, at least not in the way she had hoped. Before turning out the light she reached for the tatty bear who had shared her bed since babyhood, burying her face in the familiar smell of its balding fur. On hearing a soft knock at her door, she hurriedly slipped it under her pillow and closed her eyes, maintaining the pretence of sleep, while her mother tiptoed into the room and out again. Only after the door had closed, cutting out the wedge of landing light, did she pull the bear back into her arms, dreaming of what she had wished instead of what had been.

  Chapter Nine

  It was with considerable trepidation that Frances boarded the train for London. The necessity of half a day away from home filled her with as much terror as the prospect of being closeted with Hugo Gerard and his colleagues discussing matters she only half understood. In the three months since Paul’s death her only excursion beyond the safe proximity of Hexford had been the run to Sussex with Felix, which had barely involved leaving the car. To prevent her own emotions getting the better of her, she had hurriedly helped him empty the car and then pooh-poohed the notion of a cup of tea before embarking on the journey home.

  Staring out of the train window, Frances’s feelings of widowly isolation returned with a vengeance, reminding her of grief’s accompanying sentence of dislocation, the way it condemned its victims to a sense of alienation from ordinary living. She found herself studying the faces of other passengers, wondering if their apparent integration into the world was genuine or merely the inference of an envious imagination. Outside, the verdure of the Home Counties, still homely in the grey light of an overcast December morning, gradually lost out to patches of urban development until every glimpse of green came in the orderly form of gardens or school playing fields.

  ‘The world is eating itself up,’ Paul had announced cheerfully, pulling her into the crook of his arm as they stared at the same view a year or so before. ‘Soon we’ll have wondered why we bothered to leave London.’ The memory of the remark, made on a rare visit to his brother and the even rarer circumstance of her persuading him to go by rail instead of suffering on the M25, was so vivid that Frances glanced to her right, half expecting to find Paul sitting there. Sensing unwelcome scrutiny, her actual neighbour, a smartly dressed woman with a ginger beehive hair-do, sniffed dismissively and gave a protective tug to the edge of her magazine.

  As well as bringing little respite to her mood, the sight of Battersea through the smeary panes of the train window made Frances wonder why she had ever wanted to r
emain in London. She glimpsed a street where she had once lived alone, during the brief period of her late teens before meeting Paul. She stared hard at the grimy terraced houses, trying to remember what she had been like, in what direction her hopes had been heading before the perhaps too easy definition provided by an early marriage and motherhood. The thought prompted the realisation that she had for years allowed her personality to be defined by outside events and other people. Alone she was afloat, not knowing who to be, who she was.

  ‘Mrs Copeland. Thank you so much for coming. Do take a seat. Coffee? We even do biscuits. So good of you to come. A smooth journey, I hope? I commute from Wiltshire myself. Quite a grind, but it’s always worth going home when you get there. Sugar? Milk?’

  Frances shook her head to both, accepting the cup of black coffee gratefully. On getting out at Victoria her mood had lifted, slipping away with astonishing ease, as her moods seemed to these days, leaving her feeling relieved and faintly bemused. Instead of plunging down amongst the stream of people heading for the Underground, she had walked across the forecourt, past the taxi rank towards the buses. She took a bench seat on the lower deck, next to a smiling grey-haired woman, who smelt of mothballs. ‘Turned out nice anyway,’ the woman said, nodding at the view through the window behind them, ‘I knew it would.’ Frances had smiled back, acknowledging this reference to the sudden emergence of the sun with a nod of her own.

  ‘I’m sorry, I know we should probably have done all this weeks ago,’ she faltered, feeling faintly shabby in the leathered opulence of Hugo Gerard’s office. He was wearing a charcoal- grey suit and what looked like a pure silk blue tie and shirt. A perfect triangle of matching blue protruded from his jacket breast pocket. ‘I’m sorry I’ve been…’

  ‘No need to apologise Mrs Copeland, no need at all. This won’t take long – all very straightforward. You’ve seen your late husband’s will –’ he picked up a sheaf of documents from his desk ‘– everything goes to you apart from a small portfolio of shares and three thousand pounds for each of your children upon their reaching the age of twenty-five.’ He paused and took off his glasses. ‘Daisy and Felix, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes…’

  He put his glasses back on and swept on smoothly, passing Frances so many pieces of paper for scrutiny or signature that by the time she remembered her coffee it had gone quite cold. ‘There’s only one small unresolved matter Mrs Copeland, and that’s the whereabouts of a missing share certificate. If you look at the list of your husband’s shareholdings’ – he pointed to the documents in her lap – ‘you’ll see I’ve marked the offending article with an asterisk. Perhaps you could let me know if it turns up at home, otherwise I—’

  ‘It’s just bloody maddening,’ Frances burst out, ‘to have…loose ends…I want – I keep trying – to accept – to close – a picture of the past, of how things were, only I can’t because things like this –’ she hit the paper with the back of her hand, sending half the pile floating to the ground, ‘get in the way.’ She was aware of the lawyer staring at her open mouthed. To be angry felt good suddenly, better than wailing and weeping. ‘I’m sorry if it shocks you Mr Gerard, but a part of me is furious at –’ she pushed the rest of the papers to the floor – ‘all of this, so much muddle and mess because Paul bloody well had to go and die before any of us were ready for it. It might sound mad, but a part of me can’t help thinking how inconsiderate it was of him…’ She stopped abruptly, slapping her hand to her mouth, as if only becoming fully conscious of what she was saying. ‘Sorry,’ she gasped, ‘you must think me quite dreadful…’

  ‘Not at all,’ he replied quietly, moving swiftly to Frances’s feet and beginning to retrieve the papers into a tidy pile. ‘I should be utterly enraged if Laetitia were to expire now, leaving me in the soup with school runs and nannies and what on earth to buy all my relations at Christmas. My entire existence would fall apart.’ He continued to pick up the papers while he talked, unable to prevent himself observing as he did so that his client was in possession of a very fine pair of legs, shown off to excellent effect in a pair of sheer black tights, or possibly stockings. Guilty at being capable of such an observation at such a time, Hugo made a big to-do of stacking the documents back into a tidy rectangle. ‘In fact there is no muddle or mess at all. Everything is in perfect order. Apart from carrying out your husband’s behests to godchildren and so forth, you have nothing more to do. Your mortgage is paid off, thanks to the insurance policy attached to your endowment, you have an income, through dividends and your husband’s excellent pension arrangements. In short there is nothing for you to worry about at all, Mrs Copeland, at least not on the practical side,’ he concluded quickly.

  ‘Thank you. You have been very kind. And I’m sure Laetitia will keep going for decades yet,’ she added, wanting to convey some of her gratitude at his response to her outburst. She nodded at a photograph of a petite brunette with two small children in school uniform sitting on each knee. ‘They look lovely.’

  After taking a taxi back to Victoria, Frances bought a newspaper and a tuna salad sandwich and hurried onto the train long before it was due to pull out of the station. She was back on her front doorstep by three o’clock. After making a mug of tea, she took a pad of paper into the sitting room and began to write to Daisy, fearful that if she resorted to the telephone her daughter would talk her round.

  Darling,

  Don’t be angry, but I just feel I’m not up to coming to stay in Paris next week after all. I’m such poor company you really wouldn’t want me around. Christmas is so soon anyway, so I’ll see you then. The Taverners have kindly invited us to theirs for the day. Granny is going to New York as usual.

  Lots of love, Mum.

  Frances folded the letter in half and slipped it into an envelope. As she ran her tongue along the flap her gaze drifted to the view of the garden through the French windows. The afternoon was already closing down, billows of grey cloud shuttering the last of the daylight from the sky. Something looked different, she realised, getting up slowly, squinting to see properly in the failing light. The grass had been cut. All the leaves which had gathered in drifts round the edges of the patio and along the path had gone. As she approached the windows she became aware of a faint smell of burning. Fumbling for the keys which were kept hidden in a pot on the mantelpiece, she hurriedly let herself out. ‘Hello,’ she called, striding to the bottom of the garden and peering over the fence. When there was no reply, she raced across to the garden shed. A mountain of bright green grass had been tipped up against the fence, covering the muddy mulch left from the end of the summer. A small fire was burning leaves in the metal brazier, sending spirals of thick smoke up towards the darkening sky.

  ‘Hello?’ called Frances again, more softly, knowing already that she was quite alone.

  Chapter Ten

  Felix stared disconsolately at the cars streaming round the roundabout, wondering whether to cut his losses and hop on a bus to the station after all. It was the first time he had tried to hitch anywhere, drawn to the idea as much for economy’s sake as the appeal of being free and adult enough to do such things at will. The day, although cold, was radiant with sunshine, the sky flecked with clouds no bigger than seagulls. Wondering whether teeming grey rain might have worked more to his advantage, he trudged to the entrance of the layby and slung his rucksack to the ground. It was a spot which his new friend Jerry, who hitched everywhere — whether his destination was Scotland or a local pub — had particularly recommended. The roundabout fed all the main routes east and the lay-by, so he assured Felix, usually housed an excellent hamburger van. There was no sign of it that morning however, much to the dismay of Felix’s stomach, which had recovered sufficiently from the excesses of the Christmas rugby dinner the night before to relish the idea of a greasy meal. The greasier the better, he thought longingly, wishing he had felt up to more than the can of coke which had constituted breakfast.

  Sitting on his rucksack at the entrance to t
he lay-by, he began to go over the letters of his makeshift sign, pressing so hard that the tip of his Biro kept puncturing the surface of the cardboard. He had got as far as doubling the thickness of the HEX of HEXFORD when an old grey Ford turned in past him, a bicycle attached somewhat lopsidedly to a rack on its rear end. A man wearing faded jeans and a weather-beaten leather jacket got out of the car. Raising one arm in greeting, he went to fiddle with the various bits of string responsible for the security of the bicycle.

  ‘You’re in luck, I was only stopping because I was afraid this thing was going to cause a motorway pile-up.’ He patted the upended wheels. ‘In fact it’s as safe as houses. I’m not going as far as Hexford – I turn off towards Farley – but that will still get you well over half-way. Are you coming then?’ He jangled his keys. ‘The car is pretty full, but I’m sure we can wedge that rucksack on the floor behind the passenger seat. A student from down the road, by any chance?’ he added, pulling open the car door and inviting Felix to stow his bag inside.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Studying…?’

  ‘Politics and Economics – first year.’

  The man held out his hand. ‘I teach at the same establishment I’m afraid. Not in your field though. You could call me a ninth-year art historian – stayed on to do a thesis and never quite left.’