Not Funny Not Clever

by Jo Verity

  He rested his folded arms on the table, and leaned his head on his forearms. ‘How do I deal with this, Elizabeth? I can’t ignore it, can I? I don’t know whether to hug them or strangle them.’

  She touched his shoulder. ‘Hug. Definitely.’

  ‘But I’ll have to have it out with them, won’t I? I can’t just give them a hug and carry on regardless. Especially if I’m banged up for GBH.’

  ‘Don’t be so melodramatic. You’re in for a few embarrassing moments, that’s for sure. Petting and love bites aren’t the sort of things a girl wants to discuss with her dad. But I’m sure they’ll be as keen as you are to iron things out.’

  He raised his head, blinking against the bright kitchen light. ‘Would you talk to them, Elizabeth? Woman to woman? They like you.’

  ‘I only met them on Monday night, Dafydd. It wouldn’t be appropriate. What would their mother think if she discovered that some stranger had been doling out advice to her daughters?’

  ‘You’re not “some stranger”. You’re a friend. And Gwen ought to be delighted because, from tonight’s evidence, she’s making a crap job of it.’

  A hand on a breast and a few love bites hardly constituted moral degradation but this had little to do with morals. It was about love and fear and the ache of parenthood. Such things were constants. Givens. No one could hope to convey that to young people caught up in the adventure of changing bodies and heightened desires. Yet every parent was duty bound to try. They’d gone through it when Ben and Alex were in their teens. She couldn’t remember the details. (Did Laurence take them to one side for a man-to-man chat?) Sons were different, anyway. Or so everyone insisted. Boys were warned against disease, entrapment and untimely fatherhood. The love, fear and ache were there but no one suggested that boys should ‘save themselves for the right girl’ or be concerned for their reputations. Although, as the boys were growing up, had they, as a family, been more open about and less embarrassed by bodily functions (something she blamed squarely on Laurence) she might have been tempted to try.

  ‘Sleep on it,’ she said. ‘Let everything calm down.’

  He looked at the clock on the kitchen wall. ‘I didn’t realise it was so late. You must be shattered. I’ll let you get to bed.’

  He looked bewildered and despondent and, without thinking too hard about it, she kissed his cheek. ‘It’ll be better in the morning. You’ll see.’

  She undressed and lay on the bed knowing that she wouldn’t be able to sleep. The brandy and the kiss – the act of kissing him – had combined to set her stomach churning. Diane was out for the count, her rhythmic breathing a whisker away from a snore. Moonlight penetrated the thin curtains and, as her eyes grew accustomed to the gloom, she stared intently at her friend, willing her to stir. She wanted to hear the story first-hand. To find out exactly what had been going on and to learn how bad things were between Dafydd and his daughters. But Diane was deep in the sleep of a woman who had no one but herself (and possibly Marin Vexler, although she seemed to have left all thoughts of him back in Cardiff) to fret about.

  She closed her eyes, trying to flood her mind with featureless, colourless, nothingness but, as if it were scrawled on the back of her eyelids, the family roll-call scuppered her attempt at sleep.

  Laurence must be over the prawn episode or he would have been in touch again. (Was he remembering to take his blood-pressure tablets?) She’d meant to text him to commiserate, but the Hills End drama had pushed it out of her mind. She must do it first thing in the morning.

  How typical of Alex to phone at the very moment when she’d ‘mislaid’ Jordan. Sod’s law. But was it a coincidence? Had Jordan prompted it with a call or a text? She could imagine it now. Hi, Mum. I’m at this awesome beach party? Elizabeth? She’s in the pub? With this man? No. He would have pressed her if he’d suspected that something was wrong.

  Then there was Ben. The pain of his absence rolled over her in waves, receding for a day, or a week, then building again to pound her with awful intensity. It was the pain of false labour. She suffered it but it never resulted in anything. It gave her nothing to hold.

  Ben had been such a cuddly baby – placid and amenable, soft and chubby (‘bonny’ her grandmother had insisted). He never objected to being passed from one cooing woman to the next although he always reserved his most winsome smile for her. Alex, on the other hand, was a skinny little thing, squirming and restless, squawking the second she passed him to someone else. He wasn’t cuddly but he needed her to cuddle him. All the time. ‘Put that child down. You’re making a rod for your own back.’ (Her grandmother again.) Maybe. But, how did it go? ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.’ Marx might have challenged her grandmother had he been there when baby Alex was screaming blue murder. She did what she did on every sleepless night – took a few anaesthetising breaths of no-news-is-good-news. What else could she do? She sighed, plumping her pillow and clearing her throat but still Diane didn’t stir. Finally, wide awake and uncomfortably sticky, she went in search of a cold drink.

  The house was dark and quiet. (Was Dafydd Jones the only man in the world who didn’t snore?) She listened, half-expecting to hear Angel and Mimi consoling each other and complaining about their overprotective father, but there was nothing except the hum of the fridge and the tap, plop plopping into the stainless steel sink.

  Taking a glass from the draining board, she turned on the tap, holding her finger beneath the stream of water until it ran truly cold, lamenting the invention of the ‘mixer tap’ which never failed to deliver water at the wrong temperature. She drank a glass of water then refilled it and took it out into the garden. Sitting on one of the wooden chairs, she leaned back to gaze up at the sky, picking out the starry landmarks. The Plough. Cassiopeia. Orion’s Belt. Here, without the interference of bright city lights, she was able to make out myriads of stars stippling the firmament. It was overpoweringly serene and incomprehensible.

  ‘Puts us firmly in our place, doesn’t it?’ Dafydd’s voice came from somewhere behind her.

  She swivelled around to see his indistinct form coming across the lawn towards her and, mindful of the thin fabric of her nightdress, she folded her arms, clamping her breasts firmly. ‘You can’t sleep either?’

  ‘I haven’t tried. I came out for a bit of a think and an illicit fag.’ He sat down next to her. ‘When I see that lot,’ he made a sweeping gesture across the heavens, ‘I say to myself … who the hell do we think we are?’

  She looked up at the sky again. ‘Is it a full moon tonight?’

  ‘Almost. Friday, I think.’

  ‘When I was looking at it earlier from the bedroom, it seemed to be casting a silvery path across the sea. It was almost too beautiful. Odd, though. It looks smaller now.’

  ‘The lower the moon is in the sky, the bigger it looks. Have you never noticed that before?’

  ‘I can’t say I have. Why is that?’

  ‘They don’t really know. The boffins think it has to do with what our brains expect to see when we look at a distant object. How the brain processes information.’

  She laughed. ‘You’re telling me that they can put men on the moon but they don’t know why it changes in size.’

  ‘Appears to change.’

  She thought for a moment. ‘I love the idea that something like that happens and, clever as we are, we don’t know why.’

  ‘There’s plenty of information on the net, if you want to read about it. It’s known as “The Moon Illusion”.’

  ‘“The Moon Illusion”.’ She stared up at the silvery disk. ‘I don’t think I do want to read about it, actually.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘It’s comforting to think that inexplicable things can happen. There aren’t enough mysteries in our lives, are there?’

  Really? The inexplicable wasn’t at all Elizabeth Giles’s cup of tea. But something inside her must have tilted, shifted, allowing the Llangennith moonlight to illuminate an enchanting tr
uth.

  He held out a cigarette packet.

  ‘I don’t, thanks,’she said.

  ‘I really should pack it in. How did you do it?’

  ‘I never started.’

  ‘Really? I’m impressed. Diane was right then was she, when she said you’ve led a blameless life?’

  ‘What?’ she laughed. ‘You can’t be suggesting that all non-smokers are blameless?’

  ‘Mmmm. Maybe not blameless but they’re certainly … sensible.’

  ‘You mean sensible as in boring. Sensible as in party-pooper?’

  ‘Whoa. Hang on a minute. I meant sensible in that, with healthy lungs, you’re better equipped to … to make a fast getaway. After the heist.’

  ‘Or … play the tuba.’

  ‘Nice one. Or … inflate an air-bed. Without a pump.’

  ‘Or go snorkelling without a snorkel.’

  He paused, ‘Or give a desperate man the kiss of life?’

  He leaned towards her, his lips within inches of hers.

  She kissed him. He tasted of brandy and cigarettes and salt and the antithesis of ‘sensible’. Her muscles and her willpower slackened simultaneously, her arms falling loose at her sides as he kissed her neck, then the swell of her breasts, then her nipples beneath her flimsy nightdress.

  ‘You okay with this?’ he whispered, taking her ear lobe between his teeth.

  ‘I think so.’

  His hand was on her knee, his thumb lifting the hem of her nightdress.

  ‘Sure?’

  She was teetering on a tiny platform, way, way up at the top of the circus tent, fizzing with anticipation, one hand grasping the trapeze.

  ‘Yes.’

  All she needed was the courage to let go and launch herself into the expectant air.

  ‘Would you like to sleep with me?’ His words were barely audible above the pulse swooshing in her head.

  A light went on in the dormer bedroom overhead, illuminating the garden beyond where they were sitting.

  ‘It’s Jordan,’ he whispered. ‘Don’t worry. He can’t see us down here.’

  He ran a finger down her neck and kissed her again, but in switching on the light, Jordan had also switched on reality.

  She pulled away from him and stood up. ‘I must get some sleep.’

  19

  THURSDAY: 4.00AM

  Elizabeth sat on her bed, leaning against the headboard, deconstructing Dafydd’s sentence.

  Would you like to sleep with me? Would you like to…? Would you…? Invitation? Hypothetical question?

  Come on. Men didn’t go in for hypothetical questions – not where sex was concerned. No. It was a proposition – assuming she’d heard him correctly. She fished around for a viable alternative, failing to come up with anything better than, Would you hike to the beach with me?

  As a child, her favourite party game was ‘Chinese whispers’. A message, whispered from one to the next, became distorted as it made its way around the giggling circle, finally emerging, with a bit of luck, as something drastically different and hysterically funny. They still played it, once in a while, at dinner parties when they’d had a few glasses of wine. Change is both desirable and inevitable had, thanks she suspected to Laurence’s judicious deafness, mutated to A range of delicious fruit and vegetables.

  Of course there was another possibility. He might have been speaking Welsh. If that were the case, he could have been suggesting anything.

  Jordan Fry was to blame for her sleep-denying confusion. It was his fault that she was tussling with the ambiguities of the English language. (Ironic, bearing in mind their recent ‘you’ dispute.) Had he not chosen that moment to switch on his light, she would be in no doubt what Dafydd had said. Or what he had meant.

  She tilted her wrist until she could make out the hands on her watch. Four-fifteen. That would make it five-fifteen in France.

  Laurence’s obsession still astonished her. When it had first flared up, it hadn’t taken her long to conclude that it wasn’t food (the substance that kept human beings alive) but cooking (the fiddling and faffing and showmanship) that excited him. Whatever the reason, the whole thing was, frankly, irritating since he’d not shown an iota of interest in cooking when she was juggling a job, the school run and the weekly shop (not to mention forays to music lessons, orthodontists, football practice and sporadic dashes to A&E). It would have been wonderful, once in a while, not to have had to think about meals. Bangers and mash. Beans on toast. Egg and chips. Anything would have been welcome, provided that someone else had prepared it. But it was twenty years too late to rake that up and she pictured Laurence now, snoring in his manoir, dreaming of bagging the Masterchef title and of opening a bijou restaurant in Ludlow (or Southwold or Padstow) under a heaven that sparkled with Michelin stars.

  Was she being naïve? Valerie Masters – A level history teacher – had rolled her eyes disbelievingly when she’d revealed that Laurence had gone off to France to do a cookery course. For ten days. Without her. ‘You must be mad,’ Valerie had said, ‘I wouldn’t let Hugo go to Fulham without me, never mind France.’

  It could be that Laurence was, at this very moment, in the arms of some … some sensible woman who had started out with every intention of learning to create gourmet meals for a trusting husband but who had, once on foreign soil, redirected her attentions to the charming, lonely London solicitor. It could be that Laurence and Mrs Sensible were, at this very moment, frolicking in a field of sunflowers, carried away by the sunrise and the scent of wild thyme. Odd that this had never crossed her mind until now. Laurence having an affair? Laurence making love to someone else? Ridiculous. But would it cross Laurence’s mind that his wife might like to sleep with (or even hike to the beach with) a stocky Welshman who said ‘different than’ and frequently dropped his aitches?

  Having sidled into her consciousness, the notion of Laurence’s infidelity lodged there, as impossible to ignore as a raspberry pip trapped between her teeth. Compelled to let the scene play out, she pictured her naked husband, hearing that odd little wheezing noise he uttered when he – they – made love. Mrs Sensible – also naked and (Elizabeth couldn’t resist it) on the plump side – her chubby fingers kneading Laurence’s buttocks, pulling him rhythmically towards her as the cicadas chirruped and the sunflowers swayed.

  How did she feel about that? Honestly?

  Honestly? Rotten for forcing him into the situation, and worse for watching. Also a tiny bit … weird. Aroused if she had to put a name to the weirdness.

  Not much caring for the way her thoughts were unfolding, she dropped a book on the floor, trying again to wake Diane. But her friend was sleeping the sleep of the innocent, untroubled by her lifelong habit of saying yes to everyone and everything. Romanians, Germans, wads of money – yes, yes, yes.

  The night was bleaching into dawn as, dressed in the clothes that she’d discarded only a few hours earlier, she sneaked out of the room. Across the hall, Dafydd’s door was ajar, light glowing through the crack. She waited, half-expecting him to call her name, but there was no sound.

  Leaving the sleeping house, she set off down the road towards the beach. Should she have left a note? Hell. No one else bothered to explain their movements.

  It felt good to be on the move, filling her lungs with the cool morning air, not entirely sure where she was going. Mist skimmed the fields, covering them with a ghostly duvet. Sheep stared vacuously through straggly hedges. A few piebald ponies shifted restlessly in a barbed-wire corral. A dog yapped from somewhere inside a pink-washed bungalow, screened from the road by a fuchsia hedge. But there were no signs of human life. After walking for fifteen minutes or so she saw a hand-painted sign at the side of a pair of open metal gates. Hills End Campsite – PRIVATE. Undeterred, she turned off the road and through the gates.

  The field in front of her fell away in a gentle slope towards the sand dunes which bordered the beach. Tall, trimmed hedges – planted, she guessed, to act as weather breaks and provide a degr
ee of privacy – subdivided the field into half a dozen smaller enclosures. Tents of varied shapes and sizes were pitched around the perimeter of these enclosures. She picked her way briskly between them, making for the stile – the one Dafydd had mentioned last night maybe – in the far corner of the field. There was little evidence of life apart from a baby crying – or was it a seagull? – and a woman chivvying a small boy towards a squat, breeze-block building, lights still glowing above its two doors. Apart from that, a muted calm hung over the sleeping encampment. Were a heavenly hand to snatch away these tents, she thought, the field would be strewn with huddles of comatose bodies, packed together in sleeping bags like sardines which had lost their tins.

  Clambering over the stile, she dropped down onto a grassy footpath. Her sandals were no defence against the dew and her feet were soon cold and stippled with particles of sand and grass seeds. She followed the footpath until she reached a place where it broadened out to form an arena. Here the wiry turf was strewn with empty cans, polystyrene food trays and the skeletons of disposable barbecues. A ring of blackened stones containing remnants of charred logs showed where a fire had burned. Further on, a flag on a bamboo cane protruded from the soil but, as she came closer, she saw that it wasn’t a flag at all but a pair of torn boxer shorts, and she understood why Dafydd had been so distressed.

  The path became less defined, eventually splitting into two. One spur veered to the right, cutting across rushy grassland and heading back towards the village up on the ridge. She chose the other spur which ran along behind the dunes, wandering on, seeking a way through, or over, the ridge. After a while, finding no obvious route, she lost patience and, grabbing at the sharp marram grass, hauled herself up the steep incline. She scrambled on up, the cold sand cascading in miniature avalanches, burying her feet and turning her ascent into a slow-motion affair.

  As she reached the top, the blustery wind straight off the sea caught her, lashing her hair across her face, inflating her shirt like a wind-sock, drying her lips and making her teeth feel cold to her tongue. Looking west across the sea, the sky, still laden with night, was slashed with silver-blue. The tide was halfway up the beach. Lacy waves curled onto the sand and, beyond them, the pewter-grey mass of the sea swelled in lazy peaks, waiting for the sun to rise and magic back the indigo and turquoise of yesterday. What had Dafydd said when they were gazing at the stars? Puts you in your place. The night sky conveyed that message tenderly, seductively, but the sea pounded it home.