I figured I had a job that I quite liked and that was therefore one achievement I had. It had its good points and bad, but in a world of growing unemployment and redundancies, I knew I was pretty safe where I was. Fine. One area of life sorted. Didn't really matter about the lowish pay and uncaring staff I had to boss about – it was okay. Because I had my own office. Even Alice and James didn't have their own offices yet.
I had to re-learn everything I thought I had previously nailed down before I was even eight years old. Communicating one-on-one, swimming, bike riding and picking out new outfits.
Speed-dating. My, that was fun. At least I knew I could go home empty-handed if I wanted to. One saving grace. Oh my goodness, never again. One guy couldn't take his eyes from my chest, another told me he dredged the canal for a living and “liked to take his findings home”, while another asked me whether I thought it was good enough for a man to be earning 25K a year. Apparently, his ex said it wasn't and had dumped him on that basis. I had an earful of his former relationship problems and thought I had stumbled on a psychiatrist's office, certainly not a “find your life partner here kinda place”.
Swimming meant: shaving areas, cellulite, pale skin, massive boobs floating under my armpits, not just men but also women oggling me and also lifeguards who might be able to see things as I mastered the breaststroke. Not good. But I went.
Biking meant: tackling roads full of cars, dusting the cobwebs off my shorts, my fat bum looking all squidgy on a tiny seat, possibility of fatal collision and getting rained on. However, I used some savings to buy myself a nice Raleigh shopper and I started cycling around the lake early on Sunday mornings, like Alex and I used to do. As the days got warmer, I started planning longer rides and would visit more far-flung places, using as many of the quieter country roads as possible. This allowed me to get some exercise, some fresh air and a moment or two of peace while the scenery distracted my warped mind. I had only ever spent time frequenting the grey streets of the city centre but there was so much lush countryside and history to explore beyond that!
New rags. I ran around H&M and just picked out lots of vests, tops, sweaters, jeans and skirts all in medium or a 12. Bit of leeway there. I plonked them on the cashier's desk and waited quietly, not even gaining eye contact. £234.97. Fine. It didn't matter. I'd done something reckless and extravagant perhaps, but it was a start. I bombed out of there with bags of stuff, reached my flat, and laughed loudly in the middle of my living room. It was all crazy gear but the only way I could manage it was to just do it, not think about it and mull over the washing instructions, or the blend of materials, the price, the size, etcetera. Even though I'd purchased a flowery zip-up dress that was practically made from polythene, I'd have to wear it. There'd be a time. Most likely, at night on my own, with nobody else to bother me. Baby steps, remember?
So, anyway, it was a year since the love of my life had died. I had decided this – him being the love of my life I mean – and had made peace with the fact that I may never meet anyone ever again who would so enrich or enlighten my life. If he was it, then well, I'd just have to do well on my own.
I rode my bicycle all the way up to his resting place in Arnold and found the garden of quietude again, where a year earlier I had fallen further into the vortex of my own black thoughts. The previous year, the weather had been cool and grey, but this time it was warmer, with the feel of springtime more prominent. His urn lay buried underground and I thought how cold and unwelcoming his resting place looked. I also didn't know why people buried ashes. I'd much rather have known his body was laid in the ground beneath, so that I may lie on the grass and imagine him right below me. I'd picture the coffin still housing his relatively intact remains and be able to sense his smile or the warmth of his cuddle.
A pot stood sturdy in front of his plaque, with a dozen red roses placed there only that day, probably. I read the card: I still miss you every single day. I hope there's a party wherever you are. Darcey xxx
“Hello?” I heard.
I turned around without surprise.
“Hey, Darcey,” I said.
“I thought it was you. I was just getting into my car when I saw you cycle up. I didn't think it was coincidence that this unloved cemetery was receiving two visitors in the same day.”
She smiled brightly, trying to evoke some small amount of positivity from behind the cloud that evidently hung over her. Her face was strained and her skin sallow.
“Are you here on your own?” I asked.
“Yes, I'm afraid so. You musn't have heard…?”
“What?” My heart leapt.
Was there some mistake? Was Alex murdered? What? What?
“I thought it might have got around at the hotel,” she said, pausing, “Alex used to tell me how news travelled round that place… Well, my parents split up. Dad moved away. Mum won't come out of the house.”
I touched her arm. “I'm so sorry.”
“Thanks. There had been cracks for years. Guess they're not as easy to paper over when something like that happens.”
“Your mum… did she blame your dad?”
“No. Wasn't that. Think it was more likely the fact that my mum knew Alex died never having felt accepted. Alex's lifestyle was always brushed under the carpet by my father.”
I tried to look sad for her but, I mean, I couldn't really empathise. I didn't really feel anything for these strangers Alex had told me about but who seemed to have only caused him pain. What could I do or say to make it better? Alex was dead. He had been for a year. In my mind, that was all I could deal with, was facts and figures. The emotions of such familial upset were too much for me to handle. I stared at her, hoping and praying she would just leave. I wanted my own time to say a few things. However, she began crying.
I had to offer her a hug. “I really miss him too.”
She clung on to my body, though her frame was much taller. She fell apart in my arms, repeating, “He was so young. He was beautiful. He was my only true friend. Why did it have to be him?”
All these considerations she made were self-indulgent and alien to me. All I knew was that someone who had been in my life now wasn't. He could have moved to New Zealand or travelled into space and never come back. To me, it was all the same. He was just gone. The unfair way in which Alex had departed this life had been what hit me a year previously, but all I could think of was how much I missed him. Her own grieving process was only just beginning. To linger on the manner of a loved one's passing was superficial; to remember the legacy they left behind a much better endeavour. As Darcey sought comfort in my arms, falling on the ground with me, I realised I was stronger than I realised. His own sister wasn't as capable as I was in freeing herself of the similar anguish I felt over the casino toilet departure he had from this world. I only knew he would never pour me a cup of tea again with such a lascivious smile or tell me to saddle up and grow a pair. His words were always spoken in jest but oh, how some of them were truer than so many others said in earnest. I suppose it probably also proved how well he and I knew one another, despite only a year or so as friends and only one night as lovers. His sister Darcey had been his consult and his ally but I bet she had never sat through a Eugene Onegin performance with him without a single word said and yet feeling so certain that no words need ever be spoken again.
The poor girl cried in my arms and I looked out into the cemetery, trying to picture Alex standing nearby. I mouthed into the distance, I will do better. I left a single pink rose amongst the red ones. It was a closed bud sat between the more mature flowers but it represented me. I thanked God for sending the angel that was my Alex and hoped wherever he was, he was watching re-runs of our favourite sitcoms with all our favourite treats. I knew, that was all that really made Alex happy. Very cliché, but very Alex.
I bundled Darcey off in her car some time later and started the long journey back to the city. I found a leaflet on the road back, picking it up out of curiosity. It was advertising walking tours in th
e area. I had decided to start saying yes to more things and thought this might be one of the little activities I could do. After all, I didn't really know much about Nottinghamshire's history… yet.
Chapter X
Summer 2009
The walking tours thing was quite a good distraction in actual fact. Though I was much younger than most taking part, this did not bother either me or them. Most of the time I exchanged pleasantries with some of the old biddies and then lost myself reading a map or listening to the tour guide. We did the caves on one excursion. That was interesting, because we got to visit some places not normally open to the public. I fancied the guy showing us around and pictured him ravaging me behind a crevice. I actually might have initiated such an assignation if I hadn't decided that I now had respect for myself and that romance, for me, was well and truly dead. A passion-killing cocktail. I had surreptitiously started watching porn at the end of my shifts, in hotel suites that had satellite. I would sneak into a room and sit on the bed, protected by a pillow against my waist, grimace at the depravity but be unable to stop myself getting a little turned on. I found the depictions artless and totally male dominated. The women were mostly doing things that turned men on, but I knew other more simple things turned women on. Although, as I sometimes sat there contemplating the scenes, I decided that perhaps society had lost sight of the simplistic ways in which men and women achieved arousal and that this wasn't necessarily gender specific. I guess this was my way of chastising my own desires – watching depraved porn, I mean. There was nothing I could do to relieve myself. The thought of masturbation was irksome, always really had been. It never worked for me. And so, the palpable frustration grew within me. This was a bubbling, chemical situation that would inevitably have to resolve itself.
That secret realms existed below ground was romantic to me and the thought of that tour guide's penis growing erect at me brushing against his arm was a hopeless pursuit. Truly. Really. Oh, who was I kidding? I had obviously decided after Alex, that I loved sex and wanted it. All the time. I had gotten it too, but it was easy to lose yourself in a quick, meaningless shag. Really allowing someone to take their time over me was something else. Nothing I had encountered so far had ever really satisfied me. It was always a bit quick. With Alex, it was amazing, but he was too exacting. I wanted ridiculous, outrageous, off-the-cuff, spontaneous fucks that were rampant and wild but were long enough to finally help me hit my peak. As women, we want it all, but I wasn't sure if we could ever have both a charming, dependable man as well as an animal in the bedroom. But what was I saying? Nutcase that I was! I'd convinced myself that the love of my life was a gay man!
It was the height of summer. The walk was around Welbeck Abbey. It was an unusually sweltering day and I wore my long denim shorts and a plain black vest. We all broke off to go and do our own thing and I stumbled on a group of artists in the landscaped gardens who were painting the topiary. I couldn't help but stop to look.
The teacher walked over to me. She was dressed in an oversized tent resembling a kimono without all the padding and belts. The cloth was white and heavy but she still looked cooler than I, walking the grass in her bare feet. She was late thirties I guessed and wore her long black hair in pretty ringlets tucked to one side. I remember wondering whether she twisted and tied up her hair with old bits of torn cloth before bedtime to achieve the effect. Seemed strange. A mature woman pretending to be girlish, perhaps. She spoke with a stiff upper lip, a Counties accent straining through the cluck of her tongue against her partially buck teeth.
“Hullo, would you like to observe?”
I gazed into her almost jet-black eyes and saw the most disturbing, confident stare looking right back at me. She examined my figure without shame and smiled. There was something reassuring about her grin, something, I don't know, comforting and wise behind her expressions. I grinned back and she directed me around the artists' pitches. Some were very bad and kind of modernist while others were quaint and delicate, in watercolours rather than thick, gloopy oils. I nodded and smiled. I felt a little uncomfortable with the woman seemingly leading me against my will. I knew nothing of art nor the skill involved and I would certainly have much rather been dipping my feet in the fountain by that point. She drew me toward her own easel and told me to sit on her stool. Each time the notion of protesting entered my mind, her solid focus on my eyes would force me to throw off my natural urge to run a mile.
She took a charcoal pencil and started to draw an outline on a fresh sheet of canvas. I was dying to leave. She got to work and was already outlining my eyes. I was trapped. Ten minutes later, she had drawn quite a lovely little sketch of my face and shoulders. She offered it to me but I refused. I said I couldn't.
“Please, please take it, and if you want, make a donation to the house instead of paying me.”
I felt her generosity was too much and reluctantly took it, placing the rolled paper inside my over-arm bag. When I was about to walk away, she said, “Oh, hang on…”
She handed me a card. “If you ever consider life drawing, let me know. I am short on candidates with curves like yours.”
“You mean…?”
“Yes, you pose for me nude. If you'd like. You can keep a copy or two for yourself, or, for your boyfriend.”
“Oh, no, there's…”
Her eyes lit up.
“Really, you never know, we might discover a side of you that you never even knew existed. Trust me. It's art.”
I nodded and shrugged, walking away with the disconcerted feeling of having just been tricked into following up on something that could fill me with regret or finally rid me of the issues that still haunted me.
For some reason, a couple of weeks later, I found myself in that woman's house. She lived on campus at Nottingham University, in a beautiful, Victorian, detached property that had its own driveway and lush green grass as its surround. I had lived in the city all that time and not realised that a village existed within it, landscaped with various parks, gardens, lakes and character houses dotted around acres of fertile space. It was a large place the woman had and she had converted it for the purpose of having a studio and space to entertain, leaving room for only two bedrooms though there should probably have been four or five. The light-pink outer walls were complemented by white wooden beams and terracotta tiles. The property had three floors and large bay windows that seemed as though they might be heavy enough to topple the whole building. There was a set of steps leading up to a grand porch, three large chimneys and an exaggerated, ornate conical spire that sat above what I guessed was the master suite. The artist was a professor specialising in portraiture and certainly seemed to have a reputation as a woman about campus, with lots of pictures in the large, airy hallway of students she had seen through to their own gallery openings. The house was lovely, with lots of chunky dado rails, thick coving and picture rails. It wasn't kept very tidy and I felt an urge to sweep and mop, but I tried to take my mind off that.
It was around 8pm and just turning to dusk outside. I nursed a white wine to take the edge off my anxiety over getting naked.
“Do you like to be called Charlotte, or something else?”
“Charley or Lottie are the usual abbreviations.”
“I like Lottie.”
“That's what my sister calls me.”
“Sister?”
“Yes, she's younger than I. A hairdresser. Much taller and better-looking.”
“I find that hard to imagine.”
A bit more chitchat and she showed me through to the studio. It wasn't as decorative as other parts of the house but you could see its bland qualities served a purpose. At the room's centre, there was a small padded bench covered in sheets and odd bits of dried grass. She gestured I was to lay there. Maybe she'd depict me as a fairy in the wood.
“We agreed on me drawing your body from a rear focus, didn't we? However, if we get into the swing and you change your mind, that's fine too. We'll just see how we go.”
&
nbsp; “Okay,” I said, nervously.
She left the room, saying she'd give me a few moments to undress in peace. The lighting was dim but I still felt as though every blemish and imperfection of my body would be glaringly on show. However, this was one of the things I had decided may help me and I felt that whatever the woman had hidden underneath her baggy clothes couldn't be much better than what I had. Besides, art didn't care for people who could be put into boxes – that was one of the things she had told me. I was reminded of the smear test I'd had a little while ago, and decided to treat this situation as if it could never be as bad as that.
I slipped off all my clothes and sat on the bench but couldn't help cross my legs and cover my breasts with an arm. She breezed into the room and caught me bashfully hiding my bits and pieces.
“Right, lay down then darling, just on your side. Yes, that's fine.”
She didn't stare or gaze, moving across to her easel as she carried on talking.
“Just place your left hand on your hip, palm down, perhaps elevate your head with your elbow and hand of the other.”
“Like this?” I asked, shaking with nerves.
“Yes, just so.”
I heard the scratching of her pencil drawing an outline and felt comforted to know she wasn't looking at my body the entire time.
“Lottie, now, could you please just turn your head slightly so I may get a little of your profile? Just a smidgen. You need not fear that anyone will recognise you. It's just to tantalise the beholder with a little of your face.”
A Fine Profession (The Chambermaid's Tales Part One) Page 9