I shifted guiltily. ‘I bought a house there.’
She stared at me. ‘A house? What do you mean? When? Where?’
‘In the same village – Bedd. Actually, I bought it years ago when I was twenty-five and came into my inheritance, such as it was.’
‘You mean you’ve owned a cottage not much more than an hour’s drive away from me for all this time, and never said a word?’
‘I knew you’d think I was mad – and it’s not like I could use it, because it had sitting tenants. Do you remember one day Miranda took us round to visit two elderly brothers who lived right at the edge of the village? She was taking them some of her marmalade.’
Mu wrinkled her brow. ‘Vaguely.’
‘It looked just like a tumbledown barn at the front, but then you went round it into a cobbled yard and there was this sweet little stone cottage with bits of carving from some old ruin set in the front.’
‘I do remember!’ she said. ‘You went into a sort of trance and we had to drag you away. The Aces, that’s what the brothers were called – and the house was half a ruin. Surely you didn’t buy that?’
‘Yes, I did, but with the understanding that the Aces would live there as long as they wanted to. Dafydd, the last brother, died earlier this year, so I’m having some basic renovation done on the cottage, and then I’m going to live there. I’m looking forward to having my own house. Pops and Jaynie have bought me a door.’
‘A door? Let’s hope there’s still a wall left to attach it to.’
‘It wasn’t that bad, Mu. I took a flying visit across to arrange the renovations, and it looks much the same as I remembered it.’
‘My God!’
‘You know I enjoy a challenge. Oh, and have you heard Miranda’s moved back to live in what was her parents’ house in Bedd?’
‘What, she’s left Chris?’ she exclaimed.
‘No, he comes down at weekends. But it’s strange he’s agreed to let her out of his sight when he’s always been jealous of her seeing even old friends like us, isn’t it?’
‘It is strange,’ Mu agreed. ‘I haven’t had a letter for a while, and it must be – oh, four years, nearly, since I last saw her. She’d put on a bit of weight – all that cooking, I suppose. Have you told her you’re going to be her neighbour?’
‘I’ve written – she’s bound to be delighted I’m moving to Bedd. And I’m going to have to be very careful about how I pronounce that, or people will get the wrong idea!’
Mu had begun to see the advantages. ‘You’ll only be an hour or so’s drive from me, and near to Swansea, for the shops and the direct train line to London.’
‘I hate shops.’
‘Well – food? You aren’t terribly domesticated, are you?’
‘I’ll buy a huge freezer and fill it. And I can cook when I want to, it’s just there are usually more interesting things to do.’
‘Did the cottage have a bathroom?’ she asked suddenly.
‘No – the Ace brothers thought indoor sanitation was a filthy modern idea, but I’m having one put in.’
‘It all sounds OK, though I can’t see you settling down anywhere for very long. Still, the Gower is quite trendy now, you know, so you could always sell it again.’
‘I won’t ever want to sell it, even though the Gower is running over at the gunwales with arty types, according to Lili Ford Jakes, who’s bought a weekend cottage there too. But I hope it’s not that bad, or if it is, that everyone will get tired of it and go away.’
‘How is Lili?’
‘Oh, the usual – except when she was drunk she confided in me that she’s the reincarnation of a vampire. I was surprised – an interest in the occult should, like the writing of poetry, be something you get over by the age of sixteen.’
‘But are vampires carnate in the first place?’ said Mu, puzzled. ‘Or do I mean incarnate? Can you be reincarnated as something that wasn’t . . . excuse me, my brain hurts.’
I shrugged. ‘She has to have some justification for leaping at men out of the darkness and biting their necks.’
Mu giggled. ‘She doesn’t!’
‘She does. One of the Creative Breakers complained to Bob. I might have a use for Lili: she bought her cottage in Rhyss because she’s in pursuit of a local man, but she’ll probably have sucked him dry by the time I move in, so if Dave comes down and makes a nuisance of himself, she’d be just the one to sort him out.’
‘My goodness, that’s brilliant! Do you think she’d go for him?’
‘Why not? Dave’s everything she ever asks for in a man: tall, handsome, virile, tricky and devious.’
‘Set her on to him!’ Mu enthused, then, raising her glass, added, ‘And here’s to the Ace in her Hole.’
‘Thank you, but it won’t be a hole when I’ve finished it. Even Aunt Pops keeps referring to it as “your hovel”, but you’ll all have to eat your words: I’m good at fixing things.’
Mu grinned.
‘What? I am good at fixing things – all kinds of things! I mean, only look at Bob and Vivi: if I hadn’t stepped in and told him that he wasn’t too old for her, and her that no one cared about dowries or that sort of stuff any more, they’d still be gazing soulfully at each other across the dining table.’
Without undue modesty, I have to say that I’m a born organizer with numerous successes to my credit. In fact the only major failure I can think of is my inability to get Ambler anywhere near a hospital for a sperm count. He has a phobia. Mu’s had all the tests, but he won’t.
If he had, maybe we wouldn’t have had to slog our hot, weary way barefoot up a lot of concrete steps on Mount Tsambika next day, together with a miscellaneous collection of (mainly) Greek women, one of whom was doing the climb painfully on her knees, and I don’t think she’d started at the car park like we did either.
It’s a pilgrimage in aid of fertility. You have to climb up the hill to the Chapel of Our Lady, where you eat a piece of lamp wick. (Yes, really, I defy even de Bono to make a lateral leap and explain that, though I suspect Freud might, poor deluded creature.)
Following this ritual, pregnancy is almost guaranteed to happen, though you have to name the resultant offspring Tsambika or Tsambikos or it snuffs it, which seems a bit unchristian.
Still, Mu had been determined to do it ever since she read about it in some travel guide, and although she really didn’t expect it to work . . . she sort of did, too. The triumph of hope over intelligence.
We’d made an early start on the long toil upwards, but already the noise of the cicadas rubbing their thighs together, or whatever it is they get up to (and don’t bother looking in my Spiral Bound guidebooks for that sort of detail, because you won’t find it), was pretty deafening.
‘This had better work,’ panted Mu as we reached our goal, and I paused to slide my feet into my sandals before we went in, rather like putting on Sunday best for church. ‘Now all I have to do is eat the lamp wick.’
‘But only a little bit of one, I hope. It’s probably cotton soaked in oil or fat or something, so it’ll grease your tubes beautifully,’ I suggested.
‘The wrong tubes, though – and hadn’t you better wait out here in case the magic works on the wrong person?’
‘No, I don’t think it could: if I’ve got a biological clock it’s a limp, Daliesque thing like a dead Dutch cap, draped over my pelvis with the hands barely twitching. But I could give it a go, if you like, and if it works, you can have the baby?’
‘You are silly,’ she said severely, but I did sneak in after her and eat a bit of wick too. Why shouldn’t I keep my pregnancy option open? In China, sisters used to give one of their offspring to infertile siblings, so perhaps it was remiss of me not to have offered before.
But such is the way of these sudden impulses that no sooner had I swallowed the unappetizing morsel than I began to see some major pitfalls in my reasoning.
While my stomach made valiant efforts to reject the greasy gobbet (a sure sign that it was a
bum idea), it didn’t quite make it, and people sticking their fingers down their throats in church is frowned on.
It was just as well I didn’t really believe in these superstitions.
The atmosphere on the way down was much jollier, with everyone laughing and joking, sometimes rather bawdily, and when we got back to our hotel Mu said she was glad she’d done the pilgrimage. ‘And when I get home I’ll just have time to ravish Ambler to within an inch of his life before he goes off to Egypt again.’
‘I don’t suppose he’ll struggle, though he may be too weak to paddle his canoe. You know, Mu, in the church I was thinking—’
‘You were thinking if I had an ounce of gumption I’d have snuck off by now and had AI!’ she interrupted.
‘No, that wasn’t quite what I—’
‘But Ambler wouldn’t hear of it, and I do love him . . . so the idea of foisting a cuckoo into his nest seems a bit underhand, to say the least.’
‘It would only be a half-cuckoo,’ I pointed out, diverted. ‘But what I was really going to say was that perhaps I could have a baby and give it to you, and—’
‘That’s very, very sweet of you, Sappho,’ she broke in. ‘Only, being adopted, I don’t have any relatives – any real family of my own. But if I had a baby myself, it would be. Do you see?’
I blew bubbles like a guppy while I digested this. I was drinking retsina in the hope it would dissolve the wick, which seemed to be coiled like a small tapeworm in the pit of my stomach.
I did see her point, and of course I was assuming that I was still able to have offspring, and Old Mortality hadn’t already snatched the cup away untasted, which he might have done . . . and which would definitely make me feel resentful.
It would be like being given a present with a timer attached to it – an egg timer – and having it whipped away before you’d got around to opening it. You might not have liked what was in it, but it was your present.
However, that very night I dreamed I was giving birth to a table, and I had terrible trouble with the corners.
Was my subconscious trying to tell me something?
Chapter 5
And So to Bedd
‘How about that one?’
Mu pointed down to the other end of the Val-U Used Cars forecourt, where an old Volvo estate in an unremarkable shade of brown squatted balefully, like the last brontosaurus daring a meteorite to get it.
‘Why that one?’ I enquired as we walked down to inspect it, closely trailed by Mr Val-U himself, who was a short, square man with a big mouth, like a human box.
‘Oh, I don’t know, it just sort of reminds me of you: it’s big, the same colour as your hair, and looks like it would come off best in an argument.’
‘Probably drinks petrol like a thirsty camel.’
‘It’s been modified,’ Mr Val-U informed us in suitably hushed tones. Presumably this is some sort of vehicular castration. ‘And it’s very economical, considering.’
Considering what, I didn’t ask, since I was rather taken with its neat, solid, rectangular aspect. This was a car that had matured rather than got older. There may be a message in there somewhere for me.
Its matching my hair was the clincher, and at least it was big enough, since the design was clearly intended for huge Swedes with arms like gorillas and legs like stilts. I’ve met one or two Swedes who look like that. Do I look like that?
I made Mr Val-U a very happy man, but not as happy as he was before I beat him down on the price by pointing out several minor defects, and twice pretending to walk away washing my hands of it. Once you’ve haggled in a souk it all comes naturally to you, but he seemed quite unnerved by my technique.
Driving my purchase back to Mu’s I had good cause to congratulate myself on choosing an estate, for I acquired a really lovely old reclining leather chair en route.
OK, as Mu pointed out, it’s really a dentist’s chair, but it is genuine black leather and chrome, and very comfortable.
Some workmen were carrying it out to a skip, and they were more than happy to help me put it in the car instead after an exchange of filthy lucre. We had to unscrew one or two of the detachable parts first, but I dare say I won’t be needing most of those anyway: Bedd might not be very exciting, but I’m unlikely ever to be spending the evenings examining my teeth in hinged mirrors.
The chair was another nice thing for my cottage, like the Portuguese door Pops and Jaynie bought me. They didn’t stop at the door, either – there was a whole vanload of stuff coming over at the weekend.
My belongings from Bob and Vivi’s were currently all at sea on a slow boat to Tenby, and I still had everything at Mu’s to pack up.
For a free-wheeling globetrotter that was a surprising number of possessions, though most of them were highly impractical things, like pottery and carvings, and enough sarongs to curtain the white cliffs of Dover, while, as Mu practically pointed out, what I actually needed were washing-up bowls and toilet brushes.
She actually drew up a horrendous shopping list of what she called ‘Essential Items’, but I found a store that sold a complete home-starting basics kit in a big box and ordered one. Everything came in white, white, or white, but I’d got lots of colourful stuff to spread around already.
It’s odd to realize that while I can quite happily live out of a rucksack, where my own home is concerned minimalism is not my style.
But I was really looking forward to making a permanent base camp now, particularly since on this visit I’d been absolutely terrorized by Mu’s vast, half-wild Egyptian cat, Ankaret, though she was currently retired to some fastness to have a surprise litter of kittens.
I didn’t think Ambler would be too pleased when he returned from his expedition because, from the sound of it, Ankaret terrorized him, too.
There were two letters awaiting me when we got back to Mu’s house, one from Bob containing the happy news that Vivi was expecting. While we were both pleased, Mu went a bit quiet, and took herself off to prepare a special dinner on the pretext of it being my last night before I moved to Bedd, although we’d been feasting every night for the last week anyway: a prolonged wake for Mu’s thirty-ninth birthday.
(Miranda’s birthday was the previous week – I sent her a long plastic tube containing thirty-nine giant jelly beans. There were forty, but I ate one, which felt a bit like buying someone’s wart for sixpence.)
After Mu had gone I settled down to read the other letter, which was from Aunt Pops, expecting the usual mix of dippiness and practical advice, and instead found she and Jaynie had been worrying over some light-hearted remarks I made while staying there, about lamp wicks, and how having a baby is one of the few things I haven’t tried yet.
The general gist was that I should resist any mad notion to go forth and multiply. As Pops put it:
. . . realizing that procreation might be an option you may not have for much longer does not mean that you must immediately get pregnant while you still can! At thirty-nine you’d probably find it difficult anyway, and older mothers are subject to more complications. A baby should not be an impulse buy, darling.
We considered it some years ago, and decided not to bother.
Jaynie got a bit broody again when she turned forty, but then bought the Harley-Davidson, which has given her years of pleasure. You can’t always say that about children.
Pregnancy must totally take over your body, and you are such a control person, dearest Sappho, that I’m sure you wouldn’t like it in the least. And a child takes over your life, too.
There’s also the small matter of a sperm donor – unless you have someone in mind that you haven’t told us about? We would love you to find that one special person – Jaynie and I have been so happy . . .
And so on.
I simply couldn’t understand why even people who know me well were so aghast at the mere thought of my having a last-egg-in-the-box baby and, perversely, it made the idea of playing a sort of Russian roulette with some suitable sperm seem scarily a
ttractive.
After dinner, and rather a lot of wine, the conversation turned inevitably to Vivi’s news.
‘It isn’t that I’m not really, really pleased for her,’ Mu said earnestly.
‘Of course not – I know that.’
‘Just that I’m jealous as hell. You know,’ she added, propping her pointed chin in her hands, ‘all the time I was saying that I didn’t expect the Tsambika pilgrimage to work, secretly I did. Isn’t that sad? I must be a prize pregnancy bore.’
The pilgrimage didn’t work for me either, but then, that might have had something to do with my not having had sexual congress within living memory.
‘No, you’re not a bore,’ I assured her. (Not since I’d suddenly become personally interested in pregnancy, anyway. Before that I just automatically tuned it out, along with other boring subjects like sport.)
‘I hoped it would work, too . . . except the problem is probably Ambler’s, and since he won’t get himself checked out, you’ve reached an impasse.’
‘A dead end to the maze, with the clock ticking the last minutes,’ Mu agreed sadly.
‘I think I really might start a baby in my gap year before senility. You can share it,’ I offered.
She smiled. ‘You must be joking! What would you do with a baby? You can’t just stick it in a rucksack and go!’
‘Why not?’ I asked, puzzled. ‘In lots of countries they do just that.’
‘Sappho, you’re not serious, are you?’
‘Well, you can’t say it wouldn’t change my life, and I wanted to find something that would give me a new direction before my fortieth birthday. But it’s in the lap of the gods whether I actually get pregnant, isn’t it?’
‘The lap of the sperm donor, actually – unless you’ve already got someone in mind?’
‘Not yet, but there’s still time. I’m not looking for a Significant Other, just a Significant Sperm.’
‘Roxana said I ought to consider AI.’
‘What, Ambler’s mother thinks you ought to have AI? When did she say that?’
‘She popped down a couple of weeks ago when she was over from Kansas with Chuck.’
A Leap of Faith Page 4