by Morag Joss
James’s theory was that only when she started playing again would the old feeling come back, and that she would overcome what he called the Block. ‘One sniff of the old greasepaint, you’ll see, that’s all it’ll take,’ he had said optimistically and, as it was turning out, wrongly. She did not want to let him down so she would play the concert, but it would be with the same perfunctory deadness of heart that had first overcome her in Paris. She would have another forage in the manners cellar in the hope of unearthing sufficient humility to ring Robin. And then she rather hoped that she would be left alone.
In a mood of atonement she worked for the whole of the morning. It did not strike her until later that she had practised mechanically for over four hours with such technical precision that she could barely remember which pieces she had been playing.
CECILY SMITH was idly considering liposuction when the bell rang. With a sigh she jammed her shoes back on, shoved her Cosmopolitan back into her desk drawer and trundled across the corridor to Derek’s office, where she set up his coffee-maker almost as carefully as he would have done himself. As it went ‘spleuch spleuch’ she washed up his cup and saucer and straightened things on the desk, running her hand lightly over his bulging brown leather Filofax. Occasionally she tugged down her short black skirt which she had bought as the consequence of an article entitled ‘The New Mini – You’re Not Too Old To Wear It!’ But she was. And Derek was too unfit to bound up the stairs, so when he swept into the room he was hot and panting as well as very large. Cecily, who knew the sound of his arrival at the top of the staircase, fluffed her hair, pulled in her stomach and turned from the desk just in time to bestow upon him the picture of herself, the consummate headmaster’s secretary, with a smile which she knew conveyed a certain readiness. Derek dumped a pile of manila folders on his desk, poured out his coffee and gulped at it twice, eyeing her dangerously. Putting down his cup, he led her by the wrist to the corner furthest from the windows and (considerately, she thought) wiped his hand across his lips before plunging his tongue into her mouth. Strange how coffee, so clean and delicious, is instantly transformed on a person’s breath into a kind of bitter compost. Somehow she hardly ever minded, and seldom allowed herself to reflect that Derek’s preferred order of stimulants these days was caffeine first, her second. Without ceremony his hands hoiked up the back of her skirt, sank under her tights and began energetically kneading her backside.
All was quiet around them, save for the far-off playground yammer. The others, to whom Derek referred as ‘my admin team’, would all be downstairs in the staff room having their coffee now, motivated by either (Cecily was not sure which) raging thirst or raging discretion. She and Derek had roughly four minutes before they could expect an interruption from a rounded-up band of bike-shed smokers or, more likely, a harassed junior teacher. Not daring to be too reckless they had learned, more or less, to wait for the sanctuary of Cecily’s little house in Bath, but for now, in the corner among the box files, spider plants and back numbers of TES, they chewed hungrily at each other’s necks with the promise of a proper meal later.
Over his shoulder Cecily looked through the windows down across the tarmac to the hall, the ‘PE Complex’ in Derek-speak, a ghastly seventies addition to a more subtly disastrous sixties building. Dispirited seagulls tottered on the asphalt roof. Below, dispirited clusters of children roamed the wire at the playground’s edge. Beyond, a line of dispirited and widely spaced saplings drooped across implausibly undulating banks of municipal grass, where two dispirited dogs sniffed and trailed each other tediously. Behind rose the estate of medium-rise blocks on whose walls even the graffiti had assumed a weary air. She could not look at any of it for long without feeling her heart sag like the gusset in an old pair of tights. It was not hopelessly awful; of course there were many places worse, but it just seemed that no one who had ever had a say in how the place was put together had bothered to consider that human beings might need to enjoy what they saw around them. There needed to be things for the eye to rest on with pleasure, things that were perhaps, strictly speaking, unnecessary. Cecily thought of her new urn. She had just bought it from an overpriced and precious reclamation outfit in Walcot Street and, knowing she had paid more than she could afford for it, consequently loved it too much. She had planted it up with an expensive collection of trailing plants which, if they did as the packaging claimed, were going to provide ‘a cascade of colour all summer long’. The urn now stood in her otherwise uncultivated front garden, which was roughly the size of a door, but it looked well, in keeping with the rest of the terrace whose six houses all had Victorian ornamental bricks above the front sash windows and twiddly bits round the doorways.
Feeling brighter, for it was Friday and she would soon be driving home to Larkhall, she pulled away from Derek, who was pinker in the face and seemed to be feeling brighter too, although he still had not spoken a word. They both looked down sheepishly at his crotch while he tried to dispose of his erection by pulling down on it as if it were a recalcitrant door handle.
‘You really turn me on,’ he said redundantly.
Cecily sorted her knickers and tugged down at her skirt.
‘I like you in that,’ he said, then added heavily, ‘and out of it too. Just a few more hours, Cec.’
She was following his train of thought, which allowed her to overlook his use of his name for her. Perhaps it was silly and overdignified to object, but her name was Cecily. She had even laughed when Derek once referred to her bedroom as the Cec pit. Ha-ha, Derek. But he did so enjoy a pun, especially his own. She put up with the little things because she really did admire him, loved him really, for the way he kept at it, toiling away to elevate the unpromising young of unlovely south Bristol. And one day she would be able to give him the real, proper support he deserved, waving him off each morning in a fresh shirt and making their large house and generous garden a pleasure to come home to, while she would be happy and organised and well dressed and get her nails and hair done regularly and never have to worry again about the Visa bill or the mortgage.
‘I’m really looking forward to it,’ she said truthfully.
Derek’s wife would be away running a course for infants’ teachers until Sunday morning, so they had the luxury of a whole evening and night together instead of a few illicit hours snatched whenever Derek could plausibly claim to be at ‘one of my meetings’. In nearly two years he had managed at least as many meetings naked under a duvet with Cecily as he had endured in a stale shirt under strip lighting with his long-winded governors and had grown adept, arriving home late and ragged, at steering his wife into indignant discussions on the iniquities of the headteacher’s workload.
‘Have you decided what you’re doing for us?’ Cecily asked.
Derek’s voice took on the authority and mystery of a man who is making dinner. ‘Duck, I thought, with something. I’ll see. Fruit, if there’s anything interesting. And some cheese, I’ll go to the Posh and see what they’ve got.’
What they always had plenty of at the Posh, Derek’s name for the Fine Cheese Company, his favourite shop in Bath, as well as dozens of cheeses, was a ruinous array of beautiful olive oils, and lovely breads to dip in the oils, and pots and jars of other lovely things marinading in oils, and even more little delicious things to nibble. He resisted none of it. Cecily, unable to afford it on her own, could not bring herself to discourage this generosity over food and still, despite the passing of two birthdays and a Christmas with only cards and nice dinners, kept hoping that the same impulse might occasionally spread over into other areas of their shared existence. She kissed her diet good-bye again and half regretfully opened her accommodating heart to the prospect of a weekend with Derek filling her pretty Victorian house with his big, powerful appetites. There was always liposuction.
SARA HAD finished the rehearsal with James and was deciding, with bad grace, that she would have to kill time in town before the concert. It was already after five o’clock and they had to be
ready at the Pump Room by half past seven. It would not be worth the effort of crawling back to St Catherine through Friday traffic to spend an hour at home.
‘Lighten up, honeybun,’ James said. ‘You’ve got your frock in the car, haven’t you? Come over to Camden Crescent with me. You can have a bath and a sit-down there. You should try to relax.’
Sara shook her head. She was restless, and the thought of two hours of James trying to be soothing and wonderful, but actually striding about his flat singing his tuneless snatches from Don Giovanni or Phantom of the Opera, was more than she could bear.
‘No, I fancy a walk. No, don’t come. I’ve got a couple of things to do. Waitrose, that kind of thing. I’ll see you later.’
‘Well, you should really be resting. But anyway, don’t forget your Chopin Liszt,’ James trilled, ‘and don’t hurt a finger. Remember the date. See you later.’
As she expected it to be at this time on a Friday afternoon, Waitrose was busy with women who were cornering recklessly round the aisles, their big hair apparently conferring upon them the sense of safety assumed by wearers of crash helmets. It was an infiltration of Hell’s Shoppers, straight from the hairdressers’, faces tight and pink from the drier, and wearing chains in most of the standard but inappropriate places: round the heels of their shoes, dangling from wrists, slung over arms as handbag straps and stretched round their uncomely waists. They did nothing to improve Sara’s temper and not for the first time she wished she could fit on to her shopping trolley axles some of those nice rotating blades that Ben-Hur found so handy.
Next to them, the Men Who Cook, browsing in their lovely putty-coloured trenchcoats and their tilted hats, were quite benign. They cooked, but for accolades and consenting adults only. They shopped, but usually for one meal at a time, never with children or a cello, and sufficiently seldom to consider fifteen minutes pondering eight different options of lettuce to be time well spent. They were often to be found hovering in the fruit and veg section, having taken off just a little early from their creative jobs in architecture, design or the media in order to put together delectably expensive food for little Friday night dinner parties. Once a promisingly attractive Man Who Cooks had asked Sara, who had happened to know, what one did with a daikon radish and had taken such an interest in the answer that she had known the question to be a disappointingly genuine request for information rather than a conversational opening. It had been disheartening to discover that she held rather less allure than a tuber. There was a Man Who Cooks picking over the nine varieties of wild mushrooms now, except that he was almost too old, about fifty. And he was really too fat but, being over six feet tall, was managing to carry it off quite well. But he certainly qualified on the basis of the shopping trolley, which contained Barbary duck breasts, tarragon, crème fraîche, a Californian Zinfandel, Beaumes de Venise, chocolate almonds, unsalted butter, ripe South African plums, tiny red peppers and shallots. Several little paper bags from the Fine Cheese Company and a bunch of five perfect tiger lilies sat in the front. And now lots of wild mushrooms, chervil and fresh figs. There was something touching about this large, gloomy-looking man in his dark suit and Liberty tie, so thoughtfully choosing such obviously seductive food. I hope she appreciates it, Sara thought, knowing for certain that it would be a she.
She looked down into her own trolley. Cashew nuts, one French loaf, a single salmon fillet and a bag of prewashed salad. Food for one. She lost heart for shopping, and wandered out of the supermarket with her carrier bag, wondering where in Bath, at six in the evening, time could best be killed without her going to a pub. She could go back to the Pump Room. She could find somewhere in the back to wait while the frantic preparations for the evening’s dinner carried on around her, but the idea held no appeal. She much preferred the daytime calm of the Pump Room, the white-clad tea tables under the chandelier, the fountain where the water was still pumped up for a pound a glass, the window with its view down to the hot, bubbling bath below. And although one could no longer enjoy the diverting sight of floating invalids bobbing scrofulosly in the healing waters, it was amusing to watch the happy trespass of the tourists, with their camcorders, phoney university sweatshirts and sweat suits, upon the late-eighteenth-century gentility of it all. But the tourists had been booted out early today, because of the concert and dinner.
She dawdled up New Bond Street and paused outside Jigsaw. The laconic dummy in the window was draped in a turquoise tube which, understandably, she did not look particularly happy to be wearing. Sara, looking past the dummy and taking in her own reflection in the mirror behind, measured herself mentally and concluded without excitement that she could get away with it, if she wanted to. The colour might suit her dark hair and large greeny blue eyes, and the cut of the dress would not be too unforgiving over her hips which, although not large, were wider than the dislocated twin pelvic bones of the plaster dummy in the window. Her jeans were looser than they had been a year ago. The cambric shirt she was wearing was baggier. It was partly because of the running and, since she had joined the health club, also the regular working out, but it had something else besides to do with a growing indifference about most things, including food. She was not exactly disinclined to eat, but often had to remind herself to do so. In the same way, the prospect of trying on dresses in shops presented itself as a tremendous chore to which she would subject herself only when she felt she needed a new one. Which she hoped would not be in less than ten years or so.
‘Hiya! Buying it? Great, isn’t it? Are you getting it? It’d look great on you!’ The sudden appearance at her side of tall, blonde, physical Sue from the health club was, despite the absence of oars and a helmet, like a one-woman Viking landing.
‘Oh, God, you gave me a fright. No, I don’t think so. It would be good on you, though,’ Sara said.
Sue looked critically at the dress and gave her stomach a complacent pat. ‘I might. Depends if Paul likes it. He hates shopping, though. They all do, don’t they?’
‘Do they?’ Sara said, remembering some of Matteo’s glorious extravagances. ‘Look, are you walking uptown? I’ll go with you – I’m just dawdling. I’m on at the Pump Room later, but I’ve got a bit of time on my hands till then.’
‘Oh, come with me!’ Sue cried. ‘I’m going to this great thing at the Assembly Rooms. The Healing Arts – it’s an alternative healing fair. You’ll love it! I’ve only got a couple of hours now. I’ve got to be back to do eight till eleven at the club. Aw, come on, it’ll be really interesting. Aunt Livy told me about it. She’ll be there; there’s a proper opening at half six.’
‘Is Olivia doing the opening first, then?’ Sara asked. ‘I know she’s coming to the Pump Room dinner at eight. Busy, busy, isn’t she?’
‘Nah, not really; she’s got to be there, but she’s only deputy director now. The new bloke’s doing the speech, I think. Forget his name. You coming? Go on, it’ll be fun. Keep me company. Paul’s there as well. He’s doing a bit of moonlighting in the kitchen, so I won’t even see him. Come on.’
Sara opened her mouth to refuse, then hesitated. Why not go? She had plenty of time, because although the Assembly Rooms were close to the Circus, almost at the other end of town from the Pump Room, in Bath that meant a brisk twenty-minute walk at the most. Even if she left the Assembly Rooms as late as ten to seven, she could, by following virtually a straight line down through Milsom Street, Old Bond Street and going via Union Street into Abbey Churchyard, be at the Pump Room before seven fifteen.
Sue was already walking up towards Russell and Bromley at the top of the street, and Sara allowed herself to follow.
‘You seem very “up” today,’ Sara said. ‘Things going well?’
‘Dunno about “things”, but Paul and me’re having a good spell. All week, now,’ Sue calculated happily.
Sara reflected that that was indeed a record. Sue’s boyfriend worked as a waiter in the hotel, Fortune Park, to which the health club was attached. One afternoon the previous winter
when the club had been almost empty she had found Sue weeping behind the desk and had got the whole blubbed story of how Paul could be terribly moody and sometimes very cold, ‘like he doesn’t want me around at all, and then it all changes and he’s nice again, so I know he loves me really’. Not having met Paul, Sara had nevertheless pictured a shallow, local boy of limited intellect, fundamentally silly and out of his depth. In the same conversation Sue had told her that her parents were divorced and her father had since died. Her mother had had two more children with her second husband and now lived in Canada. She only really had her Aunt Olivia and her grandfather, Olivia’s father, although she didn’t really live with them anymore. ‘She works at the museum, my aunt,’ Sue had sniffed. ‘She’s a curator, practically in charge. She’s really nice.’ She had been strangely consoled to find out that Sara already knew Olivia, and Sara suspected that since that day she had looked upon her as a kind of stand-in auntie.
They wandered up into Milsom Street. Well, since Auntie One was on museum duty, perhaps it would be a kindness if Auntie Two were to stand in and keep the child happy – admittedly a stunning, volatile, twenty-four-year-old child, who was now contentedly window-shopping at the lingerie shop with the eighty-quid knickers – and it would not kill Auntie Two to do something unselfish for once, after all.
‘I really want to go to this. It’s all about being centred, you see. I haven’t befriended my inner child enough,’ Sue told her earnestly. ‘Have you?’