He is walking along the pavement when the accumulated strain of the months, thinking about Felicity, imagining her departure, projecting a future without that compassionate presence, takes its toll. He is again suddenly exhausted, irritated with himself for being caught out by predictable fatigue. It is like a light going out. He casts around for a seat.
There is a fortuitous coffee bar at his elbow. If only, thinks Christopher, I believed in fate. It is a place he has passed two dozen times either without noticing or, when he does, thinking it as somehow not for him. It is a place of chrome and blonde wood that he has dismissed as ersatz Scandinavian, staffed by the young for a clientele he has ceased to understand. Tieless professionals shout for amiable drinks after working hours, a code of behaviour Christopher believes they have learned from beer commercials where everyone is remorselessly happy. He sees the café as a place of contrived bonhomie. The prices deter the hooded elements who haunt the common. At this time of day the customers are mostly young mothers with infants, whose collapsed prams clutter the entrance, and a scattering of affluent young who can afford to be redundant here in the middle of the day.
He negotiates the prams. The plentiful seating is illusory – at least for Christopher. There are a series of tall stools at the window nestled beneath a foot-deep bar where clients can perch, rest their elbows and contemplate the foot traffic. Christopher decides not to risk it. A fall from that height could prove fatal. There is a number of what look like giant leather bean bags on the floor. A teenage boy and girl occupy adjacent bladders and lean, exploiting the intimacy of gravity. To get on one of these Christopher decides he’d have to kneel down first. Getting back up would involve a block and tackle. These are more hazardous than the stools. There are a number of couches, some still occupied. These aren’t hard-backed functional things. To Christopher they look more like distended marshmallows, reminiscent of American sitcoms or those dreadful morning television talk shows. He casts about some more.
The only real options are the tables with hard chairs and arms for purchase. Most of these are occupied by the sorority of young mothers. He is the focus of a number of accusatory glares. They are staring at him staring at the half-obscured bosom of one of their members, breast-feeding. The infant detaches. The nipple is mesmerisingly red and upright, reminiscent of a wine gum, the aureole huge and glistening. His eyebrows shoot up. He realises he is being watched watching, shields his eyes with a hand that shoots up like a salute, mutters a general apology and sits at the vacant table at his other elbow.
But is it vacant? There’s a smouldering cup with a creamy inch of residue that the waiting staff have also chosen to leave in case the customer returns. Shifting his position he can see some official-looking papers in the chair, pushed under the table, invisible to the aproned girl spraying rainbows of antiseptic mist in the mid-morning glare and wiping the tables in moist crescents. He is about to alert her to the papers when he is distracted by the movement at his side.
It is Vanessa, as preserved and svelte as the image he is slightly ashamed of having retained in memory. She is, of course, the owner of the coffee. He doesn’t know if she has come back from the toilet to sip the residue or in from the street to retrieve her papers.
‘Vanessa.’
‘Christopher.’
‘Vanessa.’
‘Christopher.’
He gets purchase from the table top and begins to hoist himself up. She puts a hand on his shoulder and persuades him back into his chair.
‘Vanessa.’
‘Don’t start that again. It’s hardly Noel Coward dialogue.’
And for the first time in as long as he can remember he finds he is gently laughing. There is no noise, just a seismic tremble of the torso and a slitting of Christopher’s eyes. When it subsides he finds he is embarrassed to find he is enjoying looking at her, her body, her neck, her face.
‘Sorry,’ says the rainbow girl, turning in a luminous sweep of careless antiseptic, ‘no dogs.’
Again he starts to stand. Again she reclines him with a hand on his shoulder. She is a woman who has learned to take her chances when she finds them and she will not have this opportunity wasted by something as trivial as a hygiene regulation. She takes the dog outside and ties him to a bin. He scratches his ear with a hind paw and his testicles vibrate. Then he watches the cars.
Vanessa returns and looks steadily at Christopher, as if willing him to speak. Realising something is expected of him and feeling unequal to the moment he peers at the chalked-up table of fare behind the counter. The array is bewildering.
‘What happened to just coffee?’
‘Tell me what it is that you want.’
He pauses before responding. Is this an iceberg question, seven eights submerged?
‘You know...’ he says.
‘No. I don’t. Tell me.’
‘The kind of thing you used to have when you went into a place that served afternoon tea but you ordered coffee instead.’
‘Those were dilute granules, unless you frequented a better class of place than I did.’
‘Yes. That sort of thing.’
She smiles at the rainbow girl and orders Christopher a flat white. He doesn’t see how she has deduced that from the blackboard. As an afterthought she points at her own cup for a refill.
‘Things have moved on, Christopher.’ Is she still talking about coffee? ‘And anyway, how are you?’
‘Oh. You know...’ He is hearing himself say this, the kind of non-committal response he dislikes.
‘No. I don’t know.’
‘Well, I got rid of the cleaner. The garden seems to be mysteriously sorting itself out although I haven’t seen the gardener to pay him. Maybe there is a standing order to pay him I don’t know about. Perhaps Marjory...’ At the mention of her name he hesitates. ‘I’m managing fine.’
Her steady look hasn’t wavered. His sense of discomfort is lessening. He wonders if this is what prey feel like, the moment of calm before being devoured.
‘I’m sorry about Marjory. I can’t pretend we got on but I’m sorry nonetheless. For you I mean. I didn’t know what to say when I heard. I thought of writing.’
He casts his mind back to the rank of cards on the mantelpiece and window ledges, more populous than the mourners, and tries to attribute an identity to each. He can’t remember Vanessa’s. He was sure it was there, now mulch, as his wife will eventually be. Christopher has always given Vanessa the benefit of the doubt, his weakness of empathy exerting itself again. Marjory didn’t. Marjory disliked Vanessa because Vanessa refused to be simply a haberdasher. Vanessa breezed into the High Street with no ring, no past, and enough collateral to open a shop. The Woman’s Guild vibrated.
Perhaps Vanessa was even aware of this. She kept the rumour mill churning by saying absolutely nothing. The truth was more ordinary and sordid, as it usually is. As a young women she had cohabited with a dentist in Bristol, when such an action still turned heads and tarnished reputations. Her parents tacitly approved. They considered her a girl of limited abilities and fewer options. Of an age and class that venerated the professions, they were so paralysed by respect for the family doctor that he attributed their silence to idiocy. Cohabitation with a dentist outside marriage was preferable to working-class drudgery within it. Love didn’t enter their utilitarian calculation. The dentist agreed and so, without thinking about it, did Vanessa. She paid her dues by looking nice and crouching before dinner most weeknights on the hearthrug, as he took her from behind while the Fray Bentos Steak and Kidney pie crisped to a turn. Three nights out of four he would adjourn to the local, leaving her with the cold dishes and lukewarm semen, to return for News at Ten and a repeat performance.
It’s fortunate she had a libido equal to the task. It was the slackening of his penetrations that led her to believe he was otherwise being serviced, corroborated the following evening when, facing the fireguard, he breathed ‘Charlotte’ into the small of her back. Charlotte was his recep
tionist. An unscheduled after-hours visit to the surgery found Charlotte in the hearthrug posture, being pantingly referred to as ‘Jane’. Charlotte accepted these confusions better than Vanessa: it was an unenlightened time and her bonus reflected the proportion of time spent on all fours. It turned out the dentist preferred coitus a tergo precisely because of his difficulty in putting a name to a face: one set of shoulder blades was the same as another, and pumping away doggedly from behind he could let his imagination wander. So could Vanessa. At any one time there were three simultaneous copulations: the literal participants, the dentist and his dulcinea, and Vanessa and the younger, handsomer, harder, more attentive man who existed out there somewhere beyond the rote of shopping, cooking and applying makeup, only to get fucked like this face down in front of The Magic Roundabout. But at least her infidelities were confined to the mind.
He had been careful to drip-feed her money. She had no bank account and no rights. She let him stew while she calculated, and wrung incremental concessions out of him each time she crouched. When he attended an amalgam conference in Galway, with Jane or one of her successors, she burnt his clothes, bent his golf clubs, poured sugar into the petrol tank of his Jaguar and left with her portable life: a matching suite of luggage and a meagre amount of money. He hadn’t broken her heart but he had dented her self-esteem. She emerged from her first affair with immaculate teeth, a regimen of dental hygiene practically American, a whetted sexual appetite and a desire to get on without ever being beholden to men. She had no delusions about her employment options and held down a series of casual jobs and casual affairs, ending most liaisons when better employment beckoned.
From crouching like a tupped ewe she now preferred to kneel astride and look down. She looked down on a surveyor, a welder, a loss adjuster, the man who came to paint lines on the road, an actuary, her postman. She was a sexual opportunist and her tastes were eclectic. She looked down on her GP, but fled in panic when he declared a love so intense he intended to expose the affair and liberate them both. She didn’t love anyone and liberation was not something she believed possible in male company. The type of people she attracted she found predictable and egocentric, but recognised decency when she saw it.
When her parents died her inheritance comprised a rented house she was obliged to clear. The tawdry furniture was auctioned for a pittance, and she was left with an enormous and unanticipated collection of buttons her mother had amassed. Her dormant acumen was roused. Couturiers looked for some of these older specimens. The Sunday stall in Camden Market graduated to a modest shop: The Button Boutique. It didn’t take a fool to make the link from price to location, and she was no fool. She had a talent for spotting talent and delegating. A disgruntled art student with a flair for decoration was the first in a series of girls. They all left in amicable circumstances with a fierce sense of independence, the best thing she could teach.
The place modestly flourished. The nest egg modestly grew. But the pace of growth was dictated by the modest means of the local clientele, so she hazarded all on the move to the High Street, where she now sits across her replenished coffee and Christopher’s flat white. The gamble paid off.
She was surrounded by people whose average age she would soon approach and whose income she could match. She had a string of liaisons behind her that she had terminated without gaining a reputation for promiscuity, and no ties. She was as respectable as her dead parents could have wished. She knew what was what in the bedroom and in the balance sheet. And she was bored.
She first met Marjory at a church function she tolerated in order to try to establish business contacts. Vanessa looked at Marjory and saw a ruthless social climber who didn’t have the saving grace of humour, or of realising her own restrictions. Her only interest lay in the exemplification of a type. Vanessa wasn’t interested in social theories; she’d seen plenty of types. Vanessa found Marjory a bore.
Sex never scandalised Marjory, it was just something other people engaged in, like eating liver or playing golf. Had Vanessa’s past come to light Marjory would only have been disappointed that rumour fell so short of the mark.
Vanessa was still bored. The menopause had left her less urgent and more discriminating. The disadvantage of the High Street was the available men it brought within her compass: a self-publicising roué with a dying wife. And then she met Christopher.
He was married, but unaccompanied, as he guilelessly walked into her shop looking for advice on the purchase of a present for his wife. Not putting two and two together she sold him a length of taffeta, knowing it was unsuitable for the wife of the man she’d just met. She wanted him to come back and exchange it because she wanted to see him again.
But he didn’t come back. Instead she was confronted by the hag of mock gentility who had sparked reciprocal dislike at the church social. She now did put two and two together, logically but not emotionally. This seasoned campaigner of erotic trysts, who had seen most things, couldn’t see Christopher and Marjory coming to grips. This cheered and excited her.
‘I believe you sold my husband this piece of cloth.’
‘Yes.’
Pushing the bolt away with the back of her hand. ‘I don’t need this.’
‘Of course not. Your husband didn’t explain the circumstances. This will do you no favours. Perhaps something darker that will look at you, something earthy, like those delightful tea-cosy colours for that social we so enjoyed. Something serviceable.’
‘I’ll take the money.’ It took her a hundred yards before she realised she’s been bested.
Vanessa thinks of Christopher constantly. His fidelity in such an obviously unsuitable match serves to make him more attractive. In the few social encounters where they do meet, some force compels her to cross the room in a conspicuous diagonal to talk to him, stand near him. She is a repository of thwarted impulses, accumulated like tree rings. ‘I am here!’ her mind and organs shout. ‘Drink deeply!’ She is aware she is making herself ridiculous. That first infatuation, suppressed by her dentist, has bloomed on her posthumous fertility. He is unfailingly polite and offers not the least morsel of encouragement.
His wife dies. She phones condolences and is met with a bewildered voice that does not recognise hers. She stands outside the church, not wishing to intrude on his grief, if that’s what it is, but to be acknowledged. He makes the forty foot trip from steps to hearse without registering anything in his peripheral vision. Her heart tugs at his immaculate cuffs. As the vehicle slides past he is frowning at his feet, concentrating on the day’s sequence that must be got through, and she stands, watching it disappear, as the other mourners register her presence with varying degrees of politeness. She decides to wait. Time’s efficacy is proverbial, but how much do they have? And now fate has delivered him, widowered, with a destitute dog and an incipient loneliness she can sense, mirroring her own, looking frankly at her across two cooling coffees and a cooling universe.
‘How are you coping?’ she asks.
‘Well, as I said, I got rid of the cleaner but’
‘No. Sorry to interrupt. I don’t mean the bread and butter things. I mean how do you fill a gap made by the absence of someone who’s been a part of your life for so long? I’m not trying to pry and I don’t mean to make you uncomfortable, it’s just that I don’t know. I’ve never had that kind of thing taken away from me.’
In other circumstances he would think this as intrusive as dreadful morning television, prying mawkish revelations. But there’s a frankness to her gaze that tells him her motives are as far removed from those people as it’s possible to be. Her reputation for privacy is well known. She must have understood the adverse speculation it invited. God knows, Marjory and her ilk made interior life around here more difficult. He senses that in her last sentence Vanessa has revealed more about herself to him than she has to anyone else around here.
‘“That kind of thing” is a bit of an elastic category. I think the kind of thing any couple has is unique. I don’t thin
k anyone outside can really understand.’
‘I think there are lots of types who just rub along, not noticing that they have less in common.’
He decides to reciprocate her confidence. ‘Marjory and I didn’t have less in common. I don’t think we ever had shared interests in that way.’
‘You and I have things in common,’ she blurts, and bites her lip, losing her composure for the first time in twenty years. She hails the rainbow girl to cover her confusion. Again he thinks something is expected of him.
‘I don’t know what your interests are, Vanessa.’
‘I’m not talking about hobbies or superficial things like that.’ She snaps it back, over her shoulder while settling their bill. The waitress is confused, believing the remark addressed to her. Vanessa smiles at her, rectifies the misunderstanding with an exorbitant tip. When she leaves Vanessa has no reason not to turn back. He knows her curt response was a defence mechanism. She takes a deep breath, lets it out slowly while contemplating her coffee and looks at him.
‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be rude. Stop waving, Christopher, it does matter. Some things are too important to be misunderstood. I’m not talking about hobbies or all the things people do with other people just to avoid doing them on their own. I think often they’re just contrivances to avoid loneliness. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with that I’m just saying it shouldn’t be mistaken for something it’s not. Communion. I think some people even do things they don’t much like because doing something slightly unenjoyable in company is preferable to them to being on their own. You’re nodding. Do you agree?’
Four New Words for Love Page 11