She tries to give him money. He uses the opportunity.
‘I tried to give you money the first day and my motives were suspected.’
‘That was the first day.’
‘I don’t want to offend, but you came here with stuff in bags. You need more clothes. Either take the money I was going to give you or use the money you were going to give me. You can’t keep going to work every day with the same washed-out things.’
There is a logic to this fait accompli she can’t take offence at. She gets the next Saturday off, takes a lunch-time train and returns after eight from the station in a ticking taxi, armed with an astonishing number of purchases. Bowed from the weight she throws the bags on the vacant sofa and seems to be filled with helium. ‘Wait there,’ the tone is peremptory, arm outstretched, palm toward him in the time-honoured gesture, ‘for the whole ensemble.’ She takes the clutch of bags upstairs, reappears, and continues to do so in a series of gaudy tableaux, each entry a new outfit. He imagines he makes a cheerful endorsement of each.
‘What’s wrong?’
Perhaps he has to become increasingly more demonstrative to remain plausible. This is new territory for him: Marjory only required payment, not approval.
‘You think they’re common, don’t you?’
‘No.’
But he does. He had assumed her appearance was a function of her budget. Rather than buy anything good she has bought what she already had, in quantities she couldn’t previously afford, loud synthetic things guaranteed to bleed out and turn shapeless at first wash.
‘Fuck! I never could dress. If I ever had anything expensive people think I stole it.’
‘I like the way you look.’
‘Tell the truth, you wanted me to look like something in one of your wife’s magazines, didn’t you?’
Remembrance of her slavish obedience to the prestige of labels makes his sincerity blatant. ‘You couldn’t be more wrong.’ Mollified, she begins to pack the stuff away. ‘One proviso – did you buy a scarf?’ Since their first meeting he has noticed her exposed neck, a trait, in his mind, associated with poverty, like lacking an umbrella. And the weather is on the turn. She flourishes some trumpery acrylic thing that crackles with static. He takes it from her.
‘There is no warmth in this. Buy a good one, wool or cashmere, or take one of mine from the hat stand.’
‘To keep?’
The question strikes him as odd. There are several and he can only wear one at a time. ‘Yes.’
She blushes, a reaction that leaves him nonplussed. In embarrassment she gathers her things and goes to her room.
* * *
The weather is on the turn: an invigorating sharpness during the morning walk; the pre-emptive sweet smell of vegetation about to rot; an amber tinge to the evening air whose beauty compels him to lengthy contemplations from his fragrant garden. He catches himself beside the hat stand mirror and experiments with various rakish angles of his hat, before returning to his usual pose. He has thought about an ebony cane but shies away from such affectation: there will be time enough when the need for support won’t be optional, and he has known poor souls who have had recourse to a stick as a cheaper alternative to a prosthesis. But why, he wonders, this inner frivolity? There is a change in both of them.
Either she has succeeded in making herself busier, or the periods of corrosive introspection are becoming fewer and further between. At any rate, he notes a lightening in her mood. He has even felt that some revelation, perhaps explaining why she got here, is about to be forthcoming. It hasn’t occurred yet. He would never press. He senses she wants to talk, and wishes he had some revelation of his own to barter, but feels his circumstances, like his personality, are transparent and uneventful. They have been for three barbecues next door. Deborah was as discreet as Christopher could have wished. Oscar was agog and had to be taken aside by his wife. Christopher felt for Gina, thinking it wasn’t her milieu, whatever that might be. He needn’t have been concerned. Both boys were there and it occurd to Christopher how pretty she is when he saw the attention they paid her, particularly the older one. On the next two occasions the three sit together at the end of the table and he glances across, trying to remember what it was like at their age. When they go back she brings up the subject of returning the favour.
‘I never thought about it.’
‘Well you can’t keep going round and eating their food and accepting their hospitality indefinitely. We’ll have a barbecue.’
‘We don’t have a barbecue.’
So the Tudor cottage is trundled out again, to her bemusement, and they go to B&Q. He is presented with a series of options as bewildering as the array of delicatessen coffees. She chooses on his behalf.
‘Marjory didn’t like the idea of barbecues. The mess.’
‘There’s a surprise.’
To celebrate the purchase she suggests lunch in the delicatessen. She gestures him cavalierly to the window stool. He tackles this unobserved while she banters with the staff. It reminds him of a child’s high chair. There’s a low back to the arrangement and a bar to rest feet on. He imagines himself trapped in a sitting position, falling like a detonated industrial chimney, fracturing from the bottom up. He gets purchase by leaning forward on the counter and eating in a slovenly pose. She stays to finish a shift. He will have to go back to see to the dog. She sees him to the car while he makes strange noises, blowing air through his teeth to dislodge the cous cous she insisted he try. She takes his arm for the two-hundred-yard walk, a habit they’ve fallen into that quietly gratifies him. On the pavement they meet Vanessa, who looks at this tableau with arresting intensity, draws her own conclusion and walks silently on.
‘Who’s that?’
‘Just... a woman.’
‘A fucking encyclopaedia, that’s what you are. I think we should invite her to the barbecue too.’
‘Why?’
‘Because she looks like she needs it.’
That evening, while Gina assembles the barbecue and experiments with the chops brought home for the purpose, he is thinking about Vanessa, Gina, Marjory and Felicity, the quick versus the dead and the lack of cosmic order in selecting who stays and who doesn’t. The first chop goes to the dog. They sit down to the successful results. Gina dresses the salad. ‘I think I will invite her.’ But Christopher isn’t listening.
The boys abandon whatever other social commitments they may have had to assemble the following Saturday night in Christopher’s garden. She has been so efficient all his efforts are ineffectual. He feels he should at least wield the tongs, like those suburban men who do nothing at all till the primitive instinct compels them to burn meat in a display of social dominance. But he’s denied the barbecue by the tight-knit backs of the boys and Gina. He sits with Deborah. Oscar’s entry is tardy and theatrical, flourishing two bottles.
Everyone has come via the back gate. The dog hears the front door before Christopher does. He stands, knees cracking. Perhaps that cane after all. He opens the door with no expectations whatsoever. She is holding a bunch of violets in one hand and in the other the crepe cone of a wrapped bottle. Her dress is pleasing, the kind of elegant thing he expected Gina to return from the shops with. Her mouth is fixed, as if caught in the act of practising a smile. The expression in her eyes approximates tragedy.
‘You didn’t know I was coming.’
‘But I’m delighted nevertheless.’ The automatic response of his manners carry the moment. He takes the flowers from her and offers her his arm, needlessly guiding her through the hall, past the hazard of Marjory’s ghastly etargé, making a mental note to consign it to the skip. Beneath the clean lines of fabric he can’t help but notice the swell of her breasts and buttocks, reduced by natural attrition and careful diet, but still shapely. On waking these mornings he is still presented with very occasional erections. They don’t have the provenance of erotic dreams that he can recall, or the temper of earlier days, but are still strident enough to earn the na
me. Each has melted with disappointment in reaction to his surprise. And now, here, with her, guiding her swaying shape, he can feel the blood flow unsolicited. Embarrassed he reverts to the teenage stratagem of pretending to tie his laces, forcing her to make her entrance unchaperoned. They cheerfully surround her. The couple and Vanessa, it seems, have played local bridge until the competitive snobbery of the others palled. She’s been more generous in her attentions to the boys than he has, giving him a glimpse of the kind of rapport Marjory stymied. Gina kisses her and is kissed in return, each unashamedly reading the other. Women – how do they do it? Oscar uncorks her superior wine and pretends to swig from the bottle. The tumid little emergency over, his sense of social obligation reasserts itself. He fetches her a glass for Oscar to fill. She accepts this, confidence restored by the warmth of her reception, and leans towards him confidentially.
‘I’m flattered. You can’t get many of them visit you at your age.’
* * *
The leaves turn. The pond in the common, now worthy of its name, has mysteriously filled. He is drawn to watch its morning mists evaporate. He’s called out of doors by some compulsion he doesn’t remember exerting itself with anything like this kind of force before. The beauty of the fading season is reaching an intense pitch that has become a narcotic to him. Perhaps, he thinks, he is calibrating these changes more diligently because there are fewer left to experience. ‘This tangible world,’ he thinks, and like a child wants to hold out his hand to the sky and grasp it all. And then, within a week, it’s over: the leaves have fallen, are dug into mulch or swept into conical piles and burnt in suburban gardens; the trees turn black with rain; the air dries, the cold intensifies and he is gratified by the plume of his breath.
She takes him up on the offer of his scarf. She consults the cookery books and changes their diet, dismays his intestines with bean soups till he establishes equilibrium, serves up stews and roasted root vegetables which he eats with a relish he can’t remember. He buys a case of Barolo, and at the first sip decides that there may be a God after all. They never did anything like this. Is this sense of awareness down to her? The only thing to disturb his peace of mind is the thought of its precariousness.
She accosts him directly one evening after dinner.
‘I was going to ask you something.’
‘Mmm.’ He’s concentrating on feeding the lamb fat to the dog.
‘You’ll kill him you know.’
‘That’s not a question.’
‘But you know you will.’
He thinks for a minute. He has no idea how old the dog is but somehow now doesn’t envisage being without him. ‘He looks as if he did without for long enough. If I thought I could prolong my life for five years by giving up wine – I wouldn’t.’
‘Were you thinking of seeing Vanessa?’ He is half turned towards the dog and stiffens in this pose. ‘You don’t have to pretend to be occupied with that. You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to.’
‘No. I know I don’t. I live here.’
‘I don’t want to make you uncomfortable.’
‘Neither did she when we met that time in the coffee shop.’
‘What shop?’
‘Your shop.’
‘When?’
‘Before it was your shop.’
‘And was it uncomfortable?’
‘Yes.’
‘And is this?’
‘Yes.’ He watches the dog gobble the fat. She hasn’t touched on anything personal to him before. He thinks this is more due to the possibility of being expected to make a similar revelation than natural reticence. When he turns round she is staring at her empty plate and looks the more embarrassed of the two. It strikes him suddenly that she is guided by generosity that builds up and manifests itself in unpremeditated outpourings: hydraulic kindness. This well-intentioned intervention is her way of trying to pay him back. ‘In answer to your question, I never thought of seeing Vanessa.’
Her embarrassment appears to vanish, replaced with curiosity.
‘I thought you liked her.’
‘I like what I know of her.’
‘And how is she supposed to know that? Look, Christopher, just liking someone in the abstract and sitting in separate rooms watching telly on either side of the common isn’t really much use to most people. Especially a woman. It might be to you but I can guarantee it isn’t much use to her.’
‘I don’t know her number.’
‘That’s lame.’
And he concedes with a nod that it is.
‘What do you think she expects of me?’
‘A little company. What everyone wants. What the dog wants. Plants grow towards light.’
‘I don’t want to raise expectations I can’t meet.’
‘Talk, Christopher. Just talk to her. If it doesn’t work it doesn’t work. She won’t die. She’s seen it all.’
‘How do you know?’
‘How can you not? Just look at her.’ There’s nothing judgmental or derogatory in her tone. She’s obviously looked at Vanessa and seen what Marjory did and he so conspicuously hasn’t. But she’s come up with an entirely different evaluation from his dead wife’s. ‘You owe her that.’
‘Why do I owe her anything?’
‘Because she’s kept faith with you in the face of no encouragement.’
She’s a girl, to him little more than a child. She has obviously come from some obscure and neglected background. He thinks she hasn’t enjoyed the benefit of any kind of formal education that he would recognise. How can she possibly know all this? He’s tempted to ask but she might have to violate a confidence. He’s decided he can’t possibly ask when he hears himself speak.
‘How can you possibly know all this?’
‘Women talk. And even when they don’t they understand. At least, some do.’
When he was a schoolboy he understood early that any mathematics was beyond him. His comprehension of numbers extended to the practicality of counting his change, or working out the square yardage to buy a carpet. It wasn’t laziness, or lack of application. He found effortless many things his fellow pupils struggled with, but he had to reconcile himself that there was a world of abstractions and symbols that more accurately described the workings of his phenomenal world than he could. He feels that way now. Half the human race has access to a kind of understanding denied him. And so, unpractised, apprehensive, feeling the way he did when he stared at a blackboard swarming with symbols, he picks up the telephone the following evening when Gina is in the next room, glued to Coronation Street.
‘Hello?’
‘Vanessa?’ If it’s her he doesn’t recognise this formal phone voice.
‘Christopher?’ The tone has instantly changed. Somehow she’s managed to infuse a three-syllable question with a note of hope. He stares, aggrieved, at the wall separating him from Gina. One word and he feels he’s already raised her expectations wildly beyond his capacity to meet them.
‘I was just wondering if perhaps you’d like to meet me for coffee. I believe it’s my turn to buy.’
‘I... I... When?’
‘Well, my time’s not taken up. It’s you who runs a business.’
‘Tomorrow? Or is that too soon?’ She is speaking uncharacteristically fast.
‘No. That’s fine with me. Does three o’clock in the same place suit?’
‘Yes. That would be ideal. I look forward to seeing you then.’ Her voice has slowed. She’s almost formal. He guesses this is deliberate, exhaling between clauses to try and modify the sound of eagerness. She puts the phone down, sealing the bargain before it can be revoked.
He arrives the next afternoon at two fifty-five. He hasn’t mentioned anything to Gina. Vanessa is already there. Gina is sitting across from her, her long apron bunched in her lap. They appear to be talking effortlessly. At his entrance they both look up. Gina walks towards him and gently touches his shoulder.
‘You kept this quiet.’ She is talking into his lapel.
Behind his back she waves away the duty waitress. As he takes a seat Gina returns with two cups of coffee, puts them down and discreetly returns behind the counter. He’s trying to work out what to say as his spoon revolves and revolves in a small frothy whirlpool of compulsive stirring. Vanessa helps him out.
‘Thank you for inviting me.’
‘What on earth do women find to talk to one another about? You two have hardly met yet you looked thick as thieves. In a nice way, I mean.’
‘The obvious answer would be to say we were talking about you. But we weren’t.’
‘Sometimes I wish I understood women more.’
‘Do you?’
He thinks for a moment. What would it be like? Understanding things that aren’t manifestly obvious. Not facts. He’s probably forgotten more of those than many will ever know, but feelings. He imagines being helplessly receptive to the cacophony of other people’s feelings, the clamour of silent wants.
‘No. Not really.’
She touches his sleeve and smiles at him. He smiles back.
Perhaps this is going to be all right.
* * *
Christmas is accelerating towards them. He finds himself anticipating its arrival in a way he hasn’t since childhood.
‘Where are all your decorations?’
He shows her a small box in the garage that yields a paltry synthetic tree.
‘Marjory didn’t go in much for Christmas.’
‘You don’t say.’
Her response at each revelation of his married life is becoming harder, as her dislike for his dead wife grows.
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