Perfect Love

by Elizabeth Buchan

  The carriage filled up within minutes, rustling with paper and snatches of conversation. Flashes of colour, movement and smells: scent, aftershave, sweat and bad breath.

  Hands clasped in her lap, Prue looked out on to the emptying platform. A vast, surf-crested tide of feeling roared in her head and swept her away.

  ‘Sorry about last night, Mum.’ Jane tucked her hand under her mother’s elbow. ‘Thanks for taking me to London.’

  Chapter Fourteen

  Rain swept down the glen in sheets and wrapped Max in a dripping blanket. It had that special soft texture of Highland rain associated with skin creams and expensive bottled water, and Max raised his face to the sky and allowed it to stream down his face.

  It was not the sort of gesture in which he usually indulged, and he hoped that Peter Broughton, fishing further down the bank, had missed it. He checked the clouds: cumuli nimbi were stacked further to the west with glimpses of blue showing between them. Meanwhile, the rainclouds overhead were thinning, which meant the rain would stop as suddenly as it had started.

  Max liked to think of himself as an expert on Highland weather. Years - how many? - of observing it first-hand gave him grounds for this harmless piece of back-patting. All those holidays. All those years lodged in his memory.

  As predicted the rain was easing, and the noise of water hitting grass gradually ceased. Apart from the murmur of the river sliding between its banks, silence reclaimed their spot. The silence of solitary sky, earth, rocks and the bleached bones of animals.

  Max’s silences could be equally terrifying, so much so that, sometimes in their grip, they frightened even him. They were a habit acquired during a childhood of watching adults behave badly and, like all habits, proved half relief, half burden.

  Once he had learnt the knack of retreat, it was easy. Silence is a weapon and, in using it, the wielder conveys all manner of power and self-knowledge. The relief of turning inward, of setting the face against the misery of the dormitory or playing-field, of being and tear-stained (and, later, a man with a spoilt marriage successful, but not brilliant, career) and moving to a quiet, sunlit interior landscape, there to crouch and lick wounds.

  No panacea remains indefinitely. Bacteria mutate to combat penicillin, ampicillin and trimethoprim. So, the retreat into silence became, as Max’s life progressed, less of a life-saver and more of a monster that controlled him. Certainly, to remain silent in the office, where making a noise is essential, was not a wise tactic, and Max’s comparative lack of advancement could be ascribed, in part, to this unwillingness to make enough noise. In marriage, silence acts as a vacuum into which evils are sucked.

  Helen tumbled to that early on. Coward, she taunted. Why don’t you say what you really think? On this, of all points, Helen was justified because she never scrupled to hold back on her own opinions.

  Typically, Prue was kinder and sought out the reasons. Please tell me what you’re thinking, she had begged him six months into their marriage, after a two-day period of Max barely speaking. (They had disagreed over where to take their holiday.) How can I understand otherwise?

  You can’t, Max had wished to say. No one can understand anyone else. The secret quarries of the mind are just that. Neither do I wish to be helped.

  No?

  Prue had helped him, lovingly and carefully. Although Max would not, perhaps, admit it, that was why he had married her. It was not Prue’s fault, either, that Max had learnt the art of survival in much tougher hands. In those days, an atheist hungering in his heart for faith, Max found it difficult to accept that trust and partnership could flourish between men and women. Neither, at that stage in their infant marriage, was Prue quite wise enough to point out that if you assume the worst it becomes impossible to accept the best. But they had learnt together.

  Max began to pack away his fishing equipment. He was beginning to feel the coarsening effects of being older. It mattered less that his career had not taken him to the top — and for that release he was thankful. Frustration and envy were not good bedfellows. But, from time to time, it concerned him that he no longer minded so much about behaving well. In other words he had become like his father.

  And here, wooed by the air and the drama of the mountains the impress of his parentage had particular sharpness, the Scottish Highlands, fishing, the annual summer holiday at Northwater House having been one of the gorier battlegrounds of his parents’ marriage. The panicked odour of dying fish and fresh blood cracked from their heads on stones, the sting of a midge bite, damp clothes, the acrid tang of peat soil were memories that dripped constantly over the line between the past and the present . . .

  ‘What are you doing, Max?’ The voice came out of that past, peremptory and demanding of an answer.

  ‘Nothing, Father.’

  ‘You must be doing something. And if not, why not? Idle blighter. Help pack up.’

  Max’s thirteen-year-old self had been watching the play of light on the pool formed by a conjunction of rocks and the bridge footings where trout - according to a notice in the guesthouse - lay with the express purpose of impaling themselves on the fisherman’s hook. So far this afternoon it appeared that the death-wish had deserted the fish and his father was leaving in disgust.

  His father’s five-o’clock-shadowed face was darkened by irritation. ‘Buggers. I’ve a good mind to demand my money back.’

  In post-war austerity, money was not a word to be taken lightly and its value was beaten daily into Max. He thought of the scene that might ensue and closed his eyes. Please, no.

  This summer the weather on the Ardnamurchan peninsula had been unpredictable: blazing hot one day, sodden the next. Today it was muggy and a storm-cloud of midges rose from the river. Max felt the sweat spring across the ridge in his back and soak into the waistband of his grey flannel shorts. (Don’t get them dirty, dear.) Beyond father and son rose the nursery slopes of the mountain, tender green and brown, and, above them, the curlews circled in the breathless hush.

  ‘Get on with it,’ bellowed his father.

  Max hauled himself to his feet and they stowed away the equipment. A folding army stool (which Max still used), the cumbersome picnic basket, huge mackintoshes stiffened with age, a tin of peppermints, whisky and a battered tin which held the flies. He sighed. Holidays were supposed to be noisy, jolly affairs with campfires, paperchases and fry-ups in the evening.

  With a great deal of noise, William Beckett tried to manoeuvre the Rover out of a mud patch in which he had, foolishly, parked it. (He was the kind of person who said, ‘Rubbish,’ when warned of obstacles.) The Rover stuck and Max piled out of the passenger seat and set his weedy body to shoving. The wheels churned. Mud splattered over the car body - and his shorts.

  ‘Can’t think what’s wrong with the car,’ said his father when Max climbed silently back in.

  On the way back to their dull guesthouse, they passed a young woman trudging along the road with her shopping. She had a young, Celtic-pale face and hips that swung to the rhythm of her walk.

  ‘I could . . .’ said Max’s father, slowing down, an expression contorting his features that Max only recognized when he was older as that of lust. ‘I’d . . .’

  Max turned his head and stared out of the window.

  His mother was waiting at the guesthouse in which they stayed each summer. It was a mean-windowed, stone-walled place dedicated to the suppression of high spirits. Not that Max possessed those in abundance, but he was young and, sometimes, the hunger to run and shriek, or merely laugh loudly, tore at him. But he knew better than to indulge it.

  On seeing him, his mother attacked him for dirtying his shorts, her air of permanent injury sharpened by having done nothing all day. To compensate herself for marrying Max’s father, Antonia took refuge in order. She possessed four pre-war tweed skirts, rotated weekly, and a dozen twin-sets, which were worn according to the season. Today, she sported lime-green — which alerted observers to the fact it was summer — and a string of grey ri
ver pearls which reminded Max of teeth.

  ‘It’s been a long day,’ she said when they assembled in the dining room with the other guests for herring high tea. ‘I thought you were never coming back.’

  ‘Bloody waste of time,’ said Max’s father, camouflaging the first of many whiskies with the water glass. ‘We’ve been bloody had this year. No bloody fish at all.’

  Antonia winced visibly and a faint pink tinged her complexion. ‘I wish you wouldn’t be so coarse, William.’

  William’s cold eyes raked the dim figure of his wife. It was not fair, but it so happened that Antonia was sitting in a light that showed her to the worst advantage. She looked more than usually worn and lustreless, not from overwork, for she lived a privileged life, but from disappointment. Deliberately, Max’s father raised his glass to his lips and Max shuddered for he knew that gesture.

  ‘And I wish you had breasts like a white dove,’ his father articulated, ‘instead of the scrag end you have hanging off your chest.’ He leant forward, paused and added in a a whisper, ‘And the wit to fuel a man’s needs.’

  ‘Oh, my God.’ Antonia looked wildly round the prim dining room. The words fell like stones into the dampish air reminding the occupants of unspeakable things they preferred to ignore. The colonel and his wife at the next table stared like wooden replicas at the window sill on which a dead fly reposed.

  ‘Oh, my God,’ whispered Antonia. ‘I’ll die of shame.’

  . . . After that scene, Max hardly spoke for three days. Along with the silences — which got mixed up with subject of sex - his hatred of porridge and herrings were acquired at Northwater House.

  If porridge and herrings were banished from Max’s agenda, it was odd that fishing remained. Each year, he swore he would no longer indulge in the stupendous expense, but back he went to stand for hours in the wind and the rain, or bucket about in a boat and returned with a fresh complexion to tell fisherman’s tales. I can’t understand the attraction, Prue complained. The point is, Max answered, usually through a cold contracted from a Highland dousing, neither can I.

  As Max drove back south with the smell of fish perfuming the car, damp clothes and muddy boots piled in the back and a selection of fishy parcels wrapped in brown paper, he wrestled with a mental picture that would not go away. It was of soft brown hair blowing in the draught of grimy air created by an incoming train, and a woman wearing a red scarf outlined against a hoarding advertising British Telecom.

  He put his foot down and the car speeded past the blue motorway signs, past the rash of ugly buildings in the ‘style motorway’ (which favoured clock towers and red paint) through slices of wet, lonely countryside, past villages hanging on the edge of survival and the squat buildings of Britain’s industries. Max crouched over the wheel - no car really catered for his height - and aimed to be home by late afternoon.

  Jane would be back at school and Prue, he knew, would be working in the library.

  Prue’s desk was in the drawing room and forbidden to everyone. Her insistence that no one else touched it was the only truly tiresome thing about his wife that Max could think of. He teased her sometimes as to what the desk contained. Now, as he entered the empty house and abandoned his luggage in the hall, Max wished he had not.

  The desk was made of rosewood and smelt of the polish that Prue favoured. On the mantelpiece beside it the tortoiseshell clock ticked noisily. An antique blue and white plate they had bought together in Hay-on-Wye hung in its accustomed place on the wall. Dust motes swirled in the afternoon sun which spread a glossy light over a pink and white china ballerina on the desk. It was minus a hand which had been Sellotaped to the tutu. A message in Jane’s handwriting was also stuck across the ballerina. ‘Don’t touch. Very, very precious.’ Max grimaced. The ballerina, acquired after seeing a performance of Swan Lake in London, was one of Jane’s very few girlie manifestations.

  Your father is unspeakable.

  Your mother is a fucking desert.

  My mother.

  My father.

  My wife.

  My daughters.

  Myself: a full bag of neuroses, disguised by six decades of living, worn corduroys, tartan handkerchiefs, aftershave, good shoes, a taste for biography and a greed for malt whisky. That is me.

  Max stretched out his hand. Like Jamie, his life had been rendered uncomfortable by the effects of the bomb in the City, and the idea of it preyed on his mind. Thus, as he made the gesture, he equated it to the terrorist’s action when he or she first pulled a pin or depressed a plunger. His fingers tensed. Once the action was done the result became the only thing that could matter. From then on, normal restraints were in the past, and it was not possible to go back.

  One drawer was devoted to bills . . . Sainsbury’s, Fenez of Farnham, Marks and Spencer at Marble Arch - Max frowned at that one. There was an invitation to contribute to a pension fund. Max’s frown remained in place. He had, he thought, discussed their financial arrangements carefully with Prue, and seen to it that she was provided for when he died. More than anything else, the idea that Prue was thinking independently of him financially suggested that she was evading his control.

  No, Max did not mean control - that was just a slip of the mental tongue. Control was not the word he wished to apply to his marriage.

  The second drawer contained a mish-mash. A letter from an old au pair bewailing her new lot and could she come back and work for dear Mrs Valour whose good heartiness (sic) she so admired and wanted to service (sic) again. The postscript to this touching appeal informed the reader that she was only being paid a fraction a week compared to what Prue had. There was a photograph of Jane dressed as a Merrie Man for the school play. A key with no label. A broken watch. A tiny white hospital bracelet which read: Daughter of Prudence Valour.

  Max’s hand shook a little.

  Three is a number common to fable and fairy stories. It holds magical properties, the key to structures, the promise of spiritual reward. Three times a prince endeavours to win his lady. The third and youngest son is the one blessed with strength and success. The third daughter is the one marked out by Fate. In ‘The Tinder Box’ the soldier is asked to choose between copper, silver and gold.

  In the third drawer Max discovered the following in Prue’s handwriting on a folded sheet of paper. ‘I have thought and thought about us and I regret . . .’ This had been crossed out and underneath was written, ‘One is ready to do anything to find peace once more. I have done everything; I have sought occupations . . . That, indeed, is humiliating - to be unable to control one’s thoughts, to be a slave of regret, of a memory, of a fixed and dominant idea which lords over the mind’ (Charlotte Brontë to Monsieur Héger).

  Underneath that Prue had also written, ‘How serious and dangerous it is curiously to examine the things that are beyond one’s understanding, and to believe in new things . . . and even to invent new and unusual things, for demons have a way of introducing themselves into suchlike curiosities’ (admonition addressed to Joan of Arc).

  It took all of Max’s self-control not to crush the sheet of paper into a ball. Here, he saw in a flash, his intuition primed by his love for Prue, was the message in the bottle. The tablet of stone. As he replaced the paper where he had found it, he noticed a smear of polish on the rosewood, a curl of dust behind the china ballerina, his big, shambling figure caught in the mirror above the fireplace.

  Articles about jealousy had sometimes appeared in Sunday newspapers and, over the years, Max had read them. He knew then from his experiences with Helen, as he knew now, that such journalism usually failed its readers. Nothing could adequately describe the sear of feeling: the isolation, the sensation of being unable to draw breath because it hurt, the shame of being jealous. Second time round was no help either. As with childbirth or injury, the mind constructs its defences and buries the sharper memory.

  Max had truly believed that he had found the formula which balanced reason with emotional and physical need. He had believed t
hat at sixty, it was possible to accept what, at twenty-five, was unacceptable and to understand the quirks of sexuality and to place them in a context.

  On the Sunday following his return from Scotland, Max and Prue were alone. In a further bid to help Jane, Prue had arranged for her to spend the weekend with one of her form-mates who showed signs of extending friendship.

  At lunch, Max said he could not finish his roast beef. Surprised, Prue looked up from hers. ‘I thought you’d like a roast.’

  ‘It’s tough,’ said Max, who did not normally comment on the cooking.

  ‘Sorry, darling. Obviously, I didn’t cook it very well.’

  He shrugged and got to his feet. ‘I’m not hungry so I won’t have any pudding.’

  This succeeded in astonishing Prue. ‘I’ve made lemon meringue. Your favourite.’

  There was a silence and Prue’s stomach contracted. Max looked away. Prue’s expression jarred on him: eyebrows slightly raised, a questioning curve to her bottom lip, the mole so marked on her skin. Once, he had imagined that her face was transparent and open. Now, he considered it the opposite.

  ‘I’m off for a walk,’ he said, and pushed back his chair with a screech.

  ‘Max!’

  I sounded like my father. Max paced up the hill towards the airstrip. I talked to Prue as if I was William.

  Nature was not in tune with Max’s feelings. It was one of those exhilarating summer days with blue sky, warm sun and a tantalizing suggestion of greater heat to come. Washed by winter and spring, colour had spread along neutral hedgerows, through the fields and along the horizon. Mallow and dog rose scattered soft pinks among the green.

  As he crested the hill and encountered the breeze which always blew off the crest, Max began to cry. As he was unused to crying, it took him by surprise. He had almost forgotten how the throat ached, or how water could force its way out of the eyes and down the cheeks. He stopped to search for a handkerchief.