Perfect Love

by Elizabeth Buchan

  Jamie pulled her down. ‘And very nice it is too,’ Prue grimaced. ‘If it makes you happy, it could be argued there are rules that apply to us, Prue, and this situation. What’s more, we’re obeying them.’

  ‘Do you really believe that?’

  Jamie shifted on to an elbow so that he could gaze down on the face he had grown to love more than he could say and it was love, rather than morality or philosophy or even good sense, which fueled his arguments. ‘Things are never as simple as you see them, my Prue,’ he said and stroked her cheek.

  ‘That’s what I told Jane.’ Prue relaxed back on to the sheets.

  ‘But do you believe it?’ Jamie’s fingers walked light as a feather down Prue’s sensitized body. ‘We’re just us. Nobody else. This is a bit of our lives that is particularly private.’

  She had a feeling that she was missing something vital, but Jamie’s finger had stopped.

  Later she said, ‘What shall we do this afternoon?’

  It was shaded in the hotel bedroom and Jamie’s eyes were dark and unreadable which exerted a particular fascination on Prue. ‘I rather imagined you wished to remain on this bed. Am I wrong?’

  Prue bent over him. Her lips were sore and her body felt battered, wonderfully beautifully battered. ‘I want to do something with you. Cinema, gallery, anything.’

  She wanted the pleasure of walking down the street holding Jamie’s hand. Of being on display as a couple in public. Or sitting at a table in a cafe. She wanted strangers to look at Jamie and herself and to register the rope of plaited emotion that stretched between them.

  The hotel staff knew them by now and the clerk behind the counter nodded neutrally as they walked out of the front entrance.

  ‘He will be used in evidence against us,’ Prue remarked.

  ‘Your conscience is guilty today, isn’t it?’

  ‘It’s always there,’ she said. ‘How can it not be?’

  He took her hand. ‘Don’t, Prue.’

  Wanting to handle it well, she thought carefully before saying, ‘It’s fine, Jamie. I’m not going to make you carry my burdens.’

  She pressed her thumb into Jamie’s palm and they walked down to Oxford Street and, via the underpass, into Hyde Park. Here they maintained a space between their two bodies, Prue hugging her shoulder bag which was full of books. Jamie stuffed his hands into his pockets, looking out of place in his grey city suit among the tourists and children.

  ‘Ice-cream?’ he asked. Prue shook her head and Jamie bought himself a vicious-looking thing from a vendor. He had an idea. ‘Dinosaurs,’ he said. ‘Let’s go and see them in the Natural History Museum.’

  ‘If you knew,’ Prue emphasized each word, ‘how many times I’ve been to see the dinosaurs you would not suggest it. Anyway, you’ll be taking Edward later on. Lots and lots of times.’

  The thought struck home to Jamie. ‘Yes, I suppose I will.’

  Instead, they fetched up in the basement of the Science Museum admiring the original Crappers, blue and white china lavatory bowls, old gas fires, early stoves and other domestic developments.

  ‘A bullseye,’ concluded Jamie after examining an early Aga. ‘A machine for cooking and a cosy ideal all wrapped up in one parcel. Whoever invented it was quite brilliant.’

  ‘Not as clever as the wheel,’ said Prue, who had been very taken by the steam engines upstairs.

  Jamie pinched her bottom and she laughed. Together, they gazed into the glassed-in displays of electric lamps.

  ‘When did you first know?’ asked Jamie, his breath frosting the glass.

  ‘That time in the cathedral.’ Pure knew exactly what Jamie was asking. ‘I knew I should be looking for God, but I found you.’

  ‘Are you searching for God?’

  She pointed at a lamp whose design intrigued her. ‘I don’t know. Are you?’

  ‘Merchant bankers and God!’

  ‘That’s too obvious,’ said Prue, ‘but I take the point.’

  She slipped her hand into his and he drew it up against his chest and held it tight.

  Jamie insisted on seeing Prue off at Waterloo. Don’t feel too guilty, he said as she got into the train. I’ll try not to, Prue replied, but it would be a strange thing if I didn’t worry about it. You are in it unless you choose to get out, he said, and kissed her quickly on the cheek. He did not mean the train.

  No wonder rationalists distrusted love, she thought. No wonder Church and moralists have striven to keep it under lock and key and searched for ways to diffuse its power. No wonder love is perceived as a monster that gobbles up whatever lies in its path. Children, spouses, households. Money and good sense.

  Think of Joan instead.

  Think of the pounding that took place at the Tourelles on that bright May day where the French fought the English from seven o’clock in the morning until eight o’clock at night, but made no headway.

  Her shoulder bandaged with cotton to staunch the blood, Joan took stock and withdrew to an orchard where she prayed. Then she galloped back, seized her standard from the Basque who was carrying it for her and shook it vigorously. ‘Whereupon’, the chronicler wrote, ‘all the Maid’s army rushed together and immediately rallied.’

  Renewed and inspired, the English resistance collapsed and the French seized the day. A triumphant Joan shouted to the English commander to yield to the King of Heaven: ‘You have called me whore, but I have great pity on your soul.’

  The accusation of sexual impropriety - ‘the harlot of the Armagnacs’ - was always one that particularly upset and enraged the Maid. And she was right to guard her reputation. Her virginity, her virtue, was beyond price for it gave her power not so much over women but over men. Joan knew that to engage in any sexual activity would both corrupt and taint her body, and her power would leach away into tales of lechery and defiled flesh.

  So simple for Joan, thought Prue.

  Max observed his second wife as, twenty-five years previously, he had watched his first. He was almost sure that his suspicions were correct. Almost but not absolutely.

  She seemed happy, she had lost weight, she was a little abstracted. Nothing significant in itself, and there was danger in deciding, as opposed to knowing, that something was true - because it became so.

  Max repeatedly asked himself what was the point of knowing. Of course he would prefer - desperately wanted - his wife to remain faithful, but since, courtesy of the age-gap and the ageing process, it was probably an unrealistic expectation, was he not muddying already dangerous waters? If he conceded the principle then, surely, it did not matter if he was aware of the chapter and verse of his wife’s infidelity?

  Well, yes. In the way that someone suffering from toothache, or an unhealed wound, kept pressing on the spot.

  After tackling the outside paintwork of Hallet’s Gate, Max organized a complete programme inside. Dining room. Drawing room. Kitchen. The double bedroom - and began with the latter. When Prue grumbled at the disruption, Max told her to stop complaining, threw a dust sheet over their bed and blotted it out.

  ‘Same again, Prue, I take it?’ Max indicated white on the colour chart.

  Prue, who had often considered pale pink and grey, but was unsure of what Max was up to did not dare to suggest otherwise. ‘Fine,’ she said.

  Max prepared the walls. He had not appreciated before how an emptied, echoing room takes on a symbolic dimension. Stripped of colour, it acquires the monastic look and Max was reminded of the reconstruction of a monk’s cell in Beaulieu Abbey. How long did it take a blank wall to hone your mind into obedience and equanimity? he wondered. The difference, he assumed, was that the monk considered the blank wall to be a positive statement. Max did not.

  Grimly, he washed the walls down, wiped the skirting boards and rubbed them dry. Then he Polyfilla-ed as if it was an art-form, sandpapered until his arm ached, and spent the weekend applying undercoat.

  ‘I’ll finish next weekend,’ he informed Prue over a dismal Sunday supper of scrambled eg
gs, and they retired to the single beds in the spare room.

  In his dreams, Max returned to childhood. To the discomfort of being born to parents who embarrassed him to the depths of his soul and yet exacted a painful love. How could he not love them? They were all he had.

  Max dear, don’t put your feet on the settee.

  Max, do you have to spread your stamps all over the table?

  Max, do . . . Max, don’t . . .

  When you roger a woman, his father advised him, you must remember that you are in command. It’s like driving a car. You shift the gears. You control the performance. Remember that, otherwise they get the upper hand. Doesn’t matter if it’s a Morris Oxford or a Rolls-Royce, the mechanism is the same.

  Max discovered later that his father could lay fair claim to these statements having taken, as it were, his advanced test and driven a sizeable number of women - in fact, a disgraceful tally. Then, of course, there was the incident with the gun, which drew from Max both pity and horrified amusement. Later, he tried to feel contempt for the big, foul-mouthed philanderer, until he remembered the fishing trips, the cricket, the long companionable car journeys and the pints of beer in the pub, the sense that he was being watched over by a kind of love, and his contempt was replaced by a deep, unhealed loss.

  To which Helen had contributed . . .

  Sergeant Miles had been one of those textbook soldiers, with handlebar moustaches, a taste for bullying and a righteous mission to knock the scions of England into shape on their National Service.

  National Service! National Bloody Misery.

  The Sergeant set about his task in a shed, marked out by a double row of beds, smelling of sweat, unwashed blankets and semen expended in loneliness and frustration. Otherwise Sergeant Miles permitted nothing: no pictures, no books. His material was the raw, spotty recruit.

  ‘Now, you boogers. You won’t be seeing the outside of these barracks for some time.’

  Max willed himself to think of other things. Fishing, pellucid water and undulating mats of underwater weed. A painting he had seen in a Mayfair house. Sex, the non-onanistic variety, a tantalizing taste of which he had been lately introduced to by Betty, his mother’s obliging housemaid.

  ‘Are we composing poetry, Corporal?’

  ‘Yessir. I mean, nosir.’

  A heavy hand descended on to Max’s shoulder. ‘It’s a funny thing, Corporal, but I have an idea I don’t like your attitude. You have a sorta look that tells me that you don’t give a tinker’s about what I’m saying.’

  Clearly, Sergeant Miles’s light blue bully’s eyes were strangers to finer points of feeling. Max gave in. He knew the type, he knew the score, he wanted to get by and he wanted to get by without being noticed — which was difficult with his height.

  ‘I’ll keep your secret, sonny, never fear.’

  ‘What secret, sir?’

  Sergeant Miles attacked one of his handlebars. ‘That you are a useless, overgrown nancy, if ever I saw one, who thinks he’s going to sail through this little episode of slumming but who thinks wrong.’

  The conversation marked the beginning of a programme of attrition that the Sergeant dished out at every opportunity. During the next eighteen months, Max learnt it was necessary to be tough to survive misery, physical exhaustion and, worst of all, boredom -but it had to be real, bone-deep toughness, not a pretence. Max knew, too, that salvation lay in humour but it was hard to laugh. Fling an intake of youths together, put them in the charge of the Mileses of this world, subject them to every physical coarseness you can think of and what, during those fifties years, did you end up with in the way of English manhood?

  Max for one. The aching, trembling thing that was Max Valour at twenty. Somehow, out of the jelly, the fear and longing for death, Max had to shape himself up for life.

  Several times he asked himself why it was that, in theory, life contained so much - music, beauty, powerful emotion - when he had been dished out a boil on the neck, sweaty underpants, bloody awful food, hatred of anything militaristic and, at night, the sounds of men snoring.

  When he walked into the Boffin nightclub with Dickie Bennett a couple of months before his release back into civilian life, Max spotted Helen immediately. She was talking to a couple of men in grey suits and her beauty struck a blow to Max’s starved heart. As a Boffinette, Helen was dressed in a tweeny outfit with a plunging neckline and very high heels which gave her an unbalanced look. Rocking on those heels, she had turned and fixed her eyes on Max and Dickie and the curve of her breasts and intelligent dark eyes (he did not notice the too-thin mouth) and, as yet, an untouched quality in her face almost brought Max to a halt.

  He should have deduced from his behaviour on the shooting range (dogged, dogged practice until his aim was dead-eyed and the envy of the squad) that he possessed untapped resources. He had imagined that he had no courage, no terrier qualities, not enough sense of self to endeavour to capture another.

  But he did. Endless telephone calls, elaborate arrangements to get out of the barracks, flowers and letters later, Helen agreed to come out to dinner. By then, Max had been past eating and drank instead of the fathomless pools of her eyes and rejoiced that, at last, life was yielding up some riches.

  The humour, so painfully acquired, stood him in good stead for Helen was not easy and never concealed boredom. Max’s boil refused to heal, and his rawness and over-eagerness bored her mightily. He wanted her body: the white breasts, slightly too full thighs and the tiny pocket of fat that sat on her hips. Above all, he wanted to capture the grubby, selfish, grasping spirit that inhabited the body that so fascinated him.

  ‘Stop it, Max,’ she would say through her thin, scarlet-slicked lips. ‘I want someone adult.’ They were the same age, but Helen imagined she was older.

  This was where Max’s terrier came in and he held on, with jaws that grew stronger every day.

  ‘All right,’ she said at last, worn down by the siege, fixing him with the eyes that promised oblivion and Nirvana, ‘we can go to bed. I owe you that. But only once.’

  ‘That’s enough,’ said ignorant Max, fingers already fumbling at his shirt.

  They were at his flat and Dickie had been bribed with beer to stay away. The gas flared in the filaments and gave off its distinctive smell. Outside its ring of warmth, the room was icy and Max’s bed occupied a polar region in the corner.

  In her electric blue dress (a colour in which Prue also looked good), Helen watched Max. His torso emerged from his shirt and he stopped, unsure how to proceed, failing to take Helen into his arms and to undress her. After a second or two, he continued and took off his trousers and stood, very white-skinned, in socks and underpants.

  ‘My God,’ said Helen from the safety of the clothed, ‘what have I let myself in for?’

  Life may have dealt Max largeness and a boil but he expected such to be his lot. Unlike his fantasies of making love to Helen. Despite Betty the housemaid, he had envisaged that sex just happened. One moment, you are dressed, the next not. He had imagined, too, that romance was a solid thing.

  It was not. It fled under the assault of bony knees, Helen’s unconcealed contempt, the Arctic temperature, his inability to take charge and his desperate need. Thus, instead of surging like a triumphant fish through tropical waters, Max was brought up against his ignorance.

  Helen showed him. He had known she was experienced but it hurt to have it demonstrated quite so brutally. This way, she told him. That way. And Max who had so wanted to lead, followed.

  Never, never again, she said afterwards. I want a rich man who wants a wife. Not you. Max argued that he would be reasonably well off as a solicitor. Articles over the next twelve months, then a partnership. Equity partnership within ten to fourteen years. ‘Give me ten years,’ he begged.

  Helen looked at Max as if he was mad, and her dark eyes were contemptuous. ‘I’m not sitting in a semi in Guildford wearing gingham while I wait for you to get rich.’

  He wanted to slap the
jeer from the scarlet lips and take her by the shoulders and shake until her teeth rattled. But he knew he was just as likely to press kisses into the hollows made by her collarbones and suck like a drowning man on that jeering mouth.

  ‘Where will you find him, Helen?’

  ‘There will always be someone,’ she said.

  After that exchange, Max allowed himself to get drunk and took Helen home. Her flat was in a decaying house off Sloane Avenue in the days before Chelsea became fashionable. At the front door, she said goodbye in a final-sounding voice and turned away. He caught a whiff of jasmine scent and tobacco, and a madness gripped him.

  ‘No you bloody don’t,’ he said and, grabbing her by the hand, he pulled her upstairs to her room and bundled her inside. Then he pulled off Helen’s mackintosh and ripped at her blouse.

  ‘Stop it, Max.’

  Helen fought him as best she could but, hardened by two years of army life, he was stronger.

  Instinctively, Max knew that Helen enjoyed what followed. As he pushed his way towards what he wanted and ignored her cries, he saw the thin mouth suddenly slacken with desire and felt the white body respond as it had not before. He held her arms tightly and inserted a knee between her legs.

  ‘You will listen to me,’ he muttered through clenched teeth.

  ‘You bastard,’ she spat back, but the last syllable was teased out, silky and heavy. Triumphant finally, he smiled down at her.

  ‘Got you,’ he said.

  A month later, Helen knocked at Max’s front door and stood, hunched and ill-looking, on the threshold. He had not seen her since that night but his dreams were filled with images of their thrashing bodies that caused him to wake shaking with desire and frustration.

  ‘I’ve got to speak to you, Max.’

  He lit the gas fire and made a pot of tea. She was sullen but accepted a cup and balanced it on the inelegant wing of the armchair.

  ‘What is it, Helen?’ Max’s cup clattered in the saucer.

  ‘Don’t do that,’ she said. ‘It’s irritating.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘I’m in pig.’ She shot him a quick, calculating look. ‘And I want you to pay to get rid of it.’