Jamie covered her hand and pressed it against his well-exercised stomach. ‘Shut up, Prue.’
She pictured what lay beneath the still faintly tanned skin - a pulsing, coiled and looped landscape that existed to service Jamie’s taut, fresh-skinned body.
With the sharpened hunger of the condemned man, for Jamie sensed that he and Prue had moved to another stage, he again plundered the closed eyelids with his mouth and the line between the clean silk of her hair and her temples. ‘I do need you, Prue.’
She put her arms around his chest and held him. Their intimacy, a compound of sex, gratification, danger, shared guilt and indecision, intensified.
‘What do you want to do, Prue? For I think you do want to do something.’
She hesitated. ‘I don’t know Jamie. Except I can’t bear to be the reason for a shipwreck.’
‘I see.’ Jamie disengaged himself and got up from the bed. ‘So we don’t go on till we’re old and past it?’ From his height, he bent over Prue and twined his fingers into the hair at the nape of her neck and pulled her head back. ‘Plenty of people live double lives, you know.’
‘I understand that now,’ she replied, feeling the tug at her neck like the tug of sexual desire. ‘I just hadn’t been looking before.’
Jamie tried to imagine what it would be like to be normal again, to conduct a Monday-to-Sunday life minus Prue. ‘Have your feelings changed?’
‘No.’ Prue stretched out her hand, fingers quivering. ‘Look, Jamie, it shakes for you. My mouth aches. My legs are weak . . . and all the rest of it. Can I prove it any other way?’
Jamie had a sudden, disconcerting vision of the future — Violet (where had all his feelings gone?), Edward, the office, bills, office cars, a little gardening, negotiations, last-minute holidays in Italy — and yearning and loss flooded him.
‘Leave Max.’
He had spoken on the spur of the moment, but the sensation of an oiled, purposeful spring uncoiling inside him suggested that he had been thinking about it for some time.
‘What did you say?’ Prue’s face twisted with a mixture of joy, fear, but not surprise.
‘Leave Max.’
Leave Max? Prue’s emotions swooped in circles like the skylark’s, high on a cocktail of thin air.
‘I could get a job abroad. It would be exciting, Prue. You’d like it. You need a change.’
Do I? Leave Dainton? Leave jam-making, gardening and flower-arranging and the balancing of the WI’s accounts with which she did battle each year. Abandon a home, a husband and a child. Abandon the idea that a marriage should be made to work. Shut the door behind her, shake the dust from her feet - it had been done before, often. Helen had done it. Statistically speaking, women do it more frequently than men. The ideal soured by years of wielding Brillo pads and baby lotion, they leave their husbands, not the other way round.
‘What about the children?’ she asked him.
‘Yes, what about them?’ He sounded bleak.
Silence fell between them. Jamie looked down at his hands. ‘Let’s go out,’ he said abruptly.
She glanced around the room which, over the months, had been scaled of its glamour, rather as the scales were flaking away, in little pearly scabs, from Prue’s eyes. Once, its shoddiness had been exciting, now it appeared unjoyful and makeshift. They left the bed as smooth and unoccupied as they had found it.
A November afternoon in London exudes a lost quality of threatening fog, congealing cold and orange neon. Oxford Street was dense with shoppers and fractured by coloured slabs of Christmas decorations. There was a hum of noise, the grind of traffic and the restless beat of shoppers pressing in and out of the stores. The pavement was too crowded to walk two abreast, which made their progress uneven. Jamie’s irritation returned.
‘Where to?’ Prue slipped her hand through his elbow.
‘I don’t know,’ he said, wishing it was late enough for a drink. ‘Coffee?’
They made for the coffee shop in Selfridges and commandeered a table. Cappuccino arrived, foamed and flecked with chocolate. To give herself time before she tackled the issues, Prue stuck her spoon into the foam and scooped it up, struck by the childishness of the gesture.
As powerful as the released genie, a picture of Max in his city suit forced its way into her mind, followed by a thin white Jane. She watched them walk into the distance, knowing that for a long time she had ignored her connection to them. Or theirs to her. She looked up at Jamie and her mind cleared. What was left? A drained coffee cup, shame and regret mixed with intense happiness, the knowledge that she had grown, and a half memory of the old Prue.
She tinkered with cup and spoon, aware that Jamie’s scrutiny was accompanied by a certain acerbity, which she was also aware indicated he was determined on something.
‘I had no idea that kicking over the traces . . . sinning . . . would be so exhausting.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘It intrudes into your mind and acts like a magnet. Everything is pulled towards it. And you can’t stop thinking about it.’ Prue pushed her empty cup into the centre of the table. ‘Instead of being automatic, everything becomes self-conscious. I didn’t think it would be so difficult. I imagined it was just a question of taking off your clothes and that was that.’
Jamie was conscious of a tinge of impatience. He gave one of his half-smiles which clients had learnt meant he was thinking strategy. ‘Whoever sent you to a convent, Prue, did you a disservice. Sin does not come into it.’ Jamie had the benefit of a non-religious education, which allowed him to be more direct. He leant towards her. ‘You haven’t answered my question, Prue. Will you leave Max?’
‘I don’t want to answer it because I can’t.’ Prue took a deep breath, terrified suddenly at the thought of losing Jamie. ‘I don’t know what to think, or what to do.’
‘Perhaps,’ said Jamie wryly, ‘you need a head-on collision with God to test he’s there.’
She appreciated the joke. ‘Touché. I’ll shut up.’
Jamie looked at his watch. ‘I’ve got to go.’
For the first time ever, their meeting had proved unsatisfactory. Prue watched him pay the bill and leave. She knew she would never fully understand how or what she had got herself into, only that she was overflowing with a feeling to which she had become addicted, so strong, so consuming was it and she wondered what on earth she had done with her life before Jamie.
Prue emerged into the street and, skilled now in managing London’s crowds, threaded her way through the crush along Oxford Street towards Marble Arch. She had no fixed idea as to where she was going, neither did she care very much. At the junction, she paused and then descended the stairs to the subway.
Underneath stretched the tunnels of no-man’s land, spiked with sudden turns, blind alleys and hidden entrances, urine-impregnated, splashed with dirt and pulverized food, lit by a dirty light from yellow lamps.
Half-way along, Prue became aware of footsteps. They were gaining on her - fast. Various thoughts jostled for precedence, but she herself to walk purposefully: there was no reason to panic. She debated turning round to look, decided against it and hoisted her bag further up her shoulder. Despite these precautions, her heart tattooed against her chest with stabs of panic.
The subway lights blinked, and time elongated into seconds of intolerable tension, long enough for Prue queasily to construct a case that she deserved this: a squalid mugging, the stinging corrective of assault. Should she turn to receive the lash and the bruise, much as she had her lover’s caress?
‘Prue!’
She came to a dead halt, swivelled and, relief and ruefulness making her furious, cried, ‘Jamie. Why did you do that?’
He gripped the lapels of her coat and dragged her towards him. ‘I wanted to frighten you. And I did.’
‘Not very nice,’ she whispered, as her head fell back and her knees trembled with both fear and desire.
‘No.’
When he kissed her, she tasted grime
and exhaust fumes and supposed that he tasted it on her. Breathing rapidly, she buried her head in his shoulder.
A woman passed them, glancing at their locked figures with an expression of distaste. Prue recollected the times when she had been confronted by couples eating each other, and did not care.
‘Jamie, we can’t stay here.’
They moved off down the subway, up the stairs, and into the park, which was still open. Welded into a mass by the dark, the trees were tipped by neon and hugging blackness at their centres. A solitary man walked towards Speaker’s Corner, his shoes clicking on the path. Otherwise, it was deserted.
‘Why did you want to frighten me, Jamie? Why? Why?
His hand forced its way inside the fastenings of her coat. ‘If I was able to explain the things I feel about you, and as a result of you, then I would be a rich man.’
Prue shook her hair loose from her coat collar and arched her head back so that Jamie could cover the exposed skin with his mouth. Then he pulled her, smiling, towards the blackness and concealment, their feet leaving matching depressions in the damp ground.
‘Here,’ said Jamie and pressed against the furthest tree. ‘And don’t say no, otherwise I’ll make you.’
‘Yes,’ said Prue, as his hands travelled roughly up her skirt, experiencing the triumphant thrill of yielding, of being at her most female and feminine. She moved a little to accommodate him. Jamie pressed closer.
‘Wait,’ she said, and altered her clothing, shivering as tongues of cold air licked the inside of her thighs. Then she said triumphantly: ‘Now.’
Afterwards, Jamie leant slack and heavy on her and pinioned her to the tree. He was panting and laughing.
‘I never, ever imagined . . .’
Prue let her head rest against the bark and smiled at the lights of an aircraft moving in an arc through the sky. Where in the world had it come from? From plague, starvation, political uncertainty? She did not care. The episode had taken only a couple of minutes but she, Prue Valour, had travelled to the outer limits of lust.
She turned his face towards her. ‘I love you,’ she said, searching for his face in the dark.
He appropriated her hand in his and ran his thumb over her palm in the intimate and tender gesture that made Prue catch her breath.
‘I love you,’ she repeated, imprisoning his thumb by curling up her hand. ‘And I must go home.’
Gently, he buttoned her blouse and straightened her skirt and she brushed at her hair with her fingers. The temperature had dropped and their combined breath streamed into the night.
‘When do I see you again?’
She took a deep breath. ‘I don’t know, Jamie.’
On the train at Waterloo, Prue searched in her too-small handbag for a piece of paper, and began to make a list of Christmas presents. Then she divided the page into ‘food’ and ‘things to organize’. Gradually, the wild, primitive feelings rocking her body dispelled along with the longing, and the urge to touch the stars. The train swayed from side to side, and the smell, peculiar to electric trains, seeped up from the floor. The dark outside the window was as thick as a blanket. Prue let the list drop into her lap and closed her eyes.
‘Is that ZBD Software?’
‘Yup,’ replied a terminally bored voice.
Prue squinted at Jane’s list of Christmas requirements, which made no concessions to legibility. ‘Look, I don’t know what I’m talking about but I want to order some things for my daughter.
‘Name on credit card, please.’
‘Before I order I want to check it will arrive before Christmas.
‘Sorry, can’t do anything without credit-card details.
After a tussle over the spelling of Dainton, Prue asked for what Jane had ordered.
‘We don’t have that one but could supply a similar model.
‘Could I send it back if it’s not right?’
‘We charge an administration cost.’
The telephone emitted a dead silence. Prue took the plunge ‘OK, I’ll order.’
‘That will be five pounds postage and packing.’
‘But it only costs nine pounds.’
‘Do you want to order?’ The voice had turned impatient.
Prue slammed down the receiver. If I sit very quietly, she thought to herself, then perhaps everything will go away. If I am extra, extra still and quiet perhaps it will turn out to be a dream.
She tried the old tricks. Think of Joan.
Against all advice, she had been desperate to achieve the impossible, which was to capture Paris. The largest city in Christendom, with its hundred thousand citizens, moats, guns on the ramparts. Ranged against it, Joan’s army and a wavering king who was conducting secret negotiations with the enemy and pursuing his own agenda. Joan had also broken her sword - the one she claimed had been given to her by God - by striking a camp prostitute with the flat of its blade, It was a bad omen and was seen as such. The offensive against Paris was a doomed enterprise, too, and Joan lost badly. Paris refused to be taken and she was borne away on the tide of a retreating, surly army.
Thereafter, Joan’s luck, her vision, her whatever-you-choose-to-call-it ran out.
Christmas presents, school runs, hotel rooms, making wild, outrageous love in a public park, a hurting, bleeding husband, a lover who had hacked his way through the hedge of thorns to the modest house (and modest life) where she had lain sleeping. A stepdaughter. A daughter whose accusing face and bewildered eyes were locked on her mother’s.
Perhaps her luck had run out too?
Chapter Twenty-Six
It was lunchtime, and, against all expectation, an early Christmas rush in Forsight’s bookshop had gathered momentum. The shop was unusually full and stuffy. The more swingeing the recession, it seemed, the more the book as a present grew in political correctness. ‘Indisputably cheaper than caviar,’ said Gerald, propping up a sagging dumpbin. Either that or the free warmth and an undemanding dose of piped classical music kept the customers coming.
For the umpteenth time the telephone rang and Gerald held it out to Prue, who balanced the pile of paperbacks she was sorting against the counter and took the call pressed up against the wall to avoid the crush. It was Mrs Harriman.
‘We would like either you or Mr Valour to come and collect Jane today,’ she said. ‘We think she needs a few days at home.’
Fear took Prue in its jaws and shook her. She could barely articulate. ‘Why?’
‘Jane has been very under par this week. So has her work.’ Fatigue and real concern toned down Mrs Harriman’s disapproval but she managed to suggest - yet again - that the situation was Prue’s fault. Buried in the part of Prue that did not want to listen, a voice said: She may be right.
Over the years complacency had provided a stout shield for Prue against the buffets, and feeling squarely in the wrong was something else with which she was coming to terms.
Time to plant the standard on the ditch? Time to admit that life was tougher and more draining than she had allowed? At forty-one Prue observed her fingers curled round the receiver, and concluded that, for most of her adult life, she had been in retreat.
‘Yes, Mrs Harriman,’ she said.
‘The headmistress had a word with her this morning and it seems to have upset Jane a great deal, in fact she grew quite hysterical, so we judge it best that she goes home to calm down,’ said Mrs Harriman. ‘We have been keeping an eye, as you asked us, on her eating.’
‘So have we,’ said Prue, ironing any suggestion of defensiveness out of her tone. ‘Her weight is stable at the moment, yes?’
On this occasion, Gerald was not so accommodating when Prue asked if she could go early. He took off his glasses and slammed them into their case.
‘If the job is becoming too much,’ he said, ‘you must tell me.’
‘I’m sorry to let you down.’ Prue looked Gerald squarely in the eyes but he merely extracted his glasses from the case and turned away.
Prue’s gaze ro
ved along the bookshelves and stopped at Fict.: W. Wasn’t it in Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust where Brenda Last, having been informed that John is dead, lets out a sigh of relief when she discovers that the dead John is not her lover, but her son?
Prue understood now — for she knew there had been times during her battle when she would not have given up Jamie. Never would, perhaps, but she must remember that, if she shared a complicity with the terrible Brenda, it did not mean that they were the same person. But yes, she and Kate had agreed during one of their no-holds-barred talks that they would never put their children in jeopardy. But, lo and behold, that’s exactly what she had done.
Feeling guilty about Gerald, Prue sorted the paperbacks into the shelves and went to fetch her coat. ‘Letting down’ people had become a regular debit on her account. Who else could she let down, she wondered slightly hysterically? She had already let down her employer, her husband, her daughter, her friends. The cat?
Jane was waiting in the front hall of the school and plainly in no state to be lectured. The junior mistress who was guarding her, handed her over with the jolliness that hides extreme embarrassment and Prue bundled her into the car.
‘Home,’ she said.
‘Home?’ Jane made the word sound as if it was recently acquired foreign vocabulary.
In Hallet’s Gate, Prue stood her silent daughter in the kitchen and unwound her scarf, removed her woollen gloves and eased the school coat off bony, unresponsive shoulders. Then she rubbed Jane’s hands between her own. They felt cold and unlived-in.
‘Jane.’ Where once Prue would have been confident, she was now uncertain. ‘Can you tell me what’s the matter?’
Jane shook her head. ‘Leave me alone, Mum.’
‘But something’s wrong.’
Prue did not require verbal confirmation, and nor could Jane give it. She allowed her mother to fuss over her and, while Prue did so, she observed her with a grown-up pair of eyes. This was not the parent who had guarded Jane and taught her the shape of the world. This was no longer the mother who was on her side but, apparently, a stranger with a secret. Jane knew, she just knew that the secret was harmful. Above everything else, Jane hated Prue for changing.
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