The Love Market

by Carol Mason

  Aimee sings along with Duffy, to Warwick Avenue while she has the task of setting the table. It’s Father’s Day and I have invited my dad. Aimee was supposed to take Mike out with the money she’s saved up but changed her mind and wanted to invite him over here. My dad said he wanted to bring Anthea, who he has apparently been seeing a lot of when he’s not molesting models, or trying to pick up my clients. Then I casually asked Mike if he wanted to bring Jennifer, and he did. Jacqui is coming alone.

  Aimee’s little warble on the high notes makes me smile as I bash a piece of garlic and ginger in my mortar to make a dressing to toss over the watercress salad that I’m laying out with the grilled salmon. I’m just adding the oil when the phone rings.

  ‘Hi.’ I hear Patrick’s voice, and light up.

  I wipe a sticky hand down the front of my apron. ‘Hi to you indeed!’ Aimee looks at me, witheringly, out of the corner of her eye, and I motion for her to turn down the music.

  ‘God, I miss you.’ he says.

  ‘I bet you say that to all the girls.’

  ‘But to you I actually mean it.’

  ‘Ha ha.’

  ‘What are you doing, wearing, thinking… I want the whole picture.’

  ‘Oh!’ I laugh. ‘Well, I’m making dinner. It’s Father’s day and I’m having my dad over.’ Aimee casts me another sidelong glance at the conspicuous absence of Mike’s name. ‘I’m wearing an apron, and I’m thinking, erm, what am I thinking?’ I whisper, ‘that I’m very glad you called.’

  ‘Oh,’ he says. ‘That sounds good.’

  ‘Which bit?’

  ‘All of it. I wish I was there.’ The dampened note of his voice.

  ‘So what have you been up to?’ I ask him, brightly.

  ‘Oh, organizing my office and a few other things. I’m working on an outline for a book on my time in the Middle East. Did I mention that to you?’

  ‘Ah!’ He did. ‘So you made a start? That’s excellent.’

  ‘Finally. Yes. Although I don’t have much to show for my efforts. You could say I’ve been distracted.’

  ‘Have you?’ I smile and Aimee goes upstairs, casting me another disapproving look.

  ‘Every time I sit down to think about the Taliban I end up thinking about you.’

  ‘I wonder what that says about me?’

  He laughs. ‘Anyway, I wanted to tell you something—the reason why I rang. I’ve decided to take the job.’

  I stare at the oblongs of salmon lying on foil on the grilling tray. ‘It’s a good opportunity for me to establish myself somewhere. I’m thinking I can work on my book at the same time, and maybe it won’t be such a bad life…’

  I clear my throat. ‘Congratulations.’ What else was I hoping he was going to say? ‘I’m sure it’ll be a great life. I’m happy for you.’

  Tense silence. Upstairs I can hear Aimee singing along to Leona Lewis’s Bleeding Love. ‘I gave it a lot of thought. I didn’t really see what the other options were.’ He sounds like he’s explaining himself.

  ‘Of course.’ I force a smile into my voice. What was I even thinking his other options were? That he was going to give up his life and move to northern England?

  It never would have worked. Because it was never meant to. Stupid!

  ‘You know my dad and Mike should be here soon.’

  ‘Mike?’

  ‘Well, it is Father’s day.’

  ‘Oh,’ he says. ‘Of course. But I was going to ask you something, before you go…’ He hesitates then says, ‘I wanted to know if you’d like to come here in the summer holidays with Aimee? Maybe middle of August?’

  ‘Come there?’

  ‘Yeah. For two weeks, if you think you could persuade her. I’ll pick up the cost of the tickets.’

  He’s going to pay for us to go and see him? I already visualize this conversation with my daughter.

  ‘I could show you Toronto. Then we could go to Muskoka, to the lakes. I have a small cabin up there. I inherited it when my dad died. It doesn’t get used very often. It could probably stand a clean up, but it’s right on the water. We could go fishing, boating, have barbeques. Aimee can see wolves and moose and white-tailed deer and black bears. The real Canada.’

  ‘Patrick,’ I fill with an inner longing, and regret hovering moments ago on that line of doubting him. ‘It’s a lovely thought. It really is. And I’d like nothing more, I really would. But I just don’t see it happening.’ I go back to slapping salmon around, my phone tucked under my chin.

  ‘Hey, don’t be so quick to say it can’t happen. I’ve got faith in you persuading her. Just think, Aimee could take some awesome photographs, bring her painting supplies…’

  ‘Well, I’ll have to think. But…’ I grimace. ‘What happens after the lovely holiday is over?’

  He sighs, and I wish I could take the question back. You fool! ‘Celine, I wasn’t thinking that far ahead. I just want to find a way of seeing you again. I want you to see this place, see Canada, see my life.’

  When I don’t respond he says, ‘Well, I should let you get back to your cooking, shouldn’t I?’

  ‘Probably.’

  ‘I love you,’ he says.

  But before I can reply he has rang off.

  ~ * * * ~

  Mike and Jennifer arrive first. Opening my door and seeing them both standing there is so bizarre that they must see the shock that comes over me before I have a chance to smile. ‘Hi,’ I say, brightly, but it’s too late. Mike’s eyes have so many mixed messages in them that it’s unbearable for me to look.

  ‘Come in,’ I say, noting that Jennifer looks very mod today, in faded, low-rise, rolled-up jeans, wedge sandals—the kind that Aimee would covet—and a sleeveless cotton floral top. She has her longish brown hair pulled back into a messy ponytail.

  ‘For you,’ she says, presenting me with an armful of flowers. ‘Just a little thank you, for, well, amongst other things, inviting me to your lovely home. It was a really unexpected, but lovely, invitation.’

  I thank her. ‘Glass of wine?’ I ask, quickly turning and trotting down the passageway.

  My dad and Anthea arrive about two minutes after. Which is a relief, because Aimee has just greeted Jennifer with a glower then gave her dad a possessive and rather protracted cuddle. When I open the door I’m completely unprepared to see my dad alongside a very old-fashioned, middle-aged woman. She has uniformly dyed dark brown hair that’s growing out at the roots, and a cheerless smile. And between the unusually large gap between her top lip and her nose, is a moustache Charlie Chaplin would have been proud of.

  ‘This is Anthea,’ my dad says, stressing her name. Anthea and I go to shake hands, and I ignore the fact that my dad is measuring me for my reaction to the sight of his girlfriend. Anthea’s and my eyes meet briefly, then we both make a policy of quickly looking away.

  Mike puts new batteries in the smoke alarm for me that has recently started tweeting all day as though we are living under the same roof as a family of foul-tempered sparrows. I keep an eye on the salmon grilling, and Anthea—who seems really nice—and Jennifer chatter away, while Aimee shows my dad her progress on the seascape she’s been working on since she and her granddad last went out.

  Jacqui arrives in an emerald green strapless sundress, smelling fresh, and bearing red and white wine. When she sets eyes on Anthea, Jacqui’s smile takes on a cunning quality, and she keeps trying to catch my eye, so I have to avoid looking at her.

  ‘You’re looking very lovely as usual,’ my dad sidles up to Jacqui. My father has always had a thing for Jacqui. And Jacqui has always managed to appreciate the charmer he is, and the suave lady-killer he obviously once was. Jacqui’s eyes linger on my father’s new teeth. ‘She smells of sunscreen,’ he says to Anthea, about my sister. And I know that my father is the type of man, who, no matter how much he might claim to only have eyes for you, will never be able to resist leering after a passing bit of skirt. His hand lingers on Jacqui’s waist, his face reaching to Jac
qui’s to smell her behind the ears. ‘Is it sunscreen?’ he asks her, his eyes eating her up. Jacqui grins from ear to ear, at me.

  ‘Isn’t she a knockout,’ my dad comes over and says quietly to me. ‘And single again, too.’

  I frown. ‘How is she single?’

  He leans into my ear. ‘If I can’t see him, he doesn’t exist.’

  ‘It’s done, I think!’ I prise two flakes of fish apart with a knife and fork. Mike is suddenly standing unnervingly close to me now. My dad has gone back to pestering Jacqui.

  ‘It is,’ Mike says. ‘You definitely want it out now, or it’ll be dry.’

  ‘Thanks. For telling me what I already know.’ I smile at Mike. Mike always used to mock my cooking. And while I honestly don’t think it’s terrible—and it definitely has improved since Mike moved out—I have to admit that Mike was the main chef in the family, and I probably could have learned a few things from him. I pop the tray on top of the oven, then give my salad dressing a final vigorous shake before tipping it into the bowl.

  ‘I’d better take my jacket off,’ he says. ‘That looks oily.’

  ‘Excuse me,’ I slide past him to turn off the oven. ’Olive oil is replete with heart-healthy vitamins and antioxidants.’ I’ve no idea if it is, but it shuts him up anyway. For a moment he continues to stand there, his gaze the only thing moving as it follows me around his body.

  Molly comes mewing into the kitchen to greet the company. Mike picks her up and cuddles her. ‘My old girl,’ he says. ‘How have you been, eh? Do you miss your old man?’

  I turn and quickly catch Mike’s eyes looking at me.

  ~ * * * ~

  The meal goes down well. I have pulled out the leaf in the table, and we sit with the back door open, hearing the birds in the garden. ‘We should have eaten outside,’ I say, wishing I’d thought to set up the picnic table.

  ‘It might be cold to eat outside,’ Anthea says. ‘It’s warm while you’re walking around, but not so great to sit in.’ She holds my eyes and I try very hard not to let mine drop to what I’ve noticed are three or four extremely long moustache hairs amongst the downier ones.

  My dad keeps us all entertained. Anthea sits next to him like a fixture, with the unexcitable air of someone much older and more jaded than she probably is. She’s not the most feminine of souls. I’m not trying to be cruel about her, it’s just a shock to see the disparity: between what my father used to get, and what he attracts now. He told me that she has been divorced for twenty years. Now, given that my father is in his mid-seventies and she can’t be more than sixty, I should be having a very hard time imagining what she sees in my father. Yet it’s more the other way round. And I can tell, by the glances she’s shooting me, that Jacqui is thinking the same thought. I put their relationship down to an ill-conceived companionship. Curiosity satisfied on that score, I move on to Mike and Jennifer. My gaze shifts surreptitiously between them, and her large breasts, especially when she moves an inch closer to say something to him that must be a touch too intimate for the table to hear. They almost can’t be real. Yet I can’t see her being the type to go for implants.

  ‘I remember she wore a pea green chiffon dress…’ My dad is in the throes of one of his stories. ‘It cinched at the waist, and then cascaded to her ankles. Her eyes were the same unusual pea green, and her lips painted cherry red. And when she stood in the sunlight facing me, the skirt of her dress was transparent like a veil, and that was how I painted her legs, through her skirt.’ He smiles distantly, appreciating a memory in his mind. ‘I remember how she would not take her dress off. Not like the other ones.’ My father is off wandering down the dissolute alleyways of his past, searching for a brief imbuement of the man he was, who drank absinthe on Paris’s Left Bank, locking heads with the literary intelligentsia, arguing Henri Matisse over Pablo Picasso and transposing into iconic creations young models who all invariably became girlfriends. But none more so than this one, the one with the pea green eyes who let her chiffon dress float off her to the paint-splattered wooden floorboards—or, at least that was the version I heard. They’ve been known to change. How many times have I heard my dad’s nostalgic embroidery? His stories are like supermarket brand wine: they go down pleasantly enough in the absence of anything better to fit the occasion. And you get so used to them that your life would be much worse a place without them.

  ‘Where was Olivia in all this?’ Jacqui asks him about my mother, in that tone that says, you old tomcat. Jacqui always has a way of appealing to my dad’s inner Casanova. And for that I know my father adores her.

  My dad’s eyes darken, as I’ve often seen them do at the mention of my mother’s name. ‘Olivia was,’ he says, after a long pause.

  Everybody looks puzzled, but me. I understand now, what I never understood growing up. My mother was his love affair in London. By the time they got to Paris, and I had come along, he was seeing her in a different role. My father had moved on. That’s why she never comes up in his stories of that time. My dad was addicted to falling in love; as fast as he fell out of it, he had to fall back in. It was the only way he could live.

  A curious thought strikes me. Was Patrick just my love affair in The Love Market? Am I also addicted to the idea of being in love? My dad looks at me, as though he could be reading my mind.

  Truth is, I probably made peace with my father a long time ago, even though I may have fought it. I am probably like him more than I care to admit.

  When I put out dessert, Mike says, ‘Oh God, it’s tiramisu.’ He winks at Jacqui. ‘She’s made this before.’ He nudges me, ‘Remember.’

  ‘It nearly killed us!’ Aimee recoils. ‘We were on the toilet for days! What did you have to make that for?’ Then she says, ‘like when we went to Spain and she came back thinking she could make paella. She put…’ she looks at me. ‘What was it? Saffron?’

  I shake my head. ‘Saffron, it turns out, costs a fortune, so I put the cheaper alternative—turmeric—instead, to turn the rice yellow. Only when I went in the cupboard looking for the turmeric I accidently picked up the cayenne pepper instead.’

  Everybody laughs. Mike just sits and stares at me, hollowly.

  I tut. ‘Anyway, the tiramisu’s a different recipe this time,’ I peel my eyes away from my ex-husband’s.

  ‘How different?’ Mike asks, suddenly snapping out of his trance. ‘Dare we ask, what have you done to it this time?’

  I dunk a big spoon through the cocoa topping, then plop a serving onto a plate and pass it to him. ‘You go first then I’m sure we’ll all find out.’

  He takes the plate off me. And as he does, he catches a blob of mascarpone off the side of my hand, with his finger. Then he licks the finger, before picking up his spoon.

  ‘It looks very good,’ says Jennifer, winsomely.

  Mike’s intimate gesture has stalled me for a moment or two. And by the look on Jennifer’s slightly discombobulated face when our eyes meet: her too.

  ~ * * * ~

  After we eat, and I manage not to poison anyone or send them to the toilet, we move to the other room, where we slide further and further down the chairs, pleasantly narcotised by my dad’s stories. My father: ever the one to hold court. In a matter of minutes we’ve traded our cultural injection of early 70’s Paris, for Aimee and Mike playing Wii Boxing. The four of us women occupy the sofa, drinking brandies, with my father in the armchair, looking bored now that he’s no longer centre of attention. Then Aimee sits one out and Jacqui gets up to play with Mike, my sister’s gorgeousness having a way of commanding the room. My father—for one—suddenly acquires a new interest in the game.

  ‘Your turn now,’ Mike says, some time later, catching me lost in thought. Family gatherings of the past. When we were a family. He’s holding out the Wiimote across the coffee table. It takes a moment to realise that he’s giving it to me.

  ‘No!’ I flap him away with a hand. ‘I’m rubbish at it.’

  ‘Come on, you just have to hit me. Surely it�
��ll not be that hard.’

  ‘You’d be surprised. The intention might flourish but the hand falters.’ I grin. I notice Jacqui is beaming a smile but her eyes are watching Jennifer watching us. ‘All right!’ I finally take the thing off him. ‘One game.’

  He slaughters me in seconds. ‘Come on,’ he laughs. ‘I’m actually letting you beat me!’ I aim the thing at the screen and go mad on the Wiimote, not having a clue what I’m doing.

  ‘You’re knocking yourself out!’ he says. ‘Remember, you’re the red.’

  ‘Oh yeah!’ I laugh. ‘I thought I was the green! God, there’s no hope for me!’ I look at Jacqui who howls, and then at my dad, whose eyes are scampering up and down Jacqui’s legs.

  ‘It’s knackering, this!’ I moan. But now I am determined to lay him out. I discover a knack for the Right High Jab and land him a good one!

  The women say, ‘Woooh!’

  ‘Nice one!’ says Mike. ‘Try doing a big uppercut now. One of these!’ Mike socks the little red me right on the chin.

  ‘Ouch!’ Aimee chuckles from the floor where she’s sitting cross-legged. ‘Victory!’

  ‘That wasn’t fair! You were distracting me by talking!’

  ‘Oh that’s what it was!’ Mike says. ‘We just thought you were totally crap.’

  Jennifer and Anthea protest, playfully: that kind of comment isn’t called for.

  ‘Look if you turn the Wiimote inward like this to cover your face…’ Mike comes to show me, but I suddenly think, oh! I know what he means now about a big uppercut! So I uppercut like there’s no tomorrow, and make contact high up on his cheek.

  ‘Ow!’ he says, as the others fold up laughing. ‘And then, ‘Bugger!’ and then, ‘All right. I think you’ve won. You play dirty.’

  I instinctively go to touch him and stifle a laugh, thinking, heavens, maybe I have hurt him! ‘Oooh, are you all right?’ Anthea becomes animated. I feel bad for thinking unkind things about her, but I notice she has a manly way of sitting, with her knees flared, and I can’t help smiling. And because I’ve had three glasses of wine, it tickles my sense of humour more than it would normally do, so I have to stand there and hide my face with my hand.