by Ann Swinfen
He stood watching as their train pulled out, not waving. Then he turned aside and touched his lips once with his fingertip.
* * *
'Let's just help ourselves,' said Giles to Alice Tyler. He had come across this attractive girl being monopolised by a large, powerful man of the type Giles always thought of contemptuously as 'City gent'. A most unexpected guest at Natasha's party. Pin-striped suit. Very white, very new shirt. Dark thick hair, just beginning to grey in the right places to make him look distinguished (not thinning on top like his own). Heavy gold signet ring. Discreet tie-pin. He was the sort of man, Giles thought, who would attend the opera because it was currently in vogue, not because it gave him pleasure. He would take care to be seen at the plays which were being discussed in the right circles, but would not have the imagination to understand a creative new interpretation of a classic Shakespeare or Chekhov play. His only reading would be company reports and the Financial Times.
He might, from his appearance, have been the product of the same social class which had produced Giles himself (and his father, whom the man somewhat resembled) but Giles's fine-tuned awareness of voices detected something wrong in the man's speech. The merest underlying trace of something at once alien and tougher than the language amongst which he had himself grown up. There was also about the man a slight hint of menace, as if – should you oppose him in some crucial matter – he might become threatening.
The girl was extremely attractive. He liked a girl who could wear tight white trousers which continued all day to look neither creased nor strained at the seams. The open neckline on her hot red blouse was deep enough to be provocative without being vulgar. And unlike most of the girls who came his way, she did not gush or press herself upon him, exuding desire (real or feigned) like a scent of musk. This girl – Alice, he discovered her name was – seemed rather cool and distant towards him, although perfectly courteous, and her smile held a hint of amusement which was suggestive. He found himself stirred and attracted by her all the more because of this slight withholding of herself.
Alice was quite relieved to be rescued from Simon Frobisher. It had been a useful contact to make, and she had set about selling herself and her work with her usual skill. This had become almost second nature to her now, so that she could keep up the mixture of mild flirtatiousness and shrewd business talk while thinking about other things, such as what to do about Tony, whom she liked and was exasperated by in about equal measures. However, by half-past five she felt she really had devoted enough time to Frobisher, and was wondering how to get rid of him without endangering the prospect of a commission. She was surprised, too, that he had stayed with her so long. He must have wished to, for he was the sort of man who would simply walk away when it suited him, not caring whether he caused offence or not. She decided that he lingered at her side partly because he was attracted to her – often an important factor in her business negotiations – and partly because he seemed to be waiting for something to happen. From time to time his attention would wander, and she would become aware that he was gazing beyond her towards the house or some other part of the garden. This sense of expectancy began at last to unnerve her, so that she welcomed Giles's arrival, although she took good care not to show it.
The covert fencing between these two middle-aged men Alice found entertaining. She knew who Giles was, though it was immediately clear that he did not know who she was. And the two men did not know each other. Alice imagined that Simon was a man whose life was too occupied with more important issues for him to find the time to watch anything so trivial as Vet in Hot Water. And unless he was a devotee of the theatre – which he showed no sign of being – he was unlikely ever to have seen Giles on stage. (Alice had seen him only once herself.) She knew from Tony that Giles rarely came to St Martins, so it was not surprising he had never met Simon Frobisher. Alice always enjoyed being in possession of more knowledge about the people around her than they had themselves, and this added spice to the manoeuvrings of Giles to cut her away from Simon. Giles was a skilled operator, who must regularly capture girls like this, but he would not have succeeded if Simon had not been willing to let her go. She saw Simon suddenly make a decision, as though his waiting was over, and then he excused himself, saying that he needed to make some business calls. He had a phone, he said, in his car.
'Thank goodness we've got rid of him,' said Giles, placing a hand under her elbow and drawing it very intimately to his side. 'I can't stand that money-grubbing type of fellow. Creatively dead from the neck up.'
Alice contemplated responding, in order to provoke him, 'But not from the waist down.' She decided, however, that it would be more entertaining to allow Giles to take the lead in their initial exchanges, so she merely smiled.
Desmond Fraser was helping Olga and Katya lay out bottles and glasses on a side table on the terrace, and Chrissie and Samira appeared, both carrying large trays of cocktail savouries with elaborate and nervous care.
'I have to go and get changed now,' said Chrissie, with a touch of self-importance. 'The performance is starting in just over half an hour.'
'Yes,' said Olga, 'come along. You can help me fix my ruff properly, and I'll help you with tying your points.'
'Points?' said Alice to Giles, who was pouring a spritzer for her and a gin and tonic for himself.
'The laces that hold your hose on to your shirt. Each one has to be tied separately. Crazy method of dressing – can't think why men put up with it so long. Absolutely bane of one's life in a Shakespeare play where the producer is aiming for authenticity. I'd have thought the village group would have settled for stretch tights.' He spoke tolerantly, with a little gentle amusement at the antics of such amateurs. 'Here you are, then. Cheers!'
'Cheers,' said Alice. 'I've heard they're rather good – the village players,' she said innocently.
'Oh, well, I suppose it helps to pass the long tedious winter evenings in the country. But at this time of the year I would have thought they would be stooking the corn, or whatever it is they do.' He gave the phrase the exaggerated Mummersetshire accent of slapstick comedy.
'I believe they do that later in the year. I should think haymaking happens about now, though I couldn't say for sure. I'm a city girl myself.'
'Ah yes, haymaking. Rural romps in the hay barn, eh?' Giles's eyes gleamed briefly. 'Look, I feel a bit silly standing here on the terrace drinking alone before anyone else arrives. Let's slip away into the garden.'
'If you like,' said Alice. Really, she thought, this is so predictable.
He guided her to a corner of the shrubbery, where earlier in the afternoon he had noticed a very private seat screened both from the house and from the rest of the garden. Alice sat down and he sat next to her, so closely that their sides brushed.
They slipped their drinks.
'And what do you do, my dear?' asked Giles, setting down his glass on the seat and resting his arm along the back, behind her shoulders.
'I'm an artist. Acrylics. I have an artist-in-residence post this year, which might be renewed for another year.'
'Well done,' said Giles kindly, taking another sip of his gin. 'I could see at once that you were in one of the creative arts. I'm a man of the theatre myself.' He said it with his pretend little-boy modesty, never doubting for a moment she knew who he was. Indeed, she had already shown it by her question about tying points.
'Oh, yes, I know!' Alice put just a touch of adolescent awe into her voice, playing up to him. It amused her to think that – from what she had heard from Tony – she probably earned twice what Giles did and (apart from this recent TV success) was better known, at least in the right circles.
'Ever had an exhibition?' he asked carelessly. He wasn't really interested. It was just part of his usual lead-in. He could feel the familiar warm, fluid excitement stirring in him. He leaned towards her as though interested in her answer. This gave him a clear view down inside her blouse. As he suspected, she wore nothing under it. Very nice.
> Alice, who had dealt with this routine many times before, neither moved away nor raised her hand to button her blouse higher. She simply relaxed back against his arm and looked up, flatteringly, into his eyes, her lips parted slightly.
'Well, yes. I have been exhibiting every summer for the last five years. Since I graduated. At one of the top Bond Street galleries. I'm very fortunate – I am doing quite well.'
Giles should have been listening to her. He should have paid attention to the slightly jarring note of emphasis in her words, which did not quite match her really very suggestive physical presence.
'Ah,' he said, 'splendid' – hearing nothing. He circled her shoulders with his arm and drew her towards him, slipping his hand, in one practised movement, inside her blouse to grasp her breast. The other hand slid up the inside of her thigh.
She tilted her head back as his open mouth came down towards her, and the smell of his gin flowed over her face. She smiled coolly, but made no move to struggle. She said simply, 'I am also considering marrying your son.'
* * *
Frances set down the tray of tea and biscuits on the small round table beside the french window in Natasha's bedroom which, like the two windows in the drawing room, opened directly on to the terrace. It stood ajar to admit a little air. These south-facing rooms had grown quite hot during the afternoon. Natasha came in, carrying her sponge bag.
'Ah, there you are, Frances. I thought I would have a quick shower to give me energy for our busy evening. And you've brought tea and biscuits, good. Has there been any word of Lisa yet?'
'Paul is just going to ring the hospital. I'd like to have done it myself, but I don't want him to think I'm interfering.'
'You are worried about her, aren't you?'
'I know I shouldn't be.' Frances fiddled absently with the teacups.
'She's strong and healthy, and there haven't been any complications in the pregnancy. I think you should try to be calm. Even if the baby is coming – early births run in the family.'
Natasha tidied away things from her dressing table and sat on her usual chair in the window, a low seated balloon-backed Victorian chair upholstered in dark gold velvet. Her movements were not as quick and decisive as they had been in Frances's childhood, but they were surprisingly spry for a woman of her age. The stick she had needed to use after spraining an ankle last winter seemed to have been discarded altogether, and apart from a certain concentration when she stood up from a chair, she had more vigour than many women twenty-five years younger.
'What is your secret, Natasha?' asked Frances, pouring the tea and handing a cup to her grandmother. 'How do you manage to stay so young?'
Natasha did not laugh or brush the question aside, but gave it serious consideration. 'I suppose it is because I have always been too busy to notice that I have grown so old. There has never been a time in my life to sit down and mourn the passing of youth. Probably, if I had led a normal life I would be decrepit or in my grave by now. But I have been preserved by my active life as an English eccentric – as the good Nigel Laker would say.'
'Nigel Laker?'
'Have you not met him? He drove Giles down from London. He wants to make a television documentary about St Martins as part of a series about eccentrics and their contributions to culture.'
'No, I've not met him. If it comes to that, I haven't seen Giles either, except in the distance.' Frances took her own cup and sat, as she had always done, on the stool beside Natasha's chair. 'Would it be a good thing, this television programme, or a bad thing?'
'Ah, there you put your finger on the exact point. I think, if we can ensure that we supervise it carefully, it might be a very good thing. It might make our work more widely known, give some of the members of the community – like Desmond – a little welcome publicity. Some of his pots are quite beautiful, you know, but he hasn't received much recognition yet. And perhaps others will be inspired to follow our example and offer a home and encouragement to creative artists.'
Natasha took a sip of her tea. 'Ah, good, I was ready for that. I find increasingly that tea is both more comforting and more stimulating than alcohol. How some of my friends in Paris in the old days would have been scandalised.' She smiled, recalling those days with fondness but no regret.
'The television programme might, however, be a bad thing,' she went on, 'if this Nigel is rather less sincere than he would have me believe. We could be held up to ridicule. Or things might simply be inaccurate and distorted.'
'As they often are.'
'As indeed they often are. The money would be useful, of course.'
'They would pay, would they? Did he say?'
'They would pay. I made sure of that. No amount has been specified yet, of course, and that would need to be negotiated with firmness.'
Natasha paused, then began again delicately. 'I want to discuss something with you. Do you remember a conversation we had, a long time ago now – wasn't it 1980? That Christmas when you had just discovered you were pregnant with Katya?'
'Oh yes, I remember that very well.'
* * *
Frances sits on the stool beside her grandmother's bedroom window, looking out over the terrace where the low early morning light catches the frost on the lawn and the last dried-up leaves of the plants in the tubs and pots. After a quarrelsome drive down with the children last night – Giles has a Christmas engagement in Wimbledon and will not be coming to St Martins – she has slept badly and awoken to another session of retching miserably over the loo, with Lisa pounding on the door, shouting at her to hurry up.
She has just told Natasha her news. What she thought was a bout of gastric flu is an unplanned and unwanted pregnancy. The temporary locum doctor in Reading – filling in until old Dr Carmichael's replacement arrived – was young, female and sympathetic. She discussed, practically and without fuss, the element of risk inherent in post-forty pregnancy, and the option of abortion. Frances, confused and angry, has said she will think about it.
'Don't think too long. Come and see me when you get back after Christmas.'
'I don't know what to do,' says Frances, looking out at the frost. 'When I was younger, I was quite cold-blooded about abortion. I didn't see why a woman shouldn't get rid of a baby she didn't want. But I think once you've carried a child, felt it growing and moving inside you, then your views change. Mine did, anyway. You realise the baby is a person in its own right, much earlier than you could ever have understood before.'
'But why should you not keep it? Are you worried it might be handicapped?'
'Of course that is a consideration. Of course it is. But it is really something quite different.'
There is a long silence, then Frances blurts out, 'I was going to leave Giles. I had definitely decided. Anya and Nicholas both have their university lives now. They hardly come back to Reading, and I can't say I blame them. I was going to ask you if Tony, Lisa and I could come and live at St Martins, at least until they go to college – then I would take myself off, out of your way.'
'Of course you can come, doushenka, always. You know this.'
'I had the offer of a job, you see, a couple of months ago. Working full-time as an editor with a small firm publishing books on local history and based in Worcester. This was before I got pregnant. I was prepared to go on trying to hold the marriage together, but I really wanted this job. It was something fresh, a new opportunity to do something I was interested in. The salary wasn't huge, but it was very much better than the pittance I get from the poly and from odd bits of coaching. And of course it offered all the things I've never had in the part-time jobs I do – company pension scheme, paid holidays, sick pay.'
'But Giles didn't want you to take it?'
'No.'
'You know, Frances, I think he feels threatened whenever you show him what he does not want to see – that you are more talented than he is, that you could walk into lots of different jobs and make a success of them.'
'Well, he certainly shouted and raged. I suggest
ed we move to Worcester – I've been waiting all these years to move away from the London commuter belt, and he keeps promising, but it never comes to anything. He won't contemplate moving, though he's hardly ever at Reading. He wants me to earn money – we couldn't do without it – but he doesn't want me to have a proper job. It would turn me into a real person with a life of my own, instead of a prop to his life. That's what it comes down to. He said some hateful things, then he went off slamming the door – off to his latest girlfriend – called, will you believe, Bootsie Fabersham.'
'I don't know why you endure it. Why you didn't leave him years ago?'
'I had this idea that children need both parents. I think I still do. Anyway, I was in a state, thinking that the children are nearly grown up now, so they don't really need him any more. Wondering if I should just take the job and leave him. Then this Bootsie telephoned – telephoned me – to announce that she was having a baby, and Giles was going to leave me for her. I thought: Right, that settles it then. I'll take the initiative and leave him first. I could bring Tony and Lisa down here and commute to Worcester, and there would always be room for Anya and Nick to come in the vacations – they prefer to spend them here anyway.'
'But I don't understand. What went wrong?'
'Giles. That was what went wrong. Pleading with me, swearing that Bootsie was only trying to use him. Being very loving, as he can be when he tries.'
'And so you became pregnant.'
'And so I became pregnant. I can't take the job now. They need someone who can start in March and spend the next two years working flat out producing a new series of pocket-sized county histories. There's no way they could give me maternity leave, even if they were willing to, and of course no obligation on them if I had only just started working for them.'
'Come anyway. We will find you something to do at St Martins.'
'I can't.' Frances lays her forehead against Natasha's skirt. 'I still feel this obligation to let the new baby know its father.' She pressed the palms of her hands to the sides of her head. 'I feel so trapped, so suffocated. I need to escape, or I'll go mad – but I can't. I'm drowning under a weight of people and responsibilities. I'm so tired.'