Out on a Limb

by Lynne Barrett-Lee

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said again, furiously stuffing his shirt back into his jeans (no buckle in play now, I noticed). ‘I shouldn’t have done that. I know I shouldn’t. Oh, God –’ His groan was both heartfelt and damningly impressive. ‘Oh, God. But it just… Jesus.’ He looked horrified. ‘ You just –’

  ‘Me??’ I screeched. ‘ Me ?? So this is all my fault? Well thanks a lot, I don’t think!’

  H e pushed both hands through his hair and then shook his head. ‘God, no, Abbie. Mine entirely. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m not trying to make excuses for myself. I had absolutely no…oh, God. I don’t know what else to say to you. I just forgot where I was…what I was doing.’

  ‘You forgot what you were doing ? Well, there’s a novel concept.’

  ‘You know what I mean.’

  ‘No, I don’t know, as it happens. It seems to me –’ I reached behind me and tried to do up my bra, ‘– that you knew exactly what you were doing. Every bit as much as I did, in fact.’ Which reality hit me like a sledgehammer as I said it. I moved my fingers frenziedly, but I couldn’t get it to fasten. My hands were shaking too much. I gave up. ‘Seems to me, the only thing you forgot was exactly who you were doing it with.’

  Which made me burst into tears again. So I abandoned the bra strap and went back to the draining board, to get a fresh pile of kitchen roll to staunch it. Then I rounded on him again. ‘And then – pow! – you did remember, didn’t you? Boy, you remembered and then some!’ I gulped down a breath. ‘Can you imagine?’ I asked him, trying but failing to keep my voice level. ‘Can you imagine how that makes me feel about me ?’

  He took a step towards me, his expression now morphing (if one wanted to be fanciful about it) into one of lovingly tender concern. ‘Abbie,’ he said gently. ‘I really can’t apologise enough. You’re so lovely, really you are…and, and, well, you and I…well, it’s always been…’

  ‘Been what? Been on the cards that we’d start snogging at some point? Well, I’m sorry, Gabriel, but that’s news to me!’

  He hesitated at this, and I could see his mind whirring, presumably the better to fashion the delicate words that came next, which were, ‘…but it’s just that…well, there’s Lucy. I’m engaged.’ He looked, in saying so, even more appalled now. ‘It was just one of those things that happen in the heat of the moment, and –’

  ‘Whhaatt !!!’ I was so horrified at how entirely he had misunderstood what I had been trying to say that for a second or two I considered violence against him. Just to wipe the sorry slick of compassion from his face and replace it with something less sick-making. ‘That’s not what I meant ! God, Gabriel! That is so not what I meant!’

  He looked completely at a loss now. Which only served to fuel my horror even more. ‘I know that,’ I said. ‘I know you’re bloody engaged! That’s precisely my point!’ I yanked out a chair and sat down on it heavily, then put my face in my hands and groaned. I heard him approach and then felt his hand on my shoulder. I snapped my head up again and he jumped back as if stung.

  ‘Abbie, I –’

  I flapped my kitchen roll at him.‘This is not about you, okay? Neither is it about some mad, tin-pot scheme to lure you from her clutches. As if! God, Gabriel, don’t flatter yourself!’

  Stung twice, in fact. Still stinging, even. I blew my nose and glared at him. ‘Look, Gabriel, just forget it, okay. Just forget it and go home. I feel bad enough about myself as it is without you cluttering up my kitchen looking tragic, okay?’

  He didn’t. ‘Please don’t feel bad about yourself, Abbie. This wasn’t your fault. It was mine.’

  I sometimes think men are irredeemably thick. Some men, at any rate. This one, for sure. I sat back in my chair and considered him. Which hurt.

  And in ways I was only now coming to terms with. Don’t flatter yourself? Who the hell was I kidding? How powerful, I realised, my denial had been. How overwhelmingly intense was my desire for this man now. Where did that come from? How did it happen? Candice was right. Life bloody well was a bitch. I shook my head. To clear all such nonsense away. ‘No, Gabriel. You’re wrong,’ I said. ‘The kissing bit, yes. That was absolutely your fault. You started it, after all.’

  ‘Exactly. So –’

  ‘But the next bit…’ I felt my voice wobble. ‘The next bit was not. The next bit I did of my own volition entirely. Would perhaps still be doing, if you hadn’t stopped it. So you can apologise all you like but it won’t make any difference. Yes, you made it happen – you’re a man, after all – but I let it happen, which is much more important.’

  He tried to smile. ‘How very post-feminist of you.’

  I didn’t smile back. ‘You can call it what you like, but the truth is that I knew what I was doing and I shouldn’t have done it. Gabriel, we are not in any sort of relationship, you and me. Never have been and never will be. And, yes, you did what you did, and I dare say you’re regretting it. But it’s different for me. Can’t you see that? I behaved like a slapper and I hate myself for it, so if you’ll excuse me –’ I got up from the table again, now. ‘– I’ve got to take a shower and you’ve got to go home.’

  Gabriel stood up too now. Extra straight, I think, on purpose. His mouth was hanging open. ‘That’s an outrageous thing to say!’

  But then he would say that, I thought. Because he didn’t know the half of it. Didn’t know how I’d felt that way already in my life. Didn’t know what it felt like to be me. I’m wasn’t even sure I did. All I knew was that right now I felt dirty and ashamed and appalled with myself.

  I shrugged. ‘Even so, Gabriel, that’s how I feel.’

  ‘But, Abbie, it wasn’t like that. You shouldn’t think that. It just happened. I’m a man and you’re a woman, and well, we’ve both been…’ Been what? But he didn’t seem to know how to begin to explain. ‘Abbie,’ he finished. ‘It just happened, okay?’

  Which I would, I knew, now have to repent at my leisure. Ad nauseam. But this was pointless. ‘In which case,’ I said stiffly. ‘Let’s forget it happened then, shall we?’

  ‘We can’t leave things like this.’

  ‘What other way would you have us leave things? Come on, please. Let’s not drag this out any longer. Like you say, it was a moment of madness, and it’s done now. We can’t undo it, can we?’

  I was already walking out into the hall at this point, and he followed me, reaching across me to collect his jacket from the newel post. ‘Look,’ he said, once he’d shrugged it over his shoulders. ‘Abbie. Please don’t hate yourself. You know, I really want you to know that even if anything had happened…well, I wouldn’t have thought any less of you. Not one iota. Ever. You do know that, don’t you?’

  It was such a wild and ridiculous scenario – him standing there, etching out the cosy hypothetical emotional aftermath of a rash hypothetical coupling on my kitchen floor – that I almost couldn’t stop myself from laughing out loud. Wasn’t that the ploy most men used as fore play? Except he was really in earnest and it really did seem to matter. I wanted to touch him but I dared not. ‘Gabriel, don’t stress. It was never going to happen. You’re way too nice a man.’

  He looked sad. In disgrace. Ashamed of himself. ‘I’m not that.’

  ‘You just proved it. And I’m sure Lucy knows it too. She’s a lucky woman. Hey, you take care of that knee, now.’

  He negotiate d the front step and started limping down the path. Then he turned. ‘So I’ll see you in clinic next week, then.’

  I was already closing the front door, so I didn’t answer. No point. I already knew he wouldn’t.

  When I got back into the kitchen, I saw the letter about Seb still sitting on the table. I put it in an envelope, wrote out the address, affixed first class stamps, added ‘Airmail’ and double underlined it, then walked Spike to the letterbox and slipped the thing in. I’d just have to hope he had a friend who spoke some English. Because I no longer had one who spoke Italian.

  *
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br />   Which just goes to show that weatherm en, however impressively tooled-up with education and intelligence and complex statistics, do not have a monopoly in predicting the future. Us mere mortals, with our reliance upon instinct and feelings, can be almost – no, probably are – as good.

  Which insight did nothing to make the day any less depressing. It only led me down avenues I didn’t much want to travel. Because all of them led to exactly the same place. My shame. My guilt. My disgust with myself. My utter conviction, once I’d dissected things properly, that this was not Gabriel’s fault. It was mine. That, entirely without meaning to, I had, in fact, seduced him. Like he’d said – oh, cruel irony – swept him off his feet.

  It wasn’t his fault. He was a man. He couldn’t help it. I, on the other hand, could. The most ridiculous piece of nineteenth-century garbage ever thought up. I knew that. It didn’t matter. That’s still how I felt. And they say we women are emancipated. I wish. Oh, I wish.

  Which was a shame because this day had already been made depressing enough, what with being bookended by Welsh men-and-sheep jokes at one end and the prospect of my mother’s return at the other.

  In fact, Pru and my mother have already arrived by the time I get in from work. They’ve made themselves tea and bought a bag of Welsh cakes, which they are chomping as I enter the kitchen. Dancing Diana is still in the hall where I left her, parked up and gurning beside the dining room door. Oh, the sorry tales she could tell.

  Pru gets up to pour a mug of tea for me too.

  ‘I hope you’re going to move that thing,’ my mother says irritably, nodding towards the open kitchen doorway. ‘I nearly had forty fits when I saw it. Wherever did you get it from?’

  ‘Gabriel Ash dropped it round,’ I say, feigning a workaday lightness when I mention his name that’s feeling ever more difficult to do. ‘Corinne found it in the garage. She thought you might want it.’

  ‘Want it? Abigail, when you get to my time of life, you will come to appreciate that looking at pictures of oneself in the full flush of beauty is about as horrendous a torture that has ever been devised.’

  I can think of worse. Far worse. But this is from a woman who would only countenance mirror sunglasses if the mirrors were on the inside. Not that I’d know, in any case. I never did have what you might call a ‘full flush’ of beauty in my youth. It wasn’t a given. It always felt like a privilege if any one thought I was pretty. Just pockets here and there when the lighting fell right and I conceded I would basically do.

  A long and deep pocket in the case of Charlie, admittedly. But that was just a blip. And a damaging one, too. My experience with Gabriel confirms it. Overall (and how much I’d like to return to that state), I’ve not been used to feeling like that. Not been used to that sort of attention on a regular basis. With Rob, yes, but he was a notable exception. And it was quite possibly why I loved him so much. Because he didn’t fancy my mother. What I mostly remember was the dropped jaws of boyfriends when they called round to take me to the pictures.

  And I do concede that for my mother the passage of time must hang heavier than for most people. If your self-esteem is so closely connected with your beauty, then it s fading must be difficult to bear.

  ‘Why d’you hang on to it, then?’ I ask her.

  She shakes her head. ‘I didn’t. That was Hugo. He had a bit of a thing about lurex.’ She mimes quote marks around ‘thing’ and accompanies them with the sort of face that’s best not enquired into. So we don’t. Not her sex life with Hugo, pur-lease. ‘Anyway,’ she says. ‘How is my poor precious grandson?’

  Pru puts tea in front of me. ‘He’s just fine,’ I tell them both, happy to move on to less difficult ground now. ‘Quite happy to abort the grand tour for a while, to be honest. He’s looking way too skinny. Oh, and he’s grown a beard, would you believe? Hang on. I’ve got a picture in my mobile.’ I pull it from my bag and find it.

  Pru shrieks when she sees it. ‘God, you’d hardly recognise him!’

  ‘I almost didn’t. I tell you, Pru, there is nothing that makes you face up to your terrible age than seeing your child with a beard.’

  Or indeed, contemplating your ageing mother as a housemate.

  ‘She said anything to you?’ I ask Pru while she tootles off upstairs for her reading glasses, the better to do the clutch of Su Dokus that have stockpiled while we’ve both been away.

  Pru glances towards the stairs. ‘Actually, I don’t want to worry you, Sis, but, yes. She was asking Doug about loft conversions last night.’

  ‘Loft conversions? But you’ve already got a loft conversion–’

  ‘Er, wakey-wakey. Hello? Engage brain. Not as in my place. As in here.’

  She moves her eyes heavenwards again, and this time, so do I. ‘ What ?’ I squeak. ‘As in here? As in my house?’

  Pru nods. ‘Well, she didn’t actually admit as much, of course. She wouldn’t risk it. Just told him she was investigating possibilities. She was grilling him about how much it would cost and everything – you know she’s had the cheque through, don’t you? No, actually. You probably don’t. Anyway, she has. And she’s clearly got her own ideas about what she wants to do with it.’

  ‘Oh, gawd.’ I groan. ‘Has she said anything to you about it?’

  Pru shakes her head. ‘But I’ve been doing my bit, promise. I spent half the journey here today banging on about how much you’re looking forward to having a bit of independence in a couple of years or so – you know, after spending so many years devotedly and slavishly looking after the boys, and what with the divorce, and Rob always having been away so much anyway, and how you really deserve to have some time to yourself, a chance to do all the things you’ve never been able to, to travel and see the world and have fun blah blah blah.’

  ‘God, you make me sound like I’ve been Mother Theresa.’

  ‘Well, I thought I’d lay it on a bit. Make her think. Make her see things from where you stand. Clear the way a bit.’

  ‘And what did she say?’

  Pru tips her head back and snorts at me. ‘She said she’d always known that you married the wrong man.’

  *

  Pru leaves a little after six, having had a promise extracted that she will, if at all possible, come to see One Black Lung play (from Jake), and another that she’ll persist with project Mother (from me).

  Mum and I go out on to the doorstep to see her off, and in doing so, the very first thing that catches my eye is the loft conversion the Thomas es across the road had done last year, evidenced by two Velux windows amid the roof slates, both with gay yellow roller blinds, at present half closed, to shut out the glare of the low late September sun. I’ve been up there. It’s nice. I think they call it their den. At one time, I might have considered one too. Early on, it was. My post-partum post-impressionist period. When the boys were both small and I only worked part-time and still nursed vague dreams of Doing a Bit of Art.

  But now I look across the road and I fashion a bleak (and wholly artless) future, a sort of Jane Eyre/Mrs Danvers in Rebecca type amalgam, in which mother sits in the attic, jotting car registrations, and periodically rapping on the floor with a stick. I’m down in the kitchen, of course, boiling bones to make broth and harbouring unspeakable thoughts.

  ‘Now,’ she says, stepping back inside. ‘Time I had my lie down, I think. I’ve promised to be at Kenneth’s by seven.’

  I follow her indoors. ‘Kenneth? Kenneth who?’

  ‘Kenneth, your neighbour?’

  ‘What, you mean Mr Davidson?’

  She looks at herself coquettishly in the hall mirror. ‘Correct. I’m going round to help him with some postures.’

  ‘Mr Davidson? Postures? What sort of postures?’ The mind seriously boggles.

  She looks at me via the mirror and rolls her eyes. ‘Well, yoga postures, obviously.’

  ‘You’re teaching him yoga ?’

  She narrows her eyes. ‘I don’t know
why you find that concept so funny, Abigail. You know, you’d do well to be altogether less judgemental generally, in my opinion. He’s a very pleasant man.’

  ‘Yeah, right, M um.’ And then I have a thought. ‘You don’t – I mean, you and him…’

  ‘Oh, for pity’s sake! No. Honestly, Abigail, the way your mind works is beyond me.’

  Still, it does occur to me that Mum working the Garland charms next door will be no bad thing in the short-term at least, as Jake’s gig is less than a fortnight away now and they’ll be rehearsing their play list with a vengeance. With any luck she’ll put Mr Davidson in a deep yogic trance, from which he won’t emerge until November.

  Chapter 24

  EMAIL;

  Hi all!

  Writing to you from my office, would you believe! Well, it’s not so much an office as a desk in the corner of someone else’s office, but it’s great. I even have a view of the med! Am feeling just fine, thanks (thanks for card, nana!). Weather glorious etc. etc. Jon’s left now – gone off to join up with Mal and Sean. Am planning couple days with them next w/end if I can do it – they’re going on some jetskiing tour.

  Was REALLY good to see you, mum (xxxxxxxx). Thanks for bringing clothes etc. Much appreciated. Hope OBL do great tomorrow night. Sure they will. Will be thinking of you all. Make a CD for me, J!

  S xx

  Late Sunday afternoon, and against all predictions, expectations and forecasts, an air of almost palpable excitement is growing in the McFadden household.

  Which is something of a relief. It’s been almost three weeks since my last brush with Gabriel Ash. But however deeply he’s burrowed his way under my skin, I’m relieved to find I’m made of stern enough stuff that I can just about manage to itch without scratching. Compartmentalise, even. Put the whole sorry charade to one side. Just as headaches can be healed by putting pins in one’s buttocks, so the dull ache of unrequited romantic yearnings can be to some extent soothed by a robust concentration on all the wonderful things that one has in one’s life.