by Patrick Gale
‘On my head?’
‘Does it itch on your head?’
‘No.’
‘Fine. Just your pubic hair. Front and back. It burns a bit but it works really fast. We’ll need your sheets given a hot wash too.’
‘I’ve not got time.’
‘I’ll do them. I’m not on till nine-thirty.’
‘Oh. Okay. Thanks, Ben.’
‘Stop scratching. Eat some toast.’
‘No time.’ Bobby lurched up and tossed the banana skin into the bin.
‘Will I see you tonight?’
‘Yeah. It’s Shirley’s thing then I’ve got a hot date.’
‘Another one? Bobby!’
‘Not Gaydar. Proper date. With a meal and everything.’
‘Who with?’
‘He’s a train driver. He’s lovely.’
‘Oh. Well, we’d better get your little friends sorted.’
‘Yeah. Shit. Gotta go.’
‘Teeth brushed?’
‘Do ’em at work.’
‘Phone.’
‘Yes. Keys! Yes!’ Bobby was halfway to his bike. He stopped, hit his pockets, grinned. ‘No.’
Ben picked them off the television and passed them to him.
‘I’m not a kid,’ Bobby told him.
‘You certainly aren’t, Master Robert. Go on. Go. Buy that stuff.’
Ben cleared away the breakfast things and went in search of Bobby’s sheets. He might be an adult now but he still slept in his boyhood single, watched over by a picture of their mother.
It was a lovely image, entirely spontaneous, snapped by some colleague at her fiftieth birthday party. As a surprise, a gang of friends had taken her and the boys out on the Kennet and Avon Canal for the day. They’d provided a picnic and champagne and even a cake with fifty candles: a day of extravagant pleasure, judged by her careful standards. In the picture she had been persuaded to pose on the boat’s roof with her legs dangling – which couldn’t have been easy, although she had excellent, if neglected, legs, because she hated being photographed. Just as the shutter was about to click, Bobby had hugged her legs to press a loving kiss on one of her knees. Startled and touched in equal measure, she was laughing at the camera and running a hand through Bobby’s snowy hair. She had been so stoical always, so often overburdened and exhausted, never less than loving but often too tired to express it, that it was a delight to see her tricked into revealing this lighter side. Ben too had a copy of the picture somewhere, and they had reproduced it on the order of service for her funeral, but he could never examine it without wondering how differently she might have aged if Bobby had not been born or had been no less healthy, no more demanding than other children. Their father might still have left her and she would have been the same woman, of course, but the emphasis in her character, the distribution of light and shadow, might have been quite different.
Her picture wasn’t the only icon above Bobby’s bed. His sleep was also watched over by several pin-ups of George Clooney and Tommy Lee Jones and, inexplicably, a ragged magazine clipping of Barbara Castle. Ben didn’t snoop but he spotted a couple of discarded condom foils as he stripped the bed, and he was reassured.
The phone rang as he was loading the washing machine and he ignored it, letting his mother’s seemingly indestructible old tape-based answering machine take the call. He heard his outgoing message, which Bobby said made them sound like a gay couple short of a social life, and then his wife’s voice.
‘Oh. Blast. Hello, boys, it’s just Chloë. Ben, are you there still? I just wanted a chat about things…’
He froze, staring down at the answering machine. He could hear Chloë breathing and the click of her car keys as she bounced them nervously in her palm.
‘Oh well…’ she said. ‘I’ll try your mobile again. Bye, both.’
He snatched up the phone. ‘Chloë.’
‘Oh. You are there.’
‘Yes. Hi. Sorry. I was just heading out to work.’
‘Well, I’ll call back on the mobile then you can talk and walk.’
‘No. I’ll call you. Just give me five minutes to brush teeth and stuff or I’ll be late.’
‘But will you? Last time you –’
‘Yes, yes. I’ll call. Promise. Five minutes.’ He hung up and realized his heart was racing.
If only she had become a monster, it would be so much easier. Weirdly, however, she had been far closer to monstrous when he was first in love with her. When they first met, her values were all awry, she was laughably vain and full of politically unsound received opinions dressed up as pretty ignorance. But physically she was perfection, with flawless skin, a cascade of tawny blonde hair, big grey eyes that spoke at once of sorrow and invitation. She was the same age as the other girls in her year but was so groomed and poised by comparison, so careful, that she had all the charisma of an older woman with none of experience’s taint.
It was a secret relief to discover she wasn’t both a model and an intellectual. Ben was such a tunnelvisioned scientist at this stage that all the humanities students seemed clever to him because they were cultured and studied the sort of things that enlivened conversation rather than the reverse. Chloë was no exception – reading French – and it was only after a few conversations that he realized she had only made it into Oxford by virtue of the efficient cramming methods at her boarding school, not from any originality of thought or even hunger to learn. Off the leash from her schoolmistresses, she had been mentally dawdling since her first-year exams, shamelessly pillaging swottier students’ notes and essays, and would be lucky if she scraped a third.
He had noticed her around the college – how could he not? – but had been content to marvel at her from a distance, assuming she was neither single nor attainable.
Being drawn into her orbit was as disorienting as being unexpectedly taken up by someone famous. The glamour of her turned his head. At a time when most female students, Laura included, were women, politically, her femininity undid him. And there was a no less disgraceful pleasure in having a girl all other men wanted. Her attractions were entirely external, or to do with how other people responded to her. If, as their relationship progressed, her words and deeds revealed less appealing aspects, he found he could overlook them as one could overlook the health implications of food or drink that was especially delicious.
In some terrible way, however, as their marriage had matured, it was as though she had sensed the snail’s pace withdrawal of his love for her and, suffering for it, became a better person by barely detectable degrees. She still had no sense of humour, especially at her own expense, but she now strove to understand the things she had once dismissed. She had distanced herself from her father’s political savagery and smothering daddyism and, through her voluntary work at a special school, acquired a raft of new friends the old (or rather, younger) Chloë would not have spoken to. His dealings with her now were shot through with a guilty evasiveness she would once have found deeply suspicious but now met with loving concern.
‘If I met her for the first time today,’ he thought, as he shut the front door and found her smiling face on his mobile’s screen and tapped it with a little wand, ‘we might even become friends.’
‘Hello,’ he said when she answered. ‘I’m back. How are things?’
He disliked walking and talking at the same time because it played havoc with his concentration and made him all too likely to say something foolish or unguarded. He had plenty of time so he walked only as far as the unfenced sloping park called Oram’s Arbour and sat on a still dewy bench there.
Chloë talked about her school work, which she loved, and her merchant bank job, which she had come to hate and how the school had once again offered her a paid, full-time position. She was dithering about whether to take it. She went on to tell him about a Sunday lunch party given by friends she thought of as theirs but who were hers, all hers, people who intuitively disliked him and were probably hoping his absence would become permanent
so they could reassert their influence and say they told her so.
‘You’re not listening,’ she said suddenly and he realized he wasn’t and that it was suddenly later than he thought. ‘I am,’ he insisted, jumping up and continuing on his way up Step Terrace towards the hospital.
‘Ben, I have to ask you something.’
‘What?’
‘Is there someone else?’
‘How do you mean?’ he asked, horrified, stalling as he so often did with her by feigning an absent mind.
‘How do you fucking think?’ she snapped and she sniffed deeply and he realized she was either crying already or fighting tears.
He pictured the angry gesture with which she’d be dragging away a tear with the back of her spare hand – angry yet not so violent as to dislodge a contact lens.
Over the last two years he had often considered the possibility of breaking up with her. Three kindred inhibitions always stayed his hand. There was reluctance to hurt her and guilt that she thought he was a better man than he was. Lastly he was paralysed by self-disgust at the knowledge that, deep down, he did ever so slightly despise her for not being clever enough.
‘Have you met someone new?’ she asked.
He snatched at the opening this offered him, despising his cowardice. ‘No,’ he said, now picturing Laura as a student whom he had known longer than he’d known his wife. ‘There’s no one new. Darling, we need to talk –’
‘I hate it when you call me that.’
‘Sorry. Sorry. But this isn’t the time. Not if I’m racing to work.’
She sniffed again. He heard the thunk of her wedding ring against her phone’s mouthpiece. ‘When, then? Tonight?’
He thought, remembered the funeral. ‘No. I’ve got to go out with Bobby straight after work.’
‘The weekend?’
‘Okay. Yes. Let’s agree to speak over the weekend.’
‘Sorry I shouted,’ she said.
‘Don’t be silly. Sorry to be so provoking.’
‘I love you, Ben,’ she said.
And the most honest he could be was to say simply, ‘I know,’ before he hung up.
BREAKFAST
Stewed apricots or prunes with home-made yoghurt, wholemeal toast, thick downland honey and coffee. Laura had long since adopted the Parisian way of eating next to nothing for breakfast but preparing the meal for her mother every day had slowly seduced her into sharing it. Unless Mummy had passed an especially bad night it was one of the more cheerful of the day’s feasts; the unvarying menu lacked shocks or disappointments, the conversation was light, spiced by small notes of optimism, buoyed up by the carefully maintained pretence that they were both still in a position to lay plans.
‘I was thinking I’d move that camellia by the water butt,’ her mother would say. ‘Or dig it up altogether. It’s not really singing for its supper and the new growth has that nasty vomitty pink tinge to it.’
Or they would discuss some play or exhibition reviewed in that day’s paper and agree they ought to go and see it, while doing nothing so rash as to make a specific arrangement to do so.
The arrival of letters provided much fodder. Professor Jellicoe had always received invitations to conferences or lectures, and to school reunions or hospital or university fundraising events, but the flow of these, it seemed to Laura, was less impressive than it had been, as though it was finally dawning on the senders that her mother now rarely said yes. She remained meticulous in always writing to say no, however, ‘So they know I’ve still got a pulse,’ she said, and, presumably, because the invitations represented at least a trickle of continuing professional recognition.
Of far more interest now were the nearly daily catalogues – Mummy having discovered with disability the pleasures of home shopping. Leaving butter smears and crumbs on the pages, they would pick through arrays of slippers and gloves, thermal underwear, birdseed, cut-price cashmere and ingenious domestic gadgets with interest, though ordered only rarely.
‘I’ve just bought twenty kilos of songbird crumble and a box of dried eelworms. Why on earth do they think I’d want to order more right away?’
Laura received announcements of births and invitations to significant birthday parties. All her friends in the market for doing so had either married or put all expectations behind them. Invariably she received work correspondence: letters from Revenue and Customs or fat padded envelopes of receipts and explanation. Mummy tended to be the one who received real letters, possibly because she was the one who still wrote them. A fluent Internet user for professional communication, she resisted the lazy attractions of personal e-mail. She never tired of pointing out how many of her friends had died yet she maintained astonishingly regular contact with two pen pals she had been writing to since girlhood, one in Sweden, one in Canada. Anna-Birgit, the Swede, was a farmer’s widow, Joyce, the Canadian, a housewife who made a lot of jam and bred Shelties. Were the three women to be brought together they would have even less common ground socially than when they were uniformed schoolchildren but they had been writing to one another for so long that, on paper at least, time and ageing itself had become the territory they patrolled together. Laura had grown up with regular bulletins from these correspondents and had recently enjoyed catching up with them as with some ancient, undemanding soap opera. Neither woman was a wit or even a prose stylist but the simple longevity of each correspondence lent the death of a favourite cow or gathering of a troublesome but long endured neighbour all the quality of high drama.
Today, however, the only breakfast interest was a holiday postcard from Polteath whose signature neither of them could decipher. Mummy could think of no one who had said they were due to go to Cornwall and decided it must be from someone she hardly saw any more – some second cousin – who wrote out of duty, not affection.
‘The great thing with holiday postcards is one doesn’t have to answer them,’ she said, when they had done deciphering. ‘So it couldn’t matter less,’ and she set the card on the little shelf above the kitchen table where they could admire its image of cliffs and sand and improbably blue sea.
‘Falls Clinic at eleven-thirty,’ Laura reminded her, topping up their coffee.
‘Bugger,’ Mummy said and tore the plastic wrapping off an old girls’ journal from St Swithun’s she had been avoiding for two days.
They had only once holidayed on a beach – when they took tents and camped at Espiguette, just outside Aigues Mortes. Otherwise they had returned year after year to the same naturist holiday camp in Dorset.
Summerglades. The place was so deeply embedded in Laura’s memories, and she had been so small when she first experienced it, that she only had to hear or read the word glade or even summer to feel softened pine needles underfoot or to smell the rotten sweet scent of lake water drying on her skin.
It had been a working farm for centuries, one that happened to have a wooded valley at its heart and a long, unevenly-shaped lake created by the partial damming of the stream at the valley’s bottom. Then an inheriting son had a revelation when honeymooning in Bavaria in the 1920s and created a holiday camp where visitors were encouraged to leave off their clothing for the duration of their stay.
Guests were housed in a sprinkling of simple wooden chalets beneath the trees. There was a shower block for women and girls and one for boys and men, a recreation hall (a Nissen hut with a gym at one end and chairs and tables at the other) and a restaurant-cum-dance hall (also a Nissen hut, but with better furniture). One could walk in the woods, swim in the lake, row or sail on it, ride bicycles along trails about the wood or simply sit in the sun. Simply sitting was rarely a popular option since even on a hottish day in a sheltered valley the blissfully naked needed motion to avoid becoming chilled. The resident games master and mistress organized sporting activities several times a day. Riding, rounders, tennis-ball cricket and badminton were popular. And since guests tended to arrive and leave on Saturdays, a ferociously competitive tournament was held every Friday afte
rnoon – a naturist school sports day – with sack and three-legged races, egg and spoon races, rope climbing, swimming contests and an obstacle course (on which most children gained the upper hand by play-practising all week).
In the evenings, as was only practical after nightfall, families dressed for dinner after which there was usually dancing, to a free jukebox, but sometimes a talk with slides from one of the guests. The latter varied from the scholarly – ornithology, botany and ancient civilizations were perennial favourites – to less highbrow, often unintentionally comic screenings of holiday slides and cine-films.
There was no church – a thing that had initially attracted Laura’s Fabian grandparents to the place – but every Sunday saw a few worshippers slipping out of the place for an hour or two, uneasy, even shifty, in suits and hats.
Any queasiness Laura felt about Summerglades was retrospective. She had no unhappy memories of it. A lifetime habitué, thanks to said grandparents, her father introduced her mother to the place – and to naturism – soon after they met, and took Laura there twice a year from babyhood, so that she grew up with the same warmly proprietorial feelings about it that wealthier children displayed towards holiday cottages in Cornwall or villas in Provence. Most small children delighted in raucous nudity and she had never forgotten the feral pleasure of running free in the woods in a naked gang, becoming streaked with mud and grass and puddle water and it not mattering. The principal vindication of naturism, her father always maintained, was the curing of prudery and prurience, and in this he was correct. Entirely used to all ages and shapes of nakedness from infancy, she was not only unselfconscious but unjudgemental. Ugly clothes revolted her, ugly people never did. Faced with bodies that were large or old or in any way unusual, she met them with a neutrality that caused consternation among her friends in France, for whom bodily elegance – as much as sartorial chic – was seen almost as a civic duty.