by Mavis Cheek
Upstairs she totters into her study. Kitchen - kindly. Food equals love. She switches on her machine and writes.
Your recipe is enclosed.
This particular dish is our most spectacular and popular, and requires great skill. We suggest you do not attempt it until you are fully confident of success. Once you have mastered it you will find it is requested of you again and again.
WARNING: This will affect your statutory rights.
essential equipment
1 ripe man 1 ripe woman
A glass or two of good wine
A little oil
A generous handful of time,
A flat surface for rolling out on
A few sweet words for decoration
method
Pour wine into two glasses. Drink a little from time to time.
Remove outer garments from the man and woman carefully. Set aside.
Check the skin for any remaining undergarments, remove slowly assessing each area uncovered for damage.
Any damage may be removed at this stage with careful application of lips to the area.
Place undergarments with outer garments for use later.
Feel remaining flesh all over for less obvious signs of damage.
If whole and unbruised, rub all over generously with oil, then lay out flat.
Wait for the man to rise fully.
The man and the woman are now ready.
Let them prove themselves, turning occasionally.
Judge when they are done by how they feel. They should be very hot and very damp.
Sprinkle with sweet words.
Leave to rest before returning to original under and outer garments.
Verity is pleased with this. It's funny. It's witty. It shows she can still be on form despite the bitter, bitter pain. It is exactly the sort of thing Mark would like to receive.
She switches off her machine and leaves the study, closing the door with a bang. But he damn well won't.
Jill watches David on the Flymo and tries to concentrate on his rather nicely muscular forearms as opposed to his rather round stomach. He is cutting the grass for the advent of Margaret and her new lover. Jill has made their bed and put fresh roses in the room, though the scent of the old rose petals, still in their bowl, lingers beneath their sharper perfume. The odour of love, she thought sadly, closing the door tight to keep it in.
She feels both excited and afraid. Excited because she has looked forward to seeing her friend for so long, afraid because everything has changed now, even to the extent of Margaret's stay. Originally she was going to come up for at least a week. Now it is only the weekend - Friday night to Sunday. When Jill had suggested that Margaret could come up a few days earlier, or even a night earlier, Margaret had made some very convincing excuses for why it was not possible. True, she did say that she would come up again on her own very soon, perhaps in July, but.. . Jill feels she is behaving like a jealous schoolgirl. She looks at David's strong arms and his well-shaped legs in their shorts. Nothing wrong with the way he is made, nothing wrong at all - only somehow, somehow right now he seems to lack the power to engage her. She looks at her watch. They are due to arrive in half an hour. Oh, David is so irritating about that bloody Flymo. He had started cutting the grass too late to finish before they arrived. Of course he had - because he wanted the new chap to admire its lines and fine engineering. He once had a Porsche, in the good old days of the eighties, and that never got half the admiration and attention. Love me, love my Flymo. Jill smiles. She had better tell Margaret to pass this wisdom on to her lover so that they can all have a really harmonious weekend!
Chapter 24
'Star bursts,' he said from the window seat.
I sat up, propped against the pillows, burrowed in the bedcover, and smiled at his dark silhouette. He had the base of the tapestried curtain wrapped around him, though his chest and shoulders were bare. He was lit from behind by moonlight and from within the room by a solitary candle's glow - a strange combination of coldness and warmth which created a hybrid image, somewhere between the cool northern painting of Vermeer and the deep warm shadows of Caravaggio.
'Sex is beautiful,' I said drowsily.
If you have no expectations nor responsibilities, I was thinking to myself, and you are turned on by the person you are with, then sex is the simplest and the best of all the rather beautiful pleasures in the world. Of course, I would probably change my mind as soon as hunger loomed around breakfast time. Eating so often supersedes sex as the most pleasurable of indulgences. Yet another example of clever Mother Nature - get 'em eating and fucking and the world goes on turning. But right then, at about three-thirty on a May night in the country, sex seemed a great deal better than bacon and eggs.
I was about to say something along these lines when my kindly eminence grisette, the one who perches on my shoulder from time to time and gently suggests that I should put a sock in it, did.
'There's no art to find the mind's construction in the face,' says Duncan, getting it completely wrong and trotting off to Glamis for a quick touch of regicide. But that was politics. After sex the face does reflect the feelings. Oxford looked at ease, and I felt at ease. We had pre-ordained ourselves -decisions were out of our hands. It was like being naked on a warm desert island.
'Go on,' he said later, as we lay close and were drifting towards sleep.
'Go on, what?'
'Say it.'
'Say what?'
He turned to me, yawned, and spoke in that tone that denotes the pleasurable slipping from consciousness. 'Say, "I'm glad we've got that bit over ..."'
'Well, I am . . .' I said, brushing off my eminence grisette.
But he was already asleep.
Later, looking suitably ragged, we dressed for breakfast. The morning was sunny, full of birdsong and warm enough for our casement to be open. A smell of lavender and newly cut grass drifted into the room. We could never have designed such perfection, I thought - it could only ever come together like this when the gods decide.
'I don't think . ..' he said, lying back on the gorgeous crumpled stuff of the bed and pulling me towards him, 'I don;t think I could face breakfast with that lot again. How about you?'
I shook my head. It could never be fun the second time around. 'Let's have it up here in the room,' I said.
'Good idea.' He began rubbing his cheek with a not altogether roseate thumb. 'And then have breakfast.. .'
As we drove out of the gates, I thought that there was some wonderful material here for Verity. She should book herself in some time and take in the eccentric flavour. That morning, while Oxford paid, I was invited to take a look at the hothouse. It was as if we really were back in Jane Austen's days when any visit to a country seat must, de rigueur, include
an opportunity to admire the peaches. In fact they were apricots - the precocious fruit - and looked so erotic, like little round and willing bottoms, that I came dangerously close to remarking so. I was about to touch one with a fingertip when my hostess restrained me.
'They are so delicate at this stage,' she said, 'and bruise so easily. When they are a little riper they will toughen up enough to be handled.' She gave me a bright smile.
'Well, isn't that just like life?' I murmured, deciding that I would tell Verity all about this place, in every seductive detail, so that she would be forced by curiosity to come here. It would do her good. She needed taking out of herself. I also felt guilty. Perhaps I had rather left her in the lurch. I quickly put the thought from my head. You couldn't go round being responsible for people in that way. Now, could you?
We returned to the lobby.
'Nasty business all over,' said mine host, rubbing his hands. Not a till nor a cash box in sight. How perfect the illusion here is, I thought, and had the uncomfortable feeling that it wasn't the only illusion in proximity.
Chapter 25
We were talking about your card from Hexham Abbey. Dad says he remembers going there as a student and copying
the carvings in the Chantry. I think he misses all that heredity stuff Who were you with? You said 'We' on your card. Was it Jill? Give them my love.
We visited Hexham Abbey before driving on to Jill and David.
I found myself wondering whether we had really needed sex to finish the circle, or whether it was the mythology that dictated it as necessary for a relationship's completion. Sure, it's a pleasure, and a free one if you are lucky, but then so is sitting on a warm beach or having your feet massaged, and you don't have to wear a condom to do either of those. Only, I suppose, they don't perpetuate humankind. Maybe the reason we get in such a muddle about sex is because we have the primal expectancy of 'mating equals offspring' and so our encounters mostly leave us feeling we have failed in our true purpose. Women are upset not because their men fall asleep straight afterwards, but really because they haven't been made pregnant. Possibly? Well, whatever, that morning we agreed to look at the world fearlessly through new eyes, and, like that, it looked very good.
A small piece of travelogue. Hexham Abbey is a comely place which still retains many of its Anglo-Saxon origins. Dating back to 674, it is built in the shape of a cross. The
Anglo-Saxon names connected with it would make a sit-com writer blush. The fair Queen Etheldreda, whose husband was godly King Egfrid, gave land for the Abbey to Saint Wilfrid, who repaid their charity by taking a lawsuit to Rome against the carving up of his see. He won it, but on his return was promptly imprisoned by said godly king. First known example of taking a case to Europe successfully only to come back to find nothing more than a big fat so what . .. Current governments, please note. Despite his huff, said Wilfrid left a splendid seventh-century stone cathedra, which had once, if sat in by an innocent sanctuaree, offered immediate and unassailable safety - cause for thought here, all right.
There were more sit-com names in the rood screen - St Cuthbert and St Oswald. The former clutched the latter's head, which produced a kind of saintly sense of sit-com. Apparently some muddle following Oswald's death on the battlefield (hardly a saintly demise) resulted in this part of his anatomy becoming coffin companion to Cuthbert. Rather presumptuous in my opinion — fancy having someone else's head chucked in beside you, not even to be sure of having your coffin to yourself once you have gone to your final rest.
Just like certain trigger words - gusset and truss, for instance - the Anglo-Saxon names rolled off the guide book with increasing absurdity. Cuthbert and Oswald were followed by Walburga and his two brothers St Willibald and St Winebald .. . There was also an Ethelberga of Barking. For these names alone it was worth letting William the Conq. overrule us . ..
The Abbey's minder, a thin, imperious-looking priest with hair and face like a falcon, looked upon us with growing disapproval. Oxford spent some time with him smoothing the feathers, admiring the misericords, discussing the mixture of styles, commiserating on the decay of the building's fabric. I wandered a little way off and leant against a pillar, watching the two men. I was amused at the thoughts going through my mind, which had little to do with Medieval
versus Romanesque- If we had not already been a little late setting off for Jill and David's, I might have suggested a pitstop on the way. But neither of us was sure enough of the other, yet, to suggest leaping under a haystack or bundling up in the back of the car, so we drove in an increasingly high state of unsaid expectancy. Just the sort of thing Jill would love, and exactly what she would hope and expect to see, I thought, as we rolled through the gates of their drive.
'How do you want to handle this?' he asked after I had switched off the engine.
'As romantically as possible,' I said, 'and say nothing about advertisements.'
He laughed. 'Shame on you,' he said.
I got out. In the distance I could see David on his grass-cutting machine, and the movement of the curtain in a downstairs window indicated that Jill had registered our arrival.
'It might remind David to be a bit more attentive to Jill if we rub his nose in it a bit. Besides' - I took his hand - 'we don't have to pretend anything, do we?'
The front door opened. Jill appeared wearing a very pretty lavender and white dress, and I thought how beautiful she looked with her shimmering eyes and her huge, bright smile.
'Welcome,' she called, arms outstretched to me. We hugged each other.
'He's very nice,' she whispered into my ear. So how could I tell her the truth?
Chapter 26
We are packing up. You won't hear much from me for a while, I wish everything was easy between us all and that you could have come over for some of the summer. I think of you and the house and my room often. Well, I guess this is growing up!
Verity has decided to go swimming in the early evening.
This is part one of plan A, called Cleaning Up Your Act Before It Shows On Your Ageing Face and Body. She feels depressed. It is not relaxing to be constantly wondering what is going on in a northerly direction. She wishes she had had the courage to say to Margaret, 'Please ring me and tell me what it was like immediately,,' because what it was like and how it is continuing are two questions that dance around in her head all the time. Margaret's taking a lover has left a hole in Verity's needy world and, though she despises the thought, she would feel much better if Margaret rang up to say it was not so hot. Or, even better, if a tear-stained Margaret arrived on her doorstep to say 'Never again.' There. The deceitful, dreadful thought is out. Swimming will cure such disease, thinks Verity, and she puts on her costume.
The costume says to her, as does her face above, that whatever the 'It' is, it already does show on the ageing face and body. 'Thank God I never had children,' Verity says to her reflection. If she had had children, she feels, then the
body would have been in an even worse state. Already it is quite bad enough. It is not so much that it is fat, it is not, but it has a saggy quality about it, as do her jaw and her eyes, the whites of which - she peers closely - are definitely looking yellow. That's it, then - she throws the towel into her bag - she has shot her liver too. Such fools love makes of us, she thinks, for she looked quite all right before all this Mark business began. She takes one last look at her bosom, decides it has become sunken treasure, and moves away from the disgracefully cruel mirror. Perhaps she will throw the mirror away and get a very small one - one you can see only bits of yourself in. 'What do you think, Wall?' she yells. But coming back up the stairs is only silence. The wall is an extremely tactful pal to have around.
At least the swimming-pool will be free of threat. At just after six o'clock on a Friday night the children will be going home for their supper, the strapping Adonii of early-morning lanes will be oiling their muscles at home ready for the weekend, the grannies and the disabled will be tucked up with their Barbara Cartlands. She feels she is allowed to make this kind of ageist suggestion since she is nearly in that category herself. So she expects that there will be either no one at the pool or others in a similar plight to herself. 'Nowhere to go, nothing to do, and no one to do it with,' she says mournfully, as she pulls on her jeans. Oh, really! How did she ever get into this state in the first place? And what on earth is Margaret doing opening herself up to it? Foolish woman. Verity sticks a bottle of body lotion into the bag and zips it up. 'Body lotion to keep the body all supple and soft,' she intones to herself as she heads down the hallway. And a tear escapes. But supple and soft for why?
She remembers what Margaret is up to. Fucking Aunt Margaret and her pick-up from Oxford. Fucking Aunt Margaret and her successful pick-up from Oxford. Last night's recipe seems to have lost its healing quality. When she rang Colin this morning, just to ask him what he thought about it all, he had seemed puzzled.
'Think?' he said. 'I don't think anything. Let them get on with it. As long as they leave me alone. But I'll tell you what I do think ...'
Verity perks up. 'What?'
'I don't think it will last.'
Verity perks up even more. 'You wouldn't like to come swimming with me now?' she aske
d. But he politely declined.
Instantly she wished she had not said it and was plunged into gloom again after he had rung off.
It will last, she thinks, it will. Margaret just has that air of confidence about her.
Verity sees Mark twice on the way to the swimming-pool. On each occasion, and once rather dangerously, she reverses the car only to find it is a figment. One was a man with a moustache who grinned back at her unedifyingly, and one a young lad with a shell suit. Verity wonders if such mistakes may be the result of delirium tremens setting in. She vows, as she parks at the leisure centre, that she will not draw cork nor twist cap once tonight. Not once. And she is deaf to the inner voice that mocks and says, 'Ha ha. Heard that one before . . .'
Jill is now sitting up in bed at midnight and extremely glad to be in a room that is on the other side of the house. David is reading - in that dozy, pre-sleep way - a magazine article about Japan. He has to go there soon and is irritatingly unexcited about the prospect. Jill did think about accompanying him at one point - hang the expense - but the prospect of doing most of her sightseeing alone, and of not having an iota of Japanese under her belt, made her decide otherwise. David suggested that they learn some Japanese together. Jill has long wanted to share an activity with him - perhaps golf, perhaps orienteering, something they could both enjoy in a childlike, open way and which would draw them closer - but learning Japanese for business reasons doesn't appeal.