by Paul Magrs
“We don’t have to, do we?” I said. We hadn’t said much to each other yet. We were still testing the waters. She looked at me dubiously, as if I was something that had fallen out of her nest and been returned to her.
“I know what you’re thinking, Wendy. I always did.”
“And what’s that?”
“You’re looking at me funny because I’ve made myself look stupid, taking up with two stupid men, one after another.”
“I never said a word.”
“But it’s just the way it ended up. I loved Daniel, I really did. The way he used to read that woman’s books. Maybe I just wanted to be her and get all of his attention.”
I looked at her.
“Ok, it’s trite, but it’s my life, right? Anyway, he lost interest when Lindsey came along.”
“It’s going to be a girl? You’ve already named her?”
“Yep. And the Professor... just happened. But you can’t cut yourself out from the disastrous relationships, Wendy. The things that aren’t quite right. You can’t hold yourself up pure and separate.”
“And that’s what I’m doing, is it?”
“You’re looking at me funny. Judgemental.”
“No I’m not! And I’m not trying to be separate about anything.”
“This money of yours is a problem, you know.” She swished the remains of her pint. “If it means you’ll never have to compromise or depend on anyone. It’ll be trouble if it means people only ever depend on you. You’ll get too far out of ordinary life.”
“No I won’t. I haven’t yet.”
“Hm.”
When Mandy arrived and said all this, like a list of things she’d prepared on the train, she disturbed me. Because just that week I had met Joshua for the first time. He came unexpectedly to Serena’s house while I was there. This was the rare, bold Joshua whose appearance she had built up to, fearing him lost to her. He came in laughing (a good sign) and treated Serena like his oldest, best friend. She became twitchy and animated and her house took on a new atmosphere that afternoon. She felt included again.
I heard him moving about downstairs and listened a while before coming down. He was turning off music and replacing it with his own choice—Rimsky-Korsakov, I think—all heady and Arabian Nights-ish. He was saying, “Serena, anyone would think you had a teenager living with you. Or that you’d discovered a second, a third, a fourth youth of your own.”
“I have,” she said, laughing.
“You’ve become the good mother at last, have you? Taking in this girl?”
“Don’t make her sound like a waif and stray, Josh. She’s hardly that.”
“Well.”
When I came into the William Morris room I found him sitting indolently on that settee that sucked you in and made it very difficult to move again. Joshua, though, was out of it in one movement that was meant to be sinuous, but he faltered at the last moment, dropping his cigarette on the African coffee table and swearing. He shook my hand and smiled and sank back down. “I’m Joshua,” he said.
He was then about thirty, I suppose. Serena had explained she’d taken him up to join her friends when he was quite young, but he had never really become part of their set. He was forever offending them. “Not that he sets out to,” Serena explained. “Josh likes who he likes and he’s very loyal, I suppose. But if he takes against you at first sight, you’d never know it. Only, eventually, he’d say something to take your breath away.” Even on first meeting Serena, who claimed to be one of the people he was closest to, he had, during dinner, told her she was ‘wonderfully greedy and self-centred’ and that was why she’d insisted on not having a dessert, but trying spoonfuls filched from everyone else’s.
That first day in Kilburn he was in a tangerine linen suit, quite crumpled, with the shoulders rucked up from the way he’d thrown himself down. He had the Saturday papers already spread out across his lap carelessly, and his shirt was so white, his hands so clean, that you couldn’t help but worry that he’d cover himself in newsprint. And this was my first reaction to Josh: an involuntary twinge, because he set out so clean and obviously he took care of himself, but he immediately messed it all up. He was smoking impatiently, taking swift gulps and blowing it noisily out of one side of his mouth like Popeye. His head was shaved almost completely, his features large and sensuous, with a jaw that dimpled when he read. He was unshaven and I found that very sexy from the start: his tiny blond hairs everywhere which, he once told me, sometimes grew in pairs in the same place, and simply slid out of his face when pulled gently. Later on he would let me try that. He was looking at me over his trendy half-moon glasses, which were very dirty. When Serena entered the room with a tray laden with her Mexican pottery tea service, he shot his cuffs to show he was wearing scarlet cufflinks.
“They’re beautiful,” I said. “Like burning coals.”
“Would you like them?” He grinned at me, stubbing out his cigarette quickly and fiddling with his cuffs. “I’d gone off them anyway, actually.” He pursed his fleshy, succinct-looking lips, uncrewed the links, and handed them to me. “I’m sure you’ll find a use for them.”
I didn’t know what to say, so I took them.
Serena seemed very nervous, perching herself on her usual chair, looking at us. “The tea’s passion fruit.”
“Oh, fuck,” said Joshua. “Why do you always have to push the boat out? Something strong and sweet and ordinary would have done for me. And this girl’s from the north, isn’t she?” He inspected the tea service. “But your ceramics are rather nice.” He felt over the warmed surface of the mustard and purple glaze as if he was reading Braille. When Serena poured his large cup he let it cool all the way through his visit, only drinking it at the end, in a single, gulping swallow. He only ever stayed long enough to let the tea cool. Josh always gave that impression of having to be off, with other things to do, but when you went with him and found out what those things were, it was most often another cup of tea he had to wait to let cool and another pile of newspapers he could riffle and dirty himself with. I ended up loving the way he read the papers, seemingly cover to cover, every column. I watched his eyes flick back and forth. He spent hours, but it was the only thing he did fast. It turned out he knew everything about what was in the papers. “Oh god,” he’d say. “Listen to this.” The bits he found to read to me were always to do with somebody’s ineptitude.
“Of course I know better than everyone,” he would say when challenged. “I just can’t do anything, can I? It’s when you try to go and do things that you fuck it all up. I like intentions. They’re fine, and as long as they stay in your head, they stay that way.”
“He’s very anal,” Serena put in.
“If I was anal, I’d be forever on the point of doing something,” he said briskly. “As it is, I’m not. I know better than that. Coleridge would have been a finer poet if he’d fallen asleep for all of his poems. If the person from Porlock had come knocking every time he was trying to write up what he’d pieced together. Imagine having a reputation for brilliance and nothing to show for it! There would be nothing for anyone to pick over and tell you you were actually rubbish.” I liked the rolling way he said ‘rubbish’. He said it with tremendous relish (which is one of his phrases, actually, not mine) in his cultivated accent, his exemplary, buffed-up BBC voice. “Coleridge was the last man to claim he’d read everything that had been published up to that point,” Joshua went on. “Imagine being him! He didn’t have to write a single word. He could go round being the universal expert, the only one in a position to judge. He could go round telling people—that’s rubbish, they’re rubbish, and you’re rubbish as well.” Joshua sighed and lit himself another cigarette, snatching it out of his mouth while he was still inhaling. “Yet he had to go on writing things. He fucked his happiness good and truly. Mind, he wrote some lovely things.”
I hadn’t read Coleridge then, so I didn’t say anything.
Serena began: “’In Xanadu, did Kubla Khan…’�
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“Yes, yes,” said Joshua, to shut her up. “Now explain to me again why you haven’t been in touch with me. Not since I sent you that lovely message at Christmas.” He looked at Serena over his glasses and his eyes were blue and hurt.
“I left you lots of messages!’
“Did you?”
“Yes! Then I gave up because you were snubbing me.”
“I don’t snub people. I just don’t listen properly to messages. You know that. When I get in and press the button, there’s so many things to do. There’s the child to look after.”
“You don’t do anything! You’ve got all of those women doing everything for you!’
“There’s the child to talk to,” he said. “It was you who said I shouldn’t ignore her. To talk to her like an adult.”
“How is she?” asked Serena eagerly.
“Nine going on forty-nine. I’ve had to buy her a huge computer so she can… surf the net. If that’s what they call it, but she’s shown me what it can do and really, it’s more like paddling. She’s writing a horror novel, drawing some horribly lurid pictures. She’s going on about something called Girl Power and starting to fret about her weight because she’s getting teased at school. I pay a fortune to keep her at that school and this is the treatment she gets.” He squished his cigarette and took up a fresh one. “Ow. I’ve got a headache. She isn’t fat, by the way,” he told Wendy. “But girls at that age, I’m sure you know, can be poisonous. Katy is just tall and rather well-made, even if I do say so myself.”
“Your best accomplishment,” said Serena.
He pulled a face. “You don’t create children in that way. They just happen. I don’t believe in biology.”
“That’s ridiculous!” She seemed to be angry with him.
“Don’t give me your pre- or post-feminist rubbish, Serena. I can only speak for myself and, to me, it seemed that Katy just happened. Although I’m glad she did. She’ll be a good companion in my old age. I warned her, though, not to grow much more. She looked at me so seriously. I said, women should be like the best books. Not too long, and certainly not padded out.”
“You’re a horrible father.” Serena tried to pour more tea for us, but I’d had enough of the flowery stuff and Joshua’s cup was still full.
“I’m more like a brother to her. Free not to tell her all the things a parent should tell her. I can tell her all the wrong things and she loves me for it. She’ll be fine and rebellious and thoroughly cynical.”
Serena looked dubious.
I realised that she and Joshua knew each other very well and that they had talked this through many times. Perhaps by now it was ritualised, or a performance for my benefit, as I sat listening and not saying much. For the first time it struck me that it might not always be for the best when two friends knew each other that well. It could even be inconvenient.
‘Will you come and see us?” Joshua asked me suddenly. “We live in Greenwich. The deep, dark South of the river. Serena will bring you. Katy would love to meet you. Outside of her ridiculous school she hardly sees anyone nearer her own age.”
“Wendy’s twice the girl’s age!”
“I bet she can still get on with her though,” said Joshua. “Will you come?”
I nodded. “Of course.”
Then he was drinking down his tea, tugging his clothes straight, and preparing to leave.
“And you,” he told Serena firmly, “had better act more fondly next time you see me. I think Scotland has made you hard and cold.”
“Oh, rubbish,” she snapped. Then he pulled her into a sudden warm hug and was gone.
Serena lingered thoughtfully over collecting up the tea things. “I’m sorry if Joshua is a bore. He’s in a world of his own. You don’t have to go round there if you don’t really want to…”
“I meant it,” I said. “He’s all right.”
“I worry about my friends meeting up like this. I’ve had some awful disasters. And in the disasters, Joshua is usually involved. He met a friend of mine once at a wedding and she was so nervous about a dress she’d bought months earlier for the occasion. He came striding over— he was clad in midnight blue velveteen—and told her she looked like a hooker and had that been the point?” She smiled her lopsided smile at me. “He seemed to take to you, though.”
“I liked him.”
“He seems different. Rather downcast. He was slower, too, in his way of talking. As if he was on Prozac, maybe. He did say last year he was thinking of giving it a whirl.”
Our trip to Greenwich was fixed for the following Friday. We saw him sooner though, and with his daughter, when we went swimming at an old-fashioned pool that Serena insisted I had to see. I had to see the mosaic walls and the Art Nouveau ceiling. She wore a black one-piece and sat smoking at the edge, tapping her ash into a sea shell and gazing at the glass ceiling with its swirling peacock design and I swam lengths, loving the warm choppiness of the water, its voluptuous pull. This was exactly how I had imagined the place under Astrid’s launderette on Leith Walk, even down to the rows of green changing cubicles along the side of the pool.
We had taxied all the way across London just to be there that afternoon and we had come, without realising it, quite near to Joshua’s house. The first I knew that he was there with the child, as he sometimes called her, was a cry that went up from Serena. She was waving and I stopped at the deep end, watching heads turn to see her hurrying across the wet tiles to talk to the new arrivals, who both had rolled orange towels under their arms. Joshua was in white linen today, with a soft pink shirt. His daughter looked sullen in cycling shorts and a Strange Matter T shirt. I plunged back into my lengths, trying to follow the madly distorting lines painted at the bottom of the pool.
When I stopped next I caught my breath and drifted over to where Joshua and Serena sat talking. He wasn’t even wet yet. His soft fair hair, all over his chest, round his tiny, pale nipples and on his neat stomach, was completely dry. They were talking and watching Katy, who clung to the edge some distance away, thoughtfully playing with handfuls of water, as if she was studying and comparing them.
Joshua caught my glance and laughed. “Did Serena bully you into buying that swimsuit?”
I felt my face burn. She had, of course.
“It won’t wash well, you know. Those fashionable ones never do. If you’re planning to swim properly and a lot, it will fade like a dishrag.”
“Such a fucking expert,” muttered Serena. The only time I heard her swear was when she was with Josh. I hauled myself out to sit adjacent to them, so that I could have a good look at his body. I took my goggles off first.
He was beautifully made, of course, with wide, muscled shoulders and a small waist. His thick thighs were squashed down on the tiles and I watched them work as he absently kicked at the water. His chest was small and later I was to hear him bemoan his lack of pectorals. He was an unashamed narcissist, but only, he claimed, because he knew he looked less than perfect. But he carried his body with easy, negligent pride, changing his clothes (as he did, three times a day) in front of anyone who happened to be around. He was covered with cappuccino-coloured moles that he would inspect routinely for cancerous danger signs. I was staring at the rounded nub of his collar bone, evidence that he’d once broken it and had it inexpertly set, when Serena suddenly said: “Look at her, staring at you! You’d think she’d never seen a naked man before!”
“I’m not naked!” he protested, and jammed his legs together self-consciously. “And she can look all she likes. As long as I can stare back.” He gave me a good looking-over then and smiled approvingly at my breasts, which had always been big and now the nipples were standing on end. It was the chill after the swimming, but it seemed like he did it just by looking at me. Josh was always very frank about his sexuality: it was part of his indolence. Or maybe vice versa. He wanted you and he wanted to lie curled up with you all the time, and he never got bored, he never wanted you to get up, ring the changes, open the curtains,
wash the sheets.
“You should meet Katy,” Serena said. “Katy, sweetheart?”
“What?” Katy thundered, still cupping her handfuls of water
Joshua explained, “She’s trying to catch the reflections of the stained glass in her hands. We’ve been coming here since she was tiny. I’ve told her she should swim, but she can’t be bothered. She thinks she can take the reflections home with her.”
“A collector just like her father,” said Serena.
“Not really,” he sighed. “She’s always breaking things.” He brushed carefully at his chest, at a pale scar he seemed self-conscious about.
I asked, “What happened to your collarbone?”
“Is it that noticeable?”
I shook my head.
“I used to row, at Oxford.”
“That’s how he got his lovely muscles,” Serena said.
“Hilarious, isn’t it? That was ten years ago and I haven’t done a stroke of exercise since. I should be a blob.”
“And he eats like there is no tomorrow.”
“Anyway, I broke my collarbone at a boating club do. I fell off a chair. Some complete fucking fool set it like this, half an inch out of place and wouldn’t put it right again. Said they’d have to break it again to put it straight. I said, that’s ok, if that’s what it takes, but they wouldn’t. They let it knit back like this, like the hunchback of Notre fucking Dame.”
“It’s not like that…” I said.
“And do you know what the surgeon said?” He looked incredulous. “He said, it’s not as if you’re going to be a model, is it?”
Serena tutted and looked away.
“I mean, I’d never considered modelling, but to have it taken away like that, and decided for me… I felt like a freak.”
Katy came over to us then. She’d let her reflections go and she came to float beside her father’s legs.
“Hullo,” he said and she scowled. “This is Serena’s friend, Wendy.”
The child looked at me. “You’ve got big tits.”