A Cornish Summer

by Catherine Alliott

  ‘Sent home again,’ he’d muttered to me in mock horror on that occasion as he passed me en route to the door. It was pretty much the first thing he’d said to me all evening.

  ‘Must be a conspiracy.’

  ‘Which always seems to happen when you’re around. Funny, that.’ He gave me a twisted little smile before exiting, pissed and angry, banging the door behind him. I watched through the window as he swayed down the wide pavement of St Giles.

  Post-university he was equally ubiquitous. I’d walk into a bar in London to meet Hugo after work, and there Tommy would be, together with all their mutual friends, all confident, beautiful and clever. His eyes would mock me as I went to greet my boyfriend, whose eyes were never like that, never snide, always open and friendly. Tommy, though, I knew, saw into my very soul. He saw all its insecurities, its lack of expensive education and brain cells, its reliance upon painting – which no one could argue with, but was I any good? – as my only calling card. He’d watch as, joining the table, I’d deliberately sit next to Vicky, the only other non-Oxbridge graduate, who could be relied upon not to ask me my thoughts on the political issues of the day as we happily compared suntan marks under our watches.

  If I’m honest, I only said I’d go to Wales for that long weekend because I knew Vicky was going. Otherwise I think I’d have turned it down. Let Hugo go alone with his hooray crowd. Obviously now, in retrospect, I wish I had. Flick, real name Felicity, who’d read Classics at Merton which apparently made her off-the-scale bright, had a cottage down there. Or at least her parents did. Most of them had one hidden away somewhere. Down we went, one windy, autumnal Friday, to a glorious secluded spot in the Teme Valley, where, tucked in a vivid green pocket, sat an ancient yellow-brick house beside a stream. There was only one girl coming we didn’t know, a new girlfriend of Sam’s, and, as we arrived, pretty much simultaneously, I spotted her getting out of Sam’s tastefully distressed Land Rover Defender. Hugo and I drew up beside them in his MG and as the Land Rover door opened a girl jumped out. She was wearing run-of-the-mill trainers, tight blue jeans and a crisp white shirt, and she was called Christina.

  It didn’t happen in a lightning flash, in fact I’d say I noticed her before Hugo did, but it certainly happened pretty damned quickly over the course of that weekend. As she shut the car door and came confidently across to say hello, she could have been Hugo’s sister. Other people have commented on it since. She was tall and slim and athletic-looking; not sexy, but fit, in the old-fashioned sense, as if she’d just come off the lacrosse field. Her short blonde hair was shiny with a floppy fringe and she had friendly blue eyes and a wide, gleaming white smile.

  The two of us smiled and said hi, and then we chatted whilst Hugo was still getting our luggage. He was a bit preoccupied, and no glances were even exchanged, so why was my heart already sinking a bit? I couldn’t take my eyes off her, if I’m honest. And for the rest of the weekend, after that initial distraction, neither could Hugo. She was fun, she was amusing, she was friendly. She was a trainee PE teacher at a London school, so not scary on that front, but she had the confidence to laugh off her terrible mistakes in Trivial Pursuit that evening, her wild guesses, which I didn’t, so that everyone laughed with her, not at her. As the games got more cerebral and she became more hopeless, she got even more amusing. I could see Hugo’s eyes on her all of Friday night.

  Flick had organized team games and obstacle races for the following day, and we all gamely joined in, getting pissed on terrible cider. The sports descended into idiotic wheelbarrow and egg-and-spoon races, and although she couldn’t have taken it less seriously, shrieking as she continually dropped her egg, running out of control in her sack and falling over, Christina looked fab. Despite being a rider I’m not remotely sporty, and in the final race of the day, I dropped the baton in the relay race to the groans of my team. Luckily, Christina was our final runner, and amazingly, she made up the ground to win by a short head, urged on by the crowd, no one roaring more loudly than Hugo. Tommy’s eyes came round to meet mine in delight. Oh yes, he was there. And he was having the best time.

  It wasn’t just me and Tommy who noticed Hugo’s distraction, either. Vicky shot me a pitying look before supper when Christina came down from her bath wearing simple white jeans with a blue shirt and espadrilles, glowing with health and vitality, whereas my forte, being small and dark, is pale and interesting with quite a lot of eye make-up. Oh, and heels are a must, which isn’t really the form for a country house weekend. And the thing is, because I was feeling insecure and jealous, I didn’t rise to the occasion. I didn’t behave very well. I’d smile thinly at Hugo, letting him know I knew. I chatted most of the evening to Vicky, even when he tried to include me after supper when we’d left the table for coffee. And we didn’t make love that night, which was rare for a precious weekend away. Interestingly, Christina’s boyfriend seemed oblivious to it all. Sam looked rather chuffed, actually, revelling in the reflected glow of his new girlfriend, who, he confided to Vicky, he’d thought pretty enough, but no great shakes. She wasn’t, if I’m honest. But she definitely had something.

  The following week was Hugo’s birthday and I bought him a very expensive pen which I couldn’t afford. We were in his car when I gave it to him, in Parson’s Green, outside the pub. I saw his face go a bit pale when he opened it.

  ‘It’s great,’ he said, taking it out of its case. ‘Wow. A Mont Blanc. That’s hugely expensive, Floss.’

  I shrugged. ‘I wanted to give you something special.’

  Odd, how, when you’re in the grip of love and panic and total horror at the ground slipping away beneath you, you’ll grasp at anything: do everything wrong. He shut the case and swallowed.

  And it got worse. Or I got worse. But not deliberately so, I swear. The catalyst for the horror that unfolded occurred before we’d even met Christina, about a month before. I’d had a terrible bout of food poisoning, courtesy of some dodgy prawns in our local Tandoori, and Hugo had held my hair as I’d lost the contents of my stomach down the loo at his flat. It meant, I was later to learn, that the Pill lost some of its efficacy, something I’d genuinely been ignorant of at the time.

  I was so shocked, so horrified, as I watched the stick turn blue in the loo at my communal studio in Clapham some weeks later, that I ran, still in my overalls, still with oil paint all over my hands, to the phone box down the road to avoid using the one in the office. Hugo was at his desk in the City. My voice, when it came, was strained, my breathing shallow.

  ‘Oh my God, Hugo, I’m so sorry. I’ve totally fucked up. I’m a couple of weeks late and I’ve just done a test. But don’t worry, don’t worry, I’m going to sort it out.’

  I heard him gasp at the other end of the line. Then there was a certain amount of crackling and confusion as he clearly tried to take his phone elsewhere.

  ‘Are you sure?’ he whispered eventually.

  ‘Positive. I’ve done it twice and it’s as clear as anything. But I’m not panicking because Lily, who paints next to me, literally had one a month ago, and it was fine. I mean – not fine, but – you know. There’s a place in Soho in Whitfield Street, the Marie Stopes clinic. I’ll book it this lunchtime, promise.’

  There was a long pause. ‘I’ll meet you this lunchtime. That bar in Maiden Lane. Don’t do anything yet.’

  ‘OK.’ I put the phone down. Panic briefly subsided and I felt love and relief flood through me that he wasn’t cross and would, I was sure, come with me. That I wouldn’t have to do this alone.

  When I met him at lunchtime, his face was pale but set. He took my hand and we went to sit at a private table in the corner of the dark cellar bar. He couldn’t bear the thought of me getting rid of it, he said. Could I? I hadn’t really thought. I’d just panicked. I thought now. He made me, as we sat, holding hands across the gingham tablecloth, him in his suit, me in my paint-spattered jeans. No, I agreed slowly, after a long pause. It wasn’t good. Wasn’t a nice feeling. We’d been together so lon
g. Think about it, he urged me. Just think about it. We’ve got a bit of time. But I had thought about it. If he’d thought about it and was happy – well, resigned – I jolly well was too. If he could put another girl who he’d literally just met, to the back of his mind, so could I. Heavens, it would be odd not to have the occasional attraction, wouldn’t it? It meant nothing. Hugo and I were as strong as ever. And a baby would strengthen that bond, naturally it would. In reality, of course, I wasn’t thinking straight at all. Not properly. Just reacting to my emotions, which were tidal. I remember nodding in agreement at the Toulouse-Lautrec poster on the brick wall behind him, but being unable to look at him: wondering if he even knew himself.

  We had to tell certain people quite quickly, obviously. Mum was good and supportive although she did ask me a few searching questions, and Belinda, dreadful. I don’t know exactly how dreadful, but Hugo, white-faced and shaken when he came off the phone, said she’d said some terrible things. I could imagine. But he didn’t change his mind; if anything he became more resolute. I wondered later, if, in some complicated way, it was precisely because of her reaction that he didn’t budge. That she’d unwittingly backed him into a corner. In some other bizarre way I began to feel like a spectator at my own execution.

  We got married quickly and without fuss at the registry office in Marylebone, because actually, since I was small and skinny, I showed quite soon. Mum came, rather quiet, and Roger, but not Belinda, who was ill, apparently. Roger beamed and was sweet and said how delighted he was. Etta was her usual silent, enigmatic self, but Shona was all I needed on the girlfriend front, and she was there. Tommy, too. And just before the service, as we waited for the registrar to arrive, I walked in on the two of them in the little back office behind the room where the ceremony was to take place, Hugo and Tommy. They were sitting at the registrar’s desk, talking in hushed, urgent tones. Tommy’s face was the most serious I’d ever seen it, his eyes fierce and intent on Hugo’s face, which had gone white. I stopped in the doorway. Tommy stared at me. Then he got up so abruptly his chair fell over. As he brushed roughly past me in the doorway he said bitterly: ‘So you got him in the end.’

  Roger set us up in a little flat in Fulham, near the river, and Peter was born that summer. And, actually, because the weather was so beautiful and Hugo was so busy and London so hot, I popped down to Cornwall quite a lot. Hardly a pop, admittedly, but I managed it. In fact, we managed everything quite well for the next couple of years. We were happy if not ecstatic. But then coping with a small baby and scraping a living together in London is not always blissful, is it? Vicky, who also had a baby by now, would tell me it was the happiest she’d ever been.

  I think it took every ounce of courage for Hugo to tell me the truth about that which I already knew. That he didn’t love me. Not like that, anyway. Hadn’t for some time. That he was incredibly fond of me, but felt about me as he would a sister. No real surprises there – after all, we hadn’t slept together for months and certainly we’d waited ages after Peter was born. But that’s not unusual following a reasonably tricky birth, although again, Vicky would disagree. She said Martin, her husband, could barely make it to the six-week check-up.

  When Hugo said he was leaving me I was completely and utterly devastated. I have been ever since, but equally, I put up no resistance. I didn’t feel I could. My heart was breaking, but deep down, I felt responsible. I should have made him examine his feelings more. I felt huge guilt and shame. And when he married Christina two summers later, at St Mary Abbots Church in Kensington, in a riot of orange blossom and confetti, and with a champagne reception afterwards at her parents’ house in Holland Park, I was not in the least bit surprised.

  7

  Roger’s study, where I would be painting him, was darker than one would have wished for. Really rather gloomy, in fact. It was part of the original fabric of the house, which, together with the sitting room, was possibly the only remaining section of the sixteenth-century core, despite Belinda rhapsodizing about the whole place being Jacobean. It was just as well it wasn’t, actually, because the rest of the house and the majority of the rooms benefited from later additions, like huge Georgian sash windows. There was only one window in the study, however, and it was small with leaded lights and faced east, which was not ideal. Roger had arranged himself facing it in his red leather chair behind his red leather-topped desk, dressed in his best bib and tucker, which consisted of a dark flannel suit no doubt hauled out of mothballs for the occasion, a white shirt and a scarlet tie. He was beaming broadly over the top of the desk, face florid, arms folded in front of him. What with the desk, the chair, the tie and the face there was an awful lot of red going on.

  ‘Comme ça?’ He beamed at me, like a benign bank manager.

  I hovered doubtfully in front of him. ‘Right … um … weren’t we going to go for a more casual look? Jumper and trousers?’

  ‘Ah, no. Belinda vetoed that. Wants me in a suit, in here.’

  ‘OK …’ I backed away towards the window, trying different angles. But the room was too small.

  ‘Um … this isn’t really working, Roger. Maybe not behind the desk?’

  ‘Oh – gotcha. Further back.’ He pushed his chair right back to the wall on its casters. ‘Legs crossed, perhaps?’ He flipped one over the other. ‘They’re not bad, actually – yes, the desk rather cuts me in half, doesn’t it?’

  ‘It does rather.’ I moved around the room, pretending to consider from the doorway, but it was hopeless.

  ‘It really is so dark. I’m wondering, what about the gunroom? Isn’t that where you normally sit and read the paper? And it’s got those great tall windows.’

  He looked alarmed. ‘Lord. Not sure Belinda would like that, she says I spend far too much time in there as it is.’

  ‘Well, because you love it, and you could even clean your guns and stuff, while you sit for me.’

  His face lit up like a firework. ‘Naughty girl! What an absolutely terrific idea. Come on, let’s do it while the old girl’s at her parish meeting. I say, won’t the dark suit look a bit odd? Got my tweed one – won’t take a mo. Nip up and change?’

  ‘Yes, I agree, not the suit. But what would you normally wear in there of an average morning? Not a tweed one either, surely?’

  Conspiracy shone in his eyes. ‘Well, if I did happen to pop in there and polish the Purdey while I was supposed to be gardening, I’d be wearing my usual kit. Old cords and a jersey.’

  ‘Exactly. That’s what I’d like to have you in, Roger, if you don’t mind. So you’re relaxed and happy.’

  ‘Splendid.’ He beamed. ‘Won’t be a tick. You potter down and I’ll see you there in a bit.’

  Relieved, I collected my easel, my bag of oils and my palette and went down the hall. I was sounding far more confident than I felt, if truth be told, but if I was to spend the next few weeks painting Roger in a dark little hole as he sat miserably and uncomfortably before me, trussed up in a suit probably last seen at Peter’s confirmation, this would surely end in tears.

  When he came down and met me in the gunroom where I was already flinging open tall shutters to the vivid green garden beyond, he was wearing a cornflower-blue jumper which matched his eyes under which a pink shirt peeked cheekily, plus baggy fawn cords and suede shoes. I knew we were in business. He rubbed his hands in delight.

  ‘Excellent! Where d’you reckon – over by the window?’ He scuttled across and draped himself theatrically on the sill of the sash window. He cocked his head dreamily towards the garden, chin raised.

  ‘It’s moody,’ I agreed, suppressing a smile; one could never quite tell if Roger was for real or hamming it up. ‘But you might get rather uncomfortable holding that pose. How about in that chair?’ I nodded across to where I was pretty sure he habitually sat, nursing his arsenal, and possibly a whisky, in an ancient, faded, exploding, pre-war armchair.

  Roger looked genuinely scared. ‘She’ll freak,’ he said weakly.

  ‘Oh, I’l
l tart it up a bit, don’t worry. Won’t show the stuffing. And if your arms are over the bad bits, we won’t see them anyway. Let’s see how it goes.’

  He needed no further prompting and scurried, with alacrity, to his favourite old chair, next to his cabinet of favourite guns, looking out over his favourite view of the front drive, the lawn, the sea and the boats beyond. The gunroom, like Belinda’s sitting room, was to one side of the front door, with a view of all the comings and goings of this great house, so that they were in effect like a couple of weather people, poised either side to dart out. Truffle, who was in her basket in the corner, got up and wandered across to her usual position by his feet, where she collapsed. Perfect.

  ‘Don’t forget, you’re in the driving seat here,’ he told me, eyeing me beadily as I busied myself, getting my easel in position, changing from one window with the drive behind to the other, which put him sideways on and still gave me enough light. It was a better composition. I dragged up an old table for my paints which I was pretty sure wasn’t precious; everything in here belonged to Roger. ‘This is all your idea, savvy? You forced me. Dragged me in here kicking and screaming.’

  I grinned. ‘Don’t you worry, Roger. I’ll protect you.’

  He wriggled happily in his seat and winked. ‘That’s my girl.’

  I set about screwing my canvas to my easel, angling it slightly more to the right, then moving it again, then again, and always glancing back to my subject to check the shadows, the light, the effect. Roger sat stiffly and self-consciously at first, head erect, an ironic smile he’d no doubt practised in the mirror playing on his lips, but he was bored now. Realizing I’d be ages preparing, he took to settling back in his chair and staring dreamily at the sea, to the sailing boats beyond, the occasional speedboat whizzing by on the horizon.