by Emma Morgan
Grace had a cup of coffee and the caffeine perked her up. Her last client today was Annie Barnes. She found her an interesting woman, glamorous and forceful, with a degree of self-confidence which was impressive. Of course, behind the make-up there were cracks, but that, in Grace’s experience, was the case with everyone. Even with Sam? Where were her cracks? If she had any Grace was yet to find them. And she didn’t feel like looking for them anyway.
Grace watched Annie sit with her legs neatly crossed. She always wore tights and heels. Grace had never got on with tights; their crotch never reached hers.
‘I’m not perfect,’ said Annie.
‘In my experience nobody is,’ said Grace.
‘I agree with you,’ said Annie, ‘but people seem to think that I am.’
‘And why is that do you think?’
‘My aura of impenetrable self-belief.’
Grace smiled and so did Annie.
‘And is that difficult to maintain?’
‘You bet it is. But nobody knows that.’
‘Nobody at all?’
‘I don’t think so. But sometimes it gives me a headache.’
‘I’m not surprised.’
‘The nearest I get to being my real self is with my best friend. But even with her I can’t let my guard down all the way.’
‘What would happen if you did?’
‘She needs me to be strong for her. She can’t always cope well on her own. She suffers from depression and I try my best with her but it’s hard.’
‘Depression is hard to deal with. Especially when it’s someone you care about who is suffering from it.’
‘I care about her a lot and I’m worried about her. She keeps sleeping with idiots. And now she’s gone and done it with a woman and as far as I know she’s never done that before.’
‘And do you find that a problem?’
‘That it’s a woman? No. I don’t care about that, it was just a surprise, that’s all. I do care about her going off with strangers all the time, though. It’s dangerous but it’s like she can’t help herself.’
‘Have you considered that it might be a way for her to alleviate the depression?’
‘Of course I have. It’s a distraction, isn’t it? We’ve never talked about it but it must make her feel better about herself. It worries me no end.’
Annie frowned.
‘Have you tried talking to her about it?’
‘I keep trying to cheer her out of it. I find myself saying the sort of rubbish my mother would say, you know, pull yourself together, pull your socks up, that sort of thing, even though I know those are useless things to say and I feel bad about saying them. But she won’t get help and what the hell else can I do?’
‘That must be very hard for you too.’
‘Nothing on how hard it is for her. I know that, even if I don’t tell her. I speak my mind you know, all the time, I’m known for it, but with her I don’t know what to say or do any more.’
This is Annie taking Laurence home to see what would happen
She gave in and took him to see her parents for Sunday lunch. She knew this was probably a mistake. Her mum would in all likelihood be dismissive, which would be depressing. On the other hand, she might be enthusiastic, which would be strange because her mum rarely showed enthusiasm for anything outside proper grouting and new hosiery. Annie was surprised to find that she felt nervous but Laurence was impeccable. She watched him shake her father by the hand and she watched her mother appraising the handshake.
‘Mrs Barnes,’ he said, ‘a handshake doesn’t feel right, does it?’ and he kissed her on one cheek. ‘What a lovely home,’ he said. ‘Now I know where Annie gets her good taste from.’
‘Annie, show Laurence around then, don’t just stand there gawping. I’ve got gravy to be getting on with, and your father has to find where on earth he has hidden the wine to stop himself drinking it.’
And Annie noticed in her mother something that she had never heard before, it was a slight change in accent, an elongation of the vowels. Well I never, she thought, and Laurence took her hand and she let him.
‘I’d love to see the house,’ he said.
‘Seriously,’ Annie said to him when they were out of earshot, ‘you don’t have to look around. Nobody’s expecting you to buy it.’
He kissed her cheek.
‘Lead on Macduff,’ he said.
Half of her was expecting him to mock them. Half of her wanted him to. Go on, she dared him mentally, muck this one up, but he didn’t.
‘That’s very nice,’ he said, about the colour scheme in the lounge. ‘I wouldn’t have thought of putting that there,’ he said about a piece of fake marble statuary in the conservatory.
By the time they had circled back to the kitchen she felt the unfamiliar sensation of having wanted approval and having got it.
‘It’s a charming home,’ he said to Annie’s mother as she dished up out of the hostess trolley. ‘And who knew these still existed? What a brilliant idea! I’m going to get one for my parents for Christmas. Perhaps you could advise me?’
Annie found herself wanting to nudge her mother, look, look, table manners. Laurence talked to her dad about property development and the wine he had brought, and to her mum about his love of real gravy and the glory of her cooking. He mentioned football in a way that seemed knowledgeable and asked about what was of note to visit in the local area. He was nothing but courteous, pulled out her and her mother’s chair to sit down, praised Annie as the most intelligent woman he knew. Her parents were themselves throughout – her dad relaxed, her mother over-observant, but they were charmed, she could tell. Her mother said nothing on the doorstep, only smiled and patted Annie’s arm and Annie didn’t know what to feel about that. Relieved? Happy? They drove home with the windows down, Annie with a scarf round her hair and her Chanel sunglasses on and the breeze blowing on her face. She pretended he was Cary Grant. She didn’t want to be Grace Kelly though. She would, of course, be Sophia Loren. Halfway there Laurence pulled over to the side of the road and stopped the car next to a hedge with bits of plastic bags stuck in it.
‘Annie, Annie, beautiful Annie,’ he said. ‘Aren’t your family great?’
He reached and took her hand.
‘That’s one way of looking at them,’ she said.
What was going on? Oh no! Maybe he had taken the whole going home for lunch thing too seriously. That hadn’t even occurred to her. What if he was going to pop the question? She bloody hoped not. Apart from anything else it hardly made a romantic story did it – he stopped by the side of a B road. Bloody stop it, she said to herself. Calm down. She withdrew her hand and took out her lipstick and tried to put it on without making a wobbly line. Her face in the mirror looked composed.
‘They were very kind indeed. Thank you for taking me to meet them. I felt honoured.’
‘I wouldn’t go that far.’
‘I have a thing to ask you?’
‘Right then,’ she said, and put her compact back in her bag, as though she was now calm, and she turned towards him and looked him in the eye. He looked, to her surprise, furtive.
‘It’s kind of a delicate matter. I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t very, very important to me.’ And he coughed.
‘OK.’
Am I blushing, she thought? I’m bloody blushing. I’m not ready for this, I’m not ready at all.
‘It’s … well … this is embarrassing I know, but I have a cashflow problem. I would ask my friends of course, but you know what Rex is like with money, and the rest of them aren’t any better. And there’s Ma and Pa of course, but they’ve bought that second place in the Dordogne and it’s eating up cash. And as for my brothers, what I’d give to have a family like yours. Respectable. Stable. Sensible, if you understand what I mean. There’s not much of that in my family unfortunately.’ And he did look embarrassed. She had never seen him look like that before.
‘How much?’ asked Annie, trying not to feel surprisingly
disappointed.
‘Not that much. A couple of thou. Two perhaps? I’ll sit down with the figures with you later if you’d like? Would you think about it?’
Annie turned back to face the windscreen and watched the cars overtake them. She thought about it; she had always been good with money, careful to the point of tight. Even her mother had had to borrow out of her piggy bank now and then when she was a child to pay the milkman. That was the only time she had lent anybody any money before; she had never even lent to Violet, who spent money as soon as she got it and often survived on change scrounged from pockets to the end of the month. But, she thought, everybody becomes unstuck now and then, and there was a small voice inside her head, a voice of pride that said but not me and she felt superior and magnanimous.
‘OK,’ she said, and looked at him. ‘I’ll lend it you. I trust you.’
‘Thank you, you don’t know how much this means to me. I’ll set a date with you to pay it back. Do you want interest?’
‘No, it’s all right.’
Was it good that he looked so grateful or was it pathetic? No, it was nice to see that he wasn’t completely perfect after all. He was flawed and that made her like him more. She smiled at him.
‘Thank you. Thank you so much,’ he said.
She felt that she should have asked for more details, but that would seem like she didn’t trust him after all, and she never liked to go back on her word.
Laurence kissed her on the mouth and looked at her with such relief that she felt like she had made the right decision.
‘Shall we go home and I can make love to you?’ he said.
And Annie giggled, although she was not a giggler by nature. I must not have my head screwed on right, she thought, and took off her scarf to let her hair whip in the breeze.
This is Grace’s girlfriend Sam
Dolores was the most curious person that Grace had ever met, and, since Sam hardly knew Dolores, this was going to come as a shock, Grace assumed. She had to watch Sam being grilled over the mussel stew.
‘And how did you get here?’ said Dolores.
‘On the bus.’
‘Were there many people on it?’
‘Not that many.’
‘Oh, that surprises me, I would have thought that this time of day there would be many, many people. How long did it take you?’
‘I’m not sure. Twenty minutes?’
‘Did it go the long way or the short way?’
‘I’m not sure.’
‘What number was it? What time did you leave home? Is it far to the bus stop from your house?’
To Grace’s relief Sam didn’t seem irritated by Dolores’s love of detail. She felt that the evening had been a success; they had all drunk a large quantity of red wine and this had resulted in Dolores showing Sam her varicose veins and then wanting to discuss the failed operation she had had to get them removed. Sam didn’t seem to mind. How tolerant she was. How nice.
‘I’m sorry about the veins,’ Grace said as they sat in bed later.
‘She’s funny,’ said Sam.
And Grace felt like this was a minor test that either Sam had passed or she had passed. Or perhaps both. Next stop was her family.
Grace sat in her office and wrote their names over and over on pieces of paper in different scripts, which is one of the most stupid things that you can possibly do with your time and which, when you are in your thirties, should probably result in community service. But she did it anyway. And she kept them in a drawer and got them out and put them in lines on her desk and they made her smile.
Sam and Grace.
Grace and Sam.
She had changed all her passwords to a variant of Sam’s name. Her pin number had become Sam’s birthday. She had bought liquorice tea and nettle tea and tea made from goat droppings that tasted like wasps. She had bought spider plants and cyclamen and most of them survived. She had experimented with the crop top type of bra that Sam occasionally wore, but rejected it for its pancaking properties. She had also bought three blue T-shirts and a pair of blue trousers because she had borrowed a blue T-shirt of Sam’s one day and Sam had said that it suited her. She went to the strange hippy shop she had never been into before to buy a wind chime because Sam had one, even though she thought wind chimes were awful. She hung it in her backyard and the clinking noise annoyed her so much she had to take it down. She even cooked, although cooking was an alien concept to her. Eustacia was the one who had cooked when they were young, because Cyril and Beatrice were incapable of anything more than anchovy paste on water biscuits, porridge, and stale brandy snaps. Grace had never learnt how, she couldn’t even cook spaghetti without it sticking together. She tried her best, though, ringing Eustacia for suggestions, but while Sam was complimentary about her efforts Grace found most of it horrible and when on her own she returned to piccalilli on toast and whatever else she had recently foraged from Manfred’s.
These were delightful days. She was still not that interested in work but who cared? No one was monitoring her levels of enthusiasm after all and it was probably a good thing that it no longer occupied so much space in her head – she was a normal person now, a person with a girlfriend, and work could be pushed into the background; it was a thing she did that was worthwhile, and which made her money, and that was all. Probably this was the same for most people. She had better things to do with her time.
Everything, as seen in the company of Sam, no matter how ordinary, was interesting. The compromises involved in going to the Co-op and chucking things into a mutual trolley became a form of entertainment. Reading out stories in the papers to each other in bed with their legs kicked over each other replaced proper books. The time Sam’s washing machine went on strike and Grace had to wash her clothes and they hung them on her radiators together and, since they weren’t dry the next morning, Sam left them behind and Grace had the later pleasure of stroking them and folding them neatly. And for days afterwards Sam’s clothes smelt the same as hers. The way that Sam mispronounced the word ‘fenugreek’ and this becoming code between them in public situations for ‘come to bed with me’. The morning Grace tripped on a book and threw muesli all over the floor and over herself and how the memory of this made them laugh every time it was mentioned. The evening they went to the theatre and both thought the play was rubbish and they left in the interval and went back to Sam’s and stayed up all night playing backgammon. How it felt naughty, like Grace imagined skiving school must have done, not that she ever had. Even when Grace woke up in her own bed on her own she remembered the fact of Sam’s existence and reached over and touched the pillow on the other side of the bed. She put her nose into it to see if it smelt of Sam’s hair and it did and it delighted her.
She had often found herself analysing the most ordinary of interactions. Now, mostly what she did was feel. Feel her skin prickling, her belly shaking, her legs going wobbly, her heart pounding away. Every time Sam kissed her she felt faint, came out of the kisses swaying, felt that she needed a wall to rest herself against, and had to hold on to Sam’s arms to stand up straight. Sam laughed at this and Grace was very pleased, she had never known that she was funny.
Sam got her to go running, which was something Sam did now and then but Sam was fit and ran like a gazelle and Grace was not and ran like a wheezy hippopotamus. She watched Sam run away from her in a tight top and leggings while Grace had only managed to find an old T-shirt and some falling-apart shorts. Sam had proper Nikes but Grace had Converse and her feet hurt every time she slammed them on the ground. Her thigh bones seemed to be grinding on her shin bones. That couldn’t be good. Sam came back to her and said, ‘Are you OK, Grace?’ and Grace couldn’t speak because she was trying to breathe. She sat down heavily on the grass. Sam jogged on the spot next to her.
‘Could you keep going, do you think?’
Grace leant back and closed her eyes and to her surprise felt Sam nuzzle her neck. She opened her eyes and Sam was lying on the grass next to her with h
er head propped up on her elbow.
‘But didn’t you want to run more?’ asked Grace when she could speak.
‘I want to be with you more than I want to run,’ said Sam, and leant forward to kiss her. Grace had never kissed a woman in public before. She looked around. There was a man walking his dog that she could hear muttering, ‘They think they can just do anything they like whenever they like. It shouldn’t be allowed.’
‘Did you hear that?’ asked Grace.
‘Stupid old man,’ said Sam, and touched her arm. ‘We should have sex right here and see what he does,’ she said.
Grace felt elated by Sam’s attitude. She reached over and traced her jawline.
‘We can do anything we want,’ said Sam.
‘Yes,’ said Grace, ‘yes,’ and kissed her again.
When they got back home and after they had showered together, Grace put on one of Sam’s T-shirts and went into the sitting room. She saw the light on Sam’s retro answerphone flashing. Sam came in. She was grinning.
‘That was good,’ she said.
‘You’ve got messages,’ said Grace.
‘I’ll get them later,’ said Sam. ‘Shall we have a fry-up?’
‘Yes,’ said Grace, even if she hadn’t had one in years.
How many times a day do I say yes now, thought Grace as she drove home. All the time, all the time. She felt so happy she wanted to do something to demonstrate it. Like throw confetti or hand out flowers to strangers in the street. She parked next to Manfred’s and got out.
‘Well, hello Grace,’ said Manfred. ‘Haven’t seen you for ages. You look flushed. Anything I should know about?’
‘I’ve got a girlfriend,’ said Grace.
‘Well, well, congratulations,’ said Manfred. ‘I’m very pleased for you. Is she fit?’
Grace blushed.
‘I’ll take that as a yes,’ he said. ‘When’s the wedding then? Do I hear the ding dong of bells?’
