by Emma Forrest
‘You’d cut an eighty-year-old dress?!’
‘I would, yeah.’
‘You and I are so similar, we really are. We could be the same person.’
People who bond through trauma often think that. It’s rarely true.
She got a Turkish ceremonial knife and I picked exactly the spot and then she hacked it.
‘What should I wear?’
She led me to her dad’s tuxes.
‘I feel weird.’
‘Don’t be. You’ll give them good energy. Your energy is radiant and beautiful and powerful. Just like mine.’
I’d never met someone before whose self-esteem problem was that it was too high.
Dinner was disgusting but I loved being there and I guess I was used to being served because my mum always did it for us. Suddenly I missed her terribly and wanted her to be there with us, though I don’t know what we’d have discussed. I just wanted her to be waited on and I resolved to do that when I got home. I just didn’t plan to be home any time very soon. When the blancmange arrived, Jasmine, speaking through its pregnant curves, announced, ‘I signed the lease on Onslow Gardens.’
‘What?’
Her face rose above the pudding. ‘It’s perfect for us. You can walk to the V and A when you have costume research to do. I submitted your application to Saint Martin’s.’
‘WHAT?’
‘Yes, when I was posting a letter of encouragement to Esther Rantzen. So I wouldn’t have to walk to the post office twice.’
‘You did that without asking me?’
‘Why should I?’
‘It’s my life.’
‘It’s my life too!’
‘But you have to ask someone before you place them, literally, directly, in your life, in the same space as them.’
She looked around her dining room. ‘Well, what are we doing now?’
I felt like an idiot. And I felt doubly an idiot because she had my heart. ‘I’m not some toy.’
‘How on earth,’ she asked, eating her dessert, ‘would you take my signing a lease for us as anything less than a sign of my commitment?’
We had a big fight. Well. Not that big. Nothing after Paris was a big fight, because, after Paris, we knew we could get past them.
I sat in the claw-foot tub, stewing over her entitlement, when she got into the bath with me. Responding to my facial attempt to maintain the squabble, she just started running more hot water and said, ‘Here’s my official title: Jasmine, the Honourable Lady of Wessex.’
‘That’s not bad,’ I answered, because it wasn’t, and because she was so deep in my space, she wouldn’t even let me bathe alone, except that it wasn’t my bath, it was hers she was invading.
The phone rang and she pointed to me to pick it up.
‘I’ve never answered the phone in a bath before.’
‘You’ve never done a lot of things.’ She dunked her head underwater.
I answered. ‘Hello, Jasmine’s phone.’
The man on the other end sounded disconnected and urgent and the crackly distance made what he was saying sound like an actor in a radio play. ‘I’m trying to get hold of Jasmine Mellor. Is the right number? We’ve been trying to reach her for days.’
Jasmine was now standing up, shaving her pubic hair with a razor.
‘She’s right here. Who may I say is calling?’
When I told her it was the hospital, she handed me the bearded razor and took the receiver.
‘Yes? This is Jasmine.’
I could hear the sound of the woman’s voice but not the shape of her words. Whatever she was saying, Jasmine rolled her eyes.
‘Well, I mean, my God, I’ve been busy.’ Now she tapped the side of the tub with her long nails. ‘No, I can’t actually. I’m not in London. I’ll call you when I get back to the city.’
And she hung up.
‘They want me to come back for tests. I mean, really, that part of my life is over. I don’t need to be dragged back into it. We’ve been having such a good time. Who wants to think about the horrible hospital? Everything’s so beautiful now.’
‘I don’t want you ever to go back there.’
‘No, neither do I. Enough, okay? It was a phase. It’s done. To life. L’chaim!’ she said as she clinked a shampoo bottle against a conditioner. I laughed and she climbed onto me, wrapped her legs around my waist, kissed me on the mouth with her tongue. She put my hand on her breast, moved a little on my lap. Then she pulled away.
‘Nope. Nothing.’
‘Nothing,’ I agreed, blushing.
‘Well. Worth a try. It would be so convenient if we could be together that way, together together, but it isn’t to be and that’s that.’ And she hopped out to dry off, holding her hand out to me to follow.
‘We’re still together,’ I said, as I let her untangle my damp hair.
I wanted to add, ‘I can still protect you without needing to be inside you. I can look after you without sex.’
Sex was the Velcro – to her it stuck her safely to the other, to me it was just an unfortunate fabric. I wouldn’t always feel that way. But it was how I felt then, still disgusted by the sounds and smells, the invasiveness, the ungainly rudeness of inserting your body into a body.
She put a wooden comb to my curls, whispering, ‘Only ever comb your hair when it’s wet. My mother taught me that.’
The next morning, we picked our way through a meadow. My curls had separated perfectly. On the path were pansies, and when we got off the path, honeysuckle; all these things my mum loved to embroider, that she took at the height of prettiness, and she was right. I stopped at the honeysuckle but Jasmine pushed me on, prodding me in the back. I wondered if that’s how she was with lovers, prodding them to indicate where they should go and how deep. The thought made me a bit queasy.
‘Oh my goodness, you’re flaming, anyone can see that. But it’s nice to be kissed. And to be close. Isn’t it?’
Now we were in a forest with weeping willows and oak trees, trees that stood beside each other, aware that they complimented each other’s good looks by dressing so differently. There were other, less well-dressed trees, which seemed to have expressions: you expected them to start talking to you and for elves to emerge from the hollows. There were butterflies and frogs. All the things I’d seen embroidered on my mum’s pillows, but never actually seen in real life. Why not? I could have taken a bus; I just never thought of it. I never thought of a lot of things until Jasmine led me to them.
There were a cluster of leaves of different colours and I couldn’t understand how they’d coordinated that if they were all subject to the same light and soil.
We lay down and looked up at the sky, the tall trees hugging us. We were holding hands but we put distance between us. Perhaps because our faces were not turned towards each other, she began to talk, with no preamble. He appeared from nowhere in her head, as he did in her life.
‘When he’s decent to me, the way a normal dad should be, it is unbearable. That’s when I go to my room and cry. The sadness is so endless when he’s here and he tries. I know he can’t do it. But he doesn’t know. He still thinks he can. It’s awful for a girl to know more than her father.’
I knew she was crying, not the snuffling ugly kind, but the tears that roll in twos as a sacrificial offering. She didn’t wipe them away and when I looked they were sitting, perfectly still on her cheek like the Man Ray photo. The whole forest was still with them. ‘When he returns, it’s like the start of a new relationship, every time, that period when things are wonderful and can only go right. But it can’t stay that way if he sticks around.’ She paused. And then: ‘Let’s sing!’ she said.
‘What do you want to sing?’ I was shy even when there was no one but her to hear me do it.
‘“October” by U2.’
‘I don’t know it.’
‘It’s only one verse. How about something from Turandot, or do you not speak Italian?’
‘I don’t know it.’
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‘Okay, I’ll sing you both.’ And she did. Her voice was broken from crying, but lovely, and the more it cracked the more it somehow swooped.
‘It’s all the echo, it’s not me. It’s wonderful to sing in the forest. You’re really missing out.’
Adam Ant had two hits that summer. I sang her ‘Stand and Deliver’ and I acted it out and she joined in and let me pretend to rob her carriage.
‘You are such a good Dandy Highwayman.’
‘I missed my calling.’
‘I’d sleep with him,’ she sighed. ‘Would you?’
I blushed. ‘Yes.’ I looked up as she laughed. ‘I’m human and my heart isn’t stone.’
‘Oh, darling, obviously. All those wonderful fine bones in his face. He looks like the painting by Charles le Brun of Cato, who committed suicide. Do you know that one?’
‘No. You know I don’t.’
We began to walk back to the house.
‘Cato was a Roman politician who could not be bought. Like you, my love. I mean, you’ll sell, you’ll make it, I know that, but you’ll do it exactly the way you intend to, with all the integrity that first drew me to you.’
‘And will I die at the end?’
Instead of answering, she stopped and pointed at the ground. ‘There. There they are.’
‘There what are?’
‘That’s what I took. To do it. That’s how we met. I’d had it with Valium, aspirin; I’d done all that. This last time I ate a bunch of poisonous toadstools. Just like these ones. My mum was such a good gardener. She’d made absolutely sure I knew which plants I must never touch.’
I felt a violence towards the toadstools, and before I knew it, I was jumping and squashing them and stamping on them, until there were none left.
‘I heard Montgomery Clift used to do that at Gucci with all the sweaters.’
‘Yes,’ she agreed, ‘I heard that, too. But it was in his later years. You’ve still many, many decades before I’d permit you to lose the plot.’
Everything about her called out ‘Damsel in Distress’, but when she felt you trying to save her, she was disgusted. We were very quiet on our way home. She didn’t sing. I did once, trying to remember the words to ‘October’ but she didn’t sing back, so I went quiet. I followed her footsteps until we were back at the honeysuckle and then at the pansies.
When we got back to the house, the fire was roaring, stoked by a man called Bertie who she introduced as an old friend, but who was clearly the groundskeeper.
‘There’s a party tonight at the next village over,’ he mentioned, and her eyes lit up.
We took a tractor there. She drove the tractor and I just looked amazed that she was driving the tractor.
‘I’ve never seen farm equipment up close before, let alone used it as a mode of transportation.’
She pulled a lever. ‘You’d have been a fat lot of use back in the shetl.’
She was wearing a 1930s gown and Doc Marten boots. There was a half-bottle of priceless whisky at her feet. She had on a tiara of daisies and a real tiara of diamonds sitting just behind it so both could be admired. One of them got lost during the party but she couldn’t remember which.
‘Just the daisies,’ she said when we got home. And we sighed with relief.
Then she double-checked, ‘Oh no, it was the diamonds,’ she said as she held up the daisy crown.
I told her I’d rather she didn’t wear the dress – with its frayed edges – until I had finished making it, but she said she wanted to give it a test run, as a work in progress.
‘This is its dress rehearsal,’ she said, and I hoped it would make it through the night without collapsing, spotlight trained on it, bad side magnified, audience asking for a refund.
We pulled up at a pub with the kind of exposed beams I, decades later, saw expensively recreated in a banker’s Manhattan apartment. The village was happy to see her, chatting as easily with her as she did them. A baby in a crochet shawl was being passed around for admiration – it turned out they were celebrating a baptism. Wide-eyed and round cheeked, the baby looked like a Mabel Lucie Atwell illustration I’d once clipped from a library copy of The Water-Babies. Jasmine held her well, cradling her head and keeping her close to her heart. A parallel life of what might have been.
But no domesticated woman wears a half-hemmed dress missing its interior bodice and straps. She needs all her willpower to hold it up. There’s no mental energy left over for a kid.
After downing a glass of amber liquid, the uncle of the baby sidled up, his wife looking anxious from a corner. Late thirties, almost handsome but then, at the last minute, ugly, he had a shaved head and overflowing hands, touching both her and me on the arms, the elbow, even the stomach as he talked.
‘Where’ve you been, then? We’ve missed you around here.’
‘What were you drinking?’ she asked, ignoring the question as I tried to piece together the history between them. I don’t like pubs because I don’t like aimless conversation with strangers. I prefer any conversation in which I take part to be remembered. As they orbited around each other I pictured Soviet satellites, redrawn boundaries.
He brought her a drink and, taking it with one hand, she pulled me close with the other. I couldn’t tell if I was being used to ward him off or, as their flirting elevated, being drawn into an unsavoury threesome (the actual third, the wife, so far distant as to be in Siberia).
‘This is Steven. He’s from the city. He’s Jewish – bet you’ve never met one of them before.’ I felt like an object being moved around a chessboard – not even a chess piece, a free toy from a cereal packet, an object that did not belong anywhere near the game.
‘I haven’t,’ grinned the uncle. ‘Are you allowed to be here? I mean, it’s okay by me, but is it okay by him?’ He nodded at the ceiling.
‘We’ll see. We’ll see if I turn to ash.’
Now when he touched her, she held his hand on the pretext of moving it away from her, but actually I could see she was enjoying squeezing him, that she regained her power. It was hard to tell which of them was more predatory, entwined like spaghetti cooked too long.
She prodded my good arm. ‘Nope. Still flesh.’ She ruffled my hair. ‘But the night is young.’
In the distance I saw that the wife was very pretty. And that she was crying. Very, very quietly so no one else could tell. But my vision is perfect and always has been: I can unpick a stitch, untangle a necklace and tell when someone is silently crying.
I tried to steer Jasmine away, but she wouldn’t be moved until she’d had another glass of liquid amber. Then she held the baby too jauntily, less maternally, and the mother politely took her away. She followed the baby with her eyes a moment, but then it was lost to the well-wishers and her eyes had grown cloudy.
When a pub band set up their equipment, she hustled us out, of her own volition. She drove the tractor onto a road that turned left and after twenty minutes became a bumpy path. The sky was turning from blue to black, a bruise too closely watched.
‘How did you know that guy?’
‘Which one?’
Spinning her half-lie, she hoisted the strap of her unfinished dress.
‘The baby’s uncle?’
‘Oh, I don’t really know him, only to say hello to.’ She winked at me. ‘And only when I’m in town.’ She fussed with the lever and we slowed down, pausing then crushing each dent in the path like it was a pimple to be popped.
She shivered in her silk.
‘Shall we find someone for you tonight? Country boys go both ways, you know. They just never talk about it.’
‘I’m fine,’ I said.
‘You’re so funny about physical affection. Are all Jews like that? I know it’s not a working-class thing because the people in the village get sloppier than I do!’
I gritted my teeth. ‘It’s just me.’
She laughed and squashed my knee with hers.
‘Please will you have a drink? Just one. Please? For me.�
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If I was going to spend the evening being part of her anthropological study of class and ethnicity, I knew I’d need a drink. I fumbled for it in the darkness, twisting the bottle cap and holding the glass to my lips. We hit a bump.
‘Shit!’
‘Oh shit! You’ve cut your lip!’ She licked it off and spat it into the road. ‘Now rub some alcohol on it.’
‘No!’
She took a swig and spat it at my face.
‘Hey!’
‘What?’
‘Don’t treat me like an object!’
‘But you are an object to me.’
The discontent that had been percolating in my heart was about to boil over. I was about to shout, ‘Pull this tractor over, right now!’
But then she added, ‘The best, most beautiful, valuable, life-enhancing, sparkling, rarefied object, discovered at a flea market, taken home and restored to its proper glory…’
I was smiling now, smiling broadly despite the blood pooling at my gum.
‘I’m honoured to have you by my side.’
I pressed my leg against hers. We were silent for a while. Then she whispered, ‘You know Liz Taylor saved Monty Clift’s life? She was first to the scene of his car wreck and she pulled his teeth from his throat so he wouldn’t choke to death.’
She liked telling this story. I liked hearing it.
‘That’s love.’
‘And that’s not all. After he healed and his looks were spoiled, she insisted he be cast with her in Suddenly Last Summer. That’s love! Fighting for the protection of a friend who’s lost their looks.’
‘It’s not a crime to lose your looks.’
‘It’s different when you’ve been a very great beauty. My mother was that way. She was ten times prettier than I am. In the old pictures. Then it changes. You can see it happening, like a flipbook that you flick with your thumb and the stick figure moves. In the years before the end, her whole face changed. In the months before, she was like herself in a photo negative. But I remember. I remember what she was. The cornflower blue of her eyes. The feel of her hair when she’d bend down to tuck me in at night.’
I squeezed her hand and suddenly she laughed, shattering our intimacy and then tucking it under a rug to deal with later.
