But today as she passed the mirror, for once she didn’t raise her hand. Instead she stopped, looked into the glass and, instead of studying that reassuring Inguedoc, she studied her face. It wasn’t half so reassuring. Her nose, her mouth, her eyes which, now she inspected them properly looked surely far too piggy – was this what she looked like to everybody else? That fat nose! This was the face, she knew it with a sinking heart, that was her, Holly, and she’d be stuck with it for the rest of her life. She’d never ever thought of her face like that before. Could anyone ever find it pretty? Or even not absolutely disgustingly ugly? Would anyone ever want to do It with someone with such a fat nose and piggy eyes and – she was sure she could see one – an actual beastly red spot in the middle of her chin?
More laughter outside. They’d been much more laughy this holiday. Holly turned and went towards the french windows, feeling older.
Read on for the first chapter of Deborah Moggach’s brilliant new novel Something to Hide
Pimlico, London
I’ll tell you how the last one ended. I was watching the news and eating supper off a tray. There was an item about a methane explosion, somewhere in Lincolnshire. A barn full of cows had blown up, killing several animals and injuring a stockman. It’s the farting, apparently.
I missed someone with me to laugh at this. To laugh, and shake our heads about factory farming. To share the bottle of wine I was steadily emptying. I wondered if Alan would ever move in. This was hard to imagine. What did he feel about factory farming? I hadn’t a clue.
And then, there he was. On the TV screen. A reporter was standing outside the Eurostar terminal, something about an incident in the tunnel. Passengers were milling around behind him. Amongst them was Alan.
He was with a woman. Just a glimpse and he was gone.
I’m off to see me bruv down in Somerset. Look after yourself, love, see you Tuesday.
Just a glimpse but I checked later, on iPlayer. I reran the news and stopped it at that moment. Alan turning towards the woman and mouthing something at her. She was young, needless to say, much younger than me, and wearing a red padded jacket. Chavvy, his sort. Her stilled face, eyebrows raised. Then they were gone, swallowed up in the crowd.
See you Tuesday and I’ll get that plastering done by the end of the week.
Don’t fuck the help. For when it ends, and it will, you’ll find yourself staring at a half-plastered wall with wires dangling like entrails and a heap of rubble in the corner. And he nicked my power drill.
Before him, and the others, I was married. I have two grown-up children but they live in Melbourne and Seattle, as far away as they could go. Of course there’s scar tissue but I miss them with a physical pain of which they are hopefully unaware. Neediness is even more unattractive in the old than in the young. Their father has long since remarried. He has a corporate Japanese wife who thinks I’m a flake. Neurotic, needy, borderline alcoholic. I can see it in the swing of her shiny black hair. For obvious reasons, I keep my disastrous love-life to myself.
I’m thinking of buying a dog. It would gaze at me moistly, its eyes filled with unconditional love. This is what lonely women long for, as they turn sixty. I would die with my arms around a cocker spaniel, there are worse ways to go.
Three months have passed and Alan is a distant humiliation. I need to find another builder to finish off the work in the basement, then I can re-let it, but I’m seized with paralysis and can’t bring myself to go down the stairs. I lived in it when I was young, you see, and just arrived in London. Years later I bought the house, and tenants downstairs have come and gone, but now the flat has been stripped bare those early years are suddenly vivid. I can remember it like yesterday, the tights drying in front of the gas fire, the sex and smoking, the laughter. To descend now into that chilly tomb, with its dust and debris – I don’t have the energy.
Now I sound like a depressive but I’m not. I’m just a woman longing for love. I’m tired of being put in the back seat of the car when I go out with a couple. I’m tired of internet dates with balding men who talk about golf – golf. I’m tired of coming home to silent rooms, everything as I left it, the Marie Celeste of the solitary female. Was Alan the last man I shall ever lie with, naked in my arms?
This is how I am, at this moment. Darkness has fallen. In the windows of the flats opposite, faces are illuminated by their laptops. I have the feeling that we are all fixed here, at this point in time, as motionless as the Bonnard lady in the print on my wall. Something must jolt me out of this stupor, it’s too pathetic for words. In front of me is a bowl of Bombay mix; I’ve worked my way through it. Nothing’s left but the peanuts, my least favourite.
I want to stand in the street and howl at the moon.
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Vintage, an imprint of Vintage Publishing,
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Copyright © Deborah Moggach 1982
Deborah Moggach has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
First published in Great Britain in 1978 by William Collins Sons Ltd
Published by Vintage in 2006
www.vintage-books.co.uk
A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library
You Must Be Sisters Page 27
