George had Space Invaders on toast for tea and then we played Jumping Frogs, a new board game which he had for his birthday. I let him win. He had his bath and went to bed without protest. He’s always tired on Thursdays after games.
And all the time I was heating up Space Invaders, and failing to see the dangerous move in Jumping Frogs, and wrapping my son in his bath towel and hugging him tight, I was thinking about Valentina D’Arby and what she would be doing at this time of day.
I knew I should feel angry. It’s such a cliché – the note in the pocket; like lipstick on a collar, or a bill for flowers. But I didn’t feel angry. I didn’t even feel surprised. It was worse than that. I had somehow been expecting it ever since we had married. Someone said on our wedding day: ‘He’s a real high-flyer, Andrew.’ I had thought then: I am not a high-flyer. I am not even a low-flyer. I am a kind of pony and cart person. I’m not a big achiever. I don’t even want to be. The evening I had just spent: caring for George, cooking him Space Invaders, playing a silly game with him, and getting him into bed at the right time without a conflict, truly seemed to me the best way to live. Or at any rate, it’s the only way I know.
I wondered what Valentina D’Arby would have made of it.
Andrew did not come home that night. He was not due home for three days, he was in Brussels on business. He rang me every morning at nine o’clock our time. It’s eight o’clock on the continent then. Or maybe it’s ten. He asked after George and he asked me if I was well. I did not say anything about the memo from Valentina D’Arby. I didn’t even ask if she were in Brussels with him. I didn’t want to hear him lie. I didn’t want to hear the truth.
Instead I rang his office. I felt strange and shaky dialling the familiar number but asking to speak to Miss D’Arby. The switchboard girls know me but I put a tea towel over the phone like they do on the television when they want to disguise their voices. I could hear the telephone ringing in her office. I imagined her reaching for it. Today in my imagination she was wearing a brown suit with a coffee-coloured shirt. Her long dark hair was swept back into what they call a chignon. I don’t know exactly what that is, but I know Valentina D’Arby would know. And she could make her hair do it, too.
The phone rings.
She reaches out for it. She picks it up. Her nails are very well manicured and shiny with pale polish. She says ‘’Allo, Valentina D’Arby.’
She is foreign!
I am so surprised that I forget to put the telephone down. And so I hear her say it again.
‘’Allo, Valentina D’Arby.’
She has a low steady voice, she sounds exotic. She might be French or she might be some nationality whose accent I don’t know – Polish or Armenian, anything. I put the telephone down and I find I am blushing furiously with an inexplicable rush of warmth to my face. I never thought of her being foreign but it fits exactly with the smart Italian suits and her dark hair.
I stop myself abruptly and turn to the sink to wash up George’s breakfast cereal bowl. Of course, I don’t really know that she wears tailored suits. I don’t know that she has thick long dark hair. But I am unaccountably excited about how much I do know. I know her name. I know her extension number. I know she is foreign. I know she is my husband’s lover.
Half the morning, while I am making the beds and Hoovering the carpet, I wonder where she learned to speak English, and where she trained in corporate tax. I feel almost certain that she must have gone to an English university, whatever her nationality. Andrew’s firm is very traditional. I can only imagine them employing a foreign woman if she was trained in England. I feel absurdly lightheaded and excited while I pull the cylinder Hoover behind me through all the upstairs rooms. I lug it downstairs and stow it in the cupboard under the stairs. I cannot resist going to the kitchen telephone again.
I dial the number, I wrap the tea towel around the mouthpiece. I ask for Miss D’Arby, and then I hear once again her quiet, assured voice: ‘’Allo, Valentina D’Arby.’
When I say nothing she says: ‘’Allo? Who is this?’
And for one insane moment I want to say: ‘It’s me, Heather!’
But I say nothing. I put the phone down slowly, with immense regret.
It rings almost at once and I snatch it up, certain that Valentina D’Arby is phoning me. But of course it is not her. It is a mother from school. She wants to know if I have remembered that George is to go to tea with her son today. She will collect them from school. I will fetch George from her house at eight. She says, ‘What will you do with a free afternoon?’
And I say, slowly, ‘I think I shall go to London.’
I have done something I think enormously clever. I saw it done once on television. I have sent Valentina D’Arby a bouquet of flowers to her office. Now I am watching the front door of the office, a large plate-glass building with a revolving door and a windy open pavement between the door and the car park. She will come out of the door carrying my flowers and I will see the flowers and know her. I will know the woman who is having an affair with my husband.
I chose the flowers with care. Silly really, for they are nothing more than a device to trap her. But when I was in the shop it seemed to matter. I did not want to give her roses or carnations, they are too obvious for her, brash flowers. I chose only yellow and white freesia, and a few miniature white iris with tiny yellow tongues. An exquisite bouquet, I know she will like it. She is bound to take it home, especially on a Friday evening. She would not leave it in the office over the weekend.
I wait in my car, scanning the front door of the building until six, I am starting to get anxious. Perhaps she will work late, or perhaps she has left early to see someone. Then I see the glint of reflections as the plate-glass revolving door turns and a woman comes out carrying my flowers.
She is smaller than I imagined, less striking. She is wearing the sort of suit I had thought, only it is navy blue. She has navy shoes too, with low heels. She doesn’t carry a handbag at all, she has a black leather briefcase instead. I think that is intensely smart. Her hair is brown and glossy as I imagined but cut in a neat bob, curling under at her shoulders. She is walking straight towards me.
I am frozen behind the wheel of my car. She is walking directly towards me and I am sure that she can see me, and see through me. She knows it was me on the phone, wanting to hear her voice. She knows it was me who sent her flowers to trap her. My fingers grip on the wheel and my mouth drops open. I look, I am sure, like some pale girlish fish, gulping against the glass wall of a tank.
She walks straight past my car. She comes so close that the tail of her jacket brushes my wing mirror. Her car is parked two rows behind mine, facing in. I watch her in my mirror. She has the keys in her hand. Her car unlocks when she presses a button. It is a sleek two-seater, navy like her suit and shoes.
Suddenly I want to speak to her. I am sure that I won’t be able to follow her when she is driving in the city that she knows, in rush-hour traffic. If I am to attract her attention it has to be now, here.
I get out of my car and I run through the rows of parked cars towards her. She is about to reverse her car out of the parking slot and does not see me. I call her name but she does not hear me. Like a fool I run straight towards her car, I step out from the other parked cars, and the back of her car knocks me from waist to knee, knocks me and throws me down on my back with a horrid clunk and the exhaust gases burn my face with their stink, and I scream.
I am in her office. It is as I imagined, only the carpet is grey, not cream. She pours me a brandy, from a decanter in the cabinet. She has a first-aid box open on her desk and she has patted my grazes with antiseptic cream. She has touched me with extreme gentleness, lifting my cotton summer dress and dabbing very softly each little graze with a ball of soft cotton wool. I feel as if I have been kissed all over by her delicate little touches.
‘Do you want to call the police?’ she asks. Her English is perfect with just a slight intonation. ‘I was quite in the wrong. I
simply did not see you.’
‘No.’
She hesitates. ‘Or a lawyer?’ she asks. ‘I accept, as I say, full liability.’
I shake my head.
‘I am sorry,’ she says. ‘Perhaps you are in shock. Should I take you to a hospital? Or call a doctor?’
I shake my head.
She finishes her gentle tending of me and she pulls down my skirt.
‘Then may I call your husband?’ she asks. ‘You should not drive yourself, I think.’
‘No,’ I say. ‘My husband is Andrew Wade.’
There is a moment of total silence. She looks at me as if she would read my face. I suddenly realise that although her eyes seem to be dark brown there is a rim of gold around each black pupil.
‘Then I have hurt you twice,’ she says slowly. ‘And there is no apology I can make.’
We stare at each other as if we would learn every detail of the other’s face.
‘You are not how I thought,’ she says.
‘How?’
‘I imagined someone smaller, more ordinary.’
I gesture awkwardly to my rather washed-out summer print dress and handbag swollen with oddments. ‘I’m very ordinary,’ I say.
She shakes her head. ‘You are physically brave,’ she said. ‘And impulsive, and imaginative, and … beautiful.’
I say nothing, trying to absorb this information. ‘I used to be pretty,’ I say hesitantly.
She shakes her head. ‘You have the looks of an English rose. A pale beauty.’
‘You are just as I imagined,’ I say. I feel shy, like a younger girl at school talking to a prefect. ‘I imagined your clothes. I even imagined your office. It’s just as I thought.’
Her face lights up as she laughs. ‘Corporate power-dressing,’ she says dismissively.
We are both silent for a moment.
‘What did you come here for?’
I can feel myself colouring, the warmth of my blush spreads up from my collar bones to flood my face with heat. ‘I came to see you.’
She sits in the chair opposite me, she crosses her long legs. She takes a cigarette from her briefcase and lights it with a table lighter. I watch her, quite fascinated. Andrew hates smoking, he hates women who smoke.
‘Obviously. But why? To ask me to stop seeing him?’
I shake my head.
‘No,’ she says. ‘You look too complicated for such a simple gesture.’
‘I just wanted to see you,’ I said simply. ‘I found a note from you, I was imagining too much. I was making pictures of you and him in my mind. I couldn’t bear not knowing.’
She nods, flicks the ash off her cigarette. ‘I too,’ she says slowly. ‘I have imagined him with you, and your son. At weekends, when I am alone, and when you go on your holidays, I imagine you then. I tried to see you as fat and dull, a drag on him.’
I blink at this cruel caricature. ‘I knew you would be beautiful, I knew you would be as you are.’
She nods. ‘So he has two women who know their place,’ she concludes. ‘Night and day. Home and away. Wife and mistress.’
‘I wasn’t surprised,’ I volunteer. ‘I wasn’t surprised when I found the note.’
She blows a smoke ring, I have never seen anyone do that except on the television. We both watch it. It has the fascination of George’s bubbles that he sometimes blows in rippling streams from a bubble tub in the garden.
She nods. ‘I was not surprised when he told me he would never leave you. He has chosen the right women, it seems.’
‘I have to go home,’ I say. ‘I have to collect George …’
‘Can you be late?’ she asks. ‘Could you come out for a meal?’
‘He can stay overnight with his friend,’ I say. ‘But I never thought …’
‘Phone them,’ she says. She moves to the desk and picks up one of the telephones. ‘Let us see where this chance meeting takes us. Phone and make the arrangements, and we’ll go out to dinner.’
I move as if I am dreaming. I call and say that I will be late and can they keep George? Susan is happy for him to stay, and she teases me about my assignation in London. I say: ‘No, no, an old school friend.’ And I think: what am I concealing?
We drive in her car to a restaurant. The waiters know her and greet her by name. The food is quite wonderful. I eat with George so often that most of my meals are child’s food: baked beans, fish fingers, sausages. With Valentina I eat asparagus and then cold smoked salmon, and zabaglione for pudding. She orders a very cold bottle of wine, dry and strong. I don’t drink usually, but I love the taste of this.
I feel rich. When they bring us coffee and a glass of aromatic dessert wine I feel full and wealthy. There is a mirror behind Valentina’s dark head and I can see my reflection. I am rosy with warmth. I am smiling.
We have talked all through the meal. She explained about her work and I told her about George and his first days at school. How empty the house seems without him. She told me about her girlhood in Padua – I will look it up in George’s atlas when I get home. I told her about the hills behind Perth and the cold red-bricked house where I lived all my life before Andrew came to take me south to London.
It is getting late, I should go. I have to drive home.
She calls for the bill and won’t let me share the cost of the meal. She shrugs. ‘Company expenses.’ She puts down a gold card.
She drives me back to my car, standing alone in the car park.
At the moment of leaving I am suddenly awkward. I do not know quite how to say goodbye.
‘I doubt that we will meet again,’ she says carefully.
I shake my head.
‘I hope George goes on liking school,’ she says. ‘He sounds such a lovely boy.’
‘I hope that Gleeson and Sons do their tax your way,’ I say politely.
She laughs. ‘I will end it with Andrew as soon as he comes back from Brussels,’ she says easily. ‘Please don’t worry about it. I give you my word.’
‘I hope it doesn’t hurt you,’ I say. It is ridiculous, I know, that I should fear for her loss when it is my husband who is her lover. But I am thinking of the demanding office routine and an empty flat at the end of her day. Her beautiful clothes in the silent bedroom, the immaculate cold kitchen. The empty tasteful sitting room. ‘I didn’t come to make you end it,’ I remind her. ‘I just wanted to know …’ I tail off. I am not sure what I wanted to know about her. Everything, I suppose. I had a great appetite to know all about her. And now I know, I am not satisfied. I feel, for some reason, sorrowful.
‘I have wanted to see you too,’ she says quietly. ‘I am glad that you came, and we spent this time together. You have showed me what I am not.’
‘What d’you mean?’
She shrugs. ‘Women make choices that men never face. You will never have a career, you will never be a senior executive. I will never bath my son and put him to bed. I am glad to have seen you. It makes me value what I have set aside.’
‘But you could have a child.’
She smiles. ‘And you could be a corporate tax specialist,’ she says. ‘But we both made other choices. Perhaps we made our choices too young. But now we have to live with them.’
She leans forward and she kisses me on one cheek and then on the other. As her dark smooth hair brushes against me I can smell her faint warm perfume.
‘Goodbye,’ she says.
Andrew called into the London office before coming home and she must have told him then that the affair was over. He was tired and quiet at tea, though he played football with George for half an hour before bedtime. He came up behind me and put his arms around me while I was washing up and laid his head against my back. ‘It’s good to be home,’ he said. ‘I have missed you.’ He had bought me some lace in Brussels and as he unpacked his suitcase he tossed a bottle of perfume on the bed. ‘I picked that up for a colleague’s wife, but it was the wrong sort,’ he says carelessly. ‘You might like it, darling.’
; I looked at the dark green box and at the glass bottle twisted like a barleystick inside. And then I knew the last unknown thing about Valentina. The name of her perfume and how the bottle looks on her dressing table.
I slept that night wearing her perfume, in my husband’s arms. But I woke in the darkness of the night and I saw her face and her hair as dark as the shadows. And I felt something I never felt before.
A sort of longing.
The Visitor
Eleanor opened the door to what appeared to be a forest – a huge swaying fir tree pressed towards her, its topmost fronds thrusting towards the ceiling, its broad skirts forcing her backwards into the narrow hall where its branches pushed against the pale walls.
‘Not here! You’ve made a mistake!’
Still the tree came on, until it was fully inside the apartment. At once the place was filled with a rich disturbing perfume of pine: a dark wintry smell, a smell of promise, of excitement, as heady as new-made wine, the irresistible secret life of evergreen plants in mid-winter.
‘I’ve not ordered this,’ Eleanor said. ‘You’ve got the wrong address.’
The tree stump thumped down on to the expensive vinyl flooring. There was a brief shower of pine needles which fell with a pattering sound like rain.
‘Now look!’ Eleanor exclaimed.
The tree leaned sideways and an old man looked around it, through the thick branches, at Eleanor’s angry face. He was a short plump man, dressed in jacket and trousers of an indeterminate rusty colour. He had thick walking boots and a shapeless baggy hat.
‘Eleanor Lease?’ he asked.
‘Yes?’
‘I am glad!’ He beamed at her, offering his hand. Reluctantly Eleanor shook it.
‘I brought you this. Something made me think you might not have a tree yet.’
‘We never have a tree,’ she said.
His face fell like a disappointed child. ‘You don’t?’ he asked. ‘Why ever not?’
Bread and Chocolate Page 16
