Fabulous

by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

  ‘So, when did you meet Mark?’

  ‘Oh, we haven’t actually met.’

  ‘But aren’t you …?’

  ‘Getting married? Yes, it’s too impossibly silly, isn’t it.’

  They were picking their way now between lightning-struck oaks, their charred and riven trunks festooned with irrepressible green. ‘He wrote to me about the accident, you see, and I wrote back, and long after there was anything for us to discuss these emails kept pinging back and forth. Very long ones from me because, as you may possibly have noticed, I am a babbling brook in human form, and laconic, witty short ones from Mark, and then just as I was thinking I really should stop wasting this man’s time with my reflections on this that and the other thing, he suddenly wrote, “I think we should get married, don’t you?” And he probably just meant it as a rhetorical flourish, but I thought Yes, Yes, and then we could carry on this conversation night and day and well … “the marriage of true minds”. So, met, no, we haven’t yet. It’s actually kind of clarifying not to have any idea how he smells or to be aware of any of that mind-fuddling carnal stuff.’

  Bronwen had found a perfectly circular dell and was sitting cross-legged at the centre of it. They paced around her, Tristan too agitated to settle.

  ‘But marriage. I mean. Suppose you don’t find him attractive.’

  ‘Oh, sex. Well. It’s not very difficult, is it? I mean guinea pigs do it all the time. Actually, guinea pigs are very clever, they can virtually talk. But llamas too. And God knows what. I’ve always been rather in favour of arranged marriage, haven’t you, it cuts out all that shy-making courtship. And failing a Pandar to arrange one for me, I thought let’s give it a go. I mean people manage to procreate, don’t they, without having felt they were drowning in the deep deep pools of a lover’s eyes or whatever. Haven’t you ever had sex with someone you hadn’t previously found physically attractive?’

  Oh yes. Yes, he had. Tristan had done that often enough. He didn’t reply. He laughed it off. This woman might be verbally incontinent, but he knew how to keep his thoughts to himself. He spread his jacket gallantly, and when she folded herself down, ignoring it, he sat himself neatly on its denim square.

  Tristan had brought sausage rolls and salmon quiche and cold asparagus and punnets of tiny tomatoes, yellow and red, and a bottle of rather good white and one of mineral water, and proper glasses to drink them out of (but only two because he hadn’t been aware of the existence of Bronwen – the women shared). For afters there was bitter chocolate and a bag of cherries. This is what Mark liked to have on a picnic, and Tristan had seen no need to vary the formula. Bronwen had brought three pale pink tablets. Fourteen minutes after they had taken them Tristan and Izza were deeply, ecstatically, helplessly in love.

  Love swept Izza up onto her feet and blew her, a tossed veil, spinning around the dell. She wasn’t small but her movements were airy. She undulated. She drifted. Tristan danced after her. As Mark had sometimes observed (not always kindly) he was a natural-born partner, a lifter and catcher, a twirler and supporter of more sparkling beings. As the prince or woodcutter’s son kneels, his legs well-muscled in tights, so that the ballerina can use his thigh as a mounting block to spring up from, Tristan was obliging, reliable, gorgeous but in a boring sort of way. Mark, frankly, was not a ballerina. Too clearly defined as a personality, insufficiently ingratiating, too self-engrossed. Izza was much better in the role. She floated around Tristan. He was her core, the pole to her banner, the peg to her blown-away tent. She appreciated him. She could make use of him.

  Bronwen narrowed her eyes and smiled and sang and drummed on the biscuit-tin for them until they withdrew into the bracken, whereupon she put on her headphones and lay back. The afternoon passed.

  Mark liked keeping an eye on people. Izza had been less startled by his proposal of marriage than she was by his request for her consent to his following her on the where-the-hell-are-you app. Tristan, of course, he’d been tracking for months. As soon as the Fair began to fall apart into a multitude of champagne-moments he checked his phone. What he saw made him smile. He texted both of them, ‘Well done you found my favourite spot … hold on I’m coming’. Kurt dropped him home, and he took off westward on the Ducati. He was vain, he knew it, and vain enough to be amused by his own vanity. She probably thought he was a middle-aged smoothie. It would be fun, he thought, to roar into her life on the bike and carry her away in a whirl of black leather and hot metal. Tristan wouldn’t mind, surely. He could pack up the picnic and bring the car back. He really seemed to like the car. Mark thought he might give it to him. Why? A sort of consolation prize.

  Bronwen stood up and positioned herself so that Mark had to turn his back to the hollow full of bracken in order to greet her, but the respite that bought the hidden pair wasn’t long.

  ‘I was looking …’ said Mark, nonplussed.

  ‘Yeah. I came with Isolde,’ said Bronwen.

  The picnic things lay scattered. The empty bottles, the two glasses, the cherrystones that Izza had arranged in a triangle on a patch of bare ground as she talked.

  ‘They went for a walk. Her and Tristan. I’ve been sleeping.’

  The last statement was implausible. Bronwen was brisk as ever. Her irises had dwindled to pinpricks but you would still have trusted her to book a holiday for you, or to draw up a table-plan.

  Mark dismounted ponderously. Roaring up is one thing, but you can’t just swing down from the saddle of a bike and stride off. There’s a lot of dragging and positioning to be done, and careful extending of the supporting leg. This other young woman needed to be absorbed into his planned future somehow – short-term only, he hoped. By the time his intended emerged from somewhere behind him, Tristan trailing her and doing that rather annoying thing with his thumb in his right ear, Mark was furious with himself for getting into this awkward situation. Why hadn’t he waited at home and greeted Izza with poise intact, and a good bottle chilling in the fridge? He needed someone to kick. ‘You’ve made a right mess, haven’t you?’ he said. ‘This patch was pretty once, before you dropped all this crud around.’

  Tristan, who knew what he was talking about, who had been trained up to Mark’s extremely high standards of litter-awareness, began to pick up the plates. Izza came forward and put out her hands, taking his, and said, ‘My life’s partner!’ in a high warbling voice. He thought, She’s barking, and then, a moment later, She’s off her face.

  He got them all home in the car. The next day he sent Tristan to retrieve the bike from the Windsor police compound. It took all day and some acrimonious exchanges of opinion and lots of money. At least it got the boy out of Mark’s hair while he accustomed himself to his bride.

  Time passed. Love grew.

  Mark’s love for Izza, because he’d been right. He’d first seen her when she was dithering about in the centre of the Campo San Barnaba. She hadn’t noticed him then, why should she, he was just another of the art-bods eating linguini with bottarga, one of the lucky ones who had got a table on the shady side opposite the church. He thought at once that she was fine and unusual and would need careful conservation work. He thought he would enjoy that. His companion knew who she was. Mark watched her. She looked tremulous and arrogant simultaneously, and the light reflected ripplingly off the canal accentuated her paleness as water brightens polished pebbles. Her hair was almost transparent. When the person she was waiting for arrived (in retrospect he realised it was Bronwen) she began to talk, to gush, not in the lazy colloquial sense of the word but like a spring after heavy rain. He saw that all her awkwardness, which was sexy in his eyes, came from the superfluity of words in her and that once she had someone to talk to she found grace.

  Then their mutual friend Morris fell off some scaffolding while squinting at a frescoed ceiling, and Mark and Izza were the only people in Venice who were prepared to help the poor guy. (Actually it was Bronwen who sorted out the insurance.) So they h
ad each other’s numbers, and they used them a lot. And then Mark made his reckless offer because he was bored of the life he had, and Tristan was proving hard to shake, and though they’d yet to have their first date he felt truly excited by her, as he had been by the Thracian cup – and look how well that had turned out. Once he’d got her, the sex was a pleasant surprise too – not because she was much of a performer but because her swooning disengagement from the process made him into one. He’d had women before, of course.

  Tristan’s love for Izza. That was delirium. Astonishing. Chemically-induced to start with, and chemically sustained, but only because it was so utterly fantastic when they took the tabs together that why wouldn’t you keep doing it? Everything else faded out. Work, food, clubbing, clothes, movies, his thesis on the tension between the sacred and the secular in Renaissance depictions of the Virgin – all gone. It baffled him to remember how much time and energy he’d put into thinking about that stuff. All that was left was her – waiting for her, then being with her, then waiting until he could be with her again. In those waiting periods he was suspended, going through the motions, observing from very far away the manikin that was his everyday self, amazed at how trivial that banal self’s occupations were – evenings prattling nonsense with his mates, mornings in the gallery smiling and suave, and let-me-know-if-you-need-any-help. And then, like the tide coming in with a rush, it would be time to see her again and he’d be right there, present, in his skin, every receptor alert, talking back when she talked to him (Christ how she talked!) kissing when she kissed him, dying, just totally dying of the bliss of it, when she dragged him into bed.

  Bronwen’s love for Izza. That was the strongest and truest. They all knew it. Bronwen couldn’t abide compromise. Her mind was lucid, her thoughts consistent. Izza was the most important person for her, and so it would have been ridiculous for her not to devote herself entirely to Izza’s care, Izza’s happiness.

  Mark accepted her. She was an asset to the gallery. It was so rare to find someone you could rely on absolutely. She instigated the practice whereby, each afternoon when he was in London, between three and five, he went through everything with her: every acquisition, every enquiry, every sale, every contact that needed following up, every piece of research that needed to be incorporated into an object’s cataloguing. By the end of the afternoon he’d have made it through more work than he’d previously have done in a week, and felt light and free and joyful for it. As he left the gallery Bronwen would call Izza and, though they never picked up, the lovers, recognising her ringtone, would haul themselves back from whatever circle of paradise they were in. When Mark got home, Tristan would be on the way out for the evening, waving to him from the basement steps (he’d moved down into the flat when the women arrived), and Izza would be upstairs, on the sofa in her study wearing spectacles, reading. Bronwen, watching over them from Cork Street, kept them all out of harm’s way and by the time she came home, looking forward to a run and a shower and an arthouse movie delivered to her by MUBI, Izza and Mark would be out (so many openings to go to) or cooking together and she could congratulate herself on another day during which her darling had got away with it.

  Mark’s love for Tristan. That had always been a puny thing. No one missed it much.

  Tristan’s love for Mark. The funny thing about that was it was still flourishing. So much so that Tristan longed to tell Mark about his rapturous afternoons, just as he’d been used to telling him pretty well everything that passed through his mind. Knowing that they shared a woman made him feel tender towards his ex-lover. It was a bit of an odd emotion, he realised that, but jealousy wasn’t any part of it. Whatever loving Izza felt like to Mark, it couldn’t come near to resembling what was happening to Tristan. He was flying. He was melting. He was burning. He was expanding until he filled the sky and dwindling until he was a pill she could hold beneath her tongue. Mark didn’t know how to cut loose. He was too good-looking ever to lose sight of himself. He couldn’t possibly know what it was to feel any of this. Tristan felt sorry for him. He would like to have shared a little of his felicity, but he knew that would have been cruel. His silence was all he could offer as a token of his love. Or loving–kindness, more like, nowadays.

  Izza’s love. Who did Izza love? Did she love any of them? On the day of the wedding she had been luminous. It wasn’t only the dress, the layer upon layer of sequinned grey chiffon, the floating sleeves, the skirts artfully tattered so that their diaphanous panels had no edges. That teary look, that made it seem she was never quite securely contained within her own skin, was more pronounced than ever. She walked in a miasma of glittering vapour, not that there was really a fog in the registry office. Beauty is as baffling as mist.

  Mark, looking at her, saw treasure. Tristan saw a kind of nimbus into which he could fall and which would transport him, as golden painted clouds bear the Virgin up in depictions of the Assumption. Bronwen saw heartbreaking vulnerability. But Izza’s glass-pale eyes showed no sign of seeing anyone – only the fixtures and fittings. She leant down to Mark and murmured to him about the ferociously varnished yellow pine benches, about the fitted carpet which crackled with static electricity, about the registrar’s magenta lipstick. She was being funny, Mark realised that, but he was hurt. This was his life he was giving her. It wasn’t a joke.

  She was soft. She was fine as gossamer. But she was also somehow impervious. Was there even perhaps something wrong with her? He didn’t really like to think this, but frankly wasn’t it a bit odd the way she had agreed so readily to marry a stranger? As though actually she couldn’t care less – as though she was so uninterested in anyone other than herself that any presentable man would do. ‘Shut up,’ he told himself. ‘She’s beautiful. She’s the making of me. The new me. This is what I wanted. It’s great, isn’t it?’ And, for a good long while, it was.

  When Mark went to New York, as he fairly often did, or Dubai (he had a very loyal and appreciative client there), Izza began to drift into the gallery of a morning. She hadn’t wanted to work there. It was essential to her, she told Mark, that her professional life should be independent of his. But despite all the people with whom she went for coffee – she had a well-filled address book – none of the encounters led to any job offers that she considered worth her while financially or helpful in terms of her personal development. So she was often in Cork Street. She’d be on her way to the London Library, where she might find inspiration for something or other. Or she’d be meeting someone for lunch so she might as well drop in first. Or it was raining, so whatever she’d planned was no-go. Tristan would look around and see her and it was as though the dove that comes rushing down the golden shaft of light to impregnate the Virgin of the Annunciation had tobogganed down into his heart. The sight of her filled him up, to bursting point, with joy.

  They stood about together. Bronwen had a chair in her little back room but, while in the gallery, personnel were required to stay on their feet. They were absorbed in each other, but they were also very attentive to walk-ins. They didn’t touch each other in public, or murmur endearments, or even look at each other too markedly, and their self-control generated a shimmering warmth. One visitor, after Izza had offered her fizzy water, and a hand-sheet, and had shown her the pre-Columbian crystal jaguar that seemed to pulse and emit sparks beneath the cunningly positioned laser-lights, put out a hand and said, ‘What’s happening to you, babe? Your aura’s like off the graph!’ and Tristan, hearing, thought, Yes. She’s transfigured, isn’t she? I didn’t realise anyone else could see.

  You know how this ends. Mark surprised them. It could have happened in any number of ways. Perhaps they were in the backroom, poring over a depiction of Lancelot and Guinevere, their shoulders touching, when he came in hours earlier than expected, having got fed up with the woman he’d been placed next to at the Met Gala dinner and taken a cab to JFK in time to make the red-eye. Perhaps Bronwen had a doctor’s appointment (even Cerberus’s eyes somet
imes close) and wasn’t there to hear Mark as he called from the doorway, ‘I’m meeting Donatella for lunch in Le Bistro so I’ll go straight on home after.’ Perhaps he said to Izza one night, ‘Is that a love-bite? You’ve not been doing it with Tristan have you?’ (because he was familiar with Tristan’s ways) and she, thinking he already knew everything, told him straight out.

  It could have been any which way. The point is – he found out.

  Nobody died. Liebestod is actually quite a rare occurrence. But Mark was taken aback to discover that, for all his sophistication, and for all his varied sexual history which might, you would have supposed, have made him immune to anything as dully conventional as jealousy, he deeply disliked the condition of cuckoldry. Was it because it was Tristan, who’d been his lover, and his protégé, and his kind of son? Not really. He’d never been possessive of the boy before – there were plenty of nights in the old days when they’d gone their separate ways.

  He was astonished by how absolutely livid with rage he was at Izza’s placidity. She never apologised. She moved around the Little Boltons, for days, packing up her preposterous quantity of gauzy dresses, talking serenely all the time about how love was a drug and an enchantment. She acted as if it was she and Tristan who were to be pitied when, as far as Mark could tell, they’d done exactly what they fucking well felt like without a moment’s thought for anyone else. What a cow. Once he’d been delighted by the theatrical way she dressed. Now he thought ‘blowsy’.