Neurotica

by Sue Margolis

  “So, what we're talking about in terms of your piece, angel,” Campbell concluded, “is a slight shift in spin, if you get my drift. But don't worry about it. I'll tweak it up a bit.”

  Anna blanched at the thought of what would appear under her byline: when it actually came to tabloid writing, Campbell, like a lot of posh boys slumming it, was dreadful. Indeed, he may well have been the worst writer since McGonagall. But she was immensely grateful to Campbell for relieving her of at least some of the pressure she was feeling.

  Despite Dan's continuing chirpiness, she was still being plagued by wave after wave of guilt about cheating on a possibly dying husband. She knew she ought to come straight out with it and ask him if he really was ill, but she kept chickening out. While there was an element of doubt, she reasoned, it was just about OK for her to carry on doing her “research” for the Rachel Stern piece. The moment she was certain he had some dreadful disease, her sense of decency would have to kick in and that would mean an end to any more extracurricular sex.

  Then there was the question of what to do about the Brenda situation. Anna reckoned it could only be a matter of days before Brenda had fifty hacks camping on her doorstep. She'd discussed it with Dan several times. At first she was cross with him for being so dismissive, but ended up being forced to agree with him. He was right; in a free country there was no legal way of preventing Giles Hardacre's wife from going to the papers. Brenda might be able to sue for libel if the paper printed anything which wasn't true, but by then she would have been named and the damage done. As the days went by Brenda seemed to be getting herself into even more of a stew. She wasn't eating properly or going to work. Anna couldn't countenance breaking her promise to her best mate. She had to come up with something. It occurred to her that maybe there was some illegal scheme they might consider to put the frighteners on Lavender Hardacre. It didn't have to be very illegal, thought Anna, just slightly immoral, if necessary.

  Another thing troubling her was that she'd barely glanced at the copy of The Clitoris-Centered Woman she had hidden from Dan in her sweater drawer. Alison O'Farrell had biked it over soon after their lunch at the Harpo. In her naiveté, Anna had been expecting a reasonably slim book. After all, Rachel Stern's thesis on why women should commit adultery wasn't exactly Wittgenstein. But being both American and an academic, Stern had managed to produce a thousand-page, close-typed treatise, packed with overblown rhetoric and impenetrable mazes of meandering sociological argument. Like most journos Anna was a past master at skimming a book in an hour and lifting all the relevant bits, but even skimming this lot was going to take forever.

  She knew virtually all her stress was of her own selfish making. She knew too that she could put an end to it in two phone calls—one to Charlie and the other to Alison O'Farrell. Maybe it was time to tell both of them she was having second thoughts. She decided to go back to bed with some Night Nurse, which always knocked her out, and sleep on it. Then suddenly there was Charlie on the line asking her to lunch, his voice sounding as if she could pour it over profiteroles. Miraculously the color returned to her cheeks, her energy level soared and she had no doubt that as soon as she got up out of her chair, there would be a spring in her step.

  “Are we talking lunch with food,” she said, chuckling, “or naked lunch?”

  “Well, I thought maybe proper lunch with clothes on would be nice for a change. Then afterwards we can make up our minds how to spend the afternoon.”

  Anna's insides turned several glorious anticipatory somersaults.

  “I think it might be the last opportunity we get for a while,” he went on. “The airline has been brilliant about extending my leave. I've caught up with all the family over here I wanted to. But I really do have to get back. They've put me on the rota for the Dublin–LA run beginning next week.”

  Anna hadn't felt up to going through the rigmarole of getting dressed up for lunch in the hotel restaurant, so she suggested a small French place round the corner. They chatted away easily about nothing in particular: Dublin, films, Charlie's cure for jet lag. Anna entertained him with the tale of Amy and Josh's latest head-lice infestation which had got so bad she reckoned the lice were wearing T-shirts with “Bloomfields 2003” written across them.

  Charlie had got some idea from Anna that things weren't right between her and Dan, but she had given him only the vaguest outline of the situation. She decided against revealing any more details because she felt it would be betraying Dan even further. She resolved that if she were to have any moral guideline in this whole exercise, it would be to protect Dan as best she could.

  Charlie also seemed pretty reluctant to talk about his personal life, although Anna had worked out from a few things he had said that there were a couple of women—one in Sydney and another in San Diego—that he was clearly screwing around with. Whether or not he felt anything for them she had no idea.

  Anna understood, and she suspected Charlie did too, that the moment they became emotionally intimate, they were, in a sense, done for. Their casual fling would turn into something far heavier.

  So they spent lunch being flippant and frivolous. Occasionally curiosity would force one of them to hover dangerously around the other's emotional boundaries, but neither dared do more than hover.

  Both of them felt too full after lunch to have sex, so they decided to take a walk down to the Serpentine. They'd just turned into Hyde Park when an early-summer shower materialized from nowhere. Anna said she thought their best bet would be to take refuge in the Culpepper Gallery if it was open. She knew it had been closed for months while the building was being renovated. Deciding it was worth taking a look, they left the winding footpath and started running across the grass towards the white Palladian gallery.

  The Culpepper was renowned for exhibiting the kind of rhinoceros-placenta-in-formaldehyde art guaranteed to outrage anyone who owned a car coat, while at the same time forcing those who owned bleached cropped hair, black roots and Buddy Holly specs to invent new superlatives to describe it. The gallery's last major exhibit, entitled Eliminate the Negative, had involved a surgeon performing real live plastic surgery inside an enormous sterile Perspex cube. There had been a new operation to watch every day. They included face-lifts, tummy tucks, liposuction and breast implants. The day after a woman had collagen injected into the outer lips of her vagina, there was a huge squabble in the House of Commons about the misuse of public money. The Guardian headlined its report on the debate “Tax Spending Under Labia.”

  Anna and Charlie stood beneath the gallery's decorative porch wiping their faces with some Kleenex Anna found in her bag. Charlie told her she looked particularly sweet and vulnerable with mascara running down her face. Anna punched him playfully. He responded by pushing her gently against one of the white Grecian columns and kissing her.

  “You know, I reckon, given another time and place,” he said when they had finished, “the two of us could have got it together.”

  Anna was cross that Charlie was suddenly mounting an assault on one of their mutually agreed no-go areas. She decided to try and keep the conversation lighthearted.

  “Cut it out, Charlie, or everything'll start going black and white and we'll end up in Brief Encounter. What's wrong with what we've got? We've had great sex. We can meet whenever you're in London and you're free to carry on jetting off to all your foreign floozies.”

  “What foreign floozies?” Charlie gave her a look of mock hurt, but she could sense that he was relieved she had let him off the hook and wasn't about to make things awkward by sobbing and begging him not to go.

  Anna couldn't get over how cool and matter-of-fact she had sounded. It flashed through her mind that her words had been nothing more than an elaborate act and that really she had fallen in love with Charlie. But she was pretty sure she hadn't. She didn't feel overwhelmed by that clingy I-can't-live-without-you sensation she always got when she was falling in love. She suddenly remembered what she had said to Brenda about it being sex and no
t a full-blown relationship that she needed. Nothing had changed. She still felt the same. Although they'd only done it once, she'd had a taste of great sex for the first time in years, and it was that she was going to miss when Charlie went home.

  “Come on,” she said, determined to sound cheerful. “Let's see if this place is open.”

  Charlie pushed the heavy paneled door and stepped inside. Anna held back for a couple of seconds to get her makeup mirror out of her bag. She was still concentrating on rubbing away at her mascara streaks as she followed Charlie inside and almost tripped on the tiny stone step into the gallery.

  It was a long, thin, airy room with tall white walls and a polished beechwood floor. It was also completely deserted. There wasn't a uniformed attendant or even one other visitor to be seen. The reason was clear. Everywhere they looked there was evidence that the place was still in the throes of being redecorated. Around the perimeter of the room there were, perhaps, ten or fifteen aluminum stepladders as well as a couple of huge bits of scaffolding which reached the ceiling. The central area was filled with what appeared to be living-room furniture. Although everything was covered in dust sheets, it was perfectly easy to make out armchairs, a dining-room suite, a couple of sofas and a coffee table. Anna thought this was a bit strange but Charlie said it had probably been removed from the curator's office while that was being decorated.

  Anna found it even stranger that there were swatches of Liberty-print curtain fabric lying on top of the coffee table. Next to these was a half-empty gallon tin of paint labeled Eggshell Magnolia and a roll of Laura Ashley wallpaper border covered in a dark-blue seashell design. Anna thought about the incongruity of the Liberty prints and the Laura Ashley in a place like the Culpepper, but came to the conclusion it was probably OK, de rigueur, even, for the curator of a gallery like this to have an office decorated like a suburban row house because it probably represented some kind of tacky chic, antiminimalist rebellion.

  The floor was littered with more pots of Eggshell Magnolia, huge industrial paint rollers, ashtrays overflowing with cigarette butts and mugs half filled with tea.

  By the Marie Celeste feel of the place, the painters had either done a bunk because the Culpepper was refusing to pay them for some reason, or, more likely, they were still on their lunch break.

  Anna turned to Charlie and said as the gallery was closed why didn't they either carry on with their walk or, if it was still raining, go to the café down by the lake for a cuppa.

  “Or perhaps we could go back to the hotel for an hour or two.” She pulled gently on the lapels of Charlie's jacket, making him lower his head to kiss her again. They kissed for a second or two before Charlie pulled away, mischief on his face.

  “Come over here,” he said, smiling. He took hold of Anna's wrist and began pulling her into the middle of the room. Confused, Anna tried to pull back, but Charlie yanked her even harder and she lurched forward like a car in the wrong gear.

  “Do you mind telling me what the bloody hell you're up to?” she demanded.

  The very next moment she had her answer.

  “Christ all bleeding mighty. You cannot be serious. Charlie, you're behaving like a total bloody lunatic. What the fuck happens if we get caught?”

  Charlie ignored her and continued to drag her over to a sofa draped in an enormous paint-splattered dust sheet. By now Anna was red in the face as she leaned back tug-of-war style, still trying to pull herself away.

  The next thing she knew he had got her onto the sofa and she was lying under the dust sheet with Charlie half on top of her.

  “Come on, relax,” he said, stroking her cheek. “With nobody here to keep track of them, the decorators'll be in the pub for hours.” Very slowly he began kissing her. As his hand slid down under her tights and pants, Anna's anxiety melted into ecstasy and she felt herself sinking into a sublime, almost transcendental, sexual trance which she later described to Brenda as being very sixties, very psychedelic. Brenda said she made it sound less like brilliant sex and more like an elderly tie-dye.

  Anna's state was made only fractionally less sublime and transcendental by the almost deafening pounding of rain on the skylight above them.

  The noise of the rain, combined with an all-out concentration on their fast-approaching orgasms, meant that Charlie and Anna failed to hear the advance of a small group of art students. They had come to the Culpepper to see the latest Frank Kennedy exhibit, entitled Anaglypta People, which, according to the blurb on the wall outside, was “a magnificent example of neofunctional postsurrealism, transgressing traditional perceptions and capturing the essence of the middle-class suburban obsession with design concepts which are primarily conservative and safe.”

  But what I don't understand, Rebecca,” said the South African, his pomposity and jingoism, unbelievably, having increased still further with the passing courses, “is why on earth the Vanguard on Sunday would be concerned about such a story. I just find it disgraceful how your gutter press latches on to these trivial matters. In South Efrica nothing like that would be considered a metter of the remotest interest to cultured people.”

  “Oh, François,” said Rebecca, “you are such a dry old stick sometimes.” Anna kept silent. It was not so much that she was enjoying seeing Rebecca have to defend her newspaper's penchant for the occasional up-market tabloid-style scandal, such as the one she had revealed to her guests was going to be in the Vanguard on Sunday the next morning; Anna's stomach was churning more than she could ever remember. She considered pretending to pass out as a diversion. Dan, unaware, of course, of the panic consuming his wife, couldn't be bothered to get involved, having decided the architect was too thick even to engage with.

  “The Culpepper Gallery story will be a complete hoot to British people,” Rebecca continued indignantly. Anna now put her hands involuntarily over her face, only to remove them smartish. “Once they'd taken the picture the VoS is using, the students even approached the couple to double-check they weren't part of the exhibit, but they refused to come out until everybody had left the building. They escaped ten minutes later with jackets over their heads and made a dash to Kensington Road, where they hailed separate cabs. Nobody got a look at them, so we'll never know who they were. It's a marvelous story.”

  Everybody agreed that it was, indeed, a hoot of Olympian proportions, and a perfectly valid story for the Vanguard on Sunday to carry.

  Everybody, that is, apart from François, who snorted and shook his head; and Anna, who continued to stare grim-faced into the beady eye of the grilled red mullet lying on her plate, and wish like François that the Vanguard on Sunday could only be a bit more serious these days.

  C H A P T E R T E N

  IT TOOK FIVE OR SIX WORDS IN ENGLISH to describe Gerald Brownstein. In Yiddish it took one. Gerald Brownstein was a schmo. It wasn't that he was stupid—his IQ probably hovered round the hundred mark—it was just that he looked stupid and sounded stupid. He also insisted on ending every meal with soup.

  Gerald came from a long line of schmos. When his grandparents arrived in Britain they decided that in order to become assimilated they needed to anglicize their surname. While most people would have opted for Brown or possibly Steen, the Braunsteins went for Brownstein. They could never get over how people always guessed they were Jewish.

  Despite his high-pitched voice, permanently open mouth and indifferent intelligence, Gerald Brownstein had managed to notch up some impressive achievements in his sixty-odd years. The most remarkable of these was his marriage, in 1960, to the beautiful, public-school-educated Kitty Wax. They had met at a synagogue dance. Gerald fell for her long legs and sharp mind. As he so rightly said, “What schmo wouldn't?” She saw in him a chap without a brash or arrogant bone in his body who would worship her and be kind to her.

  A couple of years later Shelley was born. She was beautiful like her mother and by the age of five could belt out word-perfect, albeit tone-deaf, renditions of Dusty Springfield's entire oeuvre. Gerald took this
as a sign of great intelligence.

  In 1970 Kitty's father died. With the money he left them, Kitty and Gerald moved to Stanmore and bought an old newsagent's shop which they turned into a kosher delicatessen. Within five years, the combination of Kitty's business sense, her ferocious drive and dogged determination to own a detached mock-Georgian house with fiberglass pillars had made it the best deli in northwest London.

  When Kitty's arteries finally gave out a couple of years ago, as a result of her constant bingeing on fried potato latkes, nobody was surprised. She would bring them home from the deli for supper, along with piles of other fattening leftovers. Gerald had always warned her that potato latkes killed more Jews than Hitler, but she never listened.

  At the funeral people remarked on how well Gerald was bearing up. Throughout the seven days of mourning, when he had a constant stream of visitors bearing food and company, he managed to appear almost cheerful. It was only when everybody stopped coming and empty day began to follow empty day that he began to appreciate the extent of his misery. He had no heart to run the deli without Kitty. Without her there to scream orders at him all day long, the business meant nothing. Three months after Kitty died he sold the shop. Shortly afterwards the obsessions began.

  At first he kept getting worried and anxious about running out of food. Every few minutes he would put down the newspaper and go into the kitchen to check the contents of the kitchen cupboards and the fridge. As the months went by he began doing mammoth shops in Sainsbury's. Every few days he would stock up on enough food to keep a family of five going for a month. By the time Shelley, who was living in sin in Temple Fortune with an estate agent called Elton Goldberg, discovered what he was doing, the huge chest freezer was packed with hundreds of packets of fish fingers and potato pieces shaped like letters of the alphabet and the fridge was bursting with chicken legs so out of date they could have walked to the dustbin.