Ring Road

by Ian Sansom

  The gardens were not large, but they had been designed by Nora McCrea herself, set around a large pool, which had later been turned into a swimming pool, and there were palm trees and cobbled walkways, with hidden trysting places set in among the shrubs and specimen trees, with a Grecian-style bathing hut and summer house facing the hotel. At midnight P. J. Bradley locked the doors leading from the ballroom, so the garden was private, and anybody’s, for a sum.

  Frank and Mrs Donelly had sat down on one of the stone benches by the summer house. She could recall the cool of the stone, the damp moss through her dress, and trying to remember her posture. Posture was important in those days. They smoked Gallaghers. Frank produced a small hip flask. Mrs Donelly remembered they talked about what they were going to do in the future.

  Frank, of course, was going to leave town and travel the world. He’d probably live in New York, he said, or maybe California. He hadn’t quite decided. There were opportunities everywhere. He was going to set up his own business. He was working on the details. He certainly wasn’t going to make the mistake his father had made, he said, getting trapped into a marriage and children when he was only in his teens. Mrs Donelly could remember him saying that clearly: he was warning her, telling her what she could expect. He was going to make his money first, he said. And he was going to have some fun. Did she want to have fun, he asked. Yes, she remembered replying and it was at that point, as far as she can recollect, that he slipped an arm round her waist. He was going to be like Elvis Presley, and James Dean, he said.

  Again, as far as she could recall – it was a long time ago – Frank Gilbey did not ask Mrs Donelly what she was going to do with her life. It was not a question you asked a girl back then and Mrs Donelly hadn’t even really considered the question herself. She knew she didn’t want to be living here for ever. She thought she’d probably be going somewhere else, but she didn’t quite know where somewhere else was exactly. Somewhere else for her was probably not as far away as America, but maybe with someone like Frank, someone from here, it would be OK. They’d have each other to rely on. Although she’d have been sad to leave her family and friends behind, of course, and she had her little job in the tea rooms – maybe she could do something like that in America. She’d really have liked to be a nurse, actually, or a doctor. She asked Frank if he thought they had female doctors in America. Probably, said Frank. Anything, he said, was possible in America.

  As they gazed at the dark pool, reflecting the moonlight, in the middle of the Italianate gardens in the centre of our small town, it was possible to imagine themselves anywhere. It was easy to imagine elsewhere.

  Mrs Donelly was imagining travelling on a vast boat, arriving at the Statue of Liberty. She was imagining their many American children, growing up wearing Mickey Mouse ears and drinking milkshakes. Frank was imagining a land of opportunity where he would be able to realise himself. And it was as these fantasies were being played out in their minds and across the water that Frank had managed to undo the catch on Mrs Donelly’s brassière, and had begun to discover the unexplored territories of her body, a new, trembling continent revealing itself to him.

  Mrs Donelly could remember even now, as she was striding past the hotel’s high walls, how cold his hands were and the fumbling roughness, and how America had become confused in her mind ever after with a kind of thrusting insensitivity and restlessness, and an unwelcome determination to overcome and to dominate. She had realised then, in the moonlight of our small town, that there were things of which she was unaware even here, and of which she had no experience, depths and breadths which you did not have to travel to discover. And Frank, after claiming the territory, felt a kind of disappointment that had become familiar to him as the years went by, which helped explain why he would often sit up late at night, when Mrs Gilbey had gone to bed, reading newspapers and watching television and drinking malt whisky and thinking about life. He no longer had to seek America – America had come to him unbidden, on television, in the magazines, on film. So, in a sense, he’d never had to go, there had been no need. He’d been lucky to live in a time when America came to him, generous with its gifts and influence. But he still felt somehow that he’d missed out. That he’d been robbed.

  Mrs Donelly sat in Martin Phillips’s waiting room, where everything spoke to her of home: the frayed and worn carpet, the splash of paint over the skirting. She liked this place and its cosy informality, even here on Sunnyside Terrace, where people were too afraid to go at night.

  ‘Hello, Mary, ’ said Martin Phillips. He always called his clients by their first names: it established a rapport. ‘Come in, come in. Sorry to keep you waiting. Now, what can we do you for?’

  ‘Well, Mr Phillips, ’ said Mrs Donelly, maintaining her dignity and settling herself into a chair, ‘I have some important business I wish to conclude.’

  She’d had the child, of course. She was too scared to do anything else. Her father had threatened to beat her unless she told him who’d done it to her. But she never did. She never told him. And she’d never told Frank. Or Mr Donelly. It was her secret. Her baby. Her firstborn son.

  * Our local politicians, for example, fall into two categories, the Happy and Generally Contented, who tend to be conservative in their habits and thinking, and the Sad and Generally Discontented, who tend to lean towards the Left. But there are, of course, exceptions to this rule. Olivia Wallace, our first pioneering female councillor back in the 1940s, believed passionately in social justice and the Soviet Union, and in allotments and modern art. She bought olive oil from the chemist to cook with and she wore her hair cropped short like a man, but she was also unfailingly polite and cheerful – not even the Soviet tanks rolling into Hungary in 1956 or into Czechoslovakia in 1968 could wipe the smile from her face. Gilbert Payne, on the other hand, at the opposite end of the political spectrum, was mayor back in the 1970s, and he believed in tradition and in the free market and in cricket and thick-cut marmalade, but it seemed to make him miserable – the contradictions were just too great. He committed suicide in 1979, just at the point at which Mrs Thatcher might have cheered him up.

  * The only thing that kept her sane, in fact, was her amateur dramatics. See pp. 325–366.

  14

  Self-Help

  In which the author sets out and fails to disprove that Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus

  It’s been blue skies for Cherith for a long time now – holiday weather. Whatever the temperature and no matter how damp, it’s the Azores overhead for Cherith, a perpetual high-pressure front. She’d lost three and a half stone by cutting out all snack foods, dairy products, tea, coffee, taking up aerobic yoga and doing a couple of hundred sit-ups every morning. She had forsaken each and every kind of ibuprofen and paracetamol, and instead ate a lot of fruit, drank at least two litres of water a day, enjoyed the occasional enema, and her urine was the colour of sparkling mineral water, with just a hint of tint – flavoured sparkling mineral water. She wore no man-made fibres, had her hair done once a month in Fry’s – which is the fancy new salon up on Abbey Street, with wall-to-wall MTV, coffee in proper cups and a monthly magazine bill that would pay everybody’s wages at Central Cutz and then some, and it’s just a pity Noreen Fry couldn’t be persuaded to call it something else, so it didn’t sound like a chippy – and she wore a crystal to channel positive energies.

  She had good chi, her yin was balanced with her yang, her communication channels were open, she practised the seven habits of highly effective people and she could fit into some of her daughter’s clothes. She’d been granted custody of Bethany after the divorce from Francie and even Bethany seemed happy – Bethany of the perpetual, seemingly endless teenage sneer, of the secret smoking, she of the hormone furies and the constant ‘WTF!’ texting. Bethany loved living with Cherith – whom she now called ‘Cherry’, obviously, rather than ‘Mum’ – and with Sammy, who doted on her, unlike Francie, who resolutely remained ‘Dad’, and who’d always been rather preoccu
pied with God and the problem of salvation, who’d been so wrapped up in the church, in fact, that he was really a live-at-home absent father, more like a vague Holy Spirit, you might say, than the historical Jesus. Francie could hardly have been called a disciplinarian, but he did believe that to spare the rod was to spoil the child, which meant that he would occasionally emerge from contemplation and prayer or the laying on of hands, to object to bad manners, and boyfriends, and certain kinds of unsuitable skirt. But Sammy was more like a friend to Bethany than a stepdad – he was most definitely just ‘Sammy’ – and these days it was Cherith, if she wanted to, who was wearing the unsuitable skirts and there was no one to disagree with her or prevent her. Sammy was cool about that, as about most things. He even allowed Bethany to smoke in the house, as long as she only did it in her room and at the moment she was hooked on something that her friend Finn had sold her, which he called the Devil’s Weed: he said it was a mix of legal herbs and herbal extracts with psychoactive effects similar to those produced by illegal substances. What Sammy didn’t tell her was he’d tried it himself and it was Benson and Hedges, as far as he could tell. The trouble with children these days was that they were all smoking Marlboro Lights; anything stronger and they thought they were blowing their minds.*

  The business, the Oasis, was going from strength to strength: they were developing new ideas all the time, setting up new courses, introducing new product lines into the shop. Scented things were always very popular – scented stones being the latest variation on the theme, from a company based in Portland, Oregon, calling itself Sweet Honey from the Rock™, who produced lemon-and-verbena pumice stones and cocoa-smelling loofahs, and cinnamon worry beads, among other things. But the main cash crop remained the self-help books and tapes. Cherith herself was addicted. She’d read Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus from cover to cover at least half a dozen times – it was, in her opinion, the original and still the best – and she’d started to run some new workshops, based on her reading, workshops she called ‘The Rough Guide to the Road Less Travelled (Beginners and Advanced)’, and ‘Emotional Intelligence for Couples (Gays and Lesbians Welcome)’. They’d also organised a successful weekend conference on alternative therapies, which had drawn in practitioners from all over. They’d had a herbalist come over from Germany. He was very fat and had bad eczema, unfortunately, which was a little off-putting, and he advocated a form of naked whole-body massage using a kind of bouquet garni steeped in a chilli oil, which did not prove popular among the Oasis clients and which might, in fact, have been better suited for the purposes of roasting chickens. Doctor Ye, the town’s acupuncturist, held twice-weekly clinics, and they’d also brought in a reflexologist, a chiropractor and Barbara Boyle, the chiropodist who runs her own little business in Michael Gardens. Barbara was doing the best business of all of them: corns and bunions, it seems, are as much a physical and spiritual challenge to the people of our town as fused spines or bad auras.*

  What was strange, though, what disturbed and unsettled Cherith, was that now she was no longer married to a minister, now that she was a bona fide and successful businesswoman in her own right, she somehow felt more pious than she ever had before. She and Sammy ate sensibly, took exercise, never drank intoxicating liquor, never argued, never raised their voices and between them they seemed to have no strong opinions about anything whatsoever, apart from which essential oils to use. They had an accountant and money in the bank, and it seemed unnatural. When she was married to Francie, Cherith had been used to spiritual highs and lows, the battle for souls, the fight between Good and Evil, and cheap biscuits with Nescafe coffee. These days she was more interested in self-realisation and self-preservation through detox diets, natural juices and meditation. She and Sammy seemed to have lulled each other into a kind of wide-eyed, cranberry and echinacea-fuelled sleepwalk.

  The death of his son, little Josh, had had an extraordinary purgative effect on Sammy – a man never given to outbursts or great enthusiasms – leaving him entirely calm and incapable of rancour. He was a walking, talking, living endorsement of the benefits of AA and self-administered self-help literature. Sammy spent hours every week in the spa pool, often lying there silent after the Oasis was closed, gazing out at the car park in front of the Quality Hotel, just floating, entirely lost to the world.

  Sammy had given up on himself after Josh had died and he believed others should have given up on him also. And when they hadn’t, he couldn’t bear it. The condemnation and punishment that he felt were necessary and right and proper he’d had to provide for himself. And just as he had condemned himself and, with the help of drink, punished himself, he had at first believed that it was up to him, and only within his gift, to forgive himself, to repair himself and put himself back together. You can take a man out of plumbing, it seems, but you can’t take the plumber out of the man. The trouble was, Sammy could find no way to put things right, or to fix things: no amount of work with a pipe wrench or a blowtorch was going to bring back his little Josh. So when he discovered Alcoholics Anonymous, and the writings of M. Scott Peck, and the love of a good woman, he was amazed and relieved, and he had come to rely entirely upon them. They had helped join him back together.

  If Cherith had learnt anything from her reading of Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus, and she believed she had, then it was this: men and women are not the same. Cherith had known this instinctively, of course, for a long time, long before Oprah, and possibly since consciousness. She had always known that men were somehow inferior. As a child growing up she’d regarded her father – taking a lead from her mother – as a kind of genial buffoon, good for certain obvious manual tasks, such as clearing drains and stripping a turkey carcass, but for little else, and she had always been amazed that the boys at her school were incapable of concentrating for long enough to get more than about three out of ten in spelling, and how messy their handwriting was, and how smelly they were. Her decision to marry Francie had been at least partly based on the assumption that as a minister of religion he might have had slightly higher standards than most other men, which he did, in some ways, although, of course, standards are one thing and maintaining them quite another. No man can keep up with all the odd jobs in life, or all the other demands of morality.

  What the book didn’t mention, though, what Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus had missed – and what now seemed to Cherith an important, essential truth, and one which she was coming to understand through her course, ‘Emotional Intelligence for Couples (Gays and Lesbians Welcome)’ – was that men are not, in fact, all the same. A better title for the book, in Cherith’s opinion, might have been Some Men Are from Mars, Some Women Are from Venus, but Also Vice Versa, and Actually Some of Us Are from Mercury, Jupiter, Saturn and Also, Clearly, Uranus. When she was living with Francie she had, of course, loved him, and now she loved Sammy, but what she had with the both of them, and the love she felt in each instance, was quite different. With Francie what she’d had was a kind of intimacy. With Sammy what she had was free out-of-hours counselling. Sammy was monosyllabic, basically, which people often mistook for his being a good listener. But Sammy was not a good listener: he was just a bad talker. Amidst all the turmoil of her split with Francie, Cherith had found Sammy’s taciturn and reliable manner serene and calming, but now she just found it frustrating. She was finding she was having to practise her yoga breaths more and more, in order to maintain her equilibrium, and she found herself lighting more joss sticks around the home and at work, and doing her ‘Om’ louder and more furiously. Sometimes she even had to turn the volume on her personal stereo all the way up to twelve, in order to drown herself in ‘Fields of Gold’ with Eva Cassidy.

  Sammy had no idea that he was becoming an annoyance. Having opened up and made himself vulnerable after the death of Josh, he had gradually begun to shut down again and although he had enjoyed his moment of self-discovery and revelation, now he’d found Cherith he felt no need to explore further. He was abstaining. He
had plateaued out and come to rest. This, he felt, was as good as it gets. He and Cherith had the business together, they meditated together, they practised tantric sex, unsuccessfully, together, following the instructions in a lavishly illustrated book from the shop; in fact, they were often together entirely, for twenty-four hours a day, in and out of bed, at work and at play. It wasn’t so much a decision as just something that had happened. They had both been very vulnerable individuals when they met and they needed all the support they could give each other. After the death of his son, Sammy no longer quite trusted himself and he looked to Cherith to do the trusting for him; after the shock of the split with Francie, Cherith had needed reassurance and a steadying hand. They’d both required someone else to help to keep them sober and they had become, in effect, their own mutual-support network.

  But Cherith did not need a mutual-support network any more. She had been sober for more than two years and what she needed now was a husband: she needed a challenge and a little more conversation. When Cherith thought of the word ‘husband’ – which she tried not to do too often – she didn’t think of Sammy, even though they had married in some style, in Thailand, on a beach, at sunrise, with him in a tuxedo and her in a cheongsam, and prawns and champagne to follow. No, when she thought of her husband she thought of Francie, whom she’d married in her mother’s old wedding dress and a cardie, and Francie in a lounge suit, in the People’s Fellowship, with a mountain of sausage rolls and a river of Shloer at the reception.