My Former Heart
Page 13
It was peculiar being old. You woke up in the morning, always earlier than you would have wished, and felt just as you’d always felt, that the day ahead was long and full of possibility. But it took such an age to do everything. Sometimes, especially in the winter, just getting dressed and having breakfast seemed the most enormous effort. The mornings seemed to go by in a flash, with barely time enough to open the post and look through the newspaper. But the afternoons lingered on and on. Had time always buckled and folded in this way? As a child she remembered interminable mornings, longing for the afternoons, to get out of doors. Now it seemed to be the other way round.
Somehow you got used to the face in the mirror. It happened so gradually, the ageing. To begin with, you just looked tired, as if a nap would restore you, iron you out, make you less jowly, less creased. That went on for several years. Then the colour seemed to fade – the lips became barely distinguishable from the skin – and your face looked almost grey, like cheap jotting paper. You couldn’t call it a complexion any more. Putting on lipstick seemed to make it worse, showing up hundreds of tiny crevices on one’s upper lip, making one look grotesque, like an old clown. One’s hair was most peculiar, at once coarser and more sparse. And the lines! But what Iris had minded most was when a snapshot taken by Jamie showed that her eyelids had lost their depth, disappearing somehow, making her eyes seem collapsed and narrow, losing the suggestion of amusement or interest they’d always carried. That had been a shock. The mirror was kinder than a photograph, because you came at it prepared, and the fact that you could move your features when you looked in the glass did something to obscure the changes in them.
A photograph was bad, but at least it was only your own face you had to contend with, your own dismay. Iris had always prided herself on not caring what other people thought, but this, she now recognised, had been a luxury afforded by the fact that she had generally been admired. On her last London visit she’d met her old friend Jocelyn for lunch at Wiltons – it was Jocelyn’s birthday – and recognised a fellow diner as he was led across to his table by a black-clad waiter. He took his seat opposite a younger man in a pinstripe suit, who looked like a stockbroker.
‘Don’t look now, but isn’t that Bunny Turner?’ she whispered.
Jocelyn swivelled. ‘I believe it is. Haven’t seen him for years. You know everyone thought he’d killed his last wife? She fell down the stairs, apparently.’
‘Ssh!’ said Iris. ‘He’ll hear you!’
‘I don’t mind if he does,’ said Jocelyn.
They talked of other things. Before they left, while Jocelyn went to the ladies, Iris couldn’t resist going over to Bunny’s table, to say hello. It must have been more than twenty years since they’d last met. She’d said his name and he’d looked up, surprised.
‘Can I help you?’ he said.
He didn’t recognise her.
‘It’s Iris,’ she said. ‘Iris Richards. Iris Browning, as was.’
‘Of course, of course! I thought it was you, only I wasn’t expecting you here, or I’d have known you at once. How delightful to see you again.’
But it was too late for made-up pleasantries. Before he had spoken, when she’d said her name, a look of horrified disbelief had clouded his face. However much he attempted to conceal it with cordial words, that look, so involuntary in its displeasure, had been his true response to the person she had become. A person who was no longer beautiful.
She’d known she was old before, but never with such force. It was much worse to have been beautiful, thought Iris; then you had looks to lose. At least if you had been plain as a young woman no one would ever have looked twice at you. It wasn’t only that people – men – no longer desired you. She wouldn’t have minded that so much. It was that people were altogether less nice to you: strangers, people in queues, the other passen- gers in a railway carriage. They didn’t smile or acknowledge you in any way: they didn’t seem to see you at all. And the funny thing was that this made you feel obscurely guilty, as though you’d done something wrong by growing old and unlovely, as though you’d squandered a wonderful gift. Iris thought of that phrase: She’s let herself go. As if there was any choice in the matter.
Being outside, that was the thing. The antidote. In the open air, time didn’t speed or falter, like a car in the wrong gear, as it did in the house. Time didn’t matter at all, working in the garden or fishing. It wasn’t that it stood still, exactly. More a sense that the sky and the earth and the river and the trees were bigger than passing minutes were, more important. They operated to a different clock. Seasons counted, but days and hours did not. What Iris liked about gardening, oddly, was the very futility of it, the sense that she was hardly more than an ant, in the larger scheme of things, scratching away at the soil, planting bulbs, dividing plants.
‘Have you been at your father’s?’ Iris asked her granddaughters, when Digby had collected them from the station.
Since the girls boarded now at their mother’s old school in Malvern, it was not quite clear to Iris where they actually lived during the holidays.
‘Just for a couple of days,’ said Emily. ‘He and Valerie are going to Portugal for Easter. They’ve taken to travelling. He dropped us at King’s Cross. They were going on to Victoria.’
‘I loathe railway stations now,’ said Iris. ‘One can’t find a porter anywhere and all the ticket collectors are blackies.’
‘Granny!’ Isobel exclaimed. ‘You can’t say that.’
‘Why on earth not? It’s true. I’ve nothing against blackies, only it’s a bore when they don’t understand what one’s trying to ask them.’
Emily rolled her eyes at her sister. Digby never seemed to notice when Iris said outrageous things. He carried on filling the kettle, before setting it on the gas to make them all some tea. Birdle started to whistle shrilly, pre-empting the kettle.
‘One of the ticket collectors at Malvern is a communist,’ said Emily. ‘Every time I went through the barrier – which was quite often, really, because I used to go over to my friend’s house near Worcester at the weekends – he glowered at me like anything, I suppose because of going to a snob school. So one day I went into Smith’s and bought a copy of the Morning Star and rolled it under my arm so he’d see it, and since then he’s all smiles.’
‘Quite right,’ said Iris emphatically.
‘Of him, or Emily?’ asked Isobel.
‘Emily, of course. If you can’t beat them, pretend to join them. That’s what I always say,’ said Iris.
That night Isobel appeared in Emily’s room.
‘Can I get in with you for a bit? Only I’m freezing,’ she said.
‘You can if you don’t put your feet on me,’ said Emily.
‘The eiderdown in the other room is all heavy from damp,’ said Isobel.
‘That room’s always the coldest. I was in there last time and it was August and I was still quite chilly,’ said Emily.
‘That stew was a bit strange at supper.’
‘I know! I only seemed to have bones in mine,’ said Isobel.
‘Same here. Was it meant to be pheasant, d’you think?’
‘I couldn’t really tell,’ said Emily. ‘Some sort of bird, I think. Isn’t it too late for pheasant? I don’t know when they stop shooting them.’
‘Digby probably ran it over, then Granny said it would be a waste and went and scraped it off the road,’ said Isobel.
They began to laugh quietly.
‘And the hard loo paper!’ said Emily.
‘What do you think Granny would do, if we brought her a proper loo roll?’ said Isobel.
‘Dunno. I shouldn’t think she’d notice. She’d probably leave it in the kitchen, for Birdle to rip to pieces.’
They lay in silence in the darkness for a time, Isobel neatly tucked against her sister’s warm back, like two forks in a drawer.
‘Lem, it will be all right, won’t it?’ Isobel asked presently.
‘What?’ said Emily.
‘You’ll go to London and get some sort of job and it’ll be great,’ said Emily. ‘Think of the freedom. Think of not having to sit through assembly any more, or sign out every time you want to go and get a packet of Opal Fruits. You won’t have to wear horrible uniform ever again. It’ll be fantastic.’
‘I know.’ Isobel sounded doubtful. ‘It will. It’ll be great.’
It was Jamie who helped Isobel find work. Ruth had wanted her daughter to go to university, but Isobel had never been terribly academic and couldn’t think of a single subject she would want to study anyway. And that would have meant another three years: an eternity. Jamie had decided against becoming an academic: his finals had not gone well and he’d become disen-chanted with university life. He had gone into a small electronics firm owned by a friend from Oxford days. They made some sort of peculiar keyboard instrument. It had been the size of a van to begin with, Jamie told her, and taken up almost the whole of the shed where the four of them worked, but they were trying to make a smaller version. Despite being so unwieldy it was becoming fashionable among the more avant-garde musicians in London. Jamie seemed to know millions of people, which was funny because he was so quiet himself. He had a friend, Jasper, who was a photographer, with a studio in the New King’s Road and plans to open a gallery in the empty shop premises below. Isobel could help him out.
She wasn’t quite sure what she was meant to do at the studio. She answered the telephone and kept Jasper’s appointments diary and produced coffee for visitors, but there were hours when she did nothing at all. Jasper didn’t seem to mind. He had two long shelves covered in big art books and she began to leaf through them in turn. At least she could learn something about art while she was sitting here. Isobel wondered if she was more for show than for usefulness, to make him look successful. Which, in fact, he was. Jasper’s photographs were of naked women, or portions of naked women. He’d photograph some-one’s knee or shoulder or breast, so close up that you could see every follicle, every tiny hair, every mole. Usually the flesh was against something hard and man-made, like a brick wall or a piece of corrugated iron.
Isobel sat at a huge glass-topped table on the far side of the studio. Jasper seemed to favour big things: her chair had a ridiculously high back and the plain white mugs in which she was required to serve coffee were more like pudding bowls with handles. One end of the studio was entirely taken up with an indoor tree which had glossy, curiously un-lifelike outsized leaves. Jasper kept several foolscap books, for appointments, client addresses, expenses.
Isobel often heard Jasper telling people that the work – he always referred to his own photographs as ‘the work’ – was all about juxtapositions.
‘You could look at the work from a feminist perspective too. That’s the paradox. It’s displaying the naked female form in a way that subverts the expectations usually imposed on it by male desire,’ Jasper was explaining to an American man with a pointed beard.
‘So they’re naked, but they’re not nudes,’ said the American.
‘Exactly!’ said Jasper excitedly. ‘That’s just it. The familiarity of the forms draws the gaze in, but then it’s blocked; it can’t complete its visual journey …’
‘Right. They entice but they resist, too.’
‘Yeah,’ said Jasper.
The two maintained a long silence while they studied the images. Isobel had not the faintest idea what they had been talking about.
‘I’d really like to write about the pictures you’ve made,’ the American said at last. ‘You know I contribute to the Voice, occasionally? And I curate, also.’
‘Great,’ said Jasper. ‘Terrific.’
‘Would you be willing to ship some works over to a group show I’m putting on in January? There’s a bunch of new artists I’d like to give a window to: a great guy from New Mexico who does surreal kind of landscapes; he uses actual sand and dirt, mixes them in with the paint. Then there’s an interesting young woman artist, a New Yorker who’s concerned with the aesthetics of protest … provisionally I’m calling the show Intersections.’
‘Terrific. Yeah,’ said Jasper. ‘Izzy! Can you come over and take down this gentleman’s details?’
Isobel was still not used to being called Izzy, but her employer had fixed on the name and she didn’t like to correct him. No one had ever called her Izzy before. She took a biro and the contact book and stood up.
She was sharing a flat with Alice, a friend from school. It was on the second floor, off the North End Road. The old house in Putney wasn’t far and she often went to Saturday lunch with her father and stepmother at the weekends. Most nights she went out, either to private views of photographic or contemporary art exhibitions, or to wine and cheese dos put on by her flatmate’s colleagues from the ad agency where she worked, up in the West End. Everybody seemed to know everybody, wherever she went.
‘You work for Jasper Sanderson, I hear.’ The speaker was an older redhead with deep burgundy lipstick and a shirt with extravagantly medieval-looking puffed sleeves.
‘Yes. I answer the phone, that sort of thing,’ said Isobel.
‘Oh. I’m Jenny, assistant creative manager.’ The stranger did not seem to think it necessary to tell Isobel what organisation she was assistant creative manager of.
‘We might be interested in getting Jasper on board for an upcoming project. It’s a new account. The client is quite keen to go arty, campaign-wise. Is Jasper still doing ad work, or just editorial?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Isobel, baffled. ‘I only started last month. He’s never said.’
‘Oh. Right. Well, give me the studio number, can you, and I’ll call next week?’
The following weekend Isobel met Jamie for tea at his favourite café, a long dark room by South Kensington tube station where hostile Polish waitresses served hot chocolate in tall glasses with metal holders. There were unfamiliar cakes displayed on glass shelves. They looked delectable, but they tasted dry and sandy. Isobel had never had a hot drink out of a glass before.
‘How’s it going?’ asked Jamie.
‘Fine, I think,’ said Isobel. ‘They all talk such gobbledegook, though, it takes a bit of getting used to. I thought a transparency meant something see-through. Well, I s’pose it does, in a way. I had no idea what Jasper was talking about at first, when he kept going on about them.’
‘That’s what working is. Learning the lingo.’ Jamie smiled.
‘It makes everyone seem important, I suppose, if it has its own language,’ said Isobel.
‘I suppose it does,’ said Jamie. ‘It’s a bit like being in a club. You should hear some of the technical language that gets bandied about, with us. A normal person wouldn’t understand half the stuff we’re saying.’
Isobel’s only real ambition was to lose her virginity. It felt like a burden to her, a badge of her provincialism. She was nearly nineteen and it was shameful, embarrassing. She worried that people could tell, just to look at her. Her flatmate, Alice, had done it with two guys already. She sounded very practised, when Isobel heard her and her current boyfriend at it, through the wall. Isobel met plenty of men, but she didn’t seem to be very good at small talk or flirting. It was another kind of language she needed to learn.
The only guy who had persisted beyond a fumble was Andrew. The trouble was, she didn’t really fancy him. He had thick hair in a centre parting, which had the effect not so much of framing his face as of carpeting it. In all weathers he wore an unbuttoned army greatcoat which made him sweat rather. Isobel supposed it was a Soviet army coat, or some such; it didn’t look English. He’d got her telephone number when they’d met at some do and had rung her three times in a week, until she had agreed to meet. They’d gone to a Spaghetti House. Andrew announced that garlic bread was his favourite thing, then looked expecta
ntly at Isobel, as if waiting to be congratulated for his culinary sophistication. When he kissed her, afterwards, his breath was heavy with the metallic tang of it.
Intercourse was an anticlimax. It was a sharp feeling, jagged, unpleasant in its insistence. She’d expected bloodied sheets, febrile declarations, a sense of deliverance.
‘I’m not on the pill,’ Isobel had whispered, as they were kissing.
‘It’s all right. I won’t come inside you,’ said Andrew.
Instead he had deposited a puddle of sticky hotness across her pubic hair and belly. As it cooled against her skin, she wondered about the polite way of dealing with such things. Presumably you had to pretend to be pleased. She imagined it was bad form to wipe it off straight away; anyway, she had nothing to wipe it with, except the sheet, and she didn’t want this alien substance on her bed linen any more than she wanted it on herself. While Andrew reached out of the bed into the pocket of his jeans for a cigarette, she glanced down. It looked like the kind of glue used for putting up wallpaper.
‘Just going for a pee,’ she said.
‘Righto, babe,’ said Andrew, leaning back against the head-board with his cigarette, looking pleased with himself.
Andrew was a graphic designer. He was working in commercial publishing at the moment, but he really wanted to get into the music business. Album covers: that was the aim. After the first night at Isobel’s, they spent most of their time at his place. He lived on his own so they had the flat to themselves, unlike at Isobel’s. It was more convenient, too, because he lived so close to the tube station. Isobel had never spent time in a basement before and it seemed intriguingly grubby and bohemian. Andrew had an extensive record collection, housed in brown cuboid shelving. As soon as they came into the flat, before making a cup of tea, before opening his post or, if it was dark, drawing the ochre-coloured Indian bedspread he used as a curtain, he would go to the shelves and select an album. He had a particular way of getting the records out. First he slid the record onto its side, so that the inner sleeve with its waxed paper lining was dislodged from its cardboard casing. Some came more readily than others, tipping obligingly into his waiting palm. Then he slid his hand inside the white vest, lodging his middle finger across the hole in the middle, allowing neither his palm nor his other fingers to graze the glossy black surface. Now, with the rim of the disc tucked between his thumb and first finger, he eased it out. Sometimes he flipped the LP over between his flattened palms – he took a quiet pride in his comprehensive knowledge of the commonly less-played second sides and often, perversely, played them first – before blowing across it. After blowing each record he always studied the tiny concentric circles which marked the tracks, tipping it back and forth like a panning gold prospector, to catch the light. Only then, satisfied, did he place the LP on the altar of the turntable and lift the stylus onto its revolving surface.