Exquisite

by Sarah Stovell

  ‘Bo,’ he said, as I stepped out of the car. He came forwards and shook my hand enthusiastically. ‘I’m Dan. Great to meet you.’

  He had the slightly star-struck look about him that I often saw when I met new people. It was something I’d never quite got used to. I, Bo Luxton, with the travelling parents and no education to speak of, was famous – a fact about my life that mostly made me uncomfortable.

  I smiled at him. ‘I’m glad to be here, really looking forward to it,’ I said. There was nothing else to say, though it wasn’t strictly true. It was the first time I’d done any teaching since the drama with Christian. I’d thought afterwards that I’d never teach again, never do any kind of public event again; but later I decided that would make me too much of a victim – cutting off ways of earning money, and increasing book sales, just because of one fan.

  Another problem was that, even now, driving so far away from the girls felt as though someone was tugging too hard on the old umbilical cord that I swore still pulsed on between us – the invisible force that made them cry when they saw me again after a bad day, and that stopped me from ever straying too far. It was the old conundrum of motherhood: always, I craved time away. But when it came to it, I couldn’t bear the distance between us.

  Dan took my bag and showed me to my room. It was at the top of the house, in the en-suite attic conversion, separate from the students, who would sleep a floor below me and would have to share a bathroom. I knew from experience that distance from them was crucial. Students were like parasites. Some of them bore an eagerness so heavy they could barely hold themselves up off the floor. They’d follow wherever I went, trying to get five minutes alone with me, away from the others, so I could say the things they thought it would be tactless to mention in front of the group. They were desperate to be singled out, to have me look them square in the eye and say, ‘You are good.’ Most writers, I felt sure, had not been loved enough as children.

  ‘A couple of the students are here already,’ Dan was saying. ‘They’re in the lounge, but get yourself settled in. We start officially at five. The usual stuff – a talk about meals and washing up, not flushing anything other than toilet roll into the cesspit, composting the compostable, recycling the recyclable – then dinner together, followed by some horrendous group activity, followed by a piss-up. It’s up to you whether you take part in that.’

  I shook my head demurely. ‘A teetotal week for me.’

  ‘Very wise,’ Dan said, and left the room.

  I unpacked slowly and checked my phone for messages from Lola or Maggie. Nothing. Nothing from Gus, either. They were fine. The week would fly by for them. Of course, Gus would read all my mail; open all my emails; keep an eye on me, even from a distance. He’d entirely fail to listen to the girls read or take them to their swimming lessons, and they would eat only fish-finger sandwiches and strawberry jelly, but they would have fun together, the three of them, liberated from my boring insistence on homework, health and trust.

  I left the room and walked downstairs to meet my students. There they were in the lounge, as Dan had said, five of them aged – it looked to me – between forty-five and seventy. The atmosphere changed as I entered. There was some nudging, a murmured, ‘Here she is,’ and then silence. Oh, God. This was what I always struggled with – the sense that my presence in a room altered it; that people paid good money to just meet me; that they wanted to hear what I had to say because it was important and relevant. That I was, in some real and vital way, less ordinary than they were.

  I had never worked as hard at anything as I worked at being ordinary.

  I cleared my throat and smiled in way I hoped was normal and friendly. ‘I’m Bo Luxton,’ I said.

  A couple of them rolled their eyes, as if the introduction was unnecessary. They knew who I was, they’d seen me on book covers, on posters, on television…

  ‘I hope we’ll have a great few days, and you’ll all go home feeling that this was a purposeful and meaningful week.’

  I stopped talking and sat down in an easy chair, feeling the comforting caress of my fleece against my skin.

  A bottle of wine was making its way around the room. One of the more courageous of the two male students approached me with it. ‘Bo?’

  I shook my head. ‘Is there some water?’

  Someone else jumped up. ‘I’ll get it. Still or sparkling?’

  ‘Just tap water. I can get it myself if someone points me in the direction of the sink.’

  They wouldn’t hear of it, and off they went, competing. Oh, the great privilege of bringing water to Bo Luxton. It was only for a week, I reminded myself. I should try and enjoy it. But I felt – had always felt – that there was something dehumanising about people removing your need to care for yourself. It was why I could never have had an au pair, even though all my friends in Oxford had one. Because really, what was left of you if you couldn’t pour yourself a drink, make yourself a meal, change your own child’s nappy? And besides all of that, I knew this was how obsession started. It was how Christian started. He raised me to the status of beyond human, then worshipped me.

  The students around me went on talking. Their voices were loud and unnatural now because they wanted me to hear what they were saying: all the details of their lives, their commitment to this week, how important it all was, what lengths they’d had to go to, rearranging their careers and homes so they could get here…

  Then someone else walked in. She was younger than the others by far, mid-twenties at the most. She was also very pretty, in a sensational, made-up way – a way that knew it would be looked at, and liked it: dark-brown, asymmetric bob; bright-pink boots; black coat with a floppy fabric flower pinned to it; glossy lips, slightly – just very slightly – underweight.

  This, I knew straight away, was Alice. The girl – for I could not think of her as a woman – stood in the doorway. She smiled brightly as everyone looked up at her, and said, ‘Sorry I’m so late. Bloody trains.’

  The men moved over for her, the women bristled. She wouldn’t let Ben, the greying man in his fifties, give up his seat for her, and so she sat on the floor, elf-like, her arms wrapped around her knees.

  ‘Alice,’ she was saying. ‘I left Brighton at six this morning.’

  ‘Early start,’ Ben commented.

  ‘A late night, really. I couldn’t face a five o’clock alarm, so I just stayed up.’

  Suddenly, unexpectedly and from nowhere at all, I felt a lurch of envy. Youth. Vitality. Freedom. Alice was years away from the time when sleep would become a drug she’d risk everything to lay her hands on. She could probably go nights and nights without it. Sleep lurked somewhere at the bottom of her priorities list, beneath dancing, food, sex.

  I went up to her and shook her hand. ‘I’m Bo, the course tutor,’ I said. ‘Sounds like you had a bad journey.’

  ‘I missed my train out of King’s Cross. It was my own fault. I realised as I stood on the platform that I’d forgotten to bring a pen with me, and I thought how slack it would look – you know, rocking up to a writing course without a pen – so I went off to buy some and the queue was long and the train left without me. I’m not very good with timetables. They always surprise me. The rest of the world moves much faster than I do.’

  Ben was eyeing her with amusement. Alice stopped talking and blushed.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m a bit nervous. I lose all power to edit my speech when I’m in a room full of people I don’t know. I suppose the good thing about it is that now you know my life story, I won’t have to speak during the getting-to-know-you activity. Thank God. I’ve always hated those.’

  ‘They have their flaws, I agree,’ I said, ‘but seeing as no one in the field of group dynamics has come up with something better, shall we begin and get ours over with?’

  There was general, murmuring agreement. They went around the room, saying who they were, condensing their identities into three sentences. Most of them were the same: They’d been bogg
ed down in the day job for twenty years, and now, suddenly, they’d looked up and realised half their lives had passed and time was accelerating beyond their control. They needed to do this now, or their lives would be over and all they’d have to leave the world was a two-page CV saying they were good with data.

  It was Alice’s turn. ‘I’m here because … well, because it’s all I want to do. I can’t do anything else. I know it’s hard and brutal and I’m condemning myself to a life of poverty, but I don’t care. Normal life is killing me.’

  I looked at her. I could see she meant this. In some strange and very real sense, she’d actually been dying of boredom. Alice was a burst of crushed energy. Her skin could scarcely contain her.

  She was like no one I’d ever met before. Except perhaps myself, when I was that age.

  6

  Alice

  I was having a great time. I’d been unsure when I first walked in – late, always late – and saw that everyone else in the room was at least twice my age, but I got used to it quickly and decided I liked these people with their steady lives, minds full of books and vintage wisdom. Besides, they all drank just as much as I did. Forget those hateful getting-to-know-you games, I’d always thought (and once tried to tell my boss); the only way to get a team bonding was through the group consumption of too much alcohol.

  Bo Luxton was everything I’d expected her to be. She looked the way she wrote: ethereal, gentle, sensual. There was, I thought – probably because I was in an old manor house overlooking the sea, talking a lot about poetry – a touch of the angel about her. It was the way her hair fell in waves around that pale and delicate face and down to her shoulders. It was also to do with the fact that, every time she opened her mouth, gold nuggets of wisdom seemed to drop from it.

  I would have loved some time with Bo, away from all the others, but knew I’d have to fight for it. The rest of them hung around her like moths; I’d need sharp elbows to get within a metre of her. I had the sense that Bo was uncomfortable with all this needy worship. Now and then, she had about her the look of a hunted animal, desperate to break away.

  Instead, I spent my afternoons writing alone in my room or the garden, or shut away in the lounge. Jake sent me a text message every day at around two, probably when he’d just got up: Hi baby hows it going missing you started new painting will have it finished before you get back.

  By Wednesday, I’d stopped replying. I had, I realised now, nothing to say to him. I couldn’t fit him into this situation, in which people were productive and articulate and managed to lead full, complicated and busy lives without feeling the need to fall down and sleep every hour so they could recover from the cycle of pressure – of walking half a mile for a pint of milk, composing an email, buying a new canvas.

  I had to end things with him. I’d do it as soon as I got back to Brighton. If I phoned him and did it now, he’d never stop phoning back, wanting to discuss it all to death in a voice slowed down by his afternoon spliffs. I sighed. Far better not to ruin the week.

  The lounge, when I went in that particular afternoon, was empty. I took a seat in an armchair and read over some of the notes I’d made in the workshops in response to Bo’s advice about my work. All Bo’s wisdom, gathered there on the page. My favourite: Everyone was a terrible writer once. You just have to keep on until you’re terrible no longer.

  As I read on in silence, the latch on the door lifted and Bo herself walked in.

  At first, she looked flustered. ‘Oh, I’m sorry. I can leave if you’re working. I was just looking for somewhere to sit in peace for a while.’

  I shook my head. ‘It’s fine. Come in, please.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Bo said, and took a seat in the armchair opposite me.

  I went on trying to read Bo’s feedback, but her presence in the room was distracting.

  ‘Are you finding the week useful?’ she said, after a while.

  ‘Really useful. It’s been great so far. Even just being out here in the countryside is so different to what I’m used to. I live in Brighton. We only really get two seasons there – cold and dark, and then a bit less cold and light. It’s not like this.’

  It was true. In Brighton now, the air would be slowly warming and the sea brightening after the long murk of winter, but there would be nothing else drawing my attention to the shift of the seasons; except for the people – there were more of them now: tourists, foreign students, and that tedious, endless procession of weekend stags and hens. But here, the brilliant green of spring made my eyes ache. Every day I walked the grounds before breakfast, saw the purple flash of bluebells among the birch trees, or the dark spread of the enclosing moors, and thought, All my life, I have missed all this.

  Bo said, ‘I’ve never regretted our decision to leave the city. It’s good for you, good in every way, to live in the natural world. I have a theory – I have lots of theories; you’ll get used to it – that it’s much harder to be miserable if you live in the country. If you look, you’ll see there is nothing ugly in nature. Nothing at all. Ugliness exists only where humans have altered the landscape. Go to the city, and you’re surrounded by concrete, industry and damage. It’s no good for people to see that all the time. It depresses the life out of us, and we don’t even realise it’s happening. It’s brutal, insidious.’

  There it was again. Wisdom. I wondered if Bo ever opened her mouth and talked crap, like me.

  I looked at her and asked, ‘Where do you live?’ The ordinary lives of famous people interested me. I found it hard to imagine them engaged with the everyday: cooking meals, cleaning bathrooms, pouring coffee, being domestic. I imagined their fame lifting them away from all that, placing them so far above the real world, they were godlike.

  ‘I live just outside Grasmere in the Lake District,’ Bo was saying, ‘in a house halfway up a mountain with my family. I have two girls and a cat. And a husband, of course.’

  Straight away, I saw this woman’s life and wanted it. The house (it would be big and beautiful), the mountain setting, the family, the talent – God, the talent! – the love. Because I could tell that this woman was loved. It hung around her like an aura.

  ‘Wow. It sounds lovely,’ I said.

  ‘It is. We moved there for my last project, which was a novel about the life of Dorothy Wordsworth…’

  ‘Oh, I read it,’ I said. ‘I really liked it.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  Bo seemed to have mastered the art of accepting compliments gracefully. She had no need, I supposed, to dwell on them and dig for more. ‘Thank you,’ was all she ever said when anyone admired her, and then she moved the conversation on.

  Now, she said, ‘It was hard to write – much harder than you’d think.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because the facts are all there for you, when you write about a real life – your story is lying on a plate for you before you even begin. That was what I thought, anyway. I thought, Great. I won’t have to think up a plot. But it didn’t turn out like that. Because I didn’t want to abandon the facts, they were there all the time, needing to be included, and it meant the book never really took off and had its own momentum. It didn’t write itself easily, is what I mean – the way my books usually do.’

  I nodded, and imagined what it would be like to be in charge of a book that wrote itself. Bo made it sound like walking a dog.

  I said, ‘Well, it doesn’t show. When I read it, I wasn’t thinking, The great flaw in this book is that it didn’t write itself.’

  Bo laughed. ‘I’m glad.’

  ‘I’m sure you hear this all the time,’ I said, ‘but I loved the way you wrote about the natural world…’ I hesitated. It was odd, complimenting someone like this. It felt like arse licking. ‘I loved the beauty of it. I would love to write like that, instead of like some hard madwoman.’

  Bo smiled and leaned forwards slightly. ‘Alice,’ she said, ‘I don’t often say this to students – because most of them are hobbyists who will never get anywher
e in the publishing industry – but as soon as I read your work I was excited by it. Genuinely. I think you are very talented. Trust me. I wouldn’t say it if I didn’t believe it.’

  I wrinkled my nose. ‘I hate that piece I sent in. It’s just a load of angst about my mother.’

  Bo shook her head. ‘Mothers are an underwritten subject. There isn’t enough about them, and yet they’re so important. Fathers are too, of course; but that’s different, because we live in a world where all the expectation is heaped on the mother. For all of us, what we experience with our mothers is the blueprint; it sets the stage for every other relationship we make and if it fails, the consequences can last forever.’

  I looked away. I felt understood suddenly, and exposed.

  ‘It’s stuffy in here,’ Bo said, after a moment. ‘Would you like to go for a walk? Then you can tell me your plans for your work. I’d like to hear them.’

  I could hardly believe it, but Bo’s interest in me seemed real. It was all new, this strange sense that what I had to say meant something to someone. To this particular someone. To Bo Luxton.

  I said, ‘OK.’

  We stepped outside. The sun polished the moorland and struck the lake with spears. The crowds of deep-green sycamores lay reflected in its waters. We walked in silence.

  ‘What do you do, in Brighton?’ Bo said at last.

  ‘I live with my boyfriend, pretty much. He’s a decent guy – really lovely. He has a great heart and he’s so talented, but I’m starting to realise he’s a bit of a waster, and it rubs off after a while.’

  ‘What will he be doing this week?’

  I shrugged. ‘Well, at this moment, he’s probably still in bed.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yeah.’ I sighed. ‘My friend keeps telling me I need to end it, and she’s right. I was going to phone him the night we got here and do it then, just so he’d have time to get used to the idea before I saw him again, but then I couldn’t be bothered.’