Aphrodite's Workshop for Reluctant Lovers

by Marika Cobbold

  ‘I’m sorry, but it doesn’t work like that.’

  ‘What doesn’t work like what?’

  ‘I do need to finish this novel, I can’t afford to pay back the advance, but not if it becomes some kind of cynical money-making exercise.’

  ‘There you go making that common mistake of thinking that your intentions matter. They don’t, only the result does. If the result is good who cares, eh?’

  ‘I would.’

  ‘I thought we were going to work on you not being so self-centred?’

  ‘You turn everything upside down. Anyway, the result wouldn’t be good: my readers would see right through it.’

  The therapist got to her feet, indicating that our time was up.

  ‘Well, if you’re going to be negative,’ she said, holding the door open for me.

  ‘Your hair looks fabulous!’ I said to Maggie Jacobs.

  ‘Thank you, I had it done this morning.’

  One of the reasons I liked Maggie was that she inspired hope for the future. Maggie was older than I, somewhere in her mid-fifties, yet a woman obviously in her prime: radiant with HRT, shiny-haired, plump-skinned and supple of movement. We had first met when she was a student on a writer’s course that I was teaching. She wanted to write a book on style. Having achieved what she had set out to achieve with the publication of If Fifty Is the New Forty and Forty Is the New Thirty Does That Mean I’m Twenty?, she had not written another word – apart from thank-you letters (Maggie was punctilious about those) and ‘To Do’ lists for her housekeeper. When asked if she was ever tempted to write another book – If Fifty Is the New Forty had been a success, selling over three hundred thousand copies in paperback – she answered with a simple no. And when her friends and her publishers suggested she could have developed her writing into a career she had been equally perplexed. What would she want with a career?

  I conceded that she had a point. If you took away the notions of ambition, work ethic and self-fulfilment, none of which seemed to concern Maggie, you were left with the prime motivation of earning a living, but seeing as her devoted and much older husband, Archie, had died leaving her a comfortable fortune – as Maggie herself put it, ‘Not enough to make the Rich List but enough to fly business class’ – money did not come into it either.

  ‘It’s so wonderful that we can all have lunch together – you’re usually too busy working,’ Maggie said as we walked towards the restaurant.

  Without warning, and to both of our embarrassment, I burst into tears. As a rule, in daytime, people did not walk down the King’s Road weeping. At night, yes. At night – when the pert and pretty young shoppers and the yummy mummies and the Big Issue sellers and the chuggers had been replaced by girls in low-slung jeans and shrunken jackets, squaring up like Capulets to the spaced-out, hazy-eyed Montague boys – weeping, loud, eyelash-drenching, mascara-smudging weeping, was commonplace, but not at one o’clock on a sunny winter afternoon. So people looked.

  Matilda was waiting at the restaurant. She got up to give us both a kiss hello, then took a step back and looked at me.

  ‘You’ve been crying.’

  I tried to smile.

  ‘I’m sorry, this is really silly.’

  ‘What’s happened?’

  Maggie replied in my place.

  ‘It’s something to do with us having lunch.’

  ‘You only needed to say if it wasn’t convenient.’

  I blew my nose with a clean but crumpled tissue I had found at the bottom of my bag.

  ‘That’s not it at all. The thing is, I don’t go out to lunch when I’m working because getting dressed properly and putting on make-up and actually leaving the house completely disrupts my day.’

  The others looked puzzled. Maggie reached across and patted my shoulder.

  ‘You don’t have to beat yourself up about it. We’re seeing each other now, which is the main thing.’

  ‘No, I’m upset because I can have lunch with you. And no, I don’t mean it isn’t a nice thing to do, but it is a symptom of how bad things have got. No, I didn’t mean it like that either. Oh, what I’m trying to say is that I’m not working.’ I brought out my compact foundation, checking my face in its mirror, wiping away the mascara smudges and reapplying my lipstick.

  ‘Because you’re having lunch with us.’ Maggie nodded. ‘By the way, after lunch I’ll take you to Boots and get you Max Factor’s Lipfinity. It’s the only long-lasting lipstick that actually does what it says and stays on, and without drying the lips.’

  Told you, Coco winked at me from an adjacent table.

  I made a mental note to ask Angie Bliss if the fact that my imaginary friend knew more about make-up than I did was in any way significant.

  ‘I’m not not working because I’m having lunch with you both,’ I said. ‘And yesterday I had a facial and my toes done. It took three hours.’

  ‘And very nice you look too,’ Maggie said.

  I was still feeling awakward about having cried in front of them. If you were very young and very beautiful, like Angel-face, then the occasional burst of tears could be touching, becoming even. But if you were forty-two and wearing black eyeliner and several coats of mascara that smudged into the faint, but nonetheless visible, lines around the eyes it was merely pathetic.

  I said, ‘I’m not working right now because I’m here with you, obviously, but what’s upsetting me so much is that I’m not working full stop, not any time, anywhere; and I feel lost and wretched, pointless, rudderless, aimless …’

  ‘I think we get the drift,’ Matilda said. ‘If you forgive the pun.’

  ‘And then there’s the mortgage. If I don’t earn I can’t pay, obviously. It worries the hell out of me.’

  Maggie looked as sympathetic as a woman who had named her bank account Saehrimnir possibly could, Saehrimnir being the roast pig in Valhalla who, having been consumed at one feast, renewed himself in time for the next.

  Matilda said, ‘You mustn’t give up. And not just because of the mortgage. Think of the pleasure you give to literally thousands, even millions, of women.’

  ‘The kind of pleasure you get from stuffing yourself with saturated fat and sugar,’ I said. ‘And about as healthy.’

  ‘That’s a really silly thing to say.’

  ‘My therapist wants me to write about a divorce. She seems to think it would … well, kind of unblock me.’

  ‘Maybe she’s right. It’s worth a try, isn’t it?’

  ‘Perhaps. Oh I don’t know. I’m tired.’

  ‘Have a complete break over Christmas,’ Matilda said, ‘Are you seeing your mother?’ I nodded. ‘Then get back to work in the new year.’

  I asked Maggie what she was doing.

  ‘Cobbler’s Cove.’

  ‘Nice.’

  ‘The main thing is that you don’t give up,’ Matilda said again. ‘I would give anything to have your success, well, Chris and my in-laws and that bloody house, not my Paddington, though, and probably not the children, but pretty well …’

  ‘What’s so special about the bear?’

  ‘Bag. Paddington bag, not Bear. Anyway, you can’t just throw away everything you’ve achieved, like so much ballast from your hot-air balloon.’

  ‘You know that’s where writers should be,’ I said, drinking deep from my glass of wine. ‘Not in an ivory tower but in a hot-air balloon. Anyway, I don’t think I have any talent, not real talent. Real talent writes real things about real lives. Not saccharine-flavoured opium.’

  ‘I wanted a Paddington,’ Maggie said. ‘A while back, obviously, the pale-blue one. So they told me there was a waiting list. How long? I wanted to know. They told me a minimum of six months. Six months! For a hip replacement I might wait six months, I said, but not for a handbag.’

  ‘Isn’t the wait more like two years?’ I said.

  ‘Not any more. It’s not a classic like the Birkin.’

  ‘I meant for a hip replacement.’

  ‘You don’t need a hip rep
lacement, do you?’ Matilda asked Maggie.

  ‘A hip replacement? Of course not. I might be older than you both, but no, certainly not.’

  ‘It’s just stupid,’ I said. ‘This being on first-name terms with small leather goods. I have problems enough remembering the names of people’s children without having to worry about their handbags.’

  Matilda said, ‘Do you want to know what I think?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘I think it’s quite wrong not to respect your own talent.’

  ‘I don’t know that I have talent for any other kind of writing. But I do know that I can’t write about love any more. You can fake an orgasm but you can’t fake a heart.’

  ‘When you do that,’ Maggie said, ‘fake an orgasm, do you stay quite quiet and just twitch a bit or …’

  ‘I’m talking about the writing.’

  ‘Of course. You always are.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I’m being a self-obsessed bore.’

  ‘That’s all right,’ Matilda said. ‘We’re used to it.’

  ‘Sure, you go ahead,’ Maggie agreed.

  ‘I’m thinking maybe crime, I might try crime.’

  ‘So you think crime is more worthwhile than romance?’ Matilda asked.

  ‘At least crime is real.’

  ‘Sure, but look around you right now. What do you see most of?’

  ‘On the King’s Road in the middle of the afternoon: romance. But that’s like saying you should take McDonald’s seriously because there are more of them than there are Gordon Ramsays.’

  ‘Only just,’ Maggie said.

  ‘It’s quite a good analogy.’ I held my glass out for the waiter to refill it. ‘Romantic love is about as nourishing as fast food.’

  ‘And crime is as satisfactory as a gourmet restaurant,’ Matilda said. ‘Good thinking.’

  ‘All right, so the analogy only takes us so far.’

  ‘There’s been romantic love for as long as there have been people,’ Maggie said.

  ‘I’m not sure that’s true,’ I said. ‘I think romantic love is just another attempt by us to separate ourselves from the other animals by elevating our mating to something less basic and instinctive, to a realm of the divine or spiritual. Christianity with its belief in love as a holy union, the Romantic movement with its theory that emotions are the better guide to living than reason – it’s all symptomatic of the sense of uniqueness with which we endow ourselves.’

  ‘I think you’re wrong,’ Maggie said. ‘Just as you can have sex without love so you can have romantic love without sex. Of course, the two often go together or the lines get blurred, but the two emotions stem from different parts of our brains, I’m convinced of it.’

  ‘And what about that quotation you love so much?’ Matilda asked. ‘I was so touched by it I memorised it.’ She closed her eyes: ‘“In the beginning men and women were round like the sun …” no, moon and the sun, oh bother.’

  I might have been getting tipsy but I still had excellent recall:

  ‘“In the beginning men and women were round like the moon and the sun; they were both male and female and had two sets of sexual organs … they were proud, self-sufficient beings. They defied the Olympian gods, who punished them by splitting them in half. This is the mutilation mankind suffered. So that generation after generation we seek the missing half. Longing to be whole again … to be human was to be severed, mutilated. Man is incomplete. Zeus is a tyrant. Mount Olympus is tyranny. The work of humankind in its severed state is to seek the missing half.”’

  ‘Well there,’ Matilda said. ‘Is that not truly a manifesto for what you have been doing in your writing?’

  ‘You don’t know how the quote ends, though, do you? Neither did I until recently: “And after so many generations your true companion is simply not to be found. Eros is a compensation granted by Zeus. The sexual embrace gives temporary relief but the painful knowledge of mutilation is permanent.” That’s Plato-speak for give up, you fools.’

  ‘Since when did you have to believe every word Plato said?’ Maggie asked.

  ‘I’m not saying you have to believe every word. But you have to take a philosophy as a whole. I despise the kind of thinking that says we can mix and match belief systems as we please: heaven but no hell, fame without achievement, gain without pain … as if it’s all just one big pick ‘n’ mix.’

  ‘With three young boys there isn’t much time for philosophy,’ Matilda said. ‘Anyway, whatever you say now, there are still countless people, me included, who would give their eye teeth to be able to earn a living, an extremely good living in your case, by writing.’

  ‘You will one day. Remember you did before you had the children. You’re very good. You just have to finish something.’

  Matilda rolled her eyes.

  ‘I know, I know, but between the school-run and football training and the music lessons and doing umpteen loads of washing a day there isn’t exactly a surfeit of time.’

  ‘Maybe you could do a couple of hours, or one hour even, once they’ve gone to school?’ I suggested.

  Matilda shook her head, sucking air between her teeth like a plumber inspecting another plumber’s work.

  ‘That’s when I have to get the washing on and do the shopping and phone my mother and Chris’s mother and …’

  ‘How about once they’re in bed?’

  ‘I’m hopeless in the evening,’ Matilda said. ‘It’s all I can do to stay awake for the ten o’clock news.’

  ‘How about before they get up? When I used to have Laura staying I would do a couple of hours before she woke. It’s amazing how much you can get done. And no one phones or delivers parcels and whatever.’

  ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, we all know you are a complete workaholic.’

  ‘Sorry. I suppose all I’m trying to say is that if writing is important to you then you need to create some time in which to do it, even if it is difficult. And it doesn’t have to be very much.’ Getting carried away with my unasked-for advice once more, I went on, ‘Anthony Trollope wrote his novels at the crack of dawn before going off and inventing the pillar-box, and Jane Austen …’

  ‘I know, I know, she sat by a creaking door writing on a scrap of paper so that she could put her writing away if she heard someone approach, bla bla bla … But maybe I need a bit more than snatched moments. You write all day, every day.’

  ‘I didn’t to begin with. I couldn’t. I was working full-time until the second book was published.’

  Maggie had been listening to the exchange, leaning back in her chair, smoking.

  Now she said, ‘I’m not a morning or a night person, more of a 12.30 p.m. to 3 p.m. with a quick energy-burst between 8 p.m. and 10 p.m. kind of woman, but when I wrote If Fifty Is the New Forty Archie was ill and I spent all day and most of the evening at the hospital. I had no option but to write at night.’

  I put my hand on hers.

  ‘I didn’t know you had all that to cope with. You never really said. I’m sorry. I would have …’ I stopped myself and thought, enough of the meaningless phrases.

  Coco, who tended to go quiet after a couple of glasses of wine, perked up.

  So we won’t hear much from you for a while then? he smirked.

  ‘Who are you pulling a face at?’ Matilda asked. ‘Someone we know?’

  ‘Was I pulling a face?’

  ‘You were saying?’ Maggie looked at me.

  ‘I was about to say something to the effect that, had I known just what you were going through at that time I would have offered to do something, but then I realised that all I would actually have done is to call you a little more frequently and offer to do things we both knew I had no intention of doing.’

  ‘You did your bit with Laura,’ Matilda said.

  ‘I never offer to do things for people unless I really I mean it,’ Maggie said. ‘Which is why I hardly ever offer.’

  ‘Which is also why you’re such relaxing company,’ I said. ‘One always know
s where one stands with you.’

  As lunch drew to an end I looked deep into Matilda’s eyes, which made her accuse me of being drunk.

  ‘Are you and Chris happy?’ I asked her. ‘I’m sorry if that’s too personal but I really, really have to know. Are you happily married?’

  ‘Yes, I think I am,’ Matilda said, before suggesting we split the bill three ways.

  On the way home Maggie led me into Ann Summers and bought me a Rampant Rabbit. I really had had far too much to drink because a few minutes later I walked into Vodaphone and handed them the Rabbit.

  ‘Try as I might,’ I said, ‘I simply can’t get a ring tone.’

  It had seemed funny at the time.

  John

  WORK HAD BEEN PARTICULARLY busy this past week. He’d done close to seventy chargeable hours and, although he prided himself on almost limitless stamina, he was tired. So when his mother called he made the mistake, he quite often did, of telling her how busy he’d been. His mother had responded, as he should have known she would, by anxious preaching on stress, high blood pressure, heart attacks and doctors’ appointments. Melanie used to ask him why he told his mother he was tired or working too hard when the inevitable result was the fussing that he professed to hate. He didn’t explain, but in truth he did it from a weakness for being told he was a clever boy, a good boy. To get approval and because sometimes he was so exhausted, not so much by work but by the need to be always strong and capable and broad-shouldered, that he longed to let go, be fussed and worried over for a bit. Of course after two minutes he had had enough, but by then it would be too late: the fluffy Duracell bunny that was his mother’s mind would be off and running along its well-worn track. This time the only way to stop her was to promise to come down to visit that Sunday so she could see for herself that he was whole and hale and not, he said, ‘a heart attack waiting to happen’.