Other People's Husbands

by Judy Astley

  Marie piled up the underwear, picked out the basque and the French knickers and took them to the counter where the girl, restored to professional poise and hiding any surprise she might be feeling, dealt efficiently with the credit card, wrapped the goods and packaged them in a shiny, ribbon-bound box and bag, then handed it all over to Marie as if it was a personal gift from her.

  ‘Enjoy,’ she commanded, smiling. She even looked as if she meant it.

  ‘OK – what now? Anything you need to look at? Shall we go for a drink?’ Marie asked Sara as they headed out of the shop into the noisy bustle of Oxford Street.

  ‘Actually, I’d quite like to get home,’ Sara said, looking at her watch. ‘Panda and Cassandra are coming for supper so we can talk about what Conrad wants to do for his birthday, and I told Cass I’d take Charlie down to the river to feed the ducks for a while. I’d like to give her a bit of peace, an hour or so to herself even if she just wants to slob out on the sofa and watch telly.’

  ‘Aha! You see, you have men in your life too,’ Marie teased. ‘It’s not just me.’

  ‘Yes, but in my case one’s my baby grandson and the other one’s . . . well, Conrad.’

  ‘Hmm. Conrad. Still nesting in his studio, is he?’

  ‘Yes . . . I don’t really get what the deal is there. When I try to talk to him about it he just looks at me as if he doesn’t know what I’m talking about. Is it normal, do you think? Is it like those couples from way back who end up in separate bedrooms just because they think well, at our age . . . and talk about how it’s now about companionship? Everything else is much the same . . .’

  ‘The same?’ Marie gave her a disbelieving look, which Sara ignored. There was a fine line between sharing concerns with your girlfriends and full-on disloyalty to your life partner. Conrad, in spite of or possibly because of having for so long been a public figure, guarded personal privacy very carefully and wouldn’t at all understand that sharing intimate concerns over a kitchen table and a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc was pretty much a normal woman-thing.

  ‘You’re too generous with other people, that’s your trouble. You should sit Conrad down and demand an explanation as to why you’ve now got the whole bed to yourself. And you do too much for your lot. I bet you had tonight’s supper sorted by the end of yesterday afternoon,’ Marie told her as they dodged a pair of skateboarders hurtling through the shoppers.

  Sara said nothing – it was a bit much, coming from the person who had dragged her out to Selfridges to help her choose slutwear, but it was also true, actually. Because she knew she was coming out with Marie today, the lamb tagine had slowly cooked most of the previous afternoon while she’d been teaching the rudiments of colour theory to Beginners Art, and it only needed heating. Salad was all washed and ready for assembling. There was a lemon tart in the fridge. Superwoman eat your heart out (lightly grilled, with a chilled pear sauce).

  ‘What about some you-time for a change?’ Marie continued. ‘If you don’t stop putting other people first, Sara, you’ll end up making the cakes for your own funeral tea.’

  Sara at twenty was a student of fine art and liked her colours clear and bright and her world to be nuclear-free. She came from Devon, an afterthought child, ten years younger than her sister Lizzie and the product of an unusual mix of a progressive education and a TV-free home. She had lost her virginity at seventeen to the Sean Bean lookalike guitar teacher in her village, with Ry Cooder playing something ethereal in the background, and by the time the relationship came to a natural but friendly end, she was well grounded in 1960s guitar heroes. Popular culture hadn’t really got near her – she was not a fan of Duran Duran or Spandau Ballet, but liked Puccini, Bob Dylan and early Rolling Stones. She didn’t wear Katharine Hamnett slogan T-shirts or jackets with oversize shoulder pads or have her hair in a Bananarama fright-fuzz. She was small and slim with long light brown hair that curled at the ends all by itself, especially in the rain. She tended to scoop it all up out of the way and shove a pencil through to keep it in place when she was drawing, and Conrad told her, some time after they’d got together, that it was the slender, vulnerable back of her neck that he’d fallen in love with as he was passing her chair while she sat concentrating on drawing the sulky life model who was draped across a green velvet couch. Sara liked clothes from a previous age – any previous age – silks and velvets and 1950s polka dots. Full skirts, tulle petticoats. 1930s skimpy knits. She wore lacy Victorian nightdresses over jeans, old Biba watered silk under PVC. An ancient Chanel jacket, treasured Ossie Clark printed chiffon, suede boots, berets, lavender kid gloves.

  Conrad at forty-five was about to quit teaching and was seeing out the last months of a college contract, calling in a couple of times a week to deal with the life class and to annoy the rest of the teaching staff by turning up in the kind of drop-head Mercedes that they would never be able to afford. Over a fast few years he had suddenly become the kind of fashionable artist that painters who weren’t so lucky pretended to despise. His bizarrely abstract portraits were very much in demand by those who’d recently become celebrities. Cabinet ministers, musicians, models, bankers, bonkbuster novelists: a full-size Conrad Blythe-Hamilton was just the thing to hang on that big, empty stairwell wall in a pretty, newly acquired Cotswold pile. His work was ever more expensive, eye-catching and recognizable as a sign that the commissioning arriviste had made it. Thanks to the PR skills of Conrad’s agent, Gerry, his subjects were under the impression that they had been selected and summoned to be painted. To drop into a conversation that you were on his waiting list was an irresistible piece of trump-that showing off.

  In his private life Conrad was bored and rootless. He was one of those who even other men described as ‘beautiful’; he moved with careless grace, had long brown rock-star hair, smile lines at the edges of his eyes and a slightly asymmetric mouth that had women longing to kiss it. Like a child in a toyshop he had spent many years dating one beautiful nineteen-year-old after another, simply because these were what he came across in his working life at the college. The relationships would last for months or weeks or even mere days. But recently, watching his date yawn while he was telling her about seeing Jimi Hendrix live, he’d had a ‘what’s the point?’ moment and suddenly seen himself heading for a long life as a grumpy loner who other men thought terminally immature.

  When Conrad reported to Gerry that for the seventh time he’d been asked to be godfather to one of his friend’s infants, Gerry told him, ‘It’s a sign they see you as a permanent bachelor.’

  ‘No it’s not,’ Conrad had growled, full of that life-passing-by feeling, ‘they just want me to leave them money or give them a painting.’ This was probably true but all the same, Gerry’s comment had hit home. It was like forever being a bridesmaid, never the bride. Too often recently he had been out with friends and actually been interested when they’d discussed the latest goings-on of their children. Some of these had now reached teenage years, getting rebellious, making trouble, fighting their way out of home and security. One evening he was in Langan’s Brasserie while those at the table around him described the horrors of a thirteen-year-old’s birthday party where the dress-up theme was Hippy – parents aghast to see their own youth sent up as a joke. He’d felt left out, as if they were all talking over him. His own youth had coincided with the beatnik era and he’d been into the peace movement long ago by way of anti-nuclear Aldermaston marches, not by wearing flowers in his hair and a bell round his neck. A terrible realization hit him that not only was he too old to identify with the younger of his companions, but that in a perverse way they were also somehow older, more in tune with the world than he was. They were grounded, settled with their families and dogs and disorganized, untidy homes full of random stuff.

  He poured another glass of wine and tried to puzzle out what this new and uncomfortable feeling was that he was experiencing. To his surprise, he could only identify it as envy. In a flashed-up moment of honesty, he concluded that he should, if he
wanted his loner life to change, find himself someone closer to his own age. She would probably be a divorcee, he reckoned, as the others talked of O-level panic and violin-practice hell. Possibly she would come complete with children. The realization that he would very much like some (though preferably biologically his own) almost made him cry. Sadly, and with huge reluctance, this also meant he shouldn’t pursue the girl whose slim neck he had longed to stroke in the life class the week before. So, not you then, Sara McKinley, he thought, already feeling bereft for what wasn’t going to happen. It was time to grow up.

  Sara didn’t much enjoy weekends in London. She went to clubs with her college friends because she didn’t want to be unsociable, but the music wasn’t the sort she’d have chosen; she wasn’t much of a drinker and her drug days had added up to a brief summer sharing her sister Lizzie’s home-grown cannabis supply and wondering what the fuss was about. During the empty weekend days she’d go to a gallery or to junk shops looking for clothing treasures, or if it was warm she’d lie in the park reading. London boys who were her contemporaries seemed silly and young and too much into how they looked and how much money they needed. They were forever telling her what they were going to be, in the great future One Day. It annoyed her, this lack of now: she preferred people who were already grown-up – people like . . . well, she quite fancied Conrad Blythe-Hamilton, but then didn’t everybody?

  It seemed an extra-unfair example of ‘wrong’ to have your bag stolen at a CND rally. It was October and Sara was in Hyde Park, where the 200,000-strong anti-nuclear march ended. No one else from the flat had wanted to go so she was there alone, trying (and failing) to catch the words of Neil Kinnock on the stage. She’d only put the bag down for a second while she searched her pockets for some chewing gum. The police would tell her, with seen-it-all resignation, that a second was all it took. Realizing it had vanished in that moment almost made her give up on humanity. Who would do that, here, where everyone was linked in support of a cause for peace and justice? Furious and feeling decidedly let down, she pushed through the crowd to the Hyde Park Corner gate and wondered how she was supposed to get back to Earls Court with no money and no Tube ticket.

  That was when she collided with Conrad. The police were right: some things do only take a moment. Robbery was one; falling in love came a close second.

  An artist is his own fault.

  (John O’Hara)

  Conrad sat on a storm-blown tree trunk that lay alongside the path through the bracken and brambles and waited for his dog to catch up. If he still smoked, this would be the perfect moment for a cigarette. He could relax and puff away contentedly, while gazing into the split and shredded oak bark at the metropolis of insect life and the oozing fungus growing on the sodden, crumbling wood fissures. Idly, he wondered if he was now old enough to have got to the point where he might as well take up the horrible smoking habit again. Even after twenty smoke-free years he missed it now and then. Was there an age where you were allowed to think, oh bugger it, drink/eat/smoke/be what you want because it really won’t make a difference any more? Had he done enough by now with the good diet, the moderation of drink and the general health awareness to allow himself some sin-time?

  In a couple of months he would have hit the biblical three-score-and-ten. He murmured it out loud. Seventy. Not good. Sara wanted him to have a big party: friends and family from all over. Caterers. A marquee. The house all tricked out with flowers like a bloody wedding. Sara would do it beautifully – she was good at organizing. She was good at everything. That was one of the first things that had struck him about her, how efficient she was, even at only twenty. Right from the off she’d been such a grown-up for someone so young. She’d never played the girly card and expected him to make the reservations, fix up the minicab. When she’d had her bag stolen at the rally she’d been perfectly prepared to hitchhike back to Earls Court rather than sit on a bench and cry till some rescuer took pity. And in the years since, not once had he set out for an airport wondering if the travel arrangements were properly sorted or if the girls’ passports were up to date.

  Back at the start, it had taken a while to work out that she really, really liked him, so cool and un-needy as she was. This was something he wasn’t used to – the usual exchange rate for enjoying the bodies and beauty of youthful women was that they had immature minds to match. Sooner or later he’d find they would squeal over a broken fingernail or sulk for hours because he hadn’t noticed their shoes. Shoes, for heaven’s sake. Sara simply didn’t do this. She was serene and sweet and instead of being some accessory to his life, as other girlfriends had been, she seemed to complete it. The anxiety that she might calmly vanish from his existence had given him worrying palpitations, enough to send him for a medical check-up.

  Gerry, his agent, currently had various magazines lined up to do ‘celebration pieces’, whatever they were, but the thought made him feel moody, like a stroppy toddler. How to tell Sara NO to a party without hurting her feelings? How to turn down publicity that would get his name profitably more prominent in the public eye? The current art aristos were a hell of a lot younger than him, but all the same, was there anyone left in this nation who couldn’t say, ‘Oh, that’s a Blythe-Hamilton’ when they looked at one of his paintings? When did he (and Hockney, and Allen Jones, Peter Blake et al.) become almost brands rather than painterly individuals? Not that he was quite up there with that lot. He never would be now – well, not till he was dead, anyway, and even then only if some arts wallah in the media made a big enough song and dance.

  Still, whichever way you dressed up seventy, it was quite old. Not venerable yet – that started at least ten years further on, surely – but you couldn’t go round any longer pretending it was late middle age. In the mirror he could see exactly what was meant by ‘long in the tooth’. He had to get up in the night to pee (occasionally twice, depending on wine intake), his left hip was iffy and it was a long time since he’d even considered doing anything more physically demanding than a few idle lengths of the pool. He had become mildly afraid to have sex lately too, ludicrously superstitious that you were only allowed so much of it over a lifetime and that he had to eke out what was left. Shame, because he didn’t fancy it any less frequently, it was just another illogical fear, like the dreams where all his teeth fell out or his hair vanished overnight. He didn’t feel particularly unfit – but you became content with that, rather than testing if you were right to feel that way in case you weren’t. Being mildly vain and stylish (long and plentiful white hair, firm body, good posture, one-time Gap old-celebrity denim model of choice) helped too. But he couldn’t pretend the Reaper wasn’t out there now, pacing the floor not too far away and looking at his watch. Now and then, especially in the pre-dawn hours when he woke and contemplated the lack of time ahead, Conrad thought he caught the distant sound of apocalyptic hoofbeats. When he’d mentioned it to Sara she’d been dismissive, told him it was trains going over the Thames bridge.

  Floss was, in dog years, even older than Conrad, and deserved patient consideration. She was slowing. This familiar circuit (field–towpath–field) now took at least twenty minutes longer than it had done the year before, and Conrad knew he wasn’t the one needing the extra time. Floss surely couldn’t carry on much longer, being fourteen and having gone well beyond a spaniel’s normal lifespan. Did she also see a doggy Reaper in the corner of her eye? How lucky they were if they didn’t have that apprehension of their own demise. Who could think that being an animal, and not knowing the things that humans know, could be an inferior deal? Floss would be his last dog. This decision came from out of the blue to Conrad as he waited for her to finish snuffling round the base of a hawthorn tree. He added it to the secret Last Things list that he’d recently started mentally compiling. It had begun with New Year’s Eve, when he’d realized he absolutely didn’t want to kiss everyone at the party just because it was suddenly January 1st. Any woman who wasn’t Sara, however stunning she was, seemed to taste of old cheese
. So that was it for New Year’s Eve – an early night from now on, in bed and asleep and let the year turn itself round without him.

  He’d also decided he’d had his last trip to America. If Americans wanted to buy his paintings he would plead age and infirmity, and they could come over here for them. He wasn’t going to exhibit there again – he hated the travel, the food, the ‘have a good day’, the overwhelming niceness (and so nice. It made him long for British surliness), the smiley, smiley teeth. They could do a retrospective after he’d gone and someone else could deal with it.

  In all honesty he didn’t much want to paint again, either. That was another thing, one that had crept up recently. He’d done his stint. Those youthful idealistic days when he’d imagined he actually had something to say in paint were long over. He’d run out of art conversation. He couldn’t talk about ‘exploring’ and ‘discovering’ any more, not without thinking surely someone would find him out, catch on that if he painted a stripe of blue down one side of a canvas, it was exactly that – a stripe of blue in a pretty shade. It didn’t have any more meaning than that it was the colour and shape that the whim of the moment suggested. How naive were people that it never occurred to them to call his bluff? Hadn’t they noticed the emperor had slowly stripped off his clothes and was now naked?

  So, four things now on a list that could only grow: kissing strangers, America, work and pets. Even if Sara did get another dog he wouldn’t really get to know it, not the way he knew Floss. He no longer had the energy or time to train up a puppy. A rescue dog was a possibility, but they took a long while to settle and get to know you. They were wary and lost-looking, like eleven-year-olds having their first frightened days at secondary school. You saw the dog-thing all the time out here on the fields by the riverbank – he could tell a newly homed Battersea mutt a hundred yards off.