by Judy Astley
Sara’s own art medium of choice was gouache, but a strong scent of turps still reminded her of when she’d first met Conrad as a student, when after their first proper date at a blues club in Soho he’d taken her back to his flat in Kensington and seduced her on a plum velvet sofa in a room full of half-finished, still-wet canvases. There had been a pink and purple fringed silk shawl beneath her body, almost certainly one that her predecessor had left behind in the hope that Conrad would think of her fondly and invite her for a follow-up sofa session; she could still remember how the rows of tiny mirrors stitched on to it had dug into her flesh. They’d left little half-moon scratches and circular weals on her skin and she’d hated to see them fade, superstitiously thinking that if they vanished completely, all would be over with Conrad.
Everyone had warned her he was a rampant womanizer, forever taking up with his students for a month or two and then cheerfully moving on, an eternally good-natured non-settler. He’d told her she was different, right from the start, right from the moment when she’d walked into him in a blind rage at Hyde Park Corner and he’d taken her to the Athenaeum hotel for tea and champagne, sympathizing over the theft of her bag. She wasn’t so naive that she’d believed him entirely; he’d probably told all his girls they were different. But he had never given her cause to suspect that having found her, he was still looking for something else.
There’d been plenty of ‘something else’ on offer over the years. Sara could always spot them at parties: the gleaming, eager women who had just happened to read about him in the culture magazines or the weekend colour supplements, or had recently admired one of his paintings at a friend’s house. They were always shiny and excited and would drift their perfectly manicured fingers across his arm and laugh a little too much at any inconsequential piece of nonsense he uttered. Often he’d push that to the limit, coming out with something totally nonsensical, or contradict himself from one sentence to the next, just to see how far he could push their fawning gullibility. He would smile and do the polite thing, and if they stayed too long beside him he’d pull Sara closer and say, ‘And this is Sara. She’s the love of my life.’
It was only eight in the morning but Sara had been awake since six, and the day promised to be a warm, sunny one. She and Floss went out through the gate to the tow-path and started walking towards the park, the spaniel excitedly snuffling out dog smells among newly sprouting nettles. It was too early for Stuart, her frequent walking companion, to be out, and besides, she wanted to be alone with her thoughts. Stuart would want to entertain her with news of his latest piece of spanking apparatus, following up with his usual request that he be allowed to try it out on her. She much preferred him when he told her how to mulch courgettes.
Tempting as it was, Sara chose not to take Floss in the other direction, for less than a mile that way was the White Swan pub and the row of pastel-painted cottages where Ben lived. At the college the other day, he had said to call in any time. But people just said that, didn’t they? Would he really want to see her ‘happening to be passing’ at an hour when most people were racing about on their way to the working day? He was a freelance journalist, too – he was probably still asleep. And there could be a Mrs Ben, who would definitely not want to be meeting her husband’s new friends at this time of the day. Besides, he’d said he’d be coming to her art class on Wednesday afternoon. It must be quite a long piece he was writing, needing more than one research visit to the college.
As she walked, Sara watched a couple of early rowers out on the Thames. Perhaps they were on their way to work. Possibly they’d discovered this was the one sure way to beat the school-run traffic and the army of Chelsea-tractor mummies. Where, she thought as she went into the park, did you park a skiff for the day? And in winter, did you row back in the freezing dark with lights on the front of the boat?
‘Hey Sara! Good morning!’ Marie’s husband Mike was sitting on a bench just inside the park gate. He had Marie’s white poodle on a pink lead and in his spare hand a cup of something frothy from Starbucks in the high street, it being too early still for the café in the park to be open. Sara felt guilt twinges immediately. How much better it would be right now if she didn’t know about Marie’s secret tryst with Scottish Angus. She wished she knew nothing of the laced basque; the French knickers. It was hard not to think she had a stake in adultery’s success. Or otherwise. Seeing Mike, she felt really bad about it all. What was it with women, that they had to have a confidante for everything? Marie talked to her, she talked to Will, Cass talked to Miranda.
‘Mike – hi. You’re out early.’
Mike got up, poured the rest of the coffee on to the grass and dropped the cup into the bin beside the bench. The poodle started bouncing and yapping. Sara and Mike let the dogs off their leads and set off along the shingle path together, heading for the duck pond. The dogs raced away, like little children fresh out of school.
‘Couldn’t sleep,’ Mike grumbled. ‘Well, correction, Marie couldn’t sleep. Kept fidgeting and muttering. So I thought, might as well get up. Take the dog out. She’s been like this for days, flipping and flapping in her sleep. Marie, that is. Not the dog. And whatever she’s got on her mind, she’s not telling me about it.’ He gave Sara a sharp look. ‘She said anything to you?’
‘No!’ Sara said, too quickly. ‘Er . . . well I saw her at the college yesterday as usual, just during the break, you know, for a quick cup of tea . . .’ She was gabbling. She took a breath. ‘She seemed fine. She said she was teaching her class how to write from multiple viewpoints or something. Tricky stuff, anyway.’
‘Oh she’s fine all right.’ Mike grunted. ‘Too bloody fine if you ask me.’
Sara bit her lip. She knew exactly what he meant. Marie was so flushed with new love she couldn’t help showing it. You might as well tell freshly poured champagne not to sparkle as tell Marie to calm down. Her eyes shone, her skin (no longer olive, just perfectly sun-kissed) glowed. She was losing weight by the day. Mike, on the other hand, was looking defeated before the battle had begun. He had become tubby lately, shambolic and bulging in clothes bought several sizes ago. His hair needed cutting and was looking Brillo-ish: matted and neglected. Sara fought back an urge to tell him to get a grip if he wanted to hang on to his wife, take care of himself and . . . well, at least clean the wood dust from his obsessive DIY ventures from beneath his nails. Women were quick to pass judgement on each other, ‘She’s let herself go’ being the ultimate condemnation, the worst female crime; but in Sara’s opinion it was the men who were more likely to decline into scruffiness as they got older. It was such a long time since they’d been children – why did so many need telling that it might be a good idea to take a shower?
‘Thing is,’ Mike continued, ‘I sometimes . . . well no, it’s not possible.’ He laughed, but it was a harsh and bitter sound. ‘I sometimes wonder if she’s met someone.’ He stopped on the path and looked Sara square in the face. ‘She’d tell you, wouldn’t she?’
Sara watched the two dogs up by the pond, avoiding having to see Mike’s unhappy eyes, full of pain. He wanted so much for Sara to reassure him, to tell him that Marie was . . . actually, what? How could the everyday Marie – or any woman of her age – be accurately described? Ecstatic to be entering her menopausal years? Thrilled to be experiencing claggy swamps of sudden flushing? Loving the newly erratic nature of her periods and their delightfully unpredictable heaviness?
No. Exactly.
Floss was wading into the pond. She’d be stinking and filthy with mud. Sara looked across at her, willing her to do something conveniently distracting, catch a duck (even at her age), get bullied by a swan and need instant rescuing. Nothing.
‘Well, yes I suppose she might tell me,’ Sara admitted, because this was factual but didn’t give anything away. ‘But you know, we meet people all the time in our job. Teaching adults is like that. With teaching children, you don’t exist for them beyond the school gates, but in adult education one or two see you
as some kind of lifeline, someone who will help them find the path out of their humdrum lives on to a whole new route.’ She laughed. ‘It can go to your head, that kind of power! Maybe life’s just going well for her right now, no hassles, no real problems. She hasn’t mentioned any problems to me, anyway.’ This much was true.
‘It’s not like that, she’s all, I don’t know, just . . .’ Mike wasn’t having it. Sara had failed here – he wasn’t remotely reassured by her breezy tone and she wasn’t surprised.
‘Look, I’m sure all’s well,’ she interrupted. ‘Why not . . . I don’t know . . . it’s a cliché, isn’t it, but why don’t you just tart yourself up and take her out somewhere lovely for dinner? Or away for a weekend? Sometimes we women just need a change of venue. And at least it’d be just the two of you. No teenage sons sprawled about all over the house, no distractions. You could talk to each other . . . properly. Or just go bird-watching or something.’ She was floundering now.
‘Agony-aunt stuff,’ Mike chuckled, picking up a fat stick to throw that surely the poodle would never be able to carry back to him. ‘You’re good at it. If that’s all it takes, will you let me take you out? For lunch sometime? I mean . . . I don’t want to come over all New Man, but a bit of guidance on this midlife female stuff would help.’
Sara realized she must be looking pretty horrified. She didn’t mean to: she liked Mike. It was just the thought of him imagining she’d discuss Marie with him seated at a table in Giraffe. Realizing how he’d come across, he all but physically backed away, hands raised as if she was about to attack him. ‘Just as friends, that is. Not that . . .’
‘It’s OK, Mike.’ Sara managed to compose her face into an expression that was more convivial. She could see him digging a deep, deep hole here. ‘I do know what you’re saying; look – just . . . keep the faith. Come to the house and have some coffee sometime, OK? And don’t worry. All will be well.’
Pandora’s hands were sore. It was the cutlery that did it. There was some knack to picking up the dirty plates and making sure the knives weren’t within grazing distance of your wrists and fingers, and she couldn’t get the hang of it. Giovanni, the manager, wasn’t helpful – he just pointed his staff at the tables and shouted orders. He seemed to assume that if they were young and female, waitressing was a skill that came naturally. The only person who got anything resembling good manners out of him was the sainted big-name chef under whose verbal abuse Giovanni grovelled and smarmed, before coming back to front of house to snipe at his staff. Pandora had cuts, quite deep ones, between the thumb and finger on her right hand, and even though they were healing (and boy had they ever bled at the time), on each shift something serrated caught the skin and started the stinging up again. And doing the breakfast hour was the worst, because the cut she’d got during last night’s late clearing was still giving her twinges in her sliced skin.
‘I hate this, I hate this’ was her mantra. The early morning customers had started noticing that she was no longer thinking it but murmuring it out loud. Giovanni had asked one of the other girls to ask her if she was on drugs. As bloody if. Did he really think she would be so moody if she was? Didn’t you take drugs to lift your spirits, not to make you feel like the drudge from hell? What did he want at 8 a.m. with the walk-of-shame party girls still in their heels and hair glitter, making a latte last for an hour, and the cabbies going upmarket with a Danish and espresso and thinking they were somebody in this so cool East London eaterie?
‘Hey! Girl, cutlery! Out of the garbage!’ Too late, Pandora realized she’d dropped yet another half-dozen knives into the food-waste bin. She’d have to delve in. She looked down at the turgid mix of last night’s pasta and chicken and streaks of salad and stinking Parmesan. It should have been emptied but would be there till the afternoon. It was too much. She closed her eyes and tried not to breathe in. She picked out the knives, one by careful one, flung them in the dishwasher and ran her hands for a long, long minute under the hot tap. Giovanni glared at her and tapped his watch impatiently.
‘What?’ she shouted. ‘I’m allowed to wash my hands, aren’t I? Basic hygiene?’
Giovanni slowly shook his head. He was going to fire her. She’d seen that look with other staff. She thought not; she’d get in first. Her fingers fumbled for the ties at the back of her long white apron. She was out of here, soon as the knots were sorted. What kind of life was this for an artist? That’s what you got for doing it the way your dad said it was done. All that starving in a bedsit was for other times, other customs. This wasn’t working for her. If Cassandra could move back into the lovely, comfortable family nest and be spoiled rotten, then so could she.
Sara was out on the pool terrace with tea and toast and the Guardian crossword, her eyes closed and the sun on her face. To hell with wrinkles, she thought; you couldn’t beat this delicious feeling of spring sun warming your skin and hair. How could it be bad for you? This was the first really sultry morning of the year, one when you didn’t think, oh this will be fine, but only for ten minutes, or that you hadn’t got quite enough clothes on to feel no chill. She sat at the old teak table, watching a pair of wrens doing the food run to a nest under the studio eaves, and, concentrating hard between Heathrow-bound jets soaring overhead, could just hear the eager squeaking of the baby birds as they sensed their parents’ return visits.
Conrad must still be asleep. The blind was pulled across the glass roof of the studio, and there was no sign of movement at all. Horribly, it crossed her mind that one day she could go in there, maybe at midday wondering why he hadn’t surfaced, and find that he had died in the night. She tried hard to push this awful notion out of her head – it was too beautiful a morning to blight with such thoughts. And after all, why should it happen? He was in pretty good condition, and not all that old in the scheme of modern life. He could outlive her. All the same, now she’d had the thought, she knew that never again would she be able to go and wake him with a mug of tea without some dread at what she’d find. Perhaps he did know something about a possible brush with death, though he seemed to have given up on the idea of talking about it. He did that . . . got all involved with things (past projects included possible purchase of an E-type Jaguar, a six-month stint in Antarctica to ‘clear the palate of colour’, sending the girls to school in America), worried at them for a week till he’d talked himself through every aspect, then never mentioned them again.
The peonies alongside the studio were about to flower. The bursting buds reminded Sara of Marie laced into her basque in Selfridges. It was going to be today, her tryst with Angus. She had phoned the night before, urgently whispering ‘Suspenders or hold-ups?’ at Sara, who imagined Mike in the background, innocently watching The Bill. Maybe he’d overheard her – perhaps that was what he wasn’t admitting in the park earlier. What would it feel like to be Marie, Sara wondered, that mixture of deep apprehension and excitement, going to meet the man who would become your lover. Those hours before it happened . . . in fact, would they be hours or would she ring the apartment bell and be hauled by Angus straight to bed with barely more than a hello? Marie had said they were going for lunch at Le Caprice first. What would they talk about, Sara considered, knowing what was to come in the afternoon. Would they whisper giggly, suggestive quips to each other over the warm duck salad? Share oysters, messily, sexily? Or make polite conversation about books and the art of fiction, or slowly, accidentally, put each other off the idea of torrid sex by talking about their families and steadily destroying the ambience? Poor Mike – if Marie was bubbly and light-headed before her date with Angus, what was she going to be like after it? Sara hoped she’d be able to tone her mood down by the time she got home. She’d insisted this Angus thing was separate, but was anything ever that separate when you’d lived with someone so long that they sensed every butterfly-wing-beat of change?
‘We must get a fence built round this pool!’ Conrad’s voice, coming from the house and not the studio, startled her. ‘Charlie will be cr
awling everywhere soon. You’ll need safety measures.’
He sounded wide awake and emerged through the open sliding door entirely naked, carrying a towel. Without any hesitation, he stepped off the side of the pool and vanished under the water, emerging to execute an elegant crawl and swim to the pool’s deep end. Sara flicked drips of splashed water from her bare arm.
‘Where did you spring from?’ she asked as he stopped to tread water under the diving board.
‘The downstairs shower. I just woke up, came up here and fancied a swim – went in through the side door. Come in and join me?’
‘No thanks, I’m full of toast. Maybe later though. And what do you mean, I’ll need safety measures? You’ll be here too.’
‘Not for long though – I could drop off life’s perch any day. I reckon I’m about ready. Like I said, I’ve had a good time, nice party and all, but it’s time to leave.’
‘Please don’t start on that one again, Conrad.’ Sara touched wood and crossed her fingers, just in case.
‘OK. But hey, sure you won’t come and swim with me?’
‘While I still can, you mean?’ she teased, reaching down to feel the water. It wasn’t icy, but the solar heating hadn’t really kicked in yet. ‘Hmm . . . it’s a bit cold. I don’t think so.’
‘Pity.’ He grinned and flipped under the water. Surfacing again, he said, ‘We don’t often have the house to ourselves just now. And we’ll be a long time dead. Quite soon in my case, like I said . . .’ He had that sex-speculation look in his eyes – one she hadn’t seen for a while. Sara felt mildly annoyed. What was he getting at? That the lack of recent sex was down to Cass having moved back in only a few days before? Hardly – the sex drought was surely all about him having taken to sleeping in the studio and only visiting what used to be their bedroom when he was looking for clean clothes.
