by Judy Astley
‘She did. But she also said she didn’t mind really, that death cosied up and became your friend when you got past eighty-five. I wonder if that’s true? I think, hey when I’m past fifty-five, will something happen that means I’ll be able to freewheel contentedly to the end or will I just go on forever feeling as if I’m seventeen?’
Sara sipped her tea. It had a slightly smoky flavour. This should be the moment when she could say that she lived with a man who was many years past fifty-five and he didn’t seem any different from how he’d been when she’d first met him – or at least not till recently, when he’d clearly had something death-like quite fixed in his mind . . . She decided not to mention Conrad. Today she was, as she’d reminded herself earlier, just herself. And it did feel good.
‘I think some people have an age at which they’re happily stuck. Like those women you see who you can just tell peaked at their best in, say, 1970, and they’ll go on with too-long hair, wearing hippy beads and weeds till they drop dead,’ she told him. ‘I walk past shop doorways that mirror my reflection back and I sometimes think, good grief, who’s that middle-aged woman? I don’t know her. I’m not seventeen though, in here,’ she tapped her head, ‘I’m in my twenties or so.’
‘You do have a very young look. Like someone who is expecting lots of adventures in life still, not as if most of them have already happened.’
Sara laughed. ‘And that’s good, is it? To be still expecting so much?’
‘Well it can’t be bad! Better than thinking it’s all over! Like I said, you’ve got that youthful, art-school aura. So . . . what do you paint? I take it you do, not just teach it?’
‘Well . . . I did, but not so much any more. I used to paint quite naive scenes, landscapes, events, very bright and colourful stuff.’
‘I’d have guessed that! I don’t see you with bland watercolours, somehow.’
‘Oh but watercolours don’t have to be bland! Look at Dufy, for instance. But anyway, I used to exhibit quite a lot but not in a huge way.’
‘Sold much?’
‘Oh yes – and for cards and posters and things. It just faded out really, though lately I’ve been thinking of doing more again. Exhibiting is all very much fun, you have a jolly party and everyone thinks you’re wonderful for a couple of ego-boosting days, but there aren’t many things more depressing than having to go and collect the unsold stuff, the leftovers. And in the end, you’ve got a big collection of framed work that you think, oh is it worth giving it one more outing, only for it not to sell again. You wonder if you’re just not good enough. It’s hard not to think of the unsold work as useless rejects.’
‘But it might sell, somewhere else, different people.’
‘Yes, I know, and it often does. It’s just chance. I should
have gone the corporate route really, paintings for hotels and all that. But my style’s a bit way out, a bit naive. I think it all ground to a halt when I had thirty paintings ready for quite a good exhibition in Bath. The night before delivery, the gallery had a fire and it was all cancelled – so I was left with this big stash of work and nowhere for it to go. The momentum kind of . . . vanished. I probably thought, hey it’s a sign! Very immature, you’ll probably think.’
‘Well, not immature . . .’ he teased. ‘A tad pessimistic, perhaps! My sister’s opening a gallery, up in Notting Hill. Perhaps she could persuade you to drag your collection out and give it another airing?’
‘You haven’t a clue if they’re up to standard!’
He smiled. ‘Oh I don’t know . . . there’s something about you; call it style. Personal style, not painting style – but there’s sure to be a crossover. Do you have a website?’
‘No – but the photos are all on a CD.’
‘May I see them? Would you be interested in gallery space?’
Sara felt flattered, even though she knew he was laying it on a bit thick. How could he possibly have a clue she was any better than an average Sunday painter? OK, so she was an art teacher. But she taught uncritical amateurs and enthusiasts. The college was hardly Central St Martins. She had to admit, though, that possibly because of her student Melissa’s enthusiasm, or maybe it was the idea of escaping the house full of people, lately she had sometimes craved the feel of a paintbrush, the exciting milky blurring of colours on paper. She could see herself reclaiming the ancient scratched table that she used to occupy at the far end of Conrad’s studio.
The late afternoon sun had made Sara feel lazy and settled. It must be getting late, she realized. There were people at home who would be wondering where she was.
‘Single?’ Ben suddenly asked.
Sara looked at him sharply. ‘Are we still talking about what’s in my head, like the virtual-age thing?’ she asked, putting off the moment of admitting the truth.
‘Real life,’ he said quietly. He was very close. Feathery eyelashes.
‘No,’ she smiled. ‘No, I’m married.’ She was surprised how reluctant she’d felt to say it. As if the statement ended something that hadn’t even started. And of course it hadn’t, had it?
‘Right.’ He said nothing for a moment, looking as if he was doing some intense thinking. She waited for him to speak.
‘Sara?’ He looked very serious, suddenly. She felt her insides go tight. What was going on here?
‘Yes?’
‘Sara – I just want to ask you . . . Would you like the last Jaffa cake?’
Jasper had pushed Charlie’s buggy in a long circuit of the town, which had been pretty useful for finding out what was where in this place. He’d found some pubs that looked lively enough: not the dark one with all the vintage fringed lampshades and purple velvet sofas. That was too much like home. His mother claimed she was going for the Biba Era look (whatever that was), but he just found it dusty, joss-sticky and gloomy. That bar would surely be full of after-office geezers in suits by six thirty every night, but there were some scuzzier pubs that looked like students hung out in them. According to the chalkboard outside one of them, bands played three nights a week, although one of those nights was advertised as Goth Night, so he’d probably avoid that.
He’d found plenty of fast-food places, too, which made him feel excitedly urban but in a slightly shaming way. It was the thrill of the unfamiliar. You had to go twenty miles to find the nearest McDonald’s down where he lived, and you got your pizzas from Tesco, not brought round to you on a bike. This was definitely something he’d keep to himself. His sun-streaked surf-boy hair and clothes would be fine; the look still defined you as cool enough (just), but he had an idea that expressing delight at the possibility of Kentucky Fried Chicken or a choice of several venues for iffy pizzas would one day get him surrounded by mocking thugs, all pointing the finger and shouting ‘Hick!’ at him. He didn’t want to get beaten up just because he’d never before bought a sandwich from Subway.
Charlie was asleep now. Jasper hoped that was all right. He didn’t know anything about babies and wondered if Charlie was sleeping because he was bored. He’d liked the park. Jasper had got him out of the buggy and sat on a swing with him, keeping it low and gentle, and Charlie had seemed to love it. Then he’d taken him down the slide, but a mother with three screamy brats had given him a bollocking and told him he was being irresponsible and anyway didn’t he know the playground was for the under-twelves? He hadn’t argued. He could have picked one, pointed out that Charlie was clearly under twelve but at his age needed just that little bit of help to make the most of the facilities, and who would deny him that? He’d just smiled instead, trying to win her over with calm silence and the kind of mad grin that Steve McQueen aimed at the camp guards in The Great Escape. It hadn’t worked in the charm sense, but it got her off his case. The mother had gathered up her children very fast and raced across the park with them to the café, where she sat on a bench and glared at him till he put Charlie back in the buggy and wheeled him out of the play area.
Jasper had taken the little road down by the church and was alo
ngside the river again. If he followed the towpath here, he’d get back to the house, no problem. Cassandra would be pleased. He’d kept her baby out a good long while and he hoped she’d be happy about that. She hadn’t called him, so she must be. He checked his mobile. Nearly six o’clock.
He passed the pub and was coming to the row of cottages where there was . . . ah. Something told him to slow down. If asked later, he wouldn’t be able to say what it was that had made him stop and wait. Well . . . it might be something to do with his aunt Sara kissing the man she was with. It wasn’t a real kiss, nothing like tongues or sexual intent or any of that stuff you really don’t want to think about the olds doing . . . Even though his mother and Jack were forever going on about sex, somehow you just had to do a mental hands-over-the-ears number and pretend it couldn’t happen to anyone over thirty (and even thirty was pushing it, he admitted to himself).
Jasper slowed up and lurked behind a chestnut tree, hoping nothing would happen next that he’d really prefer not to see, yet unable to stop watching. He’d clocked that the man had his hand on Sara’s body – about hip level, intimate enough but nothing you could say was totally out of order. It was just a goodbye kiss, bit of a clinch/ hug-type thing, and the moment passed really quickly. Then she turned away and walked towards the gate. It was, if he analysed it, no more than his mum and her women friends did, just a mutual quick brush of mouth on skin, but the way she smiled as she came out of the gate, well that was something else.
Jasper waited, moving further into the foliage. Sara walked off along the river, going pretty fast, but he was taller, faster. He could catch her easily. He could even call out – she’d wait for him. But then they’d have to make conversation for the next half-mile . . . Jas turned the buggy around and walked back to where a side lane led up to the main road that ran parallel to the river. Better this way, he thought. Then by the time he got home, Sara might have done something about that loved-up look on her face. God, was she just like his own mother? Staying here was supposed to be a rest from all that. This sex-obsession stuff, it must run in the family.
Love is a game that two can play and both win.
(Eva Gabor)
Sara was up before everyone else, showered and dressed before seven, leaving Conrad to sprawl starfish-style across the bed on his back and enjoy some extra snoring time without her being there to nudge him and make him turn on his side to stop. No wonder he’d liked sleeping in the studio, it must have had a lot to do with not being elbowed sharply in the ribs at three in the morning, she thought as she brushed her hair and watched him, by way of the mirror, being blissfully unconscious and flickering slightly like a dreaming cat.
It wasn’t about avoiding sex after all, it seemed. Not if the night before was anything to go by. She smiled to her reflection at the memory of a fast and deeply pleasurable bout of passion that she’d initiated and in which he’d been more than happy to participate. If thoughts of death were really on Conrad’s mind, he seemed to have suddenly worked out that there were mortal pleasures he had to make the most of while they were available. And it was so lovely to have him back in this bed with her. She had hated being alone. Having it to herself used to be a bit of a luxury, the times when he went away to paint. But when your life partner chose to sleep somewhere else rather than it being a necessity, it was like being abandoned. Even though the weather was now early-summer warm, there was a definite chill to a huge bed when you were the only one in it.
The house, these days, only seemed to be properly hers at this silent time of the day and Sara treasured her hour or two of peace when she could read the paper before Pandora nabbed the crossword, and drink plenty of wakeup coffee uninterrupted. But as she went down the stairs today she could see the first traces of all the clutter that resulted from too many people occupying the place. It was like visiting a wonderful beach and finding, as you approached, that it had shocking quantities of washed-up rubbish hidden among the dunes and rocks. It wasn’t a small house, by any means. Upstairs had four bedrooms (plus another which had become an office and contained no bed) and three bathrooms, Sara and Conrad’s room being across the stairwell, apart from the rest, linked by a metal walkway, like a bridge. Despite its size, the essentially open aspect of much of the ground floor meant that everything that wasn’t where she wanted it to be was exposed to general view the whole time.
Since Cassandra had gone to university and Pandora had lived in her grimy but arty East End bedsit, Sara had become used to the house having the sleek, junk-free adults-only look that its architect had intended for it, and which meant minimum time spent tidying up. She liked knowing that books she’d put on the shelves would be where she’d left them. That her tall glass vases of pieces of twig and long-stemmed agapanthus wouldn’t be tipped over by a teenager (Jasper) who turned round carelessly while wearing a rucksack – as had happened the day before. It wasn’t that she wanted to sit around posing in something that resembled a swanky, sterile furniture gallery, but she could do with not being the only one who picked up the heedlessly scattered possessions from all over the place.
Why were they all so oblivious to the concept of a certain amount of order? She’d long ago lived through the stage where small children hurled their toys at random. Everyone in this house should have grown out of that by now, apart from Charlie, who hadn’t even reached it. And yet how quickly, how thoughtlessly they regressed. Coats flopped over the post at the bottom of the stairs because Pandora, who was sleeping in the studio, couldn’t see the point of hanging hers in the cloakroom (‘Why? I’ll be going out again soon . . .’). Shoes were trailing from the front door all through the hallway as if their owners had simply stepped out of them as they walked. Heaps of sundry possessions (iPods, CDs, items of clothing) were trip hazards on the lower stairs, waiting for someone to remember that they needed to carry them up and find them a home.
Beyond, through the open double doors to the sitting room, the seat cushions on the big purple sofa had been left squashed and all over the place, because whichever of the younger ones had been sprawling on it the night before had merely got up when their TV viewing was done and moved seamlessly from there straight upstairs to bed, without so much as a cursory backward glance. The pink sofa was covered in Charlie’s toys, the blanket from his buggy, a pile of books that Cassandra had been reading. The rug was half hidden under magazines (music ones Jasper). In the kitchen, Panda’s computer was charging on the table, plugged in with its wire trailing across to the socket on the worktop. Not what you’d call safe.
Sara cleared some space on the worktop, mopped a puddle where the dog’s water bowl had been kicked over but no one had bothered to clear it up, made herself some coffee and carried it out to the terrace, but there was a coolish breeze, this early. Floss ran out past her, peed on the grass then raced down the garden to the studio where she barked to be let in, still not having cottoned on to the fact that Conrad was now sleeping in the house again. Pandora had said couldn’t someone keep the dog in, so that she didn’t get Floss waking her at what she called ‘the devil’s dawn’.
No I bloody can’t, Sara now thought as she went back into the bomb-site house, feeling annoyed that her blissed-up mood from the night before was in danger of turning to grumpiness. The only bona fide child on the premises was Charlie. Only he had an excuse not to help keep the place looking habitable. The rest of them were adults: did they still think the tidy fairies came in the night and cleared the surfaces? Truth was, of course, they didn’t care what the place looked like – for the younger ones it was no longer ‘home’, so the clear-up rules of the benign dictatorship Sara had imposed during their growing up no longer applied now they claimed visitor status.
Even Cassandra, who had left Paul partly because he was an unreconstructed slob, seemed to have reverted eagerly to domestic anarchy; she might need nudging about that. Lizzie too was hopeless. In Cornwall she lived with so many items of casual decoration (collections of shells, curiously marked stones fr
om the seashore, jars of beads, dresser shelves crammed with beach finds) that it was hard to tell whether she was doing just a careless plonking-down of stuff on every surface, or whether it was all thoughtfully placed and arranged. She had a lucky talent that way; always had, Sara remembered. She’d bought ten folding chairs from a car boot sale, all hideous, flimsy and cheap, but by the time she’d painted each of them a different shade of blue and added junk-shop cushions patterned with Siamese cats (which should have looked hideous but worked in a kitsch way), you looked at them and thought, oh what a fantastic idea, why don’t I . . .?
Conrad’s view on furniture was that it should last. Sara put it down to a generation thing. Their chairs were beautiful, expensive craft pieces, made from twisted elm and commissioned from a genius in Norfolk. They would last for ever and look wonderful for ever . . . so long as people like Jasper didn’t try to swing them on the back two legs, risking breakage of both chair legs and his own neck. You couldn’t be overprecious about these things, she told herself, after the third time of reminding him over dinner not to do it and fighting back an urge to wallop him. It was people who mattered, not things. But she mattered too, she told herself. She was not anyone’s skivvy.
Ace cleaner Xavier would leave if they weren’t a bit more together. He was already tutting and disapproving for half of his working hours. If it wasn’t that he clearly fancied Pandora (trailing around after her, smiling, telling her she spoke French très, très bien, even though he almost always spoke English), he’d probably have left after his first encounter with an inadequately rolled-up dirty nappy that Cassandra had left on the downstairs shower-room floor after she’d got distracted by a phone call from Miranda. Xav’s face had been as horrified as if he’d come across a badly dismembered goat, and he had needed extra coffee and a doughnut.
