Sweets From Morocco

by Jo Verity

Tessa squeezed Lewis’s knee beneath the table and he realised, then, what was coming. Not quite ready to hear the words that would convert speculation into reality, he concentrated on Barbara’s face as she sat, straight-backed, an indulgent smile fixed on her lips, like a mother willing her son not to fluff his lines in the school play.

  When he’d bought the radio, he’d pictured his father in the shed or the garage, listening to the rugby commentary on the natty little Roberts, and it was odd to think that it would sometimes be tuned to Woman’s Hour.

  ‘We’d like you all to come back to the house.’ Their father, tipsy with the good wishes of his guests, was clearly reluctant for the party to break up. ‘It’ll be a chance for you to pick up that box, Tessa.’

  Tessa spotted Barbara’s daughters exchanging Oh, no glances. The last thing she wanted was to spend the afternoon at Salisbury Road, but she was affronted on her father’s behalf. ‘We’d love to, Dad.’

  Dick Swinburne had already given Tessa the bulk of his wife’s ‘treasures’. He’d presented these to her over a period of years, as if it were too painful to part with them all at once. He’d prefaced each with the story of where it had come from. ‘That Toby jug’s from Shanklin. We went there for our twenty-fifth,’ and ‘Your mother fancied the china kitten when we went on that tour around the Royal Worcester factory.’ Tessa disliked knick-knacks but it would have been cruel to refuse. She’d wrapped them in newspaper and packed them in her mother’s hatbox, promising to take them back to London when she came in the car.

  As kids, when the coast was clear, she and Lewis had bounced on their parents’ bed, trying to get a better view of the pink and white striped box which had lived on top of the wardrobe. If they bounced high enough, they caught a glimpse of the white satin bow draped across its lid. When the family moved from Medway Avenue, the box had gone with them but, in the new house, the object that had once seemed enchanting became disturbing. Why was it there? What did it contain? Their mother would never have worn a hat grand enough to warrant such a fancy box. The answer came to her one winter’s day when she and Lewis were snooping around, trying to discover where their Christmas presents were hidden. It was obvious. The hat box was full of Gordon’s clothes, wrapped in folds of white tissue paper.

  When, in the course of sorting through her mother’s things, she’d finally lifted the box down, she could tell from its weight that it was empty. ‘What’s the hatbox all about, Dad?’ she’d asked. He’d smiled, ‘Your mother bought it in a junk shop, not long after we were married. She used to say that when we won the pools she’d buy a posh hat to put inside it.’

  ‘Did she keep anything in it?’ Tessa persisted.

  ‘Not as far as I know. I kept doing the Pools and she kept on hoping, I suppose.’

  So her mother had been a dreamer as well as an accordion player.

  ‘I’ve often wondered what happened to Gordon’s clothes.’ She hardly dared look at him in case she saw pain in his face.

  But he answered without hesitation, ‘Your Gran packed them all up. Gave them to the Salvation Army.’

  ‘So you never really thought…?’

  ‘The clothes wouldn’t have fitted him anyway.’

  She laid a hand on his arm to signal her thanks, but he hadn’t finished.

  ‘Your mother did keep something. A pair of knitted bootees. She thought I didn’t know. But sometimes I’d come into the bedroom and she’d be pushing them away in that little sewing box she had.’

  Tessa waited to hear the conclusion of the sad story.

  ‘I put them in with her when…’ He took out his hanky and blew his nose.

  ‘She’d have liked that, Dad.’

  During the period of their estrangement, she would not have believed reconciliation was feasible. In the beginning it was a little awkward but now they were ‘rubbing along’ fine. Were she inclined to whimsy, she might be tempted to view it as a parting gift from her mother.

  During those first months on his own, Dick Swinburne had learned to cook simple meals and mastered the twin-tub; he emptied the vacuum cleaner bag regularly and made a reasonable job of ironing his shirts. But he was baffled by choice and asked her advice on the most basic things. Which pyjamas to buy – cotton or winceyette? The sort of saucepan to replace the one he’d burnt. Christmas cards – robins or a manger scene? It touched her that this man who had always ‘known best’ was unable to decide between granulated and caster sugar.

  She’d made a point of coming down on his birthday. They went to see Chariots of Fire at the Odeon, following it with a fish and chip supper. In the vinegary fug of the chip shop, across the Formica-topped table, Tessa came close to asking him about … it. How had it felt coming out of the newsagent’s to find the pram empty; to tell his wife that their baby was missing. Had she ever forgiven him? Had he forgiven himself? But his bemused expression as his wrinkled hand thumped the bottom of the ketchup bottle had made it impossible.

  Another time, when her father was doing something to the car, Tessa had flipped through the calendar that hung near the telephone. In painstakingly neat writing, her mother had, with unfounded optimism, filled in the birthdays and anniversaries for the year ahead. Tessa, her throat aching from holding back the tears, had studied the entries for ‘August’ and ‘November’. But there was nothing, not even the faintest pencil mark, to verify that, on this day Gordon Swinburne had been born and, on that day, taken from her.

  After they had seen the first twelve months through and weathered all the meaningful dates, the force that had drawn them together at the graveside slackened and they began to withdraw a little. Nothing was said; they didn’t row or fall out, but their need grew less. When she mentioned it to Lewis he told her not to feel bad. ‘The main thing is that you’ve reached an accommodation. And that’s terrific. There was a time when you two couldn’t be in the same room without laying into each other. Mum would be pleased.’

  Loading the remnants of her mother’s life into the boot of the car, it occurred to her that her father’s marriage to Barbara wouldn’t be such a terrible thing. The woman standing at his side on the pavement, waving them off, seemed very fond of him. Protective, too, as if he needed to be treated with special care, as if he were damaged. Tessa had never considered that.

  ‘I bumped into a bloke called Mark Hollinghurst today,’ Dan said. ‘He says he met you in Cornwall that summer. Bit of an entrepreneur these days. He’s looking for staff for a gallery he’s opening. I said I’d ask if you were interested.’ It didn’t ring true but it was sweet of Dan to find a tactful way of suggesting that she get off her bottom and do something; sweet of him to pull the necessary strings to secure the offer.

  She envisaged Lewis, Dan and Kirsty hatching the scheme. It would do Tessa a world of good to mix with some new people; get out of the flat. She knew they were trying to help. In fact she’d been thinking that she should find something to occupy her until she got underway with the next book.

  ‘Why not? It might be fun. I don’t remember him, though.’

  Dan primed her. Hollinghurst had been a second-rate painter who had hovered around the fringes of the art world for years, eventually forsaking fine art for commerce and working on ‘visuals’ for a successful advertising agency.

  ‘He has fingers in several pies. Jay told me that he’s recently inherited serious money from his grandfather, hence the gallery venture. Poacher turned gamekeeper – or vice versa.’

  She suddenly remembered the journal that she’d kept in St Ives and eventually she unearthed it in a large carrier bag, crammed with letters and postcards. The bag had moved with her several times but, knowing it was dangerously full of the past, she hadn’t opened it for years. She flipped through the pages of the journal. There they all were. Liza. Valmai and Connor. Jay, of course, on every page. God, she’d been besotted with him. Occasionally, even now, when he came into a room or when they spoke on the phone, a sweet burst of lust exploded in her gut. ‘Suzie’, ‘Midge’,
‘Steve’, ‘Terry’, the names stirred memories of flat-chested girls with wild hair; intense young men with nicotine-stained fingers and unattractive feet. But she could find no reference to Mark Hollinghurst. Or Dan Coates either, come to that.

  Gallery Seven’s glass and steel minimalism was an incongruous addition to a streetscape of shabby houses, family-run businesses and basement sweat shops. The front door was propped open with a couple of bricks, allowing the smell of gloss paint to spill into the street. An electrician on a stepladder was rigging spotlights on a track.

  ‘Is Mark Hollinghurst around?’ Tessa asked from the threshold.

  He pointed to the corner where a man in a dark grey suit and black brogues was sorting through a pile of papers. His hair was unfashionably neat but, as if to deny that he might be an accountant, his white shirt was buttoned to the top and he wore no tie. Suddenly she felt foolish. She’d come to see if it might be bearable to work here but she’d got it the wrong way round. It was she who was under scrutiny.

  Ignoring her extended hand, Mark Hollinghurst kissed her on both cheeks and steered her to his office where they sat in trendy leather chairs surrounded by boxes and wrapped furniture. He assured her that she hadn’t changed; she told him that he had, which he took as a compliment not a confession that she didn’t remember him. He asked about Dan and the Costelloes and, from his accurate recollections, it was clear that he must have spent a good deal of time with them. While he reminisced, she studied him, imagining how he might have looked twenty years earlier, but his was a run-of-the-mill sort of face, without a single remarkable feature. She would have sworn in a court of law that she had never seen him before.

  He admitted this wasn’t the obvious location for a gallery selling ‘cutting edge stuff’ but he seemed convinced that the area was on the up.

  ‘In five years it’ll be buzzing. A couple of good restaurants have opened recently in the area and there’s a very trendy furniture shop around the corner. Anyway, I plan to target investors, not passing trade. City boys with red braces. Ad men. Punters with money, prepared to take a gamble; anyone who wants to be in on “the next big thing”. I’m out to sign up new talent. Tomorrow’s Hockneys and Warhols. Give them their first break.’

  ‘It sounds a bit … cynical,’ Tessa ventured.

  ‘No room for sentimentality in Thatcher-land.’ He grinned as though ruthlessness was something to applaud.

  She asked what the job entailed. He wrapped it up in fancy terms but it boiled down to opening the post, typing letters, keeping lists up to date and responding to enquiries. Glorified clerical work.

  ‘You’re not looking for an art expert then,’ she said.

  He missed the irony. ‘I’ve got one if I need one. You’ll be working with Amelie Tanqueray. Degree in History of Art. Nice girl. All you need to do is stick to facts. A bit of background on the artist. The date the work was done. Price, of course, once you’re sure they’re genuinely interested. But no opinions. Nothing subjective.’ He smiled an implicit warning.

  The pay was poor and the job unlikely to stretch her but it was a long time since she’d chalked up a success. ‘No worries. I can be extremely objective when I have to be.’

  ‘Great. I’ll take that as a yes.’ He leaned across and kissed her again, this time squeezing her thigh. ‘Make sure you drag Dan along to the opening party next week. Jay Costello, too, if you can twist his arm. We need a few big names on board.’

  Tessa liked being part of it all; dressing stylishly and joining the troop of workers on its daily march to the Tube; checking her make-up in the staff cloakroom and priming the coffee machine for the first cup of the day; squaring up the pile of catalogues on the low glass table; replenishing the water in the vases containing fresh flowers. Being on the inside for a change.

  Amelie Tanqueray was in her early twenties. Blonde and self-assured, a size eight in clothes and four in shoes, Gran would have described her as ‘a little china doll’. She was bilingual – her mother, a French socialite, her English father, ‘something in the city’. Educated at posh schools and the Courtauld Institute, she skied, rode and sailed. The labels on her clothes read like captions from a fashion magazine. If Mark Hollinghurst employed Tessa for her links to the art world, Amelie was there for her class and family connections.

  Tessa couldn’t help liking the girl. She was funny and irreverent. She knew how to get things done. She balanced irony and optimism in exactly the right measures. It wasn’t her fault that her parents were rich and influential, and naturally they’d wanted the best for their daughter.

  Amelie appeared to like her, too. She asked Tessa’s advice on dealing with the Ruperts and Ralphs and Hugos who constantly pursued her; confessed that she’d cheated in her ‘finals’; confided that she’d taken ‘this poxy little job’ as a stopgap whilst she caught her breath after a frenzied affair with a married man.

  Tessa had never, until now, been called upon to play the wise older sister. Strange, bearing in mind that she had a younger brother.

  Chapter 31

  The house in Salisbury Road was becoming less and less the place where Lewis had grown up. The front door had always been privet green but now it was canary yellow. A shower had appeared above the bath and a leather three-piece suite filled the living room. The towels smelled different and a musky bouquet of garlic and ground coffee pervaded the kitchen cupboards. In his mother’s day, the house had been a Forth Bridge of never-ending domestic duties but, since his father’s marriage to Barbara, it had been demoted to a backdrop, setting the scene for more interesting events. The Swinburne Family, as a unit, was retreating from the place.

  Barbara continued to be pleasant and welcoming, leaving them to themselves whilst she wrote a letter or went to the library. Not that he visited as often as he used to. There was no longer the same imperative.

  Bristol was a lively city where he and Kirsty had a growing circle of friends. Invitations to dinner parties decorated the mantelpiece and their pin-up board was a patchwork of concert and theatre tickets. They spent the half-term holiday in Amsterdam and were planning a few days in Paris at Easter. They were back on their old footing but, once in a while and for no obvious reason, sadness would creep between them, sending one or the other off for a brisk walk or an early night.

  Lewis was pleased that Tessa was sticking with the gallery job. From what he could make out it wasn’t anything special but she seemed to get on well with the people there and she’d hinted that she was writing another book. Perhaps, with that on the go, she needed a job that didn’t require much brainpower.

  Lying in bed next to Kirsty, the back of his hand resting against her thigh, he was a grateful man. Kirsty was well again and his kidney stone crisis was resolved; his father was settling in to his new life and, remarkably, Tessa had a job. Now that his daughters were older, he was finding them easier to get on with. Doug Williams was due to retire soon so there would be a vacancy as head of the Maths Department. Yes. Things were ticking over nicely.

  Although the job at Gallery Seven wasn’t the most stimulating in the world, Tessa enjoyed it. She should look for something more challenging soon but in the mean time it wouldn’t do any harm to use this period to make contacts and get something concrete on her CV. Hollinghurst had signed up a cohort of talented youngsters and she was damned good at selling their stuff. When Lewis phoned or when she was out with friends, she had tales to tell of eccentric artists and celebrities who spent unbelievable amounts of money on unbelievably outrageous items. Most satisfying of all, the embryo of a novel was quickening in the back of her mind.

  Tessa was thirty-nine years old, a fact which astounded her. When her mother was this age, she’d written her off as fit only for perms and wrap-around ‘pinnies’. Recently she had started colouring her hair and used reading glasses when she needed to look up a number in the phone book. But she didn’t, and never would, possess a ‘pinny’.

  Her doubts about living with Dan were more or less res
olved. He was good company and a thoughtful lover. He didn’t smother her with attention or demand that she account for her every movement. The flat was spacious enough for her to have her own study where she could write or read or simply be alone. She realised that the ‘sell-out’ that she’d been fighting against was, in fact, ‘balance’. Balance. It sounded positive. It implied expertise.

  One thing threatened to destabilise everything. Her addiction to Rundle. She’d broken with him on several occasions, the most recent, twelve months ago. ‘Okay,’ he’d agreed impassively, ‘see you around’. She’d held out for four months then, when she’d gone back, he’d neither crowed nor shown any indication that he was pleased. And they’d carried on as before.

  It had been up to her to decide when to meet. On the face of it she called the shots but in truth it made her need for him all too evident. She would resist for as long as she could then, when she could bear it no longer, she would phone him. This time it would be different. She would arrive unannounced. Rundle didn’t know she had keys to his flat. Once, when he’d been called away to sort out a crisis at the garage, he’d left her a set which she’d ‘forgotten’ to give back, hanging on to them until her next visit, in the meantime, getting a duplicate set cut.

  At Victoria station, she bought the Observer and a black coffee. The station concourse was busy with families getting out of London on what promised to be a lovely day. She watched a woman, hand in hand with a skipping toddler, another wrestling with a dog and a cumbersome pushchair. Did she envy or pity them their domesticity?

  She chose a window seat in the corner of the carriage where she wouldn’t have to talk to anyone. Balancing her coffee on the flap-down table, she laced it with whisky from the flask in her handbag. The train journey held no interest for her. She’d seen every isolated farmhouse, every picturesque village church, and every graffitied railway bridge a dozen times before. She opened the paper. ‘Cold War in Space.’ ‘The Hitler Diaries’.’ More trouble in Zimbabwe. Alcohol and the pulse of the train lulled her and she drifted.