by Barbara Vine
Richard and I must have visited at least ten of these residential homes. What was I looking for, beyond comfort and attractive surroundings and some sort of proximity to him? Someone who wouldn't patronize me perhaps, someone young and pretty and honest. One person among those who would look after me that I could talk to. If I don't know what I was looking for I know what I found. She would probably say that fate directed me to her. Yet I had never met her, never thought of her since that day, but when I heard her name…
Mrs Keepe, Lena, isn't a bad woman at heart. Basically she is kind-hearted, and she runs this place with efficiency and – yes, consideration. But she is insensitive to other people's vulnerability, or perhaps I should say she believes vulnerability shouldn't be allowed. Her sense of humour, which I'm sure she believes she has in abundance, is the banana-skin kind. It's concentrated on making others look foolish or, rather, on finding those areas where they differ from the common run and pointing out the peculiarity. I, for instance, have to be given a mock title because I dress as I've always dressed and wear make-up and don't have the local accent. But this – this propensity of hers, served me well that day Richard and I walked into the lounge on our exploratory visit. She might be in the habit of calling the carer who was sitting there with a resident Jenny the rest of the time, but here was her chance to expose someone's sensitive place to Richard and me.
‘This is one of our care assistants, Jenny Warner, or Genevieve, if you like a real mouthful.’
The day I can never forget for long came back to me, and the smell of smoke and the tiny glass cuts on my hands. I could almost see the blood on my fingers. But I looked at her, I was intrigued by her. In the beautiful face was something of a face from long ago, a tilt of the eye, a colour in the cheek, a curve of the lip.
I said to Richard as we got back into the car, ‘I think that's the place for me, don't you?’
Simply on account of Genevieve? That was only part of it. How did I know what sort of person she would be? That I would even like her? I might be wrong, that christian name might have been a favourite in the Waveney valley thirty years ago. The truth was that I was tired of looking for somewhere to live. To die. Every time we went out I had to suppress my fear of riding in a car. I was tired of these toothy, smiling matrons – heaven knows what they call them these days – their waiting lists, their patronizing ways. Middleton Hall it would be, for good or ill, by destiny, or far more likely, by chance.
She stopped the recorder. I am digressing, she thought. I must keep to the point. Rex used to complain of how I let the association of ideas spoil my train of thought and he called me a mistress of the non sequitur. She pressed the red button.
Seeing the obituary was a shock, she said. I don't know why I even looked at the obituaries page, I don't usually, just the front page and an article or two before I turn straight to the back and the crossword puzzle. But that day in early August I happened to open it at the obituaries page and saw his face looking at me from a small photograph, his youthful face as he was when I first saw him. I gasped and it was quite a loud sound I made, like the breath one draws after crying. His name, in upright black type, jumped out at me and seemed to dance on the air in front of my eyes.
It wasn't a long obituary. I have it almost by heart. Oh, yes, it's still possible to learn something by heart when one is seventy, the memory doesn't fail in all ways. But I won't repeat it now. What would be the point? If I keep this tape and anyone ever listens to it, if he or she wants to know more, the obituary exists, it can be found in some archive or other or in a newspaper library. Richard would know, but do I want Richard or Marianne ever to hear any of this?
The writing was impersonal and cold. It described him as a painter and illustrator of children's books, notably the well-known Figaro and Velvet series. His portrait of Edwina Mountbatten was named as his best-known work. The writer followed this statement with an underhand remark about the picture finding no favour with its subject and the artist therefore receiving no more commissions from that quarter. But I won't go on. I am already doing what I said I would not. It is the last sentence which is responsible for my speaking now, and that I must repeat from memory.
‘He was married to the film actress Gilda Brent in 1949 and they separated, though were never divorced, in 1970. She survives him.’
That is how I know that no one knows.
The other day I tried out the name on Genevieve but it meant nothing to her. I knew then that I was going to make this tape or series of tapes and it was an effort for me to say ‘Gilda’ aloud. It is an effort now. Gilda, Gilda, Gilda. Of course it gets easier as I persist…
With Genevieve I felt frightened, embarrassed, shy and distressed all at the same time. But I spoke it and the name meant nothing to her, just as his name would mean nothing. I shall play back the tape now.
It works, she said. I have done it. Like most people of my age I have a deep distrust of these so-called modern conveniences. And that is not because they are modern or we are old-fashioned so much as because we have lived in this world a long while, at some time or other have experimented with the latest gadget and usually found it inadequate. I am glad my tape recorder functions properly, as much as anything because it was Richard's present to me.
The subconscious acts in strange ways. When I played the tape back I saw, I heard rather, that I had never uttered his name. I suppose, I know, that I couldn't bring myself to speak it aloud into an empty room, even though there is no one to hear it and never will be if I erase the tape as I very likely will. Inside my head I can say it over and over softly to myself, but it seems that my lips will not actually form the consonants nor my tongue make the sounds.
Will I ever be able to say it to Genevieve? Am I going to try? And if I am, is it because she is the only possible person to be the recipient of my – what?
My confession.
I'm not doing it for Genevieve, but I am doing it because Genevieve is here and because of a child's face seen twenty-four years ago.
Stella stopped the recorder and into the silence poured an overwhelming tiredness. She held the screwed-up paper in her hand but when she fell asleep her fingers relaxed and it fell to the floor.
6
Mike never proposed to me. I wonder if men do in real life as against in books and films. Does anyone really say, Will you marry me? We were walking up the hill one evening and he pointed over to Chandler Gardens and said,
‘We ought to put our names down if we're going to have one of them when we're married.’
I wasn't surprised. I took it for granted too. It wasn't mentioned again for a few months but by the end of that year everyone was talking about us as an engaged couple and Mum was thinking about our wedding reception. We used to make love in the back of Mike's car, an old yellow Triumph Herald, parked in the pine plantations behind the Legion. That's all right when you're eighteen but I wouldn't do it now. You know you're not a girl any more when you can say you're too old for something.
Mike wasn't the first boyfriend I'd had, he was the third, and I hadn't even liked the others much, they were just people to go out with when you're afraid of the other girls seeing you without anyone. The main reason I got married was to get away from home. Mum was married to her second husband, Dennis, then but she'd got a relationship going with a chap called Barry from Breckenhall and the atmosphere was scary, what with Barry sneaking in when Dennis was on nights and Dennis drinking more than he should have and the endless fighting. Mike is placid and calm and even-tempered. He never has a row, he'll just say, ‘Let's not get on to that,’ go out of the room and shut the door. He's not a talker or a reader, come to that. Most of the time he's at home he's doing something to improve the house.
So am I saying I got bored? I don't know. People in our village don't expect to talk to the people they're married to. The women expect their husbands to spend their free time in the garden or doing some DIY. Mum never talked to my dad or he to her, she never talked much to the res
t of them either, they had plenty to do together without talking. I never thought of being bored till I met Ned, or, rather, I thought boredom equals marriage, you can't expect excitement.
Because we never talked much, Mike didn't notice the change in me. That was how it came about that I hardly had to lie. If I was a bit more silent than usual he probably thought it was because I was getting older. In the country people start getting old when they're young. I don't know much about other people's sex lives – does anyone? – but I knew a bit about Philippa's and Janis's and they both said the excitement had gone out of it long ago. After her second child was born Philippa and Steve didn't do it for months and now they hardly ever do. She even talks the way my nan does, as if she'd never enjoyed it and it was something to put up with, and I've had to remind her of what she was like once, crazily in love and not able to stop herself touching Steve and fondling and kissing him all the time.
Mike was away so much that the weekends were the only opportunity, but often weeks went by without him touching me and I sensed that the times I said no he wasn't bothered. Before I met Ned I even used to wonder how Mike and I were going to have a family, the way we went on. I once said to Janis, what was marriage for, what was the point of it if you had no kids and hardly any sex and you never talked except to say tea was ready and ask what was on the telly. Janis being Janis said that was immature and typical of me. Marriage was a partnership, a commitment, and for making a home together.
When we first thought we could be friends I used to meet Ned in the Legion and of course Mike and Jane were there too. It all looked as if it happened by chance but in fact it was the result of some careful planning on my part. Until Jane got bored, that is, and stopped coming. She didn't like Mum having a juke-box and a space-invaders game, not to mention horse brasses and china gnomes on shelves in the alcoves.
‘English country pubs used to be marvellous until they got fucked up with Muzak and kitsch,’ she said.
Mike got the look on his face I know so well. It creases up his forehead and pulls his mouth down at the corners when he hears that sort of language from a woman.
‘I get enough of that on the site,’ he said later. ‘It's one thing hearing it from brickies. She's supposed to be an educated woman.’
So he stopped going to the pub too, and for a while Ned and I had a couple of drinks there alone together on Saturday nights. He'd go in there at about eight and I'd just turn up with shopping I'd got for Mum or to fetch my eggs. Then one Saturday she said to me, leaning across the bar and whispering, ‘You may have the hots for him but you don't have to write it all over your face.’
Apparently I needed my mother to tell me when I was in love. I knew then that I wanted him to be in love with me, to love me back. Well, I had a remedy for that. I don't know why I'm ashamed of it, I shouldn't be, because it worked. It was a charm that's been working for centuries.
Three or four years ago my nan gave me something to bring back Mike's love. It sounds crazy, doesn't it? Preposterous. I didn't know his love had gone, still less if I wanted it back again. But Nan had noticed the way he was, she noticed in the village hall at her eightieth birthday party. I suppose he was off with the boys as usual or at any rate not taking much notice of me. It was a love potion she gave me that she'd made herself, she called it a philtre, or sometimes an elixir, brown liquid the colour of tea in a little bottle that had been a Cointreau miniature.
Mike never got a taste of it. Perhaps by then I was indifferent as to whether he wanted me or not or perhaps I didn't believe it would work. But when you're in love you'll try anything. Knowing no one ever drank miniatures in our house, I'd kept the bottle in the back of our sideboard, so the next Saturday I got it out and went down the Legion at eight.
I don't know to this day if Mum saw me put it in Ned's half of Abbot. I did it while he'd got up to talk to Mrs Thorn who was nagging him for a donation to the bells fund. My heart was thudding when he came back. He drank the Abbot and had another and then, instead of saying as he always did that he'd have to go and leaving me there, he just looked at me and said, ‘Coming?’
I followed him out and it was dark as pitch. He took my hand and led me a little way down the narrow lane where the hedges are high. Nan's elixir makes the man who drinks it love the first woman he sees and I'd had twenty minutes of terror lest the first woman had been Myra Fletcher or even Mrs Thorn. But it was all right. It had worked. In the dark that my eyes were getting used to I saw his face transfigured. He put his arms round me and kissed me. He said something but I don't remember what it was and I don't remember what I said. We kissed and we were into love, we were lost.
I never told Mum anything. She just assumed. She took it for granted it was magic too, her own mother's magic. Nan had done the same for her when she met Dennis, though I can't say hearing that pleased me. Magic, she guessed it was, and something else.
‘No doubt about it, we're a good-looking family.’ She laughed. ‘You've got a better figure than I ever had, girl. Easy to tell what he sees in you.’
I wanted to tell her that it wasn't for the way I looked that Ned wanted me, he loved me, that magic only started things off, but that would have meant admitting too much. I wasn't going to admit anything. Going back alone to my empty house I thought about what she'd said, I sat down and thought about it for a long while. She hadn't said any more, hadn't touched on what I could see was in her mind, but she'd been thinking: what else but her figure and her face would a fellow like that see in Jenny? He's educated, he's been to Cambridge University, he's in television, and what's she? A Tharby girl who's got no qualifications in anything and was a home help till she got that care assistant's job at Middleton Hall. It stands to reason it's just one of those physical things, he fancies her like mad, and no wonder.
Mum knows a lot about sex but she doesn't know much about what goes on in people's minds. She only knows about love in terms of bed and only about bed in terms of a bit of fun. But what Ned and I have isn't fun, it's good and sometimes it's grand, and sometimes it's awe-inspiring and then it frightens me. For what will I do when it's past and gone?
That was back in April and luckily for Ned and me it was a warm April. The day I was walking with Stella and we saw the Dalmatian was the 6th of September and you could feel autumn in the air. Ned was coming down on the Thursday and I was praying for a fine evening, not cold and wet as it's been since Saturday. But that Tuesday I walked round to Philippa's about seven with a couple of videos I'd done for her, knowing they'd have finished their tea and the children would soon be off to bed.
Philippa lives in one of the Weavers' Houses. There are a row of them, half-timbered places with no front gardens and steps up to the front doors. Silk weavers lived in them when they were first built in the 1600s. Everyone thinks them very wonderful and when you see a picture postcard of Tharby it's usually of them. But I don't know, I think they're a bit dark and grim with their tiny windows and the plaster you're not allowed to paint. I asked Ned why it was that everything over two hundred years old was supposed to be beautiful and he laughed and he said he didn't know, he'd never thought of that before but I had a point. The way he likes the things I say, the way he agrees with me and sometimes says I make him see things with new eyes, that would convince me if I needed convincing that it's not just for the way I look that he wants me.
The seven-year-old and the five-year-old were both in bed and Steve was out helping his father get the potato crop in. I gave Philippa the videos I'd made, they were Steel Magnolias and Dangerous Liaisons, and she gave me The Young Lions and The Anderson Tapes. Not that I'm likely to get around to watching them, I'm not film-mad the way she is, and I only do the videos for her because she can't watch one and record one at the same time. Her house isn't big but it has lots of rooms, all of them tiny, and we had to sit in the one where the television is because she was halfway through watching John Wayne being a captain in the US Cavalry. She couldn't video it, she was already videoing Hi-de-hi on B
BC 1, so we sat there drinking Diet Cokes while the soldiers fought the Indians until twenty to eight and it was over.
‘Will you do On the Waterfront for me on Thursday if I do The Paleface for you? I want to do The Trials of Rosie O'Neill myself and I can't do that and the Marlon Brando. And I can't sit up that late to actually watch either of them because the kids get me up at six.’
Philippa's life is as complicated as if she was juggling a marriage, a job and a couple of love affairs but her affairs are with video tapes and her job programming the VCR. I said I'd record anything she liked and nearly added I'd be out on Thursday evening, stopping myself just in time.
‘Have you ever heard of someone called Gilda Brent?’ I said.
Philippa looked at me as if I'd asked if she'd ever heard of Marilyn Monroe.
‘Ealing comedies,’ I said. ‘Is that right?’
‘Of course it is. Everyone knows that. Not just Ealing comedies. She was in a lot of war films. HMS Valiant and The Skies Above Us.’
‘Tell me something I'll have seen.’
‘I'm just amazed by the films you haven't seen, Jenny. Let's see. The Wife's Story?’
‘I've heard of it.’
‘Well, it's on next week, so I'll video it for you. It'll be a change to video something you really want to see.’
‘What did she look like?’ I said.
‘Blonde, but face a bit like Joan Crawford's. Great legs. Why d'you want to know?’
Why did I? Stella had only asked me if I'd ever heard of her. I suppose I thought that if I found something out Stella would tell me more and that would have some connection with herself.
‘There's a woman at the home who knew her.’
Did she? ‘Did she?’ said Philippa, and her whole face lit up. It's her dream to meet a real actor or actress, and if she knew how well I knew Ned she'd want me to ask him to introduce one of them to her. But she doesn't and she won't. ‘Did she know her well?’
