“Let me do a count to make sure they’re all there . . .” He drew out the photos, and although I retreated to the window to wait I was aware of him stealing a glance at me. The next moment I heard him murmur amused: “Wicked!” but I immediately faked a yawn, glanced at my watch and said: “Get a move on, can’t you?”
“I’ve just come across this truly amazing pic of my equipment. Want to look?”
“Sweet of you,” I said, adjusting my watchstrap, “but why should I be interested in equipment that’s sold to all-comers by a pretty-boy too immature to know better?”
“Someone immature wouldn’t last two weeks in the kind of world I live in! But thanks for calling me a pretty-boy, angel-tits. It gives me carte blanche to call you any name I like.” Stuffing the photos back in their envelopes he turned aside and paused to pick up the silver-framed photo which stood there. It was a picture of Richard with his children, and the background of a garden suggested it had been taken at Compton Beeches. The two adolescents stood together, slightly apart from him, and as Bridget was plump I knew the photo must have been taken some years ago. It was an excellent picture of Richard. His vitality seemed to rise from the frame and hit me straight between the eyes.
“I want this,” said Gavin suddenly.
I was shocked. “Well, you can’t have it! Nothing leaves this flat except for your vile photos!”
“How do you know they’re vile if you refuse to look at them?”
“After your descriptions I don’t need to look. Gavin, put that picture down!”
“Moira won’t want it!”
“But the kids might, and they’ve got more right to it than you have!”
He sulked. He sulked beautifully, careful to milk the mood for maximum effect. His handsome mouth tightened. His jaw seemed more elegant than ever as he tilted it. His long dark lashes pointed downwards past his cheekbones as he gazed at the photograph and refused to look at me. But finally he did replace the frame on the chest of drawers.
“You ever consider a career as a dominatrix?”
“Grow up, Blake!” I moved into the hall as smoothly as possible, but my ankles felt flimsy, as if my feet were having trouble connecting with my legs. “Can’t you think of anything but sex?”
“Well, you’re not thinking of much else, are you? That’s why you refused to see my pics—you were scared shitless they’d turn you on!”
“I absolutely and totally deny—”
“Okay, forget it. What does your bloke do for a living?”
“He’s a novelist.”
“A novelist? Shit, what kind of neurotic creep are you shacked up with? He’s probably bi if not gay!”
“What utter crap!” Turning my back on him in fury I marched—or tried to march—to the front door. I was in such a state, heart pounding, skin sweating, blood roaring, everything below the waist knocked silly by the adrenaline rush, that all I could manage was not a march but a totter, but luckily Gavin was backtracking as if he realised that the revenge he was taking for being deprived of Richard’s photo had gone too far.
“Okay, okay!” he said hastily. “The bloke’s as straight as a Mills and Boon hero, but why are you so reluctant to discuss him? Does he drink, do drugs? Is he refusing to marry you? Is your life being blighted by Fear-of-Commitment Phobia?”
I was so shattered by this last question that I dropped my bag, which burst open to shower various objects onto the floor. With a curse I knelt to shovel everything back, and quick as a flash Gavin sank to his knees beside me as he pretended to give me a helping hand.
“It’s all right—I can manage—I can manage, I tell you—” I was almost screaming.
“Relax, love,” he said amused. “I’m not going to rape you, although you’ve as good as begged for it by deliberately dropping your bag to make sure we both ended up together on the floor, but let me ask you again for a date. Monday through Friday I don’t do chicks because I need all my energy for work, but weekends I’m neat testosterone, all revved up and ready to go. So how about it?”
I lurched to my feet. “No way!”
“Ah, come on! Listen, you and I could do things Mr. Scribble-Scribble can only write about. You and I—”
“Shut up!” I yelled. I was by this time so infuriated not just with him but with myself for being so mindlessly vulnerable to his smash-and-grab behaviour, that I could hardly get my words out, but I did manage to gasp: “You’re pathetic!”
“No,” he retorted without a second’s hesitation, “I’m not pathetic. I’m a bright, tough bloke who’s made a big success of his job, but you’d like me to be pathetic, wouldn’t you, because if I was pathetic I wouldn’t be churning you up to such an extent that right now you don’t know whether to slap my face or beg for a fuck!”
“Wrong!” I shouted. “I’m in no doubt whatsoever! I’m going to slap your face!”
He laughed. “Okay, hit me—do it, do it, do it, as they say in the TV cop-soaps! Give me the excuse we both want to get you spread-eagled and ready for mounting in no time flat!”
I wrenched the front door open and blundered out, eyes burning with tears of rage and humiliation, but then I realised I couldn’t rush away down the stairs. I had to wait to lock up. I groped for the keys, and as I did so I realised, to my intense relief, that he was switching off the hall light and preparing to leave. So long as I was no longer alone with him in that flat—
“Mounting’s a fun word, isn’t it?” he was musing lightly, underlining his control of the scene by making a smooth attempt to steer the conversation onto a civilised pair of rails. “Sort of Regency—or do I mean eighteenth century? Can’t remember when Fielding wrote Tom Jones.” Closing the front door he took the keys from my unresisting fingers. “Here,” he said kindly, “let me lock up for you.”
The moment he turned back to the front door I scuttled down the stairs. Outside in the porch I took great lungfuls of fetid air spiked with diesel fumes as I fought to recover my shattered confidence, but when he rejoined me I was still in turmoil.
“Sorry if I upset you back there,” I heard him say as he slipped the keys into the pocket of my jacket. “Richard wouldn’t have liked that, would he? He’d have wanted me to treat you right, and that’s what I aim to do in future because I think you’re terrific. I’d really like us to be friends.”
All I wanted now was to get away from him so I merely nodded, but at once he added: “I’m really grateful for your help—and now please let me give you a ride home. That’s the least I can do in the circumstances.”
I lost my nerve again. The suave good manners coating the raw sexuality hit me like a bunch of red-hot pokers slamming through loose-packed snow, and in panic I said the first thing that came into my head. “Oh, you don’t want to trail back to the City!” I exclaimed, but as soon as the words left my mouth I knew I’d made a very big mistake.
“So you live in the City, do you?” he said quickly, and I could almost hear him thinking: I’ll look her up on the electoral roll.
“I’ll get a cab, no problem, don’t worry,” I said in a rush, and he shrugged, willing enough to let me go now that he had an easy way of uncovering my address.
“Seeya!” he said buoyantly as we parted, but I could only slump back on the seat as the cab pulled away from the curb.
IV
The house on Wallside was in darkness, a fact which startled me because Eric had promised to have supper waiting. Grabbing the phone I dialled his studio.
“So where are you?” I said aggrieved when he picked up the receiver. “Where’s dinner?”
“Oh, my God! I’ll be with you in five minutes.”
Storming to the kitchen I flung some scotch into a glass and began to make myself a low-calorie, vegetarian-cheese sandwich on wholemeal bread. Then I saw the bread was mouldy. With a curse I binned it, swilled some scotch and winkled a couple of biscuits from the packet of Tuc in the store-cupboard.
When Eric arrived I realised he was still mentally and emo
tionally in his studio where he was reworking a difficult segment of his new novel. “I’ve got Marks and Spencer’s fish pie,” he was saying from far away in 1940 where he was living with his characters in Norway during the Second World War. “It won’t take a moment to nuke it in the microwave.”
“But you were going to get that low-cal chicken and broccoli dish!”
“Was I?”
“Oh, spare me the Alzheimer’s routine!”
“Darling, is something wrong?”
“He finally noticed,” I said to an imaginary audience.
“I’m sorry I lost track of the time, but the commandos were delayed and my hero was almost garotted—”
“Eric, that’s fiction—fiction—and my problems are for real! I’m totally stressed out after messing around with a tart, and—”
“I’ve always said you were too obsessed with dieting! If you ate sensibly—”
“Not that kind of tart, you fruity-loop! A tart, a tom, a hooker, a hustler, A PROSTITUTE!”
“Blimey, what were you doing with one of those?”
“Well, I haven’t mentioned it before because it was confidential, but—no, forget it. Listen, I’m cross, I’m starving, I’m—”
“I’ll take you out. Let’s go to Fish Heaven.”
“I don’t want fish and chips! Let’s go to Searcy’s!”
“I can’t afford Searcy’s.”
“I’ll pay.”
Silence. Suddenly all the humour drained out of the conversation and an invisible curtain dropped noiselessly between us. We were two years into our relationship but the money problem had never been solved, even though we often pretended that it had. I always told myself that this problem was the reason why we weren’t married; I was too afraid that if Eric was unable to share my money with good grace before we were married he would be most unlikely to do so afterwards, and the marriage would quickly become dislocated.
“God, I’m so sick of you being neurotic about money!” I burst out. “If you were the one who had the cash, this problem wouldn’t exist!”
“We’ve had this conversation before. If you’d only commit yourself by agreeing to marry me, I wouldn’t feel so like a kept man whenever you fling money at me!”
“I never fling money at you!”
“You flung Searcy’s at me just now when you know damn well I have to go back to office-work next week to pay for my research trip to Norway!”
“Sometimes I think all you’re interested in is your writing and I’m just an accessory to keep you amused between chapters! If you feel like a kept man, I feel like a cheap sex-aid!”
Eric plonked down the frozen fish pie. “Okay, let me try again. Marry me.”
“What?”
“MARRY ME! You say you’re over that first marriage, you say you’re fully healed from that terrible time you went through with Kim in 1990, but if you were truly recovered you wouldn’t have this paralysing fear of commitment. We’d get married and—”
“How can I commit when we haven’t solved the money problem?”
“But can’t you see? You’re using the money problem to avoid—”
“No, I’m not, no, I’m not, NO, I’M NOT!”
“Oh yeah? Think about it,” said Eric, and walked out, leaving me alone with my empty whisky glass and the frozen fish pie.
V
A minute later I was calling my best friend Alice Darrow, the Rector’s wife. There’s nothing so therapeutic as a good moan to one’s girlfriend when men are driving one up the wall—as Alice herself said to me before I could even confess I had a problem. I volunteered to be with her in ten minutes. Then I called Lewis Hall, the retired priest who lived with Alice and Nicholas at the Rectory.
“I’m just about to drop in to see Alice,” I said to him. “Could I please look in on you afterwards? I’ve got mixed up in a weird way with a prostitute and I’ve had a row with Eric and I feel I could use a head transplant.”
“My dear,” said Lewis, “my dull evening has been miraculously transformed.”
I sighed with relief. Then I grabbed my bag, left the house and headed for the St. Benet’s Rectory, which stood in Egg Street less than quarter of a mile away.
VI
If I had stayed at home that evening I would have moped, wept and drunk too much in an orgy of anxiety and depression, but fortunately I had been saved from all this rubbishy behaviour because my friend Alice needed me. I had to shape up; I had to stop thinking me, me, me and start thinking you, you, you—always a startling philosophy for a former high flyer who had not so long ago thought of no one but herself.
Alice and I were both in our mid-thirties, and although we were in many ways very different, we had one important thing in common: we had both encountered St. Benet’s by accident when we had been quite outside any formal religion and had had no interest in God. Alice’s encounter had taken place in 1988, mine in 1990 at the time of my disastrous marriage to Kim. Now, in 1992, I felt that although Alice’s journey and mine were continuing down different paths, they were still running parallel, still cementing our friendship, still making it not only possible but natural for us to reach out and help each other whenever the going got rough.
Alice had married Nicholas last year after a lengthy engagement complicated by his dragged-out divorce, and she was now beginning to worry that she might have a fertility problem. The doctors refused to take her worries seriously, since she hadn’t been trying to conceive for long, but what disturbed her more was the question of whether Nicholas would have time to be an attentive father if a baby showed up. He enjoyed his work too much, and although with the help of his spiritual director he was always battling away not to be a workaholic, it seemed to be a never-ending war in which there were more defeats than victories.
To complicate this stressful situation, Nicholas’s first wife Rosalind, who lived only thirty miles away, was always phoning him to talk about their two trouble-prone sons and conjuring up excuses (or so it seemed) to stay closely in touch. Nicholas and Rosalind had been friends since childhood; the marriage might have been dissolved but the friendship was apparently indestructible. Alice had reached the stage where she felt something should be said about Rosalind’s persistent intrusiveness, but couldn’t quite work out what that something should be.
“. . . so Rosalind phones and says she simply has to talk to Nicholas about Benedict’s arrest for drunk-driving and would I mind if she and Nicholas met for lunch, and I say: ‘Oh no, I wouldn’t mind at all!’—why are the English so hopeless about complaining?—and of course that’s a lie and I’m seething. So I say: ‘The trouble is he’s so busy I doubt if he’s got time for lunch,’ and she says: ‘Oh no, he’s already told me he’s doing nothing on his next day off!’ And I think: that day off is supposed to be spent with me, and I feel so furious that I want to slap her—but of course I never will . . .”
Alice was too nice, that was the problem. I said that if I were her I’d tell Rosalind to piss off and then I’d shake Nicholas till his teeth rattled.
“Oh Carta, you do me so much good!” exclaimed Alice gratefully. “I don’t know what I’d do without your moral support. Have another piece of cake—or would you like a slice of deep-dish apple pie with cream?” A cordon bleu cook with a richly curving figure to bear witness to the irresistible food she produced, Alice was always generous in her hospitality.
“But enough of my problems,” she was saying, refilling my plate. “Tell me about yours . . .”
That’s the good thing about being part of a community. People care. People are interested. One never has to endure bad times alone. However, although I did talk to her about how Eric had driven me crazy, I never mentioned Gavin and I was careful not to moan about Eric for too long. That night I was clearly meant to be Alice’s listener, and besides, the confidentiality issues meant that Gavin was difficult to discuss.
“. . . and when Eric’s working I hardly see him at all,” I said, concluding my brief whinge.
&n
bsp; “Welcome to the club!” sighed Alice.
Eventually I left the Rector’s flat and went downstairs to the main hall on the ground floor. This was in the handsome Georgian section of the house where Nicholas had his study, I had my office and Lewis occupied a pair of interconnecting rooms known as “the bedsit,” a nicotine-stained, whisky-smelling, dust-laden retreat crammed with Victorian furniture, icons, books, records, tapes, CDs and bound volumes of The Christian Parapsychologist. There was no television. On his seventieth birthday Lewis’s daughter, who was married to one of the northern bishops, had given him a computer “to keep his brain active in old age,” but this white elephant was consigned to a corner and covered twenty-four hours a day with a disused altar cloth.
Lewis was now seventy-one, a state of affairs which he claimed didn’t suit him even though we all knew it gave him an excuse to be as eccentric as he chose. He was chunky in build, neither tall nor short, and had silver hair, sharp black eyes and a foxy look. Apparently in his youth he had sailed close to the ecclesiastical wind, but in his old age he had become something of an elder statesman, respected for his traditionalist views.
Nicholas and Alice had both invited him to stay on at the Rectory after their marriage, and although Lewis had said to me more than once that they should be “left alone to enjoy married life without some senile pensioner cluttering up the landscape,” he had so far made no attempt to move out. He and Nicholas went back a long way and were as close as brothers. He had been Nicholas’s spiritual director at one time and even now often assumed the role of mentor.
Although Lewis had officially retired he still helped out at the church and still saw a certain number of people for spiritual direction. He was reputed to be better at dealing with men than women, and indeed he always cited his divorce as evidence that he had never been good at long-term relationships with the opposite sex, but for some reason he and I had always got on well. Since Lewis disliked feminism, female high flyers and women who prized their independence, and since I disliked crabby old heterosexuals who were convinced a woman’s place was in the home, our friendship was all the more remarkable, but he had been very kind to me after my marriage ended, and very helpful as I had struggled to understand the Christianity of the Christians who had come to my rescue. Lewis dished out certainties. It’s all very well for liberal Christians to sneer at clergymen who do this, but when one’s starting out on the spiritual journey and making a serious attempt to understand a complicated major religion, one needs certainties in order to find a patch of firm ground to stand on; the sophisticated approach can come later. I had reached the stage where I had dug myself in on a patch of firm ground but had so far been unable to work out how to move on.
The Heartbreaker Page 6
