The Lover

by Amanda Brookfield

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Jesus – you – I didn’t see you.’ He punched at the bag, beating the air back out of it till it was flat and harmless once more.

  A part of Sally was quite unsurprised to see him. ‘I found her there, amongst those reeds.’ She pointed with her index finger. ‘Then I phoned you.’

  ‘I know. It was kind.’

  ‘Do you miss her a lot?’

  He rubbed the back of his head, absently pulling at the blobs of mud. ‘Some things. I miss some things. Not the wet sheets. She used to wet her bed.’

  Sally made a face and squatted down beside him, a little thrilled at her own lack of fear. Nothing got to her these days, not because she had grown brave, but because she had perfected an artful state of level-headed numbness. Not even the sight of his scar was shocking. It had faded to a dirty grey, she noticed, and sunk back into the skin of his forehead as if resolved upon burying itself from view.

  ‘One of my brothers did that for years and years. Mum and Dad took him to a special doctor. Turned out to be a weak sphincter muscle. Even now he isn’t allowed to drink anything after supper time.’ She picked up a stick and traced a pattern in the ground. ‘I come here quite a lot.’ She hesitated, resisting the urge to mention Felix.

  ‘Because of the Copeland boy?’ he whispered, watching her face.

  ‘How…?’ Sally began, before quickly recovering herself. ‘Nah. That’s all over. Sometimes I need to see the river without your mother in it, if you see what I mean and also…with such a big family I like to have a place to go. Space and all that.’ She laughed uncertainly, her eyes flicking to the wall for mementos of their trysts and then remembering that she had ritualistically removed and destroyed all such evidence weeks before. Apart from the black bag. She picked up the corner nearest her and began pushing holes with her fingers through the thin plastic, her expression momentarily soured by the recollection of old hopes.

  ‘You could come to my cottage if you wanted. Anytime.’ Joseph spoke firmly, warming to the idea as it took shape, liking the sense it gave him of life in the surroundings he loved stretching ahead into some still unidentified future. ‘Plenty of space there.’

  ‘Could I?’ Sally’s eyes lit up.

  ‘Come now, if you like.’ It was only as he struggled upright that Joseph became aware of the discomfort round his feet. Sally watched curiously as he emptied each boot of several cupfuls of water and wrung out his socks.

  They emerged side by side into the muted daylight. A thick band of mist had materialised from nowhere, an elegant swathe of white that erased the trunks of the trees, leaving their branches protruding like shipwrecks on a snowy sea. Sally pulled a half-crushed box of chocolate finger biscuits from her pocket. She took three herself before offering one to Joseph, who accepted out of the desire to appear companionable rather than because he was hungry. The girl looked plumper than he remembered, the features of her pretty face submerged in a roundness that he associated with female adolescents. She ate very quickly, he noticed, her pink lips closing round the entire half of one biscuit at a time, her tongue greedily searching for signs of any remnants.

  ‘If you like sweet things, I’ve got jarsful at home.’

  ‘Oh, don’t tempt me,’ she groaned. When she smiled he could make out smudges of chocolate on her front teeth.

  ‘I wouldn’t dream of it,’ he quipped, aware of the importance of appearing normal, fearful that if he gave any inkling of his precarious mental state she might turn tail and run.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  ‘Have you got any jam, by any chance?’ Daniel spread generous portions of butter on his toast and popped two more pieces of bread into the toaster.

  ‘Jam…let me see.’ Frances opened her larder door and reached for the still unopened jar that had been left on her doorstep by Joseph Brackman months and a lifetime before. ‘Yes, but I’m not sure what flavour.’ She tipped the jar and squinted at the winy red contents, which looked ominously runny. ‘Either a dark strawberry or a light blackcurrant. Consume at your own risk. It was given to me ages ago.’

  ‘I’m so famished I’ll eat anything.’ Daniel took the jar from her and sat back down, for a few moments oblivious to everything but the pleasure of eating.

  Watching him, Frances felt suddenly consumed by uncertainty and shyness. She wanted to touch him but did not dare. That they had made love seemed nothing short of incredible. She tried to cast her mind back to how it had happened, to each step that had led them to the first embrace, to the house, to the stairs, to the door of the bedroom. It was at her insistence that they had returned from Dervayne Abbey to Leybourne, part of her hoping that the familiar context would provide some yardstick of common sense, some obvious reason for her to call a halt to the tidal wave of insanity which had begun in the car.

  But somehow the obvious reason never presented itself. The thought of using the more neutral territory of the spare room popped into her head and slid out again. If demons had to be faced, then she wanted to confront them head on. But no demons had appeared, either in her own mind or between the crisp white sheets of her double bed. The sight, over Daniel’s shoulder, of Paul’s photograph on her dressing table made her pause, but only for a moment. The smile in Paul’s eyes was unchanged, fixed at some vague point on the opposite side of the room, an integral part of an existence which she still cherished, but from which she had moved on.

  Soon Frances was focusing on the rather more pressing concern of what Daniel might think of her forty-three-year-old body, preserved by a combination of good fortune and a healthy lifestyle, but still looking as used and lived in as a favourite set of clothes. At each fresh revelation of the smooth hard physique of the man undressing her, Frances felt more and more inclined to keep her own silhouette under cover. If Daniel was drawing any such comparisons however, he gave no indication of them. The duvet was soon on the floor, removing every last possibility of modesty and leaving Frances no option but to concentrate on a pleasure that she had sometimes feared she might never know again. Binding, extraordinary pleasure, which had, for a while, suffused her with a wild confidence. It had taken time – half an hour at least – for the doubts to creep back in, for her to feel separate again, dumbfounded by her recklessness.

  ‘Aren’t you eating?’ He looked at her own untouched piece of toast, surprised.

  ‘Yes, I…’ She picked up a knife. ‘Daniel, I…’

  He stopped, his mug of tea half-way to his mouth. ‘You’re not going to say you regret the whole thing and I should put on my trousers and leave quietly, are you? No, no, no, no. He took the knife from her and began buttering her toast. ‘I’m not having that. Either you have found everything that’s happened every bit as amazing as I have or you’re the most proficient faker in the…’

  ‘Faker? Certainly not. Of course I—’

  ‘Well, there you are then.’ He cut her toast into two neat triangular halves and pushed the plate back across the table. Jubilance shone in his face, widening the pupils of his eyes till the surrounding brown was barely visible at all. With his hair still dishevelled and wearing only his T-shirt and boxers, he looked even younger than his twenty-eight years. But inside he felt old and very wise, more than a match for her fears. ‘I feel I have known you forever,’ he continued quietly. ‘You are so familiar to me Frances, it’s almost weird. Just now – upstairs – I felt as if I was discovering what I have, unknowingly, been looking for – waiting for – all my life. For years I’ve been stumbling, falling, towards…this.’ He spread his arms wide, reached across the table and cupped her head gently in his hands. ‘I know you are scared. Please don’t be. So long as we believe in each other, nothing else matters.’ He leant across the table and kissed her on the mouth, flooding her senses with certainty again. ‘Though,’ he frowned, ‘I couldn’t help wondering…did you…did you…think of Paul?’

  She met his gaze squarely. ‘No.’

  ‘Phew.’ He pretended to wipe his brow
. ‘Glad I got that one over with. Now then, who are this lot?’ Taking the remains of his toast, he leapt up from his chair and began scrutinising a collage of family photographs hanging beside the fridge. ‘That’s got to be your daughter – Daisy is it? And that’s Paul, of course…’

  Frances went to stand next to him, deeply grateful for his ability to sound so natural, to make her feel that he embraced her as much in the context of her family as for herself.

  ‘And this must be…hang on a minute…’ He leant closer to an image of Felix, triumphantly displaying a fish, caught on an expedition with his father several summers before.

  ‘That’s Felix.’

  ‘Yes, I thought so…funny…’ Daniel cocked his head at the picture. ‘He looks extraordinarily familiar…’

  ‘Everyone always says he looks very like me.’

  ‘Where did you say he was at university?’

  ‘I didn’t. But it’s the same place as you,’ she admitted quietly.

  Daniel clapped his hands together in amazement. ‘Really? But that explains it – I know him – well, not know exactly – but I’ve met him – gave him a lift when he was hitchhiking home for Christmas. Isn’t that incredible?’

  He looked elated, but Frances could feel nothing but dismay. The coincidence merely heightened the anxieties which had deterred her from mentioning the connection in the first place. Anxieties connected to the grim fact that in terms of age and situation Daniel was much closer to her son than her, that the real world was already crouched on her doorstep, waiting to pounce and turn everything sour.

  ‘He even mentioned that his father…about Paul…’

  ‘Did he?’ She was genuinely surprised. ‘How improbable.’

  ‘But Frances, why didn’t you tell me about Felix being at Sussex?’ he pressed gently.

  ‘I…I didn’t think it relevant.’ She began clearing the table, scraping crumbs into the bin and dropping the plates into the sink. Living alone, she had got out of the habit of using the dishwasher, since it took days to fill sufficiently for a load. ‘He’s doing Politics and Economics, which is nothing to do with your department, and of course with you on holiday—’

  ‘Sabbatical—’ he corrected her, pretending to look offended.

  ‘Whatever. Look, it never crossed my mind that I would get…close to you, that it would matter where the hell my son was studying for his degree.’ She tried to carry on washing up, but Daniel came up behind her and slipped his arms round her waist.

  ‘Tell me what you’re thinking.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Please.’ He pressed his hands against her stomach, pulling her back so hard she could feel his hip bones pressing into her waist. ‘We must have no secrets or we haven’t a hope.’

  Frances sighed, letting the back of her head rest on his shoulder, unable to resist the notion that they didn’t have a hope anyway. ‘I was thinking that my son is only ten years younger than you and that if he finds out his mother has been screwing a member of the history of art faculty he will, understandably explode with disgust and outrage and never talk to me again.’

  ‘That’s what I thought you were thinking.’ Daniel kissed the top of her left ear. ‘And I’m certain you’re wrong. Let’s break the news next time he’s home – together. It’ll be fine, you’ll see.’

  ‘And Daisy? What are your plans for her?’ Frances turned to face him, the rollercoaster of her emotions nose-diving again. ‘I’m going to stay with her in a couple of weeks, I could just drop into conversation over dinner, that my lover is the same age as hers. She’d like that, I’m sure.’ She was laughing but inside she felt hopeless.

  ‘Frances, what do you feel when you’re with me? Like now. What do you feel now?’

  ‘Honestly?’

  ‘Honestly.’

  ‘Terror. Disbelief. Happiness. In equal quantities.’

  His face creased into a broad grin of relief. ‘Good.’

  ‘You call that good?’

  ‘I call it fucking marvellous. Can I come to Paris too?’

  She let out a small shriek. ‘You’re unbelievable. We barely know each other. In a couple of days you’re bound to wake up to common sense and realise that it’s hopeless and that I’m irritating and carrying a lifetime of baggage with which you have no desire to become acquainted. Can’t we just tiptoe along quietly for a while and let it all go wrong without anyone else having to know about it?’

  He shook his head, smiling. ‘You’re awful. I can’t think what I find so attractive. Apart from, let’s see now,’ he held up his fingers as if to enumerate her qualities out loud.

  Frances clamped her hand over his mouth. ‘I would love you to come to Paris, but…but I’ll have to think about it.’ She hesitated, frowning. ‘Maybe if you go independently, so that I can see how things go with Daisy, decide on the spot whether getting together would work…is that too mean?’

  He nodded vigorously, pretending to look appalled. ‘It’s mean, all right,’ he gasped, when he managed to prise her fingers from his mouth, ‘But I accept. Beggars can’t be choosers. I’ll stay in a cheap pension nearby, skulk around the place in dark glasses and a trilby, waiting for secret meetings with you on street corners.’ He rubbed his hands together. ‘God, how romantic.’

  ‘And now I think you had better go.’

  He looked crestfallen. ‘You can’t mean it?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘For how many minutes?’

  ‘For a few hours. Till tomorrow. Come tomorrow evening, for dinner.’

  ‘Promise?’

  ‘You’ll still be here? You won’t disappear abroad or get run over by a tractor?’

  ‘Promise.’ It took some effort to retain her composure, not to lunge for him as he traipsed to the front door. Too much had happened too quickly anyway. She needed time to digest it, to try and get some perspective on what she was doing and where it might lead.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  ‘Good weekend?’ enquired Libby breezily, when Frances appeared half an hour late for work on Monday morning.

  ‘Yes thanks, fine, very good.’ Frances felt as if a glass wall had slipped down between her and the rest of the real world. Everything was still there as it always had been, but continuing in a way that felt somehow distant and inconsequential. The attempt to marshal her thoughts on Thursday night had turned out to be a short-lived process. After obediently driving away as instructed, Daniel had reappeared on her doorstep a couple of hours later, clutching a heavy blue saucepan and a bottle of red wine.

  ‘I thought if I made supper then you couldn’t possibly throw me out at once. It’s pointless being away from you because all I do is think about you. Whereas when I am secure in the knowledge that you’re actually reachable I can concentrate on all sorts of other things.’

  ‘Well thanks for the compliment.’ She had laughed, unable to contain her delight at the sight of him. On opening the door wider, light from the hall revealed a sports hold-all sitting behind him on the lower step.

  ‘Just a bit of work,’ he explained hastily, managing to look meek and impudent at the same time. ‘And, I’ll admit it, a toothbrush – just in case. Be prepared, that’s the key. Let’s see how dinner goes, shall we? My cooking is quite an acquired taste. I can’t resist weird additions that aren’t in the recipe.’

  ‘Like what?’ Frances folded her arms and peered suspiciously at the saucepan, as if the answer to her question would determine whether she allowed him into the house.

  ‘In this one? Let me see…there’s chicken, brandy, sun-dried tomatoes and…fresh basil. I think that was all. Oh yes and some Chinese mushrooms – I put those in most things. Can I come in now? I’m freezing my bollocks off out here. Tomorrow I thought we might turn the tables and spend the weekend at my place. Feel free to bring an easel and anything else you might miss during the course of forty-eight hours away from home.’

  It was imprudent of course. Frances knew that even as she took charge of the saucep
an of chicken and ushered Daniel and his holdall across the threshold of her home. In the three hours since his departure she had not managed to progress beyond a sense of disbelief. Even at the height of a modest teenage rebellion she had never behaved in a way so contrary to her own instincts for wisdom and self-preservation. A colleague of her father’s had once offered her a fur coat and a key to a flat in Parson’s Green, but at the last minute the glee in his glassy eye had made her change her mind. She had entrusted the burden of her virginity to a sixteen-year-old classmate instead, a disappointingly unerotic experience which months of practice had done little to improve. A handful of subsequent affairs had failed miserably to match up to the levels of ecstasy claimed by friends and writhing lovers on the big screen. Sexual pleasure had not arrived in earnest until Paul. To encounter it so immediately and strikingly with Daniel seemed to Frances to be a matter not so much for celebration as acute wariness. She could feel the thrill of it impairing her judgement, pulling her in head first and jeopardising all the emotional stability which had taken months to rebuild.

  ‘No more pictures then?’ barked Libby, driven by Frances’s lack of response to repeat the question for the third time. Recognising a semi-somnambulant state reminiscent of the weeks immediately following Paul’s death, she feared the worst.

  ‘Pictures?’ Frances glanced up from the box of birthday mugs which she had been pricing in a desultory fashion for a good half an hour. ‘Oh God, sorry…no. I mean, not yet. Almost. Three are being framed.’

  ‘Same size?’

  ‘I think so…that is, yes, they are.’

  ‘Are you all right?’ Libby peered at her anxiously. ‘You’d tell me if you were back on the sleeping pills wouldn’t you? I mean there are bound to be ups and downs, for quite a long time to come yet…’

  ‘I’m fine thanks Libby,’ Frances interjected hastily. ‘A little tired, that’s all.’