by Tim Pears
When something was worrying either of them, a problem at home or school, they made a teatime appointment to discuss it properly. Laura shared her moods and hopes with Adamina; her small daughter was her confidante, her pal and her partner. But no one thought of Adamina as a spoiled child since petulance and whining were beneath her: Laura never gave her cause for immaturity, because she treated her as an equal.
They went shopping together in the superstore on the ring road as a couple: Adamina demanded not the sweets on sly display at the checkout, like other children, but rather pointed out toilet rolls which they were low on, Green washing-up liquid, a bottle of special-offer Bulgarian white wine, and not that red because, although it’s cheaper, you know it gives you a headache, Mummy, and a bottle of fizzy mineral water, we shouldn’t drink out of the taps, it’s horrible and it’s probably bad for you.
Despite the fact that her mother was a professional chef, Adamina herself lived on a diet of Heinz baked beans, oven-ready chips and Mars bars (plus McDonald’s burgers on a Sunday) and the only times she ever threw a fit with her mother were when Laura tried to entice her into trying something new: on such matters Adamina was inflexible, and showed herself perfectly capable of starving rather than weaken.
Adamina recognized James as a rival from the very beginning, and James realized that he would have to court her as much as Laura herself. He organized an expedition to the ice-rink, but when they were there Adamina made it clear that he was enjoying it much more than she was (which was certainly true). Then he arranged a visit to Whipsnade Zoo, only for Adamina to refuse to go at the last minute, and they had to cancel the trip.
Despite Laura’s warning that it was pointless, James brought fruit and sweets and drinks to the cottage, all of which Adamina spurned as if he were tempting her from a religious fast, until in a minor victory she sneaked a sip of sweet pear juice when no one was looking, finished off the bottle in one ecstatic splurge, and told him by the way that if he insisted on bringing all that stuff she might be prepared to drink a little bit of pear juice, now and again, just to make him feel better.
James sometimes came to Laura’s cottage late only to find Adamina still up, prolonging bedtime by fooling around, getting stuck in her pyjamas, pretending she’d gone senile and couldn’t find her bedroom. Laura told her off while laughing in the same breath, and said, yes, she could stay in Mummy’s bed again tonight; then James and Laura had to sleep together on an improvised mattress of blankets and sheets on the sitting-room floor. Or else Adamina feigned sleeplessness or an upset tummy, kept coming through to the sitting-room, wanting to sit in front of the fire in Laura’s arms, saying: ‘I can’t sleep, Mummy,’ even when it was clear that it was only an extraordinary force of will that was keeping her awake at all. And while she lay there in her mother’s lap she sneaked a look at James, a brief half-smile, just enough to let him know that she was the one in control of things around here, including her mother’s heart, and he was an impostor.
James wanted to say something but he didn’t know how to. Laura sometimes got annoyed with Adamina but in the end she always relented to Adamina’s armoury of tactics, which were both persuasive and various, and if one looked like it might not work, then she changed gear abruptly and moved on to another, from insomnia to indigestion, bad dreams to existential despair, wailing: ‘They told us in school, the universe is thirty billion light years across, Mummy, and it’s all dangerous.’ Until her mother succumbed. It was worst after she spent the first Sunday of December with her father. She came back with both her language and her behaviour roughened, treated James with open hostility, ignored him, swore at him (which, to his consternation, made Laura laugh). Then she was surly with her mother but also softer too, asking if Laura liked having a day without her and why didn’t they live with her father?
‘Can’t you and Robert live together because of me?’ she asked. ‘Is it my fault, Mummy?’
‘No, honey, no,’ Laura assured her, ‘I love you, I adore you.’ She hugged her daughter, who sneaked a look at James. The two of them drew closer together again, with James locked out.
James was perplexed by this little adversary. They circled each other, circled around Laura, looking for cracks in the other’s resistance. But only Adamina jabbed forward. She scribbled his name in big letters with a bright felt-tip pen in library books he forgot at the cottage; one morning she hid his shoes under the sink in the bathroom and then while James was looking everywhere for them, cursing that he was already late to meet someone in town, she told Laura that that nasty dog of Sam’s and Amy’s had let himself into the cottage, he was up to his tricks, maybe he’d taken them.
When Laura dropped in to see James with Adamina the following Saturday he was in the middle of printing, and Adamina stayed in the darkroom with him, making him explain what he was doing and letting her help him. The infrared seemed to soothe her.
When he’d finished, Adamina ate the lunch Laura had been preparing in the kitchen, while James and Laura chatted in the sitting-room. Laura regarded herself as a woman free of sentimentality. Without realizing it, however, she had begun to utter endearments and whisper cute profanities in her lover’s ear which, if she heard someone else use them, would have made her cringe. Now while they whispered and laughed louder than they thought they were doing Adamina in the kitchen emptied a bottle of whisky down the sink, rinsed it, and filled it with pear juice (which had incidentally relieved the constipation of her unhealthy diet) from the fridge. James flew off the handle and Adamina burst into tears, explaining to Laura through her sobs that she only wanted to make James feel that she appreciated his gifts.
She was an unpredictable opponent, spurning his approaches of affection yet also badgering him to play games with her.
‘Tell me a joke,’ she demanded.
‘What tree smells?’
‘Don’t know.’
‘A lavatree.’
To James’ delight she laughed as loudly as he did.
‘I’ve got another one,’ he said. ‘See if you can get this one,’ he enthused. ‘What fish is musical?’
Adamina shrugged, and sighed.
‘A tuna fish,’ James said, and started to fall about. Adamina, though, looked at him with a disdainful expression, raised her eyebrows, and said: ‘What’s so funny about that? It’s stupid. Mummy,’ she called, ‘did you hear that? James’ jokes are stupid.’
On the other hand Adamina cornered James and made him listen to rambling stories she made up as she went along that had neither point nor punchline, and asked him riddles to which there was no answer.
‘How old am I?’
‘Six.’
‘No.’
‘Five?’
‘No.’
‘I give up.’
‘You can’t!’
‘Nine? Twelve? Twenty-seven?’
‘No, no, no.’
‘I don’t know, I give up.’
‘You’re not allowed to!’
She was playing for time to invent an explanation for the riddle, but she couldn’t, she didn’t have the brainpower, so when even Adamina herself tired and said, ‘Yes!’ to James’ weary ‘Fifty-three?’ and he asked her why, she came up with some nonsensical, unsatisfying answer. She reminded James of his sister Alice.
They circled each other, feinting, parrying, retreating; circling around Laura. Through those hurried weeks James and Laura – despite the interruptions – shared their bodies and their secrets, and James felt a mix of exhilaration and fear as he realized that their separate destinies were becoming intertwined, were being tugged forward and spliced together; and at a speed that was just out of control. The one thing they didn’t share, the only thing James couldn’t raise, was his suspicion that Adamina was an obstacle to their relationship.
* * *
The three of them went away for a long weekend to Devon in the middle of December. They took a circuitous route there, visiting farms mentioned in Patrick Rance’s Book of British Che
ese, and James discovered that Laura had a puritanical streak: she needed a reason for a brief holiday; once she was able to call it a research trip she felt less guilty about taking time off.
‘Curse of the self-employed,’ James sympathized.
‘You’re self-employed,’ she replied.
‘I’m a workaholic and a lazy sod,’ he said.
‘You take your camera everywhere,’ she pointed out.
‘That’s true,’ he admitted.
James said he hated cars but Laura persuaded him it was time he learned to drive: she put L-plates on her VW Golf and gave him lessons along the back lanes. It was a disaster. James was always braking, accelerating, lurching back and forth, an irredeemably jerky driver; as with his dancing, he observed, behind the wheel he responded to each junction, traffic light and corner as if it had just appeared unexpectedly in the road before him; he was forever improvising. Whereas Laura, at ease in life (if clumsy on the dance floor, which was where the analogy broke down), cruised along the road. She registered obstacles well in advance and slowed down imperceptibly, or spotted an opening up ahead and accelerated smoothly towards it.
‘You remind me of your mother in her kitchen,’ James told Laura, ‘with her flowing movements. When you drive, the car floats.’ Whereupon, feeling utterly safe while hurtling through space at 80 mph, James dozed off. When Laura braked, her left arm came across in front of James, in barely conscious protectiveness, as she had once done with Adamina (who now sat in the back seat, belted in). While when she let him drive, Laura was unable to stop herself from scrutinizing the road more keenly than when she was behind the wheel, and emerged from the passenger seat with her clenched knees aching.
Eventually Laura plucked up the courage to tell James she realized she’d rather drive than be a passenger any day, she never got tired driving so she didn’t even need a rest, and maybe it wasn’t so important for him to be able to give Adamina lifts after all. She was as tactful as possible because she knew that the only thing people hate more than being told they’re a bad driver is that they lack a sense of humour.
‘Suits me,’ James replied happily. ‘If you’re really sure. I’m a crap driver; I hate cars.’
It was the same on foot. James and Laura walked at different speeds, and had to learn to walk together comfortably, because at first James strode ahead without noticing: he’d done so much walking alone in his life, striding forward with his camera at the ready, eyes seeking rectangular compositions in the fluid world before him. Laura found herself forgotten in his wake and had to shout at him, ‘Hang on, Harry Dean Stanton. What’s the hurry, James? Jesus, we’re not due anywhere you know, we’re just walking out. We’re on holiday.’ Sometimes she stopped walking and waited, arms folded, until James eventually recalled that he was one of a pair, and he turned round to see Laura’s sardonic posture in the middle distance.
James carried Adamina on his shoulders when she was tired of walking across Dartmoor as the sun lowered to the horizon, and the shadows of a tor stretched across the sea-green moor. Laura’s research continued with visits to the kitchens of National Trust houses at Saltram, Buckland Abbey and Castle Drogo: she checked out the menus provided in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and they marvelled at what were once innovative labour-saving gadgets: mechanical spits and trivets on the kitchen range; tin-plated graters and peelers, corers and slicers.
‘How on earth did they make such feasts with these?’ James wondered.
‘They had another labour-saving device,’ Laura pointed out. ‘Called servants.’
On meandering drives around the moors and along the coast they played car games, in which James and Adamina discovered an affinity from which Laura was excluded: she was prosaic, choosing ‘I spy’ objects she knew Adamina could guess if she thought logically, regarding such games as educational. Whereas Adamina needed only the slightest prompting from James to fly off into her imagination: instead of thinking of objects, people or animals she thought of a joke James had told her earlier (Q: ‘What’s yellow and stupid?’ A: ‘Thick custard’) or the look on Natalie’s face a few days before when she’d taken a sip of Simon’s camomile tea.
While James stretched his arms back behind the passenger seat for Adamina to slap high-fives on his palms Laura complained: ‘But Mina, it’s supposed to be animal, vegetable or mineral; it’s supposed to be real, honey.’
‘Natalie’s face was real, Mummy,’ Adamina told her.
‘Of course it was,’ James agreed.
A lot of the time, though, Adamina nodded off on the back seat – perhaps she hadn’t entirely outgrown the days Laura got her to sleep as a baby by driving round the block. While Adamina snoozed behind them James and Laura continued the process of revealing themselves to each other, a car cruising through December afternoon darkness an isolated, intimate chamber.
‘What do you want, James?’ Laura asked.
‘How? In what way?’
‘What’s your fantasy life? You know, if you won the Pools, or when we have this lottery they’re talking about.’
‘I’m happy now,’ he told her.
‘Oh, come on, play the game, spoilsport, now I’ve got one I like,’ she pressed him.
The only thing James could imagine that he really wanted was Laura.
‘Well,’ he began, ‘I guess I’d like a big house in the country, with a wood of beeches and birches—’
‘In the country?’ she interrupted. ‘I thought you were a complete townie, James, and you were never going to leave the town. That’s what Zoe told me. That nothing would make you leave.’
‘That’s true,’ James admitted, ‘but this is a fantasy game, isn’t it? And I’m trying to play it.’
‘OK. What else do you want?’
‘Let me think. There’s a football pitch in the back garden, not full-size, but five-a-side, with floodlights and vivid green grass and lime-white lines. And there are animals, lots of animals, not a farm but like a sanctuary, an Ark. And children, plenty of children, too. I’d have table-tennis in a large room so that a bunch of people could play round the table without bumping into things. I’d want a bed so big I could get lost in it. Just for the pleasure of finding you again.’
James realized he’d got carried away and made a mistake – that maybe Laura didn’t want it assumed that she’d be in the bed of his fantasy future; don’t cramp her.
‘A darkroom,’ he added hurriedly. ‘With the most modern equipment, of course. And a bathroom with a big sunken Roman bath, and shelves of smelly soaps and oils and foaming liquids. And flowers in every room, provided daily by the gardener.’ James paused.
‘Is that all?’ Laura asked.
‘No,’ he answered. ‘I could carry on,’ he said, and he did, enumerating objects of desire that were no part of any ambition he had, not even of fantasy, really, it was simply a banal vision he was improvising on the spur of the moment, in order to avoid mentioning the one thing he did want. It was hard to avoid it, since he saw Laura lounging in the Roman bath, the photographs he was developing in his hi-tech darkroom were of her, and the flowers were meaningless unless she inhaled their scent.
‘What about the kitchen?’ Laura suggested. ‘You haven’t mentioned that.’
‘Oh, no. No kitchen,’ James replied. ‘I’d live on takeaways.’
‘In the country?’
‘You said I was rich, so I’d pay over the odds. And tip the despatch riders generously, to make it worth their while.’
‘A house is no home without a kitchen,’ Laura said.
‘Well, OK, I’ll have a kitchen, but then I’ll need a cook. Hey, you could apply for the job.’
‘Thank you very much.’
‘You’d need bloody good references,’ he warned her.
‘Fair enough.’
‘I could give you one if you want. Don’t know if it’d do you any good.’
‘You’re too kind, sir.’
‘Let’s change the subject,’ James suggest
ed.
‘But it’s my—’
‘I know!’ James cut her short. ‘Desert Island Discs.’
‘You start then,’ she frowned.
‘Bach: Goldberg Variations.’
‘Bach sounds like clockwork, James. No soul. My turn. The Pogues: “Thousands are Sailing”.’
‘They’re drunken louts, Laura. They play out of tune. Kate Bush: “Running Up That Hill”.’
‘Well, she sounds certifiably mad to me. Miles Davis: Concierto de Aranjuez.’
‘Jazz? I don’t get it. I can’t hear it.’
‘It’s your loss.’
‘You’re probably right. The Clash: I don’t know which one.’
‘That’s just noise, all that punk stuff. What’s it got to do with music? Maria Callas, singing … I don’t know either. We can come back to those. Next.’
‘Elgar: Cello Concerto.’
‘Everyone chooses that.’
‘It’s beautiful, Laura.’
‘It’s too English.’
‘Too English?’
‘Robert Wyatt: “Shipbuilding”.’
‘That’s OK.’
‘Thanks, James.’
‘I wouldn’t choose it.’
James tried to put a Bach tape in the cassette player.
‘You do, and you can bloody drive,’ Laura warned him. ‘And I’ll put on earmuffs.’
‘I want to share these things with you,’ James complained.
Laura nearly told him that this overbearing need was a legacy from his father, but restrained herself. ‘I love you for you,’ she said, ‘not for your taste in soporific music.’
