As she reached the headland it started to rain and she turned inland and slightly back on herself to cut her losses and join the road this side. As she trudged over the shallow dunes she could see the edge of the golf course, now veiled in fine, sifting drizzle, and the three women came into view, striding out briskly with heads down, hoods up and golf trolleys in tow. They conveyed the impression that nothing short of a full-scale blizzard would prevent them from finishing their game.
It was another half an hour’s stiff walking, and coming up to four o’clock when she got back, to find the Rolls pulled up outside with its driver lying back in the reclined front seat, eyes closed, a cigar between his fingers and Rachmaninov pouring from the stereo.
She walked straight past him, unlocked the front door, and closed it after her. Two minutes later as she stuffed yesterday’s Daily Mrrior into her sodden boots, he knocked and came in. The thunderous knock and the entry were always synchronised, sounding as though he’d forced the door with his shoulder like some hotheaded television cop. The door banged shut. She didn’t look up as he came into the kitchen, but stood her boots carefully upright on the boiler, their uppers resting against the flue pipe, her socks draped over the top.
‘You look gorgeous doing that,’ he said with a growly Glaswegian inflection, as if lodging a complaint.
Still without looking at him she went to the sink and ran her hands under the hot tap. Then dried them. ‘You’re easily pleased.’
‘I am not.’
‘Drink?’
‘No, thanks, I don’t have long.’
‘Excuse me.’ She went past him in the doorway. He was smoking the cigar, with his free hand in the pocket of his historically dilapidated waxed jacket, and he made no move to touch her, but she nonetheless sucked herself small as she went by so that there was a couple of inches between them. Still in her bare feet she went into the living room and knelt down to light the fire, conscious of him following and watching her from a distance.
‘Where’ve you been?’
‘Out for a walk.’
‘You and your walks . . .’
‘It’s what people come here for.’ She applied a match, shook it out. ‘Most people.’
‘Do I detect a note of censure?’
She cast him a sardonic look over her shoulder. ‘Moi?’
‘Toi, my tatty. My stroppy little neep.’
She placed pieces of coal on the burning wigwam of sticks and paper. ‘What do you do all day when you’re here?’
‘I rise late, drink and eat, smoke rather fewer of these—’ he indicated the cigar ‘—but relish them more, admire the scenery through various windows, take the occasional boat trip, and cook simple but sensational meals.’
‘While at all times preserving your self-esteem.’ She dusted her hands and stood up.
‘Naturally.’ He moved to the fire and threw in his cigar butt. ‘Stella, are we going to fuck? Because frankly I’ve got a bone like a dinosaur rib and I don’t have all day.’
Afterwards she got herself a glass of wine which he declined on the grounds that it might incriminate him. He never referred to his wife, but instead made these unashamed, almost bullish references to the process of deception in which both he and Stella were implicated. In this he was better and worse than most of the other married men she’d slept with. Better because he was at least frank, and did not heap responsibility for his own behaviour on to his wife by listing her shortcomings; worse, because the effect of this was to reduce their meetings to the level of no more than a successful scam – an uncomfortably honest dishonesty.
Stella was used to being adored, and to not giving a shit. In Robert Vitello’s case there seemed a distinct likelihood that it was the other way about.
She didn’t, of course, adore him, but there was the odd thing about him she adored. She liked – indeed found irresistible – his fierce, ugly, intelligent looks, his foxy pointed face with its high colour and sharp eyes, and his red hair (something she had always previously loathed), which was receding at the temples on either side of an already pronounced widow’s peak. She was turned on by his voice – groiny but with the words enunciated diamond-sharp, a voice designed to cut the crap. She admired his cleverness, which he himself took for granted, and warmed to his complete lack of physical vanity. His unconcern about appearances extended to his lovemaking which was that of a far younger man – selflessly ardent and absorbed. She weakened at his touch, and at the sight of his touch – his large, corded hands, more like an artisan’s than a doctor’s, that moved over her own pale skin in a particular intense, focused way he had, as if he were reading her mind through her body.
And she was in danger of being read. For the first time she was a man’s to command and she strove hard and constantly – she believed successfully – not to let him see it.
He looked at his watch, which he never removed. ‘Ten minutes to pumpkin.’
‘Why don’t you go now?’ The watch irritated her, it had become a symbol of his condition, as relentless as an electronic tag.
‘Would you like me to?’
She shrugged.
‘In that case, since it’s a matter of indifference to you and I’d quite like a few more sticky moments, I’ll hang on.’
Slightly nettled, she said: ‘What are you doing here at this time anyway?’
‘Making whoopee with you.’
‘I mean, how come you’re free?’
‘I have my methods.’ He turned his head on the pillow and she felt rather than saw him grin. ‘Questions, questions.’
‘I have my reasons.’
‘Sex and backchat, what a woman . . .’ He licked the side of her arm, a long lick like a lion washing. ‘Have you decided how long you’re staying yet?’
‘No. I like it here, and I’m getting some work done, but real life will be camping out at my door when I get back.’
‘Do you know,’ he said, suddenly chatty, ‘I can’t imagine your real life. The life of a creative person. A life without imperatives. Doing a job that’s only there once you’ve done it, because you put it there in the first place.’
‘Is that what you think it is?’
‘It’s a way of looking at it for a non-creative person like me.’
‘I do have imperatives.’ She liked having this sort of discussion with him, found it sexy and combative. ‘I have to make money and fulfil expectations just like anyone else.’
‘Your song in the pub wasn’t about money, though.’
‘The impulse behind it wasn’t money, but the song will have to pay its way in the end.’
‘Poor little song.’ He lurched upright so that her wine slopped. ‘Sorry – got to go.’
She didn’t answer but got out of bed before he did, pulled on her dressing gown and took her wine glass to the kitchen. Outside it was dusk.
He came down the stairs, flop, flop, flop, and picked up his waxed jacket from the chair in the hall. She felt messy and vulnerable in her old dressing gown, and folded her arms across her chest. When he’d put on the jacket he prised her arms apart and pushed his hands inside the gown to cover her breasts.
‘Woman in a dressing gown. Sluttish . . . Great.’
She shut her eyes for a moment and hoped he didn’t see. Then he closed the front of the gown, crossed her arms again as though she were a doll, said, ‘Take care,’ and was gone.
It was a new experience for her, this melancholy when left alone. She was more used to experiencing elation on a man’s departure – no matter how great the sex, freedom was better. She felt it in her skin, which tightened as a defence against their neediness, and breathed again once they were gone. They might not ask anything specific from her, but that was because what they wanted was everything. They wanted her body and soul to make them feel wonderful again, to give them back something they’d lost. And whatever they thought had happened with her, she knew that it was something she did to them, before detaching herself and sending them on their way.
It was five-thirty, no-man’s-land. She poured herself a glass of whisky, lit a cigarette and sat on the floor by the fire which wasn’t drawing properly this afternoon, sending up only a few sulky pale flames and a column of dank smoke. It occurred to her that one way of wresting back the initiative would be to leave the island before he did.
Halfway between Stella’s house and his own, Robert pulled over and stopped. He passed his hand over his hair and sniffed it. Rubbed his sweater and did the same. Did he smell of her? She didn’t seem to wear perfume, but every person had their particular scent, as singular and identifiable as a fingerprint. There were no marks on him, he was sure of that, even at her wildest she didn’t bite or scratch. Remembering a little ruefully their first time, he was sure that she was the veteran of many such encounters, accustomed out of habit to leave no scars. He almost wished that she would – that he could make her lose it enough to break his skin, give him something to carry away and find excuses for. A reason to deny her.
He turned the stereo on and Rachmaninov once more flooded the car: a composer with a hotline to the emotions. He let the music swirl round and through him. It was a long time, years, since his own feelings had been so ferociously, intensely engaged, and he’d forgotten what it was that people did, or how they played it. Also, a long-ingrained habit of self-protection meant that he was waiting for signs from her which she might never give. He couldn’t read her, didn’t know what she was up to. Sometimes in bed there was something, he wasn’t sure . . . But it was never articulated and he felt rebuffed, as though maybe she had been thinking of somebody else.
He brought nothing, he took nothing. If Sian were to say: ‘Is there someone else?’ he would of course say ‘No’ – and it wouldn’t be entirely a lie.
When he got back Sian was sitting, still in her tartan golfing trousers, with her feet curled up on the sofa, reading her enormous, challenging, away-from-home novel. She wore her bifocals. As he entered she turned a page and then held out a hand to him without lifting her eyes from the book.
He took it: cool, trusting, familiar. She had what he had once heard described as a lucky palm, as smooth as an egg. In the early days of their relationship the feel of those hands, their satiny integrity, had driven him wild with desire. Now they were just her, like her little pinned-back lobeless ears, her ‘pixie ears’ he used to call them, and her long second toe, and the minute dusting of dark hairs along the line of her upper lip. Until relatively recently these hairs still had the power to move him; he was wounded when she went to some clinic or other and had them removed by electrolysis. But when she’d decided to do something she did it, and though she was teasingly sorry about thwarting his little fetish, the hairs had not been seen since.
She rubbed the back of his hand with her thumb. She did that. He always felt that she might be taking his emotional temperature by doing so. But when she eventually glanced up all she said was: ‘Do you feel like making us a cup of tea?’ And he went to the kitchen, glad of something to do.
Stella decided to stay for another fortnight. In that time she calculated that with a following wind she could compose another three or four good songs and some odds and ends that would reward further attention when she got back to London.
She also set herself some other targets: to sing again at the Harbour Light; to walk the whole perimeter of the island, not necessarily in one go; to treat herself to dinner at the restaurant in the big house; to be grown up and ring her agent, Alan Mercer; and to level with Robert Vitelio.
Alan was surprisingly bobbish about her prospects. ‘There’s someone I want you to meet.’
‘What if I don’t want to meet anyone?’
‘Darling heart, you love meeting people.’
‘So you keep telling me.’
‘Lucky you. What it is to have at your disposal a man who knows you better than you know yourself!’
Stella took a beat. ‘Who is it?’
‘Wait and see.’
‘Alan – I’ve been working up here. On my own. It’s been bliss. It’s reminded me how nice it is not to have to consult and confer.’
‘Ah,’ he said maddeningly, ‘quite, but I’m talking yes-man.’
This remark had the twin effects, wholly intended, of making her vehemently deny that a yes-man was what she wanted, and piquing her interest as to the sort of yes-man Alan had found. They fixed on a date for the meeting.
Walking the perimeter of the island took her three days in fits and starts and on the third of these she got back to find a note from Robert. It was written in his rapid, raggedy black handwriting on the back of a ferry timetable.
‘More bloody walking, I suppose. We go back in a couple of days. Any chance of seeing you before then? I’ll call.’
He rang the following morning at six-thirty, from a phone box.
‘What the hell do you mean ringing at this hour?’ she complained, standing shivering in her pyjamas in the hall while every chink in the house’s armour whined in a strafing nor’wester.
‘I’ve been out in the fishing boat.’
‘Are you off your trolley? It must be force ten out there!’
‘Nothing like. But brisk enough to be interesting. I’ll bring you a herring.’
‘Keep your damn’ herring, I should be in bed.’
‘Exactly. Any chance of breakfast?’
‘Not if you’re after the full monty. You can get yourself tea and toast.’
‘I’m on my way.’
She took the door off the latch, went back to bed and waited for him. Fifteen minutes later he burst in, ran up the stairs two at a time, pulled off layers of sodden, salt-smelling clothing and got in with her, wrapping her in his chilly limbs and pressing his cold wet nose into her neck till she bristled with goose-pimples, before growling ‘Bugger breakfast’ and falling asleep with his erection subsiding against her thigh.
She let him sleep for half an hour, then extricated herself and went downstairs where she made up a tray with tea and toast spread with peanut butter, though what the hell she was doing waiting on him she couldn’t imagine.
‘Hey.’ She put the tray on the floor and shook his shoulder roughly. ‘Wake up.’
He sat bolt upright immediately, and she could tell from his eyes that for a nanosecond he was disorientated and didn’t know where he was.
‘What time is it?’ He looked at his watch. ‘Christ, woman, you let me sleep!’
‘Not for long.’ She watched in amazement as he threw back the bedclothes and staggered to his feet on the far side of the bed. ‘And I didn’t “let” you do anything. You fell asleep on me. I got your damn’ breakfast. I woke you up.’
‘Too late now,’ he snapped, as though sweeping aside a confession. He began blundering about the room, dragging on his clothes, cursing their wetness, overbalancing and catching himself on the end of the bed. Determined not to be drawn in she sat down on the chair by the dressing table. She hated him.
Hated him.
Hauling on his socks, he tottered and put one foot down on the edge of the tray, sending tea and milk all over the floor.
‘Bugger!’
He gave the tray a kick and the stuff went everywhere. Stella darted forward, picked up one of the china mugs and threw it at his head. It missed, but caught him on the elbow with a hard, satisfying sound. She half expected it to be thrown back, but other than grunting with pain he ignored it.
A minute later he’d gone.
She told herself that she didn’t expect to see him again, and didn’t care. Only the first of these was true, but she was sufficiently battle-hardened to know that the second would become true, given time. If she had been granted one wish it would have been t
o turn back the clock, not make the tea and toast, and to have gone back to sleep herself How she would have lain there, watching lazily as he acted out his little charade. How she would have yawned and stretched and told him to take it easy. How she would have burrowed tranquilly beneath the duvet as he thundered down the stairs. How she would have put the rude, self-dramatising bastard in his place.
The dinner out that she’d promised herself seemed itself something of a charade in the light of all this. What had been a feisty scheme for self-indulgence after weeks of jacket potatoes, baked beans and stoneground bread now looked like a sad and lonely stab at fun. But she rang and booked herself a table in a spirit of see-if-I-care.
Driving over the island on an unusually clear night with stars as big as lanterns she told herself that this jaunt was by any standards an aberration. In London she would no sooner have booked a table for one in the kind of restaurant this undoubtedly was, than flown. For some reason she found this a comfort. Normal rules did not apply.
But she was unprepared for the poshness of the place. A drive wound up between pines to a Jacobean house of glowing magnificence, tastefully floodlit, its golden windows like small stages filled with well-heeled actors.
She pulled up outside, peering crossly out of the car window. She wore one of her long velvet dresses, but it was not a long dress as the staff or patrons of this establishment – the establishment – would understand it. She had bought it in a flea market. It did not signify formality, rather the opposite, and the seam in the left armpit had opened as she was putting it on. She was overcome by a sudden powerful nostalgia for the mean streets of North London, their mess and mixture and teeming anonymity. A place where one belonged by not belonging. She felt not so much déclassé as rebellious. She almost wished that she had not put on the dress at all but stayed in her jeans or one of her ragged skirts so that some poxy hotel functionary would take issue with her. She could picture herself saying, ‘That’s quite all right, you’ve told me all I need to know,’ or something like it, and steaming out into the night, absolved of the need to make any further effort . . . On the other hand she had come this far, she had money, so to speak, in her back pocket and her empty stomach was leaning on her backbone.
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