by Jane Rogers
“Are you trying to make a mountain range?” he joked.
“No – just to fit an awful lot into a small space.”
The area seemed huge to him. “Who will use it, anyway, now everyone who used to live here has been rehoused and demolished?”
She laughed. “It’s the same all around. This bit was no different to what’s left on all sides, except that there was no functioning industry left. It’ll be used. The primary school on Lawrence Street over there has got seven hundred and fifty kids for a start. They sent the two hundred who were left at Tandown Primary, the field study place, over there, but they didn’t get any more space to put them in. They’ve got an asphalt yard the size of three tennis courts, and wire netting to peer through. You wouldn’t keep seven hundred and fifty monkeys in such conditions.”
Her incisive accuracy on such matters always gave him a jolt. She knew the area inside and out; she knew the numbers of preschool children who would waddle down to throw crusts at the ducks and fight for the swings, and armed with the figures for the old-age-pensioner population she had waged a private battle for a walled blind garden to be constructed at one end. It would be filled with sweet-scented plants in waist-high beds, with bench seating around them, she said. The suggestion had been clipped and pinched for financial reasons. She explained to him how she and Ron, her section head, had modified the drawings. Her knowledge was too precise to allow his irony scope. He found himself envying her her commitment, that her work was a living thing – almost like a child, he imagined. This area was like a wounded child that she cradled in her brain, imagining and exulting over its development. Her enthusiasm made her magnetic.
When they got back to the road he asked her if she wanted a drink, but she said no. She was going to see a friend.
“Who?”
“You don’t know her. A girl called Vicky.”
“Well can’t you see her later?”
“No. I said I’d be there for seven.”
“Oh.”
There was a silence.
“Who is she?” he asked, searching for some way round the problem.
“I was at college with her. She’s got a stall on the market – she –”
“Caro?”
“Yes?”
“Why don’t we go out properly one night? I mean, for the evening – for a meal?”
They were standing beside Alan’s car. Caro turned away from him, towards the dark shop window flanking the pavement. It was a butcher’s. She studied the empty white trays and plastic tomatoes carefully.
“Is it a good idea?”
“No, it’s a terrible idea. I think we’d both be bored stiff. That’s why I suggested it.”
She was quiet again, then she said slowly, “Not – not in the evening. Why don’t we go out in the day – on Saturday or something?”
“What’s the difference?” He knew there was one, that she was trying to force something on him.
“I’d prefer it.”
“Why?”
“Because –” She hesitated. “Because there are assumptions about how you behave and what happens when you go out for the evening which – which there aren’t in the day.”
He laughed. “I asked you out for a meal, not an orgy.”
“OK.” To his surprise, she suddenly laughed. “I wouldn’t like anything to happen that you hadn’t intended. Better make it lunch. Where shall we meet?”
“I – I’ll pick you up. You’re a manipulative baggage.”
“No I’m not. You were trying to be. I’ll see you at twelve.” She crossed the road quickly and disappeared in search of her bicycle. Driving home, he found himself still slightly shocked by the way the conversation had gone, the change in direction which he had not reckoned with.
When Alan knocked at the door of the Red House the following morning, Caro answered it and came out immediately, slamming the door behind her. It was a warm morning, but the sky was solid with curdled white cloud, creating an unpleasantly bright glare. She glanced up, shielding her eyes.
“I don’t need a mac, do I?”
“No – no, there will be brilliant sunshine this afternoon.”
“Really,” she said ironically, and smiled.
They got into the car and Alan dangled the keys in his fingers. “Well?”
“Well what?”
She was wearing strange trousers, he thought. They were dark green with a thin gold stripe running through them, and they seemed enormously baggy. As she stretched out her legs in the car he noticed that the full material was gathered into a tight cuff just above each ankle. It made her ankles seem thinner and more fragile than ever. “Why do you wear such silly shoes?”
“Well, why do you wear such silly shoes? Is that the question? Because they’re comfortable and I like them.” She was wearing flat black pumps. “Why do you think they’re silly?”
“They look like a three-year-old’s; my daughter wears shoes like that for PE.”
“And what d’you think I should wear?”
“Oh – some nice strappy sandals, something like that. Something grown-up.”
“You really have the most incredible cheek. Shall I tell you what you look like?”
“Oh please – yes.”
She gave a little snort and looked away from him, out of the window. “Most women’s shoes are both uncomfortable and physically harmful.”
“Ah, but we all know you have to suffer to look beautiful.”
She glanced at him and saw that he was smiling. “Oh, piss off.”
“Like taking sweets off a baby, isn’t it?”
“You haven’t seen my feet anyway.”
“No. You always keep them in three-year-old’s shoes.”
She braced her heels against the car floor and slid her feet out of the pumps. There were three toes missing off the right foot, and a shiny mauve scar.
“Oh God – I’m sorry Caro –”
“It’s all right,” she said, turning the foot and examining it. “It’s just not beautiful – although it has suffered, I must say. It’s the one that got run over. I don’t mind it any more. But it sometimes gives people a funny turn, so I keep it in a shoe rather than on general display.” She put her shoes back on.
Alan leaned back in his seat. “Good. Right. Now you’ve made me feel like a worm, where are we going?”
“If you didn’t mind a bit of a drive – we could go out to Gratton Hall. There’s a pub there, and they do food.”
“Where is it?”
“It’s a stately home and garden – out towards the airport. You must have seen it. . . . To be honest, I’d like a look at their gardens. It’s somewhere I’ve always thought I’d go to on a free day, you know, and there never are any.”
He started the engine. “And you thought I’d come in handy as chauffeur and porter.”
She glanced at him then leaned back in her seat. “That’s right.”
“You never know when I’m joking, do you?”
“I never know when you’re serious, you mean.”
The Hall was surrounded by a rolling park with scattered clumps of trees and sheep, like a toy landscape made big. There was no one in sight, although the car park, when they reached it, was half full.
“Where are they all?”
“In the Hall looking at stately treasures? I don’t know.”
It would be easy enough, Alan reflected, to find a private place in a park that size. Somewhere among the trees and bushes and tall grass. . . . He had told Carolyn he was going out for lunch with a crowd from work. That gave him licence to return early or late. But what was going to happen? He could not imagine at all how the afternoon would develop, and the lack of knowledge manifested itself physically as a hollow in his belly, as if he were about to do or not do something irrevocable – crouching in an aeroplane gazing down through the open hatch at the distant countryside below, and waiting to see if he was capable or not of jumping. Caro seemed very self-contained. When they got out the car she walked over to
a map of the grounds that was displayed on the wall, and studied it. He leaned against the car, watching her and waiting. She looked striking, he thought, with her baggy trousers, red shirt, and boyish hair. He liked the way she was standing, with her hands deep in her pockets and her head back looking at the map, and then the way she came walking back, smiling. She looks as if she doesn’t care who sees her, he thought. He had noticed that other people stared at her, men especially.
“Why are you smiling?” she wanted to know.
“I was wondering if people stare at you because you’re a weirdo or because you’re phenomenally attractive.”
She pulled a face. “Come on.” She led the way across the car park.
“You don’t like compliments, do you?”
“I – I don’t know. I suppose I do. But they embarrass me. There are compliments and compliments, anyway, aren’t there?”
“Meaning?”
“Well, when you sit back like that and stare at me as if I was – oh – an exotic animal of some kind, a sex object, rather than a person – it’s offensive.” She hesitated. “But –”
“But?”
“But then I quite like it if you like to look at me. Which is contradictory, isn’t it?”
“You are a sex object to me. I fancy you something rotten.”
She laughed.
“Bad, isn’t it?” he continued. “I find the trouble with sex is that it’s dreadfully sexist. You know, things like the male finding the female body attractive.”
“Well if you only fancy me –”
“Of course I only fancy you. Can’t you tell I’m after your body? Why else would I invite you out for –” he dropped his voice to an outraged whisper “– a meal? Certainly not to have you preach feminism at me.”
“Oh, I’m a pale version of a feminist. You should meet Clare.”
“I’d rather not.”
They stopped at a kiosk and Caro paid for the tickets to go into the gardens. She bought a leaflet and stood just inside the gate reading it, while Alan stared at the rows of ugly houseplants for sale on a display stand. His head was full of banter and quick replies, like flies buzzing around foolishly above the surface of deep water; “What next? and what next? and what next?” – and underneath it a calm deep stillness, like a paralysis, a spot where your life stands still for a moment before it moves on or changes course, beyond the realms of your control, and the buzzing surface flies.
Caro finished her leaflet and began to walk around the side of the building. He caught up with her, and she started to explain the layout of the garden to him. Her words drifted past him lightly. When she stopped there was a silence. They had come out on to a wide lawn, which led down to a view of tree tops. Two giant cedars stood on the lawn, their greenness almost black against the white sky. They both stopped. Alan touched her arm. “Hold hands?”
She nodded without looking at him, and he clasped his hand lightly around her arm then slid it down so that their palms met, and stuck together.
“Your hand is very hot.”
“Yes. And yours.”
They spoke without looking at each other, standing rigidly still with clasped hands, staring down at the view. At last he said, “Are we going to move?” and in moving it was possible to turn and embrace almost naturally, folding their arms around each other. They separated awkwardly and began to walk towards a pathway that led to the right, between trees, to another lawn.
“Look,” she said, pointing to the high wall that ran along to their right.
He looked. It was a red brick wall.
“Yes?”
“It – It’s got fireplaces in it – at the end of each section. Those urns on top are chimney pots. To keep the frost off the fruit trees – the gardeners used to cultivate apricots.”
“Oh.” He didn’t know what she was talking about. She had brought them here. She must know what would happen. They walked in silence past the flowerbeds; the flowers were white, then red, then yellow, all of one colour together.
“You’re very quiet,” she said after a while.
“I’m all right.”
“Do you mind if I look at the flowerbeds?”
“I – no. No. I’m going to sit here and look at the view.”
“OK.”
He sat on the bench by the gravel path and watched her walk quickly along to the end of the beds. She stopped by the last one, bending over and examining the flowers. Then she crouched down, raising the head of a full heavy bloom with her fingers, and inspecting it. The image of her filled his whole head. A blurred crouching figure, with hand outstretched and head down-tilted, absorbed. Like Carolyn with one of the children, he realized. Like Carolyn. In a vision of devastating clarity (hallucination? what was it, that stayed so doggedly vivid through all the flickering joy and anger and despair and drunkenness that followed) he saw that they were the same; Caro and Carolyn. What you see with the right eye when the left is shut, and what you see with the left eye when the right is shut, come together with a jump when you open both eyes: twenty twenty vision. And so (delusion, that he could never be undeluded from, although his rational brain dismissed it on the instant as a dodge to escape guilt) he could not hurt Carolyn. Because in loving Caro he loved her too, the love did not harm her, could not give her cause for jealousy. They were the same.
When she stood up and moved on to the next bed he stood too, to shake himself free of the idiotic thought. He felt suddenly clear and incisive. It would be all right. They would make love. There was no point in worrying any more about what might happen. He walked quickly towards her.
“Well, are they up to standard?”
She smiled and came towards him. “They’re beautiful. But look at all those dead heads over there – they should be taken off.”
Alan linked his arm through hers. “Come away before you start on them. I came for a romantic interlude, not Gardener’s World.”
“You should choose your company more carefully then,” she laughed.
They walked over the grass towards a great yew hedge. A huge bird had been clipped out of the yew, as if it were perched on the bush. Alan thought of the privet hen. It was all right. They went through an archway and into a walled, paved garden. It was full of bright flowers, he noticed, and there was a little summer-house opposite a shallow green pool with tinkling fountain. There was nobody there.
“Shall we sit in the summer-house for a while? It’s almost hot here – feel how this stone holds the heat.” He held his hand low over the path as if he were warming it at a fire, and looked up at Caro. “What’s the matter?”
“It’s horrible! I don’t want to sit here.” She walked quickly around the garden, up the steps on the other side, and out. He followed her.
“It’s meant to be a rose garden.”
“So?”
“A walled rose garden – a little trap for heat and scent and bees. And what have they planted it with?”
Her indignation made him want to laugh. “I don’t know. Something pink.”
“Begonias! Bloody pot-grown plastic-faced begonias.”
“Well it’s nice and bright.”
“Yes, lovely. I wonder why they don’t fill the pool with blue plastic chips and paint the walls Day-Glo orange.”
“You’re a snob. People enjoy it. It’s colourful.”
She pulled a face. “They’re just lazy. They don’t deserve to have a garden like that here, if they can’t be bothered to plant it.”
In order not to laugh at her absurdity, Alan began to hum quietly. When he’d hummed the tune once, he sang the words.
“I beg your pardon,
I never promised you a rose garden.
Along with the sunshine,
There’s got to be a little begonia sometimes –”
“That’s a stupid song,” she snapped. Then she began to laugh.
“It’s not stupid,” he assured her. “Far from it. It has some of the most deeply moving and meaningful lyrics ever written.”
He placed his hand on his heart and took a deep breath.
“I can promise you things like big diamond rings
But you don’t find roses growing on stalks of clover,
So you better think it over.
When it’s sweet talking you could make it come true
I would give you the world right now on a silver platter
But what would it matter –
So smile for a while and let’s be jolly
Love shouldn’t be so melancholy. . . .”
“Are those really the words?”
He nodded.
“‘You don’t find roses growing on stalks of clover’?”
“‘So you better think it over –’”
They laughed until Caro could hardly breathe, and had to stop to wipe her eyes.
Heading back for a drink, Alan asked her, “Do you do this often?”
“What?”
“Take strange men to stately homes?”
“No, never.”
“Make dates with strange men.”
“Well, not with strange ones.”
“You’re being deliberately obtuse. I want to know about your love life.”
“I’ve never been married.”
There was a long silence.
“Are we going to talk about it?” she said.
Suddenly he was furious with her. Was this what she had planned? Did she want to talk about Carolyn, and find out “what was wrong”? Was that what she thought would happen today?
He began to walk more quickly, and she lagged behind. When he got to the big courtyard where the pub was she was out of sight. He drank a pint at the bar, and took two pints outside again. She was sitting at an empty table. He went and sat opposite her.
“Thank you.”
They drank in silence.
“Why are you so angry?”
He shrugged. “My wife isn’t anything to do with you.”
“No. I know.”
“It’s none of your business.”
“Good. I don’t want it to be.”
She looked at him directly, and he felt so angry and frustrated that he wanted to throw the beer in her face.
“Alan – stop it. I wanted to know – how we stood. I don’t want it to be a mess. Now it’s clear. All right?”
“What’s clear?”
