by Jane Rogers
“All right.” He thought she was angry. He was going to be appallingly late back to work, but he could hardly leave now.
Lucy chose a pub, a huge crowded barn with a loud TV above the bar. She sat at a table in a murky corner, with a look of fastidious distaste.
“This will do. It suits the tone of proceedings better, I feel. You’ll have to buy the drinks, sweetheart. I can’t go and stand over there.”
“I was going to. What d’you want?”
“God knows. Something they can’t ruin. A double Scotch.”
When he returned she was smoking, leaning back in her chair. Her elegance and composure were as striking as ever. He sat down.
“Cheers, darling. I’ll tell you about Jeremy, shall I? For the record. So that you know exactly what to accuse me of, if you ever decide that I’ve ruined your life too.” She drew on her cigarette and exhaled slowly. “I met Jeremy when I was eighteen. He was the great romance of my youth. We played in the town orchestra together, and were wicked tearaways. It was terribly exciting. We lived together, causing your grandmother – my venerable Mama, as was – never to speak to me again. We used to get terribly drunk – once we got thrown out of our rooms for being rowdy late at night, and had to sleep in a bus shelter. It was all quite overpoweringly Bohemian.” She smiled wryly.
“But I was a nice conventional girl, at heart – I found it all much more difficult than I liked to admit. And while Jeremy was enjoying himself being terribly gifted and wasting his talents, and taking obscure and nasty-smelling drugs – and going in for stunningly unpleasant fits of temper – I got more and more depressed.” She sighed. “It all dragged on unseasonably long. We’d agree to separate, and just when I was getting myself sorted out, he’d turn up and do his seductive bit and convince me that I couldn’t live without him again.” She drank her whisky and smiled at Alan. “So at last I married your father.”
Alan waited for her to continue but she didn’t. “It doesn’t seem a very good reason,” he volunteered.
“For marrying Trevor? Oh, it was. I knew what I wanted. I knew that Jeremy could charm the birds off the trees, but it would be the most frightful mistake to marry him. I thought I wanted children too, which he would never have tolerated.”
“Did Dad know – about Jeremy?”
“Yes. Oh yes. It was all above board. And I got what I wanted – a nice solid husband and two lovely children. I was very lucky.”
It was no longer possible to tell if she was being ironic.
“And a romantic lover.”
“Not at all. I told him that if I married Trevor that would be the end. It had to be, really darling. Human beings are predictable enough, after all, for me to have seen what might have happened. . . . I’ve – we –” She laughed and he realized she was embarrassed. “Let me marshal the sordid details. Jeremy and I made love precisely twice, after I’d married your father – in the last twenty-nine years, that is. The first time was when I came back from my honeymoon, I don’t know why – I just had to . . . and the second and last time was that fateful occasion in the drawing room. It was – I don’t know – a mixture of too much to drink, and nostalgia, and curiosity – a dreadful mistake. Which we haven’t repeated.”
There was a long silence.
“Do you love him?”
“Jeremy? Oh yes. Desperately.”
She leaned forward and patted his hand.
“So you can understand, sweetheart, why it’s most unlikely that I would want to pry into your affairs. And much less, to offer advice.” She looked at her watch. “Don’t you do any work at that blessed office of yours?”
“Yes. I’m only an hour and a half late. D’you want to write me a note?”
She laughed. “Give me a lift to somewhere where there are taxis, and I’ll let you escape.”
He emptied his glass. “What about Pam?”
She shrugged. “I can write and disabuse her of the notion that I’ve spent twenty-nine years having it away with Jeremy on the family sofa. It does seem a little unfair, after I’d been so scrupulous to protect your delicate little psyches. And Trevor’s. And my own. They do say that virtue brings its own rewards. Perhaps I’ll win the Inner Wheel raffle this year, or end up in heaven, or something equally appropriate.”
He drove her to the station, and she took a taxi from there – although a train would probably have taken her home faster, Alan reflected. He went back to the office, because he couldn’t face going anywhere else. Why should he believe her? But he knew she was telling the truth. He remembered how he had felt as he lit that cigar in the restaurant; cynical and hard-bitten as Bogart in Casablanca. And now he was crying, as he had done when Pam first told him. He wiped his face angrily and pushed his papers into a heap. It was five-thirty. The Rose and Kettle would be open.
Chapter 20
The park was beginning to take real shape now; the landscaping and lake were finished, and Caro was delighted to discover, on one site visit, that two ducks had moved in. They went quacking about their business, not in the least deterred by the workmen’s huts, the rich black mountains of topsoil that bordered one side of the lake, the constant engine roar of lorries bringing in, and carrying to destinations all over the park, sandstone, brick, red ash, fencing and logs. The young trees they had planted alongside the canal in March, which had looked like bare twigs stuck into the ground, were green and leafy now. The leisure centre was growing too – several feet higher each time she saw it. The vehicle access paths, which in many places would be the eventual park paths, criss-crossed and divided the area, so that Caro could look at a specific patch of ground which up till now had only existed in that shape on the plans, and visualize its final appearance. By the end of June the weather was becoming hot. The contractors worked stripped to the waist, laying foundations, building walls, preparing the ground for autumn planting. The whole place seethed with energy, noise and dust, seeming to Caro like a gigantic workshop where something huge and precious was being forged. The workmen were initially amused by her site visits, and more inclined to whistle at her than take her seriously. But she checked every detail meticulously, and they found themselves having to re-lay one particular section of paved footpath, because she said the joints were too wide.
“What about wheelchairs or prams?” she asked the foreman, trying to make a joke of it. “With joints like that, they’ll need a–an army of boy scouts to push them along, and their teeth will be j–jolted out of their heads.”
She stammered and flushed bright red when she had anything critical to say. It made the foreman embarrassed. He began to look out more carefully for shoddy workmanship, relieved if he could pick it up before she did.
Despite the occasional awkwardness, Caro loved site visits, loved watching the place take shape and grow under the men’s hands and machines. Ron and David, the two on the Planning and Development team who had done the basic park design, were happier working on paper than in mud – and Caro had been responsible for a lot of detail, like the blind garden, and for the planting design. So they were content to leave her the lion’s share of site visits.
As the park suddenly began to take off, moving from the conceptual through a birth of deafening noise, fierce energy, stifling heat and dust, to become something tangible and real: so the relationship with Alan moved and changed also, into something much more insistent. Something so close up to her that it touched and blurred all her receptive senses, stunning her mind and her ability to be rational about it. He was there – right there; so close that at times it seemed she could not breathe, see, smell, touch, taste, hear without it being of him. The flavour and sense of him was somehow soaked into all her being. The fear (it was not an idea, it was a sliver of ice which insinuated itself to maximum effect, like an anaesthetist’s cold needle, to freeze and numb her) that the relationship must end was often present. But she was incapable of doing anything other than experiencing it and being at its paralysing mercy. Alan told her that his wife had discovered
the affair and Caro felt a kind of relief, because surely that fact must precipitate some change. But it did not. At first he told her his wife did not mind, as long as he could preserve enough semblance of their married life to keep the kids happy. A week later he told her that his wife was devastated, that she had done nothing but cry for a week, and he could not stand it. That week he and Caro saw each other every night but one. He was drinking heavily, and they became almost manic together, like passengers on a slowly sinking ship, determined to extract every last ounce of pleasure and sensation from the short time remaining. His drinking affected Caro curiously. Rationally she might have been worried (sometimes experienced the ghost of the thought, fleeting through the outer bloodless reaches of her brain); might have thought that it was not right for him to drink so much, that it could affect his health. But her feeling about it was quite other. She admired it. It was part of what she loved in him. His drinking was a logical extension of that forcing oneself up to the very edges of experience. She saw that it was as necessary to him as, perhaps, all her nightmare visions after the accident had been to her. That people cannot always live neatly within the hygienic confines of sanity, good sense and sobriety. That there must be nightmares, visions, drunkenness, lunacy, a hand stretched out to grab from the blackness whatever it is out there – whatever it is. He made her aware of the edge of normality again, and the huge compelling chaos that lies beyond that edge.
She drank with him, but not as heavily, having neither the practice nor the constitution for it. Being drunk made her sick, which did not happen to him.
Unless they were really late, Caro preferred to ride in to work on her bicycle, rather than get a lift with Alan. Neither of them had any desire for their affair to be made public. One Friday morning, when Caro got into the empty office, it was not quite quarter to nine, and the phone was ringing already. It was Johnny – the Clerk of Works at the park site. He was very agitated. It turned out that someone (kids, Johnny thought) had climbed the fence during the night, and “made a hell of a mess”. He was not very clear about what exactly they had done, his description was full of “over there’s” and “you can see’s”. She realized that the police he had called were on the spot already, and he was trying to explain to them and her simultaneously.
“I’ll be there in ten minutes,” she said, cutting him short, and ran back down to her bike.
She was relieved when she had seen the site for herself. There was very little damage. The sweet chestnut logs, which were cut to length and treated, ready for the construction of the adventure playground, had been pushed out of their neat piles, and lay scattered about like the spilt contents of a giant box of matches. She guessed that someone had been playing at balancing on them, rolling them along under their feet. They were not damaged. Several cans of spray paint had been liberally applied, but mainly to surfaces that did not matter – the walls of the workmen’s hut and store, for example. There was a lot of red spray up and down one side of a large stack of engineering bricks, which were to be used in the construction of the blind garden retaining wall and path. But once the bricks were laid only one edge would be visible anyway. The workmen would just have to take care to lay them with the painted side to the earth. Johnny told her there was graffiti sprayed on the half-built wall of the leisure centre. That was more serious, but thankfully not her concern. He led the two policemen off to the leisure centre, and Caro made her way down to the canalside fence, to see where they had got in. It was obvious; the diagonal wire mesh was sagging between two crookedly leaning support posts. They had simply walked up it. Now there would have to be tighter security. Barbed wire, perhaps a guard dog. She was depressed by it. People should feel the place was free and open for them, not that it had to be fenced off and kept secret. Walking slowly along the fence, to see if there had been any other entry point, she felt upset to the point of tears. It was silly. She knew it wasn’t just the park. It was Alan. She had to do something about Alan. It was a pressure of emotions that threatened to come pouring out in tears whenever any irrelevant excuse offered itself. After Alan had told her that his wife was upset – and that he found her distress unbearable – they had simply avoided the subject. Neither of them had referred to her, or to what happened when he went home to her. The thought of her misery haunted Caro, but she did not seem to have any strength to attempt to change the course of events.
Walking back towards the huts – there were no other entry points she could see – she forced herself to grasp the situation. Alan was spending more and more time with her. He was unhappy. All three of them were unhappy. Something must be decided. He must talk to his wife properly. He must decide what he was going to do. Or if he couldn’t decide, really couldn’t – then she must decide, and refuse to see him. It would be better in the long run, she told herself – though “the long run” seemed as unreal to her as the notion of going to heaven after you’re dead. She told Johnny she would write a report, and add security to the agenda for Tuesday’s section meeting.
When she got back to the office she wrote the report mechanically, and sat for a long time staring sightlessly at the papers on her desk. At one o’clock she went down to the canteen to meet Alan for lunch.
He was already there, halfway through his roast beef and Yorkshire pudding.
“What’s up?” he asked, before she even had time to sit down. She opened her mouth to tell him about the vandalism, then closed it. This was how it went on, from moment to moment, day to day, because neither of them could face the situation squarely. She sat down and picked up her knife and fork.
“I don’t think we should see each other this weekend.”
He looked at her in silence for some time, then said, “OK.”
There was another long silence, in which Caro pushed food around her plate with a fork, then Alan spoke again.
“What good d’you think that will do?”
“I don’t know.”
“D’you think it will make Carolyn feel any better to hear that you have banished me to her company for the weekend?”
“No – no. But it – it might make her feel better than knowing we’re spending the weekend together. You might be able to talk to her at least – make her understand. . . .”
“What? Make her understand what?”
“I don’t know.”
Caro forced herself to eat a mouthful of meat. It seemed to need a lot of chewing. “Alan – we’ve got to do something. We’re going on like blind people –”
“You choose your times, don’t you? Couldn’t we talk about this tonight?”
Caro glanced around the room. Now she had started to talk, she could not bear to give up. “No. I want to talk now.”
He slotted his hands together, finger by finger, and rested his chin on the platform they made, looking at her with resigned patience.
“You – you’ve got to talk to her properly.”
“I don’t like talking to her. She cries. It upsets me.”
“But you – you – If you didn’t care about her, her unhappiness wouldn’t matter to you.”
“No. But I never said I didn’t care about her.”
“I know. So you must tell her – that – that you do care about her.”
He nodded. “Sure. I must tell her that I do care about her, and then continue to do what makes her most unhappy.”
“No.”
“No?”
“No. If you – if you do care about her – I mean, I know you care about her – look Alan – we must stop. That’s what.”
He nodded. “OK.”
“I mean it.”
“Of course you do. Shall we start now?” He made it sound like a game of hide-and-seek.
“I’m serious. We must stop seeing each other. How can it go on like this? It’s got to finish.” She couldn’t believe it wasn’t a game. A game of dares, running across the lines in front of the train; seeing who dared to go nearest to the edge of the cliff.
“Can you?”
“What?”
“Finish.”
“I – I – yes. I am doing.”
“What if I see you? What if I pass you in the corridor?”
“Just ignore me.”
“Ignore you.” He stared at her for a moment, then began to laugh. She couldn’t stop herself from laughing too. It made her furious. “It’s not f–funny. It’s not – not –” She couldn’t speak for laughing. What was there to laugh at? Were they both completely mad? At last, when he stopped laughing, he smiled and said “Is that it then?” as if she had meant the whole thing for a joke.
“Yes. That’s it,” she said angrily, biting her lips to stop herself from giggling again.
“It’s an unsatisfactory ending, you know. It hasn’t got much of a punch to it. Romances don’t end like this in films, or books.” He was laughing again.
“I – I don’t think there’s anything else to do.” Suddenly she felt adequately serious. This sense of numb irresponsibility would not last much longer; there is no feeling at first in a savage wound to the flesh, but pain creeps up. She pushed back her chair. “I think I’ll go now.”
“You haven’t finished your lunch.”
“I – I’m not hungry. Does that make it more romantic?”
He didn’t say anything, but she could tell he was trying not to laugh at her.
“I am serious Alan. Goodbye.” It sounded ridiculous. She walked as quickly as she could between the tables, feeling absurd and wooden, like a bad actress in a badly written play.
There was light drizzle all weekend, and the warm air was thick with moisture. Caro spent the time gardening. She instructed Sue and Clare that Alan was to be told she was out, and she did not answer the phone or the door once. She drove herself to the limits of exhaustion, planting out endless muddy rows of lettuce, carrot and cabbage seedlings, more than they would ever be able to eat, and prising up all the weeds that had appeared between the bricks in the path. Then she assaulted and cleared the sodden sticky patch of land at the far end of the greenhouse – the only bit of the garden she had never dug.
