The Man Who Understood Women

by Rosemary Friedman

  ‘There is parquet flooring throughout the ground floor,’ Mrs Menzies said. ‘It takes a bit of polishing but it pays. You don’t see floors like that today.’

  ‘We would have wall-to-wall,’ Lois Cobb said. ‘Shag-pile.’

  ‘You mean you’d cover …?’

  ‘Why don’t you start in the drawing room,’ Belle suggested. ‘Then they can see the garden while the sun’s out. The weather forecast said rain, but it’s held off so far. You never can tell with the weather forecast … Are you interested in gardens, Mr Cobb? My mother grows the best roses for miles around – of course, we have the soil for it – but then you must be if you’re considering a house out here.’

  Howard Cobb followed his wife into the drawing room which was bathed in yellow light.

  ‘As long as there’s room for a pool and a handsome terrace. We have a gas barbecue. Two dozen steaks at one time.’ He looked through the leaded lights at the lawn, surrounded by roses and hollyhocks, lovingly tended. ‘Might even manage a tennis court as well. What do you think, Lois?’

  She was looking at the fireplace, which to Belle meant hot-buttered toast and chestnuts.

  ‘This would have to go for a start. I wonder about the chimneybreast?’

  ‘No problem. Picture windows, floor to ceiling. Patio doors; let some light into the place.’

  ‘We used to have dances for the girls,’ Mrs Menzies said. ‘More than fifty young people …’

  ‘We could extend another twelve, thirteen feet …’

  Mrs Menzies wondered if they were considering moving in with a regiment.

  ‘It certainly has potential.’

  ‘Would you like to see the garden?’ Belle asked, opening the French windows.

  Outside there was a garden room, brick on three sides, in which they kept the faded wooden deckchairs, the canvas rotting. Even on showery days in summer you could sit just inside it, waiting for the clouds to pass.

  ‘It’s very useful,’ Belle said, remembering all the homework she had done there as a child. ‘When it rains, suddenly, you know, as it does.’

  Mrs Cobb clapped her hands with delight. ‘It’s quite charming, Howie. A perfect changing room.’ She turned to Belle. ‘Of course, there’d have to be a bathroom.’

  ‘Bathroom?’ Belle said.

  ‘Serving the pool area.’

  Mrs Menzies was looking at the lime tree, majestic and glorious, hundreds of years old, in full leaf. She could see it from her bedroom when she lay in bed and had often fantasised her own death – peaceful of course – with the tree in full view.

  Mr Cobb followed her gaze.

  ‘Take some getting out.’ He scratched his head. ‘Roots might even go under the house.’

  ‘Getting out?’ Mrs Menzies said faintly.

  ‘To make room for the pool.’

  ‘I expect you’d like to see the kitchen,’ Belle said, leading the way round the side of the house.

  It was almost a year since her father had died, leaving her mother alone in the big house. They had decided it would be for the best. At least she and Timothy and Grace had. Embroiled in their lives, none of them could visit more than infrequently. They had worked on their mother both singly and conjointly. It wasn’t that they didn’t understand about the house; it was the total impracticality of its upkeep. They appreciated that it had been their mother’s first proper home as a young bride, that she had kept it all through the war, turning it into a convalescent home for servicemen. They knew that she loved every stick and stone of the place, as they did themselves, and were aware how she felt about leaving it, and that the rambling dwelling with its gabled roof was more than a sum of its parts. It was roses plucked still wet with dew, purple beads of blood drawn by the thorns; huge Christmases when the grandparents were alive; Grace falling from the garden swing the three of them took it in turns to paint; Timothy on the doorstep with his first girlfriend; Mr Harper who had grown old tending the garden each Wednesday.

  There was no other way. Apart from the work entailed there was the expense. The garden couldn’t be managed without Mr Harper and the heating still ran on anthracite. The outside of the house had to be painted every few years and … there was no end. Between them the decision had to be made.

  Just within the side door – which Belle could not bring herself to say had always been known as the ‘welly’ room, because of the boots and raincoats and plimsolls and hockey sticks and ice skates and cricket bats it had housed over the years – they huddled together, an awkward foursome.

  ‘I’ll lead the way,’ Belle said. ‘This is the kitchen.’ Mr and Mrs Cobb stared at the scrubbed wooden table and the glazed cupboards through which you could see the china with its familiar willow pattern, at the Welsh dresser, the Aga cooker, and the worn lino on the floor.

  My father was ill for so long, Belle wanted to say in its defence, there simply wasn’t the money.

  She intercepted their glance. It said: how on earth can people live like this?

  ‘It’s a very roomy kitchen,’ Belle said weakly. The Cobbs looked up as if to assess its spaciousness and saw the paint flaking from the ceiling, above which a bath had overflowed. There was no more to be said.

  They passed on into the hall again. It was the moment Belle had been dreading. ‘Upstairs next, Mother?’ she said. ‘I should think Grace has had time to tidy up.’

  ‘What about the dining room?’ Mrs Cobb said. You do have a dining room?’

  ‘Yes,’ Belle said. She looked at her mother who was removing some imaginary fluff from her cardigan and refused to meet her eye.

  Her father had first been taken ill ten years ago. A day Belle would not forget. It was Sunday and he had been mowing the lawn, his relaxation after a week in the city. Her mother had been preparing lunch for the visiting family. A Sunday like any other. Timothy had seen to the drinks and Belle was taking hers out to the garden when the mower stopped. She remembered thinking, how odd, in the midst of a row, like knitting, but had thought it was only to empty the grass box. Her father had just stood there, transfixed. A cerebral embolus, out of the blue, had paralysed one side of his body. It happened so quickly. One moment of disbelief, then she must have shouted because her mother and Grace and Timothy came running out of the house and all at once there were doctors and ambulances and confusion disturbing the peace of the Sunday morning. The beef was charred to a cinder and they had to throw it away.

  Her father had recovered, partially and painfully, from that first stroke. A man wont to boast that he had never had a day’s illness in his life, reduced to a pitiful slowness of speech, a shuffling of step, a need to move his left arm, obstinately useless, with his right. The second episode, affecting the other side of his brain, had come three years later, like a thief in the night. It has robbed him of all movement, all speech, and had left him a human vegetable, with eyes.

  The dining room had seemed the best place. Her mother and the nurses who came and went could more easily keep an eye on the invalid and it was less tiring. Belle could scarcely remember when it had not been a sickroom with the high bed and the paraphernalia attendant upon one unable to do a single thing for himself.

  Afterwards the bed had remained. They had no desire to use the room. Not one of them could have eaten a bite in a place so full of memories.

  Last week the Church Army had come to take the bed away. It was at the suggestion of Town and Country Properties. The table was now back in position with its William and Mary chairs.

  ‘In here,’ Belle said, opening the door.

  The Cobbs, both Howard and Lois, were silent. Either they could not believe their eyes – the room was, Belle supposed, rather shabby – or they felt, as she did, the presence of the wasted body by the wall, the comings and goings of the white-capped nurses, the watching hours. No, that was absurd.

  Mrs Cobb was tugging at the twin doors of the serving hatch that led to the kitchen.

  ‘Don’t you ever use this?’ she asked. ‘I always thin
k a hatch is so practical.’

  ‘Not very often,’ Belle said.

  Mr Cobb tugged. ‘Warped,’ he said. ‘The whole thing would have to come out anyway.’

  ‘You need some imagination,” Mrs Cobb said, half-closing her eyes. ‘A black-glass-topped table and some decent chairs.’

  Mrs Menzies, who had been standing in the doorway pulling at her handkerchief, looked at the much-loved furniture and wondered who could possibly love a table with a black glass top. ‘Decent chairs?’ she said weakly.

  ‘Leather and chrome. Get rid of that old cornice and the overmantel, lower the ceiling … a sort of grotto with concealed lighting …’

  ‘Grotto!’ Mrs Menzies could not believe that she had heard aright.

  ‘Room doesn’t look as if it’s ever used,’ Mr Cobb said, ‘it has a sort of odd …’

  ‘Mother eats in the kitchen,’ Belle said quickly. ‘It’s cosier.’ She felt rather than saw her mother glance at the wall against which the bed had stood for so many years.

  ‘We’ll go upstairs now,’ Belle said firmly, holding open the door.

  Upstairs the Cobbs decided to turn the old nursery into a guest bathroom, Timothy’s bedroom into a sauna … unless, of course, they had it by the pool.

  They discussed under-floor heating.

  ‘It’s a very warm house,’ Mrs Menzies said. ‘Most of the rooms face south and get every bit of sun.’

  ‘Double glazing,’ Mr Cobb said, making notes on the particulars from Town and Country. ‘Essential.’

  His wife was shaking her head at the ‘dreadful leaded lights’ and ‘not a single closet you could really call a closet’. Had it not been for Belle, Mrs Menzies would have asked what you could call them and how it was they had all managed to keep their clothes quite satisfactorily in them for so many years.

  Mr Cobb stood on the ladder Belle held and peered into the loft.

  ‘How is it, Howie?’

  Full of memories.

  ‘Black as hell. Runs the length of the house, as far as I can tell. A stairway, a window, a decent floor, and you might do something with it.’

  Belle assumed that the note he made was ‘Loft. Potential’. At the front door Belle said, ‘Would you like to see the garage?’

  ‘I glanced at it as I came in,’ Mr Cobb said. ‘I guess something could be done.’

  ‘Two cars easily,’ Belle said, ‘and the bikes.’

  ‘Up-and-over doors,’ Mr Cobb said.

  More beautiful oak destroyed.

  ‘Remote control. Intruder alarm,’ Mr Cobb added to the notes which by now covered most of the two sheets of paper.

  When they had gone Belle considered it politic not to look at her mother, but to say brightly: ‘How about some lunch – I’m starving.’

  Grace came down the stairs. ‘Have they gone? Didn’t you even offer them a drink?’

  ‘Drink!’ Mrs Menzies said. ‘We haven’t any polystyrene cups! They probably wouldn’t know what to do with crystal.’

  ‘It’s not our business,’ Belle said. ‘You want to sell the house, don’t you?’

  ‘Not to them,’ Mrs Menzies said. ‘Glass and chrome, and what about my roses and my tree? Over my dead body!’

  But when the offer came for a sum larger than they had anticipated, even she knew that the battle had been lost.

  ‘You will like it in Fulham,’ Belle said. ‘Near the shops.’

  ‘In that horrid little town house …’

  ‘You wouldn’t consider a flat.’

  ‘… full of those screaming infants.’

  ‘It won’t be full of screaming infants. You have plenty of imagination. You can do it up as you like.’

  ‘There’s a split-level cooker,’ Mrs Menzies said. ‘It will be nice not to have to bend. Belle?’

  ‘Mmm?’

  ‘Do you think I could dig up that horrid patio with the multi-coloured random paving and have just a tiny lawn and a few roses?’

  ‘I don’t see why not.’

  ‘And that downstairs room, with the bunks and the blackboard and the electric trains … it could, I suppose, make a sewing room. The sitting room isn’t really a bad size. Once they remove the convertible sofa and the haircord carpet and the rubber plants and all that horrible hi-fi. I could have a pretty little cornice. Some watered-silk wallpaper …’

  ‘There’s no end,’ Belle said, ‘to what you can do with a house.’

  À la Carte

  2010

  It was Gail who suggested that her mother try Internet dating. She had persuaded Stephanie, who taught English in a deprived school in North London, into believing (almost) that fifty-three was the new thirty and that going online was a great way to get back into the game.

  ‘Give it a go,’ Gail had said, not once but many times until, in an idle moment between marking sadly illiterate essays and eating her solitary dinner, Stephanie had logged on to U-Date and, in the boxes indicated, described her personality type, revealed her interests (listening to music and belly-dancing), outlined her perception of an ideal relationship and pressed the ‘search’ key.

  There were not many people, according to her daughter, who hit the jackpot first time. Scrolling through the dozens of thumbnail images of men looking for women who were ‘gentle and caring’ or ‘fun-loving, confident and smart’, Stephanie had clicked on Dominic, a substantial, chess-playing, widowed solicitor who liked reading, travel and listening to music.

  It was five years now since Robert, who taught history in an upmarket boys’ school, had sneaked off with a fluffy supply teacher, five years since Stephanie had been on her own. Once she had got over the shock of her ex-husband’s betrayal, and to fill the gap which the absence of what she had imagined was an entirely satisfactory marriage had created, she had sought out a new interest and found it in a twice-weekly belly-dancing class that got her out of the house. Between her fulltime job, caring for her affectionate King Charles spaniel with whom she carried on a one-sided conversation, and practising her new hobby, her time was fully occupied.

  Having at first approached each other tentatively in a local wine bar, she and Dominic had got on like a house on fire. Any initial shyness on her part – it was a long time since she had dated – had been dispelled by Dominic’s kindness and his warm personality. It was a level playing field and together they went to concerts and restaurants, walked on the Heath near which Dominic lived, and discovered, among other things, that they shared similar birthdays and that each of them had a daughter. He would not let her pay for anything. It was not until Stephanie began to feel, much to Gail’s delight, not only safe, but that there could indeed be life after Robert, that she invited Dominic home to dinner.

  Although she had never been a great cook and since she had been on her own didn’t bother too much, picking up something from the supermarket on the way home from school, the menu she decided upon was ambitious. Individual cheese soufflés would precede the crown roast of lamb with a herb crust and would be followed by raspberry pavlova. Her heart, for some reason, fluttering like a young girl’s, she spring-cleaned the terraced house left to her (together with the mortgage) by Robert, got out her recipe books and, admonishing herself to ‘act her age’, put a couple of candles on the kitchen table.

  When Dominic arrived, his face almost hidden by yard-long red roses for which she did not have a tall enough vase, he kissed her firmly on the mouth, arousing sensations that over the past five years had become alien. Leaving him in the living room, where he made himself comfortable in the armchair and switched on the TV, she went into the kitchen where she put the flowers in a plastic bucket, struggled with a bottle of Côtes du Rhône and, as the recipe dictated, set the soufflés in their ramekin dishes in a bain-marie and slid them gently into the oven. When they were risen to perfection and would, like time, wait for no man, she announced, her voice urgent, that dinner was ready.

  ‘Hang on,’ his eyes were fixed on the screen. ‘Arsenal have given away a free kick!
’

  By the time he took his seat at the kitchen table, the cheese soufflés had collapsed. Singing her culinary praises Dominic seemed not to notice. The crown roast of lamb had been cooked to perfection, although it was not for her to say so. While he ate it, leaving a clean plate, he reminisced about his late wife, a keen horticulturalist who was never happier than when she was pottering about the large garden or bottling and preserving the fruits of her labours.

  When Stephanie enquired could he manage a little more of the lamb, Dominic consulted his Rolex before stroking her bare arm warmly and looking steadfastly into her eyes. She thought he was about to say something.

  ‘What’s for pudding?’ Something in his voice triggered alarm bells in her head as he handed her his empty plate. ‘Just going to check the score.’

  Stephanie thought about the pavlova with its chantilly cream and its egg whites whisked laboriously by hand. She opened the fridge where the pale cloud of meringue reposed in its raspberry splendour then shut it again firmly. Picking up the fruit bowl she set it before Dominic on the table and watched as an expression of disappointment, like that of a thwarted child, scudded briefly over his face.

  He selected an apple. ‘Do you mind if I take this inside?’

  Clearing the remains of the dinner which, if you counted the planning and the shopping, it had taken her almost two days to make, she saw herself, in a moment of clarity, dreaming up puddings and listening to the disembodied voice of the football commentator ad infinitum. Dismissing the idea from her head, she thought what a good life she had made for herself since Robert had walked out of it, with her circle of like-minded friends, her rewarding job, her cosy house and her dog. Belly-dancing over to the dresser, she picked up her mobile and, with a smile of relief on her face, telephoned Gail.

  O Sole Mio

  2013

  William Lightfoot sat at the table for one overlooking the lake, which he had occupied for the first two weeks in June for the past five years. Since Helen had died, leaving him on his own, it was simpler to contact the Hotel Bella Vista as soon as his fork was out of the Christmas pudding than it was to wade through the sea of unsolicited offers of tours and sea voyages to exotic destinations that came through the letterbox of his Sussex cottage, a five-minute walk from the bank that he had managed for almost fifteen years.