Aphrodite's Hat

by Salley Vickers

  ‘Yes, but …’ The truth was he was shocked. How did you explain the Immaculate Conception?

  ‘I don’t rubbish your beliefs – you shouldn’t mine.’

  It was the picture of her, in her grey fluffy coat bent over her book, for which he had left Josie; his daughter now would not even let him visit his grandchildren. He felt the back of his throat prick again. ‘I wasn’t rubbishing …’ He knew she knew that he wasn’t. This was one of those inexplicable, unpredictable things which women did to you – pretended you were treating them badly when all the time they must know how hard you were trying. He had been so pleased to take her to see the dragon’s bones. And Josie – there was no help for it. In his heart he knew he had treated her badly.

  The girl turned away and stalked down the side aisle towards the door. She no longer looked like a bird – unless it were something wild and dangerous which might flash suddenly at you with its beak and cut your flesh to the bone. To his horror he saw she was about to address the guide of the party. In this mood she might say anything.

  Hurrying after her he understood suddenly, why, in the days before he left, Josie had gone about the house without a bra. Her nipples protruding through her cardigan had startled, then revolted him. He had backed away from the thought of it. Now, in a flash, he saw that she had been trying – poor Josie – to rekindle his interest in her.

  He caught up with the girl and grabbed her arm just as he heard her say, ‘Excuse me, the dragon …?’

  ‘Si, signora?’ The guide, a short stocky woman with a white face and a faint trace of moustache, stared at them with a tincture of insolence. It must have been obvious they were having a row.

  ‘We were wondering – St Donato killed it … when?’

  ‘It was eight, nine century, signora.’

  ‘And was it why he was made a saint?’

  Looking down at the intricate marble patterns of the floor he was conscious of the Virgin’s measureless blue gaze above.

  ‘Si, signora. He kill the dragon which make all the people afraid.’

  ‘You see,’ she said, triumphant, disengaging his grip from her arm and placing her own under his, ‘even your stupid old Church believed in it!’

  She was smiling again, and in a rush of joy that the matter of the dragon had been settled – slaughtered for good, he hoped – and that she was back with him again, he was about to propose lunch in the trattoria they had passed when she continued:

  ‘Where shall we go for lunch?’ – and before he could answer – ‘Or, let’s just have a snack now, shall we? Then we can eat properly for once tonight. At the Danieli, or that one I read about, where the film-stars go, the Cipriani. We can, now, can’t we …?’

  THE HAWTHORN MADONNA

  Every Easter, Elspeth and Ewan stayed in a cottage loaned them by Mrs Stroud, who had been a school friend of Ewan’s Aunt Val. Not that the two old ladies ever saw much of each other in their latter days. Still, it was recognisably Edie Stroud in Aunt Val’s photo album – the girl with the almost coal-black hair, very bobbed – unless that was Mary Squires, after all, who died of tuberculosis after her fiancé shot himself. When Mrs Stroud herself died, the cottage passed to her nephew who worked in Amsterdam – something to do with diamonds, someone had said, though that might have been wishful thinking. He was glad enough to let it without trouble to a couple who did not mind that there was a greenish fungus around the window frames and that you had to hang the bedding before the fire to air each night before you went to sleep. Indeed, they would have missed the nightly ritual, Elspeth and Ewan, if Mrs Stroud’s nephew had done what his aunt had always been saying she would do and have a proper damp course laid down.

  Luckily, Mrs Stroud herself was now laid down instead and the fingers of moisture were allowed to settle inside the glass of the windows unhindered and make little feathery rivulets down the pane and emanate out into the general air of the place.

  Elspeth and Ewan had never had any children. In the early days when they went to ‘Brow’ they had gone with the plan of serious lovemaking. But as anyone who has ever tried it knows ‘serious’ lovemaking is not the most successful kind. When it became clear that for one reason or another (they never tried too hard to discover which) they were not going to have children they tacitly dropped such plans. This did not mean that they were not affectionate with each other. People often said of them that they were an exceptionally warm couple – really, it did you good to be with them. In bed at night they held each other close even years after the lovemaking had been dropped altogether, except for birthdays and Christmas. But it was Easter when they always went to ‘Brow’ which seemed not quite to qualify …

  This Easter was particularly cold, though Elspeth said that all Easters were cold these days and it must be to do with climate change. She believed that something had happened to the calendar since they were young. Not at all, Ewan said. The Met Office had produced statistics which demonstrated that the weather had been much the same, give or take the odd fluctuation, for the past two hundred years. That was just like men, Elspeth had retorted, to dismiss everything the scientists tell us if it didn’t suit their prejudices. They were driving, as usual, down the M3 and off the A303 past Stonehenge and into the heart of Somerset, if such a promiscuous county could be said to have a ‘heart’.

  The cottage was called ‘Brow’ because it stood on the brow of a low hill – hardly a hill at all, really, more a kind of hump. It stood alone at the end of a lane, which fortunately had never been surfaced and therefore discouraged picnickers.

  Elspeth unpacked the box of groceries she had brought from London to save having to go too often to Brack, the nearest village, or to Wells for decent wine. Ewan went at once to inspect the woodshed. Yes, plenty of sawn logs stacked – so Tim, the young man who seemed always to be smoking joints but who for all that kept the hedges neatly clipped, had done his stuff. And there were enough candles too for when the electricity tripped off. All in order, then. And it never took long to heat up the tank for a bath.

  It was still cold the next day when they went for one of the walks which over the years they had taken possession of – behind the hill and along the track through the plantation, towards Wells. You could just see the twin honey-coloured cathedral towers in the distance below them. ‘Shall we go to Wells tomorrow?’ Elspeth asked. ‘Tomorrow’ was Good Friday. But in the end they decided not – it wasn’t a big thing with them, church at Easter – just that Elspeth liked the pageantry.

  ‘It’s going to snow,’ Ewan remarked as he opened the wine for supper. They were to have boeuf en daube, brought all the way from Highgate in a casserole. Years ago Elspeth had learned the recipe from reading To the Lighthouse but these days she never imagined herself as Mrs Ramsey.

  ‘“Nudity banned until this appears in hedges” – eight letters?’ Ewan asked later by the fire. Although Elspeth had quite a different cast of mind, and never got crossword clues, for twenty years he had persevered in asking her advice.

  ‘Hawthorn,’ she said, proving that it is right never to stop trying.

  ‘Why so?’

  ‘“Ne’er cast a clout till may be out.” People think it’s the month, but in fact it’s the may flower. Don’t you remember? I’ve told you that millions of times!’ But a mind that grasps crosswords will usually be too reasonable for rhymes or folklore.

  Perhaps it was the extreme temperature but by Saturday Ewan had contracted a cold. They ate toasted hot-cross buns by the fire and he went to bed early. Elspeth wished they had packed whisky and Ewan wished she wouldn’t fuss.

  ‘It’s not “fussing” to want you to have a good time!’

  ‘I’ll be right as rain tomorrow,’ Ewan said.

  But he wasn’t. Elspeth was aware that his night had been restless. Years of sleeping alongside her husband’s tall frame had attuned her own to his. When he slept badly so did she – one of the penalties of a successful partnership. By morning he was coughing alarmingly and even –
more alarming – agreed to stay in bed.

  There is only so much attention you can give a reluctant invalid. By afternoon Ewan shooed Elspeth out for a walk. ‘But where shall I go? I don’t want to do one of ours without you.’ Ewan thought this daft but Elspeth, who could be stubborn, had her own rules. Well, she would strike out, find somewhere new, then when he was better they could explore it together, add it to the others they had made their own over the years.

  Although the walks Elspeth liked best started from the cottage door, there was no chance she could discover new territory that way – it was all too well tried. So it would have to be a car trip, which would give her a chance to buy whisky – she felt that the least she could do for Ewan was provide that. Wells had a Majestic. She would go that way and then on towards Glastonbury, never mind the old hippies.

  With a bottle of Glenfiddich in the back of the car, Elspeth felt more entitled to her outing. But even then she wasn’t about to abandon her husband altogether. She would keep him with her by doing what she and Ewan had done when they had first met – drive where fancy took you, then take every left turn until you found the place you were looking for; it always worked in the end.

  Elspeth drove by instinct, following roads she had never travelled until all she knew was that she had come some way from Wells. But wasn’t Somerset a strange county? Even such a short distance from where she had started the snow was quite deep, lining the hedges with precarious spines of powdery white. The white gave her a chill feeling. She half wished she had packed a thermos flask. There, she hoped she was not becoming one of those people who forever wished they had done things differently! She had the whisky, after all. Left, left, left again – it was funny, when you thought about it, that you so rarely came back on yourself – left here, and here and here – now stop.

  She had fetched up in a dead-end – not so much a dead-end because there remained ahead a track which a lighter vehicle could traverse but not the Volvo. Plenty of room for a person though.

  Elspeth stepped out of the car pulling on her fleece-lined anorak. Would she take the whisky just for the fun of a nip? No, it was for Ewan; unsealed it was not so much of a present. Lucky she had brought her boots.

  The snow was melting into the mud as Elspeth walked along the lane. On either side the hedges grew high, covered in wild clematis and the fine, light dusting of particles of snow which gave the wrong seasonal feel: it was Easter not Christmas. Although still early afternoon the light had begun to fail – or perhaps more snow was gathering, blocking out the weak sun. Now there was a wooden gate ahead, its mossy slats slightly out of true – and just beyond Elspeth made out a small stone building with a cross aloft. A chapel.

  Despite her expectations, the door of the chapel yielded quite naturally and Elspeth stepped inside. A sweetish, musky smell greeted her – not altogether disagreeable, but not wholly pleasant either.

  ‘You can put the lights on if you like.’

  The voice, neither low nor loud, was pitched from somewhere in the shadowy back part of the chapel – what in a church is called the apse.

  ‘I’m sorry?’ She wasn’t alarmed yet.

  ‘No need to be! The switch is on your left, just shoulder height.’

  The chapel lit up to reveal a man seated on a bench at the wall farthest from the altar, on which were arranged thorny branches of green and flowering white. To the left there stood a slight wooden statue.

  ‘See there, the Hawthorn Madonna,’ said the man. ‘We’re proud of her here.’ Although, since he was sitting down, it was hard to be sure, he appeared of medium height – quite ordinary, in fact.

  ‘It looks old,’ said Elspeth, trying to be polite.

  But at this the man merely laughed – a brusque barking sound, like some large, indifferent seabird. ‘You can touch her if you like.’

  ‘Surely not!’ A touch of reproof – Elspeth was only mildly religious but she knew what was to be respected.

  ‘Why not? You won’t hurt her. ‘Sides, she’s meant to be touched at Eastertide.’

  Some local rite or ritual, Elspeth thought.

  She walked forward, setting her boots down carefully on the flags. The figure was made of a knotty dark wood, with a natural-looking twist in it which greatly added to the feeling of something limber and flowing.

  ‘Does she have a baby?’ Elspeth did not know why she had asked this – nor even that she was going to ask it until the words flew, with a life of their own, from her lips. Once out, they seemed to hang in the air, with the breath which was making icy clouds before her face.

  ‘Is it a baby you want, then?’

  ‘Oh, yes!’

  Once more, the words were out before she knew it but she had no thoughts of taking them back. After all, it was what had lain behind all her other thoughts, during the nights when she didn’t sleep; maybe even more the ones she did.

  ‘Touch her then and ask.’

  It was odd how she didn’t mind that he mentioned it – the subject she and Ewan had put away for good between them. But Ewan was at home, sick, and here she was in an unknown place – with a stranger …

  Ewan said later that it was the whisky that had done it. ‘She got me into bed, got me tight and raped me!’ he used to say, and Elspeth would blush a little, perhaps because she didn’t like the word ‘rape’ to be used of anything to do with Jack. On the other hand, she didn’t want to take from Ewan his pride in their son – or her husband’s part in creating him.

  Jack was born, slightly premature, late on Christmas Day. But of course, Easter was early that year – and the may flowers were not out for a good few weeks after.

  APHRODITE’S HAT

  ‘Why is she wearing a hat?’ I asked. We were in the National Gallery at the time and looking at a painting by Cranach the Elder of Aphrodite and her son, Eros. He has been stung by a bee and they both are stark naked except that the Goddess of Love seems to be sporting a splendid hat, broad and flat and trimmed with feathers and set slantwise on her coquettish head. I could tell James was thinking about something else and didn’t take in my question. It was rhetorical anyway; posed for myself, for some future enquiry.

  James and I met occasionally at the National Gallery. It was close to where we both worked and we had long ago decided that it was safe to be together in a public place. We both had spouses, neither of whom worked in town. And there was no one likely to meet us there who knew us, though you can never tell. But these days it is not, in any case, uncommon for a man and a woman, who are friends, to meet in a lunch break. Nevertheless, there are pitfalls in conducting a love affair, even one as well organised as ours.

  James and I had first met years ago at university. We had gone out together and then ‘slept’ together (which is what we called it then) in a rather fumbling incompetent way, with not much actual sleep but not unpleasant either. Then, for reasons neither of us could remember, we drifted apart.

  There are few things more mysterious than endings. I mean, for example, when did the Greek gods end, exactly? Was there a day when Zeus waved magisterially down from Olympus and Aphrodite and her lover Ares, and her crippled husband Hephaestus (I always felt sorry for him), and all the rest got rolled up like a worn-out carpet? But with me and James it turned out not to have been an ‘end’ after all.

  After we both left university, I married Pete, a research chemist, and James married Diane, who became a solicitor. It was pure chance (though is chance ever quite ‘pure’, I wonder?) that we all met years later at a party, quite an ordinary affair. It was James and I who encountered each other first and I remember he said, ‘Oh, it’s you, you never collected your sponge bag …’ and I blushed, because I do blush, and because it’s unnerving meeting someone you’ve been to bed with but haven’t seen for over twenty years.

  Later we discovered that neither of us had told our spouse about the other, which somehow made things easier. Not that we sprang into bed together again all at once.

  It was James’s son, A
lastair, who prompted the revival. He was going for a university interview at Bristol and there was a train strike, so Diane said he could use the family car. James is an architect and had a house to see that day down in Sussex. Pete and I happened to be dining with them when all of this was being discussed and I could see a row was brewing over the dispensation of cars so I offered James a lift. I had to go to Brighton anyway and his appointment wasn’t far out of my way. Sometimes I wonder if Diane would have been so pleased with this solution if she had known about me and James in the past.

  My own appointment didn’t take long. I’m a casting director and I had to see a new young possible for a projected screen test, a problematic, but definitely screen-desirable, boy of nineteen, and James’s clients had decided to have a family rather than a refurbished house, so we ended up having lunch together, which went on rather longer than we both intended. And then at the end of it there still seemed more to say. Slightly awkwardly, we arranged another lunch and found we didn’t want to stop. Funny, how much more passionate it was than at nineteen.

  I looked again at the painting. It would have been fun casting Aphrodite. Her long, tilted, small-breasted body was undeniably erotic, and that hat on top of all that blatant nakedness …

  We moved on to look at the Uccello of St George killing the dragon. I like this painting because it looks as if the princess has the dragon on a lead rather than her being held captive by him. ‘Poor dragon,’ I said, as I tended to. I’ve always been on the side of the beast in fairy stories.

  James didn’t say anything but he was never a great talker. I was the one who rattled on, and he liked me to do so because it allowed him space to think. His wife, Diane, tended to question him rather too much. So when he told me there was something he wanted to say, I guessed that all wasn’t well.