Aphrodite's Hat

by Salley Vickers

  We walked, as we did on such occasions, to the Italian restaurant where they suppose we are married. Or, they pretend they suppose. I don’t know how many married couples in their late forties still hold hands. But these are Italians, and I cling to a sentimental notion that the Italians still look at things differently when it comes to matters of the heart.

  ‘It’s Diane,’ James said, once he’d ordered the wine. ‘She’s not well.’

  I’ve noticed that I only have to be working on a film for it to begin to resemble my own life. Or, more scarily, for my life to begin to resemble it. The film I was casting just then was called Misdemeanour and was about a middle-aged couple who have been childhood sweethearts and meet after twenty years and fall in love again. But the husband (at the time it was the husband but the director was toying with the idea of making it the wife instead – anyway, one of the lovers’ partners) gets MS. It’s a kind of ghastly pun, you see, MS demeanour = what is the correct ‘demeanour’ with which to meet multiple sclerosis? From which you will understand this is a supposedly arty film: one with a moral to it.

  ‘Yes?’ I said, carefully. It was implicit between us that we never put pressure on each other. Instinctively, I drew back.

  ‘She may have, well, almost certainly has got, cancer.’

  ‘Oh hell,’ I said.

  I could just as well have said nothing. ‘You could always try saying nothing,’ my husband, Pete sometimes remarks, when at times I have, untruthfully, suggested that I do not know what to say. I like Diane, you see. That’s the hell of it. In another life she and I might have been friends, though not close friends. We aren’t enough alike.

  The wine arrived just then so we had the usual courtesies of drawing the cork, which meant the conversation, too, was drawn, to a temporary pause. When James had tasted the wine and pronounced it ‘fine’, I asked, ‘What kind?’

  ‘Bladder,’ said James briefly. I had guessed it might be breast, which of all the cancers, I have been given to understand, is the least bad. Diane had good breasts; mine were meagre affairs by comparison.

  ‘Shit!’ I allowed myself to say this time.

  The starter arrived now, seafood salad for me and a pasta for James. Again we expressed fake enthusiasm and began to eat in silence. A silence that I broke: that was my role.

  ‘I suppose it makes you feel badly about me,’ I suggested. I didn’t say ‘us’. Even with James, ‘us’ is a term I fight shy of.

  He didn’t have to reply; I knew him so well. Sometimes I wondered why we even bothered to speak, except that I like to talk and he liked to hear me.

  But more than that, I wondered why it took us so long to discover we loved each other? Why did we not recognise this all those years ago, as students back in Newcastle, when there was no one to hurt or be hurt by this sense of the two of us being joined, irrevocably and eternally, in some inexplicable linking light? Why had we so botched it then? Failed to perceive the potential for delight in the other’s bone and skin, in misdeeds divulged, in shared observations – starlings scattering across a green dawn London sky, the subtle discretion of a wrinkle in a Rembrandt portrait, the plangent note of a Schubert song, the correct use of an unusual word or phrase – in the lovely, inimitable – and, oh why is this the test of tests? – smell of the beloved? Why, oh why, had we parted at nineteen and twenty only to come together at forty-five and forty-six? And why Pete and Diane, two utterly decent people, whom we both loved in another way? Why not a shrew and a monster? A harpy and a bully? Why not two utter beasts whom we could ethically and happily rid ourselves of … but ‘beasts’ would have been no help either – I liked beasts …

  I recalled suddenly Uccello’s dragon and then Aphrodite in her hat. It’s her doing, I savagely thought. She, she has wantonly arranged this terrible timing.

  James had finished his pasta, which he had eaten with ferocious rapidity, and was now breaking bread sticks into shards.

  ‘I don’t know what to do,’ he said.

  This was why I loved James. No, what am I saying? There was no ‘why’ about my loving James. I loved him from top to toe and inside out and back to front and reasons were superfluous. I wasn’t besotted. I was aware that like everyone else he had his annoying side. It just didn’t annoy me. There is no rhyme or reason to these things. But implicated in that love was the recognition that he wouldn’t lie to me. And that meant he would never say what he didn’t know he truly felt.

  ‘I shouldn’t think you do,’ I said bleakly.

  He has never said so, but with the part of me that ‘knows’ things in my bones I knew that if James loved me too it had to do with the fact that I never pushed him to feel things he didn’t feel. Or, more important, not to feel things he did feel. Letting each other be as we were, and not as we might wish that we were, was one of the ways we matched.

  Another was my habit of voicing seeming irrelevancies which weren’t, so that what I said next had a connection.

  ‘Perhaps that’s why she kept her hat on,’ I said, and it drifted into my mind that my godmother used to say ‘Keep your hat on!’ when anyone got agitated.

  Another ‘reason’ for loving James was that he was quick. He didn’t say much but his understanding was as swift as mine, so he didn’t now say, as most men would, ‘Who?’ or ‘Whose hat?’ Although he had made no comment on the painting we had looked at that morning together he knew at once who I meant.

  ‘Perhaps it’s too dangerous if she’s completely naked,’ he agreed.

  After that we were both silent again. Toni was filleting my sole and making a fuss over whether we wanted spinach or carrots. I found that, quite desperately, I wanted spinach; you’d think, in the circumstances, I wouldn’t give a damn. But when larger matters are beyond your control small things take on an especially vivid importance.

  And, in case you are wondering, yes, of course I was thinking: Perhaps Diane will die and then James and I can go off together. But even in the fraction of a second it took to have that thought I knew that such an outcome would be hopeless. There was Pete, solid and kind and, so far as I knew, faithful – and there was Diane; dead or alive, she would matter. That was the point. She mattered to James and so she mattered to me. She was partly why he loved me, because I understood why she mattered.

  I can’t remember what we talked about for the rest of lunch. Afterwards, we did what we usually did and went back to my office off St Martin’s Lane and made love on my couch. And yes, I’m afraid I have a casting-couch, though so far it has only ever entertained one man. I tried not to think about what James had told me, as we embarked on the familiar but ever-sweet engagement, but our poststudent lovemaking had always been real, so after a bit we stopped and had a cup of tea instead and just looked out of the window at the church of St Martin-in-the-Fields. I suppose there must have been fields there once.

  Later, when James had gone, I rang the National Gallery and asked if I could speak to someone who would tell me about the iconography of Aphrodite’s hat. They put me through to a young man who was an art historian. He was very polite and began to tell me enthusiastically about the significance of Eros and the bees and how the son of the goddess of love had himself suffered from love’s sting and how the ‘hat’ – he was especially polite about this – wasn’t really a hat at all but – but suddenly I didn’t want to hear and I gently pressed the receiver button as he was in full flow. He must have thought me rude; which I regret. I prefer not to be rude.

  But I needed no longer to hear what anyone else thought or knew for I knew for myself why Aphrodite wore that hat. It wasn’t mischief making. It was a recommendation to avoid total exposure. In case you give everything to someone who can’t give it back.

  ‘By all means go naked,’ she seemed winningly to say, ‘but keep your hat on …’

  It’s a magnificent hat. I have wished since I had one like it; or had been better able to learn from Aphrodite’s example.

  PRUNING

  When Harriet Green
wald was cross she would often deal with it by gardening: vigorous digging, raking, mowing and – best of all – pruning usually put paid to any serious anger. Not that Harriet was essentially an angry person. She was, she liked to think, mostly easygoing. But, as everyone does, she had her moments. And these ‘moments’ tended to arise where her father was concerned.

  Harriet’s mother had departed life when her only child was sixteen. She had died under an anaesthetic during a quite ordinary procedure and Harriet had sometimes wondered if her mother had done it as a last resort, having tried, and failed, to leave her husband by less drastic means. Her mother had twice before attempted to escape the marital home: once in a solitary dash for liberty and once on the arm of the owner of a Turkish restaurant, who had promised the earth, or at least to provide for her in Tooting. But despite the restaurateur’s forceful demeanour and material advantages – the restaurant had been doing well – the liaison had not been proof against the remedial effects of Harriet’s father’s disconcerting charm.

  The charm, as charm generally is, was ephemeral. It emerged as a winning card on those occasions which Harriet’s mother had used to call ‘the last straw’ (but which, due to the charm, never quite were). At other times, Harriet thought to herself as she savagely pruned swathes of the Virginia creeper which adorned their back wall, he was intransigent, selfish and crafty. He had been so today.

  Harriet and her husband Mike were due to leave for the US at the end of the week to visit their daughter. Joanna had had an internship with a design studio in Boston specialising in sportswear. Despite the economic downturn, sportswear, it seemed, was booming and Jo had been taken on as an assistant designer.

  Mike and Harriet were both teachers. It was over a year since they had seen their daughter and with the Easter holiday pending they had a splendid opportunity to pay her a visit. ‘But,’ Harriet had said grimly, ‘before we make any serious commitment I’ll have to be sure things are OK with Dad.’

  Being sure things were ‘OK’ meant seeing to it that her father did not alienate his latest carer, though how she was supposed to ensure such a thing, Harriet would dearly love to know. Mike said nothing to this. In the thirty-two years since his wife had died, his father-in-law had been a source of perpetual anxiety for his daughter, who was now the same age as her own mother when she finally escaped her husband’s toils.

  Over the last two years, Sam Davis had run through eight carers, all, as the agency assured in tones of reproach, coming with the highest recommendations. Four of the carers had been men, four women, so it was not gender discrimination operating as Harriet had hoped at first. Replacing the troupe of departed men with women had made not a blind bit of difference. Men and women alike, in the end Sam got them to go.

  Nor was it any kind of racial prejudice. Her father had had British, Afro-Caribbean, Irish, Spanish, Polish and even Venezuelan carers. The fact was, whatever corner of the globe they hailed from, Sam Davis was always too much for them.

  ‘What is it he does exactly?’ Mike asked when the last-but-one carer had given notice.

  Harriet reflected. Mike knew her father, so the question was rhetorical but it was worth trying to put a finger on it.

  ‘He’s changeable,’ she said after a while. ‘But not in the way that we all are. Deliberately. He muddles them: asks them to do things and then when they do just what he has asked he says, quite charmingly, that that wasn’t what he wanted them to do, or that he never asked them to do it in the first place. It drives them mad. And it’s not as though he has dementia or anything. He’s perfectly sound in mind. He just likes to mess people about. It amuses him.’

  ‘Yes, well it doesn’t amuse me,’ Mike had said. ‘If he wasn’t your dad and half paralysed, I’d thump him.’

  ‘Someone will one day,’ Harriet said. ‘I don’t know whether to dread it or pray for it.’

  But today, cutting back the Virginia creeper, she was more inclined to the latter course.

  All had been going so well. They had booked their tickets, suitcases were filling, Mike had Googled what to do in Boston and Harriet had found Jo’s black silk camisole, without which, she emailed, she could no longer survive. And Mira, Sam’s latest carer, seemed really to like him. When Harriet, her heart in her mouth, had visited last, she had found Mira sitting on the kitchen table eating chocolate digestives and screaming with laughter. It was true that what she was laughing at was a fiction with which Sam was regaling her about his alleged career in the navy. There were things about her father’s life of which Harriet guessed she was ignorant, but that he was ever in the British navy she was pretty sure was not one of them.

  But that very morning, just as everything looked set fair, Harriet received a call.

  ‘Madam, I am sorry but I leave Mr Davis.’ The sound of gentle crying filtered down the phone.

  ‘Oh dear, Mira. Why? What has happened?’

  ‘He ask me to buy him pyjamas and I buy and he send me back four times. Now he send me back to get the pyjamas I buy first. I say, “But these are what I bring in the first place.” He say, “I know, I want to see again to see why I no like them.” And then he hit my bottom. It is not right he do this, Mrs Greenwald. My behind it is not right he hit.’

  ‘Mira, wait there. I’m coming right round.’

  Mira let her in red-eyed. Harriet went straight through to the untidy garden room where she found her father sitting, apparently studying the sky. ‘Dad, what’s this I hear from Mira?’

  Her father smiled in the way that to another person might have been winning. He waved his stick in the air. ‘Have you ever studied clouds?’

  ‘Dad, Mira says you hit her.’

  ‘Good Lord.’ Sam Davis turned a mild and mischievous stare on his daughter. ‘As if I would.’

  ‘She claims you smacked her bottom.’

  Her father shrugged. ‘The girl’s an idiot. It was a mere affectionate pat.’

  ‘Dad! For God’s sake, this is the twenty-first century. You simply cannot pat girls’ bottoms.’

  ‘Anyway, I’ve told her she must leave.’

  ‘Why? We’re about to go away.’

  This, she saw, was a mistake. Her father’s face took on a musing look. He was cooking up, Harriet suspected, an answer to rile her further. ‘Have you considered the miracle of cloud formation?’ he eventually asked.

  ‘No,’ Harriet said, furious. ‘With a father like you I have more onerous things on my mind.’

  Apologies and cajoling, and a couple of twenty-pound notes, failed to bring round Mira. She left, promising only, for Harriet’s sake, or perhaps it was the twenty-pound notes, not to make any mention of the assault on her behind.

  And now Harriet, clipping like mad at the already radically barbered Virginia creeper, was at a loss. Today was Saturday. On Maundy Thursday, she and Mike were due to fly to Boston, and what was to be done about her father? Social Services could of course be alerted but he had successfully alienated them long ago. And then, he had ‘means’. Quite how much these ‘means’ amounted to, Harriet had never quite fathomed. But money it seemed was in too much supply for Social Services to consider a trying old man a real emergency.

  The bell rang and, dismounting the ladder, Harriet went through the house to answer it.

  Florid and smiling, Brenda Bottrell, the chairperson of the local gardening society, stood monumentally on the doorstep. ‘The promised Hostas,’ she announced, brandishing a bag overflowing with earthy foliage.

  ‘Oh, thank you,’ said Harriet, who had forgotten the chair had offered her these plants. ‘Do come in,’ she suggested, trying to make up for her forgetfulness, ‘and have a cup of tea.’

  ‘Well, maybe just the one.’

  Mrs Bottrell, moving like a tank, manoeuvred herself on to the ricketiest kitchen chair. It was impossible not to suppose she had picked it deliberately as the least fit to bear her weight. Widowed for who knew how many years, Mrs Bottrell, Harriet had always to remind herself, must be lonely. Lon
ely but undeniably awful.

  Over tea, Harriet explained that, regrettably, their impending Easter trip would mean her missing the next meeting of the garden society. Mrs Bottrell was condescending and understanding.

  ‘I have never crossed the pond myself,’ she averred, as if only the foolhardy failed to follow her example.

  ‘Though we mightn’t be going after all.’ Harriet explained to Mrs Bottrell’s questioning brow that her father’s carer had given notice and she was pessimistic, at such short notice, about finding a replacement for the Easter weekend.

  ‘Where does your poor father live?’

  Electing not to query the ‘poor’, Harriet said, ‘Just round the corner. We moved here to be near him when he had his stroke. He’s half paralysed,’ and sighed.

  Mrs Bottrell’s fierce little eyes took on a sudden lustre. ‘If I can be of any help …? I was, you know, a trained nurse.’

  It was as if some empress had loftily offered her services. ‘Oh, I couldn’t possibly impose,’ said Harriet, flustered.

  But later that evening, when the agency had ‘regretted’ they had ‘no one at present suitable for Mr Davis’, Mike said, ‘Why not accept the old trout’s offer? She might even enjoy it if time’s heavy on her hands.’

  ‘I doubt if anything is “heavy” on Mrs Bottrell’s hands.’

  None the less, the following morning Harriet rang the chair of the gardening society.

  ‘If you really mean it,’ Mike heard her say, ‘then we will be for ever in your debt.’

  Returning from Boston, Harriet delayed going round to her father’s house longer than good conscience quite allowed. The trip had been heavenly. Jo was thriving and had a pleasant-seeming boyfriend, Mike had ‘done’ Boston and she had had time to catch up on her reading. On the few calls they had made to her father he had been uncharacteristically polite. Nevertheless, after bracing herself to ring to arrange the dutiful visit, it was with some trepidation that she walked up the path to his front door. The door, she observed, had been newly painted a startling red.