It was hot inside the cloth skin as she and Kate lolloped around the stage next day, falling in and out of step. But she was cheered by the howls of laughter from the audience and even more by the thought that Christmas was over for another year. She began to nurse a fantasy that she really could drop in on her way back, that he’d be pleased to see her, that he too felt as if they’d met before, maybe in a previous incarnation. She liked the idea of that. But she knew she wouldn’t do it when it came to the crunch and the knowledge made her sad.
Kate put her head round the door of what passed for a dressing-room at the church hall. ‘Someone to see you,’ she said, and went away.
‘I thought the back legs were absolutely brilliant,’ he said. ‘Best back legs I’ve ever seen. But I’ve had a hell of a job finding you. Why didn’t you give me your name and address?’
Laura felt a huge delighted smile fill up the whole of her face. ‘Why didn’t you ask me?’
‘Don’t laugh,’ he said, ‘but I didn’t think of it till after you’d gone. I felt as if I knew you already.’
‘That’s amazing,’ she said, shaken. ‘That’s exactly how I felt too.’
Kate peered round the door, saw them grinning idiotically at each other, shook her head and disappeared.
‘Tell you what,’ he said. ‘Let’s start again. I’m Tom Mallison and I really like your hooves. Could we take it from there?’
‘I’m Laura Nichols,’ said Laura, ‘and I really love Christmas. Did I mention that before?’
The Consolation Prize
In the summer, she went to live by the sea.
‘Do come,’ Penny urged her. ‘Jean wants to go to Vancouver and she needs someone to water the cat and feed the plants. I could do it but I’d have to drive there every day. It won’t cost you anything and you can let your flat and make a fortune.’
Annie felt she was being manipulated. The idea of a summer spent away from London, away from Daniel, threw her into a panic, and yet at the same time it was perversely attractive. It would serve him right. He was always away for most of August anyway, down in Cornwall with his family, and they only met three or four times a month for a few hours each time, so if she did go away for the summer she was probably only missing about twenty-four hours of Daniel.
It was sad arithmetic. It evoked a day and a night of unbroken time, which of course they had never spent together, and it made her angry that she was managing on so little.
‘Besides,’ Penny added unfairly, ‘now I’m pregnant I need you more than ever. Just imagine, a whole summer only five minutes apart. It’d be almost as good as sharing a flat again.’
Annie still wasn’t used to the idea of Penny being pregnant. The bump wasn’t very obvious yet but she found herself staring at Penny’s stomach every time they met and thinking with a certain amount of apprehension about the miracle that was taking place. Would it come between them mentally as it already did physically when they hugged? Would Penny be too tired, too preoccupied, too maternal to sit up late and hear about Daniel and care about people who didn’t have children? Pregnancy was something they had discussed so often, inevitable but remote, like the end of the world, and here was Penny already doing it. Was summer by the sea a last chance to make the most of Penny in case she was submerged when the baby came?
They went to look at the flat together. It was small, like Annie’s place in London, two rooms, kitchen and bathroom, but it had a balcony overlooking the sea. Annie stood there for a long time watching the windsurfers with their gaudy butterfly sails. Sometimes they capsized ignominiously; sometimes they were swept along fast in a straight line. The sun on the water dazzled her and the sea and the sky merged, making the horizon a distant blur. She was conscious of Jean waiting for a decision, the tiny diamond glinting on her left hand. She was younger than Annie but she had the confident air of one who knows she has got her life in order. She would be much too sensible to get involved with a married man. ‘I just need someone to look after the flat,’ she said, ‘while I visit my fiancé.’ She had an open honest face with no make-up, and she was decidedly overweight, but Annie still couldn’t like her. The word ‘fiancé’ took her straight back to her teens when your parents paid for the reception and your father gave you away and your first marriage was also your last.
‘It’s a lovely view,’ she said, as the cat twined itself round her legs. She thought of Daniel and how surprised he would be if she went away.
‘So we’re going to be neighbours,’ Steve said that evening when she joined them for supper.
‘Well, I haven’t really decided yet. I said I’d ring her next week.’
‘She wants to talk it over with Daniel first,’ said Penny.
Annie was grateful for the way she always made it sound as though Daniel were part of her life, instead of belonging to someone else. Penny understood even though she couldn’t approve. Annie didn’t blame her for not approving; after all, she didn’t really approve herself.
‘How is Danny boy?’ Steve enquired.
‘Fine,’ said Annie, ‘but d’you have to call him that?’
‘Sorry, sorry.’ Then he whistled a few bars of the ‘Londonderry Air’.
‘Lay off, Steve,’ said Penny. ‘Not everyone appreciates your warped sense of humour.’
Annie couldn’t understand why Penny had married Steve. Apart from the fact that he looked rather like Warren Beatty, he didn’t seem to have much to recommend him. But perhaps that was enough. Perhaps he was wonderful in bed. Perhaps he was also very kind and had a lovely nature hidden away under his silly jokes. Perhaps they had proper conversations when they were alone. Sometimes when she visited them she felt like Blanche in Streetcar staying with Stella and Stanley Kowalski, and very much hoped it wouldn’t end the same way, with her getting raped and going off her head and being carted away by men in white coats, dependent on the kindness of strangers. The whole situation with Daniel made her feel a little crazy at times, as if she was living two half lives, or as if she were a puppet kept in a toy cupboard, not an adult woman in charge of her own fate. Perhaps that was why Penny had married Steve, so as not to feel like that.
‘Just think,’ said Steve, perhaps trying to make amends, ‘if you were only down the road, how much work you and Pen could do on Lydia Snake.’
This was their pet project. In a rare idle moment in the staffroom long ago they had come up with the idea of a series of children’s books, written by Annie and illustrated by Penny, about Lydia Snake, a charming reticulated python who lived in an airing cupboard and had various adventures when she was off duty from busking with her owner. She was in love with Peregrine Python, but he was a bit of a snob and preferred Anna Adder, so Lydia Snake spent a lot of time pouring out her troubles to her best friend Cindy Cat. They had great fun planning the series and how to spend the vast royalties, but so far Penny had done one rather tentative charcoal drawing of their heroine coiled up on a striped bath towel, and Annie had written half a paragraph beginning, ‘Lydia Snake really wished people weren’t so prejudiced against pythons.’
‘After all,’ Steve added, spoiling it all, ‘you’ll have to find something to do with those endless holidays you teachers get.’
‘Absolutely right,’ said Annie, refusing to rise to the bait. ‘And now I’m teaching adults, my holidays are even longer.’ She knew from experience that the best way to deal with Steve was to smile and agree with him, but she didn’t always remember in time. ‘I shall think of you, Steve, when you’re out driving your minicab and I’m sitting on my balcony looking at the sea and writing a bestseller.’
Steve grinned, acknowledging defeat, Penny giggled and poured some more wine, and the evening ended more amiably than it had begun.
When she got home Annie rang Jeremy for advice. He seemed delighted to be asked and insisted on taking her out to dinner next day to discuss it. She protested feebly; she always felt guilty about letting him spend money on her, but he would never let her pay her share, no ma
tter how often she suggested it. ‘There are other reasons than sex,’ he would say solemnly, ‘for a man to buy a woman dinner. Her nut-brown hair. Her cheekbones. Her sense of humour.’
‘I don’t think I have much sense of humour,’ said Annie, who couldn’t deny the hair and the cheekbones but felt bad about the number of times she had cried on Jeremy’s shoulder.
‘You laugh at my jokes, don’t you?’ said Jeremy. ‘What more proof do you need?’ And she hadn’t the heart to tell him that he didn’t make very many jokes.
Proposals, now, that was a different matter. She had lost count of how many times Jeremy had proposed to her. She had learnt to take him seriously, although she had to keep saying no. Now he had stopped asking her, and contented himself with telling her to let him know if she ever changed her mind. ‘I’m going to leave the offer on the table,’ he said. ‘Okay?’ She was ashamed to admit that she actually missed being asked. Now when they met he would simply say, ‘Still Daniel?’ and, when she nodded: ‘Lucky chap.’
Jeremy was thirty-eight and lived with his mother who said plaintively at intervals, ‘Annie, my dear, I do wish you’d marry Jay and take him off my hands. He’s such a responsibility and I want to grow old disgracefully.’ Jeremy said his mother needed protection from unsuitable men who were after her money rather than her body, but since knowing them both for five years Annie had reached the conclusion that they needed each other.
She had tried hard to fall in love with Jeremy. If anyone could have fallen in love by sheer willpower, she would have managed it. He was tall and thin, with sandy hair and anxious brown eyes behind thick glasses, but he had nice hands and a lovely voice and he was kind and intelligent and he cared about her. They had met when he sold her a flat after her divorce and for a couple of years the relationship stayed platonic while she described herself as the walking wounded.
Then one fatal New Year’s Eve they had tried to make love, perhaps feeling it was expected of them after such a long friendship, or that it was silly not to, with so much goodwill around. It was a dismal failure and left them both feeling embarrassed. Even their arms and legs didn’t seem to fit, quite apart from the more important bits. Jeremy was not well-endowed and she didn’t feel filled up at all; he didn’t seem to have heard of foreplay, or afterplay, come to that; and the whole performance, if she could call it that, was over almost as soon as it had begun. ‘Was that it?’ she felt like saying but didn’t because she had a kind heart and besides, like every other woman, she knew that the male ego was a delicate thing: since puberty she had been conditioned not to damage it.
‘It’ll be better next time,’ he promised her, breathing hard, and she longed to say, ‘If there is a next time.’
Even their mouths were ill-matched: their teeth clashed and their tongues were tentative. Jeremy didn’t smell of anything either: sweat or soap or skin. He was totally bland. If you shut your eyes, you could pretend he wasn’t there, which she did. They were obviously meant to be friends and that was that. They shouldn’t have pushed their luck. The best part had been when he put his arm round her and stroked her hair.
‘I’m afraid I’m not very good at this,’ he added disarmingly, ‘because I don’t get enough practice.’
‘I’m rather out of practice myself,’ she said, to comfort him. It was true but irrelevant. Making love was not something you forgot how to do, if you had ever known. She felt bitterly disappointed that the two miserable celibate years since her divorce should end in this undignified fumbling. Then she began to wonder if she was at fault, not sufficiently erotic or skilful to get the best out of Jeremy. Like most women, she had been trained to blame herself for men’s shortcomings.
‘I shouldn’t have drunk so much, trying to get up my courage,’ he said.
‘Neither should I,’ she said dutifully, although they had only had two gin and tonics, and a bottle of champagne with their dinner. She wondered how long it would be before they could both pretend the whole thing had never happened.
Then he had really surprised her. ‘Of course,’ he said, in the same casual, excuse-making tone, ‘if you were just anyone I’d be much better. I’ve really made a hash of it because I’m in love with you.’
She was so overwhelmed by this statement that she couldn’t think of anything to say.
‘Story of my life,’ he added.
‘Jeremy, you’re a lovely person and I’m very fond of you, but I’m sure we’re just meant to be friends. It feels a bit incestuous. The chemistry isn’t right. It’s nobody’s fault. Or maybe I haven’t got over Peter yet.’ Words poured out of her now, anything that came to mind that would make him feel better and make sure it never happened again.
‘I do wish you’d marry me,’ he said. ‘I’m sure I could improve a lot over the next fifty years.’
On the whole he seemed to get over the incident, as she thought of it, rather faster than she did. She went on feeling embarrassed on his behalf for quite some time, whereas once she’d made it clear to him that they were going to be platonic or nothing, and no hard feelings, he relaxed and seemed to recover all his old zest for taking her out for dinners and concerts and drives in the country. He held her hand in the street and kissed her goodnight in the hall, but he never again tried to get her into bed, and she thought she detected relief rather than disappointment. If he wasn’t allowed to try, then he could not fail. For herself, she enjoyed his company; she was also grateful to have someone to talk about when her ex-husband Peter rang up with news of his new wife and child.
And then she met Daniel. It still made her go cold when she thought how easily she might not have met him. Liz had invited her to the latest private view at the gallery as usual, but she was late home from school after rehearsing Saint Joan and due to meet Jeremy for dinner at eight. She was thoroughly exhausted and really wanted nothing more than a bath and an early night. Besides, the gallery seemed to be moving away from the splashy dramatic abstract paintings that she enjoyed towards huge heavy badly drawn nudes. Perhaps that was the new trend. It was probably just like skirt lengths and she was out of date as usual. Just as she was deciding that she liked modern art after all, they went and changed it.
But Liz had rung up at the last moment and said, ‘Don’t you dare cancel, I’m counting on you. Gian-Carlo’s bringing his wife, for God’s sake, you can’t let me down now, I need some moral support.’
So Annie had gone, half out of sisterly loyalty to Liz, and half out of curiosity to see the legendary Gian-Carlo, Liz’s Italian lover, at close range. She recognised him at once, although she had never seen him before, because he was supremely beautiful, like a film star, a god; she found herself wondering how Liz could possibly go to bed with him. It would be like sleeping with a work of art: too awe-inspiring to be fun. The wife was predictable too: plump and plain and confident, her status reinforced by many children. Annie felt comfortably above it all, divorced and celibate, and ready to be soothed by yet another peaceful dinner with Jeremy. Then she saw Daniel.
He was shorter than Jeremy and wider, so that he formed a rather delectable rectangle like some of the paintings, which were not all the ugly figures she had feared. He had dark hair turning grey and an air of weariness, as if he had seen it all before and found it wanting. There were exhausted shadows beneath his eyes, which were a murky green. But he had a smile that made you feel you were the only person in the room, and dark hair escaping from his collar and cuffs, suggesting it must be all over his body. She fell instantly in love, or was it lust? She didn’t care. Her knees sagged and she could feel herself salivating, as if, starving, she had pressed her nose against the window of a top-class restaurant serving rare steak.
‘Who is that?’ she said faintly to Liz.
‘Where?’ Then she followed Annie’s eyeline. ‘Oh, him. That’s Daniel Hurst, Gian-Carlo’s accountant. We call him the gorilla.’
Annie gulped. ‘I nearly poured my drink over him and he said, “Excuse me”.’
‘Oh, te
rrific,’ said Liz. ‘Sounds like an old Doris Day movie. That’s really sparkling dialogue.’
‘Introduce me, Liz, please. I’ll do anything you like. I’ll hem your curtains. I’ll walk the dog. I’ll even unblock your sink.’
‘Follow me,’ said Liz instantly. ‘He’s heavily married, of course. But you expected that, didn’t you? All the good ones are.’
They crossed the room together and she heard Liz say, ‘Oh Daniel, have you met Annie? She needs some advice about her income tax and I told her you were just the chap.’
‘We nearly collided just now,’ he said, smiling the irresistible smile. ‘Hullo again.’
Then Liz was suddenly gone and they were alone in the crowded room. Annie heard herself telling him about the Lydia Snake project as if it were a reality and he said something about Schedule D and spreading her (as yet non-existent) self-employed income over three years, but she didn’t really take it in because she was too busy looking at his mouth.
‘It sounds like great fun,’ he said. ‘I’m sure my children would love it.’
The word children gave her a pain in the heart, the sort she had not had since Peter announced he was leaving her for pregnant Linda Jones in the upper sixth. She wondered if they looked like him. That large squashed crooked nose of his would look odd on a child. She thought he looked rather Roman, like someone out of I Claudius or possibly The Godfather. Maybe he was in the Mafia. She remembered Liz saying that the gallery was meant to be a tax loss for Gian-Carlo, while the ceramics shop next door made all the real money. Perhaps Daniel was a crook.
She wondered if she were going mad. She had never been so instantly devastated by anyone. She heard herself talking as if she were perfectly in control of herself, and she must have said something amusing because he laughed.
‘Perhaps we could discuss it over dinner,’ he said. ‘My wife’s up in Scotland with her parents and I do hate eating alone.’
That of course was her cue to say no, thanks all the same, she didn’t go out with married men.
Triangles Page 14
