by Angela Huth
‘I never suggested. . . .’
They often got off to a bad start. Things would ease after the vegetarian salad – Anne’s recent exaggerated vegetarianism was another of her annoying features – and a couple of glasses of wine. Anne settled into a long monologue about her new exercise routine and her plan to join the Greens. Rachel picked at grated carrot, disliking Anne: she disliked the gold-rimmed spectacles, the frizzy hair, the pale grey tracksuit, the aggressive attempt not to look attractive. She was irritated by the self-congratulation of the voice, the implied criticism of Rachel’s lesser life.
With the herb tea (’You know I never touch coffee, God if only people would give up drinking so much coffee, we’d be a healthier nation’) Anne at last turned her attention to Rachel.
‘And how’s everything with you?’
‘Fine, as I said. All much as usual. Jeremy likes Cambridge, Helen loves Durham, all much as -’
‘Thomas?’
‘Thomas?’
‘How’s he?’
‘He’s fine, too.’ This was ridiculous. Anne had no interest in how any of them were. ‘Painting away at weekends. Buying watercolours.’
‘Ah.’ The tip of a grey tongue explored Anne’s precise, colourless lips. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘for once I’m going to say something. About you.’
‘Oh?’
Anne fiddled with a gold chain round her neck. Even her sudden embarrassment was glazed with an air of efficiency. ‘Right. This is it. Here goes.’ She coughed. ‘Rachel, I think you ought to take a lover.’
In the split second afforded to her, Rachel calculated she must extract all feeling from her answer.
‘Why?’
Anne looked her sister in the eye, gave a pained sigh. ‘It would change your life,’ she said.
Rachel had always thought that to take offence is a waste of both time and energy, and when necessary fought hard against that particular reaction. But she felt herself stiffen at her sister’s words, and drew herself up very straight.
‘What an incredible, impertinent idea,’ she said at last. ‘I’ve never had a lover, and I don’t want one now. From all I’ve heard, they’re a terrible complication and not worth all the deceit. Besides, what makes you think I’ve any need for a lover? You know nothing about my life. Thomas and I are perfectly happy, thank you.’
‘You’re right. I don’t know much about your life, and I’m sure you and Thomas are fine if you say so. But I have this instinct – I don’t know – that you could be happier.’
‘Don’t be so absurd. Everyone could be happier. I wouldn’t have thought calculated infidelity was a way to ensure marital bliss.’
Anne sighed again, a touch impatient. ‘Perhaps the word I’m looking for is livelier. More like you used to be.’
‘Livelier? Thomas said I was the liveliest girl he had ever met.’
‘That was a long time ago.’
Rachel reflected in a moment’s silence, determined to appear unperturbed by such cheek.
‘Youthful skittishness would look pretty silly in middle age. I agree I haven’t your energy, of course. I’d never manage all the swimming, exercise, dashing about, that you manage so well. I’d hate all that.’ She paused, then added quietly, ‘But I think I’m still reasonably lively.’
‘Well, you’re not.’ Anne thumped the table. ‘You’re fading, Rachel, if you really want to know. You’re retreating into some private place where you’re inaccessible.’
‘How can you say that?’
‘I’ve noticed.’
‘You’ve hardly seen me.’
‘I’ve noticed all the same.’
‘It’s not true.’
‘Look, this isn’t an attack.’
‘It sounds like one.’
‘It’s meant to be a help.’
‘Very peculiar help from you, recommending adultery, I must say. You, the greatest upholder of monogamy –’
‘One can change.’
‘Change?’ Rachel was mildly curious.
‘I’ll tell you, if only to support my suggestion. Since we last met – what, six months ago? – I’ve begun looking into myself. Really looking, to see if I can discover what’s going on behind all the frenetic dashing about. Begun finding out who I am.’
‘Oh Lord, not all that,’ answered Rachel with distaste.
‘Despise me if you like,’ said Anne, huffily. ‘I know your aversion to any real kind of truth, so I won’t bore you with my discoveries. But I’ll just tell you this. The people I turn to – and, yes, they’d be the sort of people you’d love to scorn – recognised there was a part of me longing to be liberated, a part that was struggling to be fulfilled.’
Rachel flinched. ‘Look, I’m sure you find all that sort of stuff rewarding,’ she said tightly, ‘and I’m glad. But I really don’t want to hear about it. I think expensive ego trips are for the humourless and the self-indulgent. They’re one of the really ill-conceived practices of this age – far worse for the population than coffee,’ she added, with a smile which Anne did not return. ‘If only perfectly able people would stop agitating about their every feeling, and get on with their lives. . . .’
‘You’re not exactly getting on with your life,’ said Anne.
There was a long silence.
‘If you think about it,’ Rachel continued at last, more gently, ‘all the most interesting people in history, the great men and women we aspire to, didn’t spend their lives boring themselves and everyone else with their introspective findings. It was Nietzsche, wasn’t it, who said: “Find myself? I’d run away.” Of course I’m not against soul-searching. It’s been a preoccupation through the ages. But on the whole its finest discoveries have been used in the cause of art. It’s only in the last twenty years or so the whole business of looking into yourself has descended to such a trivial, commercial level, mostly indulged in by people who have nothing more vital to occupy them –’
‘Please don’t go on,’ shouted Anne. ‘Such short-sighted nonsense makes me angry. And besides, I insist on telling you about me before I go.’
‘You. Yes.’
Anne took a deep, magnanimous breath. Efficient control against blighted prejudice.
‘As you know, I’ve a good marriage, I love my children, I like my work, I’m blessed with energy and friends and enough money. All wonderful, super, fine.’
‘So?’
‘So that wasn’t enough, I found.’
‘Good God. What more do you expect?’
‘A touch of – outside adventure, you could call it, to complete the happy picture. It was all too good.’
‘I can’t believe it,’ said Rachel. ‘You.’
‘The . . . people I consult about these things believe a touch of nefarious pleasure is in fact an asset to a marriage. The adrenalin it engenders cancels out the resentment. That can’t be bad. You must do your own thing, if that’s going to enrich your life. Applied selfishness can be beneficial.’
‘I think it’s appalling, an immoral recommendation,’ said Rachel. ‘Who are these people who make such ghastly suggestions?’
‘You wouldn’t understand about them: I’ve no intention of telling you. And it’s all right if you stick to certain rules. No-one need be hurt, if that’s what you’re thinking. Andrew’s fully aware of what’s going on. He has his own meaningless flutters here and there.’
‘It wouldn’t work for us,’ said Rachel.
‘It might. I bet Thomas allows himself the occasional diversion.’
‘Of course he doesn’t.’
‘All I’m suggesting is: it works for some. It works for us. I’ve never felt better. The new regime suits me. It might be worth trying. It might put some colour in your cheeks.’
Rachel shook her head. She felt sick. She stood up, wanting Anne to go now. It was time this horrible lunch came to an end. Anne stood, too. She put a hand on her sister’s shoulder.
‘Sorry if I’ve shocked you. But there are times when one suddenly real
ises one has come to a crossroads.’ Rachel winced. ‘And times it’s worth trying a new direction. If that direction doesn’t work for you, well, you won’t have lost anything. But it’s worth experimenting. Honestly. Better to experiment than to fade altogether. Thanks for the lunch.’
Anne left the kitchen silent as a ghost in her hideous trainers. Rachel watched her through the window, bouncing down the steps, so cocky, confident, smug, unattractive. Suddenly, the shock and effrontery Anne had caused lifted. She wanted to laugh. The thought of her wiry, frizzy-headed sister with her loathsome tracksuits, cramped teeth and onion-smelling fingers acquiring queues of eager lovers was completely absurd, darkly comic. How on earth . . . ?
Rachel flew down the path.
Anne was already in the driving seat of her Fiesta, pursing her washed-out lips. She wound down the window.
‘Yes?’ Suspicious eyes crinkled into tiny slits.
‘Where do you find these men?’ Rachel asked.
At last, Anne laughed. It was a long, frilly laugh that set the crooked teeth jiggling on the blanched lips, and spit bulleting from their corners.
‘Oh, that!’ she finally managed to splutter. ‘That’s the least of the problems. Signal your availability and they flock, believe me.’ She shut the window and drove off, waving.
Signal your availability, indeed, Rachel snarled to herself.
She returned indoors. The routine of her afternoon was by now shattered irreparably. There was only one thing she could contemplate: bed.
Five minutes later, curled between cool sheets, head cradled in her huge, soft pillow, she shut her eyes. Among the indeterminate scarves of sleepy thought an unexpected idea came to her: to signal availability might not be a bad idea before fading altogether, she thought, before the darkness of sleep released her from any clear plan.
* * *
Mary’s private rule was not to think about death in the house. It was a superstition she had first put into practice years ago, when thoughts of dying had begun to accumulate.
On Monday morning she drove the few miles to the beach, parked at the golf course. Two old ladies were putting on a brilliant green, the only visible players. They wore shapeless, colourless anoraks, but gaudy socks enlivened their stick legs. Their identical angora berets, brushed by a small breeze, made scarlet spume of their hair. My generation, thought Mary. Do they think of dying as they position the ball, aim for the hole, wipe the wind from their eyes with blue-veined hands?
Mary crossed the golf course, unobserved by these contemporaries. She climbed the dunes, making her way along paths scratchy with marram grass and sea gorse. At the top she stopped to survey the high tide, the empty sweep of beach. Through the thickness of her jersey she felt the sun. She made her way down on to the sands. There, in the sharp morning light, each small stone and shell made its particular shadow. A single seagull kited above her, rising and falling, pulled by an invisible string. How many more times can I have all this, she wondered? She was glad she could not know.
Mary’s purpose in coming here this morning was to reflect upon the practicalities of Bill’s life once he was alone. It was a subject which she knew would both repel and appal him, and which she would never dream of talking about. To Bill, any speculation about death was the epitome of bad taste, something he was not prepared to consider. Did other couples, Mary wondered, discuss what would happen when one of them died? Or was the topic unmentionable in the majority of elderly households? Did millions of husbands and wives, like her, keep their private fears to themselves?
As she wondered about these things, Mary saw a large, uncomfortable-looking man shuffling and slipping down the dunes, waving. When he came closer she saw that she did not know him. Overweight, inappropriately dressed in a tight tweed suit, he was red in the face and shining. Mary glanced about her. Not another person in sight. What ailed this troubled stranger? (She liked the word ailed, not often used these days.) She smiled, more at herself than at him, still not moving.
A few feet from her, the man returned her smile.
‘Lovely morning.’ He looked at his watch. ‘I’m a bit early. Thought I’d fill in time with a breath of fresh air on the beach. Didn’t realise how far it was, across the golf course, over the dunes.’
‘No. It’s deceptive.’
‘Heading for Marsh Cottage, actually. Would I be on the right road?’
Mary laughed. ‘It’s back up the road you’ve come on, then first left up a small lane leading to the marsh –’
‘Thanks, thanks. I missed the lane. I’ll be all right once I’m there.’ He panted, still out of breath. ‘Visiting the painter, R. Cotterman, as a matter of fact.’ He looked at his watch again.
‘She’s an old friend of ours,’ said Mary, ‘and our favourite painter. We’ve been collecting her pictures for years.’
‘Really? Coincidence, coincidence. I’m about to become a collector, I hope. Well, I must be off. Thanks for the directions.’
He loped back off across the beach, anxiety in every step. Mary wondered where he had come from, and what was the cause of his trouble? In the brief crossing of strange paths it is ignorance that makes us helpless: there is rarely either the time or the possibility of discovering what the other person has come from – what state of life, what state of mind. Meetings are conducted in a fog of signals whose significance is often missed or misunderstood. Thus the act of communicating, even on the most superficial level, is full of mysteries. Many of them can never be solved but can only become the grist of speculation.
Engaged in such thoughts, Mary followed the deep footsteps made by the man. He had curiously aroused her pity, her curiosity. Who was he? Bill might know if Cotterman was expecting a rich buyer. . . . She would ask. Or perhaps they would invite her round for a drink this evening, find out.
Mary reached the car park to see the man driving swiftly away in a Mercedes. She waved. He did not appear to notice her. She unlocked the door of her own small car, lowered herself into her capsule of familiar, dog-smelling warmth. The problem of Bill’s life after her own death had been blasted from her mind. In the quiet pattern of her life, the idea of Cotterman’s strange visitor gave rise to a small, unexpected frisson. She looked forward to questioning Bill as they ate their lunch of cottage pie, sprouts and rice pudding. What she would keep from him, of course, was the timeliness of the stranger’s arrival – the happy dissipation of her thoughts it had caused, and this agreeable feeling of curiosity.
* * *
Thomas drove down the lane to the marsh. It was so narrow that hedges scratched the sides of his car. He was generally unnerved, both by the prospect of the meeting, and his brief visit to the beach. There, he had seen in a glance that all the elements of the place, familiar to him from R. Cotterman’s paintings, were precisely, searingly conveyed in her simple and melancholy watercolours. He felt weak with awe.
The cottage was a small Norfolk building of brick and flintstone. A smattering of careless gravel edged the forlorn grass, hovered round the front door. Thomas spent a long time parking; whatever angle he tried seemed to take up too much room. When he had finally determined on a corner and locked the door – unbreakable habit of a Londoner – he was dismayed to see how vulgar the car looked in this hidden place. He wished he had borrowed Rachel’s old Fiesta.
There was neither bell nor knocker on the door – a door whose brown paint was so bleached, blistered and uncared for that it put Thomas in mind of a back door. He thumped on it with his fist. Two flakes of brittle paint fell to the ground. He tried again. Silence. Nothing. Long silence.
Clumsy with impatience, Thomas turned the handle. The door opened directly into a room which extended the entire length of the cottage. For several moments he stood where he was, arms limp at his sides, taking in the muddle of objects and smells that assailed him. He did not feel the awkwardness of an intruder but, rather, the intense relief of one who has arrived somewhere he always has wanted to find, though he has not been able precisely
to envisage that place. With a strange and wonderful sense of ownership, Thomas banged the door behind him, and made his way further into the room.
He moved with caution into the dense jungle of tables, chairs, easels, pictures, books, newspapers, magazines, plants, gumboots rimed with pale dry mud, jerseys, teapots, candles, bottles of wine huddled randomly in groups, unopened letters, jars of paint brushes and countless boxes of well-used paints. At one end of the room was an ancient Aga, the colour of old teeth. A fat tin coffee pot sprawled on its top. The muffled bubbling that came from it was the only sound in the silence. Two smells – distinct and yet merging, like distant railway tracks – filled the room: burnt toast and turpentine. Tears blurred Thomas’s eyes. He could not account for the emotion he felt: it was a kind of recognition that left him both weak and strong.
He reached the window, which stretched almost the length of the room. Outside, in contrast to the chaos within, stretched the supreme simplicity of marsh, distant dunes, vast sky. Thomas found himself puzzling how to paint such a scene: raw umber, yellow ochre, cadmium yellow, windsor yellow, burnt sienna, cerulean blue, sap green – the names in his paint box fumbled through his mind, none of them the pale, hay colours lit from behind ‘by heaven’s light’ that were actually there, before him. How, in paint, could a man convey the tautness of May sky, so surprisingly edged with frivolous cloud? At the hem of this particular sky shirred clouds ruffled the horizon, evocative as petticoats. . . . How could I ever? thought Thomas. He glanced down, wondering.
There, on a path of beaten mud – a towpath, a right of way, perhaps – he saw a small figure in a yellow fisherman’s mackintosh and sou’wester, dazzling in the sun. She carried a sketchbook under one arm. Brushes stuck out from a pocket. Very upright, she moved slowly, as if the weight of each footstep was of some private significance. She came to a halt just at the place where Thomas stood behind the glass. She turned, waved, smiled, as if she had expected him to be there. Her hat, fallen forward on to her forehead, concealed her eyes. But Thomas saw her hand was small and brown, speckled as an egg. Having taken in the sight of him at her window, she then moved on at the same pace, giving no indication the rhythm of her progress should be interrupted by a stranger who had let himself into her empty house.
