by Sarah Long
If he were in his garden in France right now, he could take a heavy-duty fork and plunge it into the ground, feel where the stones lay and where the sandy soil allowed the prongs to pass. Digging over the beds, he could reach down to remove the roots of weeds, anaemic as beansprouts. Afterwards, he would have a mug of steaming coffee and be glad to think that he had rescued his garden from those intruders, that later on, in summer, the flowers would be all the more exquisite as a result of his labours.
‘Lovely card from Baz, thanking us for the party.’
Lydia’s voice reached him like an unwelcome, distant wake-up call.
‘You might take him out for lunch, see if he wants to invest in your fund. Now it seems we’re well and truly in the toy cupboard.’
Baz was the capricious chairman of Lydia’s magazine group, renowned for bullying his staff, who referred to themselves as being in or out of the toy cupboard according to whether they were currently in favour. Lydia, being fearlessly self-confident, always assumed she was well in, and Baz’s note would seem to bear her out. Rupert considered him a nasty piece of work he would rather have no dealings with.
‘You have lunch with him,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t touch that piece of shit’s money with a bargepole.’
‘Ooh, you’re so upright,’ she said, clattering round the kitchen. ‘I do love it when you make a stand, such a contrast to my own more fluid approach to people. Shall I see if I can book Caraffini for tonight?’
‘Surely we can eat in, we’ve eaten out every night for the past three weeks.’
The thought of another evening in a restaurant listening to Lydia’s brittle talk was not appealing. This was hardly a good omen for their married life, but maybe he was just suffering from the over-exposure of three weeks’ holiday.
‘You’re cooking, then, are you?’ she said.
‘Fine.’
‘Because you needn’t think I’m going to spend my first night back in London messing up the kitchen . . .’
‘I said I’ll cook.’
‘But you’re tired.’
‘Let’s get a takeaway then.’
‘Might just as well pop down the road to Caraffini in that case.’
‘OK, whatever.’
He closed his eyes again and returned to dreaming of his house in France. Jane would sit beside him and plan how to spend the rest of the day. Lunch might be a cassoulet that he would prepare in the big rough-cast iron pot that always sat on top of the cooker. The cannellini beans would have been soaking all night. You had time to cook and garden and do the things that really mattered when you were there. Not like in London where you were always rushing off to the office or catching a plane in search of the driest or hottest or coldest or most miraculous places on earth.
‘I’m definitely coming down in favour of the Scottish castle,’ said Lydia, calling out from the bedroom. ‘The weather can be dodgy anywhere in the UK, so unless we were thinking of chartering a plane for everyone to go somewhere hot . . .’
There was a hint of a question in her voice, which Rupert was quick to answer.
‘No.’
‘So in that case, I think the castle. Entirely in keeping with your dour Scottish roots and relatively economical. I know we need to keep a bit of a lid on it, and we don’t want to compromise on the honeymoon. Or the London home ‘
She appeared in the doorway, wearing a bathrobe, arms folded as she outlined their wedding plans. She was like his business partner, or his accountant, or one of those scary PAs who used to be the power behind the corporate throne in the days before women had proper jobs.
‘I’m going for a shower,’ said Rupert. ‘I can’t be thinking about this right now.’
He patted her on the shoulder on his way out — he didn’t want to be unkind — and went into the bathroom, stripping out of his travel-stained clothes, turning on the shower and standing under the powerful jet of hot water. It was no good, he was going to have to tell her he couldn’t go through with it. The only question was, how? How did you walk out on the wedding you had just spent three weeks hearing about? How could you break off the engagement that you had only announced a month ago to a room full of approving friends?
His friend John had done it from the driving seat of his sports car after Sunday lunch with the future in-laws. Engine throbbing, he had dropped the bombshell, then it was foot down on the gas and he was out of there. Rupert could never be so cruel. Maybe he should just suggest they continue as they were, backing down from the wedding but not going as far as ending the relationship. He couldn’t bear to make a scene. But even as he was convincing himself, he knew this was impossible. You could live with someone for years without any talk of getting married, but once the idea had been mooted and the deal agreed, there was no going back to the way things were.
He finished his shower and dressed and combed his hair. It was jet lag and exhaustion that was doing this to him, he needed to rest and come to his senses. It had hardly been a spur-of-the-moment thing, his engagement to Lydia, and if he felt rather underwhelmed by the whole thing, it must simply be that you didn’t get that excited about things once you were forty. By leaving it so late to get married, he had leapfrogged straight into discontented middle age, bypassing the young-love stage altogether.
By the time Lydia left to go shopping, Rupert had chased away his dark thoughts. He had found two crumpets in the freezer that he had toasted and spread with butter, and was now lying on the sofa, watching football on the telly. For the first time in three weeks he was alone, and the silence reassured him. Outside, the grey sky was a comforting reminder that here was a temperate land, unlike the violent climatic extremes he had just visited. He was a temperate, reasonable English person about to get married to a vivacious, clever, attractive woman. He wanted for nothing materially, and if he was finding his job vexing, well, he was only like most people, and lucky to have the job in the first place.
When his phone rang he was still in the comatose state induced by watching sport on an English winter’s afternoon when it gets dark at four o’clock, his body still bridging the gap between two continents.
‘Hallo,’ he said sleepily, eyes still fixed on the TV.
‘So you’re back?’
It was Jane. In a shot, he snapped back to life; all thoughts of football and illusions of contentment went straight out the window. He couldn’t marry Lydia when the mere sound of another woman’s voice was enough to turn him to jelly. He sat up and swung his feet back onto the ground, turning down the sound on the remote. ‘You got my message,’ he said, idiotically, getting to his feet and pacing towards the window, as if in hope of seeing her in the street outside.
‘Yes. I was unreasonably pleased to hear from you.’
‘Me too. I am pleased. Ecstatic, in fact. Above and beyond the call of reason. To hear from you, that is.’
‘How was your trip?’ she asked, after a moment.
How was his trip? Did she mean apart from the fact that he wasn’t travelling with her? Apart from the fact that every morning when he woke up he wished it was her lying beside him instead of Lydia?
‘As you’d expect,’ he said. ‘Very cold, and then very hot. What about you?’
‘Neither hot nor cold, but something in between. Quite rainy.’
‘I see.
‘Do you think it’s a bit weird, us talking about the weather?’ she asked.
‘Not at all. I think it’s a fine topic. In the States they have an entire TV station devoted to it.’
‘I know, the Weather Channel, I love it.’
‘So there’s something else we have in common.’
‘Yes.’
‘We’ll be able to talk hurricanes and sleet showers when we next meet.’ He bunched his left hand up tight as he said it, pressing his nails into his palm, bracing himself for a refusal, waiting for her to make her excuses, to say that she couldn’t meet him again, that she’d been thinking things over and there was no future for them.
E
xcept she didn’t say that. Instead, she said, ‘Mow about next Friday?’
He unclenched his hand, felt a rush of blood to his head.
‘Next Friday it is then.’
Sunday morning invariably found Will and Jane in bed with the papers. Piled up on their laps, spilling out onto the floor from all sides, awash with magazines and Internet supplements and sections about homes and business and the arts. It frightened Jane to think of it, all those people like Will being paid to produce the endless, spewing words, words, words, that you never had time to absorb. It was always with a sense of personal failure that she gathered them up for recycling, confronted by reams of unread pages.
Going out to buy the papers was Jane’s job. Will was not a morning person so it was Jane who carried them back like a weightlifter in two extra-strong stripey nylon laundry baskets, remembering to ask for a receipt so Will could set the cost off against his tax. She didn’t mind, it made her feel less guilty about agreeing to meet Rupert again, going back on everything she had decided. When she got his message, all her determination to cut him out of her life had evaporated. She had to see him. She’d tell him they must just be friends, there was no harm in that.
The mood in their bedroom could be volatile on these mornings, but today it was relatively serene. Will’s spirits were dictated by what he read in the papers; it all came down to how the competition was faring. This morning he was in luck, there was a scathingly bad review for a friend’s book that set his heart singing.
‘Dear oh dear,’ he chuckled to himself, shaking the paper out in front of him so he could make the most of the experience. ‘I think this deserves another cup of ayurvedic tea, Jane, if you wouldn’t mind.’ He held his cup out to her, his eyes alight with pleasure. ‘Poor old Jeremy, he’s going to be mortified. Mind you, I’m not entirely surprised, he is a bit second-rate.’
Jane filled his cup and handed it back to him, then picked up a health and well-being supplement that explained how to achieve shiny eyes from inner peace and eating more vegetables. It insisted you could be even more fabulous if you really, really tried. Then they offered a quiz to assess your stress levels to see if you needed to go on a swanky spiritual retreat in Tibet. The whole tone of the thing was that you were one very special person who deserved endless, narcissistic grooming.
‘I’m sick of the papers,’ she said, pushing them onto the floor. She thought about Rupert saying how he no longer bothered with them. What did he do, then, on Sunday mornings? What was he up to now? She felt like ringing him to find out.
‘Careful,’ said Will, pulling on his Chinese embroidered dressing gown. ‘Don’t go biting the hand that feeds you. Speaking of which, I’d better get upstairs to the thought laboratory.’
He had renamed his workspace since reading that Barratt homes had launched a new development in Peckham under the name of The Galleria.
‘Just something light for lunch, please,’ he added. ‘Don’t you go trying to fatten me up with a stodgy Sunday roast!’
‘I’m going out, remember?’ she called out, but he didn’t hear.
She sank hack in bed, picking up a travel section although it was her least favourite part of any paper. Journalists gushing about their all-paid-for stay in a luxury hotel. Who cared if the end of the bog paper was folded into a peak or if they scattered scented mimosas on your pillow at night? Will was with her on this, he couldn’t stand travel journalism, and would never stoop so low as to be sent on what he termed a tart’s freebie. He was fond of pointing out that travel journalism was to travel literature what penny dreadfuls were to Dostoevsky. Like Tolstoy, he considered journalism a brothel from which there was no return, except for his own column, which was a mere sideline to his true vocation.
She turned the page to read the question-and-answer column. A school-leaver wanted to know where in the world he should go and spend his gap year that would be free from terrorism. He had a budget of six thousand pounds, and would like to do something a little different from the usual hippy trail. His sense of entitlement was that of an eighteenth-century aristocrat setting out to do the Grand Tour before coming home to run the family estate. Why don’t you get a job in a canning factory to pay for your tuition fees, you spoilt little toad, she thought, moving into the bathroom to run the taps.
Climbing into the bath, Jane planned her day ahead. Her cousin was in town, over from New York, and she had arranged to meet him in the V&A. It was the first place that had come to mind when he rang and he sounded pleased with the idea. ‘Tell Liberty I can’t wait to see her,’ he said, ‘but you don’t need to bring Will.’ Simon had never liked him and after their first, disastrous meeting he had tried to put Jane straight. ‘I just don’t get it,’ he said, ‘you can’t possibly want to spend the rest of your life with him.’ Jane had been very offended and they had barely spoken for a year, but it was all forgiven now. She missed Simon and wished he lived closer.
Liberty came wading through the sea of papers into the bathroom. ‘Cartoons have finished,’ she announced. ‘What can I do now?’ She slipped on a pair of high-heeled shoes that Jane had kicked off last night and neglected to put away in the wardrobe. ‘Look, Mum, I’m a top model.’ She stuck her nose in the air and walked towards Jane, striking a pose and delivering a fearsome scowl, then turning on her heel and sashaying back to the door, swinging her narrow little bottom.
Jane smiled. ‘Very good. Is that what you want to do then, when you grow up?’
‘Got to get my bosoms first,’ said Liberty. ‘Then I might marry someone nice and do my exercises and have lunch with people.’
‘Lucky we’re giving you that expensive education, then,’ said Jane. ‘There goes a century of feminism down the toilet.’ ‘What can I do? I’m boredy-boredy.’
‘How about tidying up my bedroom? Pick up all those newspapers and put them in that bag in the corner.’
Liberty set about it, gathering the papers, folding them neatly, like a small and slightly manic housemaid. Jane was reminded of the Montessori nursery school that Liberty had first attended, where a lot of expensively crafted wooden objects were imported from Scandinavia in order to teach the children how to put them away. The headmistress had promised the Montessori system provided a tidy mind for life, so maybe they were reaping the benefits of that precious establishment where, the head had once told her in a frighteningly controlled whisper, the voice of the teacher was never raised above that of the children.
‘We’re going out soon,’ she said, ‘don’t you remember, we’re going to meet cousin Simon.’
Liberty looked up from her folding. ‘Hooray, I like Simon! Where are we going?’
To look at some tiny shoes. They’re only as big as dolls’ shoes, but they were worn by Chinese ladies who tied their feet up in bandages to stop them growing.’
Liberty nodded her approval. She would enjoy it, and Jane need not feel guilty about engineering an outing to the place where she last saw Rupert. Only five more days, and she would see him again.
ELEVEN
On the morning of her date with Rupert, Jane was planning her tactics. She would play it cool, tell him they could just be friends. There was no need to be dramatic about it, friendship was a fine thing. Except that friends didn’t usually wake up at 6 a.m. in excitement at the thought of seeing each other.
‘I know how the world began,’ said Liberty from her soapbox in the back seat of the car.
‘Do you?’ Jane was always grateful when Liberty claimed to have the answer. It meant she didn’t have to cast around for one that was accurate but also comprehensible to a seven-year-old.
‘Yes. Monkeys were thrown out of a volcano, then they turned into people.’
‘Mmm, nice idea. Kind of Darwin meets Big Bang.’
They were just coming up to Hyde Park, and Jane thought maybe she should unload Liberty at Speaker’s Corner, so she could share her theory of evolution with a wider audience.
‘Mum?’
She was off agai
n, on her philosophical half-hour. Thank goodness they didn’t live any further from the school, otherwise it could turn into a full hour of high-level debate.
‘Yes?’
‘What is the point of living if you are going to die?’
She was going for the big ones this morning.
‘That’s a very good question. I think I would say, the point is you should try to lead a useful life.’
‘Is that what you do?’ Children were ruthless, they hadn’t yet learned that it was bad manners to question the meaningless lives of their parents.
‘In a way. I earn money to pay for things, and I look after you. That’s useful.’
The streets round Leinster Square were clogged, as usual, with the cars of useful parents pouring their hopes for the future into their children. When Jane was growing up, children were accommodated into their parents’ lives. Now it seemed it was the other way round. The child was the tyrant king, and woe betide the parent who didn’t put them first.
Most of the children were looking tanned this week, after the Christmas break. The skiers had white goggle-marks round their eyes, while the winter-sun brigade were all-over honey brown. Jane had joined the mothers for coffee on the first clay back, so knew all about the benefits of Club Med mini-club versus going it alone in a villa with only the nanny to entertain the children. ‘No, we stayed at home this year,’ she had replied to their questions, as if this were an act of astonishing originality.
Liberty slammed the car door shut and Jane turned the car homewards, back to her useful life spent translating books to pay the fees for Liberty’s horrid school for spoilt brats. No, stop it, she chased the madness from her head. The school had been chosen for good reasons, and she worked not just for the money, but because she enjoyed the mental stimulation, and working from home gave her so much freedom.
