Perfect Love

by Elizabeth Buchan

  At the van, Angus fitted the key into the lock and prised back the door.

  ‘Come to my place tonight, Emmy?’

  She paused in the act of clambering in, catching a jigsaw piece of her reflection in the passenger mirror. Her lips were uncharacteristically red and her wretched hair had escaped the scarf.

  ‘No, thanks.’

  ‘Why not?’

  Emmy shrugged. ‘I don’t want to.’

  ‘I’ll make it worth it.’

  She did not doubt it. ‘Bad times come after good. I’ll pass.’

  Dear Marje. What do I do? I am hopelessly, shamingly in love. But he is just after one thing. I’m after several, but I don’t know what they are.

  Emmy stared out of the window and Angus headed the van towards the pub. There was one advantage of not being a femme fatale - a hard head.

  Hard head. Soft body.

  Angus let his fingers trail up Emmy’s leg. ‘Quite sure?’ His relative indifference stung her until he flicked his pony-tail over his shoulder with a gesture that suggested he knew he was the coolest, hottest lover since Casanova. It was so peacockish, so akin to the male sparrow’s mating behaviour . . . fluffed-out chest, preened feathers, swagger . . . that Emmy smiled.

  ‘Quite sure,’ she said.

  ‘Like the bloody Crown Jewels, then? All locked up.’

  She turned and looked at him and, after a minute, he slowed the van down and returned the scrutiny. ‘I’ll get you, Emmy. Don’t worry.’

  Saturday at the Blue Orchid in Croydon was the night, Cherry informed Emmy. Angus nosed the van into a parking place only a street away, and the girls immediately headed for the ladies’ in the club. It was lit with neon light and smelt of hair lacquer and fags. A row of girls, faces and bodies in various stages of contortion, stood in front of the long mirror.

  ‘Here,’ said a big blonde, balancing a lit cigarette on the edge of her Marks and Spencer’s travelling cosmetic box. ‘Help me lace the bustier up, would you?’

  Her auburn friend had a go.

  ‘Not that tight,’ yelled the blonde, her breasts rising and spilling over the cleavage.

  ‘What’s the point, then?’ said her friend. ‘You don’t want to land up with bee-stings, do you?’

  Sal stripped to the skin and pranced around in briefs and long tight boots. Emmy ground her teeth, for Sal’s figure was everything that had been promised, and watched as she poured herself into a Lycra mini-dress, with high heels, and Cherry did a paler imitation. Emmy ran a comb through her hair and applied a coat of mascara to her lashes, which gave her a startled look.

  ‘Effing Cleopatra, are we?’ said Cherry.

  The noise on the dance floor backed up under the roof in a smothering blanket. Glitter balls hung in the ceiling; the room was cut by electric strobes and swivelling light. This was a temple indeed.

  Sal raised her glossy arms, wriggled her Lycra rump and her hair flamed around her head - a sleek, confident goddess who ruled over youth, sex and gratification.

  ‘Get on down,’ screamed the DJ through the microphone. ‘Get on down there.’

  The egg-smooth floor was covered first by a trickle, then a stream, of bodies, oscillating like cornstalks in a stiff breeze.

  ‘Right,’ said Sal and sent Emmy a look. She seized Angus, who had emerged with Vince from the shadows that formed the perimeter of the floor. By the look of him, Vince had taken in another skinful and he grabbed at Cherry with a movement that owed more to luck than control.

  ‘Lover boy.’ Sal hung on to Angus and moved her hips suggestively.

  Oh, yes, Emmy could tell that Angus was not unaffected and she was furious with herself for minding. You told him no, she repeated to herself. No. No. No.

  She watched them dance - Vince’s lurch, Cherry’s spaced-out bop . . . and Angus and Sal — until too many dancers had poured into the space and they were lost to view.

  ‘Fancy one, then?’ A dark youth materialized by Emmy, fingering a bottle of beer in a manner that betrayed his nervousness. He was sweating, too: drops sat on his face and blackened his T-shirt.

  Emmy stared at him. Somehow, she had got into this and she had to go with it. ‘Don’t mind if I do.’

  A damp hand descended on to her arm, and the youth sent his empty beer bottle spinning into the shadows and pulled her into the centre.

  At the edge of the floor, packs of youths hunting females grew bold and ferocious. Their willing prey preened and re-formed in their groups whenever one of their members was snatched away. The music drilled into the brain.

  At first, Emmy moved like a wary animal, stiff-legged and eyes flicking. The beat grew louder, the smell of sweat, feet and beer stifled the remaining senses and, suddenly, she heard a click in her head, the distinct, decisive sound of a switch moving from negative to positive, from 0 to 1, and, to the beat of soul, house, rap, whatever it was, to the flash and throb of the strobe, Emmy gave herself up.

  Her sweaty youth pressed against her. ‘Nice?’

  ‘Nice,’ she echoed, lost in the sea of bodies. The youth ran his hand down Emmy’s back and between her buttocks.

  She let him.

  She had no idea how long she shook and strutted with her partner, being conscious only of the sensation of release pouring like liquid through her body. To celebrate her rebirth, she raised her face towards the strobe’s fractured glitter.

  Angus reappeared and shouted into her ear. ‘What are you doing?’

  Emmy’s face was patched with silver. Angus reached out and pulled her towards him until her body was arched against his.

  ‘Get rid of him,’ he ordered.

  She was tempted to reply, ‘You get rid of Sal,’ but the youth had gone. Angus’s grip did not slacken and they stood together. Then he began to dance and made Emmy dance with him, and her heart began to beat with a wild rhythm. Angus bent over and Emmy felt his mouth move over her chin and rest briefly on her lips.

  ‘Why not, Emmy?’ he said into her ear.

  For the second time, Emmy asked, ‘What about Sal?’

  ‘She’s hotting it up with another guy.’ Angus jerked a hand in the direction of the dark, heaving mass where the faces and bodies had been reduced to blanket homogeneity.

  ‘Good for Sal.’

  His mouth made another journey across the unmapped continent of Emmy’s face and she shuddered.

  Later, how much later Emmy was not sure, Angus led her through discontented prowlers who had failed to make a kill and around couples who did not care or could not wait to find privacy, towards the exit.

  He pulled her into the street. They were out in the night where air was cold water and music a dull pulse. Emmy wanted it to stop right there, but Angus had got this far and he meant to go further. He opened the van door and gestured for Emmy to get inside. Felled by panic, she hesitated.

  ‘Come on, Emmy. Get on with it.’

  So Emmy climbed inside.

  Remembering something often brings a sensation of unreality, helplessness, weightlessness. Even of someone else doing the participating.

  At least, that’s what Emmy thought.

  Between her pale body and her mind yawned a gap. Thus, when she dwelt on Angus’s naked body and face, sometimes readable, sometimes not, it was with the curiosity of an onlooker viewing a painting. What did those closed eyelids signify? Or the way he rolled over at a certain point? When he whispered, ‘That’s good’?

  She could not remember her own words but she did know that she had wanted to cry out with the love that bound her as tightly as if she was tied up. She had wanted to try to convey how she felt, what it all meant. But Emmy lacked the vocabulary, and years of being solitary in the real sense had taken away the habit of many words - or, conversely, nurtured a healthy disrespect for them.

  Noises from the street trickled into the hot van. A conversation. A shout, the echo of a can rattling in the gutter. Inside, it was close and lit by ragged filtrations of neon. The blanket Angus had spread on the
floor felt scratchy against Emmy’s back. Each time she moved her foot, she encountered their clothing or the bulky packages of Angus’s work tools.

  He lit a cigarette, lay back but made no move to take Emmy into his arms. She coughed and desolation washed her, seeping into the crevasses of her spirit and the hairline cracks of a fantasy that had formed with ill-advised, lightning speed.

  She reached for the cigarette packet.

  ‘What’s it like having a virgin in the back of a van?’ she asked, and could have bitten her tongue.

  Angus’s hand encountered Emmy’s buttock. ‘Nice one,’ he said.

  ‘Are you sure you’re giving Edward enough vegetables?’

  ‘No problem, Mrs Beckett. He likes them.’

  Today, Violet was having an acute attack of Working Mother, which tended to happen on Mondays, and Emmy was, as usual, the target. She shot Emmy a look which implied that Emmy was guilty of doing all sorts of unmentionable things with the puréed broccoli, including throwing it away. Emmy, who had grown wiser in the ways of her employer, did not drop her gaze. Have you, she was asking silently, ever made love in the back of a van?

  Violet prodded a pile of laundry in the basket. ‘You will do this today, won’t you, Emmy?’

  Violet was thinking, It’s so bloody exhausting having an employee. They never do anything. You have to check, check, check, and you can’t ever, ever, rely on them.

  If Violet had allowed her reading these days to extend beyond the fashionable blockbuster, she would have been reminded that a large proportion of literature has been devoted to the battle between employer and - more powerful than supposed - employee. Neither side won.

  ‘I’ll do the laundry first thing, Mrs Beckett. I was a bit pushed last week.’

  Violet’s pursed lips apparently suggested that she could not conceive how, compared to the rigours of running an office, looking after one small baby at home could leave you pushed. Emmy was not to know that beneath the Yves St Laurent foundation and Chanel lipstick churned relief, spiced with guilt, that it was not she, Violet, who was having to cope with Edward. In her heart of hearts, Violet suspected she was not up to it.

  Emmy of course, did not know and thought: this woman is unbearable.

  Violet’s heels clicked over the kitchen floorboards. Her shoes were black, very high-heeled and of extra supple leather. Above them, she was wearing a Chanel suit with a long jacket and a short, pleated skirt which she had enhanced with an abundance of gold buttons and chains.

  Emmy pulled her faded T-shirt down over her bottom and over the leggings which had developed a hole in the crotch.

  ‘How’s my boy?’ Violet bent over Edward’s chair.

  Edward regarded his mother solemnly and Violet inserted a finger into the centre of one curled hand. Edward pulled. ‘He’s getting very strong, isn’t he, Emmy?’

  At the sound of Emmy’s name, Edward loosened his fist and swivelled to look at Emmy. For a moment or two, Violet remained as she was, then she withdrew her hand,

  ‘He’s fond of you, Emmy, isn’t he?’

  Emmy reckoned that if Violet said her name again in that particular tone she would say something shocking. Go away, she willed silently. Go to your work or whatever keeps you so busy.

  From upstairs, Jamie gave a shout. ‘Are you ready, Violet?’

  Violet sighed and picked up her briefcase and an unfamiliar look spread over her features. Emmy knew why: she had heard the Becketts quarrelling the previous evening. The unwilling snooper, the keyhole witness, she had sat in her top-storey sitting room and listened to their voices raise in anger and discord and wondered if they realized how much was revealed. Eventually Violet had retreated to the drawing room and Jamie had gone to bed in the spare room.

  ‘If you could make that vegetable pie, Emmy.’

  Emmy looked at Edward. ‘Yes.’

  Violet lowered her briefcase on to the table. ‘Emmy, I think you could call me Violet. After all, we are living under the same roof and I do trust you.’

  There, she thought, that will encourage Emmy.

  Jamie stood in the doorway. ‘Hurry up.’ He spoke curtly and without his usual smile.

  ‘Thanks, Emmy,’ said Violet.

  The front door banged. Immediately Emmy switched from Radio 4 to Capital. Pop music filled the room and Edward banged his spoon as an accompaniment. Emmy picked him up and he settled in her arms with complete familiarity. She nuzzled the top of his head, and smelt his funny little smell composed of nappy cream, talc and a faint echo of regurgitated milk.

  ‘Vegetables, huh?’ she said to him.

  If the result of making love in a van was a house whose rooms were occupied by separate and angry people, then Emmy knew better than to enter it. She knew she was right to be careful.

  Her eye drifted across the piece of garden framed by the window. A clematis had caught blight and hung in a blackened tangle from the trellis. The lawn needed mowing. The frame also caught the bird table on the tree at the bottom of the garden.

  Angus’s bird table.

  Emmy sighed and closed her eyes.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Prue’s love affair was also flourishing. While Emmy’s peace of mind was encumbered by caution and anxiety over Angus’s motives, Prue’s was being fed on a cocktail of intense sexual experience, astonishment, wild joy and terror. Such feeling, she discovered, is greedy and, while it lasts, gobbles up other perhaps more ordinary but no less significant feelings. Thrown into relief by the blaze of novelty, other reliable attributes like good humour lost their importance.

  What is happening to me? Prue asked herself as she made arrangements, once, twice, three times to meet Jamie at the hotel, and there to sink, shaking and slippery with desire and hunger, through waters of oblivion.

  And he as hungry and seeking as she was.

  Why is this happening?

  But Prue was too happy, too saturated with emotion to do anything other than surrender.

  In the early summer of 1429 (‘check 7 May correct’, Prue wrote in her notes) at approximately 6 a.m. Joan, having spent the night in the besieged city, arrived at the Tourelles (a stone fort held by the English near the head of the damaged bridge across the Loire) outside Orleans and immediately called a council of war. A woman, circumstance and place had come together in one of those significant, delicately timed fusions that make history. Joan’s moment had come - la journée des Tourelles - and forever after her name would be associated with Orleans.

  Like Prue was for Jamie, Joan was hungry - to put into action what her voices had been instructing her to do. Hungry, and as blazing.

  The city had survived the siege for six months so far, partly because the English, under the Duke of Bedford, showed a marked lack of enthusiasm for engaging in action, wrote Prue. Instead, from time to time, the English Passevolant tossed its one-hundred-pound stone balls into the city and, from time to time, the French Rifflard returned the compliment. Such was the lack of action that on Christmas Day 1428 the English had borrowed a troupe of musicians from the French. Although Joan was not a soldier, knew nothing of strategy and, above all, was not a man, the citizens were greatly cheered by the news that the famous pucelle of Domrémy was to take up their cause.

  Prue dropped her aching head in her hands.

  Joan and the captains discussed tactics, although the course of action was obvious: to storm the earthworks from the south bank of the river before launching an assault on the Tourelles.

  It began at seven in the morning and the English fought like animals or rather, as one chronicler phrased it, ‘as though they were immortal’. From their advantage on the earthworks, they rained down fire, cannon and lead slingshot on the French in the great fosse, or moat, below and succeeded in repulsing them.

  Circles of light slid across Prue’s vision.

  Towards midday, the French retired to eat their lunch which was trying for Joan, who was famously abstemious in her eating habits and often, after a hard day’s
battle, had to be coaxed to eat. Afterwards, they reassembled and launched themselves yet again at the earthworks. Joan helped to raise a scaling ladder. The air was once again ringing with noise and thick with flying objects, and the embattled French and English hacked at each other with axes, lances and bare hands.

  It was at this point that Joan was hit by a crossbow bolt which lodged at the junction between her neck and breast, piercing her shoulder. She had predicted this wound. Both St Catherine and St Margaret had warned her. Indeed, a letter exists, written from Lyon a fortnight before the attack, in which Joan states clearly that it would happen.

  Predicting a wound is different from experiencing it. Apparently, Joan wept and shuddered with shock and pain. She was pleased that her prophecy had been so exact but a solid wedge of steel-tipped bolt driven at speed into flesh hurts. As she pulled it out of her shoulder to an accompanying gush of blood and splitting of flesh, one of her soldiers offered to put a charm upon the wound.

  Joan refused. ‘I would rather die,’ she said, ‘than do what I know to be a sin.’

  Prue raised her head.

  Were decisions easier in that different age? Prue asked Jamie as they lay in bed in the hotel bedroom. You were given a scheme, a set of rules, the notion of direct retribution for veering off-course, all of which left you in no doubt as to how you should behave.

  ‘Sounds terrible,’ said Jamie drowsily. ‘Who wants rules?’

  ‘People,’ said Prue, and nipped his bare shoulder with her teeth.

  Potential sinners, of course. The ones born with fleshly lusts and the normal quota of selfishness, greed, cunning and the ability to lie. Natural saints do not require rules for they are never tempted. Their goodness is absolute.

  ‘I don’t know about that.’ Jamie rolled over. ‘I always thought St Simon the Stylite was a roaring exhibitionist,’ he said, and pressed his mouth down onto her breast. ‘Anyway, the only way he could manage being good or a saint, or whatever, was by staying on top of a pillar.’

  ‘We’re sinning,’ said Prue, and sat up in bed.