Perfect Love

by Elizabeth Buchan

  I want to tell you something, Prue, something I find awkward to say and is easier to show, or to write, but what I feel for you, Prue, influences everything. It gives me enormous joy to tell you that, but also anguish because our lives are arranged as they are and the situation is as it is.

  PS I bought you this card of the Botticelli Madonna. She reminded me of you.

  The card was one of those small rectangles of thick paper on which was reproduced a suitably religious painting to be sold in Catholic churches and shops. On the back he had written, but not signed, ‘I needed you to see Italy properly. I love you.’ In the paler English sun, the colours in the figures and landscape beyond glowed with an enigmatic radiance: pink with a green tinge, blue, a hint of gold. Rich, joyous and assured.

  Prue destroyed the letter even though she desperately wanted to keep it but decided she could risk keeping the card. There were several caches untouched by the male hand in Hallet’s Gate. The plastic box where Prue stored bathroom cleaning equipment, the Hoover and the linen cupboard. But guaranteed absolutely inviolate was the mending bag. Prue hid the card under a torn summer skirt unlikely to be resuscitated and Jane’s green poloneck sweater with a hole in the elbow.

  Prue ran a bath as hot as she could bear it and soaked herself until her skin turned the colour of salmon mousse. She washed her hair in two different shampoos and applied conditioner that had been so expensive she would not dare to confess its purchase even to Kate. The hairwashing was followed by applications of body and face creams and scent.

  So had women prepared for men since time immemorial - wives and harlots both - but when Joan, repeatedly harried over this knotty problem, had been asked about her man’s clothing, she stated that the matter of dress was a small thing.

  Scented and arrayed, Prue dialled Kate’s number where Jane was staying for the night.

  ‘Kate? Just checking that Jane’s all right.’

  ‘Fine. She and Judy are dressing up at the moment and arguing as to who should be the tragic Queen of Scots and who the executioner.’

  ‘What are they using for the axe?’

  ‘Good point, sweetie. I’ll check.’

  Prue listed the possibilities in her head, all of them menacing.

  ‘Prue. That reminds me, let’s set a date for the Christmas concert now.’ Kate was showing signs of settling down to one of their extended conversations. Prue cut her off.

  ‘Kate,’ she said, ‘I don’t want to do it this year. I think someone else should have a go. I want . . .’ she gestured into the air, ‘I want time off.’

  ‘Prue! You always do it.’

  ‘Precisely.’

  Kate’s voice had gone a little cool. ‘It’s not like you to back off. You were so keen earlier in the year.’

  ‘Sorry. I think fresh blood is called for.’

  The silence at the other end indicated that Kate was waiting for the confidences which both women would normally expect from the other after such a revelation. None was forthcoming.

  ‘All right, Prue. You don’t have to say anything. I suppose Molly did warn me—’

  ‘Molly warned you of what?’ Prue gritted her teeth.

  ‘Nothing really. She just mentioned that you had been very preoccupied, which wasn’t like you. Apparently, you’ve signed off the flower rota.’ The rising inflection in Kate’s voice indicated the friend with proprietorial rights of two decades or so of friendship who suspected something was up and wanted to know. ‘Have you and Molly had words?’

  Terror that sharp, nosy Molly had worked it out, made Prue reckless. ‘Sometimes I wish Molly would jump in the ford.’

  ‘Prue!’ Kate was genuinely shocked, but also rather titillated at the spectacle of Prue letting rip.

  ‘I think we’d better finish this conversation,’ said Prue and put the phone down. She sat and looked at it, very sand-coloured, very plastic, and came to the conclusion that it was one of the ugliest she had ever seen. Then she dropped her head into her hands and pictured her vengeance on Molly. After a minute or two, she dialled Kate’s number.

  ‘Kate? I’m sorry I lost my temper and you’re wonderful to look after Jane. I’ll reciprocate. Promise.’

  ‘OK.’ On occasion, Kate could brood on a slight like a Greek fury but, having been a banker, she was reluctant to relinquish capital advantage in the shape of an uncalled-in favour. ‘Since you’re my friend, I won’t tell you what I really think of you.’

  Just as well, thought Prue as she sat, tense and excited, in the London-bound train. I’m like an animal, streaking back to its lair. A she-wolf. A jackal, caught on camera lens as it lopes across the horizon. Clever. Feral. On heat.

  The train slid into Basingstoke station. Basingstoke apparently had the highest figures for divorce in the south of England. Or was it suicide? Set out in bland, box-like estates - the Home Closes, Hill Rises and Manor Gates - the houses in Prue’s line of vision looked too neat and new for divorce and death. Yet behind the net curtains and pots of begonias, messy things were taking place and people were behaving badly.

  She considered good behaviour and was forced to conclude that hers - dutiful wife, loving mother and village stalwart - had been easy because it required no special effort, a depressing conclusion for someone who had spent twenty years imagining the opposite.

  Unfolding the Independent, she tried to concentrate on an article on whether child benefit should be stopped or not. We should not be selfish, wrote the journalist. Shouldn’t we? Selfishness is a sucker which shoots without warning from the main stem and threatens to destroy the whole. Rose manuals counsel that suckers should be snapped off- not cut - at the root base. Prue looked up as the train drew out of Basingstoke. The truth was, she wanted to be selfish. She no longer wanted to behave well, but to let go, to step out of her skin and, exposed, pulsating, blood racing, sun-warmed and supple, fly through thin, singing air.

  Fleet, Farnborough, Woking, Surbiton . . . a litany of southern England rushed past, bathed in a hot yellow light - the kind of places immortalized in black-and-white films starring Kenneth More and Richard Todd when there was forever tea at the Pantiles and everyone played cricket according to the rules.

  Discarding the newspaper, Prue picked up the glossy magazine she had bought at the station, which was filled with articles on women’s consciousness in African tribes, and the latest in face-lifts and ferocious diets. Inserted among them was one on unfaithful wives, purportedly in-depth. The women recorded their need for fulfilment. Yes, yes, thought Prue. She recognized the power of an affair - the power of a secret - to consume an ordinary life. To make that life seem more significant, precisely because it was secret.

  Yes.

  The aphrodisiac of terror at being discovered. How to deal with it: run, fight, defend? The need to occupy territory that had nothing to do with your family. A place where you were not viewed as a wife or a mother.

  Yes.

  None of them spoke of the ravening need, the greed, the hot pulsing rage for another’s body. Of lust and tenderness, of darkness and desire, of the sweetness of gorging on another’s mind.

  Neither did these women speak of the loss of innocence that Prue had found more shattering than relinquishing virginity or giving birth. She knew now, for certain, that all of us harbour secret areas of darkness. And those who know this are truly exiles from the Garden of Eden.

  Thus, gentle, hitherto contained Prue, hurried along the platform at Waterloo and Jamie, waiting by the barrier, watched her search for him and hoarded anticipation for a few extra seconds before he raised his hand and waved.

  They stood looking at each other with famished and desperate eyes. Then, unaccountably, Prue took fright. A summer holiday was a long time and it was possible that things had changed.

  ‘Prue.’ Jamie’s eyes had settled deep into his tanned face. ‘I can’t touch you because if I did . . .’

  Relieved, she moved towards him. ‘You’re brown.’

  ‘Boiled to be precise.�
�

  For a second, he was back in the Tuscan hills retasting the vividness of longing, reluctant to yield up the intenseness of the feeling.

  ‘How long have you got?’ Prue asked.

  ‘An hour-ish.’

  ‘No time for the hotel.’

  ‘No.’

  They walked across Hungerford Bridge to the Embankment Gardens. A hot wind whipped at their clothes and below, slapping at the bridge’s moorings, the Thames flowed, dull, poisonous-looking green water in which drifted an assortment of flotsam.

  It was less windy in the gardens, and the ground was scabby with dried earth and litter and, because it was mid-morning, they were empty of people, except for a couple of tramps who sat on a bench sharing the contents of a cider bottle. Jamie and Prue sat down on an adjacent one, and only then did Jamie’s brown fingers slide up over her hands and catch her by the wrist. ‘You’ve hardly said a word.’

  She moved closer and smelt warm body and familiar aftershave. ‘Words are not useful at the moment.’

  He smiled. ‘I wish.’

  I wish. She wished. She wished what? That, like a moll in Boswell’s London, he would grab her, drag her into the shadows of the bridge and take her against the wall. A knee-trembler, in the hot, airless city, hard and fast enough to assuage the tormenting wen of desire.

  She listened to his account of outings, meals, Edward, paintings, the primitive kitchen . . . grateful that he kept his account shorn of Violet.

  ‘And you?’ he finished.

  Prue supplied an account of house painting, Jane, the disappointing school report, the garden. In her ears, she sounded dull and uninspired but Jamie, observing the movement of her generous mouth and the soft, creamy skin on her cheeks and neck, felt his feelings renew and expand.

  ‘That’s all,’ Prue finished a little helplessly.

  With a sudden movement, Jamie put his arm round her and turned her face up to his.

  ‘Enough,’ he said, and kissed her.

  Suborned by the mouth on hers, Prue drank of it with the greed of the dehydrated. She murmured his name, her husband, her home, her child pushed into a dark area where she could not see them. Jamie ran his hand across her shoulder, caressing the soft part of her upper arm and gave it a little pinch.

  ‘Fat,’ she said.

  ‘Don’t you start.’ Jamie kissed the area of softness behind Prue’s ear which especially fascinated him. ‘I love you, Prue, and I missed you.’

  Prue stretched and closed her eyes. The sun shone down on the lids and orange and red exploded into her eyeballs. She had never, ever felt so easy in her skin, so absorbed into life. One of the tramps shot them a look and laughed.

  ‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘Go on.’

  Jamie released Prue and got to his feet. ‘I’ll ring you. Soon.’

  He’s had enough, flashed through Prue and her happiness vanished just like that. She got up from the bench, suddenly weary of her vulnerability and of a situation that absorbed so much of her energy. Jamie took her by the hand, tucking his thumb into the hollow of her palm and they walked up the stone steps in Buckingham Street.

  Prue heard herself cry out, ‘I don’t think this will do, Jamie. It’s no good, I can’t bear it anymore.’ She meant the switchback of emotion and despair that she was on, but Jamie misunderstood her.

  ‘I don’t think I can either.’ Jamie’s thumb pressed hard into her cupped hand. ‘Let’s go to the hotel.’

  ‘That’s not what I meant.’

  ‘Let’s go to the hotel. I’ll make an excuse at work,’ he repeated. ‘Will you wait? Then we can discuss what we’re going to do.’

  It was extraordinary how passion could subvert pain, uncertainty and commitments. Prue ran her fingers through her hair. She was expected back by Jane, the supper required attention, Kate might be busy. Her absence would look odd.

  ‘Yes,’ she replied, shuddering in anticipation, at the mercy of the rolling waves of joy that, after all, he loved her. ‘I’ll wait.’

  She paid no attention to Jane sounding tearful when she rang, to Kate’s obvious annoyance, to Max coming home to an empty house - to the sort of considerations that she had poured her energies into over the years and imagined were enough.

  Flying through thin, singing air.

  No. As she and Jamie tore off their clothes in the hotel, Prue realized that her vision had changed, as once she had made the change from black-and-white television to colour, and could not now remember the former.

  ‘Say you love me.’ Jamie was peeling off his socks.

  Head inside her T-shirt, Prue told him and pulled it over her head. Then, conscious that Jamie had come from Violet’s beauty to her slackening middle age, she folded her arms across her chest. Jamie pulled her to him and she felt the deliciousness of rediscovery, and the burn of his skin against hers.

  ‘I’m so surprised at myself,’ he said. ‘And I think you are too. This was not part of the life plan.’

  She reached up to touch his face. ‘Don’t say anything. Not now.’ She raised her arms towards the ceiling in the ancient gesture - a sun god blessing the earth, or Moloch claiming his victims. ‘I’m here, Jamie.’

  He ran his hands across her breasts, down her arms and encircled her wrists with his finger and thumb. Then he led her towards the bed.

  She thought later, I can’t give this up. I can’t.

  The winged mirror on the cheap dressing table reflected the image on the bed in triplicate and later their separate images as they dressed and said goodbye.

  Chapter Twenty

  Jane clicked the mouse with her middle finger, once, twice, three times, and the icons on the computer screen arrived and departed at her command.

  Click. She conjured up a line that elongated across the screen and which another snap of the mouse turned into a circle. This she wrapped with a ribbon (summoned from the icon treasure box), ‘painted’ it in with light green and the ribbon a darker green. Underneath she used the mouse to call up HAPPY BIRTHDAY DADDY in green type and centred it under the circle.

  Gravely she considered the design, checked it for imperfections and printed it out. The result was just what she had striven for. She folded the paper to make it into a card, and inserted it into an envelope ready to give her father the following morning. Well satisfied, she switched off the computer and tidied the desk.

  The swing mirror on her dressing table had tipped over and gave Jane a fine view of her ankles and an empty area of carpet. She got up to adjust it, and her torso and face came into view.

  As people are, she was caught by the fascination of the self, and stood for a minute or so absorbing the image. A child’s face looked back, on to which she busily superimposed the features she wanted to see. Underneath the fair-skinned face and thick dark eyebrows, there was a body on the cusp of change which she examined with the same absorbed attention, and played the what-will-I-look-like-when-I-grow-up? game.

  Tall, blonde, thin? Alice said she looked like a horse without a chin. Implying that it almost was, Lydia had said that wasn’t quite right, which if it was meant to be loyalty ranked with the rottener variety.

  Would Alice and the others like her next term? Apprehension at what might be in store settled on Jane with the weight of a hundred preps undone and a hundred hundred loathed steamed puddings. She hated herself for being weedy and fragile, for minding, but the memory of the previous term’s misery made her feel sick.

  ‘You can’t run away,’ her mum had told Jane (with a catch in her voice) when Jane had cast herself into Prue’s lap and begged to be allowed to leave.

  ‘Why not?’ asked Jane with the straightforward logic of the child. ‘Why can’t you run away if it saves you?’

  Why not? Prue asked herself, but said, ‘We have to stay and stick things out otherwise we would always be running away, because quite a lot of things we find ourselves doing have their bad moments.’

  For priggishness that took some beating. Yet if something is priggish i
t is not, necessarily, untrue.

  Prue gathered Jane into her arms and they talked over the problem for a long time.

  Jane raised her eyebrows and stuck out her tongue; the image in the mirror responded. She had failed to make her mother understand that understanding was not enough: it did not change anything. It did not make Alice and the others like her.

  ‘But you will change,’ her father pointed out when they took the problem to him for a second opinion. ‘Do you remember,’ he said, ‘when you wouldn’t go downstairs because they seemed so large and frightening?’

  ‘Wasn’t that Violet?’ Jane accused him. ‘She was the scaredy one.’

  ‘No, darling,’ said Prue, ‘Daddy’s right. You wouldn’t go down those stairs for ages.’

  Some comfort was available, for only half the holidays had gone. Seven weeks was a long time, as adults kept informing her infuriatingly. But it depended how you looked at it, and how it seemed to you, and Jane was inclined to pessimism. Three and a half weeks would vanish. Just like that. She knew — she just knew. However hard she tried to make the holidays different and special, they would slip from her grasp.

  Diverted by the pinkness of her tongue, she waggled it, practised a smile and pulled back her hair to check on the effect. Then she stood sideways to examine the outline of her body and sucked in her stomach which she reckoned stuck out too much. Jane frowned. She was too fat. Much too fat. Yet again, she wished that she had a sister with whom to ruminate over these problems. Half-sisters, or rather Violet, were no use.

  The inspection over, Jane launched on a hunt for the green corduroy skirt and polo-neck jumper that she planned to wear for her father’s birthday supper. The skirt was unearthed from underneath the bed and she smoothed the creases out as best she could. Her next task was to bully her mother into ironing it for her.