Perfect Love

by Elizabeth Buchan

  ‘I’m fine,’ said Emmy and, to her horror, tears welled in her eyes. ‘Absolutely fine.’ She struggled with herself. ‘Would you like me to take Edward to the clinic today? He’s due his twelve-month injection.’

  It was Monday morning and Violet was not up to dealing with tears before work. She followed on the lead thoughtfully provided by Emmy. Waiting with a hot, restless baby in a hot, noisy clinic had not been written into her blueprint of motherhood when she devised it in those pre-conception days of sunlight and balm. Neither was it now. She looked at her watch.

  ‘Yes, do.’

  She dickered with the idea of trying once again to get to the bottom of whatever was worrying Emmy, then decided that ignorance on the behalf of the employer was best.

  Alone, Emmy resisted the impulse to ring Anna. What’s up, then, you old cow? Anna would say, heavy with the weekend’s excess. Keeping your legs tight together? Tell us the gen on Madam. How many pairs of knickers has she got through this week? Have I got news for you . . .

  No, Emmy would say. Have I got news for you.

  Instead, she plodded up the stairs to the first floor. The door to the main bedroom (Emmy could not bring herself to look through it) was open, revealing abandoned clothes and an unmade bed. The cistern in the bathroom gurgled quietly.

  She held on to the newel post and hauled herself up the next flight to her flatlet. Here the doors were kept tight shut, for Emmy’s standards had dropped lately and she was pretty sure that Violet checked up regularly on the rooms. Well, Madam could get her eyeful of piled clothes and overflowing wastepaper baskets.

  Her sitting room smelt . . . of what? Despair? It should. Disuse? Certainly, the room looked despairing and out of sorts. Emmy stabbed her finger down on the table (a cast-off from the garage and Hallet’s Gate with a split top) and wrote ‘Fool’ in the dust.

  It was no use ignoring any longer what she had to do.

  The bathroom door made its familiar popping noise and the displaced air raised the edge of the carpet, which had not been fixed. Emmy registered the wet flannel lying in the bath, the shell-shaped soap dish floating its burden of jelly and soap, five bottles of shampoo, each with a different set of promises, and one of Edward’s rubber ducks.

  A moth to the flame, her gaze was riveted on the test she had left on the shelf above the basin.

  Hundreds, no millions of women had crossed this bridge. No, no, nothing so comforting as a bridge, more a thin, rotting plank balanced over a big question mark, with the scatter from spoilt lives clotted into heaps underneath - like the discarded cars, bits of pushchair, kitchen waste and old clothes of the council tip.

  It was Emmy’s luck that she had had no practice at plank walking and was the sort of person who developed vertigo on a deep-pile carpet.

  Imagine inching forward and hearing the rotten fibres give under her weight with the sodden, sullen sound! Imagine the shake of her body and the freezing blood forcing its way through her arteries and, down below, the gap into which she was falling.

  Twenty, thirty years ago - Emmy did not know enough to estimate precisely - she would have had no choice. Stuffed, finished, probably banged up in some home and saddled with the stigma for the rest of her life. Now Emmy had three options, which made it worse because she did not know what to do - either what she wanted, or what was right.

  Emmy surprised herself, for she was not in the habit of considering ethics.

  Jamie stepped neatly out of the way as Emmy jumped down the last six stairs into the hall. It was odd activity for an adult, and Jamie was transported back to the time when he did just that for a dare with his friends, the era of long shorts and scratched knees. He did not associate Emmy with those moments of shivering abandonment and free fall.

  ‘Are you practising for the next Olympics?’

  Emmy flushed and muttered something unintelligible, but there was something in the manner in which her eyes glittered that told Jamie that she had been crying.

  ‘I thought it was only athletics who did that sort of thing.’

  Emmy regained her balance. ‘I don’t know what came over me,’ she said, with perfect truth.

  Jamie looked at her thoughtfully. Guilt he may have felt - and Jamie had been suffering from a diminished appetite and fretful sleep - and it had had a curious effect on him.. Jamie wanted to find out about other people, was ravenous to do so, because it gave him a sense of being earthed. By contemplating the mistakes and suffering of others, Jamie gave himself licence not to think too badly of himself.

  Quite forgetting that it was loose, Jamie leant back on the radiator and sprang forward again when it cracked and shifted in its moorings. He collided with Emmy.

  ‘Oh, Lord, sorry, Emmy.’

  He flashed her a wry grin. ‘If there’s anything we can do, Emmy, you only have to ask.’

  Peaky, thin, shivering in the recently intensified autumn chill, Emmy was the incarnation of misery. A spot of red crept into her cheeks and Jamie mistook it for anger. Later, he realized it was a badge of courage, for Emmy shook as she said: ‘I’m going to have a baby.’

  Then Jamie made the reply that was to haunt him for many months: ‘Is that all?’

  Violet’s reaction was not much better.

  ‘I hope she doesn’t want it,’ she said, but had the grace to stop there. A flush suffused her cheeks and her red mouth twisted. ‘I mean, I don’t want to make it sound as if a baby is a disposable asset.’ She paused, thinking of the offer she had made Jamie and which had never been spoken of since. ‘Of course they’re not.’

  ‘Well, we agree on one thing.’ This time, Jamie’s smile was a formality.

  Well . . . in a way, a baby was. Helen, darling mother Helen, had thought so. Bye, bye, little daughter. I’m off and I don’t want you hanging on my arm like a weekend bag (the sort that Violet had bought from exclusive shops: elegant but hell to carry). It doesn’t suit me to have you along with Jack.

  Violet often wondered if it would have been better if Helen had popped into the local pregnancy advice bureau and, hey presto, Violet would have been disposed of down the hospital drain – and she wouldn’t have been alone.

  The strange thing was: Violet did not think the worse of them for it. Life had to be got through. Far worse to be born and then not loved. Correction: not to be loved enough.

  Violet’s analysis terminated at this point and she did not make the connection between Helen’s treatment of her and her attitude to Edward.

  ‘Do you want it?’ she asked Emmy, who was retching over Edward’s meal of puréed soya beans and tomato. ‘Here let me.’ She wrested the spoon away. ‘Go and sit down. I’ll feed him.’

  Endeavouring to be practical was no defence against bone-deep confusion and anxiety. ‘I don’t know.’ Emmy’s hand fluttered in the region of her stomach.

  ‘Well, you must decide quickly, otherwise it becomes worse.’

  Violet remembered her surprise when she woke up one morning, twenty-two weeks pregnant, to encounter the definite, writhing bulge under her ribs and thought: Legally, I could still get rid of it. And also, Not now. It is alive.

  Emmy sat down in the kitchen chair. Even now, Violet was no expert in the business of shovelling food down her son and, the bout of nausea having subsided, Emmy was able to watch with scientific interest the false moves and baffled impatience on Violet’s beautiful face.

  ‘If you wait between mouthfuls,’ she said at last. ‘He likes to eat slowly.’

  Clearly, this was news to Violet but she took the advice and harmony was achieved between mother and son for the remaining mouthfuls. At the finish, Edward threw himself back in his chair and flashed his mother one of the smiles that came from nowhere. Violet found herself smiling back.

  ‘Cheeky monster,’ she said, softer than Emmy had ever seen her, and dabbed Edward’s face with a wet flannel.

  Emmy breathed out slowly, and tried to imagine that her stomach did not belong to her. Violet captured one of Edward’s flying
hands and held it at an exaggerated distance while she tackled the grunge clinging to the fingers.

  ‘Is it tactless to ask who the father is?’

  Emmy swallowed and waited for the word Angus to form on her lips. It did not. If she expected something sharp and stinging from Violet she was mistaken, for Violet returned Edward’s hand to him - rather as if it was a bag full of rubbish - and said: ‘Don’t worry. It’s none of my business.’

  Emmy revised her ideas on Violet.

  Two days later, the postman delivered a parcel for Emmy elaborately tied up in string.

  ‘You don’t see that often,’ Jamie commented as he passed it over to Emmy, who knew at once who had sent it. She held it between her cold hands, knowing that it contained the books she had lent him and her CDs. The string, so carefully and determinedly knotted, undid Emmy — it was so like Angus to wrap things up well. To her surprise, she dropped her head in her hands and wailed from sorrow and nausea.

  Within seconds, Jamie was on his feet. ‘Violet, I’ll leave you to sort this one out.’

  Violet shot him a look which said, ‘Typical’, but the next thing Emmy knew was an arm circling her shoulder.

  ‘Look,’ said Violet in her ear, ‘you’ve got to wise up, Emmy. You can’t go on like this. I suggest you get along to the clinic this morning and get some advice.’

  She glanced at her watch - Piaget and new - saw that she was running late, but made an effort. ‘I’ll ring up and make an appointment for you if you like.’

  Emmy promised to do something, blew her nose and unpicked the string surrounding the parcel. Inside was the novel by Virginia Andrews that Angus had kidnapped before she had finished it. It was a novel about children in danger. Inside it, he had inserted a note: ‘It was nice knowing you, Em. Don’t worry about anything. Me and Sal have gone off to live in the country for the winter.’

  It was so like him, too, to return everything.

  Autumn had settled heavily over the city. Ringed by the ceaseless traffic, Wandsworth Common was damp underfoot and mud-clogged. Here and there a light shone out of a building, or the bright red of a bus cut through air layered by damp and pollution. Trees, roofs, gates dripped. Emmy’s feet left dark footprints on the grass and the buggy bucked and snagged.

  What do I do? She watched a couple of mothy Canada geese by the edge of the pond, panic routing her resolution to be sensible. A jumble - abortion, welfare payments, coping alone, labour, a council flat - clogged her mind, which had lost its ability to concentrate.

  She strove to pin down a rational thought, to settle on a concrete plan that would help, and failed. Her thoughts slid, despairing, muddled and without much hope, to the only thing she wanted to think about: Angus.

  She had sent him away, and she did not know if she had the language to call him back.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Prue noticed that the photograph of Helen in Max’s study had been returned to its prominent position on the table.

  ‘I hate you,’ she told it, then admitted, ‘but I think I understand you a bit better now.’ Helen’s face glistened mistily with non-comprehension.

  She attacked the pile of papers on Max’s desk and emptied an ashtray, releasing a whiff of stale tobacco and dust. It was then she noticed the box of gun cartridges on the right-hand side of the desk. Frowning a little, she checked the contents and refastened the lid. It was almost full, and should not have been left lying around. Guns and the cartridges remained in the gun-safe. Always.

  Upstairs, Prue retrieved the key from its hiding place under the bathroom basin and unlocked the safe. There was plenty of room so she pushed the cartridges inside and relocked it.

  Later, when she was ironing Max’s tartan handkerchiefs into the precise rectangles he preferred, Prue remembered something. The iron, which was on its last legs, hissed and an overabundance of rusty-looking water spilt on to the linen. Prue cursed and propped it on its side. Why, she asked herself, had there been so much space in the gun-safe?

  In her mind she ran over the contents. Max possessed two guns: the one he had inherited from his father, and the other from an uncle. Max preferred the latter and it was his father’s that was missing.

  She tackled a shirt. Perhaps it was being overhauled.

  The shirt-sleeve panned out under the iron, crisp and smooth. The smell of clean, hot clothes filled her nose. Strange that the cartridge box had been practically full. But not absolutely. Was Max becoming careless? The iron hissed in protest as she jerked it upright. Where was that gun? Prue snatched up the iron and ironed until there was a pile as high as her shoulder.

  She was in the kitchen when the phone rang.

  The phone call had been Jamie.

  ‘Will you come, Prue?’

  She had glanced at the kitchen clock and the clutter of cooking ingredients and utensils. This was as good a moment as any to say, No. It’s over. Enough. Finish.

  ‘Please, Prue. We haven’t been together since the summer, and I can’t wait any longer. It’s been difficult.’ Jamie meant Violet, work, a creeping restlessness, some money worries for, healthy as Jamie’s salary was, its chief characteristic was a tendency to melt.

  No, Jamie, she could choose to say. I no longer wish to be overwhelmed. By guilt. By deceit. By love. It has to stop. Sometime. It will stop. Why not now?

  But her body said something different, and Prue was already opening the drawer and putting away the kitchen knives and frowning as she tried to remember what time Max was coming home and whether or not there was a stew in the freezer.

  There was, and she left it to defrost on the sideboard and moved quickly around the kitchen wiping surfaces and stowing saucepans in cupboards. Since her affair, Prue’s kitchen had changed. The more she entangled with Jamie, the more snowy and starched her tea-towels, the more polished the furniture. All of these achievements (snowy tea-towels, for goodness sake!) would offer clues to the observant, for Prue had never been a fussy housewife. Now, if the sink was rid of its coffee stains and supper was on the table, Prue felt a balance had been struck, and part of the bargain still held.

  She draped the dishcloth over the tap. In other words, adultery is an activity squeezed in between cooking, washing and dusting.

  From her position on the boiler, Bella stared at her mistress and folded her paw carefully underneath her plump body. ‘Not quite as simple as that, Bella, is it?’ she informed the large, unblinking eyes.

  Prue drove a third of the way to Winchester and, at the last minute, turned the car back. She had been using her country handbag, a terrible old plastic number, which accommodated her notebooks, and had neglected to transfer her cheque book and credit cards into the smarter London leather version. Ergo, no train fare.

  She swore and headed back at top speed.

  ‘How do you manage to get away from the office?’ Prue asked Jamie when they eventually caught up with each other in room number 35. Prue was late and Jamie a little irritable as a result. ‘Surely someone must be putting two and two together?’

  It was, perhaps, significant that they did not fall on each other but sat down to talk.

  ‘Office life is a monastery requiring poverty and obedience, until you have learnt the rules . . .’ Jamie sat down on the bed, ‘. . . which are to do precisely as you wish and explain later.’

  ‘How is the office, and is anything happening?’ Prue tossed the leather handbag on to the chair as if it had not cost her extra petrol, panic and most of the things she required in a handbag for it was much too small.

  ‘Work? Busy. And Dyson is still very difficult in meetings.’

  ‘Tell.’

  Jamie’s eyebrows twitched together. ‘There’s nothing to tell, really. His views and mine are poles apart and we clash. Meanwhile, the middle east is threatening to erupt, the phylloxera bug is ravaging Californian vineyards and there will be a new US president. The infuriating thing is, the problems with Dyson take up far more of my energies and attention than anything else.�
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  Prue touched Jamie’s knee. ‘We’re not so far apart, then. I’ve realized that I spend my life tiptoeing between alliances and hostilities. But it’s not such a terrible thing.’ She was silent for a minute while she considered what she wished to say. Her hand fell back into her lap. ‘I have a feeling Max knows something,’ she admitted at last.

  Jamie went quite still. ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘No, I’m not sure. It’s a feeling. A feeling that he’s watching me all the time.’

  Knowing Max might be snooping made Jamie feel better. It provided Jamie, who tried not to think of his father-in-law, with a small opportunity to think less well of him.

  Prue read her lover’s thoughts and her protective instincts towards her husband were roused. ‘Don’t,’ she said almost sharply. ‘Don’t think badly of him. Didn’t you do the same with Lara?’

  Lara? Golden, lying Lara. Ah . . . as golden as a young man’s carelessness chose to make her and as lying . . .? Be honest, Jamie Beckett. As lying - as he himself had turned out.

  Jamie caught Prue’s hand and pulled her roughly down beside him. She gave a little laugh, and pretended to protest. He brushed his mouth along the line of her jaw until it rested on the soft point pulsing beneath her ear. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I watched her long before she knew I knew.’

  She drew in his subtle smell, and turned her head so that their lips were almost touching. ‘How did you find out?’

  Jamie’s mouth lingered on Prue’s and she nipped his bottom lip luxuriously. ‘Jenny was the one to tell me about Lara. She didn’t realize she was doing it, of course. She just said that Mummy was spending the afternoon with Uncle Robert.’

  ‘Poor Jenny.’

  ‘Poor Max.’

  Prue was still amazed by herself. How was she capable of talking about Max while she slid her hand under Jamie’s shirt? Perhaps, perhaps, the things she had chosen to dictate the shape of her life had merely been props.

  ‘Max may well suspect something,’ she said. ‘I’m distracted and forget things. I keep dashing up to London and I lose my temper. Relations between me and Violet took an all-time plunge at the theatre. Then there is Jane - and her problems.’ She paused. ‘And there I do blame myself.’