The Benefits of Passion

by Catherine Fox

  ‘Now what?’ he asked, when she tugged at his arm.

  ‘I don’t mean to be like this. Honestly. It just sort of happens . . .’ The sentence tailed off miserably.

  ‘Some things are like good wine, Isabella. They improve with keeping.’

  ‘What about Beaujolais nouveau? You drink that the minute you get your hands on it,’ she pointed out.

  He was trying not to smile again. ‘True. But I’m a claret man. I prefer something a bit more mature.’

  ‘Oh, thanks. You’ll wait for me to grow up, will you?’

  He touched her lips briefly with a finger and smiled. ‘Well, you never know.’

  She watched him walk back down the long path and join the others playing croquet. The woodpecker’s drum sounded hollow as she cycled away.

  CHAPTER 5

  It was Thursday afternoon again. Annie looked out of her window. There was a yellowish tinge to the clouds and she wondered whether it was going to snow. On her desk lay the notes for an essay. The navel-gazing session had been cancelled in favour of King Lear, but Annie was not about to waste the gift of two hours on the Shape of Modern Liturgy.

  It was the evening of the ball. Isabella and Camilla were standing in front of the big mirror in Camilla’s room wearing identical slinky dresses. This was deliberate, of course. The only difference was the colour. Camilla, being blonde, was in black, while the dark-haired Isabella wore white. As they pouted and busied themselves with their make-up, Isabella couldn’t help feeling she’d got the short straw. Camilla was already tall and slim enough without the benefit of black. White could be so fat-making. Isabella scrutinized her own slim form for bulges. Still, it set off that exam-revision tan she had worked so hard on. Camilla began applying some lipstick. Isabella had just recounted an edited version of her lunch with Barney.

  ‘All that play and still no score,’ marvelled Camilla. ‘Here, put some of this on.’ She handed Isabella the lipstick.

  ‘Slut red. I like it.’ There was a silence as Isabella painted her lips scarlet, and tried to muster the right casual note to tell Camilla the whole story. ‘He asked me for a blow-job, actually.’

  ‘Yeah?’ Camilla was pulling on her long black gloves, unmoved by this revelation. ‘They all do, sooner or later.’

  ‘Sure,’ mumbled Isabella, as she blotted her mouth on a tissue. They did? ‘But he makes this great thing about being celibate.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Well, what?’

  ‘Did you oblige?’

  ‘No-oo. Gravel drive, you know? Plays hell with a girl’s knees.’ She tossed the screwed-up tissue towards the bin and hoped she wasn’t blushing. But when she slid a glance at Camilla’s reflection she met an amused stare.

  ‘Let’s face it, child, you’ve never done it.’

  Isabella grimaced. ‘Nah. Never fancied it.’

  Camilla laughed and put a long black cigarette into her predictably long black holder. ‘Send him round to me.’

  ‘Over my dead body.’ There was a hostile silence; then Isabella abandoned pride in favour of gleaning a little information. ‘It’s just that . . . I mean, what do you do exactly, when – when – you know?’

  ‘Spit or swallow, little one,’ drawled Camilla, lighting her cigarette.

  Annie shut the book with a guilty giggle. I can’t write that! The scene had been inspired by an occasion when she and Isobel had shared a mirror as they prepared for the college ball. Annie owned no make-up and was borrowing some of Isobel’s. The colours were all wrong for her freckled skin, and she could never apply make-up without feeling like a six-year-old raiding Mother’s dressing table. Not that Mrs Brown ever wore it. It was sinful. The only woman in the Bible who wore make-up was Jezebel, and we all know what sort of woman she was. The Brown girls were forbidden to touch the stuff. Annie accepted this meekly, and to that day found bright lipstick faintly shocking. Damn rebelled, though. Annie could still remember the long bitter eyeshadow wars that raged throughout her adolescence.

  Isobel had worked in the mirror with cool efficiency. Annie watched her sidelong as she blended exactly the right amount of blusher into her hollowed cheeks. The pinnacle of Annie’s cosmetic ambitions had always been to apply mascara without getting a black line across the bridge of her nose when doing the left eye. She’d never mastered the professional backhanded method Isobel was so casually employing. Annie stared at her reflection. Her brown eyes looked rounder than ever – like a startled marmoset. The scene Annie had just written was her revenge on Isobel. She could always repent and cross it out later.

  It was just that Isobel was so frostily perfect. Her dark blue silk dress had been simple but stunning. Annie had given up trying to look conventionally beautiful, much to her mother’s disgust. You look like something the cat’s brought in, Anne. Why don’t you wear something smart for once? You’ve got plenty of nice things just hanging there in your wardrobe. If you’re not going to wear them you should take them down to Oxfam. And look at your hair. You’ve really let yourself go.

  Annie had ditched her teacher’s image along with the job. All those polite skirts and V-necked pullovers. Beige and grey, like her life had been. These days her only sartorial rule was to wear what she wanted, regardless of what it looked like and whether other people thought it was appropriate. Her clothes came from charity shops and jumble sales, or from dark little shops reeking of patchouli. All her skirt hems drooped. Her sweaters were vast and had unravelled cuffs. Nothing went with anything else. Army surplus with sequinned velvet. Tramps’ coats with silk stockings. Perhaps it would have worked if Annie hadn’t lacked that special ingredient – self-belief, perhaps? – which synthesized random garments into a fashion statement. Most of the time she knew she just looked odd. Edward called it her Orphan Annie look and it annoyed him almost as much as Ingram’s hair. Ted had teenage daughters and found it normal. He had only commented on her clothes once. She remembered him saying, after looking thoughtfully at her most wildly unravelled pullover, ‘Don’t go near any working machinery while you’re wearing that, will you?’

  Her choice of outfit for the ball had been a little black cocktail dress. Late Fifties or early Sixties, low cut and exquisitely tailored – four pounds from Save the Children. When she had tried it on in the shop it had seemed quirky and slightly risqué; but standing beside Isobel’s dark blue silk, Big Mistake seemed nearer the mark. Whatever was Edward going to say?

  Annie was going to the ball with him because he was trying to escape the attentions of an eager undergraduate who had – through no fault of his – got hold of totally the wrong end of totally the wrong stick. Annie could be counted on not to misconstrue his gallantry. Thanks, darling. Annie had tugged futilely at the front of her dress to make it plunge less, suddenly fearing that Edward would prefer whoomfy taffeta to exquisite tailoring and quirky décolletage. Oh, no! His feet coming along the corridor. A knock. She opened the door and he took two clear steps back, astounded.

  ‘Gosh, Annie. Curves.’

  She wrung her hands, looking at his dinner suit. ‘Is it too awful? I don’t want to let you down.’

  ‘Turn round.’ She obeyed. ‘I say, Miss Brown. Those aren’t stockings, are they?’

  ‘Oh, no! They don’t show, do they?’ She tried to wriggle them up, but it proved impossible without hoisting her skirt. ‘Oh, help. What am I going to do? I should have bought tights, only I hate wearing them.’

  ‘I could lend you some,’ offered Isobel politely, coming to the door with the little evening bag that matched her dress.

  ‘No, no!’ protested Edward. ‘She wouldn’t dream of troubling you.’ And to Annie’s amazement, he swept her up in his arms and made off with her down the corridor like a caveman. Isobel stared after them in fastidious disapproval. I may be gone some time, Annie wanted to call to her, but had not dared. She was saving the line for her novel.

  From that moment on Annie had her work cut out. It was all she could do to prevent Libby from knocking E
dward flat, sitting on his chest and licking his face. He was flirting outrageously. He pulled Annie on to his knee and fed her strawberries, letting her run her hand through his short brown hair. But he misbehaved so impeccably that there was never any real danger of her misunderstanding him. She was a super Christian girl, but she was not the future Mrs Edward Hunter. Annie was aware that he had had a little conversation with himself: Q. Do I want this woman to be the Mother of my Children? A. No. Sadly. Therefore, no entanglements. But poor old Libby couldn’t grasp this.

  After it was all over Annie lay awake till dawn. The taste of strawberries, his strong arms round her. It was so long since anything like this had happened to her, since she had been kissed. Edward’s goodnight kisses had been enthusiastic but chaste – mwah! mmm-wah! – planted one on each cheek, just brushing the corner of her mouth. And then to round things off – mmwah! – a firm kiss on the lips. His Imperial Leather soap, his hard smooth chin. Libby howled from her cold kennel outside.

  Heigh ho.

  Well, what am I going to wear tonight? She decided on her long green crushed-velvet dress. It had come from a Scouts’ jumble sale and she suspected that it had once been yellow, only someone had tried to dye it blue. She loved the gentle mottled effect that had been achieved. That dress looks like an old dishrag, Anne.

  Would it be warm enough, though? she wondered. The fabric was panne, light as a bird’s feather. It was the kind of thing she’d worn in her teens when she had been a tempestuous Pre-Raphaelite poet with clouds of raven hair every night as she fell asleep. Maybe she could wear her baggy chenille sweater over the top. It was dark blue-green. Rookwing. Annie was as colour-conscious as Dr Mowbray. It came from all those hours she had spent as a child poring over her mother’s wool catalogues, running her fingertip over the yarn samples and drinking in jade, moss, aquamarine, twilight. Colour had flooded her parched imagination.

  Mrs Brown’s choice in clothes and interior design had been governed by the twin principles of economy and serviceability. Colour schemes were a silly extravagance. Their home was a battleground where ugly browns slugged it out with orange and maroon. Annie and Damn were mocked at school for their strange clothes. One day, when her parents were out, Damn had thrown the ghastly curtains, carpet and bedspread out of her bedroom on to the landing and painted the walls, furniture and floorboards white. White sheets for curtains and bed cover, white pleated filepaper for a lampshade.

  Annie had accepted the violent swirls and dinginess with an outward submissiveness, but in her heart she treasured up all the gems of the New Jerusalem, turning them over and over and watching them flash. Jasper, sapphire, chalcedony. Sardius and chrysolite. Jacinth. Amethyst. Damn would have found the Holy City incredibly tacky, but Annie’s soul was ravished by colour. No wonder she had been drawn to Anglicanism with all its jewelled windows and winking brass.

  After a moment her thoughts returned to the rookwing sweater folded in her chest of drawers. It was new and expensive – one of her rare Isabella-type purchases. ‘Chenille comes from the French for caterpillar,’ read the accompanying rhetoric on the label, ‘because that is exactly what it is like.’ Exactly what it is like. Annie was enchanted by the notion that her sweater could be weaving a cocoon for itself in the dark of the drawer, and might one day burst out and flutter away across the university on petticoat wings. She looked at the dull sky out of the window and saw the first flakes of snow whirl past.

  The cathedral clock struck the quarter hour. There had been a time when the sound had quivered in her very marrow. She had fallen in love with the City at first sight, with its steep riverbanks and towering cathedral. Even the cold air had seemed to teem with promise when she came up on interview. Now it oppressed her. The streets and buildings had a mad claustrophobic intensity. They were dwarfed by the cathedral, belted in by the tight loop of river. Annie longed for the wide fields and huge sky of Cambridge. Each time she travelled north again after the vacation her heart sank when the cathedral appeared. It rose up out of the horizon like a shark’s fin above the waves, full of silent menace, making her feel that God was out to get her. If ever she strayed above her ankles into the sinful tide – VOOM!

  Anyway, she thought, shaking off such ideas, tonight would be fun. King Lear was not everyone’s idea of fun, of course, but they couldn’t know what it meant to her to go to the theatre without fifty teenage girls. She’d be able to enjoy the play for once without fearing that someone would get lost, or drunk during the interval, or put on too much make-up on the coach beforehand, or wave at lorry drivers out of the rear window. And Edward would be coming, which would be nice. He had consented to join them since the group was actually doing something for once. And they would be joined by Edward’s doctor friend William, whose cottage Annie had once stayed in with Ted and his family.

  Annie had been curious to meet William Penn-Eddis for a long time. His cottage had been so fearsomely well furnished and decorated that even Damn would have found nothing to shudder at. It was not full of other people’s discarded three-piece suites and divans, as Annie had anticipated and, indeed, would have found quite reasonable. Everything was discreetly new. There were no frills or horsebrassy knick-knackery, and no colour to speak of. It made Annie want to toss a crimson silk cushion aggressively on to the ivory sofa. Whoops! There goes my glass of burgundy on to the oatmeal carpet. All in all, the place seemed to be crying out for an axe murder to be committed in it.

  Annie smiled. She knew a great deal about Dr Penn-Eddis, considering she had never met him. Edward prayed for him regularly in their Coverdale prayer meeting. William had once been a keen Christian of the same hearty evangelical Boys’ Public School Camp kind as Edward, but he had gone off the rails. Annie knew all this because Edward’s prayers were always superbly informative, tactfully filling God in on the biographical details of the person being prayed for. Annie pictured the archangel Gabriel riffling through a card index and trying to locate the relevant soul for God while Edward was saying, ‘And we pray for Hugh, an old Etonian, now working as a missionary in Uganda . . .’

  ‘Hugh Duncan. Got him!’ Gabriel would say, plucking the card out triumphantly and handing it over. ‘Born in Amersham, Bucks, nineteen fifty-two.’

  William, Annie had gleaned, was a Cambridge man, the oldest son of a vicar in North Oxford. He was very bright, could have done anything, and was now working as a GP in Bishopside. (A nearby north-eastern town where, as God was no doubt aware, reluctant Coverdale students were sent by the college to gain Urban Experience.)

  Edward’s affection for his friend seemed to be composed in equal parts of hero-worship and exasperation. Annie thought she could account for this. Not only was William thirty-seven, four years older than Edward, he was the one who had ‘brought Edward to faith’. And, if this was not enough, he had also rescued Edward from drowning at camp that same summer. Edward had therefore been saved body and soul by William Penn-Eddis, and Annie winced to think how devastating it must have been for Edward when his mentor later renounced the Christian faith. William fascinated her so much as a concept that she wasn’t sure she wanted to meet the real thing and be disappointed. She tried to guess what he looked like, but her imagination could only suggest a picture of Edward with a stethoscope round his neck, barking, ‘Antibiotics? Nonsense! Cold shower and a quick run round the rugger field – soon sort you out.’

  What’s going on? Annie demanded suddenly. I give myself permission to work on my novel, and what do I find? I sit here thinking about clothes and men, for heaven’s sake. She reread the mirror scene, hand poised to strike out the rude bits.

  Isabella sat on the edge of her bed. It was three p.m. the day after the ball and she had just woken up. Her head ached, but it wasn’t a full-blown hangover since she’d only got three-quarters drunk, not paralytic. She hadn’t got laid, either; although, if she was honest, that had less to do with self-control than that her partner had passed out face-down in a lavender bush while throwing up. She had always
found Luke sexy in a dark, smutty, two-days’-growth-of-beard kind of a way; but as she tried to haul him out of the herbaceous border his charm suddenly eluded her. The mingled smells of vomit and crushed lavender did not add up to irresistibility and, on a callous impulse, she let him lie. There then followed a brief window of sobriety in which she wandered around watching everyone else’s antics. The spectacle disgusted her so much that she downed a couple more glasses of champagne to obliterate it.

  Now, as she sat in her room with a throbbing head, she began to see what Barney meant by preferring something a little more mature. In that brief clear-eyed period she had witnessed Camilla not as a cool cynical beauty but as a silly drunken slag. Is that how I look to Barney? She winced at the probable reply and went to have a shower.

  Camilla was still dead to the world when Isabella tapped softly on her door. Was that two sets of snores, even? She hurried away, embarrassed. She decided to go out and buy a new dress to cheer herself up. Want and need were synonymous in Isabella’s vocabulary, so she had no difficulty in justifying the enterprise to herself. Before long, however, she began to sense the presence of Barney’s disappointed face looming above the lingerie like Banquo’s ghost in every shop she entered. Bugger off, she told him. I’ll do as I please. Her eye fell on a cream straw hat with deep red silk roses on it and she knew at once that she had to have it. Wasn’t it just perfect for her new silk dress? It would be a sin not to buy it. She tried it on. The hat insisted on being bought. She took it off and looked at the price. Over a hundred pounds! Barney shook his head. Oh, please! she wheedled. He turned to leave. Oh, all right, all right! She put down the hat and stomped out of the shop.

  After a while her spirits rose. She had done the right thing, for once. Furthermore, she had saved a hundred quid and could therefore spend up to that amount on something else with a clear conscience.

  It was in the next shop that she saw The Dress. Long and tight and black, split almost to the hip-bone up each thigh with nothing but latticework down the sides. Yes! She tried it on and bought it at once. It was a dream and, amazingly, it wasn’t expensive! Well, not that expensive. Cheaper than the hat, anyway. Oh, no-oo. By the time she got home she was writhing with guilt.