by Marie Joseph
She would go for a long walk, she told herself, but it began to rain. She would sew, she decided, and then found she had no cotton to match the length of turquoise wool she had had for months. She would read; then, after the first few pages, she put the book down.
Unearthing the length of turquoise wool, she came across a scrap of hyacinth silk, a dress she had made for a dinner date at a local roadhouse with two couples she had been friendly with in the old days.
‘Why not ask that gorgeous hunk of man who stays with you?’ Margery Mathieson had said. ‘I promise to flirt with him all evening if you don’t want him to get any ideas.’
‘It’s a purely business arrangement,’ Laura told her firmly, ‘and that’s the only way it’s going to work. If I invite him, it may look as if I’m . . . as if I’m trying to . . .’
‘Egg him on,’ the irrepressible Margery had said. ‘Oh well, you know best.’
Wearing the hyacinth silk dress, she had passed Roger on the stairs. The dress, a simple sheath, had been a success.
He stopped, barring her way, and from the stair below his grey eyes stared directly into her own. ‘How beautiful you are,’ he said softly in his low voice, and embarrassed, she tried to move past him.
‘You should go out more often,’ he went on. ‘There’s colour in your cheeks, and a sparkle in your eyes. Some man’s a lucky guy.’
‘I’m going out with two married couples,’ she said primly, not meaning to be.
‘Pity,’ he said, at last moving aside for her to pass.
Malcolm was in the kitchen, poring over his books, but he gave a low wolf whistle when he saw her. ‘You know, Mum, you must have been quite pretty when you were young . . .’
Graciously, Laura accepted the compliment she knew it was intended to be. ‘Why are you studying in here?’
Malcolm winked at her. ‘Because Angie’s snogging in the loungewith Gareth. On the settee. Kissing,’ he enlarged, and by the way they sprang apart when she went in, she knew that Malcolm had been right.
Sitting alone in the back of the Mathiesons’ car, she worried silently. What would Miles have done? What would he have said? Angie had been the child of his heart, and not one of her previous boyfriends had satisfied his standards. What would he have thought about Gareth, son of a Welsh farmer, with his tow-coloured hair and his aggravating way of calling everyone ‘boyo’?
As they drank sherry in the bar of the newly sprung-up roadhouse, she tried to discuss it with Margery Mathieson.
‘Heavens, Laura,’ Margery said, ‘Angie’s seventeen, not a child any more. How old were you, for goodness’ sake when you married?’
‘Nineteen,’ Laura admitted unhappily. ‘But Miles was older and settled in his career. It was different.’
‘To you doting parents, it’s always different,’ Margery said from the wisdom of her childless marriage. Feeling like an overfussy mother hen, Laura had followed Margery’s elegant back into the softly lit dining room.
It was close on midnight when she got home. Gareth had gone, and Angie and Malcolm were in bed, but a light still burned in the lounge.
‘Good time?’ Roger asked, standing and smiling down at her.
‘How tall you are,’ she said, surprising herself. Then she flopped down on the settee and kicked off her mauve shoes.
‘I’m just the teeniest bit woozy,’ she told him seriously. ‘What my head will feel like in the morning, I daren’t begin to think.’
It was hard to fathom the expression in his eyes, and she was too muzzy-headed to want to try.
‘Stay where you are and I’ll make coffee for you,’ he told her, and with exaggerated politeness she thanked him.
Hearing him move around in the kitchen was a soothing sound. What a nice man he was! Kind and thoughtful. He’d make a wonderful husband for some lucky girl.
‘You’d make a wonderful husband for some lucky girl,’ she told him as he handed her a cup of coffee, black as he knew she liked it, with only the merest suspicion of sugar. ‘Why have you never married?’
He sat down again in the big armchair, stretching out his long grasshopper legs to the fire and stirring his own coffee thoughtfully.
‘That’s a good question,’ he conceded. ‘Let’s just say I’m waiting for the right girl to come along.’ Over the rim of his cup his grey eyes were suddenly serious. ‘I thought she had come along once, a long time ago, but it wasn’t to be.’
Full of food and wine, relaxed and blissfully tired, Laura’s voice oozed sentimental sympathy. ‘Oh, I am sorry. Did she die?’
‘She married someone else,’ Roger said. ‘Richer, more ambitious, an altogether better prospect than I. I am godfather to one of their children. Would you care to see a photograph?’
‘Not particularly,’ Laura said, and he laughed out loud.
‘I like you when you’re just the teeniest big woozy,’ he told her. ‘The tension’s gone out of you, and your face doesn’t look so worried.’
‘I am worried,’ she said childishly, ‘about Angie and Gareth. They’re serious, and she’s only seventeen.’
He took out his pipe. Mind? his eyebrows said, and she shook her head. ‘You can be serious at any age, and Gareth is a steady, sensible boy. I thought that was what all mothers wanted for their daughters – a steady, sensible boy.’
‘He has no ambition, and he says “boyo”,’ she said stubbornly.
‘And that matters? More than the other things?’
Laura leaned her head back and closed her eyes, giving it thought . . .
To Miles it would have mattered, and what mattered to him, she supposed, after eighteen years of marriage had come to matter to her. But did it really? It seemed important to be absolutely truthful to this man sitting opposite her, holding his pipe in the hollow of his hand and watching her steadily.
‘No, it doesn’t matter. Those kind of things don’t matter at all,’ she said at last, and smiled at him, stretching her arms high above her head. ‘I’m off to bed,’ she said, unconsciously provocative.
Afterwards she never quite knew how it had happened. She stood up, and he was moving towards the door to open it for her, and their bodies were close, almost touching. Then what she saw in his eyes made her breath catch in her throat, and she swayed towards him. Or had he put his arms round her?
After, she couldn’t remember.
At first his lips were no more than a gentle caress on her throat, and his hands were on her shoulders, so that if she’d wanted to she could have moved away. Then, with an aching tenderness his mouth explored the contours of her face, closing her eyes, and then, oh then, Laura remembered, his hands were on her face, holding her still for the wonder of his kiss.
That must have been the exact moment that Angie, coming into the room, saw them . . .
Still holding the scrap of hyacinth silk, Laura recalled the horrified gasp of dismay, the look of utter disgust on her daughter’s round face before she turned and ran back up the stairs.
‘That was a pity,’ Roger said slowly, running a worried hand through his brown hair.
‘A pity!’ Laura exploded. ‘I wouldn’t have had anything like that happen for the world.’
In her room Angie lay between the sheets, her long hair spread out over the pillow. Laura had never seen her cry quite like this before. Usually when Angie cried she did so with wholehearted abandon, the tears running down her cheeks. But now there were no tears, just this hard dry sobbing, and when Laura stretched out her hand, she jerked away.
‘How could you?’ the pale set face accused. ‘How could you, with Daddy dead barely a year? It’s disgusting and horrible.’
The words stung Laura more than a sharp slap in the face, and although usually she could find words to calm Angie, there was nothing to say.
Insomnia had been her torment since Miles died, and that night she lay awake until the sky grew light. Then she slept right through the alarm, and breakfast was a shambles.
Angie was stony-faced and s
ilent. Roger tried to get her on her own, but she avoided him completely.
Then, after a day coping with backward readers, dinner money and a headmistress in what young Miss Edwards described as a foul menopausal mood, she went home, and at the first opportunity told Roger that he must find somewhere else to stay.
‘Because I kissed you,’ he said.
‘Because you kissed me,’ she echoed wearily.
‘But mainly because Angie saw us,’ he said. ‘Look, love, she’s a big girl now, and the sooner she faces up to the fact that her mother still has a life of her own to live, the better.’ He held out his hand to draw her towards him, but she backed away.
‘It won’t do,’ she said dully. ‘I’d rather you found somewhere else to stay. The children need me, and I owe it to them . . .’ Her voice tailed off at the disappointment in his eyes.
‘Can I come and see you?’ he said.
She shook her head. ‘I’d rather you didn’t. It’s all too soon. I’m not ready for any involvement. Perhaps I don’t want to be involved again.’
It was then he had said: ‘All right then, Laura. Your husband has been dead for a year, and it’s shocking that I should have made love to you. But I can’t help loving you, and I think that you could love me . . .’
‘I can’t love anyone,’ she’d said. ‘Not yet. Perhaps not ever.’
When she told Angie that Roger was leaving them, she thought she saw a tiny flare of triumph in her daughter’s eyes, but Malcolm’s reaction was more unexpected.
‘A decent chap, old Roger,’ he said. ‘I think he was a bit stuck on you, Mum. I thought perhaps you might have married him some day.’
Laura held her breath. ‘And you wouldn’t have minded?’
‘I’d have been glad. I’ll be at university, then off to Canada, and Angie will certainly be marrying Gareth.’
‘Not for a long time yet,’ Laura said. ‘She’s only a child.’
Yet within a month Roger had gone, leaving the telephone number behind, Malcolm was at university, and Angie was attending secretarial college, wearing Gareth’s engagement ring on her third finger.
When they told her they wanted to be married at half-term, she gave in almost without a struggle. She pointed out that it would have been better if Angie could have finished her secretarial course, but her daughter smiled at her with Miles’s cool blue gaze.
‘I’m going to be a farmer’s wife, Mummy,’ she reminded her gently . . .
Laura walked over to the mantelpiece and picked up Angie’s card. On her one visit to Wales she hadn’t been in the least surprised to find that Angie was coping with her new life as if she’d been born to it. The cottage shone, and Angie got up cheerfully around six o’clock to do the things a farmer’s wife was expected to do.
‘Do you see anything of Roger?’ she asked carefully one day as they prepared vegetables together in the stone-flagged kitchen.
Embarrassed, Laura shook her head, the memory of the kiss making the colour flood her cheeks.
‘He was rather a nice person. It’s a pity you don’t see him,’ Angie said coolly, and went to feed the pigs.
Gareth caught her standing there, by the scrubbed table, and came and laid his arm round her shoulders. ‘What’s the matter, boyo?’ he teased. ‘Angie been saying something she shouldn’t?’
Laura shook her head. ‘I was just thinking how very much like her father she is,’ she said slowly.
Gareth had squeezed her shoulder sympathetically. ‘I’ve thought so too. She has his colouring.’ The sympathetic squeeze hardened, and she winced away.
‘But it wasn’t your colouring that reminded me of your father that day, Angie,’ she told the birthday card. ‘You have Miles’s way of creating a fuss when things don’t go your way, then, when you’ve won, and it doesn’t matter any more, capitulating and graciously offering the olive branch.’
She was laying the table for the pork chop when the telephone rang. Angie’s voice came loud and clear. ‘Happy birthday, Mummy. Did Malcolm remember?’
‘A card.’ Laura laughed and described it. ‘I couldn’t believe my eyes. He never remembers anniversaries. What got into him, this year?’
‘I wrote and told him,’ Angie said, and Laura smiled, remembering other birthdays when the children had bought her gifts, and she had been immeasurably pleased, only to be told later that Miles had given them the money and told them what to get.
There was a small silence as the precious seconds ticked away.
‘I wrote to Roger,’ Angie’s voice said. ‘Just a letter telling him all about the farm. He was interested.’
‘How did you know his address?’
‘It’s on a piece of paper in your dressing-table drawer. I saw it once when I was borrowing your earrings – you’d said I could – and I don’t know why, I just copied it down.’
‘Did you tell him anything else?’
‘Only that it was your birthday today. I only sort of mentioned it. You don’t mind?’
Exchanging a wry smile with herself in the hall mirror, Laura accepted the proffered olive branch.
‘Mummy, are you still there? I’d better go. The bill, you know. I just wanted to ring. I didn’t like to think of your being all alone.’ Her voice was suddenly childlike and wistful again. ‘Bye then, Mummy.’
Slowly, Laura replaced the receiver on its rest.
He knew it was her birthday, and he hadn’t even bothered to send a card. He had merely pitied her, and pity, she knew now from bitter experience, was a fleeting thing.
She ate her solitary lunch with the library book propped against the silver cruet, and outside the rain slanted down and a sudden gust of wind scattered the last of the fallen leaves across the lawn.
There was no question of a walk now, so she decided to lie down in the hope of sleeping the afternoon away.
She cried a little as she turned back the bedspread. They were, she knew, not tears of self-pity, more of emotional release, and with an overwhelming feeling of relief she knew what she had to do.
She took the scrap of paper from the drawer, and went downstairs again, and carefully dialled the number.
A woman’s voice with a marked Lancashire accent answered and told her that Mr Baynes had gone out – that she had pleaded with him not to go because he’d had a cold, and his car was at the garage for repair. But he would go and in all that rain too. Was it raining where she was, and wasn’t it a dreadful day? She’d give him a message the minute he came in if that would help.
After thanking her, Laura said it didn’t matter, and upstairs in the bedroom she calmly smoothed the bedspread back into place again. She powdered away the trace of tears, and outlined her mouth with a soft coral lipstick. There were no more tears now. She was resigned to whatever had to be.
She had more, much more than many women in her position. She had this house, and now that the children were gone her financial position had eased considerably. She had her job, and she would think about joining the local dramatic society.
She would count her blessings, starting right now.
As she lifted a corner of the curtain to see if the sky had lightened at all, he was coming up the path. He had obviously walked from the station, his thin shoulders were bent against the rain, and his hands were thrust deep into his raincoat pockets.
She was running downstairs and opening the door before he had time to raise a hand to the bell.
‘I came to wish you a happy birthday,’ he said steadily, and seeing him standing there, the tears she had thought were gone filled her face again.
And somehow she was in his arms, held against his wet coat, and his cold hands were stroking her hair, and he was whispering that surely she knew that he’d come back some day. When she was ready to listen to his love.
Then, as he kissed her and she felt again the gentle strength of his tenderness for her, it was like the ending of an awful loneliness that she knew now had been a part of her for a long, long time.
&nb
sp; Love in Top Gear
THERE WAS ONLY one snag about deciding that I would never see Rufus again. The snag was that I was madly in love with him.
There are times, however, in one’s life when one has to be ruthless; and ‘better to have loved and lost’, I decided that afternoon, as I changed with the speed of light from a maxi-coat worn with red tights and a cowboy hat into a gold lamé evening dress that clung like a second skin.
The audience at the fashion show in the big store in Regent Street consisted mainly of middle-aged matrons and grans who would, let’s face it, have looked a bit odd in the outfits we were modelling that day.
‘Seeing Rufus tonight?’ Deirdre, one of my co-models, whispered out of the corner of her mouth as we leaned together against a silver-spangled cardboard tree for the finale.
‘Yes, we’re trying out his latest on the Ml,’ I hissed back. ‘A GT sports with all the “extras”, whatever that means.’
And tonight I will tell him that we can’t go on, I told myself, striking the next pose.
The truth was that the love of Rufus’s life was cars, and my rivals of the moment were, in order of precedence, the GT and a 1928 Lagonda, which he’d sprayed a tasteful shade of mustard.
Rufus is addicted to his cars as a hippie is addicted to freethinking. He lavishes as much care and attention on them as is usually afforded to a delicate and only child. In the first flush of enthusiasm after exchanging yet another car, I have known him walk to the station if it’s raining to avoid leaving his latest darling exposed to the elements in the station yard.
And in the middle of a conversation about how much he loves me, and how much I love him, I have known him shush me into instant silence to listen to a perfectly mythical knock in the engine.
The conversations I’ve held with his big toe as he’s lain supine to check for corrosion underneath are nobody’s business. Nobody’s but mine, that is, and that afternoon, as we swayed down the catwalk to genteel applause, I decided that enough was enough.
