A New Map of Love

by Annie Murray

  She held up a box of liquorice allsorts. George had told her of Monty’s adoration for sweets and these in particular.

  ‘It’s a shame he’s not here,’ she said valiantly. ‘But you can give him one from me, all right?’

  George was very touched. He knew the sweets were aimed more at pleasing him than the dog, but it was a kind thought and he said so. ‘Oh he’ll be very pleased with those,’ he added.

  ‘Well, I know how much you love that dog – and he’s a fine old boy,’ she said, turning with a smile as she laid a rug over the duckboards and brought from the bags a succession of Tupperware boxes stacked in descending order of size. George wondered what was in the really enormous one at the bottom. From the other ones she brought out onto melamine plates sandwiches – egg mayonnaise and beef – chicken drumsticks, Scotch eggs and cocktail sausages, tomatoes, cucumber and celery sticks and from another box, a deep green tangle of watercress. There were packets of crisps and bottles of Watney’s Pale Ale. (‘You like a nice ale, don’t you, George?’ Said with the sweetest of smiles.)

  Once everything was laid out she sat up, hands on her thighs. ‘There – how’s that? And I made a strawberry gateau.’ She pointed at the biggest box. ‘Can’t have you going hungry, can we?’

  ‘What a treat!’ he said.

  ‘Come and sit here.’ She patted the bench beside her. He smiled and shifted over, carefully, to the middle of the boat.

  Sylvia turned to look coyly at him. ‘There’s something else you haven’t said, George. Haven’t you noticed?’ She patted her head. ‘D’you like my hair?’

  George examined her with a sense of disquiet. The hair – was it different somehow? More of it, perhaps, or curlier?

  ‘I had a perm.’ She shook her head so that the dark curls rippled loose around her head. ‘I hoped you’d like it.’

  ‘Oh I do,’ George agreed fervently. He did like it, he realized, though he would have approved however she wore it. ‘It makes you look very youthful,’ he said.

  She laughed, pleased at this. He longed to reach for her, to press his face into the shadowy little crannies round her neck and collarbones and altogether fold himself round her.

  This was already their second meeting since the dinner at the Bridge. On Sunday night they had sat outside at the Nautical Wheel pub by Wallingford Bridge – more vermouth for her, a couple of pints for him. She had gazed at him with that dreamy attention she gave him when he talked. She asked about Win and he told her what he could, casting Win in the kindest light possible. After all, there was nothing wrong with Win. He had always felt that the fault lay with him – for wanting and needing more, for settling for less than that. But he did not say this. He did say, ‘She was a good sort. Lots of friends – you know, active in things in the village.’

  Sylvia’s eyes became liquid with sympathy. ‘It’s terrible, losing the people you love, isn’t it?’ She reached for him for a moment and stroked the back of his hand. ‘It’s the worst thing. Oh I do know, George.’

  He was gratified, melted, by the attention she paid him. He was not used to such attention – only from Maggie, ever. Of course in some ways she was foreign to him, the way she seemed preoccupied with how much things cost to a degree that he found positively alien. And those girlish mannerisms . . . But, he reminded himself, people had to get used to each other. And what about him, with his pipe-smoking and his dog who liked sniffing people’s backsides? If they were to get used to each other then each of them would have to forgive the other for their age, their habits.

  That evening as the dusk fell about them, and her eyes remained the brightest part of her, giving back the strings of light outside the pub, she told him about her father.

  ‘He left us.’ She looked down as if in shame. ‘Just went off and left Mum and Jean and me. I can barely remember him – I was only three. Jean was six. Poor Mum; she set to and started baking her own bread and cakes, selling them out of the front room to make ends meet.’ She raised her head. Her face had changed. George thought he had never met someone with such expressive features. There were no tears, but a puckering of pain. ‘I haven’t been very lucky with men in my life, you see. I mean, with them ever staying to take care of me. I suppose that’s why I never rushed into having children – not even with Lionel, though as it turns out I was right to feel . . . you see, I never felt safe enough.’

  This soulful vulnerability and her sheer fleshy loveliness sent desirous, protective feelings swilling round George’s body.

  ‘You poor girl.’ This time he reached for her hand. ‘You’ve been so unlucky, haven’t you?’

  ‘Oh George.’ Sylvia’s words rode on a sigh and she tilted her head to one side. ‘You’re so kind to me. Of all the men I’ve ever met, I really think I feel the very safest with you.’

  As they sat side by side, close to Day’s Lock eating her picnic, she plied him with questions.

  ‘Oh George, you’re such an astonishing person, such a man of the world. You must tell me about New York.’ This was gratifying to hear and George, feeling short on gratification, swallowed her words like the first summer strawberries.

  What he was in fact eating at the time was a satisfyingly large mouthful of Scotch egg, enjoying the promising press of her thigh against his. After chewing and swallowing, during which he rapidly calculated how to unpack this particular drawer of memory, he decided that glamour was the key.

  ‘Old Joe and Walter, the Black brothers, knew how to do things in style,’ he said. ‘They sent me over as an agent for them – put me up at the Waldorf Astoria on Fifth Avenue.’

  He heard Sylvia gasp, just as he himself had when he saw the place and realized that he, gauche country boy, was really to stay in such a looming palace of a place. He had walked round it every day, dazed by its vast opulence.

  ‘That was the old Astoria, of course – they pulled it down the year after. But oh my, you should have seen – the dining room, the luxury of the bedrooms . . . Telephones – can you imagine?’

  Glancing at Sylvia, he could see that he had her rapt.

  He told her about crossing the Atlantic Ocean, on the SS Aquitania. Once installed in the Waldorf Astoria, in the company of Edvin Helle, his aptly named contact in New York, he held meetings with dealers and antiques buyers, some of whom had driven, or ‘travelled the railroad’ – he enjoyed saying that – from the surrounding states, to sit sipping expensive coffee and perusing the seductive catalogues Joe and Walter had sent with him. Thick vellum pages arranged with photographs purveyed fine craftsmanship of the old countries for which the buyers hungered and with which they might grace their homes and company offices. He met imposing, athletic men who looked to have eaten well from birth, with sharply pressed suits, slick hair and debonair self-confidence. Only one, he remembered, a stunted fellow from Pennsylvania with hollow cheeks, wire-framed spectacles and a diffidence covered by loudness, looked to have thrown off the pinched horizons of poverty.

  ‘I’d wire their orders through to the Black brothers – or requests. Could they find this piece or that? Something French, or . . .’ He thought he noticed spores of boredom beginning in Sylvia’s expression, rather like mould beginning to bloom on a peach.

  ‘Sorry – rambling on . . .’ He looked down at his shoes feeling foolish; a boring show-off.

  ‘No, George!’ She laid a hand on his arm and kept it there. His hairs rose as if lifted by static. ‘It’s all so interesting. But tell me more about the place itself. I’d love to see it. Is it as different as they say it is?’

  ‘Oh, it is.’ Her hand still on his arm, he tried to capture it: the soaring tallness, the way looking up at the buildings made you feel dizzy. ‘The lads who build those things, the skyscrapers, are called “sky boys”. Imagine it, working all the way up there.’

  ‘Ooh,’ Sylvia gave a shudder, which transmitted in a pleasing way through her whole body.

  ‘And the people there – you’ve never seen so many different types and accents a
nd languages! Rich, poor – everything seems to be more than here. And the music – oh, it was a whole new world for me, I can tell you.’

  He did his best to make himself sound an adventurer, a lad with more conviction than the callow twenty-year-old he had been. In reality, almost all his memories of that escapade the other side of the Atlantic were tinged with humiliation and a lingering disgust. New York had only been the beginning, before he was invited – commanded, more like – to Buenos Aires, by Paul Lester. But New York, though it was undeniably exciting, had disquieted him in ways he would never admit to Sylvia. It would make him sound unmanly. It was the crazed, loud pace of everything, the way that, because alcohol was prohibited, it had become an obsession. He even drank soup laced with some hooch or other. And – harder still to admit – that music, the raucous, wild signature tune of the ‘jazz age’ horrified him. He had heard it snaking and blaring its way out through doorways, or beating on his temples in those places – clubs reeking of hooch and sex and incipient violence – to which tedious, prurient Helle insisted on taking him. Helle, into whose company he was forced during those days.

  Helle, six years his senior, worked for a prominent New York dealer. He was a gangling creature with a thin fuzz of hair atop a long face, white as a fish’s belly. He wore a drooping moustache which he seemed to imagine made him sexually irresistible.

  ‘Come on, Sonny Jim,’ Helle repeated in lofty tones. He said ‘Sonny Jim’ aggravatingly often. ‘I’ll take you to a speakeasy. You can’t leave this city of ours without a taste of the high life.’

  For two evenings George managed to avoid him. All he wanted each evening, after days of strain and new faces, was to stroll about the streets. He wandered in Central Park with its soothing lake, his unaccustomed eyes free to drink in this heaving, modern place. He wanted to sit somewhere quietly and look around him. Boring, perhaps, but he had grown up in a town where a passing motor car was an event that sent children scurrying out to wave and stare.

  By the third night he had run out of excuses.

  ‘So . . .’ Helle said as they stepped out of the Waldorf on a warm, April evening. Helle was sweaty and excitable. His breath stank like fermented apples. ‘Out on the town at last! You might want to cut your teeth – or rather, spill your seed’ – a nudge which made George long to punch him on his stupid, bony jaw – ‘Sonny Jim!’

  Helle led him along various side streets. He seemed soon almost lost and childishly excited. ‘You can drink all you like where we’re going, Sonny Jim!’ Pinching George’s arm at the elbow, he led him along streets of soaring, narrow tenements and down steps to a gloomy basement. George loathed it all from the moment they stepped inside, the way the walls seemed to close in, containing air thick with cheap perfume mingled with hooch and other primal stinks and an atmosphere of licence and looseness.

  Helle pushed him across to a table. A dark-haired woman was sitting astride the lap of a man whose features George could not see, since her face was pressed to his as she rocked up and down. It took moments for it to dawn on George that they were actually . . . They were . . . He tried not to look. As soon as Helle had a drink inside him he became multiple times more tedious than when sober. George was handed a tot of some clear liquid. It smelt like paint thinner. The place was full of women who, he realized by their insistence and handling of him, were offering him what was going on just outside the vision of his right eye. He endured half an hour of acute discomfort and rising rage, pretending to sip the hooch, having girls sidle up to him, making suggestions to which he had no idea what to say. Bugger this, he thought, past bearing it any longer, and walked out. Helle, who was talking to some girl with caked eyelashes and a beauty spot on her cheek, barely noticed. For the next two days of his visit he and Helle did not speak, except on strictly business matters, and Helle never again looked him in the eye.

  But to Sylvia, he described the place in a way that implied he had been its equal, or at least its eager disciple. After all, it was not the fashion to be unequal to New York. He had roamed the streets, looked out from the Battery, moved to its music (or rather away from it), drunk in all its glamorous atmosphere. He found himself dredging his memory to describe the mansions and shops of Fifth Avenue because he thought this was what she would like to hear.

  And then, because he had run out of things to say about New York, and he guessed that she would not be interested in Argentina, he told her the one thing he could relate to her as a story about lords and ladies, about seeing the Allodola Venus and Mars at Lord Buckleford’s mansion, his seeing Mars on Horseback again at Lester’s estancia in Argentina, about the missing Venus.

  ‘What a sad story,’ she said. ‘Lord Buckleford, you say? Having to sell his lovely home. And imagine losing all his sons like that – so tragic.’ She shook her head, then brightened. ‘I can help you look for Venus if I come out with you. I’d like that!’

  George smiled. As if, after all this time they might walk into some shop and . . . But then they might. Anything was possible.

  ‘It can be our little treasure hunt,’ she said, though he was not sure if she was saying it just because she thought it would please him. As they talked she had started running her fingers along the hairs of his forearm. The tickling of it, the cherry-coloured nails just in his line of vision, brought him back from these memories to the glitter of light and the smell of the river. And to her. In his hungry mind, each touch felt like a stroke of hope and possible fruition. He stopped talking, drawn too much back into the present to remember more.

  ‘George?’ Sylvia stilled her fingers, but left them resting on him. With the other hand she reached down for the oblong plastic box. ‘I made a strawberry gateau.’

  ‘How lovely.’ He was full of a desirous, trance-like feeling.

  She needed two hands to open the thing on her lap. Inside, resting on a sponge ring, the red shine of strawberries set like jewels into whipped nests of cream.

  ‘Oh my word,’ he found the presence of mind to exclaim. ‘What a woman you are!’

  Sylvia laughed, seeming gratified and he saw tiny suns reflected in her eyes. ‘Mum taught me to make a good cake. All for you, George.’ She gave him a long, deep look, then reached up softly and kissed his cheek. As she moved slowly away, he was caught by the sight of her ear, the fleshy pink lobe, a dark wisp of hair curling down her cheek in front of it. It seemed to show him something absolutely female, the secret shell tunnel of ear, the pearl nestling in the lobe. Her ear filled him with tender longing.

  Pulse drumming along his veins, he took her in his arms, his lips seeking out hers, which were offered to him, full and warm. Everything else was forgotten. He wanted this to go on and on, here, somewhere, anywhere . . .

  ‘George, dear . . . ?’

  She drew back, tapping his arm, amusement in her eyes. The gateau was still in its box on her lap. ‘I’m going to drop this . . . Let me cut you a slice, shall I?’

  He surfaced, like someone pulled back from the brink.

  2.

  In that night’s balmy darkness, the moon like a tiny rent in the sky, George took Monty out to stretch his legs. The dog, having idled all afternoon, was eager as a pup. He dragged George down the drive and, before George could think about it, to the chalk path along the edge of the downs and Maggie and John Wylde’s farm.

  A faint chill was settling over the fields. The night sweats of plants reached him in the darkness: cow parsley, honeysuckle, a heady mixture which brought back to him the smell of Sylvia’s scent. Sylvia . . . A besotted array of emotions passed through him.

  He hesitated, then followed the dog’s determined course towards the farm. Monty could obviously smell something and was surging forward. George let him off the lead. What harm would it do? He hadn’t seen Maggie even in passing for weeks. He bought his eggs on his Saturday afternoon trips into Didcot once he’d shut the shop. He wasn’t going to meet her out here now. And if he did . . .

  A pang of affectionate regret went thr
ough him. Dear Maggie. He was already in a simmering state as a result of his extended farewells to Sylvia. They had paused on their journey home, tying the boat up in their secluded spot under the willows upstream of Wallingford. She had allowed him – for the first time and so briefly he felt she might be carrying a stopwatch – to move his hand over her breasts. And oh, what magnificence . . . but after not more than a few seconds she seized his wrist.

  ‘We’d better not go too far, had we, George? Not here.’ While he was thinking that they had not in fact gone anywhere, she was gazing into his eyes with an air of serious social responsibility. Supposing, her look said, a child were to come past? He remembered the little girl perched on the bow of her father’s sailing boat and tried not to sigh.

  Not here. Those words seemed full of promise. Full of longing, he stood there in the dark, concentrating on the thought of that pearled ear, the contours of those breasts. An ache solidified in his chest, that longing to clasp his arms around a warm, giving body, to be held in return.

  ‘Tell you what,’ he’d said as they parted. ‘Why don’t you come over to my place this weekend – Sunday, when the shop’s shut? I’ll come and pick you up and I can show you around.’

  My place, where there was seclusion, privacy . . . Sylvia readily agreed.

  He paused at the foot of the Wyldes’ drive, calling softly for Monty. There was a dim glow of light from the farm. Standing in the darkness he smiled, thinking of Maggie’s pink, kindly face, her rough hands, her lying slack and naked on that bed. What he felt for her was surely a kind of love, even if they had been right to retreat from one another. Turning to walk home, whistling for the dog, he thanked her inwardly and hoped that she was all right.

  Ten

  1.

  Stepping out of the front door a couple of days later, at the beginning of the working day, he saw Kevin halfway across the drive, at a standstill and clutching his daily parcel of sandwiches as if overcome by some biblical-type event.