by Annie Murray
He held her as they cooled on top of the bedclothes, letting her cry it out. It was sweet to feel the brush of her hair against his skin and her warm solidity. He knew he did not belong with her or she with him, now any more than before, but he felt a huge rush of fondness for her.
‘You know,’ he said, as the fit of tears quietened, ‘you did say you wanted a bigger life. For things to expand.’
‘Did I?’ she said in a bleak tone. ‘Yes, I s’pose I did. I just—’ She pushed herself up on one elbow and looked down at him. In the gauzy evening light her face looked older, sadder. There were more lines around her eyes than he remembered. ‘I don’t think I meant quite this big. I was thinking of a nice little trip to France, maybe . . .’
‘Well,’ he tried, ‘life is full of surprises.’ Even platitudes were in short supply. He struggled to think of something deep to follow this but nothing came to him.
‘Huh. Well this is one I could have done without.’ She lay down again. ‘It’s a shock, George, it really is. But I s’pose I’ll have to come to terms with it.’
He reached over and stroked her belly, reacquainting himself with the feel of it, soft, yet also strong. He stilled his hand on her and they lay in a pool of quiet. George just made out the sound of Monty’s toenails clicking along the hall floor.
In the silence, her mind must have slid back to thoughts of the world enlarging suddenly, against her will.
‘Tell me . . .’ She snuggled close to him, on her side, like a child demanding a story. ‘What was it like where you went? Argentina, you said? What on earth were you doing there?’
He would always remember Helle’s face when they visited that swanky dealers on Fifth Avenue. Paul Lester was there, a thin, austere-looking man in a long dark overcoat. He was English. They were introduced – Lester, a businessman from Buenos Aires; George, agent for the Black brothers, the London dealers. Helle, who kept trying to poke his nose in, never really got a look-in.
‘I’d never met anyone like Lester before,’ he told Maggie. ‘He looked like a Methodist preacher, but I realized – well I didn’t have to realize because he told me soon enough – he was one of the richest men in the world. Baron Lester. Even bought himself a peerage, I found out later.’
‘Where did he get all his money from?’ She sounded puzzled.
‘Meat. All those cattle across the plains of Argentina. Refrigeration – packing and exporting meat. He had one of the biggest outfits at the docks in Buenos Aires . . . This was 1928 and by then he’d made a fortune – through the Great War of course. Bully beef for the troops. What he wanted, though, was furniture for his place in the country – estancias, they call them. It was being built at the time. He wanted European furniture, especially English and French. He looked at all the catalogues I’d brought, very quietly for ages. Then he said – never left me any choice really – ‘I want you to come with me. There’ll be good business in it for you.’
‘But why did you have to go? Couldn’t he have just ordered it?’
‘That’s what I wondered. He could command whatever he wanted. But he insisted I go. I never quite worked it out – it was all very peculiar. I came to the conclusion he was actually lonely and wanted someone to show off to.’
George paused; swallowed. Everything about Argentina, his first views of Buenos Aires, between the plains and that great brown river like a sea, the stench of it, of blood from the slaughterhouses, of the water, of decay and poor human lives and desperation and money – all of that, fascinating as it had been, was overlain and tainted by the Lesters.
‘He took me by seaplane.’
Maggie gasped. ‘His own plane?’
‘Not his own – but they’d just started up a service down that way and he had the money to charter it when he wanted. He was rich beyond . . . you know, he said to me, “People think the British live well in India. But it’s nothing to what we’ve got here in South America. Here we live like kings – we are kings.” Anyway, we flew from New York, along the coast. It was an experience, of course. Like sliding across a map. Only time I’ve ever flown, in fact – there and back. He took me to his factory and then we drove out to the country place.
‘It was a palace in the making. Absolutely enormous – I’d never seen anything like it. Turrets and gables and what seemed like a quarter of a mile of house – let alone all the land around it, all red earth, polo horses. I was terrified really. He wanted me to tell him how to furnish it. He didn’t have a clue and I didn’t have much clue either, not in a house that size!’
A queasy feeling arose in him at the memory. He had seen it not long after walking into the vast house – on a side table. He had walked towards it, hardly believing, a feeling of the hairs standing up on the back of his neck. There, the horse, the warrior, muscled, armoured: Mars on Horseback. It felt like reacquainting himself with a friend. He leaned over it, hardly breathing. At the side of the base, the imprint of a tiny black bird.
‘Like him, do you?’ Lester had said as George stood astonished, transported back to Lord Buckleford’s grand, sad manor in Sussex where he had seen the two gods, exquisitely together. ‘It’s a valuable thing – but apparently nothing like what it would be with its pair. Now, if I could get my hands on her . . . I’m keeping an eye out; somewhere there’s a matching Venus – worth a fortune together.’
Trust Lester to talk only about the money – no word of the fineness of the thing. He did not start on this with Maggie.
‘I spent four days there. The furniture part wasn’t too bad as it turned out. Everything had to be on a grand scale, obviously. Lester ordered a lot of stuff from the catalogues. He hardly seemed to care what. They were just things to acquire. He had no sense of beauty, of proportion . . . Once I was actually there he seemed to lose interest and got his wife to choose most of it. She was pleasant enough, had quite a good eye. I wired London and tried to explain the problem, which boiled down to more and bigger. But Joe and Walter Black knew what to look for. I left it to them in the end and they wired back suggestions to her – Inés Lester.’
‘Other than that . . .’ It was hard to explain the Lesters, the at-odds atmosphere between them despite their devoted appearance. Or the effect they had on him over those days – a sense of being scraped out and emptied, yet at the same time poisoned and humiliated. ‘It was . . . repellent. I’ve never met anyone like Lester before or since. One of his things was tax – not paying it, that is. The British government were after him. He owned some huge pile in Hampshire so he hadn’t fully left the country. But he knew every trick in the book not to pay up.
‘Everything was about money. Just about everything he said was some form of showing off. He had stables full of polo horses – dozens of them – and a whole staff of grooms. He made me ride with him. There was no choice – he spoke and everyone jumped. I had never ridden a horse before and it was bloody terrifying. Lester kept barking orders at me. “For goodness’ sake, man. Can’t you even do this, or do that?” – depending on what it was I’d done wrong each time. It was like being at school again, only worse because this man was a . . . He was a bully. And a money-making machine, as if there was nothing else. Even the furniture, the house – all of it was about showing off. Every meal we ate, that was all he talked about: the business, his shares in the railway, how he was working it to get a complete monopoly over the trade . . . He was the most boring man I have ever met. Anyway, that bloody horse could tell a mile off I didn’t know what I was doing and it soon began to jitter about and threw me off.’
He heard a faint sound of amusement from Maggie. In retrospect it did seem funny. He could not describe to her the acute sense of shame and humiliation he had felt at the time. Lester made him feel it, wanted him to feel dominated and put down. George saw the contemptuous curve of his lips as he struggled to remount, his right buttock and thigh stabbing with pain.
‘The thing was, he had all this – money, house and all that. The wife, Inés, was beautiful. Half Spanish. She
said her father had been an English railway engineer, working over there. Met her mother in Rosario. She was nicer than him. She pandered to him. But she was bored, I think.’
‘No kids?’
‘Not then, no – no doubt they were on his list of future acquisitions. He wasn’t young but I don’t think they’d been married all that long . . . I really don’t know how she put up with him. That was a gilded cage if ever I saw one.’
He wanted to stop talking now; stop before his mind ran up against that afternoon, that soft knocking on the heavy wooden door . . . By the time Lester sent him back to New York, it was as if his inner self had undergone a scouring, a quiet revolution. He would never, ever live just for money. If that meant a smaller life, so be it. Paul Lester did not live so much as stand with his head tilted back, mouth stretched open like a grotesque fish, to catch any and every thing that might fall into it. This cold, predatory man had sickened George to his very core.
Lying here now he remembered that vow, taken on the seaplane back from Buenos Aires, staring down at the leaden ocean; the vow that he would never be anything like Paul Lester. He would live a life filled with beautiful things made by human hands, not by machines . . . He would never take things that were not his to have . . . And yet now – this brought him up with a jolt – here he was with Maggie . . .
Her voice came to him. ‘You’re not doing a very good job of persuading me I ought to see the world.’
He laughed, giving her thigh a gentle squeeze. ‘Oh – I’m sure it wouldn’t be like that. That was pretty unusual.’
‘You all right, George?’ Maggie said after a pause. ‘You managing?’
‘I’m getting married.’ Even as he said it he could not really believe it. Laughter came then, taking him by surprise. He felt his whole body shaking with it. Maggie shot up beside him.
‘Married? Who to? And if you’re getting married, what’re you doing in this bed with me?’
This was a question so pertinent that he had no reply to it.
‘So who? Is she from the village?’
‘She’s called Sylvia Newsome,’ he said. ‘She lives in Wallingford.’ He started laughing again. It seemed the only thing to do.
Maggie’s greenish eyes stared at him in utter perplexity. ‘Well . . . congratulations,’ she said uncertainly. ‘That’s lovely. What the hell’s so funny?’
He sobered himself, ashamed, and lay quietly. Maggie leaned closer, hair tickling his cheek. He could see that the flesh of her face sagged more than before.
‘What’s up? You don’t look all that happy about it.’
He was overcome by that cold feeling of helplessness. He was promised and that was the truth of it. You didn’t break a promise.
‘Oh, you know. Pre-nuptial nerves.’ He forced his lips into a smile. ‘Out of practice I suppose.’
He and Maggie said a sweet goodbye, but he knew and she knew that everything was different now. The exuberance of their lovemaking the year before had faded. Each of them was older, more weighted down by something – above all, today, by the knowledge that this must not happen. Not again. He thought of Maggie’s world, enlarging against her will. Of his own, of his engagement to Sylvia which he saw, with a terrible stab of realization, was not the expanding horizon of which he had dreamed, but would make his own world even smaller.
‘Goodbye, my dear,’ he said, as she slipped her boots back on at the door. The rain had stopped. The sky offered an optimistic brightness and his body felt momentarily lighter, as if on the verge of a dance.
Maggie smiled with affectionate sadness. ‘Bye, George. And thanks.’ She reached up and kissed his cheek before stepping outside. Turning, she said, ‘I hope things . . . You know.’
He watched her walk away in her black wellies, the umbrella held rolled in her left hand. She didn’t look back.
Thirteen
1.
As the next week passed, George’s life took on an increasing sense of fractured unreality.
There were the small things, like walking, one morning, into the bathroom in the not unreasonable hope of relieving himself, only to encounter Sharon’s brown-clad haunches rearing up before him as she leaned over to clean the bath.
‘Ah, er – oh!’ he exclaimed, already retreating as Sharon’s heavy features turned on him in a look of scowling disapproval.
‘Sorry!’ he called, scarcely wondering why he felt bound to apologize in his own house, let alone bathroom.
Later that morning, a fruit pie – not something that had featured much recently – appeared in the refrigerator, only to have disappeared again a few hours later when he had actually decided to eat a slice of it. He stood for a few seconds staring at the empty shelf. Was he starting to imagine pies?
The strangest and largest eventuality of all was that he was apparently on the point of getting married to Sylvia Newsome and no one else knew – except for Maggie. Well, and Maud, sort of. That particular day he spent fully occupied – other than with glimpses of domestic oddness – with business. He listened to the requirements of customers and to Clarence on a long and obscure matter of French polishing, and also spent some moments instructing Vera on a few aspects of book-keeping, all of which she grasped before he had finished speaking. All the while, repeating in another layer of his mind was the drumming of the wedding march: pom, pom te pom, POM, POM TE POM . . . It seemed, even though it was emanating from inside his very self, to be played in a mocking sort of key.
He kept repeating to himself, I’m getting married to Sylvia Newsome.
Now, after his sexual rescue by Maggie, all this seemed even more improbable. It was like a parallel-story world that did not coincide with his real life. Or at least it didn’t until that evening.
Since the storm, the weather had returned to warm sunshine but with a touch of freshness to it, a hint in the mellow angle of the light that they were reaching the waning point of summer. The rain-soaked rose heads turned up to the sun and their scent filled the garden.
The sunshine also meant that Sylvia was back, soon after six o’clock, on the buzzing pink Vespa. Vera, who was engrossed in totting up numbers had not, as she would usually have done, left for home.
‘I made a quick pie here at dinnertime,’ she confided to George. ‘I thawed out a bit of the pastry. I hope you don’t mind. I popped it home – helps me get ahead of myself a bit.’
She made this confession while on her way out through the front door, basket in hand, and in doing so was confronted by the arrival of the pink motor scooter. George had been full of misgiving that something like this would happen. The game was very definitely up.
‘Hello, Georgie!’ Sylvia cried, beaming at him from under her white helmet as she swept past to the spot by the garden gate where she now always left the Vespa. She was wearing a dress of pink and orange flowers, with short, puffy sleeves. The dress was rucked up by the necessity of straddling the bike, revealing plump, white knees.
Vera halted; stared. She swivelled round to look at George. George, determinedly, did not look back. He watched Sylvia with what he hoped was an expression of calm benignity.
Sylvia’s feet could be heard crunching on the gravel. She approached, twitching at her skirt hem to return it to a more dignified position.
‘Vera,’ George said, with a now-or-never plunge within, as if diving into rapids, ‘may I introduce to you Sylvia – my fiancée?’
‘Hel-lo,’ Sylvia gushed, seizing Vera’s hand. George suppressed a smile. He could see that this, in its way, was Sylvia at her best: warm, forthcoming, irresistible. Her brown eyes were signalling happiness and enthusiasm, her scarlet lipstick lips turned up in an ecstatic smile.
Vera managed to insert an uncertain, ‘Er, hello,’ into the exchange before Sylvia was off again.
‘I’m so excited,’ she prattled. ‘So nice to meet you. I’ve heard such a lot about you – you’re the person who cleans the shop, aren’t you?’
‘Well, rather more than that,’ George att
empted.
‘We’ll all have time to get to know each other better when I move in,’ Sylvia said, beaming. ‘Dear George . . .’ She turned to him for a second before returning to Vera. ‘Look at my lovely engagement ring! I don’t want to be a show-off but he has such good taste – it’s so pretty, isn’t it?’ She extended her hand. Vera stared at it, expressionlessly.
‘I’m so lucky to have met George . . .’ Sylvia put one arm round the back of George’s waist, the other hand resting on his upper arm. ‘He’s so marvellous. But then of course you know as much already.’
George began to wonder if Vera was all right. He had never seen her so silent or so thunderstruck. She was gazing at Sylvia with a sharp, musing expression. What was up with her? Unease stirred in him.
At last Vera spoke. ‘Ah. Well.’ She made her face smile. ‘This is a surprise. What did you say your name was?’
‘Oh sorry,’ Sylvia said, swooping forward again to hold out her hand. ‘Sylvia. Sylvia Newsome.’
‘Vera Day.’ She shook hands properly this time, seeming to relax now, though she still seemed dazed. George felt ashamed. He should have confided in her.
‘Well,’ Vera said, looking from one to the other of them. ‘I’d better be off home now. Congratulations to both of you. I hope you’ll be very happy.’
2.
Vera was very quiet the next morning. Ominously quiet. No Beatles songs: the radio was not switched on. Even her hair looked stiffer and more bouffant than usual, as if embalmed in hairspray. By the morning tea break George felt bound to ask if anything was wrong.
‘No,’ Vera said, passing out of the kitchen with raised eyebrows. ‘Of course not. Why should there be?’
George sighed. Was she in a huff? Why was it so hard to tell with women? But he did know enough to surmise that when a woman would not look you in the eye, trouble was probably on its way. He increasingly had the sense that his home was becoming a terrain more mysterious to him than familiar.
