The house was crowded, badly maintained by the landlord, uncomfortable – and magic. After the doctors released me from hospital, with the advice to keep out of the way of mad drivers, Hal collected me in the white van and we stopped there briefly before he took me out to dinner. ‘I want you to meet Mazarine, you will like her.’
How right he was. He had spotted that we were of a kind.
Hal kept a permanently packed rucksack in his room: water-bottle, day sack, all-seasons sleeping-bag, lightweight walking trousers and water-purifying tablets. He explained that it was ready to grab at a moment’s notice, when he could not bear being confined any longer. It was, he explained, necessary to him to have that readied rucksack.
He spoke rapidly, carelessly, with the confidence I craved for myself. Had he suckled it from his mother? ‘There, my golden-haired baby,’ she would have said, kissing him frantically, ‘no awkwardness for you. No doubts, no blunderings. Not if I can protect you.’ Or had Hal worked at it, chiselling away at the lumpen miseries of growing up?
Mazarine listened in to the rucksack explanation. Dressed in a black skirt and slenderly cut jumper, she was a great deal more knowing and sophisticated than any of the girls I had met in college. In heavily accented English, she said, ‘I should point out that he employs others to wash his socks… Don’t let him keep you up too late, you must be still weak.’
Hal bore me off to a Moroccan restaurant, which had recently opened on the outskirts of the city and, a novelty, was extremely popular. ‘It’s a very small way of saying sorry,’ he said, as he ushered me inside. It was crowded with students cherishing their drinks and rolling their own fags but, to my dazzled eyes, Hal stood out like a beacon.
He sat down opposite me, placed his hands on the Formica table top and studied me. ‘I could have done a lot worse. I like the blouse. Young ravishing beauty versus old clothes. Guess who comes off best in the contest. Even with bruises.’ He touched the one on my cheek.
I felt colour sneak into my face and fiddled with the lace on my cuff. Money was so short that I dressed more or less entirely in second-hand-shop pickings, and I was wearing a muslin blouse trimmed with lace. It was worn and soft, and held the faint suggestion of other lives. ‘If I had been an old lady, would I not have got dinner?’
‘Probably not. A nice bunch of carnations instead.’
‘I don’t like carnations.’
‘Pity. They have an interesting history. The name derives from the Arabic qaranful, a clove, by way of the Greek karpyhillon, the Latin caryophyllus, the Italian garofolo and the French giroflée but they are very English. You should like them.’
This was the first of many teases, but I was not going to let the point slide. I was still so unsure, so raw, so shakily unconfident, but I summoned my wits. ‘I wish to defend elderly ladies. You are discriminating on the grounds of age, which is no basis.’
The transformation from tease to steely seriousness was instant. ‘On the contrary. On the basis that anything, money, good luck, space on this planet, is finite you could argue that the old lady has had her share of fateful or important encounters and must not be greedy. On the other hand, by virtue of your age, you have not.’
Shocked I stared at him, only to be transfixed by the blue eyes. They reminded me of gentians in an alpine meadow, the rich blue of an Italian nobleman’s surcoat in a painting, the pure glassy resonance of a sapphire. ‘You don’t really believe that?’
‘What do you think?’
I swallowed. ‘I demand to be greedy’
‘Luckily it’s a long time, Rose, before you will be old. And me. But we must cultivate the right attitude to keep age at bay. Travel. Keep on the move.’
‘Poor old lady,’ I said, my heart as light and dancing as a feather. ‘Poor dinnerless old lady’
‘As it happens, she is done out of her dinner because you are here.’ Once again, that confident gentle hand traced the outline of my bruise. ‘Thank goodness.’
The helpless, unstoppable feelings that had been gathering inside me as I lay in hospital fused, ignited and burst into flame. Tentatively, I put up my hand. Our fingers met and the beat of my heart was as loud as a drum.
Hal dropped his and picked up the menu. ‘Chicken tagine?’ He made it sound impossibly exotic.
Half-way through the meal, he put down his knife and fork. ‘I’m falling in love with you, Rose. Isn’t that funny?’
I shivered.
Hal was often away on a dig and, with her firm intellectual grasp on life, Mazarine approved. ‘Pain is essential,’ she argued, ‘or how do we recognize the opposite?’
It was, I pointed out, a position argued from innocence, for at that point no pain had touched the clever and lovely Mazarine. Surely the validity of the argument rested in the experience of it. ‘Poof,’ she said.
Apart from a troubling stiffness in one hip, I recovered quickly from the accident. The addition of love and adrenaline to the blood coursing through the veins proved a great healer. In one respect, the stiff hip was a godsend, for I had plenty of time to work during the next two terms. ‘This is a student knocking at the door of a first,’ wrote my happy tutor at the end of the summer term. ‘Let us see if she can knock it down.’
Hal was so considerate about my injuries. He fussed over them, called taxis, kept me warm, and made me feel that no other woman existed on this earth. ‘I’ll will you better,’ he said. ‘Then we can concentrate on us.’
That was in character. He never asked questions – he was not interested in my past. Nor was he interested in telling me his. It doesn’t matter who or what we have been, he said, it’s the now that matters.
How true that was. The sun had never been so bright, the sky so blue. My body was weightless, throbbing, never satiated. I was filled with insane joy and thankfulness, touched with awe that this had happened to me.
He was the stranger who came from other lands; he was the other for whom I had been searching.
On the last day of the summer term, we walked by the river in the botanical gardens; its watery rush sounded above the traffic. The sky had thrown off a half-veil of cloud and the smell of earth after rain pricked sweetly at my nostrils. I pinched a stalk of lavender in the flowerbed between my fingers.
Hal grinned. ‘Lavandus,’ he said wickedly, ‘from the Latin, to be washed. The Romans washed in it.’
I seized his hand and plunged it into the purple-blue blooms, and the leaves released their fragrance. I pressed his fingers to my face and inhaled. ‘I am bathed in you.’
Abruptly, he pulled me to him and kissed me. ‘Lovely Rose,’ he murmured. ‘What would I do without you?’
The next day when I had packed and was ready to leave, I phoned the house. ‘Darling,’ Mazarine sounded concerned, ‘he’s left this morning, with the rucksack.’
I felt a chill go through me. ‘Is there any message?’
‘No. I thought you would know’
‘See?’ said Ianthe, when I arrived back at Pankhurst Parade, shaking and tearstained. ‘I told you that you would come to no good.’
Hal was gone for three weeks, during which I was driven to the edge, and went over and over what had gone wrong. Why? I questioned everything: my mind, my body, my sexual inexperience, which Hal had thought so touching. I tried to identify where I had failed him, where I had failed, where I had erred and why he would leave me without a word.
Three weeks later, I opened the front door and there was Hal. He looked tanned and fit, but in need of a shower and with every finger wrapped in Elastoplast. ‘Get your boots on, we’re off to Cornwall.’
Between speechlessness and laughter, I demanded, ‘Where’ve you been? I had no -’
He was genuinely surprised. ‘Didn’t I tell you? I was on a dig up north. Roman.’
I felt myself turning white with rage. ‘No, you did not. Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘I’m here now so it’s all right, isn’t it?’
‘Go away’
H
e inserted a foot into the door. ‘I’ve bought you a rucksack. A good one.’
Despite his winningly phrased plea that, as an ignorant American, he wanted to see as much as possible of this island and only Rose could show him, Ianthe disapproved of his carrying me off. Girls did not go jaunting around the countryside as if they were already married. But I was past caring, and I left her standing on the doorstep with a face like thunder.
When I returned, I had a pink glow in my cheeks, my feet had toughened, my hip had healed and I had grown used to the sound of the sea. I told Ianthe of Penzance, Marazion, Helston, St Mawes… of how we walked the coastal path, observing how the rockscape changed from granite to slate, and how, in the evenings, we sat in pubs, drank beer and cider and ate fish and chips. Of course I did not tell her of the nights, white and violet nights, when I unwrapped the Elastoplast from his battered fingers and, one by one, kissed the wounds made by the hammer and chisel. Or of how he turned me this way and that until I thought I would die, not of pleasure but of love.
It was not a light thing. I was not reinventing myself as the good-time liberated girl. I wanted to step into something serious. I did not want those extraordinary feelings to come and go, like birds wheeling and taking flight over a cornfield. I wanted Hal to imprint himself on me, and I on him. I wanted our affair to have weight and depth, and I wanted to move knowingly from a state of innocence into the unfamiliar abandon that surged through every nerve end, powered every heartbeat.
At Fowey, we had turned on to the Saint’s Way, which went up to Padstow, a cross-country route of thirty miles or so. ‘The route of the Bronze Age traders and missionaries from Wales and Ireland.’
We looked at the churches with their grey headstones, the epitaphs to drownings, plagues and early death, and I thought, We should not be deceived: the Celt still rules here and this is a country of fire and passion.
At Port Isaac, the route took us north and the terrain became more demanding. Every so often, Hal called a halt to rub my back where the straps bit into it, but we made good progress. At last, we rounded the corner and stopped.
The sea roared below us, and seagulls coasted on thermals. Before us rose monumental black cliffs and, high up on them, the remnants of salt-lashed walls. These were the ruins of Tintagel.
I slipped off my rucksack and sank down. The turf was hard and springy, my lips and skin were salty and I was tired. Hal hunkered down beside me. ‘This is the first of many journeys, I hope.’
‘So do I,’ I said.
Hal folded his arms around his bent knees and talked about climbing mountains, traversing deserts and finding the valley where hard apricots were harvested and soaked in spring water.
The sea ran up the beach, indifferent and careless. Suddenly I was cold. I thought of Ianthe’s scones on a blue and white plate and of a fire burning in a grate and how far they would be from the valley where the hard apricots grew
Later, huddled behind a rock on the beach, we ate our sandwiches and told stories about the castle.
Treading carefully over the slate and past the rock pools, the pregnant Queen Ygrayne would have wrapped her fur-lined cloak around her swollen body and entered Tintagel, the door clanging shut behind her. As she went upstairs and prepared to give birth to a son called Arthur, she would have given thanks for refuge from the violence that had killed her husband.
And here too, at another time, high up where the seagulls flew past the arched windows, King Mark installed his wife, Iseult, of the hand’s-span waist, to reign over the cliff and the sea. Here, too, a young knight halted to pay homage to the king. His name was Tristan.
‘These are not happy stories,’ I pointed out to Hal. ‘A mother left alone. A husband abandoned. Lovers who die.’
Hal’s arms tightened around me. Through his jacket, I could hear his heart beating.
Chapter Thirteen
When I was pregnant with Sam, I swallowed iron pills, poured milk down my throat and avoided wine, coffee and curry. I slept in the afternoons, visited the dentist for regular check-ups and every week I consulted the manual as to what had happened to the bundle of cells, then the miniature footballer, that I carried. I told it that I was doing my very best to give it a sporting chance, that, however tedious, I realized my relinquishing of favourite foods and other little adaptations of behaviour were vital to its future. And how time spun itself out. How each week dragged its feet into the next.
Time dragged now. March limped away. April and May were slow, oh, so slow. June came, and my hard gestation of grief showed no sign of ending.
The oldest memories are so much sharper and clearer than the near past and, thinking over this hypothesis, I could see that this was – partly – what Nathan had battled against when meeting Minty had forced him to take stock. He chose to believe that those sharp old memories meant more than the blurred, tumbled, frantic moments of our family life. He feared that my sweet, vivid awakening into sexual passion and love with Hal had greater staying power than my years with him.
Robert Dodd, the solicitor, and I stitched up the final strands of my severance package and I signed a document agreeing that I would not take up a similar job within six months. The trade-off was a reasonable, but not generous, sum of money.
‘Must be nice to have six months.’ Robert allowed himself to show a glimmer of frank envy.
‘I might be back,’ I told him, ‘for the divorce. But I hope not. I hope Nathan and I can work through this.’
He smiled with professional detachment that suggested experience had taught him otherwise then showed me out.
Sam made a point of coming up at weekends, and for the May bank holiday he brought Alice with him. I slapped on lashings of red lipstick, too much, and made them a supper of chicken breasts seethed with garlic and fennel, and pushed a piece around my own plate.
Apart from pointing out that I should try to eat more and drink less, Sam was quiet, but Alice made up for it. Smart as paint in a grey suit and gold jewellery, she questioned me closely as to what had happened at work. ‘I hope you made them squeal,’ she said at last, fiddling with her bracelet. She had painted her nails with a shiny, clear gloss, which made her hands look efficient. Then she asked which I minded more: losing my job, or my salary, and it struck me that, on this subject, Alice was vulnerable. It was also a good question. ‘It must be difficult,’ she said, ‘not to have a financial base. If you have no money you have no power, and it is others who drive the negotiations.’
‘Experience counts for something,’ I pointed out.
She smiled disbelievingly. ‘Not enough.’ I liked Alice better for her honesty, but she was straying close to the bone. I tried to change the subject and asked her if she had seen Spielberg’s latest film.
‘Alice couldn’t possibly spare the time.’ When he wished, Sam had his own brand of irony. ‘Her power base demands all her attention.’
Displaying her efficient nails, Alice raised her wineglass to her lips. ‘Jealous, Sam?’
Yet when we said goodbye Alice surprised me by giving me a kiss: brief and businesslike, but a kiss all the same. ‘I shall think of you, Rose,’ she said. ‘I really will. I’m sorry about… Nathan.’ She meant it, and I found myself kissing her back.
Unlike Alice, I had plenty of spare time at my disposal and, a past-master at tweaking my conscience, Mr Sears made use of it.
Apart from taking him Sunday lunch, my charity consisted of tossing coins into hats held out in the streets and responding irritably to telephone requests for donations, but the image of Mr Sears sitting each day in his fuggy, dingy room was not easily dismissed. Cross and snippy as he could be, his right to more pricked away at me like a thorn. In the end, I told him I was taking him out. ‘Don’t mind if I do,’ he said, which, considering he had not left the house for three years, was pretty cool. Somehow, I bullied the reluctant social services into providing a wheelchair and a carer for a few extra hours. ‘Call this a bus?’ he said, when the single-decker drew up. She
and I manhandled him on to the number eighty-eight, where he was completely happy. The three of us did a double run, which took most of the day, and he sat by the window, treating us to a running commentary on a cityscape in which familiar landmarks, mostly pubs, had been transmogrified into bars and grills. ‘What’s wrong with a pub? If you wanted a cup of coffee you nipped up to the Kardomah.’
It was not beyond the bounds of possibility that Mr Sears concluded, given the treacherous pace of change, he was better off in his room.
The second that finals were over, Poppy materialized at Lakey Street and unloaded her possessions all over the house. In a lightning procedure, she repacked her suitcase, kissed me goodbye and demanded money for a taxi to the airport. ‘I forbid you to worry,’ she said. ‘Worrying is for wimps.’
That weekend I bought a copy of the papers and the Digest. Until then, I had not touched it, but I wanted to see the worst for myself. I carried it into the park and walked up and down, gathering sufficient resolve.
Whatever else she might be, Minty was professional. The pages were different but fine: more celebrities, more photographs, and more books covering a younger age group. Yet I had not been entirely obliterated, for Minty had built on what had been there, but my ideas no longer held the centre stage. It was a kind of compromise, a nod to the relationship we had once shared.
Astonishingly, as I read on, I felt not jealousy but a growing detachment from that which had previously absorbed me. A small Martian in a shiny helmet and knee-pads streaked along the path, followed by a puffing adult. I followed their progress, feeling that on this subject I could breathe more easily, and I seemed to have been granted a respite from professional rivalry. It was not that I did not care, but I did not care so very much any more.
I turned to the other sections. ‘Where Will Our Staff Be Heading This Summer?’ ran one feature under a shrunken map of the world. The city editor was going to Martha’s Vineyard, the features editor to Tuscany (naturally) and the books editor was planning two weeks on a remote Greek island. The article included a photo of Minty dressed in a scoop-necked top and skimpy skirt. ‘Kea is really hot and secluded,’ she was reported as saying. ‘Nothing but sea and sand.’
Revenge of the Middle-Aged Woman Page 13
