The Carer

by Deborah Moggach

  They sat there, wreathed in cigarette smoke, exhausted by the disintegration of their past. They knew life was messy – who didn’t, at their age? – but nothing had prepared them for this.

  PART TWO

  James

  When he was a child James liked putting things into boxes. There were owls in the garden of the big house in Hampstead where he grew up, and when he found their pellets he dissected them with a scientist’s precision, laid the mouse skulls and beetles’ wings in cotton wool, put them in matchboxes and hid them in his bedroom drawer. They joined his other treasures – coins, football cards, scraps of this and that – how thrilling to turn the key and lock them up.

  So from an early age he’d learned to compartmentalise.

  This was no justification for what happened later. Many years later, when James was a grown man and happened to be attending a conference in Cardiff. He was sitting in the canteen with Hans Tamchina, a colleague from Stuttgart University, who waved his hands around to demonstrate some point and knocked his coffee into James’s lap. Luckily it was institutional coffee and therefore tepid, but it was still a shock.

  A waitress came to the rescue, carrying a sponge.

  ‘Blimey, it looks like you’ve—’

  ‘Yes, yes, I know.’

  She started giggling, which James thought heartless, and passed him the sponge. ‘You’d better do this yourself.’

  During the afternoon session the damp patch dried and at teatime there she was again, the waitress, roaring with laughter at something someone said as she stood behind the urn. After the droning lecture it was a tonic to see her. She fairly crackled with energy. As James joined the shuffling queue she glanced at his crotch and gave him the thumbs up.

  He didn’t attend the final session. He had a paper to prepare for the following day, so he went outside and sat at a table in the sunshine. It was the university holidays and there were no students around, just a couple of waitresses smoking and talking. One of them was her.

  She stubbed out her cigarette and walked over. ‘So what do you lot do?’

  ‘We’re particle physicists.’

  There was a silence.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ James said. ‘Nobody can ever think of anything to say.’

  ‘Except another particle physicist.’

  ‘That’s why we need to stick together.’

  ‘You’re better behaved than my students, anyway.’

  ‘Clumsier, though.’

  Suddenly a gust of wind blew his papers off the table. He jumped up and she helped him collect them.

  ‘It’s the wind that’s clumsy,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, but the wind can’t help it.’

  ‘Nor could that bloke.’

  She put the papers on the table and weighed them down with the ashtray. He noticed her reddened hands and wedding ring.

  ‘Oh, well,’ she said, looking at his scribbles. ‘Better let you get on with designing the atom bomb or whatever.’

  ‘I’m afraid somebody else got there first.’

  She laughed at this feeble response, the wind blowing the hair across her face. No doubt she was the good-natured sort who would laugh at anything; he felt a small jolt of disappointment.

  James watched her as she walked off. Wide hips, heavyish legs. Shapely and womanly, in that era of stick-thin girls. There was something bracing about her; she made the air crackle. No doubt it was simply cheerfulness, something that was largely missing from his life at that time.

  And he thought no more about it, that August day those many years ago. For he was married, with two small children.

  But then she was on the train.

  One of his colleagues, a Japanese chap called Itsuki, was helping her lift her suitcase onto the rack.

  For a moment, James didn’t recognise her. It was startling to see her in normal clothes, like a teacher out of school. James was not a visual person, something his wife complained about on the rare occasions she bought a new outfit. But James remembered every detail that day. She wore a sky-blue dress with a wide, buckled belt, and big buttons down the front; she told him later she’d made it herself. On top, a cardigan with little bobbles knitted into it. Her hair was pulled up into a surprisingly formal bun.

  She looked genuinely pleased to see him and they sat down opposite each other, in one of those compartments that trains had, in those days. Itsuki must have been sitting in it too, and a couple of other passengers, but he didn’t remember them.

  ‘My husband’s redecorating the lounge,’ she said, ‘so I’m leaving him to it. He’s ever so finicky, you see, and gets the hump when I just slap it on.’ She said she was going up to London to stay with a girlfriend for a couple of days. ‘He’s painting the flat and we’re going to paint the town.’

  ‘Gloss or emulsion?’

  ‘Gloss, of course.’ She gazed out of the window at the countryside rattling past. ‘I mean, look at this big shiny day!’ She turned back to him, her eyes brimming with merriment. ‘Three guesses who’s going to have the most fun.’

  He felt a stab of envy. What a lucky young woman, to feel life vibrating through her like an electrical charge! He thought of a pit pony released into a meadow, tossing its head. Just for a moment he thought of her bun loosening and her hair tumbling down. It was just an idle thought, passing through his mind along with his doubts about the paper he had presented – the reaction had been muted – and whether his car would start. He’d left it at Oxford station and it had been making a rattling noise when he changed gears. As he’d remarked when phoning his wife: ‘Cars only make two noises, cheap noises and expensive ones.’

  But then he and Stella were talking – he knew her name now. She said her previous job had been at the Imperial Hotel, where she’d learned the silver service. She preferred her present position because she liked being around young people. If she envied the students their education she didn’t show it; when it came to class, he would discover, she was without rancour. In fact, it wasn’t in her nature to be bitter about anything. He soon found out that she was that rarest of creatures: a happy woman. Something that couldn’t be said, with any stretch of the imagination, about his wife.

  Fun. That’s what they were going to have. Suddenly he envied Stella and her friend, who apparently lived in East Cheam. Like Tony Hancock, he said. Stella loved Tony Hancock so they talked about the blood donor episode, her favourite and indeed his. This led onto the Coronation, how it was the first thing they’d ever watched on TV, and this led onto rabbit-keeping, for some reason, and from there to funny pub names.

  ‘When I was six,’ James said, ‘the girl next door built a pub in her bedroom, out of a blanket and chairs, and called it The Rosy Arms.’ He realised, with surprise, that he’d never told anyone this.

  ‘That is so sweet,’ she said. ‘What did she serve?’

  ‘Liquorice water. Like William Brown.’

  She hadn’t read the William books so he told her about them. This led on to a disagreement about blancmange – him for, her against. Basically, they nattered. Babbled, in fact, which wasn’t his sort of thing at all. He wasn’t a babbler. He was a talker. But then what did he know? For though he loved Tony Hancock he also loved Montaigne, who understood the fluidity of human nature. I give my soul now one face, now another, according to which direction I turn it. If I speak of myself in different ways, that is because I look at myself in different ways. All contradictions may be found in me.

  This James, Stella’s James, was a babbler. And now he was eating a Kunzle Cake, which Stella had produced from her basket. He licked the cream off his fingers as she uncorked a Thermos of tea. Stella had a sweet tooth; something she would pass on to her daughter. Their daughter. Who was unimaginable then, and who would die before he did.

  As indeed would Stella. But in 1963 she was a radiant young woman, flushed with high spirits, looking forward to high jinks in London. Buxom, funny, avid for life, not beautiful but utterly gorgeous, with her ruddy cheeks and g
enerous mouth, her earrings jangling as she swung round to point out a field of lapwings, birds which are seldom seen any more.

  ‘Does anyone remember Kunzle Cakes?’ James asked Phoebe many years later, sitting there in his tracksuit bottoms. For they, too, had long since gone. Cakes, birds, Stella.

  Only he had remained, with memories of that day. A day that changed everything. For he missed his connection at Reading – the 6.15 to Oxford, where his car waited to take him to Summertown, where his wife and children lived – and stayed with Stella on the train, all the way to London.

  They didn’t sleep together for several weeks. That hardly made him less culpable but he tried to resist, truly he did. He was a married man. Stella was a married woman. Sometimes James felt that their mutual guilt drew them as closely together as their tidal wave of lust.

  For that’s what it was, in those early weeks. Sitting in the library, the words blurred on the page and became Stella’s fingers unbuttoning her blouse and releasing those stupendous breasts. He was stupid with desire. His legs weakened when he stood up to give a lecture. The very sight of a pay-phone made his heart beat faster.

  Finally he surrendered and booked them into the Walnut Tree Hotel in Burford. It was a genteel establishment smelling of floor wax and cabbage, as hotels did then. They signed in as Mr and Mrs Telford, for reasons best known to themselves.

  After all the expectation, however, it was something of a let-down. Stella, normally a happy-go-lucky creature, was subdued during dinner and scarcely responded to James’s somewhat laboured speculations about their fellow diners. He was sweating with fear – Burford was near Oxford, would someone recognise him? – also with the beginnings of flu.

  His condition rapidly worsened and by the time they went to bed he had a raging temperature. Not surprisingly, neither of them had brought a thermometer. Stella helped him into the bath. It was the first time she had seen him naked, and in rather different circumstances than she had imagined – a hunched invalid, petulant and wheezing, his shrunken penis floating in the water, which remained stubbornly lukewarm.

  After the bath they did make an attempt at sexual congress but by now his skin was burning and any movement made him nauseous. Though an atheist, he was consumed by a sense of divine retribution. Round and round his fevered brain rolled the words, The gods make fools of us all. Stella did her best in her unexpected role of nurse but he flinched at her touch and once actually snapped at her – ‘For Christ’s sake, woman!’ – when she tried to turn him over.

  To be frank, he longed to be safely tucked up in his own bed. Illness makes us long for home, and Stella didn’t help by telling him about her husband’s various ailments, the last thing James wanted to hear. ‘He’s always had a weak chest, the poor love, he was coughing up his lungs for weeks.’ Stella was a glorious woman, but not blessed with tact.

  Nor did it help that during that long night, while they lay tossing and turning, James pushing off the blankets and Stella yanking them back, his paroxysms of coughing shaking the bed – nor did it help that through the wall came the thumps and groans of a prolonged copulation that didn’t stop until dawn.

  It wasn’t the best start, if ‘best’ is an appropriate word to describe an adulterous affair. But, surprisingly enough, this dose of reality plunged them into deeper intimacy and the trysts continued in Burford and various other Cotswolds locations both indoors and outdoors – indeed, sometimes in the very fields in Chipping Norbury with which their daughter would become familiar whilst caring for James in his dotage.

  During this time his children simply presumed he was away, because that’s what fathers did, and his wife believed he was at one of his conferences – oh, those conferences! Anna was a highly intelligent woman but appeared to suspect nothing. Once the children were born she had given up her career but she had a big, busy life in North Oxford, people in and out of the house all day – neighbours, fellow parents. She cooked the most wonderful dinner parties, organised school events, sat on various boards, worked part time as a JP and created a stunning garden that was opened twice a year in aid of Ugandan lepers. She had a Rolls-Royce of a brain – forensic, dispassionate, scrupulously fair. All in all, she was an admirable woman.

  Stella wasn’t particularly admirable. Stella was fun. James and his wife had proper conversations about proper things but he and Stella just larked about. Pushing each other off the pavement, snaffling each other’s crisps. Just silliness.

  Her body; her smell. The laughter at the heart of their lovemaking; the ferocity of their rapture in a hayfield, or in a rented room.

  The taste of her.

  The jokes evaporated, as jokes do, but he would always remember that.

  More months passed. The trees shed their leaves; Christmas came and went. The thing was, he loved them both. Stella wasn’t, grubbily, a bit on the side. She filled his heart, which was already full with Anna. They both dwelled there, strangers to each other. Sometimes he felt like a pregnant woman who, unbeknownst to the world, was carrying twins. He never knew that he would be capable of such duplicity, such a slippery accommodation to this dual life in which he found himself enmeshed. And it wasn’t as if he was some kind of Lothario. He was a virgin when he met Anna and she and Stella were the only two women with whom he had ever slept.

  It was no excuse – no excuse at all – that his was largely a lust-free marriage. He could admit this now. Anna was a highly strung woman who feared losing control. She never flung off her clothes, but folded them before she got into bed. He’d never once seen her on the lavatory. Sometimes he wished she would get roaring drunk and tear off his trousers. It felt like a kind of betrayal, even to admit this to himself. She was so beautiful that the sight of her stopped his heart – olive skin, Aztec cheekbones, something exotic and watchful about her – but she was at her most unreachable when they were making love, which happened only too rarely. What was she thinking, his tense, lovely, complicated wife?

  Whereas, as Stella said: ‘What you see is what you get.’

  How thrilling was this, in its simplicity!

  So time passed. James’s big, generous, open face was a double-bluff. Like all charmers he made people feel they were the only person in the room. But he had another room beyond that one and maybe more, who knew? He once gave his son a tiny box of drawers with a padlock, because he’d loved squirrelling things away when he was a boy. He called his wife The Sphinx but he was the one with the secrets.

  A year after he met Stella, he bought Hafod, the holiday cottage in Wales. Robert was eight and Phoebe was six; he bought it so they could run free in the woods and swim in the river and have an old-fashioned childhood.

  Curiously enough he didn’t mention that ten miles away, near Crickhowell, was a caravan site belonging to a friend of Stella’s uncle. A man who apparently turned a blind eye to the comings and goings of its occupants, as long as they paid the rent.

  The irony being that for his wife, Hafod was the place she was happiest, because she had him to herself. In fact, it was at Hafod that she shared him. For just ten miles down the hill, in a shabby two-tone caravan with a leaky roof, James lived his other life.

  Ken

  Ken was a silent man. Of course he talked, when such a thing was necessary, but he was a doer and a fixer. It was his body that spoke. Sturdy, capable Ken, banging in nails and digging up potatoes, holding his wife in his arms at night, keeping the bogeyman at bay. He whistled when he worked. Men did, in those days. In those days, when the two of them were newly married, their world was innocent. He and Stella had known each other since childhood and that glow was still within them, that blithe carelessness that exulted when it rained, when it snowed, when the two of them kicked up the leaves, and in those early months they were carried along in its slipstream. How tender they were with each other, the newest of lovers. And now, wedded.

  Ken couldn’t believe his luck. Stella was a catch, bees around the honeypot, life and soul of the party. She energised him, she was f
un. With her ruddy cheeks, her soft brown hair and wondrous, heavy breasts, she brought him alive. That she was sexually experienced – far more than he was – caused him no pain in those early years. He simply exulted in her. Wordlessly.

  He loved her and she loved him. Nothing changed that, through all the troubles that lay ahead. It was a testament to his generosity and to her instinctive, animal tact. Things would change between them, but in those early years they were simply a young couple starting out in life, him up a ladder renovating their home and Stella sallying forth in her uniform and returning, flushed and exhausted, to collapse on the settee and be served a cup of tea by her devoted spouse. They lived in Cardiff, where he worked as a postman, and when dawn broke it was she who brewed up for him before crawling back into bed. ‘I look out for you,’ he said, ‘and you look out for me.’

  And if she wanted talk there was always her family, the whole nattering crowd of Coxes, living nearby. In those days nobody locked their doors and they were in and out of each other’s houses in the street where they lived, long since demolished. They outnumbered Stella’s sweet, diffident husband and if he found them raucous and overpowering he kept quiet about that, too. For he had a poor opinion of himself and still marvelled at possessing such a magnificent creature as Stella, with her throaty laugh and dizzying appetite for life.

  Besides, he could always escape to his allotment. His shed was his home from home, papered with offcuts and only a feral cat for company. In it, he hammered a crib for their unborn child.

  But three years passed and the child didn’t arrive.

  Stella

  Out of sight, out of mind. What you don’t know can’t hurt you. Stella lived, voraciously, in the present tense. She was a woman of impulse, with strong animal instincts, and to hell with the consequences. This had led her into tricky situations in the past but she’d always been able to block off any unpleasantness, and to blind herself to repercussions. This, the adulterer’s most powerful muscle, was one of the few things she had in common with James. This, and an abundance of charm.