The Carer

by Deborah Moggach

  For she was loved by the world in general, and most of all by Ken, her kind, sweet husband, with his wide moon face and jug ears – Ken, to whom she ruthlessly blinded herself when she was in the arms of her lover in their draughty, tinny caravan, the rain drumming on the roof, their home from home, their little world, with James reciting her poetry.

  And now good morrow to our waking souls, he said,

  Which watch not one another out of fear;

  For love, all love of other sights controls,

  And makes one little room an every where.

  Sometimes she couldn’t believe that James loved her. He was so distinguished, so awesomely clever. His marriage must be deeply unhappy, she thought. But he seldom spoke of it, and mention of his children plunged him into silence. She was learning how to navigate around him. When it came to men, she wasn’t stupid.

  And how they larked around! She remembered lying there laughing, her face buried in the pillow, while he ran his finger down her spine. ‘You’ve got one of the six most beautiful backs in Britain.’

  ‘You done a survey then?’

  He nodded. ‘I have a team in every county.’

  ‘Catch women in butterfly nets, do they? Line them up in an aircraft hangar with a cup of tea and a bun?’

  He said that when he was a child he liked collecting things. Butterflies. Owl pellets, filled with bones and beetles’ wings. She shuddered at beetles but loved the Beatles and sang him ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’, their latest hit; she knew all the words. He was such a square.

  Of course she felt guilty but it was a chronic condition, like her mother’s emphysema. And now they had the caravan it was only too easy, horribly easy, to seal themselves off from the world and exist in their own bubble, where they could live their fantasy life, free from responsibility. There was something potent about a caravan, furnished with dolls’-house pots and pans, where they could play at being a couple. And its thrilling air of transience – here today, gone tomorrow, leaving nothing but tyre tracks on the grass. Not that they ever considered running away together, never during those four long years.

  The owner turned a blind eye. The two of them felt safe there; they never bumped into anyone they knew. In the holidays the place was so full that they passed unnoticed. Out of season the caravan park was largely deserted and its few permanent residents singularly lacking in curiosity, being shadowy types who all too visibly had problems of their own. She and James liked making up stories about them. ‘Gobby Dobson’, who had buried his wife under the patio; ‘Bryn Gwyllin-Ap-Gwyllin’, who’d been chucked out of the family home for having an affair with a sheep. That sort of nonsense.

  It wasn’t edifying, any of it. They shouldn’t be laughing. They shouldn’t be loving each other – heck, he even loved her thick ankles that she’d always hated, even her bunions, the Ugly Sisters of her job. And how carefully they worked on their alibis, the two of them. They were becoming such experts. To the world, James was a vague and amiably bumbling intellectual. In fact, he was a scheming tactician. She herself invented a hotel in Abergavenny where they were frequently short-staffed and called her in as a stop-gap. It was forty miles away – far enough for her to have to spend the night there. This imaginary hotel assumed a weirdly vivid presence in their lives, with its extensive grounds and bossy manager. Sometimes, to amuse themselves, the two of them made up stories about its cast of characters, including a lovelorn bellboy called Dafydd. Sometimes, in fact, it felt as real as the Palisades Holiday Park, Crickhowell, where they actually met.

  To be honest, it wasn’t the sex. She’d had great sex with a number of men. It was James, however, who discovered her true erogenous zone, her brain. He unstoppered her words that had lain there, dormant, unvoiced throughout her love affairs and marriage to a sweet, silent man who knew so little about her. They gushed forth, and in James’s company she opened up like a flower. She was witty, she was clever. She, who had left school at fifteen and never heard of John Donne. It was astonishing to her. It was better than sex. It was sex.

  That was no excuse. Nothing was an excuse for betraying her beloved husband, who plodded out each morning with his sackful of letters while an hour’s drive away she lay in the arms of her bushy-haired professor.

  Not hers, of course. But hers, just for now.

  Sometimes they talked until the birds started singing and the sun rose up behind the Black Mountains. She told him everything, even events in her childhood she didn’t remember she remembered. He gave her the words and in return she gave him her body.

  In all their conversations, however, she kept one thing to herself. Her deepest sorrow.

  James

  James was a changed man. A spilled cup of coffee did it. Without that flourish from a German academic he would never have met the second great love of his life.

  Outwardly, however, nothing had altered. He disappeared, sometimes for two days at a time. He said he was escaping to Hafod to write. Anna’s support of this broke his heart. So did his son’s face when James missed his sports day. It wasn’t often that he let his children down; he tried, truly he tried, to be there for them, but that caravan had a magnetic pull. Years later, when releasing the newts, James had gazed at the buddleia breaking through the concrete, the sheer force of it, too powerful to resist, and he’d thought of his passion for Stella and her sturdy, intoxicating body.

  He knew what people would think: brainy wife versus earthy mistress, lucky bastard; men have been doing it for centuries. Playing away, dipping their wick. Any number of loathsome phrases. Maybe, as Rick said in Casablanca, his pitiful excuses didn’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. But he was smitten. In Stella’s company the grass was greener, the food more delicious even though it was only pasties from the takeaway in Crickhowell. ‘Shake, shake the ketchup bottle, none’ll come and then a lot’ll,’ Stella sang as she splashed it over her chips. Her luscious lips, her bitten fingernails, her dirty laugh . . . oh, the delirium of it.

  Even in the rain they found ways of amusing themselves. Like many intellectuals, James was mad about ping-pong. Why? God knows. At the Palisades there was a table set up in the Recreation Centre, a corrugated-iron hut next to the toilets, and it was there that he taught Stella to become a demon opponent. Did his children ever cross his mind as he larked around the playground with his mistress, when he should have been playing with them? Indeed, there was a ping-pong table in the barn at Hafod, just ten miles up the road.

  In his other life, the one with children in it.

  In retrospect the whole thing seemed so unlikely. He, living like a Hobbit in a Welsh caravan park. Trysts in a service station on the M4, Stella still in her waitress uniform. Stolen kisses in the alley behind Chelsea Girl, Cardiff. An existence teetering on a shaky edifice of lies. It was astonishing that he got away with it.

  Of course he still loved his wife. As much as ever. Sometimes more. Like every marriage it had its dips and troughs, its moments of soaring joy, its flat periods of contentment. The chemistry constantly changes.

  Especially with Anna. His darling, quivery thoroughbred-racehorse of a wife. So volatile, so incandescently intelligent and sometimes – he had to admit it – so difficult. Engaging with her was a thrilling but sometimes exhausting experience. He had nobody with whom to compare her, however. Not until Stella came along, who lived, so simply for the moment. She was the perfect mistress, for she demanded nothing.

  An affair, he had discovered, remains aspic’d in the present tense.

  Nothing, ostensibly, changed. And four long years passed in a flash. How did they manage to keep it going for all that time, without being discovered? He had no idea. It was so long ago that it felt like a dream. When he was a middle-aged man he went back to Crickhowell, on some pretext or other, and parked outside the Palisades. It was a wet November day and the hills were shrouded in fog. How dank and desolate the place looked now, how exposed their secret! A row of fir trees had been chopped down, to reveal the electricity
substation. There were no signs of life, just a couple of crows stepping sideways around the rim of a rubbish bin; stepping fastidiously, as if it were hot. The caravan was still there, smaller and shabbier, dwarfed by a new trailer home topped with a satellite dish.

  Our little room an every where. Did he really lie in that caravan spouting John Donne? It was mad, the whole thing was mad . . . the risks they took, the complex logistics and marathon cross-country dashes, the frantic search for a functioning phone box, those Judas coins jangling in their pockets. They were both busy people with full-time jobs; how on earth did they get any work done?

  Love is merely a madness; and, I tell you, deserves a dark house and a whip as madmen do; and the reason why they are not so punished and cured is that the lunacy is so ordinary that the whippers are in love too.

  It was the ending that jerked them to their senses.

  Stella

  It was a strain, being the perfect mistress, cheerful and undemanding, even for someone like Stella. She had assumed this role from an early age, as children do in large families. Each settles into a slot, and hers was to be the peacemaker, sunny and emollient, the healer of rifts between her squabbling siblings. Thus was her character set in stone, and it was a struggle to escape that even as an adult. Besides, it was what made her lovable, so why should she stop?

  To James she was Little Miss Sunshine, unchanging in her weather. He had enough complications at home. Despite their intimacy, however, he had no idea what was going on in her head and as time passed she was becoming uncharacteristically mutinous. Why should she be always at his beck and call, ready to drop everything to rush off and meet him? Was her work really less important than his? She’d already given up her canteen job, which she’d loved, in order to take on temping work, which was more flexible.

  And though she gave no sign of it, she burned with a morbid curiosity about his wife and children. Of course she did, she was only human. Just occasionally he confided in her – Phoebe in trouble at school, his wife’s distress when her mother died – but basically he kept his mouth shut. They observed the adulterers’ pact of silence, the two of them.

  She was starting to resent this, however, and to dislike herself for resenting it. Indeed, as time passed, she resented the very fact that James had children at all.

  For she and Ken couldn’t. It was the sorrow at the heart of their marriage. Several years had passed before he’d finally agreed to a test.

  She remembered that day so well, the two of them walking home from the doctor’s surgery. There was a heatwave and the tar in the street was melting. They passed the Rec, where naked children splashed in the paddling pool.

  ‘Let’s go to the pub,’ she said, grabbing his arm.

  He shook his head. ‘I’m going up the allotment. Radishes won’t water themselves.’

  Later she found out he’d thrown the crib on a bonfire.

  Stella told no one, not even her family. And certainly not James. It would have been an even deeper betrayal of her husband, if that were possible.

  But something was changing in her attitude towards him. Didn’t he know how lucky he was, having children at all? Yet he took them for granted. Worse than that, he neglected them. He was missing their growing-up, those precious years disappearing in a flash. Their faces emerged from the shadows, a plaintive little boy and girl, the Robert and Phoebe of her imagination. They weren’t angry, just bewildered. How could their father be so ruthless?

  Yes, Stella could now admit it – ruthless and selfish.

  So during that last year she felt herself loosening from him. The clock was ticking and he was never going to leave his wife. Nor, in fact, was she going to leave Ken. So what were they doing, stuck in a caravan in the middle of a muddy field? They were going nowhere. She gazed at the tyre tracks, and thought: we’re getting into a rut, in more ways than one.

  His great gift had been his words. But he’d also given her, unwittingly, a vocabulary of discontent. Besides, she was exhausted by the guilt and the lies, by juggling her work and her marriage. She was thirty-one. Her bunions were hurting. Sooner or later she’d have to make a decision.

  But then, that final Easter, the decision was taken out of her hands.

  James

  A little girl disappeared from the caravan site. She was six years old. One minute she was playing in the sandpit next to the shower block, and the next minute she was gone.

  Her mother had been distracted by her other child, a baby, yelling its head off in their caravan. It was the first day of the holidays and there weren’t many people about – just a few teenagers mooching around the swings and a family unloading their car.

  Nobody saw anything. No strange man, no struggle. The little girl had simply vanished off the face of the earth.

  The police were called and a huge search was mounted. The national press arrived in droves and the girl’s smiling face appeared on all the front pages. The local people rallied round, combing the town and surrounding countryside.

  And James was taken in for questioning.

  He had been spotted by one of the long-term residents. They said he’d been acting suspiciously, coming and going at odd hours, looking furtive. He had been there that day, with his lady friend, but had left before the alarm was raised. She had left in a separate car.

  Somehow, the police tracked him down to his office at the university. The phone rang when he was marking students’ papers, and thankfully alone. And then he was driving to Wales in torrential rain, his heart hammering. Anna had no idea where he had gone; he must have gabbled something on the phone. His brain had seized up and he was clammy with sweat. Needless to say he couldn’t ring Stella at home. It was a miracle that he didn’t crash.

  Stella was already at the police station. She stood in the lobby, shaking out her umbrella. For a moment he didn’t recognise her; she wore her red PVC raincoat but under the harsh light she looked alien to him. A policewoman touched her arm. She shot James a look – a disconcertingly stern look, like a headmistress – and was ushered away, to be questioned separately.

  And then he was sitting in a room that smelled of bleach and cigarettes. A man came in and pulled up a chair. For a moment James thought he was the man who had repaired his car in Banbury, but he introduced himself as Inspector Griffiths. The table between them was empty except for an ashtray full of butts. In those days everybody smoked, whether or not they were being questioned for child abduction.

  ‘You are Professor James Wentworth, of 14 Avenue Road, Summertown, Oxford?’

  It was a shock to hear his own address. He realised, then, that Stella didn’t even know where he lived.

  ‘Could you tell me your whereabouts on Thursday last week, March 23rd?’

  Don’t tell my wife.

  The inspector took out a notebook and opened it. He sat there, pen poised.

  Don’t let her know I’m here.

  ‘I was here in Crickhowell, at the Palisades Caravan Park.’

  ‘And why was that, sir?’

  ‘I was visiting a friend.’

  ‘A Mrs Stella Gatterson?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Of 45A, Port Talbot Road, Cardiff?’

  ‘I don’t know her address. But I expect that’s it.’

  The inspector wrote in his notebook. Thin grey hair, the baldness showing through. Footsteps passed in the corridor; somebody laughed.

  ‘Can you tell me the purpose of your visit?’ The inspector looked up at him.

  ‘I told you, she was a friend.’

  He heaved a sigh. ‘How long have you known your friend Mrs Gatterson?’

  ‘About four years.’

  ‘And you’ve been meeting Mrs Gatterson here, in the caravan park?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You’ve been driving here, from Oxford?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘On a regular basis, would you say?’

  James nodded. The inspector raised weary eyebrows.

  Love is merely a madn
ess.

  It was mad. Mad and grubby. This man was getting the picture. To him, James was just another furtive husband, sweating under the harsh strip light.

  And now a photo of a smiling little girl was put into his hand. Did he recognise her? No. He didn’t see her that day? No.

  ‘Where were you, around half-past four?’

  ‘In the caravan. I imagine.’

  There was a silence. The inspector scratched the side of his nose with his pen.

  James looked at the photograph of the girl. Pigtails and a wide smile. She was missing a tooth. His own daughter, Phoebe, had recently lost a tooth; he had noticed it only that morning. She told him she’d lost it the week before and had long-ago spent the sixpence.

  That’s how little he knew of her life.

  Suddenly he was overcome with sorrow. For the girl. For being in this barren little room with its yellowing spider plant. For being in that caravan with his wanton mistress and noticing nothing. Why didn’t he look out of the window? Lurchingly, he felt that his affair had caused the girl to be stolen away. This was ridiculous, of course. Just as ridiculous as the inspector thinking he was responsible. How could he think that James would harm a child?

  But he had. He had harmed his own. It was all his fault, all of it.

  As he answered the questions he felt the pressure lifting. The inspector lit a cigarette and James realised that he was no longer a suspect. He had simply become an object of contempt – the weary, indifferent contempt of an officer who had heard it all before so many, many times, in all its tawdry banality.

  For that was it, his grand affair. Exposed for what it was, under the brutal strip light, the colour and joy drained from it, revealing the truth. That his thrilling and beloved co-conspirator was simply a pleasant, stout young woman with whom he had nothing in common. Nothing at all.