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‘Would you like to meet again?’ he says. ‘Perhaps for lunch or something.’
‘Yes. Yes, I’d like that. I’d like that very much,’ I say. I manage not to say Please.
‘We’ll do that, then,’ he says. ‘If you’d like to.’ But he doesn’t move.
I can feel his eyes on me, but there’s such a space between us: unbridgeable space.
‘Ginnie,’ he says.
My name in his mouth. The tenderness in his voice undoes me. I look up, meet his eyes: everything loose, fluid in me.
Slowly he moves his hand across the space between us, reaches his hand out to me, runs one finger slowly down the side of my face, tracing me out, watching me. I feel the astonishing warmth of his hand right through me: hear my quick in-breath.
He shakes his head, with that look he has, as though I puzzle him.
‘I dream about you,’ he says.
‘Yes,’ I say. I think of my own dream.
‘I want to make love to you. You know that, don’t you?’
I nod. I can’t speak.
We stand there for a moment. He cups the side of my face in his hand. I press my mouth into his palm: there is an extraordinary pleasure in the feel of his skin against my mouth. I would like to feel his whole body against me. He says my name again.
But people are coming towards us along the pavement—people from the bar, with their harsh raised voices and laughter. He takes a step away from me, lowers his hand. I can understand that he doesn’t want to be seen here with me: but I still feel a quick ache of rejection when he takes away his hand. I hate these people. I would like to stay here for ever on this pavement, his gaze on me, feeling his warmth on my skin. He shrugs a little.
‘We’ll speak,’ he says, and turns and walks away.
CHAPTER 11
Thursday is my day off. I decide I shall clean out Molly’s room so Greg can sleep there. Greg is working at home today, in his study under the eaves. Before I start on the bedroom I take him a mug of coffee. He’s intent on his work; he doesn’t hear me come in. In the angled light from his desk lamp, the bones and lines of his face are etched in shadow; he looks older, more severe. The room feels cloistered, apart; up here you’re scarcely conscious of the bustle of the street. You can see across the trees in people’s gardens and down to the river, on this dull wet day a sullen dark surge.
He’s checking through the editing of his latest book, an anthology of medieval Irish prose and poetry, aimed at a general readership. I glance at the page over his shoulder. There’s a little poem called ‘The Coming of Winter’: it tells how the bracken is red and the wind high and cold, the wild goose crying, cold seizing the wings of the birds.
‘I like that,’ I say.
‘It’s Irish,’ he says. ‘Probably ninth century.’
‘It makes me feel cold just to read it,’ I say.
He smiles a little. This pleases him.
‘We’re calling the book Our Celtic Heritage,’ he says. ‘Fenella reckons that anything Celtic sells.’
‘It’s a good title,’ I tell him.
‘D’you think so? I’m really not sure,’ he says. ‘I thought I’d have a word with Mother about it.’
Greg’s mother is a highly energetic woman, who likes to wear elegant layers of grey linen, and volunteers with the Citizens’ Advice Bureau, work to which she seems admirably well suited. I don’t doubt she’d have an opinion.
I put the coffee mug down on the desk beside him.
‘Not there,’ he says.
I put it on the floor.
Molly’s room has purple walls and fairy lights and a feather boa draped across the mantelpiece. She used to say smugly, No one would think it’s a lad’s room, would they, Mum? But today her room smells troublingly of vinegar and everything is covered with a velvet bloom of dust. I fling the curtains wide. This hasn’t been done for months: she lived a subterranean life, never let the day in. There are cobwebs where I’ve pushed back the curtains; I swipe at them with a duster and they break up, but the rags of web have an unnerving stickiness, lacy grey fragments clinging to my fingers. I feel a vague surge of guilt. There are certain feminine skills I’ve never really mastered—ironing, making your home gleam, straightening your hair. When the girls were small and I picked them up from school, there were women I used to notice at the gate who had clearly mastered these things, who knew what it means to be female: who were different from me, sleek and ironed and certain. I bet those women never find such cobwebs in their homes.
Molly is a hoarder. Her desk is littered with things she has no use for but can’t quite throw away—earrings speckled with tarnish, dog-eared essays, karma bracelets. I come on a handmade birthday card from Else, her German penfriend: it’s decorated with spangly stickers, and inside Else has written, in carefully looped handwriting, ‘To your 18 birthday. I wish you health, good luck and a lot of effect in your life!’
I penetrate under the bed, where I find a collapsed heap of celebrity magazines and an apple core and an open bag of crisps—the source of the vinegar smell. I heap up all the glittery chaos from her desk into boxes, and dust and polish everywhere. The room comes into focus, as though its lines and edges are clearer, sharper, than before.
And as I do these things there’s part of me that’s somewhere else entirely—as though I’m living another life in parallel to this one. A life in which I’m with Will on the pavement in the dark of the evening: and this time no one disturbs us, and he pulls me towards him and holds me to him, the whole warm length of his body pressing into mine. The sensation overwhelms me, and for a moment I sit on the bed and just let myself feel it: and the smell of his skin and the touch of his hands are almost as real as if these things are happening. As though it’s this room and my life here that is imagined. But mixed in with the longing, I feel a kind of fear. Yet what is it I’m so afraid of? That something will happen between us, that I could imperil everything? Or do I fear that nothing at all will happen, that nothing will be imperilled, that my life will just carry on, quite calmly, like before?
I hoover under the bed, and the noise brings Greg downstairs.
‘How long is this going to take?’
‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘It’ll just be a moment or two.’
Next to the fireplace there are bookshelves that stretch to the ceiling. It’s a kind of archaeology, these layers of the past—A-level and GCSE textbooks, and, from further back, the books the girls liked as children. There have always been loud protests if I threatened to give them away. The Storyteller is here, and Death who played dice with a soldier, with his bulbous eyes and his sack, the drawing that haunts me; and Amber’s book of nursery rhymes. I turn to ‘Grey goose and gander’, that I had to read each evening, feeling a mix of tenderness and tiredness, remembering the countless repetitions of early mothering, the things that always had to be done the same. Eva can get quite poignant about this sometimes, in the Cafe Matisse after one too many Bloody Marys, leaning towards me across the table, her splendid cleavage gleaming, the candle-flames reflecting in her eyes. ‘What happened, Ginnie?’ she’ll say. ‘D’you ever think—what happened to those children? The little children you bathed and read all those stories to? Don’t you sometimes want to be back there? You know—when you could make them perfectly happy by buying a chocolate muffin. And you’re so scared for them—you fear for them, that it’s all so fragile, that something awful could happen, that they’ll stick their fingers in an electric socket or something. But the thing is, you lose them anyway. You don’t think about that, you think it’ll go on for ever.’ She’ll look down into her wine glass and slowly shake her head. ‘Sometimes I wonder—where have those little children gone?’ I always tell her that I don’t share her nostalgia—that I like the teenage years; but now as I pile these books into boxes, ready to go to the second-hand bookshop in Sunbury, it seizes me for a moment, that sense of something lost and irreplaceable.
Right at the top of the bookcase there’s a shelf of Ursula’s books. Leaves and tendrils from her drawings decorate the spines. Ursula draws such wonderful plants—extravagant, Italianate—that she sometimes gets letters from fans—Ursula, I would so love to see your garden. But the plot at her Southampton home is a few square yards of decking and a cactus: the enchanted gardens she draws are all from her imagination.I run my finger along the spines, feeling a flicker of envy; it must be good to have achieved something as solid as this whole shelf of books. The one that made all the difference for her is there—the volume of Hans Anderson fairy tales she illustrated.
She wasn’t always successful. She’d been struggling for years, largely living off Paul, her husband, wondering if it was worth it, or whether she should perhaps go back to primary teaching, when she did this book. I remember when she showed it to me—hesitant, self-deprecating—she used to be hesitant then. I could see at once it was special. There was something about these stories that suited her wayward imagination—these white-fleshed girls with their voluptuous deprivations: the mermaid trying to walk on her beautiful legs that cut her, the curve of Gerda’s white throat and the scratch of the robber girl’s knife. Everything was animate, full of sex or threat, every petal, every tree-root; tendrils of ivy clutched like greedy caressing fingers, the flowers had lascivious smiles.
Nothing much happened to start with—she sold the usual few thousand copies; and then it was chosen by children’s BBC, to illustrate a series of fairy tales read by celebrities—and suddenly everyone was buying it. Not just children either, for her books inhabited that sought-after terrain—books for children that adults also enjoy. One drawing was even reproduced in Vogue, in a piece on the New Romantics—the picture of the Little Mermaid that I have in my kitchen, that Molly found so troubling as a little girl. I remember when Ursula visited, just after the arrival of her first fat royalty cheque. She looked different. Still hardly any make-up, and her hair severely tied back, but with a new coat of the softest buttery suede. Though it wasn’t just the money. There was a new certainty about her: she knew what she was for.
My phone rings. It’s Molly.
‘Sweetheart, how are you?’
‘Well…my pimp beat me and then I got raped and I’ve started shooting up.’ She can’t quite suppress a giggle. ‘Fine otherwise.’
‘Tell me what’s happening.’
The Freshers’ Fair was great, she says, she’s joined at least thirty societies. Even the Blonde Society—you don’t have to be blonde, they just go round all the cocktail bars. And can she have a long denim skirt and some shots glasses for Christmas? And thanks for the alarm clock, but she didn’t really need it, she’s using the clock on her mobile.
‘Molly, are you eating OK? Can you manage all right with the cooker?’
‘I don’t cook much really,’ she says. ‘If I miss a meal I have Pringles.’
I question whether Pringles are a satisfactory meal.
Molly sighs extravagantly over the phone.
‘Mum, d’you ever listen to yourself? You been on one of those parenting courses or something? Look,I’m fine, OK? I’ve just joined thirty societies and I’m fine.’
‘Have you got everything you need? D’you want me to send you anything? I could send you some echinacea.’
‘OK, Mum, if you want to…’
‘Are you making plenty of friends? ‘
‘They’re really nice in my corridor. We’re going out for corridor curry tomorrow.’
‘Any men you like the look of? ’ I say tentatively.
‘Just don’t go there, Mum, OK? Anyway, half the guys in my college are gay—that’s why they have such nice trainers. Look, my phone needs recharging,’ she says. ‘I’ve really got to go.’
I finish the room. I box up the books and dust everywhere. I strip the bed and heap up the linen to take to the kitchen to wash.
It’s raining more heavily now: there’s a thick brown light in my kitchen. I make a coffee and sit at my kitchen table. Suddenly, after talking to Molly, I feel ashamed; the things I’ve been thinking astound me. All the desire has left me. I can’t believe I considered getting involved with this man, this stranger: took it seriously, half imagining it would actually happen. My family and their needs are all that seem real to me now: Amber, struggling with school work, needing stability: Molly just starting out, eager but brittle, tense with the newness of everything, joining thirty societies: Greg and the Celtic anthology that he works on with such diligence, for which he has such hopes. How could I have imagined I would put this life at risk?
I make plans. I shall put more energy into my home, my family. I shall get a private tutor to help with Amber’s Maths and one of those French courses she can do on the computer. I shall hold a dinner party; if Greg won’t take me out to dinner, then I shall ask people here: Clem and Max, perhaps—they might get on well together. I shall redecorate my kitchen, which looks so gloomy in this dull brown light. These colours I’ve loved—deep russet red, and the sort of green that has a lot of blue in it—are all too dark, too dreary. I shall paint this room a brisk cheerful colour, cream, or the yellow of marigolds. I shall have a lot of effect in my life.
I sip my coffee, hearing the rain on the gravel, like many people walking outside my window.
My phone rings and I jump. I take it out of my pocket, expecting Molly again.
‘Ginnie, it’s Will.’
My body changes when I hear his voice, something opening out in me.
‘Oh. I mean, I wasn’t expecting you.’
‘It was good to see you,’ he says.
‘Yes, it was good,’ I say.
There are moments when we choose. Maybe this is the moment: here in the silence, waiting, hearing his breathing the other end of the line.
‘Will.’ I hear how my voice is hushed now. ‘Look, I’m at home at the moment, so.’
I leave the rest of the sentence unsaid. In that moment we become conspirators.
‘OK,’ he says evenly. ‘We won’t talk long. I only wanted to ask if you’d like to have lunch some time? There’s a bar in Sheffield Street—it’s a little further from where I work, we shouldn’t be interrupted.’
He says we could meet at twelve-thirty. He tells me how to get there. We both know I have said yes already.
CHAPTER 12
The bar is empty. It has cream walls and big mirrors on the walls with elaborate gilt frames, like in an old-fashioned ballroom. As I walk in I am surrounded by reflections of reflections. There are hanging baskets full of ivies that curl and reach out like hands. The back wall is all glass, wide French windows that look out into the garden, letting in lots of light: but today the light is dull, thick, like in an old photograph. Soon it will rain again.
A barmaid is wiping glasses at a sink behind the bar: she’s young, with sharp, pretty features, her hair tied up with string. There are baguettes in a glass case. I order a whisky and go to sit by the windows on a flimsy bentwood chair. There are only one or two other people drinking here. Outside there’s a wet grey sky and eddies of starlings, and the lawn is covered in drifts of fallen leaves, soaked through and shiny as mahogany, everything fading, sifting down, except in the flowerbed where a random rose still clings to a blood-red stem. A saxophone is playing a song on the edge of memory, something I know but can’t name.
I sip my drink and read my newspaper, the same paragraph over and over, none of it making sense. My other world doesn’t exist—my children, my home, my husband: there’s just here, now, the sepia garden, the saxophone, in my mouth the taste of whisky.
Half twelve passes and Will doesn’t come. Perhaps he will never come. I was crazy, deluded, to think that he meant what he said. Undoubtedly, he has been prudent and thought better of it. What did I expect? I’m not the kind of woman men take risks for. I would like to be someone different, to be confident, at ease: a woman skilled in the way she moves her body, the way she touches a man. I would like to be balanced on one of the slender barstools, poised, rather louche, a woman who expects to be looked at: or leaning on my elbow at the bar, wearing a short black dress and vanilla-pale stockings and dazzlingly high heels, the sort of heels that make your pelvis tip and your body arch a little: a woman perhaps who has a vibrator discreet as a silvery lipstick hidden in her handbag.
The barmaid changes the CD. A lazy beat, a pensive muted trumpet. Maybe like me she only likes slow music.
I can see how it will happen, the whole thing spooling out in front of me, filmic, vivid, as though I am watching myself. How I sit here, drinking whisky, studying my paper, not looking up too often, and still he doesn’t come: and then at last I shrug and gather up my things and walk away—not very embarrassed, because I’m too old for that, but a little: watched by the barmaid with string in her hair, who has seen this before, who immediately comprehends the whole scenario. Feeling a surge of shame—the shame of having so longed for something that I have no right to, no claim on.
The music stops and you can hear the squawk and clatter of starlings in the garden. The barmaid wipes some glasses, holding them up to the light to check for smears.
I look up and into the mirror on the wall in front of me: Will is there, his reflection as he walks down the street towards me. A sudden easy happiness warms me. Of course he would do what he said. I watch him in the mirror: intrigued to see him when he can’t see me. He’s serious, unsmiling: like someone heading for a work meeting, preoccupied, someone on whom things weigh heavily. Not someone coming to meet a woman. I watch him till he walks out of the mirror.
The door opens behind me and I turn. We smile, he kisses my cheek.
I eat him up eagerly with my eyes, his worn face, knowing hands.
‘So. Was your morning OK?’ I ask him.
He shrugs. He brings the dregs of work with him—the things that still have to be done, or that have been done, but badly. While I have given no thought to such things, coming here with reckless abandon,leaving my whole other world behind. I want to peel all this preoccupation from him, to say, Don’t think about all that. Just be here with me, for a while, for this moment.
He doesn’t take off his coat: I notice this. He sits in one of the bentwood chairs; he’s too big for this feminine furniture. I sense his uncertainty. He’s looking at me, trying to read me. It would be easy to keep it all ordinary and safe: to buy him a drink, to talk about our work. The easiest thing in the world.
‘Are you hungry?’ he says.
‘Not especially.’
‘Me neither,’ he says.
I don’t know what to say now. I don’t know how to get from here to where we want to be.
I look at his face, his mouth, his dark eyes with the red flecks in, his jaw shadowed with stubble. I would like to move my hand on his face, to trace out the lines of him, to pull him towards me and press my mouth into his. I feel no guilt, just this wanting—clear, explicit, exact.
‘Perhaps we could go off somewhere?’ I say.
‘Where would you like to go? ’ he says.
‘We could go down to the river.’ My voice hushed, questioning. ‘There’s a car park I know. It’s quiet there. Perhaps we could walk by the river.’
‘I’d like that,’ he says.
I leave my whisky undrunk.
We drive there through the dull day. We talk about the traffic and the weather.
At the park by the river I stop the car. It’s raining again. It seems a bleak, forsaken place in the rain: there are puddles on the gravel, holding the grey of the sky, and a starling pecks at a litter bin. When I turn off the engine, all you can hear is the water on the roof, like drumming fingers. A single dark leaf with a rim of white light is pressed against the windscreen. I turn to him as he undoes his seat belt: I hope he will kiss me properly, but he just gets out of the car. I put on my mac but I leave my umbrella—some calculation that there’s something deeply unsexy about an umbrella. It’s as though I’m drugged or in a dream.
‘I’m sorry about the rain,’ I say. Then think how silly this sounds.
There’s one other car in the car park: a man sitting there, smoking, his newspaper propped against the steering-wheel. He stares at us, a cool unguarded stare. This makes me uneasy. I think how obvious we must be—a preoccupied man, a middle-aged woman in suede boots that are clearly all wrong for the weather, and both of us oblivious to the rain.
We walk to the left along the path by the river. Even on this dull day, the water has a faint shine, reflecting the opalescence of the sky. The river is running high and dimpled by the rain and full of movement, all its contrary surges and eddies and ripples. We can see Eel Pie Island to our right across the water, one of the biggest islands in the Thames. At either end there’s a nature reserve, huge gold willows reaching down to the water, but there are houses too, and from this bank we can see the back gardens of some of them, ending abruptly in a steep drop to the river. On the flagstones at the end of one garden sits a terracotta boy, one leg dangled over the edge, his head turned as if he’s looking down the river; he’s so precisely the colour of sunburnt flesh that you think for a moment he’s real. But there are no houses or gardens here on the bank where we walk—on one side of us the river, to the other side a tangle of bushes and trees.
