Isabel could hardly meet her eye. She was angry with herself for succumbing so transparently to physical beauty. She felt like a schoolgirl caught ogling a schoolboy; she was ashamed.
“You can’t take him home and put him on your mantelpiece, you know,” said Cat.
“Did I express any intention of doing that?”
Cat looked at her in a bemused way. “Didn’t I detect a certain … frisson?”
Isabel sighed. “He’s pretty gorgeous. But he’s very young. He’s a boy, really.”
“He wants to be a model,” said Cat. “He’s already been in some advertisement somewhere.” She glanced at her watch. “You aren’t by any chance free for an hour or so?”
“When?”
“Now. I have to deliver a ham to one of my customers. She lives in Trinity and can’t get over to this side of town because she’s snapped her Achilles tendon playing tennis.”
Isabel winced. She coped well enough with pain when she experienced it herself, but not when it was visited upon others. “You go,” she said. “I’ll stay and look after the shop.” She paused. “Can Sinclair manage on his own?”
Cat shook her head. “Sinclair is not all that bright,” she said. “He can’t add, and I think he’s dyslexic. He reads sixes as nines and the other way round.” She rose to leave. “I didn’t make you your coffee,” she said.
“I’ll do it,” said Isabel.
She made a better cup of coffee, she thought, than Cat did. Cat could be careless, and often served coffee with saucers swimming in foamy milk. And it was exactly that carelessness, Isabel reluctantly concluded, that had prompted her to sell mushrooms of doubtful provenance.
SINCLAIR SEEMED quite happy for Isabel to attend to the few customers who came in over the next hour or so. He stacked plates away, finished the grinding of the coffee and then leaned, a tea towel in his hand, against the door of one of the fridges.
Isabel engaged him in conversation during a lull between customers.
“Cat tells me that you’ve been in an advertisement,” she remarked. “What was it? I could look out for it.”
He seemed pleased with the question. “Yeah, I have. It was on a poster. You might have seen it on some of the bus shelters. It was for sunblock. It was really great.”
“It must have been exciting for your friends,” said Isabel. “I’ve often wondered what it must be like to recognise somebody in an advertisement.”
He had been smiling; now the smile faded and the dimples disappeared. “You couldn’t actually tell it was me,” he said. “It didn’t show my face.”
“Still,” said Isabel. “It was you, and that’s the important part.”
“Yeah, that’s right. And I’m going for an audition next week. This is a big job, my agent says: nationwide.”
Isabel appeared suitably impressed. “You have an agent?”
It was terribly grand to have an agent; she had never had one, and had never been able to say speak to my agent. How powerful one must feel to be able to say that!
“Sort of,” said Sinclair. “She hasn’t quite committed yet, but says she will.”
Isabel thought that a commitment to commit was almost as good as a commitment itself, but only in a moral sense, of course, and the world of business was not always constrained by moral sense.
“I’m sure she’ll say yes,” she said reassuringly. “And I’m sure that you’re very good at it. She’ll want you.”
She wondered, though, how one could be good at being a model. Models did not have to do much; they simply were. Perhaps there was some work involved—pulling in one’s stomach, or sucking in one’s cheeks; but then if you were a good model you would not have much of a stomach to pull in and your cheeks would be just right as they were.
She took another discreet glance at Sinclair. He was at that moment in his life, she suspected, when his looks were at their best: a trace of boyhood and its softness, but without the coarsening that comes with later manhood. In due course he would fill out; his features would become heavier, his beauty fade. Lithesome youths, Ganymedes and Adonises to a boy, became thickset, paunchy men, and quickly. Did he know that? Did he ever think: I shall not be like this for ever? Probably not.
Her question slipped out, as it sometimes did with her: the mind conceived the thought and the tongue made it flesh.
“What will you do when you’re older?”
Sinclair frowned. “Older?”
“Yes,” said Isabel. “Sometimes people grow old. And models … well, models seem to be younger. Most of the time, anyhow.”
She thought of advertisements featuring older models: they existed, of course: for pension plans, for comfortable clothing, for funeral insurance. The notion depressed her.
Sinclair chewed on his lower lip. “Oh, for when I’m forty? Well, I thought I might be a golf pro.” He clasped his hands together, as if gripping a golf club, and swung his arms. “See.”
Isabel raised an eyebrow. “That’s interesting. What’s your handicap?”
Sinclair shrugged. “I don’t play yet. I will, though. Later.”
She stared at him. Young children could have unrealistic ambitions—Charlie, no doubt, would go through the stage of wanting to be an astronaut, but one did not expect it of nineteen-year-olds. Now, watching Sinclair swing his arms again, she thought: This young man is utterly vacuous.
“I hope you find that you can play, once you start. You have to be quite good to be a pro, I believe.”
He looked at her almost scornfully. “I know.”
“It’s just that if you’ve never played, how do you know that you’ll be good enough? I don’t want to put you off, of course.”
“It’s better than working in a food shop,” he said, regarding her disdainfully. “Selling cheese and stuff.”
Isabel took a deep breath. She was finding Sinclair both vacuous and irritating.
“People need cheese and stuff,” she muttered.
“Sure, they need it. But I don’t want to sell it all my life.”
It was clear to Isabel that he assumed that she had devoted her life to the selling of cheese and stuff. The wording of her obituary flashed through her mind: For many years, she sold cheese and stuff … Such a life would have its dignity and such an obituary would not be anything of which to be ashamed.
“Selling cheese is a better way of spending one’s time than being a clothes horse,” she said. “Infinitely so, in my view.”
She had not intended to engage with Sinclair, and this comment, she knew, was childish and confrontational; but she had to make it.
He responded truculently. “Clothes horse? Who’s a clothes horse?”
“Nobody in particular,” said Isabel innocently. “I merely illustrate a point.”
She looked about her; she wanted to bring this conversation to an end. Picking up a knife to return it to the rack, she noticed that it was still dirty; Sinclair’s washing, it seemed, had not been thorough enough.
“You’ll have to do this one again,” she said. “Look, it’s not properly clean at the top there.”
Sinclair glanced at the knife. “Looks clean to me,” he said.
“Well, it isn’t. Look over here. And this bit here too.”
“Can’t see anything.”
“Well, I’m telling you, I can.”
He walked away, simply ignoring her, and started to rearrange small jars of spices on a shelf. She noticed that as he walked he studied his reflection in the window behind him. She turned away, her heart thumping unnaturally within her.
Conflict and confrontation had that effect on her; she had no stomach for it. What a thoroughly unpleasant young man, she thought. She tried to put him out of her mind, but he stubbornly insisted on returning. In her mind’s eye she now involuntarily pictured Cat and Sinclair in an embrace, and it was intimate. It was a shocking, unwanted image, and she recoiled from it. It was, she realised, a dirty thought, of the sort that plagues the smutty male mind: not what women were
meant to think about, or at least in theory. A dirty thought: what a sordid little expression that was, how prosaically grimy.
She closed her eyes, expecting the image to fade, but this merely served to intensify it. They were even more intimately engaged now and she gasped. I must think of something else, she told herself: of cheese, perhaps. She closed her eyes once more. But it was not just cheese that came to mind, in all the innocence that cheese possesses; Cat was offering Sinclair little cubes of Cheddar, popping them into his mouth with practised flirtatiousness.
Such thoughts, she told herself, were not her fault. They were the product of the subconscious mind, which in all of us, she knew, was a wild, anarchic place, quite capable of doing the most out-of-character things, of dwelling on the most impermissible fantasies, but nothing to worry about, really, because it was not us, not really us; or so it claimed, but did not convince. That mind was us all right—more authentically us than the us we presented to the world. And yet it was an us beyond blame and recrimination; it operated in an area of licence, where the rules are suspended.
That suspension of the rules can happen, she thought, remembering how the most rigid systems will allow the normal restraints to be turned on their head, provided this is done at the right time. Years ago, after she had come back from the fellowship at Georgetown, she had paid a brief visit to Moscow and had seen young soldiers there riding down the escalators of the staid and well-behaved underground system, shouting uproariously at a couple of noncommissioned officers travelling in the opposite direction. The sergeants had smiled tolerantly, and she had been told that the young men were on their last day of military service—they had done their bit—and such behaviour was viewed with indulgence by the army, but only on that day. The day before it would have been punished severely: with months in a military prison, perhaps, but not now, within the parameters of this indulgence. So we can think what we like, she told herself, as long as we think in private.
And yet there was a distinctly slippery slope that descended from that particular conclusion. How easy it was to create little areas of excuse in one’s life—things that we did, which, we would tell ourselves, were not really our own acts and did not matter. The person on a strict diet who tucks into a poke of crisp-fried potato chips may tell himself that it is not really him eating the chips—but that the real him, the him that counts, is obedient to the doctor’s instructions. This was an innocent illustration, but at the other end of the spectrum there is the respectable husband and father, by day the pillar of the community, who by night is the serial murderer. There were plenty of such people, many of whom had two selves that seemed to sit quite comfortably with one another.
She remembered the murderer who had terrorised a whole region of England, who was by day a truck driver, leading an apparently mundane and blameless life, while by night he preyed on young women. Did the truck driver read the newspaper headlines, the reports of his depredations, and think, that’s me? No, or, if he did, he must at least have thought it was a different me.
CAT TOOK RATHER LONGER than anticipated to return from delivering the ham.
“Sorry,” she said. “I had to help her do one or two things in the house, poor woman. Her leg’s in plaster, you know. If you snap your Achilles tendon you can’t do very much.”
“Of course,” said Isabel. “You must feel like a puppet with its strings cut.”
The simile seemed to interest Cat. “Yes, that’s right. It must be a bit like that.”
Isabel glanced at Sinclair, who was at the other end of the shop, attending to a customer who was sampling a piece of Camembert.
“I got to know our young friend,” she said. “He told me that—”
“Good,” said Cat. “He’s nice, isn’t he?” And then she said something that surprised Isabel, perhaps even shocked her. “Temptation on legs.”
Isabel was not a prude, but this seemed out of place. In saying this, to Isabel it seemed that Cat was inviting her participation in the act of concupiscent looking, and she did not wish to be part of that.
We do not have to reveal to others what we want, thought Isabel. Private desires should be precisely that: private.
“He’s certainly nice-looking,” she said. “But—”
Cat interrupted her, making Isabel wonder whether her inner reaction to the curious aside had been outwardly visible. “Thanks for looking after him. I think he’ll be fine.”
Isabel weighed up whether to say something about the knives, and Sinclair’s rudeness, but she did not. And as she made her way back to the house, she reflected on it further and decided that she had done the right thing. She should not interfere in Cat’s life; any comment that she made about Sinclair, however well intentioned, would not be appreciated and could even have the opposite effect from that which she intended. If Cat was going to fall for this narcissistic young man, then she would do so irrespective of what Isabel advised. And that falling, thought Isabel, had probably already occurred.
She knew the signs by now, and she reckoned they were already there for the reading—the touchiness, the slight air of distraction: this was Cat in love. Love is blind: the old adage was absolutely true, as were so many vintage clichéd sayings. And that was precisely why such axioms were popular, and overused: because they showed themselves to be true time and time again. We knew that love was blind because so often we witnessed it obscuring the judgement of others—not our own, of course—although love was far from blind to begin with. It had its eyes wide open and saw only too clearly the things it was looking for—at least in Cat’s case, where looks, it seemed, counted for everything, with Bruno, the tightrope-walker, being the sole exception. Even he, though, must have held some physical attraction for Cat; probably his legs. A funambulist must have strong legs if he is to balance on the wire, and Cat liked men with strong legs. She remembered Toby, who had proved to be disastrous, with his crushed-strawberry trousers; one could not help but notice his legs, and Cat had.
Men’s legs, she thought, as she made her way up the path to her front door. An odd thing to think of, but then so much that went through our minds was odd in one way or another: unexpected, unconnected, unimportant; mental flotsam swilling around with sudden moments of clarity and insight. A hotchpotch of memories, plans, dreams, random bits of silliness: the very things that made us human.
CHAPTER TEN
THE ARRANGEMENT HAD BEEN that if Isabel were to be back late, then Grace would collect Charlie from his playgroup. Grace liked this, and Isabel believed that she passed herself off to the other mothers as his aunt—a slightly peculiar thing to do, but harmless, as deceptions go.
She had found this out thanks to a remark made by Algy’s mother, the actress, who had said, in the middle of a casual conversation that she and Isabel were having, “As I said yesterday to Charlie’s aunt …” and then drifted off into some remark about something unimportant. Isabel had been momentarily nonplussed: Charlie’s aunt?
And then she had realised that she must mean Grace, and had said, “Actually, she’s not his aunt.”
Algy’s mother had paused and said, “She said she was. I’m sure she did. But it doesn’t matter, does it? The more aunts one has in this life, I would have thought, the better.”
It did not matter, of course; it was a tiny, irrelevant thing. And yet it was poignant, Isabel thought, that Grace should want to have a more formal connection—an auntly one—with the little boy of whom she was undoubtedly so fond. Grace had her own family—she frequently mentioned cousins and other relatives, telling Isabel about their doings and their foibles—so why should she claim kinship with Charlie? Unless it was simply a matter of love; after all, that was exactly how families expanded: through love.
And Grace loved Charlie: that was touchingly evident, as well as being exactly what Isabel expected and wanted. She and Jamie loved him to distraction, and it seemed only natural that others should do so too. Charlie loved them back, and showed it in the grasp of his tiny hand and the
way he nestled his cheek against the face of the one carrying him, and in the odd little gifts that he would suddenly give: a crust of bread from which the butter and jam had been thoroughly licked; a feather he had picked up in the garden; something he had drawn, a scribble that was a house or the sun or a person, it was impossible to tell. So if Grace claimed to be his aunt, it was done out of love, and was a compliment.
They were in the kitchen when Isabel came back. Charlie ran to her and flung his arms around her knees. She bent down and embraced him. There was something sticky on his face—strawberry jam, probably; Grace gave him it as a treat—but she did not mind its being transferred to her skin, not from him, because he was, she realised with sudden clarity, her. That was the miracle of giving birth to another person, the existential miracle of motherhood. Your child was you. It was as simple as that.
But that conclusion, of course, gave rise to all sorts of moral hazards. Your child might be you, but would not want to be you for ever. It was all very well with a child of Charlie’s age, who snuggled and cuddled and wanted to be part of his mother, but already there were the seeds of separation. And the desire of the child to be himself should not be resisted; parents had to let go, and if they did not, then they were building up for themselves resentments and distortions that had the capacity to ruin the child’s life.
What we do to our children, they do to the world, thought Isabel. If only Hitler had been loved more as a little boy and as a young man too—given a few prizes, told by some woman that he really was a wonderful lover, and so handsome; if only somebody had taken Stalin and kissed him and made him feel good about himself. Or was that all too simple? Was the massive psychopathy of the mass murderer something that sprang from an entirely different psychopathology? Perhaps some monsters are monsters because they feel too good about themselves; perhaps, but love could still have made such a difference, even to the likes of them. Amor vincit omnia.
She was not sure whether it was Virgil or Horace, but whoever had coined the phrase was being … She paused. Was it omnia vincit amor? One could so easily change the emphasis if one cleared one’s throat at the end, thereby by adding an em, and misremembered, or misheard, the verb. She smiled at the notion. Omnia vincunt amorem: all things conquer love. The problem with which Romeo and Juliet, and many other star-crossed lovers, had to contend. She smiled again as she drew the inevitable conclusion: don’t clear your throat when completing a pithy saying in an inflected language!