And Sandra did not slap his face, or his hand, or rush from the room. She made a correction on her screen, turned to look at him. A long, steady look. “As it happens,” she said, “so have I.”
Sandra is nothing like the girls he used to run after, time was. She does not have long blond hair or legs to her armpits. She has full breasts and quite muscular calves. Her face is rather flat, all on one plane, it seems; large gray eyes, the mouth a trifle thin. Her neat cap of brown hair is streaked with gray—becoming silver glints. She is quick and calm and cool. Oliver has never seen her truly fazed, that he can recall. An essential quality in a business partner and also, he now finds, one conducive to a tranquil home life. The fridge is always stocked, the bills are paid, the insurance policies are in order.
Actually, Sandra is nothing like the people he used to know. She is nothing like Nick. As business associates, Sandra and Nick might as well be from different planets. She is nothing like Elaine.
She is nothing like Kath. Above all, she is nothing like Kath.
As if, thinks Oliver.
Oliver used to know all sorts of people. Quite a few of these were women in whom he was currently interested, but usually not sufficiently interested to make a great issue of it. He took them out from time to time, and then, usually, they went off with someone more pressing. The rest were people with whom he had a drink or a meal every now and then. Some of these were fallout from the days with Nick. Nick and Elaine. The business generated a vibrant social life; there were always people turning up at the house, those whom Nick thought potential contributors to some series and had invited along with a gust of enthusiasm—picture researchers, photographers, freelance designers. Temporary assistants came and went, hired by Nick and then gently fired by Oliver when it was realized that resources couldn’t run to this. Oliver had his own office in the converted barn that adjoined the house, and a scruffy flat in the nearby market town. In his office he dealt with what Nick called the boring part of publishing: the negotiations with printers, with distributors, with accountants. Over in the house, the fun went on. Nick seldom came to the barn, though Oliver was frequently in the house, summoned to meet this brilliant photographer, this amazing writer. He spent many hours at that kitchen table, while ideas were bandied about over glasses of red plonk. Often Elaine was there. Polly was a baby in a high chair, then a toddler, eventually a schoolgirl.
Sometimes Kath came.
Oliver did not contribute much to those fervent creative sessions around the table. He would come up with quickly calculated figures when appropriate; occasionally, when the level of unreality was getting high, he would be quietly insistent about costings and projections. But not too insistent; he had learned that it was better to have a chat with Nick at some later point, by which time he might have gone off the whole idea anyway. Besides, Oliver enjoyed those occasions. He enjoyed the heady to-and-fro of ideas, Nick’s flights of fancy, the provocative range of people. He liked the fetching girls with portfolios of artwork—and tried his luck with these, every now and then. He was properly impressed by the erudite experts on this and that, who might or might not be just the author they were looking for. He was well aware of his own role and image: the sweet voice of reason, sensible Oliver, who’ll sort out the paperwork and get this off the ground. But it seemed as though he had taken on a degree of protective coloring; he too was caught up in the creative process. He was a modest but essential adjunct to all this excited planning. He contributed by his very presence, and thus became a part of the fluctuating society around Elaine’s kitchen table. He stepped out for a while with a girl Nick brought in to do design. He struck up a friendship with a man who knew all there was to know about windmills. He became someone people invited along to Sunday lunch gatherings, he was a useful extra car-driver for spontaneous excursions. That was a breezy time; there was always some new venture in the pipeline, other projects charging ahead, fresh people conjured up by Nick. Thus it was perhaps that Oliver’s natural pragmatism was set aside, that he failed to be alert to the warning signs until it was too late. Then there were the unnerving weeks when he went over the figures again and again, looking for some lifeline, and could find none.
“I feel I’ve let you down.” It was to Elaine that he had said this, not Nick. And he remembers being surprised by her calmness in the face of what was happening. Her husband was about to go out of business, but she seemed quietly buoyant. “We’ll be all right,” she had said. “I’ve got some plans. What will you do, Oliver?”
He too had had a strategy in mind. He had seen what he could do, even as Hammond & Watson was laid to rest. He had taken happily to computers. That was the way to go. Word processing, printing on demand. He had sidestepped Nick’s bustling ideas for future collaboration and slid away. Sometimes he thinks of those years with a touch of nostalgia; mostly he relishes his present certainty and control. Satisfaction lies in an impeccable page, and healthy accounts.
Sandra knows little of Nick, or of Elaine. Least of all does she know anything of Kath. She is aware that Oliver’s previous business venture had to do with mainstream publishing, and that his partner was the inspirational and creative member of the team and ended up if anything a mite too inspirational and creative, which was why the thing folded.
Both Sandra and Oliver are reticent about other times. Sandra is divorced, but Oliver knows little of why or when. “’Nuff said,” says Sandra crisply. “Over and done with.” Equally, she does not press Oliver for information. There is tacit agreement between them that both have lived other lives and that a mutual respect for privacy is appropriate in a late liaison such as theirs. Oliver finds that he is distinctly incurious about Sandra’s past. This fact has occasionally given pause for thought; it seems to indicate a detachment that is perhaps not quite right. He reminds himself of Sandra’s qualities and of the reasons why life with her is so compatible—her unruffled efficiency, her household management. Her compact, nubile body—nicely sexy when you wanted to see it that way but not a daily disturbing provocation. Her panache behind the wheel; he has come to dislike driving. Her bœuf en daube.
Given all that, an obsessive concern with Sandra’s previous life seems superfluous, and indeed childish. Leave that to young lovers.
And Sandra too steers clear of inquiry. Though just occasionally an edge creeps into her voice which perhaps indicates suppressed attention. She comes across an inscription in one of Oliver’s books: “Happy birthday—tons of love, Nell.”
“One of your ladies, I suppose.” Crisp, but a statement, not a question. The matter is not pursued.
Where Nick and Elaine are concerned, she is apparently uninterested. The business was wound up; Oliver went his own way. That will do, it seems, for Sandra.
Nowadays, Oliver does not know nearly so many people. He has lost touch with pretty well all of those acquired during the Hammond & Watson years. His clients of today do not move on to a more intimate plane; many of them he never meets—they remain a voice on the phone, a sender of faxes and e-mails. Occasionally he and Sandra entertain another couple for supper. He has moved into that closed society of coupledom, he realizes, on the fringes of which he hung round for so many years. A member of a couple always has someone with whom to go to the cinema, to take a walk. The unattached are flotsam, eddying about the solid purposeful mass of the coupled. From time to time, he does give a wistful thought to life as flotsam: it had its compensations.
“Kath?” says Sandra.
She speaks so abruptly that Oliver is jolted to attention. He has been cruising happily, fingers tapping out a routine task, thoughts quite elsewhere. He stops tapping, and returns to the office.
“The sister. What did she look like?” Sandra is wearing that intent look that he knows so well, like a dog pointing. This can be applied equally to the choice of a cut of meat or consideration of a page layout.
What did Kath look like? Oliver is stymied. How did you begin to describe Kath? “She was . . .” he begins. “Well
, she . . . she had dark hair. Not very tall.”
“There’s a photo I saw once in that envelope you’ve got in your desk at home. I noticed it when you were trying to find an old photo of yourself to show me. A girl sitting beside a pond. Is that her?”
Sandra’s observational talent. He knows at once the picture she means. Kath is sitting cross-legged on the grass in front of the garden pond at Nick and Elaine’s house. Her eyes are screwed up in the sunlight, she has bare arms and legs, and a radiant smile, beaming straight at the camera: she is entrancing. Yes, Sandra would have noticed that photo.
“That’s her,” he says. “Yup.”
“I see.” Sandra looks reflectively at him. “She was extremely attractive, then?”
“Yes,” says Oliver. “She was. Yes, you could say that.”
“I’d taken it that the photo was of some girlfriend.”
Oliver is almost shocked. “Oh dear me, no. No, no.”
Sandra gives him a little smile. She turns back to her screen. Kath has been dealt with, so far as she is concerned.
It still seems incredible to Oliver that Kath will not suddenly walk into the room. Never again. That is what she did, back then. No one was expecting her, Elaine didn’t know where she was, what she was doing, and then there she would be—smiling, laughing: “Are you all terribly busy? Can I come to lunch?”
He sees her arriving thus with a great tray of peaches in her arms. She has bought up the entire stock of some greengrocer. “Here . . .” she says. “I couldn’t resist. Let’s gorge.” And Elaine has pursed lips. Oliver can read her thoughts: extravagant, exaggerated, they’ll go bad before they can all be eaten.
Elaine was strange where Kath was concerned. You could feel that she was unsettled when Kath was around, there was that sense of concealed tension. She watched Kath a lot—but, then, everyone did that. And she chivied her. Criticized. Elder-sister stuff—but there was a compulsive edge to it. Though it all seemed to roll off Kath; she would smile, deflect. “All right, I’ll reform, I promise. . . . Listen, I want to tell you about this amazing place I’ve found—”
Kath. What a shame it was, thinks Oliver. What a crying shame. When Kath comes into his mind, it is always like a sudden shaft of light. She is talking about a place she’s been to, a person she’s met, she is all zest and animation, a group springs to life when she is there. There was nobody, Oliver thinks, but nobody, less likely to be . . . dead.
He sometimes wonders why he did not fall in love with her. Plenty did, after all. But no. Kath always seemed out-of-bounds. Sacrosanct, in some curious way. Not for him. She was never less than warm, friendly, welcoming. But then she was like that with everyone. Almost everyone. If Kath didn’t care for a person she simply moved away; you never saw dislike, disapproval, but she would have created a space, turned aside. What a talent, thinks Oliver. But that was how she seemed to run her life. When things no longer suited her, she moved on, moved off. Or so one understood. He remembers Elaine’s terse inquiries: “You mean you’re not working at that gallery anymore?” and Kath’s light responses: “Things weren’t going quite so well. And I’ve met this nice man who wants me to help with a festival he’s running.”
Occasionally, when Kath turned up, there was a man with her. Hardly surprising. Oliver can barely remember these men. One cast an eye over them, of course. Envious? Well, no, not that—but with a kind of proprietorial concern. Was this fellow worthy? And since the same man seldom came a second time, and more often than not she was alone, there was no reason to get exercised about the matter. It seemed remarkable that no one had snapped her up on a permanent basis, but clearly she had this talent for evasion.
Which made Glyn Peters all the more surprising. Oliver remembers well the advent of Glyn Peters. One became aware of an intensity about Elaine, a tautness. And then one day there was Kath and she had this bloke with her, very much at home apparently, knees under Elaine’s kitchen table as though he had a right there, one eye on Kath all the time, holding forth. Oliver had been wary at first, hackles raised; gradually he had found himself intrigued, even slightly mesmerized. The man had a way with him, no doubt about that. Not surprising he’d been a hit on the telly, apparently. He had that knack of talking whereby he seemed to be addressing you personally, as though you were especially equipped to appreciate all this intriguing information. Oliver can hear him now, giving them all a breakdown on medieval crop-rotation systems, on how to date a hedge; he would glance in your direction, and you felt flattered, singled out, recognized as a connoisseur.
Was that what Kath had felt? Elaine put her head round his office door one morning—brisk and to the point: “A date for your diary, Oliver. Kath’s getting married. We’ll have a bit of a party. You met Glyn a few weeks ago—remember?” And that was it. Well, well. Lucky Glyn Peters. How had he done it? Oliver remembers Kath at one of those kitchen gatherings, the table awash with food and drink, Nick talking, Glyn talking most of all, and Kath sitting slightly apart, on the window seat, her legs curled under her, Polly alongside. Polly was always wherever Kath was. Kath is plaiting Polly’s hair—Polly’s long schoolgirl hair. She combs the hair and looks towards Glyn, a speculative look, as though she is asking him something, asking herself something. They are shortly to be married. Oliver inspects Kath for indications of consuming passion; but there is just this querying gaze. Puzzled, almost.
You could not but be absorbed by Kath, even if you did not fall in love with her. There was what she looked like, and there was what she was. She was . . . What was she? thinks Oliver. She was an entirely nice person. Nice? What does that mean? A non-word. You couldn’t imagine Kath doing anything mean, or malevolent, or despicable. She was nice to people—hang on, that word again—she was friendly, and interested, and kind. And a provocative thought arises: Was she able to be that way because of what she looked like? Because the world smiles upon the physically attractive and they can smile back? But the world is also well stocked with malign beauties, and ever has been, from Snow White’s stepmother onwards. A ravishing woman can also have a vile temperament. So that theory won’t wash.
When Oliver remembers Kath, that luminous quality predominates. The way your spirits lifted a notch, just because she was there: the day seemed more promising, the adrenaline ran stronger. And really, Oliver thinks, that is distinctly odd. Perverse, even. Kath had gaiety and verve, but she was not especially wise, nor clever, nor well informed. If one is being realistic, one would have to say that her contribution to society was nil. She did nothing useful, had no sustained employment, was neither creative nor industrious. She had no children, if children are to be seen as fulfillment of a social purpose. She simply was—as a flower is, or a bird. People are meant to be more than that, are they not?
Oh, come on, thinks Oliver, this is getting heavy. It’s enough that she was a startlingly appealing person, in every way.
She could surprise you, take you unawares. Once, he was with her in the courtyard between the house and his office in the barn; they were sitting on the bench there, waiting, it seems, for someone or something—the framework of the moment is gone now. And she turned to him and said, “Are you happy, Oliver?”
He had clenched in alarm. He had wanted to protest that he wasn’t the sort of person who answers that sort of question, or to whom that sort of question is put. He had gazed at her beseechingly: was he supposed to say, “Are you, Kath?”
She had gazed back, thoughtful, expectant, really wanting to know, it seemed, as though his reply might solve some problem. And when he went on saying nothing she smiled—that smile, that great smile that always made you smile back, willy-nilly: “I bet you are. You’ve got more sense than to be unhappy.”
When he realized that there was something going on between her and Nick, he had been disturbed. More than that—incredulous, alarmed, offended. How could this be?
The first intimation had been a look, quite simply. Nick watching Kath in the way that others watched her, those coming a
cross her for the first time, people who hadn’t known her for years, as Nick had. Elaine had not been present; Oliver had been uneasily glad of that.
After that, small disconcerting signals. Nick covertly attentive when Elaine was on the phone to Kath, pretending to read the newspaper. Kath visiting less, rather than more. Elaine saying one day, “Ages since Kath showed up—where’s she got to now?”; Nick’s furtive look, his apparent casual lack of interest.
And then one day Oliver had gone to the Blue Boar in Welborne to meet a man for a drink—a piece of fellow flotsam from that footloose uncoupled time—and there at a table across the room were Nick and Kath. Quite evidently intent upon one another. Oliver had been all of a dither. What to do? March up to them, jolly and unconcerned: “Hi there—what a coincidence! Tom’s with me—you know, Tom Willows—we’ll join you.” And then he had hesitated, headed in one direction and then another, and they had looked up and the expression on their faces was not one of cheery innocent welcome but of dismay. Oliver had flapped a hand, mouthed some dismissive greeting, bolted for an alcove as far from them as possible. “Isn’t that your partner?” said Tom Willows, puzzled. “No,” said Oliver. “I mean, yes. Business meeting—no need to get involved. Pint?”
Later that day Nick came across to the barn. “Just to have a word about print runs for the new series, and to ask what you think about this jacket artwork—fantastic, isn’t it?” The usual Nick, all lit up with plans and ideas. “I think we should really go for broke on this one, don’t you—?” And, at the end of it, turning to go, he had shot Oliver a look—a wary, propitiating look: “Oh . . . and, Olly, incidentally, you didn’t see me this morning, OK?”
I don’t want this, Oliver had thought. I don’t want any part of this. This is nothing to do with me.