‘You can, on your bike, if you keep to the side of the lane and are very careful.’
‘Aren’t you coming?’
I hesitated. I could easily tell him it was my day at the shop; he never kept track. Then when he’d gone out for the day, I could catch up on some sleep. But the lie wouldn’t come out this time, though minor lies were not always beyond me.
‘I’m pretty bushed, David—after last night.’
I hadn’t meant to reproach him. If there was one thing that woman had taught me, it was that he couldn’t help it. In any case, it was useless. His reaction was always the same when I brought up the nights during the days. He frowned slightly, moved away from me a little, and changed the subject.
‘Amm and I could go out on our ponies, and leave you a map with a cross where you had to meet us with the picnic. Oh, Mummy, do let’s!’
He lay on me, belly to belly with the bedclothes between us, his face poised eagerly a few inches from mine. I felt his slight but formidable weight on me and I trembled suddenly.
‘You cold, Mummy?’
‘No . . . Get off, darling, will you? I must get up now.’
‘And will you come today?’
‘Okay then.’
‘YIKE!’
‘Only darling, I must, must have a nap this afternoon. Will you promise to play quietly?’
‘Promise. Or I’ll stay over at Amm’s if you like.’
‘Well, we’ll see. Now go and get dressed, and don’t forget your teeth.’
‘Why don’t you wear pyjamas in bed, Mummy?’
‘Because I prefer a nightie.’
‘Amm wears a nightie but she says it gets up under her chin and leaves her bottom bare.’
‘Oh do dry up about bottoms, David! You’re obsessed.’
‘What’s obsessed?’
‘When you think about a thing far more than it needs to be thought about.’
David dawdled on the bed and watched me getting dressed.
‘Why do you do everything behind your dressing-gown, Mummy? Amm says Auntie Jo goes around the house with nothing on in the mornings.’
‘Do you want me to go around with nothing on?’
He considered. ‘No, but not to hide, either.’
‘I’m not exactly hiding. I’m just being modest.’
‘What’s modest?’
‘Keeping covered what ought to be kept covered.’
‘That’s hiding.’
‘Oh dear—perhaps it is. Well, that’s how I am. If you want a bare Mummy rushing around the place, you’d better move in with Auntie Jo.’
David rolled over on his back with a snort of laughter.
‘Bet she wouldn’t rush around bare if I was there!’
‘No, I bet not too. Why’s that, do you suppose?’
‘Because I’m a boy, I should think.’
‘Exactly.’
‘But Amm and I see each other’s bo—I mean, bare.’
‘David, honestly, you know there’s a difference between a little girl and a woman.’
‘Yes. Bosoms.’
This word had its inevitable effect of reducing him to such a helpless condition that he fell off the bed.
‘Oh come off it, for goodness sake! Go and dress yourself.’
Eventually I had to hike him to his feet and propel him through the door, hicupping, and he tottered off to his own room crying ‘Bottoms!—and Bosoms! Alive, alive-o!’ I went downstairs and got the breakfast ready. While the eggs were poaching I went out into the hall and phoned Jo.
‘Hi—’
‘Hi, Jane, don’t stop me duck, I’m on the verge of being late.’
‘Never mind, Georgie’s always there to open up.’
‘The employer should be there first, you know that. Besides, we’ve got that consignment from Brum to unpack.’
‘I did it before I left last night.’
‘Oh really? You are good, thanks. Listen, what about the kids today? Any plans?’
I told her David’s.
‘Can you face it?’ she asked. ‘What of the night?’
‘Unspeakable—don’t even ask.’
‘Poor, poor you.’
‘My eyes aren’t properly open yet. Never mind. A breath of fresh air’ll do me good, and after lunch I thought I might leave David at your place and get some kip—would that be all right?’
A slight pause. Jo was never happy about the kids being left alone. ‘Why don’t you sneak up and kip on my bed? Then you’d be around if they needed you.’
‘That’s a thought. Right, I’ll do that then.’
‘What about supper? Shall I bring home fish and chips?’
‘Yes—I can’t face cooking.’
‘Don’t blame you. You must be buggered.’
‘That’s an understatement.’
‘I’ll be back by 5.30. If you’re asleep I won’t wake you. I’ll feed the kids and, if you like—’ I knew what she was going to say and I knew why she’d stopped herself. In the good old days, David often used to sleep at Jo’s house with Amm. But you can’t do that, even to your best friend, especially when she’s the kind of sleeper that even the alarm-clock doesn’t always wake. ‘Well,’ she broke off, ‘maybe not. Though we might give it a try one night; you never know; maybe he wouldn’t wake up if he knew you weren’t going to be able to come.’
‘You don’t know how he is at night. I’d be afraid to risk it. He might go into hysterics or something . . .’
‘It’s hard to imagine . . .’
For Jo, perhaps; but she’d only ever seen David’s daytime self.
While David ate breakfast, I prepared the picnic to his instructions and incidentally swallowed three cups of very strong black coffee. After that I went upstairs, undressed again and had a cool bath. Then I made the beds and tidied up and washed the breakfast things, and by that time I felt a great deal better and David was literally dancing with impatience.
‘Mummy, come on! It’s nearly ten o’clock. It won’t be worth going—’
‘Take it easy. I asked Auntie Jo to tell Amm to catch the ponies and saddle up—they’ll be ready to start when we get there.’
‘If we ever do.’
Just as we were leaving the cottage, the phone rang. David nearly burst into tears.
‘Oh, leave it, Mummy! Please leave it!’
But it’s against my nature to leave a phone to ring.
‘You open the gate and unlock the garage door. I won’t be a moment.’
‘Good morning,’ said a voice I knew.
‘Andy. Hallo.’
Anything? Something, undoubtedly. A feeling as if the skin of my face were being lifted. A slight breathlessness. I was given to these acute moments of self-analysis. I wanted to retain my objectivity, and this seemed one way.
‘I’m phoning in the hope of persuading you to spend the day with me.’
‘Oh, I’m sorry, I can’t.’
‘It’s not your shop-day. I’ve been counting.’
‘When it’s not my shop-day, it’s my children’s day.’
‘Are you taking them out?’
‘They’re going riding and I’m meeting them with a picnic.’
‘Sounds fun. Couldn’t I come? I’ll bring my own grub.’
I hesitated. ‘But I don’t know where we’ll be meeting. They set the place always.’
‘Well today you set it, and make it somewhere near the site.’
‘Well—all right. Let’s say one o’clock.’
‘Good. I’ll expect you.’
He hung up without goodbyes as he always did. His curtness was not a lack of manners; it was more as if he rationed himself for words, as if he were determined not to allow himself to waste any. His movements, too, were almost nervily direct and contained. Sometimes when we were together I longed to stroke him, soothe him somehow, make him relax with me . . . I thought if he relaxed physically, if he were not always so stiff, so spare and squared-off and unsprawling, I might get that mouth of
his open and some words out of it which would let me know what the hell was going on in his head. His speech was quite stark in its lack of frills; like his blueprints—like his buildings, as a matter of fact—his sentences came out in clean pre-fabricated neatly-finished shapes—geometrical. He never stumbled or withdrew anything or repeated himself. It put me off him, and yet, perversely, attracted me. There was more there; I knew it. Shut away, but there. That hidden human being I could sense, huddled inside those hard straight lines of certainty, order and purpose made me wonder bemusedly from time to time whether it was possible that I could love him.
Often I was quite sure I couldn’t. How can one love a man who never reaches out to you, never offers you any part of himself or, for that matter, invites you to give any of yourself to him? Anyway, he was often pompous. Once he’d said, while we were having what ought to have been a cosy drink together in the Swan, ‘Geometry is founded in natural laws, and so are we. We unearthed the laws of form and numbers, dug them out of the world like ore. They’re impregnated with us, and we’re impregnated with them.’ I choked on my beer. Who the hell, I wanted to say, can find a warm, on-coming answer to a remark like that? And the insane thing was that even while this mini-lecture was in progress, I got a strong intuitive feeling that he was trying to woo me. His hand, a traitor to its orders I felt sure, suddenly shot out at the end of his speech and enclosed mine, a hand as warm and male and desirous as his words were remote and didactic and impersonal.
This was, and had been during the whole two months I had known him, the pattern. During his dry, often witty but never forthcoming comments over a dinner-table, his eyes, his hands, his whole inner self would be yearning towards me in a way that had me utterly confused. Every instinct I had told me that he loved me and wanted me, and often it was hard to tell whether what I felt for him was an answering, concealed desire, or merely a burning curiosity bordering on exasperation.
Physically he had attracted me from the first time I saw him, leaning against a gate with his large black Rover parked in the lane right in my way. When I honked, he’d turned in my direction with an expression of thinly-veiled annoyance as if I’d interrupted a mood of cogitation.
‘Could you please let me get by?’ I asked politely, leaning out of my own car window.
‘Oh,’ he said, straightening reluctantly from his gate, ‘sorry.’
As he took the few steps to the Rover, I saw he was tall, square, solid—the antithesis of Toby; middle-aged, middle-class, well-dressed, square-featured, brown-haired, clean-shaven. I liked his looks; I liked his bulk. I’ve always seemed to fall in love with thin (Terry) or small (Toby) men; and a man like that who looked like a bulwark could not but appeal, other things being equal.
He drove ahead of me to a lay-by, where he drew in, and then leant across to roll down his offside window and ask, ‘Are you local?’
I pulled up level with him. ‘Yes. I live in a cottage over there. Why?’
‘Only that we’ll be neighbours.’
‘Oh really? Where are you going to live, then?’
‘Back there, where you first saw me.’
‘But there isn’t a house anywhere near there.’
‘I know. I’m going to build one.’
Oh, God. Bulldozers, builders, noise, despoilation. I suppose it showed in my face (every bloody thing does, apparently) because he grinned a bit ruefully and said, ‘Sorry. But it won’t last long, the upheaval I mean, and after that I’ll let nature take over again. It’ll all look very green and unscarred by the time I’ve settled in—I’ll bury the house in trees—you’ll hardly know I’m there.’
Our eyes met for about two seconds and something in me registered: possible. Later I asked Jo about him. She knew at once who he was.
‘His name’s Felix Andrews. He’s an architect, quite successful I believe. Moving out of the Smoke and going to build his own country house. He’s bought quite a large acreage from George Downing, over the other side of the wood.’
‘Yes, I know, that lovely open bit where the children can ride. Has he got planning permission?’ I asked unkindly.
‘Must have, surely. What’s he like?’
This question meant, Is he a possibility for either of us? And I answered it: ‘Nice, early forties, but of course he must be married.’
However, Jo knew all about that too, trust her. ‘No, he’s not, not any more. He must have been, at one time, because he’s got a grown-up son—’
‘Doesn’t necessarily figure, as we know—’
‘Come on, we’re not all like you.’ I may say that after seven years of the closest ties, she only just knew me well enough to get away with that kind of remark, even though I’d asked for it. ‘He’s probably a widower. Anyway, according to the grapevine he’s building this house for himself and his-son-at-weekends, sort of thing. It won’t be very big. Meanwhile he’ll be down in the district a lot, supervising the building. He’s staying at the Swan.’
‘With the Davies?’
‘Yes. It was Alf who told me all about him.’
Alf Davies, who, with his buxom wife Dora, ran the Swan Inn, had once been my employer. They had a daughter about the same age as David called Eleanor, known to Jo and I as Little Nell because she was so precisely the opposite of that pathetic waif—a fat little blonde replica of her mother, rosy-cheeked, good-natured, lolly-sucking, over-dressed and spoilt rotten as the only offspring of besotted parents (well, Dora wasn’t all that besotted, and frequently redressed the balance with a good clout on her ample bottom when Alf wasn’t looking). Naturally she was the butt of contempt of all her school-fellows, including my son, whom I could reduce to howls of outrage by reminding him that he had often, as a baby, shared a bed with her. I had a number of photos, taken by Alf with a flash, to prove it.
Alf, having despaired of the large family he had hoped to raise, had turned the slack of his overflowing energy to being the village gossip and matchmaker. Dora, un-cooperative in the matter of child-bearing, was more keen on Alf’s substitute enthusiasm, and, to hear them tell it, they had already ‘brought together’ several couples towards whose children they adopted a possessive attachment even when they were not invited to be god-parents. They both took a special interest in me, of course, and I couldn’t help wondering whether all this information, filtered through Jo in Alf’s typically elephantine idea of discretion, might not be directly aimed at promoting a match between me and this stranger.
‘I couldn’t marry a Felix, could you?’ I asked unguardedly, following in a completely unserious way this train of thought.
Jo looked at me sharply. ‘Hey! Was he as attractive as that?’
‘Oh, don’t talk cock.’ (Dottie’s style, not mine; I was startled to hear myself say it, especially to Jo. I only use male swear-words under high pressure. I hadn’t realised, till I said that, that I felt under pressure then.)
I had next encountered Felix Andrews in the saloon bar of the Swan when Jo and I went in there some days later to pick up our kids, who were in the Davies’ living-room behind the pub attending Eleanor’s eighth birthday party. This occasion held sufficient hedonistic promise to overcome their everyday distaste for the hostess. I had thought this highly hypocritical and had tried to dissuade David from going, but he just looked at me as if I’d gone daft.
‘But Mummy, it’s her birthday! I mean, it’s a party, with games, and presents, and special food, and a conjuror.’
‘Well, I hope you’ll take her something very nice, to make up for all your beastliness to her.’
‘Oh yes . . . Mummy, will you . . .?’
‘No, I won’t! Out with the old money-box, my lad, a personal sacrifice is called for.’
Now I listened through the pub noises for the lighter, shriller sounds of happy children at play, but hearing high-pitched shrieks instead I raised my eyebrows questioningly at Alf, who looked harassed.
‘Just a little contra tomps, I expect. With twenty-two of them in there, you can’t expect
much peace and quiet.’ He listened a moment, then his face changed. ‘My Gawd, it’s Nelly! What are they doing to her?’ And he dashed through the dividing door, leaving the bar unattended.
Several customers came in just then, and for old-time’s sake I ducked under the bar and began to serve them. Jo said, ‘Oh, come on, ducky, you don’t have to do that, he’ll be right back,’ in a slightly put-out tone, but I was enjoying myself and the jokes of two old-timers who knew me from my first year in the village when I’d acted bar-maid for Alf out of necessity. Now, when I had lived down my dubious fame as an unmarried mother and become a respectable shop-proprietor and—so to speak—village matron, it was amusing, and fun, to find I could still pull pints neatly and hadn’t forgotten my skills.
Suddenly I caught sight of Felix Andrews. I became self-conscious, and stupidly, snobbishly, wished myself on my own side of the bar. However, I had to brazen it out now, so I went up to him.
‘What would you like?’
He was staring at me. ‘Hallo Do you work here?’
I was relieved to get the chance to explain at once, and I did. He smiled. Did I detect relief there, too? We’re all snobs at heart, we English, all of us. And yet the feminine machinery went into automatic motion, because I immediately registered his relief as a compliment. Why else should he care if I was a bar-maid? What sort of list would I be struck off, if I were? He held my eyes, once again, a fraction too long for perfect casualness. I turned away quickly to serve someone else, and left it to Alf to find out what Felix Andrews wanted to drink.
The party, Alf informed us (all smiles now, having discovered that his Nelly had worsted her persecutor with a fat-handed blow to the ear) was going like a bomb, but was at the present-giving last stage. Our young would soon be available for us to take home. Meantime we might as well have a noggin—I think he was about to say ‘on the house’ but then he caught the eye of the architect and, divining his intention by instinct, bit back the words and waited. Sure enough, he came across to us. Seen like that in isolation, crossing a room towards us, he was easy to appraise as a good-looking, confident man. Jo straightened herself and I sensed her favourable reaction, even before she knew who he was.