A Glove Shop In Vienna (21 page)

I took the chopping-board from her and reached for the onions. Thus covered for impending tears (Daniel and Vanessa were outside playing with Kirsty’s Shaun) I began to tell her about Stefan.

‘Oh, Helen, you poor old thing! Mind you, I’ve been expecting something like this. You’ve had that sort of
look
. And you’ve lost your smugness.’

‘Was I smug?’

‘Oh, well, a very little. Just a touch of “I can’t see what all the fuss is about” when other people came unstuck. Not much of the divine discontent.’

I reached for another onion. ‘Well, there’s plenty now,’ I said, dabbing at my face.

‘What’s he like?’

I said I didn’t really know any more. He had green eyes and said his ‘Rs’ in a funny way because his mother had been Viennese and when we went out to dinner he buttered my roll. Then, reaching new heights of originality I said that without him I was probably going to die.

Kirsty poured out a tumbler of wine and pushed it over. ‘It’s pretty disgusting. I was going to marinate something.’

I drank it down. A mistake. Experiencing suddenly total recall, I began to describe Stefan, gabbling like a mad nun reciting a litany.

When I had finished, Kirsty put down her knife and said; ‘If it’s like that, then you must go to him.’

I stared at her. The Bartok was finished. The children’s voices came from outside.

‘You’re mad, Kirsty. I can’t leave John. I can’t break up our marriage. And the
children
…’

Kirsty looked at me. ‘It’s tough, I know. But you’re living a lie, aren’t you? Lying beside one man and pining for another. It’s disgusting, that. Children make out. Husbands, too. You should have seen Chris when I left him and within six months he was having a fantastic time with Sarah. And look at Shaun -he’s all right, isn’t he? It’s lies that kill, Helen. Anyone can stand a bit of pain, but there
has
to be truth.’

I felt suddenly sick with terror.

“We’re all right, John and I. We’re
good
.’

‘If you’re all right,’ said Kirsty sternly, ‘why are you here howling into my marinade? Why have you lost half a stones since you came back from Russia? Don’t lie, Helen, not to anyone. Lying’s the end.’

I went home, my head ringing with Kirsty’s words. She was right. I had been smug. I
did
lack courage.

Stefan! If I was brave enough I could be with Stefan.

Four days after my visit to Kirsty, John came home with a little clump of primroses. ‘They’re the first ones. I found them on the bank at Dundry.’ He put them gently into my hand. ‘I’ll bring back a pot tonight. They’ll grow all right, you’ll see.’

I knew then that I would never leave him.

So Stefan’s letter remained unanswered and the dearth began again. I stood it for a couple of weeks and then I went to see Elaine.

Elaine was married to a businessman. She lived in a Regency house filled with Famille Rose china, potted orange trees and exotic
au pairs
whose emotional disasters were our staple gossip. Her taste, her flair for clothes were a byword. She also handled, with competence and warmth, three sturdy little boys and a jet-setting husband too handsome for his own good.

I usually went to see Elaine on a Sunday morning when Tony went sailing and she sat on a chaise-longue in a series of devastating kaftans, combing her snow-white Shi-Tzu, manicuring her nails and swearing to give up alcohol, dinner parties and sex.

‘Helen, how lovely! I’ll get Conception to make us some coffee.’

I shook my head. ‘I’ve just had some. Elaine, I’m in such a mess, I
have
to talk to you.’

And I began it again, my wail, my litany. ‘I feel so empty and awful without him, as though everything had dried up inside. It seems so
wrong
to turn your back on something like that.’

‘Oh, I know, darling, it’s quite, quite dreadful loving someone like that, but really rather marvellous too, and in a way it’s what you
need
.’

I stared at her. ‘What is?’

‘An affair, of course. A bit of fun and excitement. I know you and John are very good and of course it would be
madness
to leave him, he adores you and he’s such a pet. But with a little spunk and intelligence…’

‘Elaine, I don’t think I
could
. Even now when I lie to John about something quite unimportant I feel physically sick.’

Elaine twisted the rubber band neatly round the Shi-Tzu’s topknot and set him down. ‘I’m afraid feeling sick’s part of the job, honey. Not sleeping, too. You must make sure you have plenty of sleeping pills, because they do
notice
if you don’t sleep and being noticed is the unforgivable thing.’

‘It sounds like an illness,’ I said.

‘I suppose it is in a way.’ She smiled. ‘But a
lovely
one. People are so stupid – all that about loving only one man.’

‘Can you really sort of plough it back into your marriage? The happiness you get from someone else? Like manure?’

‘Heavens,
yes
. I reckon some of the best times Tony and I have had have been because I felt as guilty as sin.’

‘You make it sound fun,’ I said wistfully.

‘Oh, Helen it
is
, I can’t tell you what fun. Only you don’t get anything for nothing. You just have to take all the beastly scheming and plotting on the chin. It’s the blabbers that are the criminals – the ones that run to their husbands and confess when the going gets tough.’

I left Elaine’s walking on air. How stupid I had been! It was so easy really. I was going to see Stefan and love him dementedly and everyone would be better for it —
everyone
!

In three weeks the children broke up. I would send them to my mother. Then I would tell John that I was going to stay wit my cousin, Laura, in Lancaster and spend a whole week with Stefan.

No, not Laura. Laura was coming to stay in the summer and she was terribly fond of John. I couldn’t burden her with a secret like that.

Well, then, I would tell him I needed a week to research a novel. Then I’d have to
write
a novel, of course, but that did not matter. I’d say it had a Scottish background and then—

And then he would offer to go with me. John had always wanted us to go to Scotland on our own.

Perhaps we’d better just take a weekend first, Stefan and I.

‘John, I thought I’d go up to London for a weekend and see that Islamic Exhibition. Could you cope with the children?’

‘Of course, lovey. Do you good to get away; you’ve been looking a bit peaked. I’ll have something in the oven for you on Sunday night. And how about getting yourself a new coat? I’ve got my examiner’s fee coming for that Ph.D.’

‘But you wanted that for some new binoculars.’

‘Oh, the old ones are all right. Honestly.’

And as he stood there, his eyes shining with delight at my coming treat, I felt my beautiful, sophisticated affair curl up and die beneath my feet.

If I sought out Trudy, the last of my special friends, it was because I knew exactly what she would say and I needed to hear her say it. She was a bit older than the rest of us, a Quaker who taught in a comprehensive school and still had time to bake her own bread, cope cheerfully with a brood of teenage children and secure for her husband the peace he needed to write his history books.

‘Helen, no one can tell another person what to do. But you know what I think. Keeping faith, being truthful, sticking to your bargain — these things weren’t meant to be easy. But without them – well, I don’t think there’s any way forward.’

‘I… must put him out of my mind?’

Trudy looked at me, a fearful pity on her face. ‘Absolutely, love. For ever. No backsliding. Because once you marry and have children you can no longer confine the paying to yourself. Others pay, always, when you grab and cheat. Oh, Helen, don’t look like that. Have a bun, love – have a big cream bun.’

I took it and ate it. A bun from Hades, from an Egyptian tomb.

That night I wrote to Stefan and said no, there was nothing for us and we must not write or meet again. At least that’s what I meant to say. My ‘no’ took five desperate pages. Like everything I did concerning him it became, somehow, an act of love. So I tore it up; did nothing.

Well, it was over now. I had stood up to be counted and the reckoning had gone against me. Kirsty’s way was no use to me, nor Elaine’s, though both were right for them. It was Trudy who spoke for me.

Or was it? One day, waiting on a windy corner for Vanessa to come from school, I remembered my old tutor at college when I went to her with some problem. She was a refugee from Hitler and what she had said was: ‘When you get to heaven, Helen, they won’t ask you if you’ve been Moses or Abraham. They’ll ask you if you have
been you
.’

Only who was ‘I’? It seemed I did not know.

All that summer I went into myself with a pickaxe, trying to cut out cant, hypocrisy, fear… seeking desperately for a solution which, however tentative, should be my own. Then, at the end of August, I went to a concert. It was Haydn’s
The Seasons
and when I came out of the concert hall I knew what I was going to do.

Oh, I know it’s a foolish, imperfect answer; I can see a hundred ways in which it might fail. But I’m going to take one day and one day only of every season of the year and spend it with Stefan. It’s my pledge (on the heads of my children, I pledge this) not to grab one hour more, not to write or phone in between or lapse into the furtive delight of an affair. But once in every summer, once in autumn, once in winter and once in spring, I’m going to be with him.

Tomorrow is our first day. A year has passed and it’s autumn once again. No Russian birches this time, no great man’s grave. But I’ll buy a bunch of asters at the station and perhaps, somehow, they’ll know, the Brides of Tula, and pray for me.

It was the kind of place you go to to get out of the rain or to amuse an ancient relative with a passion for stuffed ptarmigans, assegais and the less important kinds of mummy. A tiny, old-fashioned museum - The Havelock, they called it -tucked away in one of those quiet grey squares between the London Library and St James’s.

A place in which one might have expected to meet anything -except one’s fate.

It was November — somehow it always seems to be in that part of London – with the bobbles on the plane trees swirling out of the mist and splayed leaves on the pavement. My wife wouldn’t come – she had an ‘engagement’ and because I suspected what that engagement was, it was with the familiar ache gnawing at my stomach that I paid my entrance fee, walked past the bust of William Havelock in his pith helmet and found myself gazing into the placid eyes of an aardvark standing solidly astride his piece of painted veld. A family of white-tailed gnus stared from a glass case, a sea-lion reared its majestic chest from a mahogany plinth. It was very quiet.

I wandered past a case of exotic butterflies, models of outrigger canoes in bark, dice made out of knuckle-bones… Havelock clearly had collected everything. Then suddenly out of a door marked ‘Private — Staff Only’ there erupted a girl… A knock-kneed, tangle-haired girl carrying a hippopotamus harpoon, a bell-jar of stuffed willow grouse and a cardboard box.

It was all too much. The cardboard box slipped, fell and a dark and unpleasantly mottled object rolled across the floor. A shrunken head, not in the best state of preservation. I retrieved it. She thanked me, apologised, smiled. Then she put down her load again and said, ‘Are you enjoying yourself? Would you like me to show you round?’

I must, I suppose, have said yes. At any rate she showed me round. No, what am I saying? She gave me that museum, she laid it at my feet. I felt she would have torn the exhibits from the walls and put them in my cupped hands, so demented was she to share, to give.

‘It’s such a lovely place — no one ever comes, but they
should
. Look, that’s a naked sea slug - they’re very rare in Britain -don’t you like those purple tentacles? And those silk moths are descended directly from the ones belonging to the Emperor Wu-Ti — the one who bred the Heavenly Horses, you know -and we have the best collection of East Indian sea-shells in the world; a dear little professor sent them from Kuala Lumpur. Did you know that some shells are whorled sinistrally and some dextrally? I didn’t until I came to work here.’

Her hand hovered above my sleeve; her heart too no doubt-on mine, on anybody’s… A cornucopia of a girl who went on talking even on an inward breath. And suddenly I imagined her making love like a football supporter, lurching out into the night afterwards to assault total strangers with her happiness.

‘Listen!’ she said. We had come to a case of stuffed roe deer: a stag and a hind prancing over some rather wilted heather. She pressed a button and suddenly the museum was filled with an extraordinary mournful, honking sound.

‘They’re roe deer rutting noises,’ she said, her plum-coloured eyes glistening with pride. ‘Mr Henry had them put in. He was our last director, he’s just retired. We’ve got some swamp noises too, in the other room, to go with the dinosaur bones. Would you like to hear them?’

But at swamp noises I stalled and excused myself. It wasn’t until I let myself into the flat and my stomach-ache returned that I realised it had disappeared during the last few hours. And yet who could I blame? I had wanted to get married, not Vivian. She had warned me all along that she couldn’t bear to be tied. ‘If you start being jealous, Paul, it’s the end,’ she had said. So I wasn’t jealous. There was just this incessant pain in my guts. I suppose that’s all jealousy is. Just pain.

The next day I went back to the Havelock with my new bunch of master keys and let myself in at the back, walking down corridors cluttered with specimen cabinets, old wall charts and piles of skins towards the director’s office. Though it was early, I was surprised to see a number of people already at work, A gorgeously dressed and rather pregnant Arabian lady was sorting osprey eggs, an ancient, bald little man assembling ichythosaurus bones, a boy in tattered jeans hammering at a display case…