Aunt Margaret's Lover (23 page)

Why
did
1
say that? What on earth did the Evangelical movement have to do with anything? I was appearing about as romantic as yesterday's cold crumpet. But you know how it is - here comes that incautious hurtling again. 'And then there's Jill - the one we're going to stay with
...'

'We are?' he said.

'Sorry. I haven't told you about that yet. But yes. She's my oldest and dearest friend and she lives in Northumberland and is a total romantic. This
...'
- I gestured - 'this could probably kill her
...'
I bent my elbow against the car and leaned my head in my hand. 'Well, not exactly. But it would seriously dent her.'

'Surely not?' he said.

'You don't know her. She has a market garden and thinks that baby leeks are the offspring of two adult leeks who are deeply in love.'

He laughed as he kissed me, which is quite a strange physical arrangement. However, putting out of my head the thought that the kiss might be a way of shutting me up and that a restaurant car park was not exa
ctly
Venus's shrine, I responded gamely and it was a success. I got that melty feeling inside that you are supposed to get, and - perhaps the best test of all - I was sorry when it was over. Funny how men, even quite ordinarily weak men, go all strong when they clinch. It must be the muscles seizing up in reaction. I didn't mind being held tightly because my ear was against his chest and I could feel his heart doing an Aurora Leigh too. It had been very nice, producing enough glowing embers for a good blaze ahead. I was perfectly happy to stay like that for a while. So why,
why
did I say, through the intimate beating of his heart, 'Well, thank God that's over . . .'

Not unnaturally he stood back and stared at me in wonder.

I explained as best I could that I had meant only that it was yet another hurdle between us negotiated. He replied, not unreasonably, and after which I felt suitably chastened, that he had not thought of it as a hurdle himself, more as an erotic part of the ritual
...
I agreed, very lamely, and then looked up at him. We stared at each other very hard, real deep-eyed stuff, forgetting the asphalt, the headlights, the accelerating cars.

'Are we ready for this?' I asked.

His eyes, my eyes, both held hesitancy. He thought for a bare wisp of time and then said, 'I don't know. Are you?' To which I said the same. And we went on staring at each other until suddenly he stepped back and looked me up and down, from frou-frou to
dtcolleti
to
les cheveux oranges,
and said, 'You look' - he touched my neck, which made me shiver - 'very fuckable.'

'Yes,' I said, looking around me suddenly and realizing we were in a car park, 'but not here.'

Of the blaze ahead we said little. In fact, driving back we said little about anything. Not a frosty silence, merely a thinking one. Once he asked me how I felt and I said the truth, which was that I felt nervous. 'Me too,' he said. I then came clean and told him all about the mundanity of my bed. It sounded extremely weird to my ears but seemed to make sense to him.

'We do have time,' he said.

'Yes,' I agreed, but I was sitting bolt upright, tense as a cat in danger.

When he stopped the car at my door, he turned to me and was smiling again. 'Perhaps we'd better knock on your friend's door - to show her that you are whole and unharmed.'

It seemed a much funnier and more welcome thing to do than pile into my house and my clean, brooding bedding. But not really practical. So into my house we went. And I suddenly realized that the problem
was
the house, although I was not at all sure what. Maybe it just wasn't romantic enough? Could it be something so silly as that?

'This is a very prosaic setting,' I muttered, turning on the kitchen light, thinking that at least Verity's kitchen had an aura about it. Mine really did look dull. I turned to him. 'Know what?' I said,
'1
think I have just discovered that I'm a romantic'

He laughed and sat down at the table. He put his chin in his hand and looked at me, very sideways. 'Well,' he said,

'you could have fooled me.' A response which, given my record to date, was hardly surprising.

'All the same,' I said, sitting opposite him, emulating his pose, 'all the same, I am.'

The upshot was that we had more coffee, talked some more, kissed and fumbled around a bit, let Verity speak into the answerphone - I knew she would call, I just knew
it
-
and he suggested that since we were apparently going away to Jill's very soon anyway, we could stop off on the way at a fancy hotel.
His
choice. The implication was that, since I had committed him to going away without so much as asking if he wanted to (which he did), at the very least he should decide the right place in which to begin our loverhood in earnest.

In earnest, I told the chaste pillows as I pulled back the duvet later. Silly cow, I told my reflection as I undressed. All the same, I was glad. It seemed much more of an adventure like this. And if there is one thing I do know from my experience of hotels, it's that they are very sexy places: you can be thoroughly irresponsible, quite anonymous, and somebody else has to wash up the glasses and remake the bed. As I slid off to sleep in my solitary fresh-Persilled mound, I found that I was smiling. If he didn't get sex on his birthday, then I should make sure he got a birthday of sex some other time and soon
...

Chapter Twenty

It was lovely to talk to you at last. You are probably right to be only cautiously optimistic about getting a show together for next

year but I mean to try. Have a good time at Jill's. I had a sudden tickle of homesickness at the thought of the season over there. I bet you're feeling quite lonely really. You could come over here. You could see for yourself how nice he is then.

Verity gave me a long, long lecture on how I should be cautious - to the point of not seeing Oxford any more. I got the distinct feeling that she preferred me as a female guru of the 'single and loving it' kind. I decided that the best thing would be to show her how it can work and be good, encourage her to unfold her wings and dare again. After all, even if love was not for ever, it could be good in its allotted span. I had no expectations, I told her, none whatsoever. She said, 'Hmm, I bet,' so that it was on the tip of my tongue to come right out with it and say
why
I had none. We reached a stalemate, or compromise, depending on which side of positivism you choose, and the days very nicely flashed by. This, suddenly, was living.

By the most curious quirk of female response I found that romantic excitement led to an outbreak of housework fever, and I spent a lot of my time tidying up. At first, I worried that it was a sign of the nesting instinct, but then I decided that it probably had more to do with clearing out the past.

It was as if I had been asleep for many years and had to start from scratch. Pregnant air - the house contained it. The house, a somewhat prissy individual, was sitting back on her matronly bottom and waiting for me to strike at her heart. I was extremely glad to be able to report to her that at least the first night of Picasso-type romping would not take place in
her
admonishing lap.

Saskia had left her room in immaculate shape, uncharacteristically, and I had only to water the plants or open a window for the new spring air to sweeten its staleness once in a while. The photographs that she had extracted from me sat in homely display on her shelves and I looked very hard at one or two of these. Somewhere my psyche seemed to sense a rush of air - as if a great and ponderous bird were slowly bearing its wings, about to take off and swoop down on me. I had felt its first faint flappings when Saskia decided to meet her father, heard as well as felt its beat as
her letters and phone calls multi
plied, and I knew that when she returned here, the beaten air would go swirling round, churning things up, settling them all back in a different and dangerous order. Dangerous? Why did I think it could be dangerous? To what was the danger? Stirred air settles again, in time, and leaves no trace of its motion.

In one of the photographs of Lorna I used to see a plea for vengeance - if not a characteristic of hers in life, then certainly one that I allowed to her in death. Now, suddenly, I saw Saskia's eyes in hers - not surprising since they were now not far apart in age - and Saskia's eyes were pleading for something altogether different.

No more housework today, I decided, and took myself out into the fine warm air instead.

Colin and I had lunch in a pub by the river. I said that the metaphor it presented of the flowing water of life was made more appropriate by my sitting with one old flame and discussing the new. 'Come off it,' Colin replied, with a dismissive - and offensive - wave of his hand. 'You can't dress
this
up so lyrically.'

I reminded him that Ovid had used a river several times to illustrate just such a fantasy, and that he had been among the most pragmatic of poet/lover combinations going.

' "Rivers know all about love themselves.

Inachus pined, we're told, for Melia the Bithynian

At her touch his icy shallows thawed."

'He gives a whole list of tough cookies whose lives are reborn by the eternal water's flow.'

'Knickers to that,' said Colin, raising his manly pint. 'All I'm saying is that you got this man out of a newspaper and you can't go turning the prose of that into poetry. You can try' - he swigged again - 'but even you won't be able to succeed with that.
That's
poetry,
this
is life.'

'I can succeed with anything, Colin,' I told him, 'because this is my fantasy. And since this is
my
fantasy - ' I stared out over the water, gleaming seductively in the sunlight, the brightness hiding any noisome objects that dipped and bobbed through its surface - 'it will be exactly as I say.'

'It'll end in tears,' he said defiantly. 'You should come a little more up to date in your literary leanings and think about Emma. Couldn't see the wood for the trees.'

I laughed. 'Do you mean Roger's new lady?' I asked innocently.

'I mean Jane Austen's female blind spot. As well you know.'

'You just don't want me to be any different from you and the hundreds of others who just muddle through instead of taking their destiny in their own hands and doing something
positive.'

'Emma Woodhouse,' he said. 'Would you like another half?'

While I waited, closing my eyes to the warm sun and feeling very much better now that I was out and about and not up in Sassy's room dealing with history's dust, I suddenly thought about the Nicaraguan question. There is absolutely no point in a man telling
a woman that there is something
pertinent to his
modus operandi
which he is obliged to keep from her. She may well sit there and nod sagely and appear to keep thinking only of the lasagne verde, but eventually she will be mighty curious, as I was now. What happened to his wife? What made him choose to go to the very depths of hell like a character out of Waugh? He was so
nice -
such an ordinary seeming man, really. So what could it be?

Colin's advice was to forget all about it. Concentrate on the here and now. If he was going, he had a reason. If he didn't want to talk about it, he also had a reason.
1
envy-men their simplicity. He was right, of course, and to concentrate on the here and now was exactly what I aimed to do.

'Talking of which,' Colin said, 'how is the here and now?' He winked across his cheese roll. I told him that we were saving that for a more romantic setting, so that we got it absolutely right first time. He stopped chewing and eyed me in amazement.

'You've gone soft,' he said.

'Romantic,' I corrected. 'And in a relationship between two
mature
people, it's perfectly easy. It's only when you mess about with giggly things fifteen years your junior it gets messy.' I leaned across and fixed my eyes on him. 'Why not try someone a little nearer your age? It could be fun. You could advertise. It does work
...'

Colin's eyes bulged. 'Not on your life,' he said. 'I'm staying just the way I am.'

'You'll be wearing a condom in your nineties,' I said scornfully.

'I certainly hope so,' he laughed. 'And I am not being Emma Woodhoused out of it.'

When I got home, I wrote to Jill. Because I didn't want to lie to her, my letter was fairly restrained. There was a new man in my life and I was bringing him up with me. I knew she would be pleased. Then I lay on my unseductive bed watching television, feeling pretty smug.
It
was nice to have a man out there for a while. And Colin, content in his bimbos, was absurd. Emma Woodhouse, indeed. I was surprised he had even read it.