Aunt Margaret's Lover (29 page)

'You've transformed the place,' I said.

'Well, Reg and I have been working after hours. He did most of the carpentry and stuff. I worked it out. Looks good, doesn't it? It's been more fun than trying to keep a boyfriend happy.' She embraced
le flick
and looked around, now with two proud eyes. 'At
least this was successful. Spite
ri Junior has definitely gone,' she said, pleased. 'So now we really are on our own.'

Reg popped out. Took one look at my hair colour, and popped back into his den again. 'Bless him,' said Joan comfortably.

Was this the girl who had once whispered from behind her grubby hand her suspicion that he was a nocturnal flasher? 'Busy, are you?' she asked. 'Enjoying the freedom?'

Was there an edge to the question? I struggled with my conscience. On the one hand Oxford and I had planned all kind of trips and treats for the next few months. On the other - well, I still had responsibilities here. Conscience pricked, and won. 'Would you like me to come back sometimes? Just to help out?'

If I had expected gratitude, I was disappointed.

'Oh no. We're fine. Really we are.'

I should like to think she was being brave.

So I took my redundant self home and gave her a grape-peeling lesson. That's to say I watched daytime television. Than which, arguably, there is no more decadent nor opulent waste of time in the world. Especially when you awake some hours later to the firm conviction that you have arrived in hell because two brightly clad young humans with smiling sickness are leaping about in that little square screen exhorting you to sing, 'If you're happy and you know it clap your hands
..

Part Two

Chapter One

After Margaret went home with what Jill found herself describing in her head as Lover Boy, Jill found herself suffering from what she - also in her head - referred to as PMT: Post Margaret Trauma. God, they had been so drippy. It took several days to overcome and several more days before she could bring herself to enter the spare room and remove the offending sheets. Margaret had left the room in a state befitting an exiting guest. The offending sheets and pillow cases were properly folded at the end of the bed, the four naked pillows were neatly arranged on the mattress, no more than barren contours beneath the spread-out blankets and immaculately smoothed crimson silk bedcover. The air in the room was musky with dried petals, and the fresh roses set there had become full blown. As Jill opened the door, sending in a draught, they finally released their blooms to fall in a soft scattering of faded colour on the dressing chest.
It
was a tableau to love, Jill thought, and she crossed to the window and threw it wide open to release the pungency of what she knew, heart and head, had taken place there. The wisteria tap-tapped away in the late afternoon light and Jill lay down on the bed and wept and wept and wept.

Later she gathered up the used bedding. She had left the door locked after the lovers had departed, but as her daily woman was now beginning to act as if she had Grace Poole shut away in there, she could no longer avoid dealing with the practicalities and did so with a certain painful tenderness. She carried the used linen as
a vestal virgin might carry the
robe of some deity, her arms out rigidly before her, her back straight, and she was aware that she looked sli
ghtly
mad. Going down the stairs, she paused to press her nose into the soft bulk of the fabric and she thought she could smell the scent of desire and joy in its folds.

When Margaret rang a day or two after the visit, Jill responded as best she could to the 'Well, what did you think?' and the 'Thank you for having us'. But with an excuse she put the telephone down as soon as she could, with relief. She had a creeping, depressing feeling that nothing would ever be the same again - not with Margaret, not with David, not with hearth and home, and not - most certainly not - with her long-term love affair with the production of vegetables. She straightened her back, told Sidney that she wished him to take on more help in the busy growing season, and loafed nervously around the house reading magazines and having long scented baths to while away the time. This strange behaviour lasted for a few days, though it felt as if it were much longer, and was terminated one afternoon when David returned early with a toothache that had dramatically begun to turn into an abscess. His ravaged, swollen face appeared round the bathroom door and his eyes, puffy as they were with pain, extended themselves in uninhibited wonder at the sight of his wife up to her neck in bubbles of lavender oil and listening to Cole Porter love songs.

Guilty to see her husband suffering and harrowed to have her secret discovered, Jill could not forgive him in her heart. Something died in her affections for him as she climbed soapily out of her delicious, watery cocoon to hunt down the oil of cloves and the aspirins.

'What on earth were you
doing
in there?' he asked peevishly as he hovered behind her while she sought the necessary medicaments.

'Riding a bloody bicycle, David!' she said, peering into the cabinet. The resultant irritation made her spitefully put more oil on the cotton-wool swab than was proper, so that his mouth stung for hours.

'Some men,' she said, having dressed herself and made him tea, which he could not drink because it tasted of cloves, 'might have found it exciting to come home unexpectedly and find their wives naked at four in the afternoon.'

'Some men,' he said in a muffled, grumpy tone, 'might find it
suspicious.'

Jill felt cheered. 'Oh,' she said. 'Do you?'

'Not at all,' he said with confidence, smiling bravely through the pain.

Later, when the aspirin and the antibiotics he had collected on the way home had begun to have an effect, Jill poured him a very large whisky. He declined because of the drugs and so she drank it instead.

'Women in the country do have affairs, you know. They get bored and they - well, look elsewhere.'

'Yes,' said David, not looking up from the crossword, his free hand pressed to his cheek. 'But not you.'

'And why not me?' She had another whisky.

'Because you are
not
bored. The reverse, thank God.'

'How do you know?'

'You always say how busy you are - rushed off your feet, busy, busy, busy . . .' He filled in some squares.

Jill wanted to pour her whisky over the newspaper, but sipped
it
instead. 'Busy may not be the same as not being bored.'

'Hellespont!' he said, throwing down the paper in triumph. 'Cracked it, tooth or no tooth.' He smiled at her, looking quite horrible with his misshapen face.

'There's no need to be so smug,' she said defiantly, 'I'm not exa
ctly
past it. Look at Margaret
..
.'

He patted the space next to him on the settee and extended his arm. A familiar gesture that both wrenched her heart and made her want to throw up. 'Come and sit here,' he said.

'Now you've finished the crossword?' 'Exactly.'

She did as he said. Maybe any touching would be a comfort. He tried to take the whisky glass from her, but she held on to it like a child with a sweet.

'Nobody's past anything in this house,' he said comfortably. 'And despite my aching tooth I did pause to notice how you looked as you stepped out of the bath. Not bad at all.'

Jill had the nauseating feeling she was being addressed as a carrot. That was the kind of thing David used to say when she inspected the crops and pulled one from the earth to show him. 'Not bad at all .
..'
Yes, it was exa
ctly
as if she were being held up for inspection, with a careless hand grasped around her young green shoots.

'I thought Aunt Margaret looked well,' she said, tracing circles round his knee. 'Didn't you?'

He pulled her towards him, arm round her shoulder, so that her head came to rest on his chest. 'You can always tell a woman in love,' he said. 'It just shines out of them. She'd dropped about ten years. Amazing the way she was showing her legs.'

Jill snapped bolt upright, banging her head against David's swollen cheek as she went.

'Shit, Christ,
fuck!’
he yelled, pushing her away and holding the place tenderly with his hand. He moaned softly and rocked himself for comfort.

'Oh God, I'm so sorry!' she said. But secretly she was pleased.

She stood up, draining the rest of the whisky. 'Do you want dinner?' she asked, looking at her watch. It was nearly six. She didn't feel like cooking for herself and was glad when he mumbled that he certainly did not
now,
and instead stumped off to bed to watch television and let the pills do what they could.

Bad cess to you then, she thought, wandering off to her office for no particular reason, aware that she was slightly drunk. Showing her legs, was she? Yes, she
was
.
.
.
And
stretching out a bare toe as she sat on the carpet near her Lover Boy, so that she could touch his leg with it. Provocative, really outrageously provocative, just like a teenager.
And
quoting Roman poets all over the place, with him chiming in the odd word here and there as if they were Romeo and bloody Juliet. Eyes across the dinner table and touching all the time. Private jokes! She swiped at a seed catalogue, which went tumbling to the ground along with a cascade of assorted paperwork. She would have left the mess by way of personal revolt were it not for the card that caught her eye. She bent and picked it up. Did the hungry, she wondered, still get sent signs like manna? For the card invited her to the opening party of the organic farm shop over the hill and far away. It was tonight, six-thirty onwards, and
it
was only just past six now. She could just get in the sodding car and go. Leave David to his bulging cheeks and bed-bound
TV
and be social somewhere.
Anywhere,
even if it was only an organic farm shop.

She skipped upstairs and plugged in her curling tongs. David, propped up on pillows, already in his pyjamas, said, 'Curling tongs?'

And she said, 'Pyjamas?'

She chose a long white pleated dress from the wardrobe, the one that David said made her look like
a refugee from an E.M. Forste
r film. Why not? she thought, rubbing scent beneath her armpits. With her hair in random curls and a rose-pink scarf round her hips, she thought she looked - well, if not like Helena Bonham-Carter
yet,
then the way she might become over the years.

The drive felt like a liberation. Empty roads, a short cut she knew past fields of young corn and the dying yellow of going-over rape fields. Poppies made their blood spots in the hedgerows and among the waving sunlit fields. The air was surprisingly warm. Or perhaps it was the whisky? Her bare arms were, she noticed, brown and healthy-looking up to the elbows, but white as milk above. It was the mark of a field worker. She turned on Radio Three but the undulations in the landscape caused interference - anyway, it was only some old medieval dirge being played. What she wanted was Elgar's
Enigma.
Corny but perfect, like all good cliches. But there was only a tape of
Gerontius
in the car. Well, that would do. She fast-forwarded it to the Good Angel's sweet farewell as Gerontius prepares to step into purgatory. She would have wept for the pleasure of it, only she did not want to mess up her mascara. She felt alive, whole again, like a young girl. Even the white dress seemed part of the sensation. She looked down and smiled as the Angel's voice soared -she had never tied a scarf round her hips in her life before. Well, well. And why not? And that was how it began.

When she arrived, the first person she saw was Sidney Burney. He was standing his ground in a large, contrivedly rustic room that had once been an immense barn. Swags of herbs hung from the rafters next to sides of bacon and impossibly decorative strings of white onions and pink garlic. Clean, white refrigerated displays of live yoghurts and butter and cheeses were chastely admonished for their modernity by renovated farm carts containing assorted, old-fashioned, nobbly vegetables. The nobblier the better for purveyors of the organic, she thought, smiling to herself. She picked out a dried apricot from a handsome wooden box and chewed on it as she wove her way towards her employee. As she approached, his eyes went shifty, lighting momentarily on the rose-pink scarf before looking away. She sashayed her hips dangerously, pretending it was necessary to pass by the various obstacles en route. In fact she was trying herself out, like a teenage girl who has suddenly discovered her attractions, and, like a teenage girl who has just discovered alcohol, she also wanted another drink. If Sidney Burney was hardly Mellors, he was a start.