Aunt Margaret's Lover (3 page)

Over the years we had become quite close. Once when I had delivered something and we were having a six o'clock sherry, I spoke my thoughts aloud: 'If I could end my days as calm and at ease as you are, I should be very pleased.'

'Ah,' she said, 'but being wheelchair-bound is rather an important ingredient in that. Don't wish your life away. You are half my age with a good pair of legs to run about on. Enjoy it. Nothing lasts for ever.' She pointed to the bottle. 'Including sherry.' She chuckled and held out her glass. 'Money helps,' she said. 'Money helps a great deal. And you must remember that since I was married I have never had to earn a living.'

'Amen to that,' I replied.

'Have you ever thought about giving up the shop? Doing something less pressured?'

I smiled. If her pictures were contemporary, her understanding of life was very old-fashioned. Saskia had a few more years of dependence ahead when this conversation took place, so the notion was quite untenable even had I the motivation. 'Impossible,' I said.

'You have missed out on fun,' she said. 'Don't you mind?'

I thought of the linen cupboard and smiled. 'Not really.'

'Well, you should,' she said thoughtfully, sipping from the little crystal glass. 'I certainly did in my youth!'

I smiled again. I doubted her notion of fun corresponded with the one I had just recalled.

I did eventually sell the shop though, but not for hedonistic motives. The economic climate - or rather the economic blanket fog - saw me struggling and when a Greek Cypriot framing chain offered to buy me out,
I
had no choice. From then on I simply became the manager and was surprisingly glad. For the first time I was free of accounting anxieties and it was like getting rid of a headache that you never knew you had until it went.

When Saskia decided she was going to see her father, she was very open about it and, like the sale of the shop, I was surprised at how easy it was to accept. They corresponded for a while and then one day the telephone rang. I answered it, and a hesitant voice - slightly transatlantic - said, 'Margaret?'

I knew it was Dickie, took a deep breath and answered, 'Yes, Dickie.'

He said, 'How are you?'

I said, 'I'm well. I'll go and fetch Sassy.'

He said, 'I wanted to thank you for -'

But I cut him short. 'Forget it,' I said, and called his daughter to the phone.

Saskia planned to go to New York by boat (having a romantic nature and a friend who had done it) and to effect this by working her passage. At the last moment the arrangement fell through, so I paid. It was my eighteenth-birthday gift and nothing - not even Saskia's urgent dissuasion - could deter me. It came to an interesting sum, one which meant remaining firmly in gainful employment, and one that had my friends' eyeballs whizzing like the symbols in a fruit machine.

'But you can't,' said Verity, who lived in my road and wrote sharp modern feminist stories and scripts. 'You'll need a second mortgage for this!'

'Don't forget that the house is really Saskia's. I would never have got it if Dickie hadn't -'

'How are you going to pay for it?'

'I have taken out a second mortgage.' I looked at her. 'Only a very
small
one,' I babbled. 'Really. Very small indeed.'

Verity looked at me as if I were sipping hemlock. 'The fun?' she asked.

'That'll happen,' I mumbled. After all, I still had my savings. Not a vast nest egg, but enough to cushion me if business at the shop declined, and a sum I took comfort from whenever those midnight panics about security took a hold.

'Hmm,' she said. 'You work dawn to dusk as it is.'

'I want her to have it. I want her to have New York and Canada in style. And if you say anything to her about the cost, I shall brain you.'

I knew that all I said was true, but I also knew that there was another important aspect. I did not want her to have to take one penny from Dickie when they finally met up. Nothing. Zilch.

After Verity's response, I decided to lie to my oldest and dearest friend, Jill. If Verity whom I had only known for about five years reacted like that, what would a pal of thirty years' duration say?

'It's a trust fund,' I said when I telephoned her.

Well, it sort of was.

'She'd do better to keep it and go by Virgin,' said Jill. 'Come on Aunt Margaret,' she said, in her no-wool-over-my-eyes telephone voice, 'you just don't want Dickie muscling in on the act, playing the generous father.'

'She needs to have a sensible amount of spending money,' I said, trying not to sound defensive.

'Saskia wouldn't mind working when she got there. Or taking some of what's due from her father. She would hate to think you were overstretching yourself just to make a point.'

'I want to do it,' I said firmly. 'Cut off nose, spite face,' she said.

Sometimes I am very glad that Jill lives a long way away. Her starry eyes can occasionally go quite hard.

'You should have a fling. A romance. You deserve it now.' She sighed, a long, mournful exhalation.

I changed the subject quickly.

'You sound a bit low. Are you?'

There was a pause and then another sort of musing sigh. 'Well,' she said eventually, 'I'm looking across the sitting-room. At the far end, resplendent on my flounced chintz couch lies the husband of my life, the father of my children. Those same children who smile gummily down from their photographs. The son and the daughter whom we laboured over and who are now respectively at an agricultural college in Amsterdam, and breeding my grandchildren in Wiltshire. It is to be hoped that Giles is, at least, having a few frolics among the tulip-growers. Amanda is, alas, a clone of her parental example
-'

'Don't be bitter
-'

'I am not,' she said peevishly. 'Let me continue. The
Sunday Times
is draped across his upper region, which has a certain rotundity not noticeable when we used to bonk all night in Brighton. This rotundity moves gently up and down. The eyes are closed, the head thrown back revealing a slightly stubbly chin -
not
designer - from the regions of which there issues the noise of an adenoidal two-part harmony. We have exchanged several interesting words this morning. Like "Pass the marmalade," "Have you got the
Review?"
At lunch it hotted up. "Pass the mint sauce." "Is this English lamb?" "I'll need two shirts on Tuesday morning - one to wear and one to pack." "Potato, please
..."
Tonight we are having one or two of his colleagues over because they can't quite get all their talking done during the week and
-'

'Enough,' I said. 'You paint a pretty picture. I'll come up for a weekend soon. After Saskia sails. I won't be able to spare much more time at the moment.
..'

Jill sighed. 'Don't leave it too long,' she sighed again. 'For I believe I am turning into wallpaper. Bye-bye for now. Lo, Leviathan stirs . . .'

After Saskia sails.
The phrase had a dull resonance like a hammer on a long-unpolished gong. Loneliness, that was my fear. How to turn it into freedom?

Chapter Four

Thus to Mrs Mortimer's exhortation to 'kick up my heels' for a bit, I smiled ironically. I really wasn't in a safe financial position to do anything immoderate. At least, that was my excuse. Perhaps a bit of travel would be fun, but I wouldn't have wanted to trek across the desert on a yak. She laughed when I said this.

'How different we are,' she said. 'I should love to
...'
She eyed me for a moment. She was good at this, and possessed a disconcerting perception. 'How are you feeling about life after Aunt Margaret?'

I did not mention the lacklustre resonance of the gong. Instead I changed the subject. For I am quite good at that. 'I do admire the way you live alone. I always assumed a wheelchair would make its occupant domestically dependent.'

'Not at all,' she said. 'You adapt very quickly. Though I dare say as time marches on it will be different. I shall cross that bridge when I come to it, for the very notion of paying a companion - or worse, some kind of nursing auxiliary - is most unedifying. No doubt Julius will sort something out for me eventually. The Stanna he put in is an absolute godsend. He's very good. If only he didn't like Victorian painting, we should get along very well. . .'

Julius, her son, who had done India and the Maharishi, finally settled down to a job in Post Office senior management. He married his secretary, had two children, and lived in Virginia Water. Like so many from that time, he swapped his laid-back, drop-out days for the solid bourgeois comforts of life in a rural Lutyens estate, and had nothing left to explore. He thought his mother had a screw loose - a wheelchair = low brain power, especially in elderly ladies -and she was happy to let him go on thinking so. Mr Mortimer senior, a solicitor, had been dead for some time before I first met her. She said little about him except that he had left her very comfortably off and had been a good man. Her wealth was not boundless but enough to indulge her whim of collecting, to take the occasional cruise, lose a little here and there at bridge, and generally conduct herself contentedly.

The major excitement in her life, some years previously, was the purchase of an electric wheelchair. She wanted a wheel on the wild side, and when she first took delivery was unstoppable.

I first confronted this new and dangerous phenomenon when she fairly charged into Cork Street for the opening of an exhibition of Picasso etchings. Very erotic - or should I say
explicit -
etchings, produced in photo-gravure. I was already in the gallery when she arrived and looking out for her. The car set her down, the two ramps that the hire company always used for her transportation were put in place, out she came backwards, and then, like some fairground toy, she whizzed around with a look in her eye that I can only say made me glad to be on the safe side of the glass. The chair was extremely smart - black and chrome - and had buttons on the arm. She pressed one, accelerated, ran straight into a couple who were preparing to make an entrance, and knocked them out of the way as cleanly as a skittle ball. There is a kind of horrible humour in the frustrations manifest upon those who have been severely bumped by a wheelchair. On the one hand they wish to shake their fists, to swear, to hit back, at least to protest loudly. On the other, they perceive a disadvantaged member of society. The man readjusted his hat, the woman gave her battered ankles a rub, and Mrs Mortimer, with a brief apologetic exchange, sat, completely in the way, and waited for the gallery minions to aid her through the door. Once through and spotting me, who it must be said was frozen from both suppressed laughter and a desire to remain unnoticed, she bore down Nigel Mansell-style, scattering the cognoscenti in her way like slaves before Nero.

'What do you think?' she asked, eyes bright, fingers playing with buttons that turned her hither and thither until I felt she must surely be sick.

'Very dashing,' I said. 'And potentially lethal.'

'I could probably take you for a short ride if you sat on my lap,' she said cheerfully. 'Care to try?'

'No,' I said, though a little part of me thought how wonderful it would be to ride down the length of these polished boards. By this time the art world had got very fusty and pompous and the old days of iconoclastic happenings and events had long gone. We were well and truly into gilt-edged, blue-chip, safe investment - the Picasso exhibition being a part of that.

'I'll get you a drink,' I said, 'while you look at these.'

'Oh no,' she said. 'I'll get you one. Watch.' And off she went.

I did watch. So did the owner of the gallery. So did his wife and his pinstriped helpmate. So did his assistants, customers, poseurs. We all watched. And the expression on the face of the white-jacketed barman as she did her Ironside towards him was worthy of a snapshot by Diane Arbus. She made it to the drinks table, collected two glasses, and with the touch of a button began the slightly slower journey back to me. The barman never took his eyes off her. Neither did anybody else. I doubt if Pablo would have appreciated in his dotage (as he would have in his youth) the way his works on the walls were forgotten for the more immediate interest of one old lady clutching two glasses of wine and steering herself past those hallowed exhibits like something out of Fellini.

'I think,' I said quietly, 'that we should just go slowly along looking at the work or there's likely to be a rebellion. Can you put that thing on manual and I'll push?'

'I don't want to,' she said. 'And there will not be a rebellion because they know I shall be buying.'

'Will you? You haven't even looked at them yet.'