Aunt Margaret's Lover (35 page)

There were plenty of absurd things to keep us going. Someone famous having his house party opened up to the goggling viewership (filmed in September, I imagine), someone else famous going around perching on children's hospital beds, and old films by the handful. I remembered how Jill had effectively blotted out any chance of talk by turning up the Delius. Well, maybe
Mary Poppins
wasn't in the same league, but what Verity needed was a bucket of sugar to make the medicine go down, and telly was the next best thing. I also bought a video of one of the oldest and worst of the
Carry On
films. Ho hum, I thought, just let her try to get maudlin over
that.

Jill wrote a short note in my Christmas card apologizing for her silly behaviour. She added, much more in the old style, that David had relented and invited Amanda and Co up after all. 'They both think I am completely potty,' she wrote. 'So I might as well act it. I've got the rosemary and rue, but would be obliged if you could send up a suitable frock for Ophelia, whom I suddenly understand rather well.'

'Just avoid sitting on your arras,' I wrote back. My reward was a fairly normal phone call. She was rushed, she was harassed, she was half looking forward to, and half dreading, the descent of her daughter, but it sounded as if Christmas had got her in its usual grip - hormones or no. She was very surprised that I was spending Christmas apart from Oxford. 'You can't be in love, then,' she said sadly, adding with astonishing ferocity, 'If you were, you would be
miserable
without him.' Ever the romantic, I thought, as I went back to decorating the tree.

Now, that
was
sad. No Saskia to help me, after all these years. I rang her on the spur of the moment, but she was out Christmas shopping. Dickie sounded as if he would like to talk. 'You must miss her,' he said. I had never yet exchanged more words than 'Can I speak to Sassy, please' or the like, and although it was the Season of Goodwill, I did not choose to do so now.

'Of course,' I said, and I asked him to tell her I had called. He wished me Happy Christmas. 'And you,' I mumbled - for wishing him anything happy was pretty phoney.

'You talked to Dad?' Saskia said later, when she rang.
1
could tell by her voice she was hopeful of something.

'Oh yes,' I said evenly. 'I was just decorating the tree and it reminded me of you.'

'I'm doing one here,' she said happily. 'We just went out on Sunday and cut one. Dad's never had a tree before and -'

'Mine doesn't look anything like as good as usual,' I interrupted. 'Not got your touch . . .'

And I steered her right away from the topic of what Dickie was and was not used to. She was drawing me a picture of a lonely, one-dimensional life and also trying to draw me into the pathos of it. But I would not be drawn, I would not. I felt lonely for Lorna, didn't I? Time never closes the gap left by a loved one. Why should I make cooing noises over the man who was responsible for that lonely space?

Chapter Five

I worry sometimes at the thought of leaving him alone again. But he says he's used to it. Sad thought.

Well, we got through the guinea fowl and the Queen, and Verity seemed to be on good form for a change. The only difficult bit was when she asked me what gift I had bought my absent lover. Her eyes widened, her mouth gaped, she sat back on her heels - we were playing Monopoly - and said, 'You bought him
what?’

'A travelling bag. A very nice leather travelling bag.'

'Christ!' she said, abandoning her bid for a hotel on Vine Street - nasty in-between place of no account anyway. 'How could you possibly do that?' And we were off again.

'What do you mean, how could I do that? I just went out with my cheque book, walked into a shop, and bought it. You know - like you do when you go shopping, Verity.'

'B
ut a travelling bag? I mean,
fuck
it:

'Don't swear like that.'

'But Margaret -' She ran a despairing hand down her face, impossibly dramatic. 'No wonder.the tag "Aunt" stuck. That's a ridiculous thing to buy a lover. Think of the message . . .'

'Message? I wrote a card that said "From me with love".'

'No, the message contained in the gift itself. That is . . .' She gave me one of her overweening patronizing looks. 'Well, I mean

'What?'

'Lovers exchange gifts that contain portents, or expressions of something. You buy Simon a travelling bag and he'll think you want him to go away.'

'Well, I do.' Mistake. Her eyes widened.

'What?'

'I mean I don't want him to feel tied.'

'Well, you bloody well should. What is the point of having a man if you don't want to tie him down?' She folded her arms. 'He'll go. He will. And
then
you'll know what it's like .
..'

The crowing had begun. Sometimes women are their own worst enemy. And sometimes a cliche is the only thing that will do.

I looked at my watch. Five-thirty. Time for drinking? We'd had tea and cake in front of the fire and I had protected Verity from her Sarah Gamp impersonation for qu
ite a long time - and, anyway, I
needed one.

'Right,' I said, reappearing with gin, tonic, ice and lemon on a tray. 'Drinks time.'

Verity stared mournfully into the fire, which was gas coal and therefore, thankfully, spared us the poignancy of dying embers. 'Mark's Christmas card came from Australia,' she said.

'Well, that's a relief.'

'God, you're a hard woman,' she said. 'I don't understand you. Here you are on Christmas Day with me - an old and miserable boot - when you have somebody lovely to love you.' She pointed a finger. 'You .
..
are crazy. Whatever the justification you give it,
you are crazy.'

'Better,' I said, handing her a glass, 'than feeling lonely, Verity, when they go.'

'Touché
,
she said, raising her glass. 'I'll drink to that.' And, by George, I'll say she did.

It was when she said, 'Buddhists believe it is insulting to mourn at the funeral of one who has had a long and fulfilled life,' that I knew it was time to see her home. Walking back in the sharp air, I thought that when all this lover stuff was over in my life, I would emulate Betty Ford and take Verity in hand a little.

And that was Christmas.

We were walking along the river's edge, waiting for the pubs to open for Sunday lunch, with those great, aggressive wads of rain forest, commonly known as the Sunday papers, wedged under our arms. One of the pleasures about opening these things away from home is that you can leave all the advertising that spills out of them - 'Is Your Home Fully Insured?', 'The Historical Book Club, Six Books for a Penny', 'Join the AA and get a free digital tooth pick' - for someone else to throw away. These Sunday lunchtimes had become an occasional ritual which we spent mostly in companionable silence. I suspected that this was what I would miss more than anything when he had gone. After all, it was one thing to cavort around in bed with someone - which can, with a little adjustment of the fantasy button, occur with many men - but quite another to sit for three hours reading the papers, eating toad-in-the-hole, and still to feel quite content and happy.

'I'm really sorry about the skiing,' he said. 'But when your mother breaks her arm and you're buggering off round the world in a few months, skiing seems a bit trivial. She can be quite volatile, my mother.'

'Do you know, I honestly didn't mind.'

He laughed. 'If things were different, I'd marry you for your amenability.'

'It's not entirely altruistic. I'm not sure I could cope with a volatile mother-in-law. My own mother was bad enough.'

'Did you never want children?' he asked, standing for a moment to watch the blue-nosed baby scullers with their fragile purple knees.

'Nope,' I said. 'Sassy was enough for me. And you?'

He shook his head. 'My wife did. But I didn't. I may have done in time, but . . .' He began walking again. 'As it happened, we didn't have a lot of that.'

'Do you want to talk about it?'

He smiled and shook his head. 'Nope. Let's just go and eat.'

Chapter Six

We have been doing so many things in these last weeks that I haven't had much time to write. I'll call you soon. Besides, I've got something very exciting to tell you. I got your card from Paris. Dad said maybe he and I would go there together one day. I should love to see the Cezannes with him.

Verity roams her house on a dull late winter's evening. Bloody February, miserable month. She is searching for an answer from her several domestic confidantes. Will the telephone tell her? She stands beside it. 'Speak, you bugger,' she says to it.
'Speak.'
The telephone does not. Frankly, it is exhausted and confused, for she has been picking it up and dialling all but the last digit of a number before flinging it down on to its rest for most of the day. Any pal would feel bruised by such an experience so it remains silent, mute and impervious. Verity shakes her fist at it, thereby spattering it with drops of gin and tonic. No telephone enjoys a cold shower after a day of abuse. So it will not speak, it will
not.

Neither the hairbrush nor the mirror has fared any better. A hairbrush feels that its purpose is to give a healthy shine to a head of hair while the mirror sits there to compliment the end result. It does
not
feel that its owner is entitled to give herself a cursory run through the crowning glory and then hurl the servant bristles across the room. And this happened not once but several times, in one instance shattering a piece

of Spode which said servant hairbrush always enjoyed looking at in its rest periods. And the mirror, which would like to reflect love of self, the private assessment between human and mineral, does not appreciate being called a stinking traitor. These two objects can't find a good word to say for Verity at the moment. So far as her abuse of them goes, she has had her chips.

The bath? This has scum around it. It used to be a good friend - always accommodating, putting warm arms around her, providing scented calm to ease the bitter wrath. Not any more. If she cannot be bothered to be civil, then it will not be bothered to give comfort. From now on, the bath has vowed, when she gets in it will be gritty and greasy to her naked flesh and remind her of her sanitary betrayal. It politely ignored her perching bottom as she ran through a litany of happier times. Sure, it thinks, you did get up to all kinds of juicy things in mc with that Mark, and I was quite happy to let you - despite being designed for only one. But to say you will never clean me again in hating memory is to break contract.

Already the wash basin is flinching from a build-up of old soap, spatterings of toothpaste and worse. The lavatory could be next. It has had to put up with her bringing in the odd male, swaying as they pee, forgetting to put the seat down, leaving old condoms floating around after producing howling noises from down the corridor. It has gone too far. Spring is nearly here, and well-brought-up Crichton-ware expects a thorough clean around this time - not to be treated like the kind of facilities found in a squat on the Edgware Road. Uh-uh, Verity. Your bathroom suite stays united in this. No more kind accommodations to be had here*

Downstairs stands the cold, white German dishwasher. It is deeply offended for it was designed to rid the world of smells and bacteria, not to sit in other people's muck and create them. If the German were any less controlled, it would break down. It may well do so anyway because its owner has forgotten to give it salt for quite a while. Life without salt for a dishwasher is pure cruelty. Besides, it gets bored looking after so many gin glasses, and, though mindful of a particular need, bearing in mind its own origins, for a liberal attitude to ethnic minorities, it finds that sitting in take-away curry and residual Chinese for over a week does not incline it to unbend towards Verity one little bit. So when she crouches down and holds its sides and weeps into its melamine reflection asking for an answer, it abandons the notion of Zeitgeist and embraces Gestalt, because in Gestalt each individual part affects the other, which is what is happening among the half-scraped biriani and sweet-and-sour.

The fridge is fed up. Nothing in it for ages except ice cubes, tonic bottles and left-over smells from rotting vegetation. Verity promised it two weeks ago that she would fill it with good, fresh things - tomatoes, cucumbers, lettuces, olives, carrots, potatoes .
..
and, of course, those offending onions. She would, she said, eat healthily. She would, she said, abandon the chink of the glass for the clink of the spoon as it mixed up a good dressing. She would make soup, she would eat wholemeal bread and good-quality butter. And the fridge had believed it all, sat back, almost pouting with pleasure at the dishwasher (the fridge being Italian and inclined to be female), thinking, Here we go at last, back to doing the job I was made for. Then
...
Zilch. A lentil and coriander soup slowly going off, and the salad weeping into itself, getting soggier and soggier. If Verity thinks she can come here now and ask it to open up for her on anything good, she is mistaken. It is full of reproach and means to make that plain.

Even the wall, dear Tuscan friend, has had enough. It is one thing to have a hot cheek, sticky with tears, pressed up against you, and quite bearable to be shouted at from time to time - these things happen - but when it gets a glass flung full in its face, followed by a stream of scatological invective and several kicks from its owner's DMs, that would try the patience of a saint. The wall may have been beatific in some ways, but it is no Francis of Assisi and never said it was. Verity can go boil herself from now on. The wall has started to crumble and will never be the smooth, silent strength it once was to her. One kick dislodged a small piece of terracotta, and more will follow. It is a wound too savage to forgive. Verity may well crawl around on all-fours picking up the shards of glass and biscuity plaster, but the wall will never forgive her. Never. Its wound it will bear as silent testimony to her disgusting displays.
Minestra riscaldare,
soup reheated, as it has tried to point out, never works. No, no. Marco is yesterday,
Marco ieri.
Verity must in future bear what she has to bear alone.