Colouring In (30 page)

At Christmas, I did have a little set back. I had this card from Yarmouth: Gary. He said he was well settled but thinking of coming back to London one day. He said he’d look me up, and he hoped all my scars had healed. For a while – I was alone in my flat – I felt knocked off my rocker, sick. I wondered if he would haunt me, taunt me, for the rest of my life. Would I ever be rid of him?

I told Henry, of course. He said ‘Don’t you worry, Gwen, I’ll look after you. I’ll protect you from anyone or anything that ever threatens you: you’ll be all right with me.’ I believed him, of course. That was very comforting, knowing there’s someone to protect me. But all the same, deep in my heart there’s this small, persistent fear. It was when I told him about Gary’s card – we were in our usual corner of the Witch and Broomstick – that he took my hand for the very first time. He ran his fingers over mine. They were so huge, strong. His nails, I suppose from the building work, were never quite clean, but not unpleasantly black. He gave my hand a reassuring squeeze. Then he patted my knee and said he was going to order more drinks. Being the festive time of year, we were going to celebrate – not just Christmas, but the good luck of having met me in the first place.

Dear Henry. He gave me a bag for Christmas, which we spent together in my flat. The most beautiful bag I’ve ever seen, black leather, with my initials engraved on a small golden plaque. I’d knitted him a jumper. He said he’d wear it till it fell apart.

And so we carry on with our lovely, gentle friendship, sure of each other. Needing each other but not imposing on each other. There’s never been any talk of moving in together or making it all official in some way, and I don’t suppose there ever will be. We like it as it is. It suits us very well. Each of us having our own little bit of life, and then the regular meetings that we can count on. We’re not hampered by those youthful desires of the flesh – and I did once explain to Henry they’d never bothered me very much – but there’s a warmth and an understanding between us that, after Barry in Blackpool, I never thought I’d find again. Only this time I won’t be let down. I’m positive of that.

Only last week Henry came up with a lovely idea. He said he’d take me dancing. ‘Not tap,’ he said. But he knew a very exclusive place where we could glide around a ballroom with a lot of others of our own age. ‘Oh my,’ I said, ‘I’ve nothing to wear.’

‘You go and buy yourself a nice dress,’ he said, slipping a bundle of notes into my hand, ‘and what with that and your green coat and your new bag, you’ll be the smartest woman there. I’ll be very proud of you.’

No, it’s not a dream. We’re set to go dancing on Wednesday night. I was so excited at work this morning that I dropped the hoover and had quite a business putting it back together. I told Mrs. G what had happened, and why, and she laughed and laughed as if she shared my excitement.

I bought a lovely dress, the sort of blue Mrs. G likes, and Henry is to wear his Sunday suit. He said we’d sit at a small round table lit with low peach-coloured lights, and the waiter would bring us drinks on a tray. Then the band would strike up, all the lovely old tunes –
Dancing on the Ceiling
, perhaps – that my mother used to play on her gramophone. Then we’d get up, and have a go, and I’d pray to God my feet would remember. Only twenty four hours till Wednesday.

‘You’re a lucky woman, Gwen Bishop,’ as I say to myself so often.

The swivel chairs arrived this morning, signifying the end at last. It’s finally done now. Finished. The office, built onto one end of the house with a huge picture window over the marsh, is ready to go. At opposite ends of the room we have our desks and our computers. Business, after a slow start conducted on the kitchen table, now seems to be taking off.

The house, too, is more or less finished: just a few more of Rosie’s pictures to hang. She came back and saw it the other day, and unlike most people who are appalled at what others do to their houses, was enchanted. ‘You’ll never want to leave,’ she said, and she’s right.

‘She’s absolutely right,’ Carlotta said this morning at breakfast, grumbling because it was her once-a-month day to go to London. Her firm was so shocked when she gave in her notice she was persuaded to stay on a very ad-hoc basis, working from home, attending just a monthly meeting. There’s a dreamlike quality to how it all happened, still pretty hard to believe.

I brought Carlotta to see the house on the worst possible day – gusts of rain across the marsh, sea invisible, mud, cold… We sat round Rosie’s fire drinking red wine and I was positive she wouldn’t agree to do the house even before the promised departure to New York.

But over dinner in the hotel that evening she said she loved it, she could envisage the whole thing. And when, next morning, we went back to the house and there was a sheen of sun over the marsh, and a thread of silver tinsel sea on the horizon, she seemed lost for words. I had an inkling she just might want to prolong the time she took to transform it.

I can never be quite sure how it came about, but there was little talk of New York after that. When the three assigned months were up, and the builders were still in the house, she continued to be in charge of it all. When I moved in, six months ago now, and the place was still pretty chaotic, she asked if I would mind if she stayed till it was quite finished. She slept in a tiny room at the back while I was installed in the large bedroom overlooking the wide view.

By now she was a Carlotta new to me, very different from the frantic London woman who had both attracted me and irritated me when I returned from America. Here, she cast aside all her previous material interests, scarcely bothered with her appearance and looked a damn sight prettier for it: her striking face needed no embellishment. Also, a kind of sweetness of nature, previously hidden, seemed to appear.

My well-being seemed her prime concern, and she obviously loved the place, whatever the weather. Long before me she had established friends in the neighbourhood, and discovered just where to find the best fish and samphire, and the retired folk who sold redcurrants from their gardens. Often I would ask her if she was not lonely, missing London.

Absolutely not, she said: this was the place – although she had never known it – that felt like home to her. I didn’t like to question her further, but I couldn’t help wondering how she saw us. Never once did she give any hint that she expected anything more than our increasingly easy and lively companionship: we didn’t go in for discussing ourselves. I came to assume that, having not found the right man in her life, she was happy to settle for living with someone with whom she got on well, with whom she enjoyed a quiet daily life, working together and just being together.

Looking back, it’s hard to understand how blind I was. All the time she was working so hard, so brilliantly putting my house in order, I was convinced she required nothing more. Then one June morning I came down to the kitchen to find her not there. Unease struck me, but quickly melted away when she came through the door, hair wet and tangled. She’d been for an early morning swim. The look she gave me was … well, I don’t quite know what it was. Appealing, perhaps. Yearning. Longing. I reacted without thought. I stood up, quickly took her in my arms, muttered something about what an ungrateful cad I’d been, and breakfast was abandoned. We spent the morning watching the sun fill the bedroom: it was a very happy lost day.

So that was the turning point. In a funny way, it didn’t make any great difference, becoming lovers. Our days still chuntered along in their quiet way, the excitement being establishing the business. I found Carlotta to be an extraordinarily good business woman – no wonder her old firm didn’t want to part with her. I would never have guessed, in our previous life in London, how sharp was her business acumen, how persuasive her suggestions, how acute her judgments.

Together we researched the east coast for projects in need of funding, and were overwhelmed with requests. As Carlotta observed one evening, my own considerable stash would soon be gone. What we must do now is to find money elsewhere, something she sees as a challenge and, judging by the results, is another of her talents.

I go to London very rarely, and sometimes stay a night in Carlotta’s old flat. I usually find time for lunch with Dan, who seems to have real hope for his new play, but then I’ve seen that so many times before. Once or twice I’ve had supper with him and Isabel, and I suppose at some time we’ll have them to stay here. I’ve never had a moment alone with Isabel since that terrible last dinner.

But sometimes, when Carlotta’s away, I ring her. I tell her what’s going on, she tells me about Sylvie and Elli, all the work she now has, Dan’s progress. We never mention anything dangerous. But because I still love her, will always love her, these talks are, I concede, a form of infidelity. If she was no more to me than a friend, Dan’s wife, they would be innocent. As it is, it’s a form of infidelity I’m not prepared to give up.

From time to time I desperately need to talk to Isabel, to hear her voice, just to remind … Sometimes she asks if I’m happy. I say I am and she says she’s glad. She never asks about Carlotta, and I’ve never told her we’ve become lovers. She probably knows. When we speak (and I know it’s at times Dan’s out of the house) there’s a kind of silent acknowledgement – I think, I can’t be sure – that once, for a moment or so, there was a flash of light between us. All I need is to be reminded of that every now and then. It was my misfortune to fall in love at a late age, with my friend’s wife – but better than never having loved at all, I suppose. I’m reminded of the truth of that on the occasions when I talk to Isabel.

I’ve never said to Carlotta ‘I love you’, and doubt I ever will. I feel other things for her in abundance: respect, affection, admiration, warmth. But not quite love. She makes no demands about my feelings and is, I believe, quieter, happier, as contented as I can make her in her new life. I don’t suppose we’ll ever have children. There’s no talk of that. It would mean a very different life which I don’t think either of us would want. We’re happy, positively happy, as we are.

She swings round on her new chair, laughing. I swing round on mine which squeaks. She has the best chair. She deserves it. Her hair is windblown into a thousand curls, her feet are bare. My old, ambivalent fancy for her thrives. I don’t love her, but she’s wonderful. I’m a lucky man.

This afternoon, she reminds me, looking at her watch, we’re to go and see again one of Norfolk’s small, fine churches that’s in a state of poor repair. Years of jumble sales and fetes and raffle tickets have not yet raised an eighth of what is needed to replace the roof, and official help has not been forthcoming. We are to have tea with the vicar in his beautiful crumbling rectory, and hand over a cheque. He will apprise us of other, equally indigent churches. We will come back, and sit in our swivel chairs, and do our sums – Carlotta’s much better at that than me.

I love Isabel, I think, as I look at Carlotta’s feet. But when impossible dreams are replaced by such pleasure as I feel in this new life, a man has to be grateful.

‘Come on,’ urges Carlotta, ‘there’s time for a smoked mackerel sandwich before we have to go.’

It’s always a curious thing, as I said to Bert the other night, when you surprise yourself. If anyone had said to me, this time last year, your life is going to be facing a marsh, raising money for old churches and small local industries, I would have said they were completely barmy. But that’s how it is, and looking back I’m still not quite sure how it all happened.

I was enchanted by the location of Bert’s house, even though the first day I went there the rain was tipping down so heavily it was hard to see anything. I had immediate ideas about what should be done, how it could be, where an extension for the office could be added. So I agreed to Bert’s cheeky idea of putting off New York for three months, and the next day the rain had cleared and a vast sky was visible.

I suppose I’d never thought much about sky before. I mean, who would? In my childhood it was unremarkable patches of blue or grey between trees, and in London it scarcely exists. For so many years I’d been looking out of windows and seeing other buildings and the tops of trees, but although sun and rain determined the day, I was never consciously aware of sky. But here: well, it knocked me out. It was a vast dome I’d been missing all my life, awe inspiring, magnificent. You could stand on the dunes, fling out your arms and become part of the blue, float away from yourself among the spumy clouds. I remember, my second evening here, a fly-past of duck in strict formation crossing the expanse of opal, knowing where they were heading, their voices making small creaks in the silence.

I’d never seen a flight of duck before. I was hooked. I was a gonner. I knew, that evening, there was no question of going to New York, or returning to London and another high-paying, high-powered job. All I wanted was to stay with Bert in Norfolk, explore the quiet life.

He was quite different here, too. Less edgy. He stopped wearing waistcoats and was no longer sarcastic. He did go on making me laugh, but he kept a polite distance.

I couldn’t fathom what was going on in his mind about
me
,
us.
Perhaps nothing. I didn’t ask. I couldn’t bring myself to ask. He’d think it very untoward if I questioned what was plainly a good friendship. I think he imagined I was happy with things as they were, and we’d continue with the platonic arrangement maybe for years. It was certainly a very happy arrangement – we got on very well, like brother and sister. He showed me Norfolk, I taught him about computers and various tricks of business which intrigued him. But just occasionally I would look at him, reading by the fire in the evening, and think why the hell doesn’t he just walk over and seduce me? What’s the matter with me?

On reflection, I don’t think he thought there was anything much the matter with me, but it just didn’t occur to him to change the nature of our relationship. He’d had his chance, the foolish evening of the bared breasts, and he hadn’t taken it. Probably thought it was too late, now. But how did he imagine the future? Perhaps he thought some woman far more perfect than I could ever be would come walking along the marsh path one day, and he’d exchange her for me. Or perhaps he imagined I’d find the equivalent man, and leave him. He must have seen I didn’t give myself many chances for this: I scarcely ever went to London – he went more often than I did – and it was hardly likely I was going to fall for one of the brash summer visitors in the local pub. But actually I don’t think Bert did much envisaging of the future: he wasn’t a man of great imagination. One of the things I loved him for was his intense, enthusiastic concentration on present involvements.