Married Love (17 page)

Invited into Vivien’s bedroom, the girls had watched her change with skilful minimal movements into something pretty, tipping a bottle, dabbing perfume on pressure points, fixing earrings, skewering her feet into high heels. She had had a neat, miniature figure, had been quick and lithe and always on the move, talking and organising. She had lent them novels – Nancy Mitford and Dodie Smith – and showed them photographs of Paris. Sweet as cake with them, she’d shown herself flinty towards anything she didn’t approve of. She couldn’t bear the hordes of tourists overtaking her old favourite places in France; she couldn’t bear the greed of the trade unions, or sloppy language – split infinitives or Bristol accents. The children hardly spoke to their parents about what went on at Vivien’s, fearing the chill of a different judgement than hers, a condemnation of her fakery.

— I didn’t need deportment classes, Amanda said. — I had natural deportment – don’t you remember Vivien saying that? Natural deportment. And look what’s become of me!

— What has become of you?

— Two shops selling ethnic jewellery: Weymouth and Bridport. What about you?

— I’m in family law. I work on contract to social services.

Vivien had been right about Chris, though, Amanda said. She’d looked him up on his university website: he was a professor of Early Modern Studies, whatever those
were
; he’d written books. With ready irony (this was a sensitive subject), he explained that at his university ‘professor’ was only an honorary title; it didn’t mean what it did at the old universities – no promotion, no extra salary. Not even much honour, really. Also, nobody read his books.

— Did she ever mention God? Susan said lazily, not sitting up. — After all, we were her godchildren.

— She gave me a little white Testament when I was confirmed, Amanda said. — I still have it, but I’ve never read it.

When they were drunk enough, they returned to the house. It seemed even chillier and dirtier inside, after their soak in the afternoon light. The kitchen hadn’t been altered in decades: there was an old gas stove, an enamel sink, little gingham curtains in place of cupboard doors. Bone-china tea sets had been pulled out of the cupboards and piled on the table with colander, grater, mincer, wooden spoons anciently dark, Breton bowls painted with names, not theirs. They felt as if they’d come upon the scene of a desecrating burglary.

— We might as well take this stuff, Amanda said, pressing her stickers defiantly on to a few items – jugs and serving dishes – and piling them apart from the rest. — You know they’ll only get the clearance people in.

— I liked this house so much, Susan said. — I liked it better than my own house, though I knew I shouldn’t. I didn’t like modern things. I liked the thick pink carpet and the embroidered tablecloths – they were like
something
out of books. I imagined having flowers on the breakfast table and a maid to turn back your bed. Not that Vivien had maids. But in those days I thought I’d want to live like that. In my head, I lived like that.

— Have a tablecloth. Here’s a whole pile of them.

— Now it all looks dismal.

— Did you go and see her, when she was ill?

None of them had. To be fair, they had not known how ill she was. Amanda and Susan had spoken to her on the phone, in the last year; Vivien, who had never allowed herself to be ill for a day – as if it were a lapse in taste – had complained in angry spurts, between deploring her weakness for doing so, about her legs and her eyes. They had never been in touch with the niece or the nephew, so had not known that anything was serious, or terminal. They had known from Vivien’s voice, however, that she was changed, desperate, and they had not done anything about it. The married man – news trickled through to their parents, always months late – had also been very ill, then died. — It’s our punishment, Susan said. — To be here.

Chris tripped over a pile of saucepans, Susan caught him, and after this they made their way around the house together, Chris hanging on to Susan’s arm, Susan and Amanda holding hands, unclasping to sticker anything they wanted. None of them were in the habit of touching other people. All of them – even Amanda, who had lovers – were rather fastidiously inhibited in their ordinary lives. Amanda was prodigal with red stickers. Chris put a yellow one on a Pembroke table that he might use to
write
on. Susan succumbed to a 1930s Parisian hatbox and a pair of Chinese ivory masks.

— Those masks are nice, Amanda said, jealous. — Clever you, I didn’t notice them.

Smitten momentarily with cupidity, Susan wouldn’t give them up; she put them in her bag, saving her pleasure in them for exploring later. At the door to Vivien’s bedroom, Amanda halted and the others crowded against her, breathing in one another’s heat and freshness, aftershave and wool, shampoo: they were middle-aged, but still clean and competent, at least. Here too, everything had been pulled out of drawers and cupboards. All their eyes were drawn to where, beside the single bed with crumpled sheets, no one had cleared away a last cigarette, crushed out slovenly in a jam-jar top. None of them mentioned it. It might have belonged to whoever had made the inventory, but it might also have been Vivien’s.

— Do you two have children? Amanda said. — I don’t.

Susan’s boy and girl were in their twenties; Chris was keen to tell them all about Thea – nine – though he didn’t see her often. None of the three, it turned out, currently had a partner.

— I have boyfriends, Amanda explained. — But I live alone, out of choice.

— What’s the matter with us? Chris wondered. — None of us have been good at making relationships. Do you think it damaged us, coming here?

Amanda was defensive. — I like my own company.

— Or perhaps we were like that in the first place, and that’s why we kept coming.

— Do you remember when we spied on her? Susan said.

— I don’t remember spying, said Amanda.

— You must. Isn’t it in your diary?

— How do you know about my diary?

— You used to bring it, and read bits out loud to us. You used to write in it while we were watching, telling us you were writing about us, then slamming the book shut if we tried to read it.

Amanda made a false face of contrition. — Did I?

— I took everything too much to heart. That was my problem.

When they were sixteen, seventeen, Vivien still made them tea, and they still ate it, but Mandy was always dieting and Chris and Susan were ravenous, triangles of sandwich making only one mouthful in the new scale of their lives. Torn out of the child bodies that had fitted them purely and exactly, they looked with resentful eyes at Everdene Walk because they couldn’t love it again with the same glee. When Vivien enthused over their prospects – university for Chris, modelling for Mandy, for Susan some deep personal adventure – they longed to believe her, but didn’t trust that she really knew anything. So they were rude or silent, and knew they disappointed her.

Also, they looked at one another differently. They had never met outside the Walk: now they were afraid that they might cross paths in the street or at a disco, and know too much about one another, blowing open the
public
persona that each so scrupulously controlled. And yet, when Vivien left them alone together, they couldn’t resist the luxury of freedom within their exceptional little tribe. Even Susan, in one of her gouts of inhibited awkward eloquence, confessed that there was ‘someone’ she liked. Mandy told the others what she’d done with boys at parties. She worked to perturb Chris, yet didn’t notice when she achieved this. He was delicious at that age, unknown to himself: skinny and jumpy, shadowed lashes dipping on his freckled cheeks, mouth twisted sardonically, a light of wit and nerves playing in his expression. Thirty-five years later, he didn’t look so very different, only his qualities, by persisting, had worn out their promise. He was more boyish in his fifties than he had been as a boy.

One summer night, they had told Vivien that they would walk home together; they didn’t need a lift. Daddy was old – he hated getting the car out in the evening – and they reassured Vivien that their parents wouldn’t worry. Their way was across the Downs, a miles-wide stretch of open grass in the middle of the city, dividing the suburbs from the centre. There was hardly anyone else about. The heady spaces of warm night above and around them made them behave as if they were drunk, swaying and falling into one another, laughing and inventing stories. In the dark, they were unafraid. Mandy seized the others’ hands; self-conscious but grateful, they allowed her to tug them close, and swing their arms. It even seemed possible for a moment, as they walked under the shelter of a copse of tall beeches where the grass
wasn’t
cut, that they might do something extraordinary, lie down all three of them in the grass and roll together, kiss together, press together, achieve some kind of inter-penetration that all of them were yearning for, though none of them had come anywhere near it (not even Mandy).

Then one of them suggested that they go back and watch Vivien’s house. It might have been Susan, because she knew how to get into the den from the public path without going through the Walk; perhaps they all thought that they would be better concealed in the den, for whatever was going to happen next, than under the beeches out in the open. It took a while to get back, and longer to discover which of the dark gardens belonged to No. 33; when eventually they’d struggled over the fence and settled into the little space, they were crowded intimately close together, breathing hard, and their mood changed from the floating blissful playfulness of the Downs to something more intent. The two girls were on either side of Chris, tight against him. They didn’t really think they would see anything. They imagined that, after they left, the house was shut up for the night.

A light went on in Vivien’s bedroom. The room had French windows and a little balcony, which was not wide enough to sit on but had a continental chic. From the den, they could see right into it. Opening the windows, Vivien leaned her arms on the wrought-iron balustrade, looking out into the night like a heroine in a film. She was wearing a turquoise nightdress under a filmy lacy matching knee-length peignoir: the girls knew that she
called
it this. With the light behind her, she didn’t look bad. Mandy put two fingers in her mouth and wolf-whistled. They expected Vivien to be shocked, to shut the windows hastily. But she only smiled, as if something were amusing, and straightened her back. Then they understood that her moments at the window had been a performance, projected at an imaginary watcher: the whistle had only made him unexpectedly real.

Turning inside, Vivien left the windows open, then came back to set up a folding chair where she had been standing. After a few more minutes she returned again, with a drink, cigarettes and lighter, and a book. She sat, crossed her legs, lit a cigarette, puffed at it in the shallow way she had, and sipped her drink; a slipper with pompoms dangled from her bare foot, which she moved in slow arcs, dipping and pointing the toes whose nails they knew were painted vermilion. Her peignoir fell open at the thigh, nothing unseemly; and, anyway, she had nice legs, for her age. Mandy whistled again, softly; Vivien settled herself more sensuously in her chair, swung her slipper. They dreaded her giving herself away any further, and yet willed her to do so. Chris couldn’t wolf-whistle, but he could do fluting whistles like bird calls. While Vivien sat reading for as long as it took her to finish her drink, his bird calls slipped intermittently – swooning, brooding messages – out of the undergrowth, through the warm night. She put down her book, leaned her head back, closed her eyes, sighed, ran her hands luxuriantly down her nightdress. The children couldn’t move or speak, in case she heard them; they swallowed with dry
throats
. They didn’t dare look at one another, for fear of spurting out with laughter.

Then at last she stood up and took the chair inside, shutting the window, and the spell that had bound them was broken. Susan got up stiffly, groaning with pins and needles, brushing earth and twigs from her bare knees, whispering that she had to go; she was afraid of what her parents would think if she wasn’t back soon. She assured them that she would be fine, making her way across the Downs on her own (and fortunately she was). Chris and Mandy were left alone together.

In the present too, Susan was the first to go. Chris walked out with her to her taxi when it came. They kissed clumsily – he went for two cheeks when she meant to only do one.

— We ought to meet like this again, he said.

— That would be nice.

Susan was insincere, one hand already on the door of her liberating taxi. Her counter-reaction after opening up came faster and more violently, as she aged: she longed to be alone with herself.

— Mandy’s right, Chris pursued. — The past’s important.

A chill made Susan pull her cardigan tighter; Chris seemed to feel it, too, when his eager look tipped down too far into her strained eyes. Embarrassed, indifferent to him, she burrowed away inside the taxi; its driver, elbow out of the wound-down window, summing Chris up dismissively, put the car in gear. She asked for the station.

Returning inside, Chris wondered aloud to Amanda, who crouched twiddling the knobs of a television with a bulbous green screen, what Susan had thought of him in the old days: it seemed to matter suddenly.

— Wasn’t she mad keen on you at one time? In my memory, she as good as told you so. You probably weren’t listening. Weren’t interested, anyway.

— You’re joking.

— It was serious. In so far as they’re ever serious, those kiddie crushes.

Chris took this new knowledge in, past the usual apparatus of his ideas and ironies, crowded as a junkyard.

— She did seem haunted. Disappointed. You don’t think there’d be any point in me …?

— Shouldn’t think so. That was a million years ago. It wouldn’t be you, haunting her now.

He accepted this, resigned.

But the vibration of passion had been introduced into the darkened room: they both felt it, taken by surprise. They talked about other things: Amanda queried whether books on the shelves, first editions by forgotten novelists, might be worth something. Chris said he doubted it. Meanwhile, he was uncovering more detail in the memory of what had happened between him and Mandy in the den. Not the dream-thing they had all three wanted under the beeches but a twosome more greedily down to earth, his hand pushed under her bra, hers into his unzipped jeans, actually a first for him. Though he hadn’t cared for Mandy much, his gratitude had been
overwhelming
; it had dissolved him. (‘Do you like me? Do you like me?’ she had kept asking.)