Muddy Waters (13 page)

‘Well thanks, Ellen, that really makes me feel a whole lot better,' Stella replied with sarcasm so heavy that even Ellen couldn't misinterpret. Abigail was right, she decided, if even Ellen thought there was truth in it – she was getting fat and frumpy. There they were, the two of them, she and Abigail exactly the same age and Abigail was, with effortless confidence, about to swipe a man from a beautiful teenager. She watched, depressed, as Abigail picked up the nearest bottle of red wine, ran her tongue over her lips and fluffed her fingers through her short hair.

‘Do let me give you another drink Bernard,' Abigail said, pushing herself firmly across between him and Ruth and topping up his glass. She leaned forward as she poured the wine so that he couldn't avoid peering down the front of her velour sweater and seeing a cleavage impressively jacked up, though he didn't know it, by a gold coloured silk Ultra-bra. She looked back at Stella and winked and then sat down next to Bernard on the bench, close up where her slim thigh in black lycra could squeeze hard against his and give him good cause to wonder about possibilities. ‘Now, tell me all about your wonderful paintings,' she purred smoothly at him with her very best smile. ‘I do so love to buy work from people I actually know . . .'

Adrian sat on the swing with Charlotte's baby on his lap. ‘If I was a ninety-year-old Transylvanian refugee my paintings would sell like hot buns in a blizzard,' Charlotte was telling him rather forlornly. She sat on the damp grass at his feet picking at daisies in the half dark and watched her baby patting at his face.

Adrian sympathized. ‘Perhaps you should tell everyone that that's exactly what you are,' he said, feeling dangerously close to adding, ‘that's what I do.' He thought of the latest pseudonym he'd created for himself, Camilla de Mornay. ‘She' it was who'd ‘written'
Maids of Dishonour.
He tended to imagine her as a frisky woman just teetering on menopausal age with a lion-gold froth of hair, red ankle-strap shoes and spiky little knees. Her natural habitat was a smart hotel's barstool. Every day before starting writing, like a pantomime dame before a matinée, he psyched himself into character and changed, figuratively speaking, into Camilla. Sometimes in the High Street he even recognized clothes she'd like displayed in shop windows. He thought of her when he saw stockings (not tights, definitely not tights) with diamanté ankle motifs, black jackets with sequined lapels, broad gold bangles. Occasionally, perhaps in Milan or New York he even saw her, recognizing immediately a pert challenging bosom, a lazily swaying bottom, a leopard-print accessory. In the worried dawn hours he hoped and prayed that his imagination would hold out for the rest of his working life and that he wouldn't have to resort to actually dressing up, getting fully into character before he could commit words to computer. He put Charlotte's wriggling baby down and watched the child lurching unsteadily on the grass, constantly looking as if she was about to topple backwards or forwards.

‘Such a funny stage in their lives. Why would any child who could crawl so fast and efficiently imagine that walking was actually a desirable alternative? They must be able to see into the future,' he concluded, wondering if he was on the way to being drunk. ‘They must have more to go on than simply wanting to be like clumsy adults.'

‘Perhaps it's true about them having knowledge of the mystical, still being in touch with their past lives,' Charlotte said.

Willow, in a translucent river-green and suitably flowing dress, joined them and looked at the baby. ‘It's true, they bring with them knowledge of before their birth,' she stated solemnly. ‘That's why they can't talk, so they can keep the secrets of the spirit world. By the time they have learned language, they've also learned to forget.' She gazed into the mysterious distance, looking as if she was searching out her own prenatal history. What her eyes picked up, though, was the unmistakable this-wordly sight of Abigail's gaze homing in on Bernard and Bernard's own gaze on the luscious form of Ruth. ‘I can have any man I want,' Abigail had hissed to Willow on the terrace, ‘just watch.'

Adrian could also see Ruth standing on the terrace talking to Bernard who sat on the bench. He was looking up at her, an expression of either frank lust or artistic calculation on his face. Adrian wasn't sure he liked either interpretation. He just hoped that Ruth, like babies, was equipped with some kind of useful and protective seventh sense. He then saw Abigail squeeze onto the bench next to Bernard and switch on her most seductive smile. Her long slim hand was already resting comfortably on his leg, just casually as if giving him time to realize what its being there might mean. He felt an unexpected pang of very old dormant envy. All those years ago he'd so often, from the safety of Stella's company, watched Abigail on the scent of a conquest and felt a thrilling vicarious excitement. And that, he knew quite well, was what had led to the Afghan coat encounter down by the lake. And
that
wasn't likely to happen again. The thought was unaccountably depressing, and he wandered off to look for Stella, for comfort.

Charlotte got up and followed her wandering baby towards the river where Enzo lurked with Toby, rolling joints and flicking bits of Rizla packet across Peggy's barge into the water. Ducks squawked, grabbing at the cardboard, thinking they were being fed and the baby pointed and squawked back at them excitedly. ‘The grass is a bit damp,' Toby warned Charlotte, ‘sit here on this step if you like,' then got up and left her and Enzo alone together, because they looked as if they should be. He wondered suddenly what had happened to Abigail. Looking up along the garden, he saw her, sitting close to Bernard with that look on her face as if she was all ready to laugh at the joke he hadn't yet told. Toby wasn't sure about her newly blond hair. There was something self-conscious and desperate about it. She reminded him of girls from the college, hanging around the common room with pale pouty lipstick and cigarettes and trying to look hard. One cutting comment, something like ‘Ugh, gross acne' or ‘Tree-trunk thighs' and they'd all be tearful jellies; he'd seen it happen. Abigail was gazing intently at Bernard with her head tipped slightly to one side, a budgie-like pose which always made Toby think was less about listening to what was being said than about
looking
as if you were listening. She'd looked at him like that in the wine bar, all that so-eager ‘and what aspect of medicine fascinates you
most
' stuff as if she'd never been so interested in anyone in her entire life. All those little touches on the arm too, so fast you thought they must be accidental, each one like a tiny dart of static – he could see her now doing it all to Bernard. Perhaps she had lust potion on the end of her fingers, he thought, chuckling at the thought of what Willow-the-Witch, who was looking as if someone had just stolen her cauldron, would give for such powers. What, he wondered, would be the killer comment that would reduce Abigail to weepy adolescent mush.

‘She's a complete cow,' Ruth murmured next to Toby. Toby looked at her in surprise.

‘Is she?' he asked.

‘More or less told me to my face that I'm disgustingly, shouldn't-dare-appear-in-public-like-this
fat
,' she continued, glaring across at Bernard and Abigail. A tinkling social laugh came from their direction. ‘God, he'll be so thrilled, she's managing to laugh at his so-called
jokes
,' Ruth snarled.

‘I thought you liked him.'

‘Oh, I do,' she giggled suddenly, ‘that's nothing to do with finding him stunningly witty. Actually, he's hardly got a sense of humour at all and that's because he takes himself so seriously. As an
artist,
brink of tremendous fame and all that.'

‘I suppose someone has to . . .' Toby muttered, wondering how else a stodgy middle-aged man could so easily get an endless succession of teenage girls to strip off all their kit for him.

‘I'm not fat. I'm big. I like being big, it feels powerful,' Ruth went on, still glaring at Abigail.

Her eyes, Toby saw, glinted with unshed hurt tears. ‘You're beautiful, you know that.
Abigail
knows that. She's just jealous,' he told her, touching her hand gently, hoping to impregnate her skin with sympathy the way Abigail had his with desire. He looked round the garden to where Enzo, Charlotte and the baby sat together like a new thrilled family, the MacIvers chatting animatedly with Peggy, all three of their heads nodding and pecking, over-emphatically agreeing some point or other, probably about the council, he thought. His mother bustled about clearing plates, pouring drinks. Enzo's sister, Giuliana, sat with Adrian looking terribly earnest and speaking as fast in English as she did with Enzo in Italian. She was sitting astride the riverbank wall like a passenger waiting for a motorbike to start. He pictured her with the wind streaming her hair out, with himself as the driver and her legs and arms holding on to him, lightly but securely. When he imagined Abigail in the same position, he could feel his body being trapped and powerless.

‘Let's leave all the old people and go to the pub before it shuts,' Toby suggested, suddenly almost desperate to get off the island to somewhere without boundaries. ‘Don't you think sometimes it feels like the river's a moat and we're all walled up inside a castle?'

‘Is the moat keeping others out or us in?' Ruth asked.

‘Both. I can't stand it, let's go,' he said, tugging impatiently at her holey dress. In the stifling, smoky atmosphere of the Red Lion, Toby felt he could breathe again. He sniffed the beery air and felt thankful that his favourite pub hadn't yet become either themed or prettified. It had an honest, grubby Englishness about it, from its stained beer-and-cider mix coloured carpet to its tobacco mottled ceiling. ‘When I'm in some bierkeller in the wilds of Germany,' he told Ruth as they waited at the bar for their drinks, ‘this is the kind of thing I'm going to miss.'

‘Is that all? Just a grotty pub? Aren't the English supposed to get all nostalgic for things like cricket and Earl Grey and oak trees and church towers?' she laughed.

‘That's only what people say when they're trying to impress about being cultured. I bet everyone who travels really misses ordinary things like cheese and onion crisps and “Blind Date” and, well, pubs with warm beer.'

‘And driving on the left,' Ruth added, her eyes full of anxiety, ‘You will be careful won't you?
Really
careful?'

Toby smiled at her, fighting an urge to tease her about how parental she sounded, ‘Course I will. I don't want to die. And by the time I get back you'll have passed your driving test too. You'll be buzzing around in your own Beetle, I should think. Or maybe a Fiat Uno . . .' He had a miles away look, the one he always had when thinking about cars.

Ruth sipped at her beer and felt rather like crying into it. She suddenly realized that after Toby left to go travelling, he'd probably never live at home properly with the family again. For him, after the trip would be university, then work, and grown-up life. They'd finished being children together, now they'd have to work out a way of being separate adults.

In a corner of the pub, Philip Porter, council spy, sipped delicately at a low-alcohol lager and lime and observed Toby and Ruth with fastidious distaste. He couldn't believe any female worthy of the name could actually go out to a public place in a dress that was running into holes. The boy had engine oil smeared on his jeans and a pair of trainers so filthy he was surprised he hadn't been asked to take them off and leave them at the door. He shifted uncomfortably on the bench in the corner, worried about creasing the jacket he'd felt forced, because of the ingrained grubbiness of the place, to take off and sit on. All in the course of civic duty, he reminded himself, preparing to leave the pub and wait in his car to see how late these two, and any other island inhabitants, were prepared to disturb the neighbourhood peace winding the rackety, clanking chain of the ferry.

‘Guess what!' Charlotte exclaimed, carrying her grizzling and tired toddler and accompanied by Enzo and Giuliana. Tumbling into the pub, they all began talking at once.

‘That friend of your parents . . .' Enzo started, looking far more animated than his usual dour self, began.

‘She's only gone home with Bernard, back to the boathouse to see his
etchings
.'

‘“I think I can promise you'll find them
fascinating
” we heard him telling her.' Giuliana giggled, her long hair, blue-black like a magpie's feathers, falling over her face. Toby watched her, suddenly wanting to stroke stray hair from the corner of her open, mobile mouth.

‘Not quite his usual age group. I wonder what he's really going to show her?' Charlotte said, catching Giuliana's laughter.

‘Nothing she hasn't seen an awful lot of before,' Ruth stated grimly. A little worry nibbled at her, suppose he showed her his unfinished painting of her? Suppose she told her parents? Worse, suppose she
laughed
? Toby said nothing. He was taking some time to wonder if it was really so funny, two people of a similar age going off to spend some private time together. They'd all got so used to Bernard making out with teenage girls that anything else was practically deviant. He wondered if it was to do with living on the island, everyone breathing down each other's necks. He thought suddenly about the
Autoroute du Soleil
and his trip took on the feeling that he imagined went with breaking out of gaol.

‘And the best bit . . .' Giuliana spluttered into her vodka and tonic, ‘Ellen MacIver was listening too and she asked if she could go with them, said she'd be
thrilled
and
privileged
to have a special viewing of Bernard's work!'

‘She should be so lucky,' Enzo said.