Muddy Waters (19 page)

‘What about Stella?' he'd said, ‘What will she be doing?'

‘Oh, she's already helped me
so
much,' Abigail had pointed out, ‘I think she should have an evening off from me and my problems, don't you? She's going to the talk on Colour in Your Life in the Noel Coward Room, and she's been really looking forward to it, so she wouldn't have wanted to come out anyway.'

So considerate, Adrian thought now as he drove at 50 mph in the slow lane of the motorway, trying to make the journey last two hours instead of only one.

The restaurant Abigail had chosen had once been a large and impressive roadhouse, back in the days when travelling by car had been more of an adventure than a chore. It was, as he drove up reluctantly and slowly trundled the Audi round the car park, the sort of place that had only just escaped being turned into a theme pub complete with ye olde Englande serving wenches. He imagined it would be full of men of his age, but in grey flannel trousers and blazers with Rotary Club badges rather than the Levis and Gap cotton sweater that he had chosen. I might even be offered a tie, he thought with dread as he pushed open the stained glass swing door and confronted the mahogany reception desk with tiny pink table lamps at each end that gave an impression of an inadequately warmed winter evening.

‘Adrian! I'm so glad you could come.' Abigail rushed out of the inner door and kissed him ferociously on each cheek, far more fondly than she had done at home when she'd been doing the wan, frail abandoned wife act.

‘I said I would,' he told her sulkily, trying to avoid breathing too deeply and inhaling a choking quantity of her perfume. The amount he
could
smell made him feel a twinge of sadness, for she was wearing the same one that Stella currently favoured and he wished, quite fervently, that it was familiar, chestnutty Stella who was clutching his hand and leading him to a secluded alcove seat and not the terrifying, angular Abigail.

‘Drink?' she asked, putting a hand out towards an approaching waiter.

‘Just tonic, I think.'

‘Oh but surely . . .' she smiled persuasively. He grinned at the waiter.

‘Oh, make it a
double
tonic, plenty of ice and lemon please.'

‘Well,
I'm
drinking, anyway,' Abigail said, ‘I'd like a very large gin with a very small tonic inside it please.'

‘How did you get here? Did you borrow Stella's car?' Adrian asked her. Abigail shifted and crossed her legs, her tight navy skirt riding up her narrow thighs. Lethally bony knees, he thought, crossing his own legs instinctively.

‘No. I got a taxi. It isn't that far, fifteen miles or so. I do so
hate
being car-less. You will give me a lift back later, won't you, darling? The
hassles
of taxis . . .'

‘Mm. Yes, of course I will.' Adrian mentally added thirty extra miles to his long homeward journey and wished he hadn't been brought up to be so good mannered. None of the over-assertive heroes in his books would be conned into such a thing, not unless they had dastardly ulterior motives at any rate. And he hadn't got any of those.

‘It'll be just like taking a naughty runaway child back to school,' she giggled and Adrian felt nervous.
She
sounded like one of his wanton heroines out for ruthless seduction. A few slowly moving loose cogs seemed to click into place in his brain.

‘Stella doesn't know you're out with me, does she? Where does she think you are?' he asked. He'd been trapped, he realized gloomily, into a pointless conspiracy and he wondered how it would look if he made a bolt for his car and a cowardly homeward dash back down the motorway. Abigail made a bad-girl face and pouted across the table at him, confessing, ‘Actually I told her I'd got rather a headache and fancied an early night.'

The waiter brought a fussy little tray of drinks with napkins, paper coasters, a mixed bowl of nuts and crisps. ‘You can have too much aromatherapy, you know,' she added defensively, stirring her drink with the pink plastic spear provided. ‘I expect it disturbed some extra stress,' she continued, rubbing delicately at her temple with her newly manicured nails.

‘But you haven't
got
a headache.' Adrian leaned forward, gently moving her hand back down to the table, and reminded her, ‘It's me you're talking to, you don't have to pretend. Anyway, what did you want to talk to me about that you'd rather say when Stella's not here?'

She looked at him intently and frowned. ‘You men, you think it doesn't matter who says what to whom, don't you? Emotional stuff goes right over your heads. In an ideal world, I'd be out of your life and having neat, weekly appointments with some anonymous counsellor.'

‘Oh, I don't know . . .' Adrian muttered, sipping at his unexciting drink and wishing he, too, had arrived by taxi.

‘When I talk to Stella it's actually a bit off-putting. She said to me once, not meaning to do a put-down, I'm sure, “If you saw some of the letters I get from kids, you wouldn't even begin to think you'd got problems.” She's two things: one is
professional.
You know, in her job, carefully trying to be objective? But then there's the second thing.' Abigail picked up the paper napkin and started shakily folding it into an aeroplane. ‘There's that thing women do, even if they don't mean to and I'm sure Stella doesn't really, which is deep down telling me that if I can't hang on to my man, it's probably all my fault.'

Adrian laughed suddenly, ‘Well it is, isn't it? I mean what
have
you been up to?' He sympathized though, about Stella. Hearing him grumbling about work she was quite likely to dismiss him briskly with something along the lines of ‘Well, just thank God you're not thirteen and pregnant for the third time by your own father'. He often thought writing a letter that started ‘Dear Alice . . .' would be the only way to get her full attention. He could just imagine her opening it and reading, ‘Dear Alice, do you think you could make your mind up about whether we're going to Sardinia or the Seychelles this year . . .'

‘I've done nothing,' Abigail was saying, ‘that's it. Not for ages.'

‘Ages, how long is that, a month, a week?'

‘
Ages
.' She looked at the floor and scuffed her feet on the carpet. ‘Martin is doing a much worse thing, he's claiming it's
love
. That way he gets to have it off with the sweet young thing and collect all the moral brownie points.
I've
never done that. Do you know, I'm beginning to think that I've only actually
loved
one man.'

Adrian sighed. ‘Perhaps you should have told
him
that,' he pointed out.

‘I think I'm about to,' she said.

Toby drove down the A423 with Giuliana next to him. They'd gone a long way from home, but he felt he could drive for weeks with her beside him. She looked delicious, as perfect as the Beetle's mirrored chrome-work. He glanced sideways and saw her cream skirt lying high across the tops of her smooth tanned legs. She had
foreign
skin. She was lush European olive, not like stodgy British wallpaper-paste skin.

‘You built the car really good,' she told him, shouting above the awful racket that was the classic Beetle sound.

Toby smiled at her. ‘It took a long time. Lots of work.'

‘I know. I watched. Every time I went on the island and off the island, there you were, in your car, under your car,' she laughed.

‘We'll stop soon,' he said. ‘Are you hungry?'

‘
Starving
,' she laughed. ‘What about that place?'

Toby slowed the little car and turned into the car park of the pub. It looked peculiarly old-fashioned, as if it was just a piece of scenery put there ready for a film to be made about the 1930s. At the side of the building, he thought, there'd probably once been a couple of early petrol pumps, the sort that had a shell-shaped glass top. There'd have been a respectful, cap-touching attendant too. He drove through the car park looking for a space and found one next to a dark blue Audi convertible. ‘My father's got one like that,' he commented as they got out. He glanced at the number plate. It
is
my father's, he thought, somehow, with a sense of foreboding, not wanting to tell Giuliana that. Stella might have done a runner from the health spa and sneaked out to meet Adrian for an illicit extra-cholesterol supper. Or Adrian might be out with his agent or an old friend. Either way, tonight the last person he wanted to run into was a
parent
.

‘Actually, why don't you just wait here and I'll see what it's like inside,' he suggested, jingling his keys from hand to hand nervously. ‘I mean, I'm not sure it's our sort of place . . . and it might be really full . . .'

He dashed off, feeling crossly that he'd left behind with Giuliana an awkwardness that would need explaining later. Inside the building he moved slowly and furtively, as shifty as a spy. He didn't want to be seen. If his parents
were
both there they'd expect him and Giuliana to join them. They were that sort of family, he thought ruefully, cheerfully ignoring cross-generation restraints.

When he caught sight of Abigail's duster-yellow hair, he didn't for a moment recognize her. He just wondered, in a blustering sort of way, what the blonde was doing with her hand on his father's arm. Their heads were close together, and the talking seemed intense and conspiratorial. It was also clearly a table for two, with neither his mother nor Adrian's bald, elderly agent, anywhere in sight.

‘Well? Is it nice?' Giuliana was waiting for him by the car, lipstick freshly applied.

He smiled feebly, out of breath from having fled the restaurant so fast. ‘No. No, it's dreadful. Full of old men with women who aren't their wives.'

She giggled. ‘Maybe fun . . .'

Toby opened the car door and she slithered back in. ‘No, it's not fun. We'll go somewhere by the river. Somewhere we can breathe.'

Stella enjoyed the talk on ‘Colour in Your Life', though felt it should have been called ‘Colour in Your Wardrobe' as only clothes were mentioned. She'd thought of Willow's lovely pottery and wondered how important the speaker would have thought it, to have the right shade of red against the various greens of a mixed leaf salad. Would the same red be all right with lollo rosso, or Chinese leaves, or rocket? Did it matter, was it relevant to one's star sign or skin tone whether coffee was drunk from a pink mug or a blue one? She finished her spritzer, said good night to the speaker and wandered quite happily upstairs to her room. How was poor Abigail, she wondered, as she padded carefully along the corridor. Outside Abigail's door she waited for a moment and knocked gently. She might be in need of extra aspirins or something, she thought. There was no reply. She must be asleep, Stella concluded, wishing her, through the door, a peaceful, head-soothing night.

If Stella had been in the bed next to him, she'd have been seriously concerned at the level of dream-twitching Adrian was doing in the early hours of the morning. In his half-sleep he groaned loudly, thrashed his arms around and knocked the clock so hard off the table beside him that its battery and innards fell out and lost themselves under the bed. He muttered and grunted and twisted the pillow, trying to escape from what was going on in his head. He dreamed about being back under the willow tree with Abigail, observed by too many stars in a sky that was far too big, moonshadows criss-crossing the grass by the lake and casting great beams of wild light on the dead black water. There were carp down there as big as alligators, weed long enough to choke an elephant. Under Abigail, this time, was not his souk-scented Afghan coat but the classy tartan picnic blanket he took annually to Lords and unfolded for a champagne lunch on the Coronation Lawn behind the Warner Stand. Her unexpectedly schoolgirlish underwear in pink gingham was strewn beside her and she lay spread naked beneath him making gratifying gasping noises. There were daisies in her hair and the scent of summer-dry grass all over her skin. He could feel the skin, tight across her bones, through his sleep. Adrian writhed and turned in his chaotic bed, trying to get the dream to end. ‘You see, there's still something there,' she was now purring to him.

His wits blunted by lust, he assumed she meant his penis. ‘Of course there is,' he protested, ‘it doesn't just shrivel away with time.'

He turned over again, and attempted mumbling different words to cancel out the others but his voice had forgotten how to make sounds. His head wagged from side to side, like a spaniel with a sheep-tick in its ear as he tried to cast out the awful mental pictures, and his hand flew up and hit the light switch on the wall, grazing his knuckles. Thankfully, at last his eyes opened on his familiar soft-edged blue and white bedroom and he stared, wide-eyed and frightened, at the ceiling, waiting patiently to unravel the comforting fact that it was, after all, only a dream. His conscious mind sorted itself out slowly and as it did he rubbed harder and harder at his sore hand, wishing he could numb his entire dreadful self. The whole sordid thing, every pink-and-white, earth-scented, moon-beamed, groin-nuking image, was only too horribly, detestably, obscenely, treacherously true.

‘Are you feeling better?' Stella asked Abigail over the Chameleon breakfast. She eyed Abigail's plate as she asked, noting that the headache the night before couldn't have been one that involved much nausea, considering Abigail now felt able to eat scrambled egg, toast, tomato and mushrooms – cooked the no-fat way, according to the menu, though still surely several thousand calories and fearsomely unwelcome in a queasy stomach.

‘I'm fine now, thanks. I expect I was just feeling a bit premenstrual or something.'

‘I quite like feeling premenstrual these days,' Stella said, sipping her grapefruit juice, ‘because in not so many more years from now I suppose all that will be over and I'll feel quite nostalgic for the awful mood swings.'