Muddy Waters (2 page)

He looks like a badly groomed old gundog, scenting at the air like that, Stella thought affectionately, hesitating by the clump of agapanthus to see if they were intending to send up more than three flower stems that summer. Looking down the garden from the top of the terrace steps she watched him stretch his long limbs and yawn hard as if he'd just reluctantly climbed out of bed rather than finished a day's work. It crossed her mind that perhaps he had actually been sleeping, down there overlooking the river, in his big, cream leather all-ergonomic, pretend-executive chair, snug as a business-class passenger on a corporate freebie. No one would know, at least not until his royalty cheques stopped coming. Adrian liked to be left well alone when he was writing, so interrupting him had become, over the years, a matter of weighing up the urgency. Wandering in to ask whether he'd like plaice or halibut for supper wasn't really on, though Toby had found he was always welcome with the latest cricket scores.

‘Adrian, supper's just about ready,' Stella called down to him. He stopped in mid-stretch and smiled up the garden at her.

‘I'm starving!' he shouted back, rolling his shoulders to free the tension from them and ambling up to join her. ‘I ran out of biscuits.'

‘Oh, that's tragic!' she laughed. ‘There're plenty in the house; you only have to come in and find them. Anyway, guess what, Abigail phoned. She needs to come and stay, so I said yes. You don't mind do you?' She said this with the kind of voice that expected an acquiescent response, but to make sure followed up with, ‘It'll be nice to see her again, won't it? It's been ages.' She didn't want to watch Adrian's face, just in case it registered ‘
Oh God, not her
', so she bent to examine the agapanthus more closely. The innermost leaves, deep in the plant waiting to be pushed up, bulged promisingly. There would be clouds of fat blue flower heads in August then, she thought with satisfaction, trying to recall where she'd read some know-it-all expert claiming with years of unobservant authority that they wouldn't grow anywhere north of Dorset.

Adrian, when she looked at him, was frowning thoughtfully. ‘We haven't heard from Abigail in ages. Why does she
need
to come and stay? More man problems, I expect. I suppose she was bound to ask you to sort her out, occupational hazard. Got a problem? Ring up your friendly local Agony Aunt. Mind you, Abigail's never been known to admit to “needs”. She's always been more inclined to have “wants”,' he chuckled rather spitefully, adding, ‘perhaps it's her age.'

‘Hey, careful, she's the same age as me!'

‘Yes, but . . .'

Stella laughed and prodded him none too gently in the ribs and marched on ahead of him into the house. ‘Yes, but . . .' hung around, buzzing like a lazy wasp in her head. He obviously saw them as completely contrasting women – Abigail wild and sexy and still with a glamorously chaotic life, herself as tame and domestic and safe. A sleek predatory panther next to a plump, dozy pussycat. She would like to be thought of, just now and then, as being just as capable of unreliable and tumultuous passions as Abigail. She didn't yet feel too old for all that, not too old to surprise him. It was only when she looked in unexpected mirrors and saw someone undeniably
not
twenty-five that she felt reminded of the creeping years, and confusion as to what they were supposed to imply. Middle age was such a peculiar thing. Often she felt she just didn't fit the time properly – in terms of, say, footwear, she thought, as she went up the steps to the door, she felt too old for Doc Martens, and far too young for the Doc Scholls, but could rarely find anything really comfortable and stylish in between.

In the steamy kitchen she lifted the chicken out of the oven and vaguely wondered if the children would remember to come in and eat it. Adrian was opening a bottle of wine very slowly and distractedly, looking out of the window and not concentrating. Bits of the foil from round the cork were shredded on to the table as if peeled off nervously by someone waiting to see a dentist.

‘Sorry,' Stella told him, ‘maybe I should have said something to you before I said yes to Abigail. I should at least have put a time limit on it, said something like, “OK, come for the weekend.”'

‘God, you mean you
didn't
?' Adrian looked quite comically terrified and she felt like giggling at him.

‘No of course not! I mean, you don't, do you, not when you're caught up in the moment. Perhaps you think I should have been even more coolly businesslike, saying, “I'll look in my diary and call you back.”' Adrian grinned reluctantly, an admission that that was
exactly
how he'd have liked her to be. But that wouldn't have ‘helped', Stella thought to herself. Where Abigail was concerned, in spite of her giving the impression of being invincible, somehow Stella had acquired a long, long habit of being helpful.

Stella assembled the vegetables and listened for signs of Toby and Ruth homing in for supper. She relied on them being like the ducks around Peggy's houseboat, drawn to meals by instinct and an acute sense of smell, too teenage-flaky to think about using a watch. Just as she was pouring port into the roasting tin she heard the distant creaking of the handle on the ferry raft that linked, by means of its platform of old wooden planks and a rusty chain, the island with the river's east bank. Well, someone's coming over anyway, she registered, listening hard to calculate whether the handle was being turned fast and furiously by starving youth or slowly and laboriously by some tired, work-worn resident.

‘I could smell roasting chicken all the way from the garage,' Toby said, bringing in with him a less tantalizing whiff of engine oil and old car. ‘Funny how I could tell it was yours and not, say, the MacIver's or Peggy's.' He slumped heavily but elegantly into the nearest chair, as if the effort of making his way a couple of hundred yards from the garage on the shore, across the ferry and along the path was all slightly too much for him. Stella wondered if that could be put down to
his
age too. ‘Outgrowing his strength,' her mother had sniffed on her last foray from Yorkshire, unable to approve of her good-looking grandson beanpoling so fast past the six-foot mark and reminding her that great-grandmotherhood was not now out of the question. ‘Catch the MacIvers using all that tarragon. They'd think it was horribly smelly and foreign! Anyway, on Thursdays they have what Ellen MacIver calls “high tea” or rather “
hay
tea” as she pronounces it, so they can go and sit at Bernard's feet and pick up artistic tips.'

Ruth came in behind him and stole a potato from the dish on the table. Her fingers, Stella noticed, were flaked red and green from painting her new batch of jewellery and neither she, nor Toby who was grimed with car-engine dirt, showed any signs of going to wash. They aren't babies anymore, she told herself, they are their hands which makes it their dirt and their problem.

‘We're getting a visitor.' Adrian had waited till everyone was actually sitting down and reasonably attentive, which gave his announcement, Stella thought, a suspicious air of foreboding. Ruth and Toby looked at him blankly, waiting to be impressed. ‘Abigail's coming to stay,' he said, ‘that old friend of your mother's,' he added.

‘She always used to be
our
friend, not just mine,' Stella corrected him, then explained to Ruth and Toby, ‘when we were students she always came out with
both
of us, especially when she was between boyfriends.'

There was a snorting laugh from Adrian. ‘The only way Abigail was ever “between boyfriends” was when she got into bed with two at once!'

‘Oh I remember
her
,' Ruth said, ‘she liked to think she was glamorous. She's not particularly interesting. I thought you meant someone new, someone thrilling and dynamic. Antonio Banderas would be very welcome.'

‘You used to find Abigail thrilling and dynamic,' Stella pointed out, pouring a large glass of wine for herself. ‘You'd hardly leave her alone when you were little.'

Ruth pulled a face and with her paint-streaked fingers shoved her long curls out of the way of her food, leaving tiny shards of dried colour on the hennaed strands. ‘When I was
little
I'd have thought anyone who brought twelve pairs of earrings when they came to stay was the next best thing to Santa and the Tooth Fairy.'

Stella remembered the twelve pairs of earrings. Those were just the ones Abigail, ten years previously, had brought for a one-week stay during a respite from builders and decorators. There was an implication of at least thirty or forty more pairs left at home, rejected for that short trip, jumbled in a vast jewellery case, a safe-like cabinet with triple locks possibly. Or, more likely, filed neatly in miniature maple drawers labelled: Formal; Informal; Balls; Banquets and Adulterous Afternoons. Stella thought about the impossibility of owning so many, choosing them, deciding which ones were appropriate and for when. She herself had a pair of old pearl ones which she wore most of the time, just to keep the pierced holes from sealing themselves shut again, some gypsyish gold hoops for parties, several sad singles waiting for their long-lost partners to turn up from down the backs of car seats and sofas and three or four pairs of impossibly glittery ones, bought on impulse, that she had never felt she could quite live up to and had therefore never worn. She felt the same about wearing red. So often she'd come home from clothes shopping with something plain, tasteful, expensive and inevitably black only to have Adrian say, ‘Hmm. It would look terrific in
red.
' Red, and even more, red with oversized dangling diamanté earrings, needed the kind of personality that shouted out ‘Look at Me!' Stella's, and she often hated herself for it, was more along the lines of ‘Don't stare, it's rude.' Abigail, by contrast, would probably burst into tears if people
didn't
stare.

‘Well, I'm looking forward to seeing her anyway. It's been ages,' Stella asserted.

They all three stopped eating and looked at her and she realized she'd been dreaming away to herself about earrings and red while they'd moved on to talk of other things. Vaguely, she heard Toby finishing a sentence that, as usual, contained a veiled request for car renovation funds.

‘What will you do with her?' Ruth asked, as if Abigail was a rare animal with exotic needs.

‘Oh, I'm sure she won't be expecting any special treatment, other than a one-to-one counselling service from me. She'll just have to fit in.'

It was easy enough to say, Stella thought later, as she sat in the lantern-lit garden with Adrian and the remains of the wine. Abigail wasn't best known for ‘fitting in'. The baggage she brought on visits tended to be as much emotional as wearable.

‘Last time she stayed it was the abortion, wasn't it? Or was it when she couldn't decide about marrying Martin?' Adrian asked.

‘No, it was way after that. They've been married well over ten years now. Their children have been sent off to prep school. And of course I've met her for lunch in London several times. I think it must have been the court case, when she ran over that actor who changed his mind and decided not to sue.'

‘Wonder why . . . You know, Ruth's got a point, what
are
you going to do with her?'

Stella thought about the contents of her own computer. She had just handed in the final chapters of her latest teenage romance so she could count on having a couple of weeks before having to deal with her editor's comments, but there was her weekly ‘Go Ask Alice' advice column for the pubescent, hormonally frantic, readers of
Get This!
magazine. Probably Adrian was right and that was why Abigail had turned to her for help, as if telling young girls (and many boys) that they didn't
have
to think French kissing was wonderful (yet), that the epithet ‘blow-job' wasn't literally accurate, or that yes, they could get pregnant standing up, also meant she could iron out crumpled mid-life marriages. There would be enough time for in-depth God-What-A-Bastard sessions over the late-night gin, letting Abigail wail away the awfulness of Martin. All that was really keeping her occupied was the Pansy Island Art Fair, of which she'd managed to end up as co-ordinator, simply because being neither a sculptor, potter or painter she was deemed to be impartial and could be relied on to organize the exhibitors with scrupulous fairness. It was almost psychically clever of Abigail to have picked
right now
to book herself in for help.

From the path came the sound of Bernard's art class returning and calling loud goodbyes to Ellen MacIver as she reached her own gate and left the group, hurrying in for her cocoa and the
Daily Express
crossword in bed. In a few minutes, Stella thought, she'd hear the ferry cranking its way across the cut. If it came and went twice, that would mean Bernard had had a good turnout that night, more than ten anyway, which would make him happy.

‘I suppose she could help you with the art stuff – send out invitations or something,' Adrian suddenly suggested, reading her thoughts. ‘I mean, if her mouth's busy licking envelopes, it can't be ranting on forever about the dreadfulness of men, can it?'

‘Good idea. It'll keep her occupied, and then maybe I can slide off and do some work. She'll need
some
looking after though, Adrian. I mean do
try
to be a bit welcoming, won't you? We all used to be such good friends, way back then.' Even in the half-dark, Stella thought she could see him flinch slightly.

He smiled at her, though nervously. ‘I'll try, I promise. But you know what they say, don't you? A friend in need is a complete and utter pain in the arse.'

Stella lay awake early in the morning and watched Adrian as he slept. She'd always considered that sleeping with someone, in the literal sense, was far more intimate than sex. It certainly required more trust. The usual kinds of sex carried informed mutual consent, but to a sleeper you could do anything. You could photograph them ludicrously splayed and naked, cut off their hair, castrate them, murder them even. People did – it was in the papers all the time. Probably a sleeper was the easiest target for a murder, she thought now as she watched him. Apart from the obvious fact that they couldn't defend themselves, sleep could be seen as halfway to death. A well-placed knife or a swift blat with a hammer would simply tip the balance, with a tiny bit less input from the conscience than when faced with rabid terror or appealing, full-awake eyes. Adrian, whom Stella did not at all (at the moment) want to murder, looked as if he was very busily dreaming: twitching and snuffling slightly in the way that dogs did when they dozed on hearthrugs. She'd been seeing him sleep for more than twenty years, she thought. Somehow he looked very much the same as he had in their narrow and creaky college bed, though with a few more lines and folds on the skin that made his face seem as worn and comfortable as an old handbag. Living with someone every day made the impact of increasing age so much more gentle than the rather startling sight of someone not seen for several years. Trying to look at him objectively, she could see that Abigail, who hadn't seen him for a couple of years, would notice his hair was still all there and still quite shaggy and long, but was now chalk-striped like an old-fashioned consultant surgeon's suit. His body also looked, in clothes, quite muscular and fit, though Stella knew that beneath the deceptively youthful T-shirts and jeans lurked a torso that had started to sag slightly as if it had a slow puncture. Abigail must have lain awake looking at no less than three husbands over the same years. Possibly she
had
felt like murdering them. Sooner or later all Abigail's men did something wrong, something terminally unforgivable. There were probably untold numbers of lovers too, but she didn't think Abigail would have let them sleep. She'd never been very good at being alone, Stella remembered, always wanting someone to write essays alongside her in the library, always emerging from her room with a spare cup of coffee, looking for someone, anyone, to share a work break with. She wondered about the three husbands, if, perhaps, Abigail ever struggled up from deep sleep with the third one (Martin) and felt a semi-conscious shock that she wasn't lying next to the second one (Noel) or the first one (Johnny).