Muddy Waters (20 page)

‘I won't,' Abigail said with a shiver. ‘Anyway I expect you still get them if you take tons of HRT.'

Stella considered for a moment. ‘I don't actually know. And I don't know if I've got five fertile years left or fifteen. It's ridiculous really, I have to keep up with all the latest stuff about adolescents – I could go on “Mastermind” with what I know about puberty, but I've hardly got a clue about what happens at the far end f fertility. Probably because I don't want to make plans for the ageing process before it actually happens so that I can go on pretending it won't. When I'm really old, I'll always think they don't actually mean
me
when they talk about crusty old pensioners. Peggy on the barge is like that. That's why she won't give up and move somewhere easier.'

‘Oh, she's just a stubborn old bat,' Abigail replied, reaching for another slice of toast and the no-sugar marmalade. ‘She can hardly even walk. She just needs to live somewhere where the damp can't get at her joints all the time. Staying where she is will only make it worse. People really should recognize when it's time to move on. Everyone should.'

‘I'm sure you're right. But then, you see, she'd probably just die.' Stella looked out of the window at the view over parkland and down towards the willow-edged lake. ‘You know, I could get used to living like this. You'd never have thought they could make the old place as wickedly comfortable as this,' she said contentedly. ‘All the waitress service and pandering to your every trivial want. It's funny to see how much the place has changed. When we were here it was always so cold, you just had to get through the work because the library was the warmest place.'

Abigail smiled broadly, ‘I'm so glad you're happy. I really did hope you'd like it. You could do a lot more of this sort of thing if you really wanted to, you know.'

‘Good grief, I didn't mean it literally,' Stella laughed. ‘I do have bills to pay, people to take care of, work to do.'

‘And they all take you disgustingly for granted. But suppose you didn't have it all to do? Suppose you could just swap lives with someone? Wouldn't that be fun? I often think it would – and don't tell me you couldn't really be tempted by permanent luxury.'

Stella thought of home, the inter-artist bickering on the island, Adrian's sleazy career and the ever-present tide of sad letters from frantic teenagers that she had to deal with. ‘You've got a point,' she conceded, ‘perhaps it would be lovely to start again and try and get it right this time. But of course we can't. We all just have to muddle through with what we've got.'

Ruth missed her mother. She missed her shouting up the stairs that it was time to get up for college. She missed her writing down phone messages and leaving them on the Post-it pad on the dresser. She even missed Stella telling her off for leaving unwashed cereal bowls by the television last thing at night and for keeping five mould-gathering coffee cups on the window ledge next to her bed. She lay curled up snugly under the duvet, wondering what day it was and whether her first class was at ten or eleven that morning. Adrian was useless. He just opted out and went down to the summerhouse (and that was another thing that needed to be discussed with her mother there to back her up) to get on with his work, completely oblivious to the fact that there was anyone else in the house at all. Toby was probably asleep too, seeing as he hadn't come home till the birds were doing their early morning singing. He'd come slamming in, whistling and clumping up the stairs and not caring who he woke, which he wouldn't have done if their mother was at home. He needed reminding about consideration. Ruth felt grumpy and blamed everyone else. They were all out there having perfectly happy and fulfilled lives. She felt as if she'd got stuck somewhere along the line, with things all planned out that weren't coming together, for reasons that were not her fault. It was hard to forgive Bernard for being really pleased, the day before, that his painting of her was almost finished. ‘All over soon, my love,' he'd told her, ‘I expect you'll be delighted not to have to keep coming down here and stripping off.'

The automatic retort – ‘I'm not your love' – had been on the tip of her tongue but left safely unsaid. After all, he was old enough to think she should take it as a compliment. Other than that, she hadn't been able to think of a suitable reply, short of the truth, which was that she felt positively insulted that he hadn't yet even suggested having sex with her. If only she had the nerve to ask him if he intended to – but she just couldn't bear the risk (and the humiliation) that he might say ‘no'.

Ruth clambered out of bed and looked out of the window to see what the weather would tell her to wear. She still had the childlike instinct to assume that a sunny day meant a hot one which sometimes meant that in February she would go out into the blazing frost in something skimpy and thin and on humid, thundery summer days pile on layers of sweaters. Down in the garden she could see her father sitting on the wall by the river, throwing pebbles in and looking as if he'd decided to take the day off. He was wearing just a black T-shirt with his jeans so Ruth decided it was warm enough for something silky and sleeveless. She had a very old red dress with huge purple roses on it and dark green swirling leaves that her mother had once said were more suited to delphiniums than roses. Ruth wouldn't know, the garden was another of her mother's departments. She'd perhaps go and visit Bernard in the dress, she decided, let him see her looking like a bouquet. Perhaps he'd want to arrange her, she thought as she selected a bottle of coconut lotion to take into the shower, though hopefully horizontally on his velvety sofa rather than vertically in a vase.

Adrian threw stones into the water and then felt cross with the daft ducks who came paddling and quacking, thinking he was throwing them food. ‘Stupid buggers,' he muttered at them, ‘can't you see it's not food?' Of course they couldn't. If it was thrown into the water, their limited reasoning told them it must be bread. He sympathized – he'd had a couple of hours now in which to work his conscience round to deciding he'd been thoroughly conned. It wasn't his fault. When Abigail had rung and told him she needed to talk, he'd believed exactly that and he shouldn't have done. He should have said he was too busy, reminded her that she'd got Stella for confiding in, bollocks to all that man's eye view rubbish. Wasn't all that girls together stuff what they'd gone away for? He picked up another handful of stones, bigger ones this time to make a bigger, crosser splash, and started trying to make them skim across the river's surface, which was difficult from up high on the wall. The tide was quite low and he could see the muddy riverbed littered with bits of bent supermarket trolley, discarded bricks, an old car battery, and various battered tin cans. Peggy's barge rested on the mud and leaned at what must be a very inconvenient angle for her. Imagine being in bed and being tipped sideways in your sleep, he thought. He sighed again, wishing he hadn't thought about bed. Not even the word – it just made him think some more about Abigail. It was like chewing at a hang-nail, prodding at a bruise. He should have backed off and fled for home the moment she slid her tongue in his mouth outside Chameleon's gates. But then he'd tasted the feeling of being young and irresponsible again. Off they'd sneaked, just like teenagers avoiding homes full of watchful parents, back to under the willow tree where it had all happened before – gigglingly thrilled that it hadn't been pollarded or chopped down or incorporated into a golf course. ‘There it is,' she'd stated triumphantly, as they stumbled to the lake edge and found the great tree, ‘It's still there, this must be
meant
.' The silly, thrilling headiness of it. And she'd meant him to feel like that, that was what really infuriated him – under that tree was where she'd been aiming for all evening. She'd probably found it during an after-lunch stroll with Stella, wandering about exploring the old grounds with half an hour to spare between a gym session and a manicure. All that poor-me talk in the pub about how she'd got her whole life wrong, wished she could have another go and get it right this time now she knew about the things that really mattered. Why, she'd asked, had other people been born with some kind of instinct for a fulfilling, selfless life, or had they learned it from mothers who hadn't been selfishly negligent like hers? She was playing with him. She'd kept touching him in a just-being-friendly and confiding way so that he'd felt guilty excitement from not being sure whether she intended him to feel like that or not. If he didn't know better he'd have dismissed her as a time-wasting prick-teaser. But she never teased. All the buttons available for pressing were the right ones, the jackpot one being the persuasive reasoning that old lovers don't count, they don't add to the total. But of course he didn't want her, not really. He was, after all, one of those lucky people who knew that what they'd already got was what they'd always wanted. One of the people Abigail said she envied. He was pretty sure he was anyway.

He chucked the biggest stone in his hand at a cruising swan, not caring whether he hit it or not. They can break your arm, he remembered his mother, and everyone else's, saying. I wonder if it's ever actually happened, if there's really a sad little collection of people out there with swan-scarred arms and a permanent terror of big birds, he thought as he swung back over the wall to the garden and went to unlock the summerhouse.

Toby was also laying blame on Abigail. Down at the showroom where he and Nick polished a just-sold Renault Espace ready for its proud new owner, Toby rubbed viciously at the passenger door and gave the paintwork a sparkle it would never see again. He breathed in the luscious, expensive smell of new-car upholstery, of pristine vinyl and for the first time in his life failed to find it thrilling.

‘What's wrong?' Nick asked, polishing the roof at the more peaceful pace they were both used to. ‘You're going to rub it back to bare metal at that rate.'

‘Nothing,' Toby lied, ‘well, not much anyway.'

‘Woman?'

‘Yeah. Woman,' he admitted, gloomily enough to hope that his expression said it all and that he wouldn't have to. Nick was one of his oldest friends, right back from snivelling small-boy primary school days, but it would be impossible, terminally embarrassing to them both, to admit that the cause of his miserable moodiness was seeing Abigail and his father snuggled up together, all touchy-feely in a half-lit pub. Nick wouldn't want to know about that – that was just too personal. And that bloody dreadful pub-type place, Toby indulged himself with another bite of angry recollection, was so remote from home that to interpret Adrian and Abigail being together as anything other than a treacherous, adulterous conspiracy, was just completely impossible.

Nick wouldn't want to know about that either. Nick was grinning and sniggering quietly to himself.

‘What's so funny?' Toby glowered at him, starting to feel an urge to throw the cloth full of polish at him. He could almost
see
Nick's imagination running through the possibilities of what his ‘woman problem' had been, probably stupidly picturing him failing to get it up with Giuliana. Well perhaps it was better, though only just, he supposed, to let him think that than have to tell him the truth.

‘You should write to your mother about it,' Nick told him. ‘You know, the “Go Ask Alice” column. She'll sort you out.' He carried on chuckling cheerily at his witty idea.

‘Oh, ha-fucking-ha,' Toby snorted, hurling the cloth with pleasing accuracy at Nick's left ear.

‘That friend of your mother's – Abigail, was it? – she said I should marry Willow, or at least let her move in. What do you think?'

Ruth rolled over onto her back and stared at the sloping ceiling. There were long, ancient cobwebs wafting up there, too high for anything to reach except maybe a duster on a very long stick. It crossed her mind, for the first time, that they looked shabby and grubby, swathed speckly grey and floating in the breeze like Enzo's wind chimes. Usually she thought the cobwebs were a symbol of the trivial domestic things that simply didn't, and shouldn't, matter to artists like Bernard. When she'd got her own place, they wouldn't matter to
her
either. Scummy, she now caught herself thinking. Probably even Willow, desperate to please, wouldn't want to bother doing anything about those.

‘Ruth? What do you think?' Bernard stood at the easel gazing at her face as if he could read her opinion long before she spoke. He put his brush (size 10, sable) in his mouth while he fiddled with the board and Ruth started grinning uncontrollably. He looked exactly, just for a fleeting second, like the jokey little self-portrait of Beryl Cook inside the back cover of all her books. He only needed a beret.

‘You should get a proper artist's smock and a big floppy bow,' she told him, folding her hands behind her head to get more comfortable. She turned her head and looked at him. ‘If you did live with Willow, would it be a marriage of true minds or just a convenient sharing of art space? I mean, her pots and sculptures would look pretty good down in the gallery with your paintings. Or you could turn this whole area up here into a gallery too and go and live with her in the cabin. You could make cute little arty babies. Or perhaps not, I suppose Willow's well past her sell-by.'

Bernard rubbed nervously at his beard. ‘Oh, I don't think I could do that . . .'

‘And why are you asking me anyway?' she continued leaning up on her elbow. ‘My mother would just say if you have to ask yourself or anyone else whether you should get married, then you shouldn't do it. Not that it's any good asking her anything at the moment though, she's gone away and left us all for a while.'

‘Oh, has she? So you're all alone at home then.'