Not That Sort of Girl (35 page)

Mylo murmured, ‘M-m-m-m friendship, yes.’

They had sat there on the sofa in the hotel lobby turning towards each other, her hands in his, searching each other’s face, oblivious of people coming and going, bringing a whiff of petrol-fumed rain from the street, muffling into their scented furs as they ventured out. Standing now on the muddy path by the water’s edge Rose could remember the smell of the leather sofa. Mylo had asked very gently, ‘What else?’

She had whispered, leaning towards him, ‘I cannot bear to think of your cock inside Victoria.’ And he, still holding her hands, had leaned forward and kissed her mouth. ‘That won’t get us anywhere.’ She had tried to draw away but he held on to her hands.

After a while he had said, ‘Listen, darling. It would be better for both of us if we could meet sometimes. We need not make love if it … well … no, wait, let me speak … we can be more normal …’

‘What’s normal, for Christ’s sake?’ she had exclaimed in anguish.

‘Lovers can be friends, my darling. I am not here often. I live in France. If we met occasionally it might stop us tearing each other apart like this …’

‘I’m
not torn!’

‘Rose, stop it, listen to me. We could lunch together sometimes, go for a walk, visit a gallery, how about it?’

‘I don’t know.’ She had been afraid then, tempted.

‘Lovers should be friends, too. You know that as well as I do. We have mutual interests. We could discuss books, films, plays. What do you say? Give it a try? Pretend we are civilised?’

‘I …’ Still she feared the unbearable.

‘You could tell me about your child, your garden, your cows.’

‘I have no cows. Ned switched to sheep …’

‘Those lovely cows …’

‘Well, it’s his farm’—she defended Ned—‘not mine.’

‘Yes, of course, but why should we not talk about it? Your dogs, for instance?’

‘I have Comrade’s descendants.’

‘There you are, a safe subject for discussion, there must be others. Give it a try?’

‘You are wheedling me.’

‘I am.’

‘Won’t it hurt?’

‘Not as much as never seeing, never knowing …’

‘So you mind, too?’

‘Idiot, you bloody idiot,’ he yelled at her.

‘Darling!’ How her spirits had soared.

‘Can’t get you out of my system. Don’t want to, don’t even try.’ (People had stared, looked away.)

‘I have tried,’ she admitted.

‘Wasted effort, wasn’t it? Waste of lovers. I could machine gun the lot.’ This rang true.

‘There were not enough for a machine gun …’

‘So …’

‘We should see a bit of sense at our age.’ She had given in, reaching for the freaky lifebelt of good sense.

‘Not always to be trusted, too much sense got you into your fool promise to Ned.’

‘And your marriage to Victoria.’

‘Enough.’ He pulled her to her feet and holding her close kissed her. ‘Eyes, nose, mouth,’ he muttered as if renewing acquaintance. ‘I mind very much that Ned …’

‘What?’

‘What you said about Victoria applies also to Ned.’

‘Ned mostly goes up Emily Thornby.’

‘Such coarse words to pass these lips.’ He kissed her again. ‘And what about those lovers?’ he asked jealously.

‘Over. My heart wasn’t in it,’ she said smugly.

‘So if I telephone …’

‘Yes, yes, yes.’

‘We shall have each to treat the other with care …’

‘That goes without saying.’

‘It won’t be often, alas …’

‘It will have to do …’

‘Resigned?’

‘I shall never be resigned.’

‘Nor I.’

As they walked out into the rain she said, excusing her pusillanimity, ‘I feel I must protect Ned, and there is Christopher.’

‘And I,’ said Mylo opening his umbrella, ‘have to protect Victoria and Alice.’

‘That’s that, then.’

‘Yes.’ They stood on the pavement unwilling to part. ‘So we won’t ever turn into one of those awful old couples who hate each other like my Pa and Ma?’

‘I dare say we won’t.’

‘So it’s looking on the bright side, is it?’

‘Yes.’

S
O THEY MET AT
intervals over the years. Of a generation used to the concept of rationing (food, clothes, petrol), they spaced their joy. In the nature of things each meeting held potential disaster, it being dangerously easy for either of them to feel jealous or possessive, resentful even. They walked a knife-edge, teetering as they nursed a passion, which could so easily have died as an adolescent obsession, into a love conjoint with friendship.

With trepidation they learned to speak of Ned without resentment, of Victoria without fear. Discussing Christopher and his friends or Alice and hers brought the alternative partner into the conversation at a neutral level. But chiefly they discussed books, plays, films. While Rose felt passionately about politics, expressing fury and despair at the lies, hypocrisies and evasions of governments, Mylo distanced himself as his father had and made Rose laugh at her own righteousness. If she had been on holiday with Ned to France, Greece or Italy, she did not tell Mylo how she had longed to be with him instead of Ned, and Mylo took care not to say, ‘Oh, but you should have seen …’ or ‘When I went there with Victoria …’. She told him about Christopher as he grew up into a mirror image of Ned, to be finally yanked from her orbit into yuppydom by Helen. She talked about her garden, her dogs and cats, her neighbours. And Mylo talked of his work, a freelance like his father, of his interest in abstruse European writers, teasing her into reading Julien Benda, Teilhard de Chardin and Michael Polanyi so that she could keep up with what he was talking about.

When her mother died he comforted her for not having loved her, understood the little problem of the ashes. When Edith Malone died they regretted her passing, reminisced about the winter tennis. When in 1956 during the Suez Crisis petrol was rationed once again and Ned, remembering his wartime hoard, found all the jerrycans empty, they shared nostalgic recollection of their wartime drives. Mylo, asking where all the petrol had gone, for they could not have used up all those gallons, was amused when she confessed to using them over a period when Ned was being parsimonious with housekeeping money, buying instead of petrol plants for her garden. She did not tell him of the scene Ned had made or the wounding things he had said, nor that he had gone off to Paris for an extravagant fortnight with Emily. In her efforts to be fair to Ned, Rose made herself feel quite sick, but she would persist as long as Mylo stayed loyal to Victoria.

Those meetings over the years, two at most a year, often less, were always hard to contrive. Twice she was ill and could not meet him; once she was away with Ned, staying with his relations in Scotland, when Mylo telephoned and they did not see each other for eighteen months. For some reason they never discussed, they never wrote letters, fearing, perhaps rightly, the easy betrayal of the written word.

Always when Mylo telephoned, Rose nearly choked with joy, having superstitiously feared that their previous meeting was the last. While they battled for continuity there was never any certainty, she never felt secure. So when one day in 1960 sitting at a corner table in a restaurant Mylo put his hand over hers and said, ‘Rose,’ she was instantly alert.

‘What is it?’

‘There is a plan—a job in the States.’

‘And Victoria wants to go?’

‘No, she doesn’t particularly.’

‘You want to go?’

‘In a way.’

‘Don’t let me stop you.’

‘Rose …’

‘You want to go. What’s the job?’

‘Lecturing, teaching, an interesting university, it’s …’

‘Go on, go. Why on earth not? What’s to stop you?’ She had controlled her voice while her stomach churned in alarm. ‘Have a great time, make a lot of money …’

‘Don’t be like that.’

She withdrew her hand: ‘They haven’t worked, these civilised meetings, have they?’

‘I can’t do with half a cake …’

‘It was your suggestion.’

‘A bloody stupid one.’

‘All this popping in and out of my life like a jack-in-the-box doesn’t amuse you, then.’ The finality refused to sink in.

‘You never look for
me.’

‘No, I don’t. Why should I? I’ve got my life, quite a busy one as it happens. I have Ned, it’s my choice, I abide by it. You have Victoria; about time she was considered, isn’t it? Time we grew up.’

Mylo had riposted, she had struck again.

My word, thought Rose, standing on the bank by the creek watching the breeze riffle the water, how we hurt each other that day, how we let rip, how well each knew how to wound the other. It was suicide. They had parted leaving the wounds raw. They had not even said goodbye. Split.

It had been a fight to come to terms with her loss. She had become quite ill, grown thin and snappy. When Ned, worried, took her to a specialist he said it was not the menopause, although she was of that age, suggested a psychiatrist. Refusing a shrink, Rose set herself tasks which she called fresh interests. She made a new lily border in the garden, planted more magnolias, took on voluntary work in the neighbourhood, tried hard to like her daughter-in-law, behaved, as Nicholas remarked, like a widow. ‘Anything wrong, Rose dear? You are behaving like a widow.’

‘I am easing myself into a role I may never have to play,’ she had replied, ‘so that, should the need arise, I can enjoy it.’ Then she found that she was enjoying her role, was being nicer than she had ever been to Ned, that people came from far and wide to admire the garden. The only failure was her lack of enthusiasm for Helen. Helen’s fault, thought Rose, watching a pair of swans cruising up towards her. She should have suppressed her longing for dead men’s shoes; one did not have to be a mind reader to know what Helen intended doing to Slepe once she got her hands on it. Well, thought Rose, she’s got it now but if she had not annoyed me so I would not have looked after Ned so well, she would have got it years sooner and I, unbraced by my dislike of her, might have moped into a decline, not considered myself cured of Mylo.

So what had she felt when, picking up the telephone nine years later, Mylo’s voice said, ‘I have tickets for Venice tomorrow, pack your bag.’ She had felt she had come alive again.

‘Are you still grumpy?’ he had asked.

‘I …’

‘To be honest with you, all those civilised meetings drove me mad, darling. I was like a randy dog.’

‘And now?’

‘Randier than ever.’

‘What time’s our flight?’

T
HE SUBTLE SMELL OF
warm drains. St Mark’s Square at two in the morning, empty by the light of the moon. Wandering along the narrow alleys. Quizzing the peeling stucco. Leaning over bridges to read each the other’s face reflected in the murky water. Mylo’s hair grey now, beginning to recede, his face thin and lined. Hers, eyes deep-socketed in reflection, pale (she had had no sun that summer), hair dusty wheat-coloured.

They had leaned towards the water, their reflections joggled into one by passing barges carrying vegetables to the markets. They had sat speaking sparsely, eating prosciutto with figs, large plates of pasta, drinking cold wine at tables by the canals, light dappling their faces. Wandered on to drink bitter espressos near the Accademia. They had swum lazily from the Lido in water soupy with sand and Lord knows what else; they had lain nights rediscovering each other’s bodies in a state of happiness neither dared remark on so perfect was it, so tender, such fun.

They were too wise to say, ‘If we never have anything else ever again, we shall have had this.’ When strolling along a small canal they heard through the shutters of a room high above the water Paul McCartney sing, ‘Will you still love me / Will you still need me / When I’m sixty-four?’ Too wise to catch each other’s eye. Too wise when they parted to make arrangements to meet again.

We got it right that time, Rose said out loud to the swans paddling past, their wings cupped over their backs. Stooping she picked a pebble from the path, threw it, broke her single reflection.

T
HEN THEY EXCHANGED THE
occasional cautious letter. Just to keep in touch, he said, writing to congratulate her on Christopher’s marriage, an event he had learned from a casual meeting with George Malone in New York. ‘I hope she is a nice girl, that she will make him happy. I remember him in his Moses basket on the back seat of your car with Comrade. You stopped the car to suckle him. Alice, Victoria’s daughter, has two children. I don’t much care for babies,’ he wrote.

‘Would you have cared for ours?’ she wrote on a postcard which she tore up on the way to the post. (Many of the letters she wrote him got torn before posting.) She wrote instead a scrawled sheet enclosed in an envelope, ‘She is not a nice girl, but she will make Christopher happy.’ It seemed of paramount importance to be honest, not to pretend to him as she did with the rest of the world that she liked Helen.

Over the years Alice, Victoria’s child by Picot, aged twenty-five at the time of the Venetian meeting, played the part of invisible go-between. ‘How is Alice?’ Rose would enquire and news came back that Alice and her family were spending the summer at Cape Cod or, the year that Picot, rich, growing elderly, retired now from his post in Monsieur Pompidou’s government, had finally acknowledged parenthood and settled a lump sum on Alice, they, this included Mylo and Victoria, spent part of the summer in the Ardèche. (Not a great success. Picot needed help with his memoirs which Mylo had not been willing to give.) Rose tried to imagine Alice, searched between the lines of information about Alice and her family for Mylo hiding like a sea anemone in the weeds of his stepdaughter’s mundane life. Alice was helpful when Victoria was away (where?) and Mylo had jaundice. / Alice had done some useful research for him. What research? / She kept her mother company while he was in Peru. What was he doing in Peru? / She was helpful when they moved house. Where to? Where from?

Rose sent her sparse letters c/o Mylo’s publishers, distancing herself deliberately. So, sparingly they wrote but did not meet; several times she suspected that he had spent time in England, not made contact. The years flew on or dragged by, according to mood and state of health. When she thought of it, reminded perhaps by a tone of voice in a crowd, a whiff of drains, Rose congratulated herself that their love had ended on such a high, not dwindled as most loves do into habit. ‘Shall we go to Venice this year? You’ve never been to Venice,’ Ned once asked.