Other People's Husbands (2 page)

‘You might think it's all right now while you're young but it'll tell, one day, that twenty-five-year age gap. You mark my words,' her mother had doomily cursed, like the bad fairy at the Sleeping Beauty's christening, when Sara had announced she would be moving in with her college's visiting-celebrity lecturer. As it happened, Conrad's energy level had, until recently, shown few signs of flagging. He'd claimed Sara kept him young, and in all but the years-lived sense he was, being one of those active and beautiful older men. He was not the average golf-and-gardening pensioner, more the Leonard Cohen, Willie Nelson and Robert Redford type. Here and now in this dark and sultry shop-within-a-shop, Sara had her first-ever rebellious suspicion that in spite of everything, perhaps he was somehow making
her
old.

The assistant came back clutching an armful of complicated underwear and looked nervous as Marie bounced excitedly away with her into the curtained fitting room, trailing a selection of frills, lace and ribbons. Sara sat on a purple velvet chair and waited, flicking through a catalogue in which too-skinny, long-legged women pouted and smouldered, looking sulky and a trifle bored, posed with leather paddles, jewel-handled whips and, for reasons possibly only fathomable to the photo shoot's stylist, a lot of tiny fluffy dogs. Sexy it really wasn't, though the clothes were undeniably gorgeous. How would it feel, she idly wondered, to wander round Sainsbury's knowing that under some very unremarkable day-to-day clothes you wore knickers that this brochure coyly described as ‘
ouverte
'? Would the check-out girl think you were loopy for standing there with a dopey look of amused knowingness on your face? Probably. As you pushed your trolleyload away, she'd catch the eye of her companion on the adjacent till, tap her head with a finger and comment, ‘Hormones, Maureen,' in a whisper just loud enough for you to catch.

‘Owwwwwww!' came from behind the padded-silk curtain, followed by ‘Ooomph!' After a few silent moments, Marie's face emerged and she hissed, ‘Sara! Over here! Come and tell me what you think!'

‘Do I have to?' Sara laughed, changing places with the assistant, who scuttled out of the lilac-satin-lined cubicle with grateful haste.

‘Well?' Marie stood with her hands on her hips, peering curiously at her own reflection as if there was something she couldn't quite understand about it. The corset had done its job – Marie's loose, well-spread middle was hauled in and tamed and the laces at the back were firmly knotted. Her breasts threatened to spill over the top and her cleavage was a mighty canyon. The effect was, Sara thought, pretty magnificent. The lighting was better in here, too – the hint of olive had softened and Marie's skin glowed a sun-smoothed pinky-brown.

‘I look ridiculous, don't I?' Marie sniffed, her eyes filling. ‘What the fuck do I think I'm playing at?'

‘Actually, I think you look completely amazing,' Sara told her truthfully, giving her an affectionate squeeze.

‘That salesgirl thinks I'm a total idiot. I bet she thinks sex should be illegal for anyone over thirty. I half want to say to her, “You wait, girl, it doesn't just go away, you know,” ‘ Marie said, casually using a pair of black satin knickers to wipe a spilled tear from her face. She realized what she'd done, met Sara's eye in the mirror and the two of them broke into laughter, which immediately turned into the kind of full-scale schoolgirl hysteria that threatened to be completely unstoppable.

‘Oh quick, Sara! Loosen this damn thing!' Marie gasped through the hilarity. ‘I can't breathe!'

‘I can't – she's knotted it!' Sara said, fumbling with the ties. ‘Heavens, do you think Scarlett O'Hara had this trouble?'

‘All right for her, wasn't it?' Marie puffed. ‘She had a well-practised servant to lace her in and out of her stays . . .'

‘Yep. That's the answer – you need the faithful Mamie, squeezing you down to a sixteen-inch waist.' Sara tugged at the cords, at last finding a tiny bit of give in a knot.

Marie shrieked, ‘Sixteen! My waist was
born
bigger than that!'

‘Well, this sort of settles it, surely?' Sara said, as at last Marie's flesh tumbled free, already livid-lined and pinched from its confinement. ‘I mean, how would you get the thing on to go and meet Angus if you don't have someone to do your laces up? You can hardly ask Mike. That would go beyond a husband's marital duty, wouldn't it? To help his wife dress in porn-star underwear to meet her lover.. . ?'

‘He'd be very good at it, though,' Marie mused as she put her own comfy black bra on again. ‘But it would take him hours, because he'd want to get each bit of the lacing perfectly even. He'd probably use a spirit level. No, I'm buying this. It's got hooks as well. Maybe I can put it on backwards, do them up then swivel it round and get in properly. But even if I can't, even if I just look at it now and then in the drawer, I'm having it. It'll remind me. Whatever goes right or wrong with Angus on Tuesday, I'll want something to make me smile.'

Marie piled up the underwear, picked out the basque and the French knickers and took them to the counter where the girl, restored to professional poise and hiding any surprise she might be feeling, dealt efficiently with the credit card, wrapped the goods and packaged them in a shiny, ribbon-bound box and bag, then handed it all over to Marie as if it was a personal gift from her.

‘Enjoy,' she commanded, smiling. She even looked as if she meant it.

‘OK – what now? Anything you need to look at? Shall we go for a drink?' Marie asked Sara as they headed out of the shop into the noisy bustle of Oxford Street.

‘Actually, I'd quite like to get home,' Sara said, looking at her watch. ‘Panda and Cassandra are coming for supper so we can talk about what Conrad wants to do for his birthday, and I told Cass I'd take Charlie down to the river to feed the ducks for a while. I'd like to give her a bit of peace, an hour or so to herself even if she just wants to slob out on the sofa and watch telly.'

‘Aha! You see, you have men in your life too,' Marie teased. ‘It's not just me.'

‘Yes, but in my case one's my baby grandson and the other one's . . . well,
Conrad
.'

‘Hmm. Conrad. Still nesting in his studio, is he?'

‘Yes . . . I don't really get what the deal is there. When I try to talk to him about it he just
looks
at me as if he doesn't know what I'm talking about. Is it normal, do you think? Is it like those couples from way back who end up in separate bedrooms just because they think
well, at our age
. . . and talk about how it's now about
companionship
? Everything else is much the same . . .'

‘The same?' Marie gave her a disbelieving look, which Sara ignored. There was a fine line between sharing concerns with your girlfriends and full-on disloyalty to your life partner. Conrad, in spite of or possibly because of having for so long been a public figure, guarded personal privacy very carefully and wouldn't at all understand that sharing intimate concerns over a kitchen table and a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc was pretty much a normal woman-thing.

‘You're too generous with other people, that's your trouble. You should sit Conrad down and demand an explanation as to why you've now got the whole bed to yourself.
And
you do too much for your lot. I bet you had tonight's supper sorted by the end of yesterday afternoon,' Marie told her as they dodged a pair of skateboarders hurtling through the shoppers.

Sara said nothing – it was a bit much, coming from the person who had dragged her out to Selfridges to help her choose slutwear, but it was also true, actually. Because she knew she was coming out with Marie today, the lamb tagine had slowly cooked most of the previous afternoon while she'd been teaching the rudiments of colour theory to Beginners Art, and it only needed heating. Salad was all washed and ready for assembling. There was a lemon tart in the fridge. Superwoman eat your heart out (lightly grilled, with a chilled pear sauce).

‘What about some
you
-time for a change?' Marie continued. ‘If you don't stop putting other people first, Sara, you'll end up making the cakes for your own funeral tea.'

Sara at twenty was a student of fine art and liked her colours clear and bright and her world to be nuclear-free. She came from Devon, an afterthought child, ten years younger than her sister Lizzie and the product of an unusual mix of a progressive education and a TV-free home. She had lost her virginity at seventeen to the Sean Bean lookalike guitar teacher in her village, with Ry Cooder playing something ethereal in the background, and by the time the relationship came to a natural but friendly end, she was well grounded in 1960s guitar heroes. Popular culture hadn't really got near her – she was not a fan of Duran Duran or Spandau Ballet, but liked Puccini, Bob Dylan and early Rolling Stones. She didn't wear Katharine Hamnett slogan T-shirts or jackets with oversize shoulder pads or have her hair in a Bananarama fright-fuzz. She was small and slim with long light brown hair that curled at the ends all by itself, especially in the rain. She tended to scoop it all up out of the way and shove a pencil through to keep it in place when she was drawing, and Conrad told her, some time after they'd got together, that it was the slender, vulnerable back of her neck that he'd fallen in love with as he was passing her chair while she sat concentrating on drawing the sulky life model who was draped across a green velvet couch. Sara liked clothes from a previous age – any previous age – silks and velvets and 1950s polka dots. Full skirts, tulle petticoats. 1930s skimpy knits. She wore lacy Victorian nightdresses over jeans, old Biba watered silk under PVC. An ancient Chanel jacket, treasured Ossie Clark printed chiffon, suede boots, berets, lavender kid gloves.

Conrad at forty-five was about to quit teaching and was seeing out the last months of a college contract, calling in a couple of times a week to deal with the life class and to annoy the rest of the teaching staff by turning up in the kind of drop-head Mercedes that they would never be able to afford. Over a fast few years he had suddenly become the kind of fashionable artist that painters who weren't so lucky pretended to despise. His bizarrely abstract portraits were very much in demand by those who'd recently become celebrities. Cabinet ministers, musicians, models, bankers, bonkbuster novelists: a full-size Conrad Blythe-Hamilton was just the thing to hang on that big, empty stairwell wall in a pretty, newly acquired Cotswold pile. His work was ever more expensive, eye-catching and recognizable as a sign that the commissioning arriviste had made it. Thanks to the PR skills of Conrad's agent, Gerry, his subjects were under the impression that they had been selected and summoned to be painted. To drop into a conversation that you were on his waiting list was an irresistible piece of trump-
that
showing off.

In his private life Conrad was bored and rootless. He was one of those who even other men described as ‘beautiful'; he moved with careless grace, had long brown rock-star hair, smile lines at the edges of his eyes and a slightly asymmetric mouth that had women longing to kiss it. Like a child in a toyshop he had spent many years dating one beautiful nineteen-year-old after another, simply because these were what he came across in his working life at the college. The relationships would last for months or weeks or even mere days. But recently, watching his date yawn while he was telling her about seeing Jimi Hendrix live, he'd had a ‘what's the point?' moment and suddenly seen himself heading for a long life as a grumpy loner who other men thought terminally immature.

When Conrad reported to Gerry that for the seventh time he'd been asked to be godfather to one of his friend's infants, Gerry told him, ‘It's a sign they see you as a permanent bachelor.'

‘No it's not,' Conrad had growled, full of that life-passing-by feeling, ‘they just want me to leave them money or give them a painting.' This was probably true but all the same, Gerry's comment had hit home. It was like forever being a bridesmaid, never the bride. Too often recently he had been out with friends and actually been interested when they'd discussed the latest goings-on of their children. Some of these had now reached teenage years, getting rebellious, making trouble, fighting their way out of home and security. One evening he was in Langan's Brasserie while those at the table around him described the horrors of a thirteen-year-old's birthday party where the dress-up theme was Hippy – parents aghast to see their own youth sent up as a joke. He'd felt left out, as if they were all talking over him. His own youth had coincided with the beatnik era and he'd been into the peace movement long ago by way of anti-nuclear Aldermaston marches, not by wearing flowers in his hair and a bell round his neck. A terrible realization hit him that not only was he too old to identify with the younger of his companions, but that in a perverse way they were also somehow older, more in tune with the world than he was. They were grounded, settled with their families and dogs and disorganized, untidy homes full of random
stuff
.

He poured another glass of wine and tried to puzzle out what this new and uncomfortable feeling was that he was experiencing. To his surprise, he could only identify it as envy. In a flashed-up moment of honesty, he concluded that he should, if he wanted his loner life to change, find himself someone closer to his own age. She would probably be a divorcee, he reckoned, as the others talked of O-level panic and violin-practice hell. Possibly she would come complete with children. The realization that he would very much like some (though preferably biologically his own) almost made him cry. Sadly, and with huge reluctance, this also meant he shouldn't pursue the girl whose slim neck he had longed to stroke in the life class the week before. So, not you then, Sara McKinley, he thought, already feeling bereft for what wasn't going to happen. It was time to grow up.