Scissors, Paper, Stone (12 page)

The effect was immediate. Frieda pushed back her chair with such violence that it screeched against the dark parquet floor. She turned to look at Anne with what could only be described as a look of utter incredulity.

‘Married?’

‘Yes,’ said Anne, obscurely satisfied to have provoked such an obvious reaction. She wondered, not for the first time, whether poor Frieda had an unrequited crush on Charles. Well, let her realise that it was hopeless. Charles had quite clearly picked Anne from the start. He was besotted with her. Just because Frieda had unlimited faith in her own allure did not mean that all men were so easily ensnared. To press her point home, Anne added: ‘We got engaged a few weeks ago. We’re getting married after we graduate. In the summer. There’s a lovely church near my parents’ house in Kent, so we thought . . .’

‘But, Anne,’ Frieda seized her hand and Anne was so taken aback by the force of it that she jumped, spilling her glass of water on to the table. ‘Sorry. But Anne, have you really thought about this? I mean, really thought it through?’

‘I . . . I don’t know what you’re talking about, Frieda. Of course I’ve thought about it. I’ve thought of nothing much else since we got together.’

‘Oh Anne . . .’ Frieda broke off and then turned back to the table, propping her chin up on her hands. ‘It’s just . . .’

‘Just what?’ Anne asked, not sure whether she should feel angry or alarmed.

‘Look, I know we aren’t as friendly as we used to be and that’s fine – no,’ she said, as Anne started to protest half-heartedly, ‘don’t be polite, that’s fine. I understand that you wanted to be with Charles and, besides, I had my own things to concentrate on. But it doesn’t mean I don’t like you any more or that I no longer care for you.’

Anne sat slackly in her chair. She had never heard Frieda speak so openly or in such a burst of agitation.

‘And all I want to ask you, Anne, is whether this is truly, deep down, what you want. Of course girls get married all the time. It’s what good, decent, nice, middle-class girls like you do. But what about you, Anne? What about your degree? What use will that be now?’

It was something that had not even crossed Anne’s mind until this moment. Her studies had diminished in importance since meeting Charles. Always conscientious, she carried on writing her essays and attending lectures, but she no longer felt particularly inspired by her subject or especially invigorated by the thought of doing well. It was true she had thought to herself that qualifications didn’t actually matter much if she was going to marry Charles. He would be the breadwinner – in fact, he already had the offer of a job with a prestigious bank in the city that would put his Economics degree to good use. Anne would concentrate on making their home as lovely as it could be. She would have children and she would bring them up, just as her mother had done. This was what she had always believed would happen. Yes, of course she was good at the academic side of things, but although her school had pushed her to stay on for an extra term and apply to Oxbridge, she had never wanted it for herself. She had fallen into it and it had been enjoyable, mildly diverting, but nothing more. The best thing that had come of her three years at Cambridge was meeting Charles. That was all there was to it.

‘I don’t need to work,’ Anne said, as if that were explanation enough.

‘But what about your mind, your brain?’ said Frieda, exasperatedly. ‘Will you just stop using it and become a breeding machine?’

‘Frieda, it’s really none of your business.’

‘I’m sorry. I simply want you to evaluate your options.’

Anne picked at the corner of her paper napkin. Spores of white flaked off it like dandruff. She had never felt her mind needed attention and thought it mildly humorous that Frieda was so earnestly anxious about it on her behalf. She and Charles did not have that sort of relationship. He didn’t ask for her opinion and she didn’t mind. He was the thinker and she was the doer. He got his intellectual stimulation from other quarters – from his friends, his books, his tutors – and relied on her for an unthinking emotional support. This, thought Anne, was the basis of a lasting and fulfilling partnership. She did not want to compete. She felt no need to. Anne was perfectly content not thinking about anything too much. But how to explain this to Frieda without feeling inferior? She knew Frieda would be horrified if Anne admitted she was quite looking forward to being a wife and nothing more.

‘I’ll always have my degree, Frieda. It’s something I can go back to a bit later on. Just at the moment, though, I want to be with Charles. I want us to be married. I want to be his wife. I love him.’

Frieda sighed. ‘And does he love you?’

Anne looked at her sharply. ‘Of course he does.’

‘Anne, I’m not saying this to make you feel angry. I’m saying this for your own good.’ The sound of shrill laughter came from a gaggle of girls by the door. Frieda dropped her voice. ‘I’m saying this because no one else will. No one else will be rude enough or plain-speaking enough. No one else will dare. Charles is not the right person for you.’

Anne began to tidy up her tray, intent on leaving as quickly as possible. How dare she, Anne thought. How dare this strange, ludicrous person sit there and be so obnoxious. And all because she thinks she’s so much better than I am, so much cleverer, so much more mysterious. She can’t bear the thought that any other woman could be wanted by such a sought-after man. She’s jealous.

‘I’m not jealous,’ said Frieda, as if she had read her thoughts. She placed her hand gently on Anne’s shoulder to make her sit for a moment longer. ‘I warn you, Anne: that man is uncontainable.’

Anne stood up, so abruptly that a gust of breeze scattered the torn-up napkin over Frieda’s skirt. She walked away, the clip-clop of her heels sounding out like bullet shots, across the dining hall. She did not say anything. From the outside, no one could have told she was furious. As she placed her tray on the shelf to be cleared away, she deliberately waved at a girl in her tutor’s group. She could see Frieda, looking at her still, her eyes impassive and unmoving, each one a lacquered sphere of black. As Anne walked out of the dining room, she brushed a lock of hair off her forehead. Her fingers, when she looked down at them, were clammy with sweat.

Charlotte

In the end, she called Gabriel. It felt like a capitulation, but she had waited a whole night and day and couldn’t face the thought of going to bed feeling so miserable.

Still, Charlotte thought, she could delay it as long as possible, just to see if he called her first. So once she got back from the hospital, she ran herself a bath that was too hot to sit in comfortably. Yet she wanted to feel the slight prickliness of the heat as if to persuade herself she still existed. She swallowed big gulps of steam, clearing the back of her throat and her sinuses. She splashed water over the bathmat and the floor as she scrubbed her arms and legs with a rough loofah that was starting to go a mouldy black around the edges.

Then she rested against the bath’s smooth enamel and closed her eyes. Her hair lay gleaming, flat against her scalp, smelling faintly of eucalyptus. But she couldn’t take her mind off the fact that she wanted to call or the lingering feeling of guilt about how horrible she’d been to her mother in the hospital. She picked up the magazine that had come free with her Sunday newspaper. For a few desultory minutes, Charlotte read about this year’s new trouser shape and a feature entitled ‘I Was Stalked By My Future Husband’. The glossy paper became crinkled with moisture. The ink started to bleed on to the tips of her fingers. Charlotte threw it aside, impatiently.

She stretched her arm out of the bath, dried her hands on the towel that hung nearby, and reached for her phone. Charlotte frequently made calls in the bath – a habit that had resulted in several mobiles falling from her grasp into a watery mass of bubbles. The staff at her local Carphone Warehouse knew her by name, such was the frequency of her demands for a handset upgrade.

No text message. Nothing. She wasn’t particularly surprised. She called his number and the ringing tone sounded loudly in her eardrum, echoing off the tiled walls. It rang and rang and then clicked into his answerphone.

‘Hi, it’s . . . er . . . Gabriel here.’

She hated his voicemail message. That little hesitation always sounded so contrived, as if he wanted the world to think he was perpetually slightly offhand and too busy to answer your call. Charlotte hung up. Then she dialled his number again. The same ringing. The same answerphone message. She hung up. Then called again. Where the hell was he?

She ran through the options in her head. It was 10.45 on a Wednesday night. That meant it was not yet closing time – he could be having a drink in a pub with friends, she thought. But which friends? He hadn’t told her he was due to meet anyone. And Gabriel didn’t normally like to drink more than one or two pints on a week night. Unless, of course, he was having fun. Unless he hadn’t noticed the time go by. Unless he was with someone so scintillating that he didn’t want to leave.

Her thoughts started to spiral. What if he was with another woman? What if he’d got drunk and thought Charlotte was annoyed with him and had gone off with someone else out of spite? What if he’d gone out with Florence and she had persuaded him to ditch Charlotte and go back to his wife? What if he was with his wife right now, asking for her forgiveness? What if Charlotte had been monumentally stupid and naive? What if she’d trusted someone who was fundamentally crooked inside and all those people – her friends, her mother – all of them had been right to warn her against getting involved? How could she possibly face up to them?

She took a sip of her hot chocolate in an attempt to calm down. She knew that her mind could occasionally get like this – overheated and irrational – and that the only way to calm her rising panic was to try and talk herself out of it logically. When Charlotte worried too much as a child and was unable to sleep owing to her fretfulness, her mother had told her that if she was thinking the worst, it was unlikely to happen because the worst would always be unexpected.

She tried to reassure herself with this but it didn’t work. Why couldn’t she be the normal, easy-going type of woman who never gave this sort of thing a second thought? Why was she automatically suspicious, jumping to the worst possible conclusion, torturing herself with her own inadequacies? Why did she get so eaten up by insecurity when there was absolutely nothing to feel insecure about? Gabriel loved her, so why would he risk losing her? Question after question piled up inside, each one weighted down with the same unanswerable gloom. Why would he go to all that effort to persuade her he meant what he said when he could far more easily have enjoyed a string of meaningless affairs?

But then, Charlotte knew that men were unpredictable creatures when it came to the sating of their own desires. How could she possibly believe Gabriel possessed any degree of restraint when his past history proved otherwise? How could she expect any man to be monogamous when it just wasn’t in their make-up? She was always being told it in different ways: in books, on television, in magazines that printed quizzes to help you work out if your lover was being unfaithful. Just the other day, a red-top tabloid had published yet another exposé of a cheating celebrity chef who was supposed to have the perfect marriage. How could she trust anyone if the untarnished surface image, the one she so wanted to believe, was actually a lie?

She felt her mind contract, the thoughts unfurling and multiplying and gradually swallowing her consciousness. She felt her chest grow tighter and she could make out the indistinct shape of something in the corner of her eye, an image that was struggling to become clear like a fuzzy photographic negative gradually shifting into focus. There was a darkened room with a bed in one corner. There was a bright, silvery flash that she couldn’t quite make out. There were dark shapes and movement and the feeling of being too hot and then too cold. There was an indistinct sound, a sort of metallic tinkle and there was a pervasive smell of burnt toast. For a while, Charlotte lost her bearings, conscious only of the cold sensation of a sort of fear heightened by familiarity. She knew, without choosing to know, where this was leading.

The phone rang. Gabriel’s name flashed up on the screen. Charlotte grabbed the phone with wet, shrivelled fingers. ‘Hello?’

‘Hi. It’s me. I had a couple of missed calls from you.’

‘Yes,’ Charlotte replied, determined to be as aloof as possible. In the background, there was the tinny sound of a Tube platform being announced. She could make out the noise of a train whooshing past, windows rattling.

‘Weeeelll, here I am calling back. What’s up?’

It was typical of him to assume this air of studied insouciance, thought Charlotte, so that she was the one who ended up sounding both unreasonable and hysterical.

‘What do you mean what’s up? I haven’t heard from you in over a day,’ she said, trying to keep her voice from becoming too shrill.

‘Yeah, and if you remember, that was because you walked out on me at the opening.’

‘Only because you were being so sodding unreasonable.’

‘Don’t swear at me.’

‘I wasn’t swearing. I said fucking sodding.’

‘I’m telling you, Charlotte, don’t swear at me –’ She started to protest, talking over him and getting more and more angry as she did so. ‘And don’t talk over me either. Do you want to listen to what I have to say or don’t you?’