Scissors, Paper, Stone (16 page)

‘It seems they must have an Italian chef even if the waiting staff are very much English,’ said Janet. There was a smudge of lipstick on her upper teeth.

‘It’s pretty difficult to ruin a bowl of pasta,’ Anne said, and it came out more harshly than she meant it to, so she added in a conciliatory tone: ‘But it is very good.’

It struck Anne, not for the first time, that the exchanges she had with Janet were more hesitation than conversation. They seemed constantly to be missing each other’s targets, misfiring and misinterpreting and then attempting to compensate while both knowing it was never going to work. It frustrated Anne immensely. She wished Janet were more capable of standing up for herself. But then, if she had possessed that quality, perhaps she would no longer have been the unquestioning, accepting presence that soaked up Anne’s moods like a good-natured sponge.

There was even more queuing to get into the theatre because Janet had insisted on getting there forty-five minutes early ‘to avoid the rush’, blithely unaware that every other sensibly minded fifty-something woman within a certain radius would have had exactly the same idea. It was clear, once they had shuffled like battery hens to their seats in the stalls, that Richard Vickers’s fanbase consisted almost entirely of a gaggle of middle-aged ladies clutching their programmes with sweaty-palmed anticipation and the sort of trembling elderly gentlemen that had reached the stage in life where one starts wearing slippers as shoes. The mosquito hum of their hearing aids sounded through the theatre like a vibrating tuning fork.

For a few moments before the lights dimmed, Anne looked around her and was horrified to think she might fit in here. She wondered briefly whether she actually looked old to outside eyes even though she still felt relatively young on the inside. She was terrified of becoming the sort of woman who doesn’t realise she is dressing inappropriately – the kind who prides herself on fitting into the same clothes as her daughter or the kind who grows her hair slightly too long, unwittingly emphasising its thin lankness.

In recent years, Anne had become frantically worried that the flesh on her upper arms was sagging, hanging off the bone like a crumpled plastic bag filled with groceries that would swing from side to side whenever she clapped. She had taken to wearing longer sleeves and altering her hand gestures so that they were no longer quite as free or expressive when she talked. Although Anne had thought these changes dramatic, no one else appeared to notice, and this had depressed her even more.

She began to realise that she had turned into the sort of woman that people no longer look at. Charles had stopped looking at her in that way many years before. But it was more the impervious nonchalance of strangers that upset her: the workman who no longer whistled or the postman who no longer winked. She found she couldn’t, as she used to, trade on mild flirtation to guarantee an upgrade on a flight or talk her way out of a parking ticket. It wasn’t that these unconscious strangers were being rude or unkind; it was because they had simply stopped thinking of her as a sexual being. To them, she looked dignified, upstanding, middle-aged. On her good days, she could appear well dressed, striking, even handsome, but only with the unspoken suffix ‘for her age’. She was not desirable. Not any more.

It was a desultory sort of evening. Richard Vickers came on to the stage and was greeted by polite applause, to which he responded with a camp wiggling of the fingers on his left hand. In his right, he held a microphone. ‘Thank you, thank you,’ he said in his whispery voice, the lights picking out a faint halo of face powder and hairspray. He made his way across to a chrome bar-stool, hoisted himself on to the seat and crossed his legs primly before launching into a seemingly endless stream of not-very-entertaining anecdotes. He was wearing, Anne noted, a pair of slip-on shoes – something that she always distrusted in men – and a double-breasted blazer with old-fashioned brass buttons and a salmon-pink handkerchief poking ostentatiously out of the breast pocket. He looked like a golf club stalwart, Anne thought dismissively, a man whose idea of bliss was a fortnight in Tenerife.

All around her, people were chuckling good-naturedly. Janet had a glazed smile fixed permanently in place, occasionally clapping softly when a punchline tickled her. There was a dreary question-and-answer session, in which members of the audience posed deferential queries as to what so-and-so ‘is actually like in real life?’ or whether he would consider such-and-such ‘the highlight of his career?’ And then it was mercifully over and they were filing out into the foggy evening air.

Once on the train, seated opposite each other with a table between them (Janet had, of course, booked the tickets in advance), Janet looked at Anne with an expression of tentative hopefulness.

‘Did you enjoy it, Anne?’

‘Yes, of course,’ she replied, not altogether truthfully.

‘I’m glad,’ there was a stilted little pause. ‘I hope it – well, I hope it took your mind off things.’ Janet left the sentence hanging.

‘It’s difficult to take my mind off things entirely,’ said Anne.

‘Yes. I imagine it must be.’ There was a weighted pause, as Janet geared up to say something else. ‘Having Charlotte around a bit more must be nice.’

Anne snorted. ‘Hardly nice. It would be far nicer if her presence weren’t required. If Charles weren’t lying there fighting for his life.’

‘Well, of course, I only meant . . .’

‘I know what you meant, Janet,’ said Anne, cutting in. ‘I didn’t mean to snap. I suppose I’m rather at the end of my tether.’

‘Of course you are,’ said Janet, and her calmness surprised Anne. ‘Are you still unsure about this Gabriel chap?’

Anne’s shoulders tensed, so that she felt her muscles tighten all the way up through her neck to the upper curve of her cheekbone. Without warning, she felt she was about to cry. Horrified at the thought of losing control in front of Janet, she made a great show of foraging around in her handbag for a tissue with which to wipe her glasses. She told herself to calm down and took a couple of surreptitious breaths. She collected her feelings in a neat pile and folded them away, like a fresh stack of ironed laundry. She looked at Janet levelly.

‘I don’t think he’s right for her,’ she said quietly. ‘And I don’t know how to tell her.’

‘Do you mind if I say something, Anne?’ said Janet, reaching her hand across the narrow table and pressing the tips of her fingers down gently on the inside of Anne’s wrist. The fragile touch felt alien to Anne’s skin and it recalled that odd sensation she got sometimes when she was rooting around for a pair of socks and her fingers brushed suddenly against the waxy texture of a drawer lining. She nodded.

‘Well, I’m not sure that talking to Charlotte would do all that much good, dear. I do think that you can’t choose who you love and –’ Janet broke off and leaned forward, so that the thick gold chain she wore round her indeterminately baggy brown jumper swung against the table’s plastic edge. ‘Anne, you should know that better than anybody,’ she said quietly.

Anne slid her hand away and hurried out of her seat to the train lavatory, opening the door into a grim grey cubicle with damp tissue paper balled up in piles on the floor. She looked at herself in the scratched mirror above the sink that was edged with the black spider’s scrawl of nameless graffiti. She met her own eyes in the reflection. A woman with brittle grey-brown hair, sensibly bobbed to just beneath her ears, her skin dulled with the slight powderiness of age. Her mouth was tightly drawn into an anxious hyphen across her jaw and the faint wrinkles that ran down her chin seemed to tether her disapproving lips in place like tent poles.

Anne took her glasses off and let them hang on her chest. They were suspended by a cheap fake-silver chain ordered years ago from a catalogue that specialised in small necessities. At one point in her life, she had thrown these catalogues unthinkingly in the bin without removing them from their plastic wrappers. Now, she relied on them. When did that happen, she thought, aimlessly. When did she get old? She placed her hands on the edge of the sink, leaning her weight forward and dropping her head so that she no longer had to look at herself. Tears dropped fatly on to the burnished stainless steel.

It didn’t work, she told herself. Janet was right. No matter how hard she tried to convince herself otherwise, she knew that she still loved him. She missed him. In spite of herself, she thought angrily, in spite of everything that bastard has done, she missed him.

Her loneliness made her shudder with a sort of distaste. However hard she tried, she still could not escape him. He was indelible; spread across her body like a dark tattoo, the inky rivulets sinking into the granular surface of her ageing skin so that she was no longer sure what flesh was hers and what flesh was his.

She had chosen him over everything: her friends, her life, what could have been her career, and even – yes – her own daughter. She stopped herself thinking then. Stopped herself short. She did not want to go back to that time, that day, that moment when her betrayal of Charlotte had become irrevocable. It was there, always there, disturbing the surface like blotches of damp seeping through fresh white emulsion, but she did not acknowledge it. Because to acknowledge it – to calibrate the precision of what she had or had not seen, to click the blurriness of that single image into a sharper focus – would be the final destruction. She would not do it, however much it cost her.

Anne waited a few moments before returning to her seat. She spent the rest of the train journey in silence.

Charlotte

‘Don’t you love me?’

‘Of course I love you.’ Charlotte rolled away from him under the duvet. She lay on her side, silent and cold, drawing her legs up to her chest with her arms and pressing them tightly to her. She wanted to make herself as small and impenetrable as possible. She closed her eyes, wishing she wasn’t there.

Gabriel shifted beside her. She felt him prop up his head with one arm and could sense his perplexed semi-frown, the slight crinkle he got between his eyes when he wasn’t wearing his glasses. She knew he was confused and upset, but she didn’t have the energy to help him through it, to tell him why, to explain what couldn’t be explained. She heard him sigh loudly and then swing his legs down to the floor, easing himself up with knuckled hands and walking out noisily to the loo. The bedroom door handle creaked as it always did when it was pushed too roughly.

Charlotte drifted into a mild sleep, waking with a jolt when she felt Gabriel’s weight depress the other side of the mattress. He turned towards her and placed his hand gently on her right shoulder, drawing her towards him so that she was forced to look at his face. She saw that he was trying both to conceal his frustration and to convey a feeling of tenderness and the effort of reconciling these two opposing forces had made his mouth vaguely misshapen, so that it looked somewhere in between a smile and a grimace. The corners of his lips were twisted like the thin metallic strips used to tie up freezer bags. Charlotte felt a sweep of emotion. She kissed the tip of his nose.

‘I’m sorry.’

He stroked her hair. ‘I just don’t understand. Perhaps if you could make me understand it would be easier.’

She said nothing.

‘We’ve been together now for almost a year and I love you more than anything else in the world. And you’ve led me to believe that you feel the same way, so . . .’

‘I do feel the same way.’

‘And you haven’t suddenly become an evangelical Christian or anything, unless you’re hiding it well.’

Charlotte laughed and nestled her head into his chest. She could hear the thick beat of his heart and imagined it pumping blood around his clean, clear arteries and veins. The image gave her comfort, made her feel oddly secure. He seemed so strong, so perfect, so unblemished.

‘Is there something wrong with me?’

‘Of course there isn’t!’ Charlotte protested, her voice muffled by the soft curlicues of his chest hair.

‘Because otherwise there’s just no explanation that I can think of for why you wouldn’t want to have sex with me.’

Charlotte drew back against the wall so that they were no longer touching. The words were out. Vocalising the thought had given it a certainty, a permanence that she had hoped to avoid. She thought if neither of them mentioned it, if they just went on doing what they were doing, smiling at each other politely through the translucent screen of a gradually building silence, then it could for all intents and purposes be categorised as ‘normal’. All couples went through dry spells, didn’t they?

Charlotte remembered a recent conversation with her newly married friend, Susie, who had admitted that she and her husband had been unable to have sex on their wedding night. They’d booked the honeymoon suite in a nearby spa hotel and the staff had thoughtfully strewn rose petals over the bed in the shape of a giant red heart. There was a bottle of champagne chilling in a free-standing ice-bucket. A few weeks before, Susie had spent almost two hours at a luxurious lingerie emporium in central London where the assistants had fussed over her with a measuring tape and pineapple slices and glasses of white wine until she capitulated and bought an absurdly expensive ‘wedding trousseau’ that consisted of a complicated arrangement of ribbons and ivory satin and underwired padding, all designed, so the assistants gushed, ‘to make your husband realise he’s a very lucky man’.

And then, after all that, the two of them had been so tired, so tipsy, so disembowelled of energy by the stress of the occasion, that they’d passed out without the necessary physical consummation. Charlotte remembered Susie telling her this shortly after the wedding, accompanied by gales of laughter.