Sex and Other Changes (41 page)

Alan hoped that all this was in his look, but what was in Nicola's?

She held his look for quite a while, but then she turned away. Alan knew that something had happened, but he wasn't sure what.

At the end of the dance the applause shook the rafters. Juanita accepted it with delight. Gray returned to gawkiness at the last. Nicola saw Em jumping up and down with joy. What a generous young woman she had become.

Alan turned to Nicola and invited her to dance. She couldn't refuse.

It wasn't ballroom dancing, of course. You couldn't waltz to the music of Los Altiplanos. The band grinned. The young cavorted. Alan wanted to say so much, but he couldn't get near enough to the frenzied, inelegant dervish that Nicola had become.

Los Altiplanos played a slow, more mournful piece, and Alan clutched Nicola and held her almost motionless as they moved very slowly around the minuscule floor.

‘Were you proud of Gray?' he asked into her ear.

‘Of course I was.'

‘As proud as you would have been if he'd been your son?'

‘Of course I was. What kind of love would it be that was dependent on that?'

Alan squeezed Nicola's hand. There was no answering squeeze.

Between numbers the musicians would briefly confer over what to play next. Then they would change some of their instruments. They had brought so many. In the course of the
evening they played three kinds of pan pipe: the huge zampona, the flute-like quena made of cane, and the little antara. They played the twelve-stringed charango made of armadillo shell. They played mandolins, guitars, drums, tambourines and a comb stroked against the side of a gourd. Throdnall became exotic that night.

It was exciting, emotional stuff, with dramatic changes of tempo that sent surges of adrenaline into the bloodstream of the listener.

But to Alan this was not the time for music. Only one thing could have sent a surge into his bloodstream.

‘I must have a word, Nicola,' he mouthed to the music.

He led her over to a far corner of the little room, and there they sat, so unobtrusively that their unobtrusiveness might have been blazoned in lights. Em and Clare, Gray and Juanita, Bernie and Peggy, even in this emotional and lively gathering all of them were so aware that there in the corner were Alan and Nicola, trying to conceal the fact that they were holding a meaningful conversation.

This conversation occurred in little bursts while the musicians conferred after each tune. It was impossible to talk during the music.

‘I have to tell you this,' said Alan. ‘I am a man. You are a woman. There is no obstacle to our loving each other.'

Nicola made no reply.

‘I know it's ridiculous, but it's only just occurred to me, so it occurred to me that it might not have occurred to you. Nicola, I love you.'

The music stopped them before Nicola could reply. Maybe she would not have replied.

‘I love you far more than I did when we were our original sex,' resumed Alan as soon as the next tune had stopped. ‘We were a couple of fumbling freaks, for God's sake, and now we're both truly ourselves. We did all right, on the whole, for half a lifetime.
Think what we could do together now. I love you. I don't want you to go. There! That's pretty straight and up-front for Throdnall, isn't it? Why do you have to go?'

‘I …'

‘Don't tell me you love Eric.'

‘Please don't start running Eric down. I know you don't like him, but he's a dear dear kind loving lovely man.'

The music began again. Alan pretended to be listening intently. He didn't know whether Nicola was listening intently or also pretending to. He didn't know what she was thinking.

This was perhaps as important a discussion as Alan had ever had in his life, and it was being conducted as if it was the conversational equivalent of a game of musical chairs. The moment the music stopped he resumed his impassioned pleas as if he had never been interrupted.

‘I know he is,' he said. ‘I'm not jealous of him any more. I just don't believe you love him. Do you love him?'

Nicola looked at him like a cornered rat. She wasn't prepared to say that she did and she wasn't prepared to say that she didn't. She thought of saying, ‘What is love?' or ‘Does anybody know what love really is?', but managed to avoid such pathetic copouts.

She gave a helpless little shrug.

‘We've learnt a lot from all we've …' began Alan, and again the music stopped him. Em glanced anxiously in their direction.

‘We've learnt a lot from all we've been through,' continued Alan when the musicians conferred once more, ‘and if at the end of all that we haven't learnt that true love should be an unselfish emotion we've learnt nothing. If you truly love Eric, then go, be with him, be happy, I want you to be happy, Nicola. If you truly love him, you go with my blessing. You really do. But I don't believe that you do. You don't live with him. I think you're very fond of him, but I don't think you love him. That's all. You don't need to say anything now.'

Nicola didn't look as if she had any intention of saying anything.

‘Perhaps we'd better move,' said Alan, ‘or people will start looking at us.'

The tide was coming in, sliding sexily up the creeks, lifting the boats off the mud, sending the birds packing. An oystercatcher piped noisily overhead.

Nicola had arrived the previous evening. It had been a long drive; traffic had been heavy. She had crawled through the flat lands of the Fens, where the fields were like carpets of sticky toffee pudding. She had felt extremely tense. She hadn't known that she was going to feel extremely tense.

‘I've made a real Norfolk fish stew,' he had said.

‘Good-oh,' she had said.

‘So, how was the wedding?' he had asked.

‘It went all right. No, it was very good actually.'

‘Good.'

‘Actually it was extremely moving and I was very proud of Gray and Em.'

‘I'm so glad.'

Was he?

The fish stew was subtle but just a little thin, Nicola had thought. Rather like Eric. She'd felt ashamed of herself for having that thought.

She hadn't wanted to make love. She hadn't known that she wouldn't want to make love. She had feigned extreme tiredness and he had suggested that she went up early while he cleared up. He could never leave anything less than immaculate. He might be awash with desire, but he'd still lay out the breakfast things ready for the next morning.

When he had come up to bed, Nicola had feigned sleep in
the pale, pink bedroom. She hadn't needed to do that for a long while, but it was like riding a bicycle, once learnt never forgotten.

In the morning Eric had driven the car to Thornham, painfully slowly, and now they were walking along the coastal path to Hunstanton.

‘It's good to have you back,' he said.

‘It's good to be back,' she said.

It was and it wasn't.

They walked steadily, trying to keep themselves warm. There was a cruel, snidey breeze from the north, and the air was as raw as herrings. If the sad sky had begun to weep it would have lost control and deluged.

The path plunged into a melancholy wood. Nicola felt that she would die of gloom among the dark trees if she didn't say something cheerful.

‘I felt that old feeling as I left Kings Lynn behind and turned north for Hunstanton,' she said. ‘That feeling of coming home.'

She had and she hadn't.

‘Good,' he said.

She wished she hadn't said it.

Now the path was in the open again. It rose and fell across the dunes like a miniature Alpine pass. To the seaward side there were salt lagoons, where shelduck swam serenely. A cormorant flew low over the water, late for an appointment as always.

‘Birds live and die and leave no individual mark, and neither will I,' said Eric.

‘Eric! Don't be so depressing,' said Nicola.

‘Oh, it doesn't depress me in the least,' he said. ‘I think it's a relief.'

Yes, his mood was strange, and she wondered how much he knew of her mood.

They walked along the side of the golf course. Only one hardy couple had braved the winds on that early spring day.

A tiny wren scolded them valiantly.

‘See what I mean?' said Eric.

She did and she didn't.

They caught a bus back to Thornham from Hunstanton. They sat in the front seat upstairs, as if that could bring back the spirit of childhood. They lunched on smoked salmon and chardonnay in the Lifeboat Inn, and then Eric drove, painfully slowly, to Wells-Next-The-Sea. Eric told her that Wells had once been a raffish place. People from Burnham Market had only gone there in disguise. Now it was Chelsea-Next-The-Sea.

Easter was coming, and the tourist attractions had just begun to creak into gear for the season. They went to an exhibition of marine paintings in a tiny gallery, and then to a little tea shop in a sweet old cottagey street. It would all have been twee, had it not been beautiful.

They discussed the works that they had just seen, which had been pleasant, safe, a million miles from the world of the Turner Prize.

‘What do you think of the Turner Prize?' Nicola asked.

‘I can't comment on its recent decisions,' said Eric, ‘because I haven't seen the works in question except in the papers and on television, but I hate the whole award. I hate it because I hate all prizes, and I hate it particularly among prizes because Turner would have hated it, because Turner hated all prizes.'

She gazed at Eric, and she drank of his passion among the toasted tea cakes, and she knew that she loved him at that moment as much as she ever could.

‘Art is about truth, not glory,' he continued. ‘It's about beauty, not rank.'

She wished that she could listen solely to Eric's words, and not have to listen at the same time to her emotional reaction to those words.

‘Nothing in the world of creative art is as contemptible, in my opinion, as to shock for the sake of shocking, and if that is what
these Turner artists are doing they are traitors to art,' said her furniture restorer.

She felt privileged to listen, she felt proud and moved that she agreed, but she had nothing to contribute.

‘Nothing in the world of art is as craven as not daring to shock when necessary,' Eric continued. ‘Shock is the most precious of all the weapons in art's armoury, and that is why to abuse it is the most serious crime in the world of art.'

Yes, at that moment she loved Eric as much as she ever could, and she knew that it was not enough.

She lay back as he clambered on to her. She made all the right noises and all the right movements, and she didn't think there was any way in which he could have deduced that she was playing a bridge hand in her head, for fear that she would be unable to go through with it if she thought about it too closely. She bid two hearts and her partner went three spades and she felt that a small slam might be on, and by the time that they'd bid it and she had played the hand and made the small slam Eric had come inside her with
such
energy and with
such
a cry: Oh yes! He wasn't only passionate among the toasted tea cakes.

Quite soon after that they were asleep, oh blessed sleep, far far from owls and lies.

In the morning, after their immaculate breakfast, laid the night before and served on the best Worcester, with not a milk bottle to be seen and the evenly browned toast wrapped in an Irish linen cloth, Eric said, ‘You still love him, don't you?'

The sun beamed with pleasure on Alan and Nicola's wedding day. It shone on the fourteenth-century church of St James. It shone on the bird shit on the roof of the Cornucopia Hotel. It shone on the unlovely lift-shaft tops that disfigured the unlovely roofs and the unlovely sixties blocks that dwarfed the fine old church.

It shone on Mr Beresford, but he didn't notice.

They had spent their wedding eve in traditional separation, but not for them the excesses of stag fortnights in Prague and hen weeks in Dublin. Alan had taken Bernie and Peggy to the Positano, and Nicola had been given a Peruvian dinner cooked by Juanita.

They had remained in separate beds until after the wedding, even though Nicola had gone back to number thirty-three after she had confirmed Eric's suspicion that it was over. Alan had slept in the master bedroom, Nicola in the granny flat. This was less a moral gesture, fatuous in today's climate, than an attempt to make their second wedding day something special. They felt that something should be denied them before the marriage, so that the day itself might seem, and indeed be, special.

Neither of them slept well on the wedding eve, Nicola at number thirty-three, where Gray and Juanita were spending the night, so that Juanita could help Nicola get ready in the morning, and Alan at Bernie and Peggy's flat.

Mr Beresford did not sleep well either.

By eight o'clock Peggy was cooking Alan a man's breakfast in their flat, Juanita was cooking Nicola a Peruvian breakfast in
number thirty-three, and Mr Beresford was in all probability walking across his dewy lawn towards his garden shed. It must have been about that time, according to the pathologist.

They had wondered whether to invite Mr Beresford and his wife. In the end, reluctantly, they did. However, they didn't turn up. They couldn't. They were both dead.

Round about half past eight Alan finished his breakfast with a slice of toast and marmalade – the sweetness of the marmalade was luscious after all the fat – a nervous Nicola gave up the struggle to do justice to Juanita's splendid bacon and eggs – yes, they have those in Peru too – and a loud scream from the jobbing gardener in the grounds of Helvellyn, home of the Beresfords, awoke their neighbours in Gairloch and froze the blood in their veins.