Simply Heaven (23 page)

So I hail a taxi on Sloane Street and tell it to take me round the corner to the house where Hilary lives in solitary splendour.

I’m in a good mood. Successful shopping does that to you; it satisfies some sort of base hunter-gatherer instinct and leaves you feeling as though you are competent to survive in a fertile world. I guess that’s why those bad shopping trips – the ones where every spot of cellulite stands out under the changing-booth lighting like the gone-cold skimmings off a stockpot, where clothes dig in under your stomach and make your breasts look like bags of slugs, where your toes poke out of dainty open-toed mules like chipolata sausages – are doubly depressing. It’s not just the grim realisation that the flesh is not only weak, but stretches as well: it’s the sense of failure. The feeling that someone, somewhere has got some quarry with your name on it. Usually someone whose arse doesn’t resemble a sack of marbles.

The house is medium-sized, white, elegant, understated. Not unlike my husband, really. I pay off the cabbie, finish listening to his Ph.D. thesis on the evils of immigration and mount worn stone steps, dropping bags all around me as he separates out his tip from his fare, elbow leaning on the doorframe.

Behind a discreet navy-blue door, all shiny brass handles and knockers, I find myself in a narrow, high-ceilinged hallway – polished wooden floor, and a couple of wishy-washy oil paintings depicting dusty vistas that I guess are probably somewhere in Tuscany. A walnut console table displays a Staffordshire bowl brimming with short-stemmed white roses. A couple of Arts and Crafts wooden chairs stand on either side. Now, this is more like it.

I drop my bags by the table and call out: ‘Hello?’

Over the swoosh of London’s perpetual traffic, a sudden change to the nature of the silence. As though someone, sitting quietly somewhere, has stopped what they were doing and is listening. ‘Hello? Anybody at home?’

I feel slightly bashful, despite the fact that I know that I have every right to be here.

A door under the stairs opens, and Hilary’s head pops out. ‘Ah,’ he says. Not what one would call an effusive welcome.

I flash him a smile. ‘Hi.’

‘I wasn’t expecting you until later,’ he says.

‘Yeah, well, I sort of ran out of arms.’

Hilary glances down at the pile of bags at my feet. ‘So I see.’

‘I’m gasping for a cup of tea,’ I inform him. ‘And a wash up. Is there anywhere I can …’

He flicks his eyes stairwards. ‘The kitchen and the drawing room are on the first floor. Master bedroom at the top.’ No offer to give me a hand or show me about.

‘Oh, OK. Thanks,’ I say with an irony that goes unacknowledged.

I walk past him and mount the stairs, feeling conspicuous. The kitchen is on the half-landing: tiny and twee, with floor-to-ceiling cupboards and not a stitch out of place. The exact opposite of the one at Bourton. I rifle through the cupboard nearest the sink and find a box of Earl Grey teabags, go to fill up the kettle.

He speaks from close behind me, over my right shoulder. He’s followed me up the stairs so silently that I have been unaware of his presence.

‘So,’ he says, ‘we’re alone.’

I jump out of my skin. If I were a cat, I’d be hanging from the ceiling wallpaper.

‘Jesus!’ I say. ‘You made me jump!’

He’s standing far too close. Smiles a crooked little smile at me, purses his lips. ‘Why?’ he asks. ‘Guilty conscience?’

I flip round to look at him. ‘Sorry?’

‘Why?’ he asks. ‘What have you done?’

‘No, I mean – I’m not sure I heard you correctly …’

‘Oh, I wouldn’t think that if I were you,’ he says. Smirks.

OK. So we’re playing silly buggers.

‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ I ask.

He hasn’t moved back. Still stands so close I can practically feel his breath.

‘You’re very quick to play the hostess,’ he says.

I don’t rise to it. ‘No? OK,’ I say. Try to sidestep round him to get to the fridge. I feel deeply uncomfortable. Not surprising, really. That’s what I guess he’s trying to make me feel.

He doesn’t shift out of the way. To get to the milk, I’ll have to put my head at crotch-level to his knife-pressed twill trousers. ‘Excuse me,’ I say.

Hilary puts a hand on the countertop. ‘Why? What have you done?’

I stand back up. ‘Never mind.’

‘Mind what?’

I look him up and down. He’s quite a fascinating specimen, in a way. Gay men don’t come like that in my generation. Maybe that’s just because we’re not old enough yet. After all, it takes several decades of plucking and cold cream to achieve that shiny, plasticky, testosterone-free texture to the skin. Hilary looks like he’s gone at his masculinity with an ice-cream scoop. I suspect that the way men like him made themselves socially acceptable among a generation who were still, many of them, saying things like, ‘I just can’t bear to think about the things they
do
’ was to make it look like they would never, ever, dirty themselves up with something like sex, to turn themselves into effective eunuchs. He must spend hours every day shaving and ironing and arranging things
just so
. His trousers are waisted and loose-cut around the groin to make it look like there’s nothing inside them. His hair looks like it’s been extruded rather than grown. The backs of his hands are pumice-smooth, the nails filed and buffed, the knuckles waxed hairless. In his top pocket he sports a spotted silk handkerchief which I doubt has ever seen the contents of a nose.

I could take him in a fight, any day.

I don’t want to, though. Not just yet, anyway.

I smile pleasantly. ‘I’m sorry if it’s a pain, me turning up like this,’ I say. ‘Please don’t feel you have to hang about with me out of politeness. I can look after myself.’

‘I’m sure you can,’ he says. And then he reaches out and, with one of those sexless hands, cups my right breast, firmly and contemplatively, and gives it a squeeze, as though he were testing a melon.

‘Bourton Allhallows.’

The pips go. I push in my fifty pee. They go away. I add ‘cellphone’ to my mental shopping list.

‘Hello?’

‘This is Bourton Allhallows.’

‘Mary?’

‘Yes?’

‘Hi, it’s Melody. I’m on a payphone.’

‘Oh, yes?’ She says this in the sort of voice you use when someone calls back from the electricity company to tell you how come your bill has suddenly doubled overnight. Maybe she’s distracted or something.

‘Mary, is Rufus about?’

‘No.’

A pause. I wait for her to qualify the statement and watch the pennies ticking down on the crystal display.

‘No, he’s not about, or no he’s not near the phone?’

‘I—’

‘Because if he’s not near the phone, could you let him know and I’ll call back in five minutes?’

‘He’s not about.’

‘Oh. OK. I’ll try him on the cellphone.’

‘All right.’

She hangs up. No bothering with pleasantries or suchlike.

I have to pop into a shop to get some change. The nearest one is a health food shop. I have a hell of a time identifying anything at all that will actually produce any change from my five-pound note, eventually buy a bag of liquorice root. It costs
£
2.95 for five sticks. Unbelievable. Chew as I dig in my bag for the number.

‘Hello?’

‘Oh. He’s left it behind, then?’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘He’s left it … it’s Melody again, Mary.’

‘Oh.’

Well, who the hell did you think it was? The Queen Mother?

‘I guess he’s left it behind.’

‘Yes. It was on the table.’

‘Right. Is he due back at any point?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, could you give him a message for me?’

‘Yes.’

‘Thank you.’

Another silence.

‘Could you tell him,’ I ask, ‘that I’ve decided not to stay up in London? You wouldn’t believe it, but I’ve got everything done already.’

‘Oh yes?’

I don’t mention Hilary. I’ve decided not to till I can see him face-to-face and there’s no point telling
her
. It’s too extraordinary a story to waste on a phone call.

‘Yeah.’ I attempt once more to engage her interest. ‘It’s great shopping up there. I’ve had a great time. I’ve bought some fabulous things.’

Now, any normal woman would, at this point, want to know what. Mary, instead, says: ‘Oh yes?’

‘So anyways, I thought I’d jump on the four forty-eight. Can you ask him to come pick me up?’

‘If I see him.’

‘Well, where is he? Is he somewhere I can call him?’

‘I think he went out,’ she says, ‘to see Roly Cruikshank.’

Oh, yes, he did, didn’t he?

‘Oh, right. Have you got the number there?’

‘No.’

‘Mary, I’m running out of money. Can you call him, please, at Roly’s, and let him know? I’m sorry to be a nuisance.’

She sounds like she’s staring out of the window. ‘Of course,’ she replies vaguely.

‘The train gets in to Moreton just after six.’

‘Yes.’

‘If you could let him know. Please?’

‘Have a nice trip,’ she says.

‘Thanks. I’ll see you later.’

‘Thank you for calling,’ she says. ‘Goodbye.’

He’s a nice guy, my cab driver. A man called Matthew Baker. There’s a Gloucestershire type that’s got a casual dignity about them that really warms your cockles. Mind, I think I’d probably have fallen in love with a one-armed jelly-wrestler after ninety minutes on Moreton station. It’s not come as a hundred per cent surprise to me, after the tone of my exchange with Mary, but there’s been no sign of Rufus, and every phone I have tried – house, office, and, with sinking heart, the abandoned cellphone – rings out with an unfriendly finality. By the time I’ve tracked down the business cards taped to the inside of the firmly locked ticket office door, located an eye-pencil at the bottom of my bag and scribbled the numbers on the back of my hand, called three men with garages who said they only picked up personal friends of their wives at three weeks’ notice, finally found Matthew and waited, huddled on a bench that’s only half-sheltered by the roof overhang of the padlocked waiting room, until he got finished with his pickup over at Kiftsgate, I’m dripping, and so are my new clothes, and I’m as glad to see him as I would have been if he’d been Keanu Reeves come sauntering out of the sea in a skin-tight rubber T-shirt.

‘You’re soaking,’ he says, observantly.

‘That’ll be because it’s raining,’ I tell him.

‘It does that,’ he informs me. ‘Don’t suppose you’re used to a lot of rain where you come from.’

‘Oh, no, we get rain. Just not twenty-four/seven. It stops, sometimes, back home.’

‘Sometimes,’ he says gravely, ‘it stops here too. You can go … ooh … two, three days with nothing but sunshine come June, July.’

He leads me to an old but lovingly maintained Ford Escort. The seats are protected by a sturdy layer of shrink-wrap plastic, and the interior smells strongly of pine air freshener. There is one of those cardboard things in the shape of a Christmas tree dangling from the rear-view mirror. Combined with the smell of my wet shoes, wet hair and sodden clothes, it produces a fug so powerful that I have surreptitiously to wind the window down and lean my face into the damp breeze in order to stop myself from chundering.

‘Bourton Allhallows, was it?’

‘Got it in one, Matt. You’ve just about saved my life, I reckon.’

‘Someone forget to come and pick you up, did they?’

‘Something like that, yeah. And now no one’s answering the phone. The lines must be down or something.’

‘That,’ he says, looking to left and right as he waits to pull out on to the main road, ‘sounds like the beginning of one of them old black-and-white horror movies.’

I shiver, but from cold and dampness rather than anything else. ‘Oh, don’t. Don’t get me started.’

‘So what you doing down there? Staying with the family?’

‘No. Worse than that. I’ve married one of them.’

I see him glance at me, interestedly, in the mirror.

‘Ah, so you’re the one we’ve been hearing about.’

‘All good, I assume,’ I half-joke.

A fractional pause. Then his natural politeness kicks in. ‘Of course … nothing you need to worry yourself about. Mostly speculation.’

‘I’m sort of getting used to that,’ I say.

‘Give it twenty, twenty-five years and they’ll be treating you like a local.’

I tuck my hands between my knees in an effort to warm them up. ‘I can’t wait.’

‘So what do you make of your new home, then?’

‘It’s … interesting,’ I say.

Matthew laughs. ‘I see you’ve got your diplomatic skills sorted out.’

We’re passing through a darkened Moreton-in-Marsh. When it looked like I wasn’t going to have any luck getting a cab I had thought of walking up into town for warmth and company, but it’s all too grimly evident that, out of tourist season, no one keeps their business open longer than they have to. The main street is eerily empty: not even the usual gaggle of teens gathered on a bench somewhere. The tea shops have given up on the crumpet trade for the day. Only the Bell and the Black Bear are open, in a desultory fashion.

‘I’ll tell you something for free,’ says Matthew, ‘I don’t envy you.’

‘Really?’

‘What? Go and live in that mouldy old pile? Not for all the tea in China.’

I sit forward. ‘You know what, Matthew?’

‘What’s that?’

‘If you didn’t have them on the steering wheel, I’d be shaking you by the hand right now.’

‘Why’s that, then?’

‘Do you know, you’re the first person who’s said anything like that to me since I got here.’

‘Sorry if I’ve said anything out of place,’ he says.

‘No. The opposite. I was beginning to think I must be mad, or something, the way they all talk. Every time somebody opens their mouth and talks about that place, it’s the way people talk about bits of the True Cross or something?’

‘Well, you do get some odd people …’

‘Yes, but it’s almost like a religion. You know the word I hear most often in relation to Bourton Allhallows? Heaven. Do you get it? I don’t.’