The Man Who Understood Women (16 page)

They watched them, the ebony reed in the two strips of yellow cotton and the upright figure of their not
undistinguished
-looking father, walk down the beach and out into the gentle sea.

When they returned, the Sleeping Beauty was invited to join them for lunch, but did not accept, preferring to sleep; it was as if she hoped to digest the sun.

Their father’s mind was on neither the prosciutto nor the lasagne on which they lunched. Usually he took a nap in his room. Today, for some unfathomable reason, he opted for the beach.

‘You will burn,’ Jasper warned.

‘I shall ask Franco to shift the umbrella.’

Saturday night at the Excelsior was gala night. In addition to the residents of the hotel, the elite of the surrounding
district
put on their finery and dined there or came later to dance and enjoy the cabaret on the fairyland of a terrace.

At first, Jasper and Stephanie were afraid she would not appear.

‘You two are exceptionally quiet,’ their father said, suffering just a little from prolonged exposure to the sun. ‘Is something troubling you?’

Not in the least,’ Jasper said.

‘We feel remarkably fit,’ Stephanie added.

‘I was not enquiring after your health,’ their father said. ‘Something is up. I feel it in my bones.’

They were seated at a table on the terrace, not too far from the band, when she appeared. Exquisite women at the
Excelsior
, in particular on gala nights, were like so many grains of sand. The Sleeping Beauty was the jewel of them all. She was dressed in pale-blue satin, the sleeveless top cut plain like a shirt and edged with amber, the floor-length skirt divided into wide pyjamas; her waist was very, very small. Followed by all eyes, she came to join them. She was the most splendid sight Jasper and Stephanie had seen.

‘Our favourite singer,’ she said to Jasper, as Mario Mariotti took the mike.

‘Shall we dance?’ their father said.

She was very tall indeed, but their father was taller. They moved over the smooth marble floor as if they had been
dancing
together all their lives. Now and again she leaned back her head and laughed. They seemed to be very happy.

At midnight, Stephanie and Jasper were sent to bed. Their father took the Sleeping Beauty to the discothèque, where it was very dark, very crowded and exceedingly noisy.

Although they had said goodnight, Jasper and Stephanie stayed talking to Dominic for a while alone in his deserted bar, then decided they had better go up.

‘Let’s just go and have a peep,’ Stephanie said.

‘What for?’

‘You know perfectly well,’ Stephanie said, ‘I want to see how things are going.’

The music assaulted their eardrums; their eyes were scarcely able to pierce the gloom. It was some moments before, on the packed floor, they were able to distinguish their father and the Sleeping Beauty.

They needed no more than a peep. Head and shoulders above the rest of the crowd, they were rocking to and fro in each other’s arms, close together from head to foot, their eyes tightly shut.

Well satisfied, Stephanie and Jasper went upstairs.

Considerately, they did not wake their father on Sunday morning. Imagining him to have danced away the night, they scarcely expected him on the beach before lunch. They were a little surprised, however, that the Sleeping Beauty’s mattress remained empty, too. They had somehow expected her to be made of sterner stuff.

Weary themselves, they dozed off in the sun, which seemed for the first time to be losing some of its intensity. When they awoke, their father, surrounded by Sunday newspapers, was lying beside them.

‘Good morning, chickens,’ he said. ‘I thought we might go water-skiing. The sea looks as smooth as a millpond.’

Jasper looked at Stephanie, both looked at the still-empty mattress beside them. Their father followed their gaze. They looked up and down the beach, sure that somewhere they would see the scarlet mouth, the yellow scarf.

‘Gone home,’ their father said. ‘Her husband is meeting her in Milan.’ He hid himself behind the business section.

For a long moment, his children were speechless. Then Jasper whispered indignantly, ‘She wasn’t wearing a wedding ring.’

‘Wanted to get her fingers brown,’ Stephanie whispered back, with a sudden flash of that feminine intuition which is the higher form of logic.

‘Oh, well,’ Jasper said, with a certain philosophical
melancholy
. ‘It isn’t long until Christmas. Perhaps we shall do better at Gstaad.’

A Day for Roses

1970

Katie mentally subdivided the men who came out of the
station
into the ‘peckers’ and the ‘huggers’. The majority fell into category number one.

She remembered laughing – what seemed like a hundred years ago, but could not in fact have been more than four or five – at stories of dutiful American wives in their nightdresses who ferried their husbands to the station in the mornings and equally dutifully collected them at night. Never at any point in her cogitations had she dreamed that she would evolve into an English counterpart.

In those days home had been a minuscule flat in Earls Court, which had nothing in its favour save that it was
centrally
situated and no one had to be ferried anywhere. They did not in fact own a car, which perhaps was just as well as there was no space to park within half a mile. She could not now remember when exactly they had decided to make the break. Certainly not when the flat had become too small.
That had been a gradual and insidious process, starting with the three children in one bedroom and ending with ironing in the sitting room, books in the kitchen, everything in the
bathroom
, and no corner that any one of them could call his own. She supposed there must have been a time of optimum strain when carrying shopping and babies up and rubbish and babies down three flights had taken its maximum toll; when the dirt and the noise and the traffic haze, which never quite cleared even in summer, had become unbearable, but she could recall no precise moment at which Richard had said, ‘Let’s go.’

When visiting friends who lived ‘out’ in their neat little semis or ‘ranch-style’ moderns, they had caught the last train back to town muttering never, not even for the dubious
pleasure
of park and patio and somewhere to hang the washing. ‘I should turn into a cabbage,’ she remembered saying once to Richard. ‘London is where things happen.’

‘They do come up to town,’ Richard said. ‘It doesn’t take long in a car,’

‘But the effort! I’m quite sure that after a while you’d simply vegetate, the high spot being meeting your husband at the
station
and taking him home to something that had taken hours to prepare and which he’d be far too tired to eat!’

Yet here she was in the station wagon with Flip, secure in the canine knowledge that the train was not yet due, asleep on the back seat, dinner in the oven, the three children in their own rooms settled down (she hoped) to homework, and Nicolette applying her false eyelashes when she should have been laying the table.

In Earls Court she might have spent the afternoon in the British Museum or the National Gallery, or upstairs talking to Paul who came from Guadeloupe and painted, or downstairs with Madeleine who had five children and was a researcher and still found time to teach an evening class twice a week. Today she had come from the Wednesday Club where young wives like herself from the right little tight little community met suitably clad and coiffed to gossip and, when they could remember, to raise money for worthy causes.

And yet and yet and yet … from the vast windows of their split-level open-plan house with its laundry room and shower room and place for the wellingtons, you could watch the changing of the seasons no matter where you looked: from the bare branches to buds and blossom that left you
breathless
, then overpowering verdure sheltering a long hot summer, to brown and gold and russet and the inevitable regrets. In Earls Court there had been only chimneypots with no life cycle and, outside, the multiracial occupants of bedsitter land, treading the pavements with layabouts and artists and typists and down-at-heel ladies who had known better times trailing shopping baskets on wheels. Now, like the Wednesday Club, her milieu was homogenised. The children could mix with anyone they were likely to meet; their mothers, although they picked and chose, arrived with the same selection of items at the supermarket checkout each week, and even the dogs knew each other from walking on the common.

At first Richard and she had gone no less to the theatre. After a while it had become a chore. They had the car, it was
true, but she disliked meeting Richard in town, feeling an
outsider
, she disliked the long drive back, and it was simpler to sit down comfortably and watch television and read the reviews in the Sunday papers so that she could hold her own at the Wednesday Club. For the children, as Richard had promised, it was bliss. There was skating on the ponds in winter,
tobogganing
on the common, picnics in summer, blackberries far into the autumn. For herself too: everything stayed clean and fresh, and there was pleasure in opening the windows.

She found, however, that she read and listened to records less and was surprised to catch herself gossiping for hours on the telephone, tearing to shreds reputations about which she couldn’t care a hang in the first place, or hadn’t. Now they had become her world – Pat and Wendy and Marcia and Lola – until there were times when she could recall only with
difficulty
spaghetti hoops from a tin with Paul and trailing to the launderette where conversation was far more stimulating than at the Wednesday Club, although no one gave you
home-made
chocolate cake for tea.

It was all right for Richard. He had the garden and golf on Saturdays, though she had not yet brought herself to be one of the wives who went too, and each day he made the exciting voyage into the big City, hating it, he said, leaving her with the trees and the open spaces. In imagination she followed him to the dirt and the noise and the crowded streets and
comfortable
discomfort of the lovely convoys of large red buses.

She did not complain. First because she felt it to be
unjustified
. She had wanted to be married and to have a family, and
why should she deny them the opportunity to be reared in beautiful surroundings? And, second, she knew that she was not the only one to have made a sacrifice, only what it was exactly that she had sacrificed she was not quite sure.

Each evening found Richard, the latest copy of
The Motor
on his lap, examining the specifications of Maseratis and
Lamborghinis
, while outside in the double garage stood a
perfectly
serviceable station wagon absolutely ideal for the life they led and going on holiday with the children and the dog. Lamborghini might be written on the page but Katie was well aware that all Richard saw was the mortgage and S.E.T. and income tax and Joanna’s dancing classes and the central
heating
oil and Simon’s extra French.

Richard worked hard and had a flourishing legal practice; had he remained single, the Lamborghini could well have metamorphosed from fantasy to reality. As it was, he bore the burdens of a wife and children and an au pair and a split-level house and a large garden and a dog and lessons for this and lessons for that, repairs to this and repairs to that and the fares that went up and up while his fees did not.

Most of the misgivings concerning their removal to the pseudo-country Katie had kept within herself, realising that it was the best for the most. It was necessary almost to admit now that she positively enjoyed the life and even the
Wednesday
Club had a certain conviviality and was not so crashing and ludicrous a bore as at first it had seemed. It was more than pleasant on sunny days to sit on the terrace with neither haze nor smog, watching the children screaming with enjoyment
under the hose, which played upon the lawn. It was good to spend the afternoon in the hairdresser’s knowing that it was Wendy’s turn or Lola’s to pick up the children from school or take everyone to dancing class. If she had missed out, she wasn’t sure on what. She had never really given room to her thoughts or vague misgivings, which were all they were, until today. But today they had come rushing to the fore like
flood-waters
, previously dammed, swamping her brain and giving rise to bitterness and recrimination.

It was their wedding anniversary and Richard had
forgotten
. Last night he had sat till late,
The Motor
before him, dreaming of Lamborghinis. This morning, as on any other, she had driven him to his train, he had pecked her cheek like all the other ‘peckers’ and disappeared into the station. It was the first time he’d forgotten, and she scarcely believed it possible.

In London they had celebrated, in the early days, at a
Chinese
or Indian restaurant, seedy but romantic, later graduating to French and Italian places with strung-up fishing nets and Chianti bottles. Since they had moved it had been the Bell or the Orchard or the Old Oak Manor, to which people came from far and wide, even from town, and there was dancing. Never, ever, since the very first had he forgotten and never, ever, had there not been roses. It was early for roses and he always apologised laughingly for the small buds that withered and died, or those that had drooping heads, but would not yield them to any other more easily obtained yet less romantic flower. In Earls Court he used to bring them in person,
taking
the three flights two stairs at a time in his haste to present
them, to take her in his arms … Since they moved they had been delivered, decorously, from the local florist, wrapped hygienically in cellophane, the card with its message of love meticulously attached with an outsize pin.

All day she had waited for the bell. There had been the fishmonger, the dog’s-meat man, a parcel from Harrods that looked hopeful but which had turned out to be hockey socks she had ordered for Jennifer, a telegram for Nicolette to say that her mother was ill (unlikely) and would she return home forthwith, and, finally, silence. She could not believe it. Fourteen years was a long, long time, it was true, but it was unlike Richard to forget and beneath her pride to remind him. She blamed it somehow on the split-level and the trees and the laundry room. It was all mixed up in her mind and she felt, unrealistically, that in Earls Court it could never have happened. They could not have stayed there; that she knew. Could not possibly have afforded anything larger or more suitable in town. Perhaps he no longer cared; perhaps there was somebody else while she occupied herself with the hairdresser and the Wednesday Club; perhaps he had a
little
love nest in town? It was not unheard of. One or two husbands of the Club members had gone off the rails at one point or another, on their own admission; others, according to gossip, were highly suspect. Not Richard though. It was her imagination taking wing. He would step briskly out of the station in the forefront of the next little exodus bearing red roses.

She never minded waiting at the station. It was nice to sit
down and it was a chore that always amused her. From six o’clock onwards the courtyard was a kaleidoscope of
movement
, Minis vying with staid saloons and saloons with
station
wagons for position. Clashing with each little posse of tired businessmen returning to their homes, and heading in the opposite direction, were the wives, fastidiously groomed, going up for an evening in town. They always looked
incongruous
, Katie felt – although she had been often in the same situation – in their patent shoes and their clean white gloves going through to the grimy trains. What else could they do? Once at the theatre or San Frediano’s or L’Epée d’Or they would be congruous again.

Another train came in and Flip awoke; it must be getting near time. She switched on the ignition as the woman in the Mini in front received her evening peck upon the cheek and drove away. Katie eased up to take her place, and Flip,
having
stretched, put a paw upon her shoulder and hung his head out of the window so that he could watch the entrance to the station. The newspaper woman was busy, not so much selling papers to the wives going up to town – they did not want to dirty their white gloves on newsprint – but giving messages that had been left with her during the day to schoolchildren that their mothers might be late, or to husbands that the car wouldn’t start and would they walk or queue up for the bus.

As each man came out he looked with some anxiety left and right for the familiar car, the familiar wife, though each, Katie thought, with her deep freeze at home and identical report of the day’s events, was somehow interchangeable.

She felt Flip become agitated. Bemused by her thoughts, she had neglected to keep vigil. There on the pavement,
looking
to right and left, was Richard. There were no roses.

He said good evening first to Flip, then to her. He took his place beside her in the car.

Don’t you know what day it is?

‘What’s for dinner?’ he asked. ‘I’m starving. All day in court. Didn’t stop for lunch.’

I did not, would not, she thought, put candles on the table, serve dinner
à deux
, your favourite moules; there is cottage pie.

‘Children all right?’

Children? What about me? Flip and the children and the dinner and I the producer, the
metteuse en scène
who made it all happen but remained in the background.