The Man Who Understood Women (7 page)

Helen!’ she exclaimed as dramatically as if I were her
long-lost
sister, and held out both her hands. I stood up and she kissed me. Her skin was cool and had the exotic tang of
expensive
perfume used lavishly. She took my arm, clinging as if she’d never let me go, and we followed the headwaiter to a table by the window.

When he’d left us I watched her go through the small
settling
motions of seeking comfort; I knew that Rosita had not fallen upon hard times. She hadn’t changed, except that the long blond hair was now shorter in keeping with the current fashion and perhaps owed a little, but I could not really be sure, to artifice. She seemed unaware that everyone at the tables around us was watching her, admiring the chiselled
perfection
of her features, as she leant forward and said: ‘It’s so wonderful to see you.’

‘How did you know my address?’

‘I saw the birth announcement, a daughter, wasn’t it? I meant to write to you.’

‘The birth announcement?’ My youngest child was four.

‘I came across the piece of paper in my wallet. I often
wondered
what I’d done with it.’

‘That was four years ago.’

‘As long as that? I stick things away.’ She opened her
handbag
. ‘I bought a present. I should have looked at the date.’ She handed me a jeweller’s box.

Inside was an exquisite coral bracelet which would have
fitted
a baby no older than six months.

‘It’s very lovely,’ I murmured. ‘Thank you, Rosita.’

Rosita dismissed it with a wave of her hand. ‘You can put it away for the next.’

The waiter asked me what I’d like to eat and it wasn’t until he’d gone that I realised Rosita hadn’t ordered anything at all.

‘So you live in Sutton,’ Rosita said.

‘Yes,’ I said, on the defensive although she hadn’t attacked. ‘Where do you?’

‘All over,’ she shrugged. ‘London, Paris, Florida. Hooper’s in oil.’

I only now remembered reading about her recent marriage to the Harrington heir. According to the papers they were blissfully happy. That put paid to my theory that Rosita was in some sort of emotional trouble, which she thought I might be able to sort out. She certainly looked happy enough and the personification of radiant health. All my speculations as to why she might want to see me became groundless in her actual presence and I waited, curious throughout the meal, for some logical explanation of why I was lunching with Rosita at
Bellotti
’s on an ordinary Wednesday when normally I would have been at home boiling myself an egg.

The waiter brought the lunch I had ordered and the headwaiter himself brought Rosita a small portion of salad
although I hadn’t heard her ask for anything.

‘You are a darling, Emilio,’ she smiled at him and then at me. ‘I never take anything more complicated at midday.’

I was a darling, too: ‘Helen, darling.’

I asked her about the letter. She had written it in Miami, she said, and forgotten to post it. She had given it to Hooper to post when she’d returned. I didn’t ask what Hooper had been doing in Streatham.

‘What upset you in Tangier?’ I asked. I pictured the
beggars
with their running sores, the waifs of children, ragged, barefooted, Rosita distributing largesse.

She wrinkled the peach-brown forehead. ‘Tangier?’ she said. ‘Oh, yes, it was the rainy season …’

She asked me and I told her about my life in Sutton, and about my marriage and about my two children. She was
listening
with only half her mind and I didn’t blame her; it didn’t sound much compared with Tangier, with Paris, with Florida.

‘Have you kept in touch with anyone else from school?’ I asked.

‘No, no one.’

‘Were you happy there?’

Rosita looked surprised. Happiness and its elusive quality was a subject I often pondered on and had long discussions about with Mitchell.

‘I suppose so,’ Rosita said.

I should have known that for Rosita life was for living and not for questioning.

‘How long are you staying in London?’ I asked, thinking
perhaps that her visit was only to be brief and there was
something
she wanted me to do for her.

‘Oh, until one of us gets the urge to move, I suppose.’

I imagined her waking up in the morning and standing on the balcony in her negligée and deciding with no ado at all to transport herself to the other side of the world. Thus it was to be Rosita.

She was still terribly amusing. While we ate she told me stories about her life, her homes, her husbands. The people at the next table listened too. The fabric she wove was of bright colours, each stitch close to the next. There was no delicate shading of hope or of dream or of aspiration.

Was this scudding across life’s surface perhaps happiness? Rosita certainly seemed to be content.

With the coffee, which Rosita had in a specially large cup brought again unasked-for by Emilio, I could not resist asking why it was that after so many years Rosita had wanted to see me.

Rosita looked puzzled. Then she said: ‘Oh yes, I told you I came across the birth announcement in my wallet.’

I waited for her to go on. But she only said: ‘I don’t know about you but I’d like some more coffee,’ and looked round vaguely for Emilio.

Of course I should have realised before. I prided myself on my knowledge of human nature yet I had in my imagination vested Rosita with a depth she did not possess. My presence in Bellotti’s was, of course, the result of a whim. ‘Helen, darling, I must see you.’ How else would you put it if you were Rosita?

She signed the bill and allowed Emilio to kiss her hand. I had a sudden sharp vision of Monsieur Bonnard, long since dead, and Mr Jarvis unable to keep the devotion from their eyes. I wondered how it felt to have all men in love with you and to revolve steadily through life surrounded by a galaxy of desire.

Outside, a long, low car and a grey-uniformed chauffeur were waiting. ‘I’ll drop you off,’ Rosita said. ‘Where?’

I mentioned the nearest tube station from which I could get a train back home and found myself sharing a rug with Rosita, which the chauffeur tucked solicitously round our knees.

There was a lot of traffic round the entrance to the tube
station
, and because I was afraid there’d be a hold-up caused by the big car, which should not really have stopped just there, I tried to get out quickly and gabble my thanks to Rosita for the lunch. But she, seeming quite oblivious to traffic problems, followed me out of the car and stood on the pavement
holding
both my hands.

A man in the car stuck behind Rosita’s hooted impatiently. Rosita turned her head and smiled at him indicating that she’d be no more than a moment and he grinned back and stopped hooting.

Rosita kissed me for the second time. ‘It was lovely, we must do it again some time,’ she said. ‘Only we won’t leave it so long.’ I was about to suggest a future date and that Rosita be my guest for a return lunch when a look into the depthless eyes told me she was no longer interested, anxious to be gone.

I waved my glove at the car until it was swallowed up
between two buses and I found myself standing there bidding farewell to nothing.

There it was. I had been picked up and put down in
whatever
sense you liked. I walked into the draughty maw of the station.

When he came home at six Mitchell’s first words were: ‘Well, what did she want?’

And it was then that I realised how stupid my ideas had been about why Rosita had wanted to see me. The Rositas never needed anything from anybody; their lives were not dependent upon love or sympathy, compassion or
understanding
. And the material things fell from overladen trees.

I told Mitchell about our meeting, describing Rosita, and when I’d finished he was smiling, one could almost say
glowing
, and offered to put the children to bed. Usually he was tired after a long day and ready to collapse into his chair with his feet up, but now he seemed revitalised. And even I, after quite a hectic day, doing my usual chores and dashing up to town to meet Rosita, was aware of an extraordinary glow of elation.

Looking at Mitchell I marvelled that the effect of Rosita could be vicarious, too, and I thought of Monsieur
Bonnard
and Mr Jarvis and my aunt, and all the conductors on the number 12s, and Emilio and the people at the next table in Bellotti’s and the man who had hooted in Oxford Street, and all the people she had made happy, if only briefly, myself included. And I did not at all mind being a whim.

The Crowded Room

1962

My name is Susan Slade and I hate cocktail parties. Not just the weary excrescences on toast and the faceless waitresses with their inevitable offerings of mouthfuls that disintegrate at the touch or are too hot, but the very format of the things.

The desire to turn and flee for home that comes between the ringing of the bell and the opening of the door. The
self-confidence
of which one is divested with one’s coat. The
bitter
taste of smoke and the back-to-front tape of a hundred unintelligible voices. With assimilation, a drink, exchange of pleasantries with a familiar face, things usually improve, only to turn sour when on the doorstep, whipped back to reality by comparatively unpolluted air, you realise that you are partly full, partly drunk, partly satiated with partly heard conversation.

Drusilla’s party was on Sunday, which made it worse. It meant stepping out of the comfortable morass of unmade
beds and Sunday papers and
The Critics
, and dressing, as one did every other day.

Informal, Drusilla said, don’t bother to dress, but of course just as much effort was needed for the ‘thrown together’ look as for the biggest gala appearance. It was just a figure of speech.

I don’t think Drusilla would have cared for my Pyrenean wool housecoat against her Chinese Chippendale, nor Simon’s glad rags, which bore abundant testimony to the
Sunday
he creosoted the side gate, and pruned the roses a little too enthusiastically, and the dog who had a fit in the scullery, and the sailing dinghy – begun a hundred Sundays ago and now languishing in the garage.

Knowing Drusilla’s crowd and unable to compete, I chose an understated tweed suit, the most expensive garment I had in my wardrobe, and Simon, begging for one more moment in his slippers, settled for the natty fisherman’s pullover I had bought him for his birthday in which he would never have dreamed of going fishing.

Reluctantly we kicked the newspapers into a semblance of tidiness – my skirt was too tight to allow me to pick them up and Simon was too lazy – admonished the children to behave, turned the oven down upon the lunch and set off.

Drusilla was the sort of woman who collected people as others did jade or old sugar tongs or first editions. She strung them on the bracelet of her basic loneliness and insecurity, and the moment she felt the slightest sign that life was
passing
her by she took them out and looked at them. Mostly they were glad enough to dance for a while to Drusilla’s tune.
Many of them were poets, writers, musicians, painters, rarely averse to the hospitality or adulation that Drusilla dispensed unstintingly.

To be fair to Drusilla herself, she was beautiful and
indefatigably
cheerful, and there were few who did not benefit from an hour in her company. Lavished by her kisses and caresses, by her endless sincere insincerities, there was not a woman who did not feel more feminine, a man more manly, in the rosy aura of her charm. If we had to waste a Sunday morning, there was no one more capable than Drusilla of sugaring the pill.

Naturally there was nowhere to park. Drusilla did not believe in doing things by halves and the cars filled the not inconsiderable carriage drive and spilled along the kerb a good half-mile down the road.

‘Simon! Simon!’ The door was flung wide and immediately one was in Drusilla’s arms pleasantly anaesthetised by ‘Moment Supreme’ and struggling to remind oneself she didn’t mean the praises she showered on one.

‘Simon, you’re handsomer than ever! He doesn’t age a day. Susan, darling, what a dream of a suit!’

Thoroughly kissed, we had a chance to look at Drusilla. It was always a surprise. Today she had on a baby-pink dress and pink phosphorescent shoes. Her hair was pink, too; Drusilla could do things like that and get away with it.

I was about to compliment her on her appearance but the door had opened behind us and someone else was drowning in her welcome, so we allowed ourselves to be carried on the tide into the depths of the party.

There was the usual nucleus of familiar faces. Drusilla always made use of the hard core of her acquaintances, of which Simon and I were a part, and embroidered it with her latest acquisitions. We waggled our fingers at those similarly extricated from their Sunday limbo and did what was expected of us by chatting amiably to the newcomers.

I lost Simon in what was now a reasonable facsimile of the platform of Tottenham Court Road station in the rush hour and was attempting manfully to keep a guard on my third champagne cocktail, an oozing asparagus roll and my tongue, when Drusilla in her pinkness appeared beside me and said: ‘Susan, darling, I want you to come and meet
someone
special.’

There was always a ‘someone special’. A particularly succulent morsel gleaned from studio or stage, frequently in transit between exciting places and dished up as the
pièce de résistance
at Drusilla’s parties.

Her slim arm round my waist, she steered me across the room, clearing a pathway with friendly hugs and squeezes to her guests as we went. The noise had become intense and reminded me of the parrot house at the zoo.

By a group near the concert grand, which took up only a corner of the great room, Drusilla stopped. A ring of upturned, attentive faces, some with cigarettes stuck in them, were
listening
to a tall man in a black, cable-stitch jersey. Obviously the lion, I thought. Drusilla stroked the back of his neck with slim, pink-tipped fingers. He turned round and with a zoomp of the time-machine I was face to face with my past.

The group that had been hanging on his words knitted together and left the three of us a separate entity.

‘This is Stefan,’ Drusilla said. She put the accent on the last syllable, conjuring up an image of some colourful eastern European village.

‘Hello, Steve,’ I said.

‘Susan!’ He was as shattered as I.

In the hubbub Drusilla hadn’t even noticed. She hugged us both to her and said: ‘Stefan paints. You simply must see his exhibition at the Cotterell. For fabulous sums he’ll paint your portrait, won’t you, darling?’

Fabulous sums! He must have covered over a hundred
canvases
with my face and I hadn’t paid him a penny.

With a delighted smile to each of us Drusilla was gone and we were left on an island of silence to roll back the years. He looked first at my hair, no longer the savage jungle it had been when I was eighteen, to be posed over my shoulder or across my mouth, but a neat tribute to fashion and my hairdresser, then at my understatement of a suit which in his eyes I could see was the grossest of overstatements.

‘So you’re really a cake-eater …’

‘And you,’ I said quickly in self-defence, looking pointedly at his champagne glass. But I knew it wasn’t true. Nearing forty he was still as thin as a lathe, hollow almost in the
middle
, and I could tell he had never returned to the petit
bourgeoisie
of Blackheath where he was raised.

It was a game we used to play in the nasty cynicism of our tender years. Looking out of the gritty window of his
studio through a peephole we had rubbed with our fingers in the dirt, we’d watch the shoppers in Fulham Road
disappear
with predatory faces into packed shops and then
reappear
laden with weekend joints and teeth-rotting, fruit-filled pies. ‘Cake-eaters’, we named them disparagingly for their philistinism.

At night we watched the ‘fat’ cake-eaters, an even more despicable class, shrugging off fur coats at restaurant tables, through lighted windows in the King’s Road. Ourselves, we lived on beans and tea and love. In summer, dust griming our sandalled feet, we roamed like an ‘entwined dryad’ in the parks; in winter we huddled in front of the electric fire in
Steven
’s studio.

As if I had spoken my thoughts aloud Steven, his black hair still at sixes and sevens, though greying elegantly now above the ears, reached for my hand. He turned it over gently in his own and looked at the white scar that puckered the palm. I could feel the pain of it now.

We used to do our cooking by turning the little stove on to its back and standing the saucepan or the kettle on its bars.

It was snowing, I remember; snow that drifted unhurriedly in fat flakes past the window. Steven had been painting all day and I sitting. We were both exhausted. I had grabbed hold of the stove too quickly, not thinking what I was doing, and the next moment was screaming hysterically in Steven’s arms.

Our idyll had lasted until the term before we were due to finish our course at the art school. To hear us talk you would have thought it infinite.

I had been home for the mid-term break and there, neat and tidy, living the other half of my chameleon existence, I met Simon. With the part of myself that recognised the need for stability and family and roots, and a thousand other things we had derided in the cake-eaters, I fell in love. For the other half, for my dream self, there was no one but Steven.

For the rest of the term I managed to keep my two lives separate. I dined with Simon in fashionable restaurants,
dressing
myself suitably, and discussed the future.

With Steven there was no future, only the intensity of existence from day to day. Because I was afraid of him I put off the moment when I must tell him. When I finally did I made the terrible mistake of throwing a sop to his disappointment.

I had always refused to sit for him in the nude. Not for any reasons of modesty, three years at the art school had put an end to any pretensions I might have had of that, but on the odd grounds that if Steven ever became famous and his
pictures
hung, I might be exposed
toute nue
to the horrified gaze of my relations.

A week before the end of the term in which I had met Simon, Steven had asked me to sit for a study of Ariadne, a painting he was doing in a series of scenes from Greek
mythology
. Without saying anything I took off my clothes and arranged myself on the couch he had prepared. He gave me a long look, but with no more comment, squeezed Chinese white on to his palette and started to paint.

He painted all that week and I don’t think that we even stopped for our customary diet of beans. At the end of it we
could hardly stagger, but on the canvas was the finest painting Steven had ever done. Wrapped in his dressing gown I looked at it with tears in my eyes; it was an inspiration of Steven and myself and paint and canvas: it lived.

‘What made you change your mind?’ Steven said, as he cleaned his brushes, and I knew the moment had come.

He looked at me, happily saturated with achievement. ‘Don’t bother to answer,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t really matter. We’re on to great things, Sue. This is only a beginning. Next term we shall conquer the world.’

‘There’ll not be a next term for me,’ I said. ‘I’m going to be married.’

He stopped with his brush in mid-air and cocked his head as though he hadn’t quite heard.

‘I’m not coming back.’

The next five minutes were the worst I had lived through to date and even now I cannot think of any experience since that made me feel so bad.

With the brush he had been cleaning, Steven attacked his
palette
savagely, and white-faced, desecrated Ariadne from top to toe until there was nothing to be seen on the canvas but a hideous, glutinous, string-coloured mess weeping great tears of viridian.

That was my first love and that was how it ended. After almost twenty years I could relive the vicarious suffering I was unable to assuage.

I didn’t see him again but I learned from a student at the art school that my place had been taken by a girl called Nadia who had Russian parents and hair she could sit on.

‘So now you charge fabulous sums to the cake-eaters?’

He had the grace to blush. ‘I don’t paint just anyone. I have to want to.’

‘Of course,’ I said, helping him, and we smiled the smile of friendship into each other’s eyes to hide the love that was almost, but not quite dead.

‘Stefan!’ a voice from the present said, and a girl with pure black hair to the waist, a blue canvas tube of a dress and no make-up, came from nowhere and leaned her really beautiful face upon his shoulder.

‘This is Katya,’ Steven said.

We shook hands politely, although she did not really look at me, but hung on to Steven as if she would never let him go.

‘The lunch will be burning,’ Simon’s voice said from my side; and my eyes met Steven’s, laughing, the old lines of
communication
still open.

‘This is Stefan,’ I said, introducing Simon. ‘He has an
exhibition
at the Cotterell Gallery.’

‘My wife was at art school when we met. You’ve always been keen on painting, haven’t you, Sue?’ Simon said.

‘I was never any good, though, at painting.’

‘Stefan, Katya, you mustn’t monopolise my friends!’ Drusilla said. ‘Susan, darling, I want you to talk to the Walshes. They come from New York and are in biscuits in a fabulous way and are on their way to Madrid.’