Aunt Margaret's Lover Read online

  Aunt Margaret capitulates. 'Sorry,' she says, reminding herself that to have a friend you must be a friend. 'Slip over then. Just for half an hour.'

  Verity puts down the telephone, clasps her knees to her chest, and looks pleased. At least somebody thinks she is important. 'See you, Wall,' she says cheerfully. 'Who needs a brute of a lover when they have a friend to see them through?'

  'I'll do the same for you one day,' says Verity, plonking herself down on the sofa.

  'I sincerely hope you won't have to,' says Aunt Margaret.

  'I will if you are going out with men.' Verity narrows her eyes. It has not escaped her notice, despite her grief, that her friend is looking well turned out. 'You have a new hair cut. It suits you,' she says.

  'Thank you,' replies her friend, patting it, a spontaneous gesture. Verity narrows her eyes some more. 'And you have painted your nails.' Aunt Margaret looks at them as if she is surprised to find them growing there at the end of her fingers. 'Oh yes. I have.'

  'You've got on sheer tights and you've had your legs shaved . ..'

  'Waxed,' says Aunt Margaret pleasantly.

  'You are wearing a little black woollen number that I haven't seen before and high heels'

  'Only little ones,' says Aunt Margaret calmly.

  'Mascara? Eye shadow?' Verity leans forward, her eyes no more than bright little slits in her face. Her voice rises. 'Foundation? Rouge?' She sniffs. 'Perfume?

  'Would you like to see my underwear too?'

  'Black? Lacy?' asks Verity.

  Aunt Margaret laughs, 'Nope. White cotton. With that vital, generous gusset.' They both laugh. 'Who is he?' demands Verity.

  Her friend and counsellor smooths down her frock. The telephone rings. Saved by the bell.

  Instead of taking the call in the hall, Verity is surprised to see those little high heels previously remarked flashing up the

  stairs, two at a time, to the bedroom. The sound of a closing door tells the listener below that this is to be a very private conversation. She is intrigued. She sits back in the sofa and her eyes re-form their normal ellipses. Above her she can just about make out the muffled sound of a voice. Up and down it goes, pausing and beginning. A laugh. A silence. And then nothing.

  The bedroom door opens, the little high heels come down the stairs in orderly fashion, and Aunt Margaret's face wears a look that says very clearly, 'Do not ask who it was.'

  Verity says, 'Who was it?'

  Aunt Margaret frowns. 'Nigel,' she says, a deal too carelessly, shrugging her shoulders as if to dissociate herself. 'Who's Nigel?'

  'Hey,' says Aunt Margaret, looking at her watch. 'You came here to talk about you. I've got to go out soon.'

  Verity also looks at her watch - with surprise. For nearly five minutes she has forgotten to think about the ghastly Mark and her heart, such an aching thing, has been pumping away quite normally and without pain.

  'Drink?' says Aunt Margaret.

  Verity nods. 'Diet Coke,' she says unexpectedly. 'If you've got it.'

  'In this house,' says her hostess, 'Diet Coke is not a problem. Saskia left cupboards full of it.' 'Miss her?'

  Aunt Margaret ponders. There is an irritating little half-smile about her lips, which Verity notices. 'Not as much as I thought I would.' She hands Verity the fizzing glass.

  Verity narrows her eyes. 'Other fish to fry?'

  'Just keeping busy. Now, come on, tell me. Talk away:'

  Verity begins. Her heart resumes its aching and the tears flow from her wide-open eyes.

  Chapter Fourteen

  At first after I arrived I felt guilty because I have no anger against him and I felt that I should have. I told him this and he just said that anger was destructive, necessary for war but not for peace. And that he hoped this was a protracted peace. It is hard to equate this man with the one I was afraid I would meet. He is quite philosophical really. I don't suppose the two of you will ever meet? I'm sure you'd be surprised and pleased.

  Jill is talking to boxes of leeks but not out loud. She cannot talk to them out loud because she is surrounded by her employees - doughty countrymen all, in mud-encrusted Wellingtons and ancient thornproofs, the backbone of rural England and already suspicious enough of her femininity without seeing and hearing her perform such a patently gender-brained foolishness.

  Jill is telling the leeks that if it weren't for them, and the carrots, she would be off down to London to stay with her friend Margaret, who would understand. Nobody up here understands. She is not sure that she does, really - and a session or two with Margaret would probably clarify things, or put them in perspective, and all those other consoling phrases which represent the comfort of women. She straightens her back and looks around. The sky is heavy with rain and the air is raw despite its being nearly May. Up here in this wild north early summer means nothing and the air does not warm up until August, if then. Jill loves it all - the seasons, the mountains, the clear streams, the contrasts. She looks at one now, clumps of speedwell glowing among the ragged grass at the edge of the field, the humble germander a brilliant David to that Goliath of a sky. If only she could keep all this, but transport herself - transport her David for a while - she would be perfectly happy. Possibly.

  'If I . . .' she says out loud, and fiercely, and then recollects herself as she sees Sidney Burney looking at her expectantly through his bushy brows. He removes the disgusting thing he keeps in his mouth and calls a pipe and grunts questioningly.

  She pushes a strand of hair from her face to give herself time to think. What can she invent to say? She has to match the fierceness. 'If I had known how long this was going to take . . .' she says, hoping it will be enough. But it never is for Sidney.

  'Yes?' he says.

  'I'd have got another lad.'

  He returns his pipe whence it came and nods sagely. 'Cost you,' he says.

  It is a conversation they have had before and with which they are comfortable.

  'You could go in now,' he says, bending low over the earth.

  Jill remembers that Margaret describes her workers as van Goghs: one of her birthday presents was a beautifully framed reproduction of an old woman bunched over the stony earth, grimly absorbed in her task. It came from the museum in Amsterdam. One day Jill would like to go and see the whole collection for herself. David keeps saying, 'Yes, old fruit,' but then never has the time. She could make time, she supposes, but to go alone would be too sad somehow. Not much point in suggesting to Giles that they might meet up there. What son in his right mind would prefer to accompany his mother on a trip to Amsterdam when he can go with a crowd of mates? Giles is stuck in the flat Dutch countryside for most of the time and when he gets away to the delights of the city, he is hardly likely to want to hot-foot it to a museum.

  Maybe she should go down to London? She really could do with a visit. But she can't leave this lot. Not yet. She straightens her back again and grunts. They all do that, the men, and she has long learned not to care if they find it unwomanly in her. She stands hands on hips, feet apart, readjusting to being vertical again. Around her the greyness deepens so that even the half-budded trees seem monochrome. It is a breathtaking piece of magic once the summer colours everything green, but not yet, not yet. Up here the gradualness of it is something like waiting for a birth. All very D. H. Lawrence, Margaret says of the wildness. Usually she finds that it calms her heart.

  Well. Jill looks from the grand mountains and the lowering sky to the men around her. Not much likelihood of finding a Mellors among them. Jill sighs. Fat chance. They are all either well over sixty, or the same age as her son. Apart from Sidney, the leader in all things and Jill's right-hand. Though possibly in his fifties, he both looks and smells like a potato which has been left in the soil too long. He sucks his pipe, not female toes, and takes his sandwiches well away from her when the time comes to cat, keeping his nose in a book and his cap well down over his eyes. No. Nothing of Mellor’s material there. He just so happens to be the backbone of the bu
siness.

  'Do you think we should get another hand?' she asks.

  He pauses, considers, removes the pipe and says, 'Maybe, See how we do to the end of the week.'

  She nods, bends again and resumes her task. A business acquaintance of David's once told her that her men would achieve a higher productivity if she didn't work alongside them but was seen to be doing all the powerhouse stuff. 'Managers manage,' he said, 'and workers work.' Jill has never liked businessmen. If she had known - she pulls aggressively at the harsh green frond - if she had known that David would turn into one, she would most certainly have thought again when he snapped open her bra after their third date.

  She stops what she is doing reluctantly. There is something soothing about the rhythm of pulling leeks, a sense of healthiness, the body in action, the mind left free. There is no doubt that this kind of work keeps her fit without her having to cavort around in overstretched pink Lycra or punish herself on the tennis court. She stands upright again. This time her grunt is valedictory.

  'Better go in and sort out a bit of paperwork,' she says, and plods back over the fields. One part of her casts a calculating eye over the carrot tops, the bushy greenness of the potatoes, the misty cucumber frames; the other part muses on the sensual effect of spring.

  David had certainly responded to the sap rising last night. While they were breathing and touching and rolling she had had the most wonderful fantasy that she was half woman, half tree. Like Diana - no, Daphne. But she could not remember which tree, so without thinking she said to David - who happened to be above her just then, although they were quite liberal in their sexual roles - 'Was it a laurel or a rowan tree? I can't remember.' And a pair of very surprised eyes, which had hitherto been bathed in that faraway ecstatic light of yielding to lust, refocused, looked down at her and blinked, and said, with just a peppering of peevishness, 'What?'

  'I was wondering if it was a laurel or a rowan.'

  She caught his look. The peevishness had deepened. His eyes opened and closed in a momentary gesture of irritation. 'You aren't bringing the bloody garden centre into bed with us now, are you?' He had never forgiven her for once mulling over expanding into peas in a post-coital state of clarity. David called the market garden a 'garden centre' only when he was sorely tried.

  She began to explain the fantasy and then decided that she could not be bothered. Not be bothered? That was seriously worrying. They could, of course, have had some fun speculating which bits had turned into tree and which were still her and where the squirrels may have put their nuts . . . But instead she just clamped her mouth shut, closed her eyes and indulged her fantasy alone. When he said a little later, urgently now, kneading and stroking her flesh, 'What are you thinking?' she just smiled and said, 'Roll over and I'll show you.'

  Leaving her boots at the door, she pads down the hallway, stopping to pick up a couple of letters from the floor. Both have familiar writing: one from London, Margaret; one from Somerset, Amanda.

  Guiltily she opens Amanda's letter first - not from motherly impatience but to get it over with. Once a week her daughter sends her a letter which contains everything a grandmother might wish to know about her distant family. But it is the kind of letter that an expatriate might send to friends in the home country, with a request to 'pass it around when you have finished with it'. Impersonal. Jill could not find a way in to her daughter, or rather, she suspected, there was nothing in her daughter to find. Amanda was happy. Extremely happy. She was dull, safe, kind, organized, calm and happy. She was David. It was hardly fair for her mother to go probing around looking for something that simply wasn't there.

  The Irish are giving British mushrooms a hard time, Amanda writes, and she is doing a course in child psychology

  -Jill's heart sinks - and they have finally got round to buying a camper van. Maybe Jill and David could come along some time? They are thinking of a holiday in Wales -doing the castles with the children. Jill's heart spreads around her on the floor. Time for an ally.

  She picks up Margaret's letter for relief but it is curiously devoid of intimacy and reads - unless it is Jill's state of mind - not unlike Amanda's. Bright, breezy, full of details about what she has been doing, but feelings? That incisive observation of the strange ramblings of life? That personal touch? No. Not about her, nor about what Jill might be feeling. She puts the letter down and sighs. Ah well, it must all be very strange now that Saskia is away. Perhaps Margaret is in

  even lower spirits than Jill and doesn't want to burden her. More than likely. She stands up, makes two flasks of coffee, which she sets on the table with several chunky white china mugs. (Should a manager make hot drinks for her employees? Yes, she says defiantly to the sleeping cat.) It is not as if she does not have friends up here - she does, but they are not pals of the heart, and everything in their lives looks reasonably rosy, secure, proper. Although Jill knows this cannot be so, that 'All human life is there' must extend to the north of England too, she has not penetrated anybody enough to find out. The market garden has saved her from idling decay, but distanced her from the kitchen tables round about.

  She takes her own coffee into her office, which makes her feel a little better. At least there is her business. This is something she has achieved, despite David at first saying it was nonsense (he is very supportive now, except occasionally when he gets into his cups and little spurts of primal resentment burst out). She opens a couple of envelopes left over from yesterday. One contains an invitation to the opening next month of an organic farm shop near Otterburn. The high life, she chuckles. Pity it's the week after Margaret is coming. A bucolic jaunt like that would have had them both giggling like schoolgirls. It would be so nice if she could live up here all the time. It has always been Jill's fantasy that her friend will find true love here among the Cheviots, and settle near by.

  She places the invitation from the organic shop on her desk. Pity, she thinks, for Margaret might have met the man of her dreams there and never gone home again.

  Chapter Fifteen

  I have been painting away — some good, some very good and some complete failures. It's encouraging to have Dad alongside. He doesn't say much unless I ask him a direct question, and then he is forthcoming and quite didactic. A sort of parent/tutor. It's a funny thing, the blood bond, but our signatures are almost identical. He signs his 'Richard Donald' and says the

  days of 'Dickie' are long gone. He showed me a beautiful drawing of my mother and me when I was asleep in her arms. It is very tender. He has given it to me. What are you doing over there? I have heard nothing for ages.

  Woman, 39, seeks lover for one year. I offer good legs, bright mind, happy disposition, in return for well-adjusted, solvent male between 35 and 40. April to April. No Expectations.

  The male population singular's view of age seems to be a broad canvas. Rather as in the old days, I suppose, when if woman say no she mean yes, now in the new days if woman say she want a man between thirty and thirty-eight, really she mean between school-cap and prostate operation.

  I went with the ageist flow. I saw the point. It is shopping and you aim to get what you want, So, feeling somewhat sweaty of palm and with a hint of humiliation about me, in went my advertisement, age range and all. In a way it seemed One For The Girls . . . Heaven knows there were enough advertisements from active chaps of autumnal hue for beautiful women with brains, legs, solvency and half their age.

  But consequently, at the beginning of the Pursuit I wasted a lot of time having jolly lunches with the 'I may be fifty but I can act like I'm thirty' types, or 'I may be an inarticulate twenty but I can roger you rigid with my fabbo joystick'. Neither of which was remotely what I had in mind. So I learned to be quite crisp on the subject of age, even more on the subject of status. 'Just what exactly do you mean by "sort of" married, squire?' And very firm on the year's duration. An apparently callous sifting but, since the response to my advertisement was in sackloads rather than handfuls, a necessary one. I could not afford t
o waste time - theirs or mine - and most went into the bin.

  I became acquainted with the mystery of physical chemistry: a conventionally handsome contender left me cold, while a chap with a broken nose and eyebrows that met in the middle gave me quite a frisson. Alas, this latter loved sailing and fishing, both of which activities cither required a lover who would be permanently available for splicing the main-brace, or ready to do battie, wreathed in loving gratitude, with a sharp knife, rubber apron and fish guts.

  In the first week I saw sixteen different men so that my days became like the dear Queen's - lunch here, drinks there, dinner somewhere else — only I had no equerry to steer me through. In this business you are very much on your own with no consultative body to advise you. It certainly streamlines your response and removes the pleasures of prevarication. I might arrive in a restaurant looking for a 'handsome, successful lawyer of thirty-seven' only to find a crumpled or defiant-looking individual some twenty years older and heavily into Grecian 2000. I would be polite and then something glaring would happen. 'Remember Alma Cogan's frocks?' he might say and our eyes would meet across silence, saying it all. Or there were the bright-faced babies of tender years who wanted an older woman, and the prospect of instructional sex and having to be powerful all the time left me cold.