“Where?” She loved the way he said “the lady” rather than “the woman.”
“Majorca.”
“Do you pay her?”
“Yes, of course,” he said, looking shocked.
“I thought churches were full of women doing things for the love of it, arranging flowers and polishing brasses and all that stuff.”
“I think that’s the past you’re thinking about,” he said. “Or a television program.”
Caroline sat in the front pew and said, “I could do with a cigarette.” He sat down next to her, the brush and dustpan still in his hand, and said, “I didn’t know you smoked?” and she said, “I don’t. Not really.” He was wearing vicarish trousers, black and nondescript and rather cheap, a white T-shirt, and an old gray cardigan that she wanted to stroke as if it were an animal. Even when he was in mufti he looked like a vicar. She couldn’t imagine him in jeans or a suit. She didn’t think he had any idea about how she felt about him. If she told him she would spoil his innocence. Of course she didn’t
know
him, not at all really. But what difference did it make? Maybe he wasn’t the right person for her (obviously not, in fact) and let’s not forget that she was married (But so what? Really?) but surely there wasn’t just one person in the whole world who was meant for you? If there was then the odds against your ever bumping up against him would be overwhelming, and knowing Caroline’s luck even if she did bump up against him she probably wouldn’t realize who he was. And what if the person who was destined for you was a shanty dweller in Mexico City or a political prisoner in Burma or one of the million people she was unlikely ever to have a relationship with? Like a prematurely balding Anglican vicar in a rural parish in North Yorkshire.
She felt suddenly tearful. “My au pair’s going to leave me,” she said. Oh, how pathetic must that sound to him. On a scale of world peace and third-world poverty, how did an unhappy Spanish au pair rate? But he was kind, as she knew he would be, and he said, “I’m sorry,” as if he really were, and then they sat in silence and stared at the altar and listened to the summer rain drumming on the ancient stone slates.
Amelia
J
ulia hauled a scuttle full of coal into the sitting room, escorted by a limping Sammy. “I can’t believe Victor never put in central heating,” she gasped, dropping the scuttle to the floor so that coal dust and tiny pieces of coal, like polished, unworked jet, spilled on the carpet. Amelia frowned at her and said, “I’ve just cleaned in here,” and Julia said, “That’s what will be written on your gravestone,” and Amelia said, “Oh, really, by you?” and Julia said, “God, I’m gagging for it, aren’t you?” and Amelia said, “Apropos of what exactly?”
“Two weeks of enforced celibacy since we’ve been here,” Julia said. “it’s doing my head in, it really is. I’m having to wank every night.”
“Oh, for God’s sake, Julia, you’re so
crude.
It’s disgusting.” Amelia hated that word, the slaters and brickies used it all the time, the hairdressers too—the girls were just like the boys. “You wanker!”—yelling at each other across the room.
“What would you call it then?” Julia asked, and Amelia said, “I don’t know—pleasuring yourself,” which made Julia fall about laughing and say, “God, don’t tell me you don’t do it, Milly. Everyone does it, it’s normal. I’m sure you do it and think about Henry—oh, no, you don’t think about Henry. I bet you think about
Jackson!
” Julia seemed particularly delighted with this idea. Amelia wanted to slap her. “You do it, don’t you, Milly? You frig yourself and think about Jackson!”
“You are disgusting, Julia.
Offensively
disgusting.” Amelia knew she had turned as red as her tights—donned especially in case Jackson dropped in today because he had seemed rather taken with them at Victor’s funeral. She’d woken up that morning and felt a good feeling, as if the blood in her veins were warm honey, and she thought, He’s going to visit this morning, and she had put on some of Julia’s makeup and left her hair loose because it was more girlish and she’d made a pot of coffee and warmed up the stale croissants that Julia had bought the day before. And she’d picked some flowers from the garden (hard to find among the weeds) and put them in a vase so that Jackson would look at her and see that she was a woman. But he hadn’t come, of course. She’d never had any intuition, womanly or otherwise. It had just been wishful thinking.
Julia sang out, “Milly’s got a new boyfriend. Poor old Henry. Milly likes Jackson,” as if she were eight years old again. Part of Julia would always be eight years old, just as part of Amelia would always be eleven years old—the age she was when the world stopped.
“How old are you, Julia?”
“Not as old as you.”
“I’m leaving the room before I hit you.”
Amelia splashed cold water from the kitchen tap on her cheeks. She could still hear Julia chortling away to herself in the living room. If she started up again she was going to yank her head off. Julia wouldn’t let it go though, following her into the kitchen, saying, “Jesus, Milly, you’re so uptight, I can’t imagine what you and Henry are like in the bedroom.” Neither could Amelia because, of course, Henry didn’t exist. He was an invention, conjured out of nothing, born of an exasperation with Julia’s constant nagging about Amelia’s celibate state and (horrors) her insistent offer to “set her up” with someone. “I
have
someone, thank you,” she informed Julia irritably, after one-too-many intimate inquiries from her sister. “A colleague, in the department”—and, searching for the first male name she could think of, Amelia came up with “Henry,” which was the name of her downstairs neighbor, Philip’s, dog, a revolting little Pekingese whose eyes looked as if they were about to pop out of its head any minute. “If Henry was a dog, what kind of dog would he be?” Julia asked, predictably, and Amelia had, unthinkingly, answered, “Pekingese” so that Julia frowned and said, “Oh, poor Milly.”
Since then, the fictional Henry had gradually acquired the accretions of a personality. He was a little on the bald and paunchy side, a beer drinker rather than a spirits man, and once, long ago, had a wife who died of cancer and whom he had nursed, devotedly, at home. Henry had no children but he had a tabby cat called Molly, who was a good mouser. Lying, Amelia discovered, was all about the details.
Henry and Amelia conducted a sedate fictitious relationship that revolved around theatergoing, art-house cinema, Italian restaurants, country pubs, and invigorating walks. They had spent two weekends away, one in the Mendips and one in North Devon, Amelia carefully researching both locations on the Internet in case Julia proved curious about the geography or the history, although, naturally, Julia only wanted to know about the food and the sex (“Oh, come on, Milly. Don’t be coy”). It was important not to make Henry too interesting because then Julia might actually want to meet him, so sex was “a bit routine” but nonetheless “nice”—a word which repelled Julia. Recently, Amelia had revealed that Henry was a keen golfer, a pastime that was guaranteed to result in indifference on Julia’s part.
Henry had proved such a success with Julia that Amelia had introduced him into the workplace as well. He served as a useful antidote to the looks of pity and amusement that always seemed to be her lot. She had heard the other lecturers call her “spinsterish” and she knew that a couple of people thought she was a lesbian. The idea of lesbianism made her feel slightly squeamish. Julia said she had had sex with women, dropped it into the conversation with the same casual air as if she were talking about which supermarket she preferred or the latest books she’d read. Amelia had made a point of not looking surprised because that was the kind of reaction Julia loved, of course. Was there no limit to the kind of thing Julia would do? Would she do it with a dog?
“Bestiality,” Julia ruminated. “Well, only if I had to.”
“Had to? For a part?”
“No, of course not. To save your life, for example.”
Would Amelia have sex with a dog to save Julia’s life? What an appalling test.
H
enry was useful at college too. As far as the inmates of the staff room were concerned, he was someone that her sister had introduced her to. Because Julia was an actress they all believed she must live a glamorous life, which was usually annoying for Amelia but sometimes useful. This Henry lived in Edinburgh, making him inaccessible and giving her something to do on the weekends—“Oh, just flying up to Scotland, Henry’s taking me fishing,” which is the kind of thing she imagined people doing in Scotland—she always thought of the Queen Mother, incongruous in mackintosh and waders, standing in the middle of a shallow brown river (somewhere on the outskirts of Brigadoon, no doubt) and casting a line for trout. Amelia had never been farther north than York, and then only to see Julia in pantomime, playing Dick Whittington’s cat in an interpretation that seemed to suggest that the animal was permanently on heat. Amelia envisaged that between York and the royal-infested Scottish Highlands there was a grimy wasteland of derelict cranes and abandoned mills and betrayed, yet still staunch, people. Oh and moorland, of course, vast tracts of brooding landscape under lowering skies, and across this heath strode brooding, lowering men intent on reaching their ancestral houses, where they were going to fling open doors and castigate orphaned, yet resolute, governesses. Or—preferably—the brooding, lowering men were on horseback, black horses with huge muscled haunches, glistening with sweat —
“Milly?”
“What?”
“You’re not listening to me, I was saying that we could use some of the money from the house to take a really good holiday.” Julia was laying a fire in the grate, folding and pleating sheets of newspaper into makeshift firelighters. Amelia frowned and turned the television on. At first, Amelia had suggested to Julia that they might watch the more cultural channels, Performance or Discovery or, at a pinch, TV5 to improve their rusty French (although unfortunately finding TV5 seemed to involve trawling through the porn and the sport), but this idea had been soundly squashed by Julia (“Get a life, Milly”) and now they spent long fireside hours in front of reruns of seventies sitcoms and creaky dramas,
Bergerac,
followed by
Poldark,
and topped off by
Only Fools and Horses,
which seemed to run on a continual loop in the ether.
“I mean a really good holiday,” Julia said. “An African safari or a Nepalese trek, visit the temples at Machu Picchu or take a boat to the Antarctic. What do you think, Milly?”
Amelia had never traveled because she’d never had anyone to travel with. Julia was the only person she had ever been on holiday with—once to Portugal (which had been pleasant) and once to Morocco (which had been a nightmare) so that Amelia felt her view of the world was through a small pane of glass, yet the idea of going
out there,
into the world, high up on some mountain, in the middle of an ocean, in some dangerous, foreign place, far from the safety of an English sitting room, made her instantly dizzy and sick with fear.
“And you could surprise Henry,” Julia carried on blithely, “take him to New York or Paris for the weekend, stay somewhere gorgeous, the Georges Cinq or the Bristol —”
“Your fire’s going out.”
M
ore often than not, “Henry” would come down to Oxford for the weekend, and if anyone asked her, Amelia would report back on Monday morning that they had spent a “lovely” weekend—a drive down to Cliveden, a “gorgeous” lunch in Bray. Not many people did ask, but there was a general agreement among her fellow workers that since she had met Henry, Amelia was a little less brittle and abrasive.
The version of Henry that was for her work colleagues was slightly less bald and paunchy than the one she had concocted for Julia. He was also more active and outgoing—all that fishing—and decidedly better off (“In finance, oh God, don’t ask me what, it’s all Greek to me”). She especially liked to flaunt the more dashing aspects of this Henry to Andrew Vardy, a fellow teacher in the “communications” department and the only man that Amelia had ever—in reality—had sex with.
Amelia had sex with Andrew Vardy ten years ago because she was afraid she would live and die an old maid. Because it had seemed ridiculous to be a virgin at thirty-five years old in the dying years of the twentieth century. Because she didn’t understand how she was as good as dead without ever having lived. She supposed she must be in this virginal state because she was shy and easily embarrassed and sex seemed so downright daunting (and, let’s face it, vaguely disgusting). At university, she’d had a reputation for being prim and proper, but she always expected that some boy (or some brooding, lowering man) would breach this defensive strategy and sweep away her inhibitions and admit sexual passion into her life. But no one, brooding, lowering, or otherwise, seemed to want her. Sometimes she wondered if perhaps she gave off the wrong scent, or no scent at all, because it was as primitive as that, wasn’t it, like cats and queen bees and musk deer?
Perhaps more curious than the fact that there was no one who wanted Amelia was that she, in turn, wanted no one—apart from men in nineteenth-century novels, which put a whole new spin on the idea of “unattainable.” Even Sylvia wasn’t a virgin. She slept with dozens of boys before her “conversion.” And if Sylvia could find boyfriends—Sylvia, who had grown into an ugly duck, not a swan—then why couldn’t Amelia? For the longest time Amelia waited for someone to appear who would make her heart race and her brain fog and her intellect crumble and when it didn’t happen she thought perhaps she had been intended by nature to be celibate, that she should rejoice (privately anyway) in this vestal state and rather than fretting about her unbroken hymen she should see it as a trophy unattainable to mere mortal men. (A dubious kind of prize, admittedly.)
She would die a noble virgin queen, a new Gloriana. This was during a period when she was having a kind of breakdown—mostly to do with the impossibility of “communicating” with the brickies and slaters and hairdressers and partly to do with the utter futility of life (although anyone with half a brain must surely be mired in existential gloom all the time)—and then, just when she was at her weakest and most vulnerable, Andrew Vardy said to her, “You know, Amelia, if you ever want to have sex, I’d be happy to oblige.” Just like that—as if she were a cow that needed servicing, or a virgin who needed deflowering. Could he tell she was intact by looking at her, that her maidenhead was unbroken? How much nicer all those old terms were. What would the slaters say? “Popping your cherry.” They probably didn’t even know any virgins. And they didn’t have any decent terms for sex, all they did was “shag” (every hour God gave them, from the sound of it). And the girls just the same.
She had taken a maidenhead fern in to college, to brighten the godless gloom of the staff room, a cutting she had taken from a plant belonging to Philip, the downstairs neighbor with the Pekingese. Someone, some sleazy old duffer who behaved as if the staff room were the library of a London gentleman’s club, said, “Ah, some of these old English terms for plants, wonderfully venereal, maidenhead fern, a virgin’s pubes—what could be more delicious?” which elicited sniggering from several people (including women, for heaven’s sake, didn’t they know any better?). Amelia would have liked to break the plant pot over his head. “And the cuckoopint,” he persisted, “sounds innocent, doesn’t it, but ‘pint’ is short for ‘pintle’ or ‘penis’!” How would he feel if she chopped his off? That would shut him up. She busied herself with books as if she had a class to teach, which she didn’t, and tried to pretend that her face wasn’t the deep crimson shade of shame and humiliation. Thankfully, the plant soon withered and died and Amelia refused to see that as metaphorical in any way but when Andrew Vardy made his overture a few weeks later she surprised herself with her response.
Nowadays, when she viewed Andrew Vardy across the jaded, Cup-A-Soup scented air of the staff room, she felt completely baffled as to why she would ever have—vile to remember—got naked with him, let alone conjoin intimate, delicate parts of her anatomy with his ugly, goosefleshed ones. The only man she’d ever had and he wasn’t even remotely good looking. His skin was pitted and pinched by ancient acne and he had a little gay mustache that his wife should have told him to get rid of. He wasn’t gay, not at all, he was a Catholic and had five children and he was on the short side, in fact he was slightly shorter than Amelia, but he could be funny, and, dear God, that was something, and for two years they had shared cynical little exchanges over coffee and the occasional longer, more philosophical conversation during one of the college cafeteria’s atrocious lunches. Andrew was a skinflint (he had five children, after all, he said) and only offered to pay for Amelia on the days when the first-year hotel management students had to cook and serve a three-course lunch at half the normal price (because the risk of dying from food poisoning was twice as high).