‘No. I’m running towards.’
‘Is that your line of business, then? Interior design?’
‘Among other things. I’ve made a serious study of ceilings.’
Andrew leapt to his feet, twisting his hands in excitement, the dual effect of stimulation and opportunity.
‘Oh, do come back to the gloomy place for coffee . . . oh, no, I’ve got to say hello to the under-fives. Can we speak later?’
‘Sure,’ she said, standing up. ‘If you promise to tell me all the gossip.’
‘Delighted, I’m sure,’ Andrew said. ‘If only there was any.’
She stiffened her hands in her pockets and the skirt billowed around her.
‘Shame on you, vicar. A creative man like you? If there isn’t any gossip, you could surely invent it. That’s what I’d do. I’m Sarah, by the way. 379 033.’
T
hat’s what I’d do.
He watched her stride away, further uphill and into the woods, out of sight. Then he ran downhill, vaulted the stile and only when he approached the church felt the remnants of the hangover. That sobered him. Surely it had made him delusional.
That’s what I’d do.
That is what I would do if I were a different kind of man with the courage of my own convictions and a bit more energy. That is what I would do if I used my time instead of thinking ‘What if?’ I could have painted the walls in the bloody house two years ago instead of singing myself to sleep. I would have examined the gravestones and found the ghosts with money, that’s what I would have done. I could have told Mrs Hurly to stop talking to me, because I can’t make her life better. Tell her that spitefulness does not take away sadness, only work does.
He turned aside into the vicarage for the key and hurried back to open the church door. The key was theatrical and ludicrous, giving an impression of gravity, while the door itself provided real security by its very appearance. Andrew approved of the arched church door, made of weather-bleached oak studded with iron, although he preferred the small door round the back that led into the vestry, even though, whenever he went in that way, he expected to find something dead on the floor. He had only found cats in search of sanctuary in here.
He propped the front door open and smelled that church smell of trapped warmth with undertones of cold as he stepped inside the foyer and through the next set of doors into the body of the church, adjusting his eyes to its dimness.
Perhaps she could paint this, too. Bring back the original bright and vulgar Victorian glory to its now-faded ornateness.
Paint it red.
Surely St Bartholomew would approve.
What on earth was she doing here? Sent from heaven?
Andrew thought of the under-fives with renewed pleasure.
Then he thought of Mrs Hurly coming to tea in the gloomy vicarage living room and sighed with resignation. That was surely not the sort of gossip Sarah would want to know.
Or perhaps she did.
T
here was nothing to compare with the joy of going home, especially if it felt like home and there was the prospect of a weekend with nothing to do but walk.
Sarah went back uphill to her own house. Not strictly her own in terms of actual ownership, but then, she had discovered that real ownership was tenuous, fragile and risky. She was here because she was wary of the home she owned and wanted to find another.
It was an advantage not to feel indebted to the landlady who had left her cottage full of J. Dunn’s dog hairs. The original mess of it gave her freedom to change it as much as she liked and there were so many other compensations. Location, location, location, which meant an angled view of the sea from the attic-bedroom window if she stuck her head out and craned left and it was this tantalising glimpse that drove her out every morning, straining to go like a dog on a leash, wondering what fresh smells today? There was an energising advantage to a limited sea view and creaking stairs.
Wanting to get out every morning never meant she was unwilling to return. It was thrilling to go up to your own front door with a good feeling even though it was not quite her ideal house, only the one she could get. The village had been selected for her by chance through knowing Jessica and she was a great believer in spontaneous coincidences like that, but the house itself was hers only because it was available. She had made a visual examination of every other visible house within her size range and already knew that she would swap her cottage for one of those in the two rows right down by the beach, set apart from the rest and looking out directly to the sea, but this was good for starters. A sweet, sad house in need of rescue, thus catering to her own speciality, also with certain vital ingredients, such as a porch at the front with the promise of honeysuckle growing over it in summer, and a small south-facing yard of a garden at the back, almost empty apart from dead things in pots and a tiny border. It was the stuff of dreams all the same, the life-lottery win, the almost perfect existence promised by a six-month lease on a cottage with honeysuckle round the door and the sea at the bottom of the road, with room to nurture cabbages and flowers.
The realist in Sarah had always known that such a dream was only a kind of analogy for something else, such as being reconciled to disappointments, free of duties, responsibilities and obligations, not having to go to work and being able to pay the bills with ease. A state of not wanting anybody or anything other than what there was, like living on one side of a river without constantly craving a better place on the opposite shore. All summed up in a vision of a cottage in a village with a large expanse of water attached, about as far distant from central London traffic and a pressurised career
as it could be without emigrating. Being in a place where the land ran out; the delightful end of the road. Not that she had ever been deluded by the notion of a perfect way of life; ambition and discontent and even a little bit of fear were so vital to achievement and survival, after all, but she knew the importance of dreaming. Of getting a dream, kicking it about, trying it on for size like a new skirt and then, if necessary, chucking it away and trying on something else. The cottage with roses round the door could mean a state of
not needing,
but a state of complete self-sufficiency would have to involve a complete frontal lobotomy. It was not natural. She might regard herself as profoundly irresponsible, wanted to be
divinely
irresponsible, a merely optional extra in other lives, but that was not quite possible, either. She was far too interested in humankind to remain aloof; could not quite disengage however hard she tried; responsibility followed affection and that was that.
It would be nice if you got to know my mother,
Jessica had said.
But you don’t have to. Just be happy. I’m not going to bugger things up for you with introductions. You don’t need them.
You’ll go crazy here,
Mike had said when he’d delivered her to the door in an uninsured, mysteriously obtained white van,
without something to do.
He was a case in point. He loved her, but he would do perfectly well without her and that was all she had ever wanted for him and he was right about her needing something physical to do and she had embarked on that immediately. She had redecorated every place she had ever occupied, whether she owned it or not (ownership was all in the mind, after all) and most of the bubbled walls in her cottage were already liberally covered in ‘orchid white’. Paint always lived up to its promise, never
disappointed, and she took immense satisfaction in the very names they gave to the stuff. Sarah had breathed on the honeysuckle branches to make it grow and the backyard was littered with trays of seeds and bulbs. She was going to stay here long enough to grow cornflowers and sweet peas at least and learn not to uproot them just to see how they were doing. That was what people did with relationships. Not a good idea to question things about their right to grow or not.
The walls were incompletely fresh; there were the few things she had brought with her standing alongside the utilitarian pine furniture left either by her landlady Mrs Celia Hurly or by J. Dunn. For the first two weeks she had been here it had rained incessantly and that had been when she had made it home. She was accustomed to big high-ceilinged rooms and found small ones so much of a doddle to paint that she looked forward to the challenge of the vicarage for further distraction. She felt detached, but she could only ever be semi-detached.
The phone rang, sounding threatening in the empty room, bringing city to village with a clarion call. Jessica; it had to be Jessica. Sarah took the phone out into the backyard and sat on an upturned pot. There were young seagulls on the roof next door, jockeying for position on a TV aerial, howling for Mummy. A March wind blew gently.
Sarah didn’t like mobiles. Jessica Hurly lived by hers, could talk in a train, a bus, a taxi, in the middle of a crowd or a meal, went everywhere with the thing glued to her hand. She would hold up the checkout line, chattering and arguing while fishing for her money, completing a purchase with gestures and smiles while talking throughout, and then getting away with it by saying sorry and being gorgeous.
She liked the challenge of talking against a background, giving away where she was, and although Sarah had once detested the horribly public nature of such conversations the irritation had long since been counterbalanced by the wonderful eavesdropping opportunities. She longed for people to shout out confidences in crowds, especially Jessica whose phone was vital to her health because without it she might fall down the nearest black hole. Jessica needed another voice to make her pause; another opinion to clarify her own, an echo for her every sentiment. Jessica could play the whole scale of her emotions on a number of instruments, but only her mobile phone could prevent her from acting them out. Thankfully, one of her many saving graces was a melodious voice.
She could see Jessica stabbing the phone with her long trademark blue-varnished nails.
Sarah tried to list the most frequent phrases she used when she spoke back to Jessica, then and now, face to face or on the phone. They were mainly brief and to the point, such as
Perhaps not; Think again; I wouldn’t if I were you;
and
Don’t.
How Jessica had ever concentrated long enough to become a chef was a mystery: she must have taken in knowledge through the skin, acquired the instincts at her mother’s knee, perhaps, in the same way that Sarah had learned a talent for painting walls in the early hours of the morning. Jessica was a cook par excellence and being an emotional prima donna went with the territory although high temperament was not always welcome in someone catering private parties for those who paid highly for the privilege of having the last word. Jessica had never quite mastered the deferential mentality required for such occasions and her career was precarious, to say the least.
Sublime food was no compensation for broken crockery and noises off and nor did Jessica’s magnificent appearance always reconcile an aggrieved host to the state of his kitchen, unless she remained behind to offer something additional to the menu. As for men, she seemed to be as obsessive about their particulars as she was about culinary ingredients, but unlike her instinctive skill with the latter she never seemed to get the mix right. As mistress of many a humiliating compromise herself, Sarah was a sucker for a person who refused to do it, but her affection and admiration for Jessica was compounded by a slow-burning nagging worry because Jessica was gelignite and Jessica in a state of unrequited love was like a piece of volatile explosive with a tricky fuse.
‘Guess what? He told me to fuck off,’ she said without introduction.
She had resiled from this theme for a week; now she was back. Once launched, though, her recitatives on the subject were always continuous, assuming the respondent’s intimate knowledge of the last episode of the long-running saga of her life, whether she had mentioned it or not. Sarah could only respond in the same way.
‘Again?’
‘Yes. Again. The stupid shit. I wrote you an e-mail about it, didn’t send it, so don’t look. I did what you said, waited at least a day, but then my blood boils again. Anyway, I’m going to sort it out with him. If he thinks he can treat me like that he’d better think twice, the shit. I thought I’d go down to that pretentious restaurant of his and vomit all over his tables. What do you think?’
You don’t want to know what I think. Nothing had altered. The same obsession, the same man as before.
Shame. Sarah had thought that Jessica had stabilised, but no chance.
‘Why?’ Sarah said.
‘What do you mean, why? He bloody well deserves it.’
‘For what?’
‘For saying fuck off, the shit. How dare he do that?’
‘Because your dogged devotion was boring him? Because you were embarrassing him? Because you were bad for business?’
‘How can I be bad for business? The last time I went there I was in that black dress. You know the one I mean? The vintage killer? And I was nice.’
She had not mentioned that. Sarah stayed quiet. There was a big dark sigh.
‘Oh, right, I think I can see what you mean. Not good for business to have a row in a posh restaurant like DK when his place is full of people. Anger doesn’t work, right? Shit.’
‘So when were you going to stage this sad repeat performance?’
‘Like now. Just when they’re queuing up for lunch.’
There was the sound of traffic and footsteps behind Jessica’s voice. Sarah could see her, standing on a corner next to a Tube station and part of her hoped that all the passers-by were enjoying the obstruction and the conversation as much as she would have done if she had been one of them. It gave her a sudden wave of city-homesickness. Must go back soon, before I forget what it’s like. I don’t want to
forget
what it’s like.
‘Hmm. Could we think back a little? What was it you wanted to achieve?’
‘I want him to love me. I love that man so much. We’re made for each other. He has to love me. We belong.’