Colouring In Page 8

  There was a fractional pause. Somehow a spark of just discernible friction tightened the line. Then she said no, my name hadn’t been mentioned. ‘It was a pretty uneventful evening,’ she added, ‘why?’ Did she suppose I might think they’d been up to something? I laughed – tried to laugh, not sure how convincing it was. ‘He’s a pretty uneventful man,’ I said, and changed the subject to Dan’s trip to Africa.

  The way she said it, un-ev-ent-ful, breaking up the syllables, made me see red. I don’t know why. But when I put down the telephone I raged round my office re-arranging chairs and shuffling through files. I couldn’t bear to think of her, innocent Isabel, my friend, helping Bert to one of her cloudy puddings and talking away about everything under the sun. Eventually I calmed down, told myself I was being ridiculous. I put my mind to the afternoon meeting. But I couldn’t get the picture of them out of my head. I know nothing would ever happen between them. Dan is Bert’s oldest friend and a man of high principle. Isabel is the last person on earth ever even to consider infidelity. So why am I so disturbed by the thought of their innocent evening? I suppose, pathetically, it’s because it’s something I can never have – an evening at home alone with an agreeable – attractive – man, protected by the state of marriage. Isabel’s ease of acquiring what she wants has always annoyed me, unreasonably, because I’m sure that both wanting and then getting don’t enter her head. So I’m being a cow about Isabel and despise myself for it.

  Driving home, I wondered if Bert had got his version of my car by now. No harm in ringing up and asking, I thought. Perhaps it was silly to keep him dangling any longer if he doesn’t realise he’s being dangled. I thought of several ways in which I could spur him to action, make him need me as a friend. That’s all I’m after, really … isn’t it? Acknowledgement. I’m not kidding myself that love would ever be involved.

  So: onto the case, Carlotta. Action.

  And if none of the plans work, as a last resort I could always… But no. For the time being I shan’t let myself think of that.

  SYLVIE

  I woke up very early, drew back the curtains. I crept to the chest of drawers, opened the sock drawer. After a bit of shuffling about I found the lipstick. I took it back to bed.

  I hadn’t even tried it on. Not even on the back of my hand. It was a lovely bright red, like Carlotta wears. Mama would think it was awful. Elli’s got masses of lipsticks hidden in her drawers. She says they’re the easiest things to get, though you want to keep changing the hiding places. She’s the one who made me do it.

  She was right, it was easy. There were lots of people up and down the aisles but no shop people anywhere near, just at the paying tills. I picked up lots of different lipsticks, opened them, and put them back. Then I quickly took this one, slipped it into my pocket and didn’t open it till I got home and locked myself in the bathroom. But the way I’m different from Elli is she says it’s all good fun and not serious stealing. But I haven’t found it good fun at all. In fact I’ve cried two nights running, now, thinking what an awful, stupid thing to have done. Knowing what Mama and Papa would think of me if they knew. And having no idea how to get it back – I got it from a Boots when I went to tea with Elli, and her mother was in the shop next door buying shoes or something. She was ages and Elli said here was our chance.

  Anyhow, now I’ve decided on a plan. I’m going to tell Mama, and put it back, and not tell Elli what I’ve done. She’d just think me a feeble wimp. So I’m going to try to do that this morning on the way to school – good thing it’s Mama taking me. Papa never has time to stop anywhere.

  Two hours still to breakfast. I feel all shivery and cold.

  ISABEL

  I woke very early, having only slept a couple of hours, and lay in the dark. I thought first of Dan, in some imagined hotel bed in Nairobi. Then of Sylvie, next door, all askew in her bed, duvet half on the floor, innocent, innocent.

  Absence is a secret presence. I’ve so often thought that. When Dan’s away I feel he’s only half away. His voice is constantly in my mind. His belongings, in the same place as when he’s there, re-assure. I only have to open the cupboard where his clothes hang, and I can smell the smell that’s on his skin: a mixture of thyme and good material, the paper of old books – how can one define smell? If I had to open a hundred men’s cupboards, blindfold, I’d know which one was Dan’s.

  So with all the re-assurance of his coming back soon, and the presence of his things, the way I miss him causes no heartache. I just miss him in the same way that I miss shade on a hot day, knowing its absence isn’t going to be for long. It’s more of a fact than a feeling.

  It was no different, this time, until last night. Since the weird episode in the cellar – and the strange, ungrounded look on Gilbert’s face in the studio – I’ve longed for Dan’s return in a wild, unnerving way. He will never know about this, just as he will have no idea of the re-assurance that’ll return with his presence. Just two days to get through. And Gilbert – will he ring? Should I ring him, so that he knows I believe him and want everything to go on as usual?

  I got up soon after six, lightheaded from lack of sleep. I knew it was going to be a lost day. I would make a stab at finishing the gold lace mask that was to be delivered by the end of the week, but I knew that whatever I did wouldn’t be much good, and I should have to do it again on a more ordinary day.

  I stood in the kitchen – our large, friendly kitchen which is just as it was when we painted the woodwork ourselves fifteen years ago – looking around at the miscellany that goes to make up the familiar pattern in my mind’s eye that travels with me everywhere. I boiled the kettle for coffee, and put the two wine glasses, still on the table, into the machine. Then, surprising myself, I hid both empty bottles of wine behind a pile of boxes in the cupboard under the stairs. I didn’t want Gwen to think that I’d been drinking with Gilbert – I’d mentioned he was coming round to supper – however innocent that was. In our guilt, planned innocence is blighted.

  Sylvie came down a little late, her usual cheerful morning face disgruntled. She ate her cornflakes in silence, then said she had something to tell me. She pulled a lipstick from her pocket and said that ‘somehow’ she had taken it when looking at a rack of lipsticks with Elli, and she wanted to get it back. ‘Somehow’ it had found its way into her pocket. She had opened it. She didn’t like the colour. Of course she hadn’t tried it. What should she do?

  Then she put her head in her hands and I could see tears running down her wrists, though she remained silent.

  I wished I had not felt so rough. I could have dealt with Sylvie’s dilemma better. I simply said if she hurried up I would drive her to the chemist on the way to school and wait while she went in, handed it back, and apologised. She lifted her head from her hands and looked horrified. If she admitted what she’d done, she said, they’d call the police and she’d go to prison. I shrugged, but said I doubted it.

  On the way to school I briefly expressed how appalled I was that she should steal, or even think of stealing. She cried again and said over and over again how sorry she was, and explained if she hadn’t taken the lipstick Elli would have thought her a wimp and probably not been her friend any more. I parked in front of the chemist and dried her cheeks with my handkerchief, wished her luck, and said I trusted she’d do what I said.

  She ran off, was back in so short a time I doubted she had kept her word, but decided not to ask. She thanked me many times and begged me not to tell Dan. I said I wouldn’t.

  At the school gate she hugged me and said I was the best mother in the world, which she says whenever I’m able to rescue her from scrapes. I said: Never again. She said: Promise. Then she ran off exuberant with relief, and I drove off into the usual traffic jam, wondering.

  DAN

  The plane was two hours late, the taxi took forever from the airport. We’d planned to have lunch then I’d have a couple of hours sleep. All plans smashed.

  I rang Isabel from the airport but she w
as in the studio. Sometimes I wish she’d have a telephone up there, but nothing can persuade her. Luckily Gwen was still there. I left a message saying I didn’t know how long it would take me to get home, and how sorry I was. In the stifling taxi, air soured with a previous passenger’s over-sweet scent, impatience rattled me. I’m always impatient to get home, but the feeling of odd urgency made my fingers sonata on jigging knees.

  I flung far too much money at the taxi driver and ran up the steps, calculating it would be quicker to use my door key than to ring the bell and get Isabel down from the studio. I had a sort of half hope she might be in the kitchen, and would run to the door.

  The hall was silent, tidy, as it always is when Gwen leaves. There was sun on the polished floorboards, a faint smell of herbs and roses: everything as always. I dumped my luggage and ran up the stairs. Hardly ever do I visit Isabel’s studio. But in my hurry to see her I couldn’t wait for her to hear my shout and come down.

  I flung open the door and saw her – in a freeze-frame that lasted less than a second – sitting at her work table, head bent over a handful of pale ribbons, sun gilding a lock of hair that fell over her face – before she saw me. Then she looked up, threw the stuff aside, rose and opened her arms. As she moved towards me I saw astonishment in her eyes, or perhaps it was puzzlement. Again, the impression cut into me only for a second. Then she was laughing, we were clutching each other, our voices chiming as we declared our happiness at my being back, being home.

  ‘I imagine you hardly slept on the plane,’ she said at last.

  ‘Hardly,’ I agreed.

  We drew apart and I looked round the studio, a room I hardly know. It seemed to me that there were many more finished masks than when I had last been here. There was a shelf crowded with beautiful, multi-coloured things, their cut-out eyes smiling, it seemed. What an extraordinarily nice place in which to work, I thought vaguely. How agreeable she’s made it. No wonder she’s keen to come up here as early as possible every morning.

  ‘Something to eat? Tea?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘You look exhausted,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you sleep for a couple of hours, before Sylvie gets home? She’s at Elli’s house.’

  Again I shook my head. I was curiously awake, I said. Was there any news? Anything been happening?

  Those eyes, the tawny pupils striped with green – I know every stripe so well – locked with mine.

  ‘Absolutely nothing,’ she said. Her smile petered out and she suggested we went downstairs.

  We didn’t reach the kitchen. Our bedroom door was open. I was curious to see it. It’s not often one goes into a bedroom mid-afternoon: the rumple of getting up has been straightened out, the night time lights and drawn curtains are a distant world. In the mid-afternoon the bedroom is a strange place, sun slanting across the white bedcover – how sun seems to rampage through our house, it’s everywhere on a day of early summer like this.

  ‘Just take off my shoes,’ I said, sitting on the bed. Even through my socks I could feel the heat of the rug beneath my feet. Isabel stood looking at me, arms folded, anticipatory laughter – I think it was – now in her eyes. Then she sat beside me. In a moment we both toppled backwards, the bed warm beneath us as a patch of southern sea. We did not bother to draw the curtains, or shut the door, but spent an hour or so in our strange, sun-filled bedroom.

  When we got up to straighten the bed and ourselves for Sylvie’s homecoming, Isabel said ‘Thank God you’re home,’ and ran both hands through her hair, so that its lights scattered like fireflies.

  SYLVIE

  Mama and Papa were in the kitchen having tea when I got home. I couldn’t think why Papa wasn’t any browner than when he went away. I mean, there’s a lot of sun in Nairobi. He said he didn’t have time to go out in it.

  He hugged me and gave me a giraffe carved out of wood and said he’d been too busy for serious shopping. Later, when I took it up to my room – and I do like it even though it’s a funny sort of thing to give someone my age – tears came into my eyes. I don’t know why. Perhaps because I still can’t quite forget that whole lipstick thing. Still, Mama obviously hasn’t told him. She’s kept her word.

  She didn’t ask me if I’d kept my promise – if I’d apologized and everything. She just trusted me, which was just absolutely awful. I’ll never forget how she looked when I got back into the car. I just couldn’t tell her I hadn’t dared speak to the horrid-looking lady behind the counter. I hope she never guesses the truth … and, if she does, she’ll understand. And I hope she’ll never, ever tell Papa. I wish none of it had ever happened. I wish it would all go out of my head. I wish Elli didn’t make me do things I don’t want to do. I don’t really want her to be my friend any more. But I don’t know what to do about that, either.

  CARLOTTA

  Right: it’s going to be all go. Time to make a move. I can’t imagine what’s going on in Bert’s mind. Why hasn’t he rung me? I offer to help, take him to a concert, show nothing but friendliness. Instead he just ignores me … and goes round to supper with Isabel. I suppose I’d had a vague hope he might be different.

  Huh! All men are the same, as the universal untruth goes. But it’s seriously strange how alike they are in not picking up on opportunities. Bert must know I’m not after his body, only his friendship. Somehow I’ve got to make that quite clear – obviously I haven’t made it clear enough to date – or he’ll want to avoid me. Oh God: it gets so tedious, the analysing, the plotting, the wondering. I’m not going to give Bert another thought once I’ve rung him. And this evening I’ll go round with my file of stuff and show him just a few things so as not to confuse him.

  I’ve even got my builder sorted – ready to start next week if Bert gives the go-ahead … if he isn’t utterly amazed by my efficiency.

  Chapter Five

  BERT

  I went to the City by bus. I hadn’t travelled on a bus for years. It was rather agreeable, trundling along the King’s Road in the sun. I was observing the changes in London – curiously, the sameness of so much. The same shops appearing again and again in different streets. The same clothes appearing in the same shops. A feeling of horrible uniformity, as if everyone was constricted by fashion, rather than daring to be different. I didn’t much like the look of the new London.

  I thought the bus ride would give me a chance to cogitate, though I wondered how I would begin to do that, on the subject that consumed my mind, affecting every hour of the day. One comforting thought: still unsettled by the move back to England, I was suffering some wild illusion. Except I know all about illusions. And this wasn’t one. I had been thunderstruck by Isabel, and my love for her was real. She epitomised the vague picture I had had in mind for so many years of the woman I might eventually fall in love with … and marry. How weird, how inconvenient that the beam of hope should fall on an unobtainable woman. How difficult would it be to extract myself from the agonising tangle I was now in? ‘God give me the strength to do the right thing,’ as my mother taught me to pray. Of course I shall do the right thing: I like to think of myself as an honourable man. The right thing is to do nothing, to say nothing, to carry on as normal in my friendship with Isabel and Dan. I will never give Isabel a clue to my real feelings … and perhaps, starved of possibility, they will go away.

  But for the moment – for every waking moment since I left her on the doorstep, her face has been there. As I sat in the chrome and leather office of a genial banker, his desk shorn of signs of vital work – virgin blotter and silver paper-cutter the only ornaments – her face hovered like a laser picture in the air. The banker’s enthusiastic murmurings about my own desirability sounded a long way off. He offered me a ridiculously large salary. What would I do with all that money? I had more than enough already. He emphasised his eagerness to employ me by pushing down the cuticles of his puffy white fingers. I resisted, though a fleeting thought came to me about how, twenty years ago when I was starting out in the business world, I dreamt
of being persuaded to join some distinguished firm who would pay the earth to acquire my talents. But now:

  ‘No thank you,’ I said.

  ‘And may I know why not?’

  ‘It’s occurred to me, sitting here in your delightful office,’ I said, ‘that perhaps office days are over for me. I don’t want to be bound any more by the clockwork days of long hours, travelling to and fro in overcrowded tubes…’

  ‘Tube?’ he interjected, incredulous. ‘My dear fellow, we’d provide a car…’

  ‘Or in traffic jams in a car,’ I went on after a pause long enough to show my appreciation for this offer. ‘Perhaps I want to do something quite different. Even retire. I’m sorry,’ I added, ‘for wasting your time. It honestly had not occurred to me, until I came here, that it wasn’t what I wanted.’

  The banker, still genial, stood up. Should I ever change my mind, he said, he would like me to remember that I was a man the bank would do anything to take on board. We shook hands. I imagined his afternoon in the stuffy, lifeless office. I could see him going home to Esher in a company car. I could see his house, probably genuine Tudor bought with a single bonus. It would be neither in town nor country, but in that ubiquitous place that journalists call ‘leafy.’ I could see his wife, of large hip and tight hair, ready with the ice for his gin and tonic. I did not want to join him in the thump, thump, thump of his financially-centred days. I did not want to earn a salary that would support an entire village in the third world. I wanted … God knows, I thought as I said goodbye.