All the Hopeful Lovers (20 page)

Alice laughs. ‘Yes, I like that. Chloe the dim bimbo. I have to salvage my dignity somehow. I’m the one in the corner of the library with the spectacles who’s going to discover a cure for cancer.’

‘Are you a scientist?’

‘No, Jack. And I don’t wear spectacles. I’m doing English. Not much scope for saving the world there.’

‘I’m doing English too,’ Jack says.

‘Yes, I know.’ Facebook tells all. Then she blushes and covers her tracks. ‘Alan keeps up with his old class. My stepfather.’

‘So how are you finding it?’

‘I love it. The reading, I mean.
Paradise Lost
turns out to be amazing.’

‘We’re still on
Gawain and the Green Knight
.’

‘No
Beowulf
?’

‘No, thank God.’

‘Lucky you,’ says Alice. ‘And you’re in a proper university town. London’s not a university town. All I have to do is go out into the street to feel irrelevant.’

‘You think being at Cambridge makes everyone feel relevant?’

‘I should think you feel like one of the rulers of the world.’

‘Well, I don’t. I feel like a fraud. I feel like I’m the one who was let in by mistake.’

Suddenly he realizes who she reminds him of.

‘You look a bit like Virginia Woolf.’

‘Thanks. Now do I go and drown myself?’

‘Good writer.’

‘I’ve never read her.’

‘I’ve only read
To the Lighthouse
.’ He grins. Somehow by starting off with Alice on such a footing of honesty everything they say is made easier. ‘Do you have secret books you love?’ he says. ‘Books you don’t admit you read?’

‘Yes. Do you?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’ll tell if you tell.’

‘Go on, then,’ he says. ‘You first.’

‘
Little House on the Prairie
. All eight books. I still cry when Mary goes blind.’

‘I’ve never read them.’

‘Works of genius.’

‘
Tintin
,’ says Jack. ‘I still read my old
Tintin
s.’

‘We never had
Tintin
.’

‘Works of genius.’

By now they’ve just about finished their lunch.

‘You want another drink?’ says Jack.

‘Sure, why not? My round.’

She gets a glass of wine for herself, another beer for Jack. Her way of making it clear she expects no more than friendship.

‘Do you read Jane Austen?’ she says.

‘Of course.’

‘You realize Chloe’s been doing an Emma on us?’

‘Oh, God! That makes me the ghastly vicar. What was his name?’

‘Mr Elton. And I’m dim little Harriet Smith.’

‘Didn’t Mr Elton convince himself Emma was interested in him when she wasn’t at all?’

‘Yes. She was trying to set him up with Harriet Smith.’

‘This is appalling.’

‘The difference is, Chloe could easily be interested in you.’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Why wouldn’t she be?’

‘She just doesn’t think of me that way, that’s all.’

‘She might. People change.’

Jack thinks about that. Maybe he should take a longer view.

‘She’s bound to ask me about you,’ says Alice. ‘She’ll want to know what happened today.’

‘What will you tell her?’

‘What do you want me to tell her?’

‘I don’t see that it really matters,’ says Jack. ‘I can’t think of anything you could tell Chloe about me that would get her interested.’

‘I could tell her you dragged me onto the railway land and ravished me and it was the most thrilling sex I’ve ever had in my life.’

‘Do you think she’d believe you?’

‘No. Not really.’

‘You could tell her I’m dark and brooding and moody.’

‘Are you?’

‘Well, I brood a lot.’

‘I know what,’ says Alice. ‘I’ll tell her you’ve got a girlfriend at Cambridge. I think she’d get off on the idea of stealing you from another girl.’

‘I haven’t got a girlfriend at Cambridge. Or I did, but we broke up. I told Chloe I was available.’

‘I could say you lied. You have girlfriends all over the place. You pretend to be available because you’re so promiscuous.’

‘Serious fantasy time.’ Jack’s impressed. ‘Why not? Make up anything you like.’

‘You drive a Porsche.’

‘I’m renting one tomorrow.’

They grin at each other again. This is how I should be with all girls, Jack thinks. Light and easy. This is how I should be with Chloe. But he knows he can only be funny with Alice because he doesn’t fancy her. It’s a cruel game played by fate or evolution or something. When you really love someone you turn into a wally.

Carrie sits as still as she can in the chair by the window, and talks as the old man paints. She hasn’t decided yet whether he’s a weirdo or a saddo but when you think about it, what does it matter? It’s different. She’s never been painted before.

‘What will you do with the picture when it’s finished?’

‘I don’t really know,’ he says. He never stops painting when he talks. His eyes keep on moving back and forth between her and the canvas. This has a freeing effect on Carrie, as if whatever she says to him will have no consequences. ‘Maybe I’ll put it in my show. I don’t know. When you paint a picture you don’t think about what will happen to it. You think about painting it.’

‘What show?’

‘I’m having a show in the barn here. The Thursday before Christmas.’

‘That’s this Thursday.’

‘Is it? Then I’d better buck up.’

But he keeps on working in the same careful way, mixing little squeezes of paint, stabbing at the canvas, bright eyes behind the gleam of spectacles jumping back and forth.

‘Can I come to your show?’

‘No.’

‘Oh.’

She didn’t expect that. Probably he thinks she’s too young, or too stupid.

‘Come the day before. I’ll give you a private view.’

‘You don’t have to.’

‘No, you must. I’d like you to.’

She feels restless.

‘Do you have a toilet?’

‘Only a thunderbox out in the yard.’

‘A thunderbox?’

‘No flush. No sewer.’

‘What! So where does everything go?’

‘Into a hole in the ground.’

She pulls a face, decides she can wait till she’s home. But she doesn’t want to go home yet.

‘Really when you think about it,’ he says, ‘everything goes into a hole in the ground. Including us.’

This strikes Carrie as both true and important.

‘Right,’ she says. ‘I mean, why do anything?’

‘There’s a question.’

Carrie warms to the theme.

‘I mean, what’s the point? You’re supposed to work hard and do well and stuff, but what difference does it make? So what if you get good A-levels? So what if you go to uni? They try to tell you you’ve got all this choice but really everyone ends up just the same. It’s like at school, they make this big deal over uniform, you get to the sixth form and you’re allowed to wear trousers, and you know what makes me laugh? People really care about it. They do that to you. They make you feel like you’re more important because you can wear trousers.’

‘Don’t you like school?’

‘It’s okay. It’s the same as everywhere else.’

He pauses in his painting, points his brush at her over his easel.

‘You sound like a very disappointed young woman.’

‘Maybe I am. What’s to get excited about?’

‘Aren’t you a bit young to be disappointed by life?’

‘Why? Does it get better?’

He laughs at that.

‘No,’ he says. ‘It gets worse.’

‘There you are, then.’

She realizes she likes him. No adult has ever admitted it to her before. It gets worse. There’s an odd consolation in that. It’s the fake passion she can’t stand. People squealing with joy like game show hosts and everyone throwing their arms round each other and saying ‘Omigod!’

‘I’m the emperor of disappointment,’ he says. ‘I’ve been disappointed since 1966. That’s over forty years of disappointment.’

‘But at least you’ve got a talent,’ she says. ‘You can paint people who look like people.’

‘The greater the talent, the greater the disappointment.’

‘So why not pack it in?’

‘Why not? I’ll tell you why not. Because underneath this almighty shit heap of disappointment that is my life there hides a tiny seed of hope. That’s what keeps prodding me on, making me think maybe my luck will change, maybe they’ll wake up from their trance and say, How foolish! What can we have been thinking? We’ve been worshipping trash! But of course, they never do. So that little seed of hope is really my worst tormentor. If it wasn’t for that, who knows? Maybe I could have lived a contented life as a taxi driver.’

Carrie understands only part of this, but the part she understands she agrees with strongly.

‘It’s no good thinking it’ll get better,’ she says. ‘It gets worse.’

‘It gets worse,’ he agrees.

‘You know how they tell you to keep on trying, try, try and try again, all those stories of people who never gave up and ended up these big successes? Well, I say, give up now. Fuck everything. Sorry. I didn’t mean to say that.’

‘With you all the way,’ he says. ‘Fuck everything.’

‘At least that way nothing can ever let you down again. I mean, if you’ve already given up, you can’t fail, can you? Tell that to your dad and he doesn’t get it. He has all these expectations of you, and I’m like, Please, Dad, just get off my back. And Mum’s worse, always giving me these little boosty chats that are supposed to encourage me, like, Darling you look so pretty in your blue dress, why not wear that? But who says I want to look pretty anyway? What if I look like a cow? So what?’

The older man is entirely undisturbed by all this, and keeps painting away. His attention to her is both total and indifferent. Talking like this puts Carrie in an excellent mood.

‘It’s different when you say I’m beautiful,’ she says. ‘You don’t make it sound like it’s some kind of competition.’

‘No,’ he says. ‘It’s not a competition. It’s a gift, like talent. I’m not beautiful, but I have talent. And for that reason I’ve never been happy and I never will.’

‘Me too,’ says Carrie contentedly.

She looks round the little room in which she’s sitting. There’s a deep old fireplace, but the fire hasn’t been lit so far today. Canvases stand in stacks, face to the walls. Newspaper on the floor, maybe to catch drips of paint, maybe because the old man is just too lazy to pick it up. A table covered in books, plates that have been eaten off, glasses that have held beer or whisky. Candles in saucers of melted wax.

‘You could make this room really pretty if you tried,’ she says.

‘I’m not staying long.’

‘You know something? I used to call this my house. We’d come on walks, and everyone would say, There it is. There’s Carrie’s house. It was all falling down and stuff, and I had this dream that I’d buy it really cheaply and do it up and live here.’

‘You still could.’

‘Oh, it was only a game. I never came inside. I imagined how it would be, and where I’d have my bedroom, and where I’d put the kitchen, and how I’d make the garden have a place with a swing seat under the trees, and how I’d paint the front door this blue colour, do you know the flowers called morning glories? I was going to paint the front door morning glory blue.’

Suddenly she wants to cry. How stupid is that?

‘Hold that! Don’t move!’

He’s painting at furious speed. She gazes at him, tears pricking at her eyes, thinking: he’s amazing. He doesn’t want to make me into anything. He just wants me to be the way I am.

This has never happened to Carrie before. People want you to be something you aren’t, so you pretend. Wear these clothes, put on this make-up, smile this smile, talk in this voice. This old man doesn’t want her to be anything, and he says she’s beautiful.

Now she’s crying. She’s crying because she wants so much to be beautiful.

He stops work when the light starts to fail. She wants to see what he’s painted so far but he says no, wait till he’s finished. She can’t tell if he’s pleased with his picture or not but now she knows she wants him to be pleased.

He asks her to help him move an armchair. He wants to drag it out of the house and into the barn where he’s hanging his pictures for his show. It turns out to be quite a struggle, because the doorways are narrow and he’s not strong at all. Carrie does most of the pulling and heaving herself.

‘Why do you want an armchair in your show? Won’t it get in the way?’

‘It’s part of the show.’

‘What, for people to sit on and look at the pictures?’

‘Something like that.’

By the time Carrie leaves it’s dusk in the sunken lane. She turns and looks back at the cottage and sees the glow of a candle in one window.

That’s okay, she says to herself. You can live in my house for now.