Aunt Margaret's Lover (13 page)

Chapter Thirteen

Verity is talking to her wall. Since she took out the video of
Shirley Valentine
she considers this to be an OK thing to do and not an occasion of madness. In the first few weeks after giving Mark the boot, she used to mutter her way around the house, embarrassed to be speaking out loud at all, and remembering that in her childhood it was considered certifiable.
Shirley Valentine
has released her from that fear. Rather like discovering that all the other private and quasi-sinful things she thought only she did were fairly standard to her sex, talking to the wall now feels All Right. She is beginning to develop a relationship with some of her consumer durables, too.

Today is Thursday. She has done a fair morning's work at the WP. Nothing great but she's keeping her hand in. Aunt Margaret's story of Joan's bisexual lover has been rewarding in the creative sense and she has nearly completed a treatment for a three-part mini-series based on the theme. Now the afternoon looms and every time she sits down to read, or lies down to snooze, her heart suddenly pounds as she remembers some betrayal, some loving phrase, some painfully magical moment with the out-booted Mark. She makes tea, dutifully, then forgets she has and pours a very weak gin. To the Italianate ochre walls of her kitchen she says, 'Well, Wall, what the fuck am I going to do with the rest of my life?'

The wall does not respond.

'Answer came there none,' she says disconsolately, and then apologizes to Tuscan Glow. It never said it would reply, after all. But at least - unlike the friends she needs to be with her and who are not - at least it is there and constant. She knows she has bored the knickers off three or four women who have their own married lives to think about as well as children, which she has not - children who, despite their smallness and one would have thought simplicity, seem to take up a damnable amount of caring time that could be spent sitting with her in her kitchen going over her pain.

She sips the gin. It really is almost tasteless, so she adds some more.

'Well, Wall,' she says, 'at least Aunt Margaret has time on her hands. At least she isn't bogged down with getting on with life and preparing the way for the new generation, while I'm stuck here attempting to climb out of the pit. It's a question of what you miss about being with a fucker like him, and what you are glad to get away from. Together she and I will survive.'

The wall seems to glow at the suggestion.

She sips again ruminatively. 'Or not make any more relationships ever again. I don't much care which. Aunt M manages it. She's even got rid of Roger - not that you could think of him as a
relationship
.
..'
She giggles behind her hand and gives the wall a wicked look. 'Not with those ears
..
.' She sips again. The conversation, though one-sided, is warming up. 'I suppose jug ears are like small dongers really; only acceptable if your name is Rothschild. Do you agree?'

If the wall does, it chooses to keep the accord to itself.

She taps the glass against her teeth and rearranges some dried herbs hanging above the hob. These make her weep silent tears, which dribble into the glass. 'What is the point, Wall,' she says, 'of having dried fucking herbs when there is no one to enjoy' — she picks up a leaf or two of rosemary -'roast lamb?' She chucks the dried spears away and snaps off a piece of basil. 'Or pasta?' She consigns the basil with the rosemary. The tears are flowing copiously into the glass, into her mouth. She crosses to the wall and lays her cheek against it. If she closes her eyes and really concentrates, the flat, emulsioned surface could be his cheek returning the compliment. For some reason she sees not Mark's face, but Roger's ears, which makes her smile. He was a prat. Mark was a prat. They are all prats, every damned one of them. 'Women are best,' she murmurs to the
little
bit of Italy beneath her cheek. 'Aren't they, Wall? And you are feminine too. The French say you are and they should know.' She laughs. 'Roger's ears.
Dear
Aunt M. Haven't seen much of her this last week, come to think of it.
..'

Verity drains her glass and puts it purposefully into the dishwasher, wagging her finger at it - she has got quite good at liberating herself from reality in the matter of addressing inanimate objects - and saying, 'You stay where you are. I do not nced^yott to survive this blip in my life. After all, what are human friends for?'

She perches on her high Victorian bar stool, takes the phone from the wall, and taps out Aunt Margaret's number. She waits. It is answered very quickly by a female voice which seems to have been steeped in rich cream before being poured over velvet.

'Hello,' says the voice. 'This is Margaret Percy speaking.'

There is a pause. Margaret Percy speaking is clearly waiting for her caller to articulate, and her caller is clearly trying to come to terms with getting the name right but the voice so completely wrong.

'Hello,' repeats the velvet cream. 'Hello?'

'Urn,' says Verity. 'Aunt M? Hello?'

Verity is much relieved to hear that the velvet cream was only a figment, for her friend's voice resumes its pleasant, familiar ordinariness.

'Verity,' she says. 'How are you?'

'Miserable,' says Verity. 'Can you come over?'

There is a tiny sigh at the other end of the phone. 'I'm a bit busy,' says the ordinary voice. 'Can I come tomorrow?'

'How can you be busy?' says Verity crossly. 'You don't do anything nowadays.'

Now there is no hint of the velvet cream, only the frostiness of an ice-lolly or two. Even Tuscan Ochre has a stern look about it. Verity realizes that she shouldn't have said something quite so querulous and insensitive. It was the gin, she tells herself, and the Wall, and prepares for contrition.

'Just because I don't go to the shop doesn't mean I sit in a heap all day.' The justifiably cross implication is that Verity does this, Margaret does not.

'I mean you are wonderfully free nowadays.'

'Mmm,' says Aunt Margaret, more like ice-cream but icecream which is inclined to melt.

'Can you come tonight?'

'No, I'm going out.'

Verity waits to hear where: the normal passage of conversation. Where is not forthcoming. 'Where?' she asks.

Aunt Margaret's voice freezes again. 'Just out. For a drink.'

'Who with?' asks Verity, thinking she might come too if it is someone she knows.

Aunt Margaret says, 'What is this? The third degree?'

Verity is puzzled. 'I just wondered,' she says. 'Well, can you come round afterwards?'

'No.'

'Why not?' says Verity peevishly. 'Because I'm doing something else.' 'Well,
what?'

'Going for another drink somewhere else.'

'Blimey,' says Verity. 'You're boozing worse than me and you haven't got a broken heart to justify it.'

'I am not boozing, Verity.
I
am going out for a drink -
two
drinks at
two
different venues. That is all.'

'High life,' says Verity mournfully. 'Can I come?'

'No!' Aunt Margaret's voice explodes. There is silence. And then, quite suddenly, as with the breaking of a storm, she resumes her normal manner. 'Sorry,' she says. 'Sorry. Didn't mean to be so .
..
But you can't.'

'Is it men?' asks Verity, aggressively.
I have no longer got one,
resounds in her head.

'How have you been?' her friend says at last - just the question Verity wants to be asked.

'Grim.'

'I'm sorry,' says Aunt Margaret.

'Yes, well, it goes like that.' Verity's voice quivers sli
ghtly
. 'Aunt Margaret?' 'Yes?'

'Whatever happened to After Mark Anonymous project?'

'Sorry?' Aunt Margaret sounds abstracted.

'You know - what you said last time. You said if I ever found myself reaching for the telephone to dial his number, I should talk to you first. Like the AA. Don't reach for the whisky, reach for a friend?'

'Well - are you feeling like calling him?'

'I'm
always
feeling like calling him. The telephone is like a sodding quart bottle of gin stuck on the wall.'

'Poor you. Can't you find something to take your mind off it?'

'I have. It's called gin. I think my liver has probably gone to live in a squat with a bunch of drunks where it's safer . . .'

'Oh, Verity.' Aunt Margaret sounds more peevish than sympatico. Verity, at the centre of her pain and anguish, steps it up.

'I've read
Madame Bovary
and I'm halfway through
Anna Karenina.
Need I say more?'

'Verity, are you blackmailing me?'

'It is not inconceivable that I could top myself.'

Silence.

'Are you dumping the project? Do you know what you are suggesting? You are suggesting that I resume the yoke of destruction, just because
you
are too busy to give me a few minutes of your time when I need it and —'

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 pleasa
ntly
.

'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.