Boys and Girls (48 page)

‘Why don't you,' suggested Susan, ‘go back to the beginning?' Amanda blinked at her, suddenly bereft of anger and scorn. I'd love to do that, is what she was thinking: go back to the very beginning. Before all the shit started happening. Whenever like that was. But yeh – I know what Mum means: tell her what's been going on. And I will, actually, because I think I need some help.

‘See, Mum … I've been away, OK?'

‘Away? What do you mean away? Away from me, do you mean?'

‘No. Well yeh – but no, I don't mean just away from you. I've been, like, on a sort of a … holiday?'

‘Don't know what you – but you're at school. How could you …? Are you telling me you haven't been at school? Is that what you're telling me? But what was your useless
father
thinking of? Where have you been? How long have you—?'

‘Look, Mum – if I'm going to talk, right, you've just got to stop being
Mum
all the time. I'm going to tell you what's been happening, OK – and then maybe we'll all be just like less crazy.'

‘I'm not crazy. You may be crazy – I'm not crazy.'

‘You going to listen or what?'

‘Oh … I'm listening. And the truth, mind. Otherwise there's no point to it, is there?'

‘Yeh – I'm going to tell you the truth. That's what I'm going to do. So – I've been away, OK? Like – to Paris?'

‘To—!'

‘Oh Jesus just
listen
, can't you? Just shut up and listen, Christ's sake. I went to Paris. I told Dad it was a school trip to Switzerland, don't know why I said Switzerland, but I did. And, well – you know it wasn't.'

‘And he
believed
you? My God, what a man. But the school, though – haven't they been in touch? They must have noticed you weren't
there
, for God's sake …!'

‘Don't know. Maybe. Don't know.'

‘And were you on your own on this … holiday of yours?'

‘Yeh. No – I was with Tara. No – I wasn't with Tara, I was with … Harry, OK?'

‘Oh –
Amanda
 …! And that little bastard – he
promised
me—!'

‘Yeh well. You said the truth, so I'm giving you the truth. Anyway, it didn't work out, and I came back. Just today. And I just got so like confused, because if you and Harry weren't … well why have you moved out? And to
here
 – why are you
here
? It's just so weird. But then – well then the
really
bad thing happened. I just can't …'

‘What? What bad thing? Tell me.'

‘Well actually – another bad thing happened first. I'm like – pregnant?'

‘But … you're not any
more
, Amanda … The clinic …'

‘Yeh. Didn't go to the clinic.'

‘You didn't keep the appointment? Well why on earth
not
?'

‘Because I wasn't pregnant.'

‘You weren't …? But you
said
to me—!'

‘Yeh. But I wasn't.'

‘And, what – now you
are
 …?'

‘Yeh. I am now. Bummer. But we can see about that, can't we? Just like make a new appointment?'

‘Oh God, Amanda – you make it sound like going to the
dentist
 …'

‘Well it is a bit. Get something rotten taken out.'

‘
Jesus
, Amanda … Maybe you really
are
crazy …'

‘Anyway. That's not the big bad thing. The big bad thing is, I get home, right? And I really feel like tired and stuff so I just drop everything and I go upstairs for a shower, OK? And just kind of chill. And oh
God
 …! It was just so … dis-
gusting
, I can't tell you.'

‘You'd better tell me, Amanda. What is it, Christ's sake? Are they all right? Alan and Black? Is one of them—?'

‘Oh I'd say they're
very
all right. Oh yeh. Oh yeh. What a filthy pair they are. There were –
women
, Mum. Like –
girls
? One on the floor, the other on top of Dad's
bed
 …!'

Susan was just so amazed.

‘
Women
 …? You mean—?'

‘Yeh. Young. Slags. No clothes. Christ, I'm so like
sick
 … Why did you go? Why did you leave them? They never would've done it if you'd … well Black would, probably. Ee-
yow
! Tried it on with me once. Sick.'

Susan sat forward.

‘I don't believe you. Black did? I don't believe you.'

‘Yeh well – believe what you like. He did, though. All over me. If Dad hadn't come home I would have had to brain him.'

‘I can't believe it … when did this happen?'

‘On one of the nights you were out, like all tarted up. I thought with Harry. I, um – told Dad that's like what you were doing. He and Black, they went round. Gave him money, Harry, so he'd stop seeing you. Loads. How we went to Paris …'

Susan was staring.

‘Did they
really
do that? Alan and Black? That is just so … and
girls
 – I just can't … I mean, Alan of all people. Oh dear. Oh dear me. Well this … this just changes everything.'

‘Like – what's left to
change
 …?'

Well yes – but the ground is altered, and it is largely my doing. All that's left that now must change are more, yet more of my plans. In which, I have to confess, I am increasingly losing faith. I no longer, in truth, actually had one, a plan – more it was a hastily devised possibility of escape, a bandage over the seeping wound, a hopeful attempt at salvation (and my own, of course my own) … but now, in the light of things,
even that – it just seems to be beyond, beyond. I believed that I had been flooded by an unstoppable force for good (and my own, of course my own) and suddenly, girlishly, all the old, the clinging on to all of the old, it seemed not just ridiculous but such an encumbrance – accumulated ballast that was holding me down. I had forgotten – or certainly I chose not to recall it – that it was I who with such great care had made sure that such an anchor was firmly keyed, and then, for certainty, I added to its weight. This much was wise. But since I cut away, that total freedom that we all of us, I suppose, so stupidly dream of … it appears to have resulted in aimlessness and shame (and not just my own, of course not just my own, although I know I am alone in feeling ugly and foolish). I doubt whether others, the two old boys, will be thinking this way. They must at first have hugged to themselves with a hot and mutual hurt and fury the righteous outrage of the wronged and badly done-by – and then, very touchingly, they had attempted repair. They still cared for me that much, at least. I had never wondered quite how much – and yet when I was gone, I thought of them not at all. I was in love. And Amanda too – that appointment at the clinic? And how I was going to accompany her? I thought of her not at all. I was in love. Who can there be left who is still in the heaven of ignorance as to just what love will do? You feast so greedily on all its sap and sugar – and, in your eagerness to suck up more, are blissfully careless of how much you have torn. And so it was love, not calculation, that made me know I had to go. It could not be ‘as well as', no not this time, for here would be a heinous infidelity: for you must be true to love. I imagine I was not the first person to be so dazed, so knocked, so struck and damned and dazzled as to have hardly thought at all. One's being, it comes into its full-blooded own – headily,
with the anticipation of yet another coming together with the adulated other, and then so very wildly on impact. Other people, other lives – they were quite as wholly irrelevant as anything but he whom I held in my arms. Is it my fault I am a sensualist?

At first, I had hardly known he was even alive. Because in the early days of trying to get the house and garden together, there were men just all over the place. It consumed me. I was running around from this project to that, consulting with Mr Clearley – constantly on the Net, tracking down not just all these specific and typically elusive materials, but also such details as doorknobs and tie-backs. A hundred decisions a day. It was fraught, but I must say I adored it. I am a manager by nature. There was also, well … I did derive a very large satisfaction in seeing the household I had envisaged, the confluences I had engineered, surely and steadily pulling together. Black's blind faith and seemingly fathomless resources, Alan just being there as just always he had been – Amanda, by degrees, accepting with reluctance at first this new situation, and then with the thrill of her very own suite, embracing it madly. I felt, in truth, more of an architect than the architects, whose services eventually I quietly dispensed with. Once the marble floor in the atrium was finally and beautifully done (it turned out we were lacking just three square metres to finish, and Mr Clearley, he had to order it specially from the original quarry somewhere in the south of Italy, though still the problem of actually matching it was quite a thorough nightmare) … but yes, that was the key to it – once that floor was down, it acted as a sort of a bridge, is the way I saw it, to all the other rooms and floors. It joined things up – the disparate sites were becoming a whole. And that's when I felt freer to concentrate
on what was for me the most exciting part of all – my fabulous schemes for the garden.

The first lot of gardeners we got, they turned out to be utterly useless – and Mr Clearley, to give him his due, he spotted it fairly early on and got shot of them. The new team we got in I had read about in one of the endless stream of monthlies I was buying. They'd done quite a lot of work for the Chelsea Flower Show, medals and everything, though I nearly didn't bother even ringing them because I thought it highly unlikely that they could take on so big a job as this would be at such very short notice. But they didn't seem even remotely fazed by the scale of the thing; sent over in the first instance a gang of navvies to clear the ground – I lost all count of the number of skips of useless clay and tree stumps we got rid of – and then the landscapers there, they went over my plans with me, pointed out all manner of practical considerations that of course would not have occurred to me, but generally were very encouraging. All of it was possible, they assured me – ‘quite do-able' was their phrase – though the final cost, they said, would be … well, ‘considerable' I think they plumped for – that was their word of choice. ‘Massive' comes closer – and all the time it was being revised, upwards and upwards, very often because of me, it must be admitted – all my glorious afterthoughts and so swish refinements – but sometimes too because of unseen complications: the rerouting of the drainage, for one – and then the discovery of what seemed to be a subterranean boulder, quite vast, that no one could explain and in the end it had to be blasted out. When finally the layout was more or less apparent, I could start in on all the earnest discussions with the plantsman, the man in control of the project on the ground. Herb. Though at first I had hardly
known he was even alive. Saw him around – didn't know his name. And then I did, and I just thought … well I
said
it to him, actually: I know people must have remarked on it before, but it is a perfectly wonderful name you've got, isn't it really? For a gardener, I mean. He grinned and said he was grateful his parents had resisted calling him Daisy.

And, like the garden … it just grew. I tried to remember, I have tried to decide … was it his eyes, warm and peeping from under the long mop of hair? The first thing to tweak me with a strange delight? Or was it his big and bony capable hands, crescents of earth beneath the nails, so very tenderly peeling away the layers of a tiny little pod, so that he could show me the seeds within …? At first, I doubted my senses – I could not possibly be attracted to so unsophisticated a person, let alone one so very almost laughably young. He had a rather odd voice – a bit sort of strangulated, his accent, quite weird noises, sometimes. Never in my life have I felt myself drawn to such a thing – maybe, I don't know, why the allure was daily proving stronger and stronger. He flirted in a rather clumsy sort of a way – but what man have I ever met who didn't? I laughed, I parried – I glanced over my shoulder at him and smiled, whenever I walked away. The day, though, he just roughly took hold of me, I could not call up even a show of resistance – I sighed out loud with so huge a relief that all the waiting now was over. The sex at first was brief, gratifying and very literally dirty, often on a bed of mud: I was surprised to remember how much I liked it. And soon I lost all caution. God – I remember one day when Amanda had come home early from school and I rushed to call out to her, so bathed in gratitude that she had not arrived just five minutes sooner when she might just have spotted us emerging from behind
the pergola, my back so wet from having been just mashed down into a bed of petunias. I was no more than babbling, really – the scent and essence of him still sticky on my fingers. That was the day she told me, Amanda, that she was pregnant. But, it turns out, she wasn't. But now, however, she is, or so she says. Christ. But anyway – all the risk and discomfort, it could not go on. And that's when we started to meet in Chelsea – in the old house, yes. I went there every evening I could, daytime too. The thrill of the journey nearly choked me. When I was not with him, I dangled at the mercy of the give and pull of a long elastic yearning. And one night, gazing at the mere and slightest shimmer of blue on the twitch of his sleeping eyelid, I simply fell in love. And so everything then just had to be changed – for this, you see, was it: the bare and true and longed-for thing. Not the outcome of a calculation, nor a canny move. From the blue (if just the slightest shimmer) – here was now the bolt, thudded into me. And this, no – it could not be as well as, no no – this just had to be instead of. And yes I know it was contrary to, oh – everything, all of it, which before I had seen quite plainly to be right – yes, and proper; I knew that, of course I did – but somehow there was now a new and more valid propriety, all the contracts of old quite suddenly null: I saw them just as dust. This great man whom I loved … I must marry and be with him, and him alone: it must be good in the eyes of God.