Colouring In (12 page)

I turned out Sylvie’s light and went down to the kitchen. It echoed in a way it never does when Isabel’s at home – or perhaps it does and I don’t notice. I was going to finish the bottle of wine in the fridge and heat up a fish pie that Isabel made yesterday. She always leaves me well provided for, but I still never manage to carry out all her instructions. ‘Scrape some baby carrots,’ she said, ‘and make a salad: there’s masses of watercress and endive.’ But I couldn’t be bothered. I wasn’t hungry. I’m domestically lazy. The vital feeling was to get back to my study as soon as possible and carry on with
Rejection.
I have a feeling it’s going quite well. I’m enjoying writing it, it buzzes along. But then I often feel that, and what happens? I send off a handsomely laid out edition of the finished product, with a statutory SAE overloaded with stamps for safety, and the result? Nothing. The envelope is not made use of. The script never returns. I never hear what the faceless man behind the desk in the office of some provincial theatre thinks of it. I’m left tormented, and the torment never quite dies. What’s so puzzling is my constant eagerness to return to this form of self-torture. Perhaps one day I shall force myself to realise that I’m no bloody good at writing plays, and I might as well give up. Then, I’d be free.

But I don’t want that kind of freedom. I want to go on trying.

I was reflecting, as I often do, on such painful matters, when the doorbell rang. I finished pouring myself a glass of wine, annoyed. I’d no desire for any kind of interruption. My evening was pleasurably planned. I didn’t want to talk to anyone but Isabel, when she rang later. But that’s the trouble with living in a street of friendly neighbours, and indeed friends: they drop in.

Carlotta, it was. Backlit by the evening sun, a halo of hair frizzed by the strong light. She apologised for not ringing to warn of her arrival but said she’d had a dreadful time with Bert, was fed up, and didn’t think we’d mind her coming round for a drink. When I explained that Isabel had gone to her parents, Carlotta’s face clenched … appalled, disappointed. She backed away – another inch and she would have fallen down the steps. I put out a hand, pulled her through the door. ‘In that case I must go,’ she kept on saying with the hollow firmness of one who has every hope of being persuaded to stay. And what could I do? She looked so forlorn. What had Bert been up to? I was faintly intrigued. All these thoughts skittered through my mind and I saw my quiet evening of writing float through the air and break like a bubble. ‘I’m all alone, for God’s sake,’ I heard myself, saying ‘please stay.’

‘If you really mean it, then,’ she answered, making her way towards the oven.

Carlotta knows our house, our kitchen, well. Often she’s helped Isabel cook. She knows where things are. She’s efficient. She doesn’t have to ask questions. ‘You’ve got eggs,’ she said with a decisive glance at the basket, piled high. ‘Omelettes, then. Salad and cheese and – look – Isabel’s left a mass of raspberries. You can keep the fish pie for tomorrow.’

She was in charge, I could only thank her. I gave her a glass of wine but she shook her head, and instead put on Isabel’s old apron to protect her tight black dress. Had this been chosen for Bert’s approbation, I couldn’t help wondering? If so, it should have had effect. It showed her small waist and very rounded breasts to great advantage. What I found confusing was that from the waist down, in the disguise of the apron, she could have been my wife. I smiled. ‘Missing Isabel?’ she asked. I confessed I was. I wasn’t much good without her, I said.

Carlotta’s one of those natural cooks who fling in a bit of this and a bit of that, and suddenly something that smells deliciously of herbs and garlic is there, ready, perfect. My darling Isabel is not in this category, far from it. I don’t mind, but it’s hard not to admire someone to whom it all comes so easily. She tossed a salad of glinting leaves, threw in chives, cut a tomato into transparent slices so fast that all I could see was the flash of the blade. I was aware that, in the admiration I felt for her speed and skill, resentment also lurked: that she should be exhibiting this talent in
our
kitchen, that she should be so much better at all this culinary stuff than Isabel, was unreasonably irritating.

‘Good thing I came,’ she said a long while after we had spoken. I wasn’t sure whether she meant because she could cook for me, or whether she thought that she might make up for Isabel’s absence. I nodded agreement and laid the table.

Over supper she confessed the trouble she was having with Bert. He was so hopeless to deal with, she said – and I was to understand she meant on a professional basis. She wanted to make it quite clear that all she wanted from Bert was friendship. She was in no way ready for another relationship with some dithering man: she had had procrastination, indecisiveness up to
here
– her hand swooped across one breast rather than her temples – since she’d had to tell Mike to bugger off. I said I quite understood. Fond though I was of Bert, I added, he’d be a tricky number to be involved with. It was not for nothing he was still a bachelor. I’d forgotten about the warmth that intense agreement so often, and confusingly, induces. I could feel this warmth, born of our agreement: it was almost tangible between us. But in a moment it was blasted by guilt. How could I have suggested to Carlotta that Bert was tricky? That was an act of unforgivable treachery. I tried to change the conversation, but Carlotta would not be deflected from her theme: Bert was a loser.
Basically –
here she shook her head so fiercely that her dotty hair shimmered like the leaves on a
tremula pendula
– Bert was nothing more than a hopeless loser. And she had made up her mind that all she was going to do was to re-furbish his house, because she was not a woman to break her word, then make no further effort.

‘Quite,’ I said. Then added (perhaps to make up for my previous betrayal) that I thought it was possible he hadn’t found his feet, yet, back in England. This idea produced a sneering laugh. Found his feet? He’d only come from New York, for heaven’s sake. He’d got bags of money, a house that someone else was going to take trouble over, and plenty of friends. So if he hadn’t found his feet he was, in a word,
pathetic.

Then, suddenly, Carlotta ran out of steam. Her sigh, followed by a silence, was a relief. I noticed her glass, and the bottle, were empty. She looked rather endearing, sitting there, chin in cupped hands, staring out of the window, indignation filtering away.

‘Why don’t we go down to the cellar,’ I suggested, ‘and choose ourselves a bottle of something memorable?’ At the word memorable she looked up at me and nodded.

Carlotta is knowledgeable about wine. She drinks a certain amount and, when we have dinner with her, always produces a very good bottle of something she thinks I haven’t discovered. I don’t think she’d ever been down to my cellar before. I felt it might interest her. She would probably appreciate the money I’d spent on its design – the lighting, the layout, the exact temperature – all things that hold no interest for Isabel. I think she’s only ever been down once since it was all finished.

I went ahead. As Carlotta was wearing high heels, I gave her a hand down the last few steep steps. When we reached the bottom she continued to clutch my hand, tightening her grip. Then she shook herself free and went over to a corner where my most valuable and prized bottles await the right moment. She still wore the apron. Its strings made two patterned snakes over her bottom. Her head was on one side as she tried to see labels without removing bottles. Then she turned to me.

‘Goodness,’ she said. ‘Lucky you. What a cellar.’

At that moment she looked desperately sad, vulnerable. Looking back I realised I was stirred by the pathos of her. At the time I was unsure what it was that made me want to cross the two yards that parted us, take her in my arms and rid her of whatever it was that had drained her of her usual high spirits.

I quickly took a bottle from the rack next to me and suggested we go back upstairs. She gave a small shudder – throwing off whatever had assailed her, perhaps. Because when I offered a hand again up the stairs, she shook her head and bounded ahead of me. The odd moment, I realised, was a figment of my imagination. I had mistaken passing thoughtfulness, which had crossed her features like a shadow, for melancholy. Carlotta, shouting from above that she was going to open the French windows because the evening was so warm, was her normal bossy self again. I had misread her, and was shaken by my misreading.

We sat on the sofa by the open windows that leads onto one of those small terraces that are common to Edwardian houses in London streets. From the garden came the faint smell of lilac: the blooms were just past their best. By day they had that cindery look that comes when some of their flowers have turned brown. But by night they still, just, held their scent.

We both kept to our far ends of the sofa. We’d sat here, in just these positions, dozens of times, while Isabel was cooking, or upstairs saying goodnight to Sylvie, and in a way it was no different from any of those other times. Except there was, I think, the faintest trace of expectation between us. Not of anything nefarious. But I think I half hoped Carlotta, alone with me, would reveal something she had never before revealed – though perhaps she had to Isabel. She looked at me with smiling eyes and said she promised she would say no more about Bert.

On the low table in front of the sofa I’d put two new glasses – our most delicate ones, kept for rare occasions – and carefully poured the Burgundy and handed her one. Then the telephone – on the table – rang.

Isabel.

She sounded cheerful, as she always does when in Dorset. Easy drive, lovely weather, and her mother had left the deepfreeze full of wonderful things so she wasn’t going to have to be bothered with cooking. I laughed, thinking of Carlotta’s heavenly omelette. How was Sylvie? How was I? About to go up and carry on writing, I said: I’ll ring you tomorrow evening. ‘Miss you, love you,’ I added. We always say that when we’re away from each other, small pebbles of words so well used I doubt either of us dwell on their meaning. They’re just habit, but I daresay we’d be alarmed if we forgot them.

‘You didn’t say I was here,’ Carlotta said when I’d put down the telephone.

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

I sighed. Took a sip of wine, needing a moment in which to answer the question to myself.

‘I don’t know,’ I said eventually. ‘At least, I don’t know exactly. Something to do with not wanting a long conversation, and with knowing I really do have to get down to work…’

‘Would she have minded?’ Carlotta asked. ‘Surely she wouldn’t.’

‘No, of course she wouldn’t. I suppose I just didn’t want to get into the whole explanation, Bert not asking you out and so on. It’s up to you to tell her all that, not me.’

All expectation – if that’s what it had been – between us had now disintegrated. We were left stranded, silent again.

‘Try the wine,’ I said at last. Carlotta leaned forward, hair falling over her face. She tasted it, said it was sublime, and returned her glass to the table. Then she rested her head on the back of the sofa, shut her eyes.

I had never seen her like this before. Vulnerable, quiet, heavy. Nor had I realised that she was, well, quite so oddly attractive: long eyelashes, two dark curved smudges on her cheeks, the two small peaks of her top lip precisely defined. I had always thought of Carlotta as over-made up, eyes lined too harshly, lips too dark. This evening she seemed not to be wearing much make-up. Or maybe it was a crepuscular illusion. Apart from a candle on the kitchen table there were no lights on in the room. The sky outside was that pale darkness, watery from streetlights: the customary early summer night sky over London.

I sat looking at her for a long time. Then two single tears, one from the outside corner of each eye, appeared, and ran a hesitant race down her cheeks. I was fumbling for my handkerchief when she jerked herself upright with a loud, animal-like noise, and began to sob. Instinctively I moved towards her, held her to me while her body heaved and the cooing noise of her weeping was alarming in the air.

I don’t know for how long we sat clasped to each other. It reminded me of occasions when Sylvie was small: clutched together, swaying back and forth, I would try to comfort her. I stroked Carlotta’s curls, said nothing. She smelt of roses – tuberoses, perhaps: the scent was too strong. When eventually she disentangled herself from me, I gave her my clean handkerchief and she wiped her eyes. Mascara ran in black streams down her face. I couldn’t help smiling, and she returned the smile.

‘Thank you,’ she said.

‘Anything I can … help with?’ I asked. But she shook her head.

‘Just, sometimes,’ she said, ‘living alone – seeing your friends happily married, children, house, family life … Just sometimes you despair … But mostly not.’ She gave another half smile. ‘I think it was Isabel ringing you,’ she went on, ‘that started me off. The idea that after fifteen years your wife goes away for a few days and misses you, and rings you, and really wants to know how you are. I’ve always imagined that one day I might have that sort of thing. But this is self-pitying rubbish,’ she added. ‘I’m sorry.’

She was scrubbing at her face with my clean handkerchief, making it a worse mess.

‘You’re striped as a tiger, now,’ I said. ‘Tiger face. And of course, one day …’

She gave a small snort of derision.

‘No, probably not. But thank you, Dan. You’ve been so kind. Such lovely wine.’

She picked up the glass, took several sips. Then she handed back the handkerchief.

I remember thinking it was imperative I get away from her. I took the handkerchief to the sink, ran it under the cold tap, wrung it out and returned to her. I had a distant sense that what I was going to do was dangerous, foolish. She stood up. I tipped up her face and began to wipe it clean. I tried to look fatherly.

‘Thank you,’ she said again, when I’d finished. ‘You’ve been…’

She couldn’t finish because I was kissing her. She was kissing me. My hand was full of one of her breasts. My inner eye was confused by scarlet flares and miniature fireworks. Carlotta was responding to the slightest movement of my free hand. Then a sudden paleness swarmed behind my closed eyes, bleaching out the colours. With one accord we pulled apart. I saw that the light in the hall had been switched on. I heard the dim slap of bare feet on the floorboards. Turning from Carlotta, I saw Sylvie standing at the kitchen door, looking at us.