Colouring In (7 page)

I still can’t work out how I came to my decision three years ago. But I suppose we all sometimes do things that seem right at the time, then live to regret them. He’d been following me for months. Never attacked me, just unnerved me. Then that day I thought maybe he’s a troubled soul, maybe I can help. Maybe if I just talk to him, listen to what’s on his mind. Maybe he’ll realise I can’t help and he’ll stop bothering me. So when I got to the door – he was just a few feet behind me, closer than normal – instead of hurrying in without looking back, my usual way, I said would he like to step in for a cup of tea? It didn’t occur to me I might be inviting an attack of some sort – me, an elderly woman with a scarf and my perm coming undone: not exactly your Nicole Kidman. You have to trust people. Instead of smiling, he just nodded and followed me in. He sat at the kitchen table, didn’t seem interested in his surroundings, never mentioned my nice clock or anything. Then he began to talk, all about his childhood and that, all very sad. I felt so sorry for him. If he cleaned up a bit and had a haircut he could be quite a presentable man, despite missing a few teeth. I don’t know why, but when he started talking I forgot all about the annoyance and frights he’d given me. ‘I forgive you, Gary,’ I said, when he got up to go. He apologised very gently. He said he hadn’t meant to scare me, just found me a lovely woman who he hadn’t dared approach. ‘Let’s be friends,’ he said. I had the feeling I’d be his only friend in the world.

I don’t know how it was, he only ever came in for a cup of tea, never brought me so much as a pot plant, but I fell in love with him (I’d never have guessed you could feel so dizzy at sixty). I never breathed a word of this, but I think he knew. Then one afternoon, I remember I’d just disinfected the sink, he came round and the way he looked at me I think he could read how I felt. So he had his way with me – there we were, at three o clock in the afternoon. We had several such afternoons in my small bed. I’ve never enjoyed the physical side of things very much, but he was gentle, got it all over nice and quick, none of that slow messing about that Bill used to called ‘forward play’.

I remember Mrs. Grant, around that time – she notices everything – was concerned about a rash on my cheek. It was Gary’s stubble agitated the skin, I knew, but of course I couldn’t tell her. She gave me a lovely tube of cream: didn’t do anything, though I pretended it did. Mrs. Grant would have been horrified to think I’d taken up with a man who followed me – an unknown man – a stalker, no less.

I may have been kidding myself about being in love with Gary, of course: it’s nice to think you’re in love with someone, though. In honesty our friendship was going nowhere, he only talked about football. It became quite boring. Then one day – one of the days it was tea only, bed had been petering out – he said goodbye Gwen in an odd, gruff sort of voice, and went. And never came back. I didn’t see him anywhere in the streets or the local shops, for two years. Disappeared off the face of the earth. In my heart of hearts I was relieved.

But a couple of months ago, just as I was taking out a pack of peas from the chiller cabinet, I heard this voice behind me. ‘Gwen,’ he said. I froze cold as the peas in my hand. I turned. There he was, same stubble, teeth still missing. ‘I’m not interested in any more cups of tea and afternoons in bed,’ he said. ‘That’s not what I’m after. What turns me on is finding out what’s going on, the
unlocking
of mystery, know what I mean?’ The unlocking of mystery? Whatever was he talking about? I swear he had murder in his eyes. Before I had time to say a word, ask him what on earth he meant, he’d gone. My knees were shaking so much I had to lean on my trolley. God knows how I managed to get to the check-out. I felt sick, cold, terrified. What was he going to do to me? Why had I ever let him in?

I got home best as I could, tried to turn my mind to comforting things like doing out Mr. Grant’s study next day. But I was really unnerved, and there was no one I could talk to, was there? I thought of going to the police, but they wouldn’t be very sympathetic to that sort of domestic matter, would they? ‘What, once your lover, now he follows you about? Never hit you?’ They’d laugh in my face.

This afternoon I took a peep behind the curtain to see if the way was clear. I needed to go to the shops to get something for my supper. Blow me down, Gary was still there, other side of the road, looking about. So I stayed indoors, heart beating, hungry, cursing Thursdays. He stayed where he was, hands in his pockets, whistling. He was still there at tea time. I sat at the table, not up to anything, full of regrets. Over and over again, I thought, what a fool I’d been. What a fool I’d been to let him in in the first place.

Goodness knows why, but the thought of Gilbert and Carlotta at the Wigmore Hall occupied an unreasonable amount of my thoughts last night. At supper Dan and I speculated about how they were getting on. Dan thought she would irritate Gilbert so much he’d probably never go out with her again. I didn’t know what to think.

And now Dan’s on his way to Rome. High among the clouds. I know he thinks it’s silly, but I always pray that the journey will be safe. I never feel totally easy till he’s rung me to say he’s landed. I hate it when he goes away, even for a few days.

All morning I worked hard on a bird mask – glorious blue black feathers spurting from a golden heart (a rather ingenious upside down heart, so that the point would touch the forehead and the two curves would fit each side of the nose). Then I went down to the telephone in Dan’s study – unusually tidy, wastepaper basket empty. Gwen had obviously had a good go at it this morning. The room was full of sun. I sat for a few moments in the swivel chair, swinging from side to side, warm, comfortable, wondering if I should. I picked up Dan’s favourite photograph in its tortoiseshell frame – the three of us, Sylvie must have been about five. Dan and I definitely looked younger, though indefinably so. I dialled Carlotta’s number.

Naturally she was in a hurry. I could tell that from the way the mobile was snatched up, even before she spoke. ‘You’re ringing to find out how it went with Bert,’ she said. ‘Thought you would.’ She laughed a short bark of laugh that wasn’t wholly amused. ‘I’m in a dash, but I can tell you, it went bloody well. Really good evening. And, no: if that’s what you want to know. But could have, easily. He was raring to go. Much livelier than the night we had supper with you. Jet lag over, I’d say. Peaceful through the Brahms – Mozart – whoever, randy but gentlemanly at the Savoy …’

‘The Savoy?’ I said.

‘Randy at the Savoy, and absolutely all for it when I parked at his front door.’

There was a brief silence between us. ‘But, hell, you know me,’ she went on. ‘I’m thirty-six, not the spontaneous woman I once was. I wasn’t interested. I’d like Bert to be a friend, a useful spare man. I’m not up for any more complications, not after Andrew.’

‘Quite,’ I said. And then I added that I hadn’t rung up to find out whether or not she had slept with Gilbert, but whether she had liked him and whether she had enjoyed the evening. ‘Oh
that
,’ she said airily. ‘Of course I liked him. I only didn’t like him decades ago when he jumped on me in the bushes. I nearly always like your friends, don’t I? I like Bert, I enjoyed the evening, I shall enjoy doing up his house, OK? Now I’ve got to go. Speak to you soon.’

So there was no time to ask more, and anyhow to have done so would have been intolerable, even in a jokey way.

Now I sit in the empty kitchen, listening to the pounding of the grandfather clock, awaiting Dan’s call to say he’s safe in Rome.

Stifling, Rome. Carlo, my only friend here, is in Capri. ‘Come and join us for the weekend,’ he said, when I rang. What an idea. But Isabel would be miserable at the thought of my extending my trip. So would I. I wouldn’t enjoy Capri without her. I rang her. Didn’t mention the invitation I’d refused just in case, in the sweetness of her heart, she tried to persuade me to go. Then had dinner by myself in a
trattoria
down the road. God it’s good being surrounded by Italians again. Their emphatic way of speaking somehow endows every moment of every ordinary day with a sense of importance, something I love. It would be exhausting in England, but it works here. Over my
tagliatelle alle
vongole
I cast my mind back to my year in Florence after Oxford, a kind of post-university gap year, and the best of my youthful decisions. The hours – careless of time, money, the need to be productive in some way – just looking at pictures, at sculptures, at the Arno, at the cypress trees black against skies familiar from the small background space they were afforded by Botticelli
et al
. I remembered that Bert came out one weekend. The thing that got him were the hot
bombolini
in – what was it called, that tiny dark street? They zoomed down from an upstairs window in a chute. You’d pick them up with a paper napkin, heat still burning your fingers. The dense sugar stuck to a huge area of mouth and cheek. Fingers could only be de-stickied by washing them. Never had such doughnuts. And the Dante and Boccaccio. I’d wake at dawn and read before breakfast. A couplet, just as I dug into a nostalgic
zabaglione
, came to me unbidden:

Chi vuol esser lieto, sia -

di doman non c’e certezza…

For how many years had that lain buried in my sub-conscious? It’s something I must pass on to Sylvie in a few years’ time.

The telephone was ringing when I got back to my hotel room: the office to say I was wanted in Nairobi on Monday. Did I want to come home first, or fly straight from Rome? Isabel, as I knew she would, said of course…it would be mad to return home for half a day. Oh hell: we’d been looking forward to the weekend. I was going to suggest Bert came round again on Saturday evening, on his own. So we were disappointed, but resigned.
Di doman
… No certainty of to-morrow, indeed.

Now I sit gloomily in my air-conditioned room, dejected by the narrowness of the hotel desk. The shutters are half-shut. Sky, the colour of wild salmon, pushes in through the shut windows. I fling onto the floor the plastic hotel blotter and all the bumf about hotel services. They make a clatter. It jars my head, previously calm, now muddied by change of plans. I set up my word processor.

My last play, finished two months ago – a more lively piece, than usual, I’d thought – is whirling round that silent outer space in which theatre managements reside and never respond. So it’s time to stop fretting about that one, and all the others, and to start something new. This time I feel more than usually enthusiastic – or do I always feel that? I’ve a suspicion I do. Anyhow, it’s to be about rejection. Something I’m familiar with. Something we’re all familiar with. Something we should all be taught to deal with as children in order to soften the inevitable blows as grown-ups. I’ve many thoughts on the subject. And I’ve a cracking good opening, I think. So here goes.

Act One. Scene One.

Now, late into the Roman night, I begin.

When Dan rang late last night to say he was going straight from Rome to Nairobi – sensible, of course – I expressed the normal sort of disappointment, and cheerfully agreed it wasn’t that long till he’d be back on Wednesday evening. In truth I felt a profound sense of gloom which I could not understand. Dan is often away for anything up to ten days. I miss him no end but can cope perfectly well, enjoy spending more time than usual concentrating wholly on Sylvie. So why the shadowed feeling after his call? Perhaps it was simply because it was late and I was tired, and the envisaged weekend was shattered. I put out the light, very awake. Then the telephone rang again: Carlotta.

‘Hope I’m not calling too late,’ she said – she would have been scathing if I had said she was. ‘But I just thought you’d like to know my plan about Bert. Would you?’ I didn’t know what she was talking about but said I’d listen. ‘Although I’ve agreed to do up his house,’ she said, ‘I don’t want him to think of me just as a decorator.’

‘I understand,’ I said, after a long pause.

‘I’d like him to be a proper friend,’ she went on. ‘Now I’ve ditched Mike, there’s – well, a bit of a gap. It’d be nice to think I could – you know – ask Bert round sometimes, take him to things, generally ease him into my life in the most innocent way. What do you think?’

I said I didn’t know what to think. I seemed to remember she’d said a few weeks ago that Mike had walked out on her. Perhaps I got it wrong. Or perhaps she’d changed her story. I felt no inclination to sidetrack her onto that subject. I didn’t really understand what she was on about, this plan about Bert. Where was it leading? Why did she have to ask my advice if all she was plotting was an innocent friendship? My long silence, tacked on to my lack of opinion, plainly disappointed her.

‘So what I’m going to do,’ she said, ‘
despite
having rushed about getting samples of goodness knows what, is to keep him
dangling
for a bit. I mean, I don’t want to sound too keen. I don’t want him to get the wrong idea. So I’m not going to ring him
at least
till the middle of next week. By then, he might have become impatient. He might want to get the house started. So he might even ring me. – Isabel?’

I said I thought she was being oddly devious about a plan which was directed at simple friendship. Why didn’t she just ring him when she was ready to explain her decorating ideas? Besides, I heard myself saying – and it was a cruel thing to say – knowing Gilbert was not the sort of man who would ever be aware of the state of
dangling,
there wasn’t much point in putting it into practice.

Carlotta gave a long sigh. ‘I might have known it wasn’t worth talking to someone who’s been happily married for fifteen years,’ she said. ‘You’ve obviously forgotten what it’s like, negotiating the single world. Nothing is simple, not even a quest for friendship.’ She sounded forlorn. Before I could apologise for my lack of sympathy, she put down the telephone. We do sometimes end conversations like that – out of sorts, ruffled. Luckily the chill quickly melts. I’ll ring her tomorrow, apologise.