Her Living Image (9 page)

His mood wasn’t consistent. Often they were just on the edge of being happy. She thought it would come right when they were married.

Alan was very unhappy. He hadn’t imagined being married, or having children, for years. It was like discovering you have a disease; something permanent but
liveable-with, like diabetes. It altered the shape of his life.

He liked Carolyn well enough. Almost certainly, he was in love with her. And on the basis of that, he was prepared to marry her, and even wanted to. The fact that she was pregnant was forcing
both their hands in a way which was nearly amusing. Everyone they knew was so amazed
–
“I never thought it would happen to you!” Grimly, he could have enjoyed the sudden
notoriety and muted sympathy. He could have felt superior and thought them all fools for pitying him for getting what he wanted. Almost certainly, nearly, quite, he could.

But for Carolyn. She had betrayed him. When she knew she was pregnant she did not tell him, she kept it secret. They had made love, and it had been so utterly different from his other
experiences of sex that he thought something wonderful had happened. He thought it was to do with passion and love. And it turned out to be simply because she knew she was pregnant; a mechanical
trick she was turning on him.

The revelation had devastated him, eroding his confidence and his desire for her. It hit at the root of his male pride, but also at the basis of his love for her. What had attracted Alan to
Carolyn initially, and reinforced his interest as he got to know her, was her painful honesty. At school he had always found it easy to get women. He was tall and reasonably good-looking, with a
slightly sad, very reserved look which could melt into a charming smile, so intimate that it unbalanced almost any girl he cared to direct it at. He was bright and articulate, the son of a
successful doctor and a concert cellist. His home was a four-bedroomed house standing in its own large garden on the outskirts of the town. He had the usual run of furtive sexual fumblings and
persuaded three of his girlfriends (whom he then held in contempt) to go all the way. Carolyn, who had been in his English class for years, had always been quite insignificant. With the thinning of
numbers to an A-level class of fifteen, she was brought to his attention. She had become rather wispishly beautiful, thin with light hair and quick nervous movements. He decided she was as clear
and pure as water, against the other girls’ coarseness. She also started speaking in class, which she had never done before. Everyone was amazed when she first did, interrupting the teacher
with a series of incoherent stammers which seemed to insist on being articulated, against her will. She would blush furiously, her pale complexion flooding red so that he actually imagined her
blood flowing in a hot tide to the surface of her flesh; a thought he found exciting. The things she said were always in disagreement, with the teacher or another member of the class, and cost her
so much, in terms of physical anguish, that they carried great conviction. Some people laughed at her, but after a while they began to take her seriously. She had an odd, idiosyncratic way of
looking at things – he felt she had some standards which he wasn’t familiar with, against which she matched the things they said. Often she had to work so hard to overcome her
paralysing shyness that what she had to say burst out in a shout, or in a tone of great fierceness. After a term, she was grudgingly admitted by the flyers in the group to be worth reckoning with
– though very odd.

Alan’s charming smile fell on stony ground with her. She was uncompromisingly hostile to him, which piqued and fascinated him. She was unreceptive to any of the signals he sent out. She
moved away when he sat near her, went into town to change her library books instead of going home when he invented a string of excuses that would enable him to walk in her direction. She displayed
no interest in any of the social events he said he was going to and wondered if he might see her at. She was prickly and sharp with him, and only too obviously relieved to make her escape. He
sought her out more pointedly, and was rewarded by, “Why are you following me about?”

The charming smile. He still couldn’t quite believe it didn’t work with her. “Because I like you.” He watched her blush, and imagined he could actually feel a little
glow of heat on his own skin, radiating off her warmth.

“I – I – I thought you were laughing at me,” she said.

“Why? Why should I laugh at you?”

“You all do, in English, I know you do.”

“No we don’t.” Suddenly he was embarrassed too, and at a loss. They stared at each other for a moment.

“Will you go out with me?” he asked, blushing himself.

“I – I – I – all right.”

Alan had his own reasons for liking her desperate honesty; reasons that went beyond his contempt for the other girlfriends of his youth. Trevor and Lucy Blake were slightly
unusual parents, although it was years before Alan and his sister Pamela realized this. They thought it normal for Daddy to get them up and dress and breakfast them, before he went down to morning
surgery, and for Lucy once she was up to spend ages talking excitedly and gesticulating on the telephone, before consigning them (with a kiss on the head) to Nissy while she disappeared to the
study to practise, and the house was filled with the cello’s dismal squeaks and groans, which always recovered eventually, into more or less of a tune. They thought it was normal for Lucy
(they had never called her Mummy) to fly from room to room looking for her watch, keys, diary, gloves, scarf, and blow a kiss to them from the garden path as the taxi-driver carried her cello out
to the car, while Nissy held them up to the window to wave. They thought it normal for tea to come out of the fridge or the oven in a tinfoil box with a peel-back lid, although they did remember
for weeks afterwards Lucy’s occasional cordon-bleu phases, when the house had been filled with heart-warming smells, and different kinds of food had appeared out of saucepans on top of the
oven, and other dishes inside it. She had a repertoire of all-time favourites, culled from these various phases, which the whole family loved, and knew that no one could make better: coq au vin,
boeuf Stroganoff, lasagne with home-made pasta, duck with orange, tandoori chicken.

Alan loved his mother hopelessly. He loved the way she looked, with her glossy chestnut hair which reached below her waist when she let it loose, and her tinkle of necklaces and trails of
silk scarves, and her neat slender legs in their high-heeled shoes, reminding him of gazelles’ legs – or gazelles reminded him of her, he supposed, since he must have seen her first. He
loved the way she smelt, the atmosphere with which she surrounded you, the way she gestured, the ear-rings that sparkled in the light when she turned her head quickly. He loved the music that she
made on her cello, and the way she sat curved around it, seeming to listen to its inner voice as she played.

He hated the way people were always ringing her up, and she was always saying, “How lovely!”
and “I’ll be there by two, I promise, darling.” He hated the
way she was always, always, on her way out and late. He hated the way she said to him, “Tell me tomorrow darling, I must fly now,” and the way that when she’d waved Bye-bye and
got into the taxi, she immediately opened her bag and took out her mirror and comb, and didn’t look at you again, even if the taxi didn’t move for ages, because the man was changing the
meter or talking into his radio.

He longed to please her. At school he laboured to make himself better than all the others. “You clever boy!” she would cry, throwing her arms around him, and sending him into a
transport of joy. “Let’s have a look at your book then.” Quickly she would flick through his exercise books, glancing from page to page as they flew by. “Oh, this is very
good, Alan. What a brainbox you are!” A kiss on the head and she was off, leaving him the more deprived for his brief spell in the full sunny glow of her attention. She always had so many
places to go and so many people who wanted to see her that he felt cruelly his own stolid boringness, and was not surprised that she did not spend more time with him.

She wanted them to be musicians like her, and both he and Pam were learning instruments, he the violin and Pam the clarinet. But he wasn’t very good, and even to please her (which was
his only motive for practising) he could not make himself into a musician. Pam was better at it. She seemed to get along quite well.

In the evenings his mother was out, and Dad would read them stories and put them to bed. Sometimes, amid great excitement, his mother was in, with guests who drank wine and laughed loudly and
spoiled him and Pam. He was ashamed of the way his father sat in his armchair staring at them without joining in the conversation, or even rudely reading as they talked. Everyone always wanted to
talk to Lucy and listen to what she had to say, everyone was always looking at her.

As he grew older his own life began to have more centre to it and he gave up yearning so hungrily after his mother’s attention. He began to find his own satisfactions in doing well at
school, in his friends, in his drawings. Sometimes Lucy would seize on one and cry, “But darling, this is marvellous! I’ve bred an artist! This must go up on the wall!” and stick
his latest painting up with Sellotape alongside the daubs by the mentally handicapped group she had played for at Christmas, and the postcards from her friends all over the world.

Despite the fact that she seemed rarely to be in it, the house reflected her taste. It had a breathless untidiness, with an underlying stratum of solid good things: expensive carpets and
curtains in dark plain colours, antique furniture ranging from valuable to junk, but having in common a charm or whimsicality that had made each piece claim her attention originally. She and Trevor
went to auctions together. It was the only pleasure they seemed to share. And there were always flowers. Lucy would laugh and wave her hand when people said, “How lovely they are.”
“Flowers are my weakness!” she said. “I must have flowers, I can’t bear it without them. Flowers are my vice.” Trevor bought her a huge bunch every Friday, the florist
made it up specially for him, and she often bought them herself as well, when something caught her eye: carnations, roses, freesias, lilies, pockets of scented air in the corners of rooms –
and flashes of colour, violet iris, scarlet tulip, golden mimosa shining on the dark polished furniture. Most of her guests brought flowers when they came, knowing how she liked them, and how she
loved to arrange them in tall glass vases on the kitchen table while people gathered around her, chatting in a tight excited crowd.

As Alan grew older he noticed that when his mother promised “Tomorrow”, she always forgot. And he caught himself thinking, as she spoke sometimes, “She doesn’t mean
that.” When he reached sixteen he was ready to condemn her as superficial and a hypocrite. He judged her the more harshly, and was the more hurt by his judgement, because he still worshipped
her. He would have given anything for her unadulterated attention and approval.

It was Pam, much more worldly-wise than he, who told him about the affair.

“I feel sorry for Dad,” she said casually one day, as they sat in the kitchen after school, helping themselves to a packet of chocolate digestives.

“Why?” he said crossly, already knowing she was going to say something stupid.

“The way Lucy carries on.”

“What d’you mean, carries on?”

“You know.” She was scraping the chocolate off the biscuit with her top teeth, and pretending to be absorbed in it.

“Stop being so thick!” he shouted angrily.

“I’m not thick, you are.”

“Why?”

“Because you don’t know.”

“What?”

“That she’s got a boyfriend.”

Alan stared at the noticeboard on the opposite wall, pretending to read something but seeing nothing but a blur of the leaflets, notes, scraps of ribbon and withered buttonholes which Lucy
had pegged up there. “Who?” he said finally.

“Jeremy. The double-bass.”

“How d’you know?”

“It’s obvious, as soon as you start to think about it. But anyway, I saw them.”

“When?”

“You’re not cross-questioning an enemy spy, you know,” she flared, and turned her attention back to her revolting biscuit.

“Go on. Tell me. When?”

“‘Please.’ You are the rudest person I ever met.”

“Please. Tell me.”

“Last night. I woke up and it was late – after two. I was starving so I thought I’d come down to the kitchen. When I got downstairs I could see the drawing-room light was
on so I thought they must still be up, I’ll go and see if they want a snack. Anyway, it was dead quiet and I felt a bit funny as I opened the door –” She stopped.

“And?”

“And there they were.”

“What d’you mean?”

“On the sofa. Lucy and Jeremy.”

“Doing what?”

“What d’you think?”

“
TELL
me.” He was so angry with the stupid little brat he wanted to smash her face in.

“All right, if you must know every disgusting detail. She was lying on the sofa and he was
–
I don’t know – doing something to her. I couldn’t see
properly.”

“With no clothes on?”

“I don’t know. I shut the door quick, before they saw me.”

He imagined opening the drawing-room door. The sofa faced the fire, at a slant. You would just see one end of a person lying on it. “How d’you know it was Jeremy?”

“His jacket was on the floor. And his double-bass was in the hall,” she said smugly.