Muddy Waters (15 page)

‘No, I don't suppose she would,' Bernard agreed readily, nodding slightly. Abigail sighed and closed her eyes against the unappealing sight of bland complacency. Where was Martin now, she wondered, glancing at the little gold watch he'd given her just after Venetia was born. He was probably asleep, she calculated, his perfect profile shadowed against a hotel pillow, the all-night buzz of New York thrumming gently through his dreams. Next to him she imagined the long lemony hair of Fiona, clean-smelling and crumpled into after-sex dishevellment. Tangled hair only looked pretty on the young, throwing into appealing relief their smooth and unlined faces. On women of a Certain Age it just drew attention to an overall slept-in hedge-backwards kind of look. She put her hand up to her own strangely short spiky hair and pulled at it, squinting upwards to try to see if its new colour was still there, or if it had dissolved in the night and turned steel grey as a punishment for her own sins. She couldn't see it, couldn't any longer put her head down and hide her face and her feelings. It occurred to her that short hair meant never again being able to lie convincingly, unless she was doing it into a phone. Perhaps that would be a good thing – forcing her into better behaviour. Who knew? It might become a habit, perhaps if she was a better person, she'd deserve more luck – maybe it really
did
work that way. She looked at Bernard who had gone down to the kitchen end of the long light room and was playing with the toaster, clumsily cramming bread in and out of it as if he wasn't quite used to having to work it by himself. She imagined his teenage conquests up early and still eager to please, bustling about playing house, carefully making him coffee and mopping up spills and drips they'd have ignored at home. They'd find his bread crock (also made by Willow) and cut Bernard's toast into crustless triangles, like their mothers' best tea-party sandwiches.

‘Breakfast?' he queried, unenthusiastically, not looking at her. ‘No thanks. I'd better go now, I think.' She climbed out of the lumpy bed and reached for the few clothes she'd thought it safe to take off. He still didn't look at her, whether out of politeness or lack of interest she couldn't tell.

‘Mm. OK then,' he muttered, his head more in the fridge than out of it. Oh, OK then, she thought.

From Ruth's skylight window Adrian could just see the boathouse. He'd been looking at it for hours, he was sure, waiting for Abigail to come out. He imagined her, hurriedly dressed in last night's clothes (knickers inside out and her bra done up on the wrong hook) and hoping no one on the island was an early riser, creeping like one of Bernard's guilt-wracked schoolgirls down the outside wooden staircase from the balcony to the scrubby garden area beneath. He thought of her picking her neat steps carefully past the old pieces of broken cabin cruiser that lurked rusty and treacherous under the overgrown grass and finding her way to the path. Even from Ruth's open window he could hear the wind chimes clanging in the trees in Enzo's sculpture garden and caught the early sun glinting on twists of steel that might represent God in Mourning or might be, as Adrian suspected, a defunct manifold from a Ford Escort. In his mind, Abigail was stealing past Enzo's tumbling shrubs, careful not to be seen by him or Giuliana who liked to breakfast on their deck and feed bits of croissant to her hens. Time to get to work, he thought, time to start thinking about sex for pretend instead of for real.

Stella sat at her desk on the first floor landing and started working her way carefully through the pile of letters that hadn't made it to the ‘Go Ask Alice' column. She divided them into heaps, the ones that needed the standard contraception leaflet, the ones that required helpline numbers, the girls who thought they were pregnant and whose replies would need an urgent first-class stamp. Then there were those without obvious categories who would need carefully thought-out individual replies – a thirteen-year-old struggling to mourn the death of a loved teacher, another whose father had taken up with a neighbouring man, and one who knew her best friend was secretly seeing her boyfriend. And I'm supposed to have all the answers, she thought, her mind still on Ruth.

‘Hi Stella, I'm back!' Abigail climbed the stairs towards Stella's desk slowly, in the manner, Stella immediately thought, of a woman who hadn't had much sleep. Last night's velour sweater was falling off one shoulder, in a way that didn't suit mornings.

‘Don't look at me, I look ghastly,' Abigail said, laughing and putting her hands to her eyes and hair. ‘After a night in that dreadful bed, I couldn't even
think
of facing his bathroom. I'll just dash up and have a quick shower.'

‘I fed your cat,' Stella told her, refusing to give in to curiosity about what Abigail had got up to with Bernard. They weren't students any more, she wasn't about to stare wide-eyed and eager at Abigail and urge her on with ‘
Well? And?
'

Abigail, now about to go up the next flight of stairs, hesitated, ‘Oh, er thanks. Sorry to have left her to you. It was just so terribly dark over there, you see. It seemed only sensible to stay . . . better than breaking my neck on that path anyway. I don't know about a bridge, what you need over here is a bit of decent lighting.' She looked up the stairs rather nervously and half-whispered, ‘Is Ruth still here?'

‘No, you've just missed her. She's gone into college, for once. Toby's gone to work and Adrian's down in the summerhouse,' Stella added, though Abigail hadn't asked.

‘Right. I'll be right back. No one phoned, I suppose?'

‘Sorry, no.' Abigail's mouth drooped for a giveaway second before she rallied with, ‘Bastard!' and an attempt at a sod-them-all-especially-Martin grin.

Nothing happened with Bernard then, Stella concluded accurately as Abigail disappeared round the bend in the staircase and started clattering about in the bathroom. She felt ludicrously pleased about that, as if she was Abigail's protector, or even taking some kind of care of her on behalf of Martin. Ellen MacIver had presumably managed to get home though, in spite of the dark and the hazards of the pathway, so Abigail must have hung on at the boathouse in expectation of at least the faintest of passes. Abigail would probably say it was all right for Ellen, she knew her way blindfold. But even so . . .

Stella turned back to the letters and tried to work out a polite way of telling a fifteen-year-old that she should ask her sex-crazed boyfriend which particular aspect of the word ‘no' he was having trouble with understanding. Whoever, she thought, would actually choose to be a teenager – or, she thought, as the shower started running in the bathroom above her, a betrayed, jettisoned, middle-aged wife.

Peggy rubbed hard at her stiff, sore knees, trying to numb them before she climbed the steps with the bucket. She'd have a rest on the deck, feed the bread scraps to the swans and see what was going on out on the river before she attempted to go back down again. If she thought it through carefully, which she'd never yet managed to do, she could carry up with her all sorts of things that she'd need for the day and, when the weather was as fine as it was just now, perhaps not have to brave those crippling steps again till bedtime. She gripped the rail hard as she climbed, thinking about throttling the horrible Mr Porter and his suggestions about sheltered housing. ‘You'd have people to watch out for you. Help at the push of a button,' he'd told her. She'd got all the help she needed, thank you, she'd told him. She didn't want any help at all, that was the thing they couldn't understand. She could manage, just, and on the day she discovered she couldn't she intended to say her goodbyes, lie down and die quietly. She detested the housing schemes for the elderly, as he'd described them. What words had he used exactly? She recalled ‘low-built', ‘easy-care', ‘economy-maintenance' – all compromise words that smacked of convenient cheapness as if a wipe-clean surface was the only spiritually gratifying thing to aspire to at her age. She didn't want to live where teams of petty vandals on community service came round and painted a whole street's worth of sitting rooms in job-lot magnolia. She even detested the word ‘elderly', it was just a silly, stilted way of saying
old,
a jollying-along word. ‘Senior citizen' was even worse – the pompous little phrase suggested a dignity and respect that old people didn't have and certainly weren't given. What had he tried to tempt her with, she tried to remember. Big windows you can be seen through, close neighbours who could hear you call through the walls, he'd said. They'd be able to hear what she liked on the radio too, she thought, hear her splashing in the bath, filling her kettle, using the loo, talking to herself, swearing at the fools on TV. They'd make her wear a panic bleeper round her neck, like being back in infanthood with mittens on a string.

‘Good morning!'

Peggy banged her hip on the deck rail as she turned quickly to find the owner of the voice. ‘Oh it's you,' she said, with hostility, recognizing the council man she thought of as Mr Nice. Perhaps the other one was dead, she hoped viciously, choked by his council biro perhaps, or his skull pulverized to mashed strawberry, falling down all three flights of the town hall stairs. ‘What do you want?' she asked with suspicion. She wanted to rub at her sore hip, but didn't want to give him any ammunition about her frailty or show any sign of pain. They might be trying a new ploy, sending them in one at a time, the nice one first to get round her, and then the follow-up, all in together for the eviction kill.

‘Nothing,' he said, smiling. He looked relaxed enough, hands in his pockets, no tie, a grubby Aran pullover that had seen a huge number of better days. ‘Nice tug. What is it, about sixty foot, Josher?'

Peggy's suspicion increased still further. ‘Yes it is. Been doing your homework? Softening up technique, is it? It won't work, you know, I'm not going. Not going
anywhere
.'

He smiled patiently. ‘My brother had one of these. He died on it actually, doing that tricky bit on the Kennet and Avon. I think it was six or seven locks too many for his heart. Good little boat though.'

Peggy gave a grudging half-smile. ‘Sorry about your brother. Not a bad way to go though. I'll probably die on mine too, though not doing anything more active than battling with your colleague.' She screwed her face up with anger, tempted to spit over the side of the tug in disgust at the council.

‘What are you using for heating? A Squirrel?'

‘Might be, why? Can the council get me for that too?'

He laughed and she felt confused suddenly. He had, for a nine-to-five office-boff, very much an outdoor face, all deeply ingrained with old sunburn. He, at least, must have a life outside the office and the regulations. There were a lot more lines when he laughed than when he didn't, which showed he'd been used to a lot of happy times. Perhaps, she thought, he'd got an allotment where he could escape from the awfulness of office life at weekends. The other one, Mr Porter, she remembered, was a poor pasty specimen, unhealthy looking, like a struggling seedling that's had too much careful protection from direct sunlight.

‘Cup of tea?' she offered warily, wondering if this counted as consorting with the enemy. The other one wouldn't be allowed so much as the toe of his over-polished shoe across her rail.

‘I'd love one,' Ted Kramer said, climbing nimbly and eagerly aboard the tug.

In the college art department, silently fuming among the casually chattering students, Ruth sat concentrating and still, her deft fingers threading fine silver wire through the baked fimo beads and twirling the ends off neatly, ready for attaching to the hooks for pierced ears. I'm going to make a fimo voodoo dolly, she thought, with spiky blond hair and a long thin beige body and thread wire through all the most painful places. She felt exhilarated with hurt and anger. She willed the feeling to be still there the next afternoon when she was due to sit for Bernard again. Even he, who, for an artist, didn't seem to be blessed with great powers of observation, couldn't fail to notice how intensely full of passionate feeling she was. If he didn't notice, she'd just have to tell him. How dare he, she thought, take that scraggy old tart back to the boathouse and show her what he was working on. She'll tell Mum, Ruth thought suddenly, her hands faltering over the beads. She'll say something accidentally on purpose grossly stupid like ‘
Marvellous
sketches of Ruth, though of course you'll have seen them – the finished painting should be
superb
'. She's been looking at me, naked, those eyes that don't care at all looking over my charcoal body and thinking about nothing but how fat I am. She probably even laughed. She
definitely
laughed. Cow.

‘I suppose stocking up at the supermarket before you leave is out of the question?' Adrian hovered in the bedroom doorway watching Stella pack for her trip with Abigail to Chameleon. It had seemed the most tactful solution in the end, though Adrian had pointed out to Stella, rather peevishly, that he hadn't meant he wanted to evict
her
from the house as well.

She looked up from folding her new red dress and grinned at him. He'd got a nerve she thought, Adrian, who'd once had every badge the Scouts could offer and made the best Caesar salad this side of Le Caprice, should have found evolving into a New Man barely a challenge. He had his hands crammed into the pockets of his jeans and his body was hunched like a small boy feeling sorry for himself. Any second now he'd be asking if his football kit was clean . . .

‘If you're referring to
me
stocking up as opposed to
us
then you suppose right,' she told him, shoving hard to get a sweatshirt into the over-full bag. ‘You know where the supermarket is and the prices of everything in there better than I do. And not to mention that I, according to you, have already over-indulged enough in food so
I
don't need any, do I?' Her smile was full of a hard sarcastic sweetness that Adrian hadn't seen before. It didn't go with the soft shades of blue and white in the bedroom. Fabrics, the muslin curtains drifting in the breeze, the waves of frilled lace on the square pillow cases, seemed suddenly brittle and hostile. The whole house was ganging up, bit by bloody bit, on him. Not for the first time he put the blame on Abigail.