Muddy Waters (17 page)

He switched on the computer and re-read his last chapter. The book was nearly finished, it was just a question of sorting out how the favourite
Maid of Dishonour
should finally (and in a tumultuous scene of orgasmic triumph) dismiss her rivals from both the story and her lover's bed.

‘Has she gone? That woman?' Willow's patchwork hair, loose and wild, suddenly floated between Adrian and his computer screen. For a second he thought of the spilled out stuffing, the shredded horsehair of an old mattress.

‘Willow,
please.
You almost gave me heart failure,' Adrian yelled, furious with the shock of being interrupted. ‘Don't you know that crashing in here uninvited is like, well, like walking in on someone
wanking
?'

‘What? Oh, I am sorry,' Willow said, unperturbed by his outburst. She put a hand on his shoulder and smiled serenely, which he assumed was meant to transmit calming vibrations, and smiled and looked out beyond him at the river. ‘Pretty view from here. You must find it makes for wonderful creativity.'

Adrian groaned. ‘I do,' he snarled, ‘when I'm allowed to get on with it.'

‘Sorry,' she said again. ‘It's just, I saw them driving away. Was Stella taking that woman to the station? Has she gone? For good?'

‘Not for good, no. I can't honestly say Abigail does anything for good, not in any sense.' Adrian flicked quickly at the computer's mouse so that the screen showed the previous year's Christmas card list for Willow, if she was feeling inquisitive, to catch sight of rather than the sordid sexual maelstrom he'd been working on.

‘They've gone off to a health farm for a few days, a thank-you treat from Abigail for Stella, and then they're back for the open day. Why did you want to know?'

‘I was hoping you'd say she'd gone for ever,' Willow said, her face disappointed like a child with the wrong birthday present. ‘She's a witch.'

Adrian could feel his mouth twitching with a sudden desire to laugh and he had to fight the urge to say, ‘that's rich, coming from you'. ‘I hope she is coming back actually,' Adrian told her, ‘but only to collect her cat. The bloody thing brought a dead robin into the house last night and took it all the way up to the top floor to eat under Ruth's bed.'

‘Poor little creature, left all alone with strangers. It was probably trying to give Ruth a present.' Willow's many-ringed hands were flapping nervously around, patting down her wild hair. ‘Would you like me to pop in and feed her for you?'

Adrian frowned. ‘What, Ruth? Oh the cat . . . no thank you, Willow, I may be a mere helpless, useless man, but I do know where the tin opener is.'

‘No, I don't mean you're
helpless
, I just mean you probably don't have the right kind of empathy with cats. I do, it's a gift, a bond, a harmonious sympathy . . .'

‘OK, OK – you're probably right, but I've got Ruth. She's very good with animals, I'm sure the cat will be fine. And it can always make a start on the sparrows.'

He wanted her out of his room. He wanted to tell her to run off and play with someone else. Willow was probably almost as old as he was and yet she made him feel as if he was talking to a little girl. Her dress, faded lilac silk that had been made for a far bigger woman, smelled of damp old cupboards. On her feet were the usual painted boots, though he somehow expected that one day he'd look down and see her tottering around on a pair of glittering silver high heels, four sizes too big. She reminds me of Miss Havisham, he decided, wanting to evict from his light sunny room the feeling that she had brought in creeping seeds of decay.

‘I'm just off to see Bernard,' she said, startling him into thoughts of mind-reading. ‘He's asked me for an opinion on his current work. And I've got an idea for a little joint project. Body casting.' She wafted her hands down in front of her and swayed slightly, reminding him bizarrely of a belly dancer doing warm-ups. ‘Perhaps I'll look in later and check on that cat.'

‘Oh do, please,' Adrian said, hoping that would make up for his earlier hostility. Inside, he was willing her to leave him in peace and he had the eerie feeling that she could read this and was deliberately hanging around waiting to put a writers' block spell on him. As she went through the door (he was surprised she even had to open it) he exhaled carefully, as if afraid to add more chaos to the air stirred up by her mothy fluttering movements. He reached for the phone again and started dialling.

Stella lay fully clothed on her bed and stared up at what must, she guessed, be a hundred yards of finely pleated chintz forming a canopy over the bed. The last time she'd looked up at that particular ceiling, at least she
thought
it was this one – the place was almost unrecognizably renovated – there had been a huge patch of dark beige damp roughly the shape of Italy. The plain terracotta fabric was the lining to a pattern of swooping, stylized kingfishers, of climbing, twirling flowers and leaves so curled and twisted that if they looked like that in her garden she'd be looking up various pests and diseases in her gardening bible. At the windows, swagged and tailed, more kingfishers dived, held back with fringed tie-backs and defying anyone to dare to twitch at the drapes for the mere shutting out of light. She thought of her own sitting-room curtains, in plain yellow padded silk, that she'd made herself, entirely hand-stitched, and had had to move back all the furniture to wrestle with the great bulk of fabric laid out on the floor. They had greying marks now on the inside edges, where carelessly grubby hands had hauled them into place on cool winter evenings and blinding summer afternoons. Apart from when she'd spent a night in hospital with Toby when he had his tonsils out, and a weekend at an advice columnists' convention, she couldn't remember a time when she'd gone off and had a night away from Adrian. He occasionally went away for work purposes, but she didn't count that – she'd rather luxuriated in being alone at home. Being away without him, especially in this place where they'd met and spent all their time together, felt quite peculiar, as if she shouldn't really be there but had gone there to wait for something to happen.

She swung her legs down from the bed and went to investigate her bathroom. There was to be no more trekking down the cold corridor, praying for the light bulb not to give out. Thank goodness, she also thought, she didn't have to share a room with Abigail. She'd probably packed several shelves worth of cosmetics, let alone the ones she was likely to pick up during the next few days of intensive make-overs. She unpacked her own selection of moisturizers and lotions and had a good close look at herself in the mirror, trying to calculate the youngest age she could reasonably hope to pass for. ‘About ninety-five in the wrong light,' she murmured to herself. ‘But maybe mid-thirties in the right one.'

‘Fancy some tea?' Abigail's blond head appeared round the door and made her jump.

‘I can't get used to you with that colour hair,' Stella told her, ‘I keep expecting it to have gone back to dark red, as if you were just trying it on for size or something.'

‘So do I. It's only been a few days and the roots are coming through already,' Abigail complained, looking at her hair in Stella's bathroom mirror. ‘You'd think God would understand that I'm having a bad time and let me keep it looking good for a bit longer than this.'

‘I don't think God cares about things like that,' Stella told her as they left the room and headed for the stairs, ‘I don't think he cares enough about the big things let alone the unimportant ones. But never mind, at least you're in the right place to get your grey roots sorted. God's at least allowed you to afford to be where the experts are.'

Toby carried Peggy's shopping across the ferry and walked with her to her barge. ‘Those council men were sitting in their car spying on us again, did you see them?' she asked him.

‘I did. They're doing a survey, something to do with how much we need a bridge.'

‘I know. I shouldn't have let you carry the shopping for me. That younger one will have put that down on his list – one more point towards sticking me into care, just like a homeless child or a delinquent teenager.'

‘That couldn't happen, could it?' Toby really didn't believe it could, being sure that for absolutely everyone over the age of eighteen, the option of making one's own decisions about life was exactly the same.

‘Oh yes it could,' Peggy told him. ‘And do you know, I'm beginning not to care very much one way or another. I can feel something adventurous coming on. There are other places to be than here, you know.'

Toby did know. He had envied, that morning, the way Abigail and his mother had hurled a couple of bags into the Golf and just driven away. Abigail hadn't even looked back at all, and his mother, driving, could hardly have been expected to. He wanted to do that, now the weather was good, to get on with his trip and just disappear for a few months. He wanted to be where no one knew him, where no one from home would know where he was. Except perhaps Giuliana. He thought about how she'd been laughing at the pub, the night of the barbecue. She was older than him, but not that much and definitely not in the predatory, youth-leeching way that Abigail was. He remembered how he'd thought it would feel good to get sorrow-stricken Abigail to smile.

Now he knew any man could, simply by looking at her and waiting for her to want his attention. Giuliana smiled at whatever amused her, and presumably not at what didn't. Honesty seemed to be the difference, honesty, and, he reflected, skin as soft as peach suede and hair that gleamed like the morning river.

‘Now let me just have a feel of your hair, Stella.' The girl in the shiny pink overall leaned forward to take hold of a strand of hair and her perfume wafted into the back of Stella's throat and made her cough.

‘Oh, you haven't got a cold have you, Stella?' The girl stepped back with wide-eyed alarm, her long, shell-pink nails wafting at the air just under her nose. Those nails couldn't be real, Stella thought, staring closely and trying to see any joins. The girl's name badge said ‘Charlene' and her piled up hair was like blond bubble bath secured with a gold and diamanté clip.

‘No, I haven't got a cold, it's OK,' Stella reassured her.

‘Any allergies, Stella, touch of asthma, that sort of thing?' Charlene's voice sang carefully up and down in the way that Stella had noticed at her local building society, on hotel reception desks and with airline check-in-staff. It went with the kind of phone answering that included a friendly first name followed by ‘and how may I help you?' They must all go to the same place to learn it, she thought, like those horsy girls way back at university who you could tell had spent a couple of months being ‘finished' because they all walked with their hips jutting out, an imaginary copy of
War and Peace
on their heads and their feet out at ballet class angles.

‘Right, now this little checklist,' Charlene said, picking up a pink tasselled Chameleon-issue pencil.

‘Would you say now, Stella,' she began, looking with serious concern at Stella's hair, ‘would you say your hair was . . .' – she hesitated before launching into her script – ‘. . . bleached, permed or tinted; greasy, dry, sensitive; frizzy, flaky, flyaway, unmanageable; abused, damaged or distressed? Or just tired?' She paused for breath, her head poised on one side, waiting for an informed and helpful answer. Stella suppressed a desire to laugh at her profound professional seriousness. She'd quite fancied having her hair washed, an inch or so cut off, that was all, just like at any normal hairdresser. Here at Chameleon, as she should have known, nothing was that simple. You got the extra attention that you paid for. Her hair had a separate personality, as did her skin, her cellulite, her diet, stress level and muscle tone and they were all allocated a right to their own range of problems and therapies. She'd always thought her hair was more or less all right, so goodness only knew what would happen when they started work on her body.

‘Distressed?' she queried, ‘how can I tell, do I ask it? And actually, I don't want to be over-pedantic but isn't hair already dead? Or perhaps that counts as terminally tired?'

‘Sorry?'

‘No, I'm sorry. Oh never mind. I think it's just normal. Just, you know, hair.' ‘Normal' was obviously inadequate. Stella wished she could come up with something more challenging, tell her it was premenstrual, or having a bad-human day.

‘
Normal
?' Charlene scanned her list, looking worried. ‘I don't think we've got
normal
.' Her big blue eyes scanned the vast glass shelves of hair products arranged beside her, looking for something suitable for an awkward customer.

Stella felt sorry for her and tried to be more helpful, ‘Well, let's put it this way, when I buy shampoo I buy the one that says “for normal hair” in the hope that normal hair is what I'll have.'

‘Oh. Oh, right.' Charlene looked relieved, as if now that Stella had shown total ignorance of her own hair condition, she could at least do her job properly by putting her well and truly right.

‘Because,' Stella went on, squinting up at a chunk of her brown hair, ‘if I accidentally buy something that's for greasy hair, that's what I tend to get. I always think if you buy shampoo “for dandruff” you'll get that as well, you know?'

‘Not really, actually, Stella,' the girl said, looking apologetically puzzled, the bubble-bath hair quivering slightly as if the brain beneath was trembling with the effort of understanding an alien sense of humour.

Stella decided to keep quiet and make more effort to relax and enjoy, as the brochure in her room had told her to. Lying back in the hair analyst's chair in the busy hair studio, wearing only her underwear and a white towelling robe with a pink and blue chameleon embroidered on the pocket, she felt like a captive hospital in-patient being queried by an absurdly young male trainee nurse about complicated gynaecological symptoms. In this room, she remembered, she'd had a weekly Anglo Saxon tutorial, uncomfortably close to lunchtime and she'd struggled with essay topics such as ‘Is The Battle of Maldon an Anachronism?' while sniffing the aroma of long-boiled cabbage steaming up from the basement. There was no hint of the smell of unappetizing food now, nothing unsavoury lingered, left over in the atmosphere, only top-of-the-range, temptingly expensive cosmetics. She felt quite homesick – not for the family just then but for Wayne of Hair Today who knew exactly how she liked her hair to look and could be guaranteed, after an hour of undemanding chat about holiday plans, excellent coffee and just the right kind of hair mousse, to send her home feeling ten years younger, a stone lighter and ready, like Abigail after her afternoon sleep, for anything. Instead there was a constant stream of analytical experts, prodding at her nails, scrutinizing her skin, with little worried sighs to convey that for such a
little
effort (and such a
lot
of money), all was not quite lost.