Other People's Husbands (12 page)

‘And
did
you get your dress from Primark?'

‘Oh yes, of course I did! But that's not the point, is it? You know the rules – if you think you might like some-one a huge lot and become proper friends with them, you say, “Oh that's lovely, is it Prada?” And then they do a big shrieky laugh and say, “No actually, it's Primark!” feel incredibly flattered and you then marvel at their amazing ability to pick out a fabulous bargain.' Marie bustled about, fetching tea and biscuits for them both, then whispered loudly, ‘Got to go send a quick text, back in a jiff ! Keep my seat, I'll be out on the stairs trying to concentrate on not sending it to Mike by mistake! God, can you imagine?'

The staffroom was filling up now. Sara relaxed in the depths of the sagging leather sofa, feeding Charlie his milk while various members of the teaching staff cooed over him. Charlie enjoyed the attention, allowing people to distract him, breaking off to smile at the ones he liked the look of. Stuart came in and hovered by the microwave, glaring across at Sara and the baby as if the child was a love rival.

‘Stuart! Thanks for this week's veg box!' Sara called across to him. ‘Why don't you come and meet Charlie?'

‘OK, just for a minute. Don't want to interrupt. Hello Charlie,' he said, rather grumpily. ‘I suppose if Sara's got
you
, she won't want to come to the pub with me any more.'

‘Of course I will, don't be daft!' Sara protested. ‘I'm just looking after him for Cassandra while she's at university. It's not a full-time thing, this grandmother business, just occasional.'

Stuart smelled of old cars, motor oil and mustiness, with an underlying hint of shower gel. She wondered if his wife found that mixture a comforting, home-familiar aroma. Possibly she even found it erotic. Or did she hate it and light scented candles or even have those plug-in room fresheners all over their house? Maybe she didn't notice. There were a lot of things you didn't notice about husbands and partners when you loved them and lived with them. It was a bit like overfond owners of cats, who managed to ignore the pungent whiff of unneutered tom. Over the years, friends who'd got drunk enough to be frank had occasionally expressed amazement that she could live so apparently easily with Conrad's constant travels to paint commissions, which meant he missed birthdays and anniversaries; and there were all those hours he spent in the studio when he'd seemed to lose track of day or night, missing appointments, social events, a couple of dinners at his own house that he simply didn't turn up to, through all of which Sara stayed calm and happy enough. Other people's husbands had always seemed a predictable and unappealing lot by comparison. Now she wondered if they might simply be quite restful. She'd be willing to bet they didn't pounce on you to discuss death while you were cleaning a table, or paddle in public fish tanks.

‘Got some new totty joined the class,' Stuart told her as he perched on the sofa arm, leering a bit. ‘A little blonde-of-a-desperate-age with a perfect derrière.' He cupped his hands round an imaginary something that Sara guessed to be a size 16. ‘She's big, round and curvy in exactly the right places. I can't wait to see her leaning over the Fiesta's radiator, delving with the dipstick!'

‘Stuart! You never give up, do you?'

‘Well, you turned me down. A man has to get his fun somewhere. And besides, what else has she come to the class for?'

‘Ah, the old theory – women only go to car maintenance in search of a big choice of geeky dates.'

‘And what do they get?' Stuart laughed. ‘Lots of women just the same as them and . . . me! Not all bad news then! Talking of which, must get going. I hope she comes back from the break even later than me, though. I can threaten her with the cane. Talking of which, fancy some nice fat cucumbers later this summer?'

Sara hesitated, wondering about an answer that would be straightforwardly non-suggestive. Stuart could find a double entendre even in a nursery rhyme.

‘It's just that I've got the seeds in and I reckon I've over-done it. You can have too many, with cucumbers.'

‘OK, thanks. That'd be lovely,' she told him.

‘No worries. I'll do you some nice long ridgy ones.' He winked. ‘We can work out terms of payment another time. Gotta go . . . got to show that new woman which way up to hold a spanner.'

What was keeping Marie, Sara wondered as Charlie was just, after what seemed ages, getting to the last drops in the bottle. Sending a text to her lover was taking a hell of a time. Maybe they were finalizing their tryst details. She shifted Charlie into a more upright position as a male voice in front of her said, ‘Is there room on this sofa for one more? Oh – hey, it's you! Hello again!'

Sara looked up, startled. And there he was, the man from the White Swan garden. She could feel her skin warming uncomfortably, and she wondered if he'd bolt if he sensed her night-time thoughts. How was one supposed to keep a dignified demeanour and make polite conversation with someone you'd imagined trailing his fingers over every inch of your skin?

‘Oh! Hi! What are you doing here? Have you joined the staff ?' Her voice sounded normal enough, if a bit shrill. She moved Charlie, who had slumped somewhat, into a more comfortable position, put Marie's bag on the floor and the man sat beside her. He was wearing ancient jeans with the hems fraying and another linen shirt, dark blue this time, with the sleeves rolled up. No watch, just a small friendship bracelet made from plaited embroidery threads in shades of blue. It crossed her mind (with a surge of dis-appointment) that possibly, as Conrad rather quaintly put it, he
travelled on the other bus
.

‘I'm working!' he told her, smiling. He did have lovely teeth. She stopped herself from staring at them; it was hardly seemly to gaze like that at a man's mouth. ‘I'm a journalist. Freelance. I'm writing a piece for the
Guardian
on the social aspect of Adult Education classes. It's not about the people who are here for extra academic qualifications that they need for work, but those who rely on it for friendships, networking and so on. I've just been checking out Advanced Yoga – there are people in there who must be pushing ninety who can tie themselves in knots. Terrifying!'

‘You should come and hang out in my art class,' Sara laughed. ‘Today it's eager pensioners giving hell to the naked life model. Not that he minds. It would take more than a lively eighty-year-old to upset Alan.'

‘Ah . . . you're an artist?' he said. ‘I should have guessed.' ‘Guessed? How?'

‘Just the way you dress. Something about what you wear. You have an original, stylish look. I thought that the other day. I liked your blue skirt – all layers and pointy bits. And . . . aha! Today you've got red shoes! Didn't we decide it was the sign of a madwoman?'

So he
was
gay, she thought. He'd noticed her clothes.

Feeling flattered but slightly uncomfortable at being so observed, Sara looked at today's dress as if she hadn't quite noticed it before. It was a shades-of-pink floral 1940s tea dress, a junk-shop discovery she'd had for years, worn with a pale green cashmere cardigan, slightly shrunken. She'd changed the buttons for tiny heart ones in rainbow colours. Her shoes were scarlet strappy wedges, found in a charity shop and probably circa 1973, though with a 1930s look. Underneath was a white antique cotton petticoat, with drawn-thread work and ribbon.

‘I don't know your name,' she said at last. ‘If you really are coming to see my class I possibly should be able to introduce you to the others. I'm Sara.' She hesitated about adding her surname – here at the college she used her maiden name. Admitting to being a Blythe-Hamilton tended to invite the question: ‘Are you any relation to Conrad?' She wanted to keep Conrad out of this, what-ever ‘this' was, so – ‘Sara McKinley,' she said.

‘Ben Stretton,' he said, taking her hand with pretend solemnity. ‘And I'm delighted to meet you.'

Sara laughed, feeling slightly light-headed. Charlie pointed across the room and bounced excitedly on her lap as he spotted Marie returning. Sara caught Marie's eye and saw a whole lot of questioning going on behind her gaze. ‘She thinks we're up to no good,' Ben whispered as Marie came towards them.

‘Marie thinks everyone's up to no good!' Sara told him. ‘Sadly, she's nearly always disappointed.'

‘Only
nearly
always? Well then, there's hope,' he said. Men, Sara thought. So confusing.

He leaned towards her and murmured very quietly, ‘And you know what they say about red shoes, don't you?'

‘Yes I do,' she said, inhaling a heady mix of laundry scents and some kind of sharp, delicious citrus. ‘That old saying: red shoes, no knickers.'

She would leave him to guess whether it applied to her.

Sara looked back at the house from the pathway through to the river. It was a strange building, all slabs of dark glass and long, weathered cedar struts. They'd only managed to get planning permission for it because it was sufficiently hidden among trees and behind high fencing not to flaunt its shocking modernity among the tasteful, discreet Georgian/Edwardian mix of the rest of the area. Someone had once commented that it looked like a low-profile outpost of MI5. Another had sniffily decreed that it resembled an airport terminal. When she and Conrad had had it built the architect had been thrilled that at last he had clients who didn't want to temper his wildest design, didn't start off by saying, ‘Yes, as ultra-flamboyant as you like,' but then keep coming back and sneakily lopping off the madder bits, deciding that really what they wanted was something that looked more like a house than a piece of jagged, glassy sculpture. He still claimed it among the proudest achievements in his portfolio, and occasionally students of architecture would get in touch and nervously, apologetically, ask if they could come and have a look. Conrad didn't mind – his opinion was that with architecture, wherever a building worthy of a second glance was situated, then that was the gallery. You shouldn't expect to hide away art.

Halfway down the sloping garden and up in an elderly oak was a tree house in a similar overall shape as the house that the architect had had built for Cassandra and Pandora. The weather had taken its toll and pieces fell off now and then in storms, but one day, Sara thought, perhaps it could be repaired for Charlie to play in. The girls had already been a bit old for it by the time they moved to this house, but it had proved useful as a place for them to go to sulk after family rows, to kiss their first boyfriends in and to climb into to cry in peace when teenage life went as wrong as it inevitably did.

By contrast, Conrad's studio, close to the boundary wall, was less contemporary and had a pitched roof, with an inset north-facing window, and was modelled on nineteenth-century artists' studios that pitched up in various hidden corners of West London. Conrad had always wanted one and took as his model those that were hidden away beside Chelsea football stadium, bent on having something as similar as possible in spite of it being so unmatched to the rest of the property. His studio was big enough to include a spiral staircase leading to a platform sleeping area above a shower room and small kitchen.

Sara wondered, these days, how he could bear to sleep in there so frequently. It had an overall grubbiness to it: it was strictly off limits to Xavier, the sweet young half-French cleaner. Conrad said he didn't want things moved about. Meticulous Xavier, who tutted about the merest fleck of thread as he hoovered, and told Sara off for the way she loaded glasses into her own dishwasher, would have paled and fainted at the ephemeral clutter; the smell of turps was completely overwhelming, ingrained into the walls and floors. Sara liked the smell, but was sleeping with it any good for Conrad's lungs? Maybe over the many working years he'd become immune to it, or even needed it, like a smoker being oblivious to the reek of stale fumes on clothes and hair.

Sara's own art medium of choice was gouache, but a strong scent of turps still reminded her of when she'd first met Conrad as a student, when after their first proper date at a blues club in Soho he'd taken her back to his flat in Kensington and seduced her on a plum velvet sofa in a room full of half-finished, still-wet canvases. There had been a pink and purple fringed silk shawl beneath her body, almost certainly one that her predecessor had left behind in the hope that Conrad would think of her fondly and invite her for a follow-up sofa session; she could still remember how the rows of tiny mirrors stitched on to it had dug into her flesh. They'd left little half-moon scratches and circular weals on her skin and she'd hated to see them fade, superstitiously thinking that if they vanished completely, all would be over with Conrad.

Everyone had warned her he was a rampant womanizer, forever taking up with his students for a month or two and then cheerfully moving on, an eternally good-natured non-settler. He'd told her she was different, right from the start, right from the moment when she'd walked into him in a blind rage at Hyde Park Corner and he'd taken her to the Athenaeum hotel for tea and champagne, sympathizing over the theft of her bag. She wasn't so naive that she'd believed him entirely; he'd probably told all his girls they were different. But he had never given her cause to suspect that having found her, he was still looking for something else.

There'd been plenty of ‘something else' on offer over the years. Sara could always spot them at parties: the gleaming, eager women who had just happened to read about him in the culture magazines or the weekend colour supplements, or had recently admired one of his paintings at a friend's house. They were always shiny and excited and would drift their perfectly manicured fingers across his arm and laugh a little too much at any inconsequential piece of nonsense he uttered. Often he'd push that to the limit, coming out with something totally nonsensical, or contradict himself from one sentence to the next, just to see how far he could push their fawning gullibility. He would smile and do the polite thing, and if they stayed too long beside him he'd pull Sara closer and say, ‘And this is Sara. She's the love of my life.'