Sunstroke and Other Stories (13 page)

In the museum café they talk unstoppably, as they always have done since they first got to know one another at college. They used to talk about men, with intensity and absorption: the rage against men was almost as stimulating as the sexual excitement men generated. Now all that’s eased off. Sometimes Louie grumbles about Duncan, her husband, but the fervour’s gone out of it. Once you’ve been together with someone for twenty years there’s no excuse for hanging on with them if you think they’re so awful: and of course she doesn’t really think Duncan’s awful, she supposes that
she even loves him dearly, these days, underneath it all. Phil, on the other hand, has only been with Merrick for five years, and she’s still tender about him and defensive, so that she won’t reciprocate when Louie makes sniping remarks about his sex. Talking about men was more fun when Louie was really, really, planning on leaving Duncan, or at least having an affair with someone else; and when Phil was in the throes of a tormenting love for a no-good community activist who made her do things in bed that frightened her.

Now they talk about all kinds of other interesting subjects. Work, of course: Phil is a designer for a publisher, Louie works from home as a translator. And then about writing, painting, politics, parents. Phil’s mother is very frail and may have to go into a home. Louie took her girls on the march against the war in Afghanistan. Both friends have, separately, seen the Auerbach exhibition: both were moved and disturbed by the monastic absolutism of his pursuit of truth. Louie confides in Phil (at tedious length, she fears) about the terrible struggle she is engaged in with her older daughter Ella, over Ella’s attitude, over whether she’s allowed out on her own in town, over what time she’s supposed to come in if she is allowed out, and so on. Louie has noticed that when she begins to complain about Ella, Phil’s expression tightens slightly: as if she is not completely, absolutely, on Louie’s side.

When they have finished looking round the galleries Phil and Louie both go back to Phil’s flat; they are hosting a meeting of their creative writing group there that evening, and Louie is staying over. Duncan is going to look after the girls (for once). Merrick is away (he is a rep for a wine company and often has to travel abroad).

Phil has been in this same small flat for years (from long before she knew Merrick): in the same period Duncan and Louie have moved three times, once with each promotion Duncan has had at the newspaper. Phil has a gift for making
a place inviting: the shelves are piled with collections of books and objects, there are cushiony corners for reading. Everything promises retreat and solitude and concentration. Louie has never, in truth, liked any of her own houses as much as she likes it in here.

—I’ve brought you a present, says Louie.—I got this in the museum shop when you weren’t looking.

Phil feels inside the paper bag: then she turns a strange face on her friend.

—Oh, Louie, she wails. —You’ve given me an egg.

Louie realises what she has done: she blushes darkly. The egg is an (expensive) replica of the kind that Victorian dairywomen put under hens to encourage them to lay: made in off-white porcelain with a grey crazing all over its surface. She had only wanted it because it was heavy and cold and smooth and she was bothered and footsore in the crowded shop.

—Don’t you like it?

—Another egg! Phil laughs. —You really don’t know you’re doing it, do you? Merrick won’t believe that you don’t know; but I’m sure.

—I’ve never given you an egg before, have I?

Phil goes off into the front room and brings back a plate on which there is a whole collection of eggs: blown and painted ones, wooden ones, stone ones, one in burnished metal. The collection must have been out on display among all the other interesting things, on all the many evenings Louie has spent here.

—I gave you all those? When? Surely not. Some of them I’ve never seen before.

—All of them. Over the past – oh, five or six years?

—God: have you thought that I meant something by it? Some awful kind of hint?

—You tell me.

—No, honestly, Phil, if I really try to think, it’s probably
just that there’s something contained and satisfying and . . . you know . . . elliptical . . . about the shape, which makes me think of you. Of how you are. That’s all I can imagine.

—Only I’d rather, says Phil, —that we agreed that at this point my egg collection’s complete. It’s finished. There aren’t ever going to be any chickens.

They only began writing about a year ago: but it has taken hold of them both with a ferocity and a destructive importance. Neither is satisfied with anything they’ve done, yet. There are five of them in the writing group: under its surface appearance of supportive and sane encouragement a kind of anarchy of need and self-doubt and competition runs loose. Phil and Louie agree privately that none of the other three are very good. Even more privately, they doubt one another. That evening Phil reads out a story about a love affair between an older woman and a boy: the paper shakes in her hands. Louie feels embarrassed for her: the story is unconvincing and mawkish. Because of the egg disaster, however, she feels absolutely unable to say anything critical about it; in fact she praises it exaggeratedly, singling out the one or two moments which could be read as if they were ironic.

—About these eggs, says Louie when the others have gone. —I feel so awful. But do you know what occurred to me? You’re always giving me jugs.

—Jugs?

—Really. The Habitat one for my last birthday, that old blue and white spotted one, a big one with a leaf pattern you brought back from Portugal . . . Perhaps you mean something about me pouring myself out. Perhaps you mean that I’m wasting myself; giving myself away.

Phil sits with her feet tucked under her in a corner of the deep blue sofa. She doesn’t seem very interested in the jugs. She tells Louie that what she wrote in the story, the older woman and the boy, really happened to her.

—You’re joking, says Louie, slopping scalding tea. —You had a whole love affair, and never told me a word about it? When, for God’s sake? Is this before Merrick?

Phil says that she finished it six months ago, that Merrick doesn’t know. She says she finished it because it was really so unforgivable, he was the son of a friend of hers from work, someone Louie didn’t know. He was eighteen.

—Not much older than Ella, says Louie.

—No.

—I don’t know how you could.

—No.

But Phil sits with her face shining in some way – contained, oblique – which closes Louie out. She tells Louie that the boy was so special, so gifted, so lovely to look at. She tells her how they spent nights together at the seaside in Suffolk because his parents had a holiday place there, and how the room they slept in was full of his boyhood photographs and birdwatching lists and Airfix models. He was so completely serious about her. He was so concentrated. He had had no idea that things could be like that. (Louie supposes that ‘things’ means sex.) He had got a place to read English at Cambridge. (That was how it had all started: Phil’s friend had asked her to give her son extra tuition for his English A level.)

—He met someone we both knew at a party the other day, Phil says.—He asked after me, and before they could say that I was fine, he filled up with tears. It was all right. The person just thought he had a crush.

—It’s terrible, says Louie.

—I had to finish it because I didn’t want to be with him and be fifty. Or anywhere near fifty.

Louie sits up late, alone, on the sofa that is now pulled out and made into a bed for her. She’s beginning to remember all the writing Phil brought to the workshop while she
must have been carrying on this ridiculous affair. How could she have failed to guess? How could she have thought those poems were about Merrick? The writing wasn’t particularly good. Love makes you stupid, she thinks, that kind of love.

You couldn’t be sorry that it wasn’t going to happen to you, ever again.

She feels as if a door is closing painfully on her, squeezing her shut: she holds the cool porcelain laying-egg against her hot cheeks and her wrists. Was she burning with envy: would she, in truth, give anything to have what Phil had had, just one last time? She reviews the things she wouldn’t give, not in her right mind: children, kindness, peace, writing. But then that kind of love has nothing to do with your right mind.

No, not ‘never again’.

Surely not.

Not ‘never’, not yet, not quite.

IT WAS 1974:
not a good year, clothes-wise, if you were an eighteen-year-old girl, tall and overweight, with thick curling hair and glasses. Gina liked best to wear a duffel coat, underneath which she imagined that she hid herself. But this was summer, she was on holiday, and she had had reluctantly to leave the duffel coat at home. She mostly wore a Laura Ashley dress in blue sprigged cotton. It was meant to look as if it had been faded by haymaking in meadows of wild flowers; but its buttons gaped across her bust, it was tight around her hips, and she knew its effect on her was not rustic but hulking and penitentiary. Sometimes while she walked along bitter tears stung her eyes, at the idea of the sheer affront of her ugliness. At other times she was more hopeful.

Today at least the sun was not shining. When it shone – and it had shone every day since she arrived – it made things worse; it seemed such an insult to nature and beauty not to want to peel off one’s clothes and run around on the beach, not to be happy. But today the sky was a soft grey which kept dissolving into warm rain, and everybody was more or less muffled under waterproofs. Because it was raining, Mamie had driven inland with her from the house on the coast, to visit Wing Lodge. Mamie was her mother’s friend, and Gina was staying with her and her family for a fortnight; although to call her a friend did not quite explain the whole thing, as Mamie was also a client, for whom her mother made clothes.

Mamie told it as a great joke that she was an Honourable because her father had had some sort of title; Princess Margaret had once come to tea with her family. She was small and very pretty, with sloping shoulders and ash-blonde hair and a face that was always screwing up with laughter; her tan was the kind you can only get in the South of France (they had a house there too). Her clothes seemed effortless – today, for example, a Liberty print blouse under a cream linen pinafore – but Gina had seen some of these things in the making and knew how much effort actually went into them, the serious scrutiny of pinned-up hemlines in front of the mirror, the bringing things back ruefully, apologetically, after a week or two, with a nagging suspicion that a sleeve was set in too high, or an inspiration that the seams would look wonderful with two rows of over-stitching. She was being very kind – very encouraging – to Gina. She had not made any mention of the Laura Ashley dress, nor the hairslide that had seemed an appealing idea when Gina brushed her hair that morning but was now bobbing against her cheek, having slipped to a wrong and ridiculous place.

On their way to Wing Lodge they stopped off at a cottage café by the side of the country road; they were the only customers in a small room crowded with little toppling chairs and glass-topped wicker tables, smelling of damp and cake.

—It’ll probably be instant coffee, whispered Mamie with conspiratorial amusement. (Gina only ever had instant at home.) —But I don’t care: do you? Or we could risk the tea. And you’ve got to have a Danish pastry or something, to keep you going.

Mamie was probably making reference to the fact that Gina oughtn’t to be eating pastries of any kind. Her diet, which alternated during this period of her life between punishing obedience and frantic transgression, had been
thrown into such chaos since she’d been staying at Mamie’s – on the one hand, she was too shy to refuse the things that were pressed upon her, on the other, she didn’t dare to raid the fridge or the cupboards in between meals – that she didn’t even know whether she was being good or not. She agreed to the pastry.

Gina had just had her A-level results – three As and two grade one S levels – and she was preparing for her Cambridge Entrance Examinations in November. Mamie professed an exaggerated awe of her cleverness.

—You really make me so ashamed, she said, when she had finished charming the elderly waitress and giving very exact instructions as to how she liked her tea (‘pathetically weak, no milk, just pour it the very instant the water’s on the leaves, I’m so sorry to be such a frightful nuisance’). —We’re such duffers in my family. We’ve hardly got an O level between us: and that’s after spending an absolute fortune on the children’s education. Josh refused to go back to Bedales to do retakes. Becky left the day she was sixteen, she never even sat any exams. How I’d love for one of them to have your brains.

—I’m not that special, Gina lied, muffled through damp pastry flakes.

Somewhere in the deepest recesses of herself, Gina pitied Mamie and her children precisely along the lines Mamie suggested. The children – three older boys and a girl Gina’s age – certainly weren’t clever in the way she was. She’d never seen them reading a book, they hadn’t known the other day at breakfast who Walter Gropius was, she was sure they were sublimely ignorant about all the things that seemed to her to matter most: literature and painting and the history of ideas. But Becky and Josh and Tom and Gabriel had every advantage on the surface in the here and now, in envy of which Gina was horribly ready to abase herself. Mamie was surely disingenuous in praising up her
brains. She was just being kind, she wouldn’t have exchanged brains, really, for the easy personable charm that all her children had, not if brains meant awkward bodies and thick glasses.

Mamie’s children might not be clever, but they didn’t actually say stupid things, as Gina did, tongue-tied with bookish awkwardness. On the contrary, they were funny and chatty and informed about practical matters. They were indifferent to politics, but sincerely charming and generous with the lady who came to clean and cook and iron for them every day, whereas Gina didn’t know how to talk to her. They were masters of arts that Gina knew she could never be competent in, however hard she tried: tennis, for example, and motorbiking, and snorkling. She couldn’t even ride a pushbike. They had tried to persuade her to put on a wetsuit to swim in; her resistance must have seemed fanatical. All the boys could sail, and had the use of their father’s boat; Gabriel and Josh were preparing to take it to the Bahamas in September.