The Heart of the Country (18 page)

Angus’ Quattro drew up beside her. She consented, once again, to get in. She had a blister on her left heel from the boots and from the feel of it the plaster had slipped. Otherwise she would just have shaken her head and walked on. But if she kept walking now she would be in worse pain tomorrow, and if she did not work, she was not paid. On such small choices are our futures determined, and not just ours, other people’s.

‘You can’t go on like this,’ said Angus. ‘Your face is thinner. You’ll get old before your time.’

‘I don’t have much choice,’ said Natalie, but no one likes to hear that time is overtaking them. If you drudge for a living you end up like a drudge. She remembered her mother telling her this, and for the first time for years, years, missed her mother. Tears of frank self-pity came into her eyes.

Angus – he drove casually, one-handed, and at unnerving speed – put his spare hand on her knee.

‘There, there!’ he said, and Natalie felt a rush of not quite affection or dependency, but a kind of sensuous, erotic helplessness.

‘What you need is a man to look after you,’ he said. ‘Heard from Harry?’

‘Of course I haven’t heard from Harry. Have you?’

‘Why should I hear from Harry?’ He sounded surprised.

‘Because I reckon you and Harry made a deal. Harry disappears. Tax man claims: knock the house out to Arthur. Re-sell: split the difference three ways. Reappearance of Harry, tax paid and twenty thousand to the good. And he does you a good turn next time.’

‘There’s a flaw in that somewhere,’ said Angus, laughing. ‘But you’re learning.’

‘What’s the flaw?’

‘We wouldn’t go to all that trouble for so small a sum.’

She didn’t appear convinced.

‘I
suppose I should be grateful he didn’t insure my life and then murder me. Just drop me at the gate, Angus. I’m not asking you in.’

‘I don’t want to come in.’ He took two twenty pound notes from his wallet. ‘These are for the kids.’

She stared at the notes and then put them in her pocket.

‘How’s your wife?’ she asked.

‘Much as usual,’ he said. ‘Shall I take you out to dinner tonight?’

‘All right,’ she said, giving in. I think it was the sight of the notes that did it. Up at the quarry she got paid in fivers and pound coins. The sight of large denominations can act as an aphrodisiac. ‘Pick me up at eight.’

She came into my house with the light of treachery, that is to say heterosexuality, in her eyes.

Normally she came in exhausted, white and depleted, and would sit down in a chair, arms and legs dangling like one of Bess’ rag dolls, and let me make her a cup of tea, which she’d drink while the children stared. But on this particular evening she came in quite cheerful and animated, and when she bent her head over the sink to shake the quarry dust out of her hair, it was as if she shook off depression, need, the past, everything. Perhaps it was just having forty unexpected extra pounds in her pocket, but I think it was more the reviving effect that the prospect of an erotic adventure has on women. I should have noticed and known.

Jealous and resentful? Of course I was. Who ever wanted to pounce on me in the hour of my greatest need and offer me a way out? Who ever followed me down country lanes in an Audi Quattro, or lay in wait in the alley behind the International Stores? I deserved good fortune, and got none. Natalie, who turned out to be nothing much better than a whore, deserved nothing and got everything. She left her children for me to look after, while she worked (of course I looked after them: what else could I do!). She had no community spirit: she took a job which fellow feeling with the hard-done-by should have prevented her from taking. She used my house as if it was her own. She used my heart as if it
were hers to use and abuse as she felt fit. When it came to it, I just didn’t count. If a man turned up, any obligation to a female friend simply fell by the way. It was inexcusable.

I told her so that evening. She went into the bathroom looking like a Moscow street cleaner and came out dolled up, in a tight black skirt (hers, from the Harrix days) and a frilly white blouse (mine, Oxfam, one pound eighty), and make-up (Marks & Spencer, bought at the school fair for four pence – the blue eyeshadow all gone but everything else okay). She’d washed her hair and towelled it dry so it was curling wildly. She looked terrific. We were meant to be having split peas and sausage for supper. I’d planned it. I’d been soaking the peas all day.

So when she came out of the bathroom I was startled and asked where she was going.

‘Out to dinner,’ she said, without so much as a by-your-leave.

‘You didn’t ask me if I’d babysit,’ I pointed out.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, not sounding sorry at all. ‘I didn’t think. My two are old enough to leave anyway.’

‘That’s hardly the point,’ I said. ‘I’ve made a special meal for us and now you’re letting me down.’

I shouldn’t have said it. I shouldn’t have been so neurotic. I should just have let her go, happily. I couldn’t.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. She wasn’t sorry at all. She was embarrassed.

‘I don’t want you to be sorry for me,’ I said. ‘I just want you to have a scrap of feeling for me. But you don’t. You use me, you make use of me, you’ll go out to dinner but you won’t think of taking me. I’m not good enough for you!’

And so on and so on, weeping and wailing. Absurd. The kind of thing wives shriek at husbands, or, I suppose, any spouse or partner of any sex who’s on the losing side. It’s a kind of madness. Every word you utter, claiming love, makes you the more unloveable. The children looked on, trying to puzzle it out. They hadn’t seen me like this, weeping and hysterical, ravenous for love and reassurance, since their father left. They’d almost forgotten. ‘Don’t leave me, how can you, you don’t love me, my life is wasted –’ Did I drive Natalie further into Angus’ arms? Probably.

When she was gone Ben said, ‘Shall I make you a cup of tea?’

During his stay with me he had become a much nicer child.

Seduction

You know how these things go! First the dinner. Angus took Natalie to the Skinflint’s Arms, Wedmore Way, where he thought there wouldn’t be too many friends and acquaintances about, and the ambience was cosy and the food good: that is to say, cooked rather than microwaved. Jean microwaved everything. She was too busy, she said, to do anything else. She would drive to Yeovil on Thursday afternoons (her half-day off), park the car on the double yellow lines outside Marks & Spencer, and stock up with frozen food. If Angus wanted anything different, said Jean, he should buy and cook it himself, particularly the former. She gave the parking tickets to Angus to pay. Angus ate out a lot, which seemed to suit Jean, but not normally in the company of young females. Though he doubted if she would have minded that either. He would have if he could, but he did not possess Arthur’s easy charm. Now, facing Natalie, Angus found his hands trembling as he handed her the menu. He was not as used to this kind of thing as he would have liked.

Natalie ran her eye briskly down the columns, stopping where the numbers were biggest. She had the crab cocktail, the fillet (not the rump) steak, and a
crème brûlée.
She asked for champagne cocktails to begin with, and Chateau Neuf du Pape ’79 with the meal. She ate ravenously and drank heartily.

‘I’ve been living on lentils,’ she said. He didn’t know what lentils were. How could he?

‘If I’m drunk,’ she said, ‘I can’t help what I do, can I?’

That encouraged him.

He said he had a nice little flat in Wells, going free; a luxury holiday let, overlooking the Market Square. Four bedrooms – ‘Oh, goodie, one for guests’, she trilled – fitted kitchen, bath with shower, heated towel rail – ‘Heated towel rail! Oh, fab!’ (was she laughing at him?) – view of cathedral and fully furnished to the highest standards. A new firm-but-soft Relyon bed in the master bedroom. Jean insisted Angus and she lie on an orthopaedic mattress for the sake of their backs. The only thing that ever gave him backache, he could swear, was lying upon it. ‘Double?’ Natalie presently inquired.

‘Of course it’s double,’ said Angus. ‘There are always double beds in master bedrooms.’ She
was
laughing at him.

Why? Her eyes were too bright. She kept touching him, speculatively, with her little fingers – more reddened and chapped than he remembered, but then quarry work’s tough, especially when the weather’s bad, and it had been the worst summer in living memory. Bess, Teresa, Edwina, Alice and Ben had all been cooped up together when by rights they should have been out in the garden. If the weather had been better, I reckon Angus’ luxury flat wouldn’t have been so enticing. View of Cathedral is all very well; but the noise! the traffic! Anyway, I blame the weather. I’m tired of blaming people.

‘You can have it free until November,’ said Angus, hedging his bets. ‘I’m not losing out. The tenants paid in advance then never turned up. After that, it’s winter rates.’

‘And by November you might be tired of me,’ observed Natalie. ‘Heigh-ho!’

‘I’ll never be tired of you,’ said Angus, and took her hand next time she touched him. She did not pull it away.

‘The only thing is,’ he said. ‘Will you want to leave your lady friend? Tucked up there so snug and cosy, the pair of you!’

Did she deny me? Did she say I was a fat, garrulous, semi-mad succubus, and she couldn’t wait to get out? Did she say she was driven mad by my lesbian advances? By the shrieks and the rows? No, I don’t think so. I think when he asked that – and ask he had to – she said something like, ‘I’ll be sorry to leave Sonia. She’s been very good to me. It’s just we’re so overcrowded, and what with money being short and the weather so bad – ’

At least I hope so. You have to believe well of at least some of the people some of the time, if you’re going to have the courage to live amongst them. Bill Mempton says sanity is returning. What on earth makes him think that?

It was Natalie’s idea that they go and seal their bargain – that is, her body for his flat – up on the tussocky grass at the foot of the Mendip Mast.

‘Why there? It’ll be cold.’ He’d had in his mind a rather nice little furnished cottage near Crosscombe, of which he had the key. The tenants had been gone only a couple of days, so it should still be warm and cosy.

‘There’s a moon,’ she said. ‘And anyway it just feels right.’

She didn’t suggest Glastonbury Tor, did she? Though the grass there is just as tussocky and smooth. She knew well enough she’d be struck dead for unrighteousness, for confusing sex with a business arrangement. Her instinct was right. The broadcast messages radiating out from the Mendip Mast – Songs for Swinging Lovers and the EastEnders and the stock market prices – have somehow got into the landscape round the Mast, which was well-suited to the occasion: an uneasy mixture of sentiment, worldliness and greed.

Angus was right, too. It was cold and uncomfortable at the foot of the Mast; the sense of electronic humming and buzzing all around and Natalie’s goose pimples and little cries, caused not by him but by gravel and stones against bare skin, made the occasion less than satisfactory. Nevertheless it was a start; it felt like an affair beginning – not beginnings climaxing and ending all at once. Natalie bruised easily. She talked while she made love: she practically chattered. He liked that. Jean never made a sound.

‘You do talk a lot,’ he said, when he was driving her back to Sonia’s. Natalie was extracting a piece of gravel out of her leg. She had not bothered to put her tights back on.

‘I
think what it is; you really like me. You pretend you’re doing this because you have to, but really you want to.’

She just laughed, and gave a little yelp as she finally squeezed the gravel from her leg.

‘Am I better than Arthur?’ He wanted to be.

‘Everyone’s different,’ she said, declining to gratify him. But he was: or perhaps they both were, together. Natalie had her own theories on sexual attraction. She told me about them when I went to visit her later in her love nest in Wells; she spoke with the kind of irritating authority women have when they’re in the middle of some swinging affair, and are speaking to friends less blissfully (or so they see it) situated. With Harry, she told me, sex had been frequent at first, and then dutiful: a matter of proximity and cleansing rituals. A lot of toothbrushing, and armpit washing before and after. In its way it had been exciting, because the need for hygiene had made the act seem dirtier: and the emotional distance between them the greater, inasmuch as how could the Harry of his orderly, conventional days be related to the Harry of his silent, sinful nights?

Arthur? Arthur made her feel wicked, not dirty. She’d stand in the back room of the shop in broad daylight dressed only in a slip. He’d take it off her, staying fully dressed himself. He hardly bothered to take his trousers off. She did what he said. There was a kind of languorousness about it she loved. I know the feeling. It’s what I had with Alec, only more so. Meet me here, he said. You do. Meet me there. You do. Who cares who’s watching? Do this, say that, feel this, think that, open your legs. You do. It’s insensate, hopeless love – it’s a disease. It’s caught from other people, just like measles. It passes, like the measles, but sometimes, in the meanwhile, damage is done. (Measles may be a childish disease but it can blind you, deafen you, kill you, too, in the passing.) You’re as much in control of yourself while it lasts as if you’re running a temperature of 105. You lie down, toss and turn, burn and freeze, moan and groan – pity is needed, not reproach. Pity and a cure. Natalie was infected by Arthur. Harry leaving had been her cure. Instantaneous. It shocked her back to sanity. Next time she saw Arthur she couldn’t remember what it had all been about – perhaps because actually the sexual satisfaction had been minimal; she needed the act like an addict mainlining to stop the distress, rather than get a high.

And Angus? Well, that worked, Natalie said, because he made some kind of connection between her and her body that Harry hadn’t, and Arthur hadn’t. She wasn’t afraid of him, as she had been of the other two: she half despised him and half liked him. She hoped for nothing, she thought the situation was ridiculous, she enjoyed herself because she could see she might as well. She looked forward to her new flat and knew it was hers as long as she wanted it: and it gave Angus so much pleasure to plunge around inside her she couldn’t help liking it too. It didn’t sound to me like true love but it sounded okay.