The Man Who Understood Women (24 page)

At 1 a.m. there was a knock at the shutters. More of a tap really.

‘Who is it?’

I opened, knowing.

He wore a white tuxedo, black satin revers, onyx studs and links. He had to incline his head to step inside. I noticed the gold signet ring on his finger, matching the gold tooth.

‘I came to see if you enjoyed your dinner, Mrs Burrows.’

‘The cutlet was very good.’

I had turned down the lamps and hoped I didn’t look too bad.

‘Is there anything else I can get you?’

I looked at him, tall, thin, handsome. I looked at him directly and noticed that the lashes curled upwards over the gazelle-like eyes.

‘Yes, Carstairs,’ I said softly, ‘as a matter of fact there is
something
else.’

I led the way unsteadily into the bedroom, where Agatha had prepared only one of the twin beds. He hesitated for only a second, wondering about his job, no doubt, although he had had plenty of time to think about it. For one dreadful moment I thought he was not going to follow me, then I heard the soft fall of his feet.

Carstairs, Carstairs. In the limpid mirror of your eyes I was young, beautiful, desirable, needed, loved, possessed. The vaulted ceiling with its fan turning like a huge propeller over our sweating bodies was lovelier than the velvet night, stars thrown in for good measure.

He did not speak, did not lose his dignity, but was aware of my needs as he was instantly aware of the needs of every diner in his restaurant. Carstairs the virtuoso, I his violin.

Milward was away three days. For three nights I had Carstairs. For three nights I slept. No pills, no potions, no alcohol. Slept like a log, a baby. Slept like I was comatose. Slept till Agatha woke me gently opening the blinds.

When Milward came back bright and breezy with dark rings beneath his eyes, he took one look at me and commented that the rest had done me good. Yes, Milward, I said, I like it here. Jamaica has done me good.

That night we ate in the restaurant. Milward gave Carstairs fifty dollars to look after us. He slipped it into his pocket. I did not raise my eyes above the wine-red tuxedo that skimmed the mobile hips.

It’s five years now since Milward died. At Christmas time his wealthy widow can be found at her hillside cottage in Jamaica where, in the afternoons, she disappears, alone, and in a taxi, often for several hours. Although the other guests assume that she is visiting the Craft Market, they find it curious that she returns empty-handed, with neither the ubiquitous straw hat nor souvenirs of hand-dyed batik.

In between times she is to be found in her Park Avenue apartment where sometimes, in the small hours, she puts on a CD and with a far away look in her eyes moves rhythmically to the beat of a Calypso: ‘Annie Palmer’ (she was a wicked witch), ‘Tak’ Him to Jamaica’ (where the rum come from), ‘Yellow Bird’ and ‘Island in the Sun’. Like many women of her size she is surprisingly light on her feet.

She knows that some day she will become old – old old – and that Carstairs will move on. Until then, as soon as the first flakes of snow fall on Park Avenue, she picks up the telephone and books her flight to Jamaica. It’s a long way to go for a good night’s sleep.

Moving

1999

‘They’ve arrived,’ Belle said from the window where she was watching, ‘in a Cadillac.’

‘What do you expect?’ Mrs Menzies selected a strand of apricot wool.

‘Mother!’ Belle warned. ‘You promised.’

Mrs Menzies threaded her tapestry needle with the aid of the ‘D’ section of her bifocals. ‘I promised not to say anything in front of them.’

‘Don’t you think, then, that you should get yourself in the mood?’

‘I shall never be in the mood.’

Belle sighed.

‘Don’t worry. I shan’t let you down. What do they look like?’

‘Smart. Very smart. I’m surprised she’s able to hold her head up. So many gold chains. He must jog. At least five miles a day. Youngish.’

‘
La jeunesse dorée
,’ Mrs Menzies said. ‘They are the ones with the money.’

‘They are indeed,’ Belle said. ‘Are you going to let them in?’

‘Where’s Grace?’

‘Tidying the spare bedroom. He’s looking at the roof very professionally.’

‘There’s nothing the matter with the roof. Your father had it completely retiled before …’

‘Look, it’s no use being touchy.’

‘I am not being touchy. All I said was there’s nothing the matter with the roof. Of course, if you’d rather I kept out of the way. You and Grace …’

‘Mother, don’t take it out on us. He’s finished with the roof. They’re coming up the drive.’

Mrs Menzies put down her canvas. It was the last of the dozen seat covers she had embroidered along the years for the William and Mary chairs. She would not be needing them. Doubted if anyone would need them now that dining rooms had fallen into desuetude.

She stood by the front door to compose herself.

‘Reeded glass would improve it no end,’ she heard a firm female voice say. ‘I would imagine the hallway’s dark as night.’

The bell rang.

Mrs Menzies, her face threatening, opened the heavy oak door. At the last moment she caught Belle’s eye, remembered her promise, and fixed a ghastly smile around her mouth.

‘From Town and Country Properties,’ the man in the
cashmere
sports coat said, waving the duplicated details with the coloured reproduction of the house.

‘You are expected. Please come in.’

They stood on the nineteenth-century rug, unique in
composition
and palette, with its filigree Herati border, which Mrs Menzies had brought personally from Iran in the days when it was still Persia.

‘I told you it would be dark!’ the woman said triumphantly.

Her husband shot her a glance. ‘My apologies for invading your privacy on a Sunday but it’s the only day …’

‘It has to be sold,’ Mrs Menzies said, as if by rote.

‘… and at lunchtime.’

‘Just a snack,’ Mrs Menzies said. ‘Of course at one time when my husband …’

‘We’re Howard and Lois Cobb. Mrs Menzies?’

‘It’s pronounced …’ Mrs Menzies felt a presence behind her. ‘Oh, this is my daughter, Belle.’

‘What a pretty name!’

‘Short for Anabelle after …’

‘Aren’t you going to show the house?’ Belle said.

‘I am, aren’t I, showing it? This is the hall,’ Mrs Menzies said superfluously, waving a vague hand, and wondering why women of Lois Cobb’s configuration insisted on wearing trousers.

She was running a red-tipped hand over the oak balustrade. ‘I guess it could be stripped and painted.’

Mrs Menzies’s mouth dropped open.

‘If there’s one thing I can’t stand it’s a dark hallway.’ Lois Cobb crossed it and stumbled. Her husband caught her. She looked round. ‘Take care, Howie, That old mat …’

‘There is parquet flooring throughout the ground floor,’ Mrs Menzies said. ‘It takes a bit of polishing but it pays. You don’t see floors like that today.’

‘We would have wall-to-wall,’ Lois Cobb said. ‘Shag-pile.’

‘You mean you’d cover …?’

‘Why don’t you start in the drawing room,’ Belle suggested. ‘Then they can see the garden while the sun’s out. The weather forecast said rain, but it’s held off so far. You never can tell with the weather forecast … Are you interested in gardens, Mr Cobb? My mother grows the best roses for miles around – of course, we have the soil for it – but then you must be if you’re considering a house out here.’

Howard Cobb followed his wife into the drawing room which was bathed in yellow light.

‘As long as there’s room for a pool and a handsome terrace. We have a gas barbecue. Two dozen steaks at one time.’ He looked through the leaded lights at the lawn, surrounded by roses and hollyhocks, lovingly tended. ‘Might even manage a tennis court as well. What do you think, Lois?’

She was looking at the fireplace, which to Belle meant
hot-buttered
toast and chestnuts.

‘This would have to go for a start. I wonder about the chimneybreast?’

‘No problem. Picture windows, floor to ceiling. Patio doors; let some light into the place.’

‘We used to have dances for the girls,’ Mrs Menzies said. ‘More than fifty young people …’

‘We could extend another twelve, thirteen feet …’

Mrs Menzies wondered if they were considering moving in with a regiment.

‘It certainly has potential.’

‘Would you like to see the garden?’ Belle asked, opening the French windows.

Outside there was a garden room, brick on three sides, in which they kept the faded wooden deckchairs, the canvas
rotting
. Even on showery days in summer you could sit just inside it, waiting for the clouds to pass.

‘It’s very useful,’ Belle said, remembering all the homework she had done there as a child. ‘When it rains, suddenly, you know, as it does.’

Mrs Cobb clapped her hands with delight. ‘It’s quite
charming
, Howie. A perfect changing room.’ She turned to Belle. ‘Of course, there’d have to be a bathroom.’

‘Bathroom?’ Belle said.

‘Serving the pool area.’

Mrs Menzies was looking at the lime tree, majestic and
glorious
, hundreds of years old, in full leaf. She could see it from her bedroom when she lay in bed and had often fantasised her own death – peaceful of course – with the tree in full view.

Mr Cobb followed her gaze.

‘Take some getting out.’ He scratched his head. ‘Roots might even go under the house.’

‘Getting out?’ Mrs Menzies said faintly.

‘To make room for the pool.’

‘I expect you’d like to see the kitchen,’ Belle said, leading the way round the side of the house.

It was almost a year since her father had died, leaving her mother alone in the big house. They had decided it would be for the best. At least she and Timothy and Grace had. Embroiled in their lives, none of them could visit more than infrequently. They had worked on their mother both singly and conjointly. It wasn’t that they didn’t understand about the house; it was the total impracticality of its upkeep. They appreciated that it had been their mother’s first proper home as a young bride, that she had kept it all through the war, turning it into a convalescent home for servicemen. They knew that she loved every stick and stone of the place, as they did themselves, and were aware how she felt about
leaving
it, and that the rambling dwelling with its gabled roof was more than a sum of its parts. It was roses plucked still wet with dew, purple beads of blood drawn by the thorns; huge Christmases when the grandparents were alive; Grace falling from the garden swing the three of them took it in turns to paint; Timothy on the doorstep with his first
girlfriend
; Mr Harper who had grown old tending the garden each Wednesday.

There was no other way. Apart from the work entailed there was the expense. The garden couldn’t be managed without Mr Harper and the heating still ran on anthracite. The outside of the house had to be painted every few years and … there was no end. Between them the decision had to be made.

Just within the side door – which Belle could not bring
herself
to say had always been known as the ‘welly’ room, because of the boots and raincoats and plimsolls and hockey sticks and
ice skates and cricket bats it had housed over the years – they huddled together, an awkward foursome.

‘I’ll lead the way,’ Belle said. ‘This is the kitchen.’ Mr and Mrs Cobb stared at the scrubbed wooden table and the glazed cupboards through which you could see the china with its familiar willow pattern, at the Welsh dresser, the Aga cooker, and the worn lino on the floor.

My father was ill for so long, Belle wanted to say in its defence, there simply wasn’t the money.

She intercepted their glance. It said: how on earth can
people
live like this?

‘It’s a very roomy kitchen,’ Belle said weakly. The Cobbs looked up as if to assess its spaciousness and saw the paint flaking from the ceiling, above which a bath had overflowed. There was no more to be said.

They passed on into the hall again. It was the moment Belle had been dreading. ‘Upstairs next, Mother?’ she said. ‘I should think Grace has had time to tidy up.’

‘What about the dining room?’ Mrs Cobb said. You do have a dining room?’

‘Yes,’ Belle said. She looked at her mother who was
removing
some imaginary fluff from her cardigan and refused to meet her eye.

Her father had first been taken ill ten years ago. A day Belle would not forget. It was Sunday and he had been mowing the lawn, his relaxation after a week in the city. Her mother had been preparing lunch for the visiting family. A Sunday like any other. Timothy had seen to the drinks and Belle was taking
hers out to the garden when the mower stopped. She
remembered
thinking, how odd, in the midst of a row, like knitting, but had thought it was only to empty the grass box. Her father had just stood there, transfixed. A cerebral embolus, out of the blue, had paralysed one side of his body. It happened so quickly. One moment of disbelief, then she must have shouted because her mother and Grace and Timothy came running out of the house and all at once there were doctors and ambulances and confusion disturbing the peace of the Sunday morning. The beef was charred to a cinder and they had to throw it away.

Her father had recovered, partially and painfully, from that first stroke. A man wont to boast that he had never had a day’s illness in his life, reduced to a pitiful slowness of speech, a shuffling of step, a need to move his left arm, obstinately
useless
, with his right. The second episode, affecting the other side of his brain, had come three years later, like a thief in the night. It has robbed him of all movement, all speech, and had left him a human vegetable, with eyes.

The dining room had seemed the best place. Her mother and the nurses who came and went could more easily keep an eye on the invalid and it was less tiring. Belle could scarcely remember when it had not been a sickroom with the high bed and the paraphernalia attendant upon one unable to do a
single
thing for himself.

Afterwards the bed had remained. They had no desire to use the room. Not one of them could have eaten a bite in a place so full of memories.

Last week the Church Army had come to take the bed away. It
was at the suggestion of Town and Country Properties. The table was now back in position with its William and Mary chairs.

‘In here,’ Belle said, opening the door.

The Cobbs, both Howard and Lois, were silent. Either they could not believe their eyes – the room was, Belle supposed, rather shabby – or they felt, as she did, the presence of the wasted body by the wall, the comings and goings of the
white-capped
nurses, the watching hours. No, that was absurd.

Mrs Cobb was tugging at the twin doors of the serving hatch that led to the kitchen.

‘Don’t you ever use this?’ she asked. ‘I always think a hatch is so practical.’

‘Not very often,’ Belle said.

Mr Cobb tugged. ‘Warped,’ he said. ‘The whole thing would have to come out anyway.’

‘You need some imagination,” Mrs Cobb said, half-closing her eyes. ‘A black-glass-topped table and some decent chairs.’

Mrs Menzies, who had been standing in the doorway
pulling
at her handkerchief, looked at the much-loved furniture and wondered who could possibly love a table with a black glass top. ‘Decent chairs?’ she said weakly.

‘Leather and chrome. Get rid of that old cornice and the overmantel, lower the ceiling … a sort of grotto with
concealed
lighting …’

‘Grotto!’ Mrs Menzies could not believe that she had heard aright.

‘Room doesn’t look as if it’s ever used,’ Mr Cobb said, ‘it has a sort of odd …’

‘Mother eats in the kitchen,’ Belle said quickly. ‘It’s cosier.’ She felt rather than saw her mother glance at the wall against which the bed had stood for so many years.

‘We’ll go upstairs now,’ Belle said firmly, holding open the door.

Upstairs the Cobbs decided to turn the old nursery into a guest bathroom, Timothy’s bedroom into a sauna … unless, of course, they had it by the pool.

They discussed under-floor heating.

‘It’s a very warm house,’ Mrs Menzies said. ‘Most of the rooms face south and get every bit of sun.’