A Spot of Bother

  She gazed onto the oval lawn. Three shrubs in big stone pots on one side. Three on the other. A folding wooden lounger.

  She enjoyed making love, but she enjoyed this too. The way she could think here, without the rest of her life rushing in and crowding her.

  Jean rarely spoke about her parents. People simply didn’t understand. They were teenagers before it dawned on them that Auntie Mary from next door was their father’s girlfriend. Everyone pictured some kind of steamy soap opera. But there was no intrigue, no blazing rows. Her father worked in the same bank for forty years and made wooden birdhouses in the cellar. And whatever her mother felt about their bizarre domestic arrangement she never spoke about it, even after Jean’s father died.

  Her guess was that she never spoke about it when he was alive either. It happened. Appearances were kept up. End of story.

  Jean felt ashamed. As any sane person would. If you kept quiet about it you felt like a liar. If you told the story you felt like something from a circus.

  No wonder the children all headed off so fast in such different directions. Eileen to her religion. Douglas to his articulated lorries. And Jean to George.

  They met at Betty’s wedding.

  There was something formal about him, almost military. Handsome in a way that young men no longer were these days.

  Everyone was being rather silly (Betty’s brother, the one who died in that horrible factory accident, had made a hat out of a napkin and was singing “I’ve got a lovely bunch of coconuts” to much general hilarity). Jean could see that George was finding it all rather tiresome. She wanted to tell him that she was finding it all rather tiresome, too, but he didn’t look like someone you could talk to, like that, out of the blue.

  Ten minutes later he was at her side, offering to get her another drink, and she made a fool of herself by asking for a lemonade, to show that she was sober and sensible, then asking for wine because she didn’t want to seem childish, then changing her mind a second time because he really was very attractive and she was getting a bit flustered.

  He invited her out for dinner the following week and she didn’t want to go. She knew what would happen. He was honest and utterly dependable and she was going to fall in love with him, and when he found out about her family he was going to disappear in a cloud of smoke. Like Roger Hamilton. Like Pat Lloyd.

  Then he told her about his father drinking himself into a stupor and sleeping facedown on the lawn. And his mother crying in the bathroom. And his uncle going mad and ending up in some dreadful hospital. At which point she just took hold of his face and kissed him, which was something she’d never done to a man before.

  And it wasn’t that he’d changed over the years. He was still honest. He was still dependable. But the world had changed. And so had she.

  If anything it was those French cassettes (were they a present from Katie? she really couldn’t remember). They were going to the Dordogne, and she had time on her hands.

  A few months later she was standing in a shop in Bergerac buying bread and cheese and these little spinach tarts and the woman was apologizing for the weather and Jean found herself striking up an actual conversation while George sat on a bench across the street counting his mosquito bites. And nothing happened there and then, but when she got home it seemed a bit cold, a bit small, a bit English.

  Through the wall she heard the faint sound of the shower door popping open.

  That it should be David, of all people, amazed her still. She’d cooked him spaghetti Bolognese on one occasion. She’d made small talk about the new conservatory and come away feeling dull but thankfully invisible. He wore linen jackets and roll-neck sweaters in peach and sky blue and smoked little cigars. He’d lived in Stockholm for three years and when he and Mina separated amicably it only increased the sense that he was a little too modern for Peterborough.

  He retired early, George lost touch with him and he didn’t cross her mind until she looked up from her till in Ottakar’s one day and saw him holding a copy of The Naked Chef and a tin of Maisie Mouse pencils.

  They had a coffee across the street and when she talked about going to Paris with Ursula he didn’t mock her, like Bob Green used to do. Or wonder how two middle-aged ladies could survive a long weekend in a foreign city without being mugged or strangled or sold into the white slave trade, like George had done.

  And it wasn’t that she was physically attracted to him (he was shorter than her and there was quite a lot of black hair protruding from his cuffs). But she never met men over fifty who were still interested in the world around them, in new people, new books, new countries.

  It was like talking to a female friend. Except that he was a man. And they’d only known each other for about fifteen minutes. Which was very disconcerting.

  The following week they were standing on a footbridge over the dual carriageway and that feeling welled up inside her. The one she got by the sea sometimes. Ships disembarking, gulls squabbling over the wake, those mournful horns. The realization that you could sail off into the blue and start again in a new place.

  He took her hand and held it, and she was disappointed. She’d found a soul mate and he was about to wreck it all with a clumsy pass. But he squeezed it and let go and said, “Come on. You’ll be late home,” and she wanted to take his hand back.

  Later she was scared. Of saying yes. Of saying no. Of saying yes then realizing she should have said no. Of saying no then realizing she should have said yes. Of being naked in front of another man when her body sometimes made her feel like weeping.

  So she told George. About meeting David in the shop and the coffee across the road. But not about the hands and the footbridge. She wanted him to be cross. She wanted him to make her life simple again. But he didn’t. She dropped David’s name into the conversation a couple more times and got no reaction. George’s lack of concern began to seem like encouragement.

  David had had other affairs. She knew. Even before he said. The way he cupped his hand round the back of her neck that first time. She was relieved. She didn’t want to do this with someone sailing into uncharted waters, especially after Gloria’s horror story about finding that man from Derby parked outside her house one morning.

  And Jean was right. He was very hairy indeed. Like a monkey, almost. Which made it better somehow. Because it showed that it wasn’t really about the sex. Though, during the last few months she had grown rather fond of that silky feel under her fingers when she stroked his back.

  The bathroom door clicked open and she closed her eyes. David walked across the rug and slipped his arms around her. She could smell coal tar soap and clean skin. She could feel his breath on the back of her neck.

  He said, “I seem to have found a beautiful woman in my bedroom.”

  She laughed at the childishness of it. She was very far from being a beautiful woman. But it was good, pretending. Almost better than the real thing. Like being a kid again. Getting this close to another human being. Climbing trees and drinking bathwater. Knowing how everything felt and tasted.

  He turned her round and kissed her.

  He wanted to make her feel good. She couldn’t remember the last time someone had done that.

  He closed the curtains and led her over to the bed and laid her down and kissed her again and pushed the dressing gown off her shoulders and she was melting into that dark behind her eyelids, the way butter melted in a hot pan, the way you melted back into sleep after waking up at night, just letting it take you.

  She put her hands around his neck and felt the muscles under the skin and those tiny hairs where the barber had run the razor close. And his own hands were slowly moving down her body and she could see the two of them from the far side of the room, doing this thing you only ever saw beautiful people doing in films. And maybe she did believe it now, that she was beautiful, that they were both beautiful.

  Her body felt as if it were swaying back and forth with the movement of his fingers, a fairground ride that was taking her
higher and faster with every swing so that she was weightless at each end, so high she could see the pleasure gardens and the ferries in the bay and the green hills across the water.

  He said, “God, I love you,” and she loved him back, for doing this, for understanding a part of her that she never knew existed. But she couldn’t say it. Not now. She couldn’t say anything. She just squeezed his shoulder, meaning, Keep going.

  She put her hand around his penis and moved it back and forth and it no longer seemed strange, not even a part of his body, more a part of hers, the sensations flowing in one unbroken circle. And she could hear herself panting now, like a dog, but she didn’t care.

  And she realized that it was going to happen and she heard herself saying, “Yes, yes, yes,” and even hearing the sound of her own voice didn’t break the spell. And it swept over her like surf sweeping over sand then falling back and sweeping up over the sand again and falling back.

  Images went off in her head like little fireworks. The smell of coconut. Brass firedogs. The starched bolster in her parents’ bed. A hot cone of grass clippings. She was breaking up into a thousand tiny pieces, like snow, or bonfire sparks, tumbling high in the air, then starting to fall, so slowly it hardly seemed like falling at all.

  She held his wrist to stop his hand and lay there with her eyes closed, dizzy and out of breath.

  She was crying.

  It was like finding your body again after fifty years and realizing you were old friends and suddenly understanding why you’d felt so alone all this time.

  She opened her eyes. David was looking down at her and she knew that she didn’t need to explain anything.

  He waited for a couple of minutes. “And now,” he said, “I think it’s my turn.”

  He got to his knees and moved between her legs. He opened her gently with his fingers and pushed himself inside. And this time she watched him as he rolled forward onto his arms until she was full of him.

  Sometimes she enjoyed the fact that he was doing this to her. Sometimes she enjoyed the fact that she was doing this to him. Today the distinction didn’t seem to exist.

  He began to move faster and his eyes narrowed with pleasure and finally closed. So she closed her own eyes and held on to his arms and let herself be rocked back and forth, and finally he reached a climax and held himself inside her and did that little animal shiver. And when he opened his eyes he was breathing heavily and smiling.

  She smiled back at him.

  Katie was right. You spent your life giving everything to other people, so they could drift away, to school, to college, to the office, to Hornsey, to Ealing. So little of the love came back.

  She had earned this. She deserved to feel like someone in a film.

  He lowered himself gently to her side and pulled her head onto his shoulder so that she could see tiny beads of sweat in a line down the center of his chest and hear his heart beating.

  She closed her eyes again, and in the darkness she could feel the whole world revolving.

  15

  “Lord, let me know mine end, and the number of my days: that I may be certified how long I have to live.”

  Bob lay just below the altar steps in a polished black coffin which looked like a grand piano from this angle.

  “For a man walketh in a vain shadow, and disquieteth himself in vain.”

  There were occasions when George envied these people (the forty-eight hours between trying on the trousers in Allders and visiting Dr. Barghoutian, for example). Not these people specifically, but the regulars, the ones you saw up at the front during carol services.

  But you either had faith or you didn’t. No reentry, no refunds. Like when his father told him how magicians sawed ladies in half. You couldn’t give the knowledge back however much you wanted to.

  He looked round at the stained-glass lambs and the scale model of the crucified Christ and thought how ridiculous it all was, this desert religion transported wholesale to the English shires. Bank managers and PE teachers listening to stories about zithers and smiting and barley bread as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

  “O spare me a little, that I may recover my strength: before I go hence and be no more seen.”

  The vicar made his way to the pulpit and delivered his eulogy. “A businessman, a sportsman, a family man. ‘Work hard, play hard.’ That was his motto.” He clearly knew nothing about Bob.

  On the other hand if you never set foot in a church when you were alive you could hardly expect them to pull out all the stops when you were dead. And no one wanted the truth (“He was a man incapable of seeing a large-breasted woman without making some infantile remark. In later years his breath was not good”).

  “Robert and Susan would have been married for forty years this coming September. They were childhood sweethearts who met when they were both pupils at St. Botolph’s secondary school…”

  He remembered his own thirtieth wedding anniversary. Bob staggering across the lawn, slapping a drunken arm around his shoulder and saying, “The funny thing is, if you’d killed her you’d have been out by now.”

  “Behold I shew you a mystery: We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye…”

  The lesson ended and Bob was carried from the church. George and Jean moved outside with the rest of the congregation and reassembled around the grave in a muggy, gun-gray light that promised a storm before teatime. Susan stood on the far side of the hole looking puffy and broken, with her two sons on either side of her. Jack had his arm around his mother but was not tall enough to carry the gesture off with aplomb. Ben looked strangely bored.

  “Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery.”

  Bob was lowered into the ground on four sturdy hessian straps. Susan, Jack and Ben each threw a white rose onto the coffin and the peace was shattered by some buffoon driving past the churchyard with his car stereo turned up.

  “…our Lord Jesus Christ; who shall change our vile body that it may be like unto his glorious body…”

  He looked at the pallbearers and realized he’d never seen one with a beard. He wondered if it was a rule, like pilots, so they got an airtight seal when the oxygen masks came down. Something about hygiene, perhaps.

  And when their time came? Did working with all those corpses make them sanguine? Of course, they only saw people afterward. Becoming a corpse, that was the hard bit. Tim’s sister worked in a hospice for fifteen years and still went to sleep in the garage with the engine running when they found that growth in her brain.

  The vicar asked them to say the Lord’s Prayer together. George said the passages he agreed with out loud (“Give us this day our daily bread…lead us not into temptation”) and mumbled through the references to God.

  “The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the holy Ghost, be with us all evermore. Amen…And now, ladies and gentlemen.” A perky, scout-group tone entered the vicar’s voice. “I would like, on behalf of Susan and the rest of the Green family, to invite you to share some food and drink in the village hall which you will find across the road directly beside the car park.”

  Jean shivered theatrically. “I do hate these things.”

  They moved with the tide of darkly suited people, chatting quietly now, down the curved gravel path, through the lych-gate and across the road.

  Jean touched his elbow and said, “I’ll catch you up in a few minutes.”

  He turned to ask her where she was going but she was already retracing her steps in the direction of the church.

  He turned back again and saw David Symmonds walking toward him, smiling, his hand extended.

  “George.”

  “David.”

  David had left Shepherds four or five years ago. Jean had bumped into him on a couple of occasions but George had hardly seen him. It was not active dislike. Indeed, if everyone in the office had been like David the place would have run a great de
al more smoothly. No jockeying for position. No passing the buck. Bright chap, too. Brains behind the whole sustainable forest stuff which got them Cornwall and Essex.

  He dressed a little too well. That was probably the best way of putting it. Expensive aftershave. Opera cassettes in the car.

  When he announced that he was retiring early everyone backed off. Sick animal in the herd. Everyone feeling a little insulted. As if he’d been doing it as a hobby, this thing to which they had devoted their lives. And no real plans, either. Photography. Holidays in France. Gold C gliding badge.

  It all seemed rather different now that George had gone down the same route himself, and when he recalled John McLintock saying that David was never really “one of us” he could hear the sour grapes.

  “Good to see you.” David squeezed George’s hand. “Even if the circumstances aren’t the cheeriest.”

  “Susan didn’t seem good.”

  “Oh, I think Susan will be all right.”

  Today, for example, David was wearing a black suit and a gray roll-neck sweater. Other people might think it disrespectful, but George could see now that it was simply a different way of doing things. No longer being part of the crowd.

  “Keeping busy?” asked George.

  David laughed. “I thought the point of retiring was that we no longer had to be busy.”

  George laughed. “I guess so.”

  “Well, I suppose we’d better do our duty.” David turned toward the door of the village hall.

  George rarely felt the desire to prolong a conversation with anyone, but David, he realized, was in the same boat as himself, and it was good to be chatting with someone in the same boat. Better certainly than eating sausage rolls and talking about death.

  “Got through the World’s Hundred Best Novels?”

  “You have a frighteningly good memory.” David laughed again. “Gave up at Proust. Too much like hard work. Doing Dickens instead. Seven down, eight to go.”

  George talked about the studio. David talked about his recent walking holiday in the Pyrenees (“Three thousand meters above sea level and there’s butterflies everywhere”). They congratulated themselves on leaving Shepherds before Jim Bowman subcontracted the maintenance and that girl from Stevenage lost her foot.