Her boss looked perplexed. ‘Isn’t that always the case?’
Isobel sat heavily in the nearest chair.
‘Isn’t that why you’re feeling peaky too?’
‘Peaky?’ Isobel looked down at her trembling hands. ‘Is that what this feeling is?’
‘Well,’ Mr Baldwin said, slightly flustered, ‘I think “peaky” may be a touch understating the case. You do seem a little out of sorts.’
Isobel looked upset.
‘Don’t get upset, Isobel.’ Mr Baldwin was floundering. ‘What about a nice cup of tea? A bit of rehydration – that’s what’s needed. It’s just a hangover.’
Was it just a hangover? Her limbs ached and she felt as if she was fading into the background. Could too much champagne make you feel like this? Or did it mean that her time here was coming to an end quicker than she’d imagined? She wondered if the disbelief and cynicism at large in the world was beginning to weaken her already. Her elders had warned her that this could be a hostile place, but she hadn’t anticipated just how fast this would affect her. She hadn’t anticipated either how funny, warm and lovely some humans could be. Isobel cast a glance over to where Leo sat. It would be hard to leave when the time came. She only hoped that it wasn’t now. She still hadn’t accomplished all that she’d come here for.
Mr Baldwin came round his desk and looked at her with concern. ‘Is there anything else wrong, my dear? Something that I can help with?’
‘No. No,’ she insisted.
Her boss gave her a hearty, jocular smile, seemingly at a loss for words.
Isobel stood up. ‘I’ll go and get that tea,’ she said.
‘Don’t worry yourself so.’ He gave her arm a comforting squeeze. ‘We’ll live.’
But Isobel wasn’t sure that she would.
Isobel joined the queue for the vending machine. There were four bubbly girls standing in line in front of her, regaling each other with tales of last night’s misdemeanours and giggling loudly at their escapades. Leo’s dancing, it seemed, was coming in for particular attention. If Isobel could have blushed, she would have. They smiled at her when she tagged on the end.
‘You look like I feel,’ one of them remarked.
‘It was a good party,’ Isobel ventured.
‘You’re telling me,’ she said. The girl gestured at the machine. ‘I need about ten cups of this stuff to get me going this morning.’
‘I know,’ her friend piped up. ‘It was a blast. I’ve never seen Old Baldy boogie like that before. Fab. The booze must have really been flowing. Everyone was legless. Look at the state of the office this morning.’ She flicked a thumb towards the rows of desks with people in various degrees of slump over them. The girl shook her head and smiled. ‘We all must have had a skinful.’
‘Don’t you think it was more than that?’ Isobel was feeling weaker by the moment.
They both looked at her blankly. ‘You clearly haven’t been to a Thornton Jones party when they’re not all drunk,’ one of them said.
‘Isn’t it possible to have a good time without everyone being drunk?’ Isobel asked.
They stared at her as if she was from another planet. Which in some ways she supposed she was. Isobel turned and staggered away from the coffee machine, bumping into the wall and then knocking over the wastepaper bin as she did. She struggled to right it. The girls tittered behind her. A sharp pain pierced her head and she put her hands to her eyes as her vision blurred. She had to see Leo. He was the only one who truly believed in her. Perhaps he could make this terrible, terrible feeling go away.
Chapter Fifty
The staff canteen was generally somewhere to be avoided at all costs. The food was truly abysmal and you ate it on plastic seats under the glare of a million halogen light bulbs. If you didn’t feel dreadful when you came in, you would by the time you went out. Isobel and Leo were sitting opposite each other. She looked absolutely miserable and her food was untouched.
‘You’re very quiet,’ Leo said. ‘Are the sandwiches so awful?’
Isobel pushed her plate away. ‘No one believes in my magic, Leo.’
‘They do!’
‘They don’t,’ she insisted. Her eyes looked bleak and there was no colour at all in her cheeks. The beautiful red lips that entranced him so much, looked bloodless and tinged with blue. ‘Everyone thinks they had a great time at the party last night because they had too much to drink.’
‘Humans tend to equate that with having a good time. It’s one of our cultural deficiencies. Don’t ask me why.’ Leo gave a shrug. ‘I never touch a drop.’
Even that failed to raise a smile.
‘Couldn’t they feel the magic in the air?’ she asked.
‘Give us a chance.’ Leo took her hand. ‘We’re a very repressed race. We handle our emotions very badly. Even if people did feel something in the air, it would make them feel more comfortable to explain it away on a few drinks too many. We wouldn’t automatically think to credit it to something mystical. We’ve closed our mind to so much of that stuff that we can’t see it when it’s right in front of our noses. We have very little joy in our lives, Isobel. You can’t blame us for that.’
Isobel forced a tired smile. ‘No one believes in fairies.’
‘Grant and Lard believe in you.’
‘Leo! This is supposed to be a secret. Our secret.’
‘I only told them a little bit,’ he protested. ‘And they didn’t take any convincing at all. Hardly any.’
‘Really?’
‘Really. In fact, Grant has a little problem – an issue – at the moment that he wondered if you could help him out with.’ Leo felt as if he was looking shifty. There was no way he should be doing this. Grant should find his own damn fairy, rather than using his one. ‘He wants you to make Emma love him.’ Everything in Leo screamed that this was a really bad idea, but perhaps Grant was right. Leo should let Emma go. It was just that he was surprised to learn that she still loved him so much. Why could neither of them admit how much they loved each other when it mattered? And now it had come to this. There was no way back for them, Leo was sure.
His friend, it seemed, had no such qualms. Grant loved Emma and wanted her to love him back. Grant – a young pretender – could stand at the coffee machine and admit that he loved Emma when Leo – her longtime lover – had never even been able to say it to her. What did that say about him? That he had indeed been a deeply inadequate and crap boyfriend all along, it would seem. And what of Emma? Did Leo have the right to stand in the way of her happiness? That pained him more than he dared to admit – but Grant was a mate and Leo had said that he would do it. ‘My Emma,’ he added, purely for clarity.
Leo tried to shrug nonchalantly, but couldn’t. Inside, his heart was breaking. He didn’t want Emma falling in love with Grant. He didn’t want her falling in love with anyone else either. He wanted her to still be in love with him.
Isobel shook her head. ‘I can’t do that, Leo. The human heart can’t be manipulated. Not by me. Not by anyone.’
You wouldn’t believe how much Leo wanted to hear this, but still he ploughed on. ‘What about Cupid? I thought he was well known for his wily ways. Isn’t he a fairy?’
‘He’s the God of Love.’
‘Is there any difference? Don’t you know him? You’re not on speaking terms with him? You haven’t bumped into him recently down at the fairy pub?’
Leo would swear that his conversations with Isobel were getting more surreal by the minute and this one was fuelled by desperation. She shook her head.
‘You couldn’t text him? Ask him to shoot a few arrows?’
His fairy friend looked cross. ‘Now you’re just being silly, Leo.’
‘I’m known for it,’ he said. ‘That and my John Travolta impersonation now, thanks to you.’
Isobel looked at him earnestly. ‘There are times in your life when you must be serious.’
Leo went to speak but she ignored him.
‘This is importan
t. You must listen to me carefully, Leo.’ She sighed at him. ‘Emma isn’t destined to love Grant.’
‘Not ever?’
‘No.’
‘Oh well.’ Leo suddenly sounded very chirpy. He didn’t want to know why Isobel was so sure about this, but he was relieved to hear that Emma wasn’t in imminent danger of falling in love with Grant. Phew. Leo felt that it gave him a reprieve and he was very grateful for a reprieve, even though he had no idea what he was going to do with it.
‘Never mind,’ he said with a happy huff. He had tried, hadn’t he? Not that hard, admittedly. But at least he could face Grant and explain, with an element of truth, that Emma was a no-go area for him. Leo could see that Isobel wanted to tell him something else, but – quite frankly – he’d had enough of revelations for the moment. He was just glad that he wouldn’t be having to buy Emma and Grant a wedding present.
Isobel smiled at Leo sadly. ‘You seem to like making your relationships very complicated.’
‘It’s an art. We spend years perfecting it.’
‘Humans are strange creatures.’
‘You have to give us time,’ he said. ‘We’re very stressed out. We’ve forgotten how to enjoy magic. Or even where to look for it. Instead, we all have crippling mortgages and dwindling pensions and plummeting share portfolios and heaps of commitments and spreading waistlines to worry about.’
‘You must be very sad people.’
‘I’m a lot happier since I met you.’ And it was true. Leo didn’t know what had shifted in him since Isobel had arrived on the scene, but there was a seed of contentment inside him that had never previously been there before, and he felt that it was blossoming. There was a settling inside of him. His days of drunken crooning in late-nite bars could well be over. Leo could end up living in the country and raising chickens if this carried on. If only he’d discovered this earlier, then Emma might have liked him more and they wouldn’t be in this mess now. He could never regret meeting Isobel – she was wonderful, if not a little surreal – but he sometimes wished that he could wind back the clock and that he and Emma could go back to exactly how they were. Except that now he’d be the new, improved version of himself and he wouldn’t irritate her quite so much.
Just as Leo was pleased to be discovering new things about himself, Isobel, on the other hand, was looking more careworn as the days went by. It worried Leo that the pressures of this life were proving too much for her. He couldn’t bear the thought of Isobel leaving him, as well as Emma.
He took her hand and kissed it. ‘Hang on in there,’ he begged. ‘For me.’
Chapter Fifty-One
‘I’m in a bad way, Mummy,’ I admit miserably as we stare at Rodin’s magnificent sculpture, The Kiss.
‘It’s Le Baiser, in French,’ my mother informs me, rolling the name round her tongue. ‘Why is it that everything sounds so much more romantic in that language? I love it when Daddy speaks French.’
The Kiss is certainly more to my mother’s taste than some of the strange and eccentric collections that the gallery houses. Depicting the adulterous lovers, Paulo Malatesta and Francesca da Rimini, its gracious marble curves with their superb blend of eroticism and idealism make it one of the greatest images of sexual love. As if I care. It has also been described as ‘three tons of pornography’.
‘Here’s a man who enjoyed – revelled in – the beauty of the female form,’ Catherine Chambers says. ‘Not like that Picasso with his arms and legs all over the jolly place. What’s that supposed to be? To my mind, he had no appreciation of our grace whatsoever.’
My mother likes art to look like art. She doesn’t think a pile of bricks or three bright pink lights in an otherwise empty room can be credited with any sort of merit or skill. Naked men and women are supposed to be pink, not blue. The National Portrait Gallery is more my mum’s cup of tea. Fusty old farts that look like fusty old farts.
Today, we’re at Tate Modern – a former power station transformed into a radical new art gallery gracing the South Bank of the Thames, a stone’s throw from the beautiful stainless-steel lines of the Millennium Bridge. My choice of venue and a bit of a busman’s holiday for me. We sit, side-by-side on a curved wooden bench in a stark, white cube of a room, enjoying the peace and quiet. Every so often, we try to have mother and daughter bonding days, taking in an art gallery, a new restaurant or some shopping in Town – or all three. Days when we can chat away without my father putting in his five-pence worth, as he’s prone to do. This particular bonding day has been called in an emergency.
We are currently in the Nude/Action/Body gallery, which to my mind is far too sensual by half. The rooms are stuffed full of lurid paintings of naked men, phallic statues, writhing bodies, couples entwined. It makes me uncomfortably aware that I’m missing Leo in more ways than one. All those things that I took for granted in our relationship are suddenly standing out to me in sharp relief. Why is it that when you’re in a permanent relationship, sex slips further and further down the list of ‘things to do’? When you’re single you suddenly become desperate for it. I sigh, turn to my mother and say, ‘I’m seeing a shrink.’
‘You don’t need a psychiatrist,’ my mother says dismissively. ‘I’ve told you already, darling. You need a good dinner and some great sex. In fact, you don’t really need the dinner.’
‘Oh Mummy,’ I huff. ‘It isn’t so straightforward these days.’
‘It is, sweetheart,’ my mother assures me. ‘You young things make your lives so unnecessarily complicated. You think far too deeply about trivia and worry about all sorts of things that don’t matter. In my day, we found someone passable – preferably from a good family if you could manage it – got married, gave up work and had babies. It was no more complicated than that. We had time to do our own housework, bake our own cakes and were never too tired to have sex. We didn’t consider whether we actually wanted children or not. We just had them, because that’s what everyone did. Now it’s a lifestyle choice. So what if we didn’t have careers that kept us in the office until midnight or business trips abroad so that we could get tiddly with the sales force, or be of independent means? It doesn’t mean that we didn’t have great lives. You think you have it all these days, but in reality you have so little. A rich and fulfilling life isn’t found behind a desk.’
‘No one gets tiddly these days, Mummy. We get lashed,’ I say. ‘You sound like some sort of terrible throwback from the Victorian era.’
‘I’m not, darling. I’m simply saying that the so-called liberation of women has resulted in them being more oppressed than ever before. Superman might go out and save the world, but he doesn’t come home to a pile of ironing, name tags to sew on and a list as long as your arm for Tesco’s.’
‘Women have fought long and hard for their independence.’
‘Independence is a myth,’ my mother says, patting her hair. ‘We are all totally dependent on others whether we like it or not. No one can operate entirely alone. We need people. And, you’re right, women have fought for their rights, but they need to know when to stop fighting. You’ve battled for a long time to achieve your status as strong, independent women, but then you all wonder why men don’t want to settle down and commit to you. Relationships shouldn’t be seen as war zones with battle-lines drawn. They should be a constant compromise. You shouldn’t spend all your time trying to control the person in your life who you’re supposed to love more than anyone.’ My mother nods at the sculpture. ‘Does Francesca look as if she’s been having a ding-dong with Paulo about whose turn it is to unload the dishwasher?’ She looks sideways at me. ‘Of course not. She’s using her power as a woman to draw him in. Look at him, poor thing – he’s putty in her hands. Francesca is the powerful force. We girls have to control the relationship, but we have to do it in a way so that our men don’t realise they’re being controlled, darling.’ My mother gives me a kindly look. ‘Have you ever been held like that?’
‘I don’t have the time to sit around cuddling
.’ I scuff my shoes on the grey concrete floor.
‘You should make time,’ my mother advises. ‘You always used to go on about how wonderful Leo was, but then I have a very good long-term memory.’
Is it a long time since I’ve had a good word for my ex-lover, when he wasn’t an ex-anything?
‘Leo loved you just as you were. Could you say the same about him?’
I say nothing. Instead I try to lose myself in the statue again. It’s certainly very sexy. I can positively feel Paulo and Francesca yearning for each other – a seething mass of sexual tension. Kissing – they say it’s the most erotic of all sexual acts. The beginning of the journey, before disappointment has time to set in.
‘The sexes aren’t the same. Not even remotely. We should all draw on our strengths and weaknesses and not fight each other for supremacy.’
‘So forty years of female emancipation didn’t exist in our household?’
My mother turns to me. ‘Are you worse off because of it? I was at home to look after you and your sisters. Your every need was pandered to – perhaps too much.’ There’s a sharp note in her voice and I feel myself blush. It isn’t just only children who are spoiled. ‘Your father has never been near a duster in our entire married life. He has no idea how to work the washing machine or the microwave. Even the kettle is somewhat of a mystery to him. But that doesn’t mean we’ve had a bad marriage.’
‘You’ve been lucky,’ I say. ‘You had a wealthy husband to look after you. Women these days have to work so that their families can have even the basics.’
‘Nonsense. I’ve seen it at the Women’s Institute – women who work their fingers to the bone so that they can afford a fortnight in Spain or a bigger car. The basics don’t include foreign holidays and in-car multi-change CD-players or air-conditioning. Those aren’t the priorities in life. Designer labels really don’t matter. We never holidayed abroad. You loved your two weeks in Devon every year, didn’t you?’
I nod in agreement. They were idyllic times spent on the beach eating cheese rolls gritty with sand and burying our father up to his neck in it too. I don’t point out to my mother that it would probably cost considerably more to have two weeks in Devon now than it would two weeks in the Costa del Sol.