The Beloveds

  “Oh, Betty, don’t joke, it’s Bert you’re talking about.”

  “Yes, I know, wonderful Bert. I really don’t want to discuss it, Gloria, it’s between Bert and me.”

  “Okay, your business. I’ll keep out of it, but I’m here if you want to talk.”

  No doubt on Gloria’s advice, Henry decides that he shouldn’t interfere, either, other than to say—more often than is necessary—what a good person he thinks Bert is. He is busy going over quotes for his new pottery studio and making the best mugs he can for the photo shoot. I can see now that they do have a naive sort of charm. The ones that don’t work, that have tiny imperfections, hairline cracks, and color runs, end up in the house. They are mostly thick-rimmed and not that pleasant to drink from.

  * * *

  IF THE TRAIN FROM Bath to London didn’t terminate at Paddington, it wouldn’t be a disagreeable journey. The passing countryside is flat but not charmless, and first class secures a seat, at least. But Paddington station is not the best of places to arrive in the capital. I remember feeling differently as a child. There was beauty in the station then: the soaring ironwork ceiling, the fragrant flower stall, and the newsagent who knew about books. Mother would let us browse there while we waited for our train to arrive. Now, though, it is littered with sad little shops, and foul with the stink of hot dogs and kebabs. And it takes an age to get out of the place, since they have relocated the taxi stand away from the platforms and up escalators.

  I am in no hurry, though. It won’t do Bert any harm to wait for me. I walk outside the station to the pub I’ve spied on previous journeys and fortify myself with a couple of gins. It’s cheap gin, you can always tell, but it does the job. In the taxi to the apartment I check on the list I’ve made of what I’ll be looking for in the divorce settlement. Most likely Bert won’t agree to it all, but that’s an argument to be had between our lawyers, and I have engaged a pretty good one. It was wise, I think, to go for a woman, one with a good record in such things.

  I give the taxi driver a three-pound tip for the twelve-pound journey. I’ve always been a good tipper. When I’m face-to-face with a stranger, I like to come off well.

  I ignore the lift and take the stairs to the apartment. At the door, I struggle with the lock. For some reason, my key doesn’t fit. I try a couple of times before resorting to the bell. Bert must have changed the locks. I am furious at the cheek of it.

  It is Helen who opens the door. I can’t say I am totally surprised, but what the hell is she doing here on the day she must know I am coming to discuss the divorce with Bert?

  My first impression is that she is wearing a dressing gown, but then I realize it is a kimono of the like I have never seen before, red wool with white felt daisies sewn on its hem. Her crazy hair is piled on top of her head in a messy bun, and long earrings that look like tiny pieces of bone, mouse legs perhaps, swing from her earlobes. Her shoes have four-inch platforms of black rubber. I am put in mind of an eccentric fat geisha.

  I don’t show my surprise at her presence.

  “Something’s wrong with my key,” I say.

  “Oh, we’ve had a break-in. Had to change the locks.”

  There is no mistaking the way she emphasises the we. Adulteress, I think to myself. Such an archaic word, but satisfying somehow. By the looks of the flat, littered with her things, and the ease with which she lets me in, I can tell she has made herself at home here for quite a while. Probably before Bert’s letter asking for a divorce landed in Pipits’ mail. I take their haste personally, how else?

  I suspected as much before I read his letter, of course, but still I find myself astonished. The attraction between this unlikely pair bewilders me. It is hard to believe Bert would give me up for Helen. Yet here she is, feet planted firmly on my expensive rug, at home in what, after all, is as much my apartment as Bert’s.

  I guess that I should have got the message a lot earlier than I did, what with the Spanish holiday, and the New York trip, and the way she always ignored me.

  In those months when I was not around, when she thought me ill, she wheedled her way into soft old Bert’s emotions. And now she stands before me, big and fat and in my sight line.

  Without her on the scene, it would have taken Bert and me longer to get to where we are now; which of course is where I wanted us to be, but still, it’s embarrassing that Bert chooses to replace me with her. She is so unlike his type, which I have always assumed was me, that it is hard to accept her presence, even now. I won’t forgive Bert for allowing her to be here today. Perhaps he is scared to see me on his own. He has never been good with conflict.

  “Really? A burglary?” I say. “What did they take?”

  “Oh, obvious things. The iPad, some cash that Bert had in a drawer, and my jewelry. I expect the insurance will pay up.”

  “What was your jewelry doing here?”

  She smiles, shrugs, says she stays over sometimes.

  I don’t believe there has been a burglary. She probably insisted Bert change the locks just so that I didn’t catch them at it. I shudder at the thought of her and Bert in bed. There is something so utterly vulgar about her. I bet she gives wet open-mouthed kisses, keeps him warm with the heat coming off all that blubber. She’ll help him out of his old-man’s troubles, snore along with him, squeeze his spots, cut his toenails. Ugh. The thought is repellent.

  “Where’s Bert?”

  “He’ll be back any minute,” she says. “He’s just walking the dog.”

  “Whose dog?”

  “Mine, actually.” She sounds proud, as though she were speaking of a child. “I just got her. Little Molly, the sweetest thing, she’s a cockapoo.”

  “A what?”

  “A cockapoo. Half spaniel, half poodle.”

  “Oh,” I say. “A mongrel.”

  Whatever the creature is, I don’t like that it has the run of my apartment. Bert always wanted a dog, but he didn’t push it with me. He knew I had contempt for them. Such needy creatures.

  I do a quick look around for stains and chewed-up sofa covers and see a mark on the parquet floor by the window.

  There’s a thin smile playing around Helen’s lips. She offers me a seat. In my home she offers a seat, tea, a drink.

  “I’ll get my own,” I say.

  She watches me pour a generous measure of gin, watches me take off my coat and throw it over a chair.

  “Would you rather I left?” she says.

  “To be honest,” I say irritably, “I don’t know why you are here at all.”

  “Well, we thought that it might be easier on all of us if we settled things together.”

  “But this has nothing to do with you.”

  “Well, in a way it does. You see, Bert is going to have to buy you out, isn’t he? I’m going to put up the money for that, so we need to know what you want.”

  “And what do you want, Helen?”

  “Well, I have Bert,” she says impertinently, “so nothing more, really. I guess, though, that my money will make me a partner in Walker and Stash.”

  “Not if I won’t sell my shares.”

  She puts her head on one side, raises her shoulders as though it hardly matters, as though I don’t matter.

  “Look, Lizzie, you will do whatever you will do. Bert and I, you can’t break us now. The truth is that we are sorry to have hurt you, if indeed you are hurt. We tried to give each other up, even though we knew we were meant for each other. You know Bert, ever loyal. That was before he realized that you had already given up on him. Now, though, we’re not going to let whatever you do spoil things for us.”

  “I suppose you know,” I say threateningly, “I could make things impossible for you if I wanted to.”

  It wasn’t an empty threat. I might keep my shares, turn up at their new storehouse whenever I felt like it. I could show the art I liked, generally be a nuisance to them. If I decided that was the way to go, there is nothing they could do about it.

  “Why would you bother?
” she asks with a sigh. “You don’t care about Bert, do you? Your lack of insight into your marriage, into the kind of man Bert is, well, it’s astounding. I love him, you know. You can’t say the same, can you?”

  She’s standing, feet apart, one hand held questioningly in the air, the other on her hip, dressing me down like some third-rate teacher. I feel like I did that day on Beachy Head, anger racing through me, everything smoky red, as though I were seeing through bloodshot eyes. I want to spit venom at her, bite her, wound her. I rush toward her with a yell and find my hand fisted up, pounding into her face. My watch clunks into her skin, and I hear her gasp. She staggers a bit, her hand flying to her mouth. She has tears in her eyes, and a vibrant globule of blood trembling on her cheek.

  “You bitch! You damn conniving bitch,” I scream at her. “You can keep the pathetic old man. Only the dregs left, anyway.” I raise my hand to hit her again, to smash into her smug face, but she turns, flies to the bathroom and locks herself in. Silly cow, silly drama-queen cow.

  I grab my bag and am out the door and halfway down the stairs only to meet Bert halfway up them, leading a bundle of brown curls on a leash.

  “Lizzie? You’re leaving?”

  I push past him. “Traitor,” I hiss.

  It is bloody awful how people let you down. I hit the pavement, the anger still fizzing in me. I rush on for a bit before it settles, before I notice how cold it is, so cold, I can feel it in my teeth. I’ve forgotten my coat, but I can’t go back. I head to the train station.

  I need to be back in Pipits’ embrace.

  9

  HENRY HAS A WORK team in, three noisy men with rolling West Country accents. Their radio thumps out a constant bass beat as they bang and drill and shout to each other over the din of it.

  When they first arrived, Henry introduced them to me as though we were all about to become best friends.

  “Terry, Dave, Bill,” he said. “My sister-in-law, Betty.”

  “Elizabeth,” I said.

  Terry is the one in charge, a thin whippet of a man who chain-smokes cheap roll-ups and drops the butts wherever he happens to be standing.

  I have asked him to pick them up, but he says they will clear the site when the building work has finished.

  “Don’t let it bother you, love.” He smirks. “It’ll get worse before it gets better.”

  Our old shed has been demolished. They have started digging foundations for the new pottery studio. Unless it is to be called something different now. Atelier? Henry rarely puts on airs, though, so I guess not atelier. He operates on a sort of reverse snobbery, likes to think of himself as the common man.

  The air is full of dust. No sooner has one lot settled than they set about creating another. I can feel it sandpapering the back of my throat the moment I step outside the front door.

  The wood from our dear old shed is piled high in the biggest of the three skips that crouch like coffins against the laurel hedge. Split and broken, the planks lie still as cut-down soldiers on the battlefield of Henry’s ludicrous ambition. Before Henry barged in, it was the potting shed. In its musty interior, I learned how to pot up cuttings there, as a child, where the damp smell of compost once sweetened the air.

  “Six weeks or so, and they’ve promised it will be finished,” he crows. “If the weather holds, the foundations will go in next week. You won’t know the old place.”

  It is to be brick built, have proper plumbing, electricity that is up to the job of running the kiln and the drying room.

  “Bricks to match the house,” Henry says.

  I can’t imagine that they will get that right. The thing will hunker down like some miserable squatter where the shed should be. I could weep.

  Of course Gloria is in “lady bountiful” mode. She makes the men coffee every morning, which they drink in the kitchen, leaving behind their muddy footprints and the cold smell of cement. You wouldn’t believe how much of Gloria’s homemade shortbread they bolt down. It is obvious they think Gloria a star. Doesn’t everyone?

  With a series of little kindnesses and inquiries, she promotes the idea that she cares about them. She laughs at the builders’ jokes as though she finds them hilarious, asks after their families, listens to their problems with her head on one side, like a bird feeding its young; that one’s a real crowd-pleaser. Beauty and niceness. Well, not hard to be nice if you have everything you could desire, is it?

  Gloria’s always bleating on about how lovely people are: the workmen are lovely, the postman is lovely, her friends are lovely. She is blessed in her friends, she says. I wonder, though, does she understand friendship? She betrayed me with Henry and poached Alice, after all.

  Now that Henry can’t work for a bit because of the renovations to his studio, the two of them are entertaining more frequently. Henry does the cooking, not only because he enjoys it, but so as not to tire his pregnant wife, with her aching back and spreading feet.

  “What do aching feet matter when I have these great boobs?” she says, pushing them up as though she is weighing them in the cups of her hands.

  “Really great,” Henry confirms.

  Henry certainly treasures his wife. It occurs to me that people like Gloria have no idea what it feels like not to be treasured, never to get your heart’s desire. There was a time when Bert treasured me, I suppose. But it doesn’t count for much if it’s the wrong person doing the treasuring.

  The pair of them make little effort for their dinner guests. They think themselves enough of a treat for company, I expect. No silver or linen napkins, as has always been the tradition at Pipits, only Henry’s hearty food, and plenty of cheap wine.

  Their chatter goes on late into the evening, long after I have gone to bed. I can’t sleep until the last of them has left, until the sound of the final engine has groaned its way up Cold-Upton Hill and faded into the night.

  In return for their beanfeasts, Mr. and Mrs. Bygone get asked out frequently. I am rarely invited. Conventional minds don’t like uneven numbers, I suppose. Not that I want to fraternize with their friends, who are mostly people I have little interest in: art teachers, other potters, a bookshop owner and his birdlike wife. People with airy-fairy beliefs, who never recovered from witnessing the tie-dye, crystal healing outbreak their mothers fell victim to.

  That day when I watched Bert sleeping, when I knew that I didn’t want to be with him, I realized that I didn’t need anyone’s friendship, either. I don’t see what is to be got out of friendships. All people really want is for someone to stand by their side so that they are not alone. The thought of being alone terrifies them. I do not suffer from loneliness, however, and I rather despise people who do. It’s childish to rely on other people to give your existence meaning. I will not kowtow to others, hoping for applause, or barter my independence for an ounce of popularity.

  A new and annoying habit has sneaked up on me, literally sneaked up while I sleep. I am grinding my teeth. I wake each morning to the scouring sound of it. It is most disturbing. I have set my mind on stopping it. Habits are the indulgence of weak-minded people.

  I blame Henry for it. His workmen crash about, banging and shouting, allowing their rubbish to blow onto the lawns and into the flower beds. I am forever picking up after them. It’s so stressful, I’m surprised not to be pulling my hair out, too.

  The mural is almost finished, and it’s no surprise to me that it looks as ghastly as I predicted.

  “Fi’s so talented, isn’t she,” Gloria says.

  Fi? Fi? I search around in my mind. Fiona, of course. I think of her as the mural girl, or Fiona, but I remember Gloria calling her Fi on Christmas Day.

  “More turkey, Fi? We’ll be eating it for days if you say no.”

  I cannot agree with Gloria that Fi is talented, so I just shrug my shoulders and raise my eyebrows. She knows I am not happy with what they have done to Mother’s room.

  Henry and Gloria coo over the mural, scary clown and all. They are in the throes of nesting, deciding
on cots, and buggies, and car seats. It doesn’t occur to them that things could go wrong. Not to them. Not to them and their little mango. They don’t want to know the sex of the child; it will be mango until it’s born.

  “We want to be surprised,” they say. “And we don’t mind whether it’s a boy or a girl.”

  Sweet, isn’t it?

  * * *

  SOMETIMES ON MY NIGHT wanders I stand in their so-called nursery and visualize how it was before Henry and Gloria started their meddling. I want to be sure when the time comes that everything will go back exactly as it was before. Exactly as it was before. The bed will be recovered from the outhouse, reassembled and dressed with its cream counterpane, which went so well with the soft blue curtains. I will find the same wallpaper, pink dog roses on an ivory background, have it copied if I must. I think there may be a spare roll or two in the attic. I shiver in pleasure at the idea of it, the peace I will feel when the circus nonsense has been seen off. And it won’t stop there, because it is not about Mother; it is about House. I will put back everything, return everything to how it was before their changes. The walls they have smashed through will be rebuilt, their gaudy colors will be returned to the soft, time-honored ones they obliterated.

  I haven’t been able to think of the big plan yet. Little things, though, are going my way. Henry just can’t understand why the spreadsheets he labored over with such diligence have disappeared from his computer. He is taking it in his stride, though, just as he is his broken spectacles, his missing car keys, his wallet that he is sure will turn up.

  I want him to feel jinxed. But he doesn’t, not yet anyway, and even if he did, it wouldn’t be enough. These little things are just not enough. Not nearly enough.

  “Ghosts about,” I say.

  “Never had you down as superstitious, Betty.”

  “Maybe this house is unlucky for you.”

  “You don’t believe that, surely.”

  He has no idea what I believe, what I am capable of. It doesn’t occur to Henry that I am a woman of passion, a woman that he will never get the better of. Henry is oblivious to the enemy he has in me.