Revenge of the Middle-Aged Woman

Chapter Seventeen

‘Hal!’

‘It is Rose. I wasn’t sure.’

His hair was longer than in the photograph, and better brushed, but ruined by sun. I don’t think, either, in the three years I knew him that I had ever seen Hal in a wing collar and a dinner jacket. He looked like a prosperous film producer.

The departing guests flowed around us like the Red Sea. I stood face to face with the person I had once loved more than anything on this earth and time performed one of its somersaults. I was transported back to the hot, airless hotel bedroom in Quetzl where, famished for every scrap of him, I lay on the bed and told him that I had chosen to live a different sort of life from his.

‘What are you doing here?’ I asked.

It was a silly question. Just as fazed as I, Hal replied, ‘I’m here as an author.’

I recovered my wits. ‘Of course, and your books are very successful.’

There was an awkward silence as we considered where, conversationally speaking, to venture next.

Typically, Hal took charge. ‘Have you got a minute? I think we need a drink.’ Without waiting for an answer, he tucked a hand under my elbow and we retraced our steps to the dining room where he cajoled two glasses of brandy from a surly waiter who wanted to go home.

The old confidence was still there, the quick, decided gestures, the impatience and the charm. He handed me a glass. ‘I read your review of A Thousand Olive Trees. Thank you.’

We sat down at an empty table. The waiters moved tiredly from one to another, whisking away the debris of wineglasses, crumpled napkins, half-eaten rolls and ice buckets filled with melting ice.

Hal smiled at me. ‘I’m not sure where we pick up, if that’s the right word.’

‘Probably “begin” is better.’

‘Yup, “begin”,’ he agreed. ‘It was a long time ago.’ He peered at me. ‘You don’t look so different.’

‘Neither do you.’ That was not quite true: close up, he was older and there was a scar on his chin that was new to me. I said, as calmly as I could, ‘I know you’ve been doing well. One of the most famous travel writers of your generation.’

‘So they tell me.’

He looked well, lean, fit and as if he was enjoying his life. Had he been spoilt? I could not tell but I was amused by my speculation, which was far more interesting than whether his beauty still made me dizzy. When I first met Hal the question of his moral texture was the last thing that interested me. Twenty-five years is such a drop of time – a snap of the fingers – but it is quite sufficient to have moved from one state to quite another and I wanted to know which.

He shrugged. ‘I had a hunch I might bump into you.’ His drawl was less marked than I remembered. ‘No, that’s not true. I asked the publicist if you might be here.’

‘Are you on a publicity tour?’

He looked at me for a long time. ‘I settled in the UK,’ he said, ‘after I got married. Amanda put up with me as best she could, then she pushed me out but I stayed here. I’d gotten used to being on an island.’ He tapped his nose. ‘If I’m honest, it’s nicer being a big fish in a small pond than vice versa. But, yes, I got what I wanted. I made a life that suited me. And you?’

The brandy glass felt cool in my hot hands. I chose equally cool and, I hoped, neutral words. ‘I’m between jobs.’

And?’

There seemed no point in prevaricating. ‘I’m afraid my husband and I have recently split up. He decided to live with someone else. I’m just getting used to the situation, then I’ll think again.’

Hal looked down at the contents of his brandy glass. ‘Was it worth it?’

This was an unfair question but it was wise to get it over and done with. ‘Yes. Yes, it was.’

‘So be it,’ he said.

I steered the conversation on to safer ground. ‘Where have you been lately?’

‘Supervising the digging of wells in Namibia. There’s an acute water shortage and no funds.’ He fingered his glass. ‘Next, though, is a return to the Yanomami territories. Remember them?’

I stiffened. ‘Of course.’

He leant forward until our faces almost touched. ‘One thing I’ve always wanted to know Did you have children in the end, Rose?’

‘Two. A son and a daughter. Did you?’

‘No, and I can’t make up my mind if that’s a relief or not.’

There was a thoughtful silence and I thought of many possible replies. Again, I chose the most neutral. ‘You had other things to do, Hal.’ I began to feel more comfortable with this encounter, and very curious. ‘Tell me about the olive farm in Italy’

He relaxed in the chair. ‘At the moment the house is a tip, but the country is beautiful. The trees need a bit of attention, which I’m hoping to give them.’ He drank some brandy. ‘Second question. Did that olive cutting ever take?’

‘It did. It’s in my garden.’

We caught each other’s eye, and shades of the young Hal and the young me rose between us, impudently demanding readmission. A waiter edged past the table with an armful of tablecloths and I concentrated on that. ‘Seems odd making small-talk with you,’ I said eventually.

‘OK. Let’s move it on. I often wonder…’

‘Don’t.’ I looked down at my ringless left hand.

Hal followed my train of thought. ‘You mustn’t fret.’ He spoke in the sweet, disarming way that I had known so well. ‘I don’t. Not a good idea.’

This was so Hal, and I laughed. ‘I knew you wouldn’t fret. I knew you would be glad, and you were. You were perfectly free to do as you wished.’

‘Yes and no.’ He placed his hand on my bare arm and the flesh pricked under his fingers. ‘I’m not saying I didn’t mind, Rose, because I did. But you taught me that you have to move on. You grow out of situations. They don’t suit any longer. It happens. Of course I don’t know the circumstances but you mustn’t castigate yourself He assessed the remains of the brandy in the glass. ‘If you can manage it, it’s best to see it as an opportunity.’

Hal was making it easy and I began to feel ridiculously light-hearted. ‘You haven’t changed a bit. My husband has run off with a younger woman and it’s opportunity knocking?’ I put my glass on the table and noted that it was almost empty. ‘That’s the kind of comment one makes years afterwards, when it’s all dead and past. But Mazarine – do you remember her? – would agree with you.’

‘So, you think it’s too calculating to view it in that way?’

‘Sort of.’

‘But you made a cold calculation when you left me.’ He spoke evenly and without malice.

‘Not cold, Hal.’ I looked up at him. ‘It seemed for the best of reasons at the time.’

He rolled the stem of the glass between his fingers. ‘I’m sorry you’ve had a bad time.’ He smiled gently. ‘Would your husband’s leaving have been less awful for you if the woman had been older rather than younger?’

‘God knows. Possibly. It’s useful having a hate figure, and if she’d been a nice hard-done-by widow, it’s possible I might have felt differently’ I brushed down the black dress over my knees. ‘Now the first shock is over I keep thinking about silly things, like how are we going to divide the china and who will take the gumboots? We have an archive of gumboots.’ I knew perfectly well I was veering from the point. ‘Actually, the woman, Minty, was my assistant and a friend, and while she was at it she took my job.’

He raised an eyebrow. ‘Go on. We’re making interesting small-talk.’

I took the last sustaining mouthful of brandy. ‘First I lost Nathan. That was bad enough. Then it was as if a wand had been waved and I was invisible. From having a settled position, as a wife and all that that meant, I was suddenly the blurred figure in the background of a painting or photograph. You know, one of the nameless ones left behind to sweep up the manure after Napoleon’s cavalcade has swept through. The ones who are asked to wait until last to climb on to the life raft. I don’t mind being a nameless one – probably very good for the soul – but it was a shock.’ Emptied of my brandy words, I peered at him. ‘Hal, am I talking sense? No, I don’t think I am, but never mind.’

The door to the dining room opened.

‘Hal,’ interrupted a voice, ’there you are. I’ve been looking for you.’

A publicist I vaguely recognized had stuck her head round the door. ‘I’ve got Jayson Verey from Carlton who wants to see you. Can you come?’

The room had grown chilly and, emptied of its glitter, depressing. I hugged my flowerpot handbag. The publicist looked uncertainly between Hal and me. ‘It’s Rose, isn’t it?’ Her forehead puckered. ‘I’m sure we’ve met.’

‘We have,’ I said. ‘You came to a Christmas party last year that I gave at the paper.’

‘Did I?’ Her face cleared. ‘Oh, of course.’

Hal got up, kissed my cheek and followed the girl out of the dining room. ‘I’ll see you,’ he said.

If I was asked to describe my mother I would reply that Ianthe was the kind of person who held vivid pictures in her mind that were no less sharp as she grew older. Young bride, happy wife and mother, the widow whose perpetual grief ratified the above. Your dad was everything. I don’t want to spoil it. I don’t want anyone else, Rose.

At first, I agreed with her position: no one could possibly have occupied my father’s chair and I loved to hear that he was irreplaceable and unique. It was only later, when my eye had become beadier, that I saw through it without understanding precisely what hampered my mother. Given Ianthe’s innate sympathy and skilful handling of men, her domestic genius and the constant terror of not making the pounds stretch, it was a deliberate waste. And why did she send us into exile down south?

‘I thought it would be easier near the big city,’ she told me. For you, she meant, the mother pelican plucking the feathers from her own breast to cushion her young. At the time, she was in the kitchen at Pankhurst Parade, mixing dough for scones. ‘Any road, home is where you make it.’ She flipped the scones on to the griddle. The kitchen was instantly flooded with a delectable smell. When they were cooked, she cut them in two, buttered them and slid the blue and white plate over to me.

But, for Ianthe, home was not down south. Home was where the drystone walls fanning up the dales resembled fish skeletons, and trees grew so close to the beck that their branches bent over and ruffled the water. When it rained, their bark turned black.

Ianthe could make scones or a steak and kidney pudding in her sleep. Her life of domesticity was as natural as breathing. At Medlars Cottage, she had coaxed vegetables and herbs out of the kitchen garden. The potatoes and carrots bore spots and blemishes, while the peas were tiny and tasted of sugar and earth. In the kitchen, she wore an apron that enveloped her tweed skirts and pastel-coloured jumpers and was tied in a bow at the back. At the sound of my father’s step in the evening, she whisked it off and ran her hand through her hair. In those days, it was short and permed into a halo.

After my father’s death, the log-pile diminished, the gutters clogged with leaves, the garden disintegrated and my hands sprouted chilblains. When I spread my fingers, the skin cracked open. More than once, I discovered Ianthe crying over her potatoes, which had developed blight, or the too-fatty scrag end of lamb that Jo at the butcher’s had sold her, thinking he could put one over on the widow. He would not have done that when she was a wife. Yet Ianthe accepted these rapidly accumulating limitations, and emulated the images she carried in her mind. Widowhood was pain. It was sacrifice and loss.

During this time, her perm grew out, leaving her hair lank and unlovely with grief and depletion. Settled in Pankhurst Parade, where there was no money to spare for a hairdresser, she gave up cutting it and put it up, which suited her better.

She knew what was what and defended her right to tackle the world with her set of rules. ‘That woman needs a good smack,’ she declared darkly, after listening to a production of Ibsen’s The Doll’s House on the radio. ‘He won’t ever settle,’ she said of Hal, her mouth set in a way that infuriated me. ‘Men like him don’t.’

We had quite an argument about it. From her standpoint, Ianthe waxed wrathful and terrible. But it was no use. I was deeply in love, wild with passion and the excitement of the venture into a new world, Hal’s world.

And during that third year at Oxford, my energy ran hot and strong and I worked myself into a stupor. ‘How nice to welcome her back,’ wrote my tutor. ‘We thought she had strayed on to other paths.’ In the spring before finals, I attended interviews for jobs. One was for a junior position in a press association where I was invited to discuss the changing nature of news. I argued that as hard news was now conveyed by radio and television, the papers should mop up other areas of interest. ‘It’s the age of the feature,’ I concluded, which seemed to go down well as I was offered a job – possibly because no one else would have been foolish enough to accept the meagre salary.

Of course Ianthe disapproved. She wanted me to opt for a steadier profession, like teaching. She did not trust or understand the media. At that period, she was the thorn in my flesh that pricked and jabbed, but I paid it no attention.

I got my first.

‘Right,’ said Hal, after the all-night celebration party. ‘We’re going on the Big One. The real expedition.’ He was feeding me with a hangover cure, teaspoon by teaspoon. Even though my head ached, my stomach heaved and a drum beat the retreat in my head, I watched his every movement with aching love. Above me, there was a blaze of candles, and angels swooped on feathery wings.

The teaspoon was inserted between my lips and I bit it. ‘Where precisely?’

Hal whipped away the teaspoon and kissed me. ‘Wait and see.’ He licked my chin and kissed me again, and we shared the hangover remedy in a very efficient way.

I was thinking about that time, when Nathan rang and asked to meet.

It was a hot, heavy day. I walked across the park to St Benedicta’s and parked myself in front of the Madonna dedicated to victims of violence. Did you overlook me? I interrogated her silently. I know you’re busy and death is epidemic but I’m selfish enough to wish you hadn’t.

I lit my usual candle and thought about it. But it’s fine, I reassured the wide, painted eyes. I have taken the point. With all the horrors you have to deal with I quite understand that the troubles of one no-longer-quite-so-young woman do not matter very much. I can cope.

I took the bus up to Mayfair and met Nathan in a bar just off Berkeley Square. It was an area where shops sold either expensive briefcases and credit-card holders or newspapers in various languages, but nothing in between.

Nathan was late and arrived with his executive expression pinned into place. He stacked his briefcase under the stool. ‘Sorry. Budget meetings.’

‘How’s it all going?’

‘Fair to middling. The Sunday paper is still in a bit of a dip.’

‘Are you doing any promotions?’

‘Well, that’s just…’ He looked at me sharply. ‘We didn’t come here to discuss the paper.’

‘No.’

‘I saw you at the dinner.’

‘Did you? I didn’t think you had.’ I added, with only the faintest tremor in my voice, ‘You seemed to be enjoying yourself.’

‘Did I?’ he replied. Automatic pilot’ A second or two elapsed. Nathan blew at the foam on his coffee. It spattered the counter. ‘Who was the man you were talking to?’

I mopped the counter with a paper napkin. ‘Lawrence Thurber, the theatre critic’ I considered my next sentence. ‘Or do you mean Hal Thorne, who I bumped into afterwards?’

Nathan became fixated by a lorry backing up the road. ‘Hal Thorne.’ He sighed. ‘Well, as you said, that was a long time ago.’ He kept his eye trained on the lorry. ‘I’ve been thinking…’ Another great pause. ‘Now that I’ve had a chance to think things over, I can see that I overreacted… to him.’

This was Nathan at his most disingenuous and I began to tremble. So much time had been wasted on the subject. For nothing. ‘Oh, Nathan. Do you know what you did? Introducing a great black spectre?’ My nail dug into my thumb. ‘Now do you believe me that, very early on, Hal disappeared? He went because I was happy’ I peered at him. ‘With you, Nathan.’

He winced. ‘I could never quite rid myself of the suspicion that your point of reference was not me but him.’ He stirred his coffee and pushed it away. ‘That’s not true. It was fine to begin with but when you started working I felt you were telling me that you weren’t happy’

‘Nathan, all I wanted was to use my mind. That was not a criticism of you.’

‘It was natural, I suppose.’ He sighed. ‘Then I began thinking about my own life, and later…’

‘Later what?’

‘I met Minty.’

‘And she came with no baggage?’

He shrugged. ‘But why did you talk about him?’

‘I didn’t.’

‘You told Minty about him. She told me. That set me off again. Started it all up.’

I said furiously, ‘It didn’t occur to you that Minty made a point of telling you? That she meant you to get the wrong idea?’

‘No need to lose your temper.’

The coffee machine hissed and gushed. Customers drifted in and out of the bar. I dropped my head into my hands. From a minor reference, a light exchange of confidence, something much bigger had – apparently – grown. ‘Nathan, everyone comes with something from the past.’

I raised my head. Nathan was staring at me. Slowly he put out a hand and touched my shoulder, his hand just grazing my breast. It was an old gesture that I loved. ‘Did he do that to you?’

I turned my face away.

‘Rose.’ Nathan withdrew into his formal office manner. ‘I’m sorry about the Hal problem. I think it was because I’m so bad at discussing these sort of things, and he seemed convenient and easy to latch on to. I used the idea of him.’

I closed my eyes. ‘How could you?’

‘We all do stupid things. Even you, Rose.’ He reached for his briefcase and produced a sheaf of papers. ‘I’ve made some lists… about things and how we should divide them. Take them away and see if you agree. I’m open to negotiation. We also have to talk about the house.’ He pushed the papers over to me. I glanced down but left them on the counter.

I should be saying, Please, let’s think again. Let’s try. In accepting the lists I was accepting that Nathan and I were finished.

‘Please look at them,’ he said coldly.

The balance had altered. Something had been smashed out of existence, and I could not put it back together again. And, yes, I had done a stupid thing. I had not noticed that Nathan and I were drifting. We had been at the stage of taking each other for granted yet we had not reached the stage when we were strong enough that it was no longer dangerous. Our keener edges had blunted, and I had stopped searching to keep us in balance… or, rather, I had not made allowances for Nathan changing and, thus, trapped him and denied him air.

I put out my hand and picked up the lists. Chairs and the sofa to him. Mirrors and the blue chair to me. ‘I’m not sure,’ I said. ‘I’ll see.’ I looked up at Nathan. ‘I’m not ready yet.’

He shifted on the stool. ‘You must take your time, of course.’

‘Thank you.’ This small courtesy was comforting, a tiny straw at which to grasp, and I glimpsed a time in the future when it might be possible to face each other peacefully.

Then I spoilt it. The state of Nathan’s shirt had been puzzling me – it was not properly ironed. I leant over and fingered the crumpled collar. ‘Don’t you have an iron at Minty’s flat?’

Nathan pulled irritably at it. ‘Minty is not one of nature’s ironers. It was her turn… and I tried to show her… you know, about shirts.’

‘Did you? And what did Minty say?’

Nathan seemed baffled. ‘When I explained that the trick is to iron from the yoke outwards, she threw it back at me.’

‘Well I never. The free spirit.’

He jerked the lock of his briefcase shut. ‘One minute women are saying one thing, then they’re demanding the opposite. They want to be noticed, they demand homage. Then we provide it, and find ourselves accused of rape or of some fearful transgression against their rights. They say they want us to be free, and they want to be free, and, saps that we are, we believe them.’

‘Oh dear,’ I said. ‘It didn’t take long.’

Angry and hostile, we slid down from our precarious perches on the stools and went our separate ways.