I want him, I want him not, I want him …
Isn’t she a bit old to be sitting cross-legged on the grass in Regent’s Park plucking petals off a daisy?
What’s the flower you pluck to see if you’re too old to be plucking it?
As a schoolgirl she played this game with cherry stones. Shiny cherries, round and sweet. Count your cherry stones, who will you meet? But it was a bit late for that. She’d already met him.
One thing she is just the right age for is a week in a wellness centre in the south of France listening to whale music.
‘There’s a lot of stiffness in your shoulders,’ the masseur tells her.
‘You don’t say!’
‘Comment?’
‘That’s what I’m here for you to fix,’ she shouldn’t have to explain.
But she knows there’s no fixing what’s really wrong. Short of—
Once, parents with enough money to act promptly on their fears would send wayward daughters abroad under the supervision of a chaperone, or escort them out of harm’s way themselves. Once might suggest a far-distant era of sexual anxiety, but it was more recently that Lily’s mother had led her teenage daughter away – ‘in chains’ was how Lily described it in her diary at the time – from scandal and heartbreak. They had crossed the Channel by ferry then travelled through France by train, her mother never letting go of her wrists, she in tears for the whole journey, until the light of Juan-les-Pins and the smiles of waiters roused her spirits, whereupon her mother had to decide whether it wouldn’t be better, all things considered, to take her back home.
Lily had brought it on herself. ‘How does one know when one’s in love with someone?’ she’d made the mistake of asking her mother.
‘One?’
‘A woman. How does a woman know?’
‘You’re not a woman.’
‘I will be next year.’
‘Then ask me then.’
Lily skipped away, pretending to be a little girl. But her mother knew the signs. For her own part, she’d decided with such finality not to be – not to be in love with her husband any longer, late in the piece though that was – that her family had wondered whether a change of air wouldn’t do her good too. She hadn’t left him for another man. Strictly speaking she hadn’t left him at all. Just pushed him away, not so far that he couldn’t occasionally see his daughter if he so wished – and, more importantly, if she so wished – but far enough so that he would never see his wife again.
Countless are the ways a husband might contrive to betray his wife. And countless were the ways – she had tried to count them, so she knew – a woman might forgive or tolerate her husband. But this husband had failed the most fundamental test of decency and not kept himself physically clean. He had returned from a business trip – some business trip! – not with his head full of another woman but with his body full of lice. She didn’t mean it in the slightest bit fancifully when she vowed to disinfect the house of all trace of him. ‘I knew you to be a louse in your own person,’ were her final words to him, ‘what I cannot tolerate is your being the bearer of other people’s.’
He knew not to try his famously handsome smile, so bowed his head and left, scratching himself for shame. There’s something about contracting a low-grade infection that will make even the most irresponsible of men wish they’d stayed away from home a little longer.
Thereafter, Lily’s mother occasionally allowed herself to be taken by an admirer to a romantic restaurant. Less frequently she would let one of them into her bed. It was hard to rid her imagination of disgust or her body of the horror of contact. And she had a growing daughter to instruct by example.
She sent her to an obscure all-girls public school in a leafy suburb of Northamptonshire. Nothing was risk-free: the girl might form an infatuation for a teacher there or put her arms around another girl when the lights went out, but on balance these were small, hygienic transgressions. Soon, rumour reached her that her daughter had been caught trying to climb out of the dorm window in the dead of night to keep an assignation with the gardener. The girl denied anything had happened. Three separate doctors confirmed her story. She bore no sign, other than a small brown tooth mark on her neck, such as a hamster might have left, of advanced lovemaking.
‘Then you’ve been lucky,’ her mother had said.
‘No, I have not,’ she answered. ‘I’ve been careful. Despite what you think’ – forgive her, she was of that age when girls find it necessary to shock their mothers – ‘I’m not that desperate to be penetrated.’
She was speaking the truth. She wanted to be held, kissed gently and precisely – she hated being smothered in wet, approximate kisses – and talked to about serious things. Even the bite she could have done without.
But bitten she had been, and the next thing she was in Juan-les-Pins, where, managing to slip her mother, she found a nightclub, danced until the early hours – dancing being her first passion – and was bitten again.
It isn’t for a repeat of the experience that, nearly thirty years later, she has taken herself away. The adage that one nail drives out another might have been true for her teenage self, but the last thing she is looking for now is the distraction of another lover before she knows what status to accord the current contender.
Contender! Did she just say contender? For what? Her heart? Her hand? Her bed?
Foolish girl, she thinks. Foolish woman.
So what has she taken herself away for?
A few quiet days, that’s all. Some sunshine. A lounger to read a book on. A soothing massage.
In the event she is enticed out to a bar by a pretty Italian boy who changes the towels at the spa. He must be no more than half her age, knows his way around the cocktail menu and dances well. She wonders, after the first couple of dances, whether he knows somewhere a bit more seedy.
‘Seedy?’
‘Low. Disreputable. A dive.’
‘Dive’ he knows.
But he’s surprised. She doesn’t look a dive sort of woman.
‘Careful,’ her mother used to say to her, after the house had been cleaned – and not just of her father – ‘you’re walking it all back in.’
They were in a state of constant war about her carelessness in the matter of walking it all back in. ‘Walk all what back in, Ma?’
Her mother didn’t think she had to go into details. All that was out there that she didn’t want to see walked in. The dirty world.
The girl took after her in the end. ‘Careful,’ she shouts to the man with whom she shares a house. ‘You’re walking it all back in.’
When it doesn’t make him furious, he laughs about it. She would like to laugh about it herself, but can’t. She hates dirt, dust, dross – everything that should stay out there coming into her space. But when she is out there herself it’s different. It’s what makes her a good documentary-maker, her fascination with life she knows nothing about and wouldn’t want in her house. So long as she’s already out there, the dirtier the world she encounters, the better.
The boy from the spa makes the wholly understandable error of confusing her request to be taken somewhere disreputable with a desire to be disreputable herself. In the malodorous dark of an immigrant jazz cellar he presses himself upon her. It’s all very flattering. Why not?
But then again, why?
She hasn’t changed much from the girl who assured her mother that penetration was not top of her to-do list. She doesn’t hate it – unless it’s hour-long, jack-hammer penetration which makes her sore and causes her ears to pop – just doesn’t go overboard for it. There are many things men want to do to her, or want her to do to them, that she doesn’t especially dislike but can take or leave alone. Once she can’t see their faces there isn’t a lot remaining that she does want to see.
‘We could either dance or leave,’ she says, squeezing the boy’s shoulder companionably. Her great skill is to refuse without giving offence.
He doesn’t much like being here himself. He too has a mother who has warned him against walking it all back in.
They leave.
She spends a day on the beach making a list. It was something her mother had taught her to do. Make a list of what you’re going to wear the day before you go somewhere special. Make a list of the necessary contents of your suitcase before you pack it. Make a list of the qualities of someone you’re thinking of going out with – for and against. Lily doesn’t say her mother’s list didn’t help much with her own choice of husband.
Lily writes down what the new man in her imagination has going for him and what he hasn’t.
| PRO | CON |
|---|---|
| Hair | Married |
| Voice | |
| Shoulders | |
| Pheromones | |
| Vocabulary | |
| Syntax |
She returns to Muswell Hill rested and browner than when she left, but when her old university friend Amaryllis asks her if anything exciting happened while she was away she is being entirely honest when she scratches her head and says, no, nothing that springs to mind.
‘I don’t believe you,’ Amaryllis says. ‘You’ve got fireworks going off in your eyes. Who did you meet? What’s he like?’
‘Amaryllis, do you really think a woman my age can find a man interesting? I have more important things to think about.’
‘A woman your age? Lily, you’re the same age as me and I’m still waiting to grow up. Look at you! Your legs are like a schoolgirl’s. I bet you can still fit into your old hockey skirt. And as for there being more important things to think about, we both know there are none.’
Lily suspected Amaryllis of having being in love with Hal since they were all students together. Was she waiting for Lily to move aside? How could Lily tell her that wasn’t necessary. Just take whatever delights your fancy, Amaryllis. I’m busy.