AS SHE DRIVES home Kat is feeling slightly guilty. She likes Jerry – it’s so easy to connect with him – yet she is wondering whether he has the right temperament for a flirtation. Their talk is effortless; he loves the theatre. It’s so good to make him laugh, to gasp and stretch his eyes, to fall in with new ideas and concepts.
Yet she suspects that, deep down, Jerry is a conventional soul. He’s stepped out of his comfort zone by buying a modern flat and is experimenting with a re-emerging personality that has been overlaid with marriage and fatherhood. He’s beginning to build a new life with new friends and he’s ready to embrace something exciting and different.
What she can’t decide is whether this is a vulnerable time for him when he should be protected from himself. Perhaps, after all, the woman in the café would be better for him.
Whizzing along the main road on her way home, Kat can’t helping laughing to herself. Jerry had several glasses of wine and grew more loquacious, inviting her to the cinema later this week at Dartington.
‘Love to,’ she said at once. ‘How about tomorrow?’ – and could see that he was slightly taken aback and incredibly pleased, rather as if he were a teenager and this were his first date.
Unlike Gyorgy or Miche, Jerry has a gentleness about him that is terribly attractive. She is used to driven, selfish artists who are ready to sacrifice anybody to their creations. There is nothing ruthless about Jerry. She’s well aware that his admiration is feeding her ego, that she likes the early indication of devotion in his eyes. He is flattered by the attention of Irina Bulova, which, in turn, is feeding his ego.
He asked her about Gyorgy, about the music he’d composed for her, and she tried to describe the magic between them that informed his music and her choreography.
‘You must miss him, all of it, dreadfully,’ he said, not mawkishly but with an intensity of understanding.
In that moment she was swamped with the bitter pain of missing and longing but she caught herself up and stretched out a hand to him. He hesitated, just for a second as if surprised, and then took her hand between both of his warm ones.
‘Yes I do. Terribly.’
He chafed her hand and then let it go, as if he didn’t quite know what to do with it.
‘It’s the same for you, though, isn’t it?’ she asked, remembering his conversation with Sandra in the Thrive Café. There are photographs of his wife and his family on the shelf and he instinctively glanced towards them.
‘Yes. Yes, of course.’
They were silent, as if the ghosts of their former loves and lives were hovering near them. She could feel his unease and wondered how to restore the earlier light-heartedness.
‘So this film, then,’ she said, picking up her glass. ‘Shall we meet in the Roundhouse?’
‘Yes,’ he agrees. ‘Or in the White Hart?’
‘That would be good,’ she says at once. ‘We can have a drink in the bar and then wander over to the Barn. Lovely.’
Yet she was aware of a subtle shift in the atmosphere, as though that invocation of their past lives had altered the dynamic. It was time to go. She finished her drink and got to her feet.
He stood up quickly, not certain if he should try to persuade her to stay, not knowing quite how they should part. She could sense him wondering if they should shake hands, kiss briefly, or just smile. His anxiety touched her heart. Forty-odd years of happy marriage hadn’t equipped him with the knowledge of how to conduct an affair.
‘Thanks for the drink.’ She brushed his cheek very quickly and lightly with her lips. ‘Saved my life. See you tomorrow. Six thirty-ish.’
She hadn’t looked back at him, still standing at the open door, but hurried away down the stairs.
Now, Kat turns off into the lane that passes the Staverton Bridge Nursery, crosses the river, and slows down as the level crossing gates swing closed. A steam-engine clatters past and she sits watching it, thinking about Jerry.
‘Cruelty to dumb animals, darling,’ she says to herself.
This was a saying Gyorgy always used when she’d flirted with young men who were dazzled by her fame. As Kat waits for the gates to be opened she wonders what Jerry is doing; what he is thinking.
‘It’s just a visit to the cinema,’ she mutters defensively, as though Gyorgy is listening. ‘How can that possibly be a problem?’
Jerry is standing staring at the photograph of Veronica, who gazes back at him, holding one grandchild in her arms and another by the hand. The photograph is nearly fifteen years old and Vee is wearing her motherly smile. It manages to be happy, commanding and confident all at once.
He studies it. Is there reproach in that steady gaze? He thinks of Vee, back then, when on those odd social occasions he’d drunk more than usual or paid slightly too much attention to a pretty woman. Glancing around – flushed with a sense of wellbeing, with pleased surprise at his ready wit – he’d meet that steady gaze across a dining-table, across a room full of revellers, and he’d know exactly what Vee was thinking. ‘You’re making a prat of yourself, Jerry.’ That glance was the equivalent of a douche of cold water and generally restored him to his senses very quickly.
And, he reminds himself now, he was always very glad of Vee’s restraining influence. She was quite right. He was too susceptible to flattery, too delighted when he made an attractive woman laugh. She’d prevented him from making a fool of himself.
He can imagine what Vee would be saying to him now, and a part of him knows that she would be right, but this time he doesn’t want to hear it.
‘It’s just a visit to the cinema,’ he mutters, turning away, picking up Kat’s empty glass. ‘How can that possibly be a problem?’