Chapter Seven

Glyn stood back on the path to check that he’d put the bean poles in straight. The designer-crafted gardens he’d seen in smart magazines were currently favouring decorative wigwam-style arrangements, usually placed in symmetrically balanced corners of the garden or arranged centrally on beds as a focal point (‘edging, filling and height’ were the potager buzz-words). Stubbornly he preferred to stick with the traditional approach: a long structure like a denuded scout tent, using plain, fuss-tree bamboo cane held together with plain green string. ‘The beans don’t give a toss about fancy scaffolding,’ he murmured to himself as he tied the last pole firmly into place. With luck, and with a good pitched battle against slugs and snails, it wouldn’t be long before the whole thing disappeared from view beneath a mat of glossy bean leaves anyway.

The fresh air and the effort had given Glyn an aching back but new energy. When he’d finished in the garden, instead of going into the house to clean off the mud, he took a wander down the lane towards the field where Rita’s goats were bleating softly just the other side of the wall. As he approached their noise grew louder and he heard the little ones scampering eagerly towards the gate, excited by the sound of his footsteps and the anticipation of attention and food. ‘Hello babies,’ he murmured to them, crouching down to stroke the pair of black and white heads that nuzzled eagerly into his hand. Behind them, their mother watched him warily, her eyes mistrusting.

‘Cute, aren’t they?’ Rita, in a swirling purple patched velvet skirt, appeared next to him and joined him petting the goats. ‘Both billies, sadly, but that’s the way it is sometimes. I can’t keep them, but I’m enjoying them for now. Perhaps we’ll get a pair of girls next time.’

‘Why can’t you keep the boys?’ Glyn asked without thinking. Rita’s great open-mouthed roar of a laugh sent the little creatures scuttling back to their mother. ‘Well, you can take the man out of the town, but you can’t take the town out of the man!’ she teased. ‘Milk, my dear, that’s why. You’d soon find out the difference if you started milking this pair’s father!’

Glyn straightened up, conscious of a twinge in his back from the work on the bean poles. ‘Aching?’ Rita was behind him instantly, one hand resting on his stomach (vanity immediately made him pull in his muscles), the heel of her other kneading into his spine just where it met his pelvis.

‘Mmm. How did you know just the right spot?’

‘It’s obvious. You’re a gardener, I’m a witch. No really,’ she laughed, ‘just common sense. It’s where everyone aches when they overdo the bending.’ She stopped rubbing and turned him to face her. ‘I could do you a wondrous rub with some delicious oils.’

Glyn looked at her warily, wishing he didn’t feel such outdated suspicion. Why did the idea of massage always seem somehow smutty to him? He was born in the wrong age. Kitty had had a course of aromatherapy massages just after Christmas and deemed it the most relaxing, calming experience ever. He just thought of tatty-edged postcards advertising Busty Swedish Models and a fast-fisted toss-off euphemistically described as Relief.

‘Yes? No?’ Rita persisted, hands on her broad velvet hips.

‘Yes,’ he agreed simply, wondering what on earth he was letting himself in for.

‘Right.’ Rita became businesslike. ‘You go home and shower the garden off you, wrap a towel round and present yourself on that big soft rug on your sitting-room floor in exactly twenty minutes. I’ll go and get the stuff. Trust me,’ she said, seeing his face registering alarm, ‘you’ll be making a weekly booking.’

When the train pulled into Richmond Kitty felt almost too exhausted to stand up and get off. She felt depressed and lethargic, wishing she was back home and walking on the beach where the air was sharp and energizing. Other passengers, with more sense of immediate purpose, pushed past her up the stairs, running to be first for the taxis and the bus queue. Outside the late afternoon was full of mild spring warmth and Kitty stopped by the flower stall and bought a big bunch of exuberantly over-frilled pink parrot tulips for Julia. She sniffed at them and their sappy scent reminded her that she missed Glyn and the earthy smell of things that grow that he seemed to carry with him all the time these days. All those things she’d said that day to the counsellor, she wondered how Glyn would have reacted if she’d sat him down and talked to him for an hour in the same way. How interested could he have been in a conversation about baby hair and a twenty-four-year sense of loss?

As she walked along the streets where so many gardens were enjoying the short spectacular blooming of plump magnolias, she wondered how long he’d have been able to sit still and silent and listen. Not for long, probably. Men looked squeamish when you started on birth stories. Rita had once said that they got that screwy-eyed look, as if you were about to produce (and possibly eat) a preserved piece of livery old placenta. Glyn might have looked at his watch, the way he used to do with the difficult ones on parents’ nights who wanted a good half-hour more on the geography curriculum. But she should have tried, she realized, at least once.

Petroc and Lily had phoned to check with Surfline for the possibility of waves and taken their boards over to the north coast on the offchance that the optimistic recorded message wasn’t out of date. Glyn was glad they weren’t there to see him wandering the house wrapped only in a towel, pretending it was the sort of thing he did all the time, like some slick executive at a city gym. He felt rather foolish and part of him hoped Rita wouldn’t bother to come. That would be the best thing, and then neither of them need mention the word massage ever again. Barefoot, chilled and with his aching back stiffening by the minute, Glyn went into the kitchen and started emptying the dishwasher, simply for something to do. He wondered if he should at least have put on some underwear. Perhaps she assumed he’d know you were supposed to, but then if he wasn’t properly naked he’d feel silly if she then teased him for being pathetically over-modest, so uptight and English. She seemed to be taking an awfully long time.

‘Hi! Sorry I was so long. Josh needed help moving a heap of wood across the barn.’ Rita strode in, bringing with her a scent of lavender and damply rotting oak. Glyn inhaled deeply, savouring country smells, earth smells.

‘I knew that rug would be just right,’ Rita told him, taking his hand and leading him like a child across his own sitting-room. ‘Be careful how you lie down, go onto your side and roll carefully onto your front using your hand for support.’

‘You’ve done this before,’ he said, following her instructions.

‘Well of course I have. You wouldn’t want some hopeless beginner pummelling your flesh would you?’

Firmly but gently Rita arranged Glyn’s arms beneath him and placed his head sideways on his hands. ‘You’re very tense,’ she commented, rubbing the back of his neck and feeling for his vertebrae. ‘Completely knotted. Obviously under strain.’

Glyn breathed out and tried to relax. ‘Kitty’s gone to London.’

‘About the adopted baby?’

‘You knew?’ His head shot up and he found his face disconcertingly close to her knee. She was squatting beside him, the velvet skirt ridden up and showing winter-pale bare legs. She’d taken off her shoes and her large scruffy toes looked bony and vulnerable. The nails were horny and yellowed as if they’d endured a lifetime of nicotine stains.

‘Of course I knew. We had a chat about whether she should go ahead or not. Did you think she wouldn’t tell me? Or shouldn’t have?’

Rita was burrowing in a deep bag, pulling out jars and bottles and doing a lot of pouring and mixing. The smell of almonds filled the air. Glyn, for a ridiculous moment, had the impression that she was going to use paint on his body, paint that would be indelible and show just where her hands had been. Not that it would matter, because this was all above board in a hippy kind of way that he’d missed out on all these years.

‘Lie down properly and relax. I’m just going to go over you with a bit of this.’ Glyn tried not to tense as Rita took hold of his left foot. She kneaded quite hard at the base of his toes and he twitched. ‘Ssh. It’s OK,’ she soothed. He looked up at the shelf over the fireplace. Things looked strange from floor level – it must be years since he’d lain down on the rug like this. He could see a chip out of the china on the underside of the big green vase of white daffodils in front of the mirror over the shelf, and the school photo of Lily that she’d been unusually proud of looked strangely distorted from that angle.

‘Aren’t you curious about her, then?’ Rita asked, moving her hand up his right calf. Wherever her hands went his skin became warm and glowing, as if she was slowly cooking him with contact.

‘About this old baby? I haven’t been asked that before. I suppose I am.’

‘What do you mean you haven’t been asked? Surely you and Kitty have talked about it, what it’ll mean if the girl ever turns up?’

Glyn felt Rita’s hands shoving hard against his back. He relaxed against them, feeling that he was letting out more than aches and tension. ‘No. We haven’t,’ he said, closing his eyes. Strangely they felt as if they might contain tears. His body was warm and tingling all over now and he felt cared for, cherished.

‘It might affect you more than any of them, Kitty, Lily and Petroc.’ Rita’s soft voice was close to his ear. ‘They’re the ones who know where they stand.’ She understood. He’d hardly had to say anything. ‘Turn over now,’ she commanded.

Glyn rolled over smoothly and easily, grinning to himself that the ease of movement made him feel like an oiled machine, albeit a machine that now smelled of lavender. Rita started work on his face, stroking away gently and lovingly. Glyn breathed smoothly and contentedly. If he was a cat, he thought as she moved down his body, he’d be purring. Without him noticing her move she seemed suddenly to be down at his feet, her hands working their way up his calves and on up his thighs. The only stiffness he now felt was in his cock, huge and hard, he was sure, as the Lizard lighthouse. He sighed contentedly as she slid the towel away and moved softly up astride him. Rita’s oiled hands stroked the length of his straining penis with the same soothing skill that she’d used on his aching body and then she lowered herself and her naked velvet thighs on top of him. Her pubic hair tickled his balls deliciously as she took him into her body as if it was the most simple, natural continuation of the massage, her hands working his chest while her hips moved harder against his as their breath and bodies accelerated the pace together.

‘How’s your back now?’ Rita asked later as Glyn tried to stop grinning.

‘Fine. Thank you.’ He opened his eyes and looked up at her. She was off him now, putting the towel back in place like a nurse sensitive to dignity. ‘Do you . . .’ he started.

‘No, of course not. Not always, only when it’s therapeutically called for.’ Her grin was teasing.

‘No consequences,’ she then said to him as she packed away her potions. ‘No telling, no guilt and no regrets, OK?’

‘OK,’ Glyn agreed drowsily. He’d been entirely (and literally) in her hands and hadn’t even considered guilt and regret. Later he was sure he would – whichever way you looked at it, however generously peace-love-and-sharing Rita was about all this, he’d cheated on Kitty and he’d never done that before. But for now he was just shamefully delighted to have all his best prejudices confirmed. Massage really could be just the most devastatingly sexy event.

‘You remember Kitty, of course, don’t you Ben? Seeing as you went out with her once or twice, so Julia tells me.’ Rose, her long folding body seeming to angle itself against both walls of Julia’s narrow hallway, was looking coolly at her husband as if noting his reaction for later use. Rose was wearing high green satin shoes that Kitty had seen in a Vogue feature on Manolo Blahnik and which made Ben, beside her, look rather shorter and more square than she remembered him.

‘Of course I do,’ Ben said, putting out a polite hand to shake hers. Kitty took it and it felt damp like a fish. This was the man with whom she’d had her first orgasm, remote and courteous now like someone about to discuss the drawing-up of a will.

‘I can almost see the mists of non-recognition clearing from your face,’ Kitty laughed. She’d been wrong about his hair, which seemed as thick and as present as it had when he was nineteen, though it was lacking colour strength, like a cheap dark teeshirt that’s been washed too much. He was still ‘average’ in girth, but in the substantial way more suited to a man of fortyish than one of twenty. His face had kept its slightly soft pudgy look, like a very old baby and with eyes that were wide open enough to make him look as if he was permanently alarmed. That was probably the result of all those years with Rosemary-Jane. She caught sight of her own reflection in the hall mirror and wondered how much of the teenager was left in her.

They went through to the sitting-room and Julia started bustling with the drinks. Rose paced about the room, inspecting Julia’s décor, feeling the curtain fabric and idly picking a couple of petals from the large blue hydrangea on the desk in the window. ‘That’s a lovely shade of pink you’ve had the wallspainted,’ she commented. ‘You can get away with pink if you don’t live with a man.’

Ben sat on the edge of the cream sofa opposite Kitty, looking nervous. ‘I’m supposed to say you haven’t changed a bit, I think,’ he said, not quite quietly enough for Rose to miss.

‘Well go on then,’ Rose urged, prodding Ben in the ribs with a long purple fingernail till he flinched. ‘Say it.’

‘He can’t, don’t be silly,’ Kitty said. ‘Nor can I. I mean last time we met I had waist-length hair and Ben was, well . . .’

‘Thinner?’ Rose suggested, her eyebrows raised.

‘Well, yes, but then we all were then. Real no-muscle thin. Even most young people aren’t that skinny these days. No, what I was going to say was that back then he was into glam-rock eye-shadow and skinny leather trousers.’ Ben groaned into his gin and tonic. ‘Oh don’t . . .’ She grinned at him. ‘Sorry if you’d rather not be reminded.’ The phone rang and Julia darted into the kitchen. Kitty sipped her drink, wondering if the whole evening was to be spent in surface chat and half-accurate reminiscing. Only Julia could honestly believe that people who hadn’t seen each other for such a long time would be sure to fall into deep and fascinating conversation the second they met up again, as if they’d been waiting all this time for just that moment. A devil in her wanted to blurt out that she’d spent two hours discussing the birth of Ben’s daughter in north London that morning, but Julia had gone to a lot of trouble with a complicated sea bass recipe and could do without flashy distraction.

‘Men. They’re so unreliable aren’t they?’ Julia hurtled back into the room looking flustered. ‘He can’t come, Martin from up the road! He waits till now to tell me! He says he’s got an urgent presentation to prepare for work tomorrow and he’s very sorry.’ She poured herself a large glass of wine and gulped at it. ‘Very sorry. Huh. Well I’m sorry Ben, it’s just you and we three women. I hope you don’t mind too much.’ She smiled at him prettily, daring him to say that yes, he did mind.

‘Just you and Macbeth’s three witches then darling,’ Rose drawled from the depths of the most comfortable chair. Kitty could just see Ben’s left eyelid twitching.

‘And they’re having a party next door, the people on the corner,’ Julia went on.

‘Oh, can’t we go to that?’ Rose asked tactlessly. Julia glared at her. ‘Actually, it’s rather insulting, they called round earlier to apologize in advance and said there’d be quite a lot of noise but they couldn’t ask me to go to it because they knew it wouldn’t be my sort of thing.’ She finished her glass of wine very quickly, tipping her head back too fast so that ruby drops slid down her chin and were hastily smeared off with the back of her hand. Kitty feared for the safe cooking of the fish. ‘I mean they hardly know me, so how can they tell I wouldn’t enjoy it? They’ve put masking tape all over the kitchen windows too, so I can’t see in. As if I’d look . . . They’re no younger than us, they’re professional types like me and I can hear their music and it’s the same sort of rock classics and opera mixture that I like . . .’

‘Don’t take it personally Julia, they might be having karaoke night with their tennis-club cronies or a reunion of last year’s Club Med in Sardinia. No-one would want to see that. You’ve probably had a very lucky escape,’ Kitty soothed.

‘Yes you’re right,’ Julia conceded. ‘Who needs them? Now come through to the kitchen and let’s eat.’

Kitty was sitting opposite Ben. As she was taking her first forkful of prosciutto, she caught his eye and he smiled at her, a shy, secret smile, too reminiscent of how he’d looked as a sixth-former. It looked most odd on a man over forty, too much as if he was trying to be coy in a way that his mummy might have been thrilled by when he was little. Her mind went way back to a conversation they’d had years ago, lying on the grass in the local park watching parents with young children. ‘Don’t you think everyone looks like an animal?’ he’d said. ‘That woman must have been a squirrel once, and that curly little kid looks just like a poodle.’ Then he’d stroked her face, gazing at her just about as fondly as any eighteen-year-old girl could hope for in a boyfriend, and said, ‘You look a bit like a Shetland pony.’ Kitty munched her rocket salad and remembered that she hadn’t felt particularly insulted. You took sentences like that and extracted the best possible way of interpreting. If he’d smiled nastily and told her she was snakelike she’d simply have chosen from that the smooth, slinky and lithe attributes. She’d had shaggy blond hair back then, which might just look a bit mane-ish, and she assumed Shetland ponies had large limpid eyes with massive lashes. She’d been careful not to blurt out that he reminded her of a rabbit. He wouldn’t have liked that and she’d been careful with his feelings.

‘I’m supposed to set fire to this . . .’ Julia slurred over the sea bass as she poured a reckless amount of Pernod over it. ‘Says it needs flambéeing. S’old-fashioned, like steak Diane, ‘member that? Who was Diane d’you think?’

‘You can’t do that Jules, you’re too pissed. Let Ben do it,’ Rose said, shoving Ben hard in the side again. His poor bruised ribcage must look like someone had spilled ink on it, Kitty thought, grimacing in sympathy. Dutifully, he got up and went to Julia’s aid ‘Sit. down, I’ll finish it off for you.’

‘And I’ll get the potatoes out of the oven,’ Kitty said, joining in.

‘I’ll just stay here and be an admiring audience with Julia.’ Rose poured herself and Julia another glass of wine. ‘Do you remember that time we got Antonia drunk on the school trip to Blenheim?’ she giggled.

‘You’re not to speak ill of the dead,’ Julia warned.

‘What’s ill? Apart from Antonia. Ill and dead! And God, was she ill!’ They fell against each other, convulsed with giggles. Kitty put the dish of boulangère potatoes on the table and sat looking at them. She remembered the incident well enough. ‘And she drank all of it!’ Julia was shrieking, ‘it was her own fault.’

‘Shouldn’t have been so greedy. If she’d sipped it she’d have tasted the rum in the Coke.’

‘She nearly got expelled,’ Kitty reminded them.

‘She probably only drank it at all because she thought we were being nice to her.’

‘Should have known better by then,’ Julia spluttered.

‘Wasn’t it a horrid mess, all that sick on the coach? It kept sliding about,’ Rose giggled. Tears had spread her mascara down her cheeks and it had caught in the fine lines of her skin, just like, Kitty thought, seaweed stuck in the ripples on the sand.

‘Anyone got a match?’ Ben was still playing with the bass, pushing it here and there with a spatula the way Glyn always did with anything on a barbecue.

‘Here.’ Rose handed him her gold lighter, not looking at him, but smirking and biting her lip, just the way Kitty remembered her when she’d offered the rum-laced drink to poor Antonia. The flame that leapt out was spectacular, shooting way up to the ceiling and licking all round Ben’s hand, which he pulled away too fast, spilling the bottle of Pernod all over the fish and into the flames.

‘Shit!’ he roared, backing towards the sink and turning on the cold tap.

‘My curtains!’ Julia shrieked, flapping at the burning cloth with a tea towel.

‘A bit clumsy, Ben.’ Rose commented.

Kitty grabbed the small fire extinguisher that Julia had hanging on the wall by the door and aimed it at the cooker. It fizzed for a few seconds, produced a pathetic stream of foam and gave out. Rose flung the contents of the kettle at the curtains and Julia squealed again.

‘Fire brigade?’ Rose’s voice was excited.

‘No, I’ll deal with this. You three out. Now.’ Ben was moving fast, scooping the three women out through the front door.

‘It’s freezing and people opposite are staring.’ Rose stood on the pavement, hugging her body and stamping her feet. ‘Let’s go to next-door’s party and keep warm.’

‘Good idea,’ Kitty agreed. She followed the sounds of music and a good time up the path next to Julia’s and rang the bell.

‘Mick’s here!’ someone on the other side yelled, opening the door wide and standing back.

‘Ah. Not Mick,’ said the voice, shutting the door quickly.

‘That was Martin!’ Julia shouted. ‘And did you see . . . ?’

‘All those studs,’ Kitty marvelled.

‘And the leather mask!’

‘I saw a naked bottom and some boots,’ Rose said solemnly.

‘No wonder I wasn’t invited.’ Julia sounded quite regretful. Kitty took hold of her arm. There was a chic and inviting café bar just across the road. Ben would find them in there if he escaped alive from the kitchen inferno. There’d be food and she was starving. ‘Suppose they had asked you,’ she comforted, ‘you wouldn’t have had a thing to wear.’

Rosemary-Jane smirked. ‘I would,’ she said. Kitty grinned at her. She didn’t doubt it.

‘Drinks,’ Julia said the moment the café door was open.

‘You’d better have a Coke,’ Rose told her, ‘unless you want to get pissed enough to do an Antonia.’

Kitty bought spritzers for her and Rose and a diet Coke for Julia. The menu looked reasonably promising with mussels and lasagne and a selection of chicken dishes and salads. There were quite a lot of customers but Julia bustled her way through to a free table and sat down heavily.

‘Shall we wait for Ben?’ Kitty said, studying the menu.

‘Heavens no. If I spent my life waiting for Ben I’d never get anything done. I love him dearly but he’s one of life’s plodders, everything at his own stolid pace.’

Her mother had been on the right lines then, Kitty thought. Staring at the menu she thought about all the sticky summer days they’d spent together, curled up in his single bed while his mother was out at work, typing for the local education authority. The sun had blazed away outside and they had lain there, sweaty and pale, touching and kissing and experimenting and being pleased to have each other like this at just the right time for learning the sexual ropes. They’d known it was to be temporary, which made it more exciting somehow (nothing of the ‘stolid pace’ about him then, she recalled). Ben had had his flight to Africa booked since well before he’d met her and neither of them was going to claim it was the kind of love that could shatter long-laid plans.

Just as they were about to order Ben arrived. He brought with him the scent of fire and cold night air.

‘All done. Though the kitchen’s a bit messy,’ he told Julia, putting her house keys into a puddle of spilt wine on the table. Rose tutted loudly, picked them up and wiped them down Ben’s thigh. Presumably used to this sort of thing, he ignored her, ‘I smothered the fire with towels but the smoke’s made the whole house smell a bit. I left the windows open.’

‘Burglars,’ Julia grumbled. ‘I’ll be robbed.’

‘No you won’t,’ Rose reassured her. ‘Say thank you nicely, Julia.’

‘Thank you Ben,’ Julia smiled.

‘So,’ Ben said as Rose went to the bar to order. ‘I suppose living in Cornwall you saw quite a lot of that poor Antonia woman you were all taking the piss out of?’ he said to Kitty.

Kitty thought about Rose at the funeral, angling her long body towards Antonia’s widower. The words ‘indecent haste’ came to mind. ‘Actually, I hadn’t seen her, haven’t seen her since we left school. Julia only dragged me along because she was curious. As ever.’ She looked hard at Julia but Julia’s attention was elsewhere, her head turned so that the salient details of the row the couple behind her were having were going directly into her left ear.

Ben’s eyebrows had shot up in surprise. ‘Really? But Rose said you were practically neighbours. She’s been working down there you know, a garden programme.’

‘Everyone thinks you’re only ten minutes from everyone else if you live in the same county. I did know about the programme.’ Ben was asking for different information, she could see it in his anxious eyes. She didn’t have it to give, only an awful sense of power that if she voiced her suspicions she could make this man very unhappy.

‘Antonia had three children, Rose told me,’ he said. ‘Poor things. Imagine losing your mother like that.’ She felt touched, recognizing real sympathy for these children he’d never met.

‘We haven’t got children.’ He was watching Rose exchanging easy chat at the bar with a blonde Australian barman. She was pulling at strands of her highlighted hair and then pointing at his, apparently deeply involved in discussing tints. ‘I didn’t used to think she minded that much though,’ Ben added.

But what about you? Kitty thought. Really, she no longer knew him well enough to ask. She never had.