You know how these things go! First the dinner. Angus took Natalie to the Skinflint’s Arms, Wedmore Way, where he thought there wouldn’t be too many friends and acquaintances about, and the ambience was cosy and the food good: that is to say, cooked rather than microwaved. Jean microwaved everything. She was too busy, she said, to do anything else. She would drive to Yeovil on Thursday afternoons (her half-day off), park the car on the double yellow lines outside Marks & Spencer, and stock up with frozen food. If Angus wanted anything different, said Jean, he should buy and cook it himself, particularly the former. She gave the parking tickets to Angus to pay. Angus ate out a lot, which seemed to suit Jean, but not normally in the company of young females. Though he doubted if she would have minded that either. He would have if he could, but he did not possess Arthur’s easy charm. Now, facing Natalie, Angus found his hands trembling as he handed her the menu. He was not as used to this kind of thing as he would have liked.
Natalie ran her eye briskly down the columns, stopping where the numbers were biggest. She had the crab cocktail, the fillet (not the rump) steak, and a crème brûlée. She asked for champagne cocktails to begin with, and Chateau Neuf du Pape ’79 with the meal. She ate ravenously and drank heartily.
‘I’ve been living on lentils,’ she said. He didn’t know what lentils were. How could he?
‘If I’m drunk,’ she said, ‘I can’t help what I do, can I?’
That encouraged him.
He said he had a nice little flat in Wells, going free; a luxury holiday let, overlooking the Market Square. Four bedrooms – ‘Oh, goodie, one for guests’, she trilled – fitted kitchen, bath with shower, heated towel rail – ‘Heated towel rail! Oh, fab!’ (was she laughing at him?) – view of cathedral and fully furnished to the highest standards. A new firm-but-soft Relyon bed in the master bedroom. Jean insisted Angus and she lie on an orthopaedic mattress for the sake of their backs. The only thing that ever gave him backache, he could swear, was lying upon it. ‘Double?’ Natalie presently inquired.
‘Of course it’s double,’ said Angus. ‘There are always double beds in master bedrooms.’ She was laughing at him.
Why? Her eyes were too bright. She kept touching him, speculatively, with her little fingers – more reddened and chapped than he remembered, but then quarry work’s tough, especially when the weather’s bad, and it had been the worst summer in living memory. Bess, Teresa, Edwina, Alice and Ben had all been cooped up together when by rights they should have been out in the garden. If the weather had been better, I reckon Angus’ luxury flat wouldn’t have been so enticing. View of Cathedral is all very well; but the noise! the traffic! Anyway, I blame the weather. I’m tired of blaming people.
‘You can have it free until November,’ said Angus, hedging his bets. ‘I’m not losing out. The tenants paid in advance then never turned up. After that, it’s winter rates.’
‘And by November you might be tired of me,’ observed Natalie. ‘Heigh-ho!’
‘I’ll never be tired of you,’ said Angus, and took her hand next time she touched him. She did not pull it away.
‘The only thing is,’ he said. ‘Will you want to leave your lady friend? Tucked up there so snug and cosy, the pair of you!’
Did she deny me? Did she say I was a fat, garrulous, semi-mad succubus, and she couldn’t wait to get out? Did she say she was driven mad by my lesbian advances? By the shrieks and the rows? No, I don’t think so. I think when he asked that – and ask he had to – she said something like, ‘I’ll be sorry to leave Sonia. She’s been very good to me. It’s just we’re so overcrowded, and what with money being short and the weather so bad – ’
At least I hope so. You have to believe well of at least some of the people some of the time, if you’re going to have the courage to live amongst them. Bill Mempton says sanity is returning. What on earth makes him think that?
It was Natalie’s idea that they go and seal their bargain – that is, her body for his flat – up on the tussocky grass at the foot of the Mendip Mast.
‘Why there? It’ll be cold.’ He’d had in his mind a rather nice little furnished cottage near Crosscombe, of which he had the key. The tenants had been gone only a couple of days, so it should still be warm and cosy.
‘There’s a moon,’ she said. ‘And anyway it just feels right.’
She didn’t suggest Glastonbury Tor, did she? Though the grass there is just as tussocky and smooth. She knew well enough she’d be struck dead for unrighteousness, for confusing sex with a business arrangement. Her instinct was right. The broadcast messages radiating out from the Mendip Mast – Songs for Swinging Lovers and the EastEnders and the stock market prices – have somehow got into the landscape round the Mast, which was well-suited to the occasion: an uneasy mixture of sentiment, worldliness and greed.
Angus was right, too. It was cold and uncomfortable at the foot of the Mast; the sense of electronic humming and buzzing all around and Natalie’s goose pimples and little cries, caused not by him but by gravel and stones against bare skin, made the occasion less than satisfactory. Nevertheless it was a start; it felt like an affair beginning – not beginnings climaxing and ending all at once. Natalie bruised easily. She talked while she made love: she practically chattered. He liked that. Jean never made a sound.
‘You do talk a lot,’ he said, when he was driving her back to Sonia’s. Natalie was extracting a piece of gravel out of her leg. She had not bothered to put her tights back on.
‘I think what it is; you really like me. You pretend you’re doing this because you have to, but really you want to.’
She just laughed, and gave a little yelp as she finally squeezed the gravel from her leg.
‘Am I better than Arthur?’ He wanted to be.
‘Everyone’s different,’ she said, declining to gratify him. But he was: or perhaps they both were, together. Natalie had her own theories on sexual attraction. She told me about them when I went to visit her later in her love nest in Wells; she spoke with the kind of irritating authority women have when they’re in the middle of some swinging affair, and are speaking to friends less blissfully (or so they see it) situated. With Harry, she told me, sex had been frequent at first, and then dutiful: a matter of proximity and cleansing rituals. A lot of toothbrushing, and armpit washing before and after. In its way it had been exciting, because the need for hygiene had made the act seem dirtier: and the emotional distance between them the greater, inasmuch as how could the Harry of his orderly, conventional days be related to the Harry of his silent, sinful nights?
Arthur? Arthur made her feel wicked, not dirty. She’d stand in the back room of the shop in broad daylight dressed only in a slip. He’d take it off her, staying fully dressed himself. He hardly bothered to take his trousers off. She did what he said. There was a kind of languorousness about it she loved. I know the feeling. It’s what I had with Alec, only more so. Meet me here, he said. You do. Meet me there. You do. Who cares who’s watching? Do this, say that, feel this, think that, open your legs. You do. It’s insensate, hopeless love – it’s a disease. It’s caught from other people, just like measles. It passes, like the measles, but sometimes, in the meanwhile, damage is done. (Measles may be a childish disease but it can blind you, deafen you, kill you, too, in the passing.) You’re as much in control of yourself while it lasts as if you’re running a temperature of 105. You lie down, toss and turn, burn and freeze, moan and groan – pity is needed, not reproach. Pity and a cure. Natalie was infected by Arthur. Harry leaving had been her cure. Instantaneous. It shocked her back to sanity. Next time she saw Arthur she couldn’t remember what it had all been about – perhaps because actually the sexual satisfaction had been minimal; she needed the act like an addict mainlining to stop the distress, rather than get a high.
And Angus? Well, that worked, Natalie said, because he made some kind of connection between her and her body that Harry hadn’t, and Arthur hadn’t. She wasn’t afraid of him, as she had been of the other two: she half despised him and half liked him. She hoped for nothing, she thought the situation was ridiculous, she enjoyed herself because she could see she might as well. She looked forward to her new flat and knew it was hers as long as she wanted it: and it gave Angus so much pleasure to plunge around inside her she couldn’t help liking it too. It didn’t sound to me like true love but it sounded okay.
When she got back to my house, all flushed good humour, I had a shock waiting for her. Oh yes. I was waiting up to deliver it.
‘Natalie,’ I said. ‘You had a visitor when you were out. Did you have a good time?’
‘I’m sorry, Sonia,’ she said (smug bitch!). ‘But yes I did have a really good time. Who was the visitor?’
‘Your husband.’
That got to her. Colour drained from her face – all that endearing pinkness – and she looked like the quarry drudge once again, the Natalie I knew and loved.
‘What did he want?’
‘He wants the children to go and live with him in Spain.’
Well, that’s what he’d said. He hadn’t said anything about wanting her back: on the contrary. He didn’t look guilty or distressed. He’d looked prosperous and healthy, if furtive. Knocking on my door after dark, frightening me out of my wits! Ben and Alice were both sleeping on mattresses upstairs. He’d gone up to look at them. I asked him not to wake them, and he didn’t. But he’d seemed shocked to see them on the floor.
‘She’s not fit to look after them!’ he said, and then, ‘Is it just you and your husband?’
‘Just me,’ I said.
‘Just you and her!’ he said, with meaning. And then, ‘Tell her I want the kids. Tell her I’ll be in touch. Out on the town, I suppose! I must have been mad to think I’d find her in.’
He wanted it both ways, I could tell. He wanted his abandoned wife to be not only a lesbian but also a heterosexual nympho. In other words he didn’t like her very much. He’d walked out, and she was taking the blame for it. He didn’t seem a particularly pleasant person to me. I told him he was polluting my house and asked him to go, which he did. Miss Eddon Gurney 1978 was waiting for him in the car outside. I caught a glimpse of her as I slammed the door. ‘Poor old Nat’, I’d thought, along with ‘serve her right’.
‘He can’t have them,’ Natalie said. ‘He can’t have the children. I won’t let him.’