He went away.
Mercantile International phoned him from Nassau at eight o’clock the following morning and requested him to catch the next plane. One of their directors had been accused of illegal speculation with company funds, for his own personal profit. Charles was required as an expert witness.
‘Please don’t go,’ begged Frances, trying to rinse last night out of her mouth.
‘Don’t be silly, darling. You know perfectly well I have to go. It’s a court case – a very nasty business by the sounds of it. God alone knows what Oppenheimer’s going to say. It’s one of his companies.’
‘Oh, he’s mixed up in it, is he? I might have guessed. Whenever there’s trouble, it always seems to be our good friend Heinrich.’
‘He is our good friend, Frances. The work he brings me pays for all our luxuries. It’s not just trouble he’s mixed up in, but all those little extras you insist on – your foreign cars, your couturier clothes, your –’
‘All right, Charles, you’ve spent the last five years telling me how obliged we are to Oppenheimer. But all the same, you can’t just disappear like that – not after what happened last night. I mean, we haven’t even discussed it yet. I know I behaved badly, but …’
‘You were tired, darling, that’s all. Let’s forget it, shall we? I’ll only be gone a matter of days, a week at the outside.’
A week. If one night lasted a hundred years, a week might end somewhere in the twenty-seventh century. Normally, she didn’t mind about his travelling. Charles dropped in at the Bahamas as other men took a spin to Bournemouth. She kept his suitcase permanently packed. But this time …
‘But what about Magda? How on earth am I going to deal with her? It’s much more awkward with you not being here.’
‘She’d better stay at Viv’s, then. I’ll arrange it.’ Another paltry item on his job list: clean car, trim hedge, dispose of daughter. Magda might be hysterical by now, or ill, or despairing.
‘But I can’t just ignore her for a week. And what am I meant to do about the walls? She shouldn’t get away with vandalism like that. On the other hand, she must be in quite a state to …’
‘I’ll think about it on the plane, darling, and phone you. Now could you please do me a spot of breakfast.’
Frances cracked an egg into the frying pan. So Charles planned to deal with a delinquent daughter by long-distance phone call, with wires crackling and the pips going; fit her in among the formulae, no doubt.
‘How’s Magda?’
‘Smashing up the house.’
‘Fine, fine.’
Here he was, escaping again, using his work as a manhole to drop safely into and hide from all the hubbub on the pavement outside. All right, she’d shouted at him to get out of her way, told him to go, but that was only in extremis, and she hadn’t meant a Bahamian business trip, lulled by labile secretaries and cushioned in a first-class cocoon of soothing schedules and self-importance, with a millionaire glittering on the sidelines.
Charles cut a neat square from his fried bread and matched it with a square of egg. He was already in the Bahamas, astounding the court-room, impressing the judge. His note-pad was propped against the coffee pot and he was smiling into it, jotting down inspired rejoinders. Last night had never existed as far as he was concerned. Her panic, her outburst, had dwindled to nothing in the face of a court case. A tenth of his income came from this Nassau company, and two-thirds of it from Oppenheimer. Heinrich was gold-dust, and she only a handful of loose change, in comparison.
‘Got everything?’ Ridiculous, of course he had. Charles had a check-list taped inside his head. He stood at the door, trying not to look too eager to be gone. He gave her his Bahamas kiss, longer and more ardent than the London peck, but slightly shorter than the full-scale Antipodean embrace.
‘Try to relax, darling. Enjoy yourself. Play a bit of golf.’
‘Yes.’ She polished up her long-distance smile and clamped it on her face. How could he talk about relaxing when hate was crouching in the house.
‘Take care.’
‘Yes, and you.’
‘I’ll phone.’
‘Yes.’
She closed the door. It was drizzling outside. Egg had congealed on the plates and the smell of bacon fat seeped into the hall.
‘Shocking weather!’ reported Mrs Eady, making a self-righteous hurricane with her plastic pack-a-mac.
‘I’m afraid I can’t be disturbed this morning. I’ve got a fashion job to finish.’
Mrs Eady pulled off a galosh and replaced it with a brown canvas beach shoe. ‘Never did understand what good fashion did to nobody.’
Frances knew what she meant. Who cared whether skirts were longer, or bosoms back? But she had decided to get down to work. It wasn’t an important job, only a paltry piece of advertising she had taken on as a favour to an old client, whose normal copywriter was coping with divorce and influenza, both at once. But at least it would return her to the iron rock of discipline and professionalism, at a time when things were crumbling like sand. She tried to sweep her problems off the desk. Magda must stay at Viv’s, not keep creeping back into the in-tray, making ugly blots all over her clean page. She had locked the studio door, so that Mrs Eady wouldn’t turn the lipstick into a National Disaster. Reggie had agreed to strip the wallpaper, and emulsion the walls in plain blue. That only left the hate …
She opened her folder with its collection of spring suits. It was summer outside, winter in her head, and spring in the advertising business. She read over the jaunty phrases she had written so glibly just a week ago. ‘Trap your big-game hunter in these jungly camouflage colours’, ‘Ambitious little hat with a going-places feather’, ‘Bosoms blossom out’. Nonsense. Whipped-cream, rose-tinted, chocolate-coated nonsense. Reality was harsher. Reality was flowery walls blighted by red lipstick. Red for hate and danger, passion and Piroska. It was almost as if Piroska herself had written on the walls, etching her love for Charles into the very fabric of the house. Love and hate, both four-letter words, which socked you in the jaw and broke families apart.
Maybe it had broken Magda, too. How did it feel smashing precious pictures, and ripping the petals off roses? Only last week Magda had picked a bunch of McGredys Yellow for Viv, wrapping them in tissue paper from the laundry box and cradling them like glass. For Viv, though – not for her. She had only the hate.
She picked up her pen again and tried to write a headline for a wedding suit. ‘Mother of the bride steals the show …’ ‘Bells are ringing for this …’ ‘I hate you.’ She stared at the three black words polluting the pad. They had blotted out every word in the whole vocabulary of fashion. She couldn’t work, had to talk to someone, to help to drown them out. But who? Magda had fled to Viv’s, so she could hardly use Viv as an ally. And even if she did, Viv would be on Magda’s side. Viv always took the ‘crime is a broken home’ line, and Magda would fit it to perfection. She and Charles would be the criminals, in Viv’s eyes. Charles was phoning Viv, in any case. He’d promised to fit it in, between his duty-free brandy and passport control.
Her other friends were useless. How could she confide in them, when she’d fobbed them off so far, with convenient fictions. She couldn’t turn a vague foreign cousin into an instant delinquent. They’d never understand, in any case. Someone else’s pretty daughter sounded a delight, not a disaster – until you were actually in the ring with her, parrying every blow, or knocked senseless in a corner. Even if she told them, it would be all a charade. ‘Little spot of bother with our guest … messed her room about a bit … yes, difficult age, isn’t it?’ The obligatory light touch and forced little laugh, feelings bandaged up, tourniquet on the tears.
There was no one she could turn to. Only stainless-steel acquaintances, neck-deep in their own problems, or their careers, or their children. Only empty formulae for standard situations.
She had been doodling on her pad, the blank page a tangle of flowers, feathers, numbers, squares, fighting and overlapping with each other. Only the numbers had arranged themselves neatly – into a group of three and then a group of four. A phone number. And she had no one to phone.
No one? She picked up the receiver and held it in her hand. She grimaced – no wonder Magda never learned, when even teachers couldn’t speak the Queen’s English. ‘It’s Frances Parry Jones here. So sorry to bother you, but I wondered if …’
‘Franny! Fantastic! Let’s go down to Brighton.’
‘Please, Ned, I …’
‘Say it again. Your Neds absolutely ravish me! It’s a magnificent day. Let’s …’
‘It’s raining.’
‘Ah, here it is, yes. But I’ve heard the weather forecast. They’re already in bikinis in Brighton, collapsing from sunstroke from Dartmouth to Dover. If you want to dodge the clouds, my love, there’s nothing for it – we’ll have to head south.’
‘Ned, do be sensible. I’ve got work to do and I only rang to …’
‘How’s Magda?’ The doodles were submerging the spring suits – umbrellas, sunshades, starfish, waves.
‘Fine.’ Puppies, cornflowers, lipstick, hate. ‘In fact I wanted to ask you about …’
‘Ask me in person. You’ll get much better answers. Meet you at Victoria Station as soon as you can get there. You bring the bikinis and I’ll bring the jam butties.’
‘Ned, if you can’t be serious, I’d better phone you later.’ She removed the telephone from the desk to a side table, and spread out her work sheets again. She stared at a picture of a pink suit with suede trimmings and frilled shirt. ‘Frills and thrills, think pink, suede upgrades …’ Why shouldn’t she escape? Charles had. She couldn’t work properly, in any case. The day stretched ahead like an endless piece of tangled string. The words had returned again. Every time she shut her eyes, she saw them bleeding down the walls … ‘I hate you.’ Terrifying words, fraught with fury and danger, hot with Magda’s misery. Part of her wanted almost to beat the brat, for ruining her room and rejecting all her attempts at a relationship, and part of her felt guilty and petty and despicable for not being able to love even a puppy, let alone a child. She couldn’t endure the battle raging inside her own head. She needed an ally or an arbitrator, someone to step inside the lines and win her peace with honour. And why shouldn ‘t that somebody be Ned? The very fact that she hardly knew him was a distinct advantage. If she confided in any member of their own sacred circle, it would compromise Charles and embarrass Magda. But Ned was outside that circle. He’d also had more experience. Working in that enormous comprehensive, he was bound to have had to deal with other Magdas. They needn’t go to Brighton – that was quite unnecessary. But she could meet him in Richmond, or even at Victoria – somewhere safe and neutral – and merely ask his advice. Magda was clearly in need of some professional help, and Ned would know the procedures for teenage counselling or child guidance. Teachers always did.
She picked up the phone again. ‘Look, Ned, I’m sorry I was sharp. I would like to talk to you, if it’s no bother – just for half an hour or so. I’ve got a problem.’
Ned sounded so close, it was as if he had squeezed down the phone and catapulted into the room. ‘Right, Brighton it is! We’ll talk on the train and then collapse on the beach. I’ll get the tickets, shall I? Meet you on Platform 16 about an hour from now.’
Frances frowned. ‘I’d really rather not …’
Mrs Eady popped her head round the door. ‘Will you be wanting coffee, same as usual?’ She made the simplest question sound like her own funeral service. Even the hoover turned tragic when she used it, droning in mingled pain and protest. Frances gestured her away – she’d missed all that Ned was saying. She moved the phone to the other hand and started again.
‘I’m sorry, Ned, but it seems a bit pointless for us to rush off to the sea. I mean, we haven’t planned it, and I still don’t even know you well …’
The phone almost rocketed out of her hand. ‘Christ, Frances! You really are the most joyless, rule-ridden female I’ve ever met. Don’t you allow yourself the slightest grain of pleasure, unless it’s been weighed out and allotted to you on your ration book? Can’t we just go to Brighton because it’s there? I’m not planning to rape you or murder you, or wall you up in the Pavilion. You phoned me in the first place, for heaven’s sake! It’s a wonder you’ve got any friends at all, if you can’t even catch a train without written permission from your husband or guardian. One day you’ll be dead, my love, and you still won’t have ventured a toe outside your impregnable fortress on Richmond Green. OK, I’m sorry, I’ve gone too far. Bugger Brighton! I’m sorry I even suggested it. I’ll meet you in the Wimpy Bar in Richmond.’
A squall of rain spattered at the windows, nagging her like Ned. The room was always sombre, with its mahogany furniture and leather-bound books, but today it was even darker, grey clouds weighing down the morning. Now she’d offended all of them – Charles, Magda, Viv, Bunty – even Ned. He was right. She was a fossil and a curio, nailed down under glass with a label and a price tag.
Yet it did seem risky and ridiculous to jaunt off to the seaside with one man, when she was married to another. Just because Charles had behaved outrageously, was that any reason why she should change her own standards? Other women might plan sordid escapades, just to get their own back, but it wasn’t easy to get even with a man like Charles. They had revenge and rebellion enough with Magda. On the other hand, Ned could be a genuine help with the child. She had only planned to see him, to help talk out the problems, and surely it was no more wicked to do it in Brighton over lunch, than in Richmond over coffee? If some solution resulted from their meeting, then it was Charles who would benefit.
‘Ned?’
‘Yes?’
‘All right.’
‘What do you mean ‘‘all right’’?’
‘I will come to Brighton. You’re right – it’s not the end of the world, either geographically or in any other sense.’
She almost heard the grin on the other end of the telephone. ‘That’s better. But are you sure, my love? I don’t want to drag you kicking and screaming from your fastness …’
‘Yes, I’m sure.’ She wasn’t. But, then, everything was confused and contradictory at the moment. Last night, she’d shouted and panicked and wished Charles a thousand miles away, but in the morning, when he’d gone that far and further, he seemed indispensable and precious. He and his daughter might be turning her from Minton china into barbed wire, but her life was still grafted on to his, like a frail scion on a strong branch, and without him she would droop and wither. It was humiliating to be so dependent on him, but she appeared to have no choice. He was her sap and root-stock, and no other man, no Ned, could be as strong. Her marriage was sacred, despite Magda. There was still the Charles who was civilized, considerate, and cultivated – loyal and faithful even. After all, the Magda business was only a relic from the past. Was it fair to keep on blaming him for something which had happened sixteen years ago? It was simpler to snip Charles in two. Magda’s Charles she could turf out and send away with no compunction, as she had done last night, but her own Charles she still needed as her rock and her lodestar. That left Magda – fatherless. The second Charles would somehow have to deal with her, not as a daddy, but as a distant relative and a strict disciplinarian – the only way the three of them could live together. And in the meantime, Magda must be sent to cool off. With a little help from Ned, they could choose somewhere bracing and remote, with friends her own age and a safe set of rules.
‘We’ll be able to have a serious talk in Brighton, won’t we, Ned? I need your advice. That’s why I rang.’
‘’Course. That’s first priority. Didn’t you know I’m Brighton’s answer to Evelyn Home?’
He was. They got down to Magda almost as soon as the train heaved out of Victoria. It wasn’t easy. Ned had met her with a huge scarlet beach-ball and a hug to match, a pile of peanut-butter sandwiches, a party pack of Mars bars and forty pigeons in tow whom he was teasing with the crusts.
‘Ned, you’re not allowed to feed the pigeons. There’s a notice up.’
‘I’m not feeding them, my darling, I’m preaching to them. It’s my Francis of Assisi thing. Though I must admit they seem more interested in their grub than in their God. Christ – you look ravishing! Let’s not go anywhere. I’ll just put you on a pedestal and stare at you for ever and a day.’
People were already staring, especially when he bounced the beach-ball all the way down Platform 16. She tried to walk a step behind. The station was probably swarming with accountants, half of whom were Charles’ bosom friends. She could imagine the phone call that evening.
‘Hello, darling. How’s Nassau?’
‘Fine, fine. How was Brighton? And what in God’s name were you doing strolling arm-in-arm with an out-of-work lunatic in shorts?’
The shorts had certainly been a stumbling block. They were cut-down jeans, sawn off so close to the crotch that his bare brown legs seemed to go on and on for ever. It was difficult to concentrate on Magda, with all that tangled golden hair creeping over the train seat and trying to involve itself with her severe brown dress. She brought out Magda almost immediately, as a shield and a defence. This was a problem-solving day, not a spree. Strangely, the lipsticked letters seemed almost to have shrunk. Ned had a way of rubbing things off with a little optimism and a lot of common sense. He turned rebellious teenagers into a temporary affliction, like a head cold, rather than a terminal illness. A wrecked bedroom, in his eyes, was a sneeze, not a death throe.
‘Kids from the cosiest families do worse than that, Franny.’
‘Yes, I know.’ She didn’t know. Teenager had just been a word until she’d met Magda – something she’d read about in the Sunday supplements, a species which roared around on motor bikes and stuck safety-pins up its nose, but always at a safe distance from her and Charles.
‘But Magda’s had a double shock. First no father, and then her mother running off …’
‘One-parent families are here to stay, my love. Brent Edge was swarming with ’em. It’s us who’ve got to change our attitudes. Lots of kids seem to thrive on Dad in jug, or Mum in Blackpool. We’re just bloody hypocrites. If you’re a famous film star, it’s positively fashionable to have a baby without a father – the Vanessa Redgrave syndrome. I bet she even denies any bloke conceived hers in the first place! But try and get away with it when you’re a humble office cleaner or a shop assistant, and all hell’s let loose.’
‘Look, Ned, that’s not the point.’ He was being far too pat. Perhaps he just wanted to dispose of Magda, so that he could get down to the Mars bars, or worse. People’s motives were always so suspect. Hadn’t she herself sandwiched Magda between her scruples and his shorts? But she must be fair to Ned. He was still up to his neck in Magda, only five miles out of Brighton. They hadn’t even had a coffee in the buffet car.
‘Her mother’s not dead, Franny, only absent for a while. And meantime, you’ll cope. You will, you know. Kids are tough. They adapt, and if they kick a bit in the process, just kick ’em back – gently. You’re tough, too, Fran. My little blue steel whiplash.’
She was amazed that he could take it all so lightly, shrug off rebellion, joke about hate. She stared out of the window. Patchwork cows chewing contentedly while Concorde screeched over them, curdling their milk; stolid sheep munching all the way to the abattoir. Nature seemed as unconcerned as Ned. It was an ordinary sort of morning, half-awake, and drizzling with a lazy rain.
‘Ned …’
‘Yup?’
‘I thought you promised sun.’
‘Give it time, love. Have a while-u-wait Mars bar.’
She shook her head, closed her eyes. The black darkness behind them suddenly capsized into crimson, as if someone had unrolled a red carpet across her eyelids. The sun had come out, blazing with repentance, galloping after the rain. It jumped in at the window and sliced Ned in half, turning his hair from straw to champagne. The dust in the air between them exploded in a thousand colours. She felt his body leap in sympathy.
‘Fantastic timing! I bet they pay the sun to do that on purpose – part of Brighton’s tourist drive. You’ve gone all golden, Franny. Cheer up! Let’s leave Magda in Richmond for a while. I refuse to let her spoil our day. It’s just you and me and the sea.’
And half a million other bods, she thought, as they fought for a patch on the beach. Charles hated crowds, especially ones with transistor radios and progeny. But Ned knew everyone.
‘See that lady there,’ he whispered, ‘the one with the double boobs.’ Her purple-padded bikini top had shifted down, so that two purple cupolas abutted against her breasts, and all four mounds rose and fell in sleep. ‘She’s madly in love with her driving instructor – the one snoring beside her with the zebra-crossing on his swim trunks. They’re staying in sin at the Metropole, but her husband thinks she’s gone to a London clinic to get her boobs fixed. He’s a conventional sort of chap who likes his ladies with the usual two. There he is now!’
He pointed to a small, swarthy man, waddling towards them with his trousers rolled up, and brandishing an ice cream cornet.
‘There’s going to be violence, I know it! Don’t look, Fran. He’s armed with a double-scoop strawberry.’
She didn’t look. She was staring at Ned. He had just removed his blue cotton sweater and underneath was a dazzling white T-shirt printed with the words ‘I‘D SELL MY SOUL FOR FRANNY‘ in screaming scarlet capitals.
‘Ned!’
‘Do you like it? I got it done just before I met you. There’s a place outside the station which prints them while you wait. I was going to put ‘‘Franny for Pope’’, but something told me you’re an Anglican.’
‘Oh, Ned.’
‘Well, I suppose you must like it, if it’s just earned me two Neds in a row. Give me a kiss, then.’
His face was moving towards hers. She dodged it and bestowed a safe peck on his shoulder. He deserved it. No one had ever plastered her name all over them before. He was like a walking advertisement for Franny. She had stopped being Franny fifteen years ago. Charles didn’t approve of nicknames. But Ned had resurrected her. Sometimes she hardly knew who she was. Franny was almost dead, and Charles’ Frances was too precious to be taken out of its case, and there didn’t seem to be a central, essential Frances in between. She was one person with Charles and a different one with Ned, and another one still with Viv, and Laura and … And yet none of them was authentic or spontaneous. But just looking at her name written on Ned’s crazy chest made her feel better. Ned was like a rope trick. One flick of his wrist and the knotted, tangled piece of string she’d been all day pulled out into a simple scarlet ribbon. All right, she would be Franny – just for a day – one magic day, when the sun was shining and half of London had parked itself on Brighton beach and a marvellous mixed-up man thought fit to write her name all over his chest.
‘Ned,’ she said.
‘Yup?’
‘It’s super.’
‘So are you. Now close your eyes. It’s sandwich time and I’m about to say grace in Latin.’
The peanut butter had melted into the bread and turned the sandwiches into soggy cowpats. He’d sat on the swiss roll and flattened it. The Acton market pears were long past their first, firm youth. On Charles’ rare trips to Brighton, he always ate at Wheeler’s, or ordered lunch in his suite at the Grand. He avoided picnics unless they were socially unavoidable, as at Glyndebourne or Lord’s. They had a picnic set, with proper china plates and small silver forks for the salmon and the strawberries. Ned was drinking out of the bottle and his table was two bare legs spread with a Mother’s Pride wrapper.
Frances bit into a squelchy pear. The juice trickled down her wrist. Ned licked it off obligingly and kept his face, upside-down, below her chin. ‘That’s how you’d look to an Australian, I suppose. Smashing! Shall we swim after lunch?’
‘I haven’t brought my costume.’
‘I have! I bought you a bikini for your birthday. It must be your birthday soon, if you’re a Virgo. Christ, you really are a Virgo, aren’t you? – so tidy and efficient. I’ve never seen a girl give hospital corners to dirty sandwich papers before. I bet your dustbins look like ornamental swans.’
Frances stared at the wrappers. She’d been giving them the Charles treatment quite unconsciously, smoothing them out and folding them into squares. She dropped them almost guiltily.
‘Happy birthday!’ said Ned, and passed her a package the size of a pocket hankie.
‘But it’s not my …’
‘It’s gotta be. Otherwise we can’t swim. Try it on.’
It was nothing more than three Union Jacks – one to cover each of her vital territories, held together dangerously by skimpy scarlet ties.
‘Ned, I couldn’t possibly wear it! It’s outrageous. Everyone will stare.’
‘And so they should. You’re a Michelin entry, ‘‘worth a detour’’. Come on, get undressed. I want to see the only walking flag in Brighton. I bought it at the same place as the T-shirt. It could have been worse. I almost got it printed with a message in morse code. Do you know, they tattoo people there. While you wait. I heard them – screaming! Shall we be done on the way back? ‘‘Why did the swiss roll?’’ plastered all over my belly!’
There wasn’t much room on his belly. It was already thickly tangled with honey-coloured hair, creeping down below his navel and disappearing into the top of his trunks. He had stripped off his shorts and his T-shirt and was standing naked except for six inches of striped poplin. Everyone else around them was more or less undressed, but somehow Ned looked nude. She couldn’t understand it. The whole beach was jostling with bare bodies, but Ned’s towered above them all like a naked bronze on a high pedestal. And yet he was small, made on a completely different scale from Charles, with narrower shoulders, tauter hips, a neat, tight bottom. Charles’ swim trunks didn’t cling like that, or plunge so disturbingly far below his stomach. Charles was a he-man, a bigger and better specimen than Ned, but Charles preferred to camouflage his form, hide it in a stern and unobtrusive uniform. Ned wore his body like an exhibit, even with his clothes on. ‘Look at me!’ it shouted, as he undid the bottom button on his shirt, or belted his trousers another inch tighter.
He was displaying it now, leaping around her, throwing up the sand. ‘Hurry up, my love. We’ll have the sea to ourselves if we get a move on. Half these bods will be tramping back to ‘‘Sea View’’ and ‘‘Mon Repos’’ for their braised-landladies-with-custard, any minute. The one o’clock curfew. Stewed prunes, pass the ketchup. Aren’t you glad we’ve eaten?’
Frances nodded, felt ridiculously glad about everything – the sea pouncing on the pebbles; the sun squeezing between brown bellies and trying to find room for itself on the beach; even the gimcrack little plastic windmill, which Ned had bought her and stuck in the sand, where it shouted to the wind. A simple, stupid word, ‘glad’, not big enough for the clean, salty feeling that tugged at her hair and had washed all the lipstick from the walls. All right, he shouldn’t be buying her bikinis and she shouldn’t be profaning the national flag by wearing them, but she was Franny today and the rules were different if you changed your name.
He held a huge striped beach towel for her, and she tried to squirm out of her clothes.
‘Oops! Dropped it. We should have gone to Cannes – they’re topless there. Mind you, you look pretty stunning not topless. I’ve always yearned for a girl with red-white-and-blue breasts.’
She could feel him looking at her and the glance was like a red-hot finger, outlining her curves.
‘Race you to the sea!’ she said, to escape his scrutiny. They skimmed across the beach, stumbling over sandcastles and stubbing their toes on spoil-sport stones. She was a barefoot Contessa again, with a red rosette crowing on her chest. And this time no Magda to come between her and her crazy, barefoot Count. He collapsed into the sea on top of her.
‘I won! Ouch, it’s freezing. I’ve changed my mind – race you back again.’
She grabbed his hand and pushed him to his knees. ‘Rotter!’ he yelled. ‘Now I’ve swallowed a starfish and I’ll have a five-pointed stomach.’
They were sitting in the shallows like toddlers, with waves thumping over their knees and seaweed tangling between their toes.
‘Shall I tell you something terrible?’ Ned felt for her hand under the water and buried it in the sand. ‘Promise me you won’t rush back to Richmond, in sheer disgust.’
‘What is it?’ She felt a sudden twinge of fear, didn’t want to rush back anywhere.
‘I can’t swim. It’s shameful, isn’t it?’ He yelped with laughter. ‘I’ve tried. Oh my God, I’ve tried. I got my best friend to push me in, once, and they scraped me off the bottom three weeks later. I even took fancy swimming lessons at the Municipal Baths in Penge with an All-England wrestler called Gladys. I sank her, all fourteen stone of her, and Penge Borough Council demanded compensation. The English don’t like non-swimmers. I suppose they think it’s unpatriotic, with all that water around us. They refused to serve me, once, when I tried to buy a pair of water wings …’
She was shocked, despite his banter. Charles could swim five thousand metres without stopping. He did it every summer, as his annual endurance test. Plunged straight in – no messing – and slogged backwards and forwards in straight lines, until the distance was up. On each occasion he tried to cut his time down. He didn’t really like swimming, but it was a challenge and a discipline, a way of measuring his prowess and fitness, making sure he hadn’t softened up.
Ned was walking on his knees and had reached neck-level, his head a smooth brown cup sticking up on a saucer of sea.
‘You swim, love, don’t let me stop you. You can pop across to Brittany and back, while I sit here and knit.’
She didn’t want to swim. It was much more fun paddling and splashing and playing childish games. They jumped waves and collected treasures – half a crab, a cuttlefish, a barnacled beach shoe, even a message in a bottle. (Well, Ned swore it was a message.)
They returned to their six-inch square of beach and Ned wrapped the treasures in the dirty sandwich papers and spread the towel for Frances. She shut her eyes against the sun and the space between her eyelids filled with gold and scarlet sequins. The sun was like a velvet towel, mopping all the water from her body, and acting like an anaesthetic to dull the darts of guilt and doubt which still kept pricking.
‘Happy?’ Ned murmured. His mouth was unaccountably close to her cheek, but she felt too lazy to move. He was trickling tiny shells across her bare tummy, his fingers soft and languorous. She was lying in a gold and scarlet paradise, where there was no time, no rules, only indolent sensations she dared not analyse. Ned and the sun had gone into partnership and were taking her over. The shingle had turned into swansdown and the sky into goose-feathers and she was tucked up between the two of them, safe, snug and heavy.
When she woke up, there was something warm beside her, like a damp hot-water-bottle. It shifted a little and turned into Ned. His arms and legs were tangled up with hers and she was using his chest as a pillow. There was a strange roar in her ears – the noise of six thousand people trying to out-shout the sea. She opened her eyes to a kaleidoscope of colours. How could anyone drop off on Brighton beach, in the middle of a multi-coloured August, least of all Frances Parry Jones who often found it difficult to sleep in the padded darkness of her own hushed bedroom? But she’d gone out like a light. A transistor radio was blaring in her ear, and a posse of cockney kids was squabbling over Smarties, but she’d still fallen fast asleep in a damp bikini, on a bed of hard pebbles, and with a half-naked centaur by her side. She was astonished, almost proud. Charles would have punished her with ten black crosses, but she felt she deserved an accolade. Not gold stars – they were reserved for Proust and piano practice. Red letters, perhaps, to match red-letter days and the scarlet message singing across Ned’s shirt. ‘I’d sell my soul for Franny.’ Charles wouldn’t. Charles didn’t sell anything, unless he’d carefully calculated his net profit, after VAT, depreciation and capital gains tax.
She closed her eyes again and the red letters slipped behind her eyelids and arranged themselves into wicked, unprintable messages. She smiled. She was wasting time, deliberately lolling about doing nothing, and actually enjoying it. There she was, sandwiched between Ned and the sun, with no clock except the sea, and no plans except allowing one luxurious moment to fall, fat and somnolent, against the next. She dared not move, lest the idyll shatter into a thousand jagged pieces. So long as she stayed still, she was like the picture on the jigsaw-puzzle box, a perfect copy of how the puzzle should come out – no cracks, no missing pieces. But if she stirred a finger, if she listened to the little voices nagging in her head, the whole day might break apart, and all she would have left would be a boxful of rattling cardboard cut-outs.
Ned was lying half underneath her, her shadow turning him from gold to charcoal.
‘Your eyelashes curl,’ she murmured, tracing their barbed-wire fretwork on his cheek.
‘Mmmm’ – he fluttered them – ‘they badly need a cut. I suspect that’s the reason I can’t swim. They’re so thick, they drag me down.’
‘Boaster.’
‘Not!’
‘Are!’
‘Kiss me.’
‘No.’
‘Please.’
His mouth was so near, it was easier not to argue. His lips tasted salty. She could feel his body murmuring underneath her, his mouth opening and softening, his hands prowling along the hollow of her back. Her breasts were trying to reach him through the flimsy Union Jacks, pressing greedily against his chest. He was already growing out of his swim trunks. He was smaller than Charles, smaller everywhere. Her head reached higher up his body, so that when he kissed her, everything else seemed to fit together like another jigsaw puzzle. Little cardboard bumps fitting into slots and making a picture; unmatched lines and splodges joining up and forming a design; limbs slotting into limbs, heads into hollows. Neat, and very orderly. A million, billion gold stars. No – stars were Charles’ notion, and she mustn’t bring him into it. There was some new, raw excitement because this wasn’t Charles. For fifteen years, she’d closed her mind and mouth to any other man.
‘Men are all the same,’ Laura had shrugged, dismissing a score of lovers, as if they were frozen peas. But they weren’t the same. Ned even tasted different, stronger and sweatier, with a slight after-tang of brine. His body was different, easier to sprawl against, less of it to oppress and overwhelm her, the hair soft and strange against her stomach. He was licking the coils of her ear, his slow tongue meandering through a maze of pathways she’d never known were there. All the paths seemed to lead, dangerously, down between her legs. Her bikini bottom was shouting out rude words, egging him on. He shifted a thigh and let his damp swim trunks tease against hers. His tongue was busier further up. It had abandoned the ear for an armpit and was circling it in a tantalizing fugue. Charles had never included armpits in his timetable. She pushed the tongue away. She mustn’t think of timetables, or include Charles as a threesome. The whole idyll would collapse.
She tried to close her mind against his name, to move out of her head again into the warm mix-and-match that was happening further down. Too late. All the pieces had already come apart. Charles had shaken up the puzzle and destroyed it. Even the sun had gone behind a cloud. She shivered. What in hell’s name was she doing? Defiling a public beach, when she herself was private property; wasting time, playing games. Her bikini was damp in wrong, accusing places; there was sand in her hair; she was faithless, childish, cheap.
‘No, Ned, no. Stop. Please.’
She was already on her feet, pulling on her dress over the damp, drooping flags. Yet she didn’t want to ruin everything. She couldn’t bear to climb back into the control tower of her head and wrestle with guilt and doubt again. Or litter the beach with apologies and explanations. Or wrap warm, simple things in Charles’ fulminating phrases. Why couldn’t Charles stay in Nassau? He had his own beach there, for heaven’s sake.
Ned groped to a sitting position. ‘What’s wrong, love? Did I press the wrong button?’ He grabbed the last, jammiest knob of swiss roll and crammed it in his mouth. She had expected hurt pride and reproaches, and there he was, cheerfully munching, as if a botched kiss were no more important than a broken shell. She loved him for it, for being so easy and greedy and relaxed, for not wrecking everything with complaints, recriminations. She was still Franny – his T-shirt said so. He had pulled it on again, and was doing a cartwheel on the sand.
‘Let’s go on the pier,’ he said, as he landed wrong side up. ‘I’ll show you where I used to fish. I caught my first bass from Brighton pier – a six pounder. It took me twelve minutes to land it. I was half dead when I reeled it in, and d’you know what …?’
‘What?’ She looked at his mouth in astonishment. How could it chew swiss roll and chatter on about bass, when it had just made her whole body turn cartwheels itself?
‘I had an eight-ounce pout-whiting on one hook and a five-and-a-half pound chunk of driftwood on the other. I’ve never liked whiting since. I cook it for the cats. Tell you what, though, I’ll win you a goldfish on the rifle range. I’m a crack shot with a rifle.’
He carried the goldfish back on the train in a jam jar. He had already christened it Edward. ‘We’ll give it gender confusion if it turns out to be a girl. But if I call it Franny, I’ll spend my whole life trying to catch it. Or end up in the jam jar, sharing the same waterlily leaf.’
She didn’t answer. She liked the crazy, dangerous things he said, but it was almost time to veto them. She was hanging on to the last dregs of Franny before all-change at Victoria. She didn’t want to talk, just shut her eyes and lean against his shoulder. He still felt strange, after Charles. She was always looking up to Charles. Her head only reached his heart, so he made her feel frail and over-mastered. With Ned she felt equal. He was taller than her, but not king-sized, god-sized. Only a Puck, an Ariel, a lion-eyed leprechaun who had cast a spell over her and turned her from Snow Queen to changeling.
Snow Queens didn’t eat chips out of newspaper or scream in ghost trains or buy hats that said ‘Kiss me slow’. Snow Queens would never deign to travel second-class to Brighton, in the first place. A town so tawdry, so blatant, a carbuncle on the coast, where tired insurance clerks took tarnished secretaries. Brighton was a joke, a nudge in the ribs, a dirty postcard. There were better parts, of course – the Lanes, the University, the Egon Ronay-recommended restaurants, the quieter streets of Hove. But Ned hadn’t even glanced at them. Ned had chosen pier and promenade, candyfloss and jellied eels, paddle boats and palmists.
‘I see romance with a fair young stranger,’ whispered Madame Astra from her plastic silver ball. ‘And twins.’
They’d laughed about the twins, but her heart had shifted into bottom gear. Twins meant charts and Clomid – subjects she had banned today. With Ned she felt at least two decades younger, too young and irresponsible to have children of her own. A whole day had passed and she hadn’t even thought about fertility. There wasn’t a baby in the whole of teeming Brighton. Strange, when every other Richmond resident was pregnant or a pram-pusher.
She sat on her bed back home and uncapped the Clomid. Day Seven. She tipped a smooth white tablet into the palm of her hand. How could something little bigger than an aspirin make her a mother? She wasn’t even sure she wanted to be one. There were other, crazier things she wanted first – forbidden Franny things. The tablet was as heavy as a ball and chain, all the responsibilities of motherhood weighing like a burden. She’d passed Magda’s room and stopped for a moment outside the locked door. Brighton slowly seeped away. It had been only a snapshot, a mirage. She was Frances now, back with the permanence of hate.
She slipped into her Harrods housecoat, and dropped her damp, dishevelled beach-clothes into the laundry basket. She showered the sand away and removed Ned’s mouth with the electric toothbrush and the Listerine. Now, sterilized and plaque-free, she sat waiting for Charles’ call.
It came, dead on ten, as promised. He was phoning from the lawyers’ chambers, where he was filling in the background to the case. It was still only teatime in Nassau, and he had several hours of gruelling paperwork in front of him. His voice was jaded, faint.
Yes, the flight had been fine; yes, Nassau was stifling; no, Oppenheimer was still in Buenos Aires. And how about her? Had she had a good day? Frances tried to remove the Brighton grin. Not bad, on the whole. Yes, of course she was missing him; no, she wouldn’t forget to cancel his dental appointment; no, she hadn’t played golf today.
‘Where tomorrow?’ Ned had asked, when he kissed her goodbye in a doorway off Victoria. ‘Kempton Park, Kew Gardens, tea with the Queen at Windsor?’
‘Windsor,’ she said. ‘Tea with you.’
‘You’re on!’ He doubled the kiss. ‘Hot buttered Franny on toast.’
‘Try to get out a bit,’ murmured Charles, between the pips. ‘It’ll do you good.’
‘Yes,’ said Frances, straightening the L to R directory, so that it lay at a perfect right-angle to the desk.
‘Yup,’ repeated Franny, doodling a six-pound goldfish on the cover, in wild red biro.
‘Love you.’
‘Love you, too.’ She was talking to the goldfish.