Gregory was waiting impatiently for Angela to come home. He’d bought a £2.99 bag of Realwood logs from the garage on his way back. When he heard her key in the door he would put a match to the kindling in the hearth. He lit a cigarette, a low-tar brand, called Ultra Low. He took the cigarette from a Zippo chromium case he’d received on his eighteenth birthday from his girlfriend at the time. “Love always, Elaine.” He rubbed the inscription with his thumb. On 30.7.76 Elaine had informed him that she had been in love with her dentist for over a year and she could ‘no longer live a lie’. The dentist, Mr Chan, was unaware that he was the object of Elaine’s love, and eventually was forced to take an injunction out to keep Elaine away from his surgery.
Gregory thought that he should stop using the cigarette case. For twenty years it had been a constant reminder to him that before Angela he had always seemed to end up with difficult, neurotic women. The type who cried easily and wore unflattering clothes that were five years behind in fashion. These women had looked unfashionable even without their clothes. He wondered why even their naked bodies had looked second-hand. He wasn’t what women called ‘a catch’. He knew that. But he was a damned sight better-looking than most of the husbands and partners he saw about. And better educated (two A levels) and he’d almost completed a degree at Loughborough University in Leisure Management. In a moment of uncertainty he’d once done a quiz in the Sunday Times and had scored just enough points, forty-five, to categorise himself as middle-middle–class. He’d got five of those points because as a young man he’d played rugby and tennis at club level, before persistent cartilage problems had forced him to stop.
Sometimes he wondered if he was performing the sex act correctly. None of them had complained, but he had to admit that not one of them had shown the wild abandonment that women on the cinema screen went in for. He had tried to arouse them by showing them drawings from The Joy of Sex but he couldn’t recall a single ex-girlfriend who had bitten a pillow or thrashed her head from side to side. He was always scrupulous about their mutual sexual hygiene but, after having sex with him, few of them ever wanted to see him again.
It was so unfair. He’d go to enormous trouble: he could only bring them to the house on Tuesday nights when his mother went to rehearsals at the local dramatic society. After she’d gone he would pick the girl up from her home and drive her back to his mother’s house, light the gas fire in the lounge, adjust the lighting, lay a towel on the hearth rug, and put ‘Bolero’ on the record player. Making love by firelight should have been a magical experience, but most of the girls had been unable to relax; some had been frightened; some had cried and had wanted to go home.
Angela had broken this unhappy pattern. She was a looker. She was interested in world affairs. Their fathers had both been members of the Lions Club of Great Britain. She was an older woman. She was sexually experienced. He’d asked her to marry him in the carpark of a country pub on their third date. They’d been standing watching the sun setting between two tall conifers and Angela’s face was suffused by the fading pink light. He had driven them back to town without once exceeding the speed limit. A queue of cars had built up behind them. Angela’s right hand had stroked his left thigh. This was the most physically intimate they had been so far. They had gone back to Angela’s bedsit for sex. She seemed to be desperate for him. He had phoned his mother to tell her that he wouldn’t be home that night, he was staying with a friend from the rugby club. His mother had laughed indulgently down the phone.
“You men?” she’d said. Though it was only eleven o’clock at night. Gregory had meant to remind his mother to lock the front door, but he had been unable to speak. Something had been put into his mouth; it was one of Angela’s nipples.
Gregory hadn’t wanted to spend his working life surrounded by napery, but when his father, sole proprietor of Lowood’s Linens, had dropped dead at work at the age of fifty-three, the family business had settled itself on his reluctant twenty-one-year-old shoulders, He had never succeeded in shrugging it off. Initially he’d agreed to it to please his mother, who had been hysterical at the graveside, and had implored him in the funeral car to carry on where his father had so suddenly broken off. He would have agreed to anything during that terrible journey. Anything to shut her up, to stop that embarrassing wet-mouthed grief, and those awful unfeminine out-of-control grunting noises she was making in the back of her throat. His mother had always been such a quiet woman. The drive back from the churchyard to the family house became a fifteen-miles-an-hour nightmare. As the black car passed Lowood’s Linens his mother began screaming, “How ean I live without him?” He had wanted to slide the glass panel aside and ask the driver of the car to put his foot down, but Lydia, his older sister, had restrained him.
Within three years his mother had died, leaving Gregory the large Edwardian house in the comfortable suburbs to the south of the city and rooms full of Jacobean-style dark furniture. Lydia had wanted the dining table and eight chairs. There had been a quarrel which turned into a feud, he hadn’t seen her for sixteen years. Gregory was now thirty-nine and was still surrounded by tablecloths and napkins, in the tiny shop, opposite the noisy market place. After a lot of agonised indecision, he had diversified into bed linen, and expanded into the shop next door, but napery was still his speciality. There was nothing Gregory didn’t know about the trade. The shelves of the shop were stacked to the ceiling with every conceivable fabric and pattern of tablecloth and napkin.
His father had been a character, he had been well known in the town for his wit and bonhomie, and his capacity for strong drink. A glamorous woman, a stranger, had turned up, uninvited, to his funeral. Gregory also wanted to be thought of as a character. He tried to make himself more interesting by wearing a three–piece suit and a bow tie to work. There was always a fresh flower in the buttonhole of his coat. For a time he had taken to buying the Daily Telegraph. He had enjoyed sitting on his high stool next to the till, flapping and cracking the large broadsheet pages into order; but he had eventually tired of what he called, ‘the smart-alecky’ writing, and had gone back to the Daily Mail, which was more manageable, on many levels.
On Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays he employed a young woman, to help in the shop. She was black, had three school-age children and was called Lynda. Gregory chose her because she was black. He thought it would make him seem advanced and daring. Lynda had not turned out to be as exotic as he had expected. She didn’t laugh as easily as he would have liked or wear bright colours. She was efficient and honest and polite to the customers and within a few weeks she knew her way around the stock.
“But I could have had all that from a white woman,” he had once grumbled to Angela.
His regular customers now were mainly old women, to whom a tablecloth was still a household necessity, but Christmas brought all types. He could move a hundred tablecloths a day in the week before Christmas. His best line was a red cloth bordered with a Santa and reindeer design. He imported these from Portugal. He could fill in the customs and excise forms with his eyes closed.
Over the years, he had taken up many hobbies and pastimes. He had collected early English teaspoons. He had then become interested in genealogy, and had traced his Lowood ancestors back to the eighteenth century. Disappointingly, they had been tanners—the pariahs of a village in Norfolk, forbidden even to go to church because of the ‘noxious odure’ of their clothing. Gregory had also experimented constantly with his facial hair; a handlebar moustache, mutton-chop whiskers, a goatee, a bushy and a half-face beard, but somehow or other his quest for the public label, that of being a ‘character’, continued to be fruitless.
He fancied himself as a bit of a scribbler and had once embarked on writing a heavily researched science fiction story about a crew of women astronauts attempting to land on Saturn, but by the nineteenth page they’d already reached Saturn and he hadn’t known what to do with them after that, so he’d abandoned the book.
What he wanted was to walk into a country pub and hear a shout go up: “What’s your poison, old boy?” He wanted to be part of a VAT-grumbling, joke-cracking, heavy-drinking crowd of small businessmen like himself. He wanted to be a man. He had no real interest in football, except on the rare occasions when his local team did well, but recently he had started to read the sports pages in the newspapers and to study the football league tables.
He’d often thought about selling the shops and buying a country pub. He would supply faggots and peas after the darts matches, and encourage his regulars, his friends, to keep their personal tankards hanging up over the bar. He’d mentioned this idea to Angela, but she’d said, “Quite honestly Gregory, I’d sooner sell my body in Wolver-hampton, than run a country pub.”