Aphrodite's Workshop for Reluctant Lovers (2 page)

Across from me on the train the woman was still reading. She had only a few pages left. By now Lucas, the novel's hero, a world-weary journalist, and Catherine, the pianist heroine, would be coming together, as the reader had always known they would, in spite of fate having done its best to prevent it.

‘Stop, stop the train!' Dominic had actually said that, or rather shouted it, running down the platform waving his arms.

Maybe I should not have waved back. No, it had not been a nice thing to do, to lean out of the window with a smile and a wave as the train pulled away, leaving him behind.

The woman had finished her book. She gave a little snort of pleasure, blew her nose and closed the pages, absent-mindedly stroking the cover: a row of hazy houses against a background of golden-yellow and turquoise, the words
Suburbs of the Heart
by Rebecca Finch in raised gold.

Dominic said that he hoped my ‘little trip away' had done me good.

I told him I thought it had.

‘Well, I'm glad all that money wasn't entirely wasted.'

‘Oh it wasn't.' I paused. ‘But I am really sorry you didn't make it.'

‘You didn't look sorry. I would have considered paying for another ticket and coming out on the next train but quite frankly the way you leant out of the window and waved at me, well, I thought, what would have been the point? Then when you didn't answer your mobile.' He shrugged.

In my mind I was busy formulating words like, No, I was simply encouraging you to run faster and, You might have thought I was smiling but I was actually fighting to hold back the tears, and, The battery ran out and I had forgotten my charger. But like George Washington I could not tell a lie, not any more.

‘I'm having lunch with Angel-face tomorrow,' I said instead. ‘What about you?'

He shrugged again.

‘I'm visiting a client in Sussex.'

As he got up from the breakfast table I got up too and put my arms round him.

‘I'm sorry,' I muttered.

Dominic stiffened and then he relaxed and kissed me.

‘Maybe it did us good, having a couple of days apart,' he said. ‘By the way; I hope you managed to arrange some sort of refund from the
pension
.'

I found it difficult to settle down to work so instead I decided to tidy my study. I was not a naturally neat person, but I had learnt through the years that if the room in which I worked was chaotic then my mind followed suit, whereas if, when I gazed up from my screen, the view was uncluttered and pleasingly ordered the words flowed easily. Of late the room had closed in around me. There were piles of paper on my desk and on the table by my armchair. On the bookshelf the books were placed anyoldhow, stacked and balanced on top of each other and mixed up with box files and magazines. The large corkboard above my desk was layered like an artichoke with leaves of cuttings and memos. In the drawer where I kept my old notebooks and diaries I found the blood-red leather-bound diary that I had kept during the days and months after I had first met Dominic. I had never consistently kept a diary although I had always liked the idea of doing so, starting yet another one when something momentous was occurring in my life or a pretty powder-blue spine and a small beribboned key caught my eye at a stationery shop. I would always start with a flourish and end, usually not many weeks later, with some dutiful jottings that seemed just a pointless distraction from my real task of writing books. But today I was glad that I had saved all these half-finished diaries, as suddenly I was curious to be reintroduced to the person I had been. I opened the covers of the diary and began to read:

‘This time it's going to be different, I know it,' my darling told me this morning as we lay in bed together. And I know he's right. I love him, I love him, I love him, and he loves me and I could not give him up any more than a prisoner could turn his back on the sun and return to his dark cell.

I had to read this passage twice, paying special attention to the way the letters were formed to make sure they were written by me and not some teenage impostor.

On moving in together this half-witted girl wrote:

It's as if there had never been a house before this one: no other kitchen stove or television, bed or linen. This is the first Christmas. It is the first tree that we carry back together through the streets, which miraculously are dusted with the first snow.

And six months later she was still at it with her pink-tinted pen:

There were just a few entries after that, fading out into white virgin pages. What a waste of good paper, I thought. I sat down at my desk and started to write, filling in according to memory an evening a year later:

I put my pen away and closed the diary. It was all going to be so different, we had said; we were going to be different, break the pattern with our everlasting, shining love. And in that, I thought, closing the drawer, we were just like everyone else.

Angel-face, my god-daughter, had just got engaged to Zac. The two of them had met at university and four years on they
were planning their wedding. Bridget, Angel-face's mother, had at first worried that they were too young but had since got used to the idea. ‘He truly loves her,' she had said to me. ‘And he's got a good career ahead of him. Angel-face needs someone with a good career to look after her.'

I agreed with that. Angel-face was a potter. Not a potter who made mugs and butter dishes and other handy household goods that sold in their hundreds, but a maker of sometimes wonderful but never useful things such as bouquets of pottery tulips, birds of paradise and pots that were just too small for anything to fit inside.

Angel-face, as always, was on time and we went inside the restaurant together. I ordered pink champagne and smiled at her across the table. Angel-face did not smile back; instead her soft brown eyes bore a troubled look and her high forehead was creased in a frown.

The champagne arrived and I tried again.

‘To Love.' I raised my glass.

Angel-face lifted her glass in reply, not with the forceful upward thrust of celebration but absent-mindedly, holding it just a little off the table, where it stayed as if she had already forgotten it was there.

‘Mazel tov?' I said.

‘What? Oh yes, mazel tov.'

‘Angel-face, is everything OK?'

‘I'm doing the right thing, aren't I, getting married?'

I put my glass back down and removed Angel-face's before it slipped from her fingers.

‘That's quite some question. What's happened?'

‘Nothing's happened.'

‘Then I don't understand. You've just got engaged. Did you
not mean to?' That wasn't such a silly question when directed at Angel-face, who quite often ended up doing things she had not really set out to do. Although of course that usually meant things like having her hair coloured black when she'd booked a trim, or joining a month-long sailing trip round the Isle of Wight when she'd just been popping down for the weekend. Getting engaged without meaning to was an altogether bigger deal.

‘Of course I meant to,' Angel-face said, sounding a little annoyed that I had felt the need to ask.

‘And you love him?'

‘Of course I love him.'

‘Has he done something to upset you then? Has he been unkind to you?'

‘No, of course not. Zac is the kindest man I've ever met.'

‘Then I really don't understand,' I said again.

‘Good,' Angel-face said.

‘Good. What do you mean
good
?'

‘I mean good as in you don't think it's inevitable.' Angel-face picked up her glass with more purpose this time and gulped down a healthy mouthful.

‘
What
isn't inevitable?'

‘That Zac and I will end up divorced like forty per cent of couples, fighting over custody of the children – or the cats. Fighting over the house. Slinging insults at each other across a mediation table. Or worse, still together like the Nicholsons but itching with pent-up resentments, nursing years of “wrongs”, unable to say a single word to the other that isn't barbed or loaded.'

‘It doesn't have to be like that,' I said. ‘Look at your parents. How long have they been married? Almost thirty years?'

‘Yes, look at them,' Angel-face said with a sour little twist of her full lips.

‘They're all right, aren't they?' I asked her. I thought surely Bridget would have told me if there were problems. Then again, she always said that in her view a problem shared was a problem doubled.

Angel-face shrugged.

‘Yeah, they're all right. And that's a worry in itself, don't you see? I mean is that the gold standard, the best I can hope for: being all right? And is all right even remotely all right or actually a complete betrayal of all one's earlier hopes and dreams? You know, Zac took me to see
Romeo and Juliet
at the Donmar last night. Oh Rebecca, it was awful.'

‘Really? I read some excellent reviews.'

Again Angel-face waved my words away with an impatient flap of her hand.

‘No, no, that's not at all what I meant.'

‘Well, what
do
you mean, Angel-face?' I said. I was used to getting it wrong at home, I thought. When I was out I wanted a break.

‘It was Juliet. There she was in her big scene trying to suck some poison from her beloved's lips and I wanted to stand up and shout, “No, no, Juliet, don't do it! Look around you first. Look at your parents and aunts and uncles before you decide to die for Romeo.'” With that she handed me a handwritten page of dove-grey A4 paper (Angel-face never had got to grips with computers). It said ‘Love – My Concerns', underlined twice in red, and went on:

Angel-face had watched me as I read, her eyes wide and expectant. I was getting upset. My god-daughter had come to me for advice. Like most people who knew very little about how to live their own life I was fond of giving advice to others. In fact in my early days as a writer I had supplemented my income by being a newspaper agony aunt. But sitting there, my glass of pink champagne in my hand like a balloon at a wake, I could think of nothing either wise or comforting to say.

Angel-face raised her little hand with its pink-tipped finger adorned with a ring of a deep-blue sapphire flanked by two diamonds.

‘I know what you're going to say.'

Really? It was my turn to look expectant.

‘You were going to say that the first flush of passion is bound to cool but that the love that takes its place is truer and deeper.'

Yes, I thought, that was exactly what I would have said, had I thought of it. I nodded encouragingly. Our food arrived. My pasta with clams was pungent with garlic, just
the way I liked it. Angel-face, however, stared moodily at her cod in a salt and herb crust.

‘Don't blame the cod,' I said. ‘I bet that poor fish didn't even have a chance to get married, let alone divorced.'

Angel-face looked up at me with a frown, then her brow cleared.

‘Oh, a joke.'

‘Well, an attempt.' I coughed. ‘You were saying?'

‘I was saying that I know all that stuff about love changing but not for the worse. I know you were going to tell me how everyone when they're young looks at the older generation and thinks, I won't ever be like them, but then you get to that same age and you do become just like them but you don't actually mind …'

I was going to say all of that too? I nodded some more.

‘But, Rebecca, if it were so, why the ennui and the quiet desperation, why the middle-aged affairs, why the hunger for your books? And why, why, Rebecca, does my mother look at me and Zac with such sad longing?'

I felt even more discomfited. Bridget was brisk and cheerful, competent and matter-of-fact. She said, ‘Let's just get on with it,' where others lingered and debated. She had no business to look at anything with sad longing. And I knew my reaction was selfish, but wasn't that how it was? We depended on the daffy friend remaining daffy so we could exercise our practical side, and on our poor friend to remain poor so we could be generous. Our strong friend must thus remain so we could let go now and then and appear just as small and scared as we felt.