Crimson (51 page)

“She certainly does,” Annabel said with feeling.

“She was unspeakably rude when I telephoned.”

“Your generation of women wasn’t brought up to handle ultimate responsibility.” To Annabel, at that moment Adam looked ready to shoulder the world.

“Traditionally, men have always done that, and they know how tough it is.” He smiled gently.

“But you, Annabel, don’t need or want to prove anything. You’re happy to be looked after and to enjoy life! You’re the only O’Dare sister who’s a realist.” Even as he spoke, Adam couldn’t believe that Annabel was swallowing this rubbish. But she was still an underdeveloped child, easily led, dependent, and naIve. No wonder she had no children. Annabel was still a child herself. She wanted to be taken care of. She didn’t want to grow up and grapple with responsibilities and problems.

Smiling, Adam offered the silver pudding dish, but Annabel shook her head.

“I have to be careful.”

“What rubbish!” Adam laughed, looking Annabel’s figure over appreciatively.

“I agree that you no longer look like a starved greyhound, but you must know that you are a sensuous and beautiful woman.”

Annabel’s basic amiability and good nature made her instinctively a flatterer: she always wanted to make people feel happy. Because of this, she did not recognize flattery when it was used as a weapon against her, to breach her de fences and melt her resistance.

Adam saw that, as with most women, praise would turn Annabel’s head; careful flattery would counteract her insecurity, for which she would unknowingly feel grateful and the rest would be easy.

He leaned towards her and stroked her pale, chiffon shoulder.

“You look like a charming wood nymph in that gauze thing.” Through the flimsy material, Annabel felt the heat of Adam’s palm against her skin. He was close enough for her to feel his warm breath and smell. his erotic odour. She shifted slightly away from him.

Adam said, “Your beautiful mouth has a crumb on it.” He leaned closer. Before Annabel realized his intention, he licked the side of her mouth with a fast, serpentine flick of -his tongue.

His movement took her completely by surprise and so did her own bodily reaction when he pressed his mouth on hers. Annabel felt his hands against her breasts. She felt a melting warmth spread quickly through her body.

After what they both recognized as token resistance, she slowly fell back upon the grass, feeling that happy warmth down to the tingling tips of her fingers.

Annabel was bewitched by Adam, overwhelmed by the feel of his body crushing hers. Unable to move, she felt the satin-slippery texture of his lips and his slow, hungry kisses.

As Adam tore the grey chiffon from her breasts, Annabel felt her reason drift away, replaced by a passionate longing for the continued hard strength of his body. She wanted him not only to cover her but to envelop her; she wanted to efface herself and melt into him, lose herself in the acstasy of fusion. Adam lowered his now -naked body upon hers and Annabel at last felt his flesh upon her flesh, hard and warm. She smelled the sharp scent of crushed wild thyme beneath her head as he started to move slowly, steadily, and rhythmically.

Afterwards, they bathed, silent and naked, in the pool, and then still naked they walked, barefoot and hand in hand, through the woods. Often they stopped to kiss and touch, regardless of who might see them, and neither said a word.

Paylight had faded into dusk when they returned to their picnic site. The overturned dish of chicken and the untouched strawberries were now abuzz with wasps.

Annabel never saw the end of Figaro,

SATURDAY, 7 SEPTEMBER 1968

Clare stood at the front door, feeling the sun warm her brown arms. The cream climbing rose appropriately named New Dawn which she had planted by the door was in full bloom. A sweet-brier hedge enclosed the garden, and before it grew fragrant, white tobacco flowers, delicate sprays of gypsophila, and very pale pink hydrangeas.

She looked down the herringbone-patterned brick garden path that her visitors were about to tread; the path was edged by herbs: behind the mint were rosemary, thyme, and tarragon sadly, not doing very well. Then came rows of vegetables, as satisfyingly neat as a sampler, in lines of different-coloured greens: cabbages and cauliflowers, lettuces, onions, and carrot tops.

Summer had spilled over into early September. It was so golden a day that Clare had almost decided to hold David’s birthday luncheon in the garden, but the buffet meal looked very pretty in the kitchen a bit like a harvest festival; she had decorated the pink-walled room with branches of elderberry and hawthorn, red berries, and sprays of blackberricd brambles. Flat loaves shaped like stooks of wheat had been painted with egg yolk before Clare baked them, so that now they shone; her showpieces were the open tarts: apricot and chestnut, plum and raspberry, peach and pear, and shiny black cherry.

Clare decided to serve drinks before lunch her homemade lemonade and elder flower wine under the apple trees. Behind her, she heard David clumping down the uncarpeted wooden staircase and turned to face him. He looked so handsome in the cream silk shirt that was Clare’s birthday gift.

In a low voice, he said, “I’m sorry. I’m leaving. Now.”

“You can’t leave! The guests are due, and they’re nearly all your friends!”

“They know me. They’ll understand. I’m sorry. I’m off.” When David was in one of his moods, he would withdraw and treat Clare almost as if she were a stranger. He was always very polite but distant.

These moods differed from David’s habitual absentmindedness, which made him unreliable and unpredictable: sometimes he was so absorbed by what he was doing that he lost track of time and forgot to eat or to go to bed only looking up from his work or his book as dawn filtered through the windows, when he would suddenly realize that he was ravenously hungry and had forgotten to phone Clare.

But when David was in a depression, he would be unable to sit still. Impatient and moody, he would stride restlessly around the kitchen or open the front door. Clare would run to a window and see his long legs hurrying down the brick path to the garden gate, which he sometimes vaulted in his haste to get away from her, she thought bitterly. If she tried to stop him from leaving, he became irritable. And if he agreed to stay, he would sit, immobile, in front of the fire for hours, in blank resignation. At some point, he would get up abruptly and leave without a word.

When he was like this, it was impossible to persuade David to do something, for no effort seemed worthwhile to him-he was incapable of reading, of listening to the music lie loved, even of eating. He wanted only to be left alone.

At such times, Clare’s self-esteem would start to crumble. Her-still-fragile newfound selfconfidence had been built Up by her growing pleasure in her successful bakery but Iso by David’s loving encouragement.

Clare had never probed for further explanation of his moods, but now, as she stood waiting for David’s birthday guests, she cried, “This time you must tell me! What do I do wrong?”

“I’ve told you before, it’s nothing to do with you, Clare. Please let me go. I can’t explain at the moment.” Behind them, Josh, in a new pair of jeans, clattered downstairs. He looked from Clare to David and said sharply, “WhatzoopT “Nothing, Josh,” Clare said.

“We’re just talking.” Josh ran off to, climb his favourite apple tree. David fled down the garden path.

Clare’s friends were surprised and sorry to hear that David had suddenly developed a migraine.

David’s friends some of whom Clare had never met before made no comment, but exchanged swift understanding glances and enthusiastically praised Clare’s homemade wine.

he following evening, after Clare had put Josh to bed, she heard the front door bang and knew that it was David.

She stayed in the kitchen, her elbows on the pine table and her chin in her hands.

“David, I’d give anything to understand your black moods and be able to help.”

“I’m sorry. I can’t see anyone when I feel like that. I can’t work, I can’t talk to people. I don’t even turn up for business appointments.”

“Why? “What’s wrong with you?” Clare asked. Again she felt the bewilderment she had experienced when she first saw her light-hearted, friendly lover so intuitive and gentle, so naturally in touch with his feelings change to a morose lump, a heavy, difficult weight that Clare sometimes felt she bore upon her shoulders. Sometimes David’s fits of depression lasted several days, and on the rare occasions when he stayed with her, Clare felt mentally drained and physically exhausted once he’d left.

in. “I’ve told you before. I get depressions. I feel hemmed “But surely that’s when you need a loving friend to cheer you up? To pour you a drink, put on a record, and cook your favourite me aI?” “That sort of loving concern only makes me feel worse. If I see that you’re making an effort to cheer me up, it sends me sliding down into the black pit even faster because then I also feel guilty.” Clare said, “Have you thought of seeing a doctor about “Our family doctor said that I simply needed to snap out of my self-absorption and self-pity. But when I’m depressed” David shrugged his shoulders in a helpless gesture ‘all people, all interests, and all activities tend to shrink and dwindle until they … disappear. I can’t think or talk or concentrate or move, sometimes and I feel as if I’m in a black vacuum. It takes an enormous effort to say “Yes” or “No” to anyone. I feel useless, unwanted, and frightened. I expect it sounds melodramatic, but I feel trapped and without hope. When that happens, it feels as if I’ve been in that state nearly all my life, and that this, time I won’t come out of it.”

“But surely something must help you when you feel like thatr “I’he only thing that helps is time. I just want to be alone, with no one making any demands on me, however slight, while I pray that it will pass. You must understand that you can’t help me. Nobody can. I only bring other people down with me. I’ve learned that it’s best if I just disappear and sit it out.”

“Do the people in your office know?” Clare asked as she struggled to understand what seemed to her a change in character as abrupt, unlikely, and terrifying as that of Dr. U into Mr. Hyde.

“It’s always posed a problem at work. Last time I was fired, I asked my uncle for help.” David’s uncle had realized that persistence, tenacity, and the medical profession seemed useless in helping David, and so he had helped him to establish a small private country practice, where the pressure was not so great as in London and David could work at his own pace.

“My colleagues are understanding and tactfully ignore my symptoms,” he went on.

“It’s the best thing to do.”

“Then I will, if that’s really what you want,” Clare said.

After that talk, she realized that she mustn’t try to get too close to David. She sensed that if she wanted him to stay with her, she had to let him feel free to leave. She must learn to trust his love for her and not to question his absences or his sudden departures.

In return, because he was neither possessive nor jealous, David was careful to give Clare the same freedom and privacy she gave him, not realizing that it was the last thing she wanted.

SATURDAY, 21 SEPTEMBER 1968

In David’s bedroom, Clare knelt on the window seat, from which she could look down upon a spectacular bird’s-eye view of Bath. Below her, the city of golden stone spread like a beautiful, fragile toy replica of classical Greek temples, set in squares and crescents of greenery.

David’s house which he was buying on a mortgage perched on the rim of the green basin in which Bath nestled, It was bare yet calm and wonderfully comfortable: it was a house in which you could curl up for the winter and almost regret the coming of summer. It was a home.

Beneath David’s bedroom, the sitting room contained great quantities of books, piled on the floor as well as stacked on the shelves; these piles overflowed through the door and on to the staircase.

“Underneath the sitting room was a large topaz-painted kitchen with a splendid view at either end. Since the terraced house was built on the side of a hill, one entered from the street directly into the kitchen. The walls were covered with pictures: architectural prints hung next to children’s paintings; antique views of Bath were beside snapshots of friends; postcards were taped to the walls, as were posters by Matisse and Hockney.

David’s offices were on the two lower floors. Beyond the tree-shaded narrow garden, black-and-white Friesian cows grazed in a field. When he was depressed, David often sat at the end of the garden; hunched up, he would stare for hours at the cows.

Hearing David clatter up the stairs, Clare -crossed her fingers and hoped he would stay in a good mood for this afternoon’s concert at the Assembly Rooms.

David burst into the bedroom.

“Time we left,” he said.

“You’d better wear a sweater. These late-September days can suddenly turn cold.” He opened a drawer, pulled out a green sweater, and threw it to her.

“I think that Bath is the loveliest city in the world,” Clare said dreamily as she shut the window.

“Small thanks to the city fathers. When John Wood drew up his scheme for rebuilding the city, the Bath Corporation didn’t like it, so poor Mr. Wood was forced to build it bit by bit, starting with Queen Square.” David was one of the architects involved in the rebuilding and cleaning of the city, which was slow work: a lot of the old stone was still stained black with the soot from Victorian chimneys and the early railway; there were still bomb sites from the German air raids in 1942. David asserted that even more damage had been done after the war, by the short-sighted ity planners who demolished the Georgian and Victorian workmen’s cottages and replaced them with ugly apartment blocks.

cy walked downhill past a classic semicircle of small ” elegant houses with pillared entrances. Clare paused on e stone pavement to peer into a bow-fronted shop. Inside were charming children’s clothes.

David gently pulled at her hand.

“Come on! You know Josh would hate those rich-kid clothes.”