Encounters (16 page)

Testing him, half daring, half afraid she left her towelling robe on the bedroom floor and walked nude into the bathroom. She could feel herself self-consciously holding in her stomach and pushing back her shoulders, walking with a studied grace she had no time for in her real downstairs life. She did not even glance at the bath. Holding her breath she went and stood at the window, looking out across the parched gardens, feeling the clammy, thundery heat touching her skin.

It took a moment to pluck up the courage to look at last into the mirror.

He was there. She could see the clouds of steam, smell the soap, the spice, hear the splashing of water as he lifted a sponge and thoughtfully squeezed it over his broad chest.

Forcing herself to stand still she stared into the mirror until she caught his eye. He smiled and raised an eyebrow appreciatively and then, slowly, he winked. When she turned he had gone.

‘I wish we knew something about the history of these old houses,’ she said to Liz a few days later.

Liz nodded. They were side by side in her house stripping wallpaper on the landing. ‘I do know something about ours, actually,’ she said. ‘It belonged to Ned Basset. He was a famous music-hall artist. “A notorious rake and a ladies’ man”, as that idiot at the house agents described him. I’m glad I never knew him. He sounds exactly the type of man I should detest.’

‘A male chauvinist pig of the worst kind, no doubt.’ Cathy found herself smiling as she agreed. ‘Ned Basset,’ she echoed after a moment. ‘So that was his name.’

‘Why, do you know something about him?’ Liz ripped a strip of torn wallpaper off, screwing up her face at the dust.

‘No.’ Cathy threw down her scraper. ‘Nothing at all.’

She didn’t tell Liz about the bath. She didn’t tell anyone. She knew Tony hadn’t seen him; nor, she was certain, had the children. He was her secret. Her admirer. Perhaps he was her fantasy.

Was that it? Was he just a product of her imagination? The creation of a woman who had been conditioned by the age she lived in to reject compliments from men as sexist and unwelcome when deep down inside she craved them? Without realizing it she looked at Tony and smiled. That night they made love for the first time in weeks.

The next day after she had taken the children to playschool she came back and walked upstairs to the bathroom. She stood looking down at the bath. It was cold and empty. The enamel was dry. The room was just as usual, the children’s toothbrushes lying on the basin, a streak of gaudy striped toothpaste decorating the soap, a wad of hairs in the plug hole, flecks of shaving soap on the mirror behind it, a pile of discarded clothes on the carpet. A towel lay near them, still damp, tangled and already a little smelly. Cathy felt a wave of depression sweep over her. Oh yes, she needed a fantasy. What woman didn’t?

But she didn’t want him to be a fantasy. That would be a weakness on her part; an admission of defeat. She wanted him to be real.

There was only one way to find out the truth.

Liz laughed. ‘It’s crazy, isn’t it? We throw out that bath, and you make it so nice that you can invite people to come along and try it!’

‘Only while your new bathroom is still disconnected,’ Cathy said, all innocence. “I thought it would be a change from the plastic bowl you were telling me about!’ She had tidied the bathroom, laid out fresh towels, put a small bowl of roses on the windowsill.

Of course, it might not work. He never appeared when she was actually taking a bath, but sometimes afterwards, when she was drying herself …

And Liz did have, when one came to think about it, a rather buxom figure beneath her habitual overalls. The kind of figure a rake and a ladies’ man might appreciate. If he were real …

Liz took her time. Cathy could hear her singing cheerfully. There was a lot of splashing and afterwards the sound of water running away. Then there was a long, long silence.

When she reappeared Cathy looked at her hard. ‘Was everything all right?’ she asked as casually as she could.

‘Fine.’ Liz smiled. But what on earth was that fantastic exotic smell up there as I was getting dry?’

‘Ah,’ said Cathy with a smile. ‘I’ve been wondering that myself …’

S
he had slept in the room for nearly three weeks before she noticed that one strip of wallpaper was upside down. A spider showed it to her.

Lying gazing at the wall she saw the sunlight in the fine lace web. Behind it a rose hung stem upwards, its petals drooping. Lazily her eye followed to see leaves and buds and further blooms suspended as though by invisible wire over the creamy void. It hurt her to see the flowers thus. It seemed incongruous and cruel; a stroke of fate which left them for ever vertiginous, outcasts among their fellows on the wall.

Now she could no longer come into the room without her eyes immediately straying to this corner by the window. When someone moved the spider’s web she was really very angry. It seemed the flowers’ only redemption that they had been selected by the spider as the nearest thing to nature in the room. Now nothing distinguished them any more, save their own oddity.

Sitting at her mirror, brushing out her long hair, she heard again in her head the voice which haunted.

‘The trouble with Samantha is of course that she is a teeny bit different from the rest of us, haven’t you noticed?’

Her eyes as she gazed at them were a pure expressionless blue. They saw much. The silver-backed hairbrush made her arm ache. It was too heavy. But she kept up the endless strokes, listening to the crackle, watching the fine floating strands as her hair took on a life of its own around her head.

‘Never, but
never,
brush your hair a hundred times, darling. It’s death, positively death, and
so
Victorian.’ She heard in her head the voice of the posturing little man who tended her hair and she brushed on harder than ever. This hairbrush had been made to brush hair a hundred strokes. It would be mortified if used to do less. When she had finished her hair then she would polish the brush. It seemed only fair.

In the mirror, in the corner where the silvering had gone in tiny freckles, she could see the angle of the room behind her. The casement window stood wide and she could see a fine mist of rain drifting over the garden below. The window still shone with wet and the pale green carpet beneath it darkened slowly as it grew damp. She could smell the grateful earth as its fragrance rose up in response to the rain.

Her roses, the upside down roses, could never smell like roses. But then they would never rot and grow black and die either.

She slammed her silver brush down on the dressing table glass and reached to clasp a bracelet around her slim wrist. Flinging off her dressing gown she stood naked on the carpet, throwing back her head and feeling the silky weight of her hair on her shoulders. It was strange that one was not allowed to appear naked before the world, even when one knew that one was beautiful.

She stood before the open window and felt the icy mist of rain on her warm skin.

A man stood outside in the garden, in the rain, his hair plastered blackly to his head, his tweed jacket heavy with moisture. He was standing looking up at her, not noticing the rain any more.

She smiled down at him and raised her hand. Then she moved away from the window and zipped herself dreamily into gold and embroidered chiffon. The spider was spinning again, she noticed suddenly, slightly further down the corner but still carefully, precisely, on the misplaced wallpaper. She watched fascinated.

She knew the man in the rain. In less than three weeks he would be her husband. His ring was on her finger; his kisses in her hair. Was it those she had been trying so hard to brush away?

The moth, its delicate finely traced velvet wings whirring ecstatically, stood no chance. Samantha put out her hand to ward it off, but she stayed the gesture in mid air, arrested by the sight of the diamond ring on her finger. It mesmerized her with its rainbow prisms and when she looked again the moth was caught. The spider’s paralysing jaws were ready, and the straitjacket of fine spun silk. The spider embraced its victim tenderly, lost in caressing the silky fur on the tiny quivering body. How quickly beauty and freedom and life itself were lost.

She turned away, revolted and suddenly afraid.

The days passed. Showers of rain swept the gardens and terraces. From time to time she saw the man again standing beneath her window. In the corner the web was deserted, the moth no more than a frail dust caught in the still-sticky threads. The spider had gone.

Now when she stood at the window she kept her dressing gown on, clutching it to her, shivering.

Then she left the house in a haze of goodbyes. When she returned she would be its daughter. The web would have closed around her and the time for dreams would have gone.

In the taxi she looked into the mirror in her powder compact and saw that the haunted blue still shadowed her eyes. Where was their expression and their life? Her soul was shut down, secret, protected. It must be kept separate now or he would possess it as he must possess her.

She could not understand, suddenly, why she was afraid now. She recognized him as her friend. He was kind and gentle. He had not tried to rush her, had carefully controlled his own swelling waves of emotion. He recognized her fragility. He would treasure and protect her as a piece of fine porcelain. Again the voice spoke in her head:

‘Samantha is a teeny bit different from the rest of us …’

‘I’m not, I’m not,’ she screamed silently. ‘I am the same. I feel, I need, I fear. But I am trapped within myself. I am Rapunzel within the tower. He stands in the garden, at the foot of the wall, but he will not climb. He does not know that I have let the ladder fall. He strokes my golden hair, but he does not grip it, does not climb.’

The train carried her back to London where the rain smelt of soot and the plane trees wept in their concrete prisons, here and there their roots breaking free of tarmac and flagstone only to shrivel and waste in the dead air.

Her flat was dark and empty, a refuge she had always thought, for her soul. But her soul would not be comforted. It sought a mystic union now and would be satisfied with nothing less. Here where the wallpaper was immaculate, where no spiders dared to defile, where no mists of rain could spatter through the window glass, she had built for herself a temple of virginity. And she knew now what must be done. She picked up the telephone and dialled his number.

‘Meet me at the station,’ she said. Her voice was smiling. This time she needed no luggage; no gold bangles; no chiffon. No hairbrush save the wind.

He did not understand. He thought she had forgotten something. Never before had he seen her smile like this. His heart grew warm as he met her eyes. Now, she saw, he understood at last.

They drove up onto the moor. Still the rain surrounded them, misting the windows of the car, soaking the bracken and heather, filling the upturned bells of tiny flowers till they hung their heads beneath the weight of the water, and spilt it, nectar-like upon the ground.

Once more she felt the weight of her hair on her shoulders, the cold rain upon her warm body. She saw in his face delight and hope as she turned to him, her arms outstretched, at one with the soft wet earth, the grass and the heather. She felt his hand gently, hesitatingly on her golden hair.

Her eyes as she scanned them anxiously in her mirror in the train going home had a new depth of violet in the iris. She tore open the windows of the flat, bought armfuls of roses and trimmed her pure white wedding dress with blue.

She took her hair, tangled from the wind and heather, to be restyled and giggled as the voice said, ‘But darling, the wind is death, positively death.’ The posturing little man wanted her to wear her veil, but now she insisted on a garland of rose buds, entwined with the white moorland heather.

In the church the carol of gladness soared up into the vaulting and her heart with it. With him at her side and their own vows already made this formal binding no longer held any terror. It blessed the bond they had pledged in the rain with public ceremony. Her eyes and his held one another and knew their own secrets.

As she changed in the room with the rose wallpaper she drew apart from her attendants. While they fussed and gossiped over tulle and silver she looked for a new web. There was none on the wall, but outside, where a watery sun shone on marquee and grass, she saw in the angle of the window, a new, more delicate web, hung with diamond raindrops. It had ensnared nothing but a wisp of thistledown.

Satisfied, she returned to the voices. Let them say what they will, she and he were one; he did not find her different. He understood the way she thought. He had not laughed when she told him about the spider and the roses, but caressed her hair with his lips, wondering and gentle. Sympathetic to her needs he had made her glad by cancelling secretly the tickets for the south of France, people and society, and planning instead for a continuation of their private ceremony.

Soon, entertaining done and friendship appeased, they would leave for the far, empty north. Among the mountains the deep, reflective lochs and the purple heather they would find one another again. There they would nurture too the first foetal moments of the child she knew would be conceived. This room, she vowed, would be its nursery.