Married Love (16 page)

Chris’s and Susan’s taxis pulled up outside 33 Everdene Walk at the same moment; Amanda had got there before them, and the front door stood open upon what seemed to their foreboding a seething blackness, in contrast to the glare outside. Who knew what state the house would be in? Susan was quicker, paying her taxi off; Chris was always afraid that he would tip too little or too much. She looked away while he probed in his change purse, then they politely pretended to recognise each other. He tried to dig back in his mind to their old acquaintance: how hadn’t he seen that the invisible unremembered Susan might grow into this slim, long-faced, long-legged dark woman, somewhat ravaged but contained and elegant?

Meanwhile, Amanda, watching from a window she had just opened upstairs, saw thirty-five years of change heaped in one awful moment on both their heads. They looked broken-down to her, appalling. On her way to the house, she had bullied her resisting taxi driver into
two
consecutive U-turns between the lime trees: visited by a premonition of just this disappointment, and then recovering, repressing her dread, willing herself to hope. Amanda remembered the old days more vividly than either of the others, cherished the idea of their shared past – strangely, because at the time she had seemed the one most ready to trample it underfoot, on her way to better things. Now she revolted at Chris’s untidy grey-white locks, windswept without wind, around his bald patch: why did men yield so readily to their disintegration? At least Susan had the decency to keep her hair brown and well cut. Chris was stooping and bobbing at Susan, smiling lopsidedly, self-deprecatory. He wound one foot behind the other calf, rubbing his shoe on his trouser leg; when he’d done that at seventeen, it had seemed to Amanda a sign of a tormented sensibility, which she had ached to explore and conquer.

She whistled from the window, piercing the Walk’s tranquillity.

— Come on up! she shouted. — Prepare for the Chamber of Horrors!

Not only the air inside the house but the light, from forty-watt bulbs, seemed ancient and rotten. The curtains were drawn across the windows in all the rooms. Odds and ends of furniture – a folding card table, a standard lamp, a barometer, picture frames showing peeling strips of passepartout – were piled in the hall, half sorted, inventoried, forlorn and sour with damp. The house had been empty for a year, from the
time
of their godmother Vivien’s death. But none of the three had visited it since long before that, when they were teenagers and came together. Chris had fallen out of touch with Vivien completely, decades earlier, on political grounds, and because it had never occurred to him that he owed her any duty; Amanda and Susan had seen her occasionally in London over the years – separately, and not recently.

Susan stopped abruptly in the hall.

— But it’s so tiny! she said. — Was it always this size? How come I remember it as spacious?

— I don’t remember anything, Chris said, alarmed. — Is it some form of dementia? I thought I remembered the house, but I’d swear I’ve never set foot in here before.

— I’ve got rid of the solicitor, Amanda called from somewhere over their heads. — We’ve got it all to ourselves. I said we’d return the key to him when we finished. He was glad to get out – who can blame him? Isn’t it horrid? They’ll never sell it, will they?

A squat staircase crawled up one wall from the varnished parquet in the hall; at the top, three bedrooms opened off a landing, along with a toilet and a bathroom whose stains they shuddered at. Amanda loomed in a doorway: years ago, the striped thing draped across her shoulder would have been called a poncho. Her voice was more familiar to Chris and Susan than her person: caramel, hectoring, running on and on. What they both remembered most clearly – though differently – about the young Mandy was her physical perfection, as simple as a drawing done in a single curving line. Whatever she
had
worn in those days – a dress, or jeans and a T-shirt – had suggested her stepping out of it in one smooth movement. Her ease in her own body had been morally terrifying to the others. Her face was still bright – she had good skin and a thick mane of hair – but the rest of her had grown overbearing, to match her voice. Now she wore flat shoes and harem pants and a lot of jewellery.

Amanda had brought a packet of coloured stickers. The plan for today, devised by her, was that they should each choose a colour and put stickers on any items they wanted, then go shares on a man with a van to collect it all and deliver it to their respective homes. They had been invited to take whatever they liked from the house. They had also been left quite a few thousand pounds each, from a trust fund. This had come as a pleasant surprise to Chris, who was genuinely not worldly enough to have thought of the possibility, and had pretty much forgotten that he had a godmother. None of them were heir to the property itself, which had gone to a niece and a nephew, deserving because they had been kind to Vivien in her old age.

— Oh, is this her? Chris picked up a photograph from the top of a chest of drawers, where it was arranged on a lace doily along with a tin alarm clock and a cut-glass dish full of buttons and paper clips, everything soft with dust. — The face does ring a bell. He was reassured. — She’s starting to come back to me.

In the photograph, Vivien wore a checked dress with a Peter Pan collar. Her small laughing eyes, horsy long
jaw
, and exuberant big-toothed smile were sandwiched between two circles of glass, held in a base of faded art deco plastic.

— Somehow she persuaded us she was good-looking, Amanda said. — She used to seem so glamorous.

Susan crossed to the open window, as if to breathe. — This place is giving me the creeps. I don’t want anything.

— Don’t be silly, Amanda said. — Take it and sell it on eBay.

— It’s all old junk. Nothing’s even antique.

— You’ll be surprised what you can get for it.

Susan was fishing in her handbag. — I’m going to call the cab back. This was a mistake. Sorry, Mandy. I’ve had a dreadful morning with my mother.

Amanda, focusing, took in properly for the first time that Susan’s understated bag was made of leather as soft as cloth, and that her clothes were sumptuous: simple cream linen dress, cranberry-red cashmere cardigan over her shoulders.

— Actually, it’s giving me the creeps, too, Chris said, looking nervously from one woman to the other. — I could use a cab – if you don’t mind sharing, Susan?

— Oh, no! Amanda wailed. — You pigs! You can’t leave me here on my own. It’s not fair!

Chris and Susan stared at this overflowing stranger, claiming them. Both felt an inappropriate anxiety that she might howl with tears, and they might be held unjustly to blame for it.

— Please, she said, softening. — We can do the stickers
later
. We could go out in the garden; we could find a local pub. But we can’t just let one another go as easily as that, as if none of it meant anything. Can we?

Chris was bewildered. — None of what?

It wasn’t anything sinister or criminal. Every few months, year after year, Vivien’s daddy, who was tiny, bulky-shouldered, ill-tempered, with a burnished, age-spotted bald pate, had picked them up in his car from their respective houses and driven them to Everdene Walk in a grim silence that was almost hieratic, as if they were sacrifices heaped up for his daughter visiting from London, where she worked as a PA to a succession of managers at ITN and Granada. From his driver’s seat, Daddy had emanated the distaste of a serious man for the frivolity of children, and an alarm that they might somehow damage his beige leather upholstery. But Vivien had been lovely to them, in her way. She had no children of her own: this was what their parents had always said when handing them over, as though they were being sent to soak up some surplus of mothering that childless women couldn’t help secreting. But Vivien wasn’t mother-like at all. She had not married, and Amanda and Susan learned only later – Chris never knew about it, because he wasn’t interested – of her lifelong love affair with a married man in London. By the time of the children’s visits, whatever friendship had originally made each set of parents choose Vivien as a godmother had melted away: Vivien was too bossy, she was a snob, she belonged to a world of musty charm and optimism that their parents were leaving behind in the 1960s. The parents had been
apologetic
, actually, when Daddy’s car came, for sending their children as their proxies, when they were too bored to go themselves. But the children hadn’t minded, and not only because of the treats.

— None of what? Chris asked, afraid that he’d missed something.

— Us! Amanda swept her arm to indicate the three of them, the sleeve of her poncho catching in a wicker-work pagoda on a side table. — We were really close, weren’t we? We were three odd solitary kids and we didn’t make friends easily, but here we met without any baggage, and we got on. It meant a lot to me.

Sometimes Amanda reread old volumes of her diary; she still wrote in it too, filling pages copiously when things weren’t going well.

The others were accusing. — You weren’t solitary.

— I was the most solitary of all: at least you both had brothers and sisters.

— You were awfully spoiled, Susan said, — with your ballet lessons and your deportment lessons and your tennis.

— I didn’t ever have deportment lessons. Look, are you two going to stay? Don’t let me down!

Susan stood hesitating. It depended on her: the others saw her power, which they hadn’t noticed in the old days. Her face was haggard, cheekbones jutting above hollows: if it was beautiful, there was also something naked in it, shocking. The unblemished skin was textured like soft parchment. What Amanda remembered was glasses, a flat chest, hand-me-down bobbled jumpers
(Amanda
had refused to wear hers, once the wool went like that), a reputation for good marks at the school where she had a scholarship (not the school that Amanda’s parents paid for), and a stubborn, sulking resistance to Amanda, who – used to capitulation – had been intrigued.

— There’s a lot of Chinese stuff here, Chris said, disentangling the pagoda from the poncho.

— They lived in Singapore when she was little, and then Paris. That’s where they got their international flavour. You’d have thought they were jet-setters, from the way they talked. But Daddy was only in insurance.

Warily Susan dropped her mobile back in her bag, yielding as if she didn’t do it often.

— All right then, she said. — I’ll stay for a bit. For old times’ sake.

In the decaying room, the three of them were linked in heady intimacy for a moment, though they were also strangers.

— I’ll stay as well, Chris said.

But the women had taken this for granted.

They found their old den. The others had forgotten it, but Amanda remembered and led them to it – bearing bottles raided from the kitchen – though the way through the garden was unrecognisable. This garden had once been Daddy’s pride: amoeba-shaped flower beds mounded with colour, crazy-paving paths set in close-clipped lawns. There had been a swinging lounge seat with a striped awning, and every summer’s day had revolved around the necessity of taking this awning in if rain
threatened
. Now the neighbours in the Walk must have been despairing at the incursion of wilderness into their sanctuary: rusty dock and nettle stood waist high, bramble was advancing in the tall grass. Rubbish had been thrown in here, split bags bulging with rot, a spillage of broken things from the house, a plastic clotheshorse, a smashed china bread crock. In the heat, it all smelled potently of rank growth, baked earth, dog shit. The den was lifted up above the chaos, a raised space of hard mud on a bank among trees at the far end of the garden, opposite Vivien’s bedroom window, backing on to a little copse where the locals walked their dogs.

Susan had brought a blanket from the house for them to sit on, and Amanda had chocolate in her handbag. They examined more closely the bottles they’d liberated: Johnnie Walker, Tia Maria, Cinzano, amontillado sherry. The bottles were filthy, sticky, greasy, but Amanda was adamant that the alcohol was safe. She wiped around the tops with tissues soaked in whisky, and was the first to swig, choosing the sherry. — My favourite, she said. — Goes straight to your head. Wow!

— Out here I feel more relaxed, said Susan. Lying back on the blanket, she looked up at the blue sky through the spreading fans of leaves in a silver birch, wafting in the merest movement of air. The urgent onward flow of her days ceased abruptly; the sensation was as if something – her soul – had floated to the front of her forehead, while she sank down, breathing differently, vastly. — That’s what used to happen, in the old days. We used to get away from the house, out here.

— But not at first. At first we loved it all.

Vivien used to have tea ready for them when they came: Twiglets, sandwiches with the crusts cut off, cream cakes, ice cream, jelly. If they visited her in London, she took them to the opera at Covent Garden, the Natural History Museum, the Mermaid Theatre, Chez Solange – where a waiter picked extra strawberries off a gateau for Amanda.

Chris played it safe with the Johnnie Walker. Susan tried Cinzano, in memory of Vivien. She reported that it was hideous.

— I danced for you all in this garden, Amanda said.

Chris seemed to see her, in a leotard and some sort of scanty, fancy-painted yellow nylon thing, fastened to elastic on her wrists, which she waved about like wings. He remembered registering both her absurd self-importance and self-exposure (the dancing wasn’t very good) and the breath-stopping effect of her bare creamy legs and bouncing pyramids of breast.

They had all shown off. Vivien had encouraged them to do it. Mandy had been a beauty, Chris a genius – he had held forth on existentialism, on the problem with Communism, which was human nature. They tried to think what Susan had been: Susan had had personality and depth, they remembered. She had read Dickens when she was eleven. Licensed, leaving shame behind them in the real world, they had expanded into the place Vivien made for them, reinventing themselves, becoming in the free space of the Walk exceptional. They had talked together, even in front of Vivien, as they talked to none
of
their friends, confessing their aspirations and their real thoughts.