Kitabı oku: «The Potter’s House»

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Keep Reading

About the Author

Also by Rosie Thomas

About the Publisher

One

The first time I saw the woman who later ran off with my husband she was giving directions to two removals men. They were struggling to lift a sofa round an awkward bend in the communal stairs and I was waiting to pass.

There were two flats per floor in Dunollie Mansions and this was evidently the new owner of the one directly above ours. Old widowed Mrs Bobinski had lived up there for twenty years in a fug of simmering soup fumes and mothballs, and then she died in hospital after a very brief illness and her heirs put the flat up for sale. It was on the market for months, partly because mansion flats like ours were no longer fashionable, if they ever had been, but mostly because the two nephews were asking too much money for it. I had heard from the Frasers on the top floor that the place was finally sold, but no one had any idea who our new neighbour would be.

‘Some nice, unremarkable couple just like us,’ Graham Fraser cheerfully assumed.

‘And us,’ I added, more thoughtfully.

I stood to one side to let the woman and her puffing retinue pass by. She was walking upstairs backwards and would have collided with me if I hadn’t put out my hand to steer her away. She wheeled round at once.

‘God, sorry. Can’t even look where I’m going. Hang on a sec.’ The last words were called down to the two young men. The one on the lower end hitched his shoulder under the padded arm and stared up in sweaty disbelief.

‘Don’t worry about us. We’ve got all day, Col, haven’t we?’

Ignoring him, she introduced herself to me. ‘I’m Lisa Kirk. Just moving in, number seven.’

‘Let your end down, Col.’

‘Right you are.’

I told the woman my name and pointed to our door. She was younger by far than anyone else currently living in the flats. I would have put her age at twenty-three, although I learned later that she was actually twenty-seven. Fifteen years or so younger them me. She had fair hair with blonde streaks and a soft leather rucksack slung over one shoulder. Even her combat pants had obviously come from somewhere expensive and fashionable, well away from the firing line. She looked as if she ought to be moving into a loft in Clerkenwell or a pastel-fronted little place in Notting Hill, not a flat in a stuffy red-brick block in a Kensington backwater.

‘If you need a cup of sugar. Or maybe gin …’ I said.

‘Thanks,’ she answered and smiled. An attractive smile. ‘You come and have a drink with me when I’ve got the glasses unpacked. Tell me what I should do with the place.’

I flattened myself against the wall as Col and his counterpart hoisted the sofa again. They laboured past me, with Lisa Kirk leading the way. I went out to post my letters and to the greengrocer’s down the side street to buy vegetables for dinner, then walked slowly back into the building.

The shallow stairs and the bare landings in Dunollie Mansions were kept clean and swept, and blown light bulbs always promptly replaced by Derek the caretaker who lived in the basement. There was a mahogany table to the left of the front door above which communal notices were posted, about things like holiday refuse collection, temporary interruptions to the water supply or work on the old-fashioned but effective central heating system. There was a faint scent of Derek’s floor polish and an even fainter whiff of disinfectant, and occasionally the rattle of the lift door grille followed by the hum of the machinery. It was a quiet, unflashy place.

I always liked the two solid doors on each landing, facing each other at a slight angle on either side of the stairwell, and the ornate brass door furniture worn with polishing, and the diamond panes of leaded glass on either side of the central panel. The hallways within were dark and would have been claustrophobic if the ceilings were not so high, but the rooms opening off them were bright and well-proportioned, especially the corner drawing rooms with their bay windows looking in two directions. From the top flats there was a view of the dome of the Albert Hall and a landscape of rooftops and chimneys, but in summertime our windows, lower down, framed nothing but the leafy plane trees out in the street. When there was a breeze the leaf patterns moved on the floor and furniture. Even in winter the bare branches made a screen against the walls and windows across the wide street.

I liked the sense of enclosure. And the well-ordered, dull and unimaginative sheer safety of everything.

It was not a background against which you could, for example, imagine anyone running amok. No one could chop through the three-inch thickness of the front doors. The walls and floors were solid too, and no murmur of the outside world ever penetrated. We all lived there in our separate castles, friendly enough and with Derek to sweep up: the Frasers on the top floor, and Mark and Gerard the gay couple who lived opposite Mrs Bobinski’s, and Peter and me, and the rest. But separate. There were no children in the block. The flats weren’t quite big enough for families. It was a place for small dogs, like Mark’s and Gerard’s schnauzer, and childless regret, like mine.

It was a few days before I saw Lisa Kirk again. I told Peter about her that evening, when he came home from work. I remember him sitting in the armchair against the Chinese yellow wall of the drawing room, with a drink on the stool beside him. It was September, and the leaves of the plane trees were just beginning to brown and crisp around the margins.

‘How old?’ he asked and I told him – underestimating by about four years as it later turned out.

‘Oh, God. It will be techno music at all hours and impossible parties, and people running up and down the stairs. We should operate on a co-op system, like the Americans. Nobody admitted unless approved by the committee.’

Peter affected fogeyishness, sometimes. It was one of the ways he tried to look after me, by pretending to be staider and more reliable and conservative than he really was. It was one of those unspoken contracts that long-standing couples make, knowing their partner’s needs and histories. In fact, he was a tolerant man, with a remarkable capacity to overlook other people’s foibles and most of the irritations generated by them.

‘We’ll see,’ I said, because there was nothing else to say, and moved on to the other snippets of the day’s news. I wasn’t working, then, and it was sometimes difficult to think of anything at all to relate. Lisa Kirk’s arrival was a welcome new topic.

When I met her for the second time we were both coming in with Safeway carrier bags, at the end of a damp afternoon with the smell of autumn thick under the plane trees.

She rested her bags on the stairs beyond our front door and looked down at me.

‘Come up and have a cup of tea. Have you got time?’

A commodity in abundant supply, as it happened. I pushed my own shopping into our hallway and followed her up, curious to see and know more.

Old Mrs Bobinski’s decor was mostly still in place: Regency striped wallpaper with darker rectangles outlined in grime where murky pictures had once hung, fluted wooden pelmets, central light fittings hideous in gilt and smoked glass. Against this backdrop Lisa had partially arranged her modishly beaten-up brown leather sofa, CD tower and two tall glass urns filled with coiled snakes of twinkling little lights.

‘It’s all a bit of a tip.’ She sighed. ‘I haven’t had time to think, let alone get anything done to it. I needed to move quickly after I split with Baz. And I really liked this place. Lofts are a bit done-that and Dunollie Mansions is so …’

She eyed me, transparently wondering which word to use in order not to offend me. ‘… Neutral,’ she concluded. ‘You know. I reckoned you could do anything here, make it into anything you wanted, without it being a statement.’

‘Really?’

I felt a twitch of dismay. This refuge, my safe haven, was about to teeter out on to some cutting edge of style. I didn’t want it to be invaded or to have its sagging face lifted.

‘If I ever get time. Come in the kitchen, I’ll make us some tea.’

There was the same schizophrenia in there. A maplewood butcher’s block on wheels, an espresso machine and Philippe Starck knick-knacks disposed against Mrs Bobinski’s yellow Formica, and one of those American refrigerators with an ice dispenser in the front, finished in pillar-box red. This monster fitted into none of the available spaces and hummed in the corner of the room next to the door like a TARDIS waiting to dematerialise. I found myself touching the polished metal handle, wondering where I would end up if I stepped inside and let it take me along.

‘Are you hungry?’ Lisa was asking, watching my hand hovering. ‘I’m afraid there’s not a lot in there, I’m not much of a kitchen person really, it’s just that we bought it jointly and I didn’t want Baz to end up with it. He only used it to keep those little vodka or champagne bottles in, you know, from when everyone used to stand at parties drinking through straws. But I’ve just got some stuff from the supermarket if you’d like …’

‘No. I’m not hungry.’ I withdrew my hand. ‘But I would like a cup of tea.’

She went on chattering and rummaging in cupboards for cups and tea bags.

‘Raspberry? Lemon and ginger? Peppermint?’

Gooseberry and leek. Tamarillo. Artichoke leaf.

‘Or there’s some ordinary.’

‘Ordinary would be good, thanks.’

When she opened the door of the TARDIS to take out the milk, I saw that it was empty except for a bottle of champagne and one of those pre-mixed packets of artful salad. We settled ourselves on a pair of steel-and-leather chairs at opposite sides of the kitchen table. Lisa lifted her cup, smiling at me again. She had grey eyes, neat features and lovely skin that seemed to have light shining through it like tissue paper stretched over a spotlight tube. I felt tired and colourless, and touched with envy. There was no point in envying youth, I reminded myself. It was a fact, vivid but perishable. You might as well be jealous of oranges.

‘Here’s to new neighbours,’ she said.

We drank to each other and then Lisa hitched her chin at our surroundings.

‘What do you think I should do with it?’

‘You could paint it all white.’

She gave this suggestion careful consideration, as if it was the most imaginative proposal she had ever heard.

‘Could do, yes.’ And then, with an abrupt switch of focus, ‘Are you married?’

I told her that I was and for how long, and that we had no children.

Lisa fixed her gaze on mine.

‘Do you mind not having children?’

‘I have learned to live with it.’

She stood up from the table and went to lean against one of the cupboards, and the TARDIS began a low humming as if preparing to relocate. When she moved, the curved wings of her shoulder blades shifted beneath her T-shirt and poignant knobs of bone showed under the skin at the nape of her neck. Her hair was pinned up today with a butterfly clip. She stood not quite looking at me, hesitating, and I waited for what she wanted to say. It was warm in the kitchen; Derek had this week fired up the big central heating boiler. We were snug in here. The heat and the hum of the refrigerator and the sense of enclosure that Dunollie Mansions always gave bred an impression of intimacy, as though Lisa and I were old friends who had momentarily lapsed into thoughtful silence.

‘I suppose that’s what you do. Learn to live with things, I mean. I wish I was any good at it. Can you learn?’

I shifted on my leather-and-steel perch. At once Lisa moved forward and poured more tea. She didn’t want me to leave yet, because she needed someone to talk to. I was a good choice, after all. I had gradually become someone who listened, rather than a creature who went out and did things.

I thought that Lisa Kirk was probably lonely. And that her loneliness might last as long as a nanosecond, before the next Baz came along.

‘Learn? I don’t know. It was just a lazy figure of speech. You accept what you are dealt, or you kick against it. The end result’s probably no different anyway.’

While she considered this Lisa groped on the floor beside her seat and found her handbag. She took out a packet of Silk Cut and lit one while I looked at the bag. It was made of chartreuse suede and shaped like a pineapple or maybe a hand grenade.

‘Like it? It’s my design. I make handbags, my own company. I’m opening a shop in Walton Street soon. We’re called Bag Shot.’

I had seen the name, possibly in a Vogue spread of witty accessories.

‘I do like it,’ I said truthfully. I was impressed. I would too readily have dismissed Lisa as merely a trust-fund babe or daddy’s girl, and now it turned out that she was a designer and a businesswoman.

She tipped the bag upside down and a heap of keys and lipsticks and ticket stubs fell out.

‘Here,’ she said and gave it to me.

I examined the cunning fastening of the hood and the bottle-green silk lining. The little golden label stitched to the inside said ‘Bag Shot by Lisa Kirk’.

‘It’s beautiful. You can’t just give it to me.’

‘Yes I can, I want to. God. Anyway, we were saying about learning to live with things, only it’s without in my case. Baz was my business partner, you know, he was the one who knew about start-ups and leases and money, and I just drew pictures of bloody handbags and chose stuff to get them made up in. We lived together as well, obviously. Ever since I was twenty-one. Work and play, me and Baz. And then it fell apart, like a piece of machinery suddenly worn out. He met a woman at a party, I was yakking and drinking but all the time I was really just across the room, frozen, watching them fall for each other like they were in a movie. And then, once that had happened, it got really difficult to go on working together, and … so.’ She spread out her hand, taking in the kitchen and the red refrigerator and ourselves, sitting facing each other across the table.

‘I see,’ I said. We sat in silence for a minute.

‘Baz’s new girlfriend is pregnant.’

‘Oh. When did all this happen?’

‘They met four months ago.’

‘That was quick.’

‘It was, wasn’t it?’

I clasped and unclasped the lid of the bag. ‘You know, you’ll find someone else. More quickly than you think, probably. I’m sure everyone tells you that. And you can find a new business partner too although that may be a bit more difficult. The requirements are more stringent.’

She smiled at that.

‘Maybe I won’t find anyone, on the other hand. I feel pretty useless.’

I told her what she probably expected to hear, that you don’t get your stuff featured in Vogue or fix yourself up in mansion flats in Kensington at her age if you are anything less them talented and able. We drank some more tea and talked a little about how Baz and she had worked together, and then about the flat and her plans to transform it once, as she put it, the shop was able to run itself around the block. She showed me round the rest of it and I saw that her bed – as narrow as a child’s – was in the little second bedroom that Peter and I used as an occasional spare room, and in the main bedroom with its good light was her drawing board, with big cork panels pinned with scraps of fabric and sketches and pages torn from magazines resting against the walls alongside it.

I thought of our tidy rooms below, static and silent at this time of day, and the way this web of Lisa’s uncertainty and tentativeness and peering into the future was exactly superimposed on them, not just on Mrs Bobinski’s. It made me feel as stiff as our decor.

We returned to the kitchen. Lisa picked up the bag and put it into my hands.

‘Thank you,’ I said.

She came with me to the front door and I looked through the diamond glass panels at the swimmy, distorted view of the hallway.

‘Would you like to have had children?’ she asked, with her hand on the latch.

I knew that she was only asking for whatever my answer might reflect on her own situation, on the baby her ex-lover was expecting that she believed should have been hers.

‘You’ll have a baby,’ I said as gently as I could. ‘You’ve got all the time in the world.’

‘But would you?’ she persisted, with the tactlessness of self-absorption.

I am used to deflecting these thoughts, but still I saw the pictures now, the queasy procession framed and frozen by the camera shutter, click, all the way back into history, click and click.

‘No.’

Her hand had dropped back to her side so I opened the door myself and stepped out into the hallway. We exchanged unspecific invitations to have a drink, or drop round for a kitchen supper. And then I went downstairs to the close air of our own flat where the supermarket carrier bags were waiting for me to attend to them.

Peter sat in his usual chair, with a whisky at his elbow. He had had a reasonable day, he said. Busy, and the Petersens people were a bunch of amateurs who couldn’t run a tap, let alone a software licensing programme, but nothing really to complain about.

‘And you?’

He looked across at me, arching his eyebrows behind the fine metal ovals of his spectacle rims. I told him about having tea with Lisa Kirk, and showed him the chartreuse hand grenade.

He examined it, inside and out.

‘Bit extreme, isn’t it? Do women really buy this sort of stuff?’

‘Yes, I think so. They probably pay about two hundred quid for it. She runs her own business and is about to open a shop.’

He puckered his lips in a soundless whistle, interested now. Peter was a management consultant, with expertise I couldn’t even guess at. He read and wrote reports in a language as impenetrable to me as Mandarin, and he too had a company, on the comfortable earnings from which we lived our sedate life in Dunollie Mansions. ‘Chalk and cheese,’ my mother said before we married, which was also not long before her early death from ovarian cancer. (My father and she separated when I was about twelve, and he married again and acquired a second family to which he and his new wife swiftly added. The Steps and Halves, my mother and I called them.)

Chalk and cheese Peter and I may have been, but we were determined to have each other. We were introduced by a photographer I knew who gave a drunken Christmas party in his studio, to which Peter was brought along more or less on a whim by the photographer’s agent. I remember looking across the room, through a sea of outlandish people who didn’t at the time look outlandish to me, and seeing his well-cut suit and the lights flickering off the shields of his glasses. He was the one who looked out of place in that company of Mapplethorpe boys and six-foot women. After a little while the photographer’s agent brought him across and introduced us.

‘Cary Flint, Peter Stafford.’

I remember that we talked about our fellow guests and a new book of our host’s pictures, and a Matisse exhibition we had both recently seen in the South of France. I had to work hard to sustain this cocktail party standard of chat. I was very thin at the time and taking a lot of pills, and felt speedy and mad. I was disconcerted by the way this man tilted his head towards me so as not to miss a word of my insane gabble, and I also saw the way that his hair fell forward over his temples and the mildness of his eyes behind his glasses, and my knees almost buckled with lust for him. The party was reaching its crescendo. Two boys were exchanging tongues under the ribs of the spiral staircase that also sheltered Peter and me. A procession of other models’ legs filed up and down past our ears and I noticed that he never even glanced at all this thigh and buttock because his eyes were fixed on me. I began to speak more slowly, although I had to shout over the noise, and all the time he watched my mouth with minute attention. Blood hummed in my ears, drowning the crashing music.

At last Peter took my glass out of my hand and put it down, reaching past the intertwined boys to do so.

‘Shall we leave now?’ he asked.

Outside, the cold air hit me in the face. My tiny party dress also exposed a length of bare leg and my coat didn’t cover much more.

Peter wrapped a protective arm round my shoulders.

‘It isn’t far to my car.’

I couldn’t even remember whether I had come in my car, let alone where I might have parked it. That was how I was in those days.

Peter’s turned out to be low, two-seater, quite old and with an interior of creased leather and glowing wood. I learned later that it was a Jaguar XK140. He always loved old cars and kept a series of them on which he bestowed almost as much affection as he did on me. He took me that night to a French restaurant in Notting Hill, old-fashioned but good, and made me eat whitebait and steak. I drew the line at pudding, although he wanted to order one for me. I hadn’t eaten a pudding or a slice of cake since I was fifteen.

Over the first course I confessed what I believed it was only fair for him to know from the beginning. If, in fact, there was actually going to be anything further, if this start didn’t turn out also to be the ending. There had been a few evenings of that sort, lately.

‘I am afraid that I am mad. Known fact. Crazy. Completely barking.’

He chewed his food, reflecting briefly on this idiotic announcement.

‘I think I will be the judge of that,’ Peter Stafford answered.

I ate as much as I could of my steak and vegetables, without making much of a dent in the portion, and all the time I could think of nothing but how soon we might be able to go to bed together. When he was finally convinced that I wasn’t going to eat tarte Tatin or chocolate soufflé, Peter shepherded me back to the Jaguar and drove me to his flat in Bayswater.

We kissed for the first time under the overhead light in the hallway. In his sitting room, standing beside the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, I reached around to the zip on the back of my dress and undid it. Slowly, I let the folds drop to the carpet. I was naked underneath except for my pants. He covered my breasts with his hands.

I kicked off one high-heeled shoe and then the other. Barefoot, I was closer to his height. He took my hand and led me into his bedroom, and closed the door behind us.

When he took off the last garment he knelt over me and looked.

‘Oh God, oh God,’ he breathed. After a beat of fear I realised that it was in pleasure and admiration, not dismay. I put my arms round his neck and pulled him down on top of me.

When we made love, Peter Stafford made me feel three-dimensional.

I forgot the jut of my hips and my overlong and protuberant spinal column, and the dull grate of bone. In his arms I became languorous and creamy and fat.

Afterwards he held me against him, warming me with his solid flesh.

‘Cary, Cary. Be still,’ he ordered and I knew that he didn’t mean just now, under the crisp covers of his bed, but in my life. No more spinning around and gobbling pills. No more talking nonsense or drinking or dementia.

‘I asked Cecil to bring me over to you,’ he said. Cecil was the photographer’s agent. ‘I didn’t think you would even speak to me, but I made him do it just the same.’

‘I would have come to you, if you hadn’t.’ Maybe I would have done, too.

That was a Thursday evening. I had a job the next day, but I called in sick. It was the first time I had ever done such a thing and my booker was astonished. Peter called his office too. We stayed in bed for the whole of Friday and for the weekend that followed it, except for when we got up to forage for something to eat and drink. I padded around wearing one of his shirts because I had nothing with me but my party dress and we fed each other cold chicken legs or buttered toast.

‘Good,’ he approved.

Another time when we were quietly lying together and watching raindrops on the window glass he asked, ‘Why did you say you were mad? Except for the job you do and the people you do it with you seem exceptionally sane to me.’

I fended him off. ‘No real reason. Drink, nerves, babble. Or I suppose that if someone were to look at you and then at me, they might put you in the sane category and me in the other. Just as a matter of relativity.’

‘Because of the way we look, relatively?’

Without his glasses Peter’s eyes were soft, with creases at the corners. His forehead and the faint lines hooking together his mouth and nose and the curve of his lips were already dear to me. I touched them, stroking the skin with the flat of my thumbs.

‘No. Nothing to do with that. It’s history.’

‘What history?’

‘Tell me yours first.’

He held me so that my chin rested in the hollow of his shoulder. I closed my eyes and listened while he described his childhood. He was the middle one of three boys, children of a City solicitor and a career mother. They lived in a good house in Hampshire and the brothers played cricket in the garden and sailed dinghies, and went to a suitable public school and then on to appropriate universities.

‘Not very interesting, you see,’ Peter said.

‘It is to me. Where are your brothers now?’

He told me that they were both lawyers and both married, and made a joke about it being such a conservative family that his own minute deviations from this norm were regarded as acts of rebellion.

‘No wife, you mean?’

‘No law, no wife. But I have had a couple of girlfriends. I’m quite normal, you know.’

I did know already, but I wanted to know more about his background because he was so safe and rational, the living equivalent of the scent of clean laundry. Everything about Peter Stafford, past and present, was a magnet to me.

Probably after that we started to make love again and so his original question to me was forgotten. I avoided talking about my own history that time, although eventually, of course, I did confess it to him.

In any case, within three months Peter and I were married.

He asked me once or twice if I had seen our new neighbour again, and I told him no. Then I met Lisa parking her car as I was coming back from a walk in Hyde Park. We talked for a minute or two, and on impulse I asked her if she would like to come and have dinner with us the following week. To my surprise she accepted. She was lonelier than I had calculated and Baz had not yet been replaced.

Lisa rang the doorbell late, well after all the other guests had arrived. Peter answered the door and I heard him introducing himself and then Lisa’s laughing response before he shepherd her into the drawing room. She was wearing a short, slippery red dress with a little pink cardigan shrugged over it, and red suede shoes. Our guests collectively sat upright, our old friends Clive and Sally Marr and Mark and Gerard from upstairs, and the visiting American woman associate of Peter’s, and the young portrait painter and his girlfriend whom I had invited in an attempt to span the age gap between Lisa and the rest of us. Her arrival was like a shaft of daylight coming into the nighttime gathering.

I saw her looking around at the room that was identical in shape and size, and yet so different from hers.

‘Your flat is very smart,’ she said, after we had greeted each other.

‘Is it?’

‘Definitely.’

I introduced her to the others and as she moved around I saw that what she brought with her wasn’t exactly light, but warmth. Aside from her youth and her prettiness, she had genuine heat that thawed the formality of the occasion. Clive Marr unwound his long arms and legs from their self-protective embrace and shook her hand, and Jessy the American woman smilingly made room for her on the sofa. I hitched my black woollen sleeves round my wrists. I was glad that Lisa Kirk was entirely natural and at ease, and that she didn’t need her hostess’s protection. My hands were cold, so I went closer to the fire and warmed them.

The evening took off. Clive told a funny story I had never heard before about his days as a houseman under an autocratic consultant who thought his inveterate stutter was an affectation. ‘D-d-d-iverticulitis, Dr Marr?’ he mimicked, embedding his own impediment within the fearsome doctor’s voice with surgical precision.

Everyone laughed including Lisa, and Clive looked boyish with pleasure.

Dan Cruickshank the portrait painter gossiped indiscreetly about the royal princess who was currently sitting for him, and Mark and Gerard leaned forward greedily to catch the details. From across the room Peter smiled at me, his eyes creasing behind his glasses. I smiled back, buckling my mouth into a curve against a sense of alarm that I didn’t yet recognise.

We went into the next room to eat. The candles reflected tapering ovals of light off glass and polished wood. Lisa studied Peter’s pictures, a pair of splashy Hodgkins and a small Bacon. She had taken off her little pink cardigan and her shoulders were bare except for thin straps. Her skin was pale and the candlelight seemed to strike off it, breaking and intensifying into painterly slashes of green and peach and yellow so that I narrowed my eyes to make it recombine, wondering if I had already had too much to drink.

‘Lisa, would you like to sit here?’

Peter drew out the chair next to his. I took the other end of the table, between Gerard and Dan. The talk and laughter swelled and I sliced and spooned food on to plates and watched it disappear. After long years of conditioning myself, I didn’t any longer care much about eating. But I had plenty of time at my disposal to prepare meals like this one and cooking was still one of my pleasures.

At my end of the table Dan and Sally and Jessy were talking about portraiture. Peter had wanted Dan to paint me and we had met originally to talk about the project. I had hedged and demurred, because I didn’t want to sit and be scrutinised so closely, and in the end the idea had come to nothing. But we had remained friends with Dan and therefore also the current one of his series of girlfriends.

‘I would still like her to sit for me, but I don’t think I can persuade her,’ Dan was saying.

‘You should keep trying,’ Gerard advised.

Lisa had been deep in conversation with Peter. Her attentiveness to him made her seem taut as a stretched bow with the arrow in the notch and ready to fly. But now she turned her head. Our eyes met and locked.

‘It would be a wonderful picture. When I first saw Cary I was almost too afraid to speak to her.’

‘Why is that?’ I asked, in spite of myself.

‘Because of the way you look.’

There seemed to be a shift in air pressure, as in the seconds before the sound of an approaching tube train becomes audible. The way you look. When I was much younger I possessed an outlandish kind of beauty. I was six feet tall, with a smooth face that make-up artists could paint over with a hundred other faces. I used my appearance to earn money as a photographic model. But I was past forty now and what was left of my extreme looks had been for a long time more an affliction than a blessing because they were at odds with what I felt inside. It was like having always to wear a mask, only it was also a mask that age kept on distorting.

‘I remember that you talked quite a lot, in fact,’ I said, recalling the confidences about Baz and his new girlfriend and the pregnancy.

There was that change in air pressure again, a movement of the atmosphere that made you suck in a breath to reinflate your lungs. In the sudden silence that was broken only by the clink of cutlery I realised that the new atmospheric component was hostility. It had replaced the oxygen.

Lisa and I were still looking at each other, the glance twisting between us like razor wire. Peter sat in his place at the head of our table, his eyes still mild behind his glasses, maybe unaware of the arrow pointed at him. But I think he did feel the tension of the bowstring. This was about him. Lisa Kirk believed that she had spotted Baz’s replacement.

‘Oh yes, once I knew you,’ Lisa said softly.

My body went stiff. That this child should think she knew me on the basis of a couple of encounters, when I had devoted so much and so many years of effort to concealing everything. Everyone in the room, it seemed, immediately began talking very loudly about the first thing that came into their heads.

Mark adjusted the already perfect folds of his turned-back shirt cuffs. He had smooth wrists, lightly tanned from the latest trip to Kerala. And then he reached out to touch Lisa’s handbag that was lying next to her plate.

‘I read somewhere that women’s bags actually represent an intimate portion of their anatomy. Do you think there’s any truth in that, Lisa?’

Dear Mark, kind and vicious in the same breath. Tonight’s little bag was in the shape of a pink satin heart, sequinned and beaded, and certainly quite anatomical if you chose to look at it that way.

‘If it is true, I’m in the right business, aren’t I?’ She smiled. ‘Even if it is only a representation. Dealing in a commodity that is so constant and yet so sought after.’

Lisa was utterly self-possessed. I had the sudden certainty that nothing would deflect her and nothing would disconcert her. She wore her youth and sureness and desirability like armour plating.

Peter’s American associate was giggling at this risqué turn in the conversation, and Lisa lifted up the bag and gave it to her to examine.

‘What do you think, Jessy?’

‘It’s certainly pretty enough.’

‘Thank you.’

I slid out of my chair and began to collect up the plates from my end of the table, moving very deliberately and with a smile nailed to my face.

The evening came to an end eventually. Lisa rested her fingers gently and briefly on my forearm as she kissed me goodnight and then gave exactly the same attention to Peter.

When Peter and I were left on our own we stacked the plates in the kitchen, blew out the candles, retreated to our bedroom as we had done so many times before. I lay very still in our bed and he put his arms round me, which made me conscious of how brittle I felt.

I wasn’t ageing well, I thought. Now that I no longer had it, I wanted my weird beauty back again. I wasn’t a model, I had failed to become an actress – which had been my subsequent intention. Another strange choice for a woman who doesn’t like to be looked at. Much uneventful time had elapsed and I didn’t know what I was any longer. Except that I was Peter Stafford’s wife and a resident of Dunollie Mansions, for now.

‘Catherine, what’s wrong?’

He doesn’t often call me by my full name.

‘Nothing. Did you enjoy the evening?’

He shifted a little on his hip, considering, and I felt the warmth of his breath on my face.

‘Yes. I think it went quite well. Clive was in good form.’

Tenderness towards him spread beneath my breast-bone like heartburn. Peter always considered his judgements, and tried to be fair and objective. How had we lived together for so long and been so different, in our chalk and cheese way?

Lying in the dark I found myself thinking of the night we met and fell in love, standing under the ribs of a spiral staircase while a procession of models went up and down past our heads. Lisa Kirk told me about watching her Baz falling in love at a party in just the same way and I was sure I had witnessed the same flash of lightning tonight, between Lisa and my husband, even though I didn’t think they had exchanged a word in private or even an unwitnessed glance. The three scenes made a bright little triptych in my mind’s eye.

I moved an inch closer to Peter and kissed his closed mouth. At the same time I lifted and crooked my upper knee. One of those signals that long-time couples read so well. He put his hand over my ribcage and splayed the fingers over the bones, as if he was fingering piano keys.

‘I love you,’ I told him, which was the truth.

‘And I you,’ he answered politely. ‘And I worry about you.’

I didn’t press him to explain the dimensions of his anxiety. ‘What did you think of Lisa Kirk?’

‘I liked her.’

‘I thought you would.’

I exhaled and his fingers moved again.

We made love, a little awkwardly, as if there were a sheet between us.

After that, it was only a matter of time.

Two

Every day of each season on the island of Halemni had its own perfection, but to Olivia Georgiadis autumn was the best time of all.

The heat of summer was contained in the brazen midday, while the chill mornings and evenings gave a taste of the coming winter. There was a smell of woodsmoke and burning pitch as the fishermen overhauled the boats, and the houses and tavernas around the harbour wall lost their wide-eyed summer expressions as shutters were nailed in place. The last of the holidaymakers were carried away on ferries and hydrofoils towards Rhodes, or distant Athens, and their flights to Munich or Stockholm or Gatwick. There was a collective sense of relief at the season’s end as the little community prepared to turn inwards.

Olivia was thinking about autumn and other things, as she made her way down the hill to her house. Her two boys were running ahead of her, their brown legs twinkling in the sunshine as they leapt the rocks. Olivia walked more slowly, with empty baskets in both hands. She had been to take cake and flasks of coffee to her guests who were at their easels in the shelter of a band of stunted trees near the top of the hill.

‘There’s Pappy!’

Georgi, the older child, balanced on a cone of rock and pointed. His brother Theo immediately ran up and pushed him sideways. Georgi toppled off and Theo leapt on to the rock pinnacle in his place.

‘I am the leader,’ he crowed.

‘Mummy, Mum, did you see what Theo did?’

The two of them spoke a mixture of Greek and English that Olivia and Xan always enjoyed. Xan’s Greek mother was less admiring.

‘They sound nothing like little Greek boys. They sound like nothing on earth,’ Meroula Georgiadis complained.

‘Take it in turns,’ Olivia told them automatically.

She dismissed the thought of her mother-in-law and watched her husband walking back along the harbour wall instead. He was looking over the turquoise water, past the moored caiques and the smoking tar barrel, but she could see the way the wind blew his hair into a crest, just as it did with Georgi’s. Her heart’s rhythm altered for a second or two as it always did when she caught sight of Xan after a separation, even if it had only lasted for an hour.

‘Come on, Theo,’ Georgi yelled, opting to ignore the rock dispute. He ran away downhill and his brother scrambled after him. Theo was only five, the younger by two and a half years, but he was impulsive and imaginative where Georgi was calm and cautious. Olivia began to run after them, with the empty raffia bags flapping against her legs. The low mounds of wild sage and spiny burnet alternated with outcrops of bare limestone and she skipped from one safe footing to the next, unconsciously copying her sons.

The old houses in Megalo Chorio, the principal settlement on the island, were whitewashed cubes with door and window frames painted bright blue or green. They lined the harbour wall and the sides of the one street that led away from the sea. On the village outskirts, a few metres back from the sickle curve of the beach, was a row of new concrete boxes, half of them unfinished with thickets of rusty metal sprouting from the flat roofs. These were the apartments and studios rented by the tourists in summer, those who didn’t stay with the Georgiadises or in private houses or one of the two tavernas with rooms in the main street. The new buildings were an eyesore but Olivia had taught herself not to look at them. The tourists brought money to Halemni, they needed somewhere to sleep, so it was necessary to have such places.

The Georgiadis house stood at the back of the village, forming the short side of a rough cobbled square dominated by a huge fig tree. Across the square Taverna Irini faced a tiny church with a rounded blue dome. The fourth side was open and gave a wide view of the bay and water skittishly silvered by the sunlight. The house had originally belonged to the island’s potter, but the local craftsman had lost the competition against cheap imported plates and dishes, and had retired to the west side of the island. Xan and Olivia had bought the house and its outbuildings ten years before, when they decided to make their lives here where Xan had been born. Before that Olivia had travelled so far and for so long that she believed to settle in one place, with Xan, would be as close to heaven as she could ever come.

And in many ways the belief had been justified. She would have argued with anyone that every idyll must have a flaw, in order for it to be recognisably an idyll. Xan came along the street just as Olivia and the boys reached the front door. He was a big man, black-haired and black-eyed. He put his hands against the oak of the door lintel and made an arch of his body. The boys ran underneath, shouting with noisy competition.

The house was washed pale-blue, like a reflection of the early morning sky. It had two storeys with shuttered windows and small iron balconies at the upper ones. The rooms were small and not very convenient, but the outbuildings were ideal. Xan had converted them into a row of modest studios, and it was these that housed Olivia’s summer guests. They were English, like Olivia herself, mostly middle-aged or retired, and they came to Halemni to paint.

Olivia and Xan made a living out of the painting holidays, just, which put them in about the same financial position as everyone else on Halemni. And they had the winters to themselves, when the wind worried at the shutters and salt spray caked the harbour stones.

Olivia stooped and tried to pass the same way as the boys, but Xan caught her by the hips.

‘Hello, yia sou.’

They kissed briefly, smiling into each other’s mouths.

‘Everybody happy?’ Xan meant the guests up on the hill, peering across their easels at the view of the village and the coast of Turkey like smoke on the skyline. This fortnight’s guests had been a more than usually demanding group. They complained about the cold at night and about the mid-afternoon heat.

‘For five minutes, at least. Chris is up there.’

Tuition was provided by Christopher Cruickshank, a good teacher and a talented watercolourist in his own right. Olivia cooked and hosted evening parties, and led walks if anyone wanted to explore the island.

Xan’s contribution was largely his geniality. It was one of the reasons why the English couples came back year after year and recommended the Georgiadises to their friends. Xan took them on boat trips and grilled fish on a driftwood fire, and teased them about English weather and their native reticence, or anything else except their ability as painters. In the remainder of the time he fixed damaged ballcocks and repaired the generator, and did whatever other running repairs were needed.

Xan grinned. Nothing more needed to be said. It was the last day of the last booking and tomorrow the hydrofoil would take them all away.

‘Pappy, look. It’s a war,’ Georgi called.

Xan put his arm round his wife’s shoulders and they squeezed through the doorway together. The boys had perched at the big scrubbed table in the kitchen, knees and feet bundled up anyhow on the chairs, and were drawing on big sheets of coarse paper. Georgi’s picture was of aeroplanes looping and smashing in mid-air. Tiny men spilled out of them with triangular parachutes sprouting from their backs. Xan put his head on one side to study it. He thought how sturdy and alert and busy his sons were. This was all Olivia’s doing.

When he first met her she always had her eyes and her attention fixed on the next place. But then, to his amazement, when they fell in love she quickly agreed to come home with him to Halemni. She had fitted in here as easily as if she had been born in a house overlooking the bay. They married and the boys were born, and it was as if she had turned herself inside out, like a leather glove reversing to its silk lining, the wanderer turned into the anchor. Olivia became the best mother he could have imagined and the little household revolved around her steady sun.

‘Why did you give up your glamorous life to come and be poor with me on this rocky island?’ he used to ask her, when it still seemed remarkable to him. ‘Even if you had done enough travelling you could have gone back to England, to your family and your friends.’

It was true, Olivia acknowledged. Her parents were there, and all her friends from school and university, and a couple of sort-of boyfriends she hadn’t missed much while she was away. It was the ordinary network of a normal life and she had broken out of it in the first place because she didn’t want to be defined by it. Most particularly, she didn’t want to live like her mother and father had lived.

‘I came here with you because I loved you more than anything or anyone else in the world. I still do. And I stay here because I am so happy,’ she told him.

It was the truth. When she put her arms round Xan she felt how solid he was and rooted in his own ground like a great tree. By comparison England seemed a pale place, and her parents’ and friends’ lives defined by too many compromises to do with more money and less love.

‘Is that what bullets look like?’ Xan asked the boy. Dots and dashes like Morse code radiated from the wings and nose cones.

‘It’s light beams,’ Georgi said witheringly.

‘I see, okay, of course. The light fighters. What’s yours, Theo?’

Big stripes and thick crayon patches. ‘Heaven,’ he said. ‘For Christopher.’

Theo’s tongue stuck out between his teeth as he worked. He gave the painter’s name the full Greek pronunciation.

‘Lucky old Christo.’

‘They’ve been drawing all morning,’ Olivia said. She had unlatched herself reluctantly from Xan and was unpacking the baskets, smoothing sheets of tinfoil and replacing them in a drawer.

Nothing was wasted here. Halemni had only small pockets of fertile ground. Everything that the islanders couldn’t grow or make themselves came in by boat from nearby islands or the mainland. Every sheet of paper and tube of paint and square of sandwich wrapping that the Georgiadises used was counted, and not just because of the scarcity but because there was not enough money to permit waste. Like most of the islanders they lived by a rule of frugality so entrenched that they rarely even noticed it. The children drew on the backs of the guests’ discarded sketches and when there was none of that paper they used the insides of cardboard cartons. They considered themselves rich in other things.

Xan sat down at the table. Olivia went into the stone larder that led off the kitchen and brought out a bowl of tomatoes, a chunk of goat’s cheese and a dish of yoghurt and put them on the table. Xan stretched a lazy arm and took a loaf of bread out of a basket near the big old sink. Olivia baked their bread and grew the tomatoes in her vegetable garden behind the house. The goat’s cheese came from a farmer inland and the oil from their neighbour Yannis who had the island’s best and biggest olive grove.

‘Put your drawings away now,’ Xan told his sons. ‘And pull your chairs straight.’ He broke off a hunk of bread and bit hungrily at it as he passed the remainder to the table. Like his own father, Xan believed in do as I say, not do as I do. The boys did as they were told, lining their seats up opposite their parents’ places and turning their faces to the food. They had the same straight noses and thick eyebrows as their father.

Olivia sliced bread and handed the bowls, and for a minute there was silence as her men ate. Before her marriage she would not have considered it but it came to her naturally, now, to look after their needs first. She smiled to herself, thinking that some of Meroula’s ways had rubbed off on her. Xan saw the smile. She caught him looking at her over the boys’ heads and the heat that flashed between them made her fidget on her seat and push the hair away from her damp cheeks.

The children were given bowls of yoghurt with a spoonful of honey dribbled in the centre. Theo stirred his into a sepia whirlpool, while Georgi dipped his spoon carefully into the glistening puddle and ate it with slow, sucking noises before licking up the plain outskirts.

It didn’t take long to eat the meal and no one made any comment about it. The food was what they ate almost every midday. As soon as the boys had finished they squirmed on their chairs until Xan nodded them permission to go and they ran outside. At once Olivia was on her feet, clearing the plates and storing the leftovers. Xan went to the stove to heat a pot of thick coffee. This was his job.

‘Who was there?’ Olivia asked.

‘Yannis,’ Xan’s fingers made a little tilting gesture next to his mouth. Yannis liked to start early on the raki, and lately did not stop until the day’s end. Olivia lifted one shoulder in a shrug of exasperation, mostly on behalf of Yannis’s wife.

‘There’ was the kafeneion down on the harbour, where Xan had just been. It was a dingy place with no tablecloths or taped music or candles in bottles, and deliberately so because these things attracted the tourists. It was where the island men gathered to talk and play backgammon, in the late mornings after the fishing and before the afternoon’s full heat, in the golden in-between seasons of spring and autumn. In high summer the village and the beaches belonged to the invaders and in the winter everyone kept more to their houses.

‘No one else?’

Megalo Chorio was a small community and the Georgiadises knew everyone. The small details of who had been where and what they had said were common currency, handed on like folk remedies. Xan mentioned a couple of names and Olivia nodded as she worked. They didn’t need to enlarge on anything for each other. She manhandled a metal pie dish into the big oven and slammed the door on it, standing up with her face slightly flushed from the blast of heat.

‘Coffee here,’ Xan said. They rested their buttocks against the scrubbed table, heads level and thighs just touching, and gratefully drank. Apart from in bed, they did not have many minutes alone together.

A thin line of sunlight striped the floor and Olivia watched it as it thickened. The window faced west and this signal of the sun meant that the afternoon had begun and the guests would be back soon for their late lunch. After a morning’s painting they were ready for food and siestas. She sighed as she put her cup aside and Xan tipped his chin against her shoulder.

‘One more day,’ he said.

‘Come on. I don’t think of it like that.’

‘Yes you do.’

‘Well. Maybe at the very end of the season I do. But I’ll be looking forward to them again by the time May comes around.’

It was true. This was the rhythm they lived by and she was happy with it, because of its regularity and simplicity. When she was travelling there had been no such rhythms.

The telephone rang. Xan made an impatient noise and reached out but Olivia beat him to it. She tried to field the business calls from the booking agents in England and from guests, because Xan could be abrupt and if there were messages to be passed on he often forgot them. In any case, she knew who this caller was. Olivia’s mother usually rang on Friday afternoons, when her husband had gone upstairs with the newspaper after lunch.

‘Mum? Hello. Yes, of course I’m here. Yes, we’re all fine. Busy, you know, but it is the last day of the season. And you? How is he?’

‘He’ was Olivia’s father. All the time she was growing up he had been a dangerously unpredictable figure, someone to be propitiated by her mother and herself. Now that she was an adult and the two of them were old, the roles were almost reversed. Denis had become the propitiator and Maddie the one who was impatient. Olivia hunched her shoulder to hold the receiver at her ear, listening to her mother’s news of the week.

She was used to this compact exchange. For twelve years between the ages of twenty-one and thirty-three Olivia had moved from place to place, taking photographs and selling them to travel magazines and picture libraries whenever she could, and doing casual jobs when she could not. She kept in touch with people by means of postcards and occasional calls, and she was happy enough with this arm’s-length contact.

Until she met Xan Georgiadis, when everything changed.

‘Anyway, Mum, I’m glad you’ve had some sun at last even if the garden’s parched. And have you heard from Max?’

Max was Olivia’s brother, younger by two years. As children they had been allies within the controlled zone of their family life, and he was still closer to her than anyone else in the world except her husband and children. But Max lived in Sydney now with his wife and daughters, and regular telephone calls were too expensive for Olivia. She relied on her mother for weekly news and waited eagerly for Max’s less frequent calls to Halemni. You should get e-mail, her brother had told her, but he might as well have suggested getting a Learjet.

There were voices across the little courtyard that separated the studios from the main house. The guests were back.

‘Mum, I’ve got to go. They need lunch. Yes, I will. And you too. Speak next week.’

‘How is she?’ Xan asked absently. There was the long table to be laid for lunch outside, and food to be placed on it. Meroula was part of the fabric of their everyday lives but Maddie was remote, more of a concept than a real presence. Olivia felt guilty about this, but there was no solution to it.

‘She’s fine.’

Christopher Cruickshank put his head round the door. ‘We’re back.’ He had a thin face almost bisected by a hank of fine hair. When he was painting he wore the hair pushed back under a decomposing straw hat.

Olivia was already taking the big tray of spinach pie out of the oven.

‘Welcome,’ Xan laughed.

‘Is everything ready for tonight?’ Christopher asked. There was a kid to be spit-roasted, the centrepiece of the last night’s party.

‘I think so,’ Olivia said, running through in her mind what needed to be done. ‘You will light the fire in good time?’ She asked Xan this question every two weeks throughout the summer season.

‘I will.’

There was no moon that night and the sky held only a faint afterglow that made it seem a blue-black hollow ball pitted with stars. The sea was black and calm for late in the season. Inky wavelets slapped the harbour wall and whispered into the shingle on the village beach. Xan had hung lanterns in the branches of a tamarisk tree, and there were candles all down the long table under the avli, the pergola with its vine shading. The kid had been roasted and carved and eaten, and the fire of driftwood had shrunk to a powdery crimson core, and now the English voices were louder and less careful.

Olivia looked down the table. The double line of faces was reddened by the sun and wine. It was always a good moment, when the inhibitions finally broke up. It was just a shame that it almost always took until the very last night. These people had chosen to spend their precious holidays here and they had brought their paintings and sketches to be admired and commented upon, and so given oblique insights into their lives. They stirred a wash of affection in her and she knew that she would miss them all through the winter. She would look forward to the first rash of floppy sunhats in the sharp early summer sunshine.

And it was always like this, she remembered. It could have been any of the years since they had begun here. Each season’s beginning and end made her feel the same, eagerly anticipatory or affectionate and pleasurably melancholy.

This was the tissue of happiness, she thought. Phases repeated themselves, and accretions of memory and pleasure built up, and you could dip down through the layers and examine them, like tree rings or sandstone deposits. The awareness of permanence on Halemni weighted her limbs, making her feel dizzy and voluptuous with satisfaction. She loved their life here and the people she shared it with. Looking down the table again, she even loved knife-faced Christine Darby and her pompous husband, who had complained about the beds and the food, and Christopher’s eccentric teaching methods.

Xan moved into the lantern light beside her, removing empty wine bottles and putting a full bottle of Metaxas in their place.

‘None for you,’ he teased with his mouth close to her hair, meaning that he could see she had drunk enough.

‘Oh, go on. Just one. You never know what it might lead to, if you’re lucky,’ she whispered back.

Later there was dancing. Christopher played the guitar and the English couples swayed and jigged under the branches of the tree, and then draped arms over one another’s shoulders and pointed their toes in a wobbly imitation of Xan, at the end of the line, when he led the Greek dance. He was a supple, stately dancer and the guests looked like a row of jerky puppets as they tried to follow his steps.

Olivia was like the maypole in the middle with two ribbons twisting around her.

‘I can’t,’ she protested. ‘My legs don’t work at this time of night.’

‘Legs like yours don’t need to,’ Brian Darby murmured in the knowledge that his wife was out of earshot.

And at the same moment at the far end of the line it was Mrs Darby who spotted the bear-like man shambling at the rim of the lantern light. She crooked her elbow gaily to indicate that he should join in.