A Stairway to Paradise (7 page)
‘And she’ll pay five pounds an hour and fares. So I just thought
maybe—
anyway you could try it and see how it goes, what do you think? All right, her name’s Louisa, Louisa Carrington—she’s a darling, so is he, I can’t think where little Fergus gets it from, I suppose he’s simply been allowed to run rather wild. So here’s the number—I should think she’ll practically
go down on her
knees
to you. She’s
desperate
.’
I’ll go down on my knees to you. I’ll completely prostrate myself before you. I’ll agree to be
buried in a deep pit
if only it will make a difference, if only I can have you. Desperate: you don’t know what you’re talking about, Claire—as usual; you know
nothing
:
this
is desperation, it has never truly existed before: it is born in me. It is borne by me. Although it can’t be borne:
it
is unbearable
.
‘Well, as I said, you must come over—what? All right, super, yes, do that—I’ll look forward to hearing from you. Don’t leave it too long! Bye!’
‘I hadn’t realised that we had people coming—’
‘Oh, Alex, you are
hopeless
. I reminded you this morning. Well, thank God you’re back in time anyway. You’ve got half an hour till countdown. David and Sarah. I
told
you. I should have known you weren’t listening.’
Alex went upstairs to see the children: Percy was still in the bath, playing with a battleship or two. He aired some of his opinions on matters social, educational and anatomical and then he said, ‘I say, Dad,’—‘Yes,’ said Alex, looking down at his tiny successor: ‘I say, why don’t we get Barbara to come and be our au pair, and then she could live here all the time: don’t you think that’s a good idea?’
‘Barbara might not think so.’
‘Oh, yes, she
would
. Will you ask her?’
‘But Astrid’s already here.’
‘Yes, but Astrid is
homesick
. She told me so.’
‘Well, that’s very sad, but she has to get over it, because she wants to learn English: that’s why she’s here. Barbara already
knows
English.’
‘She could learn something else instead. She could learn Latin.’
‘Perhaps she knows that too.’
‘No, she doesn’t. I know because I asked her. I told her I was starting Latin in two years and could she speak Latin and she told me no. So there!’
‘I shouldn’t think she wants to learn it now, though.’
‘She
might
. Will you ask her?’
‘I say, Percy, old thing, it’s time you got out. Have you actually washed yourself? With soap? All right then, pull the plug.’
Nothing so thin, so pale, so stick-like as a little boy. He seemed to be made of wire, his cranium full of tiny wheels and rods all turning, endlessly turning, producing their endless stream of speculations and conclusions, notes and queries. Quite soon they would begin to get their first serious tuning:
amo, amas, amat; amamus,
amatis, amant
. The great mantra: around and around and around, until the end of time. God have mercy.
Fergus Carrington, that fiend in human form: what would she have done without him? He had silky ash-blond hair and a rosebud mouth and one saw quite a lot of his pink tongue because he so frequently poked it out at one. He also liked to kick and punch and pinch and to hit one with his satchel. He was a perfect little darling: exactly what she needed: what
would
she have done without him?
By the time she had him under something like control (it took only two months or so: she bribed him with the ten remaining marrons glacés, and when these were all gone, the National Army Museum) her yearning for Alex was only a dull constant ache.
The weather got colder; she took Fergus to Harrods and bought him the regulation navy-blue overcoat and they had tea at Daquise on the way home. Fergus ate a large cream cake with a fork which he held in the correct manner, attracting comments full of extravagant admiration from two aged Polish women at a nearby table. Some of this admiration was directed at Barbara on the assumption that she was his mother and thus the person to whom credit was due, which was half true; she smiled at them briefly in graceful acknowledgment.
‘They think you’re my mother,’ observed Fergus.
‘It’s a natural mistake,’ said Barbara.
‘What
are
you?’ said Fergus.
‘Tell me,’ said Barbara.
He thought for a moment and gave her a sudden suspicious sideways look. ‘You’re not an au pair, are you?’ he said. ‘I don’t like au pairs.’
‘No,’ said Barbara. ‘I’m not an au pair.’
He thought again. ‘I suppose you’re just a friend,’ he concluded.
‘Yes,’ said Barbara. ‘Just a friend.’
He sat brooding to himself for some time and then began kicking his heels against his chair and making a noise like an engine revving up, so his friend paid the bill and took him home.
It had been a creditable performance for a five-year-old boy, especially as it was he who, just as they were leaving, remembered the Harrods bag stashed away under the table. Just think if they’d forgotten that!
‘What
would
I do without you, Fergus?’ said Barbara.
‘You’d be in really
bad
trouble,’ said he.
Then the weather became seriously cold; Barbara and Fergus, coming home from school, ran all the way from the corner and up the steps and she unlocked the front door as fast as she could and they tumbled together into the hot, hot house and shrieked with relief as they took off their coats and their scarves and her gloves and his cap, which he threw into the corner, and was told to pick up, and Barbara hung it on the top branch of the coatstand.
And when Alex came home it was as dark as the shadow over his heart and as he went up the stairs to see his children, Claire in the kitchen thought, vaguely, Alex is getting older; Alex is slowing down. Poor old Alex.
As it happened there was a poem (Anon., sixteenth century: another Tudor clergyman?) which having been quoted in one of the Sunday broadsheets was seen by both Barbara and Alex: perhaps even at the same moment:
O western wind, when wilt thou blow
That the small rain down can rain?
Christ! that my love were in my arms
And I in my bed again.
So that they both—perhaps even at the same moment—stared into the void of their loss and were half-consoled.
It was not long afterwards that Barbara heard, thanks to her elder sister, of some people living near Bath who were going on a three-month cruise and wanted someone to house-sit for them, starting early in March. There then she was when the small rain down did rain: far from her lost love and the bed they had shared; not far, but a little farther, from the anguish (Christ!) of his loss.
Alex at about the same time had a drink with someone he knew at Macmillan, and over additional meetings on subsequent occasions managed to get himself commissioned to write a book on the black economy: all of his free time (except for the part which belonged to Percy and Marguerite) was thus taken up, and he fell asleep late every night too exhausted altogether to suffer the old torment of anguished, almost maddening, yearning.
The black economy book was now almost finished; there were just a few loose ends to see to before the final draft.
Alex, sitting on the daybed, was staring unseeing at the Caucasian rug. Funny to think that it was really because of Barbara that he had finally done what all journalists mean to do, and written a book. Men used to go out and explore the dark unmapped interior for less, he thought. And that—come to think of it—is what, after all, one could say I’ve been doing these last eighteen months: for the
terra incognita
of the world is all under our feet, these days; everywhere around us; it hides behind and beneath the allegedly known, the pattern behind the pattern: and there can be no end to it.
He got up from the daybed…
this bed is rather hard, isn’t it; I do
hope you haven’t been sleeping badly…no, not at all: it’s fine…
Christ! that my love were in my arms…and he looked out of the square window at the hawthorn tree.
Why did I come in here, he thought; what did I come in here
for
? And he looked vaguely at the bookshelves again, as if to find a clue. Then he suddenly remembered what it was: he’d come in here to look up a word in the
Shorter
; and he took out the A–M volume and opened it at the beginning, because the word he wanted was
abrogate
.
‘Tom, I’m home! Where are you—oh! Ah. Sitting in the kitchen. And you’ve stolen a march on me, I see. Yes
please
.’
Serena sat down at the kitchen table opposite where Barbara had been. ‘What’s this?’ she said, seeing Barbara’s abandoned glass. ‘Been drinking gin with the help, have we? Tut!’
Tom looked so stupendously sheepish that she laughed aloud. ‘Oh dear,’ she said.
‘Well—’ said Tom. ‘I mean, it seemed only polite…’
‘To be sure,’ said Serena. She took a swallow of the drink Tom had given her and got up. ‘I say, let’s go into the drawing-room, shall we?’
They sat down on the sofa; Serena kicked off her shoes and curled up next to Tom. ‘Are the heavenlies around the place?’
‘No—visiting Simon, so I understand.’
‘Ah. Well then. Nice day?’
‘Oh, yes. Usual thing. You?’
‘A conference in Jessop’s chambers.’
‘Ah. The Meares thing, was it?’
‘The same.’
‘Go well?’
‘Pretty foul.’
‘Poor darling.’
‘But you’re the one who looks knackered. Everything okay?’ She stroked the side of his head. He had that weary, bemused look, and he was gazing through the window at some far-distant and possibly even invisible point, whether in time or space who could tell?
‘Oh, yes,’ said Tom. ‘Hmmm.’
She went on looking at him and stroking his head, still holding her drink in her free hand—the one with the terrific solitaire diamond engagement ring on it. It was a cracker, that stone, and that natty Van Cleef setting. ‘And how’s our Barbara?’ she said.
‘Oh, you know,’ said Tom. ‘She’s always the same. She’s fine. She’s—yes. She’s—fine.’
Serena laughed again. ‘You don’t fancy her, do you? Just a
tiny
bit?’
Tom started. There was something about barristers: he’d noticed it often: they did tend to be disconcertingly, and sometimes even deplorably, direct. ‘I say, Serena!’ he protested. ‘Steady
on
.’
She laughed some more. ‘I shouldn’t be at all surprised,’ she said gently. ‘I’m not sure I don’t rather fancy her myself.’
Ye gods! Barristers! He shot her a look, so wonderfully compounded of dismay, disbelief, shock, and the suspicion that his leg was being pulled that Serena positively pealed.
She put down her drink and put both arms around his neck. ‘I really do
love
you, Tom,’ she said. ‘Isn’t it funny? After all these years! I’d be so
very
sorry if you were to run off with Barbara.’
‘Oh, she wouldn’t have me,’ said Tom. ‘I’m quite safe; you really needn’t worry. Anyway, you know I can’t actually afford to. Not really.’
‘No, that’s true,’ said Serena. ‘So, look, do you think we might run to a long weekend away soon, once the babies have settled down at school? We might go to Paris, or Amsterdam, or that very flash hotel in the West Country that the Perelmans were telling us about, the one with the jacuzzis.’
‘Gosh, yes, rath
er
,’ said Tom. ‘Perhaps there’s a hotel in Paris with jacuzzis, what would you say to that?’
‘Might that not be overdoing it?’ said Serena.
‘Oh, I think we can cope,’ said Tom.
‘All right, darling,’ said Serena. ‘I’m sure you know best. So we must really plan this properly. Do bring your work diary home tomorrow, will you? Now I wonder what that
delicious
Barbara has left for us to eat tonight, I’m famished.’
‘Er, I seem to recall there’s a fool,’ said Tom.
‘I shouldn’t be at all surprised,’ said Serena, and she jumped up and went into the kitchen to see what else there was and put it all on the table and telephoned Simon’s house to summon the twins. ‘Ooh, smoked salmon,’ she said, opening the refrigerator. ‘
Goody
.’ And she ate some immediately, licking her fingers, her terrific diamond ring flashing in the light.
‘Barbara? It’s Andrew here—Andrew Flynn, we—’ God help him, there was surely no need to remind her who exactly he
was
, after— had it really happened? Or had he not, after all, merely dreamed that he had sat with her on Primrose Hill and then moments later felt, tasted, smelled, devoured and devouring, that golden-skinned fairy—was it not much too good to be true? God help him.
‘Yes. I know who you are.’
‘Right.’ A half second of that particular laugh, self-abnegating, self-exculpatory, nervous but not mirthless: a brief but complex sound which summed up an entire civilisation: not all those years’ residence in a foreign land could banish it from the repertoire. Hurry up now and
say something
. ‘Look, I just—how are you?’ Oh, that skin, that voice; her hands: had he not merely dreamed the whole thing?
‘Very well, thank you; and you?’
‘Yes, I’m very well too. I was just wondering—I tried to get you earlier, as a matter of fact—’
‘Oh, that was you, was it? I was upstairs, I heard the telephone but I couldn’t—’
‘No, of course not. No, it’s nothing
desperately
urgent, but I just wondered if we might do something together perhaps tomorrow night, I’m afraid I have to be away at the weekend, but—you wouldn’t feel like dinner or something, would you? If you’re free?’
Oh, there it was: he hadn’t really thought of it seriously before: she couldn’t possibly be free, at twenty-four hours’ notice, just like that, just for him. Not that voice, that skin, those hands; not for him. How dared he ask? And she was saying nothing—there was a silence, a silence even of embarrassment, that sense of the quest for the right phrase, the right tone, the right, polite, gentle, unmistakably definite dismissal.