Aphrodite's Hat (7 page)

‘You mean pay for mine?'

There was no other way of putting it. ‘Yes.'

‘Ta. That's kind.'

‘Not at all,' William said, relieved to have done the right thing. She might be a feminist and object to being patronised.

They walked back together up the steep cobbles towards the Tate. William, looking down at the girl's sturdy boots and his own neatly polished brogues, wondered how he could keep her at his side. Suddenly she said, ‘Let's go to Trewyn Studio, shall we?' and when he turned to her a surprised face, explained, misconstruing his expression, ‘You know, Barbara Hepworth's place.'

‘Finding Trewyn Studio was a sort of magic
.' William read aloud the words from the informative leaflet provided by her studio. They had passed out of the buildings and through into the garden and were standing under the shade of trees through which the clear May sunlight was dappling the dead sculptor's monumental creations of stone and wood and bronze.

‘It
is
magic,' said the girl. ‘Like an enchanted place.' She swayed a little and William took her arm.

‘Are you all right?'

‘Never better. It's just, all this …' She swept out a large, almost mannish hand, to indicate the vista before them. The hand, he couldn't help noticing, bore the marks of several cuts. ‘It's too much.' There were tears in her voice and, turning his gaze, he saw the visible counterparts glimmering in her eyes.

‘I don't know your name,' he said, embarrassed. Helena would never have cried in a public place like that.

‘Hazel. What's yours?'

‘William. Like your eyes,' he added.

But this she chose to ignore. Perhaps he had offended her. I must be careful, he thought. Me an old man with this young thing.

‘You know how Hepworth died?' the girl asked. They had returned to the studio and were looking at a naked torso carved in stone. It might, William thought, resemble the girl's. Although he did know of the tragedy that had killed the famous sculptor, he let the girl explain. ‘She burned to death in her own studio. They think it must have been a faulty wire.'

‘Horrible.' He shook his head, unable to begin to imagine anything so awful. The terror of it, the pain.

‘But at least her work survived. She would have been glad about that.'

He had a sudden inspiration about the cuts on her hands. ‘You're a sculptor, too?'

‘I try.'

‘But that's marvellous.'

‘It doesn't really keep the wolf from the door. But it's what I want to do.'

‘Oh, always do what you want to do, my dear.' In his admiration for what he saw as her brave choice of life, he slapped his new companion on the shoulder harder than he had intended. Once more she swayed and seemed almost to crumple. ‘Look,' he asked, concerned now, ‘are you really all right?'

‘I'm just tired. I slept on a bench last night. Lucky it was warm.'

‘You had nowhere to go?'

She laughed, showing the strong teeth untarnished by age. ‘I hadn't the money, guv.'

‘Oh Christ,' he said. ‘I'm sorry to be so tactless.'

‘You couldn't know. I was saving it for this – and for a decent lunch, as a treat. So, thanks to you buying me lunch I've got some extra now to spend.'

Walking down the hill towards the bus stop William wondered how he could put to her what was in his mind. He had a horror of seeming to patronise such vivid independence. And he was aware of his own neediness, the loneliness and the attendant wish to extend the time spent with her, which might not – almost certainly wouldn't – be to her liking. Nearing the bus stop, he asked, ‘Where are you going?' and was relieved when she said, ‘Penzance.' So they could travel together and he could postpone what he wanted to say – what he thought, at least, he wanted to say. On the bus, he could reconsider if he wanted to make his bold suggestion – that the girl take a room for the night at the hotel, at his expense, of course. An image assailed him of the amused ironical smile Helena would give if she were privy to this proposition.

The bus was already revving up to leave when they reached the bus stop. A green bus, almost full up with its complement of passengers. One seat only was free as if it were waiting especially for them.

The bus started off as soon as they had boarded and began to make a brisk progress through St Ives. William sat, rather more upright than was quite comfortable, conscious of the girl's body beside him. In his mind's eye he couldn't help seeing again the Hepworth torso, beautiful in its lean grace. All of a sudden, the bus lurched violently and then took off at a terrific lick. They drove through the outskirts of the small town, careering around corners as the passengers were tossed wantonly about in their seats. Reaching, finally, the freedom of the wider main road the driver accelerated wildly.

No one on the bus seemed to make anything of this but William and the girl. Surely, though, they asked each other, ruminating cattle and quietly grazing sheep must have recognised, as they rattled past, a madman? At first bemused, then entertained and finally laughing fit to bust William and the girl clutched each other as they were jolted back and forth. There was no question now of William avoiding the girl's body. For safety's sake, they clung together for dear life.

The strange thing was, they agreed, finally alighting at Penzance, arm in arm like drunks with tears of laughter still in their eyes – yes, the strange thing was how the other passengers sat quite placidly through it all. As if they were quite accustomed to being driven by a maniac.

‘My God,' she said. ‘What was that about? What was he about, the driver?'

They were walking along the harbour front, still laughing, still a little shocked and excited. ‘Look,' William said, ‘I'm staying up there, at that hotel, see.' He waved towards the beacon of blue on the rise. ‘How about a drink to celebrate our survival?'

‘I wouldn't mind.'

William felt proud as he escorted the girl into the hotel lounge. The Austrians had taken up position on the larger, deeper sofa, so William and Hazel had no option but the smaller, less accommodating one. But in their recent escapade William's anxiety over physical proximity had evaporated. His shoulder now touched the girl's companionably as side by side, like colleagues, they drank their gin and tonics. They were still under the enchantment of their adventure – a fact which William presently saw was making the Austrians suspect that it was they who were being laughed at.

Concerned not to seem rude, he attempted explanation. ‘We're laughing because we've just had a most extraordinary nightmare ride.'

‘Excuse me. Nightmare ride?' the man of the couple solemnly enquired, which set Hazel off again into great whoops of laughter.

‘I'm sorry,' she said when the Austrians, with a marked Prussian stiffness, had made their way out of the lounge and through to the dining room and she and William were alone. ‘But they looked so offended and it was nothing to do with them.'

‘It takes a large heart not to take things personally,' William said, surprising himself, for he had not known that he knew this.

‘Oh, I do agree.' The hazel eyes were looking levelly at his. He thought, She has candid eyes.

‘Listen,' he said, touching her sinewy forearm. How well he could envisage it welding steel or sawing wood. ‘Would you do me the honour of accepting my hospitality? If there's a room free here tonight, will you let me give it you? A kind of –' he hesitated, he didn't want to seem to be offering to thank her for her company exactly – ‘acknowledgement', he alighted on, ‘of our shared experience of the green bus from St Ives.' For all his newfound confidence he was careful to make it clear that it was a room separate from his own one that he was offering her.

She continued to look at him, not warily but with the same frank look in her eyes.

‘You know what,' she said at last. ‘That's kind. Very kind. I accept.'

‘Really?' Now he had pulled it off he felt the risk he had taken with his odd gesture – the risk of offending her, of clouding the immense fun they had had, were still having.

‘Really.' She nodded, smiling at him, her eyes still quite at ease.

‘And dinner?'

‘Yeah, dinner too. But not here. That would make me feel guilty. Too pricey.' She took his arm. ‘Come on. Let's find the local chippy.'

‘Let's get you that room first.' He would have gone with her to McDonald's had she suggested it.

He was sleeping dreamlessly when he was woken by the tapping at his door. ‘What is it?' For a moment, he could not recall where in the world he was.

‘It's me. Can I come in?'

He was out of bed in a trice and putting on the light and his dressing gown. ‘What time is it? Are you all right?'

‘You keep asking that,' she said. ‘I thought it would be nice to talk.'

‘Of course, but where …?' He looked round the room vaguely as if the hotel might have made some special provision for this unlooked for event.

‘In bed, stupid.'

‘Oh. Right ho, then.'

He got back into bed, still in his dressing gown.

‘Aren't you going to be hot in that?' She was wearing a long cotton T-shirt. Nothing more.

‘I thought you would rather …'

‘Don't be silly.' By now she was in the bed beside him. ‘I would have been happy to share. I thought that's what you had in mind.'

But at this he protested. ‘Oh no. I never thought you'd …'

‘Don't worry, it's not for ever and ever amen. Just tonight. So we remember the bus ride.'

In the morning she said, ‘I'm catching an early train. Don't argue, the ticket's booked and I can't change it. But this here –' handing him a leaflet – ‘is about an exhibition I'm showing some work at soon. Come and visit me if you fancy seeing it.'

William was back home and reading in the sitting room with the larger tortoiseshell cat on his knee when Helena returned from Paris. She sailed in, bearing a flat white box which when opened revealed some exquisite cherry tarts.

‘How was your arty trip?' She kissed him graciously, still smelling gorgeous, not, in truth, wanting to know.

‘Immense fun.'

‘Really?' Helena raised her perfectly symmetrical eyebrows. William could usually be counted on to have a dull time.

‘Really. I found a pleasant hotel. Next time you go off on one of your jaunts I might go away again.'

Helena's scarlet mouth made the slightest movement of resistance. ‘If the hotel's that good, then perhaps I'll come too.'

‘I don't think it's your cup of tea. I had to have supper in the local fish and chip shop and there was a traumatic bus ride from St Ives. I doubt I shall ever recover.' He hoped he never would.

‘Food in the hotel no good?'

‘Not in the circs, no.'

‘Doesn't sound much fun to me.' She glanced at the book. ‘What are you reading?' She never usually asked.

‘It's about modern sculpture.' He closed the book, marking his place with a leaflet. He nodded down at it. ‘There's an interesting exhibition coming on in Derbyshire. I might go.'

Helena gave a dramatic shiver. ‘Derbyshire? Brrrr. Chilly.'

‘Yes,' said William, comfortably. ‘I know. That wouldn't be your cup of tea either.'

‘Did you know that Sphinx means “strangler”, and that she strangled travellers who couldn't solve her riddles?' Sylvie Armstrong asked a fellow guest during a dull conversation about Egypt at a dinner party.

‘I wonder how the bodies were disposed of?' was the rejoinder.

Sylvie was impressed. The young man seated beside her was beautiful and she had asked the question expecting a more sentimental response.

Sylvie's husband, Phillip, whose son was an archaeologist out on a dig in Egypt and had raised the topic under discussion, shot a look across the table. She knew that look. It meant: please don't embarrass me in public.

‘She ate them, I think,' Sylvie continued. ‘Though they never explained the “whys” of that sort of thing, did they, the ancients? I mean, why would one mind so much if one's riddles remained unanswered?'

‘Perhaps it was disappointment,' was the young man's response to that. ‘Maybe she didn't know the answers herself and strangled them in frustration when they failed to come up to expectation.'

A psychoanalyst who had been lecturing the rest of the table on the manifestations, late in life, of addiction to the breast, shoved his oar in at that point. Perhaps it had to do with an infantile fear of being smothered by the placenta at birth? he suggested, somewhat aggressively bringing up the Oedipus complex. But Sylvie was too intrigued by her young man to be led into the misty labyrinth of psychoanalytic theory.

‘I expect you're right.' Her eyes covertly surveyed his across the table. He had, she noted, the mild china-blue eyes of a certain breed of expensive cat. ‘But you can't help wondering why someone so powerful needed someone else to supply them with answers.'

‘It is of the essence of power,' the young man equably suggested, ‘to look for a match.'

‘And ditch it when it proves unequal …?' Sylvie asked.

Although Sylvie found her husband tiresome she had never been unfaithful to him. Infidelity was not her line. She didn't like complications and sex with anyone but her husband was something she was prepared to try again only in the unlikely event that she might fall in love. She had been in love once and the experience had been painful. The other person had been married and they had agreed to be honourable. In marrying Phillip, she had succumbed to the lure of security – a false one, as she now saw, but the nature which had kept her from stealing another woman's man also kept her faithful. So when the beautiful young man telephoned at first she pretended not to know who he was.

‘Who is it?' she enquired. And waited.

‘If that's a riddle it's either very difficult or very easy,' was the answer. And after that Sylvie stopped pretending with Jamie Ransome.

Sylvie had always thought of herself as someone who disliked the phone. ‘I can't think what we find to say to each other,' she remarked one day when Jamie had called three times.

‘We speak the things we would otherwise say only to ourselves,' he replied.

There was no doubt that it was flattering to be the object of so much attention from someone so young and so beautiful.

‘I am eighteen years older than you, old enough to be your mother,' Sylvie commented when Jamie exclaimed that a particular hairstyle made her look sixteen.

‘An indecently young mother,' was his rejoinder, ‘and besides, a person's “age” has more to do with their soul than their chronological years.'

Sylvie had worried at first that she might fall in love with Jamie; it hardly seemed possible she could avoid doing so. It was not so much his beauty but the wisdom of his utterances which she found compelling. To be understood was a secret yearning; one she had put away after the experience of falling in love had worked out so badly. Phillip understood her so little that it was almost a relief. There was a cool privacy in his non-comprehension which left her free to be herself. But to be oneself is almost always lonely; to be perceived and apparently comprehended was unexpected, and disarming.

Sylvie hoped that she was not going to make a fool of herself, something, temperamentally, she fought shy of. But as the weeks went by, and she and Jamie became more and more familiar, she was glad to note that while she occasionally wanted to fold him in her arms, she had no thoughts of any greater intimacy with her new friend. Instead, they talked, animatedly, and intimately, several times a day, and went on shopping trips together, where Jamie dictatorially chose her clothes and issued decrees over makeup.

From time to time, Sylvie wondered what Phillip made of her friendship; but a bonus of living with Phillip was his apparent indifference to how his wife spent her time. That she might be becoming a little dependent on Jamie occasionally troubled her. But she was not a dependent sort and told herself firmly that when, as she must expect, Jamie found more enthralling company than herself she would swallow any hard feelings and be dignified.

However, Jamie seemed to want no other confidante and, after a while, she began to take her position with him for granted. The dinner they had met at was in February. ‘We'll have known each other six months next week,' she reminded him. The six months had passed in the blink of an eye. She could not say where the time had gone; only that it had passed more vividly than usual.

‘We must celebrate,' Jamie declared. ‘We'll put on our glad rags and paint the town red. Where would you like to go?'

Before he went off to be killed in the Great War, Sylvie's grandmother had met the love of her life at Claridge's and it lingered in Sylvie's mind as the most desirable place in London to dine. She and Jamie were not a romance, they were something else – unique, as he was always saying – but nevertheless, she felt almost timid when she suggested the celebrated hotel as a possible venue for their own celebration.

‘It's rather luxurious,' said Sylvie – which was not like her. On the whole she took for granted the fact that luxury was her due.

‘Don't be absurd,' said Jamie. ‘For people like us no corner should be cut.'

Sylvie spent an unusual amount of time shopping to buy her outfit for the celebration evening. She found the experience enervating. Unconsciously, she had come to rely on Jamie's decisive judgement over what suited or didn't suit and deprived of this firm touchstone she found herself unusually dithery and at sea.

In the end, she bought a dove-grey frock, a smart pink suit and a little black dress, to add to the many similar ones already accumulated in her wardrobe. She arrived home fatigued, with quantities of bulky carrier bags, to a brief message from Phillip on the answer phone.

‘Hugh's back from Egypt. He'll be arriving this evening.'

Hugh was Phillip's son by his previous marriage. Sylvie had tried her best with Hugh, but the relationship had remained strained. Hugh was an only child; his mother was a confirmed hypochondriac who, despite the fact that the marriage had ended long before the advent of Sylvie, made it plain that the source of any continuing infirmity was the usurping second wife.

Sylvie rang Phillip. ‘I'm out tonight – what do you want me to do about Hugh?'

‘I'll be tied up till late,' was the unpromising answer. ‘Can't you cancel?'

‘No,' Sylvie said, ‘I can't.'

Phillip's obliviousness to her arrangements was matched by a blank insistence over his own which angered and occasionally depressed Sylvie when she came up against it. ‘You'll have to organise something – I can't get back and he's no key.'

‘I can leave a key with Marje.' Marje was their cleaner. But, no, she couldn't, she remembered: Marje was off with her sister for a week in Lanzarote. ‘Can't he get here before I leave?'

‘I don't know when he'll turn up,' said Phillip. ‘I told him you'd be in. I'm sorry, I've a meeting to get to now.'

Sylvie tried on the dove-grey dress, disarranged her hair as she pulled it off again, smudged mascara on the pink silk suit, snagged her tights as she changed them for a second time and finally settled for the little black number, not the new one, but another she'd had in the wardrobe unworn for an age. She settled down with a large gin and tonic to wait for Hugh and tried to calm herself. A part of her suspected that Hugh knew about the dinner and sensed that it was important to her: he had the uncanny intuitive flair of the ill-disposed.

At ten to eight, Sylvie, defying burglars, left a note on the door. ‘Will be at Claridge's. Come there for key.' She did not quite dare to defy Phillip enough to leave Hugh wholly abandoned.

The taxi she called at the last minute was late, and by the time they reached their destination the evening had turned humid and she was sweating in the little black number which appeared to have acquired moth holes in the skirt. She almost lost the third pair of tights as a woman in killer heels nearly trod on her foot as she hurried from the taxi.

But there to greet her in the cool, dimly lit dining-room was a welcoming Jamie, kissing her cheeks and commenting appreciatively on her scent – ‘Chanel 22, no?' – as he helped her with attentive hands to her seat at their carefully placed table.

She had chosen her starter, and was laughing in relief at his wicked observations over a very cross couple dining in silence at the other side of the room, when she heard a voice behind her.

‘Jay!'

‘Hugh!' Across the table, the opaque cat's eyes she knew so well were alight with a strange feverish fire.

‘What are you doing here?'

‘I'm dining with a friend, Sylvie Armstrong. Sylvie – my very, very old friend Hugh …'

Sylvie found herself tongue-tied during dinner. The conversation about Hugh's Egyptian dig dominated the evening and it was late when Jamie called her a cab. He brushed her cheek and thanked her for the ‘enjoyable evening' and promised to be ‘in touch' in the next few days.

Sylvie was still up drinking when Phillip arrived home. He asked for Hugh and she delivered the message. ‘He sends his love and says to tell you not to worry. He ran into an old friend – he'll be staying with him for a while.'