Aunt Margaret's Lover (16 page)

'Who? Me or the lily?'

I was about to forget the friendly flattery and the forwarding address and tell him what I thought of him when his arch expression gave way to a sudden softness and the hand that had touched the lily touched my cheek.

'Margaret,' he said, 'if you go putting out a message in that voice you're asking for trouble. I mean, I
know
you, so I don't find it a come on, but somebody else - anybody male - hearing that kind of up-front allure, might get the wrong idea . . .'

Up-front allure? I thought. I was impressed. However, the rod came out of my back and spinal curvature renewed itself. It had never occurred to me that I was being naive.

'I know about things like provocation,' he continued, far too pretentiously. 'After all, I
am
a man.'

'No you're not,' I suddenly giggled. 'You're a hamster.'

And while he was looking puzzled and a
little
anxious about that statement, a shaft of wondrous deceit hit me.

'Colin,' I said confidingly. 'You are right. I have got a lover. Only he's married.'

'Why a hamster?' said Colin wonderingly.

I waved my arm dismissively. It had goose bumps. I had to move swiftly before the dropping temperature restored his vigilance. 'The thing is, he doesn't want to have any connection with my address here in case his wife is using a detective. You know. They can' - I thought of V. I. Warshawski -'they can trace anything. Even post. So I wondered if I could use you as a safe letter-box. You know. He could send his letters to you and I could come and collect them.'

He stared at me, then rubbed the tip of his nose thoughtfully. I waited. He said nothing.

'Oh, go on,' I said. 'You can't go getting all moral about it, considering your checkered past.'

'Two things,' he said, extending the correct number of fingers. 'One: why a hamster? And two: you want me to be a holding address so that when the crap hits the spinometer I get the knock in the night? And for ever after get branded as a covert homosexual?'

'I thought you were liberated. You read the
Guardian.'

'Honey, I am liberated. If I
were
gay, I would tell the world and celebrate it if necessary. But I'm not. And I don't think my
..
.' - he paused, looking worried now - 'my women would be impressed.'

'They wouldn't know.'

'Try keeping women away from scrutinizing incoming mail.'

'OK,' I said, prepared to be kind. 'Tell them.'

He scratched his head in genuine confusion. 'This just doesn't sound quite right to me. I mean, it's a hell of a lot of subterfuge. What is he? The Prime Minister or something?'

Deceit has a way of enticing us further into wicked abandon. 'Nearly,' I said. 'He's a diplomat. A very high-ranking diplomat.
Now
do you see?'

'What's his name?'

By now I was clone of Mata Hari. I looked down at my empty glass wistfully. 'I can't tell you that,' I said. Which was true.

He agreed, if slightly fuzzily, and so, fluttering femininity over, I slipped into Mama Pasta mode. 'What you need is something to eat.'

He stuck out his underlip. 'Why a hamster?' he said with an insistence that brooked no denial.

So while I chopped onions and garlic and he mashed up the basil leaves, I told him about what Saskia had said.

'That child always had the devil in her,' he said fondly.

I felt a sudden pang. 'Yes,' I said, chopping more fiercely. 'It came from her father's side.'

'I thought you had let all that go,' he said, pushing all the greenery into the sizzling pan.

'I think I have. I think that was a Pavlovian reaction rather than what I feel now. Time heals and I can't hold on to hatred for ever.' I could use strong words like 'hatred' because that was how I had felt and the Martini countered caution.

'How's she doing?'

'She is doing fine. She writes me long, long letters all about Canada and the people she's meeting and little snippets about the different ways of living and looking at things - it really has worked so far as broadening her out. She's in Quebec at the moment for the ice hockey which is
very
exciting
...'

'And the other thing?'

'You mean Dickie? Or
Richard,
as we are supposed to call him now.'

I paused. I realized that I had not really thought about it properly. Afraid it would hurt, I suppose. Curiously it didn't. I turned down the flame and folded my arms. I looked at Colin and felt an immense rush of gratitude for his friendship. Being a friend, he could touch these sensitive areas without appearing obtrusive.

'She and he,' I said, 'are quite clearly made to love each

other. And reading between the lines, she wants me to love him too. Of course I can't. But I don't begrudge her the closeness of a father. So long as he stays over there and out of the way. She's painting a lot, which is what she wanted. And she's happy.'

Colin pulled a cork out of a bottle of Merlot. 'You've changed your tune,' he said. 'There was a time when you considered him entirely evil. In fact you built your whole life around that notion.'

'It's only for a year. I can't deny genes after all. I only hope she's got the few good ones he may have.'

'Well, well,' he said, sniffing the cork. 'Aunt Margaret
resurgat.
Pity it's with a married man, though.'

'What are you talking about, Colin?'

'Your new lover,' he said, eyeing me over the bottle.

'Oh, that. Yes.' I sighed as convincingly as possible. 'Well, who knows where love will lead us?' I turned back to the bubbling pot.

'Indeed,' he said, in a tone that made me feel like kicking him again. 'Glasses?'

Chapter Sixteen

Dad has gone away for a week with Judith, so I have the place entirely to myself. I could do wi
th a bit more twentieth-century
stuff out here. You don't send me any news of the London scene. Is
n't there an Auerbach show open/
opening soon? It's at the Hayward, I think. Can you get me the catalogue? You've been out such a lot that I feel a bit guilty. Is the loss of Roger hitting you? Dad and Judith have been a bit fraught recently, hence the holiday. Your answerphone voice is disgusting. Why?

I had given myself until the end of May to meet Mr Right so that he could be with me when I visited Jill. There were about three weeks to go. Or to be precise, two weeks, since we would need at least a week beforehand to . . . um .
..
get to know each other a
little
first. Hardly fair to meet him in a wine bar and tell him to have his bag packed - a little time was necessary. Also I didn't want to make any bloomers at Jill's. I could imagine it:

Jill: How did you two meet?' Me: At a party.

Him: Through an advert in
On Sight
.
Jill: Is that a joke? Me: Yes. Him: No.

Jill was clearly fed up and I hoped that she would get some vicarious pleasure from my happiness. She needed occasional reminders that the world could, indeed, be frosted pink and sweet to the lips occasionally, but David seemed increasingly unable to provide such reminders. There really are virtues to the life singular. Maybe Jill and David had grown apart because the children had left home, for the family unit had been their lodestar. With just the two of them now, all the flaws took on a sharper edge. But it was hardly fair for Jill to expect more pink fluff from a man who had never claimed to have any in the first place. So, I decided, she could turn to me. If Jill wanted candyfloss, why then I would provide it -in abundance if the lover was willing - the darlings and endearments dropping like dew from a rose leaf.

Verity was seriously absorbed in what was going on in my life. She did not approve and felt that I had let her down, but I calmed her by saying my various dates were just dates and nothing more. But she would come round on any pretext early in the morning and look pleased if I were still in
dishabille -
quite often bounding up the stairs, two at a time, to peek through the crack in the bedroom door, no doubt to behold some tousled head still breathing satedness into the pillows. She said it was jest. I knew it was not. Why, she had already given me a serious, low-voiced, gimlet-eyed chat about
condoms,
Margaret,
condoms.

'Tom Cruise has just gone,' I would shout. 'But Eddie Murphy's just called to say he's on his way.'

'You should be so lucky,' she would say, coming down the stairs with a faint leer on her face. And since I had probably had a date with nothing resembling either of them the night before, I was inclined to agree.

'But where do they all come from?' she asked me peevishly on one such occasion, and I have to say that pride upped and pinched me.
Where do they come from,
indeed! Anyone would think I looked like a Troll.

'They come from their mothers' wombs, Verity,' I said. 'The same as you and me.'

'You know what I mean,' she said waspishly. 'Where do you pick them up?' The urge to denounce myse
lf as a hooker and say 'King's C
ross and environs' was delightful temptation. Instead I patted my hair and pouted into the mirror, saying, 'Oh, here and there, you know.' A secret, significant little smile reflected back at me. 'Here and there.' I knew that would infuriate her. There was no doubt that while Verity was absorbed in my life and romantic interludes, she felt much better. Her weight had returned to normal (perhaps this was not a credit, since about the one thing she could celebrate in all her sufferings was that she had got back into her ten-year-old jeans without dieting), her eyes were bright with life rather than gin, and she was less and less inclined to speak with poetical, tear-stained yearning of the absent Mark. At this stage I still had plenty of time for her and I was sure she'd be more or less cured by the time Mr Right came along. Fondly, I saw again the
tendresse
of Tintoretto. Two women: one stumbles, one saves. Despite Saskia's going away, life could be fun after all. Did I hear the echo of a ghostly chuckle?

One morning the doorbell rang and it was not Verity but Colin. A grinning Colin, holding out three letters. 'Well, well,' he said, his eyes gleaming dangerously. 'A clever cove this one. Writes you three different letters, from three different addresses, and in three different handwritings. My, my -his wife
will
be confused, never mind MI5!' It was a fair cop.

I took him into the kitchen, shoved a bowl of muesli under his nose, told him I hoped it choked him, and while I made coffee explained everything. I also told him that if he broke my confidence and anyone else found out, I would consider it my duty to the feminine cause to make his future participation in muesli in my house a dangerous form of cereal roulette.

Women are the only
true
romantics. They understand the dimension of the spirit which drives the soul towards the sublime and are quite ready to be pragmatic about it. They know that as the melting splendour of a perfect souffle requires some shit-hot elbow time to make the conditions right, so romantic liaisons will not arrive in their laps unless they prepare the ground. Prepared ground can be anything from fancy clothes, scented cleavage and a Marks & Spencer's dinner for two on Wedgwood, to an inner belief, en route for the canning factory in a dawn-damp overall, that today might be the day.

Colin's bleating indignation at my calculated methodology would have made a grown feminist weep. 'How . . .' he said passionately, indeed, with more passion than I had heretofore experienced in his pronouncing presence, 'how can you set out with such a cynical undertaking?'

What on earth
is
it about this 49 per cent of the world's population that when a woman says 'I know what I want and I know how to get it', she must immediately be suspect? The virtue of patience, with all its attendant passivity, is considered suitably female. To the man falls the much more muscular and outward-bound virtue of endurance. Thus, of course, did Boccaccio's final tale turn the legend of Job, who endured the wrath of a psychopathic
God
and was rewarded for it, into the disgraceful episode of patient Griselda, who was accorded the mere domesticated trials of a psychopathic
husband
to prove her worth. God, presumably, felt it was beneath him in her case. Job Endured, got rid of the boils, collected fourteen thousand sheep, six thousand camels, a thousand yoke of oxen, a thousand she-asses and one hundred and forty years of fulfilling life, in which he produced seven sons and three entirely marriageable daughters, and finally retired, without the need of a hip replacement, to sit on the right hand of God in virtuous splendour.