Homesick (27 page)

For Hugo, the sex was centred about
her
and her alone. Her body’s changes had only increased his desire, as if each pocket of fat or crease or stretch mark was a decorative proof of his infinite love, as if she were a house that in its subsidence became safer. How odd, she would think, how odd that you can love me more. For Dorothy, sex was an insular game. When they talked of it, and in their forties and fifties they talked of it a lot, Hugo would say—but that’s all women, isn’t it? Women think their way through
the process. When he made love to her, he knew she fantasised. Here she lied to him; here she never told what she really thought of. When he asked, when they talked during the actual moments, she made stories up: stories that would excite smart, funny Hugo. Stories about Hugo as a prince, and Dorothy a slave girl. Stories about Hugo being married to an older woman, and she, Dorothy, being the wife’s maid, who fellated him behind a screen. But when she came, the sad truth was that Hugo, in her head,
was
married to an older woman, to whom Dorothy was in fact making love behind the screen.

Now that she was alone, now that he had vanished into death (a future she contemplated with more and more frequency), she could awaken to the reasons she had lied. It was not satisfactory to think—oh, I was a lesbian all along—because she had not been. She had loved Hugo with an intensity and a fire that raged and burned and nearly destroyed her at times, the bad times when they’d almost parted. She had been fond of him and liked him. She had worshipped his smile, his common touches, his private caresses. There had been no better person for her, and in his death, he had taken her with him and left in her place a dried rind, her body a desiccated, pocked, disfigured old case, which she pulled about like luggage on an overlong journey.

When she woke in the mornings—late—in the house they had chosen together deep in the Cotswold countryside, near enough to a small, lively town full of things to do (he must have known he would leave her soon, she often thought), she would walk about naked, looking through the bedroom window at birds and avoiding mirrors until after her shower. Then she would stand in the steamy bathroom and examine herself. Poor old Tiresias would always spring
to mind, with his “wrinkled dugs.” There she stood, the thin bones of her slumped shoulders jutting like already sprouting angel wings. Her short hair boyish, her belly flat and flaccid, its skin falling like rivulets of candle wax toward her thighs. The breasts she could write an essay about. She had lost weight since Hugo died, and where there had been a fullness still ten years ago, now that she was eighty, they stopped being recognisable at all. The gap between the two appendages had widened, the brown skin on the sternum the only part of her chest that was still taut, and this skin was covered in beige, brown, black, and red liver spots. When she looked closely, she could see the tiny hairs there, browner now. “Oh, Hugo,” she would sigh, imagining his hands reaching around her and cradling her body with his own. He would not recognise her now, with the grey hair and the hunch that had arrived back, an old friend from her teenage years before Hugo, before she walked tall.

And once she dressed, pulling on Hugo’s old boxers, a pair of Hugo’s jeans, and one of his old shirts, she was asexual, as old people become. She was just a shuffler, ambling every day to the library, where she would meet Rosemary, her friend in widowhood, met at the library a few months after Hugo went and now a comfortable habit. They read the papers in the morning, then used the computers at lunchtime, jumping from subject to subject with clicks, as if they were young and could keep up.

Well, Rosemary liked to do this, bounding through her genealogy, making visits to great-great-greats like a reverent time-traveller, calling on her long-dead relatives as if they were close friends, telling Dorothy about a front parlour in Birdlip or a rolling journey on oceans that somehow, two hundred years later, still surged the same waves. Dorothy’s family were a mix-up: her father, the son of a
British headmaster in Colombo, had never left Sri Lanka, being sickly, and had married a native schoolteacher, Dorothy’s mother, Celie. Celie’s ambition had sent Dorothy off to university in England. Dorothy’s own history was so varied and interesting that she had never required more, and when she had asked, a few names offered up had misdirected and confused her. She wrote to a cousin in Sri Lanka and met her on her only trip back twenty years ago, when she was handed the holiday photos of a maiden aunt from the 1950s. The maiden aunt sitting in the Botanical Gardens at Kandy. This was her genealogy. As Rosemary, woodpeckerlike, tapped away at her family tree, Dorothy liked to play Scrabble on Facebook with her grandchildren: what she and Hugo had started was genealogy enough. At lunchtime, Dorothy and Rosemary went to the bakers’ across the road and had soup and a roll. Then a little shopping and Rosemary would walk back up the hill with her as far as the bend, when Rosemary would go her way and Dorothy would carry on up home. That was weekdays.

At weekends, she stayed in, disturbing her own dust, picking things up and putting them down again, the way they were when Hugo was there. She would sit in his chair to watch the afternoon movie. On Sunday, after church, she ate a chicken or a small joint, and it would last for two or three meals or more, until she found it in the fridge, or on the side, smelly, and she’d throw it away. This life was enough for her.

Her daughter disapproved. Stella was all for coming to the house and clearing out the bits of Hugo that pervaded every room.

“At least give his clothes to someone who could use them,” she said in their last telephone conversation.

“No,” Dorothy said, but listened to the reasoning. I am
eighty, she thought. I am old enough and wise enough to know what is good for me. Her son called once a week, dutiful, and after the painful silences and the too-bright chatter about “the grandchildren,” as he referred to his own brood, he would say goodbye. It was only in the inflections he used in that word (“
Good
bye,” he would say), mocking himself, that she heard Hugo. She heard Hugo’s voice say goodbye once a week.

Perhaps it was a midsummer madness that caused it. She had no feelings about sex, no longing for it, not even a nostalgia, beforehand. But one early June day, walking down to the library in sandals and a pair of Hugo’s gardening shorts, her old sunglasses balanced on her nose like a heavy lamp, she suddenly thought of the women who had fuelled her fantasies of old. So many buxom, large-nippled, creamy-coloured, plump mistresses of her dreams. It made her stop in her tracks to think of the photographs she had glimpsed over the shoulders of other people in newsagents’, and the one or two magazines she had bought herself when in her twenties, telling the newsagent (an Indian lady, Varma) that she had been asked to buy them for her next-door neighbour, who Varma knew was infirm. These ladies were ideals, glowingly pale goddesses, their fingers trailing along blurred blouses and shiny lips, their legs parted to reveal flesh rarely touched by sunlight. The magazines were “soft porn,” Varma had said, quite enough for the old man, and as it turned out, quite enough for Dorothy, too. The porn of today, all over the Internet if required, showed girls of all hues and sizes, splayed up toward the camera in much the same way she imagined that sacrificial goats were slit through the gullet and offered up to silent, distant gods.

She had thrown the magazines away, not risking putting
them in her own rubbish bags, in case Hugo should tidy the bins for the bin men, as he would sometimes, and find them. She double bagged-them in Sainsbury’s bags, tied the top, and took them to a park bin. At the last moment, she felt a sadness for the lovely ladies she had memorised, dressed as French maids and countesses, and propped the bag against the bin next to a bench, hoping that a lonely man would find them. The ladies were alive to her; they were helpful, kind even. Their bodies, with their warm pink skin, had made her ashamed of her own ugly black, nubby nipples, her beige-brown arms, her servile breasts, which never failed to make Hugo hard. In the middle spread, lying propped on pillows in a state of undress, the ladies’ eyes twinkled with warmth, as if the man behind the camera were a friend, as if he were a husband they loved. As if they could spare a little of their wifeliness.

The too-large shorts riffled in the wind, and she looked down to her scrawny, lizard-skin legs and her toes, such good friends for so long, now irreconcilably worn and wrinkled. The women in the magazines had been ten, twenty years older than her. They were probably all dead now. It was with indefinable sadness that she thought of the games she made up for them in her head. How they would move with bovine grace through her fantasies, their pudgy toes showing through American tan tights, the only pornographic thing about it all. They would lie languidly on a bed, and she would lie next to them, and as Hugo touched her, she would touch them.

Walking into town tired her, and she was hot. She stopped for a glass of white wine and some olives at the café at the beginning of the high street. She sat at a table for two outside in the shade and wondered if she would see Rosemary marching through. She drank too quickly, perhaps,
and did not order a glass of water. At the next table was a woman in her mid-forties, Dorothy supposed, and she was the type of woman Dorothy had been thinking of. It used to happen like this sometimes. A woman would wander into their working life, a therapist of some sort, or someone who had started up a small shop, and Dorothy would become a friend, in the easy way that middle-aged people of shared experience can. She would ask them their names, pat their hands when thanking them. And that would be all, until the night, in the dark, where their clothes would fall from them, and they would kiss her, when her eyes were closed and Hugo kissed her. Dorothy stood up to pay, but the wine had been stronger than she realised, and the sun hotter. She sat back heavily in her chair. The woman looked over and said, “All right?”

“Oh, yes,” Dorothy said brightly, “I’m fine.” The woman was
honeyed
, Dorothy decided. The freckled skin on her forearms shone with perspiration or glittery cream, the expensive rings on her fingers glinting. Her blond hair waved about her face as she stood and walked smoothly over, bending toward Dorothy to smile and ask another question. She said something, but Dorothy did not hear because the top button of the woman’s blouse had loosened and now came undone to reveal a palely freckled cleavage.

Dorothy thought of the madness of it afterward, as if it were someone else. She reached up, and with one hand brought the woman’s mouth to hers, and with the other, cupped her plump breast. In order to know how it felt, she thought later. It felt as she thought it would, in fact. It felt as beautiful and warm and soft as she imagined.

When Rosemary picked her up from the police station, she told Dorothy that Stella was on her way to see her.

“You are a
ridiculous
old woman. Imagine kissing a
young thing like that? You have no
taste
.” She drove in silence until they entered town again. They drove past the café, now closed up, lights off, a sleeping monument to her folly. From now on it would always be closed off to her. Rosemary stopped her car outside Dorothy’s house and left the engine running.

“Will you be all right?”

“Of course. I have no idea what came over me. Ridiculous,” she said, and she gave Rosemary a sad smile.

Rosemary patted her hand. “We’re all lonely in our own way, darling,” she said. She beeped as she drove away.

Stella was waiting in the sitting room. She had been crying.

“Oh, please don’t make a drama of it,” Dorothy said wearily.

“I’ve made you a gin and tonic and some fish.”

“All in the same glass? How kind.”

“Hair of the dog, by the sounds of it.”

“Who have you been talking to?”

“Well, you were drinking?”

“I had a glass! One glass of white.”

“And look what happened.…” Stella stood, went to the kitchen to see to the fish. On the coffee table, next to the gin, was a photograph album Stella had left open. There was Dorothy’s maiden aunt Megan, sitting on the grass in the Botanical Gardens, next to three friends, all wearing saris, white blouses, and pearls. Their legs curled beneath them, they sat straight-backed, smiling in black and white, the fronds of a palm tree invading the picture on the side, exotic plants she had forgotten the name of swaying above their heads. She positioned the album on her lap and looked closer. Megan’s arm was placed gently around the girl next to her in the picture. Oh, genealogy and genetics are peculiar
sciences, she thought, and I hold no truck with them. And yet, Stella? She took her drink to the kitchen.

“Stella? Why did you never get married?”

“Why are you asking me today? Why have you never asked before?”

“Well … because I thought that one day you would tell me. I didn’t want to pry.…”

“I would stick to that if I were you.”

Stella turned to the sink, where she was washing a pan. The water arced out and splashed the surface, and Dorothy had to stop herself from saying the things she said—
Why do you put the tap on full?
or
Can’t you be more careful?
It would lead to the inevitable snapping and bickering, the tired nonsense they always spoke to each other, a couple of old maids.

“She thought I was a man,” she said instead.

Stella looked around, appraising her. She nodded. “You do look like a man in Pappa’s clothes.” She turned back to the sink, wiped down the surfaces with the drying-up cloth.

“Shall we eat?” she said. Then: “Would you like me to stay? I could move in for a while if you want.”

They sat at the table, and the things Dorothy never said wanted to come:
I am like you
, she wanted to say.
I loved your father … but
—but she nibbled at the plaice and garlicky potatoes and kept her counsel.

“It’s a very kind offer,” she said eventually, taking her daughter’s hand, “but I think I am fine on my own. I think I will be fine, I mean.” And Stella nodded, and after they had drunk some coffee, she walked out into the night, on her way back to a life that Dorothy had no inkling of, could not even guess at. She had no right to know, she thought. It was Stella’s life. Private.