Limestone and Clay (2 page)

‘Points failure!' says Celia, ‘also the bane of British Rail …'

‘Oh do shut up, Celia,' says Simon, and Nadia would have been grateful if his exasperation didn't sound so affectionate.

‘It'll come back,' Miles comforts. ‘Don't force it.'

‘S'pose so,' Nadia says. She stands up. ‘I'll leave you three to it. I'm going out for some fresh air … said I might call in on Sue.'

‘Thanks for lunch,' Celia says.

‘Thank Simon. Bye, Miles. See you.' Nadia pushes her feet into her boots and buttons up her coat on the way downstairs. The amount of irritation she feels is quite out of proportion, she tells herself, but still there is adrenaline in her arms and legs that screams to be spent and she strides fiercely along, swinging her arms, punching holes in the air with clenched fists. It is Celia who rubs her up the wrong way – one of her mother's favourite expressions, and it is very apt. She feels like a cat that has been foolishly ruffled.

It is not just Celia. It is the pathetic flutter of hope that a tiny spurt of nausea, an extra day on the calendar can provoke. If Celia hadn't said … but it is that sort of subject, always lurking, always a snare. Just forget it, just manage not to register the date, and someone will be there, pregnant, or breast-feeding, or talking about babies. And Celia, no doubt, will have no trouble. There she'll be this time next year, a baby in her arms, and Simon will want to hold it too, will be bound to. ‘Uncle Simon', Celia will call him with a self-mocking laugh, and he'll look with his grey eyes, pupils flared, at the baby at Celia's white breast, and he will think, will be bound to think, of what might have been. Oh yes, Nadia can see it all.

There has been hope after hope after hope. Late periods, false alarms – only they weren't alarms but quite the opposite – and then, worse, real confirmed pregnancies that lasted a few weeks until her body mutinied and rejected them. And there was the one that was longer, the last one, the five-month pregnancy that really had her fooled. She hesitates outside the park gates, and enters. Usually she avoids the park on Sundays for that is the time when people parade their fertility. The duck-pond is glassy under the cold sky. It will rain, there is just a rustle of wind, a goose-pimpling of the water, a stirring in the trees which sprinkles blossom like confetti. Nadia's mother hates ornamental cherry trees for their messiness, their brief spring triumph and then its aftermath: the soggy, brownish, slippery mess of petals. A waste of time, she says, give me a good old laurel any day. Dependable. Nadia finds a smile on her face at this memory of her mother who detests the muckiness of nature, can't abide autumn, the scruffiest of all the seasons, the most wasteful.

By the water a row of small muffled children throw bread to the quacking ducks. Seagulls wheel greedily overhead, briefly mirrored in the water. A sparrow hops, cocking its head, eager for crumbs. ‘Mu-um,' a child complains, ‘Sacha's not giving hers to the ducks, she's
eating
it.'

April, May, June, July, August, September, October, November, December, January. If Celia gets pregnant straight away, as she is bound to, it will be a new-year baby. Blossom floats past Nadia and sticks to the surface of the water. She walks on, leaving her hope, a little woolly shape, invisible at the water's edge.

‘Be seeing you,' calls Miles as he clatters down the stairs.

Simon hugs Celia and kisses her cheek. She turns her lips towards his, but he pats her awkwardly and steps back.

‘Got right up Nadia's nose, didn't I?' she says, grinning in her sheepish way.

‘Well you can be a prize pain in the neck,' he says. ‘You can't blame her. I'd have expected more diplomacy from a personnel manager …'

‘Maybe it's a reaction. I can't seem to help it.' Celia buttons up her coat and lifts her hair clear of the collar. ‘I don't mean anything. I
do
like her. And, Si,' she touches his arm, ‘I am sorry about the baby thing. That was clumsy.'

‘Yes,' says Simon, ‘well.' He looks away. ‘Say hello to Dan for me. And see you on Friday.' At this thought he smiles. ‘And we'll do it. I feel it in my bones this time, we'll find the way through.'

‘We'll have a bloody good try,' Celia says, ‘and if we don't we'll try again.' She leans forward and succeeds in kissing him lightly on the lips. She looks at him in her level, amused way, as if aware of her power, using it judiciously.

Simon listens to her running down the stairs and banging the door. He is irritated. She is wrong to think she still has that power. And she should know that now. Recent events should have shown her that. It is true that the scent of her skin and her clean soft hair can stir desire in him, but not more so than any lovely woman who stands so close. He remembers her long body, pale and almost featureless, small breasts with white nipples, just the faintest pink at the tips, the shallow indentation of her navel, the merest scrap of colourless pubic hair. Her body has a childish smell and it was touching to find the truth of her inside the brittle smart-arsed shell. But he found her unwomanly in an almost perverted way, an elongated child. And eventually, with familiarity, he found her, at least undressed and available, hopelessly unerotic. He never said that, of course, she never knew, and their parting was for other reasons,
her
reasons, more convenient for him to let her think that, except for this look she gives him that says, We have secrets, there is still something between us. And there is a secret. But nothing else. He fervently hopes there is nothing. Wishes nothing.

He wanders into the bathroom. Nadia's things are everywhere: her brush, its bristles clogged with wiry hairs; her mascara, powder and eye-pencils; tweezers; a packet of sanitary towels; an ear-ring; some tortoiseshell combs, breath freshener, the red varnish with which she paints her toenails. He has never known a woman to have so much feminine clutter. His other women, Celia included, have been natural, soap-and-water types. Friends who happen to have female bodies.

In the kitchen he looks at the piles of greasy crockery and cutlery, the crusty roasting-tin, and sighs. Strictly speaking it's Nadia's job. Cook doesn't wash. But she's not there and they were his friends. He picks potato peelings and coffee grounds from the blocked plughole and runs the taps.

Nadia wears a strong musky perfume in the crooks of her elbows and between her breasts. She is darkly, strongly female in a way that used to scare him. Not his type. The first time they made love had been completely unexpected. He had gatecrashed a party at her house, along with some friends. They'd never even met before, and exchanged no more than a cursory word all evening, but somehow he'd been left behind at the end of the party among the bottles and overflowing ashtrays. She'd started to clear up around him, assuming he was asleep, but he was watching. And there was something about her, something about the way her breasts pressed against the stretchy velvet stuff of her dress, or about the way the damp tendrils of her hair made ringlets against her neck, or just about the unselfconscious way she moved that moved
him
, and he had reached out, half hopefully. She had hesitated and them let him pull her down beside him and hold her. He had been surprised by her softness and her womanly smell, amazed by the way his body responded, a Pavlovian response which seemed to bypass his brain altogether. He had followed her into her bedroom and found the experience of her almost too intense, the dark shadows, the soft depths, the scented puff of hair that crinkled against his belly making him want to yelp at the sensation. It had been like the first time all over again for him. It
was
the first time he had been so engulfed in sensation, lost himself completely.

In the morning he had woken and seen that her sleeping face was smudged with mascara and lipstick, which he ought to have disapproved of, but which moved him instead to tenderness. She lay on her side, facing him, so that her breasts were squashed together, a dark crease between them. Her nipples were pinkish-brown, large as pansies, and around them were little wisps of hair. He touched one of her nipples experimentally with his fingertip and watched, amazed at the way it crinkled, stirring like a growing thing. He looked at her face then and saw that her eyes were open and that she was grinning. As he kissed her smudgy face he experienced a slithering sensation, both exhilarating and exasperating, that he only recognised later as the beginning of falling in love.

Five years. He squirts detergent in the water and whips up a foam with his fingertips. And something needs to happen now. A child might do, might prove the catalyst they need to propel them forward. He washes the wineglasses first in the clean water and rinses the bubbles off under the tap. He looks up and catches the empty eyes of one of Nadia's masks, a mask with a lopsided smirk. He echoes the expression and loads the sink with plates.

Nadia walks and walks. She is hot inside her coat though her fingers and her ears are cold. She walks down a road of semi-detached houses and hesitates outside Sue's. The lights are on and she can see the bright cartoon blinking of the television set. The children will be sitting round it – even Robin, the baby, watches. Nadia's baby, the five-month one, would be due about now. She should be bulky now, walking with difficulty, her coat buttoned tight around the bulge. May 1 was the date. Has Simon thought of that? She could not talk about it without tears – and there have been enough of those already. If, by some miracle, this time … She walks on. She cannot bear to go in. Not that she resents Sue's family, or begrudges her her children. But just now Robin would tear at Nadia's heart with his round brown eyes and his way of snuggling on her lap. Sunday is not a day for calling on families, anyway. Sunday is a day for family patterns, fathers and mothers and knives and forks, strolls and bathtimes and stories. Nobody visited on Sundays, she remembers – except proper visitors, uncles and aunts who stayed overnight. Nobody dropped in casually. That was more a Saturday thing. Her father would have hated it. He liked to sleep late on Sunday mornings and then wake up and wallow in the bath. He'd walk to the pub before lunch, for a snifter, he said, and come home smelling lovely, of whisky and cigar smoke, benign and ready for lunch. After lunch he'd wash up, with Nadia and Michael drying and putting away, and then they would all drive out into the country to pick strawberries or kick a football about or sledge. Or if the weather was really terrible they'd watch old films on the television and eat slices of home-made cake. It would have been awful if anyone had dropped in. An intrusion.

It is still light, but there is the feeling that it should, by rights, be dark. Lights are on and leaves flutter darkly, and there is the irritable twitter of invisible birds. Nadia walks until she feels the first spots of rain, and then she turns towards home, hoping that Miles and Celia have gone. She thinks about a cup of tea, a bath, something soothing on the television, an early night.

‘You weren't serious about your pots?' Simon says. He is pouring tea. ‘Anything to eat?'

‘No. I'm still stuffed. Half serious. I
am
stuck. And as I said, I can't see the point any more.' Simon frowns and hands her her tea. ‘I mean, I think of a new shape, a new idea, something to hang on the wall, or some functional thing. I invent it. I make it. And there it is, tra-la, another
thing
. Do we need more things?'

Simon considers. ‘More beautiful things, I think, yes.'

Nadia frowns. ‘Yes, well. Thanks for washing up. I would have done it.' She takes her tea and sits in the sitting room in front of the gas fire. She feels her shins warm up and remembers the mottled blue of her grandmother's shins, plain to see even through thick mouse-coloured stockings. ‘She's cooked her legs,' her mother had said when asked, ‘sitting so close to the fire. Legs
in
the fire near as damn it. It's a wonder she hasn't gone up in smoke.' And Nadia had imagined meat, dead cooked meat on her grandmother's shinbones, and been sickened as well as fascinated. She picks a last shred of lamb from between her teeth and sits in the Lotus position instead, smoothing her dress in a warm tent over her knees.

Simon sits down on the sofa behind her. ‘You might just as well say what's the point of exploring, of what I do, of what I'm going to do. Of finding a way through.'

‘I do say that.'

‘And discovery. What's the point of that? Finding a new species, say, bats or something.'

‘Well?' Nadia unfolds her legs and turns to face him.

‘Well it's obvious. It increases human knowledge and, in a way, power.'

‘Power!'

‘Yes. Don't scoff. Over nature.'

‘Ah, so that's it.' Nadia points her toes and reaches over to grasp them, her face flattened against her knees.

‘No. Or not just that.'

Nadia sits up straight, raising her arms above her head. She exhales loudly, letting her hands flop to her lap. ‘I suppose you'd say then, by the same token, that by moulding something out of clay I'm exercising power over nature.'

‘Depends how you want to look at it.' Simon looks at her irritably. ‘By creating something beautiful you're increasing the world's stock of beauty.'

‘Maybe,' Nadia says. She lies on her back and pushes herself up on her hands and feet. The Crab. She cannot be bothered to argue. ‘Ouch,' she says, and lowers herself to the floor. ‘Belly still too full.' She gets up and sits on the sofa beside him. ‘I suppose you're all ready for Friday? The Three Musketeers.'

‘Shut up.'

‘Sorry.' Nadia puts her hand on his knee. ‘I really can't stick Celia,' she says, without really meaning to. ‘
She
makes me go like this. That's why I went out.'

‘I know.'

‘It's the way she goes on I can't bear.'

‘Yes,' Simon agrees, and Nadia looks at him with sharp surprise. They sit quietly for a moment listening to the vague murmuring of the television in the flat downstairs.