Made in Heaven (7 page)

Seeing Lydia there, after so long, looking so beautiful, so like the woman he'd dreamed about, turned him for a few moments into a kind of statue. He'd stood there and tried to take in that she was Zannah's mother. Everything they'd said to one another, everything he'd been fantasizing about in the privacy of his mind night after night came back to him. Maureen had stared at him as though he were ill, and he was in a way. He'd pulled himself together eventually, and Lydia had left the party at once, which made things easier, but all through the evening, during a meal that seemed never to end, with Adrian and Maureen discussing what had happened, he'd sat there wanting to hit both of them.

He thought back to that first course at Fairford Hall. Although they'd done poetry workshops and cooked the communal meals together, he'd circled round her from some distance till the second evening, when they'd talked alone for the first time. The following day, they went for a walk through the wintry landscape. Later, it occurred to him that he should have said something at the beginning of the walk. It would have altered what they said to one another, how they were with each other.
Gray cringed now to recall how shy he'd been. They'd discussed that morning's poems, the tutors, a couple of course members who were more than usually annoying: trivial things. I didn't care. I just wanted to listen to her voice. I would have gone on chatting like that for a long time. But then it had started to rain. They'd taken shelter in the porch of a small, grey, architecturally undistinguished church. There was no one around.

‘I knew I ought to have brought an umbrella,' he said. ‘We're stuck here for a bit, I'm afraid. It should clear up quite soon.' He had no idea how soon it would or wouldn't clear up.

‘Never mind,' she said. ‘At least there's a bench. And maybe we can go in and have a look. Do they lock churches round here? It's such a shame when they do.'

He tried the heavy wooden door and it opened. The interior of the church wasn't memorable in any way, but there was the hush and the chill; the stained glass, the smell of winter greenery in the vases near the altar, and the unexpectedly fine carvings on the lectern. They spoke softly as they went round, and he took her hand. She didn't pull it away. They walked down the nave together and sat in the front pew.

‘I never go to church,' he told her. ‘Are you religious? Am I allowed to ask you that?'

Lydia shook her head. ‘Not religious at all, but I do love churches. I love the thickness of the silence. I like organ music, too.'

When they emerged, the rain had stopped.

‘We can go back now,' he said.

If she'd said,
Okay, let's
go, it was entirely possible that he wouldn't have kissed her just at that moment. But she hesitated, peering out at the graveyard as though reluctant to go back, and turned to him. She started to say something and he stopped her. He simply leaned forward and took her face between his hands and kissed her. His first thought was how different it was
from kissing his wife. Maureen smelled of make-up and tasted of lipstick. She often giggled when they kissed; wriggled herself up to him in a suggestive way, almost forcing him to respond. And he did, too. No one could accuse Maureen of not being sexy. Lydia wore lipstick too, but that first time, all he could taste was
her
, her skin, her mouth. The kiss went on for a long time, and she didn't move, didn't step forward. He had the feeling that she was a source of something he needed, like water, like breath. When she took a step back at last, he couldn't think what to say. He was profoundly grateful for the thigh-length jacket that hid his erection. Was she aware of that? He was blushing again. What would happen now? He wasn't used to such intensity of feeling and therefore said nothing. Neither did she. They began to walk in the direction of Fairford Hall, not speaking. What am I going to do if there are people around when we get there? he thought. I want to kiss her again.

No one was in the entrance hall when they reached the house.

‘Lydia?' he said, not knowing how to ask, suddenly awkward.

She reached up to gather him into her arms. She pulled him down to her, her hands on his neck, in his hair. He could feel how much she wanted the kiss. If she hadn't done that, hadn't reached out to him, would he have stepped back? No, no way, but things wouldn't have turned out the way they did, perhaps. I'll never know, he thought, as he stared out at the road unrolling in front of the car and tried to ignore what Maureen was saying.

She obviously couldn't leave the subject of Lydia alone. She'd chattered on till his teeth hurt. ‘Whatever d'you think was the matter with her? Menopause, I shouldn't wonder. She's quite nice, isn't she? I wish I had the dressing of her, though. Somehow unfinished.
And like Zannah, a little too thin. But very pretty, really. And I like her husband. And Adrian likes them.'

Sometimes he wondered why he'd married her, but now, back home, looking around the morning room, he recognized that her love of order matched his. Her gift for household management, her capacity for seeking out the very best, exactly the right thing for whatever they needed in the house or garden was something he admired and appreciated. And she'd been a knockout when he first met her. Naturally blonde in those days, and with breasts that she managed to display to their fullest advantage while at the same time being dressed as soberly and neatly as befitted a hospital receptionist, she'd made no secret of her attraction to him and he … well, as someone once said: she threw herself at him and he didn't exactly step out of the way. She'd made him feel drunk with lust. He hadn't even minded Adrian then. At the time, he was a toddler whose father had walked out. Gray was moved by the plight of the gallant single mother, struggling alone to keep up standards and get her life together, and her pretty son. He thought of himself as their rescuer and it felt good.

Maureen had been so lovely as a young woman. And she flirted with him in a way he liked. You had to hand it to her. As soon as she saw he was keen, she'd started inviting him round to her house. Adrian was only a little kid then, and Maureen made much of how good he was and how much he needed a father. They used to go to the cinema and snog their way through the films. No question of going back to her place, and his room in the hospital wasn't much better.

‘It's not exactly home from home,' Maureen used to say.

He didn't mind. They'd start taking their clothes off as soon as the door closed and he couldn't have cared less where they were. Maureen was so enthusiastic, such fun, so full of laughter and so uninhibited that he
wanted to make love to her all the time. He'd slept with a few women before he met Maureen, but no one who enjoyed it so much, and responded so quickly.

‘Oh,' she'd say, and her eyes would roll back in her head, ‘oh my God, I can't get enough of you, my darling. I wish I could gobble you all up!'

Afterwards, her talk often turned to her little boy. She started to drop hints about how ghastly it was living where, she did. And she began to paint pictures of what life could be like if they moved in together.

He'd soon fallen out of love with Adrian, but Maureen was a different matter. What he felt for her now was complicated, but some sort of love was still bound up in there somewhere, and denying it wasn't going to help matters.

Their wedding had been very low-key. A couple of the nurses from the hospital as witnesses and that was it. Maureen had worn a blue suit with a wide-brimmed hat to the register office. He'd bought her some flowers. Nothing as grand as a bouquet, but a small bunch of yellow and white roses. There were a few photos of the occasion, taken by one of the witnesses on his very basic camera and that was it. Where were those photos now? He had no idea. Maureen would know but he had no desire to look at them again.

For the honeymoon, they'd sent Adrian to Maureen's mother and gone to Paris for the weekend. Maureen found fault with the hotel in the short intervals between fucks.
We'll stay at the Ritz one day, darling, won't we?
she'd asked him. He'd agreed. He'd have agreed to fly to Mars, just to get her to stop talking. Just to see her waiting for him, opening herself, legs, mouth, arms, everything, wanting him and nothing else. Remembering those days, he felt uncomfortable. Guilt, regret … it was difficult to put a name to it. All he knew was, seeing Lydia again had stirred up all kinds of complicated emotions and he wasn't sure he knew how to manage them.
Maureen was sharp, too. The last thing he wanted was for her to discover the truth. But would it matter if she did? If she left him?

I'm a selfish bastard, he told himself. I had it all worked out. No one keeps house better than Maureen. She cooks as well as any chef. Wherever he looked, he saw a kind of beauty. The house was orderly, with not so much as a smudge on the wallpaper or a whisper of dust on the skirting-boards. She was a better gardener than any of that lot on TV. She was efficient. She kept track of his diary. She made sure his life ran like clockwork and that was something Graham needed. She knew he wrote poetry, but she left him well alone to do it, regarding it as a kind of indulgence, a silliness she forgave him. Maureen had, however, almost no claim on his heart. That had belonged to Lydia since the very first day he met her. Maureen didn't even realize that his love had mostly been given to someone else. They still fucked often enough. More often, he thought, than other couples in their fifties, but she had no notion that behind his eyes, he was conjuring up Lydia's pale face as it had been on that night, their one night together, when he'd actually considered how good it might be never to wake up and know what it was like not to be with her. His Lydia. The name he would always use, even though she was Jocelyn Gratrix. He went to the door. She'd be phoning him in half an hour. He had no idea what she'd say, but he had to see her. They needed to talk about this new situation. I'll walk round the golf course, he told himself, me and my trusty adulterer's phone. Maureen was at church. She wasn't a bit religious but had a firm belief in the desirability of being the kind of person who was seen in a pew on Sunday and, what's more, wearing better clothes than anyone else in the congregation.

*

‘Such a shame!' said Edie Nordstrom, balancing a piece of
tarte aux pommes
on her fork before putting it into
her mouth and munching it with her eyes closed to indicate pure pleasure, ‘ … that your guests never got a chance to taste this. Still, their loss is our gain. Your pastry's divine, Charlotte. As usual.'

Edie was a small woman with sharp eyes and short grey hair, cut in a style she liked to think made her look like Judi Dench. The pinkish shade of her spectacle frames, together with a taste for the pastel in matters of dress, led people to think of her as a sweet old lady. Nothing, Charlotte knew, could have been further from the truth. Edie was stubborn, intelligent, kind and rather cynical. She trusted no one except her children, Charlotte, and Val. Even Nadia with whom they played cards and took tea, she regarded as slightly unreliable (because she was foreign by birth), even though she conceded she was ‘a good egg'. Charlotte had met her when she fell ill shortly after arriving in prison. Edie had been one of the youngest nurses in the sickbay, and did what she could to make the time her patients spent there both calm and pleasant. She thought of her charges not as criminals but as women who needed her help. Most of them were much older than she was, but even in those days she had a natural authority. She was, Charlotte thought, like Mary Kingsley, who in the nineteenth century had explored Africa and apparently used to subdue fierce animals with nothing more than a glance. She was also, in the modern phrase,
non-judgemental
. It wasn't so much that she believed every single woman's assertion that she was innocent. Many, she knew, were as guilty as hell but in Edie's eyes that didn't affect their humanity or their needs. She would have been happier if there were a category called something like,
‘Guilty but Justified
,' which described many of the women she had to deal with in prison. She'd done everything in her life with the minimum of fuss, marrying, having two sons and losing her husband in a slow, organized progress through the years. Nowadays, she spent much of her
time fundraising for a local battered women's refuge and it was she who made sure that jumble sales and whist drives were put on regularly to benefit it. She'd helped to found it in the early seventies and still took an active part in running the place, sitting on the steering committee and frequently ringing up the newspapers to give them opinions on many issues relating to violence in the family, whether they'd asked for them or not. She even appeared on the radio from time to time, and when she did, she always spoke clearly and with a precision that came as a surprise to those who had written her off as a sweet old thing.

‘Did you even get a chance to discuss things like the venue?' Val Handley asked. ‘You have to start thinking about that months ahead, booking the church and so forth.'

She was sitting across the table from Edie and Charlotte, looking exactly like what she was: a middle-aged tomboy. At sixty-five, and because she was younger than her companions, Val refused to be categorized as ‘old'. She wore corduroy trousers in what Charlotte privately considered an unfortunate shade of beige, a brown and orange hand-knitted Fair Isle cardigan, and her dark hair (‘only about sixty per cent grey' she maintained) was tied back in a girlish ponytail.

On Sundays, Edie went to church, Val spent the morning in the garden and Charlotte cooked lunch. Today there was enough food left over from the engagement party to feed all three women. Val was a romantic and almost as excited at the prospect of a wedding as Isis, in spite of her own experience of matrimony. She'd been married at a ridiculously early age to a domestic monster and only Charlotte and Edie knew how little she regretted his death, for which she'd served six years in prison. He'd been an optician in a small market town and had taken in everyone with his façade of respectability. Behind closed doors, though, he'd made
Val's life a constant torment. Everyone agreed on that, and she was very young, but the law was the law and this was in the days when desperately hitting out at an animal who repeatedly brutalized and beat you was not quite as sympathetically regarded. We've come a long way, Charlotte thought, looking at Val. She'd never have served a sentence like that nowadays. Mitigating circumstances. Today, someone like Val had people like Edie to help her and places like the refuge to run away to.