Muddy Waters (16 page)

‘It's your own fault, you shouldn't have said I was fat,' she reminded him cheerfully as she opened and shut cupboards briskly, collected moisturizer and make-up from the bathroom and found her swimsuit in the back of her underwear drawer. ‘
Especially
in front of Abigail. That was unforgivable – women have killed,
and
got let off, for less. Also you've made it quite clear you'd rather she was off the premises, so don't forget I'm doing you a huge favour.'

‘I know, I know. And you know quite well I didn't really mean you were
fat
,' he said, sighing heavily. ‘I just meant, well you know, none of us are getting . . .'

‘Don't say younger,
please
,' she interrupted, hauling her pink Paisley quilted bag off the bed. It felt awfully heavy, considering it contained very little by the usual going-away standards.

‘We can buy things there, I happen to know,' Abigail had told her, with that beady-eyed gleeful look that accompanied the thought of spending a lot of money. Stella had packed a few rather tatty old tracksuit and sweatshirt items for lounging around and being pampered in, plus an ancient leotard with very little stretch left over from Ruth's ballet days for exercise classes and a few circuits in the gym. Perhaps, in spite of the rowing, she was really terribly unfit and these few days of toning and honing at the spa were long overdue.

Adrian kicked sulkily at the doorframe. ‘I wasn't going to say younger. I was going to say, well, having the skeletal Abigail around must have made me forget that it's perfectly natural to be filling out and drooping a bit by our age. She looks more than a bit ill if you ask me. You'd look terrible that thin, people would think you were dying.'

Stella found she was trying not to laugh. She almost felt sorry for him, digging himself deeper into trouble with every well-meaning word. She pulled a jacket out of the wardrobe, kissed him as fondly as she reasonably could and breezed out of the room. He flinched slightly as if scared she'd actually intended to give him a spiteful bite. ‘Well you just keep on drooping away, my darling,' she said, ‘while I spend a few days gathering up all my own loose body folds and tacking them back together. All right? Bye, then!'

‘I feel as if we're running away,' Stella told Abigail as they drove away from the riverbank in Stella's sky blue Golf. Outside the rowing club as they passed, eight young women with sleek cycling shorts and tight firm bottoms bent and effortlessly lifted their boat, ready to put it in the water. Oh, to look like that again, Stella thought, resolving to buy something ridiculously outrageous at Chameleon, perhaps a pink thong leotard to wear at the exercise classes instead of the baggy old Pansy Island Arts T-shirt she'd packed. Baggy T-shirt, baggy body went through her mind like a new mantra.

‘I know. Isn't it fun? We haven't been anywhere together on our own since the night before your wedding all those years ago.' Abigail sounded like an excited child on her way to a birthday party. Stella felt nervous, as if, like a warning mother, she should be saying that things might end in tears. If that happened, the tears were unlikely to be Abigail's.

‘Hmm. Some matron of honour you turned out to be, telling everyone in the bar that we were on our way to Paris to work in a strip club and that it was our last night in England.'

‘Got free drinks, didn't we?'

‘We nearly got a lot more than that. When that bloke from the chemicals company started the bidding to get us to demonstrate our “act” I really thought you were going to get your kit off up on the table.'

‘I would've, if they'd gone over £500!'

Stella concentrated for a moment at a tricky roundabout, then asked, ‘And what about now?'

‘Now?' Abigail gave a cool sad laugh, ‘No one would ask me now.' She fidgeted with her seatbelt and added, ‘And I know it's ridiculous, but I do
mind
about all that.'

‘What? Fading attractions?'

‘I suppose so. Time you can't have again.'

‘We all mind about the
time
that can't be had, but you seem to mind about the
men
,' Stella said. ‘Isn't that what's gone wrong with you and Martin?'

Abigail stared out of the window, so Stella couldn't read what she was thinking and said, ‘I seem to have to keep checking that it's not all over. Like I said, really I'm starting to think I'd rather be you, all contented and snug with Adrian.'

Stella pulled a face at her and laughed, ‘Ugh, you make us sound like the Flopsy Bunnies. The worst smugness of the nuclear family.'

‘I didn't say “smug”, I said “snug”.'

‘I know what you said. And you wouldn't rather be me, chasing my tail in that circle of working woman and household slave, forever guilty that I'm not doing either properly. Besides, you'd miss all that money.'

‘Yes, I probably would, though it seems less important right now. And at least you earn your own. When you bought this car, you didn't have to smirk and simper and say
thank you,
ever so nicely with the sure knowledge in the back of your mind that you owed Adrian a session of very special sex. With me it's mostly all Martin's, apart from the house, of course. Everything is like
presents.
And I'm pretty sure I'm only allowed to share it while he's there. Presumably Fiona will be getting all the financial perks now. It's not as if she needs them either. How can a girl of her age possibly need the cosmetic support that I'm used to having him pay for?' Abigail was inspecting her badly bitten nails. ‘I mean, just look what he's made me do.'

‘If Adrian had had his way, he'd have made me fill up the freezer with Sainsbury's ready-mades before we left. Don't you think that's worse than making you bite your nails?' Stella laughed at her.

‘I told you before, you do too much for them all. It'll do them all good to fend for themselves. You need to spoil yourself a bit, everyone does.'

Stella felt quite excited as she drove into the pretty Cotswold village. The road sign saying ‘Belstone College', once attached to the main street's only lamppost had gone. She wondered what else about it had changed. The college had occupied the eighteenth-century Belstone Hall, a run down once-stately home that had never quite recovered from being requisitioned by the RAF during the war. Its Adam fireplaces, magnificent oak staircases and velvet curtains, so threadbare that the sun shone through and faded the pattern on the old-rose wallpaper, had all sunk further into sad disrepair under the thoughtless treatment of exuberant students. Stella remembered cigarettes casually stubbed out on the library windowsill, coffee stains on the neglected oak flooring, beer in the workings of the rotting Steinway, hair dye staining a chipped marble bath. She trusted that all this had been meticulously salvaged by Chameleon.

‘Hey, look, Mrs Berry's post office is now an Eight-til-Late. Remember all those old envelopes she used to add up on? I bet she can't cope with a till,' she pointed out to Abigail, slowing down and peering out of the window to see what other changes there were. ‘The pub's looking much the same though, apart from all those hanging baskets. I haven't been back here since we left, have you?'

‘Once, because I was somewhere round here and got a bit lost. When I saw the sign for the village I drove here to get my bearings again. But that was at least five years ago. Those new houses weren't there.' Abigail pointed to a small square of pale grey starter-homes, all neat with white paint and their windows awash with froths of flounced net curtains. ‘The people living in those were probably at the church hall playgroup when we were here.'

I shouldn't be here, Stella thought guiltily as they passed the little recreation ground where, on a seesaw and holding a bunch of poppies from the next field, Adrian had asked her to marry him. I should be at home making sure Ruth isn't spending all her time hanging round Bernard's studio and neglecting her A-levels. I should be making a start on my next book and giving Adrian a bit of support with his. Or maybe I should be in Sainsbury's, she thought, more cheerfully, playing at good wives and choosing all the different shapes of pasta to disguise how often we eat it. She pressed the accelerator harder as she turned in through the vast black double gates with
Chameleon
scrolled out opulently in gold on each of them. Next to her, Abigail sighed as if she'd at last come home. Perhaps she had, Stella thought, perhaps this was her idea of checking in, like a rock star with ‘nervous exhaustion', into a form of private psychotherapy wing, only in her case it was her body that would be soothed back into shape, rather than her brain.

‘This is just what you need,' Abigail said to Stella as they climbed out of the car, ‘time for yourself.'

Ruth walked past the shampoo display in Boots the Chemist and stopped abruptly next to the Footcare stand where she gazed at the corn plasters and verruca lotions with deep interest.

‘What are you doing?' Melissa asked. ‘Why've we stopped here?'

‘I can't buy condoms in here,' Ruth whispered. ‘That woman behind the till, she's known me from way back, ever since nit lotion and junior Calpol.'

‘Oh, don't be silly, she won't care.'

‘She won't, but I do. How do you think she'll look at me next time I come in for just Hedex? She'll say something stupid and loud and all full of double meaning like, “Ooh, telling him you've got a
headache
now, are you?” You buy them for me.'

‘What? Me?' Melissa's voice rose. ‘No way. If you're too cowardly to buy them, perhaps you're too immature for sex.'

‘I have done it before, you know, I do know what it's like.' Ruth's voice rose, in indignation, above normal conversational level and a customer in a red and white striped knitted hat browsed longer than she needed to by the hair sprays. ‘When it's sex with one of
our
age, they've all bought their own, no big deal, which just about sums up the sex with one of our age too, actually.
His
generation think women are all permanently on the pill, all chemically ready and waiting in case some man wants to do them the big favour. For heaven's sake, he's so old his favourite music is
jazz
.'

‘He sounds horrendous. I don't know why the hell you fancy him.'

Ruth shrugged and turned away to play with the lipstick testers. ‘I know. And politically he's a bloody dinosaur. It's part of being a muse. I mean, look at Gauguin in Tahiti, and Picasso. They had these women who
inspired
them – drove them to paint, to fall in love.' Melissa looked terribly doubtful, which Ruth thought was very unflattering of her. ‘What's the matter, don't you think I'm capable of being someone's great inspiration?'

‘It's not that,' Melissa tried soothing her, ‘it's just, well, I'm surprised you'd want to. You make really great jewellery, you paint really well – you should have them lining up to be
your
muses, not the other way round. I'm sure your mum must have mentioned feminism . . .'

‘Oh, you just don't understand. Look, are you going to buy these things for me or not?'

‘Not. You can get them yourself in the Body Shop or at the petrol place or out of the machine at the back of the Coach and Horses.'

‘I'll get them for you, what do you want? Rough riders, flags of three nations, cherry cola flavour or what?' Peggy, wrapped as ever in her crocheted blanket, emerged from the back of the make-up display carrying a hot water bottle in a fluffy panda cover.

‘You've been listening!' Ruth accused her, horrified at the offer.

‘Well, of course I have, dear. How else does a woman of my age get her entertainment? And if the alternative is a nice girl like you getting herself pregnant, well . . .'

‘You don't “get yourself” pregnant,' Melissa stated stroppily. Peggy gave her a weary look and Melissa fell immediately silent.

‘If he was a nice young man, you wouldn't have to do this kind of shopping. In my day . . .'

Ruth smiled kindly at her and tried to feel more grateful than embarrassed. ‘No, look, it's OK, Peggy, it's not a problem. I think I've gone off the idea now anyway. Come on Mel, we're late for college. Bye then Peggy and thanks . . .'

Ruth and Melissa fled from Boots, giggling frantically. ‘Oh God, our
neighbour,
can you believe it? Suppose she tells Dad? I'll just die, I know I will.'

‘No you won't. And no, she won't either, won't tell your dad, I mean. She couldn't, could she, how would it look?' Melissa collapsed into another wave of giggles. ‘And can you imagine if she
had
bought them, what the assistant would think, I mean at her age they could hardly be for her, could they?'

‘I wonder if she realized it was Bernard I was talking about?' Ruth said as they walked up the road. ‘I wonder if she's even surprised.'

‘Probably not. That's the kind of thing you take for granted on Pansy Island. Everyone knows that, local den of vice.'

Ruth laughed and pulled at Melissa's sleeve as they turned the corner by the traffic lights. ‘Come on, this way.'

‘Why, aren't we going to the college?'

‘Yes, after we've been to the Coach and Horses.'

Adrian paced up and down in the summerhouse and picked up the phone. Stella had left the number, ‘in case of emergencies' she'd specified, which made him feel that ringing her just to say he missed her might seem more than slightly foolish. She'd only been gone a few hours, he thought, hanging up again, halfway through dialling. Of course what he really wanted to say was not so much that he missed her, but how much he
didn't
miss Abigail. Having her in the house was constant nerve-tweaking, like not quite remembering where you'd left a loaded gun.