Muddy Waters (6 page)

‘Well, you would say that, you live down
this
end,' Willow replied curtly, adding for good measure, ‘at least they
buy
what you call my “fat pots”. That's more than they do with your bits of twisted old car bonnets.'

Charlotte put her hands over her baby's ears to protect them from the discordant sounds of conflict. ‘We need a proper route map,' she suggested quietly.

‘Funny you should say that, I made one last night,' Ruth stated, standing up and handing over to Bernard a sheet of card. Her hand shook slightly, Stella noticed, as if this was something that really mattered to her. Her whole face, tilted up at him, was childishly demanding approval, willing him to like it and like her.

He smiled at her and Ruth's large blue eyes glistened happily. ‘You are such a good girl,' he praised her, and her face went quite pink with delight. ‘This is wonderful, much better than last year's plain old list of exhibitors.' He studied it for a few seconds more, showing no democratic urge to pass it round for general comment. ‘Terrific. It shows where all the relevant people live, with an explanatory key. With a copy of this, our great public can just ferry themselves over and make up their own minds where to go to be parted from their cash.' He chuckled and beamed round, expecting agreement and, as it was his home and they were all good-mannered, he got it.

‘Stella, I'll leave this one with you, shall I, to organize printing and mailing and such?'

‘OK,' she agreed, ‘no problem.' She made a note in her diary, adding it to the list of other things that she'd said would be no problem that week. One of the items on the list, the care of Abigail, seemed to be going smoothly so far as Abigail was now looking quite relaxed and amused. Another thing to be done was to persuade Adrian that Ruth should be allowed to use the summerhouse to display her jewellery for the Art Fair. He was so precious about his workspace, as if the slightest disturbance to his routine might destroy for ever the flow of his writing. Every now and then, for the pure wicked hell of watching him being thrown into panic, Stella reminded Adrian that the summerhouse had been built for the whole family to enjoy and suggested that they took people down there for pre-dinner drinks. She herself had to write with her computer perched on top of a junk-shop desk squashed into an alcove on the first floor landing, with reference books lined up on a shelf above and paperwork and correspondence filed away beneath it in Habitat baskets. Adrian ‘went out' to work, whereas she got on with it right there in the house's very centre, which meant she was constantly available to answer the phone, be told that they'd run out of bread or be pleaded with for lunch money.

‘What about food?' Ellen MacIver asked. ‘I thought I might rustle up a few batches of my famous saffron scones. I've still got some damson jam, I think, somewhere.'

‘Absolutely no catering, not this time,' Bernard decreed firmly. ‘You're with me on that, aren't you Stella?'

He turned to her, appealing for support, but before she could answer, Abigail leaned forward and stared incredulously at him, eyes large and appealing. ‘No wine and cheesy bits?' she pleaded sweetly. ‘One always needs something to nibble at when one's looking at art,' she went on with a tinkly laugh, ‘
I
do anyway, it gives me something to do with my hands.'

Willow smirked at her. ‘Well actually, you'll find some of the exhibits are really quite tactile,' she told her, sneaking a slidey-eyed look at Bernard to see if he reacted to the suggestion of touching. ‘My pots just cry out for stroking.' There was a sceptical loud grunt of ‘Huh!' from Enzo which Willow ignored and she continued, ‘Though I do partly agree, it's so
sensual
to combine food and art. I was planning some lentil dips and couscous and breadfruit.' The whole room groaned quietly.

‘No, I'm with Bernard on this,' Stella said, ‘Last year got ridiculously competitive on the food front, with everyone thinking they'd got to provide something to keep the visitors interested. I suggest we have nothing home-made and don't even bother with wine, then costs are cut down.'

‘What? Do you mean just
bought cakes
or something?' Ellen looked outraged, as if Stella had suggested they greet the visitors clad only in their most revealing underwear.

‘Biscuits, bulk bought and distributed among the exhibitors,' Stella explained, ‘so there'll be no bickering afterwards about anyone unfairly luring the buyers by tempting them with a banquet.' There was some guilty sniggering.

‘But still no wine?' Abigail persisted, as if on behalf of everyone present. Stella wished she'd keep quiet – on the day itself she'd probably be back home in Sussex giving hell to a penitent Martin. She was obviously just enjoying making her presence felt, throwing in the odd interfering spanner.

‘I shall get a tea urn from the Scouts,' Ellen MacIver was muttering quietly, as if afraid someone else might get in first. Fergus nodded his head violently in agreement.

‘
A tea urn from the scouts
?' Abigail snorted derisively, adding in a stage whisper to Ellen, ‘You two, Pinky and Perky, you really know how to
live
.' The few nearby who had heard her comment either giggled disloyally or glared at Abigail, who looked blithely unconcerned. Stella missed what she'd said but sensed tension and a need to end the meeting.

‘All right, wine then. Own expense,' Stella conceded. ‘But don't go mad, we don't want any trouble like last year.'

‘So tell me what happened last year?' Abigail asked Stella eagerly as soon as they'd got out of earshot on the path home. She seemed to have cheered up quite a bit, Stella thought, feeling glad she'd managed to find the afternoon at least a bit amusing.

‘Well it got terribly competitive in the hospitality department – everyone outdoing each other as if it was Private View day at the Royal Academy. Willow laid on a calypso band and an oil-drum barbecue and Ellen and Fergus did a full-scale English tea, Enid Blyton style, with
lashings
and
lashings
of clotted cream. They both sold loads of their work and everyone else accused them of bribing all the buyers by force-feeding them.'

‘Goodness, exciting stuff,' Abigail said, laughing, ‘I hope I'm still here to see it.' She's too tough for suicide, Stella thought, so with the art fair still a few weeks away, it looked as if Abigail had moved in for quite a long visit.

Adrian sat in the summerhouse playing Tetris on the computer and trying to recall what it had been like having sex with Abigail.
She
probably didn't remember that long-ago one-off occasion at all, lost as it must have been among so many others. At the time, she'd seemed to be glorious sexual liberation personified, a truly celebratory of-the-times representation of complex-free living – no hang-ups would have probably described it in the vocabulary of those days. You couldn't even have described her as a pushover – that would imply you had to make a bit of an effort – Abigail had been more of a fall-over. Now he was older and supposedly wiser and the words were different, he'd simply say she'd been rampantly promiscuous. He wasn't sure if it was times that were a-changing or himself – either way, the thought depressed him. That sultry, rustic evening, with Abigail and his old and smelly Afghan coat spread out beneath himself and the willow tree, was a very long time ago and he probably hadn't been very adept at sex then, quite literally groping in the dark. With gut-curling embarrassment he recalled how, elated and heady with sex, wine and the rare splendour of a hot summer night, he'd even, in post-coital idiocy, asked her to marry him. He'd never since heard anything as instantly detumescent as the harsh tease of her laughter. How mockingly kind her response had been. ‘Not just now, thank you, but perhaps I could marry you later when Stella's had enough of you.' After the appalling risk he'd taken, sneaking off to make love, no,
lust,
to Stella's best friend, he'd selfishly expected to feel more special than some kind of toy that she'd played with in the shop but not quite wanted to buy. For him, sex then was still all about the thrill of coming across the unexpected. At that age, nineteen or so, around the age his son Toby was now, he had never failed to be completely astounded that if he made unchallenged progress under a skirt and past the complicated barrier of tights and underwear, he would always find the same warm, moist furry equipment inside a girl's knickers. They all had
parts,
soft, welcoming, wonderful parts, each and every one of them like finding a kitten in a bag. He remembered sitting on buses, walking down streets, looking round in lectures and thinking of absolutely every woman he saw:
she's got one.
He was permanently, sometimes almost cripplingly, horny, in that way only youth on the sexual look-out can be. He wondered if Toby felt the same, or if he sublimated it by constantly tinkering with his beloved Beetle's mechanical innards. He sighed, thinking of the confident grace of his son, who seemed to have none of the problems boys sometimes confided to Stella's ‘Go Ask Alice' column (The perennial ‘Is mine too small?' ‘Can you forget about a condom when she's got a period?'). The readers of his own books, on the other hand, probably
did
have problems.

He abandoned Tetris and called up his latest oeuvre on to the screen. ‘Sleazy little tale,' he muttered as the title
Maids of Dishonour
flashed up. So tabloid, he thought, so horribly tit and bum, romp and frolic like the
Daily Star.
Somewhere inside him, he was sure, there was an absolute heavyweight
Sunday
Times
of a novel battling to get out. He and the Apple Mac were ready. He'd created a folder for it, opened a document, named it Serious Book, organized the page layout and inserted Chapter One as a header. Then he'd closed it, opened another document titled Plot and Notes and the mouse had nudged that one into place beside Chapter One. After that he'd sat and daydreamed about having twenty-five completed chapters all lined up, a hundred and twenty thousand words of prize-winning fame-gathering profundity instead of these ten-chapter batches of pseudonymous profanity. His readers, his agent had crudely reckoned, were all wanked out by fifty thousand words, couldn't take any more, might go too blind to buy the next book. He felt he was too grown up, too old anyway which might not be the same thing, to whinge that it just wasn't
fair
but sometimes he sure as hell felt like it. In the sitting room was a shelf full of Stella's teen novels with her name out there proudly on the covers – people introduced her as ‘Stella Hutchens, she's a
writer,
isn't that exciting?', whereas his own books were, quite literally, not allowed houseroom and his own name had never appeared on any of the lurid covers, not in any of the twenty-six countries that they sold to. If his readers could only see just who was the real ‘Marcia Teal' or ‘Cassandra Wiley'. He was the real day-to-day writer in the family, the hack who had traded his creative soul to earn the bread, butter and lavish dollop of jam that the family lived on. Ruth and Toby still thought, if they thought about it at all, that is, that he wrote English literature school textbooks. He had done a few of those, back in the days when O-levels still existed. They'd paid reasonably but not stupendously well, he recalled, wondering if he'd really, now, give up his gorgeous new Audi convertible for the satisfaction of putting together coursework on contemporary poets and critical analysis of William Golding.

He tapped at the keyboard, wishing there were more words that meant ‘fuck'. He'd used every one he could think of in the previous chapter, setting himself a target of at least twenty, just for the tedium-relieving challenge of it all. Playfully, he considered using them all again in exactly the same order, wondering if any of his bog-eyed readers would notice. He sighed once more and forced himself to tackle an unusual way for one of the Maids to be parted, yet again, from her underwear, what there was of it. That was another thing; he'd long ago stopped associating titillating knickers with real-life sex. His books were full of women who couldn't contemplate wearing anything more substantial than a silk G-string fronted by a lace butterfly and as a result he could now get deliriously aroused only by sensible Marks and Spencer hi-leg knickers, preferably in sober grey. He thought some more about Abigail as his typing revved up. He thought about her way back then, remembering her stealthily guiding his hand under her skirt in the cinema darkness, (Stella concentrating on popcorn and
The Italian Job
on the other side of him) and the heart-stopping shock of encountering no underwear at all. He couldn't imagine her, all designer-smart like an advert for Harvey Nichols, doing all that naughtiness with him now, but he tried, for the sake of the craft of fiction, he tried.

‘Your bastard husband buggered off then?' was Adrian's cheery bravado-shot greeting to Abigail when he eventually let manners and hunger get the better of him and drive him into the house just before supper.

‘Oh
Adrian
!' Abigail, to Stella's unsurprised amusement, went straight into a dramatic poor-me wail and flung her arms round him as if he was to be her saviour and shining knight. Stella hauled the heavy lasagne dish out of the oven and watched out of the corner of her eye as Adrian put tentative arms round Abigail's shoulders, rather as if he was hugging the kind of animal that might just turn nasty. Stella, flushed and limp-haired from the oven heat, put the lasagne on the table while Abigail continued to sob gently into Adrian's sweatshirt. Adrian glanced over the foxy head and mouthed ‘Help!' which Stella grinned at but callously ignored. Serve him right for skulking in the summerhouse all afternoon, she thought as she tossed the salad and watched the touching little scene. Abigail's face was hidden against Adrian, but her hands were skilfully fondling his back, all the way down to the pockets on the back of his jeans at which point she lingered and pressed in a way that didn't look as if she was checking for loose change. ‘Just keeping her hand in, I expect,' Stella murmured sympathetically to him with a smile as she went to call Toby and Ruth. When, as teenage feet clattered down the stairs, Abigail's face eventually emerged from the sweatshirt, Stella wasn't at all astounded to notice that it showed no trace of actual tears.