The Men and the Girls (3 page)

‘My mother comes from Mallow,' Kate had said. ‘Mallow in County Cork. In summer, her parents took her and her sisters to paddle in the Glashaboy River.'

James took her telephone number. Next day, he rang and asked her out to see a film with him. Then he asked her to come and have Sunday lunch with him at Richmond Villa. He wouldn't let her help, but sat her at the kitchen table with a glass of wine, while he chopped and sliced. She sat there and watched his hands and forearms as he chopped, his shirt-sleeves rolled up to his elbows, until she couldn't watch any more, being so giddy with the longing to be in bed with him that she could hardly sit upright on her chair. After lunch, James did take her to bed, and it was extraordinary. It was, Kate told herself, like those sex scenes in novels that you scoff at for never happening in life. But this one did. That spring Sunday afternoon when Kate was twenty-eight and James was fifty-three (and Joss was six) the sex was sensational.

When at last it was over, James took Kate down to his study, and showed it to her. She was amazed at how clean everything was; not at the cleanliness itself, but because everything that was so clean was also so old. In Kate's childhood, apart from a few family treasures of her mother's, only new things had ever been clean. Old things were, by definition, worn, grubby, stained, decrepit. Here everything was the reverse. Old things wore a glow of health. Kate sat in James's spinning desk chair and looked up at the painting of the smooth, plump, pale-brown prince, with pearls looped in his turban and around his neck, and his hand resting upon a sword slung from a silken sash.

Two weeks later, she had moved in. She couldn't now remember if James had precisely asked her, but she was so consumed with longing to live with him, she'd have hardly noticed if he had asked or not. James painted a little bedroom for Joss, who had never slept on her own before and who wouldn't have the light turned off at night for two years. When he was working, writing articles at his desk, or tutoring pupils in his study, Kate crept about the house with excited reverence. Nothing must be changed, she must respect what James wanted. Even later, when she realized that he had grown to love her, and that she could be quite bold with him, she still had no desire to alter things. The villa was James. Kate, as James was quickly grateful to realize, did not judge; Kate had a huge capacity to accept.

She accepted the habits of a man accustomed for twenty years to living on his own; she accepted his desire for order, even if she could not match it in her own behaviour; she accepted the need, for James's sake, for Joss to lead a more disciplined life; she accepted Uncle Leonard; she accepted too, without asking him, that James would give her, in return, all the freedom she needed to do the things she wanted to do. One of those things was to stay single.

‘I'm dead scared of being pitied,' Kate said. ‘And I'm even deader scared of being a burden.'

‘But you wouldn't be. I want to marry you because I love you and I want you to be mine. I want you to be a burden, if you put it that way. I want to be responsible for you.'

‘Today, perhaps. Even tomorrow. But not for ever. I couldn't take the responsibility for disappointing you.'

‘But you wouldn't. I know you. You're what I want.'

‘All the same. No.'

‘Your reasons are so flimsy.'

‘Not to me. Clear as crystal and solid as rock to me.'

And so it went on, wrangle after wrangle. Gradually, he ceased to fear that if she wasn't married to him she would leave him. When she began on her voluntary work, with problem families, with young drug addicts camping out at Horsley, with battered women, she said it was the least she could do. ‘I'm so lucky, I stink.' Three days a week she worked for a friend in a little pasta restaurant, waitressing, washing up, doing the books. It kept her and Joss in clothes and extras; she would have liked it to have kept them in food and household expenses too, but when she said this to James, he was absolutely adamant.

‘No. I'm not even going to discuss it. You can call me antediluvian if you like but I want to support you both. If there ever comes a time when I can't, I'll tell you, but until then, shut up and eat up.'

Kate sat up in the bath and seized the soap. She began to wash vigorously, almost punishingly, as if she were scrubbing away something much more than tiredness and a day's wear on her skin. When she had finished, she let the bath water out and turned the shower on, to cold, and rinsed herself all over, for longer than was anything but purely unpleasant. Then she towelled herself dry, pulled on jeans, a huge old jersey of James's, and a pair of thick white seamen's socks, and padded downstairs.

James had laid the table, and put candles on it. He had also piled the tangerines in a green glass bowl, cleared the day's detritus off most of the surfaces and opened a bottle of wine. The air smelled deliciously of supper and Radio Three was kindly playing some Vivaldi. James turned it off when Kate came in, and looked at her.

Kate bit her lip. ‘I'm so sorry. I don't know why I said it. I never meant to.'

He made a little gesture. ‘Forget it. It doesn't matter. I expect it's true, anyway.'

They waited, to see if anything either of them had said would make things feel better. It didn't. The telephone rang. Out of habit, because James hated the telephone, Kate went to answer it. ‘Hello,' she said. ‘Oh hi. It's you. I know. Awful. I got wet through. Hang on, I'll get him for you.'

She held the telephone out to James as if it were a peace offering.

‘It's Hugh,' she said.

Two

Hugh Hunter sat on a rush-seated bar stool in his perfect country kitchen, and talked into the telephone. The kitchen had been made perfect by Julia, who had an unerring eye for not overdoing things. It was a long, low room with white walls and a cork floor and just the right kind of wooden furniture and jars and racks of practical kitchen things. There were terracotta pitchers and cracked blue-and-white plates and old copper pans, but not too many and not obviously displayed. All guests to Church Cottage seeped gradually into the kitchen because the atmosphere was so alluring, and sat by the Aga in Windsor armchairs on patchwork cushions to watch Julia stirring a sauce or giving the twins their tea. Hugh had an office to telephone from, at the back of the cottage, and another telephone, comfortably beside an armchair in the sitting-room, but mostly, and particularly if the call was conversational, he found himself in the kitchen, on a bar stool, with his elbow and wineglass and ashtray on the waxed elm dresser beside him.

‘I've rung to grizzle,' Hugh said to his oldest friend, James Mallow.

‘It'll have to be a short grizzle then. We're about to eat.'

‘Julia's left me
boeuf Bourguignonne
and gone off to record something. I should never have egged her on to try her hand at interviewing.'

‘Rubbish,' James said, ‘you're sick with pride.'

‘True.'

‘And quite right too.'

‘Yup,' Hugh said. He was proud. In one way or another he had been proud of Julia all along. When she had produced boy twins for him, he had thought he would expire with pride.

‘Look,' James said. ‘You eat your
boeuf Bourguignonne
and read something improving, and I'll see you on Saturday, in the King's Head.'

‘Condescending prat,' said Hugh, and put the receiver down. He thought a bit. James had sounded unrelaxed. Probably it was Joss, who was enough, if she tried, to unrelax the most lowly-strung of households. Why were most teenagers such helpless posers? Would the twins be? Would those dear little fair boys with their earnest four-year-old faces turn into stereotypes of elaborately anarchic adolescence? How sad, if so, how sad and how deeply, profoundly, boring.

Hugh opened the bottom door of the Aga. His casserole sat there in an olive-green glazed pot from Provence. He took it out carefully and put it on the rush mat Julia had left on the table, beside the place she had laid for him. ‘Salad in fridge,' her note said. ‘Then cheese. Could you bear to finish the Brie first?' That was typical of Julia, firm but very polite and charming. They had been married for seven years and, during those seven years, Hugh had frequently been out in the evening without Julia, or in London for the night. Tonight, however, was the first night of their marriage, with the exception of the odd occasion when Julia went to see her parents, when the goose's accepted sauce applied to the gander.

Hugh turned on the radio. Vivaldi. He didn't feel like Vivaldi, he felt like something harsher, Walton or Britten, perhaps. Church Cottage had an elaborate music system, piped throughout the ground floor, but Hugh did not, somehow, feel like going to the trouble of finding the right disc, and feeding it into the player. ‘It'll take two minutes,' he told himself. ‘I know,' he said back. ‘I know, I know, but I don't want to do it.'

He found his salad in the fridge, little curly fronds of dark and pale leaves sprinkled with walnuts. There was a brown baguette loaf too, and unsalted butter in a white rectangular china box with a cow reposing peacefully on the lid. He arranged his supper around the laid place at the table. It looked faultless; it smelled glorious. For some reason, Hugh wanted to pick up the butter dish lid by the china cow, and flick ash inside. He poured more wine into his glass – a thick, lovely glass which they had bought together in Venice – and splashed some on to the smooth blond surface of the table. He let the red pool lie there for a while, and then he drew in it with his finger and made it into a red snake. He thought of Joss Bain again. He was behaving like Joss. Joss made him think of James. He sat down on a patchwork cushioned chair, and began to spoon casserole on to his plate, and wished that James was there, eating with him, telling him not to smoke, looking at him with exasperation and affection.

They had met at Cambridge. They had been tutorial partners, both reading history. James had been born in South Africa, in Grahamstown, in the Eastern Cape, where his father, arriving there from England in the mid-twenties, was a schoolmaster. The family had returned to England just before the Second World War, and James's father had survived almost the whole war, only to die of a virulent dysentery in Italy, in a prisoner of war camp. His younger, physically frail brother, Leonard, had come to the family's rescue, helping with James's school fees and introducing his sister-in-law to the bursar at the public school where he taught himself, whom she subsequently married. James was brought up to believe that there was no career in life to be considered but schoolmastering.

Hugh was brought up very differently. His father, an asthmatic, throve commercially during the War – black market dealings, Hugh always suspected – and died in 1948, the year Hugh went up to Cambridge, leaving just enough money to pay his debts, and to pay off, in the shape of a passage to Australia and a small capital sum, a hitherto unsuspected mistress and eight-year-old child. Hugh's mother, a brassy woman of unquestionable courage, sold the family house, gave half the proceeds to Hugh, and took his sister to live in a flat in her home town of Huddersfield. A dressmaker by training, she set up a tiny business, which grew to be a bigger business and then to be a significant shop. When she died, she left most of her money to her daughter, who had inherited her father's asthma and was too frail to do more than part-time work, and two hundred thousand pounds to Hugh. With it, he and Julia had bought and entirely renovated Church Cottage.

At Cambridge, James was as haunted by not wanting to be a schoolmaster as Hugh was fired by longing to be an actor. He was a member of the dramatic company and after his degree (a third) he joined a touring company, as a student ASM for twenty-five shillings a week, which rose after six months to the basic Equity wage of six pounds and ten shillings. His mother disapproved violently; in her view, the theatre was full of nancy boys and show-offs. In all his three years in rep, she never came to see a performance, and when his delicate, breathless sister came, she had to pretend she had gone somewhere else. ‘It wouldn't be worth the row,' she'd say in her soft Yorkshire voice, holding out a food parcel to Hugh. ‘She can keep a row going two weeks or more. I'm not stopping coming, but I'm not confessing either.' When independent television was born, in the fifties, and Hugh got his first contract with one of the major companies, his mother said without enthusiasm that that was more like it. She'd wanted him to be a lawyer, after Cambridge, she'd wanted him to better himself.

Hugh Hunter and television adored one another and he was made front man for one of the first national news and views programmes. He was known as Double H, by his colleagues and by the public; in due course, his programme was successfully rechristened
Double H Time
and won awards. He had a flat near the studios, an MG and a series of lovely sixties girlfriends with enormous painted eyes, and sometimes, at a weekend, he would put the current girl into the MG and drive her down to the old Oxfordshire rectory on the Windrush River, where James lived, with his wife.

His wife was much older than James. She was also quite wealthy. She had bought the house on the Windrush, and she paid most of its expenses, so that James was quite free to please himself as to what he did. He tried several things, opening a bookshop, writing a thriller, beekeeping to a commercial standard, but they did not satisfy him. He recognized that his dependence upon his wife probably accounted for his dissatisfaction, but he never blamed her for it. He was deeply fond of her; she had been a parent at the school where his stepfather was bursar and she had, in the truest sense, rescued him from Mallow expectations and tyrannies. They lived in great harmony in their riverside house, only disagreeing over one thing, which was Hugh Hunter. In the end, to keep the peace, Hugh stopped coming down to Oxfordshire, and James met him in London. When James's wife died, of a brain tumour, when James was thirty-two, Hugh was the first person to come to comfort him.