Whatever You Love (5 page)

I understood this was a test and did as I was bid, pulling a face at David as I passed him with the platter in my hands.

*

As we left the house, three hours later, David slung his arm around my waist and pulled me in so close he made me squirm, digging his fingertips into me. ‘You were great!’ he murmured, and bit my ear. I was a bit drunk, a bit tired, and wondered if this was it, the signal – I had met his family and I had passed. I wasn’t a stuck-up cow and I didn’t wear too many synthetic fibres. Now we were a couple in public, so to speak, could we be one in private too? I wasn’t afraid of eccentricity. Having always considered myself something of an oddball, I had found it easy to take his large, voluble family in my stride. Previous girlfriends from nice, nuclear families had found them all somewhat intimidating, I later gathered, had been put off by the smoking and shouting and occasional outbursts of anti-English sentiment. Those family gatherings were always on the edge of chaos. I had known from the first moment I had met David that he was chronically impulsive, giving of himself and self-centred in equal measure, and used to being indulged – now I had seen him in the context of his extended family, it made perfect sense.

Later, I came to love them, the aunts and uncles – even his parents who were probably the most restrained of the lot, and his sister who was four years older than him and married with three children and rarely spoke except to be even more sardonic than her brother. A whole family; and they swallowed me whole.

We had walked only a few hundred yards from Lorraine’s house when David stopped suddenly in the middle of the icy pavement, turned to me, and looked at me as if he had just realised his pocket had been picked and suspected me of being the culprit. I looked back at him, thinking he was about to tell me he had left something behind at the house, or that his lower back had gone again.

He shook his head a little, then strode off down the road, leaving me to trot after him in the cold. He always walked at a ferocious pace. I caught up with him and pushed my arm through his – he had his hands shoved deep into his pockets. I peered round and up at his face, questioningly, but he ignored me and was silent the rest of the way home. When we got back to my tiny, two-room flat he wouldn’t take his coat off. He sat slumped in an armchair while I made us both tea in the kitchenette, glancing at him from time to time as I tried to work out what was wrong. When I handed him the mug, he took it without comment and drank it in silence. I sat down in the opposite chair with my own mug and did the same, waiting for him to explain. I was expecting him to stay the night – he usually did – but all at once, he rose from the armchair, took his mug into the kitchenette and emptied the remaining contents into the sink. He rinsed it and turned it upside-down on the drainer. He came over to where I sat, stooped and kissed the top of my head – very tenderly, as you would do a child – then left.

Up until then we had spoken most days, but after that, I didn’t hear from him for a fortnight.

*

My mother hated me going for walks on the cliffs. ‘Cliffs crumble,’ she said, and I whooped at her and said it sounded like a pop singer who sang novelty songs: Cliff Crumble. ‘You may laugh,’ she said, wagging her head, ‘but the people who were in that cottage didn’t think it was so funny, did they?’ She was referring to an event that took place in 1953. A chunk fell off one of the cliffs and half of the cottage that was sitting on the chunk went with it. A photograph appeared in the newspapers afterwards and it still shows up on the cover of local history pamphlets in the library: a black and white shot – often given a sepia wash in the pamphlets – showing a wonky cottage with a wall missing and the sitting room open to the elements: a standard lamp, a sofa, flowered wallpaper. ‘The people who were in that cottage didn’t laugh.’ In actual fact, the owners had had plenty of warning of the danger and were nowhere near at the time but this remark was typical of my mother who saw danger everywhere. One morning, she had looked up from her breakfast cereal to see her husband slumped on the kitchen table, dead from a heart attack at the age of fifty-one. One minute, she had been eating Weetabix – or whatever it was my mother had for breakfast – while I was asleep in my pram and my milk bottles sterilising in a bucket of diluted chemicals – and then the next, she was a widow. Cliffs crumble. Cars crash. Tree branches give way and stair carpets turn maliciously shiny beneath small, hurrying feet. It was amazing she let me out of the front door.

Later, when she was ill and I was her carer, she had no choice. Once a week, when the district nurse was there or when a neighbour popped in, I would pull on my old pair of trainers, the ones with the broken laces, and head up to the cliffs.

Cliffs crumble
. David and I went up to the cliffs a lot in the early days of our relationship. Our first encounter, against the tree in the park, turned out to be a portent. He liked outdoor sex – he liked it a lot. Outdoors had never been my thing, particularly, but I was so crazed about him I probably would have done it on a bench in the High Street if he’d asked me.

Our clifftop walks answered both our needs. I would stride along and let the cold wind numb my face, and think of the sense of freedom I felt when I went there as an adolescent and marvel that here I was now, a grown-up, feeling freedom in an opposite kind of joy, trapped by my glorious obsession with David, loving my imprisonment. And half an hour or so into our walk, when we were high above the town with open fields on our left and the great grey heft of the English Channel to our right, David would hustle me behind a rock or fence and I would laugh and protest until the moment when I fell silent with the seriousness of it, rendered mute by the intensity of his desire and loving his desire so much my own hardly counted. Truly there was nothing better: the moments when this man that I wanted so badly wanted me even more badly in return.

*

He didn’t ring me for a fortnight and during that fortnight I came to the conclusion, quite naturally, that I had been dumped. I resisted ringing him myself more out of pride than judgement. I couldn’t believe that he didn’t even have the courage to call me and tell me he had finished with me – I was furious and, in my fury, certain that my mourning for him was as good as done. When he eventually rang, I would be able to be suitably cool.

It was a Saturday morning. I knew it was him calling as soon as my mobile vibrated in the pocket of my jeans. There was no one else who would ring me on a Saturday morning. I contemplated screening his call even as I slipped the phone out of my pocket and raised it to my ear. ‘Dodgson, hey Dodgson, it’s me…’ He liked to call me by my surname, a legacy of the boys’ grammar school he had attended, where, after he had stood up to the boys who tried to punch him for his accent, he had thrived. He liked to use my initials too. LD. Disbelievingly, I heard myself say, ‘Hi…’ in a seductive, luxurious tone, as if I was languishing on my sofa dressed in a negligee and furry mules, twisting a string of pearls between my fingers.

‘Fancy a walk on the cliffs, Dodgson?’ I glanced outside the window, where a wild wind shook at the fragile panes of glass. I had just come back from a trip to the newsagents and was planning a cup of coffee and three biscuits with the weekend newspaper and the gas fire on maximum. I was still wearing my hooded fleece and parka. ‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Yeah, okay.’

*

We met at the end of the esplanade where the cliffs took a rash swoop upwards, away from town, at an incline sharp enough to discourage both the very young and very old – on a day like this we would have the cliffs to ourselves. David was there first. He was wearing his big old suede jacket and a beanie hat. The middle button on the jacket was dangling by a thread, about to fall. It had been like that for as long as I had known him. He looked pale and handsome, a little tired – there were slight bags beneath his eyes. We stared at each other as we approached and I had time to appreciate, consciously and openly, what I loved about him, this man – the opacity of him, a mercurial mixture of pride and insecurity, a capacity for hiding things twinned with a terror of not being found. Here he was, this man, and that was all he was, and his life had collided with mine when we could so easily have never met, and I knew then that I loved him because of his faults, not in spite of them, and that I would no more change an ounce of him than sew that middle button back on his coat. It came to me that he had been involved with someone else when he and I met – I remembered those phone calls in the pub – and that he had not been open with me, and that he had discarded her, perhaps only recently, and that a similar fate would probably be mine, and that I didn’t care: I felt the swoop and fall of all this and knew I was in bigger trouble than I had ever been in my life.

He smiled as I neared him. My stomach folded. All the reproaches I had been saving up for the last fortnight seemed childish and petulant. He held out his hand as I drew close and I extended mine. He took my hand firmly in his and pulled me after him as we turned to walk up the steep incline. We took wide strides, panting, layered in clothing and beaten by the wind. When I opened my mouth, the cold air snatched the breath from it. The sky above was hard white.

At the top of the incline, the walk was open to the elements. There was no fence between the path and the cliff and occasionally a tourist took a tumble from it; sometimes accidentally, sometimes not. Our coastal stretch was not picturesque but we were widely acknowledged as the best place for miles to come and top yourself. As David and I climbed higher, we reached the part of the walk where the cliff sloped up in crazed, jutting plates – the scrubby grass went right up to the edge, as if a hill had decided to stop mid-air. Further on, the walk levelled out and you could see over the edge but the early, irregular parts of the cliff were particularly hazardous because of the overhang. To our left was farmland. Sheep were grazing on the sloping field that led down to the river, the chill wind ruffling their dirty-white wool coats. To our right, the world swooped upwards and ended with improbable suddenness in sky.

David was striding hard. He had such long legs our gaits were out of step. I stumbled on the uneven grass. I let his hand drop and moved away from him a little, not meaning anything in particular, just making myself more comfortable to walk. He stopped and looked at me. I stopped too. He appeared to be about to speak, then changed his mind and continued walking. I followed, a little behind.

He said something to me, but the wind caught his words and I didn’t hear properly, something about my kitchen.

‘What?’ I said, raising my voice.

He turned to me. The expression on his face was irritable. ‘I said, you know, girl, I think it’s just a bit peculiar that you’re so keen on washing up but you never wipe the surfaces.’

‘What?’ I laughed.

He leaned forward and grabbed me by the arms, bending me backwards. ‘Think it’s funny, do you?’ he said, mock-menacing.

Mock-menacing was his habitual manner before sex. It was foreplay, and a shared joke. When I wanted sex I behaved mock-defiantly, in a way I knew would provoke it.

‘You and whose army?’ I shouted above the wind, derisively.

‘That’s it!’ he yelled. ‘You’re the bane of my life, you’re going over!’ He slung one arm beneath me and wrenched me off-balance.

This, too, was a joke he had pulled several times on our walks together, grabbing me and dragging me towards the cliff edge. David had inherited his Aunt Lorraine’s love of robust physical comedy. Pretending he was going to throw me off the cliff was a prank he never tired of. He was also fond of pointing at a button on my jacket, mid-conversation, then flicking my nose with his finger when I looked down. This always made me smile, no matter how often he did it. When I got wise to the pointing-at-the-button trick, he would invent new ways of getting me to look down; telling me I had a mark on my shirt, asking me about my brooch. It delighted him when I fell for it.

Before, on the clifftop, I had always shrieked in alarm quickly enough to make him stop: but that day, something was different. Perhaps I had heard the joke once too often, or I was simply in a provocative mood after his neglect because instead of shrieking for mercy I yelled into the wind, ‘I’ll take you over with me!’ I wanted to push him, to see how far he would go, to unsettle him after his fortnight of silence.

He pulled me right up to the cliff ’s edge, where it sloped sharply upwards and there was a dangerous overhang. Even then, I let him do it, thinking still that it was the old joke, that it meant nothing – but as we reached the edge and the first tickle of real alarm fluttered in my stomach, he did something he had never done before. With one swift movement of his arms and shoulders, he spun me round, so that instead of holding me face to face, he was grasping me from behind, both arms wrapped round me at chest height and holding my arms pinioned to my side. He bent forward, so that I had to bend forward too – and I could see right over the edge, to where the waves heaved and chopped against the rocky shore and the brown foam frothed beneath us. There were great, jagged lumps of concrete dumped among the rocks at this part of the coast, deposited years ago to protect the bottom of the cliffs from erosion. They were as big as cars, their corners and edges pointing menacingly upwards. If you went over at this point, you wouldn’t stand a chance. Your skull would split as easily as an eggshell.

I let out a cry of fear, real fear, out into the freezing wind and air, and shrieked his name – I was dangling, completely off-balance, as helpless as a puppet, with only his weight behind me as counterbalance. I couldn’t believe how reckless he was being. Beneath us, the waves leapt and broke apart over the concrete blocks, grey beneath but slimy with algae. The sea smelt acrid. Gulls shrieked and dived above us.

‘Scared?’ he yelled into my ear. ‘Are you scared? You should be, LD!’

‘David! David!’ I hollered. ‘Oh my God, we’ll go over!’ He didn’t know the cliffs as well as I did. He was misjudging the overhang. For the first time since I had known him, it came to me that there was a touch of real lunacy in him – a lack of caution that could not be explained by impetuosity, a small link or wire missing in his brain in the place where most people tempered their impulses with the knowledge of the effect those impulses had on others.