Zoo Time (2 page)

To the fairest of the fair:

my beloved wife and mother-in-law

‘That’s coming it a bit rich, isn’t it?’ he said.

‘What is?’

‘Saying that you love your mother-in-law.’

I peered over his shoulder at my dedication. It was a few years since I’d come up with it. You forget your dedications. Given enough time you even forget your dedicatees. ‘No,’ I said, ‘it’s my wife who’s the beloved. To my beloved wife,
and
to her mother-in-law. The adjective applies only to the first of them.’

‘Shouldn’t you have put a comma before the
and
, in that case?’

He jabbed the page with his finger, showing me where he thought the comma ought to have gone.

Oxford, I remembered, had its own rules for where commas go. ‘The Oxford comma’ had long been a matter of fractious controversy inside the university, but I hadn’t thought the constabulary was hot on the subject as well. No doubt Oxford also had its own rules regarding the doubling of epithets. Wasn’t there a word for the rhetorical device I’d inadvertently – assuming it had been inadvertence – deployed? Something like zeugma, only not zeugma. Maybe the policeman knew.

‘Listen,’ I said, ‘as you appear to be an unusually discerning reader, can I make a present to you of my book?’

‘You certainly cannot,’ he told me. ‘Not only would I be guilty of taking a bribe if I accepted it, I would also be guilty of receiving stolen property.’

In the circumstances I considered myself lucky to have got off with a caution. Those were no small transgressions: stealing a book, leaving out a comma, and scheming to misappropriate my wife’s mother.

2

V&P

They hadn’t come with a comma between them, that had been the problem from the start.

Vanessa strode into the shop I was managing one lightless Tuesday afternoon in February when my assistants had gone home – clip-clop up the cold stone steps of the converted Georgian town house that was Wilhelmina’s – and wondered if I had seen her mother. I asked her to describe her mother. ‘Tall’ – she made a sort of pergola of her arms. ‘Slender’ – she described what looked like two downpipes on a building – ‘yet high-breasted’ – she looked down at her own chest, as though surprised by what she saw. ‘Vivacious’ – she shook an imaginary orchard. ‘Red hair, like mine.’

I scratched my head. ‘I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘Could you be more specific about her appearance?’

Whereupon, talk of the devil, she arrived, clip-clop up the stone steps, as tall as a pergola, as slender as a downpipe, yet high-breasted, as vivacious as an apple orchard in a tornado.

And red hair, which just happened to be my weakness. Red hair styled in a near psychedelic frizz, almost comically, as though she knew – as though they both knew – that with beauty like this you could take all the liberties with your appearance you liked.

Two burning bushes, two queens of the music hall, red-lipped to match their hair.

A word about the shop I was managing. Wilhelmina’s was the most sophisticated women’s boutique in Wilmslow, a whisperingly affluent town mingling comatose blue-bloods and the newly and tastelessly wealthy, just a few miles to the east of Chester. Not only was it the most sophisticated, most stylish and most expensive boutique in Wilmslow, it was the most sophisticated, most stylish and most expensive boutique in the whole of Cheshire. Beautiful women from all over the north of England, unable to find anything that did justice to them in Manchester or Leeds, never mind Chester, dressed themselves from head to toe with a wink and a nod from us. I say ‘us’ because Wilhelmina’s was a family concern. My mother had started it and had entrusted it to me, in what she grandly called her retirement, while my younger and more suitable brother was being trained at a local business college with a view to his taking it over permanently. I was the dreamer of the family. I did words. I read books. Which meant I couldn’t be trusted. Books distracted me, they were an illness, an impediment to a healthy life. I could have applied for a disability badge for my car, permission to park anywhere in Cheshire, so incapacitated by books and words was I. Indeed, I was doing words, ignoring customers and reading Henry Miller who at the time was my favourite writer, when Vanessa, followed by her mother, no comma, clopped up my stairs. It was as though characters from
Sexus
and
Nexus
had suddenly come alive, like the toys in the
Nutcracker Suite
, on the shop floor of Wilhelmina’s.

You could say I saw more of the mother, first off, than I saw of the daughter, given that she appeared twice, first in words, then in person. And words affect me more than persons do. But Vanessa had made her own impression. Tall, slender, vivacious, yes, flamboyant even, but angry about something too – not improbably about having such an attractive mother – and not just incidentally angry, more as though her frame had been overstrung, taut, vibrating, in a way that reminded me of a description of a schooner’s rigging I had read by Joseph Conrad, the schooner being his first command. One of those descriptions that make you want to be a writer (though don’t explain why you might want to be a writer like Henry Miller). The ship’s quivering, I took it, was in reality the young commander’s own. So maybe that was true of Vanessa and me too. The sight of her set me trembling. My first command. Correction:
her
first command. But I haven’t imposed any anger of my own on her. It was all hers, the condition of her nature, as though she had to rage the way a sunflower had to turn its head. Besides, I had nothing, at that particular moment, to be angry about. I was in sole possession of a shop illuminated – someone might as well have lit flares – by the blazing red presence of Vanessa and her mother.

To this day I can remember everything Vanessa was wearing – the high black patent shoes, minimal so that you got to see her arches and her instep; the paper-fine leather coat belted so tight that it did what I thought only a pencil skirt could do, which was to make a still point of tension of her behind, a tremulousness, as though some law of gravity or protuberance were being defied; the V of its fur collar, like the vagina of a giantess; and pushed back a little from her red hair a Zhivago hat – Anna Karenina was who I saw (who else?) – the air from our fan heater winnowing its fine hairs, as though a Russian bear had stepped in out of the wind.

She wasn’t expensively dressed, at least by Wilhelmina’s standards. These were all top-of-the-range high-street garments, but the high street is only ever the high street. So I must be forgiven for imagining what she would have looked like had
we
dressed her.

Zandra Rhodes, I’d have put her in. She had the stature and the jawline. And could carry the brightest colours. And the boldest jest. But she wouldn’t consider it, even when she became my wife and could have the benefit of my fashionable expertise gratis, as she wouldn’t consider any of my suggestions.

As for Poppy, her mother, well, she was attired identically. They presented themselves to the world as sisters. Except that where the hem of Vanessa’s coat was if anything a fraction too long, Poppy’s was decidedly
more
than a fraction too short. But then she had lived for a while in America and American women were then, as they are now, beyond help when it comes to hemlines. How old would she have been when she first walked into Wilhelmina’s? Forty-five or -six. Making her, when the police apprehended me in Chipping Norton, knowing in their bones that I was on a pervert’s errand no less than on a thief ’s, in her middle sixties. A wonderful age for a woman who has kept an eye on herself.

Back in Wilmslow, she closed the shop door behind her, looking around.

‘Ah, here she is,
ma mère
,’ Vanessa exclaimed, as though after her description I needed telling who she was.

They kissed. Like herons in a park. One of them gave a little laugh. I couldn’t have said which. Perhaps they shared one laugh between them. And here’s the thing to consider when weighing up the rights and wrongs of my behaviour: how could I not fall in love with the daughter and the mother when they came to me so indissolubly bound?

‘Well, there’s certainly no mistaking who you are,’ Poppy said to me once she was able to distinguish herself from her daughter.

I raised an eyebrow. ‘Should there be?’

‘You even raise your eyebrows like her.’

‘Like whom?’

Vanessa blew out her cheeks with impatience. This was evidently as long as she could bear a confused conversation to continue. ‘My mother knows your mother,’ she said. Meaning, now can we get on with the rest of our lives?

‘Ah,’ I said. ‘Well?’

‘Well what?’ Don’t ask me which of them asked that.

‘No, I meant does your mother – forgive me –’ turning from the daughter – ‘do
you
know her well?’

At that moment a customer emerged from the dressing room wanting to be pinned up. How long had she been in there? All day? All week? This was too much for Vanessa who, having been in the shop all of three minutes herself, felt she had been there the whole of her life. ‘If we go and have tea might your mother be here when we return?’ she demanded to know.

‘No. My mother is on holiday.’ I looked at my watch. ‘Probably on the Nile right now.’

Poppy looked disappointed. ‘I told you,’ she said to her daughter, ‘that we should have rung first.’

‘No, I told you.’

‘No, darling,
I
told
you
.’

Vanessa shrugged. Mothers!

‘I’m sorry,’ I said, looking from one to the other. ‘Have you come far to see her?’

‘Knutsford.’

I expressed surprise. Knutsford was only a short drive away. Given their agitation, I expected them to say Delhi. Vanessa read my surprise as anger. Angry women do that. They think everyone is at the same temperature they are. ‘We are new to the area,’ she said. ‘We are not yet used to the distances.’

Knutsford is of course the town on which Mrs Gaskell, a one-time resident of the area, based her novel
Cranford
. And this sounded like a scene from
Cranford
. ‘We are new to the area.’
Imagine, reader, the perturbation in every heart when the new residents were introduced on the first Sunday after Easter to the parishioners .
. .

Which was nothing compared to the perturbation in mine. New to the area, were they? Well, in that case they would need someone who was old to the area to put them at their ease.

How it was that Poppy knew my mother, who was considerably older than her, I discovered later. Not that I was curious. Mere plot, how people come to know one another, on a par with why the butler did it. Something to do with an older sister (Poppy’s) who’d died in tragic circumstances – car crash, cancer, cranial palsy – one of those. Something about my mother having gone to school with her, the older sister. Who cared? Poppy, returned to Cheshire, wanted to pick up the connection again for her sister’s sake, that was all.

Mills & Boon.

‘Tasty shop,’ she said, looking about her for the first time. ‘A girl could get into trouble in a place like this.’

Girl?

HarperCollins.

‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘My mother’s taste. She’s rarely here now. I keep an eye on the place for her.’

I was trying for insouciance. People who think of themselves as writers cannot believe that any other calling can be of interest. Only once they’d been apprised of the fact that I went home at night and wrote sentences in a lined notepad would Vanessa and Poppy want to know me better. As for shopkeeping – oh my Lord, I did that from a distance, through the back of my neck, while I wasn’t looking. But I couldn’t come straight out with it and say I was a novelist because then one or other of them, or most likely both of them together, would say ‘Should we know anything you’ve written?’ and I didn’t want to hear myself reply that I wasn’t a novelist in the crude sense of having actually produced a novel.

Even allowing for my naivety, that’s a measure of how things have changed in twenty years. Then, no matter with what foundation in truth, it was possible to believe that being a writer was a glamorous occupation, that two beautiful women might travel up again from Knutsford sometime soon to renew their acquaintance with a man in whose head words cavorted like the Ballets Russes. Now, one has to apologise for having read a book, let alone for having written one. Food and fashion have left fiction far behind. ‘I sell suits by Marc Jacobs in Wilmslow,’ I’d say today if I wanted to impress a woman, ‘and when I’m not doing that I’m practising to be a short-order chef at Baslow Hall. This fiction shit is just a way of killing time.’

Had I known then what I know now I would have burnt my books, boned up on Balenciaga, and held on to the shop for dear life, instead of letting it pass to my younger brother who lived the life of Casanova from the day he got it.