Perfect Love Read online

  ‘I’ll measure your body fat first, Mrs Beckett, on the machine here and the computer will work out your needs and then we’ll construct your personal fitness programme.’

  She spoke with the driven energy of the fanatic and Violet began to relax.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘I need attention because I’ve had a baby and I’ve not had the time or energy to get myself back on form but I need to look my best for my job.’

  The girl nodded sympathetically. ‘It’s hell on the thighs and hips,’ she said.

  Violet did not ask her if she meant the job or the baby.

  ‘My name is Carole,’ said Carole, scrawling it across a virgin chart which she had clipped on to her board. ‘Let’s go . . .’ She produced a tape measure. ‘Bust first.’

  Violet gazed at the bobbing head busying itself around her hips and thighs and, for the first time in months, felt curiously liberated and soothed.

  ‘Thirty-six and three-quarters hips.’ Carole flicked the tape measure. ‘Waist twenty-seven.’

  ‘Thighs?’ Violet hardly dared to ask.

  Carole told her and threw in the circumference of her upper arms for good measure. The two women shook their heads at each other.

  ‘Not good,’ said Violet between clenched teeth.

  ‘Well, we’ll soon see to it.’ Carole spoke as the zealot faced with the task for which she had been searching. ‘Let’s measure the composition of your body. Please He down.’ She indicated the narrow treatment couch. ‘I’m going to attach these electrodes to your feet and wrists. Don’t let your thighs touch each other.’

  Violet gazed at the ceiling and recollected that the last time she had been strapped to machinery her legs were raised and something dreadful was happening to her exposed body. She closed her eyes.

  Carole applied the pads, read the machine and fed data into the computer which, after a couple of seconds, flicked up a breakdown of the constituent parts of Violet’s body.

  ‘Not too bad,’ said Carole. ‘Actually, quite good. You need to lose three pounds of fat. That’s pure fat, remember, so you’ll have to lose about seven pounds altogether to do that.’

  Three pounds of fat! Violet stared at the screen. On top of everything else - fatigue, work. food, baby, house, husband - how was she going to peel away those glistening yellow collops?

  ‘Blow, please.’ Carole held out a lung-capacity monitor. Trusting it was germ-free, Violet blew into it as directed. The result was not startling, but not bad either.

  Carole wriggled herself up on to the couch and swung her purple lycraed legs in a relaxed fashion while she wrote busily on the chart.

  ‘Now, getting thin is your primary objective. I shall put you on the thigh abductor. Then the abdominal stretch and the treadmill.’ She wrote on. ‘Your next assessment will be in six weeks and we’ll keep a close eye on progress. But first, the StairMaster. I promise you, it will make your buttocks beg for mercy.’

  ‘Good,’ said Violet.

  Thereafter, as the days grew longer and warmer, Violet went to the gym whenever she could, plunging out of the spring sunshine into the dark, electrically lit intimacies of an exclusive female mystery. She invested in a plunge leotard, leggings and designer trainers, and with her dark hair and magnolia skin, she resembled an exotic hummingbird.

  At first, she was wary of exposing her body in front of so many potentially critical gazes, but soon discovered that she had been judging others by her own standards. Granted, the gym was a temple to narcissism, lined from floor to ceiling with mirrors designed to catch every muscle twitch, and, granted, it was filled by women driven to desperation by a culture that demanded they should be thin. But the neophytes at the temple were too absorbed in the drama of thigh abduction and abdominal stretching to take much notice of others. It was their own panting, bulging, sweat-rimed bodies that absorbed these women’s time and concentration, and there were no extra grammes of energy to expend on others.

  Violet was effortlessly absorbed into the ranks, snatching every minute to come and worship, to tread out the litany of hope on the StairMaster and watch Jane Fonda on the video screen, whose changes of outfits were as numerous as stars. (Even Violet wondered if a black lace body cinched in at the waist by a designer belt was quite suitable.)

  By the middle of June, Violet had lost an inch all round and Carole, who regarded it as a personal triumph, was delighted.

  ‘Your thighs are looking really good. We’ll beef up the programme.’

  Oh, yes, thought Violet, bending her will to master her protesting, hungry body. More, please.

  Jamie did not approve. ‘You spend all weekend at that place,’ he said as Violet handed Edward to him on Sunday morning. ‘Don’t you think you’re overdoing it?’

  ‘No.’

  They were in the hall in Austen Road and Violet was packing her holdall. Jamie hefted Edward from one arm to the other. He was in playful mood and bumped around on his father’s shoulder and reared back in what to him was a wildly funny game.

  ‘Don’t go again, Violet. After all, we only have the weekends to be together.’

  Violet stuffed a pink towel into the holdall. ‘It’s only an hour or so. I’m not disappearing for the weekend.’

  Just in time, Jamie prevented Edward from dive-bombing to the floor. An inner, and honest, voice insisted that it was not only the prospect of being deprived of his wife that was driving him to protest, but the knowledge that even an hour with a demanding child is a long time — especially when you want to read the Sunday papers.

  ‘Why don’t we go for a walk instead and then have a drink somewhere?’

  Violet’s face set into obstinate lines. Jamie was acquainted with the look but had never quite appreciated how etched in stone it was. She bent over and her hair fell in a waterfall over her shoulders. She looked smooth, sweet-smelling and very desirable and Jamie ached to have her back as they once were.

  ‘Don’t nag,’ she said. ‘I’ll be back to cook lunch if that’s what you’re on about.’

  (Which she would not eat.)

  Jamie hunched his shoulders, a habit when he was offended, and put Edward down on the floor where he made for the doormat and the curls of mud lying on it. ‘It wasn’t what I was getting at,’ he said untruthfully. ‘Don’t worry, I shall demand my pound of flesh and go for a jog when you get back.’

  He was left looking at the freshly painted front door which closed with a snap, aware that Violet would be hurrying out of the gate and into the street as if her life depended on it.

  Perhaps it did. But Violet left behind a vacuum and into vacuums creep replacements. Or sometimes they arrive with a roar. Jamie bent down to retrieve Edward and an image of Prue flashed across his mind. What was she to him? A pair of grey eyes above a grey crepe jacket and a pair of delicate wrists. She had raised one towards him when she had told him to leave the bedroom that night. Yet she had been willing, flattering to him, interested, her stillness infinitely seductive. Her foreignness begging to be explored.

  I must have been mad, he thought.

  Scented, yielding, mysterious. His image of Prue. Always softness, and the idea of fire burning quietly inside her.

  He bent down to pick up his son and, at that angle, the blood beat and roared in his ears. Jamie held Edward’s compact, wriggling body and stroked the now curly head and, once again and against his better judgement, fell in love with his wife’s stepmother.

  You pay for everything, reflected Violet as she sped in the car over Westminster Bridge. Someone up there is appointed full-time to work out the sums. If you take here, the result is debit there. Accountancy, really. That Violet resented being in debt to Jamie and wanted her old life back did not make the balance more palatable.

  ‘Who’s the hottest kid on the block, Violet?’

  Violet concentrated on keeping her eyes open. She was lunching in a fashionable restaurant in Covent Garden, the kind she loved, with a visiting American rights director with whom she had been f
riendly in New York.

  Nicole was a highly successful, blonde-streaked, long-nailed career woman without children. Her colleague, however, with whom they were also lunching (who was Nicole’s lover), was married. His name was Chuck and the trip to London provided an admirable opportunity for a real get-together with Nicole.

  The bout of drowsiness routed, Violet studied Chuck over the undressed radicchio and artichoke hearts for a trace of guilt that might indicate he had mixed feelings about what he was doing. She found none.

  ‘Come on.’ Nicole was impatient. ‘You look half asleep.’

  Violet bit back the urge to say, Oh, God, I’m going to die if I don’t get a night’s sleep, but knew it would expose her flank. Instead, she said, ‘There’s a rumour that Dinsen and Fraser are going to be taken over.’

  Her companions digested this admittedly not very exciting gossip.

  ‘Honey,’ said Nicole. ‘I’ve got a hundred times more dirt than that.’

  She drank tiny sips of her wine as she told Violet who was sleeping with whom, which famous novelist’s book had virtually been rewritten by the editor (who had then been sacked), and the cock-up on Helen Hines’s publicity campaign which had cost Nicole’s firm close on a hundred grand.

  A little scene re-enacted itself behind Violet’s dark eyes. Of her stumbling up at night, of cold creeping up her legs, of a wide-open baby’s mouth and of the horrifying but quite clear urge to smack him. Hard.

  ‘What did you think of the Hines novel?’ asked Chuck.

  ‘Very good,’ she answered, automatically. ‘I liked the way she handled the love story.’

  ‘But, Violet, it’s an anti-love story. It’s a hate story. Love is a piece of cultural crap according to Hines.’ Chuck looked smug in his Armani shirt and well-cut suit. Pleased to have caught her out, she thought.

  The world, it seemed, was full of vindictive, uncooperative men.

  ‘Yes, that’s what I meant,’ she said.

  Nicole laughed and poured out more wine. Her bracelets clinked against the bottle and Violet forced herself not to wince.

  ‘Do you have children?’ she asked Chuck.

  For a few seconds, she imagined that colour stained the tips of his ears, then concluded she had been mistaken.

  ‘A three-month baby and a two-year-old.’

  A baby and a two-year-old and you are sitting here in the pink of health and energy . . . with your lover. She was surprised by the strength of her outrage.

  ‘Your wife holds the baby, then?’

  ‘Sure, she enjoys all that,’ said Chuck. ‘We agreed that was her role.’

  Violet drank her wine and said nothing.

  Across the table, Nicole raised one shoulder in a little shrug which said: What did you expect, darling?’

  Chapter Nine

  ‘Jamie,’ went the message, ‘I think you have been ignoring me and I find your attitude difficult. I would appreciate a good morning when you come in. It would make a great difference to our working relations.’

  Jamie read it twice to make sure he was not hallucinating. Dyson was a good chap, friendly, co-operative, clever, and not given (overtly) to indulging in scenes.

  Exchanges such as this one between colleagues were not uncommon. Jamie was also well aware that flare-ups of irritation, hurt and worry were not the sole property of either sex and, in the pressurized world of high finance, flare-ups raged like bush fires in unexpected places.

  The points where humans make contact with each other require insulation grease of the thick electrician’s kind, he thought. A viscous, stabilizing blanket which protects against the pinpricks and uncertainties of this world. Stroking it on was part of the business of life, Jamie knew that well. He grabbed a cup of coffee from the machine, made his way to Dyson’s office along the corridor and said, ‘Good morning,’ pointedly. Flushing, Dyson looked up from a spreadsheet.

  ‘Look, I’m sorry if I’ve offended you, I certainly didn’t mean to.’

  Cup in one hand, Jamie lounged against the door jamb. ‘I don’t know what I’ve done but whatever it was, I’m sorry.’

  The casual pose irritated Dyson and he said stiffly and with an effort, ‘Perhaps I’ve overreacted, but I felt I had to say something after that meeting.’

  Jamie searched his memory until he remembered that he had confronted Dyson over the issue of privately funded motorways. That in itself was not a problem; locked antlers frequently resulted in spilt blood. It was rather that both the chairman and the chief executive had been present at that particular meeting — and Dyson had lost the argument.

  ‘Sure.’ Jamie heaved himself upright a little, shocked at how little he cared about Dyson’s pique. That and the knowledge that the London job he had so keenly anticipated was, for the moment, of less importance than he had imagined - a state of mind that was new to him. ‘Why don’t we meet for a drink after work and sort it out?’

  Back at his desk he chucked Dyson’s memo into the bin and stood looking down at it.

  What were the great sins? Murder, torture, rape, the taking of a good name – they all grabbed the headlines. But he had a suspicion that laziness and evasion did as much damage in a quieter way, and were practised on an even larger scale. To take it further: given that human beings were endemically lazy and evasive, it was astonishing that goodness infected the world at all.

  He was dimly aware that his emotions were too confused at this point for him to add adultery to the list, if indeed he ever would. Naturally, he could not exempt himself from any of the aforementioned sins but he was all too well aware that that was about as far as it went.

  These conclusions, however, did not make him feel better and he turned his attention to his in-tray, which contained a letter marked ‘Personal’ in familiar writing. It was from Jenny who, young as she was, had quickly grown old in the ways of jealousy and taken to sending letters to Jamie at his work address in order to avoid Violet.

  Dear Jamie [she wrote],

  I’m off to the Brazilian rain-forest to work for a couple of years. If you would like to contribute some dosh to a good cause, I need a pair of boots.

  Love Jenny.

  Jamie smiled and pulled out his cheque-book. Jenny was very dear to him and he did not like the idea that Lara’s new man saw more of her than he did. ‘Good luck, Jen,’ he wrote. ‘Make sure you have the right jabs.’

  Jamie had not meant to loop his life into an extra twist and, a conventional person at heart, had intended it to run along a straight line. It had not been sensible, therefore, to hitch up with the fascinating but unstable Lara. But she had been ripe and golden -and on the search for a new man. He had been romantic, passionate, and in a hurry. That was that.

  Subsequent events squashed the idea that Jamie had once held that good things remain intrinsically so, and taught him the opposite. Good things could, and did, turn into bad things.

  Jamie looked out of the window. The dusk outside possessed the white, peeled quality of late spring that he loved. It made him think of Prue walking down the lane at Dainton, and an unfamiliar tension gathered in his throat.

  How he wanted her, as he had once wanted his wife. His hand moved towards the telephone and stopped.

  Growing older you can lose the habit of love (and probably acquire the habit of bad temper), he reflected and, if love arrives in a burst of feeling it is, without doubt, that much tougher to cope with.

  Jamie folded up Jenny’s letter. As the years lay down hard accretions round the body and soul, it is harder to fight through habits of selfishness to find those initial impulses towards niceness that, once, he had been so ready to deal out. Indeed, he wondered if there was anything left of that in him at all.

  Eve Watts knocked and came into the office. She was the corporate PR officer. Tall, slim and given to linen suits with short jackets that showed off her waistline, she had long red hair which she wore in a French plait. She wanted to talk to him about the company’s results and how they should pitch them to
the public. Eve was clever and fluent, and knew how to sit in a chair without fidgeting, and after they had sorted out the strategy she stayed on to gossip. Eve made it her business to know down to the last sneeze what was going on. They discussed office antics and the row brewing between the Conservative Party and Lloyds.

  ‘Could be quite a fight ahead.’ Eve’s linen skirt hitched up to reveal a very nice thigh. ‘Stand by for heads on Tower Bridge.’

  Jamie recollected a conversation with Prue. She had been describing Joan of Arc’s famous relief of Orleans in 1429, and how Joan had woken one morning to sounds of the citizens of Orleans attacking an English garrison outside the walls at St Loup. Joan had leapt to her feet and dashed into battle. Apparently, she had wept at the sight of spilt French blood before planting her standard on the edge of the ditch and storming the bastille built around an abandoned church. All manner of English blood had then been shed, but it was not recorded if Joan wept for it.

  He studied the thigh laid out for inspection and Eve, sensing his dispassion, twitched her skirt down. ‘Do you have any views on Lloyds?’ he asked her.

  She did, of course, and confidently planted her standard on the edge of what Jamie suspected was an abyss. He pulled himself together and responded, aware that Eve was a little puzzled by his lack of enthusiasm and his failure to respond to the direct signals she was sending him.

  After a while, she got to her feet. The red plait danced back over her shoulder and the linen skirt was pulled straight.

  ‘See you, then.’ She paused. ‘Perhaps we could have lunch?’

  Jamie’s ‘Let’s’ sounded unconvincing.

  She got the message and shrugged elegantly. ‘We younger women differentiate love from sex, you know. Rather as men have always done. Yes?’

  ‘Aren’t you generalizing somewhat?’

  Eve moved towards the door. ‘In a recent survey it was shown that over fifty per cent of married women are unfaithful at some time or another.’ She raised her fingers and waggled them at Jamie. ‘Just a thought to be going on with.’