Perfect Love Read online

  ‘Don’t look at me,’ she said to Max’s photograph. What she meant was: don’t judge me.

  She got up, wriggled into a pair of loafers and picked up her shoulder-bag.

  Don’t go.

  Don’t.

  But she did.

  The hotel - which Prue knew well - prided itself on chintz, judging by the generosity with which it had been lavished around windows and ruffled on to chairs and stools.

  Prue paused in the lounge entrance and Jamie rose from a flower-encrusted armchair.

  ‘Have I kept you waiting?’ she asked, brushing back strands of escaped hair.

  ‘Do you like chintz, Prue?’

  ‘Depends.’

  ‘I loathe it and the three minutes forty-five seconds I have been waiting for you surrounded by it have been deeply uncomfortable.’

  She laughed and then was serious. ‘Why did you ask me to come?’

  ‘Why did you come?’

  She shifted her handbag strap. ‘Because . . .’

  ‘Exactly,’ he said gently. ‘Because . . .’

  He took her hand as he spoke and with the other smoothed back Prue’s rogue strands of hair. Registering her quickened heartbeat, she allowed him to do so, and forgave him everything.

  He smiled in reassurance. ‘I am here on a genuine work project and there’s nothing wrong with lunch.’

  ‘That’s what Caligula told his victims before eating them.’

  Over coffee, Jamie told her about Lara and Jenny, and Prue, listening hungrily, realized with a sense of déjà vu that she had heard the story before. It was Max’s story, too, and the pain that had been inflicted was as deep as his, although Jamie was not as honest or perhaps as wise in himself to acknowledge it as Max had been. Prue dropped her napkin on to the table. Perhaps there was something about her - face? expression? lack of glamour? - that attracted men who carried these secret histories?

  If taxed, Jamie could have explained. Prue was peaceful-looking: so warm and still and intent that she invited men to break their habit of silence.

  Later, he suggested Prue show him around the cathedral and they walked down Jewry Street and into the cathedral grounds. The tourist season was well under way and the city was crowded but the precinct escaped the worst excesses. Summer had arrived and the sun had come with it. Hot and vigorous, it shone down on air that pulsed with heat, on flesh slicked with damp, on the rounded curves of women, fattening buds in the gardens, and grass that was still plump and juicy from the spring rain. People sat in groups, or meandered down the paths, and children wheeled, noisy ice cream-stained starlings.

  Prue and Jamie sauntered towards the entrance to the cathedral.

  ‘Like pilgrims,’ said Jamie, who was not usually given to poetry or history.

  ‘Your name is Beckett,’ Prue pointed out.

  Jamie rarely considered the implication of his name. ‘A wastrel and a saint.’

  ‘If you’re true to it, you’ll have a wonderful excessive time and then repent at leisure.’

  Prue’s hand brushed Jamie’s, and flesh whispered together, tasted the impulse to cling and a fleeting of warmth, and fell apart.

  Inside the cathedral, Jamie admired the thirteenth-century floor tiles in the retro-choir and the Great Screen behind the high altar.

  ‘The original statuary was broken up during the Reformation and replaced during the nineteenth century.’ Prue pointed at an example. ‘That’s why Queen Victoria’s up there with the Saxons.’

  That amused Jamie. Secretly Prue watched him, her gaze a moth pulled to the flame. He was standing with one hand in his pocket, the other holding a pamphlet they had picked up at the entrance about the cathedral. Absorbed, slightly tense, eyes narrowed, an assembly of flesh tones, of blue veins, of light indrawn breaths, of pulses beating in his neck and at his wrist, of grey suit against the blue-green stripe of his shirt, Jamie, contrasted with the gloom and sanctity of the cathedral, became a voluptuous object.

  Assaulted by colour, smell and yet conscious of darkness clutching at the circles of light, Prue inhaled candlewax and incense. Jamie turned to say something to her, something about Queen Victoria not being a Good Thing, something she never could remember and, with a little sigh, Prue yielded and leapt.

  She found herself soaring up into the dark, sweeping spaces in which God dwelt, enriched and at peace before the warfare began. The steps up to this moment had been the tiny steps of the infant. The flailing of a novice.

  Shaken and shaking by what had been unleashed, Prue, a forty-one-year-old - with lines, for goodness sake, at the corners of her eyes - who had not meant this ever to happen, said ‘Jamie?’ Her tone conveyed that for which, unconsciously, he had been listening and waiting. Very gently, lightly and with care, he touched her fingers with his own.

  After a second or two, she moved on down the aisle.

  ‘Why don’t you light a candle?’ he called after her, producing a coin. Prue looked at it. At the coin held between lean fingers. He had made a similar gesture at the Ivy, and he was doing it again, only now he was offering it to her as a symbol of whatever lay between them. She hesitated only a second or two, and took it.

  ‘You ought to pray.’ She led him towards St Swithun’s memorial where racks of candles were burning and added, to appease God (if he was there) whom she must be grievously offending, ‘Not about anything secular.’

  ‘I’ve lost the habit, Prue.’

  A flare from the candles caught Prue’s face in profile as she touched the tapers to the wick, and traced her generous features with soft light. Jamie drew in his breath.

  The candle joined the others. Flames shifted in the draught, and, mesmerized, Prue gazed at them until the light fused into a dazzling expanse that hurt her eyes.

  Outside, the colours were equally dazzling. Prue retied her scarf, which had worked loose. ‘Jane Austen died in Winchester,’ she said. ‘Do you want to see the house?’

  She led Jamie through the Close into College Street and he gazed dutifully at the bow-windowed front. ‘This is a private house’, proclaimed a notice on the door.

  ‘They must be driven crazy.’ Jamie ignored the house and looked down at Prue.

  ‘She died from Addison’s disease, you know.’

  ‘What’s that?’ Jamie continued to look into her face, and search her eyes with his own, and she shook her head. It was like having the components of her body taken apart and put together in a different arrangement.

  He was due to catch the 4.05 back to London and they turned north and set off for the station. Half-way down one street they passed a shop selling electrical goods and videos. Dances with Wolves . . . Thunderbirds . . . Jean de Florette . . . Pirates of the Caribbean . . . A camcorder had been placed in the window, trapping pedestrians on the screen. Prue caught sight of them both as they passed, grainy, unreal and turned into fiction, ratified by being imprinted on celluloid - as so much was.

  ‘Look, Jamie.’ She stopped. On the screen the space between them was filled in by a shop front. Jamie moved closer and the image on the screen responded obediently. She felt him draw her closer and his fingers press into her back, exploratory and possessive and she thought that she had waited all her life for that touch. Then she thought: I’m going mad.

  ‘You’ll be late,’ she said.

  At the station, Jamie told her not to wait and Prue obeyed. As she walked down the platform, the down train from London drew into the station. Because she made a point of not looking back, Prue did not see Max alight from the carriage where he always sat.

  Max saw Prue. Or rather, he caught sight of the distinctive scarf over the blazer. At first, it did not register in his brain. Then it occurred to him that Prue sometimes wore a red scarf and his navy blazer. Later, as he stood in the taxi queue, having rung home twice for a lift, it dawned on him that it had been Prue.

  In the train, Jamie occupied himself by staring out of the window, his neglected briefcase lying beside him on the seat, and analyzing Pr
ue.

  Little things. Strands of hair that required tying back. A red scarf caught in a knot over her chest. Sharing fried sausages in a kitchen filled with rubble. Her trick of looking at him. Sleepy-eyed but there.

  How could unimportant things awake such yearning? Such frantic hunger? And was it not true that the clichés - a pitching stomach, unreliable knees, a wildly beating heart - were part and parcel of falling in love?

  Jamie shifted in his seat. Violet would never eat two sausages and ask for more. Violet, Jamie now realized with a major shift in loyalties, never listened.

  As the train sped through southern England, past back gardens filled with apple trees and a litter of plastic toys, washing and lawns pocked by weather and pollution, past ugly office buildings, strips of wasteland encrusted with abandoned cars, through complicated railway junctions, the life that Jamie had constructed, and which had seemed so solid, began to assume dream-like qualities. As the carriage slid along the tracks so, too, did his sense of direction.

  Fear pricked at his neck. Fear that the centre of his existence was not going to hold and that he had been instrumental in its dissolution. On the other hand, Jamie was a male and the testosterone that had driven him to reach and take throughout his adult life was not going to disappear. Like breathing, those reflexes were unconscious.

  ‘Were you at the station today?’ Max asked his wife over tea. ‘I thought I saw you.’

  They were sitting on the patio outside the kitchen. The air was warm and filled with summer scent. Prue poured out her cup of tea and during those seconds made a decision.

  ‘No. Why should I be there? I didn’t know you were coming home early.’

  ‘I should have let you know before I left the office and saved the taxi fare.’

  ‘Never mind, darling.’

  Prue’s teacup rattled in the saucer.

  . . . No, no, Max, where have you got that idea from? Of course, Jack and me are nothing more than friends.

  Jack and I, Helen.

  Stop being so pedantic, Max. It’s so typical.

  Eyes narrowed in anger, hair scraped back over a face that seemed peeled back to its bone. Scarlet lips mouthing untruths.

  Helen later amended her statements to something more approximate to the truth. Yes, Max, actually Jack and I did have a little something. Not serious, you must see that. But I get so bored, darling, stuck in Dainton. It wasn’t my fault he came sniffing round.

  It wasn’t your fault that you didn’t send him packing?

  Helen had got used to a glass of whisky, or four, by this point and had almost stopped eating. Drink and semi-starvation gave her a transparent, insubstantial look, like a leaf skeleton tracked with veins to which flesh had once clung.

  And Violet? Max persisted.

  Along with the whisky, Helen had taken to shrugging.

  And Violet?

  Violet’s all right, Max. Don’t worry about her. Everything’s fine if we all calm down. I’ll get rid of Jack if that’s what you want.

  Yes, Max had wanted that but, like everything Helen promised, it did not turn out quite that way. By the finish of the bloody battle of their marriage, it did not matter any longer what Max wanted. It mattered what Jack wanted. And why Jack did not have the grace to get himself killed in the car crash that eventually killed Helen, Max had never worked out, or accepted.

  Finding yourself, an ordinary person, at the mercy of a beating, onrushing tide of pain, impotence and ugliness were, at best, bewildering. Max had not anticipated such swirling depths in his ordinary life . . .

  Over the teacup, a tempered Max, wise in the art of lying, regarded his second wife. He had known for some time that the twenty-year difference in their ages might surface eventually. No matter, he was prepared. He felt differently now about fidelity than he had at forty. No, the struggle now surely was to yield the possibility of his wife looking elsewhere with the grace and common sense that he had, in theory, perfected.

  Allow her an episode, he had sermonized to himself, falling into the error of imagining that bowing to the inevitable was the only course to take. The past tends to dictate the blueprint for the future - and there was, after all, much to lay at Helen’s door. Or, when the thought was too painful, Max amended it: allow that it is probable, that it may happen.

  He did not regard his conclusions as presumptuous. Or that he was traducing Prue by prescribing her infidelity. It seemed right to be sensible, to understand, to take a step back. After all, he had a lot for which to give thanks. He had his home and his daughters, and his feelings for them were so satisfying that they were sufficient.

  Then again, he was not getting younger and the pricks (he excused the wordplay) and promptings of his flesh were not what they had once been. To make love these days required a different combination of engorged flesh and triggered hormones. It took the thought and preparation of the voyager embarking on a taxing journey.

  In these ruminations, Max forgot that theory is not the same as practice.

  Prue refilled their cups, and had an extraordinary feeling that Max was looking at her along the barrel of a gun. She drank the cooling tea and listened to the evening birdsong. Guilt . . . She tried to concentrate on guilt. Guilt creates lies and monsters.

  Instead she felt the most complete and utter joy, as wild and beautiful as the swallow’s cry from the hot sky.

  ‘When?’ said Jamie on the telephone the next day. ‘When, Prue?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said hopelessly, and tried to be correct and right. ‘Never.’

  ‘You don’t really mean that.’

  ‘Yes. I do.’

  ‘I’ll find a way,’ said Jamie. ‘Tell me when you can get away.’

  She opened her mouth to speak, stopped and tried again.

  ‘Prue. Don’t renege. Prue?’

  She told him when.

  Chapter Twelve

  Emmy upended the baby and laid him on the changing mat. The nursery at Austen Road was not as pristine as it had once been. A pile of soiled baby clothes lay on the floor, cotton wool littered the top of the chest of drawers, and baby lotion dripped from a plastic bottle lying on its side.

  Edward did not want his nappy changed and squirmed. Clamping one hand on his stomach, Emmy reached for a clean one. After a struggle, she managed to attach it to the baby.

  ‘You horror.’

  She bent over him until their noses met. Edward’s eyes did a wild dance and he giggled and pulled at her hair.

  ‘No, you don’t.’ Emmy unlocked his fingers and levered him upright. ‘Pull your own.’

  The telephone rang as she was negotiating the stairs with a wriggling Edward in her arms. Emmy made herself take the last few treads very carefully before plonking the baby on the floor and launching herself at speed towards it.

  ‘Everything all right, Emmy? I thought I’d give you a quick ring before the meeting.’

  She may not have shown at school, but Emmy had quickly learnt that the phrase ‘a quick ring’ hid many meanings. Because she was charitable and innocent (for it never occurred to Emmy that people might misconstrue her motives) she had, at first, concluded that a quick ring’ equalled guilt - until she realized she was being checked up on. Violet never deployed subtlety unless she thought it was worth her while. It drove Emmy mad.

  Today disappointment made her snippy as well. She pictured Violet at her desk, coffee (real) steaming beside her in the French cup and saucer on which she insisted, perfectly cut and conditioned hair swinging, nails varnished a (perfect) bright red. Perfect because Violet never did the washing-up.

  ‘Fine, Mrs Beckett. I’ve just changed him.’

  At her feet Edward was discharging a pool of dribble into the brand-new carpet. Emmy rolled her eyes at him.

  ‘Make sure he eats his lunch, won’t you?’

  Safely out of sight, Emmy raised her eyes heavenward and twirled the flex around her finger. ‘Steak and chips,’ she muttered. ‘Rare.’

  ‘What did you
say, Emmy?’ At her end Violet frowned, suspicious suddenly.

  ‘Nothing, Mrs Beckett.’

  ‘Look, I must go. There’s a meeting. Tell him I rang, won’t you?’

  Emmy replaced the receiver. Either Violet had lost her tea trolley or she was thinking of something else — which would not surprise her. She squatted down beside Edward, grasped each hand and pulled him up until he was half off the floor. The baby’s head fell back like a plum on a spindly branch and he made pleasurable noises.

  ‘Your mum rang,’ Emmy informed him, blowing softly on his hands. ‘Had to dash to a meeting and rule the world so couldn’t talk to you. Sent her love.’

  Edward had no intelligible comment to make on the subject. Emmy carried him into the kitchen, managing to avoid looking at the telephone gleaming so whitely on the wall. ‘Lunch, Teddy-bear.’

  Lunch — any meal - required preparations as for battle. Emmy spread a sheet of newspaper on the floor and dragged the high chair on to it. Then she locked Edward into the harness and poked the fastening of a plastic bib that reminded her of a landing-stage on the moon around Edward’s neck.

  ‘Steak,’ she said, spooning repellent-looking yuck - apparently braised beef and carrots - from a jar (Violet had approved the brand) into his mouth. ‘Without the chips. Tough titty.’

  Edward sucked at the spoon with the strength of a sumo-octopus and ate the lot. Emmy gave him puréed apple and Edward hurled the spoon on to the floor and bent over to stare, owl-like, at the results. Emmy swore.

  The phone rang. Emmy let it ring for precisely five rings and then grabbed it.

  ‘Hi,’ said Angus.

  Emmy sat down hard. ‘Hallo.’

  ‘What are you doing?’

  Emmy eyed the horrors on the floor. ‘Ducking flying baby food.’

  ‘Fancy a beer?’

  She found it hard to articulate and swallowed. ‘Now?’ she managed.

  ‘Why not? I’m in the area and I’ve got the van.’

  Emmy sighed and proceeded to explain why not. Bring the baby, said Angus. A warm little picture took shape in Emmy’s mind of being tucked up with Angus and Edward in a pub with a fire and horse brasses and a beer. A real couple, saying nice, warm things to each other like: ‘You make me happy’ or, better than that, ‘We are so happy together.’ (Emmy’s experience of real couples was limited mostly to what she had read.)