Perfect Love Page 4

  She was wearing a blue dressing-gown, minus its belt, revealing a soft, white-cotton nightdress underneath. She looked warm and rather sensual, with the blurry languor of mussed hair and drowsiness, and he was suddenly conscious that he was looking at a private side of her. Perhaps fatigue acted as a filter on Jamie, for the colours that made up Prue, blue, brown hair, and the white skin, veined and intimate at the junction of her neck and collar-bone, dry and slightly stretched on her hands, painted themselves on to his vision.

  ‘Where’s the bottle?’ she asked, after a slight pause, aware of his scrutiny.

  Jamie handed it over. She settled Edward in her arms and tested the milk. ‘It’s cold,’ she said. ‘I bet he doesn’t like that.’

  ‘We never heat it up at night.’

  Prue raised her eyebrows and then lowered them again. It was not her business. She got up and switched on the kettle, talking to the baby as she did so. Jamie could not make out what she was saying, but her voice was steadying. Evidently the baby agreed for he quietened and when Prue offered him the warmed milk he nuzzled at the teat. After a hiccup or two, he began to feed.

  ‘This might take a while, Jamie, because he’s been so upset. Do you want to go back to bed?’

  Yes, he did very much. And no, he did not. ‘I’ll wait with you.’

  The cuffs of Prue’s nightdress had slipped up her arms and Jamie found himself fascinated by the movement of her surprisingly delicate wrist-bones under the skin and the long fingers that were working magic on the baby. The kitchen was quiet and very cold. Neither of them said anything, but every so often Prue shifted the baby or adjusted the angle of the bottle and Jamie was reminded of paintings of the Madonna and Child - the calm and potent icon from which we demand comfort.

  ‘Like the Virgin,’ he said aloud.

  ‘St Joan called herself the Virgin.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘An interest of mine.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  Prize told him. During her life, Joan had been given several names, even more after her death which, she said again adjusting the angle of the bottle, was an indication of how puzzling and incomprehensible she had been to her contemporaries. Joan herself preferred the term la pucelle which means virgin, but a virgin who anticipates a change in her state.

  ‘Oh,’ said Jamie.

  It was a condition, continued Prue, that suggested flux, a condition that Prue had at first found difficult to understand. ‘But now . . .’ she looked up at Jamie ‘. . . I think I do.’ It pinpointed the maiden, both innocent and nubile, spread-eagled on the cusp.

  There was a pause.

  ‘Ambiguous, but not,’ Jamie supplied.

  ‘But how acute,’ said Prue. ‘How psychologically sound for a so-called unlettered peasant. And it fascinates me how she knew.’

  The chill deepened. Prue addressed the now peacefully sucking baby. ‘I suppose I’d better wind you.’ She draped Edward across her shoulder. ‘Did you have trouble at night in New York?’

  ‘Sometimes. But it’s far worse when you’re responsible for someone else’s household stuffing its fingers into its ears.’ Jamie began fiddling with an orange from the fruit bowl and looked up at Prue with a smile rendered devastating by its rueful irony. ‘I’m learning.’

  She smiled back. ‘If you mean that parenthood is a state of extended exhaustion . .

  ‘I do. I do.’

  ‘Actually, it’s extended terror as well.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘You’re constantly frightened for your children.’

  Jamie was silent.

  ‘Do you think . . .’ Prue sounded tentative. ‘Do you think Violet should be going back to work quite so early?’

  He frowned and tossed the orange from one hand to the other. ‘That’s up to Violet.’

  She thought for a moment, digesting the rebuke.

  The light was not good in the kitchen but good enough for Jamie to witness the flush flooding Prue’s cheeks. The desire to leap up and comfort her cut into him with the speed, thoroughness and surprise of a knife, and he dropped the orange. ‘I didn’t mean to be rude, Prue.’

  ‘But justified,’ she said, got up and handed Jamie his son. ‘I think he’ll be fine now.’

  She left him holding a damp, but silenced, baby.

  As a result of that last episode, Emmy Horton came into their lives for Violet insisted that she just had to have help. Period.

  All right, Prue conceded wearily and wrote out the postcard for the village shop.

  KIND, CARING, TEMPORARY MOTHER’S HELP WANTED TO LOOK AFTER FOUR-MONTH BABY AND DO LIGHT CLEANING. GOOD CONDITIONS AND PAY. REFS. APPLY MRS. VALOUR, etc.

  The notice attracted a good deal of interest, not least because it was placed beside the one announcing the sale of bankrupt Jack Woodham’s personal effects on 26 February. Jack had been the head of the local fern-growers’ association and his greenhouse collection — now in jeopardy because he could not heat it — was being fought over.

  ‘Has Mrs Valour had a baby, then?’ asked Anna Vigas, reading the postcard.

  ‘No,’ said Emmy Horton.

  Anna’s attention span was never great and she lost interest in the subject. She scuffed a bit of mud with the toe of her Doc Marten’s and, in a prize-winning imitation of Annalise in Neighbours, flipped her blonde hair over her shoulder. ‘Are you coming tonight, then?’

  Emmy was searching her bag, a huge, floppy leather affair with a fringe, for a biro. ‘Hang on.’

  ‘You’re not going to apply, Em? A baby and cleaning?’

  ‘Unemployment plus extra cash equals nice idea,’ said Emmy. ‘I like babies and I want something to do.’

  ‘You could do lots of things,’ said Anna unfairly, for her own horizons were not vast.

  ‘But I don’t, do I?’

  It was a bitter day but neither girl was wearing much. Thin T-shirts, leggings and jackets from the discount store. Both of them were skinny and, clearly, cold but neither appeared to mind. Emmy sniffed the air.

  ‘It’s going to get colder,’ she said. ‘I think I’ll go and try my luck now with Mrs Valour.’

  Flip went Anna’s hair.

  ‘The baby is still very young,’ said Prue later, in the kitchen of Hallet’s Gate, worrying about the thin T-shirt and goosefleshed arms, ‘but it’s reasonably simple to look after him. My stepdaughter wishes to have some help because she needs a bit of a rest and she has to go up to London quite a bit.’ Prue outlined the situation.

  Emmy shifted on the kitchen chair and her eye lit on a framed photograph on the dresser of a beautiful girl with black hair and rather remarkable eyes. She looked smart, in control and well off. I see, thought Emmy, who was no fool. Madam needs her beauty sleep.

  Prue apologized for Violet not being there and asked when Emmy could start. Emmy replied she could then, that moment.

  Aren’t you going to ask me about my experience? she projected silently, feeling almost embarrassed for Prue. As if on cue, Prue produced a red-and-black notebook and scanned the last page where headings such as ‘martyrdom’ and ‘treachery, Burgundians,’ were interlarded with ‘check hourly rate’, ‘no smokers’ and ‘notice period’ which Violet, who reckoned she knew about management, had dictated to Prue.

  ‘Do you have experience with babies?’

  ‘No.’

  Prue stared at Emmy and then smiled. ‘Nor did I when I had my daughter.’

  Her smile was infectious. OK, thought Emmy, not bad. She was aware that she did not look her best. She and Anna had been out drinking the previous evening and it had been an effort to get up. She felt the outline of dark circles under her eyes, the lank feel of her awful hair at its worst, and she was thirsty.

  ‘First aid?’ Prue was searching her notes. ‘Do you know what to do when a baby chokes?’

  ‘Turn it upside down?’

  It did not rank with one of the great answers, but it would do.

  ‘Could I get you a cup of coffee
?’

  Emmy hesitated. ‘Could I have tea, please?’

  She watched Prue organize the cups, familiar with the type. Mrs Valour was the sort of person who bent over backwards not to offend but, in so doing, sometimes did. I wonder if she knows she’s beautiful? Emmy considered herself ugly and measured her sex from this relative position, and Prue’s well-tended hair, English skin and unforced, untampered feel struck her. Is her husband as nice as he looks? Both Valours were well known in Dainton, but Max’s large, hunched figure, his courtesy and his willingness to sit on committees and councils made him especially popular.

  The warmth in the kitchen was making Emmy’s cheeks glow. Evidently, she had caught Prue just as she had returned from a shop. Ordeal-by-trolley at the local Sainsbury’s and, judging by the amount, ordeal-by-chequebook as well. She bent down to retrieve a rogue tin from the floor.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Prue. ‘Do you mind if I unpack while we talk? Some of the stuff needs to go into the freezer.’

  ‘I’ll help.’ Emmy got to her feet.

  ‘That’s kind of you.’ Prue shoved a polystyrene tray containing twenty-four chicken thighs towards Emmy before she could change her mind. ‘Special Price’, it said on the red sticker. ‘Family bargain’. ‘Could you bag those up in fours, please, in the freezer bags?’

  Emmy touched the sticker. ‘Favouritism. Do you ever get a bargain if you’re an old bat on your own?’

  Prue handed the roll of plastic bags across the table, and the light caught a couple of strands of hair at her temples, which were lighter than the rest, ‘No, I don’t think you do.’

  Emmy took a gulp of tea with an unfamiliar taste, ate Prue’s biscuits and began work. A stack of polystyrene, plastic and clingfilm mounted on the table. Prue stuffed it into the rubbish bin.

  ‘I know, I know,’ she grimaced guiltily, ‘it’s not good. I keep meaning to protest about the amount of packaging.’

  ‘Gives someone a job, though,’ said Emmy.

  It crossed Prue’s mind that she and Emmy might not get on, and it crossed Emmy’s that this was a very different world from the one she knew.

  She stood bottles of sherry and wine on the table, piled butter and low-fat spread into a heap, and marshalled tins of petit pois, flageolet beans and green lentils for the larder. There were bags of different pastas and pasta sauces, but no gravy browning or salad cream.

  ‘“Farfalle”,’ Emmy read out from a packet. ‘I don’t know why they bother. It’s all the same at night.’

  ‘There’s a theory that sauces bind better to the pasta the more surface there is.’

  Prue gathered up the bags and Emmy repressed her reply.

  The larder impressed her, however. It was one of those cold, shelved, walk-in rooms, ventilated by mesh and dubbed game-larders by pretentious estate agents. Tins - lentils, artichoke hearts, plum tomatoes - were ranged one side, jars of chutney, expensive jams, bottled fruits and emerald-coloured olive oil on the other. There was a ham, the remains of a truckle cheese and a half-empty jar of Quality Street. Someone had a sweet tooth.

  Emmy closed her eyes for a moment.

  ‘You must help yourself to anything you want,’ said Prue in a rush, anxious to make up for her slightly superior attitude over the pasta. ‘I’m out at work three mornings a week and Mrs Beckett will see to her own meals.’

  By that, Prue meant that Violet had categorically refused to do any cooking for the mother’s help. ‘And, anyway, Prue, I have just gone on a vicious diet in order to get into trim for London.’ Do you not have to be in trim for Hampshire? Prue wanted to ask her.

  ‘Do you have a microwave, Mrs Valour?’

  Prue handed Emmy the final tin to be stowed and took so long to answer the question that Emmy was not quite sure if her question had been offensive.

  ‘No, we don’t.’

  Prue had been thinking about Jamie’s rebuke over Violet.

  Anna was suspicious. The idea of the cash was OK, but babies spelt work. ‘They want something for nothing,’ she repeated, endlessly in Emmy’s opinion.

  ‘Shut up,’ she told Anna, finally.

  Anna adjusted a migrating shoulder-pad under her jumper and scrutinized her friend. Emmy wore her miserable-and-alone look, which she did from time to time. ‘Sorry, Em.’

  Emmy grinned suddenly. ‘I’ll watch out,’ she said. ‘If they overwork me, I can always clean the baby’s bum with Jif.’

  Scanning the gardens and fields that lapped the village boundaries for the things that interested her - earth thrown up by a mole, a stream swollen and flowing with energy, the bright green of grass sated with winter rain - Emmy walked home. Almost too dazzling for the gloomy day, a burst of winter jasmine was draped over the wall of Horton’s farm. Further up the road, rooks were nest-renovating in the beeches that edged the copse up the rise. Good. That indicated spring. Not spring because the calendar said so, but spring because things were happening in the earth.

  Emmy considered the subject of spring. She knew quite a lot about wild life and bits of this and that picked up from GCSE biology and the snippets of medical detail with which her mother, a clerk at the hospital in Winchester, occasionally regaled her. Knowledge that surprised her sometimes, for Emmy, though sharp and shrewd, did not consider herself in any way bright and school had been an experience to get over and done with as soon as possible.

  The wind shifted, and she responded by hunching her shoulders. Where in the damp, frozen woods were the fritillary butterfly caterpillars overwintering? Hidden in the violet leaves? She hoped so because it sounded so nice, and they must be there because last summer had seen fritillaries. Emmy had spotted a rare pair of Monarchs, too, blown 3500 miles across the Atlantic by the winds.

  Imagine being blown all that way.

  She bent to pick up the discarded husk of a beech nut which cracked between her fingers. Gently, she prised it open and was rewarded by a glimpse of secret, intimate green at the centre. Its unexpectedness, and the contrast — death and life, sweet and bitter - pleased her greatly.

  These days, Father was on a reduced shift, Mother was on night duty, because it brought in more, and her two elder brothers had joined the army and she never saw them. In the empty space that remained was Emmy, a solitary girl, in an empty house on the edge of Dainton. Either that or it was full of people trying to sleep at awkward hours.

  A green Range-Rover followed by a Volvo drove down the road and sent up a spray of water. Emmy stepped back smartly.

  ‘Sods,’ she said half-heartedly.

  The Volvo had a FOR SALE notice pasted on to its back window. GOOD PRICE FOR QUICK CASH SALE.

  Emmy’s lack of obvious prettiness was not helped by the pinched look characteristic of someone who did not eat quite enough, in contrast with the glossy hair and skin of someone who did. Like Mrs Valour, for example.

  In one respect, unremarkable bone structure and lank hair made life simpler: the race was so unequal there was no need to enter it. Observing Anna’s unrelenting attention to her body — haircuts, face packs, depilations - Emmy appreciated her freedom and was grateful for the anonymity granted by ugliness. People looked straight through Emmy to the blonde, full-lipped Anna, who then had to cope with the attention.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said her mother, often enough. ‘You won’t even try to look nice.’

  She reiterated the complaint on Emmy’s return to the house and stepped up the pressure when she heard Emmy had got herself a job. She suggested that Emmy got herself a perm, at least, and emptied the contents of her straw basket on to the table. Having located her wallet, one of those fat-bellied affairs into which you can stuff a life, and extracted a twenty-pound note, she held it out to her daughter. ‘Here, have it on me.’

  ‘You really think it’ll help?’ asked Emmy.

  Mrs Horton’s own face was framed by a construct of ice-blonde curls. ‘Of course,’ she said impatiently, and picked at a flaking cuticle. ‘You see, Emmy,’ she confided, and clicked her
frosted nails on the Formica table, ‘you’re so much on your own and I don’t do enough for you.’

  ‘And a perm will alter that?’ Emmy flashed back.

  Mrs Horton was tired from having raised three children, harassed by the family’s reduced income and the demands of running a home and a job. (‘Thank the Lord,’ she often said, ‘I won’t have to empty a Hoover bag in my coffin.’) She did not feel equal to pulling Emmy’s life into shape. A perm was the best she could offer. Emmy knew that, and knew her mum tried, and was grateful. ‘Stand by for the mob, then,’ she said, ‘and for the suicides under my window.’

  The perm, as she could have predicted, was not a success. In the seconds before her scalp disappeared under the baking foil and chemicals, Emmy allowed herself to fantasize: from under them a woman of power and beauty would emerge. Then she pulled herself together and studied her reflection in the mirror while Neil worked her over. Surrounded by lights and bottles of shampoo and conditioners promising Nirvana, it was not a kind mirror. Its object was to strip its prey to the bone, and it did. There sat Emmy, a plucked chicken with nodular wrists, peaky features and collar-bones that made lines under her T-shirt. She lit a cigarette.

  ‘Shouldn’t do that,’ advised Neil, ‘it destroys your Vit C level. Have a cup of herb tea instead. Else,’ he shouted across the saloon floor, ‘bring us a cup of Blackcurrant Bracer.’

  Neil was a great deal prettier than Emmy and she could see from his clear eyes and fresh skin that his Vit C level was kept topped up. A wholesome, tutti-frutti, blow-dried walking advert for citric acid.

  Else placed a mug in front of Emmy and a sweetish smell rose from a curl of steam.

  Two hours later, Emmy alighted from the bus at the Dainton stop. Patches of frost glimmered in the light thrown from the houses edging the road, and the landscape was how she liked it best: stark, with gaunt, skeletal plants. She liked the smooth bark, bleached branches and cleanness of stripped winter trees. It was growing even colder and her hair fizzed and burned around her face. She pushed it back and contemplated doing a Sinead O’Connor and shaving her head.