Perfect Love Read online

  When she arrived at the Ivy her jumper was waiting, exquisitely packed in tissue, in a smart carrier bag. In it, Violet had also put several give-away samples of face creams from one of the most exclusive and expensive make-up houses as a thank-you present. ‘I thought you should try these’, she had written. ‘Thank you again.’

  Prue replaced them carefully at the bottom of the bag. ‘How thoughtful,’ she said.

  Flushed from a struggle with the A-Z and the briskish walk from the London Library, she sat down at the table, spread her napkin over her knees and realized she had made a mistake. If a course of action is likely to change the image of ourselves and our lives that we carry tucked into our minds, then it is as well to read the government health warning. Within seconds, Prue knew that this lunch - knives, forks, some meat, a salad, a bit of bread - would be a profoundly disrupting experience, and the needle carefully balanced between the poles of contentment and tormenting yearnings would be set quivering.

  Why did she do it? Why did she sit there, innocent of her understated beauty and its effect, dressed in a grey crepe wool suit and white blouse, and eat the lunch?

  Who knows? Perhaps it was something to do with the search for St Joan. For a second, Prue was back scrutinizing Decari’s mezzotint of Joan’s burning. Already, the toes were disintegrating, the bony, slender fingers (this was a highly idealized representation) cramping in agony, and Joan herself was translucent and insubstantial, like a photographic negative.

  She directed her attention at Jamie and, once again, his likeness to the younger Max nagged at her. ‘I gather this is the place to be.’

  ‘It is,’ he replied. ‘And I intend to be smug about the ease with which I procured a table.’

  Prue decided she was impressed by the close proximity of two actors and a television mogul. ‘Wait till the WI and Kate hear about this.’

  Jamie gave her a look usually reserved for clients who wished to play the coy game. True, do I look taken in by the hick-comes-to-town bit?’

  Prue’s eyes were hidden suddenly by her eyelids. Behind them coalesced a picture of Joan riding away from Vaucouleurs, an ignorant, unlettered peasant girl with ideas above her station, struggling to master a warhorse and the unfamiliarity of her longed-for breeches.

  ‘You should be,’ she said coolly. ‘I am from the country. And the WI has a healthy interest in most things.’ She sipped her wine. ‘You’re being rude about them.’

  Jamie sent his knife spinning in a circle and watched the flash of silver. ‘Yes, I was,’ he said.

  She enquired after Violet and the new job, and then how Jamie’s new job was going. ‘What qualities do you need for it?’ Prue was anxious to understand what an asset manager did. She cut a piece of carpaccio and ate it slowly.

  Jamie was amused, then intrigued, by her interest. ‘Energy. The nerve to know when to act when the consensus is right, and that’s difficult. You have to play devil’s advocate, and keep your ear finely tuned to what’s going on.’ In contrast to Prue’s slow progress, Jamie’s Caesar salad disappeared rapidly. The energy that he cited flowed over the table and sucked her in, pulling her, unresisting, along. Jamie was over twenty years younger than Max and it made a difference. Jamie was expanding: his knowledge, his job, his life. Max less so. As he had once remarked when they had talked about his retirement in 1997, he had finished climbing the mountains and was now on the plateau. At the time, Prue had not understood.

  It is a matter of luck when you meet someone. Prue smiled across the littered table at Jamie who smiled back. It was luck whether or not that person had reached the same point as you, and bad luck if you were too far ahead.

  Jamie made a joke. Prue laughed. Then she became quiet, and so did Jamie. Holding her gaze, Jamie offered her a second piece of bread from the basket which she accepted.

  ‘Sleepy Prue,’ he said.

  Her eyes widened at his tenderness, and the bread turned to stone between her fingers. Dressed in that deceptive grey, Prue Valour gazed, with an abundance of . . . what was it? . . . illicit interest and delight, at her stepdaughter’s husband and, for once, felt remarkable.

  She knew suddenly that she needed to have everything quite open and honest between her and this man. It was important that the dark things, the past and its accretions, its mistakes, should be laid on the table between them. ‘I don’t know what Violet has told you, but she was cruel to me sometimes,’ she said with a rush, breaching a dam she had resolved would never be breached, but impelled by an honesty that determined he should see her worst side. Now. Before it went any further. ‘And I wish I could say that I don’t blame her, but I did mind. Still do. That is not to suggest that Violet did not suffer. I know she did, and badly.’

  It was not a pretty piece of self-justification, but Jamie had a Lara in his past, and understood what prompted Prue’s confession. Vulnerability always stirred him, and Prue looked so woundable, and so embattled by a complicated family situation, not unlike a child herself. ‘You tend to see things the way you’re told them,’ he said, ‘and I had no reason not to accept Violet’s version.’ He wiped his mouth with his napkin and threw it down on the table. ‘Violet never said that much, you know.’

  ‘I’m sorry about the disloyalty,’ she said quickly. ‘It’s unforgivable. Yours, I mean, in listening to me. It’s not your fault, and you didn’t start the conversation.’

  He lifted and let drop the crushed linen. ‘If we accept truths about those we love, does it make us disloyal?’

  ‘“I hate you, Prue. He didn’t want you. He wanted Mummy but she’s dead.”’ Prue repeated the words that had reverberated in her mind for so long, and which she had kept hidden from Max because she knew she should not pay attention to them. But she had.

  Equally, her loyalty at this lunch, or lack of it, was past retrieving, and the intimacy of the confession had . . . well . . . she drank more wine very quickly, an erotic compulsion to it.

  Daddy doesn’t really like you. He loves me and he wants Mummy only she’s dead. Granny says she thinks Daddy married you because you were convenient.

  ‘I was cruel, too, Jamie. First from ignorance then, perhaps, because she hurt me so often. It made me understand that being innocent doesn’t prevent you being wicked.’

  Jamie listened in silence. Then he refilled her glass.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘That’s enough of that. I won’t mention it again.’

  No fool, Jamie understood when it was time to back off. Besides, it was a long time ago, before he was on the scene. He steered the subject away from Violet and, because his work was never far from his thoughts, asked her if she thought the City had changed.

  A little surprised, and disarmed, Prue considered. People tended to solicit Max if they wanted an opinion, and Prue if they wanted help with the school-run or harvest-supper. It was habit, and Prue forgave male chauvinists and related species, like maiden aunts, for she herself was as habit-bound as they were. Still, she had felt some resentment in the early days and then grew used to it, as women did the layer of fat on the hips.

  ‘What do I think?’ Prue prodded into action a brain that felt as murky as Loch Ness. ‘I think recent events show that politics doesn’t influence the City any more. Money markets influence politics.’

  ‘Politicians are past their sell-by date?’

  ‘Sort of.’

  ‘Is that a good thing? At least, we elect politicians.’

  Prue’s attention was caught by a blonde in a short black suit settling herself at an adjacent table. Pulled back by a tortoiseshell clip, her streaked hair framed a face cherished by artifice into plate-glass flawlessness. She was as unlike Prue as it was possible to be.

  She returned to unemployment and the City’s underbelly. ‘“The centre isn’t holding,”’ she remarked.

  ‘That’s a quotation, isn’t it? I can’t remember where from.’

  ‘Nor can I.’

  Joan might have said the same thing, except she was not given to p
hilosophy and mysticism. France was in a mess, Domrémy was in a mess, its church partially destroyed. How did she feel about her tranquil, fertile Meuse valley as she watched dawn slide over the dew-laden meadows and tear apart the mist draped over the famous bois chenu? What did she think after the Anglo-Burgundian band had swooped down on the cattle and plundered the church? That the centre was not holding?

  Jamie talked on about the Russian aid programme, a junk-bond king’s deal with the courts to reduce his sentence, and the rise of the new right in Germany which had grabbed 13 per cent of the vote. Prue listened to the world being dealt with across the lunch table -economics, high finance, bomb explosions, the politics of greed, aid and consensus. Such a big place, it seemed, in which small acts repeated themselves until they became huge - greed, power-seeking and polluting habits.

  Jamie was in his stride. Prue listened and interjected now and again, and it seemed to her that a transparent bell-jar lowered itself over the table, trapping them inside its shiny, revealing dome. Prue knew she should beat at the sides to be let out, even smash through them, but did nothing.

  Afterwards, they walked down St Martin’s Lane and Jamie asked Prue why she was so interested in Joan.

  ‘Because she practised the art of the impossible, I suppose,’ she said.

  When she looked back through the window of the taxi into which Jamie had handed her, he was standing quite still, looking at the pavement. Nothing had been said about the shaming incident in the other taxi, or what had taken place afterwards.

  The interlude is over, it is closed. Prue sat back. Cradled and protected as she had chosen to be, she now understood that passion could arrive out of the blue, like a bunch of flowers from Interflora with a tag on it saying: Your turn.

  Jane’s rats were giving problems. When had they ever not? thought Prue, disloyally reflecting on their brief, but incident-strewn, careers. Not only did they act as a magnet to Bella the cat — and the danger of a rat holocaust was ever present - but they had acquired a taste for liberty. Thanks to Jane, in whose scale of priorities animal comfort ranked highest, the rats took morning and evening constitutionals around her bedroom, driving Prue to shampoo the carpet at regular intervals and to reassure herself constantly that domestic rat droppings could not possibly be harmful.

  Worse: a rat’s life runs out fast and, for the past fortnight, Toffee had been ailing. When Prue picked up Jane that Friday, Jane insisted they took him to the vet.

  ‘He’s ill. I know he’s ill.’ Jane pressed her nose against the wire cage where Toffee’s tail stuck out cold and limp from a pile of shredded newspaper.

  Prue bent down and studied Toffee. Her heart sank. ‘OK. Let’s take him to the vet.’

  Jane’s expression was a compound of distress, fear — and complete reliance on her mother. ‘Do you think he’ll be all right?’

  Do you lie to reduce a child’s terror? Should you erase that look, which strikes straight to an adult’s heart, for the sake of few minutes’ grace? If Jane suffered, Prue suffered, and she was never sure if she lied to ease Jane’s pain or her own.

  In the event, the journey to the vet proved to be Toffee’s last. By the time they had manhandled the cage into the surgery, he was dead. Prue would long remember Jane’s cry of anguish, and the sight of her daughter sitting on a plastic chair surrounded by a clutter of Country Lifes and give-away magazines clutching a dead rat to her chest.

  ‘I’m trained in bereavement management, Mrs Valour,’ whispered the vet, gently disengaging Toffee, ‘I’ll deal with her.’ In his experience, humans grieved more bitterly for their animals than for other humans — it was amazing how many widows became merry. He produced a cardboard box from a pile under the counter for Toffee’s coffin and laid him gently in it.

  ‘Come and choose the label to put on it,’ he invited Jane, closing it up. ‘You must write his name and his dates.’

  ‘If you want any help, Mrs Valour, in the grief management - it takes a little time you know - come and see me,’ he said as he examined Buttons, the survivor, whom he pronounced fit and well. Just a little top-up of vitamins to make sure, he said, producing an enormous syringe and an equally enormous bill.

  ‘What will Buttons do without Toffee?’ Tears washed in a sea down Jane’s cheeks. ‘He’ll be so lonely.’

  Prue’s own throat jammed up at this point, and she cursed the day the rats had entered the house. ‘Perhaps he won’t notice too much, darling. It’s not like a human being.’

  Jane interrupted her crying to stare at her mother, and Prue felt as if she had been chastised with a whip.

  ‘How do you know, Mum?’

  She drew her daughter close. ‘I don’t, darling, but I think there is a good chance he doesn’t feel like us.’

  Jane clung to Prue. ‘It’s so awful that everything has to die. Why do they?’ and added, ‘Toffee wasn’t doing anything. Just living in his cage.’

  Prue stroked the wet face. ‘People have been asking those questions since time began and I don’t know the answers.’ She thought for a second or two. ‘You might think this odd, but death improves life, Janey.’

  Perhaps, she reflected, piloting a still weeping daughter into the car, a rat mortality in the home is a useful aid in the teaching of metaphysics to one’s offspring.

  Jane got up on Saturday having slept badly. Pale and heavy-eyed, she spent the morning hanging over Buttons in his cage. At lunchtime, Prue went upstairs to investigate.

  The bedroom resembled a bomb-site, but Prue bit her lip and merely drew back the curtains. She bent down to pick up a pair of rollerboots apparently left in the middle of the room with express intent to kill.

  ‘Lunch,’ she said. ‘Didn’t you hear me calling?’

  Jane looked up from the cage and Prue’s irritation vanished. Her daughter’s eyes were underlined with what a previous au pair had termed ‘suitcases’. From long habit, projections of the direst kind - anaemia, leukaemia - surged into Prue’s mind.

  ‘Are you feeling all right?’

  ‘Fine.’

  Jane was lying. Prue sat down on the bed and studied her. ‘Everything OK at school?’ This time the hesitation was obvious and enlightenment (with relief) dawned on Prue. She patted the space beside her. ‘Tell me what’s going on.’

  Jane tensed, and Prue divined that a battle was being waged between keeping up the pretence and the comfort of casting her troubles on to her mother.

  ‘Everyone hates me.’ Jane made the confession sound shameful. ‘They all tease me.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘Nobody wants to be my partner. I was left by myself at CDT lesson and Miss Cook had to do it with me. I thought I’d die.’ Jane slumped against Prue’s shoulder. ‘If I died at least I’d see Toffee.’ Jane tried hard to stop her lip trembling, and she said, ‘I don’t care really, Mum.’

  Any suggestion of attack on their daughter drew elemental feelings from both Max and Prue, chief among them desire for vengeance, mixed with hurt for the child. It did not matter how often Prue lectured herself, and Max, on being too emotional, or that Jane needed to learn some lessons for her survival or that they, the parents, could not, should not protect her. Not trusting herself to speak, she took Jane’s hand in her own and rubbed her thumb up and down the palm.

  ‘Alicia hates me, and she makes everybody else say I’m stupid and ugly. Even Lydia.’

  Technically, Lydia was Jane’s best friend, with whom she had swapped wrist snappers and, in a major demonstration of best friendship, Julip Horses. Prue concentrated on achieving a perspective while suppressing the wish to shake Alicia until her teeth rattled.

  ‘What shall I do, Mum?’

  The virus of hate in the fourth form was proving as disfiguring and contagious as smallpox, and here it was disfiguring her eleven-year-old daughter’s face as surely as the evil blotches. Prue cradled Jane’s head between her hands, feeling the bony plates of the skull as if it was her own, and kissed it.

  ‘Listen to me
. It won’t last. Nothing ever remains the same. I know, it happened to me.’

  Jane went rigid and still against her mother. ‘Did it, Mum? Did it really? You’re not just saying that?’

  ‘I begged Granny and Gramps to take me away from my school. They didn’t, and I discovered that being unpopular is like a switchback. Sometimes you are, sometimes you aren’t. I bet you next term Alicia hates someone else.’

  ‘A whole term, Mum.’

  ‘Listen. If you show you mind, Alicia will make it worse. She wants you to look miserable, so don’t. And tell her to shut up if she attacks you. Bullies don’t like to be told to shut up.’

  Jane appeared to be absorbing the advice. Prue breathed in the smell of her daughter - a combination of Prue’s best jasmine soap and cheap shampoo - acutely conscious of the growing body against hers. Love flowed out of her in a hot, aching tide and lapped the suitcase-eyed little face, unformed hands and too-thin shoulders.

  Please (God?), please, see to it that I carry on protecting her until she’s big enough to cope.

  ‘Just one thing, Janey. If they start on someone else, don’t forget what you’ve felt. Don’t forget what it feels like to be miserable.’

  ‘No, Mum.’

  Even if they resemble a cross between Little Nell and Barbie, children are not natural Christians. Abnegation was for adults and even then it was comparable to a white Christmas: you should not bank on it. Prue was not going to bank on it.

  Jane grabbed Prue’s proffered handkerchief. ‘Thanks, Mum,’ she said in a small voice. ‘I don’t know what I’d do without you.’

  Never, ever will I take risks with Jane, resolved Prue. She is my absolute responsibility.

  Never, ever.

  Jamie telephoned.

  Prue gripped the receiver until her knuckles turned white.

  ‘Next time you’re up, perhaps we can have lunch again?’

  She shut her eyes and thought of Jane. ‘I don’t think it’s a good idea,’ she addressed her corpse-like knuckle, and thought, If I bang you hard against the table perhaps it’ll kill the devil that has got into me. She was taking the call in Max’s study, facing the photographs on his desk. One was of a family group - she and Max with Jane between them. Max was looking towards Prue, fondly and she now perceived, a little possessively. Her knees felt weak, and her heart was pounding. She inhaled deeply and continued. ‘I think you know why.’