Aphrodite's Hat (6 page)

William had not planned to go to St Ives over the May bank holiday. But four nights earlier, out of the blue, his wife, Helena, had announced that she was going to Paris with her friend, Dotty Blaine, adding casually that it would be ‘all right about the dog and the cats' as William would be there ‘to see to them'.

I'll be damned if I will, William had said to himself. As those who feel wronged will tend to, he searched about in his mind for something that would demonstrate his difference from his wife. He had never yet visited the Tate Gallery in St Ives and had been promising himself that pleasure for years. Helena didn't share his enthusiasm for modern art.

‘I'm afraid I shall not be here,' he said, more belligerently than he felt, for the truth was he felt rather scared. ‘I'm going to St Ives.'

If Helena, who was used to her husband's mute acquiescence in her suddenly announced but often long-brooded plans, was surprised to hear of this proposal she didn't allow it to show. She was a woman who had worked to make efficiency her hallmark and she was not to be put out because her husband had taken it into his head to be mulish and awkward. She organised a neighbour to see to the cats and for Wanda, their cleaner, to walk Daisy the dachshund.

‘I've given Wanda the number of the burglar alarm in case it goes off while we are away,' was all Helena said as she swept a carmine streak across William's cheek on her way out of the door to the taxi which was waiting to take her to Heathrow. She smelled, as always, delightful and William felt a flash of regret. But as his small act of rebellion seemed really not to trouble Helena he did not allow compunction to lessen his excitement.

So now he was on the train to Penzance, inwardly mouthing the Robert Louis Stevenson rhyme for children,
Faster than fairies, faster than witches
as they rushed through a countryside all green and white and yellow and alive with fields hopping with sturdy-looking lambs.

William had booked a room at a hotel he had found via the Internet. Privately he abhorred the Internet, perhaps because Helena had become such a mistress of it. Their aged copy of
The Good Hotel Guide
had disappeared (no doubt considered by Helena redundant it had been passed on to a charity shop) and he was reluctant to give his wife rope by asking for her help. She would be sure to ‘know' somewhere he ‘must' stay. This trip, he had determined, was to be strictly his enterprise.

Arriving at Penzance, an almost violent smell of sea assaulted his nostrils. Above him a chaos of seagulls wheeled, white as angels, noisy and obstreperous as alley-cats. The hotel, painted a maritime blue, was easy to spot on the nearby rise. William was breathing hard by the time he had hauled himself and his suitcase up the cobbled incline. Not that he was a heavy man; on the contrary, he was slenderly built and fighting fit, he liked to think, for his years.

He was reassured by the hotel's peaceful interior: no sign of brass-work or Cornish piskies, a pleasing smell of wood smoke, elderly, well-polished furniture and white china jugs of pretty wild flowers. The young hotel manager showed him to his room.

‘You're lucky, we had a cancellation so I put you in our best room. There's a view front and back, and you can see the weather from your bed.' The manager drew back the curtain to a chorus of screeching gulls. ‘It looks set fair for the whole weekend.'

William hoped this was an omen and unpacked his clothes. Unsure what to do next, he went out to explore Penzance.

It was the inconvenient time of day when – unless one is an alcoholic – it is too early for a drink and too late for tea. William bought a vanilla ice cream, licking it rather dubiously as he walked by the old harbour. It was one of those enjoyments, he decided, which are better in recollection. He had forgotten how ice cream will always drip down the cone and on to the wrist and sleeve, and was relieved when he finally polished the thing off.

What to do now? Had Helena been with him there would have been no problem filling the time. Already, she would have formulated plans for the day ahead and his part would have been merely to agree with or, less likely, dispute them. Over the long years of their marriage, the initiative had passed lock, stock and barrel to Helena. Suddenly a free man, he felt, as old recidivists are said to feel, nostalgic for familiar constraints.

He walked past a café which displayed in its window a timetable of the local bus service. Here was the chance to make some sort of plan. The bus to St Ives, he calculated, ran every forty minutes and took as long to get there. Well, that was good. He could set out tomorrow after breakfast and be in St Ives by ten.

There was a couple already in the hotel lounge when, after several consultations of his watch, William felt it was decently possible to go down for a drink. The couple, expensively dressed, were sitting knit together on the more comfortable and capacious of the sofas. The girl had with her a vast patent leather handbag which she had placed on the coffee table so that it obscured William's view. Helena would have asked her to move it. Instead, William wished the couple good evening and asked if they had had a pleasant day.

The couple, who turned out to be Austrian, admitted that their day had passed well. But their demeanour indicated that this concession was to be the extent of their intimacy with him. They were there, their healthy young bodies suggested, for serious pleasure and were not about to squander their time in dull conversation with elderly men.

William took refuge in the dinner menu. Had Helena been there she would, by now, have been suggesting what he might like to order, forbidding certain dishes on health grounds and urging others on him for similar reasons. She herself would have chosen what was most likely to keep her figure the trim size 10 it had been since they had first met. Dover sole, probably, or perhaps the sea bass. William found it was easier to guess what Helena might have eaten than to choose for himself.

Dinner was just himself and the amorous Austrian couple, who had taken off their shoes and were playing footsie under the table. William ate his lamb in silence. He thought wistfully of Daisy and felt envious of Wanda walking her in the park.

Over coffee, he chatted to the young hotel manager, more for a need to demonstrate to the Austrians that he was capable of being good company than for any inclination to talk. He confided his project of visiting St Ives. The manager said that it was possible to hire a car from Dave's down the road but that if he were William he would take the local bus; the parking in St Ives was dreadful and the traffic tomorrow would, he could guarantee, be nobody's business.

William, in fact, had already decided on the bus, but he was grateful for the manager's advice. His wish to oblige was such that he might have felt compelled to hire one of Dave's cars had the manager recommended it. Politeness, as Helena never tired of assuring him, was William's bane.

Despite the large dimensions and even larger softness of the bed, William slept poorly. He dreamed and woke with a start but with no recollection of the dream. Getting out of bed, he went to the window and drew back the curtains. Moonlight was playing in a trembling dance over black water. The masts of the boats made a stack of black spillikins topped with an occasional white blur of resting birds.

William got back into bed, turned on the sidelight and tried to read his book. But it was no good. For the life of him he couldn't take in what he was reading. He switched off the light and lay in the sea-lit darkness, wondering about Helena. Was she sharing a room in Paris with Dotty Blaine and if so did they lie and chat together at night, as he and Helena had done in the past? He remembered a time when they were students, lying in someone's loft in sleeping bags, side by side but with their cocooned bodies touching, talking through the night till the birds rang in the morning. He would not be sure what to talk to her about now.

He was very early at the bus stop, a habit for which Helena mocked him and he felt the relief of being allowed to indulge his anxiety free of any critical comment. Over the years, he could not help having noticed, his wife had grown to the opinion that her husband was a poor fish. Well, perhaps she was right, he thought, stepping on to the bus which had now pulled up and was letting aboard a queue of impatient passengers.

William found a seat towards the back of the bus. Behind him, two American women seated themselves and, as they got underway, became enthusiastic and voluble about the Cornish countryside.

‘See there, Janie, those lambs. They might be out of a nursery rhyme.'

Janie, it seemed, was made of sterner stuff than her companion. She remarked that the same lambs were very likely bound for the butcher's block, adding that the lamb they had had last evening at the restaurant had been as sweet as butter.

Her travelling companion was silent on this topic but kept her end up by trying to recall a children's rhyme. ‘
As I was going to St Ives, I met a man with seven wives
… but I can
not
remember how it goes on, Janie.'

William turned around. ‘
Seven wives had seven cats, seven cats had seven kits, kits, cats, men, wives, how many were going to St Ives?
' he quoted.

The woman who was not Janie beamed. ‘That's it. How very kind of you.'

Janie had been calculating. ‘Twenty-two.'

Her companion laughed, exalted but nervous that she was about to best her friend. ‘No, the answer's one. You see he
met
the man with all the wives. He, the man with the wives, I mean, was coming from St Ives, it's the speaker who is going there.'

But Janie was not to be contradicted. ‘Why shouldn't he meet them on the way? He might be overtaking the guy if he had all those blessed creatures to drag along with him.'

It was the sort of remark Helena might have made. William turned back to observe the countryside. The fields were not, as they had seemed from the window of the train, merely yellow and white but pink and blue besides. He wished he knew more about wild flowers. He had picked up a little about the garden ones over the years from Helena. Helena, as she liked to say, was ‘dedicated' to her garden.

Reaching St Ives, the bus came to a faltering halt on the brow of the hill. Fearful that Janie and her companion might latch on to him, William set off purposefully down the crowded streets towards the wide curved sandy bay where the St Ives Tate stands.

His visit to the gallery took up most of the morning. He was looking at a drawing of roof-tops by Ben Nicholson when he noticed a tall young woman, dressed in jeans and boots, entering the room. She was not particularly good-looking but her face was interesting. It was long and pale and bony, the sort of face, William speculated, that an artist might like to draw.

The girl came across and stood beside William, looking at the clean line of the roof-tops until he half thought of addressing her. But as he was considering what he might say she wandered off and out of the room.

William, watching her leave the room, found that he was hungry. He walked downstairs and out of the gallery and went in search of lunch. He followed the narrow road till he found a small place, not too crowded, advertising homemade soups and salads. He was eating a ham salad when the tall girl with the bony face came into the café. Involuntarily, he smiled at her.

The girl looked at him, frowning slightly. The tables were crammed together and he expected her to take a distant one but she came and sat at the table nearest his, almost touching his arm. ‘You were in the Tate this morning.'

‘That's right,' William said, pleased at having been noticed.

‘You were looking at the Ben Nicholson.'

‘Yes,' William agreed. And, ‘I like Nicholson,' he offered.

The girl nodded as if that were an accepted fact between them. ‘Looking at pictures makes me hungry. You too?' Her voice was deepish with an accent, hard to place, but he guessed from somewhere North.

‘I suppose it does. I'd not thought.'

‘Well,' the girl said, ‘me, I'm ravenous.'

‘Where are you from?' William risked after she had ordered.

‘Derbyshire. The Peak District.'

‘Like Joseph Wright. You've come a long way.'

‘Too right,' said the girl. She was eating bread ferociously, tearing it into chunks and cramming it into her mouth. She spoke now through the bread, ‘How about you?'

‘Oh, nowhere interesting,' William apologised. ‘London.' He wondered whether to offer her the contents of his own, still full, breadbasket.

‘London's good,' the girl said, ripping into more bread. ‘You shouldn't knock London.'

William, who had meant to be reassuring, felt put in his place. The girl turned her attention to her chicken salad. This too she wolfed down, eating so fast that by the time William was ready to order coffee her plate was clean and she was ordering coffee with him. ‘You having a sweet?'

William who never ate cake and rarely pudding said, ‘Maybe I'll try a flapjack.'

‘Go on. A little of what you fancy …'

I fancy you, William thought to himself and all but blushed. ‘I try to watch my calories,' he explained.

‘Don't look as if you need to,' the girl said, sinking her teeth into the slice of walnut cake the waitress had brought. The girl's teeth were large and even. She reminded William of a hungry horse.

He said, for something to say, ‘Do you know the rhyme about St Ives?'

‘Don't think so. Tell me.'

When he'd recited it she thought a moment and frowned again and said, ‘It's one, isn't it?'

‘It's not very difficult,' he apologised, and told her about the bus and Janey.

‘Yeah, well, you know those old American girls.'

Pleased to be exempted from the category of being ‘old', when the bills arrived he asked, summoning courage, ‘May I give you lunch?'