Read Close Relations Online

Authors: Deborah Moggach

Close Relations (6 page)

BOOK: Close Relations
6.94Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

A tap. She swung round. Stephen stood there. He wore his green corduroy jacket. Her chest folded within itself.

‘Morning, Trish. Pru. Has Bill shown you the mock-ups for the authors' cards?'

‘Not yet.' She looked at Stephen's clothes. She longed to buy him something new. She couldn't even buy him a pair of socks. ‘Alan wants to see us both at four.' She turned to her secretary. ‘Trish dear, could you photocopy these?' Why did she call her dear? Because Trish was bathed in her happiness.

Trish left. She was not a curious person; she suspected nothing.

Stephen said: ‘I'm sorry.'

‘I'm sorry.'

He shut the door. They collided, bumping against the edge of the desk. After two days they always felt awkward with each other, especially in the broad daylight of the office. The hiatus of the weekend set them back to being acquaintances. His interlude of family life made him strange to her, all over again. It usually took them until Tuesday to recover their old intimacy. Prudence rubbed her cheek against his, shyly. He smelled of the aftershave his wife must have given him. It seemed to have a stronger aroma on Monday mornings.

‘I didn't dare go out in case you rang,' he whispered. ‘I sat there for an hour. Then they came home, all smelling of chlorine.' He drew back and touched her hair. ‘My love, I wanted you so badly.'

‘Did you really?' She hadn't smoked a cigarette yet; she wanted to keep her breath fresh for him.

‘Shall I tell you which bits?'

Prudence froze. A face had appeared at the window. It was the gardener, from the van. Prudence jumped back and busied herself, riffling through her mail. The woman didn't
seem to have noticed them. She was replanting the window-box. She pulled out the summer bedding – white geraniums – and flung them out of sight.

‘I can't bear it,' said Prudence.

‘I want to run my finger down the inside of your thigh,' Stephen murmured, standing on the other side of the desk.

‘I want to suck your fingers, one by one . . .' she said.

‘I want to take your breast in my mouth . . . I want to be inside you, now . . .'

Prudence picked up a letter. Her hand trembled. ‘I want to lie with my arms around you all through the night . . .' She stopped. Trish came in. Prudence said: ‘See you at four then, in Alan's office.'

‘And could you run me up a budget for the bulimia book?' he asked.

He left. Prudence sat down heavily in the swivel chair.

Stephen Miller was a charming, weak man of forty-six. He had always been susceptible to women. He liked talking to them; he liked the sort of things they talked about. He sought out their company. In this respect he was unusual for an English man of his class – upper-middle, public school. They responded by finding him endearing, though he was far from handsome. He was a soft man, chubby in fact, with sandy hair and freckled hands. He had a dry, amused way of talking, as if nothing much mattered in the end, life was a baffling business. He wore bow ties and scruffy corduroy jackets which devoted girlfriends, in the past, had repaired for him. He had been to Oxford. He was well-read, there was something of the absent-minded schoolteacher about him which had lulled women into thinking they were safe in his company. He was a romantic. If he forgot someone's birthday, because he was forgetful, he made up for it by an extravagant present the next day, because he was extravagent. In his publishing career he had frequently been bailed out by a devoted series of assistants – underpaid, over-educated women who
covered up for him and took the blame. They didn't resent him for this because he thanked them profusely and took them out to lunch.

Stephen liked lunch. During it he invariably drank too much, charging it to the firm of course, and all afternoon his secretary had to make excuses for him and tell callers he was in a meeting. There are many such men as Stephen, supported by invisible women. This is because, even in the the last years of the nineties, there are still women who willingly do so.

Prudence was an intelligent woman. Love had not blinded her to Stephen's weaknesses. He had been her boss for three years now; on occasion she, too, had bailed him out. He was the editorial director, responsible for the trade lists at B&B – fiction, children's and – Prudence's section – general nonfiction. He had slid into the job through a combination of flair and charm; he was particularly good at wooing authors from other publishers. He was also close friends with the Bunyan family, having been at All Souls with one of the sons where they had performed together in amateur dramatics.

Under the ruthless new ownership, however, Prudence feared for him. Their new MD, Alan, had a more hands-on approach than his predecessor. He liked to know what everybody was up to. He involved himself in every detail down to the consumption of petrol in his staff's company cars. He summoned them to meetings – Prudence and Stephen had one that afternoon – where he watched them shrewdly through a veil of cigarette smoke and asked them to update him on their projects.

Prudence was thinking about this when she left the office for lunch. She was also remembering the last time she and Stephen had made love – a snatched hour in her flat ten days earlier. It was almost impossible for him to get away in the evening without arousing suspicion. Most of their lovemaking consisted of fumbles in doorways or in his car, with the windows steaming up as if the two of them were teenagers. Except teenagers seemed to be at it all the time.
‘
What we've got is sex-free adultery
,' she had complained to him, the week before. ‘
Like alcohol-free lager
.'

She was remembering his tongue nuzzling her pubic hair when she stepped onto the pavement. The gardener's van was still there. She gazed at it fondly, for it was imprinted with her erotic memories. The gardener leaned against it, eating a samosa. Prudence smiled at her. She hadn't seen this one before. She was just about to cross the road when the woman said: ‘Hey, are you an editor?'

Prudence stopped. ‘How can you tell?'

‘You look like one.'

Prudence was silent. She didn't know how to take this.

‘Wait a moment.' The woman was tall and striking; a jewel winked in her nostril. Her hair was bundled up in an ethnic turban. She swallowed the last mouthful of samosa, wiped her hands and reached inside the van. She took out a mud-streaked folder and shoved it in Prudence's hand. ‘Will you read this?' It was more a command than a question.

‘What is it?'

‘My novel.'

‘Goodness.' It was heavy. Four hundred pages at least. ‘I'm non-fiction.'

The woman laughed shortly. ‘We're all non-fiction, aren't we. If you think about it.'

‘I mean –'

‘My address is on the inside.'

The woman strode off. She got into the van, slammed shut the door and started the engine.

It was called The Birches, the house in Purley. There was a birch wood at the end of the garden. Silver birches, they reminded Dorothy of her eldest daughter Louise – slender, graceful, bending to the will of the wind. The wood was thin, however; just a belt of trees. Beyond it was the local comprehensive, a series of ugly modern buildings that were revealed each autumn when the leaves fell. Raucous shouts rang out at
lunchtime. The pupils climbed into the wood and left behind a litter of sweet wrappers and worse. Depending on the season, the wood seemed either like a barrier sealing her home safe from the outside world or a sieve that let it all in. Whether this disturbed Dorothy varied according to her mood. Sometimes she welcomed the yells and laughter; they seemed the only sign of life in the hushed, respectable neighbourhood. Even with the windows closed she could hear them; they cheered her when she stood in the empty house.

There was no one moment, of course, when her daughters had left home. It had happened gradually. For years they had left their things in their rooms; it had taken a long time for them to depart entirely. But they were gone now, they had been gone for almost two decades, and the house seemed huge without them. The bedrooms had reverted to just being bedrooms. Sometimes relatives came to stay. Sometimes even the grandchildren came to stay. But it was no longer a family home; it was a large house, with Gordon and herself rattling around in it. Now and then she grew restless. She told her husband that they must move somewhere smaller and more suitable but he wanted to stay put.

Besides, they were too busy. At this moment, for instance, Gordon had seven jobs on, one of them the refurbishment of ten thousand feet of commercial premises down by the Elephant and Castle. In addition to this he had constant calls from his regular customers – maintenance, emergency repairs. He was up at six, out of the house by seven. Like all builders his own home remained full of half-completed tasks. When the girls were small it had taken him four years to put in a proper kitchen; she had had to nag him to get it done and finally threatened to walk out. He hadn't taken her seriously, he never took her seriously. And she hadn't walked out, had she? She was still here.

It was lunchtime on Monday. Dorothy sat in the office extension. One window overlooked the front yard; the other overlooked the garden. She was typing up the estimate for a new job. In the front yard, two of the lads were loading
panels of Gyproc onto the van. Gordon breezed in.

‘Got the Selwood Avenue invoice, love?'

She gave it to him. ‘I've left off the VAT.'

‘Thanks, pet.' He pocketed it.

She put on the kettle. ‘She seemed very quiet yesterday.'

‘Who did?'

‘Prudence.'

‘She's a quiet girl.'

‘Shouldn't call them girls.'

‘They are, to me.' He lit a cigarette.

She fetched two tea-bags. ‘How do you think Maddy looked?'

The phone rang. He picked it up. ‘Kendal Contractors . . .'

She looked out of the window. At the end of the garden, on an old stretch of hard standing that had once been a garage, sat the caravan. It had been parked there for years, quietly rotting.

‘. . . in the woodwork, you said?' Gordon was talking on the phone. ‘Well, rot's a fungal infection, give it a sniff . . .'

Through the woods, the schoolchildren shouted. They echoed through the years. If she narrowed her eyes she could see her daughters playing in the caravan, playing houses.

‘. . . it gives off, well, a fungal-type smell . . . slide in a knife and see if it gives . . . I'll send one of the lads around tomorrow . . .'

She remembered their holidays, parked in the sand dunes near Hythe. Maddy was shouting, she could hear her. Why was Maddy always angry? Nothing Dorothy said could comfort her.

Gordon put down the phone. ‘I'm off.'

‘Gordon! There's a sandwich here.'

But he had gone. All that was left was a cigarette, smouldering in the ashtray. He never stubbed them out properly.

Through the trees the school bell rang. The voices ceased. In the front yard, the lads drove away. Dorothy sat there in silence. Yesterday, for the first time in years, she had seen all
three of her daughters together. It had been a curious sensation. Oh, it was lovely, of course, that Maddy was home and that they had all gathered together, briefly, as a family. But it had been painful too. The undercurrents had risen to the surface, nothing had changed. Maddy contradicting her father; Gordon rising to the bait. Prudence the peacemaker looking diminished, as she always did in her sister's house. And yet, at the same time, her daughters seemed like strangers. By seeing them together, she realised how unknowable their lives had become – even Louise, to whom she felt the most close, with whom she had domestic life and the grandchildren in common. Her own role as a mother was long since over. Her role as a grandmother was almost over too; Imogen and Jamie no longer needed her.

Dorothy sat there with her pile of invoices. Was this all there was to it? You raised children, you made a home, you kept the business ticking over. And in the end you were left alone with a husband who fidgeted to be somewhere else.

Dorothy was not a rebellious person. She had been brought up by strict parents. Her father had run a haulage company, her mother had raised a family. Dorothy herself had followed in her mother's footsteps; she had just accumulated more money on the way. Suddenly she envied her daughters their freedom. Even their unhappiness seemed an adventure, a voyage into uncharted waters. Her grandchildren were growing up in a world that was largely incomprehensible to her. She had sat here in this suburban street; over the past years her main contact with the outside world had been the lads, her surrogate children, jostling into her office on payday and bringing tales of treacherous girlfriends and custody battles.

She gazed at the caravan – curtained windows, shabby cream bodywork. What a symbol of freedom it had once seemed! All of a sudden she had an impulse to hitch it to the car and drive away – anywhere, anywhere but here. Chester. Aberystwyth. Somewhere she could see before it was too late. Drive off to a new life and see if anyone noticed.

She didn't, of course. Instead, wrinkling her nose, she stubbed out Gordon's Marlboro. She thought that in all their years of marriage, her husband had never asked if she minded the smell of his cigarette smoke.

‘The thing about adultery,' said Prudence, ‘is that you have to snatch your moment and it's always the wrong time of day. Like two in the afternoon, sitting in a freezing car. Or a quick grapple in the photocopying room at half past nine in the morning. The person they're living with gets all the good times – the evenings, the nights, oh, the nights . . . the sunny Sundays in the park. As if they don't have enough of them anyway. Seems so greedy of them.'

‘Give him up then,' said Maddy. ‘Seems stupid to me.'

Prudence sighed. If only it were so simple. It was Wednesday evening. They were sitting in the basement flat in Tufnell Park, the place that had been lent to Maddy, eating takeaway pizza.

BOOK: Close Relations
6.94Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Thirty and a Half Excuses by Denise Grover Swank
The Nannies by Melody Mayer
Ruthless Temptation by Ravenna Tate
Blood Maidens by Barbara Hambly
Maybe This Time by Joan Kilby
Jump into the Sky by Shelley Pearsall
It's Always Been You by Paige, Victoria
Death Takes a Holiday by Elisabeth Crabtree
Dragon Harper by Anne McCaffrey