Scissors, Paper, Stone (15 page)

‘You want me to sell that for you?’ The tout extended his hand, the yellowed tips of his nails poking through a pair of grey fingerless gloves. Janet looked at him in surprise.

‘Well, that would be kind. Are you sure?’

‘Course, love. I’ll have it sold for you in a jiffy.’

And he had. Within five minutes, a harassed-looking businessman with a bundle of Cellophane-wrapped roses under his arm was handing over £40 in exchange for Janet’s ticket. ‘There you go, darling,’ the tout said, passing on the two crisp £20 notes.

‘But it only cost me £35.’

‘Spend the extra on ice cream,’ he said, with a wink. But Janet insisted on giving him the £5 excess. He looked a little offended, but he took it nonetheless, and she pushed her way into the foyer feeling strangely exposed. It was an experience she never wished to repeat.

Most of the time, of course, Janet could rely on Anne to come with her. She knew Anne was almost as lonely as she was, although she also knew that Anne would hotly deny this was the case. Anne could be prickly, yes, and give the appearance of ingratitude, but Janet felt, at some level, she needed her friendship even though she would never actually say so. The two of them needed each other. They both needed to believe life was more than it was. They needed to cancel out each other’s solitariness, even if all it meant was a simple physical togetherness that was worn lightly, that was accepted without question because to question it would be to admit what lay beneath. To question it would be to strip back the skin of their mutual compromise.

So Janet would always book two tickets. More often than not, Anne would say yes in spite of herself.

This time, it was one of those dubious shows that involved an ageing raconteur holding forth in front of an appreciative gaggle of people who should know better. It was called ‘An Audience With . . .’ and featured a silver-haired man called Richard Vickers who had achieved minor fame as the presenter of a humorous quiz on Radio 4 that required contestants to speak for a whole minute on a random subject without hesitation, repetition or deviation. Janet had called round at Anne’s home one evening after she had returned from the hospital to ask if she wanted to go.

‘I know you like the show,’ Janet said brightly, sitting at the wooden kitchen table and fiddling with the coaster beneath her mug of tea. ‘And it’s at the Cambridge Arts Theatre, so I thought we could make a day of it.’

Anne found, to her surprise, that the prospect didn’t fill her with quite as much dread as it usually would. Perhaps it would be nice to have something to relieve the tedium of hospital visits and tense exchanges with Charlotte. There had been no change in Charles’s condition for over three weeks. The doctors were starting to talk gently about persistent vegetative states and ‘quality of life’.

She glanced across the table. Janet was wearing a new voluminous brown cardigan that she had bought in the sales but which didn’t suit her at all. It made her look fatter than she actually was and accentuated her short arms and large bust. Her face, powdered and lipsticked with the normal carelessness, seemed a mask of trembling desperation, almost of nervousness.

‘I suppose it would be all right not to go to the hospital for one day.’

‘Of course it would be, Anne. You’ve been running yourself into the ground these past few weeks and you thoroughly deserve some time off.’

There was a pause. Anne turned away, patting her hair down, so that she didn’t have to maintain eye contact. The fact that she wanted to go seemed almost like a defeat that she wasn’t quite willing to admit to herself. When she spoke, she was deliberately offhand.

‘Yes, well, all right, Janet. I’d like to.’

There was a delighted squeal from across the table.

‘Thanks for thinking of me,’ Anne added, even though she knew there was no one else Janet was likely to have thought of first.

‘Oh, that’s terrific,’ said Janet, sitting back in her chair with two hands clasped around her mug, her hunched-up shoulders finally relaxing into the shapeless cardigan. She took a sip of her tea and Anne noticed there was a genuine gleam of happiness in her eyes. She was moved by this. How wonderful, Anne thought, to be able to gain such joy from something so insignificant. How touching that Janet seemed to value these tiny shreds of friendship so highly. She would give anything to experience the same degree of uncomplicated optimism, the same wholesome faith in life. She used to be able to, thought Anne, filling up Janet’s mug from a dribbling teapot. She wondered what had happened to make her so dried-up inside.

It reminded her, oddly, of the wording of a prayer she had learned in the run-up to her confirmation, something about the faithful ‘not being fit to eat the crumbs’ from under God’s table. The phrasing had lodged itself in her fifteen-year-old mind. She had an image of a powerful God-like figure sitting at a vast, polished dining table with a shepherd’s crook in one hand, breaking up a big loaf of bread with the other, crumbs of it falling on to the ground and being meekly gathered up by a crowd of enthusiastic pygmies, crawling over each other like ants following a trail of honey.

Anne sometimes felt as though she scattered her morsels of affection on to the floor just like this, to be hoovered up by Janet with her customary, slightly pathetic, gratefulness. It gave Anne the occasional twinge of guilt, but it also left her with a sense of power over someone else that she had never before experienced and that she had come to cherish. In every other area of her life, Anne felt she was controlled by other people – by Charles’s domineering manner, by Charlotte’s conscious detachment, by shop assistants and bus conductors and parking wardens who saw her as a worn-out housewife with grey hair and nothing more. Her love had never been returned as unconditionally as she had bestowed it and now it was too late to hope for this to change.

With Janet, Anne knew she was in a position of dominance, and she exploited this. She knew that Janet’s affection for her outweighed its reciprocal measure. After a lifetime of giving too much love only to have it scorned or dismissed or broken by the person to whom it had been entrusted, it felt good to be on the other side. She convinced herself that this was not cruelty so much as a deliberate thoughtlessness: she liked Janet to an extent – despite finding her (and she felt bad about this) so intensely irritating – and she knew that Janet liked her and got pleasure from their friendship. As long as this was the case, she couldn’t see the harm in her behaviour. They were both getting something out of it, weren’t they?

So they went to Cambridge, catching a fast train from King’s Cross station at 9.15 on a Saturday morning. It was the first time Anne had been back to her university town since a Newnham College reunion over fifteen years ago that had promised more than it delivered. Anne had rather hoped to dress up and impress the old familiar faces with tales of Charlotte’s academic success and domestic bliss with Charles, but hardly anyone she recognised had come. She ended up sitting next to a dour woman who did something incredibly dull in flour imports and had only two conversational topics – the fragility of the flour markets in times of financial uncertainty and the world’s most challenging hiking hotspots.

This time, Anne found she was looking forward to the prospect of showing Janet round her old haunts. When Charlotte was applying to universities, Anne had dearly wanted her to try for Cambridge but Charlotte had refused point blank, even though her grades would have been good enough.

‘Don’t you want to go there?’ asked Anne, mystified.

‘No, Mum. Why would I want to do exactly the same as you and Dad?’

‘It wouldn’t be exactly the same,’ she replied. ‘You’d be able to make it your own. It’s a wonderful opportunity, Charlotte, and you might end up regretting –’

‘No,’ Charlotte butted in. ‘I don’t want to be where you and Dad were.’

And that had been that. Charlotte ended up going to Leeds, doing some ridiculous degree in media studies that seemed to mean nothing at all.

The train pulled out of King’s Cross and the drizzle-dampened concrete gave way rapidly to terraced houses with creosoted fences bordering the railway line. Anne wondered idly if The Currant Bun coffee shop, where she had spent many a happy teatime with Charles in the early days of their courtship, was still there. And the dark little pub, tucked away by Jesus Green, where they had once got drunk on a Saturday afternoon without intending to. And the Grantchester fields where he had proposed, although she doubted that they would get time to go there.

Anne drifted off into a pleasant reverie as the buffet trolley came rattling up the aisle. She bought herself an overpriced bottle of still water and treated Janet to a hot chocolate. In a fit of exuberance, she asked for a packet of shortbread biscuits at the last minute and didn’t get much change out of a £10 note. She unwrapped the shortbread and offered some to Janet, whose face broke into an uncomplicated smile.

‘Ooh, yes please,’ Janet said, dipping a shortbread finger into her steaming plastic cup. ‘Lovely.’

‘Might as well treat ourselves,’ said Anne, with uncharacteristic jollity.

Janet beamed. It made Anne feel – not happy, exactly – but good. She felt like a good person.

But when they got there, nothing was as it had been. The Currant Bun had turned into a Starbucks and was filled with tourists wearing anoraks and back-packs talking loudly over their guidebooks. The pub was still there, but the doors were shut up and one of the windows had been cracked and hastily stuck together with a length of dirty plastic tape. When they went to Newnham and Anne tried to show Janet her old room, the porter – an unfriendly man with small, hard eyes and flesh spilling over his shirt collar – had not allowed them in because they had no proof of Anne’s alumna status. She had to content herself with pointing to the relevant window from the road, but she wasn’t sure which one had been hers and, although she feigned a certain level of interest, it was clear that Janet had minimal enthusiasm for finding out.

It started to rain, an imperceptible dampness at first that fell harder and harder, covering their cold faces with a thin sheet of wetness. They had hoped to walk along the Backs and look at the colleges, but this plan was swiftly abandoned as the weather worsened.

‘Let’s find somewhere cosy for lunch,’ said Janet, zipping up her lightweight red mackintosh.

‘Right,’ said Anne, annoyed at both the weather and the use of the word ‘cosy’, which she hated beyond all reason.

They tramped back to King’s Parade, but every restaurant or café they passed was full of people, the windows fogged up with condensation. At one unappetising Italian chain, a queue of forlorn-looking customers had formed underneath the dripping awnings outside.

‘How long do we have to wait for a table?’ Anne asked a young waiter sporting a diamond earring and a shaved head.

‘Dunno. Could be as little as half an hour. We’re busy.’

‘Yes,’ said Anne in a clipped voice. ‘I can see that.’

They seemed to walk for hours in ever decreasing circles of dispiritedness. Even Janet’s perpetual good humour seemed to be starting to flag.

‘It would be so nice to sit down, wouldn’t it?’ Janet said wistfully as they passed a grotty Wetherspoon’s pub that had no free tables.

Eventually, they had to admit defeat and return to the Italian restaurant, where they joined the queue. The waiter Anne had spoken to earlier came up to them carrying a clipboard.

‘You back then?’ he said with an insolent grin.

‘Evidently,’ said Anne.

‘Right, you’re looking at a forty-five-minute wait. What’s your name?’

‘Forty-five minutes?’ Anne said, incredulously, her voice rising. ‘You said half an hour.’

The waiter scowled. Janet laid her hand gently on Anne’s arm. ‘I’m sure it’s not this young man’s fault,’ she said, smiling with a benevolence that served only to heighten Anne’s bad temper. ‘My name’s Janet and we’ll be happy to wait for when the next table becomes available.’

The waiter snorted derisively. ‘Janet. How you spelling that?’

Anne groaned and shook her arm free. Janet spelled out her name with painstaking politeness and the waiter left, leaving the two of them in a stilted silence.

‘There,’ said Janet as if she’d just put a plaster on a child’s knee graze. ‘All done.’

‘Good for you.’

Janet smiled pleasantly into the mid-distance and started to hum an indistinct tune. The queue moved more quickly than either of them had anticipated and they were soon seated at a cramped corner table just by the door, so that every time someone walked in, the two of them were assailed by an icy blast of East Anglian wind.

‘Shall we share a bruschetta?’ said Janet, putting on her reading glasses.

‘I think you pronounce it brus-ketta.’

‘Oh,’ said Janet, her lips quivering. ‘I’m sorry.’ Janet started to concentrate intently on the menu, the tip of her tongue poking through her thin lips. She was still humming when the waiter came to take their order. Anne deliberately skipped the starters and asked for the basil pesto pasta. She caught Janet’s eye and saw her look momentarily bereft that Anne had ordered the plainest thing on the menu, ignoring the fact that it was meant to be an ‘occasion’.

‘I’ll have the same,’ Janet said in a small voice before closing the menu and passing it back to the waiter with an ingratiating nod of the head. The pasta, when it came, was surprisingly delicious.