Scissors, Paper, Stone (22 page)

And now they had agreed to go to the Trenemans’ and there was no way out of it. Anne was already feeling nervous. Looking at the clock on the kitchen wall, she noticed that it was just after 7 p.m. and Charles was late back from work, despite promising that he wouldn’t be. She started scrubbing down the worktop surfaces with a dishcloth to take her mind off her unease, even though she had already cleaned them a few hours before. Then she cast a critical eye over the windows above the sink and noticed the tell-tale silvery screeds of a spider’s web in one corner. She took out a feather duster from the cupboard beneath the stairs and ferociously jiggled it so that the threads broke off and collapsed in a tangle on to the windowsill. Then she stretched a layer of cling-film over several bowls of coronation chicken that she had made earlier in the day and placed them in the fridge, with a view to eating them at intermittent intervals through the coming week.

She looked at the clock again. 7.10. She sighed. There was no point putting it off any more. She would have to get ready.

Anne made her way upstairs to their bedroom and sat down on the pink velvet stool in front of her dressing table. She started brushing her hair methodically, staring at her face without quite seeing it. Although these days she increasingly found herself feeling faded, drained and empty, she acknowledged that she still looked striking in the mirror’s reflection. She had lost a bit of weight recently without really trying and her cheekbones appeared more prominent, so that her face seemed somehow to hang better. She was lucky in that her features were regular and symmetrical – almond-shaped eyes that disappeared into almost-squints when she laughed, pale, fluid lips that were just fleshy enough not to appear stretched and a high, smooth forehead. Hers was an obvious attractiveness. It struck you immediately and then sat there, not having to prove itself. It was not especially interesting – you did not have to work to appreciate it – but it was easy, straightforward and pleasing to look at. When Anne smiled, it still gave her a vivacious air that others found charming. But she noticed that her smiles now never quite reached her eyes. They seemed glazed, somehow, as if drawn on to her face.

Her life had become a daily routine of nothing much and although a part of her had always craved this habitual domesticity – had hoped, in essence, to find security in it – she had never envisaged it being shaped by an absence of ease. She had always imagined a happily mutual marriage, where Charles would go out to work and return, pleased to see her and grateful for the meal on his table, while she would take pride and delight in making things nice for him, in keeping house, in feathering her nest in preparation for children. But it hadn’t worked out like that. Anne wasn’t yet pregnant despite Charles’s regular advances – he appeared to regard the business of procreation as another mindless task to perform, another index card to be filed away – and she found that she felt alone and bored. Not having children felt like a profound failing, an emptiness that spoke of her worthlessness as a woman, especially as she found herself surrounded by smugly fecund females popping out babies with disheartening regularity. In the darkest moments, the moments that she hardly ever allowed herself to contemplate, she felt terribly sad.

Anne found the best way to deal with it all was to pretend it wasn’t happening. There was nothing much she could do about it now and she felt ashamed for having self-righteously ignored Frieda’s warnings. She made an oddly conscious decision not to follow her thoughts to their worst conclusions, instead erecting a mental dam against the flow of her half-buried misery. She acted as if the superficialities – the surfaces she had made so pretty and clean and sweet-smelling – were indicative of greater meaning. She surrounded herself with the trappings of happiness and did not question them. Disconcertingly, she found that no one else questioned them either and, in this way, Anne was able to convince herself that the appearance of something was the best substitute for its actual existence. She found that her mental neatness started to manifest itself on her outward environment – she cleaned the house with ferocious efficiency, had two baths a day and took great care with her make-up.

Anne started to apply her face powder, dabbing it on to her skin with a thin pad clogged up with years of use. It smelled lightly of vanilla pods and flour and it gave her a twinge of hope, a light fragrance of expectation. She spritzed some perfume – Yardley’s White Linen – on her wrists and on the nape of her neck just beneath her hairline, something that her mother had taught her to do because it was meant to last longer that way. With an eyeshadow brush, she painted a slick of beige across her lid, accentuated by a small triangle of darker brown on the outer edges. She covered her lashes with a thin coating of mascara – dark brown because black looked common – and then swept her cheekbones with pale blush. She sat back to examine herself with a critical gaze and then she heard the keys turn in the front door. Anne looked at her watch: 7.25. They were due at the Trenemans at 7.30 for 8.00, which meant that, depending on Charles’s mood, they might just make it.

She took a deep breath and smiled so she would sound more cheerful than she felt.

‘Hello, darling,’ she said, her voice slightly raised.

‘Hello.’ There was the sound of scuffling and muttering downstairs, of his coat being taken off and his briefcase being put on the hallway floor. Then she heard him walk into the kitchen and open the fridge. What was he doing? she wondered. He knew they were going out – surely he wasn’t making himself something to eat now? But then she heard a clattering of china and knew that he’d taken out one of the bowls of chicken. There was a silence which meant he was probably eating and then, shortly afterwards, the sound of him making his customary gin and tonic. Anne got up from the stool and walked downstairs.

She entered the kitchen and saw Charles facing away from her, standing over the sink and looking out of the window at the garden beyond. It was autumn and the leaves from a tall oak tree were in constant fall, leaving a thick layer of brittle brown-red covering the lawn like a spilled glass of beer. He did not turn round even though he must have heard her footsteps. She tried to interpret what this meant about the mood he was in and found that she couldn’t.

‘Hello, darling,’ she said again, feeling slightly stupid for repeating herself. He turned to her.

‘What time are we due at the Trenemans’?’ he asked, taking a sip of his gin and tonic. The ice cubes bumped noisily against the side of the tumbler. So at least he’d remembered, Anne thought with relief.

‘Cynthia said 7.30 for 8.00 so you’re just in time,’ she said brightly.

He crunched an ice cube noisily between his teeth and then looked at his watch, an unnecessarily shiny silver Rolex that he had bought himself when he started his job.

‘Right. Well, I’d better have a shave.’ His eyes met hers, unsmiling. ‘Is that what you’re wearing?’

Anne glanced down at her dress. It was a patterned empire-line cotton smock in emerald green. Two strings hung from the neck, each one ending in three small silver balls that jangled as she walked. She had bought it recently on a trip to Sloane Square because she loved the depth of the colour and because wearing it made her feel other than who she was. It was an exotic dress, a dress that breathed optimism and laughter and youth. It was the sort of dress she used to wear. It felt good against her skin.

But now, looking at it out of the light of the shop changing room, she saw it suddenly through Charles’s eyes and worried that it appeared absurd, too ornate and over-the-top for an evening at the Trenemans’. Their neighbours would no doubt look at her askance, as if she had ideas above herself, as if she was trying to make them feel foolish in their provinciality simply by wearing something quite so unapologetically impractical. She bit her lip, feeling sick inside.

‘I thought so, yes,’ she said, her voice uncertain. ‘What do you think?’ And she forced herself to give a gay little twirl, like a fifties film star.

‘It’s very . . .’ he broke off for several seconds. ‘Adventurous.’ He swallowed the rest of his drink in one quick motion, put the glass down on the side of the sink and walked past her without saying anything more. After a few moments, she heard the sound of a basin filling with water upstairs.

She felt dejected, as if the air had been sucked out of her. She didn’t know whether to change or not. If she changed, she would be equally nervous that Charles wouldn’t like the new outfit and a part of her would feel pathetic, as if she had no mind of her own. But if she stayed in the dress, she knew it would make her uncomfortable all night; she knew she would constantly be questioning her own taste and wondering if everyone was looking at her with secret disapproval. In the end, she walked into the hallway and took down a long black cashmere cardigan from the coatrail to wear over the top. The dazzling green of the dress now appeared dulled against the dark fabric. She felt her eccentricities had been sufficiently disguised.

Then, noticing the bottle of Gordon’s still open on the counter, she poured herself a large tumbler of gin. She debated adding a splash of tonic but, before she had time to decide, she downed the glass in a single slug. Anne felt the clear liquid spiciness trickle down her throat and slam into her stomach. Her gastric juices bubbled and twisted with the sudden heat of alcohol. She poured herself another glass and knocked it back. By the time Charles came down, freshly shaved and wearing a new shirt, Anne felt pleasurably numbed against the evening.

Cynthia’s husband, Giles, opened the door. ‘Well, hello there, Redferns!’ he said with half-mocking jollity. He was a florid-faced man who drank too much, the redness of his capillaries getting more intense with each glass of Burgundy. Tonight, the veins in his nose were criss-crossed like contour lines on an ordnance survey map. Anne took this to mean he was already pretty far gone.

‘Hello, Giles,’ she said, smiling and leaning in to kiss him on the cheek. His skin felt clammy against hers. He hugged her for slightly too long and pushed himself slightly too close to her so that she had to step away first.

‘Annie! Looking lovely as ever.’ He made a great show of taking her by the hand and standing back to admire her. ‘You are a lucky bugger, Charles,’ Giles said, pumping him by the hand and drawing them into the heat and the party noises. There was the sound of tinkling Richard Clayderman piano music coming from within and the occasional staccato burst of laughter.

‘Come in, come in. Cynthia’s just doing the rounds with a particularly good French brie.’

Anne glanced at Charles and, for a brief moment, they shared a look of pure camaraderie at the awfulness of the situation they found themselves in. Charles took her hand and gripped it tightly as they walked into the Trenemans’ sitting room. She felt absurdly thrilled at this small, physical gesture. In one stroke, all the insignificant strain and build-up of the evening dissolved into nothing. He did love her after all.

Cynthia beetled up to them in a flurry of hairspray and pale purple angora. ‘Anne! Charles! So pleased you could make it!’ She air-kissed Anne and then made a semi-lunge for Charles, leaving a wet smudge of lipstick at the corner of his mouth.

‘Cynthia, you’re looking spectacular,’ Charles said with a wolfish grin. ‘Thanks so much for having us over. It all looks wonderful.’

He sounded so unutterably genuine that Anne found herself casting an eye round the room in case she’d missed something. But no, there were the usual suspects in evidence – the Gordons (Tina and Max), the Chethursts (Gwen and Tommy), the Stenhams (Julie and Terry) and the Cockburns (Marcus and Antonia). Marcus caught her eye and raised his wine glass with an almost imperceptible leer. Anne winced involuntarily. He was a strange little man, whose hair was always overgrown and whose collars were always unwashed. For some reason, he had taken a particular shine to Anne from the moment they’d moved to Carlton Avenue. It had become something of a joke in their social circle because, at parties, he would trail after her with a hang-dog stare, totally ignoring his mousey but well-meaning wife.

Tonight proved to be no exception. Almost as soon as Cynthia had plied them with chunks of refrigerated brie (served on a red napkin triangle), Marcus shuffled across the room, his shoulders hunched forward with intent. When she looked round, Anne found that Charles had disappeared.

‘So, how have you been keeping, Anne?’ Marcus said, passing a hand through his greasy hair so that a light sprinkling of dry skin scattered on to his shoulders like dust. His breath smelled tepidly of old vegetables and cheap wine.

‘Very well, thank you, Marcus,’ Anne said, a vague smile fixed in place. ‘How’s Antonia?’

‘Oh, she’s fine.’ He glanced in the direction of his wife, who was gripping her glass of orange juice with two hands, her eyes darting nervously around the room. Giles, noticing her isolation, immediately strode up to Antonia with a tray of cheddar. He wasn’t a bad sort really, thought Anne as she watched Giles engage her in a vociferously one-way conversation.

Marcus was standing so that his shoulder brushed against her cardigan, saying something complimentary about Anne’s dress. Anne zoned out, giving him non-committal but polite answers while letting her mind wander over other things. She wondered what she and Charles would do this weekend, whether he was going to do his enigmatic disappearing act or whether she could tempt him into a few hours of togetherness. Perhaps they could go to Petersham and have a picnic on the riverbank like they used to in Grantchester, she thought. Perhaps they could re-establish some of their old, easy intimacy. Perhaps she could cook him a favourite meal. But then she realised she had no idea what his favourite meal would consist of and, besides, she knew she was a terrible cook despite her best efforts, and then Anne felt curiously flat all over again, the faint flicker of lightness she had experienced when Charles took her hand suddenly doused by the cold dankness of the reality of their life as it now existed. She blamed herself for not being able to keep his attention. He was too charming, too clever, too good-looking for her and he always had been. She was an unpolished pebble next to his dazzling diamond. She was meant for men like Marcus: men suffocated by their own accumulations of disappointment, men who never expected to do much more than fail, who treated anything mildly good as a happy accident, who were crumpled by the expectations of others and who would not demand anything other than the chance to claim her as their own. Men who would not challenge her sense of self. Men who could be understood and contained by their own limitation. Men with dirty shirt collars. Men whom she didn’t love.