Scissors, Paper, Stone (3 page)

The asthmatic, mechanical, barely-there sound of her husband’s breathing interrupts her thoughts. He is still a handsome man, she thinks, looking at the clear, pronounced angle of his jawbone jutting out from beneath his earlobe as if welded in place. The skin around his eyes has been marked by a series of fine, engraved wrinkles in the last few years, but the crow’s feet suit him; give him an approachable air of bonhomie and sunkissed good health. His eyes look like crinkles of paper, twisted at the ends like packets of picnic salt. His lids are closed now, occasionally twitching as if a small bird’s heart is thumping delicately just below the surface of his face. But when they were open, his eyes were the bruised blue of faded hydrangea petals: flat, pale, remote.

The door opens and a nurse – the nice one with the dimpled smile – peers round the door. ‘Cup of tea, Anne?’

She nods her head, just as she is supposed to.

Anne; Charles

Charles Redfern was what her mother called ‘a catch’. She spotted him on the first day of lectures, sitting at the back in a tangle of splayed-out limbs and slumped shoulders. He raised his head briefly when she walked into the auditorium and she just had time to make out the arch of his eyebrows, peaking like precisely pitched tents, before his attention turned back to the well-thumbed paperback in his hands.

She couldn’t read the title. She found out later, much later, that it had been James Joyce’s
Ulysses
, a book that Charles had never read in its entirety, always giving up about a third of the way through the second chapter. But he liked to carry it around with him in those first few weeks of university in order to cultivate an impression of enigmatic intelligence; an aloofness that he thought made him both attractive and indefinable.

He was right, of course. Almost every girl had a crush on Charles Redfern by the end of freshers’ week. There would be a gentle buzz of whispered giggles when he walked down the corridor. Girls pressed their noses to the glass when he jogged past their windows on the way to an early morning training session by the river for the college rowing team. He was reported to have a girlfriend at secretarial college whom someone had once met at a hunt ball and who was believed to be astonishingly glamorous with unparalleled taste in clothes.

His was the type of beauty that lost all its originality in description. He was broad-shouldered and tall and possessed of a disarming smile that crept slowly over one side of his face when he was about to laugh. His hair was the gold of hard-boiled caramel. Once, a friend back home had asked her to describe his profile and she thought immediately of him lying next to her in the hazy light of early morning.

‘He’s like a Greek god,’ she said, totally serious.

‘What kind of answer’s that?’ shrieked her friend. ‘A Greek god? You’ve got it bad.’

‘Honestly. I think he’s the most handsome man I’ve ever met.’

‘And he’s your boyfriend? Well, I think you’re awfully lucky.’

The friendship hadn’t lasted much longer after that. There was something about Charles that made her both defensive and perpetually insecure – she feared never living up to his physical superiority, never being interesting or charming enough to keep his attention, as if his eyes would always drop, after a few seconds, back to a paperback he would never read all the way through.

But – miraculously, it seemed – he claimed to be smitten with her. He started seeking her out after that first lecture, turning up at odd intervals in the porter’s lodge of her college, a scuffed leather satchel slung across his shoulder. He would be there when she went for coffee on campus, sitting at a corner table with a group of boys in rugby shirts laughing raucously and throwing the occasional, level glance in her direction. He was there, standing in between the bookshelves of the university library, his unmistakable silhouette casting its shadow over the dusty spines. He was there at a cocktail party thrown by the German Society, an event she had gone to under duress from Frieda, her friend at the time. Frieda was a self-consciously dramatic Modern Languages student who believed that men her own age were all hopelessly immature and sought out the companionship of graduate students or professors wherever she could.

‘Come along,’ said Frieda, in that curiously mocking way she had. ‘You never know who you might meet.’

So she had gone because Frieda was too forceful to refuse. As a bribe, Frieda had lent her a greeny-blue shift dress, beautifully tailored from a length of raw silk inherited from her Parisian grandmother. It was the sort of material that was rough to the touch, yet glistened as smooth as an oil slick in the evening light. She was delighted with it.

‘It suits you,’ said Frieda. ‘I am too flat-chested to carry it off.’

‘Nonsense,’ she said, unsure whether to be offended or complimented. ‘Oh, I love it. Thanks so much for lending it to me.’

‘Pleasure. I’m glad it’s getting some use.’ Frieda stopped at the mirror above the basin in the corner of her room where she had been applying her make-up. She let the mascara wand hang in her hand in mid-air. ‘My grandmother went mad, you know. She ended up in a lunatic asylum, thinking she was Marie Antoinette.’

‘Oh,’ Anne said, because she wasn’t sure what else was expected. Frieda’s conversations were full of such brutal truths, buried strangely in the middle of a perfectly normal exchange. They would surprise her with their very matter-of-factness, their sudden bleakness bringing her up short and making her feel somehow frivolous, as if she had stubbed her toe against a half-concealed boulder.

Half an hour later, they set off, arm-in-arm, not quite intimate enough to be true friends and yet not antipathetic enough towards each other to bother much about this fact. She found that university was full of such thrown-together alliances. She planned to stay for an hour at most at the cocktail party, then walk back to her room and finish an essay that was bothering her.

As soon as they walked through the door, Frieda became engrossed in conversation with a lugubrious-looking professor who bounced up and down on his tiptoes every time he got excited. She, meanwhile, hung about on the fringes, feeling rather trivial. For some reason, as she had walked through the college gardens, she had been seized with the desire to pluck a bright purple bloom from the flowerbed and put it in her hair. Frieda had looked at her disapprovingly and she saw now that Frieda had been right: it was a studiedly whimsical gesture that all at once seemed out of place here, in this dark room, filled with earnest undergraduates in elbow-patched jackets and wire-rimmed spectacles. Along one wall, a long table was half-heartedly filled with two trays of damp mushroom vol-au-vents and bowls of Twiglets. Someone had tried to make a hedgehog shape with cocktail sticks of cubed cheese and pineapple, but the sticks appeared to be too heavily weighted, so that the display looked wilted. The desultory strains of an ana-chronistic harpsichord were emanating from a slim record player in the corner.

Anne hated clubs and groups and societies as a rule – had spent most of the first half of term avoiding enthusiastic recruiters for hockey teams or film appreciation discussions – and now here she was, feeling uncomfortable and cross with herself simply because she had been too weak to say no.

She was smiling listlessly, working herself into a gradual state of agitation, and then she turned round and Charles Redfern was suddenly in front of her, holding a bulbous champagne glass filled to the brim with a violently crimson liquid.

‘I want to take you out for a drink,’ he said, as simple as that.

‘You don’t even know me.’

‘I do. I know your name is Anne Eliott. I know you are a first-year History student at Newnham College, Cambridge. I know that you are approximately 5ft 6 and that you have –’ he broke off, leaned forwards and squinted intently at her face, ‘dark brown eyes flecked with green.’

‘They’re not flecked with green.’

‘Yes, they are. You should look at them some time.’

She couldn’t think of anything to say to that. He smiled, still looking straight at her, and she noticed that the smile didn’t quite reach his eyes but stopped at the bridge of his nose. Although she never usually blushed, she could sense an unfamiliar warmth creeping up from her clavicles to her face.

‘It’s much easier to say yes now. Otherwise, I’ll have to keep pursuing you and you’ll have to keep pretending to ignore me.’

‘How do you know I’m pretending?’

‘I don’t know . . . something about the tilt of your head. When you’re concentrating on a lecture, I’ve noticed that you sit very upright. And when you’re chatting to friends or whatever, your hair sort of bobs from side to side. But when you’re pretending not to notice me, it’s neither one nor the other. You stand very still and you stare very intently at something you’re meant to be concentrating on, but there’s a slight . . . well, I suppose it’s a tremble, for want of a better word.’

‘A tremble?’

‘Yes. Like when you pretend to be asleep, but other people can tell that you’re not. Like that.’

She couldn’t say anything much for several seconds and he just kept on looking at her, gravely and with such intensity she couldn’t help but think it meant something. He seemed irrevocably in control of the situation, silently directing its progress according to some plan he had already formulated and would not be diverted from. His calm, focused insistence was intimidating but also oddly flattering. She was disarmed by his attention.

Then, just as she was preparing to say, yes, take me for a drink, I’d like that, he smiled at her, lifted his right hand so that it was just level with her cheek and quickly, so quickly she wondered afterwards if it had actually happened, brushed a tendril of her hair behind her ear, letting his fingertip graze against the nape of her neck. She breathed in, sharply. Then he turned and walked away.

So then, inevitably, she was smitten too. A week later, she ran into him again in the library, sitting at one of the long wooden desks in the reading room, rolling a cigarette.

‘Hello, Charles.’

He looked up and a grin spread slowly across his face.

‘Anne Eliott,’ he said, licking the cigarette paper. ‘When are you going to come for that drink with me?’

They cycled to a pub in Grantchester on a windy, grey day with the flat, grassy meadows spreading out beneath them like wet brushstrokes. Swans dotted the riverbanks, patches of white set with angular elegance against the murky brown water. Charles led the way, with Anne following breathlessly behind. She looked at his back, the dip and rise of his shoulders as he cycled over the ruts and bumps of the path. She saw the way his hair was just long enough to be ruffled by the breeze. She noticed that he kept checking she was keeping up, head turning just far enough to catch her eye. It felt entirely as it should.

Later, after her half shandy, he kissed her briefly on the lips and said she tasted of sherbert. Later still, he took her back to Newnham and pushed her gently against the red brick wall, taking her face in his hands and, without speaking, kissing her lips, her cheeks, her eyelids. Then, because male visitors were not allowed to stay the night, he left and she went up to her room, tingling with the quiet fizz of joy.

When she took him home two months later her parents were predictably charmed.

‘Darling, he’s wonderful,’ her mother said in a theatrical whisper, almost as soon as her father had shown him upstairs to his room. ‘What a catch!’

At supper, Charles complimented Mrs Eliott on the perfect pinkness of the roast lamb, and her mother, suffused with pleasure, let the gravy boat slip in her hand so that it almost spilled its contents all over the embroidered linen tablecloth. He engaged Mr Eliott in a lengthy and considered conversation about the American civil rights movement without ever proffering an opinion that might have been deemed overly controversial or uncomfortably radical. He seemed a perfect cut-out of everything her boyfriend should be.

‘He’s a damned sound chap, Annie,’ her father said in the drawing room the next morning, folding away his newspaper and leaning forwards to stab at the fire with a long brass poker.

‘Archie!’ said her mother, whose unnecessary horror at her husband’s language had become a sort of fond family joke.

‘I’m only saying, darling. I like him. Like his drive. You could do a lot worse, you know.’

‘I’m sure Annie knows her own mind.’ Her mother lifted her dark-grey eyes from her sewing. ‘Don’t you, darling?’

She smiled. Yes, she did. She knew her mind. But, as she was about to find out, she couldn’t have claimed to know his.

Charlotte

Charlotte was late again and although her lateness had an inevitability about it, this was never the comfort that it should have been. You’d imagine, she thought as she wove perilously in and out of the dense London traffic in her small blue car, that knowing I was going to be late would make me prepare more thoroughly in advance so that I would end up being on time. But she never quite managed the crucial leap between thought and action. Her lateness was now one of her defining features, an aspect of her personality that was gently tolerated and jovially referred to with affectionate exasperation by almost everyone who knew her. She had friends who would deliberately factor in a delay of half an hour when Charlotte arranged to meet them. But her mother was different: she could never be late for her.